Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (46 page)

Within thirty seconds he had located the entrance to the Netvis Toldon’s apartments, and had passed through the doorway.

He discovered the family reclining about the horseshoe-shaped table in the refectory, for it was the hour of the evening meal. He paused in the refectory doorway, was met with a semicircular row of surprised glances, bowed low to the Netvis Toldon.

‘I beseech you to pardon this intrusion, my Lord Netvis. It were inexcusable under other circumstances, at a more favorable time.’ The utterly stultified nobleman returned no answer, only stared in the throes of his paralysis of surprise. Then, the dear lady of his heart, the Netvissa Ledda, rose to her feet from her place at her father’s table, her eyes wide with wonderment, and a dawning realization of what this strange invasion might mean, her lovely face suddenly of the hue of the Aluan roses. She looked at this heroically formed lover of hers, her whole soul in her eyes.

‘Come, my Lady Ledda!’ said Bothon quickly, and as lightly as a deer the Netvissa Ledda ran to him.

He took her arm, very quietly, and, before the assembled members of the family of Toldon had recovered from their utter stupefaction, the two were hastening along the corridor towards the palace entrance.

From around the first corner before them came then abrupt sounds of armed men, hastening, the authoritative voices of military commands. They paused, listening, and Bothon shifted his axe into his right hand and stepped before the Lady Ledda to meet whatever force might come into sight within the instant.

But the Netvissa Ledda laid firm hands upon his left arm. ‘This way, swiftly!’ she whispered, and led him down a narrow passage-way at the wide corridor’s left. This they traversed in haste, and had barely negotiated a sharp turn when they heard the guard-troop rush along the main corridor, and a voice, insistent, commanding: ‘To the apartment of my Lord, the Netvis Toldon!’

The narrow passage-way led them past cook-rooms and scullery-chambers, and ended at a small door which opened upon a narrow court. Rapidly traversing this, they emerged upon a square at the west side of the palace, and well before any pursuit could have traced their course, were indistinguishable among the vast concourse of the people who thronged the wide avenues of Alu.

Bothon now resumed the direction of their course of escape, with a few low and hurried words of thanks to his companion for her timely guidance out of the palace to the freedom of the streets. Leading the way across a larger adjacent square, he reached the secluded corner, mounded about with
débris
, where he had secured his weapon. It was not yet past the early dusk of a mid-summer evening, and now there was nothing to interfere with his keen vision.

Yes, it was as he had guessed from the quality of that torn fragment of silken tunic with which he had wiped his tortured eyes free of the stone-dust. The dead man was an officer of one of the Imperial Legions.

Seating the Lady Ledda upon a block of granite and requesting her to watch for any intrusion on their comparative privacy, Bothon knelt swiftly beside the dead body and busied himself upon it energetically with his two large and capable hands.

At the end of two intensive minutes the Netvissa Ledda looked up at his light summoning touch upon her shoulder to see her lover for whom she had unhesitatingly abandoned all else that life held dear to her, apparelled from head to foot in the uniform, armor, and accoutrements of an Elton of the Imperial Legion of the Hawk.

Then they hurried southward, side by side, across the great square with its desolation of shattered buildings, towards one of the few remaining residences of the rich before which four coal-black slaves in the livery of their household were lowering an ornamental litter to the ground.

From the luxurious vehicle, as they arrived beside it, there emerged a stout citizen who stared at them enquiringly, his initial obvious fear of molestation disappearing at his recognition of the Emperor’s niece and the uniform of an Imperial Legion.

‘We request the loan of your litter, my Lord,’ said Bothon.

‘Most willingly,’ returned the citizen, smirking and flattered at this form of address.

Bothon expressed hearty thanks, handed his companion into the litter, distributed a handful of silver among the four slaves, and gave the destination to the Negro who stood beside the forward left-hand pole. Then he climbed in himself and drew the red silk curtains together.

The strong litter-poles strained and creaked as the load was hoisted to four brawny shoulders, and then the litter swung away from the residence of its still bowing and smirking owner towards the military enclosure which housed and guarded the flying-vessels of the Aluvian standing army.

‘You may have observed how very completely I have entrusted my Imperial person to you,’ remarked the Netvissa Ledda, smiling. She was very well aware of the reasons for the Imperial request which had sent Bothon back to Ludekta, and for the first armed invasion against the Aluvian metropolis. ‘I have not so much as enquired our destination!’

‘It is my intention to seek safety to the northwest,’ answered Bothon gravely. ‘I have become convinced, I may say to you plainly, my beloved, that the prediction of Bal, Lord of Fields, as to the destruction of the Mother Continent, is not a mere classic to be learned, as we learned it in our childhood, as a formal exercise in rhetoric. Here, all about us, is the evidence. More, my four augurs warned me of the continent’s danger ere I brought my war-galleys up upon the beaches of Alu. The four great forces, they insisted, were in collusion to that end. Do we not see and hear them at their work? Fire raging through the land; earth shaking mightily; winds such as never were encountered hitherto upon the planet, else the old records lie! Water, the commotion of which surpasses all experience – is it not so, my beloved? Am I not constrained to speak thus to be heard amidst this hellish tumult?’

The Lady Ledda nodded, grave now in her turn.

‘There are many deafened in the palace,’ she remarked. ‘Where are we to go for refuge?’

‘We depart straight this night, for the great mountains of ’A-Wah-Ii,’ answered Bothon, ‘if so be the four great forces allow us possession of a war-chariot. And, to that end, your ring, my beloved.’

The Lady Ledda nodded again, understandingly, and removed from the middle finger of her right hand the ring of the two suns and the eight-pointed star which, as a member of the Royal Family, she was entitled to wear. Bothon received it, and slipped it upon the little finger of his right hand.

The sentinel on guard before the barracks of the officer commanding the military enclosure of the Aluvian supply-barracks saluted the commanding-looking Elton of the Legion of the Hawk who stepped down from the gorgeously ornamented litter at the entrance to that military residence. The Elton addressed him in formal military phrases. It was evident to the sentinel that this officer was here on official duty.

‘Report at once to the Ka-Kalbo Netro, the arrival of the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, conveying a member of the Imperial household into exile. I am requisitioning one battle-chariot of capacity for two persons, and officer’s rations sufficient for fourteen days, together with the medicinal supply for a full kit-va of men. My authority, the Imperial Signet. Behold!’

The sentinel saluted the sun-and-star ring of the Emperor, repeated his orders like an efficient automaton, saluted the Elton of the Hawk Legion, and departed at the double to fetch the commandant, the Ka-Kalbo Netro.

The Ka-Kalbo arrived promptly in answer to this summons. He saluted the Imperial Signet, and, as a Ka-Kalbo outranked an Elton by one full grade, was punctiliously saluted according to military usage by the Elton Barko of the Legion of the Hawk, an officer whose personal acquaintance he had not previously made. Within ten minutes the Netvissa Ledda had been ceremoniously carried to and placed upon her seat in the commandeered battle-chariot, and the Elton Barko had taken his place beside her. Then, the dozen sweating mechanicians who had carried out their commandant’s orders in record time, standing in a stiff, saluting row, the battle-chariot started off at a stiff gallop, the driver standing and plying his long thong with loud, snapping reports over the horses’ backs, while at the great chariot’s rear the spare-horse leader whistled continuously to the four relay animals which galloped behind. The empty litter, its bearers freshly rewarded with another heaping handful of coins by this generous officer, swung swiftly through the dust-heaped streets and square towards its owner’s residence.

The heights of ’A-Wah-Ii, to the northwest, gave some promise, in Bothon’s opinion, of security from the anciently predicted submersion of the continent. Those towering mountains would, at least, be among the last sections to sink, should the gas belts, hypothecated by the scientists of the mother continent, explode, and remove the underseas support of this great land of the globe’s most ancient and noble civilization.

Shortly after daybreak, and accurately, according to the map and careful explanations of the painstaking Ka-Kalbo Netro, the chariot paused in the centre of a great level table-land one quarter of the way to his destination. The country hereabouts was utterly uninhabited. They were relatively safe here in a region only lightly visited by the earthquakes, and not at all by fires. The roar of the north wind troubled the Netvissa Ledda severely. Bothon barely noticed it. He was now convinced that he was losing his sense of hearing.

They ate and slept and resumed their journey at noon after a readjustment of the provisions and a change of the now rested animals.

Their four days’ journey steadily northwest was uneventful. The charioteer drove onward steadily. On the fourth day, as the coppery ball which was the smoking sun reached and touched a flat horizon, they caught their first view of the lofty summits of the ’A-Wah-Ii region, goal of a possible immunity.

Dr Cowlington, an anxious look in his face, was standing beside Meredith’s bed when he awakened in the middle morning. He had slept twenty hours. However, what the doctor thought of as his patient’s ‘mental condition’ was so entirely normal, and his cheerfulness so pronounced after his protracted sleep, that Dr Cowlington was reassured, and changed his mind about removing the bottle of sleeping medicine. Plainly it had had an excellent effect on Meredith.

Stretched out in his usual quiet-inducing attitude on the davenport just before lunch, Meredith suddenly ceased reading and laid down his magazine. It had occurred to him that he had ‘heard’ none of the turmoil of Alu during that waking period. He sat up, puzzled. Bothon, he remembered, had been hearing the sounds about him only dimly, a strange, perhaps a significant, coincidence.

He felt the bruise behind his right ear. It was no longer even slightly painful to the touch. He pressed his finger-tips firmly against the place. The contusion was now barely perceptible to the sense of touch.

He reported the apparent loss of what the ear-specialist Gatefield had named his ‘clairaudience’ to Dr Cowlington after lunch.

‘Your bruise is going down,’ said the doctor significantly. He examined the posterior edge of Meredith’s right temporal area.

‘I thought so,’ remarked the doctor, nodding. ‘Your secondary “hearing” began with that injury to your head. As it goes down, some obscure stimulation of the auditory apparatus, which accounts for your ability to “hear” those sounds, diminishes accordingly. You could probably “hear” only some stupendous sound from “there” now. And in a day or so I predict that you will be “hearing” nothing more, and then you can go home!’

And, within an hour came the ‘stupendous sound’ in very truth. It broke in upon Meredith’s quiet reading once more as though someone had opened that sound-proof door.

A curious, secondary mental vision accompanied it. It was as though Meredith, in his own proper person, yet through the strange connection of his personality with the General, Bothon, stood on the heights of Tharan-Yud, overlooking the stricken city of Alu. The utter fury of mountainous waves accompanied the now titanic rumblings of malignant earth, the wholesale crashing of the cyclopean masonry of Alu as the vast city crumbled and melted beneath his horrified eyes. With these hellish horrors went the wild roaring of ravaging flame, and the despairing, hysterical cacaphony of Alu’s doomed millions.

Then there came, at last, a sound as of the veritable yawning of the nethermost watery gulf of earth, and the high sun itself was blotted out by a monstrous green wall of advancing death. The sea rose up and fell upon accursed Alu, drowning forever the shrieks of utter despair, the piping and chittering of the obscurely gnawing Gyaa-Hua distracted at last from their loathsome banquet – hissings, roarings, shriekings, whinings, tearings, seethings – a cacophony more than human ears might bear, a sight of utter devastation more onerous than man might look upon, and live.

There came to Meredith a merciful stupor, as the waters of Mu-ladon closed in forever over the mother continent, and as his consciousness failed him, he emerged once more out of that quiet bedroom – away from his overlooking of the world’s major catastrophe, and as Bothon, walked beside the Lady Ledda along a wooded ravine in ’A-Wah-Ii, goal of safety, among laden fruit trees, yet not, it seemed, upon the towering heights of those noble mountains but upon an
island
about the shores of which rolled and roared a brown and viscid ocean choked with the mud which had been the soil of the mother continent.

‘We are safe here, it would appear, my Bothon,’ said the Netvissa Ledda. ‘Let us lie down and sleep, for I am very weary.’