The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Outside the window, there was a car accident. Very sudden. They looked out. A police officer had thrown himself into the path of a turning garbage truck. The result was unpleasant. Helpful pedestrians rushed up and flung the mangled body into the open maw in the truck’s rear.

  “Are you doing that?” Luck demanded.

  “We are weeding out the weak. Only the strong will be permitted to survive. For we do not need you all…”

  The two men paled, but Blackfeather continued to battle with his skepticism.

  “Explain Morgellons,” said Bill Luck.

  “The first subcutaneous generation sprouted in the year 1636, during the lifetime of Wormius. That, and subsequent outbreaks after his demise, were activated by inaccurate readings of the Wormius Necronomicon. All failed to take proper root. The first modern wave was more successful, but not fully so. Our numbers grew, but dominance continued to elude us. This changed when the first human eyes gazed upon its future masters through the medium of the Great Invisible Web known to humans as the internet. A psychic link was created between microscopic inhabitant and macroscopic man. Control was asserted. The susceptible human mind was inculcated with the urge to scratch an imaginary itch. Abrasions were thus produced, and dormant parasites had a site in which to flourish. Out of these raw patches sprouted the filaments mistaken for hair. Not hair! Antennae! The subtle means by which the colonies communicated with one another. As they grew, they exerted greater influence over the brains of the hosts, which suspected them not. These weak hosts became incubators and then unwitting vectors for what was to come. Through them, actions were taken which were not suspected. Through these tools, the Necronomicon was inserted into the general discourse of dumb humankind.”

  “It’s a virus then?”

  “The Necronomicon that you know is a virus in every sense of the word, including a sense that you do not understand. It is a mental worm, a telepathic contagion, a vector that is now unstoppable. For it has infiltrated virtually every mental and spiritual orifice on the planet, bringing to life others.”

  Luck blinked uncomprehendingly. “Others?”

  “All virus, bacteria, mites, worms and similar parasitic lifeforms which colonize the human hosts infecting the crust of this world. Originating in other dimensions, we are reborn in this low-vibration world. We dwell in you, feed off you, keep your inner systems regulated and healthy so that you will flourish and reproduce, so that our legions are perpetuated. Without us, you would have perished as a race long ago. Now that we are awake in unison, those deemed worthy will continue to be colonized. The tapeworm will frolic with the E. coli bacteria, for all brothers to the Not-To-Be-Named-One.”

  “Oh my God!” Blackfeather said dispiritedly. “This is so unreal it is beginning to sound real.”

  “Where is all this madness going?” Luck demanded.

  “It has arrived,” retorted the thin voice of the being that could not be seen without benefit of an electron microscope.

  At that moment, Dr. Carter poked his head in and began whistling.

  The two medical men turned, and politely waited for the whistling to stop. It did not stop. It continued. It was high, tuneless, and not at all melodic. As they listened, a disquieting feeling came over them, for they realized that the man was not whistling a tune, but emitting a vocalization unknown to them, like certain species of aborigines, whose language consists of clicks and whistles and other vocalizations which are not a part of any western mode of speech.

  Blackfeather burst out, “Carter, what is the matter with you?”

  The man continued whistling, and as he did so another person—a nurse—passed by, who was also whistling eerily.

  Briefly, Dr. Carter and the passing nurse exchanged an interlude of sounds that were incomprehensible, yet struck Dr. Luck and Dr. Blackfeather as a form of intelligent communication.

  The whistling doctor withdrew, closing the door, and followed the nurse. Their whistling exchange faded down the corridor.

  As Doctors Luck and Blackfeather stared at one another, both at a loss for words, they became aware of other whistling that passed down the hall.

  “The virus!” Luck said suddenly. “It is passing from person to person in this hospital.”

  “Which virus?”

  “The one from the Plateau of Leng. Vanderhoofs. It is killing off the weak, but inhabiting and taking over the strong. The first victims were not strong enough to support the parasites.”

  The voice from the tablet said, “Correct. The weak must die. We will only have the strong. They will do our bidding.”

  Blackfeather demanded, “What is your bidding?”

  “Nothing more than to be hosts. And slaves. Beyond that, it will not matter to you, because your minds will not be your own, for we have infiltrated your dull brains.”

  His face flushing red, Dr. Blackfeather demanded, “Where are you speaking from?”

  The strange figure on the tablet paused briefly. Then in its high, thin voice, it admitted, “I am personally speaking from within you, host.”

  “I do not believe that!” raged Blackfeather.

  “You do not need to believe it, verminous one,” returned the thin voice. “It will not be necessary for you to believe or disbelieve anything in the future. Inasmuch your personality is about to be subsumed into that of the colonies inhabiting you.”

  Then the voice commenced a thin, reedy whistling.

  Blackfeather stared down at the tablet in his hand, and seemed to be struck speechless. His dark eyes, moist with hot emotion, softened and wavered.

  He seemed to listen for a very long time. Pursing his lips, he began whistling back.

  As Bill Luck watched in horror, a strange exchange commenced.

  “Dr. Blackfeather! Snap out of it!”

  The eyes of Ronald Blackfeather looked up, scrutinized him, and seemed not to fully comprehend what they were seeing and hearing.

  Scratching his elbow, Blackfeather revealed bristly hairs—no, antennae—that were slowly sprouting from the open rawness.

  The sight struck Bill Luck with nauseating force. He looked down at his own wrist, and saw similar bristles emerging, thicker than before. They resembled coarse insect hairs…

  In his excitement, he had been scratching the site, not realizing it.

  Thinking that the end was near, he called his wife.

  Deborah answered, not with words, but a weird whistling that was wandering off-key and dismal in its melancholy meaninglessness.

  “Not you, too!” Luck choked, dropping the whistling instrument. For a moment, his sweating head swam as his brain overloaded with a overwhelming flood of knowledge, whose source he could not comprehend.

  A voice, sub-auditory but reverberating clearly in his shaky brain, asked, “Don’t you know that you are part of something greater?”

  And he knew the truth. That all of Mankind, the supposed lords and masters of the Earth, over whom he arrogantly believed he held dominion, had in truth been created and bred long ago for exactly this purpose—to host the coming offspring of the Great Old Ones until the hour of their formal awakening.

  Now it had finally arrived.

  “We are the vermin now,” he mumbled. “They are our masters. They can do with us as they wish.”

  Luck felt sick—sick to the pit of the stomach, and perspiration popped out of his forehead. Parasites, living in his eyebrows and lashes, greedily devoured the oils being transported along his epidermis.

  His vision wavered as the floaters existing on the surface of his eyeballs stirred and awakened to their new life, fattening and turning pink as an engorged larva.

  All over his thin frame, Bill Luck felt a crawling sensation. It went as deep as his marrow. It stirred in his digestive tract, crawled confidently along his epidermis and burrowed in the subcutaneous fat below, feasting on what it wished to ingest. For now they owned him, hide, hair, brain and corpus.

  A humming, buzzing, chirring cacophony as of a swarm of trillion
s of awakening insects filled his senses—a noisy chaos long-dead Abdul Alhazred first called Al Azif.

  William Luck did not feel his humanness go away; he only saw and heard with new eyes and ears that were no longer his own.

  His searching gaze finally came to rest upon the face of Dr. Ronald Blackfeather, and it was glorious in its weird transfiguration. Gone was the glowering countenance of the seasoned medical man. In its place was a vacuity of expression that no longer reflected a central personality—for the man had become a biological mechanism controlled, not by his mortal brain, but by thousands of unseen parasites.

  Dr. Blackfeather whistled and Dr. Luck comprehended the sounds perfectly.

  “A trillion young!” Blackfeather vocalized.

  “Ia! Ia! Shub-Niggurath!” chorused the former William Luck in the same unmelodic language, the new universal tongue of those who crawled upon the crust, no longer masters of the Earth, not even masters of themselves….

  THE PARADOX COLLECTION

  A. C. WISE

  There was a monster outside, and any minute, it would break the door down and come inside. Not a rational thought, but Everett couldn’t shake it. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a scared little boy anymore, or that the library had always been his safe place and Miskatonic was far safer than the Municipal Library that sheltered him as a child. There was a monster outside, and it was coming to get him.

  His first day on the job—first night, working the graveyard shift—and already he was having a breakdown.

  Everett breathed out, pressing his palms flat against the desk they’d given him. It was on the mezzanine, watched over by stern oil portraits of Chief Librarians past—Henry Armitage, Ward Phillips, and Cyrus Llanfer. A faux wood sign bore his title—Special Collections Assistant. Someone had added a post-it note: Temporary.

  The note seemed harmless earlier, teasing the new guy. Now it felt ominous. Everett wouldn’t be here long. His monster was coming for him, and the charms that worked as a child didn’t hold any longer.

  Even though students were guaranteed twenty-four hour access to the library during exam periods, he was alone. Needing to burn off nervous energy, he rose from the desk and paced to the railing overlooking the first floor. A compass rose inlaid in the marble, and above him, a skylight sitting like an eye at the center of the library’s panoptic design. The first floor was all computer terminals—Miskatonic in the 21st century. But the mezzanine, Everett’s level, held books. Real honest to goodness books. Primary documents, true source material cataloguing New England’s strange history.

  He would be safe here. He had to.

  Everett pulled his father’s letter from his pocket. We didn’t always get along, but I want to make things right. I’m coming to see you. I hope you can forgive me.

  Not can I come to see you, but I’m coming to see you. Everett’s hands shook. He crumpled the letter and shoved it back in his pocket. Breathe.

  He had a life now, a real job. He wasn’t a frightened eight year old listening to the impossible loudness of his father’s breath beyond the bedroom door—a dragon, a bull made of scarred and twisted metal with steam engine lungs.

  Until the letter arrived yesterday, Everett had assumed the old man drank himself to death. But some hunters, as long as their prey ran, they would keep on chasing.

  Everett realized his fingers were balled into fists, and he forced them to relax. A library had protected him before, and Miskatonic was bigger, older —an ur-library full of exactly the arcane knowledge he’d sought as a child. At eight years old, the Municipal Library was the one place his father couldn’t find him. During the summer months, Everett crept out of the house before his father woke, spending all day tucked into one of the reading corners. But inevitably, dread would creep in as the clock ticked down to closing time.

  After the first few weeks of vacation, Everett devised a plan to hide in the library’s supply closet. One of the librarians, Mrs. Stadhoff, found him hiding behind boxes of copy paper. She’d reached for the phone, as any responsible adult would.

  “Please. Don’t.” Everett caught her arm, but didn’t go any further. If he told on his father, things would get worse. Next time, the monster wouldn’t stop. Tattle-tales deserved whatever happened to them.

  Mrs. Stadhoff had set the phone down. Maybe she’d seen the bruises not quite hidden by the long sleeves Everett wore even in the heat.

  “You can stay with me,” Mrs. Stadhoff said.

  Her kindness opened the crack in Everett’s resolve. Tears came, words stuttering out in gasps between them.

  “If I go anywhere else, he’ll find me. Please. The library is the only safe place.”

  So Mrs. Stadhoff brought blankets from home. Over the course of the summer, she perfected the art of microwave s’mores in the staff breakroom, and kept a toothbrush for Everett in her desk drawer. She was the grandmother he’d never had, and Everett never had to ask again—the library was his haven whenever he needed it.

  As the summer wore on, Everett grew impatient. He wanted more than just a safe place. The library was magic. Books were magic. Surely one of them would hold the key to let him fight back—turn him into a monster with wings and claws, or open a doorway to another world.

  Each night, after Mrs. Stadhoff drifted to sleep, Everett prowled the shelves. He discovered the horrors lurking beneath the skin of New England’s history—creatures with too many limbs and too many eyes, impossibly ancient things from between the stars, creatures who caused madness just by looking at them.

  But no matter how much he read, or twisted his tongue around the fragments of incantations in the books, the monsters remained stubbornly confined to the page.

  At first, crushing disappointment filled him, but as he grew older, he realized what he’d always known—monsters didn’t have tentacles and star-shaped heads. They wore human skin; they were fueled by drink and rage, and the only way he would escape into another world was to leave. He studied, kept quiet, got good grades, and as soon as he graduated high school, Mrs. Stadhoff helped him apply for scholarship funding. Everett never looked back, not once. Until now.

  He scanned the shelves radiating out from the central core of the mezzanine. Getting his library sciences degree, he’d spent enough time around books to know they had a different kind of magic than the kind he’d looked for as a kid. A faint smile tugged at his lips, the panic ebbing somewhat. He was at Miskatonic, for God’s sake—the heart of the mythology he’d devoured as a child. He should enjoy himself, not cower in fear.

  Everett turned down the first row of shelves, trailing his fingers along spines. Even if he knew there wasn’t a monster outside the door, it was still eerie being in a library alone again after all these years. Surely there were other staff members somewhere, but Everett hadn’t seen them yet. He might as well be the only one in the building. The back of his neck prickled. The feeling of being exposed returned.

  He focused on breathing, but the sensation only grew worse. The air pressure changed. Lightning tripped across his skin. Panic attack? Or worse—a stroke? An aneurysm?

  Reaching for a shelf to steady himself, Everett turned the corner, and froze. There, between one shelf and the next, one heartbeat and the next, stood a door. A door where there shouldn’t be a door. A door that wasn’t a door, but a translucent sheet of ice, mist grown milky and solid, skin stretched so thin he could see shapes moving on the other side, bruising the surface. Things with too many limbs, tentacles, heads like stars and bodies like barrels. Impossible things.

  Everett stepped back, colliding with a shelf. He stumbled, trying to keep the door in sight.

  A voice spoke behind him. “Are you quite lost?”

  Everett whirled. A woman leaned against the shelf behind him. Impossible. He blinked.

  A parrot perched on her shoulder, nibbling her ear. She toyed with a long string of beads wrapped around her throat.

  “Hello.” She held out a hand, straightening; sequins rasped on her kn
ee-length dress. “Are you new?”

  “Are you…” Everett swallowed, words vanishing.

  The woman’s nails were bitten to the quick, her skin flushed slightly green around the torn cuticles. And in the next moment, her nails were whole, perfectly manicured and shining slick, dark red. A cigarette burned in a long, elegant holder, and her hands were empty. She flickered, not entirely solid, yet undoubtedly there.

  Everett reached for her hand out of instinct, drawing back too late when he realized what he was doing. Her fingers brushed his palm, both cool and warm.

  The word that insistently battered itself against Everett’s lips slipped out. “…dead?”

  The woman laughed, the delighted chime of crystal bells, a New Year’s Eve sound, all glittering lights and ringing champagne glasses.

  “What a perceptive question.” She clapped her hands, eyes glittering. “No, I’m not dead. But I’m not alive either. A bit of a Schrödinger’s Cat, minus the box. In fact, the cat is probably around here somewhere, too.”

  She made a kissing noise. “Here, puss, puss.”

  No cat materialized.

  “Never mind.” The woman turned back to Everett. “You never did tell me your name.”

  “Everett. Special Collections. Temporary.” He pointed toward the desk. “What…”

  And his words stalled again. The door shifted, moving into his line of view. Looking at it made the space behind Everett’s eyes ache, the bones of his jaw buzz. He clenched his teeth, grinding his molars together.

  “Oh. The Paradox Collection. Didn’t they tell you?” The woman’s eyes widened, guileless, made larger by dark make-up. “It’s part of Special Collections.”

  Everett thought back to his brief orientation. No one had mentioned the Paradox Collection. He shook his head, but the motion only made the ache behind his eyes worse. He’d been thinking about his father and…