“But where are you going, Danford?” Marriot called after him.
“Away,” came the answer from the door. “Away from here. I’ll—I’ll be in touch, Marriot—but I cannot stay here now.” The door slammed behind him as he stumbled into the darkness and a moment or two later came the roar of his car’s engine.
When the sound had faded into the distance, Lord Marriot turned to me with a look of astonishment on his face. He asked: “Well, what was that all about? Did he see something, d’you think?”
“No, David,” I shook my head, “I don’t think he saw anything. But I believe he sensed something—something perhaps apparent to him through his religious training—and he got out before it could sense him!”
• • •
We stayed the night in the house, but while bedrooms were available we all chose to remain in the library, nodding fitfully in our easy chairs around the great fireplace. I for one was very glad of the company, though I kept this fact to myself, and I could not help but wonder if the others might not now be similarly apprehensive.
Twice I awoke with a start in the huge quiet room, on both occasions feeding the red-glowing fire. And since that blaze lasted all through the night, I could only assume that at least one of the others was equally restless…
In the morning, after a frugal breakfast (Lord Marriot kept no retainers in the place; none would stay there, and so we had to make do for ourselves), while the others prowled about and stretched their legs or tidied themselves up, I saw and took stock of the situation. David, concerned about the aged clergyman, rang him at home and was told by Danford’s housekeeper that her master had not stayed at home overnight. He had come home in a tearing rush at about nine o’clock, packed a case, told her that he was off “up North” for a few days’ rest, and had left at once for the railway station. She also said that she had not liked his colour.
The old man’s greatcoat still lay across the arm of a chair in the library where he had left it in his frantic hurry of the night before. I took it and hung it up for him, wondering if he would ever return to the house to claim it.
Lavery was baggy-eyed and dishevelled and he complained of a splitting headache. He blamed his condition on an overdose of his host’s sherry, but I knew for a certainty that he had been well enough before his dramatic demonstration of the previous evening. Of that demonstration, the medium said he could remember nothing; and yet he seemed distinctly uneasy and kept casting about the room and starting at the slightest unexpected movement, so that I believed his nerves had suffered a severe jolt.
It struck me that he, surely, must have been my assistant through the night; that he had spent some of the dark hours tending the fire in the great hearth. In any case, shortly after lunch and before the shadows of afternoon began to creep, he made his excuses and took his departure. I had somehow known that he would. And so three of us remained…three of the original five.
But if Danford’s unexplained departure of the previous evening had disheartened Lord Marriot, and while Lavery’s rather premature desertion had also struck a discordant note, at least Turnbull stood straight and strong on the side of our host. Despite Old Danford’s absence, Turnbull would still go ahead with his part in the plan; an exorcist could always be found at some later date, if such were truly necessary. And certainly Lavery’s presence was not prerequisite to Turnbull’s forthcoming performance. Indeed, he wanted no one at all in attendance, desiring to be left entirely alone in the house. This was the only way he could possibly work, he assured us, and he had no fear at all about being on his own in the old place. After all, what was there to fear? This was only another experiment, wasn’t it?
Looking back now I feel a little guilty that I did not argue the point further with Turnbull—about his staying alone in the old house overnight to sketch his automatic portrait of the unwanted tenant—but the man was so damned arrogant to my way of thinking, so sure of his theories and principles, that I offered not the slightest opposition. So we three all spent the evening reading and smoking before the log fire, and as night drew on Lord Marriot and I prepared to take our leave.
Then, too, as darkness fell over the oaks crowding dense and still beyond the gardens, I once again felt that unnatural oppressiveness creeping in upon me, that weight of unseen energies hovering in the suddenly sullen air.
Perhaps, for the first time, Lord Marriot felt it too, for he did not seem at all ill-disposed to leaving the house; indeed, there was an uncharacteristic quickness about him, and as we drove away in his car in the direction of the local village inn, I noticed that he involuntarily shuddered once or twice. I made no mention of it; the night was chill, after all…
At The Traveller’s Rest, where business was only moderate, we inspected our rooms before making ourselves comfortable in the snug. There we played cards until about ten o’clock, but our minds were not on the game. Shortly after 10:30 Marriot called Turnbull to ask if all was going well. He returned from the telephone grumbling that Turnbull was totally ungrateful. He had not thanked Lord Marriot for his concern at all. The man demanded absolute isolation, no contact with the outside world whatever, and he complained that it would now take him well over an hour to go into his trance. After that he might begin to sketch almost immediately, or he might not start until well into the night, or there again the experiment could prove to be completely fruitless. It was all a matter of circumstance, and his chances would not be improved by useless interruptions.
We had left him seated in his shirt-sleeves before a roaring fire. Close at hand were a bottle of wine, a plate of cold beef sandwiches, a sketch pad and pencils. These lay upon an occasional table which he would pull into a position directly in front of himself before sleeping, or, as he would have it, before “going into trance”. There he sat, alone in that ominous old house.
Before retiring we made a light meal of chicken sandwiches, though neither one of us had any appreciable appetite. I cannot speak for Marriot, but as for me…it took me until well into the wee small hours to get to sleep…
• • •
In the morning my titled friend was at my door while I was still half-way through washing. His outward appearance was ostensibly bright and breezy, but I sensed that his eagerness to get back to the old house and Turnbull was more than simply a desire to know the outcome of the latter’s experiment; he was more interested in the man’s welfare than anything else. Like my own, his misgivings with regard to his plan to learn something of the mysterious and alien entity at the house had grown through the night; now he would be more than satisfied simply to discover the medium well and unharmed.
And yet what could there possibly be at the place to harm him? Again, that question.
The night had brought a heavy frost, the first of the season, and hedgerows and verges were white as from a fall of snow. Half-way through the woods, on the long gravel drive winding in towards the house, there the horror struck! Manoeuvring a slight bend, Lord Marriot cursed, applied his brakes and brought the car skidding to a jarring halt. A shape, white and grey—and hideously red—lay huddled in the middle of the drive.
It was Turnbull, frozen, lying in a crystallised pool of his own blood, limbs contorted in the agony of death, his eyes glazed orbs that stared in blind and eternal horror at a sight Lord Marriot and I could hardly imagine. A thousand circular holes of about half an inch in diameter penetrated deep into his body, his face, all of his limbs; as if he had been the victim of some maniac with a brace and bit! Identical holes formed a track along the frosted grass verge from the house to this spot, as did Turnbull’s flying footprints.
Against all my protests—weakened by nausea, white and trembling with shock as he was—still Lord Marriot raced his car the remainder of the way to the house. There we dismounted and he entered through the door which hung mutely ajar. I would not go in with him but stood dumbly wringing my hands, numb with horror, before the leering entrance.
A minute or so later he came staggering to the door
. In his hand he carried a leaf from Turnbull’s sketch pad. Before I could think to avert my eyes he thrust the almost completed sketch toward me, crying, “Look! Look!”
I caught a glimpse of something bulbous and black, hairy and red-eyed—a tarantula, a bat, a dragon—whose jointed legs were tipped with sharp, chitinous darts. A mere glimpse, without any real or lasting impression of detail, and yet—
“No!” I cried, throwing up my hands before my face, turning and rushing wildly back down the long drive. “No, you fool, don’t let me see it! I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!”
Curse of the Golden Guardians
My “Primal Land” trilogy is set in a forgotten prehistoric Age of Man when Ma Nature hasn’t yet decided what talents men should or should not have: an age of wizards and weirdlings! The semi-barbarian Tarra Khash is an itinerant Hrossak, an adventurous steppesman whose wanderings carry him far and wide across the Primal Land. In that most ancient period our Earth was that much closer to Cthulhu’s era; the facts of His being were not nearly so esoteric; indeed certain of the darker mages of the era studied Him and His legends most assiduously, especially in their quest for immortality. They even built temples to Cthulhu and others of His cycle, some of which—like the tombs of the Pharaohs in far more recent times—were lost. In “Curse of the Golden Guardians”, Tarra Khash comes across just such a place, and then meets up with the ones who watch over it. The Primal Land tales were written in the early 1980s, this one in February 1984. W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook Press first published it, in Vol. 1 of The Compleat Khash (1991) along with five other stories.
Thin to the point of emaciation and burned almost black by a pitiless sun, Tarra Khash came out of the Nameless Desert into dawn-grey, forbidding foothills which, however inarticulate, nevertheless spoke jeeringly of a once exact sense of direction addled by privation and dune blindness. For those misted peaks beyond the foothills could only be the southern tip of the Mountains of Lohmi, which meant that the Hrossak had been travelling a little north of due east, and not as he had intended south-east toward his beloved and long-forsaken steppes.
Another might have cursed at sight of those distantly looming spires of rock in the pale morning light, but Tarra Khash was a true Hrossak for all his wanderlust and not much given to bemoaning his fate. Better to save his breath and use the time taking stock and planning afresh. Indeed, it could well prove providential that he had stumbled this way instead of that, for here at least there was water, and an abundance of it if his ears played him not false. Surely that was the thunder of a cataract he heard?—Aye, and just as surely his desiccated nostrils seemed to suck at air suddenly moist and sweet as the breath of his own mother, as opposed to the desert’s arid, acrid exhalations.
Water, yes!—and Tarra licked his parched lips.
Moreover, where there’s water there are beasts to drink it, fish to swim in it and frogs to croak in the rushes at its rim; and birds to prey upon frogs and fishes both. But even as thoughts such as these brought a grin to haggard Hrossak features, others, following hard and fast upon their heels, fetched on a frown. What he envisioned was nothing less than an oasis, and never a one-such without its lawful (or often as not unlawful) masters and protectors. Mountain men, probably, well known for their brute natures; or polyglot nomads from the desert, settled here in what to them must surely be a land of plenty.
Or…or perhaps he made too much of a mere sound, a touch of moisture in the morning air. For after all he had ventured here by chance; perchance he was the first such to venture here. Still, better safe than sorry.
Tarra had several small sacks of gold tethered to a thong about his waist. Other than these he wore a loincloth and carried a scabbard slung diagonally across his back, in which was fixed the jewelled hilt of a curved ceremonial sword; but just the hilt and a few inches of blade, for the rest had been shivered to shards in battle. Tarra kept the broken sword not for its value as a weapon but for the jewels in its hilt, which were worth a small fortune and therefore held high barter value. A man could buy his life many times over with those gemstones. Moreover, anyone seeing that hilt stuck in its scabbard would picture an entire sword there, and a Hrossak with a scimitar has always been a force to be reckoned with.
Jewels and gold both, however, might well prove too much of a temptation, for which reason Tarra now removed the sacklets from their thong and buried them beside an oddly carved rock. That was better; few men would risk their necks for a sweaty breech-clout, and scarcer still one who’d attempt the removal of a man’s personal weapon!
And so Tarra climbed rocks and escarpments toward sound of rushing water and taste of spray, and along the way ate a lizard he killed with a rock, until after half a mile an oft-glimpsed glimmer and sparkle was grown to a shining spout of water descending from a high, sheer cliff. By then, too, the sun was up, and the way grown with grasses however coarse and bushes of thorn, then flowers and a scattering of trees with small fruits, and some with carobs and others with nuts. Here a small bird sang, and there the coarse grasses rustled, and somewhere a wild piglet squealed as it rooted in soil now loamy. A place of plenty indeed, and as yet no signs of Man or of his works, unless—
—Unless that was firesmoke Tarra’s eager nostrils suspicioned, and a moment later more than suspicioned: the tangy reek of a wood fire, and the mouthwatering aroma of pork with its juices dripping and sputtering on smoking, red-glowing embers.
By all that was good!—sweet pork for breakfast, and a pool of clear water to draw the sting from sandpapered skin and soothe the stiffness from creaking joints. Tarra went more swiftly now, lured on irresistibly; and yet he went with caution, until at last he reached the rim of a great bowl-like depression in a wide terrace of rock beneath beetling cliffs. And there, lying flat upon his belly, he slowly craned forth his neck until the cataract-carved pool below, and its sandy margins, lay visible in every aspect to his desert-weary eyes. And a sight for sore eyes it was:
The pool was round as a young girl’s navel, and its waters clear and sparkly as her blue eyes. Fish there were in small shoals that Tarra could plainly see, and reeds along one curve of bank, giving way to a species of wide, low-hanging willow which grew in a clump where the rock was cleft. And there sat one who looked like an old man half-in, half-out of the sweet green shade, at his feet a fire whose smoke rose near vertical to the sky, except where gusts of spume from the waterfall caused it to eddy.
Even as Tarra watched, the old man (if such he was) baited a hook and tossed it on a line into the pool, where fish at once came speeding to investigate. The Hrossak glanced back over one shoulder, then the other. Nothing back there: the foothills and mountains on one hand, the shimmering desert on the other. And between the two this hidden pool, or rather this lake, for certainly the basin was a big one. He relaxed; he scanned the scene again; his mouth watered at the delicious, drifting odour of roasting meat. Down below a fish took the hook, was hauled in a frenzy of flexing body and flash of scales dripping from the water. It joined several more where they glittered silver in a shallow hole close to where the old man sat. He baited his hook again, turned the spit, swigged from a wineskin. Tarra could stand no more.
Here the descent would be too steep; he would break a leg or even his neck; but over there, close to where the waterfall plunged and turned the lake to milk, were rounded terraces or ledges like steps cut in the rock, and projecting boulders for handholds. No problem…
He wriggled back from the rim, stood up, loped around the edge of the bowl toward the waterfall. Almost there he stopped, used his broken sword’s scant inches of blade to cut a bow, strung it with the thong from his middle. Two straight, slender stems for flightless arrows—crude but effective at short range—and he was ready. Except…
It is never a wise move to come upon a man suddenly, when he may well be shocked into precipitous and possibly violent reaction. Tarra went to the head of the water-carved steps, leaned casually upon a great boulder and called down,
“Halloo, there!”
The basin took up his call, adding it to the thunder of plummeting waters: “Halloo, there—halloo, halloo, halloo—there, there, there!”
Down below the lone fisherman scrambled to his feet, saw Tarra Khash making his way down slippery terraces of stone toward him. Tarra waved and, however uncertainly, the man by the pool waved back. “Welcome!” he called up in a tremulous croak. “Welcome, stranger…”
Tarra was half-way down. He paused, yelled: “Be at your ease, friend. I smelled your meat and it aroused a small hunger in me, that’s all. I’ll not beg from you though, but merely borrow your hook, if I may, and catch a bite of my own.”
“No need, no need at all,” the other croaked at once, seemingly reassured. “There’s more than enough here for both of us. A suckling pig and a skin of wine…which way have you come? It’s a strange place for wanderers, and that’s no lie!”
Tarra was down. Stepping forward he said, “Across the Nameless Desert—which is just a smidgeon dusty this time of year!” He gave his head a shake and dust formed a drifting cloud about his shoulders. “See?”
“Sit, sit!” the other invited, fully at his ease now. “You’ll be hungry as well as thirsty. Come, take a bite to eat and a swig of sweet wine.”
“I say gladly to both!” answered Tarra Khash. “But right now, the sweetest thing I can imagine is a dip in these crystal waters. What?—I could drink the lake dry! It’ll take but a moment.” He tossed his makeshift bow and arrows down, stepped to pool’s rim. The scabbard and hilt of sword stayed where they were, strapped firmly to his back.
“Careful, son!” the oldster cautioned, his voice like dry dice rattling in a cup—but the Hrossak was already mid-dive, his body knifing deep in cool, cleansing waters. “Careful!” came the warning again as his head broke the surface. “Don’t swim out too far. The water whirls toward the middle and will drag you down quick as that!” He snapped his fingers.