Shadows Out of Time

“Hmm,” Tindall said. “Psychometry experiments haven’t been conducted here in a while. Usually, when there are results, they’ve been gained with man-made artefacts that belong to specific people. Objects with intense personal meaning, or close associations with dire events. I remember one youngster in a hypnotic session who held a single-action revolver that a Texan named Reynolds used to suicide in the old days, during a feud. The boy babbled of horrors and monsters in a hidden cave and tried to shoot himself with the pistol. It wasn’t loaded then, naturally. He needed therapy for a time. And Reynolds, the gun’s original owner, evidently dynamited a hidden cave just before he died. Sealed it permanently.”

I’d have sworn there was a certain relish in the way he spoke.

“I’m a bad subject for hypnosis, dean,” I told him. I wasn’t eager for it, either. I trust it about as much as I do polygraph tests, which is to say, not at all. “If there’s anything to these dreams, I seem to have them when I’ve not been sleeping enough and I’m on edge as a result. And when I’ve been handling these rocks a good deal.”

“While I can’t recommend that as a steady habit, I know a lot of students work on coffee and amphetamines,” Tindall said primly. “You have a strong constitution, Orlanski. If the medical staff monitor you during the experiments, as they’d be required to, you shouldn’t be in danger.”

“Thank you, dean,” I said. “That’s reassuring for me.”

Connie’s spontaneity is one of the endearing things about her, but I heard her choke slightly and knew she’d been close to a laughing fit. Good thing she managed to repress it. Tindall didn’t have a sense of humor about his own dignity.

“Show me these rocks,” he said.

He’d seen them before, but I rolled a protective sheet of suede on his desk and spread the samples out. In color they’re a dark red-purple, except two banded gray ones, dense and heavy, with a vitreous gloss. They are essentially basaltic, the crystals in them minute. They cooled close to the surface, not at a great depth like granite. In appearance they could be a kind of porphyry.

They are radioactive too, but nothing to worry about; common granite is radioactive. The rocks of Leng, though, are provably more than four billion years old, the most ancient ever discovered. Just the fact that they survived into the present, still in their primal form, is as fantastic as any of Connie’s speculations about time having spasmed erratically on some occasions during the life of the planet.

While he studied them, I looked at the books on his shelves, some dealing with esoteric physics and multi-dimensional geometry, others with anthropology, some with law and philosophy, and many on varied subjects from the Miskatonic University Press, which was Tindall’s particular darling. They included the Necronomicon in English, translated straight from what had probably been the last eighth-century Arabic copy in the world, an abomination to all Muslims. Our Miskatonic edition of von Junzt’s Nameless Cults was there, too.

“I’ll arrange a psychometry series for…whenever you are ready,” Tindall declared. “I think Raxton will be pleased. I understand that you’re averse to hypnotic sessions, and if you think a couple of sleepless days immersed in the analysis reports on these rocks will prepare you better, we’ll try it on that basis.”

I should have been pleased that he agreed with such alacrity. Somehow, I wasn’t. Somehow, it seemed to me that he looked at Connie and me in the way the owl he so resembled would look at a couple of mice.

III

I’d spent two days with very little rest and no sleep. Besides studying all I had on the rock samples — my own notes, chemical analysis, isotope ratios, examination of thin cross-sections by electron microscope, and for a contrast, the myths and legends of Leng — I’d worked out strenuously in the gym. Then I settled myself on a comfortable bed in the medical center with the light subdued and my body functions monitored, cameras watching me. I made myself breathe deeply, steadily. I was tired but also keyed up. My other dreams had always come when I’d been in that state.

I grasped one of the wine-colored rocks in my hand. The others hung from the bed-frame in mesh drawstring bags on either side of me. Concentrating on the texture and weight of the rock, breathing deeply, I slept at last.

I hadn’t dreamed while actually holding one of those samples before.