The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (36 page)

I needed a second to figure out what he meant. “Right. I stupidly left my stuff out in the yard. Sorry.”

“No, no, it is good.” He gestured toward the door. “I will go too.” Damn, I’d furnished him yet another delaying tactic on the path to introducing his “houseguest.” He commended Clairette for an excellent meal, at which I nodded in hearty but unacknowledged agreement, and he assured her we would be fine now on our own. In the softening nine o’clock light, while I grabbed my backpack, he looked around at nothing in particular and stretched and rocked on his heels. I had the sneaking impression he was steeling himself, limbering up to propose a contentious thesis. This I read as a sign of progress. The din of cicadas was unabating.

He nodded on eventually realizing I had backpack in hand, and I followed him through front hall, past a room blocked off by hefty sliding door, and up a dim stone stairwell. He was out of sight around the bend, and I heard but didn’t see him stomping something. As he climbed, he defined the chitin bits in ugly smudge upon a step, “Sometimes in the south you find a scorpion.” He glanced behind to appraise my reaction. I must have gone pretty waxy. “Please, it is no big deal. If one stings, you just go to the hospital for six months and you are fine. Then you come home, and the other one stings and you just go to the hospital again for six months. They travel in pairs, you know.”

Hervé, I surmised, had reverted to the rustic humor of his youth while readjusting to home turf. I was feigning an appreciative grin in case he checked for therapeutic effects of his jest, but he intrepidly clambered onward.

Mine was one of two chambers off the cramped landing. The professor pulled a cord on a pole lamp inside the doorway and conducted what I inwardly disparaged as a spotty search for the other scorpion. In the casement above the bedstead, twin panes swung in, and green shutters swung out. He set the latches to allow an inch-wide stream of air to enter. “It will stop only the most idiotic of mosquitoes, but you will have air to breathe.”

I dropped my backpack onto the bed. The only other item of furniture was a straight-backed wooden chair. The professor bowed dramatically to peek under the bed and proclaimed, “You are safe for now.” Without more ado he ambled out and I trailed after. His bonhomie had withered to a husk before he reached the bottom step.

To initiate me into this mystery, this “cosmic joke” of his, had evidently been a much less fraught proposition from four thousand miles away. He dawdled outside the sliding door till I caught up. He had two fingers in lozenge-shaped brass indentation to pull the door aside, but first he whispered, “Clairette has been forbidden to go inside. She should be in her quarters, elsewhere on the property.”

He retracted the door by slow centimeters. Milking the moment for maximal suspense? No, on his face was a safecracker’s degree of concentration, as if he feared triggering any disturbance within, or perhaps destabilizing some cherished illusion. He poked his head through as soon as space permitted and murmured,
“C’est bon.”

At that instant a smell lunged out at me, a potent meld of unclean fish tank, fermenting hot sauce, and dead lilies, and something more was wrong with it, a dissociation from the natural world, like a square peg in the round hole of my experience. Hervé went ahead as if perceiving nothing amiss or offensive.

He nudged a dimmer switch on the wall, and a glass chandelier suffused the stuffy, shuttered room with twilight. Here was his
salle à manger
cum personal museum, cluttered with the Cambrian hagfish skulls, beetles in amber, ammonite shells, and jumbo shale dragonflies of a career teaching invertebrate paleontology. The casement windows were all gaping open, though the green shutters were fastened together, permitting air to circulate through gaps a mere few centimeters wide. Eight brocade chairs, as if they’d wantonly obstructed him, were scattered at a distance impractical for dining from a marble-topped table whose dimensions could accommodate a billiards game. Dozens of hardbound volumes, many of them by Hervé, had migrated from built-in wall shelves to secure a perimeter around the edge of the table, like a corral of dominoes.

With a detachment that rang patently false, he indicated the polished white surface rife with black veins and said simply, “Voilà.”

At first I couldn’t fathom what was so significant. My aching, unsteady eyes veered haplessly from a blue enamel basin of water to the evenly split halves of a derby-sized hunk of coal. Nothing else leapt out at me. I stole a glance at Hervé. He was observing me keenly, in plain expectation I should be astounded. I blinked and re-examined the tabletop. In a reprise of my student days with him, the pressure to react appropriately was on.

Wait a minute. Something so subtle I almost blamed it on imagination or bleary vision was moving across the mineral expanse, gaining definition under my focus. And the sharper its outline, the more willing I was to shift that blame to the power of suggestion or the double whammy of pastis and exhaustion. Or had Hervé plied me with liquor and exploited my jetlag to soften up my incredulity, my common sense?

The thing was no bigger than a child’s fist and had eluded my haphazard survey because it for the most part wore the white and striated black of its surroundings, camouflaged like an octopus or chameleon. That, however, was the extent of its connection to conventional zoology. Its top-heavy, wedgelike head most resembled a trilobite’s, except for the curtain of feelers depending from it like baleen, and its hunched and banded body loosely mimicked that of a shrimp. Transparent legs like jointed straws, maybe ten, maybe more, held it aloft, in the posture of a daddy longlegs on tiptoe. It indecisively tottered around as if in perpetual daze at its circumscribed parcel of our alien world, conceivably suffering as much confusion as it inflicted. I hoped my gawking astonishment was up to the professor’s standards. “What the hell is it?”

“What indeed?”

“Where did it come from?”

“You see that broken block of coal?”

“No. That’s as impossible as the thing itself.”

Yet there it is, his arching eyebrows challenged. “In the cellar is a bin full of coal not used up by some
ancien régime
,” he recounted. “On rainy days for amusement I would fetch the bigger lumps and chisel at their seams to hunt for fossils. This I regarded as an idle pastime, with only poor chance to uncover anything. So when I pried open a crack in that block on the table and met my little friend snug in a cavity, my expression must have been like yours just now. And when he began almost at once to awake, my head was spinning, believe me.”

An eruption of coughing interrupted him, leading me to wonder if that vertigo might have resulted from inhaling some virulence that had survived along with its chimeric host. Which was as good as saying I’d already bought into Hervé’s outlandish claims at face value, hadn’t I? But I hadn’t, damn it. “A live animal trapped in stone? Can you name me one reputable scientist who wouldn’t laugh outright at that old wives’ tale?”

He raised a coy index finger and essayed a mordant smile. “I am back on my native soil to be reborn as an old wife, then.” Very funny, professor, and not getting us anywhere, and me wobbling on the brink of collapse.

“You alone have I called upon because I trust you most to accept the truth in front of your eyes. Nor do I guess you will reject the lesson this has forced on me, after decades spent defending my house of orthodox cards, for that is how I see it now.”

“Fine, but aren’t you maybe throwing out the whole deck because there’s one joker in it?” I had just enough starch left to feel smug about winging a passable comeback.

“If you like to say so, you may.” Hervé always had dealt patiently with sales resistance. “But these anecdotes of living toads encased in rock date to the twelfth century and recur independently of one another, in all corners of Europe.” He shrugged diffidently. “I would only suggest reopening the book on these many cases, that was shut too soon for lack of understanding.” He peered solemnly at his
“farce cosmique,”
which had meandered to the phalanx of volumes bordering the head of the table and was butting sluggishly against it, to no effect. “I might also submit that these prisoners freed from stone were not in actuality toads, but in spite of outward similarities may have been more akin to our present specimen.”

“Before you go reopening any books, though, let’s be clear on the kind of reception you can look forward to. Unless you can somehow safely transport your fragile pet from point A to point B, you couldn’t offer any meaningful proof it existed. Any photographs would be denounced as a Photoshop hoax. And if you brought over a hundred eyewitnesses, it would only amount to a hundred instances of hearsay.”

“Well, to counter you item by item, my miraculous pet cannot be as fragile as you suppose, or it would not have persevered through the terrible upheavals of many eons. However, I do not care to exhibit it to the public. I am showing it to you and not to
Le Monde
or the Smithsonian.”

“But to play devil’s advocate a minute, were you to ditch the academic integrity for a more P. T. Barnum approach, you might parlay your pet into a much more comfortable retirement than you’ll enjoy in a rented farmhouse with Madame Clairette.”

“Mademoiselle Clairette.” He declined to dignify my mercenary pitch any further. Good man, as I well knew. “Besides, I would not dare inform our colleagues of my orphan from the coal, because I have not yet learned the most basic facts about it. Please, ask me anything, you will see my problem.”

I sighed, hard-pressed to hide my petulance after running on vapors too long, but to begrudge my dear mentor a round of Twenty Questions would be the nadir of bad form, wouldn’t it? “Okay then, what is that thing?”

“Ah, the second time you ask that. Of course, what more natural starting place for curiosity? I unfortunately remain ignorant after weeks of watching. Our guest is unlike anything alive today or in the fossil record. Dissection might be informative, but what a cruel end for this sleeping beauty, to be awakened after ages only to be butchered. I would also lose forever everything its behavior might teach me.” Hervé’s “guest” had refrained from breaking through the stockade of books and was torpidly patrolling the paper bounds of its exercise yard. It had yet to perform any actions I’d qualify as behavior, and perhaps it couldn’t in this totally foreign context. I’d never have dreamed the thing knew we were talking about it, and had my doubts it even knew we were there.

“That incompatibility with the rest of the fossil record would damage your credibility even further, wouldn’t it?”

“For some, yes.” The professor unpocketed a handkerchief to muffle another barrage of coughing. “I might have been one of those martinets myself, not long ago. Sneering when somebody said, ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ Now my paradigms have necessarily shifted, better late than never. Uppermost for me finally is the truism that only a limited percentage of species had the luck to join the fossil record, and of those, how many will be discovered? I find myself aligned now with the partisans of yetis.”

“I think you’re a giant step ahead of them in terms of hard evidence, and you must have collected some specific findings by now. Any idea how old we’re talking?”

“How old is coal?” he countered. “It began forming in the Carboniferous, three hundred million years ago. But how long had our little iconoclast’s species existed already?” I tried not to fixate on the sheer, staggering impossibility of that timeframe. “Moreover, if we incline toward that maximal age, we have a clue to our friend’s lethargic movements. The air was a good deal richer then, and therefore I am not surprised at signs of oxygen deprivation. It may not be as stupid as its aimlessness leads you to suppose.”

Was Hervé’s tone a bit defensive, as if I’d unwittingly disparaged a favorite dog or cat? “At least it’s still ambulatory, so you must be feeding it right.” Did that sound vaguely conciliatory?

Hervé spread his hands to encompass frustration. “Again we touch on the dilemma of what to tell our colleagues. It does not eat, it does not defecate, not in ways I can detect. I provided raw meat of all kinds, in every combination of tough or tender, fresh or spoiled, including insects, and the broadest variety of fruit and vegetable material. Nothing won a flicker of its attention. It dips its head into the basin of water or climbs in sometimes, and perhaps on those occasions fulfills some alimentary functions. But in those as in other respects, it guards its mysteries impeccably.”

I desperately wanted to sit in one of the brocade chairs and conserve my failing resources, but couldn’t take my eyes off our Paleozoic foundling. “You haven’t tried handling it, have you? Have you any idea if it’s dangerous?”

“I am more wary about the harm my handling might do to it.”

“I’m wary as well, but for your sake. How long have you had that nasty cough? Have you seen a doctor?”

“When would I find the leisure to do that? I am always monitoring the situation here.”

“You went out long enough to send me that fax.”

“Clairette drove to the village with my message. Besides, I often cough from dust and allergies. It is nothing.” Another bronchial fit badly undercut his nonchalance.

“But would our genes still confer resistance to diseases dormant for three hundred million years? You must have asked yourself that once in the last couple of weeks.”

Hectoring my mentor—and my distinct better in scholarship, in eloquence, in the art of living—made me profoundly uncomfortable. Probing his features for signs I was getting through to him made matters worse, for then I discerned new redness encircling his nostrils, with tiny burgeoning granulations.

My gaze seemed to make him no less profoundly uncomfortable. He reapplied handkerchief to lower face, dabbing self-consciously as if at a runny nose, and then masking himself for the balance of our discussion. “What you said earlier, about misusing my discovery to procure wealth? I fully appreciate you endorse no such crass plan. Therefore you may appreciate why I keep this difficult discovery of mine to myself, as a lesson in humility after enforcing dogma upon too many generations. To you, however, I hope to impart a short cut to that lesson.” By this indirect route he’d also exiled the topic of his health beyond the conversational pale.