Collected Short Fiction, page 59
Ariel’s overwrought senses felt other things in the room. She could not see them, but they crowded around. They pressed in close, a tripod, in front of the altar, was a copper dish. In it, charcoal burned fitfully. Solomon stood behind the altar. He was dressed in a long white tunic.
The men ripped off Ariel’s clothes. They placed her face up on the altar.
Casey! she moaned. Her voice was terror.
The room was silent, except for the thunder that came at intervals like a roll of giant drums. Solomon began to speak in a low voice. Ariel could not make out the words at first and then his voice grew louder.
“. . . gathered here in the required numbers, we summon Thee, Prince, Ruler of Darkness, Lord of Evil. Your worshippers summon Thee to receive our sacrifice. We summon Thee by our allegiance. We summon Thee by the great Names of the God of gods and Lord of lords. ADONAY, TETRAGRAMMATON, JEHOVA, TETRAGRAMMATON, ADONAY, JEHOVA, OTHEOS, ATHANATOS, ISCHYROS, AGLA, PENTAGRAMMATON, SADAY, SADAY, SADAY, JEHOVA, OTHEOS, ATHANATOS, a Liciat TETRAGRAMMATON, ADONAY, ISCHYROS, ANTHANATOS, SADY, SADY, SADY, CADOS, CADOS, CADOS, ELOY, AGLA, AGLA, ADONAY, ADONAY . . .”
Casey! He’s got a sword! And there’s something coming. I can feel it. It’s getting closer!
Her silent screams echoed and re-echoed through my mind. I made one last convulsive effort that broke my unseen bonds like rotten ropes and sent me hurtling to the door. I tore it open.
Far across the room, was the altar, with Ariel’s white body outlined against its blackness. Behind her, was Solomon, white-robed, his face lit redly by the fire in front of the altar. But the face glowed from within, with a darker light. Behind him, cast like a shadow against the wall, was a towering shape of darkness that appeared to draw in upon him as I watched. His hands lifted the sword high . . .
“Stop!”
The shout froze the room into a fantastic tableau. But it hadn’t been my shout.
Someone else was moving in the room. Someone came close to the altar, into the flickering light. It was Catherine La Voisin, her hair gleaming brighter than the fire. And then it was no longer the red-haired witch. Uriel stood where she had been. Small, old, shabby, he defied the room.
“Begone, shadows!” he said, pointing one long finger toward Solomon and the altar. A spear of light shot out from his finger. “Flee, shadows—as you must always flee before the light!” His body seemed to glow in the darkness. “Twisted projections of a twisted mind, vanish into the nothingness whence you came!”
He rattled off a series of equations, filled with functions and derivatives, faster than I could follow. I felt a fresh clean wind blow through the room, sweeping cobwebs away before it. Ariel stirred.
The shadow behind Solomon had shrunk when Uriel’s finger of light struck it. Now it dwindled farther. It crouched behind Solomon.
“Go!” Uriel commanded sternly.
Solomon woke from a daze. “Night conquers the day,” he thundered. “Darkness conquers the light. Power makes all men bow before it. Bow, then!”
THE sword over Ariel trembled in Solomon’s hand, as he fought to bring it down. His Satanic face and whiter robe towered over Uriel’s white-haired shabby insignificance. They battled for the sword, the two of them, straining against invisible forces.
Slowly the sword started down. “Senator!” I shouted.
Solomon looked up. He peered across the room at me, his face contorted and beaded with sweat.
“This time the gun will not fail, Senator!” I yelled. “The bullets are silver, and your name is written on them!”
I pulled the trigger of the gun that had rested in my hand for over twelve hours. My hand recoiled again and again. I saw his robe twitch. He staggered. The sword dropped in his hands. And then it lifted again.
The hammer clicked emptily. “Lights!” Uriel shouted. “Let the light chase away the darkness!” Blindingly, the lights came on. The young man who had been the doorkeeper of the Crystal Room was blinking dazedly beside the switch. The others in the room seemed just as dazed.
Uriel’s finger was outstretched toward Solomon, his lips moving rapidly. Energy flashed throught the room, brilliantly, electrically. Thunder crashed.
The lightning seemed to pour down the blade of the uplifted sword. The sword fell. There were no hands to hold it. The white robe crumpled emptily to the floor. There was no one inside them.
Solomon was gone . . .
I heard the door open and the sound of running feet, but I didn’t look to see what was happening. I was racing toward the altar. I gathered Ariel into my arms and kissed her and held her tight. She was crying shakily, but, in a moment, her arms went around me. She stopped shaking.
“Casey!” she said softly. “I knew you would save me.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Uriel.”
I half-turned. Uriel was standing beside us, smiling mildly, looking pleased. Otherwise the room was empty. The others had fled.
“It was mainly trickery,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “To confuse Solomon.” He opened his hand. There was a pencil flashlight in it. “That was the beam of light. I used a phosphorescent dye on the clothes and, by hypnosis, induced the young man by the light switch to smuggle in an ultraviolet projector. The most difficult job was immobilizing La Voisin.” He shuddered. “A violent woman.”
“What about Solomon?” Ariel asked, shivering, as she turned to the crumpled white robe.
“Oh, he’s gone,” Uriel said cheerfully. “Where, I haven’t the slightest idea. But he won’t be back. I hated to do it, but he insisted on forcing his warped ideas onto formless energy. Now that he’s gone, his simulacrum in Washington will die in a few days. A very neat ending for public consumption, although something of a puzzle to the doctors, I’m afraid.” He looked at me approvingly. “Those bullets were very helpful. They distracted him at a crucial moment.”
“They didn’t seem to do much damage,” I said puzzedly. “Of course, they weren’t silver, and they didn’t have his name on them.”
“Wouldn’t have helped if they had,” Uriel said. “In those clothes, I think you’ll find what was called in my day a bulletproof vest. He always liked to play both sides.”
“You gave us a scare, though,” Ariel said. “We thought you were captured.”
I TURNED quickly and raced to the bedroom door. “My God, yes!” Uriel was still standing there in the darkness. I looked back and forth between the two. “But what . . .?”
“Solomon wasn’t the only one who could manufacture simulacra.
I let him take this one, and he didn’t even wonder why it was so easy. He had a bad habit of underestimating his opposition. But I’d better get rid of this.”
He muttered something under his breath. The image disappeared.
I sighed. “Now we can forget the whole thing.”
“Forget!” Uriel exclaimed. “Dear me, no! The Art is still valid. It must be given to the world.”
“But—but,” I spluttered, “that would be like telling them how to make atom bombs in their basements!”
“Knowledge can never be suppressed, young man,” Uriel said sternly. “Common understanding is the finest safeguard. Of course, there are some finishing touches that are necessary. Oh, dear me, yes. I must be going. There is so much to be done.”
He nodded happily at us and trotted out of the room.
I turned to Ariel in bewilderment. She had slipped back into her torn clothing. She fumbled behind her back, looking at me over her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Casey,” she said.
“He’ll be putting finishing touches on his theory for years. Fasten this, will you?”
I fastened it, and it seemed very commonplace and marital, but it sent shivers running up and down my arms, and this time it wasn’t terror.
“I wonder what my life will be like,” I said, bending down to kiss the soft hollow between her throat and her shoulder, “when I’m married to a witch.”
She took a deep breath and leaned her head against mine. “It’s a good thing you said that. Because you haven’t any choice. From now on you’re going to be a faithful, submissive husband.”
“Why?” I asked uneasily. “Because,” she said, twisting around to press herself against me, “I know your real name.”
I sighed and resigned myself to my fate. After all, every man marries a witch, whether he knows it or not.
And one kind of witchcraft is pretty much like another.
A Monster named Smith
It was alien, indestructible and mysterious—therefore a terror and a menace. It was also alone, hungry and afraid—therefore prone to miscalculation.
PANIC! Isolation! Terror!
Blind, mindless, insensate. Odorless, dumb, deaf. Fear.
Pressure from within, instinctive and powerful. Around it, a constriction. Cause unknown. Conflict. Pain.
One sense remains. Listen! Send out feelers through the darkness! Somewhere there must be something else alive. Somewhere there is a reason for fear. Listen!
“The board shows a gap on Harrison. If open, detail a company to close it up. General orders to all searching parties: every building will be thoroughly searched inside and out, top to bottom. Search everything, in, under, above. Parties will not proceed until certain that every building is clear, every eave and rooftop is clean.”
“Is that right, Mr. Gardner?”
“Don’t ask me,” Gardner snapped. “Mr. Burke is in charge here.” He turned to Burke. “As city manager, I can’t permit the city to be shut down indefinitely on mere suspicion. Besides the personal distress and inconvenience, this shutdown is costing the city millions of dollars an hour . . .”
“Would you rather be a zombi—you and all the other millions of people in the city?”
“You have a wild imagination. You don’t know that the thing can take over a man. You aren’t even sure that it escaped. And if something did escape, you can’t be sure it’s still alive. There was no reason for the declaration of martial law?”
“I’ll give you a reason,” Burke explained quietly. “The animal is dead. Cold, stony. No doubt about it. The deceleration killed it. With extraterrestrial fauna, we have to work fast. We can’t be sure how soon decomposition will set in or how the internal organs will be affected. The body is in the examination room, on the dissecting table, within minutes after landing. But before we can make an incision, something starts oozing out from under it. A black blob . . .?”
“Good God! What’s that?” Daniels was more startled than afraid. He was staring at the sheep-like animal on the dissecting table. The scalpel was poised in his hand.
Burke was afraid. He had been afraid for a long time. “Parasite,” he said. He spat it out viciously, as if that would deny his fear.
The inky blob continual to ooze.
Ellis, who had insisted, like Burke, on being present as an observer, was calm and analytical as usual. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Could be a symbiosis.”
“Symbiosis is a careful balance,” Burke said violently. “For us it’s a parasite. Dangerous. What I was afraid of all along.”
“Okay, okay,” Daniels put in quickly. “The question is, what do we do with it?”
“Kill it!”
“How?”
“Not so fast,” Ellis said. “We can’t be sure it’s dangerous. This opportunity might be unique.”
“It took over this thing,” Burke pointed out. “It’s an animal, like us. We can’t take the chance that it could adapt itself to man.”
The blob oozed. It was bigger than a hand, now.
“It has to have a means of propagation,” Burke said, suppressing a shudder. “It’s amorphous, like an amoeba. Binary fission is indicated. If so, then no one on Earth is safe. We shouldn’t have brought it back.”
The blob oozed. It was the size of a dinner plate. It had begun to thin out near the body.
Ellis sighed. “Kill it?”
Daniels sliced down with the scalpel in his hand. It passed effortlessly through the blob, as if through a shadow, and skidded along the stainless steel top of the table. The blob, uncut, continued to pull itself free of the animal.
It was like a pool of ink. There was no smell to it and maybe no feel either, but no one offered to touch it. It was just black. Innocent, maybe, but black and alien and therefore evil.
Daniels was shaken. Without reason.
“Obviously it can’t be cut or shot or hurt by any such weapon,” Burke said impatiently.
“Well, do something,” Daniels stammered. “Don’t just stand there talking about it. It’s pulling itself free. It’ll be coming after one of us in a minute?”
Ellis glanced around the room. “The door’s closed. Nobody leaves here?”
“What good will that do,” Daniels objected strenuously, “if it can interpenetrate matter?”
“Flesh and steel are two different substances. It hasn’t entered the table.”
“You mean we’re stuck here with that thing until it gets us or we can find a way to kill it?” Daniels shouted.
Ellis nodded impatiently. “Obviously.” He studied the room again. “Somewhere within these walls we have to find a weapon or a poison.”
By now Burke had collected a litter of bottles from the reagent cabinet. He tried them on the blob. Acids and bases, one by one they poured into the blackness and fumed together and dripped onto the Floor to eat holes in the rubberized covering. The body of the animal began to dissolve in the growing puddle on the table. The stench of the chemicals and their reactions was almost stifling. Nobody seemed to notice.
The blob pulled and thinned and grew larger and remained unaltered by the chemicals. Burke looked around hastily. He grabbed up a burner, turned it on, lit it. It burned blue and hot.
He held it upside down, pointed toward the black pool. The blob squirmed. Burke pressed the burner close. The blob moved quickly, moved away from the flame, and as it moved the last strand of blackness pulled loose from the dissolving, alien body.
“Quick!” Daniels said hysterically. “Before it gets away! It’s afraid of the fire!”
Burke hadn’t waited. He held the flame as close to the blob as he would get it. “We need a blowtorch,” he said.
The blob squirmed. It flowed away from the flame, across the table, and the flame looked as if it turned back from the blackness. But it wasn’t that. There just wasn’t enough gas pressure. The flame curled up naturally.
The darkness wavered, its edges curling. It wriggled and began to flap, first one side and then the other, alternating. Slowly, awkwardly, it began to fly. It climbed into the air and circled around the room silently, a blot of darkness.
“Close the ventilators!” Ellis said quickly.
Burke raced to the side of the room and pulled the switch that slipped steel shutters across the gratings.
“Oh God, oh God!” Daniels was saying. He cringed beside the table, shaking, as the blackness swooped close.
“The interpenetration is obviously variable,” Ellis said. “Otherwise it couldn’t fly.”
“Or the only thing it can penetrate is flesh,” Burke amended. He was searching the room for another weapon, Futilely.
The circular shadow flapped its way high into one corner of the room. It pressed itself against the ceiling and clung, unmoving. It looked like a black stain. They stared up at it, the three of them, with different eyes. Ellis was curious; Burke was murderous; Daniels was terror-stricken.
Daniels moved.
“Stay away from that door!” Ellis snapped.
Daniels stopped. He was shaking as he looked back over his shoulder. “We can’t kill it,” he said. His voice shook, too. “What do we do? Wait here until it decides which one of us it wants?”
“If we have to,” Ellis said.
“The question is, how long can it live outside a host?” Burke said. “It isn’t breathing. Presumably, it can’t eat in its present form. But it does use up energy. If we can’t kill it, we can starve it to death.”
“Unless we starve first,” Daniels moaned.
“We’ll run out of air before then,” Ellis observed.
“We’ll have to take a chance. One of us will have for a blowtorch,” Burke said.
“Me!” Daniels panted. “Me!”
“I’m staying here,” Burke said. “I don’t want to let it out of my sight. You’re staying here, too, Daniels. We want someone who will come back.” He looked at Ellis; Ellis nodded. “I’ll stand guard in front of the door with the burner. If you open the door just a crack, you can slip through before it can move.”
Daniels was standing by the table where the animal was half-dissolved. His eyes were wild and staring.
The burner hose wouldn’t reach to the door. Burke pulled off his shirt, looked at Ellis, who was standing beside the door, and held his shirt close to the flame. The shirt smoked and started to burn. In two quick steps Burke was in front of the door, his back to it, his eyes on the blot of darkness that clung to the ceiling.
“Go!” he said.
Ellis moved. And the blot moved, swooping down at Burke. Burke waved the flaming shirt. The door behind him slipped open. The blot swerved in the air, away from the flames. It headed straight for Daniels. Daniels screamed. He put his arms around his head and sprinted blindly for the door.
The blot followed him, only a foot behind. Burke glanced at them, at Daniels and the blot, and he tried to do two things at once. He lowered his shoulder at Daniels and tossed the burning shirt at the blot. Somehow, both missed. Daniels sidestepped instinctively, and the blot swerved in the air.
Flesh smacked solidly against flesh. Something snapped. As Burke spun around, he caught a glimpse of the blot slipping through the door. Daniels was gone.
“Commander!” Burke gasped. “What happened?”
Ellis raised a white face from the floor. “Broken leg,” he said, and fainted.
Burke turned and ran toward the intercom. “Air lock guard,” he snapped. “Close the lock. Emergency.”
Trained responses were quick. No one questioned orders like that. Burke heard the whirring of motors. Something clanged shut, with finality.
