The Fiddle is the Devils Instrument Page 14

  “What did it say?”

  The inspector glanced at his hands, and I suppose I was surprised that they were not shaking. Then he looked back at me.

  “I can’t be sure, of course, for I only heard the barest whisper. But I thought it said three words…

  “‘Not…yet…ripe.’”

  THE WIND PASSES LIKE A FIRE

  When the wind comes to the city, it blows dry…and hot. It creeps up quietly. Sneaking up behind you, like a thief or an old friend. Sometimes it tickles your senses, caresses your neck. Other times it hits hard, like a slap in the face. It brings the smell of heat, the taste of dust. It nuzzles your legs like kittens. It nips at your heels like dogs. It pats you on the back, it rubs you on the stomach. It surrounds you, envelops you, embraces you. Makes you sweat.

  That's how it was that summer, like all summers, when it came. Slowly at first. Trickling down the mountains, dancing down Mulholland, sweeping through its dark corners, its hidden places. Loping down Sunset and Cahuenga. Furtively, secretly. But then with a roar, a howl. The wind came, like it always did. But that summer, it was different.

  The wind carried more than the dust, more than the heat. It brought a shadow, a cloak of fear, a shroud of secrets. We all heard it. Heard its murmured warnings, its whispered cries. Then we saw it.

  On the news, at first. And when we saw the stories our first reaction was laughter and smiles. A joke, it seemed, hallucinations of drug-addled minds. Reports of a wild animal in the hills, they said. The Beast of La Brea some called it, mostly in jest. But then they stopped laughing.

  It was the animals that were struck first. Starting with the small ones. The birds, the squirrels. And then the dogs and cats. Disappeared without a trace. Without blood, without remains, without struggle, without sound. No one ever saw who or what did it. No one ever knew where the victims went.

  There were rumors, of course. Twice told tales. A girl might mention that her best friend’s boyfriend swore he saw a shadow move across his backyard, the night the family dog went missing. Probably a coyote, someone would reply. And that was good enough for a while. But then it wasn't just dogs and cats.

  It seemed I overheard a different story every day. In cafes and coffee shops, in beauty parlors and boutiques.

  “Did you hear about the Johnsons?” they'd ask.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Gone? Where did they go?”

  “Nobody knows. One day they were there, the next they weren’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what I said. One day they were there. Becky Johnson went to school. Dave Johnson went to work. Alice Johnson stayed home. The next day, they didn't.”

  “Did someone call the police?”

  “Of course someone called the police.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They don't know. They say that when they got to their house, everything was in order. Nothing was out of place. They even fixed breakfast.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Yeah. If you believe what you hear, the coffee was still hot.”

  “That's impossible.”

  “I just know what I hear.”

  And so it went. I'd walk down the street, my street, in Silver Lake, like I did every summer. The wind would blow around me, tickle my senses, carry me along like a kite on a string. But every day it seemed the people on the street were just a little bit fewer, just a little bit less. Where they went, I didn't know. Whether they hid in their houses in fear, cowering behind locked doors. Or whether there was no one left to cower.

  There was an old man. He used to stand on the corner of Griffith Park and Hyperion and sell fresh fruit. Some days it seemed like he was the only one left.

  “Business is slow,” he'd say. “Business is slow, and I think it's gonna get slower.”

  “Why do you say that?” I'd ask. He'd just chuckle.

  “You know as well as I. Look around. Where are they going?”

  “Away, I guess.”

  “That much's certain. It's the wind, you know.”

  “The wind?”

  “It came down different this year.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just came down different. Like it had a purpose. Like it had a hunger. It'll take us all, I suppose. The wind. Before it's gone.”

  “But it's just the wind,” I pleaded.

  “Ain't it always just the wind? Or is that just what we tell ourselves. When we hear or see something we can't explain. But sometimes…sometimes it's more.”

  The next day, the old man was gone.

  But the wind remained. Blowing through the empty roads, the alleys. Swirling in deserted parks. Parading down abandoned subway tunnels. No one to kiss. No one to touch. No one but me.

  I don't know why it’s left me. Don’t know what I'll do now, either. I went to my old school yesterday. There was no one there. No teachers. No students. No parents. Truth is, my mom and dad disappeared a week ago. They didn't leave a note. They didn't even take the car. I guess I didn't want to believe it, not at first. There's no denying it now.

  The electricity still works. The plant's running on its own. But how long will that last? How long can it? It'll go soon. And when it does, the world will go dark. But the wind still knows the way.

  I turn on the TV every now and then, just to see. There's nothing on, of course. You might have thought there would have been an emergency broadcast at least, but there's not. Whether it happened so slow that no one noticed or whether the world didn't want to see, it all ended with a whimper, not a bang. Just the blank blackness of electricity on a screen.

  Truth is, I don't know if there is anyone else left in all the world. I took the car yesterday to the city. Right to the heart of it. I don't know what I thought I would find. But I know what I hoped to see. Death, destruction, blood. Signs of a disaster. A disaster I could understand. A disaster my mind could take. But that's not what I saw. Not at all.

  It was quiet, empty, and perfectly in order. It was as if the city went to sleep and never woke up. The same as everywhere else. Perfect silence, perfect stillness. Except for the wind. Running down the streets. Brushing through the palms.

  I didn't come back till it was almost dark. As I pulled the car into the drive, I thought I saw a shadow move behind me. I tried to make it out, as much as you can with a shadow. Can't say I saw much, but I guess my mind made up for what I couldn't see. And in my mind, I saw a beast. A great stalking terror. With massive shoulders, loping on all fours. Fiery eyes and sharp teeth.

  “It's just the wind,” I murmured to myself. Just the wind, blowing through my mind. Casting shadows on my soul.

  I don't know what I'll do now. I guess I'll wait. The same fate awaits all men, right? In the end? I guess the same fate awaits me, too. When will it come? I don't know. Why does it wait? I can't say. But I do know this.

  When the wind comes to the city, it blows dry…and hot.

  THE LOST CLASS OF MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY

  Let me set the scene. The year is 1715. Queen Anne’s War has concluded only a couple years before. The raiding of two nearby Wampanoag villages by Arkham militia ended native resistance, but not their thirst for revenge or the suspicion the white settlers hold for them. A cloud lays over Arkham: of doubt, of anger, of fear. It is into this dark miasma that twenty students entered when they came to Miskatonic that season, looking forward to a year of academic delights, blissfully unaware of the doom that hung over them. Everything came to a head on All Hallows Eve.

  I’ll start with what we know, or at least, what history teaches us. The official record comes from a sensational story printed in the Boston News-Letter on November 12. That story paints a graphic picture of a violent storm that had befallen Arkham on the evening of October 31. It was late in the season for such a storm, yet it raged from the falling of the sun till its rising. When the storm cleared on the mo
rning of the first, Arkham men who had gone out to survey the damage stumbled upon an unusual scene at Miskatonic College. The professors were in a state of panic. Having left their homes to check on the twenty students who were in attendance that year, they could find no one. Not on the grounds. Not in their living quarters. None of the students had turned up in the town proper, either.

  The Arkham men conducted their own search. They found nothing out of place in any of the students’ rooms. No signs of struggle. No evidence of break-ins. It was as if they simply disappeared.

  Arkham and College authorities fathomed only one conclusion—the local natives, the Wampanoag, had come under cover of storm and spirited away the students. A raiding party was formed, and Wampanoag villages burned. But no trace was ever found of the boys.

  It’s strange, then, that Miskatonic has never acknowledged the fate of the class of 1715, never erected a monument to those who perished, never memorialized their names. In fact, you can find no record of the events, save in the tattered pages of the Boston News-Letter archives. Some claim that the truth is far less romantic, that Miskatonic simply failed to open that year, that ecclesiastical disputes, of all things, led to a strike that was not resolved until the fall of 1716. But how then does one explain that strange story that riveted the people of Boston? True, the press was even less reliable in those days, even more likely to engage in supposition, superstition, and sensationalism. But to make up the story out of whole cloth?

  And that’s the rub, my friends. As Professor Wade has said, there is truth in all legends. I found the truth in a journal, written by one of the Arkham men who came to Miskatonic that dark day, and who found his nights—and his dreams—haunted by what he saw there. The terrible story relayed by the Boston News-Letter? It was wrong all right. It barely scratched the surface of the horror that befell this place.

  The man who wrote the journal was Arthur Belknap. He was a blacksmith, a simple but honorable man who had attained a position of leadership and respect in the community. When the strange mystery of October 31 began to envelop the town of Arkham, he knew it would fall on him to unravel it.

  Belknap wrote that there was no storm that day. That was the first of the inconsistencies. A chill was in the air instead, and from the waters of the Miskatonic a thick fog had rolled in. Nothing unusual about that, not for that time of the year. And yet, Belknap did not like that fog. He could not say why, couldn’t put his finger on it. But he felt it, in his bones, in that deep part of your brain that you best not ignore.

  A ship’s captain would later relate to him that he had seen the birth of that fog as it arose from Arkham Harbor. He had marked it then as an ill omen, more so when he saw it gather at the mouth of the Miskatonic River, gather and then creep inexorably toward the town. Creeping—against the wind.

  The mist spread over Arkham, and the few people who had ventured out that evening fled its coming. Belknap himself took in another man, a tavern keep named Jeremiah Prim, who could not make his own dwelling before the bank of fog overtook him. As he stepped across the threshold, he clasped Belknap on the arms, and in his eyes was a gratitude so deep that Belknap had only seen it one other time in his life, when he pulled a sailor gone overboard from the sea. And yet somehow, even the terror of the deep did not compare to what came stalking down the street just beyond his door.

  In his journal Belknap recorded that as it passed over and around them, he felt for the first time in his life as if he were cut off from God, as if he stood alone against some horror he could not fathom and could never hope to defeat. It was not simply that the fog blocked out the full moon that had risen earlier that night, he wrote. Rather, it was as if that moon no longer hung in the sky above them. As if there was no sky at all, beyond the mist. Or perhaps it was that there was nothing beyond it, that the thick tendrils of gray smoke that seemed to move with a purpose down the cobblestone street, caressing the windows—or licking them even, Belknap had thought with a shudder—had devoured all the world, and would devour them, too.

  Belknap’s mind went back to Exodus, to the ten plagues of Egypt and the Passover, when the angel of death, the finger of a vengeful God, cast his shadow upon the people of the Nile. The old blacksmith knew what he saw that day was something very much like that; death was in the cloud, and any who would open his door and invite that visitor in would not live to close it. But Belknap knew something else, too. It was not God that walked in the shadow. Not his God, at least.

  “’Tis of the devil,” Prim murmured. Belknap did not rebuke him, even if he didn’t precisely agree with him either. The groaning of the timbers above chilled him, and his eyes followed Prim’s to the ceiling. A scrabbling, a scratching, trickled down to them, as of a thousand clawed hands scrambling across the roof. The timbers creaked again, and dust shook down into Belknap’s eyes.

  It’ll never hold, he thought, and then whatever walks—or crawls—above, whatever lives in the cloud, will come to take us. But the beams that Belknap had laid with his own hands did hold, and so did the roof. Just as the night became darkest, a single ray of light cut the mist, shining through Belknap’s window. As quickly as the mist had come, it passed on, and Belknap felt the heaviness, the weight of something immeasurable, lift from him. He walked to the door, grabbed the handle.

  “Wait!” said Prim, fear in his voice.

  “It’s alright. Whatever it was, it is gone now.” He opened the door, and stepped out into the dying light of the day. The streets were empty still, but when Belknap knelt down, he shuddered at what he saw.

  That the markings were tracks was unmistakable. They could not be numbered, such did they spill over each other. But that wasn’t what scared Belknap the most. It was what made the tracks that chilled him. Or, should I say, the fact that he had no idea what made them, that he’d never known anything like them before in all his days in the forests that surrounded Arkham.

  “Look!”

  Belknap followed Prim’s shaking finger. The mist rolled on away from them, down the road. Belknap marveled at it, this dark miracle. It was a wall of black cloud. Sheer, like it was made of stone. And just as impenetrable. It crept away from them, as the last light of the sun died away. Belknap’s mouth fell open. Of all the things he had seen, it was the unnatural luster of the mist—the cold, green glow that brightened as the night descended—that bothered him most.

  “Get McBride,” Belknap said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from the cloud. “The mist moves toward the College. I shall follow it thence. Meet me there.”

  “Follow it?”

  “Go!”

  Prim went, and Belknap took one tentative step after another toward the wall of cloud. And with each of those steps, the mist seemed to move one more step away. That is, until it reached Miskatonic. There, it stopped, settled, swallowed the school whole. Belknap came to within ten feet. He would go no further, could go no further. His feet refused to take him one more step. There he waited for Prim to return with McBride, his friend and the village constable. What he saw and what he heard while he waited would haunt him until his dying day.

  He had known that something walked within the mist. Now, he heard it. He heard them. Mutterings in some unknown tongue. Shrieks, pain-filled and horror-born. Chittering laughter that no human voice could make. But what his ears could hear, his eyes could not perceive; the fog flowed like smoke, and the wind that whipped around Belknap did not move it. It was solid, like marble. But it did show some things.

  Flashes of pallid red light outlining shadowed forms, beasts perhaps, but of no kind Belknap knew, and possessing an unsettling and distinctive hint of humanity. And glowing pinpricks. Eyes, Belknap thought. Thousands of eyes. Yet Belknap knew, knew without doubt in that way men know things even when they shouldn’t, that only one mind controlled them.

  “God in Heaven,” said a quavering voice. Belknap turned to see Prim, returned with McBride. “What devilry…”

  A crackling interrupted h
im. A flash, and the cloud turned orange red as if it burned. Then the sound.

  Each man heard something different. Prim fell to his knees, clutching his ears and wailing in pain. McBride’s face went slack, his mouth moving, and Belknap believed that McBride whispered but a single word—Sara, the name of his wife, dead that summer of the fever.

  At first, Belknap heard nothing. Nothing but the sound of the wind blowing, Prim’s cries, and McBride’s tears. Then in one mad moment, true silence crashed upon him. Leaves rolled along the ground, but made no noise. He could see Prim wail, but could not hear it. McBride shed quiet tears. Had he been struck deaf? Then he heard the voice, and he wished he were deaf, for it said the most terrifying word of them all—his own name.

  “Arthur…” It called to him, and he felt himself drawn. If he’d had a rope around his waist, drawing him into the void, the pull would have been no more irresistible. Belknap took a stumbling step forward, then another. “Arthur!” said the voice, louder, urging. Without warning, he stood mere inches from the solid mass of cloud. He could not hear Prim and McBride calling for him, broken from their trances but unwilling to take one step closer to the fog to pull him back. Belknap reached out a hand. One finger extended. He touched the face of the cloud. Only then did he realize what he’d done.

  Crimson light flashed, and the world shifted. Belknap no longer stood upon a cobbled street of his native Arkham, but upon a beach he did not know, did not wish to know. The sea lay dead, stinking. Belknap retched, vomited onto the moving sand. The beach teamed with flies, worms, maggots, the foot soldiers of death. He stumbled backward, slamming into a wall of stone. But Belknap was not alone. At the edge of the unmoving sea stood a line of figures, black cloaks spilling down their bodies to the writhing ground. Belknap could not see their faces, did not want to see their faces, and if one had turned to him then, he’d have torn out his eyes before he would look upon it. But they did not turn. Their gaze, he knew, was to the heavens.