|
|
You can adjust to all kinds of things, no matter how depressing they may be. Working in a facility that deals with Alzheimer’s patients, for instance; sure, it might be distressing at first, how they grab onto you with wild, panicked desperation and stare, unable to articulate the howling darkness inside their minds. How they beg you to save them from being sucked down into it.
But you get used to it. Sad fact. You can get used to anything.
At the time I met the newest resident of Shady Grove, I’d just become a Licensed Elder Care Technician—that’s what my paystub said, anyway, and it earned me a sweet twenty bucks an hour. I was relatively new at the whole Elder Care game, but most of the time, it wasn’t so bad. I mean, you had to have a strong stomach; there’s a whole lot of waste spillage involved, if you know what I mean, but I’ve never been squeamish about bodily fluids. Shit, blood, urine, vomit . . . it never made me sympathy puke, though some of my coworkers just couldn’t deal. I was the one who got emergency mop-and-bucket duty for the most part, and I was fine with it. My colleagues usually bumped me some extra cookies or something at breaks to make up for it.
What was harder for me were the faces of our patients—excuse me, residents. The blank, slack, yet still somehow living faces, continually struggling to climb out of whatever pit they’d fallen into inside their skulls. The human body is tough, and a lot of the time it just doesn’t know how to quit, even when the fight’s long lost. I was always as gentle as I could be with them, even the ones who hit the skids and took a wrenching left turn into screaming, spitting, biting, punching, you name it. My facility didn’t get those as much. There were—air quote—special facilities for those cases. I’d only been slapped or hit a couple of times, once by a tiny little lady who just the day before had been the sweetest, most fragile thing.
They changed, you see. They all changed, eventually. And there was never any going back, just a long, slow march down into the dark.
I was in my seventh month of the job when destiny moved in. Well, moved in wasn’t quite right; she was wheeled in from St. Gregory Hospital one rainy afternoon, and as I watched them roll her down the hall and into room 422, I thought, she’ll take some work. The old lady who passed me was bedridden, and worse, she had the thousand-yard, dead stare of an end-stager . . . if anybody was still home in that graying head, she sat in the dark, silent and alone. Better than combative, but not by much. Special care would need to be taken to ensure she didn’t develop bedsores, and she was probably on a boatload of meds, too.
Not my wing, thank God, I thought, right before Chris, the nursing supervisor, stuck his head out of his office and beckoned me over. He was sorting out boxes of medications, logging them in on charts, and labeling them with room numbers, and while he worked he jerked his pointed chin in the direction that the gurney had taken, toward 422.
“She’s yours,” he said. Chris—Christophe, really—had a rich, soft Jamaican accent that always reminded me of some sun-drenched shore far from our dim old Arkham, Massachusetts, nursing facility. “They asked for you special.”
This part of the state always seemed gloomy, overcast, raining, or managed to be dour and played out even on sunny days; a little Jamaican beach fantasy wasn’t a bad thing. Christophe was also tall, broad-shouldered, and had the most perfect, poreless skin I’d ever seen on a man. He had a white-ink tattoo on his shoulder that rumor said was a voudon symbol, but I figured it was probably just picked out of a design book somewhere in Boston, and neither Chris nor the tattooist had the vaguest idea what it really was.
Still, for all his charm and warmth and handsome features, many of the staff, especially those with Caribbean backgrounds, minded their manners around Christophe.
“Wait, what?” His words finally registered on me like the brassy clang of a bell. “I—what? That’s not my wing!”
“Special request,” he said again, and gave me a broad, amused smile. “Your fame is spreading, Rose.”
“That is not my fault.” Somehow, when I’d done my job and nothing but, an enterprising blogger had twisted me into an ALZ whisperer who could charm difficult patients into miracle recoveries. For one thing, that poor old man hadn’t even been properly demented, just neglected and lonely. For another, half of what that damn post had said was nonsense anyway. “Please don’t make me some bullshit plastic dashboard saint.”
“We can charge extra if we sell action figures.”
“You asshole.”
He shrugged. “She’s your patient. Saint Rose.”
I flipped him off, and he crossed himself, and we parted friends, I hoped. I wasn’t really upset. The new patient—resident—wouldn’t be too much trouble. If I could persuade Christophe to let me spend more time with her, I might be able to cut down on some of the emergency shit detail I usually inherited. A little more quality time with a person, even a nearly dead one, was much better.
And I did like being able to make their dark days a little brighter, even if they could only see it in glimpses and shadows. Wasn’t really
cool to say that around the others, who all complained about the work and the lousy pay and the heavy lifting, but I didn’t mind all that, mainly because I’d done worse. Ever clean out portable toilets? This beat that by miles.
I stopped by the main office and picked up a Welcome Pack, which was kind of a joke because most of our residents were too far gone to understand what we were giving them, and anyway it was just soap, tissues, a lap blanket, things like that. Things their families, if they had any, forgot to provide. It came in a cheery yellow wicker basket with some sugar-free candies and Depends. I carried it over to room 422, where the ambulance attendants who’d brought her were just finishing up transferring her from the gurney to the small medical-grade bed where she’d finish up her life. One of them handed me the paperwork, and I looked it over. “Acanthus Porter,” I said. “Huh. Sounds familiar. Should I know her?”
The younger one shrugged, but the older, about thirty, said, “Yeah, she was some kind of movie star back when dirt was new. Couldn’t tell now, huh?”
“Don’t get cocky,” I said. “You won’t be the handsome specimen you are now at her age, either.”
He laughed. I read the rest over quickly—the usual stuff, statements about her condition, meds, a do not resuscitate order, contact info for her next of kin, which included a daughter and son who hadn’t bothered to show up to see her moved into what was almost certainly her last residence. Both local. I signed the transfer and handed it back, and got a bag of stuff that was all Acanthus Porter had now in terms of worldly possessions: mostly nightgowns and robes. No valuables, thank God; those had to be locked up in the office safe. I could never understand why people put Grandma’s jewel collection in her room, when Grandma was dotty enough to flush it down the toilet.
The ambulance guys left, and shut the door, and I put Acanthus Porter’s things into the small chest by her bed. Her belongings only took up two of the four drawers. Sad. I put the Depends in the bottom drawer and the candy arranged in a nice little bowl by her bed, and tried to spread the rest of it around so it looked less like a cell and more like a home.
As I was spreading the cheery plaid lap blanket over her, I looked up into Mrs. Porter’s face. She was as wrinkled as a raisin, pale and bloodless, and her blue eyes—which had probably been a stunning cornflower blue in her prime—stared blankly, faded and dull. No sign of life in her, though the pulse at her throat still beat, and her frail little chest rose and fell. I took her hand. It was chill and slack, and the skin was thin enough to see through, like something half-formed and unborn. I could see the shadows of bones, feel the ridges of thickened joints.
Her hand tightened on mine with sudden, shocking strength. It didn’t surprise me; Alzheimer’s patients were capable of that kind of thing. Their minds were wasting away, but the body was slower to follow. And the body was afraid.
Her grip hurt, but I didn’t wince. “It’s all right,” I said, and gently eased some of the gray hair off her forehead. She was sweating a little. “Acanthus, it’s all right. You’re safe here. My name is Rose. I’m going to take care of you.”
I kept my tone gentle. The words really didn’t matter; I could have recited the phone book to the same effect, because at her stage, patients lost the ability to keep up with the meaning of sentences. They responded to touch, and to tone, and sure enough, gradually the grip around my hand slackened and fell away. I felt the sting of cuts and looked down. She’d dug in with her nails and left little red crescents in two spots. I should have nails that good, I thought, and almost laughed. I’d cut them short later.
“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” I told her, in the same warm, soothing voice. “I have to warn you, the food’s pretty crap, but I’ll get you something tasty, all right? Something soft and warm. And some pudding. You like pudding, I’ll bet.”
I got up to go, and when I did, something . . . happened. I don’t believe in ghosts, or demons. I’d always believed in what I could see and feel, and I believed that everything had a reason. Everything.
So all I can say about it is that I felt a wind out of nowhere blow up from beneath us, from the damn floor, and it felt hot and yet somehow clammy, like the skin of something dead a long time. It was so strong it felt as if it would tear the skin off my bones, and then it was gone, and I realized—though believe me, I know it doesn’t make sense—that the shocking blast hadn’t so much as ruffled the cheery green curtains on the window. I experienced a terrible stillness in that room, a presence like something awful smothering me with a wet, hot mouth, and I covered my face and, as strong-stomached as I am, I almost vomited into my hands.
Then it was gone. Just . . . gone.
I turned back to the bed, and the frail little woman dying on it, and another inexplicable feeling swept over me. A hot flash of utter horror, as if I was staring at something that should not be, then I blinked and it was over, except for the incredibly fast pulse of my heart and the sickening taste at the back of my throat.
Acanthus Porter sat up in bed and looked at me with cold, shining blue eyes. There was something wrong in the tilt of her head, the set of her shoulders, as if she’d put on the wrong skin.
I bit back the urge to scream and managed to say, fairly calmly, “Acanthus? Can you hear me?” Maybe, I told myself, there’s nothing really wrong at all. Alzheimer’s patients didn’t react well to changes in environment; routines were everything to them. Maybe she’d just frozen out during the transfer and was starting to come back a little. Weird, but not unprecedented.
That fragile, desperate hope shattered when Acanthus opened her wrinkled little mouth and out poured a sound that was so wrong, so chilling, it sounded more like metal shrieking under pressure than a voice. Loud, so loud I had to clap my hands over my ears. It physically hurt, and when it finally died away I heard myself screaming in protest.
Acanthus dropped back to the pillows as if a puppeteer had cut her strings, with dead-but-alive eyes staring up at the ceiling, just as Christophe banged open the door to the room and charged in. He skidded to a halt, staring at me and breathing fast.
“What the hell are you screaming about?” he demanded. I slowly took my hands away from my ears, still watching Acanthus the way I might a poisonous spider on my pillow. “My God, Rose, you could have raised the dead! I’ll have half the hall agitated the rest of the day after that!”
It slowly penetrated to me that he hadn’t heard Acanthus’s awful, metallic shriek at all. He’d only heard me, screaming for no apparent reason.
Acanthus lay limp on the bed, breathing evenly, a fragile old lady without much of a mind left, and I knew I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen. Not if I wanted to keep my job.
I made up some story about seeing a rat and left him to hunt it down while I ran to the bathroom to throw up. My body needed to expel something, and if it couldn’t get rid of the image of Acanthus upright in that bed, her eyes bright and dead inside, that voice . . .
Breakfast would have to do.
• • •
So, yeah, I thought about leaving—just quitting, walking off the job, never coming back. Problem is that, at least in Arkham, there are a limited number of jobs for someone like me, and I liked what I did. I couldn’t afford a bad reference out of Shady Groves, or Christophe spreading the word I was unstable. I just had to find a way to never be alone with Acanthus again.
Easier said than done, but I managed for a while; I kept the door open to her room and engaged other caregivers in conversations while changing her clothes and sheets and bathing her and turning her and feeding her. She was a warm, malleable doll in my hands, though from time to time I saw that flash of cold intelligence in her eyes and was glad I had someone else to chat with, someone to offer me protection. Somehow, I knew it wouldn’t happen when there were other witnesses.
That didn’t last, of course. I was dressing Acanthus in her nightgown after her bath when my friend Marisela was called away to tend to someone who’d had a fall, and the instant Marisela was gone the old lady’s faded eyes flicked over to fix on mine. Utterly present. Utterly terrifying.
I let go of her. She should have fallen back to the pillows, but instead she stayed where she was, half-reclined, floating on the air . . . and then she sat up.
She swung her stick-thin legs over the edge of the bed and stood.
I’d moved back by then, well back, out of grabbing range. I didn’t know what was coming. There was that damp heat in the room again, with a strange edge of chill underneath, and something wrong, very wrong, in the way Acanthus stood on her two feet. Stroke patients sometimes relearned how to sit, stand, walk, talk . . . but even then, they looked human in their bodies. Just uncertain and clumsy.
Acanthus looked wrong. And not at all uncertain.
“Jesus,” I breathed. She was staring at me with those greedy, wet eyes—observing every little tic and breath and muscle. I had the odd, creepy idea that she was learning. She suddenly cocked her head to an angle that just had to hurt, too far over, too sudden, and then slowly straightened it again. Took a slow, shuffling step toward me. “Oh Jesus Christ—” The dread had taken hold of me hard, but I couldn’t let it paralyze me. She’s just a frail old lady, what the hell are you afraid of?
It made me feel physically ill to push through the dread, but I moved to her, not away, and took her arm. Thin, velvety skin slid loose over muscles that, though wasted, felt cable-strong beneath.
“Acanthus?” My voice sounded high and strange, and there was a tremble in it, just as there was in my grip on her forearm. “Dear, you should sit down. I don’t think you should be standing up.”
She obligingly sat on the edge of the bed. I felt her body shifting, trying to find a balance that, even in an Alzheimer’s patient, should have had some instinct to it . . . but it felt like she’d never done this before. I held her in place until she was steady, then let go. I rubbed my palm down the fabric of my uniform pants, trying to scrub off the feel of her flesh, but I somehow managed to smile. “That’s good, Mrs. Porter. Very good.”
She opened her mouth, and I winced and flinched, waiting for that metallic screech. Instead, breath whistled out. Not words, just air. She was trying to talk, I thought, but didn’t know how. There was a dim kind of surprise in her eyes now. Harder than she thought, I realized. She would have to learn things.
Things most humans took for granted.
It isn’t her, some part of me insisted, still repulsed. Violently afraid. That thing isn’t Acanthus Porter. It’s some . . . stranger.
Like I said, I’m a practical girl. Unimaginative. Solid.
So I pushed that aside and went to get Christophe, and together we marveled at the miracle of Acanthus Porter, a vegetative-state Alzheimer’s patient who was learning to walk and talk and move again.
• • •
It took months of slow progress, and I began to believe that I’d had some kind of strange episode. She was just a little old lady who’d somehow woken up again from her ALZ slumber, a miracle case that doctors studied and shook their heads and said scientific things that boiled down to utter ignorance. She became something of a media darling, though we forbade cameras inside the facility; I had to answer questions once in front of a battery of reporters, and that was awful. Meanwhile, Acanthus learned to walk, though she used assistance at first; she learned to do simple tasks that kindergarteners learned, like matching shapes and colors. She began to understand letters and numbers. It was as if she’d never had any of that knowledge, but it didn’t take long for her to master that part of her education, and soon she was reading with speed. Too much speed. I caught her a few times leafing through books with sure, avid movements, her light, bulging eyes drinking in words faster than I ever could. When she noticed me, she slowed to a more . . . normal pace, tracing her skeletal finger along the pages and mouthing them silently to herself.
She learned to speak, of course. It never sounded quite natural, more like someone to whom it was a second language with all the wrong vowels. Natural enough, I told myself. It was amazing she spoke at all, or walked, or breathed, or lived. Based on the condition I’d seen her in when she’d rolled in the doors of Shady Grove, I’d have given her six months, tops.
For an entire year, she rehabilitated herself into something that was almost normal, but never quite . . . human.
That was never clearer than when her children finally came to see her around Christmas, halfway through her rehab. The daughter was a portly fortyish woman with a pursed-up mouth and stress lines around her eyes; she looked mousy and unhappy to be there. The son was one of those high-powered executive types, with a cell phone constantly at his ear and buzzing with texts, and a bespoke suit and silk tie and a haircut that cost more than my paycheck.
They both had the exact same reaction to their mother: not relief and joy at seeing her improving again, but revulsion.
It happened almost immediately as they walked into the common room, where Acanthus sat by herself in the corner. They moved in about halfway to her, and then, in unison, both her children just stopped and stared.
The daughter said, “That’s not Mom.” There was horror in her voice. “Ken, that’s not.”
“No,” her brother agreed. He’d been texting as he walked, but now he just put the phone in his pocket, forgotten, and stared. “What are you people playing at? That’s not our mother!”
“Acanthus Porter? And you’re Ken and Darlene? Her children?”
“Yes, but—” Darlene kept staring with a kind of shaking dread I knew all too well. I still felt it, though I’d gotten used to the sensation. “It looks like her, but it’s—not her.”
Christophe’s soothing, strong presence came up behind us, and he said, “Is there a problem, Rose?”
“I think Acanthus’s children are just a little shocked,” I said. “She’s suffered some damage due to strokes and the Alzheimer’s, and she might not be quite what you remember—”
“No,” Ken cut me off. He actually took a step back, and I couldn’t imagine this soul-crushing businessman had ever done that before. He wasn’t a retreat kind of guy. “No, it’s not right. This isn’t right. I can’t do this!”
His mother, I saw, had looked up to watch us with those soulless, yet avid, eyes. She had loose sheets of paper in front of her, and she was writing on them, but she never looked down at her hands or the page as the pen moved. It was an eerie sight.
While Ken turned on his heel and stalked away at a walk so fast it might as well have been a run, Darlene managed to stay put. Daughters always felt more obligated, I’d found, even when their instincts told them there was nothing they could do.
“Just say hello to her,” I said to the Darlene. “You’ll feel better. Just a quick hello, and you can go.”
She nodded jerkily, and her eyes—cornflower blue, as Acanthus’s must have been in her younger days—were wet with something that wasn’t tears, but was more purely horror, as though I was a bully forcing her to touch something dead and rotten. But she went with me. Heavy, slow steps. She halted about five feet away while I walked over to perch on a chair next to Acanthus. Being so close to her was a strange sensation, still; she felt warm and solid and real, but there was an energy coming off her that jangled my nerves, like being too close to a power line. She’d just had a bath, but there was a smell that never quite went away, something like a hot, fetid swamp.
She was writing very quickly. Her pen moved over the paper right to left, the opposite of how English would be written, but she wasn’t writing English. I wasn’t certain what it was. It had some strange loops to it, and too many vowels, and though it looked like English letters there were subtle signs it wasn’t at all. Her writing was neat and precise, and very fast. In one corner, she’d sketched some kind of plant, but no kind I’d ever seen before; it had an unsettling look to it, with an organic geometry that seemed monstrous even as a flower, and a sinuous stem that writhed and curled into roots like claws.
She finished the page abruptly and dropped her pen. It rolled off on the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice. She stared at her daughter with wide, strange eyes, and her daughter stared back in mortal terror with tears streaming down her face, and when she said “Mama?” it was in a little-girl voice that spoke of nightmares and monsters under the bed.
Acanthus Porter smiled and said, “Darlene, how good to see you. How are the children?”
It sounded normal, although there were strange lilts to the words, odd accents. Darlene’s reaction was out of proportion. She stumbled backwards, ran into a table that held an abandoned game of checkers, and overturned that as she pushed through. Red and black plastic chips rattled over the floor, and Marisela, feeding gelatin to an elderly man in a wheelchair, glared and got up to clean the mess.
Darlene bolted from the room. Ran. The door slammed behind her.
“Goodbye,” Acanthus said, in the same flat, uninvolved voice, and looked at me. “Will you get my pen, dear?”
There was no warmth in the endearment. I bent over and retrieved the pen. “What are you writing?”
She smiled. It was a strange kind of expression—secretive, cynical, delighted all at once. “A history,” she said.
“What language is that?”
She said nothing. Just kept smiling. On impulse, I took out my cell phone and snapped a pic, and when I did, that smile vanished. What was left didn’t look . . . happy. “What are you doing?” Her voice had taken on a metallic undertone, and I remembered the unnatural, piercing shriek of her first day at Shady Groves—worse, I heard it, like it was happening all over again. There was something in it that wouldn’t go away. I managed to hold my reaction to a flinch.
“I just wanted to see if I could find out what language it is,” I said. “It’s beautiful. You must have learned it somewhere.”
Acanthus said nothing to that, but watched me for another long moment, then picked up her pen and began another page. Line after line flowed, seamless and utterly unknown.
I got on Google and did a reverse image search, and boom. There it was. Page after page of the exact same looping, upright, foreign script, only in an ancient faded ink. Some pages in the scans were decorated with those same eerie, unnatural plant illustrations, and no two were the same. There were other pages, even more unsettling, with miniature women swollen with pregnancy, feet in a tub of liquid, arms thrust into strange tubes. Prisoners. The eerie menace of it vibrated off the screen at me.
The Voynich manuscript, the results told me. Written in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Author unknown. Language unknown. Illustrations of plants unknown to science. It existed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in their private collection.
How was that possible? How would Acanthus Porter have come in contact with that manuscript, which had only recently even become available to public view, in such detail that she could reproduce entire pages line by line?
The whole thing gave me the shivers and an intensely bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I took Acanthus to the lunchroom and escaped. She had a table all to herself, since every attempt to sit another patient with her, even the most quiet and oblivious ones, had resulted in agitation (one docile old lady had cried hopelessly for days after), and I left her to manage the meatloaf and pudding on her own while I got some alone time. My duties had narrowed down to just caring for Acanthus; she was a star pupil for Shady Groves, and I was the only caregiver she’d accept. I now slept there, which sucked, but at least I had my own private room and bath, and my salary had more than doubled. Acanthus didn’t require any help during the night, thank God, because even as armored to her as I was now, I couldn’t imagine having to deal with her in the dark. The thought terrified me.
Reading about the Voynich manuscript led me to other strange anomalies. Living in Arkham had always had a dark side; there were rumors all my life of cults, evil books, monsters lurking just beyond our senses. Somehow, things that would seem ridiculous in New York City or Seattle seemed utterly possible here, and it didn’t surprise me to find out that there were people who claimed to know about the Voynich manuscript. One of them was an old professor named Peaslee—Wingate Peaslee II—who was somehow still clinging to an endowed chair at Miskatonic University. He’d written a few papers positing that the Voynich book was a phenomenon related to his grandfather’s case, Professor Nathaniel Peaslee. I couldn’t find much online about that; it seemed like the papers he was talking about were kept under lock and key at Miskatonic, and I’d have to talk to Peaslee to gain access.
Was it really that important?
I didn’t know.
I turned off the light, shut off the computer, and dreamed, very strangely, of cities under the wrong stars, soaring towers winking with odd lights, and shadows moving that did not look in the least human.
And of a black, slender tower, featureless, without windows or doors, like a monster’s clawed finger poking out of the ground. On dreaming of that building, I woke up shaking and cold and clammy, and it took me the rest of the night to shake the feeling that, as I’d been observing the tower, something inside it had watched me with a long, slow, cold regard.
And it would not forget.
• • •
I took a rare day off and went to see Professor Peaslee. To my surprise, he was an elegant old man, compact and dapper, with silver-fox hair and dark eyes that glowed with intelligence and interest. His office in the dour old Psychology Building of Miskatonic University was near the back, without much of a view, and it was small and packed with books and papers that definitely weren’t there for show.
“Welcome, welcome,” he told me, and shuffled a stack of books off a dusty old armchair, which he pulled across the threadbare Persian carpet to sit across from his desk. As I sat, I noticed row after row of skulls on top of the bookcases—animal skulls, mostly, some I recognized and a few I couldn’t. Perched across from me, directly above Professor Peaslee’s head, sat a human skull, gleaming in the soft morning light.
“Friend of yours?” I asked, nodding at the skull. He turned and looked, then turned back to me. Still had his smile on, but it had gone brittle at the edges.
“My grandfather’s,” he said. “He insisted on a thorough examination of his body, followed by a donation to science. He had certain . . . experiences . . . that he thought might have resulted in abnormalities. We didn’t find anything.”
“And you keep that here?”
Peaslee shrugged. “This was his office. I thought he’d feel most at home here, with his books. Now, Miss Hartman, how can I be of help?”
“I understand you think your grandfather’s papers are somehow related to the Voynich manuscript. I’d like to take a look, if you don’t mind.”
His white eyebrows rose high, and wrinkles folded his forehead, but somehow he didn’t seem all that surprised. “That’s an unusual request. Few these days have any interest in my grandfather. The Voynich book still attracts curiosity seekers, of course, and puzzle addicts. Are you certain you want to investigate this?”
“Why? It’s just a book, isn’t it?”
He sat back, staring at me for a long moment, and then said, “If you don’t mind me saying, Miss Hartman, you have a certain . . . look to you. It’s subtle, a tension around your eyes, the way you hold yourself. I’ve seen it before. It runs in my family, to anyone who ever encountered my grandfather after his . . . collapse, in 1908. I saw that in my own father, who was the only member of the family to stick by Nathaniel’s side in that difficult time. I only met my grandfather once, near the end of his days, but I still vividly remember the . . . the feeling of being in his presence. It leaves a mark. And I see the same mark on you.”
I wanted to tell him the whole story of Acanthus Porter, but I couldn’t. Didn’t dare. I just shrugged and stayed quiet, and he kept observing me for another long moment before he said, “Have you started to dream yet?”
That shocked me into a flinch. “What?”
“The ancient city. The black tower. Trap doors. Shadows moving between the lights.”
He’d just described exactly what I’d dreamed, except for trap doors, and I had the sense that might be the worst thing of all. I wondered how long it had taken him to have the dream, and how often it came back. It scared me to think I’d never be rid of it.
“I’d like to see the papers,” I said again, and with a sigh Wingate Peaslee II stood up and walked to a painting of a particularly unpleasant stretch of Arkham coastline showing a strange iridescence in the water. I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something hiding in those foaming waves, massive and horrifying. Peaslee slid it aside to reveal a quite modern safe. He punched in a code and retrieved a sheaf of yellowing paper from inside.
“Are you sure?” he asked me. “Because once you’ve read these things, you can’t go back. For your safety, Miss Hartman, please. Reconsider.”
I had to know what was wrong with Mrs. Porter. I could never sleep again until I understood. Until I knew what my dream had been about, and how what she did was related to this long-dead professor with his skull staring down on me.
I reached out, took the papers, and began reading the horrible, chilling ramblings of Nathanial Wingate Peaslee. There was no sound in the office other than the turning of the pages. I couldn’t stop. I devoured the cramped, handwritten sentences, speeding faster and faster, and with every page came another shock of recognition.
• • •
It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful . . . My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband.
• • •
I remembered Ken and Darlene Porter abandoning their mother, Ken immediately, Darlene in a horrified rush. I remembered my own reaction to Acanthus, the one that pulsed deep inside me still.
It was the same. Exactly the same.
Peaslee’s story was incredible and obviously the work of someone in the grip of serious delusions—after all, he seriously believed that he’d been possessed by an alien intelligence from across space and time, who’d come to learn of humanity. Who could visit, and had visited, countless species through the universe and the fabric of time, seeking new ones into which they could shift their bodies (granted, a pretty cost-effective form of space travel). Even so, it was the dreams that resonated most strongly with me. The idea that the great city that I’d dreamed in such horrifying detail had been in his mind, too. And with his son, and his grandson.
As if it actually existed. Or had, sometime in the distant past.
The last part of the story, of his discoveries, seemed more impossible than the beginning. I finished, and sat back, thinking. Peaslee watched me with bright eyes that, for an unsettling flash of a moment, reminded me of the way that Acanthus watched me.
“Well?” he asked, with barely concealed eagerness. “Does it shed any light?”
“I still don’t know how it relates to the Voynich manuscript,” I said. In answer, he took one last piece of paper—one he’d held back—and put it on the desk, facing me.
There, on a cream-colored page, marched neat, perfect lines of the exact same script that I’d seen flowing from Acanthus’s pen that morning. And inked in strange, sinuous lines, a drawing of an otherworldly plant that reminded me unsettlingly of a mouth, teeth, and legs that would jitter and scurry to carry it along.
“My grandfather drew many pages like this toward the end of his life,” Peaslee said. “He claimed he couldn’t get the images out of his head, and he hoped that by putting them to paper he’d find relief. I don’t think it worked. When I heard of the Voynich manuscript, imagine my shock to see that some poor unfortunate four hundred years ago suffered from the same obsession . . . the same window locked open in his mind onto madness. My grandfather, an educated and kind man, ended his days raving in Arkham Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane. Toward the end, he was shrieking in a language no one could identify. It was a ghastly affair that scarred my poor father deeply, and I am convinced it cut his own life short.”
He waited for me to tell my story, to blurt out the tale of Acanthus Porter, but I didn’t. I thanked him in barely audible whispers, grabbed my bag, and got the hell out. The Miskatonic halls seemed drenched in shadows so thick I could feel them drag on my skin as I hurried away, toward the dim, cloudy light outside. A breeze blew in from the sea, and I shuddered. It felt damp and clammy and wrong and held a dark, swampy odor I recognized.
I drove back to Acanthus Porter, simply because I didn’t know where else to turn.
• • •
The next few days brought an unexpected flurry of events. First, Mrs. Porter got a visitor—a buttoned-up, sharply dressed lawyer, who had her fill out paperwork without any involvement from me. She dealt with him as sharply as any rational person, and speed-read the documents he put in front of her, legalese and all, before signing with bold slashes of her pen on the last page. I asked what it was about, but she didn’t answer. She asked for more paper, and I watched her draw more unsettling illustrations, and write more obscure, unknown lines of text. When I asked what she was doing, I got a one-word answer.
“Waiting.”
She didn’t have to wait long. Two days later, Ken and Darlene made another appearance. They were shaken and angry, and Ken was clutching a piece of official-looking paper in one hand. He stormed in and found his mother writing, as usual, in the corner of the common room. Like Darlene before him, he came to a sudden halt five feet away, well out of touching distance, and brandished the paper in front of him. “What’s the meaning of this, Mother?”
Acanthus didn’t look up. I suppose Ken didn’t know to be grateful for that. She was carefully inking in details of an illustration of what looked like an astrological symbol, but nothing I recognized. “It’s self-evident,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“It withdraws our power of attorney for you!”
“It does,” she agreed. “I feel it is time for me to take over my own affairs again.”
“But—”
She looked up then, and whatever Ken would have said, it died in his throat, rotted, and turned to dust. There was something wild and alien in Acanthus’s look, something awful I couldn’t even comprehend. “I will require money,” she said. “For what I need to do. So I will take it.”
Darlene, who’d been hiding behind Ken, stepped out and, keeping her gaze averted from her mother, said, “Mama, maybe you should let us handle your finances—”
“You have the papers,” Acanthus said. “Now go away. I don’t need you.”
Darlene flinched, and Ken actually growled somewhere deep in his throat, like a dog hopelessly facing a bear, and then backed away. I realized he didn’t want to turn his back on his mother. Darlene didn’t have such qualms; she turned and hurried out as fast as she could without running.
Acanthus laughed. Or, at least, I think it was a laugh. It didn’t sound amused, or human, but there was a rhythm to it that approximated laughter. The short hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
The laugh cut off abruptly, and her head turned toward me. I didn’t look. I stared hard at the lines of text on the page in front of her, the half-inked drawing.
“You,” she said. “I’ll need you to come with me.”
I swallowed hard and shook my head. “I have a job here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“A million dollars,” she told me. “A million dollars to accompany me. Surely that will be better than this.” She indicated the room of Alzheimer’s patients with a contemptuous jerk of one hand, as if slapping them away. “I need you. Rose.”
It was, I thought, an attempt to sound warm. Human. It failed. But a million dollars . . . I stared at her doubtfully. To someone at my wage rate, a million bucks sounded like miracle money. Life-changing money. If she has it, I thought. I cleared my throat. “I’d have to know you’re serious,” I said. “I have to see the money.”
She gave that awful laugh again, took another piece of paper, and wrote something down—not in the strange, alien script this time. In English. Perfect cursive, old school rounded letters and numbers, like a calligrapher. It gave the phone number of someone named Elliott Lange. “Ask him,” she said. “He will show you.”
I took out my phone and dialed and got an immediate, crisp voice on the other end saying, “Law Offices of Elliott Lange, how many I direct your call?”
“Mr. Lange, please,” I said, and swallowed hard.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Rose Hartman. I’m the . . . attendant to Mrs. Porter.”
While waiting, I switched to the internet and looked up Elliott Lange. He was a high-powered Arkham lawyer specializing in estates and wills, and I recognized his picture. He’d been the man bringing papers to Acanthus to sign.
The one who’d cut her children clean out of the process.
“Lange,” said a clipped, businesslike voice on the other end of the line. “Miss Hartman? Any problems with Mrs. Porter?”
“No, I just—”
Acanthus’s withered hand snatched the phone away from me and put it to her ear. “Tell her how much money I have,” she said, and handed the phone back.
Lange was silent on the other end, then said, “I see. This is irregular.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “She offered me a million dollars. Does she, ah, actually have it?”
“You can safely assume that. She could offer you ten times that without any problem. You’ll forgive me for not being more specific.”
“Of course,” I said. “Look, I don’t want this to look like I’m taking advantage . . . ”
“Put Mrs. Porter on the phone and I’ll verify.” I handed it to the old lady and walked away. She talked for a while, then put the phone down and gestured for me to come back. I picked up and found Lange still on the line. “It’s settled. I’m drawing up papers for her to sign. You’re firewalled from any undue influence charges.”
“No offense, Mr. Lange, but I’ve met her kids.”
“So have I. She’s leaving them everything else, an estate in the hundreds of millions. They’re not going to care. She just wants a million for you, and a million for herself.”
“A million for her? What for?”
“Travel,” he said. “I’ll wire your cash to you tomorrow. Give my assistant your bank information. And Miss Hartman?”
“Yes?”
He hesitated. Up to that point, it had been a brusque, just-the-facts conversation. But his tone was entirely different when he said, “This may be a breach of protocol, but . . . I wouldn’t go with her. Not for any amount of money. You understand?”
I did. I said, “How much cash do you have in the bank? Because if it’s more than five hundred bucks, I don’t think we’re operating from the same starting point on that one. Besides, I know her. I’m with her every day.”
“Point taken. I hope—I hope to hear from you soon.”
That was it. Next thing, his assistant was asking for my bank info, and I gave it, and when I hung up the call, Acanthus Porter was watching me.
She said, “Pack.”
• • •
It was a long flight. Arkham to Boston, Boston to New York, New York to Melbourne. I worried Mrs. Porter wouldn’t be able to cope with the rapid changes, the rush, the security, but I shouldn’t have; she seemed vital, healthy, full of sharp energy. We flew first class, and oddly, the passengers in the row behind and ahead of us requested new accommodations in business class instead of being nearby. Bad dreams, I guessed; my head had been full of them every time I tried to close my eyes. I saw the city, the towers. I saw strange, half-seen creatures floating in the dark skies. I saw huge, bolted trap doors that seemed to strain and bend with pressure from below. I felt the whispering touch of an ancient, utterly incomprehensible darkness that bubbled around me like black oil.
We arrived in Melbourne, and I staggered off the plane sick and weak from proximity to Acanthus Porter. I seriously considered abandoning the old woman and fleeing back to safety, but she didn’t give me the chance; we marched directly to a waiting chauffeur and black car, and from there we were whisked off to another airport, and another smaller, claustrophobic plane. This new plane only held the two of us, plus a silent crew who avoided even looking in our direction. They were so quiet, in fact, that I wondered who they were. One of them made a gesture to Acanthus at one point that was very like a bow.
Strange.
I don’t know how long we traveled, or how far. It became a blur. I lost the will to eat, to sleep, to even try to find a way out and away from her; it was as if she’d somehow harnessed me, and I felt energy draining out of me just from standing in her shadow. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t imagine my old life before her, the other sweet old people I’d cared for, Christophe, Marisela, all my other friends who’d just . . . disappeared. I had a family, somewhere, who must have been thinking of me—a mother, a father, two sisters. Hadn’t talked to them in a year, now.
I couldn’t remember their faces. All I could see was shadows, and all I could feel was that awful, soul-sucking wind that had brought Acanthus Porter—or what walked inside her—into this world.
I wondered if it had taken part of me away at the same time.
We finally arrived at our destination. By that time, we were traveling in a sturdy, large desert vehicle, something almost military in size, and when we exited we were in the sandy wastes of Western Australia, away from the coast and into the Outback. To call it desolate would bean understatement; it was one of the harshest places on earth, and my Arkham-adapted skin cooked in the first moments of being under that staring, hostile sun. Even the hat some kind soldier-type gave me didn’t help. I felt dazed from the jet lag and lack of food and sleep. I didn’t know why I was here.
Acanthus Porter knew.
I struggled along with her, a caregiver for someone who needed no help at all, and the million dollars I’d traded for my soul seemed far, far away. Useless. Lost. There was nothing here, and whatever was coming next would be worse. No amount of money was worth this, because I realized with a dreadful certainty I was never, ever going back.
It was night when we finally staggered to a halt in a place that seemed no different from the others—windswept and empty—until I realized that what I’d taken for a boulder was actually wind-eroded stone block. It still had some kind of script incised into it, something that looked almost notational, like the strange symbols they use for higher mathematics. I wanted to touch it, but I was afraid to. There was energy in that stone, and I was so horribly, mortally weary.
I was staring at the stone, and realizing there were more stones, many more, scattered around us, when several people came out of the swirling sand and darkness to gather with us in the middle. A young man of around twenty who seemed of South American ancestry. A middle-aged Chinese woman with a younger man in tow. An older African man who had the muscular, wiry build of a runner.
Those four, and the two of us.
“You didn’t bring what you promised,” Acanthus said, and pointed to the South American and the African men. “Why not?”
“I lost them,” the South American said, and shrugged. “They saw.”
“When?”
“Years back. They saw the glory to come, but they could not understand when. The instructions were imprecise. I did not understand the time of this place. I lost them fifty years ago. They sacrificed too early, and too far away.”
Acanthus looked at the African. “And you?”
“Mine is gone as well,” he said. “But longer ago. He did not understand what was meant by Taman Shud. At least he was here on these lands, where he could be heard. He echoes.”
“He echoes,” said the others, in unison, except for the poor Chinese man, as frightened and out of place as me. Echoes. This place did echo, horribly, as if it existed all around me, these fallen stones rising into solid structures, and the shadows of black towers piercing even higher toward the stars. Echoes. This place vibrated with a horrible dark energy, and I remembered the scream from Acanthus’s mouth, the rending metal shriek, the trap door bulging in the depths under pressure, the shadows on the stars.
• • •
Shadows licking over my skin.
I felt sick, thirsty, hungry, disoriented. Taman Shud. I knew those words. I saw them. I saw . . . I saw . . .
I saw two men on a hillside far, far from here, in thick trench coats buttoned tight in the blazing sun, fitting lead masks over their eyes. They were reading instructions in a language I couldn’t understand, yet I knew what it meant . . . “16:30 be at the specified location. 18:30 ingest capsules, after the effect protect metals await signal mask.”
It made no sense. I saw them check watches. Take some strange capsules with the air of ceremony. Lift their faces to the blazing sky.
Fall to the ground and stretch themselves out as if they slept.
I watched them die.
And then I was somewhere else, in a nauseating spiral of movement, on a beach, with a man in an old-fashioned suit who took a capsule from a pocket, raised his face to the night sky, and swallowed the medication down. He stood with his neck craned at a completely unnatural angle, and he changed words and numbers under his breath, and then suddenly said, “Taman Shud,” and sat down against the seawall, as if he’d become tired. He looked at rest there, legs crossed, arms at his sides.
He died staring at the sky.
None of it made sense. None of it.
I realized, with a jolt, that the Chinese man was trying to run away now. He fell over a hidden stone block, and in a strange burst of moonlight I saw the stone was black, black, and I knew without being told that it had fallen from that eerie, awful black tower that had stood here hundreds of thousands of years ago, that stood here now, in shadows, in whispers, and he screamed as if he was being consumed, and he was, he was, I saw it eat him. But not his body.
I saw it eat his soul. I saw the oily blackness slide over his eyes, and then he was dead.
The other four nodded in unison: young, old, from four corners of the earth. All somehow not themselves.
And then they all turned to me.
No. No, I had a million dollars. I was going to go home. I was going to change my life. I was going to be . . . I was going to be . . .
I fell through a black hole, into Hell, and my last sight was of the four of them lifting up their hands, but they weren’t hands, the shadows behind them were different, awful, wrong, and Acanthus smiled, and I saw nothing there but darkness.
I grabbed for a handhold in the black, and felt rock slip through my fingers. I tried again as I plummeted down, and down, and finally my fingers caught something. It broke free, but my fall slowed, and the next grip I caught and held. I hung there, suspended, gasping, desperate. There was light here, but . . . a dark kind of light, like the glow from something rotting in a grave. The stench was overwhelming: that swampy odor I’d sensed constantly from Acanthus. I felt that wind again, pushing at me, sucking at me, hot and cold at once, and clammy as the skin of a corpse.
Taman Shud, it whispered, and I saw the strange, reaching tendrils of the plants from the Voynich manuscript, and the ones that had grown obscenely from the tip of Acanthus’s pen.
Something touched my legs. Slithered around them.
Pulled.
I fell, screaming, and when I landed, I hit hard on a rocky floor that was strangely flat. Blocks. I felt around and touched carvings that burned my skin, leached into me like poison, and I screamed and crawled away toward a half-seen light. The only light I knew.
Rose, something whispered down there. You are Rose. But that wasn’t me saying it. Something else.
The time is here. It is time.
I lurched to my feet and ran before it could touch me again. Whatever Acanthus was, she was better than what dwelled down here. I needed to go up.
I burst into a room, and the light hit me like a fist, driving me to my knees. It blazed up in a column of cold blue, and lit up tilted spires and columns, broken arches like the fantastic skull of an ancient beast. It was massive, on a scale like nothing I understood, and yet there were shelves, shelves with metal boxes. Each shelf was as tall as I, each box almost half my size. One had fallen at my feet, and when I reached down to move it I found it was light, wrongly light. There were knobs on it, and my hands moved without any direction of my own, turning, pushing, pulling in a complex code until the box’s top folded back. Inside were pages coated in some strange oily substance.
Voynich pages, but new and vital, the colors bursting from the pa.per.
I could read them now. It was the history of a world, a long-lost world vanished into dust. A people gone into shadows, who had never been people at all, but something else. They’d observed us. Manipulated us.
Invaded us.
They were gone now, and only a few left. Only a few surviving.
Only four.
I held the pages and listened to the dark around me as it whispered my name. Four of them lived, up on the surface, and four of them held the darkness down here, by giving it sacrifices. Souls to taste and chew until there was nothing left.
There was a darkness at the heart of our world, and it wanted to eat us all.
You are chosen, I heard Acanthus whisper in my ear. It is the last act we can perform, we four of the Great Race of Yith. We survived so long, traveling through bodies. Through time. Here we prisoned the darkness. Here we built our cities. Now you must save your race, Rose.
You must close the door.
There should have been more of us, I realized. The two men dead on a hillside in Brazil in 1966. A man dead in Australia, on a beach, in 1948. The terrified Chinese man who’d died just moments ago.
Four to close the door.
Now, just me. Rose Hartman of Arkham, Massachusetts. I knew this place. I’d read Wingate Peaslee’s horrible account of falling here, of the Great Lost Library of Pnakotus, of the trap doors hiding the end of the world.
They were open.
He’d opened them. He hadn’t meant to do it, but from the moment that Peaslee walked these stones, he’d doomed us all.
I stood up, still holding the Voynich pages, and staggered on. The blue flame followed me, lighting my way, holding shadows back. It flickered and whipped in the wind that tore at me and ripped my clothes, yanked hair from my head, scoured away skin. I kept going.
There was no choice. They’d given me none.
The yawning, gaping hole into chaos lay down a spiral of stone, and I half ran, half rolled down toward it, gasping what air I could and clawing my way the last three feet. The trap door was open. It was a massive thing, a dozen feet across and thick as a battleship’s armor plate. There was no way I could push it shut. It had been blown back on its massive hinges and lay flush to the floor. Even if I’d had a lever, I didn’t have the strength. Four of us together couldn’t have done it.
I threw back my head and screamed, “What do you want me to do?” It was a shout to Acanthus Porter. To God. To the cold and uncaring stars and the moon hovering over the sand, and to anyone, anything who would listen.
They came out of the shadows, then. Shapes, from the corner of my eye—giant conical things, ten feet high, clicking and scraping with strange, chitinous claws but gliding like something from a nightmare. I felt them pouring into me, screaming in a language I could not understand, could not bear. The Great Race, the last memory of them, lost in the shadows of time.
And here. With me.
For the first time, I understood. Acanthus was not the evil; she was the light, a feeble and dying light, trying to talk to a world that could not hear. Did not see the danger beneath.
Would not believe. They’d found the darkness here, on Earth, when they’d come hundreds of thousands of years ago, and they’d locked it away.
I understand. I believe. Like Wingate Peaslee, I had no choice.
The Great Race knew that eventually the trap door would open, and all would be lost. The Great Race—Acanthus’s race—controlled time. And that, suddenly, made a mad kind of sense to me.
And I knew what they wanted. What I had to do. My feeble human strength could never move that trap door and close it. What was open would be open.
Take me to a time when it was still closed, I told them. Take me to the past.
And in a rush, I was falling through a vast, cold space, into the same cavern I stood in a hundred years later, but not the same. The journey made me sick, weak, horribly stretched, but I knew I was right.
The trap door was shut. Bolted, bulging from beneath, but still sealed. I could hear scraping from the opposite side.
It wanted out, that horrible evil.
There was a massive archway towering above me, something like the exposed rib of a dinosaur the size of a city; millions of blocks, each the weight of a car. It had stood all this time, standing watch.
But it was fragile. In my time, a hundred years hence, parts of it had fallen.
Not much time, the Great Race whispered to me. You are fading into history. Your world is fading. We can help you no more.
Every arch has a keystone, a point of weakness. This one was far up, above my head, but I’d always been a good climber, with a practical girl’s knack for heights. I found handholds. Footholds. Climbed. The keystone was already crumbling under the weight of millennia.
I braced my back against the wall and put my feet against it and pushed, pushed, cried out and pushed again.
It slid. Just a little.
I realized that if I continued to push, the arch would crush me as it fell.
No. Not after all this. Don’t make me do this.
But something told me the Great Race had seen this. Knew this. Knew me.
Acanthus’s metallic voice whispered in my ear. Everything dies, she said. Even time. Even us. We can flee no more. We die here too.
I remembered the light going out in the eyes of my patients back in Shady Grove, the slow and bitter slide into the dark. Maybe dying for this was better.
It was damn sure faster.
“I’m dying a millionaire,” I said out loud, in a place that had never heard human speech, and I laughed. It sounded pure. It sounded right.
And I pushed the last crucial inch, and the keystone shattered.
I had time to see the millions of blocks break and fall, clanging and burying the trap door beneath a mountain of inscribed stone, and it was the last block, the very last one, that hurtled down toward me in a killing arc.
The light died, and I died in the dark.
• • •
I awoke.
My limbs felt frail and unfamiliar. My eyes saw colors that made no sense. Sounds blared at me in a confusing, awful spiral.
Some alien creature touched me and chittered, and I thought, no no no, and then I understood. I hadn’t died. This was Acanthus’s last, horrible gift . . . the gift of life. She’d pushed me forward, through time, into another body.
I looked down at myself, and screamed. My body was a vast chitinous mass of sharp joined legs and the thorax of an insect, armor as black and iridescent as spilled, dirty oil. I saw in brilliant opal fragments from a hundred eyes just how monstrous I really was.
And as I screamed, I knew where I was—in a place of care, with strange, chitinous creatures who stroked me with insectile palps and tried to comfort me as I struggled for control of an alien body. A nursing home of monsters.
My new world.
The Great Race was gone. I was the last. And one day, I would write a manuscript of Earth, of plants long dead, of a people lost to dust. I had saved them, but even rescue doesn’t last. Time destroys all things. And even time dies.
This was the end of my world, the inheritors of the human race. I could see the sun on the horizon through an opening in the burrow where I lay on my back, and the sun burned old and red and feeble.
I was here, at the dying of the light.
And I laughed.