Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  “But what of the animals in the millpond?” I asked.

  “How should I know? Maybe they take some sort of a fit that makes them leap into the water. It could be anything like that.” He was complete in his confidence, but his self-assuredness did not relieve me of that foreboding which was now almost a part of my mind.

  We finished supper shortly after total darkness enveloped the forest. Varnum rose in the circle of firelight, stretched, and rubbed his unshaven jowls.

  “Are you going digging tomorrow”” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ll try to find the grave of Pauquatoag. And you?”

  “I’ll ride north-west about eight miles. There’s a stand of pine that looks good from here.” He scratched his sides and, without a further word, entered his tent and drew down the doorflap.

  Since the night chill had come up, I banked the fire and retired to my tent, bringing the few birch rolls with me. By the light of the kerosene lantern I sat for an hour deciphering those of the records which were easily legible.

  Although fragmentary, they spoke of the last days of the tribe during the smallpox epidemic, which they believed was a curse levied upon them because of the illicit congress between Pauquatoag’s wife and the colonist. One roll mentioned that at the first sign of smallpox tokens on her body the woman was slaughtered most cruelly and her carcass literally thrown to the dogs. But this gesture of appeasement to the gods was ineffectual—each succeeding roll was covered with drawings of dismembered bodies, the Massaquoit method of depicting death from disease. The living perished even as they keened the dirges for the dead in their birch lodges.

  When I found myself drowsing over the records I snuffed the lantern, bedded down, and was immediately asleep. But it was not long after midnight when I suddenly awoke to the feel of Varnum shaking me. In the glare of his battery lantern I could see his rifle glinting in his hand.

  “Get up,” he said. “Something’s wrong outside.”

  I drew on my leggings and seized my own rifle. In the darkness of the campsite the ashes of the banked fire glowed hotly.

  “To the northeast,” Varnum whispered. “Animal noises.”

  I listened carefully, straining to hear over the roiling of the Penaubsket, which had risen during the night. When I had retired the only sounds were the metrical chirruping of the crickets and the eerie call of a night-roving whippoorwill. I could still hear only these sounds, and the river. I looked at Varnum and shrugged.

  “Wait till the wind swings around,” he said.

  The breeze, which had been at our backs, began to turn with excruciating slowness until it cooled our faces as we stared off into the black wood. As its direction shifted, the wind brought with it at first the merest suspicion of a sound on the very edge of audibility, which gradually burgeoned into a high murmur. With a thrill of fear I recognized the sound as a frantic chorus of animal voices.

  “Coming this way,” Varnum said. He snapped off the safety on his rifle.

  “What’s driving them?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—never saw anything like this.”

  Even as he spoke the murmur became a steady wail of individual yipping ululations. From the edge of the camp came the noise of bodies thudding through the thickets of scrub pine. We dropped to our knees by the tents, rifles at the ready, just as a wave of small dark shapes burst into the lantern-lit clearing filling the night with a mad chattering as they swept over the ground. Some of the larger animals could not check their momentum and plunged through the fire, sending a plume of sparks through the tops of the pines and hemlocks. Missing their grips on the dark branches above, squirrels dropped into the light, then scurried in confusion back into the total darkness. Under the press of bodies the two tents collapsed. Loose gear was thrown about the camp and into the thickets on the edge of the clear ground. All at once a full-grown buck exploded into the clearing and made for us blindly, his great rack of antlers lowered. We fire simultaneously, and the shock of the slugs lifted the spray from his sides as he leapt high in the air, then thudded dead to the earth. All the animals headed unerringly for the Penaubsket, as if they were being herded to their destruction. Behind us we heard splashings as the first of the wave skittered down the steep banks into the flood. But the noise did not subside—a horrible collective moan, made in the extremities of terror.

  Then, as quickly as it had begun, the stampede ended. The night was still again, save for the river, the crickets, and the lone whippoorwill. We waited without a word for fifteen minutes, each on one knee, safeties still off and torches out, peering into the forest. Although the air was chill Varnum mopped his brow.

  “Did you see anything?” I asked.

  “I—I don’t know.” Varnum rose hesitantly and began building up the fire. “For a time I thought I saw something—something blue, like a glow, through the trees. But it was so faint I’m not sure.”

  I was baffled. “What could have caused such a flight? There was no fire, no sound except that of the animals. Yet they were running for their lives.”

  In the glow of the fire Varnum’s face was haggard.

  “Do you really think I look like Prester?” he asked.

  “Why—yes. The resemblance is a bit startling. Why do you ask?” There was a macabre oddity about his question in these circumstances. “Never mind—-just a thought.” He laughed, but it was a dry, whickering sound, rooted not in humor but in fear.

  For the remainder of the night we sat by the fire, dozing on our rifles, never daring to fall asleep completely. The first timorous glow of dawn through the ground mist rising from the marshes was a welcome sight. With the coming of day we repegged our tents and retired for a few hours’ rest.

  By nine o’clock the fat sun had dispelled the forest chill. Varnum approached me as I tightened the harness about the pack horse in preparation for the short trek to the burial ground.

  “Say, how much longer do you want to stay here?” His manner lacked the arrogance which had grated on me at other times. As he spoke, his tone was almost supplicating.

  “After last night, I’m not sure,” I replied. I had planned to stay at least a week, but now it seems there is something wrong in this forest. The warden should be notified about the animals.”

  “But how much longer?” he asked.

  “If I can find the grave of Pauquatoag today, we can leave in three days at the very latest.”

  “Then I’ll give you a hand,” Varnum said. Apparently his desire to see the timber resources in the area had vanished.

  We rode to the burial ground, each sunk in his own thoughts. Varnum was undoubtedly troubled by the wave of animals which had come to a watery end in the Penaubsket. As for myself, I was frankly puzzled and not a little disturbed. As far as I knew, there was nothing in the natural order that could cause such a phenomenon except fire—and in the fungused, dripping underbrush that night there had been no fire, save for the eerie but harmless glows over the fens adjoining the river. Disease organisms could cause such madness, but I knew of none that affected such a large number of species simultaneously. Had I been a zoologist, perhaps I would have exulted over the chance of discovering new information about the behavior of forest dwellers. As a student of ancient records, versed only incidentally in animal lore, I could only stand in awe and bewilderment.

  All that second day we worked at the burial ground. I had abandoned my plan of collecting as many of the subsidiary rolls as possible, and instead aimed at locating the grave of Pauquatoag immediately. Varnum and I hammered our iron sounding bars into the flinty soil innumerable times, locating the individual graves by the softness of their contents as contrasted to the density of the surrounding soil. As we probed I noticed that Varnum’s hand trembled as he guided the bar. He swallowed often, and although the day was cool his face and neck were covered with a web of perspiration. The man had a look of doom about him.

  It was late afternoon when our probes found an area of soft soil which, because of its size, could only
be the grave of an important member of the tribe. As we dug through the layers of decaying pine needles and sterile earth, my conviction grew that this was indeed the grave of Pauquatoag. We removed cache after cache of wampumpeag, the cowrie shell money which paid the spirit’s passage to the next world. Our trowels and shovels uncovered fire-blackened cooking utensils, fine weapons, and the remains of what had been rich ceremonial vestments three hundred years before. But the richest treasure would be the records which chronicled the life of the shaman, his feats, his genealogy, and his death.

  With each succeeding foot that we penetrated into the grave Varnum’s tension grew, and was transmitted in part to me. He did not speak, but I could read his anxiety in his jerky motions as he wielded the shovel and in the serious cast of his features. Although I had opened many graves in my researches, I resonated with his emotion. A strange unreasoning pall of fear settled over the burial ground.

  We struck the level of ashes in which would be buried the pictographs. The body, or bones, would be just below this. Gently, with a small whisk broom and an old lobster pick, I separated the fragile rolls from their protective crust of ash and handed them to Varnum as he knelt on the lip of the grave. He dropped one and apologized for his clumsiness, saying that he was not himself. And I, kneeling in the mold above the resting place of the greatest of the northeastern tribal sorcerers, was not completely composed myself.

  When the rolls were cleaned and packed in their padded boxes I walked to where Varnum was sitting like a dumb man.

  “Shall we have a look?”

  He nodded and rose with an air of resignation. We re-entered the excavation and with trowels cut into the hardened ash, which the Massaquoits believed would preserve the skeleton for eternity, for any injury to the remains would affect the spirit in the next world. We scraped and sifted through at least a half-yard of the grey ash. Then Varnum’s trowel rang against a granite ledge.

  “Oh God,” he whispered to himself, “the bottom.”

  I continued digging in my corner of the excavation, trying to uncover some part of the remains. But not a fragment of bone was at the bottom.

  “Nothing,” I said quietly. We stared at each other. The layer of ash had been unbroken, the funereal gifts in perfect arrangement, the grave undisturbed for three centuries—and yet, no remains.

  Beads of perspiration broke out on Varnum’s brow. The forest at dusk, which had been tranquil, became ominous because of our discovery.

  “But bodies just can’t vanish, can they?” asked Varnum, almost pleading.

  “There is always a trace,” I said. “Sometimes, if the soil is abnormally acid and water continually leaches down, the bones, the clothing, even metal objects will disintegrate. But the hair always remains. Yards of it, in the case of a woman, since it continues growing for a time after death.”

  “There’s no water seepage here,” Varnum said. “The grave bottom’s on a granite shelf, and there’s no hair at all. Almost as though there never were a body.”

  “Ridiculous—these Indians did not make mock graves. This one is genuine, but, inexplicably, something has happened to the remains. I’ve never encountered such a thing before.”

  We rose in the ashen light. “We’ve done all we can here,” I said. “During the next two days I’ll clean the rolls further and pack them in preservative for the trip back. Then we’ll fill the grave and leave Pauquatoag for the paleontologists. We must get back to Dunstable and notify the authorities about that stampede last night.”

  Varnum helped me to strap the record containers securely to the back of the pack horse. We rode back to the tents, arriving a few minutes before universal darkness settled over the wood. Against the possibility of another stampede we decided to stand watches through the remainder of the nights we would be on the camping ground.

  During the next two days I was continually busy preparing the records for transport back to Dunstable and, eventually, the British Museum. Every particle of ash which might abrade the delicately figured surface of each roll had to be teased away. A coating of paraffin was applied to protect the dry birchbark from the atmosphere. This would suffice until a more durable preservative could be used.

  Despite my preoccupation with the rolls, I could not overlook a progressive deterioration in Varnum’s morale. On the evening of our discovery at the grave he had suffered nightmares all through his sleep. Sitting on watch, I could hear him moaning and speaking unintelligibly to some unknown adversary. When he came on watch he was obviously unrested and bore a harried expression about his eyes which only first light would dispel.

  On the second evening his discomfort was worse. I decided to wake him, since the sounds which issued from his throat were scarcely human.

  “It’s—it’s the same as last night,” he gasped, blinking in the light from my lantern. “I can see myself asleep in the tent, and you sitting on watch—but there’s something else there beyond the clearing, something which is slowly moving in towards the tents. And you can’t see it, but it’s there, coming for—for me!”

  The man was almost hysterical. In view of his condition I decided to stand his watch for him, and so administered a sedative from the medical kit which I hoped would at least quiet the terrible sounds and cries he had been making. When he fell back to sleep I took a turn around the fringe of the clearing, then returned to my seat by the fire.

  For a time, wrapped in my blanket, I contemplated to try at deciphering the records of Pauquatoag, but the light from the embers was feeble. In retrospect I doubt that I could have long concentrated on the pictographs, given the situation. My mind was occupied with thoughts of the unnatural fear which hung over Dunstable and this forest—the unspoken fear of the townsmen at the mere mention of penetrating north of the lumbering camps; the bizarre sight of animal bodies circling aimlessly in the eddies of the millpond; the insane, chattering flight of the animal horde through the forest and into the Penaubsket. And now, our failure to find a trace of the shaman in his virgin, untouched grave.

  With an effort of will I forced my mind away from these thoughts since there in the ruddy glow of the dying fire I found myself becoming mortally afraid. I was a grown man, only a few years away from the slaughter of Belleau Wood. I had been afraid there yet had never betrayed the emotion since I was among my fellows. With the romanticism of a nobler age we thought we were all marked for death, and so resigned ourselves. But there in that black forest where each breath brought the taste of mold, there was no flashing cannonade or shrapnel warbling into trenches or bullets thudding through the olive drill of uniforms—only the steady dripping of the leaves, the smell of unknown centuries of decay and dissolution, and the unbearable silence. Although I trust no human group above the size of a British Infantry platoon, that night I longed for the babble of a crowd.

  To compose myself I reached inside my pack and drew out the dog-eared copy of the works of Alexander Pope, my beloved Pope, whose graceful verse had solaced me on many such a watch. I hunched in my blanket against the fire, rifle at my knee, and almost pushed the sense of foreboding from my mind. It was two hours before dawn, and I had just finished “Windsor Forest”, when the pain began.

  Without warning I was in the extremities of agony. Every joint, nerve, and organ writhed under a pain so intense it was exquisite. I bit my tongue and tasted blood as the volume slipped from my fingers. Entirely paralyzed I began to fall forward, afire in a frenzy of pain and fear but unable to scream and hardly to breathe. The brief interval of my fall seemed a day; although my mind was numbed a small, cold faculty dispassionately and at great speed reviewed the possible causes of my agony—a cerebral hemorrhage? An injury to the spinal cord, grievously damaging the major nerve bundles? A crushing blow to the cerebellum? With damp moss against my cheek I lay facing Varnum’s tent across the fire, almost mad with the spasms which tettered up and down my limbs. “My God,” I thought, “is this the end?”

  And then, on the periphery of my vision, sliding in across
the fringe of the clearing, soundlessly, inexorably, came the damned Thing. A cold blue glow, a lurid phosphorescence which gave no warmth to the night which enveloped it. It crossed the open space, my pain increasing with its approach. But no merciful unconsciousness came. The nimbus passed through the fire while not an ember stirred, not a spark rode the column of warm air. Ignoring me, it made for Varnum’s tent, from which came the sounds of a sleeper in the throes of a horrid dream, the mumbled cries of a mind battling a hideous foe.

  As I listened, lying mute like a felled animal, the cries changed in timbre and Varnum was awake. The glow hovered over, then invested the entire tent, its unearthly light playing over the canvas and ropes like St. Elmo’s Fire in the rigging of a ship. The door flap burst open and Varnum bolted out, naked to the waist, clawing his flesh and the air as the radiance settled around him. On his chest and arms the muscle bundles were twitching and cramping spasmodically. From his frantic screams I knew he shared the agony in which I lay. Frenziedly he ran through the fire, setting his leggings ablaze in a vain attempt to outrun his tormentor.

  “Grail, for the love of God, help me!” he cried. He wore the glow like a cloak; his limbs pulsated with an unholy light and thrashed about like those of a madman.

  With a sudden shock that rose even above my numbing pain I realized that Varnum was headed toward the river. He passed out of my field of vision as his agonized screams were joined by the crackling of underbrush. I tried to move my arms, to grasp my rifle, to seize a brand from the fire—anything to relieve my terror through action. But I was paralyzed as surely as if my spinal cord were severed. I could only lie sobbing as the wails grew more distant, finally vanishing under the roar of the flooding Penaubsket. With the knowledge that Varnum now shared the fate of the stampeding animals, blessed unconsciousness came.

  * * *