The Womb of Time, page 3
Ouch, Halsted thought, as the accurate shot struck home. He attempted to cover up his irritation by sitting down in the empty chair opposite Graham Ridpath’s position and turning away from Rylands to thank Giles Crome for the dishes he was distributing at various points around the guests’ table. The position he had taken set him opposite the residents’ table, and one of the two old men caught his eye and nodded to him; he returned the salutation as best he could, although the three guests constituted something of a barrier to the communication. The other resident seemed not to be paying attention to anyone else, including his companion.
“The tea’s brewing, sirs,” the innkeeper said. “I’ll bring out the pot directly. If there’s anything else you need, please let me know.”
Halsted unfolded his napkin carefully, and grabbed an egg, tapping it on the rim of his plate to crack the shell. “I’m not a permanent member of the Oxford Faculty,” Professor Rylands,” he said, feigning the utmost tranquility. “The reason you don’t know my name is that I’m merely a visiting scholar from the States—Arkham, Massachusetts, to be precise: Miskatonic University.”
Mention of Miskatonic had not produced anything more than a faint stir of interest in Oxford, so Halsted had not anticipated that the name would produce any reaction at all in a small hotel in a remote part of Suffolk, but he realized immediately that the expectation was seriously misled. Indeed, the only person in the room who did not react visibly to its pronunciation was Martin Rylands.
Wychelow sat up straighter; Ridpath sat up much straighter, and looked at him quizzically; Giles Crome hesitated in the doorway and almost turned back, but apparently thought better of it. Most surprisingly of all, the two residents, including the one who had been lost in his own world a moment before, turned to look at him so sharply that Halsted had the peculiar sensation that their curious gaze had actually penetrated his flesh. They were so similar in appearance, as they struck that attentive pose, that they reminded him, absurdly, of the ebony book-ends on the mantelpiece in his room. For a brief moment, he couldn’t help imagining their thin noses as beaks, and their eyes as those of birds of ill-omen.
“I guess you all know that there’s a Dunwich in the States, too,” Halsted suggested, trying to keep his voice light, “and you’ve doubtless heard of the Miskatonic River in that connection.” He knew full well, though, that the reason why his fellow guests had been so startled by the name of his college his had nothing at all to do with the river that flowed alongside its campus. When no one endorsed his remark, he felt obliged to continue: “We’ve lately become a trifle notorious in some circles for another reason too. Your British Museum has its own copy of the book in question, but you’re much too sensible to make as much fuss about it as some of the folk back home.”
Rylands’ face suddenly cleared, as he made up his brief intellectual deficit with a bold leap. “That’s right!” he said, as he resumed his own seat. “I heard some common-room gossip about Miskatonic…about the…” He faltered, but only because he couldn’t quite remember the name of the accursed book, not because he was reluctant to pronounce it.
Ridpath was quick to take up the thread. “The Necronomicon,” he enunciated, deliberately. “Have you read it, Dr. Halsted?”
Giles Crome still had not turned round, but nor had he made much progress beyond the threshold. Wychelow was still staring, though not nearly as intensely as the residents at the smaller table. Conscious of holding his entire audience in a kind of thrall, Halsted felt fully entitled to give an honest but slightly indirect answer. “I’ve held it in my hands,” he admitted, “and turned its pages. Our chief librarian, Henry Armitage, was kind enough to let me look through it, before he locked it away in a safe, swearing never to release it again.” The wonderment of the several stares was further augmented, exactly as Halsted had intended. He felt compelled to add: “But no, I can’t claim to have read it. No one can—not even John Dee, who’s reputed to have made an English translation. It’s not actually intelligible, except for a few brief passages. That’s what gives it its impenetrable mystique.”
Crome moved on then, and the two residents resumed eating—but at least one of them was still listening in to the conversation at the “guests’ table”, with the utmost attention.
Rylands had realized by now that his temporary intellectual disadvantage was not only real, but general. He looked around, first at the other two men at his own table, and then at the two residents, to whom he had so far paid no attention whatsoever. His face clouded over, and his prominent eyebrows came together. “I’ve heard the name,” he admitted, swallowing his pride, as a good scholar in search of enlightenment had to do, “but I’m afraid I don’t know much more than that. It’s some sort of grimoire, isn’t it?”
Halsted almost licked his lips at the imagined sight of so much intellectual high ground stretching out before him, ready for occupation. “Actually, no,” he said. “Strictly speaking, it’s not even a Necronomicon. That was the title foisted upon the document by a scholar in Constantinople named Theodorus Philetus, who produced a Greek version in 950 or thereabouts—when Dunwich, or Domnoc, was still an important town and thriving sea-port, though not yet at its heyday. It’s difficult to be certain exactly what Theodorus meant by that title, but it isn’t the title of the work he was supposedly translating. That was Al Azif, and the manuscript in question is said to have dated from the 8th century, although there’s no way of knowing how often it had been copied prior to that date, or what its true date of origin might have been. Nor do we know who wrote it—the oft-quoted attribution to a mad Arab named Abdul Alhazred is an obvious western improvisation, which makes no sense.
“What Miskatonic Library actually possesses—and what your British Museum also has, although I believe that ours is a more complete copy, is a supposed Latin translation—taken from the Greek rather than the Arabic—made circa 1228 by someone who signed himself Olaus Wormius, although that was a long time before the more famous scholar of that name was born. Wormius retained the name Necronomicon, presumably because he wasn’t sure how to translate it, but how closely his version resembles the Greek one in other respects is indeterminable, since no copy of the Greek version seems to have survived. The Latin version would probably have perished too if it hadn’t been proscribed by Gregory IX in 1232—there’s nothing like a papal ban to encourage inquisitive monks to squirrel manuscripts away securely and copy them clandestinely. John Dee reputedly acquired a copy of the Wormius version in the sixteenth century, and made a translation of it, but the translation was never printed and both manuscripts are believed to have gone up in smoke when a mob burned his house in Mortlake during his absence—along with hundreds of other texts of even greater rarity and value.”
Halsted had to finish there because he was out of breath, but he felt exceedingly pleased with himself, even though he had plagiarized almost every word of what he had said from Henry Armitage. The point was that he had shown up Martin Rylands in no uncertain terms, and knocked him clean off his patronizing perch, at least for the time being.
Rylands seemed quite undaunted, though. “So, if it’s not a grimoire,” the Cambridge man said, loftily, “what is it?”
Crome had returned by now with a huge teapot, and he began to pour tea into the six cups that were ready and waiting for it, with scrupulous care and method.
“Theodorus Philetus seems to have thought that it was some sort of directory,” Halsted told the Cambridge man, having taken a deep breath beforehand, to make sure that his explanation would last the course. “If the Wormius version really does correspond closely to his, and his to the Al Azif, the original must have been a sort of guide-book to a number of entities—gods or demons—that existed in the remote past, at least one of which still allegedly lies dormant somewhere on Earth, probably under the sea. It’s possible that the names are derived from some ancient Arabic myth-system that was suppressed and largely obliterated by the advent of Islam, much as the Hebrew myth-system echoed in the Talmud was suppressed by the orthodoxy of the Torah, although Henry Armitage thinks that the directory might be Sumerian in its ultimate origin rather than Arabian. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that the original was mostly gibberish, or written in some kind of esoteric code, and that such semblance of meaning the Wormius version retains was imported into it by one or both of its translators, who might have manufactured the names from strings of syllables that originally had some other significance entirely. When you consider that Theodorus substituted Necronomicon, which is probably intended to mean something like ‘the book of the images of the dead’, for Al Azif, which seems to refer to some kind of weird sound made by demons, akin to the whistling of the wind and the stridulation of locusts, it suggests that he might have been more than a trifle casual about other matters of supposed translation.”
Having said that, Halsted finally felt free to attack his boiled egg—which he had peeled some time before—with appropriate gusto. He did not look up again for several seconds. When he did, it was Graham Ridpath who had a question ready; “Is that what brought you to Dunwich for the ultra-low tide, Dr. Halsted?”
“No, of course not,” Halsted replied. “I was drawn here by the same document that attracted Professor Rylands and Mr. Wychelow—the Wychelow letter.” It wasn’t until the words were out of his mouth that he realized that there could no longer be any “of course” about it, given the way that everyone had reacted to his confession of intimate knowledge of the Necronomicon. “Obviously,” he added, “I was aware of the coincidence of names between the two Dunwiches, and I know that some of the unpleasantness in the library back home was caused by a man from our Dunwich, but I wasn’t aware of any connection between this Dunwich and the so-called forbidden books.”
Ridpath nodded, but slowly and hesitantly, as if he were not quite satisfied with that answer. Wychelow seemed even less convinced. “Awareness,” he said, a trifle portentously, “is sometimes peripheral to such matters. We’re not always aware of the forces that impel and guide us.”
Rylands almost laughed at that, as if to presume that it had been intended as an esoteric joke, but he thought better of it. Instead, he said: “Was it some strange destiny, do you think, Mr. Wychelow, that led you to discover the letter referring to your ancestor’s brief involvement with Thomas De Quincey?”
“How can I tell?” Wychelow retorted, with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “One thing of which I was quite unaware, however, was the reaction that it would prompt in academic circles. I certainly did not expect, when I booked my room at the hotel, to meet two literary scholars here—one of them from as far away as Massachusetts. The letter seemed to me to be a mere curiosity, of purely antiquarian interest.”
Halsted looked at Rylands then, and Rylands looked back, hesitantly. Halsted had no difficulty interpreting the hesitation. Rylands was torn between the possibility of letting something slip that might be of interest and use to a rival De Quincey scholar, and by the need to reassert his own intellectual qualifications, so that he might regain the impression of academic superiority to which he clearly thought himself entitled.
In the end, vanity won the day. “Perhaps Thomas De Quincey was little more than a name to you when you saw the letter, Mr. Wychelow,” the Cambridge man said, politely. “To a De Quincey scholar, however, the date on the letter was immediately significant, not so much because we had previously believed the poet to be elsewhere on that date, but because we knew that he must have been hard at work, mentally if not in terms of the physical act of writing, on the first version of his most celebrated work, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It must have occurred instantly to Dr. Halsted, as it did to me, that the inspiration or formation of that work might possibly have owed something to the poet’s experiences in the village—particularly the excursion to the water-line at the exceptionally low-tide that he must surely have undertaken, along with your ancestor. That would fit in with certain items in the addenda to the Confessions that were eventually published under the title Suspiria De Profundis—roughly, ‘Sighs from the Depths.’ As you will doubtless understand, I’m delighted to meet you here, as Dr. Halsted must also be, by virtue of the possibility that you might be able to cast some further light on your ancestor’s reasons for coming here in August 1821, and his possible motives for inviting De Quincey to accompany him.”
“If that were not something of a mystery to me, Professor Rylands,” Wychelow replied, equably, “I probably would not be here myself.”
Halsted judged that Rylands and Ridpath, like himself, were expecting more, although they were just as busy buttering toast or sipping tea. The toast was a little underdone, the tea a little overdone, but no one seemed to mind. Wychelow, however, had said all that he intended to say, and there was a pause that lasted almost fifteen seconds.
Finally, it was Ridpath who broke the silence. “If I might hazard a guess, Mr. Wychelow,” he said, “it was probably your ancestor’s interest in the Morte d’Arthur that brought him here. Peacock followed in his footsteps a few years later, I believe—Mr. Crome mentioned his visit to me yesterday.”
“Thomas Love Peacock?” Rylands queried, a trifle warily. “You’re referring to The Misfortunes of Elphin.”
Halsted cursed himself for being slow off the mark. He had actually read Peacock’s Arthurian fantasy, which featured the drowning of a city, but it had been set in Wales, transplanting the Breton myth of Lyonesse to Cardigan Bay, and it had not occurred to him to connect it to Dunwich, even when Crome had mentioned Peacock’s name in the list of famous writers who had lodged at his inn.
“My forefather certainly had an interest in the original of Malory’s Mordred,” Wychelow admitted—and stopped dead again. Halsted realized, a trifle belatedly, that the amateur scholar was adopting a strategy very different from his own, throwing out mysterious hints about what he might know rather than parading his knowledge to the metaphorical accompaniment of trumpets and banners. He met Rylands’ eyes briefly, and saw that the Cambridge man was just as reluctant as he was to ask a question symptomatic of ignorance. Given that Ridpath apparently already knew what Wychelow was getting at, Halsted expected that the obvious question would go unanswered for want of being asked—but Giles Crome was still hovering in the doorway, as if waiting to discover whether anyone might want a second cup of tea.
“In these parts, sirs,” the innkeeper said, as if it were a mere matter of gossip, “we call him Medraut. I can’t speak for incomers, of course, but we Electors still hold Malory a villain for blackening his name. For those who believe in the Hidden Crown, Arthur was a villain or a fool, not a hero, and Medraut was the once and future king defending England from catastrophe.”
The four guests all turned to look at their host, with varying degrees of astonishment. The two residents did not; they had evidently known him for far too long to be surprised by anything he knew or said—and they seemed perfectly familiar with the name of Medraut. They had after all, taken up residence in a hotel called the Hidden Crown, and its owner must have acquainted them with the reasons for its change of name.
“Medraut was king in this region in the sixth century, or thereabouts,” Crome explained for the benefit of his ignorant professors. “So tradition says, at any rate. He was contemporary with Arthur, who was king of the western lands. They went to war, and fought the battle of Camlan, in which Arthur was killed. The rest of Malory’s story is malicious slander, in our reckoning. Mr. Wychelow—the Reverend Mr. Wychelow, I should say, not the one here present—might well have been in search of local folklore on that account. Whether he found any, I can’t say.”
Halsted tried hard to remember whether De Quincey had ever written anything about Medraut/Mordred, or Arthurian legend in a broader sense, but nothing came to mind immediately. He took some comfort from the fact that Rylands failed to chip in with anything relevant.
Wychelow turned to Ridpath. “I take it, then, that your own interest in Dunwich stems from the Arthurian connection,” he said. “It seems an odd hobby for a government scientist.”
“It doesn’t do to become overly obsessed with work of that sort,” Ridpath replied, blandly. “One needs distraction.”
“By work of that sort,” Rylands put in, sharply, “I assume that you mean work for the Ministry of Defense—work on chemical and biological warfare.”
Wychelow seemed startled by that question, and Halsted winced slightly, although it certainly explained Rylands’ hostile tone when he had introduced the scientist. Common room chat in Oxford often turned to the apocalyptic potential of the next Great War, and chemical warfare was the great bugbear, of which there was much loud disapproval on moral grounds. Similar discussions obviously went on in Cambridge too—and perhaps in the parlor of the Hidden Crown, given the way that both the residents were now staring at the civil servant.
Ridpath, however, simply shook his head. “I’m here to get away from work,” he said, airily. “For the next few days, I’m only an amateur antiquarian, who has come to Dunwich to savor the experience of a once-in-a-century low tide, just like the three of you—and half a hundred other birds of passage, I dare say. I’m well aware of the absurdity of coming all this way merely for the privilege of standing on a narrow expanse of mud that hasn’t been exposed for a century and won’t be exposed again for another century, but civil servants live such regimented lives that a little self-indulgent absurdity is a real tonic.” What’s your excuse? was the question he left unspoken.
“It’s a purely symbolic gesture, of course,” James Wychelow said, “but I am, as Professor Rylands said, “following in the tradition of my august ancestor, and I shall value the experience of standing where he once stood, in near-unique circumstances. I understand that Professor Rylands and Professor Halsted will value their emulation of De Quincey in much the same way. It will bring them closer to the object of their study, psychologically speaking—more so, I hope, and certainly less perilously, than becoming opium-eaters themselves would.”
