Hutchins started to reply, but contented himself by storming away with a snort of irritation.
“We were just having a bit of fun, eh, Templeton?” said Eaton in a querulous tone. “No need for insults.”
“No insult intended, I assure you,” said Templeton. “Simply a leveling of the playing field. I’m sure you understand. All’s fair in love and war and academia.”
Eaton grunted and retired from the conversation, joining Hutchins by the fire.
Oliver smiled, almost ashamed at the pleasure he took in seeing his antagonists so humbled. Templeton offered him his hand.
“How are you, Oliver?” he said.
“Well, Alexander, well,” said Oliver. “Do you have time to join me?”
“Of course,” said Templeton. “It would be a pleasure.”
* * *
Alexander Templeton was a comparatively new addition to the teaching staff at Miskatonic University. A Princeton graduate, his area of expertise lay in the fields of history: more specifically the study of ancient religions and the societies that created them. A decorated war hero, he had fought as a Marine captain in the Great War and returned home with numerous commendations and, it was said, a box containing a Citation Star.
Templeton rarely spoke of his years as a soldier, but Oliver had gleaned a measure of it from Henry Cartwright prior to his incarceration. Alexander Templeton had captained the Marine company in which Henry had served as a corpsman, leading his men through the nightmarish battlefields of Europe to the final defeat of the Bosch. Henry had spoken highly of Templeton’s military record, but appeared to dislike him for no reason he would adequately explain.
Likewise, when Alexander Templeton’s application for a position at Miskatonic was under review by the board, Henry had vehemently opposed his appointment. Oliver had read the man’s exemplary resume and could find no reason for Henry’s reservations. Templeton had graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, was class valedictorian, and had his pick of the universities to approach in order to pursue his post-graduate work. Instead, he had enlisted in the Marine Corps and earned numerous commendations for meritorious conduct during the last years of the war.
The deans of the university saw the opportunity to employ a man they felt would soon become a leader in his field, and Henry’s objections were overruled—much to his vitriolic indignation. Such was Henry’s apoplexy that words harsh enough to see him suspended had been yelled at the dean. In the aftermath of the shouting match in the university council chambers, Oliver had tried to talk to Henry about the matter, but his friend would not be drawn. All he would say was that during the war he and Templeton had disagreed on a matter that had seen a number of men die.
The strain of his suspension had proven too much for Henry, and the fire starting had begun soon afterward. Within the space of a month, Henry had been arrested and committed to Arkham Asylum, where he remained to this day. A sad end to an unnecessary fiasco.
Oliver had known Alexander Templeton for three years. They had become good friends, and spent many an afternoon in the faculty lounge discussing how religion in ancient societies had shaped the anthropological development of the culture. From the pyramids of Egypt to the cave dwellers of Petra and the spirit worship of the American plains, their discussions were often rambling, digressive, and impenetrable to those not versed in ancient history, but never less than fascinating.
Indeed, the insights Templeton had given him regarding the likely origins of the Yopasi belief structure had advanced his research immeasurably. True, there was not the easy rapport Oliver had shared with Morley Dean, but Templeton’s intellect was sharp and cut at the leading edge of modern thinking, which though seemingly at odds with his doctorate, was a measure of his capacity for insight.
* * *
“Intriguing,” said Templeton, after Oliver had outlined the substance of Amanda Sharpe’s dreams and their correlation with the Yopasi belief structures. “And you’re sure this young girl couldn’t have seen your notes or any of the publications in which your extracts appeared?”
“As certain as I can be,” replied Oliver. They had procured a pot of tea and as the drinks were poured, Oliver sipped his hot drink with a wistful recall of his time in Cambridge. William Hillshore had given him an education in the appreciation of a good cup of tea: a drink Oliver’s countrymen didn’t seem able to reproduce as faithfully as the English.
He put down his cup and said, “Miss Sharpe is an engineering student taking my class as an elective, so I don’t think that she would be perusing obscure anthropological journals simply to hoodwink me.”
Templeton also took a drink of his tea and nodded. “That does seem unlikely,” he agreed. “But you must be careful, Oliver. Whatever she tells you should be subjected to the same intellectual rigor as any other source.”
“Of course, yet it would be quite a find were we to prove there was a link.”
“That it would, but how one would go about verifying the authenticity of a dream, I do not know. I am aware of the new vogue for the interpretation of dreams with the Austrian neurologist’s publications, but no man can say for sure what goes on in the head of another.”
“The fields of psychology and psychoanalysis are coming on in leaps and bounds, Alexander. Don’t you think it possible we might finally unlock the human mind with such academic tools at our disposal?”
“I am not sure the human mind should be opened to such scrutiny,” said Templeton. “I saw enough in Europe to make me question the goodness of even the most kindly man. Some things are best left in the darkness of a man’s own private kingdom.”
“You think she might be lying?”
“It’s certainly a possibility,” said Templeton, lighting a cigarette and running a hand over his jaw. He cocked his head to one side. “Is she attractive, this Miss Sharpe?”
“She’s pretty enough,” said Oliver. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Alexander with a shrug. “Maybe everything. You are not an unattractive specimen yourself. A professor with a decent income. Knowledgeable and erudite. Many a pretty young thing has found herself drawn to such a figure.”
Oliver was taken aback. He hadn’t expected this interpretation of Amanda Sharpe’s dreams.
“I see you’re shocked,” said Alexander with a smile. “You shouldn’t be. I’ve seen it before. The young girls of Princeton were far more forthright in their attentions. Several times I was put in a position where I had to politely decline offers of inappropriate…companionship. I’m surprised you haven’t had the same, Oliver.”
“You flatter me, Alexander,” said Oliver, feeling his skin redden. “How did you handle such a delicate situation?”
“I told them that I was married.”
“Were you?” asked Oliver. Alexander had never mentioned a wife, and he had presumed him to be a studied bachelor, content to spend his money on his own amusement and sailing the yacht he had moored at Kingsport.
“I was,” said Templeton, and Oliver saw a tightening around his friend’s eyes that made him wish he’d never asked.
“Ever since the war there’s been an undercurrent of self-indulgence that flies in the face of all this country stands for,” said Templeton. “Just look at the youngsters crowding the speakeasies and dance halls of the cities: unrestrained and selfish things, sybaritic, and following blind instincts and perverse fancies, worshippers of tinsel gods on perfumed altars and silver screens. I think I would be outraged if it wasn’t all so half-hearted. It’s just despair turned inside out.”
Oliver didn’t know quite what to say. Their conversation had strayed into an area that contained an exposed nerve of Alexander’s. His friend had never spoken about a wife, but Oliver now wondered whether that was a means of sparing him the pain as opposed to one never having existed.
“I’m sorry, Oliver,” said Templeton. “Sooner or later I compare everything in terms of religion and its organizing principles. O
nce an academic…”
“Always an academic,” completed Oliver. “And there’s no need to apologize. As a matter of fact I quite agree with you.”
“In any case, I think you’ll find that Miss Sharpe, like many of her generation, is acquainted with the writings of Freud only in the most superficial way. I don’t doubt that she’ll have read that water in dreams is said to represent sexual feelings and that playing in water can denote a sudden awakening to passion. To most girls, the good doctor’s writings seem to mean that if you want to be well and happy then you must indulge your libido. I believe she is hoping that you are familiar with Dr. Freud and will reciprocate.”
“I’ll certainly bear that in mind, Alexander,” said Oliver.
“Good,” said Templeton, finishing his tea. “I’d hate to see you make a terrible mistake with this girl. Academic or otherwise.”
“Good Lord,” said Oliver. “Perish the thought!”
Templeton smiled as he stood from his seat. “Well, you did say she was pretty,” he said.
CHAPTER SIX
The noonday sun woke Finn, streaming in through the threadbare curtains of the room he’d taken at Ma’s Boarding House. He blinked sleep-gummed eyes and smacked hangover-cracked lips as he tried to moisten his mouth. Drinking a half bottle of whiskey might not have been the best idea, but it had sure felt like it at the time.
His head hurt and he could hear folks running over the hardwood floors in hobnailed boots doing their best Irish jig. Or at least that’s what it felt like in his head. He rolled onto his side and spat into the bowl beside the bed. He lay on top of the sheets, still fully clothed. The blanket he’d been given was wrapped around the metallic sphere he’d taken from the Billington mansion, sitting atop the sagging dresser on the far side of the room.
Finn couldn’t remember climbing into bed—a torture device of iron springs and jabbing struts—but he knew he’d been lucky to get a bed at all. Most respectable Arkham boarding houses shut their doors around nine, and didn’t open them till morning. But Ma’s was the one place where anyone could get a room, no matter the hour of the day, so long as they had money.
Finn didn’t have much cash, certainly not after buying that whiskey from the drunk raging at the gates of the graveyard, but he’d had enough to convince Ma to give him a key to this flophouse room. With the door locked behind him, he’d hit the bottle hard, pacing most of the night, alternately reliving what he’d seen and drinking toxic mouthfuls of rotgut, until the horror had receded into an alcoholic stupor. The whiskey was venomous stuff, but it had done the job, blotting out the intrusive thoughts of what he’d seen the night before.
Whatever that had been…
“Christ on a cross,” moaned Finn, holding his head in his hands.
What had he seen? He still wasn’t sure.
He climbed out of bed and forced himself to stand on wobbling legs, holding onto the wall for support. The room spun crazily around him, like he was the center of a giant merry-go-round, and he closed his eyes to stop his guts from emptying onto the floor. Ma was famously tolerant of her guests, but wouldn’t take kindly to a pool of puke in the middle of her room.
“Hell, she’s seen worse, I reckon,” muttered Finn.
The image of Sean being eaten by those repulsive creatures leapt unbidden to the inner surfaces of his eyes, together with the sight of the cannibal horde eating the flesh from the seared bodies of the Newburyport gangsters. Those monsters had been hideous wasted things, scrawny and thin, like the starving men and women of the Great Famine that had driven his family across the Atlantic in the first place. Unlike those poor bastards, these flesh-eaters were fast and strong, like the hunting dogs the bailiffs used to chase people from their homes.
Sean and Fergal were dead, and that didn’t bother him at all, but Jimmy was dead, too. Poor, harmless Jimmy, who never did no one no harm at all, and who just drank himself stupid whenever he had enough money and cooked when he didn’t. The sight of him being cut up by those flying things was like something from a nightmare, and Finn could contain his sickness no longer.
He ran to the window and hauled it up in its frame before loudly throwing up down the side of the building. Thankfully, he had a room that overlooked a trash-filled alleyway, so he figured no one was going to complain too much. He lay over the windowsill, his stomach pumping itself empty, until a cold breeze revived him enough to lift himself back inside. Finn spat a last greasy mouthful out the window and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“Okay, Finn lad, time to get your damn fool self together,” he said. “Think. Your mam din’t raise no eejits, now did she?”
That was debatable, he knew. His brother Connor wasn’t exactly blessed with smarts, but at least he was bringing in a wage somewhere in New York and not getting attacked by…by what exactly? Try as he might, Finn couldn’t quite frame the image of the things he’d seen in that damned attic, though he’d stared at them, clear as day in the moonlight. He recalled vaguely insect bodies, wings that were there and not at the same time, and…something strange about their heads. Try as he might he couldn’t or wouldn’t focus on their heads, because that was just too horrible, too nightmarish to contemplate.
What was worse was that he knew they weren’t just freakishly large animals. They’d been working on that silver globe like watchmakers or mechanics. And didn’t that make them intelligent? The idea that something so unnatural and alien could be intelligent was more horrifying than any repulsive detail of their form.
Finn looked over at the dresser where he’d wrapped the silver sphere he’d taken from the house. He still didn’t know why he’d done that. Taking tentative steps, he retrieved the object from the dresser, finding it heavier than he would have expected, as though made of some incredibly dense metal. Perhaps it was valuable. Finn sure hoped it was, because there was going to be hell to pay for the loss of so much booze last night. The Newburyport gangs would think they’d been double-crossed, and the Arkham hoodlums would believe they were betrayed. That was the trouble in dealing with criminals, Finn thought, there was no trust.
As the only survivor of the debacle in the woods, he knew his chances of survival were low. Both gangs would be looking for someone to blame so they could save face and keep doing business with one another. Finn would be a convenient scapegoat. But what could he do, hide? Nah, that wasn’t the Finn Edwards way. Why hide when you might have something to trade?
He unwrapped the item he’d taken. “Now, what have we here then?” he asked.
It was spherical, brilliant silver in color, but with a sheen like a thin layer of gasoline coated it. Finn rubbed his palm over the surface of the object, but it was completely dry. The surface wasn’t completely flat-ridged and angular lines cut across its surface as if it had been put together like a jigsaw. Was that what the flying things had been doing: assembling this object?
Finn turned it over in his hands, finding that some of the interlocking pieces seemed capable of moving. He pushed against one curved section and it slid upward, displacing another portion that slid into the place vacated by the other. Turning it this way and that, Finn found he could reconfigure the surfaces of the sphere like some kind of kid’s toy. The metal made no sound as it slid and shuffled across the surface. Finn became strangely fascinated by the shapes it made, shapes that shouldn’t be possible on the surface of a sphere.
Though his hands told him the object was still a sphere, his eyes beheld cubes, rectangles, and cylinders, as though these protean forms sought to replace the device’s original shape. Was it some kind of trick, a neat illusion...or was it something else entirely?
Just as he was about to replace the sphere on the dresser, it emitted a deep bass note, like the sound of a distant foghorn. At the threshold of hearing, it grew in volume and resonance until he felt it in his bones. Dust bounced on the floor, and Finn’s ears popped as the air itself began vibrating. Glass shimmied in the window. He felt an electric tingle in his t
eeth, like biting on a copper penny, and his eyes watered worse than when he peeled onions for one of Jimmy’s stews.
“What the hell?” he said, the vibration growing from the sphere.
He blinked through his tears as the room shifted. The far wall seemed to stretch away from him as the floor and ceiling twisted in ways they couldn’t possibly move. A nauseous sensation of vertigo seized Finn and he dropped to his knees, the sphere falling from his grip and thudding to the threadbare carpet.
It rolled toward the door, the floor seeming to tilt crazily and the walls bulging and sagging like taffy. The sphere rolled on, and Finn lunged for it, hoping that Lady Luck would take a shine to him for once. It seemed she did, for no sooner had he laid his clammy palm upon it, than the dreadful vibrations ceased and the sphere became silent once more. The room regained its normal dimensions and the crazy, electric sensation dissipated like the heat after a really good storm. Finn took a deep breath, his hangover forgotten in the wake of so horrifying a sensation. He rolled onto his back, clutching the strange silver orb to his chest.
Its impossible weight pressed down on him, its nature utterly beyond his understanding.
“Okay,” he said. “This is way outta my league. I’m gonna need some help with this thing.”
* * *
Rita and Amanda strolled through the campus grounds, books clutched close to their chests and coats draped over the books. The day was unseasonably warm, and they had bought their lunch from the university refectory to eat in the small park around the bell tower. Neither was inclined to venture too far from Dorothy Upman Hall, and with no classes until later in the afternoon, the opportunity to enjoy some time in the sun was too good to miss.
Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) Page 9
