It hovered just beyond the gla.s.s. Something intelligent that was aware of us. And then... Dear G.o.d, how could such a thing be possible? The gla.s.s flowed, melted, and a wriggling tendril of inky blackness oozed into the room. I saw it glide forward and curl around Valliecchi's waist. It plucked him bodily from the floor and drew him, screeching, into that outer darkness.

I did not wait to see any more. I only knew that the room had fallen suddenly silent and I was somehow on my feet and pulling at the door with a mad frenzy that enabled me to break the lock and send me staggering into the parlor and then through the outer door. A moment later, I was outside with the cold, damp mist on my face and clean air in my bursting lungs.

I must have run mindlessly along that ancient cobbled street with only a single backward glance at the house on top of the hill. How I reached home in a half-demented state, I shall never know. I vaguely remember hailing a taxi more than half a mile from Mewson Street and being deposited on my doorstep at two-thirty in the morning by a concerned taxi driver who thought I was either drunk or under the influence of drugs.

Now I seldom go out at night and am mortally afraid of shadows. I cannot explain what happened that night. I do not believe any sane man can.

There is, of course, one further thing that the reader will probably have guessed already. When I fled precipitously from Valliecchi's house, I did turn my head for that one backvard glance.

And, of course, there was no window on that side of the house at all-just a blank brick wall!

IN THE HAUNTED DARKNESS.

by Michael R. Collings.

I am not mad.

Note how calmly I can make that declaration. Listen to the evenness in my voice, the smoothness of my blood flowing through my veins as I repeat it: I am not mad.

I know...I know. Others have made the same declamation, only to have their protests proved false by their ghastly aberrancies.

But I...I know...I know that the sounds I hear are safely locked within the thin-walled cabinet of my skull, that they cannot take on a frightful life, a horrifying tangibility. They are no more than the constant firing of nerve-cells linking ears to brain, a sea-storm waving of internal cilia.

And I know that there is nothing medicine can do to forestall the constant barrage of sounds.

To some degree, I have learned to live with my condition.

Living with tinnitus is h.e.l.l.

Days are really not so difficult. I have private means, so I needn't contend face-to-face with the mindless hordes of fast-tongued, slurring consumers that would make communicating with them unbearable. Nor do I have to listen to the endless riffle of pages turning as I make meaningless computations on a softly sputtering computer screen.

My time is my own.

I can take long walks. The wind-however slight, there seems always to be a breeze near where I live-fluttering against my ear-porches nearly masks the underlying crackles, sizzles, staticky wheezes. Even the sounds of my heels on concrete walkways or asphalt pavements can help...and for that reason I wear distinctive high-heeled boots with arced steel taps affixed. Tap-tap-tap swissssssh tap-tap-tap.

And there are other options.

I spend long afternoons at a nearby fast-food joint, relishing dollar-a-cup refillable drinks and cheap food in an ambience that generates sufficient noise that I don't notice my internal cacophony...almost. Nor do I have to pay close attention to what anyone there says. I do not know them-indeed, I carefully refrain from cultivating even an all-too-casual howdy-de-do level of acquaintance. I do not know them. They do not know me, except perhaps as the frequent purchaser of a certain sandwich and an all-you-can-drink soda from their limited menu.

The bridge over the river sometimes invited me. There is a concrete railing just chest-high where I can rest my arms and lean over the bal.u.s.trade to watch the infinitely changeable currents of light and shadow on the surface, and listen to the subtle hiss-gurgle-slap as water swirls around the weathered marble pillars...at almost the same volume as my sounds. Almost.

And there are other distractions.

Colors. Shapes. Surfaces glinting and angling and casting eldritch shadows even at the height of noon.

So.

Days are not too difficult.

But nights. Ah, nights. The times of incipient madness, when it seems as if my head must burst and all the captured noise spill like clotted blood to spatter against walls and floor and ceiling. When it seems that I might lay on one side, ear flattened against the thin mattress-even though that accentuates rather than m.u.f.fles the sounds-and close my eyes so tightly that tears start almost against my willing them, and half-pretend half-pray that my ear is but a conduit to some vast underground vault, lined with time-effaced bricks and fouled with the cast-off hopes and fears of negligent humanity, and that my sounds will trickle from my brain, through the ear, and dissipate among the noisome jetsam.

When around me presses darkness and loneliness and silence and despair.

Those are the difficult times.

Tinnitus is h.e.l.l.

Or rather, those were the difficult times.

Because of late, I have made a rather startling discovery, one which even now I can barely comprehend.

It began on an otherwise nondescript night. The sounds were neither more intrusive nor less than usual. Indeed, I had almost grown used to them as they winnowed their way through the darkness with the treadless stealth of ghosts.

I recall that I had taken up another of my strategies for dealing with them...cataloging them, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g my eyes tight against the blackness and constructing a mind-chart that would tell me where...and what...each sound might be.

The closest ones came first.

The hmmmmm-buzz-static just beneath the surface of my left ear. On my mind-chart, it would be represented by a fine red line, perhaps only half an inch long, midway between the pinna and the eardrum. It might, perhaps, vibrate just slightly, almost beneath the terminus of sight.

Almost touching the outer flesh of my left ear, the clatter-rattle-click of a dozen nuts and bolts being shaken violently in a fragile gla.s.s jar.

Then, the electrical crackle that formed a tight sphere not more than nine inches from my left ear, hovering in the silent air, slightly more dorsally positioned than ventrally.

Next, the frenetic tic-tic-tic, as of a hyperactive alarm clock nestled just where my neck meets the pillowcase, tic-tic-tic-tic so rapid that I feel my heartbeat hasten to make up for lost time.

I do not have an alarm clock in my bedroom. Even though I occasionally hear one ring, I do not own an alarm clock.

Somewhere, a door closes with a m.u.f.fled thump. Footsteps echo on the carpeted stairway leading to my bedroom. From the doorway, someone whispers my name. Once.

I am alone in my house. I am always alone.

These sounds-and more-are part of my every moment. They are the standard of routine.

I finished my normal catalogue of the bangs, clatters, and rattles that surround my head like some insane diving helmet composed of fractured sound rather than clear, pure, crystalline gla.s.s. Then, for reasons I still do not comprehend, I reached outward, beyond the protective borders of my house.

First I found the sound of shovels-broad lips of sharpened steel grating against the concrete sidewalks, sc.r.a.ping away non-existent snow half-melting in the 100+ August night-time heat. Sc.r.a.pe. Sc.r.a.pe. Sc.r.a.pe. As rhythmical as if I were observing some night-watchman laboring at his task, struggling to remove the snowfall faster than it acc.u.mulated. Sc.r.a.pe. Sc.r.a.pe. Sc.r.a.pe.

(All of this time, of course, the nearer sounds continued unabated, if anything sharpened by my unwonted attention to sounds outside my window.) Somewhere down the street, the whine of an electric garage-door opener. Up. Down. Up. Down. Whine-roar.

Just beyond the garage door, a motorcycle wails into the night. Once. Twice. Three times, each time softer than the last until it disappears. Almost.

Further yet, and the m.u.f.fled bellow of eighteen-wheeler caravans on the ten-mile-distant freeway, low and warm, nearly smelling of exhausted ozone and over-heated rubber tires. Almost-almost-could I hear the individual music of each tire, the hummm of each separate tread.

Usually, this was as far as I would go. On a good night, I would be asleep by this time. On a bad night, the susurration of the faraway traffic-not discernable by ears used only to more mundane sounds-would eventually lull me into dreams. Vivid dreams. Long, frantic dreams that would make me yearn to wake.

But tonight, for the first time, I ventured ever-ever-further outward, beyond the flat and unspiring landscapes of this earth and into the vasty regions of the unending s.p.a.ce that surrounds this petty point of life.

Perhaps because I had been listening to Gustav Holst's miraculous composition earlier that afternoon, perhaps because subconsciously I had had a premonition of the course this night would take...whatever the reason, I had been hearing the key melodic line from the first piece of that magnificent suite repeating as if on a loop through my conscious mind. Mars: The Bringer of War. All evening, again and again, over and over, the same phrase.

So, perhaps naturally, I sent my mind upward and outward, toward the Red Planet, then but little more than a rusty speck among so many other insignificant specks. But still I urged my brain to listen, to stifle the common, closer racketings and concentrate on more distant, reverberant sounds.

I pa.s.sed the dead-cold-silence that I somehow knew was the limit of the moon but heard nothing there, nor in the icy blackness that lay beyond.

I moved through the softly infinite white noise of empty s.p.a.ce, straining to hear.

Then: the almost silent rustle of windless pa.s.sages across red sands.

The crack of frozen stone first touched by the vagrant warmth of a sun millions of miles more remote than it had seemed from Earth.

And Mars was suddenly next to me...behind me, receding into darkness.

With the nearly infinite speed of human thought, I pa.s.sed beyond the orbit of Saturn, Bringer of Old Age, and felt myself bend beneath the weight of uncounted-uncountable-centuries. I would have paused, listened to the friction-hiss of its jeweled rings, but already my frenzied course had speeded up, catapulting me into the lifeless depths beyond.

Then Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity. How I longed-yearned-to slow and refresh myself in the not-quite subliminal chaos of its storms, its gigantic eye peering up at me as I listened, unblinking, rea.s.suring.

But my speed allowed only for the briefest hint of something like music, something like static, something like the labored breathing of a monstrous beast before I was whisked beyond, arcing into frozen night with such rapidity that I felt I must soon reach the awesome maw of the great Black Hole that surely lies at the heart of this galaxy. Mentally I closed my eyes-they were wide open where my body lay, not yet asleep on the thin, lumpy mattress in my bedroom-and strained to feel...to feel, not see illimitless s.p.a.ce flash by.

If I had been travelling in a physical body at even an infinitesimal fraction of the speed I had attained, I would have been instantaneously crushed, if not utterly discorporated, when abruptly I encountered a barrier at once definitely solid and yet so diaphanous that I could almost hear the remote stars whispering, "Come, come, come." But I could not.

Instead, I began to hear colors, some familiar-viridian, cardinal, cobalt, xanthous-others such as human eye has never seen, furious whirlings and wheelings of light-not-darkness, of hues beyond description and recall; yet each, even those few for which I could find a name, seemed touched by something wild, something untamed and untamable, something ineffably dark and...dare I say it...evil.

Something eldritch.

Within the color-sounds and the sound-colors, I detected yet something more, a voice perhaps, or many speaking in the choral unison of legions, speaking in a language I did not, could not know, and still I understood: "Not yet. Go back. What you seek awaits you there. Go back. Not yet."

And a force as of huge tentacles, fibrous, muscular, irresistible and enormous, pressed against me, became tangible against my nothing-flesh, grasped harder with a deadly cold, and began to penetrate toward the center of my warmth and being.

It was a threat.

Return or die.

And I heard the aggregation of millennia of miles unwind as I slipped backwards, through the spheres of the Jupiter, and of Saturn, and of Mars, and finally through the sphere of the Moon itself, careening backward into sublunar s.p.a.ce until abruptly I hovered-hearing only, mind you, not seeing or feeling, bereft even of the sense of those cyclopean tentacles that had wrapped around my being-hovering only and hearing only, just above the surface of the ocean's deepest abyss.

For an instant that lasted longer than my lifetime of memories, I heard only the almost soothing murmur of ocean waves as they roiled ceaselessly above unfathomable depths. They soothed, they smoothed, they smothered all sounds but themselves.

Then: "Welcome."

I could hear the colossal size of the speaker, its frigid antiquity beyond all human history, beyond all human cares, its coldness, its utter alienness-these manifested themselves in the timbre of the sound, in the unbreathing, inorganic difference from anything I had ever heard before. I heard the meanings, not the words muttered in some pre-pre-Adamic language never meant to be articulated by human tongue.

"Come closer."

Beneath me, I heard the whispering waves draw nearer, close around me, and I sank deeper and deeper into the abyss until I heard something more: the wash of currents around monolithic stones, the hiss of Stygian dwellers directed even toward the phantom of an interloper.

"Come to me, O nugatory one, and I-even I the Chief of All, will give you what you wish for."

"What I...?"

"What you wish for more than anything in this world or in the worlds beyond."

"But...."

"I will give you this one great thing. All that you must do is to return once more-a simple thing-and speak the words that I will give you. Then I will grant you...

"Serenity..., "Stillness..., "Siiiiiiilenccccce...."

While the final sibilants insinuated themselves into my mind, I fell into dream: a dream of a hidden megalopolis, its tremendous stones resting, sleeping, waiting beneath the waves, its ma.s.sive structures, its tortuous thoroughfares of great stone ramps, its behemoth citadels that dwarfed all mortal trials in petty grandeur and foolish grandiosity. For endless hours-in the dream-I wandered through broad avenues, with bas-reliefs incised into the living stone, with statues standing free at intersections, with murals on every surface...all depicting such wondrous horrors, such loathly terrors that they cannot be spoken of in any human tongue...we mortals have not the words, have not the consciousness of the words, would not dare speak the words if they existed.

Yet I suddenly knew certain words, a litany of rhythmic utterance beyond all meaning and beyond all hope, that would recall the mighty city to the surface, awaken the sleeping G.o.d-behemoth, leviathan, kraken, cthulhu, by whatever outre name know-restore the Outer Ones to their ancient place within the universe...and condemn humanity to slavery, to torture, and to death.

And all the time I knew it was a dream, just as I had known my voyages through s.p.a.ce, the voices and the words were not, because there were no sounds except the touch of water on time-polished stone. No clack-hiss-buzz-pop-screech.

In my dreams, I never hear the sounds. Only when I awaken do they return to launch once again their insistent attack.

In that monstrous city, there were no sounds. Blessedly, no sounds.

Living is h.e.l.l.

I awoke when the sun first broke over the distant mountain crests and shattered through my window. Immediately-more rapidly than immediately-the sounds resumed. Immediately I struggled to ignore them.

I went at once to my computer and began to write, to record what I had heard, as best I could.

And now I understand that I must choose.

I know that I cannot continue as I have, slave and subject to the random firings of nerves, interpreted by my brain as sounds.

In my bathroom cabinet are the bottles of pills my doctors have prescribed to help me sleep. There are enough, I think, to bring me what I most devoutly wish.

Someone once wrote: By the silence I will know That I am dead.

There are enough to grant me that.

But...what if...?

I am not mad. I know the difference between Dream and not-Dream.