The Taint and Other Novellas (12 page)

V

By 1:30 P.M. we were once again mobile, our vehicle driving through occasional flurries of snow, fortunately with a light tail wind to boost us on our way. And it was not long before we came upon signs that warned of the presence of others there in that white waste, fresh snowshoe tracks that crossed our path at a tangent and moved in the direction of low hills. We followed these tracks—apparently belonging to a group of at least three persons—until they converged with others atop one of the low bald hills. Here I halted the snow cat and dismounted, peering out at the wilderness around and discovering that from here, between flurries of snow, I could roughly make out the site of our last camp. It dawned on me at once that this would have been a wonderful vantage point from which to keep us under observation.

Then Mrs. Bridgeman tugged at the sleeve of my parka, pointing away to the north where finally I made out a group of black dots against the pure white background straggling toward a distant pine forest.

“We must follow them,” she declared. “They will be members of His order, on their way to the ceremonies. Kirby may even be with them!” At the thought her voice took on a feverish excitement.

“Quickly—we mustn’t lose them!”

But lose them we did.

By the time we reached that stretch of open ground where first Mrs. Bridgeman had spied the unknown group, its members had already disappeared into the darkness of the trees some hundreds of yards away. At the edge of the forest I again brought our vehicle to a halt, and though we might easily have followed the tracks through the trees—which was my not-so-delicate companion’s immediate and instinctive desire—that would have meant abandoning the snow cat.

Instead, I argued that we should skirt the forest, find a vantage point on its northern fringe, and there await the emergence of whichever persons they were who chose to wander these wastes at the onset of winter. To this seemingly sound proposal Mrs. Bridgeman readily enough agreed, and within the hour we were hidden away in a cluster of pines beyond the forest proper. There we took turns to watch the fringe of the forest, and while I took first watch, Mrs. Bridgeman made a pot of coffee. We had only unpacked our stove, deeming it unwise to make ourselves too comfortable in case we should need to be on the move in a hurry.

After only twenty minutes at my post I would have been willing to swear that the sky had snowed itself out for the day. Indeed I made just such a comment to my pale companion when she brought me a cup of coffee. The leaden heavens had cleared—there was hardly a cloud in sight in the afternoon sky—and then, as if from nowhere, there came the wind!

Instantly the temperature dropped, and I felt the hairs in my nostrils stiffening and cracking with each sniff of icy air. The remaining half cup of coffee in my hand froze in a matter of seconds, and a rime of frost sprang up on my eyebrows. Heavily wrapped as I was, still I felt the cold striking through, and I drew back into the comparative shelter of the trees. In all my meteorological experience I have never known or heard of anything like it before. The storm that came with the wind and the cold, rising up in the space of the next half hour, took me totally by surprise.

Looking up, through gaps in the snow-laden branches, I could plainly see the angry boiling up of clouds into a strange mixture of cumulonimbus and nimbostratus, where only moments before there had been no clouds at all! If the sky had seemed leaden earlier in the day, now it positively glowered. The atmosphere pressed down with an almost tangible weight upon our heads.

And finally it snowed.

Mercifully, and despite the fact that all the symptoms warned of a tremendous storm to come, the wind remained only moderate, but by comparison the snow came down as if it had never snowed before. The
husshh
of settling snow was quite audible as the huge flakes fell in gust-driven, spiraling myriads to the ground.

Plainly my watch on the forest was no longer necessary, indeed impossible, for such was the curtain of falling snow that visibility was down to no more than a few feet. We were stuck, but surely no more so than that suspicious band of wanderers in the forest—members of “His order,” as Mrs. Bridgeman would have it. We would have to wait the weather out, and so would they.

For the next two hours, until about 5:00 P.M., I busied myself making a windbreak of fallen branches and packed snow until even the moderate wind was shut out of our hideaway. Then I built a small fire in the center of this sheltered area close to the snow cat. Whatever happened, I did not want the works of that machine put out of order by freezing temperatures.

During all this time Mrs. Bridgeman simply sat and brooded, plainly unconcerned with the cold. She was frustrated, I imagined, by our inability to get on with the search. In the same period, busy as I was with my hands, nevertheless I was able to ponder much of what had passed, drawing what half-formed conclusions I could in the circumstances.

The truth of the matter was that there did seem to be too many coincidences here for comfort, and personally I had already experienced a number of things previously unknown to me or alien to my nature. I could no longer keep from my mind memories of that strange dream of mine; similarly the odd sensations I had felt on contact with or in proximity to the yellow medallion of gold and obscure alloys.

Then there was the simple, quite definite fact—bolstered both by the Judge and the widow Bridgeman alike, and by McCauley the Mountie—that a freakish five-year cycle of strange excitement, morbid worship, and curious cult activity did actually exist in these parts. And dwelling on thoughts such as these, I found myself wondering once again just what had happened here twenty years gone, that its echoes should so involve me here and now.

Patently it had not been—could not possibly have been—as Mrs. Bridgeman “remembered” it. And yet, apart from her previous nervousness and one or two forgivable lapses under emotional stress since then, she had seemed to me to be as normal as most women….

Or had she?

I found myself in two minds. What of this fantastic immunity of hers to subzero temperatures? Even now she sat there, peering out into the falling snow, pale and distant and impervious still to the frost that rimed her forehead and dusted her clothes, perfectly comfortable despite the fact that she had once again shed her heavy parka. No, I was wrong, and it amazed me that I had fooled myself for so long. There was very little about this woman that was normal. She had known—
something.
Some experience to set her both mentally and physically aside from mundane mankind.

But could that experience possibly have been the horror she “remembered”? Even then I could not quite bring myself to believe.

And yet…what of that shape we had stumbled across in the snow, that deep imprint as of a huge webbed foot? My mind flashed back to our first night out from Navissa, when I had dreamed of a colossal shape in the sky, a shape with carmine stars for eyes!

—But this was no good. Why!—here I was, nervous as a cat, starting at the slightest flurry of snow out there beyond the heavy branches. I laughed at my own fancies, albeit shakily, because just for a second as I had turned from the bright fire I had imagined that a shadow moved out in the snow, a furtive figure that shifted just beyond my periphery of vision.

“I saw you jump, Mr. Lawton,” my companion suddenly spoke up. “Did you see something?”

“I don’t think so,” I briskly answered, my voice louder than necessary. “Just a shadow in the snow.”

“He has been there for five minutes now. We are under observation!”

“What? You mean there’s someone out there?”

“Yes, one of His worshipers, I imagine, sent by the others to see what we’re up to. We’re outsiders, you know. But I don’t think they’ll try to do us any harm. Kirby would never allow that.”

She was right. Suddenly I saw him, limned darkly against the white background as the whirling snow flurried to one side. Eskimo or Indian, I could not tell which, but I believe his face was impassive. He was merely—watching.

• • •

From that time on the storm strengthened, with the wind building up to a steady blast that drove the snow through the trees in an impenetrable icy wall. Behind my barrier of branches and snow we were comfortable enough, for I had extended the shelter until its wall lay open only in a narrow gap to the south; the wind was from the north. The snow on the outside of the shelter had long since formed a frozen crust, so that no wind came through, and the ice-stiffened branches of the surrounding trees gave protection from above. My fire blazed and roared in subdued imitation of the wind, for I had braved half a dozen brief excursions beyond the shelter to bring back armfuls of fallen branches. Their trimmed ends burning, Indian fashion, where they met like the spokes of a wheel to form the center of the fire, these branches now warmed our small enclosure and gave it light. They had burned thus all through the afternoon and into the night.

It was about 10:00 P.M., pitch-black beyond the wall of the shelter and still snowing hard, when we became aware of our second visitor; the first had silently left us some hours earlier. Mrs. Bridgeman saw him first, grabbing my elbow so that I started to my feet and turned toward the open end of our sanctuary. There, framed in the firelight, white with snow from head to foot, stood a man.

A white man, he came forward shaking the snow from his clothes. He paused before the fire and tipped back the hood of his fur jacket, then shed his gloves and held his hands out to the flames. His eyebrows were black, meeting across his nose. He was very tall. After a while, ignoring me, he turned to Mrs. Bridgeman. He had a strong New England accent when he said, “It is Kirby’s wish that you go back to Navissa. He does not want you to be hurt. He says you should return now to Navissa—both of you—and that you should then go home. He knows everything now. He knows why he is here, and he wants to stay. His destiny is the glory of the spaces between the worlds, the knowledge and mysteries of the Ancient Ones who were here before man, godship over the icy winds of Earth and space with his Lord and Master. You have had him for almost twenty years. Now he wants to be free.”

I was on the point of questioning his authority and tone when Mrs. Bridgeman cut me short. “Free? What kind of freedom? To stay here in the ice; to wander the icy wastes until any attempt to return to the world of men would mean certain death? To learn the alien lore of monsters spawned in black pits beyond time and space?”

Her voice rose hysterically. “To know no woman’s love but sate his lust with strangers, leaving them for dead and worse in a manner that
only his loathsome father could ever teach him?”

The stranger lifted his hand in sudden anger. “You dare to speak of Him like—” I sprang between them, but it was immediately apparent that I was not needed.

The change in Mrs. Bridgeman was almost frightening. She had been near to hysterics only seconds ago; now her eyes blazed with anger in her white face, and she stood so straight and regal as to make our unknown visitor draw back, his raised arm falling quickly to his side.

“Do
I
dare?” Her voice was as chill as the wind. “I am Kirby’s mother! Yes, I dare—but what
you
have dared!…You would raise your hand to me?”

“I…it was only…I was angry.” The man stumbled over his words before finding his former composure. “But all this makes no difference. Stay if you wish; you will not be able to enter the area of the ceremonies, for there will be a watch out. If you did get by the watch unseen—then the result would be upon your own heads. On the other hand, if you go back now, I can promise you fair weather all the way to Navissa. But only if you go now, at once.”

My white-faced companion frowned and turned away to stare at the dying fire.

No doubt believing that she was weakening, the stranger offered his final inducement: “Think, Mrs. Bridgeman, and think well. There can only be one conclusion, one end, if you stay here—for you have looked upon Ithaqua!”

She turned back to him, desperate questions spilling from her lips. “Must we go tonight? May I not see my son just once? Will he be—?”

“He will not be harmed.” She was cut off. “His destiny is—
great!
Yes, you must go tonight; he does not wish to see you, and there is so little—” He paused, almost visibly biting his tongue, but it seemed that Mrs. Bridgeman had not noticed his gaffe. Plainly he had been about to say “there is so little time.”

My companion sighed and her shoulders slumped. “If I agree—we will need fair weather. That can be…arranged?”

The visitor eagerly nodded (though to me the idea that he might somehow contrive to control the weather seemed utterly ridiculous) and answered, “From now until midnight, the snow will lessen, the winds will die away. After that—” He shrugged. “But you will be well away from here before then.”

She nodded, apparently in defeat. “Then we’ll go. We need only sufficient time to break camp. A few minutes. But—”

“No buts, Mrs. Bridgeman. There was a Mountie here. He did not want to go away either. Now—” Again he shrugged, the movement of his shoulders speaking volumes.

“McCauley!” I gasped.

“That was not the Mountie’s name,” he answered me, “but whoever he was, he too was looking for this lady’s son.” He was obviously talking about some other Mountie from Fir Valley camp, and I remembered McCauley having mentioned another policeman who set out to search the wastes at the same time as he himself had headed for Stillwater.

“What have you done to him, to this man?” I asked.

He ignored me and, pulling on his gloves, again addressed Mrs. Bridgeman: “I will wait until you go.” He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head, then stepped back out into the snow.

The conversation, what little there had been, had completely astounded me. In fact my astonishment had grown apace with what I had heard. Quite apart from openly admitting to what could only be murder, our strange visitor had agreed with—indeed, if my ears had not deceived me, he had
confirmed
—the wildest possible nightmares, horrors that until now, so far as I was aware or concerned, had only manifested themselves in the works of Samuel Bridgeman and others who had worked the same vein before him, and in the disturbed imagination of his widow. Surely this must be the final, utmost proof positive of the effect of the morbid five-year cycle on the minds of men? Could it be anything else?