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The Thing That Walked on the WindStatement of John Dalhousie, division chief of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police issued from temporary quarters at Navissa Camp, Manitoba, 10/31/31: This is my final word regarding the strange circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Constable Robert Norris from Navissa Camp last March 7th, and the discovery of his body on the 17th of this month in a snow bank four miles north of here. My attitude in the matter will be clearly seen by the time the end of this statement is read. For the assistance of those to whom this matter is not so familiar, I want to chronicle briefly the facts leading up to it. On the 27th of February last, Robert Norris sent me the appended report, which apparently solved the now famed Stillwater mystery, a report which for reasons that will be obvious, could not be released. On the 7th of the following month, Robert Norris vanished without leaving a trace. On the 17th of this October, his body was found deep in a snow bank four miles north of here. Those are the known facts. I append herewith the last report made to me by Robert Norris: “Navissa Camp, 27 February, 1931: In view of the extreme difficulty of the task which lies before me in writing to you what I know of the mystery at Stillwater, I take the liberty of copying for you in shortest possible form, the account which appeared in the Navissa Daily under date of 27 February, 1930, exactly a year ago at this writing: Navissa Camp, February 27: An as yet unverified story regarding the town of Stillwater on the Olassie trail thirty miles above Nelson has come to the editors of the Daily. It is said that no single inhabitant can be found in the village, and that travelers coming through the district can find no signs of anyone having left it. The village was last visited on the night of February 25th, just prior to the storm of that date. On that night all was as usual, according to all reports. Since then, nothing has been seen of the inhabitants. “You will remember this case at once as the unsolved mystery which caused us so much trouble, and which earned us so much undeserved criticism. Something happened here last night which throws a faint light on the Stillwater mystery, affording us some vague clues, but clues of such nature that they can help us not at all, especially so far as staving off press criticism is concerned. But let me tell this from the beginning, just as it happened, and you will be able to see for yourself. “I had put up with Dr. Jamison, in whose house at the northern end of the village I had been staying for years whenever I stopped over in Navissa Camp. I came to the Camp in early evening, and had hardly got settled when the thing happened. “I had stepped outside for a moment. It was not cold, nor yet particularly warm. A wind was blowing, yet the sky was clear. As I stood there, the wind seemed to rise, and abruptly it grew strikingly cold. I looked up into the sky, and saw that many of the stars had been blotted out. Then a black spot came hurtling down at me, and I ran back toward the house. Before I could reach it, however, I found my path blocked; before me, the figure of a man fell gently into the snow banks. I stopped, but before I could go to him, another form fell with equal softness on the other side of me. And, lastly, a third form came down; but this form did not come gently—it was thrown to the earth with great force. “You can imagine my amazement. For a moment, I confess that I did not know just what to do. In that brief space of my hesitation, the sudden wind went down and the sharp cold gave place to the comparative mildness of the early evening. Then I ran to the closest form, and ascertained at once that the man was still living, and was apparently unhurt. The second, also a man, was likewise unhurt. But the third body was that of a woman; she was stone cold—her skin to the touch was icy to an astounding degree—and she had the appearance of having been dead for a long time. “I called Dr. Jamison, and together we managed to get the three into the house. The two men we put to bed immediately, and for the woman we called the coroner, the only other doctor in Navissa Camp. We also had to summon other help, and Dr. Jamison called in two nurses. A quick examination proved that the men were, as I had conjectured, very little hurt. The same examination disclosed another astonishing point—the identification of these two men. “You will remember that at about the time of the Stillwater case, on the night of the 25th of February, in fact, two men had left Nelson for Stillwater, and had vanished as mysteriously as the inhabitants of that town. These two men had given their names in Nelson as Allison Wentworth and James Macdonald; identification papers found on the bodies of these strange visitors from above proved conclusively that at least two of the men who were supposed to have been in Stillwater at the time the mysterious tragedy occurred had returned, for our visitors were none other than Wentworth and Macdonald. You can easily visualize with what anticipation I looked for a solution to the Stillwater mystery from these two men when once they regained consciousness. “I resolved, in consequence, to keep a bedside watch. The doctors told me that Wentworth showed the best signs of coming out of his unconscious delirium first, and I took my place at his side, one of the nurses ready to take down anything Wentworth might say. Shortly after I had taken my position there, the body of the girl was identified by a resident of Navissa Camp who had already heard of her and had come to look at the body. The girl was Irene Masitte, the only daughter of the Masitte who ran the tavern at Stillwater. This indicated conclusively that the two men had been in Stillwater at the time of the inexplicable tragedy which swept its inhabitants off the face of the earth, and very probably were in the tavern at the moment the tragedy occurred, perhaps talking with this girl. So I thought at the moment. “Naturally, I was deeply perplexed as to where the men and the girl might have come from, and also as to why the men were practically unhurt and the girl dead, dead for a great length of time, said Dr. Jamison, perhaps preserved by the cold. And, why and how did the men come gently to the earth, and why was the girl literally dashed to the ground? But all these puzzling questions were for the time being shoved into the background, so eager was I to get at the mystery which surrounded the Stillwater case. “As I have already written, I had taken my place beside the bed of Wentworth, and listened eagerly for any hint he might drop in his delirium, for as he became warmed, he began to talk a great deal, though not always intelligibly. Some sentences and phrases could be made out, and these the nurse took down in shorthand. I copy a few of the sentences I heard as we bent over the bed: “‘Death-Walker... God of the Winds, you who walk on the wind... adoramus te... adoramus te... adoramus te.... Destroy these faithless ones, you who walk with death, you who pass above the earth, you who have vanquished the sky.... Light gleams from the mosques of Baghdad... stars are born in the Sahara... Lhassa, lost Lhassa, worship, worship, worship the Lord of the Winds.’ “These enigmatic words were followed by a deep and profound silence, during which the man’s breathing struck me as highly irregular. Dr. Jamison, who was there, noticed it also, commenting on it as a bad sign, though there was no intimation as to what might have brought on this sudden irregularity unless it were some unconscious excitement. The delirious jumble meanwhile continued, even more puzzling than before. “‘Wind-Walker, disperse the fogs over England... adoramus te.... It is too late to escape... Lord of the Winds.... Fly, fly or He will come.... Sacrifice, sacrifice... a sacrifice must be, yes, must be made.... Chosen one, Irene.... Oh, Wind-Walker, sweep over Italy when the olive trees blossom... and the cedars of Lebanon, blue in the wind... cold-swept Russian steppes, over wolf-infested Siberia... onward to Africa, Africa.... Blackwood has written of these things... and there are others... the old ones, elementals... and back to Leng, lost Leng, hidden Leng, whence sprung Wind-Walker... and others....’ “Dr. Jamison was much interested in the mention of ‘elementals,’ and since he appeared to know something of them, I asked him to explain. It seems that there still exists an age-old belief that there are elemental spirits—of fire, water, air and earth—all-powerful spirits subject to no one, spirits actually worshipped in some parts of the world. His excitement I thought rather exaggerated, and I shot questions at him. “It is very difficult for me to chronicle what came out finally in answer to all my questions. It is something that had been kept carefully away from us, though how it could have been is puzzling to me. Even I hesitated at first to believe Dr. Jamison, though he appears to have known it for some time, and assures me that a number of people could tell odd stories if they wanted to. I remember that several anonymous reports of a highly suggestive nature were turned in to us, but I hardly dared suspect what lay behind them at the time. “It seems that the inhabitants of Stillwater to a body performed a curious worship—not of any god we know, but of something they called an air elemental! A large thing, I am told, vaguely like a man, yet infinitely unlike him. Details are very distorted and unreliable. It is said to have been an air elemental, but there are weird hints of something of incredible age, that rose out of hidden fastness in the far north, from a frozen and impenetrable plateau up there. Of this I can venture nothing. Dr. Jamison mentions a ‘Plateau of Leng,’ of which I have never heard save in the incoherent babblings of Wentworth. But what is most horrible, most unbelievable in the mystery of this strange communal worship, is the suggestion that the people of Stillwater made human sacrifices to their strange god! “There are queer stories of some gigantic thing that these people summoned to their deeply hidden forest altars, and still weirder tales of something seen against the sky in the glare of huge pine fires burning near Stillwater by travelers on the Olassie trail. How much credence it is advisable to give these stories you must decide for yourself, for I am, frankly, in view of later developments which I will chronicle in their order, unable to give any opinion. Dr. Jamison, whom I regard as a man of great intelligence, assures me that the elemental stories are sincerely believed hereabouts, and admitted to my surprise that he himself was unwilling to condemn belief without adequate knowledge. This was, in effect, admitting that he himself might believe in them. “The man Wentworth suddenly became conscious, and I turned from Dr. Jamison. He asked, naturally, where he was, and he was told. He did not seem surprised. He then asked what year this was, and when we told him expressed only an irritated surprise. He murmured something about, ‘An even year, then,’ and aroused our interest the more. “‘And Macdonald?’ he asked then. “‘Here,’ we answered. “‘How did we come?’ he asked. “‘You fell from the sky.’ “‘Unhurt?’ He puzzled over this for a moment. Then he said, ‘He put us down, then.’ “‘There was a girl with you,’ said Dr. Jamison. “‘She was dead,’ he answered in a tired voice. Then he turned his strangely burning eyes on me and asked, ‘You saw Him? You saw the thing that walked on the wind?... Then He will return for you, for none can see Him and escape.’ “We waited a few moments, thinking to give him time to become more fully conscious, but alas, he lapsed into a semi-conscious state. It was then that Dr. Jamison, after another examination, announced that the man was dying. This was naturally a great shock to me, and this shock was emphasized when Dr. Jamison added that the man Macdonald would in all probability die without ever gaining consciousness. The doctor could not guess at the cause of death, beyond referring vaguely to an assumption that perhaps these men had become so inured to cold that they could no longer stand warmth. “At first I could not guess the significance of this statement, but it came to me suddenly that Dr. Jamison was simply accepting the notion, which had occurred to all of us, that these two men had spent the year just passed above the earth, perhaps in a region so cold that warmth would now affect them in the same manner as extreme cold. “Despite Wentworth’s semi-conscious state, I questioned him, and, surprisingly enough, got a rather jumbled story, which I have pieced together as well as I could from the notes the nurse took and from my own memory. “It appears that these two men, Wentworth and Macdonald, had got into Stillwater quite late, owing to a sudden storm which had come up and put them off the trail for a short time. They were eyed with distinct disfavor at the tavern, but insisted on remaining for the night, which the tavern-keeper, Masitte, did not seem to like. But he gave them a room, requesting them to remain in it, and to keep away from the window. To this they agreed, despite the fact that they regarded the landlord’s proposal as somewhat out of the ordinary. “They had hardly come into the room when the inn-keeper’s daughter, this girl, Irene, came in, and asked them to get her away from the town quickly. She had been chosen, she said, to be sacrificed to Ithaqua, the wind-walking elemental which the Stillwater people are said to have worshipped, and she had decided that she would flee, rather than die for a pagan god, of whose existence even she was not too sure. “Yet, the girl’s fear must have been convincing enough to impress the two men into going away with her. The inhabitants had recently, it seems, been working against the thing they had worshipped, and its anger had been felt. Because that night was the night of sacrifice, strangers were frowned upon. According to suggestions Wentworth made, he discovered that the Stillwater people had great altars in the pine forests nearby, and that they worshipped the thing they called variously Death-Walker or Wind-Walker at these altars. (Though you can imagine my skeptical view of this entire matter, this does seem to tie up with the stories of giant fires which Dr. Jamison mentioned travelers on the Olassie trail as having seen.) “There was also some very incoherent mumbling about the thing itself, vague and horrible thoughts which seemed to obsess Wentworth, something about the towering height of the thing seen against the sky in the hellish glow of the nocturnal fires. “Exactly what happened, I hardly dare venture to guess at. Out of Wentworth’s incoherent and troubled speech, there came only one positive statement, the substance of which was simply, that the three of them, Wentworth, Macdonald, and the girl did flee the sacrificial fires and the village, and had been caught on the Olassie trail on the way to Nelson by the thing, which had picked them up and carried them along. “After this statement, Wentworth became steadily more and more incoherent. He babbled a horrible story of the thing that swooped down after them as they fled in terror along the Olassie trail, and he blurted out, too, some terrible details of the mystery at Stillwater. From what I can make out, the thing that walked on the wind must have avenged itself on the villagers not only for their previous coldness toward it, but also because of the flight of Irene Masitte, who had been chosen for the sacrifice. At any rate, between hysterical wails and shuddering adulations of the thing, there emerged from Wentworth’s distorted speech a graphic and terrible picture of a giant monstrosity that came into the village from the forest, sweeping the people into the sky, seeking them out, one by one. “I don’t know how much of this I should chronicle for you, since I can understand what your attitude must be. Could it have been some animal, do you think? Some prehistoric animal which had lain hidden for years in the depths of the pine forest near Stillwater, that perhaps had been preserved alive by the cold and revived again by the warmth of the giant fires to become the god of the mad Stillwater people? This seems to me the only other logical explanation, but there still remain so many things not yet accounted for, that I think it would be much better to leave the Stillwater mystery among the unsolved cases. “Macdonald died this morning at 10:07. Wentworth had not spoken since dawn, but he resumed shortly after Macdonald’s death, repeating again the same vague sentences which we first heard from him. His incoherent murmurings leave us no alternative in regard to where he spent the past year. He seems to believe that he was carried along by this wind thing, this air elemental. Though it is fairly certain that neither of the missing men was anywhere reported throughout the past year, this story may be simply the product of an overburdened mind, a mind suffering from a great shock. And the seemingly vast knowledge of the hidden places of the earth, as well as the known, may have been derived from books. “I say may have been derived, because in view of Wentworth’s suggestive, almost convincing, murmurings, it becomes only a tentative possibility. I know of no book which chronicles the mystic rites at the Lamasery in Tibet, which tells of the secret ceremonies of the Lhassa monks. Nor do I know of any book which reveals the hidden life of the African Impi, nor of any pamphlet or monograph even so much as hinting at the forbidden and accursed designs of the Tcho-Tcho people of Burma, nor of anything ever written which suggests that there are strange hybrid men living under the snow and ice of Antarctica, that there exists today a lost kingdom of the sea, accursed R’lyeh, where slumbering Cthulhu, deep in the earth beneath the sea, is waiting to rise and destroy the world. Nor have I ever heard of the shunned and forbidden Plateau of Leng, where the Ancient Ones once ruled. “Please do not think I exaggerate. I have never heard of these things before, yet Wentworth speaks as if he had been there, even hinting that these mysterious people have fed him. Of Lhassa I have heard vague hints, and of course I do remember having once seen a cinema containing what the producer called ‘shots of Africa’s vanishing Impi.’ But of the other things, I know nothing. And if I can assume anything from the shuddering horror in Wentworth’s semiconscious voice as he spoke of these hidden things, I do not want to know anything. “There was a constant reference, too, in Wentworth’s mutterings, to a Blackwood, by whom he evidently meant the writer, Algernon Blackwood, a man who spent some time here in Canada, says Dr. Jamison. The doctor gave me one of this man’s books, pointing out to me several strange stories of air elementals, stories remarkably similar in character to the curious Stillwater mystery, yet nothing so paradoxically definite and vague. I can refer you to these stories if you do not already know them. “The doctor also gave me several old magazines, in which are stories by an American, a certain H. P. Lovecraft, which have to do with Cthulhu, with the lost sea kingdom of R’lyeh and the forbidden Plateau of Leng. Perhaps these are the sources of Wentworth’s apparently authentic information, yet in none of these stories appears any of the horrific details of which Wentworth speaks so familiarly. “Wentworth died at 3:21 this afternoon. An hour before, he passed into a coma from which he did not emerge again. Dr. Jamison and the coroner seemed to think that the exposure to warmth had killed the two men, Jamison telling me candidly that a year with the Wind-Walker had so inured the men to cold, that warmth like ours affected them as extreme cold would affect us normal men. “You must understand that Dr. Jamison was entirely serious. Yet, his medical report read that the two men and the girl had died from exposure to the cold. In explanation he said, ‘I may think what I please, Norris, and I may believe what I please—but I dare not write it.’ Then, after a pause, he said, ‘And, if you are wise, you will withhold the names of these people from the general public because questions are certain to arise once they become known, and how are you people going to explain their coming to us from the sky, and where they spent the year since the Stillwater mystery? And finally, how are you going to react against the storm of criticism which will fall on you once more when the Stillwater case is reopened with such strangely unbelievable facts as we have gathered here from the lips of a dying man?’ “I think Dr. Jamison is right. I have no opinion to offer, absolutely none, and I am making this report only because it is my duty as an officer to do so, and I am making it only to you. Perhaps it had better be destroyed, rather than kept in our files from which it might at some future time be resurrected by a careless official or an inquiring newspaper man. “As I have already told you, any opinion that I have to offer would be worthless. But, in dosing, I want to point out two things to you. I want to refer you first to the report of Peter Herrick, in charge of the investigation at Stillwater last year, under date of 3 March, 1930. I quote from the report which I have at hand: On the Olassie trail, about three miles below Stillwater, we came upon the meandering tracks of three people. An examination of the tracks seemed to indicate that there were two men and one woman. A dog sled had been left behind along the trail, and for some inexplicable reason these three people had started running along the trail toward Nelson, evidently away from Stillwater. The tracks halted abruptly, and there was no trace of where they might have gone. Since there had been no snow since the night of the Stillwater mystery, this is doubly puzzling; it is as if the three people had been lifted off the earth. Another puzzling factor is the appearance, far off to one side of this point in the trail, in a line with the wandering footsteps of the three travelers, of a huge imprint, closely resembling the foot of a man—but certainly a giant—which appears to have been made by an unbelievably large thing, and the foot, though like that of a man, must have been webbed! “To this I want to add some information of my own. I remember that last night, when I threw that startled glance into the sky and saw that the stars had been blotted out, I thought that the ‘cloud’ which had obscured the sky looked curiously like the outline of a great man. And I remember, too, that where the top of the ‘cloud’ must have been, where the head of the thing should have been, there were two gleaming stars, visible despite the shadow, two gleaming stars, burning bright—like eyes! “One more thing. This afternoon, a half mile behind Dr. Jamison’s house, I came upon a deep depression in the snow. I did not need a second glance to tell me what it was. A half mile on the other side of the house there is another imprint like this; I am only thankful that the sun is rapidly distorting the outlines, for I am only too willing to believe that I have imagined them. For they are the imprints of gigantic feet, and the feet must have been webbed!” Thus ends Robert Norris’s strange report. Because he had carried it for some time with him, I did not receive the report until after I had learned of his disappearance. The report was posted to me on the 6th of March. Under date of March 5th, Norris has scrawled a final brief and terrible message in a hand which is barely legible: “5 March—Something is pursuing me! Not a night has passed since the occurrence at Navissa Camp to give me any rest. Always I have felt strange, horrible, yet invisible eyes looking down at me from above. And I remember Wentworth saying that none could live who had seen the thing that walked on the wind, and I cannot forget the sight of it against the sky, and its burning eyes looking down like stars in the haunted night! It is waiting.” It was this brief paragraph which caused our official physician to declare that Robert Norris had lost his mind, and had wandered away to some hidden place from which he emerged months later only to die in the snow. I want to add only a few words of my own. Robert Norris did not lose his mind. Furthermore, Robert Norris was one of the most thorough, the keenest men under my orders, and even during the terrible months he spent in far places, I am sure he did not lose possession of his senses. I grant our physician only one thing: Robert Norris had gone away to some hidden place for those months. But that hidden place was not in Canada, no, nor in North America, whatever our physician may think. I arrived at Navissa Camp by plane within ten hours of the discovery of Robert Norris’s body. As I flew over the spot where the body was found, I saw far away on either side, deep depressions in the snow. I have no doubt what they were. It was I, too, who searched Norris’s clothes, and found in his pockets the mementoes he had brought with him from the hidden places where he had been: the gold plaque, depicting in miniature a struggle between ancient beings, and bearing on its surface inscriptions in weird designs, the plaque which Dr. Spencer of Quebec University affirms must have come from some place incredibly old, yet is excellently preserved; the incredible geological fragment which, confined in any walled place, gives off the growing hum and roar of winds far, far beyond the rim of the known universe! |
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