“What have you done to him, to this man?” I asked.
He ignored me and, pulling on his gloves, again addressed Mrs. Bridgeman: “I will wait until you go.” He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head, then stepped back out into the snow.
The conversation, what little there had been, had completely astounded me. In fact my astonishment had grown apace with what I had heard. Quite apart from openly admitting to what could only be murder, our strange visitor had agreed with—indeed, if my ears had not deceived me, he had confirmed—the wildest possible nightmares, horrors that until now, so far as I was aware or concerned, had only manifested themselves in the works of Samuel Bridgeman and others who had worked the same vein before him, and in the disturbed imagination of his widow. Surely this must be the final, utmost proof positive of the effect of the morbid five-year cycle on the minds of men? Could it be anything else?
Finally I turned to the widow to ask, “Are we actually going back to Navissa, after all your efforts? And now, when we’re so close?”
First glancing cautiously out into the falling snow, she hurriedly shook her head, putting a warning finger to her lips. No, it was as I suspected; her almost docile concurrence, following that blazing, regal display of defiance, had merely been a ruse. She in no way intended to desert her son, whether he wished it or not. “Quickly—let’s get packed up,” she whispered. “He was right. The ceremony is tonight, it must be, and we haven’t much time.”
VI
From then on my mind was given little time to dwell on anything; I simply followed Mrs. Bridgeman’s directions to the letter, questioning nothing. In any case it was obvious that her game must now be played to outwit the enemy (I had come to think of the strange worshipers as “the enemy”), not to defeat them physically or to talk them down. That was plainly out of the question. If indeed they had resorted to murder in order to do whatever they intended to do, they would surely not let a mere woman stop them now.
So it was that when we set of south aboard the snow cat, in a direction roughly that of Navissa, I knew that it would not be long before we were doubling back on our tracks. And sure enough, within the half hour, at about 11:00 P.M., as we came over a low hill in the then very light snow, there Mrs. Bridgeman ordered a wide swing to the west.
We held this westward course for ten more minutes, then turned sharply to our right flank, bringing the snow cat once again onto a northerly course. For a further twenty minutes we drove through the light snow, which, now that it had the slackening north wind behind it, stung a little on my face. Then, again at Mrs. Bridgeman’s direction, we climbed a thinly wooded slope to fetch a halt at the top not twenty minutes distant from our starting point. At the speed we had traveled, and given that the enemy had no machine comparable to our snow cat, we could not possibly have been followed; and here, sheltered by the thin trees and the still lightly falling snow, we should be quite invisible to the enemy somewhere to our front.
Now, while we paused for a moment, I once more found questions forming in my mind for which I had no answers, and I had no sooner decided to voice them than my pale companion pointed suddenly out through the thin branches of the trees on the summit of the hill in the direction of a great black forested area some half mile to the north.
It was that same forest into which the enemy had vanished earlier in the day when we had been trailing them. Now at its four cardinal points, up sprang great fires of leaping red flame; and now too, coming to us on the wings of the north wind, faint and uneven we heard massed voices raised in a chilling ritual—the Rites of Ithaqua:
“Iä! Iä!—Ithaqua! Ithaqua!
Ai! Ai! Ai!—Ithaqua!
Ce-fyak vulg-t’uhm—
Ithaqua fhtagn!
Ugh! Iä! Iä!—Ai! Ai! Ai!”
Again and again, repeatedly the wind carried that utterly alien chorus to our ears, and inside me it seemed suddenly that my blood froze. It was not only this abhorrent chanting with its guttural tones, but also the precision of the—singing?—and the obvious familiarity of the voices with the song. This was no blind, parrotlike repetition of obscure vocal forms but a combination of a hundred or more perfectly synchronized voices whose soul-rending interpretation of a hideous alien liturgy had transformed it into this present awesome cacophony—a cacophony whose horror might indeed breach the voids between the worlds! Suddenly I knew that if there was an Ithaqua, then he must surely hear and answer the voices of his worshipers.
“Very little time now,” my companion muttered, more to herself than to me. “The place of the ceremony must be central in that forest—and that’s where Kirby is!”
I stared hard through the snow, which again was beginning to fall heavier, seeing that the nearest and most southerly of the four fires blazed some distance to the northeast of our position. The westerly fire was about a half a mile southwest of us.
“If we head directly between those two fires,” I said, “entering the woods and heading straight for the most northerly fire, on the far side, then we should come pretty close to the center of the forest. We can take the snow cat to the edge of the trees, but from there we must go on foot. If we can grab Kirby and make a run for it—well, perhaps the cat can take three, at a push.”
“Yes,” she answered, “it’s worth a try. If the worse comes to the worst…then at least I’ll know what the end of it was….”
With that I started up the cat’s motor again, thankful that the wind was in our favor and knowing that under cover of the continuous chanting we stood a fair chance of driving right to the edge of the forest without being heard.
As we headed out across the white expanse of snow to the forest’s edge, I could see in the heavens the glow of the fires reflected from the base of towering, strangely roiling nimbostratus. I knew then, instinctively, that we were in for a storm to end all storms.
At the edge of the forest, undetected so far, we dismounted and left the snow cat hidden in the lower branches of a great pine, making our way on foot through the forest’s dark depths.
The going was of necessity very slow, and of course we dared show no light, but having progressed only a few hundred yards, we found that we could see in the distance the fires of individual torches, and the chanting came much louder and clearer. If there were guards, then we must have passed them by without attracting attention. The chanting was tinged now with a certain hysteria, a frenzy that built steadily toward a crescendo, charging the frosty air with unseen and menacing energies.
Abruptly, we came to the perimeter of a great cleared area where the trees had been cut down to be built into a huge platform in the center. All about this platform a mongrel congregation of fur- and parka-clad men and women stood, their faces showing ruddy and wild-eyed in the light of numerous torches. There were Eskimos, Indians, Negroes, and whites—people from backgrounds as varied as their colors and races—over one hundred and fifty of them at a guess.
The time by then was rapidly approaching midnight, and the deafening, dreadful chanting had now reached such an intensity as to make any increase seem almost impossible. Nevertheless there was an increase, at which, with one final convulsive shriek, the entire crowd about the pyramidal platform prostrated themselves facedown in the snow—all bar one!
“Kirby!” I heard Mrs. Bridgeman gasp, as that one upright man, proud and straight backed, naked except for his trousers, commenced a slow and measured climb up the log steps of the platform.