The Book of Cthulhu

The Oram County Whoosit

Steve Duffy

Maybe for the rest of the welcoming committee it was the proudest afternoon of their lives; I remember it mostly as one of the wettest of mine. We were standing on a platform in Oram, West Virginia, waiting for a train to pull in, and it hadn’t stopped raining all day. It wasn’t really a problem for everybody else: the mayor had a big umbrella, and his cronies had the shelter of the awning, over by the ticket office. I had my damn hat, was all.

They belonged to the town, you see, and I didn’t. I’d been sent down from Washington, like the guest of honour we were all waiting on that day. Our newspaper had sprung for him to travel first-class, having sent me along the afternoon before in a ratting old caboose—to pave the way for his greatness, I guess. Because he was some kind of a great man even then, in newspaper circles at least. Nowadays, you’ll find his stories in all the best textbooks, but back then the majority of folks knew Horton Keith mostly from the stuff they read over the breakfast table; which was pretty damn good, don’t get me wrong. But then so were my photographs, or so I thought, so why was I the one left outside in the cold and wet like a red-headed stepchild? It’s a hell of a life, and no mistake; that’s what I was thinking. I was twenty-four back then, in case you hadn’t guessed: as old as the century. That didn’t feel so old then—but it does now, here on the wrong side of nineteen-eighty. Then again, the century hasn’t weathered too well either.

Away down the track a whistle blew, and the welcoming committee spat out their tobacco and gussied themselves up for business. Through the sheets of rain you could barely see the hills above the rooftops, but you felt them pressing in on you: that you did. Row upon row of them, their sides sheer and thickly forested, the tops lost in the dense grey clouds that had lain on the summits ever since I arrived. By now, I was starting to wonder whether there was any sort of blue sky up there, or whether mist and rain were the invariable order of the day. Since then I’ve looked into it scientifically, and what happens is this: the weather fronts blow in off the Atlantic coast, and they scoot across Virginia like a skating rink till they hit the Alleghenies. Then, those fronts get forced up over the mountains by the prevailing winds, and by the time they’re coming down the other side, boy, they’re dropping like a shot goose. And then, the whole bunch of soggy-bottom clouds falls splat on to Oram County, and it rains every goddamn day of the year. Scientifically speaking.

A puff of smoke from round the track, and then the train came into view. The welcoming committee shuffled themselves according to rank and feet above sea-level; one of them dodged off round the side of the station, and hang me for a liar if he didn’t come back with a marching band, or the makings of one at least—a tuba, half-a-dozen trumpets, and a big bass drum. The musicians had been waiting someplace under shelter, or so I hoped: if not, then I wasn’t going to be standing too close to that tuba when it blew. It might give me a musical shower-bath on top of my regular soaking.

The first man off the train when it pulled in was a Pullman conductor, an imperturbable Negro who looked as if he’d seen this sort of deal at every half-assed station down the line. Next was a nondescript fat man packed tight into a thin man’s suit, weighed down by a large cardboard valise. If he looked uncomfortable before, you can bet he looked twice as squirrelly when the band struck up a limping rendition of “Shenandoah” and the mayor bore down on him like a long-lost brother. One look at that, and the poor guy jumped so high I practically lost him in the cloud—his upper slopes, at least. In many ways he was wasted on the travelling-salesman game; he ought to have been trying out for the Olympics over in Paris, France. Instead, he was stuck selling dungarees to miners. Like I said before, it’s a hell of a life.

While that little misunderstanding was being cleared up, a few carriages down my man was disembarking, quietly and without any fuss. You may have seen photographs of Horton Keith—you may even have seen my photograph of him, which just happens to be the one on the facing-title page of his Collected Short Stories—but in many ways he looked more like his caricature. Not a bad-looking man, hell no; that sweep of white hair and the jet-black cookie-duster underneath meant he’d always get recognised, by everyone but the good folk of Oram, West Virginia at any rate. And there was nothing wrong with his features, if you liked ’em lean and hungry-looking. But the hunger was the key, and it came out in the drawings more vividly than in any photo I ever took of him. I never saw a keener man, nor one more likely to stick at it till the job got done. As a hunting acquaintance of mine once put it: “He’s a pretty good writer, but he’d have made one hell of a bird-dog.”

“Sir?” I presented myself as he stepped down from the train. He looked me up and down and said, “Mister Fenwick?” Subterranean rumble of a voice. I nodded, and tipped the sopping straw brim of my hat. “Good to meet you, sir.”

“Nice hat,” he said, still taking my measure as he shook my outstretched hand. “Snappy.” No hint of a joke in those flinty eyes. It was 1924, for God’s sake. Everyone wore a straw hat back then.

“I guess it’s had most of the snap soaked out of it by now,” I said, taking it off and examining it. “We could dry it out, maybe, or else there’s a horse back there in town without a tooth in his head, poor bastard. He could probably use it for his supper.”

Keith smiled at that. Didn’t go overboard or anything; but I think I passed the test. Then, the welcoming committee were upon us.

∇

The guest of honour was polite and everything; that is to say, he wasn’t outright rude, not to their faces. He shook all their hands, and listened to a few bars more of “Shenandoah” from underneath the mayor’s big umbrella. I was fine, I had my snappy straw hat. But then the mayor, a big moose called Kronke, wanted to cart him off in the civic automobile for some sort of a formal reception with drinks, and Keith drew the line at that.

“Gentlemen, it’s been a long day, and I need to consult with my colleague here. We’ll meet up first thing in the morning, if it’s all the same to you.” My colleague. That was about the nicest thing I’d heard since I’d arrived in Oram County. It did my self-esteem a power of good; better than that, it got me a lift in the mayoral flivver as far as the McEndoe Hotel, which was where Keith and I had rooms.

The McEndoe was a rambling old clapboard palace, one of the few buildings in town that went much above two storeys. It had a view over downtown Oram that mostly comprised wet roofs and running gutters, and inevitably you found your eyes were drawn to the wooded hills beyond, brooding and enigmatic beneath their caps of cloud. Here and there you saw scars running down the hillside, old landslides and abandoned workings. Oram was a mining town, and you weren’t likely to forget it; at six in the evening the big siren blew, and soon after a stream of men came shuffling down main street on their way home from the pits. Looking at their sooty exhausted faces from my perch in the window of the hotel smoking lounge as I sipped bootleg brandy from my hip flask, I told myself there were worse things in life than getting my hat a little wet. I might have to work for a living, like these poor lugs.

“It’s funny,” Keith said, close up behind me. I hadn’t heard him come in.

“What?” I guessed he meant peculiar; God knows there was little enough that was comical about the view.

He was staring at the miners as they stumbled by in their filthy denim overalls. “I was up in the Klondike round the time of the gold rush, back in ’98,” he said. “Dug up about enough gold to fill my own teeth, was all. It was like that with most of the men: I never knew but half-a-dozen fellows who ever struck it rich; I mean really rich. But my God, we were eager sons o’ bitches! We’d jump out of our bunks in the morning and run over to those workings, go at it like crazy men all the length of a Yukon summer’s day till it got dark, and like as not we’d be singing a song all the way home. And were we singing because we were rich? Had we raised so much as a single grain of gold? No, sir. Probably not.” He took a cigar from his inside pocket and examined it critically. I waited for him to carry on his story, if that’s what it was.

“Now these fellers,” he said, indicating with his cigar: “each and every one of them will have pulled maybe a dozen tons of coal out of that hill today. No question. They found what they were looking for, all right. Found a damn sight more of it than we ever did. But you don’t see them singing any songs, do you?” He looked at me, and I realised it wasn’t a rhetorical question: he was waiting for an answer. I was sipping my drink at the time, and had to clear my throat more quickly that I’d have liked.

“They’re working for the company,” I said, as soon as I could manage it. “You fellers were working for yourselves. Man doesn’t sing songs when he knows someone else is getting eighty, ninety cents out of every dollar he earns.”

“No,” agreed Keith. “No, he doesn’t. But that’s just economics, after all. You know what the main difference is?” I had a pretty good idea, but shrugged, so that he’d go on. “We were digging for gold,” he said simply, “and these poor sons-of-bitches ain’t. Call a man an adventurer, send him to the top of the world so he’s half dead from the frostbite and the typhus and the avalanches, and he’s happy, ’cause he knows he might—just might!—strike it rich. Set him to dig coal back home day in, day out for a wage, and he’s nothing but a slave. It’s the difference between what you dream about, and what you wake up to.”

It sounds commonplace when I write it down. That’s because you don’t hear the way his voice sounded, nor see the animation in his face. I don’t know if I can put that into words. It wasn’t avaricious, not in the slightest. I never met a man less driven by meanness or greed. It was more as if that gold up in the Klondike represented all the magic and excitement he’d ever found in the world; as if the idea had caught hold of him when he was young and come to stand for everything that was fine and desirable, yet would always remain slightly out of reach, the highest, sweetest apple on the tree. That he kept reaching was what I most admired about him, in the end: that he knew he wasn’t ever going to win the prize, and yet still reckoned it was worth fighting for. The Lord loves a trier, they say, but sometimes I think he’s got a soft spot for the dreamer, too.

“Well, these fellows here might have been digging for coal,” I said, offering him a light, “but seems as if a couple of ’em may have lit on something else, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed,” said Keith, glancing at me from beneath those jet-black bushy eyebrows before bending to the flame of the match. “Now you mention it, I guess it is kind of time we talked about things.” He fished out another stogie and offered it to me.

I sat up straight and gave it my best stab at keen and judicious. Keith probably thought I’d gotten smoke in my eyes.

“What do you think we actually have here, Fenwick?” He honestly sounded as if he wanted to know what I thought. Back in my twenties, that was still pretty much of a novelty.

“Toad in a hole,” I said promptly. “There’s a hundred of ’em in the newspaper morgue—seems like they pop up every summer, around the time the real news dries up.”

“Toad in a hole,” said Keith thoughtfully. He gestured with his cigar for me to continue. Emboldened, I did so.

“The same story used to run every year in the papers out West,” I said, to show I’d done my homework and wasn’t just any old newspaper shutterbug. “Goes like this: some feller brings in a lump of rock split in half, it’s got a tiny little hole in the middle. See there, he says? That’s where the frog was. Jumped clean out when I split the rock in two, he did. Here he is, look—and he lays down some sorry-looking sun-baked pollywog on the desk. Swears with his hand on his heart: it happened just the way I’m telling you, sir, so help me God. And the editor’s so desperate, he usually runs with it.” I spread my hands. “That’s about the way I see it, Mr. Keith.”

Keith nodded. “So you don’t believe such a thing could happen?”

“Huh-uh.” With all the certainty of twenty-four summers. “Toads just can’t live inside rocks. Nothing could. No air. No sustenance.” Speaking of sustenance, I offered him a pull on my hip flask. Keith accepted, then said:

“But these miners here—they don’t claim to have found a toad exactly, now, do they?” He was watching my face narrowly all the while through a pall of cigar smoke, gauging my reactions.

“No sir. They say they’ve found a whoosit.”

“A whoosit.”

“Exactly that. A whoosit, just like P.T. Barnum shows on Broadway. A jackalope. A did-you-ever. An allamagoosalum.”

“Jersey devil,” said Keith, entering into the spirit of the thing.

“Feegee mermaid,” I amplified. “Sewn-up mess of spare parts from the taxidermy shop, monkey head stuck on the back end of a catfish. That’s the ticket.” I felt pleased we’d nailed the whole business on the head. Maybe we could be back in Washington by this time tomorrow evening.

Keith was nodding still. He showed every sign of agreeing with me, right up until he said—musing aloud it seemed—“So, how does a thing like that get inside a slab of coal, do you suppose, Mr. Fenwick?”

“Well, that’s just it. It doesn’t, sir.” Had I not made myself clear?

“But this one did.” His deep-set eyes bored into me, but I held my ground.

“So they say. I guess we’ll see for ourselves in the morning, sir.”

Unexpectedly, Keith dropped me a wink. “The hell with that. I was thinking we might take a stroll down to the courthouse after dinner and save ourselves a night of playing guessing games. Skip all the foofaraw the mayor’s got planned. That is, unless you have plans for the rest of the evening?” A wave of his cigar over sleepy downtown Oram.

I spread my hands, palms up. “What do you know? Clara Bow just phoned to say she couldn’t make it.”

∇

And so, in the absence of Miss Bow’s company, I found myself walking out down the main street of Oram with Horton Keith, headed for the courthouse. We’d passed it in the mayor’s car earlier that afternoon; Kronke had told us that was where the whoosit was being kept, under lock and key and guarded by his best men. If the man who was on duty out front when we arrived was one of Kronke’s best, then I’d have loved to have seen the ones he was keeping in reserve. He was a dried-up, knock-kneed old codger with hardly a tooth left in his head, and when Keith told him we were the men from Washington come to see the whoosit, he waved us right through. “In there,” he said, without bothering to get up off his rocking chair. “What there is of it, anyways.”

“What there is of it?” Keith’s heavy brows came down.

“Feller who found it, Lamar Tibbs? Had him a dispute with the mine bosses when he brung it up last week. They said, any coal comes out of this shaft belongs to the company, and that’s that. Lamar, he says well, thisyer freak of nature ain’t made of coal though, is it? Blind man can see that. And they say, naw, it ain’t. And Lamar, he says, it’s more in the nature of an animal, ain’t it? And they say, reckon so. And Lamar says, well, I take about a thousand cooties home out of this damn pit of yourn ever’ day, so I reckon this big cootie here can come along for the ride as well. And he up an took it home with ’im.” The caretaker cackled with senile glee at Lamar’s inexorable logic. I guess it was a rare thing for some poor working stiff to get the better of the company, at that. But more to the point:

“You’re saying the whoosit isn’t actually in there?”

“No sir. It’s over to Peck’s Ridge, up at the Tibbs place. Mayor’s plannin’ to take you there in the automobile, I believe—first thing after the grand civic breakfast.”

This was starting to look like a snipe hunt we’d been sent on. Keith jabbed his cigar butt at the courthouse. “So what have you got in here?”

“Lump o’ coal it came out of,” said the caretaker proudly. “Got an exact imprint of the whoosit in it, see? Turn it to the light, you can see everything. Like life.”

“Is that right?” Keith said. “Company hung on to the lump of coal, I guess?”

“That they did,” agreed the last surviving veteran of the Confederate army. “All the coal comes out of that mine’s company coal—them’s the rules. Mayor’s just holdin’ it for safekeeping, is all.”

“Exactly so,” said Keith. “Well, thankyou, sir.” He slipped a dollar into the caretaker’s eager hand—assuming it was eagerness that made it tremble so. “Now if you could see your way to showing us where they’re keeping it, we’ll quit bothering you.”

“They got it in the basement,” said the caretaker, leaning back in his rocker and expelling a gob of tobacco juice. “Keep goin’ down till you can’t go down no more, mister, an’ that’ll do it.”

The basement of that courthouse was like a mine itself; you might almost have believed they’d dug the whoosit out right there, in situ. Keith and I came to the bottom of a winding flight of stairs and found ourselves in a damp dripping sort of crawlspace, its farther corners filled with shadows the single electric bulb on the ceiling couldn’t hope to reach. The ceiling was low enough that we both had to stoop a little, and most of the floor was taken up with trunks and boxes and filing cabinets full of junk. Thank God we weren’t looking for anything smaller than a pork barrel. We’d have been down there all night. As it was, we began on opposite sides of the basement and aimed to get the job done in something under an hour.

“This is annoying,” Keith called over his shoulder. “These damn rubes don’t realise what they’ve got a hold of here.”

“Toad in a hole,” I called back. Keith ignored me.

“This miner fellow—”

“Lamar Tibbs,” I sang out in an approximation of the caretaker’s Virginian twang.

“—he probably thinks he’s sitting on a crock of gold, just like the mayor here and the mining company with their slab of coal. But the two things apart don’t amount to a hill of beans, and they don’t have the sense to see it.”

“How so?” I didn’t think the whole thing amounted to much, myself.

“Because the one authenticates the other, don’t you see? Look here, I’m the authorities, okay? This here’s some sort of a strange beast you claim to have found in the middle of a piece of coal. Who’s to say it’s not a, a, what-d’ye-call-’em—”

“Feegee mermaid.”

“Feegee mermaid, exactly.” A grunt, as he moved some heavy piece of trash out of the way. “Nothing to make a man suppose it ever saw the inside of a slab of coal—without the coal to prove it. The imprint of the beast in the coal goes to corroborate the story, see?”

“Yes, but—” I was going to point out that you didn’t find beasts, living or dead, inside slabs of coal anyway, so there was no story there to corroborate, only a tall tale out of backwoods West Virginia. But Keith didn’t seem to be interested in that self-evident proposition.

“And it’s the same thing with the coal. Suppose there is an imprint of something in there? What good is it without the very thing that made that imprint? It’s just the work of an few weekends for an amateur sculptor, is all.” He bent to his task again, shoving more packing-cases out of the way. “They don’t understand,” he muttered, almost to himself. “You need the two together.”

“Even if you did have the two things, though—” I wasn’t letting this one go unchallenged—“it still wouldn’t prove anything, in and of itself. It might go some way towards the appearance of proof—hell, it might even make a good enough story for page eight of the newspaper, I guess. That’s your business. I just take the pictures, that’s all. But at the end of the day—”

At the end of the day, Keith wasn’t listening. I happened to glance in his direction at that moment, and saw as much immediately. He was standing in the far corner of the basement, hands on his hips, staring at something on the floor—from where I was, I couldn’t make it out. I called his name. I had to call again, and then a third time, before he even noticed. When he did, he looked up with an odd expression on his face.

“Come over here a second, Fenwick,” he called, and his voice sounded slightly strained. “Think I’ve found something.”

I crossed to where he was standing. In that corner the light was so dim I could hardly see Keith, let alone whatever it was he’d found, so the first thing we did was lay ahold of it and drag it to the centre of the basement, right beneath the electric bulb. It was heavy as hell, and we pushed it more than carried it across the packed-mud basement floor.

It was lying inside an open packing-case, all wrapped up in a bit of old tarpaulin. You could see the black gleam of coal where Keith had unwrapped it at one end. “You raise it up,” muttered Keith, and again I heard that unusual strain in his voice; “I’ll get the tarpaulin off of it.”

I laid hold of it and heaved it upright, and Keith managed to get the tarp clear. It was just one half of the slab, as it turned out; its facing piece lay underneath wrapped in more tarpaulin. Stood on its end, the half-slab was roughly the size of a high-back dining chair: it would have weighed a lot more, more than we could have dreamed of shifting, probably, except that it was all hollowed out, as if someone had sawn a barrel in half right down its centre.

The hollow space was nothing more than an inky pool of shadow at first, till I tilted the slab toward the light. Then, its shiny black surfaces gave up their secrets, and the electric light reflected off a wealth of curious detail. I gave a low whistle. Whoever’s work this was, he was wasted on Oram. He ought to have been knocking out statues for the Pope in Rome. For it was the finest, most intricately detailed job of carving you ever saw—intaglio, I believe they call it, where the sculptor carves in hollows instead of relief. There was even a kind of trompe l’oeil effect: as you looked at the shape while turning it slightly, it seemed to stand out in prominence, the strange hollow form suddenly becoming filled-out and real. I’d have to say it was actually a little bit unsettling, for a cheap optical illusion.

“My God.” A fellow would have been hard put to recognise Keith’s voice. It made me turn from the slab of coal to look at him. He was staring open-mouthed at the hollow space at the heart of the slab, with an expression I took at first to be awe. Only later did I come to recognise it as something more like horror.

“It’s pretty good at that,” I allowed. “The detail…”

“It’s exact in every detail,” said Keith, in wonderment. “You could use it for a mould, and you’d cast yourself a perfect copy.” He shook his head, never taking his eyes off of the coal slab.

“Copy of what, though?” I squinted at the concavity, turned it this way and that to get a sense of it in three dimensions. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen—it’s a regular whoosit, all right. Are those things supposed to be tentacles, there? Only they’ve got claws on the end, or nippers or something. And where’s its head supposed to be?”

“The head retracts,” said Keith, almost as if he was reading it from a book. “Like a slug drawing in on itself.”

I stared at him. “Beg your pardon, sir?”

“You said it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” said Keith. “Well, I’ve seen it. Or something exactly like it.”

“You have?” It was all I could think of to say.

Keith nodded. “Let’s get out of this damn mausoleum,” he said abruptly, turning away from the packing-case and its contents. “I’ll tell you up in the real world, where a man can breathe clean air, not this infernal stink.” And with that he turned his back and was off, stumping up the wooden steps and out of the basement, leaving me to rewrap and repack the slab of coal as best I could before hastening after him.

I was full of questions, all of them to do with the strange artefact we’d been looking at. I have to confess, the level of realism the unknown sculptor had managed to suggest had impressed me—not to say unnerved me. I mentioned before the optical illusion of solidity conjured out of the void, that sensation of seeing the actual thing, not just the impression it had made. That actually began to get to you after a while. Three-dimensional, I said? Well, maybe so. But the longer you looked at it, the dimensions started to looked wrong somehow; impossible, you might say.

On top of that was Keith’s admission that he’d seen the like before. What did he mean by that? And over and above everything… well, Keith was right. We needed to be in the fresh air. Fact was, it stank in that damn basement: I’ve never known a smell like it. It was as if a bushel of something had gone bad, and been left to fester for an long time.

An awful long time, at that.

∇

Back at the hotel Keith went straightaway up to his room for about an hour, leaving me to pick at my evening meal in the all-but-empty dining room. The smell down in that basement had killed my appetite, pretty much; in the end I pushed my plate aside and went to the smoking lounge. That was where Keith found me.

He looked better than he had back outside the courthouse, at least. I’d found him leaning against the side of the building, looking as if he was going to be sick: he had that grey clammy cast to his face. I asked him was he all right, and he waved me away. Now, there was a little more colour in him, and his eyes were focussing properly again, not staring off into the middle distance the way they do when a fellow is on the verge of losing his lunch.

“You got any of that brandy left?” he said, taking the chair opposite mine. “Medicinal purposes, you understand.”

“You’re in luck, as it happens,” I said, offering him the flask. “I’ve just taken an inventory of our medical supplies.”

“Good,” said Keith, and took a long swallow. His eyes teared up a little, but that was only natural. It had kind of a kick to it, that bathtub Napoleon. You could have used it for rocket fuel.

“Well, then.” Keith handed me back the flask. “I believe I owe you a story, Mr. Fenwick. Recompense for leaving you with the baby, down there in the basement.”

I waved a hand, which could equally be taken to mean, no problem, don’t trouble yourself about it, or—as I hoped Keith would read it—Go on, go on, you interest me strangely. The reason I waved a hand instead of actually saying either of those things was because I’d just taken a pull on that flask myself, and was temporarily speechless.

Keith settled back in his armchair and crossed his long thin legs. He lit a cigar, having thrown me one over too, and then he told me the following tale in the time it took us to reduce them down to ash.

“I was thirty at the time: a dangerous age, Mr. Fenwick. You’ll learn that, soon enough. I was working on the Examiner back in San Francisco when gold fever hit up in the Yukon, back in ’98. That news came at exactly the right time, so far as I was concerned—a lot of other folks too, among that first wave of prospectors and adventurers. I was missing something, we all were: the frontier had been closed, and all the wild days of excitement out West were over, or so it seemed. For better or for worse, the job of shaping the nation was finished, over and done with, and we’d missed the chance to leave our stamp on it. It felt as if we’d all been running West in search of something—something magical and unique, that would make real men out of us—only once we’d gotten there, it had already set sail out of the Golden Gate, and there was no way we could follow. The Gay Nineties, you say? I tell you, there were folks dying in the street in San Francisco. Hunger, want; maybe nothing more than heartbreak.

“So you can bet we jumped at the chance to go prospecting, away up in the frozen wastes. That was a new frontier, sure enough: maybe the last frontier, and we weren’t about to miss it. So we piled on to those coffin-ships out of Frisco and Seattle, hundreds of us at a time; stampeders, we called ourselves. There was about as much thinking went into it as goes into a stampede.

“The Canucks wouldn’t let you into the country totally unprepared, though. You had to have a ton of goods, supplies and suchlike, else they’d stop you at the docks. So that took some getting together; eleven hundred pounds of food, plus clothing and equipment, horses to carry it with, that sort of thing. I was travelling light—reckoned to hire sled-dogs up in Canada—but even so, my goods took some lugging at the wharf.

“So we sailed North. A thousand miles out of Seattle we made the Lynn Canal, which was where every one of us bold prospectors had to make his first big decision. Where was he going to disembark? ’Cause there were two trails, see, up to Dawson and the gold-fields, six hundred miles due north. You could take the easy route, avoiding all the big mountains—that was Skagway and the White Pass. The other route started in Dyea, and it took in the Chilkoot Pass, leading on to the lakes. Even us greenhorns knew about the Chilkoot by that time.

“A lot of folk chose Skagway, but I never heard anything good about that town. In Indian it’s “the place where a fair wind never blows”, which pretty much sums it up, I guess. Leave it to the Indians to know which way the wind blows. Soapy Smith’s gang ran the town—he was an old-time con-artist out of Georgia, and he knew a hundred ways to pick the pockets of every rube that staggered down the gangplank. Twenty-five cents a day wharf rates on each separate piece of goods. Lodging-houses where they fleeced you on the way in and the way out. Saloons and whorehouses; casinos with rigged wheels and marked cards. Portage fees. Tolls all the way along the trail—and bandits too, armed gangs and desperadoes, hand in glove with the ‘official escorts’, like as not. No sir: I chose Dyea, which was not a hell of a lot more salubrious, but at least you didn’t have Soapy’s hand in your britches all the while.

There was ice all over the boat as it hove into Dyea. It looked like a ghost ship, and I guess we were a sorry-enough looking bunch of ghosts as we stumbled off. The mountains came right down to the outskirts of town; took us two weeks of hard going to climb as far as Sheep Camp, at the base of the Chilkoot. I tell you: there were lots of men took one look at that mountainside and gave it up on the spot, stayed on in camp and made a living for themselves as best they could. You couldn’t call them the stupid ones, not really. A thousand feet from base to summit, sheer up and down, straight as a beggar can spit? Any sane man would have turned round and said okay, my mistake, beg your pardon.

“We were obliged to stay in Sheep Camp for the best part of March, till the pass came navigable. Bad weather, and the worst kind of terrain; even the Indian guides wouldn’t touch it in those conditions. It was just before spring thaw, and the weather was ornery in the extreme. Minus sixty-five one night, by the thermometer in Lobelski’s General Store. It stayed light from nine-thirty in the morning to just before four in the afternoon. The rest of it was pitch dark and endless cold.

“They were building kind of a hoisting-gear up the Chilkoot, the tramway they called it, but I never saw it finished. I hauled my goods up there, the old fashioned way. I could have paid the Indians to do it for me, a dollar a pound, but I didn’t have two thousand dollars to spare. That was why I was bound for the Yukon in the first place. So I hauled every last case up that mountain side, forty trips in all. I was raw from the chafing of the ropes on my shoulders, and I was nigh on crippled by the exhaustion and the cold—but I managed it. Somehow. Don’t ask me how. It’d kill me now if I tried it.

“Truth is, I don’t know how it didn’t kill me back then. Fifteen hundred toe-holds in the ice, up a trail no more than two feet wide. Take a step to left and right, and you were in the powder stuff, loose and treacherous. If a man slipped, it was all up with him; you never saw him again. That pass was filled with the bodies of good men.

“Anyway! Come April I was over the Chilkoot and heading toward Dawson, a mere five hundred and fifty miles off. The trail led along Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett: if you waited for the thaw, the sheer volume of melt coming down off the mountains turned the rivers into rapids. If you went early, like I did, it was just a question of praying the ice wouldn’t break. You put it out of your mind, till it came time to camp at night and you’d hear the ice creaking and groaning below you. We rigged up the sleds with sails, and the wind used to push us along at a fine clip. All we had to do was trust in the Lord and watch out for the cracks.

“The lakes weren’t properly clear of ice till the end of May, and by that time we bold sled-skaters were already in Dawson, just six months after we’d first set out to strike it rich. Dawson was a stumpy, scroungy kind of town at the bend of the river, set on mudflats and made of nothing much but mud, or so it seemed. Five hundred people lived there as a rule: gold fever pushed that up to twelve thousand by the start of the year, thirty thousand by that summer’s end. It was a breeding ground for typhoid—I stayed clear of the place, except when I made my victualling run once a week.

“I was working my claim south-east of Dawson city, out among the dried-up river beds. That was where I got my crash-course in mining—a year earlier, I’d have thought you just scuffed around in the dirt with the toe of your boot till you turned up some nuggets. Not in Yukon territory. You had to dig your way down to the pastry, we called it, the layers where the gold lay, through forty, fifty feet of rock and frost-hard river muck; hard going? Yes, sir. You broke your back on nothing more than a hunch and a hope. After that, all you had was the comradeship of your fellows and the one chance in a hundred thousand your claim would pay out big. I almost came to value the one more than the other, because when the chips were down you could rely on the comradeship at least.

“So, all through that summer I dug away in the dried-up beds, till it came autumn, and time to make another big decision. The last boat out of Dawson sailed on September the sixteenth, and a lot of fellows I knew were on it, the ones who’d struck it rich and the ones who’d simply had enough. I didn’t fall into either camp: I waved that boat away from the landing, and made my plans to stay on through the winter. Plenty did: the proud and foolish ones like me, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to admit defeat and go home with only a few grains of gold in their pokes; the optimists, who couldn’t believe that the best was over, that the juicy lodes were already worked out and the rest only dry holes; and worst of all the hard core, the ones who’d caught it worst of all, who had no place left for them back in the real world. Quite a bunch.

“I remember one evening in that October of ’98, standing up on the banks outside my camp and looking out over the dry gulches. Some of the fellows were burning fires at their workings, trying to melt the frost so the digging would go easier. It lit up all that strange alien landscape, like lanterns shining out in the gloom, and the way the woodsmoke smell drifted up across the bluffs… I could have stayed there for the rest of my life, or so I told myself. I sat and watched those fires till it got full dark, anyway, and later on that night I saw the aurora for the first time, the Northern lights, flickering green and magical in the moonless sky.

“The week after, it began to snow for real, and I had to strike camp and head back for Dawson. Some didn’t; some stayed out on the flats, and that’s where the story really begins.

“I must’ve been back in Dawson a couple of months, because it was nigh on Christmas when we got word from out on the workings that they’d found something strange—not gold, which would have been strange enough by that time, but something weird, something the likes of which nobody had ever seen. At least, that’s what Sam Tibbets told us, when he come in to Dawson for supplies. It was the three Tibbets brothers worked the claim, along with a half-dozen other fellows all hailed from Maine: they were a syndicate, all for one and one for all. They hadn’t found a lot of gold—hardly enough for one man to retire on, let alone nine—but Sam reckoned if the worst came to the worst, they could always go into the exhibition business with this thing they’d dug up out of the frost. ‘It’s a new wonder of the world, or maybe the oldest one of all,’ I can hear him saying it, hunkered down by the stove in the saloon with the frost melting in his mustache and the steam rising off his coat; ‘I reckon it must ’a turned up late for last boarding on the ark, or else Noah throwed it overboard on account of its looks.’

“‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

“‘Aw, Horton, you never saw such a cretur as this,’ he said earnestly—he was straight-ahead and simple, was Sam Tibbets. He was one of the original ice-skaters from back on the lakes in the spring: I liked him a lot. ‘It’s like an ugly dried-up old thing the size of one of them barrels there—’ he pointed at a hogshead in the corner—‘and about that same shape, ’cept maybe it comes to sort of a narrow place up top. It’s got long thin arms, only dozens of ’em, all around, and there’s nippers on the end, same as a lobster? I swear there ain’t never been such a confusion. Wait till we haul it back out of here, come the thaw. They’ll pay a dime a head back in Frisco just to clap eyes on it, I tell you!’

“It was a plan at that, and if nothing else it made me mighty curious to take a look at this thing, whatever it was. The way Sam told it, they’d been digging through the frozen subsoil when they turned it up: he thought it must have gotten caught in the river away back, stuck in the mud and froze up when the winter came. How deep was it, I asked him, thinking the deeper it lay, the older it must be; ’bout twenty feet, he reckoned.

“‘So it’s dead, then, this thing?’ That was Cy Perrette, who was not the smartest man in the Yukon territory, not by a long chalk. He was staring at Sam Tibbets like a dog listening to a sermon.

“‘It better be,’ said Sam. ‘It’s been buried in the earth since Abraham got promoted to his first pair of long pants, ain’t it?’ Men started laughing all through the saloon, and pretty soon Sam had a line of drinks set down before him. Dawson folks appreciated a good tale, see: something to take their minds off the cold and dark outside, and the endless howling winds. I remember the aurora was particularly strong that night; when I staggered out of the saloon and the cold knocked me sober, there it was, fold upon fold, glowing and rippling from horizon to horizon. I remember thinking, that’s what folk mean when they say ‘unearthly’. Something definitively not of this planet, something more to do with the heavens than the earth.

“Come morning there was quite a little gang of us, all bent on following Sam Tibbets back to his camp for a look-see at the eighth wonder. Sam was agreeable, said he’d waive our admission fees just this once, on account of the circumstances, and we set off towards the workings. It was a cheerful excursion; the sleds were always lighter when you had company along the trail.

“Sam broke into a run when we reached the banks of the river bed; wanted to welcome us to the site of their discovery, I suppose, like any showman would. He clambered up a snowdrift; then, when he reached the top, he stopped, and even from down below I thought he looked confused. He let go his sled; it slithered down the bank and I had to look sharp, else it’d have taken me off at the shins. ‘Sam!’ I called him, but he didn’t look round. I scrambled up after him, cussing him for a clumsy oaf and the rest of it; then I saw what he’d seen, and the words got choked off in my throat.

“Straight away you could see something was wrong. Sam and his partners had built themselves a cabin by the workings, nothing fancy, but solid enough to take whatever the Yukon winter could throw at it, they’d thought. Now, one end of that cabin was shivered all to pieces. The logs were snapped and splintered into matchwood, just exactly as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. Only the cannon would have had to be on the inside of the cabin, not the outside: there was wreckage laying on the ground for a considerable distance, all radiating out and away from the stoved-in part.

“That wasn’t the worst part, though. In amongst the wreckage you could see the snow stained red, and there was at least one body mixed in with the blown-out timber. I saw it straight away; I know Sam had too, because he turned around and looked at me as I grabbed his arm, and I could hear this high sort of keening noise he was making, like some kind of machine that’s slipped its gears, about to break itself to pieces. That was the purest, most fundamental sound of grief I ever heard coming out of a human being. I’ve never forgotten it to this day.

“My first thought as we began running down the banks was: dynamite. Plenty of the miners used it to start off an excavation, or to clear whatever obstructions they couldn’t dig around. It wasn’t unusual for a camp such as this to have a few sticks laying around in case of emergencies. Now, if you got careless…? You understand what I’m saying. That was my first assumption, anyway. It lasted until I got in amongst the wreckage.

“Dynamite couldn’t account for it, was all. It couldn’t have left cups and bottles standing on the table, and still blown a hole in the cabin wall big enough to drive a piled-up dogsled through. It wouldn’t have left a man’s body intact inside its clothes, and taken his head clean off at the neck. And it couldn’t have done to that head… the things I saw done to the head of poor Bob Gendreau. Put it this way: my second assumption was bears; them, or some other wild animal. Bears roused too soon from their hibernation, hungry and enraged, coming on the camp and smashing it all to pieces. But again, when you looked at all the evidence, that didn’t sit right either.

“There was a side of bacon hanging on the wall still; bears would have taken that. And they wouldn’t have stopped at knocking off the head of Bob Gendreau; that’s not where the sustenance lies, and all a bear ever looks for is sustenance. Whatever took Bob’s head off, then mauled it so his own mother wouldn’t have known it; that thing wasn’t doing what it did out of blind animal instinct, nor yet the need for nourishment. That thing was doing what it did because it wanted to—because it liked it, maybe. Some say man is the lord of all creation because he’s the only creature blessed with reason; others, that he’s set apart from the rest of the beasts because he takes pleasure in killing, and there’s no other animal does that. But up in that cabin I learned different. Now, I believe there’s at least one other creature on this planet that draws satisfaction from its kills, and not just a square meal. I got my first inkling of that when I saw what was left of Harvey Tibbets.

“He was jammed into an unravaged corner of the cabin. It looked as if he’d been trying to dig clean through the packed-mud floor; there was a hole in the ground at his feet, and his fingers were all bloodied and torn. You could see that, because of the way he was laying; hunkered down on his haunches, facing out towards the room, for all the world like a Moslem when he prays to Mecca. His forehead was touching the earth, and his arms were stretched out in supplication. His hands were clenched in the dirt, still clutching two last handfuls of it even in death. There was no mistaking it: he’d been begging whatever had passed through that cabin to spare him. Begging it for mercy.

“And whatever it was had looked down upon him as he crouched grovelling in his corner; listened to his screams, I guess. And had it granted him mercy? I don’t know. I can’t speak as to its motivations. What it had done, was sever both his hands, cut ’em clear off at the wrists. Remember before, when I said he appeared to have been digging in the dirt, trying to escape? Both his hands were still there, torn-up and bloody like I said. And he was kneeling down with his arms outstretched; you remember that. But in between the stumps at the end of his forearms and the tattered beginnings of his wrists, there was nothing but a foot of blood-soaked earth. Whatever had killed him had cut off both his hands, and watched him bleed out on the floor while he begged it still for mercy. Now what sort of a creature does that sound like to you?

“Indians, was what some of the men thought; Indians touched with the windigo madness. But how could any man, crazy or sane, have knocked an entire gable end out of the cabin that way? There was an Indian with us, one of the portageurs, a quiet, dark-complected fellow named Jake: he wouldn’t come within ten yards of the devastation, but he told me it wasn’t any of his kin. ‘Not yours either,’ he said after a pause, and I asked him what he meant by it.

“He took me aside and pointed in the snow. There was a mess of our prints, converging on the cabin so that the ground outside the blasted-out place was practically trampled bare. All around the snow was practically virgin still, and Jake showed me the only thing that sullied it. A single set of tracks, leading from the cabin and headed away north, down along the gulch. I say leading from the cabin, mostly because there wasn’t anything in the cabin could have made those prints, living or dead. If it wasn’t for that, then I don’t know that I could have told you what direction whatever made the prints was travelling in. They weren’t regular footmarks, you see, and they were all wrong in their shape, in their arrangement—in their number, even. And the weirdest thing about them? They stopped dead about fifty yards out. A step, then another, then nothing but the undisturbed snow, as far as the eye could see.

“Later on, once the shock of it had passed, I asked Jake what could have made those prints, and he told me an old legend of his people, about the time before men walked these northern wastes, when it was just gods and trolls and ogres.

“Back then, he said, there were beings come down from the sky, and they laid claim to the Earth for a long season of destruction. They were like pariahs between the stars, these beings: not even the Old Ones, the gods without a worshipper, could bear to have them near. They were cast out in the end, as well as the Old Ones could manage it: but the story goes that some of them escaped exile by burrowing down into the earth and waiting their time, till some cataclysm of the planet might uncover them. They could wait: nothing on Earth could kill them, you see. They couldn’t die in this dimension. They would only sleep, through geologic ages of the planet, till something disturbed them and they came to light once more.

“That was the legend: I got it out of Jake later that same day, when the party had split up and we were searching all the low land around the arroyo. The mood of the party was shocked and unforgiving: something had done this to our friends, and we were bound to avenge them the best we could. The trail of footprints had given some of the fellows pause for thought, but I think most of them just took the prints as simple evidence of something they could go after, and didn’t reflect too much on what could have made them. If they’d stopped and thought it through, I doubt whether any one of them would have been prepared to do what we ended up doing that night: lying in ambush and waiting for the culprit to come back to the cabin.

“The reasoning—so far as it went—was, if it’s an animal, it’ll come back where there’s food. If it’s a man, it’ll come back because that’s what murderers do: revisit the scene of the crime. Pretty shaky logic, I know, but the blood of the party was up. We were really just looking for trouble, and we damn near found it, too.

“As night fell we set up an ambuscade in the ruins of the cabin. We’d buried the bodies by then, of course, but inside the cabin still felt bad; stank, too, like something had lain dead in there all through the summer, and not just a few hours in the bitter icy cold. We had the stove going: we had to, else we’d have froze to death. We had guards at all the windows, and a barricade at the wrecked end of the cabin. It didn’t matter what direction trouble might be coming at us from, we had it covered. Or so we thought.

“God, we were so cold! The wind died down soon after dark, and that probably saved us all from the hypothermia. Still it was like a knife going through you, that chill, and you had to get up and move around every so often, just to prove to yourself you were still alive. We passed around a bottle of whiskey we found among the untouched provisions, and waited.

“All across the wide northern sky there was a glow, cold and mysterious, as far removed as you could imagine from the world of men and their paltry little hopes and fears. The aurora was so vivid that night, you might have read a newspaper by it. All the better to see whatever’s coming, we thought; at least it can’t creep up on us and take us unawares, not in this light.

“Somewhere in the very pit of the night, just when the body’s at its weariest and wants only to drop down and sleep, an uncanny sort of stillness fell across the snowed-up river bed. What was left of the wind dropped entirely, and the only sound beneath the frozen far-off stars seemed to come from the creaking of the stove round which we sat, the cracking and spitting of the logs that burned inside it. A few of us looked round at each other; all of us felt it now, the heightened expectation, the heightened fear. Without words, as quietly as we could, we moved away from the stove and took up our places at the barricade.

“I remember—so clearly!—how it felt, crouching behind that mess of planks and packing-cases, waiting to see what might show its head above the snow-banks. A couple of times I thought I saw something, away out beyond the bounds of night vision. Even under the greenish radiance of the aurora I couldn’t be sure: was that something moving? Could it be? One time Joe McRudd discharged his rifle, and scared us all to hell. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, when we’d all regained our senses. He cleared his throat. ‘Thought I saw sump’n creepin’ round out there.’

“‘Save your ammo,’ grunted Sam Tibbets, not even bothering to look at poor Joe. ‘Keep your nerve.’ That was all. Directly after that it was upon us.

“It came from the only direction we hadn’t reckoned on: overhead. There was a thump on the roof of the cabin, and then a splintering as the boards were wrenched off directly above our heads. It caused a general confusion: everyone jumped and panicked, and no-one really knew what was happening. Joe McRudd’s rifle went off again; some of the other fellows shot as well, I don’t know what at. Before I could react, Sam Tibbets was snatched up from alongside me—something had him fast around the head and was dragging him off of his feet, up towards the hole in the roof.

“I grabbed him around the waist, but it was no use: I felt my own feet lifting clear of the floor as Sam was hoisted ever upward. He was trying to call out, but whatever had snatched him was laying tight hold around the whole of his head and neck, and all I could hear was a muffled roar of anger and pain—fear, too, I guess. It was as if he was being lynched, hung off a high bough and left to swing there while he throttled. I called to the rest of them to help, to hang on to us: a couple of them laid ahold of my legs and heaved, and for a moment we thought we had him. Then there came an awful sound, like something out of a butcher’s shop, and suddenly we were all sprawled on the floor of the cabin, with Sam Tibbets’ headless body lying dead weight on top of us.

“I don’t remember exactly how the next few seconds panned out. All I remember was being soaked with Sam’s blood: the heat of it, the force with which it gushed from his truncated neck, the bitter metallic stink. The fellows told me afterwards that I was screaming like a banshee on my hands and knees, but I know I wasn’t the only one. Jake the Indian brought me out of it: he dragged me away from the shambles in the middle of the room and slapped me a couple times till I quit bawling. As if coming round from a dream I goggled at him slack-mouthed; then I came to myself in a dreadful sort of recollection. Before he could stop me, I’d grabbed the big hunting-knife from its scabbard at his waist and pushed him out of the way.

“By climbing up on top of the hot stove, I just about managed to reach the hole in the roof. I had Jake’s knife between my teeth like the last of the Mohicans; I was covered all over in Sam Tibbets’ blood, and I was filled with the urge to vengeance, nothing else. I hoisted myself up so my head and shoulders were through the hole. With my elbows planted on the snow-covered shingles, I looked around.

“It was crouched by the farther end of the roof like a big old sack of guts, mumbling on something. Sam’s head. I made some sort of a noise, and it looked up: I mean, the thick squabby part on top of it suddenly grew long like an elephant’s trunk, and one furious red eye glared out at me from its tip. The noise it made: good God, I never heard the like. It damn near deafened me, even out in the open; it went ringing through my head like the last trump.

“Some part of its belly opened itself up, and Sam Tibbets’ head was gone with a terrible sucking crunch. Then all those tentacles that fringed the trunk suddenly came to life, writhing and flailing like a stinging jellyfish. One of them caught in my clothing—I slashed out at it with Jake’s knife, but I might as well have tried to cut a steel hawser. It had me fast; it was like being caught in a death-hold. The thing let rip a revolting sort of belch, and started to haul me in, and I had just enough time to feel the entire sum of my courage vanish in a wink as fear, total and absolute, rushed in to fill up every inch of my being. It’s a hell of a thing, to lose all self-respect that way: to know that the last thing you’ll feel before death is nothing but abject, craven panic. God, let me die like a man, I prayed, as the thing dragged me up out of the hole towards its gulping maw—that glaring gorgon’s eye—

“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 laying 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 eldritch 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 judgement on his tale—to say yes, I believe you, or hang on a minute, are you sure about that? Then I realised 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 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. 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 nightshirts, 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. He 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 nurses a 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 DON’T 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.”

“I know,” Keith wheezed. He was keeping up pretty good, for a man well into his fifties, but Tibbs was setting a punishing pace. “Seen it—back at the courthouse.”

“You seen that? You seen the coal? Then you got a pretty good idea what we brung back here.” He’s got a better idea than that, maybe, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say anything. For one thing, I doubt my aching lungs would have let me—nor yet my growing panic, which I was only just managing to keep in check.

“Anyhow, it was deader’n Abel slain by Cain—I’ll swear to that, an’ these men here’ll back me up. You never seen a thing so dried out an’ wrinkled—nor so ugly, neither. Jesus Christ, it made me sick to look at it!—but it was my prize, an’ I swore it was goin’ to make me a rich man. Me an’ all my kin—” He choked up at that, and we none of us pressed him; we ran on, was all, with the rustling thud of our footfalls through the brush warning the whole forest of our approach, probably.

The dogs were still straining hard after the scent, when all of a sudden they stopped and gathered round something underfoot, down by a little stand of dwarf sumac. I thought it was a rock at first: I couldn’t see through the bodies of the hounds. It was Tibbs’ cry that made me realise what it might be—that, and the story Keith had told me not half-a-dozen hours previously, rattling round my mind the way it had been ever since.

Tibbs couldn’t pick it up, that roundish muddy thing the dogs had found. That was left to Horton Keith: he lifted it just a little, enough for one of the other men in the party to gasp and mutter “Jesse.” Tibbs repeated the name a few times to himself, while Keith replaced the thing the way he found it and straightened up off his haunches. Then Tibbs gave it out in a howl that made the dogs back off, cower on their bellies in the leaf-rot as if they’d been whipped. I swear that sound went all the way through me. I hear it still, when I think about that night. It’s bad, and I try not to do it too much, mostly because the next thing I think of is what I heard next—what we all heard, the sound that made us snap up our heads and turn in the direction of our otherworldly quarry.

You’ll probably remember that Keith had already taken a stab at describing that sound. If you go back and look what he said, you’ll see he compared it to the last trump, and all I can say is, standing out there in the middle of the forest, looking at each other in the lantern light, we all of us knew exactly what he meant. It turned my guts to water: I damn near screamed myself.

It was so close; that was the thing. Just by the clarity and lack of muffling you could tell it wasn’t far off—five, maybe ten score of paces on through the trees, somewhere just over the next ridge. Tibbs got his senses back soonest of us all, or maybe he was so far gone then that sense had nothing to do with it: he was off and running, aiming to close down those hundred yards or so and get to grips with whatever cut down his brothers and took a trophy to boot. The dogs almost tripped him up; they were cowering in the dirt still, and there was no budging them. He flung down the leash and left them there.

It was Keith started after him, of course. And once Keith had gone, I couldn’t not go myself. Then the rest of then followed on; all of which meant we were pretty strung out along the track. It may have saved Keith’s life, that arrangement.

I heard Tibbs up ahead, cursing and panting; then, I heard a strange sort of a whizzing noise. I once stood at a wharf watching a cargo ship being unloaded, and one of the hawsers broke on the winching gear. The noise it made as it lashed through the air; that was what I heard. Whip-crack, quick and abrupt; and then I didn’t hear Tibbs any more.

What I thought I heard was the sound of rain, pattering on the leaves and branches. I even felt a few drops of it on my face. Then one of the men in the rear caught up and shone his lantern up ahead. It lit first of all on Keith as he staggered back, hand to his mouth. Then, it lit on Tibbs.

At first it seemed like some sort of conjuror’s trick. He was staggering too, like a stage drunk, only there was something about his head… At first your brain refused to believe it. Your eyes saw it, but your brain reported back, no, it’s a man; men aren’t made that way. It’s a trick they do with mirrors; a slather of stage blood to dress it up, that’s all. Then, inevitably, Tibbs lost his balance and fell backwards. Once he was down it became easier to deal with, in one way—easier to look at and trust your own eyes, at any rate. At last, you could look at it and see what there was to be seen. Which was this: from the neck up, Tibbs’ head was gone.

I said you could look at it; not for long, though. Instead I turned to Keith, who was pressed back up against a tree trunk, still with his hand to his mouth. He saw me, and he tried to speak, shaking his head all the while, but he couldn’t find the words.

Then we both heard it together: a rustling in the branches above our head, the sound of something dropping. We both looked up at about the same time, and that was how I managed to spring back, and so avoid the thing hitting me smack on the crown of my head. It hit the ground good and hard, directly between the two of us: the soft mud underfoot took all the bounce off it, though. It rolled half of the way over, then stopped, so you couldn’t really see its features. There was no mistaking it, though, even in the shaky lantern-light; I’d been looking at the back of Tibbs’ head only a moment ago, hadn’t I?

A dreadful realisation dawned in Keith’s eyes, and he looked back up. Instinctively I followed suit. I guess we saw about the same thing, though Keith had the experience to help him evaluate it. It was like this:

The branches were close-meshed overhead, with hardly any night sky visible in between. What you could see was tinted a sickly sort of greenish hue: the way modern city streetlights will turn the night a fuzzy, smoky orange, and block out all the stars. Through the treetops, something was ascending. I’d be a liar if I said I could recognise it; there was just no way to tell, not with all those shaking, rustling branches in the way. All I got was a general impression of size and shape; enough for me to stand in front of that slab of coal in the courthouse basement the next day and say, yeah, it could have been; I guess. Keith was with me, and so far as he was concerned it was a deal more straightforward; but as I say, he had the benefit of prior acquaintance.

Up it went, up and up, till it broke clear of the canopy, and we had no way of knowing where to look. The sky gave one last unnatural throb of ghoulish green, as if it was turning itself inside out; and it was over. All that was left was the bloody carnage down below: Lamar Tibbs’ body, that we dragged between us back to the farmhouse, and the bodies of his brothers covered up with a tarpaulin. One entire generation of a family, wiped out in the course of a night.

What with the weeping and the wailing of the relatives, and the never-ending questions—most of them from that fat fool Kronke, who hadn’t even the guts to leave his damn automobile—that business up on Peck’s Ridge took us clear through dawn and into the afternoon of the next day to deal with. It stayed with us a good while longer than that, though; in fact, it’s never really gone away. Ask either of my wives, who will surely survive me through having gotten rid of me, as soon as was humanly possible. They’ll tell you how I used to come bolt upright in the middle of a nightmare, hands flailing desperately above my head, screaming at the ghosts of trees and branches, babbling about a sky gone wrong. Ask them how often it happened, and what good company I was in the days and weeks that followed. Yes, you could say it’s stayed with me, my three days down in Oram County.

∇

I knew Keith for a dozen more years in all: right up till the time he set off with the rest of the Collins Clarke archaeological party for the headwaters of the Amazon, and never came back. Missing, presumed dead, all fifteen men and their native bearers; nothing was ever found of them, no overflights could even spot their last camp. Keith was well into his sixties by then, but there was never any question that he’d be joining the expedition, once he’d heard the rumours—the ruins up above Iquitos on the Ucayali, the strange carvings of beasts no-one had ever seen before. He’d done his preparation in the library at Miskatonic with Clarke himself, cross-referencing the Indian tales with certain books and illustrations—and with that slab of coal from the Oram County courthouse, one-half of which had made its way into the cabinets of the University’s Restricted Collection. There was no stopping him: he was convinced he was on the right track at last. “But why put yourself in their way again?” I asked him. “With all you know; after all you’ve seen?” He never answered me straight out; there’s only his last telegram, sent from Manaus, which I like to think holds, if not an answer, then a pointer at least, to the man and to the nature of his quest.

Dear Fenwick (it said): Finally found someplace worse than Skagway. And they say there’s no such thing as progress. We set off tomorrow on our snipe hunt, not a moment too soon for all concerned. Wish you were here—on the strict understanding that we’re soon to be somewhere else. With all best wishes from the new frontier, Your friend, Horton Keith.

∇