Shadows Out of Time

I lay shaking a little in my bed, because that was not the first of these dreams I’d had since I started working with those rock samples the Geology Department had obtained from an odd source in Germany. They had lain neglected among others in a store room until I happened to find them and wonder if they were really just a purplish variety of basalt. They felt mighty dense in my hand for that.

Tests, comprehensive ones, had since borne that out.

I put myself in order and left the small house I rented, one of the old gambrel-roofed places that characterize Arkham, though like a lot of others, it was restored for the tourists and given modern wiring and plumbing. Arkham used to be a haunted backwater, in spite of the university’s prestige, and these days the university is still a mainstay, but tourism has become another. To keep Arkham quaint, the modern apartment blocks mostly stand at the other end of town with the shopping mall. I wouldn’t mind a modern apartment myself, only I can’t afford one, and at least that house in Lich Street stands in easy walking distance of the campus.

A crowded tour bus drove past me, down Parsonage, its next stop Keziah Mason’s witch house. It’s not the original; that collapsed in a gale nearly ninety years ago, and when the wreckage was cleared away some awful discoveries were made. Some bad things happened, too, in the house that was built on the site, and it caught fire in the ’seventies. Later they built a kitsch reproduction of the Mason house and turned it into a museum. There are waxworks of Keziah and Brown Jankin, and poor Walter Gilman’s fate is described by the guides with relish, as are Keziah’s child-murders.

I’ve never visited it. But Miskatonic still has that alien image Gilman gave the university, and that other, larger one of bluish stone they discovered in the collapsed witch house. They’re made of substances more interesting, and baffling, to a geologist than any amount of sick folklore.

I thought about my dream as I walked. It wasn’t hard to explain, of course. My field is the continent building processes, geochronology in particular, and I’d been working hard on a paper to do with weird anomalies in a region between Tibet, Inner Mongolia and the Great Wall. There’s a part of it, apparently a plateau, that doesn’t show up well even on EarthWatch satellite scans, and the Chinese government is blandly unforthcoming about it, though there doesn’t seem to be anything like missile sites there. Very little of any kind was there, that I knew about. The rock samples I’d been analyzing might have come from that area, and been taken to Europe in the late 1830s by a much travelled and peculiar German scholar, but that was indefinite too.

The milieu of my dreams was plainly Earth before there was a drop of liquid water on its surface, or a molecule of free oxygen in its air, the very subject of my paper. Only a creature of living mineral could have survived in it, and how it would obtain energy to sustain its great bulk I did not know. From the furnace heat all around it? From radioactivity, even? Four billion years ago, or more, the isotopes of uranium were more plentiful in the crust. There was nearly twice as much U-238 alone, and the others have much shorter half-lives.

Then I wondered why I was even speculating about the life processes of an impossible monster in my dreams. Of course I’d had several dreams like that. I’d been working hard, perhaps too hard, and going without sleep. You don’t produce good results that way.

Reaching the university, I walked past the engineering building and the athletic fields, then across the Twisted Quad to the library. I didn’t expect Connie to be there yet. She’s smart as can be, but not too well organized, and in our student days she’d come to lectures late, disheveled and apologetic. Maybe I shouldn’t call her disorganized. She turned in her assignments on time. I sweated like hell over mine and always worried that I’d have to ask for extensions, which I hate being reduced to. I’m thorough, and haven’t a bad brain, but it doesn’t work quickly.

Connie was there, as it happened, waiting for me. Her field is Chinese languages, history and myth, the obscure ones especially. She had a dozen old books in front of her on the long table’s green leather surface, spread out under the light of a bronze reading lamp. The folder containing my geological notes, that I’d given her, lay at her elbow. She was frowning over a massive volume with Chinese characters marching down the pages. The covers were some kind of hardwood with strongly grained patterns of yellow and purple.

“Roy!” she exclaimed, seeing me. “This is great! I have it, that book I was talking about. Mister Yu found it for me. It came from Los Angeles yesterday.”

That was terrific. I said so, but added with trepidation, “What did it cost?”

“Don’t worry. He was reasonable about the money if I’d become his number four concubine. I said number one and it’s a deal.”