Acolytes of Cthulhu

THE DUNSTABLE HORROR

BY ARTHUR PENDRAGON

A PALEOGRAPHER CANNOT BE THOUGHT A MADMAN. TO AVOID such a charge I have suppressed until my retirement the story which I now add to this book of memoirs. Do not doubt the accuracy of the tale. My memory has not failed me in probing the skin of this earth; it could not betray me now, for I bear like an old unclosed wound the remembrance of that horror in the forest north of Dunstable.

I had come from the British Museum to Dunstable in northern New England during the rainy March of 1920 in order to find and study the long-buried records of the Massaquoit tribe of red Indians. They were an isolate and obscure nation, a sea-marsh people who perished shortly after the foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. My grips and gear were thrown from the creaking passenger train at the Boston & Maine depot on the outskirts of the town. From the platform of the small Victorian building the landscape was singularly depressing. The continual drizzle of winter’s end reduced all to a monochrome grey of muddy flats and dripping scrub-topped hills. I would have been stranded were it not for the New England type lounging with the stationmaster in the telegraph office. As I entered the warmth of the waiting room he casually surveyed my dripping waterproof and the cut of my clothes, remarking drily, “Looks like the tourist season has begun.”

I took an instant dislike to the man which went beyond the sneer in his remark. However, since his was the only team outside I forced myself to be polite, to suffer his arrogance for the sake of a ride to town and a warm billet. After a few minutes of conversation he rose to his feet and grudgingly offered to drive me into Dunstable if I would help him load the wagon.

We wrestled several boxes of parts for his lumber mill, apparently the only industry in this area of rocky farms, into the back of the wagon, and added my gear. As the team plodded through the cold mist I found him more talkative than the traditionally taciturn New Englander. He commented, in a fragmentary fashion, on his mill, his position of authority in the town, and his affluence. From the very beginning his family, the Varnums, had inhabited the town, and he was the culmination of the line. Although unmarried at forty, he had decided to take a wife when time allowed in order to perpetuate the Varnum house.

The wagon swung onto a paved and wider thoroughfare posted as the Black North Road. Varnum finished his monologue and eyed me suspiciously, asking why I had come all the way up the coast to Dunstable. I decided to put an end to his egoistic spouting by exploiting the awe for learning shared by the middle classes, and so replied, “I am Thomas Grail of the British Museum, and I have come to find Pauquatoag.” To my utter astonishment he recognized the name of the great sorcerer of the Massaquoits, the evil Merlin of the New England tribes.

Varnum saw the surprise on my face. “Oh, yes. The family had a certain—ah—contact with Pauquatoag when they first landed.” He smiled darkly and alluded to several diaries he had inherited with his father’s estate. I would not learn the peculiar nature of that contact, and its terrible result, until later.

We rolled onto the covered bridge over the Penaubsket River. On the far bank lay Dunstable, its lights wanly glowing against the foggy dusk. “I suppose this means you’ll be going up north into the forest,” Varnum said. “You’ll have a hard time getting anyone to go with you.” I told him that I could offer good wages, and that the work would not be difficult, merely a bit of digging. “You’ve got three things working against you,” he replied. “Number one—the frost is coming out of the ground and the farmers’ll be putting in the seed pretty soon. Number two—the ice broke on the Penaubsket and the Kennebago last week, so the mill will be running at top speed in a few days.” He cracked the reins as we left the bridge for the main road. “And number three—everyone’s been sort of reluctant to go farther north than the logging camps since the animals came floating down river.”

He pointed out a mill pond at the side of a small dam. The oily water circled and foamed in endless eddies. “That pond has been almost full of dead animals two or three times since the thaw began. Came floating downstream from beyond the last logging camp. Squirrels, foxes, even a deer or two. Never saw anything like it.”

I asked how they had died. “As far as we could tell, by drowning. As if something had driven them into the river. When the snow melts in the uplands the current gets vicious. You’ll see it at its worst in about a week. Ever since then, nobody has gone beyond the camps. Superstitious peasants.” He laughed wryly. “And some of my men who’ve been past the camps laying out cutting stakes even say they saw a glow in the forest after dark, near the marshes. I just couldn’t convince them that they had seen an ordinary will o’ the wisp.”

I recognized the popular name for ignis fatuus, a light seen at night moving across bogs, thought to be caused by the slow oxidation of gases from rotting vegetation. “But surely,” I said, “they must see that sort of thing often around here, judging from the number of fens I passed on the train.”

Varnum snorted. “They all said this light was different—steady, not flickering, and moving from the marshes into the forest. They’re just trying to get out of camp duty. Lazy oxes. I have to keep after them all the time.”

We reined up before the Dunstable Inn, which looked as though it had received its last repair in colonial times. “Well, that’s what you’re up against, Mr. Grail-of-the-British-Museum.” Varnum dropped my bags into the muddy street. “If you’re going to come all this way to dig up a three-hundred-year-old Indian, you’ve got to expect little problems like this. If you ask me, you grave-robbers are all a little bit off.” He laughed and reined on the team, spattering me with mud as the wagon was enveloped in the steady drizzle. Chilled and disgusted, I collected my gear and entered the inn.

* * *

Varnum was correct in his prediction about the difficulty of obtaining guide service. The following morning, after a restive night in a battered four-poster, I began to make the rounds. At the feed and general store I was met with the reticence and suspicion of the highland New Englanders. The booted farmers and hands fell silent when I entered, awed by my accent. When I told them of my purpose they shifted their bodies uneasily. I promised a good week’s wages, and in some I could see raging the battle between the desire for money and some strange dread. But they all hung back, muttering lame excuses, saying, “You’re sure to get someone at the mill.”

The millpond was already filling with rafts of logs ridden downstream by the pikemen. The rasp of a giant saw somewhere in the bowels of the mill trembled across the damp air. At the hiring office I was informed that the mill was laying on a second shift that night, and that no one would be available for a week’s leave. Furthermore, the foreman doubted that I would be able to get a single townsman to accompany me because the news of the dead animals and the light in the forest had made the residents fearful of traveling beyond the logging camps on the two rivers.

When I left the office a small crowd of workers had gathered on the bank of a short canal which ran from the millpond into large dark orifices beneath the brick building, in which the rushing water turned underground wheels to power the saw. A line of wooden floats connected by a heavy chain closed the mouth of the canal against any influx of debris which might jam the wheels. Bobbing against this guardline were the bodies of numerous small animals. I walked into the knots of loitering millhands for a closer look at the animals—grey squirrels, chipmunks, and several large hares, forest dwellers which generally avoid the water. The squirrel which I examined bore no marks of disease or violence; it had apparently drowned, since the chest cavity was heavy with water. I remember that Varnum had spoken of similar occurrences during the past weeks, and a curious fear touched me for an instant. Had these animals actually sought out a water death, like the lemmings which I had seen literally choking the Trondheim Fjord in Norway the previous year? Or had something driven them before it, something so repugnant to even their coarse animal mentality that they preferred the water they abhorred to its presence?

I returned to the inn that afternoon puzzled both by the sight of the animals at the mill and by the fear of the townspeople at the mere mention of going north beyond the lumber camps. If necessary, I could go it alone—the previous autumn I had sighted from the air what I believed to be the remains of the chief Massaquoit campsite. But the location was thirty-five miles north of Dunstable, through an alien forest, and the going would not be easy.

I had not long been at the inn when a servant called with the message that Mr. Varnum would be pleased to entertain me at dinner that evening. Any company would have been preferable to the loneliness of the town after dark, so I accompanied the man in a wagon to the Varnum house, mystified at the sudden largesse of a person who seemed to resent my presence as one whom he could not awe with his authority.

My host met me at the door of his manse-like stone house. As he conducted me to his drawing room he smiled knowingly. “I hear you weren’t too successful at the feed store and mill today.”

“No,” I said, “all the men I asked seemed too busy for the project. Or perhaps they were a bit afraid at the prospect of going beyond the camps.”

“Craven, superstitious bumpkins, the lot of them! Since those animals began showing up at the mill, they’ve been acting like old women.” Varnum dismissed the subject with a contemptuous wave of the hand. He poured me what he called “a hearty old colonial drink,” aptly named The Dog’s Noses: a bumper of warm ale to which he added a jigger of gin. The taste was wretched, but I stomached it in deference to his attempt at hospitality.

“By the way—you saw the millpond today?” he asked.

“Yes, the animals have begun to appear again,” I said. “Forest creatures, which seldom go near the water. Puzzling, and a bit eerie.”

“Why, Mr. Grail-of-the-British-Museum,” said Varnum in mock surprise, “are you becoming a little unsure about the trip to find your sorcerer? Don’t tell me that a few waterlogged animals are giving a man of science cold feet!”

“My dear Varnum,” I replied, considerably nettled, “let me assure you that I have seen things far more eerie than a few squirrels bobbing in a millpond. Whatever the phenomenon, sir, it is all grist for the mill of science, and we will find it out.”

Varnum grunted and motioned me to the dining room where dinner was laid out by his decrepit house-keeper. The menu was a boiled New England dinner, more bland than the tasteless food which gluts Britannia. While eating I remarked on the gallery of portraits, mostly in American Primitive style, which covered the walls of the room. Varnum bore a striking resemblance to the first portrait, although the family features appeared in all of them—small, heavily lidded eyes, insipidity of the brow, large nose, and the surprise of a markedly narrow and thin-lipped mouth set between heavy and sensual jowls.

“You’ve noticed the resemblance between Prester and myself,” Varnum said, pausing in ravenous devoural of the steaming food. He shook his fork at the portrait. “A real rake—for one of the old guard he was a high-stepper. You should read his diaries. By Nick, I’ll show them to you, after supper.” He flicked a fragment of cabbage off his vest. “The folks used to tell me that I was the reincarnation of Prester. But it must go only skin deep—I have no time for women. Too much to be done—the mill, the town council, and now this damned business beyond the camps to be settled.”

I was amazed at his lack of interest in the subject of the ladies, myself having been without an amour since the pretty but petulant botanist at Harvard who had been a most charming companion until I became completely unnerved by the continual presence of beef-eating plants in her flat. Varnum’s sangfroid, I decided, was simply another aspect of the consuming ambition which drove the man to his displays of arrogance.

We rose from the wreckage of the dinner and re-entered the drawing room for cigars and a look at the diaries of Prester Varnum. My host excused himself to go and fetch them, indicating the liquor cabinet to me before he left. I surveyed the dismal array of American firewater, fit for no civilized gullet, my spirit sagging, until I saw a tenth of Cointreau forgotten in the corner. The sugary crystals on the bottle’s neck formed an unbroken seal—Varnum was obviously not an enthusiast of the delightful liqueur. I wrenched the cap off and poured myself a finger as he returned with several calf-bound octavos.

Varnum at first persisted in showing me the sections chronicling the romantic peccadilloes of his ancestor. These were of little interest, merely egomaniacal neighings of no great literary or historical merit. Far more to my use was the matter concerning the extinction of the Massaquoit tribe, of whose annihilation Prester was the root cause. The cramped and miniscule script coldbloodedly narrated the tragedy of this race.

In the spring of 1657 Prester Varnum, accompanied by his Mohegan guide, Mamtunc, had passed from the hamlet of Dunstable Northward along the Penaubsket seeking the extent of the pine resources in that area. During the journey they had surprised a woman of the Massaquoits. Putting aside his stern Calvinism for the nonce, Prester had enjoyed her despite Mamtunc’s warning about reprisals against Dunstable by her tribe. The woman later escaped and fled in shame back to her people.

Not long after, Prester had fallen ill with a fever in the forest, and was brought back to the settlement in a travois by the Mohegan. When they arrived the town was in the grip of the second outbreak of plague since its foundation nine years before. Worse, a friendly savage had informed the inhabitants that because a colonist had molested a wife of Pauquatoag, the Massaquoit shaman, the tribe was preparing for war.

During that black summer Dunstable buried its dead and readied itself for the Massaquoit onslaught. Smallpox claimed over a third of the villagers, including Mamtunc. But Prester Varnum recovered and was strong again by the time it was discovered that the Massaquoits had perished to a man, infected by the unknown white plague through the wife of Pauquatoag. The courier who brought the news also spoke of the curse which the sorcerer had levied upon the defiler of his wife—that the line of descent which produced such a man would end most horribly and in the same manner as the extinction of the Massaquoits. However, Prester discounted this a superstition and, indeed, came to a peaceful death in his sleep at seventy-two, leaving many children to mourn him both in Dunstable and the nearby Indian camps.

I closed the diaries of Prester Varnum and exhaled slowly. The narration of the needless extinction of the Massaquoits had depressed me considerably. But the flare of a match as my host lit his cold cigar, and then mine, brought me back among the living.

Varnum cleared his throat importantly. He had become increasingly impatient as I lost myself in the pages of his ancestor.

“You’ve probably been wondering all evening why I invited you,” he said. “This—this phenomenon as you call it is beginning to be troublesome to me. There are some fine stands of pine beyond the last camp, between the Penaubsket and the marshes. I’ll have that lumber at any price.”

“If you can get your crews to go into the area,” I said. “They seem to have little stomach for it.”

Varnum took a deep draught of bourbon. “Exactly. As long as these animals that keep floating downriver are unexplained, my boys’ll be jumpier than a bull at fly time about getting into that timber. We know the animals drowned. The vet examined a few, and found nothing from disease, no marks or broken skin, no singed fur from a brush fire—nothing except water in the lungs. The question is, why in Hell did they jump into the Penaubsket in the first place?”

“Perhaps they were driven,” I hazarded.

“By what?”

“The Headless Horseman,” I answered, sipping my Cointreau. Varnum failed to detect the note of humor in my voice. “You’re not superstitious too, are you?”

“It was merely a drollery,” I assured him.

“Oh. Well, whatever the reason my friend, I won’t have my men harassed by a will of the wisp and a few sopping animals. I’m going along with you. When do you leave?”

I was inwardly seething at being told that I would be accompanied, but allowed little sign of this emotion to betray itself on my face. It would be, at least, better than going it alone. “I plan to leave day after tomorrow,” I replied. “Tomorrow I’ll hire the horses at the livery stable.”

“Good, I’ll see you then,” said Varnum, rising from his seat. Apparently the evening was over, although it was only ten o’clock.

At the door there were no amenities, simply a curt “Good night” by Varnum, as though dismissing an inferior. As I rode in the wagon back to the inn I found myself boiling over my host’s bad manners. For the sake of a guide to my project site I would suffer the man’s company, although it probably would not be the most pleasant two weeks I would spend at a site. I consoled myself by fondling the tenth of Cointreau which I had surreptitiously tucked into the inside pocket of my black greatcoat upon leaving. “Why waste it on a boor with no palate,” I thought, and laughed aloud. The first frogs answered from the marshes where the faint blue will o’ the wisp hung over last winter’s cattails like an augury.

* * *

By the time of our meeting two days later I had hired four horses, two as mounts and two for portage. It had taken me almost a full day to prepare the gear we would transport to the burial site of the Massaquoits—the probing bars, shovels, picks, brooms, and padded hardwood boxes which would protect whatever fragile birchbark rolls had survived. This baggage, plus rations, camping equipment, firearms, and a copy of Pope’s Essay on Man, composed the burdens of our two pack horses.

We left Dunstable as the sun rose on a clear day, a rarity in the New England spring. When I gave Varnum my compass readings and landmark notes on the site, he found that we would be able to use the most northerly of the logging camps as a jumping-off point for the burial ground. Thus, we were able to keep to logging roads and tracks for a good part of the trek.

On entering the great New England forest I experienced an almost religious awe which was never duplicated in any other jungle, veldt, canebrake, or tundra of this earth. A brooding stillness invested all. The light filtered greenly through the solemn pines and hemlocks so that even the air we breathed seemed the color of the vegetation which pressed in around us. The sound of hooves was muffled by the thick carpet of dry reddish needles, the organic sediment of the centuries. When a bird called, the echo amid the quiet was startling—one felt that a blasphemer had defiled a dark and sacred place. And the small towns and hamlets of the forest seemed to share my awe, huddled as they were along the seamarshes as if they preferred the known dangers of the sullen North Atlantic to the silent encroachments of the dark woods; their names stark, staunch, reflecting the cold indefatigability of the Yankee settlers—Sabbathday, Icepond, Landsem Depot, Wind Flume, and Bell Shoals.

Varnum was immune to such feelings, riding before me with his head sunk into a great woolen muffler, lost in thoughts of cutting schedules, board feet, and distances along the Penaubsket to the mill at Dunstable. He also seemed unmoved by the unshakeably ominous foreboding which had beset me since leaving the town. I found my mind turning back inexorably to the sight of the animals revolving lifelessly in the black eddies of the millpond, and to the thought of the blue nimbus, so much like the will o’ the wisp, but feared by the lumbermen more than the Penaubsket at flood. I tried to concentrate on the work which lay ahead—finding the site, the excavations, the discovery, identification, and packing of the Massaquoit pictographs. But there in the greenish light and stillness north of Dunstable the emotion was irrepressible.

On the morning of the third day, after a night’s halt at the most northerly of the logging camps, we arrived at the site. The reader may wonder at the ease with which we located the tribal ground of the Massaquoits. But in addition to compass fixes and landmark notes I had another factor working for me—the almost eternal sterility of land used for many years as a camping place. Because of constant foot traffic, cooking and smelting fires, and the disposal of alkaline solutions used in primitive tanning, the land is so leached and eroded that it can support only the hardiest of weeds.

I recognized the site immediately upon breaking out of the scrub pine into the roughly circular fifteen acre clearing. There were no middens, or refuse mounds, for these had long ago vanished under the winds of the summer hurricane and incursions of scavenger animals. There were, however, rows of blackish depressions in the earth which once held the lodge-poles supporting the Massaquoit dwellings. Except for these the ground was clean of any trace of a civilization; if anything were to be found here, it would be an occasional discarded arrowhead, or shard of pottery, or other artifact of the tribe. The birchbark picture records would be in the burial ground, distributed among the graves of the chiefs and first warriors. Unlike many of their neighbors, the tribe of Pauquatoag cremated their dead and interred the remains; the corpse was not lashed to a scaffold or tree limb to tatter in the wind.

We made camp at the center of the clearing, pitching the two one-man tents about twenty yards apart on either side of the fire. I was eager to find the burial ground, and Varnum wished to ride through the area both to inspect the stands of timber and to search for any trace of the mystery which had been worrying his men. Accordingly, we agreed to meet back at camp before sundown.

Through the long afternoon I made shallow preliminary excavations at the burial ground, about a mile north-west of our camp. It was not long before I found the first of the pictographs, interred with the remains of one who had been a major warrior. The primitive stick figures might have come from the hand of a child, so simple were they, carefully drawn in berry dyes on sheets of birchbark packed in a matrix of alkaline ash which preserved them from fungus and bacteria through the centuries. But while the analytical faculties of my mind feasted on the details of the records, my emotions were disturbed with the same sense of foreboding which had dogged me on the passage from Dunstable. Perhaps it was the starkness of the area, or the solemnity of walking in the footpaths of a vanished race. Whatever the cause, I was relieved to find Varnum waiting at the camp on my return.

He had lit the campfire although it was not yet sundown, and glanced up as he gingerly inserted a dry log into the blaze.

“Did you find your Indian comic books?” he asked.

“Yes—the records are buried with the remains, just as I thought they would be. I took only a sampling today, but the pictographs seem remarkably well preserved. But, a rather curious thing—I didn’t see the grave of Pauquatoag, although that should be the most clearly indicated of them all, with at least a rock cairn atop it.”

Varnum looked into the fire with an expression of absolute disinterest.

“Perhaps the old faker was assumed into the Indian heaven. He was supposed to be a witch doctor or something, wasn’t he?”

“Well, perhaps I overlooked the grave. But it should be large and easy to find, what with the immense number of trappings they buried their shaman with.” I poured myself a cup of coffee. “How did your day go? Any sign of—anything?”

Varnum laughed shortly. “Not a thing. Those old women who call themselves lumbermen are afraid of a will o’ the wisp, just as I said. No tracks, nothing unusual for miles around. A moving blue light—nonsense!”

“But what of the animals in the millpond?” I asked.

“How should I know? Maybe they take some sort of a fit that makes them leap into the water. It could be anything like that.” He was complete in his confidence, but his self-assuredness did not relieve me of that foreboding which was now almost a part of my mind.

We finished supper shortly after total darkness enveloped the forest. Varnum rose in the circle of firelight, stretched, and rubbed his unshaven jowls.

“Are you going digging tomorrow”” he asked.

“Yes, I’ll try to find the grave of Pauquatoag. And you?”

“I’ll ride north-west about eight miles. There’s a stand of pine that looks good from here.” He scratched his sides and, without a further word, entered his tent and drew down the doorflap.

Since the night chill had come up, I banked the fire and retired to my tent, bringing the few birch rolls with me. By the light of the kerosene lantern I sat for an hour deciphering those of the records which were easily legible.

Although fragmentary, they spoke of the last days of the tribe during the smallpox epidemic, which they believed was a curse levied upon them because of the illicit congress between Pauquatoag’s wife and the colonist. One roll mentioned that at the first sign of smallpox tokens on her body the woman was slaughtered most cruelly and her carcass literally thrown to the dogs. But this gesture of appeasement to the gods was ineffectual—each succeeding roll was covered with drawings of dismembered bodies, the Massaquoit method of depicting death from disease. The living perished even as they keened the dirges for the dead in their birch lodges.

When I found myself drowsing over the records I snuffed the lantern, bedded down, and was immediately asleep. But it was not long after midnight when I suddenly awoke to the feel of Varnum shaking me. In the glare of his battery lantern I could see his rifle glinting in his hand.

“Get up,” he said. “Something’s wrong outside.”

I drew on my leggings and seized my own rifle. In the darkness of the campsite the ashes of the banked fire glowed hotly.

“To the northeast,” Varnum whispered. “Animal noises.”

I listened carefully, straining to hear over the roiling of the Penaubsket, which had risen during the night. When I had retired the only sounds were the metrical chirruping of the crickets and the eerie call of a night-roving whippoorwill. I could still hear only these sounds, and the river. I looked at Varnum and shrugged.

“Wait till the wind swings around,” he said.

The breeze, which had been at our backs, began to turn with excruciating slowness until it cooled our faces as we stared off into the black wood. As its direction shifted, the wind brought with it at first the merest suspicion of a sound on the very edge of audibility, which gradually burgeoned into a high murmur. With a thrill of fear I recognized the sound as a frantic chorus of animal voices.

“Coming this way,” Varnum said. He snapped off the safety on his rifle.

“What’s driving them?” I asked.

“I don’t know—never saw anything like this.”

Even as he spoke the murmur became a steady wail of individual yipping ululations. From the edge of the camp came the noise of bodies thudding through the thickets of scrub pine. We dropped to our knees by the tents, rifles at the ready, just as a wave of small dark shapes burst into the lantern-lit clearing filling the night with a mad chattering as they swept over the ground. Some of the larger animals could not check their momentum and plunged through the fire, sending a plume of sparks through the tops of the pines and hemlocks. Missing their grips on the dark branches above, squirrels dropped into the light, then scurried in confusion back into the total darkness. Under the press of bodies the two tents collapsed. Loose gear was thrown about the camp and into the thickets on the edge of the clear ground. All at once a full-grown buck exploded into the clearing and made for us blindly, his great rack of antlers lowered. We fire simultaneously, and the shock of the slugs lifted the spray from his sides as he leapt high in the air, then thudded dead to the earth. All the animals headed unerringly for the Penaubsket, as if they were being herded to their destruction. Behind us we heard splashings as the first of the wave skittered down the steep banks into the flood. But the noise did not subside—a horrible collective moan, made in the extremities of terror.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the stampede ended. The night was still again, save for the river, the crickets, and the lone whippoorwill. We waited without a word for fifteen minutes, each on one knee, safeties still off and torches out, peering into the forest. Although the air was chill Varnum mopped his brow.

“Did you see anything?” I asked.

“I—I don’t know.” Varnum rose hesitantly and began building up the fire. “For a time I thought I saw something—something blue, like a glow, through the trees. But it was so faint I’m not sure.”

I was baffled. “What could have caused such a flight? There was no fire, no sound except that of the animals. Yet they were running for their lives.”

In the glow of the fire Varnum’s face was haggard.

“Do you really think I look like Prester?” he asked.

“Why—yes. The resemblance is a bit startling. Why do you ask?” There was a macabre oddity about his question in these circumstances. “Never mind—-just a thought.” He laughed, but it was a dry, whickering sound, rooted not in humor but in fear.

For the remainder of the night we sat by the fire, dozing on our rifles, never daring to fall asleep completely. The first timorous glow of dawn through the ground mist rising from the marshes was a welcome sight. With the coming of day we repegged our tents and retired for a few hours’ rest.

By nine o’clock the fat sun had dispelled the forest chill. Varnum approached me as I tightened the harness about the pack horse in preparation for the short trek to the burial ground.

“Say, how much longer do you want to stay here?” His manner lacked the arrogance which had grated on me at other times. As he spoke, his tone was almost supplicating.

“After last night, I’m not sure,” I replied. I had planned to stay at least a week, but now it seems there is something wrong in this forest. The warden should be notified about the animals.”

“But how much longer?” he asked.

“If I can find the grave of Pauquatoag today, we can leave in three days at the very latest.”

“Then I’ll give you a hand,” Varnum said. Apparently his desire to see the timber resources in the area had vanished.

We rode to the burial ground, each sunk in his own thoughts. Varnum was undoubtedly troubled by the wave of animals which had come to a watery end in the Penaubsket. As for myself, I was frankly puzzled and not a little disturbed. As far as I knew, there was nothing in the natural order that could cause such a phenomenon except fire—and in the fungused, dripping underbrush that night there had been no fire, save for the eerie but harmless glows over the fens adjoining the river. Disease organisms could cause such madness, but I knew of none that affected such a large number of species simultaneously. Had I been a zoologist, perhaps I would have exulted over the chance of discovering new information about the behavior of forest dwellers. As a student of ancient records, versed only incidentally in animal lore, I could only stand in awe and bewilderment.

All that second day we worked at the burial ground. I had abandoned my plan of collecting as many of the subsidiary rolls as possible, and instead aimed at locating the grave of Pauquatoag immediately. Varnum and I hammered our iron sounding bars into the flinty soil innumerable times, locating the individual graves by the softness of their contents as contrasted to the density of the surrounding soil. As we probed I noticed that Varnum’s hand trembled as he guided the bar. He swallowed often, and although the day was cool his face and neck were covered with a web of perspiration. The man had a look of doom about him.

It was late afternoon when our probes found an area of soft soil which, because of its size, could only be the grave of an important member of the tribe. As we dug through the layers of decaying pine needles and sterile earth, my conviction grew that this was indeed the grave of Pauquatoag. We removed cache after cache of wampumpeag, the cowrie shell money which paid the spirit’s passage to the next world. Our trowels and shovels uncovered fire-blackened cooking utensils, fine weapons, and the remains of what had been rich ceremonial vestments three hundred years before. But the richest treasure would be the records which chronicled the life of the shaman, his feats, his genealogy, and his death.

With each succeeding foot that we penetrated into the grave Varnum’s tension grew, and was transmitted in part to me. He did not speak, but I could read his anxiety in his jerky motions as he wielded the shovel and in the serious cast of his features. Although I had opened many graves in my researches, I resonated with his emotion. A strange unreasoning pall of fear settled over the burial ground.

We struck the level of ashes in which would be buried the pictographs. The body, or bones, would be just below this. Gently, with a small whisk broom and an old lobster pick, I separated the fragile rolls from their protective crust of ash and handed them to Varnum as he knelt on the lip of the grave. He dropped one and apologized for his clumsiness, saying that he was not himself. And I, kneeling in the mold above the resting place of the greatest of the northeastern tribal sorcerers, was not completely composed myself.

When the rolls were cleaned and packed in their padded boxes I walked to where Varnum was sitting like a dumb man.

“Shall we have a look?”

He nodded and rose with an air of resignation. We re-entered the excavation and with trowels cut into the hardened ash, which the Massaquoits believed would preserve the skeleton for eternity, for any injury to the remains would affect the spirit in the next world. We scraped and sifted through at least a half-yard of the grey ash. Then Varnum’s trowel rang against a granite ledge.

“Oh God,” he whispered to himself, “the bottom.”

I continued digging in my corner of the excavation, trying to uncover some part of the remains. But not a fragment of bone was at the bottom.

“Nothing,” I said quietly. We stared at each other. The layer of ash had been unbroken, the funereal gifts in perfect arrangement, the grave undisturbed for three centuries—and yet, no remains.

Beads of perspiration broke out on Varnum’s brow. The forest at dusk, which had been tranquil, became ominous because of our discovery.

“But bodies just can’t vanish, can they?” asked Varnum, almost pleading.

“There is always a trace,” I said. “Sometimes, if the soil is abnormally acid and water continually leaches down, the bones, the clothing, even metal objects will disintegrate. But the hair always remains. Yards of it, in the case of a woman, since it continues growing for a time after death.”

“There’s no water seepage here,” Varnum said. “The grave bottom’s on a granite shelf, and there’s no hair at all. Almost as though there never were a body.”

“Ridiculous—these Indians did not make mock graves. This one is genuine, but, inexplicably, something has happened to the remains. I’ve never encountered such a thing before.”

We rose in the ashen light. “We’ve done all we can here,” I said. “During the next two days I’ll clean the rolls further and pack them in preservative for the trip back. Then we’ll fill the grave and leave Pauquatoag for the paleontologists. We must get back to Dunstable and notify the authorities about that stampede last night.”

Varnum helped me to strap the record containers securely to the back of the pack horse. We rode back to the tents, arriving a few minutes before universal darkness settled over the wood. Against the possibility of another stampede we decided to stand watches through the remainder of the nights we would be on the camping ground.

During the next two days I was continually busy preparing the records for transport back to Dunstable and, eventually, the British Museum. Every particle of ash which might abrade the delicately figured surface of each roll had to be teased away. A coating of paraffin was applied to protect the dry birchbark from the atmosphere. This would suffice until a more durable preservative could be used.

Despite my preoccupation with the rolls, I could not overlook a progressive deterioration in Varnum’s morale. On the evening of our discovery at the grave he had suffered nightmares all through his sleep. Sitting on watch, I could hear him moaning and speaking unintelligibly to some unknown adversary. When he came on watch he was obviously unrested and bore a harried expression about his eyes which only first light would dispel.

On the second evening his discomfort was worse. I decided to wake him, since the sounds which issued from his throat were scarcely human.

“It’s—it’s the same as last night,” he gasped, blinking in the light from my lantern. “I can see myself asleep in the tent, and you sitting on watch—but there’s something else there beyond the clearing, something which is slowly moving in towards the tents. And you can’t see it, but it’s there, coming for—for me!”

The man was almost hysterical. In view of his condition I decided to stand his watch for him, and so administered a sedative from the medical kit which I hoped would at least quiet the terrible sounds and cries he had been making. When he fell back to sleep I took a turn around the fringe of the clearing, then returned to my seat by the fire.

For a time, wrapped in my blanket, I contemplated to try at deciphering the records of Pauquatoag, but the light from the embers was feeble. In retrospect I doubt that I could have long concentrated on the pictographs, given the situation. My mind was occupied with thoughts of the unnatural fear which hung over Dunstable and this forest—the unspoken fear of the townsmen at the mere mention of penetrating north of the lumbering camps; the bizarre sight of animal bodies circling aimlessly in the eddies of the millpond; the insane, chattering flight of the animal horde through the forest and into the Penaubsket. And now, our failure to find a trace of the shaman in his virgin, untouched grave.

With an effort of will I forced my mind away from these thoughts since there in the ruddy glow of the dying fire I found myself becoming mortally afraid. I was a grown man, only a few years away from the slaughter of Belleau Wood. I had been afraid there yet had never betrayed the emotion since I was among my fellows. With the romanticism of a nobler age we thought we were all marked for death, and so resigned ourselves. But there in that black forest where each breath brought the taste of mold, there was no flashing cannonade or shrapnel warbling into trenches or bullets thudding through the olive drill of uniforms—only the steady dripping of the leaves, the smell of unknown centuries of decay and dissolution, and the unbearable silence. Although I trust no human group above the size of a British Infantry platoon, that night I longed for the babble of a crowd.

To compose myself I reached inside my pack and drew out the dog-eared copy of the works of Alexander Pope, my beloved Pope, whose graceful verse had solaced me on many such a watch. I hunched in my blanket against the fire, rifle at my knee, and almost pushed the sense of foreboding from my mind. It was two hours before dawn, and I had just finished “Windsor Forest”, when the pain began.

Without warning I was in the extremities of agony. Every joint, nerve, and organ writhed under a pain so intense it was exquisite. I bit my tongue and tasted blood as the volume slipped from my fingers. Entirely paralyzed I began to fall forward, afire in a frenzy of pain and fear but unable to scream and hardly to breathe. The brief interval of my fall seemed a day; although my mind was numbed a small, cold faculty dispassionately and at great speed reviewed the possible causes of my agony—a cerebral hemorrhage? An injury to the spinal cord, grievously damaging the major nerve bundles? A crushing blow to the cerebellum? With damp moss against my cheek I lay facing Varnum’s tent across the fire, almost mad with the spasms which tettered up and down my limbs. “My God,” I thought, “is this the end?”

And then, on the periphery of my vision, sliding in across the fringe of the clearing, soundlessly, inexorably, came the damned Thing. A cold blue glow, a lurid phosphorescence which gave no warmth to the night which enveloped it. It crossed the open space, my pain increasing with its approach. But no merciful unconsciousness came. The nimbus passed through the fire while not an ember stirred, not a spark rode the column of warm air. Ignoring me, it made for Varnum’s tent, from which came the sounds of a sleeper in the throes of a horrid dream, the mumbled cries of a mind battling a hideous foe.

As I listened, lying mute like a felled animal, the cries changed in timbre and Varnum was awake. The glow hovered over, then invested the entire tent, its unearthly light playing over the canvas and ropes like St. Elmo’s Fire in the rigging of a ship. The door flap burst open and Varnum bolted out, naked to the waist, clawing his flesh and the air as the radiance settled around him. On his chest and arms the muscle bundles were twitching and cramping spasmodically. From his frantic screams I knew he shared the agony in which I lay. Frenziedly he ran through the fire, setting his leggings ablaze in a vain attempt to outrun his tormentor.

“Grail, for the love of God, help me!” he cried. He wore the glow like a cloak; his limbs pulsated with an unholy light and thrashed about like those of a madman.

With a sudden shock that rose even above my numbing pain I realized that Varnum was headed toward the river. He passed out of my field of vision as his agonized screams were joined by the crackling of underbrush. I tried to move my arms, to grasp my rifle, to seize a brand from the fire—anything to relieve my terror through action. But I was paralyzed as surely as if my spinal cord were severed. I could only lie sobbing as the wails grew more distant, finally vanishing under the roar of the flooding Penaubsket. With the knowledge that Varnum now shared the fate of the stampeding animals, blessed unconsciousness came.

* * *

I revived shortly before dawn, groggy at first, then wide awake. The paralysis and pain had left me; now I experienced a wild desire to run, to leave the damned campsite. I loped to the brush near the river and lay amid the wet leaves expecting the reappearance of the awful Thing at any moment. Thoughts of Prester Varnum, the curse of Pauquatoag on the Varnum house, and the empty grave seethed through my mind, dominated by the image of that inexorable blue nimbus moving across the clearing and through the fire like a mad surrealist’s rendering of the Angel of Death.

With the coming of dawn I returned to the campsite and hurriedly packed the more important gear and the precious rolls, leaving the tents and utensils to rot away. I paused briefly at the burial ground to pack the few cases of unprocessed rolls I had left there. Then I rode headlong through the forest, toward Dunstable, as fast as the pack horses and Varnum’s riderless mount would permit.

A cloying fear hung over the town where I arrived after a two-day journey. Work had halted at the mill. The inhabitants gathered in tight knots along the main street. At the police office the Sheriff of Sussex County was talking with the district coroner. Varnum’s body had been found that morning in the millpond, borne like the animal corpses on the flood of the Penaubsket.

Given the circumstances of his death, I chose to edit my statement—the events of that night seemed too fantastic to be believed. Accordingly, I reported that I had heard Varnum screaming in the underbrush as he ran toward the river, and that he had apparently tumbled down the bank in his frenzy and drowned.

The officials received my statement with no sign of disbelief. We walked to the local undertaking parlor to view the corpse. Although in the water for only thirty-six hours, the body was badly mangled from snagging on obstacles in the Penaubsket. However, it was unmistakeably Varnum, but with the remains of his face twisted into an uncannily ironic smile, a true risus sardonicus. The areas of unscratched flesh were covered with numerous reddish weals and puckers.

The coroner saw me stiffen at the sight of the marks. He tapped the cold flesh with his pencil. “Bee stings,” he said. “He must have tramped down on a bee nest, and run from them down the bank into the river.” His tone was that of a man disbelieving his own diagnosis. I nodded my head in false agreement, for I had seen such marks once in Alexandria. They were unmistakeably the first tokens of smallpox.

On the following morning I ended my stay in Dunstable, not wishing to remain for the funeral of a man who had perished in such a loathsome manner before my eyes. As I sat in the passenger coach lurching southward toward Boston and civilization, I mused over the events at the burial ground as if they were dreams remembered from the delirium of an illness. But they were real enough, as real as the pictographs in the baggage car, recording the extinction of the tribe and the curse on the Varnum house. Thinking of this I wondered who would believe me if I ever let it be known that on the morning after Varnum’s death, while collecting the rolls at the burial ground, I saw at the very bottom of the open grave a faint area of bone-colored powder outlining the form of a man, and knew that after three centuries, Pauquatoag of the Massaquoits had come to rest.