Spawn of the Winds Read Free Page B

it—a thing that can walk on the wind, an alien monster from God only knows what infinities of space and time—and a little star-shaped stone from Miskatonic’s kilns rendered him powerless to harm us. Almost.
    No, he couldn’t directly hurt us any worse than he had already, but he certainly didn’t intend to let us off lightly.
    By then I think Dick Selway was already dead. He’d cracked his head against the control panel and there was blood everywhere; he just hung limp, trapped in the pilot’s seat. Still, even with Dick gone, if Ithaqua had let go of the plane right then—which I thought he was going to for a second—I think that perhaps I could have landed her. And I believe the horror outside picked that little fact right out of my head, too. Only he had worked it out differently.
    After being hoisted up to the sky, I had fallen back away from the gun in the nose; now Paul White, hunchman and photographer, made it up there hand over hand and checked Dick Selway’s pulse. Whitey
cursed softly and pushed Dick’s body over to one side, then wedged himself against the gun. He had taken all the pictures he wanted; now he wanted something else.
    Jimmy Franklin was still on the radio but getting nowhere; the aerial must have been ripped away. And so Whitey started hammering away with the tracers, hitting the Wind-Walker almost point-blank right in those eyes of his. And all he got for his pains was a shower of harmless sparks from somewhere at the back of Ithaqua’s head.
    Then the creature was off with us, loping across the Arctic skies in lengthening strides that took us even farther north and farther— up! The ice-wastes fell away beneath the plane as we rose into the sky ever faster; the acceleration was tremendous and I was slammed against the buckled wall of the fuselage with Tracy still in my arms.
    Whitey, shaken loose from the gun, whirled by us and fell down into the tail section as the whole plane suddenly tilted. Before I blacked out I managed to clear the frost from one of the windows. Looking out I saw a black sky, and away and below I could plainly make out the curve of the Earth.
    Yes, frost on the windows, Juanita. That started the moment Ithaqua grabbed us; ice formed on the inside as well as the outside of the plane, but without making us feel any normal sort of chill. Oh, yes, it was a strange cold. Not merely the subzero temperatures of Arctic climes but an iciness unique in Ithaqua and the weird ways he treads. It was the bitter chill of the winds that blow between the worlds.
    From then on until we touched down on the littered plains of Borea—beneath vast, pitted triplet moons that hung low over the plateau on the horizon, eternally frozen in a starless sky—Whitey, Jimmy and I were unconscious. Yes, for a whole month, it seems. Some sort of deep-frozen suspended animation, I suppose. But not Tracy.
    Oh, she passed out initially, but later she regained consciousness while we were still en route. She didn’t know that right off, though, for there was no sensation of movement or acceleration. She believed that we were down somewhere in the mountains; coming from outside was an eerie whine or hum, like the thin winds of high peaks. The inside of the plane was all white with frost; the windows were completely iced over and opaque; she could detect no sign of life in any of us and our bodies were heavily rimed witch frost. Poor kid, she could hardly be blamed for thinking that we were all dead.

    Yet in a way she was lucky, too, because the door of the plane was frozen shut, and though she put everything she could into getting it open it simply wouldn’t budge. God knows what might have happened if she had opened that door!
    It was when she realized that she couldn’t get out of the plane that Tracy panicked and tried to smash one of the windows in the nose. Well, she could make no impression on the window either, but she did manage to