The Taint and Other Novellas (6 page)

• • •

When Martin Spellman awoke on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1936, he had no time to pause in consideration of the occurrences of the previous night; he had slept late, was on duty soon, and the time was flying by. Spellman was not to know it but that day was to be the most eventful since his arrival at Oakdeene—and at the end of the day….

At ten-thirty in the morning he managed to find a way to get down to the basement ward, and once there in Hell he went straight to Larner’s cell. Through the barred spy-hole he saw that his mission was useless. Larner, frothing at the mouth, was flinging himself in a silent fit from wall to padded wall, his eyes bulging and his teeth bared through the foam of his madness in gnashing frenzy. The student left the ward and found the nurse whose duty it was to attend the lower wards. He made Larner’s silent raging known and then returned to his duties.

Toward the end of the lunch-break, after missing Spellman at the dinner table, Harold Moody found the young nurse prowling worriedly back and forth across the restricted but private floor of his room. Spellman would say nothing of what was on his mind. In fact, he did not himself know what was bothering him, except that he had feelings of an impending—something. Feelings which were somehow relieved a little when Moody delivered his news that Alan Barstowe had quit his job at the sanatorium. No one, it transpired, knew for sure why the squat nurse was throwing up his job; but apparently there had been rumors about his nerves for some time. Moody stated that in his opinion the place and the inmates must have been “getting on top” of the man….

• • •

Later, after finishing duty for the day, Spellman—still inordinately pleased at the news of Barstowe’s imminent departure, feeling more himself and easier in his mind by the minute—ate a quick meal before returning to his room and getting out his manuscripts. By nine in the evening, however, discovering that with the encroachment of the dark outside his queasy uneasiness had returned at the expense of his concentration, he put away his book and simply lay on his bed for a while. He spent some time in trying to detect unusual sounds from Hell, finding himself no happier to discover that all seemed very quiet down there. A few minutes later, catching himself beginning to nod, he got up and smoked a cigarette. He did not want to sleep; his aim was to stay awake until midnight, to see if the inhabitants of the basement ward would get up to any more Larner-inspired tricks.

By ten a powerful desire had taken hold of Spellman to read through the
Cthaat Aquadingen
again—particularly the Sixth Sathlatta—and he actually got the book out before managing to fight down the urge. For his life he could not see just what there might be in Larner’s “Black Book” to interest him now. He was feeling very tired, though, natural enough considering the disturbances of the previous night, and he had something of a headache coming on. But even following a hastily brewed cup of coffee and an aspirin, Spellman’s weariness and the pain behind his temples increased until he was forced to lie on his bed. He glanced at his watch, seeing that it was ten-fifty; and then, before he knew it—

—Someone, somewhere—a well-known voice—was muttering the chaotic words of the Sixth Sathlatta, and even as he fell into a deep sleep Spellman knew that the voice was his own!

He was at the edge of the poisoned clearing again, under dark-green skies and with the evil jungle already behind him; and to his front, in the center of the clearing, Yibb-Tstll waited, turning inexorably as ever on His own axis. Spellman wanted to turn and run, to get away from The Thing that waited in Its great green billowing cloak; and he fought—pitting all the strength of his subconscious mind and will against the awful magnetism radiating from the revolting, revolving monstrosity before him—fought and almost won….But not quite! Slowly, agonizingly slowly, with his sleeping mind squeezed to a tiny ball of concentration, Martin Spellman was pulled forward across the leprous earth. And as he pitted himself against the horror of the Ancient One, he could feel Its anger, could sense the urgency It engendered now in this hideous dream-region’s atmosphere.

For what seemed like hours Spellman fought his losing battle, and then Yibb-Tstll—tiring of the game and aware of the shortness of time—tried a different tactic. While he had yet a good distance to go to the center of the clearing, Spellman saw The Thing stop Its turning; and then, without warning, the horror threw back its cloak to release the hellish “pets” beneath!

Spellman could only fight one thing at a time, and Yibb-Tstll was not going to allow him to escape this time into wakefulness. Even knowing he was dreaming Spellman was at the mercy of his dream. He screamed voicelessly, lashing out at the flapping, blank-faced, vile-bodied night-gaunts as they buffeted him with skin-and-bone wings and tried to shove him off his feet. Finally they won and he fell, cowering down and wrapping his arms about his head as he felt himself swftly borne forward on his nightmare’s ghost-drift. When the noisome activity about him ceased, he fearfully looked up—and found himself at the feet of the colossal Thing in the green cloak!

Again those awful eyes—
those red eyes that were not fixed in their places—the eyes that moved quickly, independently—sliding with vile viscosity over the whole rotten surface of Yibb-Tstll’s pulpy, glistening head!

Mercifully distracted from the horror before him, he saw suddenly that he was not alone. There were others with him—twelve of them—and even in the dream the features and shapes of some of the twelve were twisted, and some of them slavered and their eyes were strange, making their identities obvious.

Larner!—and the rest of Hell’s inmates—a complete coven, now, come to worship at the feet of a lunatic “God,” the loathly Yibb-Tstll!

Still kneeling, sickly turning his face away, Spellman saw a book lying open before him on the rotting ground. The
Cthaat Aquadingen,
Larner’s copy, and open at the Sixth Sathlatta!

“No—oh, no!”
Spellman screamed voicelessly in sudden understanding. Why?—to what end should this—Thing—be allowed to walk upon Earth?

Larner got down beside him: “You
know,
in your heart, Nurse Spellman. You
know!”

“But—”

“No time,” Larner cut off his protest. “Midnight is almost here! You’ll join us in The Calling?”

“No, damn you—
no!”
Spellman cried his mental denial.

“You will!” answered a booming, alien voice in his head, “Now!” And Yibb-Tstll reached out from under His cloak a green and black thing that might have been an arm, with a hand and fingers of sorts, pushing the tips into Spellman’s mouth and ears and nostrils—deep into his mind—searching and squeezing in certain places….

When the great Ancient One withdrew his slimy fingers Spellman’s eyes were very vacant and his mouth, trickling saliva, hung slack. Only then, at midnight—as if at a spoken command though none was given, simultaneously and in perfect unison—did the coven begin the invocation; with Spellman sitting bolt upright in his bed, and with the others below in their cells.

• • •

It was early February before the furor at Oakdeene died down, by which time the events of the night of 1st January 1936 had been carefully examined—as best they could be—and chronicled for future reference in various reports. By then, too, Dr. Welford had resigned; he had been unfortunate enough to be Duty Officer of the night in question; and while it was generally recognized that the responsibility had in no way been his, his resignation seemed to appease directors, newspapers and the relatives of many of the inmates alike.

Certainly, had Dr. Welford been a man without scruple, he might have turned at least part of the result of that night’s happenings to his advantage; for in the following month five of Hell’s inhabitants—three of them previously “hopeless” maniacs—were released as perfectly responsible citizens! Alas, five others, of which one was Larner, had been found dead in their cells shortly after the midnight disturbance—the victims of “frantic lunatic convulsions.” The remaining two—
survived
—but in states of deep and constant catatonia.

Such had been the upheaval at Oakdeene on the morning of the 2nd January, that at first it was believed Barstowe’s ghastly death on the lonely road between the sanatorium and Oakdeene village had been brought about by a madman escaped in the confusion. For some reason the squat nurse had not waited until morning to leave—perhaps he had some premonition of the horror to come—but had departed on foot with his case shortly after eleven that very night. Apparently Barstowe had tried to fight back before succumbing to his attacker: a black telescopic stick with a silver tip—an instrument that could be opened out to make a pointed weapon some nine feet long—was found near his body, but his efforts had been of no avail.

As soon as Barstowe’s body was discovered, a count of Oakdeene’s inmates, living and dead, served to put down any rumors that might have arisen in respect of the institute’s security; but certainly the squat nurse
had
suffered some sort of maniacal attack. No sane man, not even any ordinary sort of animal, could have savaged him so and chewed away half his head and brain!

In all, the occurrences of the night of the 1st-2nd January 1936 could have filled a whole chapter in Spellman’s book—had he ever finished that book. He did not finish it, nor will he ever. Having suffered a terrible
reversal,
Martin Spellman, now in late middle-age, still occupies the second cell on the left in Hell; and because, even in his more lucid moments, he only babbles and drools and screams, for the most part he is kept under sedation….

Born of the Winds

In late 1972, early ’73, I wrote BOTW. Agented in America by Kirby McCauley, at 25,000 words it was too long for Ed Ferman’s “Fantasy & Science Fiction” and had to be reduced by some 5,000 words. By the time I had completed the work on it I was a Staff Sergeant serving in Celle in Germany, writing evenings or whenever I could find some spare time. This novella first saw light of day in the December 1975 issue of “F&SF,” and at once earned itself a World Fantasy Award nomination—I suspect for its originality. Alas that it didn’t win the award! Reprinted two years later, in “The Horror at Oakdeene,” and having twice seen print in the quarter century gone by since then, it remains one of my personal favourites…

I

Consider: I am, or was, a meteorologist of some note—a man whose interests and leanings have always been away from fantasy and the so-called “supernatural”and yet now I believe in a wind that blows between the worlds, and in a Being that inhabits that wind, striding in feathery cirrus and shrieking lightning storm alike across icy Arctic heavens.

Just how such an utter
contradiction
of beliefs could come about I will now attempt to explain, for I alone possess all of the facts. If I am wrong in what I more than suspect—if what has gone before has been nothing but a monstrous chain of coincidence confused by horrific hallucination—then with luck I might yet return out of this white wilderness to the sanity of the world I knew. But if I am right, and I fear that I am horribly right, then I am done for, and this manuscript will stand as my testimonial of a hitherto all but unrecognized plane of existence…and of its
inhabitant,
whose like may only be found in legends whose sources date back geological eons into Earth’s dim and terrible infancy.

My involvement with this thing has come about all in the space of a few months, for it was just over two months ago, fairly early in August, that I first came to Navissa, Manitoba, on what was to have been a holiday of convalescence following a debilitating chest complaint.

Since meteorology serves me both as hobby and means of support, naturally I brought some of my “work” with me; not physically, for my books and instruments are many, but locked in my head were a score of little problems beloved of the meteorologist. I brought certain of my notebooks, too, in which to make jottings or scribble observations on the almost Arctic conditions of the region as the mood might take me. Canada offers a wealth of interest to one whose life revolves about the weather: the wind and rain, the clouds, and the storms that seem to spring from them.