“Y’all go ahead,” said Howard. “I’ll keep watch.”
“That’s hardly—” Smith began out of habit, but he interrupted himself. “We’ll only be gone a few minutes.”
“Don’t worry, Clark, I ain’t aimin’ to run off nowhere.”
As the three headed back toward the cabin, Howard laid his sleeping bag on top of the cot nearest the fire pit. He untied it, rolled it open, and took up the .45 that emerged from its folds. Quickly, like someone being watched, he glanced around before opening the chamber to be sure the bullets were still inside. When he could no longer see the others, he walked the perimeter of the compound, counting his paces for some reason he could not explain to himself. Once, then twice, he quickly spun around to face the tree line as if to surprise someone peeking from behind a tree trunk. He saw nothing, but he could still feel something brooding from the slowly darkening shade in the woods.
Howard stuck the pistol in his waistband and gathered up some wood for the fire. In a few minutes he had a small but cheery flame going, and even in the daylight, it made him feel more secure. “Damn it,” he said to himself. “I’m spooked like an oldmare.”
NOT TEN YARDS from the cabin was a shoulder-high mound of earth with rough planks for a roof. Smith led Glory and Lovecraft over and gestured into the pit inside. “It’s our all-purpose pantry,” he said. “One of those mine shafts I was telling you about.” He took hold of the small ladder that slanted into the hole and took the first steps down. He paused. “Aren’t you coming? The ladders don’t look like much, but they’re sturdy, I assure you.”
Lovecraft felt a sudden sense of vertigo wash over him, and he shivered as it passed. It was a powerful deja vu he felt, accompanied by images of fantastic caverns full of gigantic alien shapes. “Clark, why don’t you and Glory go on down. I shall remain up here if you don’t mind.”
“What’s the matter, HP?” Glory saw that his complexion had grown even paler than usual, if that was possible.
“It’s nothing. I simply have a distaste, at the moment, for dark and conclosed spaces.”
“‘Conclosed?’ “repeated Smith.
“Did I say that? ‘Conclosed.’ Hmm. I must have enjambed ‘enclosed’ and ‘confined.’ Obviously the workings of my unconscious mood.”
“I’ll call up if we run into our friend Nyarlathotep,” said Smith. Lovecraft did not look the least bit amused, but he forced a smile.
Glory waited until Smith was down the ladder and below on the other side of the shaft before she followed. Another ladder went down from the small ledge, zagging the other way, and she suddenly found herself in a chamber ventilated by the chilly air of the mines. She rubbed her arms and shivered despite herself.
“It stays remarkably cold through the summer,” said Smith. “Here, take some of these.” He handed her an egg and pointed to the remainder on the rough-hewn shelf. “We’ll need some butter, an onion. Whatever else you think we’ll need for omelets in the morning. I’ll get the water.”
Glory could hear it trickling somewhere, and when her eyes were finally adjusted, she saw the black-surfaced pool. She shivered again. “Does that go all the way down?” she asked.
“Holds quite a bit, but that part there is only thirty or forty feet deep. We diverted the stream, and I only have to fill it once in a long while.” Smith dipped two tin pails into the pool and lifted them out, each threequarters full. “I’ve already compensated for what gets spilled from the walk back,” he said. He found another pail and handed it to Glory.
“More water?”
“No, for the other supplies. You need something in which to carry them. ”
“Thanks.” Glory put the eggs, the butter, the onion, into the pail.
She smiled. “Suddenly, I thought of jack and Jill,” she said.
“The nursery rhyme?”
” ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.’ ”
“Hardly relevant to us,” Smith surmised. “I have two pails here. And we’ve hardly gone up a hill.”
“I was thinking of the irony of doing the opposite.”
“And what’s the ironic opposite of losing one’s crown and tumbling after?”
Glory let out an involuntary giggle.
“Hullo?” Lovecraft called from above. “What is transpiring down there?”
“We’re trying to imagine the inversion of broken crowns and tumbling,” Smith called up. “Help the lady up, why don’t you?”
Glory went up the ladder first, holding her pail out for Lovecraft to take. Smith made two trips with the heavier water pails.
“I thought I heard voices other than yours,” said Lovecraft, when they were assembled to go back.
“Just the wind, HP.”
“That is also my sincerest hope, Clark.”
As she started back to the camp, Glory felt compelled to look down into the pit once more. She shivered again before she followed the two men.
FOR HOWARD THE TEXT was utterly unintelligible, and Lovecraft, though Latin had been one of his best subjects in high school, could do no more than make intelligent guesses at the meaning of the ciphers on the pages. So they hovered over Smith’s shoulders like a pair of birds as he ran his fingertips lightly over the text as if to make meaning of it by sensation alone. Watching this procedure from the other side of the table, Glory paced back and forth in boredom until finally she paused to make a suggestion.
“Wouldn’t this be easier if we read it out loud and tried to figure out the meaning together?”
“I’m afraid HP and Bob here wouldn’t be much help,” said Smith. “That’s why we came here in the first place,” Howard added. Glory gave a smile that Howard took to be a smirk. “I haven’t been out of college all that long,” she said. “My Latin’s only a bit rusty. Why don’t you let me help?”
Howard and Lovecraft exchanged a glance over Smith’s head. “Perhaps you could be of service to us by reading the text,” Lovecraft offered. “But even if you had the rudiments to offer us the phonics of the text, I doubt you have the depth of learning to make much of its meaning.”
“Oh, come on, HP,” said Smith. “My Latin isn’t much better than a good Catholic high-school boy’s. I could use all the help I can get.”
At this, Howard and Lovecraft shrugged and moved aside, letting Glory take her place at Smith’s side. There was an awkward silence for a moment, and then Howard cleared his throat, and said, “Hey, Smith, ain’t you gonna offer the lady your seat?”
“I’m sorry. Where are my manners?” Smith stood up and pulled the chair out for Glory with a flourish, and when she had seated herself, he went to the other side of the camp, where he produced a rough-hewn stool from behind a tree.
Glory began to read: “Nh’we n’it eh! Csu’r oe f’o! Hm-nau tves’ne’ti b’cme oes c’nees yras! F’ro p’noe ple-oe t’dios slvoet’eh p’lta! C’iilo b’ndas ch’hiw ave’hc: non ctede h’tem h’twi t’ran! Hoe dna’to sasu em n’ga om! T’hep r’wo sefo eh’te h’rat t’hes par! Eeta!” And then:
Y’ AI ‘NG’NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH H’EEL’GEB F’AITHRODOG
UAAAH
“This is gibberish,” she said. “It’s not any kind of Latin I’ve ever read or heard of.”
“It has a certain guttural resonance to my ear,” said Lovecraft. “That would be in keeping with the speech apparatus of the Old Ones. A corruption, perhaps?”
Smith perched on the stool, adjusting the uneven three legs. “MY guess is that we have anagrams of Latin terms,” he said. “The symbols in the margins might serve as a key to how they are to be unscrambled.” He read a few lines himself, trying the words in different configurations of letters until he arrived at something familiar.