The Orne Library gets a lot of attention on campus tours, mainly because it’s so ugly. It’s a hulking monstrosity made out of rugged blocks of rough brown stone with lots of arches and twisty columns and a stubby round tower with a pointy red top. Miskatonic’s faculty and administration are very proud of the campus, finding it beautiful, although they’re in the minority. A few years ago, U.S. News & World Report noted that Miskatonic (ranked number 7 among Best National Universities) had “some of the most hideous examples of Beaux-Arts and Richardsonian Romanesque architecture to be found on any American college campus.” It singled out the library for special criticism, saying that it resembled a cavernous mausoleum, with stained-glass windows illustrating some of the more gruesome stories from Greek mythology. The writer was particularly disturbed by the one over the circulation desk, which lovingly depicts Laocoön and his sons being strangled to death by sea serpents.
I agree that the Orne is not a place conducive to lingering after dark. Most people cleared out well before the 6 p.m. closing time in favor of the all-night study room at the Wilmarth Student Center or the one in the basement of the Halsey Building, over at the medical school. A lone security guard was stationed in the library overnight but he kept to his well-lighted nook off the lobby, listening to ball games on the radio and trying to ignore the occasional sound of whispers and muffled footfalls coming from the stacks.
The library wasn’t bad in the daytime. While lounging in the Tisdale Reading Room, I had ample time to study both of my ancestors’ portraits when I should have been studying Latin. One of Miskatonic’s many quirks is it requires all students to take four years of Latin. It used to require both Greek and Latin, but something unfortunate happened to the sole remaining Greek instructor, Ambrose Greer, in the nineteen-seventies and he was never replaced. The unfortunate event is rumored to have been either a case of spontaneous human combustion or some kind of chemical experiment that went horribly wrong. Nobody knows for sure because the administration refuses to talk about it, other than to confirm that Professor Greer is dead.
Hephzibah’s portrait, like many of those painted by itinerant artists of the seventeenth century, makes her face look like a hard-boiled egg with thin eyebrows and a knife blade of a nose. Nevertheless, the anonymous painter managed to capture something of her personality that hints she was a little dangerous. Maybe it’s her red hair peeking out from beneath a decorous white cap. Her hair in the painting is startlingly red, like the leaves of a sugar maple in autumn. Maybe it’s the ironic glint in her eyes, gray as the waters of the Atlantic when there’s a Nor’easter brewing. Whatever it is, there’s something about her portrait that makes it seem entirely possible that Hephzibah actually was a witch.
Her journal is also in the Orne Library, having been donated by one of my ancestors, Professor William Dyer, who was part of Miskatonic’s famous Antarctic expedition of 1930. A lot of the flotsam and jetsam of my family has ended up at Miskatonic, drawn there either by some kind of gravitational pull or because nobody knew what else to do with it. What Hephzibah wrote in her journal about the events that led up to her being tied to a dunking chair one chilly October morning and plunged beneath the murky water of Allen’s Pond was this:
They said I was not meeke, as befitted a woman who carried ye sin of Eve upon her soule, but haughty and sharpe-tongued as an adder. Goodman Hewitt told ye magistrate that on divers occasions I absented myself from ye meeting-house of a Sunday, going instead into ye forest, to gather plants and consort with ye Indians who dwelt therein. Upon being asked to account for my purpose in so doing, I would not speake, but instead gave them insolent looks, for my business was mine own and not theirs.
Her defiant attitude didn’t endear her to her neighbors. When a cow gave birth to a two-headed calf and Goodman Hewitt fell and broke his leg while climbing over a stile, insisting not that he’d had too many tankards of ale at the White Horse tavern but that he’d been pushed by a small pair of invisible hands, it became clear to the people of Arkham that there was a witch in their midst and that it was none other than the sharp-tongued, red-haired young woman who ditched church in order to go into the woods and do who-knows-what.
The very same dunking chair upon which Hephzibah faced her ordeal by water is in the Wainscott Museum at Miskatonic. It’s made of oak boards aged to so dark a brown that they’re almost black and resembles a seesaw, with a wheeled platform underneath. Hephzibah’s hands and feet were bound and she was placed into the chair at one end (none too gently, I imagine) as her neighbors jeered. Four men pushed down on the other end as they ponderously rolled the platform to the edge of Allen’s Pond. Then they let go and down she went with a splash.
The theory behind witch-dunking goes back to classical times. Pliny the Elder – the author, naturalist, and Roman navy commander who was killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius – reported witches could not be drowned. King James I of England later wrote in his Daemonologie that water was so pure an element it repelled the guilty. Therefore, anyone who sank was considered innocent. Anyone who floated was considered guilty. Either way, you were dead. But Hephzibah neither floated nor sank. She disappeared.
I’ve been to the site of Hephzibah’s dunking, now a parking lot at a strip mall with an auto parts store, a pizzeria, a laundromat and a nail salon, the pond having dried up long ago. I tried to imagine how astonished the townspeople must have been when the board was pulled up to reveal the dripping wooden chair on the other end was empty. They thought the Devil had spirited her away, which was exactly what Amos and Hephzibah wanted them to think.
Family legend tells how the villagers looked on, all agog, as Hephzibah was marched down to the pond, where Amos, every inch the dour young reverend, sternly rebuked her for being a witch. Then he tied the ropes that bound her, making a great show of pulling them so tightly she cried out in pain. In reality, he tied them gently, in slipknots. Once underwater, she quickly loosened the knots and swam beneath the surface to the other side of the pond, where she pulled herself up among the tall cattails. She laid flat on the muddy ground, her heart thumping wildly, soaking wet and freezing but trying not to shiver so the cattails wouldn’t shake and give away her presence.
The story goes that the instant the chair went down, Amos wheeled and pointed to the nearby woods, loudly claiming to see demons cavorting in the shadows among the trees. Everybody strained their eyes to see and some cried out in fear of the horrible creatures that were plainly visible right there! There were gasps and screams and at least one person fainted. There were more gasps and screams when the chair was pulled up, empty. It was a masterful piece of misdirection. Nobody thought to look in the reeds for the missing witch. Instead, they all raced over to the meeting house, where they prayed for deliverance from the hellish beings in their midst. All, that is, except for Amos, who saddled a horse, gathered some dry clothing, and galloped off to rescue his beloved. It’s a thrillingly romantic story, one of which my family is justifiably proud.
The fugitives fled south to Connecticut. There they passed themselves off as Ezra Hodges (Hodges was Amos’ mother’s maiden name) and his wife, Mercy. Ezra became a ship’s chandler and Mercy became what was called a simpler, someone who made herbal remedies. They lived peacefully for many years, raising a family of four boys and four girls, until they got homesick for Arkham and moved back there. By then, nobody cared anymore that Hephzibah/Mercy had been accused of witchcraft and that Amos had helped her escape. People were more concerned about the fighting between the French and the English and with local matters, like how the crops were doing and whether the miller’s wife’s new cloak violated the sumptuary laws. The tale of the empty dunking chair became just another story that was told at the White Horse, with every old codger in town claiming to have been there and seen it with his own eyes.
Amos gave up everything to save Hephzibah: his family, his home, even his real name. He may have looked like he went through life sucking on a lemon while suffering from stoma
ch cramps (or at least that’s how his portrait made him appear) but inside, where it counts, he was a romantic hero. That’s why I was thinking about him right before I died, as I crawled on my hands and knees through a long-disused room in a locked and shunned tower at the Orne Library. My hair was filthy with dust and spider webs and I cursed under my breath when a splinter from one of the ancient floor joists lodged painfully under the nail of my right index finger.
“Shit! Dammit!” I hissed, sucking on my wounded finger.
“Shhh, keep it down,” my boyfriend, Andrew “Froggie” Gilman, whispered.
I narrowed my eyes at him, mentally comparing him unfavorably to Amos. Amos would never have made Hephzibah crawl through a dusty old attic in order to make a video to post online. Unlike Froggie, Amos was considerate. Amos was a gentleman. I planned on telling Froggie so at the very first opportunity.
Froggie was the reason I was at Miskatonic. Originally, I’d thought I’d like to go to college someplace out West, where it never snowed and was sunny all the time. Then I met Froggie at the children’s camp in Vermont where I worked as a counselor the summer after my junior year in high school.
He was the swimming instructor and the captain of the swim team at Saint Roch’s, an all-boys boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. Everybody said that he was headed for the Olympics, he was such a good swimmer. His love of the water was the reason he was called Froggie, that and his croaking voice and his eyes, which were blue and bulging. He was great with the kids and he got them enthusiastic about swimming, even the ones who’d initially been afraid to go in over their heads. I thought he was cute. I liked his funny croaking voice and his eyes, while bulging, were kind and humorous. I liked everything about him. Fortunately, he felt the same way about me. We were inseparable all summer, and when Froggie told me he had a scholarship to attend Miskatonic the following September, I immediately changed my plans and decided that I wanted to go there, too.
In addition to being the reason I was at Miskatonic, Froggie was the reason I was crawling through the dusty old room in the tower. Froggie was an urban explorer. He liked to go to places that were abandoned and where entry by the general public was strictly forbidden to make videos to post on the internet.
On one of our first dates, he took me on a road trip from Bennington, where the summer camp was, to the Danvers State Hospital, in Danvers, Massachusetts. Going on a journey to visit an abandoned lunatic asylum rumored to be the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy was surprisingly fun. We played guessing games on the way there, with Froggie behind the wheel of Hooptie Ride Ironhide, his old but trusty Mazda 3.
In a voice that he imagined made him sound like a mad scientist, he intoned, “I’m thinking of a word beginning with the letter I, something I used in my little experiments on the human brain.”
“Icepick,” I promptly guessed. “How about this one? I’m thinking of a word that begins with the letter S, something the inmates at the lunatic asylum wore.”
“S, huh? Humm. What could it be?” He pondered, drumming his webbed fingers on Hooptie Ride’s steering wheel.“Oh! I got it! Straitjacket!”
Yes, Froggie had webbed fingers. Webbed toes, too. He said it made him a better swimmer. When I was little, my family had a standard poodle with webbed toes that I used to like to examine. The poodle didn’t mind, and neither did Froggie, when I played with his fingers and toes.
We couldn’t get into the abandoned hospital. A security guard in a truck with a revolving light on top turned us away when we tried to sneak into the grounds. He was nice enough to let Froggie take some pictures, and he directed us to what he said was the best restaurant downtown. He was right. The food was outstanding.
“See? Urban exploring is an adventure, even if you can’t get into someplace,” Froggie said complacently as we drove back to camp.
Our purpose in sneaking into the tower at the Orne Library was to find out what was in there that drove my freshman roommate mad. Besides the usual eating disorders, binge drinking, and drug use that afflict college students elsewhere, Miskatonic students sometimes went insane. They’d run through the halls, tearing at their hair and shrieking about having seen some kind of gibbering, eldritch abomination that appeared suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. They’d be taken to the infirmary, where they’d snap out of it in a few hours, with no memory of what it was that had terrified them.
Not so my former roommate, Olivia Cabot-Fenton. She was a disagreeable girl whose parents owned an antiquarian bookstore in Boston. We hadn’t hit it off. She disliked me on sight and complained the cologne I wore aggravated her allergies. She said I breathed too loudly, and made what she called “rustling noises” when she was trying to study. No one else ever told me I breathed loudly. I suspect she just didn’t like sharing a living space.
She’d reported two girls who lived down the hall for having beer in their room, and routinely stole food belonging to other people out of the refrigerator in the lounge, so nobody was especially sorry when she was found crouched on the floor in the tower one morning, rigid and catatonic. She remained unresponsive in a hospital a year later, being fed intravenously, since she was unable to chew or swallow food, or do anything at all, except stare mindlessly at nothing. As a result, the door leading to the tower was kept locked. There was wild speculation among the students about what had fried her mind.
Froggie was of the opinion that she’d taken some kind of drug. “'Shrooms,” he said, succinctly.
I wasn’t so sure. Olivia hadn’t seemed like the kind of person who’d take drugs. And could mushrooms make somebody catatonic?
“I dunno, maybe. Maybe those girls she snitched on for having beer slipped her something without her knowing,” Froggie said. “You know, for revenge.”
I doubted it. It seemed more likely she was unhinged to begin with and something sent her over the edge, but what was she doing in the tower in the first place? Froggie was determined to get in there and make a video, one he was certain would get an unprecedented number of likes on his favorite website, catapulting him to instant fame. Neither of us believed there was really anything frightening in the tower. We certainly didn’t take into account the fact that termites had eaten parts of the floor joists, turning the wood to powder in places, as I was to discover when I fell though the floor to my death.
We got in the same way that Olivia did: by hiding in the library after it closed for the night. Our hiding place was on top of a bookshelf in the Philosophy section. At first we stretched out flat and silent, trying not to sneeze from the furry blanket of dust that tickled our nostrils. We thought a janitor or the security guard might come by but we eventually realized nobody was coming. It was pitch dark save for a dim light coming from the foyer and the illuminated signs over the emergency exits.
The library was on the corner of the busy intersection of South Garrison and West College Streets, home of numerous fast food places catering to students, as well as a couple of tattoo parlors, a lot of little stores selling candy and t-shirts and the kinds of trinkets and vintage posters that people liked to adorn their dorm rooms with, as well as a hookah lounge owned by an old hippie – a Miskatonic graduate – who looked exactly like Jerry Garcia. There were also several bars notorious for not being overly finicky about checking IDs. Consequently, the streets were usually jammed with cars honking their horns and people yelling back and forth to their friends as they roamed around at all hours of the day and night, but the library’s massive stone walls were thick and no noise from outside filtered in. It was silent as a tomb.
We climbed down off the bookcase and walked stealthily to the locked tower door, a ponderous arch-shaped thing made of oak. I unlocked it using the skeleton key I’d taken from my father’s desk at home. Dad was given the key when he joined the board of trustees, although to my knowledge he never used it. The bestowing of the key was largely ceremonial. Having a key that unlocks every door in every campus building constructed prior to around 1950 is one of the pe
rks of being a Tisdale at Miskatonic, along with being virtually guaranteed admission. The newer buildings, and by those I mean the ones less than seventy or so years old, have modern locks that the old skeleton key doesn’t fit.
We crept up the circular iron stairway to the second floor of the round tower, where Olivia had been found. It was just one big open room up there, with leaded glass windows in narrow slits in the stone walls. It was too dark outside for much light to come in. We switched on the flashlight apps on our cell phones and took a look around. It looked as if it had once been someone’s office. There was an old roll-top desk with a black candlestick phone on top, a bentwood coat tree with curly arms, and a couple of wooden filing cabinets. Everything was covered with dust. The desk chair was pushed back a little, as if whoever had been sitting there had casually gotten up and left one day, never to return.
“Look at this,” Froggie whispered, pointing to the desk. The top was open, permitting us to see, amid the cobwebs over the pigeonholes and the thick dust, a little drift of clutter that included a glass ashtray filled with ancient cigarette butts, a perpetual calendar made of pinkish-orange celluloid which marked the date as August 8, and a cloth-bound book entitled Antarctica: Land of Frozen Majesty. There also was a black and white photograph in a carved wooden frame of a coyly smiling woman, her hair arranged in a nineteen-thirties finger wave. Her lipstick appeared to be black but was probably very dark red. The picture was inscribed, in a looping, girlish handwriting, ‘To My Darling Thomas, Bon Voyage!’
“Uh-oh. I think I know who this stuff belonged to,” Froggie whispered. There was little chance the security guard would hear us up here, since he never strayed far from his post in the lobby where he was probably listening to a Red Sox game on the radio, but something about this deserted, dusty room made it seem best if we kept our voices down.
Miskatonic Dreams Page 13