HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

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72 H .P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R given me. Then I had dreams. In all of them, I watched scenes unravel from two perspectives, like I had two heads, two sets of eyes. In one head I was a regular guy and people walked around and did normal, people things. In the other I was a freak with white, glowing skin, and I watched tentacled monsters oozing pus and ichor pace beside not-human people with too many eyes, or not enough limbs, or extra animal parts. The screaming-weird part was the two visions overlaid each other so the normal people and the not-people were the same. And it all made perfect sense to both of me. I woke to Olson licking my face. Groggy and confused, images from my dreamscape were still stuck in my head. Olson looked like a normal dog, as normal as a disfigured Deagle can look—copper and black fur, banner-like ears, and wagging tail. But like a bad special effect, an image was superimposed over him. His markings writhed, blurring on his body so it looked like something was slinking through his skin. When I looked into his face, his eye sockets were filled with a bright, green light. I yelped and shoved him. He yelped back and cowered at the foot of my bed. I woke up completely and remembered it was Olson, my Olson, who I’d just batted away. “I’m sorry, fellah,” I said.”Had a bad dream. Didn’t mean to scare you. You’re a good dog. C’mere, boy.” He crept to me; his tail lifted from where he had tucked it between his legs. I fluffed his ears and tugged on his dangling jowls.”Good boy.” He drooled happily on me and lolled on his back so I could rub his tummy. He peered up at me, his doggy face grinning and trusting, and his phantom eyes glowing neon green. I stopped myself from recoiling by will power alone. This was still just Olson. I forced myself to continue ruffling his belly fur as he eyed me sideways, wondering why I was being so stiff but willing to be forgiving about it. I saw he only had ghost eyes if I looked at him through my empty left socket, which shouldn’t have been able to see anything. With my right eye, no green glow, nothing but bandaged dog face. I couldn’t stay inside. Jitters prickled up and down my spine, and my skin felt like it was going to get up and slither off me if I didn’t do something. The clock told me it was five-thirty in the morning. Early dawn when the world would be crisp and new, the streetlights beginning to turn themselves off, and the sky just light enough to see your feet against the whiteness of the sidewalk. “Wanna go for a walk, boy?” Olson’s tail thumped. I pulled on a t-shirt and a jacket over the sweatpants I wore to bed, and tugged on the sneakers Olson usually didn’t chew on unless he was feeling ornery. Outside, it looked different. The air shimmered and glistened, heavy like I could reach out and touch it, feel the textures of it between my fingertips. Indigo shadows dipped in and out of the edges of my sight. I tried to follow them and caught afterimage effects, like blinking from a flashbulb pop. The shades mimicked the monsters of my dreams. They made faces at me, leering at a spot between my shoulder blades. I should have been unnerved. But instead, I was amused. It was funny. I laughed. I think the sound offended them. The shadow shapes zipped away. I watched them enter homes—the Thompson’s, the frat house across the road, the other buildings that lined my street. I watched it all from my left, like you’d focus on a telescope with both eyes open, but only paying attention to one side. Olson hruffed and set off at a trot. “Where you going, fellah?” He turned his head. Glowing green eyes regarded me, and he hruffed again. This way, he said in clear-as-day dog talk. We have to go this way. So we went that way. I walked silently on my rubbersoled, gnawed-on sneakers, and Olson prowled beside me—a fierce hunting dog on short, stumpy legs. He turned into a driveway. An elderly lady lived in the house that driveway belonged to. I didn’t know her name, but I knew she fed the birds and squirrels. A feeder and birdbath ornamented the huge oak tree in her front yard. I’d seen her, now and again, putting millet or seed out as I drove to class. Olson led me around back. I knew, the same way I knew to look out of my left, we needed to be quiet. More than quiet. We needed to be invisible. Not understanding why or how, I reached out to the mercury air, and touched it. It felt like cool water streaming over my palm. It clung to my hand, and I wrapped it around us like a mantle. Now we were grey and silver too. As soon as the edges of our air-cloak closed around us, I heard it, smelled it: the burning tang of tar in summer, the high, shrill sounds of a woman’s death cry. A second later, the screams sheered off, truncated. We slipped around the corner. The Blindman bent over the bird and squirrel-loving old lady. A sack of seed and corn lay scattered over the ground; the grainy textures splashed with bright, bright red. The woman’s blood, strewn across the yard, gleamed in the bleak pre-dawn, pulsing a hot, tawny crimson. Her chest was a pulp of tissue, nothing but shredded meat. As we watched, the Blindman reached into the ragged cavity and pulled out her heart. He shoved it into his mouth, crammed the whole thing in, and swallowed. I didn’t need to look to know he had already taken her eyes. Olson and I, we moved together, launched ourselves at the Blindman, silently, swiftly, invisibly. His left eye socket glowed fiery red; his right was a mass of scars. The light of his eyes flickered as I ran, right, left, scars, no scars—my mind wasn’t used to focusing only out of one side when I was in motion. I slammed my fist into his face; Olson locked his teeth around his calf. I heard the snap of bone as my dog’s jaws ground together. The Blindman gibbered and went down, reaching for the silver air. He plucked free a great sheet of it and wound it about himself in a cocoon of nothingness. I smacked his hand aside, and he lost his grip on the rippling ether. We grappled and I sprawled on top of him. “What the hell are you?” I snarled. He laughed. It was a terrible laugh, sharp like the sound of a man’s neck snapping at the end of a noose, and wet like flesh
eing torn from bone. “I am lost innocence and hatred. You can’t kill me. You or your animal.” His voice was the rasp of night ghouls mocking you as you huddle under the covers, the hyena cries in the bush no animal throat makes, and everything evil that waited in the darkness for a moment of weakness. I shuddered and felt my strength ebb away. “Watch and judge, watch and judge.” The Blindman jabbered on. “When you tire of all those eyes seeing, all those minds hating, you’ll understand. You too will devour them, the blackness of their hearts.” He surged up. I couldn’t hold him; he was so strong. He threw me and Olson off, knocking us to the ground, and went after my dog. The scalpel in his hand plunged into Olson’s side. Olson yowled and bit at the Blindman, but his teeth passed through him, not connecting, not slowing him. I tried to tackle him, but I couldn’t touch him either. I passed right through him with the sensation of syrupy air all around me as I flew through his body. The Blindman sawed at Olson, shoving his scalpel deeper into my dog’s squat body. I knew he was going for the heart. Olson howled, struggling but unable to sink teeth into his tormenter. I tried to grab the Blindman’s arm and felt only air. Viscous air, but just air. My hand slipped down, unimpeded, until it jolted against the scalpel. Olson yelped. I could touch the scalpel. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled, fighting the Blindman for it, trying not to widen the terrible wound in my dog as we struggled. The Blindman’s fingers raked my face. I felt the sear of jagged nails score my right cheek, dangerously close to my eye. He was going for my eye. In that moment when the Blindman was solid, hurting me, Olson lunged. His teeth closed over the Blindman’s arm, and the Blindman’s grip on the scalpel loosened. I tore the blade free. As hard and as fast as I could, I shoved the scalpel into the Blindman’s chest, aiming for his heart. Looking leftward, I could see it thrumming there, quickened with the heart’s blood of all his victims. I slipped the weapon through his ribs and punctured that putrid, beating organ. The Blindman shrieked, flailing and spitting. His hands closed around my throat. I ignored the spotlights firing behind my eyes and focused on cutting. I had to cut out his heart. I knew it. He’d told me so himself. His blood was hot as it coursed over my hand. Blisters erupted, but I kept sawing, slicing him open, through meat, bone, and muscle with the scalpel, sharper than it had any right to be. Then I had it. His shuddering, beating heart in my hand. He fell back and watched me with his glowing eyes. “What now, filth?” he whispered. “Can you do the rest of it?” I looked at Olson, so still on the ground, his ghost eyes dimming but still lit. I used the scalpel to chop the Blindman’s heart in half. I bent over my dog, presenting him one half, while I crammed the other into my mouth. Olson accepted my offering, wolfing it down in a single gulp. The Blindman screamed. The gash in Olson’s side seamed closed. I felt the gashes on my face heal and the blistered skin soothe. The Blindman’s heart tasted of bile and night—bitter darkness, acid hate, and fear. I ate his heart and saw into his soul. It was an old soul, older than memory, as old as the stories parents tell their children at night to get them to behave. But once, a long time past, he had been a young man, and he had been a victim too. He had lost his eyes to a worse evil, a nameless horror. That evil had left him insane from the visions coursing through his wrecked head. The Blindman—his true name had been mislaid in time’s fog—could look into people’s souls. All of humanity’s quirks and weaknesses, the petty hatreds, the malice, the loneliness— revealed to him, even drawn to him, like circus clowns cavorting for a rapt audience. He repaid pain with violence. He discovered if he ate the orbs of sight it would give him relief from his own visions—at least for a while. The more innocent the soul, the longer the relief. And hearts gave him life—stolen vitality, pilfered years. It also gave him a moment of empathy and insight into the souls he hated. I think he’d been asleep for a long while. Who knew what had wakened him. So where did that leave me? His infernal vision had spread to me, me and Olson. How did Olson see me; what did he think of the petty malices around us? Did it bother him, the skewed shadows that gibbered and leered silently at me from my left? (How apt, the sinister side.) Maybe with his simple dogness he trusted what he scented, what he felt and heard, more than what he saw. The touch of the Blindman opened a means to immortality as well as the ability to wield the stuff of reality, the mercury air. I distrusted both gifts. I still had one eye, could still see the sunny-bright world if I only looked to the side. And I still had Olson to keep me company, to remind me ear scratches and belly rubs were good, never mind the hell spawn sulking in the corner. I could resume walking my days as I had before. Maybe I’d switch majors to Psychology. If I could see what was wrong, surely I’d be better equipped to fix it, without resorting to scalpels and a diet of eyeballs and raw heart. Seeing into the souls of men wasn’t a surefire sentence of insanity and violence. Surely it didn’t have to be. Or that’s what I keep telling myself. n Eugie Foster’s fiction has received the 2002 Phobos Award; been translated into Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and French; and been nominated for the British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Southeastern Science Fiction, Parsec, and Pushcart Awards. She is the editor of The Fix, the short fiction and poetry review magazine published by TTA Press, and also the editor/director of Dragon*Con’s on-site publication, the Daily Dragon. Her short story collection, Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, debuts March 2009 from Norilana Books. More info online at www.eugiefoster.com. H .P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R | 73
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Page 23 and 24: AND I WOULD NOT FEEL SO ALL ALONE .
Page 25 and 26: Lunch with Cedric went well. He alw
Page 27 and 28: EVERY PERFORMER DREADS DYING ONSTAG
Page 29 and 30: t “Isn’t he one o’ they gangs
Page 31 and 32: a meal out of you. Malky and I didn
Page 33 and 34: smoke billowed from the burning spo
Page 35 and 36: HE WOULD DO ANYTHING TO SAVE HIS BR
Page 37 and 38: fine; the problem was, like always,
Page 39 and 40: You and I were pros, never carried
Page 41 and 42: just stood there a bit taking in th
Page 43 and 44: “You coming or not?” “Hey, du
Page 45 and 46: THERE ARE PATHS TO AND FROM THE WOR
Page 47 and 48: g Macchi shrugged. “It is nothing
Page 49 and 50: “A sad story, Padrone.” “It i
Page 51 and 52: d and hopping toward the breach in
Page 53 and 54: l "IRCHA $;S
Page 55 and 56: WITHIN AN EGYPTIAN TOMB, HER DESTIN
Page 57 and 58: A Hatshepsut Temple. Then back to y
Page 59 and 60: she puts it in the sun. She is hopi
Page 61 and 62: H . P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A
Page 63 and 64: THERE ARE THOSE WHO PLAY MUSIC. AND
Page 65 and 66: "Haven't heard piping like that in
Page 67 and 68: (e continues to sit, in his forgott
Page 69 and 70: H . P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A
Page 71 and 72: HOW COULD MAN’S BEST FRIEND SURVI
Page 73: jumping up and down when Olson’s
Page 77 and 78: ALWAYS READ THE FINE PRINT. ALWAYS,
Page 79 and 80: “Hi, Mard,” said Meg, then look
Page 81 and 82: “Okay, okay,” said Don, “will
Page 83 and 84: THERE ARE MORE PLANES OF EXISTENCE
Page 85 and 86: on appearances, things and people,
Page 87 and 88: these thoughts, they are too much t
Page 89 and 90: I tried to speak. At that moment th
Page 91 and 92: carven surface resembled a bristlin
Page 93 and 94: No response. He wasn’t seeing me
Page 95: The thing’s grey mouth reared up.
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HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

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