The Last Heretic by Darrell Schweitzer & Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Darrell Schweitzer & Darrell Schweitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Fantasy, Lovecraft
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

ENVY, THE GARDENS OFYNATH, AND THE SIN OF CAIN

JUSTIN NOYES, THIS IS FOR YOU. Some of it is the work of the imagination, the paradox being that only the imagined parts are purely true, for the rest is clouded by passion, by memory, by human consciousness.

I do not think you will ever understand. But bear with me. Remember that we used to be friends once.

When they first take me, there is that moment of unbearable pain, as the limbs, or tendrils, or whatever they are penetrate the skull. I more sense than actually see the great bodies hovering above me in the air. They seem to condense out of nothingness. Then the hard sharp claws take hold, and I am pierced; but numbness soon follows as if some intensely cold fluid were pouring down into my body. I barely feel the alien limbs sliding down through my neck, into my spinal cord. They have control of my nervous system now. I feel something seize hold firmly under the arms from inside my own body and then I am well into the air. The great wings spread above, not so much flapping as vibrating in some way human senses cannot quite follow, some way that defies gravity.

Inevitably, I look down. The ground falls away swiftly now, like in a rocket launch, only I don’t feel any acceleration, only the cold, and then not even that. Somewhere along the way I have stopped breathing, but I don’t feel that either.

The ground falls away, then the Earth. The curved edge is clearly visible, and the terminator between night and day. The roaring in my ears becomes utter silence, and there are stars everywhere, brilliant, unflickering.

There’s a glimpse of a crescent moon. My captors pull away from the Sun, into the eternal darkness. The stars. The darkness. Silence. All is abstraction, my body a speck, a mote, something I can barely remember. If I look down, I might see my legs and feet trailing against the starfields.

Or nothing. It is like a long dream.

It has only begun.

Justin, you couldn’t possibly have known, when I finally walked up the dirt path to that Vermont farmhouse, “the old Akeley place,” as I had heard it called in my childhood—as I clambered up over the stones because the road was long since washed out and impassible—you couldn’t possibly have known how far I had come, not merely in miles, which was no more than the distance between New York and Brattleboro, but the distance in my life itself, midway in the course of which, as Dante so aptly put it, I wandered into a darkened wood and became lost.

I knocked on the door. There were no lights. The night was very, very dark, as only a Vermont night can be when there is no moon.

I knocked again. The door opened. There you were holding a barely flickering kerosene lantern. You stared up at the brilliant stars. I turned to look too. They were very beautiful, yes, but you and I both knew how to look at them and see them as something more.

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