by Byron Craft
“I am sorry Professor,” he smiled. “No one was at home; we decided to wait out here.”
“I did not see your JLTV and trailer when I pulled up,” the Professor countered.
“There is no room out front, sir,” Gideon appeared to be taken back a bit by the Professor’s observation. He, of course, was not aware that Ironwood had seen him earlier and knew about his transport. “We parked around the corner.”
Ironwood slowly released the gun’s hammer back onto the empty chamber and slipped it between his belt and trousers. “The three of us will talk under more pleasant circumstances,” he announced, also with a faint smile.
***
Gideon Ward looked around the house trailer/office. The walls were literally crammed with books. The fans in the window air conditioner made a white noise working to keep the noonday heat at bay. A thick opened leather-bound brief lay on the desk which the Professor promptly closed when they all sat down. “You and I were informally introduced, but I don’t know this gentleman,” Ironwood offered, indicating Gideon’s companion.
“His name is Dutch. He doesn’t talk.” Reading the quizzical look on the Professor’s face, he continued, “He suffered an injury while serving in Afghanistan. It left him without the power of speech.”
“How unfortunate, Dutch. As trite as it may sound, I am very grateful for your service to our country.”
Dutch smiled.
Turning his attention back to Gideon Ward, Ironwood’s features became stern. “I knew your brother very well. We were good friends. If it is any consolation to you, he spent his last moments with me. He was very brave.”
“Thank you, sir. I am grateful to you as well for exterminating the shoggoth that was responsible for Alan’s death.” That got Ironwood’s dander up, Gideon judged, if the Prof had been playing poker the expression on his face would have given away his hand.
“We never let that information out to the media,” Ironwood roared. “Everyone that witnessed the event was sworn to a non-disclosure agreement that promised court martials and imprisonment for anyone that leaked it. We didn’t want to cause unnecessary panic.”
“Don’t get riled, Professor. When you served as long as I had, you acquire certain contacts.” Ironwood appeared to relax some. Gideon guessed that he wasn’t going to volunteer more than he had too. “This isn’t a social call, sir. It may seem unlikely to you, but my brother and I had more in common than you may think. There is more to this shoggoth ‘event’ then you may know.”
“The subject is classified top-secret,” he emphasized.
“I urgently need your help, Professor. We need to return to the tunnels.”
“Classified top-secret, means I cannot talk about it.” Gideon could see the anger welling up in his features.
“I retired from the military and later learned about my brother’s death. Since then I have a new career hunting down the unearthly, sometimes evil things and at other times deadly. So, you see I am not totally unlike my brother.”
“Knowing your brother as well as I did and looking at you makes that difficult to believe,” Ironwood contradicted, still not loosening his top-secret trap.
“When my brother and I were kids, we had a penchant for the weird he eventually chased after his through academia, and I sought mine down the barrel of a gun. The pen versus the sword, a minor difference when you seek the strange and the bizarre.”
“You said it was urgent, for what, thrill-seeking? Gideon are you in search of the problematical?”
Gideon could see that Professor Ironwood was a tough debater. A tight-lipped S.O.B. “Next time the people you work with at the NWC want to keep something secret make sure that they don’t send a principal player’s cell phone along with his personal effects to his next of kin.” There was the sound of Velcro separating as Gideon undid the flap over his shirt pocket. He removed a small black fob on a keychain and handed to Ironwood.
“What’s this?” The professor asked.
“A thumb drive, plug it into that PC of yours. It will answer a lot of questions.”
Ironwood turned his flat screen monitor so all three could view it and inserted the USB drive. A second elapsed while his computer identified the flash drive as a new device and a file directory appeared on the screen. Ironwood clicked on it, and a video began to play.
***
The image was dark. Someone was lighting the subject matter with a flashlight. The person must have been taking the video one-handed while lighting the area in front of it with the other hand holding the light, Ironwood speculated. The picture shook a bit and intermittently bounced up and down. It was photographing glyphs. The same pictoglyphs he and Alan had examined carved into stone in the tunnels beneath the desert area comprising the Naval Weapons Center. The camera phone moved in for a closer view, and the image grew brighter as it approached. A narrator’s voice accompanied the video.
“I am able to read these, with some difficulty though . . . they are like the ones I have studied in the Necronomicon,” a chill ran through Ironwood. He recognized the voice immediately; it was Alan Ward.
“The drawings tell most of the overall picture with only a minor stretch of the imagination,” the voice continued. “See this little curlicue here, now that’s very important. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to tell if the ancient ones were writing about their past, present or future. Oh. And this one, over here, the one that looks rather like a boy scout’s badge, is striking, it connects us to this image.” Alan had zoomed in on the carving. It was five-sided, all five-sides equal. The tunnels they had explored beneath the NWC were five-sided. However, this icon did not depict a tunnel opening. There were additional images engraved within it. A square with five dots inside and two lines of foreign writing, hieroglyphics, above it. “This is amazing!” exclaimed Alan’s recording. “The boy scout badge combined with the curlicue tells us that this was forthcoming. What was in store for them? It is almost as if they were having difficulty illustrating its purpose. Like trying to describe a color you have never seen before. Wait, can it be, the Great Race, I know from experience, did not recognize mortality as we know it. Their lifespan lasted thousands of our years. Oh, my God, it is! This thing, this image, is a door, probably a great big mother of a door . . . to a doomsday vault!” The video ended and returned to the restart symbol with the triangular “play” arrow pointing to the right side of the screen.
Ironwood stared at the blank monitor and then back at his two visitors. What do I do with these two, he deliberated. What can I impart to them without violating my confidentiality pledge?
Gideon was first to break the silence. “He took the video with his cell phone. I downloaded it onto the drive. What did my brother mean, Professor, when he said he knew the Great Race from experience?”
So, Gideon Ward isn’t all that informed, after all, inferred the Professor. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the trailer’s side window. He was able to view a portion of Main Street across his patio, through the glass. A red Ford Explorer drove up and parked on the other side of the street. It was Amy’s car delivering their houseguest. Turning back, he enquired, “Were you aware of your brother’s medical condition?”
“You mean the retrograde amnesia?”
“Yes.”
“I know he suffered from it for close to five-years. Some of his colleagues told me that he had a complete personality change during that time. I sent him numerous emails when I was overseas, but he never answered one of them.”
“And then, one day, he returned to his old self again,” Ironwood added.
“That is what I was told, except he had no memory of the previous five-years.”
“What if I told you that he did have a recollection of those lost years? First through his dreams and then later sparked by trauma. A memory so fantastic that if I had not had shared his ordeal, I would have considered him insane, delusional. It is bizarre, Gideon and would be, at the very least, deemed absurd and far-fetched by most.”<
br />
“Try me on for size, Professor. I’ve witnessed everything from a dissolving bloodsucker to ferocious disintegrating lawn jockeys with heads like oversized cumquats.”
Ironwood squinted and turned his attention to Dutch. The big muscular blond smiled and nodded the affirmative. With a reluctant sigh he continued, “Shortly after your brother regained his faculties is when the dreams began, dreams that had the aspect of memories. In due course, he became aware that in his amnesiac state he had formed a sort of exchange; that a secondary personality had intruded, from an unknown region, and displaced him. Alan, before long, was driven to the conclusion and the frightful awareness that the whereabouts of his true self, during those lost years, that another had held his body.
“Driven by a feverish desire to know more, Alan searched for every scrap of information bearing on the studies of the Other One, during his dark years. His inquiries included records of split personalities from demonic possession legends to present day medical cases. The results of his findings, he believed, and I concurred, that advanced beings had groped through time from an unknown abyss. Through the power of their keener minds, they were able to project themselves into the past and future, through gulfs of time, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of these beings, your brother assumed, rose many legends of human mythology. They did this by way of a technology foreign to us that permitted the elder race to displace the personality, the total make-up of an individual, and replace it with their own. The displaced personality was, in turn, conducted through the ether and imprisoned in the alien body of the traveler. Once the nomadic Elder Being had completed its research, the process was reversed, and the unsuspecting victim would have its memory wiped clean of the event.
“Only in your brother’s case, they failed to completely suppress his memory of the time he spent in an alien body.”
“A cockeyed tale at best, but it makes sense,” answered Gideon slowly as Ironwood handed him back his thumb drive. “I always wondered why he journeyed to the Mojave. Look, Prof, I know a few details about your tunnels, there was this shoggoth thing down there, lots of old writing on the cavern walls, but . . . wait a minute,” he proclaimed, fingering his chin. “These beings were from the past, right? If they were of this earth, long ago, then maybe, just maybe your tunnels are all that is left of their civilization. And if Alan broke from his suppressed memory, it stands to reason that he may have been compelled to seek out the ruins of his ancient prison.”
Ironwood leaned back in his chair once again; the guy has a good head for logical deduction, he observed. “That’s about it, in a nutshell, Gideon.”
“No, there’s one more thing,” he announced. “Alan mentioned the old book, the Necronomicon. I’m pretty familiar with it, Prof. It’s supposed to be as old as the hills. One of the rarest books in the world, I am told. My sources tell me that he carried it with him often and learned to read certain hieroglyphics and formulas from its numerous pages. That leather portfolio on your desk wouldn’t happen to be it, would it? he alleged, pointing.
Professor Thomas Ironwood was not enjoying this battle of wits. He did, however, admire Ward’s tenacity. The NWC knew nothing of the Necronomicon; he was sure of that, and, after all, it did originally belong to Gideon’s brother. Revealing its existence would not violate his oath of secrecy. Should he shoot him with his .38 or show it to him, he smiled internally. I’ll show it to him, he decided. “Alan and I spent a considerable amount of time studying the book. In a way, I guess it belongs to you now, if you can make heads or tails out of it. Take a look.” Ironwood slid the leather-bound tome to the edge of his desk.
“I would have thought,” declared Gideon, getting excited, rising from his chair and approaching Ironwood’s desk, “that bells and alarms would have gone off at Miskatonic University when Alan took it out of their forbidden library.”
“Not at all, Gideon. When the head librarian was down with the flu, Alan played the good-hearted soul and volunteered to be his substitute. So, while the cat was away, the mouse simply photocopied it.”
Chapter 9
- The Houseguest -
Pemba was overwhelmed by the desolation of Darwin. She had thought of America as a place of great wealth. Her plane had landed at LAX, and she took a commuter flight to Inyokern Airport. Amy Murchison had greeted her at the baggage check. So far, her journey through the USA had been limited. Darwin looked lifeless. There was no activity in the tiny weather-beaten town. Mrs. Murchison had told her that the population numbered forty-five people, but there was not a soul in sight. The little bit of blacktop left on Main Street was unraveling, becoming coarse black granules. The old mining community looked to Pemba as a place people used to store their junk. Long forgotten house trailers with their paint sandblasted off dotted the landscape. Here and there disused pickup trucks and automobiles stood rusting on concrete blocks. To the northwest was a row of one-room shacks, all abandoned and crumbling by the weight of the harsh Mojave seasons.
“Decades ago,” Amy Murchison told Pemba, “Darwin contained simple dwellings for the transient miners that came with hopes of striking it rich. Nowadays, most of the mines are depleted of their worth, or the cost is too great to retrieve the minerals from the earth.”
Many of the larger homes that Pemba could see were wood frame with green roof shingles and tar paper on their sides. Tar paper huts were not unfamiliar to her. They were common in some of the poorer areas of Africa. When they came to the end of Fulton Street and turned right onto Main, she was surprised to see a few new homes constructed of rough sawn plywood siding, dark brown and tan shingles, all with satellite dishes. They came to a stop. Mrs. Murchison parked across from a house half-buried in the ground with a funny looking little yellow car on its roof.
***
Professor Thomas Ironwood flipped through the pages of the Xeroxed "Al Azif," an Arabic term, meaning the nocturnal sound of howling demons, the original title of the ancient grimoire. The pages that he turned displayed crudely drawn icons, cryptic formulas along with several foreign languages, all handwritten. “As you can see you would need to be a scholar of ancient languages even to begin to unravel this work,” Ironwood proposed.
Gideon and Dutch peered at the facsimile of the age-old papyrus. “What language is that writing?” Gideon asked, a look of wonderment crossed his features.
“Not one etymology as we were led to believe about the original authorship of the Necronomicon. It evolved from several different and diverse tongues. Part of it is transcribed in Aramaic which was ancestral to the Arabic alphabet, scattered throughout the pages you will also observe ancient Greek and some Latin. Legend has it that the source was a poet by the name of Abdul Alhazred, but with close inspection, it becomes obvious that several hands were involved in its making. It could also mean that the primary manuscript has been lost through the ages, although copied and re-copied over the centuries. Subsequently, the few remaining copies in existence today, while ancient and very rare, are, at best, a hodgepodge of the original.”
Leafing through the pages of the big book, Ironwood ceased when Gideon yelled, “stop!”
“I’ll be damned,” the Professor exclaimed. In the center of the page, where he ceased his leafing, was a five-sided drawing. It was identical to the one Alan Ward had pointed out in his cell phone video. Within the pentagon shape was the small square containing its five dots and the two lines of hieroglyphics above.
“What the hell is that?” exclaimed Gideon pointing to the opened page. In the margin, someone had written in reddish ink an asterisk and on the bottom of the page, in the same sepia, a rhyming couplet was penned, in English.
“It looks like Alan’s handwriting,” answered Ironwood slowly. He recognized the couplet but had never been sure of its source. The implication was beyond belief. It read:
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
“Do you think that is a tran
slation of the hieroglyphics in the drawing, on the door to what Alan called a doomsday vault?” Gideon suggested.
“Could be,” answered the Professor. The thought had already crossed his mind.
***
Mrs. Murchison insisted on carrying Pemba’s bags. No amount of coaxing on Pemba’s part would persuade the woman to let go of her luggage. She was a very attractive blonde-haired lady, middle-aged and agile in appearance. She looked as if she was accustomed to regular physical activity, backpacking, weight training? Pemba was envious of her hairdo. Pemba’s was the color of coffee and extremely short while her companion’s hung like a beautiful silk waterfall over her shoulders. Amy Murchison picked up Pemba’s two heavy suitcases as if she was going to start a workout.
The Professor’s home was beneath the ground, Pemba observed, with a fieldstone foundation. She saw that a section of earth terraced away from the house and three stone steps led down to the front door. A raised wood panel below, and a frosted glass above in the door, greeted her at the base of the third step. The glass was approximately two-feet square with a wildlife setting etched into its surface. An American mountain lion, an eagle in flight and what she guessed to be a Joshua tree, indigenous to the area, was displayed in the door. All in all, it looked inviting. Mounted to the door, below the pictorial setting, hung a wood plaque. The words, “lignum vitae,” had been burned into its face. Pemba smiled. She was fluent in Latin. Strictly translated it meant, “wood of life,” it was also used to describe a tropical tree with a very hard grain, “wood of iron.” Ironwood, she happily determined. The name of her new employer.
Pemba crossed a large rustic dining area. A long table for eating, she decided, with big high back chairs. All the furnishings shined from excellent care. So, did the fixtures in the southwestern styled parlor. Through a pair of French doors, she spied a spacious patio. She guessed that Professor David Hambling’s Tudor cottage in Norwood would have fit nicely within its boundaries.
