Miskatonic Nightmares Page 7

  I managed to get a look inside the empty cell. I found the entire south wall of his cell was covered in various mathematical formulae, including many unidentifiable symbols very similar to the material he had published in Forbidden Knowledge. Tests confirmed the text was written in Campbell's own blood.

  Within a few short hours, I was taken to Arkham Hospital with a severe migraine headache. I never had one before in my entire life. While on a morphine drip to deal with the intense pain, I naturally hallucinated, or I assumed they were hallucinations. I saw Campbell’s cell with that one wall covered in his arcane equations. Then everything started moving, the walls bent into angles I knew were not possible for this physical universe. These visions went on periodically for two days before the pain subsided and I was taken off the drip.

  After being discharged, I spent the next few weeks in a daze, trying to make any sense out of what had happened. Every rational and scientific explanation I tried to come up with failed. The very foundation of what I had long believed to be real slowly faded away. My very being as a rational scientist existing in a rational universe was over. I did my best to put on a brave face, going to various pointless meetings and committees with people totally ignorant of the fragile state of the world they all blissfully enjoyed. About halfway through the fall semester of 1966, I walked into the Provost’s office unannounced and abruptly resigned. I was done trying to educate others about the universe I no longer believed was real.

  *

  I had spent the preceding eight years of my self-imposed retirement living in a small house up on Sentinel Hill. Then on a spring day, out of the blue, I received a call from Barry Glynn, the new dean of the science school. By the tone of his voice I could tell he was trying to conceal great apprehension. It took me a few moments to even realize what he was talking about. It seemed as though a small group of young undergraduates were exploring the basement of Mathewson Hall when they discovered a small, disused space just off the boiler room. It was obvious no one had opened the door for several years owing to the rust on the hinges and latch. Upon prying the door open, they were hit by a smell they could only describe as “electric” in nature, similar to “what a new television smells like right after you plug it in.”

  Inside it was completely empty, just as it had been left in 1965, save for one thing. In the very center of the room was the dried out husk of a human body. The corpse was desperately clinging onto a familiar looking metallic disk covered in unrecognizable symbols. On the south wall of the room was the freshly burned outline of a man just under six feet in height, his hand extended as though he was waving to them. One of the kids even said he thought it moved. The body belonged to what the Essex County Medical Examiner described as an elderly man about sixty to seventy years of age. After looking into the dental records of missing persons, he conclusively identified the body as that of Marcus Jensen, the missing graduate student. In 1974, he should have been only 33 years old.

  A Breath of Cold Air

  Emma Tonkin

  The great turbines roared into the twilight.

  In the semi-darkness of her office, bathed in the light of her computer screen, Marlene Astier rubbed at her forehead with the back of her hand. The sound of the turbines was her cue to leave.

  Her paper was nowhere near done. She compiled it to check: even with the two pages of mathematical proof she'd added tonight, it was still three pages short of the minimum length set by the journal editor.

  "Just finish it tomorrow," she told herself.

  The tone of the sound intensified; a dark rhythmic pulse joined the booming. Slam, whir. Slam, whir. Thump, thump, slam.

  "No," she answered aloud. "I can't." She had an exam to invigilate in the afternoon.

  The room in which she sat was a corner office on the third floor of the Neils Bohr building, purchased by Miskatonic University to house research into applied physics. Once upon a time, it might have been meant as a courthouse.

  Though simple enough inside, its modern partition walls liberally dressed with whiteboards and posters, the outer walls had been layered in stone in the manner of a neo-Gothic pastiche. There were even grotesques; gargoyles with no practical function. On a stormy day, Marlene could look up from her west-facing window and see water dripping over the worn wings and snout of a stone dragon. Tonight it was barely eight-thirty and the carved stone beast basked in the last rays of a fading, red-tinged sun.

  The windows, predictably, were single-glazed, so she could hear every conversation from the quadrangle outside. They offered no respite from the ungodly noise emanating from Aeronautical Engineering.

  *

  Someone knocked at the door. She looked up, startled, then relaxed. "Hey, Mr Coots, how are you?"

  The security guard smiled at her. "I'm good, Dr Astier. Long night?"

  "Oh, yeah. It's paradise, academia. Got to teach, or I don't get paid. Got to research, or I kiss goodbye to tenure..."

  He nodded. "It's a tough old life, ma'am. You could always join the UMisk campus police. We're hiring."

  "I'll consider that offer very seriously, Mr Coots. You got a coffee machine in your office?"

  "Yep. Finest filter coffee money can buy, within reason and assigned budgetary limitations."

  "Even better."

  The racket outside had gained in volume as they talked. It pulsed with a dark rhythm. Their voices were drowned in the flow of sound. It struck her that she'd had to raise her voice to near a shout to be sure of being heard.

  Peace and quiet. If an academic existed who was capable of writing a paper with the sound of a howling gale as backdrop, Marlene was not that person.

  Time to go home.

  *

  The next morning, she stopped at the little coffee shop by the campus gates. Browsing the muffins, she saw the culprit.

  "Pieter," she called. He didn't react. Maybe all that noise had affected his hearing.

  She headed him off at the till. "Dr Meijer," she said, "how nice to see you out in daylight. We were beginning to wonder if you'd developed an allergy to the sun, sharp teeth and a taste for blood. Or an allergy to staff meetings, I guess. Lord knows I'd understand that."

  He blinked at her like a bemused bat and put his cardboard cup down on the side table. A long, slow moment passed. "No," he said eventually. "There's just a lot to do." His Dutch accent ghosted through his r's.

  "Teaching load?" she said.

  "Oh, no, no," he said. "I'm on a research-only contract these days. It's tenure track, but if it doesn't go through this year, I'm afraid I'm scuppered."

  That explained a lot. If a tenure committee turned him down for promotion, he'd have very few alternatives but to try again elsewhere. Tenure at Miskatonic University was an extremely competitive process. "Is it your first try?" Marlene asked.

  His mournful expression reminded her of her basset hound, Sookie, discovering her food bowl empty. He smoothed down the thick folds of his waterproof wax jacket with his hands, a dry, crackling sound, snakeskin on leather. She wondered if he was aware he was doing it. The sadness in his eyes bothered her.

  "I know how that feels," she said. "I'm fighting the same fight myself."

  He nodded. "You work late, don't you," He made it a statement, not a question. "I see you sometimes leaving the campus, when we run the wind tunnel late at night. Especially then. I hope the noise doesn't bother you."

  Oh, how she wanted to give him a piece of her mind, to tell him how often and how thoroughly his experiments ruined her work. But there was that sad basset-hound face. "Come and sit down," she said, instead. "Just for ten minutes. Did you want cream in that coffee?"

  *

  "It started with the crash," he said, restless fingers laced together around the rim of his cup. "I don't know whether you remember the HS491 flight lost last year on the way from Mexico to Spain." His cadence was flat. He didn't say it as a question, but as an observation: I don't know.

  She remembered the crash, vaguely. "It came down in
the sea."

  "Yes," he said. "All we had was automated reporting of a minor electrical fault. One engine failure shouldn't have caused a crash. They found the site, but the black boxes never showed up. For a manufacturer that's a worst-case scenario. If they know what broke, they can address it, do something about it. If it's never resolved, then market confidence is lost, because we know it can happen again."

  "Did it?" she asked.

  He nodded. "Slightly different aircraft, but yes. Do you remember the plane that came down last August?"

  "The Dart," she said. The new high-speed flight from London to New York. She wasn't likely to forget that in a hurry. It was a wonder of its time, a brand new supersonic aircraft, unleashed in a blaze of glory and somehow lost just a few short months into its operative life.

  "That's the one. Well, the HS491 was the precursor to that model. It isn't universally realized because the cosmetic differences are significant and the manufacturer would like it to stay that way, but they're both essentially based on the same Gryphon core design and engines."

  She nodded, willing him to get to the point, with his hangdog expression, brown eyes staring from eye-sockets bruised by lack of sleep.

  "The thing is," he said, "there's been a third."

  She stared at him. "Since August?"

  "That's what has Gryphon so concerned. They're my industrial sponsor. They want solutions, yesterday. The tenure committee wants a convincing narrative. They want impact, yesterday. And you know, I care about that, of course I do, but mostly..."

  His attention wandered back to his cup.

  She felt cold fingers brushing the back of her neck, the first tendrils of autumn snaking into the room.

  "All those people," he murmured. She was unsure if he'd meant to say it aloud.

  Marlene felt an irrational urge to stand up, walk away, put this man and his troubled soul behind her. Instead she said, "It's not your fault. I'm sure you're doing everything you can."

  He gave her a weak, insincere smile. "It's a perfect storm," he said. "I have to solve this. For myself, for the funder, for my own future. And for the public."

  "You can't take responsibility for everything," she said.

  "I've been working on this for over a year, ever since the Mexico flight went down. Three flights. Two hundred and ninety-seven victims." He rubbed his bruised eyes with the back of his right hand.

  There was a pause.

  "So you see," he said, "I really should get back to work." He pushed back his chair and stood up, face neutral of expression.

  She watched him leave, coffee-cup in his right hand. With his left, he brushed imaginary crumbs from his coat.

  *

  The wind tunnel started up that evening slightly before nine. Marlene abandoned her work. She sat for a moment outside on a stone bench in the courtyard, looking across at the incongruously modern red brick block housing the Aeronautical Engineering facilities. The air was cold and fresh and smelt of crushed pine needles and damp oak leaves in the first stages of decay.

  A light flickered on the second floor. The turbines growled into the night. She thought she saw a figure silhouetted against a window. She scrambled to her feet to wave up at it, but when she looked back, it was gone.

  *

  The following morning, she took the proofs for her journal article down to the coffee-shop, ordered a tea and tried to persuade herself that she wasn't waiting for Pieter. After a few minutes, the article grabbed her attention, and she forgot to watch the door.

  When he sat down opposite her, she jumped involuntarily and dropped her red pen, which rolled away and over the side of the table, clattering on the floor.

  Pieter leant down and picked it up. "Your weapon," he said, smiling.

  "Hey, thanks," she said. "Sorry for jumping like that. I was just-"

  He shook his head. "I know. A good book does that to me every time. What are you reading?"

  She showed him the title page.

  He read aloud, "'Some observations on gravitational lensing in dark matter.' Sounds great. Have you got to the denouement yet?"

  She smiled at him. "Actually, I'm still working on the introduction."

  "The butler did it," he said, grinning back. "It's always the butler."

  She capped the pen and clipped it back onto the paper. "You seem happier. Did something change?"

  "Yes, a little. We moved on from testing models of the full airframe, because we know the characteristics very well by now, and it's pretty clear there's nothing wrong with it. If there's something inherent to the structure, it's in the engines. So we're gearing up for a new set of tests tomorrow."

  She nodded. "It's good to feel like things are moving on," she said "But listen, I was thinking..."

  He held out his hands, palm-up, in a gesture of welcome.

  "I'm dealing with the same tenure struggle you are," she said. "And I'm an applied physicist, when I'm not playing games with astrophysics, and I'd like to work more in that area. So I thought perhaps we could join forces. Maybe I could help you, just a little bit, with your analysis."

  He gave her a thoughtful stare. She added in a rush, "No competition, nothing like that. I don't want to steal your credit."

  "Then I'll do it," he said. "If you agree to coffee in my office, tomorrow."

  *

  She spent the afternoon reading his back-catalog of scientific papers and their primary references. The next morning, they met at his office to review the engine design of the aircraft.

  It was hard to tell the remarkable from the everyday. The design made sense, to the extent that anything did. After all, it was a jet engine. The essential points were present: suck in as much air as possible, compress, combust, and exhaust.

  On one photograph, she saw something that made her pause. "What are these discolorations on the blades?" she wondered aloud.

  Pieter shrugged. "I asked that," he said. "They're an artifact of the manufacturing process, apparently. Striking, aren't they?"

  They certainly were. The thin streaks snaked down the blade like tendrils of cat's-claw vine, swallowing forgotten places in its embrace. She pulled her laptop from her bag and fired up Mathematica.

  "Cup of coffee?" Pieter asked, but she had already retreated into the world of equations.

  *

  Half an hour later, she sat back in triumph. "Look at this."

  The screen showed a complex three-dimensional nest of lines radiating from a central nexus. It could've been a flower, or thistledown fluff in a high wind.

  "Pretty," said Pieter. "What is it?"

  "That's the pattern of discolorations," she said. "When you combine the patterns on each blade, this is the result."

  She twisted the onscreen image to shift the nexus to the left. "How about that?"

  Pieter blinked. "That's a coincidence."

  It looked for the entire world like a ball of flame rocketing from the right to the left of the screen.

  "Are you sure it isn't intentional?" she said. "It's a very pretty effect. Manufacturer's branding?"

  Pieter pulled a folder from a shelf, liberally annotated with Post-it notes. He yawned.

  "Sorry," he said. "The blades are fabricated in a nickel alloy, designed to promote air cooling. The channels you've drawn are intended to support that process. The design is certified and has passed all relevant safety tests."

  Marlene slid the folder across the desk. "It's unusual," she said.

  "True, true, but these things happen."

  She looked up at him, suddenly hesitant in the face of his apparent certainty. "I have a student meeting soon, but... I read a paper about hypersonic noise. It occurred to me to wonder whether there might be some sort of effect, a harmonic oscillation that could cause sudden failure under unusual circumstances."

  Pieter ran a hand through his thinning yellow hair. "That's...interesting, actually. Thank you. In any case, tonight we're moving on to the engine turbines. If you come and find me tomorrow, we'll have some
real data of our own to work on."

  She nodded slowly. "Same time, same place?"

  "Unless you want to join me at the wind tunnel facility."

  She shook her head, regretfully.

  "Join me later if you change your mind. I asked Security to add you to the access list."

  Marlene gathered her material into her bag and stood up. Impulsively, she reached out and touched Pieter's shoulder, her umber skin dark against his pallor.

  "Be safe," she said.

  *

  Her student, Sanjit, arrived punctually at her office. They spoke for over half an hour. His work was competent, if uninspired. "Strengthen your literature search," she told him. "You need to explore all the options."

  When he left, she sat back at her desk and watched the fireball graphic rotate on her screen, thinking. All the options.

  This pattern seemed likely to be intentional. That meant it must have a purpose. Corporate branding? Classical reference? Good-luck charm?

  Who made these turbines, anyway?

  She thought of asking Pieter. That would involve explaining to him why she needed to know. Instead, she called a friend.

  "Ali. How's life in NYC? Last journalist in the shop? Hey, I need you. Mm-hmm. It's a big favor. I'm sorry. I'll owe you. A big favor. Promise..."

  After explaining the situation, she listened for a moment and wrote 'Gryphon' on a Post-it. After listening a little longer, she crossed it out again. While she waited, she opened the campus directory and began to scroll through the list of academic departments.