The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library

by Darrell Schweitzer

  He wouldn’t tell me what he saw in its pages. Only that it was devastating. He needed to peer inside the book a third time in the desperate hope that his destiny had changed, that this time he might glimpse a fate he could bear for the remainder of his days.

  Others told tales of heavenly dimensions, unfathomable ecstasies.

  The lawyer’s enthusiasm had been contagious, while the vagabond infected me with dread. I liked the lawyer more, but both men had reaffirmed what I already knew: to pursue the quest I would need capital and the freedom to travel.

  After college I went into finance. I traveled the world and built a small fortune. And while entire neighborhoods fell to foreclosure, overtaken in a tide of graffiti, weeds, and broken glass, while national economies swirled in strands of bloody water around the drain, I prospered. And I searched.

  And I found.

  When you scour the globe for the most elusive treasure, you don’t expect to find it close to home without fanfare. I suppose deep down I didn’t expect to find it at all and had kept up the search out of habit, an obsessive ritual from my school days that I couldn’t shake. I’d long ago given up on expecting a tingle of intuition upon entering a library, and so it took me utterly by surprise when at last I found The White Door in Newburyport, Massachusetts where I had settled my family to enjoy an early retirement in my fifties.

  On the fateful occasion I hadn’t even entered the library with the book on my mind. Children have a way of distracting you from your own priorities, and only after dropping my daughters off for Story & Craft Hour, did I find myself ascending the stairs to the quiet of the third floor, past the nonfiction stacks and empty study cubicles to the small occult section.

  I knew I’d found it before I was close enough to read the title—a black leather volume with raised bands standing out among the tattered new age paperbacks like a Masonic officer in a tuxedo and white gloves amid a crowd of hippies. I walked toward it as if in a dream, not quite believing what I saw, not knowing what I felt. And I realized in that moment that I no longer knew why I wanted to read this book, that I hadn’t known for years, had maybe never known.

  Had I embarked on this quest to find proof of a single piece of magic in a mundane world? Well, here at last was my proof, long after I ‘d mastered the spells of mathematics and accounting to conquer that mundane world.

  Did I really want to know what awaited me beyond death’s door? I’d seen what that knowledge had done to others.

  I slid the book off the shelf and thought of Professor Nourse. He was an old man nearing retirement when I’d paid my last visit to the academy, but his opinion of me still carried weight, and I feared he would think me foolish to still be chasing a phantom he had entertained me with as a boy. And yet, in his company it was all I could think of. My research had shown that most of what he’d told us had some basis in fact, but had he ever read the book?

  I had to know.

  After a few drinks and the sort of disclaimer adults make before inquiring about magic, I asked him flat out, “Did you ever find The White Door?”

  Nourse held my gaze in silence as tears welled up in his raw pink eyelids.

  “Yes,” he said at last, with a tone that conveyed how odd he found it that I’d never asked him before.

  “What did you find when you opened it?”

  He looked through me, beyond me, and said, “It’s so close now. So close.” And I wondered if he spoke to himself when he said, “It’s not so bad, not so bad. Better than ceasing to exist…it’s not so bad.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Right here at the school. One day there it was. Knocked the wind out of me.” He laughed.

  “And do you still look for it?”

  “No. I don’t need to see it again. Once was enough.”

  Emboldened by his admission, I confessed to having done a little research of my own after college. “No two accounts of the contents ever match. It’s enough to make you doubt the whole business. And of the few who claim to have seen it twice, some—but not all—visited different realms on each occasion. What do you make of that?”

  “Maybe…” he began, and paused to formulate the sentence in his mind before continuing, reminding me of his manner in the classroom. “Maybe a man’s final destination can change over the course of a lifetime. Remember, one of the oldest bits of lore about The White Door, one of the first things I ever told you boys about it, is that it’s the only book in the world that reads the reader. Maybe if you get a second look, it behaves like a GPS and…what do they say? Recalculates.“

  The notion chilled me for some reason I could not explain.

  It was the last time I saw Professor Nourse. I’d left him on that occasion expecting him to have more years, but he’d been right. When I last saw him, what lay beyond the white door was close.

  Driving east on 101 and leaving the academy behind, I contemplated the blank screen of my GPS and wondered what cosmic intelligence could be responsible for the recalculation of a man’s soul and its trajectory.

  I’ve never been a gambling man—except at work where the house always won—but I feel I am becoming one now; a man down and hoping for redemption before the clock runs out. I know the location of every library within a sixty-mile radius of my home, and I visit a new one every time I have reason to travel outside that radius.

  My children knew where to look for me when I didn’t appear with the other parents at the end of the story hour. They climbed the stairs, ran to my favorite aisle, and found me splayed on the floor regaining consciousness.

  The book was gone.

  The lawyer I’d met in Providence had it right. The White Door was illustrated. At least, for me it was. A woodblock print of a derelict cottage constituted the first page. Weeds reached through the broken windows and birds wheeled over the roof. Columns of oily smoke tumbled from the slouching chimney and from craters in the rocky ground upon which the structure was perched.

  The drawing reminded me of a tarot card. I felt a cold unease spreading in my belly as I brought my nose closer to the page, the leather clammy in my hands, the paper fragrant with a spice reminiscent of sandalwood. I saw that the birds were not birds at all but a shoal of alien fish with barbed beaks, bulbous veined sacks, and razor fins. The weeds groping through the window frames were fronds of seaweed, and the columns of smoke, noxious volcanic emissions bulging with the shadows of agonized faces. The lines wavered before my eyes, and, entranced, I swayed on my feet.

  A wash of green watercolor infused the black-and-white page, and with the color came a texture, a lace of filthy foam. I recoiled, fearing that I might vomit on the world’s rarest book. Only it wasn’t a book at all by then, it wasn’t even a window through which I beheld a world—it was a world, as real as the library had been only a moment ago. The pallid tip of a tentacle unfurled around the rotting door and pulled it inward, nearly ripping it from its barnacle encrusted hinges. The vortex sucked me through the water, a sensation of viscous fluid coursing through gills at my throat.

  The darkness swallowed me and before I lost consciousness, I had time to think that the day would come when I would never leave this place, that axons would pass in this house of shadow and ink, of necrotic suctioned embrace amid plumes of tortured shadows and my final, eternal prayer, howled in broken bubbles through a crumbling chimney at a surfaceless sea, would be a petition for extinction beyond the white door.

  ONE SMALL CHANGE

  P. D. CACEK

  It was only a small thing, or perhaps it wasn’t so small if you were of a certain age and had lived your entire life within the tidy, familiar confines of the town and its surrounding fields and woods. But small or not it was wrong, so wrong that it stopped her just short of the pedestrian crossing to cup hand to eyes and look up into a pale October morning sky.

  The geese were flying the wrong way.

  For all her sixty-three years, or at least the sixty she was cognizant of, Eleanor McCormack knew that when sum
mer was over and the air grew chilled and frost began to crackle underfoot geese flew south, and south in the small New England town she’d been born and raised in had always been in the direction of the fields of harvested corn and soybeans behind the Episcopal cemetery.

  Directions didn’t change and migratory birds like geese and ducks always flew south in the autumn and returned north the following spring. Always. It was a fact, pure and simple, and one that she could verify both personally and from verbal accounts told to her by her father and grandfather.

  Geese flew south for the winter and north in the spring.

  Indisputable.

  Yet there she stood watching a squadron of geese fly north toward the sheer bluffs and sea beyond and not south toward warmth and food.

  It was a small thing, but small in the way a poppy seed in the tooth or a splinter just under the skin is a small thing.

  It bothered Eleanor to the point where she slipped her index finger between her glasses and face and gently rubbed her eyes as if having suffered another sleepless night, the fourth in a row, had somehow disrupted her near legendary powers of observation.

  There wasn’t a child or adult in the town who hadn’t fallen under her gaze while aimlessly wandering the stacks or slouching like a melted candle at one of the reading tables, or, worse yet, giggling behind the covers of a respectable tome. Eleanor would stand quietly and watch, either from behind the fortress of the library’s original 1909 massive oak reference desk or at the end of the aisle, until the one observed felt the weight of her eyes against their skin.

  There’d be no foolishness in the library while she was on duty.

  Taking a deep breath, she pushed the lenses back in place. She may have gotten nearsighted in her old age, but her mind was clear, her memory sound and the birds were flying in the wrong direction.

  It had been the sound of their honks that made her look up and remember, if only for a moment, the hidden joy she’d felt as a child sitting hunched in her father’s duck boat watching the fluctuating arrowhead-sharp Vs cross the sky, while her father and grandfather readied their shotguns. It had always been her job to keep the dog, always a retriever or water spaniel, steady and calm until the shots were fired and the birds fell.

  Most of the time the birds were dead when they hit the water, but if they weren’t it was also her job to snap their necks, an easy enough task and one that made her feel part of something old and sacred.

  Eleanor never equated the dead birds bleeding onto the gunny sacks at her feed with the living geese that flew in formation across the sky. The dead birds were simply food and would continue to be harvested like walnuts and pumpkins year after year because geese were creatures of habit and instinct, not intellect.

  Which meant they should have been flying south.

  Her hand still shielding her eyes, Eleanor felt a frown deepen the lines on her forehead. This is wrong, she thought and was about to consider the reasons for the birds’ deviation when a horn sounded next to her. Taken by surprise, she jumped and her hand knocked the glasses halfway down her nose before she could stop herself.

  “Ah, ah oh!“

  Eleanor had never liked to be frightened as a child or caught unawares as an adult. She thought it undignified especially in her position, so when she turned, carefully pushing her glasses into their rightful position, she narrowed her eyes ready to deliver a withering glare.

  “Oh dear, did I scare you, Ellynor?”

  Eleanor’s glare gutted and went out.

  There was power in words, in names…especially in the horrible nickname that had been bestowed upon her by the bright and shining and young woman who now smiled up at her from behind the sporty little convertible’s steering wheel. The top was down and the woman’s hair, shining and bright as a new penny, was windblown perfection.

  If it had been possible, Eleanor would have used her best authoritative voice and commented about the impracticality of driving a convertible in autumn, in New England, especially for someone from Southern California. But if that had been possible Eleanor would also have spoken up and demanded to know why she, the young woman from Southern California, had been hired and made Head Librarian when there were more deserving candidates for the position…and no one more deserving than Eleanor herself who had been with the library longer than the transplanted Californian had been alive.

  Again, had it been possible, she would have screamed at the injustice of it all. But it wasn’t.

  Eleanor looked down and saw that the instep of her left shoe was on a crack in the sidewalk—step on a crack, break your mother’s back—and quickly stepped back even though her mother had been dead for seven years.

  “Oh, I did scare you, didn’t I?”

  The saccharin-sweet concern in the young woman’s voice made Eleanor look up.

  “Wh-wh-what? Oh, n-n-no. I w-w-was just—” Eleanor pressed her lips together and pointed to the sky. “B-b-but—G-G-Geese fl-flying wr-wr—”

  The young woman, Taylor Dickson, Ms. Dickson, leaned back against the car’s red and gray seat and looked up. The flock Eleanor had first noticed was gone, but there were two new flocks in the sky now, both formations heading north.

  Ms. Dickson smiled at the birds. “I just love to watch geese fly, especially here. I mean, we have honkers in California, especially in the winter, but it’s such a New England thing, isn’t it? I mean, I like palm trees and stuff, but geese just go better with the whole autumn leaves changing color thing, don’t they? Just like something out of a movie or on a post card.”

  When she finished Ms. Dickson dropped her chin and returned her attention to Eleanor. She hadn’t noticed that the geese were flying in the wrong direction.

  “Well, as much as I’d love to just sit here and—”

  The car behind hers, a dark sensible New England sedan, bleeped its horn to remind Ms. Dickson that a STOP sign was not a red light.

  “Sorry,” Ms. Dickson glanced at the driver in the rearview mirror and waved, the car easing forward. “Better hurry Ellynor, I don’t want to have to mark you late. See you!”

  Eleanor watched the little car slip away as another flock of geese headed north crossed the sky above her.

  Eleanor was five minutes late and as she passed the reference desk on her way to the staff lounge/lunchroom to hang up her coat and muffler, Ms. Dickson had smiled and said she wouldn’t mark down the infraction, this time, because it had partially been her fault, then suggested that Eleanor might want to leave a bit earlier so it wouldn’t happen again.

  Immediately after which she told Eleanor they were expecting an Inter-Library Loan shipment of requested books and to make herself available to accept it.

  Ms. Dickson hadn’t even bothered to look up from sorting the morning’s newspapers, smiling as if the assignment was nothing out of the ordinary; which it wasn’t except that beside logging the books in, Eleanor would also be responsible for contacting the person who made the request to let them know their book had arrived. She would also need to tell them if there were any restrictions placed upon their request.

  Eleanor would have to call up and talk to them—which was the thing she dreaded the most and Ms. Dickson knew that.

  Knew it from almost the first moment Ms. Dickson had been introduced to her “staff”: the two half-day librarians who shared storytelling duties, Tom, the custodian and Eleanor.

  When Eleanor was hired, fresh from college with the ink barely dry on her diploma, the library had a full staff which meant she’d been assigned to sort and reshelf books.

  While other Library Science graduates might have thought this beneath their skill and education level, Eleanor blossomed in her new position. It gave her the opportunity to be surrounded by books and lessened her need to speak and so expose herself to humiliation.

  It had been a dream and like all dreams ended much too soon, but by then Eleanor had perfected her observational acuity and most people, including the other librarians, were not inclined to speak to
her.

  Ms. Dickson had not been put off in the least.

  “You just need to talk more, not less,” she’d said after Eleanor had stuttered and stammered out an explanation as to why she couldn’t share “storytelling” duties and never answered the phone. “Didn’t you ever see The King’s Speech? I just love Colin Firth, don’t you? All you need to do is practice.”

  Eleanor had started trembling and to this day didn’t know if it had been from fear or anger.

  “B-B-But it’s im-im-impossib-b-b—”

  “It’s not impossible,” Ms. Dickson had said from behind her desk in her office, the office and desk that should have come to Eleanor despite her…problem. “All you have to do is try and stop being so negative. You’re just like Eeyore…”

  And then she did the most despicable thing Eleanor could have imagined. Ms. Dickson laughed.

  “You are just like Eeyore. Eeyore…Eleanor…Ellynor, that’s what we’ll call you. Ellynor, until you realize your worth and to not worry so much about how you sound. We love you, Ellynor. You just have to learn to love yourself, too. And don’t worry, I’ll help you all I can.”

  And part of the help was always putting Eleanor in charge of Inter-Library Loans.

  Since most libraries no longer had a Carnegie or Rockefeller to endow them, Inter-Library shipments came via the postal service which meant the requested volumes would arrive just after three that afternoon, with their regular mail…and also meant that Eleanor had all morning to fret and fume and work herself up into such a state that by lunchtime she couldn’t look at, let alone eat the tuna salad sandwich she’d brought for lunch.