Shadows Out of Time

“Sure you did. I can come through — and I mean this month. Certain it’s genuine, though?”

Most English-speaking collectors doubt there is a Han translation of Nameless Cults. Connie nodded, though, as vehemently as an excited little girl. That was endearing, because Connie Burcham is nobody’s little girl. She’s two inches taller than I, a bit loose-jointed and gangling, but I’ve known her since we were freshmen and there was nothing clumsy about her sprinting or going over hurdles. Her nickname then was Flash.

“I’d bet on it,” she said. “People who’d even know how to forge it are rare, let alone who’d go to the trouble. The pages are woodblock printed, and the paper, the ink, is a hundred years old if it’s yesterday! A scholar named Huang Jing translated it from von Junzt’s German, and a good thing, too, because I can read the Han for you on my head but I can’t even say ‘It’s raining’ in German. Huang learned from a German missionary as a boy, he says. I suppose about 1900.” She touched the hardwood covers. “Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, he called this, his interpretation of Unspeakable Cults. The Book of Awful Clans. There are more copies left of it than of the 1839 German original run, probably a lot more, but hardly anyone in the west knows about it.”

“If Huang was good, and if he translated it straight from the original Dusseldorf edition, the one Gottfried Mülder printed, this could be treasure!”

I was hoping that Huang Jing had added a lot between von Junzt’s chapters, a lot that was only known in China. Friedrich von Junzt had returned from Mongolia a very different man to the one who’d begun that last journey, and he hadn’t survived long. He’d been strangled in a locked tower room in his own ancestral castle. No-one had seen the assassin come or go. It was part of his legend that the marks on his throat had been made by fingers that weren’t human.

Nameless Cults, or Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, had nothing in it about Mongolia or the Plateau of Leng. The German spent the final months of his life penning an account of his last journey at a frenzied rate. His last friend, Alexis Ladeau, was supposedly the only person ever to read it, just after von Junzt was murdered. Having done that, Ladeau burned it and crushed the ashes to powder. Then he cut his own throat.

Aside from Ladeau, only Gottfried Mülder, the Baron von Junzt’s printer, would have been in a position to know anything from von Junzt himself about that final expedition. Mülder wrote that von Junzt had absolutely claimed to him and Ladeau that Leng was a real place, it existed, and he had reached it, seen horrors there of which the Tcho-Tcho tribe and its stomachturning customs was the least, and escaped alive with a number of relics, including rock samples which the printer described in detail — and they were exactly like the ones I’d been testing. The ones that supposedly had come to Miskatonic from a castle near Dusseldorf.

Leng. It’s variously said to be a mythical version of Tibet, a lesser plateau in Qinghai, a remote highland in the southern Gobi, and even a region of the dreamlands! Legends or not, though, if there was an actual place called Leng in the world, and it was the source of those rock samples, it could write an entire new chapter in geological history. Because their content said they were forty-two hundred million years old.

No rocks verifiably that old had ever been found, much less strata. We haven’t even discovered any minerals of that age, except for minute zircon crystals. They’ve been dated by the uranium to lead decay rate. They’re never found in the rocks that originally contained them, though. Those have been eroded, crushed, heated, buried in sediment, incorporated into metamorphic rock, and much else through eons, the microscopic crystals surviving it all. Zircon is tough.

I hadn’t settled it yet. Still, those rocks appeared to be as old as the zircon crystals in them, which would make them primeval past belief, and somehow untouched by the eons. I kept telling myself, as an inoculation against disappointment, that it was most likely a mistake, a false alarm, and I’d have to wait on publication and review.

For that, I’d have to find and prove the samples’ source, which looked like a difficult job. Essential, though. I couldn’t see myself making much headway in the scientific world with a claim that the rocks had been brought from the Far East by a bizarre eccentric of the early nineteenth century, not even a geologist, who said they came from a very likely mythic plateau.

“Roy, don’t look so perplexed,” Connie said, punching my shoulder lightly. “Maybe there’s a way you can learn more. If you’ll open your mind just a bit. Those dreams of yours. Are you still having them?”

“Had another one last night,” I admitted.