The Spawning (28 page)

Coyle started thinking about those psychic gifts Locke had talked about that were in us all supposedly, put there by the Old Ones to make us like them.

The author went on, mentioning how the descriptions of the Hogenhaus Devil were very similar to those that had come out of Siberia in the 17
^th
century and the Pyrenees in the 15
^th
, Prague in the 13
^th
century and Egypt in the 5
^th
. Comparable devils were known to Aborigine tribes of the Australian outback and the Bushmen of the Kalahari in Botswana.

In 1099, during the Crusades, a mummified creature of this type was discovered in a subterranean temple in Jerusalem during the bloody siege of that city and destroyed . . . along with its worshippers.

This same devil was known in Sumer in the 25
^th
century BC and was worshipped in the 11
^th
by a fervent Chaldean cult in Babylonia. And there was a very intriguing tale handed down orally generation to generation among the Inuit of the Baffin Bay region that told of the sky being black with a swarm of such creatures, that the buzzing of their wings was louder than storm winds. According to this legend, an Inuit village on what is now known as Ellesmere Island was emptied by the swarm, that the inhabitants were carried off into the sky. That peculiar legend was thought by anthropologists to be many thousands of years old, handed down father to son and mother to daughter. And in a subsurface cave system in Belgium, badly worn Neanderthal cave paintings approximately 60,000 years old seemed to show a large tribe being taken up into the air by winged creatures that bore a remarkable resemblance to “modern” accounts of the Hogenhaus Devil.

Coyle wanted to toss the book in the corner and forget about it all, but he couldn't. It was all there and it always had been. It was only a matter of looking and connecting disparate geographical areas and time periods. Regardless, it was there.

He paged through the book and there were other historical and folkloric references ranging from Assyrian temples to Scandinavian sagas. Locke had been very thorough in his research as had the author, a professor of classical archaeology out of Cambridge. Here were Celtic myths of wind demons called the “Dawn Reapers” and blasphemous statues of such devils in Ireland and Wales to which blood offerings were made as recorded by Roman scholars; Nigerian folk tales of winged devils carrying entire villages up to heaven; and the whispered tales of Germanic barbarian tribes.

Too much. It went on and on.

Coyle would have tossed the book aside at that point, but he found something a little closer to home.

It concerned the infamous “Arkham Devil-Cult” in Massachusetts of the 17
^th
century, a hard time for witches in Colonial New England. The Arkham Devil-Cult, or Witch-Cult, apparently held Sabbat in some shunned, dark ravine beyond a place called Meadow Hill during the dark nights of the four major witches' holidays: Candlemas, May-Eve, Lammas, and Halloween. Here, they worshipped at some ancient white stone which sat in the ravine where vegetation refused to grow. This ravine had long been a place avoided by both colonists and Indians alike due to its unpleasant history of apparitions, unexplainable noises and high-pitched sounds. Early colonists claimed that staring into the ravine would give you a terrible headache and that those that dared visit it often saw ghostly, monstrous figures and objects—tree branches and heavy stones and leaves—that blew about and flew through the air when there was no wind. The local Narragansett tribe claimed that it was haunted by a large winged creature with a dozen burning red eyes, that was sometimes ghostly and ethereal and sometimes fleshy and solid. It often exuded a pale phosphorescence that could burn your flesh. To look upon this thing would empty your mind. Tribal shaman often went there and had nightmarish visions that stayed with them throughout their lives. The stone itself was apparently hewn from some form of meteoric quartz by a banished sect of the Narragansett centuries and centuries before.

During the nights of the witches' holidays were times of great terror in Arkham, for children often went missing and noises were heard from the sky and the earth trembled and shook.

The Arkham Devil-Cult was greatly feared because of its power. Witches from the cult that had been brought to trial admitted, under duress, that a great hideous winged devil had shown them the secrets of the outer spheres, how to physically vanish and move through solid matter, and to jump from place to place over great distances via the manipulation of certain esoteric figures, formula, and the distortion of unknown angles. Modern conspiracists claimed that this was evidence that this creature, probably of extraterrestrial origin, had taught the Witch-Cult the primal, unguessable secrets of quantum physics and space/time distortion. Although others claimed it meant nothing, that these same conspiracists were linking black magic and Einsteinian physics into some impossible proto-science that could not possibly exist.

Essentially, they said, it was all randy bullshit.

On May-Eve, 1691, a Congregational minister named Daniel Hooper, incited by the works of Cotton Mather, hid himself in the ravine to learn the identity of the witches. He was found four days later on a hilltop seven miles away, naked and badly bruised and scratched, his eyes struck mad with fear. After nearly a month of convalescing, he claimed (in writing) that he,
“Dide wytnesse a divers covven of wytches number'g thyrteen upon ye Fryday E'en and dide heare great shriekes and fryghtfull noisess inn that spirit'd ravin beyond Meddowe Hille whereof I speak, whereon I was badly terrifyed and affear'd: anon, I duly descried an awfull discoverye of these wytches hold'g congress with a darke and diabolicall figure of extreame foulnesse, himm being of corruptnesse and filthe rais'd upp frome Hell, the adversarye lykenesse to the Divell as writ in ye Bible: wing'd and of greate size with many eyes that burn'd lyke redde as of bloode and possess'd of a voice as of pyp'g cycada. Such things descried bye others at yr Hallow'en and Candelmas rites. This Divell dide bestowe crawl'ng spyders or such vermin unto the wytches as gifts for foul magick and conjur'g. I owne that thiss statemente I tell of woulde be true.”

Hooper didn't have much of a life after that.

He was shunned and lived by himself, was considered mad. He claimed that the Devil walked through the walls of his house and called him by name. No one would have anything to do with him whatsoever, claiming that he was “hex'd and oft visit'd bye spirits” and tales sprung up like weeds around the poor man. Several people claimed to have seen a winged hobgoblin lighting off the roof of his house at Midsummer and others claimed to see several such creatures buzzing about like corpse flies. Hooper rarely went into the city for he was known to all and had been beaten on several occasions and publicly stoned on yet another. Horses would not go near his house. They reacted the same as they did when they neared the old ravine, whinnying and racing about in circles and had broken free of their harnesses on several occasions.

On Halloween night of 1693, a terrible wind rushed through Hooper's house though it was calm everywhere else in Arkham. Screams and strange noises were heard like throbbings and pipings and ear-piercing squeals that terrified half the city. Hooper's house stood in shambles by morning. He was found in it, dead, having supposedly committed suicide. He left a note which said:
“I hadde bin nam'd bye Them thrice.”

The house was burned to the ground and the yard salted.

It would be well over a hundred years until anyone dared make use of the property. And then only for a warehouse stockyard.

What was interesting in all this was that when Keziah Mason, a member of the Arkham Devil-Cult, was arrested during the witch-scare of 1692, certain things were found in her house on East Pickman Street, a house which would be forever known as the “Witch-House.” Among her scribbled papers which made little sense whatsoever—she being barely literate—was mentioned again and again that the cult worshipped and interacted with “
Them Old Ones.”
According to contemporary accounts of the time, she was the prototypical hunched-over old hag and was said to have leering red eyes and carried a large unpleasant rat which was thought to be her familiar.

After naming the members of the coven, Mason was condemned to death, but then disappeared from her locked cell at the Salem gaol.

She left on the walls a series of odd, unintelligible geometrical formulae in her own blood, apparently, that were quickly scrubbed clean. And particularly after a magistrate traced those cabalistic figures, abstract curves, and distorted angles with his hand and his fingers were seen to momentarily fade and become transparent so that they could be clearly seen through. It was thought to be Devil's work. When the High Sheriff attempted to arrest the other members of the Witch-Cult, they had disappeared like Mason, leaving only those same figures and formulae on the walls.

Another interesting point: physical examination of Keziah Mason had found a V-shaped cutting on the nape of her neck just below the base of the skull. The author thought that was intriguing, but did not make much of it saying that throughout history witches had been found with assorted marks—cuts and incisions and scars etc.—and most of these were probably inflicted by the witchfinders themselves.

And that was a rational, realistic explanation, but Coyle wasn't sure if he was buying it. Maybe that V-cut meant nothing and maybe it meant everything.

Another side-note: in 1928, a mathematics student named Walter Gilman was found dead in the upper floors of the Witch-House, apparently attacked by rats, but in the weeks before his death he complained of vivid dreams of Keziah Mason, her familiar, and strange winged extradimensional entities shaped like tapering cylinders that walked on stout tentacles and had starfish-shaped heads, the tips of these appendages which were set with eyes.

There was no doubt in Coyle's mind what these entities in fact were.

Later writers mentioned that Gilman was obsessed by the possible connection between theoretical mathematics and the whispered truths behind black magic formulae. These entities that tormented him, it was claimed, were in league with Mason, whom they had taught the vagaries of multi-dimensional physics and time/space distortion, vortexual matter displacement and interspatial transmission.

At this point, Coyle threw the book aside.

It was obvious what Locke was getting at with all this.

Witchcraft, sorcery, black magic, and all that business were not the products of human imagination and man's ceaseless attempt to explain and control natural forces and phenomenon, but something else entirely. For once you stripped away the superstition and myth and old wives' tales, there was a system of logic here. A highly advanced alien science that involved physics, mathematics, and psychic ability.

Keziah Mason must have been one of those rare individuals throughout history that were born with those latent psychic gifts fully activated: a witch, sorcerer, conjuror . . . they would have been known by many names in many lands. But it was these people who would have discovered these alien sciences either through their abilities or by coming into psychic contact with the aliens or by the Old Ones themselves leaving scraps of information in remote places that adepts and scholars would find and translate and pass down to the like-minded.

Coyle sat there for some time trying to convince himself it was all utter bullshit. But he knew better. Things were coming to light now. It was all there, the ultimate truth shivering in the ancient shadows of witchcraft and blatant superstition.

Keziah Mason was not a witch. Not really.

She was a human member of the alien hive and, ultimately, what all men and women and children would become when those controls in our minds were unlocked globally.

The witch-swarm.

W
ARREN DIDN'T WANT TO see the thing.

He really didn't.

He already didn't like the way it was making everyone act, spiking stress levels and giving everyone awful nightmares, but he knew he had to go. Beeman wanted him to and that decided it. Besides, Beeman had been acting funny ever since Dryden called up the Hypertat and described to him what they had found in the cavern.

He was almost afraid to let Beeman go down there alone.

Yes, Beeman was an asshole, a rigid military type who thought with his balls instead of his brains, but Warren knew he was part of their team and recognized his value. They needed each other. Regardless of what Biggs said, they needed each other.

And Beeman was in a bad way.

Like the discovery of that thing had laid something open inside him and the only way he could heal himself was by looking at what frightened him, what wounded him. All the way down to the cavern, he kept stopping, cocking his head like he was listening for something. But there had been nothing but the sound of the ice itself . . . that primordial sound of creaking and cracking and shifting. The music of the glacier.

Warren was disturbed by what had been found, but it was not until they made the cavern and he saw it there encased in ice that the impact of the thing hit him. It was like a radio had been cranked full blast in his head—just a shrieking barrage of static and whining white noise that made his jaws lock tight, squeezed tears from his eyes that froze on his cheeks, and cycled a thrumming headache to life in his brain that he thought might blow out the back of his skull.

That was what looking at the thing had done to him.

His limbs shook, his heart palpitated, his vision went blurry . . . and the next thing he knew he was down on his knees before the thing, vomiting on the ice, clouds of vile-smelling steam wisping up into his face.

And then hands were taking hold of him and voices were asking him if he was all right.

But he couldn't answer just then.