Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (20 page)

Approaching footsteps on the red pavement interrupted Smith's reply. A dryland Martian came past, reeling a little and exuding an aroma of
segir
-whisky, the Venusian brand. When he caught the red flash of the girl's tatters he turned his head sharply, and as his
segir
-steeped brain took in the fact of her presence he lurched toward the recess unsteadily, bawling, “Shambleau, by
Pharol
! Shambleau!” and reached out a clutching hand.

Smith struck it aside contemptuously.

“On your way, drylander,” he advised.

The man drew back and stared, bleary-eyed.

“Oh! Yours, eh?” he croaked. ”
Zut!
You're welcome to it!” And like the ex-Patrolman before him he spat on the pavement and turned away, muttering harshly in the blasphemous tongue of the drylands.

Smith watched him shuffle off, and there was a crease between his colorless eyes, a nameless unease rising within him.

“Come on,” he said abruptly to the girl. “If this sort of thing is going to happen we'd better get indoors. Where shall I take you?”

“With you,” she murmured.

He stared down into the flat green eyes. Those ceaselessly pulsing pupils disturbed him, but it seemed to him, vaguely, that behind the animal shallows of her gaze was a shutter — a closed barrier that might at any moment open to reveal the very deeps of that dark knowledge he sensed there.

Roughly he said again, “Come on, then,” and stepped down into the street.

She pattered along a pace or two behind him, making no effort to keep up with his long strides, and though Smith — as men know from Venus to Jupiter's moons — walks as softly as a cat, even in spacemen's boots, the girl at his heels slid like a shadow over the rough pavement, making so little sound that even the lightness of his footsteps was loud in the empty street.

Smith chose the less frequented ways of Lakkdarol, and somewhat shamefacedly thanked his nameless gods that his lodgings were not far away, for the few pedestrians he met turned and stared after the two with that by now familiar mingling of horror and contempt which he was as far as ever from understanding.

The room he had engaged was a single cubicle in a lodginghouse on the edge of the city.

Lakkdarol, raw camp-town that it was in those days, could have furnished little better anywhere within its limits, and Smith's errand there was not one he wished to advertise. He had slept in worse places than this before, and knew that he would do so again.

There was no one in sight when he entered, and the girl slipped up the stairs at his heels and vanished through the door, shadowy, unseen by anyone in the house. Smith closed the door and leaned his broad shoulders against the panels, regarding her speculatively.

She took in what little the room had to offer in a glance — frowsy bed, rickety table, mirror hanging unevenly and cracked against the wall, unpainted chairs — a typical camp-town room in an Earth settlement abroad. She accepted its poverty in that single glance, dismissed it, then crossed to the window and leaned out for a moment, gazing across the low roof-tops toward the barren countryside beyond, red slag under the late afternoon sun.

“You can stay here,” said Smith abruptly, “until I leave town. I'm waiting here for a friend to come in from Venus. Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” said the girl quickly. “I shall — need no — food for — a while.”

“Well—” Smith glanced around the room. “I'll be in sometime tonight. You can go or stay just as you please. Better lock the door behind me.”

With no more formality than that he left her. The door closed and he heard the key turn, and smiled to himself. He did not expect, then, ever to see her again.

He went down the steps and out into the late-slanting sunlight with a mind so full of other matters that the brown girl receded very quickly into the background. Smith's errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith's living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by the ray-gun only. It is enough to say that the shipping-port and its cargoes outbound interested him deeply just now, and that the friend he awaited was Yarol the Venusian, in that swift little Edsel ship the
Maid
that can flash from world to world with a derisive speed that laughs at Patrol boats and leaves pursuers floundering in the ether far behind. Smith and Yarol and the
Maid
were a trinity that had caused the Patrol leaders much worry and many gray hairs in the past, and the future looked very bright to Smith himself that evening as he left his lodging-house.

Lakkdarol roars by night, as Earthmen's camp-towns have a way of doing on every planet where Earth's outposts are, and it was beginning lustily as Smith went down among the awakening lights toward the center of town. His business there does not concern us. He mingled with the crowds where the lights were brightest, and there was the click of ivory counters and the jingle of silver, and red
segir
gurgled invitingly from black Venusian bottles, and much later Smith strolled homeward under the moving moons of Mars, and if the street wavered a little under his feet now and then — why, that is only understandable. Not even Smith could drink red
segir
at every bar from the
Martian Lamb
to the
New Chicago
and remain entirely steady on his feet. But he found his way back with very little difficulty — considering — and spent a good five minutes hunting for his key before he remembered he had left it in the inner lock for the girl.

He knocked then, and there was no sound of footsteps from within, but in a few moments the latch clicked and the door swung open. She retreated soundlessly before him as he entered, and took up her favorite place against the window, leaning back on the sill and outlined against the starry sky beyond. The room was in darkness.

Smith flipped the switch by the door and then leaned back against the panels, steadying himself. The cool night air had sobered him a little, and his head was clear enough — liquor went to Smith's feet, not his head, or he would never have come this far along the lawless way he had chosen. He lounged against the door now and regarded the girl in the sudden glare of the bulbs, blinking a little as much at the scarlet of her clothing as at the light.

“So you stayed,” he said.

“I — waited,” she answered softly, leaning farther back against the sill and clasping the rough wood with slim, three-fingered hands, pale brown against the darkness.

“Why?”

She did not answer that, but her mouth curved into a slow smile. On a woman it would have been reply enough — provocative, daring. On Shambleau there was something pitiful and horrible in it — so human on the face of one half-animal. And yet . . . that sweet brown body curving so softly from the tatters of scarlet leather — the velvety texture of that brownness — the white-flashing smile. . . . Smith was aware of a stirring excitement within him. After all — time would be hanging heavy now until Yarol came. . . . Speculatively he allowed the steel-pale eyes to wander over her, with a slow regard that missed nothing. And when he spoke he was aware that his voice had deepened a little.

“Come here,” he said.

She came forward slowly, on bare clawed feet that made no slightest sound on the floor, and stood before him with downcast eyes and mouth trembling in that pitifully human smile. He took her by the shoulders — velvety soft shoulders, of a creamy smoothness that was not the texture of human flesh. A little tremor went over her, perceptibly, at the contact of his hands.

Northwest Smith caught his breath suddenly and dragged her to him . . . sweet yielding brownness in the circle of his arms . . . heard her own breath catch and quicken as her velvety arms closed about his neck. And then he was looking down into her face, very near, and the green animal eyes met his with the pulsing pupils and the flicker of — something — deep behind their shallows — and through the rising clamor of his blood, even as he stooped his lips to hers, Smith felt something deep within him shudder away — inexplicable, instinctive, revolted. What it might be he had no words to tell, but the very touch of her was suddenly loathsome — so soft and velvet and unhuman — and it might have been an animal's face that lifted itself to his mouth — the dark knowledge looked hungrily from the darkness of those slit pupils — and for a mad instant he knew that same wild, feverish revulsion he had seen in the faces of the mob.

“God!” he gasped, a far more ancient invocation against evil than he realized, then or ever, and he ripped her arms from his neck, swung her away with such a force that she reeled half across the room. Smith fell back against the door, breathing heavily, and stared at her while the wild revolt died slowly within him.

She had fallen to the floor beneath the window, and as she lay there against the wall with bent head he saw, curiously, that her turban had slipped — the turban that he had been so sure covered baldness — and a lock of scarlet hair fell below the binding leather, hair as scarlet as her garment, as un-humanly red as her eyes were unhumanly green. He stared, and shook his head dizzily and stared again, for it seemed to him that the thick lock of crimson had moved,
squirmed
of itself against her cheek.

At the contact of it her hands flew up and she tucked it away with a very human gesture and then dropped her head again into her hands. And from the deep shadow of her fingers he thought she was staring up at him covertly.

Smith drew a deep breath and passed a hand across his forehead. The inexplicable moment had gone as quickly as it came — too swiftly for him to understand or analyze it. “Got to lay off the
segir
,” he told himself unsteadily. Had he imagined that scarlet hair? After all, she was no more than a pretty brown girl-creature from one of the many half-human races peopling the planets. No more than that, after all. A pretty little thing, but animal. . . . He laughed a little shakily. “No more of that,” he said. “God knows I'm no angel, but there's got to be a limit somewhere. Here.” He crossed to the bed and sorted out a pair of blankets from the untidy heap, tossing them to the far corner of the room. “You can sleep there.” Wordlessly she rose from the floor and began to rearrange the blankets, the uncomprehending resignation of the animal eloquent in every line of her.

Smith had a strange dream that night. He thought he had awakened to a room full of darkness and moonlight and moving shadows, for the nearer moon of Mars was racing through the sky and everything on the planet below her was endued with a restless life in the dark. And something . . . some nameless, unthinkable
thing
. . . was coiled about his throat . . . something like a soft snake, wet and warm. It lay loose and light about his neck . . . and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressive pressure that sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous delight — beyond physical pleasure, deeper than joy of the mind. That warm softness was caressing the very roots of his soul with a terrible intimacy. The ecstasy of it left him weak, and yet he knew — in a flash of knowledge born of this impossible dream — that the soul should not be handled. . . . And with that knowledge a horror broke upon him, turning the pleasure into a rapture of revulsion, hateful, horrible — but still most foully sweet. He tried to lift his hands and tear the dream-monstrosity from his throat — tried but half-heartedly, for though his soul was revolted to its very deeps, yet the delight of his body was so great that his hands all but refused the attempt.

But when at last he tried to lift his arms a cold shock went over him and he found that he could not stir . . . his body lay stony as marble beneath the blankets, a living marble that shuddered with a dreadful delight through every rigid vein.

The revulsion grew strong upon him as he struggled against the paralyzing dream — a struggle of soul against sluggish body — titanically, until the moving dark was streaked with blankness that clouded and closed about him at last and he sank back into the oblivion from which be had awakened.

Next morning, when the bright sunlight shining through Mars' clear thin air awakened him, Smith lay for a while trying to remember. The dream had been more vivid than reality, but he could not now quite recall . . . only that it had been more sweet and horrible than anything else in life. He lay puzzling for a while, until a soft sound from the corner aroused him from his thoughts and he sat up to see the girl lying in a cat-like coil on her blankets, watching him with round, grave eyes. He regarded her somewhat ruefully.

“Morning,” he said “I've just had the devil of a dream. . . . Well, hungry?” She shook her head silently, and he could have sworn there was a covert gleam of strange amusement in her eyes.

He stretched and yawned, dismissing the nightmare temporarily from his mind.

“What am I going to do with you?” he inquired, turning to more immediate matters. “I'm leaving here in a day or two and I can't take you along, you know. Where'd you come from in the first place?”

Again she shook her head.

“Not telling? Well, it's your own business. You can stay here until I give up the room. From then on you'll have to do your own worrying.”

He swung his feet to the floor and reached for his clothes.

Ten minutes later, slipping the heat-gun into its holster at his thigh,. Smith turned to the girl.

“There's food-concentrate in that box on the table. It ought to hold you until I get back. And you'd better lock the door again after I've gone.”

Her wide, unwavering stare was his only answer, and he was not sure she had understood, but at any rate the lock clicked after him as before, and he went down the steps with a faint grin on his lips.

The memory of last night's extraordinary dream was slipping from him, as such memories do, and by the time he had reached the street the girl and the dream and all of yesterday's happenings were blotted out by the sharp necessities of the present.

Again the intricate business that had brought him here claimed his attention. He went about it to the exclusion of all else, and there was a good reason behind everything he did from the moment he stepped out into the street until the time when he turned back again at evening; though had one chosen to follow him during the day his apparently aimless rambling through Lakkdarol would have seemed very pointless.