Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (23 page)

“Well, half this town knows. I hadn't any idea what they were talking about, then. And I still don't understand, but—”

“Yes, it happens like this, sometimes. They'll appear, and the news will spread and the town will get together and hunt them down, and after that — well, the story didn't get around very far. It's too — too unbelievable.”

“But — my God, Yarol! — what was it? Where'd it come from? How—”

“Nobody knows just where they come from. Another planet — maybe some undiscovered one. Some say Venus — I know there are some rather awful legends of them handed down in our family — that's how I've heard about it. And the minute I opened that door, awhile back — I — I think I knew that smell. . . .”

“But — what
are
they?”

“God knows. Not human, though they have the human form. Or that may be only an illusion . . . or maybe I'm crazy. I don't know. They're a species of the vampire — or maybe the vampire is a species of — of them. Their normal form must be that — that mass, and in that form they draw nourishment from the — I suppose the life-forces of men. And they take some form — usually a woman form, I think, and key you up to the highest pitch of emotion before they — begin. That's to work the life-force up to intensity so it'll be easier. And they give, always, that horrible, foul pleasure as they — feed. There are some men who, if they survive the first experience, take to it like a drug — can't give it up — keep the thing with them all their lives — which isn't long — feeding it for that ghastly satisfaction. Worse than smoking
ming
or — or praying to
Pharol
.”

“Yes,” said Smith. “I'm beginning to understand why that crowd was so surprised and — and disgusted when I said — well, never mind. Go on.”

“Did you get to talk to — to it?” asked Yarol.

“I tried to. It couldn't speak very well. I asked it where it came from and it said — 'from far away and long ago' — something like that.”

“I wonder. Possibly some unknown planet — but I think not. You know there are so many wild stories with some basis of fact to start from, that I've sometimes wondered — mightn't there be a lot more of even worse and wilder superstitions we've never even heard of? Things like this, blasphemous and foul, that those who know have to keep still about? Awful, fantastic things running around loose that we never hear rumors of at all!

“These things — they've been in existence for countless ages. No one knows when or where they first appeared. Those who've seen them, as we saw this one, don't talk about it. It's just one of those vague, misty rumors you find half hinted at in old books sometimes. . . . I believe — they are an older race than man, spawned from ancient seed in times before ours, perhaps on planets that have gone to dust, and so horrible to man that when they are discovered the discoverers keep still about it — forget them again as quickly as they can.

“And they go back to time immemorial. I suppose you recognized the legend of Medusa?

There isn't any question that the ancient Greeks knew of them. Does it mean that there have been civilizations before yours that set out from Earth and explored other planets? Or did one of the Shambleau somehow make its way into Greece three thousand years ago? If you think about it long enough you'll go off your head! I wonder how many other legends are based on things like this — things we don't suspect, things we'll never know.

“The Gorgon, Medusa, a beautiful woman with — with snakes for hair, and a gaze that turned men to stone, and Perseus finally killed her — I remembered this just by accident, N. W., and it saved your life and mine — Perseus killed her by using a mirror as he fought to reflect what he dared not look at directly. I wonder what the old Greek who first started that legend would have thought if he'd known that three thousand years later his story would save the lives of two men on another planet. I wonder what that Greek's own story was, and how he met the thing, and what happened. . . .

“Well, there's a lot we'll never know. Wouldn't the records of that race of — of
things
, whatever they are, be worth reading! Records of other planets and other ages and all the beginnings of mankind! But I don't suppose they've kept any records. I don't suppose they've even any place to keep them — from what little I know, or anyone knows about it, they're like the Wandering Jew, just bobbing up here and there at long intervals, and where they stay in the meantime I'd give my eyes to know! But I don't believe that terribly hypnotic power they have indicates any superhuman intelligence. It's their means of getting food . . .

just like a frog's long tongue or a carnivorous flower's odor. Those are physical because the frog and the flower eat physical food. The Shambleau uses a — a mental reach to get mental food. I don't quite know how to put it. And just as a beast that eats the bodies of other animals acquires with each meal greater power over the bodies of the rest, so the Shambleau, stoking itself up with the life-forces of men, increases its power over the minds and the souls of other men. But I'm talking about things I can't define — things I'm not sure exist.

“I only know that when I felt — when those tentacles closed around my legs — I didn't want to pull loose, I felt sensations that — that — oh, I'm fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that — pleasure — and yet

“I know,” said Smith slowly. The effect of the
segir
was beginning to wear off, and weakness was washing back over him in waves, and when he spoke he was half meditating in a low voice, scarcely realizing that Yarol listened. “I know it — much better than you do — and there's something so indescribably awful that the thing emanates, something so utterly at odds with everything human — there aren't any words to say it. For a while I was a part of it, literally, sharing its thoughts and memories and emotions and hungers, and — well, it's over now and I don't remember very clearly, but the only part left free was that part of me that was all but insane from the — the obscenity of the thing. And yet it was a pleasure so sweet — I think there must be some nucleus of utter evil in me — in everyone — that needs only the proper stimulus to get complete control; because even while I was sick all through from the touch of those — things — there was something in me that was — was simply gibbering with delight. . . . Because of that I saw things — and knew things — horrible, wild things I can't quite remember — visited unbelievable places, looked backward through the memory of that creature — I was one with, and saw — God, I wish I could remember!”

“You ought to thank your God you can't,” said Yarol soberly.

His voice roused Smith from the half-trance he had fallen into, and he rose on his elbow ', swaying a little from weakness. The room was wavering before him, and he closed his eyes, not to see it, but he asked, “You say they — don't turn up again? No way of finding — another?”

Yarol did not answer for a moment. He laid his hands on the other man's shoulders and pressed him back, and then sat staring down into the dark, ravaged face with a new, strange, undefinable look upon it that he had never seen there before — whose meaning he knew, too well.

“Smith,” he said finally, and his black eyes for once were steady and serious, and the little grinning devil had vanished from behind them, “Smith, I've never asked your word on anything before, but I've earned the right to do it now, and I'm asking you to promise me one thing.”

Smith's colorless eyes met the black gaze unsteadily. Irresolution was in them, and a little fear of what that promise might be. And for just a moment Yarol was looking, not into his friend's familiar eyes, but into a wide gray blankness that held all horror and delight — a pale sea with unspeakable pleasures sunk beneath it. Then the wide stare focused againand Smith's eyes met his squarely and Smith's voice said, “Go ahead. I'll promise.”

“That if you ever should meet a Shambleau again — ever, anywhere — you'll draw your gun and burn it to hell the instant you realize what it is. Will you promise me that?” There was a long silence. Yarol's somber black eyes bored relentlessly into the colorless ones of Smith, not wavering.

And the veins stood out on Smith's tanned forehead. He never broke his word — he had given it perhaps half a dozen times in his life, but once he had given it, he was incapable of breaking it. And once more the gray seas flooded in a dim tide of memories, sweet and horrible beyond dreams. Once more Yarol was staring into blankness that hid nameless things. The room was very still.

The gray tide ebbed. Smith's eyes, pale and resolute as steel, met Yarol's levelly.

“I'll — try,” he said. And his voice wavered.

Published in
Weird Tales
, Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1935).

Snow fell over Righa, pole city of Mats. Bitter snow, whirling in ice-hard particles on the thin, keen wind that always seems to blow through Righa's streets. These cobblestoned ways were nearly empty today. Squat stone houses crouched low under the assaults of that storm-laden wind, and the dry snow eddied in long gusts down the reaches of the Lakklan, Righa's central street. The few pedestrians along the Lakklan huddled collars high about their ears and hurried over the cobbles.

But there was one figure in the street that did not hurry. It was a woman's figure, and by the swing of her gait and the high poise of her head one might guess that she was young, but it would be no more than a guess, for the fur cloak she clutched about her muffled every line of her body and the peaked hood of it hid her face. That fur was the sleek white hide of the almost extinct saltland snow-cat, so that one might presuppose her wealth. She walked with a swinging grace rarely encountered in Righa's streets. For Righa is an outlaw city, and young women, wealthy and beautiful and unattended, are seldom seen upon the Lakklan.

She strolled slowly down the broad, uneven way, her long hooded cloak making a white enigma of her. But she was somehow alien to this bleak, bitter scene. That almost dancing litheness which attended her motion, eloquent even through the concealing folds of rich snow-cat fur, was not a characteristic of Martian women, even the pink beauties of the canals.

Indefinably she was foreign — exotically foreign.

From the shadow of her hood an eager gaze roved the street, avidly scanning the few faces she passed. They were hard-featured faces for the most part, bleak and cold as the gray city about them. And the eyes that met hers boldly or slyly, according to the type of passer-by, were curiously alike in their furtiveness, their shadow of alert and hunted watching. For men came to Righa quietly, by devious ways, and dwelt in seclusion and departed without ostentation. And their eyes were always wary.

The girl's gaze flicked by them and went on. If they stared after her down the street she did not seem to know, or greatly to care. She paced unhurriedly on over the cobbles.

Ahead of her a broad, low door opened to a burst of noise and music, and warm light streamed briefly out into the gray day as a man stepped over the sill and swung the door shut behind him. Sidelong she watched the man as he belted his heavy coat of brown pole-deer hide and stepped briskly out into the street. He was tall, brown as leather, hard-featured under the pole-deer cap pulled low over his eyes. They were startling, those eyes, cold and steady, icily calm. Indefinably he was of Earth. His scarred dark face had a faintly piratical look, and he was wolfishly lean in his spaceman's leather as he walked lightly down the Lakklan, turning up the deer-hide collar about his ears with one hand. The other, his right, was hidden in the pocket of his coat.

The woman swerved when she saw him. He watched her subtly swaying approach without a flicker of expression on his face. But when she laid a milkily white hand upon his arm he gave a queer little start, involuntarily, like a shiver quickly suppressed. A ripple of annoyance crossed his face briefly and was gone, as if the muscular start had embarrassed him. He turned upon her an absolutely expressionless stare and waited.

“Who are you?” cooed a throatily velvet voice from the depths of the hood.

“Northwest Smith.” He said it crisply, and his lips snapped shut again. He moved a little away from her, for her hand still lay upon his right arm, and his right hand was still hidden in the coat pocket. He moved far enough to free his arm, and stood waiting.

“Will you come with me?” Her voice throbbed like a pigeon's from the shadow of her hood.

For a quick instant his pale eyes appraised her, as caution and curiosity warred within him.

Smith was a wary man, very wise in the dangers of the spaceways life. Not for a moment did he mistake her meaning. Here was no ordinary woman of the streets. A woman robed in snow-cat furs had no need to accost casual strangers along the Lakklan.

“What do you want?” he demanded. His voice was deep and harsh, and the words fairly clicked with a biting brevity.

“Come,” she cooed, moving nearer again and slipping one hand inside his arm. “I will tell you that in my own house. It is so cold here.”

Smith allowed himself to be pulled along down the Lakklan, too puzzled and surprised to resist. That simple act of hers had amazed him out of all proportion to its simplicity. He was revising his judgment of her as he walked along over the snow-dust cobbles at her side. For by that richly throaty voice that throbbed as colorfully as a dove's, and by the milky whiteness of her hand on his arm, and by the subtle swaying of her walk, he had been sure, quite sure, that she came from Venus. No other planet breeds such beauty, no other women are born with the instinct of seduction in their very bones. And he had thought, dimly, that he recognized her voice.

But no, if she were Venus-bred, and the woman he half suspected her of being, she would never have slid her arm through his with that little intimate gesture or striven to override his hesitation with the sheer strength of her own charm. His one small motion away from her hand on his arm would have warned a true Venusian not to attempt further intimacy. She would have known by the look in his still eyes, by the wolfish, scarred face, tight-mouthed, that his weakness did not lie along the lines she was mistress of. And if she were the woman he suspected, all this was doubly sure. No, she could not be Venus-bred, nor the woman her voice so recalled to him.