The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (15 page)

“He figures the answers must be in ‘The Miskatonic Manuscript.’”

“Oh, I think we can take it a little further than that. I think we delivered the manuscript, he found the machine, and possibly with
the help of somebody who must be an electronics whiz, he got it running again.”

“At which point they could see some orbs floating around,” Les shrugged. “Or an occasional ectoplasmic jellyfish out of
Ghostbusters.
A nice demonstration for the high-school science fair. Where does that get him?”

“Lovecraft never pursues the obvious questions.” All his burners shut down except the one under the teakettle, Matthew was finally tackling his own ham and eggs. “Whether he actually saw the machine work or just heard about what it was supposed to do, to him it was worth a 2,400-word short story and then he moved on. But if we can see across the dimensional barrier and these creatures can also see us, do they have weight and mass on their own side of the barrier? Is there a way for us or for them to cross over? In the story, Annesley says some kind of monster
did
cross over. What’s all this talk from people who have been photographing orbs about ‘vortexes,’ orbs appearing to emerge from and then retreat back into ‘vortexes’? If you could cross over and back, wouldn’t that make it seem to someone with normal human vision, unenhanced, like you could appear and disappear from our reality at will, vanishing into thin air?”

“The assassination of Judge Crustio,” said Les, frowning.

“They’d need a trial run. It’s an interesting coincidence.”

“But if they took out our meanest Drug Judge, wouldn’t they be bragging about it all over town?” asked Skeezix, who’d been busily cutting up little pieces of cooked egg yolk and slipping them to the cats when he thought no one was looking.

“Possibly,” Matthew frowned. “They did release the video from the older brother. You’ll notice Windsor disavowed any responsibility for the Crustio hit, but it was pretty much a non-denial denial. It was also generic, he didn’t actually name Old Crusty. They filmed it that way to leave Worthy free to go after a secondary target if necessary. Besides, what if their trial run wasn’t entirely successful? What if their two hit men never made it back?”

“And now Marquita says Bucky and one of his buddies are missing,” offered Chantal.

“Technically,” Matthew admitted, “we’re under no obligation to help find Bucky, or anyone else. In fact, given the political proclivities of the Cthulhians, there’s a chance we’ll be messing in legal … gray areas.”

Marian and Chantal both looked down into their teacups and smiled at this description of what a prosecutor might call “obstruction of justice” or even “accessory after the fact.”

“But we helped Worthy find ‘The Miskatonic Manuscript,’ so I feel some responsibility,” Matthew continued. “If we can find Worthy Annesley, I suspect he’ll lead us to his great-uncle’s resonator, and that in turn will lead us to Bucky … or at least some answers about where he is.”

“How does the resonator actually work?” Trust Chantal to get down to something concrete.

“It reactivates the pineal gland, the organ that allows us to see beyond this dimension.”

“Reactivates it?”

“Babies who are raised by apes or wolves can hardly ever learn speech if they don’t hear and start to decipher human speech in their first two years,” Matthew said. He started to clear some of the dishes. Chantal and Marian waved him off and did it for him, Marian grabbing the teakettle as it started to whistle and offering more tea or coffee to any takers. “People born blind who have their optic nerves repaired in later years can tell light from dark but they can never really perceive integrated images if their brains don’t learn those functions in their first two years.”

“So if we reach adulthood without ever having used our pineal gland to perceive the world beyond the four dimensions, wouldn’t it be too late?” Chantal asked.

“Maybe we don’t,” Matthew answered. “Maybe we
have
used it, when we were children, and we just don’t
remember
using it. It
appears we lose the ability to see this stuff when we’re very young, probably before we’re five.”

“You’re saying children can see things with the help of the pineal till we teach them to stop seeing them?” Marian asked.

“Exactly. In nearly all human cultures children see fairies, they have invisible playmates. Parents, adults, have a
huge
power of suggestion, of approval or ridicule. Children
want
to learn to be grownups and join the grownup world.”

“So they learn not just to ignore the fairies, but to actually
stop seeing
the fairies?” Chantal was concentrating.

“I’m not saying they necessarily look like Tinkerbelle, like little angels with wings. No way to tell. Maybe they’re just little sparkling lights, like the orbs Marquita picks up with her electronic camera. She showed us something that she said was a fairy last night. I’m with Bucky, I think it was some kind of damselfly or something that flew into camera range. But the point is, if we’re taught not to use the part of our sensory equipment that makes those things visible — if we’re actively discouraged and told those things aren’t really there and it’s very babyish of us to keep insisting we see them, maybe that part of our ability to see really does shut down.”

“And the resonator reactivates it.”

“Yes. Psychoactive drugs like the tryptamines — psilocybin and ayahuasca — can do it, but the
ayahuasceros
insist chanting is a necessary part of the rituals. Native Americans chant during their peyote rituals, too, so clearly indigenous users of the phenethylamines have noticed the same effect. Strong audible vibrations seem to have a profound effect on the pineal body. Lovecraft wrote that the Annesleys’ great-uncle Henry was trying to activate the pineal gland with his resonator. It sits behind the optic nerves. It appears to be largely dormant in adults in Western cultures; there’s a lot of speculation about why it’s there and what it’s supposed to do.”

“What do we actually know about these orbs?” Les asked.

“They appear to be a life form,” Matthew thought for a moment. “They don’t act like rocks or pine cones. They’re usually airborne, and
they don’t settle slowly to earth like soap bubbles or stray feathers, so they have some energy source that holds them up against the force of gravity, assuming they feel gravity, and that also allows them to propel themselves up as well as down, and against the wind, or possibly oblivious to the wind.”

“Assuming they feel gravity?”

“If they have a physical existence here, a mass, then they’d be affected by gravity, by the curve of space,” Matthew replied. “But if we’re seeing them through a transparency in the membrane and they’re actually in some parallel dimension, who knows? They don’t seem to emit light, or fluoresce on their own, but they will reflect or fluoresce ultraviolet light from the strobe which can be picked up by the electronic camera, which is sensitive to light frequencies a little further into the UV spectrum than most human eyes. So if they reflect light, does that mean they have mass? I would think so. They can’t be made of light, because photons have no rest mass, when they sit still they cease to exist. The orbs also have a structure, Chantal and I both noticed how much they reminded us of some giant version of an amoeba, a one-celled organism that you see on a microscope slide. Marquita even says she has photos of what appears to be an orb dividing in two, the same way one-celled organisms reproduce.”

“And they seem curious, they’re drawn to humans and human activities,” Chantal added.

“Does anyone find that disturbing?” Les asked.

“They show no signs of hostility or aggression.” Chantal sounded exasperated. “They’re just curious, like hummingbirds.”

“Yes, but they’re watching us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Humans invest a lot of energy in each of our offspring, in part because we don’t have many,” Les explained. “Other creatures take a different approach: a moth or butterfly may lay thousands of eggs, knowing only a few will reach adulthood. Eggs are cheaper than college freshmen. We show the same predisposition for complexity in exploration. We don’t send a thousand cheap robots to go look at the
surface of Mars, that sounds inefficient to us; we build one or two of the fanciest robots we can, all our eggs in one basket.”

“But you’re saying a non-human culture might …”

“What distance do they travel to get here? How much energy is involved in crossing over? What’s the mortality rate for scouts trying to move back and forth? Can you make it a safer trip by building one or two really fancy scouts? If not, if the size of your energy investment has no bearing on the loss rate, it might be more efficient to build thousands of cheap scouts, basically big one-celled organisms, one designed to take temperature readings, one designed to measure oxygen concentrations, but all of them with a secondary function of closing to within 20 yards of anything that might be an intelligent life form, and sending back pictures.”

“Scouts,” Chantal repeated.

“You said they demonstrate curiosity.”

“Isn’t that a little paranoid?” Chantal asked.

“I’m not saying we should go shoot down your orbs like a bunch of skeet. I just thought we were searching for a theory that might explain their actions. I doubt they’re here looking for Lost Elvis. What do they want? Do we know what they eat?”

“Marquita thinks they eat light,” Chantal replied.

“They’re on low-calorie diets?” Les frowned.

“Light. That they eat photons. Since it’s pure energy, there’d be no byproducts. And there’s no evidence that they excrete.”

“There are no orb droppings.”

“Right.”

“I just think we need to be asking more questions, that’s all.”

A brief period of pensive coffee and tea stirring ensued. Chantal scraped leftovers onto a cat plate in the corner, the fur people pirouetting and bounding over one another to keep ahead of her. Not entirely trusting the old kitchen clock, Marian pulled out her cell phone and checked the time. She was responsible for making sure the store opened by 10.

“So, Marian, I hope you kept a decent photocopy of the Lovecraft notebook,” Matthew said, getting them back on track.

“Several, as requested. Two are in the safe; I’ve got one downstairs.”

“Les, if Worthy could work out the location of the house where the author saw his great-uncle’s resonator, we ought to be able to do the same. Unless it’s in some demonic Cthulhian code.”

“Not a code, exactly. I’ve already had a look at Marian’s copy. Lovecraft’s handwriting was hard enough to decipher under any circumstances, but in this case he used a number of ambiguous abbreviations. What appears to be ‘Ben’t’ street could be either Benefit or Benevolent, for instance. Then you’ve got to try to orient yourself from landmarks that might have looked a lot different a hundred years ago. What it comes down to is, I can come up with half a dozen addresses that are good candidates. Although a few have been remodeled or torn down, unfortunately.”

“The published story says it was ‘off’ Benevolent, as I recall.”

“‘Set back from,’ I think. I’ll double check,” Les volunteered, “although fiction writers have a habit of disguising things, the same way Lovecraft changed the name of old man Annesley to ‘Tillinghast’ when the thing was finally published, years later.”

“The Annesleys have had money for quite awhile, I doubt Uncle Henry was living in rented quarters. Can you take those six likely addresses and run them against city property records, see if any of them were owned by the Annesley family in 1920?”

“I know a lady in real estate, they’ve got a lot of those records online now, indexed by parcel numbers. Once I get a parcel map I should be able to trace them all back a ways. Whether I’ll have to go downtown and check actual map books for stuff as early as 1920 I don’t know.”

“But you could do that?” Matthew insisted, gently.

“The guardians of our so-called ‘public’ records sometimes have a funny idea of what the word ‘public’ means. I’d expect to be asked three or four times whether I’m a lawyer or a member of the
Benevolent and Protective Order of Realtors. But yeah, I can get it one way or another.”

“Sooner the better, if you’re willing.”

“I can start this morning, if Marian can spare me for a few hours.”

“We’ll somehow keep the hordes of swarming customers at bay till noontime, dear.”

* * *

Les was, indeed, back around lunchtime. There were a couple of customers in, but Marian’s estimate of the weekday morning traffic had been accurate.

“Hi, Les. Online, or the big map books?” Matthew asked.

“Some of both. Anyway, it’s the Benevolent Street address, the one with the lowest number.”

“I thought so. Belonged to the Annesleys in 1920?”

“Better than that. It still belongs to the Annesleys.”

“They’re living in it?”

“No, that’s what’s strange. A pretty valuable piece of real estate to be left unoccupied, but no one has lived in that house for years. They keep it up, they pay the taxes on it, but it just sits there, boarded up.”

They decided to go in at suppertime, Matthew and Chantal and Skeezix.

“Stumbling around in the dark we’d end up making more noise, and it would be harder to explain why we’re there,” Matthew explained as they huddled again near the front desk, during a brief respite after the lunchtime browsers departed. “Plus we’d have to use flashlights, and a flashlight spotted through the window of an abandoned house is just begging some Good Samaritan to call the cops. We go in after any workmen are likely to have gone home for the day, but while we’ve still got enough daylight to see what we’re doing. It’s much less suspicious than sneaking around in the middle of the night”

“Why would there be workmen?” Chantal asked.

“Hypothetical workmen, OK?”

“Someone mows the grass at that house,” Skeezix volunteered. Skeezix knew every shortcut and side yard on College Hill, which was one reason they were taking him along.

“There you go.”

“And what’s our story if someone does ask why we’re there?” Chantal asked.