The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes

by Sterling E. Lanier

  "Betty struck her horse over the withers and we started to gallop again in real earnest. Bran was tired, but he went on nobly, and her big mare simply flew. The Hunt was silent now, but I knew they were still coming. And I knew too, that something else was coming. Almost, I felt a cold breath on my back, and I held the spear tightly against Bran's neck.

  "Suddenly, Betty checked, so sharply her horse reared, and I saw why as I drew abreast. We had come very close to the mouth of the valley and a line of fires lay before us, not three hundred yards away on the open flat. Around them moved many figures, and even at this distance I could see that a cordon was established and from the hats and glint of weapons, I knew not by the Waldrons or their retainers. Apparently the outside world was coming to Waldrondale, at least this far. We had a fighting chance.

  "Between us and the nearest fire, a black horseman rode at us, and he was only a hundred feet off. The raised spear and the bare head told me that at least one of the valley maniacs had been posted to intercept me, in the unlikely event of my getting clear of the rest.

  "I spurred the tired hunter forward and gripped the short spear near its butt end, as one might a club. The move was quite instinctive. I knew nothing of spears but I was out to kill and I was a six-goal polo player. The chap ahead, some Waldron cousin, I expect, needed practice, which he never got. He tried to stab at me overhand, but before our horses could touch I had swerved and lashed out as I would on a long drive at the ball. The heavy bronze edge took him between the eyes and really, that was that. His horse went off to one side alone.

  "Wheeling Bran, I started to call to Betty to come on and as I did saw that which she had so feared had tracked us down.

  "I am still not entirely certain of what I saw, for I have the feeling that part of it was seen with what Asiatics refer to as the Third Eye, the inner 'eye' of the soul.

  "The girl sat, a dozen yards from me, facing something which was advancing slowly upon us. They had called it the Dead Horse, and its shifting outlines indeed at moments seemed to resemble a monstrous horse, yet at others, some enormous and distorted pig. The click of what seemed hooves was clear in the night. It had an unclean color, an oily shifting, dappling of grey and black. Its pupilless eyes, which glowed with a cold, yellow light, were fixed upon Betty, who waited as if turned to stone. Whatever it was, it had no place in the normal scheme of things. A terrible cold again came upon me and time seemed frozen. I could neither move nor speak, and Bran trembled, unmoving between my legs.

  "My love broke the spell. Or it broke her. God knows what it must have cost her to defy such a thing, with the breeding she had, and the training. At any rate, she did so. She shouted something I couldn't catch, apparently in that pre-Gaelic gibberish they used and flung out her arm as if striking at the monster. At the same instant it sprang, straight at her. There was a confused sound or sounds, a sort of spinning, as if an incredible top were whirling in my ear and at the same instant my vision blurred.

  "When I recovered myself, I was leaning over Bran's neck, clutching him to stay on and Betty lay silent in the pale dust of the road. A yard away lay her horse, also unmoving. And there was nothing else.

  "As I dismounted and picked her up, I knew she was dead, and that the mare had died in the same instant. She had held the thing from Outside away, kept it off me, but it had claimed a price. The high priestess of the cult had committed treason and sacrilege and her life was the price. Her face was smiling and peaceful, the ivory skin unblemished, as if she were asleep.

  "I looked up at the sound of more galloping hoofbeats. The Wild Hunt, all utterly silent, were rounding a bend below me and not more than a hundred yards away. I lifted Betty easily, for she was very light, and mounted. Bran still had a little go left and we headed for the fires, passing the dead man lying sprawled in his kilt or whatever on the road. I was not really afraid any longer and as I drew up at the fire with a dozen gun barrels pointed at me, it all felt unreal. I looked back and there was empty hill, a barren road. The riders of Waldrondale had vanished, turned back apparently at the sight of the fires and the armed men.

  " 'He's not one; look at the gal! That crowd must have been hunting him. Call the parson over or Father Skelton, one of you, Keep a sharp lookout, now!'

  "It was a babble of voices and like a dream. I sat down, staring stupidly and holding Betty against my heart until I realized a man was pulling at my knees and talking insistently. I began to wake up then, and looking down, recognized the minister I had seen the previous day. I could not remember his name but I handed Betty down to him when he asked, as obediently as a child.

  " 'She saved me, you know,' I said brightly. 'She left them and saved me. But the Dead Horse got her. That was too much, you see. She was only a girl, couldn't fight that. You do see, don't you?' This is what I am told I said at any rate, by Mr. Andrews, the Episcopal minister of the little Church of the Redeemer. But that was later. I remember none of it.

  "When I woke, in the spare bed of the rectory the next day, I found Andrews sitting silently by my bed. He was looking at my bare breast on which lay the little Celtic cross. He was fully dressed, tired and unshaven and he reeked of smoke, like a dead fireplace, still full of coals and wood ash.

  "Before I could speak, he asked me a question. 'Did she, the young lady, I mean, give you that?'

  " 'Yes,' I said. 'It may have saved me. Where is she?'

  " 'Downstairs, in my late wife's room. I intend to give her Christian burial, which I never would have dreamed possible. But she has been saved to us.'

  " 'What about the rest of that crowd?' I said. 'Can nothing be done?'

  "He looked calmly at me. 'They are all dead. We have been planning this for three years. That Hell spawn have ruled this part of the country since the Revolution. Governors, senators, generals, all Waldrons, and everyone else afraid to say a word.' He paused. 'Even the young children were not saved. Old and young, they are in that place behind the house. We took nothing from the house but your clothes. The hill folk who live to the west came down on them just before dawn, as we came up. Now there is a great burning; the house, the groves, everything. The State Police are coming but several bridges are out for some reason, and they will be quite a time.' He fell silent, but his eyes gleamed. The prophets of Israel were not all dead.

  "Well, I said a last goodbye to Betty and went back to Washington. The police never knew I was there at all, and I was apparently as shocked as anyone to hear that a large gang of bootleggers and Chicago gangsters had wiped out one of America's first families and gotten away clean without being captured. It was a six-day sensation and then everyone forgot it. I still have the little cross, you know, and that's all."

  We sat silent, all brooding over this extraordinary tale. Like all of the Brigadier's tales, it seemed too fantastic for human credibility and yet—and yet.

  The younger member who had spoken earlier could not resist one question, despite Ffellowes' pre-story ban on such things.

  "Well, Sir," he now said. "Why this means that one of the oldest royal families in the world, far more ancient than King Arthur's, say, is only recently extinct. That's absolutely amazing!"

  Ffellowes looked up from his concentration on the rug and seemed to fix his gaze on the young man. To my amazement he did not become irritated. In fact, he was quite calm.

  "Possibly, possibly," he said, "but of course they all appear to have been Irish or at least Celts of some sort or other. I have always considered their reliability open to considerable doubt."

  -

  THE LEFTOVERS

  I started the discussion by accident. A national magazine recently had carried some color photographs of an alleged giant, ape-like creature said to be living in the California mountains. This intrigued me, and I mentioned that I would like to go and look for the beast and wished I were younger.

  We were sitting over coffee at the club's big table, four or five of use, and Ffellowes, out retired British brigadier, was one.

  "L
ike that coelacanth fish off East Africa," said somebody. A survivor from earlier times, perhaps, like a live Pithecanthropus or even a Neanderthal man."

  "Probably a lot of nonsense or else a crude publicity stunt," said someone else. "You've traveled a lot, General Ffellowes, what do you think?"

  " 'Brigadier', please, not 'General'," said Ffellowes absently. "Our generals begin with major general. A lot of nonsense? I saw the pictures and they looked extremely convincing to me. I must say. But I don't think I want to look for the thing, not myself. If it is a survivor, a sort of leftover, as it were, why I would leave it quite to itself, or themselves properly speaking. There must be more than one, if they do exist, you know."

  He looked vacant, his red, clean-shaven face smooth as a boy's, his eyes focused on nothing as he stared over our heads.

  I scented a story. The vacant look and musing manner had always preceded one of Ffellowes incredible tales in the past, and I felt sure there was something similar on his mind now. Several others, who had heard him in the past, also looked alert. None of us dared speak, because Ffellowes is moody. Usually you can let well enough alone and he'll talk by himself, but if someone says something at the wrong moment, he simply shuts up. We waited.

  "If my geological knowledge is not too dated," he said, still looking at the mantelpiece, "these man-apes and hairy giants once existed in the Pleistocene epoch, about a million years ago, and may still be with us. Why not, indeed? A million years is nothing in terms of the Earth's history."

  Mason Williams had been sitting glaring at Ffellowes since he first spoke. Williams disliked him, and the British in general, but he couldn't seem to stay away from him, either. Now he had to say something.

  "A million years ago there was only the beginning of intelligence, pal. That's a mighty long time and it's how long it took to develop us, from whatever ancestor you pick."

  Exactly what his point was, I don't really know. He'd just been looking for something to argue with Ffellowes about, and this was the first statement he could pounce on.

  Ffellowes stared coldly at Williams, and I knew it was touch and go. He'd either clam up or be irritated enough to go on talking. But we were lucky.

  "Intelligence, according to a number of experts in the field of evolution, a study, Williams, somewhat removed from stock-broking, may well be an accident. That Pleistocene or Pliocene, or even earlier still, hominids of some sort achieved it could very well be ascribed to luck. Circumstances in one place loading the dice, so to speak, in terms of the right animal, the right climate, the right impetus.''' He fell silent again.

  Williams opened his mouth, but what he was about to say will remain unknown, because Ffellowes started talking, steadily and precisely, in a way which permitted no interruption, at least not by anyone of Williams' caliber.

  "I rather imagine none of you know the Hadhramaut, do you? I thought not. Well, it's the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, the area the British just abandoned when we left Aden last month. If you go from the Aden area east, you run through a lot of what were called 'associated states'; and finally, a little more than halfway, on a map, across the Arabian peninsula, you hit Oman, a sort of dreary, fringe state which borders Saudi Arabia on the southeast, cutting it off from the sea. Now that we're gone, I rather imagine that the Saudis will do something about Oman. They could use a seaport on the Indian Ocean. But that's by the way.

  "A most unpleasant country to travel in, the Hadhramaut, unless one is, or appears to be, a part of the scenery and very well armed in addition. Two people simply aren't enough, or weren't in 1924.

  "A Sudanese Arab named Moussa wad Helu and I were moving east along the coast, quite near the Oman border and hoping we'd get out alive. I'd been sent to get some information on a reputed Mahdi, a prophet, who was going to expel the British from that part of the world, and I'd got myself rumbled. You'd say 'blown' now I think.

  "Old Moussa, who was an awfully sound chap, one of our best men in the area, volunteered to get me out, before the Mahdi's boys did me in, that is. We left a ghastly hole called Hauf on the run, with the opposition firing badly aimed Lewis guns at our backs. We had two fairish camels and a limited amount of food and water, plus one rifle, two pistols and an assortment of knives. I was rigged out as an Arab but couldn't have fooled anyone. I speak Arabic but appearances are against me. I'd been hiding, lying low inland collecting information when the balloon went up.

  "We knew the local Mahdi's people would be after us like a shot, and we only had one ace in the hole. This was a big torch, a flashlight, for signaling a motor torpedo boat the Navy had in the area. We'd got a last message off on my wireless set before we destroyed it, and we could only hope the boat would be cruising along looking for us where it was supposed to be.

  "We rode all through the night, along the low dunes behind the beach. It was cool and lovely, but we knew what the next day would be like.

  "In the dawn light the ocean stretched like a sheet of pink glass on our right. There was a narrow stretch of pebbly beach, about a quarter mile of exposed coral reef, because the tide was out, and then the empty, motionless sea.

  "We rode on all through the burning hot day, hoarding our water and not talking. The vague rendezvous with the MTB was about fifty miles ahead, and we knew the local bad types were sure to be not too far behind.

  "Lovely scenery if one had the time to enjoy it, really. I saw a flock of large black and white birds, not gulls or terns, but something else, standing on the reef at one point. That was all that moved until about noon. Then I pulled up my 'oont' with a jolt. There were five blackish, hunched figures way out on an outcrop of coral, scrabbling about in the shallow water.

  " 'Only dwellers of the tide, S'ayyid,' said Moussa, also reining up. 'They are dwarfs, harmless, not even able to kill. They eat all the dirt cast up by the sea, shells and seaweed, dead fish also. They are no danger to anyone.'

  " 'Are they then Bedawi (Arabs)?' I asked.

  "He looked disgusted, his narrow, sun-blackened face wrinkled in contempt. 'They are barely human. They have no house, nothing. God never sent the Prophet, blessed be His Name, to speak to such as they. But they are very old. They have always been here.'

  "This was apparently all he cared to say, and we moved off again. I looked back at the strange little shapes and wished I knew more about them.

  "At dusk we stopped. The straight shore had sloped in a little, and some sort of seep had brought enough water to form a small bog at the entrance of a shallow gully. It was a nasty, evil-smelling place, but the camels needed rest and so did we. Also, and this was even more important, the camels could drink the brackish, scummy water of the seep and allow us to save our waterskins.

  "The mosquitoes were particularly bad, so we tethered the animals in the gully and climbed to its western edge to both rest and keep watch. I noticed Moussa seemed a bit edgy, constantly glancing about, you know, and I finally asked him if he had heard or seen anything that disturbed him. He'd been quite relaxed earlier in the afternoon and had even said we had a good lead on the opposition, so this change in attitude got the wind up a bit for me.

  " 'I don't like this place, S'ayyid,' he finally said. 'No one comes here. It has a bad name among all the people of the Hadhramaut. I wish we were far enough along the shore to signal the English ship.'

  "I looked about us more carefully, but I couldn't see anything very disturbing. A range of barren, reddish hills rose inland, the ground sloping up rather sharply from the sea coast. Below us, in the light of late afternoon, the camels fed placidly in the marsh, ignoring the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes around them. I couldn't see what was bothering the man, a very tough customer indeed, and I said so, telling him at the same time to calm down a bit. To get him in a better mood, I asked him to give me a bit more detail about the area and why it was so disliked.

  " 'Dawut, S'ayyid,' he said, staring at me with his red-rimmed eyes. Now dawut means a number of things, depending on the context of your speech
. His meant magic, magic and sorcery.

  "I had sense enough to keep from smiling, and I think this reassured him. He fiddled with his big, sickle-shaped Hadhramaut dagger and then went on, clearly speaking with an effort.

  " 'Not all of the demons were caged by Suleiman bin Daoud' (that is, Solomon). All sensible men know this. Djann and Grol still live in the Rub' al Khali, the greatest of deserts to the north, claimed now by Ibn-Saud. But around here,' and he looked around in the failing light, 'here the cursed ones, the worst of those ancient ones who lived before Adam, the Beni (unpronounceable) are said still to hide. That is why no one ever comes here.'

  "After the word Beni, which means 'sons of,' the next word had been a curious grating hiss, which 1 can't imitate now and which somehow made me rather uncomfortable then.

  "I was quite intrigued. Moussa was anything but soft, and I'd never heard a superstitious word out of him before. Now all this tosh about magic and devils came boiling out like beer from a shaken bottle. It was all very surprising and mysterious.