The recruitment went off flawlessly. The athletic lad he chose was eager to do anything that might help him avoid the wrath of his parents, who were footing the bill for his education. And the promised money? That would come in handy for a few, or maybe more than a few beers at Ernie’s Tavern. The kindly old librarian ushered his protégé into his apartment, careful to make sure no one saw them enter. The lad expressed a degree of surprise at the state of the apartment, with chairs, desk, and sofa shoved to the margins and floor empty save for a strange and complex diagram drawn in colored chalks.
“Some kinda hopscotch?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I suppose it is a something of a game, though, because there are definite rules, and I need your help to follow them, Tim. Now I need you to stand right here. You’re going to hear me, er, say a prayer in a language you probably don’t know. It will seem a bit strange, but bear with me. You’ll know just what to do when the time comes. I really appreciate this, my boy.”
“Sure, Dr. Pepper.” It was a joke the old man had heard too many times to take offense at any more. And the student probably thought that was really the librarian’s name.
The student stood quietly, his only motion an occasional scan around the room, as if looking for someone for whose benefit this peculiar charade was being performed. He had not long to wait.
The room temperature grew suddenly very cold. At that signal, Dr. Pepperidge emptied a clump of ashen matter onto the floor at the center of the diagram and quickly stepped back. Retrieving a butcher knife from a sheath on his belt, he swiveled about and grabbed the blank-staring student by the collar and plunged the blade into his chest. As the boy silently crumpled to the floor, Pepperidge clumsily cupped as much of the spurting crimson as he could into his hands and splattered it over the small ash-heap. Gasping with his adrenaline rush, the old man became dizzy but managed to resume the prescribed chant.
His eyes felt a sudden pressure, as if something had exploded in front of his face. He was blinded for the merest instant. Things started to swim into view again as he heard a voice, imperious with a sly hint of the devious. Before it gave way to screaming, Pepperidge knew the voice spoke Dutch, as expected. Luckily, this was one of the many languages in which the erudite librarian was reasonably fluent. The screaming died away, replaced by halting speech. The more he heard, the more difficult it was to understand, and Dr. Pepperidge realized Ludvig Prinn, standing there quite naked, his bald and wizened form well-nigh covered with severe burns and scars, was speaking a long-antique version of the language. But he easily adjusted his ears to this, the tongue in which the familiar text of Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm was written.
“Welcome, O Master Prinn! Forgive my disturbing your rest!”
“Rest? Knowest thou not whence I come? Believe it, no repose awaiteth thee there! Now, O wretched man of a decadent age, I am bound to do thee service. Fear not, and speak thee forth!”
“Ah, it is your, thy, book that I must needs seek.”
“And dost thou expect a book from me, who hath not even rags to cloth me?”
“Nay, nay, kind sir. But only that thou shouldst dictate unto me, and I will copy.”
The being he had raised trembled violently as if his burns still tormented him, but he replied: “I do remember it, the cursed tome that damned me to the flames in this world and the next. But bid me not repeat it, lest some torment even worse befall me!”
Pepperidge was growing desperate. “Milord, I must have it! But mayhap thou mightest recite but a portion thereof? Might I hear from thee The Saracenic Rituals?”
“Ugh—the very worst, on which account I suffer most! But come, let us be about it, so the sooner I may depart!”
His interlocutor clicked on a hand-held tape recorder, hoping he would not have to try the reluctant revenant’s patience by stopping to change tapes.
An hour later it was done. The visitor seemed to be oblivious of his presence, flinching at some new degree of torment. Pepperidge turned off his machine, then spoke the incantation in reverse, and the grotesque figure dropped away, returning to that from which it had risen. Something made the exhauster librarian say aloud, “Ye are the salt of the earth.”
He had memorized another procedure from the Nameless Cults, one designed to reduce an intact body to its chemical rudiments, and this he now spoke over the murdered student whose name he had already forgotten. There was still something of a mess to clean up, but at least there was no inconvenient corpse to dispose of.
Around midnight, the weary old savant woke up with the realization that he had now performed one of those ritual murders he had long bemoaned. Nothing to be done about it now, though.
Transcribing the recitation was no easy chore. Things like voice recognition software presented a daunting prospect for the old man, and he did not dare hire someone else to transcribe the Saracenic Rituals. So he set about the task, constantly stopping, writing, hitting re-play, checking his accuracy, and so on. Despite the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, Pepperidge found it an almost intolerable penance. But he finally got through it and rejoiced. Then a long nap.
The following day, he assessed his progress. He had managed to obtain, in one form or another, three of the fundamental works of eldritch lore: the Book of Eibon, the Nameless Cults, and the Saracenic Rituals. It had been a rigorous process, but it was far from complete. There was at least one more volume he must restore. He consulted the book of Von Junzt, feeling sure it would offer the solution he required. No one had ever claimed to possess the remains of the Mad Arab. Indeed, none could even exist if the legends told truly of the old apostate’s death. His biographer, Ibn Khallikan, swore that, according to horrified witnesses, Abdul Alhazred had been completely devoured in plain sight by some invisible demon. So there would have to be another way.
And there was. He would go to the same source from which the Arab had himself received his revelations. Prinn’s Saracenic Rituals told how one might summon the Host of Ekron, that swarm of desert jinn who are said to appear in the form of cachinnating insects, chittering locusts and buzzing flies. It was this mode of revelation to which the abhorred book owed its original Arabic title, Al-Azif, “the Buzzing.” In remote antiquity, Ahaziah, King of Israel, had dispatched messengers to Ekron, one of the five cities of the Philistine pentad, to seek an oracle from its deity, mighty Baal-zebub, the Lord of the Flies, only to be cursed for it by the prophet Elijah. Centuries afterward, Alhazred, too, had sought out the forbidden oracle, and he, too, finally succumbed to a deadly curse. What might befall Ezra Pepperidge if he also dared? He decided to bow to a fate that lay before him as surely as if he had deciphered it from the writings on the linen shroud of Nephren-Ka.
Things were eerily falling into place, for he soon learned of plans for an archaeological expedition to the Holy Land to be sponsored by Miskatonic’s Divinity School. It was a simple matter, almost too simple, for him to secure a place on the team. They would soon be taking a plane to Tel Aviv, then striking out for Ashdod, another of the great Philistine cities. Ekron lay just to the south of the still-inhabited town. Ekron, like ancient Gath but unlike Gaza and Ashdod, had long ago been depopulated. It was located at the mound of Khirbet el-Muqanna. Ekron was also transliterated as Accaron, which Dr. Pepperidge recognized as Acheron, an ancient city of sorcery and wickedness in the Hyborian Age.
He had taken part in one of these expeditions before, so his participation did not seem a contrivance. Despite the limitations of his age, Dr. Pepperidge was able to roll up his sleeves and do real work for the endeavor, which was in itself of interest to him as an antiquarian. But no one objected when he pleaded fatigue and asked for a day’s rest. Behind the wheel of a jeep, and without informing anyone of his destination, he followed the bumpy road to Khirbet el-Muqanna. There was little else to be seen in the vicinity, so it proved not difficult to find. A couple of Bedouins at a distance took little notice of him, so he faced no challenge. Except that of ignorance. He did not really
know what ought to happen next.
Along about eleven that night, the old scholar took out his Bible and began to read aloud from the story of Ahaziah and his doomed embassy to Ekron and Baal-zebub. As it happened, that was all it took. Gradually a wind stirred the chill night air and whipped the flames of his campfire. On the wind he heard the rising sound of buzzing insects. The stars above him were suddenly obscured by an army of flying insects. Among them, new “stars” of purple light flickered.
The librarian-turned-archaeologist sensed a Presence at the center of the whirling spiral. He heard no voice, saw no form, but the intuition would not be denied. As if praying to an invisible god (which, come to think of it, was just what he was doing), Dr. Pepperidge vocalized his heart’s desire. He sought the secrets vouchsafed to his predecessor, Abdul Alhazred. He felt sure he would be heard, since otherwise his presence would not have called forth the phenomena he now experienced.
At once he blacked out, too fast for him to wonder if he might be dying. But he soon awakened to a dreamlike sensation of flying through space as one of the Host of Ekron. Time had become an illusion. Or he suffered from an illusion of timelessness. He seemed to witness scenes of history ancient and modern. He dreamed he was present at the emergence of indescribable behemoths from deep-sea prisons. He saw terrible sacrifices, obscene rites of blood and fire; writhing figures in living bas reliefs; undersea denizens and purposeful crustaceans the size of a man; pulpy maggots crawling forth from fresh graves, taking upon themselves the rough outlines of humanity. He glimpsed the conical aliens at war with another race of entities who wielded shrill whistling as their weapons. He gazed upon great citadels of chiseled ice through and around which strange creatures with stars for heads swarmed like bees in a hive. He recoiled from the face of One who was both the key and the guardian of a Gate. And there was much, much more.
At length Dr. Pepperidge’s over-loaded brain returned to waking consciousness. His poor head throbbed, both from the merciless sunlight without and from the daunting knowledge within. He opened his sore eyes as unknown hands helped him to his feet. Members of the Miskatonic expedition had grown alarmed at his lengthening absence and gone looking for him. His jeep’s tracks were easy to follow. But what could possibly have taken them so long? Judging from the huge mass of new learning at his command, he reckoned that he must have been “away” (whether in or out of the body, he could not say) for over a month, like Moses atop Sinai receiving the words of God for forty days. But when questioned, his rescuers informed him it had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d left the camp. Now he knew how Scrooge felt on Christmas morning. The spirits had done it all in one night.
Back in camp, the rest of the team insisted he take an early flight back to the States. Apparently, the old scholar was not quite as vigorous as they had all thought. He swiftly acquiesced and packed his things.
On the plane home, he considered his next move. He had read the book of Alhazred, so what he had seen in his dream quest was not in principle new to him, and the experience was by no means as mind-unhinging as it must have been to another man, perhaps as it had been to the “mad” Arab, who could not possibly have emerged unscathed after the thunderstorm of revelation he had been deluged with.
Dr Pepperidge knew he could not hope to restore the actual text of Alhazred’s fabled Necronomicon, down to the evocative and poetic wording. He had never memorized the hundreds of pages of the book, nor had any need to. Some few passages he probably knew pretty literally. His desert vision had not imparted Alhazred’s text to him, but only more or less the same information. It would be his task for the next months, if not years, to compose a new compendium of the revelations he and his predecessor had received, a “Neo-necro-nomicon,” as it were. It ought to serve the purpose.
It took Dr. Pepperidge more time than he had thought it would to finish his new version of Al-Azif. He had it printed and bound. Then he took his prizes to the Hoag Library as the seed from which a new Special Collection might grow. There were many volumes he had reluctantly despaired of restoring. But he had managed to obtain hitherto-uncatalogued copies of a few: the Black Sutra of Li-Po, Jacob Frank’s Book of Iod (known to some as the Black Zohar), and Rudolf Yergler’s potent Ghorl Nigraal.
His long chore could have been longer, true, but Ezra Pepperidge was physically and emotionally exhausted. He finally allowed himself to relax in the hope that these new acquisitions would together rekindle that ring of ectoplasmic fire which should again shelter the community and its University from nefarious assaults. There would be no public access at all to the Collection, and researchers must not even be allowed to know of it. That was no longer the purpose of Miskatonic’s holdings in this field. The books would now serve exclusively as a protective talisman.
The trouble started with a distressed call from the Library Director. “Ezra, how many copies of those crazy books did you order? And who the hell paid for the printing? For the distribution?”
“Slow down, Malcolm. I don’t know what you’re upset about. What seems to have happened?”
His face went blank as the Director told him the news. Miskatonic’s Special Collection was widely known among university librarians, who had long ago learned to turn down Inter-Library requests for these titles. This morning the Hoag staff had been swamped with calls from colleagues at other campuses all over the country and several others. Suddenly and inexplicably, every one of these institutions found on their shelves brand new copies of the Necronomicon, Mysteries of the Worm and the rest of the notorious books. None of them knew to be afraid of the contents; all lacked Miskatonic’s experiences with Whateleys and Marshes and Waites. But they wanted to know what sort of prank had been played on them and how it had been done. It was a week or so before any of these colleges realized they were not the only recipient of these supposedly rare books.
Pepperidge could have told them all he knew and he still could not have explained this mystery. He was fully as baffled as everyone else. But the mystery only grew deeper when scrutiny of computerized card catalogs and bookstore inventories the world over indicated that a great many books had somehow vanished from all shelves. If thieves had been at work, how did every one of them escape any and all notice? Even more strange was that it was only the total numbers of entries that were inconsistent with the actual holdings. No one could name or think of any missing volume! No one recalled ever hearing of the works of Shakespeare, of the Bible, of Homer, Dante, Ingersoll, Einstein, or of any others based on them.
As soon as he was off the phone, Dr. Pepperidge saw that he had a visitor at his door. Still at sea, he vacantly opened up and waved the man in. They both sat, and the librarian shook his head to regather his wits.
“I…I’m sorry to be so distracted! Uh, what can I do for you? Are you a student here? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
He would have remembered him had he ever seen him, for the tall, rather gaunt fellow was particularly striking. He was of indeterminate age and ethnicity, probably African or South Indian. But the features were chiseled, the nostrils not flaring as they would if the man had been of African or Australian Aborigine descent. His voice betrayed no specific accent. He was completely bald and dressed in jet black, as if he wore a costume rather than casual clothing. Pepperidge realized he was studying the man more intently than was polite.
“If you’ve told me your name, I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten it! Forgive an old man.”
“Not as old as me. Not nearly. My name is an old one, out of fashion. It’s Lathrop Nye. Are you sure you haven’t at least heard of me?”
“Wait, now it’s coming back…I think perhaps I have…” His eyes widened.
“Surely you can’t be the man who…”
“Burned down the library? I admit that I am, Mr. Pepperidge.”
“Why aren’t you in police custody, Mr. Nye? I was under the impression they had apprehended you.”
“They couldn’t make it stick. And I didn’t admi
t it to them as I have to you. Anyway, I thought I ought to stop by and explain what’s happened. You see, I knew it would. Mr. Pepperidge, do these book titles mean anything to you? The Iliad, The Bible, The Divine Comedy? No? Never heard of them? Can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Mr. Nye, you may think you’re explaining something to me, but I’m more confused than ever. Won’t you get to the point, assuming there is a point?”
A curt laugh prefaced the black man’s answer, which was another question.
“Do you by chance recall a dream you had a couple of years back? You were speaking with a figure veiled in yellow silk.”
“Yes! But…I’ve never told anyone about that dream! How…?”
“The fact is, my good man, that it was I myself to whom you spoke, with whom you bargained. I know I don’t look the same.”
“You’re saying it wasn’t a dream, then?”
“Not a dream, that’s right. Now I’ll tell you what it was. Let’s call it an interview, a negotiation. At issue was the loss of your special books, the Library’s special books. You were rather shaken up, as I recall.”
“Yes. Strange things, dangerous ones, have happened around here for many years. I thought things were likely to get much worse without those books.”
“So you wanted to replace them, and you knew that would be no simple task. You explained it all as we talked. And I offered to help. I did. I fed you your initial ideas once we had agreed on terms.”
The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Page 23