I understood his allusion; the previous year the museum had gained considerable notoriety for having conducted some really appalling- and, to my mind, quite pointless - experiments on cats.
Most of the public had, until then, been unaware that the building housed several working laboratories.
'Anyway,' he continued, 'the robe's down in the shop, and we're stuck with patching up the damn thing. It'll probably be down there for the next six months before we get to it. We're so understaffed right now it isn't funny.' He glanced at his watch. 'Come on, I'll show you. Then I've got to go upstairs.'
I followed him down a narrow corridor that branched off to either side. At one point he said, 'On your right, the infamous zoology lab.' I kept my eyes straight ahead. As we passed the next doorway I smelled a familiar odour. 'It makes me think of treacle,' I said.
'You're not so far wrong.' He spoke without looking back. The stuff's mostly molasses. Pure nutrient. They use it for growing microorganisms.'
I hurried to keep up with him. 'And for other things?' He shrugged. 'I don't know, mister. It's not my field.' We came to a door barred by a black wire grille. 'Here's one of the shops,' he said, fitting a key into the lock. The door swung open on a long unlit room smelling of wood shavings and glue.
'You sit down over here,' he said, leading me to a small anteroom and switching on the light. 'I'll be back in a second.' I stared at the object closest to me, a large ebony chest, ornately carved. Its hinges had been removed. Richmond returned with the robe draped over his arm. 'See?' he said, dangling it before me. 'It's really not in such bad condition, is it?' I realized he still thought of me as the man who'd complained.
On the field of rippling green fled the small brown shapes, still pursued by some unseen doom. In the centre stood the black man, black horn to his lips, man and horn a single line of unbroken black.
'Are the Tcho-Tchos a superstitious people?' I asked. 'They were,' he said pointedly. 'Superstitious and not very pleasant. They're extinct as dinosaurs now. Supposedly wiped out by the Japanese or something.'
'That's rather odd,' I said. 'A friend of mine claims to have met up with them earlier this year.'
Richmond was smoothing out the robe; the branches of the snake-trees snapped futilely at the brown shapes. 'I suppose it's possible,' he said, after a pause. 'But I haven't read anything about them since grad school. They're certainly not listed in the textbooks anymore. I've looked, and there's nothing on them. This robe's over a hundred years old.'
I pointed to the figure in the centre. 'What can you tell me about this fellow?'
'Death's Herald,' he said, as if it were a quiz. 'At least that's what the literature says. Supposed to warn of some approaching calamity.'
I nodded without looking up; he was merely repeating what I'd read in the pamphlet. 'But isn't it strange,' I said, 'that these others are in such a panic? See? They aren't even waiting around to listen.'
'Would you?' He snorted impatiently.
'But if the black one's just a messenger of some sort, why's he so much bigger than the others?'
Richmond began folding the cloth. 'Look, mister,' he said, '! don't pretend to be an expert on every tribe in Asia. But if a character's important, they'd sometimes make him larger. Anyway, that's what the Mayans did. But listen, I've really got to get this put away now. I've got a meeting to go to.'
While he was gone I sat thinking about what I'd just seen. The small brown shapes, crude as they were, had expressed a terror no mere messenger could inspire. And that great black figure standing triumphant in the centre, horn twisting from its mouth - that was no messenger either, I was sure of it. That was no Death's Herald. That was Death itself.
I returned to my apartment just in time to hear the telephone ringing, but by the time I'd let myself in it had stopped. I sat down in the living room with a mug of coffee and a book which had lain untouched on the shelf for the last thirty years: Jungle Ways, by that old humbug, William Seabrook. I'd met him back in the twenties and had found him likable enough, if rather untrustworthy. His book described dozens of unlikely characters, including 'a cannibal chief who had got himself jailed and famous because he had eaten his young wife, a handsome, lazy wench called Blito, along with a dozen of her girl friends,' but I discovered no mention of a black horn-player.
I had just finished my coffee when the phone rang again. It was my sister.
'I just wanted to let you know that there's another man missing,' she said breathlessly; I couldn't tell if she was frightened or merely excited. 'A busboy at the San Marino. Remember? I took you there.'
The San Marino was an inexpensive little luncheonette on Indian Creek, several blocks from my sister's house. She and her friends ate there several times a week.
'It happened last night,' she went on. 'I just heard about it at my card game. They say he went outside with a bucket of fish heads to dump in the creek, and he never came back.'
That's very interesting, but ...' I thought for a moment; it was highly unusual for her to call me like this. 'But really, Maude, couldn't he have simply run off? I mean, what makes you think there's any connection -'
'Because I took Ambrose there, too!' she cried. Three or four times. That was where we used to meet.'
Apparently Maude had been considerably better acquainted with the Reverend Mortimer than her letters would have led one to believe. But I wasn't interested in pursuing that line right now. 'This busboy,' I asked, 'was he someone you knew?'
'Of course,' she said. 'I know everyone in there. His name was Carlos. A quiet boy, very courteous. I'm sure he must have waited on us dozens of times.'
I had seldom heard my sister so upset, but for the present there seemed no way of calming her fears. Before hanging up she made me promise to move up the month's visit I'd expected to pay her over Christmas; I assured her I would try to make it down for Thanksgiving, then only a week away, if I could find a flight that wasn't filled.
'Do try,' she said - and, were this a tale from the old pulps, she would have added: 'If anyone can get to the bottom of this, you can.' In truth, however, both Maude and I were aware that I had just celebrated my seventy-seventh birthday and that, of the two of us, I was by far the more timid; so that what she actually said was, 'Looking after you will help take my mind off things.'
I couldn't live a week without a private library. – H.P LOVECRAFT, 2/25/1929
That's what ! thought, too, until recently. After a lifetime of collecting I'd acquired thousands upon thousands of volumes, never parting with a one; it was this cumbersome private library, in fact, that helped keep me anchored to the same West Side apartment for nearly half a century.
Yet here I sit, with no company save a few gardening manuals and a shelf of antiquated best-sellers - nothing to dream on, nothing I'd want to hold in my hand. Still, I've survived here a week, a month, almost a season. The truth is, Howard, you'd be surprised what you can live without. As for the books I've left in Manhattan, I just hope someone takes care of them when I'm gone.
But I was by no means so resigned that November when, having successfully reserved seats on an earlier flight, I found myself with less than a week in New York. I spent all my remaining time in the library the public one on Forty-second Street, with the lions in front and with no book of mine on its shelves. Its two reading rooms were the haunt of men my age and older, retired men with days to fill, poor men just warming their bones; some leafed through newspapers, other dozed in their seats. None of them, I'm sure, shared my sense of urgency: there were things I hoped to find out before I left, things for which Miami would be useless.
I was no stranger to this building. Long ago, during one of Howard's visits, I had undertaken some genealogical researches here in the hope of finding ancestors more impressive than his, and as a young man I had occasionally attempted to support myself, like the denizens of Gissing's New Grub Street, by writing articles compiled from the work of others. But by now I was out of practice: how, after all, does one find references Go an obscure Southeast Asian tribal myth without reading everything published on that part of the world?