Reanimators (25 page)

Wilmarth seemed equally pleased, or at least intrigued, by the conversation he was having. I will fully admit that I understood little of what was said, though the words “Inuto”, “Lomar”, “Voormis”, and “Cailleach” seemed to be common subjects for discussion. At one point, Wilmarth uttered the word “Ithaqua” and the conversation suddenly ceased; the patient I was examining quickly crossed himself, while his heart rate jumped propitiously. Later, over lunch I asked Wilmarth about what he had learned about the Clagues. At first Wilmarth was evasive and seemed unwilling to reveal what the Clagues had told him, but after some further pressure on my part he finally began to speak.

“Dr. Hartwell, the Clagues are a superstitious lot who believe in things long since suppressed by the Church, but once common amongst some of the barbarian clans that were spread amongst the islands and lands of the North Sea. In the mythology of the region, a giant made of ice was used to create the substance of the world. His flesh became the soil, his bones the mountains, his teeth boulders, and his brains became the clouds. Some traditions hold that in the cold places of the world, what was left of the giant called Ithaqua still stalks the skies, bringing winter storms and desolation to the land. At certain times of the year, Ithaqua, like the gods of the Greeks, may enter into a dalliance with a woman and inevitably leave her with child. These children are always female, and are collectively known as the Cailleachan, kind of like the Storm Hags I mentioned to you yesterday. The Cailleachan hide themselves amongst men, secretly spreading the seed of Ithaqua into unsuspecting families.” He paused. “At least that’s the legend according to the Clagues.”

After lunch Wilmarth and I began our work with the women of the family. Unlike the men, the women seemed more reticent, and as a result our conversations, both medically and in terms of family folklore, seemed stilted. Like the men, the women were in extremely good health and seemed strong, showing no signs of disease or illness, though all exhibited a curious trait that I had not noticed in the men. The women of the Clague family, even the youngest of girls, all showed a curious malformation of the feet, which appeared noticeably disproportionate, extremely small, with foreshortened, stub-like toes. When questioned about them as a group they simply looked at each other and giggled about it being an ancestral trait.

Late in the afternoon, as dusk began to draw long shadows and the oil lamps were lit, Lake, Dyer and the two Clague boys returned from their sortie, cold and tired but none the worse for wear. While the two warmed themselves by the fire they described their hike as little more than a pleasant, albeit chilly, walk through the hilly countryside. Much of the land was unremarkable, consisting primarily of hills of the same loose rock and sediment that covered most of the Miskatonic Valley, worn down from the rounded mountains from which the Miskatonic itself arose. The flora too was unremarkable, being primarily conifers with a scattering of maples and a few stands of thick ancient oaks. Animal life was plentiful and the boys had brought home a covey of rabbits for dinner. Lake had taken a casting from a bear print of unusual size, and along a stream bank had found a print he swore belonged to a wolf rather than a dog.

However, the most interesting thing they had found had nothing to do with the natural history of the area, but rather was something the locals had done. Deep in the woods, someone had cleared twenty acres of forest, leaving nothing but stumps and sawdust behind. At first the two learned men had thought that they had stumbled upon an area long in use by some local lumberjack, or woodsman, who had over the years slowly cleared the area. Such a conclusion was quickly rejected, given the lack of new growth, and the prodigious amount of fresh woodchips that spanned the entire area. The only possible explanation for the evidence around them was that sometime within the last few days, a small army had descended on the area and in a furious bout of effort cleared it entirely, leaving behind only a drag trail leading north, deeper into the woods.

The existence of the cleared patch seemed to create much discontentment amongst the family. Window shutters were closed and locked, livestock was rounded up and the barn door barred. We talked at length about the barren area and the four of us agreed that we should mount an early morning outing to follow the trail that led deeper into the woods. In this we would apparently be on our own, as the Clagues seemed unwilling to explore the path any further. Indeed, an attempt was made to dissuade us from going at all. When it became clear that our minds were made up, Ambrose Clague shook his head and then had one of the boys bring forth a valued shotgun and a box of shells, insisting that we take the weapon as a precaution.

It was well before dawn when we four stumbled out of the house and into the yard that surrounded the farm. As we gathered up our supplies and secured our packs, I noted that the women of the house had come to the windows and were watching us. Wilmarth noted it as well, and as the two of us conferred the figures moved away, and the house quickly grew dark. Overnight the air had turned bitterly cold and a wind whipped from the north and gusted strong enough to stop us in our tracks. The sky was dark and any starlight was apparently covered by a thick layer of clouds that rolled like waves through the atmosphere. The ground and grass beneath our feet were frozen and crunched as we marched out along the trail that Lake had mapped out for us. All I could hope for was that with dawn, some lessening of the bitter cold would come as well.

We marched for an hour before we reached the place that had been clear-cut, and it was as Lake and Dyer had described. We paused to rest and assess the site. Wilmarth complained that surely it must already be dawn, and I looked eastward to see a small glow desperately trying to burst through the thick roiling clouds. I turned back to Wilmarth and as I directed his gaze toward the struggling sun I saw his eyes grow suddenly large and his face go white. Wilmarth rushed me, tackling me about the midsection, knocking me backwards into the camera and our colleagues, and carrying us all to the ground. As I struggled to recover, the sky grew suddenly dark and there was a great sound like wind blowing through the grass, or a train rushing past. It lasted a good five seconds and we cowered in the clearing for a few seconds more until we were sure it was past. But what it was, I cannot say, for I saw nothing but the darkness. Wilmarth, who had obviously seen something that spurred him into action, was vague and talked of a whirling mass of black wind that had come from beyond the treetops. Dyer suggested that we had just encountered a snow devil, a tornado generated by extreme cold usually associated with a whiteout. As if to confirm Dyer’s hypothesis, from the sky huge flakes of snow began to fall at a rapid rate, and within seconds a thin layer had covered the clearing.

Undeterred by the sudden foul weather, the four of us marched valiantly, and I will admit, a little foolishly into the woods following the trail created by whoever had dragged the felled trees branches and all, north. The trail was little more than a deep rut, and traversing it was no easy task. The accumulating snow made the frozen ground slick, and on several occasions one or more of us slid or stumbled and landed unceremoniously on our posteriors. As we moved away from the clearing the forest grew thicker, and the sky grew darker. I suddenly came into the habit of periodically looking eastward and noting the illumination which weakly penetrated the clouds and lit up the sky. The trail crept through the woods and eventually reached the base of a low rocky ridge. The trail continued up this ridge, and we dutifully scrambled up to the top. It was Dyer who reached the edge first and he quickly ducked down and waved us into a cautionary silence.

The ridge formed the lip of a small valley or hollow that had been modified into a kind of amphitheater with long terraces cut into the hillsides forming a set of concentric rings around a large central plaza easily five acres in size. This vast central space was itself filled with a large ring of fallen trees, obviously those that had been clear-cut further south, that had been stripped of their branches. The branches themselves formed another ring just on the interior of the larger one. All of this seemed to serve as a kind of huge pen, for the interior was replete with cattle, goats and other assorted livestock, all of which seemed on the verge of freezing to death. Outside of the rings dozens of cloaked figures mulled about. Some were climbing the terraces, while others had taken up positions on those terraces and seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

Wilmarth struggled to get a better view. “It’s a ceremony of some sort. This is what Groundhog Day used to be. Watch for a wild animal of some sort to be brought out and used to prognosticate the change in season. It’ll probably come through there,” he said, pointing at a large squared-off cut on the far side off the ridge.

Dyer slid back a little. “What’s with the wooden ring and the animals?”

Wilmarth hemmed and hawed a little. “Animal sacrifice using a bonfire probably. I’ve read of similar rituals in Summerisle off the coast of Scotland.”

We sat there for quite some time, and Wilmarth, like those below us, seemed to be waiting for something to trigger whatever was going to happen. Then as I looked back east I saw the sun, still weak behind the clouds, rise up over the trees and cast the first rays down into the valley below. Wilmarth suddenly became agitated, and those below us rose up from wherever they were sitting. They rose up and all at once shed their cloaks. From our vantage point we saw them in all their wondrous glory. They were all women, women of all ages, from teens to haggard crones, and without their cloaks they were all completely nude.

The wind suddenly whipped down over us and into the hollow. The penned animals called out in anguish and fear. Lake, Dyer and I hunkered down and let the wind blow and howl all around us. Wilmarth, however, clung to the ridge and bore witness to what occurred in the amphitheater below. Over the roaring winds I heard snippets of singing, but in a language I had never heard before. I heard a great wailing as well, and the screaming of the animals. There was a horrendous smell, like carrion, or the Miskatonic at low tide. How long Wilmarth watched I could not say, though perhaps it is best to say that he watched for too long.

Of the frantic race away from that haunted place I can say little. Wilmarth maniacally insisted that we stay off the rutted trail, and although we argued with him at first, our protestations ceased when he broke open one of the shotgun shells to reveal nothing more than rock salt. That someone was searching for us as we tore through those thick woods was clear, for several times we took refuge in the thick underbrush and waited until angry, threatening voices passed us by. We avoided the Clague farm as well, taking a long arc to the south, and then working our way back to the dilapidated span just as the sun set. We crossed the rope bridge in the dark and on the far side we crawled into the woods to rest for a while. It took us more than two hours to reach Dean’s Corners, and seeing us all wild-eyed and exhausted the shopkeeper offered to let us stay the night. Wilmarth violently refused and at his insistence we drove the whole way to Arkham that night.

Wilmarth has never spoken of that day, at least not to me. We have told no one of what we saw, for whom would believe us? All four of us have since resigned from Dr. Ramsey’s project, and we recommended that no one else ever go to Quirk. Of course someone finally did visit that hamlet. In May, a state surveyor found the rope bridge deteriorated, the farm and Quirk abandoned. The state police found no evidence of foul play, and the residents of Dean’s Corners have no recollection of any large group of people passing through. Somehow or other, the police learned of our visit, and we were questioned. We told the investigators nothing. Even Wilmarth, who eventually recovered from his mania, was silent on the subject. In time the missing villagers of Quirk were forgotten, the bridge was never rebuilt, and Quirk became just another footnote to be added to the mysteries that haunt that strange country.

I, however, cannot forget the mania that possessed Wilmarth as we drove down the Aylesbury Pike. The road was clear, the stars and moon bright, and the night air was unseasonably warm, and we drove with the windows down and the wind roaring in our ears. Over this we listened, try as we might to ignore him, as Wilmarth screamed into the night. What Wilmarth saw as he watched, and we hid, he could not tell us save in the most obscure and disjointed of rants. He spoke of Ithaqua and of the Storm Hags that were his daughters. He whispered madly of the Windwalker’s feet, and of the dark symbolism of the beast in the cave searching for his shadow. All these things he ranted incoherently about, over and over again as we drove down that dark lonely highway. But only once did he speak of the freshly fallen trees, and the gathering of wood by something akin to monstrous birds. He laughed like a madman at this, and he grabbed me by the collar and yelled uncontrollably, “You don’t look for your shadow in spring, you look for a mate! And you don’t start fires using freshly cut wood. It’s not a fire they were building! God help us, it was a nest!”

Chapter 22.

UNCORRELATED CONTENTS

After I and my colleagues fled Quirk, there followed an incredible and perhaps well-deserved lull, a period in my life in which little to nothing untoward occurred and I could concentrate solely on my medical practice and documenting the outcomes of my clandestine experiments in the administration of my reagent as a prophylactic against death. I say untoward, but that is not to say that nothing troubling occurred. Miss Soames, my long-time housekeeper and receptionist, passed away in the fall of 1926, a victim of her age and an unrevealed addiction to smoking a pipe each evening. Sometime after that my junior partner, Dr. Randolph White, announced that he needed to either advance in position or move on. Reluctantly I agreed, and the two of us negotiated a price by which he could purchase the Kingsport practice and property from me. It was not a large amount, but it was adequate for my needs and was more than enough to absolve me of any of my own debts with a significant sum left over, which despite the advice of my banker I declined to invest in the stock market, but rather purchased a small bayside cottage in the shadow of Kingsport Head that I could use as a summer retreat.

As time progressed, I became more interested in following the progress of my patients who had been treated with the reagent than with actually maintaining my practice. By my estimation, nearly ten percent of Arkham’s entire population had been exposed to some level of treatment or another. This represented a significant number of individuals that I suddenly felt I was too old to properly handle. I thought about taking on yet another junior partner, but then reconsidered. I had no desire to train yet another doctor and live with the possibility that my privacy and secret life might be invaded once more. In the end I realized that I had spent twenty years as one of the premier physicians in Arkham, and perhaps it was time to slow down. Over the course of several months I negotiated with both my patients and other doctors to reduce my workload.

In the fall of 1927 and into the early winter I began to review, analyze and draw conclusions from the data my experimental subjects were supplying to me. Surprisingly, perhaps because I had for so many years been distracted, a significant number of my patients had obtained advanced age, and though I believed myself and my reagent to be the cause, I could hardly believe the number of septuagenarians, octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenaries that now called Arkham home. As was the goal, my subjects, even those exposed to the lowest dose of reagent, showed increased resistance to infectious diseases and the ravages of old age, and even trauma. Those that did suffer some kind of cataclysmic trauma, a broken bone for example, healed at an incredible rate. At least this is what the information my experimental subjects, as compared to the control group, told me.

In the interest of science I began to read and take comparative notes on the changing patterns of human lifespan as they related to geographic area, cultural origin and even diet. In almost every case, no matter how I clustered the information, it seemed that my subjects were always significantly above the average. That is to say, in all areas but one, and I was surprised to discover that such a population existed so near to me and yet I had never heard word of it. There existed but scant miles from my own home a population of individuals whose average lifespan appeared equivalent, perhaps even superior to those individuals that I had treated with my reagent. At least they had been. Information on the population of the small and decrepit town had some decades ago ceased to be reported, but near the turn of the century it seemed that the population was dramatically skewed toward individuals over the age of fifty and well into the hundreds. Inquiries with county service members revealed that the last doctor for the town had vanished some time ago, and even before that, his reporting had been spotty at best. Undaunted, I sent an inquiry to the Federal government for details from the national census that had last been carried out January of 1920, and every decade prior to that. If local authorities had no information perhaps the national government could tell me what the demographics of Innsmouth had been over the last thirty years.

The answer to my inquiry came in a manner I could never have expected. One early February morning I opened the paper to discover that Federal agents had descended on Innsmouth. A destroyer had been spotted off the coast, and state police had closed the road. There was talk of a pitched gun battle between revenuers and smugglers, as well as the bombardment of the waterfront by naval vessels. One unidentified source contended that the navy was systematically dropping depth charges along the reef that ran outside the harbor in an attempt to capture or damage a submarine vessel belonging to an unidentified foreign power. This anonymous claim, however, was simply too fantastic, and later editions of The Arkham Advertiser disavowed such wild notions.

Over the course of the next few days agents of the Federal government, treasury agents, military men and officials from innumerable other agencies and departments descended not only on Innsmouth, but on Arkham as well. The campus was cluttered with strangers who seemed intent on talking with a number of professors and examining in detail the historical and cultural documents of the area. This made the Miskatonic University Library a virtual beehive of activity, and on the few occasions I found it necessary to visit, I had nothing but sympathy for Dr. Armitage who was spending most of his time supervising the rare book rooms which were now flooded by government researchers who, he complained, knew little concerning the proper treatment of antique volumes.

Thankfully, I needed little in the way of assistance and was fully capable of finding whatever volumes I needed. The din that the strange events in Innsmouth had brought to our fair University was difficult to ignore, and created certain problems with the allocation of reading rooms and private carrels. Thus it came to pass that on one particular day I was forced to occupy a chair amongst the common space opposite the rooms set aside for the review of rare volumes and was in a position to overhear some small portion of the loud discussion that Armitage was engaged with behind closed doors. I was not alone in eavesdropping, for two young graduate students, who from their books I determined were students of mathematics, were with me, apparently keenly interested in what was going on between Armitage and his unidentified partner in conversation. Though it seemed to me they were less interested in the subject of the conversation than they were in gaining access to Armitage.

When several minutes of apparent debate ended, and there came an uncomfortable silence, my two companions rose from their chairs and moved into the hall so as to make their way toward Armitage. Just then the door to the room opened and from it stepped a monster of a man. He was easily over seven feet tall and his vast bulk was barely contained by the worn suit he had stuffed himself into. His face was long, almost goatish, and covered with coarse hair. That thick black hair was apparently endemic over his entire body, for it peeked out from his sleeves and between the buttons of his shirt. His walk was a lumbering gait, and from the way he twisted himself I suspected a significant deformity of the pelvis, spine or both.

Stunned by the appearance of the giant, the two graduate students stood dumbfounded. Even as the monstrous man reached out one of his massive hands they failed to move. Unable to move around them, the giant spoke in a low but deep voice, and said something I could not hear before gently moving one of the young men to the side. His path unblocked, the ogre was quickly gone from my sight. In the distance, somewhere outside the library, a dog howled.

When Armitage himself came out of the room he seemed flustered and mumbling under his breath. “Inbreeding? Great God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing—what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensioned earth—was Wilbur’s Whateley’s father?”

Whatever it was that Armitage said next was lost to me, for I focused entirely on the name that Armitage had given to the thing that had just walked out of the library, for I knew that Wilbur Whateley, the creature that had lumbered past at more than seven feet tall, was no more than fifteen years old, and that I had inadvertently exposed his mother Lavinia to my reagent while Wilbur was still in utero. It was I who was responsible for not only his cyclopean proportions but also his congenital deformities that forced him to walk with that horrid gait. Wilbur Whateley was a monster of my own making.

I fled the library blindly. The knowledge that that creature was Wilbur Whateley was stupefying, and the possibility that I was likely responsible for his condition froze me to the core. Soon I was wandering the campus in a daze, unconsciously following the paths and walkways that wind through the University. I shudder at what people must have thought of the blank-eyed mask that gripped my face, and I was grateful that the cold had kept the common areas clear of staff and students.

Somehow or another I wandered off campus and soon found myself wandering through the construction site for the new Tillinghast Building, the pride of Arkham’s so-called new skyline. The lower floors of the building were nearly done, and the site was still littered with massive earthmovers, cranes and trucks, mostly concentrated around the great pit that had been dug to construct the tunnel that would connect the railway platform in the basement to the new subterranean railway that the city was building. Each day the project consumed tons of concrete and the trucks that brought it ran through the streets all hours of the day. There was something hypnotically soothing about the construction, and I settled in to watch it and let my mind go blank.

It was sometime later that a familiar, though perhaps unwelcome face disturbed my peace. It had been some time since I had seen Dr. Ambrose Dexter, but suddenly he was beside me, smiling. I should have refused to talk with him, but he waved my request for statistics on the population of Innsmouth in my face and spoke of things that both intrigued and frightened my sensibilities. By that evening I was in my office making arrangements for an army doctor to take over my practice while I was whisked off to a Federal facility in what was left of the village of Innsmouth.

The agreement I signed with Dexter forbids me from going into detail on what I saw and did, but I am not sure that it matters much at this point. I spent six months working for Dexter and his associates, who consisted primarily of military and Bureau of Investigation agents that had seized control of Innsmouth by presidential order. The residents of Innsmouth had not been involved with the smuggling of contraband, but, rather, sometime in the late nineteenth century became enamored with the people and religion of one of their trading partners in the Pacific islands. In fact, the people of Innsmouth had not only married many of the natives of these islands, but had also adopted their religious beliefs incorporating the worship of a triumvirate of monstrous aquatic gods that fit nicely into their seafaring lifestyle. Unfortunately, this miscegenation had resulted in the expression of certain retrograde characteristics that gave the inhabitants of Innsmouth an unwholesome and even somewhat batrachian appearance. Apparently the entire community had been affected by the condition, and the Federal government had found it necessary to reach out and recruit assistance from private individuals such as myself.

Under Dexter’s guidance I was responsible for what were designated marginal cases, showing minimal defects. These included cases of ichthyosis, a skin condition that created scale-like patches, webbed fingers and toes, premature balding, and particularly Grave’s ophthalmopathy. Given the extensive malformations that my patients exhibited, I was grateful that I did not have to work with the patients that had been classified as having extensive or severe cases.

It was not my duty to develop or even suggest possible treatments for the exhibited conditions, but rather, I was to interview individuals concerning their conditions, behaviors and personal medical history, this being much of the information that I had put forth in my request to the census, and also taking skin, blood and hair samples. On the rare occasion that one of our charges suffered an injury I would undertake the menial tasks of setting broken fingers, stitching lacerations and tending to bruises. Although I will admit that such tasks were unusually rare.

I spent six months at the facility, during which I discerned an incredible, almost miraculous, condition amongst my patients. As with my experimental subjects, those of Innsmouth showed an inordinate resistance to injury and disease, as well as a longevity that was to be envied. This was coupled with, and may have been directly related to, a marked difference in the rate of growth, maturation and aging. As far as I could tell, for I was never actually allowed to correlate the information that I was gathering, the children of Innsmouth grew at an astounding rate and matured quickly, often entering puberty between eight and ten years of age. However, once a state of adolesence had been achieved, individuals, particularly males, seemed to stay in this state for an entire decade, and failed to show signs of physical and mental maturity until they were well into their mid-twenties. Adulthood seemed to span from an average of twenty-five to well into the seventies, with the first signs of age, such as grey hair or arthritis, not appearing until individuals had become octogenarians.

Investigating such trends was irresistible to me, and in July when Dexter made it plain that the compound was to close and the patients to be scattered to other facilities in Utah and Arizona, I schemed to acquire samples of my patients’ tissues, particularly blood, for my own purposes. I accomplished this by collecting the blood that remained in the actual needle as opposed to the tube itself. Admittedly, this often left me with incomplete or even compromised samples, but for my purposes it was enough. Examination of these samples revealed an unfamiliar component, a kind of spindle-shaped, nucleated cell. Similar cells perform a clotting function in non-mammalian vertebrates, but this seemed somewhat different in appearance, and reminded me of the experiments Muñoz and I had performed using the extract from the glands of crocodiles and alligators.