Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (21 page)

One and all, these individuals moved out within a short time, saying little, but hinting much. Yet, the nature of their whispered hints was such that they were soon forced to abandon any explanation; so incredible were the tales they told, with overtones of something too horrible for description, of age-old evil which preceded anything dreamed of by even the most learned archaeologist. Only one of them vanished, and no trace of him was ever found. The others came back out of the forest and in the course of time were lost somewhere among other people in the United States—all save a half-breed known as Old Peter, who was obsessed with the idea that there were mineral deposits in the vicinity of the wood, and occasionally went to camp on its edge, being careful not to venture in.

It was inevitable that the Rick’s Lake legends would ultimately reach the attention of Professor Upton Gardner of the state university; he had completed collections of Paul Bunyan, Whiskey Jack, and Hodag tales, and was engaged upon a compilation of place legends when he first encountered the curious half-forgotten tales that emanated from the region of Rick’s Lake. I discovered later that his first reaction to them was one of casual interest; legends abound in out-of-the-way places, and there was nothing to indicate that these were of any more import than others. True, there was no similarity in the strictest sense of the word to the more familiar tales; for, while the usual legends concerned themselves with ghostly appearances of men and animals, lost treasure, tribal beliefs, and the like, those of Rick’s Lake were curiously unusual in their insistence upon utterly outré creatures—or “a creature”—since no one had ever reported seeing more than one even vaguely in the forest’s darkness, half-man, half-beast, with always the hint that this description was inadequate in that it did injustice to the narrator’s concept of what it was that lurked there in the vicinity of the lake. Nevertheless, Professor Gardner would in all probability have done little more than add the legends as he heard them to his collection, if it had not been for the reports—seemingly unconnected—of two curious facts, and the accidental discovery of a third.

The two facts were both newspaper accounts carried by Wisconsin papers within a week of each other. The first was a terse, half-comic report headed:
SEA SERPENT IN WISCONSIN LAKE
? and read: “Pilot Joseph X. Castleton, on test flight over northern Wisconsin yesterday,
reported seeing a large animal of some kind bathing by night in a forest lake in the vicinity of Chequamegon. Castleton was caught in a thundershower and was flying low at the time, when, in an effort to ascertain his whereabouts, he looked down when lightning flashed, and saw what appeared to be a very large animal rising from the waters of a lake below him, and vanish into the forest. The pilot added no details to his story, but asserts that the creature he saw was not the Loch Ness monster.” The second story was the utterly fantastic tale of the discovery of the body of Fr. Piregard, well-preserved, in the hollow trunk of a tree along the Brule River. At first called a lost member of the Marquette-Jolliet Expedition, Fr. Piregard was quickly identified. To this report was appended a frigid statement by the president of the State Historical Society dismissing the discovery as a hoax.

The discovery Professor Gardner made was simply that an old friend was actually the owner of the abandoned lodge and most of the shore of Rick’s Lake.

The sequence of events was thus clearly inevitable. Professor Gardner instantly associated both newspaper accounts with the Rick’s Lake legends; this might not have been enough to stir him to drop his researches into the general mass of legends abounding in Wisconsin for specific research of quite another kind, but the occurrence of something even more astonishing sent him posthaste to the owner of the abandoned lodge for permission to take the place over in the interests of science. What spurred him to take this action was nothing less than a request from the curator of the state museum to visit his office late one night and view a new exhibit which had arrived. He went there in the company of Laird Dorgan, and it was Laird who came to me.

But that was after Professor Gardner vanished.

For he did vanish; after sporadic reports from Rick’s Lake over a period of three months, all word from the lodge ceased entirely, and nothing further was heard of Professor Upton Gardner.

Laird came to my room at the University Club late one night in October; his frank blue eyes were clouded, his lips tense, his brow furrowed, and there was everything to show that he was in a state of moderate excitation which did not derive from liquor. I assumed that he was working too hard; the first-period tests in his University of Wisconsin classes were just over; and Laird habitually took tests seriously—even as a student he had done so, and now as an instructor, he was doubly conscientious.

But it was not that. Professor Gardner had been missing almost a month now, and it was this which preyed on his mind. He said as much in so many words, adding, “Jack, I’ve got to go up there and see what I can do.”

“Man, if the sheriff and the posse haven’t discovered anything, what can you do?” I asked.

“For one thing, I know more than they do.”

“If so, why didn’t you tell them?”

“Because it’s not the sort of thing they’d pay any attention to.”

“Legends?”

“No.”

He was looking at me speculatively, as if wondering whether he could trust me. I was suddenly conscious of the conviction that he
did
know something which he, at least, regarded with the gravest concern; and at the same time I had the most curious sensation of premonition and warning that I have ever experienced. In that instant the entire room seemed tense, the air electrified.

“If I go up there—do you think you could go along?”

“I guess I could manage.”

“Good.” He took a turn or two about the room, his eyes brooding, looking at me from time to time, still betraying uncertainty and an inability to make up his mind.

“Look, Laird—sit down and take it easy. That caged lion stuff isn’t good for your nerves.”

He took my advice; he sat down, covered his face with his hands, and shuddered. For a moment I was alarmed; but he snapped out of it in a few seconds, leaned back, and lit a cigarette.

“You know those legends about Rick’s Lake, Jack?”

I assured him that I knew them and the history of the place from the beginning—as much as had been recorded.

“And those stories in the papers I mentioned to you …?”

The stories, too. I remembered them since Laird had discussed with me their effect on his employer.

“That second one, about Fr. Piregard,” he began, hesitated, stopped. But then, taking a deep breath, he began again. “You know, Gardner and I went over to the curator’s office one night last spring.”

“Yes, I was east at the time.”

“Of course. Well, we went over there. The curator had something to show us. What do you think it was?”

“No idea. What was it?”

“That body in the tree!”

“No!”

“Gave us quite a jolt. There it was, hollow trunk and all, just the way it had been found. It had been shipped down to the museum for exhibition. But it was never exhibited, of course—for a very good reason. When Gardner saw it, he thought it was a waxwork. But it wasn’t.”

“You don’t mean that it was the real thing?”

Laird nodded. “I know it’s incredible.”

“It’s just not possible.”

“Well, yes, I suppose it’s impossible. But it was so. That’s why it wasn’t exhibited—just taken out and buried.”

“I don’t quite follow that.”

He leaned forward and said very earnestly, “Because when it came in it had all the appearance of being completely preserved, as if by some natural embalming process. It wasn’t. It was frozen. It began to thaw out that night. And there were certain things about it that indicated that Fr. Piregard hadn’t been dead the three centuries history said he had. The body began to go to pieces in a dozen ways—but not crumbling into dust, nothing like that. Gardner estimated that he hadn’t been dead over five years. Where had he been in the meantime?”

He was quite sincere. I would not at first have believed it. But there was a certain disquieting earnestness about Laird that forbade any levity on my part. If I had treated his story as a joke, as I had the impulse to do, he would have shut up like a clam, and walked out of my room to brood about this thing in secret, with Lord knows what harm to himself. For a little while I said absolutely nothing.

“You don’t believe it.”

“I haven’t said so.”

“I can feel it.”

“No. It’s hard to take. Let’s say I believe in your sincerity.”

“That’s fair enough,” he said grimly. “Do you believe in me sufficiently to go along up to the lodge and find out what may have happened there?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But I think you’d better read these excerpts from Gardner’s letters first.” He put them down on my desk like a challenge. He had copied them off onto a single sheet of paper, and as I took this up he went on, talking rapidly, explaining that the letters had been those written by Gardner from the lodge. When he finished, I turned to the excerpts and read.

That was the first letter, written about a week after Gardner had reached the abandoned lodge on Rick’s Lake. The second was extremely terse, and had been sent by special delivery.

Startling as this letter was, the third was even more so. For an interval of a fortnight went by between the second and third letters, and it was apparent that something had happened to threaten Professor Gardner’s composure, for his third letter was even in this selected excerpt marked by extreme perturbation.

I found myself increasingly shaken as I read those excerpts. Certain implications and hints lodged between the lines of what Professor Gardner had written were suggestive of terrible, ageless evil, and I felt that there was opening up before Laird Dorgan and myself an adventure so incredible, so bizarre, and so unbelievably dangerous that we
might well not return to tell it. Yet even then there was a lurking doubt in my mind that we would say anything about what we found at Rick’s Lake.

“What do you say?” asked Laird impatiently.

“I’m going.”

“Good! Everything’s ready. I’ve even got a dictaphone and batteries enough to run it. I’ve arranged for the sheriff of the county at Pashepaho to replace Gardner’s notes, and leave everything just the way it was.”

“A dictaphone,” I broke in. “What for?”

“Those sounds he wrote about—we can settle that for once and all. If they’re there to be heard, the dictaphone will record them; if they’re just imagination, it won’t.” He paused, his eyes very grave. “You know, Jack, we may not come out of this thing.”

“I know.”

I did not say so, because I knew that Laird, too, felt the same way I did: that we were going like two dwarfed Davids to face an adversary greater than any Goliath, an adversary invisible and unknown, who bore no name and was shrouded in legend and fear, a dweller not only of the darkness of the wood but in that greater darkness which the mind of man has sought to explore since his dawn.

Sheriff Cowan was at the lodge when we arrived. Old Peter was with him. The sheriff was a tall, saturnine individual clearly of Yankee stock; though representing the fourth generation of his family in the area, he spoke with a twang which doubtless had persisted from generation to generation. The half-breed was a dark-skinned, ill-kempt fellow; he had a way of saying little, and from time to time grinned or snickered as at some secret joke.

“I brung up express that come some time past for the professor,” said the sheriff. “From some place in Massachusetts was one of ’em, and the other from down near Madison. Didn’t seem t’ me ’twas worth sendin’ back. So I took and brung ’em with the keys. Don’t know that you fellers ’ll git anyw’eres. My posse and me went through the hull woods, didn’t see a thing.”