That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1) Read online

  Mad Scientist Journal Presents

  That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley

  Edited by Jeremy Zimmerman and Dawn Vogel

  Cover Illustration by Shannon Legler

  Cover Layout by Katie Nyborg

  Copyright 2014 Jeremy Zimmerman, except where noted

  Amazon Edition

  "A Matter of Scale" is Copyright 2014 Emily C. Skaftun

  "Goat" is Copyright 2014 Nathan Crowder

  "The Crumbling of Old Walls" is Copyright 2014 Craig D. B. Patton

  "The Laughing Book" is Copyright 2014 Cliff Winnig

  "Passenger" is Copyright 2014 Evan Purcell

  "The Hill" is Copyright 2014 Damir Salkovic

  "In Defense of Professor Falcrovet" is Copyright 2014 Darin M. Bush

  "Arkquarium" is Copyright 2014 Folly Blaine

  "Dr. Circe and the Shadow over Swedish Innsmouth" is Copyright 2014 Erik Scott de Bie

  "A Dog Named Shallow: The Testimony of Lilya Redmond" is Copyright 2014 Erick Mertz

  "So Praise Him" is Copyright 2014 Samuel Marzioli

  "Ride into the Echo of Another Life" is Copyright 2014 Kelda Crich

  "The Ghost Circus" is Copyright 2014 Phil Gonzales

  "August and Autumn" is Copyright 2014 Jenna M. Pitman

  "The Reservoir" is Copyright 2014 Brian Hamilton

  "Hostel Night" is Copyright 2014 Brandon Barrows

  "The Pull of the Sea" is Copyright 2014 Sean Frost

  "Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star" is Copyright 2014 Sanford Allen

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  A Matter of Scale as provided by Emily C. Skaftun

  Goat as provided by Nathan Crowder

  The Crumbling of Old Walls as provided by Craig D. B. Patton

  The Laughing Book as provided by Cliff Winnig

  Passenger as provided by Evan Purcell

  The Hill as provided by Damir Salkovic

  In Defense of Professor Falcrovet as provided by Darin M. Bush

  Arkquarium as provided by Folly Blaine

  Dr. Circe and the Shadow over Swedish Innsmouth as provided by Erik Scott de Bie

  A Dog Named Shallow: The Testimony of Lilya Redmond as provided by Erick Mertz

  So Praise Him as provided by Samuel Marzioli

  Ride into the Echo of Another Life as provided by Kelda Crich

  The Ghost Circus as provided by Phil Gonzales

  August and Autumn as provided by Jenna M. Pitman

  The Reservoir as provided by Brian Hamilton

  Hostel Night as provided by Brandon Barrows

  The Pull of the Sea as provided by Sean Frost

  Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star as provided by Sanford Allen

  About the Editors

  About the Artists

  ________________________________________

  Foreword

  * * *

  The first Lovecraft story I ever read was "The Music of Erich Zahn." It was collected into an otherwise forgettable anthology of "spooky stories" targeted at teen readers. I didn't have any idea who Lovecraft was at the time. But the story stuck with me. I would later be introduced more formally to the works of H.P. Lovecraft in high school, when a guy named Chad loaned me a bunch of Lovecraft collections in addition to a bunch of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books. (I returned the Lovecraft. I still have his AD&D books. Sorry, Chad.)

  But "The Music of Erich Zahn" has continued to stand out for me. It fostered a love of not only the strange but also a strange fascination with fictional locations. What started with Lovecraft's Rue d'Auseil expanded to include such locales as David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Sue Grafton's Santa Teresa, Bioshock's Rapture, and the sleepy desert town of Night Vale. Places that seem larger than the stories they live in.

  But Lovecraft's Miskatonic Valley has always held a warm place in the cockles of my heart. It somehow feels more tangible than many other fictional burgs. A horrible place that you might end up coming across on a dark and foggy night. Seeing it through the eyes of so many authors was a treat, and one I hope you will also enjoy.

  This book would not be possible if not for the generosity of our Kickstarter backers. In particular, we would like to recognize the contributions of Stephen Acton, Don Ankney, Matthew Carpenter, Andrew Cherry, Terence Chua, Eric Cook, Bob Desinger, Zedd & BJ Epstein, Chris Gates, Darin Kerr, K. Kitts, Brendan "HollyKing" Leber, Marlo M., Jamie Manley, Steven Mentzel, John Nienart, Katherine Nyborg, Diane Osborne, eric priehs, Alx Sanchez, Deb "Seattlejo" Schumacher, Wendy Wallace, Catherine Warren, and You Know Who.

  Yours,

  Jeremy Zimmerman

  Co-Editor

  * * *

  A Matter of Scale

  An account by Dr. Riley Lovegood, as provided by Emily C. Skaftun

  * * *

  You know that thing where you become aware of something, then suddenly you see it everywhere? Like, maybe a year ago I saw cavatappi on a menu, and I had to ask the waitress what it was. The day after that, I was at the grocer and the only pasta on the shelves was cavatappi. Or anyway they had more than one brand of the curly noodles in stock, when I only just learned that they existed. It must have been there all along, right? Because the other alternative is that cavatappi was in the store because I was now aware of it, and that model of the universe is one I simply cannot live in. If that's the kind of universe we live in ... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

  Let's assume these things have been around since the beginning.

  I want to go back to the beginning. And that is my family crest.

  Many of the older families of the Miskatonic Valley have shields with lions or gryphons or other beasts. Ours--it's sort of a symbol. It has a few sharp lines that seem familiar, like a rune or Cyrillic or Chinese character (but it's not--trust me, I've looked). It's bulbous and symmetrical and yet deeply wrong. It resembles an animal if you squint a certain way. If you ignore biology and allow for tentacles to replace most other body parts. If you accept that eyes are windows to the bottomless, meaningless, dark, soul-devouring depths of space.

  But that's only if you accept that those things on the crest are eyes.

  The symbol is like a Rorschach test, telling more about the beholder than itself. Furthermore, it's like cavatappi. Once you see it, you can't stop seeing it everywhere. Come to think of it, it even looks a bit like cavatappi.

  Father saw it in the ocean. He thought a beast slumbered below, trapped on an undersea island. Actually, he thought it was a god, and that it was his destiny to find and awaken the god, who would then go on a rampage and destroy the fragile sanity (and home planet) of insignificant humans. I don't know why Father thought this was a good idea.

  He sold the scheme to Miskatonic University as a scientific survey to discover what creatures live in the ocean's depths. Giant squid, perhaps. Not the Kraken, or Leviathan. Certainly not Cthulhu.

  He didn't find it there, and returned a broken man.

  It was Mother who identified the god Father sought as Cthulhu. She introduced him to a cult worshipping this and other demon gods, where his family crest was sensibly taken as proof that he was a chosen one.

  I dismissed their obsessions. If I'd believed in their apocalyptic gods, I suppose I'd have feared them--I certainly fear the other cult members, with their worship of gibbering madness.

  But I
had more important things to worry about than sunken continents and mythical monsters. Rural New England escapes the scrutiny of, say, Appalachia, but a real problem of poverty surrounded us. Nutrition was an issue, as was hygiene, safe drinking water, and disease. So rather than devote my life to the search for ineffable evil, I became a doctor.

  I kept a small office at the MU teaching hospital--mostly so I'd have an excuse to "run into" Gina, in Research--but most of my work involved visiting patients in their far-flung homes, bringing basic medicine to folks who really needed it.

  #

  There is a lake just outside our town where children swim and old men fish. Nestled between craggy hills choked with mouldering pines, Needle Lake was shady all hot summer long, and frozen solid all winter. I always hated it. It was one of those lakes where one step off the bank puts you knee-deep in frigid water, a second step gets you waist deep, and by the third step you're swimming. The water was murky and, to my mind, menacing.

  Who knew what was down there?

  Legend said Needle Lake had no bottom, but I always knew it did. A lake that had no bottom would pass right through the Earth, and you couldn't just have a hole in the planet like that. Magma and other stuff would bubble up and fill it, and certainly water wouldn't stay in it. The truth was that no one knew how deep the lake was, until a few months ago. A team of cartographers from old MU finally surveyed it and came to the shocking conclusion that it was 1,666 meters deep, or 5,466 less evil-sounding feet deep. It was the deepest lake in the world.

  Considering the lake's small size, this was even more shocking. Its sides must truly drop straight down, as though a giant bored a hole in the Earth. MU was determined to (literally and figuratively) get to the bottom of this mystery.

  Of course, Father and his cult of lunatics were even more excited. This explained why he hadn't found slumbering Cthulhu in the ocean! All this time the god had been in our own backyard! His eyes lit up with manic fire when he heard the news.

  Miskatonic still had Father's equipment from his failed oceanographic voyage, so they enlisted him to guide the deep-diving submersible, nicknamed DeeDi, into the bottomless pit, cataloguing what they found there. We were alone on the boat when he winched her aboard--none of the undergrads MU had assigned could stand to work with Father, so he'd roped me in as an assistant.

  DeeDi swung to the deck with a gentle scrape, dripping mud and an ichorous green slime like putrid seaweed. Nevertheless, Father ran to it like a long-lost lover, hugging and nuzzling it like a kitten. "What eldritch secrets have you brought with you?" he whispered.

  I turned my head away in revulsion, as he smeared lake-gunk all over himself. The trees on the nearest shoreline shook in a breeze. To me they looked like multi-limbed figures crossing themselves against a great evil. For the barest of moments, I glimpsed the symbol from my family crest among them, before flexible branches bent another way and the mirage passed.

  #

  I'd been watching the video feed as DeeDi explored the lake, so I knew no colossal monster slumbered there. There were barely any fish either, though they may simply have been nimble enough to stay out of DeeDi's headlights. The deeper she went, the less we were able to see through the stagnant murky water.

  But that very murkiness told us that something was down there. When we putted into the dock, the first thing the undergrads did was hose DeeDi off with a high-pressure hose and decontaminants and collect the sealed samples she'd collected. They hosed Father off too, eyes darting askance at each other as they did.

  I never knew for sure what DeeDi dredged up, as the University never released that information. I cannot actually prove that what came next came from Needle Lake.

  But it did.

  It took a while to notice the change in Father. He'd been nuts for years, maybe always, and he surrounded himself with people who supported and reinforced his insanity. When he started speaking in tongues, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, and so on, he was at a cult meeting. The others simply joined in.

  Soon, though, he became ill. He couldn't eat, and when he did he could keep nothing down. He spiked a high fever and shook with the chills it wrought. I carted him in to the MU teaching hospital after a day of this, but we couldn't save him.

  Mother buried him in an ornate coffin, carved with the family crest. The day was drizzly and flat gray. And when I looked at the crest in the cemetery, clods of dirt raining upon it and turning to thick, dark mud, it looked like a virus.

  Oh no, I thought. What have we unleashed?

  Father wasn't the only one it was too late for. By the time he died, the hospital was full of people like him, ranting in a consonant-heavy babble and vomiting up their lives.

  #

  After Father's funeral I went straight to the lab at the hospital. I didn't even change out of my black dress, just threw a lab coat over it, swapped heels for sneakers, and knocked on Gina's window. She looked up from a microscope, frowned, and then waved to me with gloved hands. She stood and stripped them off, opening the door with a geeky smile on her face. People were dying, but she had a mystery to solve, and her enthusiasm for her work couldn't be hidden.

  I smiled back at her, despite a growing cold fear in my stomach.

  "Riley," she said. "You've got to look at this." She stood behind the wheeled stool she'd just vacated, gesturing to the microscope's eyepiece.

  I was terribly afraid I'd see a familiar shape. "Dammit Gina," I tried to joke, "I'm a doctor, not a microbiologist."

  She didn't laugh. She just grabbed me by the shoulders and gently pressed me onto the stool. I bent my head to the microscope and saw--I really couldn't say. It didn't look like anything I'd seen before and, to my immense relief, it didn't resemble my family crest.

  My relief was so immense I almost laughed. To think I'd almost believed in Father's end-of-the-world nonsense!

  As I watched, one of the little blobs shivered and stretched and split into two. It seemed to happen very fast, but what did I know?

  Gina explained to me, very impatiently, that this microbe behaved unusually. It seemed able to manipulate the host's DNA, yet it replicated using mitosis and a lot of other highly technical stuff that I mostly failed to follow. The kind of doctoring I did largely comprised prescribing antibiotics and ointments and referring patients to specialists. Joking aside, I was rusty on the biological basics.

  I tuned back in when she said she could develop a vaccine. And then it was all I could do not to kiss her like that soldier in Times Square. Maybe for lots of reasons.

  #

  Gina delivered the vaccine in less than a week. Many people died in that week, and MU was losing control of their carefully tended secrecy. Rumor had it the CDC was on its way to take over if we didn't clamp down on our disease STAT.

  Gina tested it on herself, because she is a real-life hero. It worked, so we gave it to everyone. It even worked, in slightly modified form, as a treatment for people who'd already been infected. Overnight the death rate from the new disease dropped to zero, and everyone in the Miskatonic Valley sighed with relief.

  I did a round to all of my rural patients, vaccinating all of them. The county made the vaccine mandatory in schools and offered it for free at the library and post office and all the chemists.

  With the danger behind us, I took a break to mourn my father. We hadn't exactly seen eye to crazy eye in life, but I found I missed him. Insane or not, it was nice to be around someone with that kind of certainty. Without him, life seemed ordinary. I often found myself drifting off, eyes locked on the crest above our fireplace.

  A phone call snapped me out of distressing thoughts. "Help, Dr. Riley," the voice said. My phone's caller ID said Mike Maguerrin, but it didn't sound like his voice--it was discordant, almost inhuman in its depth, like there was a growl underlying it.

  I asked a few follow-up questions, but he was unresponsive. I suspected tonsillitis or strep throat, made sure I had tongue depressors and flashlight, and set out to
help poor Mr. Maguerrin.

  #

  It was dark when I got to the Maguerrins' house, and quiet as a grave.

  I rapped on the screen door, and for a long moment heard nothing. When sound came, it was in the form of an otherworldly wail that loosened my bowels. I admit that I almost dropped my medicine bag and ran like a ninny back to my car. But I'd taken an oath, and furthermore curiosity compelled me to see what was inside the house, even if it was some form of monster. I felt my father with me, his apocalyptic curiosity tugging me forward.

  The screen door creaked open, and behind it I found the door unlocked. I pushed inward very slowly, calling out for Mike, or Clara, little Belle and even baby Billy. All I heard was a sort of whimpering from down the hall. I fumbled on the wall for a lightswitch, finally flicking on the porch light. It did little to illuminate the house, and much to lengthen all the shadows into eerie monstrous forms. But it was light enough for me to pick my way across the living room floor toward the hall.

  The living room looked like it had seen a fight. A shoddy armchair had been overturned, and books and other detritus littered the floor. A lamp lay broken on the floor, still plugged in. "Mike!" I called again. "It's Dr. Riley. I'm coming toward your bedroom."

  A grunting murmur was my only answer, and a scuffling that got louder as I approached the door. And then a little girl's voice from behind me nearly scared me out of my skin. "Dr. Riley," it said, and of course it was only Belle. I turned and saw her in the low light, a silhouette of a little girl clutching a baby doll in one hand. And yet something about it seemed off. I groped again at the wall for a lightswitch, and this time when I found it the light was almost blinding.

  And what I saw ... Words fail me. Belle was a little girl still, but she was also ... not. Her skin was a bilious shade of green somewhere between mucus and seaweed, and her once-long hair was gone. In its place--and, indeed, in many places on her naked body--tendrils sprouted that waved and groped in the air with unspeakable intelligence. I could swear that some of them were eyelessly watching me. Her eyes were not a child's any longer. They were black pits deeper than the murk of bottomless Needle Lake. They were abominable eyes.