Free The Taint and Other Novellas by Brian Lumley Page B

flames, there were those furtive figures, silent in the snow, watching and…waiting?
    “They talked, Sam and Lucille, huddled together in the door of their tent before the warming fire, whispering of the dead guides and how and why those men had come to such terrible ends; and they shivered at the surrounding shadows and the shapes that shifted within them. This country, Sam reasoned, must indeed be the territory of Ithaqua the Wind-Walker. At times, when the influence of old rites and mysteries was strongest, then the snow-god’s worshipers—the Indians, half-breeds, and perhaps others less obvious and from farther parts—would gather here to attend His ceremonies. To the outsider, the unbeliever, this entire area must be forbidden, taboo! The guides had been outsiders…Sam and Lucille were outsiders, too….
    “It must have been about this time that Lucille’s nerves began to go, which would surely be understandable. The intense cold and the white wastes stretching out in all directions, broken only very infrequently by the boles and snow-laden branches of firs and pines—the hunger eating at her insides now—those half-seen figures lurking ever on the perimeter of her vision and consciousness—the terrible knowledge that what had happened to the guides could easily happen again—and the fact, no longer hidden by her husband, that she and Sam were—lost! Though they were making south, who could say that Navissa lay in their path, or even that they would ever have the strength to make it back to the town?
    “Yes, I think that at that stage she must have become for the most part delirious, for certainly the things she ‘remembers’ as happening from that time onward were delusion inspired, despite their detail. And God knows that poor Sam must have been in a similar condition. At any rate, on the third night, unable to light a fire because the matches had somehow got damp, events took an even stranger turn.
    “They had managed to pitch the tent, and Sam had gone inside to do whatever he could toward making it comfortable. Lucille, as the night came down more fully, was outside moving about to keep warm. She suddenly cried out to Sam that she could see distant fires at the four points of the compass. Then, in another moment, she screamed, and there came a rushing wind that filled the tent and brought an intense, instantaneous drop in temperature. Stiffly, and yet as quickly as he could, Sam stumbled out of the tent to find Lucille fallen to the snow. She could not tell him what had happened, could only mumble incoherently of ‘something in the sky!’
    “…God only knows how they lived through that night. Lucille’s recollections are blurred and indistinct; she believes now that she was in any case more dead than alive. Three days and nights in that terrible white waste, wholly without food and for the greater part of the time without even the warmth of a fire. But on the morning of the next day—
    “Amazingly everything had changed for the better overnight. Apparently their fears—that if they did not first perish from exposure they would die at the hands of the unknown murderers of the two guides—had been unfounded. Perhaps, Sam conjectured, they had somehow managed to pass out of the forbidden territory; and now that they were no longer trespassers, as it were, they were eligible for whatever help Ithaqua’s furtive worshipers could give them. Certainly that was the way things seemed to be, for in the snow beside their tent they found tinned soups, matches, a kerosene cooker similar to the one stolen by the unfortunate guides, a pile of branches, and finally, a cryptic note that said, simply: ‘Navissa lies seven miles to the southeast.’ It was as if Lucille’s vision of the foregone night had been an omen of good fortune, as if Ithaqua Himself had looked down and decided that the two lost and desperate human beings deserved another chance….
    “By midday, with hot soup inside them, warmed