Acolytes of Cthulhu

by Robert M. Price

  We reined up before the Dunstable Inn, which looked as though it had received its last repair in colonial times. “Well, that’s what you’re up against, Mr. Grail-of-the-British-Museum.” Varnum dropped my bags into the muddy street. “If you’re going to come all this way to dig up a three-hundred-year-old Indian, you’ve got to expect little problems like this. If you ask me, you grave-robbers are all a little bit off.” He laughed and reined on the team, spattering me with mud as the wagon was enveloped in the steady drizzle. Chilled and disgusted, I collected my gear and entered the inn.

  * * *

  Varnum was correct in his prediction about the difficulty of obtaining guide service. The following morning, after a restive night in a battered four-poster, I began to make the rounds. At the feed and general store I was met with the reticence and suspicion of the highland New Englanders. The booted farmers and hands fell silent when I entered, awed by my accent. When I told them of my purpose they shifted their bodies uneasily. I promised a good week’s wages, and in some I could see raging the battle between the desire for money and some strange dread. But they all hung back, muttering lame excuses, saying, “You’re sure to get someone at the mill.”

  The millpond was already filling with rafts of logs ridden downstream by the pikemen. The rasp of a giant saw somewhere in the bowels of the mill trembled across the damp air. At the hiring office I was informed that the mill was laying on a second shift that night, and that no one would be available for a week’s leave. Furthermore, the foreman doubted that I would be able to get a single townsman to accompany me because the news of the dead animals and the light in the forest had made the residents fearful of traveling beyond the logging camps on the two rivers.

  When I left the office a small crowd of workers had gathered on the bank of a short canal which ran from the millpond into large dark orifices beneath the brick building, in which the rushing water turned underground wheels to power the saw. A line of wooden floats connected by a heavy chain closed the mouth of the canal against any influx of debris which might jam the wheels. Bobbing against this guardline were the bodies of numerous small animals. I walked into the knots of loitering millhands for a closer look at the animals—grey squirrels, chipmunks, and several large hares, forest dwellers which generally avoid the water. The squirrel which I examined bore no marks of disease or violence; it had apparently drowned, since the chest cavity was heavy with water. I remember that Varnum had spoken of similar occurrences during the past weeks, and a curious fear touched me for an instant. Had these animals actually sought out a water death, like the lemmings which I had seen literally choking the Trondheim Fjord in Norway the previous year? Or had something driven them before it, something so repugnant to even their coarse animal mentality that they preferred the water they abhorred to its presence?

  I returned to the inn that afternoon puzzled both by the sight of the animals at the mill and by the fear of the townspeople at the mere mention of going north beyond the lumber camps. If necessary, I could go it alone—the previous autumn I had sighted from the air what I believed to be the remains of the chief Massaquoit campsite. But the location was thirty-five miles north of Dunstable, through an alien forest, and the going would not be easy.

  I had not long been at the inn when a servant called with the message that Mr. Varnum would be pleased to entertain me at dinner that evening. Any company would have been preferable to the loneliness of the town after dark, so I accompanied the man in a wagon to the Varnum house, mystified at the sudden largesse of a person who seemed to resent my presence as one whom he could not awe with his authority.

  My host met me at the door of his manse-like stone house. As he conducted me to his drawing room he smiled knowingly. “I hear you weren’t too successful at the feed store and mill today.”

  “No,” I said, “all the men I asked seemed too busy for the project. Or perhaps they were a bit afraid at the prospect of going beyond the camps.”

  “Craven, superstitious bumpkins, the lot of them! Since those animals began showing up at the mill, they’ve been acting like old women.” Varnum dismissed the subject with a contemptuous wave of the hand. He poured me what he called “a hearty old colonial drink,” aptly named The Dog’s Noses: a bumper of warm ale to which he added a jigger of gin. The taste was wretched, but I stomached it in deference to his attempt at hospitality.

  “By the way—you saw the millpond today?” he asked.

  “Yes, the animals have begun to appear again,” I said. “Forest creatures, which seldom go near the water. Puzzling, and a bit eerie.”

  “Why, Mr. Grail-of-the-British-Museum,” said Varnum in mock surprise, “are you becoming a little unsure about the trip to find your sorcerer? Don’t tell me that a few waterlogged animals are giving a man of science cold feet!”

  “My dear Varnum,” I replied, considerably nettled, “let me assure you that I have seen things far more eerie than a few squirrels bobbing in a millpond. Whatever the phenomenon, sir, it is all grist for the mill of science, and we will find it out.”

  Varnum grunted and motioned me to the dining room where dinner was laid out by his decrepit house-keeper. The menu was a boiled New England dinner, more bland than the tasteless food which gluts Britannia. While eating I remarked on the gallery of portraits, mostly in American Primitive style, which covered the walls of the room. Varnum bore a striking resemblance to the first portrait, although the family features appeared in all of them—small, heavily lidded eyes, insipidity of the brow, large nose, and the surprise of a markedly narrow and thin-lipped mouth set between heavy and sensual jowls.

  “You’ve noticed the resemblance between Prester and myself,” Varnum said, pausing in ravenous devoural of the steaming food. He shook his fork at the portrait. “A real rake—for one of the old guard he was a high-stepper. You should read his diaries. By Nick, I’ll show them to you, after supper.” He flicked a fragment of cabbage off his vest. “The folks used to tell me that I was the reincarnation of Prester. But it must go only skin deep—I have no time for women. Too much to be done—the mill, the town council, and now this damned business beyond the camps to be settled.”

  I was amazed at his lack of interest in the subject of the ladies, myself having been without an amour since the pretty but petulant botanist at Harvard who had been a most charming companion until I became completely unnerved by the continual presence of beef-eating plants in her flat. Varnum’s sangfroid, I decided, was simply another aspect of the consuming ambition which drove the man to his displays of arrogance.

  We rose from the wreckage of the dinner and re-entered the drawing room for cigars and a look at the diaries of Prester Varnum. My host excused himself to go and fetch them, indicating the liquor cabinet to me before he left. I surveyed the dismal array of American firewater, fit for no civilized gullet, my spirit sagging, until I saw a tenth of Cointreau forgotten in the corner. The sugary crystals on the bottle’s neck formed an unbroken seal—Varnum was obviously not an enthusiast of the delightful liqueur. I wrenched the cap off and poured myself a finger as he returned with several calf-bound octavos.

  Varnum at first persisted in showing me the sections chronicling the romantic peccadilloes of his ancestor. These were of little interest, merely egomaniacal neighings of no great literary or historical merit. Far more to my use was the matter concerning the extinction of the Massaquoit tribe, of whose annihilation Prester was the root cause. The cramped and miniscule script coldbloodedly narrated the tragedy of this race.

  In the spring of 1657 Prester Varnum, accompanied by his Mohegan guide, Mamtunc, had passed from the hamlet of Dunstable Northward along the Penaubsket seeking the extent of the pine resources in that area. During the journey they had surprised a woman of the Massaquoits. Putting aside his stern Calvinism for the nonce, Prester had enjoyed her despite Mamtunc’s warning about reprisals against Dunstable by her tribe. The woman later escaped and fled in shame back to her people.

  Not long after, Prest
er had fallen ill with a fever in the forest, and was brought back to the settlement in a travois by the Mohegan. When they arrived the town was in the grip of the second outbreak of plague since its foundation nine years before. Worse, a friendly savage had informed the inhabitants that because a colonist had molested a wife of Pauquatoag, the Massaquoit shaman, the tribe was preparing for war.

  During that black summer Dunstable buried its dead and readied itself for the Massaquoit onslaught. Smallpox claimed over a third of the villagers, including Mamtunc. But Prester Varnum recovered and was strong again by the time it was discovered that the Massaquoits had perished to a man, infected by the unknown white plague through the wife of Pauquatoag. The courier who brought the news also spoke of the curse which the sorcerer had levied upon the defiler of his wife—that the line of descent which produced such a man would end most horribly and in the same manner as the extinction of the Massaquoits. However, Prester discounted this a superstition and, indeed, came to a peaceful death in his sleep at seventy-two, leaving many children to mourn him both in Dunstable and the nearby Indian camps.

  I closed the diaries of Prester Varnum and exhaled slowly. The narration of the needless extinction of the Massaquoits had depressed me considerably. But the flare of a match as my host lit his cold cigar, and then mine, brought me back among the living.

  Varnum cleared his throat importantly. He had become increasingly impatient as I lost myself in the pages of his ancestor.

  “You’ve probably been wondering all evening why I invited you,” he said. “This—this phenomenon as you call it is beginning to be troublesome to me. There are some fine stands of pine beyond the last camp, between the Penaubsket and the marshes. I’ll have that lumber at any price.”

  “If you can get your crews to go into the area,” I said. “They seem to have little stomach for it.”

  Varnum took a deep draught of bourbon. “Exactly. As long as these animals that keep floating downriver are unexplained, my boys’ll be jumpier than a bull at fly time about getting into that timber. We know the animals drowned. The vet examined a few, and found nothing from disease, no marks or broken skin, no singed fur from a brush fire—nothing except water in the lungs. The question is, why in Hell did they jump into the Penaubsket in the first place?”

  “Perhaps they were driven,” I hazarded.

  “By what?”

  “The Headless Horseman,” I answered, sipping my Cointreau. Varnum failed to detect the note of humor in my voice. “You’re not superstitious too, are you?”

  “It was merely a drollery,” I assured him.

  “Oh. Well, whatever the reason my friend, I won’t have my men harassed by a will of the wisp and a few sopping animals. I’m going along with you. When do you leave?”

  I was inwardly seething at being told that I would be accompanied, but allowed little sign of this emotion to betray itself on my face. It would be, at least, better than going it alone. “I plan to leave day after tomorrow,” I replied. “Tomorrow I’ll hire the horses at the livery stable.”

  “Good, I’ll see you then,” said Varnum, rising from his seat. Apparently the evening was over, although it was only ten o’clock.

  At the door there were no amenities, simply a curt “Good night” by Varnum, as though dismissing an inferior. As I rode in the wagon back to the inn I found myself boiling over my host’s bad manners. For the sake of a guide to my project site I would suffer the man’s company, although it probably would not be the most pleasant two weeks I would spend at a site. I consoled myself by fondling the tenth of Cointreau which I had surreptitiously tucked into the inside pocket of my black greatcoat upon leaving. “Why waste it on a boor with no palate,” I thought, and laughed aloud. The first frogs answered from the marshes where the faint blue will o’ the wisp hung over last winter’s cattails like an augury.

  * * *

  By the time of our meeting two days later I had hired four horses, two as mounts and two for portage. It had taken me almost a full day to prepare the gear we would transport to the burial site of the Massaquoits—the probing bars, shovels, picks, brooms, and padded hardwood boxes which would protect whatever fragile birchbark rolls had survived. This baggage, plus rations, camping equipment, firearms, and a copy of Pope’s Essay on Man, composed the burdens of our two pack horses.

  We left Dunstable as the sun rose on a clear day, a rarity in the New England spring. When I gave Varnum my compass readings and landmark notes on the site, he found that we would be able to use the most northerly of the logging camps as a jumping-off point for the burial ground. Thus, we were able to keep to logging roads and tracks for a good part of the trek.

  On entering the great New England forest I experienced an almost religious awe which was never duplicated in any other jungle, veldt, canebrake, or tundra of this earth. A brooding stillness invested all. The light filtered greenly through the solemn pines and hemlocks so that even the air we breathed seemed the color of the vegetation which pressed in around us. The sound of hooves was muffled by the thick carpet of dry reddish needles, the organic sediment of the centuries. When a bird called, the echo amid the quiet was startling—one felt that a blasphemer had defiled a dark and sacred place. And the small towns and hamlets of the forest seemed to share my awe, huddled as they were along the seamarshes as if they preferred the known dangers of the sullen North Atlantic to the silent encroachments of the dark woods; their names stark, staunch, reflecting the cold indefatigability of the Yankee settlers—Sabbathday, Icepond, Landsem Depot, Wind Flume, and Bell Shoals.

  Varnum was immune to such feelings, riding before me with his head sunk into a great woolen muffler, lost in thoughts of cutting schedules, board feet, and distances along the Penaubsket to the mill at Dunstable. He also seemed unmoved by the unshakeably ominous foreboding which had beset me since leaving the town. I found my mind turning back inexorably to the sight of the animals revolving lifelessly in the black eddies of the millpond, and to the thought of the blue nimbus, so much like the will o’ the wisp, but feared by the lumbermen more than the Penaubsket at flood. I tried to concentrate on the work which lay ahead—finding the site, the excavations, the discovery, identification, and packing of the Massaquoit pictographs. But there in the greenish light and stillness north of Dunstable the emotion was irrepressible.

  On the morning of the third day, after a night’s halt at the most northerly of the logging camps, we arrived at the site. The reader may wonder at the ease with which we located the tribal ground of the Massaquoits. But in addition to compass fixes and landmark notes I had another factor working for me—the almost eternal sterility of land used for many years as a camping place. Because of constant foot traffic, cooking and smelting fires, and the disposal of alkaline solutions used in primitive tanning, the land is so leached and eroded that it can support only the hardiest of weeds.

  I recognized the site immediately upon breaking out of the scrub pine into the roughly circular fifteen acre clearing. There were no middens, or refuse mounds, for these had long ago vanished under the winds of the summer hurricane and incursions of scavenger animals. There were, however, rows of blackish depressions in the earth which once held the lodge-poles supporting the Massaquoit dwellings. Except for these the ground was clean of any trace of a civilization; if anything were to be found here, it would be an occasional discarded arrowhead, or shard of pottery, or other artifact of the tribe. The birchbark picture records would be in the burial ground, distributed among the graves of the chiefs and first warriors. Unlike many of their neighbors, the tribe of Pauquatoag cremated their dead and interred the remains; the corpse was not lashed to a scaffold or tree limb to tatter in the wind.

  We made camp at the center of the clearing, pitching the two one-man tents about twenty yards apart on either side of the fire. I was eager to find the burial ground, and Varnum wished to ride through the area both to inspect the stands of timber and to search for any trace of the mystery which had been worrying his men. Ac
cordingly, we agreed to meet back at camp before sundown.

  Through the long afternoon I made shallow preliminary excavations at the burial ground, about a mile north-west of our camp. It was not long before I found the first of the pictographs, interred with the remains of one who had been a major warrior. The primitive stick figures might have come from the hand of a child, so simple were they, carefully drawn in berry dyes on sheets of birchbark packed in a matrix of alkaline ash which preserved them from fungus and bacteria through the centuries. But while the analytical faculties of my mind feasted on the details of the records, my emotions were disturbed with the same sense of foreboding which had dogged me on the passage from Dunstable. Perhaps it was the starkness of the area, or the solemnity of walking in the footpaths of a vanished race. Whatever the cause, I was relieved to find Varnum waiting at the camp on my return.

  He had lit the campfire although it was not yet sundown, and glanced up as he gingerly inserted a dry log into the blaze.

  “Did you find your Indian comic books?” he asked.

  “Yes—the records are buried with the remains, just as I thought they would be. I took only a sampling today, but the pictographs seem remarkably well preserved. But, a rather curious thing—I didn’t see the grave of Pauquatoag, although that should be the most clearly indicated of them all, with at least a rock cairn atop it.”

  Varnum looked into the fire with an expression of absolute disinterest.

  “Perhaps the old faker was assumed into the Indian heaven. He was supposed to be a witch doctor or something, wasn’t he?”

  “Well, perhaps I overlooked the grave. But it should be large and easy to find, what with the immense number of trappings they buried their shaman with.” I poured myself a cup of coffee. “How did your day go? Any sign of—anything?”

  Varnum laughed shortly. “Not a thing. Those old women who call themselves lumbermen are afraid of a will o’ the wisp, just as I said. No tracks, nothing unusual for miles around. A moving blue light—nonsense!”