And on the other hand, if I forego all rationalizations and listen only to the little winds whispering among themselves behind my flimsy shelter?…Can I deny my own senses?
I remember only snatches of what followed the terrible carnage and the onset of the aerial battle—my return to the snow cat and how that machine broke down less than half an hour later in a blinding snowstorm; my frozen, stumbling fight against great white drifts with various items of equipment dragging me down; my bruising fall into a frozen hole in the snow whose outlines sent me in a renewed frenzy of gibbering terror across the wastes—until, exhausted, I collapsed here between these sheltering trees. I remember knowing that if I remained still where I had fallen, then I must die; and I recall the slow agony of setting up my shelter, packing the walls solid, and lighting the stove. There is nothing more, however, until I awakened around noon.
The cold roused me. The stove had long since burned itself out, but empty soup cans told me that somehow I had managed to feed myself before giving in to my absolute fatigue. I opened the reservoir of fuel in the stove’s body and fired it again, once more attending to my hunger before drying out and warming my clothes item by item. Then, fortified and almost warm, heartened by a slight rise in the outside temperature, I set about the strengthening of this, my last refuge; for I knew by then that this was as far as I could hope to go.
At about 4:00 P.M. the sky told me that soon it must storm again, and it was then that I thought to search out the snow cat and fetch precious fuel for my stove. I almost lost myself when the snow began to fall again, but by 6:00 P.M. I was back in my shelter having recovered almost a gallon of fuel from the crippled cat. I had spent at least fifteen futile minutes trying to restart the vehicle, which still lies where I found it less than half a mile from my refuge. It was then, knowing that I could live only a few days more at the outside, that I began to write this record. This is no mere foreboding, this grimly leering doom from which there can be no escape. I have given it some thought: I am too far from Navissa to stand even the slightest chance of making it on foot. I have food and fuel for three days at the most. Here…I can live for a few days more, and perhaps someone will find me. Outside, in some futile attempt to reach Navissa in the coming storm…I might last a day or even two, but I could never hope to cover all those miles in the snow.
• • •
It is about four in the morning. My wristwatch has stopped and I can no longer tell the time accurately. The storm, which I mistakenly thought had passed me by some miles to the north, has started outside. It was the roaring of the wind that roused me. I must have fallen asleep at my writing about midnight.
• • •
This is strange: the wind howls and roars, but through an opening in the canvas I can see the snow falling steadily against the black of the night, not hurried and hustled by the wind! And my shelter is too steady; it does not tremble in the gale. What does this mean?
• • •
I have discovered the truth. I am betrayed by the golden medallion, which, when I discovered the howling thing still in my pocket, I hurled out into a drift. There it lies now, outside in the snow, shrieking and screaming with the eternal crying of the winds that roar between the worlds.
To leave my shelter now would be certain death. And to stay?…
I must be quick with this, for He has come! Called by the demon howling of the medallion, He is here. No illusion this, no figment of my imagination but hideous fact. He squats without, even now!
I dare not look out into His great eyes; I do not know what I might see in those carmine depths. But I do know now how I will die. It will be quick.
All is silence now. The falling snow muffles all. The black thing waits outside like a huge hunched blot on the snow. The temperature falls, drops, plummets. I cannot get close enough to my stove. This is how I am to pass from the world of the living, in the icy tomb of my tent, for I have gazed upon Ithaqua!
It is the end…frost forms on my brow…my lips crack…my blood freezes…I cannot breathe the air…my fingers are as white as the snow…the cold…
NAVISSA DAILY
The Snows Claim a Fresh Victim!
Just before the Christmas season, bad news has come out of Fir Valley camp where members of the Royal Canadian North-West Mounted Police have winter residence. During the recent lull in the weather, Constables McCauley and Sterling have been out in the wastes north of Navissa searching for traces of their former companion, Constable Jeffrey, who disappeared on routine investigations in October. The Mounties found no trace of Constable Jeffrey, but they did discover the body of Mr. David Lawton, an American meteorologist, who also disappeared in the snow in October. Mr. Lawton, accompanied by a Mrs. Lucille Bridgeman, still missing, set out at that time in search of one Kirby Bridgeman, the woman’s son. It was believed that this young man had gone into the wastes with a party of Eskimos and Indians, though no trace of this party has since been found. The recovery of Mr. Lawton’s body will have to wait until the spring thaw; Constables McCauley and Sterling report that the body is frozen in a great block of clear ice that also encloses a canvas shelter and bivouac. The detailed report mentions that the eyes of the corpse are open and staring, as though the freezing took place with great rapidity….
NELSON RECORDER
A Christmas Horror!
Carol singers in the High Hill quarter of Nelson were astounded and horrified when, at 11:00 P.M., the frozen body of a young man crashed out of the upper branches of a tree in the grounds of No. 10 Church Street where they were caroling. Such was the force of its fall that the icy, naked figure brought down many branches with it. At least two of the witnesses state that the horribly mauled and mangled youth—whose uncommonly large and strangely webbed feet may help to identify him—fell not out of the tree but through it, as from the sky! Investigations are continuing.
The Fairground Horror
This one was written in the first half of 1972. Kirby McCauley sold it on my behalf to editor Edward F. Berglund for an anthology that would be called “The Disciples of Cthulhu.” And indeed The Fairground Horror was so published—by DAW Books in 1976, in an attractive and now much sought after paperback edition—since when it has been reprinted variously, most recently in my TOR Books collection, “Beneath the Moors and Darker Places.” My Lovecraft dependency (and its resultant purple prose) is not so much visible as unmistakable in this novella…!
The funfair was as yet an abject failure. Drizzling rain dulled the chrome of the dodgem-cars and stratojets; the neons had not even nearly achieved the garishness they display by night; the so-called “crowd”was hardly worth mentioning as such. But it was only 2:00 P. M. and things could yet improve.
Had the weather been better—even for October it was bad—and had Bathley been a town instead of a mere village, then perhaps the scene were that much brighter. Come evening, when the neons and other bright naked bulbs would glow in all the painful intensity of their own natural (unnatural?) life, when the drab gypsyish dollies behind the penny-catching stalls would undergo their subtle, nightly metamorphosis into avariciously enticing Loreleis—then it would be brighter, but not yet.