The Taint and Other Novellas

by Brian Lumley

  “At first, seen through the whipping trees and blinding snow, the thing looked like a huge squat cabin, but as they approached it they could see that it was in fact a great raised platform of sorts, sturdily built of logs. The snow, having drifted up deeply on three sides of this edifice, had given it the appearance of a flat-roofed cabin. The fourth side being free of snow, the whole formed a perfect shelter into which they crept out of the blast. There, beneath that huge log platform whose purpose they were too weary even to guess at, Sam lit the kerosene stove and warmed some soup. They felt cheered by the timely discovery of this refuge, and since after some hours the storm seemed in no way about to abate, they made down their sleeping bags and settled themselves in for the night. Both of them fell instantly asleep.

  “And it was later that night that disaster struck. How, in what manner Sam died, must always remain a matter for conjecture; but I believe that Lucille saw him die, and the sight of it must have temporarily broken her already badly weakened nerves. Certainly the things that she believes she saw, and one thing in particular that she believes happened that night, never could have been. God forbid!

  “That part of Lucille’s story, anyway, is composed of fragmentary mental images hard to define and even harder to put into common words. She has spoken of beacon fires burning in the night, of a ‘congregation at Ithaqua’s altar,’ of an evil, ancient Eskimo chant issuing from a hundred adulatory throats—and of that which answered that chant, drawn down from the skies by the call of its worshipers….

  “I will go into no details of what she ‘remembers’ except to repeat that Sam died, and that then, as I see it, his poor wife’s tortured mind must finally have broken. It seems certain, though, that even after the…horror…she must have received help from someone; she could not possibly have covered even a handful of miles in her condition on foot and alone—and yet she was found here, near Navissa, by certain of the town’s inhabitants.

  “She was taken to a local doctor, who was frankly astounded that, frozen to the marrow as she was, she had not died of exposure in the wastes. It was a number of weeks before she was well enough to be told of Sam, how he had been found dead, a block of human ice out in the snows.

  “And when she pressed them, then it came out about the condition of his body, how strangely torn and mangled it had been, as if ravaged by savage beasts, or as if it had fallen from a great height, or perhaps a combination of both. The official verdict was that he must have stumbled over some high cliff onto sharp rocks, and that his body had subsequently been dragged for some distance over the snow by wolves. This latter fitted with the fact that while his body showed all the signs of a great fall, there were no high places in the immediate vicinity. Why the wolves did not devour him remains unknown.”

  Thus ended the Judge’s narrative, and though I sat for some three minutes waiting for him to continue, he did not do so. In the end I said, “And she believes that her husband was killed by?…”

  “That Ithaqua killed him?—Yes, and she believes in rather worse things, if you can imagine that.” Hurriedly then he went on, giving me no opportunity to question his meaning.

  “One or two other things: First, Lucille’s temperature. It has never been quite normal since that time. She tells me medical men are astounded that her body temperature never rises above a level that would be death to anyone else. They say it must be a symptom of severe nervous disorder but are at a loss to reconcile this with her otherwise fairly normal physical condition. And finally this.” He held out the medallion for my inspection.

  “I want you to keep it for now. It was found on Sam’s broken body; in fact it was clenched in his hand. Lucille got it with his other effects. She tells me there is—something strange about it. If any, well, phenomena really do attach to it, you should notice them….”

  I took the medallion and looked at it—at its loathsome bas-relief work, scenes of a battle between monstrous beings that only some genius artist in the throes of madness might conceive—before asking, “And is that all?”

  “Yes, I think so—no, wait. There is something else, of course there is. Lucille’s boy, Kirby. He…well, in many ways it seems he is like Sam: impetuous, with a love of strange and esoteric lore and legend, a wanderer at heart, I suspect; but his mother has always kept him down, Earthbound. At any rate, he’s now run off. Lucille believes that he’s come north. She thinks perhaps that he intends to visit those regions where his father died. Don’t ask me why; I think Kirby must be something of a neurotic where his father is concerned. This may well have come down to him from his mother.

  “Anyway, she intends to follow and find him and take him home again away from here. Of course, if no evidence comes to light to show him positively to be in these parts, then there will be nothing for you to do. But if he really is here somewhere, then it would be a great personal favor to me if you would go with Lucille and look after her when she decides to search him out. Goodness only knows how it might affect her to go again into the snows, with so many bad memories.”

  “I’ll certainly do as you ask, Judge, and gladly,” I answered immediately. “Frankly, the more I learn of Bridgeman, the more the mystery fascinates me. There is a mystery, you would agree, despite all rationalizations?”

  “A mystery?” He pondered my question. “The snows are strange, David, and too much snow and privation can bring fantastic illusions—like the mirages of the desert. In the snow, men may dream while yet awake. And there again, there is that weird five-year cycle of strangeness that definitely affects this region. Myself, I suspect that it all has some quite simple explanation. A mystery?—I say the world is full of mysteries….”

  III

  That night I experienced my first taste of the weird, the inexplicable, the outré. And that night I further learned that I, too, must be susceptible to the five-year cycle of strangeness; either that, or I had eaten too well before taking to my bed!

  There was first the dream of cyclopean submarine cities of mad angles and proportions, which melted into vague but frightful glimpses of the spaces between the stars, through which I seemed to walk or float at speeds many times that of light. Nebulae floated by like bubbles in wine, and strange constellations expanded before me and dwindled in my wake as I passed through them. This floating, or walking, was accompanied by the sounds of a tremendous striding, like the world-shaking footsteps of some ponderous giant, and there was (of all things) an ether wind that blew about me the scent of stars and shards of shattered planets.

  Finally all of these impressions faded to a nothingness, and I was as a mote lost in the darkness of dead eons. Then there came another wind—not the wind that carried the odor of outer immensities or the pollen of blossoming planets—a tangible, shrieking gale wind that whirled me about and around until I was sick and dizzy and in dread of being dashed to pieces. And I awoke.

  I awoke and thought I knew why I had dreamed such a strange dream, a nightmare totally outside anything I had previously known. For out in the night it raged and blew, a storm that filled my room with its roaring until I could almost feel the tiles being lifted from the roof above.

  I got out of bed and went to the window, drawing the curtains cautiously and looking out—before stumbling back with my eyes popping and my mouth agape in an exclamation of utter amazement and disbelief. Outside, the night was as calm as any I ever saw, with the stars gleaming clear and bright and not even a breeze to stir the small firs in the Judge’s garden!

  As I recoiled—amidst the rush and roar of winds that seemed to have their origin in my very room, even though I could feel no motion of the air and while nothing visibly stirred—I knocked down the golden medallion from where I had left it upon my window ledge. On the instant, as the dull yellow thing clattered to the smooth pine floor, the roaring of the wind was cut off, leaving a silence that made my head spin with its suddenness. The cacophony of mad winds had not “died away”—quite literally it had been cut off!

  Shakily I bent to pi
ck the medallion up, noticing that despite the warmth of my room it bore a chill that must have been near to freezing. On impulse I put the thing to my ear. It seemed that just for a second, receding, I could hear as in a sounding shell the rush and roar and hum of winds far, far away, winds blowing beyond the rim of the world!

  • • •

  In the morning, of course, I realized that it had all been a dream, not merely the fantastic submarine and interspatial sequences but also those occurrences following immediately upon my “awakening.” Nevertheless, I questioned the Judge as to whether he had heard anything odd during the night. He had not, and I was strangely relieved….

  • • •

  Three days later, when it was beginning to look like Lucille Bridgeman’s suspicions regarding her son were without basis—this despite all her efforts, and the Judge’s, to prove the positive presence of Kirby Bridgeman in the vicinity of Navissa—then came word from the Mounties at Fir Valley that a young man answering Kirby’s description had indeed been seen. He had been with a mixed crowd of seemingly destitute outsiders and local layabouts camping in crumbling Stillwater. Observers—two aging but inveterate gold-grubbers, out on their last prospecting trip of the year before the bad weather set in—had mentioned seeing him. Though these gnarled prospectors had by no means been made welcome in Stillwater, nonetheless they had noted that this particular young man had appeared to be in a sort of trance or daze, and that the others with him had seemed to hold him in some kind of reverence; they had been tending to his needs and generally looking after him.

  It was this description of the boy’s condition (which made it sound rather as if he were not quite right in his head) that determined me to inquire tactfully of his mother about him as soon as the opportunity presented itself. For the last two days, though, I had been studying the handling and maintenance of a vehicle that the Judge termed a “snow cat”: a fairly large, motorized sledge of very modern design that he had hired for Mrs. Bridgeman from a friend of his in the town. The vehicle seemed a fairly economical affair, capable in suitable conditions of carrying two adults and provisions over snow at a speed of up to twenty miles per hour. It was capable, too, of a somewhat slower speed over more normal terrain. With such a vehicle two people might easily travel 150 miles without refueling, in comparative comfort at that, and over country no automobile could possibly challenge.

  The next morning saw us setting out aboard the snow cat. Though we planned on returning to Navissa every second or third day to refuel, we had sufficient supplies aboard for at least a week. First we headed for Stillwater.

  Following a fall of snow during the night, the trail that led us to the ghost town was mainly buried beneath a white carpet almost a foot deep, but even so, it was plain that this barely fourth-class road (in places a mere track) was in extremely poor repair. I recalled the Judge telling me that very few people went to Stillwater now, following the strange affair of twenty years gone, and doubtless this accounted for the track’s derelict appearance in those places where the wind had blown its surface clean.

  In Stillwater we found a constable of the Mounties just preparing to leave the place for camp at Fir Valley. He had gone to the ghost town specifically to check out the story of the two old prospectors. Introducing himself as Constable McCauley, the Mountie showed us round the town.

  Originally the place had been built of stout timbers, with stores and houses and one very ramshackle “saloon” bordering a main street and with lesser huts and habitations set back behind the street facades. Now, however, the main street was grown with grass and weeds beneath the snow, and even the stoutest buildings were quickly falling into dilapidation. The shacks and lesser houses to the rear leaned like old men with the weight of years, and rotten doorposts with their paint long flaked away sagged on every hand, threatening at any moment to collapse and bring down the edifices framing them into the snow. Here and there one or two windows remained, but warped and twisting frames had long since claimed by far the greater number, so that now sharp shards of glass stood up in broken rows from sills like grinning teeth in blackly leering mouths. A stained, tattered curtain flapped moldering threads in the chill midday breeze. Even though the day was fairly bright, there was a definite gloominess about Stillwater, an aura of something not quite right, of strange menace, seeming to brood like a mantle of evil about the place.

  Overall, and ignoring the fact that twenty years had passed since last it knew habitation, the town seemed to be falling far too quickly into decay, almost as if some elder magic had blighted the place in an effort to return it to its origins. Saplings already stood tall through the snow in the main street; grass and weeds proliferated on window ledges, along facades, and in the black gaps where boards had fallen from the lower stories of the crumbling buildings.

  Mrs. Bridgeman seemed to notice none of this, only that her son was no longer in the town…if he had ever been there.

  In the largest standing building, a tavern that seemed to have fared better in its battle against decay than the rest of the town, we brewed coffee and heated soups. There, too we found signs of recent, if temporary, habitation, for the floor in one of the rooms was fairly littered with freshly empty cans and bottles. This debris, plus the blackened ashes of a fire built on stones in one corner, stood as plain testimony that the building had been used by that group of unknown persons whose presence the prospectors had reported.

  The Mountie mentioned how chill the place was, and at his remark it dawned on me that indeed the tavern seemed colder inside (where by all rights it ought to have been at least marginally warmer) than out in the raw air of the derelict streets. I was about to voice this thought when Mrs. Bridgeman, suddenly paler by far than usual, put down her coffee and stood up from where she sat upon a rickety chair.

  She looked first at me—a queer, piercing glance—then at McCauley. “My son was here,” she abruptly said, as if she knew it quite definitely. “Kirby was here!”

  The Mountie looked hard at her, then stared about the room in mystification. “There’s some sign that your boy was here, Mrs. Bridgeman?”

  She had turned away and for a moment did not answer. She seemed to be listening intently for something far off. “Can’t you hear it?”

  Constable McCauley looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He frowned. The room was very still. “Hear what, Mrs. Bridgeman? What is it?”

  “Why, the wind!” she answered, her eyes clouded and distant. “The wind blowing way out between the worlds!”

  • • •

  Half an hour later we were ready to move again. The Mountie in the meantime had taken me to one side, to ask me if I didn’t think the search we planned was just a little bit hazardous considering Mrs. Bridgeman’s condition. Plainly he thought she was a bit touched. Perhaps she was! God knows, if what the Judge told me was true, the poor woman had enough reason. Being ignorant of her real problem at that time, however, I shrugged her strangeness off, mentioning her relationship with her son as being obsessive out of all proportion to reality. In truth, this was the impression I had already half formed—but it did not explain the other thing.

  I made no mention of it to the Mountie. For one thing, it was none of his business; and for another, I hardly wanted him thinking that perhaps I, too, was “a bit touched.” It was simply this: in the derelict tavern—when Mrs. Bridgeman had asked, “Can’t you hear it?”—I had in fact heard something. At the exact moment of her inquiry, I had put my hand into a pocket of my parka for a pack of cigarettes. My hand had come into contact with that strange golden medallion, and as my fingers closed upon the chill shape, I had felt a thrill as of weird energies, an electric tingle that seemed to energize all my senses simultaneously. I felt the cold of the spaces between the stars; I smelled again, as in my dreams, the scents of unknown worlds; for the merest fraction of a second there opened before me reeling vistas, incredible eons flashing by in a twinkling; and I, too, heard a wind—a howling sentience from far beyond the univ
erse we know!

  It had been so momentary, this—vision?—that I thought little more of it. Doubtless my mind, as I touched the medallion, had conjured in connection with the thing parts of that dream in which it had featured so strongly. That was the only explanation….

  I calculate that by 5:00 P.M. we must have been something like fifty miles directly north of Stillwater. It was there, in the lee of a low hill covered by tall conifers whose snow-laden branches bowed almost to the ground, that Mrs. Bridgeman called a halt for the night. Freezing, the snow already had a thin, crisp crust. I set up our two tiny bivouacs beneath a pine whose white branches formed in themselves something of a tent, and there I lit our stove and prepared a meal.

  I had decided that it was time tactfully to approach Mrs. Bridgeman regarding those many facets of her story of which I was still ignorant; but then, as if there were not enough of mystery. I was witness to that which brought vividly back to me what the Judge had told me of the widow’s body temperature.

  We had finished our meal, and I had prepared my bivouac for the night, spreading my sleeping bag and packing snow close to the lower outside walls of the tiny tent against freezing drafts. I offered to do the same for Mrs. Bridgeman, but she assured me that she could attend to that herself. For the moment she wanted “a breath of fresh air.” That turn of phrase in itself might have been enough to puzzle me (the air could hardly have been fresher!) but in addition she then cast off her parka, standing only in sweater and slacks, before stepping out from under the lowered branches into the subzero temperatures of falling night.