July, 1908: Arkham, Massachusetts
Oct. 23rd, 2007 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gone_byebyeIt was well known by now that whatever terrible fate had befallen Professor Nathaniel Peaslee on the occasion of his collapse had also awakened a sort of 'secondary personality' in him. While his speech was somewhat closer to the norm than had previously been the case, his words still rang of a peculiar archaism, and the sense existed in everyone who spoke with him that some vast and terrible gulf of the unknown separated him from all his fellows. He was by no means the Nathaniel Peaslee that anyone had previously known, and it showed most in the strain that it placed upon all his family members and sometime colleagues.
It would be some time before Dr. Peaslee's strangeness truly bore fruit in terms of the damage it would do to his relations with those around him. For the moment it meant little more than a certain extra solitude as he made his way about the Orne Library. That, at least, seemed to please him. No one much cares to be interrupted during reading, after all- and oh, how he read, as if every book were the last book in the world and he had to commit it to memory straightaway! No volume was too simplistic or too obscure, no text too unimportant. All that he could read, he did read. And that was where the trouble began. Henry Armitage had not been particularly close comrades with the man before his collapse, but he knew this much: there was no reason at all that he ought to have such an interest in the contents of the Restricted Section. He half-wondered if Peaslee and Stantz weren't in cahoots somehow, given that peculiar evening in early June. But then he chanced to step out of his office at a moment when both the other men were present. Peaslee was making some show of idly leafing through a volume from the time of John Dee on the true nature of alchemical symbolism. Stantz sat some distance away, his own book all but forgotten as he watched Peaslee with the intensity of a hawk after a mouse.
There was a quality of determination to that look so very much unlike anything Armitage had seen before that he was taken aback. It was scarcely to be credited as the look of a man, though surely there were some guards of places too dangerous to name who might have appeared so. No, this was beyond any such expression, though it seemed familiar to Armitage somehow. It took him some little while to realise that Napoleon, the great mastiff who patrolled the library's grounds at night, assumed such a look towards certain misliked students (chiefly of Innsmouth and Kingsport extraction). Stantz's look was not so hostile as the mastiff's, but it was nothing at all like one of trust or cooperation. Armitage relaxed as the realisation came to him, and returned to his office.
It would have done his nerves no good to see what followed after. Peaslee, upon judging that Armitage was no longer taking an interest in the scene, set his text aside and made for the entrance to the Restricted Section. That had been what Stantz had been waiting for; he got up and followed the man, and caught up with Peaslee as his hand descended upon the doorknob. "Is there a problem?" he inquired.
Peaslee blinked back at him amiably enough, for all that it was an artificial sort of friendliness, and said, "There were some matters in my last book which I wished to confirm. By some chance, might you be willing to assist me in this?"
"Maybe," said Stantz, crossing his arms over his chest. "It depends on whether you come clean with me in the next sixty seconds or not."
"I don't believe I take your meaning," said Peaslee carefully. "Come clean? How do you mean?"
"I know what you are..."
Stantz leaned in close and lowered his voice; Armitage would have had to strain very hard indeed to hear the word that blanched Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee's face.
"Yithian."
It would be some time before Dr. Peaslee's strangeness truly bore fruit in terms of the damage it would do to his relations with those around him. For the moment it meant little more than a certain extra solitude as he made his way about the Orne Library. That, at least, seemed to please him. No one much cares to be interrupted during reading, after all- and oh, how he read, as if every book were the last book in the world and he had to commit it to memory straightaway! No volume was too simplistic or too obscure, no text too unimportant. All that he could read, he did read. And that was where the trouble began. Henry Armitage had not been particularly close comrades with the man before his collapse, but he knew this much: there was no reason at all that he ought to have such an interest in the contents of the Restricted Section. He half-wondered if Peaslee and Stantz weren't in cahoots somehow, given that peculiar evening in early June. But then he chanced to step out of his office at a moment when both the other men were present. Peaslee was making some show of idly leafing through a volume from the time of John Dee on the true nature of alchemical symbolism. Stantz sat some distance away, his own book all but forgotten as he watched Peaslee with the intensity of a hawk after a mouse.
There was a quality of determination to that look so very much unlike anything Armitage had seen before that he was taken aback. It was scarcely to be credited as the look of a man, though surely there were some guards of places too dangerous to name who might have appeared so. No, this was beyond any such expression, though it seemed familiar to Armitage somehow. It took him some little while to realise that Napoleon, the great mastiff who patrolled the library's grounds at night, assumed such a look towards certain misliked students (chiefly of Innsmouth and Kingsport extraction). Stantz's look was not so hostile as the mastiff's, but it was nothing at all like one of trust or cooperation. Armitage relaxed as the realisation came to him, and returned to his office.
It would have done his nerves no good to see what followed after. Peaslee, upon judging that Armitage was no longer taking an interest in the scene, set his text aside and made for the entrance to the Restricted Section. That had been what Stantz had been waiting for; he got up and followed the man, and caught up with Peaslee as his hand descended upon the doorknob. "Is there a problem?" he inquired.
Peaslee blinked back at him amiably enough, for all that it was an artificial sort of friendliness, and said, "There were some matters in my last book which I wished to confirm. By some chance, might you be willing to assist me in this?"
"Maybe," said Stantz, crossing his arms over his chest. "It depends on whether you come clean with me in the next sixty seconds or not."
"I don't believe I take your meaning," said Peaslee carefully. "Come clean? How do you mean?"
"I know what you are..."
Stantz leaned in close and lowered his voice; Armitage would have had to strain very hard indeed to hear the word that blanched Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee's face.
"Yithian."
