Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (33 page)

There were perhaps a dozen or so buildings, or what was left of them: a general store here, an eatery/hotel there, a blacksmith’s — the rest were an assortment of small homes. Most of the buildings were partially collapsed and some even had full sized trees growing up from their walls. Everything was covered with a thick blanket of leaves and branches, one house had been completely crushed by a fallen oak. Judson wandered into the center of the village, looking back and forth before deciding to investigate the general store. He could tell it was a store by the large frames of windows whose glass panes had long since shattered and the broken remnants of farming implements that spilled partially from the door. A board nearly gave way beneath him as he stepped lightly onto the wooden platform before the door and peered cautiously inside, holding his shotgun out ahead of him. Inside, he could see the droppings of various animals on the floor amid the scatter of old merchandise that lay everywhere. An old fashioned pot-bellied stove sat in the center of the room with its black flume lying in pieces about it and broken shelving, some still holding a stray can or two, lined the walls. Some broken chairs lay around the stove and the cash register sat on the counter against the opposite wall with its cash drawer sticking out. Judson moved over to check its contents. Empty. Oh, well, it was worth a try. He moved down behind the counter toward the rear of the store where a small screened off section showed where the local post office was situated. The neat arrangement of brittle envelopes, stamp pads and cancellation stamps indicated to him how important the postal supplies had been to the residents who’d so hastily abandoned the town. Then it struck him how strange it was that for all the remains of farm animals he saw, he never saw a single human skeleton. He felt a rising uneasiness until he rationalized it by figuring that if anyone had died their families would have buried them of course. Still, why hadn’t he heard of such a hurried exodus from this old town from the locals who lived up the interstate where he usually stopped for breakfast and to tank up the pick up? They’d always been forthcoming with the local news before and the old timers who gathered there on Sunday mornings never missed an opportunity to regale a stranger with their knowledge of the area.

A bird cawed somewhere outside and broke his reverie. He looked around the room again and was about to leave when his eye caught something on the table behind the postal cage. A drawer was still partially open and something white peeked out at him. He leaned over and opened it more fully and found a handful of undelivered mail. Scooping the envelopes with the vague idea of taking it with him and dropping them at the first post office he came to (
wouldn’t that be a kick?
), he idly sifted through them. Finally, he decided it wouldn’t do any harm to open one up. He didn’t think he’d get arrested for opening such old mail, and in any case, he could just not deliver this one. He placed his gun on the counter with the rest of the mail, selecting an envelope addressed to a Miss Fletcher who lived at…Misty Meadows,
so that’s where he was
…and tore it open.

Judson grunted to himself, replacing the letter in its envelope. He should’ve realized he’d learn nothing. He placed the mail inside his coat, took up his gun, and exited the store. Outside, nothing had changed. It was still only mid-morning, so he decided to continue down the old road for another hour or so before heading back. Looking behind him, he spotted the old dog again, except this time he didn’t try to hide. He just stood in the center of the street, eyeing him. Judson shrugged. If the dog wanted to follow him it could, but if it tried anything, he’d find a barrel full of shot to cool his temper. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards however, before the road began to bend to the left, and soon the gradient increased as well. In no time Judson figured that he must have missed a fork, because if he continued to follow this road much further he’d end up at the crest of a tall hill that dominated the town and the valley in which it was located. But why would anyone build a road to the top of hill instead of going around it? Further thoughts along such lines were soon dissipated in the natural beauty of the Vermont forest as the golden-leaved branches of the surrounding woods formed a glittering arch over Judson’s head. He reached a switchback, turned the corner and immediately saw that the road became much rockier from the effects of run-off from the hilltop and it was with increasing difficulty that he was able to keep his breath with the steepening ascent. At last, the blue of the sky began to predominate behind the thinning trees and soon, they gave way completely to the balding hilltop. As Judson cleared the tree line, he had his second surprise of the day. At the rocky crest of the hill stood a tight circle of standing stones that bore obvious resemblance to certain megalithic structures elsewhere in New England.

Judson had been to North Salem, New Hampshire, where the oldest megalithic site in North America was situated. That one was presumed to have been built by Celt-Iberians but this one didn’t seem, on first glance to be anything like it, nor as old. As he approached closer, Judson could see that the circle comprised four huge stones standing on-end to a height of over nine feet, and an equal number of two-foot-high stones spaced between every other tall one. In the center of the circle stood a much broader stone that could have been used as an altar; but as Judson looked closer, he saw that it wasn’t an altar at all, but some sort of capstone. It had been pushed aside, revealing a black opening into the rocky crest of the hill. In the morning light, he could just make out what might have been stairs leading downward. From the look of it all, the work had been done a long time ago.
But what
, he wondered,
had been kept down there?

Judson shook his head; this was all pretty interesting, but what in the world was all this doing on a hilltop outside Misty Meadows? He looked around and judged by the amount of scrub that the site had not been visited at least since the town below had been occupied. He shaded his eyes and scanned the surrounding countryside. There was the town; he could just make out some of the buildings peeking from the canopy of trees. Around about, there were more hills, most a good deal higher than the one he stood upon. He studied the receding forest as it lay like a multi-colored carpet over the rounded Vermont hills. Then Judson decided he could have a better view if he stood on the capstone, and clambered up. From there, he could almost see straight down the rather steep hillside. He turned slowly, inspecting the hill from every direction until he faced the far side, and his eyes were immediately arrested by the sharp contrast of white against the dulled hues of the woods. He took his hand from over his eyes and squinted for a better look, but it didn’t work; all he could see was that dog nosing around near the spot. At last, he hopped down from the capstone, frightening the dog with the sudden motion and sending it scampering away to a safer distance. He passed through the circle to the edge of the hilltop and stopped. At his feet, strewn along the face of the hillside, was a field of discarded bones, thousands of them. They were as thick as a carpet, but farther out, scrub and grasses had begun to obscure them with years of slow growth. His first thought was that someone may have once performed animal sacrifices on the hill, maybe Indians, but as his eyes roamed over the bones they began to settle on something in particular. Carefully, instinctively respectful, he negotiated his way a few feet downward until he was able to stoop and pluck up a skull from the collection at his feet. It was clearly human. No doubt about that entered his mind. And now, looking more closely, he could see half a dozen others. Suddenly, a strange feeling came over him and an atavistic fear spurred him back up the hill and back within the circle of stones, the sharp cackle of dried bones in his ears as his feet knocked them aside.

As he fell back against the capstone, a stray breeze mussed his hair, the first he’d felt all day. For a moment, it seemed to sooth him and calm his inexplicably shattered nerves, but then, a strange odor began to permeate the hilltop and as his gorge began to rise, Judson suddenly remembered the smell that he’d encountered in the barn outside the town. Immediately upon the recollection, he began to retch, violently and completely, and soon, his system drained, he was struggling with the dry heaves that, when they finally abated, left his abdominal muscles weak and sore. Propping himself against the capstone and wiping his mouth, he noticed that the breeze he’d felt earlier had grown, and the once blue sky had clouded over into a featureless gray. The trees of the forest below began to whip and toss and soon he was nearly blinded by the amount of flying grit and debris that seemed to be focusing around the circle of standing stones. Then, through squinting eyes, he saw what looked like a wind-blown path open up among the trees along the distant hillsides. It was as if the wind blew in a stronger current than the winds elsewhere in the valley and created an effect that looked for all the world as if some massive, invisible creature was shouldering its way through the encumbering woodland. A low whining caught his attention and when he looked around, he found that the dog had come within the stone circle with him and now huddled, shaking at his feet. The fear that had seized Judson a few moments before, returned with renewed strength as he saw that the current of air was pushing a path directly for him.

Fear had turned to panic as Judson backed slowly away from the unnatural phenomena and made to dash from among the stones, but just as he did so, he was buffeted by the rising wind back toward the altar. Again he tried to leave and again he was forced back. Against all reason, his mind began to accept the seemingly impossible: that some supernatural force was at play that refused to allow him escape from the hilltop. He looked over his shoulder back in the direction of the hills, hills that now seemed sinister and brooding, silent witnesses like accomplices, watching the unfolding of events as the current of air reached the base of his own hill and trees at the tree line began to shudder in expectation of its arrival. With increasing violence, their branches were whipped to and fro, shearing the foliage and sending the leaves and twigs flying skyward in a cloud that gathered overhead focusing around the megalithic circle.

Blinded and stung by the flying debris, Judson fell back against the capstone, lifting his shotgun out before him in a useless defensive gesture. His arm was over his eyes and when he noticed a definite change in the timbre of the howling wind, he lowered it a bit and gasped as he saw that he was now situated in the center of a small cyclone whose twisting leaf-filled winds completely obscured the surrounding landscape. Then, slowly, horribly, it began to change. Before Judson’s disbelieving eyes the wind began to coalesce and visibly slow even as his hair and clothes continued to be whipped about.

He began to see eyes, thousands of eyes, and he felt without knowing, that these were the eyes of the vanished townsfolk, of the Indians who had once lived in the hills, even of ancient Celts who’d been marooned on a strange, empty continent. They communicated volumes of suborned purpose, of enslaved purposes, of unwanted actions, at once, refusal and acceptance. The love/hate relationship of ecstatic union between two opposing forces, and they wanted him to join them.

A sudden yelp from his feet enabled him to drag his eyes from the fantastic sight as the dog was lifted from the ground at his feet and whipped into the cyclone. Judson took one instinctive step forward to help, but found he was frozen to the spot by invisible, windy hands. He heard the dog howl with such terror and pain as he’d never in his most fearsome nightmares imagined. He watched in horror as the fear-maddened creature, thrashing wildly, was carried into the whirling maelstrom and suspended in the air a short distance from where he stood. Instantly the wind was filled with flying fur, and then with a sticky red mist as the dog was stripped of flesh, layer by layer, until Judson cold see its still-pulsing vital organs against the white of its skeletal structure. After a few seconds only naked, scoured bones remained suspended before him, and then they were discarded to fall to the hillside below.