The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  * * *

  Matthew must have been making up for a lot of lost sleep, because he usually popped awake with no trouble, even if it was just a cat meowing, but this time it was like clawing his way back up from quite a few levels down. At first, he couldn’t even figure out if it was day or night, which of course was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, “Love Potion Number Nine.” The Clovers, or the Searchers?

  “Honey, I don’t think he’s going to quit.”

  “Hm?” He had the strangest feeling there was a storm somewhere over the horizon. Was that thunder, or were those distant drums?

  “The guy who’s been banging on the door of the shop, downstairs. He’s not going away. I’m going down.”

  “Jim Reeves?” Matthew asked.

  “What?”

  “No, no, I’ll do it,” he said, rolling his feet to the floor. “Assuming I can find my pants.”

  “Everything went in the laundry, dear. There’s a clean pair in the drawer. But I go first.”

  He noticed she was already dressed … pretty much. That wasn’t the way he remembered seeing her, last.

  “I’ll take care of it, babe,” he said.

  “And are you taking the gun?”

  “Do I know how to use the gun?”

  “Which is why we’re both going.”

  “Had the strangest dream,” Matthew said as he pulled on enough clothes to be decent.

  “I could tell you were dreaming.”

  “Dreamed we just ran a normal little bookstore, most exciting thing that ever happened was stumbling on a signed copy of The Godfather.”

  “That was all just a dream, honey. In real life, we’re actually interdimensional psychedelic rangers, who go around rescuing bare-assed jungle girls from giant man-eating spiders.”

  “In flying saucers?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Hallo?” Came the distant shout that occasionally interrupted the knocking downstairs. “Is anyone there?”

  Down at the bookstore level, on the landing that led into the kitchen, they met Les and Marian coming up from the basement apartment, which — given the steep hill into which the old house was set — looked out the west face of the building through a set of high windows in its small kitchenette two stories down. The couple rarely used the interior stairs except in miserable weather, since it meant coming past the gritty furnace room. Marian, now noticeably pregnant, was in some kind of nightgown with a pink or orange shawl over her shoulders — hard to tell the color; the stairwell light being quite dim. Les wore black stovepipe trousers, some kind of ungodly sequined curly-toed Oriental slippers, and an equally unlikely purple corduroy smoking jacket with black silk lapels. Maybe he actually was a two-hundred-year-old vampire.

  “He’s not going to stop,” Marian sighed.

  They moved through the kitchen and the “check with front desk” room of pricier books, parting the drapes to enter the front of the store. Les leaned and peered through one of the big bay windows in the old dining room, trying to make out the figure on the front steps and at least determine whether he was alone. Marian turned on a second desk lamp, adding a little more illumination to that of the single green-shaded light they always left burning. From below the curtain in the doorway to the pricier books behind them and from the wider doorway to the darkened old dining room, several pair of iridescent cat eyes stared, curious, like glowing green and yellow coals. Chantal positioned herself to the side, where she’d have a clear shot without plugging Les at anyone who tried to force an entrance, while Matthew unlocked the front door and opened it a few inches, blocking it somewhat ineffectually with his shoeless foot.

  “Thank God, you are here,” said the strange little man with the close-cropped hair and the good-sized package under his arm. He was some kind of Eastern European, judging from his accent and his too-short jacket, which made him look like some kind of oversized Capucin monkey. “You are Matthew Hunter?”

  “What seems to be the nature of your emergency?” Matthew asked, still squinting. “It’s the middle of the night,” he added, which of course was Bobby Lewis, “Tossin’ and Turnin’.”

  “Of course. I am so devastated to impede upon you at this ungodly hour, but I fear even now they pursue me.” On cue, the little guy looked anxiously over his shoulder. “If you are Matthew Hunter, won’t you please to let me be coming in and explain?”

  Matthew looked at Chantal, who shrugged. He let the small visitor in, closing and locking the door behind him. Chantal lowered her little nightstand revolver but still kept it handy beside her knee.

  “Thank you. I cannot thank you synthetically. I simply couldn’t think where else to turn. Now that they know the papers exist, these men will stop at nothing.”

  “Maybe you’d better sit down and explain,” said Matthew, gesturing toward one of the desk chairs and closing his eyes for a few more precious seconds.

  “I’ll put on the kettle,” said Marian, yawning as she headed back to the kitchen.

  “The … papers?” Matthew asked, still wincing a bit. How long had it been since they’d been attacked by a giant shark? Was Chantal’s shoulder still black and blue? There ought to be a way they could put in for a mental-health day.

  “My great-grandfather had been betrayed so many times, in the end he trusted no one except his landlady, you understand. So he left the papers with Mrs. Milosevic, with instructions to repatriate them to our homeland. Of course, the war intervened, and the terrible time of the Communists. All that time Mrs. Milosevic stayed true to her charge, here in America. But finally, when she knew her time was gathering to an end, she managed to get the papers to my father in Uzice, in the western part of the country.

  “One of the reasons I took my degree in engineering at the Polytechnic was so I could become custodian of the papers,” the earnest if somewhat unkempt foreign visitor explained. “At first they seemed almost nonsense, what they elaborate is so advanced. In fact, what they contain is začuđujući — how do you say …”

  “Astonishing,” said Matthew with a sigh of resignation, closing his eyes again, just for a minute.

  “Yes, ‘astonishing,’ thank you. Of course you realize the men who run the world industries of energy would stop at nothing to destroy them. Unlimited electric power, transmitted through the atmosphere or through the earth without benefit of wires? It could cost them billions, rendering out of date their entire infrastruktura! How do you say it?”

  “The same: infrastructure.”

  “Yes. Somehow that part of the papers must be published, made available to all mankind. What a tragedy that these technologies have been suborned for so long!”

  “That … part of the papers?”

  “There is more, of course, I hesitate even to speak of the rest, lest I be thought a madman, or the great-grandson of a madman. In the second half of the papers, my great-grandfather writes of a self-renewing field he established, a field which girdles the globe and protects us from invasion by creatures unspeakably horrible, who first sought to come here in 1908, until my noble progenitor managed to stop them almost single-handed.”

  “A microwave field?” asked Chantal.

  “Yes, dear lady, you have it correct. But even this great man’s genius was not sufficient to build a system of generators which would never fail. For now the field is failing, Mr. Hunter. It has lasted more than a century, but by my own measurements, in the past year alone it has lost more than a third of its effectiveness! I fear the time left to us is intransitively short.”

  “So you’re from … Serbia?”

  “Oh! I am morbidly sorry not even to have introduced myself. The trip here was very trying. Very circuitous, you understand, as I attempted to throw my pursuers off the wall. I thought in Chicago the ‘game was up,’ as you say, until a group of brothers came to my rescue, who gratuitously turned out to be relations on my mother’s side, the Popovich clan. You know them?”

  “The world-f
amous Popovich Brothers Tamburitza Orchestra of South Chicago?” Matthew asked. “Of course I know them.” If it was a piece of information so obscure as to make people wonder whether he was making it up, Matthew would have it at the tip of his tongue.

  “Ah, then you are Matthew Hunter, of a certainty, thanks be to God! Yes! In my native Serbia, you understand, my great-grandfather is esteemed as a national hero, while here in the land where he did his most important work, he is barely remembered.”

  “And your great-grandfather was?” Matthew asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew.

  “A thousand pardons. These are not all his papers, you understand. Some were missing when my father received them, some crucial diagrams which you must still help me to find, if I am not too insidious to ask. But for myself, I am the great-grandson of — and these, Mathew Hunter, these are the long-hidden papers of — Serbia’s national hero, the inventor of radio, the laser beam, and alternating current, Nicola Tesla!”

  “How many tea and how many coffee?” Marian asked. “And at that point is our visitor going to need sheets and a blanket, or should I just go ahead and start breakfast?”

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT TUNGUSKA, SIBERIA, IN JUNE OF THE YEAR 1908? WHAT ROLE DID THE GENIUS NICOLA TESLA PLAY AT THE CRISIS? WHAT SECRET LIES BEHIND HIS MAXIM: “ENERGY, FREQUENCY, VIBRATION” — AND CAN OUR BRAVE DIMENSIONAUTS FIND OUT IN TIME? STAY TUNED: THE ANSWERS ARE IN “TUNGUSKA SERENADE,” ANOTHER ADVENTURE FROM THE CASE FILES OF MATTHEW HUNTER AND CHANTAL STEVENS.

  APPENDIX A

  from http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/fb.aspx

  From Beyond

  by H.P. Lovecraft

  Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and a half before, when he had told me toward what goal his physical and metaphysical researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened remonstrances by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of fanatical rage. I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed or greyed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this there be a repellent unkemptness; a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of pure white beard on a face once clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect of Crawford Tillinghast on the night his half-coherent message brought me to his door after my weeks of exile; such the spectre that trembled as it admitted me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its shoulder as if fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent Street.

  That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice.

  “What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognised sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall over-leap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.

  When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely recognise. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in all the shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.

  Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he had some stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I followed the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was for a definite reason.

  “It would be too much … I would not dare,” he continued to mutter. I especially noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister, violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.

  He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering began, turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed a pale, outré colour or blend of colours which I could neither place nor describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.

  “Do you know what that is?” he whispered. “That is ultra-violet.” He chuckled oddly at my surprise. “You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is—but you can see that and many other invisible things now.

  “Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have seen truth, and I intend to shew it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you.” Here Tillinghast seated himself directly opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes. “Your existing s
ense-organs—ears first, I think—will pick up many of the impressions, for they are closely connected with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense-organ of organs—I have found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you are normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it … I mean get most of the evidence from beyond.”

  I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by rays which the every-day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows, and the whole place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited the imagination to symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast was silent I fancied myself in some vast and incredible temple of long-dead gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless space. There seemed to be a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I always carried after dark since the night I was held up in East Providence. Then, from the farthermost regions of remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality of surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught, which apparently swept past me from the direction of the distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived that both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a gigantic approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only the man, the glowing machine, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was grinning repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from his expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great deal more. I whispered what I had experienced, and he bade me to remain as quiet and receptive as possible.