by Joshi, S. T
The surging black tide lifted the boat and propelled it down the enormous tunnel like a toy down a sewer pipe. I clung to the oars, but needn’t have bothered. My fortunes were chained to the boat, and I did all I could merely to keep our waterborne missile flying upright.
The ghoul clung to the boat with all four grasping paws, howling to drown out the roar of the flood breaking over our gunwales in frothy black splashes wriggling with blind, glowing things. Throwing his ponderous bulk around in the boat to toss it askew on the face of the flood, I feared the ghoul had tumbled before the wave to drown us, but the boat shot ahead of the wave and right out of the water, skidding into a sharply ascending tunnel. The waves only swamped our beached boat and soaked us as they passed.
I lay in the slimy bottom of the boat for a long while, catching my breath, before I took stock of my current troubles. Fetid breath washed over my face, but the ghoul didn’t touch me. He only dropped a bundle of rags in my lap. “Hurry,” the creature growled. “It’s coming.”
“What’s coming?” I screamed and brandished my chains. “How am I to—”
“Show your work, boyo,” he said. Then he took out a meat cleaver and chopped off my right hand at the wrist.
When I had recovered from the initial shock, I found the ghoul had gone, along with my hand. I was free, and in the rags that I used to make a rude tourniquet, I found a test.
I ran and then crawled up from the underworld, taking any fork that seemed to turn toward the surface, until somehow, touched at last by fickle fortune, I found my way into a crypt with the lock already forced and stumbled out into the blinding light of dawn.
I had to hide from a party of mourners and as I tried to get my bearings. The road at the bottom of the hill was the Aylesbury Pike, and the Miskatonic sparkled in the rosy morning light. The towers of the university reared up out of the mist in the east like … well, damn what I thought they looked like, just then.
I was in the wrong cemetery.
Exhausted as I was, I still had to make a long detour back to Sentinel Hill on foot before I could go home. The bells were ringing for church, but most of my fellow medical students still slept, so no one stopped me as I struggled with a bundle wrapped in my cloak over my shoulder for the dormitory. As well as I was able, I saw to my wounds. I had nothing to lose, just then, by conducting an experiment.
I had seen ghouls with mismatched and piebald limbs, and heard Augustus’s lunatic claims, but I had no reason to trust in them. But I had come here to study the mechanisms of the body, and I had prepared all my life for this test.
The ghoul’s hand was still sickeningly warm, the black-red blood oozing from it still vital. I touched it to the stump of my hand and instantly felt a tingling sensation, as of a galvanic current.
One taloned finger on the paw jumped and pointed, and then it made a fist.
It required less than fifty stitches. The paw was as good, in its way, as my own hand, by the time I said my prayers and went to bed. I slept through Sunday night, when I awoke with a horrible shock that I could only dispel by checking my closet.
I confess that, despite all the terror and agonizing pain I suffered in escaping from the underworld, I would still have been a failure as a medical student, had I not secured what we came for in the first place. Although his brain and sundry other organs were missing when I found him in catacombs beneath the potter’s field, Linus Keebler would still get to make a noble contribution to medical science, and he would still, in a manner of speaking, get to take the final examination.
* * *
Monday morning found us at our operating tables in the main theater. The cold familiarity of stainless steel and formaldehyde was a welcome distraction from the morbid delusions my febrile brain had entertained, of late.
Professor Aldwych patrolled the aisles between us, calling out the objectives for the procedures we were to perform on our cadavers. More than a few students received a sharp jab of the professor’s cane for looking at their colleagues’ work, or at the professor himself, or asking him how his crippling arthritis had so miraculously cleared up.
I was thankful for the inattention, for I had replaced poor Keebler’s purloined parts with beef organs from a butcher shop, and it was difficult to use my elegantly shaped tools with the paw of a carrion-eating beast. Indeed, the scalpel and spreaders only hindered my work, and I found it all too easy to lay open the chest of my subject with my naked claws, flaying the fatty endodermis away from slack brown muscle as easily as one peels the husk from an ear of corn. Aldwych’s roving eye never stopped to remark upon my technique, though I took only the clumsiest steps to conceal my condition, and he no longer seemed to need his spectacles.
Our fears that a deficit of materials would derail the completion of our studies had been allayed, though a few of our classmates were missing, aside from Augustus and Linus Keebler, who acquitted himself admirably, in a role much better suited to his native talents. I could not identify the missing, of course, for we all wore masks and gowns, the ceremonial uniform of our grisly trade. To my weary eye, we did not resemble pioneers of medical science so much as acolytes of some ancient order, training to slaughter human sacrifices for a bloodthirsty god.
We had only just concluded the penetration of the anterior ribcage when a cloaked figure stormed the operating theater, using a laden gurney as a battering ram. We all looked askance at the outrageous invasion, but none was half so shocked as I to see that it was Augustus Odum, tardy to final exams.
If Professor Aldwych was known for anything besides his age, near-blindness, and slow, pained gait, it was his obsession with punctuality. But he meekly admitted Augustus to the theater and allowed him to unpack his surgical tools and commence with his examination.
My confusion and curiosity were almost unbearable, but I could not abandon my post to brace Augustus. I risked a glance his way when Professor Aldwych laid into an incompetent student at the far end of the theater. I was startled to find his eyes settled upon me.
His hands held a pen and scribbled notes in a journal, but his dissection continued apace and had already proceeded with the excavation of the thoracic cavity. I should not have been surprised at this, at least. Augustus had never troubled himself with tiresome labor, when he could coax another into doing it for him.
Augustus stood beside a big, strapping cadaver that appeared to be in excellent condition, except where its face had been gnawed off by some singularly vicious animal.
In a flash, I recognized the knotty hands and stubby fingers of Bart Parrish, but never had they operated with such deft precision as they did now; for they were engaged in cutting the aorta and pulmonary artery from their own heart and lifting it from the gaping chest cavity like a freshly delivered baby.
Slack-jawed, I watched the fumbling cadaver on Augustus’s gurney remove its own lungs and then begin to cut the esophagus and trachea, when I felt a sharp blow in the small of my back. “See to your own work, Mr. Lennox,” Aldwych hissed in my ear. “Only with your own heart and hand can you take the Hippocratic oath.”
My own hand. Where was my own hand, at that moment? And what was it doing? Most likely, I confess, something not unlike what I was doing.
Before any of us had begun to finish, Augustus yawned loudly and proclaimed the dissection complete. All the major organs and blood vessels lay pinned and tagged beside the emptied vessel of Bartholomew Parrish, whose family later commissioned a statue of Bart for their family plot overlooking Hangman’s Slough. The grave was, of course, empty.
Before Augustus took his leave, Professor Aldwych shook his hand and bowed to him, as if he were the student, bidding farewell to a master. Augustus favored him with a few whispered words, then left without any fanfare.
His rooms at Saltonstall Street were empty when I came calling that evening, but his landlord gave me an envelope that bore my name in Augustus’s looping, swooping script.
Inside, I found the signet ring I’d been wearing on my right h
and, and a note:
Apologies for the chaotic way our jaunt turned out, but it’s within my power to put it right. Ask yourself—not tomorrow, but when the days grow long and cold—if you would rather I cured your hand, or your heart?
I never saw him again, nor, to my great relief, have I heard his name …
Until yesterday, when fate reached out and bullied me into penning this confession, before the will to make a clean breast of my sins should be ripped away from me.
For over thirty years I have served well the town that placed its faith in me, and never has my curious deformity become any more than a source of idle church gossip. I have done all that is in my power to keep them in health, to ease their suffering when no more could be done, and to comfort them, almost as a priest, that the mysteries of the flesh are not ours to divine or determine.
And all the while, I have known it for a lie.
I have told broken young men who left arms and legs in Philippine jungles and the muddy trenches of the Somme that nothing can be done, but to carry on. The god of my neighbors demands prayers, but never answers them. In my heart, I have not only sinned, but I have prayed to the secret god of my trade. And damn me, he has answered.
Yesterday, a package arrived in the post, bearing no return address, but I recognized at once the unruly penmanship.
Inside, I found no letter or note, only a patent medicine bottle bearing the label of Dr. Balfour’s Vitonic. The seal is broken, and I have little doubt but that the contents are not what the label promises. The bottle is full of something black and fluid, yet when I hold it to the light, it strives to congeal into something alive. Squirming with unspoken promises, it repeats the question Augustus asked me.
My hand or my heart?
My heart—
THE HOLLOW SKY
JASON C. ECKHARDT
“The human race, then, is not alone in the universe. Though I am cut off from human beings, I am not alone.”
—Adm. Richard E. Byrd, Alone
1
I AM FORCED INTO SPEECH BECAUSE MEN OF SCIENCE HAVE REFUSED to follow my advice without knowing why.
Where have I read those words before? I know them well and see the rust of age upon letter and syllable. Yet they are pertinent still, eighty years on—or rather, they are applicable again. In this case, though, I am reversing the advice of my maligned predecessor: Where he sought to dissuade, I seek to encourage. Pray God, what God there may be, that these men of science heed me better than they did him.
Here I speak of “men of science” as beings apart when I am surely one myself. My name is Victor Hope Metcalfe, and I am professor of climatology at the University of Northern Rhode Island in Smithfield. My interest in science was born during field-trips with my father, a professor of physics at MIT, to the wealth of science museums near our home outside of Boston. I got to know the ancient glass specimen cases of the Peabody and Agassiz Museums of Harvard as well as my own room; and how I brimmed with excitement at the annual Christmas show at the Boston Museum of Science’s Hayden Planetarium!
But I saved my most ardent enthusiasm for the Gilman Memorial Museum at Miskatonic University. All the way out to Arkham on the Fitchburg line I would daydream of the Gilman’s dusty halls, its dioramas and its fossils. Of primary importance to me was the exhibit assembled around the university’s ill-fated 1930–31 Antarctic Expedition. When you first enter the museum’s classic granite building, you are presented with one of the expedition’s huge Dornier Do-J “Wal” aircraft, suspended over the great hall in perpetual flight. Craning my neck, I could see the glint of the museum’s lights off the plane’s surfaces, still “bruised to a high polish” by the terrible Antarctic gale, as the writer H. P. Lovecraft put it. In the Antarctic Hall itself I half hesitated down its crepuscular length, both dreading and thrilling to the sight of the full-size reproduction of an “Old One.” It hangs from the wall midway down the hall, the thing’s pseudo-wings and tentacles spread in awful, ten-foot glory between a map of Antarctica circa 1930 and a blow-up photo of fur-clad explorers on a landscape of pure white. I had nightmares about it that I treasured.
By the age of ten I knew the whole tragic story of that voyage to the ends of the earth. The successful flight over the South Pole; the destruction of most of the expedition’s company in a howling blizzard; the strange discoveries and Professor William Dyer’s stranger revelations; and perhaps most tragic of all, the student Danforth’s confinement to the Danvers Asylum upon his return to the States—all were chapter and verse to me. Later I would read Lovecraft’s fictional treatment of the expedition, At the Mountains of Madness; and later still raged to discover how Dyer had entrusted Lovecraft with his notes, only to discover that Lovecraft had turned his learned dissertation into pulp fiction. Dyer was completely discredited. He had waited five years to publish his revelations, and the shock of Lovecraft’s treatment of them helped kill him. He died of a stroke in August 1936, just four months after publication. If there was any justice, it was that Lovecraft followed him in March of the following year.
Of course, who would have believed Prof. Dyer’s allegations of alien creatures, hidden antediluvian cities, and titan mountain chains anyway? The Starkweather-Moore Expedition of 1936–37 effectively quashed such wild rumors. There was a mountain chain, yes, but nothing to dwarf the Himalayas; and even the biologists of Miskatonic University itself, working from samples brought back by Dyer and Danforth, concluded that the “Old Ones,” far from being extraterrestrial in origin, were almost certainly from a lost branch of the Crinoidea class of creatures—cousins to starfish and sea urchins. Monstrous, certainly, but well within the limits of sane biology. They belonged with the seven-toed lizard, the trilobite, and other dead-ends of evolution.
Yet, disaster or not, the Miskatonic Expedition exercised an inspiration over me. I resolved to make some branch of science my career. My second year at U. Mass. Amherst I was able to secure access to the papers of Professor Lyman Atwood, Miskatonic’s Antarctic meteorologist, and it was these that inspired me to become a climatologist. It was through published papers of my own that I was invited to be part of this year’s World Geophysical Society’s Antarctic Symposium. Thus am I come full circle.
2
SOME SUCH THOUGHTS AS THESE RAN THROUGH MY MIND AS I SAT in Logan Airport, awaiting the first of a series of flights that would take me halfway around the world to Antarctica. Outside the March sunshine was glittering off Boston Bay and melting the last of winter’s snow, but I knew that where I was going the weather would be far less hospitable. March is the tail-end of Antarctic Autumn; it must truly be urgent for the WGS to beckon us to the bottom of the world at such a time, I reflected. But for the prestige of the gathering, my long-standing fascination with Antarctica—and the fact that the WGS was paying my way—I might have declined the invitation. Even then the whole southern continent was veering toward that months-long night when temperatures could drop as low as -90° F. All right then, I thought, taking a deep breath. You’ve always wanted to see True South—now is your chance. Brace up.
The theme of the symposium was kept something of a mystery. But being a climatologist and considering our destination I had brought all the information on polar climate that I could lay my hands on at short notice. A good thing, too; organizing this information and refreshing my memory on it occupied me on the interminable series of flights from Boston to New Zealand.
At last we raised the spires of Christchurch. More flying awaited me there, but at least I was given a couple days’ hiatus while the organizers of the symposium waited for its last attendees. I made good use of the time by acquainting myself with my fellow scientists (I had little choice: we were secluded from the rest of society in a hotel close by Christchurch Airport). In particular I befriended a tart but brilliant biologist from Oxford, Thomas Spratt. A veteran of two seasons at the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Halley Station, Spratt had much to tell me about life on “the Ice.” Spratt was exacting, acerb
ic, and uncompromising, but at the same time possessed of a wit that was as hilarious as it was unexpected. He was thin as a rail, and his short yellow hair never seemed to have known a comb. I liked him immediately.
Gathered here was the cream of intelligence in such fields as chemistry, biology, paleontology, physics, and geology. The place fairly sizzled with invention, but still no one was any wiser than I as to why we had been gathered. It was not until we were herded onto the massive C-130 aircraft for the actual flight to Antarctica (just another ragged band of tourists, to anyone looking) that we were given a presage of what awaited us. Each of us received a package that included polar-grade parka and snowpants (WGS stenciled in large black letters on the back of the orange parka—I felt like a convict wearing it); a manual on survival on the Ice; a set of earplugs and a pair of jet-black wraparound sunglasses; an entrenching tool that combined the virtues of a pick, shovel, and adze; and a hefty, ring-bound volume bearing the ominous title, INVESTIGATIONS INTO ULTRA-NORMAL PHENOMENAE ON EAST ANTARCTIC SHIELD. A computer disk in slipcase with the same Doomsday title on it was also included. No author was given, but glancing over the table of contents I was very surprised to see a section headed: “Miskatonic Expedition Findings—Dyer, Lovecraft, et al.”
A tall, cultured-looking man in one of the symposium parkas (the phrase “a sheep in wolf’s clothing” came to mind) appeared at the head of the cabin.
“If I may have your attention, please,” he shouted. The C-130’s four big engines were cycling up. “My name is Noel Personne, and it is my honor to welcome you here on behalf of the World Geophysical Society’s Antarctic Symposium. Contained in the packets provided you will find several items essential to your participation in this event. The book—or CD, for those who have laptops—explains the background of the current emergency.”