Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (21 page)

Thirty notebooks in the late Professor Peaslee’s tiny, cramped writing lay stacked on the dining room table in the Peaslee house. Barnsby hovered over them like a buzzard, flipping through the volumes, leaving some open on the table and stacking others on an empty chair in an unspecified order. Arnold glanced about the room, bored, and was drawn to a series of photographs hung on the wall closest to the door. In them, a group of men posed in front of a huge stone block in the midst of an immense desert. Wingate and his late father, Nathaniel Peaslee, were visible in the photos, looking sunburned and sunblind. Each photo was labeled “Miskatonic Australian Expedition 1935.”

As Barnsby continued to flip through the documents, Arnold looked around the room. The den had been converted to a makeshift library; shelves were covered in precarious stacks of books. The cleaning woman, Caroline, had done just as Professor Peaslee asked; she let them in and dutifully disappeared again. Now their only companions were the chill in the air and the tick of the grandfather clock.

“Listen to this, Tom.” Barnsby flipped through a penny notebook labeled “Dreams (August-September 1931)” with his gloved hands.

“I have been dreaming most recently,” Barnsby began reading, standing up, with the book opened before him like a hymnal, “of the library again. It is in this immense place, I believe, that I was sent to spend the years of my life which I lost when it took over my body in 1908. These dreams seem to be veiled recollections of actual events which seem too monstrous and unreal to have truly occurred. Still, the dreams continue.

“From all accounts I believe this library was somewhere in the distant past and was populated with creatures completely unlike humanity. Huge, cone-shaped beings of incredible intellect and superior ability, who, although distant, treated me quite kindly, and offered even to let me write down my reminiscences in books of their design.” Barnsby looked up at Arnold, whose face was a mask.

“What do you think?” Barnsby folded the book and placed it on the table.

“I don’t know what to think about that,” Arnold mumbled, and stood up. “But I think we should call Washington and figure out what General Donovan wants us to do with all this.” He waved his hands around dramatically, gesturing at the hundreds of occult volumes in their various elaborate piles. “And I think maybe the OSS should take an interest in Second Lieutenant Peaslee, maybe bring him into the fold.”

“That’s an idea,” Barnsby replied, shuffling through the penny notebooks.

“Listen, Al. This psychic mumbo-jumbo you got going, how does it work?”

“It’s a bit difficult to explain.”

“Try me.”

“Very well.” Barnsby looked down at his gloved hands and took a deep breath. It was obvious to Arnold that he never spoke of the ability, and that in doing so now Barnsby was baring a part of his soul.

“Some things are very plain when I touch someone. It seems to have to do with the intensity of the sensation. Even objects sometimes have impressions, which is why I wear the gloves. With you it was all very plain. Sometimes, and this is even more rare, I can see what is going to happen to someone.”

“Does this skill even have a name?”

“Yes. It’s called Psychometry.”

“Are there any others like you?”

“Quite a few, I would think. We know the Polish underground has one. Major Cornwall has found three in his pursuits. I’m the strongest he’s seen.”

“Cornwall made you do a reading on me because of the France mission, eh?” Arnold locked eyes with the little man.

“Yes. We wanted to make sure you had not been...turned...by the Germans.”

“Smart.”

“Yes. Terribly.”

They both laughed.

“Why don’t they use you more often? I mean, I would think you would be pretty valuable...”

“So it would seem, but it causes more problems than it ever solves. No one outside PISCES would believe it anyway, except perhaps the prime minister.” Barnsby shrugged apologetically. “I just don’t get many chances to do what I seem to be suited for. ‘We don’t like to show our position on the battlefield,’ is how the major puts it.”

Arnold stood and lit a cigarette. “The impressions you get from some objects—do you think the senior Peaslee left anything behind for you to lift out with your hands?” He gestured around the room with the cigarette’s smoky tip.

“I thought it was all psychic mumbo-jumbo to you, Tom.”

“You got us here, didn’t you?”

“Well, then,” Barnsby said. He removed a glove from his pale white hand with care and considered the books spread about the table like an artist studying his palette.

There was no barrier which could hold as the memories swept in. No break for the flood of images as they swelled Barnsby’s brain, snuffing all his thoughts out like a harsh wind extinguishing a candle. The little Englishman, notebook clutched in his naked hand, collapsed and twitched on the floor of Wingate Peaslee’s den like a grounded fish.

In the fugue Barnsby, as Nathaniel Peaslee, now three years dead, was dimly aware of the den in Arkham, of Thomas Arnold yelling to him from far away, of a sound like a telephone ringing; but mostly, as the images swelled and rolled through his mind like waves, he was aware of the sheer power of the other place he could see now. A place no human body had ever been—but that was occasionally exposed to the human mind.

Graceful, arcing buildings of red concrete, cast in a scale greater than the pyramids, lay beneath the Paleocene sun, broken by splotches of vibrant green and small arteries of distant elevated roadways carrying alien vehicles swiftly between unknown destinations. Huge cone-shaped creatures milled nearby, sliding slowly up ramps and in and out of the immense buildings, each crawling about on a single, huge footpad, like gigantic slugs. Barnsby’s/Peaslee’s vision was distorted and unclear, washed out like an old color-painted photograph and bent at the edges like a fisheye. He struggled to focus and study the scene beneath him.

The cone creatures extended tentacular limbs from the pinnacles of their cones in manners suggestive of intelligence. Their most prominent limb held giant, bulbous yellow eyes which goggled about; it was flanked by two pincer-tipped tentacles, which often held some metallic, technological trinket. Their fourth tentacle was tipped with bright red, horny protrusions which occasionally emitted a sonorous hum, like the bleating of an elephant. These creatures moved about slowly, oblivious of Barnsby/Peaslee, content to interact with each other and go about their business in this metropolis of the dim past. Distant flocks of what Barnsby/Peaslee hoped were birds fluttered through the rich air miles distant.

Barnsby/Peaslee turned his head to see more of the metropolis and was shocked to discover a huge, rough limb within inches of his distorted vision. He pulled back his head in a sudden, jerking movement and was amazed to find, as his point of view rose to towering heights, that it felt as if his head was floating free of any confinements. Glancing down again, Barnsby/Peaslee found himself looking along the shaft of a long, ridged tentacle which terminated in a massive rugose cone, attached to the ground by a slimy, muscular, slug-like foot. A flailing movement a second later and the other limb shot back into his field of vision, roiling open like a snake traversing water. At its end was a giant, double bladed claw of ridged green gold. His claw.

Barnsby/Peaslee tried to scream but all that he heard was the low hum of a horn, like that of a distant car. He knew now why none of the cone creature were concerned with his presence. He was one of them.

The primal telepathic ability which toiled in Barnsby’s brain began to spin out of control. His strained mind attempted again and again to disengage from the images which flooded all corners of his consciousness, to no avail. The visions spun on, unmindful of their unwilling participant.

In the fugue, more images rattled his brain. Barnsby completely collapsed under their assault, his mind mimicking the long-dead Professor Peaslee’s emotions and memories, reflecting them back from the abyss like an echo. The dark wave of memories of a dead man, of a place before man, leapt on the Englishman’s mind like a cat pouncing on helpless prey, sending his consciousness deeper into the black than it had ever been before.

In the great library, blue-white light spilled down through circular windows. This vast cloistered space was broken by hundreds of tables and thousands of rectangular shelves which divided the floor into a maze-like track. Octagonal flagstones comprised the floor, flowing with a mathematical elegance towards the walls in odd progressions, defying human reason. Occasionally a single flagstone was missing and in its stead a well-tended palm tree grew. These full-size trees were dwarfed by everything in the room and gave him the first indication of the truly monstrous proportions of the structure. Even the tables were taller than a full-grown man.

Professor Nathaniel Peaslee looked up, disoriented, and realized he was not alone in the colossal vault. Huge, iridescent cone-shaped creatures moved about the floor, caught up in their industriousness, unmindful of the intruder watching them. Their yellow eyes, hanging from tentacle-like limbs, carefully took in their environment or read from their vast catalog of tomes which lined the endless rectangular shelves. Some were even writing in those tomes, utilizing a stylus-like device in a cluster of dexterous filaments that grew from beneath their eyes. The cone creatures wore sacks of woven rough cloth, filled with questionable devices of metallic alienness, some of which they clutched in their long claw-tipped tendril with terrible purpose.

Globes of scintillating crystals illuminated the efforts of these inhuman scholars as they toiled, casting light even in the darkest recesses of the library where the primordial sun could not reach. It reminded Peaslee of a nightmare version of his own library at his school, Miskatonic. It was hard to imagine such a place as this existed, would exist, but the reality of the library before him was undeniable. Peaslee’s mind shuddered at the vision, the memory, the experience he had felt in another form a hundred and fifty million years before he had been born. Had he been here before? Why did this all seem familiar?

Why was he here?

Peaslee searched his intellect for information about the creatures and found the task daunting. His reason floundered in the vast sea of space that he found within his own mind. Time itself seemed inconsequential when confronted with such a vast empty void; seconds passed and shifted within the black, hours, years, rearranging themselves clumsily at his whim. A shock passed through his mind as time re-ordered itself, memories returned, and the confusion and discomfort drifted away.

He had been in the library for more than three years now, answering the questions of the creatures that had brought him here. A race beyond conception and human knowledge, which had predated man and which moved between times and spheres man would never know. It was his understanding that an agent of theirs had taken control of his body, back in his native time, and that he was stuck here in the form of a cone-like creature until that agent returned, at a time they would not reveal to him. Now, he knew, their plans were much less perfect than they intimated.