Doc Ardan and The Abominable Snowman

by Guy d'Armen

  Unnerved, but also irritated, Hareton’s pulse raced. He wanted to shout at the man who stood over him, demand what the Hell he was doing staring down at him like some fiendish ghoul. Instead, Hareton feigned a yawn, ran his fingers through his straw yellow hair, and said calmly, “Having problems sleeping, N’desi?”

  N’desi’s only answer was to remove from a pouch at his hip a small stone, which with slow, graceful strokes, he began grating against the sharp edge of his strange square-ended, slightly curving sword. The iron weapon gleamed hideously in the starlight.

  Hareton sighed. The man had been acting queerly since they had picked up the telegram in Fort Lamy that sent them on their new mission, refusing to leave Hareton’s side for even a moment. This despite the fact that N’desi was no longer technically in the American’s employ. Stranger still, the man had begun uttering strange pronouncements in his native Bantu dialect whenever he caught a glimpse of the glittering ax which, less than a month ago, they had recovered from the forbidden ruins in the high reaches of the Tibesti. Perhaps the fellow was taking taduki again. He had seen N’desi light a blue flame in the desert a fortnight before they had come upon the ruins, and the unmistakable sweet aroma of that rare herb had drifted to Hareton upon the cool arid breeze.

  Time seemed to shatter like a brittle stone and the strange dream from the night N’desi took taduki settled over Hareton. A dream of the same nightmare creature that had just now visited his sleeping spirit–a towering being, with a roughly human-shaped body, with rippling plantlike skin mottled with many deposits of sparkling silicate crystal, and thick trunk-like limbs that shot into the ground like tree roots. In the dream, the creature led him on a secret way through the mountains, its body stretching from its lower torso, twisting over the seemingly unending desertscape, while its legs remained rooted beneath the sand miles behind. When Hareton awoke the next morning, he had followed the dream path and discovered an old hermit watching over the crumbling foundations of a primordial mountainside settlement. To the protests of the hermit, Hareton, as if possessed by some feverish delirium, had with his bare hands unearthed a stone altar in the ruins, long buried by the dust of time; and upon the altar found the very prize he had come to Africa to obtain: the ax known as the Reaver of Worlds.

  Had the taduki Hareton so faintly inhaled given him a vision, as it was so reputed to do? And if so, by what strange mechanism did the herb open up the doors of time and space and bring him to his goal? And for what sublime intent?

  He felt the bulge of the ax in the pack at his side. Yes–it was still there. Feeling its hard substantiality somehow seemed to mend time and return him to the present.

  “It is xanigew.” N’desi’s deep voice, so rarely used, startled Hareton.

  “What? You mean the ax? It’s what, did you say?” Hareton took care to impart an air of indifference. He did not want to egg on the man’s superstitions, which ran thick in his bloodline. After all, N’desi’s grandfather, Mavovo, had been a pupil of the great Zulu witchdoctor Zikali.

  N’desi remained silent for nigh a minute. Then he said, “The glittering stone you carry disturbs your sleep. As it does mine.”

  Getting up from his sandy bed, Hareton shot the man an accusatory look. “The ax is cursed,” he said flatly, “that’s what you’re saying. Or xanigew or whatever you called it. But I don’t think it’s that at all. You know something more than you’ve been letting on.” A shiver seized Hareton, which he disguised by rubbing his arms as if chilled by the early desert morning. But an uncanny realization now came over him: meeting N’desi in the bazaar in Marrakech had been no coincidence. The man must have sought him out when he heard the famed American explorer was searching for the Reaver of Worlds.

  The ax. It all seemed to come back to the ax. The stories of the natives in eastern Niger said the glittering, iron-headed weapon had been crafted from a splinter of a much larger one. The latter was reputed to have been cast to the Earth by the natives’ gods, the Sky People, and wielded by a giant who, in his great anger, had smashed the ax into the Earth countless generations ago, giving rise to the Tibesti Mountains and unleashing a cataclysmic torrent that gushed from the belly of the Great Mother goddess and consumed the world. The legend of the ax, and a tip off from the wise and trusted old mystic Hâjî Abdû that the Reaver of Worlds was in truth a very real artifact, is what had launched Hareton on his recent quest.

  N’desi, half a head taller than the six-foot-two American, looked down at Hareton, his dark eyes glowing dimly in the sand-reflected starlight. “The search for your countryman is noble. But it will lead to the rise of a great evil. Leave him to die in the Hoggar.”

  “Is that what the taduki has told you? That I should let the son of my greatest friend die, and place my faith in your depraved addiction to that mind-numbing herb?”

  So that explained the man’s odd behavior since Hareton had received the telegram from New York. Partaking of the herb had caused some errant signal in N’desi’s brain to connect two unrelated events–the finding of the ax, and the search for the son of Hareton’s friend, whose plane was last sighted two weeks ago by French military intelligence on a precise course for the Hoggar’s Mount Tahat. Now, because of the herb’s rewiring of the Zulu’s gray matter, N’desi believed the ax had somehow cursed Hareton’s new mission.

  “Your heart knows the truth.” N’desi placed his sharpening stone back in its pouch and returned the long iron sword to its wooden scabbard. “Do not forget the dream which led you to the ax you sought.”

  Hareton guffawed. “Coincidence! That smoke of yours fouled up my mind and sent it spinning backwards. The local hearsay brought me into the general vicinity of the ruins. It was luck we found it, I’ll say, but the herb only tricked me into thinking I knew the route to the ax ahead of time. That’s how the psychologists explain déjà vu, you know–the mind working backwards to solve a problem that’s already been solved?”

  N’desi lips stretched into a rare smile. “And what of the old hermit seizing up and dying at the very moment you raised the ax from the dirt?”

  Hareton said nothing, but his own grin faded. N’desi, perhaps sensing he had won the battle but lost the war, began breaking camp. Already in the east the desert night’s sable blanket faded. Soon the blood-red orb of the Sun would again bake the sands and Hareton would welcome the shadows of the Hoggar, curses or no.

  Harry Killer was not dead.

  He reclined on the throne, padded with luxurious gold-laced pillows, and snapped his fingers. A man shambled over bearing a jewel-encrusted bowl filled with olives and cheeses. The servant was hunched over, back and arms bent at almost simian-like angles. The dim light provided by elaborate copper oil lamps suspended from the cavern ceiling shadowed the man’s face.

  Killer waved the servant away and pointed him toward the cavern’s other occupant.

  Queen Antinea was on her knees at the base of her throne. Black circlets of metal banded her wrists in front of her, as well as her ankles. Thick chain links connected her manacles.

  The servant loped toward Antinea and shoved the bowl under her face. Her lustrous dark hair waved and she shook her head in apparent disgust. Killer knew the revulsion she must feel at the man’s fetid breath, his heavy, fur-covered brow, his protruding yellowed teeth.

  The juxtaposition of the young chained beauty and the panting beast-man amused Killer. He admired her, the curve of her hip, the swell of her breasts under the thin gown he allowed her.

  But most of all he admired her youth. He wanted it.

  By rights, Harry Killer should have been dead. He should have been killed when Blackland, his criminal outpost in the Sahara, was blown to bits almost 30 years ago.

  Instead, he had awoken deep in the rubble and foundations of the City in the Sahara, buried in dirt and grit and concrete. There had been a shimmering glow in the darkness where none should have been, an almost crystalline light. When he had reached out and grasped this beacon, time swirled and space
inverted. The glittering light expanded and enveloped him, and he saw a vast and hidden underground realm buried in a rocky and barren mountain range.

  And Killer saw the nude woman, the raven-haired queen of indescribable beauty, with haunted green eyes and a lush red mouth. This woman, posing with nonchalance and shaking her head, as if to say to him, “No, you cannot have this, Harry Killer, this is not for you.”

  Then time righted itself, and the crystal light was solid. It wrapped around his legs like a sea-birthed tentacle, dragging him gasping through the sand, until it thrust him upward into the air. Killer had hacked and spit up dirt and grit, and lay there on the ground for what seemed like hours, chest heaving. Then, gathering his wits, he was finally able to sit up and look around him.

  The smoldering ruins of Blackland were nowhere to be seen.

  Harry Killer crawled out of the desert and headed south, holing up for half a year at a native village. Scars and burns pulled his face into a ghastly skull-like visage, and his previously bushy eyebrows, burned in the explosions, were now thin and sparse. As he healed, the Wantso villagers who had initially taken in this broken and burned husk of a white man grew to be more and more afraid of him. More strength flowed into his massive frame with every passing day. And with every passing day, he took more and more liberties, eating their food, using their women.

  Finally, one day, he heard some of the men complaining about him. Killer was not a linguistic expert, but he was sharp enough to pick up much of the villager’s language within the six months of his stay with them. The native men spoke unthinkingly in front of him, while Killer grinned his death’s head grin and bobbed his head like an idiot, and listened intently.

  They planned to kill him. Dismemberment, preferably while he was still alive, was not too good for him.

  Though huge and muscular, Killer was no match for a whole village of men, and he knew it. When he stole away in the dead of night, he thought about razing the village, but decided that would give any survivors even more reason to seek vengeance and come after him. If he left quietly, they might just leave him alone and not give chase.

  Finally Killer made his way to the coast and from there to Europe. He traveled the globe and rebuilt his criminal enterprises, this time choosing to remain mobile rather than once again banking all his resources on one base which could be destroyed. He diversified.

  There was one other thing.

  Harry Killer did not age. When Blackland had gone up in flames, he had been in his mid-forties. A decade later, he felt as he had when he was 30.

  War to end all wars came and went, the trenches of Europe filled with lost souls while Killer got rich dealing in the weapons of German scientists like Herr Doktor Krueger.

  Another decade later, and he still felt the same. The crystal light, he realized, in the bowels of Blackland, must have saved him, even rejuvenated him.

  But the effects were not permanent. By 1926, he was almost a cripple, dying.

  It was chance that gave him a clue. Boredom had led Killer to the ship’s library on the Ile-de-France, a steamer on Compagnie Générale Transatlantique’s New York-Le Havre route, and thus to the fantastical memoirs of Lieutenant Ferrières, of the 3rd Spahis. As Killer read Ferrières’ account of Queen Antinea’s hidden lair buried in the Hoggar Mountain range of Africa–so close to the Saharan location of Blackland!–and the Queen’s apparent everlasting youth, he became convinced there was a connection to his experiences and the visions he had experienced in the wake of Blackland’s destruction.

  Within a month, he had mounted and fully stocked an African expedition. He planned a detour to a hidden valley he had discovered in his post-Blackland wanderings, there to recruit some local “muscle:” degenerate para-anthropoids of a lost race who called themselves the Wandarobo.

  With the Wandarobo beast-men in tow–or rather with him in tow, borne through the jungle and then the rocky desert in a covered litter, as he became increasingly weak–Killer descended upon Hoggar. Antinea’s hideaway was ridiculously easy to find. Benoit, the editor of Ferrières’ memoirs, had not taken the pains to alter names and places, trusting that the Lieutenant’s account was so fantastic it would be viewed as complete fiction–as it likely would have been if not for Killer’s visions.

  As simple as it was for Killer to locate the decaying empire in the volcanic landscape, Mount Tahat looming in distance, it was even easier to conquer and secure. Antinea’s highlands realm, the Mountain of Evil Spirits, once a flourishing community, was reduced from its former glory. Many faithful servants, handmaidens, farmers, and Arabian guards remained, but not nearly enough to repel Killer’s swarming Wandarobo.

  And so Harry Killer sat upon the plush throne of Antinea’s Hoggar sanctuary, while the Queen knelt defiantly before him in chains.

  Antinea swung her chained fists at the beast-man, sending the bowl of olives and cheese flying. She spat at Killer, her eyes cold with fury.

  “Now, now, my Queen,” Killer said. His dried skin pulled tightly about his skull as he forced a smile. “That will get you nowhere. You know what I want. You’re older than I am; you must be much older, in fact. Yet you don’t look a day over 20. I’ve been here two weeks. I’ve been gentle with you so far, but my patience wears thin. I won’t wait forever.”

  “Gentle? Ah…You have thrown me in a cell in my own dungeon. I’ve no pillows to rest upon and no coverlets to warm me at night. My bath is a cold bucket of unscented water, dumped on me in the morning as I sleep. And you dare cast your treatment as gentle?”

  “A little hardship in life does us all good, my Queen. It builds character.”

  “Then, indeed, your life to this point must have been one of unparalleled luxury.”

  “I’d revel in this banter with you, draw it out for days, weeks, my Queen, if I had time.” A dry rattling cough wracked his body, and he recovered. “I promise you, if you don’t tell me what I want to know, and soon, I may die, but if I do, the Wandarobo will tear you limb from limb while you still live. You’ll beg for them to dispatch you cleanly before they’re done with you.”

  At this threat, Antinea’s imperious anger evaporated. Killer watched her smile serenely at him, then turn her gaze to the three Wandarobo guards crouched at the entrance of her cavernous throne chamber. She stood, her movements slow, sinuous. Then she reached up to her neck, unfastened the gown, and at a leisurely pace drew it down her body, like honey flowing down a spoon.

  Antinea stood nude before the panting Wandarobo. They stared, hypnotized as one, at her magnificent, uplifted breasts. She continued to smile at Killer.

  He was transfixed, just like the primitives who served him. Antinea appeared just as she had in the crystalline vision years ago.

  Antinea’s voice punched through the memory. “I think there will be no tearing limb from limb any time soon.”

  Killer saw red, and yelled at the Wandarobo. “Get her out of here. Back to her cell!”

  He watched Antinea continue to smile. The guards didn’t move. Then she nodded slightly at them in acquiescence. Or was it command? Rough Wandarobo hands eagerly grasped her slender, pale arms and drew her away.

  The beautiful Antinea, who reminded them so much of their own ruler before their exile to the squalid outpost where Killer had found them, was once again locked away in her cell. They had stood gazing dumbly at her for minutes, which would have dragged into hours, if she hadn’t finally dismissed them with promises of more delights, visual and otherwise, later.

  Now the three tramped through the dank caverns, grunting and bragging and arguing about which of them had captured Antinea’s green-eyed gaze the longest.

  As they rounded a darkened bend, a bronzed and heavily sinewed arm reached out and encircled the latter Wandarobo’s neck, pulling the beast-man silently into the shadows.

  His two companions lumbered onward, oblivious.

  “Well, my Queen, how are you doing it?”

  “Doing what?” Antinea responded to Harry Killer
’s question. Her ever-serene smile belied her innocence.

  “You know what!” he practically shrieked. He inhaled deeply to calm himself, and, not for the first time, wished he hadn’t become a teetotaler after the destruction of Blackland. He could use a snort right now, but alcohol had never tasted quite the same after he’d seen the crystalline light.

  More calmly, Killer continued: “Over the past three days, half of my men have disappeared without a trace. The first, right after I sent you back to your cell following your burlesque display.”

  “I have no idea of what you speak.”

  “Never mind!” He took another deep breath. He really could use that drink. This woman was getting to him. “My men are disappearing, and they’re all whispering that the ilhinen have come to get them.”

  As Killer spoke the word ilhinen, the Wandarobo guards in the chamber stirred and rocked back and forth, howling and making signs to ward off evil spirits.

  Killer glared at them, and when they quieted somewhat, Antinea remarked, “Ilhinen. That is not good.”

  “Of course it’s not good, you traitorous bitch!”

  “Traitorous? I owe you no allegiance. I’ll see you in the Hall of Red Marble before this is over.”

  Killer would have stomped his feet on the stone floor, if he had had the strength. But his energy was fast fading.

  “I have no plan to become one of your lovers, or rather your victims, my Queen. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave.”

  Antinea smiled faintly.

  “I’ll give you one more day,” Killer said. “I have no more time to play with you. Tomorrow, we start removing fingers. Then toes. Then the other extremities. I guarantee the Wandarobo won’t pant at you after that. But it doesn’t have to come to that. Tell me the secret of rejuvenation. We’ve searched everywhere. It must be here. Where is it?”