I returned to the sitting room to find Claude slouched in a battered leather armchair by the fireplace. Even in the roseate glow of a log-fire, his face seemed exceptionally pallid. I remember reflecting that it was as though he were suffering a blood-draining chill; a chill that went deeper than flesh to clutch the soul in icy fingers. His eyes came up quickly as I took the chair opposite him and lit my pipe. I fancied that the ancient, cryptic malevolence of the smile he turned on me was inexplicably tinged with anxiety. It gave me rather a start, when, while I was still searching for a proper approach to the subject, he said, softly:
“I’ve already decided on the college, you know…”
“Well… No… I didn’t know…”
“Yes…” Quite suddenly the opaque cold eyes glinted with quiet cunning. In that moment I should have sensed the malefic import of Claude’s choice. I confess I felt nothing but a vague uneasy puzzlement at his next words. “I’ve decided to go to Miskatonic University…”
He spoke the name with an unusually resonant clarity, and as he did, I saw again the unwonted hint of anxiety that seethed behind his reserved smiling mask. One would have said that Claude was afraid I might recognize that name; that it bore some corrupt connotation of which he hoped I was ignorant. Almost imperceptibly, when I asked where Miskatonic was located and what sort of reputation it had, he relaxed. In sibilant, strangely hypnotic tones, he drew a pleasant picture of a well-endowed college, abounding in charming tradition, nestled in the domed hills of Arkham, in northern New England. He did not speak, that night, of what obnoxious horrors lay hidden within the ivy-strangled walls of the Library of Miskatonic. He told his fetching lies with brilliant ease. And, despite the warning voice of danger that had nagged me from the outset, in the end I sanctioned Claude’s choice. For, watching the frozen, grinning determination of his face, I knew I could never change his mind.
That first year at Miskatonic was a brilliant success; Claude’s grades were so far above average as to exact an enthusiastic, complimentary letter from the Dean of Men. I remember how the pallor of doubt ebbed from Father’s face as he read that message; there was a child-like pride in the way he handed it to me. I myself was inordinately pleased by this unqualified praise of Claude; the apprehension that had tortured me all that year began to melt away. Then, I read the list of subjects in which my brother had excelled, and the warm glow of the library hearth seemed to smother suddenly under an intangible, chill blanket of corruption. “Medieval Lore; Ancient Cults and Sects; History of Necromancy; Examination of Extant Literature on Witchcraft.” The vile titles floated, smiling evilly, in the shadowed corners of the room. It was then that I realized the gross impudence, the monstrous significance of Claude’s selection of Miskatonic University.
In his second year at Miskatonic, Claude came home for the Christmas holidays. He had been at the Priory only three days when Father suffered a sudden and irreparable relapse.
It was the argument that brought it on. I was passing the half-open library door when I heard Father’s voice. I turned in at the threshold, my cold-stiffened face already wreathed in a holiday grin; then, I stopped. They had not heard me. Father sat slumped in a chair by his reading-table; in the lamplight his mouth looked twisted, his eyes anxious. A sickly pallor coated his parchment-dry skin. Claude, his back to me, stared silently at the raw orange corpse of a dying log in the fireplace.
“Claude…” My father spoke thickly, as though some insupportable burden crushed his chest. “You must try to understand…”
“I understand,” Claude’s voice was barely audible, yet brutally hard.
“No you don’t…” Father waved an ineffectual, blue-veined hand. “You’ve got to see that I’m doing this for your own good. Yes; your mother left you some money in her will—she left equal amounts to you and your brother—but, it was put in trust, to be controlled by me, until you come of age, or… or, until I die… Claude, you must stay at Miskatonic. You…”
“I tell you I’m sick of college! I’ve learned all I can there. I’ve got to have the money! I want to travel. I want to see Tibet and China. I want to live in the Bayous and the Indies…” Abruptly, Claude spun to face Father. For the first time, I saw the feverish, seething hate, the uncontrollable rage in his eyes. I watched my father wilt before the power of an unhuman gaze. Claude’s voice rose to a demented, grinding cry. He lurched toward the cowering form in the chair. “I tell you, I’ve got to have that money!”
“Claude!”
As I stumbled into the room, bundles spilled from my arms. Tree-decorations crashed to the floor, splintering into myriad scarlet and green slivers. Claude stood frozen, only a few feet from the easy-chair.
Terrified, prayerful relief flooded the wide eyes Father turned on me. He raised that hopeless, gentle hand as though he would speak, then suddenly sank back, death-pale and senseless, against the cushions of the chair. Choking with sick fury, I brushed past Claude, and knelt at my father’s side. The pulse in his withered wrist was pitifully feeble. “Why can’t you let him be?” I said hoarsely.
“Why can’t you get the hell out of here, and let him alone?”
“One way or the other,” he said softly, “I mean to have what I want.”
Only the terrible urgency of Father’s condition enabled me to struggle to sanity through the cold, throttling web of terror Claude’s words had woven. Almost before the library door closed behind my brother, I had rung Dr. Ellerby’s number on the desk-phone. He came at once. He had grown fatter and nearly bald with the passage of years, but that night, as he prescribed a sedative and several days in bed for my father, there was in his jowly, florid visage the same impotent puzzlement I had seen there the night Mother died. In a professional matter-of-fact tone, he advised that Father should have as little excitement as possible, and all the while I could feel him thinking that, here, in this ancient Priory, throve a malady that no worldly knowledge of medicine could cure.