Miskatonic Nightmares Read online

  “The angles! The angles!” he yelled out "I've got to go back!” His face turned toward mine. He saw me and immediately yelled out “Edward! I was right! I was right! It was beautiful!”

  I recognized the eyes behind the bearded and withered face. But how could this man be Dr. Jack Campbell?

  *

  Like millions of other Americans, Jack Campbell was drafted into the Army a few months after Pearl Harbor. Soon after finishing basic training, he was sent to artillery school at Camp Carson where he excelled, making child’s play out of basic trajectory calculations. After the war, he went to Hargraeves University on the G.I. Bill, naturally studying mathematics. While in graduate school at MIT, he quickly gravitated toward Theoretical Physics, remarking to his advisors that “measuring the already known can be quite boring. It's only the mathematically invisible that can be truly interesting.”

  After receiving his PhD in 1953, he was seen as a rising star in Theoretical Physics, even turning down an offer from Sandia National Laboratory. His name and reputation for being a good, solid scientist came to my attention and I quickly recruited him to Miskatonic University in 1957. Campbell was a natural at departmental politics, becoming the Physics Department vice chair in 1960. Those first few years, things were going quite well for Jack Campbell at Miskatonic. He published regularly, focusing on massless sub-atomic particle trajectories. Although not necessarily breakthrough in nature, his papers were interesting to say the least. He was well-liked by students and faculty alike. Then in the spring of 1964, something happened and Campbell stared to change.

  It began when I was visited a couple of overeager, cherub-faced FBI agents. They started by clumsily asking me a few badly phrased questions about Campbell's "loyalties" as they put it. I had no idea what their suspicions about him may have been, but imagined his turning down the job at Sandia may have put him on sort of list. I did what I could to disguise my relative disgust at their line of inquiry. I reminded them Campbell been a decorated artillery officer during the war. They acknowledged the fact with all the confidence of someone who's never heard a shot fired in anger. But I put up with it for the good name of the University.

  The next day I ran into Campbell and asked him pretty directly what was going on. He apologized for my "interrogation" and calmly told me it was about his correspondence with an East German physicist named Obermaier at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. I assumed that’s what prompted the FBI visit. Getting letters from the other side of the Iron Curtain wasn’t exactly an everyday experience in those days.

  Campbell met Obermaier in 1945 when his unit was in Pilsen at the very end of the war, nervously trapped behind Soviet lines for six weeks. This too could have fueled suspicion from the Feds. Campbell told me he had recently received a letter from Obermaier. He didn't elaborate on the contents, and I didn't ask. But whatever it was, that’s when first I noticed the changes in Campbell's overall demeanor.

  *

  During summer, there were a few unexplained happenings at Miskatonic University. On a few occasions, the campus police reported someone lurking around the Orne Library in the middle of the night. Dr. Sutton, the head of Special Collections, was convinced someone had gained entry to the closed stacks and may have been accessing restricted material, perhaps once or twice a week during most of July and August. Nothing was ever missing, but there were just enough evidence to convince her someone had been accessing “certain areas” without authorization. When pressed for further details by both the Head Librarian and the University Provost, Dr. Sutton hesitated, dubiously claiming she had no idea what specific material anyone might have been accessing. Subsequently, there was no further investigation into the matter.

  Also during that summer, the campus police had a few odd experiences while patrolling the area at night around Mathewson Hall. First there was the sound. Initially it seemed nothing more than an intermittent dull rumble so quiet it was barely perceptible. Yet, over the course of a few weeks, it grew louder and became more ominous. By the middle of August, what the police reported hearing sounded “as though the entire building was somehow breathing." Several attempts were made to locate the source of the sound, but to no avail. The sounds seemed to be coming from inside the building. But upon entering, it simply stopped. The police also reported a strange, infrequent odor, like “burning batteries” one of them said. This continued until the fall semester started in September.

  When classes resumed, people noticed a dramatic change in Jack Campbell. He was described to me as a bit unkempt, with his hair longer and sporting a slightly messy beard. His normally cheerful attitude had changed as well, the usual smile replaced by a look of intense thought. Campbell had always been fond of talking about his research with the enthusiasm of a kid showing off a new toy. But when asked about what he had been working on, he would reply, without making eye contact, "You'll all see soon enough."

  That fall, Campbell was assigned two graduate teaching assistants, Harold Gibbs and Marcus Jensen; two very eager, bright young men. It was only a month into the semester when they both began to make informal reports to Dr. Larsen, the chair of the physics department, about how Campbell was becoming increasingly reliant on them for conducting the day-to-day lectures in his classes. On some days, he would disappear for several hours at a time, no one having an idea where he had gone. On those days when he did lecture, he seemed detached, even combative at times. On one occasion he lashed out at Gibbs after mentioning their increased teaching responsibilities saying, "Aren't you here to learn? Well, now you're learning how to teach."

  At the end of October, Marcus Jensen simply disappeared. One Tuesday morning he was expected to be lecturing in one of Campbell’s classes but he just didn’t show up. His usual punctuality caused serious concern within the department. He was last seen the previous afternoon by a classmate who thought he was on his way to Campbell’s office. Campbell told Sherriff Bishop he never arrived. Sherriff Bishop conducted an investigation but not a single trace of Jensen was found. One of the cleaners told him she heard some odd voices “coming right up though the floorboards” that evening. Three weeks later, Harold Gibbs, Campbell’s other assistant, suddenly packed up and transferred to Brown. He gave no substantive explanation.

  *

  In the following spring of 1965, things really came to a head. The annual New England Conference of Theoretical Physics was coming up in Providence. Campbell’s papers usually generated some anticipation within the physics community. This year the situation was a bit different. News had spread around to the other regional schools about his erratic behavior and no one really knew what to expect. It was when the title of his paper was announced that his peers knew something had gone wrong with Jack Campbell.

  I wasn't present at the conference, but I was told all about it afterwards. The Aklo Formulae: The Possibilities of Interdimensional Travel by Applying Extreme and Non-Euclidean Angles was not only a confusing title, but the presentation itself had those in attendance scratching their heads. There was very little that was scientific, just unsubstantiated theories about certain passages in a mythical “pre-human” language and their “uncanny connections” to modern multidimensional theory. The various equations he presented were an odd combination of recognizable theorem mixed in with various arcane looking symbols. At its conclusion, there was no applause and no questions, only stunned silence. They knew something about Campbell had definitely gone awry.

  After learning about what had happened in Providence, as Dean of the Science School, I had certain obligations to the university to investigate further. I immediately got on the phone to Burt Larsen, his department chair, for an explanation. That got nowhere. Bert was well known for being non-confrontational. He claimed he had no idea, unlike years before, what Campbell had intended on presenting and that he had been uncharacteristically secretive about his work. With a tone of trepidation in his voice, he said he would have a word with Campbell and “get to the bottom of things.” I foolishly took
Bert at his word.

  Not only did Bert fail to rein Campbell in, but Campbell decided to shop his paper around for publishing. Naturally, not a single reputable peer-reviewed journal would consider printing something so fantastically unscientific. Then an obscure magazine called Forbidden Knowledge included Campbell’s paper in their Summer 1965 issue. After a little digging, I learned the magazine was run out of a rundown basement in Ludenberg by a group of fake researchers, old friends of Campbell’s from his days at Hargraeves University. The magazine’s subject matter included UFOs, secret Nazi experiments, pseudo-archaeology, and something called cryptozoology. After that, it wasn't just Jack Campbell's reputation at stake, it was also the reputation of the whole science school and good name of Miskatonic University. I needed to take control over the situation immediately.

  The first thing I did was to get a copy and read it to try and get an idea how far Campbell had gone. The paper was a total mess. The only thing I managed to find even remotely comprehensible was what he called “extreme angles.” The principle was interesting, that an angle more than 360 degrees actually became extra-dimensional by its very nature. It was how to actually move an object into such a position that was beyond the realm of rational thought.

  He made several references to something called the “Aklo Formulae.” I’d heard the word Aklo some years before, referring to some ancient, pre-human language, more than likely invented by Victorian spiritualists and perpetuated by similar frauds. Just as he had done in Providence, the paper began with a few recognizable mathematical concepts. Then several pages in, his increasingly lengthy formulas started to include more and more of the arcane symbols and glyphs. Even looking at them on the page made me feel uneasy, anxious, and even slightly nauseated. Their disturbing curves and angles appeared as though they had not been originally created by a human hand, let alone intended for human use.

  The conclusion he eventually came to was intriguing if not bordering on the insane; travelling between dimensions was possible when “angles were forced greater than 360 degrees.” I took a few minutes to let than sink in before moving on to the bibliography. I half expected his source material was going to be at least entertaining. Apart from the usual standard texts, there were a few odd papers he cited, mainly coming from a handful of scientists in Eastern Block countries. Including half a dozen from his friend Obermaier in Leipzig that the bulk of his citations were conveniently from the other side of the Iron Curtain made further investigation rather difficult. A few were about this mysterious “Aklo language,” including one written in the 1890s by an archaeologist from the Cabot Museum in Boston named Johnson. Then, just at the bottom of the last page, one particular title popped out at me:

  Wormius, Olaf The Necomonicom (The Book of Dead Names), ca 1230 A.D. Latin Translation from the Arabic of the Al Azif of Abdul Alhazred, c. 730 AD. Special Collections, Orne Library, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Massachusetts.

  Thirty years before, as an undergraduate here at Miskatonic University, I had heard several rumors about such books, that the Orne Library held a secretive collection of occult grimories. There were the inevitable stories handed down from upperclassmen, tales spun over a few beers late at night. There was the inevitable “I heard from such and such that so and so” about the mythology surrounding such a rumored collection. The usual tale was that some unfortunate nosy, overachieving undergraduate had slipped into the closed stacks at the library late at night and casually perused a few, only to be found the next morning in a state of total insanity, eventually to be carried off to Arkham Sanatorium and never heard from again. There was also the consistent tale about some barely human, deformed freak, from somewhere out past the Aylesbury Pike, determined to see one particular volume for “Satanic purposes”. He broke into the library only to meet some undisclosed, horrible death. This was the common mythology of Miskatonic University. Of course I never believed a word of it, but now I was beginning to wonder.

  Later the same afternoon, at a library committee meeting, I overheard a discussion between the Head Librarian and the Provost about “someone possibly sneaking into the closed stacks” the previous summer. I was actively avoiding making the connection between that and what Campbell may have been up to. So I didn’t say a word on the subject. I just kept my mouth shut and hoped I was wrong. At that point the only thing I knew for sure was Campbell was on a sinking ship and he wasn’t about to take the good name of the Science School or Miskatonic University with him.

  I made an appointment with the Provost to discuss the situation and decide on a course of action. It was also protocol to inform Campbell of the results of the meeting. That’s when we noticed he was missing. No one in the department had seen him for at least two days and had no clue where he might have been. I quickly informed the Provost of the situation and that I was reporting Campbell was now a missing person. He made it very clear to me he was much more concerned about the reputation of the school than Campbell’s well-being.

  The next day the Sheriff and I took a look around Campbell's office for clues to his possible whereabouts. As expected, it was a complete mess. The first thing I noticed was a pile of badly mimeographed papers, most of them barely readable owing to the fact hardly any of them were in English. I was able to make out some of the titles, guessing these as the source material for Campbell's recent research. While ruffling through the stack of books on his desk, I found an envelope addressed to Campbell, bearing a return address from Leipzig and postmarked the previous spring. The letter inside was again barely legible. First of all, the handwriting was terrible and secondly that my wartime German was long out of practice. There was just one passage I could just make out.

  “The final formula is contained within the Al Azif. Our suspicions are correct about the Wormius translation. I trust you to discover its location. All who know will deny its very existence. Don’t let that stop us. We have already worked for nearly twenty years to make this happen.”

  The final two pages contained a series of symbols, nearly identical to those that I had seen in Campbell's recently published work. It was pretty easy to conclude what had been going on that previous summer. Having no clue what may have happened to Campbell, the Sherriff reported up to the Staties about the situation. They could do very little as there wasn’t really all that much to go on. Three weeks later I was woken up in the middle of the night by a dull rumbling coming from the direction of Mathewson Hall.

  *

  The Jack Campbell they found cowering near the medical school appeared radically different from the one we had seen just a few weeks earlier. He was much more manic, even more animated and combative than before, so much so he had to be sedated by the county police surgeon. He looked older, his face had deep wrinkles, and he was sporting a thick beard. His hair had gone dead white. Although he had only been missing for just over three weeks, there was no explanation for the change in his appearance. The next morning, the assistant county prosecutor took one look at Campbell and petitioned for a full psychological evaluation. The judge quickly agreed and Campbell was sent to Arkham Sanatorium that afternoon. I tried to find out more, but at the request of the University President, the judge ordered all the court records sealed.

  None of us had any notion there were hidden rooms in the basement of Mathewson Hall, let alone that Campbell had been up to something in there. Whatever the contents of the room had been, there was very little left, not much more than a few unidentifiable bits of burnt refuse on the floor. Even stranger, there was very little evidence there had ever been a fire. The floor, ceiling and both the East and West walls had been oddly damaged, covered in a series of large, irregular parallel lines that ended at the south wall. When I saw them I couldn’t help but to imagine some huge incomprehensible fantasy monster dragging its claws deep across the concrete.

  The south wall was the oddest though. It had taken on a strange dark discoloration somewhere between the green-purple that made people a little queasy just to look at. On it
s entire surface, just barely noticeable, was covered in what looked like a series of mathematical equations, including many unidentifiable symbols identical to what I had seen both in Campbell’s paper and in the letter from Leipzig. Right at its center was a light spot clearly in the shape of a human being. It measured at 5'9" tall, Campbell's exact height. There was no explanation for any of this.

  When the maintenance crew came into clean up and repair the room, they encountered something very odd. When standing at the back of the room, near the door, all appeared completely normal. But as they got closer to the back wall, the corners of the room no longer appeared perpendicular to the floor. This impossible geometry gave one of the workers a terrible migraine headache. While another one suffered an inner ear imbalance so severe he spent a week in the hospital. About a day later the room seemed to go back to normal.

  I was finally allowed to see Campbell three months after his committal. What I saw was the heavily sedated shell of what had once been the brilliant man I knew, sitting in the center of a white room, wearing a clean white straight jacket, and quietly mumbling incoherent gibberish. I asked the sanatorium staff about the metal disk Campbell was found with. I was told Dr. Bentham from the archaeology department had taken it to the Cabot Museum in Boston, supposedly for comparative studies with what he called “items of similar cultural origin, specifically its connection to the Aklo language.” About a year later, the tablet disappeared from a locked and alarmed storage room at the Cabot Museum.

  *

  The next fall I went back to Arkham Sanatorium to see Campbell but he had simply disappeared from his locked room sometime the night before. The orderlies on duty strongly insisted they were not negligent in their duties. The lockdown logs from the previous evening confirmed their version of events including the fact Campbell had still been restrained in a straight jacket. The only out of the ordinary occurrence that night was the lights in the building flickered for a few moments just after two in the morning.