Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 21

"You'll have to work alone tomorrow, I'm afraid," Laski told him. "I need every person at the tunnel."

"Now that the imager is in place, that won't be a problem."

He was rechecking his test results at the desk in his tent an hour later when Luce entered, wearing only a yellow silk robe tied at her waist. Her short blonde hair was immaculate, but the powder on her cheek could not completely hide the bruise beneath.

Amundson stared at her from his chair without rising. He had not expected a return visit, given the tense circ.u.mstances. s.e.x was not high on his list of priorities tonight.

"He hit you?"

She touched her cheek gently and winced.

"What does it matter? I do what I want, when I want."

She approached the desk and took up the printout, turning it over to stare at the image with fascination as though mesmerized by a serpent.

"What does it mean?" she asked in a low tone that was barely audible.

"It means we are all going to be famous, and quite possibly rich. No discovery like this has ever been made before."

She shook her head with annoyance.

"But what does it mean? Why our own faces?"

"I have no idea," Amundson said, wis.h.i.+ng she would just turn around and walk out of the tent so that he could get his work done. "That's something you archaeologists will have to determine. I'm an engineer."

"Do you suppose the original face of the colossus, before it was chiseled off, had the same effect? Did everyone who looked at the statue see themselves?"

"Yes, I think so," Amundson told her. "What my imager generated is an accurate reproduction of whatever was on the original face of the statue. I don't see why the effect would be any different."

"That's why they cut it off," she murmured with conviction. "They couldn't stand seeing themselves, so they toppled the statue and struck off its face before burying it."

"I expect you are right," Amundson said, shuffling the printouts of readings from the machine. "Look, Luce, I'm really quite busy now-"

She sat across his thighs, her arms around his shoulders, and forced her tongue into his mouth before he could finish the sentence. Her robe fell open, and the erect nipples of her firm young b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed against his s.h.i.+rtfront. She arched her back to raise herself and slide her b.r.e.a.s.t.s from side to side over his face. With a moan of desire, she dug her hand between his legs.

Amundson found himself thrusting into her as she lay diagonally across his cot. With part of his mind he realized she was naked, and that he wore only his open s.h.i.+rt. He had no memory of moving across the tent, or of taking off his pants. He shrugged out of the s.h.i.+rt with annoyance, relis.h.i.+ng the freedom from its enc.u.mbrance. He felt wholly alive, like some powerful beast awakened from long sleep. When she bit his shoulder, he slapped her across the face, back and forth, until her upper lip split and blood marked her bared white teeth.

Only when he had exhausted his l.u.s.t and lay panting across her did she push him off and leave the cot. Her eyes held a restless look, sliding over him as though he were of no further interest. Neither spoke. Shame mingled with regret welled inside Amundson when he looked at the blood on her lip. He might be many things, but he had never hit a woman. She bent to pick up her silk robe and slid into it, then flipped it closed and tied it with a sharp tug of its sash. Without a backward glance she left the tent.

Amundson lay naked across the cot, listening to the sound of his own breathing. What the h.e.l.l had just happened? In an instant he had gone from bored indifference to white-hot l.u.s.t mingled with violence. The sight of blood on the girl's face had excited him. That had never happened before. s.e.x had always been good for him, but n.o.body would ever describe it as anything other than white bread. The outburst of pa.s.sion had left him drained. Suddenly, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He s.h.i.+fted himself on the cot into a more comfortable posture and knew nothing more until the following morning.

WHEN HE LEFT HIS TENT, THE SUN WAS ALREADY WELL above the eastern horizon and the morning chill had been driven from the stones that lay scattered across the pebbly ground. He was almost glad to discover that he had overslept and that the rest of the camp, with the sole exception of Sikes, had already left for the pa.s.sage excavation. In the main tent, Sikes gave him scrambled eggs and toast, with black coffee. He sipped the bitter liquid with grat.i.tude. A headache throbbed between his temples, making it hard to focus his eyes.

Sikes must have had a rough night of his own. The little Englishman was uncommonly quiet and seemed to perform his housekeeping duties in a meditative daze. After he finished clearing away the breakfast dishes and silverware, he announced to Amundson that he was leaving to help with the excavation work.

The engineer nodded absently at him and did not turn his head to watch him go. His thoughts were preoccupied by the question Luce had asked the night before. Why their own faces? What did it mean to see oneself, to have one's essential pattern exposed?

He had brought the printout into the dining hall with him. It rested on the table beside his coffee cup, face down. Turning it over, he held it up and studied it. The face, which was most definitely his own, stared back at him. There was a trace of amus.e.m.e.nt at the corners of its lips-or was that only his imagination? The longer he stared into the eyes of the image, the more variable the expression of the face seemed to become. It s.h.i.+fted from wry amus.e.m.e.nt to arrogance to lip-curling contempt. Its mouth trembled as though it were trying to speak to him.

Amundson set the sheet of paper down and rubbed his eyelids with his thumb and index finger. Little wonder his mind was playing tricks, given the stress he had been under for the past few days.

He took up the paper and regarded it again, striving to separate himself from it. This could not be an image. It had to be some sort of symbolic code series designed to affect the human mind at the deepest level and provoke the same illusion in every person who looked at it. He was not seeing the code, he was seeing only the effect of the code, but the code itself must be printed on the paper in his hand, just as it had been impressed onto the stone face of the colossus so many thousand years in the past.

There was a popular name for a self-executing code that reproduced itself from one medium to another. Virus. What he was looking at on the paper, without actually being able to see it, must be some form of symbolic mind virus, transmitted through the visual sense.

He turned the paper face down, his fingers trembling. The sophistication required to produce such a code was terrifying in its implications. No ancient human culture could have designed it, or at least no culture recognized by science. Unless the code had been generated by some intuitive process, or channeled from some higher external source. Perhaps if he divided the code into parts, he could a.n.a.lyze it without being affected by it.

He slammed the flat of his hand against the table and pushed himself to his feet. It was pointless to speculate in the absence of data. He would run another scan, varying the parameters from the first scan to see if it achieved a different result. It would probably be best to do an entire series of scans under as many conditions as possible.

Bright spots of light danced before his eyes as he left the main tent. He gathered up the processing computer and the laptop from his own tent and carried them toward the canvas enclosure around the colossus, where he busied himself connecting wires and preparing for the scan. His mind was not on his work.

If a copy of the face were published in major world newspapers and shown around the globe on the nightly television news, in a single day it would imprint itself on the minds of perhaps a billion human beings. That was a sobering thought. Before releasing it to the press he would have to a.s.sure himself that the coding of the image was not harmful.

Thus far, it had not caused any damage. His thinking was still clear. It was absurd even to consider withholding the results of the test from the media: once it became public, his fame and prosperity were a.s.sured. He would write a book and it would become a bestseller. He wondered why the idea of withholding the results had even crossed his mind and laughed to himself. The eerie chuckle startled him, until he realized that it had proceeded from his own mouth.

The desert was filled with strange sounds this morning. On the other side of the canvas barrier, he heard a distant barking. It was followed by a series of drawn-out howls, like those of a wolf. He wondered idly if there really were wolves in the Gobi. It would be a fine state of affairs if the archaeologists returned to camp at the end of the day and discovered his wolf-mauled corpse. He couldn't let that happen. Was there a weapon in the camp? He decided to look for a knife or a gun, even a good solid club.

The ghosts were waiting for him when he emerged from the enclosure. They stood silent and motionless all over the open ground, watching him with dead eyes. Their bodies were translucent and colorless, but they wore some kind of ancient apparel that resembled none he had ever seen before. There were soldiers, priests, merchants, slaves, maidens, matrons, wh.o.r.es. Some were even children, but they stood as impa.s.sively as the rest.

The weight of their dead eyes on Amundson was like a physical force, compelling him to do something, but he knew not what. It produced an unpleasant twisting sensation in his lower belly. Coupled with his headache, it made him irritable.

"I don't know what you want," he muttered to them. "You'll have to be clearer, I don't know what you want."

He walked through them on his way to Laski's tent. He needed to acquire a weapon before the wolves reached the camp and tore him apart. The touch of the dead against his skin was similar to the brush of cool silk. The ghosts made no attempt to stop him, but merely turned to regard him with mute accusation.

Inside Laski's tent, the sweet-sick smell of fresh blood struck him in the face. He blinked in the dimness. The Mongolian archaeologist lay on his back on the bed with his throat torn out. d.a.m.n wolves, Amundson thought. The shy grad student, Maria Striva, crouched on his chest, naked, her body streaked with blood. She glared at the engineer, blood and bits of flesh clotting her teeth, her nose, the corners of her mouth, and her chin. Her bloodshot eyes were so wide open that he could see their whites all the way around their brown irises. There was no sanity there.

With some part of his mind Amundson realized that she had become a wolf. The desert was filled with wolves. Why didn't the Mongolians kill the verminous creatures? If the wolves were permitted to roam free in this way, sooner or later everyone would be attacked.

The woman threw herself off the bed, her blood-covered fingers clawing for his throat, but her feet became tangled together and she fell heavily onto her face and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, knocking the wind from her lungs with a sharp yelp. Calmly, Amundson stepped across her body and picked up a short-handled pickaxe that rested on the floor next to a travel trunk. As the woman pressed herself up on her hands, he sank the point of the pickaxe into the top of her skull. She collapsed, dead.

One less wolf to deal with, he thought with satisfaction. He remembered why he had entered the tent and rummaged through the trunk. At the bottom he found a revolver. When he left the tent, the ghosts nodded their heads at him with satisfaction.

AS AN EXPERIMENT, HE SHOT ONE OF THE GHOSTS. THE report of the revolver rolled across the desert and lost itself on the dusty wind. As expected, the bullet did nothing. The ghost merely smiled at him, and its translucent head became a naked, grinning skull. That was to be expected, but he was a scientist after all, and of what use was surmise without verification? Thereafter, he ignored the ghosts, even though they followed him all the way to the entrance of the pa.s.sage.

He recognized the two corpses that lay near a mound of tailings, not far from a black hole in the ground, bodies grotesquely twisted in their death-throes. One was the red-headed grad, Jimmy Dolan, and the other was Sikes. Amundson tilted his head as he studied the tableau. It appeared that Dolan had stabbed Sikes in the back with a tent spike, and that Sikes-plucky little man that he was-had managed to bash in Dolan's brains with a rock before he died. Two more wolves taken care of, the engineer thought with satisfaction.

He climbed down the aluminum ladder into the pit and entered the mouth of the slanting pa.s.sage, which descended into the solid bedrock at a downward angle of around twenty degrees. The light soon failed behind him, but he saw a tiny square of brightness at the end of the long, straight tunnel, and continued on, feeling his way along the wall with his left hand. The stone felt smooth beneath his fingertips, almost like polished marble.

At the end, Amundson had to pick his steps with care over uncleared rubble. An opening had been made that was large enough to crawl through. He emerged into a vaulted chamber of thick, square pillars. The portion of it near the tunnel entrance was illuminated by the glowing mantle of a propane lantern. From the corners of his eyes, Amundson saw carved statues resembling animals and manlike beasts. They nodded their heads at him in approval, but he paid scant attention.

On the open floor lay the bodies of Laski and his wife, horribly mutilated. Between them, a naked Luther White, his muscular dark body glistening with sweat in the light from the lantern, stretched across the corpse of Luce Henders. She also was naked and lay face down on a low platform of polished stone. With scientific detachment, Amundson noticed that her head was missing. He glanced around but failed to locate it.

White was busy thrusting his erect member into the dead girl's pale, blood-streaked backside, and did not notice the intrusion. With each thrust he grunted, "ugh-ugh-ugh," and the headless body jerked on the altar as though by some undead animation. From the darkness beyond the reach of the lantern, ghosts began to gather. Amundson threw back his head and howled.

"She's mine," White snarled at him. "You can't have her."

He thrust himself away from the corpse of the girl and stood up, still impressively erect, his p.e.n.i.s coated with blood. Between the b.u.t.tocks of the headless corpse there was only a ma.s.s of chewed flesh that resembled raw beef. White looked around with quick jerks of his head from side to side. He lunged and grabbed up a shovel with a short D-handle. Holding it like an axe, he advanced with cautious steps toward the engineer.

Amundson shot the black man in the chest. White looked down at the hole until it began to ooze blood, then laughed.

"Bullets can't kill me," he cried through lips caked with dried blood.

Amundson howled again and shot White two more times. The second bullet found his heart. The black grad student dropped like a marionette with its strings cut. The ghosts cl.u.s.tered close and nodded, their translucent eyes s.h.i.+ning in the lantern glow like pearls.

The engineer thrust the revolver into his belt. The sharp tang of gunpowder cut through the cloying scent of blood. He felt strong. More powerful and more potent than he had ever felt before. His mind was clear, his thoughts ordered and supremely rational. He realized that his s.e.xual organ was engorged with blood and gazed down at the headless corpse with a speculative eye.

"No, mine," he murmured to himself, and began to giggle.

Something drew him more strongly than his l.u.s.t. In the darkness beyond the circle of the lantern light he sensed a vast s.p.a.ce that extended downward, like the inverted vault of starry heaven. That was what the ghosts were trying to tell him. He must explore that s.p.a.ce. It was his destiny, the only thing for which he had been born into this world. He listened, and now he could almost hear the whispers of the ghosts. If he remained in the darkness with them, it would not be long before they could talk to him and teach him. He could remain here a long time. There was ample food. Was that his own thought, or the thought of the ghosts?

As he started forward, his boot slipped in White's blood, and he fell heavily to the floor, the back of his head striking and rebounding from the polished stone. Something rolled beneath his hand when he struggled to get up. He blinked and held it to the light. Recognition entered his thoughts-the oval black stone he had put into his s.h.i.+rt pocket and then forgotten about.

As he held up the stone, a kind of sigh arose from the throng of the dead. Acting on some impulse below the level of thought, Amundson extended the stone toward the ghosts. The pallid forms withdrew like mist from flame. He blinked heavily and shook his head. What was he doing here in this dark cavern? The vague memory of leaving the camp and climbing down into the pa.s.sage came into his mind. He tried again to stand, then cursed and began to crawl toward the lantern with the stone clutched firmly in his left hand.

Awareness came to him in flashes, between which there was oblivion. He was in the tunnel. He stumbled across the loose stones of the desert. He pushed through the resistless ghosts in the camp. Then he was sitting at the table in the main tent. Everything looked completely normal. He picked up his half-emptied coffee mug and felt a faint trace of warmth, or perhaps it was only his imagination. The printout of the face lay beside him on the table. He turned it over and looked at it. Fame. Fortune. Prestige. Success. Acclaim.

He let it drop from his hand. It drifted under the table. He realized with surprise that he still held the oval talisman clutched in his left fist and laid it with care on the table. He sat staring at the doorway of the tent. Through the opening he could see the ancient ghosts walking to and fro in their eternal procession of the d.a.m.ned.

With quick, economical motions he drew the revolver, c.o.c.ked the hammer, put the muzzle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

GENERAL GOPPIK SURVEYED THE CORPSE OF THE American with distaste. Blood and brains had splattered the wall of the tent around the hole left by the departing bullet. The man's pale eyes stared sightlessly, already starting to shrivel in the dry desert air. He picked up the black stone that lay on the table and regarded its carved surface with curiosity before putting it into his pocket. A keepsake for his young son, he thought.

There were corpses everywhere. The more his soldiers searched, the more bodies they found. Evidently the entire party of foreigners had gone mad and murdered one another with extreme violence-all except this one, who had taken his own life. It was a propaganda nightmare. The Western press would never stop talking about it. The archaeological dig at Kel-tepu would have to be closed down, naturally. There was no other course of action to follow. The entire site would have to be sanitized, and some story invented to account for the ma.s.sacre. Terrorists, perhaps. Yes, terrorists were always useful.

Noticing a sheet of paper on the floor beneath the table, he bent and retrieved it. The paper bore some sort of computer printout of a black-and-white photograph, not a very clear one at that, showing a Mongolian man. He frowned and squinted at the image. There was something familiar about this face. He had seen it before, perhaps in some rogue's gallery of wanted criminals.

Grunting in dismissal, he started to crumple the paper in his hand, then thought better of it and smoothed it out on the table before folding it and putting it into his inner vest pocket. More than likely it held no importance, but it was evidence at a crime scene. He would take it back with him when he returned to Ulaanbaatar. If the face were publicized in the newspapers, perhaps someone would recognize it.

The History of a Letter AS RELATED BY JASON V BROCK.

Jason V Brock's writing and art have been published in Butcher Knives & Body Counts, Animal Magnetism, Calliope, Like Water for Quarks, Ethereal Tales, Dark Universe (comic), Logan's Run: Last Day (comic), San Diego Comic-Con's Souvenir Book, Fangoria, and many other venues. He is Art Director/Managing Editor for Dark Discoveries magazine and coeditor (with William F. Nolan) of The Bleeding Edge (Cycatrix Press, 2010). His films include the doc.u.mentaries Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man, The AckerMonster Chronicles, and Image, Reflection, Shadow: Artists of the Fantastic. He lives in the Portland, Oregon, area and loves his wife, Sunni, reptiles/amphibians, and vegan/vegetarianism.

INTRODUCTION.

WHEN THE EDITOR ASKED ME FOR A CONTRIBUTION TO this anthology (the very one in your hands), I knew I had my work cut out for me. A flurry of correspondence ensued: When was the book coming out? Who was the publisher? Was there a theme? What were the restrictions on length and so on?

As usual, the editor was courteous, prompt, and succinct. Did I mention thorough? At any rate, I went off to consider all this information and came to a stark realization-I had nothing to contribute! This was a quandary; I wanted to be part of the book, yet I had no idea what to write.

Weeks of vexation, false starts, irritable moods, and agitation followed. As the deadline loomed, I went through my normal course of actions, as is my coping strategy at such times: 1. I searched through my files and notebooks, hoping to stumble across that gem of an idea waiting to be fleshed out (always a dubious gamble, I might add).

2. I castigated myself as a procrastinator (though I had been quite involved in another task, which I will address in a moment).

3. I played loud music (a normal, albeit damaging, habit for me).

4. I stayed up very late, unable to sleep (another habit I cannot seem to rid myself of).

Finally, several months later and just a few weeks before the piece was due, I asked the (patient) editor if a nonfiction submission was acceptable, and the reply was "Of course! But I need it quickly." I felt better then, as I had been working on something that had haunted me for some time, but was unsure where it might lead. I hoped that the article would be of use, as I felt no small amount of guilt that I had been spending hours fiddling with it and trolling around various libraries, bookstores, and online venues doing research in lieu of writing a story for the anthology I had committed to those many months previous.

A brief explanation: While conducting an investigation for an unrelated project, I stumbled across an old copy of the Georges Bataille1 cla.s.sic Histoire de l'oeil2 at Powell's City of Books3 in Portland, Oregon. As I was leafing through the crumbling pages of this book, something fell out and fluttered to the ground-a letter. It was tightly folded, ragged, stained, and yellow with age. I picked it up, and what I read filled me with a peculiar disquiet; as I deciphered the cramped, spidery handwriting, I lost all interest in the Bataille volume and, though I knew it was wrong, I could not resist the impulse to take the dispatch.

What follows are the contents of that strange missive; the notes are my own, based on investigations that have distracted me, as I stated, for the better part of a year and sidetracked my other ambitions, consuming more and more of my time and attention.

THE LETTER.

Dearest-4 BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I5 WILL BE NO MORE, AND most likely your time will be limited as well.6 Thus, as a final testament, I have decided to address a question that you posed long ago, and I never answered...

Do you recall when you asked what single event in my life had most disturbed me? I had scoffed at the notion, stating that I had no use for such ba.n.a.lity, but the truth is-I was loath to revisit the moment. I'm ahead of myself: allow me to "begin at the beginning," as it were...

It was yet another melancholy fall afternoon about eight years ago,7 and I was walking through the Olde Jewish Shopping District8 when I saw it. Just the recollection sets my teeth on edge! At any rate, I was crossing the street when I glanced up and there the hideous object was, on display-obscene display-in an antiquarian book and curio dealer's window.9 Though I had been feeling febrile and ill for many months,10 and had been warned against undue excitement by my attending physician, I rushed back across the boulevard, pressing my hands against the cold gla.s.s of the display. I was horrorstruck that the rest of the world continued unabated as though this was the most natural thing in the world. My focus was now reduced-to this moment in time, to this instant of revulsion and comprehension brought on by the relic. The sky darkened for a moment and I felt nauseous, my stomach aflutter. As I extricated myself from the window, the Earth seemed somehow robbed of all colour, and the chilly air had the stale quality of a giant's exhalation. A man b.u.mped into me, and his cursing brought me back to the external present. Dabbing perspiration from my face, I straightened my tie and decided to enter the shoppe.

An archaic bell, too loud in my sensitive state, jangled atop the door as I stepped through the ornate threshold. The musty atmosphere was frigid-colder even than the late fall day outside. A chill swept my bones and the crisp air inside felt alive; in every direction I looked, I could not escape the unspeakably ghoulish contents of the room. Sinister etchings and shadowed portraits peered from the corners of the weirdly expansive shoppe, and the dimly lit parlour seemed scarcely able to contain all the objets d'art that the owner had acc.u.mulated over the years. The place reeked with the mould of old furniture and older books, causing my nose to tickle as I observed the bottles of freak fetuses preserved in clouded green fluid, the rough-skinned shrunken heads with empty-eyed stares, the colorful voodoo effigies of the Caribbean, the strange skin-bound tomes of an apparently Arab11 origin, their spines decorated in Sanskrit letters...

I glanced to the window that I had leered through only a moment before; the heavy door closed behind me with dreadful finality, and I felt my throat constrict. I should have stayed away; in that moment, I had decided to turn, to leave, to try to forget the madness in the window, but was interrupted...

"Mon Dieu! I see you've returned," the shopkeeper said from the back of the cramped s.p.a.ce. Lately, I had been experiencing disturbing bouts of deja vu; as the wizened, stoop-shouldered proprietor shuffled toward me, the sensation rea.s.serted itself in a forcefully disorienting fas.h.i.+on.

"Au contraire, Monsieur-I'm quite sure I've never had the pleasure of visiting your fine establishment before.... Perhaps I have a twin?" My clumsy attempt at humour was met with stoicism by the keeper, who was now in front of me, leaning on a gnarled wooden cane capped by a silver skull. Squinting, he studied me with piercing blue eyes from behind thick, wire-rimmed spectacles, thoughtfully stroking his white beard; after a long moment, he straightened his shawl-covered frame and flashed a brief smile.

"Oui-quite a remarkable doppelganger. How may I a.s.sist you?" He paused, then bent forward, conspiratorially peering over his gla.s.ses: "Let me guess-the display in the window, correct?" His voice was quiet, his enunciation precise.

The world seemed to spin for an instant. I glanced again around the claustrophobic showroom, with its dust-enrobed grotesqueries and curios from across the planet; its masks out of darkest Africa; its fetishes from the cannibal tribes of Papua New Guinea; its arcane trinkets from the savages of South America and the madmen of Asia.

"Yes," I managed at last. "The window." Our gaze locked, and I realised that I could no longer hear the bustle of the street outside, just the creak of wooden shelves, the wheeze of the shopkeeper's ragged breath. I dabbed my forehead again, though the dark room was chilly to the point of my breath fogging. Perhaps my fever had returned. Perhaps it was something else.

The owner nodded. "I thought so, just like yesterday, and all the days prior to that..."

Before I could rouse another protest, he turned his icy stare away, breaking our connection.

Here I must insert an aside: Though the aged retailer insisted that we'd met before, I know that this is not the case. His innuendo of "yesterday" would have been an impossibility, for example, as I had been in the next town over, acting as a pallbearer with Ernst, Alistair, and Isaac for my poor brother, Stefan,12 who had finally succ.u.mbed to his injuries.13 Given the great distance and my ill health, there was no way I could have been at the funeral service and then to his establishment in the same [illegible].

"Oui, oui-you've never been here before; I recall," he said, lightly tapping the side of his head as he moved to the front of the store. I followed, navigating around the jammed shelves, the queer items suspended from the ceiling. In the swirl of dust motes kicked up by our trespa.s.s, I continued to be plagued by the peculiar nag of deja vu; the whole strange episode had the quaint aspect of a fever dream.

The old bay windows of the storefront rattled from a sudden gust. A dull ache began to throb in my temple as I felt the barometric pressure drop; such is the normal course of events in coastal towns when a storm gathers on the sea. The waning orange glow of evening glinted off the chop in the harbour across the bay,14 clearly visible from the dirt-gauzed panes. The antiquarian dealer's battered s.h.i.+ngle squealed as it was buffeted by the wind. No one was outside; the cobblestones on the street glistened with rain, puddles reflecting the baleful flicker of the gaslights.15 A cloud of dread enveloped me as I watched twilight cloak the city. It was rare that I frequented this aspect of the port, even more rare that I would be out this late in the day, especially at this time of the year, when the light and the darkness changed places so much earlier. My salivary glands tightened, making my mouth dry, my jaw twinge, adding to my headache.