Spawn of the Winds

Read Spawn of the Winds Online

Authors: Brian Lumley

“For Gail”
I remembered Atal's warning “not to watch,” but was unable to turn away. I was rooted to the spot, and as the screams from the city rose in unbearable intensity, I could but stare into the darkness with bulging eyes. Then …
It
came!
It came, rushing from out the bowels of the terrified town, bringing a black and stinking wind that bowled over its fleeing enemies as if they had no weight at all. And God help me, I
saw
it! Blind but all-seeing—without legs yet running like flood water—the poisonous mouths in the bubbling mass—the fly-the-light beyond the wall. The sight of the thing was mind-blasting.
And what it
did
to the pitiful Leng-creatures!
by Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University, Director of the Wilmarth Foundation
 
In 1966 the
Wilmarth Foundation recruited a telepath of exceptional talent, a man who could tune his mind to the aberrant sendings of the CCD, the Cthulhu Cycle Deities, and make a sort of sense out of what he “heard.” Hank Silberhutte was the man: a tall, tow-headed Texan of daring and adventurous, albeit hasty and often hot-headed, inclinations.
Several years prior to his joining the Foundation, Silberhutte had lost a cousin in the cold wastes of Canada. The circumstances had been mysterious; following an unexpected cold snap of especial ferocity the party of six, engaged on government survey work, was suddenly missing, “lost from all contact with the civilized world.” He joined in the Foundation. Having learned something of the CCD, it dawned on Silberhutte that his cousin's disappearance had coincided with strange undercurrents of unrest in the Canadian trail towns and logging camps, and with the peculiarly feverish culmination of a five-year cycle of esoteric religious festivities as practiced by certain local Indians and, farther north, Eskimos.
In short, he became interested in Ithaqua, that fearful air-elemental of the CCD. It was this fascination of Silberhuttes—one might almost say obsession—which, following the very successful part he had played in a major Foundation project, prompted me to offer him the job of researching, compiling and correlating a working file or dossier on this mythical being of the Arctic snows; further, of carrying out his own survey work in Canada on the periphery of the Wind-Walker's domain, and over the line of the Arctic Circle into the interior of that frozen territory itself.
Silberhutte immediately jumped at the chance I offered and in very short order produced an almost Fortean file of related incidents and occurrences, all of them showing definite connections with that monstrous manifestation known as Ithaqua, “the Thing that walks on
the wind.” I was amazed that any single man could have accumulated so vast an amount of lore in such a short time—much of which had previously been overlooked, had gone unnoticed, or was quite frankly unknown to the Foundation archives—until I recalled that the Wind-Walker had a very special attraction for him.
Genial and affable though Hank Silberhutte invariably was, at the merest mention of elementals of the air, Eskimo legend, or cycles of morbid CCD influence, his face would harden and his eyes narrow. He was a Texan and was as proud of that fact as any man of his race, and his cousin had died in the white wastes of Ithaqua's Arctic domain. Enough said.
Perhaps in retrospect, knowing what I knew of him, I should have thought twice about giving Silberhutte the job of tracking down the Snow Thing. One needs a cool head when dealing with such horrors, and the Texan could fly off the handle in as little time as it takes to tell. But the man's physical strength and keen intelligence, his dedication and great telepathic talent, more than balanced the odds and qualified him for the tasks he might need to perform. Or so I thought.
It came about that at a time when I myself was in Denizli, directing the commencement of certain operations in Turkey, Silberhutte, was making preparations for an aerial reconnaissance of the Arctic Circle, or rather of its rim, from the Bering Strait to Baffin Island. His reason for this survey, in his own words, was to allow him “to get the feel of it; to look down on the ice-wastes from on high and see them as a great bird might see them—or as a Thing that Walks on the Wind!”
But of course there was more to his planned survey than that. There would be a strenuous series of treks to follow it, commencing before the thaws set in, for which he intended to prepare detailed routes from the air. Of these treks, one would be across the Brooks Range northwest of Fort Yukon on the Arctic Circle; another would cover a large area north of the Great Bear Lake; yet another should prove to be particularly grueling and would take the Texan's team along the Mackenzie Mountains Trail to Aklavik.
Tough groundwork of this nature was to be a period of acclimatization for the team rather than an actual frontal attack on the Snow Thing. Those regions where Ithaqua had made his awesome presence known in the past—and where doubtless he would make it known again in the future—were to receive the team's attention at a later
date, when its members had been made more able to survive by these “toughening-up” exercises of Silberhutte's.
Finally, the third and possibly most important of all reasons for this aerial survey: he intended to put his telepathic talents to the test in a series of attempts to search out from the air the massed mental seedings of local religious cults and sects. Strangers of many lands with no easily discernible purposes were massing northward; rumours of a “Great Coming” were legion among the barely civilized inhabitants of the whole vast region, and whispers were already filtering back to Miskatonic through strategically placed Foundation agents.
This, in the main, formed the core of my knowledge of Hank Silberhutte's initial plan of campaign against Ithaqua. Busy as I was in Denizli, he was now completely in charge of Project Wind-Walker, free to get on with it in his own way. All that I asked of him was that I be kept notified of the operation's progress.
And here I find I must insert something about Juanita Alvarez. Silberhutte was on vacation in Mexico prior to being offered Project Wind-Walker. He found Juanita in Monterrey working as an interpreter with an international firm. She was young and single, very well educated, extremely independent, and spoke four languages without a trace of accent in any of them—and she was telepathic! And here an exceedingly strange thing: Juanita's talent was in a way as unique as Silberhutte's, for she was only telepathic with him. In exhaustive tests later carried out at Miskatonic, this proved to be an enigma that baffled all the experts. Only Hank Silberhutte could receive her mind-sendings; she in turn could only receive his. It was as if, at their first accidental meeting in Monterrey, Hank had sparked off something in her mind, something that had found and formed a unique empathy with his own extraordinary talent. They had seen one another—and they had
known.
It was as simple as that.
And of course Hank had known that this would be a major breakthrough for the Foundation, because very few members of its telepathic fraternity were actually capable of communicating with one another; those who could were usually only able to receive very vague and ill-defined mental pictures. It was not their purpose to talk telepathically with
people
, but to use their talents to detect the machinations of the lurking, alien CCD and their minions; in Hank Silberhutte and Juanita Alvarez, however, the perfect link of mental communication had been forged.
So it was to the utter despair of the theorists and telepathic technicians at Miskatonic when Hank accepted his new job, and even more so when after some months he left Arkham to travel up to Edmonton with his team, there to form a Foundation detachment for the duration of the project. In his absence they would have to temporarily suspend their attempts to discover what made Hank and Juanita tick. As Hank himself pointed out, he would not be completely out of touch; they could contact him any time they so desired—through Juanita. Still, the professors would have preferred the telepathic “twins” together in the laboratory, in a controlled environment.
However they might have wanted it, the girl stayed on while her alter ego (that was how they had come to think of one another, even though there was absolutely nothing else between them; there was no romantic connection) was off to Canada at the start of the greatest adventure of his life. In the days that followed, try as they might, the Foundation's experts in mental telepathy could get nothing out of the girl. To all intents and purposes, except for her ability instantly to contact the Texan whenever she felt inclined or obliged to do so, she was telepathically deaf, dumb, and blind.
That was how things stood when, on January 22, I received word from Miskatonic that Hank's plane was missing somewhere over the Mackenzie Mountains. Had there been an accident? A long letter from Juanita Alvarez, doubling as a report and confirming the disaster, followed. The following excerpt is part of what Hank Silberhutte's devastated alter ego had to say of the matter:
His call was like an alarm clock, waking me from nightmares that I could not quite remember—but the reality was worse than any dream. It was about 9:15 a.m. and I had slept late. Immediately I was wide awake, knowing that he had called out to me, feeling for him with my mind.
“Hank,”
I answered him, speaking it out loud as well as with my mind,
“what is it?”
“Juanita!”
he answered,
“Get all of this—don't miss a thing!”
And then he simply opened up all his senses to me and let me see it all, everything that was happening …
… The plane was low, skimming the undersides of boiling black clouds as the pilot tried to keep his craft below the weather but above the white peaks of mountains that rushed madly by on both sides. Weaving and bucking, riding the wind wildly and
whirling in mad currents of air, the plane fought its pilot like a wild animal, and through all this Hank started to tell me the story:
“We spotted him, Juanita—Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker—and our very first time out at that. It was no coincidence; we were looking for him, certainly, but he was just as surely looking for us. Or at least he was looking for me, and he certainly picked me up easily enough. We were at about N. 63°, W. 127° when we first felt it—that fantastic pull!
“ … What a bloody fool I am, to go chasing the Snow Thing in the sky, his own element! We can forget whatever remains of that old fallacy about Ithaqua being restricted to the Arctic Circle. To the Far North, yes, but we have ample evidence that he's ventured as far south as North Manitoba, and so he could certainly—”
Abruptly he stopped consciously sending to let me see more clearly through his eyes. Only a few miles ahead of the rushing plane the white peaks reached up to the turbulent clouds. The pilot was wrestling with the controls, trying to pull the plane's nose up into the swirling cauldron above, but the wind seemed actually to be blowing now from on high, blowing
down
on the wings of the straining plane and driving it toward the harsh ice-peaks of the mountains.
Hank could see what was going to happen—what
must
happen—and now his mental transmissions became a frenzied gabble as he tried to tell me all before—before—
“We must have been Somewhere between Dawson and Norman Wells when we saw him: a great blot in the sky like smoke solidifying, taking on a vaguely manlike but gigantic shape, a beast exactly as described in the Lawton Manuscript. but a description is one thing while actually to see him is—
“Then the skies darkened over in what seemed like only a few seconds and the black clouds boiled up out of nowhere and he walked up the wind on his great splayed feet and disappeared into the clouds. But before he went completely his awful face came out of the clouds to look at us through flickering carmine stars that were like the very pits of hell!
“Juanita—look!”
And again Hank's mind opened up to show me the scene he himself saw at that exact moment of time, allowing me to participate visually in his experience. It was a favor I might well have done without; the Thing that Walks on the Wind had returned.
I had read something about Ithaqua, and Hank had told me a lot more. There is one part of the legend that warns of an unholy curse; to see the Snow Thing is to be doomed, for having seen him is to know that you must become his victim—sooner or later.
With me it is sooner. I can no longer close my eyes without that hideous vision of Ithaqua being there, lurking in my mind, behind my eyelids, etched on my memory's retina. Professor Peaslee, Ithaqua is a monster, indeed a “Prime Evil,” a being that never was spawned on this world and could never be accepted in any sane universe.
He—
it
—was there, perched atop that mountain peak directly ahead of the crazily lurching plane, a black bulk against the white snow and blue ice, filling the space between frozen peak and tortured sky and radiating his alienness more tangibly than the sun radiates light. To look at the sun for too long would burn one's eyes out, but to gaze into those carmine pits that Ithaqua wears for eyes—that is to scar one's very mind!
Oh, I can well believe that Ithaqua's curse might work. Out there in the snowy wastes, it must be a very strange and lonely world. A weak person, perhaps even a strong one, having seen the Wind-Walker, might easily be drawn to go in search of him, simply to prove that the nightmare he had suffered was only a nightmare. Then again, perhaps it is the being's mind that draws its victims back again, as in post-hypnotic commands.
It could be so, Professor, I know it. Why, I can almost hear his command in my own mind at this very moment! But I am strong and I understand what this hellish attraction is. I can fight it.
There he was, that monster, stretching out his great arms to snatch with massive hands at the plane before it could crash into the peak, drawing it to him until the metallic gray of its wings and fuselage glowed a flickering pink and red in the reflection from the twin stars that burned in his face.
I had seen all this with Hank's own eyes, until the last moment when he deliberately shut the vision out. But even so I could still read what was in his mind. I saw the cold despair and bleak but useless anger and hatred there. So powerfully was he transmitting that I could actually feel the machine gun in my own hands as Hank put a flaming stream of tracers across the snarling dark visage of the Wind-Walker, tracers that seemed to pass right through the horror's face and into the furious clouds above.
Then Hank sought out an eye, and his shells found its center to pour into it like a swarm of angry bees—only to burst from the back of the darkly massive head as a shower of drifting sparks! And that monstrous being threw back his head and laughed, shaking with hellish glee; but his shaking turned instantly into the hideously aberrant, spastic twitchings of indescribable madness, and this in turn gave way just as abruptly to anger and then to megalomaniac rage as finally … I
heard
him!
For until that last moment of time the Wind-Walker had been
a creature of silence; indeed, I believe he is vocally dumb, inarticulate—but mentally … ?
I have been told, Professor, that telepathy is telepathy and thought is thought, and there are theories and theories of which the majority agree that one telepathic being sends thoughts which must be at least partially understandable to any other. It is not so. The minority which has it that truly alien thoughts would be incomprehensible are right.
Nothing
is more alien than the Wind-Walker, despite his anthropomorphism—nothing that I can imagine anyway—and his thoughts are … they are terrible things.
I
think
that it was an alien mixture of glee and murderous rage I heard, an obscene flux reflecting telepathically from Hank's mind like images from a cracked mirror, but the thoughts of Hank himself came to me clear as crystal in the final moment. He knew what must happen, you see, and I anticipated his shutting me out.
And I fought him because I wanted to be there, to help if I could. Oh, Hank won, but even as he drove me from his thoughts and back to my bedroom at Miskatonic, still I received impressions of the terrific acceleration he felt as Ithaqua lifted the plane high, high in his hands, even reaching up through the clouds—as a child lifts up a stone to skim across the water, or a ball to bounce.
And at the very end Hank said, “
Juanita, tell them—
”
And that was all, he was gone. There was nothing in my mind at all; it was a vacuum into which the Miskatonic morning flooded as if all the doors and windows had been opened together. And though I screamed for Hank to come back, to talk to me, all the while searching desperately for even the faintest echo of his telepathic voice, I knew that it was over.
There is one other thing, Professor. I believe that Hank's sister, Tracy Silberhutte, was on board the plane. I do not know why; she was not part of his team (in fact I do not think that she knew anything of his work with the Wilmarth Foundation), but she was certainly on board. His mind was full of her, worrying about her …

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