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)

The Night of Three Fires#

“I waited a whole year to get into a body. It is not going to end like that.”
— the thing wearing Professor Harrold’s face, in the emptied Restricted Collection

Summary#

The Science Annex, before dark — Left alone with Professor Learmonth once Clarissa’s face is gone from the window, Susan beats him down with the violin case and finishes him with his own rock hammer; she hides the body in a closet, washes her hands, and returns to the others. No one is going to harvest that brain now.
The butcher’s shop and Gambino’s parlor — Clement reclaims Amigo from the butcher’s yard; Nari walks into O’Bannion’s back room and, with a lit cigar drifting toward her skin, persuades him that tonight is his last chance for revenge. A whispered report from the pike convinces him, and O’Bannion, Johnny, Clement, and Nari drive for the university.
The bushes outside the Orne Library — Susan and Sofia wait in the dark with a single stick of dynamite; the Restricted Collection stands emptied and the guard doubled at Armitage’s doing. Lillian finishes her supper, and of all of them, only she has eaten.
Ten o’clock — Whatever was in the food takes the campus: Lillian laughing and tearing her clothes, saying one word; a naked professor hunting passersby with a scalpel; Nari’s father on a car roof; fires in the dormitories; the library guard drawn away into the noise.
The raid — Harrold, Laslow, Trent, and Mauricio walk through the madness as through furniture and blow the library entrance with dynamite; Sofia’s answering throw, meant to pen them in, lands among eight maddened men and kills them all. A fleeing student screams her name.
The burning library — Clement’s shot bursts Trent’s kerosene canister and fire takes the ground floor; Laslow escapes with a duffel bag; Johnny goes down under the lightning gun; Sofia cuts apart the thing that had been Mauricio. On the third floor, Harrold finds the Restricted Collection empty, and Clement executes what turns around inside his face — taking from his pocket a note of names that includes Daphne Devine and Henry Akeley.
The Science Hall — Playing mad, Nari walks half-dressed past Noakes and the others, opens the gas jets in the chemistry laboratory, and puts the building to the torch. Amigo dies on the way, at the scalpel. In Roderick Block’s truck outside, Father Cloutier waits at the wheel and drives Laslow away.
West College Street — The Tommy gun finds the truck’s fuel tank: Laslow, the priest, Clarissa, Gibbons, and Noakes die in one blast. The police take Sofia, Susan, and Clement; Nari dances her way into custody; and Dean Bricknell — naked — is arrested for urinating on an officer’s boot, waving goodbye as the cars pull away from three fires.

The Rock Hammer#

They had until nightfall, and not one plan, but five half-ones. Armitage had emptied the Restricted Collection and doubled the library guard. Somewhere in a violin case there was a Tommy gun, and in Sofia’s pocket a chemist’s certainty about how long a fuse needed to be. Susan said she would have one last try at Learmonth — the professor they could not warn, could not move, could not save — and took the violin case with her.

Nari watched her go and said, quietly, that she was worried about Susan. That her eyes had been blank. She wants revenge, someone answered. She wants it all to end tonight.

Clarissa had stopped watching the laboratory door. Learmonth stood at his bench with his back to it, breaking rock samples with a geologist’s hammer, a microscope at his elbow. He did not hear the violin case come down on the back of his skull. He did not hear much of anything after.

The rest was decided in a few cold seconds: a man that size, in a building that would be raided at ten — there was nowhere to carry him, nowhere to hide him whole. So it was the hammer. Then a supply closet, a wet cloth, and two hands washed in the corridor basin until the water ran clear.

At the cafeteria, they asked whether the professor had been hard to convince.

You know how they are, Susan said, and sat down, nineteen years old, and asked what the plan was for the library.

The Butcher’s Dog and the Cigar#

Clement, still barred from the campus, went looking for a dog. He found Amigo in the yard behind a butcher’s shop off the Aylesbury street, working a bone with the contentment of an animal that had decided the world owed him a living. The leash was still on. Come, Clement said. We have impostors to catch.

At Gambino’s the man at the counter saw the husky and reached under it. No dogs. — This is not a dog, Clement said, in the flat voice he used on mountains. This is my Amigo, and if I let him loose he will eat your afternoon. Shall we agree he is a customer? The hand came back up empty.

In the back room, Nari sat opposite Danny O’Bannion with her wrists already held, while Johnny lit the boss’s cigar and the cigar drifted, unhurried, toward her cheek.

So. Yesterday you park my crew in the woods and a charge takes the truck, and there’s no house on that pike, and today you walk back in here. Either you’re the stupidest girl in Arkham, little lady, or you’ve got nerve my whole crew didn’t. A pause, smoke. Johnny — do Indian girls feel heat like we do?

Nari closed her eyes and said a short prayer in the language of her grandmothers. Then she opened them and gave him the only coin she had: his cousin was dead, and the things that had emptied his skull were the same ones that had burned the truck — and tonight they would all be in one place, the university, taking what they came for. His last chance. Keep me tied to this chair, she said. I don’t mind. Just help my friends.

O’Bannion sent Johnny out the Aylesbury Pike to see what there was to see. When Johnny came back he leaned down and whispered, and whatever was in it, the smirk went out of the gangster’s face like a lamp snuffed.

Tell me where they are.

Ten O’Clock#

Sofia and Susan lay in the shrubbery off the library lawn with the dynamite between them. Lillian had pressed Sofia’s hand at dinner — we must do our best to protect the property of the university — and cleaned her plate. The others, for once, had not.

At ten, Arkham went out of its mind.

It began as yelling without words, a man running past the parked cars screaming syllables that belonged to no language and every language. Then Lillian began to laugh — high, delighted, unending — and to say how warm it was, and to pull at her clothes, and the only word left in her was banana, and she said it, and said it, and crept away under the cars saying it. A man with no shirt knelt on a hood and smiled into the windshield and asked if it wasn’t fine weather. O’Bannion hit him once and he wandered off.

A professor of chemistry — naked, unrecognizable, utterly calm — walked the paths threatening anyone who passed with a scalpel. And on the roof of a car by the quad, a large man with his collar open and his bow tie gone — Nari’s father, who had never in her life seen him less than buttoned — beat his chest and swung from the mirrors like an ape. Nari pressed a hand over her mouth, and no one watching could have said whether she was laughing or weeping.

Smoke rose from the East and West dormitories. A boy stepped out of a second-floor window, folded onto the grass with a leg gone wrong, and simply walked away. No one outdoors could finish a sentence. The library guard looked at the burning skyline, weighed one building against his city, and went.

They’ve put something in the water, Nari whispered. It was the food. Only one of them had eaten it, and she was under a car by now, saying her word.

The Door of the Orne Library#

Two cars came up West College Street and stopped. Four figures got out with duffel bags — Harrold, Laslow, Trent, and Mauricio, walking through the end of the world as if it were furniture. They did not look left or right. Trent knelt at the great front door, set his charge, and the Orne Library’s entrance ceased to exist.

O’Bannion pressed a revolver into Clement’s hand. Come on, old man, he said. You’re with me.

Sofia had lit the fuse already — a chemist’s count, the shortest window she could give them — and threw. The stick sailed past the raiders and landed in the middle of a knot of maddened men who were punching each other over some insult no one had words for, and the night opened and closed, and there was a hole in the crowd where eight people had been standing.

A student stood swaying at the edge of it, staring at her, at Susan, at the smoke.

You — it’s you — you’re the South American — what did you do?

It wasn’t them I was aiming at, Sofia said, to a boy who was already running, and then, because there was nowhere to put what she felt, she turned it over to the only one of them she could stand to hate. Mauricio had walked into that library. Mauricio had chosen his side.

She went in after him.

Fire in the Stacks#

Inside, Laslow was going through the reception desk with a thief’s speed, and Jason Trent stood in the reading room with a kerosene canister in one hand and the black, triggerless thing from the warehouse in the other, sloshing fuel across the floorboards with a caretaker’s patience.

Clement shot the canister.

It burst in a soft white bloom and then the bloom found the kerosene and the ground floor of the Orne Library became a single running sheet of flame. Laslow went out through it like a rat along a wall, duffel bag on his shoulder, and did not stop. Trent stayed. The fire took him standing, and out of the burning boy came one astonished phrase — bloody hell — in a crisp English accent Jason Trent had never owned in his life.

On the floor above, a guard’s voice — put that down right now — and then the electric snap of the lightning gun, and no more guard. O’Bannion met Mauricio on the landing with the Thompson and Johnny flanked him, and the boy’s weapon spoke first: a white line, a smell like a struck match the size of a room, and Johnny went down in convulsions, the whole left side of him scorched dark.

Take it, Susan said, shoving the violin case at Sofia. I never learned it.

Sofia had. The burst caught the thing that had been Mauricio Duarte at the top of the stairs and unmade it against the banister — a boy who had once been gentle, who had gone into the hills for a promise of eternal life and come back as cargo. She would see his face for the rest of hers. She climbed past it anyway.

The Empty Room#

The third floor smelled of explosive smoke. The door of the Restricted Collection hung in splinters — blown from outside, by the professor’s own hand — and through it Clement could hear a man’s voice climbing into something that was not quite panic.

No. No, no, no—

Harrold stood in the doorway of the little room with the lightning gun hanging from his fist, and the shelves behind him were bare. Armitage had been thorough. Of every forbidden book the thing had crossed a year of scheming to reach, there was nothing left but shelf-shadow and dust.

Clement came up behind him and laid the muzzle of the Luger against the back of his skull.

The voice that answered him was one Clement had known across years of contracts and laboratory visits — and it was not the one Harrold spoke with.

Who are you, idiot? You shouldn’t mess with things you don’t understand.

Drop it. Clement did not remove the gun. Who sent you. What is all this for.

My masters will come for you. A little laugh, conversational, wrong. I waited a whole year to get into a body. It is not going to end like that. And your Blaine — that stupid, stupid Blaine — he ruined everything. Well. The library will burn to the ground and I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about any of—

It moved. Clement had spent forty years reading what a body intends to do before it knows itself, and his finger was already finished.

In the dead man’s coat there was a folded note, two columns of names in a small, orderly hand. Under Library: Devine. Akeley. Smith. Under Laboratory: Osborne. Ludendorff. Smith.

Daphne Devine, who had walked into the Vermont hills a year ago and never walked out. Henry Akeley, the friend Wilmarth had left behind him. Whoever had written the list was not finished with either of them.

The Girl Who Danced#

Nari was crossing the green toward the Science Hall with Amigo’s leash wrapped around her fist when the naked professor stepped into her path and began moving the scalpel in small, thoughtful arcs.

Amigo did not bark. He simply went — low, silent, straight for the arm that held the blade — and the blade opened his throat in passing, and the best of them all went down in the wet grass and did not get up. Nari knelt in the mud with her hands in the ruff of his neck while a madman wandered off into the dark, and then she stood up, because there was a building to burn.

There was a hole in the side of the Science Hall where a door had been. She took off her shirt, let her hair down, and walked through it barefoot and half-naked, grinning the empty grin of the evening, saying banana at every shadow. William Noakes passed her in the corridor with Clarissa and Gibbons, heading for Learmonth’s laboratory and whatever their tools were for. His eyes touched her, filed her under mad, and moved on. It was, she would think later, the only honest disguise the night had offered anyone.

She took a bottle of acid off the chemistry benches, went back out, and pitched it underhand at Roderick Block’s parked truck, where a priest sat motionless at the wheel — Father Cloutier, who had ridden north with a rosary in his hand. The bottle burst against a statue thirty feet wide of the mark and began eating it. So she went back inside and did the thorough thing: opened every gas jet on the bench line, fed the fire into the curtains, tipped a tray of solvent after it, and walked out into the night air as the windows behind her went orange.

Laslow came running around the corner with his duffel bag, and the priest drove him away into the dark, and Nari slid behind the wheel of the raiders’ second car and followed.

The Tank#

The police were on West College Street by then, and someone’s finger was already out: that’s her — the one with the dynamite. The big officer started toward them, and a naked undergraduate hit him at the knees like a dropped sack, and for a moment there was nothing at all between the three of them and the dark.

They could have run.

But the truck was pulling away with Laslow and the priest in it, and Clarissa and Gibbons and Noakes were sprinting for it through the firelight with their stolen tools, and this was the last of them, all of them, in one place at one time. Sofia put the Thompson to her shoulder, found the fuel tank rocking down the street, and held the trigger down until the night turned white.

The truck went up like a struck match the size of a house, and the blast reached out and gathered in the three who were running for it, and when the street stopped ringing there was nothing left moving on it. Laslow. Cloutier. Clarissa. Gibbons. Noakes. All of them.

The officers came to their feet with their mouths open, and then they simply fell on the three of them. Susan went into the police car laughing — laughing the way a rope laughs when it has held — and Nari stepped out of her stolen car to meet the last officer of the night, chanting banana, banana, dancing her little dance, until even Arkham had no answer to that except you’d better come with us, lady.

They were locking the car doors when Dean Marinus Bricknell came down the sidewalk, naked as the day he was tenured, walking with all the dignity the night had left him, and urinated on a police officer’s boot with the ceremony of a man dedicating a fountain. They took him too. As the cars pulled away he stood up in the road behind them and waved goodbye.

Behind the whole city of them, the Orne Library burned, and the Science Hall burned, and the dormitories smoked like feeble candles, and somewhere under a car in the middle of it all a lecturer was still saying her one word.

Next: the morning of September the thirteenth. A campus waking with its memory fully restored and nothing to show for the gap but shame, charges, and three fires. A night in the cells for three students & Clement the university has already warned once. And in Clement’s pocket, a list of names in a dead man’s hand — two columns, and a girl in one of them who vanished in Vermont a year ago and, whoever wrote that note believes, can still be reached.