“It’s volume two, you see,” he said.
Bewildered, I signed the proffered card, affirming I was now responsible for the contents of “Dyer Manuscript: Volume Two,” and noting as I did so the paucity of other signatures. There was Dyer’s, of course, and one or two others that I recognized from the faculty directory, and one that stood out because of its obviously foreign origins.
The librarian bobbed his head at me and departed. Leaving me alone. With volume two.
But those two simple words—
volume two
—could not begin to convey the strangeness of the revelations set down by William Dyer in an attempt to prevent the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, a privately funded group, from exploring the same region as had produced the strange radiata and the mountain range. Warnings of dangerous conditions would have been perfectly understandable, but Dyer instead spun a fantastic tale of a pre-human—and decidedly
non
-human—civilization whose age could be measured only on the scale of geologic time and whose origins seemed to lie more in the realm of religion and flying saucers than in science; and despite the remarkably lucid exposition of his narrative, the evidence of the collapse of one of the great minds of the twentieth century left me shaking my head. But then I came upon the photographs. The sketches. The pages torn from books and curiously marked not only with drawings, but with what seemed an unintelligible, dot-based script.
The photos … faked, of course. If two English schoolgirls had found the means to dumbfound photographic experts from all across England with the Cottingley pictures, then what heights of deception might be attained by a university professor with full access to specialized equipment? No, the photographs of the barrel-shaped monstrosities—starfish-headed and equipped with a multiplicity of eyes and mouths and tentacular appendages—could have been done up in any theater department or motion-picture studio worth its salt, and in that sense were laughably absurd. The sketches, however …
I had friends in the university’s art department at that time, many of whose names had become something of a byword for the consumption of various recreational drugs, and as might be expected, their works reflected their reputations. But nothing they had ever produced, even when in the grip of life-threatening overdose, came even remotely close to the alien inhumanity of the strange cartouches recorded by Dyer’s flash camera or the sketches and dot-script left on the pages of the torn-up books. Regardless of deformity, futurism, style, or evidence of mental instability, a work of art made by a human being demonstrates by its very nature the axiomatic groundwork of our consciousness and psychology. But those photographed carvings and ink sketches showed, even to my inexperienced eye, a controlling consciousness that had not the faintest shred of commonality with
Homo sapiens.
True, then? Dyer’s fantastic tale? His hints of strange beings filtering down from interstellar voids to populate the nascent earth with their biological experiments … of which we, all of us—people, animals, trees and fish and paramecia alike—were the eventual products? Pre-human civilizations fighting unimaginable wars against unimaginable, equally star-born entities with unimaginable weapons?
The appendix broke the butterfly. The Starkweather-Moore Expedition, spurred on by expectations of discovery and possible mineral exploitation, had sailed for Antarctica in the late 1930s and hauled and flown its equipment across the Ross Ice Shelf and the snowy wastes. By December, it had reached the charted locations of Dyer’s peaks.
And it had found nothing.
No fantastically high mountains. No mountains, in fact, at all. No city. No second range of even higher peaks hiding unnamable horrors. Only endless, windswept ice and snow.
The final entries told of William Dyer’s disgrace. His chairmanship terminated. His tenure revoked; even threats of fraud charges leveled at him and those of his expedition rash enough to support the less outrageous parts of his story. But the university’s reputation was at stake, and so the matter was suppressed. Far from appearing in any official university publication, Dyer’s document went into Special Collections, to molder alongside the equally hysterical delusions of d’Erlette and Prinn. He was allowed to resign, and he eventually emigrated to Switzerland, where, at the advanced age of sixty, he taught school, married a Swiss girl, and raised a son: Paul.
Paul Dyer. Dr. Paul Dyer. Who, bearing his gentle accent, eventually returned to the United States, accepted a position at Miskatonic, and supplied the final chapters of his father’s tragic story.
But the sketches.
But the Starkweather-Moore findings.
But … the
sketches
. The technique was so assured, so unaffected. One might as well dispute the authenticity of one’s own handwriting.
I understood now why Paul Dyer had pointed me toward the macaronic report: my discussion of hydrothermal vents dovetailed neatly with his father’s insistence that the creatures he (rather shortsightedly) called
Old Ones
—an unfortunate reference to the
Necronomicon
of Alhazred, whose lunatic ravings he was known to have read—had, at the beginning of the Antarctic freeze, taken refuge in deeper caverns where subcrustal heat still lingered. Unfortunately for them, one of their more outré biological creations—the half-sentient conglomerations of hypnotically controlled cells which he (equally shortsightedly) insisted upon calling
shoggoths
—had wildcatted and, at least according to Dyer’s manuscript, wreaked genocide on the whole, impossibly long-lived species.
Which was, of course, patently impossible, because of what the Starkweather-Moore Expedition had found. Or, rather,
not
found.
I left the library late that evening, my mind caught firmly and painfully between the utter conviction of William Dyer and the incontrovertible evidence of Starkweather and Moore. I therefore decided against the late lecture on Sumerian antiquities I had planned to attend and instead went directly home. Alas, when I arrived unexpectedly at the apartment I shared with my fiancée, I found it occupied by an assortment of half-clad art students and a few disreputable derelicts from the town where I was born.
It took less than a minute to discover that my lady love was holding court in the bedroom, in the throes of a drug-fueled orgy.
My thoughts, already fevered, impelled me to immediate action. Flushed with betrayal, frustrated, angry, I packed my bags, my books, my notes, and my typewriter, and left the apartment, abandoning that part of my life forever.
Where to go? I would have turned to friends of whom I could have begged a night’s lodging, but I had just seen those very friends participating in the apartment’s festivities. Owing to my parents’ premature loss at sea in a boating accident, I had no resources, monetary or otherwise, save my own. Standing, then, in the middle of the large university quadrangle, with the autumn’s evening chill beginning to bite through my light jacket, my suitcase and books growing ever heavier in my hands, and my bereft, betrayed heart turning all my efforts at research—hydrothermal vents and geological anomalies alike—to dust, I all but fell to my knees and wept.
But thoughts of my research put me in mind of one source of aid that might possibly remain to me, and a short while later I was ringing the doorbell of a house in one of Arkham’s quieter neighborhoods.
Clad in sweatshirt and sweatpants and puffing a little from his exertions with a set of free weights, Paul Dyer opened the door, and it took him but a moment to realize my obvious distress. “Why, Alf!” he said. “What a pleasant surprise! Come in, my boy, come in!”
* * *
Paul Dyer was childless, unmarried, without stateside relatives, and his house was his alone, its furnishings settled in like brown smoke, its curtained windows rarely opened, the only utilized rooms being his study, his bedroom, and the kitchen; but as he was much too gracious a host to consign me to the living-room sofa, I found myself directly possessed of an initially musty but easily aired and quite reasonable guestroom. And thereby began a residency that proved to be not expedient and temporary, but comfortable and longterm, a professional relationship with a congenial colleague whose scientific interests dovetailed neatly with my own, our serenity interrupted only occasionally by the local Gay and Lesbian Coalition’s clumsy attempts to profit from our celibate Castalia.
But though I followed in my mentor’s footsteps, eventually taking a doctorate and a faculty position at Miskatonic, and we grew old together—two confirmed bachelors with too much teaching, research, and study to bother about marriage and families—I never mentioned the notebook, and Paul referenced its contents only indirectly. But it was obvious that his father’s disgrace weighed heavily upon him, so much so as to manifest itself occasionally in bursts of anger or, alternately, depression, the underlying cause of which I could never be precisely sure. His father’s squandering of a brilliant career? Starkweather and Moore’s insistence upon prosecuting their expedition? Those strange, vegetable entities that first appeared and then vanished, leaving a reputation in shambles?
I confess that I myself could not reconcile William Dyer and his deception any more than could the son. And so, as Paul’s progress toward a solution seemed immobilized by the profound and inherent contradiction of father and fantasy, I turned my own extracurricular efforts toward the conundrum.
I used my faculty status to gain access to the minutiae of the original Miskatonic expedition and compared the reports Lake transmitted—the mountains, the caves, the soapstone fragments with the inhuman dot-script, the strange radiates—with the sanitized versions relayed to the world, wondering again and again at the depth of the hoax. Not just William Dyer but the entire Miskatonic expedition must have been involved in a deception so colossal it made the Piltdown chicanery seem the merest trifle.
Which led me back to the enigma that so enmeshed the man with whom I had been living for the last fifteen years.
Why? Why, why, why?
And finally, in the pre-dawn darkness of an Arkham winter, with the wind singing Siren-like through the archaic eaves and peaked roofs of the surrounding town, I made my decision to break free of the ever-moving, ever-stationary möbius that had so ensnared my mentor. A simple assumption, really:
there had been mountains.
Lake had seen them. Dyer had seen them … and flown beyond them. Radiates? Star-spawn?
Shoggoths?
I put such questions aside and dealt only with the comparatively simple problem of the disappearance of billions of tons of Archaean slate.
Which brought me back to Special Collections … and to that strange name on the list of those who had perused the Dyer manuscript:
Hugo Kalpaxia.
Neither faculty nor student. And without ever having been given access permission. Yet there his name was, floridly limned by an obviously expensive fountain pen … itself a wild luxury at a time when most of the civilized world was in the stern grasp of the Great Depression. But perhaps that explained all, for in those dark days twenty dollars slipped to a sub-librarian would have guaranteed access to
anything
.
It took but a little search-engine and hacking help from an acquaintance in the computer science department to ferret out the saga of the Kalpaxia Mining Company, a Greek concern that had weathered the worst of the Depression without so much as a blink, prospering from sheer, daredevil ruthlessness combined with the ready availability of a massive pool of cheap, desperate labor. And the mining expedition to Antarctica during the austral summer of 1933 to 1934, fueled by the Miskatonic expedition’s hints of mineral wealth, and involving countless vehicles and aircraft and thousands of men and sled dogs, proved to be the pinnacle of the company’s cruel exploitation. And the mechanism of its downfall.
Cross-references and late-night hyperlinks eventually led me to a locked ward less than an hour’s drive from Arkham, where a very old man was spending his last days lashed down in emphysemic and urine-soaked squalor, his skin scabbed with age, his nights fitful and rife with screaming nightmares that even the most potent antipsychotics could not suppress. But as the nurse on call explained after I slipped her a hundred dollars, he would talk to anyone.
“He dan’t make much sense, though,” she added in her flat, New England accent as she swung his door open and left me engulfed in a miasma of neglect and human waste.
A common navvy, he had been present, at a much younger age, when Kalpaxia, broad-shouldered and swaggering in its corporate arrogance, had, with the intention of removing the useless slate overburden hiding what was expected to be several fortunes’ worth of iron, copper, and heavy metals, blasted Dyer’s mountains with thousands of tons of explosives tamped down into the basal strata of the range.
“Went the wrong way, tho’,” he yammered at me in a spray of odiferous sputum. “All o’ it slid down inta what was
behind
, instead of comin’ forward. An’ it filled that valley straight up. An’ there was more mountains a ways away, an’ the blow bounced off’t and made that tumble in, too. Happens satimes in minin’, if yer not careful, an’ they weren’t careful, ’cause they rushed it. In an hour there wan’t anything left.”
And thus, I thought, ended the existence of the two mountain ranges, and thus the perfectly understandable reason Starkweather and Moore found nothing more than a snowy, high-altitude plateau. Archaean slate. Of course. Slate by nature cleaves almost effortlessly into flat sheets. An unfortunate arrangement of strata had precipitated an immense orographic collapse.
But the old man was not finished. And the nurse was wrong: he made perfect sense. Albeit not the kind I wanted to hear.
“An’ when the dust settled, we saw it. Comin’ from where the second range’d been. Flowing like a river. With eyes. A-and mouths. And places …
things
… that din’t belong. And other things … comin’ up from the rubble t’ meet it. And they all came t’gether there in the rubble, bubbling an’ crawlin’ on each other like a pot o’ greasy eels. And then the ground collapsed an’ buried ’em all. And the wind brought snow t’ bury ’em deeper.”