Blick’s own hemisphere had a stylized “B.” With branches so pretty. The birthday cake with three yellow hyacinths in the bowl or Alice’s hospital where Momma died and buried in chilly October bobbing for apples in raining buckets canceled Mardi Gras communion wafer after the ash roasting marshmallows—“You little Oreo piece of shit!” in the playground. High School graduation. “Billy Jean” by Michael Jackson, “Twilight Zone” by Golden Earring, the first time he saw the Inverted Fountain at UCLA, Royce Hall, “Ain’t your daddy a fucking Jew?”, the Hollywood Sign, taking Laura to the Magic Castle, the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, getting a blowjob from the tranny hooker . . .
Blick looked away. Somehow his whole life was netted in its glowing web. Holding cells. The thought popped in: He was drifting back into the hemisphere.
The memory flashes had left him drained. He tried to hoard the elevator rising image. Inches above the hemisphere he stopped and began drifting upward, this time much more slowly. Memory is ballast.
He rose about seven feet from his cell when he saw the gargoyles. Black wings. Gray scaly features, dog heads, goat horns. Three of them. Their great black wings beat against the glowing silver atmosphere. They flew with eagle grace.
Blick fumbled for his gun, realized that he had been clutching it tightly since the coffee shop. The gargoyles sliced through the sky twenty yards above Blick. The humming background became a sharp keening as they passed. “Let them consume your flesh, Bill, they are our love. They are the great Night of Be With Us!”
They wheeled about, descending in a rapine arc toward one of the hemispheres close to Blick.
The first swept above it, gathering a glowing sigil in an outstretched talon. It tore from the light as a scab from a wound, bursting into sparks a few wingbeats away. The other two plunged into the now softer-seeming light, snatching a victim, a tall bald man dressed as a fisherman. His shouts were silent. Caught firmly between the two gargoyles. The three gargoyles and their bloodied prey flew away.
Far below the hemispheres two dark figures were rising. Blick darted into the recently vacated hemisphere. He sank into eye level—the light in this one was wet and slimy, its noise much more metallic.
The figures rose. Dark, hooded. Long before they reached the hemisphere level, Blick recognized them for the Tenniels.
They rose, floated over Blick’s hemisphere. Charles gestured and the sigil glowed brightly.
Blick shot. Twice.
The first shot caught Charles just above the chest. His body began drifting downward. The second shot caught Anna in her stomach. She clutched her belly, crying as if betrayed.
Blick told them what he had told all humans for over forty years: “I reject your love!”
Before Blick fired again Anna wiped the sigil away with her foot and pointed.
Detective Sergeant Blick materialized almost a thousand feet above L.A.
(
For Fritz Lieber
)
To Mars and Providence
Exactly twenty-nine days after his father had died of general paresis—that is to say, syphilis—in the local asylum, the boy observed the cylinder land upon Federal Hill. On some level this extramundane intrusion confirmed certain hypotheses that he had begun to form concerning the prognosticative nature of dreams. He had been dreaming of the night-gaunts for three years. They had—the horrible conclusion now obtruded upon his reluctant mind as an awful certainty—come for him. As befit a gentleman of pure Yankee stock and the true chalk-white Nordic type, he had but one option: he must venture forth to meet and if possible defeat these eldritch beings.
He was eight years old.
The initial and certainly most daunting difficulty would be getting past his mother and aunts. His grandfather Whipple Phillips might be an ally in this quest, since he had often kept Howard entertained with tales of black voodoo, unfathomed caves, winged horrors, and old witches with sinister cauldrons. But Grandfather Whipple was in Idaho, and his mother, though normally indulgent of such whims, would not allow his questing into the night air. Howard therefore adopted extreme stealth in the acquisition of his bicycle. He actually carried it several yards from the house before mounting it in quest of adventure.
Down College Hill across the river and then hard work up toward St. John’s Catholic Church on Federal Hill, which is where he judged the cylinder had fallen. The neighborhood, alive with nameless sounds that vied with morbid shriekings, seemed to have taken notice of the cylinder’s fall. There was a general lighting of candles, lanterns, torches, and the like. By the time he reached St. John’s a rugged ring of light surrounded the shiny cylinder. He could not stand to force his way through the crowd, so he entered the church proper and climbed up to the bell tower. Opening a small window in the bell tower, he watched the scene below with growing horror and fascination.
A portion of the cylinder had begun to turn. No doubt the entity or entities therein sought the relieving air of the night as a counter to the searing heat of their bulkhead. The crowd grew fervent with their prayers— prayers to an entity Howard knew to be no more real than the Santa Claus he had abandoned at age five. The lid fell free, and a great fungoid stench assailed Howard’s nostrils.
The great leathery wet glistening squamous head of the cylinder’s occupant lunged out, pulsing and twitching obscenely. Its vast liquid eyes, whose terrible three-lobed pupils spoke of the being’s non-Terran evolution, gazed with glittering contempt upon the sea of humanity surrounding the smoking crater. Some brave soul, perhaps hoping to get a better look at the horror, shined a bull’s horn lantern at its eyes. It recoiled from this unwanted stimulus, making a great hooting cry that would be difficult to render phonetically.
Ulla!
Or perhaps
Kuulla!
The creature ducked back into the cylinder, only to re-emerge with a weapon of some sort. Suddenly a flash of blue lightning so intense that it made all the other light a darkness flashed from the weapon. Amidst the screams, Howard fainted.
When Howard returned to consciousness, it was a return from a dream of being medically examined by panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling Martians. He was—to his intense surprise—in his bed at 454 Angell Street. Susan Lovecraft, his mother, was standing above him.
“I see that my little Abdul has wakened. I trust your materialism will be thoroughly shaken by the miracle which saved you from the Martians.”
“Martians?”
“One edition of the
Gleane
r made it out before the error disrupted the city. Everyone has fled. We, however, will remain until Grandfather Whipple comes for us.”
Howard could begin to smell the burning city. His mother couldn’t be this calm, if what she was saying was true. This must be some sort of game, like when she fixed an Oriental corner in his room when he took the name Abdul Alhazred when he was five. He would play along; after all, there was the fact that he had arrived back at his home.
“You said something about a miracle?”
“The Martians killed everybody near the cylinder. Some men at the university watched it all with binoculars. One of the Martians climbed up the side of the church, to the bell tower’s open window, and pulled you out. It carried you down inside the cylinder. I suppose it thought it was one of their own. You are a very ugly child, Howard, people cannot bear to look upon your awful face. When the second cylinder fell, the Martians hurried out of the first to aid in the other’s arrival. One of the brave men of the Brown Library, Armitage I believe his name was, ventured all the way there to find you. He knew you because you had pestered him with questions on Cicero. You were there in the cylinder ‘sleeping peacefully,’ he said.”
“How long?”
“You’ve been asleep three days.”
There was something in his mother’s eyes that wasn’t right. Perhaps the “Martian” invasion had unhinged her highly strung nervous system. He must obtain nourishment and newspaper quickly, and then scout out the city.
“Could you bring the copy of the
Gleaner,
Mother?”
“Certainly, Howard.”
The paper had huge headlines. EARTH INVADED BY MARS. The cylinders had fallen in London and Texas.
How ironic, thought Howard, that the Martians would have chosen to land in the Italian section of the city, since it was Giovanni Schiaparelli who had discovered Mars’ canal system.
Mother brought him a sandwich for breakfast. The bread was stale and the house quiet.
He asked after his aunts.
Mother’s face went blank and dreamy. “They’ve gone west to speak with your grandfather concerning the invasion. I believe they took the train.”
Howard knew that one of the first things the Martians would have done would be to destroy trains, telegraphs, and roads. Mankind would panic if it lost its ability to reassert its pathetic reality by its continuous idiot-god mutterings. What happy cows they would become in a few days, happy to be herd animals. He could feel the contempt he had seen in the three-lobed eyes of the Martian, a burning contempt that an older and more perfect civilization must feel against the ape-like humans.
He would have to meet them again. He could feel a pull toward the cylinder near St. John’s Church. An actual physical attraction like iron filings to a lodestone. Perhaps his mother was right and there was something in him that was like the Martians.
He began surveying the town from his window. Great paths of black ash cut obscene angles across the landscape. The Martians’ traveling machines respected neither human habitation nor the barriers of river or hill. What marvelous creatures these Martians were to fashion machines to replace bodies! To become pure brains able to cross the cosmos! What starry wisdom they must have accumulated!
He saw the glint of metal and reached for his telescope. A great walking machine was traversing Federal Hill, moving toward St. John’s. He could see the pit in front of the church quite clearly. A strange red vegetation covered the pit’s sides. The red weed seemed to move slowly of its own accord, for surely no ash stirred with any breeze. The walking machine brought the Martian alongside the bell tower. The Martian placed a small golden box within.
At that moment his mother rushed into the room and pulled Howard from the window. She closed the curtains. She told him she was making hot chocolate. He should come to the parlor to enjoy some.
He felt sad for his mother, but guessed that it was perhaps a blessing that the human mind is unable to correlate all its contents. Howard went down into the parlor and did partake of hot chocolate. His mother talked of trivial things as though no horror waited outside of the curtained windows.
Everything was still, very still, and Howard surmised that the city was deserted. Then a great ululation so horrible that surely no human mouth could utter nor mind conceive it smashed the stillness of the air as a monolith of terror upon a plain of endless desolation. Mother nearly dropped her tiny white teacup, a proud relic of the family’s past. Golly, thought Howard, something needs to be done. Mother talked rapidly and quietly. Once again the Martian cry resonated obscenely in the Terran atmosphere.
Howard excused himself. Mother didn’t seem to notice. He went to his grandfather’s medicine chest. Grandfather Whipple fought his pernicious insomnia with a powerful sleeping powder. Howard believed that he could easily mix it in the malted milk that his mother favored as an evening meal.
Waiting out the afternoon was torture. Something pulled Howard to St. John’s Church. He could almost see the bell tower room when he closed his eyes. Knowing that the mystery was there was making him do and think things he had never thought. Mystery, he decided, was the great
transformatrice
. She effected a change in one’s self by simply
being.
The evening meal proved worse. He had had to argue with Mother so that he could prepare her malted milk. She would have to be sedated if he were to quest further. This time he must not faint and be subject to removal before viewing whatever horror his destiny had chosen for him.
Mother drank her malt. She joked gently that he did not know how to prepare it. He watched her carefully, making sure that she drank it all rather than pouring it down the kitchen drain. She retired to the parlor afterwards, where her fear kept her from lighting candle or lamp. As it grew darker, her words grew fainter and fainter. He listened long and hard to be sure that the whisperer in darkness did indeed sleep, then tiptoed out of the house.
Outside, deep twilight held the city in its gray-purple embrace. Only the topmost windows reflected the glorious sunset. The enchanting and beautiful twilight almost concealed the great ashen pathways of desolation that the Martians had left in their wake. Only one of the once many proud bridges still spanned the river. Howard began to run toward it. The sense of movement made him feel watched; Howard was the only thing moving on College Hill. The Martians’ siege had stolen the comforting noises of the ancient city, leaving it as still as the vast void of darkling space through they had traveled, and as foul-smelling as the odor of plague-stricken towns and uncovered cemeteries.
As Howard crossed the bridge he looked upon the ancient city with eyes of memory, preferring not to see the havoc of war. He looked upon the entrancing panorama of loveliness, the steepled town nestling upon its gentle hills.
Howard’s run slowed to a panting walk as he climbed Federal Hill. When he reached the crater he nearly swooned from the Oriental sweetness that the undulating carmine growth dispersed through the still air, but the distant cry of a Martian, mixed with the terrified cry of the human herd, reminded him of his mission. He entered the dark church and made for the bell tower.
Beneath the bells, on a small table, the object lay. It was a garnet crystal in the shape known to science as a trapezohedron. It shone with faint ruddy light—the light of Mars, which the Babylonians (Howard reflected) called Nergal and the Northmen Tyr. By the small table stood a small chair that would exactly fit an eight-year-old boy.