The Resurrection of Meleck-Taos

"It is well the infant has been recovered," my colleague Dr. Percy Belknap told the police sergeant. "Where is it now?"

"Returned to the maternity ward at the hospital," he said. "Unharmed."

"And the nurse who abducted it?"

"Still missing." The sergeant pointed to a black jitney parked down the street. "But that's her car. We're making house to house inquiries."

My mentor pulled me aside as the policeman left us.

"We will leave them to search this side of the street," he murmured. "But you and I—" He nodded at the cemetery that glimmered in the moonlight. From the trunk of his touring car we removed lanterns, an iron stake, and a silver dagger.

The kidnapping of a newborn infant, though tragic, would not have concerned us, save that our trail and that of the police had intersected in one person: the nurse who snatched the child from the hospital. Our own researches had suggested—and our questions at the hospital confirmed—that she was an initiate of that most infernal of cults, the Temple of Meleck-Taos!

We had thought the Temple derelict, until news came that its most verminous relic had been stolen from the vault where our own society kept safe from evildoers the most terrible and potent of occult artifacts. In hasty fear we had mobilized.

Hunched over, with our faces turned to the ground, Belknap and I found a set of tracks through the graveyard, and our boots sank into the soft turf as we followed them.

"Look, there!" Belknap lifted his lamp and pointed. Something in white garb was stretched on the grass in the shadow beneath the bone-white wall of a marble mausoleum. He lifted his lantern over it.

"The nurse!" I exclaimed as the shadows fled from the woman's pinched and bony face. "But why?" I asked. "Plain murder after she had served her purpose?"

"Don't forget the tattoo that was observed on her wrist. She was one of them!"

"Are we successful then despite ourselves?" I asked. "Did the tools break in their hands?"

Belknap didn't answer right away, but mused to himself.

"A sacrifice was necessary," he said, "if they were to employ the altar-stone. These are fanatics, and we must put neither murder nor willing suicide beyond them. Yet it is more likely they would murder an innocent if they had one to hand."

"The child? But it yet lives!"

Belknap glanced about with a frown until something caught his attention. He plucked my elbow and drew me around first one corner of the mausoleum and then the next, until we stood, staring aghast, at the object that sat opposite the side where the nurse sprawled.

It was a crib. My brain was hot as I comprehended the concrete proof of the intended depravity implied by its presence. Still—

"Were they interrupted?" I asked. "The child recovered before they could—?"

Belknap made a circuit of the mausoleum, examining it from every angle. "Look," he said, lifting his lantern to illuminate the lintel over the door. "Here is confirmation of their intention at least. The name of Ulysses Fordham, last high priest of the Temple!"

"And the last to attempt the ceremony," I observed.

"Exactly. Remember the description of his death. A blue flame like a finger burst from his forehead and burnt there for some minutes before expiring even as he did. The demon, baulked by the holy water surreptitiously traced there by my old teacher DeCamp, was prevented transference into a terrestrial abode until death had embraced the would-be host. And so here," he grimly concluded, "trapped within desiccating bones, hath the terrible Meleck-Taos slept these five decades. Until another acolyte was able to steal the altar-stone and effect the ceremony!"

"Monstrous!" I exclaimed. "Monstrous! To sacrifice any living thing to resurrect that—! But to snatch from its mother's arms a—! Faugh! At least they failed to carry out their scheme!"

"It is indeed monstrous," Belknap agreed in a voice husky with fear. "But you speak too quickly if you think they failed. You do not read the signs as I do!"

"What do you mean?"

He pointed. "See where they placed the crib. On the east side of the mausoleum! Facing the Luciferean star!"

Indeed, now that he drew my attention to it, I saw that he was right. But that meant—

We hurried around to the other side. Belknap gripped the nurse's corpse by the shoulder and turned her onto her face. Beneath her lay a slab, and by our lanterns we saw the horned star carved into its center.

"The altar-stone of Meleck-Taos!" my teacher whispered.

"Why did they abandon it?" I asked.

"Do you not see? They came within a whisker of failure! They must have heard the police, seen their lights, and fled ere they could remove all their vile tools! Oh, but they didn't neglect to pluck and carry off the foul fruit of their labor!"

"The child?"

"Indeed," he groaned. "It was the nurse they sacrificed to effect the exchange. The vessel for the demon—" He tramped around the mausoleum to point a shaking finger at the crib. "Lay there!"

It took a moment for my horror-benumbed brain to comprehend what he was saying. "Then the infant that she stole from the hospital—"

"Is now the physical embodiment of the resurrected fiend!"

I felt myself reel, and put my hand on the crib to steady myself. It was hot beneath my palm.

Still, I tried to rally. "There is yet time to stop them," I said. "If we could not prevent his resurrection, we may yet—"

"No. We have lost," Belknap murmured.

"It is loathsome," I admitted, "but is it really cause for despair?"

"Oh, see you not the deviltry of it?" he cried. "Even if we found it, and even knowing what it really was—!" He showed me the cruelly sharp iron spike he clutched. "Could you drive this into the beating breast of a newborn babe?"

-30-
Winner "SCREAMS!!!"  for 3-17-21
Prompt: A crib in the graveyard.