Shadows Out of Time

The Miskatonic River flows north of town. We drove along River Street, where restored seventeenth century warehouses and taverns line the waterfront. The island itself is a tourist attraction and heritage site. There are river tours by boat, but the boats don’t land on the island. The moss-grown standing stones there make people uneasy even by day. I’ve taken the tour and looked at those menhirs as the boat passed by. The patterns and angles disturbed me too. Some archaeologists think the stones were raised by an unknown people long before the Paleo-Indians crossed the Bering land bridge, and I mean serious people, not ancient astronaut enthusiasts. If Tindall was there tonight, with the rock samples, well then, it meant that Connie was right, about his intentions and motives at least, and perhaps about far more than that. My scalp prickled. My spine felt cold.

“If we cross to that island you’ll ruin your suit,” I said.

“The hell with my suit.”

As Connie looked good in that suit and really liked it, her words proved she thought we were on a real errand. There was a timber landing opposite the island, with a couple of canoes moored there. I unhitched one. We peered across at the island, and I saw what seemed to be a dolphin light, moving in the dark. Someone was there, and not many people went to that island in darkness. Connie and I, looking at each other, entered the canoe and paddled across, by mutual consent keeping as quiet as possible.

V

It’s a rocky islet, a hundred and fifty yards long and about fifty wide. The gray standing stones, finger-shaped, are between seven and ten feet long, counting the lower parts buried in the earth. They don’t belong in this region. Where they came from has never been conclusively pinned down, even now. The most surprising thing about them, to me, is that they still stand as they were first raised. None of them seem to have fallen down or been removed, even though they make Stonehenge look like yesterday, and the seventeenth-century Puritans of Massachusetts viewed them with harsh disapproval. In reason they ought to have gone long since.

Were they immune to time in the same way as the rocks of Leng?

The dolphin light switched out, and Connie and I crept through the grass and low bushes of the island. The stones seemed to lean in as though threatening to topple on us, and they seemed to bulk bigger than by daylight, too. I heard a harsh chanting, and while the voice was Tindall’s it did not speak in his usual tone. It sounded vehement, and rose at times to a downright boom. He was repeating unknown words in crazy rhythms, but they did not sound like pointless gibberish, somehow. They had the sense, the feel, of an actual language, though not one many humans had heard.

Connie and I crawled forward through the rank grass. In the ground, between the gray moss-grown stones, we felt strange energies quiver. Ahead of us were dim red glows, like small lights arranged in a circle, and in the center stood Tindall, in slacks, shirt and tie, conventional even while mouthing mad spells. I thought, ridiculously, that I felt surprised he had even removed his coat.

Then he cried the name Yog-Sothoth. Not mispronouncing it for safety. I felt the air quiver and curdle. Connie shuddered beside me. I might have whimpered, but I could not even force that much sound from my throat.

He doesn’t know enough. He just thinks he does.

The dim lights on the ground brightened from red to orange. With a sudden inspired guess, I knew they were the rock samples I had been working with. Tindall had taken them. Just my dreaming of their incredible past with one of them gripped in my hand had turned it hot.

The air thickened and swirled. It grew hotter, too. Odors, not unpleasant but strongly aromatic, struck our nostrils. They hadn’t any source that I could identify, and I felt dizzy as I whiffed them, with a sense of vertigo, of being poised above endless gulfs. And suddenly I was gazing into them. I wasn’t dreaming now, but wide awake, and I saw the naked crags, surging red magma, and molten pinkish-white moon huge in the sky, through gaps in searing clouds, that I’d seen before. The vision superimposed itself on the island in the Miskatonic. Tindall’s raw-throated chant filled my ears. All I clearly saw of the island was the circle of rocks Tindall had placed around himself, and the lines of standing stones dark against a dreadful sky. Tindall cried the name Yog-Sothoth again, and the orange glow the rocks were radiating shifted to a pale, hot yellow.

Above the circle, a misshapen vortex appeared in the air, sulfur-yellow streaked with dirty brown, like a stained hole into nowhere. The weird spicy scent became strong enough to clog our throats. I started to hallucinate, or at least, I hoped I was hallucinating.