She had me there. “Yes, it does.”
“Time isn’t just weirder than we know, Roy,” Connie said earnestly. “It’s weirder than we can know. Einstein and relativity only started proving that. It can be slowed down. It can be accelerated too. Maybe in less drastic ways than near lightspeed or the g-field of a neutron star. There are convincing cases of personalities being transferred across time, not all of them human personalities. Experiments have been done right here at Miskatonic. Wingate Peaslee carried them out in the 1950s. He had a strong interest because his own father had been a victim of transferred personality for five years. Wingate was the only one who stood by him; his wife got a divorce. Just about unthinkable in New England before the Great War! It’s a family matter, you know. Wingate’s sister Hannah was my great-grandma. I’ve read Wingate’s record of what his father found and saw in Australia in ’35. You should too. I’m worried about these dreams you’re having, and I think you ought to be careful.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “No, I’m not humoring you, I meant it, Connie. The dreams bother me too. If they happen much more, or get more intense, I’ll stop working with those rock samples.” I didn’t say for how long. “Meanwhile, you know, could you translate some of Huang Jing’s masterpiece?”
II
We worked on it for hours. That Chinese student really had mastered German, it seemed, and his translation of von Junzt’s chapters seemed accurate, which I knew from reading an accurate English version of Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The first one was that shoddy Bridewall effort of 1845, worthless to any real scholar, and the early twentieth century Golden Goblin edition, expurgated to the bone, was merely ornamental. Then it was forgotten for about sixty years. When hippie mysticism came in, though, and pious conventional horror lost a lot of its power, a real, complete translation into English came from Maelstrom Press, first in stiff covers and then in paperback, with Secret Mysteries of Asia for a companion volume. When Connie and I were an item I’d read them both.
Huang Jing’s sections of Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, interspersed with his translations of von Junzt’s chapters, said nothing much about the German’s last journey. What he’d written on that subject came from the Mongols who had accompanied von Junzt to Leng, but deserted him before he arrived there. Pure hearsay, no doubt, which Huang had got third or fourth hand, and decades after everybody involved was dead.
I was disappointed, to be truthful. Huang gave no clue as to where Leng was situated. He even suggested it was part of the dreamlands, a notion I’d read about before, and he stated as fact that the stars of Leng were unlike Earth’s. His more realistic details described Leng as a dry, cold, stony plateau, very difficult of access. He recounted a story that the Qianlong Emperor, in the eighteenth century, filled with the pride of his conquests, had sent an army eight thousand strong to subdue Leng, and fewer than a hundred came back. That was expunged from the imperial records, and it was made a capital crime to repeat the story or set it down in writing.
Connie told me that was possible. The Qianlong Emperor had been quite a book-burner, destroying thousands of volumes, especially ones that said too much about problems with defense, or failed frontier campaigns. A few dozen indiscreet writers in his reign were sentenced to nasty deaths by the Literary Inquisition. Charming.
“Huang was lucky to be born after that emperor died,” I said. “Would it be true that he sent a force to conquer Leng?”
“Can’t confirm it. He might have. The approaches are supposed to be harsh, and of course disease might have destroyed the army. Huang does say here that nobody finds Leng by the same route twice.”
This was no help. Huang also recounted the same legends about Leng I had heard before. It was supposedly the original home of the Tcho-Tcho people, held in disrepute throughout Asia, and Huang described them with the same disdain. According to him they were horrid quasi-humans, squat and powerful in form, their abundant body hair more like stiff black bristles, their mouths grotesquely wide, stretching almost from ear to ear. Their manners and customs were appalling, their closest approach to religion a corpse-eating cult with a winged canine sphinx for its symbol, and they killed strangers on sight, quickly if they were fortunate.
Leng was populated, thinly, by more prepossessing people, who lived in stone villages and traveled only in armed caravans. There was supposed to be at least one city, but that was long abandoned and its history enigmatic. There were ancient burial mounds and strange towers, said to be as deserted as the city. There was a sprawling stone monastery or temple, also without inhabitants, except a high priest who wore robes and mask of yellow silk, and whom it was death to see even hidden in his vestments. Seeing him without them, wrote Huang (and Gottfried Mülder, too) meant a less comfortable fate.
Having got that far, I decided I might as well be reading Sax Rohmer. Yet von Junzt had died mysteriously and badly after his return from Mongolia, terrible things had evidently happened there, no-one ever caught his murderer, and his friend Ladeau had destroyed von Junzt’s last manuscript and then suicided. Any real clues to where Leng can be found were probably crushed ashes with the manuscript. All of this meant dead ends.
I said slowly, “Connie, maybe you’re right and I’ve no way to go now but with psychometry experiments. If they don’t give me a thing, I’m no worse off.”
“Of course you’re not!” she said. Then she pulled a face. In a lot of ways she’s as spontaneous as a kid. “It’ll mean going through Tindall. And a certain amount of butt-kissing.”
Neither of us liked the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He resembled an intensely staring owl. His people were rich, he’d been a force in getting some grants Miskatonic needed badly, and he was a player in the university’s politics. By that I mean he excelled at planting knives in backs. The trustees didn’t quite jump to attention when he spoke, but they certainly didn’t ignore him, and he had a weakness for bizarre projects. Perhaps, then, even though he no more liked me than I did him, he’d approve this one.
Among Tindall’s oddities was an office that would have been bang up-to-date a hundred years ago. His desk, bookcases and filing cabinets were carved black oak, with matching chairs. These had no upholstery and were ugly, wide enough for people with backsides like Percherons, standing on four thick legs. A despot’s interrogators would have approved them for discomfort. Even Tindall could not do without a computer, printer and fax, but he kept them in a broad alcove behind a tawny plush curtain.
His social attitudes were as far behind the times. I think he’d prefer that no-one with a name like Orlanski trod the hallowed precincts of Miskatonic. Believe me, he talked like that, and I’d heard him refer in public speeches to “the charmed circle of New England life”. Polacks should have the grace to stay out, was his meaning, and maybe that’s why he treated Connie with respect. Ancestors of hers fought in what Tindall still calls “King Philip’s War”, and they’ve lived in Massachusetts ever since. That meant a lot to the dean. His own forebears were Providence folk and had been there a long time, but still only since 1750 or so, when they arrived as merchants. (They were Tories during the Revolution, by the way.) Connie’s family can beat that by a full lifetime.