Pyrate Cthulhu:

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Vol.1)

(version 4.0)

***

Contents

The Swelling by David Conyers

The Disciple by David Barr Kirtley

A Colder War by Charles Stross

The Ghoulish Wife by Kevin L. O’Brien

The Last Horror Out of Arkham by Darrel Schweitzer

Harold’s Blues by Glen Singer

Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley by Richard A. Lupoff

The Plague Jar by Allen Mackey

The Dead Man’s Hand by Jason Andrew

A Little Job in Arkham by John Sunseri

In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb by Tina L. Jens

The Swelling

by David Conyers

For five violent days, the unrelenting storm battered the Daintree, threatening to submerge her at any moment, but it was the unraveling of Greg Wright’s mind that disturbed Tracy more than any elemental assault.

As the weather worsened, so did his delusions. First, he claimed to see mermaids then fish-demons. Both, he said, were plaguing the angry waves, clawing at their yacht. Tracy never witnessed these fanciful creatures herself, even when he pointed them out. After his fifth day of peculiar behavior, Greg calmly explained to Tracy that he’d finally read the truth in a book. It told him what to do and he had done what he was told. He had just murdered their daughter Matilda. How? A revolver pressed against her temple had splattered her brains all over the cabin walls.

Unwilling to witness his wife’s shock and grief, Greg threw himself into the crashing waves, becoming lost within seconds. Perhaps this was his only appeasement.

Not long after, the weather finally beat her. Tracy knew she had lost her mind, and then didn’t know who or what she was.

That was the beginning.

As for the end, she didn’t know when that day might come, and if it did, would she even recognize it….

***

The Vestibule churned over the swelling ocean. Salty foam broke at its bow as the steamer fought back and ploughed towards its unknown destination. Overcast and grey, the clouds above filled the sky, never relenting in spitting rain. The chill captured in the wind ran straight from Antarctica itself.

Wrapped in a blanket while the tears on her cheeks vanished in the spray, she lost her thoughts towards the horizon where the water and clouds merged into one. Their unnamed destination was somewhere out there and it seemed to her to be so far away, unreachable, as if it did not exist except inside her mind.

She understood that her current emotional state was shaky and weak. Her thoughts had been disjointed these last days or weeks - exactly how long she could not remember.

To compensate, she tried to recall pleasant memories and found that she had lost all that she might once have known. A loss which served only to catapult her into deeper depression.

No birds in the sky, no fish in the sea, and the colour of the water always a decisive grey, textured like spoilt meat. What survived in this place? Herself, obviously, and the crew, but what the crew were was not exactly what she would call “living”.

Despite her misgivings, the fresh air did somewhat relieve her nausea. In the last few hours, the swelling had grown worse, and she wasn’t sure why. So, she had slipped outside, hoping to escape her sickness. With the fresh air came the cold and wet which, in minutes, became a worse misery. Yet again, there was no simple solution.

In the end, she returned to her cabin, found her daughter wrapped in blankets as she had left her. The little girl’s smile was faint and grey. Her face pasty and dry like cardboard.

“Where are we?” her daughter asked somberly.

“Safe,” she answered. A mother’s response, spoken while she ran her fingers gently through the young girl’s auburn hair. Ever since the accident, the strands had tangled in knots and stayed that way. Neither mother nor daughter had been able to straighten them again, even with persistence and their only comb.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Daddy’s gone away for a while.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“Soon,” she whispered. “We’ll be with him soon.”

One day, she’d have to tell her daughter the truth, but to do so, she would first have to be honest with herself.

Running out of time, she didn’t know if that day would ever come.

***

During the passing weeks, her daughter had become infected with a lasting illness that was more than just a cold or flu. Confined to her bunk and this cabin, her little girl had remained here since their rescue. All fates considered, it had been a miracle that they had been discovered at all. Floating alone, thousands of kilometers off the east coast of Australia, fighting to stay alive in a cold, frigid and tumultuous ocean. What had begun as a luxury yachting cruise from Sydney to the tropical Pacific atolls had ended in nightmare. She wasn’t sure that her torment would ever end.

Always, they were hungry. Always, the food was unpalatable, its taste nothing more than wet cardboard or soggy paper. Yet, they must eat, especially her little girl, whose health was not improving. As a mother, she instinctively knew that she must again seek medical help. Unfortunately, she didn’t trust any of the crew, so again, she was forced to take on the role of examining doctor herself. The cause was easy: they needed to eat proper food and to find proper food, she would have to overcome her loathing towards venturing beyond their cabin. She would once more have to explore the interior of the Vestibule in hope of discovering the elusive kitchens.

Like a memory that was a dream turned inside out, she recalled their third day when the mother first wandered into the lower levels on a similar quest. In no time at all, she became hopelessly lost in the labyrinthine turns and dead ends that made no sense. There had been no doors or portals down there either, only stairs and corridors that echoed endlessly. As she foolishly descended to each successive level, they progressively became darker and colder than the one above, and the half-heard noises muffled through the walls became harder to disbelieve. A part of her knew that if she descended too far, she might actually hear what they were saying, and what they had to say would not be pleasant.

The one location on this ship that she could easily find at any time was the bridge.

From all points on the decks, it could be seen, high and lofty like a lighthouse upon a cliff, a beacon of rationality. At night, when the ocean was pitch-black and restless, it seemed that the bridge and her cabin held the only light in the entire world, that everyone elsewhere on this ship did not require electricity. After this realization, she ceased to venture out at night.

It was the middle of the day now, not that the sun was ever seen. Climbing the metal stairs, drenched by the incessant salty spray and convinced that she was always wet, the mother stumbled inside the bridge. She sensed the pronounced effects of the swelling now that she was up high, looking down on the Vestibule as if it were a map. The nausea returned, but if she threw up again, her subconscious reminded her that she would probably drown by doing so.

At the wheel stood the Captain, positioned in the only place she had ever seen him. He was staring forward, towards the vanishing point that was a never-ending merger of a violent ocean and a tumultuous sky. He turned when she sealed the porthole behind her, and nodded delicately to acknowledge her presence. Wrapped in a dark grey coat, his feet and hands were covered in their entirety by leather boots and gloves. The woolen scarf about his neck was wound tight, and that large pirate hat on his head didn’t really seem all that odd, despite

“Ma’am,” he nodded ever so slightly. His voice was lyrical, even familiar, and disturbingly feminine. He was her height exactly, so she didn’t need to chink her neck to look up at him, as she had to do when conversing with any of the strange crew.

“Captain,” she shivered then dripped. Now that she had joined him on the bridge, words were lost to her. He said nothing in response. He would wait indefinitely until she had a question to ask of him.

Concluding that she had not come here to talk, the Captain returned to the wheel. Feeling awkward, she glanced at the charts pinned to the back wall, hoping to discover a topic of conversation. She quickly found one, when she was surprised that the charts displayed no continents or even islands, as if the sea was all there ever was and ever could be. “What’s our destination?” she asked, knowing that she had asked before, only she could never fully remember his previous answers, and that she would forget again what he was about to tell her now. Still, he never seemed to mind her repetition.

“Carcosa,” his words were soft.

Whimsically, she said, “I’ve heard of that place, but just can’t seem to remember where?” She searched for it on the map and failed to find it. “Will I find what I’m looking for there?”

The Captain nodded slowly. “If you can create happiness, Carcosa is the one place that I know of that can manifest it in you.”

“And if I can’t?”

“That is the normal state of affairs, for most that arrive there. That is how it will be.”

“So, then, why is that our destination?”

He did not answer. A part of her knew she didn’t want to hear the answer, anyway. It was as if the Captain understood her very mind, had probed the very insanity festering inside, and knew what must not be said to keep the insanity locked inside.

“Is it far? I can’t see it anywhere.” She pointed to the blank charts.

The Captain appeared unconcerned and shook his head. “Not far.” His reflective goggles turned to the swelling seas while a gloved hand pointed toward the horizon. “I’ve seen the signs.”

She followed his finger and saw nothing out of the unusual. “What signs?”

Doing what she was told, she spied nothing out of the ordinary, or what passed as ordinary in this place. Then the sign appeared, as if the distance to the horizon had suddenly shrunk, as if the circumference of the earth had diminished to almost nothing. A moment later, the horror of what she witnessed overcame her, and she understood that it was neither of these things. Rather, it was a wall of water, a tidal wave a hundred meters high, rolling straight for them.

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. There was nowhere to escape, for it grew from every horizon, roaring like the thunder that follows impressive lightning.

The Captain turned to her. She saw her fear reflected in his goggles. “There is no concern,” he spoke calmly. She expected his lips to move behind the scarf when he explained such things to her, but they never did. “This is the eighth tidal wave today. It will pass without effect.”

“Eighth?” He was so calm she almost believed him.

Almost.

What was she to do? The crest was advancing so rapidly it would be upon them in minutes. Not even enough time to run back to her daughter, to be with her at the end. Dumbfounded, she could only stand calmly by the Captain, tasting sea water in her mouth, ready to drown again.

But when the wall of water finally caught their vessel, she saw that it was wide, and they rode right over the top without incident. She compared it to the rising and falling of her daughter on a swing, and suddenly, an explanation for today’s peculiar nausea was revealed.

“See,” said the captain once the ocean settled again. “No danger.”

“No…?”

Even to herself, her voice sounded distant. Unreal.

She knew she should have been worried about the wave. But she just wasn’t, couldn’t afford to be, not while she was still pretending.

Still hungry, always hungry, her drive for food again overcame her distrust of the ship’s interior, and she ventured into the one place she dreaded more than any other. She told herself to trust her instincts and that her nose would smell the food, lead her to the kitchen and then all would be right in the world again. They both needed to eat. If they did not eat, then her daughter would never recover.

Progressing into the depths, the interior seemed to grow darker at every turn. Grey walls, fashioned from old timber supported by heavy iron struts, vanished into the shadows. The swell seemed more pronounced without portholes to watch the ocean, and the taste and wetness of sea water in her hair and clothes would not leave her. The corridors carried dampness. It was no better than standing on the deck, and she wondered if the Vestibule were not rotting from the inside out.

Again, despite the whispering voices in the walls and the distant sounds of portals opening and closing, she failed to find any doors apart from the one that had led her down here.

Vestibule…. The thought occurred that this was a strange name and that maybe it held meaning. A clue perhaps which might reveal her purpose in her being in this place, this nightmare. All this time, she had been thinking “vestibule” was a French word, and it probably was, but it was also commonly used in English. “Vestibule” meant an entrance hall, a reception area, somewhere to wait. Were they waiting to get somewhere? Was the Captain waiting for something to happen? Did a decision need to be made first? But to get where they wanted to go, well, they’d have to first step outside of the “vestibule” to get there. She wondered how to do that.

She remembered bobbing in the ocean, crests threatening to crash down upon her time and time again, while the reciprocal troughs promised to drag her into the depths at any moment. The nightmare never seemed to end. The sea spray kept her cold and filled her mouth with the salty water taste that lingered with her today. Her only hope was rescue…. For a moment, she was back, really in the ocean, really drowning.

For a moment, she scared herself half to death.

“Ma’am?”

A steward had found her, dressed in his fine, three-piece suit cut entirely from paper. His face was hidden behind one of the paper masquerade masks that all the crew insisted upon wearing at all times. He was stuffing something into his sleeve, and she noticed it was more paper, crunching into tiny balls. Memories came back to her, of a scarecrow on her parent’s farm in Adelaide, an effigy fashioned from her old clothes, filled with yellow straw.

“Hello,” she stuttered, surprised that the servant managed to sneak up on her unannounced, even unheard. “I’m looking for the kitchens. I’m lost.”

“I’m sure you are.” Like the Captain, his answer was matter-the-fact and useless.

Annoyed that he had not properly answered her, she straightened her back and raised her pitch. “Well, then, would you be able to show me where they are?”

He said nothing. Did nothing. The silence grew more uncomfortable as each second passed, but only for her.

“Are you going to answer me?”

As if snapping out of a hypnotic trance, the crewmember’s head flicked towards her, the motion reminiscent

of a mechanical doll controlled by external powers. “Sorry, Ma’am, I cannot. It is not possible to reach the lower decks from the upper decks.”

“What do you mean? I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, without modifying his pitch or tone. “But I can arrange to have food brought to your cabin, if you like.”

She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or angered further. In the end, her daughter’s wellbeing had to be her first priority. She could never take any course of action that would harm her daughter. Besides, picking a fight just to win a point didn’t seem worthwhile, not if there was any chance they could eat again. “Yes, for me and my daughter, both. And please be hasty about it; my daughter is not at all well.”

“Certainly, Ma’am.” He gave a curt bow, spun on his toes and vanished down a corridor as if he were gliding on wheels.

***

The yacht was lost and so was her family. Tracy cried, giving to the ocean more water than it would ever need or even notice. Moments before, the Daintree splintered and crumbled, she had dared to peer inside the cabin. Tracy was sure she had, for the image of the blood and skull fragments splattered on the wall was too powerful a nightmare to easily forget, burning into her mind and tearing apart her soul. Her only child…. For the life of her, Tracy could not recall why her husband chose to murder their only creation together.

Much later, while the crashing waves and the storm’s unrelenting downpour threatened to drown her again at any moment, she heard a ship, its foghorn reverberating through the sleeting rain. They might all still be rescued, she hoped. They might all become a family again. All she had to do was believe.

Anything was better than believing she’d lost everything and that the only path lying ahead was a lonely death at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

So, she clung to Greg’s book, his sole purchase on their last port stop at Rarotonga. It was the King in Yellow, with its waterlogged pages and disintegrating cover. What did it say about that place on the shores of the Lake of Hali? What did that book mention about hope and the futility of it all? What did it say about distant, fabled Carcosa, where one could lose one’s mind and, in doing so, perhaps rediscover happiness.

She didn’t know, but she knew her husband had discovered the truth. She recalled that it said something about them all being together again, perhaps.

So, she kept reading.

***

Somehow, she found her way back from the endless corridors and up onto the deck, again. Here, her nausea lessened and so, she took a moment to study the waves, all the time ensuring that she didn’t drown from vomiting. The massive surges of water were like big angry slugs shaken inside a bowl, fighting each other to crawl to the top of the chaotic collection of their own kind. The ocean was rising higher and higher by the minute. The spray was hard on her face, tasted again in her mouth, and stung at her eyes. She fought against the salt water sloshing inside her stomach, expecting at any moment that the Vestibule would be overrun with breakwaters.

On the distant deck, she spied two of the masked, paper-wrapped crew, struggling to tie down several loose crates, wooden boxes large enough to hide elephants. She had failed to notice these crates before and wondered why, as if she perhaps had just made them up and placed them into this picture.

As if sensing her awareness, the two men stopped dead in midpoint of their frantic work then pointed together back towards the ocean. Theirs was not a command, but she had the sense that if she did not look, she would miss an important aspect in the deeper symbolism of this exotic ship, where she was nothing more than one of the lost.

Heeding their advice and returning to the rails, she gazed out into the churning waters and spotted what she thought must be a human head. Then she noticed arms attached to that head, pushing through the waves. It was a young woman without garb, swimming in the frigid waters. Next to her was a man then another figure. Soon, she became aware of dozens of humans, naked and cold, powering through the water. The heavy waves kept taking them down, pounding them with their foamy swells, but they kept rising up, kept swimming. They had hope when really, they had none. They believed in the impossible.

As the next wave subsided, the new vision presented before her forced her to draw breath. Not a dozen, not even hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of pale, naked humans were swimming these seas. None screamed, none called for help, not even in this cold water, where they should have all died from hypothermia. Uncaring, the Vestibule ploughed right through them, crushing swimmers who were too slow to get out of the way, or too preoccupied to care. Yet none of this shocked her. She knew their fate was hopeless, and yet, they blindly continued to pretend otherwise.

But what did tear at her soul was the fact that each and every man, woman and child was swimming in the same direction, swimming in her direction, towards Carcosa. Did they, too, believe salvation might find them in such a distant and exotic land? Was she perhaps not one of those swimmers herself?

Unsure both of whom she was and what her eyes now witnessed, she fled to her cabin, sealing the portal behind her. Somehow, the darkness seemed inviting. She drew a breath, then another, and tried to forget.

“Mummy, are you okay?”

“I made you something,” spoke the child.

It took a moment to remember where she was, that there was a shape in the far corner, wrapped in blankets The only bulb overhead swung with the ocean roll, casting sharp shadows over the shape now must be her only daughter.

Fear returned to the mother. She looked at her daughter for moving lips, or perhaps for fidgeting, anything, something to indicate that her child was real.

“Something for me?”

“Yes…Mother.”

A chill stung at her heart. That was not her daughter’s voice. It wasn’t even human a human voice. Rather, it was something artificial like the voices that all the crew shared. For the briefest of moments, she was back in the ocean, lost in the storm, recalling what had really been left behind inside their crumbling yacht.

“That’s really nice. How sweet.”

She sat by the dark, speaking shape. An arm extended, wrapped in papery cloth so tightly that no skin showed. At the end of the appendage was a white-gloved hand holding forth folded paper. Tentatively, with more than a hint of trepidation, she withdrew this gift from the icy-cold grip. “I’m so lucky to have you,” her words forced themselves, spoken through whispers and trembles.

The paper unfolded easily into white cutouts of mother and daughter, hand-in-hand, foot-to-foot, unraveling in a chain. Like two mirrors that forever reflected occupants trapped between their panes, so, too, the paper continued to unfold. She almost cried at the thought of its symbolism, of being bound to her only child forever. That nothing would take her away again, that everything distant Carcosa promised her was here for her now.

She kept unfolding.

The paper stretched deeper, into her daughter’s arm and then on through into the sleeve. In moments, she had hundreds of the mother-daughter folds spilling out of her hands. And then, without warning, the arm vanished under the weight of paper and now, the very sheets themselves were unfolding, cut and shaped into the same pattern: mother-and-daughter, mother-and-daughter, mother-and-daughter….

She kept unfolding.

Paper lay everywhere. Soon, her undoing smothered the entire floor until the bunk itself was lost under a mass of folded pulp. The paper became wet and it was no longer pure white, for words were etched in the cuttings. She read some of the lines. It was a play, the characters speaking nonsense she could not read. The play’s characters’ were her daughter and herself, or that was how she interpreted the passages. Characters were discussing their loss, but they were unwilling to accept the truth. They focused their minds on discovering lost Carcosa on the shores of Lake Hali where Hastur lies. Carcosa was a mystical land - the words kept telling her

How long she unraveled she could not recall. To her, one moment, this had been her cabin. In another, it was a mass of pulpy, wet paper filling all the space that was possible to fill in such cramped quarters. A chain of the larger-then-smaller woman repeated endlessly, cut from the pages of a waterlogged book that she had so desperately clutched in her hands for so long, reading it for hope.

“Where are you?” she asked, pushing through the walls of paper. Its mass was too thick, so she had to tear at it, shred her way through like some Victorian explorer braving the thick jungles of Africa. “Where are you?” she cried wildly. She sobbed the same words again, sensing now her pathetic loss.

“Where are you?” she could only whisper.

Eventually, the weight of paper was pushed aside and the bunk re-emerged, only for her to discover that it was empty.

Empty except for a cut-out, masquerade mask. Like all the other masks worn on this ship, it was fashioned entirely from paper.

It was the mask that her daughter had worn.

It was all her daughter’s face had ever been.

***

Exhausted and terrified, red-eyed and wide-eyed, she ran across the decks, screaming inside, hoping for any kind of release.

While she sprinted across the deck, a wave of salty water gushed around her. Ahead, it grew large, collected the two crew and their huge boxes, tossing them into the water like dust flicked from an emptying dustpan.

As the ocean took the crew, they crumbled and folded, as if they, too, were made of paper and the spines of old, waterlogged books. Neither cried nor struggled to hold onto life. Both accepted their fate as readily as she accepted the sun or moon, or that her daughter and husband had once loved her. She was struck dumb as they promptly vanished then felt sick at the thought that death was so easy and so casual. She didn’t want to die like that. She’d do anything to ensure that never happened to her and her family.

A second wave, not as crushing as the first, managed to wipe the decks, drenching her further, filling her mouth with its putrid tastes. She clung to the railing, feeling its pull grow ever stronger, threatening to take her, too, or, failing that, drown her on these very decks, themselves. She held on. She knew that she was drowning. Very soon, it would all be over.

And then, at the last moment, the waters subsided and she was cold and wet and drenched on the decks as she had always been. Now, the Vestibule was rising out of the water, still floating, still powering ever onwards to hopeful Carcosa. She stared out. Beyond her immediate surroundings, it was impossible to see much beyond the rising waves and the grey spray of the mist. Of the horizon, nothing at all could be seen. The world was shrinking inwards, trapping the Vestibule inside what must seem to some to be an enormous glass bottle, forever shaken by an angry owner.

Darkness was settling, readying the world for the night.

She took to the stairs, climbing higher to where the only light shone, to the only place that might provide answers…or relief.

At the portal, she wrenched open the latch and threw herself inside. Everything was as before. The sole captain wrapped in his coat, scarf and flying goggles, diligent at the wheel, fighting the angry ocean. Lightning flashed outside and he lit up like a black-and-white photograph before he had time to notice his visitor.

She ran up to him, pulled him by his arm so he had to look upon her. “My daughter, someone has taken my daughter.”

The expressionless face, always concealed, gave nothing away concerning any emotions that it might feel. “Daughter?” he asked in that strangely familiar voice, “you have a daughter?”

“Of course I have a daughter.”

The Captain shrugged. “Oh? Well, that is strange, because I was well-informed that your daughter had been dismantled.”

“What?” Her voice became hysterical. She needed answers. She needed them fast; otherwise, she knew she would really lose her mind, or find it. “I want to know what you and your crew did with my daughter.”

Another shrug. “We did nothing.”

“Then who did?”

“Oh, I thought that would have been obvious too.”

She tried to speak, but his words were just confusing her. She wanted to be angry, wanted someone else to take the blame for her hopeless predicament. She wanted the Captain to take control, to bring her back and restore everything that she had lost these last weeks. “Who dismantled her?” she finally demanded, even though a part of her already knew, a part of her that knew a lot of things that the rest of her mind pretended not to.

When the Captain finally answered her, all he said was, “You did.”

“I did?”

Her mind flashed to that moment, the unraveling of the mother-and-daughter paper chain. Only now did she see what she had done. Her daughter had been made of paper, always had been. From the beginning, her only child had been nothing more than the mother-and-daughter chain. Her heart turned cold at the very thought of what she had created.

“I pulled her apart, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but you made her, first. Don’t ever forget that.”

More lightning as deep shadows threw themselves onto the wall of charts behind them.

“We just assumed that you no longer required her. But don’t concern yourself. My crew are clearing the mess away as we speak.” Again, that voice, it was almost female. And he was her height exactly, even the same build.

“You mean, she’s gone?”

“Yes. You no longer need her, now that we are nearly there.”

Her angered flared, built upon an ever-foreboding thought that in reality, all was lost, and all that she had hung onto was nothing more than fantasy. She didn’t want to think that, didn’t want to remember.

“Who are you?”

Once more, the face was as silent as stone, the goggles reflecting her own eyes. Or were they? She looked again and saw that they were not reflections, rather, real eyes behind the mask, so similar to her own. “Who are you?” she asked again.

“I thought you already knew.”

Her hand flashed to her open mouth, because suddenly, she did know.

How easy it was for the human mind to deceive, especially to deceive oneself. So, she unraveled the scarf, pulled away the World War One flying goggles and drew from his head the pirate hat. He was her height, of the same build - these should have been clue enough. The familiar voice, like the familiar human face that looked back at her now, she was looking at herself.

Who was the only living person in this entire ocean who was willing to do anything to find fabled Carcosa?

Only her.

***

Tracy Wright came up from the ocean for what was probably the hundredth time. It could have been her thousandth for all she cared, or remembered. Down there, in those moments trapped in the murky, dark waters it was calm, it was just water. Down there, she couldn’t breathe either. Up here on the surface were the swelling waves, the eerie lightning and angry thunder. They would eventually claim her and send her back down again. That final moment now could be no more than hours away at most. Probably sooner, considering how exhausted her muscles had become treading water.

The wreckage of the Daintree had long dispersed. Her daughter with her splattered brains was somewhere down there, many miles under the angry sea. Her husband might still be alive, but she doubted it. He was never as strong a swimmer as she.

All she had left was his book, that dreadful King in Yellow. She’d held onto it this long, so she might as well keep reading until the very bitter end. Only that book offered any semblance of hope, no matter how futile that hope had ever been.

She laughed at the irony. Her wish would finally come true. All she had to do now was to decide how to make it so. Down there, at the ocean’s end where the dead are never found, she could still be reunited with her husband and daughter and it would be a silent, lifeless reunion.

Instead, if she wanted the madness, if she wanted to escape oblivion, to become lost in her own torment in a world where she would always believe her family could be made whole once again, all she had to do was keep reading.

It was the impossible dream. Oblivion with nothing, or madness with false hope?

The choice was so easy.

So, she kept reading and asked again of her captain to take her to the distant shores of Lake Hali, where fabled Carcosa lay.

The Disciple

by David Barr Kirtley

Professor Carlton Brose was evil, and I adored him as only a freshman can. I spent the first miserable winter at college watching him, studying the way he darkly arched his eyebrow when he made a point, or how he could flick a smoking cigarette away into a murky puddle, forgotten the instant it left his touch. I mimicked these small things privately, mercilessly. I don't know why, because it wasn't the small things that drew me in at all. It was the big things, the stories people told as far away as dear old Carolina.

You heard the name Brose if you ran with any cults, and I ran with a couple. Society rejected us and so we rejected them. The more things you give up, the less there are to bind your will. There's power in that, we were sure of it, but it was damned elusive.

I knew the owner of an occult bookstore in Raleigh. He claimed he had actually met Brose. "These other guys you hang with," he said, "them I'm not so sure about. But this guy Brose, he's the real deal."

I studied the man carefully. "You believe that?"

He'd been shelving books, but then he dropped them into a pile on the floor and turned to me with a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

"I've seen it, man," he said, "personally seen it. Flies buzz up out of the rot and swirl in formation around him. He can make your eyes bleed just from looking at him. The guy's tapped into something huge."

I was skeptical. "And he teaches a class?"

"Not just a class, all right? It's this special program, only a dozen or so are admitted, and they get power. I've seen that too. Then they go away. Every spring."

"Go where?"

He shook his head. "Damned if I know. Places not of this world, that's what some people say."

"I don't buy it," I said. "If he's got so much going for him, why's he working a job at all? And what kind of school would let him teach it?"

He just shrugged. "I don't know about that. All I know is that Brose is for real. You can take my word on it."

"Then why aren't you in his class?"

He stared at me fixedly. "Brose wouldn't take me. He said I had no talent, no potential, said I was harmless and should go get a job. It hurt like hell, but that's another reason I know he's legit — what kind of fraud would turn people away like that?"

I had no answer for him, and I'd known a lot of frauds.

I traveled to Arkham, to Miskatonic University where Brose taught. I sought out his office in the deepest corner of the Anthropology building. I sat on a bench there, pretending to read, waiting for him to emerge.

The door opened and I caught just a glimpse of his shadowed chamber, of the brooding, crowded shapes that lurked in there. Then the door was closed again and Brose was walking past me down the hall. I glanced up just as he went by, as if it were an accident, as if it was the motion of his dark sleeve that had caught my eye.

Brose stared down at me with eyes the color of a tombstone. The shadows seemed to lengthen and darken as he passed, and he smiled knowingly. I shuddered, because he had seen me and because I knew just from the look that it was all true. I had found the real thing. Brose practically radiated power. On that day my initial skepticism transformed itself into the most helpless adoration. I enrolled myself in the school.

Winter came. The inside of his office was like some terrible jungle. Loose, shadowed papers crammed the bookshelves, drooping downwards like wild leaves. A filth-choked, and apparently unused, fish tank cast a dim green light. Through the window I saw the lonely stretch of gray-green Massachusetts woods that was called the Arboretum.

Brose leaned back into those shadows of his own making and eyed me severely. "Why do you want to join the program?"

"To study with you," I responded automatically.

"Why should I accept you?"

"I'll do anything," I said. "No hesitation. No regret."

His lips curled into that now familiar smile. "But what have you got already? What are you bringing to the program?"

I knew he meant power. I sighed. "Nothing. Not yet, that is. But you can —"

He shook his head. "If nothing's what you have, then nothing's what you get from me. Go back to literature. It's really —"

"No!" I broke in. I halted then. Breathing was a sudden strain. "I don't have much, that's true. I've lost things in my life." I paused. "So many things, but I've gained something, too. I've gained this rotting emptiness inside me and I can use it. I swear I can use it. All the loss, it can't all have been for nothing." I added softly, "I won't let it be."

Brose watched me from the darkness for a length of time that seemed to stretch into endlessness. Finally he nodded. "All right," he said. "You'll do. I'll go get the form."

I let out a long sigh of relief and leaned back in my chair as Brose stepped from the room. Something on the bookshelf caught my eye, not because it glinted or was bright, but because it was more in darkness and more in shadows than it should have been. I rose from my seat and walked gingerly across the floorboards toward it.

It was a black statuette about a foot tall, carved from some sort of soapy ebony. It was a thing resembling a man, but with eyes that were utterly empty, and a beard of tentacles. The farther down it my eyes traced, the more that noble visage merged into the grotesque, until it was nothing but tentacles. They seemed to squirm and writhe and cling to the base of the statue.

I went to pick it up, to study it closer, but I gasped when I lifted it. The thing was unearthly heavy — heavier than anything that size could possibly be, heavier than I could hold in one hand. It tore itself from my fingers and lunged for the floor, where it thudded and lay still.

"Don't touch that," Brose ordered and I stiffened. He closed his office door behind him and placed a shoebox on his desk. He picked up the statue, with two hands, and returned it to its resting place.

"I'm sorry," I began. "I —"

My voice died in my throat as Brose lifted a small white mouse from the shoebox, dangling it from his fingers by the tail. It squirmed and flailed and sniffed.

"What's that?" I said.

"This," said Brose, indicating the mouse, "is the form. The application form." He paced over to that gruesomely overgrown fish tank and removed the cover.

He held the mouse out to me. "Fill out your application."

I took the mouse by its tail and held it over the foul water. The snowy little white thing tried playfully to nibble my finger.

Brose eyed me intently. It was a test. Of what? Of my willingness? Of my resolve? I let the mouse go. It fell into the water and began to thrash and scream, clawing at the sides of the tank and at all the sticky filth that enveloped it. Water soaked its fur and garbled its cries. Then it died and floated there, spinning slowly, four pink legs hanging down, and its tail trailed behind it.

"Your application's been accepted," Brose said. "Congratulations."

The members of the special program sat in a circle, with Brose at the center, and he taught us.

"There's only one thing you must learn, and that is to bind yourself to something more powerful — to attach yourself to its will. There'll be other lessons, other abilities, other distractions. The binding is all that matters. Never lose sight of that."

There were thirteen students in the class. Most were male, all had sallow flesh and haunted eyes and skinny limbs. Many were involved with cults in and around Boston. They were all from New England, at least. Everyone but me.

Brose crucified a cat. The animal howled and squirmed around on its back, pounding its tail against the desk, but the nails driven through its outstretched limbs held it firm. Blood flowed from its paws, and Brose washed it and washed it until there was no more blood.

He turned to me. "Make it bleed again."

I was filled with an aching desire to prove myself. I wanted him to think I was special — that I was his most talented, most dedicated, most favored student. I would have done anything, endured anything, to make him adore me, the way I adored him.

The cat's eyes were narrow slits, and where the eyeballs met the fur its flesh was pinkish and gummy. The iron nails and the blood were both dark and seemed to run together. The cat had soft little pads on its feet. It was innocent and helpless but I would have made it bleed. For him.

"I don't know how," I whispered desperately.

Brose paced back and forth in front of us all. "To control the body you must feel the mind. Pain is conspicuous. It'll point the way, but don't depend on it. There are greater things than cats you must connect to, greater things than you, and they have never felt pain."

Brose turned to another student, a heavier guy with dark, scornful eyes, and pointed at the cat. "Make it bleed again."

The student kept his eyes on Brose, never even glancing at the cat. The animal began to bubble and ooze and spray little spurts of thick blood from its punctured body.

"Good," Brose nodded. "Very good."

At the end of class we were ordered to pack up our things and move into a sprawling colonial house on the edges of the campus. We would have no more contact with the other students.

"Tell no one what you have learned," Brose admonished us. "The penalty will be expulsion from the program, and worse things."

I met my new roommate later that night. He had already unpacked when I arrived. Our room was small, with hardwood floors and peeling white paint and touches of Gothic architecture around the windows and the molding. I stared at his familiar, slightly heavy face. My bags fell from my hands and dropped heavily on the floor. "You're —"

"Adrian," he said quickly, smugly.

I finished lamely, "— the one who can make the cat bleed."

He leaned toward me, resting his arms across the back of his chair. "I can do a lot of things. I'm the best in the class, and Brose knows it."

"We'll see," I said. I was jolted by the way he seemed to have figured me out. I couldn't believe it was an accident, the way his words seemed calculated to tear at my greatest longing: to be favored, to be adored.

I added, "It was only a cat."

He stiffened. "You think I should've used something bigger?"

Before I could answer I felt a thick wetness on my upper lip, running down my face. I glanced at Adrian, then moved quickly to the mirror. Rivers of blood poured from my nose, breaking into thin tributaries that covered my mouth and chin, streaking down my neck toward my collar.

I gasped and seized a nearby towel, mopping at my face, leaning my head back and pressing the towel against my nose.

"Don't lean back," Adrian ordered. "Keep pressure on your nose. The bleeding will stop." I bent forward and pulled the towel away from my eyes, watching Adrian guardedly with one eye. He smiled.

What a horrible desire, this desire to be favored. So much worse than any other desire — whether for money or fame or pleasure. Those things could be shared with others. To be favored requires that others are disfavored, cast out. A horrible desire, but mine nonetheless.

Each day it became clearer that I had failed in my ambition. Adrian was the best in the class and he knew it, and so did Brose, and so did I. I also knew that I was the worst. I trailed behind my classmates in absorbing those increasingly macabre lessons we received.

If I could not be favored by Brose, I would have preferred to be disfavored, to be his enemy. In reality he was indifferent to me. I was not important enough even for him to despise.

As I walked along the shaded pathways of the college grounds I pondered the strange role that Brose played here. It was clear that the other students, faculty, even the administrators, suspected the dark nature of our special program. They gave us plenty of room when we passed on the sidewalk, and shot us looks full of fear and hostility. They disapproved, but made no effort to stop us. Were they simply afraid of Brose? I couldn't decide.

Brose himself became more and more agitated as the semester wore on, his lectures increasingly frenzied and mad. He raved of nothing but the binding.

"You must learn faster!" He pounded on his desk. "The hour of the binding is coming. It has all led up to this." He took a great, heaving, somber breath. "You must bind yourselves to the impossible mind of the Traveler on the Oceans of Night, the Stepper Across the Stars. If you ingratiate yourselves you will earn a place as His favored disciples and journey with Him forever to those places only He can make by His dreaming."

I glanced at Adrian, but he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. So now we knew our fate. We would gain the ultimate power we sought by pledging ourselves to this ultimate being.

With two hands, Brose lifted the black statuette out of his briefcase and placed it on his desk. It was denser and darker than any earthly thing could ever be — the tentacled man-thing with its empty eyes. I noticed an aspect of the carving I had not seen before. Among its many limbs, tiny human figures clung lovingly. Such an abrupt transition of scale almost made me seasick. If those men were the size of normal men then that creature must tower to unimaginable heights. The Traveler on Oceans of Night. The Stepper Across the Stars. It was He.

That week I dreamed murky dreams of upside-down cities built from granite and slime. One night I was awakened by the fevered whimpering of Adrian. He scrabbled wildly across the floor, as if something horrid hung from the ceiling overhead.

"What is it?" I asked him, "What's wrong?"

"Oh God," he wailed. His usual swagger had disintegrated. "Oh, can't you feel it? Are you blind and deaf and numb to everything? His boundlessness reaches across the void to poison our dreams."

"What?" I pressed.

Then I saw his eyes and knew that he wasn't staring at the ceiling at all, but at the sky and the stars and the dark emptiness beyond.

"The Traveler on Oceans of Night," Adrian whispered. "He's coming." .

I had failed to win the adoration of Brose, but who was Brose, compared to all this? Compared to this great Traveler? Brose was nothing. He was a small man who lived a small life, pointing others along an exalted path that he himself dared not follow. I had found an object far more worthy of my attention. To be a disciple to such imaginable power, to be favored by the Traveler! I trembled at the thought.

I wouldn't fail this time.

The night of the binding arrived. The Traveler on Oceans of Night was near. His power and his presence was palpable, casting long shadows of blackened ether over the landscape. He loomed imposingly, like a tsunami just offshore. I looked out into the sea of forests, and the trees themselves seemed to quake and tremble, the air charged with magic. I shivered.

We donned black robes and Brose led us deep into the Arboretum, down well-worn trails, among piles of sharp, mossy stones, beneath the thin thorn branches of withered old trees. Brose held that dark stone idol before him and we didn't need light to see, because the statue seemed to suck the shadows out of the ground and pull them into itself.

In the deepest corner of the woods, within a grotto of carved gray stone, sprawled a huge and ancient shrine interwoven with the roots of great, rotting trees. Brose set his statue on the ground and- we settled among the gnarled roots to wait.

I don't know how many hours we waited out there on the cold, unforgiving stones. A breeze began to twist and turn, picking up damp leaves and flinging them about, raising them into great columns in the sky, faster and louder every second until the wind seemed to shriek in pain from the forces tearing at it.

There was a sudden, maddening sense of dislocation, like a dream and a nightmare spun together into a crazy cacophony of unbearable sensation. The shadows leapt from beneath the trees to block out the starlight and wrap themselves around my throat and sink behind my eyes.

The Traveler on Oceans of Night was there, his form stretching upwards to infinity. There was no limit to his dimensions and all of him was far away and yet pressing close around us all at once. He was so enormous, so horrible, so magnificent, that our bodies collapsed into a formless mass and we wept helplessly and without shame to behold Him.

Through that confused jumble of sensation and reality came the voice of Brose screaming. "Bind yourself! Do it now!"

Adrian was first. He rose off the ground, arms outstretched, robe whipping wildly about him. He had closed his eyes and his face was turned to the sky. His expression was one of wild religious ecstasy. One by one my classmates lifted from the ground until they circled in rings around that great being, weaving complex patterns — like flies, I realized suddenly — like flies rising out of the rot to circle around Professor Carlton Brose.

I saw Brose, and on his face was something I had grown to know too well. Indifference. It was all horribly wrong. I imagined I saw that same expression mirrored in the face of the creature before me, on that incomprehensible otherworldly countenance.

I would not bind to Him. I crawled and crawled until somehow I found a rock to hide behind and then I screamed incoherently to my whirling classmates. "We're the flies!" I screamed until my throat was torn and useless. "Oh God, we're like the flies."

Then the Traveler made one ponderous motion with a million of His slimy tentacles and He stepped away towards another star, another dimension, another world He had dreamed.

The night was silent and empty, except for me, and Carlton Brose, huddled against the ground. When he saw me, he said, "You failed the binding."

I seized him by the throat and forced his head down against the stone. "You lied," I growled. "You said you'd make us His disciples."

Brose watched me uneasily for a long time. Finally, he whispered, "The Traveler on Oceans of Night is a great vessel. I would put you aboard."

"As what?" I challenged. "A rat in the hold?"

He closed his eyes and was silent for a long time.

I said, "Or rather, a flea on a rat."

I relaxed my grip for a moment, and in that moment I imagined I saw the dozen bodies of my classmates, sucked away into the bitter black void between worlds, grouped close, their frozen forms twirling slowly, stiffly, in an endless dance among the stars. I shuddered.

Suddenly, Brose seized my temples with his muddy fingers and forced me to look down into his cold, tombstone eyes. Then my own eyes began to burst and ooze, and red blood filled my sight. I screamed out in the night and knew he meant to kill me.

Flailing on the ground, my fingers fell on the dark statuette. I lifted the thing above my shoulders and brought it down with two angry arms. The unearthly weight of it fell into Brose's forehead and it sank and sank deeper, without resistance, until it reached the ground. I pulled it away. There "was a black, gaping hole where the face of Professor Carlton Brose had been.

The empty eyes of the Traveler could see things that humans never dreamt of, but He was blind to the pain of this sad world.

You were the best, Adrian. You were better than me, better at a lie. Are you proud?

A student came to see me today, to beg admission to my special program. He pushed a mouse down into the fish tank and held it in his fist until it drowned.

"Congratulations," I said. 'You have been accepted."

He smiled.

So much cruelty. I could teach the class without it, but I keep the tradition, as I'm sure Brose did, to ease my conscience. It reassures me that my students are evil, that they deserve their fate.

The college hates the special program, but they know it's necessary, and after Brose died I was the only one who could replace him. Dangerous people are lurking around New England — ones who've latched onto darkness, or might — and they need to be taken care of. The harmless ones I turn away.

I've learned the truth Brose knew: it's best to be a big fish in a small pond. Fish can't live outside the pond, and it's not so bad being a fish. Every Spring, until I send them off to die, a new class studies with me. They are enthralled by my meager powers, they long for my briefest attention.

They adore me.

A Colder War

by Charles Stross

Analyst

Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

The file he is reading frightens him.

Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly colored streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.

He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.

There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ‘61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

Project Koschei.

Red Square Redux

Warning

The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

You have sixty seconds to comply.

Video clip

Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little whispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of five four-engined bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.

Voice-over

Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:

Video clip

Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armour and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air grey with deisel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56’s, their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, formations of MiG-17 fighters.

Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing low-slung trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive-drab tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of jeep-like vehicles on each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention in their backs.

There are big five-pointed stars painted in silver on each tarpaulin, like outlines of stars. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver circle; a unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for Red Army units. There’s lettering around the circles, in a strangely stylised script.

Voice-over

These are live servitors under transient control. The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and used for structural engineering assignments relating to nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard Engineering Brigade operates four units. Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT we can then extrapolate a total task strength of two hundred and eighty eight servitors, if this unit is unexceptional.

Video clip

Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow skies.

Voice-over

This conclusion is questionable. For example, in 1964 a total of two hundred and forty Bear bomber passes were made over the reviewing stand in front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that time technical reconnaisance assets verified that the Soviet air force has hard stand parking for only one hundred and sixty of these aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs of the extent of the Tupolev bureau’s works indicate that total production to that date was between sixty and one hundred and eighty bombers.

Further analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was over-estimated by as much as three hundred percent.

We must therefore take anything that they show us in Red Square with a pinch of salt when preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these four servitors are all they’ve got. Then again, the actual battalion strength may be considerably higher.

Still photographic sequence

From very high altitude—possibly in orbit—an eagle’s eye view of a remote village in mountainous country. Small huts huddle together beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.

In the second photograph, something has rolled through the village leaving a trail of devastation. The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by an artillery bombardment: something roughly four metres wide has shaved the rocky plateau smooth, wearing it down as if with a terrible heat. A corner of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half sliced away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the track; no vultures descend to stab at the remains.

Voice-over

These images were taken very recently, on successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart. This village was the home of a noted Mujahedin leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads on the load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962 parade.

These indicators were present, denoting the presence of servitor units in use by Soviet forces in Afghanistan: the four metre wide gauge of the assimilation track. The total molecular breakdown of organic matter in the track. The speed of destruction—the event took less than five thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were visible, and the causative agent had already been uplifted by the time of the second orbital pass. This, despite the residents of the community being armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers, and AK-47’s. Lastly: there is no sign of the causative agent even deviating from its course, but the entire area is depopulated. Except for excarnated residue there is no sign of human habitation.

In the presence of such unique indicators, we have no alternative but to conclude that the Soviet Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode in the Khyber Pass. There are no grounds to believe that a NATO armoured division would have fared any better than these mujahedin without nuclear support...

Puzzle Palace

Roger isn’t a soldier. He’s not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with the CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the assassination business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out National Security assessments: that’s fine by Roger. Only now, five years later, he’s no longer able to roll along, casually disengaged, like a car in neutral bowling down a shallow incline towards his retirement, pension and a gold watch. He puts the file down on his desk and, with a shaking hand, pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer. He lights it and leans back for a moment to draw breath, force relaxation, staring at smoke rolling in the air beneath the merciless light until his hand stops shaking.

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. It’s one of a series of highly classified pieces of paper that he is summarizing for the eyes of the National Security Council and the President Elect—if his head of department and the DDCIA approve it—and here he is, having to calm his nerves with a cigarette before he turns the next page.

After a few minutes, Roger’s hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the eagle-headed ash tray and picks up the intelligence report again. It’s a summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of photographs. It’s barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just the bare skeleton, and rumours from a highly-placed spy. And their own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that particular field, the USAF fielded the silver-plated white elephants of the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-PLUTO, ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a single target, and nobody was certain it would be enough to do the job.

And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face: a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term. The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing what had really happened to the 501st Airborn Division on the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn’t know about, that didn’t show up on the maps issued by the geological survey departments of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931—an arrangement that even Hitler had stuck to. The plateau that had swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface expeditions than darkest Africa.

Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for him?

Roger’s spent the past five hours staring at this twenty page report, trying to think of a way of summarizing their drily quantifiable terror in words that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the unthinkable: but it’s proving difficult. The new man in the White House is straight-talking, demands straight answers. He’s pious enough not to believe in the supernatural, confident enough that just listening to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience if you can close your eyes and believe in morning in America. There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system—which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil . . .

He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It’ll be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of a white-elephant shuttle, when he realised just how hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter’s faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.

He stands up, nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks round at the walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette smouldering on the edge of his ash tray catches his attention: wisps of blue-grey smoke coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in a strange cuneiform text. He blinks and they’re gone, and the skin in the small of his back prickles as if someone has pissed on his grave.

“Shit.” Finally, a spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking as he stubs the cigarette out. Mustn’t let this get to me. He glances at the wall. It’s nineteen hundred hours; too late, too late. He should go home, Andy will be worrying herself sick.

In the end it’s all too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe behind his chair, turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then signs himself out of the reading room and goes through the usual exit search.

During the thirty mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.

Late Night in the White House

The colonel is febrile, jittering about the room with gung-ho enthusiasm. “That was a mighty fine report you pulled together, Jourgensen!” He paces over to the niche between the office filing cabinet and the wall, turns on the spot, paces back to the far side of his desk. “You understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few more guys like you running the company and we wouldn’t have this fuckup in Tehran.” He grins, contagiously. The colonel is a firestorm of enthusiasm, burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He has Roger on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger has to bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the colonel ‘sir’—he’s a civilian, not in the chain of command. “That’s why I’ve asked Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office, to work on my team as company liaison. And I’m pleased to say that he’s agreed.”

Roger can’t stop himself: “To work here, sir?” Here is in the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension hanging off the White House. Whoever the colonel is he’s got pull, in positively magical quantities. “What will I be doing, sir? You said, your team—”

“Relax a bit. Drink your coffee.” The colonel paces back behind his desk, sits down. Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug with the Marine Corps crest. “The president told me to organize a team,” says the colonel, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his coffee, “to handle contingencies. October surprises. Those asshole commies down in Nicaragua. ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball with an Evil Empire, Ozzie, and we can’t afford to blink’—those were his exact words. The Evil Empire uses dirty tricks. But nowadays we’re better than they are: buncha hicks, like some third-world dictatorship—Upper Volta with shoggoths. My job is to pin them down and cut them up. Don’t give them a chance to whack the shoe on the UN table, demand concessions. If they want to bluff I’ll call ’em on it. If they want to go toe-to-toe I’ll dance with ’em.” He’s up and pacing again. “The company used to do that, and do it okay, back in the fifties and sixties. But too many bleeding hearts—it makes me sick. If you guys went back to wet ops today you’d have journalists following you every time you went to the john in case it was newsworthy.

“Well, we aren’t going to do it that way this time. It’s a small team and the buck stops here.” The colonel pauses, then glances at the ceiling. “Well, maybe up there. But you get the picture. I need someone who knows the company, an insider who has clearance up the wazoo who can go in and get the dope before it goes through a fucking committee of ass-watching bureaucrats. I’m also getting someone from the Puzzle Palace, and some words to give me pull with Big Black.” He glances at Roger sharply, and Roger nods: he’s cleared for National Security Agency—Puzzle Palace—intelligence, and knows about Big Black, the National Reconnaisance Office, which is so secret that even its existence is still classified.

Roger is impressed by this colonel, despite his better judgement. Within the byzantine world of the US intelligence services, he is talking about building his very own pocket battleship and sailing it under the jolly roger with letters of marque and reprise signed by the president. But Roger still has some questions to ask, to scope out the limits of what Colonel North is capable of. “What about FEVER DREAM, sir?”

The colonel puts his coffee-cup down. “I own it,” he says, bluntly. “And NIGHTMARE. And PLUTO. Any means necessary he said, and I have an executive order with the ink still damp to prove it. Those projects aren’t part of the national command structure any more. Officially they’ve been stood down from active status and are being considered for inclusion in the next round of arms reduction talks. They’re not part of the deterrent ORBAT any more; we’re standardizing on just nuclear weapons. Unofficially, they’re part of my group, and I will use them as necessary to contain and reduce the Evil Empire’s warmaking abilities.”

Roger’s skin crawls with an echo of that childhood terror. “And the Dresden Agreement . . . ?”

“Don’t worry. Nothing short of them breaking it would lead me to do so.” The colonel grins, toothily. “Which is where you come in...”

The moonlit shores of Lake Vostok

The metal pier is dry and cold, the temperature hovering close to zero degrees Fahrenheit. It’s oppressively dark in the cavern under the ice, and Roger shivers inside his multiple layers of insulation, shifts from foot to foot to keep warm. He has to swallow to keep his ears clear and he feels slightly dizzy from the pressure in the artificial bubble of air, pumped under the icy ceiling to allow humans to exist, under the Ross Ice Shelf; they’ll all spend more than a day sitting in depressurization chambers on the way back up to the surface.

There is no sound from the waters lapping just below the edge of the pier. The floodlights vanish into the surface and keep going—the water in the sub-surface antarctic lake is incredibly clear—but are swallowed up rapidly, giving an impression of infinite, inky depths.

Roger is here as the colonel’s representative, to observe the arrival of the probe, receive the consignment they’re carrying, and report back that everything is running smoothly. The others try to ignore him, jittery at the presence of the man from DC. There’re a gaggle of engineers and artificers, flown out via McMurdo base to handle the midget sub’s operations. A nervous lieutenant supervises a squad of marines with complicated-looking weapons, half gun and half video camera, stationed at the corners of the raft. And there’s the usual platform crew, deep-sea rig maintenance types—but subdued and nervous looking. They’re afloat in a bubble of pressurized air wedged against the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet: below them stretch the still, supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.

They’re waiting for a rendezvous.

“Five hundred yards,” reports one of the techs. “Rising on ten.” His companion nods. They’re waiting for the men in the midget sub drilling quietly through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a long-drowned tomb. “Have ’em back on board in no time.” The sub has been away for nearly a day; it set out with enough battery juice for the journey, and enough air to keep the crew breathing for a long time if there’s a system failure, but they’ve learned the hard way that fail-safe systems aren’t. Not out here, at the edge of the human world.

Roger shuffles some more. “I was afraid the battery load on that cell you replaced would trip an undervoltage isolator and we’d be here ’til Hell freezes over,” the sub driver jokes to his neighbour.

Looking round, Roger sees one of the marines cross himself. “Have you heard anything from Gorman or Suslowicz?” he asks quietly.

The lieutenant checks his clipboard. “Not since departure, sir,” he says. “We don’t have comms with the sub while it’s submerged: too small for ELF, and we don’t want to alert anybody who might be, uh, listening.”

“Indeed.” The yellow hunchback shape of the midget submarine appears at the edge of the radiance shed by the floodlights. Surface waters undulate, oily, as the sub rises.

“Crew transfer vehicle sighted,” the driver mutters into his mike. He’s suddenly very busy adjusting trim settings, blowing bottled air into ballast tanks, discussing ullage levels and blade count with his number two. The crane crew are busy too, running their long boom out over the lake.

The sub’s hatch is visible now, bobbing along the top of the water: the lieutenant is suddenly active. “Jones! Civatti! Stake it out, left and centre!” The crane is already swinging the huge lifting hook over the sub, waiting to bring it aboard. “I want eyeballs on the portholes before you crack this thing!” It’s the tenth run—seventh manned—through the eye of the needle on the lake bed, the drowned structure so like an ancient temple, and Roger has a bad feeling about it. We can’t get away with this forever, he reasons. Sooner or later...

The sub comes out of the water like a gigantic yellow bath toy, a cyborg whale designed by a god with a sense of humour. It takes tense minutes to winch it in and manoeuvre it safely onto the platform. Marines take up position, shining torches in through two of the portholes that bulge myopically from the smooth curve of the sub’s nose. Up on top someone is talking into a handset plugged into the stubby conning tower; the hatch locking wheel begins to turn.

“Gorman, sir,” It’s the lieutenant. In the light of the sodium floods everything looks sallow and washed-out; the soldier’s face is the colour of damp cardboard, slack with relief.

Roger waits while the submariner—Gorman—clambers unsteadily down from the top deck. He’s a tall, emaciated-looking man, wearing a red thermal suit three sizes too big for him: salt-and-pepper stubble textures his jaw with sandpaper. Right now, he looks like a cholera victim; sallow skin, smell of acrid ketones as his body eats its own protein reserves, a more revolting miasma hovering over him. There’s a slim aluminium briefcase chained to his left wrist, a bracelet of bruises darkening the skin above it. Roger steps forward.

“Sir?” Gorman straightens up for a moment: almost a shadow of military attention. He’s unable to sustain it. “We made the pickup. Here’s the QA sample; the rest is down below. You have the unlocking code?” he asks wearily.

Jourgensen nods. “One. Five. Eight. One. Two. Two. Nine.”

Gorman slowly dials it into a combination lock on the briefcase, lets it fall open and unthreads the chain from his wrist. Floodlights glisten on polythene bags stuffed with white powder, five kilos of high-grade heroin from the hills of Afghanistan; there’s another quarter of a ton packed in boxes in the crew compartment. The lieutenant inspects it, closes the case and passes it to Jourgensen. “Delivery successful, sir.” From the ruins on the high plateau of the Taklamakan desert to American territory in Antarctica, by way of a detour through gates linking alien worlds: gates that nobody knows how to create or destroy except the Predecessors—and they aren’t talking.

“What’s it like through there?” Roger demands, shoulders tense. “What did you see?”

Up on top, Suslowicz is sitting in the sub’s hatch, half slumping against the crane’s attachment post. There’s obviously something very wrong with him. Gorman shakes his head and looks away: the wan light makes the razor-sharp creases on his face stand out, like the crackled and shattered surface of a Jovian moon. Crow’s feet. Wrinkles. Signs of age. Hair the colour of moonlight. “It took so long,” he says, almost complaining. Sinks to his knees. “All that time we’ve been gone...” He leans against the side of the sub, a pale shadow, aged beyond his years. “The sun was so bright. And our radiation detectors. Must have been a solar flare or something.” He doubles over and retches at the edge of the platform.

Roger looks at him for a long, thoughtful minute: Gorman is twenty-five and a fixer for Big Black, early history in the Green Berets. He was in rude good health two days ago, when he set off through the gate to make the pick-up. Roger glances at the lieutenant. “I’d better go and tell the colonel,” he says. A pause. “Get these two back to Recovery and see they’re looked after. I don’t expect we’ll be sending any more crews through Victor-Tango for a while.”

He turns and walks towards the lift shaft, hands clasped behind his back to keep them from shaking. Behind him, alien moonlight glimmers across the floor of Lake Vostok, three miles and untold light years from home.

General LeMay would be Proud

Warning

The following briefing film is classified SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE. If you do not have SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

You have sixty seconds to comply.

Video clip

Shot of huge bomber, rounded gun turrets sprouting like mushrooms from the decaying log of its fuselage, weirdly bulbous engine pods slung too far out towards each wingtip, four turbine tubes clumped around each atomic kernel.

Voice-over

“The Convair B-39 Peacemaker is the most formidable weapon in our Strategic Air Command’s arsenal for peace. Powered by eight nuclear-heated Pratt and Whitney NP-4051 turbojets, it circles endlessly above the Arctic ice cap, waiting for the call. This is Item One, the flight training and test bird: twelve other birds await criticality on the ground, for once launched a B-39 can only be landed at two airfields in Alaska that are equipped to handle them. This one’s been airborn for nine months so far, and shows no signs of age.”

Cut to:

A shark the size of a Boeing 727 falls away from the open bomb bay of the monster. Stubby delta wings slice through the air, propelled by a rocket-bright glare.

Voice-over

“A modified Navajo missile—test article for an XK-PLUTO payload—dives away from a carrier plane. Unlike the real thing, this one carries no hydrogen bombs, no direct-cycle fission ramjet to bring retalliatory destruction to the enemy. Travelling at Mach 3 the XK-PLUTO will overfly enemy territory, dropping megaton-range bombs until, its payload exhausted, it seeks out and circles a final target. Once over the target it will eject its reactor core and rain molten plutonium on the heads of the enemy. XK-PLUTO is a total weapon: every aspect of its design, from the shockwave it creates as it hurtles along at treetop height to the structure of its atomic reactor, is designed to inflict damage.”

Cut to:

Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: a holiday in hell.

Voice-over

“This is why we need such a weapon. This is what it deters. The abominations first raised by the Third Reich’s Organisation Todt, now removed to the Ukraine and deployed in the service of New Soviet Man as our enemy calls himself.”

Cut to:

A sinister grey concrete slab, the upper surface of a Mayan step pyramid built with East German cement. Barbed wire, guns. A drained canal slashes north from the base of the pyramid towards the Baltic coastline, relic of the installation process: this is where it came from. The slave barracks squat beside the pyramid like a horrible memorial to its black-uniformed builders.

Cut to:

The new resting place: a big concrete monolith surrounded by three concrete lined lakes and a canal. It sits in the midst of a Ukraine landscape, flat as a pancake, stretching out forever in all directions.

Voice-over

“This is Project Koschei. The kremlin’s key to the gates of hell...”

Technology taster

“We know they first came here during the precambrian age.”

Professor Gould is busy with his viewgraphs, eyes down, trying not to pay too much attention to his audience. “We have samples of macrofauna, discovered by palaeontologist Charles D. Walcott on his pioneering expeditions into the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of British Columbia—” a hand-drawing of something indescribably weird fetches up on the screen “—like this opabina, which died there six hundred and forty million years ago. Fossils of soft-bodied animals that old are rare; the Burgess shale deposits are the best record of the precambrian fauna anyone has found to date.”

A skinny woman with big hair and bigger shoulder-pads sniffs loudly; she has no truck with these antedilluvian dates. Roger winces sympathy for the academic. He’d rather she wasn’t here, but somehow she got wind of the famous palaeontologist’s visit—and she’s the colonel’s administrative assistant. Telling her to leave would be a career-limiting move.

“The important item to note—” photograph of a mangled piece of rock, visual echoes of the opabina—“is the tooth marks. We find them also—their exact cognates—on the ring segments of the Z-series specimens returned by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition of 1926. The world of the precambrian was laid out differently from our own; most of the land masses that today are separate continents were joined into one huge structure. Indeed, these samples were originally separated by only two thousand miles or thereabouts. Suggesting that they brought their own parasites with them.”

“What do tooth-marks tell us about them, that we need to know?” asks the colonel.

The doctor looks up. His eyes gleam: “That something liked to eat them when they were fresh.” There’s a brief rattle of laughter. “Something with jaws that open and close like the iris in your camera. Something we thought was extinct.”

Another viewgraph, this time with a blurry underwater photograph on it. The thing looks a bit like a weird fish—a turbocharged, armoured hagfish with side-skirts and spoilers, or maybe a squid with not enough tentacles. The upper head is a flattened disk, fronted by two bizarre fern-like tentacles drooping over the weird sucker-mouth on its underside. “This snapshot was taken in Lake Vostok last year. It should be dead: there’s nothing there for it to eat. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Anomalocaris, our toothy chewer.” He pauses for a moment. “I’m very grateful to you for showing it to me,” he adds, “even though it’s going to make a lot of my colleagues very angry.”

Is that a shy grin? The professor moves on rapidly, not giving Roger a chance to fathom his real reaction. “Now this is interesting in the extreme,” Gould comments. Whatever it is, it looks like a cauliflower head, or maybe a brain: fractally branching stalks continuously diminishing in length and diameter, until they turn into an irridescent fuzzy manifold wrapped around a central stem. The base of the stem is rooted to a barrel-shaped structure that stands on four stubby tentacles.

“We had somehow managed to cram Anomalocaris into our taxonomy, but this is something that has no precedent. It bears a striking resemblance to an enlarged body segment of Hallucigena—” here he shows another viewgraph, something like a stiletto-heeled centipede wearing a war-bonnet of tentacles—“but a year ago we worked out that we had poor hallucigena upside down and it was actually just a spiny worm. And the high levels of irridium and diamond in the head here . . . this isn’t a living creature, at least not within the animal kingdom I’ve been studying for the past thirty years. There’s no cellular structure at all. I asked one of my colleagues for help and they were completely unable to isolate any DNA or RNA from it at all. It’s more like a machine that displays biological levels of complexity.”

“Can you put a date to it?” asks the colonel.

“Yup.” The professor grins. “It predates the wave of atmospheric atomic testing that began in 1945; that’s about all. We think it’s from some time in the first half of this century, last half of last century. It’s been dead for years, but there are older people still walking this earth. In contrast—” he flips to the picture of Anomalocaris “—this specimen we found in rocks that are roughly six hundred and ten million years old.” He whips up another shot: similar structure, much clearer. “Note how similar it is to the dead but not decomposed one. They’re obviously still alive somewhere.”

He looks at the colonel, suddenly bashful and tongue-tied: “Can I talk about the, uh, thing we were, like, earlier . . . ?”

“Sure. Go ahead. Everyone here is cleared for it.” The colonel’s casual wave takes in the big-haired secretary, and Roger, and the two guys from Big Black who are taking notes, and the very serious woman from the Secret Service, and even the balding, worried-looking Admiral with the double chin and coke-bottle glasses.

“Oh. Alright.” Bashfulness falls away. “Well, we’ve done some preliminary dissections on the Anomalocaris tissues you supplied us with. And we’ve sent some samples for laboratory analysis—nothing anyone could deduce much from,” he adds hastily. He straightens up. “What we discovered is quite simple: these samples didn’t originate in Earth’s ecosystem. Cladistic analysis of their intracellular characteristics and what we’ve been able to work out of their biochemistry indicates, not a point of divergence from our own ancestry, but the absence of common ancestry. A cabbage is more human, has more in common with us, than that creature. You can’t tell by looking at the fossils, six hundred million years after it died, but live tissue samples are something else.

“Item: it’s a multicellular organism, but each cell appears to have multiple structures like nuclei—a thing called a syncitium. No DNA, it uses RNA with a couple of base pairs that aren’t used by terrestrial biology. We haven’t been able to figure out what most of its organelles do, what their terrestrial cognates would be, and it builds proteins using a couple of amino acids that we don’t. That nothing does. Either it’s descended from an ancestry that diverged from ours before the archaeobacteria, or—more probably—it is no relative at all.” He isn’t smiling any more. “The gateways, colonel?”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. The critter you’ve got there was retrieved by one of our, uh, missions. On the other side of a gate.”

Gould nods. “I don’t suppose you could get me some more?” he asks hopefully.

“All missions are suspended pending an investigation into an accident we had earlier this year,” the colonel says, with a significant glance at Roger. Suslowicz died two weeks ago; Gorman is still disastrously sick, connective tissue rotting in his body, massive radiation exposure the probable cause. Normal service will not be resumed; the pipeline will remain empty until someone can figure out a way to make the deliveries without losing the crew. Roger inclines his head minutely.

“Oh well.” The professor shrugs. “Let me know if you do. By the way, do you have anything approximating a fix on the other end of the gate?”

“No,” says the colonel, and this time Roger knows he’s lying. Mission Four, before the colonel diverted their payload capacity to another purpose, planted a compact radio telescope in an empty courtyard in the city on the far side of the gate. XK-Masada, where the air’s too thin to breathe without oxygen; where the sky is indigo, and the buildings cast razor-sharp shadows across a rocky plain baked to the consistency of pottery under a blood-red sun. Subsequent analysis of pulsar signals recorded by the station confirmed that it was nearly six hundred light years closer to the galactic core, inward along the same spiral arm. There are glyphs on the alien buildings that resemble symbols seen in grainy black-and-white Minox photos of the doors of the bunker in the Ukraine. Symbols behind which the subject of Project Koschei lies undead and sleeping: something evil, scraped from a nest in the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor. “Why do you want to know where they came from?”

“Well. We know so little about the context in which life evolves.” For a moment the professor looks wistful. “We have—had—only one datum point: Earth, this world. Now we have a second, a fragment of a second. If we get a third, we can begin to ask deep questions like, not, ‘is there life out there?’—because we know the answer to that one, now—but questions like ‘what sort of life is out there?’ and ‘is there a place for us?”’

Roger shudders: idiot, he thinks. If only you knew you wouldn’t be so happy—He restrains the urge to speak up. Doing so would be another career-limiting move. More to the point, it might be a life-expectancy-limiting move for the professor, who certainly didn’t deserve any such drastic punishment for his cooperation. Besides, Harvard professors visiting the Executive Office Building in DC are harder to disappear than comm-symp teachers in some fly-blown jungle village in Nicaragua. Somebody might notice. The colonel wouldn’t be so happy.

Roger realises that Professor Gould is staring at him. “Do you have a question for me?” asks the distinguished palaeontologist.

“Uh—in a moment.” Roger shakes himself. Remembering time-survivor curves, the captured Nazi medical atrocity records mapping the ability of a human brain to survive in close proximity to the Baltic Singularity. Mengele’s insanity. The SS’s final attempt to liquidate the survivors, the witnesses. Koschei, primed and pointed at the American heartland like a darkly evil gun. The “world-eating mind” adrift in brilliant madness, estivating in the absence of its prey: dreaming of the minds of sapient beings, be they barrel-bodied wing-flying tentacular things, or their human inheritors. “Do you think they could have been intelligent, professor? Conscious, like us?”

“I’d say so.” Gould’s eyes glitter. “This one—” he points to a viewgraph—“isn’t alive as we know it. And this one—” he’s found a Predecessor, god help him, barrel-bodied and bat-winged—“had what looks like a lot of very complex ganglia, not a brain as we know it, but at least as massive as our own. And some specialised grasping adaptations that might be interpreted as facilitating tool use. Put the two together and you have a high level technological civilization. Gateways between planets orbiting different stars. Alien flora, fauna, or whatever. I’d say an interstellar civilization isn’t out of the picture. One that has been extinct for deep geological time—ten times as long as the dinosaurs—but that has left relics that work.” His voice is trembling with emotion. “We humans, we’ve barely scratched the surface! The longest lasting of our relics? All our buildings will be dust in twenty thousand years, even the pyramids. Neil Armstrong’s footprints in the Sea of Tranquility will crumble under micrometeoroid bombardment in a mere half million years or so. The emptied oil fields will refill over ten million years, methane percollating up through the mantle: continental drift will erase everything. But these people..! They built to last. There’s so much to learn from them. I wonder if we’re worthy pretenders to their technological crown?”

“I’m sure we are, professor,” the colonel’s secretary says brassily. “Isn’t that right, Ollie?”

The colonel nods, grinning. “You betcha, Fawn. You betcha!”

The Great Satan

Roger sits in the bar in the King David hotel, drinking from a tall glass of second-rate lemonade and sweating in spite of the air conditioning. He’s dizzy and disoriented from jet-lag, the gut-cramps have only let him come down from his room in the past hour, and he has another two hours to go before he can try to place a call to Andrea. They had another blazing row before he flew out here; she doesn’t understand why he keeps having to visit odd corners of the globe. She only knows that his son is growing up thinking a father is a voice that phones at odd times of day.

Roger is mildly depressed, despite the buzz of doing business at this level. He spends a lot of time worrying about what will happen if they’re found out—what Andrea will do, or Jason for that matter, Jason whose father is a phone call away all the time—if Roger is led away in handcuffs beneath the glare of flash bulbs. If the colonel sings, if the shy bald admiral is browbeaten into spilling the beans to congress, who will look after them then?

Roger has no illusions about what kills black operations: there are too many people in the loop, too many elaborate front corporations and numbered bank accounts and shady Middle Eastern arms dealers. Sooner or later someone will find a reason to talk, and Roger is in too deep. He isn’t just the company liaison officer any more: he’s become the colonel’s bag-man, his shadow, the guy with the diplomatic passport and the bulging briefcase full of heroin and end-user certificates.

At least the ship will sink from the top down, he thinks. There are people very high up who want the colonel to succeed. When the shit hits the fan and is sprayed across the front page of the Washington Post, it will likely take down cabinet members and secretaries of state: the President himself will have to take the witness stand and deny everything. The republic will question itself.

A hand descends on his shoulder, sharply cutting off his reverie. “Howdy, Roger! Whatcha worrying about now?”

Jourgensen looks up wearily. “Stuff,” he says gloomily. “Have a seat.” The redneck from the embassy—Mike Hamilton, some kind of junior attache for embassy protocol by cover—pulls out a chair and crashes down on it like a friendly car wreck. He’s not really a redneck, Roger knows—rednecks don’t come with doctorates in foreign relations from Yale—but he likes people to think he’s a bumpkin when he wants to get something from them.

“He’s early,” says Hamilton, looking past Roger’s ear, voice suddenly all business. “Play the agenda, I’m your dim but friendly good cop. Got the background? Deniables ready?”

Roger nods, then glances round and sees Mehmet (family name unknown) approaching from the other side of the room. Mehmet is impeccably manicured and tailored, wearing a suit from Jermyn Street that costs more than Roger earns in a month. He has a neatly trimmed beard and moustache and talks with a pronounced English accent. Mehmet is a Turkish name, not a Persian one: pseudonym, of course. To look at him you would think he was a westernized Turkish businessman—certainly not an Iranian revolutionary with heavy links to Hezbollah and, (whisper this), Old Man Ruholla himself, the hermit of Qom. Never, ever, in a thousand years, the unofficial Iranian ambassador to the Little Satan in Tel Aviv.

Mehmet strides over. A brief exchange of pleasantries masks the essential formality of their meeting: he’s early, a deliberate move to put them off-balance. He’s outnumbered, too, and that’s also a move to put them on the defensive, because the first rule of diplomacy is never to put yourself in a negotiating situation where the other side can assert any kind of moral authority, and sheer weight of numbers is a powerful psychological tool.

“Roger, my dear fellow.” He smiles at Jourgensen. “And the charming doctor Hamilton, I see.” The smile broadens. “I take it the good colonel is desirous of news of his friends?”

Jourgensen nods. “That is indeed the case.”

Mehmet stops smiling. For a moment he looks ten years older. “I visited them,” he says shortly. “No, I was taken to see them. It is indeed grave, my friends. They are in the hands of very dangerous men, men who have nothing to lose and are filled with hatred.”

Roger speaks: “There is a debt between us—”

Mehmet holds up a hand. “Peace, my friend. We will come to that. These are men of violence, men who have seen their homes destroyed and families subjected to indignities, and their hearts are full of anger. It will take a large display of repentance, a high blood-price, to buy their acquiescence. That is part of our law, you understand? The family of the bereaved may demand blood-price of the transgressor, and how else might the world be? They see it in these terms: that you must repent of your evils and assist them in waging holy war against those who would defile the will of Allah.”

Roger sighs. “We do what we can,” he says. “We’re shipping them arms. We’re fighting the Soviets every way we can without provoking the big one. What more do they want? The hostages—that’s not playing well in DC. There’s got to be some give and take. If Hezbollah don’t release them soon they’ll just convince everyone what they’re not serious about negotiating. And that’ll be an end to it. The colonel wants to help you, but he’s got to have something to show the man at the top, right?”

Mehmet nods. “You and I are men of the world and understand that this keeping of hostages is not rational, but they look to you for defense against the great Satan that assails them, and their blood burns with anger that your nation, for all its fine words, takes no action. The great Satan rampages in Afghanistan, taking whole villages by night, and what is done? The United States turns its back. And they are not the only ones who feel betrayed. Our Ba’athist foes from Iraq... in Basra the unholy brotherhood of Takrit and their servants the Mukhabarat hold nightly sacrifice upon the altar of Yair-Suthot; the fountains of blood in Tehran testify to their effect. If the richest, most powerful nation on earth refuses to fight, these men of violence from the Bekaa think, how may we unstopper the ears of that nation? And they are not sophisticates like you or I.”

He looks at Roger, who hunches his shoulders uneasily. “We can’t move against the Soviets openly! They must understand that it would be the end of far more than their little war. If the Taliban want American help against the Russians, it cannot be delivered openly.”

“It is not the Russians that we quarrel with,” Mehmet says quietly, “but their choice in allies. They believe themselves to be infidel atheists, but by their deeds they shall be known; the icy spoor of Leng is upon them, their tools are those described in the Kitab al Azif. We have proof that they have violated the terms of the Dresden Agreement. The accursed and unhallowed stalk the frozen passes of the Himalayas by night, taking all whose path they cross. And will you stopper your ears even as the Russians grow in misplaced confidence, sure that their dominance of these forces of evil is complete? The gates are opening everywhere, as it was prophesied. Last week we flew an F-14C with a camera relay pod through one of them. The pilot and weapons operator are in paradise now, but we have glanced into hell and have the film and radar plots to prove it.”

The Iranian ambassador fixes the redneck from the embassy with an icy gaze. “Tell your ambassador that we have opened preliminary discussions with Mossad, with a view to purchasing the produce of a factory at Dimona, in the Negev desert. Past insults may be set aside, for the present danger imperils all of us. They are receptive to our arguments, even if you are not: his holiness the Grand Ayatollah has declared in private that any warrior who carries a nuclear device into the abode of the eater of souls will certainly achieve paradise. There will be an end to the followers of the ancient abominations on this Earth, doctor Hamilton, even if we have to push the nuclear bombs down their throats with our own hands!”

Swimming Pool

“Mister Jourgensen, at what point did you become aware that the Iranian government was threatening to violate UN Resolution 216 and the Non-Proliferation Protocol to the 1956 Geneva accords?”

Roger sweats under the hot lights: his heartbeat accelerates. “I’m not sure I understand the question, sir.”

“I asked you a direct question. Which part don’t you understand? I’m going to repeat myself slowly: when did you realise that the Iranian Government was threatening to violate resolution 216 and the 1956 Geneva Accords on nuclear proliferation?”

Roger shakes his head. It’s like a bad dream, unseen insects buzzing furiously around him. “Sir, I had no direct dealings with the Iranian government. All I know is that I was asked to carry messages to and from a guy called Mehmet who I was told knew something about our hostages in Beirut. My understanding is that the colonel has been conducting secret negotiations with this gentleman or his backers for some time—a couple of years—now. Mehmet made allusions to parties in the Iranian administration but I have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, and I never saw any diplomatic credentials.”

There’s an inquisition of dark-suited congressmen opposite him, like a jury of teachers sitting in judgement over an errant pupil. The trouble is, these teachers can put him in front of a judge and send him to prison for many years, so that Jason really will grow up with a father who’s a voice on the telephone, a father who isn’t around to take him to air shows or ball games or any of the other rituals of growing up. They’re talking to each other quietly, deciding on another line of questioning: Roger shifts uneasily in his chair. This is a closed hearing, the television camera a gesture in the direction of the congressional archives: a pack of hungry democrats have scented republican blood in the water.

The congressman in the middle looks towards Roger. “Stop right there. Where did you know about this guy Mehmet from? Who told you to go see him and who told you what he was?”

Roger swallows. “I got a memo from Fawn, like always. Admiral Poindexter wanted a man on the spot to talk to this guy, a messenger, basically, who was already in the loop. Colonel North signed off on it and told me to charge the trip to his discretionary fund.” That must have been the wrong thing to say, because two of the congressmen are leaning together and whispering in each other’s ears, and an aide obligingly sidles up to accept a note, then dashes away. “I was told that Mehmet was a mediator,” Roger adds. “In trying to resolve the Beirut hostage thing.”

“A mediator.” The guy asking the questions looks at him in disbelief.

The man to his left—who looks as old as the moon, thin white hair, liver spots on his hooked nose, eyelids like sacks—chuckles appreciatively. “Yeah. Like Hitler was a diplomat. ‘One more territorial demand’—” he glances round. “Nobody else remember that?” he asks plaintively.

“No sir,” Roger says very seriously.

The prime interrogator snorts. “What did Mehmet tell you Iran was going to do, exactly?”

Roger thinks for a moment. “He said they were going to buy something from a factory at Dimona. I understood this to be the Israeli Defense Ministry’s nuclear weapons research institute, and the only logical item—in the context of our discussion—was a nuclear weapon. Or weapons. He said the Ayatollah had decreed that a suicide bomber who took out the temple of Yog-Sothoth in Basra would achieve paradise, and that they also had hard evidence that the Soviets have deployed certain illegal weapons systems in Afghanistan. This was in the context of discussing illegal weapons proliferation; he was very insistent about the Iraq thing.”

“What exactly are these weapons systems?” demands the third inquisitor, a quiet, hawk-faced man sitting on the left of the panel.

“The shoggot’im, they’re called: servitors. There are several kinds of advanced robotic systems made out of molecular components: they can change shape, restructure material at the atomic level—act like corrosive acid, or secrete diamonds. Some of them are like a tenuous mist—what Doctor Drexler at MIT calls a utility fog—while others are more like an oily globule. Apparently they may be able to manufacture more of themselves, but they’re not really alive in any meaning of the term we’re familiar with. They’re programmable, like robots, using a command language deduced from recovered records of the forerunners who left them here. The Molotov Raid of 1930 brought back a large consignment of them; all we have to go on are the scraps they missed, and reports by the Antarctic Survey. Professor Liebkunst’s files in particular are most frustrating—”

“Stop. So you’re saying the Russians have these, uh, Shoggoths, but we don’t have any. And even those dumb arab bastards in Baghdad are working on them. So you’re saying we’ve got a, a Shoggoth gap? A strategic chink in our armour? And now the Iranians say the Russians are using them in Afghanistan?”

Roger speaks rapidly: “That is minimally correct, sir, although countervailing weapons have been developed to reduce the risk of a unilateral preemption escallating to an exchange of weakly godlike agencies.” The congressman in the middle nods encouragingly. “For the past three decades, the B-39 Peacemaker force has been tasked by SIOP with maintaining an XK-PLUTO capability directed at ablating the ability of the Russians to activate Project Koschei, the dormant alien entity they captured from the Nazis at the end of the last war. We have twelve PLUTO-class atomic-powered cruise missiles pointed at that thing, day and night, as many megatons as the entire Minuteman force. In principle, we will be able to blast it to pieces before it can be brought to full wakefulness and eat the minds of everyone within two hundred miles.”

He warms to his subject. “Secondly, we believe the Soviet control of Shoggoth technology is rudimentary at best. They know how to tell them to roll over an Afghan hill-farmer village, but they can’t manufacture more of them. Their utility as weapons is limited—but terrifying—but they’re not much of a problem. A greater issue is the temple in Basra. This contains an operational gateway, and according to Mehmet the Iraqi political secret police, the Mukhabarat, are trying to figure out how to manipulate it; they’re trying to summon something through it. He seemed to be mostly afraid that they—and the Russians—would lose control of whatever it was; presumably another weakly godlike creature like the K-Thulu entity at the core of Project Koschei.”

The old guy speaks: “This foo-loo thing, boy—you can drop those stupid K prefixes around me—is it one of a kind?”

Roger shakes his head. “I don’t know, sir. We know the gateways link to at least three other planets. There may be many that we don’t know of. We don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.” He nearly bites his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget. He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air defense missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the Skunk Works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and thousands of support personnel. In event of war they’ll be evacuated through the small gate that has been moved to the Executive Office Building basement, in a room beneath the swimming pool where Jack used to go skinny-dipping with Marilyn.

“Off the record now.” The old congressman waves his hand in a chopping gesture: “I say off, boy.” The cameraman switches off his machine and leaves. He leans forward, towards Roger. “What you’re telling me is, we’ve been waging a secret war since, when? The end of the second world war? Earlier, the Pabodie Antarctic expedition in the twenties, whose survivors brought back the first of these alien relics? And now the Eye-ranians have gotten into the game and figure it’s part of their fight with Saddam?”

“Sir.” Roger barely trusts himself to do more than nod.

“Well.” The congressman eyes his neighbour sharply. “Let me put it to you that you have heard the phrase, ‘the great filter’. What does it mean to you?”

“The great—” Roger stops. Professor Gould, he thinks. “We had a professor of palaeontology lecture us,” he explains. “I think he mentioned it. Something about why there aren’t any aliens in flying saucers buzzing us the whole time.”

The congressman snorts. His neighbour starts and sits up. “Thanks to Pabodie and his followers, Liebkunst and the like, we know there’s a lot of life in the universe. The great filter, boy, is whatever force stops most of it developing intelligence and coming to visit. Something, somehow, kills intelligent species before they develop this kind of technology for themselves. How about meddling with relics of the elder ones? What do you think of that?”

Roger licks his lips nervously. “That sounds like a good possibility, sir,” he says. His unease is building.

The congressman’s expression is intense: “These weapons your colonel is dicking around with make all our nukes look like a toy bow and arrow, and all you can say is it’s a good possibility, sir? Seems to me like someone in the Oval Office has been asleep at the switch.”

“Sir, executive order 2047, issued January 1980, directed the armed forces to standardize on nuclear weapons to fill the mass destruction role. All other items were to be developmentally suspended, with surplus stocks allocated to the supervision of Admiral Poindexter’s joint munitions expenditure committee. Which Colonel North was detached to by the USMC high command, with the full cognizance of the White House—”

The door opens. The congressman looks round angrily: “I thought I said we weren’t to be disturbed!”

The aide standing there looks uncertain. “Sir, there’s been an, uh, major security incident, and we need to evacuate—”

“Where? What happened?” demands the congressman. But Roger, with a sinking feeling, realises that the aide isn’t watching the house committee members: and the guy behind him is Secret Service.

“Basra. There’s been an attack, sir.” A furtive glance at Roger, as his brain freezes in denial: “If you’d all please come this way . . . ”

Bombing in fifteen minutes

Heads down, through a corridor where congressional staffers hurry about carrying papers, urgently calling one another. A cadre of dark-suited secret service agents close in, hustling Roger along in the wake of the committee members. A wailing like tinnitus fills his ears. “What’s happening?” he asks, but nobody answers.

Down into the basement. Another corridor, where two marine guards are waiting with drawn weapons. The secret service guys are exchanging terse reports by radio. The committee men are hustled away along a narrow service tunnel: Roger is stalled by the entrance. “What’s going on?” he asks his minder.

“Just a moment, sir.” More listening: these guys cock their heads to one side as they take instruction, birds of prey scanning the horizon for Mukhabaratets. “Delta four coming in. Over. You’re clear to go along the tunnel now, sir. This way.”

“What’s happening?” Roger demands as he lets himself be hustled into the corridor, along to the end and round a sharp corner. Numb shock takes hold: he keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

“We’re now at Defcon one, sir. You’re down on the special list as part of the house staff. Next door on the left, sir.”

The queue in the dim-lit basement room is moving fast, white-gloved guards with clipboards checking off men and a few women in suits as they step through a steel blast door one by one and disappear from view. Roger looks round in bewilderment: he sees a familiar face. “Fawn! What’s going on?”

The secretary looks puzzled. “I don’t know. Roger? I thought you were testifying today.”

“So did I.” They’re at the door. “What else?”

“Ronnie was making a big speech in Helsinki; the colonel had me record it in his office. Something about not coexisting with the empire of evil. He cracked some kinda joke about how we start bombing in fifteen minutes, Then this—”

They’re at the door. It opens on a steel-walled airlock and the marine guard is taking their badges and hustling them inside. Two staff types and a middle-aged brigadier join them and the door thumps shut. The background noise vanishes, Roger’s ears pop, then the inner door opens and another marine guard waves them through into the receiving hall.

“Where are we?” asks the big-haired secretary, staring around.

“Welcome to XK-Masada,” says Roger. Then his childhood horrors catch up with him and he goes in search of a toilet to throw up in.

We need you back

Roger spends the next week in a state of numbed shock. His apartment here is like a small hotel room—a hotel with security, air conditioning, and windows that only open onto an interior atrium. He pays little attention to his surroundings. It’s not as if he has a home to return to.

Roger stops shaving. Stops changing his socks. Stops looking in mirrors or combing his hair. He smokes a lot, orders cheap bourbon from the commissary, and drinks himself into an amensic stupor each night. He is, frankly, a mess. Self-destructive. Everything disintegrated under him at once: his job, the people he held in high regard, his family, his life. All the time he can’t get one thing out of his head: the expression on Gorman’s face as he stands there, in front of the submarine, rotting from the inside out with radiation sickness, dead and not yet knowing it. It’s why he’s stopped looking in mirrors.

On the fourth day he’s slumped in a chair watching taped I Love Lucy re-runs on the boob tube when the door to his suite opens quietly. Someone comes in. He doesn’t look round until the colonel walks across the screen and unplugs the TV set at the wall, then sits down in the chair next to him. The colonel has bags of dark skin under his eyes; his jacket is rumpled and his collar is unbuttoned.

“You’ve got to stop this, Roger,” he says quietly. “You look like shit.”

“Yeah, well. You too.”

The colonel passes him a slim manilla folder. Without wanting to, Roger slides out the single sheet of paper within.

“So it was them.”

“Yeah.” A moment’s silence. “For what it’s worth, we haven’t lost yet. We may yet pull your wife and son out alive. Or be able to go back home.”

“Your family too, I suppose.” Roger’s touched by the colonel’s consideration, the pious hope that Andrea and Jason will be alright, even through his shell of misery. He realises his glass is empty. Instead of re-filling it he puts it down on the carpet beside his feet. “Why?”

The colonel removes the sheet of paper from his numb fingers. “Probably someone spotted you in the King David and traced you back to us. The Mukhabarat had agents everywhere, and if they were in league with the KGB... ” he shrugs. “Things escallated rapidly. Then the president cracked that joke over a hot mike that was supposed to be switched off... Have you been checking in with the desk summaries this week?”

Roger looks at him blankly. “Should I?”

“Oh, things are still happening.” The colonel leans back and stretches his feet out. “From what we can tell of the situation on the other side, not everyone’s dead yet. Ligachev’s screaming blue murder over the hotline, accusing us of genocide: but he’s still talking. Europe is a mess and nobody knows what’s going on in the middle east—even the Blackbirds aren’t making it back out again.”

“The thing at Takrit.”

“Yeah. It’s bad news, Roger. We need you back.”

“Bad news?”

“The worst.” The colonel jams his hands between his knees, stares at the floor like a bashful child. “Saddam Hussein al-Takriti spent years trying to get his hands on elder technology. It looks like he finally succeeded in stabilising the gate into Sothoth. Whole villages disappeared, Marsh Arabs, wiped out in the swamps of Eastern Iraq. Reports of yellow rain, people’s skin melting right off their bones. The Iranians got itchy and finally went nuclear. Trouble is, they did so two hours before that speech. Some asshole in Plotsk launched half the Uralskoye SS-20 grid—they went to launch on warning eight months ago—burning south, praise Jesus. Scratch the middle east, period—everything from the Nile to the Khyber Pass is toast. We’re still waiting for the callback on Moscow, but SAC has put the whole Peacemaker force on airborn alert. So far we’ve lost the eastern seaboard as far south as North Virginia and they’ve lost the Donbass basin and Vladivostok. Things are a mess; nobody can even agree whether we’re fighting the commies or something else. But the box at Chernobyl—Project Koschei—the doors are open, Roger. We orbited a Keyhole-Eleven over it and there are tracks, leading west. The PLUTO strike didn’t stop it—and nobody knows what the fuck is going on in WarPac country. Or France, or Germany, or Japan, or England.”

The colonel makes a grab for Roger’s wild turkey, rubs the neck clean and swallows from the bottle. He looks at Roger with a wild expression on his face. “Koschei is loose, Roger. They fucking woke the thing. And now they can’t control it. Can you believe that?”

“I can believe that.”

“I want you back behind a desk tomorrow morning, Roger. We need to know what this Thulu creature is capable of. We need to know what to do to stop it. Forget Iraq; Iraq is a smoking hole in the map. But K-Thulu is heading towards the Atlantic coast. What are we going to do if it doesn’t stop?”

Masada

The city of XK-Masada sprouts like a vast mushroom, a mile-wide dome emerging from the top of a cold plateau on a dry planet that orbits a dying star. The jagged black shapes of F-117’s howl across the empty skies outside it at dusk and dawn, patrolling the threatening emptiness that stretches as far as the mind can imagine.

Shadows move in the streets of the city, hollowed out human shells in uniform. They rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks like the dry leaves of autumn, obsessively focussed on the tasks that lend structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel, propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky: blocking out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail humanity from the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of the ancient world. The gravity here is a little lighter, the night sky whorled and marbled by the diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star that lights their days. During the long winter nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide snow dusts the surface of the dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city slaking its thirst on subterranean aquifers.

This planet was once alive—there is still a scummy sea of algae near the equator that feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and there is a range of volcanoes near the north pole that speaks of plate tectonics in motion—but it is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but no future.

Sometimes, in the early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks outside the city, along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labour on behind him, keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little attention. There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time erase them forever. Roger doesn’t like to think about that. He tries to avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible: except when he cannot sleep but walks along the cliff top, prodding at memories of Andrea and Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and friends, each of them as painful as the socket of a missing tooth. He has a mouthful of emptiness, bitter and acheing, out here on the edge of the plateau.

Sometimes Roger thinks he’s the last human being alive. He works in an office, feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong: and bodies move around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talking to him and waiting as if they expect a dialogue. There are bodies here, men and some women chatting, civilian and some military—but no people. One of the bodies, an army surgeon, told him he’s suffering from a common stress disorder, survivor’s guilt. This may be so, Roger admits, but it doesn’t change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless nights into oblivion, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like sand into the un-dug graves of his family.

A narrow path runs along the side of the plateau, just downhill from the foundations of the city power plant where huge apertures belch air warmed by the radiators of the nuclear reactor. Roger follows the path, gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes. Foreign stars twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him he’s far from home. The trail drops away from the top of the plateau, until the city is an unseen shadow looming above and behind his shoulder. To his right is a dizzying panorama, the huge rift valley with its ancient city of the dead stretched out before him. Beyond it rise alien mountains, their peaks as high and airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.

About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of rock and takes a downhill switchback turn. Roger stops at the bend and looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the rough cliff face and stretches his legs out across the path, so that his feet dangle over nothingness. Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might have been fields, but nothing like that survives to this date. They’re just dead, like everyone else on this world. Like Roger.

In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.

He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. “Why me?” he asks quietly.

The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with the Colonel’s voice. “You know the reason.”

“I didn’t want to do it,” he hears himself saying. “I didn’t want to leave them behind.”

The Ghoulish Wife

by Kevin L. O’Brien

In the city of Cairnsford, in the state of Colorado, during the tenure of Gov. Roy Romer, there lived an entrepreneur who - through a great deal of hard work and dedication during his youth - had amassed a considerable fortune by the time he was thirty-five. By name Sidney Hardon, he unfortunately had no family, because his fiancee had died the night before their wedding day. Sidney Hardon had known her all his childhood, and the grief of her loss weighed heavily on his heart, so that to assuage his grief he had devoted himself entirely to business. Now, however, that weight had eased somewhat with the passing years, and he began to consider his future. With wealth enough and property to secure him for the rest of his life, he decided that it was time to seek a new bride, so that he may have children to pass his fortune on to when he finally died.

In that same city was a house that was shunned by all, because the property on which it sat bordered the cemetery. This burial ground had an evil reputation as being darkly haunted, so no one would occupy the house. One day, however, a young woman named Amina Nadil, whom it was said had been married to a celebrity from whom she had just become divorced, took the house and moved in. Though seldom seen during the day, she was often heard singing in the garden at night. Those who heard her voice claimed it sounded like that of an angel; those who saw her through the windows of her home or on

one of her rare trips into town remarked that her dark beauty was greater than that of any woman in Cairnsford.

When Sidney Hardon heard of this he resolved to meet her. So one night he left his house and drove the darkened streets of Cairnsford, until he came to her home. He parked in the shadows on the street and waited until he heard her voice. It was of such enchanting sweetness, and rendered with such great skill and tenderness certain love songs, that he felt an overwhelming desire to see her. Heedless to caution, he left his car, scaled the wall surrounding her property, and followed the sound of her voice. There, in the moonlight, he saw her. Amina Nadil was bathing in a spa, lit by a half-dozen decorative garden torches surrounding one side of an ornate stone patio. On the opposite had been erected an artificial cliff-face, from which a waterfall tumbled into the pool. Even as he watched, she rose and stood beneath the cascade, allowing the water to flow over her statuesque body. Unconscious of her audience, she continued her singing, and her mesmerizing voice fascinated him as much as her dazzling physical charms. In that moment he fell in love with her, and vowed to make her his own.

He slipped away noiselessly and returned to his house to make plans. The next day he sent his majordomo to her home with a gift of flowers. Each day afterwards he sent her more gifts: gourmet chocolates, fine wines, perfumes, expensive clothing, and jewelry. Amina Nadil received them all warmly, and finally invited Sidney Hardon to visit her. He did so, and spent most of the day with her. Before he left he asked for her hand in marriage and she accepted. They were wed amid much splendor within the week, and he and his household moved into her home.

Several days passed in extreme happiness before Sidney Hardon became aware of a peculiarity in his wife's habits. Amina Nadil was extremely diligent in overseeing the preparation of each evening meal, and she sat with him as he ate, but she would only eat a dish of rice one grain at a time, and instead of partaking of the other dishes she only took a single slice of bread, which she also ate one small piece at a time. When he asked her about this, she excused herself by saying that her family were members of an austere religion, and while she no longer practiced its esoteric rites, she continued to live the somewhat frugal and severe lifestyle it imposed out of long habit.

Sidney Hardon accepted her explanation and thought no more of the matter, so it was a few weeks more before he noted another oddity. One night he awoke from a deep sleep to find that he was alone in their bed. At first he wasn't surprised, but he grew anxious as substantial time went by and she did not return. At first he feared for her safety, but then he feared she was perhaps being unfaithful. By the time Amina Nadil returned shortly before dawn, he had decided to solve this mystery, so instead of confronting her he pretended to be fast asleep. The following night he pretended to close his eyes, but all the while he carefully watched his wife's activities. After a short time, when she believed herself unobserved, she rose from the bed, threw a long dark robe over her shoulders, and silently slipped out of the room.

Sidney Hardon flew out of the bed, hastily dressed, and followed her as closely as he dared. To his surprise she crossed the garden to the farthest corner of the property, where the cemetery fence formed part of the border. Parting a clump of bushes, she passed through a hole in the fence made by the bars having been pulled apart, and entered the cemetery. Pursuing her very carefully he watched as she entered a large vault. He approached with extreme caution and peered inside. The interior was dimly lit by three funerary lamps, and to his horror he saw his young and beautiful wife surrounded by a group of hideous creatures.

They were of such surpassing monstrousness as he had never seen before. Though they had the vague form of man, their faces were like those of dogs, with long. broad snouts and low, pointed ears. They were hairless except for scraggly patches on their digitigradal legs, but their obscenely rubbery, deeply tannic skin was covered with mold and patches of lichens. Their arms were long and powerfully muscled, and their broad hands had long, dexterous fingers, each of which terminated in a great claw. But their feet were cloven, like a pig's, and they danced about like grotesque satyrs celebrating some macabre bacchanalian rite.

Rather than attack her, however, they each embraced her as if she was an old friend. She then seated herself at the head of a sarcophagus lid set upon two piles of stacked tombstones. One of the monsters carried in a corpse which had been buried that very day and tossed it without respect onto the grisly table. The ghouls - for that was what they were - then joined her in quickly tearing the body to pieces, devouring the various parts with exceeding gusto and satisfaction. He became sick with terror and revulsion as Amina Nadil greedily stripped the flesh from an upper arm, then bit through the bone to suck out the marrow. The sight of her lips, which he kissed each night, and her hands, that caressed him, smeared with gore turned his burning love to a smoldering hate. Had he been armed he would have tried then and there to kill her and as many of her company as he could.

Instead, fearing that he might be discovered, he escaped back to the house and their bed, and when his wife returned he pretended to be deep in sleep until the morning. Throughout the whole of that day he made no mention of what he had discovered, but in the evening as Amina Nadil took her customary bowl of rice, Sidney Hardon insisted that she should share some the same foods he ate. When she declined as he expected, he remarked with all the sarcasm and disgust he could manage: "I take it then that none of these dishes are as palatable as the flesh of a corpse?"

At the sound of his words, Amina Nadil turned pale, her eyes blazed, and she shook with fury, but she made no reply and stalked off in silence. She locked herself in a guest room and refused to come out or even talk through the door, no matter how urgently he entreated her, or how furiously he pounded upon the door. Finally, his rage kindled, Sidney Hardon ordered her to leave the house by morning. He then retired to their room. However, suspecting that she might try to do him harm in the night, he took a pistol and hid it under his pillow, and again he feigned sleep.

Sure enough, about midnight, when she thought that her husband was fast asleep, Amina Nadil stole into their bedroom. She was unclothed, and at first he thought she would try to seduce him as a way to gain his forgiveness. Instead, once she had straddled his prostrate form she bent low over him and, again fooled by his act, then whispered: "Now will you receive your due reward for your curiosity." At the same moment she set one hand firmly on his chest and seized him by the throat with the other. Before he could react, she pulled him up to her mouth, tore open a vein with her sharp teeth, and began to greedily suck his blood. On the verge of panic, he reached behind his pillow and took hold of the gun, brought it forth and, placing the muzzle against her own neck, pulled the trigger. She jerked awhile from him and released him; as he fell back she stared at him as if in disbelief, her mouth covered with his blood. She then slumped to one side of the bed and did not move. He called for help then, and his majordomo came and dressed the wound in his throat. They then examined the body of the monster that had been his wife. It did not breath and they could feel no heartbeat. Relieved, the following day the two of them took the remains of the ghoul-woman to the vault where she had partaken of her nightly repasts, and laid her on the "table" for her dining companions to find.

However, three nights later, though the doors were locked and the windows barred, Amina Nadil appeared exactly at midnight in her husband's room and attacked him with superhuman strength and ferocity, tearing at his throat. His gun proved useless now and he ran from her in sheer terror. He escaped only by fleeing the house and running off into town. He did not even attempt to return until well after dawn, and when he did he discovered that his majordomo had been killed, torn to pieces and devoured like the corpse he had seen that previous night. On the floor around what was left were numerous bloody

footprints, most resembling cloven hoofs, but some being delicately feminine human feet. Sidney Hardon then fled once again, but this time leaving the house and his possessions, the city and his businesses, and even his sanity, behind.

To this day no one knows the fate of Sidney Hardon. Though the police sought him for the murder of his manservant and the disappearance of his wife, though the FBI searched for him for a year or more, he was never found. So it is unknown whether he finally escaped his wife, perhaps by finding shelter as a John Doe in a mental hospital, or if she found him and took him in one final embrace.

The Last Horror Out of Arkham

by Darrel Schweitzer

Professor Latham Knucklebury was a bent, grey-haired little man with a penchant for bizarre theories, and a tendency to lecture on them, as if he were in front of a class, to anyone he could corner. I shared an office with him at U. Mass. (pronounced You-Mass by its denizens) and I suppose I heard more of his ideas than anyone else in those days. His arguments were uniformly as strange, incredible, and seemingly ridiculous on the surface as they were, if you stopped to listen to all the reasoning behind them, logical, brilliant, and backed by evidence overlooked by everyone else. Knucklebury often compared himself to Copernicus, Galileo, and other persecuted scientific greats of the past, and perhaps this wasn't entirely inappropriate, because his mind was undeniably first rate, but in the end that didn't save him. He had no tact at all, and thumbed his nose at the Chairman of the Anthropology Department visibly, publicly and with a personal vindictiveness matched only by that directed against him by the late Professor Chambers.

It was obvious that Latham wouldn't last long at the University and it came as no surprise when the axe finally fell. The immediate cause was the publication of his article, Evidence of Fungoid Phallic Worship Among the Early Fire Islanders, despite statements of disapproval and outright threats from Chambers in the Spring 1978 issue of the Squammous Review. It made a laughing stock out of the department as I had feared it would, and when it appeared the Chairman consulted with the President of the Board of Directors, and it was agreed that my colleague had to go. He did. The next morning Latham found a note of dismissal in his mailbox and, true to his nature, his first impulse was to rush into the Chairman's office, interrupt a long-distance phone call and demand an explanation. Now the Anthropology Department's office consisted of a large centre room with the individual offices of the chairman and the various teachers opening into it, and this meant that anything said in a loud voice behind one door could be heard behind all the others. I was at my desk that morning grading some exams, so I heard the whole thing. Before long Chambers was shouting like a barrage of cannon fire, and Knucklebury had degenerated into a shrill screech. Latham sounded hurt, indignant, and furious all at the same time, as if the most cowardly and treacherous thing imaginable had been done to him. He played the martyr-to-science role well.

"I don't need to remind you," he said, "that when I was teaching at Miskatonic they never treated me like this. There I was given respect!"

"And that's why they closed the place down!" retorted Chambers. "Nobody wanted to go to a place filled with lunatics like you!"

"That's not true! They lost a government grant!"

"Hallelujah! Maybe Nixon was a good guy after all!"

"Just because your own curiosity has dried up, because you haven't functioned as a scientist in decades, because your sterile little mind can't appreciate anything new -"

"You ought to be locked up, Knucklebury. You might be dangerous. Delusions of grandeur, hallucinations, I don't know what. But in the meantime, get out of here.

The matter is settled. You're fired. Talk it out with the Board or the President, but leave me alone. I never want to see your face in here again!" With that Professor Chambers broke into a stream of language unbefitting a scholar speaking to another scholar. Latham realized that there was nothing he could do and left the room. He came over to my office and I dropped the test paper I had been hiding behind during the battle.

"Jesus Christ, what brought that on?"

"Just make sure that you don't rock the boat around here Richard," he said. "If you write anything more than stale rehash you won't have your job very long."

"Anything I can do for you, Latham?”

"No. Just watch and wait. I swear to you that I’ll vindicate myself. I'll prove every one of my hypotheses to be a fact, not just conjecture. Watch and wait, and I promise you, unusual things will begin to happen."

He refused to explain what he meant while he packed a few papers into his briefcase. He left the office and that was the last I saw of him for months.

***

An unsusual thing did happen almost immediately, within a week in fact, but at the time there was no way I could connect it with Latham Knucklebury.

Even though anthropology is ray profession, I have always maintained an avid interest in literature. It was my undergraduate minor and my wife Peg teaches English, so between the two of us ours is a very literary household. Both of us are incurable bibliophiles. We collect rare editions, old periodicals, and publishing oddities, so we were both fully equipped to appreciate the uniqueness of the volume that came in the mail the following Saturday morning, four days after my friend's dismissal.

I was sitting at the table finishing my coffee while Peg tidied up the kitchen, when the doorbell rang and the mailman left off a large parcel marked "fourth class-book." When I picked it up I was surprised, the thing must have weighed a good fifteen pounds. I looked for a return address but there wasn't any, and the stamps were obscured by a black smear of a postmark.

"What was that?" Peg called.

"A package."

"What is it?"

"A book, but I don't know who it's from. You didn't order anything, did you?"

"No. It might be freebies from some textbook company.”

"I don't think so," I said as I began to unwrap it. "No, it's an old book, a very old book - God'.”

She dropped something and came running.

"Well? What is it?"

I showed her the title page:

Mr. William

SHAKESPEARE'S

Comedies Histories & Tragedies.

Published according to the True Original Copies

((an engraved portrait here))

London

Printed by Isaac Jaggard and

Ed. Blount, 1623

"It's got to be a fake," I said. "It must be a fake."

Peg picked up the book gingerly, with a half religious awe. She paged through it, checking certain points, then sniffed the binding.

"No," she said. "I think it's the real thing. This is a genuine First Folio. The paper's old enough. Smell it."

I did. Every book collector knows what musty old books smell like, and very old ones, prior to the invention of wood pulp paper, have an odour all their own, and you get to recognize it after a while. This one smelled right.

"Isn't there any way you could fake it?"

"Have you got any idea how much trouble it would take to forge a book of this size? You'd have to make all the plates, get specially aged paper, get the watermarks right, get the typoes right, the corrupt lines, the smears, the wormholes, everything accurate enough to fool an expert. The expense wouldn’t be worth it. You could only make one or two copies without raising suspicion, and this book isn't all that rare. A hundred and fifty copies are known to exist, and that's pretty good for an Elizabethan book that isn't a bible."

"How much do you think it's worth?"

"A lot. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars maybe. But wouldn't it be easier to rob a bank than to counterfeit something like this? And then why would anyone send it to you anonymously in the mail, real or fake?"

"I don't know. Maybe they'll come to collect a pound of flesh later, but when they do I'll make them explain that inscription first."

"What inscription?"

I pointed out the handwriting in the upper right corner of the title page, in a nearly illegible hand and faded ink. It read:

To my dear friend, R. B.

-William Shakespeare.

"Your initials," Peg said.

"Isn't that funny. But wait a minute, didn't Shakespeare die in 1616, and wasn't the first edition of his plays posthumous?"

"Touche! Now you see why it can't possibly be real. Shakespeare couldn't have autographed it if he was already dead,"

"One minute. Let me check something." She left the room and came back a minute later with a book on Shakespeare, in which were reproduced the four extant signatures of the Bard. Ours matched one of them almost exactly.

"Somebody is one hell of a good forger," I said.

We kept the book as a curiosity. I took it to a rare book dealer once when the lure of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars became too much for me, and he went over it carefully. He asked me how I had come across it, and when I couldn't tell him he became very suspicious. Books like that don't drop out of the blue. Usually an individual copy has a known history with a long line of owners who can be traced. Eventually he refused to even make an offer on it, convinced that I was some sort of crook, and the book rested on our shelves ever after.

I took it down to glance through occasionally, and that was how I chanced to notice something written in quite modern ballpoint on the blank page following Troilus and Cressida. The handwriting was not my wife's, but it looked somehow familiar. The message was:

TEST RUN. ONLY THE BEGINNING.

***

That summer Peg and I went on vacation for all three months.

One of the wonderful things about teaching is that if you live modestly, hoard your money, are married to another teacher, and don't have any kids, you can afford to take the entire summer off sometimes and travel. That year we drove west to California, up through Oregon and Washington, then all the way across to Canada and down into Maine. When we got there we indulged in one of our quaint hobbies of dubious legality.

The backwoods areas of northern New England were cleared and farmed once, but the principle crop turned out to be rocks and the farmers went broke. They left their land and moved away, the result was a region of declining population scattered with empty farmhouses and barns, many half in ruins among overgrown fields and re-encroaching forests. Many of these were left partially furnished, filled with whatever the owners thought not worth taking or couldn't carry. Values change over the years, and what was junk in 1890 is often today a much sought after antique.

So what Peg and I have done more than once is find a particularly isolated abandoned house, break in and help ourselves. Sheriffs frown on it, but I don't think there's an antique dealer in the business who doesn't do the same. They don't see anything wrong with taking old books, plates, and furniture that have been left to the elements and neither do I. Call it an informal type of archeology.

We went treasure hunting in our station wagon at a place called Appleton Hidge which is off Route 1 near Rockland, atop miniature mountains. The view is spectacular on a clear day, and where the cliffs drop away you can see for miles across a wide green valley to the opposite slopes where another row of hills rise. Roads wind in long dusty lines, occasionally stirred by the speck of a car; houses are white matchboxes, and the cows in their pastures look like ants.

We spent a lot of time bouncing along the narrow rocky path that was the local excuse for a road.

We stopped and looked at the scenery, picked blueberries where they grew wild among barren slabs of boulder, and finally we found the house. It stood alone with weeds up to the windowsills facing a barn on the other side of the way with its roof fallen in. I knew there would be nothing in the barn that the wind and rain hadn't ruined long ago, but the house appeared to be in good shape. I parked the car out of sight behind the wreckage of the barn, perilously close to the edge of a cliff, and then Peg and I went around to the back of the house, found an open window, and climbed in.

The place had been looted before. Most of the furniture was gone or smashed, and there were empty liquor bottles scattered about, left by passing derelicts or the local teenagers. Broken glass was everywhere, and in many places plaster had fallen from the ceiling in heaps. We dug around in what must have been the kitchen looking for china plates - the kind they used to use as ballast on clipper ships and now sell for two and three figures - but came up with nothing.

It was only when we got upstairs that the pickings got any better. There we found a laboratory the vandals never touched.

All the upstairs rooms were empty save for one, which was locked, but it wasn't hard for me to break the door in. The first thing we noticed was that there was a statue in the middle of the room, a huge, extremely crude man-like figure with bat wings on its back and the trunk of an elephant for a face. Two deep holes represented eyesockets. Whoever made it hadn't been much of a sculptor, obviously.

Around on tables were pieces of chemical equipment, glassware, tubing, beakers with a gummy residue in them. These I passed over quickly, and forgot them entirely when I noticed what books were on the shelves that lined the walls.

"Peg! Look at this! It's impossible!"

The shelves were packed with crumbling leatherbound volumes. I picked one up and the spine left a brown smear on the palm of my hand.

I opened the book and it cracked. When I saw the title page I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a book of magic, the Grimoire of the sorcerer Honorius, and it was one of the most sought after books in the occult field. It was worth a fortune. Peg opened another at random, and it was something similar. "The guy must have been a wizard," I said. "And I halfway believe the lump of rock over there is in fact the original Golem, brought from de ghetto of Prague to... vork new ewils in dis land."

"The what? What are you talking about?"

"The Golem, dear, is, or maybe I should say was, a stone robot built by Rabbi Loew in medieval Prague to protect his people from persecution. He wrote the word for "life" on its forehead and that turned it on, and the only way to stop it was to erase the word. Unfortunately the thing didn't like having its word erased, so it got loose. Like Frankenstein's monster.

"I hope you're not serious about this. Besides, this writing doesn't look Jewish." She handed me a thick, squat volume in black leather.

"Hebrew, dear, and no I'm not serious. As for this book, it's in Latin, and it's a copy of Alhazred's screwy gibberings, collectively known as the Necronomicon. It's worth a mint, and I'm quite serious about that. We're rich, you know, and maybe sometime we can come back and have the statue made into a birdbath for the lawn of our estate I mean, look at these books!"

And look we did. There was another copy of the Necronomicon,

John Dee's English version, carefully sewn into what looked like late 18th century deluxe leather. The original was just unbound sheets, you recall. Also stuffed on those shelves, covered with cobwebs and filled with worm tooth-marks were such rarities as Ferdinand de Schertz's Magia Posthuma, Morryster's wild Marvels of Science the mind blasting Sonnets on Time by the crazed medieval monk Donaldius of Garthstead, Borellus' De Motu Animalium, The Book of Eibon bound in some sort of reptile hide, the Complete Works of Scott Edelstein, Magia Naturalis by Della Porta, the 1720 edition of Mason's Observations on Superhuman Natures, The Stone from Mnar undated, and perhaps five hundred more.

As we were carrying the books out of the house I remarked, "You know Peg, the guy who lived here must have found the philosopher's stone. Where else would he have gotten the gold to buy all these? This house hasn't been abandoned for more than fifty or sixty years. Necronomicon's didn't come cheap even then."

"Your friend Latham was interested in this sort of thing, wasn't he?"

"Yes, he was.”

"Well, I was thinking, now that we have so many, that we should send him a couple as a gift."

"Yeah, that would be nice."

We had intended to spend a coupl more days vacationing, but after we got the books loaded into the wagon we decided to head home right away. This cargo was too valuable to risk theft in a hotel parking lot. We made it to Amherst Massachusetts a few hours later, with only a few odd looks from the toll booth attendants on the turnpike.

The two of us spent the following week taking inventory of what we had, comparing them against prices in catalogues and reading some. The name of Latham Knucklebury came to me again in a very odd way, as I found another message written in a book, in the same hand that had marked out Shakespeare. It was on the flyleaf of an edition of Van Prims and read:

HAVEN'T YOU EVER WONDERED WHY THESE BOOKS ALWAYS TURN UP, DESPITE THEIR ALLEGED RARITY?

LK

Latham Knucklebury! It had to be.

"I have to be going dear.”

"Why? Where?"

"To Arkham," I said. "I’ll tell you more about it later. Hold the fort for me in the meantime. Bye."

And I was gone. West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and the roads are narrow, steep and treacherous through those deep woods that no axe has ever cut. Still I drove like a maniac, spewing dust and gravel in my wake. I showered a bearded old man and he raised his hand to make an odd sign against me, but I was gone around a bend in an instant.

***

“So you have come at last. Good," Latham Knucklebury said as he met me before the locked gates of the Miskatonic University campus.

"I knew you would be here. Your curiosity would force you to come."

He walked away from the gate, over the grass and along the wall.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I know a way in. I still have a key. Several keys in fact."

He took me through a tiny gate around the back, and we walked briskly across the empty campus, past rows of dormitories with gabled roofs and fanlighted doorways, until we came to a large brick building the size of a barn with no windows on the first floor. It had only one opening, a massive slab of metal which slid aside after Latham had inserted and turned a six-inch key.

"Now you see my work, and I hope you'll understand," he announced.

Inside was a single room, almost completely filled with a fantastic array of machinery of completely alien design. There were huge globes of transluscent glass, coils of tubing, cyclopean columns of a greenish metal, gigantic cubes, pyramids and cylinders, rhomboid-sided solids of impossible crystals, blue, red, and yellow, and some shapes defying any geometry I knew altogether. In front of all of it stood the image of what I took to be an animal, perhaps an incomplete specimen. It was as tall as an elephant, with four long, tapering legs, and covered all over with a rope-like hair of a vaguely purplish colour. It had no visible head or tail, and I wasn't sure which end was the front.

Latham Knucklebury climbed in among the machines, onto a three-pronged operator's pedestal obviously designed for anatomies other than human.

"Behold around you," he said, waving his hand showmanlike, "the innermost secret of Miskatonic University."

There was a faint humming sound coming from the hardware, which seemed to get a little louder as he spoke.

"Some secret; What's the hairy thing?"

"That's the builder of this apparatus, Richard, a being from beyond the Earth. Alone it came from distant Shaggai in centuries past. It transported all this machinery here and assembled it, then went into suspended animation when the task was completed. It is actually a low form of Shaggaian life, more like a dog than anything else in the ecology of that world."

"A Shaggai dog built this?"

"Yes. You see, the Old Ones are so advanced and incomprehensible to mankind, that they never lower themselves to touch mechanical objects at all. But this device was a vital part of their overall plan, so they sent the creature you see before you to set it up."

"Now wait a minute! This mutt looks stuffed to me." I tried to touch the thing with my finger, but suddenly a blue light arced over it, and I felt a strong electrical shock. I drew back, and found that my arm was numb past the elbow.

"Not stuffed,";said Knucklebury. "It's in a kind of time stasis. The beings of Shaggai have long since harnessed Time.”

"Tell me more," I said, nursing my arm.

Latham was no longer merely conversing. He began to take on a fanatical tone, like a soapbox preacher ranting for revolution. He got down from his stool and began to shout and point.

"The Old Ones are the masters of all cosmic forces, Richard, and they have bided their time while the superstitious rabble forgot them and went on to new hysterias. The men who first discovered this equipment were persecuted as witches. Later others came, and to hide the frightful object from view they built this hall around it and locked the massive door, after the Shaggaian machinery proved indestructable despite all the childish efforts of the Puritans to smash it as a work of the Devil. Eventually braver and wiser souls arrived, men who understood. They built Miskatonic University on this site to mask their true activities. Only a few of all those who have studied here ever came inside this building. When I was here in my last year there were only nine professors and three graduate students who were part of our brotherhood.

We alone knew, and had the power-"

"What power? What does this gizmo do?”

"Have you never heard of the Great Old Ones, who came to this world ere mankind was even an idea in the mind of a deranged amobea?

The-Old Ones are; the Old Ones were; the Old Ones shall be. They came from the stars and ruled over the Earth in Their mysterious ways, until they were cast down by forces even more terrible. But They shall come again and drive the human scum from the globe. I tell you -"

"You tell me just what all this is about, because I still haven't the slightest idea. What has this contraption and that - that whatever it is - got to do with anything? Where did those old books come from, and how did you know we would come to that particular house? We didn’t know ourselves until we got there."

"Like I said, the Old Ones have made Time their servant. I merely looked ahead, saw that you would go there, and deposited what I wanted you to find. By our science such a thing is inconcievable, but to the Old Ones it is nothing."

"Well thanks, but I really couldn't take them all from you -"

"Richard, you will take them and you will read them and you will -"

"I won't do anything unless you tell me where they came from."

"Alright then, if you must know, this device here bends the fabric of space. When you do that something coexists with itself. I merely took the extra copy each time."

"Huh?"

"Did you by chance notice the stamps on the wrapping to the Shakespeare book?”

"No, I didn't."

"Well you should have, because they're all 1856 British Guiana one cent magenta, the rarest stamp in the world, worth easily $75,000.

Only one copy is known to exist, and you have six. And that is a demonstration of my power. It has nothing to do with my true purpose."

"Tell me, did you get Shakespeare's autograph with your space bending machine?"

"Of course. I took the book back, asked him to autograph it, and brought it to our own time again. He took me for a magician, and said I had inspired him to write a play about a magician.”

"The Tempest."

"Maybe so, but in any case, They of Shaggai and Yuggoth have no interest in Shakespeare. This machine was designed to mass produce mouldering and unquestionably authentic copies of the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and all the rest, so they would get wide circulation and inevitably fall into the hands of those who know how to use them."

"Wouldn't it be a lot simpler just to publish the Necronomicon in paperback?"

"What? No, don't be silly. It would vanish into the occult racks without a ripple. People would think Lin Carter wrote it. I want these copies to be believed."

He was clearly mad, or at least half mad. I didn't understand half of what he said, but what was clear was simply more of his screwball ravings magnified enormously. I didn't feel like humouring him any more.

"Is this your idea of a joke?"

At that he grew wild with rage.

"Joke? Do you take me for a prankster? No, I tell you it is my plan to bring the Old Ones back in our own time! When I am done every occultist, every satanist, every teenaged witch, every person on the planet with the slightest amount of curiosity will have a copy of Alhazred. They'll read it aloud, speak spells they don't understand, and the gates will be ripped back, and the Old Ones will come through and clear the world of all human garbage. Nothing will be left of what was!"

This was ridiculous. I didn't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. I tried to show him the illogic of his fantasy.

"Yes, but if that happens, won’t everybody be killed, including you, Latham Knuokleberry?”

"No, I shall not die, for the blood of Dagon and Cthulhu runs deep in me. Those who are touched by Them and who serve Them shall live on in new and glorious life."

"You really are crazy. Chambers was right."

"No, I am not crazy, Richard. I am not entirely human, nor are you."

"Me? What do you mean I'm not human?"

"Through my machines I know more than you think, about the world, about you, Professor Richard Brown. What happened to those tentacles on your chest?"

"How did you ever -? The doctor cut them off when I was a baby! A birth defect."

"Your tail, Richard! The scales down your back. What of them?"

"What the hell are you, some kind of peeping tom?”

"Richard, I know you have webbing between your toes!"

"Shut up you madman! Shut up!"

"la Hastur! Tonight the stars are right! The time of Their return is at hand!"

I turned and fled from that place in blind terror. Behind me the machinery began to whir and clank. As I passed a copy of Cultes des Ghoules slid down a chute and fell into a basket. The blue light arced again and the nameless creature from Shaggai began to stir. I glimpsed over my shoulder - God, that I had not! - and saw that the creature 's head was not at the front or the back, but in the middle!

The last thing I heard was the shrill voice of Latham Knucklebury cackling in hideous, obscene triumph .

"Run you coward! Run and die; You won't escape Them. Ia! Ia Hastur! We want a touchdown! Ia! Harken ye, O Dark Ones, to the ancient words! Ia Shub-Niggurath! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth.”

***

Three months have passed since that frightful spectacle at Miskatonic University, and I know now that I should not have run away. I should have allied myself with Latham Knucklebury and the demonic forces he served, for then I would have had some hope of survival .

Since last I saw him there have been signs and wonders, reports of strange lights in the sky, unheard of shapes rising out of the seas, monsters roaming the countryside, and even a walking winged statue haunting New England.

This morning the sun did not rise. There are no stars, and a black shroud has fallen over the world. I can hear nothing but static on the radio and my watch has stopped, so I know not what hour it is, but I know that all over the globe cities are in flame, and humankind reels before its last, irresistable nemesis. The Old Ones have returned and again they walk the face of their ancient home!

I shall not live long now! The last news bulletin was two days ago, and Professor Chambers has been found murdered in his office, with inhuman three-toed footprints in blood on the ceiling. A similar doom awaits me -

God! Downstairs! My wife is screaming. Something has shattered the living room window! I hear the flapping of leathern wings! Outside in the hall! The house is filled with smoke! Terrible stench! Hell-wind!

"Help me The three-lobed burning pustule..."

Harold’s Blues

by Glen Singer

Editor’s Note:

The following material concerns the legendary blues guitarist Harold Robinson, who in a short but full life produced twenty-four records which had a very profound influence upon later blues musicians. His intricate slide-guitar technique became a definitive factor in the development of the post-World War II urban electrified blues. The editor hopes that this interview will fill in many important gaps in Robinson’s biography, despite some of the fanciful notions described within it.

The interview itself was recorded in the field, near Tillman’s Station, Mississippi, on September 28, 1943, by Pete Ford and Gregory Koplowitz. The subject of the interview was Hanson Kirkland, a guitarist of slight renown who appears to have been Robinson’s closest acquaintance. The material of the following interview was transcribed from tape by the authors and was to have appeared in a projected book entitled The Folk Roots of America. Unfortunately, this project was never completed, for both Ford and Kopowitz were killed in an automobile accident outside Helena, Arkansas, on June 21, 1947. Some of the Ford-Koplowitz material was published in Leslie Baum’s American Negro Music (New York: Holcomb House, 1951). This, however, is the first publication of the Kirkland interview.

An expression of gratitude is due to the executors of the Koplowitz estate, who were of great assistance in the publication of the document.

* * * * *

Now, Harold, many people say he’s dead; but others, they don’t agree. Me, I know. The story has it a bunch of mad women got hold of him around Jackson and give him poison. That ain’t true. ’Course, that’s a good story to believe, ’cause, at times, Harold did have a way with the ladies. At least, that’s what I heard, though that weren’t the way that he was when I first knew him. He was opposite to that, all the way.

The first I remember about Harold was when he was still just a kid, wide-eyed and full of dreaming. He couldn’t play nothing then. I first saw him when Yancey and I and Pa Simms come down to Dumphy, for one of them barbecues they used to have in those days. He sat there the whole time, never saying a word, just sat, looking and watching. A long string-bean kid, kind of light and, like I say, all eyes. He watched us way late into the evening, when all the other folks was pulling out the cork and not caring much about our music. He come over then, when I was taking a blow, catching a little wind, and asked me straight off to teach him to play. I showed him some few things, but it all seemed to come hard to him. So, I told him to take time and learn some. He nodded and shucked a little, then split, real scared- like. Plenty of other kids are the same.

After that time, whenever we come down, he was always there, and after a while he come up again and said he’d learned some stuff. He showed me what he knew. I have to say it weren’t much, kind of scratchy noise, that’s all. So I smiled, like I should with a kid, and told him to keep on trying and that more would come.

About that time I got married to my first wife, Glory, and it turns up that Harold’s her cousin. So, I guess that it was really then that I started knowing Harold. Right after we got together, Glory and I and her ma went over to see Harold’s pa—he was Glory’s cousin—down at Griffen’s Farm, near Lake Chataw. Glory’s ma and pa, they were easy-type folks and didn’t mind me and my Saturday-night devil music at all. But Harold’s folks, that was a different story. They was halle-lujah-people with a set of rules that run a solid mile. I never did see a people in one family so different. They had Harold running here and there all the time, doing chores and working, whenever he could, in the fields. On Sunday, they dragged him off to the meetinghouse as soon as the sun come up. It was all he could do to sneak a little time off by himself, behind the bam. How he ever made it to those barbecues of ours, I’ll never know either. I guess he just paid with the back of his britches.

Later on, Harold’s pa died and he come up to live with me and my wife. That was around ’36 or so. He was about sixteen then, and his oats was fit to bust out all over. When he come to the house first day, I give him an old cigar box I’d made and strung, when I was still learning, and told him to get down to his stuff on that Harold still didn’t quite get the knack of the thing. He kept on playing every day, practiced real hard, but to no use. At the time, I was working on Moore’s Farm, near here, and I was playing every weekend. I didn’t want to push Harold to work none, ’cause we had money enough and I figured he could use some time to himself. And that boy, man, he wanted to play, but it wouldn’t come. Sometimes he got fierce over it, mad enough to cry. The boy had the music in him, the blues, I mean, but they just stayed there inside.

Harold and me and Glory was all together about a year and some months, then Glory and me took to fighting and kicking and the whole thing busted up. All of us went our own ways. I stayed at Moore’s, and where Glory went I don’t know. Harold, I think, went back down by Griffen’s—I’m not sure; didn’t see him for a long time.

Really, when I think on it, there ain’t much more to tell about Harold as a kid. I mean, he was just like any kid, though maybe a little more hard on himself, that’s all. After he lived with me and Glory, I guess I only seen him twice again, at the beginning and the end. But I’ll tell all that.

*

It was a couple of years later I next seen him. It was almost like he was waiting. I was back at Dumphy, playing, and Harold come over during our time out; I asked if he was still playing and such like, and he says, yes. He’d filled out by now, and was something around nineteen then. He’d a fine-looking girl with him, though now I can’t remember her name. He said he was going down by Bachelar Creek to play a house party and he told me to come over after I finished up, if I could. I said I’d try; he told me where the house was, then he took off.

I stayed around pretty late that night, and since I wasn’t together with no woman, I really put away quite a bit. I mean, I was wobbly. Anyway, about two, I took off to see Harold. The wind had come up and was whaling around in the leaves. There was that summer lightning, all silent, lighting up the sky every now and then. I stumbled and I staggered down toward Bachelar and cut myself all up on the branches and fell down badly a couple of times. The lightning stopped, but then the sky got terrible black and it was hard to find the way. And the old wind kept whipping up those trees.

How I found the house Harold was at, I’ll never know, but finally I saw it, though only one light was on, and I thought to myself that it certainly didn’t look like there was no party going on. I walked up to the place, but I never got to the door. I looked in the window when I went by, and there was Harold, all alone, except for another stud. I didn’t see the gal that left with him, nor nobody else. But that cat in the house Was something else; the kind you don’t see around these parts. He was decked out all strange, wearing a long red robelike thing and had a big gold chain hanging round his neck. His head was all covered in something like an Arab would wear. But it was his face that put the chills on me. I don’t know how to talk about it. It was mean and it was old, hit, I don’t know, kind of young, too, at the same time. All that while he stood there, his eyes was burning and mad-looking, like he wanted to kill somebody. And he just stood. That’s all I saw; never said a word, never moved. He was set there, loose and tough, like a cat. Harold, he was in front of him, fingering something in his hand, talking real excited-like, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. His guitar was standing in a comer and everything else was empty.

I weren’t sure about going in, but I had just about made up my mind, when a screech, real scary and evil, come from the other side of the creek there. It come again, long and louder. I turned and headed down toward the creek, figuring there was somebody in trouble, but when I was near there, another noise started up, at first a kind of mumbling, then sort of like a song. It was a singing, you know. And there was this whistling, like is played on swamp reeds hereabouts. That whistling noise went for a while, then would stop. I pulled back right there. My head was spinning round from all the drink I had, and with the sky so black and the wind pulling all round, I felt the fear come into me. I fixed to head back to the cabin and get Harold, but when I looked round, the light was gone. Just then, words begun to come, though they sounded farther away, sounded, too, like they was being said in some kind of foreign language; strange words like “Shubby Niggrath, Shubby Niggrath.” That’s all I can remember. That was enough. It sounded like voodoo talk to me, even though I’d never given much belief to those notions.

Well, anyway, I turned back, all messed up, trying to decide where to go. The house was all dark, and that singing and chanting, or whatever, was getting even louder. Some drums somewhere began to pound, and the reed pipes was fair screaming.

Just then, the wind blew harder than a thousand and the clouds must’ve scattered away, for the moonlight come bright. Down by the creek there was a splashing and I seen some big horse kind of thing going around, coming toward me. I guess you could say it was a horse, though it looked to have a set of goatlike horns on it. But then I’d drunk pretty much, like I say. And I seen lights too, little lights that looked to be clouds, blinking all round in the air.

Well, I turned and run through the woods, tearing myself all to pieces, falling and running. I guess I was just plain scared of the hoodoo. I run all the way back to Blarney’s place, where I was staying, and beat on the door. Blainey finally got me calm and told me I’d drunk too much. At last I got myself to sleep, and man, did I sleep like the dead through the day! When I got myself up everything was dearer and all that stuff in the woods down at Bachelar, I figured, was only drunk-dreaming.

After that crazy night, I looked some for Harold, but couldn’t find him. I heard that the girl that was with him was gone too. But I figured that her and Harold must have headed off together. A little later, somebody, I forgot who, told me that Harold had gone off to Jackson to look round for some work. Well, that was quite natural in those days, since times wasn’t easy for many. I figured, too, that maybe Harold was marrying himself to that little gal.

Maybe a couple of months after that, I was back down at Moore’s, at the store, one night. I heard this tune playing in the back. The voice was pitched high and the guitar was Whining out, sad and broke. It sounded like an old man crying in his throat. I asked who made that song and Willy Bukha asked if I didn’t know a friend when I heard one. Well, it was good, that record, but if I listened real hard, I could hear some of that young kid in the back of it, scratching, fit to cry. That was Harold Robinson’s first record, Lost Highway Blues. Later, Harold told me he’d recorded it at the old Blue Star Company, in Jackson. I couldn’t get over how a boy could come along so far, in so little time. He was all over that record, playing runs, plunging in, real hard and mean. Harold made a couple more after that one, before I saw him again. One, I remember, was called Hudson Blues, and another, I think, was Old Devil at my Door.

Well, things went OK for me and I continued on pretty much the same. A little while after I had heard Harold’s record, I went up to Greenville and recorded a couple of songs. That’s when I made Lonesome Piney and ABC Blues.

I guess you might remember them. After that, I got to playing round more and was a little famous. Things was going good.

*

One night, about three years after I first heard them records of Harold’s, I was down at Collierville with Pa Simms and Elias Parker, who was calling himself Mobile Red at the time, and we was playing a club. I can’t remember the name. We was laying on our stuff heavy and sounding good. During the break, somebody said, “Hey, man, it’s me.” I turned round and there was Harold, but it wasn’t like old times. I didn’t know him at first, though it wasn’t like he was so different either. But man, he had changed. He was nothing like a kid no more. He was smoothed and slick, dressed to knock the gals out; looked bad.

Well, this time, the first time ever with me, he asked to sit in. I said sure, and he did play that night, ripping right in, talking. There wasn’t none of us as good as him and none of us would probably ever be that good. Pa Simms and I just stared at one another. Good, man—he was better than those records, his hand sliding up and down with that bottleneck shining bright. I can’t tell you really how he played or what it sounded like, ’cause his music did so many things. It just seemed to take hold of him and stretch out real tight, like it was going to break. At the same time, it scratched and clawed and cried. It wailed and it said, “Come here to me, ease my mind.” There was never nothing else like it.

Harold played that night, and none of us broke in. The place was his and I was happy to watch. One song after another come out. Some of them I’d heard before, old stuff from Hubie White and Panama Mac, and plenty of stuff of his own invention that I’d never heard before, crazy stuff about the devil and the hoodoo and such like.

About halfway through, somebody give Harold a pint of whiskey and he began to drinking while he played on. Pretty soon he got loose and the sound come even better. He then started to talk out to the people on the floor, you know, between songs. And the women, they took to it, like Harold had some kind of magic in him. He looked back at them, up and down, and I was worrying some, ’cause I didn’t know these parts well and didn’t want no trouble. At first, it was the regular stuff, like about being lucky and the seventh son and having a mojo, all that kind of nonsense that you will usually hear from the younger cats. But, like I say, the gals really took it as being something special, nonetheless. After a while, they was all crowding the platform. And Harold, he was into it, and his talk got fiercer. He went on about how he was the devil’s son-in-law and a natural-born gypsy lover. When he played, the music got faster, ripping and sliding and moaning on. That guitar of his was doing things that it didn’t know how. Somehow, the room was fair screaming, not only with the music, but everything: Harold, the guitar, the women, even the air was fired up.

Then he quits, right in the middle of a song. Just quits, and everything gets quiet. Harold’s eyes are red and strange. He then pulls open his shirt and there’s this green kind of charm thing hanging about his neck. I ain’t ever seen nothing like it, though that don’t mean much, ’cause I never went far from here, nowhere. Anyway, Harold pulls this thing from round his neck and yells out something like “Shubby Niggrath, Shubby Niggrath. Bullshit, man. Don’t need it. I’m going to say it’s in me, nowhere else. I’m Harold Robinson and this music, it’s me, too. Don’t need no fool bad sign.”

He threw that thing from round his neck, way back, into a corner. Nobody, ’course, could make no sense of the whole business, except that I begun to think about what I thought I seen that night, down on Bachelar Creek. Everybody else didn’t give it too much mind, but they did quiet down and stare some. But mostly, they just figured he was young and wild and had drunk too much. Harold, himself, he just stood there a minute, looking mad and, maybe, a little mixed-up. Then he picked up his box, real slow-like. He started to play again, but this time the music was only crying and soft, real sad. And Harold’s voice, it was trembly and up high, sounding like it was stretching out for some help. Harold didn’t play much more, just a few songs. Then he put down the box, real gentle, and headed out the door, silent as a snake. Pa Simms and I and Elias finished up, hut for some reason, we was flat and that last of Harold’s music made us feel real low.

So, we finished up about one, and got together our stuff. I was still thinking about Harold and his music and that Shubby Niggrath stuff. You know, I was wondering about it all. Couldn’t make much sense of the whole deal. It was good to get out of that club, though, and feel the coolness. Pa Simms and I was going over to his cousin’s, where we was staying, and Elias took off for the night with some gal. The road over to Albert’s—that was Pa’s cousin—was about two mile long and we walked along there without talking too much. We was a way up the road, when I seen Harold coming down toward us, weaving around, drunk-like.

When he got up close, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t booze that was bothering him. He was shaky-scared and lost looking. All the smoothness and hard-cut was gone from him. He come up and kind of stuttered out about if he could come and stay with us the night. Pa, he says, sure, and we all started out along together. At first, Harold didn’t say nothing; just trailed along, head down.

I was wondering about what had got hold of him, but I didn’t ask straight out. Instead, I went on about where he’d been, since I seen him last; stuff like that. Well, he answered OK, but sounded quiet, even then. He said he’d been up to Jackson for a while and then over to Memphis and St. Louis; said he’d been in Texas, too. I told him about the records of his I’d heard and how good they’d been. He said those records wasn’t all, but that he’d cut more in Memphis and St. Louis and that maybe I’d hear them all someday. Those were the ones, you know, that got real famous later on, like Black Widow Blues and Satan Closing Down on Me and She Devil Moan.

We talked about such things till we got to Albert’s place. Harold was still acting funny, but I didn’t ask no more, figuring all would come out in due time. We talked awhile with Albert, though Harold stayed on being still. Then we bedded down. I don’t know when it was, maybe a couple of hours later, or less, when Harold come over and got me up to talk. We went out back and set on the old wagon there. It was then that I noticed how scared Harold had got; I mean, even more than he was.

He looked at me, all shaky, and says straight off, just like that, “Hansom, I ain’t going to make it out of this night. Man, you’re looking at the dead.” At first, I laughed and told him that he just had got hisself up too high during the evening; though, course, I was still wondering some, myself. He wouldn’t have none of that and he kept right on talking about how he had a curse on him, and how the devil-woman thing was going to come and get him. He said he knew that the she-devil was coming tonight, before the sun got up. He told me Shubby Niggrath was on his trail, hunting him down. Well, ’course, he didn’t know I’d ever made it down to Bachelar Creek that night and I didn’t let on I was there. I just asked who this Shubby Niggrath fellow was. Then he told me the whole thing.

It seems he’d been up around Dumphy for a year before I saw him that night, learning his licks and so on. Then this circus-like thing come to town—you know, wagons and potions and music and magic tricks. Well, the head of this circus, he called hisself something like Nya-lee-hotop, the Egyptian Cobra King. He claimed he knew secrets that went far back in time and that he’d been around when kings lived. But Harold, he was interested in something else about the cat. That was that he could play the guitar like steel lightning. Harold begun to go over to where that circus was camped out and the Cobra King would play. Harold said his own playing was nothing, compared to that man’s.

Anyway, the Cobra King took to liking Harold and said he’d show him how to play and how to make the songs Harold wanted to play come out He told about how he had a black cat bone and a mojo hand to help him, but, you know, such talk is common in these parts. He went on, telling Harold about having traveled around and having been in Boston or Philadelphia, or one of those places, and about how there they knew the same secrets he knew, secrets he’d learned as a king back in Egypt. I guess that king stuff was all nonsense, though it’s hard to tell, seeing as what happened. Anyway, the King he pledged Harold that with help from him he would play like sixty. And Harold, he went right along with him.

Harold then told me that the night I had seen him at Dumphy was the night he went to see Nya-lee-hotop to learn the secret of the pledge from him. He said they met one another at the campground and some of the folks from the King’s circus was decked out all flashy in long robes, while some others of them had nothing on at all. They was all chanting and singing in some funny language. That was the first time Harold heard of Shubby Niggrath. The Cobra King, he explained some, telling Harold that Shubby Niggrath was a goat-woman with a thousand kids and that she was older than old, going way back in time to before there was no world. He said she was strong and might give a man the power to do all: to play music, to love women, to make hisself king. He told that she was from the earth and her power flowed upon a man through his bones, right out of the ground. He then made Harold say all kinds of words he didn’t understand and to walk around in a strange way, like in squares and angles. After that, they went across the creek together, up to the house where I seen them, v Harold talked about the same noises I’d heard, but said he didn’t know what caused them, though he figured that it was the King’s people getting whipped up. In the cabin, the King give Harold a charm-thing, made from some green, slippery rock, and Harold thought maybe it was a picture of the goat-lady, but in all the time he wore it, he never made up his mind. And then the King made Harold swear that if he wore the thing, he’d never take it from round his neck, and said that Shubby Niggrath was always watching and waiting. Harold, he promised outright, saying that he didn’t care, as long as the thing would help the music come out. Then the King made Harold get onto his knees, and he put the thing round his neck. Everything went dark, and Harold felt that charm fair burning his skin. He said that the room got terrible hot and that he couldn’t get no breath. Then he felt like there was some huge thing in there with him and he smelled animal smells coming down fierce. That’s all he remembered, and next thing he knew, he was laying on the road, right out- side Dumphy, coming back to his senses.

Nothing seemed to have changed, to Harold. He wondered if maybe he’d dreamed it all about the King. But when he next lay hands on a guitar, everything was different. The music just jumped from his fingers, like fire, and songs came to him that he never knew was in his head.

Well, Harold stopped there, in the story, real long and looked out at the trees. I waited, ’cause I knew there was more to tell. Finally, he says, “Hey, man, you know why I went up to Jackson? Remember that gal I was with at that night at Dumphy? Well, I gave her to them, the King and his people. After that night, I knew she’d never come back.”

After that, we both just sat for maybe a half-hour, neither of us saying nothing, though I felt tight inside. Then Harold turned to me, sudden-like, his eyes smoking, like he was mad. He says, “Baby, when I threw that goat-stone away, I didn’t know what I was up against. I was never sorry for that deal I made with the King, even with whatever happened to that gal. Man, I threw that thing away, ’cause I thought I had it. I mean, I thought that music was mine. Now I know I was wrong. The whole thing looks different. I’m waiting and it’s going to get me, soon.”

Harold didn’t say much more; just told me he was going to wait, ’cause there weren’t no escape. Then he pushed me to get back in the house and not to butt in, no matter what; said he almost brung me down before, when he didn’t know what it all meant, meaning Bachelar Creek, I guess. I begged like a father to a son, but he’d have none of it; and so I went back inside and lay there, all awake, waiting with him.

It happened soon after that, and real fast, so fast I hardly can recall. I was laying there, listening to the wind, all hushed and soft, when of a sudden it turned to a storm, blowing hell. The wind was like that night at Bachelar Creek, whaling at the trees and crying. And then there was light in the sky, like a glow, getting brighter and brighter, but still kind of dark, not like the sun.

Then, like a knife, Harold’s scream come through the might, wailing, almost like one of his songs, pitched high and tumbling down to nothing. It only come once, but I’ll remember it always. Pa and Albert jumped up and was almost at the door, but I didn’t need to stop them, for the fear hit them quick. They stood still, shaking like me. Then the smell come in strong and my stomach almost leaped out my mouth. It was like poison, and I swear, man, I could fair feel it on my skin, pressing hard, and hot. Then it went, all of it: the smell, the light, the wind. Everything was dead still a minute, but real quick, far off in the woods, I heard them swamp reeds playing wild, and voices singing. Again I heard them singing to Shubby Niggrath, just like before. Them voices went on till the sun came up, and Pa Simms and I and Albert just sat, too scared to move.

Finally, the sun got up and the birds begun to sing, but we still sat there, for a long time. By noon it was hot and the chanting was long gone. It was then that we finally got the nerve to walk out and look around.

There wasn’t nothing there. Everything was clean as bone: no tracks, nothing. Harold was gone, just vanished away. No one ever seen him again.

When I think on it now, it all is kind of foggy. Pa and Albert is both dead, and sometimes I get to thinking that maybe it was all a dream, or some kind of spell. Sometimes I don’t believe none of it. But then I can still hear that scream, and I still remember that animal thing thrashing through Bachelar Creek. I heard them sing to Shubby Niggrath, too. There was something, and it took Harold, ’cause he crossed it. I don’t know if Harold did right or wrong in getting mixed up with it, but I do know, whatever made Harold to make that music, no matter what it was, man, it made the best damn blues you ever heard!

Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley

by Richard A. Lupoff

Surveillance of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church of San Diego was initiated as a result of certain events of the mid and late 1970s. Great controversy had arisen over the conduct of the followers of the Guru Maharaj-ji, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishna’s”), the Church of Scientology, and the Unification Church headed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

These activities were cloaked in the Constitutional shield of “freedom of religion,” and the cults for the most part resisted suggestions of investigation by grand juries or other official bodies.

Even so, the tragic events concerning the People’s Temple of San Francisco aroused government concern which could not be stymied. While debate raged publicly over the question of opening cult records, federal and local law enforcement agencies covertly entered the field.

It was within this context that interest was aroused concerning the operation of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, and concerning its leader, the Radiant Mother Elizabeth Akeley.

Outwardly there was nothing secret in the operation of Mother Akeley’s church. The group operated from a building located at the corner of Second Street and Ash in a neighborhood described as “genteel shabby,” midway between the commercial center of San Diego and the city’s tourist-oriented waterfront area.

The building occupied by the church had been erected originally by a more conventional denomination, but the vicissitudes of shifting population caused the building to be deconsecrated and sold to the Spiritual Light Brotherhood. The new owners, led by their order’s founder and then-leader, the Radiant Father George Goodenough Akeley, clearly marked the building with its new identity.

The headline was changed on the church’s bulletin board, and the symbol of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, a shining tetrahedron of neon tubing, was erected atop the steeple. A worship service was held each Sunday morning, and a spiritual message service was conducted each Wednesday evening.

In later years, following the death of the Radiant Father in 1971 and the accession to leadership of the church by Elizabeth Akeley, church archives were maintained in the form of tape recordings. The Sunday services were apparently a bland amalgam of nondenomina- tional Judeo-Christian teachings, half-baked and quarter-understood Oriental mysticism, and citations from the works of Einstein, Heisenberg, Shklovskii, and Fermi.

Surviving cassettes of the Wednesday message service are similarly innocuous. Congregants were invited to submit questions or requests for messages from deceased relatives. The Radiant Mother accepted a limited number of such requests at each service. The congregants would arrange themselves in a circle and link their fingers in the classic manner of participants in seances. Mother Akeley would enter a trance and proceed to answer the questions or deliver messages from the deceased, “as the spirits moved her.”

Audioanalysis of the tapes of these seances indicates that, while the intonation and accent of the voices varied greatly, from the whines and lisps of small children to the quaverings of the superannuated, and from the softened and westernized pronunciations of native San Diegans to the harsh and barbaric tones of their New Yorker parents, the vocal apparatus was at all times that of Elizabeth Akeley. The variations were no greater than those attainable by an actress of professional training or natural brilliance.

Such, however, was not the case with a startling portion of the cassette for the session of Wednesday, June 13th, 1979.The Radiant Mother asked her congregants if anyone had a question for the spirits or if any person present wished to attempt contact with some deceased individual.

A number of questions were answered, dealing with the usual matters of marriage and divorce, reassurances of improved health, and counseling as to investments and careers.

An elderly congregant who was present stated that her husband had died the previous week, and she sought affirmation of his happiness “on the other side.”

The Radiant Mother moaned. Then she muttered incoherently. All of this was as usual at the beginning of her trances. Shortly the medium’s vocal quality altered. Her normally soft, rather pleasant and distinctly feminine voice dropped in register until it suggested that of a man. Simultaneously, her contemporary Californian diction turned into the twang of a rural New Englander.

While the sound quality of this tape is excellent, the medium’s diction was unfortunately not so. The resulting record is necessarily fragmentary. As nearly as it has been transcribed, this is it:

“Wilmarth... Wilmarth...back. Have come... Antares... Neptune, Pluto, Yuggoth. Yes, Wilmarth. Yug—

“Are you...If I cannot receive...Windham County...yes, Townshend...round hill. Wilmarth still alive? Then who... son, son...

... ever receives... communicate enough Akeley, 176 Pleasant... go, California. Son, see if you can find my old friend Albert Wilmarth...chusetts...

“With wings. Twisted ropes for heads and blood like plant sap .

... Flying, flying, and all the while a gramophone recordi... use apologize to Wilmarth if he’s still alive, but I also have the most wonderful news, the most wonderful tales to tell him...

“... and its smaller satellites, well, I don’t suppose anyone will believe me, of course, but not only is Yuggoth there, revolving regularly except in an orbit at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic, no wonder no one believed in it, but what I must describe to you, Albert, the planet glows with a heat and a demoniacal ruby glare that illuminates its own... thon and Zaman, Thog and Thok, I could hardly believe my own...

"...goid beings who cannot...corporeally...Neptune...central caverns of a dark star beyond the rim of the galaxy its...

...wouldn’t call her beautiful, of course...dinary terms... than an arachnid and a cetacean, and yet, could a spider and dolphin by some miracle establish mental communion, who knows what...not really a name as you normally think of names, but... Sh'ch’rrrua'a...of Aldebaran, the eleventh, has a constellation of inhabited moons, which... independently, or perhaps at some earlier time, traveling by means simi...

"... ummate in metal canisters, will be necessary to . . . aid in obtaining . . . fair exchange, for the donors will receive a far greater boon in the form..."

At this point the vocal coherence, such as it is, breaks down. The male voice with its New England twang cracks and rises in tone even as the words are replaced by undecipherable mumbles. Mother Akeley recovers from her trance state, and the seance draws quickly to a close. From the internal evidence of the contents of the tape, the Radiant Mother had no awareness of the message, or narration, delivered by the male voice speaking through her. This also is regarded, among psychic and spiritualistic circles, as quite the usual state of affairs with trance mediums.

Authorities next became aware of unusual activities through a copy of the Vermont Unidentified Flying Object Intelligencer, or Vufoi. Using a variety of the customary cover means and addresses for the purpose, such federal agencies as the FBI, NSA, Department of Defense, NASA, and National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Agency subscribe regularly to the publications of organizations like the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau and other self-appointed investigatory bodies.

The President of the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau and editor if its Intelligencer was identified as one Ezra Noyes. Noyes was known to reside with his parents (Ezra was nineteen years of age at the time) in the community of Dark Mountain, Windham County. Noyes customarily prepared Vufoi issues himself, assembling material both from outside sources and from members of the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau, most of whom were former high school friends now employed by local merchants or farmers, or attending Windham County Community College in Townshend.

Noyes would assemble his copy, type it onto mimeograph stencils using a portable machine set upon the kitchen table, and run off copies on a superannuated mimeograph kept beside the washer and dryer in the basement. The last two items prepared for each issue were “Vufoi Voice” and “From the Editor’s Observatory,” commenting in one case flippantly and in the other seriously, on the contents of the issue. “Vufoi Voice” was customarily illustrated with a crude cartoon of a man wearing an astronaut’s headgear, and was signed “Cap’n Oof-oh.” "From the Editor’s Observatory” was illustrated with a drawing of an astronomical telescope with a tiny figure seated at the eyepiece, and was signed “Intelligencer.”

It is believed that both “Cap’n Oof-oh” and “Intelligencer” were Ezra Noyes.

The issue of the Vermont Unidentified Flying Object Intelligencer for June, 1979, actually appeared early in August of that year. Excerpts from the two noted columns follow:

From the Editor’s Observatory

Of greatest interest since our last issue—and we apologize for missing the March, April and May editions due to unavoidable circumstances—has been the large number of organic sightings here in the southern Vermont region. We cannot help draw similes to the infamous Colorado cattle mutilizations of the past year or few years, and the ill-conceived Air Farce coverup efforts which only draw extra attention to the facts that they can't hide from us who know the Truth!"

Local historians like Mr. Littleton at the High School remember other incidents and the Brattleboro Reformer and Arkham Advertiser and other Newspapers whose back files constitute an Official Public Record could tell the story of other incidents like this one! It is hard to reconciliate the Windham County sightings and the Colorado Cattle Mutilization Case with others such as the well-known Moth Man sightings in the Southland and especially the batwing crea-

cure sightings of as long as a half of a century ago but with a sufficient ingeniusity as is definitely not a task beyond undertaking and the U.S. Air Farce and other cover-up agencies are hear-bye placed on Official notice that such is our intention and we will not give up until success is ours and the Cover-up is blown an Sky-High as the UFO sightings themselves!

Yours until our July issue,

Intelligencer.

Vufoi Voice

Bat-wing and Moth Man indeed! Didn’t I read something like that in Detective Comics back when Steve Englehart was writing for DC? Or was it in Mad? Come to think of it, when it’s hard to tell the parody from the original, things are gettin' mighty strange.

And there gettin’ mighty strange around here!

We wonder what the ole Intelligencer’s been smoking in that smelly meerschaum he affects around Intelligence Bureau meetings. Could it be something illegal that he grows for himself up on the mountainside? Or is he just playing Sherlock Holmes?

We ain’t impressed.

Impressionable, yep! My mom always said I was impressionable as a boy, back on the old asteroid farm in Beta Reticuli, but this is too silly for words.

Besides, she tuck me to the eye dock and he fitted us out with a pair of gen-yew-ine X-ray specs, and that not only cured us of Reticule-eye but now we can see right through such silliness as bat-winged moth men carrying silvery canisters around the skies and hillsides with ’em.

Shades of a Japanese Sci-Fi Flick! This musta been the stuntman out for lunch!

And that’s where we think the old Intelligencer is this month: Out 2 Lunch!

Speaking of which, I haven’t had mine yet this afternoon, and if I don’t hurry up and have it pretty soon it’ll be time for dinner and then I’ll have to eat my lunch for a bedtime snack and that’ll confuse the dickens out of my poor stomach! So I’m off to hit the old frigidaire (not too hard, I don’t want to spoil the shiny finish on my new spaceman’s gloves!), and I’ll see you-all nextish!

Whoops, here’s our saucer now! Bye-bye,

Cap’n Oof-oh.

Following the extraordinary spiritual message service of June 13, Mother Akeley was driven to her home at 176 Pleasant Street in National City, a residential suburb of San Diego, by her boy friend, Marc Feinman. Investigation revealed that she had met Feinman casually while sunning herself and watching the surfers ride the waves in at Black’s Beach, San Diego.

Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth had been invited by a friend of approximately her own age to attend a concert given by a musical group, a member of which was a friend of Akeley’s friend. Outside of her official duties as Radiant Mother of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, Elizabeth Akeley was known to live quite a normal life for a young woman of her social and economic class.

She accompanied her friend to the concert, visited the backstage area with her, and was introduced to the musician. He in turn introduced Elizabeth to other members of the musical group, one of whom Elizabeth recognized as her casual acquaintance of Black’s Beach. A further relationship developed, in which it was known that Akeley and Feinman frequently exchanged overnight visits. Elizabeth had retained the house on Pleasant Street originally constructed by her grandfather, George Goodenough Akeley, when he had emigrated to San Diego from Vermont in the early 1920s. Marc had been born and raised in the Bronx, New York, had emigrated to the West Coast following his college years and presently resided in a pleasant apartment on Upas Street near Balboa Park. From here he commuted daily to his job as a computer systems programmer in downtown San Diego, his work as a musician being more of an avocation than a profession.

On Sunday, June 17, for the morning worship service of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, Radiant Mother Akeley devoted her sermon to the previous Wednesday’s seance, an unusual practice for her. The sexton of the church, a nondescript looking Negro named Vernon Whiteside, attended the service. Noting the Radiant Mother’s departure from her usual bland themes, Whiteside communicated with the federal agency which had infiltrated him into the Church for precisely this purpose. An investigation of Mother Akeley’s background was then initiated.

Within a short time, agent Whiteside was in posession of a preliminary report on Elizabeth Akeley and her forebears, excerpts from which follow:

AKELEY, ELIZABETH—

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

The Akeley family is traceable to one Beelzebub Akeley who traveled from Portsmouth, England, to Kingsport, Massachusetts aboard the sailing caravel Worthy in 1637. Beelzebub Akeley married an indentured servant girl, bought out her indenture papers and moved with her to establish the Akeley dynasty in Townshend, Windham County, Vermont in 1681. The Akeleys persisted in Windham County for more than two centuries, producing numerous clergy, academics, and other genteel professions in this period.

Abednego Mesach Akeley, subject's great-great grandfather, was the last of the Vermont Akeleys to pursue a life of the cloth. Born in 1832, Abednego was raised in the strictly puritanical traditions of the Akeleys and ordained by his father, the Reverend Samuel Shadrach Solomon Akeley upon attaining his maturity. Abednego served as assistant pastor to his father until Samuel’s death in 1868, at which time he succeeded to the pulpit.

Directly following the funeral of Samuel Akeley, Abednego is known to have traveled to more southerly regions of New England, including Massachusetts and possibly Rhode Island. Upon his return to Townshend he led his flock into realms of highly questionable doctrine and actually transferred the affiliation of his church from its traditional Protestant parent-body to that of the new and suspect Starry Wisdom sect.

Controversy and scandal followed at once, and upon the death of Abednego early in 1871 at the age of 39, the remnants of his congregation moved as a body to Providence, Rhode Island. One female congregant, however, was excommunicated by unanimous vote of the other members of the congregation, and forced to remain behind in Townshend. This female was Sarah Elizabeth Phillips, a servant girl in the now defunct Akeley household.

Shortly following the departure of the remains of Abednego Akeley’s flock from Vermont, Sarah Phillips gave birth to a son. She claimed that the child had been fathered by Abednego mere hours before his death. She named the child Henry Wentworth Akeley. As the Akeley clan was extinct at this point, no one challenged Sarah’s right to identify her son as an Akeley, and in fact in later years she sometimes used the name Akeley herself.

Henry Akeley overcame his somewhat shadowed origins and built for himself a successful academic career, returning to Windham County in his retirement, and remaining there until the time of his mysterious disappearance and presumed demise in the year 1928.

Henry had married some years earlier, and his wife had given birth to a single child, George Goodenough Akeley, in the year 1901, succumbing two days later to childbed fever. Henry Akeley raised his son with the assistance of a series of nursemaids and housekeepers. At the time of Henry Akeley’s retirement and his return to Townshend, George Akeley emigrated to San Diego, California, building there a modest but comfortable house at 176 Pleasant Street.

George Akeley married a local woman suspected of harboring a strain of Indian blood; the George Akeleys were the parents of a set of quadruplets born in 1930. These were the first quadruplets on record in San Diego County. There were three boys and a girl. The boys seemed,

at birth, to be of relatively robust constitution, although naturally small. The girl was still smaller, and seemed extremely feeble at birth so that her survival appeared unlikely.

However, with each passing hour the boys seemed to fade while the tiny girl grew stronger. All four infants clung tenaciously to life, the boys mote and more weakly and the girl more strongly, until finally the three male infants—apparently at the same hour—succumbed. The girl took nourishment with enthusiasm, grew pink and active. Her spindly limbs rounded into healthy baby arms and legs, and in due course she was carried from the hospital by her father.

In honor of a leading evangelist of the era, and of a crusader for spiritualistic causes, the girl was named Aimee Doyle Akeley.

Aimee traveled between San Diego and the spiritualist center of Noblesville, Indiana, with her parents. The George Akeleys spent their winters in San Diego, where George Goodenough Akeley served as Radiant Father of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood, which he had founded in a burst of religious fervor after meeting Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist whose name his daughter bore; each summer they would make a spiritualistic pilgrimage to Noblesville, where George Akeley became fast friends with the spiritualist leader and sometime American fascist, William Dudley Pelley.

Aimee Doyle Akeley married William Pelley's nephew Hiram Wesley Pelley in 1959. In that same year Aimee’s mother died and was buried in Noblesville. Her father continued his ministry in San Diego.

In 1961, two years after her marriage to young Pelley, Aimee Doyle Akeley Pelley gave birth to a daughter who was named Elizabeth Maude Pelley, after two right-wing political leaders, Elizabeth Dilling oflllinoisand Maude Howe of England. Elizabeth Maude Pelley was raised alternately by her parents in Indiana and her grandfather in San Diego.

In San Diego her life was relatively normal, centering on her schooling, her home, and to a lesser extent on her grandfather’s church, the Spiritual Light Brotherhood. In Indiana she was exposed to a good deal of political activity of the right-wing extremist nature. Hiram Wesley Pelley had followed in his uncle’s footsteps in this regard, and Aimee Doyle Akeley Pelley took her lead from her husband and his family. A number of violent scenes are reported to have transpired between young Elizabeth Pelley and the elder Pelleys.

Elizabeth Pelley returned permanently to San Diego where she took up residence with her grandfather. At this time she abandoned her mother's married name and took up the family name as her own, henceforth being known as Elizabeth Akeley. Upon the death of George Goodenough Akeley, Elizabeth succeeded to the title of Radiant Mother of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood and the pastorhood of the church, as well as the property on Pleasant Street and a small income from inherited securities.

Vernon Whiteside read the report carefully. Through his position as sexton of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church he had access, as well, to most church records, including the taped archives of Sunday worship services and Wednesday message services. He followed the Radiant Mother’s report to the congregation, in which she referred heavily to the seance ofjune 13, by borrowing and listening carefully to the tape of the seance itself.

He also obtained a photocopy from agency headquarters of the latest issues of the Vermont UFO Intelligencer. These he read carefully, seeking to correlate any references in the newsletter with the Akeley family, or with any other name connected with the Akeleys or the content of the seance tape. He mulled over the Akeleys, Phillipses, Wilmarths, Noyes, and all other references. He attempted also to connect the defunct or at least seemingly defunct Starry Wisdom sect of the New England region, with the San-Diego based Spiritual Light Brotherhood.

At this time it appears also that Elizabeth Akeley began to receive additional messages outside of the Spiritual Light message services. During quiet moments she would lapse involuntarily into her trance or trancelike state. Because she was unable to recall the messages received during these episodes, she prevailed upon Marc Feinman to spend increasing amounts of time with her. During the last week of June and July of 1979 the two were nearly inseparable. They spent every night together, sometimes at Elizabeth’s house in National City, sometimes at Marc’s apartment on Upas Street.

It was at this time that Vernon Whiteside recommended that agency surveillance of the San Diego cult be increased by the installation of wiretaps on the church and the Pleasant Street and Upas Street residences. This recommendation was approved and recordings were obtained at all three locations. Transcripts are available in agency files. Excerpts follow:

July 25, 1979 (Incoming)

Voice #1 (Definitely identified as Marc Feinman): Hello.

Voice #2 (Tentatively identified as Mrs. Sara Feinman, Marc’s mother, Bronx, New York): Marc.

Voice #1: (Pauses.) Yes, Ma.

Voice #2: Markie, are you all right?

Voice #1: Yeah, Ma.

Voice #2: Are you sure. Are you really all right?

Voice #1: Ma, I’m all right.

Voice #2: Okay, just so you’re all right, Markie. And work, Markie? How’s your work? Is your work all right?

Voice #1: It’s all right, Ma.

Voice #2: No problems?

Voice #1: Of course problems, Ma. That’s what they pay me to take care of.

Voice #2: Oh my God, Markie! What kind of problems, Markie?

Voice #1: (Pauses, sighs or inhales deeply) Were trying to integrate the 2390 remote console control routines with the sysgen status word register and every time we run it against—

Voice #2: (Interrupting) Markie, you know I don't understand that kind of—

Voice #1: (Interrupting) But you asked me—

Voice #2: (Interrupting) Marc, don’t contradict your mother. Are you still with that shicksa? She's the one who’s poisoning your mind against your poor mother. I’ll bet she’s with you now, isn’t she, Marc?

Voice #1: (Sighs or inhales deeply) No, Ma, it’s Wednesday. She's never here

Wednesdays. She’s at church every Wednesday. They have these services every Wedn—

Voice #2: (Interrupting) I'm sure she's a lovely girl, my Markie would never pick a girl who wasn’t a lovely girl. I wish you’d kept up your music, Markie. You could have been a great pianist, like Rubenstein or even Lazar Berman that red. You still have that crazy Boxer car, Markie?

Voice #1: Yes, Ma.

Voice #2: That isn’t what I called about. I don't understand, Markie, for the money that car must have cost you could have had an Oldsmobile at least, even a Buick like your father. Markie, it’s your father I phoned about. Markie, you have to come home. Your father isn't well, Markie. I phoned because he isn’t home now but the doctor said he's not a well man. Markie, you have to come home and talk to your father. He respects you, he listens to you, God knows why. Please, Markie. (Sound of soft crying.)

Voice #1: What's wrong with him, Ma?

Voice #2: I don’t want to say it on the telephone.

July 25, 1979 (Outgoing)

Voice #3 (Definitely identified as Vernon Whiteside): Spiritual Light Brotherhood. May the divine light shine upon your path.

Voice #1: Vern, this is Marc. Is Liz still at the church? Is the service over?

Voice #3: The service ended a few minutes ago, Mr. Feinman. The Radiant Mother is resting in the sacristy.

Voice #1: That’s what I wanted to know. Listen, Vern, tell Lizzy that I'm on my way, will you? I had a long phone call from my mother and I don’t want Liz to worry. Tell her I’ll give her a ride home from the church.

Feinman left San Diego by automobile, driving his Ferrari Boxer eastward at a top speed in the 140 MPH range, and arrived at the home of his parents in the Bronx, New York, some time during the night of July 27-28.

In the absence of Marc Feinman, Akeley took agent Whiteside increasingly into her confidence, asking him to remain in her presence day and night. He set up a temporary cot in the living room of the Pleasant Street house during this period. His instructions were to keep a portable cassette recorder handy at all times and to record anything said by Mother Akeley during spontaneous trances.

On the first Saturday of August, following a lengthy speech in the now-familiar male New England twang, Akeley asked agent Whiteside for the tape. She played it back, then made the following long-distance telephone call.

August 4, 1979 (Outgoing)

Voice #4 (Tentatively identified as Ezra Noyes): Vermont Bureau. May we help you?

Voice #5 (Definitely identified as Elizabeth Akeley): Is this Mr. Noyes?

Voice #4: Oh, I’m sorry, Dad isn’t home. This is Ezra. Can I give him a—

Voice #5: (Interrupting) Oh, I wanted to speak with Ezra Noyes. The editor of the UFO Intelligencer.

Voice #4: Oh, yes, right. Yes, that’s me. Ezra Noyes.

Voice #5: Mr.Noyes, I wonder if you could help me. I need some information about, ah, recent occurrences in or around Townshend.

Voice #4: That's funny, what did you say your name was?

Voice #5: Elizabeth Akeley.

Voice #4:I thought I knew all my subbers.

Voice #5: Oh, I’m not a subscriber, I got your name from—well, that doesn’t matter. Mr. Noyes, I wonder if you could tell me if there have been any unusual UFO sightings in your region lately.

Voice #4 (Suspiciously): Unusual?

Voice #5: Well, these wouldn’t be your usual run-of-the-mill flying objects. Flying saucers. I hope that phrase doesn’t offend you. These would be more like flying creatures.

Voice #4: Creatures? You mean birds?

Voice #5: No. No. Intelligent creatures.

Voice #4: People, then. You mean Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering with their rocket flying belts.

Voice #5: Please don't be sarcastic, Mr. Noyes. (Pauses.) I mean intelligent, possibly humanoid but nonhuman creatures. Their configuration may vary, but some of them, at least, I believe would have large, membranous wings, probably stretched over a bony or veinous framework in the fashion of bats’ or insects’ wings. Also, some of them may be carrying artifacts such as polished metallic cylinders of a size capable of containing a—of containing, uh, a human—a human—brain.

(Sounds of distress, possible sobbing.)

Voice #4: Miss Akeley? Are you all right, Miss Akeley?

Voice #5: I’m sorry. Yes, I’m all right.

Voice #4: I didn’t mean to be so hard on you, Miss Akeley. It's just that we get a lot of crank calls. People wanting to talk to the little green men and that kind of thing. I had to make sure that you weren’t—

Voice #5: I understand. And you have had—

Voice #4: I’m reluctant to say too much on the phone. Miss Akeley, do you think you could get here? There have been sightings. And there are older ones. Records in the local papers. A rash of incidents about fifty years ago. And others farther back. There was a monograph by an Eli Davenport over in New Hampshire back in the 1830s. I’ve got a xerox of it... .

Shortly after her telephone conversation with Ezra Noyes, Elizabeth Akeley appealed to Vernon Whiteside for assistance. “I don’t want to go alone,” she is reported as saying to Whiteside. “Will you help me, Vernon?”

Whiteside, maintaining his cover as the sexton of the Brotherhood, assured Akeley. “Anything the Radiant Mother wishes, ma’am. What would you like me to do?”

"Can you get away for a few days? I have to go to Vermont. Would you book two tickets for us? There are church funds to cover the cost.” “Yes, ma'am.” Whiteside lowered his head. “Best way would be via Logan International in Boston, then a Vermont Lines bus to Brattleboro and Newfane.”

Akeley made no comment on the sexton’s surprising familiarity with the bus service between Boston and upper New England. She was obviously in an agitated state, Whiteside reported when he checked in with his superiors prior to their departure from San Diego.

Two days later the Negro sexton and the Radiant Mother climbed down from the bus at Newfane, Vermont. They were met at the town’s run-down and musty-smelling station by Ezra Noyes. Noyes was driving his parents’ 1969 Nash Ambassador station wagon and willingly loaded Akeley’s and Whiteside’s meager baggage into the rear cargo deck of the vehicle.

Ezra chauffeured the visitors to his parents’ home. The house, a gambrel-roofed structure of older design, was fitted for a larger family than the two elder Noyes and their son Ezra; in fact, an elder son and daughter had both married and departed Windham County for locales of greater stimulation and professional opportunity, leaving two surplus bedrooms in the Noyes home.

Noyes was eager to offer his own services and assistance to Akeley and Whiteside. Elizabeth informed Ezra Noyes that she had received instructions to meet a visitor at a specific location near the town of Passumpsic in neighboring Windsor County. She did not explain to Noyes the method of her receiving these instructions, but Vernon Whiteside’s later report indicated that he was aware of them, the instructions having been delivered to Miss Akeley in spontaneous trance sessions, the tapes of which he had also heard.

It must again be emphasized at this point that the voice heard on the spontaneous trance tapes was, in different senses, both that of Miss Akeley and of another personage. The pitch and accent, as has been stated, were those of an elderly male speaking in a semi-archaic New England twang while the vocal apparatus itself was unquestionably that of Elizabeth Akeley, nee Elizabeth Maude Pelley.

Miss Akeley’s instructions were quite specific in terms of geography, although it was found odd that they referred only to landmarks and highway or road facilities known to exist in the late 1920s. Young Noyes was able to provide alternate routes for such former roadways as had been closed when superseded by more modern construction.

Before retiring, Elizabeth Akeley placed a telephone call to the home of Marc Feinman’s parents in the Bronx. In this call she urged Feinman to join her in Vermont. Feinman responded that his father, at the urging of himself and his mother, had consented to undergo major surgery. Marc promised to travel to Vermont and rendezvous with Akeley at the earliest feasible time, but indicated that he felt obliged to remain with his parents until the surgery was completed and his father’s recovery assured.

The following morning Elizabeth Akeley set out for Passumpsic. She was accompanied by Vernon Whiteside and traveled in the Nash Ambassador station wagon driven by Ezra Noyes.

Her instructions had contained very specific and very emphatic requirements that she keep the rendezvous alone, although others might provide transportation and wait while the meeting took place. The party who had summoned Elizabeth Akeley to the rendezvous had not, to this time, been identified, although it was believed to be the owner of the male voice and New England twang who had spoken through Elizabeth herself in her trances.

Prior to departing Windham County for Windsor County, a discussion took place between Akeley and Whiteside. Whiteside appealed to Elizabeth Akeley to permit him to accompany her to the rendezvous.

That would be impossible, Akeley stated.

Whiteside pointed out Elizabeth’s danger, in view of the unknown identity of the other party. When Akeley remained adamant, Whiteside gave in and agreed to remain with Ezra Noyes during the meeting. It must be pointed out that at this time the dialogue was not cast in the format of a highly trained and responsible agent of the federal establishment, and an ordinary citizen; rather, the facade which Whiteside rightly although with difficulty maintained was that of a sexton of the Spiritual Light Brotherhood acting under the authority of and in the service of the Radiant Mother of that Church.

Whiteside did, however, succeed in convincing Akeley to wear a wireless microphone disguised as an enamel ladybug ornament on the lapel of her jacket. Akeley, of course, was garbed in ordinary street clothing at the time, reserving the ecclesiastical vestments for use during official functions of the Church.

The microphone transmitted on a frequency which was picked up by a small microcassette recorder which Whiteside was to keep with him in or near the Nash station wagon; additionally, an earphone ran from the recorder so that Whiteside was enabled to monitor the taped information in real time.

The Nash Ambassador crossed the county line from Windham to Windsor on a two-lane county highway. This had been a dirt road in the 1920s, blacktopped with federal funds administered by the Works Progress Administration under Franklin Roosevelt, and superseded by a nearby four-lane asphalt highway during the Eisenhower presidency. The blacktop received minimal maintenance; and only pressure from local members of the Vermont legislature, this brought in turn at the insistence of local residents who used the highway for access to Passumpsic, South Londonderry, and Bellows Falls, prevented the state from declaring the highway closed and striking it from official roadmaps.

Reaching the town of Passumpsic, Akeley, who had never previously traveled farther east than Indianapolis, Indiana, told Ezra to proceed 800 yards, at which point the car was to be halted. Ezra complied. At the appointed spot, Akeley left the car and opened a gate in the wooden fence fronting the highway.

Noyes pulled the wagon from the highway through the gate and found himself on a narrow track that had once been a small dirt road, long since abandoned and overgrown.

This dirt road led away from the highway and into hilly farm country, years before abandoned by the poor farmers of the region, that lay between Passumpsic and Ludlow.

Finally, having rounded an ancient dome-topped protruberance that stood betwen the station wagon and any possible visual surveillance from the blacktop highway or even the overgrown dirt road, the Nash halted, unable to continue. The vegetation hereabouts was of a peculiar nature. While most of the region consisted of thin, played-out soil whose poor fertility was barely adequate to sustain a covering of tall grasses and undersized, gnarly-trunked trees, in the small area set off by the dome-topped hill the growth was thick, lush and luxuriant.

However, there was a peculiar quality to the vegetation, a characteristic which even the most learned botanist would have been hard pressed to identify, and yet which was undeniably present. It was as if the vegetation were too vibrantly alive, as if it sucked greedily at the earth for nourishment and by so doing robbed the countryside for a mile or more in every direction of sustenance.

Through an incongruously luxuriant copse of leafy trees a small building could be seen, clearly a shack of many years’ age and equally clearly of long abandonment. The door hung angularly from a single rusted hinge, the windows were cracked or missing altogether, and spiders had filled the empty frames with their own geometric handiwork. The paint, if ever the building had known the touch of a painter’s brush, had long since flaked away and been blown to oblivion by vagrant tempests, and the bare wood beneath had been cracked by scores of winters and bleached by as many summers’ suns.

Elizabeth Akeley looked once at the ramshackle structure, nodded to herself and set out slowly to walk to it. Vernon Whiteside set himself at her elbow, and Ezra Noyes set a pace just a stride behind the others, but Akeley halted at once, turned and gestured silently but decisively to the others to remain behind. She then resumed her progress through the copse.

Whiteside watched Elizabeth Akeley proceeding slowly but with apparently complete self-possession through the wooded area. She halted just outside the shack, leaned forward and slightly to one side as if peering through a cobwebbed window frame, then proceeded again. She tugged at the door, managed to drag it open with a squeal of rusted metal and protesting wood, and disappeared inside the shack.

“Are you just going to let her go like that?” Ezra Noyes demanded of Whiteside. “How do you know who’s in there? What if it’s a Beta Reticulan? What if it’s a Moth Man? What if there’s a whole bunch of aliens in there? They might have a tunnel from the shack to their saucer. The whole thing might be a front. Shouldn’t we go after her?”

Whiteside shook his head. “Mother Akeley issued clear instructions, Ezra. We are to wait here.” He reached inside his jacket and unobtrusively flicked on the concealed microcassette recorder. When he pulled his hand from his pocket, he brought it with the earphone. He adjusted it carefully in his ear.

"Oh, I didn’t know you were deaf,” Noyes said.

“Just a little,” Whiteside replied.

“Well, what are we going to do?” Ezra asked him.

“I shall wait for the Radiant Mother,” Whiteside told him. “There is nothing to fear. Have faith in the Spiritual Light, little brother, and your footsteps will be illuminated."

“Oh.” Ezra made a sour face and climbed onto the roof of the Ambassador. He seated himself there cross-legged to watch for any evidence of activity at the shack.

Vernon Whiteside also kept watch on the shack, but chiefly he was listening to the voices transmitted by the cordless microphone concealed on Elizabeth Akeley’s lapel. Excerpts from the transcript later made of these transmissions follow:

Microcassette, August 8, 1979

Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Hello? Hello? Is there—

Voice #6 (Unidentified voice; oddly metallic intonation; accent similar to male New England twang present in San Diego trance tapes): Come in, come in, don’t be afraid.

Voice #5: It’s so dark in here.

Voice #6: I’m sorry. Move carefully. You are perfectly safe but there is some delicate apparatus set up.

(Sounds of movement, feet shuffling, breathing, a certain vague buzzing sound. Creak as of a person sitting in an old wooden rocking chair.)

Voice #5: I can hardly see. Where are you?

Voice #6: The cells are very sensitive. My friends are not here. You are not Albert Wilmarth.

Voice #5: No, I don’t even—

Voice #6: (Interrupting) Oh, my God! Of course not. It’s been so—what year is this?

Voice #5: Nineteen seventy-nine.

Voice #6: Poor Albert. Poor Albert. He could have come along. But of course he—what did you say your name was, young woman?

Voice #5: Akeley. Elizabeth Akeley.

(Silence. Buzzing sound. A certain unsettling sound as of wings rustling, but wings larger than those of any creature known to be native to Vermont.)

Voice #6: Do not taunt me, young woman!

Voice #5: Taunt you? Taunt you?

Voice #6: Do you know who I am? Does the name Henry Wentworth Akeley mean nothing to you?

(Pause . . . buzzing . . . rustling.)

Voice #5: Yes! Yes! Oh, oh, this is incredible! This is wonderful! It means—

Yes, my grandfather spoke of you. If you're really—My grandfather was George Akeley. He—we—

Voice #6: (Interrupting) Then I am your great-grandfather, Miss Akeley. I regret that I cannot offer you my hand. George Akeley was my son.

Tell me, is he still alive?

Voice #5: No, he—he died. He died in 1971, eight years ago. I was a little girl, but I remember him speaking of his father in Vermont. He said you disappeared mysteriously. But he always expected to hear from you again. He even founded a church. The Spiritual Light Brotherhood. He never lost faith. I have continued his work. Waiting for word from—beyond. That's why I came when I—when I started receiving messages.

Voice #6: Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Perhaps I should not have stayed away so long, but the vistas, my child, the vistas! How old did you say you were?

Voice #5: Why—why—18. Almost 19.

(Buzzing.)

Voice #6: You have followed my directions, Elizabeth? You are alone? Yes?

Good. The cells are very sensitive. I can see you, even in this darkness, even if you cannot see me. Elizabeth, I have been gone from earth for half a century, yet I am no older than the day I—departed— in the year 1928. The sights I have seen, the dimensions and the galaxies I have visited! Not alone, my child. Of course not alone. Those ones who took me—ah, child! Human flesh is too weak, too fragile to travel beyond the earth.

Voice #5: But there are spacesuits. Rockets. Capsules. Oh, I suppose that was after your time. But we’ve visited the moon. We’ve sent instruments to Venus and Mars and the moons of Jupiter.

Voice #6: And what you know is what Columbus might have learned of the New World, by paddling a rowboat around the port of Cadiz! Those ones who took me, those old ones! They can fly between the worlds on great ribbed wings! They can span the very ether of space as a dragonfly flits across the surface of a pond! They are the greatest scientists, the greatest naturalists, the greatest anthropologists, the greatest explorers in the universe! Those whom they select to accompany them, if they cannot survive the ultimate vacuum of space, the old ones discard their bodies and seal their brains in metal canisters and carry them from world to world, from star to burning, glittering star!

(Buzzing, loud sound of rustling.)

Voice #5: Then—you have been to other worlds? Other planets, other physical worlds. Not other planes of spiritual existence. Our congregants believe—

Voice #6: (Interrupting) Your congregants doubtlessly believed poppycock.

Yes, I have been to other worlds. I have seen all the planets in the solar system, from little, sterile Mercury to giant, distant Yuggoth.

Voice #5: Distant Yu—Yuggoth?

Voice #6: Yes, yes. I suppose those fool astronomers have yet to find it, but it is the gem and the glory of the solar system, glowing with its own ruby-red glare. It revolves in its own orbit, turned ninety degrees from the plane of the ecliptic. No wonder they've never seen it. They don’t know where to look. Yet it perturbs the paths of Neptune and Pluto. That ought to be clue enough! Yuggoth is very nearly a sun.

It possesses its own corps of worldlets, Nithon, Zaman, the miniature twins Thog and Thok! And there is life there! There is the Ghooric Zone where bloated shoggoths splash and spawn!

Voice #5: I can’t—I can’t believe all this! My own great-grandpa! Planets and beasts....

Voice #6: Yuggoth was merely the beginning for me. Those ones carried me far away from the sun. I have seen the worlds that circle Arcturus and Centaurus, Wolf and Barnard's Star and Beta Reticuli. I have seen creatures whose physical embodiment would send a sane man into screaming nightmares of horror that never ends—and whose minds and souls would put to shame the proudest achievements of Einstein and Schopenhauer, Confucius and Plato, the Enlightened One and the Anointed One! And I have known love, child, love such as no earth-bound mortal has ever known.

Voice #5: Lo-love, great-grandfather?

(Sound of buzzing, loud and agitated rustling of wings.)

Voice #6: You know about love, surely, Elizabeth. Doesn't your church preach a gospel of love? In 57 years on this planet I never came across a church that didn’t claim that. And have you known love? A girl your age, surely you’ve known the feeling by now.

Voice #5: Yes, great-grandfather.

Voice #6: Is it merely a physical attraction, Elizabeth? Do you believe that souls can love? Or do you believe in such things as souls? Can minds love one another?

Voice #5: All three. All three of those.

Voice #6: Good. Yes, all three. And when two beings love with their minds and their souls, they yearn also for bodies with which to express their love. Hence the physical manifestation of love. (Pause.) Excuse me, child. In a way I suppose I’m nothing but an old man rambling on about abstractions. You have a young man, have you?

Voice #5: Yes.

Voice #6: I would like to meet him. I would like very much to meet him, my child.

Voice #5: Great-grandfather. May I tell the people about you?

Voice #6: No, Elizabeth. The time is not ripe.

Voice #5: But this is the single most important event since—since—(Pause.)

Contact with other beings, with other races, not of Earth. Proof that there is intelligent life throughout the universe. Proof of visits between the worlds and between the galaxies.

Voice #6: All in time, child. Now I am tired. Please go now. Will you visit me again?

Voice #5: Of course. Of course.

Elizabeth Akeley emerged from the shack, took one step and staggered.

At the far side of the copse of trees, Vernon Whiteside and Ezra Noyes watched. They saw Elizabeth. Ezra scrambled from the roof of the station wagon. Whiteside started forward, prepared to assist Mother Akeley.

But she had merely been blinded, for the moment, by the bright sunlight of a Vermont August. Whiteside and Ezra Noyes saw her returning through the glade. Once or twice she stopped and leaned against a strangely spongy tree. Each time she started again, apparently further debilitated rather than restored.

She reached the station wagon and leaned against its drab metalwork. Whiteside said, “Are you all right, Radiant Mother?”

She managed a wan smile. “Thank you, Vernon. Yes, I'm all right. Thank you.”

Ezra Noyes was beside himself.

"Who was in there? What was going on? Were there really aliens in that shack? Can I go? Oh, darn it, darn it!" He pounded one fist into the palm of his other hand. “I should never have left home without my camera! Kenneth Arnold himself said that back in ’47. It’s the prime directive of all ufologists, and I went off without one, me of all people.”

Vernon Whiteside said, “Radiant Mother, do you wish to leave now? May I visit the shack first?”

“Please, Vernon, don’t. I asked him—’’ She drew Whiteside away from Noyes. “I asked him if I could reveal this to the world and he said, not yet.”

“I monitored the tape, Reverend Mother."

“Yes.”

“What does it mean, Reverend Mother?”

She passed her hand across her face, tugging soft bangs across her eyes to block out the bright sunlight. “I feel faint. Vernon. Ask Ezra to drive us back to Dark Mountain, would you?”

He helped her climb into the station wagon and signaled to Ezra. “Mother Akeley is fatigued. She must be taken back at once.”

Ezra sighed and started the Ambassador’s straight-six engine.

Elizabeth Akeley telephoned Marc Feinman from the Noyes house in Dark Mountain. A message had been transmitted surreptitiously by agent Whiteside in time for monitoring arrangements to be made. Neither Akeley nor Feinman was aware of the monitoring system.

Excerpts from the call follow:

August 9, 1979 (outgoing)

Voice #2 (Sara Feinman): Yes.

Voice #5 (Elizabeth Akeley): Mrs. Feinman?

Voice #2: Yes, who is this?

Voice #5: Mrs. Feinman, this is Elizabeth Akeley speaking. I’m a friend of Marc’s from San Diego. Is Marc there, please?

Voice #2:1 know all about Marc’s friend, Elizabeth darling. Don’t you know Marc’s father is in the hospital? Should you be bothering Marc at such a time?

Voice #5: I’m very sorry about Mr. Feinman, Mrs. Feinman. Marc told me before he left California. Is he all right?

Voice #2: Don't ask.

(Pause.)

Voice #5: Could I speak with Marc? Please?

Voice #2: (Off-line, pickup is very faint) Marc, here, it's your little goyish priestess. Yes. On the telephone. No, she didn't say where. No, she didn't say.

Voice #1 (Marc Feinman): Lizzy? Lizzy baby, are you okay?

Voice #5: Yes, I'm okay. Is your father—

Voice #1: (Interrupting) They operated this morning. I saw him after. He’s very weak, Liz. But I think he’s going to make it. Lizzy, where are you? Pleasant Street?

Voice #5: Vermont.

Voice #1: What? Vermont?

Voice #5: I couldn’t wait, Marc. You were on the road, and there was another trance. I couldn’t wait till you arrived in New York. Vernon came with me. We're staying with a family in Dark Mountain. Marc, I met my great-grandfather. Yesterday. I tried to call you last night but—

Voice #1: I was at the hospital with Ma, visiting my father. We couldn't just—

Voice #5: Of course, Marc. You did the right thing. (Pause.) How soon can you get here?

Voice #1: I can’t leave now. My father is still—they're not sure. (Lowering his voice.) I don’t want to talk too loud. The doctor said it’s going to be touch and go for at least forty-eight hours. I can’t leave Ma.

Voice #5: (Sobs.) I understand, Marc. But—but—my great-grandfather....

Voice #1: How old is the old coot? He must be at least ninety.

Voice #5: He was born in 1871. He’s 108.

Voice #1: My God! Talk about tough old Yankee stock!

Voice #5: It isn’t that, Marc! It has to do with the trance messages. Don't you understand? All of that strange material about alien beings, and other galaxies? That was no sci-fi trip—

Voice #1: I never said you were making it up, Lizzy! Your subconscious, though, I mean, you see some TV show or a movie and—

Voice #5: But that’s just it, Marc! Those are real messages. Not from my subconscious. My great-grandpa was sending, oh, call them spirit messages or telepathic radiations or anything you like. He’s here.

He's back. Aliens took him away, they took his brain in a metal cylinder, and he’s been traveling in outer space for fifty years, and now he’s back here in Vermont and—

Voice #1: Okay, Lizzy, enough! Look, I’ll drive up there as soon as I can get away. As soon as my father’s out of danger. I can’t leave my Ma now, but as soon as I can. What’s this place....

Late in the afternoon of August 9th Ezra Noyes rapped on the door of Elizabeth Akeley’s room. She admitted him and he stood in the center of the room, nervously wondering whether it would be proper to sit in her presence. Akeley urged him to sit. The conversation which ensued was recalled by young Noyes in a deposition taken later at an agency field office. Excerpts from the deposition follow:

“Well, you see, I told her that I was really serious about UFO’s and all that stuff. She didn’t know much about ufology. She’d never heard about the men in black, even. So I told her all about them so she’d be on the lookout. I asked her who this Vernon Whiteside was, and she said he was the sexton of her church and completely reliable and I shouldn’t worry about him.

“I showed her some copies of the Intelligencer, and she said she liked the mag a lot and asked if she could keep them. I said sure. Anyway, she wanted to know how long the Moth Man sightings had been going on. I told her, only about six months or so over at Townshend and around here. Then she asked me what I knew about a rash of similar sightings about fifty years ago.

“That was right up my alley. You know, I did a lot of research. I went down and read a lot of old newspaper files. They have the old papers on microfilm now; it kills your eyes to crouch over a reader all day looking at the old stuff, but it’s really interesting.

"Anyway, there were some odd sightings back in the ’20s, and then when they had those floods around here in November '27, there were some really strange things. They found some bodies, parts of bodies that is, carried downstream in the flood. There were some in the Winooski River over near Montpelier, and some right in the streets of Passumpsic. The town was flooded, you know.

"Strange bodies. Things like big wings. Not like moth wings, though. More like bat wings. And there seems to have been some odd goings on with Miss Akeley's great-grandfather, Henry Akeley. He was a retired prof, you know. And something about a friend of his, a guy called Al Wilmarth. But it was all hushed up.

“Well, I told Miss Akeley everything I knew and then I asked her who was in the cabin over at that dirt road near Ludlow. I think she must have got mixed up, because she said it was Henry Akeley. He disappeared in 1927 or '28. Even if he turned up, he couldn’t be alive now. She said he said something to her about love, and about wanting a young man’s body and a young woman's body so he could make love with some woman from outer space, he said from Aldebaran. I guess you have to be a sci-fi nut to know about Aldebaran. I’m a sci-fi nut. I don’t say too much about it in UFO circles—they don’t like sci-fi, they think the sci-fi crowd put down UFO’s. They’re scared of 'em. They want to keep it all nice and safe and imaginary, you ought to read Sanderson and Early on that some time.

"Well, how could a human and an alien make love? I guess old Akeley must have thought something like a mind-transfer, like one partner could take over the body of a member of the other partner's species, you know. Only be careful, don't try it with spiders where the female eats the male after they mate. Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha!

“But Miss Akeley kept asking about lovemaking, you know, and I started to wonder if maybe she wasn’t hinting at something, you know.

I mean, there we were in this room. And it was my own parents’ house and all, but it was a bedroom, and I didn’t want her to think that she could just walk in there and, uh, well, you know.

“So I excused myself then. But she seemed upset. She kept running her hand through her hair. Pulling it down, those strips, what do women call them, bangs, over her forehead. I told her I had to get to work on the next ish of my mag, you know, and she’d have to excuse me but the last ish had been late and I was trying to get the mag back on schedule. But I told her, if she wanted a lift over to Passumpsic again, I’d be glad to give her a ride over there any time, and I’d like to meet her great-grandfather if he was living in that old shack. Then she said he wasn’t exactly living in the shack, but he sort of was, sort of was there and sort of was living there. It didn’t make any sense to me. So I went and started laying out the next issue of the Intelligencer ’cause I wanted to get it out on time for once, and show those guys that I can get a mag out on time when I get a chance.

"Anyway, Miss Akeley said her great-grandfather’s girlfriend was named something like Sheera from Aldebaran. I told her that sounded like something out of a bad '50s sci-fi flick on the TV. There’s a great channel in Montreal, we get it on the cable, they show sci-fi flicks every week. And that sure sounded like a sci-fi flick to me.

“Sheera from Aldebaran! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha!"

***

Marc Feinman wheeled his Ferrari up to the Noyes home. His sporty driving-cap was cocked over one ear. Suede jacket, silk shirt, gucci jeans and frye boots completed his outfit.

The front door swung in as Feinman’s boot struck the bottom wooden step. Elizabeth Akeley was across the whitewashed porch and into Feinman’s arms before he reached the top of the flight. Without releasing his embrace of Akeley, Feinman extended one hand to grasp that of Vernon Whiteside.

They entered the house. Ezra Noyes greeted them in the front parlor. Elizabeth and Vernon briefed Marc on the events since their arrival in Vermont. When the narrative was brought up to date, Feinman asked simply, “What do you want to do?”

Ezra started to blurt out an ambitious plan for gaining the confidence of the aliens and arranging a ride in their saucer, but Whiteside, still mainlining the role of sexton of the Spiritual Light Church, cut him off. “We will do whatever the Radiant Mother asks us to do.”

All eyes turned to Akeley.

After an uncomfortable interval she said, "I was—hoping that Marc could help. It’s so strange, Marc. I know that I'm the one who always believed in—in the spirit world. The beyond. What you always call the supernormal.”

Feinman nodded.

“But somehow," Elizabeth went on, “this seems more like your ideas than mine. It’s so—I mean, this is the kind of thing that I’ve always looked for, believed in. And you haven’t. And now that it’s true, it doesn’t seem to have any spiritual meaning. It’s just—something that you could explain with your logic and your computers.”

Feinman rubbed his slightly blue chin with his free hand. "This great-grandpa of yours, this Henry Akeley He looked into her eyes.

“You say, he was talking about some kind of mating ritual?”

Liz nodded.

Feinman said, “What did he look like? Did you ever see your great-grandfather before? Even a picture? Maybe one that your grandfather had in San Diego?”

She shook her head. “No. At least, I don’t remember ever seeing a photo at home. There might have been one. But I hardly saw anything in the shack, Marc.”

Ezra Noyes was jumping up and down in his chair. “Yes, you never told us, Lizzy—Miss Akeley. What did you see? What did he look like?"

“I hardly saw anything!" Liz covered her face with her hands, dropped one to her lap, tugged nervously at her bangs with the other. “It was pitch-dark in there. Just a little faint light seeping between the cracks in the walls, through those broken windows. Those that weren’t broken were so filthy, they wouldn’t let light in."

“So you couldn’t tell if it was really Henry Akeley.”

“It was the same voice,” Vernon Whiteside volunteered. “We, ah, we bugged the meeting, Mr. Feinman. The voice was the same as the one on the trance tapes from the church.”

Feinman’s eyes widened. “The same? But the trance tapes are in Lizzy’s voice!”

Whiteside backpedaled. “No, you’re right. I don’t suppose they were the same vocal chords. But the timbre. And the enunciation. Everything. Same person speaking. I’d stake my reputation on it!” Feinman stroked his chin again. “All right. Here’s what I’d like to do. Lizzy, Henry Akeley said he’d see you again, right? Okay, let’s surprise him a little. Suppose Whiteside and I head out there. Can you find the shack again, Vernon? Good! Okay, we'll take the Ferrari out there."

“But it’s nearly dark out.”

“No difference if it’s so damned dark inside the shack! I’ve got a good five-cell torch in the emergency kit in the Ferrari.”

“I ought to come along," Ezra Noyes put in. “I do represent the Vermont UFO Intelligence Bureau, you know!”

“Right,” Feinman nodded. “And we’ll need your help later. No, we’ll need you, Ezra, but not right now. Whiteside and I will visit Henry Akeley—or whoever or whatever is out there claiming to be Henry Akeley. Give us a couple of hours’ head start. And then, you come ahead. Lizzy, you and Ezra here.”

“Can I get into the shack this time?” Ezra jumped up and paced nervously, almost danced, back and forth. “The other time, I had to wait at the car. If I can get into the shack, I can get some photos. I’ll rig up a flash on my Instamatic. I want to get some shots of the inside of that cabin for the Intelligencer.”

“Yes, sure.” Feinman turned from Ezra Noyes and took Elizabeth Akeley’s hand. “You don’t mind, do you, Lizzy? I’m worried that your ancestor there—or whoever it is—has some kind of control over you. Those trances—what if he puts you under some kind of hypnotic influence while we’re all out there together?”

“How do you know he’s evil? You seem to—just assume that Henry Akeley wants to harm me.”

“I don’t know that at all,” Feinman frowned. “I just have a nasty feeling about it. I want to get there first. I think Whiteside and I can handle things, and then you can arrive in a while. Please, Lizzy. You did call me to help. You didn’t have to, you could have just gone back and never said anything to me until it was over.”

Elizabeth looked very worried. "Maybe I should have.”

"Well, but you didn’t. Now, can we do it this way? Please?”

"All right, Marc.”

Feinman turned to Vernon Whiteside. “Let’s go. How long a ride is it out there?”

Whiteside paused for a moment. “Little less than an hour.” Feinman grunted. "Okay. Vernon and I will start now. We’ll need about an hour, I suppose—call it two to be on the safe side. Lizzy and Ezra, if you’ll follow us out to the shack in two hours, just come ahead in, we’ll be there.”

Ezra departed to check his camera. Vernon accompanied Marc. Shortly the Ferrari Boxer disappeared in a cloud of yellow Vermont dust, headed for Passumpsic.

As soon as they had pulled out of sight of the house, Vernon spoke. “Mr. Feinman, I’ve been helping Radiant Mother on this trip.”

"I know that, Vernon. Lizzy mentioned it several times. I really appreciate it.”

“Mr. Feinman, you know how concerned Radiant Mother is about Church archives. The way she records her sermons and the message services. Well, she was worried about her meeting with old Mr. Akeley. So I helped her to rig a wireless mike on her jacket. So we got a microcassette of the meeting.”

Feinman said he knew that.

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do the same again.” Whiteside held the tiny microcassette recorder for Feinman to see. The Ferrari’s V-12 purred throatily, loafing along the Passumpsic road in third gear.

"Sure. That’s a good idea. But you needn’t rig me up. I want you along. You can just mike yourself.”

Vernon Whiteside considered. “Tell you what....” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of enamel ladybugs. “I’ll mike us both. If we happen to pick up the same sounds, there’ll be no harm. In fact, it’ll give us a redundancy check. If we get separated—”

"I don’t see why we should.”

“Just in case.” He pinned a ladybug to Feinman’s suede jacket, attached the second bug to his own. He made a minor adjustment on the recorder.

"There.” He slipped the recorder back into his pocket. “I separated the two input circuits. Now we’ll record on two channels. We can mix the sound if we record the same events or keep it separate if we pick up different events. In fact, just to be on the safe side, suppose I leave the recorder here in the car when you and I go to the shack.”

Feinman assented, and Whiteside peeled the sealers from a dimesized disk of double-adhesive foam. He stuck it to the recorder and stuck the recorder to the bottom of the Ferrari’s dashboard.

"You’re the sexton of the Spiritual Light Church," Feinman said.

‘‘Yes, sir.”

“You know a hell of a lot about electronics.”

“My sister’s boy, Mr. Feinman. Bright youngster. It’s his hobby.”

Feinman tooled the Ferrari around the dome-topped hill and pulled to a halt where the Noyes station wagon had parked on the earlier visit. The sun was setting and the somehow too-lush glade was filled with murk.

Vernon Whiteside reached under the dashboard and flicked the microcassette recorder to automatic mode. He climbed Irom the car.

Feinman went to the rear of the Ferrari and extracted a long-handled electric torch. He pulled his sports cap down over his eyes and touched Whiteside’s elbow. The men advanced.

The events that transpired following this entrance to the sycamore copse were captured on the microcassette recorder, and a transcript of these sounds appears later in the report.

In the meanwhile, Elizabeth Akeley and Ezra Noyes waited at the Noyes home in Dark Mountain.

Two hours to the minute, after the departure of Marc Feinman and Vernon Whiteside in Feinman’s Ferrari Boxer, the Noyes station wagon, its aged suspension creaking, pulled out of the driveway.

Ezra pushed the Nash to the limit of its tired ability, chattering the while to Elizabeth. Preoccupied, she responded with low monosyllables. At the turning-point from the Passumpsic-Ludlow road onto the old farm track, she waited in the station wagon while Ezra climbed down and opened the fence gate.

The Nash’s headlights picked a narrow path for the car, circling the dome-topped hill that blocked the copse of lush vegetation from sight of passers-by. The Ferrari Boxer stood silently at the edge of the copse.

Ezra lifted his camera-bag from the floor and slung it over his shoulder. Elizabeth waited in the car until Ezra walked to her side, opened the door and offered his hand.

They started through the copse. Noyes testified later that this was his first experience with the unusual growth of vegetation. He claimed that, even as he set foot beneath the overhanging branches of the first sycamore, a strange sensation passed through him. The day had been hot, and even in the hours of darkness the temperature did not drop drastically. Even so, with his entry into the copse Noyes felt an unnatural and debilitating beat, as if the trees were fitted to a different climate than that of northern Vermont and actually were emitting heat of their own.

He began to perspire and wiped his forehead with his hand.

Elizabeth Akeley led the way through the wooded area, retracing the steps of her previous visit to the wooden shack.

Noyes found it more and more difficult to continue. With each pace he felt drained of energy and will. Once he halted and was about to sit down for a rest, but Akeley grasped his hand and pulled him with her.

When they emerged from the copse, the dome-topped hill stood directly behind them, the run-down shack directly ahead.

Ezra and Elizabeth crossed the narrow grassy patch between the sycamore copse and the ramshackle cabin. Ezra found a space where the glass had fallen away and there was a small opening in the omnipresent cobwebs. He peered in, then lifted his camera and poked its lens through the opening. He shot a picture.

“Don’t know what I got, but maybe I got something,” he said.

Elizabeth Akeley pulled the door open. She stepped inside the cabin, closely followed by young Noyes.

The room, Ezra could see, was far larger than he’d estimated from the outside. Although the shack contained but a single room, that room was astonishingly deep. Its far corners were utterly lost in shadow. Nearer to him were a rocking chair, a battered over-stuffed couch and a dust-laden wooden table of the type often found in old New England homes.

Ezra later reported hearing odd sounds during those minutes. There was a strange buzzing sound. He couldn’t tell whether it was organic— a sound such as a flight of hornets might have made, or such as might have been made by a single insect magnified to a shocking gigantism—or whether the sound was artificial, as if an electrical generator were running slightly out of adjustment.

The modulation of the sound was its oddest characteristic. Not only did the volume rise and fall, but the pitch, and in some odd way, the very tonal quality of the buzzing, kept changing. “It was as if something was trying to talk to me. To us. To Miss Akeley and me. I thought I could almost understand it, but not quite.”

Noyes stood, all but paralyzed, until he heard Elizabeth Akeley scream. Ezra whirled from the table, whence had emanated the buzzing sounds. He saw Elizabeth standing before the rocking chair, her hands to her face, screaming.

The chair was rocking back and forth, slowly, gently. The cabin was almost pitch-black, its only illumination coming from an array of unfamiliar machinery set up on the long wooden table. Ezra could see now that a figure was seated, apparently unmoving, in the rocker. From it a voice was coming.

“Elizabeth, my darling, you have come,” the voice said. “Now we shall be together. We shall know the love of the body as we have known the love of the mind and of the soul.”

Strangely, Noyes later stated, although the voice in which the figure spoke was that of Marc Feinman, the accent and intonation were those of New England old-timers. Noyes testified also that his powers of observation played a strange trick on him at this moment. Although the man sitting in the chair was undoubtedly Marc Feinman—the clothing he wore, even to the sporting cap pulled low over his eyes, as if he were driving his Ferrari in a bright sun—what Ezra noticed most particularly was a tiny red-and-black smudge on Feinman's jacket. “It looked like a squashed ladybug,” the youth stated later.

From somewhere in the darker corners of the cabin there came a strange rustling sound, like that of great leathery wings opening and folding again.

Noyes shot a quick series of pictures, one of the figure in the rocking chair, one of the table with the unusual mechanical equipment on it, and one of the darker corners of the cabin, hoping vaguely that he would get some results. The man in the rocking chair tilted slowly backward, slowly forward, finally saying to Ezra, “You’ll never get anything from there. You’d better get over to the other end of the shack and make your pictures.”

As if hypnotized, Noyes walked toward the rear of the cabin. He stated later that as he passed a certain point, it was as if he had penetrated a curtain of total darkness. He was unable to see even a little as he had previously. He tried to turn and look back at the others, but could not move. He tried to call out but could not speak. He was completely conscious but seemed to have been plunged into a state of total paralysis (except, of course, for the autonomic functions that preserve the life of the body) and of sensory deprivation.

What transpired behind him, in the front end of the cabin, he could not tell. When he recovered from his paralysis and loss of sensory inputs, it was to find himself alone at the rear of the shack. It was daylight outside and sunshine was pushing through the grimy windows and open door of the shanty. He turned around and found himself facing two figures. A third was at his side.

“Ezra!” the third figure said.

“Mr. Whiteside!” Noyes responded.

“Well, I’m glad to see that you two are all right,” a voice came to them from the other end of the cabin. It was the old New England twang that Ezra had heard from the man in the rocking chair, and the speaker was, indeed, Marc Feinman. He stood, wooden-faced, his back to the doorway. Elizabeth Akeley, her features similarly expressionless, stood at his side. Feinman’s sporting cap was pulled down almost to the line of his eyebrows. Akeley’s bangs dangled over her forehead.

Noyes claimed later that he thought he could see signs of a fresh red scar running across Akeley’s forehead beneath the bangs. He claimed also that a corner of red was visible at the edge of the visor of Feinman’s cap. But of course this is unverified.

“We’re going now,” Feinman said in his strange New England twang. “We’ll take my car. You two go home in the other.”

“But—but, Radiant Mother,” Whiteside began.

"Elizabeth is very tired,” Feinman said nasally. "You’ll have to excuse her. I’m taking her away for a while.”

He started out the door, guiding Elizabeth by the elbow. She walked strangely, not so much as if she were tired, ill, or even injured. Somehow, she had the tentative, uncertain movements that are associated with an amputee first learning to maneuver prosthetic devices.

They left the cabin, walked to the Ferrari. Feinman opened the door on the passenger side and guided Akeley into the car. Then he circled the vehicle, climbed in and seated himself at the wheel. Strangely, he sat for a long time staring at the controls of the sports car, almost as if he were unfamiliar with its type.

Vernon Whiteside and Ezra Noyes followed the others from the cabin. Both were still confused from their strange experience of paralysis and sensory deprivation; both stated later that they felt only half-awake, half-hypnotized. “Else,” agent Whiteside later deposed, “I’d have stopped them for sure. Warrant or no warrant, I had probable cause that something fishy was going on, and I’d’ve grabbed the keys out of that Ferrari, done anything it took to keep those two there. But I could hardly move, I could hardly even think.

“I did manage to reach into that car and grab out my machine. My microcassette recorder. Then I looked at my little bug-mike and saw that it was squashed, like somebody’d just squeezed it between his thumb and his finger, only he must have been made out of iron ’cause those bug-mikes are ruggedized. They can take a wallop with a sledge hammer and not even know it. So who squashed my little bug?

“Then Feinman finally got his car started and they pulled away. I looked at the Noyes kid and he looked at me, and we headed for his Nash wagon and we went back to his house. Nearly cracked up half a dozen times on the way home, he drove like a drunk. When we got to his place, we both passed out for twelve hours while Feinman and Akeley were going God-knows-where in that Ferrari.

“Soon as I got myself back together I phoned in to agency field HQ and came on in.”

When agent Whiteside reported to agency field HQ he turned over the microcassette which he and Feinman had made at the shack. Excerpts from the tape follow:

(Whiteside’s Channel)

(All voices mixed): Yeah, this is the place all right.. I’ll—got it open, okay... Sheesh, it’s dark in here. How’d she see anything? Well... (Buzzing sound.) What's that? What’s that? Here, I’ll shine my—what the hell? It looks like... Shining cylinder. No, two of ’em. Two of ’em. What the hell, some kind of futuristic espresso machines. What the hell....

(Buzzing sound becomes very loud, dominates tape. Then it drops and a rustling is heard.)

Voice #3 (Vernon Whiteside): Here, lend me that thing a minute. No, I just gotta see what’s over there. Okay, you stay here a minute, I gotta see what's....

(Sound of walking, buzzing continues in background but fades, rustling sound increases.)

Voice #3: Jesus God! That can’t be! No, no, that can’t be! It’s too....

(Sound of thump, as if microphone were being struck and then crushed between superhard metallic surfaces. Remainder of Whiteside channel is silent.)

(Feinman’s Channel)

(Early portion identical to Whiteside channel; excerpts begin following end of recording on Whiteside channel.)

Voice #1 (Marc Feinman): Vernon? Vernon? What—

Voice #6 (Henry Wentworth Akeley): He is unharmed.

Voice #1: Who’s that?

Voice #6: I am Henry Wentworth Akeley.

Voice #1: Lizzy’s great-grandfather.

Voice #6: Precisely. And you are Mr. Feinman?

Voice #1: Where are you, Akeley?

Voice #6: I am here.

Voice #1: Where? I don’t see . . . what happened to Whiteside? Listen, what’s going on here? I don’t like what’s going on here.

Voice #6: Please, Mr. Feinman, try to remain calm.

Voice #1: Where are you, Akeley? For the last time....

Voice #6: Please, Mr. Feinman, I must ask you to calm yourself. (Rustling sound.) Ah, that’s better. Now, Mr. Feinman, do you not see certain objects on the table? Good. Now, Mr. Feinman, you are an intelligent and courageous young man. I understand that your interests are wide and your thirst for knowledge great. I offer you a grand opportunity. One which was offered to me half a century ago. I tried to decline at that time. My hand was forced. I never regretted having... let us say, gone where I have gone. But I now must return to earthly flesh, and as my own integument is long destroyed, I have need of another.

Voice #1: What—where—what are you talking about? If this is some kind of...

(Loud sound of rustling, sound of thumping and struggle, incoherent gasps and gurgles, loud breathing, moans.)

(At this point the same sound that ended the Whiteside segment of the tape is heard. Remainder of Feinman channel is blank.)

When agent Whiteside and young Ezra Noyes woke from their exhausted sleep, Whiteside revealed himself as a representative of the agency. He obtained the film from young Noyes’ camera. It was promptly developed at the nearest agency facility. The film was subsequently returned to Noyes, and the four usable photographs, in fuzzily screened and mimeographed form, appeared in the Vermont UFO Intelligencer.

A description of the four photographs follows:

Frame 1: (Shot through window of the wooden shack) A dingy room containing a rocking chair and a large wooden table.

Frame 2: (Shot inside room) A rocking chair. In the chair is sitting a man identified as Marc Feinman. Feinman’s sporting cap is pulled down covering his forehead. His eyes are barely visible and seem to have a glazed appearance, but this may be due to the unusual lighting conditions. A mark on his forehead seems to be visible at the edge of the cap, but is insufficiently distinct for verification.

Frame 3: (Shot inside room) Large wooden table holding unusual mechanical apparatus. There are numerous electrical devices, power units, what appears to be a cooling unit, photo-electric cells, items which appear to be microphones, and two medium-sized metallic cylinders estimated to contain sufficient space for a human brain, along with life-support paraphernalia.

Frame 4: (Shot inside room) This was obviously Noyes’ final frame, taken as he headed toward the darkened rear area of the cabin. The rough wooden flooring before the camera is clearly visible. From it there seems to rise a curtain or wall of sheer blackness. This is not a black substance of any sort, but a curtain or mass of sheer negation. All attempts at analysis by agency photoanalysts have failed completely.

Elizabeth Akeley and Marc Feinman were located at—of all places—Niagara Falls, New York. They had booked a honeymoon cottage and were actually located by agents of the agency returning in traditional yellow slickers from a romantic cruise on the craft Maid of the Mist.

Asked to submit voluntarily to agency interrogation, Feinman refused. Akeley, at Feinman’s prompting, simply shook her head negatively. “But I’ll tell you what,” Feinman said in a marked New England twang, “I’ll make out a written statement for you if you’ll settle for that.”

Representatives of the agency considered this particularly unsatisfactory, but having no grounds for holding Feinman or Akeley and being particularly sensitive to criticism of the agency for alleged intrusion upon the religious freedoms of unorthodox cults, the representatives of the agency were constrained to accept Feinman’s offer.

The deposition provided by Feinman—and co-sworn by Akeley—represented a vague and rambling narrative of no value. Its concluding paragraph follows:

All we want is to be left alone. We love each other. We’re here now and we’re happy here. What came before is over. That’s somebody else's concern now. Let them go. Let them see. Let them learn. Vega, Aldebaran, Ophiuchi, the Crab Nebula. Let them see. Let them learn. Someday we may wish to go back. We will have a way to summon those ones. When we summon those ones they will respond.

A final effort by representatives of the agency was made, in an additional visit to the abandoned shack by the sycamore copse off the Passumpsic-Ludlow road. A squad of agents wearing regulation black outfits was guided by Vernon Whiteside. An additional agent remained at the Noyes home to assure noninterference by Ezra Noyes.

Whiteside guided his fellow agents to the sycamore copse. Several agents remarked at the warmth and debilitating feeling they experienced as they passed through the copse. In addition, an abnormal number of small cadavers—squirrels, chipmunks, one grey fox, a skunk, and several whippoorwills—were noted, lying beneath the trees.

The shack contained an aged wooden rocking chair, a battered over-stuffed couch, and a large wooden table. Whatever might have previously stood upon the table had been removed.

There was no evidence of the so-called wall or curtain of darkness. The rear of the shack was vacant.

In the months since the incidents above reported, two additional developments have taken place, note of which is appropriate herein.

First, Marc Feinman and Elizabeth Akeley returned to San Diego in Feinman’s Ferrari Boxer. There, they took up residence at the Pleasant Street location. Feinman vacated the Upas Street apartment; he returned to his work with the computer firm. Inquiries placed with his employers indicate that he appeared, upon returning, to be absent-minded and disoriented, and unexpectedly to require briefings in computer technology and programming concepts with which he had previously been thoroughly familiar.

Feinman explained this curious lapse by stating that he had experienced a head injury while vacationing in Vermont and still suffered from occasional lapses of memory. He showed a vivid but rapidly fading scar on his forehead as evidence of the injury. His work performance quickly returned to its usual high standard. "Marc’s as smart as the brightest prof you ever studied under,” his supervisor stated to the agency. “But that Vermont trip made some impression on him! He picked up this funny New England twang in his speech, and it just won’t go away.”

Elizabeth Akeley went into seclusion. Feinman announced that they had been married and that Elizabeth was, at least temporarily, abandoning her position as Radiant Mother of the Spiritual Light Church, although remaining a faithful member of the Church. In Feinman’s company she regularly attends Sunday worship services, but seldom speaks.

The second item of note is of questionable relevance and significance but is included here as a matter of completing the appropriate documentation. Vermont Forestry Service officers have reported that a new variety of sycamore tree has appeared in the Windham County-Windsor County section of the state. The new sycamores are lush and extremely hardy. They seem to generate a peculiarly warm atmosphere and are not congenial to small forest animals. Forestry officers who have investigated report a strange sense of lassitude when standing beneath these trees, and one officer has apparently been lost while exploring a stand of the trees near the town of Passumpsic.

Forestry agents are maintaining a constant watch on the spread of the new variety of sycamores.

The Plague Jar

by Allen Mackey

“Damn!” barked Professor Henry Winwood after he had slammed his office door. “Idiots! Obscurantists!” He ranted for several minutes, as if to an unseen audience, stalking furiously around his desk, waving a thick sheaf of papers with one hand, until there was a brisk knock at the door.

“Yes, what is it!” the professor harshly called out.

The door opened hesitantly and a youthful face peered inside. “Er, Professor Winwood? I wanted to ask about... my paper...” The speaker paused as he read the professor’s features. “If this is a bad time—”

"No, no, come inside, Jamison.”

Trent Jamison, a student in the professor’s afternoon seminar on Middle Eastern cultures, had never seen the usually stolid instructor so upset before. Jamison felt almost ashamed to disturb Winwood; he felt that he had interrupted the man at a private moment. He then decided that his business could wait.

“Sorry about the disturbance, Dr. Winwood. It’s really not that important; I’ll come back some other time,” he said, embarrassed, edging back the way he had come.

“Nonsense, come in,” Winwood urged, more his normal self. He then realized the source of his student’s trepidation. “Oh, Jamison, never mind my anger of a moment ago,” he began by way of apology, though he was still fuming on the inside. “It’s just that those damn fools at the university press have rejected my latest manuscript, a work entitled The Plague Jar. ‘Too controversial,’ they said. ‘It violates the established theological doctrines,’ they whimpered. ‘The university would never live it down,’ they muttered.”

His initial purpose forgotten, Jamison entered the small office, firmly closed the door behind him, and seated himself on one of the pair of wooden chairs before the desk. He gave the office a cursory glance; he had been inside on only three other occasions. The room was unremarkable: tall gray metal filing cabinets stood against one wall, a small set of book shelves along the wall opposite, with a paper-littered desk in the middle of the floor space. Directly behind the professor’s chair was a large window shaded with Venetian blinds.

The professor sat behind the desk and thumped the computer- printed sheets on top of the paper landscape. He wearily closed his eyes and inhaled deeply for a moment.

“Are you okay, Dr. Winwood?” asked Jamison, genuinely concerned.

“I’ve been better,” replied Winwood, resting his elbows on the desk. He had taken off his glasses and began rubbing his temples; apparently he had a tension headache. “What did you need, Jamison?”

“Nothing, sir. Look, forget what I need. What do you need? I mean, is there anything that I can do for you?”

Professor Winwood glanced up with narrowed eyes, studying his pupil’s face as if he were gazing into the depths of Jamison’s soul. “Yes, you are a gifted student,” Winwood slowly began while massaging his weak chin, speaking more to himself than to Jamison. “Perhaps you would be able to understand... yes,” he concluded with gravity. With that Winwood resolutely pounded the desk with an open palm. He then began sorting through the disheveled manuscript before him. With the pages he was searching for in his hand, he turned and looked his student squarely in the eyes.

"Jamison, you seem to be trustworthy. You’re bright, soft spoken, prompt with assignments—not like the other grad students,” he added with mild irritation directed toward those he felt didn’t take his class seriously enough. “Plus,” he returned, “you have an uncanny knack at things Middle Eastern—you’re a natural antiquarian. What I have to say will probably very much interest you.”

Jamison was pleased with the professor’s evaluation of his character but tried not to let it show. He said: “Thank you for the kind words, sir. I would be honored to hear what you have to say.”

Winwood nodded his balding head, relieved. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, a ponderous pressure that he had felt for over a year. It was one thing to have your soul bared on a computer file, to write about the secret of the ages, but it would be much more effective to tell another person. Jamison might understand, even if those imbecilic directors did not. Right now he needed someone to understand.

“You must know beforehand, Jamison, that what I will discuss is, shall I say... ‘explosive? You may not want to hear this if you are Christian or religious in any way...” He watched Jamison carefully. The student merely shook his head, indicating that he was not easily offended. “Good,” Winwood pronounced. “Now, then, let me tell you about my apparently never-to-be-published book, The Plague Jar...

“Everything to do with The Plague Jar began, for me, in this very office.” Noting Jamison’s confused look, he said, “Don’t worry, everything will shortly be explained. With your enthusiastic penchant for Semitic lore and antiquities, I’m certain that you know of the story that caused much excitement in archaeological circles a few years back, the one about the expedition that uncovered the ruins of Irem, the City of Pillars —”

Jamison gasped with disbelief; he had been waiting to learn more about the curiously silent details of that expedition since he first heard of the discovery. However, it seemed that the records and findings of the expedition had been buried—beneath red tape. “Of course I know about Irem,” he heartily replied. “In fact, that’s one of the things that cemented my interest in the Middle East!”

Winwood nodded. “Anyway, a few months after the initial reports of the expedition leaked into the scholarly journals, I received a bulky package in the mail from Professor Gordon Qualt, who teaches at Bedford University in Massachusetts. Among other things, he sent no less than six notebooks and first generation photographs that he got from Saudi Arabia—from one of the last survivors of that fated expedition!”

"Last surviving... fated?” Jamison uttered, perplexed. “But from what little I read in the journals, the expedition was a total success! I mean, Irem was long thought to be mythical, although it was mentioned in the Koran and the Arabian Nights and many other old books; its discovery—”

“Yes, I know,” Winwood interrupted. “Listen, almost all legends are based on fact. Haven’t you wondered why the site wasn’t exploited by the international media?”

“I always assumed that there were political factors involved,” Jamison honestly stated.

“There were, evidently. But there was more to it than that. The discovery of Irem should have been one of the most important archaeological events in modern times. Instead it was hushed up. And I have the answer to the obvious question. This manuscript,” he stated, holding the relevant portion in his hands for Jamison’s inspection, "outlines the details of the Irem expedition.”

Jamison was duly impressed. “But you said earlier that your book was rejected by the university press directors. Surely a book about a missing piece of history would be widely received and highly praised!”

“Be patient,” Winwood urged with a smile, holding his hands up, palms outward. “I’ll get to that.”

Jamison sat in place, listening to Winwood’s narrative without comment, nodding his head occasionally. Winwood spoke for fully an hour and a half, pausing now and then to redirect his train of thought. His words utterly engrossed Jamison, who absorbed them with something akin to religious awe.

It all began with Professor Ali Yaquud, director of Archaeology at the University of Riyadh. Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia, and the university is the most modern in the country. The Archaeology Department was renowned for its work in uncovering elder antiquities. Yaquud himself was one of the leading researchers in the Middle East. He was a well-versed man—perhaps overly well versed, for his drive for knowledge led eventually to his downfall. He had studied under

Professor Yuni Abdalmajid of the University of Baghdad, and some said he had perhaps learned too much from his Iraqi mentor.

Professor Abdalmajid was known as an eccentric; his colleagues tolerated him only because of his large body of scholarly accomplishments from earlier in his meteoric career. All brilliant, but comfortably conventional in assumptions as well as results. It was Abdalmajid who had scried the secrets of the pre-Sumerian Rawson tablets from Ur and thereby filled in curious gaps in the early Mesopotamian history. Ali Yaquud was a zealous student; like his young peers, he was mesmerized by his teacher’s every word, until one day in 1967 Abdalmajid did not appear for his classes. Two days later he was still unaccountably absent. The police were eventually called in. To everyone’s complete shock, investigators discovered that in his study blood had been splashed on the walls, floor and ceiling. He had been deciphering an unidentified manuscript at the time of his disappearance. The blood samples matched the professor’s own, but as no corpse could be found, no one could rule out the unlikely possibility that Dr. Abdalmajid himself had scattered the blood, presumably not his own, during the reconstruction of an ancient ritual detailed in the mysterious text.

Yaquud spent years after the death of his mentor studying his chosen field with fervor. He eventually obtained a position at the University of Riyadh, where he would be reasonably close, geographically, to his main goal. It was Yaquud’s ambition to one day uncover the ruins of Irem, the City of Pillars, and this he actually accomplished. Before that, however, he confided to certain colleagues, including one Hassan Ze’ez, that he had gleaned clues to various half-mythical sites from the yellowed pages of the more dubious volumes stored in the Cairo Museum. Yaquud claimed to have spent months on leave from his academic duties searching the most desolate regions for lost relics of the past. Some suggested that these delvings were far from fruitless, but that Dr. Yaquud dared not display—or even disclose—what he found.

That Yaquud was not quite sane was widely whispered, but the man was indisputably a genius. He was tolerated as Abdalmajid had been by his colleagues; he was Saudi Arabia’s greatest savant, a reputation won early in a precocious career and invulnerable to later suspicions. Irem had been a fascination of his that quickly grew into a fanatical obsession. He claimed to have owned photostats of rare, hitherto- unknown passages from moldering scrolls and codices concerning the many-columned city. Based on the findings of an earlier American expedition which had employed infrared satellite photography to trace ancient caravan routes, Yaquud knew the general vicinity where Irem must be, if it still existed, but he did not wish to lead a team of diggers there until he was fully “prepared.” Or so he told Hassan Ze’ez, who was not certain of what he meant.

For the span of seven years, Yaquud voraciously studied everything he could find that concerned Irem, including ancient maps of Arabia and eldritch astrological/astronomical charts. He also consulted so-called sages and wise men in Riyadh and other cities, asking for information and guidance, all of which served to fuel his desire to find the city. With great excitement Yaquud spoke of some coming event of tremendous import. The pending expedition was highly anticipated, for Yaquud had long since chosen his team of experts and promising doctoral students.

Using certain vague connections with highly placed individuals in the Saudi oil industry, he obtained permission to dig in the Rub al-Khali, the little-explored and rarely crossed body of sand, one of the most desolate regions in the world. The desert is generally restricted from public exploration, though to little point, since few have any desire to venture into the region. Plans for the official expedition were rapidly finalized. A dozen team members were present, most of whom were former students of Yaquud’s, with one notable exception, Professor Kashan, a contemporary of the esteemed professor who had on more than one occasion expressed doubts concerning his rival’s wilder theories.

The team members had a fortnight to prepare; then, on the first of May, they left Riyadh. They were equipped with three outdated trucks of government issue, their gear piled haphazardly in the long beds. The men were cramped but relatively comfortable. Their fist objective was to reach Laila, roughly two hundred and fifty miles south of Riyadh, where they would pick up more supplies. The expedition proper began after this stop. Heavily laden with equipment, they left early in the morning, before the worst of the heat. Within four days they had entered the Empty Quarter. According to Yaquud’s calculations, Irem lay somewhere in the southwest portion of the trackless waste. He had more specific coordinates, but these he refused to divulge, even to Kashan.

The caravan slowly wormed its way into the burning land. The monotony of the trek grew evermore apparent; during the day all that could be seen was the endless ocean of sand, and during the night, a black star-filled expanse overhead. Nothing seemed to change. For a week the expedition crawled deeper into the uncharted void.

On the first day of the third week a sudden sandstorm ravaged the party as soon as they had set camp. In the morning it was found that one of the trucks had been partially buried—sand had seeped into its motor, rendering it inoperable. Although the caravan was crippled, Yaquud refused to return to Riyadh empty-handed. They salvaged what they could and continued. For the next few weeks mysterious things happened at night when the caravan stopped to make camp. Several men complained of seeing fleeting shadows and other strange hallucinations. Yaquud carefully listened to their words, plainly worried. It almost seemed as if they were being followed—but by whom, or what? Small objects were invariably found missing in the mornings, like pots and pans, electric torches, and, in one instance, a hand pistol. With each successive night the thefts became more numerous.

It was on the second night of the fourth week that Dr. Kashan awoke to see a shambling, emaciated figure kneeling over his knapsack, rifling through its contents. Kashan let out a yelp of alarm and the thing loped off into the sandy wilderness, lurching with a peculiar gait. Kashan immediately informed Yaquud, who muttered something about “ghouls." Ignoring his nonplused colleague’s stammered protests, Yaquud produced a khaki-veiled glass container that he had ordered from a glazier in Riyadh just for this purpose, it seemed. He set out into the night carrying the curiously shaped container, almost manshaped, like a hollow glass doll, and came back five hours later, empty-handed and depleted of strength. “I have paid the price; we shall have safe passage from here on,” he announced. True to his word, the thefts stopped after that.

For another two weeks the caravan straggled onward, fatigued by this time. A depression had settled over the party, numbing each member to the rigors of the journey. The bleak surroundings seemed to drain them of vitality; the desert waste is empty. It erases. It is rightly said that no man may dwell for too long in the Empty Spaces and not be changed.

Throughout the journey, Hassan Ze’ez silently wondered about the real objective of Yaquud. Surely it was not merely archaeological, he reasoned. Ze’ez rode in the back of the second truck, shaded from the brutal sun by a canvas top. The only thing for him to do was to constantly think.

On the third night of the sixth week, Ze’ez finally approached the enigmatic team leader as he sat to one side of the camp fire. Yaquud was wont to brood alone, as far away from the others as possible. Ze’ez bluntly demanded to know the source of Yaquud’s information concerning the location of Irem. For a minute it seemed as if Yaquud would not respond, then he muttered something about an ancient manuscript owned by a private collector in Baghdad. When asked what manuscript this might be, Yaquud again waited, then shrugged his bony shoulders and said, "The Kitab Al-Azif, the author of which spent much time in the many-columned city.” Of the matter he would speak no more. Confused more than before, Ze’ez made his way to the tent that he shared with three others. Silently he shook his head at his colleague’s apparent gullibility at an imposture which had now implicated the whole party in a fool’s errand.

The next day was when the momentous event occurred: The ruins of Irem were discovered. In the false dawn the expedition broke camp with a keen feeling of expectancy in the air. They had traversed little more than two miles when Yaquud, who rode in the cab of the first truck, sighted the ruins from afar. The sky by then blazed with dazzling brilliance.

At first glance the City of Pillars seemed like a shimmering mirage —skeletal ruins half buried under the shifting sands. Immediately Ze’ez was struck with a wave of emotion, a strange mixture of elation and menace. An eerie quiet settled over the party, intensifying as they drew closer.

At close range the brooding ruins proved to be faded red in color, webbed with cracks from centuries of weathering. Crumbled piles of titanic masonry, baked clay blocks weighing many tons each, comprised the inner foundation of the eroded city. Encircling these were massive broken walls and battlements. The empty gates were flooded with sand.

Yaquud bleated with insane exhilaration; the rest of the party was still gripped by the strange hush. The leader hopped out of the truck before it had come to a full stop, fifty yards from the nearest tumbled wall. He scurried away toward the city, notebook in hand. Without hesitation he ran unerringly through the maze of debris to a colossal mount of stone, a building that had not completely crumbled.

The rest of the men shortly followed, stunned by the dark atmosphere of age that radiated from the fallen city. Sand choked the ancient streets and huge, fantastic, half-hidden columns lay scattered about. As the men wove their way through the debris, it seemed as if something sinister lurked nearby, unseen.

Yaquud was within the vast central edifice—the only structure still standing—scouring the walls, searching for minute inscriptions. Once aware of other presences in the chamber, he feigned minimal interest.

The remainder of the day was spent on surveying the site, with two teams dashing about recording their findings. According to certain elder texts, Irem was a square of ten parsangs—or leagues—on each side, i.e., thirty miles; the walls were of red Cyclopean bricks, 500 cubits high and 20 broad—approximately 11,000 feet tall, 440 wide; with four gates of breathtakingly ornate grandeur. It was further said that Irem contained 300,000 kasr—palaces—each with a thousand pillars of gold-bound jasper. The old tales had been exaggerated with each translation, of course; the palaces were considerably fewer in number than supposed and showed no signs of precious metals. The measurements for the walls, however, were fairly accurate.

Before long a rough map of the site was sketched out, although much of the southern section was blanketed with sand. Much work had been accomplished by the time night fell; despite the oppressive silence of the ruins a celebration was held in honor of Yaquud and the discovery. Ze’ez was torn; he was frightened by a nameless dread and elated— what they had done was secure proof of a myth, the existence of which would insure the team’s fame and prosperity for the rest of their days.

The night passed slowly, abnormally cold. Yaquud had erected his tent next to the central structure while the others had made camp beside the broken walls. Ze’ez stayed awake, conscious of the nearly suffocating mental miasma of age that emanated from the city.

The morning came quickly. The aura of dread lingered on the dry air, though not as strong as the previous day. Ze’ez’s duties included digging for relics and listing the visible remnants.

The first finds were prosaic enough—initially. Nine immense broken pillars were uncovered, ringed about the central edifice. They appeared to be composed of stones not native to the region; indeed, Professor Yarib, a geologist/mineralogist, could not identify the stone. Further digging revealed grotesque baked clay images that had squatted on the tops of the columns while they stood. Yarib and Sabi, one of the diggers, brushed sand from the statuettes. As they did, the other team members gathered around, fascinated.

The images represented non-human figures with bizarre symmetry and configurations. Ze’ez, standing on the outside of the rough circle, felt an immense surge of undiluted apprehension. The carven images were evil. Of this Ze’ez did not doubt, though never before would such an emotional reaction to an ancient artifact have even occurred to the archaeologist. From the reactions of those around him, this impression was not his alone. Yaquud, however, excitedly shoved his way through the small crowd to examine the finds. Eyes wide and gleaming, Yaquud gathered the fragments of the statuary and carried them away to the research area he had marked out by the central structure, where he remained for the rest of the work day.

Later more pillars and statuettes were found. Apparently Irem had been home to a vast forest of stone monoliths, each with its own hideous guardian. Ancient lore had made of Irem a center of idolatrous pilgrimage foreshadowing Mecca. From all points of the Arabian peninsula (and, some hinted, farther), the faithful and the superstitious would converge on the many-columned metropolis seeking out any and every debased idol and blood-stained effigy known to Semitic demonology —and no doubt many that were not. Had not the Prophet warned Mecca that it, too, stood to reap the fate of Irem, destroyed for its blasphemies by the vengeful hand of Allah?

When informed of the new discoveries, Yaquud hastily ordered each to be sent to his quarters. Yaquud was trembling with obvious anticipation, affecting the team members. He was absent from the evening meal. He was absorbed in cataloguing his finds when Professor Kashan consulted him about the morrow’s activities. Kashan came away from Yaquud’s tent ashen-faced. When asked the source of his trouble, Kashan fearfully whispered, “Yaquud merely stared at the statuary and said ‘It is even as the mad Arab wrote.’” Kashan retired early, leaving the others bewildered.

Ze’ez remembered what Yaquud had told him in private about his information and wondered if this "mad Arab” was the one who wrote the Kitab Al-Azif. The name—or title, rather—struck a chord in the murky depths of his memory, but the information stubbornly refused to be recalled. With all the legends and folklore that Ze’ez had studied, it was easy to forget names.

A quick glance in Yaquud’s general direction showed that he was still awake; his silhouette as he sat at his small table could faintly be seen against the canvas wall of his tent. He seemed to be studying the pieces of statuary.

Ze’ez wearily responded to the wake-up call. It seemed as if something—perhaps the bleakness of the region—had been draining him of vigor. Ze’ez groggily assisted with the excavation of more monoliths and fallen buildings, carefully photographing each one for documentation.

Yaquud and Achmed, his assistant, were working in the colossal central edifice, leaving no stone unturned in their search for useful specimens. Toward midday an amplified howl of triumph tore from the interior of the structure, bringing the scattered men running to investigate. Inside, Yaquud was lying on his side, his face pressed against the rubble-strewn ground.

“See? There!” he exclaimed, pointing to a long, thin crack in the stone floor. “I did not notice it before—a concealed trapdoor!”

Working with renewed fervor, Yaquud and three others cleared the area, brushing sand away with their hands. An irregular flat stone soon lay uncovered.

“What can it lead to? A tomb?” Achmed asked.

“No, I think not,” Yaquud absently murmured. After a moment’s pause in which he seemed to eye his companions suspiciously as if regretting he were not alone at the moment of revelation, Yaquud called for a spade. With the tool firmly in hand, he wedged its blade into the crack. Achmed joined him with a spade of his own. With assistance from the others, they succeeded in prying the lid from the ground, releasing a rush of stale air. After giving the edifice several minutes to air out, they returned to the edge of the aperture. With the dim light cast from an electric torch they saw crude steps leading downward.

The find caused a great deal of excitement among the workers, but Ze’ez, watching Yaquud’s countenance flash with ulterior triumph, felt chills travel up his spine.

Yaquud stood and announced that he would descend the stairs, followed by any volunteers. Despite the general excitement, no one offered to accompany him. At this he appeared not disappointed but, rather, relieved. Yaquud found a heavy coil of rope and tied one end around his waist, securing the other end under a large chunk of masonry. He selected a fresh flashlight and entered the opening, stepping cautiously to determine if each eon-untrodden step would bear his weight. A moment later he disappeared. Only the uncoiling rope indicated that he was still moving.

Twenty minutes slowly passed. During the last five of these, the rope ceased to feed out. Worried, Achmed called out to Yaquud, who answered a minute later, his voice distant. “I am fine,” his voice trailed up. “The stairway is fifty yards deep. I am presently before a large— bronze?—door adorned with curious inscriptions. I am transcribing these into my notebook.”

The group erupted with fanciful discussion. Young Achmed said, “It is a tomb!”

Kashan differed. “No, in the Arabian Nights this city was likened to Paradise—it is a treasure room!”

The speculation continued until Yaquud climbed out of the tunnel, covered with dust. “Here it is,” he wheezed, producing his worn notebook. Several sheets were decorated with elaborate sketchings of bizarre characters. The origin of the writing was unknown, yet strangely familiar to Ze’ez. The hooked glyphs were arranged in narrow rows and bore a slight resemblance to Sanskrit, but this was only an analogy; he could think of no language, ancient or modern, to which such gibberish might be akin.

After taking a long draught from his canteen, which he had thoughtlessly left behind, Yaquud said: “I have just the book to translate the writing.” He retrieved his notebook and rushed to his tent, where he shuffled through a box. He at length pulled out a battered copy of Professor Gordon Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions.

“I must have silence,” Yaquud instructed the jubilant men who had followed him into his quarters. The various discussions trailed off. A few of the men left. The rest watched as Yaquud flipped through the smudged pages of the book until he had found a chart. Then the long process of translation began.

An hour later all the men had drifted away, as if feeling themselves intruders upon an intimate moment, waiting patiently outside in the shade. All thoughts of work were far from their minds. Only Achmed stayed by Yaquud’s side. That evening, after dinner, a haggard-looking Yaquud made his way to the workers, holding the notebook once again. It was plain that he had succeeded in his task; his gloating features said as much.

“After reading over the translation and making a few minor corrections, I came out with this message:

Beyond the beyond is chaos. The gate/door lies not here but in the great tower which is elsewhere but near. Here is the jar. The jar brings plague, famine and death. The jar is plague, famine and death. The jar is the scourge of doom, the breath of chaos, molded by the very hand that smites. Carried by those who fled from the (north?) it was and here it rests, waiting until the time is right to open.”

Intrigued by the message, Ze’ez listened silently as the others discussed its possible meaning. No conclusion could be reached. It was readily decided that four men would accompany Yaquud to open the bronze door in the morning. Ze’ez experienced that tingling sensation in his spine again; he was of the opinion that the matter should be forgotten—he sensed danger ahead.

Icy fingers of dread caressed Ze’ez throughout the bitter evening. He shivered under his bedding for an indeterminate amount of time, worried about the turn of events. Irem was eerie enough with its toppled monoliths and ugly statuary without this new development. The translation, with its references to chaos, the tower and the jar, was disturbing. A black depression settled over him, clouding his thoughts. He was aware of strange forces gathering in the City of Pillars...

He gradually swam into awareness under the steadily increasing glare of the sun. Looking around, he saw that he was outside the tent... outside the city, in fact. He espied the ruins, shimmering in the dawn light, not too distant. Apparently he had been walking in his sleep. This revelation in itself was not as alarming as the thoughts that crowded his head. He had dreamed of a massive black tower protruding from the sands, jutting skyward like a skeletal finger for over a mile. This tower was older even than Irem, undecorated except for a huge symbol embossed on one side: an immense spiral design with jagged lines, like lightning, extending outward from the hazy center.

Ze’ez hastily made his way back to the encampment. He assumed that the nightmare and somnambulism had been initiated by Yaquud’s reading of the inscription and its mention of a tower. However, once with his companions, he heard talk of shared dreams—while only he had seen the black tower, six others had dreamed of the unsettling symbol; all the men had felt a formless dread. For reasons that he could not explain, Ze’ez kept the details of his own nocturnal vision to himself.

Yaquud and his hand-picked team prepared for their descent into the subterranean passage. Armed with picks and shovels, the men somewhat reluctantly trailed Yaquud, who was plainly eager to embark on the mission. To his relief, Ze’ez was not chosen to go under.

Rashim, one of the men behind Yaquud, later described the descent. The way was slow, the gloominess of the narrow, high-ceilinged tunnel stifling. Centuries of dust layered the bulky, roughly hewn steps. Their passage caused motes to linger in the musky air, bringing coughing bouts. Rashim was consumed with the thought that hundreds of tons of earth were above his head; he was convinced that the passage would collapse at any instant.

At length they stood before the gigantic bronze door. It was fifteen feet in height, ten wide, adorned with a series of crude bas reliefs and the same inscriptions that Yaquud had copied the day before. The intrepid explorer’s footprints from the previous day were deeply etched in the dust.

One of the men began to take photographs of the spacious alcove, while the others minutely examined the door for a means of ingress, but to their dismay, no hinges of any kind were visible. There were also no hidden levers of similar devices. Yaquud impatiently ordered the door pried open with the shovels.

For ten grueling minutes the men toiled, shovels wedged in the hairline cracks that bordered the barrier, with no discernible results. With a final burst of strength, Rashim heaved all his weight onto his tool, breaking its long wooden handle. A grating rumble began, reverberating against the earthen walls. Suddenly Rashim understood: Grinding against the walls, the door began to topple outward. Three of the men had time to react; one, Balili, did not. The mammoth door landed with a ground-shaking clang!, slapping choking clouds of dust into the air.

Balili was crushed in an instant. The others barely had time to cross the alcove to the passage; still, they were assailed with severe coughing fits and, in one case, vomiting.

The third survivor fled to the surface when he was able. Yaquud and Rashim waited—the latter against his will, for Yaquud had tightly gripped him by the arm—in the passage. When the dust settled they gingerly ventured back inside the alcove. There was no chance of lifting the heavy, foot-thick door to retrieve Balili’s remains, Yaquud decided. He then stepped over the edge of the door and entered the dark chamber beyond. Rashim wanted desperately to return above ground, but Yaquud called out to him, bidding him to follow. Rashim hesitantly did as he was told.

The chamber was vast and empty. Or almost empty. No treasure carpeted the floor, no bodies resided in sarcophagi. The only object present was shockingly prosaic: a rather large, gray jar, which stood in the center of the room. Yaquud was already kneeling before it, running his hands over its surface. “It is smooth,” he observed, plainly expecting otherwise. He released a hiss of tension when his hands found something. “There it is,” he breathed. Wiping dust from the area, he indicated the same spiral symbol that Ze’ez had seen in his dream.

The rest occurred in quick succession: Yaquud, his voice more fervid than ever, bleated commands to Rashim. They carried the ancient five-foot-tall earthen jar out of the chamber and, with considerable difficulty, up the stairs. Several diggers dutifully assisted, summoned by the sounds of exertion. Once above the ground they carefully cleaned the artifact’s surface. The discovery did not impress the men; they were upset about Balili’s death.

“This is it!” Yaquud ranted to himself. “The jar of plagues, older than mankind; indeed, older than time!” His eyes were feral, his voice strained. He dragged the jar into his tent for closer examination.

Rashim, that night at the camp fire, related the events of the day, how he and Yaquud had found what the leader called “the Plague Jar.” He trembled when he said that the clay was cold and damp to the touch, though the subterranean chamber had been utterly dry. Furthermore, the jar did not seem to have contents; at least, Rashim felt no shifting weight. Perhaps the jar had once contained spices or diseased clothing that had long since deteriorated to dust.

All throughout his tale, Rashim absently scratched his hands. When this was brought to his attention, he mumbled something about them “itching like a mangy dog.” He went on to explain that his flesh had been numbed by the disconcertingly smooth clay of the jar. Most ancient relics were rough and grainy; the jar was neither.

As for the jar itself, it stood five feet off the ground, and was two feet wide at its base and top with a tapered neck. Its middle section bulged outward. Its mouth was sealed with a dark gray plug and a translucent layer of wax. Under the wax a star-shaped design could faintly be seen. Unnoticed before was a series of minuscule ideoglyphs, below the embossed spiral symbol on the jar’s surface. Yaquud was engaged in deciphering the glyphs.

Young Achmed related how Yaquud had spurned his assistance with the new translation. He did, however, inquire if Yaquud recognized any of the writing. Yaquud stared at the symbols for a minute and replied: “Yes, I can identify the glyphs that represent ‘jar’ and ‘plague’ often. That is of course ‘chaos,’” he pointed to the spiral design, “while these seem to be measurements for constructing a new form of metal,” he concluded, indicating the lower dot-group lines.

When Yaquud made his way to the main camp to eat he was asked about his progress. Shaking his head, he refused to reply. His sullen mood affected the men; one by one they went to their tents. Ze’ez saw the opportunity to question his eccentric colleague.

Yaquud was exhausted. He, too, scratched incessantly at his skin, Ze’ez noticed. He promptly took advantage of Yaquud’s discomfort, plying him with inquiries. First he asked—demanded—to know who the “mad Arab” was and what his book had to do with the expedition. Abdullah Al-Hazred, it seemed, had lived during the time of the Ummayad Caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He was a poet, a collector and chronicler of forbidden lore. His only surviving work, the Kitab Al Azif now known as the Necronomicon, had been translated into various other languages. This book contained an account of Al-Hazred’s sojourn in Irem. Using elder astrological maps to correspond with certain clues left by Al-Hazred, Yaquud was able to plot a course to the City of Pillars. Astrology is an exact science, one that requires precision and patience to utilize.

Yaquud continued, seemingly relieved to talk at last about his dark knowledge. Ze’ez’s flesh crawled as the expedition head spoke. He had heard of the Necronomicon. There is an incomplete copy in the Cairo Museum, he had heard. It is a forbidden book, fearfully whispered of by learned men and peasants alike. As for the exact reason the book was considered blasphemous, Ze’ez did not know—nor did he want to.

He did ask what this mad Al-Hazred had done while there at the City of Pillars. Yaquud eyed him shrewdly and replied: "The mad Arab made the Red Sacrifice here, to open a gate." The way he said the word gate sent chills up Ze’ez’s spine.

“How does the jar fit into the scheme of things?” Ze’ez asked.

“That puzzles me—it does not ‘fit in,’ as you say. Al-Hazred never mentioned it. But it makes sense...,” he mused. “Something else only now starts to make sense. As you know, the library of the Jebel Druze Institute in Syria contains what purports to be the only pre-Uthmanic manuscript copy of the Koran to survive the Caliph Uthman’s standardization of the canonical text. Having commissioned his scholars to produce an ‘official’ recension, he had all the earlier, variant versions burned—but this one escaped the conflagration, carried to safety by heretical savants who cherished certain of its unorthodox readings, Surahs dismissed as ‘Satanic verses' by the conventional authorities. Among these is a passage in which the Prophet speaks of the doom of Irem in terms something like this, as I remember: ‘Recall what doom thy Lord did visit upon Irem, the many-columned, how he did smite them with the devils of the jar and did feed them with the bitter clusters of Zakkum.’ Most of those who know of the passage at all make it a corruption of the text, a copying blunder—because it makes no sense to them. One or two connect it with tales of genies in lamps and bottles.”

Ze’ez had followed all this attentively. Most of it was indeed familiar to him, as Yaquud had anticipated. “Yes, I believe the passage is paralleled in a unique hadith peculiar to the Zaidi sect in Yemen. But even that tradition sheds no further light on the matter.”

“True enough,” Yaquud agreed, one of the few times the two scholars had agreed on anything for many years. “But I should say this,” indicating the newly unearthed artifact, “does shed some light on the matter.” With that he fell silent again, lost to a new train of thought. The interview was at an end; Yaquud stood up and meandered back to his quarters, leaving Ze’ez with more questions than before.

The night was unaccountably cold. Ze’ez considered the low temperature to be an ill portent of things to come. He exhausted himself by worrying and shortly fell asleep. He woke at noon. Five party members were sick; Rashim’s skin was by now inflamed, covered with tiny pustules. The day’s digging had been canceled due to the outbreak of sickness.

The sky darkened prematurely that afternoon; a sandstorm was approaching. The men were secluded in the slight shelter of their tents for the remainder of the day, eating only tinned foods. The night was again cold with what Yaquud had once called the “spectral wind.” By morning the sandstorm had stopped but the sky remained overcast.

Unrested, Ze’ez ventured outside the tent to find the majority of the ruins buried, with new dune formations looming on the horizon. The canvas tents were torn in many places; one was little more than tatters flapping in the warming breeze. Only one truck was visible—the other had been lost beneath the sands.

The brooding atmosphere and bleak weather proved too much for several team members’ minds. One had fled into the desert, never to be seen again, while another had slit his wrists. Rashim’s skin was sticky with yellowish discharge from the pustules. He had loosely wrapped himself in a blanket. A loud report was heard: He had placed the barrel of his rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The two men who shared Rashim’s tent were mentally unhinged by the event. In a matter of perhaps five minutes they had managed to kill each other.

The survivors, with the exception of Yaquud, gathered to discuss the immediate agenda. They agreed that they should depart from the doomed city with haste—with or without Yaquud and his damned jar.

Dr. Kashan led this new faction. He resolutely marched to Yaquud’s tent, pulled the flap aside—and let out a bark of disgust!

Once at Kashan’s side, Ze’ez and the others saw Yaquud sprawled half across his small table. His skin was worse than Rashim’s: bubbly with pestilence, obscenely decorated with seeping sores. His left hand feebly clutched the plug of the jar—he had opened the Plague Jar!

They entered. The sickly stench of the tent’s interior was almost overwhelming. Kashan lifted Yaquud’s oozing face from the table; the fluids had congealed—it pulled clear with a loathsome sucking sound. His face was gaunt, lined with deep-set grooves, as if he had aged twenty years in as many hours. His mouth gaped idiotically, revealing empty tooth sockets with bleeding gums. Only the rapid heaving of his bony chest proved that he was still alive.

"Yaquud! Yaquud, what happened here?” Kashan shouted. Frantic, he shook Yaquud by the skeletal shoulders, causing his head to loll jerkily from side to side, until his eyes popped open. They were glazed with milky cataracts.

Aghast, Kashan sharply withdrew his hands and stepped back with one fluid movement. Yaquud, standing of his own accord, positioned his head as if listening. A distant low-pitched rumbling could barely be heard. A smile tugged at the corners of his cracked lips. The next instant a high cackle rose from his wiry frame, piercing the interior of the quarters, finally ebbing away to a faint echo. “Kashan, is that you? I cannot see clearly...”

“Yes, we are here,” Kashan hoarsely whispered. “What did you do to the jar...?”

“Opened it! Called for the Demon-Sultan—”

“You’re mad! I shall destroy the jar!” Kashan shouted.

“Away! Away, fools! Back from the jar! It is mine,” he bleated, rudely shoving the men aside. “I had hoped to open a gate—and it appears that I have! But not as I ever dreamed! No, not as I thought...”

The rumbling brewed outside, increasing with each passing second. “Fool that I was!” he now screamed at himself, bloody spittle flying from his frothing mouth. “Fool! The Blind Idiot God is bereft of mind, it cannot be bargained with—”

He continued to rage, while the distant rumbling grew in crescendo, cloaking his ravings. He groped the air in front of him, grasped the jar and hauled it against his chest with maniacal strength, still screaming. Back bent, he stumbled out of the tent and into the empty waste, clumsily but doggedly dragging the jar behind him.

Outside the darkened sky had become gauzy. High in the sky a churning vortex had formed, half-luminous in its slowly rotating center, with stabbing lightning bolts that lanced forth. The shape was convoluted, rolling erratically, horrifying in its sheer immensity. The swirling cloud of negativity crackled with dark undercurrents, drifting lazily across the sky—directly above the fleeing Yaquud!

An electric tension tingled Ze’ez’s flesh. He watched alternately fascinated and terrified by the blooming spectacle. The others had fled, for the exodus had begun.

Kashan emerged from Yaquud’s tent with the latter’s papers, notebooks and a handful of undeveloped 35mm film. “Documents,” he wheezed, racing toward his tent for his own belongings.

Meanwhile, Yaquud zigzagged wildly across the debris-strewn sands. The nebulous sky-shape followed, multiplying in girth, suspended in the supercharged atmosphere like a malignant thunderhead. As its mass increased it seemed to lower itself to the earth.

Ze’ez’s terror-blasted mind tried to grasp the tableau. What had Yaquud done during the night? What had he unleashed?

The gyrating sky-shape had assumed a semisolid state, with multitudinous tentacles whipping about, while in the center blazed a luminous circle, almost like a vast staring eye. Thin, elongated feelers, pale gray and glistening, reached down to clutch their prey. It looked for all the world as if the Andromeda Galaxy had taken on the flesh of a single creature.

A glimpse was all Ze’ez witnessed, for he turned away to flee, running for his life. Kashan and three others were already in the truck. Together they sped from the scene of madness. Behind them came a tremendous earth-shaking explosion and a brilliant burst of light, then the worst hail of sand yet experienced by the men. The sudden blast nearly overturned the truck. There was a casualty: One of the men, Jafara, was permanently blinded when he turned to gaze at the source of the inferno.

Ze’ez remembered nothing of the journey to the outskirts of the Empty Waste, where four men of the returning party—one had died en route—were found by a nomadic tribe. The battered truck had been lodged in a sand dune, devoid of fuel. Ze’ez regained consciousness to find himself in a hospital ward, isolated from other patients. Only the burn scars on his body, from that last encounter, attested to the fact that he had ever been in Irem.

Ze’ez did not recover from his severe malnutrition and heat stroke; in fact, his condition worsened. He requested writing material—he wanted to transcribe the account of the expedition before the details faded from memory. In four weeks he had filled two notebooks. During that span of time, he received a bulky package from Dr. Kashan, who had died a few days before, in another ward of the hospital.

Jamison blinked his tired eyes. His head hurt from feverish concentration. Dr. Winwood had concluded the narrative. He glanced at the wall clock; the time was half past seven. A sheen of sweat coated his skin— the account had disturbed him more than he cared to admit.

"My God!” he croaked, his throat dry. “The story of that expedition was entrancing! Rather fanciful, though, isn’t it? I mean, it can’t be true... can it?”

Winwood’s countenance bore a serious expression. “It can and it is,” he replied, almost regretfully. “The veracity of the story has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, as far as I’m concerned.”

“But Dr. Winwood,” Jamison protested, “the narrative ended abruptly, unresolved. What happened to Hassan Ze’ez?”

“His fate is more fully described in my book, but to summarize, he died, but not before he had a friend smuggle the notebooks and Kashan’s package out of the country—”

“You mean,” Jamison interjected, "that the package Professor Qualt sent you was the same one that Ze’ez mailed?”

“Yes. Old Qualt was this country’s leading scholar on pre-Islamic antiquities back in the seventies. He had a bad experience with ancient Persian magic once—anyway, he wanted nothing to do with the Plague Jar, so he forwarded the package to me.

“By the way, Kashan’s contribution was nothing less than Professor Ali Yaquud’s personal notebooks and undeveloped film, which Kashan had taken from Yaquud’s tent before the flight from Irem.”

Jamison gasped. “You mean—?”

“Photographic proof!” Winwood exulted. “But,” he continued, more soberly, “only five pictures came out. The rest were blurry or altogether blank, due to exposure to—I don’t know what. Well, only five photos survived.” Winwood maneuvered his rolling chair to the second filing cabinet and pulled a drawer open. He withdrew a thick folder and selected a group of eight-by-ten inch black and white glossies and handed them to his student. “Here they are. You are the first person to see these, other than myself.”

Jamison’s head swam as he accepted the pictures. He was indeed privileged! The top photo showed the City of Pillars from afar, just as Ze’ez described; the second depicted a close-up shot of a pillar lying on its side, capped with a grotesquely squatting eidolon; the third was of a man of medium build, standing before a defaced wall with notebook and pencil in hand; the fourth was of the colossal central edifice, constructed in a manner unsuggestive of earlier Mesopotamian cultures. Where was the fifth photo?

Jamison handed the evidence of Irem’s existence back to Winwood. Noting the puzzled expression of his student, Winwood anticipated the next question.

“Yes, there is a fifth photo, of the jar itself, but it is too disturbing. I never take it out of the file.

“After I got the package I sent letters to Saudi Arabia in an attempt to locate Hassan Ze’ez. Finally, after two months had passed, I received an anonymous letter from that unstable country, informing me that my inquiries of Ze’ez’s whereabouts were not welcomed by the authorities, who did not want further details of the Irem expedition leaked to the media. The writer, however, implied that he was a friend of Ze’ez’s, possibly the very same that smuggled the package through customs, and offered the final piece of information concerning him. Ze’ez had died of the same wasting disease as had his teammates. The ‘official’ cause of death was attributed to AIDS.”

“AIDS!” Jamison exclaimed.

“A flimsy excuse if I’ve ever heard one. My Saudi research appeared to end in a cul-de-sac before it had truly started. Instead, I concentrated on the subject of Irem and jars—and was amazed by the sheer volume of information I obtained, though admittedly, much of it was useless.

“For instance, Jamison, did you know that there was another city, in northern Saudi, the Hejaz, that was found back in the 1930’s and was thought to be Irem?” Without giving Jamison time to respond, Winwood continued, “Yes, a Nabataean site, ‘RM, twenty-five miles east of al-Aqubah’, was thought to be the ever-elusive city but was since proved—by Yaquud’s mentor, Abdalmajid—not to be. And anyway, most old records state that Item is in the southern sector.

"Then, with Professor Qualt’s gracious assistance, I investigated the antique lore of jars. Most references we found, though interesting, were worthless to my purpose. Frazer’s Golden Bough was particularly disappointing.

“In the end, however, I found that, with the foreign notebooks, I had enough material for my book and immediately set forth with it, placing things in their proper order. Just two weeks ago I completed it and submitted it to the university press directors—who had, mind you, published three of my books previously—.” Winwood’s face grew red with returning anger.

“What was so objectionable about it?” Jamison innocently asked. He had heard nothing overly offensive in the account, however bizarre some might deem it.

"In Yaquud’s notebooks there are repeated mentions of certain taboo books. With a great deal of trouble I received photostats of the relevant portions of the Al-Azif. The librarian at Harvard’s Widener Library had to call the FBI to inform them that I had merely inquired about the book! Just standard procedure,’ she assured me. Still, it made me feel like a criminal! I was eventually given clearance for the pages I needed.

“Anyway, I conducted a voluminous amount of research into unbelievably eldritch myth-cycles that supposedly predate man”—Jamison twitched as a shudder abruptly rippled through his body—“and discovered the true nature of the so-called ‘Demon-Sultan’, the Blind Idiot God that is said to exist at the center of infinity: Azathoth, the nuclear chaos!"

The words instantly chilled Jamison. He harbored no doubts concerning the professor’s mental state; Dr. Winwood seemed stable enough. Instead, he asked a question that had been on the tip of his tongue for the past few minutes, an idea that Dr. Winwood had apparently not taken into consideration: “Couldn’t you submit The Plague Jar to another publisher?”

The professor began, “It’s not that simple, my young friend. You don’t yet grasp the politics of academic publishing...” But by this time, Jamison’s mind was already off on a tempting tangent.

Trent Jamison couldn’t sleep that night. He meditated over Dr. Winwood’s story and conversation. It was consuming him! He had to know more about the Plague Jar and this “Source” Winwood had mentioned. Before long he had a definite plan. He waited till Friday, when the university would be unattended during the night...

Breaking into Winwood’s office was easy. The professor himself wasn’t about—hadn’t been for the last couple of days. Campus security was laughable—Jamison knew that the officer in charge of night patrol spent much of his time in the women’s dormitory, partying with girls young enough to be his daughters.

Making sure that the blinds were completely drawn, and after placing his jacket on the floor under the door (which had no window), he turned on the overhead light. Rifling through the second metal cabinet, Jamison quickly found what he was looking for: the folder and notebooks.

He intended to peruse the collection in the office, so as not to be bothered with returning it later. He first flipped through Yaquud’s enigmatic notebooks; Winwood had laboriously translated the Arabic into readable English in the margins of each sheet.

In one notebook was a sketch of what was presumably the Plague Jar. It was unremarkable enough; just an old ceramic jar, Jamison thought. Beside it read: "Must check Al-Hazred on jar. Don’t recall one. In all the annals of pre-history, only one race on this world actively worshipped Azathoth—the reptilian Gnophkehs. It must have been them that crafted the jar. It is a link to Ultimate Chaos—the Source!”

An intricately detailed sketch of a hazy spiral with radiating lightning bolts was next. It was labeled “Sign of Azathoth.”

The next few pages were occupied with Yaquud’s renderings of the Plague Jar’s inscriptions. The dot-groups resembled nothing that Jamison had seen before. On the last page of the enlarged dot-groups, Yaquud had written: “See Ludvig Prinn on Azathoth. Must compare Fission formulas.” Winwood’s own observations were scribbled in the margin: “Markings similar to dot-group formations from the G’harne Fragments and Pnakotic Manuscripts. See Walmsley’s book.”

Yaquud’s second notebook contained similar citations and related material. Most were hastily written technical information: very complicated, from the look of Winwood’s translations, now typed and placed by the originals. The following paragraphs caught Jamison’s eye.

Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth “twin Old Ones in angled space.” In quotations "Yog-Sothoth IS the Gate by where the spheres meet.” Literally, when a place-gate is made, two spheres, two planets (spheres are planets) meet. The place-gate is a bridge or short-cut.

Yog-Sothoth is the Gate in the matter time references. Azathoth is the Gate in anti-matter time references.

Azathoth WAS the Big Bang—“the nuclear chaos”—but he (?) existed before, in a bivalvular shape, according to Al-Hazred, before the war with the Elder Gods. He (?) led the rebellion against the Elder Gods and was punished, thereby creating this universe and the laws that govern it...

Jamison wasn’t interested in reading more. He skipped over the other notebooks and opened Winwood’s folder.

Within were copies of sections from old Orientalist texts, the same ones that Jamison was already familiar with, such as Al-Hamdani’s Antiques of South Arabia, which spoke of a “treasure” hidden in Irem. Included with the historical material was a photostatic copy of something called Azathoth and Other Horrors, by one Edward Pickman Derby. Flipping through the ink-smudged pages, Jamison saw that it was a collection of macabre poetry. He laid it aside with the intention of returning to it later.

The next group of stapled clippings was evidently from the “taboo” books that Winwood had mentioned. Jamison carefully read the first section, excerpts from the Necronomicon:

... concerning Irem, the City of Pillars, I spake of the Elder Days and of the four nations that had ruled this land of old, Thamood of the north, and Ad of the south, and Tasm, and Jadis; and I spake of many-columned Irem and of Shaddad the Accursed who had raised up its walls around an Elder central obelisk and who did build therein an Thousand pillars to Those better left unnamed.

Jamison read on. It seemed that Al-Hazred claimed to have opened a "gate” with a Red Sacrifice to Yog-Sothoth, causing the pillars to topple. Astounding! Al-Hazred had a near perfect description in his book, written over twelve hundred years ago! Many more quotes from the same book followed, but Jamison skipped past them.

The next xerox was from a book called Cultes des Goules:

There is a Terror lurks in carved stone: not without reason do the children of the wastes shun horrible and thousand-columned Irem, whereof each pillar bears up an eidolon of Those Who Dwell Afar...

The following sheet was devoted to an excerpt from the Mysteries of the Worm, by Ludvig Prinn. Winwood had scrawled “See Yaquud” in the margin.

THE SUMMONING OF AZATHOTH

To Call upon that Sultan an ensorcelled metal needs be devised with utmost caution, which may be found only by the most powerful use of extreme and dangerous thaumaturgies. To raise the Ultimate Chaos would be foolhardy, indeed suicide, and not less so even for the practiced delver into the forbidden of the forbidden Arts. The invocation and its shield are of but temporary duration, for the opening of a Gate to the Blind Idiot God brings only destruction...

On the side, Winwood had written, in small characters:

Of course! Azathoth here in the matter universe would result in an explosion! Like the one that blinded Jafara! Azathoth is nothing but a nuclear explosion—the Big Bang, at the center of infinity, bereft of mind—the “blind idiot god!” The primal Power, Godhead, Chaos! What’s more, the cryptic Prinn formula details the manufacture of an unspecified metal—in actuality a critical mass of extremely fissionable material! And Prinn’s book was printed in 1490!

There was something that Jamison felt he should understand, an elemental connection that he was not making. He considered the situation. Something had happened at Irem; agate to Chaos—Azathoth? —was opened. How? The Plague Jar! He recalled Yaquud’s translation of the inscription from the bronze door: “The jar brings plague, famine and death. The jar is plague, famine and death. The jar is the scourge of doom, the breath of chaos... ”

What contagion was contained in the ancient clay? What timeless plague waited to be released? With dawning comprehension, skin prickled with cold sweat, Jamison began to understand...

The Plague Jar was a link to Chaos—the Source!

The illness that infected Yaquud and the rest of the expedition was —radiation sickness! Radiation was "the breath of chaos”—still active after untold millennia within the jar!

What the hell was this? People didn’t have nuclear energy thousands of years ago! It’s a hoax, he decided, it must be... Then he remembered Von Daniken’s unorthodox theory of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction—by nuclear explosion! What untold story lay behind the events related in the Bible?

Mind spinning, he began to believe the account as Dr. Winwood related it, Azathoth and all. Just as he was ready to close the file and replace it in the cabinet, his fingers found the fifth photograph, behind a batch of clippings from archaeological journals.

With shaking hands he moved it before his face. He couldn’t see what was so disturbing about it. It was just a view of the top of the jar, apparently shot through some sort of heavy filtering lens. It was empty, but then radiation would not have been visible. The rim of the jar was pale, the inside deep... the inside... was hazy, the yawning opening beckoned...

Bewildered, Jamison looked closer and saw small flickering lights, swirling in a funnel-shaped vortex. Vertigo instantly seized him—he felt himself being drawn out of his body through his eyes, leaning toward the spinning lights. Spinning? But it was a still photograph... Then, with a glaring magnificence, he passed the weirdly hued lights and was engulfed by folds of blackness.

The darkness of the jar’s interior multiplied, became more dense, the dark beyond the universe, pulling Jamison into a narrow lightless tube of negative energy that writhed sinuously, leading to a black hole that pulsed in the center. A cacophony born in the howling pits of nightmare bellowed in his mind: raging star-winds and discordant pipes and flutes, blaring at once, with no sane rhythm. Jamison was falling, tumbling head over heels toward the mindless Khan of the Ages, the Creator, an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which bubbles and blasphemes at the center of all infinity!

Trent Jamison was discovered early the following morning by a janitor, sprawled face down in Dr. Henry Winwood’s office, with files scattered around him. He was in a comatose state. After being rushed to a nearby hospital and placed on life-support machines, his family was notified. Similar efforts to contact Dr. Winwood proved fruitless. No one had seen him in days, not since his heated dispute with the directors of the university press.

After staying by their son’s side for two weeks and seeing no improvement in his condition, his parents held a family conference. They discussed the options and tearfully decided to “pull the plug,” to terminate Jamison’s life-support equipment. Sobbing, his mother turned to the doctor in charge and said: “I know he’s not coming back. He’s with God...”

The Dead Man’s Hand

by Jason Andrew

On the steamship voyage from San Francisco to Seattle, Finneas Bagley won three thousand dollars in a poker game while sipping his customary olive martini. He had planned to spend a quiet, leisurely trip on the upper passenger deck. He might have resisted the temptation to gamble if a young lad had not overheard his name mentioned by the concierge. The boy gingerly approached Finneas holding a weathered copy of a dime novel titled Wild West Stories. “Are you Finneas Bagley?” Finneas had not been considered young in several decades, but his eyes still gleamed with boyish charm. He had gained a small pooch in his belly, but he was still an impressive figure clad in velvet. “I have that dubious honor, son.”

“Is it true that you saw Wild Bill draw the Dead Man’s Hand?”

The old man rolled his eyes and then wiped his brow. “I did indeed witness that unfortunately tragedy.”

After that, various passengers constantly harangued him to recall the dreadful night. Of course, he told the popularized version of the evening’s events. If he had told them the truth, he would be labeled a madman. It was quite arduous, but then he never had to pay for a single meal or drink. Several men wanted to play poker with one of the men that had been playing poker when Wild Bill Hickok drew the infamous aces and eights in black and was murdered by Jack McCall.

Finneas was careful to avoid winning too much. Professional gamblers sometimes paid scouts to watch opponents for their tells. There was a big game in Seattle, perhaps the biggest of his career. Finneas made a strong effort to keep his winnings low, but several traveling businessmen insisted upon making colossal blunders. He prided himself on being an honest gambler and an occasional scoundrel. Many sharpers were rogues that cheated to win. Still, he could use the extra money to build his stake. He wasn’t entirely certain how much money was required to enter this game. He only knew that this game would be his last chance for immortality.

As soon as the ship reached port, he hailed a carriage and passed along a note with an address. The coachman winked and Finneas suspected he was well acquainted with the destination.

The landscape of the Puget Sound was lush with vibrant colors of green and brown. Seattle was a small camp built in the middle of a series murky mudflats. The trip from the docks was quite bumpy as the driver attempted to dodge several of the potholes in the dirt road. Some of them were several feet deep and filled with foul smelling water. The carriage slid to a stop, jerking Finneas forward and knocking the bowler off his head. He glanced out of the window to see one of the only brick buildings in the camp. He stepped out, over another mud puddle, and was warmly greeted by a short boisterous woman of many curves and charms. “Finneas Bagley! It’s about time you show up, you old scoundrel!”

Finneas kissed her lightly upon the cheek. “Miss Lou Graham, it is my privilege and honor to see you once again; though I am unaware that I had announced my arrival.”

She grinned slyly. “I run the best brothel and gambling hall in three states. Not much happens in this town that I don’t hear about in the morning over toast and coffee.” Lou curtsied wryly. “And when I found out what deck they would be playing with, I knew you would be arriving soon enough.”

Finneas wiggled his eyebrows and leaned closer. “As I hoped, my beautiful dove. Alas, while I have heard news of the pending game, I have not yet secured arrangements for an invitation.”

Lou fluttered her eyes. “Such arrangements might be neigh on impossible. I’ve seen man and beast with better clothing and fatter wallets turned away.” She whispered into his ear, “But it might be possible that I know of a potential benefactor for your cause.” “How much would such information cost, my ever succulent lambchop?”

Lou’s eyes narrowed. “Fifteen percent.”

Finneas scoffed. “Would you take my shirt and shoes then? Five percent!”

Lou rubbed his chin with her forefinger. “Ten percent. And a free room.”

Finneas took her hand and kissed it. “My dear, we have an understanding between us.”

Lou’s smile returned. “You want to find Lewis Borri. He’s a local Jew doctor. He has a stake in the game, but doesn’t play cards. I’ve heard that he’s looking for a proxy.”

Finneas rubbed his hands together eagerly. “I’ve heard many stories of him in other circles. Well then, Miss Lou, if you would honor my arm by escorting me to the tables?”

The gambling den smelled of sweat, tobacco, booze, and cheap perfume, which suited Finneas nicely. Lou had five poker tables, all of them busy. Customers gulped drinks at an ornate wooden bar. Several of Lou’s soiled doves were plying their trade. Some were dancing for twenty-five cents a song. Others were hawking drinks or other more intimate pleasures. Lou gestured to a dark curly-haired man who appeared to be no older than twenty.

Finneas frowned. “That can not be Borri! Surely it is his son. The man should be pushing forty, if the stories are true.”

“I’ve known him for fifteen years and he’s never aged a day.” Lou shrugged. “Everyone is too afraid to call him on it. He might look like a tenderfoot, but he can turn a man yellow with just a word. He’s a real curly wolf that one.”

Borri was a thin, frail looking man with delicate features. He was studying the various games, tracking the winners and losers. Lou tugged him toward the center of the room, amongst the tables and players. “Pick a table and we’ll cash you in, Mr. Bagley. We’ll have your room ready for you when you are tired.” It was said loudly enough that several turned their heads from their various activities to take a look at the new player. Now, the gamblers knew that he had money, and if Lou’s attentions were an indication, quite a bit of it.

Finneas closed his eyes and listened to the shuffling of the decks. The familiar rhythm of cards shuffling brought a grin to his face. He listened for a few seconds and then scowled. “Alas, Miss Lou, I regret that I can not play cards in this establishment.” Several of the gamblers craned their necks to listen. He pointed at a thin, gaunt man who had been shuffling the cards. “The dealer is cheating.” The players at the table reached for their guns. Lou pulled a derringer from her garter belt and shot into the air. “Wait! Wait! My games are all clean according to Hoyle!” She glared at Finneas. “You’d best explain yourself.”

Finneas held his own hands in the air, palms up. “If I may demonstrate.”

Lou wagged her finger at him. “You had better be right. We take accusations of cheating dead serious around here.”

Finneas winked. “What was the high card from the hand?”

“Ace of Spades,” a ruffian replied. He had a small pile of chips and a peacemaker revolver in his hand and wasn’t in a mood to be too particular about who he used it on.

Finneas reached across the table and scooped the deck of cards into his hands. “Let’s just deal face up and see what would have happened.”

He expertly dealt the players their hands, in the same order as the round would have played. Deuce of Clubs, Five of Diamonds, Six of Hearts, and the Ace of Spades.

The burly man with a dusty rancher’s hat snarled defensively. He had the largest pile of chips at the table. “That just proves I’m lucky.” He leveled his six-shooter at Finneas, but the other three players were aiming their weapons toward him.

The gaunt man cocked his pistol and stood. “You cheating, Bart? You ain’t ever had a lucky streak like this!”

The dealer started sweating. He raised his hands gingerly. “That don’t prove nothing.”

Finneas nodded, solemnly. “That my lad, is very true. But let us continue and see what fate the cards had for these players.” He quickly dealt through the rest of the deal. Bart drew the Ace of Clubs, the Ace of Diamonds, and the Five of Hearts. “That my friends is a handsome hand.”

Lou aimed her derringer to the back of the dealer’s head. “How’d he do it?”

“There is a rather unique sound to dealing from the bottom of the deck. It is a hard thump, but with the noise in this room hardly noticeable unless you were listening for it.” Finneas waved his hand over the covered poker table. “That is why steamboats on the Mississippi only allow hard wood tables.”

Lou cocked her derringer and patted the dealer on the shoulder.

He closed his eyes, shaking, fighting tears. “Sorry, Pete. You know the rules.”

Finneas quietly sipped a martini, annoyed that there were no olives to be had in Seattle. The ruckus from the gunfight had died down and he was weary. He wanted to go to his room minus the complementary dancing girl, but he waited for Borri to approach him. He did not have to wait long.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you, Mr. Bagley.”

Finneas nodded. “It would seem that the deeds of my youth have been wildly exaggerated.”

“Lou informs me we have common business interests.” He gestured to a side room. “Shall we speak in private?”

“Of course, Doctor Borri. Your reputation is well known.” Borri strode to a door on the side of the bar, opened it, and bowed.

Finneas followed entering first, secretly gripping his pistol. Borri followed and closed the door behind them, locked it, and then gestured to two comfortable looking plush chairs. “Please sit, Mr. Bagley. I am going to ensure that our conversation remains private.” He removed a small beaker from his jacket pocket and pulled out the wooden cork. It was filled with a milky liquid. He dropped a few drips in front of the door and smiled. “There! That is as much privacy as I can assure.”

Finneas wasn’t certain what Borri had just done, but he didn’t want to ask. Borri was quite infamous for his involvement in the occult. “I trust this is about the upcoming game.”

Borri nodded. “You are seeking Tituba’s Deck. I am seeking a proxy to play for my interests. The winner of the evening will receive Tituba’s Deck. Tell me, why do you wish to procure it?”

Finneas swallowed nervously. “That damned deck of cards destroyed a great man. I’ve tracked it for years while learning all that I could about it. I know that it can’t be destroyed, but I can prevent others from falling to its seductive charms.”

“And you believe that you can resist its siren charms?” Borri asked.

“I did once before in Deadwood with Wild Bill. I caused him to draw the Dead Man’s Hand.” Finneas finished his martini. It felt good to admit this to someone. “If I had stayed in the game, I would have burned off the last few cards.”

Borri narrowed his eyes. “If that is true, then you saw what really happened.”

“I felt uneasy and didn’t know why so, I folded. I ordered a drink and stepped away from the table. After Wild Bill drew the Dead Man’s Hand, a thick black fog seeped forth from the cards. A dark figure reached for Wild Bill. We were all struck with panic. It laughed maliciously. McCall panicked and shot Wild Bill. Afterward, the smoke cleared and no one else there seemed to remember that part. If I hadn’t folded, Wild Bill wouldn’t have drawn that hand.” “Perhaps that is true. However, I believe that fate and the cards will not be denied.”

“Does the Dead Man’s Hand always mean death?” Finneas asked.

Borri shook his head sadly. “Not as you mean it. Tituba’s Deck was made in mockery of the tarot. Spades for swords, hearts for cups, diamonds for coins, and clubs for wands. During play, if a player draws the correct combination of cards, it can summon the Black Man.”

“The Lord of Witches? I had heard the legend, but hardly credited it to be true, despite what I had witnessed,” Finneas protested.

Borri shrugged. “He is known by many names. In this guise, he is the lord of witches. I suspect his company would be unpleasant for you.”

“Do you know where it came from?”

“I do. And if you agree to be my proxy, I shall explain all.” “What are the stakes?” Finneas asked. He didn’t like playing without knowing the rewards.

“Several illuminares are quarreling over matters that do not concern you. The winner of this game will be allowed to dictate certain terms that do not concern you and yours.”

“Why would they let a card game decide?” Finneas asked.

“As you know, this deck of cards is special. Unique. Some of them will consider this a form of worship.” Borri shrugged his shoulders. “I can not say more until I have your word that you will be my proxy.”

“What happens if I lose?” Finneas asked.

“There is no penalty for losing.” Borri grinned. “Of course, the game has other dangers, of which you have witnessed, yes?”

“What would have happened if McCall hadn’t shot Wild Bill?”

“The Black Man would have taken him. His life would have

been a series of unending torments. McCall unknowingly did him quite the favor.”

“Forgive me for seeming rude, but why not play yourself?” Finneas asked.

Borri coughed. “Gambling is not one of my skills, Mr. Bagley. This is a game that cannot be fixed or marked. Tituba’s Deck won’t allow it.”

Finneas spat in his hand, extending it. Borri rolled his eyes, spat in his hand, and then shook hands. “We have a compact then. I shall make the arrangements.”

“It would help me win if I knew everything about Tituba’s Deck.”

Borri nodded. “The legend is true. Tituba’s Deck was a gift from the Black Man to the witch Tituba in Salem over two hundred years ago. It has the ability to tempt those who play to lose themselves in the game.”

Finneas scratched his chin. Wild Bill had played like a fiend, foregoing sleep and food. Had he been enchanted? “Why was I able to leave the game then?”

“I suspect that you view gambling as a profession, a skill. It is not mysterious, nor random to you.” Borri coughed into his handkerchief. “Forgive me, I was recently poisoned and the toxin is still working its way through my system. As you might surmise, the cards have a life of their own. Madness follows Tituba’s Deck everywhere. Salem is proof enough of that.”

Finneas thought about it for a moment. “You seem to know quite a bit at such a young age.”

Borri grinned, showing off his perfect white teeth. “I assure you that I am far older than I appear.”

“If that is so, sir, then you must have found the legendary fountain of youth.” Borri appeared no older than twenty years. “Would you care to share the secret?”

“Perhaps, if you win this game this evening, I shall give you a small taste.”

Lou’s brothel had been closed to the public around eleven that evening. It was very early end for the brothel, but the tournament promised that Lou would make up every lost cent and double an average night’s profits. Finneas was pleased that the arrangements had been made so quickly, but learned that the other players had been waiting for Borri to select a proxy for several weeks. Whatever the stakes of the game, he realized that the contestants considered it very important.

Finneas bathed and shaved. He then dressed in his finest ensemble and tied his favorite cravat. If he was going to die gambling tonight, he wanted to ensure that he left a well groomed and snappily dressed corpse. He descended the stairs and was surprised to see that the layout of the gaming room had been rearranged. The overhead oil lamps had been removed and replaced with candles. The air of jovial excitement had been drained from the room; there was only anticipation, dread, and loathing. He had seen many strange things in the dark cracks of this world, but rarely had he felt the dread creeping into his stomach as it did now. It smelled faintly of fish and sulfur.

Borri glanced over Finneas’ clothing and nodded his wry approval. He gestured for Finneas to take the fourth seat at the poker table. Lou sat in the dealer’s chair and introduced each of the players. There was a small group of presumed luminaries hidden in the shadows whispering to each other. They spoke in hideous, unknowable languages with clicks of the tongue and gargles of the throat. He tried to get a good look at them, but the candle light left too many shadows for them to hide their faces. “It would perhaps be better if you didn’t look too closely in the shadows,” Borri whispered.

Finneas felt like a Christian awaiting the lions. He watched the other players carefully during the first few rounds of the game. Jimmy “the shark” Schultz was a lean fellow with large bulbous eyes. His cheeks were sunken and his lips were wide, giving the impression of a fish. He knew that the Shark was from the east coast and stuck mostly to Massachusetts. Occasionally, the Shark won a couple of large pots in Boston and then disappeared for years at a time. He played cautiously, slowly grinding out small wins.

Dog-Eye Eric Vanhee was a swarthy, voluminous man with jet-black hair. He chewed constantly like a goat, occasionally spitting into a spittoon. Dog-Eye traveled extensively in the southern territories, occasionally making it to San Francisco. Finneas had the dubious pleasure of meeting Dog-Eye at a gambling house in Chinatown where he had a pretty girl on each arm and a jug of rice wine on the table. Finneas had been able to watch him play before leaving. He played aggressively, as though each hand meant life or death.

Samuel Kane was an old man with thin puffs of white hair upon his otherwise bald head. It was rare for a gambler to reach old age without retiring willing or via the business end of a bullet. Samuel rarely moved as it seemed that each motion stirred pain in his joints. As his own hands had started to creak in the mornings, Finneas very much sympathized. Samuel seemed content to play each hand and take a measure of his opponents. Although he had never heard of this man, Finneas pegged him as the potential threat.

The game progressed slowly. Schultz played conservatively while Vanhee raised the pot several times. It was easy enough to push Dog-Eye Vanhee out of the game. Aside from keeping count of the various cards in play, Finneas noted that Vanhee counted his chips every time he had a good hand. His body would tense as though preparing to fight. Finneas, Schultz, and Samuel took turns draining Vanhee’s chips.

Two hours into the game, Finneas won a hand with three of kind. Vanhee growled. His cheeks flushed and he slammed his fists down upon the table. His fingers became clawlike, ferrous, and monstrous. Tiny bone horns peeked out from his thick hair. Worried, Finneas started to reach subtly for his pistol. A deep voice from the shadows silenced Vanhee; it chilled Finneas. “Do not shame me further.” Vanhee’s shoulders slumped and then he stood and left the table. Finneas and Samuel had piles of chips roughly the same size. Schultz trailed them by half, but he had been slowly adding to his pile. Finneas changed his strategy and started betting less and letting Schultz win a few hands. Samuel matched his attack, which worried him. Meanwhile, Schultz started getting more aggressive. Each win of five dollars became a loss of ten dollars in his mind. As he started winning more hands, Schultz started betting more. Finneas and Samuel fed him just a little and then pulled the chair out from under him. Schultz started losing in larger and larger quantities. Once his nerve was rattled, Schultz was desperate to win big. An hour later, he’d lost his last hand. He bowed to the table, and left.

“Time for a break, gentlemen,” Lou announced.

Borri handed Finneas a martini with olives. “Thank you, kind sir. How ever did you manage to find olives?”

Borri shrugged shyly, but didn’t answer the question. “You seem to be doing quite well.”

Finneas scowled. “Perhaps not, sir.”

“Explain.”

“Mr. Kane is a complete conundrum. I cannot fathom his tells.” Finneas sipped the martini. “And he is good. He’s playing off me as though he knows everything.”

Borri took a drink of coffee. “That he is, but then he has been playing for many a year.”

“Surely, I would have heard of him,” Finneas protested. He knew all of the best sharps in the country.

“That man has had many names. I wouldn’t be surprised if you did know of some. He is the reason I sought you. I couldn’t gamble against him.” Borri wiped his brow, sweating.

“Perhaps, if you told me his story, I could play better against him.”

“He is my third son.”

Finneas glanced over to Samuel Kane and took note of his advanced years and thin gray hair. “Of course, he is.”

“My appearance is quite deceiving. I am a master of the alchemical arts. I have lived quite well for far longer than you can imagine possible, Mr. Bagley.”

“Why do you want your son to lose so badly?” Finneas asked. Borri grimaced. “If he wins, he shall face a doom hither fore unknown to this world.”

“He’s dying, isn’t he?” Finneas asked, suspicious.

“Enemies of mine poisoned all of my children. I was able to counteract the toxin, but at a price. My art can no longer prolong his life. He was condemned to a single lifetime. And now, he seeks to win the approval of the Black Man.”

“His immortal soul for his life?”

“Save my son, and that which I cannot give onto him shall be yours.”

Finneas began the next round slowly. He wanted to prolong each hand, hoping that Samuel would become impatient. His opponent remained calm. They played for several hours, neither side taking a decisive victory. It had turned into an endurance game.

Finneas drew the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of Diamonds for his two face-up cards. Samuel drew the Ace of Spades and the Eight of Clubs. Finneas started the bet at five dollars. Samuel matched it, raising ten. Finneas called, and then Lou dealt each of them the remaining cards.

Finneas glanced at his hand, pleased to see three Queens and a Jack of Diamonds. Samuel checked his cards and visibly blanched. Finneas raised the bet by fifty. Sweating, Samuel matched and bet an additional five hundred. It was all of his chips. Finneas barely had enough to match it. It was a risky move, but it wasn’t his money and he had to try to win at all costs. “Call.”

Samuel sighed. He flipped over his hand; Ace of Spades, Ace of Clubs, Eight of Spades, Eight of Clubs and six of Clubs. The crowd gasped; it was the Dead Man’s Hand.

Finneas glanced at Borri. He had the cards to win, but wasn’t sure that Borri would still want it. The alchemist nodded sadly. The room was as silent as death. Finneas showed his hand.

Samuel clutched his chest as the black mist rose from the cards, burning his fingers. Finneas dropped the cards, trying to see Samuel through the haze. He imagined Samuel’s heart beating, struggling to burst through the chest. His own heart burned, his chest barely able to contain the fear. A hand formed in the mist and reached for Samuel. “Father! Help me!”

Finneas drew his pistol, aimed at Samuel’s heart, and fired twice. Samuel slumped into his seat. Black blood seeped from the wound. A heinous howl erupted from the mist as it began to fade. “Tell my father, I understand.”

Borri stood behind his son. He leaned over, and whispered, “I am very proud of you, son.”

Samuel struggled to make his last few raspy breaths. He tried to reach for his father. Borri grabbed his son’s hand and watched him die. “I’m very sorry, Doctor Borri,” Finneas whispered. “I couldn’t stand to let the Black Man take him.”

Borri reached into his pocket and produced a small vial. “Drink this within the hour and all I promised shall come true.”

Finneas accepted the vial gratefully and turned to scoop up the remaining cards in Tituba’s Deck. “Thank you, Doctor Borri.”

“I would run now, if I were you.” Borri cradled his dead son in his arms. “It has already started.”

Finneas sniffed the air. There was smoke somewhere near by. He had not noticed it previously. “We should leave the building.”

Borri scoffed. “I will remain here. I suggest you leave now, Mr. Bagley.”

Finneas slipped Tituba’s Deck into his pocket, grabbed Lou by the arm, and made his way to the door. The black smoke was thick on the city streets. “Do you have a fire department?”

“Only a bunch of drunken volunteers!” Lou yelled.

As the fire swept up the street consuming building after building, they treaded up the steep slope hoping to escape the city limits. An explosion rocked the area as the liquor store caught fire. Exhausted, they stood on the hill, watching the city burn. Finneas thought of Tituba’s Deck and wondered if it had caused this as punishment for denying the Black Man his rightful prey. He pulled out the small vial and flipped the stopper off with his thumb. Finneas gulped the foul smelling liquid and fell back upon his rear.

“I’m ruined!” Lou cried.

“So are we all, Miss Lou. So are we all.”

A Little Job in Arkham

by John Sunseri

Milton Trent cautiously — ever so cautiously — pulled the handle of the suction cup. The glass circle whispered almost inaudibly and came free, and Trent placed it atop the handkerchief he’d laid down for that purpose. He raised his empty hand, reached through the hole in the case and paused for a second. If there were any alarms he’d missed, this would be when they went off.

Nothing. Silence.

A bead of sweat rolled down the back of his neck into his shirt, but he ignored it. He focused again on the cameo in the case, his black- gloved hand hovering motionless an inch above it, his eyes locked like lasers on the prize while his ears strained to hear anything unusual. The tick of the grandfather clock (a splendid William Hasler of Chatham, worth maybe ten thousand bucks) plunked quietly in the corner, a creak of a floorboard from the kitchen as the house cooled, and from outside the mournful chorus of frogs in the water garden. Nothing to worry about.

He took the cameo.

He could feel the fine carving through the thin fabric of the glove, could sense the bumps of the diamonds, nine total, could almost imagine the cool feel of the gold setting, but he wasted no time fondling the thing. In a quick motion the cameo was through the glass hole and into Trent’s pouch, and he picked up the plunger and the round piece of glass, secreted them as well. He stood, not sparing a backward glance, and moved quickly and surely through the dark room toward the window.

“Very nicely done,” came a voice from the easy-chair by the fireplace.

This is not to say that Trent stood there and listened to the sentence for the whole second and a half it took the invisible speaker to say it. No, at the first vibration of the ‘V’ in ‘very‘, he had gone from a quick walk to a bound toward the window that would have shamed a jack- rabbit. By the time the word ‘nicely’ started, he had skidded to a halt, his rubber soles squelching on the hardwood as he noticed a bulky, bodyguard-shaped silhouette outside the glass. He’d spun toward the kitchen by the time the ‘ly’ came, and had taken a fast step toward the back of the house, and was well on his way to sprinting when the lights came on, just in time for the final thud of ‘done.’

The study was a lot nicer in the light — he could see the magnificent oriental rugs, the breathtaking tapestries and glassed-in shelves with the huge antique tomes and folios, the ornately-framed Whistler, the less-ornately-framed Gainsborough, a Pickman sketch in its own corner. And a man sitting comfortably in the chair, remote control in his hand, looking amusedly on as Trent turned his head this way and that.

“The kitchen blocked as well?” Trent asked, stopping and casually turning toward him.

“Indeed,” said the man. “Your reflexes are very good.”

“They’ve had to be,” said Trent. “But apparently I’m slowing down.” “Nonsense,” said the man. “You’re exactly what I’ve been looking for. I am Cornelius Bowen, the owner of this house — and, I might add, of that antique cameo in your pocket.”

“They say possession is nine-tenths of the law,” said Trent.

“If we go by that logic,” smiled Bowen, “we could argue that since you’re in my home, I own you.”

Trent took the cameo out of his pouch, reached over, set it down on the table next to him. He then crossed his arms, let himself relax, and looked at his host.

“So,” he said, “what next? The cops?”

“An offer,” said Bowen. He stood, put down the control for the lights and moved over to the sideboard. “Brandy?”

“An offer,” repeated Trent.

“Yes,” said Bowen, reaching for a bottle. “I have need of a thief. A great thief. I need you to do a job for me. Would you like a glass? It’s ‘Old Havana’, from Germain-Robin in California.”

“Not France?” Trent asked.

“I dislike the French,” replied Bowen. “A Frenchman once double- crossed me.”

“What happened to him?” Trent asked, taking a few steps toward the old man.

“He died,” said Bowen simply, extending a glass. “Here.”

“I don’t drink on the job,” said Trent. “And when I do drink, it’s usually beer. Cheap beer.”

“What do you spend your money on, then?” asked Bowen, taking a sip from the snifter and smiling in appreciation of the taste. “You live simply, drive old cars, you don’t have a drug habit. You reside in one of the seedier parts of Boston. You don’t frequent whores...”

“Whoa, whoa,” said Trent, his eyes widening. “How do you ...?” “I’ve been doing my research, Mr. Trent,” said Bowen, setting down the goblet. “I needed the best thief on the East Coast, and it turned out he lived in my very own city. I could have saved some money had I known that in the first place.”

“Good people have been looking for me for ten years,” said Trent. “Entire police departments. Interpol. And you just found me? Just like that?”

“I have certain advantages that most lack,” replied the old man. “But once I obtained your name, I monitored you on two of your jobs. Again, you have my compliments — the theft of the kylix from the design museum in Providence was brilliant.”

Trent looked steadily at the man, but inside he quailed. How the hell had the guy known that he was involved in the theft of the ancient drinking cup? He’d used his usual string, of course, but he was a hundred percent sure that none of his partners would have ratted him out.

If they had, he’d be in the deepest cell at 200 Nashua Street right now instead of here watching Cornelius Bowen drink expensive brandy. “May I ask,” said Bowen, “what you did with the kylix?”

“No,” said Trent.

“Very well,” said the older man, a slight smile on his face. “Now, to business. I need a book stolen, and I need you to steal it.”

“What book?” asked Trent.

“It’s called the Necronomicon,” began Bowen, but Trent interrupted.

“Up in Arkham,” he said. “At the University.”

“Exactly,” said Bowen, his eyebrows lifting. “You’ve heard of it?”

“I make it my business to hear of everything valuable and easily portable,” said Trent, arms still crossed before him. He wanted to put them into his pockets, but he didn’t want to scare the old man. He’d seen one bodyguard already, imagined several more, and didn’t need a beating. “And that’s a doozy of a profit, that book.”

“You’ve looked into stealing it?” asked Bowen, eyes narrowing. “I’ve looked at it,” said Trent. “It’s impossible.”

“Nonsense,” said Bowen. “Anyone can steal anything.”

“All right, let me amend that,” said Trent. “It’s impossible for me. Maybe if I had three months planning, unlimited funds, and access to a whole lot of hard-to-find information and if I had a man on the inside I might be able to pull it off. But that thing is locked down tighter than the United States Constitution.”

“I can get you whatever cash you need,” said Bowen quietly. “And whatever information you need. You’ll have to find your own inside man and you’ll need to do it quick. I need the book by the end of the month.” Trent laughed. “I guess I’m going to jail, then. I told you, Mr. Bowen, that it’s impossible.”

“And at the end of the whole affair, when I have the book in my hands,” continued Bowen, ignoring the thief s protests, “I will give you a million dollars each, you and your team.”

“I ...” began Trent, then stopped. “Four million dollars?”

“Five million, Mr. Trent,” smiled Bowen. “Though it was a nice test -but, yes, I’m aware that you use four helpers on your bigger jobs. Shame you didn’t bring them along tonight, or I would have talked to you all at once.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t,” said Trent. “I’m a peace-loving man -a thief, not a fighter- but if you cornered Buddy Bang like you did me tonight, one of you would’ve ended up dead.”

“I did research on Mr. Bangatowski as well, Mr. Trent. I assure you, he wouldn’t be allowed to be as close to me as you are right now.”

“Humph,” grunted Trent. He had been testing the old man a little bit, but he’d come through with flying colors -if he knew about Buddy, he knew about all of them. And that was scary.

“Why do you need it by the end of the month?” he hazarded, trying to buy a little time.

“That’s not your concern, Mr. Trent,” said Bowen coldly. “Suffice it to say that I’ve found myself in a position where I need to buy your services. If you decide that you will not do this thing for me, I assure you that you’ll wish you’d never broken in here to steal the Waterston Cameo.”

“Mister,” said Trent, “I was there five minutes ago.”

***

“You agreed to what?’ asked Theresa, incredulous.

“I know,” said Trent, lighting a Marlboro. They sat in Cloot’s, back in their normal corner, 20-oz pints in front of them. “But I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?”

“The book’s impossible,” she said, leaning back and picking up her beer. “We looked at it last year, remember? Drove all the way up there ...”

“Things are different now,” said Trent. Buddy Bang sat way back in the corner, sunglasses on, but Trent felt the man’s eyes on him through the cheap plastic lenses. On either side of Theresa were Mike and Willem, and they both stared at him too, wondering how things had gotten to this point — how someone had found them all, found their names and addresses.

Wondering which of them had sold them out.

“Look,” said Trent, “we’re gonna have to do this thing. Either that, or you’ll all have to go on the run. I don’t know how this guy got his information, but he’s got us all cold — from the stuff he knows, he could send us all to prison for a long, long time.”

“Makes you wonder,” said Buddy, the lights from the bar glinting on his knockoff Vuarnets.

“Yes it does,” said Trent, picking up his glass, raising it to his lips. He took a long sip, set the pint back down, wiped his lips. “I’ve been wondering some of the same things myself, Bang, and you know what I came up with?”

“What?” asked Willem, elbows on the scarred oak table, Camel hanging from the corner of his mouth.

“I figured that, if any of you had sold us out, we wouldn’t be here right now,” said Trent.

“Bullshit,” said Buddy. “We got a rat amongst us, and said rat is setting us up for something.”

“Setting us up for what?” asked Trent. “Even if one of you is a traitor, the only thing we’re being forced to do is steal the Necronomicon, and that’s not some kind of set-up. Bowen really, really wants this book, folks, and he wants us to get it for him.”

“I don’t buy it,” said Buddy. “There’s something else going on here.”

“Then we’re gonna have to be real careful, aren’t we?” asked Trent. He finished his beer, set the empty glass back on the table, then sighed.

“I’m going up there tomorrow morning to case the place,” he said finally. “Who’s in?”

“For a million bucks?” asked Mike. “Versus having that creepy old guy coming after us? What time do we leave?”

***

“It’s impossible,” said Theresa.

“I’ve been saying that,” agreed Trent gloomily. They were in a cheap room in Arkham’s Holiday Inn, the four of them uncomfortably sitting wherever they could while Willem was out getting food. “Tell me again about the security systems.”

“Two guards at the front desk — armed guards — and they’re pros, not your normal campus cops. During library hours the book is inaccessible unless by appointment — it’s in the far-back room in a sealed glass case, surrounded by infrared beams and pressure pads on the floor, and at any intrusion the steel gates slam down in front of the door and the room fills with knockout gas.”

“Any way to get around the pressure pads?” asked Mike.

“You could fly,” suggested Theresa. “Assuming, that is, that you could also avoid the beams — the projectors are actually set into the walls behind bulletproof glass.”

“How about cutting the power?” asked Buddy. “Knock out the electricity...”

“They’ve got two backup generators in the basement,” said Trent, looking over the blueprints Bowen had gotten them. “Both are self- contained and also defended. And that’s where they keep the dogs.”

“What kind of school library has freaking guard dogs?” asked Mike.

“It’s a tradition,” said Trent. “Apparently, they came in handy one time — there was some yokel tried to steal the Necronomicon a hundred years ago, and the dogs took him out.”

“Nice,” said Buddy. “They run through the place at night, shit everywhere?”

“I don’t know about the shitting,” said Trent. “Maybe they’re trained not to. But, yeah, they’ve got the run of the place after the library closes. And then the library‘s got all those weird defenses — the things all over the walls ...”

Two knocks came at the door and everyone tensed, Buddy reaching down and grabbing his pistol — and then two more knocks and Trent nodded. “Come,” he said.

Willem entered, three pizza boxes piled up in his hands. He kicked the door shut behind him, set the food down on the table next to the Gideon Bible and shrugged his shoulders. “Cold out there,” he said.

“You get combination?” asked Theresa, moving over to the pies.

“Two large combos and one plain cheese for Mr. I Don’t Eat Meat,” said Willem.

“Fuck you,” said Buddy, grabbing his box and returning to the bed. He opened it and steam escaped into the air. “I take care of my body, lard-ass.”

“Meat is good for you,” protested Willem, shooting a quick look down at his gut. It was pretty big.

“How about digging from underneath?” asked Mike, taking a can of Coke from the minibar.

“It’d take a month to tunnel under where we need to go,” said Trent, “and we don’t have a month. Even if we could get underneath, we’d have the problem of escape.”

“Yeah, what about escape?” asked Theresa. “You go to the cop shop today?”

“The police station’s on the other side of town, which is nice,” said Trent, moving over to the window and looking down at the parking lot. “But they patrol. If we time it right, it’ll take 'em ten minutes to respond. If we don’t, they’ll have a car there in a minute or two.”

“I’ve got routes all drawn up,” said Theresa, “and we can get a fast car from the Bruno brothers.”

“The problem is getting that damned book out of the safe room,” said Trent. “How about we just make an appointment to work with the book — say we’re doing research, do a switcheroo…”

“Never work,” said Theresa. “First thing I thought of, so I made inquiries. Turns out they only let you use the Necco . .. Neconimo ... whatever the hell it’s called, if you’re internationally well-known in your field and they’ve got you on some kind of list. And even then they set you up with two special guards and one librarian standing watch over you while you work. No chance to make a switch, even if you’ve got a copy to switch — the thing’s distinctive-looking.”

“We could make a copy,” mused Willem. “Polish Rob is real good at that kind of shit — you’ve seen his work.”

“He’s real good at driver’s licenses,” said Trent. “This might be a little much for him.”

“No, really,” insisted Willem. “One time, he made an imitation Shakespeare first folio for some guy from New York wanted to switch it out with the one at Yale.”

“What happened?” asked Buddy, interested.

“Didn’t work out,” said Willem, sipping a 7-Up. “Guy made some bonehead mistake, pretended to be a professor from Wales or somewhere, and ran into a Welsh librarian who wanted to talk with him. Far as I know, he’s still in jail in New Haven. But the forgery sure looked good.”

“Amateurs,” muttered Trent. “Goddammit, though -how are we going to do this thing?”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Buddy. They all looked at him.

“We’re not going to use machine guns,” said Theresa. “We’re not going to take hostages or kidnap the librarian’s wife and kids...

“Hey,” said Buddy, wounded, “what kind of guy do you think I am? I’m a gentleman burglar!”

“You’re a semi-civilized thug,” said Theresa. “But that’s okay — we love you anyway. What’s your idea?”

***

An hour later, Trent nodded.

“That might work,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of stuff to set up. Theresa, can you get hold of the Brunos and get what we need?”

“Easy,” she said. “I imagine this’ll be right up their alley. They grew up in the construction business, you know.”

“I’m amazed they grew up at all,” said Trent. “New Jersey wise-guys don’t usually last that long. Willem, call Polish Rob. Bring him all the pictures we have of the book. Buddy, I’m gonna need you to do the research on the cops — find out when they patrol and where, give us the biggest window we can get when this goes down.”

“And me?” asked Mike.

“You’re the point-man,” smiled Trent. “You’re the only one hasn’t been on campus, so they won’t have your picture.”

“Great,” said Mike, grimacing. “How about you?”

“I’ve got a little more research to do,” said Trent, “and I’ve got to use the school library to do it.”

***

October 24 — a full week before the deadline Bowen had set — was a bright, crisp day in Arkham. It had rained the night before and the cobbled paths in the quad still shone wetly, water slowly dripped from the maples and elms onto the carpet of leaves beneath, and students wore wool jackets and gloves on their way to class.

Richard LePlante, head librarian at Miskatonic’s Curwen Rare Books Library spent a few moments talking with the guards on duty before his shift started, the three of them drinking coffee he’d brought from the Starbucks at the Student Union. They chatted about inconsequential things as the first few research students of the day entered, went through the check-in procedure and the metal detector and began negotiating with the assistant librarians for access to their thesis materials. LePlante finished his chat, nodded at the door guards and went to his office.

It was quiet for the first half-hour, and he got a fair amount of work done on his correspondence — Professor El-Ibrahim from Cairo University wanted to stop by on his visit to Harvard and look at the cuneiform holdings, and a team of archaeological researchers digging in Arizona wanted him to check a few strange coincidences they had discovered in the Native artifacts they had dug up — he responded in the affirmative to the Egyptian, made a note to look up the symbols for the diggers, then sighed and reached for the stack of acquisition forms. He hated this part of the job — acquiring new works, vitally important though it was, kept him from dealing with the already-rich collection they had, and he wished he could delegate the buying decisions to someone else. But the trustees counted on his judgment and his alone, so he was forced to wade through catalogs of ancient books every week, searching for gems...

“If it were done when ‘tis done,” he sighed, “then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” Shakespeare was his passion, and his frequent use of the Bard’s quotations often annoyed his wife — but in the solitude of his office, he let fly.

But today, just as he took the top sheet of paper from the stack his secretary had left for him, all thoughts of classical language and iambic pentameter were driven from his head.

The sound was so loud and sudden, so explosive, that LePlante’s first thought was that a gas line had blown and that the ceiling was coming down. He dove for the floor under his desk and squinched his eyes shut, waiting for the masonry to crush him like a roach.

More grinding, rumbling sounds, and he realized they were coming from outside his office, from somewhere back in the stacks.

From the rare book area.

He got to his feet, papers flying everywhere, and sprinted for the door. He threw it wide, darted out into the hall where students were milling in panic and confusion, and looked back through the main room — where a cloud of stone dust billowed through the stacks and carrels from the rear of the building.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and started running. The guards from the front door followed, and they sped past the small knots of seniors and grad students toward the Rare Book Room.

As they did, the alarms started, wailing like banshees in the cavernous library.

***

The bulldozer had worked just fine, Mike Mulligan thought as he unbuckled himself and watched as light poured into the dark room through the hole he’d knocked in the wall. The gas was already starting to billow into the chamber and he again checked the seals on his mask and goggles, nervously wondering how powerful the stuff was — it couldn’t be too powerful, he reassured himself; otherwise, it would damage the books it was supposed to protect.

The steel gate had dropped instantly as he’d breached the wall, but he could sense motion from beyond it as he hopped to the ground, avoiding chunks of broken stone and masonry. That would be the library guards, and it would take them a moment or two to figure out that they’d have to go around.

Mike reached back up into the cab of the ‘dozer and grabbed the sledgehammer. He waded through the cloud of dust and smoke, raised the thing and swung it as hard as he could at the glass case in the center of the room, thankfully undamaged by the flying, falling hunks of marble and granite.

The glass shattered and he dropped the hammer, conscious of the red beams of the security system shining through the haze, playing across him. He reached in, grabbed the book and shoved it into his jacket. Then, not even looking at the men screaming at him through the bars of the security door, he picked his way back outside.

Where two cops waited, guns drawn and aimed at him.

City cops.

***

“Thank God,” said LePlante, huffing and wheezing from his sprint through and around the building. “Where’s the book?”

“It’s safe, sir,” said the older cop. “We’re bagging it and the other one for evidence, and we’ll take it over to the station ...”

“Other one?” LePlante asked, confused. “What else did he take?” “Just the big one from the glass case, sir,” said Officer — LePlante squinted through the haze at the man’s badge — Officer Robie. “But he had a duplicate on him. Probably meant to drop it somewhere, slow down the pursuit.”

“How was he going to get away?” asked the librarian, frantically looking around at the scene. The cops had already shoved the would-be thief into the back of the Arkham PD patrol car, and it looked as though they hadn’t been gentle about it; the man was bleeding from a wound on his scalp and struggling frantically to get out of his cuffs. The other officer was gently shoving both copies of the Necronomicon into large plastic bags near the hood of the car.

“We got a witness says a sports car parked about a hundred yards that way” he gestured with his pen down the access road “tore off as soon as they saw us. Had a good-looking woman driving…”

“Oh my God,” said LePlante. “There was a blond woman here a couple of days ago, asking to be allowed to examine the book...”

“Good thing you didn’t let her,” said the cop, smiling. “I guess they figured, they couldn’t do it the easy way, they’d just try a little harder.” “You can’t take the book, Officer,” said LePlante, turning his attention back to the policeman. “It’s fragile, it’s been through physical trauma today and it’s valuable beyond belief. It must stay here.”

“It’s evidence, sir -sorry,” said the cop, still writing in his notebook. “Don’t worry -we’ll take care of it for you and you’ll get it back just like it is now ...”

“Officer,” LePlante said, drawing himself up and staring at the man with the full authority he was capable of, “I understand your rules, but they simply cannot be allowed to apply in this situation. This is a serious attempt at theft, and for all I know you’re part of the team of burglars.”

Officer Robie looked at LePlante and frowned. “Sir, I’m gonna forgive your slur on my professionalism and that of my partner. I’m gonna put aside for the moment that I’ve been protecting this burg for fifteen years and I’ve been decorated for bravery twice, because there’s no way for you to know all that. But what I’m not gonna do is let some pantywaist librarian dictate police policy to me.”

LePlante took a step back, feeling the sheer anger of the cop radiate through his bulky body, though his voice and manner remained outwardly placid and professional - he felt as if he were confronting a wolf in human guise. But he refused to give in to his atavistic fear, and instead forced himself to respond firmly and forcefully.

“Regardless,” he said, his voice steady, “you cannot be allowed to take that book. I want to talk to your superior - hell, I want to talk to the chief.” And he began moving toward the other cop, who was just beginning to open the door of the squad car and put the plastic-wrapped books into the front seat.

“I’ll take those,” said LePlante, holding out his hands expectantly and hugely grateful that a crowd of people had gathered, undergraduates mixing with professors and grad students, and that the two security officers from the library had followed him and stood just feet away, hands resting lightly on their pistols.

The cop with the books — Officer Raffles, according to his badge — looked at his partner quizzically.

“Guy wants to talk to the chief about avoiding procedure,” said the first cop. “Doesn’t want us to take the books.”

“Well, tough shit,” said the second policeman. “I don’t particularly want to argue about it. Regs say that...

“Oh, Christ,” said Robie, looking around. “We got people filming us.” They all looked around and, indeed, a couple of the students had brought out digital cameras and were recording the scene.

“Remember Rodney King, Officer,” said LePlante a bit smugly. That was probably a bit unfair, considering these guys weren’t beating on him with their nightsticks — but boy, did they look like they wanted to.

And now the security guards were getting into it. “Say,” said one of them, hand still on his gun. “Why don’t we just put the books aside for a few minutes and call up the Chief of Police. He can come down here, we can call up the University’s lawyers, maybe come up with some kind of compromise ...”

“Why don’t the rent-a-cops just shut their fucking pieholes and let the professionals do their job?” snarled the first cop. You could tell — he wanted to reach for his own pistol — but then he looked around again, saw the students with their cameras again, and shook his head. “Aw, fuck it. Give these assholes the books, Charlie.”

“You sure, John?” asked the other cop, confused. “I mean — regulations say…

“Go ahead,” said Robie. “We got more important things to do, anyway, like getting this scumbag in the back to the station.”

The other policeman shrugged and handed LePlante the books, both of them sealed in plastic.

“Now,” said LePlante, “let’s call the chief...”

“You call the chief,” said the big cop, scowling. “We’re outta here.”

“Oh no,” said the security guard. “I think we should all just wait around for a while…”

But instantly, quick as cats, both cops — fake cops — dove into the car. While the security guard hastily yanked out his firearm, the cruiser started up with a roar as the engine caught, and in less than a second it dashed onto the road, tires squealing.

The guard managed to get a couple shots off, missing completely with the first one but shattering the rear windshield with his second, and then the car was gone, disappearing into the woods as the road curved.

“Goddammit!” roared the security guard. “Ralph, get 911 right now/”

“On it,” said the other, reaching for his cell phone.

LePlante stood for a moment in shock, the weight of the Necronomicon and its double heavy in his hands, watching as the guards sprang into action, feeling a sense of relief spread through him.

They had failed. It had been a complicated, devious plan, but the thieves had failed.

He staggered back inside through the hole in the wall and set the package down, waving slightly to dissipate whatever gas was still in the air. He spent thirty seconds ripping open the tape on the bag, then with trembling hands drew out the first book. It looked like the Necronomicon, with the ancient hide cover, but when he cautiously opened it he was faced with blank pages.

So he took out the other one.

***

“Guy had guts,” said Buddy, removing the plugs from his cheeks, ripping off the false mustache.

“Yeah,” said Willem, stretching, leaving on the toupee for the moment. They walked briskly away from the damaged police car toward the panel truck Theresa had stashed for them in the copse of trees. They both wished she could be driving — the woman was flat-out the best wheelman they’d ever come across in their lifetimes of larceny — but she’d been busy setting up a fire in an abandoned building way the hell on the other side of town that would keep the patrol cops busy while they pulled off their heist.

“And the Pole did a good job on the books,” said Buddy, casually reaching in to his cop jacket and pulling out the real Necronomicon, sliding it onto the dash of the truck while he climbed in. “A hell of a job in just a couple days.”

“I told you he was good,” said Willem. “Expensive, but good.”

“I hope the old man’s not counting on us paying for all this shit out of our take,” grumbled Buddy. “The bulldozer, this truck, the cop car, the uniforms and the copies of the book — they should all go on expenses.”

“I’m with you pal,” said Mike, coming out of the bushes where he’d thrown the gas mask, his latex gloves, the goggles and the clothes he’d worn for the job. “But let’s talk about it on the road, huh? They’ll set up roadblocks real soon.”

“They’ve got fifteen cops in this town,” said Buddy, scornful. “And thirty roads out. Theresa’s got us maps, and we’ll be just fine.”

“Just saying,” said Mike, sliding into the seat. “You gonna leave the book up there?”

“Naw,” said Buddy. “Throw it in the glove box.”

***

“Welcome back, Mr. Trent,” said Bowen. “And congratulations.” “Thank you,” said Trent, the bulky box in his hands. “You got our money?”

“Is that the book?”

“Money first,” said the thief. He looked out the window, saw the shapes of his team and the gigantic forms of Bowen’s bodyguards out there, silently waiting for the business to be concluded. Watching the frogs, maybe.

“Show me the book first,” commanded Bowen.

“I flipped through it,” said Trent, beginning to fiddle with the latches on the lead box. “Some creepy stuff in there, man. I’ve been having nightmares all week.”

“The uninitiated should not view the work of the Arab,” whispered Bowen, his eyes avidly watching Trent’s hands. “It can be... dangerous.”

“That’s what I hear,” said Trent. “But I imagine you won’t have any problems with it, will you? All these spells and incantations and such — I bet they’re right up your alley.”

“Hurry, man,” urged Bowen. His hunger, his need for the Necronomicon was almost palpable.

Trent stopped what he was doing for a moment, looked over at the older man. “So why do you need the book by tomorrow, Mr. Bowen? Something important going on on Halloween night?”

“That is none of your concern, Mr. Trent,” said Bowen.

“I did a little research,” said Trent, ignoring the older man. “See, I was wondering a couple of things about this whole mess. First of all, how had you found me in the first place? That little trap you set, with the Waterston cameo, was brilliant, and you knew I’d come for it. But how?”

“Psychology,” said Bowen, smiling thinly.

“I don’t think so,” said Trent. “It’s more like you’d been watching me, watching my methods and techniques. But that’s impossible.”, “Obviously it wasn’t,” said Bowen. “Like I told you before — I have resources the police don’t have ...”

“And when I broke in here, you somehow managed to sneak into the room while I was working and plant yourself in that chair, there,” continued Trent. “Which is also impossible. There’s no — I repeat, no- way you could’ve done that without me hearing or sensing you.”

“So how did I do it?” asked Bowen.

“Magic,” said Trent.

The two men looked at each other for a moment, then Bowen smiled again, a toothy smile full of menace.

“Magic,” he repeated.

“Yep,” said Trent, beginning again to fool with the latches on the big leaden box. “Magic. I’m kind of a hard-edged realist, Mr. Bowen, but I’m not stupid. If I have to accept that magic exists, I’ll do so. And the more I looked at the Necronomicon, the more I realized that, yeah, this stuff might be for real.”

“That’s very... broad-minded of you,” said Bowen.

“Thank you,” nodded Trent. “And once I accepted the possibility that you were some kind of magician, it answered another question for me. See, if you could do all sorts of mystical stuff, why couldn’t you just go get the book yourself? Seems like that’d be fairly easy for a wizard or whatever the hell you are.”

“Seems that way,” said Bowen, his eyes again locked on the box in Trent’s lap. “So, why couldn’t I?”

“We got through all the defenses and alarms and poison gas at the library,” said Trent, clicking the locks open. He didn’t raise the lid, though — he just looked at Bowen while he spoke. “But Miskatonic also had all these doohickeys all over the place, on the walls, embedded into the floor, things looked like hieroglyphics. So while we were waiting to pull off the caper, I did some more research in some of the other books in the library. Turns out, they’re mystical protection. According to the books, you can’t do magic around these Signs.”

Bowen shook his head, as if dislodging a fly. “And your point?” he said.

“My point?” repeated Trent, now smiling himself. “I don’t really have one. But I do have an experiment I’d like to try...”

And he opened the lid, turned the box around so that Bowen could see inside.

There was no book. Inside, resting on a cushion of red velvet, was a stone carving — one of the Signs.

“We took a few of these things while we were in there,” said Trent. “Just in case. Seemed the prudent thing to do ...”

Bowen snarled and shrunk back in his seat, his eyes widening, his lips curling. He threw up his hands, gnarled like claws, and hissed like a pissed-off snake. “Put it away!” he choked finally. “Close the lid!” “Now, see,” said Trent, nodding, “this was the other possibility I discovered. If you were just a wizard, this wouldn’t hurt you or any thing — just keep you from casting a spell on me. But looking at the way you’re reacting...”

Bowen started kicking his feet on the floor, moving the chair backwards, but Trent got to his feet, pulled out the carving and took a couple of steps forward, toward the frantic, wriggling form of the old man.

“... I don’t think you’re human at all,” he said. And thrust the Sign forward, directly into Bowen’s face.

The wizard keened loudly, his voice as high-pitched as a tea-kettle, and fell backwards, the chair collapsing under the spasmodic thrashing of its inhabitant. Trent was just as quick, however, and leapt over the fallen chair to keep the ancient sigil trained only inches from the face of the man.

But it was no longer a man — the skin had started to stretch and peel over Bowen’s skull, and blood oozed slowly from a dozen splits in the flesh. The thing’s hands thrust up, claws forcing themselves through the false meat of the man suit, and Bowen’s whole body convulsed and ratcheted itself into new, impossible configurations. Trent fought the impulse to step back, to get away from the monstrosity, and instead moved even closer, inch-by-inch, until the stone actually touched the writhing, gibbering mass of alien flesh and faux humanity.

The thing had been loud before, but now it let out such an air-raid siren of a scream that Trent could feel his eardrums compressing. He wanted to drop the totem, throw his hands to his violated ears, but forced himself to keep going, to keep moving with the scuttling insectile horror around the room, to ignore the flailings of the thing’s arms and tentacles, to ignore the gobbets of Bowen-flesh that it sloughed off as it crawled along the floor, to ignore the madness his eyes refused to accept, and to keep the stone sigil touching the creature.

And, suddenly, with one last inhuman alien wail that sounded like a star exploding, the thing finally fell — collapsed loosely inside the bloody dressing gown it had been wearing — bubbled like pancake batter on a hot grill — melted down into the floor — and the last thing Trent saw before he threw the Sign onto the roiling mass of decomposing plasma were the being’s eyes, red and violet, multi-faceted like a mantis’s, glaring enragedly at him with a hatred more intense than nuclear fire...

And then the doors to the patio burst open and Willem and Buddy and Theresa and Mike poured into the room, gabbling in excitement and terror.

“Jesus,” yelled Willem. “The bodyguards — they just fucking melted.”

“Oh,” said Buddy, the only cool one in the group. “I see your plan worked.”

***

“So where’s the five mil?” asked Theresa, still staring at the mess on the floor.

“There never was five million,” said Trent, taking a big gulp of Bowen’s cognac. “We were supposed to die here tonight.”

“There’s some pretty good stuff in the house, though,” said Willem, looking around at the paintings and artworks.

“Yeah, we’ll take everything when we go,” said Trent. “You all still have your Signs?”

“You kidding me?” said Theresa, pulling on the chain around her neck, tugging the stone sigil into view. “From now on, this thing sleeps with me, bathes with me ...”

“Sounds fun,” smiled Mike, leering at her. But Trent saw him fingering his own Sign and nodded.

“So how about the Necronomicon?” asked Buddy. “It’s worth a lot of money — what’re we gonna do with it?”

“Miskatonic’s offering half a million for its return,” said Trent, poking at the bubbling mess that had been Bowen with his boot, and grimacing. “I say we take it.”

“We could get a lot more,” complained Buddy.

“Yeah, we could,” said Trent. “But then we’d have to worry about who actually had the thing in their possession. Can you imagine one of these things” — pointing down at the pool of ichor — “getting its claws on the book? God knows what would happen to the world.”

“Yeah,” sighed Buddy. “I get your point.”

In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb

by Tina L. Jens

In his daughter’s darkling womb

Great Cthulhu will be born

And at his birth the Fabric of

Space and Time will be torn

When he casts away Death’s shroud

And rises from the Deep

Star of yellow will burn out

Mankind slaughtered like the sheep

Mother/Daughter to the eldritch god

And those attendant at his birth

Will be Judge and Executioner

To the Cosmos and the Earth

“Or, so it is written in the poem.”

“That’s very interesting, David,” Katherine Cullom said sarcastically. “But this is a science lab, not a literature classroom.”

David Gaughan did not tell the marine biologist that the poem, or prophecy, was written in von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, but she would not have recognized the title if he had.

***

Field Journal Dr. Katherine Cullom September 29

After years of preparation, everything has come together!

It was with no little awareness of the scientific significance of this experiment that I first observed the giant cephalopod this afternoon.

Reciting the phylogeny can't begin to capture the emotions of seeing the specimen for the first time.

It was monstrous in size, with what seemed like innumerable tentacles that could curl around the length of the tanker. It seemed to radiate, if you'll forgive the word, an aura of age, aeons, and absolute Evil.

As best we can measure a live specimen it's 24.3 meters in length, roughly the height of a five-story building! Its weight, judged by water displacement, is 490 kilograms. Just imagine, this massive creature weighs less than a standard automobile!

Its skin in its natural state is a deep crimson with concentric black rings running around its tentacles and body like wild racing stripes. Like its cousin, the Octopus vulgaris, it has the ability to change color and skin texture in response to its environment and mood, a fact we learned almost immediately upon entering the hold of the converted oil tanker, where the immense aquarium had been constructed...

***

Despite repeated warnings to move slowly and speak softly, chaos reigned in the lab.

You’d think none of these people had ever dealt with a cephalopod before, Katherine thought angrily. They’d soon learn their lesson if it inked repeatedly and they had to climb into the tank and net out the cloud of black ink and mucous. The filtration system was top of the line, but no filter could keep up with multiple inkings by a specimen this size.

The presence of David Gaughan only increased Katherine’s rage. Katherine had tried to have him thrown off the boat, or at least out of the lab, but he had the proper authorization papers from Arkham Industries Corp. She couldn’t fault the staff in the home office. She knew the techniques that David and Animal Rights Now! used to get such permission slips. David was an official observer for ARN!. She’d had numerous run-ins with the activist, despite the fact that she was a research scientist for a marine institute, not some corporate chemist looking for a way to dump pollution undetected. She often suspected David harassed her for purely personal reasons.

No hint of her raging emotions slipped past her mask of professionalism, and it took only a firm hand on the shoulder and a quiet, “Let’s calm down, shall we?” administered to the half-dozen people nearest to her to start a ripple effect through the room.

In a voice only a notch louder than normal conversation, Katherine began issuing orders to the team. Despite the immense size of the ship’s hold, she had no need to repeat herself.

Only after teams were dispatched to measure, weigh, and photograph the specimen did she allow herself the luxury of turning back to the aquarium tank and studying the creature.

The techs had done a good job of building a giant cave in the middle of the tank, as well as tunnels and perches all along the floor of the massive aquarium.

Katherine was more than a little disconcerted to find it had climbed out of its cavernous lair to press itself against the glass and study her.

Like most Octopods, its eyes were telescopic, and could raise and retract from the side of its head more than two feet in any direction. Unlike most Octopods, it had three sets of eye stalks, far more than necessary given the telescopic range of each eye. All six eyes seemed to ignore the rest of the team and follow her about the room.

The specimen was remarkably calm, exhibiting none of the characteristics of fear common to its family, other than a slight pulsing of color when a skin scraping was taken from the tips of one of its tentacles. The examination revealed retractable claw hooks on the underside of each tentacle, five inches in length, curved, and tapered to a deadly point.

It could climb a mountain with spikes like that, Katherine thought.

There were also tiny growths at the base of its two back legs where the tentacles joined the body. They looked like wing buds. More likely, they were the last remnants of dual dorsal fins, discarded by species evolution, but not quite disposed of by the species’ genes.

One of the younger members of the research team climbed the ladder to the room of the enormous tank and unlocked the feeding hatch. Using a wench, he raised a giant crate up to the top, then guided it to the opening and dumped the contents in. He quickly closed the hatch when he was done.

Ten pounds of assorted live fish and crustaceans began swimming about the tank. The young scientist would monitor what the creature ate, in order to determine its dietary range and preferences.

“Remember to lock that hatch securely,” Katherine told the Feeder. “The specimen may be a giant, but we shouldn’t assume that it isn’t every bit the escape artist other Octopods are.”

He shuddered and nodded. No one wanted to imagine this creature slouching moistly through the corridors of the ship.

Katherine was beginning to think the early field reports were inaccurate and that this specimen didn’t have a protective ink sack, when the creature proved her wrong.

Considering how calmly it had weathered the earlier chaos in the lab, its reaction to the ship’s cat surprised her.

The specimen had somehow worked the hatch open and snaked a long tentacle across the floor in pursuit of the cat. There were more than a dozen people in the room, but no one noticed until the feline screeched.

Hissing wildly, the cat scraped its claws down the length of the menacing tentacle. Ichor squirted from the wounds. The specimen thumped two tentacles against the aquarium wall as it retracted its injured arm. A black cloud struck and rebounded against the glass. A high-pitched wail pierced the room as it jetted into the rocky cave.

The scream did not end when the creature reached its lair, and more than one member of the team was on his knees, hands clasped to his ears in pain.

But discomfort did not relieve duty.

Katherine barked orders. “Get that blood sample off the floor, on a slide, and into the lab!”

She pointed at the Feeder. “Grab a net and scoop that ink cloud out before it disperses. Send a sample to the lab and monitor the water chemistry every half hour.

“Someone catch that cat and take scrapings from underneath its nails for tissue samples. Let’s get a move on, people!”

Ten minutes later and throbbing headaches all around, the team cleared out of the lab and escaped to the top deck for a half-hour break, a private lecture for the Feeder, and a general briefing.

And still, the high-pitched wail drilled into their brains and continued, for over an hour

***

Katherine Cullom looked up from her computer as she heard the metal clanging that indicated a visitor at the door. She opened the hatch and greeted her research assistant and second in command of the project.

“Helen, come in. I was just working on my journal.”

“I’m sorry, Cassie. I can come back if you’re busy.”

“No need. Let me just save the file.”

Katherine completed the series of keystrokes, then gently pushed the flip-top closed.

“You’re up late,” Katherine said to her friend.

“Can’t sleep,” Helen grinned.

“Want a celebratory nightcap?”

“Sure.”

Katherine opened her desk drawer and pulled out a velvet-lined box. She undid the clasp and removed two crystal snifters, filling each with a generous measure of cognac.

Helen whistled. “That’s a beautiful set!”

“It was a gift from Frank on our fifth anniversary.”

Helen searched her friend’s face for signs of grief at the memory of her dead husband. She saw none. But then, Cassie was a master at shutting off her emotions.

Helen shrugged out of her white lab coat before accepting the drink.

Katherine grinned as she saw Helen’s under-apparel. Blue jeans and tennis shoes—standard field gear—and a red T-shirt with a picture of two giant squids mating, encaptioned, “Cephies Do It in the Sea.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Going-away gift from The Boyfriend,” Helen said.

Helen went through men so fast that Cassie never bothered to memorize their names. The man of the moment was always referred to as The Boyfriend.

The two women were opposites in every way, which may have been the reason they were best friends. Or in Katherine’s case, her only friend. There weren’t many who wanted to get close to “Dr. Coldfinger”, but Helen had known Cassie back before she’d earned that name. She knew why winter had moved into the woman’s heart.

“I just stopped by to drop off the briefing reports. I knew you’d want to see them tonight.”

Helen handed the stack of papers over and finished her drink quickly. She’d seen Cassie’s eyes glancing back to the computer and knew her friend was eager to get back to work.

Katherine closed the door behind her, returned to her desk, and opened her computer. She took another sip of her cognac and started a new paragraph.

***

Field Journal September 29 (Continued)

Arkham Industries is to be commended for the high quality of our floating lab. I had reservations about this project when A.I. insisted on having so many of their own people on the research team, and in handling all the arrangements themselves, rather than trusting our expertise in such matters at the Institute.

The work progresses well.

I have tentatively classified the specimen from phylum through genus, with species as yet undetermined. Or (as I strongly suspect that this is a previously undiscovered creature) species unnamed.

Our records search continues. Meanwhile, I have classified it as: Mollusca, Cephalopoda, Octopoda, Octopodidae, Octopus ... (Species undetermined.)

However, there are numerous distinctions in characteristics that separate it from other species in this phylogeny. I expect this matter to undergo fierce debate....

Katherine hit the Save command on her computer before picking up the written reports from the afternoon briefing.

***

Field Journal September 29

Addendum: Summary of Specimen's Natural Territory and Capture

After repeated attacks on Devil's Reef, and what the more fanciful segment of the population refer to as the sunken ruins of Y'ha-nthlei, the specimen has, over the last decade, abandoned its original domain and established a new territory that is roughly bordered by three deep sea trenches in the South Pacific and the Great Barrier Reef, where it has been observed feeding on semiannual occasions on the abundance of sea life drawn there.

The coral reef has provided excellent coverage and protection during these infrequent feeding periods. Boats are unable to navigate the shallow waters, and divers have been unable to keep pace as the specimen slipped through the razor-sharp coral structure. Despite numerous pursuit attempts, on each occasion the creature was able to leave the diving teams behind and slip into deeper waters.

Once away from the reef, the creature has been observed to run for three separate bolt holes, all deep sea trenches that fall far below the depth to which equipment and divers can follow, where it will remain for many months at a time. We know of no other creature that can withstand the G-pressures at the bottom of these trenches.

Cthylla, as the regional natives have named it, was spotted feeding at the Barrier Reef at 9 p.m. Sept. 23rd. Three dive-teams were immediately dispatched southeast of its location, with an additional three teams dispatched to the north, in the coastal waters of New Guinea, to assist in herding the target.

The dive teams, and their accompanying motor boats, chased it for five days. There was a very real fear it would once again escape to the Mariana or Tonga Trench, meaning at least six months would pass before the teams could try again.

It did an admirable job of weaving in and out of the small South Sea islands, and two of the boats were run aground on rocks or coral. Finally, calling on the help of several fishermen and their skiffs, as well as a submersible, the fleet was able to herd the creature into open waters and through the underwater hatch of our research vessel.

When she could no longer control her yawning, Katherine turned off her computer and went to bed. Her dreams that night were graphic and unpleasant, and filled with high-pitched wails, but it did not occur to her to record that fact in her journal.

***

Field Journal October 10

We have been unable to put a diver in the tank with Cthylla as yet. We can't get more than a fin in the water before she begins inking and bolts for her lair. Her body turns white instantaneously. The pale form shooting through the black water resembles nothing so much as a ghost floating through the darkened halls of a haunted house.

However, Cthylla has become very social, as long as we remain on the other side of the glass, and has on numerous occasions suction-cupped her entire body to the glass wall, almost as if she knows we want to examine her. In this way, we have learned a great deal about her anatomy and physiology. We have determined she is female.

Working from the blood and tissue samples taken last week during the unfortunate cat incident, and with the long-preserved blood samples taken from the creature which foundered the Sea-Maid off Hunterby Head nearly two decades ago, Helen is creating a biogenetically engineered spermatophore.

Our team of technicians is hard at work constructing a mechanical male. Or at least the parts necessary-four electronic tentacles and a body front—for our first attempt at artificial insemination.

We're afraid there isn't much time. Octopods have very short life spans, and we believe Cthylla may be the last of her kind.

The only other member of this species, that we know of, was killed in the Sea-Maid incident.

The research still hasn't revealed a species name, but local natives nicknamed that specimen "Dagon."

***

“Excuse me, Dr. Collum?”

David’s voice bore into her brain, but Katherine’s face was a mask of composure when she looked up from her computer at her work station in the lab.

“I don’t mean to bother you,” he said insincerely, “but, can an octopus have more than eight legs?”

“Of course not. The prefix ‘octo’ means eight.”

“Then I think you’re going to have to rework your phylogeny. And you might teach your lab assistants how to count.”

“What are you talking about?”

He pointed to the tank.

Cthylla had twelve tentacles.

The research team clustered around the tank in disbelief.

“Is there any chance we miscounted?” Katherine asked.

“All of us?” Helen asked, incredulously. “That’s impossible.” “Feeder” spoke up. “Believe me, I know exactly how many tentacles Cthylla has, and exactly where they are, before I open that hatch. I don’t want her grabbing me ‘cause she’s hungry!”

“Well, she has twelve now,” Katherine said. “How do we account for that?”

“The Octopus vulgaris can regrow a partial tentacle if it loses one to a predator,” Helen pointed out.

“But not four full ones in a matter of hours!”

“Are there any unusual markings on the new legs?”

“Can anyone distinguish between the old and new ones ”

The lab erupted in a babble of unanswerable questions.

***

Field Journal October 12

Today Cthylla has only eight legs. There is no sign that the other four ever existed. As a result of the disappearing legs, debate rages among the team about her phylogeny. Half the team insists that she must be in the giant squid family.

But that is based strictly on her size. While giant squids do grow to twelve meters, far bigger than the largest known octopus, Cthylla still dwarfs that to such a proportion the issue becomes irrelevant. And squids only have ten arms.

I remain convinced that she is related to the Octopods because of her ink sac and her lack of internal shell structure. The squid family exhibits neither of these characteristics.

***

Field Journal October 15

She is eating far more than we expected. Then, little is known about the feeding patterns of many of the Octopodidae family.

We have hired a family-owned fishing company off the coast of New Guinea to provide one hundred pounds of live fish each day.

The cost is far more than we budgeted for, but Arkham Industries has assured us that there's no problem.

It won't be a concern much longer, as all species in the Octopodidae family stop feeding after they've laid their eggs, and die soon after.

We have discovered that she prefers crustaceans and mollusks, especially prawns and giant clams, but as an economic necessity, we favor the larger, cheaper game fish such as blue marlin, mackerel, sailfish, and tuna. While we keep at least a half dozen of these large fish swimming in her tank at all times, she seems constantly hungry, and begs for treats.

Today, when her increasingly insistent demands were ignored, she shot a stream of water through her filter vent at Feeder. The water struck him full in the chest, knocking him on his back and sending him hydroplaning across the floor. Afraid of more urgent messages, he dropped in the last two giant oysters.

I observed her hunting technique. She crawled through the "octopus garden" of discarded bones and shells which litters the front yard of her lair, carefully sifting among them until she found two long, sturdy bones. Then she crawled quietly across the floor till she was just within reach of the oysters. She waited until they opened their shells. Then she quickly dropped the bones lengthwise across the openings, simultaneously. The oysters tried to snap their shells closed, but it was too late.

Cthylla dragged her prizes into her lair to eat in privacy. Twenty minutes later, she tossed the shells out her door. She did not come out for several hours. I can't help but think she was taking an afternoon nap.

***

Field Journal October 17

Mike The Mechanical Monster is done. The mantle is just a large, red mylar balloon with black stripes painted on it. But the four mechanical tentacles are a wonder. Based on current Hollywood FX technology, the techs have rigged up sleeves and a harness backpack that allow the tentacle to mirror human arm motion.

I will operate the foreplay arms, while Helen handles the insemination.

We've been practicing on large boulders set up in the secondary tank, which we have prepared in case Cthylla shows any signs of cannibalism following the birth. After two days of practice, we feel comfortable enough with the equipment that we intend to make our first insemination attempt tonight.

‘“The dreamer dying faces death with scorn,

‘“And in his seed will rise again reborn!”’

“David, what are you muttering now?” Katherine asked, not really wanting an answer, as she slipped into her harness and checked the controls.

“Just a bit of Alhazred’s ancient poetry. Perhaps you’ve heard his most famous couplet? Seems quite fitting for the evening’s event.

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie,

‘And with strange aeons even death may die.’”

“Thanks for that bit of literary brilliance. Now will you get out of our way, please?”

Using the winch, the techs lowered “Mike” into the tank. Cthylla had retreated to her lair, but was peeking out, watching the proceedings.

When it became apparent the humans weren’t invading, she crawled out and ambled awkwardly toward her visitor.

***

Field Journal October 18

Intercourse occurred! Now we have to wait and see if Cthylla lays her eggs.

It took an hour of flirting and teasing, with Cthylla frequently bolting back to her lair.

Finally, she moved closer and let "Mike" touch her.

Her skin changed from the heavy bumps that indicate fear or anger to a velvety smoothness. Her color changed to a pale green, indicating sexual arousal.

Like other Octopods, she expected a period of foreplay, where the male caresses the female, stroking her body. But we had not anticipated this phase would last more than two hours! My arms were aching horribly by the time Cthylla finally allowed "Mike" to grasp and hold her while the scooped tentacle inserted the spermatophore into her mantle cavity.

An hour into the process, one of the techs offered to relieve me, but I was afraid that the break in action might upset Cthylla.

At times I saw Cthylla watching me, rather than her mechanical suitor, almost as if she knew it was me touching her. That's impossible, of course. We stood well away from the tank, relying on video monitors to guide our actions.

I am amazed we were successful on our first attempt. Cthylla has been far more cooperative than most lab specimens. Perhaps her size gives her confidence. When one is as large as an apartment building, one has few natural predators.

A side note, the cat is missing, and hasn't been seen for several days. The Feeder thinks it may have jumped to the fishing boat, lured by the smell of abundant food, during one of their deliveries.

***

Field Journal October 22

Cthylla has spent the last two days actively engaged in housekeeping. She began by sweeping all the refuse out of her lair: stray shell fragments, cartilage, and bones from her many meals. Which solved one mystery at least—the disappearance of the cat. Its skeleton was in the "dustbin."

Helen was quite upset at the discovery. She had become rather attached to the creature. It did not surprise me overly much. It isn't the only example of a marine carnivore preying on land animals and birds.

One of my earliest summer internships was a study of tiger sharks. Albatross chicks were a favorite delicacy of theirs. I'll never forget watching the sharks lunge out of the water to catch the birds in low flight.

In a move that did surprise me, Cthylla continued her cleaning efforts, sweeping up the extensive octopus garden that surrounded her lair into a heaping pile below the feeding hatch. She moved to a distant corner and waited patiently as the Feeder netted the discards out.

***

Field Journal October 23

It has been our custom to work though the night and sleep by day. Cthylla, like all Octopods, is a nocturnal creature. We generally retire when she does, around 8 a.m. We were surprised to discover she had worked through the day yesterday. When we returned to the lab this evening, we found she had completely rearranged her lair, repositioning each of the 500-pound boulders to build a new cave, somewhat closer to the viewing wall, but much taller.

As I had hoped, these domestic preparations were prenatal in nature. Cthylla began laying her eggs this evening.

They look like a cluster of giant phosphorous jalapeno peppers hanging from the ceiling of her lair. Each oblong egg is roughly the length of a banana.

There is only one strand of eggs, only 200-250 total. We are not sure what to make of this. The common octopus lays approximately 200,000, of which only one or two will survive.

***

Field Journal October 24

The egg strand hangs well inside the cave, but the technicians have rigged up spotlights and attached high powered zoom lenses to the video cameras. We have captured some spectacular video, and the team is quite excited about documentary and publishing prospects.

I can't share their enthusiasm, however. I fully realize our work will revolutionize this branch of marine biology, but at present I'm too exhausted to think about it.

David grates ever worse on my nerves. Today, when he laughed at the team's discussion of a documentary, I found myself having to defend him physically when one of the junior research assistants took a swing at him. He quoted more obscure poetry before strolling blithely into the hall.

The words were nonsense, of course, but they have stayed with me. Perhaps it was the subtle menace in his tone. I do not trust David. His poem of the day was this:

"We lie on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

It is the antithesis of all that I stand for as a scientist. I can not understand this man's motives or thinking.

However, it does make me wonder, why has David been so cooperative? He's annoying, but he hasn't really interfered with anything we've done. On previous missions, he's fought my actions at every turn.

***

Field Journal October 27

Cthylla has begun the egg-cleaning and care rituals common among Octopods. Twice daily she oxygenates the eggs with streams of water from her siphon, then gently cleans them with her suction cups. The delicacy with which she handles them, in comparison with her enormous size, is amazing.

Our Fertility Specialist believes Cthylla is winnowing the eggs, and claims she has discarded at least three of them.

I have my doubts, however. Egg winnowing is not a trait common to other species in this family. More likely, the Fertility Specialist's first count was inaccurate.

***

Field Journal October 29

Cthylla actually pounded on the hatch today. We are uncertain what this means. Her restlessness is apparent, however. She paces the confines of her tank, her tentacles whipping furiously as she stalks across the aquarium floor.

***

Field Journal October 30

Cthylla began wailing in that painfully high pitch as we left the lab this morning. We are at a loss for the cause of her cry. The eggs are growing well, and she continues to treat them with the utmost care.

I can't believe she's crying for her mate, as the Fertility Specialist suggests. In no Octopod family does the mate help care for the young.

We are monitoring the water conditions carefully to be sure it isn't a chemistry problem.

We are checking the hatch and all possible escape points carefully, as she is exploring those same areas from the inside of the tank.

I don't know how I will stand her cries if they continue throughout our sleep period. I've barely slept in all the time I've been aboard this junker.

And what little I do get is plagued by horrid dreams. I often regret sleeping at all.

To make matters worse, Tomorrow is The Anniversary.

***

Field Journal October 31 Personal Note

Damn Cthylla's cry! I'd finally fallen asleep when she started up again, her wails corrupting my dreams before I woke. Though I'm not sorry I woke when I did! I remember only a snippet of the nightmare, but that image alone was more than my nerves can take.

I was on a delivery room table. I'd just given birth. But it was David standing there with me, not Frank. He held up our baby. It was grotesquely deformed! It had four little legs, and a horrible soft beak where the mouth should be...

Helen knocked softly on Cassie’s door. It was 4 p.m., hours before lab duty began, but Helen was worried about her friend. She’d watched a deep depression settle over Cassie during the last week that no success in the lab could stave off.

Receiving no answer, she knocked again, louder, and called out, “Cassie, it’s me, Helen. Can I come in?”

She listened, heard nothing. She tried the latch. The door opened. The room was dark. It took a moment before her eyes adjusted and she could see Cassie, still in her night clothes, sitting up in bed, clutching a pillow to her face to muffle her sobs. Helen sat down beside her. She said nothing. There were no words that could take this pain away.

Once a year, the doors to Cassie’s heart came unlocked and all the grief she kept imprisoned there poured out. Grief for a dead husband and an unborn child.

Helen pulled Cassie into her arms and gently rocked her back and forth, as one might comfort a child.

***

When Helen left, Katherine forced herself from the bed and into the bathroom. She showered and dressed, even applied makeup with unusual precision, all of it with shaking hands and deep breaths, as she tried to calm her nerves. With a Herculean effort of will, she marched to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hall.

She made it down the corridor and around the first corner before the first sob racked her body. She lurched against the wall. Her back pressed against the cold metal; she slid slowly to the floor. Her head buried in her knees, her arms locked around her legs, she hung on in desperation as the flood gates opened again.

When the tears ran out, leaving only stuttering hiccups, she crawled on hands and knees back to her room.

***

David Gaughan prowled the corridors looking for his prey. She hadn’t been in the lab at all this work-night. He had thought there was nothing that could shake her resolve, topple her unyielding strength. But there were hidden dimensions to Katherine, despite her near-seamless facade.

David hid dark secrets behind his facade, too. Far darker than Katherine could ever comprehend.

***

Field Journal November 1

Personal

It is possible that I have misjudged David Gaughan.

Our jobs have too often pitted us against each other as enemies (despite my feelings that we are each fighting for the same thing—the preservation of the sea's rich diversity of marine life).

Last night I saw the more human side of David.

Concerned that I wasn't in the lab, he came to my quarters. He found me in tears. As there was no way to hide them, and he refused to leave until I told him what was wrong, I was forced to tell him the whole story.

God! Even now I have trouble writing about it!

I told him about the artificial insemination procedures and miscarriages. I told him about my husband's boating accident and death, on Oct. 28th. I told him that I had been pregnant, with the first chance to carry a baby to term. I fell apart, lost control, when I heard the news. Went into shock. My body terminated the pregnancy. The doctors couldn't save the infant. October 31st. How badly I wanted that child. I can't face this... can't face him.

David comforted me. I let the comforting go too far.

But it's been so long since I was with a man...

***

There was an urgent pounding on Katherine’s door, but she took the time to save and close the computer file before she answered it.

It was... Jim? ...she was so bad with names ...the Feeder.

“Dr. Cullom, come quick! There’s been an accident in the lab!”

***

At first Katherine could see no signs of trouble other than the huddle of team members in the corner, whispering and watching her. But at Helen’s work station there was evidence of a struggle. The computer, still on, though the monitor was dimming as the batteries failed, had crashed to the floor.

Her voice dead of emotion, she instructed a lab assistant to pick up the computer. “Save her work. There could be important information there.”

A box of slides had been swept off the table. Glass splinters littered the area. Halfway down the aisle, the bar stool from Helen’s station lay on its side in a puddle of water.

Katherine kneeled down to avoid the glare of the lights on the metal floor. She could just make out the damp, suction-cup marked trail that led back to the tank. The feeding hatch was closed. But a femur, with fresh bits of muscle and tendon still clinging to the joints, lay in the “octopus garden”, right outside Cthylla’s door.

As they watched, the rib cage was flung out of the lair.

“Kill it,” Katherine whispered. Her body began to shake.

Grasping a table leg for support, she stood stiffly.

The Feeder was trying, unsuccessfully, to fight off tears? panic? horror? Katherine couldn’t tell. She had little practice reading people’s emotions.

He babbled at her. “It... it ate Dr. Hydreah because it was hungry! It’s all my fault! I... but... octopuses are supposed to stop eating after they lay their eggs! Why is she still eating?”

Katherine knew no words of comfort. She offered the only advice she could. “Feed her now. Call the fisherman. Sedate her if you have to, but get the body out of there!

“Take pictures first. I want a full autopsy—including blood analysis for toxins. Let’s see how that poison works on the human system; and an analysis of the skin abrasion for feeding patterns. Let’s at least learn something from this!”

She strode out of the lab, well aware of the angry, shocked looks the team was giving her.

Katherine made it back to her quarters, locked the door, and turned on the radio before her knees gave way and the tears began. She composed herself and turned to her computer.

***

Field Journal November 1

Personal Addendum

Helen Is Dead. Because I Was Fucking David Gaughan Instead Of Doing My Job!

***

The team avoided Katherine as much as possible after that. In reality, there was no great difference in the amount of contact between her and the team.

Katherine did nothing to try to fix the rift in the weeks that followed, though she felt Helen’s loss far worse than any of them, and she desperately needed someone to talk to. She kept her distance because she didn’t want them to see that she had morning sickness.

***

Field Journal November 21

Arkham Industries has sent me a new assistant to fill Helen's position. His name is Johnny Depone.

His specialty is ocean ecology.

I'm not particularly fond of him, though I can't put my finger on the reason why. I sometimes think he's following a different agenda, though I can in no way criticize his performance or dedication.

Perhaps it is just my changing hormones, or the loss of Helen.

On the positive side, Johnny and David are old acquaintances, and get along well. So well that I'd question Johnny's alliances, if I didn't hear them arguing so often about marine conservation policies. I'm pleased with the arrangement, if for no other reason than it provides a buffer between David and myself.

***

Field Journal November 21

The eggs are the size of a beach ball now. And the Fertility Specialist was correct. Cthylla is winnowing the eggs, eating those she deems unfit to continue.

The Feeder, convinced that he's to blame for everything she eats, has upped her feeding to one hundred fifty pounds a day, heavy on Cthylla's favorite delicacies. Would that the team were so indulgent of me! There are more fish swimming in her tank than there are people on board this boat.

***

Field Journal December 1

Personal

I have decided to take a brief shore leave and visit my mother before the holidays. Undoubtedly, most of the team will want to go home for Christmas, if only for the weekend.

With no grandchildren in the family, we haven't made a big fuss about Christmas in years. Though I dread the reaction my pregnancy will cause. For Mother, Hope Springs Eternal, and Dies Hard. Each death is more painful.

But it should provide a welcome respite from our usual morbid conversations regarding Frank's death, and my dimming prospects for remarriage.

***

"Leaving without saying good-bye? I’m hurt!” David said.

Katherine tried to hide her sigh. She’d been so close to a clean getaway. She dropped her bag to the boat pilot waiting below the ladder and turned to answer.

“David, a high-impact, deep-sea oil drill couldn’t pierce your heart. What do you want?”

“Nothing much,” he said, smiling in a way that made Katherine queasy. “I just had a little bon voyage present for you.”

He handed her an envelope, printed with the ARN! stationery.

“A very little one, I see. What is it?”

She took the documents out of the envelope.

“Just a couple of restraining orders.”

Katherine looked up, shocked. “For what?”

“To protect two babies I happen to care about.”

She sputtered.

“You will not abort our child,” David said sternly.

Katherine started to protest, but David cut her off.

“Don’t tell me that isn’t why you planned this little trip.” Katherine said coldly, “I won’t have to go to the trouble. You’re well aware of my medical history. I’ve never carried an embryo to term. The odds don’t improve with age. So I wouldn’t start calling myself ‘daddy’ just yet if I were you.

“What’s the other little document?”

“It protects Cthylla’s baby. I won’t allow you to kill and dissect it in the name of scientific research. I have the court’s backing on this,” he said.

“That’s a little premature too, don’t you think?” Katherine snapped at him. “Cthylla may eat all the eggs. She’s got an appetite that just won’t quit.”

“Then feed her more—or I’ll file a lawsuit against you for animal abuse and neglect, and toss in a wrongful death against you on behalf of Dr. Hydreah.”

Katherine’s eyes narrowed and she dropped her voice to a whisper. “You are way out of line! You have no right telling me what I can or can’t do with my body, or with my project. I will appeal.”

“I had no doubt that you would,” David said. “But the babies are protected while we fight it out.”

***

Field Journal December 24

It's quiet, with just Cthylla and me in the lab. Everyone else has gone home for the holidays.

We were in a holding pattern while the eggs developed. We expected it to last several more months. Cthylla had other plans.

There were only three eggs left when I began my shift tonight. She was fussing with them more than usual. She kept prodding them with her tentacles, until at last, a small tear formed and a small tentacle poked out.

I turned the spotlight on and watched the entire birth through the telephoto lens. It took over an hour for the little guy to struggle out of the egg sack, with Mamma pacing nervously the whole time.

He's a translucent milky color. His pigment sacs should develop within a few weeks. For now, his internal organs are clearly visible. It was amazing to watch his little heart pumping.

He shares his mother's appetite. As soon as he escaped from his sack, he devoured the other two eggs.

From Cthylla's egg winnowing, and the newborn's first meal, I think it's safe to hypothesize that Cthylla will care former young, rather than abandon it, like others in her phylum.

The timing of the birth is an odd bit of irony... or was it planned? Perhaps Cthylla didn't want a crowd witnessing such a private event.

***

Field Journal December 25

I have named the baby Cthyhni.

I'm having great fun today dropping small fish into the tank, to assist Cthylla in her training of the little guy. He is a natural hunter, and seems to enjoy the thrill of the chase and kill more than the meal itself.

I had to pay a premium to get a delivery on Christmas, especially with the request for some smaller fish. But I consider it a Christmas present to myself and Cthylla.

I have decided not to recall the team today, despite the birth. Let them enjoy their holidays. I am quite capable of operating the cameras and equipment for observation. And I think Cthylla will appreciate a few days of quiet with her baby.

***

Field Journal December 31

Cthyhni is growing like wildfire, and cavorts around the tank in a manner more befitting a seal than an octopus! He is a delight to watch, and we're getting very little work done, other than observing his antics.

He is a master escape artist. There seems to be nothing we can do to make the tank escape-proof. Luckily, Cthylla doesn't let him wander far before she gently hauls him back in with one of her tentacles. The extra tentacles have reappeared. They're coming in handy.

The team is having a party in the mess hall. I should drop by and toast in the New Year with some apple juice. But first, I want to stop by the lab.

The team won't miss me. They'll probably enjoy themselves more with my absence.

Katherine hit the Save command and turned off her computer.

***

In the lab, the lights were turned down low. Katherine enjoyed the artificial twilight. She walked softly to the window of the tank and gently rested her forehead against the cool glass.

Cthylla ambled across the floor of the tank until she reached the window. She seemed to be studying Katherine. They watched each other, until Katherine felt a wet tentacle on her arm.

There was no mistaking the odd sensation of an octopus’ suction cups. Katherine turned slowly, so she wouldn’t frighten Cthyhni, but he was not there. It was only then Katherine realized the tentacle was far too large to belong to the baby. She turned back to face Cthylla, unafraid.

The tentacle grazed across her body until it reached the plump curve of her belly. The tentacle rested there, and Katherine had the eerie feeling Cthylla was familiar with human anatomy, and knew she was pregnant.

Cthyhni was close beside his mother, her arm wrapped lovingly around him.

A shock coursed through Cthylla’s tentacle and into Katherine’s womb. The scientist fell to the floor, convulsing.

In the tank, Cthyhni jerked and turned a ghostly white.

David Gaughan stepped from the shadows, gently picked the woman up, and carried her back to her room.

***

A medivac arrived within the hour. Katherine was groggy, but still fighting as Johnny Depone packed her things. David sat with her, trying to calm her down.

“You must go to the hospital, for the baby’s sake.”

“The miscarriage has already started. Nothing can stop that,” Katherine insisted.

“The doctors disagree. You have to go to the hospital and try.” “No!” Katherine howled. “The baby is going to die! Why can’t you accept that? I want to stay here! With Cthyhni, with the baby who will live!”

“You care more about a sea monster than a human!” David accused. “I care about what’s alive, rather than what’s dying in my womb!”

***

Personal Journal January 7

After much fighting with the obstetricians, they've finally relented and allowed me to have my computer. They got more than their share of concessions in exchange, though.

I am to be confined to bed for the duration of my pregnancy. It wasn't too hard to agree to that, as I still can't bring myself to believe for even one moment that the embryo inside me will live. However, between David's court orders and a doctor with no regard for my medical history, it seems we must all wait and see.

I miss the lab, and Cthylla and Cthyhni. And most of all, Helen.

I am tired of the moralizing, the pompous righteousness of all these men, who see me as nothing but a cold-hearted bitch who cares more for her work than her unborn child. What do they know of the pain I must endure as I wait, helpless, hopeless, and without distraction, as yet another child withers and dies in my womb?

How can they ever know what that does to your head and to your heart? I can not hope this child will live! My sanity will not hold if I love and lose another child.

***

Personal Journal January 15

I am receiving daily reports from Johnny Depone via E-mail. The news from the lab is as dreary as my own.

Little Cthyhni has stopped eating. And Cthylla is neglecting him.

They have asked me what to do.

As a scientist, I should tell them to continue observing them. An autopsy of Cthyhni would answer many of the questions we still have about this species. But there's been enough death on this mission, and chances are good Cthyhni would survive if we released him and his mother back into their natural habitat.

We will not be sacrificing everything. We can tag and monitor the two of them.

I should order a new insemination attempt. Several international zoos could advise us on the problems of captive breeding. All the evidence—from Cthylla's continued eating, to the birth of a single baby—suggests this species goes through more than one birth cycle. But I find I haven't the heart to order the procedure.

If Arkham Industries objects to my decision, I have complete faith in David to file the necessary legal documents to see that my will is carried out.

***

Personal Journal April 3

I gave birth to a beautiful little boy two days ago! He was three months premature, but healthy. So tiny and perfectly formed! David was by my side.

To my bitter disappointment, they heavily sedated me. I never thought I would be blessed with childbirth. It eats at me that I could not experience the event fully.

The birth was not an easy one. I had severe hemorrhaging, horrendous pain! In all honesty, I probably couldn't have handled it without the sedation.

There was a lot of tissue damage. I have sixty-five stitches! The nurse told me this was the obstetrician's most difficult delivery in his forty years of practice.

I suffered bizarre hallucinations from the drugs, and, at one point, David tells me I screamed out in abject terror. I remember the vision vividly. There was tremendous pain and a sickening sensation of wriggling as the baby passed through the outer canal. (I know that's impossible, as they completely numbed my pelvis and thighs.)

I thought I saw the doctor hold up a limp, wriggly mass of flesh, full of grasping tentacles dripping blood and gore. It emitted a high-pitched wail that drilled into my brain.

I saw David take it and hold it up, like a proud papa. One of the tentacles brushed across his cheek, leaving a trail of blood and slime. Then he handed the thing to Johnny Depone, who whisked it from the room!

I blacked out at that point, possibly from the pain. Obviously, my mind was still on my work, even at such a profound moment! But I can't help but hope Cthylla and her son are well, swimming free and swooping down on some unsuspecting monster of a fish.

But enough of such musings. David and the nurse are approaching. It's lunch time for the little one. Just four pounds and six ounces—how could one so small do so much damage to my womb! He has brown eyes, and just a hint of angel-white feathery hair. And Daddy say's he's hungry! We've named our little boy Keenan.

Table of Contents

Contents

The Swelling

The Disciple

A Colder War

The Ghoulish Wife

The Last Horror Out of Arkham

Harold’s Blues

Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley

The Plague Jar

The Dead Man’s Hand

A Little Job in Arkham

In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb