New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (27 page)

“He was jammed into an unravaged corner of the cabin. It looked as if he’d been trying to dig clean through the packed-mud floor; there was a hole in the ground at his feet, and his fingers were all bloodied and torn. You could see that, because of the way he was laying; hunkered down on his haunches, facing out towards the room, for all the world like a Moslem when he prays to Mecca. His forehead was touching the earth, and his arms were stretched out before him. His hands were clenched in the dirt, still clutching two last handfuls of it even in death. There was no mistaking his attitude: he’d been grovelling before whatever had passed through that cabin. Begging it for mercy.

“And whatever it was had looked down upon him as he crouched there; listened to his screams, I guess. And had it granted him mercy? I don’t know. I can’t speak as to its motivations. What it
had
done, was sever both his hands, cut ’em clear off at the wrists. Remember before, when I said he appeared to have been digging in the dirt, trying to escape? Both his hands were still there, torn-up and bloody like I said. And he was kneeling down with his arms outstretched; you remember that. But in between the stumps at the end of his forearms and the tattered beginnings of his wrists, there was nothing but a foot of blood-soaked earth. Whatever had killed him had cut off both his hands, and watched him bleed out on the floor while he begged it for leniency. Now what sort of a creature does that sound like to you?

“Indians, was what some of the men thought; Indians touched with the wendigo madness. But how could any man, crazy or sane, have knocked an entire gable end out of the cabin that way? There was an Indian with us, one of the
portageurs
, a quiet, dark-complected fellow named Jake: he wouldn’t come within ten yards of the devastation, but he told me it wasn’t any of his kin. ‘Not yours either,’ he said after a pause, and I asked him what he meant by it.

“He took me aside and pointed in the snow. There was a mess of our prints, converging on the cabin so that the ground outside the blasted-out place was practically trampled bare. All around the snow was practically virgin still, and Jake showed me the only thing that sullied it. A single set of tracks, leading from the cabin and headed away north, down along the gulch. I say leading from the cabin, mostly because there wasn’t anything in the cabin could have made those prints, living or dead. If it wasn’t for that, then I don’t know that I could have told you what direction whatever made the prints was traveling in. They weren’t regular footmarks, you see, and they were all wrong in their shape, in their arrangement—in their number, even. And the weirdest thing about them? They stopped dead about fifty yards out. A step, then another, then nothing but the undisturbed snow, as far as the eye could see.

“Later on, once the shock of it had passed, I asked Jake what could have made those prints, and he told me an old legend of his people, about the time before men walked these northern wastes, when it was just gods and trolls and ogres.

“Back then, he said, there were beings come down from the sky, and they laid claim to the Earth for a long season of destruction. They were like pariahs between the stars, these beings: not even the Old Ones, the gods without a worshipper, could bear to have them near. They were cast out in the end, as well as the Old Ones could manage it: but the story goes that some of them escaped exile by burrowing down into the earth and waiting their time, till some cataclysm of the planet might uncover them. They could wait: nothing on Earth could kill them, you see. They couldn’t die in this dimension. They would only sleep, through geologic ages of the planet, till something disturbed them and they came to light once more.

“That was the legend: I got it out of Jake later that same day, when the party had split up and we were searching all the low land around the arroyo. The mood of the party was shocked and unforgiving: something had done this to our friends, and we were bound to avenge them the best we could. The trail of footprints had given some of the fellows pause for thought, but I think most of them just took the prints as simple evidence of something they could go after, some critter they could corner and shoot. They didn’t reflect too much on what could have made them. If they’d stopped and thought it through, I doubt whether any one of them would have been prepared to do what we ended up doing that night: lying in ambush and waiting for the culprit to come back to the cabin.

“The reasoning—so far as it went—was, if it’s an animal, it’ll come back where there’s food. If it’s a man, it’ll come back because that’s what murderers do: revisit the scene of the crime. Pretty shaky logic, I know, but the blood of the party was up. We were really just looking for trouble, and we damn near found it, too.

“As night fell we set up an ambuscade in the ruins of the cabin. We’d buried the bodies by then, of course, but inside the cabin still felt bad; stank, too, like something had lain dead in there all through the summer, and not just a few hours in the bitter icy cold. We had the stove going: we had to, else we’d have froze to death. We had guards at all the windows, and a barricade at the wrecked end of the cabin. It didn’t matter what direction trouble might be coming at us from, we had it covered. Or so we thought.

“God, we were so cold! The wind died down soon after dark, and that probably saved us all from the hypothermia. Still it was like a knife going through you, that chill, and you had to get up and move around every so often, just to prove to yourself you were still alive. We passed around a bottle of whiskey we found among the untouched provisions, and waited.

“All across the wide northern sky there was a glow, cold and mysterious, as far removed as you could imagine from the world of men and their paltry little hopes and fears. The aurora was so vivid that night, you might have read a newspaper by it. All the better to see whatever’s coming, we thought; at least it can’t creep up on us and take us unawares, not in this light.

“Somewhere in the very pit of the night, just when the body’s at its weariest and wants only to drop down and sleep, an uncanny sort of stillness fell across the snowed-up river bed. What was left of the wind dropped entirely, and the only sound beneath the frozen far-off stars seemed to come from the creaking of the stove round which we sat, the cracking and spitting of the logs that burned inside it. A few of us looked round at each other; all of us felt it now, the heightened expectation, the heightened fear. Without words, as quietly as we could, we moved away from the stove and took up our places at the barricade.

“I remember—so clearly!—how it felt, crouching behind that mess of planks and packing-cases, waiting to see what might show its head above the snow-banks. A couple of times I thought I saw something, away out beyond the bounds of night vision. Even under the greenish radiance of the aurora I couldn’t be sure:
was
that something moving?
Could
it be? One time Joe McRudd discharged his rifle, and scared us all to hell. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, when we’d all regained our senses. He cleared his throat. ‘Thought I saw sump’n creepin’ round out there.’

“ ‘Save your ammo,’ grunted Sam Tibbets, not even bothering to look at poor Joe. ‘Keep your nerve.’ That was all. Directly after that it was upon us.

“It came from the only direction we hadn’t reckoned on: overhead. There was a thump on the roof of the cabin, and then a splintering as the boards were wrenched off directly above our heads. It caused a general confusion: everyone jumped and panicked, and no one really knew what was happening. Joe McRudd’s rifle went off again; some of the other fellows shot as well, I don’t know what at. Before I could react, Sam Tibbets was snatched up from alongside me—something had him fast around the head and was dragging him off of his feet, up towards the hole in the roof.

“I grabbed him around the waist, but it was no use: I felt my own feet lifting clear of the floor as Sam was hoisted ever upward. He was trying to call out, but whatever had snatched him was laying tight hold around the whole of his head and neck, and all I could hear was a muffled roar of anger and pain—fear, too, I guess. It was as if he was being lynched, hung off a high bough and left to swing there while he throttled. I called to the rest of them to help, to hang on to us: a couple of them laid ahold of my legs and heaved, and for a moment we thought we had him. Then there came an awful sound, like something out of a butcher’s shop, and suddenly we were all sprawled on the floor of the cabin, with Sam Tibbets’ headless body lying dead weight on top of us.

“I don’t remember exactly how the next few seconds panned out. All I remember was being soaked with Sam’s blood: the heat of it, the force with which it gushed from his truncated neck, the bitter metallic stink. The fellows told me afterwards that I was screaming like a banshee on my hands and knees, but I know I wasn’t the only one. Jake the Indian brought me out of it: he dragged me away from the shambles in the middle of the room and slapped me a couple times till I quit bawling. As if coming round from a dream I goggled at him slack-mouthed; then I came to myself in a dreadful sort of recollection. Before he could stop me, I’d grabbed the big hunting-knife from its sheath at his waist and pushed him out of the way.

“By climbing up on top of the hot stove, I just about managed to reach the hole in the roof. I had Jake’s knife between my teeth like the last of the Mohicans; I was covered all over in Sam Tibbets’ blood, and I was filled with the urge to vengeance, nothing else. I hoisted myself up so my head and shoulders were through the hole. With my elbows planted on the snow-covered shingles, I looked around.

“It was crouched by the farther end of the roof like a big old sack of guts, mumbling on something. Sam’s head. I made some sort of a noise, and it looked up: I mean, the thick squabby part on top of it suddenly grew long like an elephant’s trunk, and one furious red eye glared out at me from its tip. The noise it made: good God, I never heard the like. It damn near deafened me, even out in the open; it went ringing through my head like the last trump.

“Some part of its belly opened itself up, and Sam Tibbets’ head was gone with a terrible sucking crunch. Then all those tentacles that fringed the trunk suddenly came to life, writhing and flailing like a stinging jellyfish. One of them caught in my clothing—I slashed out at it with Jake’s knife, but I might as well have tried to cut a steel hawser. It had me fast; it was like being caught in a death-hold. The thing let rip a revolting sort of belch, and started to haul me in, and I had just enough time to feel the entire sum of my courage vanish in a wink as fear, total and absolute, rushed in to fill up every inch of my being. It’s a hell of a thing, to lose all self-respect that way: to know that the last thing you’ll feel before death is nothing but abject, craven panic. God, let me die like a man, I prayed, as the thing dragged me up out of the hole towards its gulping maw—that glaring gorgon’s eye—

“It was Jake down below contrived to save my life. He grabbed me by the ankles and swung on them like a church bell, and there came a sharp rip as my coat came to pieces at the seams. It didn’t have proper hold of me, only by the fabric, you see: that was what saved me, that and the Chinee tailor back in San Francisco who’d scrimped on the thread when he put that old pea-coat together. I went sliding back through the hole on the roof, while the thing struggled to regain its balance on the icy shingles. It let out another of those blood-freezing hollers, and then I was laying on top of Jake, in amidst all of the blood and the panic down below.

“All of the breath had gotten knocked out of me by the fall, and the same for Jake, who was underneath me, remember. The two of us were pretty much hors de combat for a while; plus, I dare say I wouldn’t have been much use even with breath in my lungs, not after the jolt I’d took up on the roof. I was aware that the rest of the fellows were running round like crazy, firing into the rafters and yelling fit to raise Cain. For myself, right then, I figured old Harvey Tibbets’d had the best idea, digging himself a hole—or trying to. I knew if it wanted to come down and try conclusions, we none of us stood a chance in hell, guns or no guns. I thought it was all up with us still, and to this day I don’t know why it wasn’t.

“Because after a while, in amongst all the raving and the letting-off of guns and the war-whoops and hollers and what have you, it gradually dawned on the fellows that there was no movement from up on the roof. Nothing coming through the hole at us, no fresh attack; no sound of creaking timbers, even—though I doubt we’d have heard it, we were making so much noise ourselves. In the end a couple of men ran outside to look up on the roof: nothing there, they yelled, and I thought to myself, no, of course not. It won’t show itself so easy. I figured it had only gone to earth for a while, that it would pick us off one by one when we weren’t expecting it.

“Then one of them happened to look upwards—I mean straight up, towards the sky. What he saw up there made him let out such a shout, it brought us all out of that broke-up shambles of a cabin. We joined him out in the snow: I remember us all standing there, staring up into the heavens as if God in all his glory was coming down and the final judgement was upon us.

“Silhouetted against the wraithlike flux of the aurora, the thing was ascending into the night sky. It had wings, but they didn’t seem to be lifting it, or even bearing its weight; it was as if it simply rose through the air the way a jellyfish rises through the water. That sound—that terrible piercing howl—echoed all across the wide expanse of the landscape, from mountain to lake shore, through all the sleeping trees, and I swear every beast that heard it must have trembled in its lair; must have whined and cowered and crept to the back of its cave and prayed to whatever rough gods had made it,
Lord, let this danger pass
.

“Up it rose, till we could hardly make it out against the green-wreathed stars. Then, there came one last throb of phosphorescence, bright as day—and it was as if a circuit burned out, somewhere in the sky. The aurora vanished, simple as that; and in the brief interval while our eyes adjusted to the paler starlight, I believe we all screamed, like children pitched headlong into the dark.