Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (177 page)

Still puzzling, he fitted his key in the lock and swung the door open.

In that first moment, as the door opened, he sensed something very wrong.…The room was darkened, and for a while he could see nothing, but at the first breath he scented a strange unnamable odor, half sickening, half sweet. And deep stirrings of ancestral memory awoke within him—ancient swamp-born mem ories from Venusian ancestors far away and long ago.…

Yarol laid his hand on his gun lightly and opened the door wider. In the dimness, all he could see at first was a curious mound in the far corner.…Then his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he saw it more clear ly, a mound that somehow heaved and stirred within itself.…A mound of—he caught his breath sharply—a mound like a mass of entrails, living, moving, writh ing with an unspeakable aliveness. Then a hot Venusian oath broke from his lips, and he cleared the door-sill in a swift stride, slammed the door and set his back against it, gun ready in his hand, although his flesh crawled—for he knew.…

“Smith!” he said softly, in a voice thick with hor ror. “North west!”

The moving mass stirred—shuddered—sank back into crawling quiescence again.

“Smith! Smith!” The Venusian’s voice was gentle and insistent, and it quivered a little with terror.

An impatient ripple went over the whole mass of aliveness in the corner. It stirred again, reluctantly, and then tendril by writhing tendril it began to part itself and fall aside, and very slowly the brown of a spaceman’s leather appeared beneath it, all slimed and shin ing.

“Smith! Northwest!” Yarol’s persistent whisper came again, urgently, and with a dreamlike slowness the leather garments moved…a man sat up in the midst of the writhing worms, a man who once, long ago, might have been Northwest Smith. From head to foot, he was slimy from the embrace of the crawling horror about him. His face was that of some creature beyond humanity—dead-alive, fixed in a gray stare, and the look of terrible ecstasy that overspread it seemed to come from somewhere far within, a faint reflection from immeasurable distances beyond the flesh. And as there is mystery and magic in the moonlight which is, after all, but a reflection of the everyday sun, so in that gray face turned to the door was a terror unnamable and sweet, a reflection of ecstasy beyond the understanding of any who have known only Earthly ecstasy themselves. And as he sat there turning a blank, eyeless face to Yarol, the red worms writhed ceaselessly about him, very gently, with a soft, caressive motion that never slacked.

“Smith…come here! Smith…get up. . . Smith! Smith!”

Yarol’s whisper hissed in the silence, commanding, ur gent—but he made no move to leave the door.

And with a dreadful slowness, like a dead man rising, Smith stood up in the nest of slimy scarlet. He swayed drunkenly on his feet, and two or three crimson tendrils came writhing up his legs to the knees and wound themselves there, supportingly, moving with a ceaseless caress that seemed to give him some hidden strength, for he said then, without inflection:

“Go away. Go away. Leave me alone.” And the dead ecstatic face never changed.

“Smith!” Yarol’s voice was desperate. “Smith, listen! Smith, can’t you hear me?”

“Go away,” the monotonous voice said. “Go away. Go away. Go—”

“Not unless you come, too. Can’t you hear? Smith!
Smith!
”

He hushed in mid-phrase, and once more the ancestral prickle of race-memory shivered down his back, for the scarlet mass was moving again, violently, rising.

Yarol pressed back against the door and gripped his gun, and the name of a god he had forgotten years ago rose to his lips unbidden. For he knew what was coming next, and the knowledge was more dreadful than any ignorance could have been.

The red, writhing mass rose higher, and the tendrils parted, and a human face looked out—no, half human, with green cat-eyes that shone in that dimness like lighted jewels, compellingly.…

Yarol breathed “Shar!” again, and flung up an arm across his face, and the tingle of meeting that green gaze for even an instant went thrilling through him perilously.

“Smith!” he called in despair. “Smith, can’t you hear me?”

“Go away,” said that voice that was not Smith’s. “Go away.”

And somehow, although he dared not look, Yarol knew that the—the other—had parted those worm-thick tresses and stood there in all the human sweetness of the brown, curved woman’s body, cloaked in living horror. And he felt the eyes upon him, and something was crying insistently in his brain to lower that shield ing arm.…

He was lost—he knew it, and the knowledge gave him that courage which comes from despair. The voice in his brain was growing, swelling, deafening him with a roaring command that all but swept him before it. A command to lower that arm—to meet the eyes that opened upon darkness—to submit—and a pro mise, murmurous and sweet and evil beyond words, of pleasure to come.…

But somehow he kept his head. Somehow, dizzily, he was gripping his gun in his upflung hand—some how, incredibly, he was crossing the narrow room with averted face and groping for Smith’s shoulder. There came a moment of blind fumbling in emptiness, and then he found it and gripped the leather that was slimy and dreadful and wet—and simultaneously, he felt something loop gently about his ankle, and a shock of repulsive pleasure went through him, and then an other coil, and an other, wound about his feet.…

Yarol set his teeth and gripped the shoulder hard, and his hand shuddered of itself, for the feel of that leather was slimy as the worms about his ankles, and a faint tingle of obscene delight went through him from the contact.

That caressive pressure on his legs was all he could feel, and the voice in his brain drowned out all other sounds, and his body obeyed him reluctantly—but somehow he gave one heave of tremendous effort and swung Smith, stumbling, out of that nest of horrors. The twining tendrils ripped loose with little sucking sounds, and the whole mass quivered and reached after, and then Yarol forgot his friend utterly and turned his whole being to the hopeless task of freeing himself. For only a part of him was fighting now, only a part of him struggled against the twining obscenities, and in his innermost brain the sweet, seductive mur mur sounded, and his body clamored to surrender…

“Shar! Shar y’danis…Shar mor’larol —”
prayed Yarol, gasping and half unconscious that he spoke forgotten prayers that he voiced years ago as a boy, and with his back half turned to the central mass, he kicked desperately with his heavy boot at the red, writhing worms about him. They gave way, quivering and curling themselves out of reach, and though he knew more were reaching for his throat from behind, at least he could go on struggling until he was forced to meet those eyes.

He stamped and kicked and stamped again, and for one instant he was free of the slimy grip as the bruised worms curled back from his heavy feet, and he lurched away dizzily, sick with revulsion and despair as he fought off the coils, and then he lifted his eyes and saw the cracked mirror on the wall. Dimly in its reflection he could see the writhing, scarlet horror behind him, that face peering out with its demure girl-smile, dreadfully human, and all the red tendrils reaching after him. And remembrance of something he had read long ago swept incongruously over him, and the gasp of relief and hope that he gave shook for a moment the grip of the command in his brain.

Without pausing for a breath, he swung the gun over his shoulder, the reflected barrel in line with the reflected horror in the mirror, and flicked the catch.

In the mirror, he saw its blue flame leap in a dazzling spate across the dimness, full into the midst of that squirming, reach ing mass behind him. There was a hiss and a blaze and a high, thin scream of inhuman malice and despair—the flame cut a wide arc and went out as the gun fell from his hand, and Yarol pitched forward to the floor.

* * * *

Northwest Smith opened his eyes to Martian sunlight stream ing thinly through the dingy window. Something wet and cold was slapping his face, and the fam iliar fiery sting of segir-whiskey burnt his throat.

“Smith!” Yarol’s voice was saying from far away. “Northwest! Wake up, damn you! Wake up!”

“I’m—awake,” Smith managed to articulate thickly. “Wha’s matter?”

Then a cup-rim was trust against his teeth, and Yarol said irritably, “Drink it, you fool!”

Smith swallowed obediently, and more of the fire-hot segir flowed down his grateful throat. It spread a warmth through his body that awakened him from the numbness that had gripped him until now and helped a little toward driving out the all-devouring weakness he was becoming aware of. He lay still for a few minutes while the warmth of the whiskey went through him, and memory sluggishly began to permeate his brain with the spread of the segir. Nightmare memories…sweet and terrible…memories of —

“God!” gasped Smith suddenly, and he tried to sit up. Weakness smote him like a blow, and for an instant the room wheeled as he fell back against something firm and warm—Yarol’s shoulder. The Venusian’s arm supported him while the room steadied, and after a while he twisted a little and stared into the,otber’s black gaze.

Yarol was holding him with one arm and finishing the mug of segir himself, and the black eyes met his over the rim and crinkled into sudden laughter, half hysterical after that terror that was passed.

“By Pharol!” gasped Yarol, choking into his mug. “By Pharol, N. W.! I’m never gonna let you forget this! Next time you have to drag me out of a mess, I’ll say —”

“Let it go,” said Smith. “What’s been going on?

How —”

“Shambleau.” Yarol’s laughter died. “Shambleau! What were you doing with a thing like that?”

“What was it?” Smith asked soberly.

“Mean to say you didn’t know? But where’d you find it? How —”

“Suppose you tell me first what you know,” said Smith firmly. “And another swig of that segir, too, please. I need it.”

“Can you hold the mug now? Feel better?”

“Yeah—some. I can hold it—thanks. Now go on.”

“Well—I don’t know just where to start. They call them Shambleau —”

“Good God, is there more than one?”

“It’s a—a sort of race. I think, one of the very oldest. Where they come from, nobody knows. The name sounds a little French, doesn’t it? But it goes back beyond the start of history. There have always been Shambleau.”

“I never heard of ’em.”

“Not many people have. And those who know don’t care to talk about it much.”

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

“Yes, it happens like this, sometimes. They’ll ap pear, 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. An other 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.