Best of Black Wings

By S. T. Joshi

The six volumes in the Black Wings series, from which these "Best of" tales are selected,  stand as a monument to H. P. Lovecraft's incalculable and unassailable influence on contemporary weird fiction, and so the time seemed right for a retrospective volume that exhibits the choicest items from the series. The task of selection was not a simple or straightforward one, for every tale in the series had some claim to be chosen; let it then be said that this volume does not contain necessarily the "best" stories, but rather the most representative stories in the series. If this selection leads readers back to the many other tales featured in those volumes, then its purpose will have been adequately served.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786369635

Book preview

HOWLING IN THE DARK

Darrell Schweitzer

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Darrell Schweitzer is the author of three novels, The Mask of the Sorcerer, The Shattered Goddess, and The White Isle, plus more than 300 stproes that have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. A volume of his specifically Lovecraft-oriented stories, Awaiting Strange Gods, was published by Fedogan & Bremer in 2015. He has edited numerous anthologies, three so far in the Lovecraftian field, Cthulhu’s Reign, That Is Not Dead, and Tales from the Miskatonic University Library (with John Ashmead), and is presently working on two more. He has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award once and for the World Fantasy Award four times, and won the latter once as co-editor of Weird Tales, a position he held between 1988 and 2007. He has also published much nonfiction, including books about Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany.

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HE SITS THERE IN THE DARK, silent, a hard, lean man of truly indeterminate age, like a creature of living stone. If his eyes seem glowing, that is my imagination. No, they are not.

He wants me to tell this story, so that I may slough it off.

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I wasn’t afraid of the dark as a child. No, in fact, I enjoyed it. Where my older sister Ann used to huddle at the edge of her bed with her face as close to the nightlight as possible until she got to sleep, I would, whenever I could, listen to her breathing and wait until she was clearly asleep, and then reach over and remove the nightlight from the wall.

The dark contained things that the lighted bedroom did not. I knew that even then. I could feel presences. Hard to define more than that. Not ghosts, because they were not remnants of former living people, or human at all. Not guardian angels, because they were not angelic, nor were they in any sense my guardians. But something. There. All around me. Passing to and fro and up and down in the darkness on their own, incomprehensible business, in their own way beckoning me to follow them into spaces far beyond the walls and ceiling of the tiny bedroom.

Then, inevitably, my sister would wake up screaming.

When we were old enough to have separate bedrooms, that solved the immediate problem, but it was not enough. My mother would all too often come in and put her arms around me and ask Why are you sitting here in the dark? What are you afraid of? and I could not answer her. Not truthfully, anyway. Because I did not know the answer. But I wasn’t afraid.

Sometimes I would drop silently out the window onto the lawn very late at night, into the darkness when the moon was down. I’d stand there in the darkness, under the eaves of the house, as if the roof provided me with a little extra shadow; in my pajamas or just in shorts, barefoot, and if it was cold that was all the better because I wanted the dark to touch me, to embrace me and take me away into the remote reaches of itself, and if I shivered or my toes burned from the cold, that was a good thing. It was an answer. It was the dark acknowledging that I was there.

I’d look up at the stars and imagine myself swimming among them, into some greater darkness, to the rim of some black whirlpool that would carry me down, down and away from even their faint light.

Are you crazy? You’ll catch your death of cold! was what my mother inevitably said when I got caught. There would be a scolding, followed by hot chocolate, being bundled up in an oversized robe, and eventually being led back to bed.

Yet I could provide no explanation for my behavior. Mom began to talk about doctors and psychiatrists.

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There are no words, the man in the dark tells me, the ageless man whose eyes are not glowing. No explanations that can be put into words. Never.

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There was a particularly inexplicable incident when I was thirteen and was discovered early one morning by a ranger in Valley Forge Park, twenty miles from where I lived, in the middle of a low-lying area that was half woods and half swamp. It was November and the half-frozen ground crunched underfoot. Here I was wearing only a particularly ragged pair of denim cut-offs, soaked, muddy, exhausted from hypothermia and covered with bruises.

I couldn’t remember very much. There were a lot of questions, from the police, from doctors; and yet another round of bundling the poor little darling up nice and warm and giving him hot chocolate. What I did know was more about how I had touched the presences in the darkness and how they had borne me up into the night sky on vast and flapping wings. But they carried me only for a moment, either because I was afraid, or because I was not ready, or because I was not worthy.

So they let go, and I tumbled into the woods, crashing through the branches, which was how I’d gotten the bruises.

Nobody wants to hear about that. I refused to tell.

It was only after a particularly tearful display on my mother’s part that I was allowed to go home at all.

Oh, I knew what my interrogators wanted me to say. Things were not going well at home, it was true. My father and mother screamed at one another. There were fights, violent ones. Things got smashed up. My sister Ann had bloated up into a 300-pound, terminally depressed monstrosity, who was ceaselessly excoriated by the kids at school as a retard, a whore, and a smelly bag of shit. I got a lot of that too, as the kid brother of same. Ann used to sit up long nights in the bright glare of lights cutting herself all over with a razor, carving intricate hieroglyphs into her too, too voluminous flesh, so that the pain would reassure her that she was somehow still