The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (29 page)

“I’m glad we could help out the Pthang yesterday,” Chantal continued, “but you and Skeezix and I could presumably open a vortex and head home any time, now. We can offer old Henry a ride home, if you like. I take it no one’s seen hide nor hair of our two missing Cthulhians, Bucky Beausoleil and what’s-his-name?”

“The reason we came down here was because I promised Marquita we’d do our best to figure out what happened to Bucky and his buddy,” Matthew replied. “I don’t like going back and having to admit we didn’t even look.”

Chantal sighed. She’s been expecting this.

“The tea might stretch for five, if we could find them. Just barely.”

“There will be plenty,” Matthew answered, with that exasperating sense of calm.

“You’re going to re-do the miracle of the loaves?” she asked.

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

“But the main question is, where do you propose we look? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in Safariland here without the benefit of a nice three-ton armored truck to protect us from the local fauna at feeding time.”

“From what we’ve been able to figure out, Bucky and Alvin were supposed to move due west after they rubbed out Judge Crustio, putting some ground between them and the courthouse before they opened a vortex back to Earth One, found their car, and drove south to Quonset Point. I figure whatever happened to them must have happened very shortly after they crossed over to Jurassic Park, back up in Providence.”

“They got eaten?”

“If so, we’re out of luck. But they had shotguns, which should have given them a fighting chance. If they’re injured or holed up or both, they could still be alive — though probably way short on food — and the way to find them is to walk due north to Providence, or the head of the bay, where Providence would be on Earth One. Then, if we strike out, we can open our vortex, and at least we’ll be almost home.”

“Skeezix?” Chantal asked. “You get a vote, I think.”

Skeezix tilted his head, looked like he was having trouble focusing his eyes. “Hm?”

“Skeezix,” Chantal asked, “Did you get any sleep at all last night?”

“Sleep?”

“Did those evil bare-assed women take unfair advantage of you?”

“They didn’t seem evil to me. I think I’m in love.”

“I knew it. Which one?”

“With all of them.”

Chantal closed her eyes, hung her head, trying not to smile.

“Sore, though. I’m sore in places I didn’t know I had places. Even the small of my back. They’re very … athletic. Is it usually like that?”

“Chantal was asking if you want to go back right away, or walk north and try to find Bucky and his missing buddy.”

“I think I’d like to stay another night.”

“Agreed.” Matthew smiled, too. “We could all use the rest.”

“Rest?”

Her head still down, Chantal was now biting two of her knuckles, for some reason.

“And make an early start tomorrow,” Matthew continued. “But then?”

“From here to Providence is 20 miles, maybe a little more,” Skeezix figured aloud, getting his brain in gear. “You think of that as nothin’ ’cause of the roads, but there are no roads, here. Walking 20 miles a day is easy enough if there are trails, but if we’ve got to work our way through swampland or brush, or if we end up taking detours around those big dinosaur things, we could get caught out at sunset, have to make a camp, either build big fires or take to the trees.”

“So you’re saying?”

“We could do it in two days, no problem, if we’re sure we can find a safe place to lay over. Hard to know where to look for those two unless you’re right and they never got far from the courthouse in the first place. But if that’s where we’re going, the head of the bay, why walk?”

“Why … walk?”

“The felinidae hate the water, so I figure the canoes I saw hauled up on the bank of the river south of here probably belong to the Pthang. Living this close to the bay, they must do some fishing. Maybe they’d loan us a canoe, or a couple of them could come with us so they’d be able to bring the boat back.”

Sure enough, the Pthang used the bark canoes for fish-netting, and the construction was light enough that they could probably make good time paddling up the bay, assuming they didn’t run into any seriously adverse weather. Turok and Henry Annesley agreed to lend them four teen-age boys as paddlers, figured they could get to the head of the bay in half a day with an early start, the four paddlers then returning alone by dark. The only concern they expressed was for the one stretch of deep water they’d face, off Warwick Point.

Old Henry Annesley laughed when they offered him a chance to come back with them.

“Oh, I was pretty desperate to get back, the first couple of years after I fell through that vortex, let me tell you. But my home is here now, these are my people. I suppose it would be fun, seeing
the tele-vision, and some of these other wonderful things Matthew talks about. But for how long? I’d be Rip Van Winkle there, probably wouldn’t even know how to flush a toilet or buy a cup of coffee, any more. I’d be a crazy old coot with stories no one would believe, and I’d probably get knocked down and killed by one of your fancy new high-speed motorcars inside a week. No, here I’ll be buried with respect before too much longer, and that’s probably best for everyone. But thanks for the offer, you’re very kind.”

* * *

They wouldn’t leave till morning. There was still plenty of daylight. Matthew wanted to take a walk. Chantal agreed, providing she could bring the rifle and her canteen — the one that just held plain water. Matthew brought along a sturdy woven basket with a fixed handle that he borrowed from one of the naked Pthang women, after some good-natured banter. Chantal still found herself snarling at how comfortably Matthew laughed with these naked hussies young enough to be his daughters, women who never failed to thrust out their chests and raise their eyebrows and give him the “See anything you like?” smile.

Just try it, sweetheart.

“What’s the basket for?” she managed to ask without grating her teeth.

“In case we find anything we might want to bring home,” he replied, an answer possessed of a level of stupidity possibly deserved by the question.

They walked east a ways, at least a quarter mile, far enough that Chantal started to get a little anxious — though she knew Matthew had ranged a lot further than this every day, looking for her, armed with nothing but his bare hands and a puckish sense of irony.

They passed out of the trees, into an open field where a faint pathway led through scattered knee-high brush. Medium-sized brown-and-orange lizards that had been doing push-ups on a flat rock near
the center of the field scampered at their arrival, clearing a sensible place to sit. They sipped lukewarm water from her canteen.

“Are we waiting for something?” Chantal asked after what seemed an appropriate period of pointless indolence, listening to the insects buzz.

“Yes.”

“And am I allowed to know what we’re waiting for?”

“For one of the gods to appear.”

“She’s going to appear here? She? He?”

“Possibly. I’m sure you know they only appear if you’re ready.”

This “Be patient, grasshopper” stuff always made her impatient. Which was the point, of course. Occasionally, she had to admit, Matthew was even right about it. OK, a lot of the time. You didn’t catch fish by stomping around in the water. But what was he up to, this time? He meant that in her impatience, she was missing something. These scattered rocks? Something over there at the tree line? She tried to catalog what she was missing. Which direction was the wind from? Could she smell anything on that wind? Animals alerted on motion. Was this just about whether she could sit still long enough for the little birdies to come and sit on their shoulders?

“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, staying here,” Matthew mused, as though he didn’t have a care in the world. “The air is clean, life is simple.”

“You’re serious?”

“The two of us, I mean. We could come back.”

“Matthew, I’m sorry. I love you, but you sound like a kid on his first camping trip. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to never go back to the world of chores and homework?’ I used to wish I could be Peter Pan. Not Wendy. I understand the appeal of ‘simple,’ really. But look around, honey. Other than Henry and Turok, do you see any old people? I’d guess the life expectancy is maybe 40, at best. The only reason we don’t see people with mangled limbs hobbling around on crutches is probably because the predators pick them off so fast.

“I’m no fan of government medicine, believe me. And I agree these people are better off without french fries and Diet Coke and television. But the standard of medical care here is, well … Stone Age, if you haven’t noticed. I dare say dental care hasn’t even progressed to the level of a string and a brick. I’m not terribly impressed with their sewage disposal system. And obstetrics? At least where we live women don’t die of breach births. Not very often. And you know the history better than I do. If a bunch of missionaries find their way back here to bring the Pthang Bibles and pants, what else are they going to bring? Whips and gallows? Measles and chicken pox?”

“I thought you favored pants.”

“I get jealous, Matthew. I know it’s not supposed to be a saintly character trait, but you’re just enjoying the scenery way too much here, OK? You really don’t think that’s part of what might keep you here? The whole ‘Jungle Girls Need Sperm Donors’ thing?”

“I’ve spent my life gathering a stockpile of information that no one cares about, Chantal. People who claim to be booksellers have trouble telling a hardcover from a paperback any more, let alone a book club from a First. I talk about how the world’s great religions all got their start with the plant helpers, Moses eating the manna and hearing the voice of God in a burning bush, and people give me the look. You know the look.

“I show people a copy of ‘The Tempter,’ I explain how the book is a thinly disguised account of the way AT&T duped Michael Pupin into believing he’d discovered the induction coil to prevent garbling of long-distance voice transmissions, ignoring the fact Oliver Heaviside had already published the whole thing years before without ever filing for a patent, which meant the coil was public domain. But AT&T succeeded in convincing Pupin he should file for the patent, the idiots at the patent office granted it, AT&T bought out the patent and became, well … AT&T, and Heaviside died a pauper. Without that fraudulent patent AT&T would never have been anything but a local Boston telephone exchange.

“Does anyone care? Of course not. Do they care that the courts gave another dimwit, Lee DeForest, the rights to Armstrong’s amplifier, or who really invented Frequency Modulation? Do they care that corporate operators like David Sarnoff spent years calling FM useless and then put an FM sound system in every TV set and never paid Armstrong any royalties? It’s not just that no one
knows
this stuff; no one
cares,
babe. In the end, my library will be scattered to the thrift stores, bought by people who want a wall of spines in alternating red and blue. Everything I know stands like a sand castle waiting for the tide to come in. Maybe it would be better to let it end here, avoiding those final weeks hooked up to tubes and pumps at some hospital, running up bills no one should have to pay.”

“Matthew, I understand your frustration, really I do. I see it every day, honey. But do you really think things were so different two hundred years ago? The majority of people have never known how to hold a book right-side up. Maybe the literacy levels de Tocqueville found when he rode around Pennsylvania were the exception that proves the rule. But
I
appreciate you. Les and Marian appreciate you. Richard and the rest of the Horrors appreciate you. We’ve always known it’s a minority who keep the candles burning through the dark ages, haven’t we?

“I’m sorry,” she touched his arm, “but I’m trying to picture you in a world without books or the Internet or email, where our hair constantly smells of soot and the only people you get to talk to are the six closest unwashed knuckle-draggers who can fit on the log next to the campfire. At least now you can write a book description or a Web posting and hear from someone in Prague or Amsterdam who has some idea what you’re talking about. I’m not saying you’re wrong, honey, except I was kind of hoping you might help me raise Heather. They say your odds improve dramatically if there are two parents. And that’s where your library goes, too, sweetheart. That’s our hope for the future. Isn’t it?”

Matthew sighed and gave her a hug. Spontaneously, Chantal threw her arms around him and pulled him down and gave him a
good kiss, a real dental exam. There were tears in her eyes, which she had to wipe away, turning her head and hunting in her pocket for a Kleenex and looking down at the ground. At the ground. On the ground. Where they’d been walking … on the ground. Because there, under the nearest bush, was a funny little cluster of shiny, dark green, rounded-off hexagonal or octagonal objects, plants, squat little plants close to the ground with little white tufts and a pale pink flower in the middle, varying in size, so the one in the center would be the size of a baseball, and the ones surrounding the mother a little smaller, like golf balls, little smooth cacti without thorns, because they didn’t need thorns … because they were so bitter.

She dropped to her knees. She pushed aside the low-hanging branches of another scraggly, knee-high bush. There were more. Lots more. Slowly, she raised her eyes toward the horizon. She found herself smiling until her eyes teared up again. There were thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. They went on forever. They were in the middle of …

“Matthew?”

“Yes, babe?”

“Are we in the middle of the biggest unmolested field of peyote cactus any human being has ever seen?”

“For about the past ten thousand years, I figure.”

“Have these been here the whole time?”

“Of course.”

“But I couldn’t see them until I was ready to see them.”

“That’s the usual way.”

“Thank you for waiting to let me find these.”

“My pleasure.”

“That basket’s going to be exactly the right size, isn’t it?”