Quests of Simon Ark (3 page)

Simon Ark himself kept in the background during most of the morning, and went unnoticed in the crowd of curiosity seekers who poured over the scene in growing numbers throughout the early hours of the day.

It was nearly noon before Simon Ark and I could make our escape in my car. I wondered briefly how this strange man had arrived the previous night when he had no car, but the thought passed from my mind as we watched them lowering the last of the seventy-three into the long grave at the base of the cliff.

For a moment, there was silence over the scene, as the last rites of various religions were spoken over the grave. Then, once again, a murmur of voices arose, as I turned my car away from the village.

Simon Ark was in the seat next to me, and I was glad I had managed to avoid the other reporters who’d ridden out to the village with me the previous day. For I had a feeling that the answer to this riddle rested somehow with Simon Ark, and with the white figure we’d seen on the cliff.

I turned into the highway that led north, toward the state capitol. “What did you want me to do?” I asked.

“Do? Oh, I would like you to look up some information in the old newspaper files. I would like you to find out if any priests or ministers have been killed in the Gidaz area within the past few years …”

I thought about that for a while. “All right, I’ll get the information for you on one condition. That you tell me just who you are, and just who this Axidus is.”

“I am just a man,” he answered slowly. “A man from another age. You would not be interested in where I came from, or in what my mission is. I need only tell you that I am searching for the ultimate evil—for Satan himself. And perhaps, in Gidaz, I have found him at last.”

I sighed softly. “What about Axidus?”

“Axidus is also from the past. I knew him long ago, in North Africa, as St. Augustine did …”

“Are you crazy? Are you trying to tell me we’re dealing with people who’ve been dead over fifteen hundred years?”

“I do not know,” Simon Ark replied. “But I intend to find out tonight when we return to the village of the dead—”

I left the strange man near the capitol building an hour later, having agreed to meet him there again at five o’clock. It did not take me long to gather the information Simon Ark had requested, and I was surprised to learn that six months earlier, a Catholic priest had been found beaten to death only a few miles from Gidaz. The crime had never been solved, although police were still investigating …

I could make nothing of the information, but I was certain it would mean something to Simon Ark.

I went next to the public library, to do some investigating on my own. I was determined to solve the mystery of Axidus and the seventy-three deaths, and I felt certain that the answer was hidden somewhere in the ancient pages of history.

I looked first in the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
but there was nothing under
AXIDUS.
I read the article on St. Augustine, but it contained no clue. A thick history book likewise offered no leads. A biographical dictionary listed no one named Axidus, and I was beginning to believe such a person had never existed.

I glanced out the library window, at the gleaming golden dome of the state capitol. Somewhere, there must be a clue … Axidus, St. Augustine … Augustine was a great Catholic saint, and a Catholic priest had been murdered near Gidaz six months ago …

I walked back to the endless bookshelves that lined the walls and took down the index to the
Catholic Encyclopedia
…

A-X-I-D-U-S
… Yes, there it was …

“AXIDUS,
leader of Circumcellions” … Quickly my fingers found the fifth volume and turned to the indicated page.

And I began to read: The Circumcellions were a branch of the Donatist schism, which had split away from the Catholic Church in the Fourth Century. They seemed to be an insane band of outlaws who roamed about North Africa, killing and robbing Catholic priests and others. St. Augustine had spent much of his life fighting them, and their leader, Axidus.

The whole fantastic thing was beginning to take shape in my mind now … Axidus … the burned book … the murdered priest …

And then a sentence leaped out at me from the page:
“They frequently sought death, counting suicide as martyrdom. They were especially fond of flinging themselves from precipices … Even women caught the infection, and those who had sinned would cast themselves from the cliffs, to atone for their fault …”

And further down the page was more:
“When in controversy with Catholics, the Donatist bishops were proud of their supporters. They declared that self-precipitation from a cliff had been forbidden in their councils. Yet the bodies of these suicides were sacrilegiously honoured, and crowds celebrated their anniversaries …”

So this was it …

Something reaching out from fifteen hundred years ago to bring death to an entire village …

Was it possible?

Was it possible that this man Axidus had convinced seventy-three persons to leap to their deaths?

I left the library and stopped in a bar and fought off the gathering clouds of exhaustion and horror with a couple of stiff drinks. Then I went to meet Simon Ark …

As we drove south once more, toward the dead village and the darkening night, I told Simon Ark what I had found. I told him about the murdered priest and about the Circumcellions.

“I feared that I was right,” he said quietly. “The death of that priest proves that there actually existed in that village the ancient cult of the Circumcellions …”

“But … but the whole thing’s fantastic. It couldn’t happen in the twentieth century.”

“Consider the circumstances, though. Here is a village almost completely cut off from the outside world. It is eighty miles from the nearest city, and almost that far from a town of any size. Its people are living completely within themselves, leaving Gidaz only about once a month. Except for the daily mail truck, they see no one else. The road leading to it is a dead end, so there are not even any other cars to pass by. The people, nearly all of them, are living in the past, in a time when the town was great and famous.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m beginning to see …”

“And into this town comes a man, a man who is completely evil, who sees the opportunity that the village and its people offer. This man, Axidus, plays on their ignorance and their superstition to get up a new religion. It is an area, I discovered this afternoon, largely neglected by the established churches because of its inaccessibility. A priest will come by every six months or so, but the rest of the time the village is alone.”

“And so they listened to Axidus.”

“Yes … I imagine he had almost a hypnotic quality in his speech, a quality that, over a period of the last two years, convinced even the most hostile that he was their savior. A few, like Shelly Constance, who were young and intelligent enough to know the truth, simply left the village, rather than stay and fight this demon who had taken control. The priest who visited the place had to die, because he realized the truth. Perhaps others who opposed Axidus died, too. Because he was playing for big stakes and could not afford to lose.”

“But … just how did he work the mass suicide?”

“In the same way that he, or his namesake, did fifteen hundred years ago. He convinced the people that suicide was a form of martyrdom, and that they should throw themselves from the cliff to repent for their sins. He had probably been leading up to it for a long, long time. But two nights ago, when he called them suddenly from their houses, he told them the time had come. They had no time to think, to consider the fantastic thing they were doing. They actually believed, I am certain, that it was good. And they walked off the cliff in the night, probably thinking that Axidus would join them. But of course he did not.”

“You’ve built up a pretty strong case,” I admitted. “I’ll agree that over a period of years, a fanatic like that might talk most of those isolated people into killing themselves, especially since they seem to have had nothing to live for anyway. But there must have been at least one or two who would have resisted. What about the children?”

“I imagine,” Simon Ark said quietly, “that the children were carried over the cliff in their mothers’ arms. Or led over by their fathers.”

I fell silent as the horror of the scene formed a terrifying picture in my mind.

“And,” he continued, “Axidus could easily have killed any adults who might have resisted the idea of suicide. He could have killed them and thrown their bodies down with the rest.”

“Still, such a thing seems so … impossible.”

“It seems so impossible and fantastic only because of its setting in time and space. In the twentieth century, in the western United States, it is fantastic. But in the fourth century, in North Africa, it was common. And who is to say that people have changed since then? Times have changed, and places have changed, but the people have remained the same, and they suffer today from exactly the same faults and weaknesses they had fifteen hundred years ago …”

I turned the car into the dirt road that led to the village of the dead. “But why are we coming back here tonight?”

“Because Axidus will return this evening, and this time he must not escape us.”

“How do you know he’ll return?”

“Because from the beginning Axidus had to be one of two things: either a clever killer whose insane mind had devised this fantastic scheme, or else he really was the long-dead Axidus of St. Augustine’s time. If he is the former, then there’s something in Gidaz he wants, possibly the gold, and he’ll come for it because we scared him away last night. And,” he paused for a moment, “if it’s to be the latter explanation, then according to legend and history, he’d return to worship at the grave, just as he did fifteen hundred years ago …”

I turned on my headlights against the thickening night and tried to shake the gathering sleep from my eyes. “Which do you think it is?”

“In a way, I hope it is the latter, because then possibly my long search will be over. But there is still one thing that puzzles me.”

“What’s that?”

“I am wondering why a mail truck was delivering mail this morning, to a village full of dead people …”

After that we waited.

We waited in the rocks of the cliff itself, overlooking the grave in the moonlight. We waited as Augustine might have waited those many years before.

The evening slipped slowly by and nothing happened. Once there came the distant call of a timber wolf, and again the hooting of a nearby owl, but otherwise the night was silent.

The grave below us had been marked with a large temporary cross, until some sort of plaque could list the names of the seventy-three.

For a moment the moon slipped behind a cloud, but then it appeared again, and the edge of the cliff glowed in its light.

Then I saw it.

High above us, on the very edge of the cliff, the girl, stood …

“Damn!” I whispered. “I forgot about the girl; she’s still here.”

But before we could move, we realized she was not alone on the cliff’s edge. A tall, bearded man, all in white, had come up behind her.

Simon Ark leaped from his hiding place and shouted one word:” Axidus!”

The figure on the cliff paused, startled, and the girl, seeing him behind her, screamed …

After that, it was a nightmare.

The figure in white was clutching the girl, like a scene from some third-rate movie, as I scrambled up the rocks toward them. But already Simon Ark was ahead of me, shouting something in the language he’d used before.

Axidus released his grip on the girl, and I caught her as she fell.

And then, there on the very edge of the cliff, Simon Ark challenged this creature from another time. He held in his hand an oddly shaped cross, with a loop at the top, and he said, in a voice like thunder, “Back, Axidus, go back to the caverns of the damned from which you came.” He raised the cross high above his head. “I command it, in the name of Augustine!”

And suddenly the figure in white seemed to lose his footing on the rocks, and he slipped down over the edge of the cliff, with a scream that echoed through the night …

We found him later, at the base of the cliff, which had now claimed its seventy-fourth life. And of course, under the blood and the false white beard, we found Joe Harris, the mail truck driver …

And one can argue, I suppose, that it all had a perfectly sane explanation. As driver of the mail truck, the insane Joe Harris would have known enough about the people to scare them into believing he was a man of supernatural powers. He had been after the remains of the gold in the old mines, and had carefully planned for two years to drive the entire town to suicide.

But of course this did not explain how a man like Joe Harris had ever heard the odd story of Axidus in the first place, nor did it explain why he found it necessary to burn the books of Saint Augustine.

That was why I never published my story. There were too many things that could never be explained. Simon Ark and I worked the rest of the night, burying Joe Harris in the big grave with the other seventy-three. His disappearance caused some further excitement, but in a few weeks it was forgotten.

And likewise the Gidaz Horror itself has been forgotten with the passage of time, except for an occasional feature article in the Sunday newspapers.

Perhaps it is better that way …

As for the others who shared my adventure, the girl, Shelly Constance, and I were married six months later, but that is another story, and a much happier one.

And Simon Ark … Well, I never saw him again after that night, but I have a feeling that he’s still around somewhere …

T
HE INTERESTED READER MAY
find the tale of Kaspar Hauser’s strange life and stranger death related at some length in volume eleven of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
And perhaps the story of Douglas Zadig’s life and death will be there someday, too.

For Douglas Zadig was also a man from nowhere, a man who came out of the mists and died in the snow—just as Kaspar Hauser had over one hundred years ago.