Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (75 page)

Desmond entered, passed through the main room over the worn carpet, and walked up two flights of bare-board steps. On the gray-white of a wall by the first landing someone had long ago written
YOGSOTHOTH SUCKS
. Many attempts had been made to wash it off, but it was evident that only paint could hide this insulting and dangerous
sentiment. Yesterday a junior had told him that no one knew who had written it, but the night after it had appeared, a freshman had been found dead, hanging from a hook in a closet.

“The kid had mutilated himself terribly before he committed suicide,” the junior had said. “I wasn’t here then, but I understand that he was a mess. He’d done it with a razor
and
a hot iron. There was blood all over the place, his pecker and balls were on the table, arranged to form a T-cross, you know whose symbol that is, and he’d clawed out plaster on the wall, leaving a big bloody print. It didn’t even look like a human hand had done it.”

“I’m surprised he lived long enough to hang himself,” Desmond had said. “All that loss of blood, you know.”

The junior had guffawed. “You’re kidding, of course!”

It was several seconds before Desmond understood what he meant. Then he’d paled. But later he wondered if the junior wasn’t playing a traditional joke on a green freshman. He didn’t think he’d ask anybody else about it, however. If he had been made a fool of, he wasn’t going to let it happen more than once.

He heard the phone ringing at the end of the long hall. He sighed, and strode down it, passing closed doors. From behind one came a faint tittering. He unlocked his door and closed it behind him. For a long time he stood watching the phone, which went on and on, reminding him, he didn’t know why, of the poem about the Australian swagman who went for a dip in a waterhole. The bunyip, that mysterious and sinister creature of down-under folklore, the dweller in the water, silently and smoothly took care of the swagman. And the tea kettle he’d put on the fire whistled and whistled with no one to hear.

And the phone rang on and on.

The bunyip was on the other end.

Guilt spread through him as quick as a blush.

He walked across the room glimpsing something out of the corner of his eye, something small, dark, and swift that dived under the sagging mildew-odorous bed-couch. He stopped at the small table, reached out to the receiver, touched it, felt its cold throbbing. He snatched his hand back. It was foolish, but it had seemed to him that she would detect his touch and know that he was there.

Snarling, he wheeled and started across the room. He noticed that the hole in the baseboard was open again. The Coke bottle whose butt end he’d jammed into the hole had been pushed out. He stopped and reinserted it and straightened up.

When he was at the foot of the staircase, he could still hear the ringing. But he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t just in his head.

After he’d paid his tuition and eaten at the cafeteria—the food was better than he’d thought it would be—he walked to the ROTC
building. It was in better shape than the other structures, probably because the Army was in charge of it. Still, it wasn’t in the condition an inspector would require. And those cannons on caissons in the rear. Were the students really supposed to train with Spanish-American War weapons? And since when was steel subject to verdigris?

The officer in charge was surprised when Desmond asked to be issued his uniform and manuals.

“I don’t know. You realize ROTC is no longer required of freshmen and sophomores?”

Desmond insisted that he wanted to enroll. The officer rubbed his unshaven jaw and blew smoke from a Tijuana Gold panatela. “Hmm. Let me see.”

He consulted a book whose edges seemed to have been nibbled by rats. “Well, what do you know? There’s nothing in the regulations about age. Course, there’s some pages missing. Must be an oversight. Nobody near your age has ever been considered. But … well, if the regulations say nothing about it, then … what the hell! Won’t hurt you, our boys don’t have to go through obstacle courses or anything like that.

“But jeeze, you’re sixty! Why do you want to sign up?”

Desmond did not tell him that he had been deferred from service in World War II because he was the sole support of his sick mother. Ever since then, he’d felt guilty, but at least here he could do his bit—however minute—for his country.

The officer stood up, though not in a coordinated manner. “Okay. I’ll see you get your issue. It’s only fair to warn you, though, that these fuckups play some mighty strange tricks. You should see what they blow out of their cannons.”

Fifteen minutes later, Desmond left, a pile of uniforms and manuals under one arm. Since he didn’t want to return home with them, he checked them in at the university bookstore. The girl put them on a shelf alongside other belongings, some of them unidentifiable to the noncognoscenti. One of them was a small cage covered with a black cloth.

Desmond walked to Fraternity Row. All of the houses had Arabic names, except the House of Hastur. These were afflicted with the same general decrepitude and lack of care as the university structures. Desmond turned in at a cement walk, from the cracks of which spread dying dandelions and other weeds. On his left leaned a massive wooden pole fifteen feet high. The heads and symbols carved into it had caused the townspeople to refer to it as the totem pole. It wasn’t, of course, since the tribe to which it had belonged was not Northwest Coast or Alaskan Indians. It and a fellow in the university museum were the last survivors of hundreds which had once stood in this area.

Desmond, passing it, put the end of his left thumb under his nose and the tip of his index finger in the center of his forehead, and he muttered the ancient phrase of obeisance,
“Shesh-cotoaahd-ting-ononwa-senk.”
According to various texts he’d read, this was required of every Tamsiqueg who walked by it during this phase of the moon. The phrase was unintelligible even to them, since it came from another tribe or perhaps from an antique stage of the language. But it indicated respect, and lack of its observance was likely to result in misfortune.

He felt a little silly doing it, but it couldn’t hurt.

The unpainted wooden steps creaked as he stepped upon them. The porch was huge; the wires of the screen were rusty and useless in keeping insects out because of the many holes. The front door was open; from it came a blast of rock music, the loud chatter of many people, and the acrid odor of pot.

Desmond almost turned back. He suffered when he was in a crowd, and his consciousness of his age made him feel embarrassingly conspicuous. But the huge figure of Wendell Trepan was in the doorway, and he was seized by an enormous hand.

“Come on in!” Trepan bellowed. “I’ll introduce you to the brothers!”

Desmond was pulled into a large room jammed with youths of both sexes. Trepan bulled through, halting now and then to slap somebody on the back and shout a greeting and once to pat a well-built young woman on the fanny. Then they were in a corner where Professor Layamon sat surrounded by people who looked older than most of the attendees. Desmond supposed that they were graduate students. He shook the fat swollen hand and said, “Pleased to meet you again,” but he doubted that his words were heard.

Layamon pulled him down so he could be heard, and he said, “Have you made up your mind yet?”

The old man’s breath was not unpleasant, but he had certainly been drinking something which Desmond had never smelled before. The red eyes seemed to hold a light, almost as if tiny candles were burning inside the eyeballs.

“About what?” Desmond shouted back.

The old man smiled and said, “You know.”

He released his grip. Desmond straightened up. Suddenly, though the room was hot enough to make him sweat, he felt chilly. What was Layamon hinting at? It couldn’t be that he really knew. Or could it be?

Trepan introduced him to the men and women around the chair and then took him into the crowd. Other introductions followed, most of those he met seeming to be members of Lam Kha Alif or of the sorority across the street. The only one he could identify for sure as a candidacy
for pledging was a black, a Gabonese. After they left him, Trepan said, “Bukawai comes from a long line of witch doctors. He’s going to be a real treasure if he accepts our invitation, though the House of Hastur and Kaf Dhal Waw are hot to get him. The department is a little weak on Central African science. It used to have a great teacher, Janice Momaya, but she disappeared ten years ago while on a sabbatical in Sierra Leone. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bukawai was offered an assistant professorship even if he is nominally a freshman. Man, the other night, he taught me part of a ritual you wouldn’t believe. I … well, I won’t go into it now. Some other time. Anyway, he has the greatest respect for Layamon, and since the old fart is head of the department, Bukawai is almost a cinch to join us.”

Suddenly, his lips pulled back, his teeth clenched, his skin paled beneath the dirt, and he bent over and grabbed his huge paunch. Desmond said, “What’s the matter?”

Trepan shook his head, gave a deep sigh, and straightened up.

“Man, that hurt!”

“What?” Desmond said.

“I shouldn’t have called him an old fart. I didn’t think he could hear me, but he isn’t using sound to receive. Hell, there’s nobody in the world has more respect for him than me. But sometimes my mouth runs off … well, never again.”

“You mean?” Desmond said.

“Yeah. Who’d you think? Never mind. Come with me where we can hear ourselves think.”

He pulled Desmond through a smaller room, one with many shelves of books, novels, school texts, and here and there some old leather-bound volumes.

“We got a hell of a good library here, the best any house can boast of. It’s one of our stellar attractions. But it’s the open one.”

They entered a narrow door, passed into a short hall, and stopped while Trepan took a key from his pocket and unlocked another door. Beyond it was a narrow corkscrew staircase, the steps of which were dusty. A window high above gave a weak light through dirty panes. Trepan turned on a wall light, and they went up the stairs. At the top, which was on the third floor, Trepan unlocked another door with a different key. They stepped into a small room whose walls were covered by bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Trepan turned on a light. In a corner was a small table and a folding chair. The table had a lamp and a stone bust of the Marquis de Dembron on it.

Trepan, breathing heavily after the climb, said, “Usually, only seniors and graduates are allowed here. But I’m making an exception in your case. I just wanted to show you one of the advantages of belonging to Lam Kha Alif. None of the other houses have a library like this.”

Trepan was looking narrow-eyed at him. “Eyeball the books. But don’t touch them. They, uh, absorb, if you know what I mean.”

Desmond moved around, looking at the titles. When he was finished, he said, “I’m impressed. I thought some of these books were to be found only in the university library. In locked rooms.”

“That’s what the public thinks. Listen, if you pledge us, you’ll have access to these books. Only don’t tell the other undergrads. They’d get jealous.”

Trepan, still narrow-eyed, as if he were considering something that perhaps he shouldn’t, said, “Would you mind turning your back and sticking your fingers in your ears?”

Desmond said, “What?”

Trepan smiled. “Oh, if you sign up with us, you’ll be given the little recipe necessary to work in here. But until then I’d just as soon you don’t see it.”

Desmond, smiling with embarrassment, the cause of which he couldn’t account, for, and also feeling excited, turned his back, facing away from Trepan, and jammed his fingertips into his ears. While he stood there in the very quiet room—was it soundproofed with insulation or with something perhaps not material?—he counted the seconds. One thousand and one, one thousand and two …

A little more than a minute had passed when he felt Trepan’s hand on his shoulder. He turned and removed his fingers. The fat youth was holding out to him a tall but very slim volume bound in a skin with many small dark protuberances. Desmond was surprised, since he was sure he had not seen it on the shelves.

“I deactivated this,” Trepan said. “Here. Take it.” He looked at his wristwatch. “It’ll be okay for ten minutes.”

There was no title or by-line on the cover. And, now that he looked at it closely and felt it, he did not think the skin was from an animal.

Trepan said, “It’s the hide of an old Atechironnon himself.”

Desmond said, “Ah!” and he trembled. But he rallied.

“He must have been covered with warts.”

“Yeah. Go ahead, look at it. It’s a shame you can’t read it, though.”

The first page was slightly yellowed, which wasn’t surprising for paper four hundred years old. There was no printing but large handwritten letters.

“
Ye lesser Rituall of Ye Tahmmsiquegg Warlock Atechironunn
,” Desmond read. “
Reprodust from ye Picture-riting on ye Skin lefft unbirnt by ye Godly
.

“
By his own Hand, Simon Conant. 1641
.

“Let him who speaks these Words of Pictures, first lissen.”

Trepan chuckled and said, “Spelling wasn’t his forte, was it?”

“Simon, the half brother of Roger Conant,” Desmond said. “He was the first white man to visit the Tamsiqueg and not leave with his severed thumb stuck up his ass. He was also with the settlers who raided the Tamsiqueg, but they didn’t know who his sympathies were with. He fled with the badly wounded Atechironnon into the wilderness. Twenty years later, he appeared in Virginia with this book.”

He slowly turned the five pages, fixing each pictograph in his photographic memory. There was one figure he didn’t like to look at.

“Layamon’s the only one who can read it,” Trepan said.

Desmond did not tell him that he was conversant with the grammar and small dictionary of the Tamsiqueg language, written by William Cor Dunnes in 1624 and published in 1654. It contained an appendix translating the pictographs. It had cost him twenty years of search and a thousand dollars just for a Xerox copy. His mother has raised hell about the expenditure, but for once he had stood up to her. Not even the university had a copy.