Visions from Beyond

Chapter 1: Silent Raindrops

Arkham, Massachusetts. Friday, September 12, 1975.

Neal Carter had another dream last night.

This one was more vivid than any of the others. He only awoke after having been catapulted out of the abyss. The experience left him shaken and exhausted. Unearthly shapes loathsome beyond man's ability to comprehend ... No, he dared not describe what he'd seen, what he'd smelled, what he'd heard. But the thin sound of insane piping still echoed in his mind.

Rubbing his eyes, he muttered, "Just a dream."

He got out of bed and wrapped himself in a robe, for the air in the loft was cold. Arkham was experiencing an early autumn. It was only mid-September, but the morning chill penetrated his bones. He retreated to his small bathroom and stared at his reflection in the mirror. His bloodshot eyes and the chalk-white pallor of his face forced him to conclude he should start calling his dreams by their real name—nightmarish visions of a world man was not meant to see.

Were the long hours he'd spent in the university library the cause? His advisor, Thaddeus Shrewsbury, had warned him to tread carefully in his research. But his specialty was ancient languages. How could he have pursued his dissertation without immersing himself in the beliefs of early cultures?

The dreams started last May when he moved back to Arkham from England. During his year at Oxford he'd been fine. Well, fine until January when he couldn't sleep at all, but that wasn't because of the dreams. When he returned to Arkham, he was determined to finish his doctoral dissertation. He longed to bury himself in his research and avoid contact with others. Late at night when he was too weary to work, he caught up on reruns of TV programs he'd missed when he was abroad. Back then, an occasional dream was easy to blame on the pressure of defending his dissertation.

He'd obtained his doctorate but the dreams persisted. Now they'd grown more frequent and terrifyingly intense.

Wearily he splashed water on his face. "Stop torturing yourself. You just survived your first week as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Miskatonic, one of the most prestigious universities in the country. You're young. You're of reasonable appearance. You have your whole life ahead of you. You're not going to let a few bad dreams get the better of you, are you?"

Lecture completed, he felt much more like himself. He moved into the kitchenette to make coffee and caught himself humming "The Times They Are a-Changin'." He shrugged. The song was an improvement over last night.

He suspected his recent insomnia had been caused by his subconscious mind refusing to revisit the dreams. Finally, with a desperation born out of bone-weary exhaustion, he'd put on a Simon and Garfunkel record. What a mistake that had been. Between "I am a Rock" and "Sounds of Silence," was it any wonder that he felt depressed? He was no rock and he'd recently decided that he'd had enough silence to last a lifetime.

When he finally crashed, sleep came immediately, but it brought no rest.

Neal retrieved a bag of Italian roast coffee beans from the kitchen cabinet and ground a scoop for the coffee press. When the coffee was ready, he lifted the steaming mug to breathe in the aroma, hoping it would clear his mind. He went over to the window and gazed out at the clapboard houses across the street. The buildings might not have the history of Oxford, but there was something reassuring about the simple wood-frame houses, each painted a different color. They were sturdy and unpretentious like the New England town they were set in.

He'd been fortunate that June had held on to his apartment during his time in Oxford. The location, only a ten-minute walk from the university, made it a prime property. She could have easily rented it to someone else while he was away, but she refused, insisting it wouldn't be right to have anyone else living upstairs. When her husband passed away, she claimed she would have been lost without Neal. He suspected she'd only said that to make him feel less alone, but he appreciated the sentiment. Now he was the one who would be lost without her.