I was at dinner alone with the Mehtar last Tuesday evening–Mr. Robertson being laid up, and Lieutenant Bruce off to Gilgut to procure supplies for his secret expedition to Lhasa–when we were interrupted most rudely at our repast. "Holiness!" The runner, quite breathless with fear, threw himself upon his knees in front of us. "Your brother . . . ! Please hasten, I implore you!"
His excellency Nizam ul Mulk looked at me with that wicked expression of his: he bears little affection for his brutish hulk of a brother, and with good reason. Where the Mehtar is a man of refined, albeit questionable sensibilities, his brother is an uneducated coarse hill-man, one step removed from banditry. Chittral can very well do without his kind. "What has happened to my beloved brother?" asked ul Mulk.
At this point the runner lapsed into a gabble that I could barely understand. With patience the Mehtar drew him out–then frowned. Turning to me, he said, "We have a–I know not the word for it in English, excuse please. It is a monster of the caves and passes who preys upon my people. My brother has gone to hunt it, but it appears to have got the better of him."
"A mountain lion?" I said, misunderstanding.
"No." He looked at me oddly. "May I enquire of you, Captain, whether Her Majesty's government tolerates monsters within her empire?"
"Of course not!"
"Then you will not object to joining me in the hunt?"
I could feel a trap closing on me, but could not for the life of me see what it might be. "Certainly," I said. "By Jove, old chap, we'll have this monster's head mounted on your trophy room wall before the week is out!"
"I think not," Nizam said coolly. "We burn such things here, to drive out the evil spirit that gave rise to them. Bring you your mirror, tomorrow?"
"My–" Then I realised what he was talking about, and what deadly jeopardy I had placed my life in, for the honour of Her Majesty's government in Chittral: he was talking about a Medusa. And although it quite unmans me to confess it, I was afraid.
The next day, in my cramped, windowless hut, I rose with the dawn and dressed for the hunt. I armed myself, then told Sergeant Singh to ready a squad of troopers for the hunt.
"What is the quarry, sahib?" he asked.
"The beast that no man sees," I said, and the normally imperturbable trooper flinched.
"The men won't like that, sir," he said.
"They'll like it even less if I hear any words from them," I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer.
"I'll tell them that, sahib," he said and, saluting, went to ready our forces.
The Mehtar's men gathered outside; an unruly bunch of hillmen, armed as one might expect with a mix of flintlocks and bows. They were spirited, like children, excitable and bickering; hardly a match for the order of my troopers and I. We showed them how it was done! Together with the Mehtar at our head, kestrel on his wrist, we rode out into the cold bright dawn and the steep-sided mountain valley.
We rode for the entire morning and most of the afternoon, climbing up the sides of a steep pass and then between two towering peaks clad in gleaming white snow. The mood of the party was uncommonly quiet, a sense of apprehensive fortitude settling over the normally ebullient Chittrali warriors. We came at last to a meanspirited hamlet of tumbledown shacks, where a handful of scrawny goats grazed the scrubby bushes; the hetman of the village came to meet us, and with quavering voice directed us to our destination.
"It lies thuswise," remarked my translator, adding: "The old fool, he say it is a ghost-bedevilled valley, by God! He say his son go in there two, three days ago, not come out. Then the Mehtar–blessed be he–his brother follow with his soldiers. And that two days ago."
"Hah. Well," I said, "tell him the great white empress sent me here with these fine troops he sees, and the Mehtar himself and his nobles, and we aren't feeding any monster!"
The translator jabbered at the hetman for a while, and he looked stricken. Then Nizam beckoned me over. "Easy, old fellow," he said.
"As you say, your excellency."
He rode forward, beckoning me alongside. I felt the need to explain myself further: "I do not believe one gorgon will do for us. In fact, I do believe we will do for it!"
"It is not that which concerns me," said the ruler of the small mountain kingdom. "But go easy on the hetman. The monster was his wife."
We rode the rest of the way in reflective silence, to the valley where the monster had built her retreat, the only noises the sighing of wind, the thudding of hooves, and the jingling of our kits. "There is a cave halfway up the wall of the valley, here," said the messenger who had summoned us. "She lives there, coming out at times to drink and forage for food. The villagers left her meals at first, but in her madness she slew one of them, and then they stopped."
Such tragic neglect is unknown in England, where the poor victims of this most hideous ailment are confined in mazed bedlams upon their diagnosis, blindfolded lest they kill those who nurse them. But what more can one expect of the half-civilized children of the valley kingdoms, here on the top of the world?
The execution–for want of a better word–proceeded about as well as such an event can, which is to say that it was harrowing and not by any means enjoyable in the way that hunting game can be. At the entrance to the small canyon where the woman had made her lair, we paused. I detailed Sergeant Singh to ready a squad of rifles; their guns loaded, they took up positions in the rocks, ready to beat back the monster should she try to rush us.
Having thus prepared our position, I dismounted and, joining the Mehtar, steeled myself to enter the valley of death.
I am sure you have read lurid tales of the appalling scenes in which gorgons are found; charnel houses strewn with calcined bodies, bones protruding in attitudes of agony from the walls as the madmen and madwomen who slew them gibber and howl among their victims. These tales are, I am thankful to say, constructed out of whole cloth by the fevered imaginations of the degenerate scribblers who write for the penny dreadfuls. What we found was both less–and much worse–than that.
We found a rubble-strewn valley; in one side of it a cave, barely more than a cleft in the rock face, with a tumbledown awning stretched across its entrance. An old woman sat under the awning, eyes closed, humming to herself in an odd singsong. The remains of a fire lay in front of her, logs burned down to white-caked ashes; she seemed to be crying, tears trickling down her sunken, wrinkled cheeks.
The Mehtar gestured me to silence, then, in what I only later recognized as a supremely brave gesture, strode up to the fire. "Good evening to you, my aunt, and it would please me that you keep your eyes closed, lest my guards be forced to slay you of an instant," he said.
The woman kept up her low, keening croon–like a wail of grief from one who has cried until her throat is raw and will make no more noise. But her eyes remained obediently shut. The Mehtar crouched down in front of her.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked gently.
The crooning stopped. "You are the royal one," she said, her voice a cracked whisper. "They told me you would come."
"Indeed I have," he said, a compassionate tone in his voice. With one hand he waved me closer. "It is very sad, what you have become."
"It hurts." She wailed quietly, startling the soldiers so that one of them half-rose to his feet. I signalled him back down urgently as I approached behind her. "I wanted to see my son one more time . . ."
"It is all right, aunt," he said quietly. "You'll see him soon enough." He held out a hand to me; I held out the leather bag and he removed the mirror. "Be at peace, aunt. An end to pain is in sight." He held the mirror at arms length in front of his face, above the fire before her: "Open your eyes when you are ready for it."
She sobbed once, then opened her eyes.
I didn't know what to expect, dear Nellie, but it was not this: somebody's aged mother, crawling away from her home to die with a stabbing pain in her head, surrounded by misery and loneliness. As it is,
her monarch spared her the final pain, for as soon as she looked into the mirror she changed. The story that the gorgon kills those who see her by virtue of her ugliness is untrue; she was merely an old woman–the evil was something in her gaze, something to do with the act of perception.
As soon as her eyes opened–they were bright blue, for a moment–she changed. Her skin puffed up and her hair went to dust, as if in a terrible heat. My skin prickled; it was as if I had placed my face in the open door of a furnace. Can you imagine what it would be like if a body were to be heated in an instant to the temperature of a blast furnace? For that is what it was like. I will not describe this horror in any detail, for it is not fit material for discussion. When the wave of heat cleared, her body toppled forward atop the fire–and rolled apart, yet more calcined logs amidst the embers.
The Mehtar stood, and mopped his brow. "Summon your men, Francis," he said, "they must build a cairn here."
"A cairn?" I echoed blankly.
"For my brother." He gestured impatiently at the fire into which the unfortunate woman had tumbled. "Who else do you think this could have been?"
A cairn was built, and we camped overnight in the village. I must confess that both the Mehtar and I have been awfully sick since then, with an abnormal rapidity that came on since the confrontation. Our men carried us back home, and that is where you find me now, lying abed as I write this account of one of the most horrible incidents I have ever witnessed on the frontier.
I remain your obedient
And loving servant,
Capt. Francis Younghusband
* * * *
As I finish reading the typescript of Captain Younghusband's report, my headset buzzes nastily and crackles. "Coming up on Milton Keynes in a couple minutes, Mr. Howard. Any idea where you want to be put down? If you don't have anywhere specific in mind we'll ask for a slot at the police pad."
Somewhere specific . . . ? I shove the unaccountably top-secret papers down into one side of my bag and rummage around for one of the gadgets I took from the armoury. "The concrete cows," I say. "I need to take a look at them as soon as possible. They're in Bancroft Park, according to this map. Just off Monk's Way, follow the A422 in until it turns into the H3 near the city centre. Any chance we can fly over them?"
"Hold on a moment."
The helicopter banks alarmingly and the landscape tilts around us. We're shooting over a dark landscape, trees and neat, orderly fields, and the occasional clump of suburban paradise whisking past beneath us–then we're over a dual carriageway, almost empty at this time of night, and we bank again and turn to follow it. From an altitude of about a thousand feet it looks like an incredibly detailed toy, right down to the finger-sized trucks crawling along it.
"Right, that's it," says the copilot. "Anything else we can do for you?"
"Yeah," I say. "You've got infrared gear, haven't you? I'm looking for an extra cow. A hot one. I mean, hot like it's been cooked, not hot as in body temperature."
"Gotcha, we're looking for a barbecue." He leans sideways and fiddles with the controls below a fun-looking monitor. "Here. Ever used one of these before?"
"What is it, FLIR?"
"Got it in one. That joystick's the pan, this knob is zoom, you use this one to control the gain, it's on a stabilised platform; give us a yell if you see anything. Clear?"
"I think so." The joystick works as promised and I zoom in on a trail of ghostly hot spots, pan behind them to pick up the brilliant glare of a predawn jogger, lit up like a light bulb–the dots are fading footprints on the cold ground. "Yeah." We're making about forty miles per hour along the road, sneaking in like a thief in the night, and I zoom out to take in as much of the side view as possible. After a minute or so I see the park ahead, off the side of a roundabout. "Eyes up, front: Can you hover over that roundabout?"
"Sure. Hold on." The engine note changes and my stomach lurches, but the FLIR pod stays locked on target. I can see the cows now, grey shapes against the cold ground–a herd of concrete animals created in 1978 by a visiting artist. There should be eight of them, life-sized Friesians peacefully grazing in a field attached to the park. But something's wrong, and it's not hard to see what.
"Barbecue at six o'clock low," says the copilot. "You want to go down and bring us back a take-away, or what?"
"Stay up," I say edgily, slewing the camera pod around. "I want to make sure it's safe first . . ."
* * * *
REPORT 2: Wednesday March 4th, 1914
CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET, Imperial War Ministry, September 11th, 1914
RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, July 2nd, 1940
RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988
Dear Albert,
Today we performed Young's double-slit experiment upon Subject C, our medusa. The results are unequivocal; the Medusa effect is both a particle and a wave. If de Broglie is right . . .
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Ernest has been pushing for results with characteristic vim and vigor and Mathiesson, our analytical chemist, has been driven to his wits' end by the New Zealander's questions. He nearly came to blows with Dr. Jamieson who insisted that the welfare of his patient–as he calls Subject C–comes before any question of getting to the bottom of this infuriating and perplexing anomaly.
Subject C is an unmarried woman, aged 27, of medium height with brown hair and blue eyes. Until four months ago, she was healthy and engaged as household maid to an eminent KC whose name you would probably recognize. Four months ago she underwent a series of seizures; her employers being generous, she was taken to the Royal Free Infirmary where she described having a series of blinding headaches going back eighteen months or so. Dr. Willard examined her using one of the latest Roentgen machines, and determined that she appeared to have the makings of a tumour upon her brain. Naturally this placed her under Notification, subject to the Monster Control Act (1864); she was taken to the isolation ward at St. Bartholomew's in London where, three weeks, six migraines, and two seizures later, she experienced her first Grand Morte fit. Upon receiving confirmation that she was suffering from acute gorgonism, Dr. Rutherford asked me to proceed as agreed upon; and so I arranged for the Home Office to be contacted by way of the Dean.
While Mr. McKenna was at first unenthusiastic about the prospect of a gorgon running about the streets of Manchester, our reassurances ultimately proved acceptable and he directed that Subject C be released into our custody on her own cognizance. She was in a state of entirely understandable distress when she arrived, but once the situation was explained she agreed to cooperate fully in return for a settlement which will be made upon her next of kin. As she is young and healthy, she may survive for several months, if not a year, in her current condition: this offers an unparallelled research opportunity. We are currently keeping her in the old Leprosarium, the windows of which have been bricked up. A security labyrinth has been installed, the garden wall raised by five feet so that she can take in the air without endangering passers-by, and we have arranged a set of signals whereby she can don occlusive blindfolds before receiving visitors. Experiments upon patients with acute gorgonism always carry an element of danger, but in this case I believe our precautions will suffice until her final deterioration begins.
Lest you ask why we don't employ a common basilisk or cockatrice instead, I hasten to explain that we do; the pathology is identical in whichever species, but a human source is far more amenable to control than any wild animal. Using Subject C we can perform repeatable experiments at will, and obtain verbal confirmation that she has performed our requests. I hardly need to remind you that the historical use of gorgonism, for example by Danton's Committee for Public Safety during the French revolution, was hardly conducted as a scientific study of the phenomenon. This time, we will make progress!
Once Subject C was comfortable, Dr. Rutherford arranged a series of seminars. The New Zealander is of the opinion that the effect is probabl
y mediated by some electromagnetic phenomenon, of a type unknown to other areas of science. He is consequently soliciting new designs for experiments intended to demonstrate the scope and nature of the gorgon effect. We know from the history of Mademoiselle Marianne's grisly collaboration with Robespierre that the victim must be visible to the gorgon, but need not be directly perceived; reflection works, as does trivial refraction, and the effect is transmitted through glass thin enough to see through, but the gorgon cannot work in darkness or thick smoke. Nobody has demonstrated a physical mechanism for gorgonism that doesn't involve an unfortunate creature afflicted with the characteristic tumours. Blinding a gorgon appears to control the effect, as does a sufficient visual distortion. So why does Ernest insist on treating a clearly biological phenomenon as one of the greatest mysteries in physics today?
"My dear fellow," he explained to me the first time I asked, "how did Madame Curie infer the existence of radioactivity in radium-bearing ores? How did Wilhelm Roentgen recognize X-rays for what they were? Neither of those forms of radiation arose within our current understanding of magnetism, electricity, or light. They had to be something else. Now, our children of Medusa apparently need to behold a victim in order to injure them–but how is the effect transmitted? We know, unlike the ancient Greeks, that our eyes work by focussing ambient light on a membrane at their rear. They used to think that the gorgons shone forth beams of balefire, as if to set in stone whatever they alighted on. But we know that cannot be true. What we face is nothing less than a wholly new phenomenon. Granted, the gorgon effect only changes whatever the medusoid can see directly, but we know the light reflected from those bodies isn't responsible. And Lavoisier's calorimetric experiments–before he met his unfortunate end before the looking glass of l'Executrice–proved that actual atomic transmutation is going on! So what on earth mediates the effect? How can the act of observation, performed by an unfortunate afflicted with gorgonism, transform the nuclear structure?"
(By nuclear structure he is of course referring to the core of the atom, as deduced by our experiments last year.)
The Atrocity Archives Page 25
