The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Page 21

  Paul’s name was not unknown at the shop. He was one of our most loyal patrons. But although the owner chatted with him from time to time when he called to request some obscure tome, he never came in himself, and an invitation was unheard of.

  “Paul. This weekend? I don’t even know where you live.”

  “I’m in Hinsdale. I’ll give you the address. Do you have a pen? Or should I send a car?”

  “No, no I can drive myself. What book is this?”

  “I’d rather not say over the telephone. I’m sorry, Paul. I didn’t even ask. Have you any plans?”

  I can’t really afford plans. When my rent and bills are paid, I have very little left over to entertain myself with, and usually spend my weekends at the shop cataloging and reading. The shop was only open by appointment on Saturdays, and there was nothing scheduled for this, the weekend after the New Year.

  “I don’t have any plans. But listen, wouldn’t you rather have Mr. Zell or Travis look this book over? I’m not really the guy around here when it comes to assessing really rare books. I’m just a translator.”

  “No, Paul. It has to be you. When can I expect you?”

  “Well, we close up in two hours. I’d like to stop to eat. I can be there at….”

  “Don’t. I’ll have dinner waiting. Can you spend the night?”

  “Spend the night? What are we, kids?” I laughed.

  “You’ll want time to look this over. I guarantee it.”

  “Paul, won’t Cherie and your little girl….”

  “They’re out of town, Raymond. Visiting her mother in Bayonne. Will you?”

  This was strange, but I thought about my shabby, drafty apartment on Lake with its ticking old radiator and shrugged. I didn’t mind spending the weekend in an old friend’s opulent digs, even if it would have me chewing my own heart out in envy on Monday.

  “Alright, Paul. It’s a date, I guess.”

  He rattled off the address so fast I had to ask him to repeat it.

  The house was what I’d expected a one percent-er to reside in. Singular, secluded, multi-leveled, post-modern architecture, aesthetically spare but pleasing, lots of glass and hardwood flooring, set at the end of a tree-lined, private drive and festooned with all the ridiculous amenities extreme wealth afforded: a garage bigger than my childhood home, a pool that might have been for reflecting or swimming, a lush, sprawling garden no one living there could possibly have the time or inclination to tend, a tennis court, etc.

  I was already chewing my bottom lip and keenly feeling all the wasted potential of my life when my hilariously out of place Civic was admitted through the electric gate. If prancing about under the moon wearing nothing but goats’ blood had earned Paul Woodson all this and more, what an idiot I was to have disparaged it.

  I’d barely cut my engine when the front door opened and Paul stood there, as if he had been anxiously waiting in the foyer the entire time, watching the approach to the house through his security cameras. Somewhere inside, a stereo was blaring a scratchy, noisy blues recording, the words strange, the background alive with the raucous, howling voices of a live audience. Something I’d never heard before, which interested me, as I’m something of a blues aficionado.

  “Come in, Raymond!” he urged, as I went to my trunk to get my overnight bag. He disappeared for a moment while I rummaged, and the music cut out abruptly. The sudden silence was startling, as if the rowdy crowd had been cavorting in the house and instantly disappeared. He returned.

  “It’s good to see you, Paul,” I stammered on his porch.

  “Yes, good to see you too, Raymond. How’ve you been?” He asked, though it was all an annoying formality.

  He desperately wanted me to get in the house, to see his wonder. His personal appearance didn’t really live up to the place. His prematurely grey hair was a bit disheveled, and he didn’t look like his press photos. His penetrating eyes had that wild, voracious look. Far from the expensive suits I always saw him in in the business section, he looked as if he’d slept in his sweater and slacks. Maybe he’d let himself go a little with Cherie away. A woman like that, I don’t know if I could ever relax around her, entirely, either.

  “Not doing as well as you, of course,” I said, admiring the house’s uncountable treasures. I felt like an intruder, no matter the invitation. I was not meant to see these things. Monday night in my sagging bed would be a hell. “What’s that you were listening to?”

  “Sorry. It helps me think. I forget how loud it is.”

  “It’s alright, while the cat’s away, eh?”

  “Cat?” he said, looking confused.

  “Cherie. I guess since she and your little girl are gone for the weekend…”

  He blinked.

  “Yes, of course. No, they hate my music.”

  “Was that Robert Johnson?” I asked dubiously, knowing well it wasn’t.

  “No. King Yeller. Just a flash in the pan from around 1964.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “You woudn’t have. That’s the only recording,” he said distractedly. “Your dinner, I ordered out. I hope you like veal scallopini.”

  I chuckled.

  “I never had takeout veal before.”

  I wandered into the dining room adjoining the immense kitchen. It smelled wonderful.

  “Oh they only do it for me, as far as I know,” he said, opening the oven and pulling out the dish that had been warming inside.

  It was delicious, but I felt hurried. Paul leaned on the marble island and simply watched me as I ate.

  “Aren’t you eating too?” I asked.

  “I’m fasting,” he said.

  “Fasting? Some diet thing?”

  “It hasn’t been that long, has it Raymond?”

  Of course. We had fasted together during my dabbling years. It was a part of magical preparation. I still didn’t want to believe he was still doing that at his age.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Please don’t let me disturb you. Here, I’ll get you some wine.”

  He uncorked a twenty five year old bottle of something called Romani-Contée and poured. I suspected I would choke on it if I knew what he’d paid for it.

  We made no small talk. He busied himself with something in the kitchen while I hungrily devoured the best meal I would probably ever have.

  I saw the object of my visit, though. It was on the edge of the marble counter, a modest sized book covered in a cloth of black velvet. I could see the gilt-edge poking out from under one corner.

  When I had cleared my plate of tender veal and porcini, and drained my glass, he clapped his hands together.

  “All finished?”

  “All finished. Now what’s so important?”

  He moved to the book and removed the covering.

  I leaned in close.

  It was an ugly little thing, less than a hundred pages. It was bound in mottled, flaking, pale leather, and rather inexpertly, I thought. Some of the pages did not quite fit, as if they were mismatched, or taken from disparate sources. I squinted hard at the cover, which bore no markings. It was old, whatever it was.

  “Anthropodermic bibliopegy,” he mumbled, very close to my ear. He was standing near, hovering almost.

  “Binding in human skin?” I wrinkled my nose. Claims of book jackets made from human skin usually turned out to be unfounded. Pig skin was often mistaken for human. I had once seen a copy of deSade’s Justine et Juliette with a human nipple on the front board below the title, and another time, Carnegie’s biography of Lincoln bound in a black man’s hide. “Not very well done, is it?”

  “It was stitched together by hand. By the same hand that did the fleshing and tanning.”

  “Whose hand is that?” I asked, reaching out to thumb the pages.

  “No, don’t open it!” he snapped. Then, more gently, “Let me.”

  There was no title, only page after page of densely inscribed text, all in various hands, languages, even hieroglyphs on what looked
like brittle papyrus. There were strange diagrams inside. I knew it was some kind of grimoire, but it was impossible for me to guess where it originated from.

  “What is this, Paul? Some kind of scrapbook?”

  “Sort of. Have you ever heard of the Infernalius?”

  “It sounds…familiar.”

  “Think back to the books we heard talked about in our college days, Raymond. The books your own grandfather had from his great uncle.”

  That was great, great uncle Warren, the man family history had always told me I’d inherited my love of languages and old books from. He’d been a Classical Languages professor in Arkham, Massachusetts in the old days, and a chum of the somewhat notorious occult scholar Henry Armitage. Upon Warren’s death in 1931, most of his books and papers had been donated to his university, though a few had been passed on to his brother.

  It was the revelation that I was Warren Rice’s great, great grandnephew that had started off Paul’s fascination with me in school. He seemed to buy into the old story about how Warren and Armitage had had some strange mystical dealings in Dunwich in 1928 or so. The books my grandfather had let us peruse in his study one summer that had belonged to Warren were mainly scholarly treatises, such as Copeland’s Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation, Casterwell’s Kranorian Annals, and von Junzt’s Nameless Cults.

  Then I remembered.

  “The Book of Books?”

  Paul smiled.

  “The Book of Books. Not some idle boast, but a literal description. A book hidden among the pages of seven other books.” He held up his hands and ticked them off, finger by finger. “The Book of Eibon, the Book of Karnak, the Testament of Carnamagos, the Ponape Scripture, de Vermiss Mysteriis, and the Scroll of Thoth-Amon. Each one a rare treasure in their own right.”

  “Come on, Paul. It’s a fantasy,” I laughed. “The timeline’s all wrong. How could something be hidden in an ancient Egyptian scroll and a book written in 1542?”

  “You know of the Akashic Record. The ethereal library of all knowledge written and unwritten which men may tap into. And the history says that The Dark Man entity dictated The Infernalius to the Hyborean wizard Gargalesh Svidren, who dispersed the knowledge through time. Abdul Al-Hazred hid the assembly instructions in the original, unexpurgated Arabic Kitab al-Azif. They’re only visible to those who already know it’s there. A book which rewards the practitioner with ultimate knowledge of the universe.”

  “I thought it was supposed to end the world,” I said, pursing my lips. “How much did you get fleeced for buying this, Paul?”

  “It’s the genuine article,” said Paul. “Dr. Francis Morgan recovered it from Old Noah Whateley’s personal library in Dunwich after the affair with your uncle and Professor Armitage. It’s been in a private collection since 1966, along with Whateley’s diary.”

  “Noah Whateley kept a diary?” I said, incredulous.

  Whateley’s reputation as a sorcerer was renowned, but like my own as a translator, only among certain circles. As students, we’d spent our junior year spring break in Arkham and Dunwich trying to learn all we could about him and run into a wall. I’d chalked it all up to being folklore. Paul had insisted the locals had protected us from the true knowledge.

  “He did, and related his assembly of the book in 1882.”

  “Finding the right copies of those books, unaltered by translation...it would’ve been impossible for one man,” I said.

  “He was hired by a cult, the Order of The Black Dragon. You remember them.”

  I nodded. Von Junzt had mentioned them, some sort of apocalyptic cult with origins in ancient Israel and adherents all over the globe.

  “Their members gathered the required books and brought them to Whateley. He assembled them, and once the Order had performed the ritual and taken what they wanted from the book, he was sent back to Dunwich with it. Apparently it was their intention to call something forth, something that should have ended the world.”

  “Well, so the book’s a fraud,” I said. “Obviously the world didn’t end.”

  “The book’s purpose isn’t to end the world, but to grant the ritualist his heart’s desire. The Order wanted the end of the world. The book gave them the means. The book changes to fit the magician’s desire.”

  “A book that changes? That’s crazy.”

  “Well, I don’t believe the ritual changes, but the end result does. The desired effect is in the heart of the evoker. Noah Whateley was depressed after the failure of the Order of The Black Dragon,” Paul went on. “He pored over the book for years, trying to figure out what went wrong. In the end, he learned that an outside party had interrupted the Order’s enactment of the ritual. The fault wasn’t his. His purpose was renewed. He decided to carry on where the Order had failed. He wanted to facilitate the return of the Outer God, Yog-Sothoth. He found the means in the book, using his own offspring. But he died before the long ritual could be completed. I don’t think his grandson, Wilbur, could properly read the Infernalius. The ritual was imperfect again.”

  I thought of what was known of Wilbur Whateley’s fate, how he had been killed trying to steal a rare copy of the notorious Necronomicon from the Miskatonic University library. A desperate act. Had he been trying to complete his grandfather’s work?

  “The man I acquired the book from was a kind of mercenary librarian,” Paul said. “He made his fortune lending the book to aspiring magicians and recovering it after.”

  “After what?” I asked.

  “After they failed. Most died. Malnutrition, heart attacks, one wound up in an asylum in upstate New York. That’s where I learned about the librarian.”

  “So what do you intend to do with it?” I asked, looking down at the strange little book with new interest.

  “What do you think? I’m going to answer the question whose answer has eluded me my entire life.”

  “But…even if this is true,” I said. “Why? You have everything, Paul…”

  “I have nothing!” he exploded, slapping his hand on the counter top. “Nothing, Raymond. Do you think I set out all those years ago to attain mere money and luxury? What kind of a fool would I be, to expose my very soul to the darkest undercurrents of the universe, open myself to the influence of malignant powers, simply to afford a ridiculous house to live in during my brief time on this earth? Do you think I’d do the things I’ve done, made the sacrifices I have, for this?” he finished the last waving his hands dismissively at his plush surroundings, as if they were my own cramped living room. “No, years of research and practice and abasement has granted me nothing but worldly pleasures. It’s as if the true power behind the veil of the universe has amused itself by tossing me bones and scraps from its table in response to my meaningless barking. But now, with this book, I believe I finally have discovered an inroad to the truth. To true power. What I do now, I do in pursuit of the only thing that has constantly been out of reach my entire life.”

  “Alright,” I said, though I wanted to shake him, remind of all the blessings he was neglecting with this insanity. “Alright, Paul. But again, if this is true, then nobody has successfully used this thing. What chance do you have?”

  “I have a resource my unfortunate predecessors didn’t. You.”

  “Me?”

  “Who knows more about the alphabet of Mu and Tsath-Yo than you? You studied your uncle’s work. I don’t believe there was a more accomplished linguist alive than Dr. Warren Rice. You’re his scion.”

  “Paul,” I snickered nervously. “It’s been years since I studied that stuff. I haven’t read a word of Hyperborean in...”

  “Let me tell you what I believe,” Paul interrupted, touching my shoulder and fixing me with those drilling eyes. “The key to the Old Ones, to the forgotten powers, was left to us in these languages. These aren’t just dead tongues. These are, in their own right, mystic formulas. God evoked Creation through the use of words of power. I think very few men can truly understand them, and those that do, once they do,
cannot hope to forget them.”

  He turned to the book between us on the island, opened it to a certain page, and spun it to show me the archaic letters of one of the headings.

  “Read.”

  I looked down at the page, doubtful. I would humbly say my mastery of the classical, Oriental, Germanic, and Semitic languages is considerable. But what I remembered of these supposedly antediluvian scripts, they had an internal consistency, but nothing in common with any other spoken word.

  I’d studied them only a little. That one summer when Paul had told me fantastic stories about the beings that supposedly existed somewhere in the outer dark beyond empirical creation, the things whose power, he said, made the angels and demons of western magic look like Saturday morning cartoons. It was the summer I’d first read my uncle’s books, and Paul had remarked admiringly that if there was an inheritable gene for language, I had it.

  As I squinted at the ancient page, a haze descended over my eyes, and it was as if the twisted letters moved and the knotted meanings untied, revealing their truth.

  “The Making of The Black Tallow,” I read, surprised at how quickly the letters came back to me.

  He snapped the book shut.

  “You see?” he said. “I knew you could do it.”

  I admit I felt a wave of excitement come over me, and a little fear, too.

  “Now what?”

  “I’m no slouch when it comes to ancient alphabets,” Paul said. “But translation and reading aloud are two different things. There’s a key passage at the end of the ritual. An invocation. The pronunciation must be precise. There, I need your help.”

  “You want me to read it?” I asked, unsure.

  “No of course not. As the evoker, I have to be the one to read it aloud. I want you to transcribe a phonetic pronunciation for me.”

  “A crib sheet?” I said, smiling.

  “Essentially,” he said, smiling back. “Raymond, I can’t stress the importance of this step. I really believe the correct invocation may have been where my predecessors have all failed. I need you to do this for me, but I also need you to tell me truthfully if you’re unable to.”