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."