“What do you want to do?”
“Get those rocks out of his reach! Charter a plane and drop them in the Atlantic, for the best! Until we can do that, get to Tindall’s apartment, now! Talk to him, if it’s not too late. Come on.”
“We can’t drive! We’re both half cut on wine. If we’re pulled over, we won’t get to Tindall’s apartment tonight, no matter what.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Roy! We’ve eaten enough to blot it up, and I’ll stay within the limit. I don’t want to be stopped either. It’s only a few k’s. Are you coming or not?”
“Coming. But I drive. I have more bulk than you.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t share Connie’s desperation — more fool me — but I didn’t want her driving, either. Her car’s a Volvo Electric and I had handled it before. We bowled along Lich Street past the burying ground — which didn’t inspire any bright happy thoughts — and the Baptist Church, towards the modern part of town. Shopping mall, apartment blocks, swimming pool, new train station, it’s all there and all brightly lit. Somehow it didn’t reassure me. The modern end and Old Arkham alike belong to the last hundredth of a second of time, compared with the rocks of Leng.
“Can we get in?” I asked, cursing myself for not thinking of that. “Without letting Tindall know we’ve arrived, I mean?”
“In the front door, yes. Haru lives there. She’ll open up for me.” Connie spoke anxiously. “Maybe nothing is happening. Maybe Tindall is only reading and preparing, but I’m worried that he’s been doing that for quite a while already. It’s funny. These beliefs survived for thousands of years among primitive, isolated groups, like those Inuit professors Webb found worshipping Cthulhu a long way up the coast of Greenland, and still, somehow they have an appeal to crabbed, civilized scholars like Tindall!”
“And people like Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, and Koresh’s bunch. Wasn’t there even a group that carried out human sacrifices ten years ago, thinking it would open a way to some underground world called K’n-yan? Didn’t they all commit suicide when they were exposed and the law showed up to arrest them?”
Connie nodded grimly. “In the Wichita Mountains. I don’t know if K’n-yan is real or not, but there’s an extensive mythology about it. In China it’s called Xinaián.”
No limit to murder and suicide cults, especially in these crazy times. Connie called Hiru’s apartment on the intercom, and asked her to open the main door because we needed to see Tindall. Hiru’s response was to ask wryly why we’d wish to see him outside office hours if we didn’t have to. Connie explained that it was urgent, and Hiru unlocked the main entrance.
Taking the elevator to Tindall’s floor, we found his apartment dark and got no response when we rang the doorbell.
“Where would you go in Arkham if you wanted to carry out some mad Necronomicon rite?” I asked, back in Connie’s car.
“Oh, God. Keziah Mason’s witch house, if the original house was still standing, but it isn’t.” She bit her lip, which would have been fetching if she hadn’t been so worried. “There’s the White Stone out past Meadow Hill. Around here, that’s traditionally a place to avoid. And there’s the river island where they say Keziah’s witches met.”
“The island!” I said. “That’s where he’d go. Von Junzt was here in Arkham, in the early 1800s. He even visited the island. I read that chapter of his Black Book. He wrote about the island and its menhirs being one of the ‘Gates’ he was always saying existed around the world.”
“Yes!” Connie said, and wrenched the Volvo’s wheel fiercely.
The Miskatonic River flows north of town. We drove along River Street, where restored seventeenth century warehouses and taverns line the waterfront. The island itself is a tourist attraction and heritage site. There are river tours by boat, but the boats don’t land on the island. The moss-grown standing stones there make people uneasy even by day. I’ve taken the tour and looked at those menhirs as the boat passed by. The patterns and angles disturbed me too. Some archaeologists think the stones were raised by an unknown people long before the Paleo-Indians crossed the Bering land bridge, and I mean serious people, not ancient astronaut enthusiasts. If Tindall was there tonight, with the rock samples, well then, it meant that Connie was right, about his intentions and motives at least, and perhaps about far more than that. My scalp prickled. My spine felt cold.
“If we cross to that island you’ll ruin your suit,” I said.
“The hell with my suit.”
As Connie looked good in that suit and really liked it, her words proved she thought we were on a real errand. There was a timber landing opposite the island, with a couple of canoes moored there. I unhitched one. We peered across at the island, and I saw what seemed to be a dolphin light, moving in the dark. Someone was there, and not many people went to that island in darkness. Connie and I, looking at each other, entered the canoe and paddled across, by mutual consent keeping as quiet as possible.
V
It’s a rocky islet, a hundred and fifty yards long and about fifty wide. The gray standing stones, finger-shaped, are between seven and ten feet long, counting the lower parts buried in the earth. They don’t belong in this region. Where they came from has never been conclusively pinned down, even now. The most surprising thing about them, to me, is that they still stand as they were first raised. None of them seem to have fallen down or been removed, even though they make Stonehenge look like yesterday, and the seventeenth-century Puritans of Massachusetts viewed them with harsh disapproval. In reason they ought to have gone long since.
Were they immune to time in the same way as the rocks of Leng?
The dolphin light switched out, and Connie and I crept through the grass and low bushes of the island. The stones seemed to lean in as though threatening to topple on us, and they seemed to bulk bigger than by daylight, too. I heard a harsh chanting, and while the voice was Tindall’s it did not speak in his usual tone. It sounded vehement, and rose at times to a downright boom. He was repeating unknown words in crazy rhythms, but they did not sound like pointless gibberish, somehow. They had the sense, the feel, of an actual language, though not one many humans had heard.
Connie and I crawled forward through the rank grass. In the ground, between the gray moss-grown stones, we felt strange energies quiver. Ahead of us were dim red glows, like small lights arranged in a circle, and in the center stood Tindall, in slacks, shirt and tie, conventional even while mouthing mad spells. I thought, ridiculously, that I felt surprised he had even removed his coat.
Then he cried the name Yog-Sothoth. Not mispronouncing it for safety. I felt the air quiver and curdle. Connie shuddered beside me. I might have whimpered, but I could not even force that much sound from my throat.
He doesn’t know enough. He just thinks he does.