Silas gritted his teeth. He couldn’t hear what they said to her over the hiss of rain, but he didn’t have to. Her eyes darted between them as she stopped short, a look of wide-eyed desperation on her face. He knew where this was going. He’d seen this too much in his travels, women accosted and treated like chattel, and not just abroad. Even after the government gave women full suffrage, some men treated them like they should be subservient. The sight of it happening here prickled his skin like a plague of nettles.
Not on my watch… Silas grabbed a slicker from the pilothouse and pulled it on. Men didn’t go shirtless in front of ladies, after all. By the time he’d climbed up to the quay, however, the three men were backing away from the woman. One of them turned with a look of unease on his face. The woman took a step toward them, but he couldn’t hear what she said.
“Off with you, ya crazy cow!” the largest of the men bellowed, flicking a meaty hand in a shooing motion, although it was he who was retreating from her.
The woman’s eyes followed them beseechingly. “Please, I just…” But the men weren’t listening, muttering under their breath as they stepped back aboard their barge.
Not knowing what she’d said to send them packing, but admiring her spunk, Silas took a closer look at her. She was younger than he’d guessed from her conservative clothes and severe hairstyle—maybe late twenties or early thirties. Her plain gray dress, speckled black by the rain, looked like something a spinster of sixty might wear. She was slim, straight-backed, with brown hair pulled into a low bun, a few curls escaping to dangle upon her furrowed brow. The book she clutched to her chest was large, thick, and leather bound. Her eyes flicked around, searching, desperate. Her earlier distress hadn’t been about being accosted at all. She was looking for something—or someone—and her gaze alighted on him.
Silas turned away, not wanting to look like another ruffian. But a conservatively dressed woman wandering the wharves alone, out in a storm without a coat, clutching a book was nigh strange. Whether she was desperate or mad as a hatter, Silas had no desire to get involved in someone else’s problems. As he started to climb back down to Sea Change, however, her voice called him back.
“Sir?” She bustled toward him, her birdlike gait closing the distance with surprising speed. “Please, sir, I need the help of a sailor. Please! The…the end of days is fast approaching, and I don’t know where else to find help!”
“The what?” Desperate and mad, maybe, he thought, but he couldn’t simply ignore her. His own pleas for help had gone unanswered for too long.
“The end of days!” She tottered up, stopping barely a step away, her eyes wide and her knuckles white on the book clutched to her breast. Her lower lip trembled, her weak chin quivering. “All the works of man will fall! The stars…the travelers will come…everything…everyone will perish! The tome foretells it all! You have to help me!”
“I…” Silas closed his mouth to keep from saying something offensive. He didn’t know if she was truly touched in the head or some kind of religious fanatic, but the book she clutched so fervently wasn’t a Bible. The tooled leather looked more like some of the things he’d seen in the Far East than anything from a church, and although the woman dressed primly, she didn’t talk like a Bible-thumper. Not your problem, Silas… “I really can’t help you, miss.”
The words sounded gut-wrenchingly familiar. No help…no answers…no one who trusts enough to help.
“Please, sir!” She tilted her umbrella out of the way as she stepped closer, and the nor’easter filled it like a sail, jerking it out of her grasp and flinging it into the river. She didn’t even glance after it, but she clutched his arm. “I know this sounds mad, but I need a sailor, someone who knows how to navigate with the stars, to interpret something from this tome.” She sheltered the book with her body even as rain soaked her hair. “Lives…no, the very world depends on this! Please!”
“The stars?” Not crazy, maybe, but clearly disturbed, she obviously needed help, and having just been refused by his cousin, her desperation struck Silas a blow. If you turn her away, what kind of hypocrite will you be, Silas? Perhaps if he could just talk her down a little, she would move on to a safer area of Arkham. Ladies like her didn’t belong on the docks. “You mean celestial navigation? You need someone to take a fix from some numbers in that book?”
“Yes! Precisely!” She withdrew her hand and clutched the book closer in a futile attempt to protect it from the rain. “I’m sorry. My name is Abigail Foreman. I’m a librarian at the university. This tome speaks of the end of mankind, a path between stars opening, horrible things entering our world at a very specific time and place. The place is denoted by celestial data, but the time and numbers keep changing.”
“Changing?” Now that did sound crazy. Books didn’t change. But a closer look at the tome’s tooled leather cover confirmed that this was no mariner’s log, almanac, or explorer’s diary.
“Please, Mister…”
“Marsh. Silas Marsh.” Her plea finally broke his reticence. Crazy or not, maybe if he spoke to her, offered to help, he could calm her down. “You’re getting soaked, Miss Foreman. You best step aboard and have a cup of java to warm you while you tell me what you need.”
“Oh, thank you, Mister Marsh!” She followed him to the edge of the quay, but then peered dubiously down at the deck of the boat. “Are you sure…”
One look at her hard-soled shoes and he knew she’d have a problem stepping onto the gunnel. Doing so without letting go of the book she clutched so dearly would make it perilous. Falling into the raging Miskatonic River would be deadly for someone dressed in heavy skirts.
“Here, miss. I’ll help you.” Silas stepped down to the pitching gunnel and braced one foot on the quay wall. His stance sure, he held up two hands. “Don’t worry.”
“Thank you, Mister Marsh.” She inched forward and started to step down, both hands still firmly gripping the book.
Her shoe met the rain-slicked cap rail and shot out from under her as if she’d stepped on ice. A clipped cry escaped her lips, but before she fell, Silas’s hands closed around her waist and he lifted her down to the deck as easily as plucking a lobster pot from the sea. She wobbled as Sea Change rolled, but he was down and gripping her elbow firmly in a flash.
“Here, miss, just step inside and have a seat.” Silas guided her into the cabin and waved her to the bench beside the chart table. He hung up his slicker and grabbed a towel from the wet locker. “Sorry for the rough handling. Let me just get a shirt on.” He handed the towel over and hurried forward to get a shirt from the fo’c’sle. The thick flannel felt sticky on his wet skin, but he didn’t want to offend the poor woman.
When he reentered the cabin, however, he found her drying off the book with the towel, not, as he’d intended, her dripping face and hair. Perhaps librarians cared more for their books than their own condition. He quickly poured her a cup of coffee and put it down on the table.
“Here you go.” He topped up his own cup and sat down across from her. “Now, what’s this about that book? You said it changed? How can that be?”
“I don’t know how, Mister Marsh, but the entry does change!” Abigail finished dabbing at the rain-specked leather and pressed the towel to her face, then dried her hands meticulously before touching the volume. “This is a book of prophecies written by an excommunicated monk in the sixteenth century. I became interested in this particular prophecy because the date of its occurrence is very near to today’s date.”
Silas arched an eyebrow. Although the edges of the leather were cracked with age, the book looked remarkably well preserved for being four hundred years old, and he suddenly understood her concern for its condition. The cover was deeply tooled with strange symbols and figures around the foreign title: Prophesiae Profana.
“I should never have taken it out of the library, but I needed proof.” Abigail sighed and finally noticed the coffee he’d placed before her. She wrapped her hands around the hot metal cup
and lifted it to her lips, sipping carefully. “I’m afraid I was rather…distraught when I discovered the date and stellar data had changed. I grabbed the tome and my umbrella and completely forgot to put on a coat!” She fumbled a tiny notebook out of a handbag she held clutched beneath the book. “But look here!”
Abigail pointed to two rows of numbers beside the names of planets and stars. Silas recognized the names of celestial bodies commonly used for navigation, the angles of their sightings from the horizon, and the exact times of the sightings down to the second.
“I jotted this first note down to convert the dates from Julian to Gregorian.”
“From what?” Had she slipped into some foreign language?
“The commonly used calendar changed after the tome was printed, so I had to convert it. Then, I took the stellar data to Professor Withers, the university astronomer. He told me he was too busy to help, that there was some strange phenomenon occurring in the heavens that he had to study. He said I should seek out a sailor who knew celestial navigation.” She pointed to the second row of data. “When I returned to the library, the date, time, and stellar data had changed to these! I wrote them down immediately, thinking I must have made a mistake, but then realized I couldn’t have! There’s only one entry in this entire passage, and I couldn’t have gotten the information from nowhere! So, I grabbed the book and came down here to find a sailor who could tell me where on Earth these entries point to.” She looked up at him. “Can you do that?”
“Yes, but…” Silas didn’t want to tell her that two scratched notes in a notebook weren’t proof of anything.
“Just let me show you the prophecy. It’s in Latin, but I can translate.”
Silas clenched his teeth against a sarcastic retort. How convenient that this book was in a language he couldn’t read. She could tell him the book said anything she wanted, and he’d be forced to accept her word. Calling her a liar, however, wouldn’t do him any good.
As Abigail gingerly opened the tome, Silas found his eyes drawn to the pages, their hand-written block print framed by artistic illustrations that filled the margins. He’d seen books like this before, old texts crafted by monks in distant monasteries, artfully decorated with depictions of holy scenes or relics. She turned the pages carefully, one at a time.
“Please, look here, Mister Marsh.” She opened her notebook and put it down beneath the celestial notations in the book. “This passage explains that a door will open to issue forth the hordes of fiends from another place, a hellish place, and those hordes and the…beings that rule them will destroy the world of man and all our works will fall into ruin.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that, Miss Foreman.” He tried not to sound derisive, but the passage could have been a recipe for goulash for all he could tell.
“And these numbers here are…” She pointed to a row of text, but then gasped, “Oh, dear Lord.”
“What?”
“Look!” She turned the book so he could see and pointed to the line of stellar names and numerals. Even in Latin, Silas recognized the names of Altair and Jupiter. Then Abigail placed her open notebook flat and pointed. “I recorded that second set just hours ago! Now they’ve changed again! See?”
Silas looked at the notation, then the text, and indeed they were different. The one in the tome itself was only five days hence, but that also didn’t prove anything. A simple error or some delusion on Abigail’s part could explain the disparity. Books simply didn’t change. But as he opened his mouth to reiterate this point, his eye drifted to the illustrations filling the margins of the tome. Cold fingers gripped his heart, twisting his guts into knots. Abigail’s voice faded into the roar of rain on the cabin roof as his mind stumbled in disbelief.
Nightmares writhed along the periphery of the pages, twisted limbs, deformed and misshapen faces with bulging eyes and needle teeth like some sort of misbegotten serpents. But it was the faces that most gripped his attention, for Silas had seen them before. He saw them every night when he closed his eyes to sleep.
“Mister Marsh?” Abigail looked at him with concern. “Is there something wrong? You look…”
“Nothing.” Silas swallowed half of his cup of coffee, biting back a curse at his burned tongue. He looked away, out the porthole, across the cabin, anywhere as his mind spun. Impossible. It’s a coincidence, some trick or other. He’d never seen this book before, but images such as these were surely copied from others, and he’d seen a lot of strange inscriptions in the distant ports of Indonesia and the South Pacific. He gulped the rest of his scalding coffee and heaved a sigh to steady his nerves. No, it had to be a coincidence. “Now, about these changes…I don’t see how—”
“I assure you, Mister Marsh, I am not making this up!”
Silas looked at the data again. “When was this book written?”
“Fifteen forty-one, AD,” Abigail said, her voice trembling. “But this piece of text was transcribed from a scroll much older.”
Silas looked at her skeptically. “I don’t think they had clocks or sextants so accurate that long ago. As for prophecies about the end of the world, I’ve heard dozens. Every culture has one.”
Her lips thinned into a hard line. “I’m not crazy, Mister Marsh!”
“I’m not saying you’re crazy, Miss Foreman, but think. Books don’t just change. There has to be an explanation. Someone must be playing an elaborate trick on you or something.”
“How? The tome hasn’t left my hands since this afternoon?”
“I don’t know, but whoever’s doing this isn’t as smart as they think!” He tapped her notes, then pointed to the page. “The calculations for celestial navigation are tricky, and working up fixes from nothing would require real expertise. If these are someone’s idea of a sick joke, something just to scare you, working out the fixes should show it.”
She looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Making up numbers like these will more than likely give nonsense results if I do the calculations.” He pointed to the data. “See how each fix uses two celestial bodies?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if someone made these up as a trick, chances are that these two fixes won’t point to any spot on the globe.” That certainly made more sense than some moldy old book accurately foretelling the end of the world down to the second, let alone the text changing as if by magic from one hour to the next. “If they are made up, I should be able to tell you so.”
“Very well, Mister Marsh.” Abigail snatched up her notebook and wrote down the third set of numbers, then ripped out the page and handed it to him. “I’ll pay you ten dollars to calculate the locations from these celestial fixes or prove them false.”
“What?”
“Prove to me this is a hoax!” Abigail rooted through her handbag and came out with a wad of banknotes. She thrust the cash at him. “Please, Mister Marsh! I’ll sleep better if you do prove this is some sick joke.”
“Call me Silas.” He pushed the money away and stood, dragging his eyes away from the tome that so accurately depicted his nightmares. “I’ll work up the numbers for you, but not today.”
“Why ever not?” she asked incredulously.
“Because…” Because I need a drink! Silas gestured out the open door at the darkening sky. “The calculations take time, and it’s getting late. You should be getting home. I’ll walk you. It’s not fit for man nor beast out, and some rough types loiter along the waterfront. I’ll do the calculations tonight and bring you the results in the morning.”
“Um, yes, okay.” Abigail stood and wrinkled her nose at the pouring rain out the door. “Oh, fiddlesticks! I lost my umbrella.”
“You can wear this.” Silas pulled his slicker out of the wet locker and a sou’wester as well. “It’ll keep your book drier than an umbrella.”
“But you—”
“I’m fine.” He helped her into the oversized slicker and hat, then banked the stove and guided her out on deck. “Now let me help
you up onto the quay. Falling in the river might not end the world, but it’ll end your life right enough.”
“You have a way of stating things in matter-of-fact terms, Silas. Thank you.” She didn’t quibble about rough handling or his hands on her waist when he lifted her up onto the quay as some women would have. “And call me Abigail, please.”
“All right, Abigail. Now, let’s get a wiggle on before the really rough types come out of their holes.” The slashing rain soaked his shirt as he guided her down River Street, but he found the chill strangely comforting after the stuffy cabin and disconcerting prophecy.
Chapter Two
The Miskatonic River
The iron back door of the Golden Plaice clanged closed behind Silas, and the blustery nor’easter slapped him in the face. After his encounter with Abigail Foreman, he’d needed a stiff drink, and two whiskeys had reinforced his long-practiced denial of such hokum. Nightmares, sure, everyone had nightmares, but the notion that some moldy four hundred-year-old tome could predict the end of the world down to the second was rubbish. The illustrations’ resemblance to his nightmares had to be simple coincidence. Myths of sea monsters were as common as barnacles on boats, and this was undoubtedly just another sea story. He’d transform Abigail’s humbug prophecy into ten clams hard cash, load up Old Man McIntire’s lobster pots, and get back to his life.
My life… He hunched his shoulders against the wind and strode down the narrow alley toward River Street, welcoming the chill rain that soaked him to the skin. Abigail had wanted to give him back his coat and hat, but he’d told her to wear them until she could get another umbrella. He’d pick them up from her tomorrow when he gave her the location of her prophetic Armageddon. Nightmares and monsters and the end of the world… What a crock of bilge water!
And yet the chill down his spine wasn’t entirely due to the rain trickling down his back. Deny as he might, something about this whole thing wasn’t quite right. It felt like an itch he couldn’t quite scratch. The illustrations had been too familiar. He must have seen them somewhere before, and whatever subtle insanity plagued the Marsh clan had latched onto them. Abigail had said the legend had been copied from an even older scroll. Others may have copied that scroll over the centuries, and those copies could have ended up in museums all over the world. He’d certainly seen a lot of strange things in his travels, and that would explain everything.
Arkham Horror- The Deep Gate Page 2
