That was when he first used a word that I was to hear many times more over the ensuing weeks and months, and would eventually come to loathe and fear. “R’luhlloig,” he murmured, softly, almost tenderly, half to himself, half to the book. I immediately queried the utterance, assuming he had said something in English that I had not quite caught. As we were both still rather drunk, my hearing and his diction were neither of them as sharp as could be. “Rolly log?” I said. “Did I get that aright? What do you mean by ‘rolly log’, Nate?” (I now know, of course, not only how to spell the word but what it signifies.)
He burst into laughter. I started laughing too. I did not know why my remark was so funny, or why Nate’s guffaws bore such a brittle, inhibited note, as though he was laughing heartily in spite of himself. Humour is a chimera, and sometimes it imposes itself upon one contrary to one’s wishes. One is amused not because one is happy but because one hopes to be or is expected to be. And so, over that sinister, black-bound tome, Nate and I laughed.
* * *
I have no memory of leaving the library or returning to my dorm, although I do recall feeling quite dismal the next morning, and also being the target of a certain amount of reproach from my roommate. It seemed, from what I could glean from a grumbling Lake, that I had crashed into the premises at an ungodly hour, reeking of liquor and formaldehyde, had stumbled into bed fully clothed, and had proceeded to fall into a deep sleep during which I had thrashed between the sheets, moaning loudly and incoherently, caught up in the throes of some violent dream of which I had no memory upon waking.
Thereafter, Nate and I were to be found consorting on a daily basis. The night of revelry and shared secrets had cemented a bond between us, and I once more had the older brother I had lost, albeit in a new and less predictable form. We took meals together, we compared notes on our individual disciplines, and we looked askance at various of the faculty members, Professor Nordstrom foremost, deeming them hidebound and ignorant, an old guard who would soon fall before the onslaught of young upstarts such as ourselves with our restless energy and innovative ideas. We became a citadel of two that no outsider could breach. Other friendships, that with Lake principally, fell by the wayside. I detected envy amongst my fellow freshmen that I had become the favoured coeval of such a prominent campus figure as Nathaniel Whateley. A couple of my professors considered him a bad influence on me and drew me aside to tell me so. I did not care about any of it, not a whit. Nate was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time, and I failed to perceive that, as a spider does a fly, he was drawing me inexorably into his web.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Omnireticulum
EMBOLDENED BY ENCOURAGEMENT FROM NATE, I began to pay greater attention to my own private research instead of following the academic curriculum. I had more to offer the world, Nate said, than being just another head for professors to dump facts into. Why waste myself listening to them pontificate when I was capable of striking out on my own into territories their timid minds would never dare explore? Accordingly, I spent less time at lectures, and more time in the laboratory. This naturally earned me the disapproval of the faculty, and towards semester’s close I was called to the dean’s office. The dean reminded me that, as a scholar, I had a responsibility towards the school, which after all was subsidising me to be there. I was expected to hand in my essays when they were due and maintain an unblemished class-attendance record. He warned me that if I did not change my ways my grant might be taken away and given to someone more deserving.
Nate had advised me on how to handle the matter, and accordingly I grovelled and told the dean I was sorry and would strive to do better in future. I did not mean a word of it, but the dean was hoodwinked and all was well. After semester ended I passed a sad, listless Christmas at home (where there was not a single festive decoration in the house, not even a paper chain) and returned to Arkham in January with renewed zeal. Not only was I pleased to be reunited with Nate after the vacation, I was keen to resume work. To that end, I began availing myself of the cadavers from Miskatonic’s medical school or, to be precise, one portion of the cadavers. Since the medical students were being taught how to fix bodies only – skin, muscles, bones, heart, lungs, intestines and the like – brains were generally held to be surplus to requirements. To others they were redundant; to me they were a precious resource.
The procedure that I began to develop, I termed “Intercranial Cognition Transference”; it was predicated upon my discovery of a tiny cerebral gland lodged between the amygdala and the hippocampus, a fleshy nodule not much larger than a shelled peanut that I had become convinced served as a conduit, a kind of clearing-house for every neurosynaptical event that occurred in the rest of the organ. Within this gland, which was common to all the higher forms of animal life and which I took to calling the “omnireticulum”, there remained the residue of all that the possessor of the brain had ever done, thought or uttered. One might liken it to a series of photographic plates retaining the impression of every image to which they were exposed. If one were being fanciful, one might even describe it as the seat of the soul.
By means of a small-bore drill, long-needled hypodermic syringes and certain injectable serums I had concocted, I was able to distil the content of the omnireticulum down to its essence and then draw it out in liquid form. I practised the technique on cadaver brains until I had it down pat. The serums were derived from blood – my own – that was infused with acids and reagents, which enabled the cells to mimic properties of other cells they came into contact with. There were three of them in all, each a complex compound of proteins, ethers and phosphates that I took to calling, with a certain elegant simplicity, Conroy’s Solution A, Conroy’s Solution B and Conroy’s Solution C. Injected in that order, in carefully calibrated quantities, they acted upon the omnireticulum to dissolve it into its constituent cells, which then bonded with the blood cells in the serum. The extractable end product was a reddish fluid in amounts averaging around half a fluid ounce. This, when inserted into the omnireticulum of another living being, had the effect of supplanting that host gland, imbuing it with the contents of the donor omnireticulum. (One might draw comparisons with a palimpsest, where the original text is erased and overwritten with a new text.) It was a one-way process, of course, since the donor omnireticulum had to be effectively destroyed in order for it to be made transferrable. The benefit was that the exchange was less invasive and potentially fatal than a straight surgical transplant, if such a thing was even feasible; it could, moreover, be conducted between different species.
In demonstration of this, and to put theory into practice once and for all, in early February of 1893 I performed Intercranial Cognition Transference from a parrot to a capuchin monkey, my maiden effort with live specimens. The latter creature I was able to render insensible with chloroform before the injections began, but the former thwarted my best efforts to sedate it, being of a belligerent and pecking inclination, so I was obliged to work upon it while it was awake and in full possession of its faculties. Nate had volunteered to serve as my laboratory assistant, and he was the one who secured the parrot in place on a table using clamps, the bird protesting volubly and resisting strenuously when subjected to such undignified treatment. Even after it was pinned down and immobilised, its screeches were ear-splitting, not least as the drill-bit burrowed into the base of its skull and the hypodermic needles followed one after another, each delivering its tiny load of serum, which then had to be left for a precise number of seconds so that it could take effect. Blood and feathers bedecked the table top, and by the end the parrot was left a squalling, twitching mess, a shell of its former self.
Into the insensible capuchin monkey went the distillation of the parrot’s omnireticulum, after which it was simply a matter of waiting until the small primate came round. In the meantime, Nate took it upon himself to deal with the bird. He released it from its bonds and held it in his hands in readiness for wringing its neck. The parrot’s beady ey
es rolled in their sockets, and its beak gaped, lumpen black tongue lolling out. Soft pathetic squawks escaped its throat. Hard though it is to define what constitutes sanity in an animal that sits so relatively low in the intelligence rankings, I would have said that the parrot had gone mad. At the very least there was nothing left of the scant personality it had had, as though by depriving it of its omnireticulum I had also taken away something fundamental to its brain function, the “glue” that bound the whole together. Its absence left a vacuum from which there was no recovery; the rest of the brain was beyond repair. Such was my inference, at any rate, and further experimentation would prove it true. For now, the parrot had to be disposed of – a more sensitive person would say “put out of its misery” – and Nate did the honours, wrenching the head round one way, the body round the other, with a crack of separating vertebrae.
An hour later the monkey regained consciousness, and almost immediately it began exhibiting atypical behaviour. It tried to preen itself but seemed not to realise that it lacked a beak or feathers, so that its teeth clacked repeatedly on empty air. It gave vent to an indignant caw, which although undeniably monkey-like, had the timbre and shrillness of a tropical bird’s cry. Then it attempted to fly. It flapped its arms and launched itself off the floor, only to come back down to earth with an unceremonious bump. The look of bafflement upon its little face was priceless. The monkey simply could not think why it had failed to get airborne. It tried again, several times, without success, before retreating into a corner to ponder its sudden attack of flightlessness. For Nate and me, these abortive avian-aping antics were utterly uproarious. We laughed, bent double, until tears were rolling down our cheeks and we could barely draw breath. The tension I had been feeling during the procedure, born of a fear that it would fail, now came surging out of me as a kind of hysteria. Doubtless it was the same with Nate, although he seemed, too, to derive a certain cruel satisfaction from the monkey’s absurd plight.
“Well, Zach, old man,” he said, clapping me on the back, “you’ve done it. You really have!” Nate is the only person whom I allowed to call me Zach. Not even Absalom was granted that familiarity. I have never liked the abbreviation, deeming it déclassé, the province of range-riding cowboys; but for Nate Whateley I made an exception.
We placed the capuchin in what had been the parrot’s cage, and the primate seemed to feel quite at home there. It squirmed its way onto the tiny wooden perch and crouched down with its arms folded behind its back as though they were wings – which, as far as it was concerned, they were. When offered sunflower seeds, the bird’s staple diet, it plucked them up off the floor of the cage with its mouth in a pecking motion, whereas ordinarily a monkey would have used its dextrous hands.
At that moment of high triumph, who should enter to ruin it but Professor Cyrus Nordstrom? The old man barged into the room, gown flowing behind him, cheeks choleric crimson. He demanded to know what we were up to. He had had reports of a tremendous hullabaloo coming from the laboratory, as though creatures were being tortured. His gaze fell upon the dead parrot, which we had yet to consign to the trash, and then upon the monkey, which was looking at him quizzically from its perch, bending its head to either side and hopping from foot to foot. He asked if any of the experimentation Nate and I were conducting was authorised. Had we obtained permission from the faculty to perform vivisection? There were protocols that must be observed. I detected a distinct gloat in his eye. He had caught us red-handed, he knew, in the commission of an offence against university regulations. He could scarcely credit his luck.
Nate blustered, as did I, but we were in breach of the rules. We had not sought the requisite permission, reasoning that it would likely not be granted because neither of us was then held in high regard by the faculty. I had squandered virtually all of the goodwill that had surrounded me upon my arrival, while Nate was considered something of an embarrassment, allowed to remain at Miskatonic only because he paid his own way and because the university, like so many institutions in the area, had benefited materially from Whateley family largesse over the years. Moreover, the dean hailed from Dunwich and had been a member of the same Lodge there as an uncle of Nate’s, Noah Whateley. The bond of Masonic fraternity between the two men lingered, even if they had since gone their separate ways, and it afforded Nate a certain immunity at Miskatonic. However, Nate had progressively pushed the boundaries of that immunity, to the point where the dean felt he could no longer give him the same latitude. In short, my friend was one misstep away from expulsion. Nordstrom was well aware of this, and reckoned he now had the wherewithal to rid the university of Nate once and for all. Besides, I don’t think he had ever forgiven Nate for standing up to him on my behalf at the beginning of the fall semester.
He duly reported our activities to the dean, and we were severely reprimanded. Nate threw himself on the dean’s mercy, pleading for both of us to be given another chance. We had, he said, allowed our enthusiasm to get the better of us. What we were most guilty of was youthful hot-headedness and a lack of good judgement. His uncle Noah was much the same, was he not? He had a tendency to lose his temper for no good reason, to the discomfort of his neighbours, and his wife had died in circumstances that aroused suspicion, if not the attention of the police; he had also earned the nickname “Wizard” owing to his antics at one of the mysterious hilltop stone circles near the town. The dean nodded in assent, but offered that at least Noah had an excuse for his aberrant behaviour, namely that his father Oliver had been lynched by the townsfolk of Dunwich after accusations of witchcraft. That would surely warp a man’s mind, growing up with such a terrible event hanging over him. What was Nate’s excuse?
Nonetheless Nate had his way. He worked his wiles upon the dean, and we were let off with a warning and a black mark on our permanent records. The dean advised me that I should keep my nose clean from here on after, and I promised I would, with a sincerity that was entirely feigned yet so convincing I almost believed it myself. Who was this honey-tongued liar I had become? How had timid, compliant Zachariah Conroy evolved into a blithely conniving renegade? The answer is obvious: Nathaniel Whateley.
* * *
Professor Nordstrom was thwarted but not defeated. He still had a trick up his sleeve. A snide article about me ran in the following weekend’s Arkham Gazette, garlanded with statements from Nordstrom himself. He had done his homework, as had the reporter, whose name I never discovered. There was mention of Intercranial Cognition Transference, and a fair description of my parrot-minded monkey. As soon as I read it, I went straight to Nate. He made light of the matter, saying that Miskatonic often attracted scathing comment from the Gazette. Arkham had long had a peculiar dichotomous relationship with the university, seeing it both as a source of prestige and as a regrettable haven for oddballs. Of all of the Ivy League colleges, Miskatonic attracted the largest proportion of eccentrics, many of them drawn to the place seemingly because the town itself had a chequered past, having been founded in the early sixteen hundreds by freethinkers and then not long after been infected by the witch-burning fever that spread from neighbouring Salem. Arkham did not like to be reminded of its murky genesis, preferring instead to think of itself as a successful port, even though the sea trade was not what it once was, and latterly a thriving mill town, if not a rival to Amesbury or Haverhill. The article about me was just the latest in a long line of gentle beatings the town had delivered upon the little academic enclave in its midst – beatings that involved more than a touch of self-flagellation. I should ignore it, Nate said. Nothing would come of it.
If only he had been right. Instead, I was once again hauled before the dean, and this time no amount of begging or contrition could save me. The article had made it impossible for the dean to overlook my misdemeanour any more. The university must be seen to comport itself with dignity. I asserted that my monkey experiment was not as absurd as it might seem to the inexpert eye. It betokened much grander things – incredible things. I simply needed time to e
xpand upon it, and not just time but liberty from interference. With regret, the dean said, he could offer me neither. I was entitled to remain at Miskatonic, and was welcome to do so, but without the benefit of funding. In other words, my scholarship was rescinded, effective immediately. Of course, if my family were able to pay for me, or I was able to find some other sponsor, my tuition would continue as normal. He left it to me to decide how to proceed.
“Devastated” does not come close to encapsulating how I felt. The blow was almost physical. I was left reeling, nauseated, stunned. I knew my father could just about afford the college fees, now that he was no longer supporting Absalom at Yale, but I was loath to ask him. Mourning my brother’s death had widened the rift that already existed between me and my parents, turning an awkward gap into an unbridgeable chasm. My scholarship to Miskatonic was my one, perhaps my only redeeming feature in their eyes, and I had tossed it aside. My father was hardly likely to be inclined to reach into his pocket now, when I had shown myself to be so unreliable. I wrote to him all the same, pleading my case. The response was as dusty and indifferent as I had predicted. “If you cannot hold on to a source of income extended benevolently by an august body,” he said, “why should I be expected to bail you out?”
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 17