Collected Short Fiction, page 179
“The eagle was already dead when I reached it. The girl was picking herself up beside it on the tumbled heap of green blocks where it had fallen. You can look at Su-Ildra, so I needn’t try to describe tor.”
With a tender gleam in his greenish eyes, Miles smiled across the table at the girl. She was listening to him intently, wonderment and understanding alternating in her darkly blue eyes. The bright helmet of her hair broke the late sun into coppery gleams; her skin was the white of alabaster.
“She wasn’t afraid of me. She called out to me in her strange language. Wanted me, I gathered, to help with the eagle. At first she couldn’t believe it was dead. We gathered it up from its sprawling position on the rocks.
“Truly it had been a magnificent bird. Its weight was between two and three hundred pounds, and the extreme reach of its wings must have been thirty feet: Beak and claws were in proportion; it must have been a savage fighter.
“Sue was heartbroken when she finally realized that it was dead. But it turned out that she had too many troubles to take much time to worry about the bird. She was frightened, Brandy—afraid of something in the Well—something that was hunting her!
CHAPTER IV
The World Beneoth
l “Now, Brandy, you know how I used to stand on the lady question. Excess baggage, and all that! But somehow I liked Su-Ildra from that first day. And when I found that she was in trouble, I decided to look after her and let the Berbers fight their own battles. My other agreement had really expired months before, anyhow.
“Our conversation, of course, was a bit slow and awkward at first, but Sue seems exceptionally intelligent. Intuition! She could always guess what I was driving at—and she’s one grand little actress. When she couldn’t tell me anything, she’d act it out. Pretty soon we were picking up quite a few of each other’s words.
“I took her back with me to the plane, all in, poor kid. I had to carry her part of the way. She was thirsty and starving. Allah knows how long she and the eagle had been flying up out of the Well. I fixed her up, and then went back and dressed out the best of the dead bird to eke out my diminishing supplies.
“I soon made the girl understand that the plane was a flying machine. She didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of it; thought it was rather crude and clumsy, or so I gathered. And when I demonstrated the machine gun, she seemed to think it a rather uncertain defense against her enemies in the Well.
“She was in a desperate hurry to get away from the vicinity of the Well. The next day I began clearing off the runway. Sue helped, as soon as she got over the hardships of her flight on the eagle.
“Those blocks of green stone were heavy. It took us three weeks to get them cleared off a space long enough to take off from. We talked all the time and got to understand each other pretty well. A bright girl, Sue, and plucky as they make ‘em.
“She managed to tell me a little about herself and the place she came from—though there is still plenty that I don’t know. She and her people live down at the bottom of the Well. There is a considerable space there—a sort of cavern world, I suppose, I don’t know how large. She calls it Xandulu.
“It seems that three races live there. Two of them are not human. At least, not completely human. I don’t understand just what they are. The third is composed of Sue’s people. She calls them the Ara.
“One of the other races she calls the Lelura, the Flame Folk. She says they are the oldest race. Once they lived above, in that green city. They opened the Well into the subterranean world. She seems to admire them a lot, or rather to revere them. Apparently she looks on them almost as gods, remote and unconcerned!
“It’s the other race, the Ryka, that is making the trouble. It’s not clear just how near human they are. They’re gigantic beings, I gather, with red skins and yellow eyes and black teeth. The females are the fighters, and larger than the males, fierce and blood-thirsty.
“This race, Sue tells me, is ruled by a being—a god, maybe, or a monster that is called the Red One, or Quithu. While the females are the warriors, the males are the special servants of this Quithu. The leader of these males—a high priest, I suppose you would call him, if the Red One is actually a god—is an unpleasant old fellow named Bak-Toreg, Sue’s special enemy.
“Now, led by the Red One, Bak-Toreg, and Hoja-Ze, their red empress, these beings have just broken an old truce to make war on Sue’s people. Pretty well exterminated them in the first attack.
“Sue, and a few others, got away. She was commanded by the Flame Folk, the Lelura, to come up through the Well. Just what they are, or how they were interested, I don’t understand. But it seems that the Ryka are planning more devilment, and she was sent out to warn the world. Just what we’re warned against, or what we’re supposed to do about it, isn’t clear. I’m not sure she knows herself, except that we are to ‘beware of the Red One.’
“The first globe came the night before last. We had been camping in a little hollow in the piles of green stone near the plane where we were sheltered from the wind. The nights were cold there on the mountain—desert air, you know, and the altitude. We kept a little brush fire.
“The fire had burned to embers; I was getting cold and just about waked up enough to build it up again, when I was roused by a queer sound, a sort of whining monotone, so shrill that it was almost a shriek. A steady vibration. It was somehow mechanical, like the keen, unchanging hum of some high-speed machine.
“A moment later I heard Su-Ildra scream. Across the bank of red coals I saw her starting to her feet, arms thrown up as if to shield her from something. And then I saw the thing that had roused me.
“A glistening bubble of violet light, it was, three feet thick. It was not opaque, not a solid object. I could see a bright star through it. I sensed about it vibrant, unstable farces—balanced energies, held in delicate equilibrium. The sound of it was somehow like that of the singing flame we rigged up in the university lab, though louder and shriller.
“I was on my feet, dragging my automatic from the spring holster under my arm, when I saw the face in it.
l “Guess you saw the spheres after the plane last night. But you couldn’t have seen the faces. That face was no more substantial than the bubble itself. It looked like a mere reflection in the heart of the bubble, and yet I knew that it could see me.
“The thing was hideous, Brandy—diabolical. You can hardly imagine the terror of it all: a disembodied face floating in the bubble—a hellish face, the concentration of all evil! It made my flesh crawl.
“The skin of it was a sort of sickly orange-yellow; dead, wrinkled parchment. The nose was a thin beak. The leathery yellow lips were drawn back in a perpetual sneering grin, and the teeth were black. The face was centuries old, with the print of obscene evil all over it. But the most horrible thing about it was its non-humanity. The stamp upon it was of alien, hostile blood.
“The eyes were strange, sunk far back beneath coarse black eyebrows, above the withered yellow cheeks. They were yellow, golden, bland. They twinkled, Brandy. They seemed gentle, mildly curious. But they only accented the horror and the evil and the ancient, timeless power of the face.
“You know I’ve done a bit of scrapping, Brandy. But when I saw that face in the violet globe, just floating there, fading out around the edges as if out of the focus of some superoptical instrument of projection—then I knew all the rest had been just a friendly preliminary.
“There was nothing weak about that face. It was all evil—cunning, obscene, cruel, hateful! There was nothing in it of stupidity or indecision, or compromising kindness.
“The sphere moved toward me a little as I got up. And I saw in that face what it meant to do for me. I didn’t waste any time on the draw. I shot right between the eyes of that yellow face, even if I knew it was no more than a reflection, an optical image.
“And the bubble exploded in violet light. You’ve seen what happens. The humming ended in a sharp report, and both of us were knocked flat. Electricity, I guess.
“That was one way to destroy the globes. I’ve thought about them a lot. I think they are just condensations of energy, vortexes of balanced forces. The bullet upsets the equilibrium, lets the force escape in light and electricity.
“They must be controlled, of course, from Xandulu, by the man the face belongs to—Sue says he is Bak-Toreg, the priest of the Red One. It’s something, I suppose, analogous to our radio remote control. But those spheres are beyond anything we have. They must be simply constructions of fluid energy, maintained and directed by a beam wave. But the man at the other end can see through them, carry objects with them, use them for weapons.
“I don’t know how many things like that there are in Xandulu, the sleeping science of the elder races. But even that one thing, Brandy, would be deadly, if men from our world got control of it—men of a certain stamp! Even Bak-Toreg is doing pretty well with it.
“We found another thing that destroys the globes. We didn’t sleep any more that night, of course. We sat there by the fire, watching. And just before sunrise we saw three more violet globes skimming along toward us from the direction of the Well.
“As the sun rose, they dropped lower, tried to keep in the shadows of the ruins. But a ray of it caught them, and they all three exploded like the one I shot. The etheric disturbance of sunlight must be enough to disrupt their equilibrium.
“That meant we would be safe enough in daylight, unless Bak-Toreg had another ace up his sleeve.
“The runway wasn’t really finished, but we contrived to get in the air yesterday evening after almost cracking up in a couple of premature attempts. Sue was desperately anxious to get away before night.
“And that’s about all, Brandy, except what you saw. We were trying for France and a fast ship for the States. Dad left me some land, you know—his country place on the old Camino Real, down the peninsula from San Francisco. Thought I’d try the simple life for a while. Sue needs a quiet place to stay for a year or so, while she’s picking up our language and customs. I’m anxious to learn exactly what it is she came to warn us of.
“But Bak-Toreg overtook us with his ‘Thousand Faces,’ as she calls them, and she thinks he will again. That’s why I asked you to race for Marseilles. I want to be as far as possible from Africa when the sun goes down.
“And it’s already getting mighty low.”
Miles unfolded his tall body and stood up. As he spoke to Su-Ildra in her own melodious tongue, there was concern in his greenish eyes, and a tenderness I had never seen there before. He shook his head at her apprehensive reply and smiled at her.
Then the two seemed drawn together by a quick current. . . . They had the deck alone, but for me; and an invalid does not matter. The passion and the agony in that embrace revealed their premonition of the weirdly terrible disaster that overtook us despite all our efforts.
CHAPTER V
The Screaming Spheres
l Midnight had passed. Again the sky was pellucidly clear, and the cold, broad crescent of the waning moon bathed the quiet sea with silver, rising at the end of a track splashed with soft, molten flame. I was in my usual chair upon the foredeck, swathed in rugs and useless as a baby.
My crew, on common occasions, are loyal and brave enough. But those who had not witnessed Miles’s combat with the violet spheres had heard of it. And when they knew that the weird instrumentalities might be expected to appear again during the night, they discovered a praiseworthy ingenuity in finding excellent reasons for staying below decks.
Some of the men, in fact, proved more superstitious than I had supposed. Carlos brought me word of dark hints that all hands would be safer if Miles and the girl were put off in a boat. Even canny Captain McLendon informed me, rather circumspectly, that while he was going to sail the yacht as usual, and while he was not objecting to the presence of our new passengers, he did not feel that it lay within the province of his duties to try to interfere in case the bubbles came again.
But in any event, we could hardly have offered effective resistance. There were almost no weapons aboard. And we knew little indeed of the timeless, brooding terror that menaced us from forgotten Xandulu.
Miles and the girl were both upon the foredeck with me, white-faced, tense, strained. I watched them, walking side by side with short, nervous steps, talking in breathless, broken tones. Sometimes they stood for a little time by the rail, staring apprehensively across the moonlit sea, or sat restlessly for a few minutes in the deck chairs.
Seeing how weary they were, I had tried to persuade them to go below. But Miles had refused.
“I want to be ready, if they come,” he said. “No use to hide Sue. A cabin door would be no protection—not against the spheres.”
He had borrowed a heavy revolver from Captain McLendon; he wore it buckled in its holster at his hip. The burden of defending the girl rested upon him alone. I had neither weapon nor strength to use it. The others had made it plain that they were seeking no trouble with the astounding spheres.
The three of us were alone upon the deck. McLendon was in the wheelhouse behind us, with one seaman; the rest were below. It was the man at the wheel who first saw the globes.
“Good God, sir;” I heard him gasp in dismay. “They’re coming.”
He was pointing to starboard. Looking in that direction, I saw the swarm of approaching globes. Up from the south they came, over the moon-bathed sea. At first they were very small, a swirling cluster of violet sparks, driving down upon us as if borne upon an unheard wind. They grew into shining spheres.
“The Thousand Faces!” Miles muttered, in my direction.
With a calm intensity of manner, he turned to Su-Ildra and put both his hands upon her shoulders and looked into her dark, pensive eyes with his greenish ones. He murmured something to her, in her own language, and abruptly was spread across his face that familiar, reckless grin, twisted by the old scar. She cried out in a protesting, heart-broken voice, and he drew her lightly toward him, and kissed her. She clung to him.
“Don’t worry, Sue,” he cried in English. “You’re never licked till you think you are!”
Then he left her and ran up the steps to the wheelhouse. The pitch of his voice was low and tense; I did not understand what he said. But I did hear McLendon’s gruff-voiced reply.
“No, Kendon, ‘tis no fight of mine. If ‘twere men, now—but them flying lights! I canna do a thing.”
And again the murmur of Miles’s voice, low, almost pleading.
“I canna do a thing,” McLendon repeated. “ ’Tis the lass, they want, isn’t it? Perhaps ye better let them take her. Such things—no good will come of fighting them.”
Miles snorted then, angrily, and hurried back to me.
“Brandy,” he appealed, “can’t you do something. That old shell-back acts like he considers the globes a flight of destroying angels! Not that they don’t look strange enough, but several of the men have guns—”
I tried to explain the difficulties of my position.
“They are too frightened to do anything,” I said. “In fact, some of them wanted—well, to put you and Sue off in a boat. And I’m just a sick man. McLendon is the master. On the high seas—”
Miles moved his great shoulders with the impatient restlessness of a baffled animal. He started away, and then turned back to speak to me.
“It’s all right, Brandy. I see you can’t do any more. And I appreciate a lot what you have done!”
He strode nervously back to Su-Ildra who stood watching the spheres breathlessly.
l Now they were near, and the violet radiance of them strangely tinted the moonlight. In a little bright cloud above the ship they clustered and slowly descended—scores upon scores of shining, iridescent globes, bright, yard-thick bubbles, half transparent, swarming down upon us. They oppressed me with a sense of the shadowy and brooding power of the alien, unguessed menace of Xandulu behind them.
Above the throb of the engines, I could now hear the sound they made, an insistent, high-pitched vibration. It suggested the humming of innumerable bees, but it was immeasurably keener, more metallic. As they sank lower, their continual mingled voices became an endless, indescribable scream.
In each of the shrieking bubbles was mirrored—the face.
A yellow face, drawn, seamed, incredibly old, it was. Except for the thick, densely black eyebrows, it was hairless. The nose was a beak, yellow and thin; and the thin-lipped mouth was tight and cruel, like a slit in dried yellow leather.
The eyes offered a note of singular contrast to the malevolence incarnate of the face. Soft, liquidly golden, they were limpidly mild and clear. From the twisted yellow mask of the face they twinkled with perpetual gentle inquiry.
The contrast of their mildness but deepened the yellow evil of the face.
Identical in hideous feature and malign expression, the same face stared from every shrieking bubble. I know that they were but optical images, uncanny projections of the senses and the power of the insidious Bak-Toreg, who was still in Xandulu.
From the wheelhouse I heard a shriek and the sound of a scuffle. Then, screaming, chattering with fear, the seaman who had been there with Captain McLendon dashed for the forecastle companionway.
“The faces. . . . the faces. . . . the bloody, staring faces . . . his cries rose out of the ship in a monody of mind-shaken horror.
I myself was weak and sick with fear. I felt a shuddering, mad desire to flee down into the ship and hide myself from the terror of these screaming shining invaders from a world unknown, from the menace of those baleful, yellow faces. But my old devotion to Miles Rendon made me stay upon the deck, even though I was helpless to aid him.
The bright spheres were settling about the radio masts. Beside the white, trembling Su-Ildra, Miles flung up his borrowed revolver at arm’s length. It barked. Following so quickly upon the report that it seemed an echo of it, was a crashing detonation. A flare of blinding purple lit the deck with the momentary vividness of lightning, and the lowest of the shrieking bubbles was gone.
