The Taint and Other Novellas

by Brian Lumley

  It was that same forest into which the enemy had vanished earlier in the day when we had been trailing them. Now at its four cardinal points, up sprang great fires of leaping red flame; and now too, coming to us on the wings of the north wind, faint and uneven we heard massed voices raised in a chilling ritual—the Rites of Ithaqua:

  “Iä! Iä!—Ithaqua! Ithaqua!

  Ai! Ai! Ai!—Ithaqua!

  Ce-fyak vulg-t’uhm—

  Ithaqua fhtagn!

  Ugh! Iä! Iä!—Ai! Ai! Ai!”

  Again and again, repeatedly the wind carried that utterly alien chorus to our ears, and inside me it seemed suddenly that my blood froze. It was not only this abhorrent chanting with its guttural tones, but also the precision of the—singing?—and the obvious familiarity of the voices with the song. This was no blind, parrotlike repetition of obscure vocal forms but a combination of a hundred or more perfectly synchronized voices whose soul-rending interpretation of a hideous alien liturgy had transformed it into this present awesome cacophony—a cacophony whose horror might indeed breach the voids between the worlds! Suddenly I knew that if there was an Ithaqua, then he must surely hear and answer the voices of his worshipers.

  “Very little time now,” my companion muttered, more to herself than to me. “The place of the ceremony must be central in that forest—and that’s where Kirby is!”

  I stared hard through the snow, which again was beginning to fall heavier, seeing that the nearest and most southerly of the four fires blazed some distance to the northeast of our position. The westerly fire was about a half a mile southwest of us.

  “If we head directly between those two fires,” I said, “entering the woods and heading straight for the most northerly fire, on the far side, then we should come pretty close to the center of the forest. We can take the snow cat to the edge of the trees, but from there we must go on foot. If we can grab Kirby and make a run for it—well, perhaps the cat can take three, at a push.”

  “Yes,” she answered, “it’s worth a try. If the worse comes to the worst…then at least I’ll know what the end of it was….”

  With that I started up the cat’s motor again, thankful that the wind was in our favor and knowing that under cover of the continuous chanting we stood a fair chance of driving right to the edge of the forest without being heard.

  As we headed out across the white expanse of snow to the forest’s edge, I could see in the heavens the glow of the fires reflected from the base of towering, strangely roiling nimbostratus. I knew then, instinctively, that we were in for a storm to end all storms.

  At the edge of the forest, undetected so far, we dismounted and left the snow cat hidden in the lower branches of a great pine, making our way on foot through the forest’s dark depths.

  The going was of necessity very slow, and of course we dared show no light, but having progressed only a few hundred yards, we found that we could see in the distance the fires of individual torches, and the chanting came much louder and clearer. If there were guards, then we must have passed them by without attracting attention. The chanting was tinged now with a certain hysteria, a frenzy that built steadily toward a crescendo, charging the frosty air with unseen and menacing energies.

  Abruptly, we came to the perimeter of a great cleared area where the trees had been cut down to be built into a huge platform in the center. All about this platform a mongrel congregation of fur- and parka-clad men and women stood, their faces showing ruddy and wild-eyed in the light of numerous torches. There were Eskimos, Indians, Negroes, and whites—people from backgrounds as varied as their colors and races—over one hundred and fifty of them at a guess.

  The time by then was rapidly approaching midnight, and the deafening, dreadful chanting had now reached such an intensity as to make any increase seem almost impossible. Nevertheless there was an increase, at which, with one final convulsive shriek, the entire crowd about the pyramidal platform prostrated themselves facedown in the snow—all bar one!

  “Kirby!” I heard Mrs. Bridgeman gasp, as that one upright man, proud and straight backed, naked except for his trousers, commenced a slow and measured climb up the log steps of the platform.

  “Kirby!” She shouted his name this time, starting forward and avoiding the arms I held out to restrain her.

  “He comes! He comes!” The cry went out in a hiss of rapture from one hundred and fifty throats—drowning Lucille Bridgeman’s shout—and suddenly I felt the expectancy in the air.

  The prostrate figures were silent now, waiting; the slight wind had disappeared; the snow no longer fell. Only Mrs. Bridgeman’s running figure disturbed the stillness, that and the flickering of torches where they stood up from the snow; only her feet on the ice-crusted surface broke the silence.

  Kirby had reached the top of the pyramid, and his mother was running between the outermost of the encircling, prostrate figures when it happened. She stopped suddenly and cast a terrified glance at the night sky, then lifted a hand to her open mouth. I, too, looked up, craning my neck to see—and something moved high in the roiling clouds!

  “He comes! He comes!” The vast sigh went up again.

  Many things happened then, all in the space of a few seconds, comprising a total and a culmination beyond belief. And still I pray that what I heard and saw at that time, that everything I experienced, was an illusion engendered of too great a proximity to the mass lunacy of those who obey the call of the five-year cycle.

  How best to describe it?

  I remember running forward a few paces, into the clearing proper, before my eyes followed Mrs. Bridgeman’s gaze to the boiling heavens where at first I saw nothing but the madly whirling clouds. I recall, however, a picture in my memory of the man called Kirby standing wide legged atop the great pyramid of logs, his arms and hands reaching in a gesture of expectancy or welcome up and outward, his hair streaming in a wind which sprang up suddenly from above to blow slantingly down from the skies. And then there is the vision that burns even now in my mind’s eye of a darkness that fell out of the clouds like a black meteorite, a darkness grotesquely shaped like a man with carmine stars for eyes in its bloated blot of a head, and my ears still ring to the pealing screams of mortal fear and loathing that went up in that same instant from the poor, paralyzed woman who now saw and recognized the horror from the skies.

  The Beast-God came striding down the wind, descending more slowly now than at first but still speeding like some great bird of prey to Earth, its fantastic splayfooted strides carrying it as if down some giant, winding, invisible staircase straight to the waiting figure atop the pyramid, until the huge black head turned and, from high above the trees, the thing called the Wind-Walker saw the hysterically screaming woman where she stood amid the prostrate forms of its worshipers—saw and knew her!

  In midair the Being came to an abrupt, impossible halt—and then the great carmine eyes grew larger still, and the blackly outlined arms lifted to the skies in what was clearly an attitude of rage! One monstrous hand reached to the rushing clouds, and through them, to emerge but a split second later and hurl something huge and round to Earth. Still Mrs. Bridgeman screamed—loud, clear, and horrifically—as the unerringly hurled thing smashed down upon her with a roar of tortured air, flattening her instantly to the frozen ground and splintering into a mad bomb burst of exploding shards of—ice!

  The scene about the log pyramid at that hellish moment must have been chaos. I myself was thrown in the rush of pressured air back into the trees, but in the next moment when I looked out again upon the clearing, all I could see was…blood!

  The ice-torn, mangled bodies of a wide segment of worshipers were still tumbling outward from the blasted area where Mrs. Bridgeman had stood—a number of bloodied bodies still fell, lazily almost, like red leaves through the howling air; logs were beginning to burst outward from the base of the pyramid where flying chunks of ice had crashed with the force of grenades.

  Nor was Ithaqua finished!

  It seemed alm
ost as if I could read this horror’s thoughts as it towered raging in the sky: Were these not His worshipers?—and had they not betrayed their faith in this matter, which was to have been His first meeting with His son on Earth? Well, they would pay for this error, for allowing this Daughter of Man, the mother of His son, to interfere with the ceremony!

  In the space of a few more seconds huge balls of ice were flung to Earth like a scattering of hailstones—but with far more devastating effect. When the last of them had hurled its ice-knife shards far and wide about the clearing, the snow was red with spouting blood; the screams of the torn and dying rose even above the howling devil-wind that Ithaqua had brought with Him from the star-spaces. The trees bent outward now from the clearing with the fury of that fiendish storm, and logs snapped and popped like matchsticks from the base of the platform at the crimson clearing’s center.

  But a change had taken place in the attitude of the lone figure standing wild and windblown at the top of the tottering pyramid.

  While the gigantic, anthropomorphic figure in the sky had raged and ravaged, raining down death and destruction in the form of ice-globes frozen in his hands and snatched down out of the heavens, so the man-god-child, now grown to strange adulthood, had watched from his vantage point above the clearing all that transpired. He had seen his mother ruthlessly crushed to a raw, red pulp; he had watched the demoniac destruction of many, perhaps all of those deluded followers of his monstrous father. Still, in a dazed bewilderment, he gazed down upon the awful aftermath in the clearing—and then he laid back his head and screamed in a composite agony of frustration, horror, despair, and rapidly waxing rage!

  And in that monumental agony his hellish heritage told. For all the winds screamed with him, roaring, howling, shrieking in a circular chase about the platform that lifted logs and tossed them as twigs in a whirlpool round and about in an impossible spiraling whirl. Even the clouds above rushed and clashed the faster for Kirby’s rage, until at last his Father knew the anger of His son for what it was—but did He understand?

  Down through the sky the Wind-Walker came again, striding on great webbed feet through the currents of crazed air, arms reaching as a father reaches for his son—

  —And at last, battered and bruised as I was and half unconscious from the wind’s screaming and buffeting, I saw that which proved to me beyond all else that I had indeed succumbed to the five-year cycle of legend-inspired lunacy and mass hysteria.

  For as the Ancient One descended, so His son rose up to meet Him—Kirby, racing up the wind in surefooted bounds and leaps, roaring with a hurricane voice that tore the sky asunder and blasted the clouds back across the heavens in panic flight—Kirby, expanding, exploding outward until his outline, limned against the frightened sky, became as great as that of his alien Sire—Kirby, Son of Ithaqua, whose clawing hands now reached in a raging blood lust, whose snarling, bestial, darkening features demanded revenge!

  For a moment, perhaps astounded, the Wind-Walker stood off—and there were two darkly towering figures in that tortured sky, two great heads in which twin pairs of carmine stars glared—and these figures rushed suddenly together in such a display of aerial fury that for a moment I could make out nothing of the battle but the flash of lightning and roar of thunder.

  I shook my head and wiped the frost and frozen blood droplets from my forehead, and when next I dared look at the sky, I could see only the fleeing clouds racing madly away—the clouds and high, high above them, two dark dots that fought and tore and dwindled against a familiar but now leering background of stars and constellations….

  • • •

  Almost twenty-four hours have passed. How I lived through the horrors of last night I shall never know; but I did, and physically unscathed, though I fear that my mind may be permanently damaged. If I attempt to rationalize the thing, then I can say that there was a storm of tremendous and devastating fury, during the course of which I lost my mind. I can say, too, that Mrs. Bridgeman is lost in the snow, even that she must now be dead despite her amazing invulnerability to the cold. But of the rest?…

  And on the other hand, if I forego all rationalizations and listen only to the little winds whispering among themselves behind my flimsy shelter?…Can I deny my own senses?

  I remember only snatches of what followed the terrible carnage and the onset of the aerial battle—my return to the snow cat and how that machine broke down less than half an hour later in a blinding snowstorm; my frozen, stumbling fight against great white drifts with various items of equipment dragging me down; my bruising fall into a frozen hole in the snow whose outlines sent me in a renewed frenzy of gibbering terror across the wastes—until, exhausted, I collapsed here between these sheltering trees. I remember knowing that if I remained still where I had fallen, then I must die; and I recall the slow agony of setting up my shelter, packing the walls solid, and lighting the stove. There is nothing more, however, until I awakened around noon.

  The cold roused me. The stove had long since burned itself out, but empty soup cans told me that somehow I had managed to feed myself before giving in to my absolute fatigue. I opened the reservoir of fuel in the stove’s body and fired it again, once more attending to my hunger before drying out and warming my clothes item by item. Then, fortified and almost warm, heartened by a slight rise in the outside temperature, I set about the strengthening of this, my last refuge; for I knew by then that this was as far as I could hope to go.

  At about 4:00 P.M. the sky told me that soon it must storm again, and it was then that I thought to search out the snow cat and fetch precious fuel for my stove. I almost lost myself when the snow began to fall again, but by 6:00 P.M. I was back in my shelter having recovered almost a gallon of fuel from the crippled cat. I had spent at least fifteen futile minutes trying to restart the vehicle, which still lies where I found it less than half a mile from my refuge. It was then, knowing that I could live only a few days more at the outside, that I began to write this record. This is no mere foreboding, this grimly leering doom from which there can be no escape. I have given it some thought: I am too far from Navissa to stand even the slightest chance of making it on foot. I have food and fuel for three days at the most. Here…I can live for a few days more, and perhaps someone will find me. Outside, in some futile attempt to reach Navissa in the coming storm…I might last a day or even two, but I could never hope to cover all those miles in the snow.

  • • •

  It is about four in the morning. My wristwatch has stopped and I can no longer tell the time accurately. The storm, which I mistakenly thought had passed me by some miles to the north, has started outside. It was the roaring of the wind that roused me. I must have fallen asleep at my writing about midnight.

  • • •

  This is strange: the wind howls and roars, but through an opening in the canvas I can see the snow falling steadily against the black of the night, not hurried and hustled by the wind! And my shelter is too steady; it does not tremble in the gale. What does this mean?

  • • •

  I have discovered the truth. I am betrayed by the golden medallion, which, when I discovered the howling thing still in my pocket, I hurled out into a drift. There it lies now, outside in the snow, shrieking and screaming with the eternal crying of the winds that roar between the worlds.

  To leave my shelter now would be certain death. And to stay?…

  I must be quick with this, for He has come! Called by the demon howling of the medallion, He is here. No illusion this, no figment of my imagination but hideous fact. He squats without, even now!

  I dare not look out into His great eyes; I do not know what I might see in those carmine depths. But I do know now how I will die. It will be quick.

  All is silence now. The falling snow muffles all. The black thing waits outside like a huge hunched blot on the snow. The temperature falls, drops, plummets. I cannot get close enough to my stove. This is how I am to pass from the world of the living, in the icy tomb of my ten
t, for I have gazed upon Ithaqua!

  It is the end…frost forms on my brow…my lips crack…my blood freezes…I cannot breathe the air…my fingers are as white as the snow…the cold…

  NAVISSA DAILY

  The Snows Claim a Fresh Victim!

  Just before the Christmas season, bad news has come out of Fir Valley camp where members of the Royal Canadian North-West Mounted Police have winter residence. During the recent lull in the weather, Constables McCauley and Sterling have been out in the wastes north of Navissa searching for traces of their former companion, Constable Jeffrey, who disappeared on routine investigations in October. The Mounties found no trace of Constable Jeffrey, but they did discover the body of Mr. David Lawton, an American meteorologist, who also disappeared in the snow in October. Mr. Lawton, accompanied by a Mrs. Lucille Bridgeman, still missing, set out at that time in search of one Kirby Bridgeman, the woman’s son. It was believed that this young man had gone into the wastes with a party of Eskimos and Indians, though no trace of this party has since been found. The recovery of Mr. Lawton’s body will have to wait until the spring thaw; Constables McCauley and Sterling report that the body is frozen in a great block of clear ice that also encloses a canvas shelter and bivouac. The detailed report mentions that the eyes of the corpse are open and staring, as though the freezing took place with great rapidity….

  NELSON RECORDER

  A Christmas Horror!

  Carol singers in the High Hill quarter of Nelson were astounded and horrified when, at 11:00 P.M., the frozen body of a young man crashed out of the upper branches of a tree in the grounds of No. 10 Church Street where they were caroling. Such was the force of its fall that the icy, naked figure brought down many branches with it. At least two of the witnesses state that the horribly mauled and mangled youth—whose uncommonly large and strangely webbed feet may help to identify him—fell not out of the tree but through it, as from the sky! Investigations are continuing.