Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (76 page)

Trepan looked at his watch. “One minute to go. Hey!”

He grabbed the book from Desmond’s hands and said, harshly, “Turn your back and plug your ears!”

Trepan looked as if he were in a panic. He turned, and a minute later Trepan pulled one of Desmond’s fingers away.

“Sorry to be so sudden, but the hold was beginning to break down. I can’t figure it out. It’s always been good for at least ten minutes.”

Desmond had not felt anything, but that might be because Trepan, having been exposed to the influence, was more sensitive to it.

Trepan, obviously nervous, said, “Let’s get out of here. It’s got to cool off.”

On the way down, he said, “You sure you can’t read it?”

“Where would I have learned how?” Desmond said.

They plunged into a sea of noise and odors in the big room. They did not stay long, since Trepan wanted to show him the rest of the house, except the basement.

“You can see it sometime this week. Just now it’s not advisable to go down there.”

Desmond didn’t ask why.

When they entered a very small room on the second floor, Trepan said, “Ordinarily we don’t let freshmen have a room to themselves. But for you … well, it’s yours if you want it.”

That pleased Desmond. He wouldn’t have to put up with someone whose habits would irk him and whose chatter would anger him.

They descended to the first floor. The big room was not so crowded now. Old Layamon, just getting up from the chair, beckoned to him. Desmond approached him slowly. For some reason, he knew he was
not going to like what Layamon would say to him. Or perhaps he wasn’t sure whether he would like it or not.

“Trepan showed you the frat’s more precious books,” the chairman said. It wasn’t a question but a statement. “Especially Conant’s book.”

Trepan said, “How did you …?” He grinned. “You felt it.”

“Of course,” the rusty voice said. “Well, Desmond, don’t you think it’s time to answer that phone?”

Trepan looked puzzled. Desmond felt sick and cold.

Layamon was now almost nose to nose with Desmond. The many wrinkles of the doughy skin looked like hieroglyphs.

“You’ve made up your mind, but you aren’t letting yourself know it,” he said. “Listen. That was Conant’s advice, wasn’t it? Listen. From the moment you got onto the plane to Boston, you were committed. You could have backed out in the airport, but you didn’t, even though, I imagine, your mother made a scene there. But you didn’t. So there’s no use putting it off.”

He chuckled. “That I am bothering to give you advice is a token of my esteem for you. I think you’ll go far and fast. If you are able to eliminate certain defects of character. It takes strength and intelligence and great self-discipline and a vast dedication to get even a B.A. here, Desmond.

“There are too many who enroll here because they think they’ll be taking snap courses. Getting great power, hobnobbing with things that are really not socially minded, to say the least, seems to them to be as easy as rolling off a log. But they soon find out that the department’s standards are higher than, say, those of MIT in engineering. And a hell of a lot more dangerous.

“And then there’s the moral issue. That’s declared just by enrolling here. But how many have the will to push on? How many decide that they are on the wrong side? They quit, not knowing that it’s too late for any but a tiny fraction of them to return to the other side. They’ve declared themselves, have stood up and been counted forever, as it were.”

He paused to light up a brown panatela. The smoke curled around Desmond, who did not smell what he expected. The odor was not quite like that of a dead bat he had once used in an experiment.

“Every man or woman determines his or her own destiny. But I would make my decision swiftly, if I were you. I’ve got my eye on you, and your advancement here does depend upon my estimate of your character and potentiality.

“Good day, Desmond.”

The old man walked out. Trepan said, “What was that all about?”

Desmond did not answer. He stood for a minute or so while Trepan fidgeted. Then he said good-by to the fat man and walked out slowly.
Instead of going home, he wandered around the campus. Attracted by flashing red lights, he went over to see what was going on. A car with the markings of the campus police and an ambulance from the university hospital were in front of a two-story building. Its lower floor had once been a grocery store according to the letters on the dirty plate-glass window. The paint inside and out was peeling, and plaster had fallen off the walls within, revealing the laths beneath. On the bare wooden floor were three bodies. One was the youth who had stood just in front of him in the line in the gymnasium. He lay on his back, his mouth open below the scraggly mustache.

Desmond asked one of the people pressed against the window what had happened. The gray-bearded man, probably a professor, said, “This happens every year at this time. Some kids get carried away and try something no one but an M.A. would even think of trying. It’s strictly forbidden, but that doesn’t stop those young fools.”

The corpse with the mustache seemed to have a large round black object or perhaps a burn on its forehead. Desmond wanted to get a closer look, but the ambulance men put a blanket over the face before carrying the body out.

The gray-bearded man said, “The university police and the hospital will handle them.” He laughed shortly. “The city police don’t even want to come on the campus. The relatives will be notified they’ve OD’d from heroin.”

“There’s no trouble about that?”

“Sometimes. Private detectives have come here, but they don’t stay long.”

Desmond walked away swiftly. His mind was made up. The sight of those bodies had shaken him. He’d go home, make peace with his mother, sell all the books he’d spent so much time and money accumulating and studying, take up writing mystery novels. He’d seen the face of death, and if he did what he had thought about, only idly of course, fantasizing for psychic therapy, he would see her face. Dead. He couldn’t do it.

When he entered his room in the boardinghouse, the phone was still ringing. He walked to it, reached out his hand, held it for an undeterminable time, then dropped it. As he walked toward the couch, he noticed that the Coca-Cola bottle had been shoved or pulled out of the hole in the baseboard. He knelt down and jammed it back into the hole. From behind the wall came a faint twittering.

He sat down on the sagging couch, took his notebook from his jacket pocket, and began to pencil in the pictographs he remembered so well on the sheets. It took him half an hour, since exactness of reproduction was vital. The phone did not stop ringing.

Someone knocked on the door and yelled, “I saw you go in! Answer the phone or take it off the hook! Or I’ll put something on you!”

He did not reply or rise from the couch.

He had left out one of the drawings in the sequence. Now he poised the pencil an inch above the black space. Sitting at the other end of the line would be a very fat, very old woman. She was old and ugly now, but she had borne him and for many years thereafter she had been beautiful. When his father had died, she had gone to work to keep their house and to support her son in the manner to which both were accustomed. She had worked hard to pay his tuition and other expenses while he went to college. She had continued to work until he had sold two novels. Then she had gotten sickly, though not until he began bringing women home to introduce as potential wives.

She loved him, but she wouldn’t let loose of him, and that wasn’t genuine love. He hadn’t been able to tear loose, which meant that though he was resentful he had something in him which liked being caged. Then, one day, he had decided to take the big step toward freedom. It had been done secretly and swiftly. He had despised himself for his fear of her, but that was the way he was. If he stayed here, she would be coming here. He couldn’t endure that. So, he would have to go home.

He looked at the phone, started to rise, sank back.

What to do? He could commit suicide. He’d be free, and she would know how angry he’d been with her. He gave a start as the phone stopped ringing. So, she had given up for a while. But she would return to it.

He looked at the baseboard. The bottle was moving out from the hole a little at a time. Something behind the wall was working away determinedly. How many times had it started to leave the hole and found that its passage was blocked? Far too many, the thing must think, if it had a mind. But it refused to give up, and someday it might occur to it to solve its problem by killing the one who was causing the problem.

If, however, it was daunted by the far greater size of the problem maker, if it lacked courage, then it would have to keep on pushing the bottle from the hole. And …

He looked at the notebook, and he shook. The blank space had been filled in. There was the drawing of Cotoaahd, the thing which, now he looked at it, somehow resembled his mother.

Had he unconsciously penciled it in while he was thinking?

Or had the figure formed itself?

It didn’t matter. In either case, he knew what he had to do.

While the eyes passed over each drawing, and he intoned the words
of that long-dead language, he felt something move out from within his chest, crawl into his belly, his legs, his throat, his brain. The symbol of Cotoaahd seemed to burn on the sheet when he pronounced its name, his eyes on the drawing.

The room grew dark as the final words were said. He rose and turned on a table lamp and went into the tiny dirty bathroom. The face in the mirror did not look like a murderer’s; it was just that of a sixty-year-old man who had been through an ordeal and was not quite sure that it was over.

On the way out of the room, he saw the Coke bottle slide free of the baseboard hole. But whatever had pushed it was not yet ready to come out.

Hours later he returned reeling from the campus tavern. The phone was ringing again. But the call, as he had expected, was not from his mother, though it was from his native city in Illinois.

“Mr. Desmond, this is Sergeant Rourke of the Busiris Police Department. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Uh, ah, your mother died some hours ago of a heart attack.”

Desmond did not have to act stunned. He was numb throughout. Even the hand holding the receiver felt as if it had turned to granite. Vaguely, he was aware that Rourke’s voice seemed strange.

“Heart attack? Heart …? Are you sure?”

He groaned. His mother had died naturally. He would not have had to recite the ancient words. And now he had committed himself for nothing and was forever trapped. Once the words were used while the eyes read, there was no turning back.

But … if the words had been only words, dying as sound usually does, no physical reaction resulting from words transmitted through that subcontinuum, then was he bound?

Wouldn’t he be free, clear of debt? Able to walk out of this place without fear of retaliation?

“It was a terrible thing, Mr. Desmond. A freak accident. Your mother died while she was talking to a visiting neighbor, Mrs. Sammins. Sammins called the police and an ambulance. Some other neighbors went into the house, and then … then.…”

Rourke’s throat seemed to be clogging.

“I’d just got there and was on the front porch when it … it.…”

Rourke coughed, and he said, “My brother was in the house, too.”

Three neighbors, two ambulance attendants, and two policemen had been crushed to death when the house had unaccountably collapsed.

“It was like a giant foot stepped on it. If it’d fallen in six seconds later, I’d have been caught, too.”

Desmond thanked him and said he’d take the next plane out to Busiris.

He staggered to the window, and he raised it to breathe in the open air. Below, in the light of a streetlamp, hobbling along on his cane, was Layamon. The gray face lifted. Teeth flashed whitely.

Desmond wept, but the tears were only for himself.