Shadows Out of Time

In every culture, every time and age, there are legends about a spirit of evil that inflicts suffering on mankind. The names of this entity vary from nation to nation, from religion to religion, from era to era. Yet the darkness never fails to return. Another empire rises, built on the trampled bones of the innocent. Great men are devoured by corruption, world leaders become murderous despots, smiling youths become serial killers. Mothers strangle babes in their cribs, fathers slaughter their loved ones like cattle. Quiet strangers go on killing sprees.

The true name of all these evils is Malygris. He can be anyone at any time. He may be hiding behind the gentle face of someone you know. You might have already pledged your loyalty to him. Or killed in his name.

I tell you this because knowledge is knowledge.

Let someone else carry the burden of it.

Malygris lives.

Nineteen Minutes FREDERIC S. DURBIN

Documents pertaining to the investigation of the Tuttle-Bigelow incident of September 9, 2022.

From the personal journal of Jeremy Tuttle, age 44, entry dated September 6, 2022:

“The Uncanny City”—that’s what I call Pittsburgh, this urban sprawl in the hills, built atop ruins. Its names are mythic: Runs and Furnaces and Hot Metal and Elfinwilds. It’s at once vibrant and half-swallowed by the earth, which always wins in the end. Go around a city block, and you’re lost in the woods; then you come out in the middle of the middle, where you might get run over by a garbage truck, or you might fall off a cliff. Deep, dark ravines…trees dense on the vertical…more bridges than in Venice; at least, that was true for a while — it may not be now. See the part about the earth swallowing and winning.

There are gaping basement pits, doorways in the hillsides, haphazard brickwork, vine-clad chimneys in the forest, and stairs. Stairs and stairs. A street may become a stairway without warning. Just because a map or a sign tells you it’s a street, don’t believe it. Steps climb and descend the banks, connecting level to level. Some of them no longer go anywhere but into the woods.

That place in particular, on the back slopes of Mt. Washington, has an eerie beauty but hardly seems a site likely for such attention, such an event. Yet therein, perhaps, may be witnessed the elegance of the mathematics governing the cosmos — the choreography behind the vast dance of the stars and worlds. Who can know whether Kafti speaks the truth or is only delusional? Can the two discrete sources of information and their terrible harmony be coincidence? I mean to find out, and so I will return there three nights from now, and I will be standing on those crumbling city stairs at the hour of 8:43 p.m. That’s the time Jen was given. I hope she won’t go there. I told her not to. If she does, well, I’ll be there first.

“Terrible harmony,” I wrote. I like that. Hmm.

This evening after dark I parked beside the fenced lot of the empty Vancilly Metals building, its windows grilled and boarded. The lot was cracked, weed-grown, and so faded with age that it seemed to be covered in frost. Asphalt goes gray just like people do. Gladys Street runs right along the woods there at the base of the steep rise. There are ferny brickworks in the hillside, the overgrown remains of old houses and garages. Peeking out among the roots, through the low branches, they look like the edge of a subterranean town, something like a dungeon in D&D or Tolkien’s Moria. “Speak Friend and enter.”

I found the entrance to Benton Avenue, still marked by a street sign. It’s called an avenue, but it’s a stairway with a 41-degree grade, punctuated by landings every so often. It climbs right up into the forest. Thick scrub trees wall it in like a tunnel and roof it over in many places. As I trudged up the steps, I could hear the traffic on Sebring Furnace Extension rattling over the potholes. It was humid on the Benton stairs and really dark — sort of breathless, like the trees were already watching and waiting. Weirdly, I had the feeling that I shouldn’t go up too far, that I was trespassing somehow. But I kept onward.

The whole “avenue” is barely a tenth of a mile. Halfway up, there’s an arm of the stairs that angles to the right and just stops — it literally goes nowhere. The last step gives way to spongy soil and nettles, and I could see the glow of a streetlight above me, through a stand of oaks all skirted around with bushes — impassable. The main flight climbs on up to Halfirth, though there’s no street sign at the intersection there; it’s pitchblack, facing a row of tumbledown apartments not far from the mountain’s spine.

An owl hooted in the branches somewhere close by, a sound so mournful and abrupt that I yelled out. Heart racing, I headed back down into the well of darkness.

Mission accomplished for tonight: I know the place now.

Notes from the E.R. of Grace-St. Vincent’s Hospital, Pittsburgh, September 9, 2022: