Miskatonic Dreams

by H. David Blalock

“Who?” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes from the photograph for fear the woman would turn her head and look at me.

  “That guy who went crazy on the Antarctic expedition, Tom Danforth. Wasn’t he a teaching assistant? This must have been his office.”

  I forced my gaze away from the photograph and looked around. The floorboards beneath the desk extended only part of the way into the room. After that, it was just the plain floor joists between which were dusty wood laths. It was a grim excuse for an office, just the sort of place where they’d be likely to put a teaching assistant.

  “I think you’re right,” I told Froggie. “It looks like nobody’s touched this stuff since he left.”

  Froggie got out his camera and slowly panned it around the room. “Madness,” he intoned portentously, speaking up so the microphone would pick up his words. “Madness destroyed the mind of a promising graduate student named Thomas Danforth, whose desk you see here, untouched for…” His lips moved silently, as he did the math. “Almost ninety years. Madness also struck Olivia Cabot-Fenton, a freshman at Miskatonic, one year ago, here in this very room. Was it coincidence? Or something more sinister? What kind of unimaginable horror could a young girl have seen here in this room, that sent her into a state of raving lunacy?”

  “She’s not raving,” I said. “She’s catatonic. Catatonic people don’t rave. They don’t even talk. And didn’t Danforth get better? I thought he became a psychology professor.”

  He turned off the camera and gave me a sour look. “That was for dramatic effect,” he told me petulantly. Then he noticed something on the other side of the room: the black iron banister of another spiral staircase, this one leading downward. “Hey! You know where I think that goes to?”

  This was getting tiresome. I wanted to get out of there and get something to eat. I hadn’t eaten since having half a club sandwich and a cup of chicken noodle soup for lunch in the dining hall and was feeling grumpy. I said I didn’t know. “Oz? Disneyland? The slot machine room at Plainridge Park Casino?”

  “Better than that,” he said. His eyes had taken on a crazy gleam that put me in mind of how Captain Ahab’s must have looked upon catching sight of the white whale. He urged, “Think, what room would be directly beneath this one?”

  I thought, mentally reviewing the library’s floor plan, and then it dawned on me: the special collections room. Access was strictly forbidden to all but a select group of scholars.

  I’d peeped in there once, during freshman orientation when an assistant librarian unlocked the heavy oak door – a twin to the one that led to the tower – and allowed us to take a swift look inside. When several people pulled out their phones, he sternly told them to put them away.

  “No photographs,” he snapped. Drawing himself to his full height, he cast a hooded gaze over his audience of freshmen. “The Jeremiah Orne Library contains over one hundred thousand volumes, many of them rare and valuable, rivaling anything in the collection at Yale’s Beinecke, or Harvard’s Widener.” He scanned our faces to see if we were suitably impressed. “In this room are Miskatonic’s greatest treasures: ancient grimoires containing powerful incantations, some of which are said to have the ability to manipulate time and space.” He lowered his voice to a hushed whisper. “I was told by a scholar of the occult that there are books in this room that can do even more than that, terrible things, the nature of which he dared not even hint.”

  “Like books of magic spells? Awesome! We’re at Hogwarts, yo!” exclaimed a boy who wore skinny jeans and a t-shirt that read FREE TIBET! (With Purchase of Tibet of Equal or Greater Value).

  The librarian rolled his eyes and shook his head in disgust before closing and locking the door.

  Froggie was so excited by the prospect of having access to this forbidden room that he was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “We can go down there and film,” he said. “We can film all the famous creepy books they’ve got down there. The Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Book of Eibon, and whatever else is there.”

  Noticing my dismayed expression, he added, reassuringly, “We’ll just film the spines or the covers or whatever, that’s all. We’re not going to open them or touch them or anything.” He gave a nervous laugh at the idea of touching the books in the special collection and acceidentally summoning a demon.

  I didn’t like this at all. “What if the door at the bottom’s locked? Or if there’re motion sensors?”

  Froggie said if there was a locked door at the bottom of the stairs we could open it with the skeleton key, and he doubted there were any motion sensors. There were none in other parts of the building, not even in the room with glass cases containing things like Cotton Mather’s gloves and Bible and a pair of sugar tongs that were made by Paul Revere, so it was unlikely there were any in the special collections room.

  He tilted his head, appearing to listen intently. “I don’t think there’s a door down there. I think there’s just an opening at the bottom.”

  He’d told me once that he could sense where holes in the floors were when he explored abandoned buildings at night. Even with his eyes closed, he knew where they were. I put it down to vivid imagination, but he did seem to have some kind of sixth sense that helped him navigate unusually well.

  “Be careful,” he said. “The floor ends and you don’t want to lose your footing and fall. We’d better crawl.”

  That’s what we were doing, Froggie crawling behind me, when I encountered a section of floor joist that had been chewed by termites. The powdery wood gave way and I felt myself falling, both arms extended, as if I were diving into a pool. The rotted laths cracked and the old plaster rained down next to me as I fell. It felt like I was falling for a long time, but it must have been only a matter of seconds before I hit the floor. Both my wrists broke. I had time to give a yelp of pain before my head struck the floor and I died.

  What’s it like to die? It’s weird, especially if you’re not expecting it. One moment you’re crawling across a dusty, splintery floor, your stomach growling, thinking that you’d like a cheeseburger and that your favorite jeans are now all dirty and it’s your boyfriend’s fault for talking you into this and the next you’re dead. What was especially weird was that despite being dead, I could hear Froggie shouting. I was certain that I was dead because I was no longer in my body, which was lying in a twisted, bloody mess on the floor. Instead, I had a bird’s eye view of the mess that used to be me from where I was perched up near the ceiling, atop a marble bust, like the raven in the poem by Edgar Allan Poe.

  The bust was of Poe, I saw, when I bent down to look. There were other white marble busts on top of the glass-fronted mahogany bookcases in the room where I’d unexpectedly found myself, dead, but very much aware. Over there was a bust of Emerson, and there was Thoreau, and Alcott, and Dickinson and Hawthorne. The whole gang of prominent nineteenth-century authors was present and accounted for. The troubling thing was that the busts only looked to be about two feet high, so how could I be sitting cross-legged on top of one? I looked down and failed to see my legs or any part of my body, not even my hands when I waved them in front of my face. I could feel my face when I touched it. It felt the same as it always did, but it seemed that I was invisible.

  “Shit. I’m a ghost,” I said.

  From out of the shadows came a man’s deep voice. “Language,” it said, reproachfully.

  It wasn’t Froggie. He was still up in the tower, frantically calling out for me, asking if I was okay. The man who stepped out of the shadows wore his chin-length black hair parted in the center and was dressed in head-to-toe black, relieved only by the white falling bands that marked him out to be a minister of the Gospel. His shoes, I saw, had buckles on them like the ones the Pilgrims wore. He surveyed my body in its spreading pool of blood and shook his head. Then he turned his stern brown gaze up to where I sat on top of Poe. “Being dead is no excuse for employing coarse language,” he told me.

  “Who is it, husband?” asked a woman who ste
pped out of the shadows behind him. She wore a white cap over her fiery red hair. I recognized her immediately from her portrait, which hadn’t done her justice. Her face was a perfect oval and her lips were full and red. She was absolutely stunning, despite her simple, floor-length black dress and white bib-style apron that made her look like she was all ready to pass around the cranberry sauce at the first Thanksgiving.

  She walked up to my body and took in the blood and my smashed skull. She shook her head, as the man had done. “It is a dead woman, husband,” she remarked. “One of our blood.”

  The man looked interested. “Truly? A Tisdale?” He looked up at the new me, the one who no longer had a body, and bowed from the waist. “Granddaughter, good evening. I am Amos Tisdale. This is my wife, Hephzibah.”

  “The witch,” I said dazedly. I could tell with my new, dead senses that she was a witch. It was as clear to me as the sound of Froggie’s sneakers clattering as he descended the iron treads of the circular staircase. My invisible heart gave a painful thump. Poor Froggie, he’d be out of his mind with grief. He’d probably blame himself.

  “Indeed, I am a witch,” Hephzibah said this as calmly as if she’d remarked that it had started to rain, which it had. I could hear raindrops pattering against the stained glass windows of the special collections room.

  “It is your good fortune that she is,” Amos said. “She can bring you back to life.”

  Hephzibah gave me a modest smile. “The presence of a witch is necessary to restore the dead to life but it requires a living human to fetch the book and to open it to the proper place and to pronounce the words that are writ therein. The person coming down yonder stairs should be able to…”

  With that, Froggie ran into the room. He’d been right: there was no door at the bottom of the stairs, just an open archway. He took in my motionless, messy body and gasped. “Lucy! Oh, my God! Are you okay?”

  “Clearly, she is not, as you put it, ‘okay.’ She is dead. Anyone can see that,” Amos told him tartly.

  “Who’re you?” Froggie asked.

  “They’re ghosts,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “We are the ghosts of this dead woman’s forebears, Amos and Hephzibah Tisdale, late of Arkham.” Amos bowed from the waist, and Hephzibah gave a graceful curtsy. “If you wish to save her, you must act quickly.”

  Froggie looked confused. “Save her? But I thought you said she’s dead.”

  “I am,” I said.

  Hephzibah looked up at me. “Hush, he cannot hear you.”

  Froggie turned to where she was looking. I waved to him. “Hi, Froggie! I’m up here.”

  “Nor can he see you,” Hephzibah said.

  Froggie ran his hands through his hair. “Who’re you talking to? Should I call somebody? What should I do? Oh, my God, this is terrible. I can’t believe it. She’s dead and you’re saying you’re ghosts and…”

  Amos stepped up to him and put his face about an inch away from Froggie’s. “Stop bellowing like a cow stuck in a mud-hole,” he barked. “Keep what few wits you have about you, boy. She can be brought back to life but you must act now, before her body grows completely cold.”

  Froggie drew back as if he’d been slapped. He stopped babbling. “Okay,” he said. “What should I do?”

  Hephzibah told him to go over to one of the bookcases and take down The Necronomicon. I saw Froggie flinch at the mention of the name, but he did it, stepping carefully around the spreading pool of my blood as he fetched it and brought it back to her.

  “It feels cold, and it’s awfully heavy,” he whispered. I could see little ribbons of steam rising from the book’s cracked, black leather cover, as if it had been frozen and was now being warmed by the heat from his hands. I wondered what kind of creature the leather had come from, and shivered.

  He went to hand the book to Hephzibah, but she shook her head. “The dead must not touch it. Only living humans may touch The Necronomicon.” She cocked her head and assessed him with narrowed eyes. “You are not quite human, I perceive, but you are close enough. Open it to chapter fourteen: ‘Mortuos ad Vitam Revocabat’.”

  She closed her eyes and stood perfectly still, palms outstretched, an expression of deep concentration on her face.

  I had enough Latin to know that meant recalling the dead to life. From my perch on top of Edgar Allan Poe, I could feel tears spring to my eyes. I wiped them away with my invisible hands. I could see now what Hephzibah meant when she said that Froggie wasn’t quite human. The dead understand things that the living don’t. It wasn’t Froggie’s fault he was what he was, and I still loved him, but I ached with grief. He’ll change into something different, something even less human. Not this year, or the next, or maybe not even ten years from now, but eventually he’ll change, and nothing can prevent it. I noticed Froggie had made no comment about her remark. He must have known. I wondered if he was ever planning on telling me. I must have given a little cry because Amos looked up at me. His stern eyes grew soft.

  “Courage, granddaughter. In the words of Virgil, Omnia vincit amor: Love conquers all. I wed a witch, remember? I never once regretted it.”

  Froggie finished reciting the words from chapter fourteen. They were in Latin and I breathed a silent prayer of thanks that we had to take Latin, so he was able to pronounce them correctly. He looked up where Amos appeared to addressing the bust of Poe. “Is Lucy up there? Her ghost? Is that who you’re talking to?”

  Amos didn’t answer. Instead he told Froggie to put the book back where he’d found it. He did, slotting it carefully back into the empty space in the bookcase and closing the glass door, wiping his hands on his jeans as if they’d touched something slimy and nasty.

  “Nothing’s happening. She’s still dead.” He looked at my body, his eyes huge and horrified.

  Amos held up his hand. “Wait.”

  A great silence fell over the room. All the little ambient noises in the old building disappeared, as if muffled by a vast velvet curtain. The creaks of wood settling and the ticking of the old-fashioned iron radiators and the scurrying of mice in the walls all fell away. In the special collections room it was as silent as the moon. Amos, Hephzibah, and Froggie stood stock still, waiting. Ten seconds ticked by, twenty, thirty… The silence seemed to stretch on forever. Then I let out a whoop of relief. The pool of blood around my body was shrinking and my broken bones were knitting together. It was like watching a film being played backwards. There was a crackling sound and I felt my ears pop, as if the altitude had changed suddenly. Then I was back in my body and Froggie was on his knees, hugging me.

  “You’re alive! Thank God! How do you feel? Are you hurt?”

  I saw Amos and Hephzibah exchange glances, their brows raised as if to say don’t we get any credit?

  “Thank you,” I told them. I told Froggie that I was all right, just very tired.

  Hephzibah said I was fortunate that she and Amos were there. “Our spirits remained with our portraits after we died. I thought it best not to move on to whatever fate awaited me after death, in case there were unpleasant repercussions for my having taken up the craft.” By that, I assumed she meant witchcraft.

  “I stayed behind also,” Amos said, giving her a fond look and clasping her hand. “I promised I would never leave her, and I never have.”

  They said they’d kept an eye on things in the library. When a girl sneaked down the stairs from the tower and tried to steal The Book of Eibon, Hephzibah had materialized and frightened her away.

  “I assumed a form that sent her scurrying like a rat chased by a goodwife with a besom,” she said, smiling happily at the memory. I couldn’t imagine what kind of form she’d assumed that was frightful enough to send a tough customer like Olivia Cabot-Fenton into a catatonic state. No doubt Olivia’s parents being in the rare book business had something to do with the attempted theft. Had they asked her to steal the book or had it been her own idea? I suppose we’ll never know.

  Amos and Hephzibah bi
d us goodbye and faded back into the shadows. I got unsteadily to my feet. I realized with dismay that I had to tell my father why there was a gaping, ragged hole in the ceiling of the special collections room. Froggie kept asking if I was sure I didn’t want to go to the infirmary. I said I was, and asked him to take me home – not to my room at Pabodie Hall but to Newburyport.

  He wasn’t happy at the thought of encountering my father. He’d met him at Family Weekend and the experience had left him shaken. “He doesn’t say much, does he?” he’d said, after my parents had gone. “He just looks at you and doesn’t say anything and his face is kind of big and frowny, like those stone heads on Easter Island.”

  Grimness is a trait among the Tisdale males and my father can be very grim indeed. I suppose it has something to do with his job as chief loan officer at a bank. It’s hard to be lighthearted when you have to foreclose on people’s mortgages.

  Froggie said he’d never want to be in the position of having to ask my father for a loan. He’d rather sleep under a bridge. My father hadn’t been too impressed by Froggie either. When I told him that he was from Innsmouth, he frowned.

  “He’s a Gilman from Innsmouth? They’re not our kind. Better stay away from him.”

  He clammed up after that and refused to say anything further. I put it down to class snobbery. We weren’t rich, but there have been Tisdales in Massachusetts since the Mayflower arrived in 1620 with a man named Dudley Tisdale on board. Old families are venerated in New England and mine is among the oldest.

  Froggie and I walked out through the front doors, past the security guard’s post in the lobby. He was listening to the radio as usual, some kind of a sports call-in show by the sound of it, and he didn’t pay any attention to us. It had stopped raining. Hooptie Ride Ironhide was parked behind the tennis courts and we got in and drove off.

  We didn’t say much as we drove, I suppose because we were both so shocked by what had happened. Froggie kept looking anxiously over at me, asking if I was sure I was all right. I said I was. I felt different since my death and subsequent return to life – harder somehow, more able to face whatever came my way. It made me feel strong, invincible, as if I could leap over mountains if I weren’t quite so tired. It’s difficult to explain, but death definitely changes a person.