Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Next I visited the town hall so I could inquire after the fate of the national archives. According to tradition, even the queens and kings of the old realm were not permitted to read the Royal Historians’ chronicles, so that the historians’ objectivity would not be compromised. I doubted the historians had been able to enforce this, but the myth meant something.

After dealing with two older clerks whose lack of interest was palpable, I tracked down an assistant, a woman perhaps a few years younger than I was. She seemed genuinely distressed that she couldn’t answer my questions. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m told there was a lot of confusion during the civil war. The person you would have wanted to ask was—” The name she gave meant nothing to me. There was no reason why it should have, yet I felt a pang of disappointment. “She was in charge of the archives and, as far as anyone knew, she wasn’t terribly interested in the job, but no one else was either. After she passed away, people let them slide into neglect. That’s all I know.”

“Did she worship often at the shrine?” I asked.

She blinked. “I—I think so, yes. She was known for being very devout.”

I told her where I was staying and asked her to send word if she found anything more.

But I already knew I would not hear from her.

I returned to the guesthouse early, stopping at a stationery store on the way to buy some paper just in case. No clues here: just ordinary blank paper. In my frustration, it was tempting to poke holes into one of the sheets, or wad it up, or tear it to shreds. My mother had taught me frugality, however, so I resisted the urge.

The hours until sunset passed half as a blur, half as a crawl. If the guesthouse keeper hadn’t called me to the common room, I would have forgotten to eat. His daughter, whom he introduced perfunctorily, asked several times if I wanted anything specific. I was picking at my food, too jittery to down most of it, and had to keep reassuring her that no, I didn’t want anything else.

After dinner I hurried to the shrine, noting the way people lifted their heads to stare at me. It was a marked difference from the way they had ignored me earlier. Moths flitted around the lanterns, and their shadows danced across my path.

I might as well have taken my time, despite my prickling awareness of the sun’s arc. After a childhood of taunts and ambushes, I had come prepared to fight if I had to. I had imagined that shamans of the high places would await me, or the scribes with their unstained brushes, or a tumult of followers barring me from the shrine.

Instead, the shrine was abandoned, the scribes’ stalls empty, just as before. The banners stirred weakly as the wind gusted around them; that was all.

I had been counting on finding someone here to ask questions of. Even walking the perimeter revealed nothing useful. The buildings in the vicinity were shuttered and showed no sign of occupation, and I would have felt ridiculous pestering the locals by knocking on doors.

I returned my attention to the shrine — specifically, to my own offering. It was no mystery to me. But what of the other offerings? Just what was on all those sheets? Had any of them been written on?

Maybe the fact that nobody was here — nobody I had spotted, anyway — worked in my favor.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I strode up to the shrine’s lowest beam and snatched at one of the gliders. It floated out of my reach in response to a sudden gust, as if it was shying from my hand.

The lines from that children’s game whispered in my mind:

Then I understood. The glider wasn’t a falcon. It was fleeing the falcon.

On the second try I ripped the glider free, destroying its eye. My hands shook as I unfolded it, eager to discover its secrets. For a moment I thought I heard the distant cry of a night bird. Then I laughed at myself: it was the train’s whistle as it approached Falcons Crossing, nothing more.

The train whistled again as I righted the paper and read it. It looked like a recipe for pickled cabbage. Who would ask for a prayer about pickled cabbage? I let the mutilated paper fall. It almost seemed to twitch limply as it did so.

The next glider I harvested was more interesting. Whoever had folded it must have had long experience coaxing old paper into shape, for it was brittle with age. In better light I imagined it would have a yellow tint.

This one was a letter from some soldier to his wife. It spoke of his sergeant’s callous sense of humor, of pranks involving mismatched socks; it asked about their children. It said without saying it outright, I am afraid I will never make it home.

I folded it back up and flung it into the night. It soared onward, finally disappearing from sight. It would fly far, I thought. The letter was full of fear. People run fastest when full of fear. I doubted a sparrow would do any differently, and Falcons Crossing was the falcon’s home.

I pulled my coat more tightly about myself as the wind picked up. The sun was sinking beneath the horizon, like an eye being blotted. I reached for another glider, then another, reading them, then folding them up again and launching them.

When I examined the first — twelve? twenty? — my hunch was right. The scribes hadn’t bothered writing anything at all, despite the trappings of their profession. After that I stopped examining the gliders. I had already figured out that people in Falcons Crossing didn’t trust writing; that they preferred to parasitize documents already in existence.

In a frenzy, I freed the rest of the gliders, the eyeless gliders, flinging them into the air. Some of the gliders dropped quickly to the ground, while others sped away as though pursued. Only when I came to my own did I stop.

Carefully, I unknotted my mother’s letter. I had almost ripped it down and flung it away. But I had stopped in time. I tucked it back into my coat.

I became aware of the old children’s chant rising around me, of the people who had emerged to circle the shrine. “Falcon, falcon,” they called to me.

The scribe I had visited earlier in the day walked toward me. She held her unstained brush out to me.

“No,” I said. I would not take up her profession.

As terrible as the indifference of the gods is, the indifference of people is worse. All that history folded up into gliders, offerings to an unlistening power. I could not stop it, but neither would I participate in it. Now I understood now why my mother had left. I walked away and did not look back.

It gives W. H. Pugmire“a kind of perverse pleasure to pen stories that are audaciously Lovecraftian, in that they reference H. P. Lovecraft’s superb stories and then weave my own diabolic twist into the tale. It’s a delicious pastime. My story herein is set in Lovecraft’s notorious witch-town and mentions his infamous artist, Pickman; I play with Lovecraft’s cosmic themes in my own fashion.”

Wilum Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian fiction since the early 1970s, at which time he began to read Lovecraft and correspond with the surviving members of the Lovecraft/ Weird Tales Circle. Since then he has published twenty books of explicitly eldritch fiction, the latest of which is Monstrous Aftermath (Hippocampus Press). He is presently at work on his second collection for Centipede Press.

Malcolm Elioth sauntered across the Garrison Street Bridge and stopped midpoint, leaned over the sturdy railing and watched the play of moonlight on the Miskatonic River below. He listened, and wondered why the flowing water seemed to call to him with liquid voice, as if trying to coax him over the barrier and into its depths; yet Malcolm resisted the call, for there were other pools of darkness into which he wished to plunge.