The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (23 page)

Darcie lowered her voice a little now, glancing around to make sure there was no one nearby. “It’s not like the old days.”

“Trouble?”

“The gals in Chemistry just laugh when we complain, they’ve had to put up with this crap for decades, now. They try to order some perfectly innocuous chemical and they get called on the carpet, ‘Why do you need this, and in this kind of quantity? You’re going to pretend you didn’t know this is now listed as a precursor compound in the manufacture of MDA?’ or MDMA, whatever. ‘Are you trying to get the entire department shut down?!’

“And it keeps getting worse. Just before he left on his latest summer cruise the department head was down here, asking if it’s true we’ve been growing
Ephedra torreyana.
That’s Mormon Tea, for God’s sake. It’s a little desert shrub, a less effective stimulant than
coffee. ‘Root it out! Don’t take the chance! It’s on the list!’ We’ve gotten to the point where we purposely mislabel things, to find what you’re looking for now you have to memorize the secret code, like we’re a bunch of Freemasons or Knights Templar or something. It’s gotten to be like things you read about in Europe during the Nazi occupation. So now the
Ephedra torreyana
becomes
Eugenia talbotii;
the plastic tags in the pots of
Lophophora williamsii
now say you’re looking at
Leptostigma weberbaueri.
I mean, those poor little babies take years to grow up to be the size of my thumb, and they expect me to grind them up for compost?”

“I had no idea. Although I wouldn’t think that would fool another botanist for two minutes.”

“Of course it wouldn’t. But the cops they send aren’t botanists, they’re idiots. They walk around asking
us
what these plants are and whether any of them are psychoactive. It’s like when the Nazis used to send the Gestapo around to shut down any decadent Jewish jazz concerts, goons that couldn’t tell Cab Calloway from Igor Stravinsky. The musicians ended up giving them a Music Appreciation class and playing some Mendelssohn until the morons meandered out of earshot. It goes against the grain in a discipline that’s always been open, let me tell you. I mean, we’re supposed to be
teaching
here, sharing and spreading knowledge, right? Not deciding which students to allow into the secret sisterhood and which to keep in the dark because they might be snitches.

“Meantime, some of our plantings were just too dangerous, we’ve started selectively dispersing them out into the private gardens and greenhouses of certain people we trust, like museum curators who used to hide works of art in the cellars when the war got close enough that you could hear the cannon. People who know enough to bring things inside before the first frost. Some of the department’s retirees have been absolute saints. I mean, these are white-haired senior citizens, you’d think they’d drop dead if you said Boo, and here they are possibly facing police raids, your whole house could be trashed,
if not actual jail time, for harboring
plants,
botanical specimens, for heaven’s sake.”

“Didn’t know botany was going to be an act of civil disobedience, did you?”

“Exactly. I hate to say it, Chantal, but I’m starting to think these Cthulhians have a point. This has got to end. I wish somebody really
would
start to fight back. It’s just that nobody seems to know where to start. Although weirdly enough, nobody’s complained about our window boxes yet.” Darcie smiled and pointed to the huge cup-shaped flowers — some white, some red — blooming in considerable profusion on waist-high thick green stalks in the white wooden-sided boxes on the floor by the sliding glass doors to the courtyard.

“
Pulmonaria saccharata,
” Chantal stooped down and read the Latin name off the little white plastic tag. “So these would actually be …”

Darcie nodded, giving her a moment.

“…
Papaver
…?”

“…
Somniferum,
” Darcie giggled. “The most addictive plant known to man.” But then she quickly grew serious again. “What it all means is I just can’t gather up the kind of volume or selection that I used to, dear. Getting a
Banisteriopsis
to grow in captivity was hard enough in the first place. Now I’ve got to keep track of who’s hiding it. Fungus, yes, but it’s seasonal. We’d be fine, there, if we could wait a couple weeks, there’s some
psilocybe
coming along but not fruiting yet. And we don’t have nearly the volume of morning glory seed I’d need to provide us with enough
ololiuquy.
You’ve got to stone grind it and get rid of the hulls and boil it down into a paste, people have tried just chewing up the seeds but it doesn’t work.

“In this particular case, though, even if the McKennas favored the tryptamines, if I know Matthew he’s going to be looking for a phenethylamine, for acid or mescaline. I assume your cactus on the bedroom window ledge are still too small?”

Chantal had to fight down the sudden urge to punch the bitch. How did Darcie know where Matthew grew his cactus? How did she know anything about his
bedroom window?

“Yes.” She controlled herself. “If I cut them all I might get a useful dose, but I’m looking to carry along enough to bring back Matthew and Skeezix and possibly two of Worthy’s boys who are stuck on the other side.”

“Give me a couple days to check around, Chantal. We’ll find something that’ll let us both go in after him.”

“Darcie, that’s a wonderful offer. It means a lot to me, really. But I worry the more people who go through, the more the continuum is disrupted. I think actually going in after them is something I have to do on my own. But I’m going to need help, backup, plenty of it. So if you’re willing to help me that way, from working out my mix and dosage, right up to the point where I go through, that would mean the world to me. So far it’s been a pretty lonely undertaking.”

“I should think so.”

Fortunately, Darcie did not try to hug her.

* * *

Cory would provide the headset resonator — plus four spares, in case she got lucky and found survivors. Stop it. Stop thinking that way. Of course she’d find them. Darcie would do her best to come up with an adequate dose of one of the entheogens — whatever was still available — to help her not only open the vortex but control, to some extent, theoretically, where it took her. Maybe.

Chantal sat on the rug in front of the cold fireplace in Matthew’s apartment above the bookstore — their apartment, the place she had planned to raise their children — and tried to plan it all out.

It reminded her of the old Hopi story Matthew had told her, about the young man who planned to visit
the land of the dead, to find out if things there were the way they’d been told. In the story, the young man manages to come back, but only after the witch removes his skin and give him a new one, since it wouldn’t be safe to return to the land of the living with a skin which had been contaminated by contact with the mesa of the dead.

Matthew said that was a recurrent theme in such myths. Somehow, Chantal did not find this terribly reassuring.

And even assuming she managed to get through, what would she find? Finding yourself face-to-face with a poisonous snake, within striking range of a monster as thick as your arm, was a scarier reptile encounter than she ever cared to repeat. If what she’d seen through the vortex in Worthy’s warehouse were what she figured they were — fast-moving reptile carnivores with jaws like steam shovels, tall enough to pick you off the roof of a single-story house,
Jurassic Park
material — how was that going to work out?

Yes, Cory had promised her some firepower. And if he let her down she still had other sources. But if, as she figured, those dinosaurs or whatever had polished off the two hit men Worthy had sent after Judge Crustio — two hit men armed with shotguns — what were the chances Matthew and Skeezix had survived to this point, with nothing but Skeezix’s pocket knife between them?

She decided that was irrelevant. She had to cross over, to give them any chance at all, so she’d just assume they were alive and waiting for her till proven otherwise.

That still left a big enough job.

The hard part was accepting — not just on some theoretical level, but actually wrapping her mind around and accepting, to the extent that she could trust her life and sanity to — what Matthew taught, which she knew on some level to be true, but which still felt so … alien.

The world as we perceived it, which seemed like a solid, concrete, and seamless whole, was no such thing. That premise was not something that Matthew had just dreamed up. All the way back to Alfred North Whitehead, up through the McKennas and others, generations of scientists and philosophers had gradually, systematically demonstrated that the “world” as we knew it was a construct, re-constructed inside the mind out of the sensory input transmitted
through various organic barriers — protective barriers necessary to the cohesion and survival of the organism — to the brain from the senses, primarily sight, hearing, and touch. It was built out of components which were really nothing but transient electrical impulses transported by molecules, atoms, electrons, along slender nerve pathways, the way people living deep underground might put together a “picture” of the surface world above by using information pulsed to them via wire cables from remote black-and-white video monitors far above … totally unaware that the world above had colors, sounds, smells, the feel of the wind — all kinds of things their TV cameras couldn’t capture and relay.

Everyone knew the senses were limited. Human sight and hearing could not pick up, detect, “see” or “hear” x-rays, radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, lots of stuff. They were missing from our picture of the world. Bees and butterflies could distinguish between a dozen different flower colors, all of which humans saw as “white.” Mankind had built
devices
to capture that input and translate it down into the wavelengths he could perceive. But even those were just interpretations, approximations, now second- or third-hand.

The psychoactive chemicals, the so-called hallucinogens, did not for the most part generate fantasies or falsehoods. They removed some of the screens which the organism had carefully constructed since its infancy to screen out lots of sensory input which gradually got categorized as “distracting and unnecessary noise.” That’s why illiterate savages deep in the jungle could see, hear, correctly interpret small sonic and visual clues to the presence of animals and their behaviors that a Western man stumbling along in his boots, slapping at mosquitoes, would completely miss. As they grew up,
those
human genotypes had realized it was important to their welfare
not
to screen out all that sensory data. That was not to say they were “better” — without massive re-training they certainly couldn’t use a computer or drive a car. But they and their different abilities had something to offer.

None of this meant the real world didn’t exist. When you reached out to touch that rock, your hand didn’t generally pass right through
it; there was indeed something there, which would hurt you if you slammed your head into it hard enough.

The problem was, she was being asked to believe that if the pineal gland was activated, excited, brought into action as part of the limbic system’s network of perception, she could then see things that she hadn’t seen before,
and that they were really there.

Easy enough to believe you could drop acid or listen to chanting and drumming at a certain frequency or Henry Annesley’s souped-up resonator until you entered a kind of trance state and
thought
you could see these things. But that — having used these mechanisms to clear and then enhance your sensory apparatus till you could see into the fifth and sixth dimensions — you could then watch a vortex open and step through it and not merely
imagine
you’d crossed over, but
actually
cross over, that when that vortex closed you’d still be you, standing on the other side looking back, while to any number of unenhanced onlookers back on Earth One it would appear you’d stepped into a hole in space and zipped it closed behind you and that at that point you were
actually gone?

It was like being asked to believe a living being could travel to the World of the Dead and return. Your mind just naturally said, “Oh, of course, they’re speaking
symbolically,
and then they woke up and It Was All Just a Dream … right?

The supposedly rational, scientific, sane and normal adult mind recoiled. The first instinct was to pour ridicule and sarcasm over it till it went away. Not only couldn’t that be true, it sounded like some kind of bizarre recipe for psychic suicide, like if you succeeded they’d find your cold and lifeless corpse lying home in your bed, from which Rod Serling would then reveal you’d never even gotten up that morning, at all — the whole episode just some kind of self-imposed verge-of-death hallucination.

And
that
was precisely the kind of thinking, of course, that could make the whole enterprise so very dangerous.

You’d be fine if you just had faith — but having faith seemed insane. The only person who could succeed was an idiot, or some kind of clinical schizophrenic. Wherever you go, there you are.

She wished she had Matthew here to go over it all, one more time, before she sat down to figure out what mix of plant helper and headset resonator would give her the best chance of opening a vortex that might actually lead to where he was … and maybe even, somehow, getting all three of them back.

There was a knock at the doorway. Marian had climbed the stairs, unannounced.

“Chantal, I know you weren’t to be disturbed …”

It took Chantal a moment to refocus. “Marian?”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re getting ready to do something dangerous. I told them.”

“I trust your judgment, Marian. It must be important.”

“Gilbert is back — Marquita’s son? They took the bus from Arizona, apparently, he and his grandmother. They … seemed to know what you were doing. Gilbert says they can help.”

Chantal met them in the kitchen, spontaneously hugging Gilbert, shaking hands with his grandmother, a small woman with a lined face, long gray hair tied into a bun, and a large nose.