Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (37 page)

  "Have you any idea how unprofessional this is?"

  Justin shook his head impassively. "Maybe some token on your part would help. Something tangible. Otherwise, I don't know."

  "You want money? This is childish! This is blackmail!"

  "Well, that's not how I'd describe it." Justin reached for another picture, but stopped as Palazzo charged from the room. Would he enlist campus security? And make a scene strong-arming an exhibiting artist and "honored alum"? Justin doubted it.

  Then the gallery lights went out. Brightness from the doorway made negligible impact in the mineshaft blackness. He anticipated Palazzo would let him stew a while and was reconciled to waiting in the dark. If the stalemate dragged on long enough, how would Palazzo respond to inquiries about the gallery blackout and Justin alone inside? Justin was conversant with feeling ridiculous, but he'd wager Palazzo was not. A drawback in these circumstances!

  The dark was coming to seem less absolute. Were his eyes adjusting? No, not exactly, because he still couldn't see his pictures on the walls. Just the same, a glow was spreading through the room, as if someone were almost imperceptibly upping a dimmer switch, to reveal surfaces at right and acute angles to each other, which dwindled to a vanishing point miles beyond the rear gallery wall. And as if it had never been absent but only lurking below a subliminal threshold, ravenous appetite welled up in him again. Nor would it scruple to take a bite out of Palazzo at the least provocation.

  He also hungered for what had attained depth and sharp outlines in soothing twilight. He was standing on a mossy slate terrace, facing west. No List Building surrounded him, no highrises rudely interrupted the scarlet horizon of western hills, and even the massive Colonial Revival courthouse on Benefit Street had reverted to rows of antique gables and gambrels. The tallest structure by five stories or so was the bracket-shaped Hospital Trust bank across the canal. A few electric signs lent primary colors to the bricks and masonry of downtown, but only the one for the Old Colony Hotel was within reading distance. Sunset made the gold dome of the Congregational church on Weybosset Street gleam softly. The streetlamps ought to be on in a minute.

  Here was the unmodern Providence of his dreams, and of heightened poignancy after a weekend in the brave new Providence. Lovecraft had not emerged beckoning, but that would have been impossible really. This was the Providence of Lovecraft's schooldays, and since Justin couldn't imagine Lovecraft as a child, that version of him couldn't materialize. In any event, it was very beautiful over there, and Justin could have it for the rest of his life, if he simply walked into it.

  He was aware at the same time of how short such a life would be, and that the cosmic angler's hidden eye had to be glowering down at him. He also belatedly recognized how cunning the angler had been, to give the fish all the line it wanted, and an illusion of freedom, while that fish spent its strength and the hook stayed embedded in unfeeling lip.

  None of this stopped Justin from shuffling his feet eagerly. His hankering for that place was inseparable from the hankering of something that regarded him as food, and he had no means to pull out psychic hook, any more than a fish could sprout hands to save itself. How covertly active had the entity been after the line had gone slack? What kind of orchestrations had been involved for Justin to end up back at List, in the dark?

  A phrase from Lovecraft's story echoed at Justin, even as left foot rose in defiance of better judgment: "I am it and it is I." Did the "it" in question feel or understand any of Justin's yearning for the mirage it created for him, the way he suffered its hunger pangs, its anxiety, because Justin wasn't in the net yet, and meals were few and far between? Did Justin want to help assuage that cruel hunger? All he had to do was be eaten!

  "Now will you please come out and behave reasonably?" Palazzo's outburst confused Justin and threw him off-balance. It sounded so clear and immediate, but how could that be? Justin was virtually a world away. "What are you doing in there?"

  Palazzo was too worked up to be observant, or else from outside the gallery was still in darkness. But Justin soon learned that it wasn't necessary to be him to see what he was seeing. Palazzo was beside him, directing eyes wide with horror north and south, east and west. "Where are we? What the hell is going on?"

  Justin, despite everything, smiled wryly. "It's Providence."

  Palazzo became even more distraught. "Where's our building? Where's everything that's happened in the last hundred years? All that progress gone! Everything we've achieved! This is terrible! Why are you smiling, you little son of a bitch?"

  Justin had been about to tell Palazzo it was all in his head, but stopped himself. Not after that abusive tone!

  Palazzo wasn't doing especially well at coping with the situation. He began babbling about what they could do to fix all this. Justin could have suggested leaving the room or taking some flash photography, but why put himself out? And would Palazzo listen to someone as unimportant as him? Remarkable, in any case, that Palazzo was so susceptible to psychic influence, taking the reality of their vista at face value. Maybe he had too much else on his mind to think critically about this. Dotted lines of streetlamps were beginning to incandesce hither and yon.

  Justin understood what happened next, because it was also happening to him by dint of celestial meeting of minds. Traveling across any surface obviously entailed the risk of slipping on that surface, particularly at stressful moments. Those who fished through a hole in the ice were always one misstep away from an unfriendly medium. And now Justin's idyllic Providence descended instantaneously from mellow dusk to heavy gloom. Big and low in the gray northern sky floated the denser black of what first seemed the moon in eclipse. But pale stars, and not craters, were scattered across its surface, in a range of sizes from pinpoint to grapeshot. Here was the angler's native sky, as glimpsed through the hole in space where three-lobed eye had glared down and dispensed visions till brief clumsiness dislocated it. If Justin had blinked, he'd have missed it, for there followed a thud that shook the unseen gallery floor and rattled the unseen pictures on the walls, and the hole in space was jammed with frantic, ciliated tissue that bulged like a bubble into the room. On contact with the atmosphere it shone pink, then hot red.

  In that span of seconds, a mounting stench of scorching mold and incinerated carcasses made Justin choke, and he reeled at a protracted, inhuman wail that was as much between his ears as in them, and that also spewed from his own mouth. It distorted as if channeled through cheap microphone. The surroundings, mean while, kept flickering between darkness and dim simulation of bygone Providence.

  Then further sound impinged on him. Palazzo was still babbling in the same rhythm, at the same tempo, but the syllables had devolved into baby talk, and their volume had drastically risen. Callously or not, Justin felt a burden melt from his shoulders, and a release of tension in his chest. Palazzo going mad had saved Justin from doing the same. This chaos wasn't simply an expression of Justin's lone delusion. He needn't doubt, or abandon, his own sanity!

  The entity broke free of vacuum seal between dimensions, and in its wake left unmediated the passage between here and there. A sonic boom knocked Justin off his feet, and the walls in the dark room rumbled, and all his artwork plummeted with a crash of shattering glass. The sour air began to whistle by his face. He lay as flat as possible, and his lunging hands bumped and clung to the cold steel siding of the attendant's desk. Praise the Lord, it was bolted down!

  A hole in space, left on its own, couldn't be stable. It had to collapse soon. But the leakage between dimensions was still accelerating, lifting Justin off the concrete floor, when Palazzo flopped onto his belly and grabbed Justin's ankles. Justin's sweaty handhold on the sharp edge of slick metal panel began to loosen. He couldn't hang on much longer in this wind tunnel with patrician dead weight doubling his own. He kicked out as if swimming the Australian crawl, once, twice, and screaming Palazzo lost his grip. Had Justin done what was needful to save himself, or had he outright killed a man? The keening airflow was already beginning to tug less fitfully at him, and with a moral issue assailing him on top of everything else, his overtaxed consciousness gave way, though his fingers knew better than to let go.

  Justin opened his eyes to bright gallery illumination. The attendant was standing beside him, studying him fretfully. She evidently knew where to find the circuit-breakers, or at least the janitor. Justin was lying on his right side and had unhanded the desk. He and the girl gawked at each other a minute. He didn't feel impelled to say anything yet.

  "You okay? You want me to call the infirmary?"

  Infirmary? The word dredged up long-lost campus lore of subpar doctors burning warts off the wrong hand. Last thing he needed now. "Oh no, not those butchers."

  She shrugged. "A friend came and got me from upstairs when she heard a noise and saw the lights were out. Was there an earthquake in here or something?"

  "Something, yeah." He raised himself on bruised and achy elbow. By the grace of whatever laws governed pressure or gravitation or aerodynamics between worlds in tangent, little had been scooped up from the edges of the room. Most of his photos lay face-up on the floor, though a lot of busted glass had crossed over. "I'm a lucky bastard," he mumbled.

  "What?" The girl wasn't going to freak out, was she? "Where's Dr. Palazzo?"

  "I don't know." Not the lie it sounded like! "Pretty sure the earth didn't swallow him up."

  She assessed the damage with a few birdlike turns of her head. "There's not much glass." She crinkled her nose. "Do you know what that smell is?"

  Pleasantly for her, most of the stink had been funneled into the void. Justin started to get up, but one foot skidded out from under him when he put his weight on it. He sat awkwardly with leg outstretched. The attendant had skipped back several prudent steps, and waved toward his less trustworthy foot. "What's that?"

  He shifted the foot aside, drew his leg in, and huddled forward for a closer squint. The item on the floor had the circumference of a pancake, and was related to humanity somehow, but was hard to define because it was so out of context. Aha! Palazzo's majestic head of wavy silver hair really had been a toupee. "It's Palazzo's," he told the girl, who persisted in her puzzled stare. "Looks like he flipped his wig," Justin hinted. Comprehension dawned. Understandably, she made no move to pick it up.

  He managed to stand. He might be in shock, but theorized that if he chose not to think about it, he could function indefinitely. "Look, if you're not busy, help me load the rest of my stuff in the van, will you?"

  "Are you sure it's all right? I thought Dr. Palazzo wanted everything to stay."

  "He left it up to me." Was that less than a half-truth? Did it matter? "Now come on. I want to be in the Catskills by nightfall."

  She wavered as if tossing a figurative penny, then with a fraction of a nod capitulated. What the hell, why not? A bigger relief than Justin dared let on! Sooner or later, Palazzo's disappearance would be police business, and they might well talk to the girl and go from there. Justin gave her two frames to carry at a time, and dawdled so that she always went out by herself. The more trips she made, the more chances she had to snoop around the van, fore and aft, and ascertain that it contained no
corpus delicti.

  He thanked her afterward, but she only made a noncommittal sound and scurried for the shelter of the List Building. Was he really such an unnerving presence? Just as well she was gone, anyhow. A bothersome soreness and itch below his left ribs called for investigation. He untucked his shirt. Thank God the psychic link was compromised when careless alien faltered onto the hole! Otherwise, instead of a puffy, flaming red welt, wide and round as a CD, he'd have an empathic third-degree burn to explain at the emergency room. He was a lucky bastard all right. Even if he was stuck with the bed-and-breakfast bill.

  He hit the road. Minutes later, according to a sign on the median strip, Massachusetts welcomed him. He'd made a scotfree getaway, or had he? Ten days went by, in which the angry red welt faded; he e-mailed the gallery director an unacknowledged apology for yanking the show, and he reframed his photos, and then the phone rang. The Providence police wanted to have their inevitable talk, and he obliged them on the way home from his Philly opening. They recorded the diffident, submissive Justin for posterity. His account contained no untruths and hoisted no red flags. He did omit any nonsense about nostalgic hallucination, hostile alien, hole in space, and kicking Palazzo into that hole. In the official version, he fell unconscious during a local tremor that interrupted an argument with Palazzo, and when he came to, Palazzo was gone. The police didn't ask about Palazzo's toupee. It must have landed in the trash before anyone realized what it was, before Palazzo was numbered among the missing. And the gallery attendant had forgotten or hadn't troubled to mention it. Justin owed her for that!

  The police let him go. He was undeniably the last man on earth to see Palazzo alive, but only he knew that for a fact, and Palazzo must have had longer-standing, uglier imbroglios with others. Hopefully Justin was shut of Providence forever. Foolhardy to second-guess when next the stars above town would be "right" again!

  Behind the wheel, it gave him pause to consider how blithely he was sidestepping any remorse about his role in Palazzo's demise. Technically, he'd killed the guy, unavoidably or not, willfully or not. But what about the hundreds of more cold-blooded, premeditated murders on the books that went unsolved? Plainly a crowded field of killers had learned to live with themselves, and go to work every day, and get married, and raise kids, and collect a pension. Justin wasn't even asking as much of life as all that. He too would learn to live with himself, just as he had learned the ropes of so many careers in his checkered adulthood. That malaise seeping up from the bedrock of his conscience would settle down if he ignored it, and stay down for months or years like any of his other wellsprings of guilt. What good would confession do himself or anybody? He was under no illusion that a jail cell or padded cell would "cleanse" him. To be honest, wasn't the world better off minus one arrogant yuppie?