Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (23 page)

“Fight them? Good God, Alexander, how do you fight things like that? We might as well be ants attacking an elephant!”

“You assume too much of our race,” said Alexander. “We are smaller than bacteria to the Great Old Ones. Yet were not such lowly microbes the undoing of Wells’s Martians?”

Oliver paced across the deserted street, hearing the silence that enveloped them as firmly as the winter’s cold. The street was utterly silent, bereft of bird song, traffic, or people. The complete absence of sound was unnerving in the extreme, and Oliver felt his heart rate quicken at the thought of what Alexander was telling him.

“Amanda is missing,” he said at last. “So is her roommate, a girl named Rita Young.”

“That is truly terrible, and is yet another reason for us not to hesitate,” said Alexander, coming close to Oliver and gripping his arms. “Don’t you see? Our enemies are moving against those who are aware of their diabolical plans. Amanda and Rita, and who knows how many others, may already be dead. You and I, Oliver, we alone are aware of the terrible forces moving against the world. We two, we happy two, may alone prevail against this gathering terror.”

Oliver backed away from Alexander’s fervor, shocked by the depth of his friend’s passion. This was too much for him. As much as he needed to do something to try and save Amanda, the idea of joining forces against foes too terrible to comprehend was beyond him. He sat on the curb and put his head in his hands.

“For heaven’s sake, Alexander, I don’t know if I can,” he said.

“You must,” said Alexander, sitting next to him. “For I desperately need your help.”

“I’ve seen where this road leads,” said Oliver. “It almost destroyed Morley, and it left Henry a raving lunatic. I don’t know if I have the strength to embark on such a journey. Look what happened to them. I don’t have a tenth of their mental fortitude.”

“You are stronger than you know,” said Alexander. “I understand such things, Oliver, believe me. After the war, I was drawn to Arkham as a moth to flame because I sensed it was a center of activity for the Great Old Ones described in the horrid books I read. This is a place where metaphysical energies and cosmic forces converge in horrifying ways. I had thought to bear the burden of their opposition alone, but it was too much for me. I knew I would need allies in my struggle to defeat these beings. I had thought Henry Cartwright might be such a man, but he and I had a…falling out in Flanders, and he would not be reconciled.”

“I know,” said Oliver. “What I mean to say is that I know something happened between you, but Henry would never elaborate on its nature.”

Alexander looked as though he too would remain close-lipped on his spat with Henry, but at length he sighed and his shoulders slumped as he recounted the cause of the friendship’s dissolution.

“I was a Marine captain during the war,” said Alexander. “My company was billeted within a ruined chateau in northern France during the spring of 1918. It was a grand structure, a fine example of north European fortification architecture, but its pleasing lines and fanciful turrets concealed a darker secret. I found a hidden library that had been uncovered by the impact of German shells the week before, a buried entrance sealed by bricks and mortar and other, more esoteric, means. Of course, the common soldiers paid the revealed books no mind, but Henry and I eventually understood full well the significance of our find.

“The Germans didn’t attack for another three days, and in that time, Henry and I acquainted ourselves with the contents of the long-dead Comte’s books.”

Alexander shook his head at the memory, and Oliver saw pain and grief etch themselves in quick succession across his face.

“Though Henry deemed it unwise, some of the more inquisitive Marines joined us in the library. I berated him for his academic elitism, but oh, how I wish I had listened to him. A measure of the true horror of this universe was contained in those blasphemous books, and while Henry and I could compartmentalize the abhorrent truths, some of my men were…less able to withstand them.”

“What happened to them?” asked Oliver, almost afraid of the answer.

“Four went mad and shot themselves with their side arms. Another leapt from the battlements, dragging two other men to their deaths as they tried to rescue him. Three others descended into catatonic states from which they only emerged upon their return to the United States. We had unlocked a dreadful Pandora’s box, and it was too late to seal it up once again. Henry blamed me for the deaths of those Marines, not without some justification, but I had no idea how much the revelations of those books had irrevocably scarred his mind.”

“Henry was changed after the war,” agreed Oliver, “but until the fire starting he was as sane as you or I.”

Alexander raised an eyebrow at that and said, “His madness was a creeping sort, like an invisible contagion that weakens the mind’s defenses little by little until it eventually snaps. Diseases of the mind are no different to those that infect the body, or societal maladies that corrupt mankind as a whole. I came to Arkham to try and help Henry and turn him into an ally, but I failed.”

“And so you come to me now,” said Oliver. “I fear I will be a poor second to Henry Cartwright.”

Alexander shook his head. “If I thought that, I would never have given you Shrewsbury’s book. You have a resilient mind, Oliver, and together we may yet hold off the encroachments of the Old Ones. Say you will join me, my friend. I need your help, more than you know.”

Oliver looked down at his hands. They were trembling with the enormity of what Alexander was asking. He was a scholar, more at home in a library than on some abstract field of battle. To take sides in a war no one else even knew was being waged was a terrifying prospect, one for which he was wholly unprepared. Yet, even as he protested his unsuitability to play the role of hero, he knew he could not refuse Alexander’s plea for help.

Did Pierre Aronnax refuse when the United States government tasked him with discovering the nature of the undersea threat in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
? Did Phileas Fogg balk when challenged by Andrew Stuart to travel around the world in eighty days?

No, they did not, and if Oliver were to live up to the exploits of his fictional heroes, he could not refuse this call to adventure.

“Very well, Alexander,” he said at last. “If you are in need of allies, then you may count me among your staunchest.”

Alexander offered his hand, and Oliver shook it firmly.

“Good man,” said Alexander. “I knew I could count on you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The low-level hum filling the laboratory was a comfort to Kate Winthrop as she wrote up her notes and observations from the day’s experiments. Frank Pabodie and Dr. Hayes had returned from their testing of the new batteries, and the job of collating their notes and tabulating the results had fallen to her. It was a thankless task requiring convoluted equations and precise arithmetic, but one Kate was happy to perform. The calculations were her constant, the mathematics a universal language that could be used to unlock the very secrets of the universe.
 

She finished a set of Dr. Hayes’s books and rubbed her eyes, looking up at the slit windows high on the wall of the laboratory. The clock on the wall said it was half past five, though only blackness could be seen through the iron meshed windows. She set down the book, and looked over at the device Professor Grayson and the Irishman had brought her.

It sat in a cardboard box covered with the cloth they used for cleaning their coffee pot. It had been in Kate’s thoughts ever since it had come into her possession.
 

If what Mr. Edwards had described was true, then the sphere might well be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century: though she seemed to be the only one to think so.

Neither Frank nor Dr. Hayes had been interested in even looking at the device. Their thoughts were on the upcoming expedition to Antarctica and ensuring that their newly developed technology would be sufficient to meet the hostile environmental demands placed upon it. Kate couldn’t blame them—a great deal of money, time, and effort was being poured into this expedition, and the prestige the university would gain from its subsequent findings was beyond measure.

Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that this sphere was something that would eclipse any discoveries made upon the cold wastelands of Antarctica.
 

Unable to contain her curiosity any longer, and deciding that she had done enough work for one day, Kate put aside the reams of data on conductivity, resistance, voltages, and energy drop-offs. She crossed the laboratory and lifted the strange sphere from the box and set it on the workbench. Its weight was surprising, far in excess of what something of its dimensions would warrant.

Following a strict methodology, Kate took a fresh notebook from a drawer and made a number of sketches of the device. She had taken photographs the previous day and was waiting for them to be developed. It appeared to be made from machine-finished steel, but polished to such a high degree that its silvery surfaces were mirror-like. What looked like a sheen of gasoline covered the device, distorting her reflection like a fairground mirror that makes you look taller or fatter or squatter.
 

Yet the surfaces were not uniform, and Kate wondered if the device was in fact made up of numerous interlocking pieces, cunningly wrought to form its perfectly spherical form. Angular lines and sweeping curves crossed its surface like impossibly complex wiring diagrams, or strange and unknown writing.

Using precise calipers, Kate took measurements of the device, finding that it was perfectly spherical. She could see that much with her eyes, but to find that it had been machined to tolerances beyond what she could detect with the laboratory’s instruments was a surprise.
 

With her initial observations and the sphere’s dimensions recorded, Kate placed it onto a set of scales and added weight after weight to the opposing side until she finally determined its weight.

The scales balanced at precisely seventeen pounds, not an ounce more or less. The metal, or whatever lay at the sphere’s core, must be incredibly dense.

“Precisely weighted and precisely measured,” she wondered aloud. “Who made you?”

Kate lifted the heavy sphere over to the machining table, a long bench fitted with clamps and vices where Frank ran prototypes of his new drill bits. Spiral-wound threads of scrap metal littered the surface of the table. Kate swept them aside to lodge the sphere in a secure iron vice. She didn’t intend to drill through its surface, just to take a sliver of its surface material to submit to Dr. Ellery in order to ascertain its metallurgical composition.

The drill was mounted on a sliding rail that could be adjusted by a crank that ran alongside it. Kate gradually powered up the drill as she eased it toward the sphere. The noise of the drill filled the laboratory, and Kate winced at the volume. She snatched up a pair of Greenwood ear defenders and settled them across her head before continuing. Carefully, she touched the whirring, whining bit against the surface of the sphere.

The drill bit screamed as it touched the material of the sphere, smoking and throwing off sparks like a welder’s torch. A high-pitched screech filled the air as acrid fumes poured from the point of contact between drill and sphere. Weird light bathed the laboratory, strange spectra emanating from the sphere and flashing like a strobe. Kate backed the drill away as a faint thrumming noise pulsed outward from the sphere. She missed the sound at first, the ear defenders blocking out the low frequency rumble.

The drill was ruined, its sharpened tip flattened without having left a mark on the sphere. Kate leaned in close, realizing that the sphere was composed of a material hard enough to withstand even the most powerful drill the laboratory possessed.

“Heavens above!” she cried, jumping back as the surface of the sphere began to move.
 

The pieces that formed the device clicked and began reorienting, like three dimensional jigsaw pieces reassembling themselves into a new configuration. Portions lifted up and rotated, others sank into the body of the sphere, while others appeared to spontaneously reform into new, previously unseen forms. The device impossibly changed its geometry from moment to moment, becoming a cube, triangle, and cylinder within the space of a few seconds.

Kate backed away and pulled the ear defenders from her head, now hearing the bass note emanating from the device. Like some clockwork automaton, the whirring, spinning pieces finally slotted back into the body of the device, and once again it was a sphere. Then, a powerful pulse of high energy noise erupted from the sphere and the vials and test tubes rattled glassily in their racks. Kate felt the vibration deep in her bones as another pulse, louder and deeper than the previous note pounded like an enormous heart beat.

“Oh no,” hissed Kate, backing away from the device as it began to emit a brilliant light that threw stark shadows around the laboratory. Another sound wave blasted outward, this time knocking over loose items and rattling even the heavy equipment benches.