Quests of Simon Ark

by Edward D. Hoch

  “In what way?”

  “Well, I suppose it would be hard for you to understand, because it was really nothing I could put my finger on. It seemed to be just a change in attitude at first. They talked of a man who had come to Gidaz—a man named Axidus, who seemed to have a great influence on their lives from then on. Of course, you must realize that Gidaz is so remote from other cities that these seventy-three people were forced to live entirely among themselves. My father and brother usually got into town about once every month or two. To them, the village was everything, even though it was slowly dying. A few of the men kept working in the mines, finding just enough gold to keep them alive. Others worked small farms in the valley. But they were happy here, probably because they had never known anything better.”

  “But you were not satisfied with it?”

  “I wasn’t the only one. Many of the young people like me left Gidaz, especially after the coming of this man Axidus.”

  Simon Ark’s face had grown dark while she talked. “You say his name was Axidus?”

  “Yes, do you know him?”

  “I may have met him once, long ago …”

  “Well, he was the cause of all the trouble, and I saw that right away. When I came home for Christmas that year, it was as if a madness had seized the people. They talked of nothing but Axidus, and how he was going to help them save themselves. He seemed to have some kind of new religion …”

  I glanced at him, but his face was like stone. Once again I seemed to feel a shiver run down my spine.

  “It really scared me, the way they all believed in him so completely,” she continued. “Once each week he held a meeting in the old town hall, and everyone would go to hear him—even the children. It was uncanny, the way he seemed to know everything that happened in the village. He would tell people secret facts that no one else could possibly have known. When I was away at school, he would tell my father everything I was doing. Of course, people like this have always been attracted by fortunetellers and the like, and a person like this knew exactly how to get them in his power. I went to see him just once, and I must admit I found something strangely haunting about this man Axidus.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “He was fairly tall, with a white beard that hung to his chest. His hair was long and white, too, and he wore a white robe. He would come out on the small platform at one end of the hall and begin talking without any introduction. Afterward, he just seemed to disappear. Sometimes people would see him around the village during the week, too, but always in this white robe. No one knew where or how he lived.”

  “It’s fantastic,” I said; “it sounds like something out of the dark past.”

  Simon Ark frowned. “It is dark, and it is certainly from the past. My only wish is that I had heard all this before it was too late …”

  There was a wind coming up outside, and from somewhere up in the hills came the cry of a lonesome timber wolf. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see it was already past midnight.

  “What do you mean …?” the girl started to ask, but she never completed the sentence.

  Suddenly, Simon Ark was out of his chair, and he was pulling open the front door of the house. I ran to his side, and then I saw it, too …

  A figure, or a thing, all in white, running with the wind toward the cliff where Death slept in the darkness …

  We followed, through the night, with the gathering breeze whistling through the trees around us. The girl started to follow, but I waved her back inside. Whatever was out here, it was not for her to see …

  In the distance, a sudden streak and rumble of thunder followed. It would be raining back in the hills, but with luck the storm would miss us.

  The wind was picking up, though, and by the time we reached the edge of the cliff it was close to being a gale. I wondered briefly if a strong wind could have blown these people to their death, but that of course, was fantastic … But perhaps the real reason for their death would be even more fantastic …

  “There!” He pointed down the cliff, to the very center of where the seventy-three bodies rested under canvas on the rocks.

  And I saw it again.

  The moon that had given us light before was hidden now by the threatening clouds of rain, but I could see the blot of white against the blackness of the rocks.

  “Axidus?” I breathed.

  “Or Satan himself,” Simon Ark answered; “perhaps this is the moment I have waited for.” He started down the rocks, and I followed.

  But the white form seemed to sense our approach. Suddenly, before our very eyes, it seemed to fade away.

  “He must be hiding in the rocks somewhere,” I said.

  The odor of the corpses was all around us then, and my head swam sickeningly.

  “I must find him,” Simon Ark said, and he shouted something in a strange language that might have been Greek, but wasn’t.

  We searched the rocks until the odor was overpowering and forced us to retreat. We found nothing …

  On the way back up the cliff, I asked Simon Ark what he’d shouted before.

  “It was in Coptic,” he said, “which is very much like Egyptian. It was a type of prayer …”

  With the coming of daylight, the horror that hung thick in the air over Gidaz seemed to lift a little. The girl had slept through the remainder of the night, and I had sat alone in the front room of the house while Simon Ark prowled the night on some further mysterious investigations.

  Since I knew sleep was impossible, I spent the time attempting to set down in words just what had happened to me that day, ever since the moment in the early evening when I’d first arrived in Gidaz. But I couldn’t do it; I was still living the thing, and the terror that clung to the village was still a very real part of the air I breathed. Maybe later …

  Simon Ark returned to the house soon after daybreak, and the sound of our talking awakened the girl. She made breakfast for us from among the remains we found around the house, and by nine o’clock we were ready to leave.

  The lack of sleep was beginning to get me then, but the sunlight helped revive me. Simon Ark looked the same as he had the evening before, and seemed anxious to leave the village. “I have things that must be done,” he said. “In the meantime, if you would desire to help me, there are one or two things you could find out.”

  “Sure. Anything for a story.”

  They were interrupted then by the sound of an approaching truck. Down the single road that led to civilization, an ancient mail truck was coming toward them.

  “This must be the man who found the bodies yesterday,” Simon Ark said.

  And it was. A fairly tall, middle-aged man named Joe Harris. “They haven’t buried them yet, huh?” he asked us.

  “No,” I answered. “The bodies are under canvas at the bottom of the cliff, a short distance from the rocks. The funeral is to take place today. I understand they’ve decided to bury them here in a mass grave rather than try to remove all the bodies to another town.”

  “Gee,” he said, “I near died of shock yesterday morning when I drove up and found them all down there. Why do you think they jumped?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It would make a great story if I did.”

  There were other trucks and cars coming now, with a gleaming State Police car in the lead. There were workers with shovels, who would soon bury the remains of the Gidaz Horror. And there were more photographers and reporters, from all over the country, coming to record forever the strange happening in this forgotten village.

  They took pictures of Joe Harris and his battered mail truck; they took pictures of Shelly Constance, and questioned her about her life in the village. She talked to them at length, but she did not mention the strange man, Axidus, again; I suspected that Simon Ark had suggested she keep silent about this part of it.

  Simon Ark himself kept in the background during most of the morning, and went unnoticed in the crowd of curiosity seekers who poured over the sc
ene in growing numbers throughout the early hours of the day.

  It was nearly noon before Simon Ark and I could make our escape in my car. I wondered briefly how this strange man had arrived the previous night when he had no car, but the thought passed from my mind as we watched them lowering the last of the seventy-three into the long grave at the base of the cliff.

  For a moment, there was silence over the scene, as the last rites of various religions were spoken over the grave. Then, once again, a murmur of voices arose, as I turned my car away from the village.

  Simon Ark was in the seat next to me, and I was glad I had managed to avoid the other reporters who’d ridden out to the village with me the previous day. For I had a feeling that the answer to this riddle rested somehow with Simon Ark, and with the white figure we’d seen on the cliff.

  I turned into the highway that led north, toward the state capitol. “What did you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Do? Oh, I would like you to look up some information in the old newspaper files. I would like you to find out if any priests or ministers have been killed in the Gidaz area within the past few years …”

  I thought about that for a while. “All right, I’ll get the information for you on one condition. That you tell me just who you are, and just who this Axidus is.”

  “I am just a man,” he answered slowly. “A man from another age. You would not be interested in where I came from, or in what my mission is. I need only tell you that I am searching for the ultimate evil—for Satan himself. And perhaps, in Gidaz, I have found him at last.”

  I sighed softly. “What about Axidus?”

  “Axidus is also from the past. I knew him long ago, in North Africa, as St. Augustine did …”

  “Are you crazy? Are you trying to tell me we’re dealing with people who’ve been dead over fifteen hundred years?”

  “I do not know,” Simon Ark replied. “But I intend to find out tonight when we return to the village of the dead—”

  I left the strange man near the capitol building an hour later, having agreed to meet him there again at five o’clock. It did not take me long to gather the information Simon Ark had requested, and I was surprised to learn that six months earlier, a Catholic priest had been found beaten to death only a few miles from Gidaz. The crime had never been solved, although police were still investigating …

  I could make nothing of the information, but I was certain it would mean something to Simon Ark.

  I went next to the public library, to do some investigating on my own. I was determined to solve the mystery of Axidus and the seventy-three deaths, and I felt certain that the answer was hidden somewhere in the ancient pages of history.

  I looked first in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but there was nothing under AXIDUS. I read the article on St. Augustine, but it contained no clue. A thick history book likewise offered no leads. A biographical dictionary listed no one named Axidus, and I was beginning to believe such a person had never existed.

  I glanced out the library window, at the gleaming golden dome of the state capitol. Somewhere, there must be a clue … Axidus, St. Augustine … Augustine was a great Catholic saint, and a Catholic priest had been murdered near Gidaz six months ago …

  I walked back to the endless bookshelves that lined the walls and took down the index to the Catholic Encyclopedia …

  A-X-I-D-U-S … Yes, there it was …

  “AXIDUS, leader of Circumcellions” … Quickly my fingers found the fifth volume and turned to the indicated page.

  And I began to read: The Circumcellions were a branch of the Donatist schism, which had split away from the Catholic Church in the Fourth Century. They seemed to be an insane band of outlaws who roamed about North Africa, killing and robbing Catholic priests and others. St. Augustine had spent much of his life fighting them, and their leader, Axidus.

  The whole fantastic thing was beginning to take shape in my mind now … Axidus … the burned book … the murdered priest …

  And then a sentence leaped out at me from the page: “They frequently sought death, counting suicide as martyrdom. They were especially fond of flinging themselves from precipices … Even women caught the infection, and those who had sinned would cast themselves from the cliffs, to atone for their fault …”

  And further down the page was more: “When in controversy with Catholics, the Donatist bishops were proud of their supporters. They declared that self-precipitation from a cliff had been forbidden in their councils. Yet the bodies of these suicides were sacrilegiously honoured, and crowds celebrated their anniversaries …”

  So this was it …

  Something reaching out from fifteen hundred years ago to bring death to an entire village …

  Was it possible?

  Was it possible that this man Axidus had convinced seventy-three persons to leap to their deaths?

  I left the library and stopped in a bar and fought off the gathering clouds of exhaustion and horror with a couple of stiff drinks. Then I went to meet Simon Ark …

  As we drove south once more, toward the dead village and the darkening night, I told Simon Ark what I had found. I told him about the murdered priest and about the Circumcellions.

  “I feared that I was right,” he said quietly. “The death of that priest proves that there actually existed in that village the ancient cult of the Circumcellions …”

  “But … but the whole thing’s fantastic. It couldn’t happen in the twentieth century.”

  “Consider the circumstances, though. Here is a village almost completely cut off from the outside world. It is eighty miles from the nearest city, and almost that far from a town of any size. Its people are living completely within themselves, leaving Gidaz only about once a month. Except for the daily mail truck, they see no one else. The road leading to it is a dead end, so there are not even any other cars to pass by. The people, nearly all of them, are living in the past, in a time when the town was great and famous.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m beginning to see …”

  “And into this town comes a man, a man who is completely evil, who sees the opportunity that the village and its people offer. This man, Axidus, plays on their ignorance and their superstition to get up a new religion. It is an area, I discovered this afternoon, largely neglected by the established churches because of its inaccessibility. A priest will come by every six months or so, but the rest of the time the village is alone.”

  “And so they listened to Axidus.”

  “Yes … I imagine he had almost a hypnotic quality in his speech, a quality that, over a period of the last two years, convinced even the most hostile that he was their savior. A few, like Shelly Constance, who were young and intelligent enough to know the truth, simply left the village, rather than stay and fight this demon who had taken control. The priest who visited the place had to die, because he realized the truth. Perhaps others who opposed Axidus died, too. Because he was playing for big stakes and could not afford to lose.”

  “But … just how did he work the mass suicide?”

  “In the same way that he, or his namesake, did fifteen hundred years ago. He convinced the people that suicide was a form of martyrdom, and that they should throw themselves from the cliff to repent for their sins. He had probably been leading up to it for a long, long time. But two nights ago, when he called them suddenly from their houses, he told them the time had come. They had no time to think, to consider the fantastic thing they were doing. They actually believed, I am certain, that it was good. And they walked off the cliff in the night, probably thinking that Axidus would join them. But of course he did not.”

  “You’ve built up a pretty strong case,” I admitted. “I’ll agree that over a period of years, a fanatic like that might talk most of those isolated people into killing themselves, especially since they seem to have had nothing to live for anyway. But there must have been at least one or two who would have resisted. What about the children?”

  “I imagine,” Simon Ark sa
id quietly, “that the children were carried over the cliff in their mothers’ arms. Or led over by their fathers.”

  I fell silent as the horror of the scene formed a terrifying picture in my mind.

  “And,” he continued, “Axidus could easily have killed any adults who might have resisted the idea of suicide. He could have killed them and thrown their bodies down with the rest.”

  “Still, such a thing seems so … impossible.”

  “It seems so impossible and fantastic only because of its setting in time and space. In the twentieth century, in the western United States, it is fantastic. But in the fourth century, in North Africa, it was common. And who is to say that people have changed since then? Times have changed, and places have changed, but the people have remained the same, and they suffer today from exactly the same faults and weaknesses they had fifteen hundred years ago …”

  I turned the car into the dirt road that led to the village of the dead. “But why are we coming back here tonight?”

  “Because Axidus will return this evening, and this time he must not escape us.”

  “How do you know he’ll return?”

  “Because from the beginning Axidus had to be one of two things: either a clever killer whose insane mind had devised this fantastic scheme, or else he really was the long-dead Axidus of St. Augustine’s time. If he is the former, then there’s something in Gidaz he wants, possibly the gold, and he’ll come for it because we scared him away last night. And,” he paused for a moment, “if it’s to be the latter explanation, then according to legend and history, he’d return to worship at the grave, just as he did fifteen hundred years ago …”

  I turned on my headlights against the thickening night and tried to shake the gathering sleep from my eyes. “Which do you think it is?”

  “In a way, I hope it is the latter, because then possibly my long search will be over. But there is still one thing that puzzles me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I am wondering why a mail truck was delivering mail this morning, to a village full of dead people …”

  After that we waited.