A Lonely and Curious Country

by Matthew Carpenter

  I am by no means unique. The Great Race are nothing if not systematic and there are many more like me, all organized and put to task quite logically. The people and beings they have dredged up from the past to relate their own histories all by and large people whose vocations it has been to do so. It is an efficient approach, I must say, though they make appropriate boogie-men for scholars: “Do not study too well,” one could warn, “or the Yith will snatch you out of your own head and reveal to you the logical end of all scholarship. Instead have a drink, blur your senses and forget what you have read today.” Perhaps that is why so many scholars are drunkards.

  1 If I ever find myself back in the age of the bright sun and in a university, I swear that I will devote myself to the study of pronouns and tenses in all the world’s languages and perhaps I will be able to write a more consistent account of my experiences, but to avoid ridiculously compounded clauses, I use “us” to denote both humanity and the beings of the future and now to denote whatever time I may be writing of and leave it to the reader to deduce from context which I am describing.

  The scholarship of the Great Race is very sober, and not cruel. I was eventually led from my place of awakening to my place of education or assimilation and their attitude was quite solicitous. They do not treat me as a prisoner or patient, I who am so strange here, but more as a kind of prophet, a madman touched with holy visions such as the Russians call a yurodivy. I soon learned, as I have mentioned, that I was far from being the only one such; rather there are many of us, all with our own particular mania and we were all indulged avidly. I prided myself on my fluency in languages when I was… human, but my grasp of the language and scripts of these beetles came to me too fast even for someone such as me to have acquired by learning. Instead, it seemed as if the knowledge had always been latent within me and its resurgence merely required the triggering effect of what passed for pen and parchment. This seemed common to us all and accordingly, we are each given a booth in what I shall call a scriptorium, furnished more or less comfortably or at least of shape and form that is convenient to my body (I do not imagine that any man of the Nineteenth Century who was not a professional contortionist would agree however!).

  My acquiescence to apparent confinement and labor may seem odd, especially to the self-styled humorists among the scholarly community (of which there are too many), but industriousness is the cardinal virtue of these creatures and they find work to be its own comfort. I was not therefore unhappy, instead I experienced the constant pleasure familiar to any writer in being able to give coherent form to my otherwise chaotic thoughts. It may seem trivial to write of the minutiae of mundane human life, but to an intelligent beetle, the most ordinary to us is the most enchanting and I could indeed, as William Blake wrote, see infinity in a grain of sand – or in my case, the items on the menu at the Café Royale, the results of horse races printed in The Times and remembered chatter over whether mauve or yellow was this year’s most fashionable color. Imagine if you will a child given a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces; rather than being daunted with the prospect of a seemingly futile task, the child is overjoyed with the assurance that they will never run out of pieces to connect. It is not so much the pieces that matters as the sense of “eureka” in perceiving their assembly into a pattern that gives pleasure. Such it is in the scriptorium.

  My mania or my task is the late Nineteenth Century, but of course I am not alone and my many companions each have their own niches. To one side of me there is an individual whose speciality is Byzantine mosaics – which is surely an appropriate metaphor for our general creation – while on the other side there is an astronomer and fifteen places down there is a being who claims to be transcribing his conversations with Machiavelli. If this is an asylum and we are all mad, then it is not without its pleasures. For instance, many supposedly established historical facts are undermined or even contradicted by these chronicles. Is it because of the wandering capriciousness of my imagination, or because the witnesses who were present at these historic events have knowledge beyond what has been officially recorded. History as we read it has been written for the convenience of the victors after all and one wit of our time – the time I imagine as such, I mean – has described the official register of the peerage as the greatest work of fiction that the English have ever produced. Then too there are many, many portraits of Renaissance popes and cardinals with their “nephews” standing in the background which anyone can guess to be their bastards. In these latter-day texts, such guesses are confirmed. Time travel, I realized with some schadenfreude, would be an excellent tool for blackmail.

  There are also the accounts of the “past” that are to me actually the future, and reading those, the pendulum of my emotion swung far away from anything like amusement; if the past is scandalous, your future is terrible. There are revelations of such depths of human depravity I could never have imagined in my worst nightmares that have filled me with utter despair of humanity itself. I can write the word “Auschwitz”, but while I could warn you of it, I am so overcome with sickness that words fail me. It is knowledge such as this that makes me wish that I am indeed mad, because sanity would be still more awful knowing what I know. Better one man be mad than an entire world! If the latter were the case, then oblivion and the wasteland outside is all we deserve!

  These secrets that I have seen – trivial, enlightening, amusing and awful – imply collectively an insidious dread. There is declared in the fact that what I had once thought to be the future is written as fait accompli. It is but one immense mechanism, a clock made of gears grinding upon gears, regular but inflexible and lubricated with a slurry of the blood and ashes of men and none of us can ever be anything more than tiniest complicit wheels within it… and having become the past, that awful machine has seized itself to hold in complete unalterable stasis all of the atrocities committed by man and nature. As the thousands of beetles scribble ceaselessly in their booths, I imagine that for each of them there is another life fixed within that machine, a tiny figure stretched and broken upon a tiny cogwheel.

  Fleeing the thought of the bloody rigid clock, now and again I wander in that wrack of a world under the red sun and I become glad of my protection. Strange as I am, strange as my companions are, we have a purpose and this damp twilit shore has none. I do not spend long outside before scurrying back under cover to write and write some more in the stone hall filled with singing machines and busy scribes. Do you see then why I found my strange embodiment ultimately reassuring and comfortable?

  This then is the peculiar entwinement of horror and hope that I have found at the end of earth’s time. I found a strange wonder and nobility in the task of the Great Race, which I shall now describe to you. Observing one scribe, I was shocked to discover that it was working on what I could describe as an historical kaleidoscope. As it scratched away at its plaque, I leant over to read and found to my shock that this creature was chronicling the work of another scribe. Tremendously intrigued by this I rushed to another and then another in the same row. All of them were writing of the experiences of scribes stationed far in the past relating events still further in the past, leading further and further back into time to the distant prehistory of earth when the Great Race occupied other bodies. According to their descriptions they were even stranger than the coleopterous things that toiled here: they were roughly conical creatures that looked like a bouquet of lilies and clawed fronds mounted in a long pleated skirt that moved it about by a kind of rippling or sweeping motion – at least that description is the best I could make sense of their words and sketches. In any case, as I peeled back one strange mask to reveal another, that mask too lifted to reveal still more weirdness. Those creatures were themselves recording the events of a time and place that could not have occurred at any time on earth and could only have happened upon a planet of another star still further back in time.

  The project of the Great Race not one of idle curiosity. They would not employ their great reso
urces to reach through time if it were of passing interest. It is, I have come to realize, their creed, the eternal mission to record. This great litany upon which they collectively toil is the very essence of their being and purpose. Unable to achieve immortality in any material form, they leap across the aeons in mind, and at each stop, they establish what we could call a civilization and which they think of merely as a base camp or reference tableau. They have, I realize, created a great encyclopedia in time and space, its chapters scattered across the eternal cosmos. At any point, on any world and at any era they can open a page on another and read it as it is being freshly written!

  These Yith know of course the horror both explicit and implicit of which I have written because they write of it too in the manifold recursions of their encyclopedia. It is their technique for crossing time and space extra-corporeally that is their liberation from determinism – provided that they keep moving and never linger in one era or place. Now, they sense that their time here has ended and more and more often their compound eyes swivel away from the dark, vermillion-lit sands of this terminal beach and towards the stars twinkling distantly in the sky above. They are ready to flee once more across the reaches of space and time, these cosmic nomads. Already they have selected their recipients and measuring them to fit. They will take with them the sum of the earth’s history as they have trawled it up from the past, and the history of all their previous abodes too. When they can carry no matter, of course memories are the most precious things to them and they are nothing if not thrifty. Perhaps they are even honorable in doing so, ensuring that mankind, a brief player in the theatre of life before collapsing into decadence and oblivion will be remembered in still more distant aeons. The fact will remain thought that we are but a medallion, a bauble in the forever-reaching hands and they have far brighter prizes.

  Perhaps before they leave they will cast my consciousness back to my human vessel in old, vanished Arkham, but I think that I do not want that. I will beg, if it is worth anything, to go with them and leave this manuscript for some other traveller to retrieve should there be someone in some age who can contrive to replicate their traversal of time with a machine of his own. Who knows? Perhaps it will find its way back to an age not dissimilar to my own where my words can be read.

  ***

  The tale of the temporal abductee came to its tentative end, but that is not all I have to relate. There is one more thing I must tell you, which is the reason why the Time Traveller held me back me and myself alone to hear his secret. The author of the manuscript who said that he was not sure if his name was real or whether it was some convenient fiction to cover an amalgam of the temporal gleanings of the Great Race was not so confused as he thought. He had a name and that name has cast a shadow across my life, bringing an awful dark enlightenment to me. It will inspire me to take up the reins of scholarship at Miskatonic University and there teach, and to delve into the libraries in search of records of similar cases of which I have already heard rumors. It will lead me to teach and its echo will wake me from my dreams at night relieved to be released from them but ridden with doubt and trembling and it will lead me to drink too, no doubt, so that my days become like a recurring dream, familiar and unfamiliar at once.

  I know this because the name on that manuscript was my own.

  All revelations have implications. I have learned my strange fate, and with it by my own circuitous route, like the Time Traveller I have learned the fate of humanity too: futility, decadence and extinction. I will work as a scholar to recover, preserve and transmit knowledge, but all the while I will know that will be as if I am shoveling water up a hill, because our mere human institutions will crumble into dust, our dying exhalations will be swept away by the wind and memory of everyone who has ever been will be doused with the last spark of consciousness of one of those barely sentient Eloi of which the Time Traveller told.

  Can this fate be changed? Now knowing, can I perhaps to take up some other vocation or perhaps like that writer friend of the Time Traveller, pen warning polemics in the hope of diverting the progress of history towards another, better end? I would have grasped at that thought as hope if I were the man that I had been just one night before, but now the uncertainty of an unmapped future horrifies me too.

  I am in a bind and I see only one way out of it. I may be mad, I may be fated to madness, I may be fated to madness because I have convinced myself of it. However, I will follow the path that I see laid out for me into the shadow of determined fate and I will stumble along under the gloom of fate and the haze of dread and drink and be tripped so that I stand upon that beach under the dying sun. There will be the solution to my dilemma. There I will see what lies beyond the end of the last sentence of that manuscript. These beings of Yith have recorded our history and surely they cannot but have judged us by such horrors as this “Auschwitz” – whatever that may be – and I wish to enter a countering plea in the record if I may. The Time Traveller, as we have arranged, will follow me by means of his own machine and together we will meet the Great Race on the everlasting eve of their departure and we will speak to them, we will beg, even. “Do not forget us,” we will ask. “You who live forever take care to remember us and do not let mankind live in vain. Let me continue to be one of the authors of your Litany.”

  After that, I do not know what will happen, and I will be free at last of that awful, bloody machine of fate that my future self has, will have seen. Perhaps I shall see a new sun upon another shore. I can only live now with the conviction that this better future must be possible.

  The Third Oath of Dagon

  Robert M. Price

  1. Multi-Culturalism

  “I tried to reason with the fellow. Just because the Divinity School has adopted an interfaith curriculum doesn’t mean each and every class session has to take that approach. You just cannot approach Christian theology that way if you’re describing its history and development. I don’t know what they’re doing over in Systematics these days, though I’m sure we’ll all be obliged to find out at the next faculty meeting.” With that, Professor Oldstone took a listless bite of his sandwich. He had made it himself this morning in his campus apartment, but he had already forgotten what he had put in it and seemed almost indignant tasting it, as if someone else had failed to get his lunch order straight. In reality, it was something else, much else, that he found distasteful. And it left him feeling quite full, for he had had it “up to here.” His lunch partner, a younger man, Simmons from Pastoral Counseling, tried to smooth the older man’s ruffled feathers.

  “Ben,” he said, “I know I haven’t been here nearly as long as you have, so I haven’t seen such drastic changes over the long haul, but the student might have a point. Many scholars would agree with him that Christian history has a pretty dark side lying beneath its progress. Its triumphs have been made at the expense of other faiths. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Our own state…”

  “You mean Commonwealth.”

  “Uh, yes, Commonwealth. Anyway, it’s seen more than a little repression, even persecution, of rival faiths in its short history.”

  “Paul, I’m guessing you aren’t thinking of the Indians, or the Quakers.”

  “You’re right, Ben, I’m talking about 1928.”

  “Everybody’s talking about 1928 these days, it seems.” In fact, the campus of Miskatonic University was locked in perpetual tension, up to and including legal and governmental actions back and forth, all relating to the events of eight full decades earlier. For all that time, all parties had been content, some said forced, to maintain a discrete silence. Everyone had his own version of the events of those far-off days, some speaking of them as if they were but yesterday’s news, and in general no one could quite agree on what had happened, nor who was at fault. It appeared, as far as the newspapers knew, that the federal government had launched a full-scale naval attack on the coastal town of Innsmouth in Essex County. The effects of the attack had been felt more broadly, with some damage to
property, in adjacent Newburyport and Ipswich, but swift assurances, not without threatenings, from the government agents had served to choke off further inquiry. Sleeping dogs lay until 2003, during the aftermath of the 2001 al-Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in New York (“that Babylonish burg” as Professor Benjamin Oldstone always called it). Old suspicions had led the local arm of the newly formed Homeland Security Department to cast a squinting eye upon Innsmouth, which had of course rebuilt itself in the interval, repopulated largely by the same stock of Polynesian islanders with whom the native Yankees had long ago intermarried, eventually sacrificing their Caucasian identity. As conspicuous foreigners, complete with an alien religion, and with an inherited tendency to keep to themselves—and especially when one recalled the destruction of 1928—they had begun to look newly suspicious to their fellow New Englanders.

  The people of the shadowed town protested at what they considered unmotivated government surveillance, even profiling. And as far as terrorism was concerned, no one could prove that the Innsmouth townspeople of eighty years previously had ever been inclined to it. After all, it was the U.S. government, not the Innsmouth population, who unleashed terrible weapons of mass destruction offshore. The real historical parallel, urged the eager lawyers representing the aggrieved immigrant town, was the case of the abused American Indians of the nineteenth century. That and the internment camps for innocent Japanese citizens during World War Two.