by Neil Clarke
Except that the night watchmen, a pair of stalwarts named Fiske and Hobden, began to complain of rats.
“Rats?” said Dr. Starkweather. “What nonsense!”
The rest of us could not afford to be so cavalier, and even Dr. Starkweather had to rethink his position when Miss Chatteris came to him on behalf of the docents and announced that the first time one of them saw so much as a whisker of a rat, they were all quitting.
“But there have never been rats!” protested Mr. Tilley, the oldest of the curators. “Never!”
Hobden and Fiske, stolid and walrus-mustached and as identical as twins, said they could not speak to that, but Mr. Tilley was welcome to tell them what else the scuttling noises might be.
Mr. Lucent rather wistfully suggested getting a museum cat and was promptly shouted down.
Dr. Starkweather grudgingly authorized the purchase of rat-traps, which were baited and set and caught no rats.
Mr. Browne was denied permission to purchase a quantity of arsenic sufficient—said Miss Coburn, who did the calculations—to poison the entire staff.
Frantic and paranoid inventory-taking revealed no damage that could be ascribed to rats, although Decorative Arts suffered a species of palace coup over an infestation of moths in one of their storerooms and our Orientalist, Mr. Denton, pitched a public and monumental temper tantrum over what he claimed was water damage to a suit of bamboo armor. Mr. Browne took advantage of the opportunity to start a campaign to have the main building re-roofed. Dr. Starkweather chose, with some justification, to take this as fomenting insurrection, and the rats were forgotten entirely in the resultant carnage.
Except by Hobden and Fiske—and by me, although that was my own fault for staying in the museum after dark. I was writing an article which required the consultation of (it seemed in my more despondent moods) no less than half the contents of my office. Thus working on it at home was futile, and working on it during the day was proving impossible, as the inventories were bringing to light unidentifiables overlooked in the last inventory, and everyone was bringing them to me. The puzzles and mysteries were welcome, but I had promised this article to the editor of American Antiquities nearly six months ago, and I was beginning to despair of finishing it. Being insomniac by nature, I found the practice of working at night more congenial than otherwise, and the Parrington was blessedly quiet. Fiske and Hobden’s rounds were metronomically regular, and they did not disturb me.
And then there was the scuttling.
It was a ghastly noise, dry and rasping and somehow slithery, and it was weirdly omnidirectional, so that while I was sure it was not in the office with me, I could never tell where in fact it was. It was horribly intermittent, too, the sound of something scrabbling, and stopping, and then scrabbling again. As if it were searching for the best vantage point from which to observe me, and the night I had that thought, I went out to the front entrance and asked the watchman if they had had any luck at ridding the museum of rats.
He gave me a long, steady look and then said, “No, sir. Have some tea.”
I accepted the mug he offered; the tea was hot and sweet and very strong. He watched, and when I had met whatever his criteria were, he said, “Me and Hob, we reckon maybe it ain’t rats.”
This was Fiske, then; I was relieved not to have to ask. “No?”
“No, sir. Y’see, Hob has a dog what is a champion ratter. Very well known, is Mingus. And me and Hob brought Mingus in, sir, quiet-like, feeling that what His Nibs don’t know, he won’t lose sleep over . . . ”
“Quite,” I said, perceiving that Fiske would not continue until he had been reassured on that point.
“Thank you, sir. So Hob brought Mingus in, and the dog, sir, did not rat.”
“He didn’t?”
“No, sir. We took him all over the museum, and not a peep out of him. And before you ask, sir, that dratted scratching noise seemed like it was following us about. Mingus heard it, sure enough, but he wouldn’t go after it. Just whined and kind of cringed when Hob tried him. So we figured, Hob and myself, that it ain’t rats.”
“What do, er, you and Mr. Hobden think it is?”
Mr. Fiske looked at me solemnly and said, “As to that, sir, we ain’t got the least idea.”
Two nights later, I saw it, entirely by accident—and not “accident” meaning happenstance or coincidence, but “accident” quite literally: I fell on the stairs from the mail room to the west storage rooms. The stairs were of the sort that consist only of treads—no risers—and when I opened my eyes from my involuntary flinch, I was staring down into the triangular space beneath the stairs and watching something scuttling out of sight. I saw it for less than a second, but I saw that it was white, and it was not a rat. And I all too easily recognized the sound.
For a moment, I was petrified, my body as heavy and cold and unresponsive as marble, and then I scrambled frantically up the stairs, banging my already bruised knees, smacking my raw palms as I fumbled with the door. It was more luck than anything else that I got the door open, and I locked it behind me with shaking fingers, then slumped against it, panting painfully for breath. And then I heard that dry, rasping, scuttling sound from somewhere ahead of me in the storage room, and with the dreadful epiphantic clarity of a lightning bolt, I knew and whispered aloud because it was too terrible a thing to have pent and unvoiced in my skull, “It’s in the walls.” Even that was not the truth of my horror, for in fact that was no more than a banality. What made my chest seem too small for the panicked beating of my heart was not that it was in the walls, but that it was using the walls, as a subway train uses its tunnels.
Subway trains, unlike rats, have drivers.
And then I was running, my mind full of a dry, rustling panic. Later, I would reason with myself, would point out that it had not harmed anyone, or even anything, that there was not the slightest shred of proof that its intentions were malicious, or indeed that it had any intentions at all. But nothing I came up with, no reasoned argument, no rational observation, could withstand the instinctive visceral loathing I had felt for that white scuttling shape. I remembered that Hobden’s dog, a champion ratter, would not go after this thing. I remembered Mr. Ferrick, shaken and embarrassed, describing the “enormous white spider” that had flung itself in his face. And I wondered that night, pacing from room to sleepless room of my apartment, just what else Miss Parrington had bought in that job lot of worthless books.
Was it a sign of insanity that I assumed from the moment I saw it that it was not natural? I do not know. I do know that discovering it to be a gigantic albino tarantula would have been an overpowering relief, and by the very magnitude of that imagined relief, I knew it was no such thing.
The next morning, I prevailed on Mr. Lucent to ask a favor of one of his friends in Entomology, and the two of them met me in the mail room. I brought a flash-light. Mr. Lucent’s friend was Mr. Vanderhoef, a shy young man who wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles and was an expert on African termites. Everyone in the museum, of course, knew about Mr. Ferrick’s spider, and I explained that I thought I had seen it the night before. Mr. Vanderhoef looked dubious, but not reluctant, and contorted himself quite cheerfully into the awkward space beneath the stairs. I passed him the flash-light.
“A big piece of plaster is missing,” he reported after a moment. “That must be how—oh! There is . . . something has been nesting here.”
“Nesting?” Mr. Lucent said unhappily. “You mean it is rats?”
“No,” said Mr. Vanderhoef, rather absently. “There aren’t droppings, and it doesn’t look . . . In truth, I’m not sure what it does look like.”
“What do you mean?” I said. Mr. Lucent and I were now both peering between the treads of the stairs, but all we could see was Mr. Vanderhoef’s shock of blond hair.
“There are no droppings, no caches of food, no eggs—nor viviparous offspring for that matter . . . ”
“It couldn’t be a, er, trap?”
“How do you m
ean?”
“Well, er, like a . . . like a spider’s web.”
“Ah. No.”
“So, what is it using to nest in?” Mr. Lucent asked before I could find a way to get Mr. Vanderhoef to expand. “It isn’t as if we’ve got a lot of twigs and whatnot in the museum.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Vanderhoef. “Paper. Newspaper, mostly, although I think I see the remains of one of Dr. Starkweather’s memoranda.”
“Paper,” I said.
“Mr. Booth?” said Mr. Lucent, apparently not liking the sound of my voice.
“You’re quite sure it couldn’t be a spider?”
“That isn’t what I said. This is not a web. There are spiders that don’t build webs, but arachnids are not my specialty, and I cannot say for certain— ”
“Is there anyone in the museum who would know?”
“Dr. Phillips is our arachnid expert, but he’s on an expedition in Brazil until Christmas.”
“Thank you,” I said, because it was important to remember to be courteous, “you’ve been very kind.”
“Mr. Booth!”
I stopped at the top of the stairs. “Yes, Mr. Lucent?”
“Did you . . . what were you . . . where are you going?”
“Paper,” I said. “Will you ask Major Galbraith to get the plaster repaired?”
Mr. Lucent sputtered; I made good my escape and went to do what I should have done weeks ago and examine the commonplace book from Mr. Ferrick’s inventory.
Mr. Ferrick was not happy to see me, though I could not tell if it was a guilty conscience—an affliction which seemed to be frequently visited on the junior curators in my presence—or simply that I irritated him. In either case, he stared at me as blankly as if I had asked about the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics.
“The commonplace book,” I said. “From, er, Miss Parrington’s crate.”
I noted that he had not been at the Parrington long enough for her name to have its full effect; we all winced reflexively, even Dr. Starkweather, but Mr. Ferrick merely frowned and said, “Is that the crate with the damaged books?”
“And the enormous white spider,” I said before I could stop myself.
He gave me a look of mingled shock and reproach and said, “Oh! That commonplace book. I gave it to Mr. Lucent because it was holograph. Was that wrong?”
It was now obvious that he did not like me. I was glad he was a naturalist by training; once he had finished his probationary period, I was unlikely to have to deal with him again.
“No,” I said. “That’s fine.” I was as pleased to leave as he was to have me go.
I spent the rest of the morning in a treasure hunt that was simultaneously ridiculous and nightmarish, pursuing the trail of the commonplace book from Mr. Ferrick to Mr. Lucent; from Mr. Lucent—who was miffed at me, he said, for rushing away in the middle of things and leaving him “holding the baby,” although whether he meant by that the hole in the plaster, or Mr. Vanderhoef, or possibly Major Galbraith, I could not determine and did not like to ask—to Mr. Roxham; from Mr. Roxham, after a protracted and egregiously dusty search, to Miss Atterbury; from Miss Atterbury to Mr. Vine; and finally from Mr. Vine to Mr. Horton, who said, “Oh, I haven’t gotten to it yet,” and reached unerringly into the middle of one of the stacks of books waiting to be catalogued that surrounded his desk.
I retreated to my office with my prize and locked the door. The first few pages of the commonplace book told me that its owner was strongly antiquarian in his tastes, largely self-educated, and with an unhealthy penchant for the occult. Judging by the authors he quoted, he must have had quite the collection; the coup of the 1588 Albinus paled in comparison.
I flipped steadily through the pages, trying not to inhale too deeply, for the book reeked of smoke and secondarily of tobacco, and there was another scent, too faint for me to identify but sharply unpleasant. I was looking for quotes from Carolus Albinus or one of the other books that had been in the crate, and I found them starting about three-quarters of the way through. Albinus; Mundy; a lengthy passage from de Winter on golems; a passage from an even more unpleasant author on the abomination called a Hand of Glory, although I had never seen these particular virtues ascribed to it before; and then the quotes began to be interspersed with dated entries such as one might find in a diary. These were written in a highly elliptical style, using an idiosyncratic set of abbreviations, and I could make neither heads nor tails of them, except for repeated references to “cllg”—“calling”?—someone or something called White Charles—the literal translation, of course, of Carolus Albinus, but the referent was decidedly not a book. And I did recognize the diagram drawn painstakingly on one verso page.
He had summoned something he called White Charles—presumably because he was using Carolus Albinus as his principal text, which ought to mean I could use my own knowledge of Carolus Albinus at least to make a guess at what he had been trying to do and what that white scuttling thing was.
So. He had summoned something, following—or improvising on—the rites of Carolus Albinus. Albinus had been a necromancer who dabbled in alchemy; White Charles was probably a revenant of some kind. The passage about the Hand of Glory suggested several further hypotheses; I was selfishly, squeamishly grateful that he had not discussed that matter in any greater detail. He had wanted power, no doubt, imagining it was something one could acquire like a new umbrella.
Whatever he had summoned, its actions indicated clearly that it had self-volition, unlike what very little I knew of golems. It had preserved itself from the fire, stowed away with the books—its books? I wondered. Did it know that those particular books were relevant to its existence, or was it mere coincidence? On reaching the museum, it had acted to preserve itself again, scavenged paper, made a nest. It had not, so far as I knew, harmed anyone, although it had greatly perturbed Fiske and Hobden—and Mingus—and had scared the lights and liver out of me. I certainly did not like the idea of a necromantic spider scuttling around the museum, but I could not immediately see any way of either catching or destroying it, and I quailed from the thought of explaining my theory to Dr. Starkweather—or even Mr. Lucent.
I would watch, I told myself. Probably before long, the thing would die or de-animate or whatever the correct term was, and it would not be necessary to take any action at all.
But over the next week, it became apparent that if I had decided to watch White Charles, White Charles had also decided to watch me. Any time I was in the museum after dark, the scuttling dogged my footsteps, and I could sit in my office and track the thing’s loathsome progress from wall to ceiling and back to wall. The plaster under the mail room stairs had been patched, but that clearly hadn’t caused White Charles more than a momentary inconvenience.
It unnerved me, but it still was not doing any harm, and surely it would disintegrate soon. Surely I would not have to . . . to hunt it down, or any of the other melodramatic imaginings that plagued me when I tried to sleep. I wanted desperately to avoid seeing it again, and most especially to avoid seeing it more clearly. This way, at least I could pretend I believed it was some sort of albino spider.
I was very carefully not thinking about Hands of Glory.
It was a Wednesday night when I finally finished my article for American Antiquities. I tidied the manuscript into an envelope and started for the mail room to leave it in the box for Miss Rivers the typist, but as I turned into the hallway leading to the mail room, I stopped so abruptly I nearly stumbled over my own feet. There was someone standing in the middle of the hall, a strange slouched figure who was certainly neither Hobden nor Fiske.
I had thought I was the only person left in the building save the watchmen. “Wh . . . who’s there?” I said, my voice wobbling and squeaking embarrassingly, and groped toward the light switch.
“Noli facere.”
It was not a human voice; it crackled and shirred like paper. And it spoke in Latin. I think I knew then, although I did not want to.
&n
bsp; “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“In a box,” it said, in Latin. It understood English, even if it would not, or could not, speak it. “Full of smoke and straw and lies.” It took a step toward me, rustling and crackling. I took a step back.
“What are you?” I said, although I did not expect an answer. I only wanted to distract it while I gathered myself to run for the front entrance and Fiske and Hobden.
But even as I began to turn, shifting my weight, it said, “I am the ghost of a Hand of Glory.” This time I did fall, sprawling my full ungainly length on the marble; before I could pick myself up, before I could even roll over, it was on top of me, paper scratching and scuffling, pinning me flat, holding my wrists in the small of my back. It should not have been able to hold me—even at the time I knew that, but I could not move, could not free myself.
“He called me White Charles” it said, the English words gratingly incongruous, and though it spoke in my ear, there was no breath, only the rustling and sighing of paper. “But he did not know me to name me truly. You do.”
“No, I don’t!” I said vehemently.
“You lie,” it said, and I shuddered and cringed into the floor, because it should not have known that, no matter how closely it had observed me.
And what served it for eyes? Had it fashioned those out of paper, too?
“What do you want?” I asked.
It pressed even closer. I had often wondered morbidly what it would be like to be buried under one of the teetering stacks of paper that rose in my office like the topless towers of Ilium; now I knew that I did not want to know. It said, in the soft susurration of paper, “I want freedom.”
