Above him, the horned moon held three stars within its sway, three great globes of light that moved inexorably toward one another. Belknap waited, frozen to the spot in terror and fear. The world held its breath. The stars moved. Then they touched, and fire fell from the sky, striking the sea. It boiled. From the depths came a roar, and the ocean erupted. A thousand black cables burst from below, writhing and snapping and slapping the churning water. Then the great beast breached the surface, and Belknap screamed.
The next instant, he found himself staring into Prim’s wild eyes set deep in a too pale face. Belknap started and fell backward.
“Arthur, it’s alright!” There was a confidence in McBride’s voice that calmed him, as did the musket he held in his hands. “Look!”
His eyes followed where his friend pointed, and the buildings of Miskatonic College met his gaze. The cloud was gone.
“What happened?”
“You fell into a sickness,” said Prim. “Thrashed about as if a man was shaking you. Then there was a scream from within the mist, and it…vanished.”
“It did not vanish,” said McBride. “A great wind came upon us, lifted it up into the sky and ripped it apart, like a ship’s sail in a gale.”
Miskatonic sat silent. A shared question, unspoken, lay before them.
“We should make sure everyone is alright,” said Belknap, answering for all. The other men said nothing, but when Belknap stepped beyond the invisible barrier—what had been the limit of the wall of mist—the other men followed.
They found not a soul. Not at first. In fact everything was as should be expected. And yet, in the light of the full moon, nothing stirred. Until a door opened and an elderly man Belknap knew as Reverend Elkanah stumbled out.
“Well,” he said, relief flooding his voice, “bless you boys for coming to help.”
Belknap spared a glance at McBride, who said, “What happened here, Reverend?”
The elderly man regarded them queerly. “Why, the storm, of course.”
“The storm?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at each, “one of the most violent I have ever experienced. It must have been a dozen times I thought I’d meet the Lord before it ended. But when it did, suddenly I must say, I knew that I should check on the boys.”
More doors opened, more of the teachers and masters who lived on the campus joined the Reverend, and each told the same tale. A terrible storm, powerful gales, fierce lighting and thunder that boomed before the flash even faded. Surely, they all said, the men had experienced the same? The three didn’t dare deny it, lest the sanity of all come into question. Instead, they urged the men to their stated goal—to check on the students.
It shouldn’t have been a difficult task. There were only twenty boys, and they lived in a handful of cottages along what would become the old yard.
Some of what Belknap relates here strains credulity, echoing as it does some of the more outrageous gothic legends. Dinner, sitting ready on tables. Boiling water on stoves. Tea in cups, still hot.
But whatever is exaggeration and whatever truth, they did not find the boys. Soon they had searched every building on campus. All, save one. Huntington Library.
They saved it for last. Maybe because it seemed the least likely. Maybe because it was big and they knew it would take time to clear. Or maybe they just had one of those feelings.
At any rate, they soon came to the great doors of the library, the three men from town and Elkanah. They waited, in silence, none willing to make the first move. Only Belknap. He stepped forward. He grasped steel rings and pulled. As the smell hit them, Prim vomited; the stench of death filled the air. And what seemed the patter of rain gently falling filled their ears. Belknap’s eyes went upward, following the sound.
When he saw it, he didn’t gasp. For he could not fully comprehend it, the thing that hung above him, suspended by ropes stained crimson, same as the mass they held. Red. All red.
They’d found one of the students. They never did find his skin.
His body hung from the rafters above the antechamber, tied to the wooden beams that supported the ceiling. Belknap briefly considered how he got there, but there was no time to unravel the mystery. More horror was to come.
“We should get more men,” said McBride, and the single musket he bore suddenly seemed woefully insignificant.
“No,” Belknap answered. “No, let’s see this through.” If the other men disagreed, they did not say.
Belknap pulled open the doors of the library itself, a drop of blood splashing onto his hand. Ignoring it, he and the others stepped quickly into the great hall.
They were everywhere, the bodies. All of them horribly disfigured. Mounds of broken bones and flesh, drowning in crimson pools. Belknap was beyond shock now, so horrible were the things he’d already seen. It struck him that one might not even know they were bodies, if there were anything else they could be. The acrid, coppery smell of blood hung as thick in the air as the fog had an hour before.
From one mound to another they walked, and with each one, Prim said a single word, a number. Two and three were on either side of the inner doors. Four through ten were between the first and second fireplaces, both of which burned down to embers. Seven more were on the other side of the great room, in roughly the same places as the ones before them. And eighteen and nineteen were against the far wall. Belknap had the shuddering sensation that could he view the room from a higher vantage, he would recognize a pattern.
“There are only nineteen.”
The three men turned and looked at Prim.
“What?” said McBride.
“There are only nineteen…bodies. There are twenty students.”
Now every man counted. And every man came to the same number, one short of a score.
“Then where is the twentieth?”
“Perhaps he killed the others and fled?”
Belknap shook his head. “No. One man could not do this.”
“But there’s nowhere else to look.”
“There is.” The others turned to Reverend Elkanah. “There is one other chamber, a chamber we never enter, nor do we allow the students to know of its existence.”
“Why not?”
“It is foul, ungodly. Cursed, perhaps. When the building was constructed, so too was it made.”
“Why don’t you just tear it down?”
“Because,” said the reverend, “it is underneath us.”
Belknap visibly shuddered. This was too much, even for him. But he knew that he would enter the chamber on that day, no matter what the cost.
“Show us, then,” said McBride.
Reverend Elkanah led, and the other men followed. They came to the center of the room, around which, Belknap realized, the bodies were arrayed. The floor there was wooden, while the rest had been stone. Elkanah removed a brass key ring from his pocket. He bent down, and then with a quickness that belied his age, stumbled backward.
“What is it?”
“It is unlocked,” he said, “and it is covered in blood.”
Belknap knelt down and looked. The old man was right. The locking mechanism had been disengaged, the iron ring that served to open this cellar door sticky with red ichor.
He pulled a rag from his pocket, wrapping it around the ring. He looked up at the three men above him, seeking, without words, an acknowledgement that they were ready. And without words, they gave it. Belknap grasped the ring and lifted. The door came away, silent. The scene it revealed was not pitch black, as he expected. Instead, the flicker of soft candlelight met his eyes.
Belknap led the way down the stone stairway. But the horrors above but foreshadowed the horrors below. The candles were many, yet they gave little light. Belknap records that it was as if the darkness was thicker, as if it swallowed the light instead of fleeing from it. And yet even in that pale glow, the scene was laid bare before him.
Something was written on the floor in white ch
alk. A design, curves bisected by lines that formed sharp angles, doubling back on each other to create the illusion of three dimensions. Triangles surrounding lidless eyes, circles inlaid upon circles. And writing, if you could call it that, though neither the letters nor the words they formed were like anything Belknap had seen before. And at the center of it all, what was left of a body.
He was not a formless lump of flesh like the others. His fate had been different. He had been eviscerated, and his entrails were spread from one corner of the chamber to the other. Split from groin to chest, but the rest of him left intact. His eyes were wide, the glassy orbs staring somewhere beyond, the last horror of what they saw burned into them. Belknap reached down to close them. It was as he brought his hand to the poor boy’s face that the youth reached up and grabbed him. And then, in one last burst of life before death finally gave him peace, he said, through the dying rattle of his final breath, these words—
“Do not call up that which you cannot put down!”
SEEING THE WENDIGO
I was, if you don’t mind me sayin’, not much older than you, I guess. Maybe even younger, by the look of you. I was a fur man by trade, as my father was before me, and his father before him, all the way back to when my ancestors came from the old country. Huguenots, they were. Fled from one persecution to the next. I guess it was only fitting they should find a home in the woods and the wilds.
This was to be my first time on my own, without my father. You may not know this, but a fur man never travels alone. We work in teams, you see. Trackers and trappers, a man who is handy with a pot and some pans and, if he is worth anything, a hammer and saw. Even a doctor if, per chance, we could find one.
I was in Monterey in those days, a wild bit of country in the Birkshires. There were to be five of us on that trip. The leader was Tom, a big man who looked like he was cut from marble. Tom was a friend of my father’s from back in their wilder days, and he had agreed to take me on that trip as his apprentice.
Then there was Dr. Samuels. We never knew if he was a real doc or not, but he had a reputation in the hill country as a man who could be counted on and knew how to treat a fever or a sickness. And, he could fix a wagon. We hauled one behind us as we went. We’d skin the animals as we caught them and, then, line that thing with as many pelts as we could carry. Once the supplies ran out and the wagon was full, we’d make our way back to the outposts along the rivers. But that was always the worst part of the trip. Wheel would break, wagon would get stuck. Without a man who knew his way around some carpentry, we would be lost. I had some of that knowledge, but the doc was the best with a knife, whether he was cutting on a man or a pine board.
Andrew was another trapper; skinny fellow, that one. He struck me as a bit skittish straightaway, and I marked him as a man you couldn’t trust. Joe was our scout. He was a bit of a mystery. He was a tracker by trade, though he could probably trap better than the rest of us, too. They said he was part Indian; I never learned the truth of that. He died too soon. And, he was quiet. Spoke barely a word.
And, then there was Travis. Travis was an experienced hand. He knew the woods, knew the secret paths, the dark places where the best fur would hide. There was something about that man, something missing from his eyes. I know that sounds strange. But that's what I felt. Like he was empty somehow. But Tom wanted him. Between Tom and Andrew, Travis, and me, we had a pretty good team goin'. There were no doubts we would make good coin on that trip. And, so I guess we got a little wild, as men like us were wont to do. On the night before we were supposed to leave, the wine, the whiskey, and the rum flowed hard and fast.
Tom had a rule on the trail—no liquor, no exceptions. It bein' the last night in town, I guess we drank a little more than we should. There was a girl who worked the bar that evening, an Indian girl. Travis watched her all night long. She was shy and a tiny bit of nothin'. Dark haired and dark skinned. Young, no more than 16, I’d wager. Every time she’d walk by, Travis would grab her, pull her to him, tell her she was “a pretty little thing.”
It boils my blood to even think about it. There was a sickness in his voice then, a nasty, godless quality. Depraved, he was. Just depraved.
Anyway, she obliged him at first, as any good girl in that trade would. But then it was too much even for someone who made her money off men like Travis. She began to struggle, to try and get away. Andy told him—that’s what we called Andrew—Andy told him to leave her alone. Travis just glared at him. He scared me, then, with that look. I wanted no part of that.
I left the bar and found Tom outside, smoking his tobacco. There was the hint of coming snow that day, but it wasn’t cold.
“You ready for tomorrow?” he asked between puffs. I wasn’t really sure. I had only gone with my father before, never with anyone I didn’t know.
“Sure, I am,” I said, mustering as much confidence in my voice as I could manage.
“Good, I’m going to need you,” he said. He didn't say how or why. I simply nodded. I had learned not to question men like Tom too often, and then to ask only the questions that really needed answerin'. But I'd be lyin' if I didn't say there was something about that night that scared me. I don't know how I knew it then, but the trip already felt foul, as if it was marked from the beginning.
I stumbled through the darkness, the haze of the whiskey thick on my brain. I don't know how long passed before I found my way to my bunk, but I do know my head had barely hit the pillow when I was asleep.
I had strange dreams that night, nightmares filled with flashes of light and thunder. I was in the forest, but I was alone. I still remember, even as I was dreaming, that I was struck by my own loneliness. “Never trap alone.” That was my father’s cardinal rule. But there I was, without another soul in sight. It was a familiar forest, and I felt I knew it, but in that familiarity there was also great fear, as if something wasn't quite right. The forest was like Travis’s eyes. It was missing something, something basic and good. It was quiet, too. A stillness as unnatural as it was complete. Nothing moved there. Nothing.
And, then it was night. I can’t explain it, but just as suddenly as you could strike a match, the sun vanished from the sky. Darkness and silence. Isolation, loneliness. Those were the things that overwhelmed me. But there was a voice in my head, too, the voice of my father.
“Steady on, Jack, steady on. You have a job to do. If you don’t finish it, no one will.”
And, so I began to move. But then came the thunder. Then, came the light. It roared and flashed throughout the wood, and it was all the more horrible because of the silence it shattered. Then a single roar over all others—the screeching of a bird, a great and terrible beast unlike any flying thing you ever saw. A great black shadow covered me so thick even the flashes of lightening couldn’t lift it.
I woke, then, drenched in sweat, screaming. I sat bolt upright in my bed. Joe was sitting across from me, just a-starin’, his black Indian eyes just as impenetrable as the meaning of my dream.
“What did you see?” he asked. If he had spoken a word to me before that moment, it’s not one I remember.
“Nothin’. Just a dream,” I said.
“No dream. What did you see?” he asked again, this time more forcefully. He had me scared, then, but I wasn’t going to relive that, no matter what he did.
So I just said, “I told you, nothin’.”
I’m old enough now to know something I didn’t know then—an angry man, or a scared man, he’s liable to turn in a moment. To snap, as they say. And, Joe snapped then. He leapt from his bunk clear across the room to mine and grabbed me around the throat. His mouth made sounds, but if they were words I could understand, I sure as Hell didn't then. I think he would have killed me. Well, I damn sure know he would have killed me, but then I felt him fly away from me. I looked up and through my near-on blacked out eyes I saw Tom sling Joe across the room like he was a bag of dirty laundry.
“Enough!” I remember he thundered like Ze
us himself. “You two get your gear. We’ve already overstayed our welcome here.”
There was anger in his face, but I knew despite my youth that it wasn’t directed at us. He stood there for a moment longer and, then, turned to go, saying, “Be at the wagon in five minutes.”
Three minutes later I emerged into the morning sun. Tom was at the wagon with Dr. Samuels loading the last bit of supplies. Travis was there, too, sitting on the buckboard smoking a rolled cigar. He was smirking, and like everything else Travis did, there was no joy there. Just a cruel, cold sneer. Joe and I walked over together, but I kept my distance. Whatever had come over him earlier, now he was as implacable as the grave. That same flat, stone-faced look I guess he always wore. I could see Tom and Travis were talking, and I could tell it wasn’t a pleasant conversation.
“Damn it, Travis!” I heard him say. “You’re bringing bad luck on us, bad luck already.”
I heard Travis curse in response. “I make my own luck, Captain,” he growled in that flat, toneless voice of his. Where he was from, I didn’t know, and his voice didn’t betray it, either. I just knew it was a place I didn’t want to visit.
“That’s right, Travis, you do,” Tom replied. “And, that’s the fear, isn’t it?”
I didn’t know what they were on about, but I was sure it had something to do with Tom’s sudden desire to get out of that place as soon as he could. I loaded up my gear in silence and climbed aboard. Joe and the doc followed. Andy skulked about, doing his best to stay invisible. It was his way, I guess. Tom had the reins of the horses, and we were about to leave. I suppose, if we had been a little quicker, I might not be sitting here today. But that’s the way of the world, right? For just as Tom was about to lead us out of that place, there was a shriek, a howl really, that stopped us dead in our tracks. Then, it turned to a word.
“You!” it bellowed. We turned as one, turned and saw an old Indian woman, older than I am now I would suppose. She had that little girl from the pub by the arm and was dragging her along behind her. But she wasn’t pretty then, probably wouldn’t be pretty for a long time after that. Her face was shattered. That’s about the only way to put it. Her lips were busted, and her cheeks bruised. One eye was so swollen she couldn’t have opened it for King Phillip himself. She was crying, though. I guess that must have hurt quite a bit.
The Fiddle is the Devils Instrument Page 15