Shadows Out of Time

I’m not a cook. My repertoire is half a dozen dishes I’ve practiced often enough for them to be edible, and a few more that’ll turn out well if I’m lucky, but I don’t have a real cook’s palate or instincts. When I’m trying something new, I work from the recipe and hope for the best.

Connie knows that since long ago. She came around to my place for dinner just the same, in a steel-gray silk pant suit, her brick-red mane tinted auburn, and we ate a meal of spicy pork chops simmered until you could cut them with a fork, irrigated with a lot of wine which I for one needed. Connie knew that too, and she was concerned. She hadn’t told me to be careful just to hear herself talk.

“Don’t do it again, Roy,” she said soberly. “When you saw those Tcho-Tcho rites and that winged hound, it may have been a close call, more than you know. I think you were lucky to wake right then.”

I was fighting the idea that what I had seen was completely real. Fighting it because it frightened me. I said stubbornly, “It could have come from my own brain and nowhere else. That early part of the dream, with the molten earth and nearby moon? I’ve done a paper on how the earth-moon system formed. As for the creatures in the cave — imagination.”

“What about Leng?” she demanded. “All through those aeons you kept seeing Leng, the plateau, not much changed, and I’ll bet you could draw me its outline right now. Wine or no wine. Here, do it.”

She thrust pen and paper into my hands.

“Oh, sure I can,” I said, and did. “Subconscious memory of an oil stain I see in the car park every day, for all I know. If the plateau really exists we ought to be able to find it, and I’ve done a computer search. Starting with Google Earth. What’s nagging at me is the way Tindall reacted. He pounced on that hot rock like an owl on a mouse. He was caught off-guard there, for a breath. He said something like, ‘It’s a link. Contact with—’ I forget with what. Yuth something.”

“A link? Well, duh. Clearly it’s a link, when you’ve been having these dreams, and especially the last one. A link across time and space? Sure he said Yuth, Roy?”

“No. It could have been Yogguth. Isn’t that supposed to be an unknown planet out past the rim of the Solar System — if you’re a cultist?”

“Yuggoth. Some believers think it’s the same as Pluto, but if it is, there’s certainly a lot we don’t know about Pluto yet. Don’t look like that. I believe Yuggoth’s a cult myth myself. I can’t see Tindall putting stock in — oh, dear God Almighty!”

“What?”

“He didn’t say Yuggoth, Roy. He said…Yog-Sothoth! Don’t repeat it! I just mispronounced it on purpose. In the Middle Ages even the darkest heretics wrote it, and I guess said it, as Iog-Sotot. It’s a dangerous name to pronounce the correct way.”

“Isn’t this Yog—”

She placed her hand urgently across my mouth. “Don’t. Say Iog-Sotot if you have to.”

“Iog-Sotot. All right, and I haven’t read the Necronomicon except to skim it, but you can’t attend Miskatonic without having heard about it. Isn’t he one of the gods that mad Yemenite poet wrote about?”

“They aren’t gods, Roy, even though strange old cults around the world worship them. I think it was Arthur Clarke who said, ‘No gods ever imagined by our minds possessed the powers they will command.’ What they are is alien, and not Disney cuties or grotesques, or little nature pixies like E.T. And they are not imaginary, much as I wish. About — Iog-Sotot— there was the Charles Dexter Ward case in Providence, back in the roaring twenties. Ward became much too interested in an ancestor of his who invoked that — entity — and it sent him insane. A unique and awful kind of madness. He vanished from the asylum in the end, nobody ever knew how, and nobody saw him again after he escaped — if that’s what happened.

“That thing, Iog-Sotot, has staggering powers, and it’s said to be congruent with all time and space.” Connie closed her eyes and quoted what I guess was a passage she’d read. “‘Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Iog-Sotot knows the gate. Iog-Sotot is the gate. Iog-Sotot is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Iog-Sotot.’ But it still has limitations. Somehow it’s barred out of this universe, can only reach into it when someone opens the way. Usually, from what I’ve read, those who try, fail, and the result is disastrous. Now if Leng is some sort of dimensional nexus, those ancient rocks von Junzt brought home with him could serve as a link or contact with — something that transcends time.”

“Connie! Tindall’s not a mythic sorcerer. He’s a pompous dick of a university dean who lives in the past.”