Miskatonic Nightmares Page 8

  "That's it? Great. Ali, I really appreciate your help. Next time you get as far as Boston, let me know?"

  Marlene put down the phone. She wrote 'Addison' on the Post-it.

  Then she dialed another, shorter number.

  *

  Professor Riecher's office was in a corner of the campus that made the Niels Bohr building look modernist. The air smelt of dust and aging paper. Not even October yet, even so, the stone tiles radiated a chill that seeped into her feet through the thin soles of her shoes.

  The professor himself was a white-haired gentleman. He had crumpled a little into himself. She imagined at some time in the past he might have been a very tall man.

  "Marlene," he began, without greeting or preamble. "I was intrigued by your description of the design. I'm glad you came to me with this. Show me what you've found."

  He spoke with a perfect British English accent, something that might have come from the BBC of fifty years in the past. It could, Marlene supposed, be a New England affectation.

  She placed her laptop on the desk. "Got a model for you. How's that sound?"

  The professor looked carefully at the simulation. He muddled with the controls for a few moments, trying to get the hang of it. He dragged it into a new configuration, and then another. At last he sighed, eyebrows raised, and took his thick-framed glasses off to polish them on his coat.

  "Astonishing," he said.

  From the clutter of books on his desk he rescued a heavy hardback, bound in plain cloth covers. "I looked it up after you rang," he explained. "It seemed so improbable for such an artifact, a technological artifact..." He said this last in a tone of voice that suggested technology was a poor compromise, which, from the point of view of a professor of anthropology, it probably was. "...to pose even a chance resemblance to the iconography reported by poor old Tolliver. And yet it does."

  Comparing the carefully-etched illustration in the book with her own efforts, the two illustrations checked out.

  "They're not just similar," she said, in wonder. "From the right angle, they're identical. Thank you. I didn't imagine you'd identify it so fast."

  The professor shook his head. "Don't thank me. To be honest, I was hoping to be wrong."

  Marlene stared at him. "Why?"

  "If it had been something simple - a good luck charm, a mythological symbol from Ancient Greece or Rome - then it would simply imply someone’s a romantic."

  "But it isn't?"

  The old man's expression darkened. "You don't know about Tolliver, then?"

  She shook her head.

  "He was one of the seventeenth-century mystics. Not the best known, of course. His writings were, to say the least, a source of confusion. Consider the time period: post-Calvinism, when educated men and women of a less pious bent were looking for something in which to dabble. Not necessarily to believe, but to entertain. Tolliver gave them that, being quite the prophet."

  She looked again at the sprawling graph. "So... what’s this?"

  "Tolliver was convinced, you see, that the world was the haunt of dark forces. He believed very strongly, or wrote as though he did, and from this distance it's hard to say which is nearer to the truth, that we are watched by otherworldly creatures. I must say that, though strange to us, this cosmology was hardly his own invention. Rather, he seems to have stolen much of it from writers of the distant past, such as Prinn, of course, and Alhazred."

  The Professor cracked his knuckles nervously.

  "Ridiculous, of course," he added, "but spirituality was very much a preoccupation of a certain type of well-heeled gentleman at the time of his writing. And Tolliver was so very detail-oriented as a thinker. He was the first to really focus on the air elementals in that pantheon. A gentleman and a scholar, poor man."

  "What happened to him?" she said, impulsively.

  He gazed at her. "Why do you ask?"

  "You called him 'poor man'. Twice."

  "Oh, I see. It's partly that despite his fame he never really made anything from it. His story was rather tragic, in the end."

  She waited.

  "He financed a large publication run of his work, you see. Rather pointless, under the circumstances."

  "Nobody bought it?" Marlene guessed.

  "Oh, no," said the Professor. "No, he died. The exact circumstances aren't clear. Got up in the night, from the looks of it, and went to the window. Goodness knows what happened, but the bottom line is when his servant came into the room the next morning there he was, dead as a doornail and burnt to stinking cinders, if you believe the servant's testimony. I'll leave you to decide for yourself." The Professor sat back, thoughtfully. "Yep. Unlucky man, really."

  Marlene felt herself inching towards anger. "This whole thing is fantasy," she stated flatly.

  He splayed his fingers out in a two-handed shrug. "Mythology," he said. "With some factual sources to support it."

  "Fine. Mythology. Either way, I don't need it. I just need to know what that... symbol... means. Is it a good-luck thing?"

  He glanced sharply at her. "I thought you'd understand," he said.

  "Understand what?"

  "It's an invocation. The manufacturer either has an evil sense of humor and a fine eye for seventeenth-century trivia, or-"

  "Or?"

  "One doesn't like to think that cults such as these have survived into the twenty-first century," he said. "Besides, who'd want to?"

  Marlene just kept watching him. There wasn't anything to say.

  "Cthugha, Tolliver called him," he said at last. "Part of a whole pantheon, you could say. There's a sea-dweller, of course, a forest-dweller, and a chaos entity. But this thing here, this sigil, it's supposed to call Cthugha. The creature of fire."

  He turned the book towards her.

  "It's a sort of prayer-wheel. Tolliver claimed this sigil was the key, if you turned it, to calling Cthugha's name. I don't know what he meant and I doubt anybody bothered to test," He shivered. "A fire elemental. Nasty bloody idea, in my opinion."

  She grinned. She couldn't help but find the humor in the idea. "If you could do that," she said, "it'd save you a whole lot of time and money."

  The Professor frowned, fearsome. "Eh?"

  "Jet engines turn heat energy into acceleration. If there were such a thing as a fire elemental, I imagine they’d be in great demand. Imagine the efficiency savings if you could just summon an elemental instead of powering the combustion cycle. Addison, the company which makes the engines, is all about efficiency. They describe themselves as the greenest avionics corporation in the world."

  He smiled weakly. "Mm."

  She closed her laptop and prepared to put it away. He grabbed her wrist with a strength and speed that surprised her.

  "Young lady," he said, a judgment she supposed to be a matter of perspective. "Before you leave, there is one point I should like to discuss with you, and it is this. I am, by now, an old man, and I attribute this triumph to the fact I am also a cautious man. You find this mythos risible, and so it is. But I think you should bear in mind that the mere fact that an idea is stupid does not mean that it cannot also be dangerous."

  *

  Marlene sat on the stone bench in the quadrangle that connected the Neils Bohr building to the Aeronautical Engineering facility. The sun was on the way down, the light reflecting redly from the windows of the Bohr building, darker and redder as the night crept in.

  She watched the sigil rotate on the screen of her laptop, thinking about efficiency, and impossibility, and the dead.

  It couldn't really happen. It was the stuff of childhood. Nothing could be invoked merely by calling its name. It was ridiculous.

  But what if the mystic had been right? Turning the key...

  She stood up. It would be okay. She'd find Pieter and explain. Not the silly things, of course. She'd tell him there was an instability in the design, that a turbine blade might shatter. Maybe the other aircraft had fallen from the sky due to catastrophic engine failure, simple unc
ontained mechanical failure, fatally damaging the structure and leading to a crash.

  As long as he agreed not to test it himself.

  Her swipe-card let her into the Aeronautical Engineering building. So far so good. The facility was two floors up. She took the stairs two at a time.

  She could hear the turbines already. He'd started the job.

  She reached the door to the facility and rattled it, shouting to be let in.

  Another sound began: a whine, something new, something she wasn't familiar with. She called for Pieter to open the door and let her in. Her throat was raw and painful from trying to be heard through the deep rattling pulse of the turbine.

  Then he opened the door, pulling off a pair of noise-canceling ear protectors.

  "Hey, Marlene. Did you run all the way here?"

  She grabbed the front of his shirt. "Listen to me, okay, Pieter?"

  He stared down at her clenched fist. "What's wrong?"

  "There's something very wrong with the design of the engine. I've got evidence. Stop the test. Please."

  "But..."

  "I'll explain everything later. Now I need you to turn it off."

  Pieter gave her a long, appraising stare. "All right. I'll do it. Stay here."

  "Can't I-"

  "Not if it's dangerous. Go downstairs. I'll be out in ten minutes, and we can talk then."

  He closed the door.

  She went back down the stairs, and was half-way to the front door when the thought hit that he shouldn't do it, after all. She turned back towards the stairs to tell him that she'd been wrong. Then the building rose up from its foundations, showering ceiling-tiles and other debris around in a whirlwind that caught her up and flung her, a helpless rag doll, against a wall.

  *

  By the time Marlene was released from hospital seventeen days later, she'd been shown the photographs of the ruin that was left of Aeronautical Engineering. It had somehow caved in, as though the wind tunnel facility had imploded. Its loss left a lopsided gap in the skyline.

  Pieter was gone, and so she had nobody with whom to share her discovery, the fact that despite everything she'd been wrong. If any of it had been true at all, then the invocations must, after all, actually have worked. The planes flew every day. Three crashes, yes, but compared to the number in service, the number was tiny.

  She had been forced to conclude that turning the key--running the engines--did not cause catastrophic failure.

  Stopping the engine mid-flight, on the other hand? Perhaps as a result of a minor electrical malfunction? That might do it.

  Marlene went home, bought milk and restocked the fridge. She collected Sookie from her neighbors and took her for walks on the bank of the Miskatonic. As soon as she could, she went back to work. Things felt strange and mournful, but she found a new sense of stillness.

  Pieter was gone. What was left of his facility had been stripped away, along with the engines he'd planned to test. The voice of Cthuga was silent, and finally--finally--the campus was peaceful again.

  The Bard Visits Arkham

  Jonathan Dubey

  The stage was set and the masks worn. Masks for all but Henry, whose own face had become as much of a mask to him as anything the drama department had to offer. The small audience was masked as well, but he took no notice. Henry focused, almost trance-like, on the performance at hand. He willed his sickly body across the stage in the first, but hopefully not final, production of the fledgling theatre department. He was proud of what he'd accomplished in his first year in Miskatonic's English department. It was this pride, and seemingly only that, which gave him the strength to move. The seven months of hard work boiled down to one task: getting through opening night. It seemed strange to him that all of the actors were on stage and costumed in the opening scene, when there should only have been four—including himself. He hadn't the time or strength to worry. His focus turned to confusion when the audience stood, then to horror as the audience and actors approached slowly, and finally to absolute terror as all began to remove their masks.

  Seven months earlier.

  Miskatonic University had a long history dating back to the late sixteen hundreds, when it was simply The Salem Academy. It was not the rich near-millennium history of Oxford University, the latter being Henry Turcotte's Alma Mater. He'd heard several rumors about the Massachusetts school from his fraternity of alumni but didn't let it dissuade him from starting his career as a professor there. He chalked up the rumors to a superiority complex most English Academia seemed to have over the American college and university structure. He'd experienced much of it first hand when he'd arrived there to study. Being referred to as a colonial or a cowboy fazed him a little at first, but he got over it, just as his fellow students got over his American status when he quickly rose to one of the top ten in marks.

  Henry was accepted to Miskatonic's faculty on the basis of grades and recommendations. He’d had no formal interview, communicating only through correspondence. His darker skin tone and slight Nubian features were never much of an issue in England, but in returning to the United States he encountered sneers and pejoratives again. He ignored them, not making eye contact with the instigators. He was used to it from his childhood. The issue was addressed once by Charleston Berquist, the head of the University's English department, upon their first meeting.

  Henry explained his mother had been half Negro, and his father white. They moved out west from Virginia shortly after their nuptials and before his birth. Mixed race was slightly more acceptable in the territories. Berquist then asked if he was called a 'quadroon', and Henry answered that he had never been called such in polite company. The two men agreed the subject of his heritage should not create any difficulty, but probably was best not discussed with the students or other faculty members.

  It was shortly after his conversation with Charleston that Henry was shown to his quarters. He was to occupy a few rooms on the first floor of one of the school's many dormitory buildings. This space was normally occupied by a head resident, usually a well-marked upperclassman who would exchange caretaker services for free or reduced housing. The rooms would suit Henry just fine in the interim, until he found a suitable apartment.

  When the school year started, his rooms were supposed to be taken over by an architecture student named Tobias, but it was understood Tobias would take a smaller room until Henry vacated. The new professor was instructed to take as much time as he needed.

  Miskatonic University was relatively smaller than Oxford, but it was still larger than some of the other schools Henry had visited before making his choice. The English department shared a building with the maths. His classroom and office were small and already cluttered with books and papers from the previous professor. 'Cluttered' described the classroom well, but the office was downright messy. The custodial staff had done what they could with the classroom, but offices were the responsibility of the individual professors, with the noted exception of cleaning the floors. The custodians had not gotten along with the professor Henry was replacing. Henry had never met the man, but understood his predecessor had left under some rather extreme circumstances. He didn't have the whole story but heard that the previous instructor had become violent with not only several students, but at least one member of the faculty. Henry didn't intend to spend very much time in his cramped office. He was more interested in another building; an old chapel on the north end of the campus, near, but not attached, to the Campus's newest building of advanced medical studies.

  Henry had been given permission to convert the old chapel, from Miskatonic's days as a Seminary, to a small performance theater and was asked to head up the new drama program. His hope was to have the students perform at least one classic play before the end of his first year there, and eventually—with any luck—push for a full drama department within five years. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he was no stranger to hard work, plus he hoped some of his new students would take to Shakespeare, as he had.

&n
bsp; The building itself may have been one of the oldest in town, but it was intact and tight. Even though it was hardly ever used of late, the gas lighting had been replaced by electricity. Unfortunately, it had become something of a dumping ground for furniture either unused or in need of repair. The clean-out was one of his first tasks. Luckily there was no shortage of able-bodied students looking to get in good with a member of the faculty—no matter how new he was.

  One such student was Tobias, the architecture major Henry quartered with. He was the first to notice a soft moist area in the back corner of the pulpit that was to serve as the stage when the conversion was completed. Though the plaster above was old, there was no discoloration to indicate water leakage. Tobias offered to remove the old wood and do the repair himself. Henry agreed and allowed the young man to enlist the help of any of the other students in the dramatic literature class.

  Tobias was convinced an old maple top from a desk with a crippled leg would provide ample material to replace the flooring at no cost. The custodian's shack had no shortage of hand tools, and only a few were needed. The night custodian was more than willing to lend the tools and even a hand, if needed, when he met Henry. He was surprised to see another man of color on the campus. Together, the two men doubled the Negro population at Miskatonic University.

  Henry proved very popular with the student body, as newer teachers often are. It was one of the few times his youth and inexperience was seen as a positive. His age made the students feel like he was easier to relate to, and they were all very willing to assist with the cleanup.

  Classes seemed to go by quickly and enjoyably, without incident. Most of the students had some familiarity with the works of William Shakespeare from their primary schooling. The few who did not caught on quickly. The students complemented Henry on his lectures being engaging as well as passionate, but often times jocular. The subject of his heritage was never an issue—at least not to his face. He heard whispers and snickering on occasion, but ignored them.