She summoned the bottom dregs of her diplomacy. “That’s fine. I need access to the most of the Native American shelf for cross-referencing. I’ll stay on my own.” To keep him calm, she tried to say, “No offense,” as genuinely as possible.
It didn’t work. “I know, I know,” he said as he shuffled past her toward the exit of the magnificent library hall. “I’m not the kind of guy girls like you date.”
She blinked. “My boyfriend’s not much lighter than you are, Chet.”
He turns back, his sarcastic tones echoing off the vaulted ceiling. “Oh, really? What’s he got that I don’t?”
“A personality.” She tightly smiled while waving. “Good-bye.”
He carefully looked at her for several seconds while a cold fear ran up her spine. With that small remark, Mary had gone against the most basic rules of surviving womanhood. She was alone with a larger man in a nearly empty building, and she had made him angry. Her breath hovered in her throat as she waited, wondering if she could cross to her purse and draw the can of pepper spray before he advanced on her.
“I’ll be thinking of you,” he concluding before leaving.
As his footsteps dimmed to her ears, Mary steadied herself, one hand on the table, her eyes closed as she drew a long breath. “Well,” she said to no one in particular, “alone at last.”
*
It watched the two-legged ones speak, ignorant and uncaring of their conversation. The smaller one was familiar; there were long hours where she was the only other presence amongst the books. It had considered a variety of options before involving her, but finally decided she was too much of a risk.
The larger one smelled right. It smelled unhealthy, the way a crawler did after eating the death-bringing food the two-legged ones left. This one smelt unwell, as if its body was an overripe bag of sickness waiting to burst at a single correctly-applied touch.
It followed through the walls of the library.
*
Chet fell backwards into the chair on the study room. It had a chair, a desk, and an Internet connection. That was mostly all Chet needed for life. Mostly, he mused, as he plugged his phone into the computer. There was something else he needed but could never obtain, despite trying to be a nice guy.
Well, Chet thought, he had certainly tried things the nice way tonight, and look what that had gotten him.
With a few keystrokes, Chet opened up a folder on his laptop. Across his screen, a gallery of art sprung to life off of his phone’s memory.
Mary bending over in class to pick up a pencil. Mary stretching, her arms behind her head, chest magnificently tilted upwards. Mary giving him a tiny view of Heaven while on her knees in the stacks, not more than fifteen minutes ago.
Now he really had all he needed, Chet thought as he unzipped his pants.
Should he cover the window, affixing the magnetic privacy paper? Nah, he thought. Let her come and see. It’d serve her right.
*
The two-legged thing sat, panting and active for no reason it could see. With rapid irregular breath, the two-legged thing looked on the brink of death, the way it had felt once running from the Awful Things It Must Not Consider. Through senses shared by nothing else on this or several planets, it felt the harsh pumping of the creature’s heart. The being below it was on the precipice of death, and all it had to do was push it over.
Now, it knew. Now it had to get into position, or wait for uncountable ages more.
It had been peering down through a slightly ajar light fixture. Now, it pushed the opaque ceiling covering aside and descended downwards, stretching itself, tearing and realigning tissue.
Its body currently consisted of at least four full crawlers, and it used a full crawler’s worth of hard bits to anchor itself to the ceiling as it extended itself, coupling and reknitting tissue as it dropped steadily towards the unaware two-legged one’s open mouth.
*
Of all the things Chet had expected to imminently feel, the terror of something both furred and sticky sliding into his mouth didn’t crack the top ten.
Chet jerked forward, his eyes opening as he choked on something that moved inside him. He rocked in his seat as his hands sprang up, clenching something that felt like a clump of fresh cat corpses. He saw eyes thrown scattershot along the body of the thing that dangled down into his mouth. They were racing in their irregular sockets, dashing thataway and thisaway, until all of them swiveled with the same speed to return Chet’s gaze.
Most other guys Chet knew would have been able to get out of the chair. The adrenaline-backed fight-or-flight response coupled with the strongest of all human fears, the fear of the unknown, would have enabled them to tear the dripping and slithering thing out of their mouth before running away for a long time. But poor Chet wasn’t even in good shape among people his size, and he refused to abstain from a number of things his doctor had mentioned in a final ultimatum months ago. With his heart already pumping fast, all Chet could do was clutch his heaving chest as madness and the heart attack raced to take him.
*
It smelled death.
The concept of death was linked in its mind to stench of exposed waste from immobile crawlers nestled in the recesses of the library walls, and the man smelled like that. Its memories of its own death smelled different. Cordite smoke mingling with the hated stench of the Awful Thing That Must Not Be Considered, the one which finally made good on all the promises its breed had snarled out during the short years of its life. It remembered briefing bleeding out on the library floor, seeing the horrified gazes of three men as it prayed . . . prayed to . . .
It would remember, it vowed. It would remember soon who it was praying to.
Its life would’ve ended there so long ago if it hadn’t been for the crawler. As its original form had collapsed into a sticky white mass, a lone destiny-stained crawler had ventured forth from a hole in the library wall. Desperate and starving, the beast had managed to consume some of its fading body before one of the two-legged ones had chased the thing away.
It was not and had never been alive in the way the two-legged ones were, even when it had resembled them, and it was their ignorance of that idea which had helped it continue its queer form of life. The smallest parts of it inside the crawler had joined together, clinging to the tubes of the crawler’s anatomy, avoiding the acid, fighting the muscle action, and above all, surviving. They had touched the tiny cells of the crawler and found them simple, tractable, useful. It had started as a meal and evolved into a sickness. On the third day, it had taken over the crawler’s nervous system. It had been born again.
Similar things now happened inside the still warm corpse in the chair. The cells of the two-legged ones were too complicated, much too hard for it to crack while a functional immune system shepherded and an ongoing oxygen supply nurtured them. With those things gone, it welcomed the last shimmering pulses of Chet’s life into itself.
The body twitched for a long time before falling silent and opening new eyes.
*
Mary looked up, her cell phone briefly dropped and forgotten as the campus exploded with sound. A symphony of chirping screams poured out of every tree on the grounds of Miskatonic University simultaneously. Mary was in the middle of the stacks, but students and faculty elsewhere caught sight of the retreating cloud of hundreds of whippoorwills frantically taking wing. As the birds retreated into the distance, flying on a straight path (“an’ probably won’t stop ‘tll they hit Dunwich,” one elderly janitor commented to a younger custodian), the silence was quickly filled in by the croaking of frogs from every pond in Arkham, starting from the north end of the school grounds to the old southern cemeteries nestled like ancient suburbs amongst the suburbs. A couple parked near the western water reservoir was frightened out of romance completely, frantically driving away from a chorus so massive that it sounded like a single voice barking amidst the decaying, malformed trees.
Mary, blissfully ignorant of things drawing inexorably t
owards her direction, shook her head and picked up her phone.
“Sorry Sarah. Some noise outside made me jump. I’m still here. No, I’m not worried about the Library Ghost. Because every school gets its legends and monsters standard-issue the moment students arrive. I’m sure the kid who broke down back in the fifties cracked under perfectly normal grad school pressure instead of seeing a horrible monster.”
She stood up, biting her lip as the expected renewed assault came from the other end of the conversation.
“And that’s not why I need a vacation. That’s why I need to stay here, so I don’t let things build up until they crack.” She breathed out slowly. “The books I need here aren’t online, Sarah. They’ve never even been scanned in. Don’t know why. Some old librarian’s rule they never got around to revising.”
As something stirred to life just one corridor and one closed door away, Mary analyzed a familiar bookshelf for the twentieth time that week.
“Sarah, I am not coming home for the weekend to see Mom, okay? I have a job to do here and these damn things won’t catalog themselves. I was there last week, and the week before, and . . .”
She looked up at a loud thump, like a heavy weight slamming into the floor. Did Chet drop his backpack down the stairwell?
*
It nestled snugly inside the body cavity, secure and protected after the reawakening corpse had sprawled to the ground. Triumph grew in its mind. These conquered cells were easier than those of the crawler, only slightly different but just enough to make their usurpation easier. Perhaps it was their shared heritage. After all, part of its ancestry had been human, once.
Resurrection began.
The temperature of the study room began to fight the previously all-powerful library air conditioning, warming under the incredible metabolic restructuring of its new body. It found a pre-extant connected network of digestion tubes and quickly separated them into sections before pushing them individually out of its new skin. Cells regrew and tissues twisted under unearthly instructions, teeth forming as the new mouth tubes whipped around the room, smacking the fallen chair into the wall. Almost as an afterthought, patches of black fur sprang up across the body, alternating with areas of leathery scales.
At the base of the spine opened a toothed hole. It pushed out of the body, elongating a distended “neck” into the air, but the fangs quivered in frustration after only stretching out a few inches. One body wasn’t enough, it realized. It needed more materials.
A fantastic hunger poured in and nearly filled it to bursting. Still, it tried to focus on rebuilding. There were certain priorities to consider.
Eyes. Eyes were important. Its original form had been forced to cover up several eyes, but that would never do now. There was a world out here to see. It vaguely recalled “clothes”, and vowed to never be truly confined by them again.
The body convulsed, easily tearing free of any of Chet’s (the name wandered into its consciousness and was properly discarded) remaining clothes. Fingers flexed. Tendrils changed color in a pattern that suggested breathing.
After years unknown, it had taken a body. Now it waited for the mind to follow.
*
Mary debated checking on Chet. As awful as he’d been to her, he at least would’ve been more pleasant company than her sister’s voice was at the moment.
“No, in fact,” Mary said into the phone with barely-feigned cheerfulness. “Fuck you. I’m a great daughter. Mom will get better even if I’m not there, because she has doctors and a fighting chance.”
Mary could no longer pretend to be looking at the book spines, even to herself. The words floated uncomprehendingly in front of her face as the world shrunk down small enough that only angry words and familiar voices could fit inside.
“Sarah, you need to realize that sometimes in life, shit just happens. Sometimes shit happens to good people because there is no damn plan.”
As a final weary torrent of abuse flowed over her, Mary breathed out. At the very least, she recognized it as the traditional end of the conversation.
“Good. Pray for me. Pray I find that damn Eli Davenport book that the computer system claims still exists and no, Sarah, I will not debate the usefulness of my degree again. Good-bye, Sarah.”
Her thumb clicks off the phone connection as she closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Business majors,” she sighed.
*
It stood up
It had a body. It had a mind, memories, and senses that scoured the entire building for stimulus. Now it would have the Book.
It approved of the vision of its new body, more vibrant than any crawler. Or had “Chet” damaged the eyes in his dying efforts? Maybe the colors were wrong. What colors did the two-legged . . . the apes see in again? In its youth, the Mother-Woman had taught it the names of the colors the apes like her could see, but it had considered the things she said rarely worth remembering.
It squinted, narrowing its vision to somewhere between purple and red while leaving a little extra both ways. The sounds of the library were bombarding it, and noises its ears (and other things) had caught a minute or more ago were registering inside the symphony of its mind. Carefully, it siphoned through the cacophony for meaning.
A wet mass smacked against the doors of the study room as it acted on the most valuable information present: It wasn’t alone.
Another ape was close by.
The study room door fell to the floor as it stumbled through the hallway. Hallway lights flickered as its body emitted forms of light humans could neither see nor detect. A reconstituting hand briefly steadied itself on a water fountain before the whole apparatus was torn from the wall, water spilling onto the floor and running down nearby stairs.
“Chet?” An unsteady voice called out for around the corner. “Are you okay?”
Words. It remembered words. They had flowed past its ears in this place for decades, unheeded, ignored, but now it was different. Now it was being addressed. Words needed to be answered with words; it searched the decaying mausoleum of its memory for useful ones, the most valuable ones it had. It remembered who to pray to.
“N’gai, n’gha’ghaa,” it said first. It had said this before, it knew, just before death. It might’ve been clearing out the old words, but it didn’t care. “Bugg-shoggog,” it all but coughed out. Once it finished with these, it could get to the important ones.
Mary heard the croaking voice approaching from out of sight and breathed in. Sexist comments were standard, but this took things out of familiar territory. “Stop grunting, Chet. You sound like my roommate’s death metal albums.”
It swallowed all the stray blood and tissue inside its mouth; this next part was important, and had to be done right. “Yog Sothoth,” it said, relishing both the renewed ability to speak aloud again and the taste of the invocation on its lips. “Yog Sothoth.”
Father, it added mentally.
*
Mary shivered in the stacks as Chet’s heavy footsteps advanced down the corridor. She’d never heard those words before but the urge to crawl under a table and never come out grew within her with every syllable. She lunged forward, frantically crawling on her hands and knees to get somewhere, anywhere, but the folklore shelf. It was the first shelf Chet would surely look.
Hiding on the ground behind the bookshelf at the farthest end of the row, Mary ventured a glance back. As her mouth opened, rather than scream she shoved her index finger inside and bit down until she bled.
A foot came into view, filling Mary’s childhood memory of terrors. Against the will of parental proclamations, Mary and her sister had once snuck a copy of Jurassic Park into their bedroom. The forbidden subject of dinosaurs thrilled the two homeschooled girls, and they eagerly began the movie. Afterwards, Sarah had wet the bed for a month, while Mary had nightmares for longer. She’d never forgot the terror of those green, clawed pistons of muscle slamming onto the ground, heralding the arrival of the predator-kings her mom swore had never existed.
/> All of those fears returned as she saw a foot that very well could have belonged to a T-rex slam onto the floor of the library.
The thing wandering into the library had skin like a dinosaur alternating with thick, bear-like fur and other surface textures for which she had no reference of comparison. Fluid pooled at its feet, the poison green of a Disney cartoon mixing with the whitish-yellow of aging pus. Two long tubes like snakes moved around slowly from its hips. From the torso up it might’ve been a man, if the man was covered in dead slimy things and trash.
It was inexplicable, and that paralyzed Mary’s brain. If an armed man, a walking corpse, a tiger, or even a fanged accented man in a cape walked through the door, she’d have some context for a response. There was no other obvious action except to hide while hoping the monstrosity did no more but sniff the air and turn back the way it came.
It stepped forward.
*
It knew someone was here. Oddly-tasting borrowed memories suggested a presence. Peering around the cathedral-like room, thoughts buried even deeper began to float up through muddy waters. The color of the marble columns along the wall, the inscriptions on the ceiling, even the smell of the shelves brought something back. Still, survival was its priority. It needed the ape.
*
Mary was frantic. The thing was starting to look around, tentative footsteps and an attentive air heralding the beginning of a thorough search. She had no idea what it would do when it finally found her and had no desire to learn.
She’d always hated the TV shows about scaring people. A friend had loved the programs where film crews surprised the unwary with frankly unconvincing Halloween costumes and second-rate make-up. Briefly, she considered the dripping freak was some kind of prank, a suit, a fraud, but no faith in the idea presented itself. Parts of it acted independently of the rest, and it all moved like a living thing. This thing was real, awful, and looking for her. She had to escape.
Miskatonic Nightmares Page 15