He Who Walks in Shadow (13 page)

“What is he saying?”

William shook his head. “It’s impossible to say. It’s Russian, I suppose, but some dialect with which I am not familiar. In a place like this, they might as well be speaking another language altogether.”

For a while the conversation seemed wholly a mystery to us, but when Rostov started gesturing with his hands, I knew they were talking money. Then the old man who was apparently the leader of this group began to shake his head. Rostov raised his voice, but the old man remained firm. I didn’t need a mastery of Russian to know that he had just given Rostov an offer he could either take or leave. Rostov sighed and nodded. The two men shook hands, and the Russian bear lumbered back to where we stood.

“Well,” he said, “the old man serves his village as elder for a reason. He drives a hard bargain.”

“But he’ll take us to the site?” I asked.

Rostov shook his head. “Not exactly. He is the leader of the Evenki tribe, the people who call this place home. He remembers well that day, the day he says that ‘Hell fell to earth.’ An incredible story. He says that a column of fire descended from the heavens, that it devoured the forests on the banks of the Tunguska River. He says that in the weeks following the event, the sky glowed a yellow so bright that the night appeared like day. It left quite the impression.”

“So will his men take us or not?” I asked again, growing impatient. Rostov frowned.

“He says that the guides will take us to the edge of the valley. But we must go the final few miles alone. I argued with him the best that I could, but on this matter he was definite. Apparently, at some point after the event, curiosity got the best of some of the braver or bolder or stupider men from the village. They went to investigate. Some stopped at the forest-fall, where the trees had been flattened. They came back. The ones who went into the fires and the smoke never returned. The old man,” Rostov said, turning and gesturing to the gentleman who watched us from beneath a snow-covered, pine-bough roof, “he says that what he calls the ‘Valleymen’ patrol the region. Whoever they are, he is very much afraid of them. He told me that he will take our gold, but that he can promise we will not return. He was very clear. ‘If you go there,’ he said, ‘you will die.’ He says they call it, ‘The Valley of Death.’”

At that Rostov roared out a thunderous laugh. He slapped William on the back and said, “Charming, eh? I love these people. So simple. So superstitious. We leave tomorrow at dawn.”

Rostov left us to talk to the Evenki guides about horses. Once he was out of earshot, William turned to Henry and me. His smile, normally easy, was forced. “Well, that’s quite the story, isn’t it? Not exactly what one wants to hear on the eve of an expedition.” He laughed, but it was no more honest than his smile.

“Yes,” Henry said, and from his furrowed brow and the drop in his voice I knew he was pondering something, something he didn’t like much at all. “You know this doesn’t make sense,” he said, turning to me.

He was right; it didn’t.

“This should be a simple recovery mission. We go to the site, we find the Oculus. The hardest part should be digging it up. The most dangerous part, the damnable Red Army. But you take what the village elder has to say, and that’s something altogether different. What do you make of these ‘valleymen’?”

“Could be superstition. Probably is, in fact.”

“No,” Henry said. He shook his head against the idea. “You and I both know that superstition is all too often grounded in cold, hard truth. There’s something to this.”

I suppose I should have listened. I suppose I should have heeded Henry’s warning. But we were so close. We were there, on the cusp of something great, on the verge of having the Oculus, one of the greatest artifacts man has ever known and a tool that we could use against whatever evils we might face in the future.

“Something to it, of course. But you must remember, Henry. Remember what these people saw. Fire falling from the heavens? An explosion, greater than anything they had ever seen? Is it any wonder that myth and legends have grown up around the event? The men from the village, the ones who never returned, they probably did die there. But not from any ‘valleymen.’ And we will be careful, as we always are. But this is something we cannot turn back on. We’ve come too far.”

Henry hesitated, but he never could stand up to me. Finally, he nodded.

“I don’t know, Carter,” William said.

“If you wish to stay behind,” I spat, still angry from William’s betrayal of the night before, “then you certainly may. Some of Rostov’s men will wait with the train. Feel free to join them.”

William glared at me. “You know, a man once told me to use my rationality, to leave my emotions behind. That logic and reason were the only defenses we had against the madness of this world. Why don’t you use that reason now?”

“No,” I said, struggling to keep my composure. “The only person being unreasonable is you. We know why we are here. We know what we must do. I am willing to take the risk.”

“You know that we are with you,” Henry said. I grasped his arm in thanks, and then I looked at William.

“Yes,” he said, “but we would do well to take every precaution.”

“Of course. We always do,” I said, looking William in the eye. He held my gaze a moment longer than I would have liked. In the end, it was Rostov that ended the tension.

“We have the horses,” he announced. “It was extra, as I have come to expect. I suppose they thought that we would walk. The people here are adept at separating a man from his gold.”

“We will reimburse you, of course,” Henry said. But Rostov only shook his head.

“There is no need my friend. Money holds little value to me these days. After all, once the Bolsheviks take power, what will we need gold for anyway?” The same thunderous laugh followed. Whatever fate awaited Rostov, it was clear that he had embraced it in full.

“We leave tomorrow at dawn.”

* * *

The sun had not yet broken above the horizon when we set out. A cold day, with mountains of ice and snow before us. I was glad for the horses.

It was the three of us, Rostov and one of his men, and two of the Evenki who would take us as far as the crest of the valley. There, in the deep cut in the earth made by the Tunguska River, we would find our quarry.

And yet, with every step, the tension seemed to grow. Our Evenki guides became more restless, more prone to panic, their hands shaking as they gripped the reins of their horses, their wild eyes scanning the forest, their voices gibbering endlessly about Chort and Baba Yaga. They weren’t the worst. William’s attitude had darkened with every step our horses took, the rift between us growing wider the closer we came to the valley’s edge.

The sun was still low in the east when we arrived at the rim of that accursed valley. And what a sight it was. It seemed that we had been traveling through thick, frozen forests for eternity. That made the shock of what we saw all the more palpable.

The end of the trees was as abrupt as previously it had been unimaginable. But our eyes did not deceive us. The forest continued until it simply did not, and at that point a vast field of felled timber met our eyes—trees bent and broken, flattened and burned. Where there had been snow before, thick and unyielding, here there was none, as if the ground itself emitted some ungodly warmth. William murmured beside me, quoting from a foul text that I knew all too well.

“‘They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites.’”

I glanced at Henry, and he at me, but neither of us spoke. Speaking was left to our guides, who were not so silent. Low moans rose from the pits of their stomachs and turned to wails. Rostov shouted at them in Russian, and in his voice I could hear a pleading, a begging for them to stay. It was no use. They turned their horses from the face of this impossibility, this absurdity. Spurring them to action before Rostov could say another word, they were gone. Disappearing into the still-standing forest behind.

“And with that,” Rostov said, turning back to the destruction ahead, “we are on our own. Though I must wonder if you still wish to continue.”

“We press on,” I said. I could feel William glare at me, and even in Henry’s eyes I could see doubt, but now was no time to give in to superstition and fear. “I believe what we seek is there.”

I gestured to a copse of still-standing trees some miles away, if trees they were. For while the forest around them had been pressed to the ground, they remained upright. But something was terribly wrong. It seemed as though they had been stripped of their limbs by some ungodly force, the trunks like sharpened pikes that waited, gleaming pale white in the morning sun. They stood as sigils to what had befallen this place, jammed into the earth like the bones of some long-dead giant, portents of an as-yet-undiscovered evil.

I can’t say what drove me in those moments. I can’t say what made me forget years of training and experience, to scoff at the superstitions and sixth sense in which I had always found truth. Perhaps the Oculus had become an obsession. Perhaps I wanted to grasp it so badly that I was blind to the signs, blind to the dangers, blind to the warnings. Or maybe it was something else, something foreign and alien that had captured my mind. Perhaps I was led by forces I could barely imagine, forces that wanted me to come to them.

In the end it mattered not. I could not be dissuaded, and William and Henry, no matter what their misgivings, would follow me into Hell. So we left our horses, tied to the trees that still stood, with Rostov’s adjunct to keep them safe, and into Hell we descended.

* * *

Our path was not easy. Into the valley we went, but felled trees blocked us at every turn. The ground itself was loathsome—a cold, frigid bog that soaked our shoes and sapped our strength. If I have ever before been so miserable, I do not recall it. The very air was foul, and a thick, pallid, yellow fog covered the earth, making every step a dangerous adventure. An eerie darkness crept over us, although the sun had not yet reached noonday. We had entered a place where even the light dared not go.

Despite the horrid conditions, my scientific curiosity remained strong. When Henry knelt beside one particularly large tree, running his hands along its trunk, I felt that youthful rush of excitement that always comes with discovery.

“Look at its size,” Henry murmured. “It must have been ancient. It would have taken an enormous force to knock it down.”

“Not to mention all the rest of them.”

Henry gestured to the underside of the tree. “See the burn marks? They’re only on one side. An enormous explosion, somewhere over there,” he said, pointing to the copse of naked trees. “It’s almost unimaginable.”

“It fits all the prophecies,” I said. “The Oculus has returned.” And yet, while I was certain, I saw doubt in Henry’s eyes. For several moments he sat there, staring into the distance at those still-standing trees.

“Does it?” Henry said finally. “Does it match what we’ve been told to expect?”

“Fire and flame, Henry. That’s what the book says. The Oculus will return in fire and flame.”

He shook his head. “This is more than that, Carter. This is destruction. Look around. It’s not just the trees. Nothing lives here. Nothing moves. There are no animals, no plants. It’s death, Carter. Death. Is that what you expected? Is that what you associate with the Eye of God?”

I sighed, long and deep. I couldn’t understand their doubt. Not William’s, and certainly not Henry’s. I felt a pressure building inside, welling up and threatening to fracture my very mind. “I don’t pretend to understand how all this works. But if you have a different explanation for what happened here, I’d love to hear it.”

A look of terror flashed across Henry’s face. “Not an explanation,” he said. “Just a fear of what might be out there.”

I didn’t bother to answer him. I turned and joined Rostov and William, who were standing at some distance, waiting on us with not a negligible amount of impatience. Henry knelt there for another moment, staring at what his mind either couldn’t comprehend or didn’t want to. William stepped behind Rostov as I approached. An involuntary shudder ran down my spine. I loved William, but now I loathed him, too. His rejection still stung.

“You know,” he said after we had walked for five minutes in silence, “this place, it reminds me of a story I once heard, back in my first year at Miskatonic. In that folk-tale class that old Freeborn taught.”

I grinned despite myself. Freeborn was a dear friend, and a professor of the highest order.

“It was a story from the South, from before the war. Nobody really remembered where it took place. Tennessee, Georgia. Alabama, maybe. It was about this old farmer, whose name was also lost. About the only thing anyone seems to recall is the name of his neighbor and rival, a planter called Wingate. Anyway, the farmer was poor. He owned enough land to get by, but not so much that he’d ever be considered wealthy, either in land or in possessions. Wingate held vast wealth, and his mammoth plantation dominated the countryside for miles. But Wingate wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more.

“So he came to the old man and offered to buy his land. The man refused to sell. So Wingate offered him a higher price. Still, the man said no. He doubled the offer, and the old man told him that the land had been in his family since they’d come to America from the old country. That it had gone to his father from his father’s father, and he would pass it to his son when he died. No price would buy it.

“Wingate, predictably, was infuriated by such a position, one almost as irrational as his own. He decided to kill the man and buy the property from his creditors before the son could take title. But he couldn’t just shoot him, of course. No man, no matter how rich, can get away with murder. So he went into the swamps, to see an old woman who local legend held was a witch. He told her his problem. She said that for a price, she could make the old man disappear. Wingate agreed and asked her how much. She named a sum in gold, a tiny amount really, for such a deed. Wingate was ecstatic, so much so that he completely missed the old woman’s warning. ‘All power has a cost,’ she said, ‘a cost that cannot be paid in gold. But paid it must be.’ Wingate handed over the money and returned to his house to wait.