by Martha Wells
Four to close the door.
Now, just me. Rose Hartman of Arkham, Massachusetts. I knew this place. I’d read Wingate Peaslee’s horrible account of falling here, of the Great Lost Library of Pnakotus, of the trap doors hiding the end of the world.
They were open.
He’d opened them. He hadn’t meant to do it, but from the moment that Peaslee walked these stones, he’d doomed us all.
I stood up, still holding the Voynich pages, and staggered on. The blue flame followed me, lighting my way, holding shadows back. It flickered and whipped in the wind that tore at me and ripped my clothes, yanked hair from my head, scoured away skin. I kept going.
There was no choice. They’d given me none.
The yawning, gaping hole into chaos lay down a spiral of stone, and I half ran, half rolled down toward it, gasping what air I could and clawing my way the last three feet. The trap door was open. It was a massive thing, a dozen feet across and thick as a battleship’s armor plate. There was no way I could push it shut. It had been blown back on its massive hinges and lay flush to the floor. Even if I’d had a lever, I didn’t have the strength. Four of us together couldn’t have done it.
I threw back my head and screamed, “What do you want me to do?” It was a shout to Acanthus Porter. To God. To the cold and uncaring stars and the moon hovering over the sand, and to anyone, anything who would listen.
They came out of the shadows, then. Shapes, from the corner of my eye—giant conical things, ten feet high, clicking and scraping with strange, chitinous claws but gliding like something from a nightmare. I felt them pouring into me, screaming in a language I could not understand, could not bear. The Great Race, the last memory of them, lost in the shadows of time.
And here. With me.
For the first time, I understood. Acanthus was not the evil; she was the light, a feeble and dying light, trying to talk to a world that could not hear. Did not see the danger beneath.
Would not believe. They’d found the darkness here, on Earth, when they’d come hundreds of thousands of years ago, and they’d locked it away.
I understand. I believe. Like Wingate Peaslee, I had no choice.
The Great Race knew that eventually the trap door would open, and all would be lost. The Great Race—Acanthus’s race—controlled time. And that, suddenly, made a mad kind of sense to me.
And I knew what they wanted. What I had to do. My feeble human strength could never move that trap door and close it. What was open would be open.
Take me to a time when it was still closed, I told them. Take me to the past.
And in a rush, I was falling through a vast, cold space, into the same cavern I stood in a hundred years later, but not the same. The journey made me sick, weak, horribly stretched, but I knew I was right.
The trap door was shut. Bolted, bulging from beneath, but still sealed. I could hear scraping from the opposite side.
It wanted out, that horrible evil.
There was a massive archway towering above me, something like the exposed rib of a dinosaur the size of a city; millions of blocks, each the weight of a car. It had stood all this time, standing watch.
But it was fragile. In my time, a hundred years hence, parts of it had fallen.
Not much time, the Great Race whispered to me. You are fading into history. Your world is fading. We can help you no more.
Every arch has a keystone, a point of weakness. This one was far up, above my head, but I’d always been a good climber, with a practical girl’s knack for heights. I found handholds. Footholds.
Climbed.
The keystone was already crumbling under the weight of millennia. I braced my back against the wall and put my feet against it and pushed, pushed, cried out and pushed again.
It slid. Just a little.
I realized that if I continued to push, the arch would crush me as it fell.
No. Not after all this. Don’t make me do this.
But something told me the Great Race had seen this. Knew this. Knew me.
Acanthus’s metallic voice whispered in my ear. Everything dies, she said. Even time. Even us. We can flee no more. We die here too.
I remembered the light going out in the eyes of my patients back in Shady Grove, the slow and bitter slide into the dark. Maybe dying for this was better.
It was damn sure faster.
“I’m dying a millionaire,” I said out loud, in a place that had never heard human speech, and I laughed. It sounded pure. It sounded right.
And I pushed the last crucial inch, and the keystone shattered.
I had time to see the millions of blocks break and fall, clanging and burying the trap door beneath a mountain of inscribed stone, and it was the last block, the very last one, that hurtled down toward me in a killing arc.
The light died, and I died in the dark.
***
I awoke.
My limbs felt frail and unfamiliar. My eyes saw colors that made no sense. Sounds blared at me in a confusing, awful spiral.
Some alien creature touched me and chittered, and I thought, no no no, and then I understood. I hadn’t died. This was Acanthus’s last, horrible gift… the gift of life. She’d pushed me forward, through time, into another body.
I looked down at myself, and screamed. My body was a vast chitinous mass of sharp joined legs and the thorax of an insect, armor as black and iridescent as spilled, dirty oil. I saw in brilliant opal fragments from a hundred eyes just how monstrous I really was.
And as I screamed, I knew where I was—in a place of care, with strange, chitinous creatures who stroked me with insectile palps and tried to comfort me as I struggled for control of an alien body. A nursing home of monsters.
My new world.
The Great Race was gone. I was the last. And one day, I would write a manuscript of Earth, of plants long dead, of a people lost to dust. I had saved them, but even rescue doesn’t last. Time destroys all things. And even time dies.
This was the end of my world, the inheritors of the human race. I could see the sun on the horizon through an opening in the burrow where I lay on my back, and the sun burned old and red and feeble.
I was here, at the dying of the light.
And I laughed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The Voynich manuscript actually does exist in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. You can view the book and pages here:
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/voynich-manuscript
The “Taman Shud” case in Australia is one of the most famous in that country and is still unsolved as of this writing. More here: http://coolinterestingstuff.com/the-very-strange-case-of-taman-shud
The “Lead Masks” case occurred in Brazil in 1966 and is still extremely odd and puzzling as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Masks_Case
My mother has Alzheimer’s disease. Immediately, upon reading “The Shadow Out of Time,” the story upon which this is based, I realized that end-stage Alzheimer’s patients would be a modern, eerie twist on the story of Professor Peaslee. I’ve incorporated many elements of his story, including the Lost Library City of Pnakotus, into what I hope is a worthy Lovecraftian effort.
Great Race of Yith
The beings who referred to themselves as the Great Race fled from their own world of Yith when their scientists predicted its imminent destruction due to a cataclysm within its depths. They could not save their world in spite of the advanced state of their sciences, so flight was the only course open to them. Their exodus was through time as well as through space, for it is a curious peculiarity of this race that it has the ability to span the ages. This it cannot do in the flesh, but only in the mind.
When the Great Race came for refuge to our world, long before the creation of humankind by the Elder Things, they were forced to select a form of life already flourishing here that was suitable to contain their bodiless intellects. The species selected by them is unknown to our sages, nor does any trace of t
heir existence remain, but inhuman beings long of life that dwell beneath the ground say they were large cone-shaped beings that moved across the ground on a single foot like a snail. They had branching limbs and well-developed eyes, two things essential to the Great Race if they were to continue to pursue their sciences, which were their primary occupations.
As their world of Yith crumbled and burned, they cast their minds across the fathomless gulfs of space and time, and into these conical creatures. The minds of the creatures were displaced by this invasion, but having no vessels into which they could enter, and no knowledge of the transference of minds from one body to another, they perished.
The Great Race had chosen well. Their new bodies were resistant to disease and injury, and long of life. Their branching limbs enabled them to build a great civilization on the surface of our planet unmolested, for at this time in the history of our world the Elder Things were still living in the oceans and had no use for the land.
For millions of years they prospered on our world. During that span they were forced to fight many wars with the other alien races that contested for dominance of the earth, but their advanced science always enabled them to prevail. All of the knowledge of the entire future was available to them to draw upon, for they could send their minds into the future temporarily to inhabit a creature of a future age for the purpose of acquiring future sciences. This made them virtually unbeatable in war.
At length, however, there came a new wave of invaders from between the stars that the Great Race realized it could not defeat. To escape subjugation at the hands of this coming invasion, the Great Race determined to leave their conical bodies and leap into the far future of our world, to a time long after the passing away of humanity. In the future it is said that they displaced the minds of a race of giant golden insects, the ruling race of that distant time. There they remain, or rather, there they will remain, safe from their enemies in the past.
Although the Great Race had no interaction with humanity, it is claimed that remnants of their cities yet remain beneath the sands of the desert places of the world. The sands preserve what they conceal. In some future period, the capricious winds may begin to blow in a new direction, and uncover these cities to wondering eyes. Those who speak about such things caution listeners to stay far away from these cities, for the creatures from which the Great Race fled in terror still remain there, haunting the buried ruins. And if the Great Race feared them so much that it felt compelled to escape from them into the future, how much more reason does frail humanity have to avoid them?
Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves
Seanan McGuire
Jeremy plucked the white mouse from its tank as easily as he would pick an apple from a tree, grabbing the squirming, indignant rodent without hesitation or concern. The mouse squeaked once in furious indignation, no doubt calling upon whatever small, unheeded gods were responsible for the protection of laboratory animals. Jeremy ignored the sound, holding the mouse steady as he moved his syringe into position.
“I’m not saying that you have to run right out and jump into bed with somebody, okay?” he said, continuing our earlier conversation as if he weren’t holding a struggling research specimen in his left hand. Jeremy was like that. He had a lot of compassion for living things, but his ability to compartmentalize was impressive, even to me. He was the sort of man who, under the right leadership, could probably have been talked into some remarkable human rights violations. But he knew that about himself. No one in our lab policed their actions more tightly than Jeremy.
“That’s a good thing, because I’m not planning to,” I said, folding my arms and leaning back against the counter. “Were you planning to scare that mouse to death before you injected the serum? I ask out of scientific curiosity, and not because it will fuck up our results. Even though, spoiler alert, it will fuck up our results.”
“What? Oh!” Jeremy turned and frowned at the struggling mouse like he was seeing it for the first time—which maybe, in a way, he was. It had been background noise before. Now it was real. “Sorry, Mr. Mouse. Let me just give you your daily dose of carcinogens, and we can put you back in your box.”
The needle slid into the mouse’s belly with venomous smoothness, the fang of the great serpent called “Science,” which had more worshippers than most gods could ever dream of. The mouse squeaked once more and then was silent, consumed by the tremors wracking its body. Jeremy placed the rodent gently back in its enclosure, treating it with more care now than he’d shown when it seemed healthy.
“Six more days of this and the tumors should start to become visible under the skin, if this specimen follows the path charted by the last twenty,” he said. “We’ll have concrete results by the end of the week.”
“Causing cancer in lab mice isn’t ‘concrete results,’” I said. “These things have been inbred and twisted until sneezing gives them cancer. We should be trying to induce tumors in something that hasn’t been primed for twenty generations. You want to make the headlines? Induce tumors in bees.”
“You hate bees.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to figure out a way to cause cancer in bees just because you don’t like them. They have enough problems.”
“Colony collapse disorder is sort of like bee cancer, if you treat each bee in a hive as functionally serving the same role as a cell in a larger body.”
For a moment—one beautiful moment—Jeremy looked like he was seriously considering it. I smiled winsomely, hoping to keep him distracted with the thought of cancerous bees, dancing and dying through fields of flowers. Maybe it was a little cruel to the bees, but it wasn’t like I was actually killing them by offering a thought experiment, and if Jeremy was focusing on science, he wasn’t focusing on my lack of a social life.
Alas, good things never last. I learned that when I was just a little girl. Jeremy shook himself back into the present and frowned at me. “That was a mean trick.”
“Yes,” I agreed. It was best not to argue when he was right. That would spark more argument, and could take up the entire day.
“You need to get out more. It’s not healthy for you to spend all your time in the lab.”
“Uh, hello?” I held up a hand, counting off my fingers as I said, “First, pot, meet kettle. Second, grad students are supposed to spend all our time in the lab. Third, if we don’t get results by the end of the month, they’re going to give our lab to Terry and her weird plant project. Four, my grants all run out at the end of the semester, and I promised my family I would come home. So this is sort of my last hurrah. Dating can wait until I’ve got my doctorate.”
Jeremy crossed his arms and scowled at me. I recognized that face. “About that. What is this crap about you giving up everything to go home to your weird hick family? They don’t deserve you.”
“You can call them all the names you want. They’ll still be my family, and that will still be where I belong.”
“You’re really going to give it up?” Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t understand you. I mean, I really don’t understand you. You’re brilliant. You’re beautiful. And you’re going to give up everything to go back to what, a bed and breakfast with a nice view of the Atlantic? Come on, Violet. I know you want more than that. You have to.”
“Oh, believe me, I do.” And I did. I wanted the sea, the blue-black sea, the great wide expanse of endless water. I wanted the benthic and the abyssal and the clear, shallow water that looked like glass in the sunlight. I wanted it all. And the first step was, as Jeremy so charmingly put it, a bed and breakfast with a nice view of the Atlantic, where a private room had been waiting for me since the day that I was born.
All I had to do was get there and show that I was worthy. All I had to do was get results. I pushed away from the counter. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
***
There’s nothing quite like Harvard in the fall. New
students in their carefully chosen outfits, wandering like lost lambs in need of a shepherd; returning students, half of them in pajamas, the other half dressed for the job interviews they have scheduled after class. The specter of student loans hanging over all but the very rich and the very careful, crushing mountains of debt and madness primed to come crashing down as soon as the stars were right.
My family is very rich, and very careful. I’ve managed to swing enough grants to make my standard of living believable, keeping me connected to my peer group and capable of sympathizing with their concerns, but the bulk of my expenses have always been covered. It’s important for the family to have a few like me in every generation, bold explorers who will go out into the world and come home with pockets full of treasure more precious than pearls—knowledge, understanding, and the scientific methods to spread that understanding further.
Jeremy strode across the campus like a young demigod, his back straight and his hair ruffled by the breeze. Some of the passing undergrads looked after him with lust in their eyes. Most were science majors and had seen him walking in the faculty halls, putting him far enough above them to be desirable, but far enough below the professors to be safe. Humans are an innately aspirational species, always wanting the next rung on the ladder, but always afraid to reach too far, lest their grip fail them, and they fall. That odd combination of courage and cowardice has served them remarkably well, all things considered, keeping them striving without allowing them to wipe themselves out.
I trailed along in Jeremy’s wake, largely unnoticed by the student body. I didn’t teach; I barely graded. I stuck to the lab, to the needles and the mice and the endless march of charts and graphs and information. Jeremy would have been lost without me. Everyone in our department knew it. And he repaid me by drawing the focus of the people who might otherwise have kept me from my work. It was a symbiotic relationship, like the clownfish and the anemone, and every time I thought too hard about it, I realized anew that I was going to miss it when it ended.