He skimmed the remaining pages. Carcosa drowned in blood and fire, and its citizens lived on—scattered across this world, and still in Carcosa, eternal decadence and ruin under the terrible king. R’lyeh rose dripping from the waves, and its impossible angles broke the known world. Strange rents appeared in the sky, many-limbed things and wrong-colored stars slipping through. Time ran backward and forward and became meaningless. Weird, high piping replaced the calls of birds. Statues wept. Roads buckled, and cities crumbled to dust. The minds of every human being on earth were ripped from their skulls and sent screaming between the stars in metal canisters.
Except none of it had ever happened. But it had.
Everett knew about monsters in human skin. As for the rest of it…He slipped Constance’s book back into his bag. He would return to the library. He would keep doing his job. If his father wanted to talk to him, he knew for certain where to find him now. Everett promised himself that this time he wouldn’t run.
The unmistakable creak of the library’s front door opening echoed up to the mezzanine. Everett had been on edge all night. The back of his neck prickling, the constant sensation of being watched, of ghosts crowding the space, of terrible things lurking just around the corner. It had been three days since he’d left the message for his father. Three days since he’d last spoken to Constance, finished reading her book, and Everett’s conviction as to what he would do if his father did arrive flickered and changed as often as Constance herself.
Pushing back from his desk, Everett moved to the railing, his legs numb. It was like walking in a dream, slow and unreal. Peering down to the first floor, Everett saw gray hair. The man was thicker around the waist, but his hands, hanging loosely at his side—they were the hands Everett remembered. The swollen knuckles, ready to strike. The coiled rage, always there, just under the skin, even when he appeared calm. His father.
The man turned his head side to side, searching. Everett couldn’t help thinking of a snake, scenting the air.
He scrambled back at the same moment the old man looked up. All his resolve fled. He kept backing up, pressing himself into the space between two shelves. Had his father seen him? Recognized him?
Heart pounding, Everett listened for the sound of the elevator, or footsteps on the staircase. The spines of books dug into his back. He was being ridiculous. He’d invited the old man here, and this was a library—Everett’s ground, his place of power if he ever had one.
He pushed himself away from the shelf, ignoring the way his legs trembled. Constance’s book was tucked into his jacket pocket. He pulled it out, holding it like a talisman.
“Come on,” Everett murmured.
He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to his father, Constance, himself, or the Paradox Collection. Maybe all of them.
He concentrated on the prickly sensation, lightning under his skin, time stretching and bending and folding around him. Rather than letting the Paradox Collection catch him off-guard, he invited it in.
A white petal, a daisy, drifted to rest on the book’s pale green cover. Everett looked up. Constance grinned down at him from her perch atop the nearest bookshelf. Her legs dangled, as she plucked petals one by one and let them fall. When the last petal was stripped, she dropped down lightly beside Everett, tucking the bare stem behind his ear.
“For luck,” she said.
Everett glanced over his shoulder. He could just see the top of the staircase from here. His father’s head appeared. His first instinct was to grab Constance’s wrist and run.
He stood firm, bracing his legs as if preparing for a blow. Shelves flickered in and out of existence, there one moment, and the next a gash in the universe showed a strange field of stars, or a tower, or a staircase, or the angles of the library suddenly gone all wrong. Everett took a deep breath, acting on instinct, and stepped sideways.
The space enfolded him. He had the sensation of being in the library, but not. A void hung below him. He could feel solid ground under his feet, and yet darkness gaped, shot through with burning stars. Like falling upward, backward. Vertigo made his stomach lurch, bile rising, but then Constance’s fingers were there, cool and long, giving his hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Can he see us?” Everett barely dared to move his lips.
“No. We’re safe.”
Half in terror, half in fascination, Everett watched his father make his way around the mezzanine. He paused at Everett’s desk, touching the wooden sign. Constance breathed rings of smoke from an invisible cigarette. The shoggoth wrapped itself around her throat like a scarf, showing feathers and beaks and talons and scales through its slickly-wet flesh. They looked like interested spectators at a play. But this was Everett’s life.
As the old man drew closer, deep lines around his mouth and eyes became obvious. He passed within a foot of where Everett stood. So close Everett could have touched him. The old man looked right at Everett. Right through him.
Everett’s heart forgot to beat. There was no air in the room. His father’s eyes were much paler than Everett remembered. A washed out blue, like color trapped under a layer of ice.
His father turned away, and the world started again. Everett let out a rush of breath. His father walked to the railing, a puzzled expression like he was trying to work out where Everett had gone. Constance leaned close, but kept her eyes on Everett’s father.
“You could push him. Just a little accident.”
Everett flinched. He tried to imagine grabbing the old man by his jacket lapels, hauling him over the railing, watching his body shatter on the compass rose inlaid on the marble below. Brains and blood. He could see himself doing it, a phantom version of himself stepping forward, the shock widening his father’s eyes, and then his body falling.
Another phantom version split off; Everett watched himself walk forward, take his old man’s hand, and speak to him in a low voice. Yet another version of Everett ran. One hid. One broke his father’s jaw, while another broke down and wept.
A carousel of infinite possibilities spinning around him and leaving Everett dizzy.
“All equally possible, all potentially true,” Constance said.
“What happens if…” Everett trailed off. He didn’t know how to finish the question.
He hated the old man, he hadn’t forgiven him, but he didn’t have it in him to kill him. Or maybe he did. Maybe it didn’t matter, because all the possibilities were always playing out on every side of him, worlds nested inside worlds. In one he was a coward, the other, a monster, a scared little boy, and a man who’d found peace.
“Take me with you?” He turned to Constance.
Of all the possible futures, it was the one he wanted most right now. Not running away, but running toward something, a world bigger and stranger than this one, the world he’d always imagined existing right around the corner. In the end, that was the point he’d chosen to take from Constance’s book. Lavinia Whatley had found that world. Constance had, too. So why couldn’t he?
“Oh!” Constance brought her hands together, pressing her fingertips under her chin. Gills fluttered at the sides of her throat. “I thought you’d never get around to asking. Silly boy. The Paradox Collection is just a start. There’s still the Great Library. And Yith. Oh, you’ll love Yith.”
Everett’s head buzzed. He felt slightly drunk, dizzy, still reeling with the impossibility of it all. At the same time, he allowed himself to smile.
“Why are you helping me?” He felt the need to ask one more time, not expecting the truth—if there was such a thing as the truth of Constance.
“I told you, the Paradox Collection gets hungry.” She flashed a wicked smile. But he could see the darkness behind it. What she’d said about monsters before, it was true. Everything about Constance was true, just as everything was a lie.
Which meant he was a monster, too. Everett could feel it, the claws beneath his skin. The teeth and feathers and raging hunger. The part of him that had considered pushing his father over the ra
iling. The part of him that had done that very thing.
The shoggoth nuzzled Constance’s shoulder, trilling. She held out her hand - bitten nails and manicured ones, alive and not.
“Are you ready?”
Everett glanced over his shoulder. A myriad of possibilities looked back at him. Some frightened, some with blood on their hands.
Everett’s pulse sped again, but this time with more excitement than fear. The air behind Constance shimmered. The Paradox Collection. He nodded.
“Let’s go.”
Constance squeezed his hand. Her features blurred, smearing between solid and translucent. The door that wasn’t a door bulged outward, reaching for them. Everett stepped forward, feeling the edges of himself fray, unravel. He imagined hitting water as cold as the space between the stars and breathing it in. Constance’s shoggoth slid down her arm to wrap itself around their joined hands.
He took another step and let himself fall, all the possible truths of his life spooling and unspooling around him—the monster and the frightened child, all tucked together inside his skin.
THE WAY TO A MAN’S HEART
MARILYN “MATTIE” BRAHEN
Lorelei Tuscarelli wearily climbed the staircase leading to the Department of Arcane Literature at Miskatonic University. She had spent a good hour shopping that morning, trawling through the quaint shops of downtown Arkham, specifically for a woman’s most significant bit of apparel: lingerie. The Massachusetts winter had subsided sufficiently to let her abandon her flannel nightgown; warm as toast though it was, it couldn’t entice her husband to provide any extra human warmth in their king-sized bed. Professor Anthony Tuscarelli preferred to curl up with a compelling book, fiction or non-fiction, rather than his wife.
Hence, Lorelei decided that, with the onset of spring, it fell upon her to spice up their love life. She found the perfect strapless boudoir gown, black lace across the padded brassiere that would lift and shape her bosom and below it, sheer black silk flowed to her ankles. To further stock her sexual arsenal, she also purchased perfume advertised to drive a man wild with desire, and a bottle of scented lubricant. These she tugged in designer shopping bags as she reached the landing and trooped down the hall to her husband’s office. Students passed her coming and going. Some of the young men gave her raven hair, blue eyes and perky smile appreciative glances. Not to mention her shapely legs. Lorelei still possessed a short but comely figure and pretty face for a woman of thirty-five.
She knocked twice on the brown wooden door with its frosted glass and turned the knob and entered. “Tony, darling. I thought I’d stop by and see if you’re free for lunch. Hope you don’t mind.”
Professor Tuscarelli slowly raised his eyes from the term papers he’d been reading and marking. He stared at her fish-eyed, unblinking, then lowered his gaze to his students’ papers again. “Lorelei, you can see I’m busy.”
“You’re always busy, here and at home. Has it occurred to you I might want a bit of attention as well?”
Tony Tuscarelli slapped his marking pen down on his desk almost truculently, pushed back his chair and stood up. “Lorelei, we’re heading toward the end of this year’s school term, which is always a hectic time for both teachers and students. My own forté involves imparting the mysteries of unique literature rarely seen outside of Arkham and seeing that my students understand all the religious, sociological and exotic components and references.”
Lorelei studied him and wondered, not for the first time, how such an attractive man (with such rich brown hair, hazel eyes and noble patrician good looks) cared so little for the pleasures of his trim body and spent most of his waking hours only engaging his sizeable brain. In the four years since he and Lorelei tied the proverbial knot and moved to Arkham to accept the university’s professorial position, she was lucky to lure him into the proverbial sack once a month. Didn’t anyone tell him that it was legal to do more than snuggle the rest of the month? “Honey, I’m sure your students think you’re the most diligent teacher in the world. But I think state law allows for lunch and break times, and what better way to spend that time than with me, your lonely honey wife.” She sat on the edge of his desk as she described herself, leaning provocatively over so that the cleavage of her breasts peeked out from her low-cut blouse. She also mentally changed her self-description from “honey wife” to “horny wife” and hoped Tony was just a tad telepathic. Maybe all those strange books he read and taught about would help him read her mind. He obviously was bad at reading her lips, no matter how many nightly verbal hints she sent his way.
Neither mind-reading nor lip-reading worked this afternoon. He came around the desk and put his arm firmly around her. “I had a snack mid-morning and won’t want lunch for at least another hour. Plus I’m bogged down with work. I’ve always said you need to find ways to engage your mind more during the day.” He waved at the bags she had dropped on the office floor. “Shopping certainly isn’t food for thought, Lorelei. If you’re not going to seek a job yourself, you should read more. Why don’t you stop by the library here at Miskatonic and find some books to intrigue you and keep you occupied until I get home this evening? They have a wonderful selection on a wide variety of subjects. I’m sure you’ll find something to suit your fancy, dear.” His arm had started to warm her and she’d thought of leaning in for a kiss, but he led her to her shopping bags, picked them up, handed them to her, and opened the door, ushering her out the threshold. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She placed her free hand against the door before he could close it behind her. “You’ll be home on time?”
“I’ll call you if I’m delayed. Now go to the library. Your library card is one of the perks of being my wife!”
She nodded absently as he did shut the door, his tolerant smile receding behind it.
Lorelei clenched her fists, trooped down the hall and down the stairs. What the hell, she thought as she headed toward the library. Maybe they’ll have something racy. Sheesh! What’s the use of being married if you have to get your thrills from a book?!
The Miskatonic University Library, an early 19th century monstrosity, boasted a main floor, two upper floors, a basement, and a sub-basement reportedly filled with more books, countless periodicals and dated ephemera carefully stored to keep them from disintegrating. She walked crisply around the first floor, perusing the fiction section. While there were modern novels by 21st century writers cloistered around older volumes from the 19th and previous centuries, the only romances were literary. Not one sported a steamy cover with scantily clad men and women. Not that Lorelei was uneducated. She had read fiction literature during her college days and managed passable grades in English, but her BA in Business Administration and subsequent employment as a manager in a real estate firm in Boston hadn’t quite prepared her for life in Arkham with Tony. They met when she was twenty-eight and Tony was thirty and teaching at U. Mass, Lowell. A three year courtship cumulated in his proposal of marriage and his landing the new job at Miskatonic at the same time. They weren’t exactly prudish before marriage; Tony was more than sexually adequate, but both his new job and the atmosphere in Arkham seemed to create a creeping reticence in him when it came to the marriage bed.
She sat down at one of the tables dejectedly, glancing at a librarian seated at the information center, a woman not much older than she was, if appearances were any indication of age. The librarian apparently noticed her as well, turning a quizzical face to Lorelei, getting up from behind her desk and walking toward her. The woman’s apparel smacked of dowdy collegiate style, long brown skirt and saffron blouse with white lace around her collar. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a low ponytail that hung to the middle of her back.
The woman paused beside her. “Pardon me, but you looked a bit lost perusing the shelves. I’m Mrs. Perkins, the reference librarian. Is there a specific book you were searching for?”
Lorelei warmed to her friendliness. “Not really. My husband works here and was too busy to have lu
nch with me. He suggested I take out something to read and go home.”
“Who is your husband, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Anthony Tuscarelli. He teaches arcane literature.”
“Ah, Professor Tuscarelli,” she said with a knowing smile. “I know most of the professors. He has a reputation for being a bit of a workaholic.”
Lorelei leaned on the table, lowering her voice. “Do you have a minute to talk, woman to woman?”
Mrs. Perkins sat down in the chair next to hers. “Of course, dear. How can I help?”
Lorelei took a deep breath and let it out. “Well, Tony hasn’t, shall we say, been paying proper attention to me for the longest time. So I thought I might get him to notice me tonight using this.” She opened one of the shopping bags and drew out the sheer black nightgown. “And other things.” She drew out the perfume and lifted its cap, allowing Mrs. Perkins a sniff.
The librarian’s smile became softer and sympathetic. “Well, you may turn his head with such things, but I’ve always subscribed to the theory that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Have you considered greeting him one night with a romantic but gastronomically delightful dinner?”
Lorelei’s face clearly reflected her doubt. “I’m not much of a cook. We buy a lot of prepackaged and frozen meals.” She frowned. “Especially lately, he’s been working till all hours and coming home long after I’ve eaten my own dinner. He just pops something in the microwave for himself on those nights.”
“You poor dear, you look positively miserable. Why don’t I show you our culinary section? It has some wonderful cookbooks and many are exotic enough to turn the head of a man in love with arcane knowledge back to his wife.”
Lorelei shrugged. “I guess it’s worth a try.” She got up.
Mrs. Perkins also rose. “Wonderful! Follow me.” And led her past the shelves marked Literature, Biographies, and Creative Arts, to a section marked Culinary and Homemaking Crafts. She raised her right hand and her fingers trailed across the spines of the books, resting on one and pulling it from the shelf. “Now you don’t want just any ordinary recipes to achieve your goal. I’d say the professor would prefer a meal of mystery. This book might just provide the perfect menu.” She handed it to Lorelei. The title read: The Gastronomicon: Recipes to Enchant and Enlighten Discerning Palates.
The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Page 13