Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  With that he left, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “What do you think?” I asked Sabian.

  He sighed. “We must at least attempt to get Francois’ furs. If he has gone soft in the skull, well… then we may have to do him violence, if he tries to visit it upon us first. But he’s no spring chicken, between the two of us I’m sure we can catch him alive. After that, well, we can turn him in to the Jesuits near the lake mission, see if they can’t help him. They’ve reformed worse than a dotty white man, eh?”

  Sabian did not sound as though he relished this course, but we both knew that as post captain he must acquire all debts by contract or lose his own profit, and possibly position as well. There was no way around it: we would be going, at least for the furs. Had I known then the horror that awaited us, all the money in the world would not have lured me there.

  As we readied our gear, I recall asking Sabian, “What was that windigo business he was talking about? He seemed terrified by the mere mention of the name?”

  “Oh, it’s just some old Indian myth,” said Sabian dismissively. “Folks who spend so much time alone in the wilds, they start acting like beasts themselves. The Indians think they are possessed… you know, like a werewolf or something.”

  “Windigo.” The strange word felt cool on my pipe-bitten tongue. “Huh.”

  “Shouldn’t you be the one telling me about it, anyway?” He said in that imperious way he got, when he felt like putting the spurs to me. “Being part savage yourself, I’d have thought your head was filled with tall tales of witches and windigos and wolf spirits, all that rot. Or did your heathen daddy only teach you how to cheat at cards and guzzle firewater?”

  “Father Orleans told me plenty of stories about spirits and witches, but only those from the Gospels,” I said, refusing to rise to his bait. I’d told him twice before it was my mother who had been Indian, which was once more than I felt I needed to. Orphaned at an early age, I had been dealing with folk like Sabian almost all my life. “And growing up with the Jesuits, most of the card sharps and drunks I met were white men who came begging at the mission. I won’t remind you again, Sabian: I’m a Christian, not an Indian.”

  “You’re red as old George’s feet, my boy,” he said in his superior way. “Doesn’t your Bible say something about accepting that what we cannot change?”

  I glared at him and sipped my coffee, now quite cold.

  “Half-breed, whole Christian, what’s the difference?” Sabian said, happy to play the peacemaker now that he had gotten my goat. “Hell, Andre, it don’t matter to me. Only thing I care about right now is going out there to get those furs. Probably old Francois’ just gone crazy — that codger’s been out here a sight longer than me, and I’ve been out here a sight longer than you. Alone in the wilderness with nobody but the beasts and the Indians for company will do that to a man.”

  “Two of the same thing, isn’t it?” I said sarcastically, but, as usual, my comment went right over Sabian’s head.

  “If he is mad, we need to get him to the mission before he chews up those furs, or something equally deranged. It also occurs to me that that damned Indian George Red Foot might’ve killed his partner, and told us a whopper to put us off the scent. If that’s the case, then we need to know so we can send word for his arrest before he gets too far. We had best hurry up and get out there.”

  “Windigos and werewolves,” I grumbled, stowing a bottle of whiskey in my bag so we would have something with which to tempt Francois into letting us into his cabin. I recall how safe we were then. We should have left with George Red Foot and his wife. Instead, I shouldered my pack for the trip and contemplated whether all Indians were insane to some degree, or only George Red Foot.

  We started out at mid-morning and traveled north about six miles, where we stopped at the Eight Stones River crossing to rest and eat. Francois’ home was located about three miles away from that point, due east along the river. I recall the weather was pleasant along the way; a warm sun had miraculously appeared for most of our trip and the duration of our rest. I remember the air had a deliciously crisp taste, heavily scented with spruce and pine. I was considering how fortunate we were to have had such splendid weather after months of brutal winter, when Sabian reminded me of the grim task at hand. We continued on in hopes of reaching Francois’ cabin before nightfall.

  As we walked along the river, I remember noting an abundance of trees snapped in half at mid-trunk, some fifty feet from the ground in some cases. Following my gaze, Sabian said, “It’s the ice and the wind that does it. The tops freeze up with ice and snow, then the wind comes through and snaps off the tops. Just like you or I would tear the drumstick off an overcooked chicken.”

  He said this easily enough, but the remark disquieted me. As we walked I imagined some monstrous hand reaching down from the sky and tearing treetops off to stick in its mouth, chewing the bark and ice as a man might relish the crispy skin of a roasted hen. With these and other dark thoughts did I wile away our march.

  Looking back on it now, it seems that as we drew closer to the damned place a pallor of cruel wickedness settled on to both my thoughts and the landscape. All around, the broken trees increased in number, and large formations of ice hung from the pine boughs and clung to the trunks, or reared up from the ground. It was almost as if they had frozen in specific places in a vaguely organized way. It struck me as… unnatural.

  Francois’ cabin appeared as we rounded a large patch of granite boulders. It was a small shack, perched quaintly atop a rise, at the edge of a steep, tree-covered embankment, overlooking the frozen Eight Stones River below. No smoke rose from the cabin, a truly ominous sign as few veterans of the northern winters would be foolish enough to allow their fire to go out before the first thaw of spring.

  “What a wretched little place,” Sabian remarked. “Hopefully it’s dry inside.”

  I briefly imagined old Francois inside, raving mad in the dark. A thought that startled me with its clarity, a thought I quickly shut out.

  As we approached the cabin, a distinct quiet fell over the area. Only our breathing and crunching footsteps in the snow made any sound. The snow around the cabin was deep and undisturbed, which struck me as odd — no one had come or gone from the cabin in some time, so when had George Red Foot last checked in on his partner?

  Then I noticed something else — the lack of birds. Most animals were silent for the winter, the exception being the ravens and magpies that hang about settlements to rob scraps of food. At the trading post, they were ever present and sometimes quite loud… yet it seemed that there were no living creatures within a mile of Francois’ cabin, save Sabian and me. As we stopped halfway across the clearing to peer at the dark structure, the silence enveloping us was absolute — we could not even hear the wind, which had harried us all along our hike.

  “The door is open.” Sabian’s whisper sounded like a yell in the unnatural stillness, and I hushed him, startling myself with my own volume. We un-shouldered our muskets as we approached the cabin’s face, making our way in total silence. I was reminded momentarily of a tomb or mausoleum as I looked at the cabin’s open door and the black interior beyond.

  Sabian lit a lantern as I stood watch over the doorway, expecting at any moment to see Francois charge forth. Nothing stirred, and, under the soft glow of the lantern, we entered the cabin. Inside was a sight that defied logic, that inspired true horror. The cabin itself was unremarkable in its design, a single room with a hearth at one corner, having the usual trinkets and gewgaws that Indians and mountain men hold dear hanging about the room. The horror lay on the floor, and the image has been seared into my mind ever since.

  A corpse of an Indian woman, Francois’ wife perhaps, lay sprawled in the middle of the cabin. She was… encased in ice, from the waist up, but, to our extreme revulsion, her legs, where exposed from the frost, were stripped of all flesh. The bones themselves were gnawed and ragged as if some predator had chewed the flesh directly off.
An expression of mortal terror was quite literally frozen onto the dead woman’s face.

  I looked away in shock as Sabian staggered past me, heading back outside. I moved for the door, fearing to be in the half-eaten corpse’s presence a moment longer. As I stumbled away, I began to hear the sound of rushing wind and cracking trees, accompanied by a shrill howling that chilled me to the bone. I followed Sabian outside into the clearing immediately in front of the cabin, shivering even before the wind and unspeakable cold hit us. Sabian stood in the snow as the howling wind hit us, looking like a man on the verge of total panic. I was nearly stricken as well.

  The shrill howl evolved into a ghastly scream, a sound utterly alien from any wind I had ever heard. The trees surrounding the cabin first bent to an impossible degree in the gale and then began to snap apart, blasting like gunshots as their trunks split. Then, above us, from the wind-thrashed and shattered treetops, Francois appeared, descending like a monstrous bird. He shrieked as he was borne through the air on the ferocious wind.

  Francois landed in the snow next to Sabian. I told myself it had been a trick of the wind and the fading light, that the deranged trapper had merely been hiding up one of the pines and now jumped down upon us… but I could not convince myself, not even for an instant. I could not even believe this was still Francois.

  I remembered Francois as aged but hardy; a somewhat stocky, short, black-haired Frenchman; what I saw now looked nothing like this memory. The thing that I saw was a horrible parody of the once rugged trapper, having more in likeness to a frostbitten corpse than any man still living. He… no, it, was at least eight feet tall, but dreadfully thin, as if it had existed in a state of starvation for months upon hungry months. Broken and jagged teeth were plainly visible; the thing appeared to have chewed its own lips off. The color of its skin, having the texture of the frozen dead, ranged from a light greenish blue along the length of the limbs and torso to a dark bruised purple that was reminiscent of deep internal trauma at the neck and abdomen. Stark naked and still howling that wracked, chilling wail, Francois, or what remained of the man, glared with a demonic mania at Sabian. It brandished a length of jagged bone.

  Sabian, realizing his doom was at hand, raised his musket in a belated attempt to shoot the horror. Before he could, the fiend stabbed him in the neck with what I now saw was a broken section of elk antler. The prongs of the antler pierced Sabian’s neck in two places, causing him to choke and gurgle. The blood spray from the wounds hit me directly in the face, burning my eyes and creating a ruddy haze that stole the clarity of my sight.

  Sabian’s awful death rattle and the howling of the monster seemed to come from all around me. In a panic I raised my musket and fired in the direction I perceived the sound of its madness. As soon as I took the shot, all sound faded, and, as I wiped the blood from my eyes, I prayed that I had struck Francois… Then the monster leapt upon me, screaming anew and clawing at my face with its foul, ragged hands. Blinded and hysterical, I grappled with it, staggering backwards in the snow.

  In a new revelation of despair, the ground disappeared, and I rolled down the embankment beside the cabin, the monster riding me all the way. Bouncing against trees and off of rocks as we tumbled down the slope only seemed to excite the wretched thing, my own body singing from the cruel bludgeoning of the fall. Its unholy mouth came at my throat, its lipless maw giggling as its teeth brushed my neck…

  By sheer providence, I landed a blow squarely to the bottom of its chin as we rolled, and it fell off of me as we skidded to a stop on the frozen river. The ice bruising my already battered back caused me to cry out in pain, and the monster laughed as though in true revelry. Frantically wiping the blood and snow from my eyes, I could perceive its unnatural shape rise up from the ice. Thoughtless as some hunted beast, I scrambled up and fled from that terrible shape, that grotesque laughter. Over the sound of my boots reverberating against the frozen river, I heard it chant in a hissing croak, some unspeakable phrase that cooled my strained, burning heart. The utter wickedness of the phrase was… imparted to me, even though I understood it not. Then the ice beneath my feet broke, as if in response to the blasphemous voice… or in revulsion from it.

  The cracking ice sounded like the scream of a swine under a butcher’s knife, and I fell through, into the lightless, deadly cold of the river. I felt the cut of a thousand razors as the black water enveloped me, stabbing into my very brain. I began to thrash in my heavy garments, once so warm yet now prohibiting any movement that might save me as I was pulled down by the iron-heavy wool and leather.

  A rock battered my scalp, stunning the fight clear out of me. As if in a dream, I drifted back up on the sluggish current, facing the ice above me as the river carried me ever closer to death. What I saw shocked me back into the full horror of the situation. Staring back through the transparent, snow-dusted ice was the grotesque face of Francois, following my progress downstream as I endured my ignoble death. I recalled that, from above, the ice was clouded and difficult to see through, but the thing that was Francois appeared to mark exactly where I was, having no trouble seeing through it. Its horrible shape and scratching claws, silhouetted against the last light of the setting sun, made me thank God in those final moments that I would be drowned and lost to its incomprehensible, evil plans. A numbness came over me, so comforting as to feel almost like warmth, but then I was thrust out of the water, to be again battered against stones and ice.

  By some miracle, or curse, I was cast down a series of small waterfalls where the river coursed down a sheer slope. Even as I realized what was happening, I became lodged in a crevice of stone and ice. I began to panic again, my heart beating frantically, from both the returning cold and from the terror of imagining the beast attacking me while I was pinned. Wrestling my way free of the cracked ice and jagged stones, I pulled myself out of the river and onto the sheer bank. Then the cold came in earnest, stealing all use from my limbs and causing me to shake so violently that I began to chip my teeth against one another.

  I gave up, God forgive me, I resigned myself to death, and waited for the monster to come and kill me, to have its reward after so long a chase. It never came, however, though even from such an impossible distance I could hear it feasting on Sabian, howling and screaming with cannibalistic, manic joy at the night-shrouded forest.

  I regained my senses to some small measure, and tried to drag my freezing body to some place where I could hide, and find some relief from the merciless cold, but all ability had departed me. My frozen hands could not even close around the roots that hung down beside me, let alone drag my weight. So I lay waiting for death in whatever form it would take.

  Death never came, despite my wounds, despite being sheathed in ice-stiffened, waterlogged wool, and I passed the night in a state of madness. I could hear animals bleating and scratching all around me throughout the night, and other, stranger noises that had no explanation in either reality or dream. This deep in the Northern winter, the animals must be sleeping or else stalk silent as ghosts through the forests, but the tumult they made around me had the wanton air of a revel.

  Then I heard a voice whisper my name. In all my many years of devout prayer, never had I heard an answer from my Savior or his saints, but, now, in my most desperate hour, I swear I heard an outer voice with perfect clarity… but this was not the voice of my Lord, or any of his servants. This was not even the voice of Lucifer, questing after my soul. No, I knew as soon as I heard that loathsome, wicked voice murmur my name that it came from someplace far, far closer than Heaven or Hell, and yet infinitely more remote…

  It spoke to me not of sin or salvation, but of boundless, frozen gulfs. Gulfs of ice at the top of the world, from which every herculean glacier and humble icicle originates. The voice told of ancient hungers and unspeakable rites. Rituals where I might live forever, with limitless power over both man and nature. I had no choice, it whispered, only a choice to die as prey or haunt the frozen forests as it required.

  Th
e light of day eventually came, revealing a great abundance of animal tracks all around the area I had passed the night. They seemed to range through the entire natural animal kingdom, and yet further still. Humanoid footprints having only three toes and vague slithering as if great serpents had passed just beside where I lay. I marveled over the tracks as dawn came in earnest, creeping over the cursed and frozen forest.

  Rather than putting my miseries to an end, daybreak brought with it fresh agonies. The sun shone down through the screen of icy branches, breaking upon me and creating an uncomfortable warmth that brought with it debilitating nausea. In time I clambered up and attempted to retreat into what shadows remained, away from the scalding light. My strength had returned sufficiently to stand and walk, but the oppressive heat of the dawn caused a new weakness in my muscles. I fled in to the darker areas of the forest and shed my frost-rimed coat. I ignored the fact that deep snow was all around me as I panted from the ever-rising temperature.

  By midday the blazing of that sun caused me to collapse, in a state near death despite the blankets of snow I pulled over myself. As the day waned on and the sun crossed the sky, the heat gradually decreased. By late afternoon I was able to emerge from the sheltering snow and stand again without swooning. As the stars came out, I began the long walk back to the river, and from there retraced my way back to the post.

  During the interminable hike, a hunger began to grow in the core of my body. It was a sharp and gnawing sensation, and, as I pushed myself onward, I dimly recognized that I had never before known true hunger. The ache of the need had reached a maddening and torturous state by the time I reach the pickets of the fort; a deep clawing agony nearly crippled me as cramping pains began to throb from my abdomen.