The Weird of Hali, page 8
The moment he started down from the crest, it was as though he had walked through a door. Even though he was only a few minutes’ walk from campus and not much further from the busy streets of Arkham’s north side, the green slope of the hill felt weirdly isolated, as if he’d suddenly stepped miles out of town. He could barely hear the traffic noise of the city behind him, and trees hid the campus to his right. He shook his head, kept walking.
To the north, the landscape spread out before him: a long grassy slope scattered with gray boulders some ancient glacier must have left behind, and then the ravine, a stark cut across the hillside, edged with tangled brush and great crannied masses of native stone. He found a way down into it after some searching. The bottom of the ravine was covered with thick grass, and rising out of it on the far side, just before the land rose back up again, was the white stone.
Owen walked toward it. He knew about the stone, and not just from the references in one of Lovecraft’s stories. The Arkham witch trials of 1692, though they’d never gotten the wider fame of the Salem trials, were still remembered among old Arkham families; teenagers in town dared each other to visit the stone at midnight, and the student Wiccan group at Miskatonic used it as an altar for their ceremonies when the weather was good enough, which wasn’t often. It was a vaguely cubical mass of hard pale stone jutting up from the grass. Owen looked around; it wasn’t hard to imagine naked revelers dancing around the stone on May Eve, as the witnesses at the witch trials claimed they’d seen.
He got to the stone, glanced down at its surface. Someone had scratched words onto the stone: SHUB-NIGGURATH WAS HERE.
He laughed and turned back the way he’d come.
At that moment something stirred and crackled in the brush behind him. Startled, he turned around, but whatever it was had already ducked back out of sight. He stood there for a moment, and then caught the smell: a rank, animal scent, faint but definite. It was—there really was no other word for it—goaty.
He turned abruptly and hurried back the way he’d come, glancing back over his shoulder from time to time as he went. Nothing followed him but the smell, which lingered until the white stone was entirely out of sight.
BACK ON CAMPUS, he climbed the long winding stair that ran up the middle of Wilmarth Hall. He was distracted enough that he almost walked right past the seventh floor landing. Catching himself, he pushed open the door and started toward Professor Akeley’s office.
There was someone standing at the far end of the hall, looking out the tall windows there toward the gambrel roofs of Arkham. At the sound of the door, he turned and came to meet Owen in front of the office door.
“You must be Owen Merrill,” the man said, putting out his hand. “I’m Clark Noyes.”
Owen shook his hand, tried to gauge the man. At first glance, he could have been any of a dozen other professors from Miskatonic’s better-funded departments, wearing the whole successful Ivy League academic kit from rimless glasses and casually knotted silk tie to tastefully overpriced Italian shoes, with a bland and genial look on his face. A second glance drew back baffled, because Owen could sense nothing at all behind the costume and the vaguely friendly expression. It was as though the clothing and the face formed a shell around empty space. “Pleased to meet you,” he managed to say. “Shelby’s talked about you.”
“I imagine so,” said Professor Noyes. “Actually, that’s part of why I came looking for you this afternoon. She’s mentioned you to me more than once. I know you have some doubts about the project.” He chuckled. It was a strange sound, as though he’d calculated exactly what a chuckle should sound like and decided to produce one just then. “No surprises there, of course. Like so many of our grad students, Shelby’s got a somewhat singleminded view of the goals of our project. She really hasn’t grasped just now much of the humanities are relevant to noology.”
Owen made a noncommittal noise in his throat, and Noyes chuckled again. “I know, you’re skeptical. Understandably so, in fact. Still, I’ve taken the time to check up on your work here at Miskatonic, and quite frankly, I’m impressed. You’ve got a good quick mind. You’re doing your thesis on Lovecraft, right?”
Owen nodded and quoted the title of his thesis at Noyes, who said, “Good, good. And studying his sources as well, which might be very helpful indeed.” Owen wondered what he meant by that. “Do I remember right that you’re planning on a doctorate?”
“Yes,” Owen said.
“Good. I’d like to encourage you to think about the possibility of doing that in our program. We’ve got plenty of funding for the next few years, and I think we could really use you in the lab.”
Taken aback, Owen said, “I’ll consider it.”
“Please do. In fact, why don’t you come up to my office sometime soon? When you have time, of course—I know your schedule’s got to be pretty busy with the semester in full swing. Still, give me a call, when you’ve got an hour or two. I’d be delighted to show you around, introduce you to the team, give you a better idea of what we’re up to and how we can use you. I think you’ll be favorably impressed.” He repeated the odd, almost mechanical chuckle. “Well, I won’t keep you. Give my best to Miriam.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Great. See you soon.” He headed for the elevators, still smiling exactly the same vague bland smile he’d had on his face all along.
Owen turned to watch him go, then went into Professor Akeley’s office, his thoughts in confusion. Having a doctorate program all but handed to him by one of the university’s most influential professors was a grad student’s wet dream—but the thought of getting involved in whatever was going on in Belbury Hall still woke the same cold sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse, absurd as it was, he couldn’t shake the thought that there hadn’t actually been anyone there inside Noyes’ fashionable clothes and smiling face.
The office was empty. A note scrawled on a bright orange pad on the desk read: Owen—will be back 12ish. One more flustered cluck around the interdisciplinary studies program and I’m going to start tearing my hair out in clumps. —MA.
Owen laughed, went over to the table, and looked over the old pulp magazines and letters from the Harriet Blake estate. The puzzling letter from Lovecraft was nowhere to be seen. He looked through the piles for the volume of Justin Geoffrey’s poetry, in case Akeley had put the letter back where it had been, but had no more luck finding that than the letter.
He was just finishing his search when he remembered that the interdisciplinary studies program had its offices in Belbury Hall. Maybe it was just a coincidence that the head of the Noology Program had arranged to be waiting in Wilmarth Hall, while someone else from Belbury Hall made sure Professor Akeley was somewhere else when Owen got there. Maybe.
The words the man in black had said on the bridge over Hangman’s Brook whispered in his memory: Sooner or later, you’ll have to take sides, he’d said. Nobody’s neutral in this business. Noyes pretty clearly wanted him on one side, the side of the Noology Program; so did Shelby, and one thing after another seemed to be lining up to push him in the same direction.
And the other side—was there another side at all? He’d gone to Innsmouth looking for it, and come back with nothing in his hands. Maybe the man in black was the other side, or part of it, but since the trip to Innsmouth there had been no sign of him. Owen sat down abruptly on one of the chairs, wondering yet again what he’d stumbled into, and whether he’d be able to get through it in one piece.
THE NEXT DAY he woke before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep. By eight he was finished with breakfast and feeling restless, and decided on the spur of the moment to spend the whole morning down in the Orne Library restricted stacks. He got to the library less than fifteen minutes later, clattered down the stair into the basement, pressed the door buzzer, waited until the door rattled open and Dr. Whipple’s lean wrinkled face peered out. The old man looked even more distracted than usual, but his face brightened when he saw who was waiting. “Owen,” he said. “Well. Come in, come in.”
He stepped through the door, and realized as he was taking his pack off that he and Dr. Whipple weren’t the only ones in the room. It took a moment longer for him to realize that the other person there was Shelby. She glanced up, saw him, and something tense and almost fearful showed in her face for a moment before she covered it with a bright smile. “Hi, Owen.”
“Hi,” he said, startled by her presence there.
She got up, took the book she’d been reading to Dr. Whipple, and handed it to him; Owen thought he recognized the cover of the book. “I think that’s everything I needed, thanks.” He responded with a skeptical sound somewhere down in his throat, and she turned the bright smile on him before leaving the restricted stacks.
Owen watched the door close, turned to the old man, and thought he recognized the sour expression on his face. “Dr. Whipple,” he said, “is she the one who keeps on asking for one book after another?”
“Why, yes, she’s one of them. It’s that program up at Belbury Hall, whatever it’s called. They keep sending grad students down here to do that sort of thing—as though anything worth knowing about the old lore can be learned in any such manner.” He shook his head dolefully. “Superficiality, Owen. It’s the bane of education.” He turned to take the book Shelby had been reading back into the stacks, then stopped. “What will it be this time? As I recall, you finished with the Eltdown Shards the last time you were down here.”
“Yes, I did.” A sudden thought came to him. “Do you have Justin Geoffrey’s The People of the Monolith and Other Poems?”
The old man blinked. “Indeed I do. Curious that you should ask for that. Just a moment.” He set down the book Shelby had been reading on one of the tables, went over to the far end of the stacks. When he was out of sight, Owen walked over to the table and opened the book. It had the crowded and ornate title page common in seventeenth-century books, but the top two lines read: Necronomicon seu Liber de Legibus Mortuorum. He closed the cover, stepped back to where he had been standing, and waited for Whipple to return.
“Here you are,” the old man said. “That wasn’t in the collection down here until a few days ago. They’ve got Lovecraft’s own copy upstairs in special collections, full of scrawls.” He shook his head. “But this is a good clean copy.”
Owen thanked him and took the book to the nearest table while Whipple picked up the Necronomicon and took it back into the stacks. It was Robert Blake’s copy of Geoffrey’s book, no question of that. The letter from Lovecraft was gone, as he’d expected, but the paper it had been written on had yellowed the pages to either side of it. The left hand page was blank; the other had a sonnet printed on it:
HALI
The prophet’s blood pools scarlet on the stone.
His eyes, that knew futurity and fate,
Stare blind and bleeding through a broken gate
Into a burning fane, where he alone
Once heard the inmost whispers of the Earth.
Did they forewarn him of the cold command,
The pounding hooves, the weapon in the hand
That struck him down, the laugh of brutal mirth?
Now muffled figures murmur in the night
His final words; now others gaze aghast
At fell shapes rising from the sleepless past.
The age that dawned there, in the flame’s red light,
Shall end in flame when, as he prophesied,
Four join their hands where gray rock meets gray tide.
He wondered what any of it meant. He remembered the prophet Hali from von Junzt and a few other books he’d studied, and something he’d read somewhere back a couple of months ago claimed that he’d been a historical figure, a priest of the city of Irem in Arabia in the second century BC. Nothing he’d read mentioned a violent death, and the prophecy of the last line rang no least bell of memory.
The faint yellowing there on the page reminded him of Lovecraft’s warning. The question that mattered, he knew, was whether he’d tried to turn back in time.
HE HAD HIS answer the next evening.
He went with Professor Akeley to her office after the afternoon class—she’d lectured on the impact of the cinema on popular culture between the wars, a fascinating topic though less relevant to his thesis than some of the others—and put something like four hours into helping her sort through the letters from the Harriet Blake estate. By tacit agreement, neither of them mentioned the fifth letter from Lovecraft. The weather had turned cold that day, and so the crotchety heating system in Wilmarth Hall went into overdrive as usual and kept the whole building stuffy enough that Akeley discarded her sweater and Owen felt overheated.
The letters included real treasures, no question. Some of them, the professor assured Owen, would keep scholarly dovecotes fluttering for years to come. Finally, though, they’d sorted through the entire collection and made a list of their authors and subjects. Through the window, stars shone bright and distant in a black sky, and the lamps around the empty quad glowed sodium yellow below. They wished each other a good night and Owen went down the long stair toward the ground floor and the walk home. The heating system was still running full blast; he slung his coat over his shoulder along with his backpack.
The main doors were working for a change. They hissed open, he stepped through, and a moment later realized that someone was standing out in front, waiting. It was Shelby.
Except that it wasn’t.
She came toward him, her face fixed in a hollow smile. “Owen,” she said, in a voice that was just as bland and empty as Professor Noyes’ had been. “It’s time for you to come with me. We’ve waited long enough.”
The sense of vacancy he’d gotten from Professor Noyes had been uncomfortable enough, but Owen didn’t know the man. With Shelby, things were different. He’d taken classes with her, argued with her, discussed career plans; he’d had a crush on her for a while, until he realized that there wasn’t enough chemistry between them for anything to come of it. He knew her—but this wasn’t her in any sense that mattered. Whatever was approaching him looked and sounded like Shelby, but there was no longer a person inside.
He tensed, backed away, and then suddenly out of the corner of his eye noticed someone else moving toward him.
Once in his Army days, out in Anbar Province, he’d been in a firefight and suddenly, with kick-in-the-stomach intensity, known that he had to get down. He dropped to the ground an instant before gunfire sprayed through the empty air where his face had been. This felt exactly the same way. He knew he had to run, and he ran. Shelby sprang after him and grabbed one end of his coat; he twisted, shed coat and backpack, and sprinted out into the quad.
His footfalls drummed on the hard half-frozen ground. Another pair followed, went to one side, heading him off in case he tried to run for the main entrance to Armitage Union. Owen gauged his options, veered in the only direction that offered any hope of safety: the green belt at the foot of Meadow Hill. The ravine, he reminded himself. The white stone.
He rounded the southwest corner of Wilmarth Hall, hazarded a glance back over his shoulder. Shelby was standing in the middle of the quad, talking to somebody on her cell phone; his coat and backpack were on the ground next to her. His pursuer had lost ground heading toward Armitage Union, but was still on his trail. Owen sped up, sprinted past the south end of Wilmarth Hall to Garrison Street, which ran between campus and the green belt, knowing that any traffic there might leave him at his pursuers’ mercy. Fortunately the only cars were a block away, and he dashed across the street, plunged into the black leafless trees on the other side.
THE DARKNESS BENEATH the trees was thick enough that Owen could barely see to run, but he kept moving uphill as fast as he could. The night around him was bitterly cold; the air burned in his throat. The footfalls of his pursuer slowed and stopped—on the street, from the sound of it—and after a moment he heard the faint buzz of a one-sided conversation as the man called someone else on a cell phone. Under the trees, Owen felt he had a chance; reactions he hadn’t had to call on since he got home from Iraq surged through him alongside the adrenaline, reminding his muscles of every nasty close-quarter combat trick he’d ever learned.
Who had Shelby called? Sooner or later, you’ll have to take sides, the man in black had said. Nobody’s neutral in this business. The words burned in his memory. Whatever the sides were, whatever the stakes might be, he knew whose side he could never be on, and that left only one alternative—if there was another side at all. He shoved the thought away, kept moving.
He’d raised a sweat sprinting across the quad, and now that he had to move more slowly, his damp clothes turned painfully cold. He clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, kept going. He tripped over a fallen branch, landed hard on his hands and knees, pulled himself up. What had the man in black said? On the far side of the ravine is an old white stone. Go there if you’re in danger—you’ll find protection there, and guidance. The words barely made sense to him. Keep going, he told himself; that at least was simple enough to understand.
He pushed ahead in the blind black shadows, finally came out onto the whaleback slope of Meadow Hill. The pale glow from Arkham’s streetlights lit up the sky behind him, beyond the dark mass of Chapman Hall. Little light reached the hill, but it was enough that searchers might be able to spot him. No help for that now. He ran, fast and low, up to the hill’s crest and over it.
As before, the moment he passed the crest he seemed to be in another world. The traffic noises and city lights behind him might as well have been miles away. Ahead, barely visible in the night, the hill sloped down toward the ravine, and the white stone.
Afterwards, he could never remember just how he found his way down into the ravine in the darkness without falling from the rocks and breaking his neck. Still, a few minutes later, he clambered down a steep slope onto thick grass crisp with frost, and saw the stone, pale in the night, not far away. He tried to remember why he was supposed to go toward it, but the memory wouldn’t surface and the cold pressed him hard from every direction. He was stumbling, barely able to walk, by the time he reached it.
