Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (7 page)

“I hate the fact that you leave your bike in the hall where I keep tripping over it,” James said. He returned to his stripping. Ron and Dave took the hint.

♦

Two hours later, he’d cleared the entire wall. The floor was ankle-deep in fragments of soggy wallpaper mixed with powdered plaster. Beneath the strange design, the stone held two short lines of what was presumably writing, though in no script he’d ever seen. Other than that, it and the rest of the wall was bare. The remaining sections of plaster were pitted and cracked. If he’d been interested in decoration, it would have taken a lot of attention to ready it for new wallpaper. In other circumstances the job would have appealed, but his attention was drawn to the strange stone set into the brickwork. It was a dull grey, and smooth, almost silky, to the touch. A fair size too, about three feet tall, two feet wide and, if his estimate of the wall had been accurate, two and a bit feet from front to back.

James looked at the design and the inscription again. He traced some of the lines with his finger, and gasped. The incisions were deep, and their edges sharp – amazingly so, after so many years. He stared for a long time, wrapped up in the delicious mystery. There was no question of trying to forget about the stone.

He rummaged through what he optimistically referred to as his desk, and found paper and biro. Once he got the ink flowing, he copied the engravings as accurately as he could. He paid particular attention to the writing, if that was what it was. He made notes of the number of different characters, and which ones occurred more than once. There were no gaps to suggest breaks between words – wasn’t that a trick cryptographers used to defend against unfriendly decipherment? Perhaps it was some sort of code.

There was another knock on his door. He stood up, folded the paper and stuffed it in his back pocket, then opened the door.

It was Ralph. “Still stripping wallpaper?”

“Just about done. Nothing much to see.”

“No shit. Dave’s done a spag bol. Want some?”

It dawned on James that he was starving. Mel, though wonderful in many ways, watched her figure by pretending that breakfast was a myth. He’d been too busy with his wall to remember lunch. Dave liked to cook, and as long as his housemates slipped him a few quid for ingredients, was happy to rustle up something sustaining from time to time. His spaghetti bolognese was a favourite. It would have provoked a stream of obscenities from Gordon Ramsay, but it stuck to the ribs in a satisfying way.

“Sure,” James said, and was soon stuffing his face. Feeling the need for distraction, he asked Ralph about the previous night’s gig.

“Got thrown out,” Ralph said happily. He launched into a tale of ribald comments, thrown beermats, and a near-confrontation with the posh totty’s even posher boyfriend. “Who’s gay,” Ralph informed everyone.

“If he’s her boyfriend, how can he be gay?” Dave objected.

“They’re both from Surrey,” Ralph said, as if that explained everything. On Planet Ralph, it probably did.

They heard the sound of the front door opening – Sam returning from his monthly visit to his parents. He wandered into the kitchen and said hello. “There’s some spaghetti, if you want it,” Dave told him. He didn’t offer the bolognese. Sam was finicky about meat preparation.

“Thank you, no,” Sam said. “I have already eaten.”

Sam was the quiet one. The one whose parents had been born in Bangladesh, and who had dedicated their lives to launching their son towards a bright future. A law student, he was studious and devout, but wore his faith with quiet dignity. He dressed like any other student, tolerated the booze and the bacon sandwiches, and winced whenever the television showed images of the more militant face of Islam. His actual name was long and complicated, and ‘Sam’ was the first syllable. Only his mother ever used the full version.

“While you’re all here,” James said, so suddenly that he surprised himself, “can any of you make anything of this?” He fished the paper out of his pocket and smoothed it flat on the table.

The others stared at it.

“What is it?” Ron asked.

“That’s what I want to know,” James said.

Ron sighed. “OK, then where did you get it?”

“I found it carved into a wall out Limehouse way,” James improvised. “Hey, I’m an architect. I look at old buildings. And this is old.”

“How old?” asked Dave.

“Hard to say. Stones from old buildings often get re-used in newer ones. This could be medieval, or even older.” The lies came surprisingly easy. His housemates seemed to find them plausible.

“Looks like a seal,” Ron said.

“Or a device,” added Dave. The others looked at him. “You know, ‘A youth who bore, mid snow and ice, a banner with a strange device.’” There was a silence. “Longfellow,” Dave added. James and Ralph exchanged a look. Dave was studying English, and was given to peppering his conversation with quotations from an astonishingly wide-ranging selection of authors, most of whom they’d never heard of. “A device is a heraldic design,” he said, sounding slightly defeated.

“Helpful,” said James. “And what about this underneath. Runes, maybe? C’mon, Ralph, you’re into that Tolkien stuff.”

“It’s not runes,” Ralph said. “Not Tolkien’s, nor the Norse ones his were based on. Not Greek either, nor Arabic.”

“Nor Hebrew,” Dave added. “I had a Jewish mate back home, and his parents made him study Hebrew for his bar-mitzvah. He taught me to write my name.”

“What about you, Sam?” James asked. “Mean anything to you?”

Sam stared at the paper for a long time. “No, friend James,” he said at last. “I do not know what this script means, but I do not like it.”

“Why not? It’s not Bengali or Punjabi or anything?”

“No. I have never seen anything like it. But it troubles me. I do not know why, but it troubles me. It is
haram
. Not holy. I beg you, do not go back to the place where you found it. Please excuse me. I must go and pray.”

Sam really did pray five times a day, but he did so quietly in his room, and the other boys granted him both space and respect.

♦

James escaped to his room, pleading tiredness and disrupted sleep patterns. Rest proved elusive however, and he found himself sitting on the end of his bed, staring at the stone. His phone rang, but he ignored it.

How to approach the mystery?
He could see two lines of attack. The first was the history of his house. As an architecture student with access to the University library, he felt that shouldn’t be too hard to uncover – in the morning, anyway. The other was the writing, if that was what it was.

He logged onto the net, and found a site that listed a surprising number of scripts, both historical and modern. Latin, Greek, Norse, Cyrillic, Arabic, Phoenician, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, various oriental characters, ideograms, pictograms, ancient inscriptions from Africa that defied interpretation. None of them matched the stone in his wall.

“My wall,” he muttered, under his breath. “My stone.” He continued staring at it. He got the strangest feeling that it was staring back, mocking him, defying him to penetrate its mystery. Various solutions – each more fantastical than the last – presented themselves to his whirling imagination. By midnight, he was prepared to believe it was the work of Zillons from the planet Thark.

Desperate for sleep, he lay down on his bed. Each time he closed his eyes however, he felt compelled to open them and gaze at the stone again. That was when he noticed its strangest characteristic that he’d yet discovered. It glowed.

James’s room never grew fully dark. He was not a big fan of curtains, and although Harstow Road was neglected, it did have street lights. So it took him a long time to notice the stone’s faint luminosity. It had been totally undetectable in daylight, and even past midnight, it took James a while to convince himself that he wasn’t imagining things. He closed his curtains, and laid his pillow against the bottom of his door to block any light from the hall. He even turned off his laptop. Then he sat cross-legged in front of the stone.

There was no doubt about it. A very faint bluish glow emanated from the stone. James racked his brains – were there any naturally luminous rocks? He couldn’t remember hearing about any. Unless it was radioactive.

The thought made him leap back in alarm, but he kept his eyes on the stone. Then he noticed the craziest thing of all. The glow, weak as it was, was strongest around the device and the inscription.

“No,” he said aloud. “That’s just too weird. I’m tired and I’m seeing things. I need some sleep.”

Still he sat and stared, however. He just couldn’t take his eyes off the glowing stone. Finally, deep into the small hours, oblivion finally overwhelmed him. With it came troubled dreams. He woke early, unable to remember any details, save that someone had been calling to him from a very long way away.

♦

The University’s head librarian seemed surprised to find James waiting outside when she arrived at eight forty-five the next morning. She looked at him doubtfully, which seemed fair enough, given that he was bleary-eyed and unshaven, and had slept in his clothes.

“Are you all right, young man?” she asked him.

“Er, yes, sorry,” he mumbled. “Bad night. But there’s something I’ve just got to look up. Archives. Historical maps. London Borough of –”

The librarian held up her hand. She did not look unsympathetic. “That’s all very well,” she told him, “but we don’t open to students until half past nine, as you can see.” She gestured at the sign on the door, and James nodded in acknowledgement. Three or four other library staff arrived as she spoke, including the large security guard who’d once caught Ron trying to make an unauthorised withdrawal. “In the meantime,” the head librarian continued, “I suggest you get yourself a cup of coffee.”
And a shower
, her expression seemed to say.

James took her advice, and had a coffee. He also visited a washroom, where he splashed his face with water and regarded his reflection critically. He’d seen worse. He’d felt worse. Then he headed back to the library.

The library was well-stocked with historical maps of London. Whilst they were reluctant to let just anyone get their dirty hands on them, the maps had all been scanned, and were available electronically. James worked backwards through time. Harstow Road had existed in its present form in 1936, which meant it had survived the Blitz. A map from 1912 showed each house individually, including his own, and another from 1880 agreed with it. The street had certainly existed in 1832, as Horstowe, though he couldn’t tell if his house had been built by then. The eighteenth century proved an elusive era, but a plan drawn up in 1667 to document the re-building of London after the Great Fire showed that his district had then been a rural area outside the city.

On a whim, he tried looking further back, and got lucky with a fifteenth-century charter delineating the various farming interests in the area. Right where his house now stood was a forested area called Hobstone Wood.

A frisson ran down his spine. “Stone” was a fairly common place name element in English. Hobstone might be a corruption of Hob’s Town. But what if it really meant Stone in this instance? Especially since the name was attached to a wood, and not a town. Then there was the other element: Hob. An old name for the Devil. Was he reading too much into things, or was he on the verge of something?

He checked his watch, and was amazed to find that it was after three. He stood up, stretching to relieve the cramp in his back and legs. Then he finally noticed the message his stomach had been sending him for some time. Another skipped breakfast, another missed lunch. He recalled there being a cafeteria in the basement of the library, so he headed down there.

♦

James was standing with a loaded tray, looking for a free table, when a voice hailed him.

“Jamie lad, over here.” Angus, flame-haired and bearded, was the rising star of the chess club. He’d once beaten James in sixteen moves despite starting the game without his queen. Prodigious drinker, too. James sat down opposite him.

“Wild night, Friday, eh?”

“What? Oh, yes,” James replied. Angus had been at Paul’s party. It might’ve been him who kicked off the nonsense with the tequila shots. James attacked his cottage pie.

“Did ye get off wi’ Mel, then?”

James stopped in mid-mouthful and grinned.

“Oh aye,” said Angus, sceptically. He was from Bedfordshire, but claimed Scottish nationality on the basis of distant ancestry. His accent was a bit too forced – and had a tendency to vanish when he was excited.

A thought struck James. “You’re doing physics, aren’t you?”

“Aye, ye ken verra well.”

“So could you do me a favour?”

“Mebbe.”

“I need to borrow a Geiger counter.” If that stone
was
radioactive, it would be good to know. Maybe he could sue his landlord for damages and never have to worry about his student loan ever again.

Angus’s eyes were wide with astonishment. “What,” he asked slowly, “would ye be wantin’ wi’ a Geiger counter?”

“Oh, the usual. Plus a five minute crash course on using it.”

“The usual, he says. D’ye think we hand them oot like sweets?”

“No, but you’ve got one? In your department, I mean.”

“Aye...”

“And could you, er, borrow one? In theory?”

“Ye can borrow anything in theory, if naebody sees ye stuff it in yer rucksack.”

“Well, then?”

“Well, what?”

“Can I borrow a Geiger counter?”

Angus had a well-developed sense of mischief. James waited for it to over-ride his good judgment.

“Ach, OK,” Angus said at last, “but it’ll cost ye.”