The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes Page 3

  " 'Steady,' came Sizenby's voice. 'Steady now. It's just a noise. Don't give way!'

  " 'No, don't give way,' mumbled Bruckheller. 'We are all dead men, but don't give way. You English are marvelous. None of us will live until morning! But don't give way! His cackling laugh was a nasty parody of the real thing, and there was a note of hysteria or worse running through it.

  "He plucked my sleeve. 'Listen, Captain, listen, Sizenby. I must tell you something. We are walking dead men, but I have to tell you. Someone should know what I have found, even if they don't live long.'

  " 'AH right, old chap, we're listening,' said Sizenby soothingly. His eyes nevertheless continued to watch the swirling mist which surrounded us and from which came an aura of silent menace, of malign observation. So did mine and the others.

  "As the silence grew and the fog seemed to form sinister shadow shapes, Bruckheller talked on and on, his voice low and grating, somehow hard to understand. I don't remember half what he said, but it went something like this:

  "Many thousands of years earlier, a tribe of brown-skinned people, hunters and crude agriculturalists, had lived in this very area. But every effort they had made in their rise to higher levels of culture had been crushed and blocked. Their foe was not neighboring tribes but a malevolent species of creature unlike anything known elsewhere on the Earth, a bloodthirsty monster, or race of monsters, which preyed upon them ceaselessly. No weapons succeeding in killing the creatures, no prayers averted their wrath. Indeed, the hapless folk even made them (or it; the number was not clear) the tribal gods, but all in vain, for no sacrifice, human or animal, was sufficient.

  "At last, despairing and decimated, the remnants of the people simply fled. Pursued by their awful oppressors, they somehow struggled north until at last in the great swamps of the White Nile the pursuing creatures were left behind. And the people, freed at last from a thousand years of nightmare, went on to become the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians.

  "Mind you, it didn't sound then, as wild as it no doubt appears to you chaps here in the well-lit room of a building in a great city," said Ffellowes. "Please recollect that out there, in that cold mist, barely held off by the fire, knowing that something had got the missing askari (soldier), and moreover got him from out of our very midst, it was a very different matter. So that although we, Sizenby and me, were only giving Bruckheller half our attention as it were, we were still impressed.

  " 'The clues are all there,' he kept repeating in that very odd voice, 'if only one takes the trouble to read them, they are all there, in the hieroglyphics, in the religion, everywhere. But only I, of all those who have seen them, realized what they actually said.'

  "Just then, any doubts we might have been entertaining about nocturnal visitors were abruptly dispelled. The mist had parted a little in front of the K.A.R. soldier on my left, the one doing sentry duty on one knee at this point. Two immense yellow eyes were reflected by the firelight, eyes with slit pupils, but nothing at all like a cat's, being long and pointed at the corners. They only appeared for a half-second, but they were unpleasantly close to us. The soldier never fired but Krock's reflexes were better and he shot almost over my head, momentarily deafening me and filling the quiet night with the crash of his Winchester.

  "In reply there came the most hideous cry I have ever heard. It was a coughing howl of volcanic rage, rising to a crescendo of sound and yet with a fearful shriek running quavering through it. It lasted for a moment and seemed to leave the very air tingling.

  " 'That's no death cry,' said Sizenby grimly. 'That was simply annoyance. A wounded brute would have sounded quite different.'

  " Yah,' agreed Krock, 'I know when I hit anyway. That one, he moves plenty quick, I can tell you.'

  " 'You cannot hurt them,' rasped Bruckheller from my knee, where he still lay. He seemed to have gotten his wind back and he sounded almost amused. 'They are just as clever as you, you must realize, and they know very well what guns can do. They have lived here since the dawn of time and never yet has anyone actually seen them and escaped.'

  " 'Did you see one yourself?' Sizenby quickly asked, dropping to one knee beside me. 'Did you actually see them?'

  "Bruckheller appeared disconcerted, as if his word had been challenged and seemed at a loss for speech. He gobbled something unintelligible and then muttered, 'I hardly got a look. They took my hunters and I had two: one by one, they took them. I saw only a dark mass as they took the last one.'

  " 'When was that and how did they let you get here, get to us? Come on, Man, speak up!' Sizenby seemed to be following a thought and his voice was fierce. I had no idea what he wanted, but he was clearly in charge so I shut up.

  " 'How do I know?' snarled the Italian. 'Sometime yesterday afternoon, I think. I have been running and hiding, running and hiding. When I heard the shots I tried to get close, but always I would hear things moving. Why do you ask me all this?' His voice had taken on an unpleasant, grating whine, like that of a spoilt child who wishes to make excuses for a fault, but in some indefinable way it was even nastier.

  " 'Just wondered, that's all,' said Sizenby in an absent tone. He was once again standing and watching the misty perimeter of visibility.

  "Since that dreadful scream, no sound had come from out in the night. But now the far silence and the patter of drops of water from the bamboos were again broken. And once again it was the sound of running feet. Never very close and never very far away, the pad,' pad of the runner came through the chill silence. First on one side of the circle then on the other. We had learned our lesson though and we watched all sides.

  "The sounds would cease at intervals, then commence again. The noises, indeed any sound in the bamboo forest, had a curious echoing quality, so that at times we seemed encompassed by legions of stealthy, padding feet, running on urgent and malignant errands. Yet at others there seemed only the one creature, running in the night, driven by some ancient and evil compulsion as if in search of a phantom prey.

  "Somehow the night passed. As the grey dawn slowly widened our circle of vision, the invisible feet ceased. One moment they were active, the next gone and a few birds began a desultory chirping deep in the ranks of the bamboo tufts.

  "At length the area one could see clearly had widened to almost a hundred feet and a hot circle in the eastern fog banks indicated the struggle of the sun to break through. We all relaxed a little and looked at one another for the first time.

  " 'I sat up for the Tsavo maneaters,' said Sizenby, passing his hand over his eyes, 'and at least once I heard them feeding on a Hindu railroad coolie twenty feet away from my tree. But it wasn't like this, I can tell you.' He looked grey and shriveled. Krock looked like the wrath of God too, and I could feel every nerve in my body aching from the constant strain of watching and waiting. The Negroes, Somali, Kikuyu and Wanderobo were silent, a bad sign if one knew them. Only Sergeant Asoto spoke, stepping forward to point at my feet.

  " 'Sirs, is this the man we hunt? He looks bad to me.'

  "This simple remark made me and the others remember our quarry, the reason for all this incredible strain and the nevus of our search, almost forgotten due to the night's stealthy evil.

  "Bruckheller had been sitting crouched at my feet and as the Sergeant spoke, he looked up and I saw at once what the Sergeant's rather basic English meant. I had thought he meant that Bruckheller was ill when he said 'looked bad.' But it was obvious that the words were meant absolutely literally. The Italian's face seemed to have suffered some indefinable change. The man's jaws appeared prolongued into a snout, almost as if he were thrusting his lower face forward, like an angry monkey's. And his eyes were narrowed in what looked like a damned vicious glare. He did indeed 'look bad.' He looked evil, if ever a man did and as his eyes wandered over us, it was as though he were cataloguing us for some peculiar vengeance.

  "Further, there was something markedly unpleasant about his posture. He was squatting but somehow gave the impression of a dangerous animal crouching to
spring, rather than a human being seated or resting. I stepped back almost involuntarily and Krock and Sizenby both raised their guns.

  " 'Stand away from him, Ffellowes,' said Sizenby sharply. 'I was afraid of this. It's one of the legends of the Kerit.'

  " 'By God, you said it!' said Krock. 'Just look at him!'

  " 'What's this?' I asked, as I turned around, baffled by the menace in their voices. All the blacks, faces set like flint, were leveling rifles and spears at the silent Italian.

  " 'Why, it's got to him,' said Sizenby. 'Look at him, Ffellowes! He's not a man any longer. Can't you see that?'

  " 'Are you completely daft?' I shouted. 'This man is my prisoner. What the hell do you mean, not a man? Put those guns down! That's an order, damn it!'

  "At this point Bruckheller sprang. I say 'Bruckheller,' but I doubt the name was deserved any longer. In the light of what I next saw and heard, our companion of the night was frankly no longer anything that could be called human. The creature on the ground leapt with a snarl on my back and with a strength I wouldn't have believed possible seized me and held me as a shield between itself and the leveled rifles of the rest of the party. Helpless to move, I was neatly interposed against any bullets as my captor backed rapidly away toward the nearest point of bamboo jutting into the rapidly clearing glade.

  "I could not move, but I could hear, see and speak. What I heard was a noise made by the thing clutching my neck in an iron grip, a rumbling, chuckling growl. It was pleased with itself, like a circus animal which has somehow downed the trainer.

  "What I saw were the agonized faces of all of our party, white and black, as they tried to get a point of aim from which to shoot, or throw in the Wanderobo's case, without hitting me. Some appeared frozen, others were moving but slowly, as one seems to in a nightmare.

  "That is not all I saw. The mist was thinning, but in swirls and twists, not all at once. And behind the men, in a patch of clarity for one second, I saw something appear.

  "Reddish, matted fur, upright posture, great gnarled, hunched shoulders and surmounting them, I saw—Anubis!

  "In one blinding instant I saw the great, pointed head, like a giant jackal's, the razor fangs bared in a snarl and I realized the truth of Bruckheller's story, the hidden horror behind the beast-headed statues of ancient Egypt.

  " 'For God's sake—behind you.' I managed to scream. It was Krock who caught my meaning fastest and he whirled and fired in one motion, one arm cradling the rifle against his side and doing the firing as well. He could shoot, could Krock.

  "Again from out of the mist we all heard that awful cry, like a coughing shriek which ran up the scale until it actually hurt one's ear. But this time there was a dreadful note of pain, so that the cry was half a wail. We all heard it. The second time, the Boer had hit his target.

  "My own captor lost his head. What ghastly metamorphosis was working in him I will never know, but it was clear that a bond of some sort, psychic, spiritual perhaps, somehow connected him with that demon visage I had seen.

  "At any rate, he hurled me on to the ground and throwing back his head (I was told this, I did not see it), he answered that horrible call with a perfect copy of it, slightly weakened but otherwise accurate. It was the last noise he ever made. Face down in the muck of that mountain meadow, I heard every rifle in our party explode simultaneously, some fired three or four times. Then, there was a great, ringing silence. I didn't move or even try to until I felt hands under my armpits and was hauled up to face the rest of the group.

  "I turned then to look down at the late Dottore Guido Bruckheller. It was not a pleasant sight, since every bullet appeared to have hit, as well as two lion spears, but I felt then and still feel most strongly indeed that we had done the man an immense favor. It is not, I think, wise to speculate upon what he seemed well on the road to becoming. Whatever it was had no place in polite, or indeed human, society.

  "Krock, Sizenby and I held a brief conference with Sergeant Asoto. The vote was unanimous. The men dug a rude grave, and, after I searched the body, unpleasant but necessary, and found nothing, we buried it. Then Asoto addressed the troops in Swahili, briefly, forcefully and, to me, unintelligibly. At the end of his speech he asked a question. I could catch the inflection as well as the answer, 'Asente', which rang out.

  " 'That means 'yes,' does it not?' I asked the two whites.

  " 'Quite so,' said Sizenby. 'They shot the foreign bwana because he was shooting at them. End of story. What they'll say in their own villages doesn't matter. It was made plain that all this had best be forgotten.'

  " 'Yah,' added Krock, 'and a good thing too. Listen, I hear of an English sea captain once who sees the sea serpent, the groot Meerschlang, and goes to his cabin and tells the mate to log him as having been sick. He don't want people to think he's crazy. Neither do we and neither do you, eh, Captain?'

  "I looked around at the sunlit glade. The mist had vanished and a green touraco bird fluttered on the stalk of bamboo over the mound where Bruckheller lay. My report would be the same, in essence, as the others. We came, he ran, he shot, we shot, finis. And there it rests to this day. You chaps are the first to ever hear the real story."

  There was a long silence as we digested what we had heard. Then someone, not Williams—he was still numb—but another man, said hesitantly, "I guess it really is like the great sea serpent, isn't it, just too much to expect the world to believe?"

  Ffellowes stared at him coldly, his blue eyes like ice. "Great sea serpent, indeed, my dear man? You don't know what you're talking about! That's a totally, I mean to say, totally different matter altogether. Why, there's nothing in the least unbelievable about the great sea serpent, as I myself can attest. Nothing like it whatsoever, nothing!"

  I felt good at once. The great sea serpent! Well, well, well.

  -

  THE KINGS OF THE SEA

  I don't remember how magic came into the conversation at the club, but it had, somehow.

  "Magic means rather different things to different people. To me ..." Brigadier Donald Ffellowes, late of Her Majesty's forces, had suddenly begun talking. He generally sat, ruddy, very British and rather tired looking, on the edge of any circle. Occasionally he would add a date, a name, or simply nod, if he felt like backing up someone else's story. His own stories came at odd intervals and to many of us, frankly verged on the incredible, if not downright impossible. A retired artilleryman, Ffellowes now lived in New York, but his service had been all over the world, and in almost every branch of military life, including what seemed to be police or espionage work. That's really all there is to be said about either his stories or him, except that once he started one, no one ever interrupted him.

  "I was attached to the embassy in Berlin in '38, and I went to Sweden for a vacation. Very quiet and sunny, because it was summer, and I stayed in Smaaland, on the coast, at a little inn. For a bachelor who wanted a rest, it was ideal, swimming every day, good food, and no newspapers, parades, crises or Nazis.

  "I had a letter from a Swedish pal I knew in Berlin to a Swedish nobleman, a local landowner, a sort of squire in those parts. I was so absolutely happy and relaxed I quite forgot about going to see the man until the second week of my vacation, and when I did, I found he wasn't at home in any case.

  "He owned a largish, old house about three miles from the inn, also on the coast road, and I decided to cycle over one day after lunch. The inn had a bike. It was a bright, still afternoon, and I wore my bathing trunks under my clothes, thinking I might get a swim either at the house or on the way back.

  "I found the place easily enough, a huge, dark-timbered house with peaked roofs, which would look very odd over here, and even at home. But it looked fine there, surrounded by enormous old pine trees, on a low bluff over the sea. There was a lovely lawn, close cut, spread under the trees. A big lorry—you'd say a moving van—was at the door, and two men were carrying stuff out as I arrived. A middle-aged woman, rather smartly dressed, was directing the movers, with
her back to me so that I had a minute or two to see what they were moving. One of them had just manhandled a largish black chair, rather archaic in appearance, into the lorry and then had started to lift a long, carved wooden chest, with a padlock on it, in after the chair. The second man, who must have been the boss mover, was arguing with the lady. I didn't speak too much Swedish, although I'm fair at German, but the two items I saw lifted into the van were apparently the cause of the argument, and I got the gist of it, you know.

  " 'But Madame,' the mover kept on saying, 'Are you sure these pieces should be destroyed! They look very old.'

  " 'You have been paid,' she kept saying, in a stilted way. 'Now get rid of it any way you like. Only take it away, now, at once.'

  "Then she turned and saw me, and believe it or not, blushed bright red. The blush went away quickly, though, and she asked me pretty sharply what I wanted.

  "I answered in English that I had a letter to Baron Nyderstrom. She switched to English, which she spoke pretty well, and appeared a bit less nervous. I showed her the letter, which was a simple note of introduction, and she read it and actually smiled at me. She wasn't a bad-looking woman—about 45 to 48, somewhere in there, anyway—but she was dressed to the nines, and her hair was dyed an odd shade of metallic brown. Also, she had a really hard mouth and eyes.