I felt a great desire to return to my room and spend the rest of the night watching old movies on the television set.
But I knew the way. I must walk the path. I edged close to the wall, fixing my eyes on the old stables, avoiding the sight of the well.
I was halfway there when I heard it.
It was a whisper. It trailed up my back and reached my ears, the voice buzzing like an insect. Then there was a soft scratching and the shuffle of a foot upon stone.
The buzzing increased and I thought maybe it wasn’t an insect. Maybe it was the flapping of wings.
There came another footstep upon the floor. The sound echoed and bounced around me. I lowered my head and pressed my hands against the wall.
I thought about a poem Don Fermin had read to me one time.
All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it, nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb.
I whispered that line half a dozen times, with my hands glued to the wall.
A loud boom caused me to turn. I saw the flashlight rolling towards me across the floor. Instinct made me scoop it up and I held it, aiming the beam in the direction of the well.
Salvador was on the floor next to it, staring at the sky.
I rushed towards him and stared at his face, which was streaked with blood. His eyes seemed glassy and unfocused. He was breathing very slowly, his chest hardly rising. I stepped back and bumped my foot against something. I looked down: it was the well’s stone cover.
The courtyard grew quiet.
There was a great deal of fuss about Salvador Machado after that. His family hired a lawyer and started arguing it was the magazine’s fault that this had happened. The accident only took place because the premises were so poorly maintained. They claimed that Salvador had tripped or fallen, hitting his head. The magazine talked about a nervous breakdown brought on by an excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, typical of the circle in which Salvador moved. Others said Salvador Machado had been trying to commit suicide by jumping into the well. An eager cop even looked at me with suspicion, perhaps thinking I had attempted to murder the student, but they dropped that theory pretty quick. I mean, Salvador hadn’t really been physically hurt. He’d just gone a bit loopy.
The well’s stone cover caused a smaller amount of concern, though it also came with its own set of problems. The thing was very heavy and it took three men to lift it back in its place, but that was only after two other men simply quit and refused to do the job.
Several years ago I took my son to the Museum of Anthropology to do some research for a paper. We walked by the exhibits, he took notes and every now and then I leaned down to read the little white placards explaining what I was looking at.
There was one typed card that said Aztec instruments for ritual bloodletting were often in the shape of hummingbirds, their needle-sharp beaks piercing the skin.
When we left the museum I stood under the shadow of the tall statue of the rain-god Tlaloc. Don Fermin once told me about the night in 1964 when they dragged the statue to its current place outside the museum. It rode on a gigantic wheeled platform, in a steel harness, from its home by the town of Coatlinchan where it had been carved. It rained that night, as though a storm followed the statue.
We are shocked when we think about the Aztecs sacrificing captives at the foot of their temples, consecrating their buildings with blood. But I’ve known of more than one man injured, maimed or killed at the construction sites where I’ve worked.
The foundations of buildings are drawn with blood.
Once you accept that, you know certain places must be haunted. Our City of Palaces, by its nature, must have more than its share of hauntings.
As I said at the beginning, I can’t speak of ghosts but there was something in the House of Hummingbirds. What exactly, I cannot say. I think Don Fermin knew but never told. I think I’ve been close to understanding it but I will never speak it out loud.
Oh, you need something more concrete than that? Well, I’ll tell you this: Look around carefully when you walk these old city streets at night. Whatever was in the House of the Hummingbirds, I’ve felt similar things brush by in other places.
You can turn your recorder off now.
. . . a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe.
“The Lurking Fear” . H. P. Lovecraft (1923)
WHO LOOKS BACK?
Kyla Ward
Who looks back on the Waimangu track?
Not Kelsie Munroe, running light over gravel, the slope gentle but the surface potentially foul. The track’s made for walking, not running or driving. There is a road proper for that, for ferrying tired tourists back from Lake Rotomahana. You’re meant to walk one way down the length of the valley, taking in all its steams and smokes, and weirdly colored sinter. But Kelsie never walks where she can run and Lewis jumps.
Lewis Zabri keeps her pace for now: brown skin abreast of freckles, black stubble beside red hair. They dress much the same; singlets, shorts and runners, packs strapped into the small of the back. Kelsie is taller and can beat him over short sprints but this is four kilometers of up and down, winding and in places rough. Lewis keeps himself loose and breathing easy. He knows she’s planning something.
The valley of Waimangu, New Zealand, is the youngest landscape on earth. Nothing here, not the trees, not the streams, nor the cliffs themselves, existed before the eruption of 1886. The ground split, swallowing everything, then spewing it out again as boiling mud. Forest and farmstead, whole villages died. For kilometers around, there was not a single living thing. On the walls of the Visitors Center, blurry black and white photos show weirdly peaked hills and plains of ash. It’s gone green now: first the extremophile algae, then lichen and ferns, then melaleuca spilling down the slopes in a long, slow race, the reclamation marathon. The algae was first to reach the bank of Frying Pan Spring. But Kelsie, or maybe Lewis, will catch up soon.
You’re not meant to run and definitely not to leave the track, risking a scalding, broken limbs or damaging the unique terrain. But Lewis and Kelsie leap, climb, and throw themselves off things as a matter of course and the terms of this race have been agreed: first to the lake via the Mount Haszard lookout. Ahead of them, and still a serious drop below, is where the track and creek first cross. The climb to the lookout begins there, but Lewis sees no reason to wait. Running straight at the guardrail, he extends hands and flips himself over the cliff in a perfect saut de chat. He doesn’t so much as glance over his shoulder.
Kelsie is not impressed. She trains in parkour herself but this isn’t the terrain. Lewis can say what he likes about the zone and the flow, but terrain is king. She knows this and that’s why she’ll win. He’s risking a spill for a gain she’ll more than make up at the lookout, if the map approximates reality. Worse yet, this close to the Visitors Center he’s risking the rangers seeing him.
Three meters below her now, Lewis adjusts automatically to the crunch and mealy slide beneath his feet. So long as he stays off the algae, he’ll reach the start of the climb seconds ahead of Kelsie and that gain he’ll keep. Ribbons of color unwind beside him, pink rock and water a startling green. Steam sifts across his field of vision and there is frantic noise around him, an all-encompassing bubble and hiss. One part of his mind feels the heat and moisture and yes, some fear; the other only registers angles, surfaces, opportunities. He is in the zone, feeling the flow. The goal of all his training is to clear his mind of the artificial clutter of modern life and here, now, he is almost free. That’s why he’ll win.
Kelsie burns on down the track. Despite his pretensions to this or that philosophy, Lewis never really thinks, or else thinks that everywhere is just like London, where no one gives a damn. But sometimes people do care. They care about traveling together. They care about sleeping together. By God, a whole lot of them care when someone tic-tacs on the shrine at Tanukitan
isan Temple and what was the point of that? They had to leave Japan overnight and it didn’t even make the blog. Then again, nor will the stunt she’s banking on today, for which she’s carrying an extra kilo. Twenty meters, ten: Lewis vanishes ahead of her into the steam. She can hear the creek: is that the creek? It sounds like voices. It’s like from out of the ground, from the weeping black ferns and deliquescent rocks there rises a deep and liquid dissension. The warmth envelops her, damp upon her arms and face, sulphurous in her eyes and nose. For a moment she runs blind.
Lewis rejoins the track and not a moment too soon: Kelsie is coming up fast. Here, the valley narrows sharply and the banks seem to be rotting, a foul, yellowish slough choking the creek bed. He peers ahead for the turn-off and sees only the wildly swirling fog. Is he motion then, with nothing to mark his passage? Can there be motion in a void? Yes, there can: so long as Kelsie comes behind. Grinning just a little, he eases, anticipating her sight of his back. She takes all their games so seriously, even in bed. Then something shifts beneath his feet. The gravel is suddenly live as well as warm. The fog billows and the noise of the creek rises sharply around him: is that the creek roaring? He does not stop, cannot, as directly in front of him, something forms from the white.
Kelsie knows that sound isn’t the creek. Its voices have not vanished, merely retreated behind the encroaching rumble of a truck on gravel: she has Australian ears, accustomed to country sounds. A bank of wind hits her face, clearing the steam and she sees Lewis running slow and beyond him a large, white utility bearing the park logo. Coming straight at him, at her. Behind the cab she glimpses ridiculous things, white and shapeless with reflective face plates and Lewis is—oh no, he’s not! Not slowing or swerving, Lewis guns straight into the path of the moving vehicle and vaults. Hands and foot on the bonnet, next step against the windscreen. Even though the truck is jerking, skewing to a stop, he executes the move with perverse bloody brilliance. Straight over the top he goes and through the white shapes, revealed by their reaction as men in thermal suits. In the instant of their shock, before they even imagine her presence, she shifts balance and angle, and leaps out across the water.
Lewis sees angles, shapes, the moving flat of the truck bed. His pulse sings as he leaps to the ground and keeps running, unfaltering. Yes, yes; that was perfect! Did those guys even see him? By those shouts and grinding, clunking gears, oh yes they did. A grin splits his face as he rounds the bend and sights the turn-off.
Kelsie grinds uphill through ferns and bushes, wincing as she pushes on her right ankle. Her leap covered the distance as she saw it, but seeing isn’t believing down here. Solid is slurry, ferns anchor foam. Her ankle stings and she’s not sure if it’s burn or graze. Either way, she’s committed: their rules don’t compensate for accident, pursuit, or even biohazard. It’s win or lose and she is not losing today, there’s too much at stake. So she climbs a bad climb. Exposed rock to fallen log: it’s an obstreperous sign of her progress that the plants get bigger. The pink and yellow cools into gray; spindly trunks and spiking tussocks block her view of the stream, but she can still hear voices. And not shouting scientists and squealing rangers; the old voices, that the Maori tribesmen must have heard to mark this place as the realm of monsters. While Lewis was psyching himself up, she read the placards in the Visitors Center. Then suddenly, startlingly she is out of the bush with hard-pressed earth beneath her feet. Before her the path to the look-out swerves up a steep defile. But she is alone and whether Lewis is ahead or behind, she has no idea.
Lewis would say he was ahead: ahead of the utility and its shrouded occupants. What the Hell were they doing, dressed up like that? The cluttered part of his mind noticed machines in the back of the ute, the monitors and probes. It made sense they’d check the valley regularly, though he would have thought they’d use the access road for that. But here he turns up the hill and here the Klu Klux Rangers cannot follow him, if that’s what they’re shouting about. It’s true they could reverse all the way back to where the climb rejoins the main track and wait for him there, but surely they’re got somewhere to be! Another blast of air strikes him from down the valley. He hears a new note in the creek, a warbling, high-pitched sound.
Kelsie plows up the path but she’s spent her best. If by some miracle Lewis is behind her now, she’ll abandon her plan and take the track down to the lake. But how to tell? The vegetation here is thick. Strange flowers rise aside of the path: purple trumpets on stems like giant foxgloves. Huge tree ferns, the biggest she has ever seen lip over her head and reach for her feet with long, black tendrils. Branches bristle with inch-long thorns. Still, a faint whispering rises from the earth, punctuated by the rasp of her feet and controlled breath. Then suddenly by screams.
Lewis looks up to see the white utility, with its doors swinging and machines falling as the vehicle flies through the steaming sky. Rangers fall too: foolish, flailing space men, mission aborted. One remains braced in the drivers seat: Lewis sees him clearly as the truck rotates. That’s a whole truck up there, spinning slowly as though something wraps it, carries it amidst shifting coils. And as the nacreous mist thickens, something does.
Kelsie all but stumbles towards the lookout. She’s made it: there’s a bench concreted firm into the ground and there’s the cliff. Ferns, flowers fall away: the valley lies before her, a snaking, smoking rift down to the metallic sheet of the lake. Nothing in that view suggests a source for the dreadful sounds, the mash of flesh and branches. It was behind her then, the accident. Lewis, oh my God. And she turns. She begins to turn back, as branches crack and wind flattens, and something huge and whistling like a train churns up the hill. Into her view drops a white utility. It drops from the sky right before her eyes, crashing, sliding away down the cliff as something in the air loosens and billows, shooting away with a furl resembling the feeding fringe of a coral polyp as much as steam or clouds or a weather balloon: what the Hell is she seeing?
Lewis hasn’t stopped moving down the main track. This was where both truck and terror came from, but they aren’t there now and he can really put on some speed. His is the discipline of pure motion, but maybe there’s something in this headlong rush of a small, brown boy being hunted through the London alleys. The track bends and bends again; on his left Mount Haszard and on his right the creek, bubbling with increased vigor. And his cluttered mind suggests that if what he saw was an explosion, the freakish herald of a volcanic event, then in all likelihood he’s running right into it. Where is Kelsie? If he was so far ahead that she didn’t see the horror, then she might well have continued on up to the look-out. He’s closer now to the exit than the entrance: when he reaches that he’ll head up and meet her. They’re bound to be safe on the mountain.
Kelsie had the rope and carabineers in her pack. This was her plan: an assisted fall from the look-out, ten meters down onto what they called the Terrace, then a straight though possibly scalding sprint to the shore. She’d take risks when it counted. Confined to the remainder of the path, Lewis would have lost minutes and been lost in wide, white-grinning admiration of a stunt so worthy of himself. Then she could have told him she was through.
Now she goes through the same motions to deadly purpose: there are people down there, she can hear them. Anchor on the bench and on the largest tree, though that wouldn’t be worth much: quickly, quickly pull the sleeve in place so the cliff doesn’t cut the cord as she goes over. Climbing was her first love, in the erosion gullies around the farm: her first attempt to escape. Her second took her to London and where hasn’t she been since then? Stepping off into air, she looks down.
Lewis hears another rumble. A thrashing, boiling, torrential sound: in the direction of the lake, pure white striates the sky. There’s been no geysers in Waimangu since just after the eruption, when they claimed it held the largest in the world. What’s this then, what is this? It’s incredible! In all his travels, running round and round the world in search of its edges, he’s never seen the like! The entire lake must be r
ising and even as he runs, as the track beneath him starts to shake and the outrunners of the wind hits, there’s as much delight in his whoop as fear. Until he realizes that the wind and the whistling is coming from behind him.
Kelsie drops into ruin. The valley floor is made up of smashed sinter, broken rocks, raw scars scraped through the undergrowth, and white wreckage steaming—all of it steaming. A white figure flails, caught half in metal, half in water the same unearthly green as the spring. Rumbling, roaring, human screams a tenuous thread of sound. Kelsie is shaking, everything is shaking and as she lands, nice and light and square, she’s nearly flung off her feet. Not even unhooked she is turning, stumbling, drawing the rope across the heaving pink and yellow ground. Inhaling an overwhelming smell, like eggs boiling in a rusted kettle, she reaches down and hauls on wet fabric.
Lewis slithers in blood-warm water, popping and stinging against his skin. There was nowhere else to go as something that wasn’t a trick of the light, nor a current of superheated water or anything else but a creature came hunting. His entire body knew it and that wracks him beyond the heat and acid. He keeps himself loose and floating: going with the flow, but he isn’t alone. Slick like rubber and obscenely buoyant, white corpses follow the current, floating swiftly towards white Hell.
The ranger’s name is Ahere, her skin darker than Lewis where it isn’t burned, her eyes a brimming brown. Crying and hugging Kelsie, she tells her things: a seismological blip, a bloom on the thermal map, an early morning expedition in full heat-wear down to check the lake. A new vent had opened, yes, but there had been nothing to suggest more until the thing emerged. Hīanga, she says, we put the lines down and it comes, we put the lines down and it catches us! She points frantically to a strange, circular mark in the sinter, a circle at least a meter across with five deep indents that Kelsie assumes was caused by some part of the utility. All she really gets from Ahere’s story is that the lake is dangerous. But there’s no going back the way she came: the whole cliff looks unstable and she doubts Ahere could make it in the best circumstances. Whatever Ahere saw, whatever she saw, they have no choice and apparently there’s a reason. Ahere is saying they’ll be safe.
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 44