“I have been getting off a refutation of some whippersnapper’s claim that the late Young Gentleman of Providence who recorded so well so many of the weirder doings around Arkham was a ‘horrifying figure’ whose ‘closest relation is with Peter Kurten, the Diisseldorf murderer, who admitted that his days in solitary confinement were spent conjuring up sexual-sadistic fantasies.’ Great God, doesn’t the sapless youngster know that all normal men have sexual-sadistic fantasies? Even supposing that the literary fantasies of the late Young Gentleman had a deliberate sexual element and were indeed fantasies!” Turning from me with a somewhat sinister chuckle, he said to his attractive secretary, “Now remember, Miss Tilton, that goes to Colin Wilson, not Edmund — I took care of Edmund very thoroughly in an earlier letter! Carbon copies to Avram Davidson and Damon Knight. And while you’re at it, see that they go out from the Hangman’s Hill sub-station — I’d like them to carry that postmark!”
Getting his hat and a light topcoat and hesitating a moment at a mirror to assure himself that his high collar was spotless, the venerable yet sprightly Wilmarth led me out of the Administration Building back across Garrison to the old quadrangle, ignoring the traffic which dodged around us. On the way he replied in answer to a remark of mine, “Yes, the architecture is damned good. Both it and the Pickman Lab — and the new Polish Quarter apartment development, too — were designed by Daniel Upton, who as you probably know has had a distinguished career ever since he was given a clean bill of mental health and discharged with a verdict of ‘justified homicide’ after he shot Asenath or rather old Ephraim Waite in the body of his friend Edward Derby. For a time that verdict got us almost as much criticism as the Lizzie Borden acquittal got Fall River, but it was well worth it!
“Young Danforth’s another who’s returned to us from the asylum — and permanently too, now that Morgan’s research in mescaline and LSD has turned up those clever anti-hallucinogens,” my conductor continued as we passed between the museum and the library where a successor of the great watchdog that had destroyed Wilbur Whateley clinked his chain as he paced in the shadows. “Young Danforth — Gad, he’s nearly as old as I! — you know, the brilliant graduate assistant who survived with old Dyer the worst with which the Antarctic could face them back in ’30 and ’31. Dan- forth’s gone into psychology, like Peaslee’s Wingate and old Peaslee himself — it’s a therapeutic vocation. Just now he’s deep in a paper on Asenath Waite, showing she’s quite as much an Anima-figure — that is, devouring witch-mother and glamorous fatal witch-girl — as Carl Jung maintained Haggard’s Ayesha and William Sloane’s Selena were.”
“But surely there’s a difference there,” I objected somewhat hesitatingly. “Sloane’s and Haggard’s women were fictional. You can’t be implying, can you, that Asenath was a figment of the imagination of the Young Gentleman who wrote The Thing on the Doorstep? — or rather fictionalized Upton’s rough account. Besides, it wasn’t really Asenath but Ephraim, as you pointed out yourself a moment ago.”
“Of course, of course,” Wilmarth quickly replied with another of those sinister and — yes, I must confess it — unpleasant chuckles. He added blandly, “But old Ephraim lends just the proper fierce male component to the Anima-figure — and after you’ve spent an adult lifetime at Miskatonic, you discover you’ve developed a rather different understanding from the herd’s of the distinction between the imaginary and the real. Come along now.”
We had entered the faculty lounge in the interim and he led me across its oak-paneled precincts to a large bay window where eight leather-upholstered easy chairs were set in a circle along with smoking stands and a table with cups, glasses, brandy decanter, and a blue- warmed urn of coffee. I looked around with a deep shiver of awe and feeling of personal unworthiness at the five elderly scholars and scientists, professors emeritus all, already seated at this figurative modern Round Table of high-minded battlers against worse than ogres and dragons — cosmic evil in all its monstrous manifestations. There was Upham of Mathematics, in whose class poor Walter Gilman had expounded his astounding theories of hyperspace; Francis Morgan of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy, now the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror on that dank September morning back in ’28; Nathaniel Peaslee of Economics and Psychology, who had endured the dreadful underground journey Down Under in ’35; his son Wingate of Psychology, who had been with him on that Australian expedition; and William Dyer of Geology who had been there too and four years before that undergone the horrendous adventure at the Mountains of Madness.
Save for Peaslee pere, Dyer was the oldest present — well through his ninth decade — but it was he who, assuming a sort of informal chairmanship, now said to me sharply but warmly, “Sit down, sit down, youngster! I don’t blame you for your hesitation. We call this Emeritus Alcove. Heaven pity the mere assistant professor who takes a chair without invitation! See here, what will you drink? Coffee, you say? — well, that’s a prudent decision, but sometimes we need the other when our talk gets a little too far outside, if you take my meaning. But we’re always glad to see intelligent friendly visitors from the ordinary ‘outside’ — Ha-ha!”
“If only to straighten out their misconceptions about Miskatonic,” Wingate Peaslee put in a bit sourly. “They’re forever inquiring if we offer courses in Comparative Witchcraft and so on. For your information, I’d sooner teach a course in Comparative Mass-Murder with Mein Kampf as the text than help anyone meddle with that stuff!”
“Particularly if one considers the sort of students we get today,” Upham chimed, a bit wistfully.
“Of course, of course, Wingate,” Wilmarth said soothingly to young Peaslee. “And we all know that the course in medieval metaphysics Asenath Waite took here was a completely innocent academic offering, free of arcane matters.” This time he withheld his chuckle, but I sensed it was there.
Francis Morgan said, “I too have my problems discouraging sensationalism. For instance, I had to disappoint M.I.T. when they asked me for a sketch of the physiology of anatomy of the Ancient Ones, to be used in the course they give in the designing of structures and machines for ‘imaginary’ — Gad! — extra-terrestrial beings. Engineers are a callous breed — and in any case the Ancient Ones are not merely extra-terrestrial, but extra-cosmic. I’ve also had to limit access to the skeleton of Brown Jenkin, though that has given rise to a rumor that it is a file-and-brown-ochre fake like the Piltdown skull.”
“Don’t fret, Francis,” Dyer told him. “I’ve had to turn down many similar requests re the antarctic Old Ones.” He looked at me with his wonderfully bright wise old eyes, wrinkle-bedded. “You know, Miskatonic joined in the Antarctic activities of the Geophysical Year chiefly to keep exploration away from the Mountains of Madness, though the remaining Old Ones seem to be doing a pretty good job of that on their own account — hypnotic broadcasts of some type, I fancy. But that is quite all right because (This is strictly confidential!) the antarctic Old Ones appear to be on our side, even if their Shoggoths aren’t. They’re good fellows, as I’ve always maintained. Scientists to the last! Men!”
“Yes,” Morgan agreed, “those barrel-bodied star-headed monstrosities better deserve the name than some of the specimens of genus homo scattered about the globe these days.”
“Or some of our student body,” Upham put in dolefully.
Dyer said, “And Wilmarth has been put to it to head off inquiries about the Plutonians in the Vermont hills and keep their existence secret with their help. How about that, Albert — are the crab-like space- flyers cooperating?”