The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Read online

  So bit by bit we traded and sold up. We moved far afield from cheap SF paperbacks. In the month before we acquired the estate of Basil Steele, I sold a diary for fifteen thousand dollars. It was the diary of a sailor on a whaling ship that sailed with Herman Melville. Christmas that year we came across a copy of De Humani Corposis Fabrica by Vesalius. The 1555 anatomy textbook was known for its superior illustrations, but it was the tanned human skin the book was bound in that piqued the collector’s interest. Life was good. Grady bought his mother a new home, and lived with her as a caretaker. My wife and I actually sailed around the world with our youngest daughter. We had phenomenal luck.

  Of course good luck in business seems always to be matched with bad luck. My daughter Sharon miscarried and her scum husband divorced her. Grady’s mother showed up with stage three melanoma.

  Then Basil Steele’s son Marcus Steele, offered us his father’s books. Basil had made a fortune in the 1990s in blood diamonds. The filth of his money was outshone by his book collecting. He collected the Modernists and the Beats. In fact he had bought our copy of Finnegans Wake. We made an offer (frankly a low ball figure) and Marcus sold us the books. Apparently some gambling debts had lessened his willingness to bargain. Grady spent a few hours on the Internet finding out about Steele.

  Born at the end of WWII, Steele had distinguished himself as an archaeologist and an adventurer. He made a survey of African megaliths along with two other men, Frank C. Long and Vladimir “Bob” Bok. Very little work had been done on the sub-Saharan Neolithic—money didn’t flow in as it did for digs in Egypt and Europe. As Africa was throwing off the shackles of colonialism, many of the places the “Three Musketeers” went were politically shaky to put it mildly. The three of them even made the cover of Life. In 1960 they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The revolution in the Congo remains one of the bloodiest periods of human history. Steele and Long managed to flee. Bok had been assumed dead. He showed up in a terrible state in 1974, made a few headlines and died—well disappeared actually. Steele continued archaeological work in Africa off and on until the late eighties. His contacts with various warlords made him a good front for blood diamonds, and he amassed a huge fortune and returned to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Then he became a book collector, philanthropist and an advocate for Native American rights. The third of the musketeers, Long, had a very exciting life. He returned to Africa and became the dictator of the short lived “Republic” of Botsmabique. The media loved the story of an American black man getting his own country, until they found out his human rights agenda would have embarrassed Hitler.

  The books arrived in twenty cases. The collection was six cases. Rare Burroughs, Ginsberg, Pound Eliot, Ford Maddox Ford. The rest of the books were tomes on archaeology and linguistics, books on chess and Louisiana fishing, mystery hardbacks and SF trade paperbacks, local history, wood working and a small sealed cardboard box. Grady opened it. Inside was a letter and a thick, small hardback with a brown and gray cloth binding, with black and green leather colophon. The tile was gold embossed on black leather. Beneath it was green leather embossed with a silver inverse pentagram. It’s title read Ool Athog Chronicles: A guide to life with Selections from the Typhonian Tablets by Vladimir Horace Bok. It bore no name of its press. The letter was addressed to Marcus Steele:

  To my beloved son,

  I was afraid to destroy this book since Bok had warned me against doing so. Now that I have passed, it is your job to burn the book. Fahrenheit 451 and all that. The book is probably harmless, and I am a superstitious fool. Please do not read it. If you do read it—read it cover to cover once and destroy it before you are tempted to read it again. Do not (even in jest) try any of the “spells” the book may contain.

  To explain this book I must make a confession. In 1960 Frank Long, Bok, and I found the nightmare city of Ool Athog on Lake Tanganyika. The city was more than half-buried with lava flows and a great part of it was swallowed by the Albertine Fault. The region had been volcanically active twelve thousand years before, so we knew the long buildings half-sunk into the Earth were older not only than any other African megaliths, but older than any megaliths. The buildings were arranged with extreme symmetry. The black and white diorite had been etched with rows of an hieroglyphic script. It had little resemblance to Egyptian writing. Inside the thick walls in rooms with no windows the script had been written in glowing green radium. We were not far from the radium and uranium mines of Katanga. Belgium was losing control of the Congo, so we knew we had to make as quick a study as possible. Long and I photographed like mad. We found a few small statues of insect gods—locusts and roaches and starfish-headed monstrosity. Because of the uranium and the radium and the diamonds, certain European powers backed Katanga as its own country. We were in the thick of it, and I developed good contacts in the native diamond industry—which is why you’ll never have to work for a living if you hang out at Gamblers Anonymous. Bok began growing crazy. He claimed that he could read the script, and that it was a pre-human script. Since he had found no Rosetta stone, the first claim was unlikely and the second is too crazy to comment on. Long and I began packing up. We knew that revolution would find us; we didn’t want to die among the strange ruins. Bok refused to think about leaving.

  One night we heard them driving in. We pleaded with Bok, but no, he had a mission. He would decipher all the writing. That was when he told us the name of the city was Ool Athog. Long and I got in our jeep and drove. We never looked back. We assumed that Bok was another casualty. We left the Congo. I didn’t go back to the Congo until the late sixties. Even then “Ool Athog” remained a dangerous place. I never set foot there again. Long and I never published, because we hoped someday to return. Then Bok showed up in 1975. He walked into the American embassy at Kenya. He looked like hell; the fourteen years had not been kind to him.

  He denounced us, of course. Said we left him to rot. He claimed that Long had delivered him to the rebels. I don’t know. I know Long had anger toward him. Bok was a crack linguist, and had more professional publications than Long. Long had fought his way out of the ghetto, Bok was, like me, a white man of privilege. I like to think I knew my friend and that Bok was crazy or resentful or both. Bok didn’t mention the city in any of his interviews.

  Bok mailed us copies of his novel. As far as I know they are the only two copies ever made. He gave us a warning letter—said that the books contained the wisdom of Ool Athog. If we read the book once we would gain some of the wisdom—and be tempted to use it. If we read the book twice, we would gain more dangerous powers. Ool Athog, he claimed, was a transitional city from an insectile race that had lived on Earth since the Jurassic and Homo Erectus. The five stage life cycle of the insects required them to call on dreadful trans-dimensional daemons, and as the race died off twenty thousand years ago, they had implanted their essence in a group of early hominids. He said the methods of contact were known to certain esoteric groups as the Typhonian Tablets or the Sauthenrom. He said that he was not long for this earth, too much of his mind thinking like an insect now.

  In the latter prophecy proved correct. Vladimir Bok went missing from his Lawrence, Kansas home in 1977. I called Long. I told him that I was going to burn the book. He laughed at me. How could I not read it? Clearly it was a leg-pull on Bok’s part. Long had started reading it the first day. “It’s sort of H. Rider Haggard,” he said, “but it’s full of blank pages were the ‘spells’ go. That’s what’s supposed to unhinge you. I am thinking of editing it and publishing it as a novel under my own name.” He called a month later. “I was wrong, the last section of the book does have the spells and rituals written out. They look very harmless—one seems to be a cancer cure.” I told him that he sounded a little unhinged if he had decided to believe in magic. “But you believe, you’re afraid to even read the book.”

  That’s the last I heard of him. He showed in Botsmabique. His weird little coup gathered massive media attention. Months after seizing power he grew bored wi
th and went to Europe, happy to spend diamond money in expensive brothels. You remember the funeral.

  On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I think Bok played a major practical joke that may or may not have unhinged Frank. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I think about buildings that had to be at least three thousand years older than any building on Earth and little idols of strange gods. I have started to read the book maybe twenty times, started to burn it twice as often. Since those “little spots” on my lungs and liver have showed everywhere I am tempted for the cancer cure. On Saturdays I drink a lot. My son, I have left you a lot of money—if you ever get over your interest in poker. Besides that I think you love me—on these two accounts I ask you to destroy this book. You can keep the letter if you ever need proof your old man was crazy.

  Basil R. Steele

  “Oh my God,” I said, “If we can offer the book using that letter as an advertisement, we could ask anything for the book.”

  James asked: “Why do you suppose Marcus didn’t burn the book?”

  “You saw it was in a sealed cardboard box. He probably thought it was another of his father’s books. Since it wasn’t displayed in the collection, it was likely a tome on African history.”

  “You think we can sell it without contacting Marcus?”

  “I’d love to, but a letter from a dead man to his son is pretty personal. I think we would be assholes if we didn’t get his blessing on any sales. I’ll contact him tonight.”

  James chewed his lip. “Let’s not be so fast. Don’t you want to read it first?”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Come on this isn’t the set of The Mummy’s Curse. This is our warehouse in Binger. Of course we’ll offer the book as unread.”

  “Well we would need any bibliographic data inside as part of the catalog listing.”

  “Ok which of us gets to read it first?” asked James.

  “James, you read much faster than I do. I think you should have the honor.”

  He had opened the book before I finished speaking. I’d like to say the light in the room dimmed or we could feel tremors from Dead Woman’s Mound or something eldritch. Instead it was my fanboy best friend with his bald spot and his nerdy glasses being absorbed in a novel. I looked over his shoulder a couple of times. There were small clusters of blank pages. I stopped him once.

  “So is there any bibliographic data?”

  “No press, no date, Just the title and pentagram. There’s a table of contents. It reads ‘First Stage, Second Stage, Third Stage, Fourth Stage and Fifth Stage.’ The book has standard pagination. Four hundred and fifty pages. Smyth-sewn. He paid good money to have this created. The editorial work is strong, I haven’t spotted any typos.”

  “So what’s it about?”

  “It’s the story of a young man named Altryss. He was sold to an insect shaman when he was 12. He’s 16 now and hopelessly in love with a female apprentice of the shaman. The story so far is sort of The Sorrows of Young Werther meets At the Mountains of Madness.“

  “Do you suppose it’s in the public domain?”

  “Bok went missing in 1977, I don’t know when (or if) he was declared dead, but the work would be protected until 2052. Of course if he has no heirs, it might be published with an escrow account for royalties. Is it good?”

  “At first it had bad exposition and leaden prose, but either Bok learned his craft or I am just hooked with the story. You’ll love it.”

  I left the warehouse at five and went home to my wife and our cats and an evening of Downton Abbey.

  The next day James came to work about 9:00. We didn’t start early, our business wasn’t about volume. I was cataloging the major items of the Steele collection. James looked sleepy and he was carrying a Big Gulp of Dr. Pepper. He was not carrying the book.

  “I read it all last night. I couldn’t put it down,” he said.

  “I see you didn’t bring it either,” I said.

  “I forgot.”

  “So how was it? Filled you with any desire to take over a small African Kingdom?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So how was it? Are you just set there sucking on your caffeine fix when you read The King in Yellow?”

  James laughed. “It really does hit on a deep level. The book is in five parts. In the first section Altryss is mooning over this older girl, Lallyssa, the star pupil of the shaman Krsssstv. Altryss tries to impress with magic, with derring do, with poetry. No dice. He asks the shaman for help in winning the most beautiful woman in the world. The shaman laughs and teaches him a ritual to gain a vision of the most beautiful woman in the world. The shaman says that if the spell shows him Lallyssa, he personally will help Altryss to seduce her. Altryss calls on the Daemon of Beauty, said to be one of the most terrible daemons. He sees the perfect beauty for several minutes until the vision melts. He is so sorrowful at the loss of the vision, he hangs himself. His dead body hangs in his room for three days, then at the beginning of the second section Krsssstv cuts him down, drones a spell and restores his life.”

  I interrupted, “So I am guessing the blank pages are where the spells should be?”

  “Right. The Spell to see Absolute Beauty, the Spell to Resurrect the Dead—as well as some of the minor spells he showed off to the girl. Now that Altryss has seen Absolute Beauty, he’s not interested in the girl anymore.”

  “So what is he interested in?”

  “Well, pussy. Getting as many girls as he can. He learns spells to seduce women, summon demon lovers, summon ghost lovers, have erections that make those four warnings on TV seem lame—and as he grows jaded spells for seducing men and animals.”

  I commented: “Magical party tricks, sounds real deep.”

  James responded with anger. “Hey, Jesus made wine at a party when the guests weren’t drunk enough. You can’t gainsay the choices of a magus. Anyway, after he’s banged everything in sight, he grows bored. There are no challenges to his tastes.”

  “You mean he got older.”

  “Probably. What’s old for a homo erectus?”

  “Sounds like he was doing the erectus part well.”

  “Anyway, he asks for the next step. It’s gold, wealth. He is introduced to spirits that can get him diamonds, gold, sink his rivals’ ships. He becomes vastly wealthy. At this point he asks what the Powers want for payment.”

  “The old sell your soul business.”

  “Sort of. They want to take his soul and use it to feed one of their offspring. Just like a dirt dauber does—plants its eggs in another insect. The eggs hatch and eat the host. As the Others eat his soul he will grow mad, see strange worlds, experience feelings beyond the simple human ranges of pleasure-pain, good-evil, hatred-love and so on. He will live in the Otherness, but very, very changed. As his nightmares grow weird, he plans on escaping. He takes his wealth and commissions a boat. He sails off to what I’m guessing is South America. Anyway no other homo erectus around. He thinks he’s given the Old Ones the slip. Then one morning, Bang! he wakes up back in his bed in Kyrsssstv’s house. He can smell the radium painters writing their endless hieroglyphs next door. Kyrsssstv tells him that no man is allowed to back out at this point. He’s been filling his soul with strong desire—for beauty, for lust, for gold. Desire is the food of the Old Ones. He begins his fourth phase.”

  I was fascinated by the book, I was also beginning to realize that James might not part with it. I was also thinking about how much money Basil Steele had squirreled away. “So what’s the fourth phase?”

  “Political power, rulership. Altryss learns spells to increase his charisma, summon demon armies, read men’s minds, and so forth. He overthrows the human king, makes peace with the insect emperor—and learns all the lessons of what absolute power can do to a man.”

  “We’re talking Long in Botsmabique here, aren’t we?”

  James looked down. “I don’t know. I am not prone to confuse books and life. Magic may be the art that does that. He runs his terr
ible little empire—which can’t expand that much. There just aren’t that many homo erectus walking around. When he feels he has gone as far as he can, he asks Krysssstv to teach him how to be happy and live well. The old shaman says his soul is falling asleep. He says a sense of fulfillment seasons the soul like pepper on meat. There are mantras for meditation, cures for many diseases—I am pretty sure cancer and diabetes are among them. In this section the spells are printed.”

  I looked at James very seriously. “So do they work?”

  James looked down again. “You don’t think I would be that silly.”

  “I think your mom you adore is dying of cancer. I think I would have chanted oh-what-a-goose-I-am ten thousand times if I thought it might help her.”

  James said slowly, “Ok I tried it. I don’t know if it did any good—and it scared the hell out of Mama, and I feel stupid.”

  “So you’re going to bring the book in tomorrow, and I can write Marcus.”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t bring the book in the next day. I let it slide. Then I asked the third day. We had a petty fight; he said he wanted to keep the book until he knew. I said that I thought he was losing it, but I promised him a week. I knew he was taking his mother’s dying very hard. He skipped work for three days claiming the flu. I called up my lawyer, and asked him to look into what I would have to do to end the partnership if James lost it.

  Then he was back. Well dressed, all smiles, happier than I had seen him since he found that copy of Finnegans Wake.

  “It worked! I took Mom to M.D. Anderson in Houston. It worked. There is no trace of cancer in her anywhere!”