Quests of Simon Ark (2 page)

“Are you a writer or something?” I asked him.

“No, I am simply an investigator; I make a hobby of investigating any strange or unexplained happenings in the world.”

“How did you manage to get here so quickly?”

“I was in the area, just across the state line, on another mission. I would have been here sooner, but it is very difficult to reach Gidaz by road.”

“It certainly is. The village is almost completely cut off from the rest of the town. Ever since the gold mines died out, the place has been almost a ghost town.”

“And yet,” Simon Ark said quietly, “there were seventy-three people remaining here. Why did they remain, I wonder. Why didn’t they leave this dying village?”

“They’ve left it now,” I said; “they left it last night when they walked over that cliff.”

“Yes …” And the man called Simon Ark left the ancient building. I followed him outside, to see where he would go.

He was a strange man, strange in many ways. He seemed almost to be from another world or another time as he walked slowly along the dirt road that led through the center of the dead village.

The reporters and the police had already searched the houses, but he seemed to be looking for something more …

Soon, he had almost disappeared in the darkness, and I hurried after him. When I finally reached him, he was bending over a dark spot on the ground. I could see only by the light of the moon overhead, but he seemed excited by what he had found.

“There has been a fire here recently,” he said, almost to himself. He pulled something from the ashes and attempted to brush it off. It looked as if it had once been a book, but in the dim light it was impossible to tell more.

I had not realized the utter silence of the night around us until that moment, when it was suddenly shattered by the distant sound of an approaching car.

“Someone’s coming,” I said.

“Odd …” And a strange expression passed quickly over the face of Simon Ark.

He pushed the remains of the charred book into his topcoat pocket and walked back toward the dirt road.

Somewhere above, a cloud passed over the moon, and for the moment all was darkness. Then the night was broken by the gleam of two headlights moving slowly along the road.

Simon Ark stepped in front of the car and held up both hands, like some ancient high priest calling upon the gods above. A chill ran down my spine as I watched him.

The car, a light green convertible, came to an abrupt halt, and a girl climbed out from behind the wheel. “Are you the police?” she asked him.

“No, only an investigator. This other gentleman is a reporter.” She noticed me then for the first time, and the tense look on her face softened.

“I’m Shelly Constance,” she said. “I … I used to live here.”

Simon Ark introduced himself. “You had a family still living here in Gidaz?” he asked quietly.

“Yes … My father and brother … I …I heard on the radio what happened last night. I came as soon as I could …”

“It would have been wiser to stay away,” Simon Ark told her. “Your father and brother are beyond all worldly aid now, and the evil of Gidaz still fills the air, mingled now with the odor of death.”

“I …I must see them,” she said. “Where did it happen?”

Simon Ark motioned toward the distant cliff and led the way through the darkness. “The bodies have been covered with canvas for the night,” he told her. “I believe the plans are to bury them tomorrow in a mass grave at the bottom of the cliff. Most of them, of course, have no living relatives.”

We reached the edge, and I played my flashlight down on the rocks below, but nothing could be seen from that far up. In the light of the flash, however, I got my first good look at the girl by my side. She was young and tall and pretty in a casual sort of way. Her blonde hair hung to her shoulders, and helped to set off the lines of her face.

“Tell me,” I asked, as we walked back to her car, “why did you ever leave Gidaz?”

“That is a long story,” she said, “but perhaps it has something to do with this horrible thing. Come, come into my …house over here for a few minutes, and I’ll try to tell you about it.”

Simon Ark and I followed her in silence to one of the houses just off the main road. It seemed strange entering this house that no longer belonged to the living. There were things, dishes and books and clothing and cigarettes and food, that were reminders of the people who had lived here. On the wall was a map of the gold mining area, where some of these people had continued to work until yesterday, in the futile hope of recovering the village’s lost greatness.

It was then, as the girl entered this dead house that had once been home, that she seemed to go to pieces. She began sobbing, and threw herself into a big armchair to cover her face. I remained where I was and let her cry. There was no way to comfort this girl who was almost a stranger to me.

I noticed that Simon Ark also left her to her sorrow and moved over to inspect the small bookcase in the dining room. After a moment’s hesitation I joined him and glanced at the titles on the shelves. They were mostly children’s books, with a few others that had probably served as college textbooks. One, an ancient history book, was stamped State University.

This seemed to remind Simon Ark of the charred remains of the book he had found earlier. He removed it from his pocket and carefully examined it. A few charred pieces drifted to the floor.

“It seems to be …” Simon Ark began, and then fell silent.

“What?”

“Ah, yes,
The Confessions of Saint Augustine. A
truly remarkable book. Did you ever read it?”

“No, I’m not a Catholic,” I replied.

“Augustine wrote for all men,” Simon Ark said slowly; “this is a very interesting discovery.”

“Why should anyone want to burn it?”

“I am beginning to fear that I know the answer to that,” he told me, and there was something in his voice that scared even me.

He returned the remains of the book to his pocket as the girl joined us again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

“Certainly,” I told her; “we understand.”

“I’ll see if I can fix us coffee or something,” and she disappeared into the kitchen.

Presently she returned, with three steaming cups, and as we drank she told us of her early life in Gidaz …

“… I suppose it was about five years ago when I left to attend college. Of course, I was home for the summers, but for the first two years things seemed the same as they had always been in Gidaz. Then, in the summer following my third year at the University, I returned home to find things had changed slightly.”

“In what way?”

“Well, I suppose it would be hard for you to understand, because it was really nothing I could put my finger on. It seemed to be just a change in attitude at first. They talked of a man who had come to Gidaz—a man named Axidus, who seemed to have a great influence on their lives from then on. Of course, you must realize that Gidaz is so remote from other cities that these seventy-three people were forced to live entirely among themselves. My father and brother usually got into town about once every month or two. To them, the village was everything, even though it was slowly dying. A few of the men kept working in the mines, finding just enough gold to keep them alive. Others worked small farms in the valley. But they were happy here, probably because they had never known anything better.”

“But you were not satisfied with it?”

“I wasn’t the only one. Many of the young people like me left Gidaz, especially after the coming of this man Axidus.”

Simon Ark’s face had grown dark while she talked. “You say his name was Axidus?”

“Yes, do you know him?”

“I may have met him once, long ago …”

“Well, he was the cause of all the trouble, and I saw that right away. When I came home for Christmas that year, it was as if a madness had seized the people. They talked of nothing but Axidus, and how he was going to help them save themselves. He seemed to have some kind of new religion …”

I glanced at him, but his face was like stone. Once again I seemed to feel a shiver run down my spine.

“It really scared me, the way they all believed in him so completely,” she continued. “Once each week he held a meeting in the old town hall, and everyone would go to hear him—even the children. It was uncanny, the way he seemed to know everything that happened in the village. He would tell people secret facts that no one else could possibly have known. When I was away at school, he would tell my father everything I was doing. Of course, people like this have always been attracted by fortunetellers and the like, and a person like this knew exactly how to get them in his power. I went to see him just once, and I must admit I found something strangely haunting about this man Axidus.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“He was fairly tall, with a white beard that hung to his chest. His hair was long and white, too, and he wore a white robe. He would come out on the small platform at one end of the hall and begin talking without any introduction. Afterward, he just seemed to disappear. Sometimes people would see him around the village during the week, too, but always in this white robe. No one knew where or how he lived.”

“It’s fantastic,” I said; “it sounds like something out of the dark past.”

Simon Ark frowned. “It is dark, and it is certainly from the past. My only wish is that I had heard all this before it was too late …”

There was a wind coming up outside, and from somewhere up in the hills came the cry of a lonesome timber wolf. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see it was already past midnight.

“What do you mean …?” the girl started to ask, but she never completed the sentence.

Suddenly, Simon Ark was out of his chair, and he was pulling open the front door of the house. I ran to his side, and then I saw it, too …

A figure, or a thing, all in white, running with the wind toward the cliff where Death slept in the darkness …

We followed, through the night, with the gathering breeze whistling through the trees around us. The girl started to follow, but I waved her back inside. Whatever was out here, it was not for her to see …

In the distance, a sudden streak and rumble of thunder followed. It would be raining back in the hills, but with luck the storm would miss us.

The wind was picking up, though, and by the time we reached the edge of the cliff it was close to being a gale. I wondered briefly if a strong wind could have blown these people to their death, but that of course, was fantastic … But perhaps the real reason for their death would be even more fantastic …

“There!” He pointed down the cliff, to the very center of where the seventy-three bodies rested under canvas on the rocks.

And I saw it again.

The moon that had given us light before was hidden now by the threatening clouds of rain, but I could see the blot of white against the blackness of the rocks.

“Axidus?” I breathed.

“Or Satan himself,” Simon Ark answered; “perhaps this is the moment I have waited for.” He started down the rocks, and I followed.

But the white form seemed to sense our approach. Suddenly, before our very eyes, it seemed to fade away.

“He must be hiding in the rocks somewhere,” I said.

The odor of the corpses was all around us then, and my head swam sickeningly.

“I must find him,” Simon Ark said, and he shouted something in a strange language that might have been Greek, but wasn’t.

We searched the rocks until the odor was overpowering and forced us to retreat. We found nothing …

On the way back up the cliff, I asked Simon Ark what he’d shouted before.

“It was in Coptic,” he said, “which is very much like Egyptian. It was a type of prayer …”

With the coming of daylight, the horror that hung thick in the air over Gidaz seemed to lift a little. The girl had slept through the remainder of the night, and I had sat alone in the front room of the house while Simon Ark prowled the night on some further mysterious investigations.

Since I knew sleep was impossible, I spent the time attempting to set down in words just what had happened to me that day, ever since the moment in the early evening when I’d first arrived in Gidaz. But I couldn’t do it; I was still living the thing, and the terror that clung to the village was still a very real part of the air I breathed. Maybe later …

Simon Ark returned to the house soon after daybreak, and the sound of our talking awakened the girl. She made breakfast for us from among the remains we found around the house, and by nine o’clock we were ready to leave.

The lack of sleep was beginning to get me then, but the sunlight helped revive me. Simon Ark looked the same as he had the evening before, and seemed anxious to leave the village. “I have things that must be done,” he said. “In the meantime, if you would desire to help me, there are one or two things you could find out.”

“Sure. Anything for a story.”

They were interrupted then by the sound of an approaching truck. Down the single road that led to civilization, an ancient mail truck was coming toward them.

“This must be the man who found the bodies yesterday,” Simon Ark said.

And it was. A fairly tall, middle-aged man named Joe Harris. “They haven’t buried them yet, huh?” he asked us.

“No,” I answered. “The bodies are under canvas at the bottom of the cliff, a short distance from the rocks. The funeral is to take place today. I understand they’ve decided to bury them here in a mass grave rather than try to remove all the bodies to another town.”

“Gee,” he said, “I near died of shock yesterday morning when I drove up and found them all down there. Why do you think they jumped?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would make a great story if I did.”

There were other trucks and cars coming now, with a gleaming State Police car in the lead. There were workers with shovels, who would soon bury the remains of the Gidaz Horror. And there were more photographers and reporters, from all over the country, coming to record forever the strange happening in this forgotten village.

They took pictures of Joe Harris and his battered mail truck; they took pictures of Shelly Constance, and questioned her about her life in the village. She talked to them at length, but she did not mention the strange man, Axidus, again; I suspected that Simon Ark had suggested she keep silent about this part of it.