Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (12 page)

Could such things as his grandfather claimed be true? Had there been a cult of snake worshippers in the Swift Valley before it was flooded? Was Jonathan Firth, easily the most important man in the area with powerful connections to the political establishment of the time, a member? And if the cult really had existed, what had become of them?

Just then there was a sound behind him and when he turned, Schulter discovered the young librarian.

“Couldn’t help noticing some of the stuff you were looking through, sir,” he said a bit apologetically. “So I wondered if you’d be interested in looking at a book we have that concentrates on, well, weird cults?”

“Sure, if you think it’ll help,” Schulter replied, intrigued.

“It’s in special collections so I can’t bring it out here,” said the young man, his body language indicating that Schulter should follow him.

He did.

The special collection was located in a separate room off the reference section that the librarian had to unlock with a key. Inside, the walls were lined by glass-enclosed bookshelves with the exception of a large, old fashioned safe-door punctuated with a combination lock mechanism. The young man spun the dial back and forth while glancing at a piece of paper that obviously held the combination. When he finally pulled the door open, a definite scent of old paper met Schulter’s nostrils. A moment later, the young man emerged with a large, hardcover volume that he placed carefully on an oaken table situated in the center of the room.

“This is a book called
Nameless Cults
, it’s an English edition of a German original that was printed in 1909,” the librarian explained. “The German title is unpronounceable…”

“The
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
,” pronounced Schulter haltingly.

“That’s it.”

“No index I see.”

“Well, these old books you know…”

Schulter turned the cover carefully. “Written by Friedrich Wilhelm von Juntz.”

The young man shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll just leave you here. The library closes in about an hour.”

“That should be enough time for me.”

Schulter began turning the pages of the book, which was illustrated here and there by garish color paintings. He wasn’t familiar with anything inside, it was all pretty outlandish stuff until he found a reference to a serpent cult. Stopping, he started reading what sounded to him like pure fantasy: once upon a time, tens of thousands of years ago, when the continents of earth were in radically different positions, a race of serpent men had once ruled the world. For thousands of years, men were their slaves until they rose up and conquered their reptilian masters. The serpent men were slaughtered and the few remaining retreated into swamps and jungles trying from to time to time to regain their lost power. But all their attempts failed and in the process, they became even fewer until even the memory of their existence faded from the mind of men.

Schulter leaned back in his chair, his mind reluctantly putting together the disparate, and unbelievable, pieces to the puzzle. Was there something to his grandfather’s assertion that, under the guise of supplying water to the eastern cities, the reservoir had been located on the Swift River by strategically placed members of a cult of snake worshippers with the specific intention of building a tunnel so that their “god” could finally escape his imprisonment far from the sea? The whole notion seemed patently preposterous until Schulter remembered something: the librarian in Firthford had said that Jonathan Firth, the man accused by his grandfather of being a member of the snake cult, suffered from an ailment whose symptoms included excessive perspiration and an unpleasant odor!

And what of the “sign of the snake?” His grandfather had said that those belonging to the cult used it when signing their names…and it was an undeniable fact that Firth used such a symbol wherever his signature appeared, he’d seen that himself!

Like his grandfather had said, whether or not there had been anything to the snake god business, the cult members believed there was and that would have been all that mattered. The fact remained: in the end, the reservoir and its 100 mile-long tunnel were built and the valley flooded.

By the time Schulter had left the Miskatonic library, he had realized that nothing had ever come of his grandfather’s accusations. Armitage had apparently done nothing (or at least there hadn’t been any record of his doing anything), the residents were removed from their homes, the dam built and the valley flooded. That seemed to put an end to his researches too until a few months later, when the whole fantastic story was suddenly brought back in all its force by the news only a few days before that because of the ongoing drought, the Quabbin Reservoir was at its lowest ebb since it had been filled in the 1940s.

Driven by inexplicable sympathy for his long-dead grandfather and a conviction that the snake cult he railed against had really existed, Schulter called Quabbin officials to find out if any of the old homesteads had been exposed as a result of the water level’s going down and was delighted to learn the area of the old Schulter farmstead was one of them.

Schulter had packed up some camping gear and driven down to the Reservoir that day. He hadn’t been sure if the Reservoir Authority would permit anyone to explore on the exposed floor of the Quabbin, but he intended to do just that.

Bringing a hand up to shade his eyes against the glare of the setting sun, Schulter looked up the valley to where the dam blocked the narrows. He had no idea what he had expected to find here, but he felt he needed to come if the strange story he’d learned was ever going to have closure for him.

He remembered how shocked he’d been when he arrived at his campsite that afternoon. Where he had expected to find a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside, the steep, pine covered hills as they sloped down into blue water for instance, he instead found a body of water that had indeed receded alarmingly as a result of the drought. So much so that great swaths of mud lay revealed and drying in the sun. Here and there, he even saw the foundations of old buildings bulldozed when the land was cleared for the reservoir.

Standing at the edge of the forest where once the waters of the Quabbin had lapped, he could see the valley slope away into the distance where here and there, small ponds of water gleamed in the light of the setting sun. Around them, for great stretches, what had once been the bottom of the reservoir was now a plain of dried and hardened mud punctuated by the carcasses of fallen trees and the detritus of decades of standing water. Around the steep edges of the reservoir’s high-water mark, scattered branches and trees now covered in a layer of dun colored dirt, had over the years, fallen from the shore into the area that had been submerged, but farther inward, there was surprisingly little in the way of obstruction. In the gathering gloom, Schulter could just make out the dim forms of the buildings that made up the little town of Greenwich, still mostly submerged in standing water with the upper half of a church steeple still clearly visible. In the morning, he’d use the town’s location as a map reference to begin looking for his grandfather’s farm.

With the sun down, darkness was rapidly falling and Schulter turned away from the little town and busied himself with building a fire. The mosquitoes were already hovering around and he still had to fix something to eat before crawling into the tent for the night.

Morning dawned bright but cloudy and Schulter was up when the shadows of the surrounding trees still stretched far out onto the emptied reservoir. After boiling water on the camp stove for coffee and oatmeal, he broke out a Xerox of an old map of the Swift Valley from before it was flooded, and located Greenwich. He circled the spot where his grandfather’s farm was and highlighted the roads leading to it from Greenwich. According to his calculations, the farm ought to lay upslope, away from Greenwich and the bottom of the valley. Off in the distance, surrounded by a plain of grey mud, he could make out what could be isolated buildings, exposed to the sun from the receding waters. Shrugging into a small backpack, he started along the edge of the woods where the water of the reservoir used to lap when it was at full tide.

A few hours later, he not only had verified that the dried mud of the reservoir bottom was hard enough to walk upon safely, but that there were indeed buildings still standing even after decades of being submerged in the cold waters of the Quabbin. Around him were the suggestion of stumps from the thousands of trees cut down when the land was cleared for the coming waters and even traces of roadway that helped him find his way across the newly exposed wilderness. At last, he arrived in the vicinity where his grandfather’s farmhouse should have been located. Behind him, the slope of what once must have been rolling pastures curved downward to where the remaining portion of the reservoir glistened in the noonday light. Off in the misty distance, Schulter could just make out the outline of the dam at the Belchertown gap.

Finding the trace of an old path leading from Greenwich, he managed to follow it for a mile or two before coming upon a group of grey buildings, like big lumps of mud a few hundred yards off the road. With growing excitement, he knew he had reached the end of his search as it surely must have been his grandfather’s farmstead. He removed a copy of an old photograph of the farm he’d found at the Firthford historical society and compared it with the structures before him. They seemed to match. Approaching the small group of buildings, he saw that what had once been the barn had partially collapsed and other outbuildings were mostly splinters. But the farmhouse itself was seemingly intact and with some wariness for its structural integrity, he pushed against the kitchen door. It didn’t budge. Carefully looking out for the wall over his head, he threw his shoulder against the dusty panels and had the satisfaction not only of having the old door scrape inward enough to allow him entrance, but not having the rest of the house come crashing down on his head.

Indoors it was dark, as the waning daylight had difficulty penetrating the layers of mud that oozed in frozen cascades across the gaping openings that had once served as windows. Slowly, Schulter stepped deeper inside. Most items of furniture seemed to have been removed, with what was left merely unrecognizable lumps beneath decades of accumulated mud and dried aquatic vegetable growth. He was standing in the entranceway from the kitchen to the dining room where he could see into the parlor area towards the front of the house when he was startled by a loud creak from the walls around him. His heart in his throat, he decided further exploration was not necessary and hurried back outside. There, looking up at the old building, he wondered that it hadn’t collapsed as soon as the supporting water pressure had left it. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem as if there was anything left of the old homestead that could satisfy any of his vague desires to exonerate his grandfather’s belief that there had been some kind of conspiracy relating to the creation of the Quabbin. Again, there was the dangerous sound of creaking from the house and it being late afternoon by that point, Schulter decided that he had learned all he could from visiting the family homestead.

Turning from the old house, Schulter retraced his footprints back to the road and began the long way back to his campsite. The sky had by then been filled with banks of dark clouds that now echoed dully with the sound of thunder. Looking up, he noticed for the first time that the day had become darkly overcast and that there was the scent of rain in the air. Quickening his pace, he hoped he could outrun whatever rain was on the way, but an hour later, as a premature darkness descended over the gloomy, naked landscape, he felt the first, heavy drops begin to fall around him.
Great
, he thought,
now the dry spell breaks!
As the rainfall picked up and he realized that he wasn’t going to make the shelter of his car before the downpour began, he looked around for some kind of cover and found it in another lonely farm building that squatted atop a low rise. Running now, he passed through the dilapidated remains of a rail fence just as the first streak of lightning flashed across the sky. He reached the house and the remains of its old porch just as the rain really began to come down and, pausing there to look back, he saw another bolt of lightning illume the surrounding area in a pale, intermittent glow. It only lasted for a second or two, but in that time, Schulter was able to take in the eerie landscape around him, the empty waste of the mud-covered countryside, the distant line of pine trees where the forest stopped suddenly at the former shore, the dull, dun colored buildings that dotted the exposed valley and…what was that? Something over the gaping opening of the barn door had caught his eye. Impatiently, he waited for the next flash of lightning and when it came, he saw what it was that had attracted his attention: a plaque fixed beneath the peak of the barn roof, a plaque that sported a circle pierced by the familiar squiggle of a snake that he could still make out beneath the grime.