“It was Jake down below contrived to save my life. He grabbed me by the ankles and swung on them like a church bell, and there came a sharp rip as my coat came to pieces at the seams. It didn’t have proper hold of me, only by the fabric, you see: that was what saved me, that and the Chinee tailor back in San Francisco who’d scrimped on the thread when he put that old pea-coat together. I went sliding back through the hole on the roof, while the thing struggled to regain its balance on the icy shingles. It let out another of those blood-freezing hollers, and then I was lying on top of Jake, in amidst all of the blood and the panic down below.
“All of the breath had gotten knocked out of me by the fall, and the same for Jake, who was underneath me, remember. The two of us were pretty much hors de combat for a while; plus, I dare say I wouldn’t have been much use even with breath in my lungs, not after the jolt I’d took up on the roof. I was aware that the rest of the fellows were running round like crazy, firing into the rafters and yelling fit to raise Cain. For myself, right then, I figured old Harvey Tibbets’d had the best idea, digging himself a hole – or trying to. I knew if it wanted to come down and try conclusions, we none of us stood a chance in hell, guns or no guns. I thought it was all up with us still, and to this day I don’t know why it wasn’t.
“Because after a while, in amongst all the raving and the letting-off of guns and the war-whoops and hollers and what have you, it gradually dawned on the fellows that there was no movement from up on the roof. Nothing coming through the hole at us, no fresh attack; no sound of creaking timbers, even – though I doubt we’d have heard it, we were making so much noise ourselves. In the end a couple of men ran outside to look up on the roof: nothing there, they yelled, and I thought to myself, no, of course not. It won’t show itself so easy. I figured it had only gone to earth for a while, that it would pick us off one by one when we weren’t expecting it.
“Then one of them happened to look upwards – I mean straight up, towards the sky. What he saw up there made him let out such a shout, it brought us all out of that broke-up shambles of a cabin. We joined him out in the snow: I remember us all standing there, staring up into the heavens as if God in all his glory was coming down and the final judgement was upon us.
“Silhouetted against the wraithlike flux of the aurora, the thing was ascending into the night sky. It had wings, but they didn’t seem to be lifting it, or even bearing its weight; it was as if it simply rose through the air the way a jellyfish rises through the water. That sound – that terrible piercing howl – echoed all across the wide expanse of the landscape, from mountain to lakeshore, through all the sleeping trees, and I swear every beast that heard it must have trembled in its lair; must have whined and cowered and crept to the back of its cave and prayed to whatever rough gods had made it, Lord, let this danger pass.
“Up it rose, till we could hardly make it out against the green-wreathed stars. Then, there came one last throb of phosphorescence, bright as day – and it was as if a circuit burned out, somewhere in the sky. The aurora vanished, simple as that; and in the brief interval while our eyes adjusted to the paler starlight, I believe we all screamed, like children pitched headlong into the dark.
“As soon as we could see what we were doing again, we lost no time in getting out of that hateful place. Without waiting to bury our dead – poor Sam Tibbets – we beat a retreat back to Dawson, and there was never a band of pilgrims more relieved to see the sun come up. It shone off the frozen river in bright clean rainbows of ice; it showed us the dirty old log cabins we called home, and we wept with joy at the sight. Exhausted as I was, and scared too, and bewildered at all I’d seen, I believed we might be safe at last. Until the night came; that first night, and all the other nights that followed through that long Canadian winter.
“The nights were bad, you see. I took to sleeping in the daytime, when I could, and once it got dark I’d sit with Jake and the rest of the men in a private room at the back of one of the saloons, playing cards and drinking through to sun-up, very deliberately not talking about what we’d been through that evening. I was never really any good after that; not till I made it out of Dawson with the first thaw. Another season of that, and I’d have ended up a rummy in the streets of Skagway, telling tall tales for the price of a pint of hooch. Some of the men had heard of a fresh strike in Alaska, up on the shale banks at Nome – me, I’d lost heart, and could only think of getting home to San Francisco, where such things as we’d seen up on the roof of the cabin couldn’t be. Or that’s what I thought back then. What do you think, Mr Fenwick?”
For a second I thought he just wanted me to pass judgment on his tale – to say yes, I believe you, or hold on a minute, are you sure about that? Then I realized the import of his words. “You mean that thing down in the basement, don’t you?” I said, slowly, almost reluctantly, and he nodded. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, and after a moment or two I shut it again.
“It looks every inch a match,” Keith said, through his hands. He sighed, and leaned back in his chair, staring up at the nicotine-yellow ceiling. “It was like some sort of damnable optical illusion – didn’t you get that? – the longer you looked at that black void, the more it seemed as if the creature was projected into the empty space.” With hands that trembled hardly at all, he lit up another cigar.
“A thing can’t come to life after so long,” I asserted, without a fraction of the confidence that had illuminated Keith’s entire narrative. “Nothing of this earth—” and there I stopped, remembering what the Indian Jake had had to say on that subject.
“—Could last so long trapped inside a layer of coal,” finished Keith, helpfully. “It’s bituminous coal hereabouts; laid down during the Carboniferous age. That’s, what? Three hundred million years ago, give or take a few million. Imagine the world back then, Fenwick: the way it looked, the way things were all across the land. Dense humid forests; sodden bogs and peat swamps. The stink of rot, of decomposition; of new life forming, down amongst the muck and the decay. The first creatures had just crawled up out of the warm slimy seas, lizards and snails and molluscs, is all. Trilobites and dragonflies. Nothing much bigger than a crawdad. And then they arrived.
“God, they would have been lords of the earth, Fenwick! They could still be now, if—” He broke off, and his hands went once more to his thin eager face. “If enough of them got turned up.” His voice was muffled somewhat, but in another way it was remarkably clear – clear-headed, at least.
“Three hundred million years.” I was having trouble with the concept – you could say that. Yes, you could certainly say that the concept was troubling me. “You’re saying that a thing . . . a thing—”
“Not of this earth,” put in Keith helpfully.
“Whatever . . . could keep alive for so long, under such incredible pressure; no air, no sustenance . . . why, it’s fantastic.”
“It’s fantastic, all right,” said Keith, and for the first time there was a hint of impatience in his deep even voice. “I thought I made it clear this wasn’t a tale you’d hear every day. But look at the facts. These miners here – they didn’t find a fossil, a chunk of rock! No more than the Tibbets found a fossil up there in the Klondike. Set aside your preconceptions, Fenwick. I had to. Look at the facts.”
“That’s just what I aim to do,” I said. “Tomorrow, when we get a look at this damn stupid whoosit of theirs.”
And on that note, though with a deal more talk thereafter, we agreed to leave it; and I went up to bed with a head full of questions and misgivings. The brandy helped me get off to sleep, in the end. If I dreamed, I’m glad to say I don’t remember it. And in any case-There are many less-than-pleasant ways to be woken from even the most fitful of slumbers, I guess: but let the voice of experience assure you that there’s no more absolute way of rousing a fellow than the sound of a monstrous siren going off in what sounds like the next room down the corridor. I was practically thrown out of bed and into the corridor, where I bumped into Keith
. He was already dressed; or more probably hadn’t been to bed yet.
“Accident at the mine,” I croaked. By this time I’d managed to remember where the hell I was, or just about.
“Maybe,” was all Keith would say. “Get your pants on, newspaperman.”
By the time we made it out into the street people were milling around in their night-shirts, asking each other was there trouble up to the mine. For a while no one seemed to know, and everyone expected the worst; then, we saw the Mayor’s Ford barrelling down main street, and Keith practically flung himself in the way of it. Before Kronke or any of his stooges could complain, we were scrambling into the rumble seat and pumping them for information.
“Had us a report of some trouble, up on Peck’s Ridge,” was all Kronke would say. He looked grey with panic; the flesh practically hung off his face.
“Peck’s Ridge?” We’d heard that place name before, of course. “Isn’t that where Lamar Tibbs lives?” The mayor didn’t answer at first; Keith leaned forwards and gripped his shoulder. “Tibbs? The man who found the creature?”
“Up near there,” Kronke said, shaking loose his arm. H tried to regain some of his mayoral authority: “Tain’t rightly speaking none of your business anyways, mister—”
“Drop that,” Keith said impatiently. “Drop that straightaway, or else I’ll make sure you come across as the biggest hick in all creation when the story makes it into the papers. How’s that gonna play with the voters come election time, Mr Kronke?”
The two men stared angrily at each other, but there was only ever going to be one winner of that contest. After a second Kronke told his chauffeur “Drive on,” and we were off, away down main street heading out of town, up into the hill country.
That was some drive, all right. The middle of the night, and not a light showing in all that desolate stretch; only the headlamps of the car on the ribbon of road ahead. Trees crowding close to the track, and between their ghostly lit-up trunks only the blackness of the forest. Overhead, a canopy of branches, and no starlight, no sliver of the moon; it felt as if we were going down into the ground as much as climbing, as if we’d entered some miner’s tunnel lined with wooden props, heading clear down to the Carboniferous.
Alongside me on the rumble, Keith sat, hands clenched on the back of the seat in front. He was willing the automobile on, it seemed to me, the way a jockey pushes his horse along in the home straight. His old man’s mop of hair showed up very white in the near darkness, but that didn’t fool me any: underneath it all was still the dreamer he’d always been and would remain, the thirty-year-old who’d walked out on his safe job with Mr Hearst and headed up North to the Klondike on nothing more than a notion and a chance. Hero worship? I should say so.
Maybe seven or eight miles out of town, we saw light up ahead: fire. The Ford swung round and down a trail so narrow, the branches plucked at our sleeves and we had to cover our faces from their lash, and then we came out into a natural dip between two high sides of hills, with a farmhouse and outbuildings down the bottom of the hollow. All hell was breaking loose down there.
People were running back and forth between the main house and the outhouses, the farthest of which was well ablaze. You could hear the screams of animals trapped in the sheds; I couldn’t be sure there weren’t the cries of people in there too.
Before we even came to a halt, an old man in biballs came running up, crying out unintelligibly. “Was it you phoned?” Kronke bellowed at him above the tumult. Whether he expected any answer, I don’t know. It was clear the fellow was raving mad, for the time being at least. Keith passed him over to Kronke’s buddies, who were very pointedly not setting foot outside the automobile, and beckoned me follow him down towards the house.
Kronke hung back, unwilling to leave the safety of the car; why he’d even bothered coming out there in the first place was hard to say. Perhaps he thought it was his chance to get the whoosit back, on behalf of the mining company. Perhaps – I think this is not unlikely, myself – perhaps there was always some sort of a trip planned for that night, Kronke and a few men armed with pistols, up to Peck’s Ridge on company business. Well, they might have had a chance at that, I guess, had things only panned out just a little differently.
Down by the sheds Keith managed to get a hold of one of the people fighting the fire; a teenager, no more, in a plaid shirt and patched drawers. “What’s going on here?” he yelled.
“They’re trapped!” the kid hollered back, his eyes round with panic. “Uncle Jesse and Uncle Vern! In there! They were a-watchin’ over it!”
“Watching over what?” The kid tried to shake free, but Keith had him tight. “Were they keeping guard? What over?”
“Over Pap’s thing!” The kid made to break loose again, without success. “That what Pap found, down to the mine! Lemme go, mister . . .”
“Your pap Lamar Tibbs?” Keith was implacable. I felt for the youngster, I did. But I wanted to know as well.
The kid nodded, and Keith had one more question. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know!” screamed the boy. “I DONT KNOW!” Keith was so shocked at the ferocity of it, the sheer volume, that he let him go. The kid stood there for a second, surprised himself I guess, then shook himself all over like a dog coming out of the creek and ran off towards the burning barn. We followed on behind.
Some of the men had formed a chain, and were passing buckets of water up from the pump. The fellows nearest the door were emptying the buckets into the smoke and flames; Keith brushed straight past them and was inside before anyone could stop him. I went to follow him, but one of the men in the doorway grabbed me. “It’s gonna come down!” he yelled in my ear.
I was just about to holler after Keith when he appeared through the smoke, coughing and staggering. “It’s not in there,” he wheezed, soon as he could talk. Then there came a mighty creaking and splintering, and we all sprang back as the roof collapsed in a roaring billow of sparks.
“It’s gone,” Keith insisted, as we stood and watched the barn burn out from a safe distance. “But it was there, though.” I was about to ask him what he meant, how he could have known that, when a stocky little man came running up from the house shouting, and interrupted me.
“You see anything of Vern and Jesse in there, mister?” His face was blackened, eyes white and staring; I learned later they’d dragged him out of the barn once already, half-dead from the smoke. “It’s my brothers – I’m Lamar Tibbs.”
Keith nodded. The man was about to ask the next, the obvious, question, but I guess Keith’s expression told him what he wanted to know. Tibbs’ own features crumpled up, and he bowed his head.
After a little while he said: “It all up with them?” Keith nodded again. “Fire?”
“Before the fire,” Keith said. The miner looked up, and he went on: “They were over in the far corner. They weren’t burned any.” I think he meant it kindly; that was the way Tibbs took it, not knowing any better then. But Keith’s eyes were flinty hard, and I for one had my misgivings.
“Was it that thing caused it?” Tibbs’ voice was all but inaudible. “That thing I brung up from the mine?”
“I believe so.” Keith’s voice sounded calm enough, the more so if you couldn’t take a cue from his face. “It’s not there any more: it looks to have busted out the back before the roof went.”
That got Tibbs’ attention. “You sure?”
“Can’t be certain that’s the way it got out,” said Keith, picking his words with care. “It wasn’t in there when the roof fell in, though – that, I’m sure of.”
Tibbs looked hard at Keith, who stared levelly back at him. What he saw seemed to make his mind up. “Wait there, mister,” he said shortly, and started back towards the house. Over his shoulder, he shouted: “You in the mood for a dawg hunt?”
I began to say something, but Keith stopped me with a upraised hand. “What about you, Mr Fenwick? You in the mood for a dawg hunt, sir?”
What could I
say? Understanding that no matter what, Keith would go through with it, I nodded miserably. Then there was no more time to think: Tibbs was running back from the house with three of the mangiest, meanest-looking yaller hounds you ever saw in your life. The chase was on.
The dogs picked up a trail directly we got round the back of the barn. They shivered uncontrollably – as if they were passing peach pits, as Keith memorably put it later that same night – and set off at a good fast clip into the trees. Tibbs had them on the end of a short leash, and it was all he could do to keep up the pace. Keith loped along after him, and I brought up the rear. A few of Tibbs’ relatives from back in the yard joined in – thankfully, they’d thought to bring along lanterns. There were a half-dozen of us in all.
“I thought it was a goner,” panted Tibbs from up in front. He’d pegged Keith for a straight shooter more or less from the beginning, that was clear: I suppose it was watching Keith dive straight into that burning barn had done it. I doubt it came easy for him to trust anyone much, outside of his extended family circle, but he damn near deferred to Horton Keith. “We’d been blastin’ on the big new seam, see: I swung my hammer at a big ol’ chunk of coal fell out the roof, ’bout the size of a barrel – the fall must ‘a cracked it some, ’cause one lick from me was all it took. That chunk split wide open like a hick’ry nut, clean in two – an’ there it was, the whoosit, older than Methuselah. Fitted in there like a hand inside a glove, it did.”
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