Selected Stories Page 4

  “But you said the cult still exists.”

  “Yes, I know it does. As I told you, they come to me with all their usual problems; they come every Sunday. Yet each full moon night, the city is dead, and I know they are up there, on the hill. Don’t ask me why, or what they do there. No sacrifices as such; maybe it is no more than a tradition, kept through generations and centuries. But why do they keep an old ceremony alive?”

  “Why don’t you ask them?”

  The vicar hesitated, took a deep breath, and continued. “That is why I think that you and I can help each other, why I asked you if you believed in the power of the mind. Because I have asked them... and they don't know! When I speak to them about what they do on full moon nights, they don’t act like people who are trying to hide something... they are people who don’t know anything about it! They just look blank as if they don’t know what I’m talking about. They don’t remember!"

  “That is impossible!”

  “You think so? But it is, nevertheless. You must have noticed that they fear the hill; they never go there. Yet I know that once every month, they are all up there... for what?”

  “There is one way to learn."

  “Of course there is. Don’t you think I haven’t tried going up that hill myself on one of those nights? Do you know what happened? I woke up here, in my house. The last thing I remembered was setting out for the hill; I even remember starting to climb that narrow path leading upward, and seeing lights burning on top of the hill. And then... nothing! Absolutely nothing, except that suddenly I find myself back here, where I started. Now do you think I’m mad?”

  “No, I don’t. With the knowledge I have, I don’t think you’re insane. But neither can I offer you an explanation.”

  “And that’s where we can help each other. You have knowledge in other fields than mine, and I don’t know what you really want. But it comes to the same thing for both of us: knowledge. Because with knowledge, I can free my people of that curse which has reigned over them from the Dark Hill for centuries. I can ask for no official help; I can’t ask for an exorcist without being considered completely insane. How can I explain to my superiors that I believe that a malignant influence still lives on that hill, that it manages to take my people from me one night every month? If we work together, maybe you’ll find what you came to find here, and I can free my people of those paganistic superstitions and rituals.”

  “I don’t know. You have told me very much, and I am very grateful for that. I only wish I could tell you as much, but I can’t. I don’t know enough.”

  “You’ll have to find out, then...”

  After his visit to the vicar, Herbert noticed that the looks and attitudes of the villagers were even more openly hostile. Not that he cared much; they must have noticed his many walks to the Dark Hill, as they had told the vicar about them. He had managed to make peace with Julien, however, by telling him that he had left the Vaeyen at the vicar’s house.

  He tried in vain to make reasonable sense out of it. He had suspected that they upheld an ancient tradition here, but the vicar’s tale threw doubts on his theory. He couldn’t find out from the villagers if they didn’t know anything, but that made no sense. He needed time. Which was the only thing he didn’t have. Because that night the dream attacked him.

  VII. Nagaäe

  There was no other word he could find for the phenomenon but “attack", because he usually never dreamed, and if he did and could remember the dream, it had been about rational things.

  He had been studying the Vaeyen that evening, after a long but fruitless search of the Dark Hill. He had made several sketches of the statuette, and fell asleep with its mental picture still foremost in his mind, which was probably what started the dream in the first place. If it was a dream...

  He thought that he awoke, and found himself standing at the beginning of a long valley which was surrounded on all sides by black mountains with ragged edges, almost as if he were standing inside a lunar crater. The earth under his feet was black-purple, a dark grinning purple, and full of clefts that seemed to reach down into the stomach of the Earth, as if the Earth itself were sick and these were the pores from which it tried to rid itself of its inner corruption and evil.

  In his dream, Herbert slowly took his eyes from the tortured earth and looked down into the valley. At its end, so very far and yet seemingly within his arms’ reach, a building stood. It had been built from titanic pieces of roughly cut stone, rudely constructed into a pyramid. A rank of slender obelisks stood on one side, covered with alien signs and symbols rudely cut into the stone. He could see the strange signs very clearly, though they were so far away from him. The top of the pyramid was flattened, and there a sacrificial fire was burning, with a strange white fire which yet was darker than the surrounding night. Far above the building and the fire an enormous pale green moon was staring down from a starless, uniformly black sky.

  Nothing seemed illogical or absurd in that dream. It all seemed perfectly normal to his drifting yet waking mind. He knew that he was waiting for something to arrive, for something to happen, yet hadn’t the slightest idea what this was supposed to be. There were no feelings of curiosity or fear; it was as if an invisible parasite had sucked all emotions out of his mind and put a dark block instead. He was a watcher, a sentinel, a puppet hanging loosely on its strings, waiting for the puppet master to make it move.

  Then something moved in the shadows and came crawling at him. He watched the being, yet was unable to feel any emotion at its sight. The toad-like body was transparent, the pulsating innards covered only by a thin layer of leathery skin. It had the hind legs of a frog, and the forelegs of a man. It moved crab-like, crawling on its lumpy belly and pushing with the force of its hind legs, giving itself direction by muscular movements of its belly. The forelegs were raised mantis-like as in prayer, all four of them. The face, if such it could be called, consisted mainly of bulging eyes and an oversized mouth with two forked tongues. The thing left a deep trail in the earth by its movement.

  Herbert was unable to feel fear or revulsion. Although he knew that the thing was there, he also knew it wasn’t what he was kept here waiting for.

  He didn’t have to wait for long.

  The moon split. He realized then that the sky was not a sky, and that the illuminated green thing was not the moon, but the eye of an enormous dark shadow which spread as a dark blot between Earth and the real sky. The eye looked down at him with horrible contempt, and for a short moment he obtained a realization of the enormity of the being which hung watching above him.

  He looked up at the thing in his dream, and then spoke the words he knew, though he had never consciously realized that he did know them. They came unbidden to his lips, as swimmers out of the dark seas of his racial consciousness, words out of a time when man still spoke with a tongue not fit to utter civilized words. He spoke them because the moon-eyed shadow wanted him to, and because he knew he had to speak them.

  The shadow in the sky changed, and then there was something which was blacker than black, darker than dark, and an enormous claw came down and reached for him.

  He screamed. And fell.

  The earth was coarse under his hands. Staggering, he rose and looked up. The moon was a partly hidden shadow in the sky, now covered by black clouds. He was standing on top of the Dark Hill, holding the Vaeyen in his hands.

  This was not a dream anymore!

  He was fully dressed, and the night wind felt cold on his warm face. He felt something close, very close, something so cold and dark that his waking mind was unable to comprehend it, to absorb and understand more than the faintest touch of Its Being. Something which was watching, and waiting.

  He looked up at the moon. The big, green moon.

  Herbert screamed and ran. As he ran down the hill with great jumps, uncaring whether he tore his clothes or not, he noticed a few deep trails drawn in the earth, as if something big and crawling had passed here, possessing more legs than it sh
ould have.

  The Nagaäe, his mind screamed at him, the Nagaäe!

  It seemed as if something were laughing behind his back, but he didn’t turn around to find out. Twice he stumbled and fell, severely hurting himself, but he rose and continued running till he reached the hotel.

  A piece of paper was nailed on the door, and he tore it down. There were strange signs on it, and he didn’t have to look closely to know that he had seen them before. In Von denen Verdammten.

  Breathing coarsely, he entered the hotel.

  A single light bulb was still burning above the reception desk. Julien was still up. In fact, he was up a bit way above the ground. He had been nailed feet up to the wall. It wouldn’t be fitting to say “head down,” because the head was gone.

  Even most of the blood had already disappeared between the cracks in the floor.

  Herbert fell back against the outside door, closing it with his back, just before he was violently sick. When he partially regained consciousness he was sitting on his knees, and his stomach was still heaving. He brought his hands to his lips to wipe away the last remains and their dirty taste, and then noticed the dry, dark red spots on his hands. Wiping them on his pants as he stood up, he saw that he was still about two meters away from the place where the blood had dripped down on the floor. A big kitchen knife, its blade dark red, was lying beside the nailed-up corpse. Julien was pinned to the wall like some hideously bloated spider, and Herbert didn’t have to reason very long to know whose fingerprints would be found on the kitchen knife. It all fitted together too closely.

  His mind rebelled. This is insane, he thought. This can’t be happening, not to me, not to Julien. Unfortunately, it was. To Julien. And to him.

  Julien had no answers, of course. His head had been severed rather crudely, almost sawed off the body with the knife, and then torn loose, once the spine had been severed, with brute force. Shreds of flesh and muscles were hanging loose from the throat.

  They must be mad, Herbert thought. They must be wholly, completely mad! But they are all asleep, the whole village, and only I, I am awake. Or am I?

  Full realization started sinking in. Where had he been these last hours? Dreaming? While his body was up there on the Dark Hill? There was no time to think further. It didn’t matter right now who had done this horrible thing, and he preferred not to think about the blood on his own hands right now. It was all a bloody setup (indeed, it was literally) to trap him, to stop his research. A fake to nail him down (as they had nailed Julien up). He had to get out; that was all that counted now. He went upstairs, carefully avoiding another close look at the blood-drained corpse on the wall, and started collecting the things he would need most of all now, putting them in one of his bags. No time now to take his books and his instruments. He had other things with him, which he needed more now, because tomorrow was the night of the full moon. He had thought he had lots of time to learn more, but there was no time left now.

  He left the hotel silently through the back door, leaving the single light burning, and went back to the hill.

  The moon was normal now, cold and unemotional.

  His mind, however, was shrouded in the fog. He knew that he wasn’t reasoning logically, that he shouldn’t react like this, but still he obeyed the ways of his body and its primitive urge to get away.

  Herbert paused at the bottom of the hill, starting to recollect his thoughts. He could still go to the vicar, if he would believe him. Maybe he would, and then maybe not; he couldn’t take the risk anyway. Not now that they had even killed just to stop him. Not now, now that things had gone this far.

  It would be better now to find a good hiding place here and spend the night. Tomorrow he could see what had to be done.

  He made himself as comfortable as was possible under the circumstances and tried to sleep immediately, trying to keep all rational thoughts out of his mind. Especially all thoughts about Julien, and what they had done to him.

  When he finally slumbered away, however, sleep brought no refreshment, because as soon as his rational thoughts drifted away, he entered the alien world below the green moon. Again the alien toad-like being, which he now knew to be a Nagaäe, crept up to him, and this time he could smell its sharp, musky reptilian odor, a dirty smell like one he had experienced before in the reptile house at the zoo. The thing was so close he could touch it, but it crawled past him, ignoring him, though he knew it was watching him, watching all the time.

  In his dream he re-entered the temple, and as he was walking him, though he knew it was watching him, watching all the end, it seemed as if there were no temple roof above him but only the empty sky. That sky was slowly being torn apart, and from it descended a darkness darker than dark, flowing down the temple’s walls like an amoeba with long searching tendrils, before the mass of its body came down to drown him, filling the temple with its hideous substance, filling his own body and mind.

  He tried to turn, but couldn’t. He tried to scream but there were no sounds left. The darkness took it all, absorbed it, became everything, a purposeful, knowing black cloud of evil.

  He awoke, with the unvoiced scream still strangling in his throat. It took some time to clear his thoughts, as he instinctively felt for the blankets and the warmth and secure softness of the bed, and only met the hard, dry earth under him and some twigs above his face. Then he realized, becoming fully awake, that he was on the Dark Hill, and that it was morning.

  VIII. The Thing That Waits in Darkness

  He spent the day alternately in preparing the ingredients he would need to survive the next night, and at the same time keeping a watchful eye on the village through his binoculars. He carefully kept all thoughts of Julien out of his mind. What had happened could not be undone. Maybe he could not forget, but he could ignore it for the time being.

  As the evening drew closer, so grew the feeling of deja vu which he had already experienced so often since his arrival. The feeling got stronger during the day. In a strange way, he felt as if he were doing preordained things, following orders given to him aeons before. It was as if he were only reliving an ever-returning dream which was now becoming a reality, a dream which he had always forgotten but kept just below the threshold of his knowing and conscious mind, and which he was now remembering while he turned the dream into reality.

  When the first shadows started to fall, he watched them leaving their houses, not in groups, but one by one, stealthily. He watched them approaching the hill, meeting each other on their way, not talking, making no gestures of recognition. So this was true too; they were keeping their monthly appointment on the Dark Hill. To what ends, he would soon find out.

  He rose from his hidden position and, taking his prepared things with him, went higher up the hill now, till he was close to the place where he had found the Vaeyen. There he searched for a good hiding place, and finally found the ideal spot behind some bushes covering a gap between two rocks. Here he could sit completely unobserved, and at the same time this gave him a good view over the greatest part of the hill, and especially on that part which seemed the best suited for nocturnal ceremonies. Not far from here, right under his eyes, was the place where the mythical temple should have been.

  He put the Vaeyen in front of him, and then took a paper bag filled with crushed colored chalk. Very slowly and carefully he began to spread the chalk powder in the figure of a pentagram around the Vaeyen, then imprisoned this pentagram in a greater star in which he himself also sat. With chalk of another color, he made three red circles around himself, then set up the small tripod he had fabricated out of some cut branches during the day. On this he placed an asbestos plate, and deposited a mixture of chemicals and herbs of a very specific nature.

  When the real darkness came, only a few scarce windows lit up in the village. They were almost all up on the hill by now, and when the first visitors stopped only about a hundred meters from his hiding place, he acknowledged his luck. There was an open space there, with only a few isolated rocks, so wh
atever was going to happen—though he had his own ideas already fixed—could be watched easily.

  The villagers had all dressed in flowing, long dark robes, without any decorations; only an older man and a young woman each wore a heavy silver necklace from which hung a small metal sculpture. From this distance, he couldn’t make out if these were images of a Vaeyen. He recognized the woman as the daughter of a farmer, and he had seen the man in the village too. It was the local butcher. As they were standing apart from the others, it was not hard to guess that they were going to take the parts of the high priest and the living altar of the cult. Through his binoculars he watched as more and more people arrived, and Herbert recognized most of them from his meetings at the cafe, though it became harder to see now that night was almost complete. None spoke; they just all took a place in the accumulating crowd, and patiently waited.

  After about an hour, he saw that three men from the group were placing the loose rocks in certain positions in the middle of the open place, so that the stones formed a rude triangle... or the horizontal image of a pyramid. Now they went to the ends of the open place, and began digging in the earth with their bare hands. They didn’t fumble and search, but acted as if they knew perfectly well where to find what they wanted. Then there was an agitated moment and Herbert understood why when they went to the high priest. They carried four statuettes, which they placed around their rock triangle Four of the five Vaeyens... they had discovered that one was missing For a moment Herbert feared that they would put a stop to their ceremony right there, but after a heated discussion, their leader made a sign in the air. The others bent their heads, and then went and ignited three fires, situated at the tips of the triangle.

  So they would go on with it. He wondered how much they really knew about what they were doing. He had known very early in his research that he would encounter opposition from religious maniacs, though he had never expected that they would go to such ends as the sadistic murder of Julien. And no doubt a similar or worse fate was reserved for him, if they found out that he had their precious missing statuette. The vicar had his ideas about their ceremony, but he was wrong, very wrong. No innocent man is murdered and mutilated in cold blood to protect a folkloristic tradition, and very probably they had expected to get him too that evening. Maybe Julien had just got in their way, or had surprised them. And, as he had said, he was a foreigner too after all, not one from the villagers blood. Maybe they really didn’t know what they were doing. He would soon know.