A Lonely and Curious Country (33 page)

              “I think I do. What I don’t have a clue about is why you are planning to do such a thing and how on earth you can possibly expect to get away with it.”

              Wasserman smiled. “It is merely the difference between today and tomorrow. Today we are playing by man’s rules, rules that have become highly advantageous to us. Yours is a civilization of advanced decadence. It stands for nothing. It has lost its way. Its only zeal is to make way for those who would destroy it. Theirs are the rights it would protect. Such an invitation we can scarcely decline. It would be ungracious in the extreme. For many decades we have planned to wipe away your people and your civilization. Eighty years ago, as I imagine you know, we had come rather close to executing those plans. A freakish chain of events temporarily derailed our program. Innsmouth, really a kind of a mock-up stage setting, was destroyed. Government bombs and torpedoes did minimal damage to our true home, off the Devil Reef. The fools had no idea how deeply we had built--and lived. But they had been warned. The element of surprise was no longer ours. Not unless we waited. So we did. For a time when we could count on your help to overcome you. And that we will do tomorrow. When reason abdicates to unreason.”

              “Are you planning a terrorist strike of some kind? A bomb? A pathogen? And what have I and my young friend here to do with it?”

              “Professor Oldstone, I am surprised you, as a theologian, would think in such mundane terms. We hope to usher in the apocalypse. Or to break one of the seals of the apocalypse. What we have done here, we have done in several other places in New England, enough to establish our beach head. We will perform the ritual of the Offering of Death and of Life. To open the way, the blood of the vanquished must be shed. But it must be coupled with the birth of new life, life of the kind that will prevail in the new era before us. This is why we have initiated your females, leading them to take the Third Oath of Dagon. By this, they open their wombs to become as many gateways for the advent of Father Dagon. The birth of their young will coincide with your deaths, and the portal will open. Then there shall be vengeance for eighty years ago. An Arkham for an Innsmouth, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You can understand that. I know that you do understand it, for the day you have long feared has come: your white, male, European, rationalistic anthill is about to be ground under the heel of hordes of those you so long oppressed! What you called madness and savagery is about to trample underfoot the castles of your intellect! And your best and brightest will rejoice to see it happen! At least until they, too, are swept away in the same tide, without even time to wonder why. It will be quite a sight! Quite a change! Quite a conflagration, and you yourself shall be the fuse.”

              Oldstone didn’t need the gag. He could think of nothing to say.

6.
Clash of Civilizations

The athletic field was crowded, mostly by Miskatonic students and various Arkham townies, though there were many present from other surrounding communities, including Aylesbury and Ipswich. Most were soon too drunk to know exactly what was going on. Their jovial hosts from the Kanaka Student Union had seen to it that everyone had more than enough to drink, including a potent rum that no one had tasted before. Something from the South Seas. There was a lot of cheering, as if for a sports rally, though there did not appear to be a game of any kind in the offing. By now no one saw anything amiss in that. But there were cheerleaders, the light of the bonfire reflecting off their naked flesh as they gesticulated wildly, yet in practiced steps that would have done a circus contortionist proud. Indeed, the girls appeared practically boneless in their sensuous movements. Neither did they miss a beat in the strange cheers in which they led the crowd. The mass of half-coherent revelers managed to repeat chains of words, or at least syllables, they had never heard and could not understand. But their pronunciation got better and better with each rote repetition.

              The lights of the Women’s Health Center were on and remained on. Two hooded and handcuffed figures were escorted out of the rear of the building and up onto a structure built only hours before. They were taken up into what looked like a press box, only there were no lights or visible windows in it. No one really noticed, though.

              Professor Oldstone and the young Ah-Poh were able to shed their loose hoods by a few violent head shakes. They had been left to wait alone and were so securely bound, no one felt they needed to guard them.

              “This is such infuriating foolishness!” blurted the professor. We’re going to get our throats slit as part of some fool costume party, and then these idiots will see that the only apocalypse that comes is when the police catch up with them!” He cursed a blue streak, while the other remained taciturn. Finally he, too, spoke, but it was with a subdued tone, one more of reverence than of resignation.

              “I am no longer so sure there is nothing to this but fanaticism and superstition, Professor Oldstone. Ever since I saw what I saw in those hospital beds—it is not easy for me to dismiss it as you do, as some unknown science.”

              “Nonsense, my boy! It’s just like that Manson Family business forty years ago when that crazy man thought Armageddon would ensue if he sent some idiots out to stab Sharon Tate to death. Well, you and I are Sharon Tate, don’t you see? And nothing’s going to happen except that we die. Unless you have some plan?” This last he said with a hint of hope that he consciously denied himself. He thought he was merely being sarcastic.

              “Professor, I believe something is starting to happen out there! Listen!” Indeed, strange drummings with intervals of flutes replaced the chanting. The crowd was hushed, itself something of a wonder given the circumstances. Suddenly, hands appeared and ripped away a bedspread that had covered a window looking down on the field. Someone evidently thought the captives should see what was coming. And something was.

              There was a vague image illumined by the bonfire, much like a lowering cloud bank or a wall of smoke. But it appeared more solid than that. It was unstable, seemed to shake as if with a wind, though there was no other evidence of one. All this the two captives saw through the dulling emotional veil of impending execution. But new terror galvanized them when a sudden motion revealed the detail of a scaly and webbed claw. That was enough for Ah-Poh.

              “That’s got to be their Father Dagon, don’t you see that?”

              The door burst open, and here came the roughneck Bacharach, holding a knife that he manifestly could hardly wait to use. His face was of a naturally malevolent caste, but tonight it was transformed by religious ecstasy, that ecstasy in which the foulest deeds of murder look like pious sacrifice. He dragged both men to their feet and shoved them out onto the rickety platform. All eyes below were focused on the bulbous apparition looming above them, trying, probably, to discern some stable outline.

              Apparently their blood had to be shed precisely on schedule, maybe no sooner than the first woman gave birth to her loathsome spawn over in the Women’s Center. So for the moment they had time to breathe. Ah-Poh stared at the thing he called Father Dagon, transfixed.

              “Snap out of it! Don’t be like one of them! At least die in possession of your senses, man!”

              “Perhaps I may do more than that,” answered the sweat-beaded Tcho-tcho. I have not told you that I was raised in the line of the high priesthood of the Sung religion. I incurred great guilt by turning my back on it and taking the path to the West. Still, they paid for my education, and my brother took the priestly office. Perhaps, though, our gods have not turned their backs upon me. Perhaps they may yet listen to the sacred summons that I know as well as my own name and genealogy. And they are no friends of the accursed Dagon. Cover your ears, Professor.”

              That wasn’t possible, the hands of both being tied. But he decided he would oblige the man by trying not to listen. Oldstone figured he could do worse than pray to his own God, and he began with the Lord’s Prayer. Then he came up with some psalms. He reflected, with a nervous inner laugh, that this way, if they did manage to get out of this alive, the credit wouldn’t go to these Burmese gods alone!

              Ah-Poh was reciting the praises of his lords Lloigor and Zhar, how they had in the past bested the enemies of the men of Sung, enslaving the gods of lesser nations. He bade them stir from sleep and come to the rescue. He detailed the blasphemies of the devils Dagon and Hydra, and their spawn. He begged his twin deities not to let their foes triumph this day, for their names’ sake to vindicate this, their priest.

              There was more, but Oldstone was trying not to listen. Still, what he heard had a strange and powerful effect upon him. He began to doze and to dream, but with none of the usual transition. He thought he beheld a clashing of two, no three, vast forms, high above the earth. Occasionally he thought he saw anthropomorphic limbs, sometimes tentacles or crustacean claws. Sometimes it looked as if there were a giant Manta Ray among the combatants. But he felt he was seeing a kind of dream symbolism rather than a real visual representation. Would he see anything at all if he were awake? And like many dreams, it was not clear how long it lasted.

7.
Orientalism

When he awoke, the first thing he noticed was that, thankfully, he was not tied up. Instead, he found himself in a bed in the University infirmary. As soon as a nurse checked on him and found him rousing, she darted back into the hall. In mere moments, here came a hoard of men in suits. For a split second, he feared it was more of the Innsmouth welcoming committee. Instead, it was a collection of campus security, town police, FBI, and Homeland Security Department officers. Oldstone’s was the ease of an innocent conscience, so he welcomed their thronging presence. No different, really, from one of his classes, though usually they were not squeezed into quite so tight a space.

              They had their questions aplenty, but Dr. Oldstone was in no particular position to answer any, beyond the narrow sphere of what had happened to him and to his student. Come to think of it, the young Burmese was nowhere to be seen. “Can anyone tell me what happened to my student, er, Ah-Poh-What’s his name? If anyone got us out of that mess, it was he.”

              The police sergeant replied: “He’s on his way back to Burma. Said he had made a sudden change in career plans.”

              “Oh, I see. Well, he’s certainly good at what he does.”

              “Dr. Oldstone, do you know what happened to the Innsmouth students?”

              “What do you mean? They’re not… dead, are they?” He thought his question might raise dangerous suspicions, but he really had no idea what they meant. What could have happened to the whole
bunch
of them?

              “They’re all gone. Just gone. You’ve been out for two days, Professor, but as near as we can surmise, the lot of Innsmouth students must have cleared out of here on signal for some reason. Funny thing is, they’re gone from all the other regional schools where so many of them had enrolled, too.”

              “But there were plenty of other students at that rally, or party, or whatever it was. Surely they saw something…?”

              “Sorry to say, not a one of them remained conscious through the thing. All hopelessly drunk. On what, I’m sure I don’t know.”

              “I suppose you sent men to Innsmouth. Maybe the students just all went home. Some holiday we didn’t know about?”

              “We did try that. They weren’t there. And, uh, neither was anybody else. The whole place was deserted. We even broke into all the old tenements with windows that had been boarded up for decades. I don’t care to tell you what we found there. There’s still a special investigation pending. But none of these students, that’s for sure.”

              Professor Oldstone was actually asking himself whether these young men had been… vaporized or something once the Burmese deities had gotten the upper hand. But that must have been an hallucination, mustn’t it? But then, here he was alive.

              “Ah, officers, what about the impregnated women? They were all due at the same time, were they not? Did any of them deliver? The Innsmouth boys were the fathers. No sign of them? No clue from the mothers?”

              The head of campus security took his hat off and rubbed his forehead. “That’s not a pretty detail, I’m afraid. They all aborted, spontaneously. Don’t ask me how. And it gets worse. You may know that most of these young women had previous boyfriends who weren’t exactly pleased when their girlfriends left them to shack up with these balding, bugged-eyed foreigners. Well, let me just say, in the wake of this, they’ve revived the old college sport of goldfish swallowing…”

              “But the girls themselves…?”

              “In shock. No clear memory. One went completely insane.”

***

The next semester started on schedule with no real problems except for the sudden drop in student enrollment. The University missed the extra tuition, but the absence of the Innsmouthers made for less tension. No damage at all had come to the campus during the ill-fated Dagon rally. As Professor Oldstone had suspected, it had been a contest between Principalities and Powers on an etheric level. Something he had no theology to explain.