Some of the shelves are bereft of books, but stand instead as habitations for busts of Greek and Roman philosophers, statuettes of gods and demons, strange twisted things that would not be out of place in a museum.
Unable to resist the impulse, I step around the desk, plant myself in the ample leather seat and try one of the drawers. Locked. All of them. I rub at my forearms; the skin is dry, thickening, irritated. The grandfather clock strikes the hour and I will be late for class. I snatch a piece of paper from the notebook and scribble a message to the Principal that I need a word. I place it in the centre of the blotter, where it cannot be missed. I carefully put the pen back in its case, only after trying to wipe off any finger marks.
Here is my problem: Tilly seemed willing. She is almost eighteen—yes, we keep them here longer, if they wish. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Some stay on and become staff, studying, learning from the teachers here, which gives them a far better training than they would find elsewhere. Here is my other problem: the possibility of Thackeray revealing what may have happened between us, but which I am unsure even took place. And Tilly, she is a child, easily influenced.
Who do I protect? Myself or the child?
I don’t know what I will tell the Head. Candide will be useless; he will simply give me a slow blink and ask whatever do you mean? The Principal is the key. When we meet I will know what to say.
V
February 16th
Look not upon me, because I am disguised,
because the sun hath burned me:
Earth’s children were angry with me;
they stole what was mine;
They kept him from me.
The west wing houses the library; it’s stacked with shelving and desks overrun by computer terminals and printers. A wooden set of card index drawers stands lonely and lost in the middle of the room—the young librarian doesn’t know quite what to do with it and is too afraid of the ghosts of librarians past to throw it out. Curiosities abound: a giraffe’s skeleton, a giant cephalopod, spears and shields and helmets of disappeared empires, bronze horse statuettes, elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns, all take up space on walls, shelves, nooks and alcoves. There are portraits, too: long-dead educators staring down with what might be disapproval or hauteur or both.
The only wall unencumbered by shelves or display items is covered by a tapestry. A woman sits enthroned on a stone seat, a staff in one hand, a snake in the other. Her eyes are wide, almost too much so: icthyoid and protuberant; her lips pouting, her nose somewhat flat; hair a mess of black; yet there is a kind of beauty to her, a compelling strangeness that draws the observer in. She wears a simple green robe, something that seems almost armored, perhaps scaled, and at her slippered feet, a field of blossoms: black, silver, red, yellow, and richest chestnut petals on stalks of green. She sits most closely to the left of the tapestry—or rather, to the right—and to the right, or rather her left, nothing more than a verdant tangle of forest. Branches and trunks, undergrowth and vines, all twist together to form a dense curtain, seemingly without uniformity or plan, utterly wild and overgrown, curled around the stony ruins of a building crushed by the foliage.
In a quiet corner of the room sits Fenella, surrounded and almost concealed by a fortress of books built on the desk in front of her. At one of the tables are Tilly and Stephen and their various acolytes; I note the blond curly head turn towards me, offering a smile, but I pretend not to see her, keep myself aimed directly at my friend.
“Have you seen the Head?” I ask, sotto voce, as I scratch at the sides of my throat, trying to get rid of the terrible itching there. She jumps, pulled from her concentration by my question, both hands thumping on the tabletop in fright.
“Don’t you knock?” One of the book towers wobbles and begins a slow slide. She tries to stop it, then gives up and lets the tomes fan out, domino-like, until the final one teeters on the edge and falls. It marks the end of its descent with a noise like a shot that stops the library for a few moments.
Fenella folds her arms and looks at me.
I ask again, “Have you seen the Head?”
“This morning,” she says. “What is wrong with you?”
And she’s right, I’m jumpy, sweating, twitching at the slightest noise, the tiniest hints of something moving in the corner of my eye. There’s still the headache: as if someone is trying to crack my skull open. And I cannot shake the accompanying sense that success will result in a dark river, a black tide flowing out of me. I blink, hard, eyes dry.
“I don’t feel well,” I say. “And . . . ”
She puts a hand on my forehead—the cool flesh is a shock against my hot skin. “Go and lie down. You don’t have any classes this afternoon.”
“Thackeray,” I say, the words becoming harder to force out, the hurt pressing in on my head. “Thackeray and Tilly, were . . . ”
She tilts; the whole room tilts and I can’t figure out why. I wonder that the books aren’t falling from the shelves; then I realize I’m the one who’s on an angle. I’m the one who’s falling. I hit the floor, head bouncing against the polished parquetry.
There’s a burble of noise around me; I see figures looming above, blurring. Beneath my head, I feel a beat. A thudding, ever so gentle, a mere echo of a vibration, a rhythm, a pulse, a song, but it will grow stronger, of that I have no doubt. It travels up me like a tremor, a whisper of motion. It moves me and shakes me and lulls me all at once. I close my eyes, for I have no choice, and everything is blocked out.
The last thing I hear is Fenella swearing at the crowd to stand back and let me have some air. I try to smile, but cannot feel my face.
VI
February 17th
Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou waitest,
where thou sleepest:
for I shall not be as one turned aside
by the rise and fall of aeons.
Sound, unclear, as if heard through water. I swim up, slowly, ignoring the yearning pain in my bones. Voices. It’s voices: male and female.
All I can feel beneath me now are the soft crisp linens of my bed; no more subtle rhythm, no more gentle beat. Clear-headed at last, but I keep my eyes closed, for they still retain an echo of the ache. And I listen.
“How is she?” Thackeray, subdued.
“The same as she always is at this point.” Fenella, cool. They’ve been arguing.
“No. It seems different—she’s never struggled like this.”
Fenella is silent.
“What if she’s—?”
“You’re an idiot.” Fenella, angry. “She saw you. You can’t just fuck about for the better part of a year. You put us all in danger. We’re not completely invisible here.”
“We’ve been over this already. What does it matter? She’ll be gone soon.”
“We go to all the trouble of choosing, of making each one think they’re special.”
“So? I just made her feel a little bit extra special.”
“Everyone else here is careful. Goes out of their way to keep us all secret and safe.” Her voice drops. “I will tell her, when this one is gone and she’s back.”
“You worry too much, Burrows. Her time is short,” he sneers.
“She won’t need long.”
That shuts him up, then there is a shuffling, his heavy steps moving away, the door opening and closing. I crack an eyelid and see Fenella, hands over her face, shoulders slumped. I know my vision is still wrong because she seems to have only three fingers. She sighs, throws back her shoulders, takes a deep breath. I focus.
She leans over me without really looking at me, touches my face. Five digits, of course; stupidity. I do not react, keep my breathing steady, slow. She steps away and leaves the room.
I wait, counting down seconds, counting down until I feel safe. I sit up, throw back the covers, swing my legs out of bed. Through the window I can see the sky, blue-black, dotted with stars, buttoned-down with a full moon; 11:30 says the bedside clock. I have slept l
ong.
My legs tremble, I straighten. My hands spasm, the base of my skull feels . . . stretched. I shake my head, leave the room, uncaring that my pink flannel pyjamas are not the best attire for sneaking through corridors.
The dust and darkness are heavy in the Principal’s office. The moonlight streams in and on the broad expanse of the desk I can see a piece of paper. My note. Untouched, unmoved, unread.
Once again, I pull at the drawers, knowing they’ll still be locked. I take the letter opener from its place and jam it into the keyhole, then into the thin space between the bottom of one drawer and the top of another, jiggle it, jimmy it and to my surprise the bottom one grinds open with a protest. The fine dark wood splinters, exposing its pale naked inside. The drawer slides on reluctant runners.
In the bottom is a sewing-box, a padded embroidered thing, quite large, a silver toggle slid through the loop on the front to keep it closed. I unclasp it and flip it open. Inside, threads. So many threads, all twisted into figures of eight, their middles cinched in by the end of the very same thread. Tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds? So many: black, silver, red, yellow, richest chestnut. On the padded silk inside the lid, an array of needles, sentinels pinned through the fabric, all fine and golden, some thicker than others, fit for all manner of work, for varying thicknesses of material, canvas, skin, hide, what-have-you. I reach in, prick my index finger, watch the blood well and drip onto the pale blue silk, clotting bundles of thread.
I suck on the injured digit and notice, behind the casket, a creamy wad of pages. I draw them forth. Each one has a ragged edge as if torn from a journal. Each one is filled with scribbles, ancient cuneiforms of text, amateurish translations beside those obtuse scratchings:
I am hidden, but lovely, O ye daughters of darkness. They kept him from me. I remember thy love more than life. Let him kiss me with his mouths. Thy name is as fear poured forth. Lead me, I will wait for thee.
Each page dated; I can see a series of different years. How many? Oh, god, how many?
The grandfather clock interrupts me as I kneel there on the floor. It chimes the quarter-hour and I watch the hands move. The office door opens and Tilly’s soft voice, rich with anticipation, a little fear, calls “Doctor Croftmarsh? It’s time.”
“Tilly. Tilly, you have to get away from here.” I scramble up off my knees, try to move towards her at the same time, stumble twice before I stand and manage to get a hand on her arm. The touch is as much to steady me as to underline my point to her. “There’s something going on. We have to go—we’ll go out through the kitchens, no one will see us—”
“Doctor Croftmarsh, don’t be ridiculous,” she says, barely concealing disdain. I tighten my fingers around her wrist. She jerks her arm away.
“No, Tilly, I’m not being silly. Something is happening and you’re in danger.”
“No,” she says, smiling, but I can’t quite fathom the demeanor. “I’m not in danger—He has called my name and I will heed him. He will know me and choose me for I am new.”
And all at once I know that inimitable combination of tone and expression: triumph and malice, jealousy and hope. The child thinks she is part of a greater mystery. She thinks Thackeray will—will what? Despair and desperation well up inside me as rhythmic pulses of pain.
We stare at each other, time seemingly marching in place until, at last, there is the sound of the final flick of the clock hands shifting into place. Mechanisms begin to sing midnight and all of my agonies fall away. I smile at the girl and offer my hand in conciliation.
VII
February 18th
If thou know not, O thou greatest among beasts,
Send me dreams so I might guess,
and kill the flock by the shepherds’ tents.
With my free hand I hook the edge of the tapestry and pull. The right half of it hangs from a rail separate to that for the left, so, when drawn across, the picture changes, the forest folded back upon itself becomes a creature, muscular, tentacled, winged; the broken stones become a second throne and the lord’s limbs, now seen true, caress his bride in lewd love.
More importantly, this redecoration shows a door in the wall behind the arras, a door which leads down to the academy’s rarely used chapel; to the undercroft more precisely. I wrench it open and a whiff of dust puffs out. Dust and something else, like long-dead fish.
“Come, Tilly,” I say. There is no answer. I turn to look at her; she is staring at the hanging. I take her face in my hands, run my fingers through her hair, tender as a mother. I kiss her on the forehead, a chaste embrace, and say, “You were right: you have been called, Tilly, and you are needed. You are anointed, the coming one. And He will know your name and I shall see you covered in the throes of glory before this night is out.”
In the darkness, I can see with the unerring gaze of a creature from the deep. In her gaze is my reflection, my features rewritten by my memories, my true memories: eyes set wide and angled up, icthyoid and protuberant, pouting lips, flattened nose. And the hair, a waving tangle of green-black tentacles, a-shiver with a life of their own. I stretch, my bones cracking. I am taller.
The girl’s expression is stunned. “Doctor Croftmarsh?”
I nod and smile, my teeth sharp and liberally spaced. The girl shudders. Some panic at this moment, the imminence of death shaking them from the enchantment of being chosen; some go quietly. Tilly, I suspect, is beginning to realize that she did not take note of the fine print in the deal that was struck. I lock a webbed hand around her wrist and pull her towards her destiny.
My head is full of things long forgotten, long set aside so that I—we—might hide and survive. Today, this anniversary of the Fall of Innsmouth, of my Lord’s terrible injuries and afflictions, of his ever-dying, this day the memories are whole. They do not afflict me. They are mine and they rest easy in the pan of my skull.
“Never fear, Tilly.” The language feels strange in my mouth, the words seemingly square, not sibilant, not long and serpentine, but blocky. I persist, dragging the girl behind me, down into the darkness of the cold stone staircase and the crushing blackness of the undercroft and the tomb. The space is just large enough to fit the rest of the staff, teaching and domestic, all changed, all re-made like me; all clustered in a tenebrous group at the far end of the crypt. “Know that you are a part of something great.”
Here she will breathe her last, her soul, her blood given so that my lord may heal. A process oh-so-slow, but only on this one day is the barrier between his death and my life thin enough for this service.
In my haste I am clumsy.
In her terror she is strong.
When she kicks at me, I loosen my grip and she pulls away, races in the shadows, back towards the stairs, towards freedom. All the trouble gone to, to cut her from the herd, to groom her, to make her feel special—and she runs. There is the sound of a slap, a grunt.
“Careless,” says Thackeray. “You are not what you were.” He holds the girl still, carries her as a child does a reluctant cat, her back against his chest, her limbs splayed, belly exposed. She no longer struggles. Thackeray offers her to me. I stare into her moon-wide eyes and whisper, “All will be well.”
The talons of my right hand open up her chest, the nightgown then the skin. A silver mist bursts from the hole, followed by a gush of blood, and both are drawn down to the stone of the tomb, then immediately begin to seep through the porous surface.
I hear, as her life pours out, the great booming rhythm of my lord’s heart, strengthened across aeons, across life and death and the space in-between. Such a slow healing.
From the gloom steps Fenella, a broad smile on her plain face. “We must talk, before you grow forgetful again,” she says.
I don’t answer, merely look at the shell of Tilly Sanderson sprawled across my husband’s resting place where Thackeray discarded her. The rhythm of his renewal is loud and I think: If one can do this, then surely a legion . . .
“You will lose yourself once mo
re,” Fenella continues. “We must discuss matters for the coming year.”
“Tomorrow’s forgetting will be but a dream,” I say, skittering my nails across the top of my lord’s tomb, finding not a skerrick of blood left there.
I am so tired of waiting.
How many years between Innsmouth and now? How many times have I taken filaments from young heads and selected a fine needle so I may embroider a new flower into the weave of the tapestry, its border growing with each passing sacrifice? How many years have I sat beside a rock and told my lord, my liege, my love the same tale, of the patient queen who hides away, protecting her beloved from his enemies? The tale of a wife who loses herself for his very sake, who folds the cloak of Vivienne Croftmarsh around her recollections, her histories, and suppresses everything she is so hunters may not track him through the power of her memory. A woman who sings him his song, his hymn, his dirge, and waits and waits and waits.
A woman who is weary of waiting.
From beneath, from across, I hear him sigh.
“Bring them,” I say to Burrows and Thackeray, who give me blank stares. My voice is thunder when next I speak, and they cringe with the power of my rage. “Bring them all!”
“But—” begins Thackeray and I grab the front of his shirt and lift him off his feet, reveling in the strength of my arm, myself; and knowing, at last, that I am unwilling to once again give up this self. I shake him for good measure.
“Bring them, by twos and threes. Bring them here and we shall see my lord awake before too many more cycles have passed. I am tired of waiting.”
A new tomorrow is about to dawn on The Esoteric Order’s Orphans Academy. And then, when my lord shall finally rise again, I shall take my proper place at His side . . .
The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal . . . one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs—some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine—chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 41