Quests of Simon Ark Read Free Page A

chest. His hair was long and white, too, and he wore a white robe. He would come out on the small platform at one end of the hall and begin talking without any introduction. Afterward, he just seemed to disappear. Sometimes people would see him around the village during the week, too, but always in this white robe. No one knew where or how he lived.”
    “It’s fantastic,” I said; “it sounds like something out of the dark past.”
    Simon Ark frowned. “It is dark, and it is certainly from the past. My only wish is that I had heard all this before it was too late …”
    There was a wind coming up outside, and from somewhere up in the hills came the cry of a lonesome timber wolf. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see it was already past midnight.
    “What do you mean …?” the girl started to ask, but she never completed the sentence.
    Suddenly, Simon Ark was out of his chair, and he was pulling open the front door of the house. I ran to his side, and then I saw it, too …
    A figure, or a thing, all in white, running with the wind toward the cliff where Death slept in the darkness …
    We followed, through the night, with the gathering breeze whistling through the trees around us. The girl started to follow, but I waved her back inside. Whatever was out here, it was not for her to see …
    In the distance, a sudden streak and rumble of thunder followed. It would be raining back in the hills, but with luck the storm would miss us.
    The wind was picking up, though, and by the time we reached the edge of the cliff it was close to being a gale. I wondered briefly if a strong wind could have blown these people to their death, but that of course, was fantastic … But perhaps the real reason for their death would be even more fantastic …
    “There!” He pointed down the cliff, to the very center of where the seventy-three bodies rested under canvas on the rocks.
    And I saw it again.
    The moon that had given us light before was hidden now by the threatening clouds of rain, but I could see the blot of white against the blackness of the rocks.
    “Axidus?” I breathed.
    “Or Satan himself,” Simon Ark answered; “perhaps this is the moment I have waited for.” He started down the rocks, and I followed.
    But the white form seemed to sense our approach. Suddenly, before our very eyes, it seemed to fade away.
    “He must be hiding in the rocks somewhere,” I said.
    The odor of the corpses was all around us then, and my head swam sickeningly.
    “I must find him,” Simon Ark said, and he shouted something in a strange language that might have been Greek, but wasn’t.
    We searched the rocks until the odor was overpowering and forced us to retreat. We found nothing …
    On the way back up the cliff, I asked Simon Ark what he’d shouted before.
    “It was in Coptic,” he said, “which is very much like Egyptian. It was a type of prayer …”
    With the coming of daylight, the horror that hung thick in the air over Gidaz seemed to lift a little. The girl had slept through the remainder of the night, and I had sat alone in the front room of the house while Simon Ark prowled the night on some further mysterious investigations.
    Since I knew sleep was impossible, I spent the time attempting to set down in words just what had happened to me that day, ever since the moment in the early evening when I’d first arrived in Gidaz. But I couldn’t do it; I was still living the thing, and the terror that clung to the village was still a very real part of the air I breathed. Maybe later …
    Simon Ark returned to the house soon after daybreak, and the sound of our talking awakened the girl. She made breakfast for us from among the remains we found around the house, and by nine o’clock we were ready to leave.
    The lack of sleep was beginning to get me then, but the sunlight helped revive me. Simon Ark looked the same as he had the evening before, and seemed anxious to leave the village. “I have things that must be