The Ark has a new lease on life thanks to its period as an archive. The Miskatonic has relocated from the burned U of A campus to McGeorge hall, three stories of red brick with freshly painted white pillars around the entrance and new-planted trees relocated from roof and doorstep. If the building's architecture reflected the facts and secrets locked within, it would be a dozen stories tall and carved out of black granite, with horns projecting from the roof and gimlet eyes peering from the gaps in the still-boarded windows. . . .
* * * *
David Valentine stepped off the train even before it came to a full stop and landed neatly on his good leg. He checked in at the Guard Station and reacquainted himself with the modest sights of the hill-circled town, enjoying the sensation of being off the rickety train.
It had been a long trip up from Texarkana, thanks to the stop-and-start nature of nonmilitary travel. He spent a night in Hope, and learned that the famous unification of Texas and Arkansas forces had actually taken place in the nearby crossroads of Fouke. Southern Command, perhaps with an eye toward history, or realism about the soldier's eagerness to say they were present at the famous Texas-Arkansas-Fouke, had broadcast the news to the world from a minor general's temporary headquarters in Hope. Valentine spent ten dollars on an afternoon outing from Hope to the spot of the linkup (sandwich lunch included!) and saw the two state flags waving on a small hill next to a creek where beer and whiskey bottles from the celebration were still in evidence.
He wandered up and down Pine Bluffs main streets. Occupation seemed to have leeched all the cheery color from the town he remembered from his early days as a Wolf, studying at the academy. Vanished flower boxes, missing chalkwork advertisements on the brickwork, empty display windows where once mannequins had stood displaying everything from rugged smocks to ruffled wedding gowns, even the tired-looking berry bushes and picked-clean fruit trees filling every vacant lot related the occupation's story.
The lots made him think of Razors for some reason. Missing faces, dead or gone. He missed Hank most of all, even more than Narcisse or Ahn-Kha. Both could take care of themselves. But Hank had gone off to school with little enthusiasm. Valentine had tried to ease the parting by giving him his snakeskin bandolier, the same one he'd worn the night of the Rising in Little Rock.
"You deserve a medal, Hank, but this is the best I can do."
Hank ran his good hand across the oversized scales. "For real? For keeps?"
"For exceptional valor," Valentine said.
Hank hooked a finger in one of the loops. "Take a while to grow more Quickwood," Hank said.
"Fill it with diplomas."
At that Hank frowned-the boy saw himself as tried and tested as any of the Razors. In the end Valentine tasked Ahn-Kha with seeing the boy safely seated-and if necessary, handcuffed-at school.
He brought himself back to the present.
Valentine read the lettering next to a white cross painted on a walkway above the street, connecting two buildings at the heart of downtown:
here they hung james ellington
for spitting under the boots of
the occupiers as they marched
they said he was to be an example
they were right
One of Valentine's happier memories was of his time spent in Pine Bluff as a student at the war college. Essays on the qualities of Integrity, Professional Competence, The Courage to Act, and Looking Forward; regulations on the care of dependants and children of his soldiers; sound management principles-Southern Command was nothing if not parsimonious-the multitude of identification badges. . .
Or the cheery efficiency of Cadet "Dots" Lambert, juggling student and instructor schedules with teenage energy. Valentine laid down circuitous paths so he could pass her desk and say hi between his early duties with Zulu Company, class, and meals. He'd never worked up the courage to so much as ask her to a barbecue-he'd been a scruffy young Wolf, a breed apart from the well-tailored guards and cadets who undoubtedly dazzled as they whirled the girl around the floor at military mixers that Valentine, with patched trousers, collarless shirts, and field boots always managed to miss.
He hoped Lambert hadn't been hung from the clock tower at the university. Or shipped off in a cattle car.
Which brought him back to his reason for the trip to Pine Bluff. The Miskatonic.
Valentine refreshed himself with a hotdog in heartroot at the diner, then wandered southward along the tracks to the old SEARK campus, now listed on the town map as the "HPL Agricultural and Technical Resource Center." The entire SEARK campus was now surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire on either side of the streets surrounding the campus, enclosing as it did the war college, cadet school, and military courthouse.
Valentine showed his ID at the gate, surrendered his weapons, and signed in as a visitor.
"Have a fine one," the gun-check said, handing him a locker key on a pocket lanyard.
He heard distant gunfire from the other side of the railroad tracks as he entered, the spaced-out popping of a practice range. The cadets probably had a range day-it was a Friday and it would be just as well to stink them up on a day when they'd be a smelly nuisance to friends and family rather than their instructors-as most of the students looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. They looked so young. Elaborate razor-cut sideburns reminiscent of a bull's horns looked to be the new standard with the boys, and the girls were showing tight ringlet curls dangling from their little envelopelike caps.
Valentine, now closer to thirty than twenty, with three long trips into the Kurian Zone behind him that aged a man more than years or mileage, could shrug and disparage them as children. Except that the children had each been more or less handpicked and was studying morning, noon, and night in an effort to win their first brass tracks. Children didn't make PT at four A.M. and fall asleep on a pile of books at midnight.
There wouldn't be any old instructors to visit-frontline officers took a year or two off to teach, sometimes, but only the cadet school had permanent faculty and Valentine had ventured onto that campus only to take qualification tests. He took the sidewalk bordering the inner fence straight to the Miskatonic.
Their new building looked a good three times the size of the old one. Perhaps Southern Command had finally decided to take the scholars seriously. The Miskatonic researched how the Kurians and other dangerous fauna they'd "brought over" interacted and thought, instead of simply cataloging and quantifying threats.