The Taint and Other Novellas (9 page)

“They talked, Sam and Lucille, huddled together in the door of their tent before the warming fire, whispering of the dead guides and how and why those men had come to such terrible ends; and they shivered at the surrounding shadows and the shapes that shifted within them. This country, Sam reasoned, must indeed be the territory of Ithaqua the Wind-Walker. At times, when the influence of old rites and mysteries was strongest, then the snow-god’s worshipers—the Indians, half-breeds, and perhaps others less obvious and from farther parts—would gather here to attend His ceremonies. To the outsider, the unbeliever, this entire area must be forbidden, taboo! The guides had been outsiders…Sam and Lucille were outsiders, too….

“It must have been about this time that Lucille’s nerves began to go, which would surely be understandable. The intense cold and the white wastes stretching out in all directions, broken only very infrequently by the boles and snow-laden branches of firs and pines—the hunger eating at her insides now—those half-seen figures lurking ever on the perimeter of her vision and consciousness—the terrible knowledge that what had happened to the guides could easily happen again—and the fact, no longer hidden by her husband, that she and Sam were—lost! Though they were making south, who could say that Navissa lay in their path, or even that they would ever have the strength to make it back to the town?

“Yes, I think that at that stage she must have become for the most part delirious, for certainly the things she ‘remembers’ as happening from that time onward were delusion inspired, despite their detail. And God knows that poor Sam must have been in a similar condition. At any rate, on the third night, unable to light a fire because the matches had somehow got damp, events took an even stranger turn.

“They had managed to pitch the tent, and Sam had gone inside to do whatever he could toward making it comfortable. Lucille, as the night came down more fully, was outside moving about to keep warm. She suddenly cried out to Sam that she could see distant fires at the four points of the compass. Then, in another moment, she screamed, and there came a rushing wind that filled the tent and brought an intense, instantaneous drop in temperature. Stiffly, and yet as quickly as he could, Sam stumbled out of the tent to find Lucille fallen to the snow. She could not tell him what had happened, could only mumble incoherently of ‘something in the sky!’

“…God only knows how they lived through that night. Lucille’s recollections are blurred and indistinct; she believes now that she was in any case more dead than alive. Three days and nights in that terrible white waste, wholly without food and for the greater part of the time without even the warmth of a fire. But on the morning of the next day—

“Amazingly everything had changed for the better overnight. Apparently their fears—that if they did not first perish from exposure they would die at the hands of the unknown murderers of the two guides—had been unfounded. Perhaps, Sam conjectured, they had somehow managed to pass out of the forbidden territory; and now that they were no longer trespassers, as it were, they were eligible for whatever help Ithaqua’s furtive worshipers could give them. Certainly that was the way things seemed to be, for in the snow beside their tent they found tinned soups, matches, a kerosene cooker similar to the one stolen by the unfortunate guides, a pile of branches, and finally, a cryptic note that said, simply: ‘Navissa lies seven miles to the southeast.’ It was as if Lucille’s vision of the foregone night had been an omen of good fortune, as if Ithaqua Himself had looked down and decided that the two lost and desperate human beings deserved another chance….

“By midday, with hot soup inside them, warmed and rested, having slept the morning through beside a fire, they were ready to complete their return journey to Navissa—or so they thought!

“Shortly after they set out, a light storm sprang up through which they pressed on until they came to a range of low, pinecovered hills. Navissa, Sam reckoned, must lie just beyond the hills. Despite the strengthening storm and falling temperature, they decided to fight on while they had the strength for it, but no sooner had they started to climb than nature seemed to set all her elements against them. I have checked the records and that night was one of the worst this region had known in many years.

“It soon became obvious that they could not go on through the teeth of the storm but must wait it out. Just as Sam had made up his mind to pitch camp, they entered a wood of thick firs and pines; and since this made the going easier, they pressed on a little longer. Soon, however, the storm picked up to such an unprecedented pitch that they knew they must take shelter there and then. In these circumstances they came across that which seemed a veritable haven from the storm.

“At first, seen through the whipping trees and blinding snow, the thing looked like a huge squat cabin, but as they approached it they could see that it was in fact a great raised platform of sorts, sturdily built of logs. The snow, having drifted up deeply on three sides of this edifice, had given it the appearance of a flat-roofed cabin. The fourth side being free of snow, the whole formed a perfect shelter into which they crept out of the blast. There, beneath that huge log platform whose purpose they were too weary even to guess at, Sam lit the kerosene stove and warmed some soup. They felt cheered by the timely discovery of this refuge, and since after some hours the storm seemed in no way about to abate, they made down their sleeping bags and settled themselves in for the night. Both of them fell instantly asleep.

“And it was later that night that disaster struck. How, in what manner Sam died, must always remain a matter for conjecture; but I believe that Lucille saw him die, and the sight of it must have temporarily broken her already badly weakened nerves. Certainly the things that she
believes
she saw, and one thing in particular that she believes happened that night, never could have been. God forbid!

“That part of Lucille’s story, anyway, is composed of fragmentary mental images hard to define and even harder to put into common words. She has spoken of beacon fires burning in the night, of a ‘congregation at Ithaqua’s altar,’ of an evil, ancient Eskimo chant issuing from a hundred adulatory throats—and of that which
answered
that chant, drawn down from the skies by the call of its worshipers….

“I will go into no details of what she ‘remembers’ except to repeat that Sam died, and that then, as I see it, his poor wife’s tortured mind must finally have broken. It seems certain, though, that even after the…horror…she must have received help from someone; she could not possibly have covered even a handful of miles in her condition on foot and alone—and yet she was found
here,
near Navissa, by certain of the town’s inhabitants.

“She was taken to a local doctor, who was frankly astounded that, frozen to the marrow as she was, she had not died of exposure in the wastes. It was a number of weeks before she was well enough to be told of Sam, how he had been found dead, a block of human ice out in the snows.

“And when she pressed them, then it came out about the condition of his body, how strangely torn and mangled it had been, as if ravaged by savage beasts, or as if it had fallen from a great height, or perhaps a combination of both. The official verdict was that he must have stumbled over some high cliff onto sharp rocks, and that his body had subsequently been dragged for some distance over the snow by wolves. This latter fitted with the fact that while his body showed all the signs of a great fall, there were no high places in the immediate vicinity. Why the wolves did not devour him remains unknown.”

Thus ended the Judge’s narrative, and though I sat for some three minutes waiting for him to continue, he did not do so. In the end I said, “And she believes that her husband was killed by?…”

“That Ithaqua killed him?—Yes, and she believes in rather worse things, if you can imagine that.” Hurriedly then he went on, giving me no opportunity to question his meaning.

“One or two other things: First, Lucille’s temperature. It has never been quite normal since that time. She tells me medical men are astounded that her body temperature never rises above a level that would be death to anyone else. They say it must be a symptom of severe nervous disorder but are at a loss to reconcile this with her otherwise fairly normal physical condition. And finally this.” He held out the medallion for my inspection.

“I want you to keep it for now. It was found on Sam’s broken body; in fact it was clenched in his hand. Lucille got it with his other effects. She tells me there is—something strange about it. If any, well, phenomena really do attach to it, you should notice them….”

I took the medallion and looked at it—at its loathsome bas-relief work, scenes of a battle between monstrous beings that only some genius artist in the throes of madness might conceive—before asking, “And is that all?”

“Yes, I think so—no, wait. There is something else, of course there is. Lucille’s boy, Kirby. He…well, in many ways it seems he is like Sam: impetuous, with a love of strange and esoteric lore and legend, a wanderer at heart, I suspect; but his mother has always kept him down, Earthbound. At any rate, he’s now run off. Lucille believes that he’s come north. She thinks perhaps that he intends to visit those regions where his father died. Don’t ask me why; I think Kirby must be something of a neurotic where his father is concerned. This may well have come down to him from his mother.

“Anyway, she intends to follow and find him and take him home again away from here. Of course, if no evidence comes to light to show him positively to be in these parts, then there will be nothing for you to do. But if he really is here somewhere, then it would be a great personal favor to me if you would go with Lucille and look after her when she decides to search him out. Goodness only knows how it might affect her to go again into the snows, with so many bad memories.”

“I’ll certainly do as you ask, Judge, and gladly,” I answered immediately. “Frankly, the more I learn of Bridgeman, the more the mystery fascinates me. There
is
a mystery, you would agree, despite all rationalizations?”

“A mystery?” He pondered my question. “The snows are strange, David, and too much snow and privation can bring fantastic illusions—like the mirages of the desert. In the snow, men may dream while yet awake. And there again, there is that weird five-year cycle of strangeness that definitely affects this region. Myself, I suspect that it all has some quite simple explanation. A mystery?—I say the world is full of mysteries….”

III

That night I experienced my first taste of the weird, the inexplicable, the outré. And that night I further learned that I, too, must be susceptible to the five-year cycle of strangeness; either that, or I had eaten too well before taking to my bed!

There was first the dream of cyclopean submarine cities of mad angles and proportions, which melted into vague but frightful glimpses of the spaces between the stars, through which I seemed to walk or float at speeds many times that of light. Nebulae floated by like bubbles in wine, and strange constellations expanded before me and dwindled in my wake as I passed through them. This floating, or walking, was accompanied by the sounds of a tremendous striding, like the world-shaking footsteps of some ponderous giant, and there was (of all things) an ether wind that blew about me the scent of stars and shards of shattered planets.

Finally all of these impressions faded to a nothingness, and I was as a mote lost in the darkness of dead eons. Then there came another wind—not the wind that carried the odor of outer immensities or the pollen of blossoming planets—a tangible, shrieking gale wind that whirled me about and around until I was sick and dizzy and in dread of being dashed to pieces. And I awoke.

I awoke and thought I knew why I had dreamed such a strange dream, a nightmare totally outside anything I had previously known. For out in the night it raged and blew, a storm that filled my room with its roaring until I could almost feel the tiles being lifted from the roof above.

I got out of bed and went to the window, drawing the curtains cautiously and looking out—before stumbling back with my eyes popping and my mouth agape in an exclamation of utter amazement and disbelief.
Outside, the night was as calm as any I ever saw, with the stars gleaming clear and bright and not even a breeze to stir the small firs in the Judge’s garden!

As I recoiled—amidst the rush and roar of winds that seemed to have their origin in my very room, even though I could feel no motion of the air and while nothing visibly stirred—I knocked down the golden medallion from where I had left it upon my window ledge. On the instant, as the dull yellow thing clattered to the smooth pine floor, the roaring of the wind was cut off, leaving a silence that made my head spin with its suddenness. The cacophony of mad winds had not “died away”—quite literally it had been
cut off!

Shakily I bent to pick the medallion up, noticing that despite the warmth of my room it bore a chill that must have been near to freezing. On impulse I put the thing to my ear. It seemed that just for a second, receding, I could hear as in a sounding shell the rush and roar and hum of winds far, far away, winds blowing beyond the rim of the world!

• • •

In the morning, of course, I realized that it had all been a dream, not merely the fantastic submarine and interspatial sequences but also those occurrences following immediately upon my “awakening.” Nevertheless, I questioned the Judge as to whether he had heard anything odd during the night. He had not, and I was strangely relieved….

• • •

Three days later, when it was beginning to look like Lucille Bridgeman’s suspicions regarding her son were without basis—this despite all her efforts, and the Judge’s, to prove the positive presence of Kirby Bridgeman in the vicinity of Navissa—then came word from the Mounties at Fir Valley that a young man answering Kirby’s description had indeed been seen. He had been with a mixed crowd of seemingly destitute outsiders and local layabouts camping in crumbling Stillwater. Observers—two aging but inveterate gold-grubbers, out on their last prospecting trip of the year before the bad weather set in—had mentioned seeing him. Though these gnarled prospectors had by no means been made welcome in Stillwater, nonetheless they had noted that this particular young man had appeared to be in a sort of trance or daze, and that the others with him had seemed to hold him in some kind of reverence; they had been tending to his needs and generally looking after him.