The Taint and Other Novellas (11 page)

“Mrs. Bridgeman?”

“He—
He was here!”
she spoke in a horrified whisper.

“Your son?”

“No, not Kirby—
Him!”
She pointed, staring wide-eyed at the compacted snow of the depression. “Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker—that is His sign. And that means that I may already be too late!”

“Mrs. Bridgeman,” I made a halfhearted attempt to reason with her, “plainly this depression marks the spot where a number of animals rested during the night. The snow must have drifted about them, leaving this peculiar shape.”

“There was no snow last night, Mr. Lawton,” she answered, more composed now, “but in any case your explanation is quite impossible. Why, if there had been a number of animals here, surely they would have left tracks in the snow when they moved. Look about you. There are no tracks here! No, this is the footprint of the fiend. The horror was here—and somewhere, at this very moment, my son is trying to search Him out, helped on by those poor devils that worship Him!”

I saw my chance then to avoid an early return to Navissa. If we went back now, I might never learn the whole story, and I would never be able to face the Judge, having let him down. “Mrs. Bridgeman, it’s plain that if we go south now we’re only wasting time. I for one am willing to face whatever danger there may be, though I still can see no such danger. However, if some peril does face Kirby, then we won’t be helping him any by returning to Navissa. It would help, though, if I knew the background story. Some of it I know already, but there must be a lot you can tell me. Now listen, we have enough fuel for about 120 miles more. This is my proposition: that we carry on looking for your son to the north. If we have not found him by the time our fuel reserves are halved, then we head back in a direct line for Navissa. Furthermore, I swear here and now that I’ll never divulge anything you may tell me or anything I may see while you live. Now, then—we’re wasting time. What do you say?”

She hesitated, turning my proposition over in her mind, and as she did so, I saw to the north the spreading of a cloud sheet across the sky and sensed that peculiar change of atmosphere that ever precedes bad weather. Again I prompted her: “The sky is growing more sullen all the time. We’re in for plenty of snow—probably tonight. We really can’t afford to waste time if we want to find Kirby before the worst of the weather sets in. Soon the glass will begin to fall, and—”

“The cold won’t bother Kirby, Mr. Lawton—but you’re right, there’s no time to waste. From now on our breaks must be shorter, and we must try to travel faster. Later today I’ll tell you what I can of…of everything. Believe what you will, it makes little difference, but for the last time I warn you—if we find Kirby, then in all probability we shall also find the utmost horror!”

IV

With regard to the weather, I was right. Having turned again to the north, skirting dense fir forests and crossing frozen streams and low hills, by 10:30 A.M. we were driving through fairly heavy snow. The glass was far down, though mercifully there was little wind. All this time—despite a certainty in my heart that there would be none—nevertheless, I found myself watching out for more of those strange and inexplicable hollows in the snow.

A dense copse where the upper branches interlaced, forming a dark umbrella to hold up a roof of snow, served us for a midday camp. There, while we prepared a hot meal and as we ate, Mrs. Bridgeman began to tell me about her son, about his remarkable childhood and his strange leanings as he grew into a man. Her first revelation, however, was the most fantastic, and plainly the Judge had been quite right to suspect that the events of twenty years gone had turned her mind, at least as far as her son was concerned.

“Kirby,” she started without preamble, “is not Sam’s son. I love Kirby, naturally, but he is in no wise a child of love. He was born of the winds. No, don’t interrupt me, I want no rationalizations.

“Can you understand me, Mr. Lawton? I suppose not. Indeed, at first I, too, thought that I was mad, that the whole thing had been a nightmare. I thought so right until the time—until Kirby was born. Then, as he grew up from a baby, I became less sure. Now I know that I was never mad. It was no nightmare that came to me here in the snow but a monstrous fact! And why not? Are not the oldest religions and legends known to man full of stories of gods lusting after the daughters of men? There
were
giants in the olden times, Mr. Lawton. There still are.

“Do you recall the Wendy-Smith expedition of ’33? What do you suppose he found, that poor man, in the fastnesses of Africa? What prompted him to say these words, which I know by heart: ‘There are fabulous legends of star-born creatures who inhabited this Earth many millions of years before Man appeared and who were still here, in certain black places, when he eventually evolved. They are, I am sure, to an extent here even now.’

“Wendy-Smith was sure, and so am I. In 1913 two monsters were born in Dunwich to a degenerate half-wit of a woman. They are both dead now, but there are still whispers in Dunwich of the affair, and of the father who is hinted to have been other than human. Oh, there are many examples of survivals from olden times, of beings and forces that have reached godlike proportions in the minds of men, and who is to deny that at least some of them could be real?

“And where Ithaqua is concerned—why!—there are elementals of the air mentioned in every mythology known to man. Rightly so, for even today, and other than this Ithaqua of the Snows, there are strange winds that blow madness and horror into the minds of men. I mean winds like the
Foehn,
the south wind of Alpine valleys. And what of the piping winds of subterranean caverns, like that of the Calabrian Caves, which has been known to leave stout cavers white-haired, babbling wrecks? What do we understand of such forces?

“Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity. All things may happen in infinity, and who knows what might come out of it? What do we know of
the facts
of anything, in our little corner of a never-ending universe, in this transient revolution in the space-time continuum? Seeping down from the stars at the beginning of time there were giants—beings who walked or flew across the spaces between the worlds, inhabiting and using entire systems at their will—and some of them still remain. What would the race of man be to creatures such as these? I’ll tell you—we are the plankton of the seas of space and time!

“But there, I’m going on a bit, away from the point. The facts are these: that before I came to Navissa with Sam, he had already been told that he was sterile, and that after I left—after that horror had killed my husband—well, then I was pregnant.

“Of course, at first I believed that the doctors were wrong, that Sam had not been sterile at all, and this seemed to be borne out when my baby was born just within eight months of Sam’s death. Obviously, in the normal scale of reckoning, Kirby was conceived before we came to Navissa. And yet it was a difficult pregnancy, and as a newborn baby he was a weedy, strange little thing—frail and dreamy and far too quiet—so that even without knowing much of children I nevertheless found myself thinking of his birth as having been…premature!

“His feet were large even for a boy, and his toes were webbed with a pink stretching of skin that thickened and lengthened as he grew. Understand, please, that my boy was in no way a freak—not visibly. Many people have this webbing between their toes; some have it between their fingers too. In all other respects he seemed to be completely normal. Well, perhaps not completely…

“Long before he could walk, he was talking—baby talk, you know—but not to me. Always it was when he was alone in his cot, and always when there was a wind. He could hear the wind, and he used to talk to it. But that was nothing really remarkable; grown children often talk to invisible playmates, people and creatures that only they can see; except that I used to listen to Kirby, and sometimes—

“Sometimes I could swear that the winds talked back to him!

“You may laugh if you wish, Mr. Lawton, and I don’t suppose I could blame you, but there always seemed to be a wind about our home, when everywhere else the air was still….

“As Kirby grew older this didn’t seem to happen so frequently, or perhaps I simply grew used to it, I really don’t know. But when he should have been starting school, well, that was out of the question. He was such a dreamer, in no way slow or backward, you understand, but he constantly lived in a kind of dreamworld. And always—though he seemed later to have given up his strange conversations with drafts and breezes—he had this fascination with the wind.

“One summer night when he was seven, a wind came up that threatened to blow the very house down. It came from the sea, a north wind off the Gulf of Mexico—or perhaps it came from farther away than that, who can say? At any rate, I was frightened, as were most of the families in the area where we lived. Such was the fury of that demon wind, and it reminded me so of…of another wind I had known. Kirby sensed my fear. It was the strangest thing, but he threw open a window and he shouted. He shouted right into the teeth of that howling, banshee storm. Can you imagine that? A small child, teeth bared and hair streaming, shouting at a wind that might have lifted him right off the face of the Earth!

“And yet in another minute the worst of the storm was over, leaving Kirby scolding and snapping at the smaller gusts of air that yet remained, until the night was as still as any other summer night….

“At ten he became interested in model airplanes, and one of his private tutors helped him and encouraged him to design and build his own. You see, he was far ahead of other children his own age. One of his models created a lot of excitement when it was shown at an exhibition of flying models at a local club. It had a very strange shape; its underside was all rippled and warped. It worked on a gliding principle of my son’s own invention, having no motor but relying upon what Kirby called his ‘rippled-air principle.’ I remember he took it to the gliding club that day, and that the other members—children and adults alike—laughed at his model and said it couldn’t possibly fly. Kirby flew it for them for an hour, and they all marveled while it seemingly defied gravity in a fantastic series of flights. Then, because they had laughed at him, he smashed the model down to its balsa wood and tissue paper components to strew them like confetti at the feet of the spectators. That was his pride working, even as a child. I wasn’t there myself, but I’m told that a designer from one of the big model companies cried when Kirby destroyed his glider….

“He loved kites, too—he always had a kite. He would sit for hours and simply watch his kite standing on the air at the end of its string.

“When he was thirteen he wanted binoculars so that he could study the birds in flight. Hawks were of particular interest to him—the way they hover, motionless except for the rapid beating of their wings. They, too, seem almost to walk on the wind.

“Then came the day when a more serious and worrying aspect of Kirby’s fascination with the air and flight came to light. For a long time I had been worried about him, about his constant restlessness and moodiness and his ominous obsession.

“We were visiting Chichén Itzá, a trip I hoped would take Kirby’s mind off other things. In fact the trip had a twofold purpose; the other was that I had been to Chichén Itzá before with Sam, and this was my way of remembering how it had been. Every now and then I would visit a place where we had been happy before…before his death.

“There were, however, a number of things I had not taken into account. There is often a wind playing among those ancient ruins, and the ruins themselves—with their aura of antiquity, their strange glyphs, their history of bloody worship and nighted gods—can be…disturbing.

“I had forgotten, too, that the Mayas had their own god of the air; Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and I suspect that this was almost my undoing.

“Kirby had been quiet and moody during the outward trip, and he stayed that way even after freshening up and while we began to explore the ancient buildings and temples. It was while I was admiring other ruins that Kirby climbed the high, hideously adorned Temple of the Warriors, with its facade of plumed serpents, their mouths fanged and tails rampant.

“He was seen to fall—or jump—by at least two dozen people, mainly Mexicans, but later they all told the same story: how the wind had seemed almost to buoy him up; how he had seemed to fall in slow motion; how he had uttered an eerie cry before stepping into space, like a call to strange gods for assistance. And after that terrible fall, onto ancient stone flags and from such a great height?…

“It was a miracle, people said, that Kirby was unhurt.

“Well, eventually I was able to convince the authorities at the site that Kirby must have fallen, and I was able to get him away before he came out of his faint. Oh, yes, he had fainted. A fall like that, and the only result a swoon!

“But though I had explained away the incident as best I could, I don’t suppose I could ever have explained the look on Kirby’s face as I carried him away—that smile of triumph or strange satisfaction.

“Now all this happened not long after his fourteenth birthday, at a time when here in the north the five-year cycle of so-called ‘superstitious belief and mass hysteria’ was once more at its height, just as it is now. So far as I was concerned, there was an undeniable connection.

“Since then—and I blame myself that I’ve only recently discovered this—Kirby has been a secret saver, hoarding away whatever money he could lay his hands on toward some future purpose or ambition; and now of course I know that this was his journey north. All his life, you see, he had followed the trail of his destiny, and I don’t suppose that there was anything I could have done to change it.

“A short time ago something happened to clinch it, something that drew Kirby north like a magnet. Now—I don’t know what the end will be,
but I must see it
—I must find out, one way or the other, once and for all….”