Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  Thunstone is not unlike Wellman himself—large, bluff, strong, and determined. The first Thunstone adventure, “The Third Cry to Legba,” appeared in Weird Tales in 1943, and at that time Wellman wrote fifteen stories, but returned to him thirty years later with further stories and two novels, What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School of Darkness (1985). The other Thunstone stories were collected in The Third Cry to Legba in 2000.

  LESS THAN FIVE PERSONS HAVE EVER SEEN JOHN THUNSTONE frankly, visibly terrified, and less than two have lived through subsequent events to tell about it. Fear he knows and understands, for it is his chief study; but he cannot afford it very often as a personal emotion.

  And so he only smiled a little that afternoon in Central Park, and the hand at which Sabine Loel, the medium, clutched was as steady as the statue of Robert Burns under which she had asked him to meet her. A few snowflakes spun around them, settling on their dark coats. “I say that you are in more than mortal danger,” she repeated breathily. “I would not have dared recall myself to your attention for anything less important.”

  “I believe that,” smiled Thunstone, remembering when last they met, and how he had demonstrated to her complete satisfaction the foolish danger of calling up evil spirits without being ready to deal with them. Not one ounce of his big powerful body seemed tense. His square face was pale only by contrast to his black eyes and black mustache. Not even his restraint seemed overdone.

  “Whatever you think of my character, you know that I’m sensitive to spirit messages,” she went on. “This one came without my trying for it. Even the spirit control that gave it was in horror. The Shonokins are after you.” “I might have known that,” he told her. “After all, I acted with what they might consider officious enmity. I stopped them, I hope, from a preliminary move back toward the world power they say they held before human history began. A Shonokin died, not by my hand but by my arrangement, and his body was buried at a place where I want them never to come—living Shonokins, it seems, avoid only dead Shonokins. Their very nature forces them to strike back at me. But thank you for the warning.”

  “You think,” ventured Sabine Loel, “that I want to be your friend?” “You do, though your purpose is probably selfish. Thank you again.

  Now, I never had any malice toward you—so, for your own safety, won’t you go away and stay away? Avoid any further complication in—in what’s to happen between me and the Shonokins.” “What precautions—” she began to ask.

  “Precautions against the Shonokins,” explained Thunstone patiently, “are not like precautions against anything else in this world or out of it. Let them be my problem. Good-by.”

  Going, she looked back once. Her face was whiter than the increasing snowflakes. Thunstone filled his pipe with tobacco into which were mixed one or two rank but significant herbs. Long Spear, the Indian medicine man, had told him how much such things did to fight ill magic.

  Thunstone was living just then in a very comfortable, very ordinary hotel north of Times Square. He entered the lobby confidently enough, and rode up in the elevator without seeming to be apprehensive. But he paused in the corridor outside his own door as cautiously as though about to assail an enemy stronghold.

  He bent close to the panels without touching them. Earlier in the day he had closed and locked that door from outside, and had dripped sealing wax in three places at juncture of door and jamb, stamping the wax with the crusader’s ring he habitually wore. The wax looked undisturbed, its impress of the cross of Saint John staring up at him.

  With a knife-point he pried the blobs away. They had not been tampered with in the least. Inserting his key in the lock, he let himself in and switched on the lights in the curtained sitting room.

  At once he started back against the inner side of the door, setting himself for action. His first thought was that two men were there, one prone and one standing tensely poised. But, a hair-shaving of time later, he saw that these were dummies.

  The reclining dummy was made of one of Thunstone’s suits and a pillow from the bed in the next room. It lay on its back, cloth-stuffed arms and legs outflung. A tightly looped necktie made one end of the pillow into a headlike lump, and on this had been smudged a face, crudely but recognizably that of John Thunstone. Ink from the stand on the desk had been used to indicate wide, stupid eyes, a slack mouth under a lifelike mustache—the expression of one stricken instantly dead. The other figure stood with one slippered foot on the neck of the Thunstone effigy. It was smaller, perhaps a shade under the size of an average man. Sheets and towels and blankets, cunningly twisted, rolled and wadded together, made it a thing of genuinely artistic proportion and attitude. A sheet was draped loosely over it like a toga, and one corner of this veiled the place where a face would be.

  “Substitution magic?” said Thunstone under his breath. “This is something that’s going to happen to me . . . ” He turned toward the desk. “What’s that?”

  On the desk seemed to crouch a little pixy figure. Made from a handkerchief, like a clever little impromptu toy to amuse a child, it looked as though it pored over an open book, the Gideon Bible that is an item in every hotel room. Stepping that way, very careful not to touch anything, Thunstone bent to look.

  The book was open to the Prophet Joel, second chapter. Thunstone’s eye caught a verse in the middle of the page, the ninth verse:

  They leap upon the city; they run upon the wall; they climb up into the houses; they enter in at the windows like a thief.

  Thunstone has read many books, and the Bible is one of them. He knew the rest of the frightening second chapter of Joel, which opens by foretelling the coming of terrible and ungainsayable people, before which no normal creature could stand. “They enter in at the windows like a thief,” he repeated, and inspected his own windows, in the sitting room and the adjoining bedroom. All were closed, and the latches still bore blobs of wax with his seal.

  These phenomena had taken place, it remained to be understood, without the agency of any normal entry by normal beings. Movement and operation by forces at a distance—telekinesis was the word for it, fondly used by Charles Richet of France, and tossed about entertainingly by the Forteans and other amateur mystics. Thoughts crossed Thunstone’s mind, of broken dishes placed in locked chests by Oriental fakirs and taken out mended; of Harry Houdini’s escapes and shackle-sheddings, which many persons insisted were by supernatural power; of how the living body of Caspar Hauser had so suddenly flicked into existence, and of how the living body of Ambrose Bierce had so suddenly flicked out. There were a variety of other riddles, which many commentators purported to explain by the overworked extra-dimensional theory. Somebody or something, it remained, had fashioned a likeness of his own downfall in his own sitting room, without getting in. Again approaching the desk without touching the Bible or the little figure crouched beside it, Thunstone drew out a drawer and produced a sheaf of papers.

  The top sheet was a second or third carbon of his own typescript. Other copies of this sheet were sealed in various envelopes with equally interesting documents, placed here and there in the custody of trusted allies, each envelope inscribed To be opened only in the event of my death—John Thunstone. The knowledge that such collections existed was a prime motive of some of Thunstone’s worst enemies to keep him alive and well. There was Sabine Loel’s warning, for instance . . . Sitting down well away from the grotesque tableau, Thunstone glanced over his own grouping of known and suggested facts about the Shonokins.

  Those facts were not many. The Shonokins were, or said they were, a people who had been fortuitously displaced as rulers of America by the ancestors of the red Indians. A legend which they themselves insisted upon was that ordinary human evolution was one thing and Shonokin evolution another. They hinted here and there at tokens of long-vanished culture and power, and at a day soon to come when their birthright would return to them. To Thunstone’s carbon were appended the copy of a brief article on the “Shonokin superstition” from The Encyclopae
dia of American Folkways; a letter from a distinguished but opinionated professor of anthropology who dismissed the Shonokins as an aboriginal myth less well founded than Hiawatha or the Wendigo; and Thunstone’s own brief account of how someone calling himself a Shonokin had made strange demands on the Conley family on a Southern farm, and of what had befallen that same self-styled Shonokin.

  Finishing the study of his own notes, Thunstone again regarded the grouped dummies, which he had thus far forborne to touch.

  The standing figure, with its foot on the neck of the Thunstone likeness, had hands that thrust out from under its robe. They had been made of a pair of Thunstone’s own gloves, and on closer scrutiny proved to be strangely prepared. The forefinger and middle finger of each had been tucked in at the tip, so that the third fingers extended longest. The only Shonokin that Thunstone had ever met had displayed third fingers of that same unnatural proportion. Thunstone nodded to himself, agreeing that this was plainly the effigy of a Shonokin. He turned his mind to the problem of why the images had been thus designed and posed.

  A simple warning to him? He did not think so. The Shonokins, whatever they really were and wanted, would not deal in warnings—not with him at least. Was the group of figures then an actual weapon, like the puppets which wizards pierce with pins to torture their victims? But Thunstone told himself that he had never felt better in his life. What remained? What reaction, for instance, was expected of him?

  He mentally put another person in his place, a man of average mind, reaction and behavior. What would such a person do? Tear up the dummies, of course, with righteous indignation—starting with that simulation of the Shonokin with a conquering foot on its victim’s neck. Thunstone allowed himself the luxury of a smile.

  “Not me,” he muttered.

  Yet again he went to the desk, and returned the paper to the drawer. He opened another drawer. Catching hold of the Bible, he used it to thrust the little handkerchief-doll into the drawer, closed and locked it in. Then, and not until then, he approached the two full-sized figures. They were arranged on a rug. For all its crumpled-fabric composition, the simulated Shonokin seemed to stand there very solidly. John Thunstone knelt, gingerly took hold of the arm of his own image, and with the utmost deliberation and care eased it toward him, from under the foot of its oppressor. When he had dragged it clear of the rug, he took hold of the edge of the rug itself and drew it smoothly across the floor. The Shonokin shape rode upright upon it. He brought it to the door of the empty sitting room closet, opened the door, and painstakingly edged the thing, rug and all, inside.

  This done, he closed and locked the door. From the bedroom he brought sticks of sealing wax, which he always kept in quantity for unorthodox uses. After some minutes, he had sealed every crack and aperture of the closet door, making it airtight. He marked the wax here and there with the Saint John’s cross of his ring. Finally returning to his own likeness, he lifted it confidently and propped it upright in a chair, and sat down across from it. He winked at the rough mockery of his own face, which did not seem so blank and miserable now. Indeed, it might be said to wink back at him; or perhaps the fabric of the pillowslip was folded across one of the smudgy eyes.

  A little quiver ran through the room, as though a heavy truck had trundled by somewhere near. But no truck would be operating in the sealed closet.

  Thunstone lighted his pipe again, gazing into the gray clouds of smoke he produced. What he may have seen there caused him to retain his smile. He sat as relaxed and motionless as a big, serene cat for minutes that threatened to become hours, until at last his telephone rang.

  “Hello,” he said into the instrument. “This is John Thunstone.” “You danger yourself,” a voice told him, a voice accented in a fashion that

  he could not identify with any foreign language group in all his experience. “And you are kind to warn me,” replied Thunstone with the warmest

  air of cordiality. “Are you going to offer me advice, too?”

  “My advice is to be wise and modest. Do not try to pen up a power greater than hurricanes.”

  “And my advice,” returned Thunstone, “is not to underestimate the wit or determination of your adversary. Good day.”

  He hung up the receiver, reached for the Bible, and turned from the Prophet Joel to the Gospel of Saint John. Its first chapter, specified by the old anti-diabolists as a direct indictment of evil magic’s weakness, gave him comfort, though he was reading it for perhaps the four hundredth time. The telephone rang again, and again he lifted it.

  “I deplore your bad judgment in challenging us,” said the same voice that had spoken before. “You are given one more chance.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Thunstone. “You wouldn’t give me a chance under any circumstances. I won’t play into your hands.” He paused. “Rather unusual hands you have, don’t you? Those long third fingers—”

  This time it was his caller who hung up suddenly. Musing, Thunstone selected from his shelf of books a leather-bound volume entitled These Are Our Ancestors. He leafed through it, found the place he wanted, and began to read:

  Stone-age Europe was spacious, rich and uncrowded, but it could acknowledge only one race of rulers.

  Homo Neanderthalensis—the Neanderthal Man—must have grown up there from the dim beginning, was supreme and plentiful as the last glaciers receded. His bones have been found from Germany to Gibraltar, and his camps and flints and fire-ashes. We construct his living image, stooped and burly, with a great protruding muzzle and beetling brows. Perhaps he was excessively hairy—not a man as we know men, but not a brute, either. Fire was his, and the science of flint-chipping. He buried his dead, which shows he believed in an after-life, probable in a deity. He could think, perhaps he could speak. He could fight, too.

  When our true forefathers, the first Homo Sapiens, invaded through the eastern mountain passes or out of the great valley now drowned by the Mediterranean, there was battle. Those invaders were in body and spirit like us, their children. They could not parley with the abhorrent foe they found. There could be no rules of warfare, no truces or treaties, no mercy to the vanquished. Such a conflict could die only when the last adversary died.

  This dawn-triumph of our ancestors was the greatest, because the most fundamental, in the history of humanity. No champion of mankind ever bore a greater responsibility to the future than that first tall hunter who crossed, all aware, the borders of Neanderthal country.

  The book sagged in Thunstone’s hands. His eyes seemed to pierce the mists of time. He saw, more plainly than in an ordinary dream, a landscape of meadow and knoll and thicket, with wooded heights on the horizon. Through the bright morning jogged a confident figure, half-clad in fur, with his long black hair bound in a snakeskin fillet, a stone axe at his girdle and a bone-tipped javelin in one big hand. If the frill of beard had been shaved from his jaw, he might have been taken for John Thunstone.

  He was trailing something—the deer he had waylaid and speared earlier in the day. There it was up ahead, fallen and quiet and dead. The hunter’s wise eyes narrowed. Something dark and shaggy crouched beyond it, seeming to drag or worry at the carcass. A bear? The javelin lifted in the big tanned fist, the bearded mouth shouted a challenge.

  At that the shaggy thing rose on two legs to face him, and it was not a bear.

  Thunstone’s eloquent fancy had identified the hunter with himself. It was as if he personally faced that rival for the dead prey, at less than easy javelin-casting distance. It stood shorter than he but broader, its shoulders and chest and limbs thatched with hair. Its eyes met his without faltering, deep bright eyes that glared from a broad shallow face like the face of a shaggy lizard. Its ears pricked like a wolf ’s, it slowly raised immense hands, and the third fingers of those hands were longer than the other fingers.

  Thunstone rose from his chair. The fancied landscape of long ago faded from his mind’s eye, and he was back in his hotel sitting room. But the hairy thing with the strange hands w
as there, too, and it was moving slowly forward.

  Thunstone’s immediate thought was that he had expected something like this. The Neanderthal man, says H. G. Wells, was undoubtedly the origin of so many unchancy tales of ogres, trolls, mantacors and similar monsters. Small wonder that such a forbidding creature had impressed itself on the night memories of a race . . . It was not coming toward him, but past him, toward the sealed door. Its strange-fingered hands pawed at the sealed cracks.

  Thunstone’s pipe was still in his hand. It had not gone out. He carried it to his mouth, drew strongly to make the fire glow, and walked across the carpet to the very side of the hairy thing. When he had come within inches, he blew a thick cloud of the herb-laden smoke into the ungainly face.

  Even as it lurched around to glare, it was dissolving like one scene in a motion picture melting into another. It vanished as the smoke-cloud vanished. The telephone was ringing yet a third time.