by Graeme Hurry
It was some time until the party ended, the last of the tired alumni departing for one last, drunkenly affectionate and recollective stroll around the campus, lean-faced and hungry eyed graduate students momentarily satiated on free food staggering back into labs, the catering service temps in white shirts and black vests bustling away the steam trays and tablecloths, emptying bins of bottles into dumpsters.
Long after that, Victor left for his rooms, frayed and dog-eared translation of ‘The Love-Songs of Crickets: Night Poetry’ folded over and over in his hand, words wandering about his head.
*
The book wasn’t much of a hit in his class – the students’ eyes had quickly glazed over, even before he had finished explaining the torturous path the text had taken from the initial observations to the modern edition he’d stuffed into his rucksack. There was a little bit of panic in his body language as he presented the slide, but he tamped it down. All he had to worry about in the end was having a presentable set of lectures to hold up to his evaluation committee, he told himself. Keeping the students’ interest was his goal, not his bailiwick.
He thought for a second that if he told them about the original edition of the work, started using the word ‘flayed’ with ‘alive’, and ‘skin’, ‘bindings’, ‘tattooed pages’, he might get a few heads raised up from their crosswords.
He thought a second time, thought of Daaniken and his long-haired ayuthalascalan and decided against it.
‘So, as you can see from the description here,’ he had chosen one of the less poetic parts, ‘early astronomical observations – not that they were thought of in those terms, at the time – were often overlain with religious portents. While some cultures – notably the Egyptians and Babylonians, as you saw in last week’s reading – developed a system of mathematical notation and calculation that, while still far from what we would call a modern framework, is at least recognizable as similar.
‘This is an example of the difficulty we run into when attempting to work backwards to ancient records. The system of zodiacal signs, although just that, a system, was still quite ill-suited for the task of recording and predicting the movements of the cosmos with the precision necessary to form a deeper understanding of the principles governing them.’
He paused while the scritch of pencils went on for a moment longer, taking notes he hoped, rather than finishing up 43 Down before looking up thoughtfully with what the student felt would be the appropriate level of anticipatory interest in what he was about to say.
‘All right. Homework assignment for tomorrow is on the board here.’ He pointed, answered a few questions, and packed up his things to take back to his office down the hallway. The first observation would start that night, and he wanted to be ready if Professor Khovanskaya had any questions about the workings of the detector he’d built for the lion’s share of his thesis.
*
‘Can you hear that?’ she asked.
‘Hear what?’ He looked up from his paperback to the video-chat window on his laptop. The clock in the corner had it as almost three in the morning, and the professor had been checking back in often enough for him to ponder just going up the hill himself and resigning his sleep cycle to a double-night shift.
‘That… such music… it…’
Her eyes snapped back from infinity to focus on him through the webcam. Her mouth hung open from what she’d been trying to say and she stood up and walked out of frame towards the optical tables.
‘Professor Khovanskaya? Professor?’
She walked back across the basement listening room, shaking her head as if a confederacy of gnats were assaulting her eyelashes. Victor tapped at the microphone, flicking the condenser and hearing the whump-thump of feedback over the soft white noise coming from Observatory Hill. He wondered if the slow muffled pulsing he could make out was from a failing condenser in the cryostat.
‘Are you all right?’
She walked back in front of the computer, gray hair ruffled up into a wild comb and forehead shining with a sudden sheen of sweat. She had her right forearm across her face as if she were about to wipe her mouth on a nonexistent shirtsleeve. The corners of her mouth twitched into a grinning rictus.
‘Professor, is -’
Her head jerked back as she pulled her arm forward like a mail clerk tearing off a length of packing tape. Gushing freshets of blood poured from her wrist, shooting down her hand across the desk and onto the keyboard.
He froze, muscles hard and tight enough to hear his shoulders crack. Cold chills wracked him. It felt like he’d plunged his hands into liquid nitrogen, all the way to the elbows, and it wasn’t until he fell out of his chair, scrabbling to break his fall as he went for the phone, that he realized he’d locked his arms tight across his chest, wrists pulled close to his breast.
On the screen Professor Khovanskaya sat down in the chair shakily and gave a strained smile to the camera. Droplets of blood spewed across her lips and chin where the razor blade nicked her as she spat it out from between her teeth. Her hands rose slowly from her sides, both wrists pouring, both arms stained a pulsing red, and she laced her fingers behind her head. She clamped her ears shut beneath her forearms. Blood began to sluice down the sides of her face, dribbling off her chin. Her eyes stayed open, burning brighter and brighter as her face drained white around them. The low, slow thrumming beat from the lab crackled over the internet connection and the telescope above her continued its ponderous traversal of the night sky.
*
Four weeks later, Victor leaned back into the creaking desk chair and sighed. It was three in the morning on a Saturday, not that what day of the week it was bore any real relevance now. Above him the skeletal frame of the radio-telescope was slowly rolling across its massive gimbals to track the movement of the galaxies above while the Earth spun and rotated about the sun.
The chair was new, as was the monitor-keyboard combo. The normally dingy tile floor gleaming a bleached white beneath his wheels was a stark reminder that only a week and a half ago Professor Khovanskaya had spilled a couple quarts of blood across the desk in front of him.
The desk was new, too.
It had been a long walk up the hill to the ramshackle house and nineteenth century observatory, retrofitted with a radio-dish inside the old observing room, the rope-elevator and grandstand still in place from a time when gentlemen in morning dress would squint into visible-wavelength optics. There were no streetlights along the two-mile mountain road up from the campus, and the memory of Professor Khovanskaya’s suicide had done little to dispel the monsters that lurked in the wooded roadside shadows.
Her children had made a token appearance around the apartment one day, down from the DC metro area, and everyone had avoided them politely as they could. She’d had a rough time of it back in the old USSR, the chair had mumbled at the end of the department meeting, and Victor had to rap his head against the door jamb on the way back to his desk to get the Beatles’ tune out of his head.
All of the students on the project wore heavy sweatshirts when they pulled shifts here now, even though the smoking cryostats were cordoned off in the far corner, hundreds of gallons of circulating liquid nitrogen maintaining the critical temperatures for the sensitive detectors hooked up to the snout of the telescope dish.
There really wasn’t much to do for whoever was on, besides be there to hear any alarms ring or notice when a valve failed, so Victor bunched the hood of his sweatshirt up behind the base of his skull and leaned back to try and rest. The suspension of the chair gave a whinging creak and then settled into place.
Speakers hooked to the back of the terminal gave out a hissing static of white noise. It bubbled once to the surface of his consciousness before he fell asleep and smiled.
Those science fiction flicks with the white-coated scientists listening intently to the telescopes through oversize headphones were all full of bunk. The scopes they used for the OZUMA project scanned on a million frequencies simultaneously, all
of them orders of magnitude away from the upper or lower ranges of human hearing.
It was a little psychological trick, to reassure them that the data was flowing, to lull them off to sleep.
*
Some hours later, in the pregnant hours just before dawn, Victor half-awoke into a hypnagogic doze. His mind clicked on and began running as his body lay quiescent, relaxed, untethered to his consciousness like he was starring in a performance by one of those Indian fakirs who’d stand on poles unmoving as audience members drove metal skewers through their genitals.
He registered a few outside sensations from a curious remove. The plank-like stillness of his body with outstretched legs resting atop the tower case of the computer, the quiet chill of the basement lab, the swooping trill of the sounds from the telescope.
Muscles stiffened minutely, but he stayed motionless, his mind jumping ahead of reaction to process that. He listened more closely, almost convinced he was still in the Dreaming.
The first thought was that someone from the morning shift had shown up five hours early and put on a CD of classical music into a badly bent stereo. A high, tremulous wail dropped to a liquid gurgle as a staccato back-beat of high chirps lay down on top of lumbering, whumping drumbeats.
His inner ear started to track along with the music, to anticipate and adapt to the weird escalations and meters and he became aware of his body through the rising churn in his gut. He started to form a picture of the sounds themselves,
An electric purple for the high notes, blending into obscene ultraviolet, while the deep throbbing pulses were a bilious red. The red ocher formed a heaving sea, while the violet flashes turned into jagged lightning sheeting across the swells.
Shades of green and yellow, dark and nauseous, swam up out of the depths to meet the surface, drifts and floes forming and then floating up in wisps of vapor to coalesce just above the surface.
Like a laser flash-lamp, Victor started to see shapes and shadows visible in the thickening mists as the flashes of dark light sheeted across the sky and flickered onto the swells.
He gasped and his body awoke at once, feet falling off the computer case and chair shooting back out from underneath him. His head barked sharply against the seat of the chair, and then the tile floor as he fell. Pain flared there and in his tailbone as he crashed awkwardly to the ground.
For a brief second the sight of the music was lost and he flooded back into himself. The aching familiarity he had felt stuttered, the memories of Professor Khovanskaya’s suicide summoned up in sympathetic resonance with the same pulsing beat he had heard then, and felt now.
Victor clambered up to his feet and shook his head violently, sending the room to a spin. The speakers seemed to have been moved to the highest setting, and the room was filled with the looping sounds.
Numb, uncoordinated hands stabbed at the dials to turn them off and a brief silence came into the room, filled quickly by the thrum of the machinery in the basement lab. He wondered what had happened and turned to look at the screen.
The red setpoint he had put in place on a morbid lark a month ago to trigger an alarm was blinking, its cry silenced with the speakers. Sidereal coordinates slowly ticked onward as the telescope moved through the fourth quadrant of the galactic center.
Victor blinked twice, and fumbled in his pocket for the copy of ‘Night Songs’ that Zimmerman had given him. Of course that was it, he thought, the alarm had just woken him up. A faint giggle of whistling washed past his ears and he glared at the speakers for a second, wondering where the headphones that must have been hooked up had fallen to, before turning back to the dog-eared passage in the book.
He’d already highlighted past the portion detailing the celestial coordinates (and it had taken him a good many hours to translate the houses of the zodiac across the centuries into inclination and declination), the coordinates he was right now scanning with the telescope, and bracketed the passage of description immediately following.
*
And so the Eye of the Old Ones opened, and the radiance of the Void spilled out across the land. Day turned to darkest night [he assumed this meant night to day, a transposition in the umpteenth generation of transcription] and the beasts and men of the land went mad beside themselves.
Colors such as could not be conceived washed through the minds of men, and the senses quailed at what they apprehended. A great cult sprang up in the city of –— and turned its obscene urges upon the surrounding citizens.
Men feared for the end of days and prayed that this was but a fraction of the unspeakable power of the Old Gods who dwelt in the heavens.
My guide, the ‘Hazred’ of his people, took me past this place on our journey quickly, remarking only that the centuries that had passed had not yet eradicated all trace of that horrid cosmic alignment from the sands, and the unwary travelers who lingered there shortly soon did so forever.
*
Victor felt a cold chill worm around his stomach and settle in. The words on the page mocked him, and as he remembered where they had been originally written – on what they had originally been written – he began shivering.
He shook his head at the thumping drums, the thin, high wailing of the fifes that sounded like Doppler-shifted mosquitoes, and threw the book away into his bag. Pacing back and forth in front of the desk, he tried to throw off the sense of rising horror. A little thought at the back of his mind told him that Professor Khovanskaya had committed suicide here, reminded him persistently, and then he realized that not only were there not any speakers of any sort hooked up to the computer, he had muted the sound.
The continuing insane prattle of the music kicked his knees out from under him and he fell into the chair. How long would it take, he wondered, before it got to be too much? His fingers missed the keyboard as he blinked back the music, then reached home row and exited the program, keying in the shutdown sequences to take the multi-million dollar project off-line.
He laughed, then again, louder, to try and drown out the whistling roar in his head. They’d start it back up. They’d go over the same coordinates. They’d wonder what it was about this room, this project when they found him slumped over the same console, blood pooling at his feet and in his ass, the puckered edges of his slit wrists looking like the seams on a quilt.
He slapped himself across the face, one way, then the other, left hand and right hand. There was a pile of CDs beside the computer and he put in the Pogues, turning the volume full up and turning the speakers back on. He sank into the roaring rhythm and tried to think.
The console that ran the telescope was on a Unix machine, and he now set the shared hard drive to run a low-level format. It would take time, time he didn’t have, but the computer did, and would. What else?
There was a hand-held micro-acetylene torch in the workshop area, and he grabbed it, opening a valve and hitting the base to spark into life a white tongue of flame.
As the sound waves around him flexed the air and crashed into ceilings and valleys of distortion, he slowly went around the cryostats welding the tanks shut with a stick of copper braze. It’d be like the video he’d seen in elementary school, a metal sphere filled with water before being dipped into a tub of sea-water slush, the water inside freezing and expanding.
The metal sphere exploding.
He thought it might be something like that. Liquid nitrogen had an expansion coefficient of six hundred and ninety four.
There was one last place he had to go before he could figure out his own arrangements. It was an unthinking, gut-level atavistic hatred that drove him towards the Special Collections Library, the primal desire to strike out and destroy the small book, that vile and loathsome tome of human skin.
He knew, even as the wails from the unblinking Eye above him drove him to his knees outside on the gravel-strewn road, even as he staggered up and ran on, that if he could just destroy it his precautions would work. It was all he could do to keep his mind on the road at his feet, and the pain in hi
s legs, and yes, the sound in his head, and not to look up. He suddenly felt that all would be lost at once if he looked up into the sky above.
In his desk at the Astronomy office he grabbed a multi-tool and his iPod before slamming out the door, jamming the earbuds in and turning the volume up as high as he could, until his vision started to flicker from the white noise roar of distorted guitar chords. He could still hear the pulsing thrum, the high pitched A6 whine of the mad sonic geometry, but the pounding throb in his head lost its alien feel and began to return to human agony as he stumbled across the rectangle of manicured grass and flower planters towards the doors to the underground Special Collections building.
*
He flicked shut the multitool’s awl and unfolded the thick blade of the screwdriver.
A minute earlier he had been grinding his forehead against the brick wall of the Special Collections building, blood and hair matting into the rough ceramic. The tip of the awl had been poised in his right ear, pricking at the tender surface of his auditory canal, when a horrid thought hit him. What if he drove it home, punctured both ears, lobotomized the bundles of nerve tissue on each side of his head…
… but still heard the drums, the idiot flutes, rising and falling in impossible choral progressions inconceivable for human fingers? An auditory landscape of non-Euclidean shapes.
What if he put his ears out but still heard that, and nothing else? He jammed the earbud back in.
The latch to the Special Collections building gave way under the screwdriver and he staggered inside. He was past the point of caring about the noise the glass surely made as it sheeted to the floor where the door slammed into the wall. If the police came he wouldn’t hear them, and he’d end up shot in the back as he ran on heedless of cries to halt. The musics roared at each other in his ears, Guns ‘n Roses a ferocious lion, the signal from the stars the unseen hunter in the night, the otherworldly scent that pauses and waits to be recognized and then slithers forward as fast as spat phlegm.