The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library
Page 24
“Terms? What terms? What are you talking about, Mr. Nye?”
“I guess you’ve forgotten all that. That’s fine; you were supposed to forget. I knew you would, and I thought I’d drop in and remind you.”
“Do I owe you my, er, my, ah, soul?”
“No such thing,” the man said with amusement. “It was more of a trade in kind. You see, for every book you restored, every title, I believe you librarians say, a classic work of thought or art would vanish from the shelves and the memories of men. They would no longer offer their wisdom to mankind. The effects will, I am sure, will be interesting. But don’t worry, these tired old tomes have been replaced with those you so doggedly tracked down. They are everywhere now, and anyone can consult them. So many already have! And soon you will see the results. Well done, good and faithful servant!”
CONTRIBUTORS
Darrell Schweitzer is the author of three novels, The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, and The Mask of the Sorcerer, plus about 300 published short stories. He is a four-time World Fantasy Award nominee and one-time winner, a former editor of Weird Tales magazine, a critic, and author of books on H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. He has edited anthologies before, including The Secret History of Vampires, Cthulhu’s Reign, Full Moon City, and That Is Not Dead (PS, 2015). His novella Living with the Dead was published by PS in 2008 and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Among his more dubious accomplishments, he authored The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal and has led the choir at Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts, for which he got his picture posted on the New Yorker website (See “Croissants with Cthulhu”) in 2015. He also rhymed Cthulhu in a limerick, but has refrained from doing it here.
John Ashmead has a BA in physics from Harvard, summa cum laude and a masters in physics from Princeton. He’s working on a physics dissertation, Time & Quantum Mechanics, which is now going through the peer review process at an online journal. He got his start as an editor at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He went on into software consulting, working for perinatal clinics, a cemetery, law firms, some schools & colleges, a cable advertising firm, and a portfolio management company. He is now a database administrator & developer at Nistica, which produces the optical switches used to control the internet. His life’s ambition is to develop a practical and cost-effective time machine.
Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen has published fiction in American and British magazines and in anthologies. Her 2003 first novel, Claiming Her, and its 2009 sequel, Reforming Hell, received good reviews. A third novel, Baby Boy Blue, a police procedural mystery set in Philadelphia, was published in 2011 and resold to Linford Mystery Library (large print edition) in Great Britain in 2014. She lives with her husband, editor and author Darrell Schweitzer, and their two cats, Tolkien and Lillyput, in Northeast Philadelphia.
The winner of both a Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award, P.D. Cacek has written over a hundred short stories, six plays, and five published novels. Her latest The Selkie, is currently available on Amazon.com. A native Westerner, Cacek now lives Phoenixville, PA, home of Blobfest, an annual street fair devoted to the classic film The Blob‘ and only a short walk away from The Colonial Theater where the famous “Run Screaming From Theater” scene was shot. When not writing, she can often been found either with a group of costumed storytellers called The Patient Creatures (www.creatureseast.com), or haunting local cemeteries looking for inspiration.
Adrian Cole writes science fiction, heroic fantasy, sword & sorcery, horror, pulp fiction, Mythos (amongst other things) and has had two young adult novels published, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants (Spindlewood, UK). His best known works are the Omarian Saga and Star Requiem fantasy quartets and these have also been published recently as eBooks under the Gollancz SF Gateway imprint and have also been released as audio books (Audible). His most recent novel is The Shadow Academy, (SF from Edge Canada) and the anthology Nick Nightmare Investigates (Alchemy UK) which collects the first arc of stories about his hard-boiled occult private eye, who confronts the various minions of Lovecraft’s Mythos, as well as other monsters and horrors in different, bizarre locales.
He has been nominated for various awards, and was the recipient of the 2015 British Fantasy Award for best collection for Nick Nightmare Investigates and has appeared in Year’s Best collections. Short stories published recently include appearances in Weirdbook, Spectral Press Book of Horror 2 and Creeping Crawlers. Tough Guys, a new collection, is due for publication this year from Parallel Universe Publications (UK).
A native of Devon, UK, he lives in Bideford with his wife, Judy, and enjoys frequent dips in the sea and an occasional bike ride up into the forests of the local area, about which the less said, the better. For more information, visit adriancscole.com.
Dirk Flinthart writes from the mist-shrouded hills of uttermost Tasmania, where he raises unusual children and awaits the Changing of the Stars. He has a long list of Australian publications behind him, and has received both the Ditmar and the Aurealis Awards. Most recently he released a collection of short stories entitled “Striking Fire” through Fablecroft Press. You can find it on Amazon and elsewhere…
Will Murray is a lifelong New Englander who has contributed to numerous fanzines devoted to HPL, as well as a growing number of Cthulhu Mythos prose anthologies. As one of the three founding members of the fundraising group that placed the memorial plaque dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft on the grounds of the Providence author’s centennial in 1990, Murray is always thrilled to be working in HPL’s fictitious milieu. The author of over over sixty novels, he currently writes the Wild Adventures of Doc Savage for Altus Press, which published his first Tarzan novel in 2015 and King Kong Vs. Tarzan in 2016.
Robert M. Price loves the smell of rotting old tomes on library shelves. He has a bogus diploma from Miskatonic University on his wall (actually, on one of his walls). And he is an indefatigable (so far!) writer of rotten tomes, both scholarly (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, The Amazing Colossal Apostle, Night of the Living Savior, etc.) and fiction (Blasphemies and Revelations), numerous Thongor pastiches, and a mounting flood of Lovecraftian tales, mostly suppressed by the authorities (i.e., editors). And he can’t wait for his allegedly forthcoming five-volume annotated edition of Lovecraft to burst upon an unsuspecting world.
Alex Shvartsman is a writer, translator and game designer from Brooklyn, NY. Over 80 of his short stories have appeared in Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and many other magazines and anthologies. He won the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2015 Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction. He is the editor of the Unidentified Funny Objects annual anthology series of humorous SF/F. His collection, Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories and his steampunk humor novella H. G. Wells, Secret Agent were both published in 2015. His website is www.alexshvartsman.com
Harry Turtledove would love to claim he was raised by an eldritch horror, or perhaps even by two of them. Unfortunately, his parents were very nice people. He turned out strange anyhow, proving—or at least asserting—that nature trumps nurture. He writes science fiction (including a lot of alternate history—natural for an escaped Byzantine historian), fantasy, historical fiction, and occasional horror and mainstream pieces. He didn’t intend to be prophetic with this story. It just looks that way.
James Van Pelt is a former high school English teacher and now full-time writer in western Colorado. His fiction has made appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines. He’s been a finalist for a Nebula Award and been reprinted in many year’s best collections. Much of his short fiction has been gathered in four collections, including the latest, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille. His first Young Adult novel, Pandora’s Gun, was released from Fairwood Press in August of 2015. James blogs at http://www.jamesvanpelt.com and can be found on Facebook.
Don Webb has written a rock song, a phone app, five books on the occult, a recipe, a story in
Truckers USA, a story in a Norwegian anarchist magazine, and had work translated into 11 languages. He has a Lovecratian collection, Through Strange Angles, not to mention collections of vampire stories and weird westerns.
A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 1, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. Her collection of inter-linked short stories, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read column to SF Signal. Find her online at www.acwise.net
Douglas Wynne is the author of the novels The Devil of Echo Lake, Steel Breeze, and Red Equinox. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals just a stone’s throw from H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional town of Arkham. You can find him on the web at www.dougwynne.com
TALES FROM THE MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Copyright © 2017 by the individual contributors.
Introduction
Copyright © 2017 by Darrell Schweitzer.
Cover Art
Copyright © 2017 by J. K. Potter
The right of The Individual Contributors to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in 2017. This electronic version published in February 2017 by PS by arrangement with the authors. All rights reserved by the authors.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-84863-387-2
PS Publishing Ltd
Grosvenor House, 1 New Road
Hornsea HU18 1PG, England
editor@pspublishing.co.uk
www.pspublishing.co.uk
Contents
TALES FROM THE MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
INTRODUCTION
ANOTHER INTRODUCTION
SLOWLY TICKING TIME BOMB
THE THIRD MOVEMENT
TO BE IN ULTHAR ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON
INTERLIBRARY LOAN
A TRILLION YOUNG
THE PARADOX COLLECTION
THE WAY TO A MAN’S HEART
THE WHITE DOOR
ONE SMALL CHANGE
RECALL NOTICE
THE CHILDREN’S COLLECTION
NOT IN THE CARD CATALOG
THE BONFIRE OF THE BLASPHEMIES
CONTRIBUTORS
TALES FROM THE MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY