by Cara Wylde
“Professor, do you have a minute?”
“Of course, Miss Aleksiev. What can I do for you?”
I took out the books I’d been carrying around in my tote bag all day. They had his name on the cover. When he saw them, his gaze softened.
“I’ve read all your eldritch stories. I’m obsessed with them, with your vision of the Great Old Ones.”
“Oh, thank you. You know, you remind me of your cousin. She had a keen interest in my horror novellas, especially the one about the Father of Serpents.”
I nodded. I had the books from Mila. Professor Lovecraft had managed to publish his novellas in a couple of volumes that weren’t very successful even to this day. And for good reason. His writing style was too convoluted to be a mainstream reader’s cup of tea. I wasn’t a mainstream reader, and I’d had difficulties getting into his stories. Mila had called them mediocre, but I had a theory of my own. Only Professor Lovecraft could confirm it.
“I would like to talk to you about the Father of Serpents. And not only. I’m interested in all the cosmic creatures you’ve written about.”
His whole face lit up. “It would be my pleasure.” He touched his hand to his heart and bowed slightly. “Any time that’s convenient to you, Miss Aleksiev. I’m at your disposal.”
Poor guy. He’d have done anything for someone who was willing to discuss his written work with him.
“This evening. Once classes are over, I’ll come straight to your office.”
“I’ll clear my schedule.” I doubted he had much to clear… “But, Miss Aleksiev, I feel like I must remind you that my stories are purely fictional.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “You made contact with indigenous tribes in North America and South America. Mila told me that you didn’t invent any of it. On the contrary, everything you wrote is based on your personal research.”
He laughed lightly. “Oh, that is true. But I researched myths, legends, old wives’ tales, and took my inspiration from those that sounded more… I don’t know how to put it… out of this world. I created fiction based on fiction, and the only difference is that mine is written, while theirs has been passed through word of mouth for centuries. Viva voce. What a wonderful way to keep the values alive and educate the next generations!”
I opened my mouth to say something, then my eyes fell on the shabby clock above the white board. I didn’t have time for this now. It was going to take me at least an hour to convince Professor Lovecraft that all his stories were, in fact, based on very real, very factual events. And I had to be in Anthropology like… five minutes ago.
“I’ll see you in your office. Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s a personal project, and it means a lot to me.”
If he hadn’t been a vampire, he would’ve probably blushed. He bowed once more, and I was out of there. In the middle of the hallway, I smacked myself over the head. I could teleport! So, I did.
The rest of the day was a blur. I barely paid attention in class, and I had lunch at the NDC table, which was the only table where I seemed to be safe. I stayed away from both Davien and Seth, and Domina seemed to appreciate it. Professor Maat had even given me twenty worth points in Geography, and I knew it wasn’t for my mediocre answer to her question about the Bermuda Triangle, but because when Seth had sat at the desk beside me, I moved desks. As long as I kept away from her beloved future son-in-law (she wished!), we could be on friendly terms.
Professor Lovecraft was waiting for me with chocolate chip cookies, banana bread, coffee, and tea. His office was in the main building, on the third floor, and the tall, gothic windows faced the forest toward the north. Thanks to the dense trees, the sun barely reached this side of the building. Red, heavy curtains guarded the windows, and the wood floor was covered in a thick, plush carpet. The temperature was low, which was natural in a vampire’s quarters. They kept the heaters off. They couldn’t feel the cold, nor the warmth, so what was the point? I tugged at my uniform blazer, but my short skirt was the bigger problem. I should have stopped by my dorm-room and changed into normal clothes. After all, classes were over.
“Please, sit. Eat. If you’re hungry…”
“Thank you.” I wasn’t, but I never said no to banana bread. It was one of my very few guilty pleasures. I opened a notebook that was already filled with messy scribbles and drawings, and looked the professor in the eye. “I would like you to tell me everything you know about the Great Old Ones. The things that you didn’t put in your stories.”
He scratched his chin. “I believe it’s all in there, Miss Aleksiev. I’m sorry to disappoint.”
“No, no. You’re a writer.” I gave him the brightest, most enthusiastic smile I could muster. “Writers always keep notes, old, unedited drafts… I’d like to see those, if you still have them.”
He was silent for a minute. He looked at me through his dark lashes, his keen eyes searching my face. He was trying to figure me out, trying to guess if I was, indeed, interested in his work, or just playing around. Deep down, I believed he knew he wasn’t a great writer and never would be. The lack of sales and royalties in his account stood as proof.
Finally, he pushed his chair away from the table, stood up, and walked to a row of antique-looking drawers lining an entire wall. He peered into a couple of them, as if he wasn’t sure where he’d put what he was looking for. With a cheerful “Aha!”, he dug into a drawer and pulled out a stack of papers. He dropped them in front of me, and the dust coming out of them made me recoil. I waved it away, trying to clear the air. Oh well. I got what I wanted. A few specks of old as time dust weren’t going to kill me. I only hoped the dust didn’t hold some ancient virus that hadn’t seen the light of day in ages and was now hungry for a human host. That was another way an apocalypse could happen, and I wasn’t sure I would be the chosen one to save the world, this time.
I took the first document on top of the pile and started looking through it. It seemed to be a first draft of a short story I’d read in his third volume. I scanned it quickly, but I was too impatient to try and figure out how much of it was different from the version he’d published. I was more interested in his personal notes, at the moment. Those notes he’d kept for his eyes only. As a writer myself, I knew that was where I’d find the good stuff. If there was any good stuff at all, that was…
I spread the papers all over the table, looking at sketches of various people, places, and creatures. Some of them had names, others didn’t. My attention was drawn to a pencil drawing of a short, stubby man with round black eyes, huge lips, and a chin that was so non-existent it reminded me of a fish.
“What is this?”
“There’s a village up north, on an island cut off from everything. The people there told me of their ancestors who worshipped a sea creature, and in exchange for gifts and small sacrifices, the creature prolonged their life. The caveat was that the longer they lived, the more they started developing traits specific to fish.”
I nodded and set the sketch aside. Not what I was looking for.
“You’re an artist,” I said, staring at a sketch of some tentacled being. “And a good one at that.” Truth be told, if he’d taken up painting instead of writing, he might have found success.
“Thank you. I did my best. The people I interviewed couldn’t tell me exactly what these… things… looked like. Although I talked to elders who claimed they’d seen them with their own eyes, it was hard to get a description out of them. A description that made sense. They kept insisting that details eluded them. That they couldn’t be sure about shapes and colors, and that when they’d come face to face with these cosmic beings, it was as if they could feel what they looked like, while their sense of sight was almost rendered useless. I must admit that in sketching what they described, I filled in the blanks with the help of my own vision and imagination.”
“The end result is what matters,” I mumbled. “Do you have a sketch of Yig?”
“The Father of Serpents…�
� There was a hint of fear mixed with reverence in his voice. It was as if he wasn’t allowed to say his name so casually. “No. But it’s easy to imagine the Great Yig. This cosmic creature must be a snake, right? Huge, old, living underground. When he calls, all snakes, big and small, gather around him.”
I pursed my lips. “I heard something else. That he’s got tentacles. So, he’s not exactly a snake.”
He shrugged. “As I said, these are myths. Each person who comes in contact with them interprets them in their own way.”
“Mhm.” I kept looking, but there was nothing earth-shattering hidden in those papers, drawings, and drafts. “I wonder… How did you discover this interest in the Great Old Ones? You must have heard something, found something…”
“I had a dream.”
“A dream?!” He was a damn vampire! I knew for a fact he couldn’t dream!
He sensed my disbelief and immediately added: “Before I turned. Before… I met my master and she turned me into what I am.”
Well, well, well. We were finally getting somewhere. “You were a dream jumper?”
“As a human, yes. But it’s been so long, I can barely remember…”
“Did you keep a dream journal?”
He shook his head.
I sighed, disappointed. I started keeping a dream journal when I was a kid, and it saved my life so many times. As a dream traveler, a dream journal was more than an account of all the adventures in all the parallel universes one visited, but it also served as a map, or at the very least, as a good starter for a map. Once I entered the community, I was shocked to learn that most dream travelers, – even the experienced ones, – were too lazy to take a few minutes of their morning to jot down where and how they’d been jumping around the night before. When I confronted them about it, they’d only laughed and said they had perfect memory. Year, right. They didn’t. There was no such thing as perfect memory when one was flooded with so much information and excitement every time one’s head hit the pillow.
“So, you said you had a dream.”
“Yes.” He poured coffee for both. He seemed thoughtful. “I wasn’t an experienced dream jumper, like you. Back then, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. No one talked about it. I hadn’t yet found out about the supernatural world, and what I could do was only known as lucid dreaming. It was fun, I did it often, but I had no idea it was all real. I thought they were all dreams, images and scenarios born of my unconscious.” He chuckled. “And when I had this dream I’m about to tell you, I remember I woke up the next day terrified, panting, and covered in sweat. I thought it’d been triggered by my fears and anxieties. I was going through a period when I had a panic attack almost every day, and I believed the monsters I saw in my dream were my fears personified. Imagine my surprise when I started traveling and discovering there were people on this very continent who claimed to have seen them as well.”
“When you started traveling… were you…”
“I had already turned, yes.”
“And the dream?”
“More like a nightmare. I found myself in the middle of an island in the ocean. I had no recollection of how I’d gotten there, if I’d been on a boat before, or if I’d swam from the shore. The second possibility seemed unlikely, since all I could see around me was the never-ending ocean. But it wasn’t like the ocean we have here…”
“In our dimension, you mean…”
He shook his head. “This is hard. I remember so little.” He touched his temple. “It’s like my memory comes in flashes. What I’m trying to say is that the landscape was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was gray, cold, and windy. The waves crashed with a vengeance, the sky roared with barely contained thunder, and black, heavy clouds seemed to rush toward the land, intent on swallowing it. And I was on this island… on the beach, and there was nowhere I could hide. I started walking, thinking I had a better chance of finding some sort of shelter inland. There were no trees. Just sand, water, and lighting crossing the dark sky. I walked and walked, until I reached what looked like… a structure.”
“Structure?” I was writing everything in my notebook.
“Like a tall building. Similar to a tower, but not quite. It seemed to be made of dark green stone. I touched it, and it felt rough under my fingertips. Shapes that could have been symbols or letters were engraved in it, covering every available space. I started walking around it, looking for an entrance.”
I looked at his sketches again. “I don’t see any symbols.”
“I forgot what they looked like as soon as I woke up. You know how in some dreams we read, and then we wake up and forget what we read? And it’s so frustrating, because it’s on the tip of our tongue.”
I nodded. Granted, that hadn’t happened to me in a while. I sipped my coffee as I waited for him to continue.
“I walked around the structure for what felt like ages. It was all the same. No entrance, no variation in its… design. I gave up. And as I stood there, trying to decide whether it was better to return to the shore and look for a boat, or move even farther inland, I saw it. It was gigantic. It emerged from the depths of the ocean, and as it moved, the ground underneath my feet shook. I looked at it, trying to determine what it was, whether it was dangerous or…” He buried his head in his hands. “My eyes couldn’t focus. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see. But the more it approached, the more this dread, this heavy, suffocating agony gripped my soul. And I remember… I remember…” He dragged in a breath. “I remember thinking… that I didn’t want to live anymore. That the life beating in my heart and pulsating through my veins was a lie. That I’d been tricked into believing that my state of a moving, breathing puppet of meat had meaning. But it had no meaning. It wasn’t real. That thing on the island… that thing was real. It was the truth. I felt like… I felt like I was standing in the middle of the greatest truth of all, for the first time, and it crushed me. It crushed me because my existence was a lie, and the lie needed to be crushed.”
He fell silent. I held my breath. I knew that was all, and that he wasn’t going to add anything else, and still I waited. I waited for my lungs to burn and remind me that I had to breathe. Keep breathing, keep living, keep searching…
“Thank you,” I whispered. I realized that telling me his dream hadn’t been easy. When he looked up again, I sensed an emptiness inside him. His eyes were hollow. I couldn’t avert my gaze, so I kept staring, and as I stared, I felt this pull toward him. No, not toward him. Toward the two vacant orbs that had once lay upon one of the Great Old Ones. It was as if I wanted to see the monster reflected in his pupils.
“I’m sorry. Excuse me for a second. I need…” He stood up and practically ran into an adjacent room.
I ran a hand over my face. The hell did just happen?! I rubbed at my eyes, shook my head, and cracked my neck, trying to re-ground myself. I’d let myself be swept into his dream. For a moment, I’d felt like I was there, with him, witnessing the cosmic spawn emerge from the ocean.
Professor Lovecraft came back feeling and looking much better. There was a spring in his step, and his sharp cheekbones displayed a hint of rosiness. A small drop of dark red blood stained the corner of his mouth. He sat down, and I offered him a napkin.
“You’ve got just a little bit…”
“Oh, dear Lord. This is so embarrassing.” He tapped his lips with the napkin and folded it quickly. “I’m truly sorry. I wasn’t feeling like myself.”
“I understand.” I let out a long breath. “To be honest with you, I’m not sure how I feel after listening to your story.”
“It has an impact, doesn’t it? As you can imagine, even if I was terrified the next morning, I couldn’t let it go. I started writing, drawing… It became an obsession. And it was so frustrating that no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t pinpoint the physical traits of the… of the creature.”
“Did you give it a name?”
He pursed his lips, hesitating, a
s if saying its name out loud meant bad luck. He made up his mind, eventually, and opened his mouth to say it, but right then, the door to his office burst open, and none other than Professor Adrian Wyvern walked in. Seeing us hunched over the table, staring into each other’s eyes, he halted like he’d just been burned.
“I didn’t know you had company, Howard. I can come back later.”
Professor Lovecraft jumped to his feet. He threw the napkin in the trash and walked toward Professor Wyvern, his arms open. It was a little awkward, if not downright ridiculous. The PE professor handed him a stack of books, his dark brown eyes flicking to me. There was a question in them, or so I thought. Maybe I was wrong.
“So soon? Did you enjoy them?”
“I’m a fast reader,” Wyvern mumbled.
“I can lend you more. I have quite the collection here. You can’t find these editions at the library.”
“I’ll let you know.”
His gaze was still fixed on me. Adrian Wyvern was odd. I’d had two PE classes this week, and he’d acted strange toward me in both of them. I couldn’t figure out what his deal was. Since we were learning the basics of scythe handling, I was seriously considering skipping a few of his classes. They were useless to me, anyway. But I found myself unable to go through with my plan. Not because I knew I’d lose a bunch of silly worth points, – after seeing Aunt Katia, I’d decided I didn’t care about worth points because I didn’t care about becoming a Grim Reaper, – but because I felt inexplicably drawn to him. His presence had this ability to pin me in place, his voice demanded my full attention, and his stature alone made me feel… small and vulnerable. I wanted to be in his class because… I needed to feel his strong, masculine energy wrap around me, cocoon me in a sort of warmth I’d never felt before. And it was insane! Because this man had never even touched me! Also, he was my professor. So, what the hell was wrong with me thinking about his skin on my skin?