The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

by James Lovegrove

  I, by contrast, was a darkly shadowed fellow, of medium height, with jet-black hair and the brooding pallor and stooped shoulders of one who prized intellectual pursuits above all else. I was more intelligent than Absalom, but lacked his charm. I was ever at pains to make myself presentable and had, I believe, some social graces, yet I was never as immediately likeable as my brother. He could win over just about any girl who crossed his path, whilst I had a tendency to flounder, tongue-tied, should a pretty eye turn my way. The amorous arts were something I found a mystery, although I was told several times that I was handsome enough. I suppose I lacked the self-confidence that Absalom had in abundance.

  His death hit us hard, as I say, and my parents retreated into mourning. The drapes were permanently drawn at our house. My mother took to dressing in black with all the avidity of an Italian widow, while my father scarcely left his study and, I regret to relate, took to the bottle with a vengeance. That summer, when I should have been looking forward to commencing at Miskatonic University, was a dismal season. In fact, I found it something of a relief to leave home when the time came. Neither parent even came out to wave me goodbye as my coach left. They had lost the light of their lives. I barely impinged upon their thoughts any more. I was Zachariah, my brother had been Absalom. I was the Z to his A, the omega to his alpha, the Esau to his Jacob. My parents would not miss me, of that I was almost certain. And several weeks into the new semester, when I had not heard one word from them, not even a brief letter, I knew it for sure. If there had ever been any hope of my rivalling their other son in their esteem, it was over. In memory he became sainted. Alive, I could not hold a candle to Absalom dead.

  * * *

  My first sight of Arkham, as we approached it along the Salem road, was unpropitious. A drizzle had set in, and through the coach’s steamed-up, rain-beaded windows I had glimpses of sagging gambrel roofs and, beneath, dun-coloured houses that seemed to crouch rather than rise. Parades of copper-leaved trees lined avenues that were somehow not quite broad enough, certainly not when compared with Boston’s, while streets meandered as though unconvinced of their own direction. I do not doubt that my depressed frame of mind did not incline me to look upon the town with magnanimity, yet I cannot say that any aspect of Arkham’s appearance evoked even a tiny leap of joy within my soul. Its one presiding virtue was that it was not, at least, Boston, which I had grown to associate only with misery and neglect.

  Arrival on the campus of Miskatonic University itself did little to lift my spirits. The bulky buildings looked forbidding when set against the glowering grey sky, more like fortresses than seats of learning. Students scurried about with their heads bent beneath the incessant rain, and their hither-and-thither dashing seemed mindless to me, almost insect-like. I began to wonder whether I had made a mistake in coming. Until then I had been quite content with the scientific investigation and experimentation I had been conducting at home. Already, on my own initiative, I had made several biological advances that I considered noteworthy, not least those pertaining to the brain. Numerous were the cerebra I had dissected and pored over – mainly animal but occasionally, when I could procure one, human – piercing with my scalpel the deeper mysteries of that organ with the tenacity of a jungle explorer hacking through undergrowth. I had discovered within it sub-organs and discrete regions not recorded in the anatomical textbooks, and had also been able to ascribe specific functions of the nervous system to certain areas of the brain which even the pioneering Italian neuroscientist Camillo Golgi of the University of Pavia – whose work was an inspiration to me – had failed to identify. Using electricity and microscopy I had traced the paths of synapses through tissue, thus establishing a cerebral cartography as accurate and detailed as any geographical map. The brain was my particular love, and I reckoned there was little about the thing known colloquially as “grey matter” that anyone could teach me. I have said that I was not self-confident, and I was not, but in this one respect I regarded myself the equal of all others. While the professors at Miskatonic University might be capable of adding to the general sum of my biological knowledge, I doubted they could significantly enhance my understanding in my one true field of expertise.

  Hence it was with misgiving and no little pessimism that I stood before the university’s imposing Alumni Hall, with its beetling bell tower, and contemplated my immediate future. Being granted a scholarship – a generous one, to boot – was nothing to be sniffed at, and it betokened the faculty’s faith in my prowess. Yet it would have been just as profitable for me, educationally if not financially, to have remained at home and continued my solitary studies there. I had made so many breakthroughs already by the tender age of eighteen, unaided, that there was no reason to think I could not continue to do so under the same conditions.

  It was just then, at that wavering, indecisive moment, that two events conspired to make up my mind for me. The first was that a man whom I shortly learned was Professor Cyrus Nordstrom appeared out of nowhere and started bellowing at me. I had contrived somehow to be in his way. My various pieces of luggage lay around me, and Professor Nordstrom’s passage was impeded by them, or so he claimed. I was far from being the only student present in the situation of having his possessions piled about him and looking rather bewildered. The steps of the Alumni Hall and the greensward in front were littered with suitcases, valises and trunks. Nonetheless Nordstrom wished to pass directly through the couple of square yards of ground I currently occupied, and he chose to treat me as an obstruction that he must remove by shouting rather than simply divert around.

  I confess to being taken aback by the sheer blunt force of the old fellow’s vituperation. His cheeks flushed crimson as he harangued me and his long black academic gown billowed behind him like the wings of some giant bat. He demanded my name, and I gave it to him quaveringly, along with a stammered apology, even though in my opinion I had done nothing wrong. Yet this drove him to greater heights of indignation, as though by saying sorry I was somehow admitting culpability.

  How long I endured that scything boreal wind of rage from Nordstrom, I do not know. It seemed as though it would never end, and the unwanted attention of dozens of bystanders was being focused on me. It was acutely uncomfortable, and then all at once relief arrived in the shape of a young man, three or four years my senior, who swept in and positioned himself between me and my tormenter, his hand held up in a manner demanding silence. This he did not receive from Nordstrom, who swivelled towards him and with scarcely a pause began castigating him instead. The main criticisms Professor Nordstrom had of him were the length of his hair, which was “disgraceful”, and the air of disrespect that he exuded, and I quote, “like a skunk gives off stink”.

  This colourful simile was Nordstrom’s parting shot, after which he stalked away muttering to himself until, shortly thereafter, he found another poor innocent upon whom to unleash a tirade of unmerited reproof. I, meanwhile, turned to my saviour and expressed the profoundest gratitude, which he deflected with a gracious shake of the head and wave of the hand. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Old Nordstrom is a right tyrant, but stand up to him and, like any blowhard, he soon enough backs down. It comes of his being an emeritus professor. His best days are behind him and he has nothing to occupy his time, so he prowls around campus finding fault where there is none. I’m Nathaniel Whateley, by the way, but my friends call me Nate, and I’m very much hoping you’ll be one of them.”

  * * *

  I was more than a little daunted by Nathaniel Whateley, and more than a little awestruck. Not only was he remarkably handsome, but he had a loose, easy-going manner that I found irresistibly appealing. From that very first encounter I wanted nothing else than to remain in close orbit of him, like a planet circling a sun. He offered to help me with my bags. He escorted me to my dorm room. Then, before taking his leave, he told me that if I needed something, anything, all I had to do was come looking for him and he would do his best to oblige. He had digs in a boarding house o
n Lich Street, right on the edge of campus, but he said that more often than not he was to be found in the biology labs, which lay on the north side of the main quadrangle. When I admitted that I happened to be a biology major myself, Nate grinned and said he knew already. In fact, he was perfectly well aware who I was, and he looked forward to getting better acquainted with me, for Zachariah Conroy, in his words, had a reputation that preceded him. Everyone in the department had heard about this freshman whose examination papers had so impressed the faculty and who had given such a good account of himself in his interview with the admissions board that not only had the offer of a full scholarship been extended but words like “genius” were being bandied about. It wasn’t everyone who came to Miskatonic riding the crest of such a wave of expectation, and Nate was keen to get in with me before anybody else did. As soon as he overheard me telling Professor Nordstrom my name, he had spied an opportunity to ingratiate himself with “the wonder kid”. “In rescuing you from the old coot,” he said, “I was actually doing myself a favour. We’re no longer strangers now, you and I, and in time we’re going to become, I’m sure, the best of pals.” To that I replied that I could think of nothing I would like more; and so, with a handshake that felt like the sealing of a deal, Nate departed.

  The foregoing exchange was conducted in front of my new roommate, Hieronymus Lake, a fellow biology freshman, who now introduced himself. He too had heard in advance about “the prodigious Zachariah Conroy”, and said he was honoured to be sharing accommodation with me. Lake hailed from Minnesota and possessed the kind of open, honest face one traditionally associates with denizens of that state, and the corn-hued hair and slow Midwestern drawl to match. He looked out of place at an Ivy League college in New England, and for that reason alone I decided I could like him. His ambition, he said, was to study biology all the way to a professorship, with a view to specialising in cold-weather life forms. One day he would like to mount expeditions to the poles – the Arctic, the Antarctic, he didn’t mind which, preferably both – and conduct research into the seal, the walrus, Ursus maritimus, and especially the penguin. The last was the queerest of birds, so clumsy on land and yet so graceful underwater, and he believed there to be species of sphenisciform yet to be discovered. His hope was eventually to have one such named after him, Aptenodytes lakensis perhaps, as a lasting monument to his life’s work. Sometimes, as a scientist, the most that one could aspire to was to leave behind one’s name – a mark on the wall of posterity.

  I agreed, and yet for myself I hoped for so much more.

  * * *

  I did not see Nate again during the next few days, although I learned more about him from my fellow undergrads. The Whateleys were an important family around Arkham, with branches all across Essex County. There was money in their background, much of it from farming, and locally they were considered aristocracy, of a kind. Landed gentry, one might say, although it was rumoured too that there was a streak of madness in the genealogy, a recessive trait that emerged now and then and manifested as devil worship, compulsive monomania, even homicidal savagery. None of those attributes had I discerned in Nate Whateley, for all that I had been in his presence for no longer than twenty minutes. Instead I had seen displayed a bonhomie and outgoingness that reminded me of Absalom. With hindsight it is plain to me that I was drawn to Nate principally by virtue of his resemblance to my late brother. He filled a significant absence in my life. Absalom had not been unaffectionate towards me, and while we were growing up he had more than once delivered me from the hands of bullies who took exception to my bookishness and felt the appropriate punishment was to manhandle me and hurl my school satchel into the mud. Absalom would send them packing, usually with a cuff round the ear, and while each time I was delighted that my antagonists got their comeuppance, I hated the fact that another had had to defend me. Churlishly I would tell Absalom that I could fight my own fights, to which his inevitable reply was that plainly I could not. He brushed off my resentment with a breezy, forgiving smile, and I loved him all the more deeply for it, even as the sense of my own physical inadequacy grew all the more entrenched. Nate Whateley had made me feel the same way, but somehow without the lacerating self-recrimination.

  When Nate’s path and mine next intersected, it was as I was walking back to my dorm one evening from the refectory after dinner. With me was Lake, whose company I had been finding increasingly congenial, but the moment Nate appeared, it was as though my Minnesotan chum ceased to exist. Nate hailed me, and with barely a glance at Lake asked if I had plans for the rest of the night. I avowed that I had none, even though Lake and I had been intending to collaborate on the transection of the rostral portion of a carrier pigeon’s brain in hopes of unearthing some clue as to that bird’s uncanny homing ability. Nate then grabbed me by the wrist and told me to come with him. Meekly I consented.

  He led me to his boarding house and up to his bedroom, which was spacious enough to double as a study. Here, upon shelves, were laid out various aberrations of nature in glass jars, steeped in formaldehyde. He asked if I had ever seen such a cavalcade of grotesqueries, and I admiringly confessed that I had not. I spent an hour studying this collection. There were furry things and spiny things and tentacled things and things whose phylum I could not even guess at, and things that filled some evolutionary niche I had never known existed. It had taken Nate several years to acquire them. Some he had bought, others he had tracked down himself in the wilds of Essex County and beyond, not least in the region to the west of Arkham known as Clark’s Corners, near a reservoir which now filled what had once been an inhabited valley and which had been superstitiously avoided by the locals ever since the landing of a meteorite the previous decade. There, strange fauna roamed and equally strange flora flourished, organisms such as might be found nowhere else on the planet. For Nate, with his evident obsession for anomalous animals, it was a happy hunting ground.

  He asked if I would care to study the brain of one of the specimens, any I fancied. I jumped at the chance, and presently we were drying the formaldehyde off a mammal that had the hyper-developed hind legs of a hare and the prehensile tail of a lemur but also the cumbrous head of a cephalopod. No sooner had I penetrated this extraordinary amalgam’s cranium with a bone saw, than I learned it lacked a traditional cerebrum. Instead it boasted a network of small brain-like lobes distributed throughout its fore-body, each of which appeared to control a separate autonomic function while together, in concert with its brethren, providing the higher level of cognitive coordination that we call sentience. The reason for this arrangement, I postulated, was to mitigate the impact of trauma to that part. The creature could sustain severe damage to one or more of the lobes and continue to operate much as normal. I even put forward the theory that the other lobes might, as it were, pick up the slack for those that were no longer viable, rewiring themselves to accommodate losses elsewhere. If that were so, then it was a unique survival mechanism, enabling the creature to endure injuries that would have left a similar mammal with a single, non-distributed brain either dead or so seriously incapacitated it could not fend for itself any more.

  Exhilarated by this foray into an alien anatomy, I proposed that Nate and I go out for a drink. I was not usually the sort to carouse, but something about the situation seemed to demand a celebration. Nate readily agreed, and so followed a night of traipsing through Arkham’s range of saloons, some of them more salubrious than others. During the small hours we wound up back at Miskatonic, somewhat the worse for wear, and Nate said he had something to show me. Next I remember, we were breaking into the university library via the back door, and there, amid the dusty shelves, Nate took me to a section devoted to esoterica and rare incunabula and fetched down a copy of a tome entitled the Necronomicon. Chortling merrily, he riffled through its pages until he came to one whereon was depicted something called a “nightgaunt”. “Remind you of anybody?” he enquired, and I, viewing the image through the swimming blur of inebriation, was forced to admit tha
t a certain resemblance to Professor Nordstrom was undeniable. I wished to know more about the strange book, for I had seen nothing like it before and felt a peculiar, chilly sensation when looking at it, as though I were staring at an inert and manufactured object which was nonetheless in some ineffable way alive. This Necronomicon seemed both attractive and repellent, and therefore was not un-akin to the organ that was of such scientific significance to me. For I was well aware that the brain’s intimate mass of tissue, with its jelly-like texture and gnarled contours, lacked aesthetic charm, while remaining, in terms of its intricacy, its sheer convoluted functionality, a thing of beauty.

  Nate described the Necronomicon as a compendium of ancient knowledge and arcane lore which some people believed to have validity – power, even – while others considered it just so much preposterous hogwash. There were spells in it that could conjure up beings from the nether regions, demons and hell-spawned monstrosities and entities that might be deemed godlike, or so it was reputed. For him, the book served as an intriguing bestiary, a reference work that he consulted on a regular basis in connection with his research into zoological oddities. Whenever he trapped some animal he had never seen before, or purchased the preserved remains of one from a fellow collector or from one of Arkham’s many labyrinthine curio shops, he would go to the Necronomicon to check if it qualified for a mention there. More often than not it didn’t, but he returned to the book again and again all the same, admitting to me that it exerted a hold over him that he could not quite explain. The mere act of glancing through it was inordinately comforting, he said, like some quasi-religious ritual.