Spawn of the Winds Read Free

creature of silence; indeed, I believe he is vocally dumb, inarticulate—but mentally … ?
    I have been told, Professor, that telepathy is telepathy and thought is thought, and there are theories and theories of which the majority agree that one telepathic being sends thoughts which must be at least partially understandable to any other. It is not so. The minority which has it that truly alien thoughts would be incomprehensible are right. Nothing is more alien than the Wind-Walker, despite his anthropomorphism—nothing that I can imagine anyway—and his thoughts are … they are terrible things.
    I think that it was an alien mixture of glee and murderous rage I heard, an obscene flux reflecting telepathically from Hank’s mind like images from a cracked mirror, but the thoughts of Hank himself came to me clear as crystal in the final moment. He knew what must happen, you see, and I anticipated his shutting me out.
    And I fought him because I wanted to be there, to help if I could. Oh, Hank won, but even as he drove me from his thoughts and back to my bedroom at Miskatonic, still I received impressions of the terrific acceleration he felt as Ithaqua lifted the plane high, high in his hands, even reaching up through the clouds—as a child lifts up a stone to skim across the water, or a ball to bounce.
    And at the very end Hank said, “ Juanita, tell them— ”
    And that was all, he was gone. There was nothing in my mind at all; it was a vacuum into which the Miskatonic morning flooded as if all the doors and windows had been opened together. And though I screamed for Hank to come back, to talk to me, all the while searching desperately for even the faintest echo of his telepathic voice, I knew that it was over.
    There is one other thing, Professor. I believe that Hank’s sister, Tracy Silberhutte, was on board the plane. I do not know why; she was not part of his team (in fact I do not think that she knew anything of his work with the Wilmarth Foundation), but she was certainly on board. His mind was full of her, worrying about her …

    And Juanita was right; Tracy Silberhutte was on board Hank’s plane. Later we were to discover how she came to be there, but not for a period of some four months. In the meantime Juanita, no longer of any telepathic value and having no desire to become an agent of the Wilmarth Foundation, went back to Monterrey. Search parties, both aerial and on foot, scoured the area north of Hank’s last known position
but found nothing; it was as if the plane had been lifted from the face of the Earth.
    Then, late in May, when I was busy organizing my expedition to the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, Juanita returned to Miskatonic. Her arrival was as unexpected as her personal appearance was changed. She looked as though she had not had a wink of sleep in a week. She was distraught, haggard; when she saw me she threw herself into my arms and began babbling hysterically and incoherently. Plainly she had received a terrific shock.
    I immediately ordered that a sedative be administered and that she be put to bed. Even under sedation, however, she rambled on about Hank, about his being alive somewhere, and about the terrible winds that blow between the worlds and the thing that walks those winds, often carrying its victims with it out of this place and time into alien voids.
    When the effects of the sedative wore off, experts at the University verified that she was indeed in contact with someone; but while they were able to detect the phenomenon of telepathic communication, they were completely at a loss as to whom exactly she was talking to. There was only one thing to do and that was to accept what she said as truth.
    It was at this point, too, that one of my “hunchmen”—a member of a team of psychically aware specialists, the scientifically enlightened counterparts of medieval mediums and spiritualists—asked me a rather strange