The Taint and Other Novellas

by Brian Lumley

  Heavily wrapped, still I shivered as I watched her from the sanctuary of our hideaway beneath the tree. For half an hour she simply wandered to and fro over the snow, occasionally glancing at the sky and then again into the darkening distance. Finally, as I suddenly realized that I was quickly drawing close to freezing while waiting for her to come back to camp, I went stiffly out to her with her parka. She must by now, I believed, be very close to suffering from exposure. Blaming myself that I had not recognized sooner how terrifically cold it was, I came up to her and threw her parka about her shoulders. Imagine my astonishment when she turned with a questioning look, completely at ease and plainly quite comfortable, immensely surprised at my concern!

  She must have seen immediately how cold I was. Chiding me that I had not taken greater care to keep warm, she hurried back with me to the bivouacs beneath the tree. There she quickly boiled water and made coffee. She drank none of the hot, reviving fluid herself, however, and I was so astounded at her apparent immunity to the cold that I forgot all about those questions I had intended to ask. Since Mrs. Bridgeman now plainly intended to retire and since my own sleeping bag lay warm and inviting inside my bivouac, I simply finished off the coffee, turned down the stove and lay down for the night.

  I was suddenly tired, and the last thing I saw before sleeping was a patch of sky through the branches, illumined by brightly twinkling stars. Perhaps that picture of the heavens, imprinted upon my mind’s eye as I fell asleep, colored my dreams. Certainly I dreamed of stars all night long, but they were uneasy dreams. The stars I saw were particularly sentient and paired like strange eyes; they glowed carmine against a moving black background of hideously suggestive design and immense proportions….

  In the morning over breakfast—cheese and tomato sandwiches, followed by coffee and fruit juice—I briefly mentioned Mrs. Bridgeman’s apparent immunity to the cold, at which she looked at me with a very wry expression and said, “You may believe me, Mr. Lawton, when I tell you that I would give all of what little I have just once to feel the cold. It is this—affliction—of mine, an extremely rare condition that I contracted here in the north. And it has come out in—”

  “In Kirby?” I hazarded the guess.

  “Yes.” She looked at me again, shrewdly this time. “How much did Judge Andrews tell you?”

  I could not conceal my embarrassment. “He—he told me of your husband’s death, and—”

  “What did he say of my son?”

  “Very little. He is not the kind of man to gossip idly, Mrs. Bridgeman, and—”

  “And you suspect that there might be much to gossip about?” She was suddenly angry.

  “I only know that I’m here, helping a woman look for her son, following her instincts and whims without question, as a favor to an old man. To be absolutely truthful, I suspect that there is a great mystery here; and I admit that I am addicted to mysteries, as curious as a cat. But my curiosity is without malice, you must believe that, and my only desire is to help you.”

  She turned away from me for a moment or two, and I thought she was still angry, but when she turned back her face was much more composed.

  “And did the Judge not warn you that there would be—danger?”

  “Danger? Heavy snow is due, certainly—”

  “No, the snow is nothing—I didn’t mean the snow. The Judge has Sam’s books; have you read them?”

  “Yes, but what danger can there be in mythology and folklore?” In fact, I guessed what she was getting at, but better to hear it from her own lips, as she “believed” it and as her husband had “believed” it before her.

  “What danger in myths and legends, you ask?” She smiled mirthlessly. “I asked the same question of Sam when he wanted to leave me in Navissa. God, that I’d listened to him! What danger in folklore? I can’t tell you directly—not without you thinking me a madwoman, as I’m sure the Judge must more than half believe—but I’ll tell you this: today we return to Navissa. On the way you can teach me how to drive the snow cat. I won’t take you to horrors you can’t conceive.”

  I tried to argue the point but she would say no more. We decamped in silence, packed the bivouacs and camp utensils aboard the cat, and then, despite a last effort on my part to dissuade her, she demanded that we head directly for Navissa.

  For half an hour, traveling fairly slowly, we followed the course of a frozen stream between brooding fir forests whose dark interiors were made darker still by the shrouding snow that covered the upper branches. It was as I turned the snow cat away from the stream, around a smaller copse of trees to head more nearly south, that I accidentally came upon that which should have gone far toward substantiating Mrs. Bridgeman’s hints of terrible dangers.

  It was a large depression in the snow, to which I had to react quickly in order to avoid a spill, when we might easily have tumbled directly into it. I halted our machine, and we stepped down to take a closer look at this strangely sunken place in the snow.

  Here the drift was deeper, perhaps three or four feet, but in the center of the depression it had been compacted almost to the earth beneath, as if some great weight had rested there. The size of this concavity must have been almost twenty feet long by seven or eight feet wide, and its shape was something like—

  Abruptly the Judge’s words came back to me—what he had mentioned of the various manifestations of Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker—and particularly of giant, webbed footprints in the snow!

  But of course that was ridiculous. And yet…

  I began to walk round the perimeter of the fantastic depression, only turning when I heard Mrs. Bridgeman cry out behind me. Paler than I had ever seen her before, now she leaned dizzily against the snow cat, her hand to her throat. I went quickly to her.

  “Mrs. Bridgeman?”

  “He—He was here!” she spoke in a horrified whisper.

  “Your son?”

  “No, not Kirby—Him!” She pointed, staring wide-eyed at the compacted snow of the depression. “Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker—that is His sign. And that means that I may already be too late!”

  “Mrs. Bridgeman,” I made a halfhearted attempt to reason with her, “plainly this depression marks the spot where a number of animals rested during the night. The snow must have drifted about them, leaving this peculiar shape.”

  “There was no snow last night, Mr. Lawton,” she answered, more composed now, “but in any case your explanation is quite impossible. Why, if there had been a number of animals here, surely they would have left tracks in the snow when they moved. Look about you. There are no tracks here! No, this is the footprint of the fiend. The horror was here—and somewhere, at this very moment, my son is trying to search Him out, helped on by those poor devils that worship Him!”

  I saw my chance then to avoid an early return to Navissa. If we went back now, I might never learn the whole story, and I would never be able to face the Judge, having let him down. “Mrs. Bridgeman, it’s plain that if we go south now we’re only wasting time. I for one am willing to face whatever danger there may be, though I still can see no such danger. However, if some peril does face Kirby, then we won’t be helping him any by returning to Navissa. It would help, though, if I knew the background story. Some of it I know already, but there must be a lot you can tell me. Now listen, we have enough fuel for about 120 miles more. This is my proposition: that we carry on looking for your son to the north. If we have not found him by the time our fuel reserves are halved, then we head back in a direct line for Navissa. Furthermore, I swear here and now that I’ll never divulge anything you may tell me or anything I may see while you live. Now, then—we’re wasting time. What do you say?”

  She hesitated, turning my proposition over in her mind, and as she did so, I saw to the north the spreading of a cloud sheet across the sky and sensed that peculiar change of atmosphere that ever precedes bad weather. Again I prompted her: “The sky is growing more sullen all the time. We’re in for plenty of snow—probably tonight. We really can’t af
ford to waste time if we want to find Kirby before the worst of the weather sets in. Soon the glass will begin to fall, and—”

  “The cold won’t bother Kirby, Mr. Lawton—but you’re right, there’s no time to waste. From now on our breaks must be shorter, and we must try to travel faster. Later today I’ll tell you what I can of…of everything. Believe what you will, it makes little difference, but for the last time I warn you—if we find Kirby, then in all probability we shall also find the utmost horror!”

  IV

  With regard to the weather, I was right. Having turned again to the north, skirting dense fir forests and crossing frozen streams and low hills, by 10:30 A.M. we were driving through fairly heavy snow. The glass was far down, though mercifully there was little wind. All this time—despite a certainty in my heart that there would be none—nevertheless, I found myself watching out for more of those strange and inexplicable hollows in the snow.

  A dense copse where the upper branches interlaced, forming a dark umbrella to hold up a roof of snow, served us for a midday camp. There, while we prepared a hot meal and as we ate, Mrs. Bridgeman began to tell me about her son, about his remarkable childhood and his strange leanings as he grew into a man. Her first revelation, however, was the most fantastic, and plainly the Judge had been quite right to suspect that the events of twenty years gone had turned her mind, at least as far as her son was concerned.

  “Kirby,” she started without preamble, “is not Sam’s son. I love Kirby, naturally, but he is in no wise a child of love. He was born of the winds. No, don’t interrupt me, I want no rationalizations.

  “Can you understand me, Mr. Lawton? I suppose not. Indeed, at first I, too, thought that I was mad, that the whole thing had been a nightmare. I thought so right until the time—until Kirby was born. Then, as he grew up from a baby, I became less sure. Now I know that I was never mad. It was no nightmare that came to me here in the snow but a monstrous fact! And why not? Are not the oldest religions and legends known to man full of stories of gods lusting after the daughters of men? There were giants in the olden times, Mr. Lawton. There still are.

  “Do you recall the Wendy-Smith expedition of ’33? What do you suppose he found, that poor man, in the fastnesses of Africa? What prompted him to say these words, which I know by heart: ‘There are fabulous legends of star-born creatures who inhabited this Earth many millions of years before Man appeared and who were still here, in certain black places, when he eventually evolved. They are, I am sure, to an extent here even now.’

  “Wendy-Smith was sure, and so am I. In 1913 two monsters were born in Dunwich to a degenerate half-wit of a woman. They are both dead now, but there are still whispers in Dunwich of the affair, and of the father who is hinted to have been other than human. Oh, there are many examples of survivals from olden times, of beings and forces that have reached godlike proportions in the minds of men, and who is to deny that at least some of them could be real?

  “And where Ithaqua is concerned—why!—there are elementals of the air mentioned in every mythology known to man. Rightly so, for even today, and other than this Ithaqua of the Snows, there are strange winds that blow madness and horror into the minds of men. I mean winds like the Foehn, the south wind of Alpine valleys. And what of the piping winds of subterranean caverns, like that of the Calabrian Caves, which has been known to leave stout cavers white-haired, babbling wrecks? What do we understand of such forces?

  “Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity. All things may happen in infinity, and who knows what might come out of it? What do we know of the facts of anything, in our little corner of a never-ending universe, in this transient revolution in the space-time continuum? Seeping down from the stars at the beginning of time there were giants—beings who walked or flew across the spaces between the worlds, inhabiting and using entire systems at their will—and some of them still remain. What would the race of man be to creatures such as these? I’ll tell you—we are the plankton of the seas of space and time!

  “But there, I’m going on a bit, away from the point. The facts are these: that before I came to Navissa with Sam, he had already been told that he was sterile, and that after I left—after that horror had killed my husband—well, then I was pregnant.

  “Of course, at first I believed that the doctors were wrong, that Sam had not been sterile at all, and this seemed to be borne out when my baby was born just within eight months of Sam’s death. Obviously, in the normal scale of reckoning, Kirby was conceived before we came to Navissa. And yet it was a difficult pregnancy, and as a newborn baby he was a weedy, strange little thing—frail and dreamy and far too quiet—so that even without knowing much of children I nevertheless found myself thinking of his birth as having been…premature!

  “His feet were large even for a boy, and his toes were webbed with a pink stretching of skin that thickened and lengthened as he grew. Understand, please, that my boy was in no way a freak—not visibly. Many people have this webbing between their toes; some have it between their fingers too. In all other respects he seemed to be completely normal. Well, perhaps not completely…

  “Long before he could walk, he was talking—baby talk, you know—but not to me. Always it was when he was alone in his cot, and always when there was a wind. He could hear the wind, and he used to talk to it. But that was nothing really remarkable; grown children often talk to invisible playmates, people and creatures that only they can see; except that I used to listen to Kirby, and sometimes—

  “Sometimes I could swear that the winds talked back to him!

  “You may laugh if you wish, Mr. Lawton, and I don’t suppose I could blame you, but there always seemed to be a wind about our home, when everywhere else the air was still….

  “As Kirby grew older this didn’t seem to happen so frequently, or perhaps I simply grew used to it, I really don’t know. But when he should have been starting school, well, that was out of the question. He was such a dreamer, in no way slow or backward, you understand, but he constantly lived in a kind of dreamworld. And always—though he seemed later to have given up his strange conversations with drafts and breezes—he had this fascination with the wind.

  “One summer night when he was seven, a wind came up that threatened to blow the very house down. It came from the sea, a north wind off the Gulf of Mexico—or perhaps it came from farther away than that, who can say? At any rate, I was frightened, as were most of the families in the area where we lived. Such was the fury of that demon wind, and it reminded me so of…of another wind I had known. Kirby sensed my fear. It was the strangest thing, but he threw open a window and he shouted. He shouted right into the teeth of that howling, banshee storm. Can you imagine that? A small child, teeth bared and hair streaming, shouting at a wind that might have lifted him right off the face of the Earth!

  “And yet in another minute the worst of the storm was over, leaving Kirby scolding and snapping at the smaller gusts of air that yet remained, until the night was as still as any other summer night….

  “At ten he became interested in model airplanes, and one of his private tutors helped him and encouraged him to design and build his own. You see, he was far ahead of other children his own age. One of his models created a lot of excitement when it was shown at an exhibition of flying models at a local club. It had a very strange shape; its underside was all rippled and warped. It worked on a gliding principle of my son’s own invention, having no motor but relying upon what Kirby called his ‘rippled-air principle.’ I remember he took it to the gliding club that day, and that the other members—children and adults alike—laughed at his model and said it couldn’t possibly fly. Kirby flew it for them for an hour, and they all marveled while it seemingly defied gravity in a fantastic series of flights. Then, because they had laughed at him, he smashed the model down to its balsa wood and tissue paper components to strew them like confetti at the feet of the spectators. That was his pride working,
even as a child. I wasn’t there myself, but I’m told that a designer from one of the big model companies cried when Kirby destroyed his glider….

  “He loved kites, too—he always had a kite. He would sit for hours and simply watch his kite standing on the air at the end of its string.

  “When he was thirteen he wanted binoculars so that he could study the birds in flight. Hawks were of particular interest to him—the way they hover, motionless except for the rapid beating of their wings. They, too, seem almost to walk on the wind.

  “Then came the day when a more serious and worrying aspect of Kirby’s fascination with the air and flight came to light. For a long time I had been worried about him, about his constant restlessness and moodiness and his ominous obsession.

  “We were visiting Chichén Itzá, a trip I hoped would take Kirby’s mind off other things. In fact the trip had a twofold purpose; the other was that I had been to Chichén Itzá before with Sam, and this was my way of remembering how it had been. Every now and then I would visit a place where we had been happy before…before his death.

  “There were, however, a number of things I had not taken into account. There is often a wind playing among those ancient ruins, and the ruins themselves—with their aura of antiquity, their strange glyphs, their history of bloody worship and nighted gods—can be…disturbing.

  “I had forgotten, too, that the Mayas had their own god of the air; Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and I suspect that this was almost my undoing.

  “Kirby had been quiet and moody during the outward trip, and he stayed that way even after freshening up and while we began to explore the ancient buildings and temples. It was while I was admiring other ruins that Kirby climbed the high, hideously adorned Temple of the Warriors, with its facade of plumed serpents, their mouths fanged and tails rampant.

  “He was seen to fall—or jump—by at least two dozen people, mainly Mexicans, but later they all told the same story: how the wind had seemed almost to buoy him up; how he had seemed to fall in slow motion; how he had uttered an eerie cry before stepping into space, like a call to strange gods for assistance. And after that terrible fall, onto ancient stone flags and from such a great height?…