by Martha Wells
She opened her mouth, and I winced and flinched, waiting for that metallic screech. Instead, breath whistled out. Not words, just air. She was trying to talk, I thought, but didn’t know how. There was a dim kind of surprise in her eyes now. Harder than she thought, I realized. She would have to learn things.
Things most humans took for granted.
It isn’t her, some part of me insisted, still repulsed. Violently afraid. That thing isn’t Acanthus Porter. It’s some… stranger.
Like I said, I’m a practical girl. Unimaginative. Solid.
So I pushed that aside and went to get Christophe, and together we marveled at the miracle of Acanthus Porter, a vegetative-state Alzheimer’s patient who was learning to walk and talk and move again.
***
It took months of slow progress, and I began to believe that I’d had some kind of strange episode. She was just a little old lady who’d somehow woken up again from her ALZ slumber, a miracle case that doctors studied and shook their heads and said scientific things that boiled down to utter ignorance. She became something of a media darling, though we forbade cameras inside the facility; I had to answer questions once in front of a battery of reporters, and that was awful. Meanwhile, Acanthus learned to walk, though she used assistance at first; she learned to do simple tasks that kindergarteners learned, like matching shapes and colors. She began to understand letters and numbers. It was as if she’d never had any of that knowledge, but it didn’t take long for her to master that part of her education, and soon she was reading with speed. Too much speed. I caught her a few times leafing through books with sure, avid movements, her light, bulging eyes drinking in words faster than I ever could. When she noticed me, she slowed to a more… normal pace, tracing her skeletal finger along the pages and mouthing them silently to herself.
She learned to speak, of course. It never sounded quite natural, more like someone to whom it was a second language with all the wrong vowels. Natural enough, I told myself. It was amazing she spoke at all, or walked, or breathed, or lived. Based on the condition I’d seen her in when she’d rolled in the doors of Shady Grove, I’d have given her six months, tops.
For an entire year, she rehabilitated herself into something that was almost normal, but never quite… human.
That was never clearer than when her children finally came to see her around Christmas, halfway through her rehab. The daughter was a portly fortyish woman with a pursed-up mouth and stress lines around her eyes; she looked mousy and unhappy to be there. The son was one of those high-powered executive types, with a cell phone constantly at his ear and buzzing with texts, and a bespoke suit and silk tie and a haircut that cost more than my paycheck.
They both had the exact same reaction to their mother: not relief and joy at seeing her improving again, but revulsion.
It happened almost immediately as they walked into the common room, where Acanthus sat by herself in the corner. They moved in about halfway to her, and then, in unison, both her children just stopped and stared.
The daughter said, “That’s not Mom.” There was horror in her voice. “Ken, that’s not.”
“No,” her brother agreed. He’d been texting as he walked, but now he just put the phone in his pocket, forgotten, and stared. “What are you people playing at? That’s not our mother!”
“Acanthus Porter? And you’re Ken and Darlene? Her children?”
“Yes, but—” Darlene kept staring with a kind of shaking dread I knew all too well. I still felt it, though I’d gotten used to the sensation. “It looks like her, but it’s—not her.”
Christophe’s soothing, strong presence came up behind us, and he said, “Is there a problem, Rose?”
“I think Acanthus’s children are just a little shocked,” I said. “She’s suffered some damage due to strokes and the Alzheimer’s, and she might not be quite what you remember—”
“No,” Ken cut me off. He actually took a step back, and I couldn’t imagine this soul-crushing businessman had ever done that before. He wasn’t a retreat kind of guy. “No, it’s not right. This isn’t right. I can’t do this!”
His mother, I saw, had looked up to watch us with those soulless, yet avid, eyes. She had loose sheets of paper in front of her, and she was writing on them, but she never looked down at her hands or the page as the pen moved. It was an eerie sight.
While Ken turned on his heel and stalked away at a walk so fast it might as well have been a run, Darlene managed to stay put. Daughters always felt more obligated, I’d found, even when their instincts told them there was nothing they could do.
“Just say hello to her,” I said to the Darlene. “You’ll feel better. Just a quick hello, and you can go.”
She nodded jerkily, and her eyes—cornflower blue, as Acanthus’s must have been in her younger days—were wet with something that wasn’t tears, but was more purely horror, as though I was a bully forcing her to touch something dead and rotten. But she went with me. Heavy, slow steps. She halted about five feet away while I walked over to perch on a chair next to Acanthus. Being so close to her was a strange sensation, still; she felt warm and solid and real, but there was an energy coming off her that jangled my nerves, like being too close to a power line. She’d just had a bath, but there was a smell that never quite went away, something like a hot, fetid swamp.
She was writing very quickly. Her pen moved over the paper right to left, the opposite of how English would be written, but she wasn’t writing English. I wasn’t certain what it was. It had some strange loops to it, and too many vowels, and though it looked like English letters there were subtle signs it wasn’t at all. Her writing was neat and precise, and very fast. In one corner, she’d sketched some kind of plant, but no kind I’d ever seen before; it had an unsettling look to it, with an organic geometry that seemed monstrous even as a flower, and a sinuous stem that writhed and curled into roots like claws.
She finished the page abruptly and dropped her pen. It rolled off on the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice. She stared at her daughter with wide, strange eyes, and her daughter stared back in mortal terror with tears streaming down her face, and when she said “Mama?” it was in a little-girl voice that spoke of nightmares and monsters under the bed.
Acanthus Porter smiled and said, “Darlene, how good to see you. How are the children?”
It sounded normal, although there were strange lilts to the words, odd accents. Darlene’s reaction was out of proportion. She stumbled backwards, ran into a table that held an abandoned game of checkers, and overturned that as she pushed through. Red and black plastic chips rattled over the floor, and Marisela, feeding gelatin to an elderly man in a wheelchair, glared and got up to clean the mess.
Darlene bolted from the room. Ran. The door slammed behind her.
“Goodbye,” Acanthus said, in the same flat, uninvolved voice, and looked at me. “Will you get my pen, dear?”
There was no warmth in the endearment. I bent over and retrieved the pen. “What are you writing?”
She smiled. It was a strange kind of expression—secretive, cynical, delighted all at once. “A history,” she said.
“What language is that?”
She said nothing. Just kept smiling. On impulse, I took out my cell phone and snapped a pic, and when I did, that smile vanished. What was left didn’t look… happy. “What are you doing?” Her voice had taken on a metallic undertone, and I remembered the unnatural, piercing shriek of her first day at Shady Groves—worse, I heard it, like it was happening all over again. There was something in it that wouldn’t go away. I managed to hold my reaction to a flinch.
“I just wanted to see if I could find out what language it is,” I said. “It’s beautiful. You must have learned it somewhere.”
Acanthus said nothing to that, but watched me for another long moment, then picked up her pen and began another page. Line after line flowed, seamless and utterly unknown.
I got on Google and did a reverse image search, and boom.
There it was. Page after page of the exact same looping, upright, foreign script, only in an ancient faded ink. Some pages in the scans were decorated with those same eerie, unnatural plant illustrations, and no two were the same. There were other pages, even more unsettling, with miniature women swollen with pregnancy, feet in a tub of liquid, arms thrust into strange tubes. Prisoners. The eerie menace of it vibrated off the screen at me.
The Voynich manuscript, the results told me. Written in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Author unknown. Language unknown. Illustrations of plants unknown to science. It existed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in their private collection.
How was that possible? How would Acanthus Porter have come in contact with that manuscript, which had only recently even become available to public view, in such detail that she could reproduce entire pages line by line?
The whole thing gave me the shivers and an intensely bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I took Acanthus to the lunchroom and escaped. She had a table all to herself, since every attempt to sit another patient with her, even the most quiet and oblivious ones, had resulted in agitation (one docile old lady had cried hopelessly for days after), and I left her to manage the meatloaf and pudding on her own while I got some alone time. My duties had narrowed down to just caring for Acanthus; she was a star pupil for Shady Groves, and I was the only caregiver she’d accept. I now slept there, which sucked, but at least I had my own private room and bath, and my salary had more than doubled. Acanthus didn’t require any help during the night, thank God, because even as armored to her as I was now, I couldn’t imagine having to deal with her in the dark. The thought terrified me.
Reading about the Voynich manuscript led me to other strange anomalies. Living in Arkham had always had a dark side; there were rumors all my life of cults, evil books, monsters lurking just beyond our senses. Somehow, things that would seem ridiculous in New York City or Seattle seemed utterly possible here, and it didn’t surprise me to find out that there were people who claimed to know about the Voynich manuscript. One of them was an old professor named Peaslee—Wingate Peaslee II—who was somehow still clinging to an endowed chair at Miskatonic University. He’d written a few papers positing that the Voynich book was a phenomenon related to his grandfather’s case, Professor Nathaniel Peaslee. I couldn’t find much online about that; it seemed like the papers he was talking about were kept under lock and key at Miskatonic, and I’d have to talk to Peaslee to gain access.
Was it really that important?
I didn’t know.
I turned off the light, shut off the computer, and dreamed, very strangely, of cities under the wrong stars, soaring towers winking with odd lights, and shadows moving that did not look in the least human.
And of a black, slender tower, featureless, without windows or doors, like a monster’s clawed finger poking out of the ground. On dreaming of that building, I woke up shaking and cold and clammy, and it took me the rest of the night to shake the feeling that, as I’d been observing the tower, something inside it had watched me with a long, slow, cold regard.
And it would not forget.
***
I took a rare day off and went to see Professor Peaslee. To my surprise, he was an elegant old man, compact and dapper, with silver-fox hair and dark eyes that glowed with intelligence and interest. His office in the dour old Psychology Building of Miskatonic University was near the back, without much of a view, and it was small and packed with books and papers that definitely weren’t there for show.
“Welcome, welcome,” he told me, and shuffled a stack of books off a dusty old armchair, which he pulled across the threadbare Persian carpet to sit across from his desk. As I sat, I noticed row after row of skulls on top of the bookcases—animal skulls, mostly, some I recognized and a few I couldn’t. Perched across from me, directly above Professor Peaslee’s head, sat a human skull, gleaming in the soft morning light.
“Friend of yours?” I asked, nodding at the skull. He turned and looked, then turned back to me. Still had his smile on, but it had gone brittle at the edges.
“My grandfather’s,” he said. “He insisted on a thorough examination of his body, followed by a donation to science. He had certain… experiences… that he thought might have resulted in abnormalities. We didn’t find anything.”
“And you keep that here?”
Peaslee shrugged. “This was his office. I thought he’d feel most at home here, with his books. Now, Miss Hartman, how can I be of help?”
“I understand you think your grandfather’s papers are somehow related to the Voynich manuscript. I’d like to take a look, if you don’t mind.”
His white eyebrows rose high, and wrinkles folded his forehead, but somehow he didn’t seem all that surprised. “That’s an unusual request. Few these days have any interest in my grandfather. The Voynich book still attracts curiosity seekers, of course, and puzzle addicts. Are you certain you want to investigate this?”
“Why? It’s just a book, isn’t it?”
He sat back, staring at me for a long moment, and then said, “If you don’t mind me saying, Miss Hartman, you have a certain… look to you. It’s subtle, a tension around your eyes, the way you hold yourself. I’ve seen it before. It runs in my family, to anyone who ever encountered my grandfather after his… collapse, in 1908. I saw that in my own father, who was the only member of the family to stick by Nathaniel’s side in that difficult time. I only met my grandfather once, near the end of his days, but I still vividly remember the… the feeling of being in his presence. It leaves a mark. And I see the same mark on you.”
I wanted to tell him the whole story of Acanthus Porter, but I couldn’t. Didn’t dare. I just shrugged and stayed quiet, and he kept observing me for another long moment before he said, “Have you started to dream yet?”
That shocked me into a flinch. “What?”
“The ancient city. The black tower. Trap doors. Shadows moving between the lights.”
He’d just described exactly what I’d dreamed, except for trap doors, and I had the sense that might be the worst thing of all. I wondered how long it had taken him to have the dream, and how often it came back. It scared me to think I’d never be rid of it.
“I’d like to see the papers,” I said again, and with a sigh Wingate Peaslee II stood up and walked to a painting of a particularly unpleasant stretch of Arkham coastline showing a strange iridescence in the water. I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something hiding in those foaming waves, massive and horrifying. Peaslee slid it aside to reveal a quite modern safe. He punched in a code and retrieved a sheaf of yellowing paper from inside.
“Are you sure?” he asked me. “Because once you’ve read these things, you can’t go back. For your safety, Miss Hartman, please. Reconsider.”
I had to know what was wrong with Mrs. Porter. I could never sleep again until I understood. Until I knew what my dream had been about, and how what she did was related to this long-dead professor with his skull staring down on me.
I reached out, took the papers, and began reading the horrible, chilling ramblings of Nathanial Wingate Peaslee. There was no sound in the office other than the turning of the pages. I couldn’t stop. I devoured the cramped, handwritten sentences, speeding faster and faster, and with every page came another shock of recognition.
It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful… My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband.
I remembered Ken and
Darlene Porter abandoning their mother, Ken immediately, Darlene in a horrified rush. I remembered my own reaction to Acanthus, the one that pulsed deep inside me still.
It was the same. Exactly the same.
Peaslee’s story was incredible and obviously the work of someone in the grip of serious delusions—after all, he seriously believed that he’d been possessed by an alien intelligence from across space and time, who’d come to learn of humanity. Who could visit, and had visited, countless species through the universe and the fabric of time, seeking new ones into which they could shift their bodies (granted, a pretty cost-effective form of space travel). Even so, it was the dreams that resonated most strongly with me. The idea that the great city that I’d dreamed in such horrifying detail had been in his mind, too. And with his son, and his grandson.
As if it actually existed. Or had, sometime in the distant past.
The last part of the story, of his discoveries, seemed more impossible than the beginning. I finished, and sat back, thinking. Peaslee watched me with bright eyes that, for an unsettling flash of a moment, reminded me of the way that Acanthus watched me.
“Well?” he asked, with barely concealed eagerness. “Does it shed any light?”
“I still don’t know how it relates to the Voynich manuscript,” I said. In answer, he took one last piece of paper—one he’d held back—and put it on the desk, facing me.
There, on a cream-colored page, marched neat, perfect lines of the exact same script that I’d seen flowing from Acanthus’s pen that morning. And inked in strange, sinuous lines, a drawing of an otherworldly plant that reminded me unsettlingly of a mouth, teeth, and legs that would jitter and scurry to carry it along.
“My grandfather drew many pages like this toward the end of his life,” Peaslee said. “He claimed he couldn’t get the images out of his head, and he hoped that by putting them to paper he’d find relief. I don’t think it worked. When I heard of the Voynich manuscript, imagine my shock to see that some poor unfortunate four hundred years ago suffered from the same obsession… the same window locked open in his mind onto madness. My grandfather, an educated and kind man, ended his days raving in Arkham Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane. Toward the end, he was shrieking in a language no one could identify. It was a ghastly affair that scarred my poor father deeply, and I am convinced it cut his own life short.”
