We had entered the faculty lounge in the interim and he led me across its oak-paneled precincts to a large bay window where eight leather-upholstered easy chairs were set in a circle along with smoking stands and a table with cups, glasses, brandy decanter, and a blue-warmed urn of coffee. I looked around with a deep shiver of awe and feeling of personal unworthiness at the five elderly scholars and scientists, professors emeritus all, already seated at this figurative modern Round Table of high-minded battlers against worse than ogres and dragons—cosmic evil in all its monstrous manifestations. There was Upham of Mathematics, in whose class poor Walter Gilman had expounded his astounding theories of hyperspace; Francis Morgan of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy, now the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror on that dank September morning back in ’28; Nathaniel Peaslee of Economics and Psychology, who had endured the dreadful underground journey Down Under in ’35; his son Wingate of Psychology, who had been with him on that Australian expedition; and William Dyer of Geology who had been there too and four years before that undergone the horrendous adventure at the Mountains of Madness.
Save for Peaslee père, Dyer was the oldest present—well through his ninth decade—but it was he who, assuming a sort of informal chairmanship, now said to me sharply but warmly, “Sit down, sit down, youngster! I don’t blame you for your hesitation. We call this Emeritus Alcove. Heaven pity the mere assistant professor who takes a chair without invitation! See here, what will you drink? Coffee, you say?—well, that’s a prudent decision, but sometimes we need the other when our talk gets a little too far outside, if you take my meaning. But we’re always glad to see intelligent friendly visitors from the ordinary ‘outside’—Ha-ha!”
“If only to straighten out their misconceptions about Miskatonic,” Wingate Peaslee put in a bit sourly. “They’re forever inquiring if we offer courses in Comparative Witchcraft and so on. For your information, I’d sooner teach a course in Comparative Mass-Murder with Mein Kampf as the text than help anyone meddle with that stuff!”
“Particularly if one considers the sort of students we get today,” Upham chimed, a bit wistfully.
“Of course, of course, Wingate,” Wilmarth said soothingly to young Peaslee. “And we all know that the course in medieval metaphysics Asenath Waite took here was a completely innocent academic offering, free of arcane matters.” This time he withheld his chuckle, but I sensed it was there.
Francis Morgan said, “I too have my problems discouraging sensationalism. For instance, I had to disappoint M.I.T. when they asked me for a sketch of the physiology of anatomy of the Ancient Ones, to be used in the course they give in the designing of structures and machines for ‘imaginary’—Gad!—extra-terrestrial beings. Engineers are a callous breed—and in any case the Ancient Ones are not merely extra-terrestrial, but extra-cosmic. I’ve also had to limit access to the skeleton of Brown Jenkin, though that has given rise to a rumor that it is a file-and-brown-ochre fake like the Piltdown skull.”
“Don’t fret, Francis,” Dyer told him. “I’ve had to turn down many similar requests re the antarctic Old Ones.” He looked at me with his wonderfully bright wise old eyes, wrinkle-bedded. “You know, Miskatonic joined in the Antarctic activities of the Geophysical Year chiefly to keep exploration away from the Mountains of Madness, though the remaining Old Ones seem to be doing a pretty good job of that on their own account—hypnotic broadcasts of some type, I fancy. But that is quite all right because (This is strictly confidential!) the antarctic Old Ones appear to be on our side, even if their Shoggoths aren’t. They’re good fellows, as I’ve always maintained. Scientists to the last! Men!”
“Yes,” Morgan agreed, “those barrel-bodied star-headed monstrosities better deserve the name than some of the specimens of genus homo scattered about the globe these days.”
“Or some of our student body,” Upham put in dolefully.
Dyer said, “And Wilmarth has been put to it to head off inquiries about the Plutonians in the Vermont hills and keep their existence secret with their help. How about that, Albert—are the crab-like spaceflyers cooperating?”
“Oh yes, in their fashion,” my conductor confirmed shortly with another of his unpleasant chuckles, this time fully uttered.
“More coffee?” Dyer asked me thoughtfully, and I passed him my cup and saucer which I had set rather awkwardly on my cardboard box atop my lap, simply because I didn’t want to forget the box.
Old Nathaniel Peaslee lifted his brandy glass to his wrinkle-netted lips with tremulous but efficient fingers and spoke for the first time since my arrival. “We all have our secrets . . . and we work to see them kept,” he whispered with a little whistle in his voice—imperfect dentures, perhaps. “Let the young spacemen at Woomera . . . fire their rockets over our old diggins, I say . . . and blow the sand more thickly there. It is better so.”
Looking at Dyer, I ventured to ask, “I suppose you get inquiries from the Federal Government and the military forces, too. They might be more difficult to handle, I’d think.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” he informed me eagerly. “I wanted to tell you about—”
But at that moment Ellery of Physics came striding briskly across the lounge, working his lips a little and with an angry frown creasing his forehead. This, I reminded myself, was the man who had analyzed an arm of a statuette figuring in the Witch-House case and discovered in it platinum, iron, tellurium, along with three unclassifiable heavy elements. He dropped into the empty chair and said, “Give me that decanter, Nate.”
“A rough day at the Lab?” Upham inquired.
Ellery mollified his feelings with a generous sip of the ardent fluid and then nodded his head emphatically. “Cal Tech wanted another sample of the metal figurine Gilman brought back from dream-land. They’re still botching their efforts to identify the transuranic metals in it. I had to give ’em a flat ‘No!’—I told ’em we were working on the same project ourselves and closer to success. Thing’d be gone in a week if they had their way—sampled down to nothing! Californians! On the good side of the record, Libby wants to carbon-date some of the material from our museum—the Witch-House bones in particular—and I’ve told him ‘Go ahead.’ ”
Dyer said to him, “As chief of the Nuclear Lab, Ellery, perhaps you’ll give our young visitor a sketch of what we might call Miskatonic’s atomic history.”
Ellery grunted but threw me a smile of sorts. “I don’t see why not,” he said, “though it’s chiefly a history of two decades of warfare with officialdom. I should emphasize at the beginning, young man, that we’re dashed lucky the Nuclear Laboratory is entirely financed by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation—”
“With some help from the Alumni Fund,” Upham put in.
“Yes,” Dyer told me. “We are very proud that Miskatonic has not accepted one penny of Federal Assistance, or State for that matter. We are still in every sense of the words an independent private institution.”
“—otherwise I don’t know how we’d have held off the busybodies,” Ellery swept on. “It began back in the earliest days when the Manhattan Project was still the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. Some big-wig had been reading the stories of the Young Gentleman of Providence and he sent a party to fetch the remains of the meteorite that fell here in ’82 with its unknown radioactives. They were quite crestfallen when they discovered that the impact-site lay under the deepest part of the reservoir! They sent down two divers but both were lost and that was the end of that.”
“Oh well, they probably didn’t miss much,” Upham said. “Wasn’t the meteorite supposed to have evanesced totally? Besides we’ve all been drinking the Arkham water from the Blasted Heath Reservoir half our lifetimes.”
“Yes, we have,” Wilmarth put in and this time I found myself hating him for the unpleasant knowingness of his chuckle.
“Well, it apparently has not affected our longevity . . . as yet,” old Peaslee put in with a whistlin
g little laugh.
“Since that date,” Ellery continued, “there hasn’t a month passed without Washington requesting or demanding specimens from our museum—mostly the art objects with unknown metals or radioactive elements in them, of course—and records from our science department and secret interviews with our scholars and so on. They even wanted the Necronomicon!—got the idea they’d discover in it terror-weapons worse than the H-bomb and the intercontinental ballistic missile.”
“Which they would have,” Wilmarth put in sotto voce.
“But they’ve never laid a finger on it!” Dyer asserted with a fierceness that almost startled me. “Nor on the Widener copy either!—I saw to that.” The grim tone of his voice made me forbear to ask him how. He continued solemnly, “Although it grieves me to say it, there are those in high places at Washington and in the Pentagon who are no more to be trusted with that accursed book than Wilbur Whateley. Even though the Russians are after it too, it must remain our sole responsibility. Merciful Creator, yes!”
“I’d rather have seen Wilbur get it,” Wingate Peaslee put in gruffly.
“You wouldn’t say that, Win,” Francis Morgan interposed judiciously, “if you’d seen Wilbur after the library dog tore him—or of course his brother on Sentinel Hill. Gad!” He shook his head and sighed a bit tiredly. One or two of the others echoed him. With a faint preliminary grinding of its mechanism, a grandfather clock across the lounge slowly struck twelve.
“Gentlemen,” I said, setting my coffee cup aside and standing up with my cardboard box, “you have entertained me in unparalleled fashion, but now it is—”
“—midnight and we all dissipate into violet and green vapors?” Wilmarth chuckled.
“No,” I told him. “I was going to say that now it is September 15th and that I have in mind a short expedition, only so far as the Burying Ground behind the new Administration Building. I have here a wreath and I propose to lay it on the grave of Dr. Henry Armitage.”
“The anniversary of his laying of the Dunwich Horror in 1928,” Wilmarth exclaimed contritely. “A thoughtful remembrance. I’ll go with you. You’ll come too, Francis, of course? You had a hand in that deed.”
Morgan slowly shook his head. “No, if you don’t mind,” he said. “My contribution was less than nothing. I thought a big-game rifle would be sufficient to knock over the beast. Gad!”
The others courteously begged off on one pretext or another and so it was only Wilmarth and I who wandered down Lich Street, now become a college walk for that block, between Administration and Pickman Lab, as a gibbous moon rose over French Hill, past whose base the lights of a few cars still whirled ghostily along the new freeway.
I could have wished for a few more companions or a less sinister one than Wilmarth had struck me this morning. I couldn’t help remembering how he had once been deceived by a monster masking as the scholarly Vermont recluse Henry Akeley, and how ironic and terrible it would be, if through him the same trick should be worked on another.
Nevertheless, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him boldly, “Professor Wilmarth, your brush with the Plutonian beings occurred September 12th, 1928, almost exactly at the same time as the Dunwich affair. In fact, the very night you fled Akeley’s farm-house, Wilbur’s brother was loose and ravening. Has there ever been any hint of an explanation of that monstrous coincidence?”
Wilmarth waited some seconds before replying and this time— Thank God!—there was no chuckle. In fact, his voice was quiet and without trace of levity as he at last replied, “Yes, of course there has been. I think I can risk telling you that I have kept in rather closer touch with the Plutonians or Yuggothians than perhaps even old Dyer guesses. I’ve had to! Besides, like Danforth’s and Dyer’s antarctic Old Ones, the Plutonians are not such utterly evil beings when one really gets to know them. Though they will always inspire my extremest awe!
“Well, from the hints they’ve given me, it appears that the Plutonians had got wind of Wilbur Whateley’s intention of letting in the Ancient Ones and were preparing to block them by winning more human confederates, especially here at Miskatonic, and so on. None of us realized it, but we were brushing the fringes of an intercosmic war.”
This revelation left me speechless and it was not until the protesting black-painted iron gate had been pushed open and we stood among the age-darkened moonlit headstones that our conversation was resumed. As I reverently lifted Armitage’s wreath from its container, Wilmarth gripped me by the elbow, and speaking almost into my ear, said with a quiet intensity, “There is another piece of information the Plutonians have supplied me which I believe I should share with you. You may not be willing to credit it at first—I wasn’t!—but now I’ve come to believe it. You know the Plutonians’ trick of extracting the living brains of beings unable to fly through space, preserving those brains immortally in metal canisters, and carrying them about with them throughout the cosmos to see, via the proper instruments, and hear and comment on its secrets? Well—I’m afraid this will give you a nasty shock, but tell yourself there’s a good side to it, for there is—on the night of March 14th, 1937, when the Young Gentleman lay dying in the Rhode Island Hospital, a secret entry was made into the Jane Brown wing, and to use his words—or rather, mine—his brain was removed ‘by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery,’ so that he is now flying some course between Hydra and Polaris, safe in the arms of a night gaunt, reveling forever in the wonders of the universe he deeply loved.” And with a gesture dignified yet grand, Wilmarth lifted his arm toward the North Star where it faintly shone in the gray sky high above Meadow Hill and the Miskatonic.
I shivered with mixed emotions. Suddenly the sky was full. I knew now the deeper reason I had all evening wanted to shudder at my conductor, yet was deeply happy that it was a reason by which I could respect him the more.
Arm in arm we moved toward the simple grave of Dr. Armitage.
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1992 by Robert M. Price
Preface copyright © 1992 by Robert Bloch
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
“The Thing on the Roof ” copyright © 1932 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company, for Weird Tales, February 1932; copyright renewed 1960 by Mrs. P. M. Kuykendall. “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (non-supernatural version) copyright © 1972 by Glenn Lord for The Howard Collector, Spring 1972. . Howard, Glenn Lord.
“The Seven Geases” (Weird Tales, October 1934) appears here by kind permission of William A. Dorman, agent for the estate of Clark Ashton Smith.
“Fane of the Black Pharaoh” (Weird Tales, December 1937) copyright © 1937 by Weird Tales, for Weird Tales, copyright © 1965 by Robert Bloch.
“The Invaders” (Strange Stories, February 1939) and “Bells of Horror” (Strange Stories, April 1939) . Copyright © 1939 by Henry Kuttner.
“The Thing That Walked on the Wind” (Strange Tales , January 1933), “Ithaqua” (Strange Stories, February 1941), and “The Lair of the Star-Spawn” (Weird Tales, August 1932) appear here by kind permission of April Derleth and Walden W. Derleth.
“The Lord of Illusion” (Crypt of Cthulhn #10, Yuletide 1982) ., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.
“The Warder of Knowledge” by Richard F. Searight appears here by kind permission of Franklin Searight.
“The Scourge of B’Moth” (Weird Tales, May 1928) copyright © 1929 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. Ltd.
“The House of the Worm” (Weird Tales, October 1933) copyright © 1933 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. Ltd.
“Spawn of the Green Abyss” (Weird Tales, November 1946) copyright © 1946 by Weird Tales. Ltd.
“The Guardian of th
e Book” (Weird Tales, March 1937) appears here by kind permission of Forrest J. Ackerman, agent for the estate of the author, Henry Hasse.
“The Abyss” (Stirring Fantasy Fiction, February 1941) appears here by kind permission of the author. This version copyright © 1965 by Health Knowledge Publications, Inc.
“Music of the Stars” (The Acolyte, Spring 1943) appears here by kind permission of the author, Duane W. Rimel.
“The Aquarium” (Mythos Version, Fantasy Crossroads #7, February 1976) by Carl Jacobi copyright © 1976 by Carl Jacobi. . Dixon Smith.
“The Horror out of Lovecraft” (Magazine of Horror #27, May 1969; original fanzine appearance 1944) appears here by kind permission of Elsie B. Wollheim for the Estate of Donald A. Wollheim.
“To Arkham and the Stars” (The Dark Brotherhood, Arkham House, 1966) appears here by kind permission of the author, Fritz Leiber.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2002091958
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First Ballantine Books Edition: October 2002
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eISBN: 978-0-307-41679-7
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