The Taint and Other Novellas (10 page)

It was this description of the boy’s condition (which made it sound rather as if he were not quite right in his head) that determined me to inquire tactfully of his mother about him as soon as the opportunity presented itself. For the last two days, though, I had been studying the handling and maintenance of a vehicle that the Judge termed a “snow cat”: a fairly large, motorized sledge of very modern design that he had hired for Mrs. Bridgeman from a friend of his in the town. The vehicle seemed a fairly economical affair, capable in suitable conditions of carrying two adults and provisions over snow at a speed of up to twenty miles per hour. It was capable, too, of a somewhat slower speed over more normal terrain. With such a vehicle two people might easily travel 150 miles without refueling, in comparative comfort at that, and over country no automobile could possibly challenge.

The next morning saw us setting out aboard the snow cat. Though we planned on returning to Navissa every second or third day to refuel, we had sufficient supplies aboard for at least a week. First we headed for Stillwater.

Following a fall of snow during the night, the trail that led us to the ghost town was mainly buried beneath a white carpet almost a foot deep, but even so, it was plain that this barely fourth-class road (in places a mere track) was in extremely poor repair. I recalled the Judge telling me that very few people went to Stillwater now, following the strange affair of twenty years gone, and doubtless this accounted for the track’s derelict appearance in those places where the wind had blown its surface clean.

In Stillwater we found a constable of the Mounties just preparing to leave the place for camp at Fir Valley. He had gone to the ghost town specifically to check out the story of the two old prospectors. Introducing himself as Constable McCauley, the Mountie showed us round the town.

Originally the place had been built of stout timbers, with stores and houses and one very ramshackle “saloon” bordering a main street and with lesser huts and habitations set back behind the street facades. Now, however, the main street was grown with grass and weeds beneath the snow, and even the stoutest buildings were quickly falling into dilapidation. The shacks and lesser houses to the rear leaned like old men with the weight of years, and rotten doorposts with their paint long flaked away sagged on every hand, threatening at any moment to collapse and bring down the edifices framing them into the snow. Here and there one or two windows remained, but warped and twisting frames had long since claimed by far the greater number, so that now sharp shards of glass stood up in broken rows from sills like grinning teeth in blackly leering mouths. A stained, tattered curtain flapped moldering threads in the chill midday breeze. Even though the day was fairly bright, there was a definite gloominess about Stillwater, an aura of something
not quite right,
of strange menace, seeming to brood like a mantle of evil about the place.

Overall, and ignoring the fact that twenty years had passed since last it knew habitation, the town seemed to be falling far too quickly into decay, almost as if some elder magic had blighted the place in an effort to return it to its origins. Saplings already stood tall through the snow in the main street; grass and weeds proliferated on window ledges, along facades, and in the black gaps where boards had fallen from the lower stories of the crumbling buildings.

Mrs. Bridgeman seemed to notice none of this, only that her son was no longer in the town…if he had ever been there.

In the largest standing building, a tavern that seemed to have fared better in its battle against decay than the rest of the town, we brewed coffee and heated soups. There, too we found signs of recent, if temporary, habitation, for the floor in one of the rooms was fairly littered with freshly empty cans and bottles. This debris, plus the blackened ashes of a fire built on stones in one corner, stood as plain testimony that the building had been used by that group of unknown persons whose presence the prospectors had reported.

The Mountie mentioned how chill the place was, and at his remark it dawned on me that indeed the tavern seemed colder inside (where by all rights it ought to have been at least marginally warmer) than out in the raw air of the derelict streets. I was about to voice this thought when Mrs. Bridgeman, suddenly paler by far than usual, put down her coffee and stood up from where she sat upon a rickety chair.

She looked first at me—a queer, piercing glance—then at McCauley. “My son was here,” she abruptly said, as if she knew it quite definitely. “Kirby was here!”

The Mountie looked hard at her, then stared about the room in mystification. “There’s some sign that your boy was here, Mrs. Bridgeman?”

She had turned away and for a moment did not answer. She seemed to be listening intently for something far off. “Can’t you hear it?”

Constable McCauley looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He frowned. The room was very still. “Hear what, Mrs. Bridgeman? What is it?”

“Why, the wind!” she answered, her eyes clouded and distant. “The wind blowing way out between the worlds!”

• • •

Half an hour later we were ready to move again. The Mountie in the meantime had taken me to one side, to ask me if I didn’t think the search we planned was just a little bit hazardous considering Mrs. Bridgeman’s condition. Plainly he thought she was a bit touched. Perhaps she was! God knows, if what the Judge told me was true, the poor woman had enough reason. Being ignorant of her real problem at that time, however, I shrugged her strangeness off, mentioning her relationship with her son as being obsessive out of all proportion to reality. In truth, this was the impression I had already half formed—but it did not explain the
other
thing.

I made no mention of it to the Mountie. For one thing, it was none of his business; and for another, I hardly wanted him thinking that perhaps I, too, was “a bit touched.” It was simply this: in the derelict tavern—when Mrs. Bridgeman had asked, “Can’t you hear it?”—I had in fact heard something. At the exact moment of her inquiry, I had put my hand into a pocket of my parka for a pack of cigarettes. My hand had come into contact with that strange golden medallion, and as my fingers closed upon the chill shape, I had felt a thrill as of weird energies, an electric tingle that seemed to energize all my senses simultaneously. I felt the cold of the spaces between the stars; I smelled again, as in my dreams, the scents of unknown worlds; for the merest fraction of a second there opened before me reeling vistas, incredible eons flashing by in a twinkling; and I, too, heard a wind—a howling
sentience
from far beyond the universe we know!

It had been so momentary, this—vision?—that I thought little more of it. Doubtless my mind, as I touched the medallion, had conjured in connection with the thing parts of that dream in which it had featured so strongly. That was the only explanation….

I calculate that by 5:00 P.M. we must have been something like fifty miles directly north of Stillwater. It was there, in the lee of a low hill covered by tall conifers whose snow-laden branches bowed almost to the ground, that Mrs. Bridgeman called a halt for the night. Freezing, the snow already had a thin, crisp crust. I set up our two tiny bivouacs beneath a pine whose white branches formed in themselves something of a tent, and there I lit our stove and prepared a meal.

I had decided that it was time tactfully to approach Mrs. Bridgeman regarding those many facets of her story of which I was still ignorant; but then, as if there were not enough of mystery. I was witness to that which brought vividly back to me what the Judge had told me of the widow’s body temperature.

We had finished our meal, and I had prepared my bivouac for the night, spreading my sleeping bag and packing snow close to the lower outside walls of the tiny tent against freezing drafts. I offered to do the same for Mrs. Bridgeman, but she assured me that she could attend to that herself. For the moment she wanted “a breath of fresh air.” That turn of phrase in itself might have been enough to puzzle me (the air could hardly have been fresher!) but in addition she then cast off her parka, standing only in sweater and slacks, before stepping out from under the lowered branches into the subzero temperatures of falling night.

Heavily wrapped, still I shivered as I watched her from the sanctuary of our hideaway beneath the tree. For half an hour she simply wandered to and fro over the snow, occasionally glancing at the sky and then again into the darkening distance. Finally, as I suddenly realized that I was quickly drawing close to freezing while waiting for her to come back to camp, I went stiffly out to her with her parka. She must by now, I believed, be very close to suffering from exposure. Blaming myself that I had not recognized sooner how terrifically cold it was, I came up to her and threw her parka about her shoulders. Imagine my astonishment when she turned with a questioning look, completely at ease and plainly quite comfortable, immensely surprised at my concern!

She must have seen immediately how cold I was. Chiding me that I had not taken greater care to keep warm, she hurried back with me to the bivouacs beneath the tree. There she quickly boiled water and made coffee. She drank none of the hot, reviving fluid herself, however, and I was so astounded at her apparent immunity to the cold that I forgot all about those questions I had intended to ask. Since Mrs. Bridgeman now plainly intended to retire and since my own sleeping bag lay warm and inviting inside my bivouac, I simply finished off the coffee, turned down the stove and lay down for the night.

I was suddenly tired, and the last thing I saw before sleeping was a patch of sky through the branches, illumined by brightly twinkling stars. Perhaps that picture of the heavens, imprinted upon my mind’s eye as I fell asleep, colored my dreams. Certainly I dreamed of stars all night long, but they were uneasy dreams. The stars I saw were particularly sentient and paired like strange eyes; they glowed carmine against a moving black background of hideously suggestive design and immense proportions….

In the morning over breakfast—cheese and tomato sandwiches, followed by coffee and fruit juice—I briefly mentioned Mrs. Bridgeman’s apparent immunity to the cold, at which she looked at me with a very wry expression and said, “You may believe me, Mr. Lawton, when I tell you that I would give all of what little I have just once to feel the cold. It is this—
affliction
—of mine, an extremely rare condition that I contracted here in the north. And it has come out in—”

“In Kirby?” I hazarded the guess.

“Yes.” She looked at me again, shrewdly this time. “How much did Judge Andrews tell you?”

I could not conceal my embarrassment. “He—he told me of your husband’s death, and—”

“What did he say of my son?”

“Very little. He is not the kind of man to gossip idly, Mrs. Bridgeman, and—”

“And you suspect that there might be much to gossip about?” She was suddenly angry.

“I only know that I’m here, helping a woman look for her son, following her instincts and whims without question, as a favor to an old man. To be absolutely truthful, I suspect that there is a great mystery here; and I admit that I am addicted to mysteries, as curious as a cat. But my curiosity is without malice, you must believe that, and my only desire is to help you.”

She turned away from me for a moment or two, and I thought she was still angry, but when she turned back her face was much more composed.

“And did the Judge not warn you that there would be—danger?”

“Danger? Heavy snow is due, certainly—”

“No, the snow is nothing—I didn’t mean the snow. The Judge has Sam’s books; have you read them?”

“Yes, but what danger can there be in mythology and folklore?” In fact, I guessed what she was getting at, but better to hear it from her own lips, as she “believed” it and as her husband had “believed” it before her.

“What danger in myths and legends, you ask?” She smiled mirthlessly. “I asked the same question of Sam when he wanted to leave me in Navissa. God, that I’d listened to him! What danger in folklore? I can’t tell you directly—not without you thinking me a madwoman, as I’m sure the Judge must more than half believe—but I’ll tell you this: today we return to Navissa. On the way you can teach me how to drive the snow cat. I won’t take you to horrors you can’t conceive.”

I tried to argue the point but she would say no more. We decamped in silence, packed the bivouacs and camp utensils aboard the cat, and then, despite a last effort on my part to dissuade her, she demanded that we head directly for Navissa.

For half an hour, traveling fairly slowly, we followed the course of a frozen stream between brooding fir forests whose dark interiors were made darker still by the shrouding snow that covered the upper branches. It was as I turned the snow cat away from the stream, around a smaller copse of trees to head more nearly south, that I accidentally came upon that which should have gone far toward substantiating Mrs. Bridgeman’s hints of terrible dangers.

It was a large depression in the snow, to which I had to react quickly in order to avoid a spill, when we might easily have tumbled directly into it. I halted our machine, and we stepped down to take a closer look at this strangely sunken place in the snow.

Here the drift was deeper, perhaps three or four feet, but in the center of the depression it had been compacted almost to the earth beneath, as if some great weight had rested there. The size of this concavity must have been almost twenty feet long by seven or eight feet wide, and its shape was something like—

Abruptly the Judge’s words came back to me—what he had mentioned of the various manifestations of Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker—
and particularly of giant, webbed footprints in the snow!

But of course that was ridiculous. And yet…

I began to walk round the perimeter of the fantastic depression, only turning when I heard Mrs. Bridgeman cry out behind me. Paler than I had ever seen her before, now she leaned dizzily against the snow cat, her hand to her throat. I went quickly to her.