Shadows Out of Time

The Rocks of Leng KEITH TAYLOR

There is tangible proof — in the form of marginal notes— that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt…

These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise.

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”

I

Wind! A howling tumult that made hurricanes seem like zephyrs, in a landscape of black congealed lava and upthrust crags. Lightning blazed crimson above. Whenever it ceased for a few seconds, I somehow knew I would have been lost in utter darkness if my eyes were human — and also, in that searing environment, my eyes would have boiled and burst in those same few seconds.

But my eyes were not human, and nor was I.

Scaly legs ending in irregular stone-like hoofs rattled on the fuming rocks I traversed. I stalked bipedally, and it felt as though my massive limbs moved slowly, as in old stop-motion special effect — and that, too, was an earthly, human thought, my own thought as Roy Orlanski of Scranton, now chasing tenure at Miskatonic.

I did not know where I was or what I was, now. I knew my bulk was more than elephantine, that I could neither smell nor hear but had other senses, and that my field of sight covered three quarters of a circle. It also extended above me.

The noisome sky, filled with vapour, dust and cinders, rolled apart suddenly as though torn by a cyclone. In the gap I saw the moon. It filled a quarter of the heavens, and glowed a hot pinkish-white, but some of the craters and markings were the ones I knew. Its radiance spilled across the world, bright as a burning mirror. It revealed naked cliffs and headlands, and below them a sea — an ocean — of blood-red pulsing lava that surged to the tidal forces of that monstrous moon. Dark slag formed on its crests and then cracked wide.

Sluggish waves broke against the quaking headlands and threw red spray a mile high. Masses of rock fell into that molten sea, sending up slow, seething splashes. Under my hooves the land tilted, quivered, and I knew it was an island of lighter rock afloat in depthless fury.

Two objects like artificial islands, or vast ships, passed across the glowing face of the moon. One of them descended towards a strange, jagged structure atop a mountain. Somehow I knew that mountain was my own destination.

That was when I woke.

I lay shaking a little in my bed, because that was not the first of these dreams I’d had since I started working with those rock samples the Geology Department had obtained from an odd source in Germany. They had lain neglected among others in a store room until I happened to find them and wonder if they were really just a purplish variety of basalt. They felt mighty dense in my hand for that.

Tests, comprehensive ones, had since borne that out.

I put myself in order and left the small house I rented, one of the old gambrel-roofed places that characterize Arkham, though like a lot of others, it was restored for the tourists and given modern wiring and plumbing. Arkham used to be a haunted backwater, in spite of the university’s prestige, and these days the university is still a mainstay, but tourism has become another. To keep Arkham quaint, the modern apartment blocks mostly stand at the other end of town with the shopping mall. I wouldn’t mind a modern apartment myself, only I can’t afford one, and at least that house in Lich Street stands in easy walking distance of the campus.

A crowded tour bus drove past me, down Parsonage, its next stop Keziah Mason’s witch house. It’s not the original; that collapsed in a gale nearly ninety years ago, and when the wreckage was cleared away some awful discoveries were made. Some bad things happened, too, in the house that was built on the site, and it caught fire in the ’seventies. Later they built a kitsch reproduction of the Mason house and turned it into a museum. There are waxworks of Keziah and Brown Jankin, and poor Walter Gilman’s fate is described by the guides with relish, as are Keziah’s child-murders.

I’ve never visited it. But Miskatonic still has that alien image Gilman gave the university, and that other, larger one of bluish stone they discovered in the collapsed witch house. They’re made of substances more interesting, and baffling, to a geologist than any amount of sick folklore.

I thought about my dream as I walked. It wasn’t hard to explain, of course. My field is the continent building processes, geochronology in particular, and I’d been working hard on a paper to do with weird anomalies in a region between Tibet, Inner Mongolia and the Great Wall. There’s a part of it, apparently a plateau, that doesn’t show up well even on EarthWatch satellite scans, and the Chinese government is blandly unforthcoming about it, though there doesn’t seem to be anything like missile sites there. Very little of any kind was there, that I knew about. The rock samples I’d been analyzing might have come from that area, and been taken to Europe in the late 1830s by a much travelled and peculiar German scholar, but that was indefinite too.

The milieu of my dreams was plainly Earth before there was a drop of liquid water on its surface, or a molecule of free oxygen in its air, the very subject of my paper. Only a creature of living mineral could have survived in it, and how it would obtain energy to sustain its great bulk I did not know. From the furnace heat all around it? From radioactivity, even? Four billion years ago, or more, the isotopes of uranium were more plentiful in the crust. There was nearly twice as much U-238 alone, and the others have much shorter half-lives.

Then I wondered why I was even speculating about the life processes of an impossible monster in my dreams. Of course I’d had several dreams like that. I’d been working hard, perhaps too hard, and going without sleep. You don’t produce good results that way.

Reaching the university, I walked past the engineering building and the athletic fields, then across the Twisted Quad to the library. I didn’t expect Connie to be there yet. She’s smart as can be, but not too well organized, and in our student days she’d come to lectures late, disheveled and apologetic. Maybe I shouldn’t call her disorganized. She turned in her assignments on time. I sweated like hell over mine and always worried that I’d have to ask for extensions, which I hate being reduced to. I’m thorough, and haven’t a bad brain, but it doesn’t work quickly.

Connie was there, as it happened, waiting for me. Her field is Chinese languages, history and myth, the obscure ones especially. She had a dozen old books in front of her on the long table’s green leather surface, spread out under the light of a bronze reading lamp. The folder containing my geological notes, that I’d given her, lay at her elbow. She was frowning over a massive volume with Chinese characters marching down the pages. The covers were some kind of hardwood with strongly grained patterns of yellow and purple.

“Roy!” she exclaimed, seeing me. “This is great! I have it, that book I was talking about. Mister Yu found it for me. It came from Los Angeles yesterday.”

That was terrific. I said so, but added with trepidation, “What did it cost?”

“Don’t worry. He was reasonable about the money if I’d become his number four concubine. I said number one and it’s a deal.”

“Sure you did. I can come through — and I mean this month. Certain it’s genuine, though?”

Most English-speaking collectors doubt there is a Han translation of Nameless Cults. Connie nodded, though, as vehemently as an excited little girl. That was endearing, because Connie Burcham is nobody’s little girl. She’s two inches taller than I, a bit loose-jointed and gangling, but I’ve known her since we were freshmen and there was nothing clumsy about her sprinting or going over hurdles. Her nickname then was Flash.

“I’d bet on it,” she said. “People who’d even know how to forge it are rare, let alone who’d go to the trouble. The pages are woodblock printed, and the paper, the ink, is a hundred years old if it’s yesterday! A scholar named Huang Jing translated it from von Junzt’s German, and a good thing, too, because I can read the Han for you on my head but I can’t even say ‘It’s raining’ in German. Huang learned from a German missionary as a boy, he says. I suppose about 1900.” She touched the hardwood covers. “Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, he called this, his interpretation of Unspeakable Cults. The Book of Awful Clans. There are more copies left of it than of the 1839 German original run, probably a lot more, but hardly anyone in the west knows about it.”

“If Huang was good, and if he translated it straight from the original Dusseldorf edition, the one Gottfried Mülder printed, this could be treasure!”

I was hoping that Huang Jing had added a lot between von Junzt’s chapters, a lot that was only known in China. Friedrich von Junzt had returned from Mongolia a very different man to the one who’d begun that last journey, and he hadn’t survived long. He’d been strangled in a locked tower room in his own ancestral castle. No-one had seen the assassin come or go. It was part of his legend that the marks on his throat had been made by fingers that weren’t human.

Nameless Cults, or Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, had nothing in it about Mongolia or the Plateau of Leng. The German spent the final months of his life penning an account of his last journey at a frenzied rate. His last friend, Alexis Ladeau, was supposedly the only person ever to read it, just after von Junzt was murdered. Having done that, Ladeau burned it and crushed the ashes to powder. Then he cut his own throat.

Aside from Ladeau, only Gottfried Mülder, the Baron von Junzt’s printer, would have been in a position to know anything from von Junzt himself about that final expedition. Mülder wrote that von Junzt had absolutely claimed to him and Ladeau that Leng was a real place, it existed, and he had reached it, seen horrors there of which the Tcho-Tcho tribe and its stomachturning customs was the least, and escaped alive with a number of relics, including rock samples which the printer described in detail — and they were exactly like the ones I’d been testing. The ones that supposedly had come to Miskatonic from a castle near Dusseldorf.

Leng. It’s variously said to be a mythical version of Tibet, a lesser plateau in Qinghai, a remote highland in the southern Gobi, and even a region of the dreamlands! Legends or not, though, if there was an actual place called Leng in the world, and it was the source of those rock samples, it could write an entire new chapter in geological history. Because their content said they were forty-two hundred million years old.

No rocks verifiably that old had ever been found, much less strata. We haven’t even discovered any minerals of that age, except for minute zircon crystals. They’ve been dated by the uranium to lead decay rate. They’re never found in the rocks that originally contained them, though. Those have been eroded, crushed, heated, buried in sediment, incorporated into metamorphic rock, and much else through eons, the microscopic crystals surviving it all. Zircon is tough.

I hadn’t settled it yet. Still, those rocks appeared to be as old as the zircon crystals in them, which would make them primeval past belief, and somehow untouched by the eons. I kept telling myself, as an inoculation against disappointment, that it was most likely a mistake, a false alarm, and I’d have to wait on publication and review.

For that, I’d have to find and prove the samples’ source, which looked like a difficult job. Essential, though. I couldn’t see myself making much headway in the scientific world with a claim that the rocks had been brought from the Far East by a bizarre eccentric of the early nineteenth century, not even a geologist, who said they came from a very likely mythic plateau.

“Roy, don’t look so perplexed,” Connie said, punching my shoulder lightly. “Maybe there’s a way you can learn more. If you’ll open your mind just a bit. Those dreams of yours. Are you still having them?”

“Had another one last night,” I admitted.

“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.”

“Time isn’t just weirder than we know, Roy,” Connie said earnestly. “It’s weirder than we can know. Einstein and relativity only started proving that. It can be slowed down. It can be accelerated too. Maybe in less drastic ways than near lightspeed or the g-field of a neutron star. There are convincing cases of personalities being transferred across time, not all of them human personalities. Experiments have been done right here at Miskatonic. Wingate Peaslee carried them out in the 1950s. He had a strong interest because his own father had been a victim of transferred personality for five years. Wingate was the only one who stood by him; his wife got a divorce. Just about unthinkable in New England before the Great War! It’s a family matter, you know. Wingate’s sister Hannah was my great-grandma. I’ve read Wingate’s record of what his father found and saw in Australia in ’35. You should too. I’m worried about these dreams you’re having, and I think you ought to be careful.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “No, I’m not humoring you, I meant it, Connie. The dreams bother me too. If they happen much more, or get more intense, I’ll stop working with those rock samples.” I didn’t say for how long. “Meanwhile, you know, could you translate some of Huang Jing’s masterpiece?”

II

We worked on it for hours. That Chinese student really had mastered German, it seemed, and his translation of von Junzt’s chapters seemed accurate, which I knew from reading an accurate English version of Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The first one was that shoddy Bridewall effort of 1845, worthless to any real scholar, and the early twentieth century Golden Goblin edition, expurgated to the bone, was merely ornamental. Then it was forgotten for about sixty years. When hippie mysticism came in, though, and pious conventional horror lost a lot of its power, a real, complete translation into English came from Maelstrom Press, first in stiff covers and then in paperback, with Secret Mysteries of Asia for a companion volume. When Connie and I were an item I’d read them both.

Huang Jing’s sections of Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, interspersed with his translations of von Junzt’s chapters, said nothing much about the German’s last journey. What he’d written on that subject came from the Mongols who had accompanied von Junzt to Leng, but deserted him before he arrived there. Pure hearsay, no doubt, which Huang had got third or fourth hand, and decades after everybody involved was dead.

I was disappointed, to be truthful. Huang gave no clue as to where Leng was situated. He even suggested it was part of the dreamlands, a notion I’d read about before, and he stated as fact that the stars of Leng were unlike Earth’s. His more realistic details described Leng as a dry, cold, stony plateau, very difficult of access. He recounted a story that the Qianlong Emperor, in the eighteenth century, filled with the pride of his conquests, had sent an army eight thousand strong to subdue Leng, and fewer than a hundred came back. That was expunged from the imperial records, and it was made a capital crime to repeat the story or set it down in writing.

Connie told me that was possible. The Qianlong Emperor had been quite a book-burner, destroying thousands of volumes, especially ones that said too much about problems with defense, or failed frontier campaigns. A few dozen indiscreet writers in his reign were sentenced to nasty deaths by the Literary Inquisition. Charming.

“Huang was lucky to be born after that emperor died,” I said. “Would it be true that he sent a force to conquer Leng?”

“Can’t confirm it. He might have. The approaches are supposed to be harsh, and of course disease might have destroyed the army. Huang does say here that nobody finds Leng by the same route twice.”

This was no help. Huang also recounted the same legends about Leng I had heard before. It was supposedly the original home of the Tcho-Tcho people, held in disrepute throughout Asia, and Huang described them with the same disdain. According to him they were horrid quasi-humans, squat and powerful in form, their abundant body hair more like stiff black bristles, their mouths grotesquely wide, stretching almost from ear to ear. Their manners and customs were appalling, their closest approach to religion a corpse-eating cult with a winged canine sphinx for its symbol, and they killed strangers on sight, quickly if they were fortunate.

Leng was populated, thinly, by more prepossessing people, who lived in stone villages and traveled only in armed caravans. There was supposed to be at least one city, but that was long abandoned and its history enigmatic. There were ancient burial mounds and strange towers, said to be as deserted as the city. There was a sprawling stone monastery or temple, also without inhabitants, except a high priest who wore robes and mask of yellow silk, and whom it was death to see even hidden in his vestments. Seeing him without them, wrote Huang (and Gottfried Mülder, too) meant a less comfortable fate.

Having got that far, I decided I might as well be reading Sax Rohmer. Yet von Junzt had died mysteriously and badly after his return from Mongolia, terrible things had evidently happened there, no-one ever caught his murderer, and his friend Ladeau had destroyed von Junzt’s last manuscript and then suicided. Any real clues to where Leng can be found were probably crushed ashes with the manuscript. All of this meant dead ends.

I said slowly, “Connie, maybe you’re right and I’ve no way to go now but with psychometry experiments. If they don’t give me a thing, I’m no worse off.”

“Of course you’re not!” she said. Then she pulled a face. In a lot of ways she’s as spontaneous as a kid. “It’ll mean going through Tindall. And a certain amount of butt-kissing.”

Neither of us liked the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He resembled an intensely staring owl. His people were rich, he’d been a force in getting some grants Miskatonic needed badly, and he was a player in the university’s politics. By that I mean he excelled at planting knives in backs. The trustees didn’t quite jump to attention when he spoke, but they certainly didn’t ignore him, and he had a weakness for bizarre projects. Perhaps, then, even though he no more liked me than I did him, he’d approve this one.

Among Tindall’s oddities was an office that would have been bang up-to-date a hundred years ago. His desk, bookcases and filing cabinets were carved black oak, with matching chairs. These had no upholstery and were ugly, wide enough for people with backsides like Percherons, standing on four thick legs. A despot’s interrogators would have approved them for discomfort. Even Tindall could not do without a computer, printer and fax, but he kept them in a broad alcove behind a tawny plush curtain.

His social attitudes were as far behind the times. I think he’d prefer that no-one with a name like Orlanski trod the hallowed precincts of Miskatonic. Believe me, he talked like that, and I’d heard him refer in public speeches to “the charmed circle of New England life”. Polacks should have the grace to stay out, was his meaning, and maybe that’s why he treated Connie with respect. Ancestors of hers fought in what Tindall still calls “King Philip’s War”, and they’ve lived in Massachusetts ever since. That meant a lot to the dean. His own forebears were Providence folk and had been there a long time, but still only since 1750 or so, when they arrived as merchants. (They were Tories during the Revolution, by the way.) Connie’s family can beat that by a full lifetime.

“Ah, Orlanski,” he said as we entered. “Doctor Burcham. Sit down, please.”

I have a doctorate myself, but that was Tindall.

There he sat, behind his broad desk in his own chair, which was as unyielding as the others. As I say, he looked like an owl. His large, round, sharp-sighted hazel eyes and small hooked nose made the impression a strong one. If he’d only had a thick head of hair tufted at the sides the resemblance would have been perfect, but he was stone bald.

“I’ve seen the analyses,” he said, when those damned chairs were digging into our napes and shoulders. “They really are unique. I take it those are the samples, there in that satchel?”

“That’s right, dean.”

“You know findings like that will be challenged? Of course we can defend them. It isn’t just Miskatonic’s high repute and facilities. Places outside our campus have confirmed them, unimpeachable institutions. I never imagined you’d falsify such tests anyway. It’s inconceivable that you’d be so stupid.”

Apparently he thought he was complimenting me. He hadn’t said it was inconceivable I would do something so unethical, you’ll notice. Well, that was Tindall too. I gave him a humble coprophagous smile and thought how fine it would feel to hit him.

Connie said from the side of her mouth, “Lucid and impartial, Roy.”

I kept a grip, and described the difficulty of confirming the samples’ source in China — if it had been that — or Mongolia. Connie took over for a while and suggested that psychometry might give some answers. That wouldn’t impress geologists, but could lead to a specific locale where solid evidence could be obtained.

“Maybe a whole area of rocks like these,” I added. “Crags, bluffs, a range of hills. It’s a lot to hope for. But it’s worth a try. It’d be revolutionary.”

“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.

There was a city of vitreous purple rock in a cavern that gave the impression of being huge — immense — even though I had nothing familiar to give me perspective. It must have been formed by stone flowing like melted wax, and great eruptions of gas bursting through it as it congealed. The buildings lacked roofs, needing none, the walls were massively thick, with pylons and courts leading one into another. I saw friezes cut into the walls. Grotesque, alien, nonhuman, they still conveyed a sense of art and the ceremonial.

A chasm cut harshly across the middle of the cave, dropping a mile or more, with a river of churning red lava at the bottom. I couldn’t judge how wide. The cavern’s roof was lost to sight in the distance above, and somehow I could see above me as well as all around.

There were beings moving about. Stony, made of mineral, they seemed hot enough to be plastic to a degree, and their limbs moved slowly, by increments. They walked on massive legs that ended in rocky, graceless hooves, and except for a number of globular eyes their heads were featureless.

Other beings, segmented and flat, with rows of flipper-like legs, moved in the same jerky way as the bipedal ones, and carried burdens through the weird courts and plazas. Maybe they were the equivalent of domestic animals. I couldn’t conceive how they had ever evolved naturally, out of molten rock and raw radioactive ores, out of primeval flame, and perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps some other race had designed them, formed them, and put them here for unknown reasons. Perhaps they had been left in possession of the planet ages ago, having served their creators’ purpose. Exploration? Geological research? Mining?

I saw one of them approach the burning abyss, step indifferently off the edge, and levitate across. Drifting safely to the secure rock on the other side, it began its stiff, clumsy walking again. They could ignore gravity. Only for short distances, it seemed, or they wouldn’t need legs. Probably they kept that talent for emergencies. Without it, in an environment so elemental, so everlastingly shattered and riven, I could not see how they’d survive a year.

With the vague transition that comes in dreams, I drifted to a far end of the cavern and saw a ship, a spaceship I supposed, bigger than an aircraft carrier, smooth, gleaming and featureless. It glided into a huge stone bay or dock. I boarded it. Looking down, I saw legs of mineral with stony hooves striding stiffly and knew they were mine, just as I knew that my clustered eyes saw all around me as those of my fellows did. I was one of these creatures.

The floor beneath me, when I willed it, became transparent, but I knew it only seemed so; that cunning optical devices in the hull transmitted all the vistas below to the floor on which I was standing. The ship rose smoothly into the sky. The energies that gripped it made no blatant displays like heat or bellowing noise. Receding below us I saw a landscape of stark igneous rock, an island of mountains and crevasses floating in a scarlet magma sea where black crust formed briefly, split and vanished again, on the crests of waves big as mountains. The floating island, large as it was, looked frail as a balsa raft in that context.

This was Earth in the time before its crust set. The time in which the rocks of Leng had formed. Our ship rose through a dreadful, raging sky and did not even quiver in the fiery clouds or winds. It ignored little inconveniences like gravity and inertia, moving through the atmosphere, then beyond it. Through the curving anterior wall, again by willing it, I saw the glowing pink-white moon I had beheld in another dream, only a quarter as far away as the moon Roy Orlanski knew. The dark areas Orlanski’s race misnamed the lunar seas were still forming. An Apollo mission that landed on it in this age — if there could be one — would meet utter destruction at once. This moon was still hot and the tidal forces of Earth worked on it constantly.

Duration altered for me then. Hanging between an Earth that still thundered with the fires of its formation, and a partly molten moon, I began to see both under a terrific acceleration of time. It was like the speeded-up films of plants in a forest battling for the light, but a million times faster. The black slag crust thickened. Lava still burst through in apocalyptic fountains and spreading fiery seas, but it cooled and darkened, the solid state increasing. Incandescent gas erupted into the atmosphere. Clouds thickened. Water eventually condensed, high in the air, began to fall, and hissed back into steam before it came close to the surface.

Finally the naked rock crust cooled enough for water to reach it. In a worldwide pall of steam, hot rain came down at last. It rained for thousands of years. Raw new oceans surged across the land, filling the basins. I kept sight of the mass that had been an island in a sea of seething magma, the island that would one day be Leng. Somehow I knew that. Somehow a weird anomaly of time preserved it from being altered. Tectonic plates ground together, subducted, formed continents and supercontinents, yet that strange highland with a shape that looked, to me, like a swimming platypus seen from above, never changed much and yet could never quite be plainly seen.

Shallow steaming seas covered nearly all the surface. The person, the thing I had seemed to be, with its partly molten rocky body, had vanished, and I seemed to have no physical form now, but to drift like a phantom. In a limitless swamp filled with crawling vapor, I saw a pulsating mass huge as a hill that was alive, and, I supposed, organic, pulpy and gray-white. A hundred million things like itself, but tiny, rolled off its sides like drops of sweat and vanished in the muck. I’m a scientist, and still, the thing was revolting. Had that, wherever it came from, been the source of earthly life based on protein, the first selfreplicating molecules that would be driven by the sun’s energy to more and more complex forms?

If it was, I understood for the first time since I’d been a child why so many people like fairy tales better.

Leng at one time became submerged, stayed deep in green water for ages, and then emerged again. It had accumulated chalk and sand in layers, then lost them to erosion, but its original rock was never reduced to dust, or changed its primal shape, almost as if time was dividing like a river to flow around it. Even when the Asian continent formed around Leng, it only assimilated the plateau, never crushed or transformed it, and Leng’s distinctive shape remained.

I’ve said it made me think of a swimming platypus seen from above. So it did. The body was arched in two-thirds of a circle, the broad duck-bill nearly parallel to the tail, as though the creature was turning sharply in the water, with a small offshoot of the main plateau resembling one web-footed foreleg. That, a remote part of me thought, should be easy to recognize in a satellite photograph — if Leng showed up in such pictures. But that was not certain.

There were glimpses, vistas, of huge occurrences on the globe, like the cities and wars of the Old Ones with star-shaped heads to which I’ve been told the Necronomicon refers, and which the expedition to the Antarctic in the 1930s confirmed. It looked like the Carboniferous Age to me, but that was peripheral to the things I was seeing. Always the central focus was on that strange plateau, maybe a hundred miles from end to end. Even in my dream I wondered how large it would seem if you reached it and had to traverse it.

Leng was not richly forested. Except when it had lain under an ancient sea, it was a highland, drier than most of the planet. The mineral beings that lived there while the surface was still largely molten were gone ages before, their citadels and their bodies inert, frozen rock deep under the plateau. If they survived, they must have gone deeper into the mantle and concentrated stores of the radioactive matter they — I assumed — needed to exist. More probably by far, they had gone where the trilobites went.

The dinosaurs arose and a race of humanoid reptiles, fanged like cobras, appeared. The other dinosaurs vanished or evolved into birds, and the serpent-men flourished, though they retreated into hiding as the mammals arose. Again, I saw them vaguely and fleetingly, and they never inhabited Leng, if the dreamvisions I had were true.

The first intelligent race to enter that dry plateau were the ancestral Tcho-Tcho, and they were as hideous as the tales of them asserted. I saw them survive a cataclysm of the Earth’s crust that, as Connie said, must have occurred in distorted time or nothing would have lived through it, and then a second cataclysm, the one described in the Nemedian Chronicles, leaving the globe’s topography as it is now.

I saw the plateau waver and tremble like a mirage, as though it was shifting between dimensions. Its links with this world appeared to lie in the region east of Tibet, but nothing looked sure. As my vision of it steadied again, I saw tall olive-skinned people who, if the Chronicles were more than the fantasy I’d always thought them, would be Hyrkanians, forging through the gray granite mountain passes on ponies. They wore leather and furs. Their weapons were lances, swords and bows. Pressing upward past the cliffs and gorges that were the natural ramparts of Leng, they came at last to the windy plateau with its ancient, abandoned city, its curious towers and its windowless stone temple, or monastery, standing huge and apart. The new settlers left these alone, maybe after some nasty experiences, and built strong stone villages instead, for defense against the debased Tcho-Tcho. They regarded these as only questionably human. I shouldn’t wonder if there was more to that judgement than ethnocentric arrogance, because I had glimpses of the Tcho-Tcho’s rites and customs, and they were sickening. In the dream I saw one of their gatherings, lit by blue fires in the sky. They were like blazing nebulae such as were never seen in earthly skies. Then, over the feasting, chanting throng, I saw an unnatural thing like a huge winged hyena, or canine sphinx, swoop down and crouch with wings folded, as though presiding. It turned its head towards me and I looked into its face.

That was when I screamed and woke.

I was disoriented for the first few seconds. Then I recognized the faces of Connie and Raxton, the psychic researcher. Beyond them I saw Tindall, and his expression was avid.

“Are you all right?” Connie asked urgently.

“Yes. Yes, I’m all right. Listen, I’ve got to write down everything I can remember from that dream, right away, before I lose it. Let me get to that desk…”

“First let go that rock. Look at your hand.”

I was clutching it so tightly my bones hurt, and while I hadn’t been aware when I awoke, it was hot! Not enough to burn me, but hot enough to notice, and enough to sting. I cursed and opened a hand that felt cramped. The rock had left a pale outline in my palm. My blood didn’t start circulating again at once.

Tindall pounced on the rock, his eyes greedy. Although he tossed it from hand to hand because of its heat, he didn’t relinquish it. Just emerged from a long, intense and harrowing dream (or true vision of the past) I still noticed. Such loss of control on his part was out of character.

“It’s a link,” he muttered. “Contact with Yog-Sothoth.”

In that moment I didn’t pay much attention. Writing down every detail of my dream was more important. I paused long enough to catch Connie’s eye and apologize for my language.

“Roy, you are so nineteenth century sometimes,” she laughed. She tapped her breast-bone with an index finger. “It’s me, Connie, remember?”

Nineteenth century, eh? I wasn’t nearly as much that way as Tindall. The word he’d mentioned didn’t ring any bells with me then. I haven’t studied the Necronomicon and I’m not interested in cults. The way he’d gloated over the rock stayed in my mind, though, lodged like a piece of almond between front teeth. I’d recall that word later.

IV

I’m not a cook. My repertoire is half a dozen dishes I’ve practiced often enough for them to be edible, and a few more that’ll turn out well if I’m lucky, but I don’t have a real cook’s palate or instincts. When I’m trying something new, I work from the recipe and hope for the best.

Connie knows that since long ago. She came around to my place for dinner just the same, in a steel-gray silk pant suit, her brick-red mane tinted auburn, and we ate a meal of spicy pork chops simmered until you could cut them with a fork, irrigated with a lot of wine which I for one needed. Connie knew that too, and she was concerned. She hadn’t told me to be careful just to hear herself talk.

“Don’t do it again, Roy,” she said soberly. “When you saw those Tcho-Tcho rites and that winged hound, it may have been a close call, more than you know. I think you were lucky to wake right then.”

I was fighting the idea that what I had seen was completely real. Fighting it because it frightened me. I said stubbornly, “It could have come from my own brain and nowhere else. That early part of the dream, with the molten earth and nearby moon? I’ve done a paper on how the earth-moon system formed. As for the creatures in the cave — imagination.”

“What about Leng?” she demanded. “All through those aeons you kept seeing Leng, the plateau, not much changed, and I’ll bet you could draw me its outline right now. Wine or no wine. Here, do it.”

She thrust pen and paper into my hands.

“Oh, sure I can,” I said, and did. “Subconscious memory of an oil stain I see in the car park every day, for all I know. If the plateau really exists we ought to be able to find it, and I’ve done a computer search. Starting with Google Earth. What’s nagging at me is the way Tindall reacted. He pounced on that hot rock like an owl on a mouse. He was caught off-guard there, for a breath. He said something like, ‘It’s a link. Contact with—’ I forget with what. Yuth something.”

“A link? Well, duh. Clearly it’s a link, when you’ve been having these dreams, and especially the last one. A link across time and space? Sure he said Yuth, Roy?”

“No. It could have been Yogguth. Isn’t that supposed to be an unknown planet out past the rim of the Solar System — if you’re a cultist?”

“Yuggoth. Some believers think it’s the same as Pluto, but if it is, there’s certainly a lot we don’t know about Pluto yet. Don’t look like that. I believe Yuggoth’s a cult myth myself. I can’t see Tindall putting stock in — oh, dear God Almighty!”

“What?”

“He didn’t say Yuggoth, Roy. He said…Yog-Sothoth! Don’t repeat it! I just mispronounced it on purpose. In the Middle Ages even the darkest heretics wrote it, and I guess said it, as Iog-Sotot. It’s a dangerous name to pronounce the correct way.”

“Isn’t this Yog—”

She placed her hand urgently across my mouth. “Don’t. Say Iog-Sotot if you have to.”

“Iog-Sotot. All right, and I haven’t read the Necronomicon except to skim it, but you can’t attend Miskatonic without having heard about it. Isn’t he one of the gods that mad Yemenite poet wrote about?”

“They aren’t gods, Roy, even though strange old cults around the world worship them. I think it was Arthur Clarke who said, ‘No gods ever imagined by our minds possessed the powers they will command.’ What they are is alien, and not Disney cuties or grotesques, or little nature pixies like E.T. And they are not imaginary, much as I wish. About — Iog-Sotot— there was the Charles Dexter Ward case in Providence, back in the roaring twenties. Ward became much too interested in an ancestor of his who invoked that — entity — and it sent him insane. A unique and awful kind of madness. He vanished from the asylum in the end, nobody ever knew how, and nobody saw him again after he escaped — if that’s what happened.

“That thing, Iog-Sotot, has staggering powers, and it’s said to be congruent with all time and space.” Connie closed her eyes and quoted what I guess was a passage she’d read. “‘Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Iog-Sotot knows the gate. Iog-Sotot is the gate. Iog-Sotot is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Iog-Sotot.’ But it still has limitations. Somehow it’s barred out of this universe, can only reach into it when someone opens the way. Usually, from what I’ve read, those who try, fail, and the result is disastrous. Now if Leng is some sort of dimensional nexus, those ancient rocks von Junzt brought home with him could serve as a link or contact with — something that transcends time.”

“Connie! Tindall’s not a mythic sorcerer. He’s a pompous dick of a university dean who lives in the past.”

“He’s quite a swell in esoteric math and physics even so. Knows more about the structure of space-time than either of us will if we live to be a hundred. Yes, he’s pompous, he over-rates himself, but that could make it worse!” Connie closed a hand on my forearm. She sounded nearly distraught. “I’m guessing he doesn’t know enough, has no idea what he’s meddling with, just thinks he does. He may believe he can learn things using rites from the Necronomiconthat he’d never learn in conventional ways. You saw he had that book in his study, out in the open. People have stopped being horrified by it, these days; they just see it as a curiosity, one more cult grimoire. They put Cthulhu on T-shirts and coffee mugs! But if Tindall opens a portal and lets something through, and that something was IogSotot, we wouldn’t be kissing anything as trivial as our asses goodbye. He has the rocks of Leng to establish contact, or he can get them. I wasn’t worried about it until you told me he mentioned that— entity.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Get those rocks out of his reach! Charter a plane and drop them in the Atlantic, for the best! Until we can do that, get to Tindall’s apartment, now! Talk to him, if it’s not too late. Come on.”

“We can’t drive! We’re both half cut on wine. If we’re pulled over, we won’t get to Tindall’s apartment tonight, no matter what.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Roy! We’ve eaten enough to blot it up, and I’ll stay within the limit. I don’t want to be stopped either. It’s only a few k’s. Are you coming or not?”

“Coming. But I drive. I have more bulk than you.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t share Connie’s desperation — more fool me — but I didn’t want her driving, either. Her car’s a Volvo Electric and I had handled it before. We bowled along Lich Street past the burying ground — which didn’t inspire any bright happy thoughts — and the Baptist Church, towards the modern part of town. Shopping mall, apartment blocks, swimming pool, new train station, it’s all there and all brightly lit. Somehow it didn’t reassure me. The modern end and Old Arkham alike belong to the last hundredth of a second of time, compared with the rocks of Leng.

“Can we get in?” I asked, cursing myself for not thinking of that. “Without letting Tindall know we’ve arrived, I mean?”

“In the front door, yes. Haru lives there. She’ll open up for me.” Connie spoke anxiously. “Maybe nothing is happening. Maybe Tindall is only reading and preparing, but I’m worried that he’s been doing that for quite a while already. It’s funny. These beliefs survived for thousands of years among primitive, isolated groups, like those Inuit professors Webb found worshipping Cthulhu a long way up the coast of Greenland, and still, somehow they have an appeal to crabbed, civilized scholars like Tindall!”

“And people like Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, and Koresh’s bunch. Wasn’t there even a group that carried out human sacrifices ten years ago, thinking it would open a way to some underground world called K’n-yan? Didn’t they all commit suicide when they were exposed and the law showed up to arrest them?”

Connie nodded grimly. “In the Wichita Mountains. I don’t know if K’n-yan is real or not, but there’s an extensive mythology about it. In China it’s called Xinaián.”

No limit to murder and suicide cults, especially in these crazy times. Connie called Hiru’s apartment on the intercom, and asked her to open the main door because we needed to see Tindall. Hiru’s response was to ask wryly why we’d wish to see him outside office hours if we didn’t have to. Connie explained that it was urgent, and Hiru unlocked the main entrance.

Taking the elevator to Tindall’s floor, we found his apartment dark and got no response when we rang the doorbell.

“Where would you go in Arkham if you wanted to carry out some mad Necronomicon rite?” I asked, back in Connie’s car.

“Oh, God. Keziah Mason’s witch house, if the original house was still standing, but it isn’t.” She bit her lip, which would have been fetching if she hadn’t been so worried. “There’s the White Stone out past Meadow Hill. Around here, that’s traditionally a place to avoid. And there’s the river island where they say Keziah’s witches met.”

“The island!” I said. “That’s where he’d go. Von Junzt was here in Arkham, in the early 1800s. He even visited the island. I read that chapter of his Black Book. He wrote about the island and its menhirs being one of the ‘Gates’ he was always saying existed around the world.”

“Yes!” Connie said, and wrenched the Volvo’s wheel fiercely.

The Miskatonic River flows north of town. We drove along River Street, where restored seventeenth century warehouses and taverns line the waterfront. The island itself is a tourist attraction and heritage site. There are river tours by boat, but the boats don’t land on the island. The moss-grown standing stones there make people uneasy even by day. I’ve taken the tour and looked at those menhirs as the boat passed by. The patterns and angles disturbed me too. Some archaeologists think the stones were raised by an unknown people long before the Paleo-Indians crossed the Bering land bridge, and I mean serious people, not ancient astronaut enthusiasts. If Tindall was there tonight, with the rock samples, well then, it meant that Connie was right, about his intentions and motives at least, and perhaps about far more than that. My scalp prickled. My spine felt cold.

“If we cross to that island you’ll ruin your suit,” I said.

“The hell with my suit.”

As Connie looked good in that suit and really liked it, her words proved she thought we were on a real errand. There was a timber landing opposite the island, with a couple of canoes moored there. I unhitched one. We peered across at the island, and I saw what seemed to be a dolphin light, moving in the dark. Someone was there, and not many people went to that island in darkness. Connie and I, looking at each other, entered the canoe and paddled across, by mutual consent keeping as quiet as possible.

V

It’s a rocky islet, a hundred and fifty yards long and about fifty wide. The gray standing stones, finger-shaped, are between seven and ten feet long, counting the lower parts buried in the earth. They don’t belong in this region. Where they came from has never been conclusively pinned down, even now. The most surprising thing about them, to me, is that they still stand as they were first raised. None of them seem to have fallen down or been removed, even though they make Stonehenge look like yesterday, and the seventeenth-century Puritans of Massachusetts viewed them with harsh disapproval. In reason they ought to have gone long since.

Were they immune to time in the same way as the rocks of Leng?

The dolphin light switched out, and Connie and I crept through the grass and low bushes of the island. The stones seemed to lean in as though threatening to topple on us, and they seemed to bulk bigger than by daylight, too. I heard a harsh chanting, and while the voice was Tindall’s it did not speak in his usual tone. It sounded vehement, and rose at times to a downright boom. He was repeating unknown words in crazy rhythms, but they did not sound like pointless gibberish, somehow. They had the sense, the feel, of an actual language, though not one many humans had heard.

Connie and I crawled forward through the rank grass. In the ground, between the gray moss-grown stones, we felt strange energies quiver. Ahead of us were dim red glows, like small lights arranged in a circle, and in the center stood Tindall, in slacks, shirt and tie, conventional even while mouthing mad spells. I thought, ridiculously, that I felt surprised he had even removed his coat.

Then he cried the name Yog-Sothoth. Not mispronouncing it for safety. I felt the air quiver and curdle. Connie shuddered beside me. I might have whimpered, but I could not even force that much sound from my throat.

He doesn’t know enough. He just thinks he does.

The dim lights on the ground brightened from red to orange. With a sudden inspired guess, I knew they were the rock samples I had been working with. Tindall had taken them. Just my dreaming of their incredible past with one of them gripped in my hand had turned it hot.

The air thickened and swirled. It grew hotter, too. Odors, not unpleasant but strongly aromatic, struck our nostrils. They hadn’t any source that I could identify, and I felt dizzy as I whiffed them, with a sense of vertigo, of being poised above endless gulfs. And suddenly I was gazing into them. I wasn’t dreaming now, but wide awake, and I saw the naked crags, surging red magma, and molten pinkish-white moon huge in the sky, through gaps in searing clouds, that I’d seen before. The vision superimposed itself on the island in the Miskatonic. Tindall’s raw-throated chant filled my ears. All I clearly saw of the island was the circle of rocks Tindall had placed around himself, and the lines of standing stones dark against a dreadful sky. Tindall cried the name Yog-Sothoth again, and the orange glow the rocks were radiating shifted to a pale, hot yellow.

Above the circle, a misshapen vortex appeared in the air, sulfur-yellow streaked with dirty brown, like a stained hole into nowhere. The weird spicy scent became strong enough to clog our throats. I started to hallucinate, or at least, I hoped I was hallucinating.

I looked into voids between universes. I saw the chaos outside ordered space-time, or else within it. Maybe they were the same thing. A dreadful entity drifted into my field of perception, out beyond the murky vortex. It might have been huger than a galaxy or small as a cluster of balloons, depending on perspective and distance, or, again, both at once. It looked like a mad tangle of dripping hawsers, frayed and knotted, twisted around pulsing globes of many sizes. It might also have been the eviscerated organs of something alive but foreign to human knowledge, writhing in a last pained convulsion. It looked like all that, and it changed as I gazed. I had the feeling I saw some shifting cross-section of a being whose terrible whole I’d never be able to imagine or perceive.

It hung in that turbulent vortex above the island. Our souls shook before it. It radiated a malign avid craving, and yet it was somehow impersonal, cruelly indifferent. It was capable of wiping all life from the earth the way I’d wash the pesticides off a grape before I ate it.

Tindall called its name again. His voice was ecstatic. The rock samples around him glowed brighter, blue-white and then a hot fierce violet. His trousers began to smoke and char. He didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re too late,” Connie whispered in horror. “We’re too late. Run!”

I hesitated. What could I do? Would I stop anything, change anything, if I tackled Tindall bodily? Even killed him? I didn’t know, and as I looked up at the roiling abomination Tindall had summoned, I knew one thing; I dared not charge into that circle.

“Run!”

We did just that, side by side, like rabbits from a dog. We reached the water-side, pushed out our canoe, and instantly capsized it like a pair of clumsy idiots. We swam for the landing in desperation, though what good we were thinking that would do us, I couldn’t tell you. We reached it and hauled ourselves out of the water.

Back on the island, it went wrong for Tindall. Maybe he bungled his invocation chant. Maybe he’d been fatally mistaken ever to use the rocks of Leng in his ritual. Maybe they made a bridge across time to the remote aeons that had formed them.

There was a thunderous, fiery blast. By instinct Connie and I held our breaths. Stinking, poisonous air that might have belched from a Bessemer surged over the water and over us, making our sodden clothes steam. We closed our eyes and pressed our faces into the landing. I think we’d have been seared blind if we hadn’t. Our hair crisped. We felt the clothes on our backs singeing.

On the island, the rocks from Leng exploded, seethed into vapor, and Tindall was consumed in what I hope was less than a second. He vanished; he was just gone. A second clap of searing air rolled across the island and the river. Connie and I endured it, seared, deafened, and when everything seemed quiet and dark, I dared to look at the island with its rows of menhirs.

The vortex in the air had closed. The horror called YogSothoth had gone, or anyhow was fenced out of ordered space-time again, not that it comforted us much when we’d just had a direct view of how fragile that fencing is. If a half-baked warlock like Tindall could breach it, create an opening…

We made it back to Connie’s car. Turning on the roof light, we inspected each other. Except for blisters and burned hair, we seemed all right. Connie looked down at herself, and the remains of her silk pantsuit.

“Ruined,” she said, in a state of shock. “It’s damn’ well ruined.”

I don’t know who laughed hysterically first. We might not have stopped if the sound of police sirens hadn’t brought us back to earth. We’d have questions to answer, and our condition, plus the grass on our clothes, made it impossible to deny we’d been on the island. Plenty of people would have seen that blast, heard and smelled it, some of them on the campus.

We didn’t, I realized, have to explain anything. The simplest, most innocent account would be best, and we could even tell the truth, within limits. We’d been testing the rock samples, and began to suspect Dean Tindall was planning to use them in an experiment that could be dangerous, to support pet ideas of his own. We’d been to his apartment — Haru could confirm that — and then to the island on the chance that he was working with them there. We’d arrived just as the rocks were becoming incandescent, and fled. We barely made it back across the river before they exploded.

Some people who had looked directly at the blast were blinded. Others who breathed the vapor spent days in hospital with damaged lungs. One, an asthma sufferer, died.

Just how those rocks could have exploded into islandscouring fire by any natural means was hard to explain, but we didn’t have to. It had happened. Detailed examination, a matter of record, had established that the rocks were unique. The police had to conclude in the end that they’d been even more extraordinary than we knew. There were the usual fringe theories about everything from terrorists and CIA black ops to extraterrestrials, and that last was correct in a way. Yog-Sothoth is as extraterrestrial as any being can be.

The island had been scorched clean of its grass and other growth. Even the moss on the standing stones had been burned off the sides facing the blast, but not one stone had fallen, or so much as shifted. That didn’t seem natural, and Connie and I are sure it wasn’t. Were those stones there at the time of the cataclysm recorded in the Nemedian Chronicles? Were they untouched even by that? Is the same true of the Plateau of Leng (my own curt answer to that is hell, yes), that cannot be approached by the same route twice, and can’t be located precisely even by EarthWatch satellites?

Whatever else is true, we had a miraculous escape that night. I don’t mean just Connie and me. We resorted to a lot of neat brandy after our hospital checkups, but not enough to dissolve our memories. There isn’t that much brandy. I’m a stolid type, and my teeth chattered on the rim of the glass. My hand shook.

“Th-that was a pinprick to what might have happened,” I said. “Christ! It could have been the whole state!”

“It could have been the Solar System,” Connie said. “We’ll never know why it wasn’t. Never. I suppose Tindall messed up the conjuration somehow.”

Almost plaintively, I asked, “How could a little human being’s conjuration summon — something like that? Why would it pay attention?”

“They are always paying attention to openings to this universe, from what the Necronomicon says. Hints in von Junzt, too. Human beings can open those ‘Gates’, even by mistake. Most can’t be opened, except from Earth, from inside orderly space-time. That’s how it seems.”

“Where did he get the rite, the chant? From the Necronomicon?”

“Maybe from that, combined with other ancient scrolls, or from papers of Charles Dexter Ward’s that weren’t destroyed. I think most of them were. But some might still exist.”

That rang in my head. A hundred years ago, only rich men or scholars at prestigious seats of learning could gain access to books and papers like that. Or members of witch cults. All those are pretty restricted groups.

Now?

Now, the Necronomicon is online, and any crazy person, any nut cult, any half-baked dabbler who fancies himself a genius, can consult it — or a version of it. Probably the Book of Eibon, too. Certainly Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten in English, or the original German. It had almost vanished by the early twentieth century, but then it was reprinted again, in both languages. Ignorant tyros would be even less fit to attempt those rites than Tindall was, but that wouldn’t stop them trying.

You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Connie and I are haunted. We wonder, who’ll be the next loon who chants litanies to Yog-Sothoth? Maybe accompanied by a mass sacrifice of willing dupes like the Heaven’s Gate crowd? Or ritual murder in the style of Manson?

What will the outcome be? Will that primal age of magma and rock and lethal furnace air reach across the ages to merge with our time? Connie is right, we wouldn’t be kissing anything as trivial as our asses goodbye. These days just about any fool can gain enough of a smattering to try something. They’d nearly all fail to get any kind of result, but God help us — if he’s even interested— it only takes one.