BY THE TIME he got back to the Dyer Street bus station, the stars were bright overhead, and his mood was less dour than it had been when he’d left Innsmouth. Sitting in the bus as it rattled south on the Federal Pike with a book open in his lap, while the sun sank toward the hills and one abandoned farm after another rolled past, he’d reviewed the trip to Innsmouth and everything that led up to it, and decided that he’d done as much as he could. Whatever secret might be behind the letter from Lovecraft, he told himself, pretty clearly wasn’t for him to discover, and it was time for him to follow the advice he’d gotten from Professor Akeley and the man in black, leave the whole baffling business behind him, and refocus his efforts on getting his degree, finding a doctoral program, and trying to claw his way to a teaching job before those dried up completely.
He walked the four blocks from the bus station to the house on Halsey Street without incident. After the unsolved puzzles of Innsmouth, the familiar shabbiness of the house comforted him; he hung up his coat in the entry, went into the living room. Jenny Parrish was curled up in her usual place on the couch, and voices and the clatter of dishes came through the dining room doorway.
“Hi, Owen,” Jenny said, looking up from her book.
“Hi.”
“How was your trip?”
“Not too bad. I’m feeling better now.”
“Good.” She gave him an odd look then, and seemed to be about to say something else, but just then Barry came through the doorway and said, “Hey, welcome back. Where’d you go?”
“Caught the county bus up the coast, stayed overnight in a cheap hotel in an old fishing town. I just needed a break.”
“I bet,” Barry said. “Me, I’d head for Boston and get some real night life for a change, but whatever floats your boat.”
A few minutes later Tish wanted to know where he’d been, and he repeated the same half-truth to her, all the while getting dinner made—this time it was minute rice and microwaved canned tamales. Back out in the living room with dinner, he slumped into his favorite chair, asked the others about their weekend, got to hear more than he really wanted to know about the ongoing scandal in the English department. He didn’t mind; it was a welcome relief from the uncertainties he’d been contending with over the previous week.
When he’d finished with his meal; he headed upstairs, pleading unread emails and work on his thesis. He’d barely gotten settled in the chair at his desk when a tentative knock sounded at the door. “Come in,” he said.
It was Jenny. “Owen,” she said, “I didn’t want to mention this in front of the others, but something kind of strange happened when you were gone.”
He gave her a startled look. “Strange how?”
“Somebody came here Saturday afternoon to talk to you. He said he was in your critical theory seminar, and that the two of you were working on a project together. I told him you were gone for the weekend, and he got upset and started talking about how you were starting to act really strange, things like that.” Her frown deepened. “The thing is, there was something really creepy about him. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I was just stressed out.”
“I’m not doing a project with anyone in that class,” Owen said, baffled.
“Well, that’s what he said.”
“Did you get his name?”
“Jim something. Or—no, what was it? That’s funny; he told me his name and now I can’t remember it at all.”
Owen shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. If he shows up again and I’m not here, get him to leave his name and email and I’ll find out what’s going on.”
“I’ll do that,” she promised, and left the room. Owen shook his head and got to work on a weekend’s worth of unread emails.
“MAN IS THE measure of all things,” said Professor Peaslee. “You’ve seen that line over and over again. You’ve read the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, right on down to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, right? Good. Discuss.”
Owen sat back in his chair, waited for the inevitable fireworks.
“I’ll bite,” said Maria Sanchez. “Man is the measure of all things, for man. Each of us can only experience the universe through human senses and a human nervous system, right? So our universe is a human universe, the only kind of universe humans can know.”
“I’d argue that it’s the only kind of universe there is,” Shelby said. “Without human reason, you have matter and energy and space in various combinations, but you don’t have a universe in any sense that matters.”
“Okay, let’s say there are intelligent alien jellyfish in the oceans of Alpha Centauri III,” said a guy from comparative literature whose name Owen had never been able to pronounce. “They’re rational beings who perceive a universe. Is jellyfish the measure of all things?”
“For jellyfish,” said Sanchez.
Jim Malkowski got Peaslee’s nod. “Fair enough. When computers become sentient—”
“If,” said three other students at once.
“When,” Jim snapped back. “Then computer will be the measure of all things, for sentient computers. Assume they’re smarter than we are and learn to access sensory data we don’t have. Their ‘all things’ contains more than ours does, and they tell us about it. Is man still the measure of all things?”
That got a low whistle from someone near Owen. “Let’s take that in another direction,” said Luellen Blair, the ministry student. “Different people have different capacities for experience. When we say Man, whose capacities are we talking about?”
That spun into a long argument about the role of the senses in knowledge, which finally wound down in a flurry of quotes from Hobbes, Berkeley, and Thomas Aquinas. When that ended in a pause, Owen got Peaslee’s nod and said, “Okay, let’s take it another step. Is Arthur Jermyn the measure of all things?”
“Howard!” half a dozen of his classmates shouted.
“You can’t draw conclusions from an imaginary human-ape hybrid,” said Shelby. “Those can’t exist for biological reasons.”
“Statistically,” said Owen, “everyone in this room who’s of European descent is supposed to have something like four per cent Neanderthal genetics. If that’s true of me, am I only ninety-six percent the measure of all things?”
“Good,” said Professor Peaslee. “Take it from there.”
Owen drew in a breath. “It seems to me that we’re avoiding the big question here, which is the relationship between this thing we’re calling Man and individual human beings. Arthur Jermyn isn’t Man, agreed. Neither am I, and neither are you. What goes into this abstract concept Man, and who makes that call?”
“That’s an issue,” Luellen said. “If I suggested that Woman is the measure of all things, I think we all know what kind of reaction I’d get.”
That got an uncomfortable silence; more than one Five-Ninety-Five session had turned into a screaming fight over gender politics.
“Can we say that each individual is the measure of all things, to that individual?” Maria asked, breaking the silence.
“Does the phrase ‘all things’ still mean anything at all at that point?” Jim shot back.
“What I think Owen’s suggesting,” said Luellen, “and correct me if I’m wrong, Owen, is that when you say ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ you’ve made a political statement. You’re holding up one particular abstract concept of what individual human beings can be, and saying that all things ought to correspond to it.”
“All things,” Owen said, “but also all people. That’s the one that matters. Start out by defining this abstraction called Man as this or that measure, and you end up demanding that everyone measure up to it, and punishing the ones who don’t.”
“The only way to avoid that is to not impose any common measure on human beings at all,” Jim said.
“I’m good with that,” said Owen.
“That’s a copout,” said Shelby. “Reason gives us a basis for measure. As human beings we can tell the difference between the rational and the irrational. We know that what’s rational is based on reality, and what’s not rational isn’t. That’s what distinguishes us from the rest of the universe. To say man is the measure of all things means that reason is the measure of all things, and that’s a valid standard for measuring everything, including human beings.”
“That would imply,” said Maria, “that you can judge human beings based on whether they measure up to your notion of rationality.”
“It’s not a matter of my notion or yours,” Shelby said at once. “Reason is what it is. Statements, ideas, and beliefs are rational, or they’re not. We can recognize that and solve our problems as a species, or we can ignore that and just keep floundering in the mud, the way we’ve done for all these thousands of years.”
The next person who got Professor Peaslee’s nod wanted to explore how Man in any sense of the word could measure anything, and before long most of the class was cheerfully wrestling with the linguistic roots of the Greek word for “measure.” Owen tried to follow the discussion, but his thoughts kept circling back to the earlier exchange. The argument Shelby had made, with its facile claims about the infallibility of human reason, reminded him rather too much of what little he’d found out about the Noology Program. Was that what they were teaching over in Belbury Hall?
He wondered bleakly whether Lovecraft’s fish-men from Innsmouth were the measure of all things, and then thought of the little girl in the children’s book he’d seen, playing with fish and octopi. Which of those was the measure of all things? The girl, the fish, the octopi?
Great Cthulhu?
When the class finally ended, Owen pulled himself out of his chair and left the classroom for the walk to Morgan Hall. Shelby got out ahead of him and was waiting outside. “I’ve mentioned you to Dr. Noyes,” she said. “He’d really like to see you this afternoon.”
“I’ve already told you I’m not interested,” Owen said.
She looked irritated. “You’re really being difficult about this.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You know what? I’m just going to get more difficult until you drop it.” He pushed past her and headed for the stairs.
DEAD LEAVES CRACKLED under Owen’s shoes as he climbed the slope behind the new parking garage, weaving around the black clawed shapes of bare trees. Up ahead was the broad green whaleback shape of Meadow Hill, and beyond it the ravine, and the white stone.
He wasn’t running from anything, he told himself. He didn’t need protection.
The words rang hollow in his mind. Two more of his friends had recounted stories exactly like Jenny Parrish’s, of people they didn’t know, whose names they couldn’t recall, who talked about how strangely he’d been behaving. Whatever was going on, it was too far from coincidence for his peace of mind.
He got clear of the bare trees and climbed the slope. At the crest he turned, looked out over the roofs of Arkham sprawled away to the south and the buildings of Miskatonic huddled to the east: Wilmarth Hall’s baroque spires side by side with the gray concrete of the East Campus Parking Garage, Morgan Hall’s bland brown brick, Pickman Hall all yellow brick and broad windows, and Belbury Hall off beyond it, pale and stark against the long row of trees lining Federal Street. The sky curved gray and bleak above him. He turned again and began walking north, toward the ravine.
The moment he started down from the crest, it was as though he had walked through a door. Even though he was only a few minutes’ walk from campus and not much further from the busy streets of Arkham’s north side, the green slope of the hill felt weirdly isolated, as if he’d suddenly stepped miles out of town. He could barely hear the traffic noise of the city behind him, and trees hid the campus to his right. He shook his head, kept walking.
To the north, the landscape spread out before him: a long grassy slope scattered with gray boulders some ancient glacier must have left behind, and then the ravine, a stark cut across the hillside, edged with tangled brush and great crannied masses of native stone. He found a way down into it after some searching. The bottom of the ravine was covered with thick grass, and rising out of it on the far side, just before the land rose back up again, was the white stone.
Owen walked toward it. He knew about the stone, and not just from the references in one of Lovecraft’s stories. The Arkham witch trials of 1692, though they’d never gotten the wider fame of the Salem trials, were still remembered among old Arkham families; teenagers in town dared each other to visit the stone at midnight, and the student Wiccan group at Miskatonic used it as an altar for their ceremonies when the weather was good enough, which wasn’t often. It was a vaguely cubical mass of hard pale stone jutting up from the grass. Owen looked around; it wasn’t hard to imagine naked revelers dancing around the stone on May Eve, as the witnesses at the witch trials claimed they’d seen.
He got to the stone, glanced down at its surface. Someone had scratched words onto the stone: SHUB-NIGGURATH WAS HERE.
He laughed and turned back the way he’d come.
At that moment something stirred and crackled in the brush behind him. Startled, he turned around, but whatever it was had already ducked back out of sight. He stood there for a moment, and then caught the smell: a rank, animal scent, faint but definite. It was—there really was no other word for it—goaty.
He turned abruptly and hurried back the way he’d come, glancing back over his shoulder from time to time as he went. Nothing followed him but the smell, which lingered until the white stone was entirely out of sight.
BACK ON CAMPUS, he climbed the long winding stair that ran up the middle of Wilmarth Hall. He was distracted enough that he almost walked right past the seventh floor landing. Catching himself, he pushed open the door and started toward Professor Akeley’s office.
There was someone standing at the far end of the hall, looking out the tall windows there toward the gambrel roofs of Arkham. At the sound of the door, he turned and came to meet Owen in front of the office door.
“You must be Owen Merrill,” the man said, putting out his hand. “I’m Clark Noyes.”
Owen shook his hand, tried to gauge the man. At first glance, he could have been any of a dozen other professors from Miskatonic’s better-funded departments, wearing the whole successful Ivy League academic kit from rimless glasses and casually knotted silk tie to tastefully overpriced Italian shoes, with a bland and genial look on his face. A second glance drew back baffled, because Owen could sense nothing at all behind the costume and the vaguely friendly expression. It was as though the clothing and the face formed a shell around empty space. “Pleased to meet you,” he managed to say. “Shelby’s talked about you.”
“I imagine so,” said Professor Noyes. “Actually, that’s part of why I came looking for you this afternoon. She’s mentioned you to me more than once. I know you have some doubts about the project.” He chuckled. It was a strange sound, as though he’d calculated exactly what a chuckle should sound like and decided to produce one just then. “No surprises there, of course. Like so many of our grad students, Shelby’s got a somewhat singleminded view of the goals of our project. She really hasn’t grasped just now much of the humanities are relevant to noology.”
Owen made a noncommittal noise in his throat, and Noyes chuckled again. “I know, you’re skeptical. Understandably so, in fact. Still, I’ve taken the time to check up on your work here at Miskatonic, and quite frankly, I’m impressed. You’ve got a good quick mind. You’re doing your thesis on Lovecraft, right?”
Owen nodded and quoted the title of his thesis at Noyes, who said, “Good, good. And studying his sources as well, which might be very helpful indeed.” Owen wondered what he meant by that. “Do I remember right that you’re planning on a doctorate?”
“Yes,” Owen said.
“Good. I’d like to encourage you to think about the possibility of doing that in our program. We’ve got plenty of funding for the next few years, and I think we could really use you in the lab.”
Taken aback, Owen said, “I’ll consider it.”
“Please do. In fact, why don’t you come up to my office sometime soon? When you have time, of course—I know your schedule’s got to be pretty busy with the semester in full swing. Still, give me a call, when you’ve got an hour or two. I’d be delighted to show you around, introduce you to the team, give you a better idea of what we’re up to and how we can use you. I think you’ll be favorably impressed.” He repeated the odd, almost mechanical chuckle. “Well, I won’t keep you. Give my best to Miriam.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Great. See you soon.” He headed for the elevators, still smiling exactly the same vague bland smile he’d had on his face all along.
Owen turned to watch him go, then went into Professor Akeley’s office, his thoughts in confusion. Having a doctorate program all but handed to him by one of the university’s most influential professors was a grad student’s wet dream—but the thought of getting involved in whatever was going on in Belbury Hall still woke the same cold sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse, absurd as it was, he couldn’t shake the thought that there hadn’t actually been anyone there inside Noyes’ fashionable clothes and smiling face.
The office was empty. A note scrawled on a bright orange pad on the desk read: Owen—will be back 12ish. One more flustered cluck around the interdisciplinary studies program and I’m going to start tearing my hair out in clumps. —MA.
Owen laughed, went over to the table, and looked over the old pulp magazines and letters from the Harriet Blake estate. The puzzling letter from Lovecraft was nowhere to be seen. He looked through the piles for the volume of Justin Geoffrey’s poetry, in case Akeley had put the letter back where it had been, but had no more luck finding that than the letter.
He was just finishing his search when he remembered that the interdisciplinary studies program had its offices in Belbury Hall. Maybe it was just a coincidence that the head of the Noology Program had arranged to be waiting in Wilmarth Hall, while someone else from Belbury Hall made sure Professor Akeley was somewhere else when Owen got there. Maybe.
The words the man in black had said on the bridge over Hangman’s Brook whispered in his memory: Sooner or later, you’ll have to take sides, he’d said. Nobody’s neutral in this business. Noyes pretty clearly wanted him on one side, the side of the Noology Program; so did Shelby, and one thing after another seemed to be lining up to push him in the same direction.
And the other side—was there another side at all? He’d gone to Innsmouth looking for it, and come back with nothing in his hands. Maybe the man in black was the other side, or part of it, but since the trip to Innsmouth there had been no sign of him. Owen sat down abruptly on one of the chairs, wondering yet again what he’d stumbled into, and whether he’d be able to get through it in one piece.
THE NEXT DAY he woke before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep. By eight he was finished with breakfast and feeling restless, and decided on the spur of the moment to spend the whole morning down in the Orne Library restricted stacks. He got to the library less than fifteen minutes later, clattered down the stair into the basement, pressed the door buzzer, waited until the door rattled open and Dr. Whipple’s lean wrinkled face peered out. The old man looked even more distracted than usual, but his face brightened when he saw who was waiting. “Owen,” he said. “Well. Come in, come in.”
He stepped through the door, and realized as he was taking his pack off that he and Dr. Whipple weren’t the only ones in the room. It took a moment longer for him to realize that the other person there was Shelby. She glanced up, saw him, and something tense and almost fearful showed in her face for a moment before she covered it with a bright smile. “Hi, Owen.”
“Hi,” he said, startled by her presence there.
She got up, took the book she’d been reading to Dr. Whipple, and handed it to him; Owen thought he recognized the cover of the book. “I think that’s everything I needed, thanks.” He responded with a skeptical sound somewhere down in his throat, and she turned the bright smile on him before leaving the restricted stacks.
Owen watched the door close, turned to the old man, and thought he recognized the sour expression on his face. “Dr. Whipple,” he said, “is she the one who keeps on asking for one book after another?”
“Why, yes, she’s one of them. It’s that program up at Belbury Hall, whatever it’s called. They keep sending grad students down here to do that sort of thing—as though anything worth knowing about the old lore can be learned in any such manner.” He shook his head dolefully. “Superficiality, Owen. It’s the bane of education.” He turned to take the book Shelby had been reading back into the stacks, then stopped. “What will it be this time? As I recall, you finished with the Eltdown Shards the last time you were down here.”
“Yes, I did.” A sudden thought came to him. “Do you have Justin Geoffrey’s The People of the Monolith and Other Poems?”
The old man blinked. “Indeed I do. Curious that you should ask for that. Just a moment.” He set down the book Shelby had been reading on one of the tables, went over to the far end of the stacks. When he was out of sight, Owen walked over to the table and opened the book. It had the crowded and ornate title page common in seventeenth-century books, but the top two lines read: Necronomicon seu Liber de Legibus Mortuorum. He closed the cover, stepped back to where he had been standing, and waited for Whipple to return.
“Here you are,” the old man said. “That wasn’t in the collection down here until a few days ago. They’ve got Lovecraft’s own copy upstairs in special collections, full of scrawls.” He shook his head. “But this is a good clean copy.”
Owen thanked him and took the book to the nearest table while Whipple picked up the Necronomicon and took it back into the stacks. It was Robert Blake’s copy of Geoffrey’s book, no question of that. The letter from Lovecraft was gone, as he’d expected, but the paper it had been written on had yellowed the pages to either side of it. The left hand page was blank; the other had a sonnet printed on it:
HALI
The prophet’s blood pools scarlet on the stone.
His eyes, that knew futurity and fate,
Stare blind and bleeding through a broken gate
Into a burning fane, where he alone
Once heard the inmost whispers of the Earth.
Did they forewarn him of the cold command,
The pounding hooves, the weapon in the hand
That struck him down, the laugh of brutal mirth?
Now muffled figures murmur in the night
His final words; now others gaze aghast
At fell shapes rising from the sleepless past.
The age that dawned there, in the flame’s red light,
Shall end in flame when, as he prophesied,
Four join their hands where gray rock meets gray tide.
He wondered what any of it meant. He remembered the prophet Hali from von Junzt and a few other books he’d studied, and something he’d read somewhere back a couple of months ago claimed that he’d been a historical figure, a priest of the city of Irem in Arabia in the second century BC. Nothing he’d read mentioned a violent death, and the prophecy of the last line rang no least bell of memory.
The faint yellowing there on the page reminded him of Lovecraft’s warning. The question that mattered, he knew, was whether he’d tried to turn back in time.
HE HAD HIS answer the next evening.
He went with Professor Akeley to her office after the afternoon class—she’d lectured on the impact of the cinema on popular culture between the wars, a fascinating topic though less relevant to his thesis than some of the others—and put something like four hours into helping her sort through the letters from the Harriet Blake estate. By tacit agreement, neither of them mentioned the fifth letter from Lovecraft. The weather had turned cold that day, and so the crotchety heating system in Wilmarth Hall went into overdrive as usual and kept the whole building stuffy enough that Akeley discarded her sweater and Owen felt overheated.
The letters included real treasures, no question. Some of them, the professor assured Owen, would keep scholarly dovecotes fluttering for years to come. Finally, though, they’d sorted through the entire collection and made a list of their authors and subjects. Through the window, stars shone bright and distant in a black sky, and the lamps around the empty quad glowed sodium yellow below. They wished each other a good night and Owen went down the long stair toward the ground floor and the walk home. The heating system was still running full blast; he slung his coat over his shoulder along with his backpack.
The main doors were working for a change. They hissed open, he stepped through, and a moment later realized that someone was standing out in front, waiting. It was Shelby.
Except that it wasn’t.
She came toward him, her face fixed in a hollow smile. “Owen,” she said, in a voice that was just as bland and empty as Professor Noyes’ had been. “It’s time for you to come with me. We’ve waited long enough.”
The sense of vacancy he’d gotten from Professor Noyes had been uncomfortable enough, but Owen didn’t know the man. With Shelby, things were different. He’d taken classes with her, argued with her, discussed career plans; he’d had a crush on her for a while, until he realized that there wasn’t enough chemistry between them for anything to come of it. He knew her—but this wasn’t her in any sense that mattered. Whatever was approaching him looked and sounded like Shelby, but there was no longer a person inside.
He tensed, backed away, and then suddenly out of the corner of his eye noticed someone else moving toward him.
Once in his Army days, out in Anbar Province, he’d been in a firefight and suddenly, with kick-in-the-stomach intensity, known that he had to get down. He dropped to the ground an instant before gunfire sprayed through the empty air where his face had been. This felt exactly the same way. He knew he had to run, and he ran. Shelby sprang after him and grabbed one end of his coat; he twisted, shed coat and backpack, and sprinted out into the quad.
His footfalls drummed on the hard half-frozen ground. Another pair followed, went to one side, heading him off in case he tried to run for the main entrance to Armitage Union. Owen gauged his options, veered in the only direction that offered any hope of safety: the green belt at the foot of Meadow Hill. The ravine, he reminded himself. The white stone.
He rounded the southwest corner of Wilmarth Hall, hazarded a glance back over his shoulder. Shelby was standing in the middle of the quad, talking to somebody on her cell phone; his coat and backpack were on the ground next to her. His pursuer had lost ground heading toward Armitage Union, but was still on his trail. Owen sped up, sprinted past the south end of Wilmarth Hall to Garrison Street, which ran between campus and the green belt, knowing that any traffic there might leave him at his pursuers’ mercy. Fortunately the only cars were a block away, and he dashed across the street, plunged into the black leafless trees on the other side.
THE DARKNESS BENEATH the trees was thick enough that Owen could barely see to run, but he kept moving uphill as fast as he could. The night around him was bitterly cold; the air burned in his throat. The footfalls of his pursuer slowed and stopped—on the street, from the sound of it—and after a moment he heard the faint buzz of a one-sided conversation as the man called someone else on a cell phone. Under the trees, Owen felt he had a chance; reactions he hadn’t had to call on since he got home from Iraq surged through him alongside the adrenaline, reminding his muscles of every nasty close-quarter combat trick he’d ever learned.
Who had Shelby called? Sooner or later, you’ll have to take sides, the man in black had said. Nobody’s neutral in this business. The words burned in his memory. Whatever the sides were, whatever the stakes might be, he knew whose side he could never be on, and that left only one alternative—if there was another side at all. He shoved the thought away, kept moving.
He’d raised a sweat sprinting across the quad, and now that he had to move more slowly, his damp clothes turned painfully cold. He clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, kept going. He tripped over a fallen branch, landed hard on his hands and knees, pulled himself up. What had the man in black said? On the far side of the ravine is an old white stone. Go there if you’re in danger—you’ll find protection there, and guidance. The words barely made sense to him. Keep going, he told himself; that at least was simple enough to understand.
He pushed ahead in the blind black shadows, finally came out onto the whaleback slope of Meadow Hill. The pale glow from Arkham’s streetlights lit up the sky behind him, beyond the dark mass of Chapman Hall. Little light reached the hill, but it was enough that searchers might be able to spot him. No help for that now. He ran, fast and low, up to the hill’s crest and over it.
As before, the moment he passed the crest he seemed to be in another world. The traffic noises and city lights behind him might as well have been miles away. Ahead, barely visible in the night, the hill sloped down toward the ravine, and the white stone.
Afterwards, he could never remember just how he found his way down into the ravine in the darkness without falling from the rocks and breaking his neck. Still, a few minutes later, he clambered down a steep slope onto thick grass crisp with frost, and saw the stone, pale in the night, not far away. He tried to remember why he was supposed to go toward it, but the memory wouldn’t surface and the cold pressed him hard from every direction. He was stumbling, barely able to walk, by the time he reached it.
Someone was sitting next to it, wrapped in what looked like blankets and rags. He could barely see the face in the dim light as it turned toward him: dark-skinned, wrinkled, surrounded by shadows.
“Come here, child.” A woman’s voice, rich with the harmonies of age.
He looked at her blankly, came over to the stone.
“You’ll catch your death of cold if you keep running on a night like this,” she said, and patted the ground next to her. “Sit yourself down.”
He stumbled over to her, slumped to the ground. There was a rank, animal scent around her, perhaps the smell of unwashed skin and clothing, perhaps something else. She turned and reached, and something that felt like a warm soft blanket settled over him; it smelled of fallen leaves and dry grass, of earth and weathered stone. The warmth brought a moment’s clarity; he wondered if he was hallucinating, and then a moment later if he was dying of the cold.
“No, no, child,” she said, laughing, as though she’d heard his thoughts. “No, you’ll be safe here with me. What’s got you out on a night like this?”
“They’re hunting me,” he managed to say
“Are they, now. Why is that?”
All at once, without any choice on his part, the whole story came tumbling out of him: the letter, the warnings, the trip to Innsmouth, all the way to the empty husk that had been Shelby and his desperate escape from the campus. All the while, the old woman nodded.
After Owen finished, the old woman nodded once more and then smiled; he could just see the gleam of her teeth. “Well, then,” she said. “It’s good that he sent you here.”
“The man in black,” he said then, guessing at her meaning. “You know him?”
“Oh, yes.” Another laugh rippled through the air like wind in the branches. “Oh, yes, indeed. We go back a long, long time.”
Then she leaned toward him. “Time to sleep now, child.” When he opened his mouth to protest: “When you wake up, head north. There’ll be a moon path waiting for you, child, and you’re to follow it. North, you hear?”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Good. Now go to sleep.”
She seemed to rise up, becoming larger and more strangely formed, with great curving shapes rising from her head. He glimpsed her briefly, a vast dark presence that seemed to loom up into the night sky, though maybe that was just because he was slipping over onto his side. A moment later his eyes drifted shut. Something soft pressed against his head. The warmth of the blanket and its scent was all around him, and the softness under him drew him down, silently and gently, into blackness.