“Anyway, she intends to follow and find him and take him home again away from here. Of course, if no evidence comes to light to show him positively to be in these parts, then there will be nothing for you to do. But if he really is here somewhere, then it would be a great personal favor to me if you would go with Lucille and look after her when she decides to search him out. Goodness only knows how it might affect her to go again into the snows, with so many bad memories.”
“I’ll certainly do as you ask, Judge, and gladly,” I answered immediately. “Frankly, the more I learn of Bridgeman, the more the mystery fascinates me. There is a mystery, you would agree, despite all rationalizations?”
“A mystery?” He pondered my question. “The snows are strange, David, and too much snow and privation can bring fantastic illusions—like the mirages of the desert. In the snow, men may dream while yet awake. And there again, there is that weird five-year cycle of strangeness that definitely affects this region. Myself, I suspect that it all has some quite simple explanation. A mystery?—I say the world is full of mysteries….”
III
That night I experienced my first taste of the weird, the inexplicable, the outré. And that night I further learned that I, too, must be susceptible to the five-year cycle of strangeness; either that, or I had eaten too well before taking to my bed!
There was first the dream of cyclopean submarine cities of mad angles and proportions, which melted into vague but frightful glimpses of the spaces between the stars, through which I seemed to walk or float at speeds many times that of light. Nebulae floated by like bubbles in wine, and strange constellations expanded before me and dwindled in my wake as I passed through them. This floating, or walking, was accompanied by the sounds of a tremendous striding, like the world-shaking footsteps of some ponderous giant, and there was (of all things) an ether wind that blew about me the scent of stars and shards of shattered planets.
Finally all of these impressions faded to a nothingness, and I was as a mote lost in the darkness of dead eons. Then there came another wind—not the wind that carried the odor of outer immensities or the pollen of blossoming planets—a tangible, shrieking gale wind that whirled me about and around until I was sick and dizzy and in dread of being dashed to pieces. And I awoke.
I awoke and thought I knew why I had dreamed such a strange dream, a nightmare totally outside anything I had previously known. For out in the night it raged and blew, a storm that filled my room with its roaring until I could almost feel the tiles being lifted from the roof above.
I got out of bed and went to the window, drawing the curtains cautiously and looking out—before stumbling back with my eyes popping and my mouth agape in an exclamation of utter amazement and disbelief. Outside, the night was as calm as any I ever saw, with the stars gleaming clear and bright and not even a breeze to stir the small firs in the Judge’s garden!
As I recoiled—amidst the rush and roar of winds that seemed to have their origin in my very room, even though I could feel no motion of the air and while nothing visibly stirred—I knocked down the golden medallion from where I had left it upon my window ledge. On the instant, as the dull yellow thing clattered to the smooth pine floor, the roaring of the wind was cut off, leaving a silence that made my head spin with its suddenness. The cacophony of mad winds had not “died away”—quite literally it had been cut off!
Shakily I bent to pick the medallion up, noticing that despite the warmth of my room it bore a chill that must have been near to freezing. On impulse I put the thing to my ear. It seemed that just for a second, receding, I could hear as in a sounding shell the rush and roar and hum of winds far, far away, winds blowing beyond the rim of the world!
• • •
In the morning, of course, I realized that it had all been a dream, not merely the fantastic submarine and interspatial sequences but also those occurrences following immediately upon my “awakening.” Nevertheless, I questioned the Judge as to whether he had heard anything odd during the night. He had not, and I was strangely relieved….
• • •
Three days later, when it was beginning to look like Lucille Bridgeman’s suspicions regarding her son were without basis—this despite all her efforts, and the Judge’s, to prove the positive presence of Kirby Bridgeman in the vicinity of Navissa—then came word from the Mounties at Fir Valley that a young man answering Kirby’s description had indeed been seen. He had been with a mixed crowd of seemingly destitute outsiders and local layabouts camping in crumbling Stillwater. Observers—two aging but inveterate gold-grubbers, out on their last prospecting trip of the year before the bad weather set in—had mentioned seeing him. Though these gnarled prospectors had by no means been made welcome in Stillwater, nonetheless they had noted that this particular young man had appeared to be in a sort of trance or daze, and that the others with him had seemed to hold him in some kind of reverence; they had been tending to his needs and generally looking after him.
It was this description of the boy’s condition (which made it sound rather as if he were not quite right in his head) that determined me to inquire tactfully of his mother about him as soon as the opportunity presented itself. For the last two days, though, I had been studying the handling and maintenance of a vehicle that the Judge termed a “snow cat”: a fairly large, motorized sledge of very modern design that he had hired for Mrs. Bridgeman from a friend of his in the town. The vehicle seemed a fairly economical affair, capable in suitable conditions of carrying two adults and provisions over snow at a speed of up to twenty miles per hour. It was capable, too, of a somewhat slower speed over more normal terrain. With such a vehicle two people might easily travel 150 miles without refueling, in comparative comfort at that, and over country no automobile could possibly challenge.
The next morning saw us setting out aboard the snow cat. Though we planned on returning to Navissa every second or third day to refuel, we had sufficient supplies aboard for at least a week. First we headed for Stillwater.
Following a fall of snow during the night, the trail that led us to the ghost town was mainly buried beneath a white carpet almost a foot deep, but even so, it was plain that this barely fourth-class road (in places a mere track) was in extremely poor repair. I recalled the Judge telling me that very few people went to Stillwater now, following the strange affair of twenty years gone, and doubtless this accounted for the track’s derelict appearance in those places where the wind had blown its surface clean.
In Stillwater we found a constable of the Mounties just preparing to leave the place for camp at Fir Valley. He had gone to the ghost town specifically to check out the story of the two old prospectors. Introducing himself as Constable McCauley, the Mountie showed us round the town.
Originally the place had been built of stout timbers, with stores and houses and one very ramshackle “saloon” bordering a main street and with lesser huts and habitations set back behind the street facades. Now, however, the main street was grown with grass and weeds beneath the snow, and even the stoutest buildings were quickly falling into dilapidation. The shacks and lesser houses to the rear leaned like old men with the weight of years, and rotten doorposts with their paint long flaked away sagged on every hand, threatening at any moment to collapse and bring down the edifices framing them into the snow. Here and there one or two windows remained, but warped and twisting frames had long since claimed by far the greater number, so that now sharp shards of glass stood up in broken rows from sills like grinning teeth in blackly leering mouths. A stained, tattered curtain flapped moldering threads in the chill midday breeze. Even though the day was fairly bright, there was a definite gloominess about Stillwater, an aura of something not quite right, of strange menace, seeming to brood like a mantle of evil about the place.