The Taint and Other Novellas (13 page)

Finally I turned to the widow to ask, “Are we actually going back to Navissa, after all your efforts? And now, when we’re so close?”

First glancing cautiously out into the falling snow, she hurriedly shook her head, putting a warning finger to her lips. No, it was as I suspected; her almost docile concurrence, following that blazing, regal display of defiance, had merely been a ruse. She in no way intended to desert her son, whether he wished it or not. “Quickly—let’s get packed up,” she whispered. “He was right. The ceremony is tonight, it must be, and we haven’t much time.”

VI

From then on my mind was given little time to dwell on anything; I simply followed Mrs. Bridgeman’s directions to the letter, questioning nothing. In any case it was obvious that her game must now be played to outwit the enemy (I had come to think of the strange worshipers as “the enemy”), not to defeat them physically or to talk them down. That was plainly out of the question. If indeed they had resorted to murder in order to do whatever they intended to do, they would surely not let a mere woman stop them now.

So it was that when we set of south aboard the snow cat, in a direction roughly that of Navissa, I knew that it would not be long before we were doubling back on our tracks. And sure enough, within the half hour, at about 11:00 P.M., as we came over a low hill in the then very light snow, there Mrs. Bridgeman ordered a wide swing to the west.

We held this westward course for ten more minutes, then turned sharply to our right flank, bringing the snow cat once again onto a northerly course. For a further twenty minutes we drove through the light snow, which, now that it had the slackening north wind behind it, stung a little on my face. Then, again at Mrs. Bridgeman’s direction, we climbed a thinly wooded slope to fetch a halt at the top not twenty minutes distant from our starting point. At the speed we had traveled, and given that the enemy had no machine comparable to our snow cat, we could not possibly have been followed; and here, sheltered by the thin trees and the still lightly falling snow, we should be quite invisible to the enemy somewhere to our front.

Now, while we paused for a moment, I once more found questions forming in my mind for which I had no answers, and I had no sooner decided to voice them than my pale companion pointed suddenly out through the thin branches of the trees on the summit of the hill in the direction of a great black forested area some half mile to the north.

It was that same forest into which the enemy had vanished earlier in the day when we had been trailing them. Now at its four cardinal points, up sprang great fires of leaping red flame; and now too, coming to us on the wings of the north wind, faint and uneven we heard massed voices raised in a chilling ritual—the Rites of Ithaqua:

“Iä! Iä!—Ithaqua! Ithaqua!

Ai! Ai! Ai!—Ithaqua!

Ce-fyak vulg-t’uhm—

Ithaqua fhtagn!

Ugh! Iä! Iä!—Ai! Ai! Ai!”

Again and again, repeatedly the wind carried that utterly alien chorus to our ears, and inside me it seemed suddenly that my blood froze. It was not only this abhorrent chanting with its guttural tones, but also the
precision
of the—singing?—and the obvious familiarity of the voices with the song. This was no blind, parrotlike repetition of obscure vocal forms but a combination of a hundred or more perfectly synchronized voices whose soul-rending interpretation of a hideous alien liturgy had transformed it into this present awesome cacophony—a cacophony whose horror might indeed breach the voids between the worlds! Suddenly I knew that if there was an Ithaqua, then he must surely hear and answer the voices of his worshipers.

“Very little time now,” my companion muttered, more to herself than to me. “The place of the ceremony must be central in that forest—and that’s where Kirby is!”

I stared hard through the snow, which again was beginning to fall heavier, seeing that the nearest and most southerly of the four fires blazed some distance to the northeast of our position. The westerly fire was about a half a mile southwest of us.

“If we head directly between those two fires,” I said, “entering the woods and heading straight for the most northerly fire, on the far side, then we should come pretty close to the center of the forest. We can take the snow cat to the edge of the trees, but from there we must go on foot. If we can grab Kirby and make a run for it—well, perhaps the cat can take three, at a push.”

“Yes,” she answered, “it’s worth a try. If the worse comes to the worst…then at least I’ll know what the end of it was….”

With that I started up the cat’s motor again, thankful that the wind was in our favor and knowing that under cover of the continuous chanting we stood a fair chance of driving right to the edge of the forest without being heard.

As we headed out across the white expanse of snow to the forest’s edge, I could see in the heavens the glow of the fires reflected from the base of towering, strangely roiling nimbostratus. I knew then, instinctively, that we were in for a storm to end all storms.

At the edge of the forest, undetected so far, we dismounted and left the snow cat hidden in the lower branches of a great pine, making our way on foot through the forest’s dark depths.

The going was of necessity very slow, and of course we dared show no light, but having progressed only a few hundred yards, we found that we could see in the distance the fires of individual torches, and the chanting came much louder and clearer. If there were guards, then we must have passed them by without attracting attention. The chanting was tinged now with a certain hysteria, a frenzy that built steadily toward a crescendo, charging the frosty air with unseen and menacing energies.

Abruptly, we came to the perimeter of a great cleared area where the trees had been cut down to be built into a huge platform in the center. All about this platform a mongrel congregation of fur- and parka-clad men and women stood, their faces showing ruddy and wild-eyed in the light of numerous torches. There were Eskimos, Indians, Negroes, and whites—people from backgrounds as varied as their colors and races—over one hundred and fifty of them at a guess.

The time by then was rapidly approaching midnight, and the deafening, dreadful chanting had now reached such an intensity as to make any increase seem almost impossible. Nevertheless there was an increase, at which, with one final convulsive shriek, the entire crowd about the pyramidal platform prostrated themselves facedown in the snow—all bar one!

“Kirby!” I heard Mrs. Bridgeman gasp, as that one upright man, proud and straight backed, naked except for his trousers, commenced a slow and measured climb up the log steps of the platform.

“Kirby!”
She shouted his name this time, starting forward and avoiding the arms I held out to restrain her.

“He comes! He comes!”
The cry went out in a hiss of rapture from one hundred and fifty throats—drowning Lucille Bridgeman’s shout—and suddenly I felt the expectancy in the air.

The prostrate figures were silent now, waiting; the slight wind had disappeared; the snow no longer fell. Only Mrs. Bridgeman’s running figure disturbed the stillness, that and the flickering of torches where they stood up from the snow; only her feet on the ice-crusted surface broke the silence.

Kirby had reached the top of the pyramid, and his mother was running between the outermost of the encircling, prostrate figures when it happened. She stopped suddenly and cast a terrified glance at the night sky, then lifted a hand to her open mouth. I, too, looked up, craning my neck to see—and something moved high in the roiling clouds!

“He comes! He comes!”
The vast sigh went up again.

Many things happened then, all in the space of a few seconds, comprising a total and a culmination beyond belief. And still I pray that what I heard and saw at that time, that everything I experienced, was an illusion engendered of too great a proximity to the mass lunacy of those who obey the call of the five-year cycle.

How best to describe it?

I remember running forward a few paces, into the clearing proper, before my eyes followed Mrs. Bridgeman’s gaze to the boiling heavens where at first I saw nothing but the madly whirling clouds. I recall, however, a picture in my memory of the man called Kirby standing wide legged atop the great pyramid of logs, his arms and hands reaching in a gesture of expectancy or welcome up and outward, his hair streaming in a wind which sprang up suddenly
from above
to blow slantingly down from the skies. And then there is the vision that burns even now in my mind’s eye of a
darkness
that fell out of the clouds like a black meteorite, a darkness grotesquely shaped like a man with carmine stars for eyes in its bloated blot of a head, and my ears still ring to the pealing screams of mortal fear and loathing that went up in that same instant from the poor, paralyzed woman who now saw and recognized the horror from the skies.

The Beast-God came striding down the wind, descending more slowly now than at first but still speeding like some great bird of prey to Earth, its fantastic splayfooted strides carrying it as if down some giant, winding, invisible staircase straight to the waiting figure atop the pyramid, until the huge black head turned and, from high above the trees, the thing called the Wind-Walker saw the hysterically screaming woman where she stood amid the prostrate forms of its worshipers—saw and
knew
her!

In midair the Being came to an abrupt, impossible halt—and then the great carmine eyes grew larger still, and the blackly outlined arms lifted to the skies in what was clearly an attitude of rage! One monstrous hand reached to the rushing clouds, and through them, to emerge but a split second later and hurl something huge and round to Earth. Still Mrs. Bridgeman screamed—loud, clear, and horrifically—as the unerringly hurled thing smashed down upon her with a roar of tortured air, flattening her instantly to the frozen ground and splintering into a mad bomb burst of exploding shards of—ice!

The scene about the log pyramid at that hellish moment must have been chaos. I myself was thrown in the rush of pressured air back into the trees, but in the next moment when I looked out again upon the clearing, all I could see was…blood!

The ice-torn, mangled bodies of a wide segment of worshipers were still tumbling outward from the blasted area where Mrs. Bridgeman had stood—a number of bloodied bodies still fell, lazily almost, like red leaves through the howling air; logs were beginning to burst outward from the base of the pyramid where flying chunks of ice had crashed with the force of grenades.

Nor was Ithaqua finished!

It seemed almost as if I could read this horror’s thoughts as it towered raging in the sky:
Were these not His worshipers?—and had they not betrayed their faith in this matter, which was to have been His first meeting with His son on Earth? Well, they would pay for this error, for allowing this Daughter of Man, the mother of His son, to interfere with the ceremony!

In the space of a few more seconds huge balls of ice were flung to Earth like a scattering of hailstones—but with far more devastating effect. When the last of them had hurled its ice-knife shards far and wide about the clearing, the snow was red with spouting blood; the screams of the torn and dying rose even above the howling devil-wind that Ithaqua had brought with Him from the star-spaces. The trees bent outward now from the clearing with the fury of that fiendish storm, and logs snapped and popped like matchsticks from the base of the platform at the crimson clearing’s center.

But a change had taken place in the attitude of the lone figure standing wild and windblown at the top of the tottering pyramid.

While the gigantic, anthropomorphic figure in the sky had raged and ravaged, raining down death and destruction in the form of ice-globes frozen in his hands and snatched down out of the heavens, so the man-god-child, now grown to strange adulthood, had watched from his vantage point above the clearing all that transpired. He had seen his mother ruthlessly crushed to a raw, red pulp; he had watched the demoniac destruction of many, perhaps all of those deluded followers of his monstrous father. Still, in a dazed bewilderment, he gazed down upon the awful aftermath in the clearing—and then he laid back his head and screamed in a composite agony of frustration, horror, despair, and rapidly waxing rage!

And in that monumental agony his hellish heritage told. For all the winds screamed with him, roaring, howling, shrieking in a circular chase about the platform that lifted logs and tossed them as twigs in a whirlpool round and about in an impossible spiraling whirl. Even the clouds above rushed and clashed the faster for Kirby’s rage, until at last his Father knew the anger of His son for what it was—but did He understand?

Down through the sky the Wind-Walker came again, striding on great webbed feet through the currents of crazed air, arms reaching as a father reaches for his son—

—And at last, battered and bruised as I was and half unconscious from the wind’s screaming and buffeting, I saw that which proved to me beyond all else that I had indeed succumbed to the five-year cycle of legend-inspired lunacy and mass hysteria.

For as the Ancient One descended, so His son rose up to meet Him—Kirby, racing up the wind in surefooted bounds and leaps, roaring with a hurricane voice that tore the sky asunder and blasted the clouds back across the heavens in panic flight—Kirby, expanding, exploding outward until his outline, limned against the frightened sky, became as great as that of his alien Sire—Kirby, Son of Ithaqua, whose clawing hands now reached in a raging blood lust, whose snarling, bestial, darkening features demanded revenge!

For a moment, perhaps astounded, the Wind-Walker stood off—and there were two darkly towering figures in that tortured sky, two great heads in which twin pairs of carmine stars glared—and these figures rushed suddenly together in such a display of aerial fury that for a moment I could make out nothing of the battle but the flash of lightning and roar of thunder.