“Yes, sir.” I fled the building, trembling with fear and rage.
Matheson had lied to me. Set me up. I strode toward his office. I’d have it out with the bastard right now. And when I got my hands on him, I would tear his throat out with my teeth, and eat…
I staggered. Put my hand out and caught myself on the smooth trunk of a sycamore.
Where had that thought come from? I shook my head. I wasn’t a murderer! And yet the image crawled in my mind. If I concentrated, I could feel Matheson ahead of me, throbbing like an open sore, hidden in the Ancient Language Hall looming before me. I tore my glance away, looking across the street, where old houses made way for the newer high school. Miskatonic hadn’t even had time to become home before it had become a nightmare. I couldn’t confront Matheson now. Not like this.
The only person who might help me was Thea. I sent her a text asking to meet. There was no immediate response. Then Zeke’s words came back to me. Who was this great-aunt of Thea’s he was obsessed with? I wandered across the street to the high school.
The halls were deserted. It didn’t take long to find the ubiquitous class portrait gallery. Zeke looked about seventy-five, so… I started looking at the class of 1953 for a Sennie Waite. I didn’t find her there. Or in 1943. Or in 1933. I found her in 1922.
Only her name wasn’t Sennie. It was Asenath. At the opposite end from Ezekiel Bronson. And I recognized her immediately.
It was the dark lady.
I staggered out, forcing myself through the day like a puppet of flesh, waiting for a text from Thea that refused to come. Eventually, I slept.
*
I woke from the nightmare of tunnels to the chill of a concrete floor. In the distance, I heard an electric whine. Familiar. What was happening? I forced my eyes open. It was dark. I hurt all over from lying on the floor. Back, legs, arms, throat…
My hand went to my throat, and I dropped something that clanged off the floor with the ring of metal. I touched a warm wetness at the base of my throat. Blood. I sat bolt upright.
Fluorescent light streamed in through the chainlink gate. I was sitting among piles of books. Six of them, stacked like altars around me. Before me rose six bronze cylinders on pedestals. Lights winked on them.
They were watching me. Waiting for the Ritual. For me. I heard their Call. To stay, and join them.
With revulsion, I looked down. The knife I had dropped glinted under a coating of my own blood. It flowed into the incised characters of the spell on which I now stood. I understood the sigils. They reached for me. Drew me.
And beyond the circle, I heard the skittering of the Lesser Servants as they waited to worship their gods, and celebrate the feast they would be granted. My flesh.
The whine of the wheelchair sharpened and stopped.
“Raymond!”
I could see her beyond the chainlink, fumbling for something in a pouch. I stumbled to the gate. It was locked. I knew where I was. The boiler room of the Library. Behind me, the skittering grew louder. “Help me,” I croaked.
With her good hand, Thea jammed the key in the lock. “Get the knife,” she ordered.
“What?”
“The knife. Quickly!”
It took all my courage to go back. I thought surely one of the Servants would leap on me, but they backed away as I seized the silvery-green blade. The lock snapped open, and I burst through the gate.
“Come with me,” she said.
“How did I..?”
“Shhh!” Her prosthesis cut the air like a whip. I heard steps on the concrete.
“That’s him,” she whispered. “The cargo elevator. Don’t look back. And don’t run. But follow me.”
I nodded. Her wheelchair was faster than I thought, but not fast enough for me. The bare, normal warmth of the elevator was reassuring.
“What’s happened to me?” I managed.
Thea watched me grimly. “Nothing we dare discuss here.” She reached up to the jagged wound on my throat. “That’s bad. I hope he doesn’t think to cut the power.”
The ride stretched on forever, but the doors opened at last. We escaped Miskatonic’s Library, making for the street.
A piercing, unearthly shriek split the night.
“The Hounds,” Thea cried. “Run!” Her chair shot forward at a running pace.
I ran, too. Faster than I had since playing baseball for Pepperdine. Arkham was a jumble of streets and alleys, but at last we stood before Thea’s apartment. I snatched the key from her one-handed grasp and let us in.
*
Thea’s studio apartment was a mass of bookshelves, college furniture and a futon mattress in the corner of the floor, a single, large room with a kitchen alcove. And all the corners, every one, had been molded into curves.
“We’re safe from the Hounds here,” she said. I collapsed in a papasan. “You need a drink,” she offered me a bourbon. She took vodka. “Now tell me what happened.”
“The Master of Gates called upon me to open myself before the Lesser Servants to the will of He whose dreams in R’lyeh warp the world.” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them. I stared at her. “What does that mean?” I whispered. I gulped my drink.
“The Grammar of Leng. It’s one of the most powerful grimoires on Earth,” she said. “And you read it like a textbook. You even pronounced the words. You cast those spells, and opened your mind to the Call. I should never have let you have it.”
“Let me?”
“Yes. Haven’t you guessed? I took those books. Hid them from Matheson. But I left the Grammar. I thought it might tempt him to go too far. Dive too deeply, too fast, and destroy himself. I never thought he’d give it to you. He knows more than I’d dreamed.”
“What? But it’s… it’s just an ancient language.”
“Just an ancient language?” Thea’s eyes pierced me. “You’re not that stupid, Raymond. Humans were around for 300,000 years on this planet and suddenly, about 20,000 years ago, we started encoding images on walls. Speaking. You must have wondered how that happened. And Who taught us.”
Fragments of memory boiled up in my mind. “The Egyptians said The Book of Thoth would grant the reader all the knowledge of the universe,” I recalled.
“And they were infants compared to the scholars of Leng and Aratta, themselves mumbling half-remembered stories of Irem, before that people reached too far into the Void…” She cut herself off. “He is using you.”
“Who?”
“You know his name. The name he uses.”
“Ma…”
“Don’t say it!” She sighed. “Raymond, names have power. It’s good you’re stubborn. If you had ever actually called him Master, as he desired, his compulsion would have succeeded. You would have sacrificed yourself, by his will.” She held up the knife. I shuddered, seeing the spells incised in the blade. I understood it.
“The Lesser Servants would have eaten my body. And this…” I couldn’t say it.
“Would have fed him your mind and soul.”
“What are those… containers? They watched me.”
“Disciples of the Old Ones, who dwell in the Madness Beyond. Your professor is their Servant, but he wants to rule them. The Gates are open, and he must join them, sacrificing his body, as they did. But with a willing sacrifice of another’s body and soul, he could have joined his mind to the Beyond and remained here in the body. And become their Ruler and conduit to the Old Ones, as no human has in ten thousand years.”
“How do you know all this?” It was too bizarre to be true. But I had seen the Servants, and heard the Call. I had cut my own flesh. And I knew it for truth.
She pushed the wheelchair forward so that the footrest nearly touched my ankles. I caught her scent: earthy, feminine, and cool. “It’s easiest to show you.”
She shrugged off her sweater. Beneath it, she wore only a camisole, and no bra. For the first time I saw that she was tattooed from shoulder to forearm in black sigils. They reached from her left
shoulder to beneath her prosthesis. The prosthesis she was removing.
The plastic joints slid off her left arm, revealing not a stump, but a smooth tentacle of flesh. At the very tip was a single remaining fingernail. She wrapped her tentacle around her right wrist. I stared.
“It’s not a birth defect,” she said. “It’s… metamorphosis. When humans touch the Old Ones’ power, it changes us. Either in madness of the mind and soul… or of the body.”
For the first time, her legs moved. Her boots dropped away. From the ends of her jeans, impossibly long, tattooed tentacles uncoiled, bifurcated at the tips. They reached for my knees, shyly.
“I learned the secrets long ago,” she said. “And used the power to keep the Gates of the Miskatonic Library shut. This was the cost. I keep the knowledge safe from foolish minds. It must remain so, until our race can make the hard choices, and reach for power without losing our souls. But so many books together have a – weight – that bends space itself. He sensed it, and slipped past my defenses.”
I reached out, disbelieving. What had once been her hand touched mine, and wrapped around it gently. It felt like human flesh; cool, but living. Suddenly, her face was very close to mine. I realized I’d never seen anything so beautiful.
“What can I do?” I whispered.
“You have already done more than you know,” she said. “By resisting. By being a friend. The path I have chosen is lonely and hard. The Call is strong.” Her lips parted. Met mine. She pulled herself onto my lap, coiling herself around me in a cool embrace as my blood heated. My right hand slid beneath her camisole and she gasped in pleasure. Her very human nipples hardened while her alien legs slid from her clothes and twisted around mine. I cried her name aloud. I rose and carried her to the futon, where we came together. For a moment, we were even grateful for the horror that had brought us there.
*
It was dark when I awoke from blessedly dreamless sleep.
Thea sat, softly weeping, framed by trees in the moonlight from the window.
“What is it?”
She wiped her eyes.
“I just… I haven’t felt human… for so long. I hope someday you can forgive me.”
“What for?”
“For the enchantment I’ve laid on you,” she said. “I had to. If I hadn’t… the Grammar has opened you to the Call. You might not have survived another night without my spell. But you may not have done… other things either.”
I stroked her left limb; it coiled around my wrist. “Like you?”
She nodded, quirking a smile through her tears. She was still beautiful. Was I enchanted? I didn’t care. The trees framing her head gave the appearance of dark hair.
“I can see Zeke’s point; you do look like Asenath Waite,” I said.
She shrieked. She couldn’t walk, but her lower tentacles moved and she flowed up from the futon and into her wheelchair. Her arm tentacle whipped out and came up with the knife. “How do you know that name?!”
I threw up my hands. “I only saw a picture!”
“Where?”
In halting sentences, I explained about Zeke, my trip to the high school, and finally, the dark lady who had interrupted my meeting with Matheson. “But it can’t have been the same woman; she’d be almost a hundred! Why does she matter, anyway?”
She lowered the knife, shuddering. “You did not see… Asenath. She is dead. But her family… mine… has other members. If,” she gulped, “she has been looking for that book, then she has heard the Call. And she is not resisting it any more than he is. The only mercy is that they are working against each other. But if he has a Kadathic book, then we must stop him now. In the library. Tonight.”
“But he knows I escaped; I might report him to the police. Won’t he move everything?”
“No. He has opened the Gates of R’lyeh. He cannot move them. And he hears the Call. He must go through the Gates tonight, as master or thrall.”
“Then won’t he be waiting?”
“Yes. But he can’t know how you escaped him. That’s why he sent the Hounds after you. So I will offer you to him. And you will have to smash the Minds. And kill our foe.”
“Offer me?” My heart pounded.
“As a poisoned bait. When he comes for you, we will strike.” Fear warred with my remembered rage at Matheson’s earlier betrayal. Rage won.
“Beware,” Thea said. “What you feel isn’t just you. It is the Call. You can use it. But it will seek to use you.” She raised the knife. Her tattoos seemed to glow black in the moonlight. Her left arm caressed my throat. “I must make it seem that I finished the job you started,” she said. “And it will hurt. You must trust me.”
I swallowed. “That’s… a lot of trust.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’ll trust you with more: I will hand you this knife. And if you see whatever looked like Asenath Waite… I’ll trust you to kill her with it. It’s the most important thing you could ever do for me.”
“Why?”
“Because she is the one enemy I fear.”
I hesitated. Nodded. “But I’ll need more than a knife.”
*
I thought the return to the Library alone would drive me mad.
Thea, obviously, could not carry me there. She had to call Matheson for help.
He sent the Lesser Servants.
I had thought they were rats, just days ago. Now I could smell them, and feel their twisted air as they hauled me across Arkham, wrapped in a blanket. Blood from Thea’s superficial cut across my throat soaked through it. It was more than I’d ever bled in my life. I concentrated on not moving. Breathing, not moving, and the whine of Thea’s wheelchair. Not the skittering and the snuffling of the Things gripping me.
When I was rolled out of the blanket, it was all I could do not to gasp in relief. But the foul smell of the boiler room quelled that desire.
Matheson spoke. “I see you keep your bargains, Miss Thea. Dead?” He stood at my head.
“Not quite yet. You can feel my power upon him.”
“And in more than that,” he grunted. “You held off the Hounds. Very well. What do you want for him?”
“Half the Minds as my servants, when I pass through the Gates in my turn.”
Matheson choked. “You would have me enter R’lyeh a pauper?”
Thea’s voice was disdainful. “Why not, when you must beg of me to enter as aught but servant?”
He stepped forward. “Now you listen here, you crippled…”
I opened my eyes, rolled over, and buried the knife in his foot.
His shriek was utterly inhuman, and he recoiled, tearing the knife from my grasp. I cursed, rose up, and gripped the weapon I had insisted on.
The sledgehammer we’d liberated from the janitor’s closet wasn’t a baseball bat, but it was close enough. The crunch when I drove it into his skull was plastic and gruesome. Matheson went down in a heap, leaving me a clear path to the Minds.
I felt their spells clawing at me, but Thea’s incantation stopped them inches from my skin. Swinging desperately, I connected. The bronze cylinder dented at the first blow, and burst at the second, jetting foul liquid over the floor. I nearly laughed. For all their unearthly power, they’d never bothered to worry about being clubbed to death. I hit the second cylinder. Then a third.
And then the Lesser Servants tackled me, and I went down beneath a living carpet of scaled and noisome flesh. They could not tear the hammer from me, but I had no room to swing it. Desperately, I rolled onto my back, fighting the choking, clawed hands.
A knife glinted. Matheson held it, lurching over me. His cheekbone was smashed, and his flesh bubbled and smoked on the left side. He was being drawn through the Gates, by the enchanted wound, but he came on, shunting the madness of the Beyond into his dissolving, metamorphosing body, hissing the words of a spell I now knew. When it was complete, he would strike, and I would be taken in his place. I struggled in vain.
“Release Him.”
The w
ords drove through the air with dark force. The Lesser Servants shrieked and fled, desperate to escape that voice. Matheson turned.
Thea rose from her wheelchair. Liquid waves of hair burst from her crown.
She walked toward him. In her left hand, she held a globe of green fire. The tattooed sigils on her perfect legs and arm were no longer ink, but incisions deeper than bone; gateways to a deep and writhing color beyond blackness and deeper than space.
“Asenath,” Matheson whispered. He gibbered and spat a terrible curse, drawing desperately on the power of the Beyond to rend her soul.
“Wrong Name, Slave. I Am Not My Elder Sister.”
Sister. And then I knew. The Grammar showed me. How she had kept her mind and youth intact at the cost of her body, lest her watch fail for the simplest of reasons: age.
Now her body was whole again, as I had seen it in Matheson’s office. But her mind was twisted into something Else.
“Thea!”
She stared at me as if at an insect examined from the madness beyond the Gates. She flung the green globe. It struck Matheson full in the face, melting his flesh off his bones.
I’ll trust you…
She advanced on me, her huge eyes blazing yellow. “Little Hero Of My Crippled Self,” she purred. “What Reward Shall I Give You For Freeing Me From Her? She Has Thwarted Me Too Long. Only Your Death Could Have Tempted Her To Free Me. Now Rise, And Join Me Beyond Life.”
I rose, powerless to defy the Call that echoed through her.
“Take The Treasure From The Defiled.”
I’ll trust you…
I obeyed. I pulled the precious things from the wreck of Matheson’s body.
“Kadath,” Thea/Asenath intoned. She went on in a language even older than that of Leng. But I understood the meaning. I would indeed join her for eternity. As her prey. “Kneel. And Give Me The Book.”
I knelt, surrendering the thick volume.
Then I struck upward. The blade sank into her throat.
Mouth agape in a bubbling scream, Thea/Asenath fell back. Her limbs writhed and twisted, and the terrible cracks in her flesh closed. She fell on me. I wept, and knew no more.
Miskatonic Nightmares Page 18