Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (36 page)

Almost as soon as he had his first good look at the creatures, he recoiled in shock, his body instinctively pushing itself away from the laboratory table. Every muscle rigid, he propped himself up against a nearby counter, knuckles white as they gripped the wooden surface. His gaze held the specimen dish where it sat, impossibly placid, on the table before him. Slowly, his pounding heart quieted as he drew the sleeve of his shirt across his feverish brow. His hands trembled as he brought the glass back up for another look, but just the thought of seeing again the sight that had met him when looked the first time, kept him even from approaching the table.

At last, a full quarter of an hour later, he pulled himself together enough for a second look.

Nothing had changed. But through an effort of will, he forced himself to stay and further examine his catch.

Up from the petri dish and through the thick lens of the magnifying glass, stared one of the most disturbing sights he had ever witnessed. Although as a physician he’d seen many grisly sights before, not the least of which included the field hospitals during the late war between the states, he felt instinctively that no insect in the animal kingdom would ever claim as members of their genus, the horrors he was now studying.

A multitude of great, bulbous eyes covered what he assumed to be the head of the creature, punctuated by coarse fibers of cilia-like hairs, some of which hung low beneath the “eyes” to lengths ten times that of the others. Other, more rigid-seeming tendrils stuck straight up above like strange antennae. Whereas insects sported an abdomen and thorax, six legs and two wings, these creatures held only the latter in common. And those seemed to flicker in ghostly insubstantiality with an electric-blue light that, now that he was aware of it, crackled audibly in the silent room. But the final horror was the fact that each of the creature’s “legs” terminated in tiny, perfectly formed hands…

He quit looking then and backed away, clenching his eyes shut in a futile attempt to block the vision of the creatures from his mind’s eye. He succeeded in banishing all but a single image. The last detail he’d observed was the one he most wanted to forget, but paradoxically, was the one he knew he would always remember.

He remembered the mere glimpse he’d had of the long tube-like shape that projected obscenely from the creature’s underside to nearly three times the length of its entire body, terminating in a sharp needle that he knew was inserted into the insect’s prey. Just beneath the jointure of the appendage and the body, hung a redly-bloated sack. A sack so heavy, it almost held the creature earthbound, despite the electric power that pulsated in its wings.

Lee dropped the dish on the floor and in a reaction that surprised him with its vehemence, set his heel to it with instinctive abhorrence.

Slowly, he retreated to the long row of windows at the end of the room. Leaning against a window frame, he breathed deep of the pungent air outside the suddenly stifling confines of the clinic.

At first, he heard nothing more than the sounds of the jungle that he’d become accustomed to over the past few weeks, but then, his senses began to sort them out, with one in particular more insistent than the others. It was a sound he’d heard before since arriving in Panama, a low buzz that grew from a barely perceptible hum to a loud grinding that seemed to threaten destruction of the entire forest.

Then, he realized that he recognized the sound from somewhere else. The electric hum generated from the wings of the insects he’d examined was the same as that one he now heard emanating from the depths of the jungle! Listening now with a greater urgency, he heard the sound reach a crescendo before dying down again. Somewhere out there was a swarm of the creatures, maybe more than one, moving like a cloud over the land looking for victims off of whom to feed. Victims such as the railroad workers toiling blissfully in the scorching equatorial sun!

Suddenly, his responsibility to protect the lives of the workers rested like a great weight upon him as the realization dawned upon him of what he had to do: find out where and how the creatures bred and destroy them.

Luckily, with all the preparation he had to make, the next few days passed too quickly to spend much time pondering about the monstrous nature of the tiny beasts he’d discovered. He’d tried to interest Dr. Jonas in the venture, but as soon as he mentioned insects as the possible source of malaise and yellow fever, the physician nonchalantly dismissed the notion. He even went so far as to approach General Ernst and convince him that the new doctor had confused classroom theory with the reality found in the field. As a result, no help was to be found from official quarters.

But his sense of responsibility as a physician and the honor he felt in the oath he had taken upon graduating from medical school compelled him to take action; even if he were alone in the endeavor. Fortunately, though, he did find some help. Corporal Jones came through for him in finding the things he needed to prepare for the project.

Those preparations included the gathering of twenty yards of good sail from the hold of one of the many ships laying at anchor at the railhead, strips of mosquito netting, and the services of a good sail maker to fashion the material in the form dictated by Lee. Though that form puzzled Jones as well as the sail maker, Lee decided not to confide its purpose in them for fear of word getting around to General Ernst, who would order him to desist in his wild ideas. And order that Lee sometimes felt he’d welcome with relief.

At last, however, everything was ready. He’d created a complete suit that would cover every exposed inch of his body. Made of the tough canvas material of ship’s sail and sewn together tightly, the suit was fashioned like a beekeeper’s outfit complete with a hard sun helmet pulled down tight with folds of mosquito netting. Though the thought of the long, wicked looking “stinger” sported by the insect he intended to hunt still sent shivers down his spine, he felt sure that the suit’s toughness would withstand the creatures’ attempts to pierce the material. Still, there was the nagging fear that under a constant barrage of stings, even the tough fibers of his protective gear might not be enough to protect him, thoughts that he preferred not to dwell upon.

And so, early one morning, Lee made a strange figure covered entirely in his coarse body-suit as he stepped from his assigned bungalow into the conveniently close jungle. He really didn’t have much of an idea about how to exterminate the creatures outside of finding their breeding ground and destroying it somehow. To that end, he carried a heavy fire-ax in case it took the shape of a hive. Perhaps, with their home destroyed, the creatures would be forced to disperse and travel further inland, away from human habitation. If there was no hive and the creatures simply breed in the open such as common mosquitoes, he had a back-up plan. He’d done some experimenting on the insects and discovered that they reacted to smoke much as did ordinary bees; it put them into a sort of coma. To that end, he intended to set local brush afire hoping that would help disperse them as well. If anything went wrong with his suit or his plans to deal with the creatures, he’d prepared a number of small huts reinforced with mud and clay and dotted them about the nearby countryside.

Pushing his way into the clinging undergrowth of the forest, he lumbered heavily out of the fragile world of men and into the stronghold of the wild. Immediately he was struck with waves of intense heat as his enclosed body began to bake in the thick sail-cloth suit. He’d not reckoned with the heat his body would generate as he marched through the jungle, but he gritted his teeth and plunged on in the direction of the Chagres River, the area from which his hasty studies of the buzzing sounds indicated the major activity of the insects came from. The buzz itself was almost always present, only building and dying occasionally as he thought the swarm moved to and from its nesting area. Just now, the intensity of the sound emanated distantly from the south-east and it in that direction he aimed his footsteps.

As he continued to move in the direction of the sounds, Lee realized that he was headed directly towards the area where the mouth of the Chagres emptied into the Caribbean. There, he knew, the river dissolved into a tangle of rivulets and tidal pools comprising a swamp thick with rotting and dying vegetation, the perfect place for the breeding of mosquito-like insects. It was in that area as well that the obscure tribe of fisher-folk identified by Dr. Jonas was supposed to be located.

But any further thoughts along the lines of the whereabouts of local Indian tribes became irrelevant when he noticed that his feet began to sink into the soft soil of the jungle. It seemed to Lee that he was still too far from the swamps for such a thing to be happening, but he could plainly see his footprints filling slowly with water. The ground all around him was like a big sponge, completely saturated with water and as he continued to walk, the area between the forest began to thin until he found himself amid a vast mud flat that extended as far as he could see. Then it occurred to him; the rainy season had only recently ended. The Chagres was swollen and had flooded the entire delta and only now were the waters receding, leaving behind muddy silts of the charging river.

Laboriously, Lee heaved himself onto the exposed roots of a huge tree and peered off into the distance. Far ahead, he could just make out the glistening surface of alluvial pools of water, left behind by the retreating river; everywhere the stink of rotting vegetation permeated the atmosphere. Lee had almost gotten used to it when his senses were suddenly overwhelmed by a stink whose smell was so repulsive, his body could only react to it by gagging. Quickly removing his hat, he’d just managed to get it off when he threw up. Weakened by the sudden attack, he replaced his hat and readjusted carefully the netting about his neck. When he’d recovered somewhat, he found that the stink was still there. Never in all his years as a surgeon had he been exposed to such a fetor! Worse than the stink of any rotting corpse or burned flesh, he could tell that it emanated from only a short distance ahead. He’d just determined to head in that direction when a great buzz of insects once again filled the air. The sound was so loud, Lee half expected to see the distant line of trees cut down as by a buzz saw.

Not without some trepidation, Lee forced himself to continue, feeling that the thing he was looking for was close by.

It took him a good hour to wade through the soft mud that rose about his ankles before finally finding what he was looking for. He could tell that he’d found it by the dark cloud of insects that boiled noisomely up ahead. Rising out of the sea of mud like some great beaver’s mound, lay a black bulk that occluded the horizon, blocking out the view of the sea beyond. Blacker than the mud surrounding it, it lay wetly in the thin skin of water that sheened the mud flat, its outline punctuated by a few old tree trunks that poked out from its sides.

Spying an island of dry land that had been too high above the surface of the flood waters to become submerged, Lee moved cautiously in its direction. At last, he managed to position himself amid the tangled shrubbery that clung to the crown of the little island. From there, his view of the mound was much improved and he discovered with a little shock that far from being some kind of lodge, the thing had once actually been a living creature! At least he hoped it was no longer living, as it showed no sign of life. There was no steady rhythm to suggest breathing, no futile efforts to right itself. Looking at the thing, Lee was almost certain that it was a sea creature of some kind, thrown up from the depths by the violent storms of the past few weeks and beached on an inhospitable shore. But if it had been a living creature, he prayed mightily that the thing was the last of its species. For there was a certain indefinable something about it that set Lee’s teeth on edge, that tickled at some long suppressed superstitious fear that lurked just below his conscious mind. The sort of fear a civilized man was long since supposed to have relegated to the memories of infancy. But the fact couldn’t be denied: he was in the presence of some lost primeval beast… Wait! The scrap of skin found on the fisherman by Dr. Jonas…hadn’t it said something about “Deep Ones”?

But before he could pursue the thought any further, his attention was drawn by increased agitation in the black cloud of insects that hovered overhead. Watching, he saw how the insects began to swarm by bringing into play the electric buzzing of their wings. In seconds, the swarm had begun to glow in the dim blue light generated by the collected power of the insects’ wings. Then, reaching a crescendo of sound, the swarm lifted higher into the air, and flew off in the direction of the railroad.

It took a few minutes after the buzzing sounds had tapered off for Lee to stir himself enough to focus his attention on the bulky form that lay out on the mudflat. Cautiously, he lifted himself from his place of concealment and inched out onto the hardening mud. He was relieved to find that the solid ground beneath the island apparently extended for some ways beyond the portion visible above the mud.