Collected Short Fiction, page 98
IT occurred to me that she must be afflicted with some form of insanity, which had given her the almost preternatural strength which she had displayed in running with the wolf-pack. Cases of lycanthropy, in which the suffered imagines himself a wolf—or sometimes a tiger or some other animal—and imitates its actions, have been common enough in the annals of the insane. But if this is lycanthropy, I thought, it must indeed be a singular case.
“Yes, I’m Clovis McLaurin,” I said, in a shaken voice. “I got Dad’s telegram three days ago. Tell me what’s wrong—why he worded the message as he did!”
“Nothing is wrong, my friend,” this strange woman said. “We merely desired your assistance with certain experiments, of a great strangeness, which we are undertaking to perform. Your father now waits at the ranch, and I came to conduct you to him.”
This singular speech was almost incredible. I could accept it only on the assumption that the speaker suffered from some dreadful derangement of the mind.
“You came to meet me?” I exclaimed, fighting the horror that almost overwhelmed me. “Stella, you mustn’t be out in the cold without more wraps. You must take my coat.”
I began to strip off the garment. But, as I had somehow expected, she refused to accept it.
“No, I do not need it,” her strange voice told me. “The cold does not harm this body. And you must come with us, now. Your father waits for us at the house, to perform the great experiment.”
She said us! It gave me new horror to notice that she thus classed the huge gaunt wolf with herself.
Then she sprang forward with an incredible agility, leaping through the snow in the direction in which Judson and I had been traveling. With a naked, dead-white arm, she beckoned me to follow. And the great, gray wolf sprang behind me.
Nerved to sudden action, I recalled the half-loaded automatic in my hand. I snapped the fresh clip into position, jerked back the slide mechanism to get a cartridge into the breech, and then emptied the gun into that green-orbed wolf.
A STRANGE composure had come over me. My motions were calm enough, almost deliberate. I know that my hand did not shake. The wolf was standing still, only a few yards away. It is unlikely that I missed him at all, impossible that I missed him with every shot.
I know that I hit him several times, for I heard the bullets drive into his gaunt body, saw the animal jerk beneath their impact, and noticed gray hairs float from it in the moonlight.
But he did not fall. His terrible green eyes never wavered in their sinister stare of infernal evil.
Just as the gun was empty—it had taken me only a few seconds to fire the seven shots—I heard an angry, wolfish snarl from the woman, from the strange monster that Stella Jetton had become. I had half turned when her white body came hurtling at me like a projectile.
I went down beneath her, instinctively raising an arm to guard my throat. It is well that I did, for I felt her teeth sinking into my arm and shoulder, as we fell together into the snow.
I am sure that I screamed with the horror of it.
I fought at her madly, until I heard her strange, non-human voice again.
“You need not be afraid,” it said. “We are not going to kill you. We wish you to aid with a greatly remarkable experiment. For that reason, you must come with us. Your father waits. The wolf is our friend, and will not harm you. And your weapon will not hurt it.”
A curious, half-articulate yelp came from the throat of the great wolf, which had not moved since I shot at it, as if it had understood her words and gave affirmation.
The woman was still upon me, holding me flat in the snow, her bared, bloody teeth above my face, her fingers sunk claw-like into my body with almost preternatural strength. A low, bestial, growling sound came from her throat, and then she spoke again.
“You will now come with us, to the house where your father waits, to perform the experiment?” she demanded in that terrible voice, with its suggestion of the wolf-pack’s weird cry.
“I’ll come,” I agreed, relieved somewhat to discover that the strange pair of beasts did not propose to devour me on the spot.
The woman—I cannot call her Stella, for except in body, she was not Stella!—helped me to my feet. She made no objection when I bent, and picked up the automatic, which Jay in the snow, and slipped it into my coat pocket.
SHE and the gaunt gray wolf, which my bullets had so strangely failed to kill, leaped away together over the moonlit snow. I followed, floundering along as rapidly as I could, my mind filled with confused and terror-numbed conjecture.
There was now no doubt remaining in my mind that the woman thought herself a member of the wolf-pack, no doubt that she actually was a member. A curious sympathy certainly seemed to exist between her and the great gaunt wolf beside her.
It must be some strange form of lunacy, I thought, though I had never read of a lycanthrope whose symptoms were exaggerated to the terrible extent that hers appeared to be. It is well known that maniacs have unnatural strength, but her feats of running and leaping across the snow were almost beyond reason.
But there was that about her which even the theory of insanity did not explain. The corpse-like pallor of her skin; the terrible green luminosity of her eyes; the way she spoke—as if English were an unfamiliar tongue to her, but half mastered. And there was something even more indefinite: a strangeness that smacked of the alien life of forbidden universes!
The pace set for me by the woman and the wolf was mercilessly rapid. Stumble along as best I could, I was unable to move as fast as they wished. Nor was I allowed to fall behind, for when I lagged, the wolf came back, and snarled at me menacingly.
Before I had floundered along many miles, my lungs were aching, and I was half blind with fatigue. I stumbled and sprawled in the soft snow a last time. My tortured muscles refused to respond when I tried to rise. I lay there, ready to endure whatever the wolf might do, rather than undergo the agony of further effort.
But this time the woman came back. I was half unconscious, but I realized vaguely that she was lifting me, raising me to her shoulders. After that, my eyes were closed; I was too weary to watch my surroundings. But I knew dimly, from my sensations of swaying, that I was being carried.
Presently the toxins of exhaustion overcame my best efforts to keep my senses. I fell into the deep sleep of utter fatigue, forgetting that my limbs were growing very cold, and that I was being borne upon the back of a woman endowed with the instincts of a wolf and the strength of a demon; a woman who, when I had last seen her, had been all human and lovable!
CHAPTER IV
A Strange Homecoming
NEVER can I forget the sensations of my awakening. I opened my eyes upon gloom relieved but faintly by dim red light. I lay upon a bed or couch, swathed in blankets. Hands that even to my chilled body seemed ice-cold were chafing my arms and legs. And terrible greenish orbs were swimming above in the terrible crimson darkness, staring down at me, horribly.
Alarmed, recalling what had happened in the moonlight as a vague, hideous nightmare, I collected my scattered senses, and struggled to a sitting position among the blankets.
It is odd, but the first definite thing that came to my confused brain was an impression of the ugly green flowers in monotonous rows across the dingy, brown-stained wall paper. In the red light that filled the room they appeared unpleasantly black, but still they awakened an ancient memory. I knew that I was in the dining room of the old ranch house, where I had come to spend two years with my uncle, Tom McLaurin, many years before.
The weirdly illuminated chamber was sparsely furnished. The couch upon which I lay stood against one wall. Opposite was a long table, with half a dozen chairs pushed under it. Near the end of the room was a large heating stove, with a full scuttle of coal and a box of split pine kindling behind it.
There was no fire in the stove, and the room was very cold. My breath was a white cloud in that frosty atmosphere. The dim crimson light came from a small electric lantern standing on the long table. It had been fitted with a red bulb, probably for use in a photographer’s dark room.
All those impressions I must have gathered almost subconsciously, for my horrified mind was absorbed with the persons in the room.
My father was bending over me, rubbing my hands. And Stella was chafing my feet, which stuck out beneath the blankets.
And my father was changed as weirdly, as dreadfully, as the girl, Stella!
His skin was a cold, bloodless white—white with the pallor of death. His hands, against my own, felt fearfully cold—as cold as those of a frozen corpse. And his eyes, watching me with a strange, terrible alertness, shone with a greenish light.
His eyes were like Stella’s—and like those of the great gray wolf. They were agleam with the fire of cosmic evil, with the light of an alien, hellish intelligence!
AND the woman—the dread thing that had been lovely Stella—was unchanged. Her skin was still fearfully pallid, and her eyes strange and luminously green. The stain was still on her pale face, appearing black in the somber crimson light.
There was no fire in the stove. But, despite the bitter cold of the room, the woman was still clad as she had been before, in a sheer slip of white silk, half torn from her white body. My father—or that which had once been my father—wore only a light cotton shirt, with the sleeves torn off, and a pair of ragged trousers. His feet and arms were bare.
Another fearful thing I noticed. My breath, as I said, condensed in white clouds of frozen crystals, in the frigid air. But no white mists came from Stella’s nostrils, or from my father’s.
From outside, I could hear the dismal, uncanny keening of the running pack. And from time to time the two looked uneasily toward the door, as if anxious to go to join them.
I had been sitting up, staring confusedly and incredulously about, before my father spoke.
“We are glad to see you, Clovis,” he said, rather stiffly, and without emotion, not at all in his usual jovial, affectionate manner. “You seem to be cold. But you will presently be normal again. We have surprising need of you, in the performance of an experiment, which we cannot accomplish without your assistance.”
He spoke slowly, uncertainly, as a foreigner might who has attempted to learn English from a dictionary. I was at a loss to understand it, even if I assumed that he and Stella both suffered from a mental derangement.
And his voice was somehow whining; it carried a note weirdly suggestive of the howling of the pack.
“You will help us?” Stella demanded in the same dreadful tones.
“Explain it! Please explain everything!” I burst out. “Or I’ll go crazy! Why were you running with the wolves? Why are your eyes so bright and green, your skins so deathly white? Why are you both so cold? Why the red light? Why don’t you have a fire?”
I babbled my questions, while they stood there in the strange room, and silently stared at me with their horrible eyes.
FOR minutes, perhaps, they were silent. Then an expression of crafty intelligence came into my father’s eyes, and he spoke again in those fearful tones, with their ring of the baying pack.
“Clovis,” he said, “you know we came here for purposes of studying science. And a great discovery has been ours to make; a huge discovery relating to the means of life. Our bodies, they are changed, as you appear to see. Better machines they have become; stronger they are. Cold harms them not, as it does yours. Even our sight is better, so bright lights we no longer need.
“But we are yet lacking of perfect success. Our minds were changed, so that we do not remember all that once it had been ours to accomplish. And it is you whom we desire to be our assistant in replacing a machine of ours, that has been broken. It is you that we wish to aid us, so that to all humanity we may bring the gift of the new life, that is ever strong, and knows not death. All people we would change with the new science that it has been ours to discover.”
“You mean you want to make the human race into monsters like yourselves?” I cried.
My father snarled ferociously, like a beast of prey.
“All men will receive the gift of life like ours,” his strange voice said. “Death will be no more. And your aid is required by us—and it we will have!” There was intense, malefic menace in his tones. “It is yours to be our aid. You will refuse not!”
He stood before me with bared teeth and with white fingers hooked like talons.
“Sure, I’ll help you,” I contrived to utter, in a shaken voice. “I’m. not a very brilliant experimenter, however.” It appeared that to refuse would be a means of committing very unpleasant suicide.
TRIUMPHANT cunning shone in those menacing green eyes, the evil cunning of the maniac who has just perpetrated a clever trick. But it was even more than that; it was the crafty look of supreme evil in contemplation of further victory.
“You can come now, in order to see the machine?” Stella demanded.
“No,” I said hastily, and sought reasons for delay. “I am cold. I must light a fire and warm myself. Then I am hungry, and very tired. I must eat and sleep.” All of which was very true. My body had been chilled through, during my hours on the snow. My limbs were trembling with cold.
The two looked at each other. Unearthly sounds passed between them, incoherent, animal whinings. Such, instead of words, seemed to be their natural speech; the English they spoke seemed only an inaccurately and recently learned tongue.
“True,” my father said to me again, in a moment. He looked at the stove. “Start a fire if you must. What you need is there?” He pointed inquiringly toward coal and kindling, as if fire were something new and unfamiliar to him.
“We must go without,” he added.
“Light of fire is hurtful to us, as cold is to you. And in other room, called—” he hesitated perceptibly, “kitchen, will be food. There we will wait.”
He and the white girl glided silently from the room.
Shivering with cold, I hurried to the stove. All the coals in it were dead; there had been no fire in it for many hours, none, perhaps, for several days. I shook down the ashes, lit a ball of crumpled newspaper with a match I found in my pocket, dropped it on the grate, and filled the stove with pine and coal. In a few minutes I had a roaring fire, before which I crouched gratefully.
IN a few minutes the door was opened slowly. Stella, first peering carefully, apparently to see if these was light in the room, stepped cautiously inside. The stove was tightly closed, no light escaped from it.
The pallid, green-eyed woman had her arms full of food, a curious assortment that had evidently been collected in the kitchen in a haphazard manner. There were two loaves of bread, a slab of raw bacon, an unopened can of coffee, a large sack of salt, a carton of oatmeal, a can of baking powder, a dozen tins of canned foods, and even a bottle of stove polish.
“You eat this?” she inquired, in her strangely animal voice, dropping the articles on the table.
It was almost ludicrous; and too, it was somehow terrible. She seemed to have no conception of human alimentary needs.
Comfortably warm again, and feeling very hungry, I went over to the table, and examined the odd assortment. I selected a loaf of bread, a tin of salmon, and one of apricots, for my immediate use.
“Some of these things are to be eaten as they are,” I ventured, wondering what her response would be. “And some of them have to be cooked.”
“Cooked?” she demanded quickly. “What is that?”
Then, while I was silent, dazed with astonishment, she added a terrible question.
“Does it convey that they must be hot and bleeding from the animal?”
“No!” I cried. “No. To cook a food one heats it. Usually adding seasonings, such as salt. A rather complicated process, requiring considerable skill.”
“I see,” she said. “And you must consume such articles, to keep your body whole?”
I admitted that I did, and then remarked that I needed a can cutter, to get at the food in the tins. First inquiring about the appearance of the implement, she hurried to the kitchen, and soon returned with one.
Presently my father came back into the room. Both of them watched me with their strange green eyes as I ate. My appetite failed somewhat, but I drew the meal out as long as possible, in order to defer whatever they might intend for me after I had finished.
BOTH of them asked many questions. Questions similar to Stella’s query about cooking, touching subjects with which an ordinary child is familiar. But they were not stupid questions—no, indeed! Both of them evinced a cleverness that was almost preternatural. They never forgot, and I was astounded at their skill in piecing together the facts I gave them, to form others.
Their green eyes watched me very curiously when, unable to drag out the pretense of eating any longer, I produced a cigarette and sought a match to light it. Both of them howled, as if in agony, when the feeble yellow flame of the match flared up. They covered their strange green eyes, and leaped back, cowering and trembling.
“Kill it!” my father snarled ferociously.
I flicked out the tiny flame, startled at its results.
They uncovered their terrible green eyes, blinking. It was several minutes before they seemed completely recovered from their amazing fear of the light.
“Make light no more when we are near,” my father growled at me. “We will tear your body if you forget!” His teeth were bared; his lips curled like those of a wolf; he snarled at me frightfully.
Stella ran to an east window, raised the blind, peered nervously out. I saw that the dawn was coming. She whined strangely at my father. He seemed uneasy, like an animal at bay. His huge green eyes rolled from side to side. He turned anxiously to me.
“Come,” he said. “The machine which we with your aid will repair is in the cellar beneath the house. The day comes. We must go.”
“I can’t go,” I said. “I’m dog tired; been up all night. I’ve got to rest, before I work on any machine. I’m so sleepy I can’t think.”
