Other than those three nondescript letters, however, there was nothing terribly unique or interesting about Dr. Hipponax. He was average in looks, height, speech, intelligence, and accomplishments. Once he learned the layout of the library collection, he could do reference and bibliographic instruction about as well as the rest, but not as good as some, and he certainly gave no sign whatever of having the potential for greater ascendancies. He would probably get tenure, probably be promoted to associate professor and perhaps even to full eventually, probably would have an undistinguished career, and probably would retire without ever having made any kind of mark whatsoever at the university. Ho hum, ho hum, ho-hum, and twiddle-dee-dee.
So I was astonished one bright April afternoon, a year or two after he was hired, to see him sitting on the Faculty Senate in the place of Ms. Marjorita Herwegh, who had represented the library so capably for the past half dozen years.
I nudged my seatmate, Senator Giordanni Gennadio, and tilted my head in the direction of the new arrival.
“What happened to Marge?” I asked.
“You didn’t know?” Joe said. “She had a stroke two weeks ago, and isn’t expected to recover.”
I was shocked. I’d heard nothing about this, but I’d been gone for a week to a conference on eighteenth-century literary exhibitionism in the Holy Roman Empire. Marge was in her mid-forties, seemingly in the prime of health.
“Where?” I asked.
“In her office,” Joe whispered, after getting several nasty looks from John de Campian, the Senate parliamentarian. “They found her sprawled like a sack of potatoes behind her door, a horrible grimace etched on her face. Had to get several of us to push it open. I saw her myself: she looked almost like she was wearing some kind of grotesque mask. It was just awful.”
“Hush!” de Campian hissed, and we had no choice but to obey. John could be such a frightful nitpicker at times.
That was the first time.
But then I began noticing him at other functions, things like budget meetings and strategic planning councils, events that almost never attracted or interested junior faculty—and certainly not junior librarians. He would always sit way, way, way in the back and watch, just watch, never taking notes, never raising a hand, never actually participating in anything. I finally decided that he was just parading, letting himself be seen by the powers that be. Maybe he was smarter than I had originally given him credit for. Maybe.
At the chancellor’s end-of-year reception, I spotted Hipponax again, talking with the old boy himself, obviously sharing a joke, both men smiling and nodding. Praed finally clapped him on the back before turning to the next person in line. I decided it was time to introduce myself to this curiosity.
I wandered sidewise in such a way that our paths would eventually intersect, seemingly at random, and managed to bump him gently, causing him to spill his drink.
“Oh, terribly sorry,” I said. I held out my hand: “I’m Bart Thököly, from English.”
His smile was a thin gray line slashed across the center of his face. “Hipponax,” he said, “but you can call me Claude.” He took my right hand awkwardly with his left, grasping it from above.
“What department are you with?” I asked, knowing perfectly well the only possible answer.
“Uh, the library,” he said, seeming to shrink within himself.
“Oh yes,” I said, frowning a little. I have you pegged, dear Claude, I thought to myself. “I don’t recall having seen you before.”
“I’m new here,” Hipponax said. “This is just my second year.”
“And how do you like our little campus?” I was merciless with my stiletto.
“Well, uh, I, I really enjoy working here,” he said. “But I don’t know many people yet.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s always difficult to make friends at first. Well, Claude,” I continued, cutting off any attempt at insipid repartee, “it’s been a real pleasure meeting you. I hope I see you again soon.” No, I don’t! I added silently to myself. Gad, what a milque-toast.
I saw him again at graduation, but then, we all had to attend that re-enactment of the Spanish Inquisition. Hundreds of otherwise intelligent, highly educated men and women were crowded together in our stifling, death-black robes in ninety-five-degree heat in the middle of the quad, while old Praed droned on and on about the joys of a college education. Enough!
* * * *
I spent the summer comparing the sonnets of Shakespeare with those of his chief rival, Lovecraft, and came back in September relaxed and ready for another battle with the hordes of ignorant Neanderthals.
Praed was in his usual fine form at the annual convocation to inaugurate the academic year. Among his announcements of new administrative staff was one that left me gasping with incredulity: Dr. Claudius Hipponax had been appointed Head of Public Services in the Clapperton Library.
What?! I just caught myself in time to avoid blurting the word out loud. I was sitting next to Michel Padeloup of the French Department, and he looked as incredulous as I. Isla Eilshemius from History, flanking me on the other side, just went “tch tch.”
I glanced at her. “What do you know that I don’t?” I asked, sotto voce.
“More than I’ll ever tell.” She giggled. I swear she giggled.
“Whatever happened to Deems?” I asked. Jules-James Deems had been Head of Public Services for perhaps fifteen or more years, longer than I could remember, anyway.
“Retired quite suddenly last month, my dear Barthélemy,” Padeloup said. “Hanky-panky with a male student assistant, or some such thing. They hushed it all up, and then gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was gone quite literally overnight. Or so I’m told. One can never be sure about these things. After all, it was academic break.”
I was stunned. Deems had always struck me as a humbug, certainly not the sort to take any kind of risk with his career. It seemed wholly out of character.
“But how did Hipponax…?” I muttered.
“Well,” Isla said, “Herwegh had a stroke, Rostopchin’s on sabbatical, Villemessant’s in the hospital undergoing tests for some strange ailment they can’t identify, Chu Ta is on an exchange program in China, and the rest of the department isn’t suitable for one reason or another. So he got it by default.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“Quite possibly,” Padeloup agreed. “Yet, this is very strange how such things will sometimes accrue.”
I found his choice of words…interesting.
* * * *
A week later I had occasion to visit the new department head in his office in the library; I wanted to arrange a series of specialized B.I. sessions for my upper division and graduate courses in Austenian swishery and Wellsian gastronomy. He was running late at some meeting or another, and had sent a message that he would be along in ten minutes, if I could possibly wait.
I could, and passed the time looking out the windows at the coeds waltzing by in their short skirts. What a delightful change the fashion world had promulgated this year! While I was pondering the eternal mystery of feminine pulchritude, I found myself getting more and more annoyed, for no apparent reason. It was almost like a buzzing in my ear. I even swatted the air once or twice.
Then I glanced over to the right corner of the office. Something was lurking in the shadows, almost hidden behind the bookshelves. I got up and moved closer to the desk, where I could actually view the thing more clearly.
It was the idol of a grotesque little man about four and one-half feet tall, with outsized head, belly, and feet, constructed wholly of dark brown, weather-beaten wood. Polynesian, I decided, after gazing upon it for a moment or two. The exaggerated lips were partly covered by a reddish-brown spray of hair hanging from the bulbous nose, and a loose beard of weedy grass was tied to the bottom of the b
roadly smiling face. The long forehead had a not-quite square white rectangle daubed just over the eyes. The latter consisted of spirals of white bone, or maybe some kind of curled twig, with empty spots at the very centers.
I was just reaching out to touch these pale curlicues when a voice blared right behind me.
“Leave it alone!”
I jumped forward, banging my nose against the image. After wiping away the smear of blood, I turned to face my accuser.
“Hipponax,” I managed to gasp.
“Indeed,” he said. “Please have a seat, Dr. Thököly.”
“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the statue.
“It’s called Pulu. It’s one of the ninety-nine gods of the Kammu tribe of February Island,” the librarian said. “Or that’s what the label says, anyway. I found it down in a storage room in Hyrtl Hall, and no one objected when I dusted it off. Striking little bugger, isn’t it?”
There was a buzzing about my ears again, and I complained about the gnats.
“Yes, they do seem a bit rife these days,” Hipponax said. “Now let’s see what we can do for you,” he continued, and we had soon settled our other business.
Later that afternoon, my curiosity got the best of me, and I checked a couple of reference books on Polynesian deities in the library, eventually locating the following entry in Guzzolini’s Divinité:
“Kammu Religion—This now extinct sect of February Island in the Calendar Archipelago of the South Pacific featured an unusually large number of deities, 99 in all, of whom 98 were depicted as great stone statues, each fashioned with a distinct visage. These were carved in a central quarry, and laboriously transported to their final resting places on either side of the island, where they were embedded deep in the soil in an upright position. 49 idols were arranged on one side of the island in two rows, 25 facing out to sea, presumably to protect the tribe from invasion by physical or spiritual enemies; and 24 facing the great volcano rising from the interior, or perhaps their 49 companions on the opposite side of the island. The 99th god, Pulu, called the ‘Slayer of Souls,’ was the only deity to be carved from wood in the more traditional Polynesian style. Its image was mounted in a shrine located at the exact center of the island, indicating a certaim pre-eminence. However, its precise role in the Kammu pantheon remains somewhat obscure.”
This was interesting, but it didn’t really tell me much. The idol in Hipponax’s office was obviously a replica.
A few days later, just as I was emerging from my graduate seminar on Ecological Despotism in Nineteenth-Century Serbian Literature, I ran into the wheelchair of Professor Flewellyn Beadlestone, and almost fell into his lap. Beadlestone had been beaten nearly to death a decade earlier by a student whose grammar he’d had the temerity to correct in class. The former pupil was now a prison guard somewhere back east.
“Have you heard?” he asked.
“Heard what?” I said.
“About Yellowplush,” Beadlestone said. “He broke one of the windows on the fifth floor of the library, and then jumped out.”
“No!” I exclaimed. Zachary Yellowplush had been University Librarian for more than twenty years.
“Why?” I asked.
“No one can figure it,” Flewellyn said. “The last time I saw him, he was talking about retiring in a few years, and seemed perfectly happy with his situation.”
“What a shame,” I said. “How’s Horatia taking it?”
“Bad, I hear,” Beadlestone said. “She’s completely devastated.”
And then, for no reason at all, there flashed into my mind an image of Pulu’s idol, with Dr. Claudius Hipponax sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of it, burning live insects in a small brazier between his legs, the bugs crackling and popping as they exploded from the heat. The god seemed to emerge from his wooden image, bow to Hipponax, and disappear through the closed door. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs.
“Ad Gehennam tecum!” I exclaimed, without even realizing it.
“What did you say?” Beadlestone said. “What does it mean?”
“Eh?” I said, shaking myself out of a self-imposed daze. “Just a piece of schoolboy Latin drivel—‘To Hell with you!’—or something like that.”
“You suddenly turned completely white.”
“I’m OK,” I assured him. “One of those middle-aged pangs, you know.”
He did, and quickly rolled off, hunting for someone else to tell his news.
I, on the other hand, clearly needed to do more research.
That evening, I returned to the library after ten p.m., when there were far fewer patrons lurking about (and most of those were sex-starved teenagers hoping to get some quiet moments on the internet), and checked a few sources known only to myself and the late Elliotte Fitzboodle. In particular, that hoary classic, De Deis Polynesiae by Master Jacobus Bunngumber, provided some interesting commentary from one of the earliest European explorers of the region. Although Bunngumber had never actually visited February Island, he did spend several weeks at November Isle in the same chain. One passage in particular caught my eye:
“Campenhout tells me that the natives of this place practice a peculiar sort of rite, in which one of their gods acts as an intermediary between their people and the other members of the pantheon (who are almost without number); and that to gain favors from these deities, they must ‘buy’ the services of the intercessor through small sacrifices that might or might not please it. The greater the boon requested, the greater the price that must be paid to have it enacted. One of the tribe, a powerful sort of medicine man or priest, speaks to this god, whose idol he keeps confined in his hut, and then tells his people what they must do to earn his favor, and what it will cost them. In the end, the king must decide whether the price is worth paying. If he guesses wrong, he may himself be sacrificed by his tribe, and then the ‘medicine man’ becomes king. This is an odd sort of business, but Campenhout assures me that it is quite true.”
It was then that I saw how the thing could be done!
I hid myself in the stacks when the library closed two hours later, and crept down the stairwell to Hipponax’s locked office. I knew I had to hurry: the motion sensors that protected the library would be activated at any moment. I had a small flameless burner with me, which I plugged into a nearby socket, and a jar with several live moths that I had gathered an hour earlier. I placed the container on the circular element as it began to heat, and the bugs were soon dropping like, well, flies.
“Pulu,” I hissed. “I call upon thee. Show thyself.”
Then the buzzing that I had heard in Hipponax’s office again emerged from the shadows, surrounding me with barely heard whispers.
A faint image of the grotesque idol appeared before me.
“Who calls my name?” I heard.
“Thököly, of Verdugo,” I replied.
“What dost thou offer?” it asked.
“These small lives,” I said, picking up the jar with my bare left hand, wincing as it seared my fingertips. “Also my pain, and something more.”
“Yes?” it said.
“The life of Hipponax,” I said.
“And what dost thou desire?” the image asked, its voice barely audible.
“A small favor,” I said, and gave it more specific information.
“It is done,” it said, and then vanished.
I crept down the stairs and out the side door, setting off the alarm, but escaped into the faculty office building next door before the campus police could arrive. All in all, it had been a fine night’s work.
* * * *
The next morning, Dr. Claudius Hipponax walked into Chancellor Praed’s office without an appointment, and calmly, almost serenely, pulled a gun from his belt and fired ten times into Praed’s chest. He was still standing there pul
ling the trigger, click click click, when the police arrived.
And that was the beginning of my ascendancy.
Now, all of this might seem incomprehensible to the man (or woman) of intellect and scholarship, and I must admit that even I have had difficulties at times believing it myself, despite the fact that Dr. Forresten Leiber’s treatise on the use of witchcraft by faculty wives has now become an acknowledged sociological standard.
Still, as I gaze down on the quad from my corner office on the second floor of the Praed Administration Building, I have gained many valuable insights into my own character and into the art and science of academic governance, and have also uncovered a few truisms that I would like now to share with you:
First and foremost, the recent rapid turnover in the administrative hierarchy of the university was generally a good thing. Dr. Praed was getting old, his direction feeble. It was time for, uh, new blood, one might say.
Second, Pulu helps those who help themselves. It is a very pragmatic god, and is always willing to lend a hand, provided, of course, that it is well compensated.
Third and most importantly, and a point all of you should remember in the future, the concept of payment is somewhat different to a Polynesian deity than it might be for an American businessman. One must always take into account cultural differences before signing an unbreakable contract with a foreign native.
Thus it is that I am now faced with two little difficulties: 1) what to do with the ninety-eight stone statues currently in transit from February Island; and 2) how to find more lives to offer Pulu and its friends without casting suspicion upon myself.
It just stands over there in the corner and grins its wicked smile of self-satisfaction. Pulu learns very quickly. Its belly is much bigger now. It already controls a major educational institution. America, after all, is a land of opportunity, and education has always provided the key for the poor, the backward, and the disenfranchised to raise their station in life.
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 45
