Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (19 page)

Since no traces of the Tenniels’ family, job, or other connections existed, Blick was given the keys to their recently fumigated flat and ordered to go pick up the State’s new property, catalog it, and deliver it downtown to close the case. Normally a uniform would do this, but the department wanted this to be a forgotten affair. Blick took two Valium and three Dramamine before driving over.

The heat was 101 degrees frightening Fahrenheit. The traffic was slow. As Blick drove across town, the first of the Watts Towers killings occurred.

Later no one would be able to say what had happened to Sy McAffery. Her body was stretched in an odd way, as though caught between two massive steel plates, each moving at a different angle in almost parallel planes. The crowd stated that the sixteen-year-old was skating by Rodia’s sculpture. Probably using speed of air to escape the summer oven.

All noise stopped. People started running away. Why they ran is unclear. Reports break down at this point. Certainly no visual horror had manifested itself.

The air was clear and quiet, just the one skater by the Towers. Her features distort with agony. She begins spinning wildly. Witnesses agree there was a rushing, whirring sound, as though a mighty dynamo had been activated.

Her distorted, broken body was left atop the sculpture like a Druid sacrifice nailed to an oak tree. Watts would never be the same. There would be riots and fear and looting in seven days, when various groups blamed this all on some evil Caucasian super-science. With the irony that governs all things in this darkling universe, William Channing Blick had been conceived when his white daddy and black momma had cuddled in fear during the Watts Riots of the summer of 1965.

Blick knew nothing of the sweet girl’s bloody death. The drive to the Tenniels had been very draining. His headache had grown to monstrous proportions. The hot air rushed against him when he left his air-conditioned PT Cruiser. When Blick reached the top of the stairs, colors swam in his vision. He felt faint. An image of the Watts Towers pressed on his eyelids for a moment. Falling, he grabbed the doorknob. He felt a cold, electrical tingling and the delirium passed away.

Inside, the air conditioning was mercifully turned on. The fumigators had banished all but the faintest trace of the smell of rot. Blick began cataloging the contents of the apartment.

The furnishings were spartan. The landlady had painted Ouroborus over with white enamel, but the darker paint was beginning to peek through. The living room missed the operating tables. The white wall monotony was relieved by a knickknack bookcase. Its objects suggested terrible things to Blick. On the left top shelf was a Klein bottle, gold-leafed with goetic symbols. Most of these were unfamiliar to Blick, although some of them had been diagrams in
Zegrembi Manuscript.
Next was a porcelain cobra rising, head extended. A very slithy sculpture. The far right was occupied by a grinning human skull, a paperweight over three copies of
The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick.

Cincinnati?

The second shelf held an assortment of scalpels, Exacto knives, and copper daggers, the last engraved with the same goetica as the Klein bottle.

The bottom shelf held an assortment of works on anthropology, history of religion, and the like. Notable were a 55-page mimeograph,
The Feast of the Hive: Non-Unique Metrics in Hilbert Space,
and
Fifty-Book,
both by Thibaut de Castries. The far left seven inches of the shelf held a cut crystal bowl with a few drops of dried blood in its center.

The kitchen, bath, guest bedroom provided no surprises, other than the absence of a TV, landline, or even a computer. But the master bedroom, painted in the omnipresent white, had a closet full of nondescript clothes and two dusty olive-green shoeboxes. The first of these contained $5,000 in twenties and two fifty-dollar gold pieces (Pacific Exhibition, 1904). The second contained a Colt .357 Magnum (stolen three years earlier in Anaheim) and a green spiral notebook with the magic marker legend “Magickal Diary.”

Walpurgisnacht. Eliphas Levi recommends the feeding of familiars on human flesh, but we have discovered that this communication was faulty. The One on the roof Abrhooz (note: replace the torn shingles; Handy Dan has composition?) said his positiveness corrupted the message. It is the Adepti who must find human flesh toothsome. The One indicated that a topological distortion is needed. Black holes are the mundane exemplar of Negativity. Banished Him (It?) back to the Abyss with the Maion ceremony after the Golden Dawn proved ineffectual. The G.D. ceremony simply infuriated Him—fortunately, we had protection.

May 8—Trouble with returning today. Charles began visualizing the planes between the Yhr and the Nhhngr. Everything reversed as usual. Saw some amusing things through the neighbors’ mirrors. No wonder Aiwaz called them looking glasses. The current caught us—we abandoned ourselves too much, I guess. Came out near downtown when we finally broke through. May the Powers be praised! We were able to roll a couple of bums for their clothes. No money on them, and their clothes truly stank as well. Had to walk home (43 blocks!) in a man’s flannel shirt that hadn’t been washed this decade—actually creased with sweat and city grime and smog! Charles looked fairly decent; got a key from the landlady. We had to smash the mirror as it was exercising an almost hypnotic influence. Charles will consult de Castries on rifts and rays on Monday. All praise to the Goddess of Transformation! Ma-Ion Iä Shub-Niggurath!

Midsummer Night—Opened a Rift without the use of mirrors. Blood of the Moon and a crack’s there anyway. Had a few white and black flashes, then the LEAP where black is white and white black. Didn’t succumb to screaming heebie-jeebies this time. Others came and talked to us—teaching our bodies. But communication so deep that we can’t remember it as yet. Thibaut de Castries says the mutation is physical, not mental. Still very dizzy—walls would spin and shift if I let them. When I finish this entry I’ll go and take a cold shower. Apartment full of junk. Eyeglasses, false teeth (2 sets!), ticket stubs, ten silver dollars (go to coin store tomorrow), and some junk jewelry. Looks like a Mardi Gras parade went through the front room.

Sothis Rising. Praise be to Sothis’ Silver Star Note: we perceive space in three dimensions because only for n = 3 is the metric unique. In n > 3 the metric is
not
unique. In everyday life we observe non-unique metric as time, 4D change in a 3D window. The Feast enables the Adept to pull out into Daath. Daath has a non-unique metric—symbolized as Magick = Energy tending to change. The negation/annihilation of the adept is important: empty space = pure energy. Talked with shades unborn tonight, got concrete plans for transformation. Equipment will be big cost, but you can’t take it with you. After dismissing Them, Charles gave (pointlessly) a talk about secrecy in our workings, ending it with some crude jokes about stakes and garlic. May need to get ID to get surgical equip—

Blick was interrupted by a noise downstairs. 17:15—someone home from work. He would have to drive downtown to check out. He completed the catalog to turn in and installed a special access lock on the door. On an impulse, he erased “diary” and slipped it into his pocket. The case was closed and this would make an interesting souvenir.

Blick’s sleep over the next week was filled with horrors. Mostly, he dreamed of the Tenniels lying naked and hairless while the many-armed surgical equipment crawled like a carnivorous spider over their bodies. The Tenniels would smile at him, greet him by name. “We love you, Bill. We loved you before you were born.”

Sometimes he would dream of being a stalker. Hunting through a vast haunted Los Angeles. Everything was reversed, distorted, half unreal, as though the entire city lay reflected in Aunt Sadie’s bay windows. Black was white; white was black, angular curved, curved angular.

After three agonizing nights, Blick looked like hell. He asked for and received light duty. No questions. Most of the squad had read his report on the Tenniels and were sympathetic. He was investigating a railway salvage fraud case when news of the second killing came in.

The graveled drive writhed in convection waves. It would have been an excellent day for hang gliding, except that hang gliding is prohibited by local statute, protecting the pools and privacy of the residents of Beverly Hills. It is difficult to say where the meat fell from, since no one was in the airspace.

It was not difficult to identify the meat as human. It fell upon the drive with enough force to imbed the hot pebbles. Mr. Victor’s driver nearly ran over it while returning from a shopping expedition in town. The remains were never identified.

Blick returned to his own flat with twilight. Going home had been hard since Laura left. The small apartment expanded to a big empty space. Since the nightmares started, the dark rooms seemed malignant as well as lonely.

The television’s red and blue lights made Blick’s face a tribal mask. When the news of the Beverly Hills Butcher came in, Blick left for the neighborhood bar. A few cold beers, exchanging a few lies, ought to quell the nausea.

Blick stopped outside Eddie’s. The night was cool. Best place to get a hold on his mounting disquiet. The front window was full of regulars, the blond kid who hustled Tempest for drinks, the fat grocer and his pink polyester wife, the sports cluster around the TV. A young couple was watching Blick intensely, reflected in the glass. They must be standing behind him. Blick turned. No one. Turn again. Only himself reflected. Into the bar. His scared face.

The next morning with a hangover that would kill small cattle, Blick called in sick. Afraid to use the bathroom mirror, he shaved by feel, cutting his chin nicely.

He dressed for inconspicuousness. Brown shirt, camel cords, tan socks. Packed his .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster. He was almost out the door when he went back to get the Seal of Solomon keychain his Aunt Sadie had given him and a St. Christopher’s medal from Lynn. Couldn’t hurt.

The bus took him near the UCLA library. His hangover and accompanying nausea had vanished during the fifteen-minute bus ride. His stomach rumbled and his head sought the magic elixir of coffee.

The air was surprisingly clean, although already in the mid-nineties. In his student days, there had been a little cafe—there it was, just six blocks from campus. It had been the Silver Grill but now was the Mecca with cut-out onion domes painted in orange and black.

The inside still featured naugahyde-covered benches and ersatz formica table tops embossed with broken paper clip designs. Blick ordered two glazed doughnuts and coffee.

The counter, its stools and old men, were reflected in a full-length mirror. Blick froze when he saw the mirror, wondering if daylight and urbanity were significant shields against the Tenniels. There might be more than just Charles and his wife. How many missing person reports did the office receive daily? Seventeen? Twenty-three? Thirty thousand disappear in the US every year without trace. Who knows how many in India or China.

The coffee was strong and the doughnuts stale. As he dunked the doughnut, he felt a fly brush his neck. He started. In the mirror, two black-robed figures were leaning toward him.

Blick spun, trying to stand and free himself from the chair. A taloned hand swished its way to his neck. Fingernails passing into his neck, lifting up and away from the direction of spin. A bright black flash. Violent nausea as the floor dropped from under him. Hieroglyphic silence. Vertigo. Reaching for his gun in a cubist freeze-frame painting. Falling.

Suddenly (at least he thought it was suddenly) Blick focused. He hung suspended in a vast purple light. Alone. A cicada music in his ears. His neck wrenched and bleeding.

Movement was impossible. Nothing to purchase against. After flailing his legs in the cold static void, Blick felt their love. “WE love you, Bill! We loved you before you were born!” Two ideas kept re-entering his mind. He spent hours fighting them. First: he was weightless. Which immediately brought about thoughts of outer space. Second: he wasn’t breathing. Which suggested the hereafter.

After deciding on Descartes’s maxim of existence, he calmed down. Panic here was unbounded; without beating heart, sweaty palms, or other visceral governors, panic could totally fill you up.

Perhaps other feelings would be as absolute. That was why the Tenniels came here. Taking Heaven by storm. “That’s right, Bill, we love you, inside out. We talked with you before you were born.”

Obviously the Tenniels had some method of movement, of interacting with the real world. As well as some need to do so, unless the stalking of himself had only been for fun. “Fun is all there is, Bill. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. We love you, Bill. Don’t make the mistake of rejecting us!”

Blick closed his eyes to shut out the humming purple void. Very carefully he imagined riding the elevator. He ran the memory, film-like, over and over. He trimmed each temporal edge until the upward sensation was all that remained. Simplistic thoughts would intervene: “I’ve really got it now” or “I wonder if they see inside me?” and he would have to begin the process again.

After an eternity of trying, he was able to hold the sensation of ascent. Slowly he began to rise.

Gradually the light changed from purple to silver-gray. Blick floated above a purple hemisphere of light in a silver-gray void. The noise was different, more of a tea whistle than a cicada song.

Stretching to the horizon were other purple hemispheres, some quiescent, some seething like cauldrons. All glowing.

After a few minutes of observation, Blick noticed a salmon-pink lightning that played over the hemispheres. Very fine, it guided the purple light back into rigidly geometrical shapes whenever it began to expand, dimple, or sag.

The lightning was a webwork emanating from the top of the hemispheres and enveloping their domed bottoms. The origin of each web was a squiggle of light in the center of the purple disk.