He tensed, throwing the window open and leaning out, closing his eyes the better to focus attention.
It was almost imperceptible except to senses sharpened like his—almost lost in the overpowering smell of the resins—a faint, sweet, yellow-dusty smell, almost lost, borne on the wind....
The Ghost Wind! Pollen of a plant which flowered erratically only once in several seasons—was released in enormous quantities, scattering its scent and queer hallucinogenic qualities from the valleys to the heights; blessedly rare, it produced euphoria and a queer drunkenness and, occasionally, if one breathed too much of it, brain damage in men. It released the animal instincts of rage and fear and anger, sending men cowering in corners or raving on the hills. But into the nonhumans it went deeper, penetrating into their strange brains and releasing very old things, very terrible things.... The catmen would howl and strike and kill wantonly, and the Ya-men—when it reached the Ya-men—
He moved fast. He was not Barron now; he was not conscious of himself or who or what he was, he knew only that he must act to warn the others at the station, to warn the men in the valleys to take shelter. It would not be strong enough for any ordinary nose to smell for two or three more hours, and by that time the rangers would be too far from the station to take shelter, and the nonhumans would already be out and ravening. By the time the Ghost Wind was strong enough to affect humans it might even be too late to take shelter.
His vision was blurring. He closed his eyes, the better to let his feet find their way around, and ran down the stairs. He heard someone call to him in an unfamiliar language, pushed past and ran on.
The beacon. He might light the beacon! He did not know the alarm systems here but the beacon would certainly alert everyone to danger. There was a fire burning in the lower hall, he could feel its heat on his face. He bent over, carefully reaching, picked out a long stick blazing at one end and cool and charred at the other. He ran with it in his hand out the door and across the graveled horse path and the lawn; almost falling into the ditch around the beacon, he thrust the blazing torch into the tinder-dry wood and leaped back as it flamed up and a tall column of fire reared to the sky. Then someone yelled at him, hands were gripping him, and Colryn was demanding, as he held him in a steel-strong grip, “Barron, damn you, have you gone mad? That’s going to rouse the countryside! If you were a Darkovan, you’d be hanged on the spot for raising a false fear!”
“False fear be——” he swore atrociously. “The Ghost Wind! I smelled it! By night it will be everywhere!”
His face slowly blanching, Colryn stared at him. “The Ghost Wind? How do you know?”
“I smelled it, I tell you! What do you do here to rouse the countryside for taking shelter?”
Colryn looked at him, only half believing but gripped by his obvious sincerity. “The beacon will alert them,” he said, “and I can signal with the mirror, after which they will ring bells in the villages. We have a good alarm system here. I still think you’re insane, I don’t smell it at all, but then for all I know you could have a better nose than mine. And I won’t take a chance on letting the Ghost Wind—or the Yamen—get anyone.” He shoved Barron out of his way. “Look where you’re going! Damn it, what’s the matter, are you
blind
? You’ll be in the ditch in a minute!” He forgot Barron again, and ran toward the station for the signaling device. Eyes closed, Barron stood listening to the beacon crackle. He was aware of the pungency of the burning beacon and through it, the growing, sick scent of the pollen-laden Ghost Wind blowing from the heights.
After a while, still disoriented, he turned and made his way, on faltering feet, inside the station. Colryn was on the tower, signaling. Paradoxically, the thing which surprised Barron most was that he was not surprised at himself; he had a vague sense of split selfhood, in the same sort of divided, underwater consciousness that he had felt once or twice before.
The next hour was insane confusion: shouts and voices, bells beginning to ring in the villages below, and the rangers at the station running about on errands they didn’t bother explaining. He kept his eyes closed against further disorientation and kept out of the way. It seemed natural to sit by while others acted; he had done his part. Presently men came riding up the slope in crazy haste and he became aware that Larry had come in and was standing with Colryn in front of him.
“What happened?”
“He smelled the Ghost Wind,” Colryn said tersely.
“And in good time,” Larry said. “Thank the gods we have warning. I had just barely begun to wonder if I smelled it myself when I heard the bells and ordered everyone back—but it’s still so faint I can hardly make it out! How did you know?” he demanded. Barron did not answer, but only shook his head. After a little while Larry went away.
He thought,
I have done a foolish thing; before, he only suspected something strange, but now he will know, and if he does not, Valdir will. Valdir is Comyn and he will know exactly what has happened.
I don’t care what they do to the Earthman, but I must get away. I should have kept quiet and escaped in the confusion of the Ghost Wind.
But I couldn’t let them all go through that danger; and Lerrys would have been caught on the hills. I owe him something. There is a blade between us.
Nothing human will dare to move in these mountains tonight. I must lie low and keep from attracting any more attention to Barron until then.
And then—then I must be gone, long gone, before Valdir comes!
CHAPTER EIGHT
It seemed eternities that he watchfully waited, that curious doubled consciousness keeping him nerve-strained, but holding himself back from being noticed. He kept out of the way while the men at the station hurried around, making all secure as the wind rose higher, screaming around the corners of the station and the fire tower. The sickish smell grew stronger by the moment and he fancied he could feel it penetrating to the rest of his nose, into the brain, subtly eating away at his humanity and his resolution.
Nor were the others unaffected; at one point Colryn stopped in his work of nailing heavy shutters tight and bent over, crouching, his arms wrapped round his head as if in terrible pain. He began a low, crazy moaning. Gwynn, hurrying through the room on some errand or other, saw him there, went to him, knelt beside him, put an arm around his shoulders and talked to him in a low, reassuring voice, until Colryn shook his head violently as if to clear it of something. Then he stood up and swung his arms, swore, thanked Gwynn and went on with his work.
The man who was not sure at the moment whether he was Dan Barron or someone else, stayed where he was, fighting for self-control; but he was not unaffected. As the wind rose and the smell of the Ghost Wind grew stronger, strange images spun in his mind—primordial memories laden with fear and terror—frightening hungers. Once he jerked upright from a waking nightmare of kneeling over a prone man, tearing at his throat with his teeth. He shuddered, rose and began to walk feverishly around the room.
When all was secure they sat down to food, but no one ate much. They were all silent, all tormented by the rising scream of the wind, which tore at their ears and their nerves, and by the spinning of vague hallucinatory images in their eyes and their minds. Barron kept his eyes closed. It seemed easier to eat that way, without the unfamiliar distraction of sight.
Halfway through the meal, the faraway shrieking began; a high, keening, space-filling howl and yelp that rose higher and higher, through the audible frequencies, and seemed to go on even after it could be heard no more.
“Ya-men,” said Gwynn tersely, and let his knife drop to the table with a clatter.
“They can’t get into the station,” Colryn said, but he didn’t sound sure. No one after that made much more than a pretense at eating, and before long they left the food and dishes uncleared on the table and went into the shuttered and barricaded main room of the station. The yelping and howling went on—at first distant and intermittent, then constant and close. Eyes closed, Barron saw in his mind’s eye a ring of towering plumed forms, raging and shrieking and hurling themselves, in a maddened dance, around the peak of the hill.
Once Colryn tried to drown out the sound by beginning a song; but his voice died away, halfway through the first verse.
The night wore on. Toward the deepest part of the darkness, the pounding and banging began; it sounded as if a heavy form hurled itself, again and again, against the barred doors, and fell back, howling with bruised, insensate rage. Once begun, it went on and on, until their nerves were screaming.
Once Larry said low in the darkness, “I wonder what they’re really like? It seems hell that the only time they come out of the deep woods, they’re maddened—and we can’t communicate with them.”
Gwynn said, with bleak humor, “I’ll unbar the door, if you want to try a little nonhuman diplomacy.”
Larry shuddered and was still. Colryn said, “Upstairs in the lens-grinding room there’s a glass window. We could get a look at them from there.”
Gwynn refused, with a shudder, and so did the other rangers; but Colryn, Larry and Barron went up the stairs together. It was something to do. At this height, the window had not been covered or barricaded. They did not light the lamp, knowing the light would attract the howling nonhumans outside. They went to the glass and, cupping their hands around their eyes, peered through.
Outside, though he had expected it to be dark and stormy, it was clear moonlight—one of the rare nights on Darkover when rain and fog had not blotted out the moons. The air seemed filled with swirling dust, through which he saw the Ya-men.
They were hugely tall, nine feet at least, and looked like tall emaciated men, wearing plumed head-dresses, until he saw their faces. They had huge heads and terrible beaked faces like strange birds of prey, and they moved with a clumsy swiftness that was like the wind-tossed branches of the trees which dipped and surged at the edge of the clearing. There were at least three dozen of them, it seemed, and perhaps more. After a little, as if by common consent, the men turned away from the window and went down the stairs again.
Barron, about to follow them, remained behind. The strangeness was growing in him again. Something turning like a thermostat in his brain told him that the tide of the Ghost Wind had turned. There was no change in the slamming noise of the wind, nor in the howling of the nonhumans, but he
knew.
They will be gone long before dawn. The wind will die and there will be rain. Only the mad and the desperate travel on Darkover by night, but I—perhaps I am both desperate and mad.
An enormous crash, and cries from downstairs, told him that the slamming attack of the nonhumans had crashed an outbuilding. He did not go down to investigate; it was not his affair. Silently, moving like an automaton, he went in the darkness to the chest of drawers where he kept his clothing: He discarded the thin indoor garments he was wearing, put on leather riding breeches, a thick woven shirt and a heavy tunic. He slipped into Colryn’s room and appropriated the man’s heavy, fur-lined cloak. He had a long way to ride and a cloak was better than a jacket. He regretted that he must steal a horse, but if he lived, it would be returned or paid for, and if not, he reminded himself of the mountain proverb, “when Eternity comes all will be understood and forgiven.”
He cocked a practiced ear; the wind was definitely quieting. In another hour the Ya-men would be gone, the restless impulse that had led them there entirely gone; they would waken to terror and strangeness and creep timidly back to their caves and nests in the deepest woods.
The poor devils must feel damn near as strange as I do.
The slamming of the wind was subsiding and even in the incessant howling there were gaps now, intervals grew wider and finally lessened to nothing. Peering through the glass, he saw that the clearing was empty. Not more than half an hour after that, he heard the other men coming up to the large room where they slept. Someone called, “Barron, are you all right?” He froze, then made himself answer in a sleepy, resentful mutter.
In a few more minutes a silence lay over the fire station, broken only by the snores of exhausted men in the far room, and the rattle of occasional branches in the dying wind. Peering through the glass, he saw that fog was rising. There would be rain and it would lay the last traces of the poison from the Ghost Wind.
All was quiet, but nevertheless he waited another hour, to dispel the chance that one of the men, sleeping lightly after fear and tension, would waken and hear him. Then, moving with infinite caution so that the stairs would not creak beneath him, he stole downstairs. He made up a parcel of food from the leavings on the table. They had left the doors barricaded, but it was no great trouble to unfasten the bars and take them down.
He was outside, in the bitter cold and fading moonlight of the mountain night.
He had to find a clawed tool to unfasten the bars they had nailed over the door of the stable, and in order to use it, confused by its unfamiliar weight in his hand, he had to close his eyes and let the inner reflexes take over. He thanked his fate that the stable was at some distance from the house, otherwise the racket he made as he wrestled with the heavy boards would certainly have wakened even such weary sleepers, and they would have come down raising an outcry against thieves. He got them loose and stole inside.
The stable was warm, dark and friendly-familiar with the smell of horses. He shut his eyes to saddle up the horse; it was easier to handle the harness that way. The beast recognized him and neighed softly and he began to talk to it soothingly in an undertone. “Yes, fellow, we have a long ride tonight, but quiet, do you hear? We must get away quietly. Not used to going in the dark, are you? Well, I am, so don’t you worry about that.”