New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

changed. The Javer sea was steaming beneath the virus star, a black haze meshed to the sky.
    A thin breeze picked up, and Henley watched several shy leaves littering away towards the ironwood posts the corral. The white horse remained motionless, its pink eyes were staring. Closer now, the boats aw
    confusion of the maze to escape the shadows that ~ut
    fuming away into an unbearable brlghtness.~a s features were visible. They were bristly and was a long
    time later, after he had distilled all ~ick, dull gaping. The puffed lips moved, but Henley memories from
    the blood-wallow of mammals, that~ard nothing. The face was moronic, the forehead
    ~: ........ ~ ~ ~ ' ing light his fi&und and bulging, filling up the sockets so that the aga,,, apF~ua~, ........ Xlt of smok o o , _ _ _
    ~;~; .... ;,~ .~. nd
    remembered with a shudder, he had to stare up from under the skull. An idiot's face. The lips continued to move in a whisper. As then the breeze shifted and was full of patterns as pressed by.
    The silky curves or air carried a voice, scrawny and wicked: Shut your ears big, let the darkness come unrolling from your eyes and your fingz blow longer all in the stillness. Shut your ears Henley.
    Henley straightened as if struck. The voice was horrible. He tried to heave himself to his feet, but the effort collapsed him, and he squelched into the mud. The heat of the black sun thudded against the back his neck.
    He squeezed his eyes tight and tried to will himself awake, but the dream was unbreakable.
    So there he lay, feeling as if he were wrinkling smaller in the alien light, drying out to a dusty ch that
    whispered away in the breeze, scattering through an incommensurable darkness.Black.
    A darkness that was palpable. A thick oozing mass of black. Immense galleries of space, choirs of distance and at their centre, a mountain of black convulsing, engulfing all sound, all light.
    With a terrible shriek, Henley wrenched awake. He was in a bed in a darkened room.
    He was sitting perfectly still in his hospital bed, Henley t utterly transformed. The room was empty, but that s
    only an appearance that confuted reality. The darkness of the room was cellular and shifting, its ative silence humming - a mockery of the void, the flute emptiness that he had just risen from. That dream deadhess was still there, but it was disguised, king as an emptiness at the centre of all things, rapacious black holes invisible behind reflecting surges: walls, a night table, a window...
    tt first light, a doctor came in with his medical trt. Henley could see through him, sensed the doc"s surprise at finding him awake, saw his body disolve into a cloud of atoms, a confusion of energies temporarily united, and, at their centre, blackness.
    The doctor unwrapped Henley's foot, and for the first time since waking, Henley stared at his own body. He could see through it as well, but at the foot there was something different - it was leaking darkness. Threads of blackness radiated from it, shafted up along his leg, his knee. Seeing it, he remembered the sharp rock, remembered hiding the cache beneath trees, remembered...
    all he could sense at first. His eyelids tugged open! 'Henley their mineral stare facing a wall.
    Gradually sou~
    sifted through, and he heard footsteps, sensed a fa~ medicinal stain on the air. He was in a hospital, al that
    realization calmed him. Yet there was no chance to wonder what had happened because it was s~
    happening. The very air around him seemed to pulse with the massed blackness of his nightmare -
    Easton snapped awake.
    Christ! Where am I?'
    The doctor looked up with a benign but puzzled expression. 'Relax, Mr Easton. You're in good hands.'
    Ralf prowled the carpet of a consultation room St Vincent's Hospital. He was exhausted, having been able to sleep only in snatches for the last week.
    No - not a nightmare. Reality! here were fever sores at the corners of his mouth, and He had been gangplanked into a perpetual nig! walked with a