Beyond the Gates of Dream, page 4
My name is Lin Carter. I was born and raised in Wade City, which is a small town in the Florida back-country on the outskirts of the Everglades in Oskeechoba County. Strangely enough for a Southerner, my first name is short for “Lincoln,” but that’s neither here nor there, and has nothing to do with my story.
My father, and his father before him, ran a general store here in Wade City and many of the local Indians traded with him, so I got to know them and to understand their ways, more or less, from the time I was a kid. The county, you see, is named after the Oskeechoba Indian Nation because this scrub and live oak country, on the edge of the great Everglade swamps, is their ancient and immemorial home, and they were here long ages before the first white men ever came. They are a pretty lazy and disreputable lot, but harmless enough. Once the Oskeechoba were a proud and mighty nation. But I guess something went out of them back in the Indian Wars; maybe it was their pride, for they never really got over their smashing defeat by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under the command of Robert Keith Call back in 1836.
When I was just a boy many Oskeechoba tribesmen worked around town; one of them—we called him Big Joe—worked for my father as a sort of general handyman, unloading the truck and doing chores around the place. I got to know them pretty well even some of their language and their folklore. But I never even heard of “Keru” until I was about fourteen.
One of my school friends had invited me to his birthday party. It lasted a few hours and it was fun enough, but when it was over and I was on the way home—that was when the real excitement happened.
My father had sent the Indian handyman, Big Joe, to pick me up about ten-thirty in the truck from the store. You must understand that farms were scattered all over the scrub-oak country, and the nearest farm was about seven miles out of Wade City. Everglades country is far from being healthy. Not only do sucking bogs of stagnant mud and quicksand lay just off the occasional road, but the palmetto underbrush teems with scorpions, coral snakes and big rattlers, and even the dreaded cottonmouth, among less pleasant swamp denizens.
It was about quarter of eleven, a clear night, dark and humid with a full moon hanging above the pine trees casting its silver on the long beards of Spanish moss that dangled from every branch. The night was still as death. There was no sound, save for the guttural music of the old Ford truck.
We were riding along slow and easy when I saw something lying in the road by the light of the headlamps. I called Big Joe to stop while I hopped out to see what it was. I bent over the body and saw, in the white glow of the moon, that it was a big dog, shaggy as a collie, splashed with drying mud. Stone dead. Nothing unusual in such a sight, but something made a tingle travel up my spine. Maybe it was the fact that the dog had not been hit by a car, but had died a more unusual death.
“Joe! Joe! Come look at this,” I yelled and he came running telling me to watch out for cottonmouth.
But it wasn’t a snake that killed that dog. Least ways, no snake I had ever seen or heard of. Something like a blunt wide-tipped funnel had been thrust deep in the dog’s back, just below the neck. And sucked the blood out of him.
It was ugly. I could see his head. The lips were drawn back, baring the teeth in a fighting snarl. The pink flesh of the dog’s inner mouth was gray-white, so much blood had been taken. His body looked … shrunken. But there was no blood on the tar surface of the country road, and no blood visible on the underbrush that lined the edge of the road. It was queer, all right.
But not queer enough to justify Big Joe’s reaction. He seemed to go wild with terror. He grabbed my arm so tight his big fingers dug in and really hurt. He pulled me to my feet with one jerk and pushed, half-stumbling, back toward the car.
“Git back, Mister Lin! Back in da car—git away from it! Keru! Unnerstan’ me? KERU!”
Joe was a big Indian, a shade over six feet, and built with plenty of meat on his bones. And he was strong. I’ve seen him lift a keg of ten-cent nails with one arm that would have taken two white men to heft. I had never before seen him scared of anything … once when I was real little I came on a coral snake in my mother’s flower garden while I was playing at helping Big Joe with his garden chores. I called him to come see the pretty snake. He grabbed up a hoe and picked me up out of the way and chopped the beautiful little serpent to pieces without a sign of fear, although the Oskeechoba Indians are supposed to be real cowardly around snakes. But he was scared now. Real scared. His big battered brown face was working with terror. His eyes rolled white and his mouth was open and twitching with panic. Great globs of cold sweat ran down his features and his bare arms glistened wetly. I had never seen a grown man so frightened, even an Indian, and I started to tremble too, even though I didn’t know what there was to be scared of. He pushed me into the car and drove off the road, the wheels sending up a brown curtain of sloshing mud. He made a wide detour around that part of the road where the dead dog lay, sucked dry, and when he got back on the tar surface again he drove that old truck so fast I thought the fenders would go rattling off.
He got me home in record time. I never told my father anything about the dog because Big Joe asked me as a favor not to. I guess he thought he would loose “face” in Dad’s eyes by showing fear in front of a white boy. Anyway, I never said a word. But Joe would never tell me what Keru was. Not ever. After a while, years later, I forgot all about it.
It was only last year the whole thing came back to me. I had come home for the first time in nearly twenty years to bury my older sister and to settle her estate. Wade City looked even smaller and dingier than I remembered, after the big buildings and bright lights of New York. I had lost most of my Florida ways in the years I sweated in a Bronx flat, trying to become a writer. Now that I was more or less well off, and just a little bit famous, it seemed strange to visit again the scenes of my boyhood. There is something in the Florida air, some rank perfume of the Everglades, that my inner senses had not forgotten. I let my wife talk to the relatives who had showed up for the funeral while I took a stroll through the Oskeechoba County night and drank in the heavy stench of scummy water and rotting pines and filthy mud once again.
I felt oddly out of place on this old tar-surfaced road, with my expensive Bermuda tan, my crisp white suit, my silver-headed cane. At once out of place, and familiar. For this unforgotten smell—the stench of putrid water and decaying leaves, mingled with jasmine and wild magnolia—took me back over the span of years. Perhaps I strolled farther than I had intended to, but soon I found myself on a stretch of road where the scrub pine and palmetto grew close to the edges of the road, making a dense green wall to either side, shutting out the moonlight. I thought back to the last time I had walked this road.
I had, I saw, a companion in my nocturnal stroll.
An old woman was slowly hobbling ahead of me. I couldn’t tell in the dim gloom of the heavy shrubbery whether she was a Negro or an Indian. She was very thin and small and bent, her old bones wrapped in a dirty blackish shawl drawn up over her head, with a nondescript and tattered brown woolen skirt covering her legs. Her arms, as much as I could see of them, were withered and lean and darkish, skinny as a couple of sticks.
She was hobbling along in a slow and painful gait, so I soon drew up beside her and decided to speak, although I still couldn’t tell whether she was Negro or Indian. Her shawl looked like Oskeechoba work, though, so I framed a polite phrase in what I could remember of that language. Her answer came in a dry, croaking voice so low that I could not make it out. I begged her pardon. Then it happened.
She spoke louder in a harsh voice. Keru, Keru! It sounded like a bird-cry, some harsh, predatory squawk from a vulture or a carrion-bird. I did not in the first moment remember the word or where I had first heard it. The moon had gone under a cloud and it was very dark under the gloomy walls of shrubbery that inclosed the road.
Then she turned her face toward me and I cried out. Keru! KERU! Memory of the moonlit road, the dead dog, and Big Joe in a sweat of utter terror came crowding back to stifle me, just as the hideous carrion stench of her lean bony body rose to gag me. I saw her face plain and clear for the moon had come out just then and lit the road. Her face, with wrinkled brown leathern skin where the eyes and the mouth should be … and that obscene and terrible hollow horn of a proboscis thrusting out from the center of the brown featureless oval that was her face, like some grisly caricature of a witch’s long nose in a child’s illustrated book of fairy tales … then I felt her dry horny claws at my sleeve, and that hideous visage was thrusting toward me, crying Keru! Keru! like a hungry bird, and I struck out blindly with my heavy walking-stick …
She was gone on the instant, gone utterly, as if the heavy underbrush, or the sucking mud, or the fetid pools of stagnant water a-crawl with venomous snakes and wriggling things, had swallowed her up. I don’t remember quite how I got back to my sister’s home, but my fine white suit was smirched with mud and filth and the elbows and knees were torn, and I must have fallen several times.
I never told my wife about it, making some excuse of wandering off the road and falling, any more than I had ever told my father about the dog, the dead dog. I knew now how that poor dog had died, and I shuddered again as the memory of that obscene and questing hollow proboscis swam back into my mind.
How had I escaped alive? I never knew. Perhaps Keru preys on small animals, and reptiles, and children, and seldom dares attack a grown person. Or maybe it was the silver-headed cane. Didn’t witches fear silver, in the old European tales, and werewolves, and other such creatures as haunt the howl darkness? I wished that I knew more about native Oskeechoba folklore. Or maybe it’s a good thing I don’t. Keru is enough. I know all I want to about her, and there may be more terrible predators of the swamp than her, known only to the Indians.
*
IF YOU will glance back at the introduction to this book, you will learn that I have been an enthusiastic fan of the late Robert E. Howard for at least twenty-five years. I can’t recall just when and where I first encountered his magnificent barbarian hero, Conan of Cimmeria, but whenever it was I adopted the stalwart and grim-jawed warrior into my private Pantheon on the spot, and have never since wavered in my affection and respect for both the burly barbarian and his Texas-born creator, who died when I was just a child.
It would have seemed miraculous, magical, fantastic, at the time, if I could have known that a quarter of a century later I would someday be asked by the Howard estate to complete the fragmentary opening of a Conan yarn abandoned sometime before REH died. In fact, it still does seem magical at times, when I realize that L. Sprague de Camp and I have now authored in collaboration something like 125,000 words of imitation Conaniana, including our pride and joy, a full-length Conan novel called Conan of the Isles, which first saw the light of print in 1968.
This next story is the first Howardian thing I did. Glenn Lord, agent for the estate, offered it to de Camp, who suggested the job be given to me. I accepted the assignment with alacrity and barely disguised glee: I was going to collaborate on a Conan story with Robert E. Howard!
Even though the collaboration was posthumus, it was still a remarkable and thrilling experience, and one I am not likely to soon forget. At first, it looked like an almost hopeless task. Howard had left about 100 words as the opening scenes of an untitled Conan yarn. But he left no notes whatsoever that might serve to guide a latter-day continuator of the story. And the Howard material broke off at a very crucial point, in the middle of a tantalizing hint of what the bloody thing was supposed to be about!
Well, I sat down and sweated. I read and dipped into and sampled all the other Conan stories to hand, making notes on style and word-choice, average length of sentences, the flavor of names, the usual length of a descriptive passage, how Howard had handled dialogue and action. I combed that story-fragment minutely, searching out every fleck of information, every nuance, every intonation, everything that might point or suggest a direction for the rest of the yarn to take.
Quite frankly, I worked harder on that one story than I have on whole novels I have since written. But I think the yarn turned out to be a glorious piece of the good old-fashioned, gore-drenched blood-and-thunder that was Howard’s specialty.
The yarn appeared in the Lancer Books collection, Conan, in 1967.
People who know and love the mighty Cimmerian warrior have been kind enough to tell me they think it is the single best imitation of Howard’s style, pace, color and plotting they have ever seen. I don’t know about that, but I am happy with the yarn. I like to think that, could Howard read it, he would approve.
I hope you do.
I called it. …
THE HAND OF NERGAL*
1. BLACK SHADOWS
“CROM!”
The oath was torn from the young warrior’s grim-set lips. He threw back his head, sending his tousled shock of black hair flying, and lifted his smoldering blue eyes skyward. They widened in sheer astonishment. An eery thrill of superstitious awe ran through his tall and powerfully built body, burnt brown by fierce wasteland suns. He was broad-shouldered and deep-chested, lean of waist, long of leg, and naked save for a rag of cloth about his loins and high-strapped sandals.
Above, from the sunset-smoldering sky of this bleak, wind-swept Turanian steppe where two great armies were locked in a fury of desperate battle, came—horror!
The field was drenched in sunset fires and bathed in blood. Here the mighty host of Yildiz, King of Turan, in whose army the youth served as a mercenary, had fought for five long hours against the iron-shod legions of Munthassem Khan, rebellious Satrap of the Zamorian Marches of northern Turan. Now, circling slowly downward from the crimson sky, came nameless things whose like the barbarian had never seen or heard of before, in all his travels … black, shadowy monsters they were, hovering on broad arch-ribbed wings like enormous bats.
The two armies fought on, unseeing. Only Conan, here on this low hill, ringed about with heaps of men his sword had slain, saw them descending through the sunset sky.
Leaning on his dripping blade, resting his sinewy arms for a moment, he stared at the weird shadow-things. For they seemed to be more shadow than substance—translucent to the sight, like wisps of noisome black vapor, or the shadowy ghosts of gigantic vampire-bats. Evil, slitted eyes of green flame glared through their smoky forms.
And even as he watched, nape-hairs prickling with a barbarian’s terror of the supernatural, they fell upon the battle like vultures on a field of blood.
Fell … and slew!
Screams of pain and fear rose from the host of King Yildiz, as the black shadows hurtled amongst their ranks. Wherever the shadow-devils swooped, they left a bloody corpse. By the hundreds they came, and the weary ranks of the Turanian army fell back, stumbling, tossing away their weapons in panic.
“Fight, you dogs! Stand and fight!” Thundering angry commands in a stern voice, a tall and commanding figure on a great black mare sought to hold the crumbling line. Conan glimpsed the sparkle of silver-gilt chain mail under a rich blue cloak, and a hawk-nosed, black-bearded face kingly and harsh under a spired steel helm that caught the crimson sun like a polished mirror, and knew him for King Yildiz’s general, Bakra of Akif. With a ringing oath, the proud commander drew his tulwar and laid about him with the flat of the blade. Perhaps he could have rallied the ranks, but one of the devil-shadows swooped on him from behind. It folded vaprous, filmy wings about him in a grisly embrace, and he froze. Conan could see his face, suddenly pale with staring, frozen eyes of fear … and he saw the features through the enveloping wings, like a white mask behind a veil of thin black lace.
The general’s horse went mad and bolted in terror. But the phantom-thing plucked the general from his saddle. For a moment it bore him in midair on slowly bearing wings, then let him fall, a torn and bloody thing in dripping rags. The face that had stared at Conan through shadowy wings with eyes of glazing terror was a red ruin. Thus the career of Bakra of Akif ended …
And thus ended his battle, as well.
The commander gone, the army went mad. Conan saw seasoned veterans with a score of campaigns under their belts run shrieking from the field like raw recruits. He saw proud and haughty nobles fly screaming like cowardly serfs. And behind them, untouched by the flying phantoms, grinning with victory, the hosts of the rebel Satrap pressed their weirdly won advantage. The day was lost … unless one strong man should stand firm, and rally the broken host by his example.
Before the foremost of the fleeing soldiers, rose suddenly a figure so grim and savage that it checked their headlong, panic-stricken flight.
“Stand, you fatherless curs, or by Crom I’ll fill your craven bellies with a foot of steel!”
It was the Cimmerian mercenary, his dark face like a grim mask of stone, cold as death. Fierce eyes under black, scowling brows, blazing with volcanic rage. Naked, splattered from head to heel with reeking gore, he held a mighty longsword in one great scarred fist. His voice was like the deep growl of thunder.
“Back, if you set any value on your sniveling lives, you white-livered dogs—back—or I’ll spill your cowardly guts at your feet! Lift that scimitar against me, you Hyrkanian pig, and I’ll tear out your heart with my bare hands and make you eat it before you die. What! Are you women, to fly from shadows? But a moment ago, you were men—aye, fighting-men of Turan! You stood against foes armed with naked steel and fought them face to face. Now you turn and run like children from night-shadows, faugh! It makes me proud to be a barbarian—to see you city-bred weaklings cringe before a flight of bats!”
For a moment he held them … but it was for a moment, only.
A black-winged nightmare swooped upon him, and he—even he—stepped back from its grim shadowy wings and the stench of its fetid breath.
