Still muttering, he took his place in the line at the circulation desk. It moved briskly. Clerks scanned barcodes and stamped due dates in books and periodicals. Or they accepted returns and, if asked, gave back receipts. All the motion, all the talk, was stylized, ritualized, as at an airport or a mosque.
Hafez realized he would be a bit of grit in the smoothly running machine. No help for it, though. He bit his lip again when he found himself facing, having to deal with, one of those free-haired young women. He thought she was homely, but it helped less than he would have wished.
“Yes?” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“I am looking for Special Collections, please,” Hafez said.
She frowned. “You are?”
“I am,” he agreed. “Please, let me show you…” He pulled out an Egyptian passport. It was, or seemed, genuine enough to satisfy airline and customs personnel. “I am Ahmad Goma.” The passport bore his photo and said he was Ahmad Goma, anyhow. “I am a graduate student to Professor Gamal al-Zubi, of Al-Azhar University in Cairo. I have his letter of introduction here.” He plucked that from a manila folder in his backpack. Unlike the ones on the passport, its signature was authentic. Professor al-Zubi had been made to understand what would happen to him and to his family if he didn’t cooperate with Hafez ibn Abd-al-Rahim and his companions.
Still frowning, the kafir girl said, “I don’t quite see—”
Hafez overrode her: “He wishes to interlibrary loan a certain book from Miskatonic University. There was reluctance to post the book overseas because of rarity and value. I have come to take it personally to Professor al-Zubi.”
She checked something on a computer monitor. A security alert? No—her face cleared. “It’s fine. They’re expecting you.”
“But how do I find them?”
She pointed to a corridor. “Go along there. Turn left, then left, then left again. It’s the first door past room 153. Take the stairs up to the fourth floor. If you come to room 155, you’ve gone too far.”
“I thank you.” Hafez went down the corridor and turned left, left, and left again. The corridors were long, so long they hardly seemed able to fit into the library, although it was a large building. With each turn, he went farther from what the infidels called the twenty-first century, from scanners and flat-screen monitors and smartphones and the Information Age.
By the time he found room 153, even the air-conditioning faltered. The walls were brickwork. Something nasty—lichen?—sprouted on the mortar. The doors here were stained a dark brown, almost the color of dried blood. Verdigris greened the brass numerals. The doorknobs and locks were of antique style.
Another few steps…and there was room 155. Hafez scowled. He was sure he’d passed no other doorways. Starting back, he murmured, “Truly there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God.”
Maybe the shahada revealed the hidden. Maybe Hafez just hadn’t paid attention before. At any rate, there it was, the door with TO SPECIAL COLLECTIONS on it in corroded brass letters. Hafez opened it and started up the stairs.
If anything, the AC in the stairwell did its job too well. It was positively arctic in there. Even the chill, though, didn’t quite mask the musty, even mephitic reek rising up from the treads and risers. Hafez couldn’t name that faint stench, but, had he had any hair at the nape of his neck, it would have stood on end. Being made of stern stuff, he climbed on regardless.
“Thank you, Lucinda,” Wilbur Armitage said, and returned the telephone handset to its cradle.
The head of the Miskatonic University Library’s Special Collections sighed as he straightened. Armitages had served the university and the library for generations. Wilbur was tall and lean and scholarly-looking, with gold-framed bifocals. People said of him that he might have been born in a three-piece suit.
Right now, he hoped his herringbone tweed waistcoat hid the pounding of his heart. Nodding to his assistants, he said, “He’s coming.”
All three of them exclaimed in dismay. Marlene Yarrow, who was his niece and who would likely succeed him one day, said, “He shouldn’t get the book, Uncle Wilbur.”
“That’s right!” Jason Griffith looked like a student himself, but had a thoroughly unmodern respect for the antiquities housed here. “The Necronomicon is dangerous—and the sun is warm, and the ocean is damp, and Pluto is a little way off from here.” Petros Papagos, the third Special Collections junior librarian, tossed his head in vigorous Hellenic agreement.
But Armitage shook his own head. “No,” he said, and then repeated it for emphasis: “No. Interlibrary loan is…Mm, I hesitate to use the word sacred, but I mean something not far from it. Not all libraries have all books. Not all scholars can come to a library that does have a book they need. Sometimes the mountain must go to Muhammad rather than the reverse.”
Marlene made a face. “Did you have to pick that particular phrase, Uncle Wilbur? With all the chaos in the Muslim world these past few years…”
“Al-Azhar University is a member in good standing of the interlibary-loan system,” Wilbur Armitage replied. “Faculty members in the Near Eastern Studies Center here have interlibrary-loaned material from its holdings. And Google shows what a distinguished scholar of early Islamic mysticism Professor al-Zubi is.”
“If he really asked for the book.” Petros Papagos had a loud, nasal, irritating voice. “If this fellow picking it up really is his grad student. Do you want a book like—that—in the hands of some of the gangs of murderers who use Islam as an excuse to do what they want to do anyhow?”
“All my e-mail and snailmail correspondence with Professor al-Zubi has been impeccably correct,” Armitage said. “I have no reason to doubt he has both reason to consult this text and the ability to navigate it with as much safety as anyone is likely to. I also have no reason to doubt that Mr. Goma studies with him. And furthermore—”
He broke off. He and his assistants all heard the footsteps in the small antechamber outside the Special Collections unit. Very softly, Marlene Yarrow said, “He’s here.”
As he had at the circulation desk, Hafez presented his documents to the old man in charge of Special Collections. Wilbur Armitage looked at them more closely than the kafir girl out front had, but even the forged passport was proof against any naked-eye scrutiny and most though not all lab tests.
After a few seconds, Armitage handed back the paperwork. “Everything seems to be in order,” he said. “Let me take you to the volume you need. There are certain precautions you will need to follow while transporting it to Professor al-Zubi.”
“He has told me to obey you as if you are my father,” Hafez said. “What you say to me, I will do.”
“Come this way, then,” Armitage said.
The Necronomicon had a small room to itself. A combination lock kept out the uninvited. Armitage interposed his body while he spun the dial this way and that so Hafez couldn’t learn the numbers. After a click, the door swung open. It might have a wooden veneer, but it was at least ten centimeters of solid steel. Hafez didn’t know the steel was specially hardened, but who would go to so much trouble for second-rate protection?
“I can understand Professor al-Zubi’s eagerness to work with the original Arabic text at last,” the Special Collections chief said. “We only, ah, acquired this mansuscript a little more than twenty years ago ourselves.”
“Yes,” Hafez said, and not another word. He thought, You got it after some kafir thief stole it when America invaded Iraq. While he could think that, coming out with it seemed inexpedient.
Inside, the codex sat on a flat-topped wooden lectern. It was bound in pale, thin, soft leather of a kind Hafez did not recognize at once. Not sheepskin, not even the accursed pigskin … He gulped, realizing what that binding had to be. He had seen and done hard things in service to the rising Caliphate, but never any to match the chilling deliberation that went into the making of that volume.
A belt cut from the same leather held the Necronomicon clo
sed. The buckle and tongue were of gold. Four stout steel chains secured the codex to the lectern, which was in turn bolted to the floor. Hafez got the odd feeling that they were there less to protect the book from thieves than to keep it from escaping.
“You will keep the belt closed at all times before the volume reaches Professor al-Zubi,” Armitage said as he freed the Necronomicon from the chains one by one. “At all times—do you understand me? Otherwise, I cannot answer for your safety, or for that of those around you.”
“Hearkening and obedience, my master,” Hafez said. “But may I not open it for just a moment, here in this warded room, to make sure it is indeed the work I seek?”
Wilbur Armitage plainly wanted to say no. As plainly, he saw he couldn’t. “That is a fair request,” he said with a sad cluck. “I will take the risk. Don’t waste any time when I undo the belt, though.”
“Hearkening and obedience,” Hafez repeated.
After closing and locking the armored door, the kafir undid the belt and quickly lifted the front cover. Hafez leaned forward. Though no graduate student, he knew what he needed to know. The Arabic script was archaic, much like that on the black flag he followed. The text was as appalling as he’d been led to believe it would be. And the way the words began to run and glow and seemingly take on a life of their own…
“Close it!” he gasped. “In God’s name, close it!”
Breathing hard, as if from some uncommon physical effort, Armitage did. The fabric of the world might have let out a sigh of relief as he fastened the belt once more. “You see what I mean,” he said heavily.
“I see, yes,” Hafez replied. “It will not open again until the professor opens it. He has the wisdom and holiness to wrestle with such and prevail.”
“He’d better,” Wilbur Armitage said.
“May I take it?” Hafez asked. The kafir scholar did not tell him no, but set about unsealing the strongroom again. When Hafez lifted the Necronomicon, it was heavier than its size would have suggested, then suddenly lighter, as if accepting him and his purposes. A good omen, he thought. God wills this.
He put the book in his backpack and carried it out of the strongroom and out of the Miskatonic University library. By the time he left the university campus, it felt feather-light. All would go well. He was sure of it. All could hardly help going well.
Jason Griffith rolled his eyes. “Wilbur, you’re the boss, but I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along. “If that Goma guy is what I’m afraid he is, it’s like giving North Korea an ICBM.”
“Worse,” Petros Papagos said. “An ICBM just sits there. You have to do things with it. That damned book”—not wanting to name the Necronomicon, he described it instead—”does things on its own.”
“Which is what I was about to say when Mr. Goma got here,” Wilbur Armitage replied. “In worrying about what his possible friends may do with the volume, you forget or misunderstand one key fact. As it has shown again and again down through the centuries, my friends, the Necronomicon is more than capable of taking care of itself.”
The rental car from Arkham back to Boston. A redeye from Boston to Rome, one made all the more vein-tracked because the three-year-old in the next row back wouldn’t stop kicking Hafez’s seat and singing. He knew many ways to kill, some quick, some slow and horrible. On an airplane, he couldn’t use any of them. He had to endure.
Having endured, he shambled from the Delta Gate to one for Turkish Air for the flight to Ankara. He dozed a little then: just enough to leave him even more exhausted than he would have been with no sleep at all. A Turkish customs inspector with a bushy black mustache eyed the Necronomicon with more curiosity than he should have. Three discreetly passed engraved portraits of Benjamin Franklin left him incurious once more.
Hafez claimed a new rental car with no trouble, but by then his body was threatening revolt. You could run on coffee and nerves only so long. He got a fair meal and a soft bed at a hotel by the airport and came close to sleeping the clock around. Another bowl of lamb stew and he was on the road.
The farther south and east he went, the narrower and more potholed the roads he traveled became. He skirted several checkpoints full of hard-faced men with assault rifles. He wasn’t always sure whose checkpoints they were. The Turkish government claimed this land. So did the Kurdish savages who actually lived on it. And the Caliphate’s wingspan was grown wide enough to make the hot, barren countryside debatable in a whole new way.
Likewise debatable was the border between Turkey and the wreckage of Syria. The Turks wanted neither Kurdish rebels nor fighters for the Caliphate sliding into their country from Syria. They cared much less about who and what went the other way. Hafez would have used a real border crossing if he’d had to. He didn’t have to. Driving the little VW down a twisty dirt track from one land to the other proved easy as you please. The rental-car company would never see the VW again, but he wasted no sympathy on it.
Only an hour or so south of the border lay the town of ar-Raqqah, which had flown the Caliphate’s black banner for some time. Before Syria’s multicornered civil war engulfed it, ar-Raqqah had held close to a quarter-million people. Its population was a good deal smaller now. To purify the faith, the Caliphate’s Sunni warriors had dynamited Shi’a mosques. What else could one do with those nests of heresy and error?
In ar-Raqqah were the men to whom Hafez was charged to deliver the Necronomicon. Having grown up in Iraq, he didn’t know the town well. He had to ask for directions twice, the second time because the first man sent him the wrong way. If I ever set eyes on that son of a diseased sow again, he thought, I’ll kill him.
Night was falling when he found the house he needed. The men waiting there, the ones who would send the mad Arab scholar’s spells against the accursed infidels, gave their names only as Khalid and Ibrahim. Well, to them he was just Hafez. Khalid was no more than a few years older than he; with gray frosting his beard, Ibrahim had to be nearing fifty, poor man.
“You made sure it was what you were sent for?” the older man asked as Hafez carefully extracted the Necronomicon from his backpack. It barely fit. And touching that binding made him want to perform a ritual purification every time he had to do it.
He nodded now. “In the name of the Compassionate, the Merciful, there can be no doubt,” he said, fighting back a shudder. “God grant you both the strength to use it to our advantage.”
“May it be so,” Ibrahim replied.
“The American kafirs have their atom bombs and missiles,” Khalid said exultantly, “but with this book they deliver the implement of their destruction into our hands. Would you like to watch as we wreak havoc upon the misbelieving dogs and sons of dogs?”
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, Hafez remembered from one English class or another. He thumped his head with the heel of his hand to get the worthless fluff out of it. “Nothing would please me more, my brother,” he said.
Ibrahim carried the Necronomicon into the house. A flat lectern like the one at Miskatonic University waited for the codex. This lectern, though, was surrounded by a pentagram scribed inside a circle. Other circles, each one bearing its own particular mystic symbols, surrounded the small inner one.
Hafez’s brow furrowed. “Is this not pagan sorcery?” he asked in a troubled voice.
“It is a sensible precaution,” Ibrahim said as he set the book on the lectern. “When you fire an RPG, you try not to let the backblast from the motor scorch anyone, don’t you? That’s what we’re doing here—trying to make sure we don’t get scorched. By all means watch, but stay outside the circles if you value your hide.”
“I will.” Nothing could have persuaded Hafez to venture inside them.
“Let’s get on with it.” Khalid undid the belt that girdled the Necronomicon and opened it to a leaf he and Ibrahim must have chosen in advance.
Standing at a distance, Hafez could not see the way the text blurred and
shifted. He’d watched it before, though, in the Special Collections strongroom. The two operators began reading—chanting—a spell in the most ancient and frightful Arabic. But those transmogrifying letters betrayed them, for at a key juncture one used the imperfect tense while the other chose the future.
They stared at each other in horror. “You donkey!” Khalid shouted at Ibrahim.
“You imbecile!” Ibrahim screamed at Khalid.
A hand that was not there—Hafez didn’t know how he sensed it, but sense it he did, not that that helped—erased a centimeter of each chalked circle, from the outermost inward. When the last circle was opened, Ibrahim and Khalid both shrieked before slime and tentacles and darkness overwhelmed them.
Hafez remembered those shrieks as long as he lived. That was no more than another few seconds. Too late, he turned to flee. Darkness poured into his eyes and ears. Stinking slime drowned his shrieks, too.
Wilbur Armitage was in the habit of watching BBC World News in his small, neat bachelor apartment in Arkham. The BBC covered foreign affairs better than the American news networks did. In Armitage’s biased opinion, it would have had a hard time covering them worse than the American news networks did.
“Devastation is widespread in the northern Syrian city of ar-Raqqah, which for the past three years has been under the control of the so-called Caliphate,” the suave newsreader said. “These satellite images show how the heart seems to have been ripped from the town. There are as yet no pictures from the ground. Intelligence experts and photographic interpreters have differing explanations for the cause of the catastrophe, but there can be no doubt as to its severity.”
Sure enough, the center of ar-Raqqah just looked…gone. Armitage didn’t need to be a photographic interpreter to see that. To his untrained eye, some buildings had been pulled down, while others were gone so completely, they might have dissolved.
The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Page 7
