Cinereous Skies

Chapter 1: The Crystal Manuscript

Miskatonic University, Arkham, Massachusetts. Friday, November 14, 1975.

"Professor Carter!"

Neal spun around to see Charlene waving at him as she determinedly plowed a path through the crowd of students coming down the main stairway at Wingate Hall. Charlene was in his Anglo-Saxon seminar. A junior, she was earnest to the point of being obsessed. She was president of the college's Middle-earth club, and Neal suspected she dreamed of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien. For that glorious future to come to pass, she believed the essential first step was a mastery of Anglo-Saxon.

It was disheartening that she had so little aptitude for languages.

Not that Charlene realized that. She'd latched upon Neal to be her Gandalf on the road to enlightenment. The path ahead was a dangerous one, fraught with harrowing obstacles. The dragon confronting her at the moment was her final paper. The selection of a subject had turned into an agonizing process not only for her but for him as well. Neal steeled himself for another onslaught of questions.

He'd arrived at the front entrance a few minutes earlier and taken his designated position by the bulletin board where Peter had arranged to meet him. They planned to go to the library together.

Charlene's face was eloquent of distress as she approached. "I just heard that you won't be teaching the lecture on the Science of Language anymore. Tell me it's not true."

"Professor Whipple is an outstanding scholar," he reminded her. "You should count yourself lucky to have the head of the department teach it instead."

"But she can't be as inspiring as you! When you lecture, you transform language into an art form." Before Neal could divert her onto another subject, any subject—her final paper, for instance—she plunged ahead. "You'll still have office hours for students, won't you? Can I come to you with my questions?" As she continued to plead her case, Neal saw Peter walking down the stairs. He slowed down as he drew near, apparently amused by Neal's efforts to placate her.

"You should give Professor Whipple a fair chance," Neal said finally, cutting short her entreaties. He attempted to use Peter's no-nonsense voice which was so effective on his own students.

"Besides, Professor Carter may be away on fieldwork in December," Peter added.

Charlene gave Neal a horrified look. "You're scheduled to speak to our club in December! Can you meet with us next Thursday instead?"

Neal knew Charlene. When it came to Tolkien, she would haunt his office until he agreed. A few minutes later, Charlene left satisfied, having extracted his commitment to the new date and a promise to discuss the dreaded paper with her on Monday.

"Are all your students reacting the same way to the news?" Peter asked after she headed back upstairs.

"Pretty much," Neal admitted. "When Marjorie offered to take over the lecture, I didn't realize it would cause such a furor. The library vault will be a welcome escape."

In the wake of their discovery of an ancient artifact underneath a mausoleum in Arkham, his and Peter's lives had been transformed. The disk, dated to 6,000 BC, was composed of a bronze alloy containing trace amounts of algolnium, a rare element that so far had not been officially recognized.

The university president was now lending Miskatonic's full support to their research into the civilization that had crafted the disk. He arranged for both Peter and Neal to have reduced teaching loads. A major benefactor to the university, Gideon Talmadge, offered to back the effort. The fact that the disk enabled them to seal a wormhole to another world was a closely guarded secret for now. How would the public react to the news that Earth had likely been visited in its remote past by extraterrestrials? Until more evidence was obtained, the wisest course was to delay announcing the discovery.