Remember, this is the second of two chapters I've just posted, make sure you read both! As a point of intrest, the Native American artifact described in this chapter is a real object, which is in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. If anyone would like to see a photo, e-mail me and I'll send you a link.
I don't own Starsky, Hutch, Kolchak, or any of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, although thanks to his generosity and that of his followers, the Cthulhu Mythos has always been regarded as a joint sandbox where anyone can play.
Chapter Twelve - A High Place of Darkness and Light
Once again Kolchak turned on his recorder:
"Detective Starsky called me that night to tell me he had made the arrangements with Professor Jacobs, so the next morning I drove over to Jameson College.
The campus wasn't far from the coast, and it seemed as though an endless wind was blowing off the ocean. I found the library at the top of a hill, the highest point on the campus. The occult section, housed in the Armitage Memorial Reading Room, was on the top floor of the building, so I made my way up to discover what arcane secrets waited inside."
Kolchak stepped out of the elevator into a small lobby with a double door at the far end. Beside the door was a marble bust on a plinth, labeled "Henry Armitage, AM, PhD, Litt.D, Librarian". He pushed the double doors open and stepped through..
Inside was a large room filled with book shelves and an imposing oak and marble desk. Glass cases lined the walls. Behind the desk was an equally imposing woman. She looked at him with clear gray eyes, and asked in a cool voice, "May I help you?"
"Yeah, hi, my name is Carl Kolchak." He struggled in his pocket for his press ID. "Someone should have called this morning about me using the library?"
"Ah, yes. I've been waiting for you. I'm Miss Dansforth, the librarian." She stepped out from behind the desk. She was tall and angular, with a face that could have been anywhere from 28 to 48. Her light brown hair was fastened tightly back with a clip. "What are you here to investigate?"
Kolchak fumbled in his jacket pocket for his recorder. "Well, I have this tape, here. And I'm trying to identify the chanting. Here, listen."
He pressed "play", and the weird noises filled the room. The librarian listened, and her lips pressed into a tight line. "Most interesting," she said after Kolchak had turned the recorder off.
"Can you identify it?"
"Assuredly." She motioned him to a seat at one of the heavy tables. "Wait here."
She vanished through a door marked "closed shelf". Kolchak took the opportunity to look around the room. The glass cases seemed to contain artifacts of various kinds. From where he sat, Kolchak could see things that looked Native American, Egyptian, and Chinese, and in other cases items he couldn't identify as readily.
It took her a few minutes, but soon Miss Dansforth returned with a towering stack of books. She spread them out on the table around Kolchak, opened one, and put it in front of him. "Start here," she commanded. And Kolchak began to read.
The morning wore on. Each time he finished a book or section, Miss Dansforth was there to put something else in front of him.
He read about the Old Ones, the Elder Gods, strange eldritch presences from out of the depths of time and space that seeped down to our world when it was young, before man had crawled from the primal ooze, when the Earth was ruled by races now forgotten. He read of Azathoth, the amorphous blight that mindlessly rules the cosmos, blasphemously bubbling at the center of the universe, surrounded by the wailing of pipes and the throbbing of drums; and of Yog-Sothoth, the all-in-one and one-in-all, the gate and the key; and their messenger and avatar Nyarlathotep, the one who takes the shape of a man to lure men to ruination, he who came to rouse the witch-cults to blasphemous, erotic frenzy as their "dark man", leading them to loathsome ecstasies, perverting them away from the gentle nature-worship of their forbears.
He read of Shub-Niggureth, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, figure of twisted evil fecundity, the Blood Mother, hideous mate of Yog-Sothoth, who produced from her diseased loins the countless gibbering monstrosities that flopped and mewled around the black throne of Azathoth.
He read of the horrifying races that predated infant humanity by millions of years; of the Mi-go, those dreaded fungi from the black planet Yuggoth; of the ghouls that gnawed through the darkest caverns of earth's bowels, taking as their fruit and bounty the harvest of the human dead; of the Elder Race, strange, extinct creators of the horrific amorphous, evil shogguths who had dwelt in primordial Antarctica, before the world changed and the ice took it over.
And he read at last of the Deep Ones, amphibious horrors in strange frog-fish combination, that dwell in all of Earth's oceans, immortal malices weaving their plans to retake the solid grounds of earth as their own, seeking miscegenation with humans to create strange half-breed creatures to re-colonize the human world. He learned how foolish and greedy men would throw a summoning stone into the deep ocean to call them, to make strange bargains that were always to the Deep Ones benefit, and to the detriment of the humans who thought they were the masters.
Many times over the years they had set up colonies off blighted shores, and made treaties with the humans living there, treaties to exchange fishing success and strange artifacts of gold, for human sacrifice, and human mates. The children of those matings would be themselves immortal, and eventually go down to the sea to live in the cold and darkness with their inhuman kin, learning to hate all the above water world. The only thing that repelled those strange colonies was the Elder Sign, certain shaped stones marked with odd glyphs, but what these were or where they could be found, the books did not say.
He read of the Deep Ones' God, the demonic entity known as Great Cthulhu, High priest of the Elder Gods, the winged, tentacled horror, sealed away for untold eons, trapped in his cyclopean underwater city of R'lyeh, there to wait until summoned forth when the stars were right, yet still even in his sleep able to bleed his evil into the waking world through men's dreams, seeking always to destroy man and bring the earth back into the hellish stew of pure chaos that was the realm and environment of the Old Ones.
And lastly he read of the human cultists who, seduced and deceived by Cthulhu and his minions, sought to restore him to full awareness and presence in the waking world. Around the world, in the dark places, at dark times, there the cultists were, written about from the time of Friedrich Von Junzt's horrifying Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or Comte d'Erlette's Cultes de Goules, up through the modern world, to the writings of those deemed by saner men to be simply writers of fiction.
Wherever more wholesome worship turned dark and foul, there the cultists could be found, in the uncivilized places, but also hidden in the underbelly of modern society. In the forests of primal North America, abhorred by the majority of the Native peoples; in the frozen tundra wastes, pushed out of the clean villages by the warriors of the Inuit and Tlingit; in the deep forests of Haiti, despised by the true voodoo worshipers; in the high reaches of Nepal and Tibet, always opposed by the priests and nuns of the Buddhists; in the seething immigrant stewpots of great American cities, feared and fought by the immigrant's churches; in the castles of Germany during the Nazi reign, shunned even by those later called war criminals, the cultists arose again and again.
And wherever and whenever they arose, their dread chant was heard, the same that Kolchak had recorded on his tape machine: "Ia Cthulhu". "Hail Cthulhu". "Cthulhu fhtagn". "Cthulhu dreams." "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn". "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming".
He learned of the verse in the cursed Necronomicon, the crazed outpouring of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, that explained that chant:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even Death may die."
He learned where this knowledge came from, the shunned and censored terrible grimoires that, along with the Necronomicon, told of the hidden knowledge, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, those strange moldy scrolls rumored to predate the existence of the human race; the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan; the Book of Eibon, and Ludwig Prinn's abhorrent De Vermis Mysteriis. He read of the bleak despair and abject madness that filled those who delved too deeply into these secrets, of the hopelessness of a world with no succor, no hope, no place for puny mortal men.
Eventually he closed the last book that Miss. Dansforth had prepared for him. "Does that answer all your questions?" she asked.
Kolchak looked at her, his mind dazed and confused by what he had read, and horrified by its import. "Is this… all true?" he whispered. "That the universe is ruled by…?" he trailed off.
Miss Dansforth looked at him coolly. "I'm a librarian, Mr. Kolchak. There's something that all librarians know, that sources must be evaluated. Truth is to be found in books but only the truth known by their authors. The authors write their truths as they see them."
She walked to one of the glass cases, and motioned him over. "Do you know what this is?" she asked.
Kolchak examined the object. It looked Native American, though he couldn't identify a tribe. It was wooden, a macabre, distorted human face surmounted by another head, a head surrounded by five tentacles. It was cunningly made so that the jointed wooden tentacles could actually be moved by means of strings made of sinew. He shook his head. "I have no idea."
"It's a mask, Mr. Kolchak, from the Kwakiutl Indians. Anthropologists say it represents an octopus spirit."
"It looks as though… does this come from one of the cults that worship Cthulhu?" His voice wavered over the name.
"It may. We don't really know. Do you know anything about the Kwakiutl, Mr. Kolchak?"
"No, never heard of them. No, wait. Weren't they mentioned in one of those books? They knew the Deep Ones and called them, what was it, Pugwis?"
"Yes, that's right. The Kwakiutl are one of the peoples of the Northwest coast. That's the official reason why we have this artifact here."
Kolchak waited. Obviously, she was coming to a point.
"There's an interesting legend that's common throughout many of the peoples of the Pacific coast. They have a story of a terrible monster in the sea that threatened to destroy the world. But the monster was defeated by the Thunderbird, and the people were saved." She turned to him. "I have no doubt that some day some scientist or other will look at that legend and say that the monster represents, oh, perhaps an earthquake, and a tidal wave. But we know better than that, don't we, Mr. Kolchak?"
Kolchak swallowed and nodded.
"What do you know of Thunderbird?"
"I… isn't he the Great Spirit?"
"Close, but not quite right. To many, maybe most, of the Native American tribes, Thunderbird is the emissary of the Great Spirit, his messenger and chief warrior. His captain of the guard, if you will."
Kolchak breathed in deeply, remembering what Mary Polanski had told him about Detective Starsky. "Captain of the Heavenly Hosts? Like the Angel Michael?"
Miss. Dansforth nodded in satisfaction. "Very good, Mr. Kolchak. You do know your material. Tell me, are you a Bible reader at all?"
"A little. Not for awhile, though," he admitted.
"Are you familiar with Psalm 74?"
"Not off the top of my head, no."
"Wait a moment." Miss. Dansforth stepped over to one of the shelves, and quickly searched for something. She pulled a fat book off the shelf. A Bible, Kolchak saw when she walked back. She leafed through it. "Here we are. Verses 13 and 14 are what I was looking for. 'You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragon in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.'"
She looked at Kolchak closely. "There is always opposition, Mr. Kolchak. From where do you think the Elder Sign proceeds? Mankind is not alone. You should know that. You have had experience."
"How do you know that?" Kolchak asked, suddenly suspicious.
"Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Kolchak. Your recommendation from Professor Jacobs got you into this collection, but it was your recommendation from Professor Wilmarth that gained you my assistance."
"Who? I don't know any Professor Wilmarth," Kolchak asked in confusion.
"That doesn't matter, Mr. Kolchak. Professor Wilmarth knows of you and that is all that is necessary. You will be welcome here for as long as you are in the area. Now, did you have any other questions?"
Kolchak thought for a moment. His head whirled with the shock of what he had read, but his reporter's instincts still functioned. "Could there be any connection between any of this and illicit drug use?"
Miss Dansforth's lips pursed as she thought. "Good question. There is anecdotal evidence that some drugs block people's reception and awareness of the Old Ones and their minions, if somehow they've become sensitized to them. On the other hand, there have been rumors that some drugs can open the perceptions wider, allowing greater access to different levels of reality. Even, possibly, allowing those levels of reality to be manipulated. However, no one, as far as I know, has ever done a study of the question." For the briefest moment, a trace of humor flickered across the cool, impassive face. "It isn't, one would think, a subject that lends itself to scientific experimentation."
"No, no, I suppose not."
"So, then, Mr. Kolchak, does that cover everything you need at this time?" Miss Dansforth went on briskly.
Kolchak considered. "Yeah, for now at least."
"Good. Remember, though, now that you have been admitted, you are welcome back here at any time for any information we can assist you with." She walked him to the door and ushered him out.
"It was after I had left, when I was trying to make sense of all that I had learned, that I recalled the man I had seen lurking outside the detective's home. The descriptions I had read of the Deep Ones intruded on my mind, and I felt a horrible suspicion. I needed some time to think all this through, and I needed to get something to eat. I decided to go back to The Pits to grab a bite, and to see if Mr. Bear would consent to pass on any information."
Kolchak put his recorder away.