Night & Demons (44 page)

“Don’t like this,” Sparrow said, shifting his revolvers a millimeter in their holsters to make sure they were free in the leather. “Too many niggers around. Some of ’em are apt to be part of the mob down there, coming back late from a hunt or something. Any nigger comes running up in the dark and I’m gonna let ’im hold one.”

“You’ll shoot no one without my order,” deVriny snapped. “The Colonel may be sending orders, Osterman may need help—this business is going to be dangerous enough without some fool killing our own messengers. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you talking.”A stray glimmer of firelight caught the throbbing vein in Sparrow’s temple.

Rather than retort, the Belgian turned back to the clearing. After a moment he said, “I don’t see this god you’re looking for.”

Dame Alice’s mouth quirked. “You mean you don’t see a fetish,” she said. “You won’t. Ahtu isn’t a fetish.”

“Well, what kind of damned god is he then?” de Vriny asked in irritation.

The Irishwoman considered the question seriously, then said, “Maybe they aren’t gods at all, him and the others . . . it and the others Alhazred wrote of. Call them cancers, spewed down on Earth ages ago. Not life, surely, not even
things—
but able to shape, to misshape things into a semblance of life and to grow and to grow and to grow.”

“But grow into
what,
madame?” de Vriny pressed.

“Into what?” Dame Alice echoed sharply. Her eyes flashed with the sudden arrogance of her bandit ancestors, sure of themselves if of nothing else in the world. “Into this earth, this very planet, if unchecked. And we here will know tonight whether they can be checked yet again.”

“Then you seriously believe,” de Vriny began, sucking at his florid moustache to find a less offensive phrasing. “You believe that the Bakongos are worshipping a creature which would, will, begin to rule the world if you don’t stop it?”

Dame Alice looked at him. “Not ‘rule’ the world,” she corrected. “Rather
become
the world. This thing, this seed awakened in the jungle by the actions of men more depraved and foolish than I can easily believe . . . this existence, unchecked, would permeate our world like mold through a loaf of bread, until the very planet became a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles toward Mars. Yes, I believe that, Captain. Didn’t you see what was happening last night in the village?”

The Belgian only scowled in perplexity.

A silver note sang from across the broad clearing. De Vriny grunted, then put his long bosun’s pipe to his lips and sounded his reply even as Osterman’s signal joined it.

The dance broke apart as the once-solid earth began to dimple beneath men’s weight.

The Forest Guards burst out of the tree line with cries punctuated by the boom of Albini rifles. “Light!” ordered Dame Alice in a crackling alto, and the lantern threw its bright fan across the book she held. The scaffolding moved, seemed to sink straight into ground turned fluid as water. At the last instant the three figures on it linked hands and shouted, “Ahtu!” in triumph. Then they were gone.

In waves as complex as the sutures of a skull, motion began to extend through the soil of the clearing. A shrieking Baenga, spear raised to thrust into the nearest dancer, ran across one of the quivering lines. It rose across his body like the breaking surf and he shrieked again in a different tone. For a moment his black-headed spear bobbled on the surface. Then it, too, was engulfed with a faint plop that left behind only a slick of blood.

Dame Alice started chanting in a singsong, molding a tongue meant for liquid Irish to a language not meant for tongues at all. A tremor in the earth drove toward her and those about her. It had the hideous certainty of a torpedo track. Sparrow’s hands flexed. De Vriny stood stupefied, the whistle still at his lips and his pistol drawn but forgotten.

The three couriers looked at the oncoming movement, looked at each other . . . disappeared among the trees. Eyeballs white, the Krooman dropped his lantern and followed them. Quicker even than Sparrow, Dame Alice knelt and righted the lantern with her foot. She acted without missing a syllable of the formula stamped into her memory by long repetition.

Three meters away, a saw-blade of white fire ripped across the death advancing through the soil. The weaving trail blasted back toward the center of the clearing like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.

De Vriny turned in amazement to the woman crouched so that the lantern glow would fall across the black-lettered pages of her book. “You did it!” he cried. “You stopped the thing!”

The middle of the clearing raised itself toward the night sky, raining down fragments of the bonfire that crowned it. Humans screamed—some at the touch of the fire, others as tendrils extruding from the towering center wrapped about them.

Dame Alice continued to chant.

The undergrowth whispered. “Behind you, Captain,” Sparrow said. His face had a thin smile. De Vriny turned, calling a challenge. The brush parted and a few feet in front of him were seven armed natives. The nearest walked on one foot and a stump. His left hand gripped the stock of a Winchester carbine; its barrel was supported by his right wrist since there was a knob of ancient scar tissue where the hand should have been attached.

De Vriny raised his Browning and slapped three shots into the native’s chest. Bloodspots sprang out against the dark skin like additional nipples. The black coughed and jerked the trigger of his own weapon. The carbine was so close to the Belgian’s chest that its muzzle flash ignited the linen of his shirt as it blew him backwards.

Sparrow giggled and shot the native through the bridge of his nose, snapping his head around as if a horse had kicked him in the face. The other blacks moved. Sparrow killed them all in a ripple of fire that would have done justice to a Gatling gun. The big revolvers slammed alternately, Sparrow using each orange muzzle flash to light a target for his other hand. He stopped shooting only when there was nothing left before his guns; nothing save a writhing tangle of bodies too freshly dead to be still. The air was thick with white smoke and the fecal stench of death. Behind the laughing gunman, Dame Alice Kilrea continued to chant.

Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot-thick column of what had been earth dominated the night. A spear of false lightning jabbed and glanced off, freezing the chaos below for the eyes of any watchers. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering over all with inclusions of quartz. They snaked among the combatants as flexible as silk; when they closed, they ground together like millstones and spattered blood a dozen yards up the sides of the central column. The tendrils made no distinction between Forest Guards and the others who had danced for Ahtu.

Dame Alice stopped. The column surged and bent against the sky, its peak questing like the muzzle of a hunting dinosaur. Sparrow hissed, “For the love of
God,
bitch!” and raised a revolver he knew would be useless.

Dame Alice spoke five more words and flung her book down. The ground exploded in gouts of cauterizing flame.

It was not a hasty thing. Sparks roared and blazed as if the clearing were a cauldron into which gods poured furnaces of molten steel. The black column that was Ahtu twisted hugely, a cobra pinned to a bonfire. There was no heat, but the light itself seared the eyes and made bare flesh crawl.

With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the center of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.

When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to sprinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume downwind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different than the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.

“Goddamn if you didn’t kill it,” Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater. There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.

“I didn’t kill anything,” Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. “Surgeons don’t kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there’s always a little left to grow and spread again . . . .”

She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping toward them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the center, skirting also the group of Baengas with a two-year-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.

“But without the ones who worshipped it,” Dame Alice went on, “without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been . . . the end of Man, the end of Life here in any sense you or I—or those out there—would have recognized it. . . . It’ll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?”

Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humor showed on the gunman’s face.

“It’s like this,” Sparrow said. “If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I’d never thought of that before, is all.”

He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.

THE SONG OF
THE BONE

I read a two-volume translation of the Finnish epic Kalevala in Viet Nam. “The Song of the Bone” is set in Norway in Viking times, but a wedding feast from the Kalevala is the genesis of this story.

I didn’t write “The Song of the Bone” till after I’d gotten back to the World. I didn’t have a potential market. Because I was pretty depressed about the piece when I finished it I didn’t try to send it anywhere. (I was pretty depressed about most things at the time, frankly. It was some years before I was able to look straight at Nam, and a very long time before that didn’t make life even more depressing. I’m not sure I’m out of that stage quite yet.)

Stuart David Schiff, an army dentist who’d just been assigned to Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, came to a Sunday afternoon get-together at the home of the Murray brothers, collectors extraordinaire, in Durham. Stu was planning to start a small-press fantasy/horror magazine to replace
The Arkham Collector
. Part of his reason for doing so was that he’d been art editor on Meade Frierson’s huge 1971 fanzine HPL and didn’t feel that he’d gotten proper recognition for his work. By doing the production himself, he’d keep that from happening again.

Stu wanted fiction, but he didn’t plan to pay for it. I gave him “The Song of the Bone,” but I told him I thought he was making a mistake: free fiction was generally going to be worth what he paid. I thought my story was valueless, which was the only reason I was giving it to him.

Stu took the piece, but much more important he took my advice: after the second issue of
Whispers
he began paying a penny a word for stories. We’re both convinced that the decision to pay for fiction is the reason that
Whispers
was there to keep alive the fantasy/horror short-story genre during the 1970s.

The difference between low pay (and a penny a word was as good as some professional SF magazines were paying at the time) and no pay was the difference between being a professional and being a dilettante. That was important to some of us, me included, even though it was nearly a decade before I even dreamed of making a living from writing fiction.

On the next issue I became Stu’s assistant editor. Throughout
Whispers’s
run, I read all the fiction that came to the magazine, sending on the ones I thought were publishable to Stu. It was a frustrating job, but I’m glad I did it. Mr. Derleth had spent more time on me than I was worth. I couldn’t repay him, but I could pass the effort on.

* * *

O
laf was king in Drontheim and prayed to the White Christ, but there were other gods still in the upcountry and it was to them that Hedinn and his wife sacrificed in the evening. Finished, they waited a moment to watch the clouds that piled up high over the tops of the firs. Hedinn smiled as the first of his cows walked across the clearing toward the cattle shed, the rest following in a silent procession. On the left side pattered a black mongrel which snapped at the nose of a cow that began to stray, and at the end of the line shambled Gage the herdsman, almost lost in the gloom of the forest behind him.

“He doesn’t have a staff,
”
Gudrun said to her husband. “How does he keep them in line like that?”

Hedinn shrugged. “He seems to whistle at them. He’s got forest blood in him, you know, and they can do things with animals. Mostly the dog does the work anyway.”

The herdsman turned toward the couple and, though darkness and distance hid his features, Gudrun shuddered. “Ugh,” she said, “I wish we didn’t have to look at him. Why don’t you sell him to a trader?”

“Now, Sweetning,” Hedinn said, stroking his wife
^’
s fine hair with affection, “he’s a good herdsman despite his looks. And we’d never get a worn kettle for him, you know.”