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

by Emily C. Skaftun

  I knew I had heard of The Ilexiataent, but in that moment I had nothing. They were gods of some kind, thankfully the passage made that clear, but from where?

  There would be time enough later to sort that out. In theory. If I hurried. I slammed the book closed and added it to my pile, preparing to flee. It was a little awkward, as encumbered as I was, but then I didn't know where I was going anyway, so I couldn't have done too much better had I not been weighed down. I moved sideways through the door to the main hallway, scuttling crab-like.

  If anything, the halls were darker than the library, maybe even darker than the servant pathways. They were tall and wide and lined with giant, streaked windows, but it was evening now and the gray of twilight was throwing itself across the walls and lengthening shadows with abandon. There was more graffiti here, paint carelessly smeared across expensive wooden paneling and thick European wallpaper. Knowing what I now did, the etchings filled me with dread. How much of this work was the result of faceless vandals and how much came from the deliberate worship of the Winsington gods?

  The seconds ticked by, itchy fingers tapping at my skull as my feet smacked compressed carpet in clouds of what I hoped was merely dust. I wished my legs were moving faster or that time was moving slower, but it seemed neither wish would be granted. This house was a mistake--visiting it, stepping inside, exploring, even my interest in it. This whole trip was misguided. But how could I have known?

  I hugged the books tighter to my chest, as though their acquisition and the knowledge they possessed was enough to make this horror show worth it. The pools of graying light that cut through the darkened hall speckled the manse's interior in a menacing merle arrangement. I was sure that at any moment, gods of indeterminate forms would be waiting to ambush me.

  Which only served to draw out another question. Why had the damned thing disappeared in the first place? Wouldn't it have been a perfect time to kill me when I was in the other room, off kilter from the discovery of August's body?

  The fetid smell was more pungent in the rest of the house. I had assumed that the stench had been the fault of the corpse--the sickly sweet way it clung to the air seemed to confirm that theory--but if that were the case, it should be growing less apparent the more distance I put between myself and the library. It made me wonder if maybe August's wasn't the only body in the house. Maybe animals? It was a real possibility, wild animals taking refuge in an abandoned house and dying once inside, but there was a level of understanding in my primal being that knew this was more than that. It wasn't just Death I smelled, it was Human Death. Even the rotting carcass of an elk or a bear, something wildly unlikely in the state of Massachusetts, wouldn't account for what I was sensing.

  It wasn't until I was approaching the broad foyer that I remembered the trouble I had gone through trying to open the front doors. If there weren't locks to throw, it was unlikely I would have any more luck on this side of them, and I had just wasted valuable time bumbling through the halls to get here. It was a more direct route, leaving out the front, but that was only if I could actually make it through.

  The wall to my right sloped away as I walked, revealing a once great staircase that rolled upward to the eastern and western wings of the building. My heart stopped, sure that something would be waiting for me on those steps. But they were empty. I gazed up each wooden stair and craned my neck to take in the landing above me. Nothing. But I felt no safer.

  The foyer was dominated by the stairway and the huge windows of colored panes of glass that lined the top half of the entry. A podium sat in the middle of the room, whatever bust or statue it held covered by a sheet. I skirted around it, my stomach a gummy soup at the sight of its ghostly shape. My mouth was bone dry, my breath paining my chest. I set the books on the floor reluctantly, loathe to part with my prizes, and began worrying at the rusted iron bolts that clasped the doors together. They were, of course, immobile. Like they had been welded in place.

  A cry of dismay escaped my throat. I clamped down any further exclamations. Unsure how to continue, I worked harder, fingertips burning painfully as they pushed against metal.

  The bolt slid--a shaking, squealing, tiny slide, but a slide nonetheless. An ember of hope surged, starting, just starting, to light a path that seemed to show a way out of here.

  Then I felt a scraping, a spiky touch on my back, a cold sensation that seemed to reach through the cloth of my shirt.

  I froze, rooted in place, hands glued to their grip on the lock. I swallowed loudly, throat ragged. The touch traveled up and down my back, multiplying and leaving bright burning sensations in their wake. The tracks mounted in intensity, shouting and boiling so egregiously I was sure my skin was bubbling and dripping from my body.

  My legs failed first, melting into a warm and wobbly numbness that could not support my strength. I don't even know if it was my ankles or my knees that buckled first because I couldn't feel them. By the time they crumbled under me and sent me toppling, my hips and forearms no longer felt a part of me. It was the way the floor crashed against my ribs and shoulders that told me how extreme the impact was. I was quickly losing sensation there as well, however.

  Ropes of ivy and holly, alien breeds with bone white stems and mahogany leaves that dripped pungent green and viscous, were snaking from the fabric that had been draped over the podium. Strange glowing eyes peered from where the cloth had lifted. Dark where the whites should be, light at the pupils, and iridescent green at the irises. A few pairs.

  Behind me I heard a rustle and, with the last of my control of my own body, I turned my neck to look over my shoulder.

  In my haste to escape, I had failed to note the carved leaves that ringed the door in looping figure eights. They were detaching themselves, pulling away and straining toward me. Another pair of eyes blinked at me with the impassive hunger of a carnivore.

  The Ilexiataent. The Winsington's gods. Or at least the result of them.

  It was such an obvious realization, it seemed a waste of my final thoughts.

  I had never wished away my time with August, not for all of the pain and all of the regret and all of the sorrow. But I did now.

  I wanted to tell Henry goodbye. Then I remembered the gift that had been sent to Henry's hospital room, the strange hue of the foliage and the way it smelled like nothing of this world, and I realized that it wouldn't be too much longer before l saw my husband again.

  * * *

  Services for Doctor Scott Randall (Baker) Thornton will be held on September 20th, 2010, at the United Methodist Church in Brookline, NH. He was preceded in death by his husband, Doctor Henry Carter Thornton. He leaves behind his father and mother, Peter and Dierdre Baker of Brookline. Scott was born in Brookline February 24, 1978. A quiet child who always enjoyed education, he was accepted by Miskatonic University in 1997. Scott went missing shortly before his husband died and his former associate, Mr. August Winsington, was reported missing last year. His family decided to honor his memory though his body has not been recovered.

  * * *

  Jenna M. Pitman's first work was published in a monthly zine local to Seattle where it ran for nearly a year, garnering a fair amount of popularity. Since then she has had a number of stories and articles published in a variety of locations. Before moving to Los Angeles, CA, in 2012, she was a well-known member of the Pacific Northwest convention community. Currently she is a happy resident of sunny Southern California where she hikes, dances, and practices yoga daily in addition to working as a full time writer.

  * * *

  The Reservoir

  An account by James Davenport, as provided by Brian Hamilton

  * * *

  "I wouldn't drink that."

  I paused, the rim of the pint glass frozen only a microscopic distance from my lips. My friend, Stan Rawlings, stared at me from across the booth. He was in his accustomed place at the old hardwood table, stacks of paper and small, old looking booklets scattered in front of him. "Wouldn't drink what?" I asked, sloshi
ng the water around in the glass. "You see something on the news? Something wrong with the water?"

  My friend shook his head. "Not on the news, no." He tapped at the papers strewn across the table. "But it's all in here. Christ, James, I can't believe no one's ever talked about this."

  Whatever "this" was, it was a part of Stan's big research project for his doctoral degree. The two of us had met at Miskatonic University--I had pursued a history degree with a little help from a small scholarship, and Stan had graduated with a degree in microbiology, thanks in large part to the full ride he had gained based on old family connections. After graduating, I got a job at Arkham's city archives, but Stan had gone right back to school for a doctorate.

  He'd been on this project for a year now, and apparently had spent most of his time disseminating the information in the Dutchman's Breeches, a bar we had found early in our college years. It was one of those little places you found in the back alleys and side streets of Arkham--all dark wood and even darker lighting, half filled with old regulars and whoever else might turn up over the course of the night. Stan and I may have been the youngest regulars there by a decade, but the beer was local, cheap, and better tasting than anything you could find on campus.

  I'd already downed a few pints and felt a little fuzzy. I'd asked for some water to steady me out--I was going to be working the next morning, and didn't relish the idea of spending a day in those dusty old halls and shelves with a hangover. I noticed Stan hadn't ordered a drink. In fact, he'd gone and brought a plastic water bottle, something from one of the local convenience stores. Its label assured that it had been bottled on some remote island where the water was extracted from pure underground springs.

  I decided to humor my friend and set the glass back down. "Alright, Stan, what's 'this' and what does it have to do with the water?"

  Stan pulled his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You know how I had to do that research project for Professor Barnes?"

  I thought for a moment. "The one about bacteria in the drinking water? The one you got removed from because you got sick?"

  Stan nodded. "He wanted to help prove that Arkham had some of the better drinking water in the New England area."

  "Didn't he get a big grant from that?"

  "More than a grant. It was a big hit for some of the water bottling companies that pull their water from the reservoir. The same one that Arkham and the surrounding areas pull their tap water from."

  "So what does that have to do with what you've got now?"

  Stan put his glasses back on and leaned towards me, as if sharing some secret to a fellow conspirator. "The report Barnes used was ... altered. Slightly."

  That wasn't a shock. I remembered Barnes as a pompous, overbearing bastard who lauded his own intellectual prowess to anyone that might listen to him on campus. "I'm not surprised," I said. "I'd honestly been more unsettled if you told me Barnes had published the honest truth. So what did he find? Arsenic? Feces?" I began to raise the glass of water again, wiggling my fingers of my free hand in the air. "Some sort of flesh-eating bacteria?"

  Normally introverted and clumsy, Stan surprised me as he whipped his hand out and stopped the glass's progress. His grip was vice-like on my wrist. We locked eyes, and I could see my own worried expression reflected in his thick glasses. "Worse," he whispered. "Much worse. So, please--don't drink."

  He let go of my hand and sat back in the booth, his shoulders slouching as he relaxed. For my part, I set the glass back down and slid it to the far side of the table, away from the wall that I leaned against. I swallowed, my throat ironically dry, and asked, "What's in the water, Stan?"

  My friend looked down at his papers and began to riffle through them. "Barnes--we, I mean, the research group--found something in the water. No bacteria, or anything that could cause sickness." He paused to look up at me. "Or, maybe not. There were particulates so small that we only detected them in one of the tests. Barnes and the other undergraduate researchers dismissed the results, but I was curious enough to take a second look.

  "What I found was, well--I don't know what it was. It was almost like tiny pieces of something in the water, like flakes, only much, much smaller. When I decided to take a closer look with one of the more powerful microscopes, I saw--I saw colors, James." He choked a little at this point. "Only, they weren't colors, you know?" I didn't. "I mean, they looked sort of something like, I don't know ..." He trailed off at this point and stayed silent for a few moments. I was about to say something when Stan started again.

  "I was sort of, I guess, blinded for a little while. Like I couldn't process what I was seeing and just kind of shut down. I woke up in the campus infirmary. Barnes apparently found me collapsed on the floor. The sample I had taken was spilled. I guess I knocked it over when I collapsed."

  "Hold on," I interrupted. "You told me you came down with a, a bug or something."

  "Barnes asked me if I could keep quiet about the whole thing. He promised a little of the grant money in return, but I turned it down." No surprise there--the Rawlings were an Old Money family in Arkham. Stan paid for most of the rent on the apartment we shared in the city's downtown area. I would've bet that he'd never have to work a day in his life if he didn't want to. "Then Barnes threatened to have me removed from the school if I told anyone."

  "Alright," I said, "so you saw something and passed out. What's the connection to what you're doing now? And why are you telling me?"

  Stan nodded. "After I recovered a little, I went back to the lab to find out where the water sample I had looked at came from. It was pulled directly from the reservoir. And so I decided to do a little more research." He pulled out a couple sheets of paper, browned and brittle with age. I recognized them as something I had found for Stan from the archives a week ago. Had he actually stolen something?

  I forgot the break from his normal character as he went on. "These papers are from the city archives, which I--"

  "Got from me, yeah, and apparently stole them. Shit, Stan, do you know how much trouble we could get into if you're--"

  He cut me off again. "That's not important right now, dammit! Listen--these papers list the name of the surveyor who went out into the area that would eventually become the reservoir." His finger rested next to the name of the surveyor and the year in which the document had been filed in: Mr. Howard Phillips, 1927. "I couldn't find anything else in the Arkham archives, so I took a trip to Boston to try my luck. It took them some time to find anything, but eventually they found this."

  He held up a small bundle of papers that looked just as old as the survey records. The yellow-brown bundle was thick, and each page was covered with typewritten words, the old ink flaking off in places. "And that is?" I asked.

  "It's something Phillips wrote after completing the survey for the reservoir. Turns out he up and quit right after completing the job, and this," he shook the bundle at this point, "is his account of why he did so. He tried publishing it, but the manuscript got lost in the process. Somehow it turned up at Boston's archives, and they went and misfiled it under someone else's name."

  He slid the old account towards me. "There's something in the reservoir, James. Phillips' story is a little rambling, and seemingly unbelievable, but it explains what I saw in the sample. What might be," he pointed at the glass of water at the end of the table, "in the water everyone in this city is drinking. If Phillips is right, something came down from the sky and infected an area in the hills outside Arkham--an area that was covered, eventually, by the reservoir. The people of Arkham at the time called it 'evil,' named it the 'blasted heath.' Phillips got the story from some senile old man, but he saw the area himself, all gray and crumbling and dead. Something caused that area to die, James, and if I'm right then it's still there, under all that water."

  With that final proclamation, Stan stopped to breathe and sat back again. I realized I had stopped breathing, and started sucking in air from the now too-stuffy atmosphere of the Breeches. My stomach felt
like it was twisting itself into a knot. I willed myself back to calmness, and wiped the thin layer of sweat from my forehead. "Do you have any actual proof, though?" I asked. "Apart from a destroyed sample and a story from a dead man, what do you have to show for it?"

  "Nothing," Stan admitted, but I could see the bright spark of something in his eyes. "Nothing yet."

  "Yet?" I dreaded the answer.

  "I'm going to go out there," Stan told me. "I'm going to go to the reservoir this weekend, find this 'heath' and see if it isn't the source of what I saw in the sample."

  I couldn't believe him. "Do you even know how to, what, scuba dive? To use any of that equipment?"

  Stan nodded. "Clara's been showing me."

  I rolled my eyes. Clara was Stan's self-styled "ladyfriend" and was probably the closest thing he'd ever had to a significant other in his whole life. If anything proved the cliché of opposites attracting, it was Stan and Clara. Where Stan was bookish and predictable, Clara was adventurous and spontaneous. Having spoken to her in the past, I'd found that she was also rather intelligent, so it was no wonder why Stan was able to put up with her. And it didn't surprise me that Clara would know how to go diving with all that equipment.

  "She's not going with you, is she?" I was worried Stan might try to rope her into this mad plot.