by John Pelan
After that, though, class went smoothly enough. I walked back to my office afterward—70 percent complete, the progress bar read—and plowed through some more of the little blue book. After about an hour, thanks to the dense prose and the lousy sleep I'd had, I was feeling pretty draggy, but it was eleven A.M.: time to meet my friend Chandler from the art history department in the park for our usual Friday lunch.
He was sitting on a bench by the time I got there, with a brown paper bag beside him and a huge gray cloth-bound book spread open across his lap. The rrockingbirds were meeping like crazy in the trees, flitting between the branches and the grates over the steam tunnels. “Hey!” I called, and he lifted his head, sunlight glinting off the thick silver frames of his glasses.
“Better timing than usual!” he shouted back, and waved. “My, you're looking perky.”
“Har har,” I said, drawing up to the bench, and plunked down near him. “Take it up with my subconscious and get back to me. I woke up from this really creepy dream, about my parents setting me up on a blind date, and couldn't get back to sleep.”
“Ew. You have my sympathies.” He wiped his forehead with one sleeve. “Anything like that time you told me about, when they dragged you to that restaurant with your sister's boyfriend's brother?”
“Kinda,” I answered lamely, and left it at that. “Anyway. What've you been up to?” The fountains burbled and gibbered, echoing through the tunnel entrance.
“Oh, the usual. The department's getting ready to do a retrospective on the early Expressionists, so I'm preparing the gallery catalog, including revising it every time Parker and MacAdams have another argument over who they want to exclude this week.” He shook his head glumly. “On top of that, Pride Week is coming up soon, and elections for next year's Faculty Senate. Who's running from your department?”
I looked down, trying to appear interested in the book on his lap. “I don't know. I don't pay much attention to those things. Probably won't even vote.”
He chuckled. “Claire, I'll never understand you. I've never met a professor so completely uninterested in university administration.”
I forced a smile and peered at the color plate he'd turned to. It was a painting of the inside of a tumbledown building, with some shabby-looking figures lurking around His arm covered most of the page. “I dunno. Office politics just bore me, I guess.” I leaned forward and reached for the edge of the book. “Hey, what are you looking at?”
That brightened him up considerably. “Oh! This showed up from one of the publishers up north.” He turned to the title page and showed me: New England Gothc Artwork, 1830-1930. “Miskatonic University Press. There's some fascinating stuff here, early Hudson River School up thi ough the Roaring Twenties realists.”
I paused. “Weren't you saying most of the big artists around that time were Impressionists, though?”
“Most of them, certainly.” Now Chandler was really in his element, paging back and forth through the book to point out full-color illustrations. “Absolutely the case in Europe, and for the most part in America, but there was a regression in Massachusetts for a little less than a decade.” He stopped at the same plate he'd had open before and pointed at the text beneath it. “Mostly involving this guy, Richard Upton Pickman, and a few people who took after him. This book calls them the Macabres.”
Without his arm in the way, I had a much better view of the painting. It was a nearly photorealistic view of a run-down interior wall, with a gaping hole in it and water pooled in front. The hunched-over figures hovered around the edges of the painting, facing the hole. Something was emerging from within; it was still too far back to see, but die artist had captured its reflection in the water. All I could make out was the outline of the body and a snoutlike face. Below was a caption: “Ghouls, Emergence I(of a series).”
“They were a strange bunch,” continued Chandler. “More of an outgrowth of the Impressionists than a backlash, according to this. They claimed they were also painting exactly what they saw, and insisted it was vital that their work be as realistic as possible—'the awful clarity of human perception.' That's a quote from one of Pickman's letters included here.” He pointed at the excerpted passage on the page opposite the plate. “Except that just about all their work contained blatantly imaginary beings—goat-headed men, people with gigantic doglike teeth carrying chewed-up bones, all kinds of strange, bestial stuff.”
I'd been thinking about opening my lunch bag, but suddenly I found I wasn't so hungry anymore. “How lovely. I can see why it was a short period.”
He chuckled again. “Indeed. Not exactly a commercially viable movement. Apparently Pickman himself quit painting around 1926, and the last of his imitators moved on to other things in '28.”
“Does it say what they moved on to?”
“Let me check.” He turned the page and skimmed the first few paragraphs. “Ah. Expressionism.” He sat up, closed the book, and set it aside. “I guess by then they had decided there wasn't much of a career in giving a straight picture.”
“The more things change,” I said, and spent the rest of the hour watching Chandler eat and listening to the meeping sounds echoing off the steam vents.
After Chandler went back to his office, I hung around the park reading until about three in the afternoon. By then it was getting oppressively hot, so I packed up my things and headed to the English building to check on Alex P. When I got upstairs, there was a note tacked to my door: The 1958 book had arrived via interlibrary loan. I unlocked the door, stepped in, and noticed that the hard drive wasn't making noise anymore. Great. I set my briefcase down and moved a stack of library books out of the way of the printer tray. I turned the monitor on, chdir'ed over to Alex P.'s output directory, and typed “Is” while the screen was still warming up.
As soon as the directory listing appeared, 1 realized I was going to need a lot more paper.
The output directory showed not one, bui five syntax-tagged files in it, each one almost a megabyte long. Instead of something simple, like “pnakotic.svo.txt,” which would've meant that Alex P. had come to the conclusion that the language followed subject-verb-object word order, it had given me “pnakotic. svo.txt,” “pnakotic.osv.txt,” “pnakotic.vso.txt,” “pnakotic.vos.txt,” and “pnakotic.ovs.txt.” For some reason, Alex P. hadn't managed to work out a verb-subject-object interpretation.
One by one, I opened the files and checked through the header information that Alex P. had prepenced. “Probable language of origin: Variant of Mongolian,” said one. “Variant of Romany,” read the next. “Inuktitut,” a third concluded. Inukti-tut? Not only had it managed to jump from central Asia to the Yukon, it was positive that was a correct interpretation! Yet, according to the fourth one I opened, the program was equally convinced that the language was a variant of Cornish. Almost any other result it could have given me would've been better than this.
I got up, stalked over to the door, and banged it shut. One of the thumbtacks fell out of my world map, which curled halfway up the wall. Shit.
This was worse than bad. Obviously I'd screwed something up and put a critical bug somewhere in Alex P.'s code. Why else would it feed back such absolute crap? Alex P. had a far better than average chance of recognizing any major human language, and an awful lot of minor ones. All I could conclude from the evidence at hand was that the Pnakotic Manuscripts belonged to a culture that had been extremely isolated, bad about keeping records, and dead for a very, very long time.
Which meant that Jane, who took the phrase “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” to the extreme, would find nothing in my work to conflict with whatever she felt like concluding. Baffling language? “Alternate modes of thinking.” Obliterated civilization? “Victims of patriarchal oppression.” It wasn't an impossibility, yet it wasn't the only possibility, either. But that didn't matter in the rat race to tack your name onto a theory that might make you famous. She could propose something that made about as much sense as believing that Si
r Walter Raleigh was Shakespeare—but there'd been New York Times bestsellers proclaiming just that.
I might even have laughed if I hadn't been the one whose hands were tied.
Then I remembered the book. I looked over the note again—interoffice package for you at the library, it read, in bubbly cursive handwriting on the department secretary's personalized notepaper. I shut down Alex P. and left to pick it up, hoping it would suggest a good place to start over.
I could've sworn I was just lying in bed reading the book, but my memory's so foggy. I remember going through the first three chapters, where the author attacked the previous attempts to translate the Manuscripts… something about the undeciphered Indus Valley scripts… strange how everyone keeps trying to push closer to the cradle of civilization. I'd like to read more, but the book's gone. I'm gone. I was only about sixty-five pages in, give or take a few, and now I'm blundering around in the dark.
Literally, I realize. All around it's pitch-black, but my feet are on something solid. I inch forward, socks on the cold hard floor, and the back of my neck goes all prickly as my toes slide past an edge where there's not a floor. My breath catches in my throat and I step backward. Whang!
Now I'm seeing light—from the stars shooting across my field of vision after my heel slammed into a hard shelf behind me. I crumple, biting back the pain, and squat on the narrow ledge where I'm standing. One leg slides out and skips off the edge— and then another edge.
Stairs. Again.
Hell of a difference four inches makes, in the dark.
I scoot forward and lower myself a step. It may be unceremonious, but it works. One bump, two bumps, then my foot lands again on something solid-and-not-an-edge—and then it's light again, the hazy orange flicker of the cavern of flame. My head ducks toward the wall, dizzying me with afterimages.
“K'neseshti, kulayr,” says that voice I'm really getting to know. I unsquint one eye, blinking to clear out the ghost-images. Just as I'd figured, it's the two robed men again.
“Hello?” I call, picking myself up off the floor. No answer. “Wie geht's du?” Nothing. “Quo vadis?” One of them might have flinched at that. Random phrases start pouring out of my mouth: Gaelic, Tagalog, Japanese, Cherokee, greetings and questions and simple textbook sentences I don't remember having picked up intentionally.
“Ura'n tlu nekophori tok'ari li nakotos!” I blurt out, and stop there, trying to figure out where that sentence came from. It takes a moment to hit: It's the first line of Bill's IPA transcription of the Manuscripts. This is the first time I've said it out loud.
As I'm staring, surprised, at my own feet, a flat clapping erupts from the other side of the room. 1 look up. One of the robed men is applauding.
“We had wondered when you would begin using it to communicate,” he says, in perfect BBC English.
A good couple of seconds go by in silence. “I've got to be dreaming. You mean you've understood what I've been saying all along?”
“Correct on both counts,” replies the other, in a graver voice. “We speak all the languages of dream.”
“Who are you?” I step to one side, putting the cavern wall behind me.
“I am Nasht,” the first one says, folding his hands, and inclines in a bow from the waist. “My companion is Kaman-Thah.” Kaman-Thah bows, too.
Nasht. I've heard that word before. I heard it here. “And you've been… calling him by name, this entire time?”
Nasht's beard dips below his clasped hands when he nods. “So he has. And you as well, Kulayr.”
Okay. Now I really feel dumb. “What am I still doing here, though? Don't you wake up when you hurt yourself in a dream?” My heel's still smarting from the whack it took.
This time Kaman-Thah lowers his head, turning toward the column of flame. “Indeed. But not at the Gate of Deeper Slumber, or beyond it. From this point onward, it is in your province to remain within dream until something sends you away.” He pauses. “Or you question the dream and send yourself away.”
That sounds fishy. “Then what is this Gate? What's on the other side?”
Neither one of them moves to answer. Seconds go by, then minutes. Did I do something wrong? Am I questioning the dream?
A ripple goes through the room, like a TV with bad horizontal hold. “Wait!” I shout. “Let me try that again. Please!”
Nasht's face is so patient. “There was nothing wrong with the question you voiced, Claire. It is a question for you to answer, though.”
“I don't get it.”
“Dreamers come to the Gate because something on the other side draws them in. It is simply our task to guard the Gate, and let the worthy and willing cross over.”
“But how am I supposed to know what's— “
“Three times you have come before us, Claire Meyer,” interrupts Kaman-Thah, “and twice you have not deigned to tell us why. So now we shall ask of you: What is it you want?”
That stops me cold, and when I start to speak I have to fight for the words.
“I—I don't know. It'd be nice to know what's in that manuscript, I guess, but…” I just know my face is going red. “That's not it. I'm willing to put in the work to figure it out on my own, but I want—I want—” My fists are in tight little balls, and I smack one into the wall behind me. “I want to not have to defend myself, goddammit. I want to ask questions and look for answers because I can, not because they're a part of some grand scheme. I want to not have to be for anything.'
Nasht and Kaman-Thah gaze at the column for a long moment, until Nasht finally breaks the silence. “Ulthar.”
“Beg pardon?”
“What you seek is in Ulthar. It is within ovr privilege to send you there, if that is indeed what you wish. We have faced far more forbidding requests before this.”
Don't question the dream.
“All right,” I hear myself say, the same way I heard myself say the words from the Manuscripts. “I'll go to Ulthar.”
“So be it,” Kaman-Thah pronounces, and gestures toward the pillar of fire. “To the Great Library at Ulthar we send you. What you seek will be deeply buried, but not beyond your grasp.” And before I have time to second-guess myself, I step forward to the column.
“Go on,” Nasht whispers, and points an avcient finger at the flame that does not scorch. I reach toward it, sinking my hand in up to the wrist, and there's no pain, no burning. Just a door, like any other.
And like that, I'm through it, out the other side, and standing on a cobblestone plaza in a city like I've never seen before.
It's a bit like the agora in Athens, I guest, a huge open-air square, although this one is ringed by buildings. Most of them are small, maybe one or two stories, with low half-walled porches, each of which looks to be the preferred sleeping ground of its own complement of cats. A full side of the square belongs to the dark stone facade of one immense building. Two columns rise up from squared-off pilasters on either side of a staircase leading up to a pair of double doors. And one of the doors is open.
It can't hurt to look, I guess.
I pace across the plaza, feeling cobblestones under my socks, and up the stairs to the door. It's incredibly thick wood, banded with iron, but it's open wide enough for me to get a look inside. So I poke my head through the entrance.
There's absolutely no way this building could be anything but a library.
A short foyer opens to the left and right, each exit leading under impossibly tall peaked and buttressed archways. Through either vault, even from my place outside the front door, it's easy to see rows upon rows of packed, towering bookshelves, some wall-mounted and some free-standing, stretching into the distance as if reflected in a facing pair of mirrors. Brackets off the sides of the shelves hold glowing clear-glass spheres, lighting the entire place with a crisp, fresh gleam. Above the shelves, there are even more—at least three more floors, so far as I can tell, of open-air galleries likewise replete with bookshelves. Human figures pace along the balconies, poring through b
ooks.
I guess they decided to send me someplace where I could find a translation of the Manuscripts after all.
So I slip inside, feeling awfully underdressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, and scout around for some sign of an information desk. Or at least a filing system. Aisle after aisle of shelves carry books of every shape and size, some with titles in Roman characters, some Cyrillic, some Arabic, some in alphabets that don't look even remotely human. Not a one of them has a tag on the spine, either, and I can't imagine they're in alphabetical order if they're not even in the same alphabet. The patrons look completely absorbed in their business, and there's no one who could pass for a librarian.
I look down the shelf-delineated corridor, trying to see the end of the building, but it doesn't look any closer. Yet when I turn around and look back to the entrance, it's farther away, too. Looking up is no better; there are only six more floors, but the galleries line the room on both sides, and they also stretch off as far as I can see.
That can't be right.
The room wavers, and one of the patrons nearby thumps his book closed and looks around, angrily. I flinch and duck into an empty row of shelves, looking left and right. One possibility duly presents itself: It looks like there's another archway in the wall opposite the entryway. No, not just an archway.
I make my way over to it, and sure enough, it's a staircase. Detailed marble steps lead up in a graceful spiral, and there's also a narrow, straight flight heading down.
What you seek will be deeply buried, said Kaman-Thah.
So I plunge forward and down the stairs, counting as I go. I'd expected seventy, but it's more than that—more than twice seventy. I lose track before I reach the bottom floor, and I'm kind of glad to see that it isn't a cavern. It's stone, but it's dark, smooth stone like the rest of the building, and the floor is made of huge regular slabs. It's a big room, but not dizzying like upstairs. The lit globes here are frosted, and dimmer, too, illuminating the vaulted ceiling better than the floor. Shelve. line the walls, a long stone table takes up much of the floor space, and one plain doorway leads out at the far end. Over by the door, there's a wiry, blond-haired man browsing through a row of books.