Protagonists#

Clement Scheidegger - FOC Representative, Mountaineer (Michalis)
Narinder “Nari” Sodhi - Natural Sciences Student (Ioannis)
Sofia Picado - Chemistry Student (Istvan)
Susan Chen - History Student (Konstantina)
Lillian Neill - Anthropology Lecturer (Tasos)

What the Dog Knew#

“You idiots. How did they find the warehouse? Tomorrow we drop the enzyme, and when it acts, tomorrow night we do the raid.”
— Professor Roger Harrold, through the boarded window of a house that had no business having him in it

Summary#

The warehouse — Inside they find Colombo’s body and crates of dynamite; the changed students drive them out with weapons of lightning and freezing mist. Clement kills the thing wearing Higgins and takes its weapon; Lillian’s hand is burned.
The split — Lillian and Nari go to St. Mary’s under a car-engine lie; Susan goes to Pizza Gambino and sends O’Bannion’s men to the warehouse; Clement takes the weapon to Wilmarth, who cannot identify it.
The next morning — An engineer breaks the strange gun open without learning its secret; Nari finds that Trent, Laslow, and Mauricio have borrowed nearly every occult and Vermont title in the library; Sofia, tailing the students, is hit by a vision of a lava pit that isn’t there.
Northam Park — Waiting to meet Mauricio, Amigo barks furiously at Professor Harrold, who flees; Clement and Sofia chase him by taxi.
The shack on the Aylesbury Pike — Clement overhears Harrold order a raid for the next night: dynamite, kerosene, the Restricted Collection’s books, and Professor Learmonth’s brain.
Learmonth’s laboratory — That night four of them break in and find letters proving the “meteoric origin” of pasquallium is a hoax to mislead FOC; Susan returns to a note under her door summoning her to Gambino’s that night.

Lightning in a Tube#

The door opened outward, and the dark came in.

They stood just inside the threshold with the smell of the place settling over them — damp brick, sawdust, the chemical sweetness of high explosive, and beneath it something organic, something that had been warm in this room for hours. Stacked neatly to the left of the door, with a care that did not belong in a ruin, were crates of dynamite. On the floor, three feet from the threshold, a man lay face down with his hands bound behind his back.

Lillian knelt and turned the head toward the streetlight. It was Bobby Colombo. He had been dead since morning. The back of his skull was gone, and the edges of the wound were charred — not powder burn, not blood, but the mark of something hotter than fire and quicker.

From the catwalk above, Laslow’s voice came down out of the dark.

Who is that?

A pause.

Get your guns. Gustav — get your gun.

Amigo was no longer a happy dog. The hair along his spine rose, and he began to bark — the full-throated alarm of an animal that has found a predator and is trying to make itself larger than it is.

Nari was already doing the arithmetic. A bullet, a spark, a flash of whatever had opened Colombo’s head — any of it, against those crates — If they shoot at the dynamite, we are dead. We run. Now.

The women took the dog and went. Clement and Lillian stayed to buy them the seconds. Lillian, still kneeling, turned to search the dead man’s pockets — and then there was the flash.

She did not see it. There was only the aftermath: a yellow-white line that crossed the space between the catwalk and her hand faster than thought, and her left palm opened, a piece of the flesh and bone of it simply gone, cauterized black at the edges, and a burning ran up her arm that felt exactly the way electricity is described in the books. She did not fall. She would not fall with them looking down at her.

Clement had never raised a weapon against a boy. But the silhouette kneeling on the catwalk was not a boy, and had not been for some time. He drew the Luger and took the shot he had, at a silhouette, in the dark.

The thing that had been wearing Harry Higgins let go of the rail and fell, and the sound it made landing was the sound of a sack of wet cloth, and after it, nothing. He crossed the floor, and in the dead hand he found the weapon still clutched — black metal, doorknob-sized, sheathed in wire, no trigger anyone could see. He took it.

He was turning to run when the second one rose. The boy who had been William Noakes held something like the slide of a trombone, a meter of twisted tubes ending in a cone, and the cone breathed — a slow fog, heavy, and inside it, ice. It rolled out over the floor and where it touched a metal bar the bar frosted white. It passed three feet to Clement’s right. He did not wait for the next breath. He ran, with the dead boy’s weapon in his coat and the voices of the things calling to each other behind him — Lawrence, get the projector — and the door, and the fog.

The Bridge#

They found each other by the bridge over the Miskatonic, where the river moved black and silver under a calm moon. Lillian held her ruined hand against her chest. Nari was praying under her breath.

Clement laid the doorknob-gun on the stone of the parapet. It was warm. It hummed, faintly, the way a tuning fork hums after the strike. There was nothing to say. They had walked in after a dead detective and walked out ahead of weapons that belonged to no army and no year, and one of the students who had come back wrong from Vermont was lying at the foot of a catwalk with a bullet in his head, and they had done that, and it had been the right thing, and the rightness did not make the boy less dead.

Sofia knelt and took Amigo’s face in both hands.

You take him, she said, to Clement. Senior Clement. You take good care of him. He had found the warehouse by scent. He had stood between them and the things on the catwalk. He was the only one of them who had not flinched. Clement took the leash. Amigo sat down beside him, and was his.

They split, because the three wounds needed three different doctors. Lillian and Nari to St. Mary’s, with a lie about a stalled motor and a hot pipe. The night nurse did not believe it and dressed the hand anyway. Nari telephoned her father — the biology professor, in whose house she was barely tolerated — and asked him, in the small voice of a daughter asking a favor she has no right to, to vouch for it. You are protecting my daughter, he told Lillian. I will count on your word. Keep her safe. It was the nearest thing to forgiveness he knew.

Susan went to Pizza Gambino. She said the name, and the name was a key, and she was taken through a metal door into the back room, where Danny O’Bannion stood up from a card table. She told him the thing wearing his cousin was at the warehouse, and might still be there, and that there were others, armed in a way she could not explain. He did not ask her to explain. He turned to the men who had come out of the corners. Come on, boys. We have a job to do. And then he looked at her: I hope this isn’t any trick, Miss Chen. She told him it was not.

Clement went home, to the rooms he kept with Wilmarth, and woke the old man and put the weapon in his hands. Wilmarth turned it over and admitted, with the honesty of a scholar out of his depth, that he had no idea what it was. Learmonth, for the metal. Armitage, for what it might mean. Clement, who could not set foot on the campus, put it back in his coat.

What the Engineer Could Not Explain#

By morning the weapon was no longer anyone’s problem, because it was in fragments. Lillian carried it to Stuart Anderson, a friend in the Engineering department, and made him promise discretion. Anderson found the wires, found a current that moved through a metal that should have resisted it, and could not name the alloy. Frustrated, he took a hammer to it. The metal did not bend; it broke, like dark glass, and inside were small tubes of the same black alloy. Reaching for two exposed wires, he closed a circuit that should not have closed — and the room was full for an instant of the same yellow-white flash, and a stack of student assignments on the desk ceased to exist. I’ve never seen anything like this, he said. I cannot tell you what it is. He gave her the broken pieces in a bag.

In the library, Nari worked the loans desk under cover of a statistics survey. She was not looking for habits. She found the names: Trent, Laslow, Mauricio Duarte — between them, in the weeks since Vermont, nearly every book the library held on witchcraft, on the Green Mountains, on the old folklore of Vermont. And not the geology books, which was the curious thing, because the geology was meant to be the whole point.

After lunch the changed students rose in a body and left, and Sofia — who had been waiting for this — followed. She was not good at it. Three minutes in, Mauricio turned his head and looked directly at her and smiled in a way Mauricio had never smiled.

She turned to run. The ground was not there.

The pavement beneath her had opened, as a trapdoor opens, into a shaft thirty meters deep, and at the bottom a river of fire moved orange and slow, and the heat came up against her face. She stood at the center of it, on nothing, unable to move — and then it was gone, and the pavement was under her feet, and the path was empty in both directions. She sat down on the curb and did not get up for some minutes.

The Professor Runs#

At five o’clock, Sofia and Clement and the dog were in Northam Park, waiting for Mauricio, who did not come. Sofia had a knife in her pocket and a theory taken from the old books — that a witch’s power left her if blood was drawn above the brow — and Clement stood some distance away with the Luger in case the theory was wrong.

A man came around the path at a pace that was not quite a walk and not yet a run. It was Professor Roger Harrold. He was looking behind him — over his shoulder, around him — the darting check of a man who believes he is followed.

Amigo had been lying down. He came up off the gravel like a thing released from a wire, every hair standing, and the sound that came out of him was not the alarm bark of the warehouse. It was deeper. It was the sound a dog makes at the one thing he has been bred, across ten thousand years, to drive back. He lunged to the end of the leash and Clement braced and held him, and the barking filled the park.

Harrold heard it. He looked at the dog, and for half a second his face went still, in the way a machine goes still when a gear catches — and then he was running, across the grass and out of the gate.

They were in a taxi before his was. Follow that car. It is a matter of life and death. The dog will not bite you. The dog will bite you if we lose him.

They went west — Church, West, Aylesbury Street, past the warehouse, past the last streetlight — and out along the pike, where the houses thinned and the trees thickened. Two miles out, the taxi ahead turned into a side road among the trees. They passed it and stopped. Through the trees, set back from the track, was a house — two stories, a gambrel roof with a great section gone, open to the sky. A dead oak. The rusted frame of a swing. Two cars outside. Every window boarded.

Clement told Sofia to stay, and went forward alone, slow and flat-footed, the way a man moves who has spent forty years not falling off things. He pressed himself beneath a ground-floor window, and listened.

The House Without a Roof#

Harrold was speaking, and he did not sound like a professor.

You idiots. How did they find the warehouse?

A murmur.

It does not matter. We move it up. Tomorrow we drop the enzyme. And when it acts, tomorrow night we do the raid. I don’t care, Lawrence — and Clement marked the name, which was not Laslow’s name — I don’t care about your arguments. We do it tomorrow.

Don’t forget the kerosene, someone said. And the dynamite. And Clement, pressing his face to a gap in the boards, could see them — the sticks in the corner, the dull gleam of jerrycans, and the shapes of five of them about a table: Harrold, Laslow, Trent, Mauricio, and Father Cloutier, the priest who taught religion, who had ridden north with a rosary in his hand.

Get all the books from the list. The restricted collection. All of it. And then, in the same level voice, as though reading items from an agenda: Don’t forget Professor Learmonth. You have the tools. You have the enzyme. Take his brain, and bring it with you.

A pause.

And now that Block is out of the way, we need to act fast.

Block. Roderick Block — Little Rod, the gentle giant, the boy who had sat apart from the others in the Dean’s office. Out of the way. Clement drew back from the wall and walked down the track to the cab, and told them they were going back to Arkham, and that the night after next was going to raid the library and cut the brain out of a professor’s head, and that the man who would give the order had already given it.

The Letters in the Drawer#

By eight they were in Clement’s rooms, with Wilmarth and the dog under the table, and the word enzyme sat among them like a piece of foreign currency no one could spend.

There were two things to do before morning. Lillian would go to Armitage — who kept the keys to the Restricted Collection, who had been told twice already and had listened to none of it — with the dead detective and the dynamite and the word tomorrow. And four of them would break into Learmonth’s laboratory tonight.

Clement could not go. Lillian, Nari, Susan, and Sofia crossed the quad in the dark and went first to the women’s dormitory, where Susan put a rock through a second-floor window. The noise traveled. They ran to the night guard, Thompson, breathless, frightened, begging him to bring help — and Thompson went to fetch David from the next building, and in the gap Susan crossed to the Science Annex and lured its guard away with a warmth the gangster had told her she was good at.

Nari put her shoulder to the laboratory door, and the lock gave with a crack. Inside, the student files were everywhere — the careful, patient architecture of a lie: pasquallium as a meteoric ore, fallen in an ancient crater, of no further interest. Maps, photographs, sample logs.

In the drawer of the professor’s desk were two letters. The first, from Harrold to Learmonth, thanking him for the funding help, blaming Damnable Wilmarth for the university’s reluctance, praising Federated Oil and Chemical — and speaking, with an eagerness that read differently now, of integrating their students. The second, from Learmonth to a man named Abelard at FOC, reporting that the pasquallium was extraterrestrial, recovered from a crater thousands of years old at Red Rock Mountain, south of Brattleboro.

Nari held the enclosed photograph under the torch and recognized it at once. It was not a crater. It was a photograph of a newspaper engraving — a comet, cropped and enlarged, dressed up to look like geology. There was no crater. There had never been a crater. The whole elaborate proof was a structure built to turn Federated Oil and Chemical away from the true source of the ore and point them at a hole in the ground that did not exist.

They heard Mendelbrot’s voice in the corridor — Young lady, why did you lie to me? — and Nari and Lillian slid beneath the desk and held their breath while the guard walked the room above them, and walked back, and went. They took the letters. They let themselves be gone.

Climbing the dormitory stairs for the coat she had used as an excuse, Susan found on the floor under her door a folded piece of paper that had not been there when she left.

That warehouse only created more questions. Tonight, Gambino. Don’t be late.

She stood on the stair and understood, with the slow cold understanding of a person told by the dark that it knows where she has been, that the things had walked her corridor while she was breaking into the laboratory of the man they meant to cut open. She put the note in her pocket and went back down without the coat.

Somewhere out on the Aylesbury Pike, the professor who had organized the expedition was sitting down to his agenda with five of the things he had made of his students, and the dynamite was in the corner, and the kerosene in its cans, and somewhere in the city a gangster’s men were not yet back from the warehouse, and Susan had an appointment at a pizzeria she did not intend to keep, and in the morning Lillian would go to Dr. Armitage and pray the old man would hear her this time.

Tomorrow night the raid would take place, and a professor was going to lose his mind.

The dog slept under the table, his nose on his paws.

Next: Dr. Armitage’s door. The Gambino note. And on the night after next, a raid in the library, and an operating table in the Science Annex, and the thing that has been wearing the professor’s face turning, at last, to smile at them in the dark.