Miskatonic Nightmares Read online

  H. H. Jones.

  On Tuesday night, Jones stood at the fourth floor landing, looking off the stairs down the hall. The moonlight was shining through the window behind him again, a bit higher than it had on the night before. It was after hours again. He’d stuck to routine and cleaned the first three floors before arriving at the fourth. No one seemed to be in the building, but once again there was light coming from under the door to Room 411. The letter from Van Gelder had not arrived, which was not really a surprise. He doubted his had gotten to the good doctor, either. The roads between were likely impassable. He shivered. The light was on, and something was in there.

  He had a yardstick with him, one of the thin broad yardsticks, not one of the square ones. He’d borrowed it from a classroom downstairs. He wanted to get that golden button, and somehow he knew it would still be there. He had dreamed about it in his fitful sleep. He gripped the dust mop handle and thought about it.

  Mrs. Steward had been leaving as he had been coming in. She’d stopped and thanked him again for all of the effort he’d put in to getting it back the other night. He’d tried hard not to stare at her chest. She was a fine looking woman, despite the glasses. The term zaftig had floated through his brain as he’d struggled to look keep his eyes focused above her neck. He’d overheard Prof. Greeves use it once to describe her. Jones had looked it up in a dictionary. Yes, she was very zaftig. She’d touched him kindly on the arm, perhaps taking his ducking eyes for an indication of shyness rather than lust. In truth, he felt both those and a heaping helping of shame.

  As he stood on the landing, more than a little scared of what was down the hall in Room 411, he felt himself spurred on by the desire for the button and the fantasy that Dr. Van Gelder’s letter would come with a note of triumph. “We win, Hogarth, we win! This was the evidence against them that we needed. Proof they are dabbling in the dark arts. Miskatonic’s miscreants are done for!” Doubled up with that and a huge monetary reward was the image of himself handing the innocent Mrs. Steward her button back and saying, “I found it ma’am, but I seem to have the Midas touch. Here’s your button.” Her gratitude and amazement would be abundant. Zaftig. He remembered the brief, guilty glimpse he’d had of her soft, white cleavage and gripped the handle of his dust mop harder. He pushed on down the hall, sweeping into the first classroom, sticking to his routine, so as not to give himself away, should it turn out anyone else was on the fourth floor. He noted as he got closer that the door seemed quite normal. No condensation, much less any ice, was visible. His anxiety did not much decrease. It had happened once, and it could happen again. He found himself avoiding looking.

  When he arrived at Prof. Greeves’s office, he took a determined look at 411. There was nothing odd about it. He shook his head. “I wasn’t dreaming. I know I wasn’t.” Still, there it was, plain as day, with no sign of the ice or foul odor from the day before. He went on, loath to have anything to do with it, knowing he would have to before midnight. When he finished sweeping the floor, having determined that no one else was around, he summoned the nerve to look under the door.

  With his oilcan nearby, to use the need to check the hinges of Prof. Greeves's door as an excuse, he put his face to the red tile and peeked under the door to 411. At first, his eyes couldn’t make out what he was seeing. Then, it became clear that he was looking at two identical, gold buttons matching the brass one that Mrs. Steward had lost off her blouse. He sat up, perplexed.

  “That can’t be right,” he said. He bent down again and looked. Two gleaming, gold buttons lay beside each other on the floor within likely reach of his yardstick.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Maybe it’s a reflection or something, an optical illusion.” He blinked hard and long and looked again. There were two button of gold. He moved about on the floor, examining from different angles.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he muttered.

  He was nervous, but there were no scurrying sounds, no shadows, no unusual odors, and no cold draft or mists. He took the yardstick and slid it under the door, careful to keep his fingers on the hall side of it. He swung the yardstick over and caught one of the buttons. It tinkled musically on the tiles and skittered under the door into his hand. It was cold, heavy, and golden. There was no mistake in his mind. It was gold, and probably solid gold.

  “I’ll be darned,” he said.

  He bent low again and tried for the other one but stopped short in surprise. There were still two gold buttons in his line of sight. He blinked hard, shook his head and looked again.

  “Can’t be,” he said.

  There was still no sign of a change in temperature, a foul odor, or a shadow. He would try again. He swept the yardstick in under the door. It didn’t quite reach. He tried harder, thinking, I can give one to Mrs. Steward and send the others to Dr. Van Gelder as samples. He’ll be fascinated and grateful, I’m sure. The yardstick was short of the buttons by an inch, perhaps. Frustrated, he stopped and thought. He didn’t have anything else that long and thin. He peeked under the door again. Everything still seemed clear. He extended the yardstick again, and this time put his fingers just under the door to get a little more reach. Again, the yardstick was just short of reaching either of the new buttons.

  “Dang,” he muttered.

  His spine began to tingle, and, a second later, a slight whiff of the foul odor was suddenly carried to him on a cold draft. He froze. Still, there was no sound and no shadow. There was the gold, gleaming just within reach if he stuck his fingers a little further under the door. He wanted those buttons. He extended his fingers a little more and swung the yardstick over again. Faster than he thought it might happen, there was the scurrying sound again. The shadow blocked the light from within, and the odor became overpowering, carried over him, washing over him with the cold mist that burst from under the door into the hall. He felt a sharp pain at the end of his middle finger. Gagging, he jerked back and rolled away from the door. He cradled his finger and vomited into Prof. Greeves’s doorway. The fit lasted a minute or more, and during all of it, as the sweat burst out of every pore, and he upended more than he thought his stomach would have been able to hold, he heard a sound that overwhelmed his senses from afar. The sound of pipes, not of music, but of musical instruments surely played by wild children without thought to anything more than making noise, rang in his ears, drowning out the sound of his retching.

  When he finally was able to stand and stumble away, the fourth floor hall was full of foul smelling mist, and he could not see where he was going.

  “Run,” he gurgled desperately, urging himself on. “Run, and never come back. Not worth it.”

  He tried for the stairs, cradling his middle finger. He felt with his other hand in horror that the end of it was missing, and blood was gushing forth from it. He felt weak, ill, and in need of air. He made the landing on the stairs and realized that he could not escape the mist going down and was too weak to ascend. He went to a cold window, fumbling for a long, agonizing time with the latch, nearly passing out, but finally unlatching it, and shoving it open. He gasped in the crisp, cold air. The mist poured out the window past him. He heard a scurrying sound behind him. He was sure of it. The sense of danger in his spine, the sense of white-knuckle dread was too much. He lurched forward, climbing out the window onto the bit of roof beyond.

  “Hide here, just until it passes,” he whimpered through the remaining bile in his throat and mouth. He crawled out onto the icy bit of roof, his feet slipping, his hands clawing at the windowsill. The scurrying sound and the pipes filled his ears and his brain. It was close. It was coming for him.

  “Oh, God,” he whimpered. It would see his fingers on the windowsill. He’d have to hold on somewhere else!

  Henry Hogarth Jones’s body was found on the frozen steps to the sociology building by Mr. James Pitswale early the following morning. There was no one else about. Pitswale examined the body long enough to discover it was a corpse, proceeded to the nearest phone in the
building, and called the proper authorities.

  The police investigation, which naturally followed, determined that Jones had fallen, broken his neck, and lain paralyzed for some time before freezing to death. The look of horror on his face was disquieting to all who saw it, and the mortician in charge of preparing his body for burial kept a blanket over the head to avoid having to look at it.

  No one ever found the missing tip of Jones’s right, middle finger. Nor could anyone explain how it had been chewed off. The unsatisfactory answer was that a rodent of some kind, possibly a Sumatran rat was to blame. For some time after, the janitors of the University were put on alert for large, Sumatran rats and called in exterminators on numerous occasions. No such rats were ever trapped.

  As to why Jones was on the roof, no one could ever guess. The prevailing theory was that he had been overzealous in his attempt to catch the theoretical rat. Delirious from the illness that had already caused him to vomit, he had attempted to trap it on the roof. It had bitten him, and he had then fallen, resulting in the broken neck and subsequent death by freezing. An alternate theory by one medical examiner was that Jones had died before his body had frozen but not from the fall. His heart, it was asserted, had stopped long before the freezing had set in, possibly from a heart attack.

  Dr. Van Gelder’s letter never made it to Jones’s Arkham address. It was damaged by the wet conditions, and Jones’s address was unreadable. It was returned to the good doctor, who checked his mailbox and picked up the morning paper at the same time. He opened the letter and read it distractedly without realizing at first that it was from himself.

  My dear, Hogarth,

  I did not write to you until after I received your last letter, because I knew any post would be delayed by the weather. Your letter makes me worried for your safety and brings to me how much affection I have grown to feel for you over the course of our correspondence. Please, whatever you do, don’t look under the door to Room 411 anymore. The presence of the gold button is very disquieting and I must ponder the meaning of it. The ice and mist are unprecedented and likewise very disturbing. We could be dealing with a whole new phase in the experiments of Dr. Perfory and Mr. Pitswale. They have apparently entered a dangerous time. Please keep up your other observations if you can, but from a safe distance. Please do not touch the door any longer. I fear it might do you harm to be in contact with anything from within even so indirectly as through a door. Look for a package to arrive from me within the next day or so. It will contain the barometer I mentioned before. If you have any fears about being on the fourth floor after dark, I quite understand and will not think less of you should you no longer wish to stay in my employ in this matter. While I wish to obtain proof for my fellow professors here that my old schoolmate is experimenting in the dark arts, I have no desire to put you into clear danger.

  Yours,

  Andre Van Gelder, PhD

  Worried, even slightly panicked, about what Hogarth might do without these instructions, Van Gelder packed quickly and went to the train station. He was on the train to Arkham before he finally opened his paper and read an article mentioning the strange death of Henry Hogarth Jones.

  The Judgment Chair

  Ethan Nahté

  Arthur Wesley III flashed a wicked smile as he passed the grotesque photograph to his left, pulling it back from the grasp of Chet Billingsly at the last second.

  “Unh, unh, unh,” Arthur chided. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Chet, old boy.”

  Chet took the photograph, once again proffered to him. He grimaced at the sight of the man in the picture. His head was on a stake and his limbs were quartered and laid out in front of his naked torso, all of it stricken of flesh. Chet quickly passed the photo to the row behind him as Arthur and his chums laughed heartily. Chet wanted to verbally lash out but was afraid if he opened his mouth he would vomit clear across the room.

  “That’ll be enough making light of both the photograph and of Mister Billingsly,” Professor Ashley warned the room filled with a score of young men, all from prosperous families, few of whom had the morals or manners to compete with a starving jackal in the professor's opinion. Billingsly was one of the very few decent students in the entire Miskatonic University.

  The professor continued with the lesson. “As I was saying, at the time of his capture and death during the Napoleonic War, General Major Bistrom commanded four regiments in the Imperial Russian Guard, each with four battalions. Shortly thereafter, Russia’s scorched earth campaign took its toll and they proceeded to chase Napoleon out of the country.”

  Barely listening to what the professor had to say, Arthur whispered out of the side of his mouth, “What a palooka,” in Chet’s direction, razzing the pale–faced boy as sweat beaded across his brow.

  Claudius Fairweather, one of Arthur’s cronies who sat one row behind, flicked a small spit-wad at the back of Chet’s head. The sticky debris landed in his fair hair. Those who could see the incident snickered. The professor let it go, knowing he couldn’t always protect the young man.

  “Professor Ashley, what’s up with the gothic rocking chair in the photo?” another lad asked. He was referencing a massive skeletal-formed chair, the skull carved from the headboard and sitting alone atop the rest as if it were an actual body in repose. The back support was formed with spindles shaped like a human ribcage and braced in the center by a spinal column leading down the length of the stile to the pelvic bone where a person would sit. The details of the wood grain were too difficult to discern in the photo, but it was a dark wood, possibly oak. The contours continued onward with the femur all the way to the metatarsals curling firmly at the front of the intricately carved runners adorned with strange sigils. The armrests of the chair were, of course, the skeletal arms and hands of the gigantic form. Between the leather-covered seat and the runners were two vertical pieces of wood per side, each carved with a furious dragon being ridden by some sort of demons. Overall, the relic made for an extremely macabre piece of furniture.

  “That, Mister Waldrop, is an early nineteenth century wooden replica of an ancient chair. History tells us the replica’s creator built it in Russia on commission for a baron. No one seems to recall the name of the carpenter or the baron,” the Ancient History professor explained. “It seems that not long after the finishing touches were put on the chair, the carpenter’s dead body was found hanging high in the rafters above his marvelous creation.”

  Lance Waldrop, another of Arthur’s friends, gulped in disbelief as he studied the photo again. “You mean he stood on the chair and hung himself?”

  Now Professor Ferdinand C. Ashley gave him a sardonic smile. He always enjoyed telling this part of the story to a class when someone had paid close enough attention to the details beyond the dismembered corpse of General Major Bistrom. He placed his hands together before his chest, his fingers pointing upwards almost as in prayer. As he opened his mouth to expound upon the question, his hands slowly unfolded like wrinkled and leathery versions of the sticky leaves from a Venus flytrap after digesting its meaty meal.

  “The story goes that the carpenter was high upon a rafter in a barn located on the baron’s property. There was no rope. He was impaled on the head of a rusty wrought iron nail, the nail head supporting the carpenter at the base of his skull. His weight crushed the cervical bones and ripped through the thick band of nerves. It was much higher than someone could’ve reached by standing on the chair and no ladder was found in the area. There was some evidence of a gigantic hand-print bruising the carpenter’s throat. Some claim it was the Great Old One known as Ithaqua.”

  The class, including Arthur, became very silent. Some were in awe while others shivered as if a cold wind had washed clean through their body only to deposit an unexplainable darkness within their soul. Professor Ashley had previously discussed some of what he knew about the pantheon and worship of the Eldritch gods. Those who could remember knew that Ithaqua was a giant, humanoid shape with glowing red eyes, and large web
bed feet. It savaged the Arctic region, silently, walking on air as easily as land.

  Professor Ashley continued speaking. “The peasants and servants were terrified. They set fire to the barn to rid it of evil, or so they believed. When the baron and his men attempted to stop them, a battle broke out and the fire spread to the baron’s castle. There were no survivors…except the chair. The barn had burned down around it, the blackened remains of the carpenter draped over the chair like a shawl, the carved skull protruding through the corpse.”

  Arthur, self-appointed Big Cheese of the wastrels, broke the silence. “That’s just an old Russian fairy tale to scare children.”

  The professor looked down the length of his nose at the dark-haired boy whose chiseled features made him appear as if he could be one of the derring-do heroes of the pulp magazines. The professor was not prone to jealousy, yet he could not stand to even look at the smirking boy. He knew that both young men and ladies looked up to those types with Arthur Wesley’s features and riches. Professor Ashley also knew Arthur’s father and his grandfather. They were all from the same cloth—arrogant, good-looking, charming when they wanted to be, and downright heartless bastards when it came to what they wanted.

  “Fairy tale, is it, Mister Wesley?”

  “Sure, there’s no way a fire could burn everything except a wooden chair in the middle of the inferno.”

  “What if, Mister Wesley, the chair was created with power derived from the original which it emulated?” The professor awaited a remark from any of the class, not just Wesley. “What if the sigils and carvings were part of a spell? What if the unknown carpenter was a practitioner of the Cthulu Cult? What if one of the Great Old Ones, such as Ithaqua, worked through the man?”