THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (18 page)

             
I opened my eyes wide, trying to come alert, but a minute later my eyes closed, just for a moment so that I could think of sipping the tea and placing the cool cucumber slices on my eyes, and, again, I snapped to as a phrase from the lecture struck a chord in my consciousness. The words this time were

             
"Ancient Ones."

             
I blinked, trying to listen, wondering what "Ancient Ones" might have to do with an ash tree.

             
It was then I felt a prickling of hairs at the base of my neck and I twisted in my seat to discover a girl staring at me with a dark look from where she sat at the back of the row. I raised my eyebrows in query as if to ask,
What's up?

             
She smiled then, a dark smile that silently hinted at possession of some mystical truth, the kind of smile a mime might give someone passing on a street corner.
I am silent
, the smile said,
because I am
mute, and I am mute because I am not prepared, yet, to deal with you any other way.

             
I turned around again, disturbed. I didn't know her and couldn't fathom why she'd been staring at the back of my head. I didn't know any of the students in Professor Alan's mythology class. It was the start of the school year at Miskatonic, early September, and I had come a long way from my home in Alabama to attend the University, feeling there was nothing the southern universities offered that I should be interested in learning. In order to afford tuition, I had taken a tiny apartment in a squalid building next to the ruins of an old church.

             
I hadn't made any friends and didn't care if I ever managed to. I have had one ambition, and it has been the acquisition of knowledge. Wide, deep, comprehensive knowledge of how the world works. I believed that if I knew that much, I could then manipulate the world for my own ends, no matter what profession I entered after my degree.

             
Professor Alan was not the most inspiring lecturer I had drawn during the lottery style sign-up for classes. I expected the subject matter to overcome whatever phlegmatic professor was assigned to teach the course, but I was wrong. Professor Alan had been putting me to sleep ever since the beginning of the term.

             
When class broke, without me falling asleep again due to the creepy stare from the girl behind me, I exited the classroom yawning. I was one of the last stragglers, slow to get my things, slow to move, worn and tired from fifty minutes of interminable droning. The pages of my notebook were full not of notes, but of miniature drawings of winged beasts and snarling Gothic creatures--evidence of my state of mind. If I could, I would have one of the little doodles on the page take life and swoop down over the balding pate of the professor, lifting off the top of his skull as if it were hinged and dining from the delicate gnarled fruit there uncovered.

             
Just outside the door of the classroom Carla Knight waited, her shoulders crouched over her books held to her chest, her neck outstretched and her head oddly thrust out toward anyone coming through the door. I flinched and stepped around her.
What a loon
, I thought. She was already speaking, though now it was to my back for I was maneuvering through the busy crowd in the hallway. "I live across the street from you," she said. "I've seen you wandering around the church ruins."

             
By now she had caught up with me and walked at my side, her head still thrust forward and now turned to watch my face.

             
"My name's Carla, Carla Knight, K-n-i-g-h-t. Want to go to the University Spa and have a Coke?"

             
I halted, turning to her. "Why were you staring so hard at me in class? What do you want?"

             
She shrugged and the strange smile slipped back to her lips. Then her eyes brightened, as she noticed I was about to leave her standing there. "Wait." She reached out and put a staying hand on my arm. "I'll tell you why I was staring if you'll come with me to the Spa. You won't be sorry."

             
It was my turn to shrug. Why not? Professor Alan's class was my last one for the day and I didn't have any pressing demands on my time. Besides, I admitted to a bizarre interest in the unusual girl. She not only looked funny, the way she held herself, the way she smiled, the way she spoke, all breathless like Marilyn Monroe, but I wanted to know what she wanted from me.

             
We made our way across the campus without talking, the only sound the crackle and swish of our feet wading through the unraked sea of autumn leaves. I never visited the University Spa on my own. I had no friends of course, and saw no reason to come alone to be ridiculed, to be whispered about behind my back. Worse than in high school, it seemed, young men and women paired off at college.

             
Though not ugly or unkempt, I've never had luck with guys. It may be the direct looks I give them or the cool aura I project, an aloofness too chilly to penetrate. It could be my intellect. Or...I'm the first to allow that I am this way to keep from being rejected. Who needs complications, that's how I think. My thirst for knowledge doesn't leave much room for hungering after romantic involvements.

             
"I like your sweater," Carla said, as we mounted the steps into the building housing the Spa. "Are those occult symbols?"

             
I frowned at her "No, it's just the threads. They're randomly selected, producing a...collage. Like modern art."

             
"Well, I like it."

             
I wouldn't say thank-you. I didn't know if I liked her enough to get too chummy. She lived across the street from my building, she said. What if she became a pest and wanted to come over all the time, interrupting my studies? I kept a four-point grade average. And I hadn't had a best friend since grade school and didn't look forward to one now. No time for that. No time at all.

             
We bought Cokes and took them with Styrofoam cups of ice to an empty table. A gaggle of laughing couples were frolicking in the pool, the sounds bouncing from the overhead dome of cool green glass. The air smelled of chlorine and damp towels, hot dogs and hamburgers. I wrinkled my nose and promptly brought the frothing Coke I'd poured into the cup of ice to my lips.

             
When I set it down on the table, I had to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. "So what was the mysterious message you were trying to send during class?"

             
"Let me ask a question first. Since you go into the churchyard and climb around the ruins and since you're taking Mythology, could I assume you're interested in the soul and in the unseen?"

             
"The what? The unseen? You mean, like spirits or ghosts?"

             
She watched me, concentrating on my lips as I spoke, which made me wonder if I'd gotten off all the Coke froth or if she were partly deaf and must lip-read.

             
"Not like spirits or ghosts," she said.

             
"What else is there that you're referring to then?"

             
We were having less of a conversation than a battle of confusing words.

             
"The gods, the old gods, the Ancient Ones. The Unseen."

             
The creep was back on my neck, standing hairs on end. How did she know my innermost thoughts? How did she guess the reason I thought I might find key secrets here at Miskatonic?

             
Since I hadn't answered her, she continued. "When Professor Alan mentioned the Ancient Ones, your head rose from your fist where you'd been resting it, and your attention, at least for a few moments, was riveted. It's what you've come here to discover more about, isn't it?"

             
I sipped Coke and looked away to the swimmers in the deep end of the Olympic-sized indoor pool.

             
An athlete with bulging biceps readied for a dive from the high board. He lifted into the air as primly as a swan and cut the water neatly. "If I have, I don't know that it would be any of your business."

             
"I've been in the library stacks," she said cryptically.

             
I looked at her birdlike neck stretched out, her inquisitive hazel eyes that promised knowledge of vital information. "How did you get in there as an underclassman?"

             
The thought of getting into the revered stacks where only graduate students were permitted sent a delicious shiver all down my spine. I would give anything to be allowed entrance to the tomes hidden there. They could not be checked out. They couldn't even be consulted within the library without special permission.

             
"You've found something," I said, "about the Ancient Ones."

             
She blinked rapidly and her eyes watered and shined as if she were starving and a plate of steak and fries had been set before her. "I've found something," she agreed.

             
"Why are you telling me this?"

             
"Because," she said, reaching out to brush a stray length of hair from my forehead. "I've read your mind. Ever since you moved into your apartment. I've read your mind."

             
#

             
There used to be a tale told in rural southern Alabama about an old black woman who lived back in the woods. She could tell fortunes, they said, and more than that, she knew what you wanted to hear before you told her of your concerns.

             
I never believed all the tall tales the country people passed around--they were too many and too outlandish--but since meeting Carla I could kick myself for not checking out the story of the mystic. If the story were true, maybe I could have consulted her and been warned about moving to Arkham to further my education. I could have foreseen meeting a dark-haired girl who would take me down the path to perdition.

             
After our first meeting in the Spa, I walked back to the apartment with Carla, uneasy all the way. If she could read my thoughts, I had no reason to speak. She knew my fears, my dreams; she knew my ambition to wrestle power away from weaker creatures so that I could use them at will.

             
She knew I was ultimately evil in my heart.

             
I had no shame about it, but then I had never let anyone know of it before now and the idea that some other human understood the craven aspects of my aspirations made me wobble in my determination. It was possible I should be exterminated, that I was an aberration, an abomination, and my goals too hellish to be affirmed and given life.

             
When we parted in the street and I turned my back on Carla to go to my own building. I happened to glance over at the ruined walls of the church and my gaze rose up the facade of the front wall to the spire that blocked the sun. Why hadn't blizzards and high winds ever brought down that tall black iron cross tumbling to earth? Religion, I believed, was not only an opiate for the people, but a sickness that had spread over nations on the globe, polluting the world. I had read a book that said even the man who proclaimed himself to be an atheist nursed a religion. He made of his life a religion. His non-belief was as much a religion as any organized one that had lasted two thousand years.

             
If it was true, then my religion was about to be given its first test, thanks to Carla Knight. She had found a small book in the library stacks. She had pilfered it and had it now, wrapped in black silk and secreted between her mattress and box spring, in her shabby room across the street. Within the book, written in tiny fading scrawls of ink, not printed words from a press, were incantations meant to rouse the old masters, the gods who slumbered on while the modern world rolled in a frenzy toward annihilation.

             
I shook myself and dropped my gaze from the church spire and the brooding black cross atop it. I felt some alien voice inside my head whisper stealthily,
Soon all the churches will be filled with
mourners.

             
I hurried into my building and up to my apartment, my footsteps clattering up the stairs. I shut the door and leaned my back against it, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

             
Carla not only could read my mind, she could invade it at will and speak to me in dreadful whispers. It would drive me crazy, make me mad as a drunk monkey. I would kill her when she was no longer useful. Once we had summoned just one Ancient One who volunteered me a portion of his great power, I would do away with Carla Knight as easily as I might swat a bothersome fly.

             
The voice in my head hissed then, startling me, and causing me to tremble all over. It had said not a word. Just a single viperous hiss and I knew that she had heard my murderous intention. I would never be done with her, never. There was no ruse or secret I'd be able to keep from her. She really could read my mind...