학장의 일기

The autumn had thickened to a pall around Miskatonic University in those days; a light afternoon rain had quieted by mid-November, leaving the air cold and metallic. Whitmore had taken the noon train to Boston — some matter concerning the estate of an emeritus colleague, as the second-floor clerk in the main office told me, and he would not return before evening.

I would be lying if I claimed the information arrived without consequence.

I passed through the entrance hall at half past two. There upon the eastern wall, set in dark oak panelling, hung the brass plate that named each Dean of Miskatonic from the institution's founding onward. I had walked beneath it for three years without registering more than the polish of its lettering; that afternoon I stopped before it.

The name Bartholomew Duncan, 1882–1893 sat third from the bottom of the elder names, the brass tarnished but the engraving still clean.

Eleven years; a man, in death, reduced to eleven engraved characters and a pair of dates.

I told myself I was merely confirming a fact for my catalogue notes. The footsteps of two undergraduates passing behind me underscored the lie. I turned toward the staircase that descended to the lowest stack.

The lamplight there was, as always, the colour of weak tea; the smell of damp leather met me a flight before I reached the floor. By the time my hand left the rail, I had decided what I would not name to myself: that Whitmore's absence was, for the present hour, opportunity.

The casket sat where I had left it, tucked behind the same pile of yellowed scrolls. I drew it forward without ceremony this time and set it upon the side table, the same table on which I had last sketched its lid. The chill rose into my fingertips at once, as it had before.

I noted it now with the calm of one who has already named a thing.

This visit, I had brought my notebook with a definite intention. The constellation glyphs upon the lid — the ones that bore no resemblance to Orion or to the Bear — I would commit to paper in their entirety, ordered and indexed. A scholar's task. So I told myself.

I traced the outermost band first, copying its small notches into clean columns. Then I came to the band of Latin which I had passed over on my first visit, having taken it then for ornament.

In the yellow light, the letters seemed to lift slightly from the bronze; I bent closer. The phrase ran across the rim in a single uninterrupted line, and yet, as my eye attempted to receive it whole, it did not arrive whole.

The syllables stepped apart on their own.

I set down my pen. I rubbed my eyes. The lamp had begun to gutter, perhaps; the November draught from the north corner often disturbed the wick. I leaned in once more.

The Latin verb came to me only in parts; the noun likewise. I knew the words — subjugare, corpora — knew them in the way a third-year assistant ought to know them. And yet I could not assemble them. I copied them as they presented themselves, with the small breaks intact, telling myself I would smooth them later in fair copy.

It was while my pen rested at the end of the second line that I became aware of something else upon the lower shelf — a volume that had no business being there.

The catalogued manuscripts in this section were all uniform in their wrapping. This was not wrapped. It was a single book, bound in dark calf-leather, set flat upon its side.

I lifted it out. It was perhaps half an inch thick, octavo size, and warmer to the touch than it had any right to be — warmer than the bronze, which still held my fingertips' chill. The leather was supple from use, not display.

Two letters were stamped into the upper cover in old blocked capitals: B. D. Beneath them, the year 1882.

I knew at once whose hand had bound this.

And the knowing arrived before my reasoning had assembled itself, which is a kind of recognition that ought to give a scholar pause. I gave it none. I carried the book to the side table and set it beside the casket.

The two objects, side by side, did not look unrelated. They looked stored together.

A small voice — not heard, only thought — observed that a book and a casket so placed had not arrived in that arrangement by chance. I attended instead to the binding's stitching, which was sound, and to the spine, which had been opened often along its central third.

I opened the cover. The flyleaf bore no inscription. The first leaf carried the title in a careful hand:

The earliest dated entry sat upon the third leaf.

I read the lines twice. The hand was firm and the ink even; the man who had written them was, by his own measure, in command of himself.

So Duncan, too, had begun by copying the glyphs. I lifted my own pen from the page where it rested. The thought arrived without my arranging it: — I am doing as he did. —

I dismissed the thought; it was an ordinary observation, and any scholar set to a like task would arrive at a similar procedure.

The next page held no entry. Where June 14th should have stood, the page had been removed at the gutter. The remaining stub bore the faintest stain along its torn edge — a darker brown that was not ink. The opposite page, June 15th, was blank.

I turned forward, more quickly than I had intended. The entries resumed in late June and continued through the autumn of 1882, though they grew shorter and the hand less steady. By the spring of 1883 the entries were brief; by 1885 the dean wrote chiefly of administrative matters; from 1888 onward there were long unwritten stretches. I did not read these carefully. I was looking for the one thing I had already begun to want.

It lay upon a page near the back, written in 1891.

Dashes stood where words should have stood. They had not been blotted, only declined. The remaining letters did not arrive to me whole. They came in pieces:

I copied them so. I did not yet know that I should not have.

Two pages from the end, the hand changed. It became smaller, more deliberate, as if the writer had decided to take care of a final matter. The entry was undated.

The last page held one line only. The ink was thinner; the date was 1893.

After that line there were three blank leaves, and then the back cover.

Footsteps sounded on the staircase above. They were measured, regular; a man returned from his errand rather than a colleague arriving for the afternoon. I knew them before I had given myself leave to know them.

I put the journal into my satchel.

I did not, in the moment, find a word for what I had done. I closed the casket — its lid settled with the small particular sound that only old bronze can make — and I returned it to its place behind the scrolls. My hand, the moment it left the surface, registered the chill again.

One beat of it. Then nothing.

The footsteps reached the landing above. I ascended the stair on the other side of the stack, the side that issues into the periodical room, and I passed Whitmore at a distance of perhaps thirty feet. He did not look toward me. He carried, I observed, a black leather case of his own.

I walked out of Miskatonic through the entrance hall. The brass plate caught the late afternoon light upon Duncan's name as I passed. I did not stop. The journal, in my satchel, had a weight to it. The cover-leather of an octavo volume of perhaps half an inch ought not, while being carried, to make its weight felt. I told myself the cover-leather was thick.

That afternoon, at the desk in my boarding-room — the same desk at which I had once written ··· 'Out · er G · ods.' in my notebook — I set the journal before me but did not open it. I sat for some time.

Rain had returned to the windows; I heard each separate drop fall, and I could not, for some minutes, hear them as rain.

It was a Tuesday in November of 1924; I think it was the eighteenth. From that afternoon I found that when I heard a word, I heard also the syllables of it, apart.