Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (31 page)

  He parked his truck and noticed that though it was after nine a.m. there was no other vehicle in the lot. He climbed out and closed the door, being careful not to slam it. He quietly made his way to the doors of the building and walked inside. He had purposely worn his sneakers so that his footsteps wouldn't be heard. There appeared to be no one around, no customers, no old man. He went inside and looked upward toward the ceiling. The eye was closed. And then he heard some strange ululating sounds, as if from someone chanting in a strange language. Louder and louder the voice called, higher and higher in pitch. The language was some guttural tongue with impossible vowels and consonants. Along with the strident tones, the screeching that he had heard before began again—this time, ear-deafening in volume. He looked up to see the black and roiling sky above, the sky of his nightmares. And appearing through the inky darkness was something moving, something sinuous in motion, which seemed to come through the eye and snake downward toward the interior of the dome.

  He could bear no more; he screamed and ran, stumbling through the masses of detritus, falling once, bloodying his face and then half running, half crawling to the doors. As he reached the safety of the threshold he turned around, just once, and that sight was enough to last him the rest of his days.

  At last he reached his house, trembling and nauseous, and fell into bed. He dropped into a sort of stupor in which he had no dreams. He awakened at sunset and felt better and sat at his table pondering the events of the morning. Was what he saw real or did he imagine the whole thing? But why should he imagine something like this when he had never been a man of fancy, but a practical person who took each day as he found it? Then it must have been real, what he saw, and he shuddered as he recalled the vision. It was Tom's scream that alerted the old man in the domed building, that made him start the machinery in motion that caused the eye to close.

  Tom's scream that stopped that monstrous thing from entering this world.

 
 
Winter had come and gone. Tom kept to his daily ritual of doing his chores and tending to the pecan trees. He had few dreams anymore, but at times during the day the whisper of a hated memory crept through and he felt afraid. Locals had told him that the dome was closed. The day after Tom's visit, the place had been boarded up, and in time the signs that announced its wares had fallen into disrepair. Whenever he would pass the place, he couldn't help looking its way and he would notice that it now looked only squat and benign and somehow ludicrous. Its silver dome was turning rusty and no one came to its doors. What had happened to the old man remained a mystery.

  But the fleeting memories Tom still had were enough to convince him that what he had seen that day had been real—that blackness, those bloated wormlike arms writhing and groping, and that sound, like waves breaking upon an unlit and unknown shore. And most of all, the smell, a rank and rotten smell of a sea bottom upturned. The smell of things better left alone. Yes, there
had
been something in that aperture, something gigantic and evil. Something ancient and grotesque, called there by the old man. Some
thing
whose entry into this world had been stopped by Tom's screams. And, before the eye had screeched shut, that nameless being had stretched ropy arms downward and enfolded the old caretaker into its embrace before the opening had closed forever.

Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle is the author of the novels 
Counterparts 
(Barrington, 1993; Penguin, 1995),
Saxophone Dreams 
(Penguin, 1996),
The Matter of the Heart
(Abacus, 1997), 
The Director's Cut
(Abacus, 2000), and
Antwerp
(Serpent's Tail, 2004), and the short story collection
Mortality
(Serpent's Tail, 2006). He has published more than 100 short stories in magazines and anthologies. His Lovecraftian tale "The Homecoming" appeared in Stephen Jones's
Shadows over Innsmouth
(Fedogan & Bremer, 1994).

 
 
s soon as Joe arrived in Rotterdam, he made for the river. He believed that a city without a river was like a computer without memory. A camera without film.

  The river was wide and gray. A slice of the North Sea.

  Joe was listening to "Rotterdam," a track on the Githead album,
Art
Pop.
When he'd last been to Paris he'd played the Friendly Fires single of that name over and over. Earlier in the year, walking through the Neuköln district of Berlin, he'd selected Bowie's
Heroes
album and listened to one track, "Neuköln," on repeat.

  He switched it off. It wasn't working. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. The chugging, wiry pop of Githead didn't fit this bleak riverscape. The breathy vocals were a distraction. Instrumentals worked better.

  He didn't have long. A couple of days. The producer, Vos, wouldn't wait any longer. The American was a busy man and Joe knew he had already more than tried Vos's patience with repeated requests to have a shot at writing the screenplay, or have some input elsewhere on the movie. For now, at least, the script had John Mains's name on it and Joe knew he could count himself lucky to be scouting locations, albeit unpaid. He hoped that by showing his willingness and maybe coming up with some places that not only corresponded to what Vos wanted but also helped to back up his own vision of how the film could look, he might still get to gain some influence.

  Joe turned back on himself and selected a cheap hotel with a river view. His room, when he got up to the fourth floor, managed to reveal very little of the Nieuwe Maas, but if you craned your neck you could just make out the distinctive outline of the Erasmus Bridge. They called it the Swan; to Joe it looked more like a wishbone, picked clean. Did swans have wishbones?

  The room itself was basic, and while you wouldn't necessarily pick up dirt with a trailing finger, there was a suggestion of ingrained grime, a patina of grease. Joe quickly unpacked his shoulder bag, placing his tattered Panther paperback of
The
Lurking Fear and Other Stories
by the side of the bed. He checked his e-mails and sent one to Vos to let him know he had arrived in Rotterdam and was heading straight out to make a start.

  He walked toward the center. The kind of places he was looking for were not likely to be found there, but he wanted to get a feel for the city. He'd known not to expect a replica of Amsterdam, or even Antwerp. Rotterdam had been flattened in the war and had arisen anew in the twentieth century's favorite materials of glass and steel. But really the commercial center could have been plucked from the English Midlands or the depressed Francophone cities of Wallonia.

  A figure on top of an anonymous block of chrome and smoked glass caught his eye. It was either hubris or a remarkable achievement on the artist's part that Antony Gormley's cast of his own body had, by stealth, become a sort of Everyman figure. A split second's glance was all you needed to identify the facsimile as that of the London-born sculptor.

  Only absently wondering why there might be an Antony Gormley figure standing on top of an office block in Rotterdam, Joe walked on. He stopped outside a bookshop and surveyed the contents of the window as an inevitable prelude to going inside: Joe couldn't walk past bookshops. It was their unpredictability that drew him in. They might not have his book in stock, but then again they might.

  This one had the recently published Dutch edition of Joe's crime novel,
Amsterdam.
He stroked the cover, lost for a moment in the same reverie that always gripped him at this point. The thought that the novel was this far—this
far—from
reaching the screen.

  Leaving the bookshop, Joe spotted another tall figure standing erect on the flat roof of a shiny anonymous building two hundred meters down the road.

  When Vos had optioned the book, Joe had thought it was only a matter of time, but delay followed delay. Vos had a director attached, but couldn't find a writer the director would work with. Joe had asked his agent to show Vos the three unsold featurelength scripts he had written on spec, but the agent had explained that Vos and his director were looking for someone with a track record. Which was why Joe made a bid to write the adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Hound," Vos's other optioned property, but the response was the same. Hence the visit to Rotterdam to look for empty spaces and spooky graveyards.

  On the Westzeedijk, a boulevard heading east away from the city center, Joe came upon the Kunsthal: a glass-and-steel construction, the art gallery had a protruding metal deck on which were scattered more Gormley figures in different positions. Lying flat, sitting down, bent double. Inside the gallery, visible through the sheet-glass walls, were more figures striking a variety of poses. Two faced each other through the plate glass, identical in all respects except height. The one inside looked taller, presumably an illusion.

  Joe had missed the original Gormley exhibition in London, when cast-iron molds of the artist's body had popped up on rooftops across the capital. Leaving the Kunsthal in his wake, he caught sight of another figure at one corner of the roof of the Erasmus Medical Center. He realized he had started looking for them. This was Gormley's aim, he supposed, to alter the way you looked at the world. To get into your head and flick a switch. As public art, it was inescapable, insidious, invasive. Was that a good thing? Was his work really a "radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation," as Joe remembered reading on the artist's own web site? Or was it all about him? All about Gormley. And if it was, did that matter? Wasn't Joe's novel all about Joe? Who's to say Lovecraft's essays were the extent of his autobiographical work?

  Joe was halfway to the top of the Euromast when his phone buzzed. The incoming text was from Vos. John Mains, the scriptwriter, was going to be in Rotterdam, arriving later that day. They should meet, compare notes, Vos advised.

  Joe scowled. He reached the top landing of the structure and exited on to the viewing deck. The panorama of the city ought to have dominated, but Joe couldn't help but be aware of the ubiquitous figure perched on the railing above his head.

  He tried to think of a way in which he could get out of meeting up with Mains. He'd lost his phone and not received Vos's text. Amateurish. Didn't have time. Even worse.

  He checked his watch. He still had a few hours.

  At the foot of the Euromast he found an empty fire station. He peered through the fogged windows. A red plastic chair sat upturned in the middle of a concrete floor. A single boot lay on its side. Joe took a couple of pictures and moved on. A kilometer or so north was Nieuwe Binnenweg. With its mix of independent music stores, designer boutiques, print centers, and sex shops, this long east-west street on the west side of the city would be useful for establishing shots. At the top end he photographed a pet grooming salon, Doggy Stijl, next door to a business calling itself, less ambiguously, the Fetish Store. There were a few empty shops, more cropping up the further out of town he walked, alongside ethnic food stores and tatty establishments selling cheap luggage and rolls of brightly colored vinyl floor coverings.

  The port of Rotterdam had expanded since Lovecraft's day to become the largest in Europe. Why the late author had chosen to set his story here did not concern Joe; indeed, he had no reason to suspect Lovecraft had ever set foot on Dutch soil. The references to Holland and Rotterdam in particular were so general he could have been describing any port city. All credit to Vos, Joe conceded, that he had chosen to film here rather than in Hull or Harwich, or the eastern seaboard of the U.S., for that matter.

  Joe's westward migration out of the city had taken him into one of the port areas. The cold hand of the North Sea poked its stubby fingers into waste ground crisscrossed by disused railway sidings. Ancient warehouses crumbled in the moist air. New buildings the size of football pitches constructed out of corrugated metal squatted amid coarse grass and hardy yellow flowering plants. Interposed between one of these nameless buildings and the end of a long narrow channel of slate-colored water was an abandoned Meccano set of rusty machinery—hawsers, articulated arms, winches, pulleys. Elsewhere in the city this would pass as contemporary art. Out here it was merely a relic of outmoded mechanization, with a possible afterlife as a prop in a twentyfirst-century horror film.

  There had been a few adaptations of Lovecraft's work, successful and otherwise, and they weren't
all
by Stuart Gordon. Just most of them. Joe wasn't sure where Vos's film was destined to play, arthouse or multiplex. As he lowered the camera from his eye, he caught sight of a dark shape behind the machinery. Tasting a rush of adrenaline, he moved his head for a better view, but there was nothing—or nobody—there.

  Disconcerted, he backed away. In the distance a container lorry crunched down through the gears as it negotiated a corner. A faint alarm could be heard as the driver of another vehicle reversed up to a loading bay.

  Keileweg had been the center of the dockside red light district before the clean-up of 2005 that had driven prostitution off the streets. If he hadn't done his research, Joe wouldn't have guessed. He found Keileweg devoid of almost any signs of life. The street was lined with boxy gray warehouses and abandoned import/export businesses. A dirty scarf of sulphurous smoke trailed from a chimney at an industrial site near the main road end of Keileweg. On the opposite side, a little way down, a building clad in blue corrugated metal drew Joe's eye. Christian graffiti decorated the roadside wall: "JEZUS STIERF VOOR ONS TOEN Wij NOG ZONDAREN WAREN." The building's main entrance was tucked away behind high gates. High but not unscaleable. Approaching the dirty windows, Joe shielded his eyes to check out the interior. The usual story: upturned chairs, a table separated from its legs, a computer monitor with its screen kicked in, a venetian blind pulled down from the wall, its blue slats twisted and splayed like some kind of post-ecological vegetation.

  The place had potential.

  Likewise the waste ground and disused railway sidings running alongside Vier-Havens-Straat.

  Slowly, Joe made his way back into town photographing likely sites, even throwing in the odd windmill in case Vos wanted to catch the heritage market.

  He returned to the hotel to shower and pick up his e-mails, including one from Vos telling him where and when to meet John Mains. Joe studied the map. He left the hotel and walked north until he reached Nieuwe Binnenweg, where he turned left. At the junction with 's Gravendijkwal, where the traffic rattled beneath Nieuwe Binnenweg in an underpass, he entered the Dizzy Jazzcafé and ordered a Belgian brown beer. He drank it quickly, toying with his beermat, and ordered another. Checking his watch, he emptied his glass for the second time. As he stood up, his head span and he had to hold on to the back of the chair. Belgian brown beers were notoriously strong, he remembered, a little too late.

  Two blocks down Nieuwe Binnenweg was Heemraadssingel, a wide boulevard with a canal running up the middle of it. Joe stood on a broad grassy bank facing the canal and beyond it the bar where he was due to meet Mains. He straightened his back and breathed in deeply. He needed a moment of calm.

  A soft voice in his ear: "Joe!"