Black wings vii, p.1
Black Wings VII, page 1
BLACK WINGS VII
Tales of Lovecraftian Horror
Edited by S. T. Joshi
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
THE RESONANCES
ER LASST SICH NICHT LESEN
HOW CURWEN GOT HIS HUNDRED YEARS
THE PIT OF G'NARRH
OPEN ADOPTION
THE LIME KILN
FATHER THAMES
WHO KILLED AUGUSTUS BOURBAKI
CAN WE KEEP HIM?
THE THINGS WE DO NOT SEE
GLOBAL WARMING
A VERY OLD SONG
DECEPTION ISLAND
AND THE DEVIL HATH POWER
THE AMBER TOAD
AN ELEMENTAL INFESTATION
WITH EYES OPENED
Black Wings VII
INTRODUCTION
S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), and other volumes. Among his anthologies of classic and contemporary weird fiction are American Supernatural Tales (2007), Searchers After Horror (2014), A Mountain Walked (2014), Nightmare’s Realm (2017), and the previous six volumes of the Black Wings series (2010–17). He is the editor of Penumbra, the Lovecraft Annual, and Spectral Realms.
THE ADJECTIVE “LOVECRAFTIAN” is nowadays applied so widely and indiscriminately that we are in danger of losing an understanding of its proper focus and parameters. This phenomenon is itself a tribute to the spectacular popularity that Lovecraft’s work has achieved over the past half-century—a popularity that extends not only to the worldwide dissemination of his writings in more than thirty languages but also to adaptations for film, television, comic books, role-playing games, video games, and even merchandising. But one needs more than slimy tentacles or bug-eyed monsters to warrant the designation “Lovecraftian,” and it might be well to remind ourselves of what the essence of Lovecraft’s theory and practice of weird fiction actually consists of.
The central pillar of Lovecraft’s aesthetic theory is cosmicism—a depiction of the nearly infinite gulfs of space and time and the derisively insignificant place human beings occupy in those realms. As he states in “The Silver Key,” “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.” This conception grew out of Lovecraft’s atheism (there is no god to save us from our own meaninglessness) and fascination with science, especially that of astronomy. In this volume, such diverse tales as Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Things We Do Not See” and Katherine Kerestman’s “Global Warming” suggest the cosmic while at the same time focusing on the human characters who dimly perceive their own insignificance. Donald Tyson’s “The Amber Toad” effects a union of weirdness and science fiction in very much the manner that Lovecraft did in such tales as “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow out of Time.”
For Lovecraft, the expression of cosmicism is facilitated by a meticulous realism, especially that of setting. His own writing vividly re-creates both the history and topography of New England as well as other locales he had never visited—not least of them the Antarctica of At the Mountains of Madness, the setting for Nancy Kilpatrick’s haunting “Deception Island.” Donald R. Burleson draws upon his long years in New England for “The Pit of G’narrh,” while other tales take us farther afield: remote rural areas of Pennsylvania (Geoffrey Reiter’s “The Lime Kiln”), very similar to the Massachusetts setting of “The Colour out of Space”; and most exotically of all, the Calcutta of Aditya Dwarkesh’s “Who Killed Augustus Bourbaki?” Even seemingly familiar regions in Great Britain (as in David Hambling’s “Father Thames” and Mark Howard Jones’s “A Very Old Song”) prove far more disturbing than they appear on the surface.
Dwarkesh’s story highlights another key component of Lovecraftian fiction: the use of the scholarly narrator or protagonist. Lovecraft himself regarded intellectual and aesthetic activity as the pinnacle of human achievement, even though he well knew its psychological dangers. Early in his career he wrote, “To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.” In this volume, we find such pursuits leading to unthinkable horrors in Mark Samuels’s “An Elemental Infestation,” John Shirley’s “And the Devil Hath Power,” and Steven Woodworth’s “Er Lasst Sich Nicht Lesen.”
In Lovecraft’s fiction, human cults devoted to the “gods” of the Cthulhu Mythos play a central role. It may well be (as Lovecraft suggests in “The Call of Cthulhu”) that these cults are seriously in error as to the nature of the entities they worship; but nonetheless, they constitute a baleful counter-culture on the underside of normal civilisation. In this volume, Darrell Schweitzer’s “Can We Keep Him?,” Mark Howard Jones’s “A Very Old Song,” and others revivify the motif of the ancient cult stretching back centuries or millennia.
Several tales in this book reflect Lovecraft’s fascination with the notion of abnormal longevity. The wonders and terrors of living beyond the bounds of normal human life were, in his work, embodied most vividly in the figure of Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Jonathan Thomas performs a clever riff on this character in “How Curwen Got His Hundred Years.” Another kind of extended life is found in the hybrid Deep Ones of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and Ann K. Schwader draws upon this tale (as many other leading writers of contemporary weird fiction have done) in “Open Adoption.”
The “forbidden book” theme, embodied in Lovecraft’s tales by the redoubtable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, became something of an in-joke even in Lovecraft’s own day, as several of his colleagues created imaginary books of occult lore in their own stories. But the motif has serious ramifications, in that these tomes feature the very knowledge that will make us aware of our fleeting tenure on this earth; and it is this element that Ramsey Campbell utilises in “The Resonances,” as he draws not only on Lovecraft’s tales but his own previous work to create a narrative that fuses metaphysical and psychological terror.
This book is, I trust, one of many recent works that display the continuing vitality of neo-Lovecraftian writing in our day. Critics and scholars have presented a compelling portrait of Lovecraft as a writer whose philosophical vision led him to create an entire cosmogony of “gods” and monsters that embody his profound awareness of the fragility of a human race lost in the vortices of space and time. Contemporary writers have learned that it takes more to be “Lovecraftian” than merely tossing in a familiar name or reusing one of Lovecraft’s own plots; it requires a deep understanding of what lies beneath the superficial flamboyance of his tales, reaching to the central core of fear and dread that his transcendent craftsmanship engendered. We are lucky that a small cadre of gifted writers can echo his vision while at the same time expressing their own ideas in tales scarcely less skilful than his.
—S. T. JOSHI
THE RESONANCES
Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and now lives in Wallasey. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes him as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction.” He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. PS Publishing have brought out two volumes of Phantasmagorical Stories, a sixty-year retrospective of his short fiction, and a companion collection, The Village Killings and Other Novellas. His latest novel is The Lonely Lands from Flame Tree Press, which has also recently published his Brichester Mythos trilogy.
AS STUART REACHED BRICHESTER CATHEDRAL A confusion of noises came to meet him—a dogged stony trudge accompanied by a rumble suggestive of the dragging of a tail and a repeated squeal like the complaint of joints in need of oil. If he hadn’t been some years too old for fairy tales he might have fancied one of the gargoyles had gone for a wander. He pushed the door next to the massive portal wide and stepped back as the wheelbarrow heaped with rubble lumbered forth, wielded by a workman with goggles dangling along with a facemask around his stubby neck. “Got yourself a job there, son,” he said.
Murmurs of visitors massed beneath the vaulted ceiling of the cathedral, above the nave Stuart had learned today was Norman. The aisle led to an enormous distant window like a rainbow shattered into fragments and reassembled to depict highlights from the Bible. His research let Stuart recognise that the limestone vines decorating the walls were Perpendicular. A muffled clink of tools on stone drew his attention to the transverse aisle, where he saw Samantha in the pew closest to the lady chapel.
A plasterboard partition shut off the chapel while the renovation was in progress. The metallic hammering put Stuart in mind of miners in a cave. Samantha glanced away from an architectural diagram on the laptop she’d propped beside a hymnal. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.
Stuart could have felt he’d blundered into the court of the princess her delicate face reminded him of—deep dark eyes, slim nose, full pink lips—while the rest of her made him feel awkward in a different although increasingly familiar way. He meant to murmur, but it
The corners of her lips turned up. “Just for me?”
“For my project as well. We can share.”
“Tell me then, Stuart.”
Her use of the name seemed to soften his innards. His friends—his other friends, he hoped he could begin to think—made him sound like the wrong sort of dish. “I can show you,” he said.
He produced his phone as the empty wheelbarrow trundled up the nave. He was bringing up the first shot he’d taken in the archives when the workman leaned over the ledge of the pew. “Can’t you kids even do without your games in church?”
Samantha’s stare did without an expression. “We aren’t playing any games.”
“We’ve been asked to look into the restoration of the chapel.”
“Keeping an eye on us lowlifes, are you? Doing what your teacher told you to, more like. You’d be more use seeing to the doors for us.”
“That’s not what I’m for and she isn’t either.”
“Down, boy. I wasn’t going for your girlfriend. You may look big to her but you don’t look big to me.”
“Can you start behaving like gentlemen,” Samantha said. “You aren’t impressing anyone.”
“Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart,” the workman said, wheeling the barrow to the door in the temporary partition. Embarrassed by the reference to a girlfriend and demeaned by her rebuke, Stuart stayed mute until she said “Aren’t you showing me?”
“It says the frescoes were meant to be special.”
“Let me look for myself.”
Her soft cool hand touched his as she took the phone, and he thought too late of keeping hold of it to retain her touch. At least he could lean close to her while she scrolled through the information. The site now known as Cathedral Mount was a place of worship long before the eleventh-century cathedral had been built there. The frescoes in the lady chapel were hailed as uncommonly beautiful by everyone who had viewed them before the walls had been covered by new stone, now in the process of removal. “Too much for the men in charge to cope with,” Samantha declared. “They won’t get their way any more.” The frescoes had been designed to sanctify the site, and she tapped the sentence with a slim pink fingernail. “What does that mean, Stuart?”
“Make it more sacred, you know, like churches are supposed to be. Like that man tried to make out we were spoiling.”
“I don’t need a translation. I’m asking if you found out any more.”
“Not yet.”
“Find out for me tomorrow, can you? I’ll be here. Just let me copy all this first.” As Samantha paired the mobile with her laptop, Stuart hoped she was making more of a connection with him. “Thanks for backing me up,” she said.
Perhaps she meant his research had confirmed her views, but he let himself think she might have reassessed his confrontation with the workman. As he made his way through the extensive antique churchyard he glanced back to check the man hadn’t followed him. The massive pallid building glimmered in the late October dusk, and for a moment he thought the fellow had sneaked past him as a preamble to an ambush, but the crouching figure must have been a toppled monument he couldn’t even locate.
His parents were at their computers in the workroom, justifying clients’ tax accounts. “You were a long time at your archive,” his father said.
“I went to the cathedral as well. I’m helping someone with their project.”
“Is she nice?” Stuart’s mother seemed to think this didn’t need an answer. “What’s her name?”
“Samantha. She’s doing the architecture part.”
“She’ll be in your class, then.”
“She’s in my one at school.”
“Not just that kind,” his father said. “You’re as good as any of them or you wouldn’t be there.”
Stuart thought this was easy to believe if you weren’t at the school, where many of his classmates didn’t bother hiding how they regarded him as an intruder hardly worth their tolerance. He couldn’t let his parents know when they worked so hard to pay for his education. They were convinced his brain required that kind, a notion that often left him wishing he were stupid. If his intelligence won Samantha over, perhaps it was some use after all.
Next day he used the archive as soon as it was open to the public. Several tables in the long high room enclosed by gloomy oak were occupied by researchers who glanced at him as if he weren’t a member of their club. The librarians brought him items—local histories, parish records, monastic reminiscences, ecclesiastical chronicles—that the archive computer suggested to him. The documents didn’t tell him much that Samantha might want to learn, and he had to remind himself he wasn’t there just on her behalf.
Some of the stone used to build the cathedral had been quarried from a cave, a process that had razed the cave to the ground at the summit of the hill the cathedral stood on. Apparently this had been a stage in the process of sanctification. As far as Stuart could decipher from the mediaeval language, one monk said the frescoes in the lady chapel were designed to counteract the grotesque forms carved on the corbels of the cathedral. Though Stuart hadn’t noticed them, some of those were so misshapen that there had been proposals to destroy them, but presumably preservationists had won the day. Why had the frescoes been covered up? Samantha would want to know, but hours of research failed to enlighten him. As the afternoon grew dark he learned that the original site on the hill had been known as the Cave of the Voice. Following up this lead would have to wait, otherwise he might miss Samantha at the cathedral.
The plasterboard partition had been removed from the lady chapel, and there was no sign of any workmen. His surge of relief dwindled as he saw Samantha had company. Opening the restored chapel had changed the acoustic of the cathedral, which meant his multiplying echoes drew attention to him as he made for the pew by the chapel. As Samantha turned to him, so did her companion, a boy of about his age but bulkier, with a broad flattish face that looked ready to lose interest in the newcomer. “What have you brought me today, Stuart?” Samantha said.
He sidled past the other boy so as to sit beside her. “The frescoes were supposed to make up for the carvings round the outside,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?” The boy’s question sounded accusing, and so did “Make up for them.”
“That’s what some monk said. Don’t blame me.”
“I’m not too impressed with your helper, Sam.”
“Stuart’s in my class.”
“I doubt it.”
“Heath.” Stuart hoped this was a rebuke, but she was introducing her friend. “Stuart,” she added.
“And may we hear what you think of our chapel?”
“Why’s it yours?”
As soon as the retort was out Stuart wished he’d been less childish—he was fourteen, for god’s sake. “We worship here,” Heath said.
“Well, I’m studying it like her.”
“We look forward to being graced with your insights.”
Stuart took this for sarcasm until he realised Heath was gazing at him, which sent him to the chapel. The exposed frescoes looked freshly painted: Mary surrounded by cherubim in the manger, kneeling at the foot of a radiant crucifixion, elevated heavenwards by angels winged with sunbursts...“Nobody ought to have covered them up,” he told Samantha. “I can’t see why anybody would.”
“The likes of some of us were responsible.” Before Stuart could react Heath said “I must say you don’t seem to have much to offer.”
“So what are you doing for her?”
“Use whatever imagination you’ve got,” Heath said and finished staring at him. “I’ll leave you to your academic conference, Sam. Just phone when you’re ready for me.”
As Heath’s retreat added echoes to the acoustic clutter Stuart said “That’s all I could find today about the chapel, Sam.”
“Don’t call me that, thank you. You’ve still got the rest of the week.”
Stuart was halfway to the exit, feeling resentfully dismissed, when his echoes distracted him. They sounded as if someone was blundering along the left-hand side aisle, barely able to walk, if indeed they weren’t proceeding on all lopsided fours. He peered around the pillar behind which the noises appeared to have lodged, and the nearest stained-glass window merged with its vague vista to produce a furtive movement, an illusion that vanished at once.
