The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  “Les, would you do me a favor and lock the door and put up the ‘Back in 10 minutes’ sign?”

  “Sure, Chantal, no problem.”

  She had their attention. Not a time for chit-chat. “You know Captain Jack took Matthew and Skeezix and me down to Quonset Point last night, that’s where Matthew figured Worthy Annesley had set up the resonator he found in the attic from the Lovecraft story, ‘From Beyond.’”

  “Yes,” Les said.

  “We found it, and him. Worthy and his team have made some improvements, designed a regeneration circuit that allows them not just to see into the next dimension, but to actually open a vortex, to cross over and come back.”

  “The Crustio assassination,” Les figured.

  “Almost for sure. But it sounds like the two button men who took out the judge and then escaped into Dimension Six never made it back. Last night, Worthy tried to open another vortex to send in a team to find them and bring them out. Something went wrong. The equipment went haywire. They opened a vortex, alright, but then they couldn’t shut it down. Somebody had to get to the main breaker and throw it, even though the vortex kept getting bigger, and by that time the breaker box was on the other side of the, uh, the threshold. So, needless to say, while a dozen of their guys in white shirts and pocket protectors who should have been taking care of business stood around with their thumbs up their asses, Matthew and Skeezix ran in and did it, thank God, ’cause otherwise by this time we’d all probably be living in Jurassic Park.”

  “It’s bad news, isn’t it?” Marian asked.

  “Matthew and Skeezix are gone.”

  “You mean they’re …?” Marian couldn’t say it.

  “Not dead. At least we don’t know they’re dead, so I sure as hell am not going to assume that. Worthy assures me he’s gotten people through these vortexes and back again, safe and sound, plenty of times. Matthew and Skeezix were just on the other side when the thing shut down, that’s all. They’re in that other dimension, as far as we know. They’re not … here. Worthy says the air and the water are fine over there, which is the main thing, although I doubt there’s anyplace to get a nice mushroom pizza.”

  “So he just has to open this vortex again and bring them back?” Marian asked.

  “Yeah. Only there was some damage to the equipment. So they might not be able to accomplish that for a while. Needless to say, I’d appreciate it if none of this goes any further. Press and police descending on Worthy’s operation wouldn’t exactly help our chances, at this point.”

  “Of course,” said Marian.

  “How long?” asked Les.

  “I don’t know,” Chantal said, her voice finally breaking a little. “They say days, but I don’t think they really know, either.”

  Marian stood up, hesitated a moment, then took Chantal in her arms. “Oh, honey,” she said.

  “So this means I’m gonna be a little distracted here for the next few days, I’m afraid.” Chantal didn’t want to push Marian away, though it felt kind of awkward. Chantal was not a naturally huggy type of person. She patted Marian on the back, which was probably wrong. What the heck were you supposed to do, stick your tongue in their ear? “Unless they move a lot faster than I’m expecting, I may have to go in myself, and try to bring them out.”

  “I thought you couldn’t do that without their new … regeneration circuit,” Les frowned.

  “I’ve got one on order.”

  “They’ve got those at Radio Shack, now?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, laughing a little, which did at least break the tension, as she backed away from Marian and pulled out a Kleenex. “Not at Radio Shack. Cory, the guy who looked at that homing beacon thing for us? He’s tied up with Worthy and the Cthulhians, he’s going to get me the equipment I need.” Of course, Chantal was pretty sure Cory was actually still taking orders from someone else, someone in a fancy white suit, but there was no sense blabbing about things no one else needed to know.

  * * *

  Chantal found Darcie in the greenhouses, as usual. Most of the doors were locked, but a departing graduate student finally held one open for her, giving her a hopeful smile and then lingering an extra few seconds to check out her butt after she’d walked by.

  “Hi, Darcie. Glad I found you, summer vacation and all.”

  “The plants always need taking care of. We do stagger some vacation time. How’s Matthew?”

  “That’s what I’m here about.”

  “Trouble?” Darcie looked serious, which bought out the vertical lines alongside her mouth, made her look a little older. A petite little number, all green eyes and freckles and auburn bangs and elfin smiles, she could usually pass for a teen-ager. Chantal knew from personal experience that wasn’t always a blessing. Women couldn’t do what small men often did — grow a beard so people would stop calling them “sonny” and asking why they weren’t in school.

  “Matthew has crossed into the sixth dimension and I’m going to have to go in and bring him back.”

  “You can’t wake him up?”

  “No, I don’t mean he’s gone that way. I mean ‘gone.’ Worthy Annesley found his great-uncle’s resonator and they’ve got it working. With the new regeneration amplifier they’ve developed, they can actually open a vortex and cross over. Like, for real. Physically.”

  “And Matthew’s working with them? He’s actually a part of that?”

  “No way. Matthew was adamant that sending people through without any preparation, people who’ve never followed the narrow road, who have no experience with the entheogens, no knowledge of the doorways, is crazy.”

  “Well, good. That’s just what I would have expected from Matthew. These people have no idea what they’re messing with. So how did he end up … on the other side?”

  Chantal quickly brought Darcie up to date. Darcie grasped the problem, but allowed as how she’d have to give the solution a little thought.

  “The first time we met I was very jealous of you,” Chantal took the opportunity to admit, figuring they should be square with each other.

  “Of me? Why?”

  “You and Matthew had such an easy way of communicating. It was obvious there was some history between you.”

  “That was a long time ago, Chantal.”

  Chantal managed to not ask “Like, when you were in elementary school?”

  “I’m the one who should be jealous,” Darcie continued. “You obviously have what he’s looking for. He speaks very highly of you, says you’re the most promising apprentice he’s ever seen.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I suspect he just likes my ass.”

  “That, too.” They laughed.

  “The way the entheogens interact with the neural receptor sites,” Chantal started, a little hesitantly, after a pause, “the reaction that the Annesley resonator is simulating, or enhancing? I don’t know the neurochemistry the way Matthew does, but I figure I need a plant helper that’ll contribute to the effect of that tone on the pineal. Is it possible to use ayahuasca and the Stropharia together?”

  “Of course. That was the McKennas’ original experiment at La Chorrera. They figured the vocalization of the harmonics of the harmine-DNA resonance frequency would cancel out the double wave form, dropping the electrical resistance to zero and causing the neurons to become superconductive, allowing access to the genetically coded memories.” Darcie evidently expected Chantal to be following along with this like she was talking about how to make a yogurt smoothie.

  “Oh-kayyy.”

  “Which would emerge on the standing wave like holograms. Both the tryptamines and the harmines are derived from tryptophan, the effects are related, so that would be a wonderful combination to try. Unfortunately, we’re very constrained in what’s available now, Chantal, in what I can lay hands on.”

  Darcie lowered her voice a little now, glancing around to make sure there was no one nearby. “It’s not like the old days.”

  “
Trouble?”

  “The gals in Chemistry just laugh when we complain, they’ve had to put up with this crap for decades, now. They try to order some perfectly innocuous chemical and they get called on the carpet, ‘Why do you need this, and in this kind of quantity? You’re going to pretend you didn’t know this is now listed as a precursor compound in the manufacture of MDA?’ or MDMA, whatever. ‘Are you trying to get the entire department shut down?!’

  “And it keeps getting worse. Just before he left on his latest summer cruise the department head was down here, asking if it’s true we’ve been growing Ephedra torreyana. That’s Mormon Tea, for God’s sake. It’s a little desert shrub, a less effective stimulant than coffee. ‘Root it out! Don’t take the chance! It’s on the list!’ We’ve gotten to the point where we purposely mislabel things, to find what you’re looking for now you have to memorize the secret code, like we’re a bunch of Freemasons or Knights Templar or something. It’s gotten to be like things you read about in Europe during the Nazi occupation. So now the Ephedra torreyana becomes Eugenia talbotii; the plastic tags in the pots of Lophophora williamsii now say you’re looking at Leptostigma weberbaueri. I mean, those poor little babies take years to grow up to be the size of my thumb, and they expect me to grind them up for compost?”

  “I had no idea. Although I wouldn’t think that would fool another botanist for two minutes.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t. But the cops they send aren’t botanists, they’re idiots. They walk around asking us what these plants are and whether any of them are psychoactive. It’s like when the Nazis used to send the Gestapo around to shut down any decadent Jewish jazz concerts, goons that couldn’t tell Cab Calloway from Igor Stravinsky. The musicians ended up giving them a Music Appreciation class and playing some Mendelssohn until the morons meandered out of earshot. It goes against the grain in a discipline that’s always been open, let me tell you. I mean, we’re supposed to be teaching here, sharing and spreading knowledge, right? Not deciding which students to allow into the secret sisterhood and which to keep in the dark because they might be snitches.

  “Meantime, some of our plantings were just too dangerous, we’ve started selectively dispersing them out into the private gardens and greenhouses of certain people we trust, like museum curators who used to hide works of art in the cellars when the war got close enough that you could hear the cannon. People who know enough to bring things inside before the first frost. Some of the department’s retirees have been absolute saints. I mean, these are white-haired senior citizens, you’d think they’d drop dead if you said Boo, and here they are possibly facing police raids, your whole house could be trashed, if not actual jail time, for harboring plants, botanical specimens, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Didn’t know botany was going to be an act of civil disobedience, did you?”

  “Exactly. I hate to say it, Chantal, but I’m starting to think these Cthulhians have a point. This has got to end. I wish somebody really would start to fight back. It’s just that nobody seems to know where to start. Although weirdly enough, nobody’s complained about our window boxes yet.” Darcie smiled and pointed to the huge cup-shaped flowers — some white, some red — blooming in considerable profusion on waist-high thick green stalks in the white wooden-sided boxes on the floor by the sliding glass doors to the courtyard.

  “Pulmonaria saccharata,” Chantal stooped down and read the Latin name off the little white plastic tag. “So these would actually be …”

  Darcie nodded, giving her a moment.

  “… Papaver …?”

  “… Somniferum,” Darcie giggled. “The most addictive plant known to man.” But then she quickly grew serious again. “What it all means is I just can’t gather up the kind of volume or selection that I used to, dear. Getting a Banisteriopsis to grow in captivity was hard enough in the first place. Now I’ve got to keep track of who’s hiding it. Fungus, yes, but it’s seasonal. We’d be fine, there, if we could wait a couple weeks, there’s some psilocybe coming along but not fruiting yet. And we don’t have nearly the volume of morning glory seed I’d need to provide us with enough ololiuquy. You’ve got to stone grind it and get rid of the hulls and boil it down into a paste, people have tried just chewing up the seeds but it doesn’t work.

  “In this particular case, though, even if the McKennas favored the tryptamines, if I know Matthew he’s going to be looking for a phenethylamine, for acid or mescaline. I assume your cactus on the bedroom window ledge are still too small?”

  Chantal had to fight down the sudden urge to punch the bitch. How did Darcie know where Matthew grew his cactus? How did she know anything about his bedroom window?

  “Yes.” She controlled herself. “If I cut them all I might get a useful dose, but I’m looking to carry along enough to bring back Matthew and Skeezix and possibly two of Worthy’s boys who are stuck on the other side.”

  “Give me a couple days to check around, Chantal. We’ll find something that’ll let us both go in after him.”

  “Darcie, that’s a wonderful offer. It means a lot to me, really. But I worry the more people who go through, the more the continuum is disrupted. I think actually going in after them is something I have to do on my own. But I’m going to need help, backup, plenty of it. So if you’re willing to help me that way, from working out my mix and dosage, right up to the point where I go through, that would mean the world to me. So far it’s been a pretty lonely undertaking.”

  “I should think so.”

  Fortunately, Darcie did not try to hug her.

  * * *

  Cory would provide the headset resonator — plus four spares, in case she got lucky and found survivors. Stop it. Stop thinking that way. Of course she’d find them. Darcie would do her best to come up with an adequate dose of one of the entheogens — whatever was still available — to help her not only open the vortex but control, to some extent, theoretically, where it took her. Maybe.

  Chantal sat on the rug in front of the cold fireplace in Matthew’s apartment above the bookstore — their apartment, the place she had planned to raise their children — and tried to plan it all out.

  It reminded her of the old Hopi story Matthew had told her, about the young man who planned to visit the land of the dead, to find out if things there were the way they’d been told. In the story, the young man manages to come back, but only after the witch removes his skin and give him a new one, since it wouldn’t be safe to return to the land of the living with a skin which had been contaminated by contact with the mesa of the dead.

  Matthew said that was a recurrent theme in such myths. Somehow, Chantal did not find this terribly reassuring.

  And even assuming she managed to get through, what would she find? Finding yourself face-to-face with a poisonous snake, within striking range of a monster as thick as your arm, was a scarier reptile encounter than she ever cared to repeat. If what she’d seen through the vortex in Worthy’s warehouse were what she figured they were — fast-moving reptile carnivores with jaws like steam shovels, tall enough to pick you off the roof of a single-story house, Jurassic Park material — how was that going to work out?

  Yes, Cory had promised her some firepower. And if he let her down she still had other sources. But if, as she figured, those dinosaurs or whatever had polished off the two hit men Worthy had sent after Judge Crustio — two hit men armed with shotguns — what were the chances Matthew and Skeezix had survived to this point, with nothing but Skeezix’s pocket knife between them?

  She decided that was irrelevant. She had to cross over, to give them any chance at all, so she’d just assume they were alive and waiting for her till proven otherwise.

  That still left a big enough job.

  The hard part was accepting — not just on some theoretical level, but actually wrapping her mind around and accepting, to the extent that she could trust her life and sanity to — what Matthew taught, which she knew on some level to be true, but which still felt so … alien.

 
The world as we perceived it, which seemed like a solid, concrete, and seamless whole, was no such thing. That premise was not something that Matthew had just dreamed up. All the way back to Alfred North Whitehead, up through the McKennas and others, generations of scientists and philosophers had gradually, systematically demonstrated that the “world” as we knew it was a construct, re-constructed inside the mind out of the sensory input transmitted through various organic barriers — protective barriers necessary to the cohesion and survival of the organism — to the brain from the senses, primarily sight, hearing, and touch. It was built out of components which were really nothing but transient electrical impulses transported by molecules, atoms, electrons, along slender nerve pathways, the way people living deep underground might put together a “picture” of the surface world above by using information pulsed to them via wire cables from remote black-and-white video monitors far above … totally unaware that the world above had colors, sounds, smells, the feel of the wind — all kinds of things their TV cameras couldn’t capture and relay.

  Everyone knew the senses were limited. Human sight and hearing could not pick up, detect, “see” or “hear” x-rays, radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, lots of stuff. They were missing from our picture of the world. Bees and butterflies could distinguish between a dozen different flower colors, all of which humans saw as “white.” Mankind had built devices to capture that input and translate it down into the wavelengths he could perceive. But even those were just interpretations, approximations, now second- or third-hand.

  The psychoactive chemicals, the so-called hallucinogens, did not for the most part generate fantasies or falsehoods. They removed some of the screens which the organism had carefully constructed since its infancy to screen out lots of sensory input which gradually got categorized as “distracting and unnecessary noise.” That’s why illiterate savages deep in the jungle could see, hear, correctly interpret small sonic and visual clues to the presence of animals and their behaviors that a Western man stumbling along in his boots, slapping at mosquitoes, would completely miss. As they grew up, those human genotypes had realized it was important to their welfare not to screen out all that sensory data. That was not to say they were “better” — without massive re-training they certainly couldn’t use a computer or drive a car. But they and their different abilities had something to offer.