Henry Kuttner - The Book of Iod

The thing came after him. He doubled around the corner of the building and made for the road. As he gained on it he chanced a swift look over his shoulder, and cold horror trailed icy fingers over his heart. It was still pursuing him.

Monk’s Hollow! At the thought he turned and fled along the road toward the town, still clutching the carving knife. He had forgotten it, but now, glancing down, he tightened his grip on the weapon and sprinted a bit faster. If he could only reach the village—

It was two miles away—two endless miles of empty road, lonely and unfrequented, with little chance of an automobile passing. Few drivers chose this road; it was rutted and in disrepair; the new state highway was more direct.

But the highway lay beyond a ridge, and Hartley knew that he would stand no chance on rocky or uneven ground. Even on the road he had to watch carefully for the black shadows that betokened gaps and ruts in the surface. Behind him something came leaping, and there was a sound of rasping, heavy breathing.

The night was cold, but sweat burst out on Hartley’s face in great beads. His shirt was sodden. His lounging robe impeded his running, and he slipped out of it. Behind him came a harsh, thick cry. There was a little scuffle, and then the rhythmic thuds were resumed.

“When they were ducking her they had to get the women folks away—she came up out of the water all green and slimy—”

Hartley gritted his teeth, fought back an impulse to shriek his terror. Behind him came the steady thud-thud, and the stentorous breathing. The thing was gaining!

If he could only reach the village! He increased his pace, straining until the blood pounded in his temples. His efforts were useless. The thing behind him matched his pace; the thudding grew louder. Once he fancied he felt the creature’s foul, hot breath on his neck. His chest was a raw flame; a knife edge of agony burned his lungs; his breath whooped in and out.

He caught his foot in a rut and almost went headlong. With a wrenching effort he recovered his balance and fled on.

But the sounds of pursuit had grown loud—dreadfully loud. He wondered whether he might elude his pursuer by a quick dash into the thickets that lined the road—black blotches in the moonlight. No—the creature was too close. Hartley’s mouth was gaping as he fought for breath.

Then he saw the light. Yellow squares that were windows in an oblong patch of blackness—but far, far distant. No—in the darkness he had misjudged—the house not fifty feet away. It loomed up suddenly before him.

He shrieked from a raw and throbbing throat as he raced for the porch.

But before he reached it he felt a heavy weight upon his back, bearing him to the ground; great talons were ripping at his shirt, raking his flesh with needle-sharp claws. His eyes and mouth were clogged with dirt, but he realized that he was still gripping the carving knife.

Somehow he managed to reverse it, stabbed up blindly over his shoulder. The slobbering, harsh breathing gave place to a frightful croaking yell, and then the knife was torn from his grasp. He struggled frantically to squirm free, but the great weight pinned him down inexorably.

A confused shouting came to his ears. He heard the crunching of quick footsteps, and the roar of a gun. Abruptly the weight was gone from his back; he heard something go thudding off into the darkness as he rolled over, scraping at the earth that encrusted his face. Out of smarting eyes he saw a man’s pale face staring at him, a man who wore dusty overalls and held an old-fashioned musket in trembling hands.

Hartley discovered that he was sobbing.

The other man stared off into the shadows, looked back at Hartley with wide eyes. “Wh-what was it?” he asked shakily. “In God’s name—what was it?”

*****

Anam Pickering, whose tiny farm lay on the outskirts of Monk’s Hollow, awoke with a start. He sat up in bed, fumbling on the bedside table for his glasses, his wrinkled face creased in puzzled lines. What had awakened him? Some unusual noise—It came again—a furtive scratching beneath the window. The farmer, taken by surprise, started violently, and the glasses dropped to the carpet.

“Who’s there?” he called sharply. There was no answer, but the scratching sound was repeated. There was another noise, too, a sound of thick, gasping breathing. Suddenly frightened, Anam cried, “Martha! Is that you, Martha?”

A bed creaked in the adjoining room. “Anam?” A thin voice called. “What’s wrong?”

Anam got out of bed quickly and dropped to his knees beside the bed, fumbling for his spectacles. A sudden shattering of glass made him catch his breath sharply.

He looked up, but his dim eyes made out only a hazy rectangle— the window—against which a vague black bulk loomed. An insidious odor came to his nostrils, his rheumatic limbs sending protesting twinges through him.

He heard a pattering of feet, and his sister’s voice. “Anam? What—,” the voice broke off, and there was a pause, frightful in its implication. Then above the scrambling and wheezing of the intruder the woman’s scream skirled out, shrill and insane with utter terror.

A little moan of bewilderment came from Anam as he hesitated, peering around blindly. He made a tentative step and caromed into the bed, fell across it. He sensed rather than saw something, huge and black and shapeless, leap entirely over him and there was a heavy thud that shook the flimsy little farmhouse.

Martha had stopped screaming. She was making hoarse little rasping sounds deep in her throat, as though she were trying to cry out and couldn’t. “Martha!” Anam shrieked. “Martha! For God’s sake—”

There was a scurry of swift movement, and a low, oddly muzzled cry from the woman. Thereafter the only sound within the room was the thick, gulping breathing, and presently, as Anam lay half fainting across the bed, another sound, monstrous in the mad thoughts it called to the man’s mind—a faint rending and tearing, as of flesh being ribboned by sharp talons.

Whimpering, Anam got to his feet. As he moved slowly across the room he repeated Martha’s name under his breath, and his head swung from side to side as his dimmed vision tried to pierce the cryptic gloom. The tearing sound stopped abruptly.

Anam walked on. The harsh fabric of the carpet scratched his bare feet, and he was shivering violently. Still whispering Martha’s name, he sensed a black bulk looming up before him—

He touched something cold, slimy, with a sickening feel of loathsome fatness. He heard a frightful guttural snarl of bestial ferocity, something moved swiftly in the darkness—and death took Anam Pickering.

Thus horror came to Monk’s Hollow. Like a foul breath of corruption from the generations of decadence in which the witch-town had brooded, a miasmic exhalation from the grave of Persis Winthorp lay like an ominous pall over the town.

When Hartley, accompanied by a dozen villagers, returned to his house in the morning, he found the flower garden trampled and ruined. The barren spot in the center of the garden had given place to a deep pit, in which, as though in ghastly mockery, lay a shocking conglomeration, the mutilated and partially devoured cadaver of old Dobson, recognizable only by the splintered remnant of the wooden leg.

The remains lay embedded in a foul-smelling pool of thick, greenish slime, and, although no one cared to approach that dreadful pit closely, the marks of gnawing on what was left of the peg leg were all too evident.

Hartley had recovered somewhat from his experience of the preceding night. Hours of nightmarish conjecture had led him through incredible labyrinths of fantasy to one inescapable conclusion, the stubborn belief that there was some logical, natural explanation of the horror.