by Scott Jäeger
In fact the steward, spying a common vagrant in the middle of his establishment, was already gesturing at me from the labyrinth of scroll-edged tables and slumberous leather chairs. He tried to intercept me, but could move no more quickly than the stiff-legged jog of the professional servant would allow.
Marcus Lowry stood out from his fellows like a rotten tooth. A week unshaven, collar loose and jacket unbuttoned, he sat in a dour reverie, like a man brooding on mortality. A column of smoke, straight as a ruler and almost as solid, rose from a foul Turkish cigarette smouldering unnoticed in a dish at his fingertips. I sat at his table, pulling my chair directly into his line of view. Lowry did not choose to shift his gaze elsewhere. At this tacit recognition of my presence, the steward cautiously withdrew.
“Mr. Lowry,” I said, “my name is Sloan.” Safe in the special sanctuary of wealth, I allowed myself to exhale.
After staring for a beat longer, he said, “You’re no Sparrow’s man, obviously.”
“No, sir.”
“Good. I hate this bloody place,” he pronounced, loudly. “Look at them: back in England, they would be riding to hounds or bawling out the butler, while here in New England, so-called, they pass their days scrutinizing ledgers and complaining about the Income Tax.”
I assumed we would be shushed by the club’s vigilant chief servant, but other than the occasional rustle of a turned page or cleared throat, there was not a sound. Smoke rose unabated from the neglected cigarette.
“Well?” he said.
“Mr. Lowry, I was told you’re an authority on occult works.” I proffered my wrecked volume. “I have taken this to every bookseller in town, but its provenance is still a mystery.”
I pushed the book towards him until it bumped his wrist. When he flipped the cover open his expression, cultivated to convey an ineffable boredom, briefly flickered. Though he wished to hide it, what he had seen shocked him.
“I’m afraid I cannot pay you–” I began.
“No!” he said with a wild look, as if the mention of money caused him physical pain. Snapping his fingers at the server, he ordered two glasses of ridiculously expensive port wine. I sipped mine and felt my belly fill with a friendly warmth, while Lowry gripped the edge of the table as if to brace himself.
"I have no love of books, Sloan, yet I have made it my career to collect and study this particular genre, the occult, as you said."
"All right," I said, since it seemed he was waiting for a reply.
“How do you suppose I came to choose this profession?”
I leaned forward to reply that I had no idea.
In a voice tired and hoarse, he related the following story.
* * *
I had been exploring a warren of passages in the Snake Den Caverns. The formations near the surface are perfectly natural but, contrarily, the deeper one goes the more one finds signs of worked stone, masonry. The hidden chamber I discovered on the lowest level was the culmination of two years spent chasing rumours, interrogating criminals and madmen, and in the scrutiny of certain black-letters which, if a man were not careful, would blast his sanity to flotsam.
I found it alongside a broken alembic and several less recognizable items, tied in a parcel of half-rotten leather. Here was a grimoire said to contain immense and portentous secrets, things Man was not meant to know. A particular warning had come up repeatedly in my research, never to touch its surface with one’s bare hands. Mindful of this, I shifted its wrapping enough to see that, though it shared the general shape and proportions of a book, it looked like a rudely cut piece of glass.
As I lifted my treasure from the rubble I felt another's presence in the low-ceilinged space, and turned to find I was not alone. He had a foreign cast, golden skin and the almond shaped eyes of the old Ægyptians. His tailored suit spoke of wealth, his features of royalty. Seeing the reflection of his pant cuffs in the shine on his shoes, my first thought was, How could he have followed me down here, yet look ready to receive his bank manager? His gaze upon me was intent but not hostile, and he addressed me in perfectly unaccented English.
“You have proved yourself a true servant of the Black Throne," he said. "What boon do you ask?”
What words could have inflicted worse terror? My legs went watery with fear, and if it were not for the wall at my back I should have fallen to my knees. I tried to stammer a reply. Nothing sensible emerged, but what rang out in my mind was that I wanted no boon of his master.
He was not angry. I wonder if an emotion so banal, so human, as anger was even possible for such as him. The electric torch, my only light, dangled point down in my hand, but something else illuminated his eyes. Those orbs swelled in my sight until I could see lights there streaming like pinwheels. Each coruscating point was a thousand thousand stars, a galaxy. I looked upon the unutterable vastness of the cosmos, and more– I sensed something of that which watches from the black gulf beyond the stars.
When he spoke once more, his eyes were merely eyes, and the spell was broken.
“As you wish,” he said. “I go now where you cannot follow”. Instead of turning away, he stepped backwards where what had been an alcove now opened into a passageway. Despite my rattled nerves, I could not mistake something awkward about his gait, as if his form was a puppet manipulated by invisible strings. When the darkness swallowed him, I did follow, a decision I would come to dearly regret.
After thirty or forty paces, the passage opened onto the side of a perfect cylindrical shaft. A glaucous ambient light revealed just enough that I wished for no light at all.
The man was floating in space, ten paces away and a short distance below, facing the precipitous ledge where I stood. The colours of his finery were still there, but the clothes themselves were merging together, melting into his skin. He looked up at me from a head that was being swiftly absorbed into the shoulders. Then his body pivoted and I saw that he –it– depended like a growth from the end of an enormous grey tentacle rising from somewhere below.
* * *
Lowry downed his five dollar glass of port in one gulp. His throat continued to convulse for several seconds afterwards.
“But that can’t be the end of the story," I said. "What happened to the book?”
“The book,” he said dully, as if struggling to recall the subject at hand. “Several days were lost to me, blacked out, but when I came to on a hillside near town, almost dead from exposure, the artefact was gone. I was a tool, you see, for that horrific entity. By moving the book from its resting place I had reintroduced it to the world, something they needed a human agent to do. Shortly thereafter I decided I would do anything to keep it from my new enemies.
“That was nine years ago this past November, and ever since they and I have been engaged in an infernal chess game. Until today the absence of the key piece, the book in the apartment on Marsh Street, represented a stalemate.”
He looked significantly at the heap of torn parchment on the table between us, which could hardly appear less like a dangerous otherworldly artefact.
"Since we were at an impasse,” he continued, “they let me be, waiting for me to make a mistake which they could use to their advantage."
“But who do you mean by they?” I asked, exasperated. “What is the Black Throne?”
He replied, simply, “Azathoth.”
The air itself seemed to gulp down the three syllables as they were spoken. For an instant the fathomless black cowls of my dream loomed on all sides, for Lowry had spoken the unrememberable word which concluded my recurring nightmare. I took a quick drink of port while the ceiling and floor returned to their proper orientation, then glanced about to see if anyone around us had sensed the peculiar effect of that name, but no one had stirred. I suspected they could not hear it. The object on the table was now a block of polished glass with beveled edges, about the size of a large bible. Lowry swathed it in its wrapping.
"It's your treasure now," he said, "may it bring you luck. Kindly remove it from my sigh
t."
“What of you?” I asked.
“I shall go where He cannot follow.” Marcus Lowry's expression was so full of his fate when he said this, I could hear the rope creak with his weight. Remembering the port glass clenched in one hand, he fumbled it back to the table where it tipped over, rolled off the edge, and shattered.
“Best exit by the back,” he wheezed, signaling the server for more wine.
I returned the artefact to its accustomed home under my left arm and went through a swinging door into a long, dim cloakroom. I made for the outlet to the street at the other end, but a painful rap on the ribs brought me to a stop. I was pushed back a step by the ferrule of a hardwood walking stick.
“Come up in the world, have you?” Jacob Roth chuckled. “Not so high, I trust, that you’ve forgotten your old friends.” The usurer was in a jolly mood, and a College Street haberdasher had tempered his feral appearance.
“Imagine it, Tom,” he said, “Mr. Sloan and I, both members of the Sparrow Club.” As ever, his muscleman, narrow of eye and broad of shoulder, was close behind.
I set the book carefully on a shelf, knowing as I did so that any item suggesting value would draw Roth like a crow to a gem.
“Hello, what do you have there?” he asked, tracking it hungrily.
I grabbed his stick and jerked him forward. In less time than it takes to relate, I separated him from his cane, gave him a smart blow to the kidney, and spun him face down. Ajer Akiti had taught me the arm lock I used to fix him to the floor, a technique just as effective in Arkham as in the Dreamlands.
Tom and I regarded each other. His great knife weaved a figure eight in the air as he stepped to his right to block the exit.
Roth took awhile to decide on his reaction, eventually stammering, “Here now,” followed by laboured respiration and, “Now.”
I rested my full weight on Roth until he let out a muffled shriek. His shoulder popped from the socket and, with a bounce of his forehead on the parquet, he fell unconscious. I rose to my feet, holding the walking stick up for a better look. The shaft was oak, the grip a silver plated raven’s head, but the metal was tarnished and the carving poorly done. It was a fitting tool for a thug.
Thinking perhaps that I was distracted, Tom rushed me, his technique not much different from a woodcutter assaulting a recalcitrant chunk of hemlock. With the stick I knocked his khukuri aside, and followed with a chop to his arm. I was about to deliver a debilitating kick, but Tom dropped his weapon and, cradling his wrist, fled straight out the door.
I smashed the walking stick on the brickwork corner of a wall. For the first time since my return I felt my need for laudanum waning. I retrieved my book, noticing of a sudden the man in the door to the lounge. He had the sapling straight bearing of a soldier and the waxed mustachios of a grandee, and had obviously witnessed the entire skirmish.
“Quite right,” he said, bowing from the waist. Then he collected his coat, stepped over Roth’s prone form, and continued on his way.
* * *
At Miskatonic Library I discovered Professor Armitage was absent, and slumped wearily into the armchair facing his door. When I shook myself awake an hour had passed, and I decided that when the professor returned I had best not be sleeping on his doorstep. Hoisting myself to my feet, I walked up and down a few aisles, running my finger along the bindings. When this diversion ceased to entertain, I sat at a study table with the forbidden object before me.
Turning back one corner of its wrap, I confirmed that the illusion of a paper and board book had been banished, though what had taken its place could hardly be compared to glass. I saw movement within, and light that had nothing to do with the glow of the library’s gas lamps. It shimmered depthlessly. I brushed the surface with my fingertips, expecting perhaps that it would be icy cold, or that I would receive an electric shock, but it was warm to the touch, silky.
“Mr. Sloan.” I heard a muffled voice, some distance away. The object’s insides shifted like smoke, first in a myriad of bright colours, then sea green and roiling.
“Mr. Sloan,” it said again. Though the voice was not the least bit interesting to me, it persisted. It was approaching me from behind, while ahead I neared an opening in the smoke, a starry space through which lay an unearthly revelation.
“Isaac Sloan,” it said and the world regrettably returned, brown, dull, and tedious. The glass book was uncovered and cradled in my lap, my head bent over it in a familiar nod. A middle-aged woman had been calling my name.
“Mr. Sloan,” she said, careful not to look in my direction, “kindly conceal that object of yours.”
Eyes shut and hands pulled back into my sleeves, I fumbled the glass book back into its wrapping. When its mesmerizing surface was hidden, the woman strode over to pluck it from my lap. Motioning me to follow, she ushered me into a different office, this one quite cramped, with a bare slit of a window, but neat as an army mess.
“I am Ms. Granville,” she said coolly. She looked the archetypical librarian, with a prim bun of hair going grey, a floor length skirt and hand knit cardigan. Yet there was something tight in the lines about her eyes and mouth, and I sensed a mettle one did not earn maintaining a card catalogue.
“You were hoping to see Professor Armitage, I presume?”
I nodded dumbly, staring at the object now lying casually on her desk.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I do not know its name,” she said. “I suspect it has none.”
“But you know who I am.”
“Henry keeps me apprised of all library business, and you struck him as something other than the run-of-the-mill fool begging to get into the Occult Room."
"No, I'm definitely not your average fool."
"I won’t ask how you came by this item,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t want to know –as long as I can trust you will leave it in our possession.” She raised her eyebrows not as a question, but an implicit threat.
"I was told by a friend,” I said, “the man who revealed the book’s whereabouts, that it would allow me to travel to the Dreamlands."
As if unable to help herself, she glanced to the door at my back before responding.
"On behalf of Miskatonic University, I promise we will provide what assistance we can. But on the ultimate disposition of the artefact, I cannot be swayed."
“Yes,” I answered. “Yes, of course it is yours. I want nothing to do with it.”
She studied me for a minute, gauging my sincerity.
“Then I think I can get you what you want. There is a property outside Arkham which we reserve for people who need to remain hidden. There you may sleep uninterrupted and, if it is in you, dream.”
* * *
A half-hour later, we were rattling through the dusk in a conveyance like a mechanical beetle. I had never seen a woman operate an automobile, but Ms. Granville navigated the smooth track with easy confidence.
“This is all very cloak and dagger,” I said into the hard silence. The pines pressed close on either side and, despite growing straight as the shaft of an arrow, gave the impression of a tunnel. “I can’t imagine this is the normal purview of a librarian.”
“No, you are right.” She allowed herself a small smile. “The Occult Room is a special charge, one we at Miskatonic have risen to defend.”
I thought this was all she was going to say on the subject but, after a few minutes, she continued.
“In the early days it was a novelty, housing items of interest to a handful of scholars. Over time the collection attracted more, and more valuable, donations. When the size of the catalogue increased, it began to attract undesirable types, cultists, secret societies. Our decision to close access to everyone but credible academic scholars was poorly received.
“My duties have grown beyond those of a typical librarian, that is true. I am on occasion called to act as a guardian of knowledge, though it does not usually need to be protected with pistol and sword. Here it is.”
Pa
st the mossy humps marking the remains of a split rail fence, we pulled into the yard of a disused farm. Beyond waves of unchecked grass, the windowpanes of a modest cottage winked in the last minutes of twilight. Ms. Granville jerked up the lever for the parking brake. The close-spaced evergreens stood like a line of sentries, though the shadows betwixt their crowded boles to me seemed fearful enough to need no guard.
“Mr. Sloan.” Ms. Granville used the same tone with which she had brought me back from the fascinating depths of the nameless book.
I preceded her to the low front door. The inside was clean, but clearly not lived in. There was no newspaper casually forgotten, no stray teacup, no fish or deer’s head mounted on the wall, though the mantle cried out for such an ornament. Two shelves and a coal stove, where Ms. Granville began arranging a fire, served as a kitchen. One bedroom had a card table with an ashtray, and two of the unforgiving wooden chairs favoured by sharecroppers and frontiersmen. The other, darkened by a double set of curtains, had a cot with an itchy blanket and a set of flannel pajamas. They were baggy on my thin frame, but as I was disinclined to shop for another pair I did not complain. I climbed between the sheets, feeling more like an invalid starting on a lengthy recuperation than a man headed for adventure. Awhile later, Ms. Granville entered with a clay mug.
“What is this, some kind of sedative?” I sat up, hackles raised. “I warn you, madam, I will take no narcotic, whatever its nature.”
“It’s cocoa.”
I thanked her and drank sheepishly. I thought back to my abrupt exit from the coal burners' camp.
“Ms. Granville, I managed to escape death the last time I was in the other place. Was it as narrow a thing as it felt? Am I proof against harm as long as my body remains here?”
