Summoned (7 page)

The left-hand window showed the landward slope, which was heavily wooded. At the forest’s edge, a crow took wing against the pearly sky, cast off by a figure almost hidden in the trees. Helen stepped closer and studied him for the thousandth time. The figure didn’t fit. Even as a little girl she’d known it. He was an allegorical figure in an otherwise historically accurate design, a man dressed in Pharaoh-chic, with skin the color of onyx and eyes all-over amber, no irises, no pupils. Uncle John had called him the Black Man, the Devil, a monster lurking in the wilderness, always ready to torment the righteous and to harvest unwary souls. The Black Man used to give her nightmares.

He still did. Well, not the Black Man per se, but the whole complex of gorgeous and precarious glass. Every morning of the three months since she’d inherited the house, she’d expected to come into the library and find the windows strewn across the floor. They were sagging, and some of the glass had cracked, and there was an ominous powdery corrosion on the lead cames. In many places, light oozed between lead and glass. Around the minister’s head and the Black Man’s upraised hand, it created accidental haloes that looked like clever design. But light leaks meant the putty had deteriorated, and where light could leak so could water, and water was the great destroyer. Another lesson she’d learned from ruined ceilings and rotted floor joists.

The windows had made it through one last night, which was all they had to do. Their savior was coming today to remove and restore, to reinforce and reinstall, all to the tune of thirty thousand dollars. Helen winced. The money would come out of her inheritance, and thirty thousand out of a million was, if not a drop from the bucket, no more than a ladleful. Even so, it was more than a year’s earnings for many people, including her, this time last year.

She gave the tender flesh below her elbow crease a little chastising pinch. The library had been Uncle John’s sanctum. It had been her own sanctuary even before she could read the books she hauled off its shelves. Of course she had to restore the windows: They were the library’s heart. Wrong. They were its inward-looking eyes, and that was a perfect metaphor for her uncle’s life, wasn’t it? If not for her own.

The sun dashed gouts of color onto her sandaled feet. Her left looked jaundiced yellow, her right a necrotic green. She backed away from the chromatic contagion, toward the library doors. The Black Man watched her go, smiling his perpetual slight smile, evidently unworried about his approaching dissolution. No, he fully expected to be resurrected shinier than ever.

Helen bumped the doors open with her pack and traversed the hall as quickly as she could without knocking over stepladders or slipping on drop cloths. Plaster dust rose around her. She held her breath until she got outside. The house faced north, not good feng shui; but at this time of day, that meant the front steps were in the shade. She settled herself on cool stone, knees to chin, like the Helen who’d spent so much time here after school in the fall and winter and spring, after day camp in the summer, waiting for her father to leave work at the bank and come drive her home to their sensible ranch in the suburbs.

Uncle John’s house had been a sort of remedy to the ranch, an echoing castle that went on forever when measured by her little-girl steps. In the castle library, John Arkwright had lived like a sorcerer surrounded by his grimoires, and scattered through the warren of rooms had been curios from all the impractical places he’d visited. Helen remembered lying in front of the library fireplace, devouring a folio of medieval woodcuts while snowy twilight drew in outside. She remembered climbing to the attic and wiping a spy-hole in a cobwebbed window so she could look out over the rooftops and the blurry lights of the city, all the way down to a wall of mist that made the harbor the edge of the world. The Arkwright House! When her parents and John had debated to whom he’d leave the place, nobody had voted to make it a bequest to the university. Though her father had always considered the house a white elephant, it had been in the family for too long to let it go. Besides, if John also left enough money to restore it, and Helen really loved it enough to take on the responsibility …

Helen had always loved the Arkwright House. God help her, she still loved it, but she’d assumed she wouldn’t become the Arkwright in residence until she was, oh, a comfortable forty-something with a comfortable forty-something husband and two or three kids old enough to know that lead-paint chips weren’t a good snack choice. Instead she was twenty-five, with a master’s degree in her pocket, but her archives and record management Ph.D. abandoned for the moment. There’d be no way she could turn down the job she’d be starting in less than two months.

So, yes, to be honest with herself, it wasn’t merely the geriatric ailments of the house that were making her cat nervous. John had carried through on another vision of her future they’d concocted when she was a kid: that Helen would join the dynasty of Arkwright archivists at MU. He’d retired shortly before his death, leaving Theophilus Marvell head of the Arcane Studies Archives; and, on John’s strong recommendation, Marvell had recruited Helen as his assistant. Her parents had recently moved, to North Carolina; she’d been looking for opportunities closer to them, but even they had said the MU position was a plum she shouldn’t refuse. She’d accepted, planning to stay with John until she found an apartment, during which time she’d pick his brain on the Archives. She had come and stayed, but John hadn’t had the time or energy to pass on the torch of his scholarship. Typical of him, hater of fusses and long good-byes, he hadn’t told the family about his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer until three weeks before it killed him.

She swallowed pain that still tasted raw and shrugged off her backpack. It bulged with books about the Cthulhu Mythos, handpicked by Marvell as her formal introduction to the treasures she’d help him guard, as Uncle John had guarded them, and great-grandfather Henry before him, right, that Arkwright dynasty. She had some basic knowledge of the Mythos from college courses in comparative mythology, but she’d worried Marvell would expect her to know a lot more, given it had been John’s obsession. She’d worried for nothing. Their first meeting that spring, Marvell had said he knew John had never shared with her the details of his work. Mythos scholars were notoriously secretive and even—Marvell would admit it—a bit paranoid about the public learning the cosmic implications of their studies. He and Helen had shared a laugh, but now that she was deep into her Mythos books she couldn’t pretend they were cozy reading. Fascinating, compelling, yes. Cozy, no, not at night in the vast old house, not at noon in her MU office, not now, in the open air of morning.

Helen looked down College Street. There was little traffic; July plus Friday meant a weekend exodus of summering staff and students. Through the gates opposite the house, she could see only one boy perched on the marble lip of the Pickman fountain. Beyond the fountain, a parrot-gaudy cluster of tourists crossed the University Green.

A van turned the corner: Clegg’s Landscaping. Helen glanced at her watch. Nine twenty. Jeremy wasn’t due until ten, but she had Marvell’s latest letter to fill the time.

It was in the outer pocket of her backpack. Helen twitched the letter from its envelope and smoothed it on her knees, enjoying the roughness of the honey-colored sheets. They were lokta paper, handmade in Nepal. Buddhist texts had survived two thousand years on paper like this—talk about something an archivist could love. Marvell used it for all his correspondence.

Dear Helen:

Write and tell me how hard you’re working. I’m having too good a time here in London and need some guilt to keep me sober. Days in the bookshops, nights at the theater. Going to Scotland on the first of August—the enclosed card has my number there. But before I get lost in the mountains, I want to bring up something we’ll need to discuss when I get back to Arkham. Lately I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to break the ice in writing.

When she’d first read this paragraph, Helen had felt suddenly cold, catastrophizing: Now they’d worked together for a couple months, Marvell was sorry he’d hired her. She couldn’t blame him. He was fairly new to the Chief Archivist position himself, and he’d still be teaching—he didn’t need an assistant barely out of graduate school. But firing her wasn’t the ice he’d broken. Another van turned the corner, a florist this time. Helen blotted her upper lip with the back of her wrist. Then, fanning herself with the first sheet of the letter, she focused on the second.

When your uncle John became ill, he asked me to safeguard some personal papers that you’d otherwise have found among his effects at the Arkwright House. At this point, John and I had agreed you’d be a good candidate for my assistant. Your uncle was eager for you to follow him at MU, but he was also concerned that you be properly prepared.

He turned to me not only because we were friends, but because I’m head of Arcane Studies. Your Latin and Greek would be powerful tools for tackling the Mythos, but still, you’d need help. I was to oversee your education in his place. I was also to decide when you should read John’s papers.

Most are letters and journals written by himself and by Henry Arkwright, recounting experiences known only to a select circle of their associates. You need to know about these experiences and associates. But the papers are disturbing in a way that you’ll understand now that you’ve started studying the Mythos.

I think you’ll be able to do the papers justice by summer’s end and so I want to pique your curiosity in advance. Curiosity is vital to anyone in our field, courage being the other essential. Your uncle believed you have plenty of both. I believe it, too, Helen.

Forgive me for not mentioning the papers sooner, and for writing now in this pulp-fiction manner. Don’t worry about the papers, either. I’ll help you with them. Study, but get some sun, too, and write back when you can.

Yours,

Theo Marvell

Speaking of the sun, its white brilliance was rising like a tide up the steps. Helen bumped her butt up a couple to keep her toes in the shade. She folded the lokta sheets and returned them to the envelope. Soon she’d have the damn letter memorized. So the withheld papers described experiences known only to a select circle? About the experiences she was ignorant. About the circle she had a clue.

There had been rare days when she hadn’t gone to her uncle’s after school or camp because he was hosting his “club” in the library. The one time she’d been in the house during a meeting, John had warned her to stay in the front parlor. She obeyed, but she cracked the parlor door so she could peek at the arriving guests. Most looked like professors or librarians, no excitement there. One, though, was a woman in a police uniform; another, an Indian with a long black beard and orange turban. The last to come was a Native American man. He startled Helen by looking her in the eye she’d fixed on the hall. He looked, and he grinned, and he made a circling motion with his right hand, index and middle fingers extended toward her. The wind must have followed him into the house—she felt it gust against her cheek as the parlor door swung slowly inward and latched shut.

Later, when she dared to creep to the library doors, she heard someone say, angrily, that there had been “a manifestation, a verified manifestation.” She felt sure the odd-cadenced voice that answered was that of the Native American, who said, “Yes, it’s him, of course, Nyah-Tepp.”

Nyah-Tepp was the name as she’d heard it then, meaningless. Only recently she’d realized the Native American had named Nyarlathotep, Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods. Anyone who mentioned a god so casually had to be a member of a “select circle,” didn’t he?

As for what the withheld papers contained to make John think she needed protecting from them, she had a theory. In her new studies, Helen had read cases of scholars and cultists who’d suffered psychological repercussions from contact with Mythos documents and artifacts: crippling anxiety, obsessions, even delusions about the reality of the Mythos and its creatures. Was Marvell hinting that Uncle John and Great-Grandfather Henry had been deranged by their work? Well, as soon as Helen had learned the word
eccentric,
she’d applied it to her uncle. Had he been more than eccentric? What about Henry? There was that ridiculous Dunwich story Lovecraft had written, thinly disguising Henry Arkwright as “Dr. Armitage.” In public Henry had insisted nothing supernatural had happened in Dunwich—bootleggers had haunted the village, not monsters from beyond. But had Henry been less skeptical in private, in his papers?

Great. Her new job and the crumbling house weren’t enough to worry about. Let’s add mysterious documents that might disclose a family weakness to crack and start believing in the craziest mythology on record. Be fair, though. Marvell hadn’t said anything about a family weakness. Helen had concocted that herself. Which maybe supported the family weakness idea?

She needed a vacation, at least a mini-one. Today, instead of going straight to the library, she’d go to Tumblebee’s Café and dive to the bottom of a large vanilla latte. She could sit outside to answer Marvell’s letter, tell him she wasn’t angry about the withheld papers, only confused. That was close enough to the truth. And to finish the mini-vacation, she could stop in the pharmacy across the street, the one with all the homemade nostrums and the old-fashioned soda fountain. One of Mr. Geldman’s cherry colas would be just the thing to power her afternoon reading.

A Ford Econoline van pulled off West Street into College. Its battered white side bore the legend
J-J REMODELING
, but she could see Jeremy Wyndham in the passenger seat. Helen hoisted her backpack and went down the steps to meet him.

Jeremy introduced her to the driver, a compact man with grizzled ponytail and beard: Joe Jackman Douglass, carpenter. “Joe-Jack,” the carpenter said, before throwing open the van doors and hauling out lumber.