The Howling Man (48 page)

"But," Claude swallowed. "But--well, come to think of it, you're right."

Dr. Nameless put Claude down. "Now, just you take a gander at the course schedule. Then I think we ought to visit the stadium." He winked. "I know about you lads. All is not dry scholarly book work here at Miskatonic U., you may be sure. We have our share of hearty outdoor activities."

"Hearty, eh?" Claude responded with feigned enthusiasm.

He studied the course schedule. It was not without a certain fascination. It listed all of the courses offered at Miskatonic, and named all the department chairmen.

His keen eye was caught by the title of a biology class, Serological Genetics. It was taught by a count, no less. He was also intrigued by the copy concerning the Student Health Center. It read: "Dr. Jekyll, MWF. Mr. Hyde, TT."

And then there was Professor Monk Lewis, of the Department of Anthropology. A chap named Hodgson, Associate Professor of Marine Fungi. A mathematics class restricted to very young girls, taught by a Professor Carroll. A course in monstrous electrodes, of all things, offered by an assistant professor with the curious name of Dr. Frank N. Stein.

Claude's attention strayed. He had but scant interest in academics. "Onward to the stadium!" he cried with youthful vigor.

"Yes, indeed," said Dr. Nameless agreeably. "Boys will be boys, and all that. I believe that Cleve will join us about now. Can't get enough of it."

"Cleve?"

"You will share a room with Cleve. Lots of fun. Been with us several semesters, you know."

Sure enough, Cleve appeared on cue. Cleve was completely cloaked in a rather garish robe adorned with purple tassels. A sophomore, at least.

"Pleasedtameetcha," Cleve intoned.

"Likewise, I'm sure," Claude said.

Cleve? The diminutive of Cleveland, no doubt. Well, no matter.

They strolled to a large, though rickety, grandstand at the far end of the weedchoked campus. It was jammed with students, most of them bearing waxen expressions.

Claude could no longer hear the tap-tap-tapping. Somehow, he was glad.

"Nice turnout," he ventured, slapping at a low-flying bat with his beanie. "I confess that I like school spirit."

"We have them," Cleve said.

Claude edged along a slat and sat down next to a sallow youth who was munching candy skulls.

On the greensward there were four spindle-shanked men, all well advanced in years. They held olive branches. Otherwise, the gridiron was deserted.

"Are we early," Claude asked of his increasingly taciturn guides, "or are we late?"

"Neither," said Dr. Nameless. He was slowly crushing a cloth effigy with his thumbs. "The game is about to begin."

"Yay," said Cleve. "Hoo, boy."

There was a surging wail from the assembled multitude.

"The mascots!" Dr. Nameles screamed.

From a manger at one end of the field an immense number of kids appeared. They were led by a maternal looking nanny.

"Don't tell me," Claude sighed. "The Goat with a Thousand Young."

"
Ygdrsll! Ia, ia, ia!
" cried Dr. Nameless, losing control. "Now look!"

Claude looked. A cloud of diaphanous girls drifted out and took their stations. They gyrated.

"Virgins," Dr. Nameless hissed. "We require them for our matriculation ceremonies."

"Cheerleaders," Cleve explained.

"Watch!" yelled the giant Dr. Nameless. He shook Claude until his, Claude's, teeth rattled. Really, the man was positively beside himself.

Claude watched. The four old men clutched one another, fanning the air with their olive branches. Then, through an arch at one end of the stadium, four more figures charged onto the field.

They were dressed all in black. They had hoods. They also had battle-axes in their hands.

A red fire truck roared across the arena, bells clanging.

"What's that?" Claude whispered.

Dr. Nameless put a sausage finger to his lips. "It's symbolic," he said. The figures in black overwhelmed the old men, trampling the olive branches. The goats bleated.

The virgins ripped off their gowns and grabbed megaphones. "Now!" shrilled Dr. Nameless. He was hysterical with school pride. "Give 'em the ax," the megaphones implored.

The crowd took up the chant. "Give 'em the ax, the ax, the ax! Give 'em the ax, the ax, the ax!"

Claude closed his eyes. He had never been what you might call the queasy type, but-- The figures in black had given the old men the ax.

"I do believe," Claude said to his escorts, "that I would like to be shown to my room."

While the candle flames fluttered and the dank wind banged against the shutters, Claude abandoned his pose of innocence. He assumed Command.

"Cleve," he snapped, "there will be no sleep this night. Do you hear the tap-taptapping? Do you hear the Noise?"

Cleve twirled the tassels on the robe. "What Noise, Smada? Many are the freshman who have imagined what you call a tap-tap-tapping. From the basement vaults, so the tale is told . . ."

Claude had no time to waste. He boxed Cleve one on the ear. "Now do you hear it?"

"I hear it, I hear it!" Cleve admitted. "But I like it where we are, in our cozy room. Observe the elegant chamber pots--"

"Thunder mugs be damned!" Claude barked. "Fire the tapers, unleash the hounds!"

"We have no pigs," Cleve quavered. "We have no dogs."

"Not tapirs, tapers!" Torches! Don't they teach you anything in this place?"

"I know much," Cleve insisted. "You will see."

"Come, then! To the catacombs!"

Down the winding, moss-covered steps they went. Their shadows danced behind them, mournful arabesques . . .

That infernal tap-tap-tapping. It beat a tattoo in Claude's brain. He would get to the bottom of this. And when he did--.

They passed the bent-backed man who tended the furnaces. His name was lettered on his coveralls: Bram Stoker.

With torches guttering, they swept by a beautiful scientist and his mad daughter. Some barbarous experiment was in progress.

They burst through a massive creaking door, older than time, and there it was.

Seated at a heavy desk enclosed in a scarlet pentagram was a bearded man. He was tap-tap-tapping on a toy typer. The echoes in the cavernous vault magnified the Noise.

"Kapital!" the bearded man chorted. "Kapital!"

"Your name?" Claude demanded imperiously.

"I belong to the family of Marx," the man said with some asperity. "Not one of those pitiful louts whose given names terminate with a vowel, but--"

"Karl," stated Claude knowingly.

"The same," Karl Marx admitted proudly. "Whoever
you
may be, I implore you not to touch that edifice." He gestured toward a precariously tilted structure that was bent over his desk. The thing seemed to be constructed of triangular slices of Italian cuisine. On top of it rested a balding head that fairly reeked of formaldehyde. "If it should collapse and come into contact with the pentagram, there will be Hell to pay."

"What is it?" Claude asked despite himself.

"It is the famous Lenin Tower of Pizza," Karl Marx explained. "A monument to my works."

"Balderdash," Claude commented.

"The word of an exploiter," Marx snorted. "The propertied classes are smug in their layers of lard. What do the downtrodden peasants know? I am the only one to divine the formula that will save them from their misery. By unleasing the plague of fantasy in the pitiless halls of the money changers, I have driven a wedge--"

"I did not come here," Claude said shortly, "to savor the rehashed fragments of a dreary lecture."

It was not simply that sociology bored him. The instant that Marx had opened his beard-stuffed mouth, Claude had realized that this was not the quarry he sought. To reach the true source of trouble, he must dig deeper.

Much deeper.

With Claude, to think was to act.

Grabbing Cleve's shrouded arm, he delivered a stout kick to the Lenin Tower with his right sneaker.

As the Tower fell, Marx screamed and clutched his toy typer to his bosom. The bowels of the Earth rumbled. Tongues of flame spat up from below. There was a distinct odor of brimstone, not unpleasant . . .

Holding tightly to Cleve, Claude leaped into the pentagram. While chaos sparked around him, he had a sensation of falling.

"Down, please," Claude murmured.

Claude found himself shoving a considerable boulder up an immense hill.

Momentarily curious, and ignoring the fearful means of Cleve, Claude turned companionably to a fellow worker. "Tedious business," he observed. "How far to the top?"

The wretch could barely get enough room to speak. It was very crowded on the mountain. The heated rock was slippery with sweat.

"There is no top," the doomed soul lamented. "There is no bottom."

Claude was not without pity but he had never admired a quitter. He summoned a fork-tailed fiend. "There has been a slight miscalculation," he informed him.

"That's what they all say," the fiend said mildly.

"My companion and I," Claude went on, undaunted, "wish to be taken to Mr. Big."

The fiend shrugged. "Why not? We have an eternity before us. Go, come, stay. It is all the same to me."

"Get some starch in your ridgepole," Claude chided him. "It is not, I assure you, all the same to me. If you are a true fiend--a fiend in need, so to speak--you will transport us to Mr. Big."

"Nobody hurries here, lad," the fiend said. "Time, we have. However, who am Ito add to your torment? In the final analysis, it can be neither better nor worse."

Sensing a growing impatience on Claude's part, the fiend escorted them to Mr. Big at something a tad faster than a snail's pace. The fiend then withdrew. He could wait. He could wait a long, long time.

Claude faced Mr. Big at last. Finally, an adversary worthy of his skills! "I am Claude Adams," he announced, "and this is my friend. Not fiend. Friend." The Devil had no horns. He was a short, fashionably-dressed man with thick glasses. He was quite busy. "Call me Tony," he said in a friendly, somewhat husky voice. "Be with you in a moment. Time! There is never enough time, even here."

Tony was awash in debris. He was surrounded by books, magazines, expense vouchers, comics, manuscripts, and opera records. He was writing a review. Claude peeked at the book's title:
The Corpse's Delight
, by S. Orbital Ridges. Tony didn't like it. Feeling that he had been too harsh in his criticism, he concluded: "Excellent sidelights on croquet playing in Wales."

"There," he sighed. "Not always easy to be fair, you know? Taste is such a personal matter. Now, what can I do for you?"

"We have come to make a deal," Claude stated.

"Flatly incredible!" Tony groaned. His voice seemed to emerge from the depths of his chest. "I had hoped for something more original. McComas and I--"

"Who is McComas?" Claude interjected.

Tony waved his manicured hand. "I always begin sentences that way. Pay it no mind. Your proposition?"

Claude did not hesitate. He who hesitated, as he had often, observed, was lost. "Do not mistake me for the callow youth I appear to be," he warned. "I am a man of no little experience.

"McComas and I understand that. Get on with it. I know you of old, Claude Adams."

Claude felt a pardonable pride. His reputation, then, had preceded him. "The essence of a good bargain," he said, "is that both sides profit from it."

"I agree with that. It is, indeed a platitude."

Claude was stung. "I will keep it simple. You are too clever for tricky clauses. I will state my case in plain terms, man to Devil. You will then have no choice."

"McComas and I," Tony said shiftily, "have many choices."

Claude seized the horns, as it were. "Try this one on for size. You are overworked and you are overcrowded. The commies are coming. They will try to organize everything, make you write reviews for the State--"

"McComas won't stand for it!"

"Perhaps, perhaps. But why face the problem at all? If you permit my companion and Ito leave, I will eliminate the difficulty! I am no slouch at population control, as you know, and I can manipulate culture patterns. It will be like old times. No fuss, no bother, you in your kerchief and me in my cap--"

Tony's face flushed. "By gad, sir, you interest me! When McComas and I deal, we deal!"

Claude smiled slyly. "There is--uh--a way out of here?"

"There is a way," Tony assured him. "A bargain, as you say, is a bargain. But it will not be easy."

"It never is," Claude observed. He managed to contain his elation. He knew what was coming. "I am, I assure you, all ears."

"Oh my," said Tony in that distinctive deep voice of his. The Devil told Claude what he had to do. "There is one teensy condition," he concluded.

"Which is?"

"You must not look behind you on the journey. Remember that! Do not look back."

"I will not forget," Claude promised.

With his robed and hooded companion in tow, Claude took his leave.

The side-wheeler splashed through the miasmic murk of the River Styx. The river, of course, was full of stones.

A bewhiskered sailor leaned over the bow-rail, casting a long knotted line. "Ma-a-a-rk Twai-i-i-in!" he bellowed.

At exactly the proper moment, neither too early nor too late, Claude rolled the dice of destiny.

He looked back.

There was a shudder of silence, a skip in the heartbeat of eternity. Then came a blinding flash. Thunder boomed. It was like all the thunder there ever was, or ever could be, all wrapped up in the fireflies of an Illinois summer's twilight.

It rained strawberries.

Claude found the results quite gratifying. He stepped ashore on an Earth of desolation. He was up to his armpits in corpses and rotting strawberries.

"Unhappy world," he mused. "The paradox of the Solor System. For rebirth, we require abortion. To live in glory, it is necessary to become one with the worm."

"But what will we
do?
" quavered Cleve.

Claude gave no answer. He had been through this before. However, he was forced to concede that he was facing certain difficulties. He fingered his beanie. The Royal Atom-Arranger had done his work well. Lost and by the wind grieved .