“Well,” Shelby sighed. “Time to get started.”
***
They ran through the first pages of antiquities within an hour, confirming the crates and caskets filled with bones and skulls were accurate according to the manifest. Among Miskatonic University’s boasts were cases containing Modern Man, his Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ancestors, and two oddities labeled ‘Arkham Man’ and ‘Innsmouth Man’.
“Arkham Man?” asked Bosanquet.
Shelby’s gloved fingers traced the latches keeping that particular case sealed against prying eyes. “Should we take a look?”
From the periphery, he saw Bosanquet’s throat knot under the influence of a heavy swallow. “That wasn’t part of the bargain. We just have to confirm that all of this stuff’s down here. We don’t have the authority to start opening up reliquaries at random. What if we damaged an artifact?”
Shelby’s thumb lingered on the latch. “Fine,” he huffed. He shot a look at his cell phone. It was still operating in dead air, though the clock continued to report the time. “It’s getting late anyway. Pick this up tomorrow after class?”
Bosanquet nodded. “Sure.”
Shelby rose from his crouch beside Arkham Man, whoever he was. “You up for a beer?”
“A beer?” Bosanquet parroted.
“Yeah, over at Buckley’s Pub. First round’s on me.”
Bosanquet smiled, a nervous response that showed a length of crooked teeth. The expression, however, quickly ironed itself flat. “Maybe some other time. I really should get back to study.”
“You do that,” Shelby said.
Martin Bosanquet clapped him on the shoulder, an awkward gesture meant, Shelby supposed, in honor of their new friendship. But the friendship was counterfeit, and that’s how contact with his new pal’s hand felt, like one of those empty high-fives other students were always throwing at one another over the stupidest things. Not even a low-five, he thought, sighing a humorless laugh through his nostrils.
“I’ll close up,” Shelby said.
Bosanquet, he saw, was already headed toward the staircase. The hollow cadence as he tromped up the steps cast a sad echo through the vault.
Shelby stretched and backtracked over to Innsmouth Man, beside whose metal coffin the clipboard rested. They’d placed red checks beside a quarter of the vault’s inventory. The temptation to gaze at the mystery laid out on the bench possessed him. What harm could one quick peek do to remains already over a hundred years old?
The creaking of what sounded like a door on rusty hinges groaned through the vault. Shelby’s gloved hand jolted away from Innsmouth Man’s casket. He turned toward the source of the unexpected sound. It came not from the top of the staircase, but elsewhere within the vault, deeper than he and Bosanquet had gotten in their duty.
“Is somebody there?” he asked, and then felt foolish. Of course there wasn’t. “Martin?”
One of the overhead fluorescent bulbs ticked. Shelby gripped the keys and backed away. He took the stairs two at a time and hastened through the cellar, aware night had fallen beyond the coffin-shaped windows.
***
He visited Buckley’s, downed two of the cheap beers the place had on tap, then headed across the Common Gardens in the direction of Gofirth Hall. A full March moon leered down from the cloudless sky. The air still had a bite to it, the last edge of winter even though the calendar had technically traveled past the start of spring. In a month’s time, the Common would be coming back to life, the nights comfortable. But not on this night.
Shelby cast a glance toward the main campus. Miskatonic University brooded past the skeletal oaks and maples, beneath the grinning face of the moon. He detected a charred smell on his next breath, a lingering reminder of the fire. Maybe it was the hour, the beer, or a combination of both, but the image of the gray stone buildings and spires unleashed a greater cold beneath Shelby’s skin. He dug in the treads of his shoes. The ground crunched underfoot. The Vulgath Building appeared beyond the trees, lit by moonlight nearly as blinding as the glow of the vault’s lights. So much so that Shelby’s eyes began to sting. He realized he’d stopped blinking, shook himself out of the night’s spell, and hurried the rest of the way to Gofirth Hall.
***
The room wasn’t much, one of twenty-five in the former Gofirth Family grand estate in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts, now divided up into student housing. He shared the bathroom with five other young men. Shelby checked his phone. Just after five o’clock on a murky March morning. He swung his legs out of the single bed and woke up the rest of the way after his bare soles connected with the cold floor.
Shelby showered, dressed, and grabbed the ring of keys off the bedside table. By six, he was back in Vulgath and descending the subbasement stairs to the vault.
The fluorescent bulbs hummed and ticked over his head. Shelby picked up the clipboard. He pressed deeper through the tables and piles of crates. Two thirds of the way in, he came across a door inset into the opposite wall. The door was closed, a fact that caused an argument to brew inside his thoughts.
I heard a door, one Shelby said.
Another facet in his consciousness replied, Impossible. It was all in your head.
He reached for the knob, an ornate circle covered in rusted filigree. The door complained as he forced it open. The white glare from outside slithered in around his shadow, illuminating more crates and containers and the thin string of an overhead light’s pull chain. Shelby entered the room, aware that the pungent sweetness he’d detected at the top of the staircase was at its strongest here. He pulled on the chain. A round fluorescent light crackled to life on the ceiling.
The room, referred to as ‘Storage Closet A’ on the manifest, contained, according to the printout, the Chalmer’s Collection; twelve pieces archived in thirteen containers, crates, and one large ginger jar-style urn. Shelby glanced around, unaware he’d been holding his breath until his last sip of air began to boil in his lungs. The room seemed to thrum with an undercurrent that one of his inner voices tried to pass off as owing to the ticking fluorescent ring over his head. His mind traveled back to summers in Worcester and the pregnant energy of storms building to explosive births. It was like that, he thought. Quiet at first, then quickly becoming angry.
Shelby expelled the bottled breath. The Chalmer’s Collection was separate from the rest of the Anthropology Department’s trove of historical relics, condemned behind the door of Storage Closet A. He ran through the manifest, matching names with crates. The giant urn contained ‘Hollan’s Teeth’. A wooden case held, according to the printout, ‘Pompeii Victim’s Body’. The tallest, ‘Hiroshima Shadow’, stood upright in a metal box against the wall and was paired with that thirteenth container on the list—a simple satchel in which Shelby discovered a pair of lead-lined gloves, the kind worn by X-ray technicians.
The urge to crack open the long-sealed clasps and locks again tempted him, this time stronger. Shelby paced the little floor space and shook his head. Long seconds later, his hand was on the lid of the ginger jar, tugging on its bell-shaped lid. Hollan’s Teeth resisted. Shelby pulled harder. The lid slowly came free with a sickening sucking sound his imagination translated into the noise made by a rotting tooth as it’s ripped free of infected gums. A foul, decayed fetor wafted up from inside the jar. Shelby turned away and sputtered. When he looked down, he saw the urn was filled with what had to be a thousand individual teeth. Human teeth, though all of them ended in a sharp point. It was a jar full of fangs.
‘Pompeii Victim’s Body’ contained one of the human statues recovered from the doomed Italian city destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a sitting man whose body had been encased in ash for over 1,900 years.
Donning the lead-lined gloves, Shelby opened ‘Hiroshima Shadow’ and, at first, wasn’t sure what he stared at. Within the big case was a length of corrugated metal wall. A black mark charred the wall’s surface. Shelby stepped back and narrowed his eyes. The black stain solidi
fied between the slits into head, torso, limbs. His soul sickened. Gasping a swear, he realized what he faced was the shadow of a living person, alive no more, burned into a section of wall by the intense heat of the atomic bomb that had leveled the city of Hiroshima.
There was a block of stone from which a petrified human hand extended, and a mummified corpse from Ireland’s peat bogs contained in a sealed glass sarcophagus filled with acidic water. The most curious part of the Chalmer’s Collection was a painting whose crate read: ‘The Contessa’.
The painting’s canvas was discolored and coated in an oily residue that felt slick beneath his touch. Shelby realized the canvas was made of human skin and that the bold, rust-colored strokes painted with fingers, not brush, had been done in blood, also likely human in origin.
He leaned ‘The Contessa’ against the wall, between ‘Hiroshima Shadow’ and the ash-encased corpse from Pompeii. The study was of a woman in a flowing rust-red dress, the finger strokes so precise that the fabric showed its fleur de lis print. The room around her appeared to be a studio or library with tall windows and bookshelves crammed with grimoires written in blood.
Shelby fell into the swirls and textile flowers, traveled around the Ouroboros loops of the Contessa’s buttons, past her scandalously bare shoulders, and from there up into oblivion. Blinking, he realized she didn’t have a head. The painting had never been completed.
A voice from behind him in the vault alerted Shelby that he was no longer alone among the relics of dead humanity. “Collins?” Martin Bosanquet called out. “You in here?”
Shelby woke from the spell and started toward the storage room’s door, aware of how erect he’d grown. Painfully so. Adjusting himself, he answered, “Yeah, in here.” A foul taste painted the words and his tongue, a coppery tang he remembered from boyhood—licking fingers after counting pennies. Coughing to clear his throat, he met the other young man in the vault’s main storage area.
“Where have you been?” Bosanquet demanded.
Shelby remembered he hadn’t particularly liked Martin Bosanquet and cared less for him now given the other student’s tone. “Down here, running through the place.”
“All day?” Bosanquet asked.
“Day?” Shelby said, and made a face. “It’s only, what? Late morning?”
“It’s after three.”
Eyes narrowed, Shelby shook his head. “No, it’s...” He glanced at the screen of his cell phone. He’d spent hours growing intimate with the Chalmer’s Collection, it turned out. “Um…”
Bosanquet checked the manifest. “You got most of it done. Thanks.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it.”
Bosanquet tipped a look beyond the threshold of Storage Room A. “And what’s in there?”
“I give you the Chalmer’s Collection.”
Bosanquet brushed past him. “Oh my God, you opened those crates, didn’t you?”
“Like I said, don’t mention it. Please.”
***
That night, Shelby dreamed he was seated in a library room, flipping through a book whose pages bled into his hands. Open French doors faced a balcony. In the day’s too-bright light, he made out the lay of the surrounding city and a lone, towering mountain in the distance.
“They all came out of the same mouth, you know,” said a man’s voice.
Shelby startled and turned toward a corner of the library where the speaker stood with his back to him.
“The teeth. Over a thousand, from a mutant of human evolution found in Australia. Found? Captured, I should say.”
The man wore a vest whose back was decorated in a print of rust-tone fleur de lis.
“Who are you?” Shelby asked.
“Aldus Chalmers,” the man answered, and tipped a glance over his shoulder.
Chalmers looked just like him. Shelby also saw what his reflection was engaged in: painting on the canvas of ‘The Contessa’, which glistened with fresh strokes of blood-red color.
Shelby stood sharply. The book fell from his grip and splashed on the floor at his feet. He shot a look down to see that the grimoire had dissolved into a crimson puddle.
“What am I doing here?”
“You opened the latches, unlocked the locks,” Chalmers said. “You wanted a look at the collection. And, like the Abyss is wont to do, the collection looked back.”
“The collection?”
Chalmers nodded. “Not everything in that room is completely dead, gone. A residue of something still beats among those relics of human life, in lieu of a heartbeat. Without a physical body, it thirsts, hungers, lusts, craves… That’s human nature.”
Shelby searched for a way out of the library. The only visible exit was the balcony. As he started toward the French doors, a massive thunderclap sounded, clawing at his ears. The mountain’s peak erupted, spewing a mushroom cloud of flame and smoke. He turned away on instinct, toward the man with his face, his shadow—
Shelby’s shadow sprayed the wall, projected against it by the blinding glare of a fluorescent white effulgence.
He woke in his room at Gofirth Hall, his heart hammering against his ribcage, a scream barely trapped behind his clenched teeth.
***
Shelby dressed in the dark of the new morning and hurried across the Common to the Vulgath Building. Again, he entered using the keys Rhodes had entrusted to him and pounded down the basement stairs. He approached the door marked ‘17’ and found it already opened.
Hadn’t they locked up after finishing the previous night’s inventory? Shelby struggled to remember anything following Bosanquet’s arrival. He took the stairs to the subbasement at a far slower clip, aware of the cold nipping at the sweat on his face.
The fluorescent lights were on, the reliquary lit by the deceptive and discouraging glare.
“Yo,” Shelby called.
Only the ticking of the too-bright lights answered.
He licked his lips, again tasting the metallic tang of pocket change. Reaching the door to Storage Room A felt far longer than the actual seconds.
The door sat ajar, the overhead light dark. Shelby willed his feet forward and reached for the cord. Cold white rained down. Ahead of him was ‘The Contessa’. Fresh red paint had been applied and, long last, she had a face. But it was cartoonish, a poorly drawn smiley-face emoji compared to the deft mastery long ago created on the sinister canvas.
Shelby raised his right hand to cover his mouth on instinct and then froze. His fingers and nails were stained in a residue of rusty color.
From the corner of his eye he caught another look at what he’d at first thought to be the unfortunate victim from Pompeii. Shelby inched his focus closer to see that the rigid corpse posed beside the actual man encased in ash was Martin Bosanquet, and that his throat had been ripped open.
And then Shelby screamed.
The Darkness Makes Us Whole
S. L. Edwards
I
I immediately regretted the way my conversation with William Dumont ended. He had come into my office with an already dimmed enthusiasm, worn down by faculty gossip and snickers from the graduates and undergraduates beneath him. He remained determined out of defiance and a genuine passion for his scholarship, the qualities which we try to instill in our students but we also are trained to cut down as ruthless, cultivating academics.
It was the middle of October three years ago when William made his final effort to persuade me on his dissertation topic. The Miskatonic Department of Literature was bearing the fruits of the new hires it had made ten years previous. The realists, new, classical, and magical came to outnumber the rest of us by the time William was admitted into our program. He and the rest of his cohort were fed the typical rejection of fantastic or even remotely unrealistic fiction by those scholars of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Hugo who I am forced to call “colleague.” However, I found them more to be like hyenas, tearing at the corpse of the old department heads who hired them.
William, only 21 and already able to de
bate Shakespeare with Dr. Pontis (who is the only remaining faculty member whom I might call my senior), immediately struck me with his knowledge of both authors and their lives. Originally, it seemed his research would tend towards the comprehensive study of author autobiographies. When he came into my office to simply talk about the sad life of Edgar Allan Poe and the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, I knew I had found a comrade of similar literary taste. As one of the final surviving academics of horror fiction, I appreciated the sincere interest William gave my research.
But by the time it came to propose his own research, William had developed a sort of mania.
It was cold that day, the white frost clinging to the collar of his long black coat accentuating the paleness of his hands and face. The sky had been bright outside my horizontal slit of a window but slowly darkness crept in shades of purple and black as William raised his voice, his face reddening with lack of breath, eyes wide with an excitement which unsettled me to my core. His notes were extensive, well over a thousand typed pages of annotations to primary sources, eye-witness accounts, and newspaper clippings.
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