while the black stars burn (15 page)

*

Bereft of television, records and card partners, Penny spent time unpacking and exploring her room. The room was large and well appointed, but dull. No books or old clothes to play dress-up in. The only oddity she discovered was a small, hinged hatch set into the bottom of the sturdy bedroom door, like a door for a cat, but it was wider and only half the height of the pet exits she’d seen.

She couldn’t imagine Morinda would allow a small yappy dog, but maybe there was a cat in the house? She loved petting the neighbors’ kitties. So, as was her habit at home, she started quietly making her way downstairs, testing for squeaky boards as she stepped, when she overheard the physician and her aunt talking in the foyer. Penny froze at the sound of their voices, listening with sharpened ears.

“So you think he’ll be awake by the new moon?” her aunt asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Well before then, I’d say. He should be in fine fettle for church.”

“Oh, thank the Great One.”

“How is the girl?” the physician asked.

“Far less fiery and strong-willed than her mother, to my eye. Ezekias says she went with him without complaint. Polite and compliant the whole trip down. A perfect little lady.”

“Good, good.”

Morinda sighed. “I don’t understand where we went wrong with Edna. Her blood was as pure as we could make it, and yet she resisted us at every turn. And she went and bred with a
Jew
, of all things, after all we taught her! I reckoned Penny would be an utter waste, and yet she seems perfect.”

“There are some who extol the benefits of hybrid vigor,” the physician replied. “Perhaps the Haughton genes were most able to come to the fore when they had lesser genes to work against?”

Lesser genes?
Penny frowned. She couldn’t remember her biological father, but her mother told her stories and showed her photos. He’d been handsome, the captain of his college basketball team despite his stature—he enjoyed a challenge, apparently—and later a rising nuclear physicist who died from accidental radiation exposure. She’d seen a letter from the President himself declaring her father’s research to be that of a genius. What greater genes did these Haughtons have? She doubted any of them could shoot a single hoop or walk three miles to the bus stop in the summer heat, much less solve a complex equation.

The doctor departed. Calling for Georgia, Morinda swept towards the kitchen. Penny let out her breath and continued down the stairs. A turn of the corner took her to a huge library with floor-to-ceiling shelves and a pair of red wing-backed chairs separated by a reading table.

A large, old, leather-bound book covered with odd symbols lay upon the table. Curious, Penny opened it, and began to read.

An Arab storyteller wrote it, and at first she thought it was some variant of
One Thousand and One Nights
. But in its convoluted prose, she found not tales of princes and thieves but a purported history of strange, unfathomably powerful beings beyond the stars. The narrative drew her in, and she felt the hairs on her arms rise and her heart begin to pound as words describing cosmic grotesqueries few humans could ever come to grips with burned their way through her retina into her brain.

Penny’s young mind floundered, drowning in the dark sea of this horrible ancient knowledge. She stumbled back from the book, her chest constricted, and fainted dead away upon the Oriental carpet.

*

She awoke later in the guest bed. The physician and her aunt loomed over her.

“Ah, she’s awake!” he declared. “No worse for wear, eh child?”

“What...what happened?” she sat up, feeling sick and dizzy. She wondered how she had gotten into her nightgown.

“Your blood is thick from living up north and your system isn’t accustomed to the heat and humidity,” the physician replied smoothly. “You just need to take it easy and not exert yourself.”

Bessie came into the room with a bamboo bed tray. Her face was a neutral mask, and she seemed to avoid making eye contact with anyone in the room.

“Drink some tea and eat some pudding,” the physician said as Bessie set the tray across her lap.

She ate a few spoonfuls of the overly sweet rice pudding from a glass custard bowl and drank the tepid, bitterly herbal tea from its dainty bone china cup. Soon, her head began to swim, and no matter how hard she tried, her eyelids wouldn’t stay open.

“There, that’s it, a young girl needs her rest,” Penny heard Morinda say just before she passed out.

Penny’s dreams took her through the gallery of monstrosities she’d read about in the Arab’s book. She tumbled through the cold void of outer space as huge malign creatures lurking in the shadows twixt the burning stars eyed her as a scientist might gaze upon the tiniest itching mite. One brushed her with an enormous icy pseudopod and suddenly she was plummeting down, down through time and space, striking cold misted water and plunging to a crushing depth where she lay trapped in sucking mud, thinking she would drown there alone when the enormous clammy bulk of
something
dragged itself from a chasm nearby and reached out toward her with slimy suckered tentacles—

—she jerked awake in her bed, her nightgown sodden with sweat, heart thudding in her chest, her throat aching as though she had been screaming. She was alone, the room silent, and in that moment she wished she were back home where her mother would always hold her and rock her back to sleep after a nightmare.

And then she remembered her mother was gone, nothing left of her but an urn of ashes buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery, and Penny’s heart broke for the hundredth time that month. Why would the universe let someone so beautiful and kind as her mother die so senselessly? The girl wept into her pillow for what felt like an eternity, and still no one came to comfort her.

Finally, she wiped her tears from her eyes, and stumbled into the bathroom to wash her face and brush the sour fuzz from her teeth. She dried herself and stared at her red-eyed reflection. Babies lay in bed and cried, and she wasn’t a baby, was she? Sherlock Holmes never cried. Her mother was gone, burned to almost nothing, and what now? What would Nancy Drew do? Why, she’d pick herself up and get on with solving the mystery, wouldn’t she?

She inhaled, trying to clear her foggy head, trying to push away the horrible images from her dreams, trying to stop remembering the smell of the funeral home. The Haughtons were not the kind of people who did something out of the goodness of their hearts. They’d brought Penny to their house for a reason. Why? And what was
really
going on in the third floor? Was the Reverend really a sleep-sickened invalid, or were the physician and Morinda keeping him there against his will?

Suddenly Penny felt completely awake, her heart beating quickly again. Her whole body shivered with dread and the desire to go upstairs and see for herself. She put on her robe and slippers, and quietly slipped from her room.

*

Penny pressed her eye to the bedroom’s keyhole. There was an unmoving lump in the bed, barely visible in the moonlight coming through the window. A sleeping man, or just mounded bedclothes? The itch to know was unbearable.

She turned the knob, expecting it to be locked, but the mechanism clicked open and the door swung inward, silent on oiled hinges. She took a cautious step forward into the room, dreading a squeaky floorboard, and then another.

“Child....” the voice was deep and oratorical.

She froze like a deer and turned her head. A gaunt figure sat in the shadowed chair in the corner of the room. It stood and came forward, entering the moonlight, and what she beheld would be burned into her memory forever.

The Reverend was tall and so thin she could see the lumps in his sternum beneath his taut skin. Her eye traveled down his naked torso to his belly, where...her mind reeled at what she saw. The skin of his abdomen had eroded away, and instead of intestines and other vitals, a vile, crab-armed creature crouched in the basket of his hipbones. A gleaming black head on a long, snaky neck pushed past the tattered curtain of skin and craned toward her. Five eyes faceted like a fly’s beheld her with cold curiosity. It chittered at her, a weird cricket chirp that felt like cold fingers scratching up her spine.

“Has your mind been opened to the stars, child?” The Revered intoned, and she realized the vile thing in his belly was controlling him as though he were some Mechanical Turk. “Do you bleed?”

Penny had seen more than enough. She bolted from the room, raced back down the hall and half ran, half tumbled down the stairs. The huge front doors were locked, and she became so focused on undoing the bolts and latches that she did not realize that someone had come up behind her until the ether-soaked rag was pressed tight to her face.

“Now, child,” Morinda admonished as Penny tried to fight free. “Be a good girl and this will all be over soon....”

*

Penny awoke some time later; her head pounded and she felt sicker than when she’d caught stomach flu. She staggered from the bed into the bathroom and dry-heaved into the toilet. The daylight streaming through the window made her eyes ache. She drank water from the tap, washed her face, and tottered back into the bedroom. At least someone had thought to pull all the drapes closed, so the room was comfortably dim. She tried the bedroom door; it was locked from the outside.

A sudden squeak and beam of light at her feet made her look down. Someone had pulled open the little hatch in the bottom of the door.

“Miss Penny, are you awake?” asked Bessie. “I brought you some food.”

Penny dropped to her knees, trying to peer out the hatch. All she could see was a tray bearing a teacup and a bowl of porridge and, beyond it, Bessie’s scuffed brown Mary Janes.

“Please help me,” Penny whispered. “I need to get out of here.”

“I...I can’t.”

“Please! Please, just...call my stepfather and let him know what happened? I can give you the number.”

“There ain’t no phones here. And if someone was to come looking for you or if you was to go missing, they’d know I had a hand in it. And then it’d be more than a broken arm for me and Mama, you understand? They might burn Bucktown.”

Penny was silent. She wanted to weep, but her eyes felt dry as sand.

“I wish I could help you, I really do,” Bessie continued. “You seem like a real nice girl. I wish we could have played cards sometime. I’m sorry this is happenin’, I really am. But I caint stop it.”

“What can I do?”

“Drink the tea. It’ll help you sleep. Mama made it real strong.”

“Will I die?” Penny whispered.

“We all gonna die. Just a matter of when.”

*

As Bessie promised, the tea was strong, and quickly took Penny back into her cosmic nightmares. They were so compelling and so vivid that, when Penny awoke to find that she had been bound to a wooden cross and men in white robes with pointed white hoods were carrying her amid torchlight toward an old stone church, she at first thought she was surely still dreaming.

But the smoke from the torches made her eyes water, and the leather manacles and straps bit into her wrists, armpits, and ankles; she realized she never felt that sort of mundane physical discomfort in her phantasms. The Klansmen’s procession solemnly bore her up the front steps and into the church, which was full of more white-hooded figures standing on bleachers from the floor to rafters along the walls. Flickering torches and wrought iron candelabras cast strange shadows throughout the whole room. The Reverend Haughton stood beside a stone altar in front of a large, round stained glass window depicting the same weird symbols she’d seen on the Arab’s book, which lay upon the altar in front of him. He wore deep-purple satin robes with a dragon embroidered on the chest. The legs of his operator moved beneath the fabric at his belly.

“Brothers, place her beneath the stars!” the Reverend ordered.

They tilted the cross and slid the post into a slanted hole in the stone floor. She found herself staring up through an open skylight into the cloudless night, the stars a profusion of cold sparks. One of the masked men pulled out another strap and secured her head to the cross so that she could look nowhere else.

“Brothers and sisters of the Invisible Empire!” The Reverend’s voice was like that of a god. “We gather here tonight to witness a new chapter for our world. Tonight ends this age of debasement and decadence, this age in which we have seen the sickly fruits of miscegenation and a society threatened by the mud peoples. Communist Orientals, cunning Jews, savage Redskins and brutish Negroes—after tonight, the world will be purified, purged of their stink and disease!”

The crowd of Klansmen and women roared their approval.

“I offer my own dearest flesh and blood, my own granddaughter, as an offering to the Great One. If she is deemed to be the example of exemplary young womanhood we know she is, she shall be the instrument of our salvation from a world of depravity!”

“Halleluja!” she heard Morinda shout from a nearby row.

Granddaughter?
Penny wondered. The relationship calculation was simple enough, but it made her feel ill just the same.

She didn’t have long to dwell on it, for she heard the ancient book creak open, and the Reverend began to read aloud some abominable incantation that was never meant for human ears. Her mind reeled in terror, and the merciless stars bored down into her eyes.

Penny felt her consciousness travel up, up into darkness as it did in her nightmares, only it was all real now, and she felt the vast consciousness of the eternal entity known to humans as Yog-Sothoth turn to notice her.

How many miserable souls live upon your petty world?
Its voice was a blowtorch upon the wax of her sanity, but the hardened bits of her mind summoned up the figure from her nearly-forgotten geography class.

“Three billion, two hundred sixty-three million,” she whispered.

A pittance. Not worth leaving my lair.
Yog-Sothoth turned away from her and went back to observing the collapse of a nearby nebula.