Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Here, people had tied paper folded into gliders and knotted the cords through their pointed “beaks” in such a way that I thought of eyes. I wondered what was written inside the gliders, but it would have been taboo for me to open one up to look.

As a child, at our neighborhood shrine, I had once broken the taboo. I had been disappointed by the ordinariness of the prayers. Most Kheneirans are literate, the result of a cultural fervor for education and the classics, but not everyone is equally skilled with brush and ink. Some of the prayers had been scratched out with a stick of charcoal or graphite; others were written in calligraphy so fine that I was sure a local scribe, versed in the formulas of piety, had been paid to do the work.

People had asked for loan sharks to develop forgiving hearts; for injured relatives to regain enough mobility to work; for the rainy season to bring rain, but not too much rain. For healthy babies, for well-favored marriages, for high scores on critical exams. Even as a child I knew how these stories ended. I slipped back home, secure — as only a child could be — in the knowledge my mother would take care of me. No doubt the prayers here were much the same.

I made my way past the shrine of Falcons Crossing, determined not to be intimidated by it. Strangely, I counted not one scribe booth near the shrine, but four. Were people especially devout here? What was more, each had a sign marked simply with the traditional drawing of brush and inkstone, but no example verse to demonstrate the scribe’s skill. In addition, banners hung from each one, their color indeterminate in the low light. I would have to ask about the booths when I had the opportunity.

The guesthouse was where the newspaper had said it would be, flanked by two enormous wisteria trees. At this time of year they weren’t in bloom, but I inhaled the evening air deeply, remembering the heady scent from my childhood. I contemplated the guesthouse’s sign as I did so. To my puzzlement, it had no writing on it, only a painted lamp.

I had worried that I’d arrived too late — especially in smaller towns, people go to bed early — but the guesthouse keeper let me in. He was a wrinkled man who spoke with a wheeze. I paid ahead for the two weeks I planned to stay. Before I asked if there was any leftover rice I could have, he said he would have a dinner tray sent up to my room. At this hour the common room wouldn’t be open anyway.

“Does it ever get busy this time of year?” I asked, the most direct way I could think of asking if there were other guests.

“We do well enough,” the guesthouse keeper said.

I couldn’t tell if I had offended him. “I have another question.”

He looked at me with unrevealing eyes. “Strangers often do.”

Not exactly encouraging, but he hadn’t told me that I couldn’t ask. “Why are there so many scribe booths by the shrine?”

“Saves the rest of us from having to learn,” he said. “Myself, anytime I need any of that done, I get my daughter to do it. My late wife was from” — he named the nearest city of any size — “and she insisted on teaching the girl. I put up with it just to get some peace.”

I blinked at the foreignness of this attitude, but just then my stomach complained. Dealing with provincial backwardness was not my affair. I indicated my desire to retire to my room, and the guesthouse keeper gave me the key after reiterating that dinner would be brought up to me.

The food was more than satisfactory. Despite having grown up listening to Ulowen complaints about the native cuisine, I liked it. Even here the rice was not poorly cooked — Kheneirans have an unspeakable contempt for people who cannot produce a decent bowl of rice — and the marinated anchovies, combined with the seasoned sautéed spinach, provided enough counterpoint to satisfy the tongue.

I placed the tray just outside my room when I was done and closed the door. The hour was too late to visit the guesthouse’s bath, so I would attend to that in the morning. Instead, I unfolded the sleeping mat, changed, and lay down.

Sleep came quickly, yet I awoke in the middle of the night gripped by a frantic exhilaration. I paced to the window and opened it. The moon was not visible from this angle, although I knew it would be a waning crescent. Parts of the sky were scarved with cirrus.

Against that dark-light sky, I saw a vast migration: gliders whose size I had trouble gauging, gliders that seemed to silhouette the moon-crescent, soaring to some unguessable destination. I could not tell whether any of them had eyes.

The local migration contests would not begin until the end of the week. But I had to know what was going on. I pulled on my shoes and flung my coat on over my sleeping clothes, then hurried outside. The chill hit me immediately, and I shivered, huffing steam into the air.

A single lantern guttered out, like a stabbed eye, as I made it past the wisteria trees. Moonlight silvered the peaked roofs, the rough stones of the street. I regretted not taking the time to dress more warmly.

I hurried after the gliders. The formation flew in an eerily constant direction. I navigated by them as though they were a sailor’s true-stars. They could have led me into the cavern mouth of a tiger and I wouldn’t have paid heed until it was too late.

The gliders took no notice of me. I might as well have been chasing seed puffs. For all that I hurried, they were soon out of sight. With the cold wind at my back, I continued to run after them, heart hammering, panting from the unaccustomed exertion. My calf cramped. I went down.

I landed badly despite flinging my hands out to catch myself. For a moment I could scarcely breathe. Then, as my palms began to throb, I staggered back to my feet.

I could keep going after the gliders. Not that I expected to catch up to them — it had been ridiculous to think I might. Now that I considered it, the chase might be hopeless, but I could trace their path backwards and figure out where they had come from.

This time I walked. Maybe people with paper cuts on their hands awaited me, people discussing omens and staring into the far haze of night for signs of — what?

I heard the piercing cries of a night-bird, which fell silent as I approached. The insects’ shrill song was almost as tangible as the bite in the air. The towns’ lanterns flickered unnervingly as I passed them.

Perhaps I should have anticipated this, but the path led me to the shrine. Its sharp angles and jutting beams intimidated me even more than they had when there had been a trace of sunlight. I pulled up short despite the twinge in my knees.

Even in the uncertain light, I saw what had changed, where the gliders had come from. None of the eyeless gliders that had been tied to the shrine remained. All the beams were barren, and the cords floated freely in the wind.

I’d never heard of this variant of the ritual. At all the other shrines I’d encountered, you let the elements dissolve the slips of paper to carry the prayers to the small gods of rock and rill and rain. But then, it was naive of me to believe that religious practice was the same throughout the peninsula. In a town where people didn’t even take interest in their own language’s writing, who knew?

The variant should have thrilled me. The idea of prayers flying into the sky had a certain elegance. Yet I remembered the eerie flock of gliders, sailing distances that should have been inconceivable without the guidance of some otherworldly force.

By that point I had finally realized how inadequate my coat was against the cold. I stared up at the shrine and wondered how I could find out more about what was going on.

Perhaps I could insinuate myself into the proceedings. Moved by phantasms of superstition rather than logic, I searched the scribes’ booths. They had left none of their supplies, and it felt sacrilegious to tear a strip from one of the banners.