Miskatonic Nightmares

by H. David Blalock

  The need for exit filled her. She was far away from the archway of freedom and flight, the exit out of the library room into the hallway. She had no confidence in her ability to slip past the monster undetected. Mary couldn’t even see the exit from where she knelt on the rug. Hell, how could she know there weren’t identical creatures in the hallway? Maybe the college was crawling with them. Maybe the saucers had landed on the campus lawn.

  Her back was against the bookshelf, and a few dozen feet behind her was the thing. She leaned against the shelf, eyes wide, trying not to lean into its gaze, and finally let her eyes wander forward. In front of her was the massive check-out desk, chest-tall and wooden, like a rampant from behind which the guardians of knowledge protected their charges.

  And behind it was the door.

  That was it, she realized. The librarian’s workroom. Doubtlessly it would connect to the outside. All she had to do was make past the creature’s notice. Crawl over quietly, pull herself over the counter, and drop to her knees. That was all, right?

  Easy, she thought.

  Her cell phone rang.

  *

  It heard. A tinny song played much too fast echoed through the air, and it turned towards the sound. Some kind of phonograph had just been activated. Someone was there. Someone useful.

  *

  Slow and powerful footsteps echoed down the bookshelves, and Mary herself started to shake. It was coming! Quickly, pushing any consideration of what it would do to the back of her mind, Mary crept into the next row over. Grabbing a book that seemed aerodynamic enough (Race Relations in The Work of Sutter Cane, her mind involuntarily filed away), she pitched the library book down the aisle and hoped the ghost of John Dewey would understand her urgent need.

  *

  It heard the thump and turned, trying to peer through the books into the next shelf over. Something was there. Smashing through the shelves was briefly considered and quickly discarded; no telling where the Book it needed had been moved in the years wasted inside the library walls. It reached up, pulling itself onto the top of the shelf and over, and dismounted with a sound like a butcher’s counter tipping over. A thrill of pleasure flickered through its consciousness; the power of this new body was addictive. Still, muscles required metabolism. It needed to find that ape soon.

  *

  As it pulled onto the shelves, Mary herself had flung herself at the oak librarian’s counter, scrambling along the surface frantically, her hands gripping the underside. She could imagine it staring right at her back and standing up, but her brain screamed down the fear as she pulled herself over the desk, quietly lowering herself below the counter onto the floor. Her breathing was a fear-fueled engine as she covered her mouth, turned on her knees, and peeked out of her four-foot-tall wooden fort, staring at the beast through the overdue book return slot.

  The abomination had already stood up on its asymmetrical legs. Miraculously, it hadn’t seen her. She expected it to snarl, look around, sniff the air, any of the things a wild animal would do when thwarted by intellect. Instead, Mary felt the tiniest outer edges of her sanity start to crumple as the thing picked up the book, looked at the cover, and flipped through the pages before throwing it to the side and looking up. More terrifying to Mary than any roar was the terrible sense of intelligent purposefulness behind each action of the thing.

  Behind her was a door, closed, probably unlocked, to the librarian’s area. Fifteen feet away. Less. All she had to do was get through that door and lose the monster in the labyrinthine halls of the Miskatonic Library. Only one problem presented itself.

  It was looking right at her direction at the moment, slowing moving through the shelves, inspecting the spines of volumes as if it had all the time in the world. The door was right inside its field of vision; she dared not open it.

  She finally made out the face, and her heart jumped at the recognition. Blood and ichor aside, she could clearly see the matted goatee, the unnatural proportions of the features, everything necessary but goat horns to complete the picture.

  It was the Devil, she knew. She had been faithless for too long and the Devil had come, just as her grandmother had always claimed.

  Mary scooted on her hands and knees to the other side of the desk and reached up, feeling around for anything useful. A display of paper bookmarks snagged her hand, her fingers entwined in the metal wire lattice. She almost flung it away, but caution prevailed and Mary pulled it down to her with slow frustration, yanking her hand out as the display tipped over emptied itself onto the floor. Her fingers dashed up and over the counter in another desperate search, touching a book of pencils and the slippery plastic coating of a hardcover before closing on a dense sphere. Mary yanked it down and out of sight as the sounds of the Devil came closer.

  A paperweight. She was clutching a fist-sized metal globe. It was heavy enough to break toes if dropped onto a foot.

  She heard sounds like a row of bellows working in odd patterns. Was that the devil’s breathing? Was it getting closer?

  Mary stared at the globe in her hands. At close distance it could’ve easily brained a man, but this was the Devil; no weapon from a librarian’s desk could kill what approached her now. Closer, maybe two dozen feet away. What could she do?

  She stood up, holding the globe in the dead white fingers of both hands. The Devil was on the other side of the desk, idly flipping through a printed reference catalog. One of those snake-like growths from its shin was pointed directly at her; she found herself looking at the baseball-sized eye at the end of it. It blinked at her.

  The Devil raised his head and smiled at her.

  Fear catapulted her over the desk and Mary ran away, colliding with a soft chair she had slept in many times. Deeper terror slipped in through the panic. She had, in blind fear, run right to the furthest place from the exit, the back wall of huge ceiling-to-floor windows looking out onto the campus below. Two floors down beckoned the electric lights advertising freedom and safety. A look back told her the Devil was coming. Closely, slowly, steadily, and still smiling.

  With the strength of the desperate and half-mad, Mary pitched the paperweight at the window of the library. It flew towards the glass in an awkward curve.

  Between the fortunes of the town and the cost of repairs after a nasty flood, those who held the financial keys to the library had let it lay fallow and unassisted. The particular window of the Miskatonic University library she had aimed for was ancient, and after the globe reached its target it wasn’t even that, not anything but debris.

  After panicked silence of before, the shattering of the glass sounded throughout the room like a supernova of high-pitched noise, followed shortly after by the loud impact of the metal globe on the sidewalk below.

  Mary stood still for several silent seconds, waiting for the Devil to take her, before turning around in amazement at her own stalled damnation. Then she screamed.

  *

  It knew it was no longer safe. In the privacy of the library, it could have completed everything it needed to do to the ape, and tendrils had already started to protrude from its body in hunger and anticipation. They were nearly touching the ape, but it retracted them. The rest of the apes were chattering outside. Only a few, but it was enough. The apes had numbers and weapons. They had always been there, on the periphery of its life, waiting to pounce en masse if secrecy was broken. The apes must have killed its stronger brother; they could not be allowed to find it before the time was right.

  Something started calling in the night.

  It froze. The voice of an Awful Thing was drawing near. The destruction of the window had attracted one. It had no illusions about escaping; the Awful Thing It Must Not Consider would find it, no matter where places it would try to hide.

  For a second, it nearly fully contemplated the terrible fury of the Awful Thing It Must Not Consider. It had carried a gun back in the days when it still had fingers and a pretense of humanity, armed itself for the very purpose of warding off the Awful Thin
gs, but even a gun did not protect its original body from their ravages forever.

  It had gone too far now. It would have to face the Awful Thing. For a brief moment, it wished it could tear that thought out of its head rather than face the snarling demon which lurked outside.

  No.

  The Awful Thing had nearly destroyed it, nearly halted the Great Work. It had been reduced to a mockery of itself for years, decades possibly, all because of a species even more primitive than the apes. It would not run again. It had learned new tricks during the long exile within the library walls, and would face the Awful Thing and kill it, or worse. It welcomed a rematch.

  As it stood in thought, the ape stood there screaming, rooted by her prey instincts to the same place. Vague teachings from the Mother Thing on dealing with the apes surfaced, and it gave her a brief smile and nod before turning away. Its body began to reshape itself, painfully tearing reknit tissues away from each other. It had no time for healing and incorporation. There would be a killing first.

  It waited in the middle of the library study tables, knocking over a few to test its recent changes. Nooks, crannies, and hiding spaces were all around, but it stood in the open. It would not hide from the Awful Thing again.

  A new ape, uniformed and armed, stepped into the archway of the room while leading an Awful Thing by a leather tether. At the sight of it the ape’s face went pale. It took control of the moment, advancing, staring the Awful Thing in the eye.

  *

  Mary could just see the imminent confrontation. She had fallen to her knees, vomited a warm, stinging splash onto the floor, and managed to crawl blindly through the puddle on the way to freedom. Such things didn’t bother her; escape was all that mattered now. She’d crept towards the exit, too weak to try pulling herself over the counter again, and had a full view of the terrified guard halted in the archway, only several dozen yards separating them.

  Mary saw the fear of the security guard, his slack jaw fallen uncomprehendingly, and screamed to the best of her frightened vocabulary. “Do something!”

  *

  Blinking, the ape reached one shaking hand towards his firearm as the other performed the much simpler task of releasing control of the Awful Thing, which sprang across the room, snarling, ready for battle.

  “Get ‘em,” the guard said with a quavering voice. “Good dog.”

  It saw the snarling Awful Thing and finally considered it before standing its ground. It flung its right arm, now much bigger than the left one, at the Thing’s fanged mouth. The Awful Thing sunk its jagged mouthful of fangs into the arm and soon regretted it. Its flesh twisted and turned inside the Awful Thing’s throat, seeking out the smallest of pathways and burrowing into the twitching body. Whimpering sounds came from the Awful Thing as it lifted the jerking beast into the air. There was a brief moment of euphoria and unity as the simple circulatory fluid of the Thing connected to the complex mixes inside it.

  It was now part Thing. It vowed to be Awful.

  *

  Mary saw the poor dog raised in the air by the Devil, twitching as the tendrils of the Devil coursed into it, and rust fell off the last bit of steel inside her. The medley of the dog’s death rattles, screams, gunshots, and many sounds no human had ever thought to name had grabbed ahold of her heart and shaken it just enough. She pulled herself up with filth-encrusted hands and stood on unsteady legs for just a second before dashing towards the exit. Mary could hear the bullets, felt the hot wind of one whiz by her, but she felt no hope for the guard. She knew no one could shoot the Devil to death.

  Crossing under the archway to safety, she refused to look back at the struggle between the guard and the Devil. As she ran passed them, it looked less like two struggling combatants and more like one giant connected mass heaving from side to side. She ignored it and kept her mind.

  Freedom was just two floors below. Mary could be out of Arkham within the hour, driving far away from whatever was going on here. All that stood between her and a rational world was a few flights of stairs. Running headlong towards her freedom, she slipped on the puddle pooled at the wreckage of the water fountain and overshot the top of the stairs, pitching forward headfirst.

  She saw the steps leaping up towards her, and then-

  *

  “Are you awake?”

  Mary surfaced into wakefulness with the impression of white walls and beeping machines. “Hospital,” she said without thinking.

  “Yes,” came the reply. The voice was high-pitched, with a heavy dose of the backwoods Massachusetts twang.

  There was a star going nova in her brain but Mary rubbed her bandaged forehead and tried to stay focused. The room was dim, its only illumination being the moonlight creeping in from the window.

  She tried rolling onto her side but her arms hurt too much to move, so she turned towards the voice. Next to her bed was a bulky man in a tight-fitting campus security guard outfit. He sat uncomfortably in the chair next to her.

  She whispered hoarsely, “Do you want to turn on a light?”

  He shook his head. “I thought this might be better. Less of a disturbance.”

  “Was . . . Was my boyfriend here?”

  “He’s no longer with us.”

  She nodded, which pushed spikes into the inside walls of her skull. Learning back, she closed her eyes and focused on breathing. “You got here pretty fast.”

  “I followed the ambulance, Miss. You’ve had quite the night.”

  Mary chuckled. “I’m not sure what happened, but it beat the hell out of me. Is it wrong that I still feel scared of . . . something?”

  “Oh, no. I know how it is,” the man said softly. “I was attacked once. Got stuck in in a very bad place for a long time. Only recently did I finally pull myself together. You just have to keep going.”

  She breathed out, turning towards the guard. “You sound better now.”

  “Me?” He chuckled and it made Mary’s teeth vibrate. “I’m just glad to be free of the fear. Think I’ll travel a bit. I came from a small town, never saw much of the world. I was stuck in one place, day after day, for so long.”

  Neither of them spoke for so long that Mary chuckled nervously. “So you’re here for a statement, I expect.”

  “Not at all, Miss.”

  “Mary,” she said.

  He smiled, and it was too wide for her to keep looking at. “Mary. Good. Appropriate. No, I’m here because you work in the library. You can help me find a book. There’s one that’s mighty important for me to get my hands on.”

  She laughed. “A grad student’s work is never done, right? No, I think I’m a little busy right now, Mister . . .?”

  He breathed in, although it sounded ridiculously loud. “My name . . .” He blinked several times. “. . . Wilbur. My name was Wilbur.”

  She waited for a last name that never came.

  “Look, Officer Wilbur--"

  “I’m not an officer.”

  Before she could respond, he’d already got his hand over her mouth. Wilbur leaned his goatish face over her and she screamed into his black-furred palm.

  “I heard what you said. Back at the library. I have great hearing now. That’s how I know no one’s coming our way for a while. I disagree with you, though. I mean, sometimes in life, shit does happen to good people because there isn’t a plan. I admit that.”

  She thrashed within Wilbur’s grasp, but he placed his other hand on her stomach. Things slid out of his sleeve, long warm cords that wrapped her arms and legs up tightly and held her in place.

  As she stared into the face of the Devil, it smiled back at her. There were dog teeth set into the gums of its mouth.

  “And sometimes, bad things happen because there is a plan, and you're a part of it.”

  Outside Mary’s window, the whippoorwills waited.

  She Who Walks in Darkness

  G. Scott Huggins

  Closing the book, I placed it on my twelfth stack of rejects, and let my head hit the table.


  The useless books towered above my head like the walls of a tomb. Fitting. Here, in the basement of the Miskatonic University Library, my career was dying. The day was long gone, and night stretched before me like doom.

  Despite my weariness, the skittering of verminous feet jerked my head around. Rats. The loathsome sounds of rats from the boiler room beyond the chain-link gate were getting louder.

  I would never find Matheson’s books.

  Against the north wall, hundreds, perhaps thousands more books lay in chaotic piles. My eyes ached and my stomach growled, but I dared not give up. I couldn’t stay at Miskatonic without my research assistantship.

  Matheson had threatened that just three hours ago. And it was only my first day.

  “I am uninterested in excuses, Mr. Cheshire. Do you have those books?” He glowered at me from under his thick eyebrows.

  “Sir, they’re not on the shelves. Not even in Special Collections. The senior librarians are all at a conference, and the assistants don’t have a clue. They aren’t even in the catalog.

  “Mr. Cheshire. If you cannot complete the very simple task of fetching books from a Library, you are no use to me or this university. Is that clear?”

  It was. If I came up empty, I’d better be able to say I’d gone through them all.

  I was maybe a quarter of the way through. I’d never seen anything like these books: spines faded to illegibility, and not one of them written before World War I. Few were in English; many were falling apart. I had to open each one to be sure it wasn’t one of the books I’d been sent for.