Читать книгу Tama of the Light Country - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 4

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The first of the midnight raids was made upon a girls' school on Moose Head Lake, in Maine. It was a summer camp, with something like eighty girls, almost all between the ages of fifteen and twenty. The affair—which occurred during the nights of August tenth and eleventh—was kept as secret as possible. It did not get into the newspapers, nor did the newscasters announce it until about a week later.

But it terrorized the immediate neighborhood at once, and little wonder. There were ten of the girls missing when, despite the confusion and terror, the others could be counted. Two more were dead. The principal, a Professor White, was wounded. Two of the other men teachers were killed, and one of the matrons.

I heard of the affair about noon of August eleventh. I was twenty-five years of age the summer when the mysterious attack upon the White Summer Camp in Maine started a chain of events which brought a menace to two worlds and utter chaos to one.

I am Jack Dean, a newsgatherer for the Broadcasters' Press Association, and occasionally I do some actual newscasting. I was in the New York studios of the B.P.A., and had just been on the air with a routine news account, when the aviator Jimmy Turk called me long distance from Boston.

"Take your plane and come up," he told me. His voice was vibrant with excitement. "Drop your work. Tell 'em it's business, the biggest piece of news this year—if you can get a release on it!"

Jimmy Turk was an operative of the newly established Interstate Flying Patrol, and a friend from my University days, though of recent years we had not seen much of each other. A short, stocky, red-headed little daredevil, this Turk—one of the most skillful wildest flyers in the service.

"Trouble up at Moose Head Lake, in Maine," he went on. "Meet you at Bangor—the Lanset Field. We'll go in my Dragon, so leave your tub-boat there. What time will you be up? Four o'clock? The devil! If you leave now you can be there by three, or earlier."

"For how long, Jimmy? An overnight job?"

"Tell 'em you don't know. A day or two. A week. Just tell 'em it's the biggest thing ever—if you get it for the air. It's been suppressed so far. I'm in it from the police end. Damn it, Jack, don't make me talk. There's no time."

I flew up the coast and met him at the Lanset Field in mid afternoon. He was wild-eyed, his fiery red hair tousled, his entire little body shaking with excitement. It was the strain of waiting for me, I thought. With action I knew Jimmy Turk to be cool and calculatingly deliberate.

He hustled me into his powerful little Dragon—the smallest, swiftest thing that flies.

"I've been over there and back. It isn't far: half an hour or so."

We settled down in the tiny oval cockpit. He lifted us and we sped away over the forest reaches toward the famous lake. It was a surprisingly wild country for this day and age—a playground for summer vacationists, yet there were deserted lakes and unbroken stretches of primeval forest.

"Well, Jimmy, now that we're here, what's the trouble?" I said lightly. "Something drastic?"

"No trouble—nothing at all except about ten young girls abducted, a few killed, and a couple of other miscellaneous murders."

He told me all he had learned about it, which was little enough. It was wholly confused—a muddle of conflicting accounts, none of which dovetailed to make a rational explanation.

The White Summer Camp for Girls consisted of a group of log-cabin type bungalows set on a promontory of the lake, with a larger cabin as mess-hall. A boathouse with canoes, a dock, float and diving board were at the end of the point. There was a small stable with saddle horses, and a taxi runway leading from the lake to a hangar-garage which housed several small sport hydroplanes for those pupils whose parents would allow and could afford them.

The camp was one of the wildest portions of the lake. Unbroken forest lay about it, with only a few houses in the neighborhood and a dirt road leading to the nearest village three miles away.

The place was in a turmoil when we arrived. Planes lay thick on the water about the runway. The road was jammed with automobiles. A police cordon about the camp managed to keep the crowd back, but within the lines there was a group of excited officials, investigators, and curiosity-seekers who had the connections to get inside.

The pupils—those who had not been killed, or abducted—had fled to their homes. Professor White lay unconscious in a Bangor hospital. What he had to tell, if there were anything rational, as yet remained undisclosed.

The affair was secret. It was kept off the air and out of the papers. But by word of mouth the news had spread like flames before a wind in prairie grass. We got through the lines. Jimmie had a conference with his superior; I wandered about the place, talking with as many of the excited people as I could, picking up a connected story of a sort for use, provided they let me give it out.

It was a weird, disjointed account. As far as I could piece it together, it ran like this:

At about midnight the previous night the camp was aroused by the wild screaming of some of the girls. The night was dark. This was a period of nearly full moon, but heavy clouds had obscured it. A fresh wind off the lake pounded waves on the shore and sang through the forest trees.

But above the noise the screams of terror-stricken girls had sounded. There were evidently screams from everywhere about the camp within a few minutes. But most of it was the panic of terror.

The original alarm came from one of the larger cabin dormitories where twelve girls and a matron were sleeping. The doors and windows were all open; the unbroken forest depths lay only a few paces away. Something or someone, human or otherwise, had made an attack. When it was over—in a few moments, no doubt, and before anyone from the adjacent buildings seemed to have reached there—ten of the girls from the cabin had vanished. The matron lay dead just outside the doorway. One of the girls was found dead on the floor beside her bed; the other lay across the road at the edge of the forest.

The two men instructors, and Professor White, were discovered on the road; they had apparently been running toward the sound of the screams when they were struck down.

I had an opportunity later to see one of the bodies where it lay in the police station of the nearby village. All the deaths were caused by a hole the size of a lead pencil which in some cases penetrated the heart, and in others pierced the brain. But there was no bullet. Nor had there been any sound of shots—every account agreed on that.

Some wholly soundless weapon had drilled the victims. The wound looked like a burn, as though a blast of intense heat had made a tiny round hole. Through flesh, or the bone of the skull, it was the same.

No one had seen any of the attackers. Hysterical pupils told of vague shadowy forms of men along the road. Huge men, some said, but others insisted they were small. There were other girls who claimed that they were not men at all, but weird monsters, half like beasts in pseudo-human form. And there was talk of dragging, shuffling footsteps in the underbrush—presumably the fantastic monsters dragging away their screaming victims.

Most of this was discredited by the investigators. The night was too dark and noisy to see anything, or hear very much. But the ten girls had vanished; there were five dead bodies—very tangible evidence! And the wounded, perhaps dying, Professor White.

There may have been strange footprints about the place. But if so, they were trampled upon and obliterated long before the authorities got there. There was another clue which appeared to be fact, since it was one of the few incidents about which everyone agreed. The attackers used no lights, but there had been a few soundless, blue-green flashes in the darkness—tiny beams a few feet in length, instantaneous, like a miniature lightning bolt. Presumably these were the shots of some unknown weapon which had killed the five victims.

Jimmy Turk joined me. "Well, what do you make of it, Jack? Come here and meet Dr. Grenfell."

He led us to an excited group nearby and introduced us to a short, thickset, middle-aged man with a massive head and a stoop to his wide shoulders which made him look almost like a hunchback.

"Who was that?" I demanded, when, after a moment, Dr. Grenfell was called away.

"Important scientific fellow. Head of the Bolton Astronomical Research Society. He's investigating this—one of the first to get here this morning."

"What's astronomy got to do with it?"

"I'm damned if I know, Jack."

But we were very soon to find out!

Such was the beginning of the mysterious assaults. A heavy guard was placed about the White Camp that night. One or two of the male teachers and three of the women remained. Only one pupil continued to stay—an orphan girl who lived with the Whites both winter and summer. I met her a few days later.

Mrs. White was at her husband's bedside in Bangor. The professor still lay unconscious, hovering between life and death. His lung had been pierced; he had fallen in the road, struck his head and suffered a brain concussion. But the doctors hoped to pull him through. What had he seen in the darkness of that weird night? We all waited eagerly for the time when he might be able to tell.

The second night was as dark as the first. The cordon of police and a few State troopers were hidden about the camp and in its buildings. But nothing happened. Jimmy's orders were to fly at about two thousand feet back and forth over the lake. I went with him.

We flew his Dragon without lights and with the engines fully muffled. Both of us realized that the authorities knew more of this thing—or suspected more—than we could guess. We were told to watch for any air vehicle rising or descending over the lake or the nearby forest; or for any strange lights. But there seemed to be nothing.

At dawn we landed at the village, turned in our report, and went to sleep. At about noon, Jimmy woke me.

"By the gods, Jack, listen to this!"

Reports were now coming in. Apparently the White Camp had been undisturbed, but from the town thirty miles away came the news that a young girl had vanished from her home during the night. It was an isolated farmhouse, with the girl's room on the lower floor.

Her parents said she had retired as usual; they had heard nothing, but in the morning she was gone. One of her window shutters had been taken off, the wood around its hinges burned as though by a blow torch.

"And there are others, Jack! This damnable, weird business!"

The reports continued to come through. Another girl was found murdered, her heart pierced by the same strange hole burned into her chest. She had screamed in the night and they had found her too late, lying by her bed; a chair been overturned with evidence of a struggle. And two sisters, sharing the same room, told of a horrible face at their window—gray, thick-featured, flabby. They had heard dragging, shuffling footsteps outside as the face vanished. One of them said it was like a man paralysed and trying to walk.

During the next few days a flood of incidents were reported from this section of the State. But except for the first two nights there were no missing girls, and no murders. Merely strange things that girls claimed to have seen and heard. Some seemed to have a fair basis of rationality—however fantastic they sounded—but most of the reports were now the product of an overactive imagination.

"The thing is about over," said Dr. Grenfell, as he, with Jimmy, myself and one or two others, sat examining the reports in the dining hall of the White Camp. "There is nothing less dependable than reports from adolescent girls. This is hysteria now."

But there were some reports which were not the fantasies of hysteria. The aerial patrols had observed strange light-glows down in the forest. One pilot had even seen a shape rushing upward from the lake. He was several miles away from it and could not reach it with his light. He described it as shaped like a vague silver ball, mounting with tremendous velocity into the leaden clouds overhead. This was reported by one of the air patrols, fifty of which were on duty. And there were surface parties constantly searching the forests of the entire State. Every effort was being made to recover the missing girls, but it was all unavailing.

It was about this time that I met the girl pupil who was still living at the White Camp. Her name was Rowena Palisse. Romantic circumstances surrounded her. She was a ward of the Whites. Ten years ago her only relative, her elder brother Guy, had invented a space rocket and attempted to reach the Moon. The entire endeavor was acknowledged to be a suicidal voyage: he had provided no way of returning.

I had been fifteen then; I still remembered my boyish interest in this Guy Palisse Moonrocket. It had successfully left the Earth, but never was heard of again. My interest now was renewed by meeting the sister of the adventurer who had so stirred my youthful fancy.

Rowena Palisse was twenty-two years old now—a tall girl of five feet ten or eleven inches. She was slender, with a regal aspect in her bearing. Her long brown braids hung forward over her shoulders in the latest fashion, and her long skirt and short-waisted jacket made her seem even taller than she was. She was handsome rather than beautiful, a girl of so queenly an air that she seemed born to command.

But there was a gentle, wholly feminine softness about her as well. I understood that she had been devoted to her brother Guy. As a child of twelve she had watched him with big, frightened eyes as his cumbersome rocket carried him away from her into the mysteries of outer space.

I found that look in her eyes now—a gentle, wondering softness, a wistfulness. There was a poise in her manner, a calm dignity; but under it the wistfulness was most apparent.

I stood before her, the afternoon when Jimmy Turk introduced us. She was a head taller than the wiry little patrol flyer. But I am several inches over six feet. She extended her hand and smiled up at me.

"I have seen you the past several days," she said. "I wondered when someone would introduce us."

I was with Rowena Palisse a good deal during the ensuing afternoons. I made the occasions. She was frightened at the events that had transpired, but there was nothing hysterical about her. Her mature, calm personality precluded hysteria.

I was more amazed at it when I realized that the investigators—there were a number of them who remained, including Dr. Grenfell—still felt that another assault might be made, and they were for some reason using Rowena as a possible decoy. She made herself prominent about the grounds, both by day and night, though always carefully, secretly guarded.

Then there came a night, just a week after the original assault, when the trap was sprung. Dr. Grenfell who was in charge here, had admitted me in the capacity of assistant... perhaps because Rowena did not hide her friendly interest in me; and because my imposing stature made me the logical choice to put up a good fight with any conceivable opponent.

It was a black, overcast night. There had been a great show of withdrawal of the guards that afternoon—though after dark many of them had crept back.

Jimmy and I, armed with automatics, crouched with Dr. Grenfell in the forest underbrush just across the road from Rowena's lighted window. She stood at it a moment, braiding her hair. And though there were a dozen armed men lurking close at hand to protect her, I marveled at her poise.

Her light went out. We waited, an hour or two at least. The heavy, leaden clouds hung close overhead. The wind swished through the treetops; the lake waves pounded the shore; the dark, silent buildings of the White Camp stood around us.

It began to rain a little. I was cold and stiff. Beside me the bulk of Dr. Grenfell's figure was a hunched black blob. At my feet Jimmy crouched like a coiled spring. There was a dim vista of the road, the roof outline of the building near us, and the vague black rectangle of Rowena's open window.

There came at last a sound, different from those of the forest to which we had listened for so long. An eerie, indefinable sound, quite close to us. We all three heard it. Dr. Grenfell stirred a trifle. Jimmy tensed, ready to leap.

A rustling of the bushes. Or was it out in the road?

I was swept suddenly with the chilling sense that this Unknown was supernatural—something advancing upon me, invisible, intangible!

From the darkness of the road the sound became clearer, turned into footsteps. But they were gruesomely unnatural, shuffling footsteps, like a wounded thing dragging itself heavily along.

A moment or two passed. Jimmy touched me in warning, but I shoved off his hand. Dr. Grenfell's flashlight was raised. We had arranged not to move, or shoot, until he turned it on.

Certainly something tangible was out there in the road. I thought I could distinguish a slowly moving, formless shape. Or perhaps two shapes, mingled in the darkness.

Abruptly there was another noise, a swishing, flapping sound—not on the road, but over it. A giant bird, perhaps, or a monster, flying. I saw something white, fluttering out there.

Dr. Grenfell flashed on the light. Figures appeared in the road some twenty feet from us—figures so fantastic that the sight of them barely registered on my bewildered brain. One was a gigantic man-shape; another, similar but smaller. And a great fluttering white thing behind and above them.

Jimmy leaped, with me after him. My shot and Grenfell's stabbed the darkness together. The forest rang with the other guards rushing and firing. From the road came an answering "shot"—a tiny stab of blue-green light. It sizzled close past me, withering the shrubbery. The gigantic figure in the road made a slow but desperate bound into the underbrush. The smaller figure fell with our shots. The white thing was hit; it came fluttering down and lay quivering, flapping in the dirt of the road.

No one thought, those first moments, of pursuing the escaping figure. With swaying flashlights we gathered in the road. A man lay there, dead from our bullets—a squat, thickset fellow clad in rude garments of animal skins. His flat-featured face was heavy with pouchy gray skin and goggling, staring dead eyes.

Near him, the wounded white thing lay struggling in death agony—a girl, her blue-white draperies stained crimson with her blood. She was a small, strangely frail-looking girl, with huge blue-feathered wings nearly as long as her body. They flapped, and then were still. She lay sprawled on the road like a great dead bird.

We bent over her. She was still alive. For a moment she tried to speak, and it seemed that the words were English! I thought that she gasped, "...warn you..." but we could distinguish nothing else intelligible. She died seconds later.