The Womb of Time, page 8
“I’m afraid that there’s nothing else I can tell you,” he said. “They came because of the low tide, which was clearly indicated in the almanacks of the day. They were both antiquarians interested in Arthuriana, but they were rational men, who understood that, even if the low tide were to expose land that had once been part of Medraut’s kingdom, there would be nothing actually to see but mud. They were aware that the romance of the occasion would be in their imagination, just as we are.”
Halsted dipped his spoon into his own soup. He had eaten mussels and oysters, so he had a vague expectation of what to expect in terms of texture and taste, and was not unduly surprised. He was glad to discover, however, that Mr. Crome’s recipe had ameliorated the saltiness of the cockles, and had added sufficient in the way of other ingredients to create a pleasant spectrum of taste sensations.
“Very good,” Ridpath approved, as Crome paused expectantly beside him. There was a general murmur of approval.
“Tell us something about your ancestor’s work on Reading Abbey,” Martin Rylands said to Wychelow. “Whether it has any relevance to our reason for being here or not, I’d be interested to hear it. He was one of the first people to dig in the Abbey ruins, was he not?”
“I doubt that,” Wychelow replied. “Treasure-hunters had probably gone over the ground very thoroughly in the previous two centuries, but the human vultures who moved in immediately after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries probably picked the carcass clean. The Reverend was one of the first to dig in what might be called a proto-archaeological spirit, however. He unearthed numerous interesting artifacts, although none were made of precious metal: stone jars, potsherds, household implements, and so on.”
“No manuscripts?” Rylands queried.
Wychelow frowned. “There was a rumor at the time,” he admitted, “that one of the sealed jars contained manuscripts that the monks of the abbey had secreted away centuries before the dissolution, but if it was any more than a rumor, there’s no evidence in his papers of what became of the manuscripts. Had there been any, he would probably have donated hem to the British Museum or the Bodleian. He wasn’t a hoarder. Most of the artifacts he dug up can still be seen in the museum in Reading’s Town Hall.”
“That’s a pity,” Rylands said. “As Dr. Halsted was saying only yesterday, there’s nothing like a papal ban for prompting inquisitive monks to hide their heterodox manuscripts away. He might have unearthed another copy of the Latin Necronomicon, or some precious item of Arthuriana…or Medrautiana.”
“Or the formula for some alchemical potion,” Halsted suggested, mischievously. “The recipe for Greek Fire, or some other item of primitive chemical weaponry.”
“There was nothing of that sort in the possessions passed down to me,” Wychelow said, a trifle frostily.
“What about items recovered during his visit to Dunwich?” Rylands asked. “Do you have anything of that sort?”
“Perhaps. I’m not entirely certain of its provenance, but I do have a small stone tablet into which a sequence of five symbols had been chiseled, which seems to have been sent to him by Paston before the Dunwich expedition, perhaps as a sample of what might be found here. Unfortunately, it’s pre-Roman, so the symbols are indecipherable. They’re somewhat reminiscent of the characters of runic alphabets, but only the first of them corresponds even approximately to any item of the 24 known symbols of futhorc. They might be Celtic rather than Teutonic, but they bear no obvious resemblance to the Irish Ogham symbology. It’s always possible, of course, that they’re not phonetic symbols at all. The Reverend sent copies to the British Museum and several of his learned correspondents, at Oxford and elsewhere, but none of them was able to help.”
“Did Paston have any theory as to what the inscription meant?” Rylands asked.
“If so, it’s not in any surviving correspondence. If the symbols do spell out a word, I have no idea how to pronounce it, let alone what it means. I have a copy in my portfolio—you’re all welcome to look at it if you wish, and make any suggestions you might care to. I’ll fetch it down before we leave the table.”
Halsted glanced at Henry Vamplew, whose eyes seemed to be staring into infinity, contemplatively if not absent-mindedly. The glance inevitably took in Conrad, who seemed to be slumped in his chair, half-asleep. The sick man had finished his bowl of soup, though. Crome was already circulating with the half-empty tureen, now supported by one napkin-swathed arm, doling out second helpings with the ladle.
“There’s no more bread until the morning delivery, I fear,” the innkeeper said, “but Mrs. Crome has made a pudding, and there’ll be a pitcher of custard ready in a few minutes’ time. It’s a pudding such as monks used to make, way back in the Middle Ages, steamed in a muslin cloth, full of fruits and spices and soaked in mead and honey. You’ll love it, Dr. Halsted—I dare say they’ve lost the art in the United States.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Halsted told him. “You English might think that we have little or no tradition, but we imported history and folklore from all over Europe, and all the detail that came with them. You’d be surprised what we’ve preserved—including items lost in their homelands. We’ve always taken your religious refugees, remember, from as far back as the Reformation and the dissolution of your monasteries. How do you think that Miskatonic ended up with its collection of forbidden books? In all fairness, though, I don’t remember eating a pudding such as you describe, and if it’s as good as Mrs. Crome’s cockle soup, I’m sure that I’ll enjoy it immensely.”
This hopeful prediction turned out to be accurate, and the suet in the pudding more than made up for the relative lack of substance in the soup.
Walter Conrad couldn’t manage any pudding, however; Crome and Vamplew had to help him back to his room before the teapot arrived. It was as well, Halsted thought, that Conrad had one of the ground floor rooms rather than room 6, next to the upstairs bathroom. James Wychelow left at the same time to go in search of the copy of the mysterious inscription, which he had brought with him in his luggage.
When Crome brought the teapot in, the remaining guests asked solicitously about his resident’s health.
“It’s pure old age, I fear,” the innkeeper said. “Mr. Conrad finds the summer heat oppressive, and he’s not been entirely well for months. Mr. Vamplew looks after him as best he can—it means a great deal to both of them that they’re not alone in the world.”
“They wouldn’t be alone if they hadn’t walked away from their duty,” Ridpath muttered. “They’d be living in comfort on civil service pensions, instead of…” He broke off, aware that Giles Crome was looking at him, waiting to react to any insult to the quality of his hospitality.
“If you can’t or won’t tell us what sort of nasty work it was they walked away from, Dr. Ridpath,” Martin Rylands said, silkily, “then you’ll undoubtedly forgive us for speculating. Am I to understand, Dr. Halsted, that Mr. Vamplew has told you something about the work that he and Mr. Conrad were doing during the Great War?”
“Nothing specific,” Halsted replied, a trifle regretfully; his own curiosity had now been thoroughly piqued, and he was entirely in sympathy with any steps Rylands might take to provoke Ridpath. “He did mention, though, that he was very glad when the armistice was signed before the worst weapons of all could be deployed…and also that he feared that their deployment had only been postponed.”
“It has to be poison gas,” Rylands said. “Poison gas or some vile biological agent—anthrax, perhaps. I’m told that the undeployed chemical weapons that were being stockpiled in 1918 included arsenic compounds that could be released from shells in the form of thick smoke, and extremely powerful neurotoxins that could be distributed in liquid or vapor form, which could paralyze a man if they came into contact with his skin.”
“You talk as if such weapons were implicitly more horrible than blades, projectiles and explosives,” Ridpath snapped, “but they’re not. If it’s moral, in times of war, to beat people to death with clubs or slay them with missiles, then it’s moral to kill them by any other means—and the whole point of the arsenous smokes you mention was to disable enemy combatants without killing them. Phosgene and chlorine got poison gases a bad name, perhaps deservedly so, but they were crude and unreliable weapons. The perfect weapon isn’t the one that kills most horribly but the one that doesn’t kill at all, enabling a battle to be conclusively won without significant casualties.”
“Narcotic gases, you mean?” Rylands countered. “There have been rumors of experiments with chloroform bombs, or agents with a similar effect.”
“That’s a cliché of popular fiction. The arsenous smokes give their victims terrible headaches, and there are other gases ready for use that make their victims cough and weep helplessly—but the most efficient way to disable an enemy would, indeed, be simply to put its combatants painlessly to sleep. On the other hand…” He stopped, and pursed his lips.
“Sleepers wake up again,” Rylands supplied, “perhaps not refreshed, but nevertheless ready for the fray. If, on the other hand, you could affect combatants’ minds more drastically—by sowing pure terror, let’s say—you might ruin your enemy’s appetite for combat altogether. There’s a whole spectrum of conceivable psychotropic effects at which military chemists might plausibly aim. Suicidal despondency, as Dr. Halsted quoted to me earlier today, from the Opium-Eater.”
“But opium doesn’t normally have that effect,” Halsted said, thoughtfully. “In fact, its psychotropic effects are very variable—a tendency it shares with cannabis and other hallucinatory compounds. I’m not sure that pure terror or suicidal despondency could be isolated as a reliably psychotropic effect, no matter how ingenious the chemistry deployed in an agent’s design. On the other hand, if something like that could be done…”
“There speaks a man, with ostentatious horror in his voice, whose nation is founded on genocide accomplished by biological warfare,” Ridpath retorted—more aggressively than the situation merited, in Halsted’s opinion. “Smallpox and other European diseases devastated the indigenous populations of the Americas, and the European colonists were heartily glad of the fact. There’s no scope for sanctimony on your part.”
“I believe the natives contrived some small retribution, in the form of syphilis,” Halsted suggested, mildly.
“That’s a slander,” Ridpath told him. “So far as we can tell, there were syphilis spirochetes endemic on both sides of the Atlantic when intercontinental traffic first began, but Europeans had less resistance to the American strains and the Amerindians had less resistance to the European ones. There were epidemics on both sides of the Atlantic—but the European one is the only one that was documented, and the only one they cared about.”
“Have you been working on that sort of weaponry too, Dr. Ridpath?” Rylands was quick to ask.
Ridpath did not admit it—nor did he deny it; either military secrecy forbade him even to do that, or he really had been working on the potential elements of plague warfare.
But what has all this got to do with the Necronomicon? Halsted wondered, privately. Ridpath has been sent to consult it, and Vamplew is at least familiar with the title, as well as literature seemingly based on it. It’s not a mere coincidence, any more than our all being in Dunwich today and tomorrow is mere coincidence—nor is it some random whim of fate. There’s some underlying connection here, which binds it all together, however crazily—but Ridpath’s probably the only one who might be able to see it, with the benefit of his secret knowledge, and he won’t say what he knows…unless Mr. Vamplew…
He resolved to take another stroll with Henry Vamplew the following afternoon, come hell or high water. In the meantime, he finished his second cup of tea, and then looked up as Wychelow came back in, in close company with Henry Vamplew. Wychelow was carrying a piece of paper, at which Vamplew was staring in puzzlement. The two men had evidently discussed it already.
“This is rather odd,” said Wychelow, “But Mr. Vamplew has suggested that we try an experiment. As I told you before, the first of these five symbols does bear some resemblance to a rune signifying the consonant sound of a K or a hard C, but it’s by no means a complex design and the resemblance might well be coincidental. Mr. Vamplew wants me to show the design to the three of you and ask you to write down your best guess as to the modern phonetic equivalents of the symbols, so that we can then compare the results.”
“Why?” asked Rylands. “Even if the guesses were to correspond, it would only mean that the symbols remind us of the same letters in the English alphabet.”
“May we try, Professor Rylands?” asked Vamplew. “It will do no harm.”
Rylands shrugged, and Wychelow set the piece of paper down on the table. The first symbol looked like a K with the upper slanting line removed. The second—which was identical to the fifth—also looked like a handwritten K, with the upper element looped back to the junction, although it could also have been interpreted as a capital R with the vertical line extended upwards. The third looked like a pictogram of the sun: a circle with spikes radiating outwards from its circumference. The fourth had a semicircle, open at the top, balanced on two horizontal lines.
The odd thing was, however, that the whole assembly seemed to Halsted to be recognizable, to the extent that he had a strange conviction that he could, if necessary, pronounce the word.
That’s strange! he thought. How can I possibly know what the symbols mean—and that they signify that name, of all things? Or is it just that I’ve been allowing the name to play on my mind, lying in wait for an opportunity to spill out?
He took out his pocket-book and extracted one of his visiting cards. On the back, he wrote a C, and then hesitated for some moments before substituting his own versions of the other symbols. By the time he looked up again, Rylands and Ridpath had finished.
Rylands immediately displayed the small sheet of notepaper on which he had written: KROUO. Ridpath glanced at that one before showing his own version, similarly written on a sheet torn from a notepad: CTULU.
That sent a shudder down Halsted’s spine, oddly akin to the thrills he had felt earlier in the day. He turned over his own, which read C-T-HU-L-HU.
“Oh!” said Ridpath. “I didn’t realize that I was allowed to use letter combinations. I’ve seen the Necronomicon too, remember.” Even before he finished speaking, though, his eyes had flickered away from the card that Halsted was holding up to a scrap of paper displayed by Henry Vamplew, which also read CTHULHU. “Okay,” Ridpath added, “so we’ve all seen the Necronomicon—or reproductions of the most famous name it contains.”
“I don’t get it,” Rylands said. “How on Earth do you get aitch-yew out of that circle with the spikes. I can make it into an O with a frill, or a crown, but…and what’s the aitch-yew supposed to signify, anyhow? How do you pronounce the word?”
“If mere pronunciation is equivalent to invocation,” Halsted murmured, “it might be best not to try.”
“That would assume,” Henry Vamplew said, “that we were the ones entitled to initiate the invocation, rather than merely subsidiary instruments of a pronunciation that has already been made.” Halsted remembered that Cthulhu’s name had already been mentioned once in the cockle-cart, by Ridpath—but he suspected that Vamplew meant something more ominous than a mere casual mention.
After a pause, Vamplew added, in response to the curious stares directed at him from all sides: “Perhaps the stars have already dictated the circumstances. Perhaps we are not the ones in control of this situation, but merely aspects of its design.”
“What on Earth is that supposed to mean?” Rylands wanted to know. “Okay, so the inscription somehow reminded the three of you of a name you already knew—probably because Halsted gave us such a long commentary on the source thus morning, and brought it to the forefront of those minds familiar with it. It was even quoted, if I’m imagining the pronunciation correctly. You surely can’t believe that we’ve just invoked some kind of demon?”
“That’s exactly what Mr. Vamplew just said,” Halsted retorted. “We haven’t invoked anything. The inverse might be closer to the truth: we’re not numbered among the invokers, but among the invoked; we’re part of the pattern.”
“What pattern?” Rylands demanded, seemingly on the brink of losing his temper in response to his companions’ conspiracy of arcane implication.
“I have no idea what it adds up to,” Halsted replied, “but I can perceive it, just the same. What about you, Ridpath?”
Ridpath nodded his head. “You’re right,” he said. “Perhaps we can’t know what it is until it’s complete—at low water tomorrow. Unless Mr. Vamplew can help us out?” There was a hint of bitterness in his voice as he framed the final interrogation.
“I fear that I’m almost as astonished by this as you are, gentlemen,” the resident assured them. “The seventeen years I’ve lived here is a small span by comparison with the century and more that had elapsed since Mr. De Quincey’s low tide—and we shouldn’t forget that the 114-year cycle is itself merely an approximation within much longer cycles of exact juxtaposition, whose amplitude is measured in thousands of years. I have no idea what is happening here—but that there is a pattern of remarkable coincidences, there cannot be the slightest doubt.”
“Well I do doubt it,” Rylands stated, bluntly, as he gave way to his exasperation. “If you’re deliberately trying to annoy me, you’ve succeeded. If not, I think you’re all going mad. I could do with a breath of fresh air to clear my head, but I didn’t bring an umbrella, so I shall take myself off to my room instead, in order to commune with the spirit of Thomas De Quincey and Our Ladies of Sorrow.”
A fine tonic for wounded sanity, Halsted thought—but did not voice the sarcasm. The situation in the dining-room seemed to have become distinctly fractious, even though the palpable hostility between Rylands and Ridpath had been temporarily set aside. He glanced out of the window before rising from his seat, and saw that it was still raining far too steadily to allow for any outdoor excursion. Steady rain’s a bouger, he quoted, still speaking only to himself. He resolved to say a prayer that the poor weather would not last long enough to do too much damage to the ongoing harvest.
