by Joshi, S. T
“For god’s sake, Kim, I’m not that busy we couldn’t meet for dinner or something,” he said, shaking his head at me in that way that always made me laugh.
But then he just stared at me the way a doctor examines a patient. “You look pale. And you’ve lost weight. Are you sick?”
“No. A little tired maybe—”
“You look like you haven’t eaten in days. Come on. I’m buying dinner.”
“An offer I can’t refuse,” I said.
He watched me place the book that I was about to reread onto the librarian’s cart.
He tilted his head and read aloud: “The Great Old Ones. What’s that about, Kim?”
“I’ll tell you over supper.”
We ate at the student cafeteria. He had meatloaf—he always had meatloaf when it was available. I was still a vegetarian and ordered a plate of vegetables-of-the-day but felt too agitated to do more than pick at the food.
“Franklin, that book?”
“The one I saw?”
“Yeah. It’s from the mythology section. The story of how life on earth began.”
“There are no shortage of theories,” he said, stuffing his mouth with gravy-soaked mashed potatoes.
“This one’s pretty bizarre. It talks about extraterrestrials—those are the Great Old Ones. They arrived long before there was anything on this planet. Or maybe when there was some life. There are several myths.”
“No shortage of mythos either.”
“In fact, they’re the ones who created life.”
“A creation mythology.”
“Kind of. But, it’s different. I mean, you know about religions, right? Why did God create humans?”
“Lots of theories there too. As many as there are religions.”
“Give me some examples.”
“Are you going to eat your peas?”
“No.” I shoved my plate toward him and he scooped up teaspoons of gray-green canned peas, then stared lustfully at my carrot coins.
“Well, with Judeo-Christian it’s man-in-His-own-image—that’s a classic. The Hindu god Brahma is said to have created the universe, with some help—they don’t know why, but the general feeling is that everybody had the best of intentions. The Muslim’s believe that Allah is manifesting his might and will through us as conscious beings so that we will know and love Him, and one another. The Buddhists say the beginning of this world is inconceivable, no beginning, no end, no reason. The matriarchies you were so hot about a few weeks ago, it seems they made a connection between the cycles of birth, life, death, rebirth, and the birth of the universe—”
“Okay, but none of this sounds bad.”
He stopped chewing and thought about it. “No, I guess not. It’s all good.”
“But what about a religion that believes their god or gods just, I don’t know, made life, but it was a mistake.”
“That’s pretty far out, Kim.”
“This book, The Great Old Ones, that’s exactly what it suggests. That there were these aliens that have always existed and they just go around doing things without any real intent. Well, maybe there’s an intent to have fun, like play practical jokes on each other, or play games, maybe malicious. And sometimes they do something and it’s a mistake. Like making us. We’re a mistake. Or a nasty joke. But they don’t really care.”
“That doesn’t sound like any religion I’ve studied.”
“I know. This is so weird. They didn’t create us for any good reason. And you know what else, Franklin? The book, it refers to an expedition from the 1930s that started out at this very university—”
“From Miskatonic?”
“—and they discovered remains. Some scientists from here went to Antarctica and they found these gods, or maybe creatures they created. They might have found the Great Old Ones!”
Franklin put down his fork and eyed me the way people stare at a woman who might be losing her mind. “Okay, Kim, you’re going off the deep end with this.”
“What I’m going to do is ferret out more information about these Great Old Ones! I want to know about why they created life!”
“Look, come to my place. We’ll have some wine and relax and you can tell me more about all this,” he said.
The library was closed, and I thought maybe relaxing wasn’t such a bad idea. I was tired, physically and mentally. “All right, but I need to be at the library when it opens. I don’t want anyone else getting to that book before I do!”
As we exited the cafeteria, Franklin said, “Kim, do you think that’s likely, an esoteric volume like that?”
“You never know who is interested in what, Franklin. The more I investigate this, the more I feel I’m on the edge of a breakthrough.”
“Just so it isn’t a breakdown,” he said in a soft voice, then draped his arm around my shoulder, just like the old days.
* * *
I spent more weeks in the library, rereading everything they had on matriarchies, including the Bachofen book, and the scant info available on these Great Old Ones. The librarian told me there were only two other volumes that even mentioned them, both focusing on the 1930s expedition. One was a scholarly assessment of the research materials gathered, saddled with the language of academia, littered with dry facts, devoid of any emotional response, an overwritten account of the fossils collected in the Antarctica expedition, which were laboriously identified and classified by their Greek and Latin names, and none of which appeared to be remains of anything unidentifiable. I found the 300-page report migraine-inducing and with only one reference to Elder Things, in the end it proved useless for my purposes.
The other book, though, a slim volume, was handwritten, an account by one of the explorers who didn’t identify himself and wrote in the third person. Besides over thirty assistants and aircraft mechanics and the fifty-five sled dogs brought along, the heavy-hitters scientifically included a biologist, a geologist, a physicist/meteorologist, and an engineer. This strange little book, scrawled on the yellowing parchment-like pages of a notebook of the day, had no title, and the librarian had handed it over the desk reluctantly, insisting that I had to sit at the study table right in front of her and reminding me to keep the protective gloves on and “Don’t crease the pages!”
According to the anonymous author, the expedition used a newly invented drill to sever ice as it moved to various geologically significant spots on the continent, mainly south of the Ross Sea.
They had set sail from Boston Harbor on September 2, 1930, and reached the Antarctic Circle on October 20th, returning home by mid-February of the following year. The party landed on Ross Island and proceeded from there by dogsled interspersed with airplane flights to locations farther afield.
When one of their little planes was forced by bad weather to land, some of these intrepid explorers accidently discovered a previously unknown mountain range that rivaled the Himalayas. And then, they found a cave. And then they found the remains.
I reread the description of the remains: bulbous things, with gills and wings, barrel bodies, suction cups at the end of multiple proboscis. Animals, likely marine, but maybe not. Anon identified them as “Elder Things” and likened them to the “Great Old Ones” of some religious mythology I didn’t know about, with five-lobed brains. There was also a comparison to bees!
I put down the book, making the instant connection to the beehive-headed goddess figure. And a shiver ran through me. I felt at the edge of insight but I wasn’t there yet, and read on.
The main body of the exposition lost radio contact with the smaller party that had discovered these remains. Consequently, some from the base camp were forced to hunt for their now-silent companions who would, ultimately, be found dead. And that’s when they discovered what appeared to be the ruins of a city. A city built for gargantuans. The writer described it in one paragraph as constructed like the cells of a honeycomb!
I felt rattled to my bones. Surely this couldn’t be connected to the matriarchal clay figures from 25,0
00 B.C.!
This is when it all turned very weird for me, because at that point the narrative stopped—the rest of the pages of the notebook had been ripped out. I counted remnants in the binding and it looked as if the last third of the account was missing. I was a little afraid the librarian would blame me for this destruction, so I turned to her and said, “Do you know that some of the pages of this book are missing?”
“Yes,” she told me, “that’s why you have to sit here and read it. Someone tore out the pages. It’s an invaluable historical account and we need to protect what remains.”
I nodded at her and turned back to the notebook. Someone didn’t want the rest of this story told!
As I’d read through the notebook, I noticed sketches the author had made of art on the walls of this giant city. I’d only given them a cursory look so I could keep reading the difficult-to-decipher script. But now I went back to them and studied what appeared to me to be almost a story in images, a bizarre history of some prehistoric race. As I examined each page of drawings, for some reason those on page 13 held my interest. That page contained images of what I would call creatures, something like animals, but not exactly animals. There were recognizable features: beaks and tentacles and multiple legs, the familiar stuck onto grotesque shapes, monstrous really, that sent another chill along my spine. And then, at the bottom right corner, I saw one figure with an enormous human body, a female, but not the head—the head was a beehive!
A small scream came from me, and the librarian instantly shushed me.
“Kim, what’s up?”
I looked up to see Franklin standing there. From the look on his face I knew my face reflected the horror I felt.
“What is it?” His voice was full of concern as he sat next to me and put a hand on my shoulder.
I turned the notebook and showed him the picture.
“Peculiar,” he said. “Kind of fantastical drawings. When were they done?”
“In the 1930s.”
“Strange images.” He looked at me. “Reminds me of early science fiction creatures. But why do you find them so upsetting?”
“Don’t you see it, Franklin? Look. Look!”
The librarian hissed, “You’ll have to keep your voice down!”
I whispered to Franklin rapidly as I frantically pointed to the image, “The huge woman with the beehive-head!”
He looked again. “Yeah, I see a resemblance, but—”
“This is the same image as the matriarchal clay figure! I’m sure of it! They’re identical!”
He stared at me. “Well, maybe it’s similar, but—”
“No, it’s the same! It’s exactly the same!”
My voice must have risen again, because the librarian was suddenly at my side, taking the book from my hands and saying, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. You’re disturbing others. And we must protect our books—”
“No!” I yelled, grabbing the notebook, almost snatching it back from her grasp.
“Kim, don’t do that!” Franklin grabbed my arm.
As I pulled the book, the librarian held tight and suddenly the fragile notebook broke apart, half in her hands, half in mine.
“Kim! What are you doing?”
The librarian called over her shoulder to a colleague, “Betty, call security, now!”
“Franklin, it’s the same. It is! The Great Old Ones. They did start life here. They made the first women, but they made them wrong, they’re not like us but they are, the same bodies, but not the heads. Not the heads! They made them like that as a joke!”
I don’t recall much after that, other than being in a speeding ambulance, Franklin sitting pensively beside me, holding my hand, the sound of the siren loud in my ears, and someone in a uniform that looked medical injecting fluid into a vein on the back of my hand.
It took weeks for the psychiatrist at the university-affiliated hospital to convince me, through drugs and psychotherapy, that I’d been making connections that just were not there. “Sometimes, Kim, it appears to make sense to put things together that don’t go together, and then it becomes easy to let an idea of a connection form. We all do that from time to time. It’s mis-thinking. It’s a way to simplify what in reality is too large a concept to understand; for instance, in this case, how life on earth began. Even the greatest scientific minds on the planet don’t know the answer to that one. It’s a mystery …”
Franklin visited me every day. He assured me I was overstressed, overworked, that I’d gotten myself in too deeply with academic research and that really wasn’t my forte. He told me that you can’t always put one and one together and make two, which I didn’t really understand, but I did appreciate his kindness and sweetness and suddenly saw that the loyal man I’d run away from in fear of destroying both of us was the one I desperately wanted to walk toward. But I knew I could not do that. Not now. Not with what I knew. I’d completely destroy him.
When the hospital released me, Franklin insisted I move in with him. He’s busy with his thesis and I know he doesn’t want distractions, so I try to keep out of his way. I’ll stay here temporarily and try to recoup whatever sanity I have left. I’ll make an effort to build a new life, one that allows me to act as if this great horror that overwhelms me is not real.
The library didn’t press charges because they got the notebook back and I guess were able to repair the damage. Most of it, anyway. All but the bottom right corner of the sketch on page 13. That’s the part I managed to rip out of the book, and while I was being hauled away on a stretcher I stuffed the scrap of paper into my mouth and swallowed. Someone had to rescue the proof of this connection, and I knew that someone had to be me. It’s my destiny. I see that clearly now. I’m the only one who has put it all together and I have to safeguard that knowledge until I can find a way to explore it further and then disseminate the information in a rational manner so that people believe me. No matter how ghastly a realization, humanity needs to know its origins:
The Great Old Ones created the beehive-headed women—and all the other abominations the artwork in the book depicted—hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years ago, to amuse themselves, because why else would they create anything so hideous, so inhumanly human? I remembered that the matriarchal books mentioned that these clay statues with obese female bodies and beehive heads were found in many places on the planet and dated to the same time frame, 25,000 B.C., pre-recorded history. But now I realized that those must have been the only clay figures to survive. What about the ones before those, which had to have disintegrated with time? That’s when I made the final connection: The Great Old Ones engineered these females long before 25,000 B.C., long before the cave paintings of 37,000 B.C. The females were around from the beginning of time. The Elder Things had connected cells together, like the cells of a honeycomb, until they came up with this construction. Then the Great Old Ones impregnated them, as if they were rats in a lab experiment. Suddenly, in a flash of brilliance, I got it, how, they did this. The Great Old Ones also created Neanderthals by combining and splicing cells and mated the beehive-headed women with the Neanderthals—more cells combining—just so they could see what would happen! The females gave birth over the millennia and those hybrids led to us! Evolving humanity. How much more apparent could it be?
These early women made little clay statues of each other, just as the cave painters replicated the animals they saw, just as the Great Old Ones painted or had painted the images of their horrifyingly distorted experiments, not human, not animal, not anything understandable! These are our ancestors! No wonder we’re all insane!
All this grim knowledge lives in me now and the details are painfully clear, so obvious that it astonishes me that no one else has seen this. The beehive-headed women with the enormous bodies. Bodies that wouldn’t have been obese if they were giants! Giants created as the first females who birthed what eventually became Homo sapiens, freakish mutants engineered somehow by gargantuan omnipotent aliens, the father
-gods of us all, who did nothing but entertain themselves, or maybe did things for a purpose we can’t fathom but a purpose that wasn’t loving. The incomprehensible archetypes that bequeathed us the legacy of soulless entertainment as a goal of life, like watching an endless string of cheap movies, wasting our precious time because our existence is pointless, meaningless and, at the core, useless.
And then they abandoned us, left us here on this planet to flounder, or evolve. It all makes so much sense, and I know it’s true. This knowledge is inside me now. I can see it’s swelling my body as I have a hard time containing these facts. When I look in the mirror I see how much I resemble the obese beehive-headed figures whose voices buzz like a swarm of bees, creating sounds that form words in my head, each word nestled in its own little womblike cell that is connected to the next little cell and the next to bind together and tell the story of the birth of Homo sapiens, a race that has no purpose, fathered by gods that just didn’t care. No wonder we’re all crazy!
THE ANATOMY LESSON
CODY GOODFELLOW
“WE ARE DEAD MEN,” I WHISPERED TO MY FRIEND AS WE FILED OUT, with all the other condemned, from Professor Aldwych’s lecture hall.
But my friend’s response was as falsely bright as the setting sunlight on the rain-washed stones of the quadrangle, that damned summer day.
“Not a bit of it,” said he. “Were we both dead, then we’d be beyond all worry, and if only one of us were dead, then the other’s troubles would likewise be at an end.” With this last sardonic observation, he only whetted the keen edge of my unease, for the same unworthy thought had crossed my own mind.
With final examinations slated for Monday morning, we were up against an unthinkable obstacle to completing our studies. The university had failed to secure adequate cadavers, and old Aldwych had left dangling the horrid prospect of suspension of exams and graduations for those who failed to shift for themselves.