Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints

  The yeti wasn’t the only thing that brought me to Tibet. While I was there I tried to track down more original scrolls with information about the mava. I did not have many contacts there, but Rigby had given me directions to a few obscure mountain monasteries.

  There were a few things there of use. Most of the description of the mava was, as noted, extremely euphemistic and the sheer horror of the sight of the thing translated clearly despite being second- or thirdhand and in Tibetan. And much of it I initially took to be so euphemistic as to be useless. “Of a multitude of that which is used in the airiest places.” I mean, what the hell does something like that mean?

  But one phrase kept cropping up, “Of like unto the crown of the Most Perfect.” Crown could mean many things. It could mean brow, top of the head, since the lamas of that period shaved their heads presumably bald, it could also mean the hat they wore, it could mean what most people take as a crown. I had no idea.

  My lucky break came in an unexpected form. While I was studying at the monastery, a monk arrived and presented me with a note and a summons. Somehow Father Pema in Crestone, Colorado, had known I would end up here eventually, and sent a letter of introduction ahead. It must have been a good letter, because I was invited to meet with an expert who never spoke with Westerners.

  I took all my notes with me to Nepal to meet with a lama in exile. The lamas of Tibet had been the lords and priests of that land from time immemorial. They were worshipped nearly as gods but by and large maintained an ascetic lifestyle that would make most homeless in the US throw up their hands in anger.

  Lama Kotokai had once been the abbott of a monastery housing a thousand monks and libraries with even more thousands of scrolls, some so ancient they were as fragile as snowflakes. Now he lived in a thin-walled, drafty hovel on the poorest edge of Katmandu where he ministered to the flock there, dispensing wisdom and medicinal healing and blessings.

  And he was probably more content.

  It was Lama Kotokai who figured out the hidden meanings in my notes.

  “This crown refers to the hat of the Most Perfect of the period,” he told me, nodding over my copy of a copy of a copy of the original text. “They were made in the shape of the shell of a sea creature. These shells were very prized by the people of that time for they came from far away and were quite rare. ‘That which is found of the airiest places’ is ropes, such as are used on bridges. These are the airy places.”

  Okay, so, covered in ropes. Tentacles? Probably. But the rest?

  “With humility.” I bowed. “There are many shells of sea creatures, Most Holy One.”

  “This was a sort of clam.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and sketched on it with a stick from the fire. “There. This was the form of the body of the mother of serpents according to these writings of the apprentice of the Most Perfect.”

  I looked at the thing and blinked. It made no sense.

  Every indication I’d had was that the body of the mava paṇauvaā was amorphous like its pseudopods. But this was, indeed, a clam. Sort of. Sort of a cross between a clam and a snail.

  A clam with tentacles? Did those even exist? Wait. What was I thinking? If this was a creation of the Old Ones, it wasn’t even from this dimension.

  “I must ask, with humility. Does this indicate that the body was hard? I had been under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that it was quite soft.”

  “Hard,” Lama Kotokai said. “Very hard. Like rock. Such is known of the Sacrifice of the Most Perfect Thubten. Their covering is like armor. If you have such in your land, they must be expelled most quickly. They settle in and cause great havoc to all around. They summon the worst of the guras, mavas and srul. It is said that they are but the young of Those Who Are Not Named. Those Who Are Not Named spread their seeds among the worlds. When the time is right, when the stars align, some hatch and, like the butterfly or the locust, go through stages of change. In time, when the changes are complete, they become one of Those of the Darkest Stars.”

  Those Who Are Not Named covered a lot of entities. Tibetans. If it’s bad, we don’t talk about it. But Those of the Darkest Stars. I had to think about that one for a second. I’d heard it somewhere before. No, I’d read it somewhere before. I’d read a lot of stuff.

  It wasn’t in English…Tibetan…No. Nepali?

  Sabaibhandā’adhyārō tārāharu?

  That’s the Nepalese term for Old Ones. Great Old Ones. Great Cthulhu sleeps Great Old Ones! End of the world, do not pass Go, Extinction Level Event Great Old Ones!

  Oh, shit.

  It wasn’t a servant. It wasn’t some mindless creation. The fucking thing was a larval Old One? Here? On Earth? Specifically under my house?

  Oh, shit.

  I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs but you didn’t do that around a lama. I just thanked him and left a large donation for the poor.

  Oh, shit.

  There went my property values.

  * * *

  There wasn’t much in the way of fine hotels in Katmandu in the late eighties. I was in a fleabag with a couple of single beds, a rusty sink, barely functioning toilet and a black and white TV. I went back to it to think and turned on the TV for background noise.

  So…did MCB know what a mava really was? Generally MCB knew more than they let on. Only if they knew there was a baby Great Old One they’d probably be doing “underground nuclear testing” beneath New Orleans. In this case, I might have made myself the greatest living expert on mava in the world. I probably knew more than MCB at this point.

  The problem was, I was on MCB’s shit list. They might or might not believe me. All I really had to go on was the words of some old fucker in a saffron robe. I was not on MI4’s shit list, though. They owed me for taking out that piru. They’d probably believe me. But it wasn’t like the thing was under Manchester: it was under New Orleans.

  I needed more proof. Hell, I wasn’t sure if I was panicking. I was having a hard time believing there was a larval Great Old One under New Orleans. Did being larval mean it was only an “Old One” and not a “Great Old One”? How did you get the honorific “Great” when you were an Old One? Size? Territory? How fast it melts your brain? Just how long do they remain “larval”? And what happens when they hatch?

  I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that one.

  More interesting question: How long do they remain larval and how long had it been cooking? These things were a complete mystery. It was assumed they could live for millions of years. Their larval stage could be a long time, like millennia or even aeons. “That is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die.” Lovecraft must have had some sort of line to the pure quill.

  Was it ready to hatch? What sort of sign would there be? Or did we have until the sun went cold to worry?

  I wasn’t really watching the TV, it was just on for noise. There was only one channel that occasionally had on English programs and it announced it was changing to a “blockbuster” movie.

  Blockbuster. It was some horrid B-grade SF flick from the 1950s called…

  It: The Terror from Beyond Space!

  I got up and changed the channel. In my current state of controlled terror, this I did not need.

  Wow. Apparently the Nepalese are really into 1950s horror flicks.

  The Monster who Challenged the World…

  Is about a mollusklike monster which lives under the Salton Sea in California and is released due to nuclear weapons testing or an earthquake or something.

  I was about halfway through the two-hour run. I did some math and figured that I’d tuned in with fifty-seven minutes to go. The Nepalese host who did comedy skits during the commercial breaks said the movie was from 1957.

  When the guy I was assuming was Saint Peter had sent me back to the world of living, he’d told me to watch for signs. And specifically my sign was the number fifty-seven.

  “Okay, God,” I said, looking up. “Got it. Giant mollusk creature. Bad thing. Do something.
”

  I called the airport and booked the next flight out. Time to head back to the States and see if I could scrounge up some proof that didn’t involve signs from the Almighty.

  The in-flight movie?

  On the flight from New Delhi to London: Alien.

  Flight Number? Indian Airlines Flight 257.

  On the flight from London to Atlanta: The Blob.

  Flight Number? You guessed it: 1157.

  On the way out of the airport in New Orleans there was a homeless guy standing there with a sign: The End is Coming.

  “But do you have a specific date?” I asked him as I got in the car. Remi had previously redeployed to New Orleans and picked me up.

  “Sir?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is “Okay, God, I’ve got it! You can turn down the volume.”

  “Things are worse here than I thought, Remi. I’m really thinking about moving.”

  “Out of New Orleans, sir?”

  “I’m not good with this continent. If I could find another planet, we’d be moving that far.”

  CHAPTER 18

  There was a lot of catching up to do. I couldn’t get a long distance call to work from Nepal, but I had called Ray from New Delhi. Upon briefing him about the mava possibly being a baby Old One, he’d hit the roof. What had just been a regional problem was now an all hands on deck, priority-one, company freak-out.

  My meeting with the DOJ lawyer and Myers was covered previously. Why didn’t I bring up the possible Old One under New Orleans? Because I didn’t have any proof and it wasn’t part of the agenda. If I could find something, anything solid, I’d…I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. MCB needed to know. On the other hand, I could easily see them nuking the hell out of New Orleans. I’m not sure what cover they’d use for that but I really didn’t want to see my house nuked.

  On the other hand, Old One. Larval admittedly. We needed intelligence and proof. Since the MCB hadn’t signed the settlement papers yet, I couldn’t engage in “Monster Hunting.” But for “research” I was the man for the job.

  * * *

  LaGrange Seismic was a small company housed in a warehouse in Elmwood. They were the first ones in the phone book I’d been able to get an appointment with, simple as that. I’d just told them I was a prospective customer.

  The receptionist was a middle-aged lady with bottle-blonde hair and otherwise indistinguishable. “Chad Gardenier. I have an appointment with Mr. Smith.”

  “Of course, Mr. Gardener,” the lady said. “If you could wait just a moment while I call him?”

  Gardenier, I thought. I might hate my name but I hated even more when people couldn’t pronounce it. Smith was medium height, brown hair and beard, heavy-set.

  “Mr. Gardener,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Gardenier. Not a big issue. Where can we talk?”

  The meeting room was small, musty and smelled of paper, ink and dirt. Not “dirty” dirt, but the kind of smell you get in construction trailers and civil engineering companies. It was from all the dirt shaking that goes on and people coming in covered in the stuff. There were piles of rolled up paper in every corner. I was pretty sure I had picked the right place.

  “My company is interested in the potential that there might be a large anomalous…object beneath New Orleans.” I chose my words carefully. Now that we knew the mava had a super hard shell with a gooey center, we had a potential way to locate it. Ray had been kicking himself for not thinking of this avenue of investigation sooner. “The exact nature of why is proprietary. This object will be approximately one hundred and twenty meters in length and composed of…stone? I’m aware that is a very generalized term to geologists, but…”

  “You meant the Frandsen Anomaly?”

  “I’m not sure. What is the Frandsen Anomaly?”

  “It’s a big cell more or less under Bourbon Street,” Smith said. “It was discovered back in the late sixties when modern seismic was really starting to kick in. There was a paper done on it in the early seventies and it even made minor news. I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, because it is a little bigger.”

  “How much bigger?”

  “Not a lot in geological terms…About double that. It’s closer to two hundred meters.”

  “Oh…” That couldn’t be good. That was way bigger than what the PUFF adjuster assumed the last one had been. “What sort of work has already been done? At this point I’m willing to pay you for your time just for a briefing.”

  “Not really my specialty.” Smith leaned back, folded his hands over his stomach, and furrowed his brow. “It’s a large carbonaceous meteor that seems to have landed more or less intact probably during the Pleistocene era based on its depth. It’s mostly known because of the issues it causes.”

  “Issues? Like odd acoustics or something?”

  “The guy who did most of the work on it was Neil Frandsen. He was one of my professors at LSU. But…I really like the guy, but he sort of went crackers towards the end.”

  “Crackers?”

  “He insisted it was a UFO.” Smith grimaced. “Again, really thought he was a great guy but…”

  “Crackers. Yeah. What set him off?”

  “This was after I was out of college and I was just getting started on this gig. So I wasn’t directly keeping up at the time. As I got it, some seismographers found this anomaly and Professor Frandsen got a grant to check it out. When they drilled, it they got back some samples that indicated some sort of proto-life indicators. Later they figured out it was contamination. But Professor Frandsen went off about it. Started saying it was proof of extraterrestrial life, which admittedly would be a big deal. That was what made it a minor news story at the time. Then he started into it was a UFO and the end of the world was coming.”

  “Did he report that to the government?”

  “Would you believe it if you were government?” Smith said, grinning. Then he stopped. Apparently I wasn’t as poker-faced as I’d hoped. “Why are you interested in it again?”

  “Proprietary. Is Professor Frandsen still at LSU?”

  “No. He resigned. Asked, just did it—I’ve heard both stories.”

  “Any idea where I can find him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up. “Not sure what your minimum billing is but time is money. How much?”

  * * *

  Neil Frandsen, PhD (GeoPh), did not reside in Louisiana anymore, thank you for your inquiry, according to the secretary for the Dean of Geology at LSU. No, we don’t know where he resides presently. Will there be anything else?

  I tracked down his old colleagues. They were one and all saddened by his “sudden change in demeanor.” Some of his less enthusiastic colleagues were more on the order of “he was always an arrogant ass and he just finally cracked.” One of them at least had a forwarding address.

  He’d moved to Canada. Northern Canada. Really Northern Canada, up by the Arctic Circle Northern Canada. Ever heard of Yellowknife? No, me neither, not before then. Of course, the fact that it was the capital of the Northern Territories means real geography buffs know where it is and probably most Canadian school kids know for all of a day so they can pass the test. But regular people? Not so much.

  How do you get in touch with him? You either write him a letter or go visit in person. And don’t expect a friendly reception.

  It was September by then. I was supposed to be back at Oxford. I’d written a tersely worded telex to Dr. Henderson telling her I was going to have to extend my “sabbatical” due to real-world issues. Now I was going to northern Canada to interview a crazy professor. Gotta love my job.

  Yellowknife was a fair-sized town, mostly ’cause it was, you know, a capital. Decent if small airport. Fucking weather was the pits. It was September and there was already a blizzard on the way. Why the hell would anyone exile themselves to a place like this? Oh, yeah, “The End is Co
ming!” Like you’d be safe up here.

  Frandsen lived in a cabin off of the Frontier Trail about ten miles outside of Yellowknife. There was a large sign on the driveway—DO NOT ENTER! THIS MEANS YOU!—along with a heavy metal gate. The driveway went around a rock outcrop to the distantly visible cabin.

  “Friendly fellow,” I said, paying the taxi driver. It wasn’t a yellow cab by any means. When I’d asked if there was a taxi that could take me out to the guy’s house, the nice Inuit young lady at the ticket counter had called a cousin who picked me up in a rattletrap pickup.

  “I’ll stick around,” Aviqming said. “You probably won’t be long. He doesn’t take too kindly to visitors.”

  “‘Shoots them’ doesn’t take too kindly or tells them to get the hell out?”

  “Generally tells them to get the hell out. Shooting’s mostly for the bears and moose. Don’t pet the moose.”

  “A moose once bit my sister.”

  “Heard it,” Aviqming said. “I’ve got a better one. A moose once killed my cousin. Seriously. Avoid the moose.”

  “Will do.” I headed down the driveway.

  The area was low scrub and dwarf coniferous trees with multiple outcroppings of rock. The driveway more or less wandered between the outcroppings. I could see why a geologist would like the area. Why anybody else would live here was the question. The trees and scrub had been deliberately cleared in a large area around the cabin. As I walked down the driveway, a rifle poked out of an upstairs window.

  “Go away! I don’t want any!”

  I slowly held my hands up over my heads. No sudden moves. There might be moose.

  “Professor Neil Frandsen?”

  “Nobody here by that name!” the man shouted back. “Go away!”

  “I’m here to discuss the anomaly! I need to know what you know about it!”