A Lonely and Curious Country (30 page)

Perhaps before they leave they will cast my consciousness back to my human vessel in old, vanished Arkham, but I think that I do not want that. I will beg, if it is worth anything, to go with them and leave this manuscript for some other traveller to retrieve should there be someone in some age who can contrive to replicate their traversal of time with a machine of his own. Who knows? Perhaps it will find its way back to an age not dissimilar to my own where my words can be read.

***

The tale of the temporal abductee came to its tentative end, but that is not all I have to relate. There is one more thing I must tell you, which is the reason why the Time Traveller held me back me and myself alone to hear his secret. The author of the manuscript who said that he was not sure if his name was real or whether it was some convenient fiction to cover an amalgam of the temporal gleanings of the Great Race was not so confused as he thought. He had a name and that name has cast a shadow across my life, bringing an awful dark enlightenment to me. It will inspire me to take up the reins of scholarship at Miskatonic University and there teach, and to delve into the libraries in search of records of similar cases of which I have already heard rumors. It will lead me to teach and its echo will wake me from my dreams at night relieved to be released from them but ridden with doubt and trembling and it will lead me to drink too, no doubt, so that my days become like a recurring dream, familiar and unfamiliar at once.

I know this because the name on that manuscript was my own.

All revelations have implications. I have learned my strange fate, and with it by my own circuitous route, like the Time Traveller I have learned the fate of humanity too: futility, decadence and extinction. I will work as a scholar to recover, preserve and transmit knowledge, but all the while I will know that will be as if I am shoveling water up a hill, because our mere human institutions will crumble into dust, our dying exhalations will be swept away by the wind and memory of everyone who has ever been will be doused with the last spark of consciousness of one of those barely sentient Eloi of which the Time Traveller told.

Can this fate be changed? Now knowing, can I perhaps to take up some other vocation or perhaps like that writer friend of the Time Traveller, pen warning polemics in the hope of diverting the progress of history towards another, better end? I would have grasped at that thought as hope if I were the man that I had been just one night before, but now the uncertainty of an unmapped future horrifies me too.

I am in a bind and I see only one way out of it. I may be mad, I may be fated to madness, I may be fated to madness because I have convinced myself of it. However, I will follow the path that I see laid out for me into the shadow of determined fate and I will stumble along under the gloom of fate and the haze of dread and drink and be tripped so that I stand upon that beach under the dying sun. There will be the solution to my dilemma.  There I will see what lies beyond the end of the last sentence of that manuscript. These beings of
Yith
have recorded our history and surely they cannot but have judged us by such horrors as this “Auschwitz” – whatever that may be – and I wish to enter a countering plea in the record if I may. The Time Traveller, as we have arranged, will follow me by means of his own machine and together we will meet the Great Race on the everlasting eve of their departure and we will speak to them, we will beg, even. “Do not forget us,” we will ask. “You who live forever take care to remember us and do not let mankind live in vain. Let me continue to be one of the authors of your Litany.”

After that, I do not know what will happen, and I will be free at last of that awful, bloody machine of fate that my future self has, will have seen. Perhaps I shall see a new sun upon another shore. I can only live now with the conviction that this better future
must
be possible.

The Third Oath of Dagon

Robert M. Price

1.
Multi-Culturalism

“I tried to reason with the fellow. Just because the Divinity School has adopted an interfaith curriculum doesn’t mean each and every class session has to take that approach. You just cannot approach Christian theology that way if you’re describing its history and development. I don’t know
what
they’re doing over in Systematics these days, though I’m sure we’ll all be obliged to find out at the next faculty meeting.” With that, Professor Oldstone took a listless bite of his sandwich. He had made it himself this morning in his campus apartment, but he had already forgotten what he had put in it and seemed almost indignant tasting it, as if someone else had failed to get his lunch order straight. In reality, it was something else, much else, that he found distasteful. And it left him feeling quite full, for he had had it “up to here.” His lunch partner, a younger man, Simmons from Pastoral Counseling, tried to smooth the older man’s ruffled feathers.

              “Ben,” he said, “I know I haven’t been here nearly as long as you have, so I haven’t seen such drastic changes over the long haul, but the student might have a point. Many scholars would agree with him that Christian history has a pretty dark side lying beneath its progress. Its triumphs have been made at the expense of other faiths. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Our own state…”

              “You mean Commonwealth.”

              “Uh, yes, Commonwealth. Anyway, it’s seen more than a little repression, even persecution, of rival faiths in its short history.”

              “Paul, I’m guessing you aren’t thinking of the Indians, or the Quakers.”

              “You’re right, Ben, I’m talking about 1928.”

              “Everybody’s talking about 1928 these days, it seems.” In fact, the campus of Miskatonic University was locked in perpetual tension, up to and including legal and governmental actions back and forth, all relating to the events of eight full decades earlier. For all that time, all parties had been content, some said forced, to maintain a discrete silence. Everyone had his own version of the events of those far-off days, some speaking of them as if they were but yesterday’s news, and in general no one could quite agree on what had happened, nor who was at fault. It appeared, as far as the newspapers knew, that the federal government had launched a full-scale naval attack on the coastal town of Innsmouth in Essex County. The effects of the attack had been felt more broadly, with some damage to property, in adjacent Newburyport and Ipswich, but swift assurances, not without threatenings, from the government agents had served to choke off further inquiry. Sleeping dogs lay until 2003, during the aftermath of the 2001 al-Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in New York (“that Babylonish burg” as Professor Benjamin Oldstone always called it). Old suspicions had led the local arm of the newly formed Homeland Security Department to cast a squinting eye upon Innsmouth, which had of course rebuilt itself in the interval, repopulated largely by the same stock of Polynesian islanders with whom the native Yankees had long ago intermarried, eventually sacrificing their Caucasian identity. As conspicuous foreigners, complete with an alien religion, and with an inherited tendency to keep to themselves—and especially when one recalled the destruction of 1928—they had begun to look newly suspicious to their fellow New Englanders.

              The people of the shadowed town protested at what they considered unmotivated government surveillance, even profiling. And as far as terrorism was concerned, no one could prove that the Innsmouth townspeople of eighty years previously had ever been inclined to it. After all, it was the U.S. government, not the Innsmouth population, who unleashed terrible weapons of mass destruction offshore. The real historical parallel, urged the eager lawyers representing the aggrieved immigrant town, was the case of the abused American Indians of the nineteenth century. That and the internment camps for innocent Japanese citizens during World War Two.

              Massachusetts public opinion was divided, and the issue dominated discussion both among pundits and pub dwellers. The notoriously liberal Commonwealth government, sovereign within its territory, had acted unilaterally to appease the complaining ethnic minority, offering what some regarded as a token gesture of opening up college admissions, with accompanying financial aid, to Innsmouth youth. It was easy to extend the policy even to private institutions by manipulation of tax laws and their application to these latter schools. Innsmouth freshmen, hitherto present only in tiny numbers even in the town’s own junior college and adjacent Aylesbury State College, began to make their surprisingly voluminous presence known at Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, and Amherst, with the largest single concentration, surprisingly to some but not to others, on the maple-shaded campus of Miskatonic University in the sleepy town of Arkham.

              Miskatonic’s student body was very liberal, very open and accepting, especially of a new victim population. No one objected to the new Kanaka Student Union, nor to the hiring of a chaplain representing the obscure faith of most of the Innsmouth students, the Order of Dagon, though some complained this ought to be classified more as a Masonic Lodge than a religious denomination.

              One of those who made this protest was, of course, Professor Oldstone, the senior professor of Historical Theology in the Divinity School of Miskatonic, a private university whose sponsorship by the Congregational Church (long since merged into the ultra-Modernist United Church of Christ) had been nearly forgotten. But not by Professor Oldstone. While he was perforce tolerant of whatever cultural mutations might manifest on the University campus as a whole, he became quickly and fiercely defensive whenever the invisible wall between the rest of the institution and the Divinity School threatened to be breached. He raised an eyebrow but no protest when the school authorities allowed a group of students to form a Wicca coven on campus and even to gather in their circles on nights of the full moon in the quadrangle. Such things, he thought, taking his long view of school history, would one day be seen as childish embarrassments dismissed with a pained laugh by succeeding generations of alumni.

              Oldstone had not expected to find many of the Melanesian-derived students of Innsmouth in his classes, especially in view of their attachment to the Order of Dagon, which was apparently the sole religious allegiance available in their decaying town. What interest could they have in the Christian ministry, even as flexible as that profession had in recent years become? The professor would have welcomed Asian students. Over many years he had come to enjoy very greatly the many foreign students who came to Miskatonic’s Divinity School as the fruits of overseas missions. They were invariably zealously pious and intellectually keen. Laotians, Ugandans, wherever they hailed from, they always added spice to class discussions. But this was quite different. Dr. Oldstone found his head spinning when, just before the new Innsmouth controversy, back in 1997, the Governing Board of the Divinity School had transformed the character of the school by declaring it an interfaith institution, welcoming not merely the whole smorgasbord of Protestant denominations, but the full panoply of “biblical” faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for starters, then, some years down the line, Buddhism and Hinduism, too. It was a matter of redesigning the curriculum and the library holdings and, of course, hiring new faculty trained in these other faiths when time came to replace the older generation of instructors. The septuagenarian Oldstone was the very last of the old guard, though he now numbered as “veteran” colleagues a handful who had joined the faculty only a decade before. There was as yet no “Dagonite” professor, but Oldstone felt confident there would be one, probably one of the very students he now had in class, before many years had passed.

              “You see, Ben, the 1928 government raid can very naturally be considered just the latest round of an age-old conflict between the Israelite and Philistine faiths, the same old conflict we read about in the Book of Judges and First and Second Samuel.”

              “You use too many words, my young friend. You may just call it the old conflict between good and evil, God and Satan.”

              The younger man’s eyes darted around, alert for busybodies, and he reflexively brought his finger to his lips: “Shhhh!”

              Lowering his voice, Professor Simmons continued, “Look, I know it’s not exactly my field, but don’t the latest Old Testament, er, I mean, Hebrew Bible, or First Testament, or whatever they’re calling it now, don’t they say that there never was any exodus from Egypt, that the so-called Israelites were really just one more group of Canaanites? Didn’t they share the same language, the same myths, essentially the same religion? Aren’t you just perpetuating the same old rivalries? Isn’t it our business to make peace between rivals?”

              “That is your calling, Paul, counseling, reconciliation. It’s all to the good. But we can’t whitewash what’s really going on here.”

              “Which is…?”