Collected Short Fiction, page 134
She gave herself to my brother in unreserved devotion, and he displayed a passionate affection for her. That, I suppose, was inevitable, since she was his perfect ideal, and since in her creation he would naturally have eliminated any traits that might have been incompatible with his own nature.
For almost a month she and Paul lived in perfect happiness. They were invariably together, strolling through the bright halls of the castle, climbing the spiral stair to look from the black central tower across the swarthy wilderness of the swamps, merely sitting side by side in some splendid room.
I might have found the period tiresome had I not, myself, taken a tremendous liking for Elaine. She appeared to return that liking—with no lessening, of course, of her entire devotion to Paul.
To my vast relief, my brother had completely ceased his experiments, surrendering himself completely to the joys of Elaine’s companionship. He did not enter the laboratory save to run the dynamo for a short time each day, to build up the “fixations” of energy in the castle—and in the lovely body of Elaine herself—which was continually dissipated through a process of disintegration.
For the first time in many years, Paul slept in complete freedom from his haunting dreams of terror. Absence of worry, rest, and the stimulating influence of Elaine’s companionship seemed to have completely banished the phobia. Not only did his nightmares cease, but he walked no more in his sleep.
His apparent recovery led me to make a fatal mistake.
Not wishing to intrude upon his and Elaine’s intense communion, I removed my sleeping-quarters to a smaller room adjoining the long chamber which Paul and I had both occupied. The girl promised to call me if he ever seemed restless or disturbed in his sleep.
I anticipated no evil; we were totally unprepared for the dreadful thing that happened.
11. The Doom From a Dream
I DO not remember any specific thing that wakened me on that fatal night. Subconsciously I must have become aware of some faint sound. I am a light sleeper, probably because of the years I cared for Paul, keeping alert, even in sleep, for sounds of his distress. On that night I was suddenly awake, and filled with the positive, inexplicable conviction that my brother was in trouble.
On my feet in an instant, I ran through the curtained doorway into the long room adjoining. In the soft, clear light radiated by the walls, I saw that Paul and Elaine were gone.
For a moment I was motionless, dum-founded. Then, recalling Paul’s recent sleep-walking, I knew in an instant what had happened. He had risen, without waking, and gone out, probably toward the laboratory. And Elaine, aware of his going, had followed without thinking it necessary to disturb me.
The swiftly rising drone of the motor in the laboratory reached my ears, then the vibrant humming of the generator. Paul had already reached the laboratory, and started the motor.
My heart thudding with swift alarm, though even then I did not realize the full horror of the impending catastrophe.
I raced desperately across the room, and down the shining halls to the laboratory.
When I burst into the room, Paul had already put on the curious head-set, with the little black disks fitting against his shaven temples. He had just lit the banks of tubes; his fingers were still on the rheostat.
His movements seemed normal, rapid and efficient enough. But a single terrified glance at his face told me that he was asleep. Though his eyes were open, they had a curiously glazed, staring, lifeless look. His features were set in a dull, leaden mask.
Immediately I realized that I might be too late to stop him.
Already, without waking himself, he had gained full control of the amazing power of the integrator, which could change his mental images, the stuff of his dreams, into physical reality. I did not know just what to expect, though the presence of danger was evident enough.
Elaine was just inside the door, watching Paul with puzzled apprehension. I must try to give some idea of that last glimpse of her full-blown beauty. In the clear light shining from rosy walls and emerald vault, she was gorgeous, breathtaking. Richly curving, erect, whiteskinned, her fine body was almost bare. Her abundant hair fell in glistening waves, parted by the soft curves of her white, upturned breasts. Her full red lips were parted a little, and her limpid eyes were filled with anxious concern. Swiftly, her oval face was turned to me. Her clear voice spoke quickly.
“Oh, Verne, I’m glad you came! Paul is acting so strangely! He doesn’t seem to be able to hear me——”
“He’s asleep!” I whispered, urgently. “Go to him, and slip that thing off his head. Hurry! But don’t startle him.”
I thought that she could approach him more quietly than I could. I was afraid of what would happen if he were alarmed, while commanding the power of the integrator.
Elaine moved swiftly across the concrete floor.
Paul’s lifeless, sleep-filled eyes were lifted toward her, now. I saw recognition dawning in them—and horror!
I remember that her bare feet made a soft, scratching shuffle upon the rough concrete. It must have been that sound. . . .
Running through a dark room, in his childhood, Paul once overturned a box of live tarantulas that had been shipped to our father. He had always been afraid of them, and the accident paralyzed him with fear. Unable to call for help, or run, he stood there among the things. He said afterward that he could hear their feet. They made soft, scratching, shuffling sounds. . . .
What happened is almost too hideous to write.
The odd sound of Elaine’s feet, on the concrete, must have brought back all the circumstances of his great fright to Paul’s sleeping mind. The sound precipitated the nightmare dream, that had its sinister roots in that fright. And the integrator translated the nightmare into reality!
I HEARD Paul scream. His cry was hoarse with insufferable agony of fear. It was choked off suddenly, into a strangling moan.
Paul struggled in the hideous clutches of nightmare. His whole body was trembling violently. Glittering beads of sweat burst out upon his grimacing, corpse-white face. He was gasping; little bubbling, squeaking sounds came from his lips, like the cries of a frightened animal.
His body was paralyzed by the recurrence of that awful fear that had been burned into his childish brain. . . . And the nightmare dream in his tortured mind was translated into unspeakable, soulsearing reality. . . .
Elaine, moving swiftly toward him, was suddenly stopped as if she had encountered an invisible stream of opposing force. Her fair white body was pushed back by some unseen energy. Even in her distress, the beauty of her made my heart ache.
She called out to me, her voice ringing clear in its desperate appeal.
“Verne, help me! Please! Something is—oh, Paul——”
Her clear, urgent call died in a dry and breathless gasp, as I leapt toward her.
Her body had been seized by the invisible projection rays of the machine. No longer was she a separate entity; she had become merely a magnified figment of Paul’s nightmare dream. Her lovely form was suddenly enveloped in a luminous flux, so that I could not see it very plainly.
Then she changed. Oh, God, she changed. . . .
Paul had told me, many times, how in his hideous dreams familiar persons were altered. . . .
Elaine became a spider!
Her fair body seemed to melt and flow in a shining vortex. It thickened, and swelled, and became dark. Her limbs grew long and black, with dreadful swiftness; additional ones were thrust out, like pseudopods. Limbs and body were covered suddenly with a rough black hair.
Her head sank, her white teeth became enormous and hideous fangs. Her limpid dark eyes grew scarlet, glowed insanely with implacable evil.
With the swiftness of a dream, the innocently lovely woman was transformed into a gigantic tarantula!
Having started to her aid, I recoiled from the incredible, monstrous thing she had become. I was paralyzed, for an instant, with an overwhelming, mind-blasting fear, akin to that of my brother.
Then, with the sudden return of desperate strength, I dashed to the accursed machine that had wrought such horror, wrenched a heavy condenser from its connections, and began smashing insanely with it the electron tubes and other delicate parts.
Like a madman, I was still hammering at the integrator when Paul screamed again, in ultimate horror.
He was awake, now.
But the gigantic spider had seized him in its hideous jaws.
Sunk in the depths of primal fear, he shrieked, babbled, implored me wildly to save him, and laughed . . . laughed. . . .
I was helpless. Even had there been a weapon available, I could not have broken the chains of stark horror that fettered me.
Physically sick, paralyzed with icy fear, I watched my brother, screaming and laughing in the jaws of the monstrous spider, until the great fangs closed with a sickening sound upon his head . . . and his shrieks came mercifully no more. . . .
12. The Lurking Horror
AT LAST the hideous beast moved away, still carrying Paul’s limp body in its encrimsoned jaws. Regaining some measure of control over my shaking limbs, I ran totteringly from the room, and out of the shining castle into the swamp.
Behind me the pile glowed with weird and eldritch radiance against the moonless darkness. Scarlet-windowed walls of lucent green. Domes of gelid violet. Towers of dull black, of sullen gold.
I staggered on, breaking my way through rank undergrowth, tearing flesh and garments upon unseen briars, splashing through stagnant, scum-covered water, until the light of the accursed castle had vanished behind me, and the ground quaked under my feet.
Two days I hid in the swamp, without food or water that I dared to drink, suffering agony from hordes of mosquitoes that was but a trifle against the agony of my memory of that night of horror.
The castle and the hideous thing within it, I knew, would quickly disintegrate, when the machine failed to replace the energy they were constantly radiating. Knowing that Henri Dubois, the Cajun, would return on the third day, with the mail and supplies, I decided to venture as far as the landing, to intercept him.
I knew there was danger, though I hoped that the monstrous spider might already have met its fate.
The castle was breaking up, when I came in sight of it. Fantastic towers and domes were toppling, crashing, shattering into showers of-colored sparks that vanished before they touched the ground. Purple lightning—the liberated electrical energy from the disintegrating space-frames—flickered in a lurid pall about the crumbling walls, crackling and muttering.
The black central tower collapsed as I watched. It fell into a blaze of electric violet, above the ghostly, shining ruins of crenelated walls; and hollow thunder boomed upon my ears.
Only the bare concrete foundation, I knew, would remain in a few hours, with the dynamo and the wrecked apparatus upon it.
Hoping that the colossal spider had met its fate within the doomed building, and forgetful of the fatal fact that Paul had been forced to make denser and hence more enduring the fixations of energy in his living creations, I started down to the landing on the bayou, to wait for the Cajun’s boat.
A crackling in the undergrowth beside the trail.
THUS, in the middle of a sentence, Verne Telfair’s unfinished manuscript breaks off. At that point in his narrative he laid his pen aside, never to take it up again. For that night, the Cajun had told me, fever and delirium seized him, sweeping him swiftly to the lonely grave in the swamp.
It is not difficult, from what the Cajun told me, to outline the rest.
The monstrous spider, escaping disintegration longer than the castle, had left the falling building. Lurking in the undergrowth beside the trail, it attacked the unfortunate Verne as he came past.
It was already weakened, perhaps, by its incipient dissolution, and he was able to escape its clutches, though somewhat injured, and to reach the landing, where he found Henri Dubois with his skiff.
His death, five days later, from injuries that appeared relatively slight, must be laid to some poison introduced in his body during the encounter with the spider. We know nothing of the reactions of the human organism to the “matter” fixated by Paul Telfair’s marvelous integrator. In Verne’s case, however, we may well believe that the spider’s venom acted as a specific poison.
I have notified police authorities and the relatives of the two brothers, of their death, though without revealing the full circumstances of the tragedy. And I have had the remains of my friends removed to their family vault in a New Orleans cemetery.
When I last saw it, the time-blackened dynamo and the corroded and shattered apparatus of the wand of doom, as it might be termed, remained undisturbed upon the crumbling concrete platform in the swamp, though half buried beneath the silt and debris left by flood waters. The swift growth of vegetation is overwhelming it, however, and within a few years the very site of Paul Telfair’s audacious and tragic experiment will be lost for ever.
1933
In the Scarlet Star
THIS story, by one who is justly called a favorite author, describes life in the stone age, when man was in the most primitive state of advance. It tells of the discovery of fire and of the combats of the herculean ancestors of our present race.
ON a hot afternoon in June, 1930, I was standing in front of a newsstand in El Paso, Texas, examining the latest copy of a magazine of science fiction.
“Like ‘em?” a pleasant voice inquired at my elbow.
“Yes,” I said. “Merritt and Wells and——”
I caught myself, looked up swiftly to see who had accosted me. A young man stood beside me. Tall and well built he was, in shirt sleeves. His black trousers and cheap shoes had seen better days. But his eyes were blue and brilliant with strange enthusiasm.
He stood still, smiling a little, while I measured him. “Beg your pardon,” he said. “I read ‘em myself. It struck me we were kindred spirits.”
“Glad you spoke. I haven’t anything to do. And I like to talk science fiction. If you like, we can go somewhere to lunch.”
There was something about his face that suggested my words; and a quick gleam in his brilliant eyes replied to them. But he flushed a little, spoke quickly,
“No. Thanks. I’ve just eaten.”
“I was going. We can talk as we eat——”
He weakened visibly, collapsed.
“All right. I’ll come. A. fifteen cent feed at that Coney Island joint—anyhow——”
We found a promising place, dark and cool, with electric fans whining overhead. My new acquaintance did his best to conceal impatience, while we waited for two full orders. I discovered that he thought Wells and Verne a bit old-fashioned and dry, that he had vastly enjoyed Merritt’s story, “The Moon Pool.”
When the soup and roast beef came, with coffee and pie and what-not along with it all, conversation lagged. He ate with the gusto of one who has been for some time practising economy in his diet. At last he pushed back his cleaned plate, rose, flushing a little again.
“You know, this is darned good of you, Mr. ——”
“Stewart. John Stewart. And it’s quite all right. Glad I met you.”
“My name’s Jimmy Miles,” he said as we strolled back out into the baking street. “Sort of roving electrical engineer. No college. But I’ve worked in power houses—nineteen of ‘em, to be exact.
“And if you’re interested, I’ve got something to show you—pay you for——”
“Don’t worry about the dinner!” I said, “I write a little, and am interested in characters.”
“Business proposition, eh?” He laughed. “Well, this might give you a plot. Strange enough!”
“Of course I want to hear it. What is it?”
“Well, to begin at the first, I came here a couple of months ago. Failed to land any job down at the light-plant. Should have been drifting on—I had enough to carry me on till I found something. But one day I got to looking in a pawnshop window——” He paused.
“Yes, they fascinate me,” he went on. “Every bright, useless article under the sun. Diamonds and watches and jewelry. Pistols and knives. Kodaks and phonographs. Probably a thrilling story for every one of them!
“I FOUND a strange thing in that window. Sort of I a crystal. Looked like red glass, or ruby. Starshaped. A big thing, heavy, nearly three feet across. I’d never seen anything like it—from what I know of chemistry, there isn’t any known substance that crystallizes in five-pointed stars.
“I went in to examine it. The proprietor said that a Mexican had brought it in two or three weeks before. Seems he’d smuggled it across the river from Juarez, said it came from the ruins of an old fallen building in the desert, way down in Chihuahua.”
“I know the sort of thing,” I said. “Big mounds of dirt, crumbled mud walls with broken pottery and stone axes and what-not mixed in. I’ve just been down on the Casas Grandes River—uncle has a ranch down there. Saw lots of the mounds—the Mexicans call ‘em moctezumas. They have been digging them up, treasurehunting—some of them have pieces of matte in them, copper alloyed with silver and gold, just as if it had came out of a prehistoric furnace. Nobody knows when those fellows lived there. To judge from the ruins, the whole valley must have been farmed.”
“Well anyhow, this peon had brought the crystal across the river, claiming he had dug it up in an old ruin. Seemed to think it was a diamond, fabulously huge. The pawnbroker knew it wasn’t any diamond, of course. But he let the fellow have something for it.
“The thing aroused my curiosity immensely. The pawnbroker wanted two hundred dollars for it. That was more than I had in the world. After three days, I drove him down to a hundred and seventeen. That left me with sixty-one dollars. I’ve lived six weeks on that, and spent twenty of it for apparatus to test the crystal with.
“Dingy little room I have, hot as a furnace. It looks out on a ventilator shaft. Three dollars a week. Living on dry bread, and raisins and a slab of cheese, in my room. When I want to celebrate, a little cheap fruit, or a glass of milk and a slab of pie at that Coney Island joint.” He grinned.
