Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

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!

Ithaqua AUGUST DERLETH

It was a Chinese philosopher who said long ago that the truth, no matter how obvious and simple, was always incredible, because of such complexity had become the social life of man that the truth became increasingly impossible to state. No reference to the strange affair of the Snow-Thing, Ithaqua, is more fitting, no comment more calculated to preface a final consideration of the facts.

In the spring of 1933 there pushed into the public prints various obscure paragraphs, most of them very muddled, concerning such apparently unrelated matters as the queer beliefs of certain Indian tribe remnants, the apparent incompetence of Constable James French of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, the disappearance of one Henry Lucas, and finally the vanishing of Constable French. There was also a brief uproar in the press regarding a certain statement released by John Dalhousie, Division Chief of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, from temporary quarters at Cold Harbor, Manitoba, on the eleventh of May, following some public criticism of Constable French and the general handling of the Lucas case. And finally, by means of a strange grapevine system of communication, apparently not by word of mouth, since no one was ever heard to speak of it, there was a certain incredible story of a Snow-Thing, the story of a strange god of the great white silence, the vast land where snow lies for long months beneath a limitless, cold sky.

And yet these apparently unconnected phenomena to which the press referred with ever-increasing scorn were closely bound together by a sinister connection. That there are some things better unknown, that, indeed, there are certain hideous, forbidden things, Constable French discovered, and, after him, John Dalhousie, and on the eleventh of May, he wrote:

* * *

I am writing much against my wish in reply to harsh and unjustified criticism directed against me in the matter of the Lucas investigation. I am being especially harassed by the press because this case still remains unsolved and, with wholly unaccountable bitterness, it is being pointed out that Henry Lucas could not have walked from his house and vanished, despite the fixed and indisputable evidence that this is what Lucas did.

The facts, for those who come upon this statement without previous knowledge of the disappearance and the subsequent investigation by Royal Northwest Mounted Police Constable James French, are briefly these: On the night of the 21st of February last, during a light snowstorm, Henry Lucas walked out of his cabin on the northern edge of the village of Cold Harbor and was not seen again. A neighbor saw Lucas going toward the old Olassie trail near Lucas’s cabin, but did not see him subsequently; this was the last time Lucas was seen alive. Two days later, a brother-in-law, Randy Margate, reported Lucas’s disappearance, and Constable French was sent at once to inquire into the matter.

The constable’s report reached my office two weeks later. Let me say at once that despite public belief to the contrary, the Lucas mystery was solved.

But its solution was so outre, so unbelievable, so horrible, that this department felt it must not be given to the public. To that decision we have held until today, when it has become apparent that our solution, however strange, must be released to stem the flood of criticism directed at this department.

I append herewith the last report of Constable James French:

“Cold Harbor, 3 March, 1933:

“Sir: I have hardly the courage to write this to you, for I must write something my nature rebels against, something my intelligence tells me cannot, must not, be — and yet, great God, is! Yes, it was as we were told — Lucas walked out of his house and vanished: but we had not dreamed of the reason for his going, nor that something lurked in the forest, waiting….

“I got here on the twenty-fifth of February and proceeded at once to the Lucas cabin, where I met and spoke to Margate. He, however, had nothing to tell me, having come in from a neighboring village, found his brother-in-law missing, and reported the matter to us. Shortly after I saw him, he left for his own home in Navissa Camp. I went then to the neighbor who had last seen him. This man seemed very unwilling to talk, and I had difficulty in understanding him, since he is apparently very largely Indian, certainly a descendant of the old tribes still so plentiful around here. He showed me the place where he had last seen Lucas, and indicated that the vanished man’s footprints had abruptly stopped. He said this rather excitedly; then, suddenly looking toward the forest across the open space, said somewhat lamely that of course the snow had filled in the other tracks. But the place indicated was windswept, where little snow stayed. Indeed, in some places the footprints of Lucas could still be seen, and beyond the place from which he supposedly disappeared, there are none of his, though there are footprints of Margate and one or two others.

“In the light of subsequent discoveries, this is a highly significant fact. Lucas certainly did not walk beyond this spot, and he certainly did not return to his cabin. He disappeared from this spot as completely as if he had never existed.

“I tried then, and I have tried since then, to explain to myself how Lucas could have vanished without leaving some trace, but there has been no explanation save the one 1 will presently chronicle, unbelievable as it is. But before I come to that, I must present certain evidence which seems to me important.

“You will remember that twice last year the itinerant priest, Father Brisbois, reported disappearances of Indian children from Cold Harbor. In each case we were informed that the child had turned up before we could investigate. I had not been here a day before finding out that these missing children had never turned up, that, indeed, there had been strange vanishings from Cold Harbor which had never been reported to us, that apparently the disappearance of Lucas was but one in a chain. Lucas, however, appears to have been the first white man to vanish.

“There were several singular discoveries which I quickly made, and these left me with anything but a favorable impression; I felt at once that it was not a right sort of case. These facts seem to rank in importance:

“1) Lucas was pretty generally disliked. He had repeatedly cheated the Indians and, while intoxicated, had once tried to interfere in some matter apparently pertaining to religion. I consider this as motive, and it may yet be so — but not so obviously as I had first thought.

“2) The chiefly Indian population of Cold Harbor is either very reluctant to talk or refuses to talk at all. Some