The Weird of Hali, page 4
“Yeah,” said Owen, without looking up.
“His work has some remarkable points of contact with the dark superstitious beliefs of the past, wouldn’t you say?”
Startled, Owen looked up then. The man was considering him with a slight smile. Lean face, dark brown skin, and a nose arched like a hawk’s beak gave him a Middle Eastern look, though not one Owen could place. He knew all of Miskatonic’s liberal arts faculty by sight, and this wasn’t one of them; a researcher or visiting faculty from another university, maybe? Something about the man made that seem unlikely.
“I suppose so.” Owen managed to say.
The man got up and went to the door. With the same slight smile: “No doubt it depends on which of his letters you’ve read.”
It took just a moment for the comment to sink in, and by the time it did, the door had swung open and shut. Owen jumped to his feet and went out the door after him.
He was gone. There was no one on the sidewalk for a block in either direction, and no one on the other side of the street.
Owen stood there in the rain for a long moment, looking this way and that, and finally went back inside. It was only then that he realized that the washer with his clothes in it was the only machine running in the laundromat.
WEDNESDAY HE PELTED out of the house on Halsey Street as soon as he’d downed breakfast, took in another session of the critical-theory seminar, then buried himself in the restricted stacks of Orne Library for three hours, where a ponderous Victorian tome on the excavation and interpretation of the Eltdown Shards kept him busy enough to chase troubling thoughts out of his mind. Once or twice, as he turned the crisp yellow pages, he found himself wondering whether the letter was right and Lovecraft had actually studied and practiced the lore of the Shards, but each time he was able to force his mind back to the work at hand.
Then it was back across the quad to Morgan Hall. Professor Akeley was perched on her chair in the little basement classroom as usual. At one o’clock exactly, she got up and started into the day’s lecture. “It’s not often that you can point to a single month when a given set of ideas dropped right out of popular culture, but today’s topic is an exception. The month was April 1945. That’s when the first ugly news reports and photos started coming out of the concentration camps at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, and people across the United States and the rest of the world had to face the consequences of the racial pseudoscience that was all over American popular culture straight through the years between the wars.”
She went on, sketching out an entire landscape of popular thought that had been swept out of sight in a hurry once the Holocaust showed where it led. She talked about how every ethnic group was assigned a place in an imaginary sequence spanning the distance from ape to Englishman, how ideas of sterilizing the supposedly unfit in order to accelerate human progress were perfectly acceptable in polite society, and how sex between people of different ethnic groups was shrouded in a language of pious horror that very imperfectly hid the outlines of an entire culture’s unacknowledged desires. It was another brilliant lecture, and once again Owen ended up with pages of hastily scrawled notes pointing to sources and perspectives he hadn’t yet included in his thesis. When it was over, he went up to the front of the class, and waited while the undergrads pelted her with questions and argued with the answers.
Finally they were alone in the classroom. “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Professor Akeley said in a tired voice. “The last time I taught this class I had two white supremacists in the back row and the class nearly ended in a riot.” She shook her head, then got out of the chair and started for the door. “You look unusually thoughtful today. What’s on your mind?”
“I wanted to talk to you about that fifth Lovecraft letter,” he admitted.
She went to the door, closed it, turned to face him. “I was afraid of that. Owen, you haven’t been following Lovecraft studies that long, have you? You have no idea how poisonous the debates about Lovecraft and occultism tend to get. It’s the kind of thing that wrecks academic careers—the kind of thing you don’t want to get anywhere near.”
“Even if there’s conclusive evidence.”
“Especially if there’s conclusive evidence.” She considered him for a moment, and went on. “This is to go no further.”
“Okay,” he said, wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
“It doesn’t really matter whether Lovecraft took occultism seriously. It matters even less whether you or I do. What matters—” Her voice dropped. “—is that there are other people who do take it seriously. Seriously enough that it really isn’t safe to attract their attention. As Lovecraft said, there are real dangers in such things.”
Owen took this in, and slowly nodded. “Got it.”
“Thank you,” she said with evident relief. “It’s simply one of those things.” She went to the door, opened it. “You haven’t heard yet—I got an email this morning from Jim Willett. He’s absolutely over the moon about the new Robert Blake stories.” They crossed the hall to the inconvenient stair, started climbing.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Owen went back to the house on Halsey Street and tried to get to work on his thesis, tackling the way Lovecraft used the old legends of Yog-Sothoth to relativize the concepts of space and time and relating them to the popular impact of Einstein’s physics. His mind kept wandering to other things, though. After a while, he noticed the flyer Shelby had given him, sitting neglected on top of his bookcase, and picked it up. The text made no more sense on another reading than it had when he first tried to decipher it, and left just as uneasy a feeling in him. After a moment, he got onto the internet and went looking for information on noology.
There wasn’t much. The obvious domain names had been purchased but didn’t yet have websites; there were a couple of mentions of the Miskatonic University Noology Program in the campus site, all mentioning the same office on the ninth floor of Belbury Hall; there were a few other references here and there. Finally he found an article tucked away in an abstruse online journal he’d never encountered before. It wasn’t much clearer than the flyer: it claimed that noology was destined to replace philosophy the way that astronomy had replaced astrology, and approvingly quoted several media figures on the militant atheist side of the current round of culture wars. The humanities, it suggested, were a mere waste of time in an age in which the human race needed to unite all its efforts in the cause of reason and progress.
Sounds great, he thought sourly. But what did they mean by those fine slogans? The article never quite got around to saying, and the raw evasiveness of it all did nothing to make him less wary. He closed the browser, tossed the flyer in the wastepaper basket and buried himself in his thesis, hammering out a workable first draft of his discussion of the influence of the theory of relativity on Lovecraft’s thought. He kept at it until Jenny’s tentative knock at the door reminded him of the blues concert that night.
Arkham didn’t have much night life, aside from local garage bands and whatever students at the university managed to cook up for themselves, but J.J.’s was an exception worth noticing. It was a drafty barn of a place on Fish Street, close to the railroad tracks, that got remodeled into a music venue in the Sixties and managed to keep going straight through the decades that followed. Wednesday was blues night at J.J.’s; top groups came through now and then, playing Arkham Wednesday night and Newburyport Thursday, and then rolling on to bigger markets like Portland or Manchester for the more lucrative Friday and Saturday night shows.
The cold damp air slapped Owen across the face like a wet towel as he headed out the door after Jenny and Tish. The last red glow of sunset was bleeding to death in the hills off to the west as they walked through Arkham’s university ghetto: lines of old gambrel-roofed houses cut up into apartments or disfigured with big, blocky, cheaply built additions, with here and there a hole-in-the-wall place selling pizza or liquor or Chinese takeout. As they walked, Jenny and Tish chatted animatedly about some bit of campus politics that had blown up the previous weekend, yet another scandal in the troubled English department. Owen tried to get interested in it, and failed completely. The conversation he’d had with Professor Akeley replayed in his head over and over again.
As they got closer to J.J.’s, the mostly empty sidewalks started to come alive. Alone or in little clusters, people headed toward Fish Street from the student neighborhoods. Friends waved to one another, conversations sprang up, and Owen had to step into the street more than once to get around a knot of people standing there talking on the sidewalk. Finally, the front door of J.J’s beckoned. Owen paid the cover charge and followed the others inside.
There were cheap round tables around three sides of the room and a space for dancing in the middle; the stage jutted out from the fourth side, and Isaac Jax and His Cottonmouths were up there already, shooting the breeze with each other and the management and tipping back a beer or two. Owen and his housemates settled at a table over on one side. Faking an enthusiasm he didn’t feel, Owen flagged down a server and treated the others to the evening’s first beer.
The two women ordered something yellow and bland. Owen asked the server to bring him the darkest beer they had, and left it at that. What came back from the bar was something called Puritan Black Stout, from a Danvers microbrewery. The bottle had a frowning Pilgrim on the label in the signature black buckle-fronted hat, arms folded, glaring defiance at every sin Owen cared to imagine and some he didn’t. He sipped, then downed a slug. It was good and bitter, and it did much to improve his mood. The moment he put the bottle down, of course, Tish chaffed him for drinking used motor oil, he offered a speculation about which of Lovecraft’s eldritch deities had produced her beverage via its kidneys and bladder, and the evening finally got off to a decent start.
The show was better than the beer, which was saying something. Delta style blues, the poster had claimed, and Isaac Jax lived up to it, belting out a mix of old standards and new pieces that sounded as though they could have been penned by Robert Johnson or Son House. His slide guitar playing and the string-band sound of the Cottonmouths made the mix perfect. Toward the end of the first set, Jax launched into “Cross Road Blues,” and Owen leaned back, remembering the old stories of the black-clothed, black-hatted devil who supposedly met some of the old bluesmen at a crossroads by midnight and taught them their chops.
Then he happened to glance to his left.
The man in the long black coat he’d seen at the laundromat was sitting three tables away, leaning back in his chair much as Owen was. Rings glittered on the hand that wrapped around his chin. He was enjoying the music, or so the smile that creased his lean dark face suggested. After a moment, he glanced toward Owen, nodded a greeting, and turned back to Isaac Jax and His Cottonmouths.
Owen turned sharply away, tried to lose himself in the music again. It didn’t work. After a few minutes, admitting defeat, he glanced back to his left.
The man was gone, and there was no chair in the place where he’d been sitting.
Owen stared, then turned away again. A server went past, and he flagged her down, ordered another beer. When that was gone, he repeated the operation and got another. You could get food at J.J.’s between sets, though Owen usually didn’t. This time, he splurged on chicken and french fries, and between a full stomach and enough beer, managed to get his nerves calmed down enough to enjoy the rest of the show.
“FAIR ENOUGH,” SAID Professor Akeley. She and Owen were in her office in Wilmarth Hall, where they’d just spent a good portion of Thursday morning discussing his thesis. Rain drummed against the window; through the blurred glass, the gray mass of the East Campus Parking Garage could just be made out, looming up against the green whaleback shape of Meadow Hill. “I’d like to see you expand the section on the historical origins of Lovecraft’s image of the nonhuman Other, as I said. Aside from that, it looks as though you’re pretty much on track.”
“Thank you.”
She nodded. Then, after a moment: “Did you ever have a chance to talk to Shelby?”
“Not really. Every time I’ve tried to bring up the subject, she’s turned it into an excuse to try to get me to go to Belbury Hall and talk to the people in the Noology Program.”
Akeley looked away. “I hope you don’t do that.”
Owen gave her a startled look.
“Over the last two weeks,” she said, “six other grad students have walked away from their programs and started over again there. The other professors are just as baffled as I am. Everything was going fine, as far as they knew, and then—” She shook her head.
“That’s spooky,” Owen said. Professor Akeley didn’t respond, and after a moment he went on. “Shelby gave me a flyer about the Noology Program. It was basically doubletalk.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“I looked noology up online, and didn’t have any more luck figuring out what it’s supposed to be—a lot of vague handwaving about progress and reason. Do you have any idea what it’s about?”
“I don’t know,” Professor Akeley said. She turned to face him. “When I first heard about noology last April, when it was still supposed to be under the interdisciplinary studies program, I figured it was one more academic fad like postmodernism or critical theory, with some cognitive psychology thrown in to make it look more cutting-edge. You’re right that the publications on the subject are gibberish, but that’s nothing new in the academy these days. But there’s this business with Shelby and the others, and...” She let the sentence trail off and looked back out the window.
Owen thought about that for a time, and then said, “Does this have anything to do with what you told me yesterday?”
“Forget about what I said yesterday,” she replied, her voice low and tense. “That isn’t a question you should even be thinking about.”
It was as much answer as he needed. He changed the subject immediately and asked her about the Robert Blake stories, and they spent the next quarter hour chatting about the reactions of the dozen or so Robert Blake scholars who’d already responded to her emails. Everything seemed fine between them when he left the office, but he noticed the worried glance she sent after him as he headed for the stairs.
Outside, he started across the quad, then on an impulse veered and went north between Wilmarth Hall and Morgan Hall. Beyond them was another grassy square edged by bare trees, with an abstract sculpture of rust-colored metal in the middle of it. Beyond the sculpture, the pale mass of Belbury Hall climbed a dozen stories toward the clouds. Despite what Professor Akeley had said, the thought of going in through the big glass doors of the hall and taking the elevator up to the ninth floor kept circling through his mind.
Each time he came close to taking that first step toward the doors, though, something stopped him, and after a few moments he realized what it was. He’d learned in Iraq to trust the gut feeling that warned of impending danger, and though he couldn’t tell why, the thought of going any closer to the Noology Program, whatever it was, set that reaction going in him. He turned abruptly and walked back between the two buildings, heading away from Belbury Hall.
RESTLESS AND UNEASY, he left campus and plunged into Arkham’s gritty heart, hoping to walk his way to some kind of clarity. The rain had stopped but great ragged masses of cloud hurried by overhead on their way to soak Boston and points further south. WITCHES BANISH PHANTOMS, the front page of the Arkham Advertiser read; Owen gathered that Arkham High School’s football team had lost the annual grudge match with its perennial rivals from Salem. He laughed sourly, wondering if a witch could banish the phantoms that haunted him just then.
He crossed Lovecraft Park, trying not to notice the gaunt puzzled bronze face looming above him, and headed down Hyde Street, where the steeple of the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church stabbed ineffectually up at the sky. The church had an old-fashioned reader board in front of it, white letters clinging none too securely to a black background. The side facing him said JESUS LOVES YOU; he passed it and glanced over his shoulder, then stopped and read it: SUNDAY’S SERMON: MYSTERIES HIDDEN FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD. He gave it a long bleak look, then walked on by and turned south on Garrison. The street went past the boarded-up train station, over the railroad tracks on one bridge, over the churning brown waters of the Miskatonic River on another.
South of the river was the old downtown district, where long-abandoned stores and empty office buildings clustered around the original Miskatonic University quad. That had once been the part of town that mattered, but the end of the postwar boom and the construction of the new campus north of town had changed that. These days the old quad was office space for the alumni association and the financial aid department, and the streets around it were as fine a specimen of urban blight as could be found anywhere in New England. Owen paced down cracked and crumbling sidewalks past one boarded-up storefront after another. High overhead, empty windows with or without benefit of glass stared like blind eyes at the dark hills around the town.
Finally, walking more or less at random, he came to one of the bridges over Hangman’s Brook and stopped there, leaning on the railing, staring at the stream. The dark tree-covered mass of Hangman’s Hill crouched against the skyline in front of him, and the black waters of the brook went splashing past below. Off to the west, the hills rose up in dark rumpled shapes thick with trees. He stared at the water for what seemed like a long time.
Eventually, he noticed that someone was standing beside him
He stared resolutely down at the water, but could not help seeing the brown fingers that grasped the railing, bright with ornate rings, and the long black coat fluttering and flapping in the wind. Finally, Owen glanced up, saw the dark hawk-nosed face, the gray scarf and broad-brimmed black hat of the man he’d met in the laundromat.
