Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (66 page)

At the Grange, Ebnezer encountered the usual suspects, Josiah Green, Jeb Casey, and Eric Leander who always found the time to hang around the hall. Leander’s presence made some sense as he acted as chairman of Dunwich’s Historical Society but the other two were a question mark being farmers just as he was. How Josiah and Jeb found the time to linger at the hall at all times of the day he could never figure out. Be that as it may, all three were interested in the stone Ebnezer brought in.

“Sure looks like one of them arteefacts,” admitted Josiah after turning the stone over in his hands.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Leander, puffing on a pipe. “Doesn’t seem to match any of the other pieces we’ve got at the town museum.”

“So you think it’s genuine?” asked Ebnezer, eager that someone else take the object off his hands.

Leander shrugged and removed the pipe from his mouth. “Hard to tell. I’m no expert…you know, one of them professors who can tell how old something is by how deep the grooves are in the carving.”

“These here don’t look so deep to me,” observed Jeb.

“Just the same, that’s no indicator,” said Leander. “Plenty of cases where something looks like it was made yesterday and turns out to be hundreds of years old. This thing here, might have been in Ebnezer’s field for who knows how long, protected from the wind and rain by being buried under the ground. On the other hand, the style doesn’t look native to the Miskatonic Valley either…could be a hoax, someone’s idea of a joke.”

Ebnezer, knowing for sure that it was not a joke but reluctant to expose himself to the ridicule of his neighbors…everyone still remembered how the town treated the Whateley’s…persisted in defense of the stone.

“This here is no joke,” he insisted. “They way I found it…well, it’s no joke.”

“I don’t like it,” said Jeb. “Never did cotton to things like this. It’s not Christian, it is. I’d take it out and smash it with a sledge hammer and be done with it.”

“I got an idee,” said Josiah, ignoring Jeb’s fears. “Why don’t we take it over to old man Corwin. I bet he can tell if it’s genuine or not.”

“I don’t know, Josiah,” said Leander. “Corwin is a bit of a crank. Just because he dabbles in the weird history of the town…”

“The Historical Society might not take much stock in his opinions but you have to admit he’s been right a few times,” reminded Josiah. “Why even some of those perfessor types from Miskatonic come down sometimes and ask for his advice.”

“A bunch of New Age nuts,” snorted Leander. “Illustrative of the low state of public education these days…”

“You have any better ideas?”

Leander shrugged. “I’ll call Corwin and see if he’s at home.”

As most residents of Dunwich would admit, Mose Corwin was a strange duck. Living in a run down Victorian-era home off the town center’s main street, Corwin supported himself as a junk collector, emptying people’s garages, basements, and attics and selling what he found or could repair to antique shops that were as plentiful up Dean’s Corners and Townsend way as mushrooms after a good rain. But a taste for the strange and the out-of-the-way compelled him to hold on to pieces he considered valuable, though no one else did. Thus, while his yard was filled with the castoff junk usually found in back country flea markets, the inside of his home was crammed with books, glassware, and bits of wood and stone he claimed were remnants from Indian tribes that had formerly lived in the Miskatonic Valley, and of Dunwich’s own early settlers who were obsessed by the devil and other even less-wholesome demons. In fact, Corwin himself was descended from one of the town’s oldest families, one that had gained an evil reputation when raiding Indians during King Philips’ War had burned out practically every home in Dunwich Village but left the Corwins’ untouched. But that was a long time ago and no cause to be held against Corwin 350 years later, although it did not keep people from talking.

“Hmmm,” was all Corwin had to say upon first laying eyes on the stone.

Ebnezer had accompanied Leander on the short walk from the Grange to Corwin’s home and, after managing to navigate the piles of bedsteads, automobile parts, and cast off lawn furniture in the yard, they found the front door and yanked the bell pull. The device worked, as they could hear its tones echoing inside the house and presently, Corwin came shambling into the front hall. A curtain covering the big glass oval in the door moved slightly before the door itself opened to reveal a tall, thin figure in flannel shirt and faded chinos. A shock of neatly combed white hair was Corwin’s most distinctive feature, other than the largish family nose. Leander guessed that the man must have been well into his 80s but was not sure.

“Well, if it isn’t Eric Leander, Dunwich’s resident historian,” chuckled Corwin, using the term historian as though the word were surrounded in quotes. “What brings you out here? Thought you already knew it all.”

Leander cleared his throat. “Now, Mose, you know that isn’t so. I’ve always been open minded…”

“Sure you have,” said Corwin, winking at Ebnezer.

“Listen, Mose, can we bury the hatchet?” pleaded Leander. “It’s been over ten years since that town meeting…”

“Not a long time at all when you get to be my age,” replied Corwin. “I warned you all about the Devil’s Hopyard, but you wouldn’t listen. You went ahead and voted to demolish the thing.”

“It was the right thing to do after that incident with Wilbur Whateley,” said Leander. “When word of that got out, Sheriff Hilger ended up spending all his time up there shooing-off Miskatonic students, self-described witches, and who knows what else off that property. It was giving the town a bad name and turning it into another commercial disaster like Salem, only Halloween seemed to be happening all the time instead of just one month a year. The folks here didn’t want any part of it, and I don’t blame them.”

“And we had a run of bad luck as a result…”

“You can call it what you want, I call it coincidence.”

“Just the same, for an historian, you’ve shown an astonishing ability to ignore unpleasant facts.” Then, before Leander could reply, Corwin changed the subject. “So what brings you out this way today?”

In tacit agreement to drop their ongoing disagreements, Leander turned to Ebnezer, introducing the farmer, and indicating the stone he held in his hands.

“Ebnezer found this stone in his pasture yesterday and came to the Grange to find out if anyone knew anything about it. I couldn’t identify it. It doesn’t seem to be the work of the Wampanoags or of any stone carvers among the early settlers…”

“Let me see it,” interrupted Corwin.

Ebnezer handed the stone over to the old man, who hefted it to gauge its weight and then moved the stone about to examine it from different angles.

“Interesting,” was all Corwin said. “C’mon in. Close the door will you? And mind the knick-knacks.

The two men followed Corwin inside and down a stuffy corridor to the back of the house, maneuvering their way among book cases, old furniture, and boxes piled high with who knew what. In a back room, Corwin set the stone down on a heavy desk and rummaged around in the drawers until producing a magnifying glass. Ebnezer and Leander remained standing, as chairs in the room were piled high with debris.

With the glass close to his eye, Corwin took up the stone again and looked at it intently, following the faded grooves carved in its surface and turning it over in his hands. At last, he put it down and declared “It’s not new but it’s not that old either.”

“What do you mean?” asked Leander.

“I mean that it was likely carved some time over the last 100 years or so, no earlier.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because the carving is of a style that I’ve only seen on objects produced from the late nineteenth century,” said Corwin. “There was a new cult popular at the time, worshipers of an entity known as Nodens.”

Leander could barely keep the disappointment from showing on his face. It was what he was afraid of when Josiah had suggested they visit Corwin. The old man was well known for his interest in esoteric cults and paleo-religious beliefs that he believed had once centered in Dunwich. It was a local reputation that residents had been trying to live down for years. Sure, Dunwich had had its kooks and eccentrics, as had other towns in Massachusetts, but no one put down Harvard for its Quakers or Pepperell for its Millerites. In fact, those towns embraced such defunct movements, preserved their sites, and otherwise hosted historians from all over the country who came to learn about them.

At length, Leander sighed and asked “Nodens?”

“No need to hide the skepticism I know you feel, Eric,” smiled Corwin. “Do you want to know what I think, or not?”

“Let’s have it.”

“Well, whether you accept it or not, I know you’ve heard about the Great Old Ones and how their worship goes back into pre-history,” began Corwin. “You also know that the Wampanoag Indians in the Miskatonic Valley worshiped them along with their own home grown spirits…”

“At least so goes the story among popular writers of the New Age variety,” interjected Leander. “Dunwich still has its share of those coming through town from time to time.”

“Be that as it may, as the belief system goes, the Old Gods were imprisoned for some infraction in different places across the universe, and in our own solar system in particular,” recounted Corwin. “I won’t go into which being is which or where they’re all supposed to be imprisoned, only that some of them are said to be here on Earth and that their jailer is an Elder God named Nodens.”

“Nodens…”

“Right. Now, Nodens is said to reside coterminously in alternate eras of Earth’s dim future, which doesn’t seem to hinder his ability to keep an eye on the imprisoned Old Gods, maybe because his servitors called Nightgaunts actually do the legwork…”

“Nightgaunts?” asked Ebnezer, trying to keep up.

“Why yes…” Corwin stopped, considered a moment, and took down a book from one the shelves in the room. “Ah, here it is. ‘Nightgaunts are bat-like creatures, denizens of the Night Land, or Dreamland as it was called by the Wampanoags and other Indian tribes of the northeast. Their master, Nodens, also makes his home there where he resides in darkness and always night.’ There’s a rather crude drawing of one here.” Corwin held out the book for Ebnezer to see.

No sooner had the farmer laid eyes on the illustration than he jumped back as if struck by an electric cattle prod.

“What’s wrong? Not afraid of a picture are you?” But the arch of Corwin’s eyebrow indicated that he suspected there was more to Ebnezer’s reaction than the fellow was willing to say at the moment.

Setting his suspicion aside, Corwin flipped a few pages further on, and stopped at another illustration.

“Here’s something I was looking for,” he said, turning the book around so that Leander could see it better. “These designs here. Do they seem familiar to you?”

Leander looked more closely. “They look a little like the ones on the stone.”

“Not a little, exactly!”

“So what if they are alike? What does that mean?”

“It means that whoever carved this stone knew something of the worship of Nodens. According to this book, such stones were a central ingredient to rites invoking the god. Likely where one was found, there are going to be others as the ritual of calling up demanded a circle be warded with five such stones, each representing eras of time in which the creature is supposed to reside. The purpose of the ritual itself is unclear, but it may have something to do with pleas to be swept up into one of the future eras in company with Nodens.”

“It’s all very fanciful, but the bottom line is that the stone is not terribly old…”

“Not a candidate for pride of place in your museum, Eric,” chuckled Corwin, snapping the book shut. “Still, I’d advise you to seek out a competent archeologist at Miskatonic to come out and do a survey of this gentleman’s field before the cold weather hits. There’s a good chance that the other stones might be buried out there.

“That does seem to be the obvious course, that is if it’s all right with Mr. Fitch…”

Worried that more stones would continue to attract the awful things he saw the night before, Ebnezer quickly agreed to the suggestion.

“Well then, I’ll contact someone I know at the university,” said Leander. “Thanks, Mose. You’ve been of some help.”

“You see? That wasn’t so hard was it, Eric?”

Leander said nothing as he left the house, concerned only that Dunwich might once-again be the destination of choice for loons who saw the town as a center for so-called demonic activity. Town officials had tried for years to play down that stuff, and had largely succeeded since the Whateley family had died out, and no one wanted to see it all started up again.

“Prof. Lilly?” inquired the pretty young graduate student. “This came for you while you were out.”

The girl stepped into Prof. Walter Lilly’s office and set down a shoebox on his desk.

“Is this all?” he asked. “Just this box?”

“A Mr. Eric Leander dropped it off. He said he was curator of the Historical Society Museum in Dunwich, and that a local farmer dug up something while plowing his pasture a few days ago. I told him you were lecturing today and wouldn’t be available until late in the day. He asked if he could leave this box with you, there’s a typed explanation inside he said, along with contact information. I gave him a receipt for the package.”

“Dunwich, hmm?” Lilly was familiar with the town and its region of course, specializing in colonial era New England history as he did. Dunwich, he knew, had been rife with all kinds of wild claims in years past, claims more suitable to books like
Weird Massachusetts
than serious history. However, he had not achieved the reputation he had among his peers by ignoring opportunity when it presented itself. Interesting things had the habit of coming over the transom, so to speak, and this new arrival could be one of those.

“Thank you, Miss Farnum,” said Lilly as the girl retreated from the office.

He pulled the string that secured the shoebox and removed its cover. Inside, wrapped in the pages of a weekly Dunwich newspaper, was a stone, one that revealed, upon closer examination, to be covered in carvings of lines that undulated around the thing suggesting a face here and a building or a house there, Lilly could not be certain. There was nothing else remarkable about the rock, it being a common fieldstone.