To my dear friend, R. B.
—William Shakespeare.
“Your initials,” Peg said.
“Isn’t that funny. But wait a minute, didn’t Shakespeare die in 1616, and wasn’t the first edition of his plays posthumous?”
“Touché! Now you see why it can’t possibly be real. Shakespeare couldn’t have autographed it if he was already dead.”
“One minute. Let me check something.” She left the room and came back a minute later with a book on Shakespeare, in which were reproduced the four extant signatures of the Bard. Ours matched one of them almost exactly.
“Somebody is one hell of a good forger,” I said.
We kept the book as a curiosity. I took it to a rare book dealer once when the lure of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars became too much for me, and he went over it carefully. He asked me how I had come across it, and when I couldn’t tell him he became very suspicious. Books like that don’t drop out of the blue. Usually an individual copy has a known history with a long line of owners who can be traced. Eventually he refused to even make an offer on it, convinced that I was some sort of crook, and the book rested on our shelves ever after.
I took it down to glance through occasionally, and that was how I chanced to notice something written in quite modern ballpoint on the blank page following Troilus and Cressida. The handwriting was not my wife’s, but it looked somehow familiar. The message was:
TEST RUN ONLY THE BEGINNING.
* * * *
That summer Peg and I went on vacation for all three months.
One of the wonderful things about teaching is that if you live modestly, hoard your money, are married to another teacher, and don’t have any kids, you can afford to take the entire summer off sometimes and travel. That year we drove west to California, up through Oregon and Washington, then all the way across to Canada and down into Maine. When we got there we indulged in one of our quaint hobbies of dubious legality.
The backwoods areas of northern New England were cleared and farmed once, but the principle crop turned out to be rocks and the farmers went broke. They left their land and moved away, the result was a region of declining population scattered with empty farmhouses and barns, many half in ruins among overgrown fields and re-encroaching forests. Many of these were left partially furnished, filled with whatever the owners thought not worth taking or couldn’t carry. Values change over the years, and what was junk in 1890 is often today a much sought after antique.
So what Peg and I have done more than once is find a particularly isolated abandoned house, break in and help ourselves. Sheriffs frown on it, but I don’t think there’s an antique dealer in the business who doesn’t do the same. They don’t see anything wrong with taking old books, plates, and furniture that have been left to the elements and neither do I. Call it an informal type of archeology.
We went treasure hunting in our station wagon at a place called Appleton Ridge which is off Route 1 near Rockland, atop miniature mountains. The view is spectacular on a clear day, and where the cliffs drop away you can see for miles across a wide green valley to the opposite slopes where another row of hills rise. Roads wind in long dusty lines, occasionally stirred by the speck of a car; houses are white matchboxes, and the cows in their pastures look like ants.
We spent a lot of time bouncing along the narrow rocky path that was the local excuse for a road.
We stopped and looked at the scenery, picked blueberries where they grew wild among barren slabs of boulder, and finally we found the house. It stood alone with weeds up to the windowsills facing a barn on the other side of the way with its roof fallen in. I knew there would be nothing in the barn that the wind and rain hadn’t ruined long ago, but the house appeared to be in good shape. I parked the car out of sight behind the wreckage of the barn, perilously close to the edge of a cliff, and then Peg and I went around to the back of the house, found an open window, and climbed in.
The place had been looted before. Most of the furniture was gone or smashed, and there were empty liquor bottles scattered about, left by passing derelicts or the local teenagers. Broken glass was everywhere, and in many places plaster had fallen from the ceiling in heaps. We dug around in what must have been the kitchen looking for china plates the kind they used to use as ballast on clipper ships and now sell for two and three figures but came up with nothing.
It was only when we got upstairs that the pickings got any better. There we found a laboratory the vandals never touched.
All the upstairs rooms were empty save for one, which was locked, but it wasn’t hard for me to break the door in. The first thing we noticed was that there was a statue in the middle of the room, a huge, extremely crude man-like figure with bat wings on its back and the trunk of an elephant for a face. Two deep holes represented eye sockets. Whoever made it hadn’t been much of a sculptor, obviously.
Around on tables were pieces of chemical equipment, glassware, tubing, beakers with a gummy residue in them. These I passed over quickly, and forgot them entirely when I noticed what books were on the shelves that lined the walls.
“Peg! Look at this! It’s impossible!”
The shelves were packed with crumbling leatherbound volumes. I picked one up and the spine left a brown smear on the palm of my hand.
I opened the book and it cracked.
When I saw the title page I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a book of magic, the Grimoire of the sorcerer Honorius, and it was one of the most sought after books in the occult field. It was worth a fortune. Peg opened another at random, and it was something similar. “The guy must have been a wizard,” I said. “And I halfway believe the lump of rock over there is in fact the original Golem, brought from de ghetto of Prague to vork new ewils in dis land.”
“The what? What are you talking about?”
“The Golem, dear, is, or maybe I should say was, a stone robot built by Rabbi Loew in medieval Prague to protect his people from persecution. He wrote the word for “life” on its forehead and that turned it on, and the only way to stop it was to erase the word. Unfortunately the thing didn’t like having its word erased, so it got loose. Like Frankenstein’s monster.
“I hope you’re not serious about this. Besides, this writing doesn’t look Jewish.” She handed me a thick, squat volume in black leather.
“Hebrew, dear, and no I’m not serious. As for this book, it’s in Latin, and it’s a copy of Alhazred’s screwy gibberings, collectively known as the Necronomicon. It’s worth a mint, and I’m quite serious about that. We’re rich, you know, and maybe sometime we can come back and have the statue made into a birdbath for the lawn of our estate. I mean, look at these books!”
And look we did. There was another copy of the Necronomicon, John Dee’s English version, carefully sewn into what looked like late 18th century deluxe leather. The original was just unbound sheets, you recall.
Also stuffed on those shelves, covered with cobwebs and filled with worm tooth-marks were such rarities as Ferdinand de Schertz’s Magia Posthuma, Morryster’s wild Marvels of Science, the mind-blasting Sonnets on Time by the crazed medieval monk Donaldius of Garthstead, Borellus’ De Motu Animalium, The Book of Eibon bound in some sort of reptile hide, the Complete Works of Scott Edelstein, Magia Naturalis by Della Porta, the 1720 edition of Mason’s Observations on Superhuman Natures, The Stone from Mnar undated, and perhaps five hundred more.
As we were carrying the books out of the house I remarked, “You know Peg, the guy who lived here must have found the philosopher’s stone. Where else would he have gotten the gold to buy all these? This house hasn’t been abandoned for more than fifty or sixty years. Necronomicons didn’t come cheap even then.”
“Your friend Latham was interested in this sort of thing, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Well, I was think
ing, now that we have so many, that we should send him a couple as a gift.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.”
We had intended to spend a couple more days vacationing, but after we got the books loaded into the wagon we decided to head home right away. This cargo was too valuable to risk theft in a hotel parking lot. We made it to Amherst Massachusetts a few hours later, with only a few odd looks from the toll booth attendants on the turnpike.
The two of us spent the following week taking inventory of what we had, comparing them against prices in catalogues and reading some. The name of Latham Knucklebury came to me again in a very odd way, as I found another message written in a book, in the same hand that had marked out Shakespeare. It was on the flyleaf of an edition of Van Prims and read:
HAVEN’T YOU EVER WONDERED WHY THESE BOOKS ALWAYS TURN UP, DESPITE THEIR ALLEGED RARITY?
—LK
Latham Knucklebury! It had to be.
“I have to be going dear.”
“Why? Where?”
“To Arkham,” I said. “I’ll tell you more about it later. Hold the fort for me in the meantime. Bye.”
And I was gone.
* * * *
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and the roads are narrow, steep and treacherous through those deep woods that no axe has ever cut. Still I drove like a maniac, spewing dust and gravel in my wake. I showered a bearded old man and he raised his hand to make an odd sign against me, but I was gone around a bend in an instant.
“So you have come at last. Good.” Latham Knucklebury said as he met me before the locked gates of the Miskatonic University campus. “I knew you would be here. Your curiosity would force you to come.”
He walked away from the gate, over the grass and along the wall.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I know a way in. I still have a key. Several keys in fact.”
He took me through a tiny gate around the back, and we walked briskly across the empty campus, past rows of dormitories with gabled roofs and fan lighted doorways, until we came to a large brick building the size of a barn with no windows on the first floor. It had only one opening, a massive slab of metal which slid aside after Latham had inserted and turned a six-inch key.
“Now you see my work, and I hope you’ll understand,” he announced.
Inside was a single room, almost completely filled with a fantastic array of machinery of completely alien design. There were huge globes of transluscent glass, coils of tubing, cyclopean columns of a greenish metal, gigantic cubes, pyramids and cylinders, rhomboid-sided solids of impossible crystals, blue, red, and yellow, and some shapes defying any geometry I knew altogether. In front of all of it stood the image of what I took to be an animal, perhaps an incomplete specimen. It was as tall as an elephant, with four long, tapering legs, and covered all over with a rope-like hair of a vaguely purplish colour. It had no visible head or tail, and I wasn’t sure which end was the front.
Latham Knucklebury climbed in among the machines, onto a three-pronged operator’s pedestal obviously designed for anatomies other than human.
“Behold around you,” he said, waving his hand showman-like, “the innermost secret of Miskatonic University.”
There was a faint humming sound coming from the hardware, which seemed to get a little louder as he spoke.
“Some secret! What’s the hairy thing?”
“That’s the builder of this apparatus, Richard, a being from beyond the Earth. Alone it came from distant Shaggai in centuries past. It transported all this machinery here and assembled it, then went into suspended animation when the task was completed. It is actually a low form of Shaggaian life, more like a dog than anything else in the ecology of that world.”
“A Shaggai dog built this?”
“Yes. You see, the Old Ones are so advanced and incomprehensible to mankind, that they never lower themselves to touch mechanical objects at all. But this device was a vital part of their overall plan, so they sent the creature you see before you to set it up.”
“Now wait a minute! This mutt looks stuffed to me.” I tried to touch the thing with my finger, but suddenly a blue light arced over it, and I felt a strong electrical shock. I drew back, and found that my arm was numb past the elbow.
“Not stuffed,” said Knucklebury. “It’s in a kind of time stasis. The beings of Shaggai have long since harnessed Time.”
“Tell me more,” I said, nursing my arm.
Latham was no longer merely conversing. He began to take on a fanatical tone, like a soapbox preacher ranting for revolution. He got down from his stool and began to shout and point.
“The Old Ones are the masters of all cosmic forces, Richard, and they have bided their time while the superstitious rabble forgot them and went on to new hysterias. The men who first discovered this equipment were persecuted as witches. Later others came, and to hide the frightful object from view they built, this hall around it and locked the massive door, after the Shaggaian machinery proved indestructible despite all the childish efforts of the Puritans to smash it as a work of the Devil. Eventually braver and wiser souls arrived, men who understood. They built Miskatonic University on this site to mask their true activities. Only a few of all those who have studied here ever came inside this building. When I was here in my last year there were only nine professors and three graduate students who were part of our brotherhood. We alone knew, and had the power.”
“What power? What does this gizmo do?”
“Have you never heard of the Great Old Ones, who came to this world ere mankind was even an idea in the mind of a deranged amoeba? The Old Ones are: the Old Ones were; the Old Ones shall be. They came from the stars and ruled over the Earth in Their mysterious ways, until they were cast down by forces even more terrible. But They shall come again and drive the human scum from the globe. I tell you!”
“You tell me just what all this is about, because I still haven’t the slightest idea. What has this contraption and that…that whatever it is got to do with anything? Where did those old books come from, and how did you know we would come to that particular house? We didn’t know ourselves until we got there.”
“Like I said, the Old Ones have made Time their servant. I merely looked ahead, saw that you would get there, and deposited what I wanted you to find. By our science such a thing is inconceivable, but to the Old Ones it is nothing.”
“Well thanks, but I really couldn’t take them all from you.”
“Richard, you will take them and you will read them and you will…”
“I won’t do anything unless you tell me where they came from.”
“Alright then, if you must know, this device here bends the fabric of space. When you do that something coexists with itself. I merely took the extra copy each time.”
“Huh?”
“Did you by chance notice the stamps on the wrapping to the Shakespeare book?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well you should have, because they‘re all 1856 British Guiana one cent magenta, the rarest stamp in the world, worth easily $75,000.
Only one copy is known to exist, and you have six. And that is a demonstration of my power. It has nothing to do with my true purpose.”
“Tell me, did you get Shakespeare’s autograph with your space bending machine?”
“Of course. I took the book back, asked him to autograph it, and brought it to our own time again. He took me for a magician, and said I had inspired him to write a play about a magician.”
“The Tempest.”
“Maybe so, but in any case. They of Shaggai and Yuggoth have no interest in Shakespeare. This machine was designed to mass produce mouldering and unquestionably authentic copies of the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and all the rest, so they would get wide circulation and ine
vitably fall into the hands of those who know how to use them.”
“Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler just, to publish the Necronomicon in paperback?”
“What? No, don’t be silly. It would vanish into the occult racks without a ripple. People would think Lin Carter wrote it. I want these copies to be believed.”
He was clearly mad, or at least half mad. I didn’t understand half of what he said, but what was clear was simply more of his screwball ravings magnified enormously. I didn’t feel like humouring him any more.
“Is this your idea of a joke?”
At that he grow wild with rage.
“Joke? Do you take me for a prankster? No, I tell you it is my plan to bring the Old Ones back in our own time. When I am done every occultist, every Satanist, every teenaged witch, every person on the planet with the slightest amount of curiosity will have a copy of Alhazred. They’ll read it aloud, speak spells they don’t understand, and the gates will be ripped back, and the Old Ones will come through and clear the world of all human garbage. Nothing will be left of what was!”
This was ridiculous. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. I tried to show him the illogic of his fantasy.
“Yes, but if that happens, won’t everybody be killed, including you, Latham Knucklebury?”
“No, I shall not die, for the blood of Dagon and Cthulhu runs deep in me. Those who are touched by Them and who serve Them shall live on in new and glorious life.”
“You really are crazy. Chambers was right.”
“No, I am not crazy, Richard. I am not entirely human, nor are you.”
“Me? What, do you mean I’m not human?”
“Through my machines I know more than you think, about the world, about you. Professor Richard Brown. What happened to those tentacles on your chest?”
“How did you ever? The doctor cut them off when I was a baby! A birth defect.”
The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK® Page 55
