Chapter 22
Our gold is not the common gold. Rosarium philosophorum
I was still in a fragile condition when I came home from work one day to find Alma literally on my doorstep, talking with Marcus Desmond, my landlord.
While they finished their conversation, I had a moment to observe her. She looked different. She had had her hair cut and was wearing some fashionably shapeless garment. I could not tell whether these changes were improvements but resented them just the same. They seemed to challenge me in some way, to make demands to which I felt unequal.
I invited her inside and offered her a drink. She took a cigarette and an amber cigarette holder from her bag and spent a few moments fitting them together. In the not so distant past I would have seen this only as an opportunity for some lighthearted teasing. Now I thought how ridiculous it was that she would take such pains to appear sophisticated.
“I’m afraid I’ve acquired this disgusting habit,” she said, but did not seem particularly regretful. “You look funny, Charles.” She blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Sunburnt and sort of worn. What have you been up to?”
“Lazing around in Kingsport for a week.” I shrugged. “It should have been the Cape, but after West’s funeral I didn’t feel up to that. I would have asked you to come, but you were away.”
“Yes, Chicago for the past three weeks. It seemed like three years. Not my favourite town. I would have much preferred the Cape, with you. I was sorry to hear of his death, Charles, for your sake.”
“But not for his sake, obviously.” I felt suddenly angry. “You never could bring yourself to admit that he had some good qualities, could you? And now you’re probably thinking ‘Good riddance, but isn’t it a pity that poor Charles has lost his best friend.’”
“Don’t be so touchy! No, I didn’t like him much, but I admit that he had some good qualities. Almost everyone has a few. I meant to say that I was sorry not to be at the funeral, again for your sake.”
“That’s perfectly all right, Alma. I managed, with a little help from his brothers.” Yes, I managed, I thought. I managed to drag him back from death, after watching him kill himself first. Then I managed to lose him forever. Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Miss Halsey, so keep your pity to yourself.
I should have made some excuse to cut short this unfortunate visit and see her at some later time when I was feeling less sensitive. But I didn’t. And Alma, with her usual zest for facts to string together pressed on, seemingly unaware of my growing anger.
“Those two!” she said, referring to the West brothers. “They regularly make headlines in Boston. Hiram the businessman and Jeremy the crook. And Herbert – you know, I’ve heard some very strange rumours about his death.”
“Oh? And what might those be?” I tried to sound uninterested, but felt a rising apprehension.
“Everything from a drug overdose to suicide to murder. Six months ago, I would have thought any of those to be pretty unlikely. Except murder, maybe.”
I choked down a reprehensible comment and remained silent.
“So is there any truth to them?” she asked finally, when she saw that I wasn’t about to volunteer a reply.
“I’m surprised you’d even bother to ask. It seems you have some very loquacious friends here in Arkham, with vivid imaginations. I can imagine who some of them are. But listen to me – if I see so much as a hint, a hint, mind you, in anything you publish that the death of Herbert West was by causes other than natural, I will sue you for libel so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
“I see I’ve hit a nerve,” she said, getting up. “I think I’d better go. But before I do, I’d like to say something: if he hadn’t had the good fortune to die when he did, your friend West would have eventually been revealed to be just as much a criminal as the rest of his family. I wouldn’t be surprised to find he’d done more than one murder himself. So I’m giving you a choice – our friendship or tending a shrine to Herbert West. Think about it and give me a telephone call when you’ve decided. But I’ve read the text of that eulogy you gave. If you were the Pope, he’d be canonized already, I guess. So I won’t hold my breath.”
She picked up her handbag and left. I heard the sound of her heels tapping down the stairs, then silence.
After this, Arkham became hateful to me. I felt there was a widening gulf between myself and the community in which I had lived and worked for more than twelve years. I thought that friends and colleagues were avoiding me or looking at me strangely and discussing me in ways I should not have been happy to hear. My state of mental health was less than robust. I can see that now, but at the time I felt that I was trapped in a glass bubble filled with a poisoned atmosphere.
I became increasingly isolated. Friends turned away after I repeatedly refused their invitations or lashed out at them in unreasoning anger. Sarah Enright had moved to California in pursuit of adventure and opportunities. I was in a worse position than West shortly before his downfall, for at least he had had me.
Thoughts of him brought no comfort. That winter, as I walked in the dim evenings across the campus or in certain narrow streets of the town, I felt I was being followed. I would turn around quickly only to see no one behind me (except perhaps the suggestion of a dark shape disappearing around a corner). Even as I looked for Herbert West in any stranger I met, I feared that one day I would indeed meet him, face to face with only the cold winter air between us. What might he have become since his death? I did not know which would be worse – to see the face I had known so well transformed by evil and violent intent, or empty of reason and cognizance, a blank mirror reflecting nothing.
On bad nights I would think about what might happen if I found him, alive but impaired in mind and body. I imagined us wandering over the land, from town to city to village, weary but fearful of pursuit and capture. Again and again, I try to teach him his name, but fail. Every night I watch him sleep only to wake in terror, clutching me, whimpering. Until the last awakening in the last of a thousand dirty rooms. His gaze is fixed on me, empty as ever. I scrabble for the pistol that has been years-long ballast in the never-unpacked bag of my possessions; I aim and fire, twice.
By the spring of 1924, I had had enough. I tendered my resignation to Dr. Armitage and accepted a position at Harvard College. It was of a lower rank than the one I was leaving and Cambridge was a more expensive place than Arkham in which to live, but I did not care. Like West, I wanted a fresh start, a tabula rasa.
One of my last acts as a librarian at Miskatonic University was highly reprehensible. Even now I have twinges of professional guilt. I visited the Quarrington Room by night, to look for the last time at the document correlating names to the codes used in Quarrington’s Profiles and Predictions. Unfortunately, I had a small accident with a bottle of indelible ink which should never have been brought into the room in the first place. Only a small area was affected, on the last page of the document. And when I departed, the file labelled DX.37-31-59 went with me.
On my last day in Arkham, I visited the Derby plot at Christ Church Cemetery. For a long time I stood regarding a grave on which the headstone had been placed only a few months before. The carving and inscription on it were familiar to me, for I had myself commissioned them. It had been necessary to make a particularly generous contribution to the Cemetery Improvement Fund in order to overcome official objections to the image on the grey granite stone – a serpent devouring its own tail, the alchemical symbol for unity, for eternity. The inscription said
Herbert Francis West
1886-1923
Life from Death.
I had done everything I could. I laid a sheaf of lilies on the grave and went away.
*******
The Friendship of Mortals Page 34