Shadows Out of Time

“He’s quite a swell in esoteric math and physics even so. Knows more about the structure of space-time than either of us will if we live to be a hundred. Yes, he’s pompous, he over-rates himself, but that could make it worse!” Connie closed a hand on my forearm. She sounded nearly distraught. “I’m guessing he doesn’t know enough, has no idea what he’s meddling with, just thinks he does. He may believe he can learn things using rites from the Necronomiconthat he’d never learn in conventional ways. You saw he had that book in his study, out in the open. People have stopped being horrified by it, these days; they just see it as a curiosity, one more cult grimoire. They put Cthulhu on T-shirts and coffee mugs! But if Tindall opens a portal and lets something through, and that something was IogSotot, we wouldn’t be kissing anything as trivial as our asses goodbye. He has the rocks of Leng to establish contact, or he can get them. I wasn’t worried about it until you told me he mentioned that— entity.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Get those rocks out of his reach! Charter a plane and drop them in the Atlantic, for the best! Until we can do that, get to Tindall’s apartment, now! Talk to him, if it’s not too late. Come on.”

“We can’t drive! We’re both half cut on wine. If we’re pulled over, we won’t get to Tindall’s apartment tonight, no matter what.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Roy! We’ve eaten enough to blot it up, and I’ll stay within the limit. I don’t want to be stopped either. It’s only a few k’s. Are you coming or not?”

“Coming. But I drive. I have more bulk than you.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t share Connie’s desperation — more fool me — but I didn’t want her driving, either. Her car’s a Volvo Electric and I had handled it before. We bowled along Lich Street past the burying ground — which didn’t inspire any bright happy thoughts — and the Baptist Church, towards the modern part of town. Shopping mall, apartment blocks, swimming pool, new train station, it’s all there and all brightly lit. Somehow it didn’t reassure me. The modern end and Old Arkham alike belong to the last hundredth of a second of time, compared with the rocks of Leng.

“Can we get in?” I asked, cursing myself for not thinking of that. “Without letting Tindall know we’ve arrived, I mean?”

“In the front door, yes. Haru lives there. She’ll open up for me.” Connie spoke anxiously. “Maybe nothing is happening. Maybe Tindall is only reading and preparing, but I’m worried that he’s been doing that for quite a while already. It’s funny. These beliefs survived for thousands of years among primitive, isolated groups, like those Inuit professors Webb found worshipping Cthulhu a long way up the coast of Greenland, and still, somehow they have an appeal to crabbed, civilized scholars like Tindall!”

“And people like Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, and Koresh’s bunch. Wasn’t there even a group that carried out human sacrifices ten years ago, thinking it would open a way to some underground world called K’n-yan? Didn’t they all commit suicide when they were exposed and the law showed up to arrest them?”

Connie nodded grimly. “In the Wichita Mountains. I don’t know if K’n-yan is real or not, but there’s an extensive mythology about it. In China it’s called Xinaián.”

No limit to murder and suicide cults, especially in these crazy times. Connie called Hiru’s apartment on the intercom, and asked her to open the main door because we needed to see Tindall. Hiru’s response was to ask wryly why we’d wish to see him outside office hours if we didn’t have to. Connie explained that it was urgent, and Hiru unlocked the main entrance.

Taking the elevator to Tindall’s floor, we found his apartment dark and got no response when we rang the doorbell.

“Where would you go in Arkham if you wanted to carry out some mad Necronomicon rite?” I asked, back in Connie’s car.

“Oh, God. Keziah Mason’s witch house, if the original house was still standing, but it isn’t.” She bit her lip, which would have been fetching if she hadn’t been so worried. “There’s the White Stone out past Meadow Hill. Around here, that’s traditionally a place to avoid. And there’s the river island where they say Keziah’s witches met.”

“The island!” I said. “That’s where he’d go. Von Junzt was here in Arkham, in the early 1800s. He even visited the island. I read that chapter of his Black Book. He wrote about the island and its menhirs being one of the ‘Gates’ he was always saying existed around the world.”

“Yes!” Connie said, and wrenched the Volvo’s wheel fiercely.