The Taint and Other Novellas (7 page)

In Manitoba on a clear night, not only is the air sweet, fresh, sharp, and conducive to the strengthening of weakened lungs, but the stars stare down in such crystal clarity that at times a man might try to pluck them out of the firmament. It is just such a night now—though the glass is far down, and I fear that soon it may snow—but warm as I am in myself before my stove, still my fingers feel the awesome cold of the night outside, for I have removed my gloves to write.

• • •

Navissa, until fairly recently, was nothing more than a trail camp, one of many to expand out of humble beginnings as a trading post into a full-blown town. Lying not far off the old Olassie Trail, Navissa is quite close to deserted, ill-fated Stillwater; but more of Stillwater later….

I stayed at the Judge’s house, a handsome brick affair with a raised log porch and chalet-style roof, one of Navissa’s few truly modern buildings, standing on that side of the town toward the neighboring hills. Judge Andrews is a retired New Yorker of independent means, an old friend of my father, a widower whose habits in the later years of his life have inclined toward the reclusive; being self-sufficient, he bothers no one, and in turn he is left to his own devices. Something of a professional anthropologist all his life, the Judge now studies the more obscure aspects of that science here in the thinly populated North. It was Judge Andrews himself, on learning of my recent illness, who so kindly invited me to spend this period of convalescence with him in Navissa, though by then I was already well on the way to recovery.

Not that his invitation gave me license to intrude upon the Judge’s privacy. It did not. I would do with myself what I would, keeping out of his way as much as possible. Of course, no such arrangement was specified, but I was aware that this was the way the Judge would want it.

I had free run of the house, including the old gentleman’s library, and it was there one afternoon early in the final fortnight of my stay that I found the several works of Samuel R. Bridgeman, an English professor of anthropology whose mysterious death had occurred only a few dozen miles or so north of Navissa.

Normally such a discovery would have meant little to me, but I had heard that certain of Bridgeman’s theories had made him something of an outcast among others of his profession; there had been among his beliefs some that belonged in no way to the scientific. Knowing Judge Andrews to be a man who liked his facts straight on the line, undistorted by whim or fancy, I wondered what there could be in the eccentric Bridgeman’s works that prompted him to display them upon his shelves.

In order to ask him this very question, I was on my way from the small library room to Judge Andrews’s study when I saw, letting herself out of the house, a distinguished-looking though patently nervous woman whose age seemed rather difficult to gauge. Despite the trimness of her figure and the comparative youthfulness of her skin, her hair was quite grey. She had plainly been very attractive, perhaps even beautiful, in youth. She did not see me, or if she did glimpse me where I stood, then her agitated condition did not admit of it. I heard her car pull away.

In the doorway of the Judge’s study I formed my question concerning Bridgeman’s books.

“Bridgeman?” the old man repeated me, glancing up sharply from where he sat at his desk.

“Just those books of his, in the library,” I answered, entering the room proper. “I shouldn’t have thought that there’d be much for you, Judge, in Bridgeman’s work.”

“Oh? I didn’t know you were interested in anthropology, David?”

“Well, no, I’m not really. It’s just that I remember hearing a thing or two about this Bridgeman, that’s all.”

“Are you sure that’s all?”

“Eh? Why, certainly! Should there be more?”

“Hmm,” he mused. “No, nothing much—coincidence. You see, the lady who left a few moments ago was Lucille Bridgeman, Sam’s widow. She’s staying at the Nelson.”

“Sam?” I was immediately interested. “You knew him then?”

“I did, fairly intimately, though that was many years ago. More recently I’ve read his books. Did you know that he died quite close by here?”

I nodded. “Yes, in peculiar circumstances, I gather?”

“That’s so, yes.” He frowned again, moving in his chair in what I took to be agitation.

I waited for a moment, and then when it appeared that the Judge intended to say no more, I asked, “And now?”

“Hmm?” His eyes were far away even though they looked at me. They quickly focused. “Now—nothing…and I’m rather busy!” He put on his spectacles and turned his attention to a book.

I grinned ruefully, inclined my head, and nodded. Being fairly intimate with the old man’s moods, I knew what his taciturn, rather abrupt dismissal had meant: “If you want to know more, then you must find out for yourself!” And what better way to discover more of this little mystery, at least initially, than to read Samuel R. Bridgeman’s books? That way I should at least learn something of the man.

As I turned away, the Judge called to me: “Oh, and David—I don’t know what preconceptions you may have formed of Sam Bridgeman and his work, but as for myself…near the end of a lifetime, I’m no closer now than I was fifty years ago to being able to say what
is
and what
isn’t.
At least Sam had the courage of his convictions!”

What was I to make of that?—and how to answer it? I simply nodded and went out of the room, leaving the Judge alone with his books and his thoughts….

• • •

That same afternoon found me again in the library, with a volume of Bridgeman’s on my lap. There were three of his books in all, and I had discovered that they contained many references to Arctic and near-Arctic regions, to their people, their gods, superstitions, and legends. Still pondering what little I knew of the English professor, these were the passages that primarily drew my attention: Bridgeman had written of these northern parts, and he had died here—mysteriously! No less mysterious, his widow was here now, twenty years after his demise, in a highly nervous if not actually distraught state. Moreover, that kindly old family friend Judge Andrews seemed singularly reticent with regard to the English anthropologist, and apparently the Judge did not entirely disagree with Bridgeman’s controversial theories.

But what were those theories? If my memory served me well, then they had to do with certain Indian and Eskimo legends concerning a god of the Arctic winds.

At first glance there seemed to be little in the professor’s books to show more than a normally lively and entertaining anthropological and ethnic interest in such legends, though the author seemed to dwell at unnecessary length on Gaoh and Hotoru, air-elementals of the Iroquois and Pawnee respectively, and particularly upon Negafok, the Eskimo cold-weather spirit. I could see that he was trying to tie such myths in with the little-known legend of the Wendigo, of which he seemed to deal far too positively.

“The Wendigo,” Bridgeman wrote, “is the avatar of a Power come down the ages from forgotten gulfs of immemorial lore; this great
Tornasuk
is none other than Ithaqua Himself, the Wind-Walker, and the very sight of Him means a freezing and inescapable death for the unfortunate observer. Lord Ithaqua, perhaps the very greatest of the mythical air-elementals, made war against the Elder Gods in the Beginning; for which ultimate treason He was banished to frozen Arctic and interplanetary heavens to ‘Walk the Winds Forever’ through fantastic cycles of time and to fill the
Esquimaux
with dread, eventually earning His terrified worship and His sacrifices. None but such worshipers may look upon Ithaqua—for others to see Him is certain death! He is as a dark outline against the sky, anthropomorphic, a manlike yet bestial silhouette, striding both in low icy mists and high stratocumulus, gazing down upon the affairs of men with carmine stars for eyes!”

Bridgeman’s treatment of the more conventional mythological figures was less romantic; he remained solidly within the framework of accepted anthropology. For example:

“The Babylonian storm-god, Enlil, was designated ‘Lord of the Winds.’ Mischievous and mercurial in temperament, he was seen by the superstitious peoples of the land to walk in hurricanes and sand-devils….” Or, in yet more traditional legend: “Teuton mythology shows Thor as being the god of thunder; when thunderstorms boiled and the heavens roared, people knew that what they heard was the sound of Thor’s war-chariot clattering through the vaults of heaven.”

Again, I could not help but find it noticeable that while the author here poked a sort of fun at these classical figures of mythology, he had
not
done so when he wrote of Ithaqua. Similarly, he was completely dry and matter-of-fact in his descriptive treatment of an illustration portraying the Hittite god-of-the-storm, Tha-thka, photographed from his carved representation upon a baked clay tablet excavated in the Toros Mountains of Turkey. More, he compared Tha-thka with Ithaqua of the Snows, declaring that he found parallels in the two deities other than the merely phonetical similarity of their names.

Ithaqua, he pointed out, had left webbed tracks in the Arctic snows, tracks that the old
Esquimaux
tribes feared to cross; and Tha-thka (carved in a fashion very similar to the so-called “Amarna style” of Egypt, to mix ethnic art groups) was shown in the photograph as having star-shaped eyes of a rare, dark carnelian…and webbed feet! Professor Bridgeman’s argument for connection here seemed valid, even sound, yet I could see how such an argument might very well anger established anthropologists of “the Old School.” How, for instance, might one equate a god of the ancient Hittites with a deity of comparatively modern Eskimos? Unless of course one was to remember that in a certain rather fanciful mythology Ithaqua had only been banished to the North following an abortive rebellion against the Elder Gods. Could it be that
before
that rebellion the Wind-Walker strode the high currents and tides of atmospheric air over Ur of the Chaldees and ancient Khem, perhaps even prior to those lands being named by their first inhabitants? Here I laughed at my own fancies, conjured by what the writer had written with such assumed authority, and yet my laughter was more than a trifle strained, for I found a certain cold logic in Bridgeman that made even his wildest statement seem merely a calm, studied exposition….

And there were, certainly, wild statements.

The slimmest of the three books was full of them, and I knew after reading only its first few pages that this must be the source of those flights of fancy that had caused Bridgeman’s erstwhile colleagues to desert him. Yet without a doubt the book was by far the most interesting of the three, written almost in a fervor of mystical allusion with an abundance—a
plethora
—of obscure hints suggestive of half-discernible worlds of awe, wonder, and horror bordering and occasionally impinging upon our very own.

I found myself completely enthralled. It seemed plain to me that behind all the hocus-pocus there was a great mystery here—one that, like an iceberg, showed only its tip—and I determined not to be satisfied with anything less than a complete verification of the facts concerning what I had started to think of as “the Bridgeman case.” After all, I seemed to be ideally situated to conduct such an investigation: this was where the professor had died, the borderland of that region in which he had alleged at least one of his mythological beings to exist; and Judge Andrews, provided I could get him to talk, must be something of an authority on the man; and, possibly my best line of research yet, Bridgeman’s widow herself was here now in this very town.

Just why this determination to dabble should have so enthused me I still cannot say; unless it was the way that Tha-thka, which Being Bridgeman had equated with Ithaqua, was shown upon the Toros Mountains tablet as walking splayfooted through a curious mixture of cumulonimbus and nimbo-stratus—cloud formations that invariably presage snow and violent thunderstorms! The ancient sculptor of that tablet had certainly gauged the Wind-Walker’s domain well, giving the mythical creature something of solidarity in my mind, though it was still far easier for me to accept those peculiar clouds of ill omen than the Being striding among them….

II

It was something of a shock for me to discover, when finally I thought to look at my wristwatch, that Bridgeman’s books had kept me busy all through the afternoon and it was now well into evening. I found that my eyes had started to ache with the strain of reading as it grew darker in the small library room. I put on the light and would have returned to the books yet again but for hearing, at the outer door of the house, a gentle knocking. The library door was slightly ajar so that I could hear the Judge answering the knocking and his gruff welcome. I was sure that the voice that answered him was that of Bridgeman’s widow, for it was vibrant with a nervous agitation as the visitor entered the house and went with the Judge to his study. Well, I had desired to meet her; this seemed the perfect opportunity to introduce myself.

Yet at the open door to the Judge’s study I paused, then quickly stepped back out of sight. It seemed that my host and his visitor were engaged in some sort of argument. He had just answered to some unheard question: “Not
me,
my dear, that is out of the question….But if you insist upon this folly, then I’m sure I can find someone to help you. God knows I’d come with you myself—even on this wild-goose chase you propose, and despite the forecast of heavy snow—but…my dear, I’m an old man. My eyes are no good anymore; my limbs are no longer as strong as they used to be. I’m afraid that this old body might let you down at the worst possible time. It’s bad country north of here when the snows come.”

“Is it simply that, Jason,” she answered him in her nervous voice, “or is it really that you believe I’m a madwoman? That’s what you as good as called me when I was here earlier.”

“You must forgive me for that, Lucille, but let’s face it—that story you tell is simply…
fantastic!
There’s no positive proof that the boy headed this way at all, just this premonition of yours.”