Black Wings VII by S. T. Joshi

Author:S. T. Joshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Lovecraft, Horror
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

CAN WE KEEP HIM?

Darrell Schweitzer

A career-retrospective of Darrell Schweitzer’s short fiction was published by PS Publishing in two volumes in 2020. A veritable flood of Schweitzeriana is soon to follow from various publishers in the next year or so, including a new Lovecraftian anthology, Shadows out of Time (PS Publishing), The Best of Weird Tales: The 1920s (Centipede Press), The Best of Weird Tales: 1924 (with John Betancourt, Wildside Press), a weird poetry collection, Dancing Before Azathoth (Hippocampus Press), a new story collection, The Children of Chorazin (Hippocampus Press), and two further volumes of author interviews (Wildside Press). He was co-editor of Weird Tales between 1988 and 2007.

THAT SUMMER, WHEN I’D JUST TURNED thirteen, I began to look at Zenobia Collins in a way I never had before. Yes, she was a year older than me, and my cousin, but so what? Yes, she had six toes on either foot and they were webbed, but so what? Nobody knew who her father was, but these things happen. Aunt Emily must have wandered into the woods when she shouldn’t have, or sleepwalked there in a dream, which is what she always hinted at, but so what? What fascinated me about Zenobia was that she was wild. She did and said things nobody else did. For all we converse with Those of the Air or raise up the dead at our festivals, and await the coming of strange gods, the people of Chorazin (Pennsylvania, not the one Jesus curses in the Bible, which is somewhere else) are a pretty conventional, dull lot.

Except Zenobia.

I remember that it was a particularly hot summer afternoon, and Elder Abraham (who really is a thousand years old, no question about that) was going on again with the story we’d all heard so many times before about how he once saw Charlemagne when he was a kid, and how the sacred and mysterious blood of our ancient race that flows through us all is even older than Charlemagne, and through that blood we shall all be transformed and find our places in the new world when the Earth is otherwise cleared off (yadda-yadda-yadda). I was alternately playing games with my toes on the dusty floor, or staring up at the cracked ceiling and trying to imagine that the cracks were rivers and mountains and I was looking at a map of lands far beyond our little village, and Zenobia was squirming in the row in front of me, making the bench squeak.

As soon as we escaped from that meeting house she grabbed me by the hand. We both ran well past the edge of the crowd, into the woods, and she said, “Come on, Abel! Wanna see something neat?”

Sure I did, but I had no idea what she had in mind; she could always surprise me; so I let her drag me along. She nearly pulled my arm out of the socket. She was in a jolly mood, kicking up new-fallen leaves and making quite a lot of

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