Multiple dimensions! That was the angle I needed! New ideas sprouted. Working past midnight with a drive long absent, I made prodigious notes for Professor Josephson’s review. I sketched out four options, with pros and cons for each. At least three seemed to be promising. The following morning, I reviewed my work and fleshed it out further. When finished, I felt very satisfied, having accomplished several days’ work in the space of about one. I was now ready for the next meeting with the professor and could spend the next few days however I pleased.
When I entered the bookshop that afternoon, Andrew was busy in the reference section, speaking with a pair of older women. I waited for him to finish in the small section on mathematics, browsing through a text on algebra. I found it amusing. Having displayed my talent with numbers at an early age, my father had tutored me in the subject before I had even taken it in school: Solve for x. What a simple concept. But something about that tickled my mind. I could sense an answer for some unasked question forming.
“Hello,” said Andrew as he approached me from behind.
At the sound of his voice, whatever had been forming dissipated. I put the book down and turned to greet him. He wore a large, toothy grin.
“Hello,” I said. “You seem to be in good spirits.”
“Those two women were commissioned to buy a set of encyclopedias for a very wealthy family. Naturally I sold them the finest volumes that someone else’s money could buy.”
He winked at me and chuckled.
“Now,” he said, clapping his hands together. “To business. I realize that the events of the other night were shocking, to say the least, but I anticipated that you would want to continue in your search for answers. I’ve arranged some materials in the back for you to begin your search. I warn you, it’s quite dense—”
“Andrew, thank you for your offer, really, but I hadn’t planned—”
“—finished with what’s back there, there’s plenty more—”
I cut him off by holding out to him the roll of bills I held in my hand. When I had counted it out that morning, it equaled almost twenty dollars, though his assistance had likely been worth more.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Payment. For all of your help.”
He looked down at the bills as one would a rat, then the bell over the door chimed, and a woman entered the store. Andrew walked over to her, and after a short discussion, directed her to some shelves on the left wall. She examined only two or three books before selecting one. After the transaction was complete, he helped her through the door.
“Put that away,” he said, returning to where I stood. “If you so desire, you can pay me when we’ve finished.”
“Andrew. This is my personal quest. I understand that I’m getting involved with forces beyond my comprehension, and that there’s a certain amount of risk involved. If I make a mistake, I don’t want to see anyone else harmed.”
He shook his head.
“It will take you years of study and practice to reach the level of mastery I have—and I myself have only scratched the surface. You would need to learn all of the base knowledge—languages, symbology, mythology—that I know by rote. Have you the background? Or the time?”
He looked at me expectantly. I could only shake my head: He was right. My Latin was passable, but for the last several years, my education had been concentrated in mathematics. With him as an ally, I could make much faster progress than if I worked alone.
“I know of the risk involved,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve known it for years. I thank you for your concern, but I’ve made my own decision. I would like to help you get to the bottom of this mystery.”
I sighed in resignation.
“Promise me,” I implored him, “that we will both be careful.”
“Of course!” He sounded excited. “I have some—”
The front door opened again, and a smartly dressed gentleman entered. With a nod to me, Andrew walked over to his latest customer. Apparently, the man had only a single question, for which he received a negative answer. After the man departed, Andrew motioned for me to follow as he made his way to the rear of the store, and through the door in the back wall. An overhead light was switched on, but its feeble rays did little to dispel the darkness. Boxes were piled everywhere, quite often six or seven feet high. A small table just inside the doorway had a single wooden chair next to it. On the table was a small stack of notebooks.
“My grandfather was generally very good about keeping notes,” he said. “These ones will help provide a base to build on. I thought it might be good for you to first become familiar with the concepts, if not the details, of both magic and the forces with which we are dealing.”
I pulled out the chair and sat down at the table, looking at the books laid out before me. I hardly knew where to begin.
“Think of them as reference material,” he said. “But please, do not try to memorize them. It would be a waste of time. I will be—”
The front door opened again and a small group of women’s voices floated back to us.
“I will be available to answer any questions you may have between customers.”
He smiled and left me alone.
The rather heavy door closed with a solid thud, effectively muffling the noises of the store. The dim lighting and the silence of the room conspired to remind me of a tomb.
I listened for anything to help dispel the illusion, and found only the unsettling sounds of scurrying rats somewhere within the towering piles of boxes. With some trepidation, I looked at the notebooks sitting upon the table, notebooks penned by a man who even in death wished me ill, and I froze with indecision. After an anxious, still minute, a faint noise stirred me. Andrew and his latest customers must have made their way toward the rear of the store, for I could hear—just barely—their dull and lifeless voices penetrating the intervening wall and door. I removed the top notebook from the pile, and creaked its binding open.
That afternoon, I learned a great number of things, many of which would have made the average man pale with fear. But if any good had come from this whole ordeal, it was this: I was now much less susceptible to shock. The first of the notebooks was very old, indicated both by its raggedness, and the dates recorded within. The whole of it was filled with tables of all sorts: astrological, alchemical, astronomical, and more. There were lists of mythological deities, and their associated odors and colors. The entire thing was just as Andrew had described: A reference volume.
The second, however, was far different. In plainest terms, it was a diary. A young and extremely thorough Mr. Hunt had recorded in that book the results of his first experiments into the science of magic. Each set of initial conditions was recorded, down to the meteorological details, and even what he had eaten that day. Each outcome was described in terms of physical, mental and emotional effects. The experiments ranged from simple meditation at the start of the volume, to speaking with the dead—as we had with Mr. Hunt—at its end. I spent an untold amount of time pouring over its pages. The third notebook picked up where the second left off. As I delved deeper, it became apparent that Mr. Hunt had been working toward a goal. The detailed notes became more and more complicated, and I found myself referring back to the first notebook as a dictionary, though not always successfully. About three quarters of the way through, the entries ended abruptly, the remaining sheets being completely blank. After closer examination, it appeared that two pages following the final written page had been cleanly removed. The only clue to their content was a mysterious comment on that last page:
I have learned all that is necessary from J.F. I know what I must next attempt.
Those initials had occurred sporadically in the second and third notebooks, but I could find no reference to a matching name. And even with all of the pages I had read, I could not determine the unspecified goal of Bertram Hunt.
The last notebook was an awful revelation: some sort of macabre scrapbook filled with articles clipped from newspape
rs around the world. Interspersed among the newspaper items were handwritten sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes pages, of notes and ideas related to the information in the accompanying article. Each clipping detailed a sinister or mysterious event, but it was the added notes that chilled me.
There was a recurring set of stories in the scrapbook that spoke of incidents at sea, where frightened people encountered strange beings described as a weird amalgam of human, and either frog or fish. Others talked of people missing from seaworthy vessels in calm waters, which Mr. Hunt confidently linked to those same creatures. I saw that the stories of these encounters weren’t confined to any one area, but were spread throughout the Atlantic, the Pacific, even the Indian Ocean.
The rest of the articles had no specific pattern. They spoke of gruesome, unsolved murders; strange, recurring noises in haunted forests; mysterious livestock deaths; and other bizarre occurrences too numerous to list. One in particular described the death of a man in India who was found with his skin, hair, nails, teeth and bones found whole and intact. The remainder of him—all organs, muscle, and sinew—was gone, apparently dissolved or eaten from within. The handwritten note alongside this account was simply:
Could be the work of the things I saw.
I was nearing the end of the scrapbook when I was startled by a knock at the door.
“Have you been asleep?” Andrew asked he asked as he entered the room.
“Why?” I asked. “Did I miss something? I’ve been reading.”
“All of this time?”
“Yes.”
“Good heavens, man!” he said. “It’s after five o’clock! I just ushered my last customer out the door and locked up for the night.”
“Five o’clock?” I asked incredulously. The day had flown.
“You must be starving.”
In all that time, I hadn’t felt hungry, but as soon as he mentioned food, I realized I was famished.
“Come on,” he said, slapping a hand down on my shoulder. “This has been a very good day for me. Let’s go out for a good meal. I know a fine restaurant just a few blocks from here. My treat.”
Living as frugally as I did, I depended heavily upon Mrs. Bettings’ daily meals to sustain me. But dinner was served promptly every night at five. By now, my fellow boarders would already be tucking their napkins into their shirt collars. In the time it would take me to get home, the food would be gone.
“An excellent idea,” I said, standing up and stretching my bones. My eyes burned from hours of struggling to read in the dim light. As I slid the chair under the table, I happened to glance down at the open scrapbook. Andrew’s entrance had interrupted my reading just as I had turned a page. The headline at the top was stunning.
“Wait!” I shouted, snatching the scrapbook from the table. Andrew followed me as I walked toward the center of the room, until I stood directly beneath the light. The words were almost too fantastic to believe, but their presence soothed my tired eyes: Man Burnt To Nothing.
Together, we read, horrified. Nearly forty years previously, a man in rural Britain had been completely consumed while sitting in front of a fireplace to warm himself after coming in from the cold. Three witnesses had seen him convulse, and then burst into flames. They tried, but were unable to extinguish the blaze. There was no mention of ashes, but not even one small bit of bone remained. Apparently, Mr. Hunt was unacquainted with this particular type of occurrence, and his accompanying notation read simply:
Being of flame. Salamander?
A clue at last! I laughed with joy—then nearly fainted, lightheaded from hunger. A hand reached out to steady me.
“Andrew, do you have any more of these scrapbooks?”
“Yes,” he said. “There are at least another dozen upstairs.”
“A dozen? We must—”
“We must eat,” he insisted firmly. “They’ll be here when we get back.”
He held out his hand, and reluctantly, I gave him the notebook. He closed, it and placed it on the table, then put a hand on my back and pushed me gently through the door. On the way out, he grabbed an apple from the counter, and handed it to me.
“Here,” he said. “I don’t want to have to carry you into the restaurant.”
Before he even had the front door locked, I had the apple reduced to its core.
Eleven
“Robert, are you familiar with the relatively recent work of the physicist Albert Einstein?”
For a moment, I wondered if Andrew had heard my question. We were sitting in the back room at Le Bistro Paris, bent over one of the finest meals I could ever remember eating. As the waiter had moved around us, taking our orders and pouring our drinks, the conversation had been restricted to mundane matters. It was only after the man had disappeared once again into the kitchen that I posed the question that had been preying on my mind: What was your grandfather’s final experiment?
And now he was asking me about Einstein.
“I know the name,” I replied.
“He postulates that the structure of the universe consists of three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension.”
His voice dropped to a barely audible mumble, and I had to stop chewing just to hear him.
“But he is wrong,” said Andrew with some authority. “There are more than three spatial dimensions. We cannot perceive the ones beyond the third, but they do exist. And our universe is embedded in those higher dimensions.”
“Speak up, man,” I said. “I can barely hear you over the growling of my stomach.”
He glanced around the restaurant, which was mostly empty, save for a few other diners scattered on the far side of the room.
“You can never be certain of who is listening,” he said quietly. “Never.”
“You can’t be serious,” I objected. But seeing his glare, I lowered my voice to match his. “This is Arkham, not New York or Paris.”
“With regard to sensitive matters such as we are investigating,” he said, “always be aware of what you are saying in public. Always.”
Even at a whisper, his tone was serious.
“As you may have surmised,” he continued, “my grandfather discovered something that frightened him so badly he stopped his magical research.”
“The notebook’s missing pages,” I said.
He nodded.
“He learned the magical formulae for traveling beyond our sphere and going Outside.”
“Outside where?”
“Outside.”
I waited for further explanation, but none came. Instead, he continued, as if what’d just said made some kind of logical sense.
“He saw something terrible while he was there. Upon returning to this sphere, he destroyed those pages. He never went into any details, and warned me not to try. I must admit that the concept of entering a higher dimension makes me a bit nervous. But at the same time…”
He trailed off.
“Have you any idea of what he saw?” I said.
“I can only guess.”
“Please do. I have no idea.”
He took another cautious look around the room before continuing.
“Picture the most gruesome and alien creatures that exist in nature: jellyfish, sea urchins, squid, octopi. Of the land creatures, insects and spiders can appear unearthly. Yet as gruesome as they are, these organisms are constrained by the physical laws of our universe, laws that we are coming closer and closer to fully comprehending every day. But consider how creatures may evolve and grow in a four-dimensional reality, a place we cannot even begin to conceive of, much less understand the physical laws which apply.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, “for providing plenty of new material for my nightmares.”
“You’re quite welcome.” He laughed.
But his dread had begun to transfer itself to me. Alien beings that were unholy combinations of incompatible creatures filled my imagination. Though in retrospect, the things that my mind could conjure were no match for that which I wou
ld soon encounter.
The next few days proceeded much the same, in the backroom of the bookstore, skimming through Bertram Hunt’s collections of newspaper clippings. My enthusiasm, high at the start of each morning, waned as the day progressed. Twice more, I came across stories pertaining to the topic of spontaneous human combustion, neither of which provided any new information. The first, concerning the death of an elderly woman from Pennsylvania, had written underneath it as a comment only a single question mark. The second described the fiery death of a young woman in Germany. Despite an incomplete knowledge of the German language, I was able to get the gist of it. The comment below it, however, was penned in English.
Not a salamander, demon or elemental. Still unknown.
That, at least, was promising. It seemed as if Mr. Hunt had been just as confused by these events as I was myself. I could only hope he had eventually found the answer. If so, he may still have written it somewhere in the volumes that I had yet to search.
As time wore on, I began to notice a change in my thinking. Page after page, the articles detailed the most brutal deaths imaginable, and yet, before long, I found myself anesthetized to the horrors laid out before me. Subject matter that would have repulsed me days before became routine. There was an eerie rhythm of violence. In fact, it began to seem odd if too many pages passed between, for example, instances of corpses found missing their viscera. Mr. Hunt believed that the events described in the articles indicated the influence of the entities known as the Ancient Ones. I was skeptical at first, but by the time I reached just the midpoint of the collection, I had to admit that I was convinced. Even more importantly, the commentaries were so detailed and consistent that I was unable to refute this nearly unthinkable new fact: As far as intelligent beings go, Homo sapiens is not alone.
Once again, my belief system was shaken. Man is not the jewel of creation, the crowning achievement of God. There are fantastic, immensely powerful beings that exist, hidden in the far corners of the universe, and of our globe. There are also other alien races—mortal races—that serve and worship those Ancient Ones. They are evil—or, they are so alien that their motivations appear to humanity to be evil. Regardless, they were here on this world before us and wish to reclaim it from us.
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