Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (74 page)

T
he long-haired youth in front of Desmond wore sandals, ragged blue jeans, and a grimy T-shirt. A paperback,
The Collected Works of Robert Blake
, was half stuck into his rear pocket. When he turned around, he displayed in large letters on the T-shirt, M.U. His scrawny Fu Manchu mustache held some bread crumbs.

His yellow eyes—surely he suffered from jaundice—widened when he saw Desmond. He said, “This ain’t the place to apply for the nursing home, Pops.” He grinned, showing unusually long canines, and then turned to face the admissions desk.

Desmond felt his face turning red. Ever since he’d gotten into the line before a table marked
Toaahd Freshmen A-D
, he’d been aware of the sidelong glances, the snickers, the low-voiced comments. He stood out among these youths like a billboard in a flower garden, a corpse on a banquet table.

The line moved ahead by one person. The would-be students were talking, but their voices were subdued. For such young people, they were very restrained, excepting the smart aleck just ahead of him.

Perhaps it was the surroundings that repressed them. This gymnasium, built in the late nineteenth century, had not been repainted for years. The once-green paint was peeling. There were broken windows high on the walls; a shattered skylight had been covered with boards. The wooden floor bent and creaked, and the basketball goal rings (?) were rusty. Yet M.U. had been league champions in all fields of sports for many years. Though its enrollment was much less than that of its competitors, its teams somehow managed to win, often by large scores.

Desmond buttoned his jacket. Though it was a warm fall day, the air in the building was cold. If he hadn’t known better, he would have
thought that the wall of an iceberg was just behind him. Above him the great lights struggled to overcome the darkness that lowered like the underside of a dead whale sinking into sea depths.

He turned around. The girl just back of him smiled. She wore a flowing dashiki covered with astrological symbols. Her black hair was cut short; her features were petite and well-arranged but too pointed to be pretty.

Among all these youths there should have been a number of pretty girls and handsome men. He’d walked enough campuses to get an idea of the index of beauty of college students. But here … There was a girl, in the line to the right, whose face should have made her eligible to be a fashion model. Yet, there was something missing.

No, there was something added. A quality undefinable but … Repugnant? No, now it was gone. No, it was back again. It flitted on and off, like a bat swooping from darkness into a grayness and then up and out.

The kid in front of him had turned again. He was grinning like a fox who’d just seen a chicken.

“Some dish, heh, Pops? She likes older men. Maybe you two could get your shit together and make beautiful music.”

The odor of unwashed body and clothes swirled around him like flies around a dead rat.

“I’m not interested in girls with Oedipus complexes,” Desmond said coldly.

“At your age you can’t be particular,” the youth said, and turned away.

Desmond flushed, and he briefly fantasized knocking the kid down. It didn’t help much.

The line moved ahead again. He looked at his wristwatch. In half an hour he was scheduled to phone his mother. He should have come here sooner. However, he had overslept while the alarm clock had run down, resuming its ticking as if it didn’t care. Which it didn’t, of course, though he felt that his possessions should, somehow, take an interest in him. This was irrational, but if he was a believer in the superiority of the rational, would he be here? Would any of these students?

The line moved jerkily ahead like a centipede halting now and then to make sure no one had stolen any of its legs. When he was ten minutes late for the phone call, he was at the head of the line. Behind the admissions table was a man far older than he. His face was a mass of wrinkles, gray dough that had been incised with fingernails and then pressed into somewhat human shape. The nose was a cuttlefish’s beak stuck into the dough. But the eyes beneath the white chaotic eyebrows were as alive as blood flowing from holes in the flesh.

The hand which took Desmond’s papers and punched cards was not that of an old man’s. It was big and swollen, white, smooth-skinned. The fingernails were dirty.

“The Roderick Desmond, I assume.”

The voice was rasping, not at all an old man’s cracked quavering.

“Ah, you know me?”

“Of you, yes. I’ve read some of your novels of the occult. And ten years ago I rejected your request for Xeroxes of certain parts of
the
book.”

The name tag on the worn tweed jacket said: R. Layamon, COTOAAHD. So this was the chairman of the Committee of the Occult Arts and History Department.

“Your paper on the non-Arabic origin of Alhazred’s name was a brilliant piece of linguistic research. I knew that it wasn’t Arabic or even Semitic, but I confess that I didn’t know the century in which the word was dropped from the Arabic language. Your exposition of how it was retained only in connection with the Yemenite and that its original meaning was not
mad
but
one-who-sees-what-shouldn’t-be-seen
was quite correct.”

He paused, then said smiling, “Did your mother complain when she was forced to accompany you to Yemen?”

Desmond said, “No-n-n-o-body forced her.”

He took a deep breath and said, “But how did you know she …?”

“I’ve read some biographical accounts of you.”

Layamon chuckled. It sounded like nails being shifted in a barrel. “Your paper on Alhazred and the knowledge you display in your novels are the main reasons why you’re being admitted to this department despite your sixty years.”

He signed the forms and handed the card back to Desmond. “Take this to the cashier’s office. Oh, yes, your family is a remarkably long-lived one, isn’t it? Your father died accidentally, but his father lived to be one hundred and two. Your mother is eighty, but she should live to be over a hundred. And you, you could have forty more years of life
as you’ve known it
.”

Desmond was enraged, but not so much that he dared let himself show it. The gray air became black, and the old man’s face shone in it. It floated toward him, expanded, and suddenly Desmond was inside the gray wrinkles. It was not a pleasant place.

The tiny figures on a dimly haloed horizon danced, then faded, and he fell through a bellowing blackness. The air was gray again, and he was leaning forward, clenching the edge of the table.

“Mr. Desmond, do you have these attacks often?”

Desmond released his grip and straightened. “Too much excitement, I suppose. No, I’ve never had an attack, not now or ever.”

The old man chuckled. “Yes, it must be emotional stress. Perhaps you’ll find the means for relieving that stress here.”

Desmond turned and walked away. Until he left the building, he saw only blurred figures and signs. That ancient wizard … how had he known his thoughts so well? Was it simply because he had read the biographical accounts, made a few inquiries, and then surmised a complete picture? Or was there more to it than that?

The sun had gone behind thick sluggish clouds. Past the campus, past many trees hiding the houses of the city, were the Tamsiqueg Hills. According to the long-extinct Indians after whom they were named, they had once been evil giants who’d waged war with the hero Mikatoonis and his magic-making friend, Chegaspat. Chegaspat had been killed, but Mikatoonis had turned the giants into stone with a magical club.

But Cotoaahd, the chief giant, was able to free himself from the spell every few centuries. Sometimes, a sorcerer could loose him. Then Cotoaahd walked abroad for a while before returning to his rocky slumber. In 1724 a house and many trees on the edge of the town had been flattened one stormy night as if colossal feet had stepped upon them. And the broken trees formed a trail which led to the curiously shaped hill known as Cotoaahd.

There was nothing about these stories that couldn’t be explained by the tendency of the Indians, and the superstitious eighteenth-century whites, to legendize natural phenomena. But was it entirely coincidence that the anagram of the committee headed by Layamon duplicated the giant’s name?

Suddenly, he became aware that he was heading for a telephone booth. He looked at his watch and felt panicky. The phone in his dormitory room would be ringing. It would be better to call her from the booth and save the three minutes it would take to walk to the dormitory.

He stopped. No, if he called from the booth, he would only get a busy signal.

“Forty more years of life
as you’ve known it
,” the chairman had said.

Desmond turned. His path was blocked by an enormous youth. He was a head taller than Desmond’s six feet and so fat he looked like a smaller version of the Santa Claus balloon in Macy’s Christmas-day parade. He wore a dingy sweatshirt on the front of which was the ubiquitous M.U., unpressed pants, and torn tennis shoes. In banana-sized fingers he held a salami sandwich which Gargantua would not have found too small.

Looking at him, Desmond suddenly realized that most of the students here were too thin or too fat.

“Mr. Desmond?”

“Right.”

He shook hands. The fellow’s skin was wet and cold, but the hand exerted a powerful pressure.

“I’m Wendell Trepan. With your knowledge, you’ve heard about my ancestors. The most famous, or infamous, of whom was the Cornish witch, Rachel Trepan.”

“Yes. Rachel of the hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, near Poldhu Bay.”

“I knew you’d know. I’m following the trade of my ancestors, though more cautiously, of course. Anyway, I’m a senior and the chairperson of the rushing committee for the Lam Kha Alif fraternity.”

He paused to bite into the sandwich. Mayonnaise and salami and cheese oozing from his mouth, he said, “You’re invited to the party we’re holding at the house this afternoon.”

The other hand reached into a pocket and brought out a card. Desmond looked at it briefly. “You want me to be a candidate for membership in your frat? I’m pretty old for that sort of thing. I’d feel out of place.…”

“Nonsense, Mr. Desmond. We’re a pretty serious bunch. In fact, none of the frats here are like any on other campuses. You should know that. We feel you’d provide stability and, I’ll admit, prestige. You’re pretty well known, you know. Layamon, by the way, is a Lam Kha Alif. He tends to favor students who belong to his frat. He’d deny it, of course, and I’ll deny it if you repeat this. But it’s true.”

“Well, I don’t know. Suppose I did pledge—if I’m invited to, that is—would I have to live in the frat house?”

“Yes. We make no exceptions. Of course, that’s only when you’re a pledge. You can live wherever you want to when you’re an active.”

Trepan smiled, showing the unswallowed bite. “You’re not married, so there’s no problem there.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, Mr. Desmond. It’s just that we don’t pledge married men unless they don’t live with their wives. Married men lose some of their power, you know. Of course, no way do we insist on celibacy. We have some pretty good parties, too. Once a month we hold a big bust in a grove at the foot of Cotoaahd. Most of the women guests there belong to the Ba Ghay Sin sorority. Some of them really go for the older type, if you know what I mean.”

Trepan stepped forward to place his face directly above Desmond’s. “We don’t just have beer, pot, hashish, and sisters. There’re other attractions. Brothers, if you’re so inclined. Some stuff that’s made from a recipe by the Marquis Manuel de Dembron himself. But most of that is kid stuff. There’ll be a goat there, too!”

“A goat? A
black
goat?”

Trepan nodded, and his triple-fold jowls swung. “Yeah. Old Layamon’ll
be there to supervise, though he’ll be masked, of course. With him as coach nothing can go wrong. Last Halloween, though …”

He paused, then said, “Well, it was something to see.”

Desmond licked dry lips. His heart was thudding like the tomtoms that beat at the ritual of which he had only read but had envisioned many times.

Desmond put the card in his pocket. “At one o’clock?”

“You’re coming? Very good! See you, Mr. Desmond. You won’t regret it.”

Desmond walked past the buildings of the university quadrangle, the most imposing of which was the museum. This was the oldest structure on the campus, the original college. Time had beaten and chipped away at the brick and stone of the others, but the museum seemed to have absorbed time and to be slowly radiating it back just as cement and stone and brick absorbed heat in the sunlight and then gave it back in the darkness. Also, whereas the other structures were covered with vines, perhaps too covered, the museum was naked of plant life. Vines which tried to crawl up its gray bone-colored stones withered and fell back.

Layamon’s red-stone house was narrow, three stories high, and had a double-peaked roof. Its cover of vines was so thick that it seemed a wonder that the weight didn’t bring it to the ground. The colors of the vines were subtly different from those on the other buildings. Seen at one angle, they looked cyanotic. From another, they were the exact green of the eyes of a Sumatran snake Desmond had seen in a colored plate in a book on herpetology.

It was this venomous reptile which was used by the sorcerers of the Yan tribes to transmit messages and sometimes to kill. The writer had not explained what he meant by “messages.” Desmond had discovered the meaning in another book, which had required him to learn Malay, written in the Arabic script, before he could read it.

He hurried on past the house, which was not something a sightseer would care to look at long, and came to the dormitory. It had been built in 1888 on the site of another building and remodeled in 1938. Its gray paint was peeling. There were several broken windows, over the panes of which cardboard had been nailed. The porch floorboards bent and creaked as he passed over them. The main door was of oak, its paint long gone. The bronze head of a cat, a heavy bronze ring dangling from its mouth, served as a door knocker.