You will note that she had not explicitly denied the possibility of hauntings, only stated her—and ideally his—lack of interest in them.
I should say a word or two about Mrs. Hoag. Nick Blackburn certainly did. She was old even then. No one new how old. She was apparently a widow, and rumored to be either the daughter or the granddaughter of that Professor Armitage who had been involved in the “ghastly incident” back in the 1920s, in which someone had died horribly, right inside the library, or so the story went.
Mrs. Hoag was an iron-gray woman who kept strictly to herself, never spoke of her background or inquired of anyone else’s, and ran the library like an empress, very much her way, allowing no deviation. In fact she had resisted such modernities as computers or an electronic catalog until very late, into the twenty-first century; as a result the old card catalog is still there—but I am getting ahead of myself. Despite her rigidity and her aspect, Nick, told me, people who worked there respected her. She was far more than a tyrant or an administrator or someone who shelved books. She was an accomplished scholar in several esoteric fields, and once in a great while, if you were around her often enough, she could discourse brilliantly on precisely the kind of forbidden lore you would expect someone who had control of the Miskatonic collection to have mastery of. Cosmic, mind-blowing stuff. You see, some of the place’s reputation was and always had been fully justified. There’s even a celebrated account, if you know where to look for it, of what precisely happened in the library back in 1928 and why the carpet in that spot always seems inexplicably stained and moldy, no matter how many times it is replaced—but I digress. Mrs. Hoag could be fascinating. She could proffer just enough hints to open vast vistas—Nick never knew if that was her intent, though he said she was always careful not to do any harm, not to tell anyone, particularly impressionable undergraduate students, how to actually do anything.
Suffice it to say that Mrs. Hoag could be open to the idea of strangeness, and she took seriously her assigned task on keeping the lid on much of it.
But this evening, she had no time for ghosts, it seemed. There was nothing more to be said. Nick went home.
That was his first encounter, he told me later, with The Book of Undying Hands. The reason he had been unable to lay his own hands on it, much less read any of it was, as he curiously phrased it, that the book wasn’t “ready” for him yet.
Now fast-forward thirty years. In that much time, one moves on through life. I had become a professor—English literature; there’s far more to study at Miskatonic than Medieval Metaphysics—and by the age of fifty-something had become fat and balding, divorced, childless, and, I suppose, rather staid. After working at several other colleges around the country and an exchange sojourn at Oxford, I found myself on the faculty of my old alma mater, with little more to look forward to than several more years of half-interested students (and the occasional bright one), the publication of a few more books that nobody would read, and retirement.
Nick Blackburn, on the other hand, had led a colorful life, as much as I had been able to gather the details. His family was mysteriously wealthy—and just plain mysterious—and so after getting his degree he had managed a several-years-long “tour” around the world, in the course of which—we had been friends, though not especially close—I lost touch with him entirely. He apparently wandered off the tourist routes several times, and joined some sort of lodge or secret society that had branches in Bucharest and Prague, and other far more distant places, including, so I am told, Borneo. (In the course of this he’d picked up half a dozen languages with enviable ease.) He’d once nearly gotten himself into considerable trouble in Tibet, when he made friends with certain black magicians of the Bonpo sect, something his Communist minders really didn’t want him meddling in. Police had tried to grab him in a cave, but he’d fled under a mountain with the other magicians, and there were some difficult-to-follow descriptions of “angles” and “planes” and a “gate” through which he not only evaded arrest but turned up, inexplicably, a month later, in Nepal, where a combination of family influence and his credit card “burning white hot” got him home in one piece.
We renewed our acquaintance when he returned to Miskatonic. That was the irony, wasn’t it? Here he’d done this Indiana Jones act all around the world, in genuinely remote and exotic locales, and developed an involvement in the occult such the popular stereotype would expect from a Miskatonic grad—I did not slip when I wrote “the other magicians” above, for by now he surely counted himself as one of them—and when it was all over, here he was back in Arkham, working in that same library, middle-aged, largely friendless, with most of his family fortune gone.
We used to go out for drinks together.
I felt like a character in a story. Settle down in an exclusive gentleman’s club or some weird tavern, get a few drinks into my well-traveled colleague, and he would start telling one of his incredible yarns, which you didn’t know whether to believe or not.
“It was in Tibet, in the month under the mountain, that I found the book again,” he said.
“What book?”
“What book do you think? The book. The Book of Undying Hands. Oh it wasn’t the same, but I recognized it all right. The first time I saw it, when I was a kid, it looked like a medieval codex, with covers as massive as a castle door, pages of stiff vellum, exactly what I would have expected at the time. But in Tibet it was like a road map that folded out in a zig-zag pattern. But it still had the hands. Not the same hands, but hands, these were withered and yellow, probably those of some late member of the fellowship, who were called Black Monks of Tsa-Neng. I touched those hands, and they yielded to me, meaning that the book was ready for me at last. The script was not the Tibetan one, or anything I recognized. The characters seemed to wriggle across the page like tiny snakes, but after a while they did something to me. My vision changed, and I was able to understand them, almost as if a voice were whispering inside my head. After a few days I could converse freely with the Black Monks in their own, secret tongue. I could even understand what they were doing, when they wrote strange things onto the book’s blank pages.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “Do you mean that this is a contemporary work, that it is still being compiled?”
He took a long sip on his drink, ran out, and ordered another. Only after some interval, as if he were trying to carefully arrange his thoughts, and, as Mrs. Hoag used to do, tantalize without giving away too much.
“It is still being compiled, but it is by no means contemporary. It is older than time, older than mankind or this planet, I am sure, but it has the curious property that it attracts, then absorbs its authors, first fascinating them, filling their minds with incredible knowledge, granting them awesome powers so that they may gain more knowledge, but in the end compelling them, as its servants, to yield up into the book everything they have learned, until each one becomes part of the book.”
“You mean it’s an anthology, then? The Cosmic Omnibus of Madness and Sin, that sort of thing?”
“More like a Black Hole that’s going to suck up the entire intellectual universe. No, perhaps I exaggerate a little bit. It is an entity in itself, not alive in any sense we could understand, but a force, certainly, something with a will of its own, which appears where it pleases and cultivates its contributors—not authors—who contribute the way a fly contributes to a Venus fly-trap, but willingly for the most part, because by then they are so much a part of it already that they want nothing more than to yield themselves up to its greater consciousness.”
“That is,” I said, “seriously insane.”
“You may be wondering whose hands those are that hold the book shut, or open it when the time is right.”
“I hadn’t. But you’re going to tell me.”
“They are the hands of the most recent ‘contributor.’ The withered, yellow hands I had seen in Tibet were those of an ancient Black Lama. By the time I left, they were those of one of his younger collea
gues.”
“Eew. You mean the book bit the guy’s hands off?”
“Don’t be childish. He became physically, and metaphysically, part of the book and of the collective entity which manifests itself as the book. He therefore no longer existed in human form, nor had any need to.”
“Seriously insane.”
“From your limited perspective, certainly.”
Outside on the street afterwards we encountered three men—I guess they were men—in odd, shapeless clothing, with what looked like flour sacks over their heads and eye-holes crudely cut out, like they were on their way to a cut-rate Ku Klux Klan rally. They came within half a block of us, then turned down an alley. When we passed the alley, there was no sign of them.
“Now that’s peculiar,” I said.
“Not the word I would choose,” said Nick.
I had the sense that he was not surprised at what he saw, and perhaps alarmed, but not yet ready to explain.
If you want to talk about peculiar, or strange, or believe-it-or-not, how about this?
Mrs. Hoag was still the head librarian. Now the students said behind her back that she was older than God, but she was still there, and the subject of her retirement simply never came up. Now she and Nick Blackburn were “thick as peas in a pod,” which is no excuse to go all Freudian. No, she wasn’t his mother figure. But he was not her naïve young assistant anymore either. They were colleagues. They understood and shared quite a lot.
It might well have been through his influence that she had yielded to modernity somewhat, although certain rigid rules still applied. No one ever took anything from the Restricted section to a copy machine, and portable scanners or cameras were not allowed. There had been another unpleasant incident in the 1980s, involving The Book of Eibon (in this case the ineradicable stain was on one of the walls). The library had computers now, though, as I’ve mentioned, the old card catalog still remained, more a museum piece for most students than anything to use. I used it, though. I looked up The Book of Undying Hands shortly after Nick told me about it, and sure enough, it was not there. You could look up Necronomicon and there was a card for it, stamped “SPECIAL PERMISSION REQUIRED.” For this other, nothing. I tried the computer catalog too. Zilch, as expected. That could have meant, simply, that the university didn’t have a copy, I mean the copy, which was apparently well-traveled in its own right. It would have fit right in, but apparently it hadn’t found its way home yet.
Until it did.
This is where I enter the story, I am afraid, as an actor, rather than a mere observer.
I was the one who found The Book of Undying Hands in the Miskatonic University Library. I found it near to where Nick had, back when he was twenty, in the periodical section on the fourth floor, although not open on a desk as he had. It was stuffed into a shelf of Shakespeare Quarterly, spine inward, so I could see that the pages were indeed held shut by a pair of human hands that looked to be still alive. They must have been fresh. The book must have taken on newer contributors on its way here, because these were not the hands of some Tibetan lama, but of a large, strong black man. For a moment my mind raced, as I tried to think of any prominent African-American scholars who had gone missing recently, but I couldn’t remember any, and maybe it hadn’t been an American at all. This was crazy. I was accepting this all too easily, but of course I was looking at something completely crazy, and when I reached for it, there was something wrong with space or the angles or my senses, and I couldn’t touch it.
I heard a shuffling step behind me, and turned around suddenly and there were two of those guys with the sacks over their heads practically leaning over my shoulders. There was something about their eyes. I couldn’t see their eyes, just black holes. There was something misshapen about them. Their faces wriggled under the cloth as human faces shouldn’t or can’t.
As soon as I confronted them, they backed off, running away in opposite directions.
I ran after one of them and called out, feeling stupid as I did so, “If this is some kind of goddamn fraternity prank…” But in a minute I was out of breath and there was no one around.
When I went back to the Shakespeare Quarterly shelf, the book was gone. Unsurprisingly. Not that they took it. It wasn’t ready for me, so it had moved itself, of course.
How easy it is to say that, once you understand.
On my way out of the building I encountered Mrs. Hoag. She must have read much from the look on my face.
“Is everything all right, Professor Gregson?”
I didn’t know her nearly as well as Nick did, and I didn’t know how much she knew I knew, or whether I’d be getting Nick in any sort of trouble, so I merely said, “Yes, yes. I am fine. Is Nick Blackburn around?”
“No, he had the early shift today and has gone home.”
“Well, good evening, then.”
“Good evening.”
I tried calling Nick’s cell phone and left several messages. I finally got him about 9 o’clock that night. I suggested we go out for a drink. He said it was too late for that.
I told him what I had seen, and he just said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” as if he were waiting for me to get finished so he or I could get to the interesting parts.
Then he told me what had happened to him early today, about noon.
He’d been working at the information desk when suddenly this apparition heaved up over the counter and damn near smothered him.
“One of those guys in the sacks?”
No, it wasn’t like that at all. This sort of apparition was more the kind you get in big-city libraries, a massive, shapeless person, clearly a stranger to soap and to shaving—so the near-smothering was mostly from the smell—ragged and overdressed for any weather, and moving in such a way that he almost seemed to have something else, an animal perhaps, tucked under all that filthy cloth. This creature’s—or person’s—stained fingers held out an equally smudged index card in which was written the title The Book of Undying Hands in surprisingly neat and ornate script, with the authorship attributed to “Legion.”
“I need this book,” the person said. “I know it is here. I must have it. It is calling to me.” Much to Nick’s surprise, his “customer” was also able to pronounce the book’s title in perfect Latin, Aeternarum Manum Liber, then in Greek, Athanaton Cheiron Biblos explaining it had many names and titles over the ages.
It was not as if this was the sort of thing Nick was going to have right under the counter and be able to hand to him—unless the book chose to manifest itself that way—so the best he could try to do was stall and ask, “Have you tried the catalog?” and then say, “I am going to have to see some ID. Are you a student here?” though he knew perfectly well…and it was unthinkable that such a person would be a member of the faculty, this being a respectable college despite its reputation.
“It is here,” the stranger said. “I have dreamed of it. I will find it my-self.”
With that he lurched past Nick’s desk, but was stopped in his tracks by none other than Mrs. Hoag, who actually held up some sort of talisman, from which the stranger recoiled.
It was obvious that there was long-standing enmity between them, as if they were ancient tribal enemies who loathed one another in their very being, and whose ancestors had done the same.
“Get out,” she said. She began to chant something. The intruder made grunting noises that almost formed into words, but became a kind of howling.
This being the middle of the day, there were other people in the library at the time, and they were staring.
She moved toward him, almost touching him with the talisman or whatever it was, and he all but melted away and practically slithered out the front door, or so Nick described it to me with only minimal hysteria and exaggeration.
He was so shaken by this that he fumbled everything he tried to do afterwards, so Mrs. Hoag sent him home early, which is why, when I was in the library later that evening, I had missed him. How imperceptive of me, when I met her on th
e way out, that I had not been able to tell that anything of the sort had happened. She had seemed her usual unflappable self, and certainly there was no ineradicable stain on the carpet.
When Nick had finished telling me this, we talked for a while, and then we hung up. I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
An hour after he got off the phone must have been when he was murdered.
Horribly, the police told me when they talked to me about it. He had been beaten to an almost unrecognizable pulp, and then the bastards had cut off his hands and taken them away. I thought I knew why. I was certain I knew why. But it was not something I could tell the police.
It was quite late, almost 3 AM by the time the police were done with me, and by then I was certain of what I must do. I was certain the crisis was at hand, that things were happening right now or had already happened. What I was most afraid of was that it would be too late, and I had wasted too much time with police questioning, during which I had provided very little useful information.
Instinct told me to call the head librarian’s office at the Miskatonic Library, despite the hour. I did. Mrs. Hoag picked up. I said I had something I needed to tell her at length. She told me to come over, despite the hour. There was no one around on the campus, not even security guards. If the surveillance cameras picked me up, so what? I doubt they got anything important.
As I got out of my car, I saw some of the guys with the sacks over their heads, standing up out of the bushes. I ran for the service entrance Mrs. Hoag had told me to come to, and she let me in, locking the door behind her.
The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Page 20