Spawn of the Winds Read online

  And Juanita was right; Tracy Silberhutte was on board Hank’s plane. Later we were to discover how she came to be there, but not for a period of some four months. In the meantime Juanita, no longer of any telepathic value and having no desire to become an agent of the Wilmarth Foundation, went back to Monterrey. Search parties, both aerial and on foot, scoured the area north of Hank’s last known position but found nothing; it was as if the plane had been lifted from the face of the Earth.

  Then, late in May, when I was busy organizing my expedition to the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, Juanita returned to Miskatonic. Her arrival was as unexpected as her personal appearance was changed. She looked as though she had not had a wink of sleep in a week. She was distraught, haggard; when she saw me she threw herself into my arms and began babbling hysterically and incoherently. Plainly she had received a terrific shock.

  I immediately ordered that a sedative be administered and that she be put to bed. Even under sedation, however, she rambled on about Hank, about his being alive somewhere, and about the terrible winds that blow between the worlds and the thing that walks those winds, often carrying its victims with it out of this place and time into alien voids.

  When the effects of the sedative wore off, experts at the University verified that she was indeed in contact with someone; but while they were able to detect the phenomenon of telepathic communication, they were completely at a loss as to whom exactly she was talking to. There was only one thing to do and that was to accept what she said as truth.

  It was at this point, too, that one of my “hunchmen”—a member of a team of psychically aware specialists, the scientifically enlightened counterparts of medieval mediums and spiritualists—asked me a rather strange question. Quite casually, he stopped me to ask if Hank Silberhutte had ever been an astronaut.

  I might normally have laughed but was in no mood. Instead I told him curtly that no, Silberhutte had never been an astronaut—what was this, some sort of macabre riddle? He answered in these words, which I will always remember:

  “No riddle, Professor, and no offense intended but after all I am a hunchman. And I’ll tell you something; I’d bet a month’s salary that it is Hank Silberhutte who’s trying to contact Miss Alvarez. And one other thing wherever he’s transmitting from, it’s no part of this Earth!”

  On the morning of June 3 Juanita began picking up a very clear telepathic transmission. The following narrative, relayed through her mind from incredible and unknown voids of space and time, was recorded exactly as she received it.

  Part One

  I

  Winds of the Void

  (Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)

  I’m sorry about that, Juanita, I realize now that it must have given you a terrific jolt to receive what must have seemed like messages from a dead man. But I’ve been trying to reach you ever since we got here three months ago, and—

  You say it’s been four months? Well, that tells me something; it took us a month to get here. And during that month we were all dead to the world except for Tracy, who had the stone, and of course poor Dick Selway, the pilot. He was just … dead. I’m not being callous, Juanita, but it’s been three pretty hellish months for us, one way or another, and we’ve seen enough of death in that time to—

  We? Yes, Tracy, Jimmy Franklin, Paul White and myself. All right, I’ll go right back to square one for you, Juanita—back to where I cut you off when I thought that Ithaqua was going to flatten the plane against that mountain … .

  Oh, I knew we were done for, no doubt about it. And that damned … Thin! He was massive enough when we first spotted him—shapeless, writhing like disturbed smoke, big as a building—but when he has a mind to he can simply, well, expand. He was just starting to puff himself up when be caught hold of the plane with a hand black as night, five-fingered but like a bird’s claw, with talons instead of fingers, and his strength was unbelievable.

  I thought he intended to crush us; I actually saw the inner wall of the fuselage starting to buckle as he tightened his grip. But then he lifted us up into the sky, way up above those clouds, and for an instant he paused in that position. Juanita, I admit that when he did that I just closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and prayed. And I’m not a man that prays too often.

  That was when Tracy grabbed me. Scared to death, all tears and snuffles, just like when she was a little kid sister. She threw her arms around my neck, and I felt the star-stone pressed between us.

  I hadn’t realized it but the thing outside the plane must have been listening and watching inside my head. He pounced on the picture of that star-stone right there in my mind, stared for a split second—then threw it straight back, withdrawing his mind from mine completely. Only after he had gone was I sure he’d ever been there.

  Now, I suppose you caught his thoughts when he was—laughing?—just before he grabbed the plane? Well, I’ve since learned that his mind-talk can only be picked up when he’s really angry or, yes, frightened. Even then, though, his thoughts can’t positively be interpreted. But still I somehow knew that when the great beast saw the star-stone in my mind it had shocked him rigid, frightened him. And it had made him angry!

  He was snarling and mewling in a frenzy of frustration and rage. I guessed right away then that he couldn’t hurt us, not directly at any rate, and for the first time since I joined the Foundation I really appreciated the power of the five-pointed stars. Think of it—a thing that can walk on the wind, an alien monster from God only knows what infinities of space and time—and a little star-shaped stone from Miskatonic’s kilns rendered him powerless to harm us. Almost.

  No, he couldn’t directly hurt us any worse than he had already, but he certainly didn’t intend to let us off lightly.

  By then I think Dick Selway was already dead. He’d cracked his head against the control panel and there was blood everywhere; he just hung limp, trapped in the pilot’s seat. Still, even with Dick gone, if Ithaqua had let go of the plane right then—which I thought he was going to for a second—I think that perhaps I could have landed her. And I believe the horror outside picked that little fact right out of my head, too. Only he had worked it out differently.

  After being hoisted up to the sky, I had fallen back away from the gun in the nose; now Paul White, hunchman and photographer, made it up there hand over hand and checked Dick Selway’s pulse. Whitey cursed softly and pushed Dick’s body over to one side, then wedged himself against the gun. He had taken all the pictures he wanted; now he wanted something else.

  Jimmy Franklin was still on the radio but getting nowhere; the aerial must have been ripped away. And so Whitey started hammering away with the tracers, hitting the Wind-Walker almost point-blank right in those eyes of his. And all he got for his pains was a shower of harmless sparks from somewhere at the back of Ithaqua’s head.

  Then the creature was off with us, loping across the Arctic skies in lengthening strides that took us even farther north and farther—up! The ice-wastes fell away beneath the plane as we rose into the sky ever faster; the acceleration was tremendous and I was slammed against the buckled wall of the fuselage with Tracy still in my arms.

  Whitey, shaken loose from the gun, whirled by us and fell down into the tail section as the whole plane suddenly tilted. Before I blacked out I managed to clear the frost from one of the windows. Looking out I saw a black sky, and away and below I could plainly make out the curve of the Earth.

  Yes, frost on the windows, Juanita. That started the moment Ithaqua grabbed us; ice formed on the inside as well as the outside of the plane, but without making us feel any normal sort of chill. Oh, yes, it was a strange cold. Not merely the subzero temperatures of Arctic climes but an iciness unique in Ithaqua and the weird ways he treads. It was the bitter chill of the winds that blow between the worlds.

  From then on until we touched down on the littered plains of Borea—beneath vast, pitted triplet moons that hung low over the plateau on the horizon, eternally frozen in a starl
ess sky—Whitey, Jimmy and I were unconscious. Yes, for a whole month, it seems. Some sort of deep-frozen suspended animation, I suppose. But not Tracy.

  Oh, she passed out initially, but later she regained consciousness while we were still en route. She didn’t know that right off, though, for there was no sensation of movement or acceleration. She believed that we were down somewhere in the mountains; coming from outside was an eerie whine or hum, like the thin winds of high peaks. The inside of the plane was all white with frost; the windows were completely iced over and opaque; she could detect no sign of life in any of us and our bodies were heavily rimed witch frost. Poor kid, she could hardly be blamed for thinking that we were all dead.

  Yet in a way she was lucky, too, because the door of the plane was frozen shut, and though she put everything she could into getting it open it simply wouldn’t budge. God knows what might have happened if she had opened that door!

  It was when she realized that she couldn’t get out of the plane that Tracy panicked and tried to smash one of the windows in the nose. Well, she could make no impression on the window either, but she did manage to clear the frost and ice away from an area of the glass. And so she looked out.

  Picture it for yourself, Juanita: to be in a plane full of icy corpses, like the interior of some weirdo outsize freezer, listening to a strange rushing hum, like a distant wind blowing through a thousand telegraph wires. To know the nightmare of being lost and alone, trapped in an ice-tomb high in mountain fastnesses. And then to peep out and discover that as bad as your plight might have seemed a moment ago, its terrors could never have equalled the horror facing you now. For staring right back at her, with the plane held at arm’s length in front of him as he flew through the star-voids, was Ithaqua, the Thing that Walks on the Wind!

  Strange starlanes—a hyperspace dimension where inconceivable currents rush and roar in interstellar spaces—and a being of utterly alien energies who knows the ways between the spheres as an eel knows the derelict and weed-strewn deeps of the dark Sargasso. But it wasn’t only this sudden inundating flood of revelation that caused Tracy to faint away on the frosted floor of the plane. Neither that nor the sight of strange stars shooting dizzyingly by—like summer showers of meteorites magnified a thousand times—as Ithaqua hurtled through the void. No, it was the look on the Wind-Walker’s face. It was those eyes, seeming to peel away the metal hull of the plane like tinsel to stare into Tracy’s very soul. For she knew that those eyes saw her even as they narrowed in that inhuman face—and she knew, too, that they had filled suddenly with all the lusts of hell.

  Thinking back to what Tracy told me when I came out of the freeze on Borea, I’m inclined to believe that time must be different for Ithaqua when he glides along the star winds, and for anything he carries with him. Not slowed down, as might be expected, but accelerated somehow. According to our calculations we’ve been on Borea for three months, and we left Earth four months ago, but Tracy reckons she slept only three or four times during the whole trip. As for myself, I wouldn’t know one way or the other. I do remember dreams—of Tracy’s head on my cold chest and her hands on my face, and her voice, crying out to me about the horror outside the plane.

  But that’s jumping things a bit. I’ll tell it as Tracy told it to me.

  When she came to after her faint it was dark; she’d accidentally knocked off the cabin lights when she slipped down the wall. The control-panel lights were still on though, and she could see well enough in their glow. Deciding to leave the main lights off to conserve the batteries, she set about making herself a sandwich and some coffee.

  That was when she first noticed that despite the ice and frost everywhere she herself was not unbearably cold. And the star-stone about her neck was warm.

  She felt a lot better after a bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee; but she kept well away from the windows and refused even to think about what was outside. And through all this there was no sensation of free-falling, none of the physiological phenomena of spaceflight at all; which leads me to believe that in fact Ithaqua was moving between dimensions.

  Then Tracy noticed another queer thing. She had moved over to sit beside me on the cabin floor, and as she sipped the last of her coffee she saw that my right arm had moved; it had left a clear space in the frost on the rubberized surface of the deck. She caught her breath. I couldn’t be alive, could I? No, not possibly. There I was, white as a snowflake and looking stiff as mutton in a freezer. But putting her ear to my chest Tracy listened breathlessly until she heard a heartbeat. Just one, and then several seconds later, another.

  From then on, except during those periods when she was sleeping, Tracy spent her time frantically trying to rouse me from my strange, frozen sleep; not only me but Whitey and Jimmy, too. Jimmy Franklin lost the skin off his lower lip through Tracy’s ministrations with hot coffee! But for all this she was out of luck and had to be satisfied with the knowledge that at least we were alive when by rights we ought to have been dead.

  The answer, of course, lay in the star-stones of ancient Mnar, but she didn’t know that. Besides the stone she wore about her neck there was one other aboard the plane—in the first-aid cabinet, of all places. That was Paul White’s stone. If it weren’t for those stones we really would have been dead by then, all of us. Only their presence in the plane had forced the Wind-Walker to exercise restraint. The ancient magic of the Elder Gods was still at work.

  Like myself, this was for Whitey his first really active stint with the Wilmarth Foundation, and he had made the same mistake as I had. I had always sort of scorned the star-stones, in the way a greenhorn soldier might scorn a bulletproof vest before he’s seen the terrible mess a bullet can make of a man’s chest—or in my case, before I really knew the kind of horror a Thing that Walks on the Wind might wreak. Whitey, a do-it-by-the-book man, had brought his stone along all right but felt stupid wearing it, so he’d placed it in the plane’s first-aid cabinet out of the way. Dick Selway and Jimmy Franklin, greener in the ways of the CCD even than Whitey and I, hadn’t bothered with their stones at all! And all Tracy knew of these things, of the star-stones, was that the one she wore about her neck, which by then she’d forgotten was there at all, had been my good luck charm, my rabbit’s foot.

  In fact that star-stone was Tracy’s reason for being on the plane in the first place. It was pure coincidence that she had been staying with friends in Edmonton for a few days while I was starting out on Project Wind-Walker. The night before we started the flying program I attended a party at the home other friends. I had a few drinks and must have mentioned something of my preparatory work at the airfield. The next morning when Paul White picked me up, I forgot my star-stone and left it in the room where I had bunked down. Tracy found it. Since she intended to start the long trip back down to our home in Texas that same morning, she decided to go via the airfield and return the stone to me. Driving out to the field, she worked out a little prank to play on me.

  For some time Tracy and my father had been speculating on my work with “The Government,” and now finally her curiosity had gotten the better of her. She saw this situation as a chance to find out what it was all about.

  The Foundation had secured for my team an outlying area of the airport; a fenced-off, run-down, dusty area with its own rather worse-for-wear landing strip. But it was good enough for us and anyway, our plane was no luxury airliner. We had also been supplied with a full-time guard for the gated entrance, though I have to admit that I didn’t brief him well. I was hardly expecting trouble, certainly not Tracy’s sort. She arrived at the gates, told the guard who she was and showed him my star-stone. She said I had forgotten it and she knew I wouldn’t want to go off without it.

  Well, Tracy’s a damned good-looking girl. She probably turned on the charm. And since the guard could have no idea just what she intended to do, I don’t suppose he could really be blamed for letting her in … .

  Delighted with herself that her plan was working out, Tracy parked her c
ar behind a hangar and sneaked over to our plane. She couldn’t mistake it. It was the only one, standing out on the runway close to the hangar. The door was open; she climbed in and tucked herself away in the tail, and that was that.

  Some time later, together with the three legitimate members of my team, I left our headquarters shack at the other side of the field and slung my gear into our jeep. We drove to the plane and boarded. Tracy didn’t show herself until we were airborne and well to the north. And like a fool, after first blowing my stack, I decided to let her stay. To head back then would have been to slow the work down for a whole day, and the team was anxious to get on with the job. In any case, there wouldn’t be a great deal for Tracy to see, would there?

  So that was how she came to be on board, and looking back now I suppose it’s just as well for the rest of us that she was. God only knows what our fate might have been without her. But I’ve been straying a bit, I think.

  After her third or fourth period of sleep, Tracy woke to an unsettling, irritable and unaccustomed feeling quite different from any emotional disturbance she might have expected to suffer in her present circumstances. She felt drawn somehow to the frosted windows, and even began to clear a large area of one of them before she realized what she was doing, but not before the huge form of the horror hurtling through the void outside began to take on an ominous shape through the glass.

  Then Tracy knew that the compulsion she felt and the inner voice she heard in her head insistently demanding that she warm the glass of the window until it cleared to its normal transparency, was not her own but the hypnotically telepathic voice of the being who now rushed with the plane on an unguessable course. And recognizing the fact that she knew him, Ithaqua grew angry. He doubled, then redoubled his mental effort to control her.

  She saw his alien lust clearly in her mind even as she stepped closer to the window, reaching out her warm, trembling zombie hands to the task imposed by the Wind-Walker’s will. And she knew, too, his purpose; to bend her mind, body and soul, completely and everlastingly to his will through those evilly flaring eyes of his, which loomed dully behind an all-too-thin layer of frosted glass.