Entry 2: A Second Letter and a Strange Drawing

Here's the second letter from Thom. This is where it starts to get really odd.

In case you can't read it, here's the text: 

"Barnes,

I know this will sound unbelievable, but I needed to tell someone about it. And after what we saw in Van Meter and Mount Desert, I am hoping your mind will be more open than most to encounters with the supernatural. Or, perhaps hypernatural.

I had another nocturnal visitor. A guide, I think he was. That’s what he told me, in my mind. He called himself the Astarapomp.

 A school of Bubble Comets woke me up. He was waiting for me out on the lawn.  God, he was a strange thing! He was blurry, as if I were seeing him through murky water. As if he weren’t entirely in this reality. But I could make out many details. He was like a column made of interlocking blue plates or mosaic tiles. Five faces set radially at human head level, like the four faces of Brahma. His eyes were vertical and golden. With three pupils like a Tokay gecko. Five arms. He had no feet. Instead his body ended in five radial flattened tentacles or pads. And five flexible tentacles on top, like wizard’s caps. Or the petals of a fat flower. There was something moving in the top part. Cilia? Hairs? Tube feet? I couldn’t tell.

He pointed and something opened in the air. A door. Beyond, I saw huge rock columns like those hoodoos from Bryce Canyon. But the foliage was purple and red. And the sky was white with black stars. He led me inside, but I don’t remember what happened then. There’s a gap in my memory. I’m trying me best to recall. It’s like there’s a black mask, hiding what happened.

I’ll keep you updated.

 Thomas"

This one leads me to believe this is all an elaborate story between Professor Barnes and this Thomas guy. I wonder why they never published it? Or even mentioned it to anyone else. There's no record of anything like this in any of the biographies I found on Professor Barnes.

Regarding his description of the landscape beyond the "door", Bryce Canyon is a National Park in Utah. This is what it looks like:

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Also, here's the back of the letter: 

It's a pretty rough sketch, but I think this might be one of those "bubble-comets" Thomas described in his first letter. The handwriting is Professor Barnes' though. It says "Now I see them. Need to call Thom." Make of that what you will.

By the way, here's the first of a series of drawings included with this pack of letters. This is a depiction of the being Thomas refers to as the "Astarapomp"

front of drawing

back of drawing

The drawings on the back side are also intriguing. I think there's another letter that details this "Hub" more. I'm assuming these are creatures Thomas encountered when he went through the door. They're clearly echinoderms of some sort- he even refers to them as "brittlestars", "sea urchins", "edrioasters" and so on. I'm curious why he chose such familiar names when designing the aliens for his story. I mean, they seem way too close to Earthly echinoderms to be believable as beings from another planet. Unless they're supposed to be an example of extreme convergent evolution or something. But you'd think Professor Barnes would have pointed out the unlikeliness of that happening on two completely different worlds.  Who knows. Maybe the other letters will tell me more.

One thing I do find intriguing is the note about how the walking urchin's tube feet are it's "eyes". This is actually true in real sea urchins, but that fact wasn't known until a few years ago. Just an coincidence?

Entry 1: The First Envelope, a Letter and and Equation

Envelope front

Envelope back

Here's the first envelope from Professor Barnes' filing cabinet. Don't worry- that red stain isn't blood. I asked a friend whose an EMT and she said it definitely wouldn't look like that, especially not after all this time. I think it might just be safranin, a compound used for Gram-staining bacteria.

Not sure what to make of those little dark figures in the corner. Some doodle for a future painting, maybe?

The symbols on the back are intriguing. From my brief glance through the rest of the papers, it looks like they appear in a number of places.

Here's the first of the letters from this Thom guy:

In case you're having trouble reading it, here's a transcript:

"Barnes,

I saw another one last night. It drifted by my window as I was falling off to sleep. This one was much clearer than the one at the hotel in Pittsburgh. A jellyfish ghost, it was. Body made of gossamer bubbles. Trailing crinkled tentacles like a Portuguese man-of-war. There was a detached “propellar” (sic) of sorts-- maybe even a set of horns?-- that floated before the front of the creature. I cannot even imagine its purpose.  For lack of a better term, I’m calling it a Bubble Comet.

It passed so slow and quiet. I thought it was merely an hypnogogic hallucination. But when I rose to investigate, I saw it still floating beside the wall of the house.

I do not know what to make of these sightings. They are unlike any spirit I have seen before. And they are certainly not human-derived specters. They remind me a little of that apparition we saw on Mount Desert, but these are clearly different. I know you still do not want to believe in that, but I for my part know what we saw that day on the mountaintop. I don’t believe Susan’s explanation of “ball lightning” or “earthquake-generated pizoelectrical (sic) sparks”

 I cannot help feelingl (sic) like Hodgson’s protagonist at the beginning of The House. As if this vision is a portend of more to come. Is this my green house in the red amphitheater? I suppose I’ll have to wait and see.

On an unrelated note, I found that book on bacterial adhesion and movement you were looking for. I’ll send it soon, once I clear my library fines. They won’t let me borrow any more books until I’m paid up. Hopefully payment from this latest commission will come in soon. Though those Historical Society people always take forever. I didn’t get payment for The Fall of Fort Duquesne for three months.

I hope everything is going well with Ellen’s surgery. I’ll try to get out there soon. We should visit Watkins Glen again.

 Thomas"

Weird stuff. I wonder what he means by "that apparition we saw on Mount Desert"? I'm he's referring to Mount Desert in Acadia National Park up in Maine. Sounds like Professor Barnes was delving a little into the supernatural herself. Assuming this isn't all just a playful private story they're sharing.

Here's one more thing. A crumpled note with an equation on it. 

Equation front

Equation back

I asked around the physics department and discovered that the equation is a component of a theory called gravitational lensing. Einstein first came up with it, so I've read. The idea is that the gravity of a galaxy is so dense that it will actually bend light around it, so that an observer on Earth who is looking at said galaxy will see the light of other galaxies and stars behind it distorted by the gravity. This equation represents the angle of defraction of the light. Here's an article with a better explanation of the phenomenon.

The back of the equation has more of those weird symbols from the envelope. Make of that what you will.

I'll post some more stuff when I get a chance.

Introduction

I work in Collections in the Microbiology Department at Grenhaven University. Mostly cataloging. Which is a pretty big job since our records go back over 150 years and stuff has gotten a bit, well, jumbled is putting it mildly.

Dr. Meredith Barnes was a pretty big name in Microbiology. She had a diverse range, though the majority of her work focused on rotifers and ciliates. She was also an artist. Did a couple of Haeckel-style plates of her rotifers and other microbes. You’ve probably seen a few of them if you’ve ever been by the campus, especially the Beech Science Building. The main hall by the computer lab has a permanent gallery of her work.  She was pretty good friends with Walter Garstang, and I think she might have even illustrated a few of his poems from Larval Forms. I swear I’ve seen one of her drawings accompanying "Oikopleura, Jelly-Builder". Have to see if I can find it. Maybe someone at the MUGLi can help me (That’s the Merryweather Ulsten Grad Library for those of you who don’t go here).

Dr. Barnes passed away back in 2013, leaving behind a huge legacy at Grenhaven. And also several hundred boxes and filing cabinets of papers, slides, specimens, journals and other scientific delights. For the last few months, I’ve been digitizing her collection of microscopy photos for a project on Zooniverse. We were going to have workers enter the info on the photos into a searchable database. It’s a lot of work. There’s over four decades worth of slides- thousands of them. And even working a full day with two assistants, I can only do so much. 

Well, hopefully we’ll see that project soon. But anyway, as I was going through the stacks and stacks of photos, I found a couple of odd envelopes crammed at the bottom of one of the cabinets. They were beaten up pretty hard. Had a lot of water damage. A few were stuck together. I don’t think anyone had looked at them in years. Maybe over a decade. Most likely she tossed them in there and forgot about them.

 I figured they were just some old rough drafts for papers and was going to see if maybe the Museum Library would like them for the archives. But then I opened the first one. I don’t quite know what to make of these things. There are letters and drawings and even a few photographs. All from some guy named Thomas, or “Thom” as she wrote it on the envelopes. I can’t even find a last name anywhere.

I showed them to my supervisor. He figures they’re notes for some kind of weird fantasy she must have been working on. A series of paintings or something.  I know she was a fan of pulp fiction. There’s a whole box of Planet Stories and Weird Tales in a corner of her office (could be worth quite a bit if her estate will let us sell any).  The third floor stairwell in the Marine Collections has a poster illustration for The Moon Pool by A. Merrit that she designed in the style of Hannes Bok.

For a while the science department heads talked about donating them to the archives at the MUGLi. Maybe even setting up a special exhibit in the Hackmann Room. Then suddenly last week they changed their minds and said I should just throw it all away. There’s talk about how this “weird fantasy will damage Professor Barnes’ reputation” or something. I really don’t know what’s going on. But I am most definitely not going to let something this unique just disappear into the dumpster. So I’m posting it here.

There are a lot of envelopes to go through, and I’ve still got research to do and papers to write on top of the Zooniverse stuff. So posting might be sporadic. But I’ll try to get as much of this up as I can.

Hope you guys enjoy.

I'll start off with a couple of odd scraps I found in a little magazine envelope on top. A few of them have been partially burned. No idea why.

If I have some time, I might take these down to the Linguistics Departmetn and see if anyone can figure out what those symbols mean.

Front

Back

Front

Back

Front

Back

This one was blank on the back, so I only scanned one side.