A. E. Merritt - The People of the Pit

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The People of the Pit

A. Merritt

http://www.blackmask.com

The People of the Pit

NORTH OF us a shaft of light shot half way to the zenith. It came from behind

the five peaks. The beam drove up through a column of blue haze whose edges

were marked as sharply as the rain that streams from the edges of a thunder

cloud. It was like the flash of a searchlight through an azure mist. It cast

no shadows.

As it struck upward the summits were outlined hard and black and I saw that

the whole mountain was shaped like a hand. As the light silhouetted it, the

gigantic fingers stretched, the hand seemed to thrust itself forward. It was

exactly as though it moved to push something back. The shining beam held

steady for a moment; then broke into myriads of little luminous globes that

swung to and fro and dropped gently. They seemed to be searching.

The forest had become very still. Every wood noise held its breath. I felt the

dogs pressing against my legs. They too were silent; but every muscle in their

bodies trembled, their hair was stiff along their backs and thier eyes, fixed

on the falling lights, were filmed with the terror glaze.

I looked at Anderson. He was staring at the North where once more the beam had

pulsed upward.

“It can't be the aurora,” I spoke without moving my lips. My mouth was as dry

as though Lao T'zai had poured his fear dust down my throat.

“If it is I never saw one like it,” he answered in the same tone. “Besides who

ever heard of an aurora at this time of the year?”

He voiced the thought that was in my own mind.

“It makes me think something is being hunted up there,” he said, “an unholy

sort of hunt—it's well for us to be out of range.”

“The mountain seems to move each time the shaft shoots up,” I said. “What's it

keeping back, Starr? It makes me think of the frozen hand of cloud that Shan

Nadour set before the Gate of Ghouls to keep them in the lairs that Eblis cut

for them.”

He raised a hand—listening.

From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not the

rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the ghosts of winds

that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that

sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering that held in it a demand. It was eager.

It called us to come up where the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it

a note of inexorable insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny

fear-tipped fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge

myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he strained

at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of the Sirens.

The whispering grew louder.

“What the hell's the matter with those dogs?” cried Anderson savagely. “Look

at them!”

The malemutes, whining, were racing away toward the light. We saw them

disappear among the trees. There came back to us a mournful howling. Then that

too died away and left nothing but the insistent murmuring overhead.

The glade we had camped in looked straight to the North. We had reached I

suppose three hundred mile

above the first great bend of the Koskokwim toward the Yukon. Certainly we

were in an untrodden part of the wilderness. We had pushed through from Dawson

at the breaking of the Spring, on a fair lead to the lost five peaks between

which, so the Athabasean medicine man had told us, the gold streams out like

putty from a clenched fist. Not an Indian were we able to get to go with us.

The land of the Hand Mountain was accursed they said. We had sighted the peaks

the night before, their tops faintly outlined against a pulsing glow. And now

we saw the light that had led us to them.

Anderson stiffened. Through the whispering had broken a curious pad-pad and a

rustling. It sounded as though a small bear were moving towards us. I threw a

pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the

bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once

it flashed upon me—it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted

themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it

was—terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns—and dropped them.

Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!

It was a man. Still with the high climbing pad-pad he swayed to the fire. He

stopped.

“Safe,” whispered the crawling man, in a voice that was an echo of the murmur

overhead. “Quite safe here. They can't get out of the blue, you know. They

can't get you—unless you go to them——”

He fell over on his side. We ran to him. Anderson knelt.

“God's love!” he said. “Frank, look at this!” He pointed to the hands. The

wrists were covered with torn rags of a heavy shirt. The hands themselves were

stumps! The fingers had been bent into the palms and the flesh had been worn

to the bone. They looked like .the feet of a little black elephant! My eyes

traveled down the body. Around the waist was a heavy band of yellow metal.

From it fell a ring and a dozen links of shining white chain!

“What is he? Where did he come from?” said Anderson. “Look, he's fast

asleep—yet even in his sleep his arms try to climb and his feet draw

themselves up one after the other! And his knees—how in God's name was he ever

able to move on them?”

It was even as he said. In the deep sleep that had come upon the crawler arms

and legs kept raising in a deliberate, dreadful climbing motion. It was as

though they had a life of their own—they kept their movement independently of

the motionless body. They were semaphoric motions. If you have ever stood at

the back of a train and had watched the semaphores rise and fall you will know

exactly what I mean.

Abruptly the overhead whispering ceased. The shaft of light dropped and did

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