Collected Short Fiction, page 387
“See, West!” she gasped. “He won’t let us go!”
Looking back, Craig found the dark line of the beach, with the rust-reddened cylinder of the Subterrane lying athwart it. Against the luminous jungle, he could see Maddrey’s palisade. Green wings were spread above it.
A troglodyte was flapping after them.
Trembling, Craig dipped the paddle again.
“No,” he whispered, “Maddrey will never let us go. Because he still wants me to repair the Subterrane. He thinks fear will drive me to do it. But I won’t!”
He wet his lips, gulped.
“Ann—I mustn’t!”
The soaring reptile overtook them. It wheeled low above the canoe. Each green-shining leathery wing was weirdly splotched with a lurid yellow marking, like a yellow eye. They seemed to blink, as the great wings beat. The fanged beak opened, as the creature dived. It hissed viciously.
Ann shuddered.
“No, West,” she whispered, “you mustn’t repair the Subterrane—and let Maddrey lead these things against the world!”
Craig paddled on, beneath the flapping hissing monster, until Subterrane and palisade were tiny with distance, He sounded with cord and stone to find a shoal, and at last dropped the weighted basket over the side.
Fighting a silent battle with his fear of the red depths, he prepared to dive. Stripped off the worn remnant of his shirt. Thrust a copper knife into his belt.
Suddenly Ann flung her arms around him clung to him.
“Don’t, West!” she sobbed. “You may be—killed! Let’s go on—in spite of the monster!”
Craig shook his unkempt head.
“It would follow,” he whispered. “More would come. We could never get away. We must wait, for a better chance.”
He kissed her cold lips, and dived.
The water was like a thick, shining mist of blood. It stung his opened eyes. He searched along the rocky bottom, amid grotesque sharp-spined phosphorescent creatures.
At last he found a giant shell. A huge, age-old oval, it was black itself, but encrusted with tiny luminescent things. He detached it with a quick slash of the copper knife, lifted it into the basket.
Already his lungs were aching. But he found another great shell. Another. And a fourth. Rotten with time, they crumbled under his fingers. In one he thought he felt the smooth round of a pearl.
Four shells filled the basket, and his lungs were throbbing, bursting. He grasped the rope, heaved himself to the surface. The watching troglodyte dived low again, and screamed.
Craig clung panting to the gunwale, getting back his breath. Beneath the oily crimson surface, something touched his feet. He kicked out, and a needle of agony drove into his knee.
Hastily he tumbled into the boat, and hauled up the basket of shell. Ann took the great black mollusks, as he opened them, to probe the decaying flesh for pearls. His eyes lifted anxiously to her white, frightened face.
“None.”
She shook her head, and her dark eyes rested sadly upon Craig. Her fingers tossed the last rotting shellfish back into the crimson sea.
“None,” she repeated.
Craig’s heart constricted with fear.
“I thought—thought I felt one!” he protested anxiously. “Now I must dive again.”
“Wait, Weston!”
HER voice was urgent, tense with dread. Her frightened fingers closed hard on his arm. She pointed at the red water beside the canoe. Craig saw a swirl of crimson foam.
Hideous, hairy yellow limbs were fighting for the mollusks they had thrown back!”
“Let’s go on!” begged the girl. “On across the sea—”
But Craig jerked his head at the wheeling troglodyte.
“We could never get away.”
He kissed Ann’s cold tense lips, and dived again.
Three shells were in the basket, when something touched his shoulder with scarlet flame. He twisted to face his attacker. It was a water spider, larger than himself!
In the stinging scarlet water, its body was a glowing yellow moon. Its huge eyes shone purple. Its limbs were hairy, taloned, frightful.
Craig slashed at it desperately. But the dull copper blade slithered harmlessly from the fearful limb that gripped him. He caught the shank in his hands, wrenched with a frantic strength.
The talon came free from his shoulder. Agony shocked him, and a new blinding red was in his eyes. He caught the rope, heaved desperately. With a maddening slowness, he came upward.
He felt the rush of the thing beneath his feet, and it came to the surface almost as quickly as he. Great hairy yellow arms broke the water, groping for him. The sinister purple eyes shone just beneath the surface.
Frantically, Craig scrambled aboard. Panting with pain and terror and exhaustion, with red water streaming down his arms, he hauled desperately at the basket rope.
But a new furious commotion broke the water to scarlet foam. A terrific jerk tore the rope from his fingers, He fell in the bottom of the canoe.
“Weston!” Ann was sobbing. “Oh, Weston—you’re hurt!”
Then she shrieked. Hideous yellow arms came over the gunwale. A frightful black talon caught her jacket, tore it half off her.
Craig dragged himself back to his knees, seized the paddle. A swift blow broke that fearful limb. He dipped the paddle, pulled the canoe desperately away. The troglodyte dived on shimmering green wings, hissing insidiously.
“Your shoulder!” Ann was sobbing. “West—your shoulder!”
Craig flung away the red drops that ran down his arm.
“Doesn’t matter,” he gasped. “No pearl. Can’t dive again. Not without basket and rope.” His red shoulders Straightened. “So we’ve got to go on in spite of the trog!”
A new eager light shone in his eyes. “Anyhow, we’ll try.”
Ignoring the blood seeping down from his lacerated shoulder, Craig drove the canoe forward again across the shining scarlet sea, toward the black illimitable mysterious arch ahead.
“I’m glad, Weston!” breathed the girl. “Glad—even if we die!”
Above them, the green-winged troglodyte hissed and screamed its menace.
CHAPTER VII
THE RIVER OF TERROR
FEAR rode the canoe. Craig knew in his heart that it was one grim pursuer that he and the girl could never escape. But he dipped the paddle swiftly, fighting weariness and pain. “West!” screamed Ann, from the bow. “Behind you!”
Craig felt the dip and swing of the canoe. Twisting, he saw that the troglodyte had dropped upon the stern. Great black talons gripped the gunwales. Shimmering green wings were still half spread, for balance. The toothed beak was hissing.
Craig half rose in the boat, and brought the paddle over his head with a swinging blow. A green wing lifted, caught it harmlessly. The beak seized the deflected paddle, tore it from his fingers, flung it into the darkly shining water.
Disarmed, Craig trembled.
The huge yellow-red eyes blinked alternately. The creature hitched itself forward. The fanged beak struck and screamed and struck again.
Craig shrank back, chilled with sweat of fear.
“Here!” Ann whispered.
He felt the hilt of the long copper knife in his hand. Surging to his feet on the bottom of the canoe, he lunged. The scaly body was hard beneath the dull blade. The leathery wings folded about him, suffocating with their sickening reek. Black talons raked at him murderously.
The monster swayed with him. They toppled out of the canoe. Craig gasped for breath as they sank in scarlet water. He stabbed, stabbed again and again. Still the wings wrapped him, still fangs and talons slashed.
Abruptly, then, something was ripping at the wings. In the painful, blinding scarlet dimness of the water, he glimpsed hideous yellow limbs. He saw an evil yellow moon, and evil orbs of purple.
The spider had followed.
The troglodyte writhed in agony. The great wings unfolded. Craig drew up his feet, kicked against the scaled body. A hairy yellow limb reached for him, He slashed at it with the copper blade, fought his way upward.
Ann had retrieved the paddle. She drove the canoe toward him. He clambered shakily aboard, and she paddled away from the increasing confusion in the foaming red water. Craig saw the black, mutilated body of the troglodyte flung clear of the surface, dragged back again by fighting yellow limbs—scores of them.
As soon as he could, Craig relieved Ann. With splinters from the canoe’s hard wood, she pinned her torn jacket together again, to cover the curves of her blood-stained breasts.
And they went on across the scarlet sea.
The black roof lifted above them, until it was lost in murky gloom. Now and again they steered away from cragged black walls that rose abruptly from the darkly shining water. However long the cavern might be, Craig supposed, it was never very wide.
Sitting in the bow, Ann kept an apprehensive watch behind. But no greenwinged troglodyte appeared to follow them. Until at last a confused tremendous roaring came to them across the luminous waters, and then a vague new light was visible against the black and lofty vault ahead.
Presently a new wall of jungle was visible, a barrier higher and more ominous than that upon the shore they had left. Far along it, miles in the distance, a bright pillar of scarlet stood up above the red sea.
The roaring came from that pillar, endlessly.
They reached the shore. Overleaning the dark water, weird plants thrust themselves fifty feet upward. The jungle was a flat-topped wall of menace. Blood-red tentacles writhed from immense, bell-shaped violet blooms. Tremendous fungi were choked in masses of twisting creepers.
“We could never cut a way through that!” Craig muttered apprehensively. “Even if there’s nothing to attack—and probably there is!”
CLOUDS of fire drifted above the jungle. Eerie colors shimmered through it—yellow and purple and flaming green. A luminous mist settled toward them. And Ann gasped with pain.
Suddenly they were both slapping furiously at faces and bare arms and the numerous rents in their clothing. For the cloud consisted of minute, luminous insects, whose stings were liquid agony.
Craig drove the canoe back until the torturing swarms diminished. Then they paddled on toward that roaring, enigmatic pillar of red. The low wall of weirdly shining jungle presently became higher. The marshes were broken by lofty cliffs, that shone with blue lichens. Beyond were mysterious, darkly glowing hills.
The roaring had become a crashing, incessant thunder. At last, rounding a dark headland, they saw the crimson fall. Over a sheer precipice, hundreds of feet high, came a long wall of water. A sheet of lambent scarlet, it tumbled into a maelstrom of shining foam.
Craig caught his breath to shout above the din:
“Above the fall—must be a river. We can go up it—toward the Outside! If we can get around the fall!”
He paddled in again, toward the foot of a mossy cliff. They dragged the canoe up upon a narrow scrap of beach, and then climbed inland. The wonder and the terror of this new world awed them to silence.
Far away, beyond a shining purple cloud, the cragged wall of the cave was visible. Ranges of hills rolled down from it, to their feet. Fantastic world! Everything was luminous.
The soil was covered with a softly glowing, yellow-green moss. And stranger plants scattered it. Here and there thick brown stalks towered out of low dense clumps of greenish fronds. Each stalk bore, a hundred feet above, a swollen sphere of elfin blue.
“Blue moons,” Craig whispered. “Growing on stalks!”
He remembered a lecture on animal luminescence. The speaker had described two wonder-chemicals. The protein, luciferine. And the enzyme, luciferase. The first is oxidized, he recalled, in the presence of the second. The chemical products are oxy-luciferase and water. And light is emitted by the most efficient process known to science.
Strange illustration of scientific fact!
Creeping apprehensively, side by side, Craig and Ann came to the summit of the hill. Beyond the forest of moon, winding away like an unimaginable crimson snake, they saw the river.
The river of terror!
Craig shuddered to a cold shock of fear, and drew Ann’s trembling body close to his side. The bend of the river spread vast, almost, as a second scarlet sea. Its flatness was alive with dull red light, scattered with floating masses of decaying fungi and patches of greenish scum.
Above it drifted weird-hued clouds of many-colored fire. The farther shore was faintly visible, a gleaming line of metallic blue and frigid violet, radiant with deadly plants.
Far-off, the river came out of another dark arch of mystery. Craig stared for a long time into it, as if trying to see every peril and heartbreak and disaster that might await them there.
Abruptly he shook himself, as if breaking from an unpleasant trance, and caught his breath.
“We may get through alive,” he whispered. “We must! But there’s such a lot to do. We’ll have to bring the canoe up through the jungle, and over the hill—we’d never make a mile, without it. But first we must have a fire—a smudge to keep away those insects. And food—”
So began another epic of frightful risk and desperate effort and unmeasured agony. They searched for dry wood, to make a fire by friction. Craig pitted the copper knife against poison-dripping yellow fangs, and killed a ten-foot greenish lizard. They dried and smoked its flesh for food, dressed its skin for clothing.
THE dead, heavy air, reeking with the rot of the swamps, was hot and fetid as some unclean monster’s breath. Despite the smudge, the stinging insects made rest impossible. Gigantic black spiders swung down from their webs in the forest of moods, to silent and deadly attack.
Exhaustion became a kind of anodyne for fear. A time came even when the continuity of Craig’s mind was broken. He toiled in a dull gray haze. He knew only that peril pressed on behind, and awaited them ahead.
Behind, the horror of the troglodytes, and the madness Of Maddrey’s venomed whip.
Ahead, unguessed danger, guarding the undiscovered passage—if any passage did exist—to the sanity and the sunlight of the world above.
Sometimes, when he had rested, his mind was very vivid. He saw Ann’s slender dark-eyed loveliness, without her rags and her half-healed scars and the fear that was like a shadow over her. It was as if he had never seen her before.
“I love you, Ann,” he told her. “And I know we’ll find a way!”
Such lucid moments, however, were rare.
Craig lived in a haze of exhaustion.
For he had little rest. He hacked with the dull copper knife at the teeming river jungle. He dragged the canoe over hot mud that quaked with hideous unseen life beneath.
And the world outside seemed remote beyond imagination.
A brief elation mounted in him, when at last they pushed the canoe out upon the river. Ann sat in the bow, tending the smudge that held back the swarming midges that looked and felt like clouds of fire.
The shining, hostile jungle wall fell away behind. And the eldritch forest of moons, beneath which they had fought so long. Silence seemed strange, after the endless thunder of the fall. Darkness pressed upon the red waters ahead, hiding both menace and hope.
“We’re on the river!”
Craig shouted with elation, as he paddled.
“And water runs downhill. If we go up—and keep on going up—we’ve got to come to the top of the ground!”
His answer was a raucous, hissing scream.
Ann looked up, and her face went suddenly white. Craig stopped paddling. Trembling, he stared. Two troglodytes flapped low above them.
Green flame lined the blackness of their wings, and orange spots winked like monstrous evil eyes.
“Maddrey’s beasts!” whispered Ann. “And—see!” Terror choked her. “One of them is going back to tell him where we are!”
Neither of the creatures attacked. But one of them, indeed, with a last vicious hiss, flew back toward the crimson sea. The other still followed—implacable, green-winged nemesis!
CHAPTER VIII
THE BLOOM OF DOOM
CRAIG toiled at the paddle. Time lost its meaning. There were no days, no nights. The darkly shining current; the heavy, enervating heat; the tiny, leaking canoe; the slick-handled paddle; their ragged tortured bodies; the tormenting midges; the monster screaming and wheeling above—such things were the only realities.
They lived with but a thin shell of wood between themselves and death. The choking smudge was never out of their nostrils. The scant food that chance brought them they cooked in the smudge-fire. They slept but seldom, half-sitting, cramped. They never left the canoe and the river.
Another troglodyte came at last to relieve the first, and a third to take the place of that, and another, until Craig no longer counted the changes.
“Why do they do it, West?” Ann once whispered fearfully. “Why do they just haunt us? They’re getting my nerves.” She shuddered. “Almost, I’d rather they attacked!”
Craig’s tired eyes lifted to the flapping monster.
“I can think of just one reason,” he said slowly. “Maddrey must be following, himself!” Despite himself, the tremor of fear came into his dried, husky voice. “He must send them ahead, to watch us and guide him.” Craig looked down at the girl. His gray eyes met her frightened dark ones. Together, they said:
“He won’t take us!”
Time there was none. But the scarlet river changed., It narrowed. The opposing current was swifter. The weird life along the banks became different, although no less hostile.
Ann sometimes paddled, while Craig slept. But she could make little gain against the strengthening current, and more often they anchored in shallow water, near the shore. There she had only to watch, and tend the smudge.
It was on such a time that Craig came awake, cold and tensed from some intuition of horror. He saw that Ann was asleep, over the smudge. Sickened with an icy, paralyzing dread, he saw—
The bloom!
The plant was drifting toward the canoe, as if some slow eddy moved it through the stagnant shallows. Its broad leaves, yards across, lay flat upon the water. Thick green pads, filled with air-cells, they formed a raft that supported the enormous, luminous bloom.
