Glory began to write them down in the order in which they made sense of the individual words. But what they had was still gibberish.
“I recommend you apply the same logic to the words,” offered Lovecraft. “Rearrange the words until they appear as sentences?”
“We don’t have enough words yet for that,” said Glory.
“Then I suggest you proceed.”
“HP,” said Howard.
“Eh?”
“I suggest we let them get at it. I could use a little leg stretchin’ myself. If the two of ya don’t mind, me and HP here are gonna go have a look around,” said Howard.
“You appear to be getting on just famously without us,” said Lovecraft.
Smith gave the men an arched eyebrow, but Glory hardly noticed,
“Don’t be away too long,” said Smith. “And don’t stray too far. There are still lots of unmarked and abandoned mineshafts in these hills.”
“We ain’t kids, Clark.”
“Duly noted,” said Lovecraft.
The two men walked toward the cabin and then past it on the trail.
In the late-afternoon light the oaks looked especially blue, their leaves almost surreal against their dark gray trunks. When they looked back toward the cabin poised there in the dry landscape with the empty Chevy standing in front, the place looked utterly abandoned.
“I have a bad feelin’ about all this, HP.” Howard hunched his shoulders and kicked at a rock in the dust. “We never shoulda picked her up.”
“She seems to have become rather essential to us, in my humble opinion,” Lovecraft replied.
“Aren’t you suspicious? It’s like she was planted there waiting for us. How do we know she ain’t the real servant of Cthulhu and the odd men are just following you around to throw us off?”
“That hardly seems likely, given how she has suffered on our account, and given how much of her tragic history we have learned over the past days.”
“Would ya put it past your Cthulhu people to fake all of that?”
“In one of our stories, perhaps,” Lovecraft said thoughtfully. “If Glory were a character in one of our Weird Tales, then one might expect some machinations in the plot that would expose her as an ally of the Old Ones. But, remember, Bob, this is not one of our tales. This is reality, which is hardly as interesting, and such machinations are unlikely to obtain.”
“I’ll tell ya what else is unlikely,” said Howard. “I’d say Klarkash Ton finding a real copy of the Necronomicon is pretty damn unlikely since you’re supposed to have made it up. I wouldn’t be usin’ our stories as examples for makin’ arguments about what’s real these days.”
Lovecraft paused his steps for a moment. “Touche,” he said to Howard’s back.
Howard stopped and turned around. He was about to reply when a long swath of the tall grass along the trailside rustled in unison. The motion carried sinuously up the incline behind Lovecraft until it stopped at the base of a large rock.
“It’s just the wind,” Lovecraft said, noticing Howard’s alarm. But there was no wind.
“Clark said there were open mineshafts.”
“An exhalation from the netherworld,” said Lovecraft.
Howard smiled. They continued down the path, trying to enjoy the quiet, dissipating heat of the day.
GLORY AND SMITH made better progress alone. They were able to unscramble a few strings of words that almost sounded like sentences.’
But during the pauses while Smith scratched out variations of the anagrams they had discovered, Glory was compelled to page through the book, and what she saw disturbed her in unexpected ways. The book was clearly based on some long-lost original whose pages must have been damaged somehow, perhaps in a fire. Some of the illustrations were only partial, their missing areas left blank because there was no way for a human imagination to predict what might have been there. The bookmakers had made precise woodcuts, but from the way the ink had blotted between the finer lines, Glory could tell the plates must have been old or their edition had been printed late in the run.
She had seen many old books, and so the pages of astronomical charts and symbols were familiar even when the particular figures were not. But she had seen nothing before like those pictures. Hieronymus Bosch came immediately to mind, but his work was clearly derivative of these unholy visions that had come from some entirely alien imagination. The abominations depicted in the woodcuts evoked in her some primitive, instinctive revulsion. She had seen plenty of depictions of Hell and demons in the medieval text collection at Vassar; her imagination was vivid enough to anticipate the extremes of such depictions, the lurid grotesqueries that a mind like de Sade’s might have added to such images; but it was not possible to anticipate these protohuman, protoamphibious obscenities.
Her response was like the instant nausea and disgust one feels at the sight of spoiled food-it was something that visceral and primitive.
And yet these images had some sort of symbolic or ritual meaning that was abundantly clear by the careful attention paid to their composition and execution, by the way certain configurations would appear again and again like the organic embodiments of some alien alphabet.
Glory turned to another page, this one illustrated by a single small image near the center. “Clark,” she said.
Smith looked up, scratching his head.
“Have you seen this?”
He leaned toward her to get a closer look. “There’s something wrong with that page,” he said. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. “Did it get wet?”
“Wet?” When Glory looked down, she saw what Smith referred to. The image, at first, appeared simply to be another woodcut illustration surrounded by text, but now she could see that it was much more complex, and the text at the borders of the image had begun to bleed-or at least that’s how it appeared. When she rubbed her eyes and looked again, the letters seemed to have gotten distorted, stretched out like fibers, and the symbol seemed to have grown larger and more distinct.
“I think our eyes are fatigued,” said Smith. “I, could swear that image was only half that size when I saw it last. All this staring at letters can distort one’s sense of scale.”
Glory looked once again at the illustration, then looked away and then quickly back again. She couldn’t see any motion, but it seemed to have changed again between glances. It was like comparing sequential frames in a motion picture film to point out the almost invisible differences. “Let’s take a break,” she said. As she placed a paper marker and closed the book, she saw the image move out of the corner of her eye. One of the tentacles had extended beyond the frame of the woodcut.
She went through with the motion and closed the book, then opened it again, quickly. “Look,” she said.
Smith, now standing, peered over her shoulder. “Hideous,” he said. “Truly hideous. More repulsive than I recall.”
“But Clark!” Glory saw the eye of the squid creature suddenly blink , open and stare into hers. She felt the gorge rise in her throat, tasted the acrid bile. She closed her eyes and slammed the book shut.
“Let’s rest a while before we become irrational,” said Smith. “This book does strange things to the imagination. How about some coffee?”
“That’s just what I need,” said Glory.
While Smith busied himself with filling the pot, Glory moved to< the fire and poked at the wood to feel its warmth. She realized she was cold for some reason, as if the chill of Smith’s underground pantry hadn’t quite left her bones. She shivered again. She wanted to talk, about something other than the book now.
“I feel like I stepped into some sort of dream when I left Texas,”