Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05

by The Voice of the Mountain (v1. 1)

  “That rope in the comer/' cawed Scylla, “the one we tug to bring us whatever we want—it was mine in Salem, it's mine here."

  “It's ours, Scylla, it's ours," said Harpe. “Community property. Thank you for your interesting history. Now, Alka, it's your turn."

  Alka put up a thin hand to straighten her big glasses. “I was a librarian," she said. “On the staff of the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham, Massachusetts."

  “Arkham," tittered Scylla. “Don't I know that town?"

  “Among my duties was the directorship of the library's considerable collection of occult literature and memorabilia," Alka went on. “I became very much interested in it. I wrote articles on occultism for various reviews. I took to attending the meetings of two interesting cults in town. I felt that most of the members were stumbling fanatics without much understanding, but I found that I could perform unusual effects—what some would call miracles."

  I felt a nudge against my leg. That would be Tarrah’s plump knee, sort of out from under her short skirt.

  “At my library post, I met many earnest researchers into the occult. Writers, for instance—Robert Bloch called on me, and Fritz Leiber, and Frank Belknap Long. And then, Ruel Harpe."

  “Yes, indeed," Harpe drawled.

  “And we had a pleasant luncheon together, Ruel and I," Alka said, “and he persuaded me to come here to be with him and Scylla, help them with what I'd learned. And I came, and I'm glad to be here. That’s my story."

  “Not quite all of it, John," said Harpe with his drawl. “When I visited her, I was able to warn her that the Massachusetts State Bureau of Investigation was mounting a troublesome probe into those Arkham cult meetings. And I knew that her name was on the list of those to be questioned. Dear Alka, you got out of there just in time.”

  “You’re right, Ruel, I did. And I managed to bring along some manuscripts from the library. They’ve been interesting, haven’t they?”

  “Interesting,” he said, “and helpful.”

  “One we don’t have yet,” squalled out Scylla. “The Judas book.”

  “That wasn’t in the collection at Miskatonic,” said Alka. “I’ve heard some reports of it, that’s all.”

  “If I knew just where it was, I’d bring it here,” allowed Harpe.

  “Judas book?” I wondered them. “What’s that?”

  Harpe wagged his head, like as if I’d shown my ignorance. “You know who Judas was, John. Judas the betrayer, isn’t that how you think of him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “For thirty pieces of silver.”

  “Judas isn’t properly understood these days,” Harpe said. “There’s a story, a highly intriguing one, to the effect that he wasn’t really a betrayer. He informed on his master and took pay for it because he expected his master to do miracles, come to the throne as king of the whole world.”

  He’d told all that without a-using the name of Judas’s master. I recollected what he’d said about not a-speaking holy names.

  “But it didn’t happen thataway,” I pointed out.

  “No,” Harpe agreed me. “When Judas saw that he’d taken the wrong thing for granted, that what his master chose was martyrdom, he gave back the thirty pieces of silver and hanged himself. But not at once. First, before putting the rope around his neck, he wrote his own Gospel—the Gospel According to Judas. With all his concept of miraculous power and world rule.”

  “Well,” I said, “I want to know.”

  “If I had the Gospel According to Judas, I’d know far more than I know by studying Abramelin,” vowed Harpe. “Maybe that’s to come, now that I have you to help. But meanwhile, you’ll be interested to hear from Tarrah.”

  Tarrah smiled us all round, and she kept her knee nudged on mine.

  “All right,” she started out, “I’ve been in this business all my life. My mother took me to my first witch meeting in Ohio when I wasn’t much more than a baby girl. I learned how to make rain fall, how to curse people blind and deaf, things like that. I was doing all sorts of things—profitably—when I was just sixteen. I did them so well that people got suspicious of me in the town where I lived. So I thought I’d look for another field for my talents. I went to New Mexico, to a little town called Estevanico.”

  “Estevanico,” Harpe said the name. “Little Stephen. Someone of that name roamed over the Southwest with Cabeza de Vaca. I wonder if your town was named for him.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” vowed Tarrah. “It was a town of Chica- nos—Latin-American people—and they took to talk and my charms and I was living more or less happily. I could make mothers have easy births, I told fortunes, I cured sick goats— things like that. But there came a time when a nice-looking young fellow said I’d put a spell on him to make him fall in love with me. And his father and mother raised up a gang of neighbors, and they were going to hang me.”

  She stopped long enough to smile all round again. Then: “They got a wagon and pulled it under a tree and stood me on the wagon and put a rope around my neck and threw the loose end over a branch. They were just about to drag the wagon out from under me and let me hang. But right then, who came through the crowd but Mr. Ruel Harpe.”

  “I’d had my eye on you, my dear,” he said, with his own smile. “I try to pay close attention to people with special gifts. John, for example.”

  “He came through and jumped up on the wagon with me,” Tarrah went ahead with her tale. “He asked them, in Spanish, to let him speak for five minutes. They let him do that. He pleaded my case. He reminded them what would happen to them at the hands of the law if they killed me. At the end of the five minutes, he took that noose of rope off my neck and took my hand and helped me down off the wagon. We walked off through the gang and nobody said a word or made a move to stop us. All the time, he talked about Cry Mountain and 1 said Td like to be there. Then—he was gone from beside me.”

  “Vanished?” I asked.

  “He was just gone from there. Next moment, I was here, right in this room where we're sitting now. He fetched me here. I suppose he pulled on that rope of Scylla's.”

  “Exactly,” nodded Harpe. “There, John, you have all our stories. And you can see how happy we'd be to have you throw in with us.”

  “I don't see how you can do otherwise,” Alka said to me.

  “No,” grated Scylla. “It's a fair offer, John.”

  “It's sure enough a direct one,” I said, “but, folks, things like this take time to think over. I'd like to think awhile. I'd like to walk outside.”

  “Why not?” Harpe granted me. “Walk out there and think. By now, you'd know better than to get outside the stockade.”

  I got up and bowed to Harpe and those three women, and headed out at the cave-tunnel where I’d been led in. I took along my old guitar, just from the force of habit. 1 strummed the strings into a whisper of music, on my way to the open.

  I had a better look at things than I'd had at first. The trees grew thick and the ground under them had moss and those bunches of toadstools, in different poisonous-looking colors. Here and yonder, flowers grew, and hard to say what flowers they were, though I'd thought I knew most kinds. Some of the tree trunks had vines a-growing up and round them, ivy and honeysuckle and so on, with leaves in clumps that looked like faces. You all know how leaves can grow like that, gentlemen, with pits of dark shadow in amongst the green leaves, to make eyes and mouths, with the eyes a-staring at you all. Human faces. Dog and cat faces. Snake faces. I've seen those leaf-faces so often, and I nair did much like them.

  I walked along to that ripped-out gulley where wind could make the voice of the mountain. It looked bigger and uglier than when Harpe had showed it to me. I looked to the other side of it, I wondered myself could I jump over yonder. Likely I could, but why take the chance right then? I came to the rugged rock of the very edge, and stooped over to look into it.

  How far did it go down? I couldn't even make a guess, but it went down down down, into a darkness so deep it looked almost
solid, until it came to the red flamy color down there. For all I could say for certain, that crack in Cry Mountain could go all the way down to the middle of the world. I looked and wondered, till I felt sort of dizzy, and stepped back off away from it, into the clear and the safe. I strummed my guitar again, and headed back toward the gate in the stockade.

  A stream ran to there. It came from a spring that bubbled and sighed. The stream ran beside me as I walked. I came to the gate, the big tall rails it was made of, and I saw a little space next to it where the stream flowed out and on, thisaway and that, down the mountain. Betwixt the upright posts I looked out at the woods on the other side.

  In amongst the thick-grown trees stood what first I thought was a trunk swaddled up in vines as black as ink. But it stirred there, it wasn't a tree. It shifted on two feet. It sort of fiddled with two long, shaggy arms. Then it slid farther back into the woods and out of my sight. All I could figure of it was it was what some call the Sasquatch, some call the Bigfoot, brought up there by Harpe to guard his stockade.

  It was gone, and there was a flutter amongst some leafy branches, like a flock of birds. Only they weren’t true birds. Not with those webby wings like bats. They looked as big as geese, and they had long tails, like no bats on this earth. Those tails were spiked at the ends, like arrows. They flew away and I made out some other thing, so deep back in the trees that all I could tell for certain sure was that it was big, big. Bigger than a horse, than a bull. As big as an elephant, bigger. I could just get a glimpse of curling white tusks. On Yandro Mountain they’d called such a thing a Bammat.

  I felt right much like a-singing a charm I knew. I swept the silver strings of my guitar, and l sang:

  “Three holy kings, four holy saints,

  At heaven’s high gate that stand,

  Speak out to bid all evil wait

  And stir no foot or hand ...”

  “That’s a pretty tune, John,” cooed a voice right next to my elbow, “though I don’t like the lyric very much.”

  I swung myself round, purely embarrassed that somebody had been able to sneak up on me thataway. Sure enough, it was Tarrah.

  She was a-smiling, with her full dark red lips that I reckoned had the only makeup air place on her rosy tan face. She stood close to me with that smile. A-looking on her, and what man wouldn’t give her a look, I figured she didn’t wear aught under that tight blouse. She plumped out inside it at the front, and you could see the two little buds of her nipples, a-shoving at the cloth.

  “You don’t mind that I came out to be here with you?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “You’re sort of cute,” she giggled.

  That was a funny word to put on a man who’s a tad over six feet, who’s built rangy and hard, who wears crumpled old country clothes and has a face that’s been worked over by wind and weather, with a day’s whisker stubble on it. But “cute” can be a sort of word of all work with some lady-folks. 1 used to know one who said the Grand Canyon was cute. Meanwhile, Tarrah was a-going on with her talk:

  “I’m glad you’re going to be here with us,” she said. “Sometimes the place gets to be a bore. It can be so much the same, sometimes.”

  “I’m not certain sure I’m a-going to be here with you all,” I said. “But Harpe can travel out into the world if he has the fancy. Doesn’t he take you with him sometimes?”

  “Not me,” she shook her ribboned head. “I think that once or twice he took Scylla somewhere, to some big city or other. And he asked her what if she could have any wish she wanted, and she said, T’d wish that I could look up the street and everybody would fall dead, and then look down the street and everybody would fall dead.’ Ruel tells that on her, and laughs, and says it taught him some kind of lesson.”

  She nudged a shoulder to me, the way she’d nudged her knee to me at the table. Whatair you might could say about that Tarrah girl, she didn’t have much of the bashful in her.

  “I’ll bet you want to kiss me,” she whispered.

  “If I did want that, I wouldn’t,” I said. “Ruel Harpe is likely a-watching us.”

  “Oh, Ruel.” She shrugged her shoulders, and made herself jiggle. “What if he did know I came out here to meet you? He more or less wanted me to meet you.”

  I frowned about that. “Looky here, Tarrah, aren't you and those others more or less his wives? Or lovers?”

  “Ruel has women, but they're all outside.” She squinted her eyes to say it. “He goes away to be with those. He doesn't do much with me, never did. Not much, anyway.”

  “Not much?” I repeated her. “How much?”

  “Look, John,” she said, “Ruel Harpe doesn't enter this conversation any further. Let's talk about us. You happen to be a mighty big handsome man, and I've been told that I'm a goodlooking woman.”

  “We won't argue that point,” I said. “I mean, about you a-being good-looking.”

  “So why don't we have a kiss for ourselves? If I kissed you, you'd stay kissed.”

  I told myself that that was likely a true word. “Not just now, Tarrah,” I said. “I didn't climb all this twenty-devil way up here to fall in love.”

  “Aha,” she said, “you think you might fall in love with me.”

  “I'm not about to do that,” I said back.

  Her eyes squinted again, and they raked me up and down like claws. She tightened her red lips.

  “Shakespeare said, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” she said after a second.

  “No, he didn't,” I said. “I believe that was said by somebody or other named Congreve.”

  I swept my guitar strings again, and I sang:

  “Take, o, take those lips away

  That so sweetly were forsworn;

  And those eyes, the break of day,

  Lights that do mislead the morn . . .”

  “There's some Shakespeare for you,” I said as I quieted the strings again. “I wonder myself why he wrote those words.”

  "You're impossible," she almost spit at me. "Do you want me to say I love you—is that what you want of me?"

  "No, ma'am," I replied her. "And don't say it, for it wouldn’t be the truth. You nair saw me in all your bom days till about half an hour ago. Folks don’t fall in love that quick."

  "What makes you so sure?" she said, and her voice shook.

  "And another thing," I went on.

  She lighted up about that. "Something about you and me?"

  "I reckon, about all of us up here on Cry Mountain. Ruel Harpe travels all over the world, and nair takes one of you all with him."

  "Except Scylla, the way I told you."

  "Hasn't one of you asked to be taken along with him?"

  She shook her head so that her hair whipped in the air. "None of us would dare ask him. He never took me, I told you."

  "And that talk of his about the Judas book," I said. "If he wants it, why can't he get it? He gets near about air thing he wants."

  "You'll have to find out from him," she snapped. "All right, I’m going back to quarters."

  "I'll walk you there," I offered her.

  She didn't forbid me, so she and I walked together toward where the mouth of the cave opened and the way led down.

  "You're so calm about everything," she half-scolded at me. "I just don't understand you."

  "Maybe you don't," I granted her.

  Because I hadn't truly been calm. Not with as pretty a girl as Tarrah right out a-flinging herself at me. I had to keep a-telling my mind that her a-doing that was more or less Harpe's idea. And if I'd done the natural thing with her, if I'd just only taken her in my arms, I’d be a closer prisoner on Cry Mountain than with that stockade and all that moved and waited outside its poles, a-daring me to come out.

  No, gentlemen, I was in a bad enough fix the way things were, without a-letting some scheming woman make it worse.

  8

  Nair another word did Tarrah speak to me as we went back under those shadowy branches, nor either
did I speak one to her. I couldn't have thought of a word to say. Right then, she was mad with me. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, that fellow Congreve had spoken the truth. Nor she didn't bump herself against me, not one time.

  In that tunnelly passage, our feet slapped on the rock floor, my boots and her sandals. They fitted themselves into a sort of duet. I wondered myself if I could make up a song to them.

  When we got into that big room that was a sort of parlor, Harpe and Scylla were at the table. Betwixt them was a bowl that looked to be made of silver, and smoke rose from it in puffs, like as if somebody was a-dragging on a cigar inside. Scylla flung a handful of something into the bowl, and it blazed up in flame. I could smell a sharp tang, like what spice I couldn't rightly guess. That smell sort of sneaked into a man's nose and tingled the side of his head.

  Scylla craned her wrinkled face round at us, and put on a mean scowl. But Harpe smiled like a father, one of those fathers who love to make fun of their children.

  “Did you have a pleasant time out there?" he asked us.

  “We did some talking," Tarrah answered him, with an air that she wished it had been more than talking.

  “Good talking, I dare hope," said Harpe, and turned toward Scylla. “That will be all for now," he told her. “The fire didn't reveal much, but perhaps the time wasn’t propitious. We’ll try again, later. You may go now.”

  Scylla got up from where she sat and went out past the green curtain.

  “You too, Tarrah,” Harpe said, and Tarrah went after Scylla, without a word. Harpe smiled on me. “Sit down here, John. You and I have some talking to do.”

  I took the chair where Scylla had been. “Whiskey?” he invited me, and reached for the jug.

  “No, I thank you. I’ve had me quite a bit already today, and I don’t want to get drunk.”

  He poured himself a slug. “Drunk,” he repeated me. “Do you know, John, I’ve never been drunk in my life. No matter how much I have, it doesn’t take hold of me. How do you explain that?”