Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (8 page)

“So you can see that the study of anthropology in Polynesia owes a debt to the sensationalist journals of Bougainville and his crew, but also to the writings of explorers such as James Cook and Dumont D’Urville. But who can tell me what else might have driven the anthropological study of these islands?”

A number of hands went up, always a good sign. Oliver scanned the faces, gesturing toward a red-headed boy from Ipswich named James Malloy.

“Mr. Malloy, what do you say?”

“From the missionaries, sir.”

“And do these missionaries have any names, Mr. Malloy?”

“Of course, sir. Laval, Turner, and Bingham are the ones that spring to mind first.”

“Very good,” said Oliver. “But, of course, Polynesia was always a land that had fascinated the Occidental nations. Partly thanks to the mythologizing of the landscape by the artist Paul Gauguin. You might know this fellow from some of Dr. Goddard’s classes. He lived in Tahiti for a time before moving to the Marquesas Islands. The works Gauguin produced there are laden with religious symbols and present a somewhat over-exotic view of the island’s inhabitants. There is undoubtedly a degree of romantic primitivism in his work, which fueled others to come after him and discover this far off land for themselves.”

“Was that what sent you out there, Professor?” asked Malloy. “After all, you spent three years out that way.”

A ripple of hushed laughter spread through the classroom, and Oliver nodded, placing the chalk down on his desk. It had only been a matter of time until word reached the student body of the ultimate fate of the Yopasi expeditions.

“That played its part, yes,” said Oliver. “But we’ll come back to that later. As far as Polynesian exploration is concerned, believe it or not, the first people to extensively study this region with a serious eye to anthropological research were the Russians.”

“The Reds?” asked a student named Jackson. “Surely not?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Jackson,” said Oliver as a rising hubbub of voices swelled from the students. “Yes, I know it’s unfashionable to credit the Russians with anything these days, but a fact’s a fact.”

“A damned Russian shot President McKinley,” pointed out Jackson.

“Actually, Leon Czolgosz wasn’t Russian, he was born in Michigan and just happened to have a Polish surname. And far from being a Red, he saw himself as an anarchist,” said Oliver. “Indeed, one writer of the time even compared him to Marcus Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar.”

“Are you saying this Czologsz was right to shoot the president?”

“Not at all,” said Oliver, not liking where this was going. “I am merely pointing out that not everything labeled as Russian should be immediately discarded as valueless. You are here as scientists, and as such you must bow only to the facts, not the mob of hysteria that distorts the truth and renders information subjective. Now, if I may continue?”

Jackson shrugged, and Oliver saw he now harbored seeds of misgivings about this class and its teacher.

“Now, if I may continue? The Russian Geographical Society was formed in Saint Petersburg in 1845, with a division that published material on ethnography, religion, mythology, and languages in Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East. Of special interest to us, as anthropological students of Polynesia, are their findings on the shamans.”

Oliver wrote the unfamiliar word on the blackboard as he spoke. “Shamanism is an understanding of the universe and the interrelation of man and nature. To the shaman, the universe is driven by ancient dualistic ideas that divides existence into the ordinary and the sacral. At shamanism’s heart lies an animistic perception, a belief in the existence of spirits and deities of nature and beyond. Indeed, the word
shaman
comes from the Tungus-Manchurian language itself.”

“Are they like wizards?”

“In a manner of speaking,” answered Oliver. “A shaman plays a vital role in the life of his tribe. They act as…intermediaries between men and spirits and are their tribe’s protectors.”

“What are they protecting their tribes from?” asked a nervous-looking young girl. Oliver remembered her name was Amanda Sharpe. She was one of his elective students. She took some form of engineering as her major, which made this class an odd choice for her, but Oliver certainly wasn’t going to turn her away for that.

“That is a very good question, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver, sitting behind his desk and opening his books. “Predominantly, the shaman is a man, though in some rare cases, a woman, who interprets the seasons and tides of the world so his tribe will never go hungry or be ousted by a rival. For example, the shamans of the Nenets people would go into the tundra in spring and autumn to learn of the soil, birds, and animal anatomy. Using that information, they would decide on the productivity of various pastures and hunting grounds, and would guide their tribe accordingly. But there were other, more tangible, threats to societies the shamans helped fight. The Evenks and Buryats shamans wore headdresses of bone and feathers, topped with iron horns, and these weren’t just for show. Indeed not. They were fighting headdresses, for the shaman was believed to be butting the evil spirits, most notably a monster that lived in a long lost city and threatened to cause the end of the world.”

The girl’s face went deathly pale and Oliver feared he had frightened her with tales of shamans and monsters.

“And this is where things become rather interesting, as we can see similar, if not virtually
identical
, practices, chants, and imprecations to mysterious deities within the tribal groups of the Polynesian and Micronesian tribes, and others much further afield.”

“How is that possible?” asked Malloy. “Surely these groups are too far apart to share any common ancestry.”

“Well spotted, Mr. Malloy,” said Oliver. “They are indeed too far apart to share any links of civilization, but what if their connection goes deeper than that? What if their connection is on some primal level, from when mankind was little more than a barely upright hominid, a creature that had yet to evolve into the sentient race that now rules the globe?”

Oliver knew he was taking a risk in mentioning evolution, for the ruckus of the Scopes trial still reverberated in academic circles. Miskatonic University had largely ignored Judge Raulston’s verdict, and continued to teach such principles to its students. For reasons unknown to Oliver, no state prosecution had ever been mounted against the professors of Miskatonic for their continual violation of the Butler Act.

Hearing no dissenting voices, Oliver continued.

“What if these ancient men knew of some great and terrible evil, a force that linked all men though a worldwide understanding of its nature? Might not
that
be enough to bring the consciousness of wildly disparate shamans together? A collective understanding that predates our own, civilized way of thinking?”

Oliver saw skeptical faces and wrote a series of phonetic words on the blackboard. To the untrained eye, these were gibberish, random collections of syllables and consonants in a mishmash of colliding, unpronounceable letter groupings.

“Now if you will turn to page ninety-seven, you can read a summation of the findings recorded by a Professor William Channing Webb. Professor Webb teaches anthropology at Princeton, and his travels around Greenland’s western coast brought a tribe of depraved Esquimaux to light, whose cult practices included a strange form of devil worship. Webb described it as including bloodthirsty and repulsive rituals, which I believe to be in direct opposition of those found in Polynesia and the coastal regions of Siberia. It’s almost as though some shamans are attempting to call forth this sea devil, while others are acting against it.”

“So which were the Yopasi?” asked Amanda Sharpe.

“Very much the latter,” said Oliver. “Their shamans were reluctant to speak of the deity their tribe so feared. Even when I was able to elicit some form of explanation, their language seemed to have no correlating words to adequately describe the horror they sought to keep at bay.”

“Did the shamans ever say where this devil lived?”

In the three seasons Oliver had spent with the Yopasi he had come to know them well. Their home was a nameless island of eastern Polynesia, a scrap of land about as close to the edge of the world as it was possible to find before the vast expanse of the Pacific stretched away into eternity.

“Indeed they did, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver. “Would you care to hazard a guess?”

“Beneath the ocean,” she said without hesitation. “In a great sunken city.”

Oliver was surprised. Though he had published selected monographs from his expeditions, he had not thought them widely read beyond higher anthropological circles. Nor had he published any of the Yopasi myth cycles, which described their wide pantheon in gross detail.

“Very good, yes. In a sunken city in the deepest portion of the sea.”

Malloy raised his hand, and Oliver knew what would be coming next.

Sure enough, Malloy did not disappoint. “But didn’t the Yopasi disappear, Professor Grayson? Into thin air? Perhaps the underwater devil rose up and killed them all.”

Nervous laugher greeted Malloy’s words, and Oliver smiled wearily at the mocking look he saw in the young man’s eyes. It was a familiar look. He’d seen it from a number of his colleagues, men he’d worked alongside for many years.

“I see the scurrilous tongues of academic rumor-mongering have been wagging,” said Oliver. He perched on the end of his desk and laced his hands before him. “Very well, I’ll tell you what I know of what happened. Ask away.”

He took a deep breath, not wishing to further expose the demise of his most ambitious work, but knowing that it would be better to scotch any rumors now than to allow them to grow with each retelling.

Jackson opened the questioning. “How could an entire island tribe just vanish?”

“I wish I knew, Mr. Jackson,” said Oliver. “The Yopasi had boats, but only small canoes used for fishing. Certainly nothing large enough to reach another island. And from what I learned in my time with them, they were certainly in no hurry to leave. They had what one shaman called a ‘duty to the world’ to stay and continue their vigil, which was how they perceived the ritual practices of their tribe.”

“So what do you think happened to them?”

“I don’t know. When our ship arrived in the cove we used as a harbor, it looked as though the entire island had been hit by a cyclone. As if a great tsunami had risen up and smashed the island. Trees were bent double, the soil was washed away, and the rocks blackened as though burned in a great fire. I have never seen the like, and I hope never to see it again.”

Oliver felt a brooding melancholy settle on him as he remembered the sight of the island last summer. “The desolation was complete,” he said. “What had once been a green and verdant paradise was now a hellish wasteland, more like one of the shell-cratered battlefields of western Europe than a Pacific Island. We searched the island for days, but found not a single trace of the Yopasi. Nothing lived there anymore: no birds, no lizards, no insects, no snakes. Nothing. The island had been scoured bare of life, though by what means I can scarcely imagine.”

“What do you think happened?” asked Amanda Sharpe. “Could it have been a volcano or an underwater earthquake?”

Oliver shook his head. “No force of man or nature I know of could inflict so thorough an extermination without leaving some trace of its substance. We found no pyroclastic residue and no mud patterns one might expect to find after such a natural occurrence.”

“Does that mean you think what happened to the Yopasi was an unnatural occurrence?” asked Malloy.

“Absolutely, but as to its nature I have not the slightest inkling,” said Oliver. “Believe me, I wish I did. I spent three years researching the Yopasi, and to know that none of my findings will see the light of day is a frightful prospect. The university spent thousands of dollars to send me and dozens of others across the world, and such a failure hangs around a man’s neck for a long time.”

The faces of Oliver’s students had changed, moving from eager anticipation of his academic misfortune to sympathetic regret. They had wanted to hear his tale, but having listened to it, now felt ashamed of their fascination.

Oliver looked up at the clock at the back of the classroom, checking the time against his pocket watch.
 

“I think that will do for today,” he said. “Remember, for next week’s class I’d like you to be familiar with part three of
Folk-Tales of Salishan Tribes
. That’s the Okanagon tales by Marian Gould. I
will
be asking you to posit theories as to how these tales relate to the ethnographic spread of the tribal groupings.”

The class broke up and the students filed out of the room, some gratefully, some already looking forward to next week’s class. Oliver returned to the blackboard and wiped away his writing with a tatty duster. A nervous cough sounded behind him and he turned to see Amanda Sharpe standing at his desk. Her eyes were downcast and she looked as nervous as a freshman during hell week.

“Miss Sharpe, can I help you with something?” asked Oliver when she didn’t say anything.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” she said. “I feel a bit foolish, but…”

Oliver gathered his books and papers, stuffing them into his briefcase as he waited for her to continue.

“I’m sure you can’t possibly feel more foolish than I for admitting to losing an entire Polynesian tribe,” said Oliver with a crooked smile.

She returned his smile, and Oliver saw the shadows under her eyes, which he had taken to be makeup, were in fact the hollows of disturbed sleep.

“I suppose not, but I don’t really know where to begin.”

“The beginning is, I find, the best place, Miss Sharpe.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so unbelievable that I don’t know if I should. You’ll laugh and think I’m nothing but a silly girl.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what is on your mind and I promise I’ll think nothing less of you, my dear. So tell me, what is it that’s bothering you?”