“Do you recall the Wendy-Smith expedition of ’33? What do you suppose he found, that poor man, in the fastnesses of Africa? What prompted him to say these words, which I know by heart: ‘There are fabulous legends of star-born creatures who inhabited this Earth many millions of years before Man appeared and who were still here, in certain black places, when he eventually evolved. They are, I am sure, to an extent here even now.’
“Wendy-Smith was sure, and so am I. In 1913 two monsters were born in Dunwich to a degenerate half-wit of a woman. They are both dead now, but there are still whispers in Dunwich of the affair, and of the father who is hinted to have been other than human. Oh, there are many examples of survivals from olden times, of beings and forces that have reached godlike proportions in the minds of men, and who is to deny that at least some of them could be real?
“And where Ithaqua is concerned—why!—there are elementals of the air mentioned in every mythology known to man. Rightly so, for even today, and other than this Ithaqua of the Snows, there are strange winds that blow madness and horror into the minds of men. I mean winds like the Foehn, the south wind of Alpine valleys. And what of the piping winds of subterranean caverns, like that of the Calabrian Caves, which has been known to leave stout cavers white-haired, babbling wrecks? What do we understand of such forces?
“Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity. All things may happen in infinity, and who knows what might come out of it? What do we know of the facts of anything, in our little corner of a never-ending universe, in this transient revolution in the space-time continuum? Seeping down from the stars at the beginning of time there were giants—beings who walked or flew across the spaces between the worlds, inhabiting and using entire systems at their will—and some of them still remain. What would the race of man be to creatures such as these? I’ll tell you—we are the plankton of the seas of space and time!
“But there, I’m going on a bit, away from the point. The facts are these: that before I came to Navissa with Sam, he had already been told that he was sterile, and that after I left—after that horror had killed my husband—well, then I was pregnant.
“Of course, at first I believed that the doctors were wrong, that Sam had not been sterile at all, and this seemed to be borne out when my baby was born just within eight months of Sam’s death. Obviously, in the normal scale of reckoning, Kirby was conceived before we came to Navissa. And yet it was a difficult pregnancy, and as a newborn baby he was a weedy, strange little thing—frail and dreamy and far too quiet—so that even without knowing much of children I nevertheless found myself thinking of his birth as having been…premature!
“His feet were large even for a boy, and his toes were webbed with a pink stretching of skin that thickened and lengthened as he grew. Understand, please, that my boy was in no way a freak—not visibly. Many people have this webbing between their toes; some have it between their fingers too. In all other respects he seemed to be completely normal. Well, perhaps not completely…
“Long before he could walk, he was talking—baby talk, you know—but not to me. Always it was when he was alone in his cot, and always when there was a wind. He could hear the wind, and he used to talk to it. But that was nothing really remarkable; grown children often talk to invisible playmates, people and creatures that only they can see; except that I used to listen to Kirby, and sometimes—
“Sometimes I could swear that the winds talked back to him!
“You may laugh if you wish, Mr. Lawton, and I don’t suppose I could blame you, but there always seemed to be a wind about our home, when everywhere else the air was still….
“As Kirby grew older this didn’t seem to happen so frequently, or perhaps I simply grew used to it, I really don’t know. But when he should have been starting school, well, that was out of the question. He was such a dreamer, in no way slow or backward, you understand, but he constantly lived in a kind of dreamworld. And always—though he seemed later to have given up his strange conversations with drafts and breezes—he had this fascination with the wind.
“One summer night when he was seven, a wind came up that threatened to blow the very house down. It came from the sea, a north wind off the Gulf of Mexico—or perhaps it came from farther away than that, who can say? At any rate, I was frightened, as were most of the families in the area where we lived. Such was the fury of that demon wind, and it reminded me so of…of another wind I had known. Kirby sensed my fear. It was the strangest thing, but he threw open a window and he shouted. He shouted right into the teeth of that howling, banshee storm. Can you imagine that? A small child, teeth bared and hair streaming, shouting at a wind that might have lifted him right off the face of the Earth!
“And yet in another minute the worst of the storm was over, leaving Kirby scolding and snapping at the smaller gusts of air that yet remained, until the night was as still as any other summer night….
“At ten he became interested in model airplanes, and one of his private tutors helped him and encouraged him to design and build his own. You see, he was far ahead of other children his own age. One of his models created a lot of excitement when it was shown at an exhibition of flying models at a local club. It had a very strange shape; its underside was all rippled and warped. It worked on a gliding principle of my son’s own invention, having no motor but relying upon what Kirby called his ‘rippled-air principle.’ I remember he took it to the gliding club that day, and that the other members—children and adults alike—laughed at his model and said it couldn’t possibly fly. Kirby flew it for them for an hour, and they all marveled while it seemingly defied gravity in a fantastic series of flights. Then, because they had laughed at him, he smashed the model down to its balsa wood and tissue paper components to strew them like confetti at the feet of the spectators. That was his pride working, even as a child. I wasn’t there myself, but I’m told that a designer from one of the big model companies cried when Kirby destroyed his glider….
“He loved kites, too—he always had a kite. He would sit for hours and simply watch his kite standing on the air at the end of its string.
“When he was thirteen he wanted binoculars so that he could study the birds in flight. Hawks were of particular interest to him—the way they hover, motionless except for the rapid beating of their wings. They, too, seem almost to walk on the wind.
“Then came the day when a more serious and worrying aspect of Kirby’s fascination with the air and flight came to light. For a long time I had been worried about him, about his constant restlessness and moodiness and his ominous obsession.
“We were visiting Chichén Itzá, a trip I hoped would take Kirby’s mind off other things. In fact the trip had a twofold purpose; the other was that I had been to Chichén Itzá before with Sam, and this was my way of remembering how it had been. Every now and then I would visit a place where we had been happy before…before his death.
“There were, however, a number of things I had not taken into account. There is often a wind playing among those ancient ruins, and the ruins themselves—with their aura of antiquity, their strange glyphs, their history of bloody worship and nighted gods—can be…disturbing.
“I had forgotten, too, that the Mayas had their own god of the air; Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and I suspect that this was almost my undoing.