The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library

by Darrell Schweitzer

  By then there were figures wearing sacks all around the building, groping at doors and windows.

  She took me into her office. The bright lights were on, and there, on her desk, open, lay The Book of Undying Hands.

  There was much to explain and little time to do it. I told her what had happened to Nick, and as I did, I began to blubber, realizing now that he was dead that he really had been a good friend, one of the few I had, and I had lost a great deal. Mrs. Hoag let this pass, but said we must be strong. Nick would want us to be strong. The reason he’d been killed, she told me, was to prevent him from becoming part of the book.

  “That’s why they took his hands,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  She explained further that there were two factions or sects throughout the world obsessed with the book. One served unrestrained chaos. Their creed was sheer nihilism, their purpose the destruction of mankind and the world, either for the perverse fun of it, or because they served some vaster, cosmic powers which desired this end. The other faction sought to understand and control the powers of the book. Its purpose was unclear, its morality ambiguous, its ultimate goals a mystery which, supposedly, one could only understand by full mastery of the book. Only those who are of the book understand the book, the saying went. The choice was between black and gray, between the howling abyss and shadows. The latter were humanity’s best bet. The competition, then, was between our faction and the others, a matter of who could insert as much of their self-gathered knowledge, their very souls, into the book the fastest. The book itself was supremely indifferent, gorging itself on anything and everything whenever an adept of either faction was sufficiently prepared and worth assimilating.

  “It’s a matter of maintaining balance,” Mrs. Hoag said. “That was Nick’s mission originally. I sent him out on his quest around the world. You didn’t know that, did you? He worked with me from the very beginning, from when he was a student. He never stopped. He was a brave man, Professor, and I am sure he was a true friend to you. Now your task is to hold off his enemies until I, as best as I am able, can take his intended place.”

  At that point I heard the glass in the front door to the library breaking, as if someone had gone at it with a battering ram.

  Quickly she gave me the same metal talisman she had used that afternoon. She had written out several chants or spells on index cards, carefully marking access and stresses, because I had to pronounce them correctly if they were to do any good.

  I heard things crashing, computers knocked over, furniture overturned.

  “This is very dangerous,” she said.

  “You don’t have to tell me that now. I’ve figured that much out.”

  “I mean we actually don’t know which side the Black Monks of Tsa-Neng were on.” She shrugged. “Well, I’ve got to try.”

  She sat down at her desk, turned the pages of the book until she came to a blank one, and began to write.

  My job was to go out and hold the fort as long as possible. I found the main lobby of the library filled with shambling figures with shapeless sacks over their heads. All of them had eyes like black pits. Leading them was a hulking thing, scarcely human at all, which could only have been Nick’s “customer” from earlier in the day. He or it, I had come to understand, was a foul descendant of someone or something else, which had tried something like this once before, back in the 1920s in Dr. Armitage’s day.

  But there was no one as strong or as wise as Dr. Armitage to defend humanity now. There was only me. I held up the talisman, and the horde drew back for a time, but they recovered their courage and advanced. I shouted the incantations I had been given, trying to read them from the index cards. I dropped one of the cards. I retreated into the head librarian’s office and moved a desk against the door, all the while chanting what I could, holding the talisman.

  This worked for a while, but eventually they forced the door open and heaved the desk aside. I struck out with the talisman, pressing it into the face of their leader, who howled as his flesh sizzled and smoked. But it was not enough. The others caught hold of me. They flung me around like a rag doll, slamming me against walls and filing cabinets, and then the inner door which led to Mrs. Hoag’s office. I think they intended to use me as their battering ram to get in.

  The rest is pretty confusing. But before I blacked out I saw the book, on Mrs. Hoag’s desk. She was not there. The book was closed. I distinctly saw the big guy, the leader, reaching for the book, but it vanished, leaving him angrily groping at thin air.

  He howled. The others lost all interest in me and let me drop to the floor.

  Of course when I woke up in the hospital some days later, I had a lot of explaining to do. The police thought it very suspicious that I had been the last person to speak with Nicholas Blackburn, who was dead by extreme violence, and then I somehow got myself mixed up in this. Mrs. Hoag was missing, I gathered. There was no body. What was I doing in the library at 3 AM anyway? One of the detectives, speaking fluent cliché, said, “It just doesn’t add up.”

  But there is at Miskatonic an inner committee unbeknownst even to most faculty members, which investigates certain matters. Dr. Armitage had founded it back in the 1920s. Once I explained myself to them, there were no further inquiries. The library was closed for a while. The damage was repaired. When I was sufficiently recovered, I returned to my teaching.

  It was many months later that I found The Book of Undying Hands in the periodicals section again. It was open on the table this time. I was able to read a page, in English, in Mrs. Hoag’s neat handwriting. I didn’t understand very much of what I read, and I did not try to touch the book, much less turn the page, though certainly I felt the impulse to do so. I looked away, but not quickly enough to avoid noticing that the hands on the covers were pale and withered.

  I forced myself to go about my business. A half an hour later, when I came back to that part of the room, the book was gone.

  THE BONFIRE OF THE BLASPHEMIES

  ROBERT M. PRICE

  (For Fred Chappell)

  The police quickly determined that it had been arson. But Ezra Pepperidge, a retirement-age scholar at Miskatonic University’s Hoag Library, knew that as soon as he trudged across the snowy campus toward the climbing flames. He saw that the fire, though extraordinarily fierce, was confined to the wing of the ivy-covered building that housed the Special Collections Room, his own favorite haunt. Someone had used sophisticated means to restrict the spread of the conflagration, like a hunter drawing a bead on one particular animal in a herd. And, as subsequent investigations would show, the culprit was a member of a militant fundamentalist sect with a vendetta against “occultists and devil-worshippers.” Dr. Pepperidge remembered the name neither of the sect (they were all pretty generic and thus interchangeable) nor of the founder. But he did recall the boast of its founder that, before he repented and “trusted in the Lord,” he had for years served as the leader of a Satanist coven seeking to infiltrate and subvert the traditional Christian culture of America. There had been several such con artists back in the 1970s, and again during the “Satanic Panic” of the 1990s. But most of them had long since sought other rackets, not yet exposed. This one, however, the old librarian had reason to believe, was a deadly serious endeavor.

  Over the decades, the exotic contents of the now ashen volumes in the euphemistically named Special Collections Room had been what the law calls an “attractive nuisance,” a beacon of light for confused lost souls who believed the heretical old books might enable them to contract for genuine supernatural power to use, no doubt, for petty and selfish ends that ordinary social skills, had they possessed them, would have been sufficient to achieve. There had been more than one sordid spectacle of ritual murder in the outlying woods, plus one or two psychotic breakdowns, and a number of expulsions for tactfully unspecified reasons. Pepperidge knew it was this dubious history that accounted for the quips of “Finally!” and “Good riddance!” he heard rising from the bundled crowd
as the inferno began to subside and yawning, shivering faculty and students drifted back to dormitories and campus apartments.

  But Dr. Pepperidge’s reaction was not of this kind, no, not at all. He knew full well that what had happened here on this cold, but fire-warmed, night was a tragedy far deeper than anyone else could know. Old and irreplaceable tomes irretrievably lost? Yes, and he would have wept over such a loss, such an act of barbarism, had it been, say, the Truman Collection of New England History or the Morryster Archive of Alternate Science that had perished. But the old man knew as none other did that the loss of the Special Collections Room and its forbidden contents posed more of an existential danger than that of cherished but mundane rarities.

  Oh, the terrible irony of the zealots who had wrought this deed! Little did they suspect what they had done. For Pepperidge knew both how right and how awfully wrong they were! He was no self-blinded earth-gazer, oblivious of the existence of Powers beyond human ken but not beyond human petitioning. He knew from his own investigations into the occasional deaths and expulsions in and around the college town of Arkham that there had been more, far more, in play in these atrocities than fanaticism and out-of-hand pranks. Some of the tampering fools had been the proverbial monkeys with machine guns, but there were times, too many of them, when real damage, even apocalyptic damage, had been invited but diverted by the very books some coveted and others feared. He had studied the various grimoires, demonologies, and occult scriptures and learned how their power might be (and had been) utilized as wards of protection, apotropaic devices to avert the dooms and sendings of the wicked. And it had worked! How else to explain how the presence of such an armory of magical weaponry had rested here on a defenseless University campus in quaint New England all these decades?

  And now that protection was gone. But the reputation of the town and the University had long ago earned (superstitious?) renown as a nexus of supernatural energies. There was still the live possibility that dimly-understood forces might make themselves known here, whether at the invitation of stupid mortals or on their own initiatives. Maybe the old librarian was being paranoid, as he sometimes suspected himself. Certainly anyone in whom he might confide his fears would think so. Thus he confided only with himself. And a plan was beginning to form.

  He knew he must replace as many of the rare texts as he could, at least their contents if not original editions. And this was no easy task. A very few other university libraries in the Western Hemisphere had once possessed copies, but they, too, had learned the hard way what mischief the mere housing of the books invited, and they had discarded them. They had almost certainly destroyed them, though no library would confess such a deed. And one or two collections, Pepperidge strongly suspected, had suffered the same fate as Miskatonic’s.

  As the old scholar stamped the snow off his boots and returned to bed, he thanked…Someone? that he had just the other day borrowed from the Collection one recent acquisition, to give it a closer look. It was a kind of apocryphal adjunct or appendix to the Eltdown Shards. The Shards purported to survive from a lost civilization or even another planet! This new section was supposed to be a similar set of messages from yet another extraterrestrial race, transmitted from an order of ancient archivists rather like himself. Some things, it seemed, were constant through the universe wherever intelligence flourished. Oh, Pepperidge was well aware that taking such a “crackpot” document seriously would cost him any academic credibility, but publicly he always took refuge in the maxim of Saul Lieberman: “Mysticism is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” But privately he knew it was not nonsense and that it was much more than scholarship.

  He thought it great luck that this particular volume had escaped the flames, as there were in its turgid translation a few hints to aid him in his project. Perhaps more would come to him as he dreamed.

  The next day, classes went on as usual, but the Hoag Library was closed as damage assessments were made and police examined the blackened shell of the destroyed book room. Dr. Pepperidge was thus able to spend the day in his campus apartment, his robe draped over his spare frame, and smoking his pipe. He was deep into the Eltdown Shards transcript when suddenly he remembered a dream from the night before. It had been forgotten, as even the most colorful dreams often are, until now. He looked up at the leak-stained ceiling, at nothing, excitedly recapturing the night vision.

  He seemed to be in a shadowed place that dimly echoed with subtle, unidentifiable background noises. He found himself standing before a seated figure of strange proportions, though vague and veiled in outline. The being was covered in silks, some yellow, some gold. The dreamer waited upon this figure as students had waited upon him for information in the University Library. It was a peculiar role reversal. He did not remember the figure actually imparting the information he sought, but when he awoke with a start, Dr. Pepperidge realized that there were certain things he knew and even felt as if he had always known. The only further specific he recalled from his dream, and that only dimly, was that there had been some sort of transaction. Oh, well. On with the business at hand.

  There was a crude diagram in the text, presumably accurately reproduced from the original. It was surprisingly complex, making Dr. Pepperidge think of the confusing mandalas of higher math. The angles gave him a faintly nauseating sense of dyslexia. The surrounding text implied it was an illustration of a “gate,” though it hardly looked like one. He took his wire-rims off and rubbed his eyes (even though doctors said you weren’t supposed to). What sense did it make even as a metaphor? As a looming headache suddenly dissipated, Pepperidge’s mind jumped to something altogether irrelevant: the portrait gallery, lining the walls of the Great Hall, of venerable faculty and administrators. Glancing at them, the librarian had often thought how, if the intent of such a display was to enshrine these veterans of Miskatonic’s past, it had not worked very well. As far as most of the students and even the current generation of faculty were concerned, these framed portraits might just as well have been likenesses of the Hapsburg emperors. Pepperidge knew his own visage would never hang there, nor did he mind; he wondered fancifully if the souls of these old bearded and balding patriarchs might be trapped within the canvases.

  “Snap out of it, old man!” he chided himself and tried to dismiss the line of thought. But just before he could change the subject, he found himself focusing on one particular remembered portrait, that of an instructor in Political Economy, named Something Peaslee, to whom some scandal or mystery had attached. One link led to another, and Pepperidge laid aside the Eltdown Shards. There was something here germane to his purpose, if he could only think of it. Like a forgotten name, it eluded him momentarily. Then he had it! In the Hoag Library, he had been shown a diary written by the man. Its contents were so outré that the head librarian asked him to decide whether it should be deposited in the Special Collection. Pepperidge read the thing with some interest and finally decided it would fit more naturally under Aberrant Psychology. Now that he thought of it, he remembered seeing descriptive notes for a hypnotic device that Peaslee thought would allow him to engage in some type of soul-projection. Later in the diary, the professor claimed that the machine had worked! For many months, others subsequently told him, his personality had undergone a drastic shift so that he no longer even seemed the same man. Of this alter ego Peaslee professed no memory after the extended spell had concluded. But he also averred that, during the same period he did remember what one would have to consider a series of fever dreams in which he had assumed a borrowed existence among utterly inhuman intelligences in an underground archive. He even said that occasional glimpses outside revealed a world of thick and steamy jungle inhabited by Cretaceous titans. This adventure Peaslee believed to have been an actual transport through time as well as space.

  At this juncture, Dr. Pepperidge’s meditations were interrupted by a knock at the door. He rose and clutched his robe together, hoping his caller would not think him a lazy lay-about. As it hap
pened, his visitor was one of the police officers who had attended the scene of the fire in the wee hours. His purpose was to supply what new details they had gathered. Naturally, the librarian was quite eager to hear them. The big development was the apprehension of the arsonist. This was when he learned of the religious zealot’s role in the disaster. He had proven easy to trace and seemed almost happy to suffer such “persecution,” as he considered it. The man’s name was Lathrop Something. When he thought back on it, Dr. Pepperidge couldn’t recall the surname. The first name remained with him because it was old on his mother’s side of the family, and the librarian hoped he was no relative of the arsonist. He thanked the officer and returned to his thoughts. But his struggles to remember this and to understand that had tired the old man, so he doffed his glasses and dialed up his electric blanket. He was soon asleep.

  He did not dream, but as frequently happens, when the waking mind gives up its worrying over an answer, the subconscious is free to dredge up the missing piece. Thus the next morning, Pepperidge blinked awake with the connection he had labored to make. Now he knew why he had thought of Peaslee’s diary: the odd design in the Eltdown Shards corresponded quite closely to the verbal blueprint of the device from Peaslee’s notes.

  At the end of two weeks, Dr. Pepperidge had located a man in Arkham who advertized a specialty in repairing small engines. He brought him a copy of both the diary description and the ancient diagram and asked the man if it looked like a functional device.

  “Well, Mr. Pepperidge, I can’t even guess what it’s supposed to do, but the plan’s simple enough. All the parts are pretty easy to get hold of. We can try.” The whole idea seemed less plausible to Dr. Pepperidge than it did to the mechanic, but then again, it had been simple enough for a professor of Political Economy, one who lived in an abstruse world of airy theory, to build. It wasn’t rocket science, but to an old dog like Pepperidge, fixing a toaster was tantamount to rocket science, so he was happy to leave it to a professional.