The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (6 page)

Les took over. “What Worthy’s asking is whether ‘From Beyond’ was just a nightmare, or whether Lovecraft based it on something real — something he encountered in the summer of 1920, something he recorded in this notebook.”

“‘From Beyond’ is the one about the resonator?”

“Exactly,” Worthy took over again. “A scientist — Lovecraft’s rough draft used the name Annesley, although later in the published version he changed the name to Tillinghast — develops a machine that allows anyone in close proximity to see things that are normally outside the limited frequency range of human vision — creatures that share this space with us but live in another dimension, able to literally pass right through what we see as solid objects.”

“Which readers at the time would have considered impossible,” Les added, getting up to answer a scratch at the back door. It wasn’t Tabbyhunter this time, though, but coal-black Serafina, she of the emerald eyes, who spotted a stranger in the kitchen, backed off nervously, and immediately scratched to be let into the back stairwell.

“Less so, now,” Matthew nodded. “It’s been commonly reported among users of ayahuasca and the
Stropharia
mushrooms that they encounter a hum, a buzzing tone, at a certain frequency that grows louder as the drug trance deepens. Then they figured out it wasn’t just hallucinated, if you hummed or chanted that same tone or its various harmonics it set up a vibration inside the skull that considerably enhanced the experience. The McKennas went down to the headwaters of the Amazon and conducted an experiment with these tones, they theorized the drug was interacting with the neurons at certain receptor sites to actually turn the nerve channels into superconductors, what you’re hearing is the electron spin of this process.”

“You know about this?” asked Worthy.

“The McKennas figured the vocalization of the harmonics of the harmine-DNA resonance frequency would cancel out the double wave form, dropping the electrical resistance to zero and in effect allowing the neurons to become superconductive, allowing access to the genetically coded memories, which would emerge on the standing wave like a hologram.”

Matthew saw them both giving him the look. He’d seen it enough to recognize it. It was the look that asked “Is this guy for real, or can he really bullshit that well off the top of his head?”

“Anyway, skipping a lot of indole neurochemistry that would put most people to sleep, the long and short of it is the tone is a side-effect of a real process in the brain that allows us to access deep-deposit memories, certainly memories from early childhood but possibly even memories implanted long before birth, some kind of group collective memory or consciousness. So, yes, exposing the brain to these tones — some say they’re harmonics of the earth’s actual vibration frequency as it rotates — can certainly enhance psychoactive effects, which is why almost all meditative communities chant in unison on certain frequencies, also why Tibet and Nepal are full of temple bells.”

“The story says someone with the same name as my great-uncle invented a resonator that did this,” Worthy explained. “The notebook should tell us how much of it was real.”

“This would be a private notebook, one of a kind, hand-written?”

“Originally hand-written. Whether at some point a typed copy was created I don’t know.”

“Most of the known Lovecraft material is in the Hay Library, a block up the hill on Prospect. I’m sure you know that.”

“My family have always been substantial donors to the university, Matthew. I have free access to the Hay. We’ve searched pretty exhaustively.”

“OK, Worthy. We can try,” Matthew nodded. “Get Les a copy of the letter that mentioned the notebook, any other details you think might help. But I need to warn you, we maintain lists of things we’re looking for, Marian and I and now Les and Chantal and even Skeezix.”

Matthew explained it was a numbers game. Not that they just sat around, doing nothing. He explained the automatic Internet searches, watching for somebody to post a rare book online in Chillicothe or County Cork, the e-mails and letters to libraries and descendants and old family law firms. Sometimes they got lucky, but you could also spend a lifetime looking for a manuscript that an author mentioned in a letter, but never got around to writing. “I just don’t want to mislead you that we’re likely to drop everything and go after this one item, full-time.”

“‘From Beyond’ didn’t just come from nowhere, Matthew. It’s based on a phenomenon that only now, a century later, is gaining credence, that there are objects, entities right around us that can be seen at wavelengths just outside the spectrum of human vision. We know Lovecraft spent part of the summer of 1920 looking into these phenomena.”

“And is there any family history of your great-uncle Henry having been an inventor, a scientist? Did he leave any records of conducting this kind of experiment?”

“He was the black sheep of his generation. Always more interested in blowing things up with his chemistry set in the basement than following the family footsteps into shipping and banking and law. When he disappeared the family went through the usual motions, hired private detectives, waited to see if there’d be a ransom note. But you get the idea they were just going through the motions. Not quite the way they would have acted if it had been the son who was expected to take over the family business. My dad says they always figured he ran off with some dance-hall girl. They certainly weren’t going to suggest he crossed over into the Sixth Dimension.”

“Henry Annesley … disappeared?”

“In early 1921. The story stayed in the papers for a few weeks, but then Babe Ruth broke the home run record for the Yankees and everybody moved on.”

“Hm.”

Marian came in from the front of the store, told Matthew that Marquita and the boy Gilbert had arrived.

“Thanks, Marian. We’re almost done.”

“So. Probably we need to talk about what this notebook would be worth, if it turns up,” Worthy said, suddenly businesslike.

“We do need some parameters for what you’re willing to pay, in case the seller sets a high asking price.” Obviously, the firm would use their skills to hold that price down, Matthew explained. It was often cheaper, for instance, to negotiate a price for a box, for a shelf of books, rather than singling out and identifying the one thing they were looking for. They never lied outright, but saying “I just don’t have time to sort through all this stuff, what do you want for the lot?” could often work out better than identifying the one object they wanted, which could have the effect of making sellers suddenly start to think about the prices they’d seen on
Pawn Stars
or
Antiques Road Show.
And “Even if we find it, Worthy, I can’t guarantee you the contents will be everything you hope.”

“Matthew, some people think that because we grew up as children of privilege, the Annesleys don’t know the value of money. Well,
I’ll admit, life is different if you don’t have to wonder where your next meal is coming from. But one of the values of money is knowing how to allocate enough to get something done. If you can find an H.P. Lovecraft notebook from the summer of 1920, making any reference at all to my great-uncle and his experiments with a machine which was supposed to somehow activate or excite the human pineal gland, I’ll pay you this amount for it.”

Worthy scribbled a dollar figure on a scrap of paper and slid it across the table. It was more than most people could expect to earn in half a year.

“Then we’ll try to find it for you,” Matthew smiled.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Worthy shook hands and took his leave. Les saw him out to the front of the store but returned immediately.

“Does this notebook even exist?” Matthew asked, as Les sat down and opened another Philippine beer.

“Lovecraft wrote longhand. If there was ever a typed copy, it would have been typed by Robert Barlow, the teen-ager down in Florida.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Whatever his faults, Lovecraft was always willing to correspond with young fans, he encouraged them, even when they turned out to be 13 years old, like Robert Hayward Barlow. They started corresponding in 1931. He may have been just a kid, but young Barlow was a collector’s dream. He convinced Lovecraft to stop throwing away his manuscripts after a story was published, the kid offered to type the manuscripts and send Lovecraft the typed copies if he could keep the autograph manuscripts.”

Les used “autograph” in the bookseller’s sense, meaning the manuscripts had been written out in their entirety, longhand.

“They’d be worth a fortune, now.”

“Lovecraft’s will named Barlow his literary executor — he was 18 or 19 by then — and Barlow donated all the hand-written stuff to the John Hay, right up the hill, which is where they sit to this day,” Les continued.

“Lovecraft wrote on odd pieces of paper, he’d write in a kid’s school composition notebook, whatever was cheap. What he mostly wrote, actually, were letters. The biographers have deciphered hundreds of them. Could there be fragmentary scraps they didn’t use?
Probably. I’ll call and talk to them. But a whole notebook sitting in the bottom of a box, still uncatalogued? I can talk to Peggy at the Hay, too, but it’s your proverbial needle in a haystack. Barlow might be a better place to start.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Absolutely. Like his hero, Barlow didn’t live long enough to see the great Lovecraft boom of the ’60s and ’70s. He committed suicide in 1951, down in Mexico. He was gay and apparently someone was going to out him. Back then he would have lost his job, maybe even been prosecuted.”

“But Barlow didn’t turn in everything.”

“That’s right. There was at least one case where he kept an original manuscript that didn’t turn up for almost 50 years. Barlow transcribed Lovecraft’s story ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ and had the manuscript with him when he landed the teaching job at Mexico City College. Later, after they made him chairman of the Department of Anthropology, he met June Ripley, a post-graduate studying the Nahuatl language, Barlow’s specialty. The two apparently became friends; Barlow gave the manuscript to Ripley just before his suicide. She stayed in Mexico for years, then came back to teach in the States. When she died in 1994 her sister-in-law found the long-lost Lovecraft manuscript, written in pencil in a child’s notebook, and donated it to the Hay.”

“So: Could the same thing have happened to our ‘Miskatonic Manuscript’?”

“Sure. If it ever existed. It’s mentioned in one letter but no one has ever seen it? You probably know the odds better than I do.”

“We’ll make a fair effort.”

* * *

Marian came back, checking. Les picked up Tyrone the orange tabby, clearing the fifth chair, and carried him out to the front of the store. You could carry Tyrone like a sack of beans, he rarely objected. Marian ushered in Bucky the Annesley bodyguard and the girlfriend
Marquita, trailing young Gilbert, 17 years old, painfully thin and obviously unhappy. The teen-ager’s complexion spoke of stress and bad diet combined. Too many French fries. Gilbert looked to have about the same amount of Indian blood as his mom; he was obviously no relation to Bucky.

“Marian, has Emilio come back?”

“Yes, he’s out in the side yard.”

“He’d wanted to meet Gilbert. Maybe you could ask him if he’d like to come in.”

Emilio came in from outside, dressed in a fancy shirt in bright geometric patterns and his turquoise and silver finery. Matthew introduced everyone. Emilio asked the mother to explain what had happened.

“He has spells. The school psychiatrist says there’s a chemical imbalance in the brain.”

Matthew laughed out loud. “Unbelievable. Which chemicals do they say are out of balance in his brain? Serotonin? Testosterone? Dimethyltryptamine? What should the levels be, and how do they propose to measure them, by drilling holes in the young man’s skull? They make fun of other cultures for blaming sickness on evil spirits, but how is ‘a chemical imbalance in the brain’ that no one can measure any different? It’s magic talk. Calling a person sick when you just find their way of being happens to be inconvenient for your institution is a good way to
make
a person sick.”

“Well, it just don’t feel right, putting him on these drugs.” Marquita agreed. She sounded angry now, which was healthy. “They say he has ‘bipolar disorder.’ They use lots of other big words, too. I’m not so dumb. I did good in school, I speak good English. They’re trying to buffalo me. This school psychiatrist is a little mouse, behind all his fancy talk. He twists his hair and picks his nose.”

“They’re called anti-psychotics,” Gilbert said, sitting up straighter now, apparently having decided these were people who might finally give him a fair hearing. “They make it sound like if I don’t take them I’ll turn into a mass murderer or something.”

“And what’s it like to be on them?” Matthew asked.

“It takes so much more energy just to get up and walk around. All you want to do is sit still and vegetate. It’s like the atmosphere is made of cotton candy and you have to push this stuff aside just to get up and walk to the bathroom or the refrigerator. Everything takes this huge effort.”

“And the voices?”

“They try to get through but they’re dulled. You just hear these faint echoes calling you, like from the other side of a wall.”

“So it was better when you weren’t doped up?”

“What are you, kidding? Everything used to be clear and sparkling. I could see and feel that things were alive, everything had its own, like, aura. Sometimes I could even see …”

“Yes?”

Gilbert sighed. He’d already learned to be careful what he told. “Sometimes I can see people’s ancestors. Their ancestors know if they’re moving in the right path, and so I can see it, too, when someone is going down the wrong path. The ancestors try to tell them, but either they can’t hear or they won’t listen.”

He looked at old Emilio, then, awaiting some judgment as to whether he was believed, or whether he’d just be laughed at or humored, once again. Old Emilio smiled, just a little, and nodded his head slowly. Young Gilbert’s sense of relief was palpable.