Collected Short Fiction, page 99
He whined curiously at Stella again, as if he were speaking in some strange wolf-tongue. She replied in kind, then spoke to me.
“If rest is needful to the working of your body, you may sleep till the light is gone. Follow.”
SHE opened the door at the end of the room, led me into a dark hall, and from it into a small bedroom. It contained a narrow bed, two chairs, a dresser, and wardrobe trunk.
“Try not to go,” she snarled warningly, at the door, “or we will follow you over the snow!”
The door closed and I was alone. A key grated ominously in the lock. The little room was cold and dark. I scrambled hastily into the bed, and for a time I lay there, listening.
The dreadful howling of the wolf-pack, which had never stilled through all the night, seemed to be growing louder, drawing nearer. Presently it ceased, with a few sharp, whining yelps, apparently just outside the window’. The pack had come here, with the dawn!
As the increasing light of day filled the little room, I raised myself in the bed to scrutinize its contents again. It was a neat chamber, freshly papered. The dresser was covered with a gay silk scarf, and on it, in orderly array, were articles of the feminine toilet. A few dresses, a vivid beret, and a bright sweater were hanging under a curtain in the corner of the room. On the wall was a picture—of myself!
It came to me that this must be Stella’s room, into which I had been locked to sleep until night had come again. But what weird and horrible thing had happened to the girl since I had seen her last?
Presently I examined the windows with a view to escape. There were two of them, facing the east. Heavy wooden bars had been fastened across them, on the outside, so close together that I could not hope to squeeze between them. And a survey of the room revealed no object with which they could be easily sawed.
But I was too sleepy and exhausted to attempt escape. At thought of the ten weary miles to Hebron, through the thick, soft snow, I abandoned the idea. I knew that, tired as I already was, I could never cover the distance in the short winter day. And I shuddered at the thought of being caught on the snow by the pack.
I lay down again in Stella’s clean bed, about which a slight fragrance of perfume still lingered, and was soon asleep. My slumber, though deep, was troubled. But no nightmare could be as hideous as the reality from which I had found a few hours’ escape.
CHAPTER V
The Machine in the Cellar
I SLEPT through most of the short winter day. When I woke it was sunset. Gray light fell athwart the illimitable flat desert of snow outside my barred windows, and the pale disk of the moon, near the full, was rising in the darkening eastern sky. No human habitation was in view, in all the stretching miles of that white waste. I felt a sharp sense of utter loneliness.
I could look for no outside aid in coping with the strange and alarming situation into which I had stumbled. If I were to escape from these dread monsters who wore the bodies of those dearest to me, it must be by my own efforts. And in my hands alone rested the task of finding from what evil malady they suffered, and how to restore them to their old, dear selves.
Once more I examined the stout wooden bars across the windows. They seemed strongly nailed to the wall on either side. I found no tool that looked adequate to cutting them. My matches were still in my pocket, however, and it occurred to me that I might burn the bars. But there was no time for such an undertaking before the darkness would bring back my captors, nor did I relish the thought of attempting to escape with the pack on my trail.
I was hungry again, and quite thirsty also.
Darkness fell, as I lay there on the bed, among the intimate belongings of a lovely girl for whom I had owned tender feelings—waiting for her to come with the night, amid her terrible allies, to drag me to I knew not what dread fate The gray light of day faded imperceptibly into pale silvery moonlight.
Abruptly, without warning, the key turned in the lock.
STELLA—or the alien entity that ruled the girl’s fair body—glided with sinister grace into the room. Her green eyes were shining, and her skin was ghastly white.
“Immediately you will follow,” came her wolfish voice. “The machine below awaits the aid for you to give in the great experiment. Quickly come. Your weak body, it is rested?”
“All right,” I said. “I’ve slept, of course. But now I’m hungry and thirsty again. I’ve got to have water and something to eat before I tinker with any machine.”
I was determined to postpone whatever ordeal lay before me as long as possible.
“Your body you may satisfy again,” the woman said. “But take not too long!” she snarled warningly.
I followed her back to the dining room.
“Get water,” she said, and glided out the door.
The stove was still faintly warm. I opened it, stirred the coals, dropped in more fuel. Soon the fire was roaring again. I turned my attention to the food I had left. The remainder of the salmon and apricots had frozen on the plates, and I set them over the stove to warm.
Soon Stella was back with a water bucket containing a bulging mass of ice. Apparently surprised that I could not consume water in a solid form, she allowed me to set it on the stove to thaw.
While I waited, standing by the stove, she asked innumerable questions, many of them so simple they would have been laughable under less strange conditions, some of them concerning the latest and most recondite of scientific theories, her mastery of which seemed to exceed my own.
My father appeared suddenly, his corpse-white arms full of books. He spread them on the table, curtly bid me come look with him. He had Einstein’s “The Meaning of Relativity,” Weyl’s “Gravitation und Elektricitat,” and two of his own privately printed works. The latter were “Space-Time Tensors” and the volume of mathematical speculation entitled “Interlocking Universes” whose bizarre implications created such a sensation among those savants to whom he sent copies.
MY father began opening these books, and bombarding me with questions about them, questions which I was often unable to answer. But the greater part of his queries related merely to grammar, or the meaning of words. The involved thought seemed easy for him to understand; it was the language which caused him difficulty.
His questions were exactly such as might be asked by a super-intellectual being from Mars, if he were attempting to read a scientific library without having completely mastered the language in which its books were written.
And his own books seemed as unfamiliar to him as those of the other scientists. But he ran through the pages with amazing speed, pausing only to ask an occasional question, and appeared to gain a complete mastery of the volume as he went.
When he released me, the food and water were warm. I drank, and then ate bread and salmon and apricots, as deliberately as I dared. I invited the two to share the food with me, but they declined abruptly.
The volley of questions continued.
Then suddenly, evidently concluding that I had eaten enough, they started toward the door, commanding me to follow. I dared not do otherwise. My father paused at the end of the table and picked up the electric lantern, whose dimly glowing red bulb supplied the only light in the room.
Again we traversed the dark hall, and went out through a door in the rear of the frame building. As we stepped out upon the moonlit snow, I shuddered to hear once more the distant, wailing ululation of the pack, still with that terrible note which suggested strained human vocal organs.
A few feet from us was the door of a cellar. The basement had evidently been considerably enlarged, quite recently, for huge mounds of earth lay about us, filling the back yard. Some of them were covered with snow, some of them black and bare.
THE two led the day down the steps into the cellar, my father still carrying the electric lantern, which faintly illuminated the midnight space with its feeble, crimson glow.
The cellar was large, neatly plastered. It had not been itself enlarged, but a dark passage sloped down beside the door, to deeper excavations.
In the center of the floor stood the wreck of an intricate and unfamiliar mechanism. It had evidently been deliberately smashed—I saw an ax lying beside it, which must have been the means of the havoc. The concrete floor was littered with the broken glass of shattered electron tubes. The machine itself was a mass of tangled wires and twisted coils and bent magnets, oddly arranged outside a great copper ring, perhaps four feet in diameter.
The huge copper ring was mounted on its edge, in a metal frame. Before it was a stone step, placed as if to be used by one climbing through the ring. But, I saw, it had been impossible for one actually to climb through, for on the opposite side was a mass of twisted apparatus—a great parabolic mirror of polished metal, with what appeared to be a broken cathode tube screwed into its center.
A most puzzling machine. And it had been very thoroughly wrecked. Save for the huge copper ring, and the heavy stone step before it, there was hardly a part that was not twisted or shattered.
In the end of the cellar was a small motor-generator—a little gasoline engine connected to a dynamo—such as is sometimes used for supplying isolated homes with electric light and power. I saw that it had not been injured.
From a bench beside the wall, my father picked up a brief case, from which he took a roll of blue prints, and a sheaf of papers bound in a manila cover. He spread them on the bench and set the red lantern beside them.
“This machine, as you see, has been, most unfortunately for us, wrecked,” he said. “These papers tell the method of construction to be followed in the erection of such machines. Your aid we must have in deciphering what they convey. And the new machine will bring such great, strong life as we have to all your world.”
“You say your world!” I cried. “Then you don’t belong to this earth? You are a monster, who has stolen the body of my father!”
BOTH of them snarled like beasts. They bared their teeth and glowered at me with their terrible green eyes. Then a crafty look came again into the man’s sinister orbs.
“No, my son,” came his whining, animal tones. “A new secret of life have we discovered. Great strength it gives to our bodies. Death we fear no longer. But our minds are changed. Many things we do not remember. We must require your aid in reading this which we once wrote—”
“That’s the bunk!” I exclaimed, perhaps not very wisely. “I don’t believe it. And I’ll be damned if I’ll help repair the infernal machine, to make more human beings into monsters like you!”
Together they sprang toward me. Their eyes glowed dreadfully against their pallid skins. Their fingers were hooked like claws. Saliva drooled from their snarling lips, and naked teeth gleamed in the dim crimson radiance.
“Aid us you will!” cried my father. “Or your body will we most painfully destroy. We will eat it slowly, while you live!”
The horror of it broke down my reason. With a wild, terror-shaken scream, I dashed for the door.
It was hopeless, of course, for me to attempt escape from beings possessing such preternatural strength.
With startling, soul-blasting howls, they sprang after me together. They swept me to the cellar’s floor, sinking their teeth savagely into my arms and body. For a few moments I struggled desperately, writhing and kicking, guarding my throat with one arm and striking blindly with the other.
Then they held me helpless. I could only curse, and scream a vain appeal for aid.
The woman, holding my arms pinioned against my sides, lifted me easily, flung me over her shoulder. Her body, where it touched mine, was as cold as ice. I struggled fiercely but uselessly as she started with me down the black, inclined passage, into the recent excavations beneath the cellar’s floor.
Behind us, my father picked up the little red lantern, and the blue prints and sheets of specifications, and followed down the dark, slanting passage.
CHAPTER VI
The Temple of Crimson Gloom
HELPLESS in those preternaturally strong, corpse-cold and corpse-white arms, I was carried down narrow steps, to a high, subterranean hall. It was filled with a dim blood-red light, which came from no visible source, its angry, forbidding radiance seeming to spring from the. very air. The walls of the underground hall were smooth and black, of some unfamiliar ebon substance.
Several yards down that black, strangely illuminated passage I was carried. Then we came into a larger space. Its black roof, many yards above, was groined and vaulted, supported by a double row of massive dead-black pillars. Many dark, arched niches were cut into its walls. This greater hall, too, was sullenly illuminated by a ghastly scarlet light, which seemed to come from nowhere.
A strange, silent, awful place. A sort of cathedral of darkness, of evil and death. A sinister atmosphere of nameless terror seemed breathed from its very midnight walls, like the stifling fumes of incense offered to some formless god of horror. The dusky red light might have come from unseen tapers burned in forbidden rites of blood and death. The dead silence itself seemed a tangible, evil thing, creeping upon me from ebon walls.
I was given little time to speculate upon the questions that it raised. What was the dead-black material of the walls? Whence came the lurid, bloody radiance? How recently had this strange temple of terror been made? And to what demoniac god was it consecrated? No opportunity had I to seek answers to those questions, nor time even to recover from my natural astonishment at finding such a place beneath the soil of a Texas ranch.
THE emerald-eyed woman who bore me dropped me to the black floor, against the side of a jet pillar, which was round and two feet thick. She whined shrilly, like a hungry dog. It was evidently a call, for two men appeared in the broad central aisle of the temple, which I faced.
Two men—or, rather, malevolent monstrosities in the bodies of men. Their eyes shone with green fires alien to our world, and their bodies, beneath their tattered rags of clothing, were fearfully white. One of them came toward me with a piece of frayed manila rope, which must have been a lasso they had found above.
Later it came to me that these two must be the mechanics from the city of Amarillo, who, Judson had told me on the evening of our fatal drive, had been employed here by my father. I had not yet seen Dr. Blake Jetton, Stella’s father, who had been the chief assistant of my own parent in various scientific investigations—investigations which, I now began to fear, must have borne dreadful fruit!
While the woman held me against the black pillar, the men seized my arms, stretched them behind it, and tied them with the rope. I kicked out, struggled, cursed them, in vain. My body seemed but putty to their fearful strength. When my hands were tied behind the pillar, another length of the rope was dropped about my ankles and drawn tight about the ebon shaft.
I was helpless in this weird, subterranean temple, at the mercy of these four creatures who seemed to combine infernal super-intelligence with the strength and the nature of wolves.
“See the instrument which we are to build!” came the snarling voice of my father. Standing before me, with the roll of blue prints in his livid hands, he pointed at an object that I had not yet distinguished in the sullen, bloody gloom.
IN the center of the lofty, central hall of this red-lit temple, between the twin rows of looming, dead-black pillars, was a long, low platform of ebon stone. From it. rose a metal frame—wrought like the frame of the wrecked machine I had seen in the cellar, above.
The frame supported a huge copper ring in a vertical position. It was far huger than the ring in the ruined mechanism; its diameter was a dozen feet or more. Its upper curve reached far toward the black, vaulted roof of the hall, glistening queerly in the ghastly red light. Behind the ring, a huge, parabolic mirror of silvery, polished metal had been set up.
But the device was obviously unfinished.
The complex electron tubes, the delicate helixes and coils, the magnets, and the complicated array of wires, whose smashed and tangled remains I had observed about the wreck of the other machine, had not been installed.
“Look at that!” cried my father again. “The instrument that comes to let upon your earth the great life that is ours. The plan on this paper, we made. From the plan, we made the small machine, and brought to ourselves the life, the strength, the love of blood—”
“The love of blood!” My startled, anguished outcry must have been a shriek, for I was already nearly overcome with the brooding terror of my strange surroundings. I collapsed against the ropes, shaken and trembling with fear.
The light of strange cunning came once more into the glaring green eyes of the thing that had been my father.
“No, fear not!” he whined on. “Your language it is new to me, and I speak what I do not intend. Be not fearing—if you will do our wish. If you do not, then we will taste your blood.
“But the new life came only to few. Then the machine broke, because of one man. And our brains are changed, so that we remember not to read the plans that we made. Your aid is ours, to restore a new machine. To you and all your world, then, comes the great new life!”
HE stepped close to me, his green eyes burning malevolently. Before my eyes he unrolled one of the sheets which bore plans and specifications for the strange electron tubes, to be mounted outside the copper ring. From his lips came the curious, wolfish whine with which these monsters communicated with one another. One of the weirdly transformed mechanics stepped up beside him, carrying in dead-white hands the parts of such a tube—filaments, plate, grid, screens, auxiliary electrodes, and the glass tube in which they were to be sealed. The parts evidently had been made to fit the specifications—as nearly as these entities could comprehend those specifications with their imperfect knowledge of English.
“We make fit plans for these parts,” my father whined. “If wrong, you must say where wrong. Describe how to put together. Speak quick, or die slowly!” He snarled menacingly.
