CHAPTER XI
The house was old but well-kept, upreared in the heart of the great green swampland. It was such a house as a troll might have built—a troll with a Gothic imagination. Rambling, with a ramshackle look despite its sturdiness, wood-turreted.... "One of our more exotic head-quarters," said yellow-hair, whose name was Skagarach. "Don't know what madman built it. We have them, HQs that is, all over the world; but not many in so congenial a setting."
"Are we truly all over the world, then?"
"Most of it. Maybe not in deep Africa, nor in places like the South Seas, but wherever there're big enough colonies of so-called white men, we are there." There arose a faint barking, somewhere in the depths of the house. Skagarach shook his head as I snarled. "No, they're ours. We have dogs, of course. The friendship of the dog was not always limited to man. He was our servant too. And will be again."
"Who were we?"
He returned a question. "Do you know why you came here?"
"I was called. Something in my mind—"
"Yes. We're telepathic to a degree." He grinned. "Don't let it go to your head. It's a gift we share with the ants and the bees." We entered the house and I found a spacious living room furnished with big leather armchairs. "Have a drink," he said, pointing to a wall bar. "One worthwhile invention of our friend Man."
"No friend of mine," I said, and then, turning to him, "but why? Why this two-day reversal of my feelings? Why has this thing happened to me, Skagarach?"
"So quickly ... I don't know why it happened so quickly. As for the general why of it, it's blood and bone and sinew and soul come down to us from the beings we once were. It's a powerful strain—so powerful that powerful is a weak word for it. I think it must be the strongest blood-strain that ever ran in animal veins. One drop, I think, would redden an ocean of milk."
"Animal." I repeated. One of the Old Companions put a tall drink in my hand and I nodded thanks. "I know this, but tell me again. We are not men, are we?"
He looked into my eyes with those uncanny gray jewel-orbs. "No, we are not. At least not Homo sapiens pure and simple. I believe we began this hybrid race by stealing and mating with human women—" I recalled my long-ago death by treachery and agreed—"and then possibly the offspring of those unions mated among men. Certainly the Picts were not pure us. Then afterward the breed was watered again when the Picts bred to outlanders. Men always hated us, but women are strange creatures and—well, the unions must have been many. A mere handful that's accounted for by thefts of women couldn't have produced the mighty tide of anti-human passion which runs in us after so many centuries. Many millions must have our taint in them, though comparatively few have it so abundantly as you and I and these Old Companions. Note that I say 'comparatively'. Actually there are thousands of us who recognize our essential difference."
"So now the old blood wakes in us," I said exultantly. "Why? After so long, why now? Are we like locusts, our knowledge lying hidden for an age and then bursting up in all of us at the same time?"
"A quaint notion," said Skagarach. "No, we have always known, I think, in all the periods of history. But we never banded together before, never fought the ancient enemy as an army within its gates, as we are doing and will do with increasing potency."
"Why not?"
"Think, Cuff, only think! You are born in 1700; at a certain age you begin to know you are different. You hate the race of men. You have racial memories of living in caves, of being harried by men. What do you do? You never heard the name of—what we were and are. Science has told you nothing of prehistory. So where do you end?" He shrugged. "Bedlam. The lunatic dungeons. Fancy ladies come and giggle at you, the murderous madman, through the bars. You pine for fresh air and freedom, because freedom is even more precious to our race than to man. You die."
"Oh," I said, catching his meaning. "It's only in the last century that science has opened the door to the past, of course. Now we can realize what we are, and work accordingly."
"Yes, we can organize, can sheer off from the pack of humankind, and strengthen our race by inbreeding. We have children here and in the other HQs, born of two of us who remember what they are before they can read and write. I said it was a powerful strain. Listen. I raise dogs. Once I bred a wolf to a shepherd. Five generations later a pup was born that was all wolf, every last ounce of him. Perfectly untameable little brute. We have that same tenacious blood-line, but to an almost incredible degree. In fact I think it is not so much blood with us as a strain in the mind. In us it has carried down through the uncountable years since prehistory. As that dog was no dog, but a true wolf, so we are not men, but—what we are." He broke off and looked at me appraisingly. "I have hopes for you," he said. "The tide runs high in you, Cuff. We will win back the world some day, we who are not of mankind. You should prove tremendously important to us."
I said, "Skagarach, who are we?"
"Hush," he said, "the Old Man is coming."
"Old Man?"
"The leader."
I turned and saw the Old Man, and I knew what we were. I had one final crashing burst of dawn memory, and I saw our beginnings and our whole long story and why we would always have to fight men. All this I saw in the Old Man's face.
That face was like a great terrible mask. The cheeks were broad, the brow low and ridged, the brain case enormous. The chin was shallow, with a wide thick-lipped mouth; and the eyes were glittering oblongs of gray mica-sprinkled flint. Gray hair covered the massive forward-thrusting head thickly, and tufts of it boiled up from the collar of the white shirt on the barrel-sized chest.
Skagarach came up to me and saw my knowledge in my face. "Yes," he said, "There is the true strain of our race; there is the result of inbreeding over a number of generations. The true he of our people."
I growled. "No truer than I, Skagarach. His are the features, but mine is the memory and the dawn brain."
He laughed. He seemed to find humor in everything. "I foresee strife," he said quietly. "You're a headstrong beast, Cuff. Never mind! We thrive on strife. Do you know now who and what we are?"
"H. G. Wells called us the Grisly Folk."
"Yes. Cuff. You have it. We are the Neanderthals."