Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (4 page)

Sighing with relief and leaning back in her seat for the first time since leaving the Pike, Ruth guided her car up the long twin ruts that led to the farmhouse passing Daniel’s truck that was parked off to the side. A light over the front door led her in the last few hundred yards and she braked to a stop alongside the Turner’s own shiny new Ford Ranger pickup truck. Also in the yard, was a good selection of farming vehicles from tractors to harvesters and seeding trailers, even a big hay bundler. And they all seemed to be new, without hardly a scratch on their paint jobs. Vaguely, Ruth wondered how Josh could afford it all and if he could, why he needed Daniel to help him clear his fields when it was obvious he could easily pay to hire some hands to do the job.

Getting out of the car, Ruth approached the house where the light shone above the back porch. There was another light on somewhere inside so she knocked at the door. While waiting for a reply, she looked around some more admiring how neat everything appeared. Standing away from the house were the various outbuildings including chicken coop, tool shed, hoppers and stalls for the farm equipment. A big, brightly painted barn stood a hundred yards off with a pair of silos sticking up from the far side. Ruth noticed the wooden sigil placed over the main doorway that most barns sported, a bit of traditional superstition that could be found across the country. But on this particular example, Ruth noticed that instead of sporting the usual gaily colored circular design pattern, the placard was quite plain and shaped in the form of a five pointed star with a single, open eye in the center.

Turning back to the door, Ruth knocked again, this time harder but with the same result. Peering in at the window, she couldn’t see any evidence that anyone was home. Could the men still be working out in the field? Maybe Mrs. Turner, Adele, had gone out to bring them some supper? Since Josh Turner was family, Ruth decided it wouldn’t be impolite to step inside and wait a few minutes until someone came back. Testing the door, she found it was unlocked, which didn’t surprise her. Stepping inside, she eased the door closed quietly and looked around. The kitchen was much like her own; neat with many feminine touches including curtains decorated with a fruit and vegetable pattern and refrigerator magnets in the shape of barnyard animals, some holding notices and household messages. The light she had seen earlier was coming from the next room and when she followed it, found herself in a small parlor. There too, everything was in order: stuffed chairs and sofa, lamps and a fireplace with kindling laid aside in anticipation of colder weather. The walls included a couple cheap prints and a few portraits of family members including one obvious patriarch with huge, mutton chop sideburns and dark eyes that looked out from beneath great, bushy eyebrows. Not the most endearing visage Ruth had ever seen. On the frame was a small metal plate engraved with the name “Ezekiah Coburn Winthrop.” Adele’s grandfather maybe? If so, it seemed that he hadn’t move into the old Coburn place by chance after all.

The light she saw now, was coming from a small oil lamp sitting on a roll top desk set in an alcove across from the front door. Moving in its direction, Ruth saw that there were a few scattered articles on the desk: a holder filled with pens and pencils, a stapler, some loose papers. Pinned to the wall over the desk however, was what looked like a hand drawn map. Looking more closely, she saw that she was wrong. It wasn’t a map but a diagram of some sort. Bringing the lamp up for a better look, she saw a series of curved lines, some dotted and some solid along which had been written numbers, some in decimals but no matter how long she concentrated, she couldn’t find a pattern to any of it. Here and there among the lines were what looked like little drawings, circles maybe, but with their edges all irregular and jagged. Inside the shapes were markings that suggested symbols like letters or numbers but of a sort Ruth could not interpret. There was something familiar about them though. Had she seen markings like those somewhere before? Giving up, she moved the light across the rest of the room and noticed a chair in a corner holding a pile of books with library tags on the spines. Curious, she picked one up and opened it. She was a little surprised to find that the stamp inside the front cover indicated that the book had been taken from the Boston Public Library. The book itself seemed to be one on higher mathematics…geometry or something. At least that’s what all the pages of diagrams reminded her of. Flipping the book shut again, she read the title
Three Dimensional Numbers for a Four Dimensional World: Mapping the Landscapes of Dis
. Frowning, she looked at the pile again and saw the next book was entitled
Finding the Way to Carcosa and Other Places: A Mathematical Guide
. The subject matter seemed far beyond anything she’d expect a farm couple in Dunwich would be interested in, let alone understand. She noticed that the rest of the books seemed to cover similar esoteric subjects…except one, much to her relief. But upon picking it up, she wasn’t sure if her initial reaction was premature:
Azathoth and Other Horrors
it was called, by Edward Derby. What was a book of fiction doing mixed up with the math texts? Idly, she thumbed through the book’s pages until they stopped by themselves where a bookmark rested. “…at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects,” read the passage. “And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher’s window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder…” A section of the text that had been highlighted in yellow marker attracted Ruth’s eye to the bottom of the page: “Azathoth: find the secret name and the demon sultan in his blindness must appear. Azathoth: ask the question and the seething chaos must give answer. Azathoth: voice the secret name and control your destiny…”

Ruth returned the book to the pile on the chair, not sure what connection it had, if any, to the other volumes. A wastebasket stood nearby with crumpled papers in it. Curious, she undid a few but stopped when she came to one so sheer, she could almost see through it. A short, handwritten note in one corner read “Call Dad about this” and beneath it, a set of straight lines had been ruled across it, all intersecting at a certain point. Again, there were the irregular shapes with familiar markings and, in a moment of inspiration, Ruth placed the paper over the diagram on the wall and found that the two sets of irregular shapes matched perfectly. The intersection of the ruled lines rested almost exactly in the center of the shapes.

Crumpling the paper and tossing it back into the wastebasket, Ruth returned to the kitchen intent on continuing her search for Daniel outdoors. But passing by the refrigerator, she recalled something she had seen earlier. Scanning the messages stuck there beneath an assortment of magnets, she found the one she wanted. A note written in the same feminine hand as the one she’d seen in the alcove. “Call Dad after 31st…first try didn’t work…asked the questions but got only garbled replies…conclusion: Josh wasn’t right…or Azathoth not the secret name.” A second word had been written that Adele seemed to have planned to try next, but the spelling was so garbled Ruth didn’t even try to read it. Fearful, for some reason she didn’t understand, she left the house and, walking down the driveway, yanked open the door to Daniel’s truck and took down a hunting rifle from the gun rack. While checking the magazine, she became aware for the first time of a dull, pulsing beat coming distantly from the rear of the house. Had it been there all the time or had it just started? Holding the gun before her, she began to walk around the house and, when she cleared it, the beating sound became a good deal more noticeable. It seemed to be drifting over from a stand of trees that bordered a paddock behind the barn. The sun had been gone now for a good hour, and night had fully fallen. There was no moon, but the starlight that shone from the cloudless autumn sky was sufficient for her to see the cart path that led from beside the paddock into the woods, no doubt to Josh’s fields on the other side. Determined to find out what was going on and where Daniel was…she hadn’t forgotten the things that Myrtle had said, and nothing she’d seen so far reassured her that the old gossip’s speculations were untrue…she started out.

As she stepped within the limits of the tree line she was plunged into impenetrable gloom, as the feeble starlight was cut off by the mix of pine trees and oaks that made up the stretch of forest along the trail. Luckily for her nerves however, the belt of trees soon petered out and opened onto fields again. Here, the path led along the fringes of a cornfield that covered the brow of a hill and, as the beating sound continued to pulsate, she found herself entering a second stretch of forest. This time it took much longer to cross, and Ruth guessed that she must have gone a good half-mile before emerging into another clearing where she found herself surrounded by the stumps of recently-cleared forest. Smaller branches littered the ground everywhere and larger limbs, cut into manageable pieces, were thrown together in huge brush piles that loomed at intervals in the semi-darkness. This, no doubt, was the field Daniel had been helping to clear. Around her, the open land rose gently and over the crest, apparently, was where the beating sounds were coming from. Carefully, Ruth began to negotiate the freshly-cleared landscape, at one point passing a big tractor with a pair of heavy chains leading from it to a huge tree stump that had been pulled from the ground. It’s spidery tangle of upended roots smelling heavily of freshly-turned earth.

For the first time, Ruth noticed that the air about her seemed to have thickened; walking through it felt like wading in chest-deep water that only grew more resistant as she went on. At last however, with the sky filled with stars and a slight wind rustling the nearby trees, she reached the crest of the hill. She hadn’t really thought about what she’d expected to see…Daniel in the arms of Adele Turner maybe, but what she saw instead puzzled her more than anything else. A few hundred feet before her, in a slight depression formed from the top of the hill, was a circle of stones not unlike those scattered about Dean’s Corners. These stones, however, were not as big, smallish and lumpy rather than chiseled and raised upright, but they sported the same kind of hieroglyphic markings that those other stones did. Over them was a soft glow, but from where it came, she couldn’t be sure.

Off to one side, beyond the perimeter of light, stood Daniel naked from the waist up. It seemed to Ruth that his posture was much too stiff to be normal, and she guessed that perhaps he might be in a sort of trance. That impression was reinforced when she laid eyes on the second figure sitting on a big, discarded tree branch just outside the circle of stones. Dressed in overalls and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Adele Turner looked exactly the way Ruth had imagined her: long dark hair, tall and slim. Men, she was sure, no doubt found her attractive. Just at the moment, she was speaking aloud in an unfamiliar language whose syllables seemed to rise and fall to a beat she kept on a small drum gripped between her knees.

Azathoth
…
demonicus
…
sultanus
…
Azathoth
…
primus
…
intelligenci
…
Azathoth
…” she recited monotonously before repeating the strange chain of words all over again.

Suddenly she stopped, and Adele stood bolt upright and, if it were not for the darkness, Ruth was sure her eyes would have been shooting daggers.

“Who are you?” Adele demanded. “You’re trespassing on private property!”

“I’m Ruth Mills, Dan’s wife, and I demand to know what’s going on here!”

“None of your business, girl,” retorted Adele, surprising Ruth with the bold comeback. “You have no right to come here. This is private property and I’m telling you to turn around and leave right now.”

“Not on your life,” replied Ruth, who could be as testy as the next woman. “I’ve come for my husband and don’t mean to leave without him.”

“Stop right there!” Adele positively screamed, moving to come between Ruth and Daniel.

Surprised at the note of desperation in the woman’s voice, Ruth halted despite herself.

“Dan is here because he wants to be,” Adele said. “Now leave this instant!”

Ruth wasn’t sure what the woman meant by her comment, whether it confirmed the gossip she’d heard in town or not, but she wasn’t about to surrender her marital rights on the say so of a stranger.

“He does, does he? Then let him speak for himself.”

Ruth never found out how Adele would have replied to the demand because, at just that moment, there was a sudden wavering in the air above the circle of stones. With the movement, Ruth expected some sound to accompany it but there was nothing, instead there was a certain thickening of the atmosphere all around that she felt as pressure on her eardrums. She swallowed in an attempt to unblock her ears and gave her head a little shake. Her behavior however, did not go unnoticed by Adele, who immediately whirled back in the direction of the stones and, when she saw the vague but growing movement in the air that now seemed to be steadily expanding, she screamed.