Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois

by Pierre V. Comtois

  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.

  But Adele’s shout was not one of fear, but of defiance.

  “No!” she cried. “Not now! Not yet!”

  Quickly, she ran to Daniel and stood before him as if shielding him from something and began reciting the same strange words she’d been saying when Ruth first encountered her.

  “Azathoth…phnglwnph…urgll…echinisis…” Over and over she repeated the unintelligible phrases, as if trying to ward off whatever was happening. But if that really was what she was trying to do, her efforts seemed useless. “Azathoth…phnglwnph…urgll…echinisis…” she tried again, advancing a little way toward the center of the stone circle. “Stop, O Great One!” she shouted, unconsciously switching to English. “I implore you with the utterance of your secret name…” And here she spoke aloud something that Ruth recognized vaguely as the word that had been written on the note attached to Adele’s refrigerator. She repeated it a number of times, enough for
it to actually begin to make phonetic sense to Ruth.

  “Now is not the time!” Adele continued. “The sight of you will be profaned by the presence of an unbeliever! I am your true acolyte! I am the one who has made all the sacrifices, slaughtered the calves, and endured the self-inflicted ritual of placing your Sign upon my body…”

  At that Adele moved quickly, and suddenly had pulled aside the straps of her overalls and torn open her shirt exposing an elaborate tattoo that Ruth could plainly see involved a hideous display of wormy filaments gathered around a sigil incised over her belly. In its center her navel, painted like the rest of her, stared like the single eye of a demented Cyclops. Feeling both repelled and attracted at the sight, Ruth vaguely recalled seeing a similar design on the Turners’ barn.

  Screaming now herself, Ruth suddenly staggered back and, lifting a hand to wipe the perspiration streaming from her head, she remembered the gun she was holding in her hand. Adele was still shouting imprecations toward the disturbance in the atmosphere over the circle of stones that Ruth could now see was blurring out the stars behind it. And even as she watched with growing horror, it seemed to her that the blurriness began to congeal into the likeness of the image upon Adele’s body, and that something was snaking out from it…

  Suddenly, there was a soundless explosion and a long scream of utter despair as the night was lit in a brilliant burst of light.

  Blinded and desperate to regain her sight, Ruth rubbed her eyes with the balls of her fists and, when at last she began to see again, she saw Daniel’s rifle lying on the ground where she’d dropped it, a thin wisp of smoke still drifting from the barrel. Quickly, she picked it up and aimed it toward the circle of stones. But the emergency of only a few seconds before seemed to have passed. The sky above was once more filled with stars, the air devoid of disturbances or the strange image she thought she had seen in those final seconds.

  Trembling slightly and still half-blinded, Ruth looked for Daniel and found him standing in the darkness, outside the circle of stones, still obviously in a trance. Picking up his shirt where it had been tossed on a tree stump, she draped it around his naked shoulders and slipped his arms into the sleeves. She was relieved when he began to fasten the buttons on his own. Satisfied, Ruth turned again toward the stone circle but saw no sign of Adele. Whether she had run off or simply vanished she didn’t care, so long as she had her husband back. Slipping her hand into Daniel’s, Ruth quickly led him away from the scene and, as they recrossed the cleared field, a kind of desperation overcame her so that she began to move faster, suddenly in a great hurry to leave the Turner farm and Dunwich altogether. Now they were among the great piles of brush at the lower end of the field and Ruth noticed that one seemed to be burning. Grateful for the additional light cast by the fire, Ruth used it to find her way to the cart path that led back to the farmhouse. But as she passed the burning brush, she couldn’t help looking in its direction, wondering idly how it had come to be lit. And as she stared, she thought she saw something in it other than the blackened bones of mangled trees. Wary of the heat and the danger of flying embers, she drew closer to the pile and, seeing what it was that rested there amid the flames, she recoiled in horror. The flames licking at jeans and work boots and hair already smoldering, Ruth nevertheless had no trouble recognizing the features of Josh Turner, as the dew that had collected on his face and naked torso earlier in the evening sheened in the flickering light.

  After that, Ruth neither cared about how the fire had been lit nor the whereabouts of Adele. All she wanted was to get as far away from Dunwich as she possibly could. The mad dash from the field to the farmhouse, boarding the pickup, and the crazy speed with which she fishtailed down the long driveway became only a blur to her. She barely even noticed the screech of her tires and the violence she might have done to the truck’s transmission as she tore down Old Swamp Road and headed for the Pike. In fact, the details of that senseless flight only began to come back to her after she was forced to slow down when the road became too curvy for speeding.

  It was only after she’d reached the center of town that she was able to calm down and check on Daniel where he sat beside her.

  “Are you all right, darling?” she asked, placing a reassuring hand on his arm while trying to keep her eyes on the darkened road ahead. There was no response and when Ruth hazarded a look in his direction, all she could see was the deep contours of her husband’s face lit in the eerie glow of the dashboard lights. Feeling the tenseness of his muscles beneath her hand, she removed it and resumed her two fisted grip on the truck’s steering wheel. Ahead of her, the cracked and pot-holed roadway leading to the Aylesbury Pike snaked into the gloom beyond the reach of the truck’s headlights. On either side was the impenetrable darkness of the forest that opened only occasionally when a pasture or cornfield was passed.

  “Don’t worry, darling, we’ll be home soon,” she said, feeling the need to reassure Daniel as much as herself.

  As she drove, Ruth found herself frustrated at Daniel’s lack of response but, convinced that something might be happening deep in his subconscious, she decided that conversation, even one sided conversation, could help.

  “Do you know what Adele was trying to do out there, Daniel?” she asked, pausing to see if there was any response, but there was none. “We’ve always heard those stories about Dunwich but we never really believed them…at least I didn’t…well not much anyway, but…”

  Had he said something? She listened a moment but didn’t hear anything more.

  “What about those stones in the clearing, Daniel?” she tried again. “The stones that were set in a circle? The ones you said that you and Josh found after clearing the forest away?”

  Looking closely, she thought Daniel was struggling to speak…or was it only her imagination? Her mind drifting, she thought of the stone circle again and remembered the diagrams she had seen in the farmhouse that matched the layout of the stones…crisscrossed with geometric lines and mathematical symbols…and the note written by Adele to her father! With all those calculations, was it possible she could have known ahead of time where the stone circle lay? And if so, could she even have been the one to suggest to Josh that the field ought to be cleared? Her mind racing, Ruth even wondered if the reason Adele had married Josh in the first place was simply to gain access to the stone circle. But that would have meant years of planning…and now she recalled what Myrtle had said about the Coburns, that the family had first come to Dunwich because of an interest in the history of local Indian tribes, the ones who’d always been suspected of having something to do with the area’s megalithic sites.

  Ruth shivered as the realization slowly dawned on her how long the Coburns must have been planning before Adele snared Josh Turner in their schemes. It all made sense now why a beauty like Adele would settle for a lump like Josh. Ruth shivered again at the cold blooded nature of the whole thing.

  “But what was it all for?” she asked aloud. “Why are there always questions and never any answers…wait a minute…wait a minute…” Ruth thought hard for a moment, there was something else she’d seen somewhere…yes! The note on the Turner’s refrigerator! It had said something about asking questions but not being able to understand the answers and that “Josh wasn’t right,” the same thing that Lizzy Doderholz had told to Myrtle Potter!

  But wasn’t right for what? Ask questions of whom? And then it occurred to her that some of the words Adele had been uttering when she first came upon her could have been names. Casting her thoughts back, Ruth tried to reconstruct the events that led up to her meeting with Adele, how she followed the cart path to the cleared field, how she walked up the hill to the crest and how she first saw the stone circle. Adele was sitting on a branch, hitting a drum or something. She said some things that sounded like Latin but one word at least, Ruth had recognized, what was it?

  “Azathoth!” she said suddenly. Something like that, but was it a name?

  And then, after Adele had been interrup
ted, she seemed desperate to stop whatever it was she’d started. Then she began to shout that other name…the one she wanted to talk to her father about. She was calling not for someone but some thing…like in those stories she used to hear about Dunwich when she was a girl. Weren’t there always folks selling their souls in order to call down things from outside? Or sacrificing their first born or something…? Her thoughts stopped right there. “Josh wasn’t right…” she recalled the phrase again and in her mind’s eye she saw again Josh’s body in the fire…now she really was frightened. Glancing over at Daniel as he continued to stare empty eyed at the road ahead, she suddenly realized what a narrow escape they both had had. That is, if she was going to believe the conclusion her thoughts had brought her to. Had Adele been trying to use first Josh, then Daniel as conduits to communicate with some creature from another world? It seemed too preposterous a notion to take seriously and yet, it was obvious that Adele at least believed it…believed it enough to have murdered Josh to do it! What had happened that first time? According to the note she had read, Adele had attempted to ask Josh some questions but that his replies were meaningless. Was that why she ended up using Daniel? Hoping that somehow, he would prove a better conduit than the slower thinking Josh? And what kind of questions did she want answers to?