The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (14 page)

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

The store didn’t open till 10, so Matthew called a council of war for 8 a.m. in the kitchen. The whole staff attended, Les the vampire novelist and Marian the manager, who seemed to stay with Les in the basement apartment more often than not these days, Chantal of course, and little Skeezix the book scout, barely five feet tall, with his distinctive unruly head of short, multi-colored hair, a subtle but symmetrical tabby pattern of gray, white, gold and brown, seldom combed and therefore rising up in unpredictable tufts and peaks, mostly above his ears. Since it never seemed to grow out, the consensus was that this was probably not a dye job.

Matthew served fried cubed potatoes, fresh eggs which Skeezix dutifully hauled in from one of the local farmers’ markets each Saturday — or Wednesdays if his Saturday yard saling kept him late — fresh raspberries and apricots, toasted slices of pear bread considerately provided by Mrs. Captain Jack the next-door neighbor, orange juice, hot mint tea, and Virginia ham. Nobody went hungry when Matthew cooked.

Les drank his tea and eyed the food dubiously. Les had been too long on thin rations to actually turn down a meal. And the truth was he actually looked better now that he was dragging himself to the gym three times a week. His waist was trimmer, his breathing was stronger, and there was a little color in his cheeks, to match Marian’s. But clearly he found the prospect of rising before noon, when the sun was in the wrong part of the sky entirely, about as appealing as electro-shock therapy.

The girls abstained from the ham, as usual, but the full legion of fur people formed an attentive perimeter around the table, eager to
help dispose of anything unwanted. In fact, though their ever-shifting formation made an accurate count difficult, there appeared to be one cat too many.

“Who’s that?” Matthew asked as he served the ham, pointing with his chin at a long-legged gray velvet part-Abyssinian who looked like he’d walked out of a painting on the wall of some Egyptian tomb.

“Serafina brought him,” Skeezix explained. “He’s new to the neighborhood.”

“Skeezix?”

“What?”

“You’ve noticed he doesn’t have a collar?”

“Really?”

If he was a stray and they fed him, he’d consider himself to have found a home.

“And he’s a he?”

“So it would appear,” Marian added, helpfully.

“OK. As long as he doesn’t spray.”

“Of course not!”

Matthew somehow found Skeezix’s assurance less than fully convincing.

“Learn anything from Marquita?” Les asked, once he’d warmed to the task and helped put away his share of the eggs and potatoes and turned back pensively to his tea and toast.

“It’s clear enough, up to a point.” Matthew shoved his remaining fresh eggs back into the refrigerator, though he did bark a sharp “Hey!” to warn off Mr. Cuddles, who’d grown tired of waiting for scraps and was wiggling his butt, preparing to launch himself directly onto the table. Matthew then turned an evil eye on Skeezix, who they all suspected of encouraging the cats in their bad table manners. Skeezix, of course, continued slathering Mrs. Captain Jack’s homemade raspberry jam on his toast, oblivious.

“Marquita showed Worthy her photos of the orbs,” Matthew went on. “Nothing magic about it, anyone with a modern digital camera can go out at night, point the camera up to the tree tops, turn
on the flash and shoot some photos. Although actually, it turns out some electronic cameras are better than others. Apparently the more expensive cameras may filter out the orbs.”

“Why would they do that?” Chantal asked.

“It wasn’t their
goal
to screen out orbs, it just happens when they apply lens coatings that are supposed to prevent color distortion.”

“You’re kidding.” Chantal half-smiled in disbelief. “They limit what the camera can see?”

“Sure. It’s the old ‘stand with your back to the sun’ routine. People want a snapshot of the kids to look ‘normal,’ they don’t want any lens flare or UFOs showing up. Anyway, except for pricier cameras that are essentially filtered to block the orbs, eventually you’ll get pictures like the ones we saw last night — orbs.”

“So they’re real?” Les frowned, obviously still enduring a bout of morning grumps. “They’re not some flaw in the camera?”

“Jesus, Les. You, of all people. History will condemn every single person who claims to be a professional physicist in this century. You show them photos of what appear to be living organisms the size of softballs or even basketballs, with interior structures that look like giant bacteria or amoebas — various colors, yellow, gold, pearl blue, iridescent green, floating around in the air, sometimes partially hidden among the leaves of a tree, obviously capable of being attracted by simple curiosity, capable of acceleration, willful propulsion, moving around at various speeds without regard to wind direction, and how do they respond? Do they immediately start cooking up experiments to film these things in 3-D, figure out their means of propulsion and how fast they move, figure out if they have weight and mass, why they reflect light or fluoresce or whatever they’re doing within the spectrum of the electronic cameras but not within the wavelength range of the human eye?

“No, it’s all ‘You must have dust on your lens; You must have water droplets on your lens; you must need to get your camera repaired; you must need eye surgery; we need to put you on drugs so you’ll
stop seeing these things.’ And they make fun of Galileo’s pals who refused to look through his telescope?”

“OK,” Les smiled. “Just asking, that’s all.”

“Mark my words,
someone
is going to figure out a commercial application for the kind of physics represented by these orbs, whatever they are, if not some method to outright weaponize them, and it’s not going to be anybody who speaks English.”

“Assuming someone hasn’t, already,” Chantal added.

“Bingo. Marquita shows her orb photos to Worthy. She’s gratified because instead of pulling the old ‘You need to get your lens cleaned’ bullshit, Worthy is extremely interested, he has lots of serious questions about where they seem to come from, whether there’s any evidence that they have any mass, displace any air, whether you could actually touch and feel one of these things. Marquita thinks he keeps saying they’re ‘from beyond.’ But almost certainly he’s saying these things remind him of the creatures floating through the air, visible only to those within the field of the resonator, in Lovecraft’s first real science fiction piece, the 1920 story ‘From Beyond.’”

“Suddenly the missing notebook from the summer of 1920 takes on a whole new significance,” Marian mused.

“Exactly. If things really do float around, just outside the frequency range of our vision, than Lovecraft wasn’t making it up. Suddenly Worthington Annesley knows why Lovecraft’s writing changed in 1920, where that short story came from.”

“He saw it,” Les figured.

“Lovecraft saw the orbs, and evidently a lot more,” Matthew continued, “— decades before anyone invented an electronic camera that can capture stuff outside the range of human vision. Which means in the summer of 1920, the resonator existed. Which leads to the obvious question, why was no more ever heard about it? What happened to the machine, and the man who built it?”