Werewolves in Their Youth (25 page)

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” he said.

I assured him that I did, but he continued to look skeptical.

“I remember the last time you archaeologist fellows came to town, you know,” he said. As a matter of fact I did know this, since he told me almost every time I saw him. “I was a boy. We had just got electricity in our house.”

“Things must have changed a great deal since then,” I said.

“Things haven’t changed at all,” he snapped. He was never a cheerful man, George Birch. He turned, hitching up his trousers, and limped on his wooden foot back to his truck.

That night I lay in my bedroll under the canvas roof of my tent, watching the tormented sky. The lantern hissed softly beside my head; I kept it burning low, all night long, advertising my presence to any who might seek to come and undo my work. It had been a warm, springlike afternoon, but now a cool breeze was blowing in from the north, stirring the branches of the trees over my head. After a while I drowsed a little; I fancied I could hear the distant fluting of the Miskahannock flowing over its rocky bed and, still more distant, the low, insistent drumming of the machine heart in the black mill. Suddenly I sat up: The music I had been hearing, of breeze and river and far-off machinery, seemed at once very close and not at all metaphoric. I scrambled out of my bedroll and tent and stood, taut, listening, at the edge of Plunkettsburg Ring. It
was
music I heard, strange music, and it seemed to be issuing, impossibly, from the other end of the tunnel I had been digging and redigging over the past two weeks—from within mound B-3, the null mound!

I have never, generally, been plagued by bouts of great courage, but I do suffer from another vice whose outward appearance is often indistinguishable from that of bravery: I am pathologically curious. I was not brave enough, in that eldritch moment, actually to approach B-3, to investigate the source of the music I was hearing; but though every primitive impulse urged me to flee, I stood there, listening, until the music stopped, an hour before dawn. I heard sorrow in the music, and mourning, and the beating of many small drums. And then in the full light of the last day of April, emboldened by bright sunshine and a cup of instant coffee, I made my way gingerly toward the mound. I picked up my shovel, lowered my foolish head into the tunnel, and crept carefully into the bowels of the now-silent mound. Seven hours later I felt the shovel strike something hard, like stone or brick. Then the hardness gave way, and the shovel flew abruptly out of my hands. I had reached, at last, the heart of mound B-3.

And it was not empty; oh no, not at all. There were seven sealed tombs lining the domed walls, carved stone chambers of the usual Miskahannock type, and another ten that were empty, and one, as yet unsealed, that held the unmistakable, though withered, yellow, naked, and eternally slumbering form of Carlotta Brown-Jenkin. And crouched on her motionless chest, as though prepared to devour her throat, sat a tiny stone idol, hideous, black, brandishing a set of wicked ivory fangs.

Now I gave in to those primitive impulses; I panicked. I tore out of the burial chamber as quickly as I could and ran for my car, not bothering to collect my gear. In twenty minutes I was back at Murrough House. I hurried up the front steps, intending only to go to my room, retrieve my clothes and books and papers, and leave behind Plunkettsburg forever. But when I came into the foyer I found Dexter, carrying a tray of eaten lunches back from the dining room to the kitchen. He was whistling light-heartedly and when he saw me he grinned. Then his expression changed.

“What is it?” he said, reaching out to me. “Has something happened?”

“Nothing,” I said, stepping around him, avoiding his grasp. The streets of Plunkettsburg had been built on evil ground, and now I could only assume that every one of its citizens, even cheerful Dexter, had been altered by the years and centuries of habitation. “Everything’s fine. I just have to leave town.”

I started up the wide, carpeted steps as quickly as I could, mentally packing my bags and boxes with essentials, loading the car, twisting and backtracking up the steep road out of this cursed valley.

“My name came up,” Dexter said. “I start tomorrow at the mill.”

Why did I turn? Why did I not keep going down the long, crooked hallway and carry out my sensible, cowardly plan?

“You can’t do that,” I said. He started to smile, but there must have been something in my face. The smile fizzed out. “You’ll be killed. You’ll be mangled. That good-looking mug of yours will be hideously deformed.”

“Maybe,” he said, trying to sound calm, but I could see that my own agitation was infecting him. “Maybe not.”

“It’s the women. The queens. They’re alive.”

“The queens are alive? What are you talking about, professor? I think you’ve been out on the mountain too long.”

“I have to go, Dexter,” I said. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay here anymore. But if you have any sense at all, you’ll come with me. I’ll drive you to Pittsburgh. You can start at Tech. They’ll help you. They’ll give you a job. …” I could feel myself starting to babble.

Dexter shook his head. “Can’t,” he said. “My name came up! Shoot, I’ve been waiting for this all my life.”

“Look,” I said. “All right. Just come with me, out to the Ring.” I looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour until dark. Just let me show you something I found out there, and then if you still want to go to work in that infernal factory, I’ll shake your hand and bid you farewell.”

“You’ll really take me out to the site?”

I nodded. He set the tray on a deal table and untied his apron.

“Let me get my jacket,” he said.

I packed my things and we drove in silence to the necropolis. I was filled with regret for this course of action, with intimations of disaster. But I felt I couldn’t simply leave town and let Dexter Eibonas walk willingly into that fiery eructation of the evil genius, the immemorial accursedness, of his drab Pennsylvania hometown. I couldn’t leave that young, unmarked body to be broken and split on the horrid machines of the mill. As for why Dexter wasn’t talking, I don’t know; perhaps he sensed my mounting despair, or perhaps he was simply lost in youthful speculation on the unknown vistas that lay before him, subterranean sights forbidden and half-legendary to him since he had first come to consciousness of the world. As we turned off Gray Road onto the access road that led up to the site, he sat up straight and looked at me, his face grave with the consummate adolescent pleasure of violating rules.

“There,” I said. I pointed out the window as we crested the rise. The Plunkettsburg Ring lay spread out before us, filled with jagged shadows, in the slanting, rust red light of the setting sun. From this angle the dual circular plan of the site was not apparent, and the thirty-six mounds appeared to stretch from one end of the plateau to the other, like a line of uneven teeth studding an immense, devouring jawbone.

“Let’s make this quick,” I said, shuddering. I handed him a spare lantern from the trunk of the Nash, and then we walked to the edge of the aboriginal forest that ran upslope from the plateau to the wind-shattered precincts of Mount Orrert’s sharp peak. It was here, in the lee of a large maple tree, that I had set up my makeshift camp. At the time the shelter of that homely tree had seemed quite inviting, but now it appeared to me that the forest was the source of all the lean shadows reaching their ravening fingers across the plateau. I ducked quickly into my tent to retrieve my lantern and then hurried back to rejoin Dexter. I thought he was looking a little uneasy now. His gait slowed as we approached B-3. When we trudged around to confront the raw earthen mouth of the passage I had dug, he came to a complete stop.

“We’re not going inside there,” he said in a monotone. I saw come into his eyes the dull, dreamy look that was there whenever he talked about going to work in the mill. “It isn’t allowed.”

“It’s just for a minute, Dexter. That’s all you’ll need.”

I put my hands on his shoulders and gave him a push, and we stumbled through the dank, close passage, the light from our lanterns veering wildly around us. Then we were in the crypt.

“No,” Dexter said. The effect on him of the sight of the time-ravaged naked body of Carlotta Brown-Jenkin, of the empty tombs, the hideous idol, the outlandish ideograms that covered the walls, was everything I could have hoped for. His jaw dropped, his hands clenched and unclenched, he took a step backward. “She just died!”

“Yesterday,” I agreed, trying to allay my own anxiety with a show of ironic detachment.

“But what … what’s she doing out here?” He shook his head quickly, as though trying to clear it of smoke or spiderwebs.

“Don’t you know?” I asked him, for I still was not completely certain of his or any townsman’s uninvolvement in the evil, at once ancient and machine-age, that was evidently the chief business of Plunkettsburg.

“No! God, no!” He pointed to the queer, fanged idol that crouched with a hungry leer on the late chancellor’s hollow bosom. “God, what is that thing?”

I went over to the tomb and cautiously, as if the figure with its enormous, obscene tusks might come to life and rip off a mouthful of my hand, picked up the idol. It was as black and cold as space, and so heavy that it bent my hand back at the wrist as I hefted it. With both hands I got a firm grip on it and turned it over. On its pedestal were incised three symbols in the spiky, complex script of the Miskahannocks, unrelated to any other known human language or alphabet. As with all of the tribe’s inscriptions, the characters had both a phonetic and a symbolic sense. Often these were quite independent of one another.

“Yu … yug … gog,” I read, sounding it out carefully. Yuggog.

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything, as far as I know. But it can be read another way. It’s trickier. Here’s tooth … gut—that’s hunger—and this one—” I held up the idol toward him. He shied away. His face had gone completely pale, and there was a look of fear in his eyes, of awareness of evil, that I found, God forgive me, strangely gratifying. “This is a kind of general intensive, I believe. Making this read, loosely rendered, hunger … itself. How odd.”

“Yuggog,” Dexter said softly, a thin strand of spittle joining his lips.

“Here,” I said cruelly, tossing the heavy thing toward him. Let him go into the black mill now, I thought, after he’s seen
this.
Dexter batted at the thing, knocking it to the ground. There was a sharp, tearing sound like matchwood splitting. For an instant Dexter looked utterly, cosmically startled. Then he, and the idol of Yuggog, disappeared. There was a loud thud, and a clatter, and I heard him groan. I picked up the splintered halves of the carved wooden trapdoor Dexter had fallen through and gazed down into a fairly deep, smooth-sided hole. He lay crumpled at the bottom, about eight feet beneath me, in the light of his overturned lantern.

“My God! I’m sorry! Are you all right?”

“I think I sprained my ankle,” he said. He sat up and raised his lantern. His eyes got very wide. “Professor, you have to see this.”

I lowered myself carefully into the hole and stared with Dexter into a great round tunnel, taller than either of us, paved with crazed human bones, stretching far beyond the pale of our lanterns.

“A tunnel,” he said. “I wonder where it goes.”

“I can only guess,” I said. “And that’s never good enough for me.”

“Professor! You aren’t—”

But I had already started into the tunnel, a decision that I attributed not to courage, of course, but to my far greater vice. I did not see that as I took those first steps into the tunnel I was in fact being bitten off, chewed, and swallowed, as it were, by the very mouth of the Plunkettsburg evil. I took small, queasy steps along the horrible floor, avoiding insofar as I could stepping on the outraged miens of human skulls, searching the smoothed, plastered walls of the tunnel for ideograms or other hints of the builders of this amazing structure. The tunnel, or at least this version of it, was well built, buttressed regularly by sturdy iron piers and lintels, and of chillingly recent vintage. Only great wealth, I thought, could have managed such a feat of engineering. A few minutes later I heard a tread behind me and saw the faint glow of a lantern. Dexter joined me, favoring his right ankle, his lantern swinging as he walked.

“We’re headed northwest,” I said. “We must be under the river by now.”

“Under the river?” he said. “Could Indians have built a tunnel like this?”

“No, Dexter, they could not.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment as he took this information in.

“Professor, we’re headed for the mill, aren’t we?”

“I’m afraid we must be,” I said.

We walked for three quarters of an hour, until the sound of pounding machinery became audible, grew gradually unbearable, and finally exploded directly over our heads. The tunnel had run out. I looked up at the trapdoor above us. Then I heard a muffled scream. To this day I don’t know if the screamer was one of the men up on the floor of the factory or Dexter Eibonas, a massive hand clapped brutally over his mouth, because the next instant, at the back of my head, a supernova bloomed and flared brightly.

I wake in an immense room, to the idiot pounding of a machine. The walls are sheets of fire flowing upward like inverted cataracts; the ceiling is lost in shadow from which, when the flames flare brightly, there emerges the vague impression of a steely web of girders among which dark things ceaselessly creep. Thick coils of rope bind my arms to my sides, and my legs are lashed at the ankles to those of the plain pine chair in which I have been propped.

It is one of two dozen chairs in a row that is one of a hundred, in a room filled with men, the slumped, crew-cut, big-shouldered ordinary men of Plunkettsburg and its neighboring towns. We are all waiting, and watching, as the women of Plunkettsburg, the servants of Yuggog, pass noiselessly among us in their soft, horrible cloaks stitched from the hides of dead men, tapping on the shoulder of now one fellow, now another. None of my neighbors, however, appears to have required the use of strong rope to conjoin him to his fate. Without a word the designated men, their blood thick with the dark earthen brew of the Ring witches, rise and follow the skins of miscreant fathers and grandfathers down to the ceremonial altar at the heart of the mill, where the priestesses of Yuggog throw oracular bones and, given the result, take hold of the man’s ear, his foot, his fingers. A yellow snake, its venom presumably anesthetic, is applied to the fated extremity. Then the long knife is brought to bear, and the vast, immemorial hunger of the god of the Miskahannocks is assuaged for another brief instant. In the past three hours on this Walpurgis Night, nine men have been so treated; tomorrow, people in this bewitched town that, in a reasonable age, has learned to eat its men a little at a time, will speak, I am sure, of a series of horrible accidents at the mill. The women came to take Dexter Ei-bonas an hour ago. I looked away as he went under the knife, but I believe he lost the better part of his left arm to the god. I can only assume that very soon now I will feel the tap on my left shoulder of the fingers of the town librarian, the grocer’s wife, of Mrs. Eibonas herself. I am guiltier by far of trespass than Ed Eibonas and do not suppose I will survive the procedure.