|
I woke with a start in what felt like the middle of the night, well before the alarm clock started its cacophony. I was still sitting in my bathrobe, my whiskey unfinished, and with a dread sense of premonition rattling about my head. Or maybe it was just a nightmare. I couldn't remember a thing. A glance at the clock told me I had been asleep for less than an hour and that it was too early to do anything useful. I crawled under the bedcovers and tried to get back to sleep. Nothing doing. There was something unsettling about this case, something that was niggling at the back of my mind. But I hadn't a clue was it was. I tossed and turned for a long while before I finally gave up and concluded that more sleep was not for me tonight. Facing the inevitable, I got up, made sure the alarm clock was thoroughly disarmed, showered again - I was inexplicably sweaty - and dressed slowly and carefully. I made coffee - thick and black - and found a couple of the hard biscuits which are so popular for breakfast in the Goblin world in a tin at the back of the kitchenette cupboards. Dunked in the poisonously-strong coffee, they weren't too bad. As I chewed, a thought occurred to me. There must be more to be learned about the Old Ones. I was certainly no expert and I would bet a goodly sum that a subject that fascinating would have attracted a great deal of study over the millennia. I needed some of that understanding, and in a hurry. A few moments search - all right, twenty minutes of increasingly frantic rummaging - in the drawers and cupboards located what I was looking for. The really quite good university that my parents' money allowed me to attend for a short period a great many years ago had numerous drawbacks, and a few virtues, after I had left under a cloud. And one of the positive things I still had, after all these years, was a card that allowed me free use of the university library. Universities are not places which start to function early in the morning so I suffered a frustrating few hours of being unable to do anything very useful. Gumshoe didn't call back. The hands on the clock didn't turn any faster. Eventually, I elected for a little housekeeping. The domestic, and largely mindless, drudgery of dusting and sweeping and cleaning providing just the outlet I needed for my pent-up energies. Even so, I was on the doorstep of the university library one minute after it opened. If the porter on duty was in the least bit surprised to see a Goblin of middle years waving a hundred year old library card, then he did a good job of hiding it. The helpful librarian on the desk was similarly unsurprised, and deftly directed me in the direction of a stack tucked into a corner of the rambling old building, as well as suggesting the titles of a few works which would provide an introduction to the subject. I found myself at the library table many hours later, surrounded by open books and scribbled notes, my stomach grumbling at the lack of lunch. I had learned a great many things about the Old Ones, although none seemed particularly pertinent to my current line of enquiry. But there was one thing that did stand out, even at a most cursory glance at the literature. It was a name, a name I recognised. It was a blast from the past, somebody who once studied in the same lectures and the same tutorials, somebody who I once called a friend, and was indeed more than just a friend, a very long time ago. The corridors of the old university building that housed the Department of Preternatural Sciences seemed as echoing as they did when I was a wet-behind-the-ears undergraduate student all those years ago. I had spent quite some time here, filling these halls with backchat and laughter in the high-spirited company of a hundred like-minded others. It was an era of my life which now seemed as long ago as forever and as far away as the moon. Following the directions made abundantly clear in the Staff Directory I studied as I entered, I navigated the half-remembered maze of glazed brick in nearly indistinguishable shades of green and brown, pacing the stone floors which had seen the tread of a million others just like me. The directory had led me true. I stood in front of the door, reading again the name picked out in gold paint of the polished wood surface. Doctor Doonira Quaig.
|
Part 9