The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Lorelei scanned the Table of Contents, full of unusual names, reading one aloud. “Byakee Steak with Sautéed Mushrooms. Umm, he’s not too big on beef. Prefers chicken and fish or seafood.”

  Mrs. Perkins peered at the contents over her shoulder. “Well then, how about Shoggoth Soufflé. It can be made as a main course or as a dessert. And if he likes seafood, try Deep Ones Delight.”

  Lorelei turned to the page for Shoggoth Soufflé, a lightly baked dish made fluffy by beating egg whites into white sauce along with fish, cheese, egg yolks and other stranger ingredients. It didn’t look difficult to make but she had no idea what Shoggoth powder was or where to find it. “What is Shoggoth powder?”

  Mrs. Perkins sighed. “There might be some ingredients in the cookbook that require a visit to The Arkham General Store downtown. They specialize in those unique additives.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Oh, yes, my dear. It thickens the soufflé…or the soup. I noticed there is a recipe for Shoggoth Soup as well in there. I’m sure Professor Tuscarelli will find either dish fulfilling.”

  “All right, I’ll take out this book and try these recipes. I can stop by the Arkham General Store on my way home.” She grinned. “I remember passing it when I went to the Enticing Undies store. Thanks for helping me, Mrs. Perkins.”

  “You’re welcome, dear.” She whispered, “Between us girls, perhaps you can wear that nightgown after dinner to see if it brings out the beast in him.”

  Lorelei giggled. “If it does, I’ll come back to thank you again.”

  She waved goodbye, checked out the cookbook and went to the store for the shoggoth powder. Its box had the curious description “guaranteed to expand any dish exponentially to the 3rd degree.” She furrowed her brows and decided against asking the clerk to explain that, murmuring: “Hope that doesn’t have anything to do with the oven temperature!”

  At their quaint cottage along the Miskatonic River, she opened the kitchen windows to let in the breeze and sat at the table, perusing the book further. It certainly had some strange recipes, including one called A Sense of the Past with “Essential Saltes,” and a back section filled with Middle Eastern recipes with “Abdul Alhazred’s Favorites.” She decided to leave those alone and simply cook the Shoggoth Soufflé, using salmon as its base, since Tony enjoyed that fish.

  She preheated her oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and got to work. She made the white sauce and let it cool. Separating the yolks and whites of four eggs, she added the yolks one at a time to the white sauce with seasonings and then the salmon. She beat and whipped the egg whites with her mixer until they stood in peaks. Now it was time to add the shoggoth powder, the special ingredient. She opened the small package and peered inside. It was a fine white powder with little specks of green and pink mixed in that almost resembled little eyes. The recipe called for three tablespoons sprinkled liberally over the beaten egg whites. The powder looked festive on the whites, which she then folded into the sauce with her rubber spatula. Lorelei poured the completed mixture into her soufflé dish and placed it in her preheated oven to bake for the allotted thirty to forty minutes.

  She was rather glad that she had stocked the kitchen with cooking dishes and utensils when they first moved to Arkham, having made some home-cooked meals in the early days of their marriage before his work pushed their relationship to the side lines. But she was equally glad that she had also picked up some broccoli and a cherry pie today at the general store for veggies and dessert. Just getting the soufflé cooked properly took all of her late afternoon energy. It was done and apparently successfully by 5:30 p.m.

  She picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Tony’s office to let him know she had prepared a special dinner for them. To her surprise, he was pleased and said he would be home in twenty minutes. Lorelei set the table, steamed the broccoli and put a chilled bottle of rosé wine on the table. She had been saving the wine for a special occasion and this seemed an apt time.

  As Tony came in the door, she was placing the broccoli, rolls and butter, and the soufflé on the table. “Well, this certainly looks scrumptious. What caused you to cook us a feast for a change?”

  “I visited the library as you suggested and found a unique cookbook, honey. I hope you like the meal. I made a salmon soufflé.”

  They sat back, sated by her cooking and pleasantly buzzed from the wine. Tony belched. “My word. That soufflé was rather filling. And had a strange but satisfying taste I can’t quite place.”

  Lorelei smiled. “That was probably the shoggoth powder, Tony. The dish is called Shoggoth Soufflé and uses three tablespoons of the powder blended into the egg whites.”

  “Shoggoth? Come now, that’s a reference to a literary creature created by a famous local author. It’s described as a shape-shifting, gelatinous, giant amoeba with eyes, mouths and pseudopodia. I doubt that shoggoths are actually involved in this recipe or in that powder.”

  “It’s a white powder with green and pink specks in it. They do look a little like tiny eyes.” She giggled, the wine making her light-headed. “They actually sell the powder at the Arkham General Store, along with ordinary veggies and fruits and baked items.”

  “And no doubt the container shows a monster on it, a tourist-trap item for fans of horror literature. Well, no matter. I hope you’re going to continue cooking as delightfully as you’ve done today, dear.”

  “How delighted are you, Tony?” She had risen and was clearing the table.

  He glanced up at her as she began soaking the dishes, glasses and cutlery.

  “I can clean up later. I have another surprise for you, honey, but I have to put it on in the bedroom. Are you game?”

  He stood up and walked over to her, putting his arms gently around her waist, nuzzling her neck. “I have to admit I’m curious. Shall we repair to the bedroom? I’m feeling expansive this evening.”

  Lorelei met his lips happily and wondered if that shoggoth powder was magical.

  Professor Anthony Tuscarelli did not have his mind on books, arcane, modern or anything in between. That much Lorelei was certain of, the moment she appeared in the doorway of their bathroom wearing the black lace and silk nightgown, the perfume and carrying the scented lubricant. His behavior afterwards brought back happy memories of their honeymoon in the Caribbean Islands.

  At one point as she was sighing and moaning from his hands and lips and other body parts, the lovely nightgown crumbled on the floor as she and Tony wrestled on the bed, she noticed a strange slithering sensation on her now naked body. It was far too long and thick to be his “little dancing man,” her pet name for his manhood, but it played up and down her inner thighs, bringing her to an ecstatic peak as it changed direction and she cried out with surprised pleasure.

  Later, as she rained kisses on Tony’s body, she noticed the tiny eyes around his stomach as they watched her appreciatively, and saw the small tentacles caress her tenderly before contracting back into Tony’s flesh to shrink within it, hidden from view. Tony groaned and reached out his hand to caress her face and neck. “Shoggoths,” he murmured. “It seems they’re real. I feel so strange, but they don’t hurt, and I seem to be able to control them.”

  “Are you angry with me? The librarian said the powder was safe. Do you need medical attention?”

  He hesitated. “I believe I could get used to them. Do they frighten you?”

  “Frighten me? It’s like you’ve grown built-in sex toys, honey. Mmn!” She bent down and her teeth nipped at his chest. The tiny green and pink eyes winked at her.

  “Then I think we’ll keep this development to ourselves. People for decades have said Arkham has some mystical qualities and the Miskatonic Library, some unique volumes that might not always be considered fiction. Up until tonight, I discounted such rumors. But starting tonight, we have to explore the possibility that fact may indeed be stranger than fiction here. I’ll have to start perusing some of the library’s ancient treasures more thoroughly. It will no doubt change
my curriculum.”

  Lorelei nibbled at her lower lip. “Tony? I ate the Shoggoth Soufflé, too. How come I’m not sprouting eyes and tentacles?”

  He laughed softly but with a maniacal edge. “Do you want to?”

  “Not really. They wouldn’t complement any bikini I wore!”

  “Perhaps only the human male is affected. We’ll have to explore the other recipes in this Gastronomicon. Perhaps there are antidotes to these side effects.”

  “Then you want to be cured?”

  He reached out and turned off the bedroom lamp, pulling her close to him. She felt his hands, lips and other pleasant appendages begin to caress her body. “The night is young,” he said. “Let’s sleep on it, and see what dreams might come.”

  THE WHITE DOOR

  DOUGLAS WYNNE

  What would you say if I told you there is but one book in all the world that reveals a true account of the realms beyond death? You’ve heard the claim before, of course, from men of cloth and cap who would tell you the title for free and how to read it for a fee. But what if I told you that there has never been more than a single copy of this book, and that it roams the libraries of the world at will? What if I told you that of all the books in the world, there is but one that reads the reader?

  I first heard of The White Door when I was a student at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Even then, in my adolescence, I was predisposed to doubt the popular claims of the world’s religions. Were they true, then surely their adherents would be endowed with powers and proofs beyond refute. Unlike men of science, the religious have failed to produce the miracles that would validate their claims. And yet, precisely because of this lack of empirical proof for a world beyond ours, I have searched for it since boyhood with a hunger all the more ravenous for the scarcity of crumbs from the philosophical table.

  That embarrassing hunger, which I’d long kept secret from family and friends, came to the fore when at Exeter I found a small band of likeminded seekers in Professor Nourse’s Parapsychology Club. I still considered myself a skeptic in those days, albeit one yearning for conversion, and I would often critique the tepid proofs of my fellow students when they offered anecdotal evidence to support their favorite claims. In retrospect, I suppose I was challenging myself, deriding my own obsessions aloud in order to test their veracity. Professor Nourse indulged my windy critiques, but he also maintained the core practice of the academy, adhering to the Harkness round table method of discussion even in our student club, sketching a web of lines around a template of the table to keep track of who in our group had spoken and who deserved a turn. Only when Nourse himself brought forth an outlandish claim would I absorb it without debate.

  Please don’t think I took my teacher’s claims on faith, I did not. But unlike my fellow students, the man had been a sifter of shadows for long decades before I was born and could be counted upon to present only the most veritable pieces of lore to our assembly.

  I received the data on The White Door from him in scattered fragments over several semesters, and each made an indelible impression on my mind.

  “There’s a legend about a book that haunts the libraries of the world,” he told us after school one afternoon in his classroom. I remember focusing my gaze on the chalk dust swirling in a shaft of autumnal light bisecting the wood floor as I listened.

  “When it isn’t roaming, it supposedly resides at Miskatonic University where its leaves were bound by the school’s most renowned librarian, Henry Armitage.”

  This met with grunts and murmurs. We were all familiar with Armitage and the collection he’d once curated. And for that reason, the conversation took a series of sharp turns touching on the more notorious tomes rumored to be kept under lock and key at the university.

  Some months later, over dinner in the professor’s cramped apartment where the club had gathered to ride out a nor’easter, I resurrected the subject.

  “What more can you tell us about the roaming book?”

  Nourse grinned. “Well, the call number, for one thing. It’s 133.9 ARM.”

  I can still hear the crystal claws of ice flakes tapping against the glass in the brief silence that followed.

  “One thirty-three for Paranormal and Occult Studies,” Brett Wheaton said, showing off.

  “And nine for The Afterlife,” I finished for him. We didn’t have the entire Dewey Decimal system memorized, but most of us were well versed in the section that catalogued our obsessions.

  “Correct.” Nourse said. “And ARM to indicate the editor, although as the story goes, Armitage did no editing whatsoever. He merely took a folio of loose incantations recorded in a single hand and had them bound to preserve them for the stacks.”

  Patrick Ellis interjected: “You’ve seen this book?”

  “On the occasions when I’ve visited the university, it was…unavailable.”

  I noticed that he didn’t exactly answer the question, didn’t say that he hadn’t ever seen the book, only that he hadn’t seen it at Miskatonic. “Unavailable, but surely not listed as checked out,” I said. “They would never allow an edition of one to leave the building.”

  He nodded. “However, I was able to study Armitage’s firsthand account of the book’s production. Very interesting, that. He never describes the contents explicitly, but he does express his consternation that what he knew to be a book of incantations became something else once it was bound. He had quite a row with the binder.”

  In the spring of my junior year the professor hired three of our group to help him with landscaping at his mother’s house in Stratham. I recall sitting on the back deck at the end of a full day’s work, drinking fresh squeezed lemonade, the condensation on my glass turning the dirt on my fingers to tears of thin mud, when I revived the topic again.

  “Professor, assuming that Armitage’s account is true, what do you suppose caused the change in the contents of The White Door? Did he ever accept the possibility that the binder didn’t bind the wrong pages?”

  Nourse swirled melting ice cubes around a vortex in his half-empty glass. “Being a very rational sort of man, Armitage dances around the conclusion, but…the pages he brought to the binder were hand-written on parchment, and the leather-bound book that came back was filled with pages of the same parchment, written in the same hand. He even recognized particular stains, having examined the leaves carefully before submitting them. Only the contents differed. He could not account for it. When he calmed down, he realized that the number of pages also matched. He never states what he read in the bound book, only that he asked a colleague to also read it so they could compare their impressions. He doesn’t name the other man, yet makes it clear that to him it was a third text; one he found far more terrifying than what Armitage had led him to expect. The two men had read two different books within the same boards.”

  I chuckled at this, but the laugh sounded false to my own ears. “How is that possible?”

  In his dirty jeans and white t-shirt, Nourse looked more like a gravedigger than a professor. He fixed his gaze on his earth-clotted shoes and shook his head. It was the first time I’d seen him at a loss for words.

  I embarked upon my own search the following week, starting with the libraries of southern New Hampshire before venturing further afield on weekends to Massachusetts and Maine. At school I began working detours through the library into my schedule, often arriving late for my classes when the errand sent me too far off-course.

  But the book never appeared on the shelves.

  Summer vacation expanded my reach. When my classmates returned in September, bronzed from New England’s beaches and lakes, I would be as pale as the day we’d left. Although I must confess that having retained a fear of drowning since childhood, I didn’t consider my time indoors a sacrifice.

  In my senior year, I finally made the pilgrimage to Miskatonic University to examine Armitage’s original documents. But there were no great revelations waiting in the source material. I had learned more from the kind
red spirits I occasionally encountered in the stacks caressing rows of call number stickers, the clear plastic wrappers crackling beneath their desperate, sweaty fingers. Always the same numbers—a litany of cabalistic equation: 131, 133…133.9…hungry eyes searching for leather under the laminate.

  Most were older and had been searching far longer than I. They had the look of addicts in their gaunt faces. But were they all addicted to something they had never sampled? For a long time I was too timid to ask. And the more of them I crossed paths with, the more convinced I became that if the book even existed, it had long since been stolen by the last seeker who’d found it.

  In time my curiosity overcame my temerity and I began prying the competition in the musty aisles, collecting theories about The White Door.

  Most agreed it was an account of the afterlife and that each reader saw in its pages a different realm: the one to which he or she would be transported at the moment of death. This was the core mythology, but descriptions of the book’s physical details differed widely, the legends of its legacy even more so. Some said the leather was black, others red or white. Most agreed that the spine had raised bands and that a geometric symbol from the text was stamped in gold leaf on the cover but no two descriptions of the symbol aligned. One popular theory held that the binding together of the spells had activated them.

  In Rhode Island I met a lawyer from Cleveland who claimed the book was illustrated with woodblock prints that came to life like opium dreams. In London, where I studied abroad for a year after graduation, a homeless schizophrenic who claimed he’d once been a prosperous antiquarian book dealer told me he had spent his life’s savings traveling the world in search of our mutual obsession and had found it twice. On the first occasion, he had attempted to leave the library with it only to find a different book in his hands when he reached the sidewalk: a cheap fiction by a best-selling horror writer. When his second chance arrived years later, he read the book from cover to cover on the spot.