By the Light of a Gibbous Moon Page 9

  ****

  Today I must deal with another fool. Turvey did not recover his speech until early morning, when he shook me from my sleep as if the bed were afire. He started at once on his addle-brained claptrap, saying he recognized the Manuxet shaman, that he was sent by the Devil himself! Now he waved his hands about him like a blind man searching for a doorway and muttered, more to himself than me I think, that he, Turvey, had met this same Misquamacus, forty years before. And the man had not aged a single day!

  I reminded him that neither he nor anyone else in Deerfield had treated with the Manuxet before. Turvey replied that this other shaman had been of the Narragansett tribe. I reasoned that if this other fellow was a Narragansett, then it must be a coincidence. Perhaps Misquamacus was after some kind of title rather than a name. But the old man would not be assuaged and began to shake worse than before. He continued with his absurd tale.

  At that time, two withered elders of the Narragansett, detractors who somehow resisted the medicine man’s powerful personality, had related this tale to Turvey: Misquamacus had not been born a Narragansett, but had been taken in after his considerable healing skills had recovered two wounded warriors from the brink of death. Further, the elders claimed to have traded with the same man fifty Winters before, when he had been with the Pocumtuc to the south.

  And so nonsense begets nonsense.

  At the time young Turvey had dismissed it all for the drivel I still believe it to be, but now the whole deal has him unmanned. His voice no more than a croaking whisper, Turvey said, I dreamed… I have dreamed of Him. Of course he had dreamed! He had been bedridden with fever. I think he is still feverish. I shook him by the shoulders, perhaps more roughly than I ought, and tried to shout some reason into him, but my efforts were in vain. He lays totally senseless now, despite his eyes starting from his head, staring at nothing.

  Turvey’s mind is unmistakably just as raddled as his frame.

  Yet does not a small part of me feel relief? With Turvey unable to fulfill his duties, my position as Chief Factor for Deerfield is all but certain.

  23 October, 1720 – Deerfield, Massachusetts

  A merchant traveler informed us that Proctor Manley will return to Deerfield shortly. I am glad of that.

  Rumour flies faster than Mercury on the most urgent errand, and I am sorry to say that the laboring class of man to be found in this settlement is as subject to superstition and phantasy as their red brethren, and grant Misquamacus such strange powers as talking to beasts and reading minds. I find now at mess times that when I desire company the tables are full, and when I desire privacy I get all that I might wish for.

  The cook’s assistant, something of a simpleton, was the only man to speak to me today. He asked how I had come by the mark on the palm of my right hand. I told him I had cut it splitting wood. I am not accustomed to dishonesty in any of my dealings, but this lie flowed from my tongue as easily as a hymn to God, may He preserve me.

  I returned hurriedly to my room –a place as private as one could want, since Turvey now sleeps almost round the clock– to study the mark. From a certain angle it looked like an old, but perfectly smooth, scar, rather like the wine stain which marks some at birth. But if one were given to fancy, it might also seem like a sort of sigil with an eye in the center. I do not know how it got to be there.

  25 October, 1720 – Deerfield, Massachusetts

  Manley has returned. How happy I was when I was called in to his private office, and how wrongheaded!

  No pleasantries were exchanged. Manley was studying the trade agreement I had made with the Manuxet. He said to me, Whatever else he may be, this medicine man is a sound trader. He was evidently displeased.

  I replied that I had got all the terms Manley had asked.

  The Proctor dropped the lamb’s-hide parchment on the table as if it carried smallpox. What I had remembered as a series of expertly drafted lines was now scratched up everywhere, amended in the margins and between the lines themselves, in a small but neat script, my own. On the right hand every change was followed by a column of my two initials. At the bottom was scrawled the sole change I did recall, the extent, so I had thought at the time, of the shaman’s literacy: a jagged letter M. The mark on my palm began to itch furiously, as if salt had been rubbed in a wound.

  Manley continued: Hardly, my friend. In my opinion, you were soundly taken by that blackguard. Normally, I would never honour so wretched a contract as this, but with the heavy snows starting I have no choice. I shall have to write to our Chamberlain for more funds. No matter. We will find someone else next time.

  I opened my mouth to defend myself, to explain, to deny, but nothing came forth –and so it remained, my lips opening and closing like those of a land-bound fish. Manley fixed me with a flat stare which, had any rebuttal been forthcoming, would have denied it. I gathered what remained of my wits and exited.

  More and more of late when I mean to speak I am silent, and when it is more prudent to be silent I find myself speaking as if with another’s tongue. With a nervous energy of their own the nails of my left hand gouged at the palm of my right, and I wondered. Had not He grasped that hand in the European manner, a gesture which I have seen many Indians adopt, but never the medicine man excepting that one instance?

  This setback with Manley has been a blow, I admit. My thoughts even wander into idiocy, like Turvey’s.

  14 November, 1720 – Deerfield, Massachusetts

  Manley has re-assigned me –to the storehouse of all places! I’m damned if I’ll play apprentice to that lickspittle Bradley. I would sooner starve. Unfortunately, that may be just the choice I must make. There is no travel out of Deefield without a sledge now, and if I do not earn my keep Manley is within his rights to turn me out, though I do not think even he could undertake an action so un-Christian.

  I suffer from a sleeping illness, and wander unknowing from my rest. On three different nights I have awoken, once without even a pair of boots, to find myself at the edge of the settlement, my neck stiff, gazing at the stars. The constellation Piscis Austrinus, where shines bright Fomalhaut, holds a peculiar fascination for me. Those nights when clouds obscure the heavens I sleep more deeply than ever before, perhaps to make up the energy I am compelled to spend when it is clear.

  As a consequence of these weird excursions, during the day I walk like a man with a belly full of lead shot. I stray farther and farther from my new duties, and with no confidant but this journal my thoughts hang as heavy as my limbs. Still I receive the sidelong glances and muttered comments of the labourers. Buffoons. Know they not I serve [furious scribbling] the King of England as righteously as any man?

  24 November, 1720 – Deerfield, Massachusetts

  I dreamt of a great gibbous moon which seemed to fill the night sky, and I saw that earth’s gray companion was not a satellite at all, but a gigantic looking-glass, and what it reflected was a world devoid of forest, ocean or any sort of life. Our Creator’s fair gift from was dead a thousand thousand years, a vast uncoloured desert.

  And I thought, our Lord God does not hang such a mirror before the world, but if not God then who? What?

  December – Deerfield

  Whether it is madness or no, I must relate the occurrences of last night as well as I may, if only to purge them from my mind.

  I woke slowly, as if from a desperate illness, my consciousness returning to me in increments. What came first to my addled senses were the droning voices, calling out a mantra in some foreign tongue. The sound was deep and sonorous, like a choir of monks, but had an unnatural undertone like the buzzing of insects.

  It was night, and but a few yards distant were a score or more figures, arranged in a circle. At regular intervals their chant rose from its discomfiting murmur in a series of bizarre syllables. The words were all nonsensical to me and I cannot recall them, except for the final intonation, something like NY-HAR-LA-TO-TEP. Then the ritual was punctuated by a guttural shout and they would throw out their arms
or make other arcane gestures.

  The worshippers wore deep-cowled green robes, such as I have never known Indians to favour, which dragged the ground at their feet. Though I had only starlight by which to see, I would swear that they were silk.

  In the spot closest to me stood the master of the ceremony, identically garbed yet different from the others, broader of shoulder and bare-headed. I knew without seeing his face that this was Misquamacus. None of his tribe came near to matching him in stature, yet his fellows tonight were all his equal in height, but thinner, even sickeningly so from the hang of their robes.

  Against all sense fascinated, I turned my eyes to the space before them. They stood within a depressed circle several yards across, scorched black at the edges as if by a single massive stroke of lightning. Within, the earth had been scoured away to the depth of about a foot, revealing the yellow clay which underlies the topsoil in these parts. At the center was a perfectly round stone platform, inscribed at the perimeter with a sequence of rough-carved sigils the meaning of which I know not. At the center was an image only slightly less mysterious: an eye perhaps two feet across with an hourglass-shaped pupil, like that of a goat. A few inches above this eye, without apparent source, danced a wavering green flame.

  Then it was that I saw I was not the lone unwilling guest. There was another, until that moment unnoticed between two of the green-garbed acolytes. The figure’s form was swaddled in a common brown camp blanket. But for the cloth sack over her head, she might have been unexpectedly roused from bed and planning to retire there again very shortly. By virtue of her build, narrow-shouldered and small, I assumed it to be a woman. She was shivering in terror and was kept upright only by the grip of her two towering captors.

  A choking, sulphurous smell rose around us, and I felt a suffocating pressure, as if an iron band squeezed my chest. The chant was reaching its apex again and I knew more horrors were to come. A terrific boom followed the end of their chant and a wave of invisible force, like one feels when standing near a firing cannon, washed out from the center of that unholy ring.

  The Heavens rushed down upon us, there is no other way to say it. Though the blasted ring, its bizarre celebrants, and we two witnesses remained in our places, the world around us vanished and we seemed to race upwards, past cloud and wind, and yet beyond into the vault of night. I clutched my silver crucifix in my burning palm, but struck dumb with terror could mutter no prayer.

  The stars grew and grew, as the ether betwixt them rushed in my ears hot and thick as blood, and their true nature was revealed to me: they are great gems, some spherical or conoid, others in shapes too fantastical to name, with countless shining facets. And they are not scattered on a velvet carpet of night, but upon a black void so complete that to gaze upon it is to feel all hope and faith, and even sanity itself, leach away.

  Whilst the bizarre panorama of outer space whirled about our piece of Earth, the green fire at the focus of that dread circle vanished, and was replaced by a dark, ever-shifting Otherness.

  At first it seemed a perfect cylinder of storm cloud streaming up from nothing and after reaching the height of about two men, returning thence. Then it was the reflection of a starry night sky on a restless sea. Then it was simply an unceasingly motive column of perfect blackness, of a piece with the horrible, endless void beyond. A scream tried to rise is my throat, but refused release it banked in my chest like the fiery heart of a forge, building and building until the pain should drive me from my skin.

  All was silent, and every observer still.

  One smoky part of it –somewhat like an arm, but also like a tail– uncoiled towards the blanketed figure, who seemed suddenly the only other human being in that unholy tableau. There was a sound like a sharp gust whistling beneath a door, and she slumped like a bundle of rags between her implacable guards, dead. A horrid conviction gripped me that what I had witnessed was not merely murder, for though the soul was fled and the husk left behind, I knew that her essence had been transferred from her corpse to some unknowable elsewhere, to the black gulf between the stars.

  This realization was the final blow to my tortured brain and that unnamed place beyond the world of men was mercifully hidden from my streaming eyes.

  I woke at seemingly the same instant, scrabbling about the dirt floor of my room like a crazed rat. Only when I struck my head a hard knock on my own bedpost did I recover enough to grasp Turvey by the arm. Because of his interminable malady, the fire in our room is always stoked high, but he was icy cold and quite dead. He had not gone peacefully at the end, for the covers were twisted about his body as if meaning to strangle him. I untangled his stick-thin limbs and straightened him on his cot. The poor fellow had succumbed at last to his sickness, but there was one detail of his demise which I wish with all my soul had escaped me: the soles of his small and shriveled feet were caked yellow with clay.

  ****

  I write this last in the small hours of morning that in a right world belong to highwaymen and grave robbers. My sleep is troubled by an image my brain tries, but fails, to refuse: of the shadowy thing in the medicine man’s stone circle. Though its shape is no clearer, I know it beckons to me, and soon I will go.

  I am dressed for travel, but I know I cannot escape its summons. Beneath my traveling cloak I have secured a certain parcel which may yet deliver me, not from death which is the best fate I may hope for this night, but from the fate apportioned to me by that medicine man whose name I will not speak nor write again. The thing from beyond I know I cannot touch, but a full horn of black powder, liberally seasoned with slivers of scrap iron from the blacksmith’s slag pile, might still prove inconvenient for my nemesis. I think that if I can extinguish that Devil who masquerades as a man, its master will be forced back to the void. A thin hope, but--

  I seal this document now in a bone case. To whomever happens upon it, I do not ask that you trust in my sanity. I only pray that you who discover this tale never have occasion to test the facts laid out herein.

  My trunk sports a false bottom, a deception I learned from a Jesuit who worked amongst a tribe of most shameless thieves. I must trust that it will be safe there from prying eyes, that He is not all-seeing. I must trust that such omnipotence is still exclusive to our Lord God,

  May He Keep Me,

  Ewan Gregory MacHale

  NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

  2 February, 1923

  UNITED STATES BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  D-C Case File #33701-1921 / NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

  The following account was recovered from the drop point for Agent William Dreyfus, a location known to myself and no one else. The agent himself was mangled beyond recognition. Dreyfus was one of our new Deep Cover units, meaning he didn’t carry any department identification. And yes, we verified his identity via dental records once we brought him in. I know better than anyone how crafty our enemy is.

  At least we know Dreyfus’s final resting place. I wish I could say the same for Bueller and Manning. As for the other thing that was found beside him –his assailant, we think– there isn’t much of anything to tell. My first analysis was that it was canine in nature, in shape at least.

  It wasn’t any dog or wolf, don’t misunderstand me. Dreyfus’s wounds– that’s a subject for a whole other report. Suffice it to say they weren’t made by teeth or claws. Standing, it was probably less than the height of a grown man’s shoulder, but not by much. That, unfortunately, is the only analysis anyone is going to make. Even when I first saw it, its shape was softening –decomposing is the word, I guess. It dissolved in less than an hour to an unidentifiable blue-black grit. The agent’s weapon had been fired. In fact, he emptied all six chambers. Did Dreyfus kill it after it had mortally wounded him? Or were there two, in which case the second one is still at large? Impossible to say.

  Report follows.

  ****

  Agent Dreyfuss, D-C Unit Reporting

  22 November, 1922

  Read the police coroner’s r
eport –again– regarding the stiffs from the firefight. He insists the bodies had been dead for varying amounts of time, but none for less than 48 hours. He also states that the blood was all pooled in their legs, as if they’d been hung up on meat hooks after they died. Those cadavers were never anything but horizontal from the time they fell to the time they arrived at the lab less than four hours later. It’s true they didn’t seem to bleed, but each to his own, right?

  I know the gunfight was described in Benson’s report, but I have to reiterate that all of Holm’s crew enjoy some unearthly vitality. It’s not fanaticism and it’s not military training. These freaks just come at you and do not quit. One of them bit Regan on the thigh and literally wouldn’t let go. We had to shoot him through the neck and pluck two of the teeth out with pliers! Every single one fought to the death, even the young female. She had been beaten down to the ground and handcuffed by Benson. He thought he would finally get some answers, but she broke the cuffs and came after him. They finally had to kill her too.

  I’ve seen a few dead folks in my time and this sort of get-up-and-go attitude is not typical.

  I ended up looking into the coroner’s background, worried that maybe our enemy had gotten to him. Heinrich has twenty years with the department. His brother was a beat cop, went missing last year on a call to a country place south of Arkham and was never found. We haven’t told Heinrich that Holm is the one we think responsible, but I don’t think we have to. I can’t believe he’d turn and I can’t believe he’s incompetent. In summary, I don’t know what to believe.

  I’ve got to stop wasting time going over old ground. The coroner’s report is sealed for now, and hopefully for all time.

  26 November, 1922