That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1)

by Emily C. Skaftun

  My Mother is in so much pain. She's ready to die. Release her,

  I don't know how to reach my son anymore. Release him,

  I can't stop drinking. I've tried. Release me,

  But on one, the letters were slashed in an angry scrawl:

  I will no longer live in fear. Release me,

  Another was stained with tears, the letters blurred:

  I'm ashamed of what he did to me. But I'm more ashamed of what I did about it. Release us,

  Still another bore the sloppy printing of a child in green crayon:

  Plese make Daddy come back. I miss him. I love him. Relees him,

  And every one of them ended with that strange name. Narlatotep or whatever. They were addressed to him. Or her. Or it. I don't know the stories well enough to guess.

  All at once a wind rose from the valley behind me. The strips of paper fluttered and danced up into it, sailing in all directions and none. I turned and looked out past the cliff, out at the enormous night sky, out at the great and terrible canopy looming over us all.

  What had I done?

  I felt a rising buzz of unease, that primal itch along the back and scalp you get when you sense you're no longer alone.

  That was enough for me. I hurried back down the path as fast as I could safely go. The beam of my flashlight danced wildly as I went. I saw jagged branches against the night sky, stark white skeletal shrubs, stones like misshapen skulls with recessed shadows for eyes. I only fell once, when I thought I heard something crashing through the trees in pursuit and looked over my shoulder. But there was nothing there and I scampered back to my feet and ran the rest of the way.

  Karen wasn't home. I thought at first she must have gone out looking for me. But then I noticed her boots and coat still by the door. Even if she had just gone to a neighbor's home she would have taken them. I must have panicked then because I don't remember going back outside. I just know I wound up in the street calling her name over and over. There was no answer except for the rattle of branches and the rising howl of the wind.

  It's been two days now. No sign of Karen. No sign of anyone. I've knocked at a dozen houses and no one is home at any of them. The doors are all unlocked, but that doesn't mean anything. People trust each other here, Karen always tells me. It's like a family.

  But every family has its secrets. And I think maybe I stumbled into some of this one's on the ridge that night. I just don't know what any of it means. Tomorrow I'll pack food and other supplies into the car. I borrowed a chainsaw from Charles Blount's garage, since we're like a family. I'm going to try and drive out. I don't know how long it will take to find someone, but I can't just stay here. The wind has stopped and the silence is crushing. Even the birds are gone.

  Guess that's it.

  * * *

  Neil Grayson grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts. After earning a degree in advertising from Syracuse University he settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked for marketing agencies for several years, eventually transitioning into the region's booming biotech industry. He met his wife, Karen Davis, at a corporate party. The couple married two years later and moved to the north-central Massachusetts town of Aylesbury, where Karen grew up. Neil is currently an Art Director for Wargo Designs in Boxborough. He is a lifelong Red Sox fan who never believed in the Curse of the Bambino. His current whereabouts are unknown.

  * * *

  Craig D. B. Patton writes stories, poems, flash fiction, drabbles, and other things made out of words. Some of his work has been published in Supernatural Tales, Illumen, Wily Writers, and other markets. He has a triptych of poems forthcoming in the Lovecraft inspired anthology The Terror of Miskatonic Falls (Shroud Publishing). He lives and writes in New England. You can learn more at flawedcreations.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @craigdbpatton.

  * * *

  The Laughing Book

  An account by Dr. Abigail Z. Phillips, as provided by Cliff Winnig

  * * *

  The Special Collections department at Miskatonic U lives in the basement, below the foundations of the old library. I've seen photos of that pseudo-colonial structure, all red brick and white columns. Its architecture evoked neither the purity of Grecian lines nor the principles of New England design. Rather, it recalled the temple of some antediluvian cult. Nobody but a few troubled and peculiar classics majors cried when it burned to the ground, its brick façade caving in from the heat. The new Whateley Library rose in brutalist glory, all concrete and glass, and loomed over an entire quadrangle, but no one who'd seen the old building ever complained.

  Yet the subterranean vaults holding Special Collections predate even the old library. Following old Barnabas Elmsley, I descended the clean, modern stairs toward a thick, lead-lined door. Rumor had it they'd installed it to block trace amounts of isotope decay, which had interfered with the ethernet cables enmeshing the new building. Elmsley unlocked the deadbolt and heaved the door open with a grunt. Briefly, I wondered what a Geiger counter would show, and then I stepped through into the gloomy stone stairwell beyond.

  There, I saw no trace of the vanished red brick. Instead, huge cyclopean stones lined the walls. As a Massachusetts native, I could tell the pale, fossil-filled blocks had not been quarried locally.

  Elmsley flipped a switch on the wall. Ancient fluorescents flickered to life and bathed the giant bricks in their harsh light. The shadows cast by the fossils and other imperfections formed sharply delineated pools of black. Still, I could tell the upper stones had melted, their uneven edges full of troughs and crests. The latter seemed to reach for the door like petrified pseudopods. I saw a few red bricks had survived after all. They'd been shoved into place to help square these blocks with the wall, a final reminder of the old library. That meant that whatever flames had touched the ancient stones had predated the library fire. No sign of soot covered the blocks. Perhaps they'd been sandblasted clean at some point.

  Elmsley turned to look up at me. "Mind the steps, Abigail. They're slippery."

  He might also have laughed. I barely heard the papery sound above the buzz from the lights, but I smiled as if we'd shared a joke. "I'll be careful."

  "A good attitude, miss." He turned away from me and gingerly made his way down the stairs. "Yes, a good attitude for life."

  One might expect the stairs to be damp, but moisture vanished on this side of the door, replaced by a crisp chill. I understood now why it was worth the bother to put the university's most precious books down here. The river runs close enough to campus to make the air humid, especially now in the autumn. Books can decay if one doesn't take precautions.

  Though dry, the stone stairs were smooth with the characteristic groove from the tread of many feet. As I carefully descended, I wondered whose feet had worn those grooves, and when, since almost nobody came down here now. If I hadn't been doing a special reading course with Dr. Hite, I wouldn't have permission to be here myself. I'd picked him precisely because he could and would give me that permission, let me work with texts even the other faculty members weren't allowed to access themselves.

  The stairs turned sharply to the right, and then again. Presently they opened into a narrow room with wooden desks against the side walls. All but the far wall showed bare pale blocks. Elmsley squeezed between the desks to the wooden door set into that wall, which was itself frosted glass. He pulled out his key ring and unlocked it, then turned to me where I stood a few paces behind.

  "Your slip, please."

  "What? Oh, sorry." I reached into my jeans pocket and fished out the paper Dr. Hite had signed, with the catalogue number of the Codex Hedersleben. Its official name bore the small German town of its discovery, but unofficially those who knew of it called it the "Laughing Book," due to the disturbing illustration that appeared on its frontispiece. Like most scholars, I'd only heard of the drawing. The university had never permitted it to be published.

  Elmsley took it and frowned, as if he disapproved of my research materials. Finally he nodde
d once, frowned more deeply, and told me to wait at one of the desks. He stepped through the door in the back wall, and I caught a glimpse of the stacks: metal shelves with glass doors, each one locked. A variety of books lined the cases, some oddly shaped, and others bound in bizarre materials. Then he shut the door and locked it behind him, and all that remained was a vague sense of movement through the frosted glass wall.

  I turned and surveyed the room. The desks were all plain, worn, and old. The wooden chairs pushed under them looked equally uncomfortable. At the far side of the room, near the entrance, stood a small round table holding a cup of pencils and a stack of note pads, all that was allowed in Special Collections. I'd had to leave my purse, my phone, even my jacket back at circulation. I was glad for the sweater I'd thought to wear, at least. The place was freezing.

  And something about the bricks bugged me. I leaned over a desk to examine one closely. I'd taken common core biology, but I didn't recognize any of the tiny fossils, spiraling shells and bodies with spines of unknown function. They might date back to the Cambrian for all I could tell. But that wasn't what bugged me. It was the color of the rock itself.

  "Like it's familiar," I told the empty room. "Even though it's totally alien."

  I heard the door in the back being unlocked, then opened. "What's alien, Abigail?" Elmsley emerged, carrying a thick book bound in grey. He placed it gently on the desk I'd been leaning over.

  "Oh, the bricks they used down here."

  "You'll get used to them. Special Collections closes at five. Ring when you're ready to go, and I'll come to put the book back."

  For some reason, I found the thought of his leaving me alone disturbing, even though it made sense. Elmsley did more than just run Special Collections. Dr. Hite had vouched for me, so I could be trusted to be on my own.

  "Ring?"

  He nodded towards a rope I hadn't noticed that hung behind the round table. "Just pull." Without a farewell he made his cautious way back up the stairs.

  I watched him go till he vanished around the turn. I suddenly realized that without my phone, I'd have no idea of the time. Next time I'd bring an old-fashioned watch, but for today I'd just have to guess. I'd come to the library at ten, so as long as I didn't get lost in my research ...

  I looked down at the book. The leather binding was white at the corners, as if perhaps that had been the original color. No writing adorned the cover. "Well, you'd better not be too interesting, or the next thing you know--"

  A loud clang echoed from above, followed by the unmistakable sound of a key turning in the deadbolt. Elmsley had locked me in.

  I grabbed the back of the chair and tried not to hyperventilate. He's just taking precautions, I told myself. Standard procedure. He's not going to entomb me down here. I can always call for help, at least if I can get a signal. I rolled my eyes. "If I had my phone."

  My rational brain knew that whatever happened, he'd be back before five. So even if for some reason the bell didn't work, or nobody heard it, the worst that would happen is I'd miss lunch. I was a grad student, so that was nothing I hadn't survived before.

  Besides--look around, Abigail. See any other students with access to Special Collections? Summoning the gumption that had gotten me here in the first place, I crossed to the table, picked out a pencil and pad, and returned to my desk. I resisted the urge to yank on the bell rope while I did these things. I pulled out my chair, sat down, and slowed my breathing. Now this book ...

  This book, I hoped, would be the keystone for my dissertation. Like several other medieval texts, it purported to detail travels to distant lands. According to summaries I'd read, it described the many unlikely peoples and animals its author had encountered along the way. It also contained highly detailed drawings of them. I expected some crazy adventures by mariners who'd probably eaten too much ergot-ridden bread before landing. It would have fit neatly into a dissertation on the fantastic in medieval travel literature, had I been writing one.

  But no, my dissertation was on actual European travels to North America. Leif the Lucky was all very good, if well-trodden, scholarly ground, but this book predated him by a century. What had sparked my interest was a footnote to an article by Blackwood and Smith in Massachusetts Botanical Review of all places, to which Dr. Hite had called my attention. They asserted the leaves and roots painstakingly described and illustrated in the codex matched flora native to New England. In other words, the Laughing Book's author had been here a hundred years before Leif Ericson discovered Vinland and, having written down what he'd found, returned to Germany.

  I hoped. If--after a year cramming as much Old High German into my brain as I could--I could read the darn thing. And if Blackwood and Smith had been correct. And if I could tell truth from fancy when I looked at the manuscript.

  I opened the book. The endpapers were newer, added by an eighteenth century binder, and depicted a vaguely floral pattern in faded black. I turned quickly to the first page, and to its left I saw the frontispiece.

  How to describe the creature? It might have been meant as a cockatrice. Its scaled bird body had a long, snakelike tail that wound between three stalks on top of its bearded human head. At the top of each stalk was another head, but not at all animalistic, or even human. The first seemed to be some sort of astronomical symbol, though with a face of sorts drawn between its lines and curves. The second held a sun, and the third a moon. Both had faces as well. The tail wove between the three stalks and ended in yet another face, this time a bird's. The bird looked down at the bearded human face, which looked back at it. All five faces were laughing, as if sharing a joke. From their look, though, the jape must have been barbed, maybe full of what the Germans call schadenfreude, delight in the suffering of others.

  Someone chuckled behind me.

  I leapt up, knocking down the chair, which banged into the chair behind it, then thudded onto the floor. No one was there, of course. I closed my eyes and breathed until I felt my pulse begin to slow, then opened them again. Still no one but me, the book, and the fossils in the walls.

  "Well, Abigail, we're off to a good start," I told myself. "Let's see if we can read some of this book before Elmsley comes down with a butterfly net to cart us off, eh?"

  I righted my chair, sat down, and turned the page.

  #

  That first day the work went slowly. The German proved thorny, and the handwriting took some getting used to. Plus the fear of being locked up and forgotten built until I finally did pull the bell rope. I didn't hear a sound, but maybe ten minutes later--it felt like years--Barnabas Elmsley returned to fetch me. Turns out it was just past one.

  So I grabbed a late lunch of pizza and a latte at the Div School coffee shop and read over my notes. Though I'd translated only the first two pages, I'd also copied one of the illustrations as best I could. It was of a conical helm. I'd have to compare it later to my Dover book on medieval armor, but I was pretty sure I'd never seen anything like it.

  I went home, brushed up on Old High German declensions, and fell asleep. When I woke the next morning, I knew where I'd seen blocks like the reading room's: in my dreams, dreams I'd been having for some time, only to forget each morning. But now, having seen the ancient bricks, I could pin those phantasms in my memory like insects in a display case.

  I'd been a warrior, a regular Joan of Arc, fighting monsters through a medieval version of Arkham. Only this town, in addition to being all thatched roofs and wooden walls, boasted a castle that looked suspiciously like the Misk U campus, but made out of the strange pale stone. I fought creatures that screamed with mouths within mouths, creatures whose voices buzzed inside my head, and silent, deadly fungoid assassins. Always I gritted my teeth and fought bravely until I heard the laughter. It seemed to come from the cloud-shrouded sky above, but no--it was the cockatrice thing from the frontispiece, a hundred feet tall, all five heads watching me, laughing.

  I wanted to ask Dr. Hite about the drawing, but he taught all morning on Fridays. Inste
ad I headed back to the library, determined to spend a few more hours with the book before I saw him.

  As before, Elmsley led me downstairs in his slow, deliberate way and fetched me the book. This time before he left he squinted at it and grinned. At least, I think he grinned. On him it came out like a rictus. "You like the pictures?"

  "Oh you've seen them?"

  "You see a lot of things down here."

  I waited for him to finish the thought and grew impatient when he didn't. "In the books, you mean."

  "Eh? Oh yes. I've been working here a long time, you know. A long time. Since before the old library burned down."

  I resisted the urge to ask him the story behind that fire, telling myself with Elmsley I'd lose the whole morning to it. This time when I heard him shut and lock the lead-lined door, I felt only a sense of missed opportunity. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get it from him one of these days. It's not like I won't be here a lot with this book.

  I turned back to the page I'd been working on, but then on a whim I started skimming, flipping through the book and looking at all the pictures. I found more examples of ancient pieces of armor and weaponry, again nothing that quite looked familiar, and detailed drawings of plants. I imagined the author had started his trip on the coast, doing botanical drawings and finding the odd rusted helm or dagger from some ancient skirmish. Traces of other explorers, even earlier? Perhaps.

  Then pictures of animals appeared. I saw a raccoon and grinned. Yes, the author had reached North America. In the late ninth century. I leaned back in my chair, savoring my moment of triumph.

  I must have laughed. At least chuckled. In any case, the sound echoed strangely in the room and the stairwell beyond. I thought I heard other voices, deeper, harsher, laughing along. This time I didn't leap up. Instead I froze. When the last echo died, I lowered my chair and waited. Nothing. No laughter, no monsters coming out of my dreams to fight me.