“Professor, don’t be absurd.” He spoke coldly, glaring from beneath his crown of black hair. “There is no ‘God.’”
“William…Your mother is dead.”
“I know, Dr. Archer,” he responded distantly, indifferently. “I was there at her funeral. I saw them put the corpse in the ground. I saw them give her the rites. I am well aware.”
“I didn’t see you there.” I began to overcome my astonishment.
“You wouldn’t have been able to, no. But I was there, I promise. But I am not here to talk about my mother. I am here to talk about our last conversation.”
“Oh?” I was immediately sad, believing that William had carried a grudge with him for years.
“I understand what you were trying to tell me then. People would need convincing that my project was important, that it actually had any scholastic merit to begin with. You believed in my potential, just not the direction I was pointing it in. But you were wrong, Professor.”
“I was?”
“Yes. In a way.” He paused, moving his hands together so I could see that the same symbol, the same mass of intricate lines and triangles with filled me with a cold curiosity, adorned both of his ring fingers as well. I looked into his eyes, which seemed darker than they had before.
“My project, Professor, had no scholastic value. Of that I have become convinced, but…my direction was true. ‘Where have I been?’ I have been out there.” He smiled now, revealing teeth that were too white and too sharp. “I have been exploring the world. I have found proof, scientific proof, that what Dr. Dyer had written all those years ago was not fiction. It was fact! Though even he got some of the details wrong.” He chuckled for a moment. “Who was he to understand them? To try and interpret them? No…no, doctor. The ‘Shoggoths’ – in truth they have no names, no need for them – are something altogether different from what he believed. True, they began as slaves but they quickly surpassed their masters. Immortal, living miracles!” His eyes were darting about the room, seeing things that I couldn’t.
I reached into my pocket, ready to call the police if I needed to.
“William…”
“Don’t talk to me as if you pity me!” he spat at me with the animal hatred of a wolf that will not share a carcass. “Me! Who has seen the temple of Leng, who has been to the darkest shores of Kaddath! I, a high priest whose doctrine you cannot even fathom! It is you who I pity and for this reason alone, I have come to speak with you. I have no need of a degree, no need of esteem! But… you were kind to me once, and I am a faithful friend, if anything else.”
I did not know what to say, so I nodded slowly. With dread, I let him continue.
“They eat our own darkness. They fill the empty parts of people, stripped away by time and illness. They make us whole.” He looked at me and I could swear for a moment that he was sad for me. “They told me that you have the same condition that I used to have. They’ve cured mine, they’ll cure yours too. All you need to give them is time.”
A creak in the floorboard jolted me away from entertaining his words as reality. Of course he knew my condition. Most depressives can recognize it in each other after one conversation or one bad episode and William had spent enough time in my office to recognize the same illness in me that he battled with himself.
“William,” I struggled for a method by which to continue, “have you told your sister you are back?”
“Ah. Yes.” He smiled, beamed at the mention of his sister. “I understand that you and Katie are dating now. No, no, don’t be worried! I’m actually quite happy. She is my sister and deserves someone good and I can think of no finer man than you. But no, I have not told her yet. I am going to see her today. Please do not call her. I want to surprise her, just as I have surprised you.”
He was pleased with himself, a child who had pulled off a great trick. He dusted his lap, sweeping invisible refuse from his great black coat before he stood up and nodded to me. I attempted to mouth a goodbye when he reached my door but he stopped me once again.
“You may think you have refused a gift but you have not. It is already given.”
William let himself out, leaving only a sour stench behind.
***
Katie called me that evening.
“He told me he had seen you,” she said, fear permeating her voice as much as excitement.
“Yes, yes, he dropped by this morning. Katie, what did he tell you? How did he seem?”
“That is the strange thing… He was happy.” She fluttered in her breathing, on the verge of sobs. “I told him about mom, about everything that has happened to you and I and he smiled the entire time. I asked him why he was so happy and he said, ‘Oh, Katie. If only you could know. If only I could show you, you would be happy forever.’”
“Wow… Did he mention anything else?”
“Only that he had been traveling, that he found himself. I am just…” I heard the tears breaking from miles away. “I am just so glad he’s finally found something to make him happy.”
I could not tell if she was too happy to have her brother back to notice the inherent wrongness in his presence, or if he had dressed differently when he met her. She did not mention his appearance, his odor, the strange things he had told me about and said nothing about the awful black clothing he wore. Had he intentionally changed his appearance for me? I decided it was best not to remark on it for now, to let her simply be happy that he was home safe.
“He’s home, Mike. He’s finally home.”
***
After William returned, it was Katie’s turn to become sick.
It was a horribly familiar scenario. Her, coughing next to me one night so fiercely that she could not breathe, a hazy mass in a demanded X-Ray, an accelerated death-sentence given by a doctor who was uncomfortable even saying the word “cancer.”
A heavy heart. A resolve to be strong for my children. And for William.
I waited with Katie in the hospital most days, bringing up a lunch from the cafeteria so I could sit with her and talk. She told me things that she wouldn’t tell anyone else: that she was afraid to die, she was too young, and secretly she sometimes convinced herself she hated her mother for giving her a disease she knew was not entirely genetic.
I, of course, had no words of comfort and could not comfort myself. Her end would be painful, I knew it. I could not tell her that it would be okay, that she would see her mother on the other side because I had long ago lost my own faith. Every day she lost a little more hair, a little more color in her cheeks, and all she wanted to see was her brother, who did not visit her once.
Then, one day I received a call from the restaurant.
“Dr. Archer,” the assistant manager spoke in a hushed, frantic voice. “Is Katie well enough to talk to me?”
I sighed. “No… no, Brian. How are you?” I asked to dodge the disparity of my own situation.
“Katie, she… gave the restaurant away!” The frustration and panic in his voice jolted me out of my self-pity.
“What?”
“There is a man here. He says he’s her brother! But he’s the freakiest guy I’ve ever seen! He’s got all the paperwork, a lawyer, the police! She gave it away! How the fuck am I going to feed my family? What the hell was she thinking?”
“I’ll be right down! Don’t let William leave. Let me talk to him!”
I grabbed my coat when Katie began to stir.
Her gaze was so distant, so weak before her eyes fell on a corner of the hospital room. Her eyes widened, mouth falling open so it could tumble in a loud, shrill scream. I abandoned all thought but her, turning to her, stroking her hair and hugging her tightly. But her body was frozen, rigid with terror.
“EYES! EYES!”
She convulsed in my embrace, thrashing while I screamed for the doctors to help. Then, suddenly, before they could arrive, she choked, coughing up a thick black mucus onto my back.
She was the second woman I had loved in two years.
A
nd the second woman to die in my arms.
VI
It was not until two weeks after the funeral that I mustered up the willpower to go to the restaurant. William had a lot to answer for, in my opinion. Enigmatic, perhaps insane, he was nevertheless answerable for the wrong he had done his sister by exploiting her to gain control of her business, to close her only legacy. And he had the gall to not visit her on her death bed, to insert himself into our lives and then immediately leave.
The outside of the building broke my heart, the once wide and beautiful windows boarded up or covered with aluminum foil. The door, covered in dust, did not budge under my touch. However, I had grabbed the key from Katie’s apartment and found that, whatever precautions William had taken, he had not changed the locks.
The interior of the restaurant was rank with the same horrible scent that William had tracked into my home. It was a raw contagion, an exposed infection that still burst out into the air with an acrid aggressiveness. I covered my mouth with my sleeve and looked around the empty edifice; tables stained with grime, paintings and beautiful carpets torn up in patches and stained with dark blotches.
“William?”
My question went unanswered.
“William? It’s me, Michael. We need to talk.”
A muffled noise came from the back of the restaurant. It was a mumbling noise and I thought William might be calling to me from the kitchen. Pushing through the door and switching on the light, I found the whole kitchen was covered with plastic and the floor was slippery with thick black blotches which had clotted and dried. Only then did my mind begin to put the pieces together.
“William?”
The noise came from behind the freezer door. I pulled the door open and flicked on the light.
My mind instantly fled me.
The thing was massive, so tall it almost touched the ceiling. In the vague darkness, I thought it at first to be a man covered in a stained sheet, lumbering in the freezer and squawking madly. But the calls were too deep, too resonant for human lungs. Against my conscious will, I began to see the sharpness of a beak, the leathery folds of wrinkled, heavy skin sagging from a lack of fat or blubber. The creature reared its head upwards towards the light, squawking repeatedly as it tried to understand the small source of heat that plagued it. Its body was covered in the same black ichor which was only too familiar to me.
The penguin, the monster of Dyer’s account of the Antarctic, lumbered towards the door, towards me in wide, blind steps. Its massive flightless wings unfolded like arms, knocking over shelves of scalpels and buckets. The noises it made, screaming in suffering and panic between reflexive squawks, were more horrific than any of Dyer’s descriptions. Before it could reach me, it doubled over as if in intense pain.
Floundering onto the floor, it expelled the same black substance which leaked out of its eyes slowly. In the puddle, bubbles began to rise.
It was when they blinked that I realized what I was looking at.
I do not know how long I sat there. Too scared to scream, too mad to move as the black substance slunk away from the dying bird. I cannot remember what happened, only that I heard William’s voice from somewhere behind me.
“They kill what they can’t help. They kill the already healthy, those who they cannot make better. It was a mistake, professor, to try and help my sister. To try and help my mother and your wife. But you’ll understand once they make our world better.
“They’ve been with us forever, living in the pipes and tubes of our civilization. But now they’ve decided to help us, to end our self-inflicted suffering by remaking us in their own image. You may think them cruel but they are organisms just as anything else, and what they cannot fix they must eat.
“You’ll understand. You’ll feel better.”
***
It’s only out of courtesy that I’m writing this. Only to give you all fair warning. The healers, they are quickly going to move from the sewers of our world to repair the damage we have made. You may hear them, creaking in your houses or whistling in your pipes, and you may try to rationalize them away. But they are there.
Do not fight them. They make you feel so good, so alive. More complete than you would ever imagine. Do not worry about your loved ones who may not survive. So be it, they are not worth this type of paradise. Not everyone need make it to the new heaven.
I do not care how this account is published, either in a news journal or a fiction one is irrelevant. Only the old vestiges of loyalty compel me to write these words, to give an account of what happened so that in the coming months you will understand the process that begins when they invade your skin and scrape under to the rotting foundations of your crippled understanding to make you better than human.
We are, above all else, loyal friends.
How I Died
Jill Hand
Right before I fell to my death onto the floor of the special collections room at Miskatonic University’s Orne Library, I was thinking about my ancestor, Amos Tisdale.
Amos was among the first graduates of Miskatonic, where I was a sophomore at the time of my death. I am (or was, these things get a little tricky when one has died) Lucy Tisdale, age twenty, of Newburyport, Massachusetts. In an earlier time, I wouldn’t have been able to go to Miskatonic and plummet thirty feet through the antique plaster of a coffered ceiling, bashing my brains out on an unforgiving black-and-white marble tile floor, like a pawn that met an especially messy end on a chessboard.
Back in Amos’ day, Miskatonic only admitted males, and then only those who were the sons of landowners. These youths, some of them as young as fourteen, were considered to be gentlemen and as such were deemed worthy of a higher education at what was even then generally acknowledged to be a second-rate version of Harvard.
Miskatonic’s second-rate status didn’t deter me from applying there. Second-rate is still above average and, although my grades weren’t the best, they – along with my family’s three-hundred-year-old connection to the school – were good enough to get me accepted, which was of the utmost importance to me because… Well, I’ll get into that later.
Back to Amos Tisdale. By the looks of his portrait, which hangs in the Tisdale Reading Room at the Orne Library, Amos resembled Severus Snape from Harry Potter. Dressed entirely in somber black except for the white linen falling bands around his neck, he has an accusing glare that would peel the paint off a wall. Maybe he had a jolly side, who knows? All portraits of that time period tend to make their subjects appear either furiously angry or deathly ill.
Amos was the eldest of fourteen children, eleven of whom survived infancy. Having so many mouths to feed put a strain on the family budget. His parents had to sell a silver teapot and six silver teaspoons in order to pay for his tuition and room and board at the home of a sea captain’s widow in downtown Arkham. Miskatonic was without a dormitory at the time, due to it having been set on fire by Indians. It burned to the ground, claiming the lives of three students, a maidservant with the wonderful name of Trembles Before the Lord Endicott, and a cow that was in the stables underneath.
I know all about the Wampanoags, the Indians who burned down the dormitory, due to my being a history major at the time of my death. The Wampanoags and their Native American allies were enthusiastically waging what became known as King Philip’s War as the result of their grievances against the English colonists. They were bent on doing everything in their power to encourage the white interlopers to get out of southern New England. It didn’t work, of course, but they gave it their best shot.
Upon graduating from Miskatonic, Amos Tisdale, my great-great-many-times-great-grandfather, decided the best course of action would be for him to become ordained as a Congregationalist minister, make friends with whatever Wampanoags hadn’t either fled to Canada or been sent off in chains to become slaves in the West Indies, and convince them what they needed was to become baptized into the Christian faith. The ordination part of the plan went off without a hitch but then things we
nt awry and Amos had to skip town due to his having rescued a witch from the clutches of an angry mob.
The witch was a young lady named Hephzibah Pillsbury, who was to become my great-great-many-times-great-grandmother. Her portrait hangs next to Amos’s above the fireplace in the oak-paneled Tisdale Reading Room, where I spent a lot of time lounging in one of the lumpy yet strangely comfortable brown leather club chairs. Those chairs, each with its own brass-shaded floor lamp, make up the room’s primary furnishings, along with a refectory table and eight chairs made from boards salvaged from the deck of the whaling ship Mariah B. Edgecomb.
The Mariah B. sailed out of Innsmouth and was thought to have gone down with all hands in a gale one long-ago November only to reappear two years later, floating serenely past Devil Reef and into her home harbor. There wasn’t a soul aboard or any indication as to what happened to them. It’s a spooky story, but then Miskatonic is full of spooky stories. It’s a spooky place.
Some of the spookiness is due to the ever-present ground fog which swirls around in ominous, clammy gray wisps, like a special effect from the old TV show Dark Shadows that I used to watch on Netflix. Towns closer to the ocean don’t have nearly as much fog as Arkham does and it seems to be drawn to the area around the campus, probably due to some kind of atmospheric condition, or maybe because of the fact that Miskatonic was built on a swamp.
Another thing that adds to Miskatonic’s spookiness are the trees which line the walkways: grotesque old sycamores, with twisting limbs and patchy bark that makes them look like they’re suffering from a bad case of eczema. Then there is the forbidding appearance of the older college buildings. The newer buildings are all right, although my dorm, Pabodie Hall, which was built in the nineteen-eighties, resembles an egg carton standing on its end.
Miskatonic Dreams Page 12