"For God's sake, don't lock eyes with it," I whispered to my postdoc. "These things can smell fear."
The Office of Contracts and Grants was bat country. It was housed in a Gothic fortress that had once served as the university's civil defense shelter. Gargoyles perched on the exterior surfaces, later discovered to be the remains of migrant workers who had been walled over when construction was complete. The place had the bad vibes of the Arctic floes where Inuits abandoned their elderly. The kind of enterprise that breeds vengeful ghosts.
Our presence was a breach of protocol of the worst kind. The only outsiders permitted here were workstudies. The drug mule of the academic world. Dark forces conspired to sever all other forms of communication with the rest of campus. OCG was the only structure in North America not wired for telegraph or teletype. Cell phone reception was nonexistent. Regular mail was impossible, as the building appeared on no map. Pneumatic tubing, semaphore flags, signal pyres. These had all failed. A program involving carrier pigeons was even attempted. It had to be abandoned when the creatures kept turning up headless and stripped of meat.
But there was no time for proper channels and so here we were. Strangers in a strange land. The immediate task was to negotiate the first floor cubicle maze and reach the stairs. Empty eyes peered from over the tops of the partitions. Reptilian Kilroys made flesh, the flesh spongiform and mottled. One wrong move and they would tear us to shreds. No choice but to crouch and press onward.
"Greetings" I said as we cautiously waded into their ranks. "I am a doctor of philosophy. We mean you no harm."
But it was not our wrath they feared. Lording over this farm of despair was a creature unspeakable and profane. A labyrinthian monarch more fearsome than any minotaur. Its presence was invisible, yet everywhere.
It was already watching us.
The budgeting process normally took at least a fortnight. We had less than two hours before the grant submission deadline. This demanded careful machination. For OCG was quick to anger and eternal to forgive. A simple untoward voicemail could get your application permanently shelved, cackling shadows arriving at your funeral decades later to commit the unprocessed paperwork to the earth along with your mortal remains.
Our odds were worse. If our mission was to have any chance of success, we had to face down the head goblin. No subordinate would dare approval of our enterprise. Constant flogging had drained the pioneer spirit from these poor beasts.
It stood on the balcony, surveying the cowed unfortunates below. This was no mere campus bureaucrat. This one had risen to the top of the heap, a king rat. Now a permanent hunched form, unisex and pear-shaped and with the head of a jackal. As if the years in this bleak inorganic realm had altered its very DNA. Anubis, if the ancient Egyptians had chosen to worship pastry.
We climbed the stairs, our steps heavy and deliberate, already feeling the thing's hot disapproval. Head shots of the previous OCG leadership hung on the wall. The portraits grew more lifelike as we ascended, their eyes tracking us as we passed. "Oilcan," the final form seemed to beg.
We crossed the landing and closed ranks. We were now within striking distance. It was wise not to have sent the grad student. We were standing on the very spot where a wisp of his carbonized cytoplasm would have stood a small memorial.
The goblin did not acknowledge us, keeping its gaze resolutely forward. This is how the first Aztec must have felt meeting the Spaniards, I thought. Cortes silently staring into the distance, ships burning just offshore. His mind consumed by thoughts of torture and El Dorado.
I decided it was best to come clean. Straighten up. Take it like a man. State our case with confidence and purpose. What's the worst that could happen?
"It's ninety minutes to the submission deadline and we need a budget."
This was a mistake.
A screeching filled the cavernous space, the likes of which no earthly mouth had ever brought forth. It buried, it drilled, it penetrated. It forced its way into the other senses. White light, bright as creation's day, and a taste of burnt meat with an odor dank and sweet. Blurred vision. Numb tongue. It was only a matter of time before this unholy noise would latch on to a resonant frequency and pop our skulls like ripe cantaloupes.
My postdoc was babbling in his native tongue, fear causing the primal division of his brain to take control.
"God damn it you Frankish bastard! Speak English!" I called out over the din.
He suggested we retreat to the stairs. A wise move. Put some distance between us and this siren and the inverse square law might offer some protection. Unfortunately, all motor skills had fled. We stumbled across the carpet like drunk marionettes twisting in Brownian motion.
Only one thing could save us now. It was time to play the trump card. I mustered all my remaining strength.
"Parlay!" I shouted. "We brought tribute!"
The goblin's screeching ceased. It regarded me with a skeptical gaze for a time, then motioned with one of its flippers.
"Give it the box," I whispered. My postdoc didn't respond. He was still rebooting.
"Get your head back in the game, man!" I urged. "I swear I will feed you to this thing!"
In the tradition of the condemned passing a few gold pieces to the executioner in return for a clean blow, my postdoc offered a jeweled box. The goblin looked to us and then to the gift, its movement both mechanized and animal. It lifted the lid and sniffed, the contents casting a sliver of light across its uneven pupils.
It chewed at the air, forming words we could not hear. A workstudy appeared. S/he took our grant proposal from me and disappeared down a passageway, leaving behind a twisted vortex in the black mist that permeated the place.
Our subterfuge had worked. We turned to leave, descending again, not daring to look back. Like Tippi Hedren slinking past Hitchcock's birds, if we could make it to the front door, we were golden. With each step the world was returning to color, echos of the horrible turbine banshee receding. Long minutes later, standing outside in the warm campus sunshine, it was over. We had reclaimed our humanity.
Matters were out of our hands now. The die had been cast, the tipping point reached. We had stood atop a great precipice, momentarily enjoyed the view, and then pressed on. From now on we would move at speed.
"This calls for strong drink," my postdoc decided as we shuffled across the quad.
"Where is that grad student?" I asked.
"I told him to return the laptop to the bookstore."
"Well, there'll be no rescuing him from that," I said. "Best we strike out on our own."
Continue to Part V
The Office of Contracts and Grants was bat country. It was housed in a Gothic fortress that had once served as the university's civil defense shelter. Gargoyles perched on the exterior surfaces, later discovered to be the remains of migrant workers who had been walled over when construction was complete. The place had the bad vibes of the Arctic floes where Inuits abandoned their elderly. The kind of enterprise that breeds vengeful ghosts.
Our presence was a breach of protocol of the worst kind. The only outsiders permitted here were workstudies. The drug mule of the academic world. Dark forces conspired to sever all other forms of communication with the rest of campus. OCG was the only structure in North America not wired for telegraph or teletype. Cell phone reception was nonexistent. Regular mail was impossible, as the building appeared on no map. Pneumatic tubing, semaphore flags, signal pyres. These had all failed. A program involving carrier pigeons was even attempted. It had to be abandoned when the creatures kept turning up headless and stripped of meat.
But there was no time for proper channels and so here we were. Strangers in a strange land. The immediate task was to negotiate the first floor cubicle maze and reach the stairs. Empty eyes peered from over the tops of the partitions. Reptilian Kilroys made flesh, the flesh spongiform and mottled. One wrong move and they would tear us to shreds. No choice but to crouch and press onward.
"Greetings" I said as we cautiously waded into their ranks. "I am a doctor of philosophy. We mean you no harm."
But it was not our wrath they feared. Lording over this farm of despair was a creature unspeakable and profane. A labyrinthian monarch more fearsome than any minotaur. Its presence was invisible, yet everywhere.
It was already watching us.
The budgeting process normally took at least a fortnight. We had less than two hours before the grant submission deadline. This demanded careful machination. For OCG was quick to anger and eternal to forgive. A simple untoward voicemail could get your application permanently shelved, cackling shadows arriving at your funeral decades later to commit the unprocessed paperwork to the earth along with your mortal remains.
Our odds were worse. If our mission was to have any chance of success, we had to face down the head goblin. No subordinate would dare approval of our enterprise. Constant flogging had drained the pioneer spirit from these poor beasts.
It stood on the balcony, surveying the cowed unfortunates below. This was no mere campus bureaucrat. This one had risen to the top of the heap, a king rat. Now a permanent hunched form, unisex and pear-shaped and with the head of a jackal. As if the years in this bleak inorganic realm had altered its very DNA. Anubis, if the ancient Egyptians had chosen to worship pastry.
We climbed the stairs, our steps heavy and deliberate, already feeling the thing's hot disapproval. Head shots of the previous OCG leadership hung on the wall. The portraits grew more lifelike as we ascended, their eyes tracking us as we passed. "Oilcan," the final form seemed to beg.
We crossed the landing and closed ranks. We were now within striking distance. It was wise not to have sent the grad student. We were standing on the very spot where a wisp of his carbonized cytoplasm would have stood a small memorial.
The goblin did not acknowledge us, keeping its gaze resolutely forward. This is how the first Aztec must have felt meeting the Spaniards, I thought. Cortes silently staring into the distance, ships burning just offshore. His mind consumed by thoughts of torture and El Dorado.
I decided it was best to come clean. Straighten up. Take it like a man. State our case with confidence and purpose. What's the worst that could happen?
"It's ninety minutes to the submission deadline and we need a budget."
This was a mistake.
A screeching filled the cavernous space, the likes of which no earthly mouth had ever brought forth. It buried, it drilled, it penetrated. It forced its way into the other senses. White light, bright as creation's day, and a taste of burnt meat with an odor dank and sweet. Blurred vision. Numb tongue. It was only a matter of time before this unholy noise would latch on to a resonant frequency and pop our skulls like ripe cantaloupes.
My postdoc was babbling in his native tongue, fear causing the primal division of his brain to take control.
"God damn it you Frankish bastard! Speak English!" I called out over the din.
He suggested we retreat to the stairs. A wise move. Put some distance between us and this siren and the inverse square law might offer some protection. Unfortunately, all motor skills had fled. We stumbled across the carpet like drunk marionettes twisting in Brownian motion.
Only one thing could save us now. It was time to play the trump card. I mustered all my remaining strength.
"Parlay!" I shouted. "We brought tribute!"
The goblin's screeching ceased. It regarded me with a skeptical gaze for a time, then motioned with one of its flippers.
"Give it the box," I whispered. My postdoc didn't respond. He was still rebooting.
"Get your head back in the game, man!" I urged. "I swear I will feed you to this thing!"
In the tradition of the condemned passing a few gold pieces to the executioner in return for a clean blow, my postdoc offered a jeweled box. The goblin looked to us and then to the gift, its movement both mechanized and animal. It lifted the lid and sniffed, the contents casting a sliver of light across its uneven pupils.
It chewed at the air, forming words we could not hear. A workstudy appeared. S/he took our grant proposal from me and disappeared down a passageway, leaving behind a twisted vortex in the black mist that permeated the place.
Our subterfuge had worked. We turned to leave, descending again, not daring to look back. Like Tippi Hedren slinking past Hitchcock's birds, if we could make it to the front door, we were golden. With each step the world was returning to color, echos of the horrible turbine banshee receding. Long minutes later, standing outside in the warm campus sunshine, it was over. We had reclaimed our humanity.
Matters were out of our hands now. The die had been cast, the tipping point reached. We had stood atop a great precipice, momentarily enjoyed the view, and then pressed on. From now on we would move at speed.
"This calls for strong drink," my postdoc decided as we shuffled across the quad.
"Where is that grad student?" I asked.
"I told him to return the laptop to the bookstore."
"Well, there'll be no rescuing him from that," I said. "Best we strike out on our own."
Continue to Part V
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