Vengeance From the Past

"You remember, Ray, the week I disappeared? You remember how I killed the two museum guards and the three cops, and afterwards the eight or ten searchers who were pursuing me through the swamp? It made headlines all over this country and the rest of the world too. Jack the Ripper had a grandson. Bill Cuff the mad berserker was unleashed on the world, breaking men's backs and twisting their heads in a nightmare of murder. Where would he strike next?

"And then I didn't strike, and they said I must be dead, drowned in the swamplands.

"I wasn't dead: obviously. I'd been discovered by a muster of the Old Companions, and was living in their HQ, an ancient wooden house in the center of the swamps. I was learning the history of my race, and the plans that it had for its future.

"My race, yes....

"Ray we are the Neanderthals...."

I didn't laugh at him, hearing Bill Cuff say that so soberly. I couldn't. Not with the thing sitting on the floor watching me; the thing that had stepped right out of a museum reconstruction of the Stone Age! Cuff went on talking.

"My memories came at me in a flood, remembrances of the dawn of time. I fled in retrospect from the encroachments of Man, he who was a little like me but so vastly different; Man who gradually, painstakingly wiped out my breed. Or so he thought. He forgot the matings, the myriad couplings of Neanderthal bucks with human women. He forgot that dark blood runs stronger than light, that the bestial is stronger than the civilized, that a drop of wolf-blood will often make a dog a ravening brute, that one small dilution of Neanderthal carries down through years and centuries to crop up again, full-fledged and vigorous, time after time in an otherwise placid strain.

"The Neanderthal died, but his seed was carried in the bodies of Homo sapiens, and after a period cropped out in violent flowering as the Pict. Luck brought out the great strain in force, and banding together in the isles, we were a race apart once more. Then time conquered us a second season; the Picts were vanquished and their pitiful remnants bred once more into the watery outlander life-form, that of Man.

"Then in later ages we discovered ourselves as different, but never could make of ourselves a dominant race: so we were hunted in ones and twos, and when our ancient blood cried for vengeance on Man, we slew him and died alone. We were the so-called werewolves and the vampires, the ghouls, the ogres, the incubi and succubi, the Good Folk and changelings and devils of the woods. We who always fought Man, unknowing what we were or why we fought, we formed the basis of every legend that told of horrible alien things lying in wait beside every path and in every fen and bog and desolute place.

"In the eighteenth century we were the raging madmen of Bedlam.

"Late in the nineteenth, science unwittingly came to our aid. The Neanderthal man emerged from dry bones as a beast, a manlike animal who had fallen to make way for Homo sapiens. And gradually those of us who had the dawn brain, the remembrance of glories far past, realized that we were not mad, but poor deluded men who thought ourselves different--we were different. We were the descendants and inheritors of the Neanderthal, he who came before man and was in many ways better, stronger, more savagely intelligent and possessed of much higher capabilities. We were not men, and the time was coming when we would no longer need to masquerade as men. We were coming into our inheritance!"

Bill Cuff halted in front of me and his face, broad, heavy-boned, topped with thick black hair and carrying an expression of cruel and truculent power, now lit up with malignant glee. I felt a cold chill.

"And all this I remembered in a space of two days!

"What I remembered best was the hate.

"We hated you--oh, God, how we hated! Imagine the hate you'd feel toward a race from Mars that came and overran your planet and stamped out your folk till only a pitiful handful were left. Man had come and usurped our earth, hadn't he? So the blood remembered, and hated."

Bill Cuff laughed suddenly.

"Ray, I'm not mad, as you were just thinking. I offer you that as proof: we are to a degree telepathic. All of us. Yet men are not.

"It's true. We are the Neanderthals. We are not human. And we have returned to take back our inheritance, which is the world!"

He allowed me to sit without speaking for the space of about ten minutes. I needed that time. I had to go all over what he'd said, consider each statement, try to forget that it sounded like fantasy, try to realize that Bill Cuff and Lord knew how many others of the so-called Old Companions believed this yarn with their whole energies. I had to take the tale and consider it in its entirety, as a broad concept which might be true, and then I had to grit my teeth and look at the significance of it as if by some incredible, wild chance it were true....

The significance was horrible, of course, but it was doubly or rather trebly awful for me personally, because Bill Cuff was my cousin.

His father, who'd died before Bill was born, had been my mother's brother.

And the reason I say it was trebly bad for me was that upstairs my wife Nessa lay asleep, and stirring in her was our child.

And if Bill Cuff was right, then that child and I myself came of a race that was only partly human; and neither of us could call ourselves by the proud title of Man.

At the end of ten minutes, the creature called Old One roused himself and gave a grunt. It seemed to be a two-syllable word, but of no language I ever knew.

Bill Cuff nodded and replied, "Yes he does, Old One," showing that it had actually conveyed meaning. I looked again at that ferocious mask, and I think I began believing Bill Cuff's story with an intelligent awareness of its truth, right them. Old One was a Neanderthal. Only a blind idiot could have doubted it.

"Now here's the reason I've come here to tell you this," began Bill Cuff, and I waved a hand to stop him.

"I know why," I said huskily. "We're cousins. You think the same blood may run in my veins."

"It does without a doubt. You see, I've checked on my mother, who's still living; and she isn't a carrier. So it was my father--your uncle. And you may not have the memory, Ray, but you have the blood. You're Neanderthal too."