“Adding to the mystery is the fact that the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel all deny striking ar-Raqqah,” the newsreader continued. “Incoherent early reports from survivors, obviously not translated well, speak of great glowing eyes in the night and sucker disks. Perhaps some experiment with disabling psychedelic drugs went horribly wrong for the Caliphate, although ISIS portrays itself as victim rather than perpetrator.” He paused. “We also have breaking news on the latest unrest in Greece.”
Wilbur Armitage stood up and stretched. Strange how such strict and strident Muslims chose an English acronym straight from Egyptian mythology. Or perhaps not so strange after all, given the headlines coming out of ar-Raqqah. One never knew, did one?
He went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of a nice California chablis, and poured himself a glass. He raised it in salute, though he wasn’t sure what he was saluting. He was sure of one thing, though: he’d done right by the interlibrary-loan system. As he’d told his younger colleagues, the Necronomicon could take care of itself. He felt confident that sooner or later the manuscript would find its way back to Miskatonic.
He sipped, savored, slowly nodded. That was a nice chablis.
A TRILLION YOUNG
WILL MURRAY
In cold print, there is cold comfort. Once set in type, a book is as permanent as the paper or parchment upon which it was printed. A typographical error will stubbornly survive as a permanent stain, even after it is carefully corrected in succeeding printings. More ominously, a missing paragraph will not be suspected by the unscholarly reader unless he is prepared to consult previous editions.
Some books, of course, are better left unread. And there are sound reasons why certain hoary grimoires do not survive, except under lock and key. Nor is it to be condemned that some of these accursed volumes are so often consigned to the flames by those spiritually wise ones who understood their corrupting power.
Of the two editions of the Necronomicon held in trust by the Miskatonic University Library at Arkham, Massachusetts, one is never consulted. This is the original Koine Greek translation of the Arabic work. Since few can obtain permission to consult its crumbling pages, its dark secrets remain safe from curious eyes.
This is not true of the 17th century edition crafted in Spain and translated into Latin by the many-times-accursed scholar, Olaus Wormius. This moldering volume, too, is kept under lock and key. Accredited scholars are permitted to consult it for no more than one hour at a time, and at strict two-week intervals, calculated to discourage all but the most trusted and determined of prying men.
Those had been the prevailing restrictions dating back to the 18th century. Alas, with the coming of the new millennium, library rules became decreasingly strict, until finally some genius thought it prudent to digitize the Necronomicon.
At first, this radical act was rationalized by a new curator with the mania for preservation. Carefully, over intervals of a month, the hitherto-proscribed work was undertaken by a librarian who could not read Latin—this simple rule being the only intelligent precaution attending the methodical operation.
The volume was successfully scanned, its metal clasps closed tight, the crumbling particles of loose paper swept into a dustpan and unceremoniously burned. The otherwise-intact book was restored to its individual vault, whose combination passed orally from chief librarian to chief librarian going back to the year 1845.
After the 16th Miskatonic chief librarian succumbed to a sudden stroke in the year 2002, there was a period of ten years wherein the Wormius Necronomicon could not be consulted, owing to the happy fact that the combination had perished from living memory when the brain of said chief librarian—Atticus Lowell by name—was destroyed by the fortunate stroke. This only forestalled the inevitable.
During the renovation of the Miskatonic Library’s rare book annex in the year of 2012, it became necessary to extract the vault itself from the wall in which this particular edition was archived. This necessitated the breaking open of the strongbox vault, and so the fell edition came to light once more, on a date marked by no modern calendar, but would remembered by succeeding but dwindling generations as the Black Day.
As it happened, the chief librarian consulted this edition of the Necronomicon out of idle curiosity. Having been born into a generation to whom the study of Latin was optional, not mandatory, he could not read a line of the accursed text.
He did, however, discover two book scorpions patrolling among its pages, and not understanding that they were not vermin, but useful creatures who ate the booklice that so often infect old paper, brushed them onto a sheet of foolscap and disposed of them unhelpfully.
It was in the aftermath of this unfortunate error that a decision of the Board of Regents was made to permanently recategorize the rare volume as permanently out of bounds for consulting.
As a consequence, the digitized version which had been laying dormant on a Windows PC machine that was not connected to the Internet was fired up, and the world’s only digital Necronomicon was copied onto a memory stick. This harmless stick was inserted into numerous institutional devices, copied onto handheld electronic readers, and made widely available in the main library and subsequently on the World Wide Web, inadvertently initiating an electronic virus of a new and inexplicable type.
None of the unthinking human drones who executed this terrible plan were aware of their role in the unfolding of events. Few of them read Latin, and those who did were not able to compare texts, otherwise they would have been mystified as to how the three obscure transcription errors in the original Wormius edition had been corrected.
The concept of typographical errors correcting themselves never passed through any of their dull, unimaginative brains. Autocorrection for ancient Latin did not exist.
Library.Miskatonic.edu was a prestigious email address, so no one suspected that it might harbor any malicious code. The subject line NECRONOMICON did not trigger any undue alarm among the ignorant. To those to whom the title evoked forbidden fruit, it was a Cthulhusend.
And so it commenced.
The first day that the Al Azif virus executed itself, a clever hacker easily cracked the DRM encryption technology, essentially permitting the Necronomicon replicate exponentially, setting itself loose upon the world. That the worm was initially limited to cyberspace was immaterial. It soon burrowed its way into the Dark Web.
There were those who, in their zeal for open access to hitherto-forbidden information, undertook translations into English, and other prevailing modern languages. Those fools needn’t have bothered.
For by the end of fourteen hours, the Necronomicon had begun translating itself into numerous languages, modern, ancient and several entirely alien and unknown. Like a virus, it mutated, thus infecting new hosts with impunity.
Recipients of these translated texts, unaware of the process by which they came into being, did not suspect that they were in receipt of a sentient entity in the form of an ancient text. They simply rejoiced in their foolishness, and in the fact that the dreaded Necronomicon—for generations off-limits to all but a very select coterie of scholars and dabblers in the occult—was now in the public domain and available to all.
History—such as remained of it—does not record the name of the first human being to discover that the Necronomicon virus was interactive. The speed and fluency with which the hyper-infectious worm reproduced and transmitted itself was such that numerous persons were simultaneously yoked under its insidious thrall.
On the second day, planetary coherence began unraveling.
In Cairo, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, and elsewhere, there were assassination attempts against sitting heads of state, all successful, and all taking place in such a way that it appeared certain that some human agency was coordinating the simultaneous outrages.
The CIA was blamed, of course. As were the state Intelligence apparatus of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and several other states, both rogue and n
ot—that political distinction being purely subjective.
Six nuclear power plants, all computer-controlled, roared out of control, with disastrous consequences rivaling those of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Entirely apart from that, rolling blackouts struck major metropolitan areas, and after being rectified, returned, or moved on, as if some sentient thing which greedily devoured electrons was on the prowl, unseen.
Aircraft—those with fly-by-wire technology—dashed themselves against mountains, buildings, and into one another in midair, their screaming pilots helpless. Cars also crashed, but only those with sophisticated computer interfaces.
Amid all this, attendance in church, temple, mosque and other houses of worship inexplicably faded into insignificance. In past times of terror, it typically exploded. A fearsome populace did not consult their holy books, seeking understanding of this newly-threatening End Time. Instead, they flew to their personal copy of the Necronomicon for guidance.
The world appeared to be flying apart. But no one could pinpoint the source of the emergent chaos. They were too busy participating in it, unawares.
The most significant figure in this unraveling was a virologist named William Luck.
Luck was immersed in the study of emergent viruses of the biological pathogen type, not of the electronic kind. The Ebola virus having been knocked aside for the moment, Luck was focusing his attention in a new and not-well- understood enterovirus which had been dubbed the Vanderhoof virus, from the researcher who had first identified it. Officially, it was designated EV-C17.
The virus appeared to have originated in the Plateau of Leng, in Central Asia, and carried out into China, from there vectoring into Southeast Asia, Eastern Russian and Mongolia, spreading globally by the usual means—international plane travel.
The first fatality recorded in the United States had succumbed in the emergency room of a San Francisco hospital and, during that brief period, had infected a nurse.
The first patient briefly struggled for her life, having lost her sight in the early stages of the infection. She also complained that her skin crawled as if ridden with vermin, and bristles resembling insect hair were sprouting from the moist portions of her anatomy—armpits and pubes particularly.
“Morgellons disease,” was the clinical pronouncement.
The doomed patient gasped. “That sounds horrible.”
“It’s believed to be psychosomatic,” the attending physician went on dismissively.
The patient groaned. Her grasp of English was not very good, and alas unsophisticated. She assumed that psychosomatic was a clinical term for fatal.
In that error, she was entirely correct, for she died the next day while being examined by an ophthalmologist who was trying to figure out why her optic nerves had ceased functioning.
The patient began gasping and wheezing and went into cardiac arrest. No stimulant—whether electrical or medicinal—could bring her back to life. So the bed sheet was draped over her staring lifeless eyes by the attending nurse.
Her final words were, “They are burrowing beneath my skin. Make them stop.”
That epitaph cleared up a question the ophthalmologist had. To wit: Why the patient kept up an incessant scratching. Her bare forearms were striated scarlet, as if scratched by a dozen house cats.
The attending nurse went to bed that night, awoke as if from a nightmare as a disembodied voice in her room asked a single question:
“Don’t you know that you are part of something greater?”
A devout Catholic, the nurse fell asleep, thinking that the archangel Michael had spoken to her. The bedroom was so dark that she did not realize that she had lost her sight. The unfortunate nurse understood this only upon awakening and discovering that she dwelled in a world of smothering darkness. And her skin itched with a fierceness beyond ravages of poison oak.
The doomed nurse was named Jennifer Brown. By the time the ambulance had taken her to Mission Hospital where she formerly worked, she was terrified.
“I have the exact same symptoms as that Asian woman who died yester-day,” she told the emergency room physician.
That medico sought out the attending physician of the recent fatality and they put their heads together.
“Nurse Brown is complaining about severe itching, as if there are insects borrowing under her skin.”
“Formication,” pronounced the attending physician, a Dr. Blackfeather.
“I’m not familiar with that term, doctor,” admitted the emergency room physician, a Dr. Carter.
“It’s a sensation, almost always delusional, of insects borrowing under the epidermis. It’s common with people suffering from Morgellons disease.”
Norbert Carter had heard of the disease, so-called. He frowned.
“I understood that Morgellons is imaginary.”
Dr. Blackfeather nodded firmly. “It’s a psychiatric disorder, characterized by the delusion that the patient is infected by parasites, which leads to excessive scratching, producing abrasions and lesions out of which the patients claim that fibers or filaments grow. But no scientific test has produced evidence of any parasite or mycobacteria. It’s a recent phenomenon, dating back only a decade or so. Our best guess is that it’s a byproduct of self-diagnosing via the Internet.”
Carter looked blank.
Dr. Blackfeather explained, “The condition has been linked to the rise of online medical sites in which the pathologically psychosomatic read about the various viruses and microbial parasites that naturally infect the human body, and are overwhelmed by the knowledge that they are host to countless microscopic creatures.”
The other man nodded. “So any itch or twitch they feel, they blame on these creatures?”
“Exactly,” said Dr. Blackfeather. “Easy access to the fact that there are microscopic mites living on a person’s eyebrows, others infesting pubic hair, and all manner of little critters, seems to overwhelm sensitive imaginations, producing the delusion.”
“So it’s not really a disease, but a kind of psychosis transmitted through the Internet?”
Dr. Blackfeather smiled ironically. “You might go so far as to say that Morgellons is the result of excessive Googling.”
“What about the fact that both patients were struck blind in very short order?” asked Carter.
Dr. Blackfeather lost his thin smile. “Just because the two patients exhibited symptoms of so-called Morgellons, doesn’t mean that there isn’t something else going on. Something has affected their optic nerves. That’s the part that we need to figure out. Ignore all other symptoms.”
The young emergency room physician showed flexibility of mind that the older medical men lacked, thanks to years of social conditioning and willingness to except authority.
“Shouldn’t we leave our minds open to the possibility that something has been aping Morgellons?” he asked.
“What conceivable virus would or could mimic an imaginary disease?”
As a rejoinder, it was perfectly logical. However, it also ignored the facts at hand, which were profuse.
While this spirited conversation was going on, the unfortunate nurse expired.
Two autopsies were conducted. They showed that in both cases the lungs had filled with a strange fluid that was not typical of influenza, or other such lung diseases. Nor had either victim showed any signs of the flu.
The two doctors exchanged opinions in the hospital cafeteria over lunch.
“If the pathology tests not ruled them out,” Dr. Blackfeather mused, “I would have laid the blame on lungworms.”
“Sounds like one of those new enteroviruses that are popping up all over the planet,” Dr. Carter offered.
Blackfeather concurred, “I know a virologist who might help us with this. I’ll give him a call.”
Enter William Luck.
The virologist was in his home office going through electron microscope slides of several newly emerging viruses, paying particular attention to the Vanderhoof virus. The first electron-micros
cope images of the virus had been transmitted globally by a researcher at Bejing University.
“Some of these things look like they fell out of another dimension,” he muttered to himself.
A female voice called from the kitchen. “What? Did you say something?”
“I was just wondering out loud where all these new viruses are coming from,” Luck told his wife.
Deborah wandered in the room, took one look at the strange image on the screen and made a face. “What on earth is that?”
“First images of the Vanderhoof virus,” Luck told her.
“Hideous.” She left the room.
“Fascinating,” Luck murmured. Given that his salary depended upon understanding the new virus, William Luck’s objectivity might be called into question.
The virus consisted of a knot of filaments, which in this particular image displayed the blue-green of algae. They resembled very thin-bodied worms with black heads, twin horns along with round eyespots, and a forked tail, along with the suggestion of numerous centipede-like arms nested close to the body proper.
Studying these images caused a weird thrill of familiarity, even though this was the first time William Luck had laid eyes on this specimen.
He was searching his memory when his cell phone rang.
“Luck!” he barked.
“Dr. Luck, this is Dr. Blackfeather over at Mission Hospital. A colleague and I have encountered something that may be up your alley. We’ve had two patients expire, exhibiting symptoms of sudden-onset blindness and unexplained dermopathy, the latter symptoms which we ascribe to delusional parasitosis.”
“Intriguing. I’ll be right down.”
They met at Dr. Blackfeather’s well-lit corner office.
Outside, the world was in the early stages of its unraveling, but the three men scarcely suspected that. The ongoing blackouts were laid to an aging infrastructure, starved by an obstreperous Congress.
“The first victim flew in from Singapore,” Dr. Blackfeather was explaining. “Ethel Wong had not been here more than 48 hours when she showed up at our emergency room, blind as a bat, and complaining of formication.”
The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Page 8
