Horror Hunters

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Horror Hunters Page 17

by Roger Elwood


  “Claire—why haven’t you told him I’ve got a hoof too?”

  She looked frightened. “I—can’t,” she whispered. “I tried, and I can’t. There’s something that stops me.”

  I looked at the book, reading over the strange, musical sounds of the formula. They had a rhythm, a lilt. Claire said, “Dr. Ponder said I must recite that in a slow monotone, all the while thinking ‘Camel, be buried forever and never show your self to mankind.’ ”

  “Be buried forever? What about your foot? Aren’t you supposed to say something about your foot?”

  “Well, didn’t I?”

  “You did not.” I leaned forward and looked close into her eyes. “Say it again.”

  “ ‘Camel, be buried forever, and never show yourself to mankind.’ ”

  “Where’s the part about the foot?”

  She looked at me, puzzled. “Thad—didn’t you hear me? I distinctly said that the Camel was to restore my foot and yours and then lie down and rest.”

  “Did you, now? Say it again, just once more the way you’re supposed to.”

  Obediently she said, “ ‘Camel, be buried forever, and never show yourself to mankind.’ There. Was that clear enough? About the foot, and all?”

  Suddenly I understood. She didn’t know what she was saying! I patted her knee. “That was fine,” I said. I stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to think,” I said. “Mind, Claire? I think better when I walk. Dr. Ponder’ll be back soon. Wait here, will you?”

  She called to me, but I went on into the Wood. Once out of her sight, I circled back and downgrade, emerging on the rim of what I now knew was the Forbidden Valley. From this point I could easily see the bluff at the far end. There was no sign of the skull. I began to walk down to where it should be. I knew now that it was there, whether it could be seen or not. I wished I could be sure of a few dozen other things. Inside, I was still deeply shaken by what I had seen Luana doing, and by what it meant—by what it made of me, of Claire, of Ponder… .

  Behind me there was a horrible gargling sound. It was not a growl or a gurgle; it was exactly the hollow, fluid sound that emerges from bathrooms in the laryngitis season. I spun, stared.

  Staring back at me was one’ of the most unprepossessing human beings I have ever seen. He had matted hair and a scraggly beard. His eyes were out of line horizontally, and in disagreement with each other as to what they wanted to look at. One ear was pointed and the other was a mere clump of serrated flesh.

  I backed off a pace. “You’re Goo-goo.”

  He gabbled at me, waving his arms. It was a disgusting sound. I said, “Don’t try to stop me, Mister America. I know what I’m doing and I mean to do it. If you get too near me I’ll butter these rocks with you.”

  He gargled and bubbled away like mad, but kept his distance. Warily I turned and went on down the slope. I thought I heard Claire calling. I strode on, my mind awhirl. Luana. Ponder. Claire. Goo-goo. The chained skull, and the blue beast. The rabbit, Luana, Luana and those lips… . Ah-tay malkuth … and a cloven hoof. I shook my head to clear my brain.… vé G’boorah. . ..

  I was on level ground, approaching the bluff. “Get up, Camel!” I barked hoarsely. “Here I come, ready or not!” Shocking, the skull, the famous mark of the Camel’s Grave, appeared on the ground. It was a worn, weatherbeaten skull, worn far past the brilliant bleaching of bones merely desiccated and clean. It was yellowed, paper-brittle. The eyebrow ridges were not very prominent, and the lower jaw, what I could see of it, was long, firm. It’s most shocking feature was part of it, but not naturally part of it. It was a chain of some black metal, its lower link disappearing into the ground, its upper one entering the eye socket and coming out through the temple. The chain had a hand-wrought appearance, and although it was probably as thick as the day it was made, unrusted and strong, I knew instinctively that it was old, old. It seemed to be—it must be—watching me through its empty sockets. I thought I heard the chain clink once. The bleached horror seemed to be waiting.

  There was a small scuffling sound right at my heels. It was Goo-goo. I wheeled, snarling at him. He retreated, mouthing. I ground out, “Keep out of my reach, rosebud, or I’ll flatten you!” and moved around to the left of the skull where I could face the east.

  “Ah-té malkuth vé—” I began; and something ran across my foot. It was the blue beast, the familiar. It balanced by the skull, blinking, and disappeared. I looked up to see Goo-goo approaching again. His face was working; he was babbling and drooling.

  “Keep clear,” I warned him.

  He stopped. His clawlike hand went to his belt. He drew a horn-handled sheath knife. It was blue and keen. I had some difficulty in separating my tongue from the roof erf my mouth. I stood stiffly, trying to brace myself the way an alerted cat does, ready to leap in any direction, or up, or flat down.

  Goo-goo watched me. He was terrifying because he did not seem particularly tense, and I did not know what he was going to do. What was he, anyway? Surely more than a crazy deaf-mute, mad with loneliness. Was he really the jailer of a great Power? Or was he, in some way, in league with that disappearing bad-dream of a familiar?

  I began again: “Ah tay mahlkuth vé G’boor—” and again was distracted by the madman. For instead of threatening me with his glittering blade, he was performing some strange manual of arms with it, moving it from shoulder to shoulder as I spoke, extending it outwards, upwards … and he stopped when I stopped, looking at me anxiously.

  At last there seemed to be some pattern, some purpose, to what he was trying to do. When I spoke a certain phrase, he made a certain motion with the knife. “Ah tay …” I said experimentally. He touched his forehead with the knife. I tried it again; he did it again. Slowly, then, without chanting, I recited the whole rigmarole. Following me attentively, he touched his forehead, his chest, his right shoulder, his left, and on the final “Oh” he clasped hands together with the point of the knife upward.

  “Okay, chum,” I said. “Now what?”

  He immediately extended the knife to me, hilt first. Amazed, I took it. He nodded encouragingly and babbled. He also smiled, though the same grimace a few minutes earlier, before I was convinced of his honest intentions, would have looked like a yellow-fanged snarl to me. And upon me descended the weight of my appalling ignorance. How much difference did the knife make to the ritual? Was it the difference between the blanks and slugs in a gun? Or was it the difference between pointing it at myself or up in the air?

  Ponder would know. Ponder, it developed, did, and he told me, and I think he did it in spite of himself. As I stood there staring from the steel to the gibbering Goo-goo, Ponder’s great voice rolled down to me from the Wood end of the vale. “Thad! Not with the knife!”

  I glanced up. Ponder was coming down as fast as he could, helping Claire with one hand and all but dragging Luana with the other. Goo-goo began to dance with impatience, guggling away like an excited ape, pointing at me, at his mouth, at the knife, the staring skull. The blue beast flickered into sight between his legs, beside him, on his shoulder, and for a brief moment on his head, teetering there like some surrealistic plume. I took all this in and felt nothing but utter confusion.

  Claire called, “Put down the knife, Thad!”

  Something—some strange impulse from deep inside me, made me turn and grin at them as they scurried down toward me. I bellowed, “Why, Doc! I don’t qualify, do I?”

  Ponder’s face purpled. “Come out of there!” he roared. “Let Claire do it!”

  I reached down and yanked the makeshift stirrup from my boot, laughing like a maniac. I kicked off the toe of the boot with its padding, and hauled the rest up my leg. “What’s she got that I haven’t got?” I yelled.

  Ponder, still urging the girls forward, turned on Luana. “You see? He saw you feeding. He could see you! You should have known!” and he released her and backhanded her viciously. She rolled with the blow deftly, but a lot of it connect
ed. It was not she, however, but Claire who gasped. Luana’s face was as impassive as ever. I grunted and turned to face the skull, raising the knife. “How’s it go, little man?” I asked Goo-goo. I put the point of the knife on my forehead. “That it?”

  He nodded vociferously, and I began to chant.

  “Ah-tay …” I shifted the knife downward to my chest. Ponder was bellowing something. Claire screamed my name.

  “Mahlkuth. …” With part of my mind I heard, now, what Ponder was yelling. “You’ll free him! Stop it, you fool, you’ll free him!” And Claire’s voice again: “A gun. …” I thought, down deep inside, Free him! I put the knifepoint on my right shoulder.

  “Vé-G’boorah! There was the sharp bark of a shot. Something hit the small of my back. The blue beast stumbled from between my feet, and as I shifted the knife to my left shoulder, I saw it bow down and, with its mouth, lay something at my feet. It teetered there for a split second, its eyes winking like fan-blades in bright light, and I’ll swear the little devil grinned at me. Then it was gone, leaving behind a bullet on the grass.

  “Vé Gedula …” I chanted, conscious that so far I had not broken the compelling rhythm of the ancient syllables, nor missed a motion with the knife. Twice more the gun yapped, and with each explosion I was struck, once in the face, once on the neck. Not by bullets, however, but by the cold rubbery hide of the swift familiar, which dropped in front of me with its little cheeks bulging out like those of a chipmunk at acorn time. It put the two bullets down by the first and vanished. I clasped my hands on the knife-hilt, pressing it to my chest, point upward the way Goo-goo had done.

  “Lé o-lahm. …” From the comer of my eye I saw Ponder hurling himself at me, and the ragged figure of little Goo-goo rising up between us. Ponder struck the little man aside with one bear-like clubbing of his forearm, and was suddenly assaulted either by fifty of the blue familiars or by one moving fifty times as fast as a living thing ought to. It was in his ears, fluttering on his face, nipping the back of his neck, clawing at his nostrils, all at once. Ponder lost one precious second in trying to bat the thing away, and then apparently decided to ignore it. He launched himself at me with a roar, just as I came out with the final syllable of the incantation: “OM!”

  It isn’t easy to tell what happened then. They say The Egg hit Hiroshima with “a soundless flash.” It was like that. I stood where I was, my head turned away from the place where the skull had been, my eyes all but closed against that terrible cold radiance. Filtering my vision through my lashes, I saw Ponder still in midair, still coming toward me. But as he moved, he—changed. For a second he must have been hot, for his clothes charred. But he was cold when he hit me, cold as death. His clothes were a flurry of chilled soot; his skin was brittle, frigid, eggshell through which his bones burst and powdered. I stood, braced for a solid impact that never came, showered with the scorched and frozen detritus of what had been a man.

  Still I stood, holding the knife, for hardly a full second had passed; and my vision went out with that blinding light. I saw Claire thirty yards away on her knees, her face in her hands; and whether she had fallen or was praying I could not know. Goo-goo was on the ground where Ponder had stretched him, and near his body was the familiar, still at last. Beyond stood Luana, still on her feet, her auburn eyes blindly open to the great light, her face composed. She stepped forward slowly, hanging her arms, but with her head erect, her heated hair flung back. The cruel, steady light made sharp-edged shadows at the hinges of her jaw, for all they were sunlit. For a brief moment she was beautiful, and then she seemed to be walking down a staircase, for she grew shorter as she walked. Her taut skin billowed suddenly like a pillow-slip on a clothes-line, and her hair slipped down and drifted off in a writhing cloud. She opened her mouth, and it made a triangle, and she began to bleat. They were wordless sounds, each one higher in pitch than the one before. Up and up they went, growing fainter as they grew higher, turning to rat-squeaks, mouse-squeaks, bat-squeaks, and at last a high thin whistle that was not a sound at all but a pressure on the ear-drums. Suddenly there was nothing moving there at all; there was only a plaid skirt and a windbreaker tumbled together with blood on them. And a naked, lizard-like thing nosed out of the pathetic pile, raised itself up on skinny forelimbs, sniffed with its pointed snout at the light, and fell dead.

  Claire drew a long, gasping breath. The sound said nothing for Claire, but much for the vale. It said how utterly quiet it was. I looked again at the plaid skirt lying tumbled on the grass, and I felt a deep pain. I did not mourn Luana, for Luana never was woman; and I knew now that had I never seen her again after our last kiss over the gate, I would not have remembered her as a woman. But she had been beauty; she had been cool lips and infernal hair, and skin of many subtle sorts of rose; I mourned these things, in the face of which her lack of humanity was completely unimportant.

  The light dimmed. I dropped the knife and went to Claire. I sank down beside her and put my arms around her. She let her hands slide off her face and turned it into my shoulder. She was not crying. I patted her hair, and we rested there until I was moved to say, “We can look at him now,” and for a moment longer while we enjoyed the awe of knowing that all the while he had been standing there, released.

  Then, together, we turned our heads and looked at him.

  He had dimmed his pent-up light, but still he blazed. I will not say what he looked like, because he looked like only himself. I will not say he looked like a man, because no man could look like him. He said “Claire, take off your boot.”

  She bent to do it, and when she had, something flowed from him to us. I had my hoof under me. I felt it writhe and swell. There was an instant of pain. I grasped the hairy ankle as the coarse hair fell out, and then my foot was whole again. Claire laughed, patting and stroking her restored foot. I had never seen her face like that before.

  Then he laughed. I will not say what that was like either. “Thad, Thad, you’ve done it. You’ve bungled and stumbled, but you’ve done it.” I’ll say how he spoke, though. He spoke like a man.

  “What have I done?” I asked. “I have been pushed and pulled; I’ve thought some things out, and I’ve been both right and wrong—what have I done?”

  “You have done right—finally,” he chuckled. “You have set me free. You have broken walls and melted bars that are inconceivable to you … I’ll tell you as much as I can, though.

  “You see, for some hundreds of thousands of years I have had a—call it a jailer. He did not capture me: that was done by a far greater one than he. But the jailer’s name was Korm. And sometimes he lived as a bird and sometimes as an animal or a man. You knew him as Ponder. He was a minor wizard, and Luana was his familiar. I too have a familiar—Tiltol there.” He indicated the blue beast, stretched quietly out at his feet.

  “Imprisoned, I could do very little. Korm used to amuse himself by watching my struggles, and occasionally he would set up a spell to block me even further. Sometimes he would leave me alone, to get my hopes up, to let me begin to free myself, so that he could step in and check me again, and laugh… .

  “One thing I managed to do during one of those periods was to bring Claire’s parents together. Korm thought that the magic thing they had between them was the tool I was developing, and when it began to look like a strong magic, he killed them. He did not know until much later that Claire was my magic; and when he found it out, he made a new and irritating spell around me, and induced Claire to come out here and walk into it. It was supposed to kill her, but she was protected; all it did was to touch her with the mark of the beast—a cloven hoof. And it immobilized me completely for some hours.

  “When I could, I sent Tiltol after her with a new protection; without it she would be in real danger from Korm, for he was bound to find out how very special she was. Tiltol tried to weave the new protection around her—and found that he could not. Her aura was no longer completely her own. She had fallen in love; she had given part of herself away to yo
u, Thad. Now, since the new spell would work only on one in Claire’s particular condition, and since he could not change that, Tiltol found a very logical solution: He gave you a cloven hoof too, and then cast the protection over both of you. That’s why the bear-trap did not hurt you, and why the wasps couldn’t sting you.”

  “I’m beginning to see,” I said. “But—what’s this about the ritual? How did it set you free?”

  “I can’t explain that. Roughly, though, I might say that if you regard my prison as locked, and your presence as the key in the lock, the ritual was the turning of the key, and the use of the knife was the direction in which the key was turned. If you—or Claire, which was Korm’s intention—had used the ritual without the knife, I would have been more firmly imprisoned than ever, and you two would have lived out your lives with those hooves.” “What about Goo-goo? I thought for a while that he was the jailer.”

  He chuckled. “Bless you, no. He is what he seems to be—a harmless, half demented old man, keeping himself out of people’s way. He isn’t dead, by the way. When he wakes, he’ll have no recollection of all this. I practiced on him, to see if I could get a human being to perform the ritual, and he has been a good friend. He won’t lose by it. Speaking of the ritual, though, I’d like you to know that, spectacular as it might have been, it wasn’t the biggest part of the battle. That happened before—when you and Claire were talking to Ponder. Remember when Claire recited the spell and didn’t know what she was saying?”

  “I certainly do. That was when I suddenly decided there was something funny about Ponder’s story. He had hypnotized her, hadn’t he?”

  “Something very like it … he was in her mind and I, by the way, was in yours. That’s what made you leap up and go to Luana.”

 

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