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 Face That Is Not a Face#

“They do not hate us, Mr. Scheidegger. They do not consider us important enough to hate. That is the worst part.”

— Professor Albert Wilmarth, behind a locked office door

Summary#

By the time the fall term was set to open, the expedition’s survivors had split into two factions: one that spent every waking hour in the library, turning the pages of occult texts with the furious concentration of people searching for something specific, and one that had colonized Professor Learmonth’s geology laboratory, feeding him data about a mineral they now claimed had fallen from the sky. Robert Blaine, the man who had led them into the Green Mountains, never returned to campus at all. There were rumors of drinking, of a collapse into the same grief that had swallowed him the year before. And in a boarding house on West Pickman Street, behind a door at the top of a narrow staircase, something was waiting for the silence to break.

Meanwhile, a professor of English literature locked his office door and told Clement Scheidegger a story he had carried alone for two years — of a Vermont farmer who mailed phonograph cylinders through the post, of a farmhouse where a man sat in shadow and spoke with a voice that was not entirely a voice, and of the moment a hand reached out in the dark and touched something warm and ridged and pulsing where a face should have been. And twelve hundred miles south, in a kitchen above a tobacconist’s shop, a woman laid ten cards on a table and told a girl from León that the man she loved was hanging somewhere between life and death, that something was wearing him the way the moon wears a painted face, and that there was a star in the sky — dark, enormous, and wrong — that was the source of everything that had happened in those mountains.

• Robert Blaine disappears from university life; rumors circulate that he has resumed drinking and collapsed into depression.
• The investigators observe the returned students divided into two groups: one reading cult lore and New England folklore in the library from ten in the morning until nine at night, the other camped in Learmonth’s laboratory, presenting the professor with pasquallium data that claims a meteoric origin.
• Professor Albert Wilmarth locks his office door and confesses: two years ago he visited the farmhouse of Henry Akeley and found something wearing Akeley’s body like a garment, its face a warm, furrowed, pulsing mass — and he fled six miles through the dark with the sound of wings above him.
• Wilmarth names the things — the Mi-Go, the fungi from Yuggoth — and tells Clement they are not evil, only practical: brains, bodies, faces are useful to them, and humans are not important enough to hate.
• Sofia travels to New York to visit her aunt Tía Rosario, who lays a tarot reading of harrowing precision: Mauricio hangs between life and death, something wears him like the moon wears a face, and a dark star at the edge of the sky is the source of it all.
• The group brings Lillian Neill into their confidence and begins surveilling the changed students, who gather every evening outside the library in tight, murmuring clusters.
• Clement lifts a key from Harry Higgins’ bag during a visit to the geology laboratory — a small key that fits no dormitory lock any of them can identify.
• At Blaine’s boarding house on West Pickman Street, the group finds the former expedition leader dead in his attic room, a .38 revolver beside him, the window open and mud tracked across the bed beneath it — though the landlord swears the window was closed and curtained when they arrived.
• Hidden beneath the mattress: Daphne Devine’s journal. On the desk: a venomous letter from the widow of Jethro Kratcher, a Cobb’s Corners farmer who died after telling Blaine his grandfather’s stories. On the nightstand: Blavatsky, Scot, and Sinistrari — books on witchcraft and the occult, their spines cracked with recent reading.
• Chief Inspector Luther Hardy is not satisfied with the suicide verdict; Clement is briefly detained returning to the scene, then released with a warning never to leave the city.

The Office Behind the Locked Door#

It was this last discovery that brought Clement to the second floor of the English Literature building, to a door at the end of a corridor that smelled of old paper and furniture polish, and to a man who had been waiting two years for someone to knock on it.

Professor Albert Wilmarth taught English Literature at Miskatonic. He was a slight, nervous man with thick spectacles and the permanently startled expression of someone who has seen something he cannot unsee and has been trying, ever since, to arrange his face back into a configuration that will not frighten his students. Clement had seen Noakes loitering outside this office too — watching it, the way a dog watches a door it has been trained to guard — and that was what had brought him here.

He told Wilmarth, carefully, about some of the things that had happened in Cobb’s Corners. He did not tell him everything. He offered a sliver — the strange tracks, the odd behaviour, the sense that something in those hills was not accounted for by any natural history he knew.

Wilmarth listened. His eyes, behind the thick lenses, grew wider. And then he stood up, crossed the office, and locked the door.

I have encountered such things, he said. Sit down, Mr. Scheidegger. I have been waiting for someone like you for two years.

He sat behind his desk. He took off his spectacles, breathed on them, and put them back on. And then he began.

Two years ago, a man named Henry Akeley had started writing him letters. Akeley was a Vermont farmer, an amateur folklorist and antiquarian who lived alone on a farmstead near the Green Mountains and who had spent decades collecting the stories that the old people of the region told when the young people were asleep. Strange lights over the hills. Livestock found drained of blood, every vein emptied, the bodies untouched by any predator’s teeth. Tracks in the snow and mud that did not match the paw of any animal a Vermont farmer could name.

Akeley sent Wilmarth letters describing these things. He sent him a phonograph cylinder — a wax recording that he claimed captured the speech of the things that came in the night, a buzzing, piping language that sounded, when you listened to it long enough, less like voices and more like the noise an insect might make if it learned to speak. Wilmarth’s predecessor in the English Literature department, an older man whose nerves had been failing for years, listened to the cylinder once and never recovered.

The letters grew more urgent. Akeley wrote that the things were coming closer. That his dogs were dead — all of them, in a single night, their bodies stiff and cold with no mark on them. That he was certain his mail was being read. That he could see lights moving in the woods behind his farmhouse after dark, and that the stones on his property had begun to develop markings that had not been there the day before.

And then the tone of the letters changed.

The urgency was gone. The fear was gone. In its place was a calm, measured, almost cheerful voice that did not sound like the man who had written the earlier letters. Akeley wrote that everything had been a misunderstanding. That the beings he had feared were not hostile. That they wished to meet Wilmarth, that they had a gift for him. That he should come to the farm.

Wilmarth went.

He found Akeley in the farmhouse, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, in deep shadow. The curtains were drawn. The lamps were unlit. Akeley did not stand when Wilmarth entered. He did not come forward to greet him. He sat in the chair and spoke in Akeley’s voice, and the voice was warm and calm and utterly wrong.

The thing in the chair told Wilmarth that they came from a planet called Yuggoth, at the edge of the solar system, a dark world that the astronomers had not yet found but would, soon, and that when they found it they would not understand what they were looking at. It told him that the journey between the stars was impossible for the human body — that no flesh could survive the crossing — but that the human mind, freed from the body, could make the passage intact. It told him that they had taken Henry Akeley’s mind. That Akeley was happier now than he had ever been. That he was out among the stars, studying, learning, immersed in a library of a civilization older than the human race, and that he wanted Wilmarth to join him.

He was sincere, Wilmarth said. His hand, resting on the desk, had clenched into a fist without his noticing, and he opened it now and laid the palm flat against the wood. That was the worst part. He was not threatening me. He was telling me the truth, as he understood it. Eternal life. Study. A library older than humanity. He offered it to me the way a man offers a seat to a guest.

That night, Wilmarth reached for his coat. It was hanging on a peg near the chair, and as his hand passed the thing in the chair, it brushed what should have been Akeley’s face.

His voice, telling this part, did not change. It stayed level, measured, academic. But his eyes behind the spectacles were the eyes of a man who has not slept well in two years.

It was not a face. It was soft. It was warm. It was ridged and furrowed, like a brain drawn out from a skull, and beneath my fingers I felt a pulse. And I saw the colours change — pinks and greys and something luminous, shifting beneath the surface the way light shifts beneath water.

He pulled his hand back. He looked at the figure in the chair. And he understood.

Henry Akeley was not in that room. The thing sitting in that chair was wearing his body pulled up over its head, the way a child wears a costume. The hands in the lap were Akeley’s hands. The boots on the floor were Akeley’s boots. But the thing inside the clothes — the thing wearing the skin — was not Henry Akeley.

Wilmarth ran. He left his coat on the peg. He left his cane by the door. He walked six miles through the dark to the nearest railway station, and above him, for the entire walk, he heard a sound — a low, pulsing thrum, like the beating of vast and membranous wings. He did not look up. He understood, as he said it, that Clement would understand: looking up was precisely what they wanted. Looking up was how they took you.

He took the first train south. He told no one. He knew that if he told anyone what he had seen — if he walked into the president’s office and described a brain-creature wearing a Vermont farmer like a suit — he would be in the Arkham Sanitarium before sundown. So he said nothing. He went back to his classes, his papers, his spectacles, and he tried to stop Professor Roger Harrold from sending more students into the Green Mountains.

He could not tell Harrold why. He went to the president of the university. He argued, pleaded, lobbied. The president agreed. They denied Harrold the funding. And Harroth found the money elsewhere — from Federated Oil and Chemical, the company that employed Clement Scheidegger, the company that wanted the pasquallium, the company that had no idea what it was paying to approach.

If not for the company that employs you, Mr. Scheidegger, Wilmarth said, no one would have gone back to those hills.

He had spent the two years since then reading. Everything Dr. Armitage would allow him to access — every text, every fragment, every reference in the restricted collection that might give him a name for the thing he had touched in the dark. And he had found it, buried in obscure manuscripts and half-burned folios, a name that recurred like a stain:

They are called the Mi-Go. The fungi from Yuggoth. They are older than humanity. They are not malevolent. Do you understand me? They are not evil. They do not hate us. They do not consider us important enough to hate. They are practical. They take what is useful. Brains are useful. Bodies are useful — they wear them, the way a man wears a coat. Faces are useful — they copy them, or they wear the originals like masks. They have been doing this for a very long time, Mr. Scheidegger. And now some of the students who came back from Cobb’s Corners are not the students who went there.

Clement sat in the chair across from Wilmarth’s desk and felt the weight of it settle onto his shoulders the way a pack settles onto a climber’s back at the start of a long ascent — the knowledge that the mountain is higher than you estimated and that the only way off it is over the top.

He grabbed Wilmarth by the collar. He shook him. He said he would tell the others — that he would bring them here, that Wilmarth would tell them everything he had just told Clement, and that together they would do something about it.

Wilmarth, shaken and pale, said no. No one else could know. If they told anyone — the police, the faculty, the university administration — they would be committed. Every one of them. They would end up in the Arkham Sanitarium, and the things wearing the faces of their students would go on wearing them, and no one would ever know.

We must be discreet, Wilmarth said. We must identify who has been taken and who has not. We must learn what they are planning. I am the only person at this university who will believe your story, and you are the first person I have met in two years who would believe mine. So we keep it between us. And the people you trust.

Ten Cards#

While Clement was sitting in Wilmarth’s office learning the name of the thing that had taken his students, Sofia Picado was on a train heading south.

She had not told anyone where she was going. She had told Susan and the others that she needed a few days, that she needed to clear her head, that she needed to be somewhere that was not Arkham and not the memory of Mauricio’s wrong voice coming out of Mauricio’s familiar mouth. She packed a small bag and she brought the handkerchief — the one with her initials, the one she used to wipe her eyes when she thought about him — and she took the train to New York City, to a street in a neighbourhood where the fire escapes dripped with laundry and the gutters smelled of rotting produce, to a small apartment above a tobacconist’s shop where a woman named Rosario had lived for twelve years since her husband died.

Tía Rosario was her mother’s sister. She was a small, dark woman with hands that moved the way a card dealer’s hands move — quick, sure, and without wasted motion — and she did not advertise what she did for a living. People found her. They always had.

Sofia arrived in the early afternoon. Rosario did not ask her why she had come. She sat Sofia down at the kitchen table and served her a bowl of gallo pinto — red beans and rice, the national dish of Nicaragua, the taste of León, the taste of home — and she watched Sofia eat with the patient, measuring gaze of a woman who had been reading faces since before her niece was born.

When the bowl was empty, Rosario turned to the corner of the kitchen. There was a small shelf there — a kind of altar, though Sofia had never been comfortable with that word — with a votive candle, some dried herbs hanging in bundles, and a photograph of a man who had been dead twelve years. Rosario lit the candle.

Bring me the handkerchief, she said.

Sofia placed it on the table. The cloth was soft with washing, the embroidered initials faded but legible. Rosario touched the letters with her fingertip, tracing them the way a blind woman traces a face. Then she opened a cabinet and took out a deck of cards.

The package was worn. The edges were soft and dark with handling — the cards had been laid out on tables like this one hundreds of times, in this apartment and in others, in kitchens and back rooms and the quiet, lamp-lit spaces where women came when the priests and the doctors had nothing left to offer. Rosario shuffled without letting Sofia cut, and laid ten cards face down on the table in a pattern that spread outward from a central axis, forming a shape like a cross laid over a stem.

She turned the first card.

La Luna. The Moon.

A crayfish in dark water. A dog and a wolf on opposite banks. Above them, a moon with a face — except that the face was wrong. The features were too still, too even, too regular. It was not a face. It was a portrait of a face, painted on.

Rosario did not speak for a long moment. Then she put her finger on the crayfish, the small creature emerging from the black water at the bottom of the card.

This is where he is, she said. A place where the moon is not the moon. She looked up at Sofia. Something came through the darkness and put itself where he was. He is not where he thinks he is.

She touched the painted face on the moon. The face has a face, but the face is painted. You understand? It is a picture of a person. And whatever wears your Mauricio wears that face the way the moon wears this one.

The second card: the Ten of Coins, reversed.

A thief in the night. Someone who comes while you sleep, while everyone around you sleeps, and takes the most precious thing — and leaves something behind in its place. Something that looks very much like what was taken. But is not.

Rosario turned the card face down and held her hand over it. The card is reversed. The theft has already happened. What they took from you cannot be reported to the police, because the police would not know how to look for it.

The third: Le Pendu. The Hanged Man.

A figure suspended by one ankle, his face serene, his hair falling toward the earth. Rosario put her finger on the spot where his heart would be and pressed.

He is alive. Or he is not dead yet. He is somewhere in between. Like a man at the bottom of a well, looking up at a small circle of sky, and the sky is getting smaller.

She was quiet for a moment.

This is a very difficult card. Because it tells you he has not gone. But it does not tell you whether he will come back. He is hanging. And the rope is not in your hands.

The fourth: La Tour. The Tower.

Lightning splitting a stone tower. Two figures tumbling from the heights. Crowns shattering on the ground below.

This is the night on the hill where Mauricio was, Rosario said. This is the night when everything you believed was true turned out to be a lie. The tower is the story you told yourself about him. The life you were going to have. The certainty you carried. And the lightning came from nowhere, and now there is nothing left but rubble where the house should have been.

The fifth: Le Bateleur. The Magician. Reversed.

A figure behind a table laden with tools, the symbol of infinity floating above his brow. But the card was upside down, and Rosario made a sound when she saw it — a thin, hissing intake of breath, not quite a word.

This is what wears him, she said. The trickster. The one who stands behind the table and makes you believe the cup is empty, and then full, and then empty again. It has the power of illusion. It has done this before — not to your Mauricio, but to others. It is a servant, not a master, and it is very good at what it does.

She tapped the reversed card.

But see — it is inverted. What it does, it does in a house that is not its own. It is above, or below, its true dwelling. And it cannot remove what it has put in place. It is trapped in the trick.

The sixth: Two of Swords.

A blindfolded woman by the sea, holding two crossed swords across her chest. Behind her, troubled water. Above, the moon.

Rosario leaned forward.

This is you, Sofia. She put her finger on the blindfold. In a month, you will sit where you must choose between two roads. Two swords. And you will not be able to see clearly, because someone — or something — will be pressing on your eyes.

She traced the crossed blades. One sword points up. One points down. They do not face the same way. One of them is a lie — the lie told around you, the lie you will hear from the people you trust. And the other is the truth, and it will cost you everything to believe it. You must choose one. You cannot hold both.

The seventh: Queen of Cups.

A woman on a throne by the sea, holding a closed cup decorated with ibises. She gazes into the cup as though into a well.

You see yourself as a woman who loves someone enough to save him, Rosario said. And the feeling is so great in you that it has become a kind of strength. This is true. This is who you are. But look at the cup. She touched it. It is closed. Your grief is shut inside it, because if you open it, it will be a flood, and you are afraid that the ocean will take you with it. You cannot save him from drowning if you are drowning yourself.

The eighth: L’Ermite. The Hermit.

An old man on a mountain path at night, holding a lantern that illuminates only the stone at his feet.

The people around you cannot help you with this, Rosario said. Your friends. The university. The professors. The police. Not because they do not wish to, but because they walk in daylight, and you are walking in darkness now. You are on a path that only people who have lost someone can walk. You will be alone. The lamp shows you the next step. But it does not show you where the road ends.

The ninth: La Mort. Death.

Rosario did not speak for a long time after she turned this card. The candle in the corner flickered. The dried herbs turned slowly on their strings. Sofia sat with her hands in her lap and watched her aunt’s face and was afraid.

This is not truly death, Rosario said at last. You know this. It is the card of change. The ending of old things and the beginning of new ones. But here — in this place, surrounded by these other cards — it is your fear I am reading. You are afraid that to get Mauricio back, the thing inside him must die.

She picked up the handkerchief. She folded it once. She folded it twice. She placed it in Sofia’s hand and closed the girl’s fingers around it.

You hope that if you kill the thing that wears him, he will come back. And I tell you — this card does not promise that. Death is change. But it is not resurrection. What comes back from death will not always be what you expected.

The tenth and final card: L’Étoile. The Star. Reversed.

A woman kneeling beside water, pouring from two vessels. Above her, a great star and seven smaller ones. But the card was upside down, and the water that should have flowed outward into the world was flowing back, uphill, against nature, and the stars were falling.

Rosario put her hand flat over the card and covered all the stars.

If this card were right-side up, she said, it would be hope. The water that nourishes. The stars that guide the lost home. But it is inverted. The stars are falling. The water goes the wrong way.

She lifted her hand. She pointed to the largest star — the one at the centre of the cluster — and her voice dropped.

There is a star in this card that is bigger than the others. And it is dark. You understand me? This is not a metaphor. This is not a symbol. There is a light in the sky that should not be there — a dark star — and it is the source of all of this. What they took, what came from that star, belongs there, and to there it will return.

She took Sofia’s hand. Her grip was iron.

You can fight the thing that wears the face. You can win. But you cannot fight the star. The best you can do is take back what it stole from you, and run, and never look back.

When the reading was done, Rosario gathered the cards, wrapped them in their cloth, and tied the bundle with a length of red string. She gave Sofia two things: a medal of Saint Michael seated upon a beast, and a piece of advice she delivered with the flat finality of a woman who had been reading cards for forty years and had learned, in that time, exactly which words to weigh and which to let blow away.

Trust nothing, she said. Not your mother. Not your brother. Not the professors who will not believe you. Trust only the people who have seen the face of the moon. And when the hour of the two swords comes — when you must choose between the lie and the truth — choose the truth, even if it cuts you. The lie is heavier. It will pull you down into the cup, and you will drown in it.

Sofia pinned the medal inside her blouse, against her skin, and spent three more days in the apartment above the shop, listening to her aunt talk about the cards, about the reading, about what each one meant and what none of them could tell her. And then she took the train back to Arkham, and the handkerchief in her pocket, and the weight of a star she could not see.

The Anthropologist#

The pieces came together slowly, the way they always do when the people holding them are afraid of the picture they will form.

Clement brought the group to Wilmarth — not all at once, not carelessly, but with the deliberate pacing of a man who understood that the wrong word in the wrong ear would put every one of them behind the locked doors of the Sanitarium. He told Nari, Susan, and Sofia what Wilmarth had told him. He told them about Akeley. About the thing in the chair. About the Mi-Go. And he watched their faces change the way a mountainside changes when the cloud lifts — slowly at first, and then all at once, the whole shape of the thing standing clear and terrible.

They brought in Lillian Neill.

Lillian had been watching from the edges of the expedition’s aftermath — the anthropology lecturer who had not gone to Cobb’s Corners, who had spent the summer reading secondhand accounts and trying to reconstruct the ethnography of a trip she had missed, and who had noticed, before anyone else, that the priest who had come back from those hills was not the priest who had gone. She listened to what they told her, and she did not flinch, and when they were finished she told them about Cloutier: the missing collar, the unrecognizing stare, the book on aerial phenomena that Armitage had identified as an 1884 occult text.

They talked in low voices in Wilmarth’s office, the door locked, the curtains drawn. Wilmarth sat behind his desk and watched them — these young people, these students and lecturers, these people who had walked into something in the Green Mountains that he had spent two years trying to name — and he saw in their faces the same thing he saw in his own mirror every morning: the expression of someone who has been told that the world is not what they thought it was and is trying, very hard, to rearrange their understanding before the next blow falls.

They agreed on a plan, or the shape of one. They would watch the changed students. They would learn what they could — who had been taken, who had not, what they were reading, what they were building, what they wanted. They would be careful. They would be patient. And they would not, under any circumstances, let the changed students know that they were being watched.

Clement, on a visit to the geology laboratory — he had an excuse, he was FOC, Learmonth was their liaison, it was natural for him to stop by — managed to slip a hand into Harry Higgins’ bag where it sat against the wall, and came away with a key. A small key, brass, unmarked. It did not fit any dormitory room they could identify. It was, Clement thought, the kind of key that opened a cabinet, or a cellar, or a door that did not appear on any floor plan.

Nari took the task of watching the library group. She sat in the reading room with a stack of botany texts and observed, over the top of her pages, the silent, mechanical turning of pages — Higgins, Trent, Laslow, Noakes, the others — and noted the titles they pulled, the pages they marked, the way they gathered in the grass outside the library steps every evening at the same hour, in the same configuration, and murmured among themselves with their heads bent close before separating and going, not to their dormitories, but in directions that led away from the campus, toward the places where they slept.

They were waiting for something. They were preparing for something. And the university, which opened its doors to the fall term on September 10th, was about to let them in.

West Pickman Street#

It was Blaine they went looking for first.

The address Wilmarth provided was a boarding house on West Pickman Street — a narrow, two-story building with a sagging porch and a mailbox by the front door that read Sam Flanagan, Proprietor. Clement and Lillian went together. The morning was overcast, the kind of late-summer grey that sits on Arkham like a damp cloth, and the street was quiet.

Sam Flanagan opened the door. He was a tall, thin man with the stooped shoulders of someone who has spent a lifetime ducking through doorframes, and his hair grew in a monk’s ring around a scalp that caught the light. He looked at them with the weary courtesy of a landlord who has been fielding worried inquiries for weeks.

Mr. Blaine? Clement said.

Flanagan’s face shifted into something that was not quite grief and not quite irritation — the expression of a man who is tired of being asked about a tenant he cannot help. He’s not well, Flanagan said. Hasn’t been. Stays in his room all day. Doesn’t eat, or eats very little. He used to come down for my beans — always liked my beans — but now nothing. I hear him moving around up there sometimes. That’s all.

He told them Blaine was in the attic room. Second floor. There was a staircase to a small landing and a single door. He offered to make coffee. Clement and Lillian climbed the stairs.

The staircase was narrow and uncarpeted, each step creaking under their weight. They reached the landing. The door at the top was closed. And as they stood before it, as Clement’s hand reached for the knob —

A gunshot.

The sound was flat and close and final, the way a book sounds when it is slammed shut, and it came from behind the door with a violence that seemed to shake the frame. Clement threw the door open.

Robert Blaine lay on the floor beside a small writing desk. His head was a ruin. The wall behind him was painted with a darkness that was still running. A .38 revolver lay on the floorboards beside his open hand, and the room was full of the sharp, chemical stink of cordite and the sweeter, heavier smell of whiskey — there were empty bottles on the desk, on the nightstand, on the floor, a half-dozen or more, and the room was a wreck of unwashed clothes and unopened books and the accumulated squalor of a man who had stopped caring about the space around him weeks ago.

The window above the bed was open.

Clement stood in the doorway. Lillian, behind him, made a sound — a short, sharp intake of breath. He looked at the window. The quilt was bunched and disordered, and on the fabric, clear and unmistakable, were smears of mud. Dark, fresh mud, tracked across the bedclothes from the sill to the edge and back, as though someone had climbed in through the window, crossed the bed, and stepped down onto the floor.

The window had been closed when they arrived and the curtains had been drawn. Clement was certain of it.

Nari moved quickly. He lifted the mattress of the bed and found, pressed flat against the frame beneath it, a small journal — a cheap notebook, the kind sold in any drugstore, with a name written on the cover in a woman’s careful hand: Daphne Devine. Inside the front cover, slipped between the pages like a bookmark, was a folded letter. He took both, pocketed them, and turned to the desk.

There was another letter on the desktop, half-hidden under an empty bottle. They took that too. On the nightstand: three books, their spines cracked with recent reading. They took those as well.

Then they heard the sirens.

The Detective#

Flanagan had called the police. Of course he had. A dead man in his attic, a gunshot, two strangers on the premises — Sam Flanagan was many things, but he was not a man who would sit with a corpse and wait for someone else to explain it.

The first officers on the scene were uniformed men, young and pale, who stood in the doorway of the attic room and looked at the body and did not enter. Then came officer Johnny — a thick-necked patrolman with a copybook — who took their names and their statement and told them to wait downstairs. Then came the ambulance.

The police officers took the investigators to the police station to talk with Chief Inspector Luther Hardy.

Hardy was a big man, with the permanent five-o’clock shadow of someone whose mustache grows faster than his razor can manage. He sat behind a desk at the precinct house with a cigar in one hand and a pen in the other and looked at Clement and Lillian the way a butcher looks at a side of beef — assessing, weighing, calculating where the cuts would fall.

Tell me exactly what happened, he said. From the beginning. Every step.

They told him. They had come to check on a colleague. They had spoken with the landlord. They had climbed the stairs. They had heard the shot as they reached the door. They had entered and found the body.

Hardy listened without expression. Then he leaned forward.

Mr. Scheidegger. The window in that room was open when you entered. The landlord says it was closed when you arrived. There is mud on the bed. You have a theory.

Clement told him the theory. It was not suicide. Someone had entered through the window, shot Blaine, and left the same way. The mud on the bed was the evidence. The closed-then-open window was the evidence. The fact that Blaine, whatever his other problems, had not left a note was the evidence.

Hardy heard him out. Then he leaned back in his chair.

He let them go. He took their statements, their addresses, their promise not to leave the city. And as they walked out of the precinct house into the thin afternoon light, Lillian turned to Clement and said, very quietly: He knows it wasn’t suicide. He just can’t prove what it was.

After they left the police station, Clement had gone back. He had gone back to look for tracks, for evidence, for anything that would confirm what the mud on the bed already told him. Detective Johnny had found him there, hands in the dirt, and had put him in handcuffs. He took him back to the police station.

Harden said, You understand, he said, that I have a body, a weapon, a room full of empty bottles, and a man with a history of mental disturbance. I also have you, Mr. Scheidegger, returning to the scene of the death this afternoon, and when my officer found you, you were examining the ground beneath the window.

I was looking for evidence, Clement said.

Everyone who returns to the scene is looking for something, Hardy said. Murderers always come back. That is what they say, is it not?

He let the silence sit. Then he shook his head.

I have no evidence that you killed anyone, Mr. Scheidegger. Nor you, Miss Neill. Mr. Flanagan confirms that you arrived together, that you spoke with him, and that you were on the stairs when the shot was fired. I cannot place two people in two locations at once, and I am not in the business of manufacturing cases. He tapped the cigar on the edge of an ashtray. But I am not satisfied with suicide either. The window. The mud. The absence of a note. Something is wrong in that room, and I do not know what.

What the Dead Man Left#

They read the letters that night, in a room with the curtains drawn and the door locked, the way Wilmarth had read his letters, the way all letters are read when the things they contain are dangerous.

The first was from Professor Harrold. It was congratulatory — a note tucked inside Daphne Devine’s journal, commending the team on their work, approving their return trip to Cobb’s Corners, praising the thoroughness of their folklore collection. It was written in the voice of a man who had no idea what he was sending his students toward, and the blandness of its optimism, in retrospect, was unbearable.

Daphne Devine’s journal itself was the record of the first expedition — the one that had killed her. It described the team’s plans to return to Cobb’s Corners, the folklore they had gathered, and their intention to interview a local farmer named Jethro Kratcher, whose grandfather had been a travelling salesman in the Green Mountains and had collected, over a lifetime, a vast catalogue of regional folk tales — the kind of stories that old men tell by firelight and that universities pay graduate students to transcribe. The journal was thorough, professional, and completely devoid of any awareness that the hills it described were anything other than a rich source of academic material.

The second letter was something else entirely.

It was dated August 20th — recent, weeks before Blaine’s death — and it was addressed to Blaine from a woman in Cobb’s Corners. Mrs. Kratcher. Jethro’s widow.

Mr. Blaine,

I write this letter only to tell you why you have not received any response to your last three pestering letters. My beloved husband Jethro, who was a great and honest man if ever there was one, is dead. Dr. Perry says it was an accident, but I think better of it. I told Jethro not to get mixed up with you or the Misses Devine and all of your also-smart, call it foolishness. But you and that woman got him to go against me, and now he is dead. I hope you are happy, sir, and I hope you rot in hell. I know he died because of the stories he was telling you. I do not know how, but I am sure you had something to do with his untimely demise. Please, if you have any mercy in your damnable heart, do not write to me again. May God forgive you, because I cannot. You have made me a widow before my time.

They sat with the letter on the table between them. Susan read it twice. Nari stood by the window with her arms folded, watching the street.

He was trying to get Jethro’s stories, Susan said. The grandfather’s collection. The folklore. He sent three letters after Jethro died, pestering the widow for them.

And Jethro died after telling Blaine those stories, Clement said. Just like Patterson. Just like Devine. Everyone who gets close to what is in those hills—

He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.

The books from Blaine’s nightstand lay on the table beside the letter: Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft, and a slim Latin volume by Ludovico Maria Sinistrari — texts on the occult, on witchcraft, on the classification of demonic entities. Their spines were cracked. Their pages were marked. Robert Blaine, in the last weeks of his life, in the squalor of that attic room with its empty bottles and its unwashed clothes, had been reading everything he could find about the things that walk in the dark and wear the shapes of men.

He had been trying to understand. And then someone had come through his window and made sure he never would.

Outside, the last warm days of summer were fading. In two days the university would open its doors for the fall term, and the students who had come back from Cobb’s Corners — the silent ones, the mechanical ones, the ones who spoke with accents they had never learned and read books they should not have been able to find — would file through the gates and take their seats in the lecture halls and dining rooms and dormitories of Miskatonic University, and no one would know, no one would see, no one would look twice at the faces that fit just slightly wrong on the skulls beneath them.

And in a pocket in Clement Scheidegger’s coat, a brass key with no label waited to be understood.

Next: The diaries of Jethro Kratcher’s grandfather wait in a widow’s house in Cobb’s Corners. The university opens its doors. And the students who came back from the mountains are ready to begin.