That Which Should Not Be

by Talley, Brett J.

  As I walked back across the Green, the twilight that had fallen over Arkham matched the darkness in my heart. The Book was gone, but I did not feel the relief I had expected. Instead, I felt empty, as a woman must who, when heavy with child, miscarries. I pulled my chair to a spot dangerously close to the fire in my hearth. But I still felt a cold that, while not physical, nevertheless racked my body with chills.

  I must have sat there for hours, thinking on the events of the last two days, wondering what import they might yet have, and perhaps most importantly, questioning the intentions of the man who had brought me to this place — Dr. Atley Thayerson.

  He had misled me; this was clear. I considered at first perhaps William was mistaken. Maybe it was some other Miskatonic professor who had come into his life all those years ago. Or perhaps William, who I had known for no more than a few passing hours, had intended to deliberately lead me astray. Neither explanation stood up to scrutiny.

  Thayerson was not the kind of name William would have accidentally uttered, and he could have no knowledge of my background. He simply had no ability to construct such a lie. But for reasons I could not grasp — or perhaps, reasons I did not wish to accept — Thayerson refused to acknowledge his participation in one of the school’s darkest hours. I hoped it was simply embarrassment that led him to so act, but I feared it was something more. So, I decided on a course of action.

  It was for this reason I found myself at the door of Henry Armitage. My sharp rapping on the painted oaken panels was quickly answered.

  “Carter!” he exclaimed, thrusting the hand not holding a glass of brandy out towards me. I shook it quickly.

  “We need to talk,” I said, stepping past him into his room.

  “Of course,” he replied, closing the door behind me. “I suppose you have completed your task for Thayerson, then?”

  “It’s about that,” I said. I sat down in a chair in front of Henry’s fire. I was still painfully cold, and the short walk to his room had done me no favors. I found my eyes glancing around at Henry’s peculiar decorations, an eclectic combination of primitive folk art and religious relics. “What do you know of the Incendium Maleficarum?” I finally asked. Henry blanched instantaneously.

  “W-e-ll,” he stuttered. “The Witch’s Fire, you ask? Why, that is quite a book. I am surprised it interests one such as yourself. It’s been lost for, oh. . . two thousand years?”

  “What if I were to tell you it has been found?”

  Henry’s eyes narrowed and filled with suspicion. He turned his head and looked askance at me. “I would say you are wrong. Such a find would be so spectacular I am sure I would have heard about it.”

  “I held it in my hands not three hours ago.”

  Henry leapt to his feet.

  “Do not say such things loosely, Carter Weston. You do not know of what you speak.”

  I stood, as well, matching Henry’s conviction with my own. “It is a book, bound in crimson skin, written in gold. It does not age, does not corrupt. It cannot be destroyed, not at least by any power on this Earth.”

  Henry’s mouth dropped. For a long moment he did not speak. Then he whispered, “My dear God, Carter. What have you done?”

  I related my story to him. Not all of it, but enough that he would understand. The talk with Thayerson, the trip to Anchorhead, meeting the Captain and his friends. Acquiring the Book and bringing it back to Arkham. How it sang, and how that singing stopped when I handed the Book over to Thayerson. How he lied to me about his involvement with Dr. Seward. Henry listened intently, and as he did, his face began to reveal a discordant combination of fear and determination.

  As I finished my discourse, Henry sat down in a large chair behind him. He put his hands together like a penitent at prayer. He sat there in that pose for what seemed, at the time, to be halfway to eternity. Then, finally, but only as I felt my mind on the verge of breaking from this unexpected delay, he lifted his eyes to me and said,

  Below the thunders of the upper deep;

  Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee.

  There hath he lain for ages, and will lie

  Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by man and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

  “Tennyson,” I said simply.

  “Tennyson,” Henry replied. “Though, he could not have known what ancient and eldritch knowledge stirred him when he wrote those words, he spoke truly nevertheless.” Now, he stood. “Thayerson will seek to wake the sleeper, Carter. He will seek to bring him forth from below the waves, to rise in power and might, and to rule this world as he and his once did. Others have tried before. Many have. Men who sought power or immortality or who were simply too stupid and vain to know the forces with which they dealt.

  “But Thayerson has something they lacked. He possesses the Incendium Maleficarum and the dread Necronomicon. With them both, he may yet plunge this world into a second darkness from which it shall never emerge.”

  “Can he be stopped?” I asked, more calmly than I might have expected. After all I had seen and heard, this came as no surprise to me.

  “Perhaps,” Henry said. “But he must be found and quickly. You say you gave the Book to him three hours ago?”

  “Yes.”

  Henry sighed. “Then all hope is lost. He could be anywhere, and he is no doubt well along in his plan. The moon is full tonight, and the tides are right. He could be performing the ritual even as we speak.”

  “No,” I replied. “No, I think I know where he is. Or at least, I think I know how to find him. Come quickly, my friend. The night is dark, but there may yet be the dawn.”

  I saw a spark of the old flame that burned within Henry return to his eyes. He smirked at me. “Yes,” he said, and then louder, “Yes! I was never one to lose hope before the game is finished.”

  “Get your cloak,” I commanded. “Where better to find a book than a library?”

  Not a minute later, we were out the door, flying quickly to Huntington Library. Henry was correct. The ritual had been tried before. And if I was right, Thayerson would be precisely where he had been thirty years past. This time, though he may have tools he once lacked, there were also those determined to oppose him.

  Chapter

  36

  We stepped into the darkness, the sky as clear as it had been that day, but with a bright full moon serving as a poor imitation of the sun. Its fragile light was enough to guide our steps to a place we had been countless times before.

  Huntington Library stood like a monolith in the distance, a great cyclopean monstrosity of learning. There had been rumors, of course. Like all of witch-haunted Arkham it seemed, Huntington had a history. It had been the first permanent building in that ancient town. It was constructed in 1640, only four years after the founding of Harvard, and a full decade before Miskatonic University came into being.

  Legend had it the people of Arkham had found something on that little mound above the river. Something ancient and arcane, something built of mighty stone blocks, the working of which was far beyond the skills of the native Wampanoag, something that covered a great, but ruined, staircase that ran into the center of the Earth itself. It was a bizarre legend, an impossible tale. But it didn’t end with that great vestibule.

  On December 21, 1639, during the darkest and longest night of the winter, three great ships sailed into the mouth of the Miskatonic River. The people of Arkham awoke to the sound of chisels and hammers, of stone cutting and construction. The men who labored on the hill were unknown to them, clad in strange raiment, faces hooded and cloaked. But fear was greater than the people of Arkham's curiosity. For the four months that followed, the men continued their work, from the rising of the sun until it disappeared behind the western Berkshires.

&
nbsp; Each night, the people of Arkham cowered behind their flimsy wooden doors, terrified of what lurked beyond. But it was the Beltane Eve, the night of Walpurgis, that the old men of Arkham still speak of in whispered words and phrases. They say the hills burned with an unnatural glow that night, that satanic psalms floated down to the town below, as creatures of darkness danced and gibbered in the moonlight.

  When the sun rose on the first day of May 1640, the men were gone. What they left behind was a great edifice of stone.

  Three days passed. When the workers did not reappear, it was determined a contingent of the town’s men should go up and investigate the structure that had been left behind. It was led by Isaac Huntington. It was no great distance from the edge of the town to the hill above, but the men advanced slowly. When they reached the palace of granite, only Huntington was willing to enter.

  For half an hour the men waited outside, many of them growing increasingly certain Huntington would never return. But he did. There was nothing inside, he reported. Nothing but several great open spaces, and some steps leading down to a vault below. In the vault were four murals. These four murals represented the four great societies of antiquity — Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. They were exquisitely constructed, and some say at night, if the air is right, they each glow in the candlelight. But the ancient staircase, the one that the people of Arkham had always feared, was nowhere to be seen.

  I had never seen the murals. They were off limits to students, as was much of Huntington Library. It was a place filled with legend and mystery, and if we were to find Thayerson anywhere, I wagered it would be there. I hoped it as well, for if I was wrong, then all truly was lost.

  Arkham Green was deserted. The library sat silently and, to all appearances, empty before us. For a moment my heart sunk, but when I pulled on the door, it opened. I looked at Henry.

  “At this hour, it should be locked.”

  I simply nodded. We stepped inside. The moonlight streamed in through the great glass windows that had been installed by the travelers from across the seas all those years ago. We supplemented that illumination with lanterns of our own.

  The entrance to the vault was in the rear of the building. I had come to that place prepared to take whatever actions were necessary to gain entrance to the crypt below, but I soon found there would be no need for violence. The great wooden doors sat open. Whatever Thayerson intended, he had no concerns he would be followed or discovered.

  As we descended the steps within, the chamber below came into view. Before me on the north wall, shimmering in the light of my lantern, was the Egyptian mural. I had seen something like this before in the great and mysterious Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  In the center of the image sat a scale. On one side, Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, held the hand of a deceased pharaoh. On the other side was Thoth, the god of judgment, whose ibis eyes were locked on the scale before him. In the balance was the heart of the king and the feather of the truth. If the heart is heavy with sin and evil, so says the wisdom of the pyramids, then the Devourer of the Dead — part crocodile, part leopard, part hippopotamus — would swallow the king whole. But if the king were true, if he were found worthy, then he would receive from Anubis the contents of his other hand — the Ankh, the Egyptian cross, the key of life, as symbolic of eternal salvation to the Egyptians as the cross of Christ still is to us.

  “What now?” Henry asked. I could hear the despondency in his voice. “If he’s not here, Carter, where could he be?”

  “He’s here.”

  I took a step forward and looked closely at the image before me. There had been something playing in the back of my mind, something I knew would lead me to Thayerson. In that moment, it became clear. It was something I had heard only the night before.

  “Choose truth, not passion. A winding staircase. Seek the light, not the darkness.”

  Even in the gloom, I could see the look of confusion spread across Henry’s face. But then some clarity.

  “A riddle?” he asked.

  “A key,” I replied.

  I rubbed my hand along the mural. It was as flat and smooth as a stone long polished by the river. A part of me felt foolish, but another bit of the previous night's tales popped into my mind. I put my hand on the feather and pushed. To my surprise and yet expectation, it moved, disappearing into the wall behind. A small door at the base of the scale popped open. Henry grinned. I found myself doing the same. Even in this most dire of moments, I felt my heart leap as some of the excitement of my boyhood forced its way in.

  The passage was small, and we were both forced to crawl on our knees to gain entrance. It opened into a cylindrical room. The curved walls surrounded the spiral stone staircase of legend, one that appeared to go down into the Earth itself. I glanced at Henry, but there was really no question as to what we should do next. And so we began our descent. Down and around, as the marble walls of the stairwell turned into chiseled rock. The rock was rough-hewn and ancient, as if it had been cut a thousand years before. We followed it farther and farther, so far down I wondered if we might walk into the very fires of Hell. My wonderings were soon proven baseless, however, as a turn of the stairs revealed their bottom.

  We were now in a small room. On either side was a passageway. Their entrances were exactly the same, with no indication of which path was true.

  “Choose the light, not the darkness,” Henry mumbled.

  I had thought it an empty statement, a truism with no significance. But now I was not so sure. I was no Mason, but I knew their temples were built on an east-west line. The west was shunned, for in the west darkness dwelt. But the east was the source of the light, the seat of God.

  “So we should go east, towards the sun.”

  “But which way is east?”

  I looked up the stairwell whence we came. Despite our turnings, I knew the rock wall that had birthed it faced north.

  “This way,” I said. Henry gave me a skeptical look. I admit in that moment I was not entirely sure of my choice, but there could be no other decision. We took what I hoped was the eastern corridor.

  We stepped into a great cavern, its vaulted ceiling reaching up and beyond our vision. A downward sloping ramp of stone stretched out before us, the puny light from our lanterns barely piercing the darkness beyond. It was either walk back up the stairs or continue into the unknown. The latter was our only option. Down we went. The slope was gentle, down enough we knew we were descending, but not so steep as to make descent uncomfortable. The gloom was thick, and the air with it. I felt as though we were pressing through water more than air, and every step was more difficult to take than the last.

  That sensation began to change, and so did the light. It started with a few shimmering spots on the ground, but it was only when the entire floor began to glow that I realized we had stumbled upon a dramatic shift in the cavern bottom. No more simple rough-cut stone, but rather a smooth surface, paved in a thick, semi-translucent material. It was as if somehow the entire path was nothing more or less than the single facet of a tremendous diamond. But even that does not fully capture the peculiar properties of that crystalline expanse. It seemed to absorb the very beam from our lanterns. Absorb it, amplify it, and exude it in far greater strength, until all but the most distant height of the cavern was filled with light. Then, we were no longer looking at the floor.

  It was Henry who saw it first. He clutched my shoulder sharply, and when I looked at his face, I knew had he not done so, he may have fallen to the floor in terror. As I followed his gaze upward, I wondered if he overestimated my own strength.

  They were forms in the rock, carved stone emerging from the wall of the cavern. But they were so much more. There, in high relief, stood the massive gods of an ancient age. These were not the crude images of the Egyptians, the Aztecs, or even the Greeks or Romans. No manufactured deities with animal appendages clumsily attached to the human form were they.

  No, these were truly monsters, creatures with
an inherent believability of form, despite the impossibility of their amalgamation of prehistoric wings, hellish tentacles and claws, and dragon-like teeth. So precise were the carvings, so neat the lines and the curves, so bright the eyes and sharp the points, that had I seen them in shadow and not the reflected light of the stone pathway, I would have fled in terror.

  We continued walking downward, our eyes scanning the pantheon of whatever race carved this temple from the solid rock. Then, the ceiling in front of us dropped low, and there, facing us, was the most horrific figure of all. He stood on legs like a man, though his feet were better suited to the oceans and the seas than the land. So, too, were the thick, cable-like tentacles that fanned out in every direction from his body, each seeming to wriggle and writhe in the light from below, each threatening to reach out and take us at any moment.

  His muscular, claw-fisted arms were draped in wing-like appendages, though whether they were meant to traverse the air or the sea or some heretofore unknown aether, I could not say. But it was his face that terrified, his cruel and lidless eyes, ever-watching, his gaping maw ready to devour. And then Henry, for the first time in my presence, and no doubt for the first time in ageless eons in that place, uttered the name of he who sleeps beneath the sea.

  “Cthulhu.”

  For a long moment we stood and stared at that great beast from a world where black stars shone down darkness on an ageless sea. He, the oldest of the Old Ones, who had come to this Earth to rule mankind with his minions. I had known for some time it was he who had stalked the shadows and dark recesses of the legends and tales to which I had become privy in past days, but it was my undying hope I would never look upon that image. Now it was only my prayer I would never see the demon in the flesh.

  “What is that?” Henry said, pointing to tiny carved specks at the feet of the god, so small in comparison that one would hardly notice their presence. It was something in the way they seemed bent over on themselves that confirmed my initial fear.