Shadows Out of Time

“They began when you started handling those rocks, analyzing them. I think you should consult the team that did those psychometry experiments here. See what sort of results you get holding those rocks while under hypnosis.”

“Connie, I’m a bad subject for hypnosis, the worst. I’ve about as much psychic sensitivity as one of those rocks myself! And psychometry — it’s never been confirmed that there is such a thing, no offence.”

“The experiments weren’t conclusive, I know. They never are. But a couple showed results, and it has been known to happen in history. That tenth-century Irish monk who wrote the Nemedian Chronicles did it after a series of visions at Saint Brigid’s shrine outside Cologne, and he had the visions while he was gripping a chalice from that prehistoric kingdom of Nemedia in his hands!”

“Whoa!” I said helplessly. “Don’t go too far into left field, Connie. You mean he believed that chalice came from ancient Nemedia. I know it’s a real tenth-century manuscript, but Prester John’s letter was real too — a real twelfth-century fabrication, that is. Or was it fourteenth?”

“Who cares?” Connie said, a bit nettled. “Doesn’t matter. Psychometry sometimes works. It’s worth a try.”

“It’s a very long shot. Besides, those prehistoric kingdoms were supposed to be destroyed in a cataclysm that changed the whole face of the earth, Connie, and that just couldn’t be. Not so recently.”

“Just remember who discovered the Nemedian Chronicles when they’d been forgotten for centuries. It was von Junzt, poking around in one of the Gaelic monasteries Irish monks founded on the continent, as a young man! It made his name. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t any trifler. He traveled everywhere except South America and Antarctica, and met everybody from the brothers Grimm to Marie Laveau and Lobachevsky. Von Junzt took the Chronicles seriously, Roy.”

I came close to saying that in the nineteenth century they’d taken phrenology seriously, too. I bit the words back. Connie’s a beautiful person, we’d been lovers when we were first at Miskatonic, she’s a good friend, and she’d cried on my shoulder the time a sorry specimen of jerkdom hurt her badly.

Just the same…

I said cautiously, “He was quite a fellow, yes. But I do know my own field, Connie. Here’s just one thing. I’ve read the Chronicles. They say the whole of West Africa was heaved up from the bottom of the sea at the time! West African rocks are basically Pre-Cambrian. There’s no possible way they could’ve been installed where they are just twenty thousand years ago.”

Crustal convulsions like that would have darkened the sky for a hundred years, probably made the atmosphere unbreathable and wiped out the higher forms of life, besides.

Connie bristled.

“Thank you so damn much for mansplaining that to me. I appreciate it. Especially after I found the Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ for you, and am going to read it for you too, you illiterate! It’s not as if I have my own work to do!”

“Connie, I appreciate that! I’m grateful. I owe you. But I can’t back down—”

“No. You certainly can’t. Just sit and listen a minute, Orlanski, because I’m about to go from left field to total craziness. Okay?”

“All right,” I said resignedly.

“I know all that,” she said, a bit red in the face. Ire, not embarrassment. “I knew it in high school, for God’s sake. But I think a little deeper than just physical facts! If a cataclysm like that actually happened, it couldn’t have been merely physical. Geological. But suppose there were dislocations in time as well as upheavals in the crust? Gigantic ones? A decade stretched into millions of years, for instance, where West Africa was concerned? Even hundreds of millions? Something like it east and south of Wallace’s Line, too, accounting for the fauna and rock formations there? Leng might have changed geologically a lot less than other regions did. If that’s rubbish, it leaves you still trying to explain those rocks and figure out where von Junzt got them, doesn’t it?”

She had me there. “Yes, it does.”