Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (22 page)

The hand which took Desmond’s papers and punched cards was not that of an old man’s. It was big and swollen, white, smooth-skinned. The fingernails were dirty.

“The Roderick Desmond, I assume.”

The voice was rasping, not at all an old man’s cracked quavering.

“Ah, you know me?”

“Of you, yes. I’ve read some of your novels of the occult. And ten years ago I rejected your request for xeroxes of certain parts of
the
book.”

The name tag on the worn tweed jacket said: R. Layamon, COTOAAHD. So this was the chairman of the Committee of the Occult Arts and History Department.

“Your paper on the non-Arabic origin of al-Hazred’s name was a brilliant piece of linguistic research. I knew that the name wasn’t Arabic or even Semitic in origin, but I confess that I didn’t know the century in which the word was dropped from the Arabian language. Your exposition of how it was retained only in connection with the Yemenite, al-Hazred, and that its original meaning was not
mad
but
one-who-sees-what-shouldn’t-be-seen
was quite correct.”

He paused, then said smiling, “Did your mother complain when she was forced to accompany you to Yemen?”

Desmond said, “No-n-n-o-body forced her.”

He took a deep breath and said, “But how did you know she...?”

“I’ve read some biographical accounts of you.”

Layamon chuckled. It sounded like nails being shifted in a barrel. “Your paper on al-Hazred and the knowledge you display in your novels are the main reasons why you’re being admitted to this department despite your sixty years.”

He signed the forms and handed the card back to Desmond. “Take this to the cashier’s office. Oh, yes, your family is a remarkably long-lived one, isn’t it? Your father died accidentally, but his father lived to be one hundred and two. Your mother is eighty, but she should live to be over a hundred. And you, you could have forty more years of life as
you’ve known it.”

Desmond was enraged but not so much that he dared let himself show it. The gray air became black, and the old man’s face shone in it. It floated toward him, expanded, and suddenly Desmond was inside the gray wrinkles. It was not a pleasant place.

The tiny figures on a dimly haloed horizon danced, then faded, and he fell through a bellowing blackness. The air was gray again, and he was leaning forward, clenching the edge of the table.

“Mr. Desmond, do you have these attacks often?”

Desmond released his grip and straightened. “Too much excitement, I suppose. No, I’ve never had an attack, not now or ever.”

The old man chuckled. “Yes, it must be emotional stress. Perhaps you’ll find the means for relieving that stress here.”

Desmond turned and walked away. Until he left the building, he saw only blurred figures and signs. That ancient wizard... how had he known his thoughts so well? Was it simply because he had read the biographical accounts, made a few inquiries, and then surmised a complete picture? Or was there more to it than that?

The sun had gone behind thick sluggish clouds. Past the campus, past many trees hiding the houses of the city were the Tamsiqueg hills. According to the long-extinct Indians after whom they were named, they had once been evil giants who’d waged war with the hero Mikatoonis and his magic-making friend, Chegaspat. Chegaspat had been killed, but Mikatoonis had turned the giants into stone with a magical club.

But Cotoaahd, the chief giant, was able to free himself from the spell every few centuries. Sometimes, a sorcerer could loose him. Then Cotoaahd walked abroad for a while before returning to his rocky slumber. In 1724 a house and many trees on the edge of the town had been flattened one stormy night as if colossal feet had stepped upon them. And the broken trees formed a trail which led to the curiously shaped hill known as Cotoaahd.

There was nothing about these stories that couldn’t be explained by the tendency of the Indians, and the superstitious eighteenth-century whites, to legendize natural phenomena. But was it entirely coincidence that the acronym of the committee headed by Layamon duplicated the giant’s name?

Suddenly, he became aware that he was heading for a telephone booth. He looked at his watch and felt panicky. The phone in his dormitory room would be ringing. It would be better to call her from the booth and save the three minutes it would take to walk to the dormitory.

He stopped. No, if he called from the booth, he would only get a busy signal.

“Forty more years of life as
you’ve known it,”
the chairman had said.

Desmond turned. His path was blocked by an enormous youth. He was a head taller than Desmond’s six feet and so fat he looked like a smaller version of a the Santa Claus balloon in Macy’s Christmas-day parade. He wore a dingy sweatshirt on the front of which was the ubiquitous M.U., unpressed pants, and torn tennis shoes. In banana-sized fingers he held a salami sandwich which Gargantua would not have found too small.

Looking at him, Desmond suddenly realized that most of the students here were too thin or too fat.

“Mr. Desmond?”

“Right.”

He shook hands. The fellow’s skin was wet and cold, but the hand exerted a powerful pressure.

“I’m Wendell Trepan. With your knowledge, you’ve heard about my ancestors. The most famous, or infamous, of whom was the Cornish witch, Rachel Trepan.”

“Yes. Rachel of the hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, near Poldhu Bay.”

“I knew you’d know. I’m following the trade of my ancestors, though more cautiously, of course. Anyway, I’m a senior and the chairperson of the rushing committee for the Lam Kha Alif fraternity.”

He paused to bite into the sandwich. Mayonnaise and salami and cheese oozing from his mouth, he said, “You’re invited to the party we’re holding at the house this afternoon.”

The other hand reached into a pocket and brought out a card. Desmond looked at it briefly. “You want me to be a candidate for membership in your frat? I’m pretty old for that sort of thing. I’d feel out of place...”

“Nonsense, Mr. Desmond. We’re a pretty serious bunch. In fact, none of the frats here are like any on other campuses. You should know that. We feel you’d provide stability and, I’ll admit, prestige. You’re pretty well known, you know. Layamon, by the way, is a Lam Kha Alif. He tends to favor students who belong to his frat. He’d deny it, of course, and I’ll deny it if you repeat this. But it’s true.”

“Well, I don’t know. Suppose I did pledge—if I’m invited to, that is—would I have to live in the frat house?”

“Yes. We make no exceptions. Of course, that’s only when you’re a pledge. You can live wherever you want to when you’re an active.”

Trepan smiled, showing the unswallowed bite. “You’re not married, so there’s no problem there.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, Mr. Desmond. It’s just that we don’t pledge married men unless they don’t live with their wives. Married men lose some of their power, you know. Of course, no way do we insist on celibacy. We have some pretty good parties, too. Once a month we hold a big bust in a grove at the foot of Cotoaahd. Most of the women guests there belong to the Ba Ghay Sin sorority. Some of them really go for the older type, if you know what I mean.”

Trepan stepped forward to place his face directly above Desmond’s. “We don’t just have beer, pot, hashish, and sisters. There’re other attractions. Brothers, if you’re so inclined. Some stuff that’s made from a recipe by the Marquis Manuel de Dembron himself. But most of that is kid stuff. There’ll be a goat there, too!”

“A goat? A
black
goat?”

Trepan nodded, and his triple-fold jowls swung. “Yeah. Old Layamon’ll be there to supervise, though he’ll be masked, of course. With him as coach nothing can go wrong. Last Halloween though...”

He paused, then said, “Well, it was something to see.”

Desmond licked dry lips. His heart was thudding like the tom-toms that beat at the ritual of which he had only read but had envisioned many times.

Desmond put the card in his pocket. “At one o’clock?”

“You’re coming? Very good! See you, Mr. Desmond. You won’t regret it.”

Desmond walked past the buildings of the university quadrangle, the most imposing of which was the museum. This was the oldest structure on the campus, the original college. Time had beaten and chipped away at the brick and stone of the others, but the museum seemed to have absorbed time and to be slowly radiating it back just as cement and stone and brick absorbed heat in the sunlight and then gave it back in the darkness. Also, whereas the other structures were covered with vines, perhaps too covered, the museum was naked of plant life. Vines which tried to crawl up its gray-bone-colored stones withered and fell back.

Layamon’s red-stone house was narrow, three stories high, and had a double-peaked roof. Its cover of vines was so thick that it seemed a wonder that the weight didn’t bring it to the ground. The colors of the vines were subtly different from those on the other buildings. Seen at one angle, they looked cyanotic. From another, they were the exact green of the eyes of a Sumatran snake Desmond had seen in a colored plate in a book on herpetology.

It was this venomous reptile which was used by the sorcerers of the Yan tribes to transmit messages and sometimes to kill. The writer had not explained what he meant by “messages.” Desmond had discovered the meaning in another book, which had required him to learn Malay, written in the Arabic script, before he could read it.

He hurried on past the house, which was not something a sightseer would care to look at long, and came to the dormitory. It had been built in 1888 on the site of another building and remodeled in 1938. Its gray paint was peeling. There were several broken windows, over the panes of which cardboard had been nailed. The porch floorboards bent and creaked as he passed over them. The main door was of oak, its paint long gone. The bronze head of a cat, a heavy bronze ring dangling from its mouth, served as a door knocker.

Desmond entered, passed through the main room over the worn carpet, and walked up two flights of bare-board steps. On the gray-white of a wall by the first landing someone had long ago written,
Yog-Sothoth Sucks.
Many attempts had been made to wash it off, but it was evident that only paint could hide this insulting and dangerous sentiment. Yesterday a junior had told him that no one knew who had written it, but the night after it had appeared, a freshman had been found dead, hanging from a hook in a closet.

“The kid had mutilated himself terribly before he committed suicide,” the junior had said. “I wasn’t here then, but I understand that he was a mess. He’d done it with a razor
and
a hot iron. There was blood all over the place, his pecker and balls were on the table, arranged to form a T-cross, you know whose symbol that is, and he’d clawed out plaster on the wall, leaving a big bloody print. It didn’t even look like a human hand had done it.”

“I’m surprised he lived long enough to hang himself,” Desmond had said. “All that loss of blood, you know.”

The junior had guffawed. “You’re kidding, of course!”

It was several seconds before Desmond understood what he meant. Then he’d paled. But later he wondered if the junior wasn’t playing a traditional joke on a green freshman. He didn’t think he’d ask anybody else about it, however. If he had been made a fool of, he wasn’t going to let it happen more than once.

He heard the phone ringing at the end of the long hall. He sighed, and strode down it, passing closed doors. From behind one came a faint tittering. He unlocked his door and closed it behind him. For a long time he stood watching the phone, which went on and on, reminding him, he didn’t know why, of the poem about the Australian swagman who went for a dip in a waterhole. The bunyip, that mysterious and sinister creature of down-under folklore, the dweller in the water, silently and smoothly took care of the swagman. And the tea kettle he’d put on the fire whistled and whistled with no one to hear.

And the phone rang on and on.

The bunyip was on the other end.

Guilt spread through him as quick as a blush.

He walked across the room glimpsing something out of the corner of his eye, something small, dark, and swift that dived under the sagging mildew-odorous bed-couch. He stopped at the small table, reached out to the receiver, touched it, felt its cold throbbing. He snatched his hand back. It was foolish, but it had seemed to him that she would detect his touch and know that he was there.

Snarling, he wheeled and started across the room. He noticed that the hole in the baseboard was open again. The Coke bottle whose butt end he’d jammed into the hole had been pushed out. He stopped and reinserted it and straightened up.

When he was at the foot of the staircase, he could still hear the ringing. But he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t just in his head.

After he’d paid his tuition and eaten at the cafeteria—the food was better than he’d thought it would be—he walked to the ROTC building. It was in better shape than the other structures, probably because the Army was in charge of it. Still, it wasn’t in the condition an inspector would require. And those cannons on caissons in the rear. Were the students really supposed to train with Spanish-American War weapons? And since when was steel subject to verdigris?

The officer in charge was surprised when Desmond asked to be issued his uniform and manuals.

“I don’t know. You realize ROTC is no longer required of freshmen and sophomores?”

Desmond insisted that he wanted to enroll. The officer rubbed his unshaven jaw and blew smoke from a Tijuana Gold panatela. “Hmm. Let me see.”

He consulted a book whose edges seemed to have been nibbled by rats. “Well, what do you know? There’s nothing in the regulations about age. Course, there’s some pages missing. Must be an oversight. Nobody near your age has ever been considered. But... well, if the regulations say nothing about it, then... what the hell! Won’t hurt you, our boys don’t have to go through obstacle courses or anything like that.

“But, jeeze, you’re sixty! Why do you want to sign up?”

Desmond did not tell him that he had been deferred from service in World War II because he was the sole support of his sick mother. Ever since then, he’d felt guilty, but at least here he could do his bit—however minute—for his country.