Food for demons, p.1
Food for Demons, page 1
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FOOD FOR DEMONS
FIRST EDITION
This first edition of FOOD FOR DEMONS by E, Everett Evans is limited to 600 copies.
Copyright 1971 by Kenneth J. Krueger
All rights reserved, no portion of this book may be reprinted or reproduced by any means without the written permission of the copyright holder.
For information address
SHROUD PUBLISHERS
3381 1/2 30th Street
San Diego, California
U.S.A. 92104
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Stories:
THE UNDEAD DIE
FOOD FOR DEMONS
THE MARTIAN AND THE VAMPIRE
THE BROOCH
THE UNUSUAL MODEL
BLURB
VISITOR FROM KOS
OPERATION ALMOST
THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT
Appreciations:
by Edward E. Smith
by Mel Hunter
by F.J. Ackerman
by A.E. Van Vogt
by Ray Bradbury
by Walter J. Daugherty
by Henry M. Eichner
by Walt Liebscher
by Kenneth J. Krueger
To Ray Bradbury, who. . . . . . . . . .
bless him. . . . . . .
THE UNDEAD DIE
He was a Jack-in-the-box. Sunset up, sunrise down. And repeat, forever and forever. He was a thing in a box in a cold deep cellar. He was a container for red wines. There was no label on him, but there were little drops of red liquor upon his sleeping lips. He was the contents of a mahogany box, in a cellar of webs and upside-down things hooked to the ceilings. He lived in a land of dropping midnight waters and soft grey web. He was a white hand, a rouged mouth, a glass eye, a set of white teeth, and a cold heart. He was a pedestrian who walked the nights. He was a sleeper with original ideas as to hours. He was a leaf, a pelt, a flame, a wing. He was Robert Warram, dead these hundreds of years.
“Lisa.”
In the cellar came the sound of a woman’s name.
“Lisa.”
His white hand lifted from his bosom. He put it against the lid firmly. His eyes opened whitely. He pressed upward.
The lid would not open.
“It has always opened.” He lay back a moment, waiting.
“It must open,” he declared. With a sudden movement of strength he pushed upward. The lid gave. Things fell with a loud roar in the cellar world. He was free of the coffin in an instant. He was the only moving thing, the only white thing in the crypt. And he was afraid.
He turned to Lisa’s coffin.
It was covered with ash and leaf and bark and limb of tree. During the day a storm had arisen and the castle walls had tumbled. A mighty tree had leaned, hesitated, and fallen, driving a splintered limb of cedar through panel of coffin, through soft body, through heart.
There was no sound in the cellar world. He did not move. Someone spoke her name again. But she was as dead as though a crowd of desperate men had descended with a stake and driven it into her.
He did not touch the coffin. He did not try to open the lid. He was cold and trembling and he could not see where he stood, swaying, and the night wind blew without ending.
Her dark hair flowed and trailed from the crack in the edge of the long, cellar box, and this moved and whispered in the night wind. He bent and touched reverent fingers along the soft dark length of it. One white hand protruded in delicate grace, like a small white toy lost in the netherworld, dropped in flight from some falling death.
He left her. He walked up the vast, crumbled stone stair of the castle and went out into the rain. Such an old place. It had taken but little wind to set it crashing like a structure of web and cardboard.
He sat down upon the edge of the ruin and his face was rigid and showed no expression. How many years? And the places they had traveled? And how had they loved?
It was not to be forgotten now, or in any future time. How long ago, and on what day in what century had they met?
He closed his eyes. The world rushed about him. Now there was nothing but memory.
They had been farm children. They had grown with the trees, and they knew the hill lands and the meadow lands. They counted sheep together, and sat bathing their feet in chill streams on warm summer afternoons.
They ran along shaded paths, laughing, pelting each other with summer apples, trailing showers of blossom behind them from full hands after excursions to pick the wild flowers of the fields and the singing forests.
That was the summer of their seventeenth year. Day
after day she danced by and looked at the team of oxen he drove ahead of a clean blade of plow. She tilted her elfin head, laughed, and flung a pebble at him. When he did not follow, she ran, took hold of the goad, and kissed Robert War ram full upon his amazed lips.
This one day they ran, through the Large Land of the Forest, very much alive, very much mortal, very unafraid of anything in the whole of the dreaming summer mid-day world.
They knew nothing of the dark and the blood and the deep-buried box. They twisted and turned and ran again yet deeper into the gloomy cathedral of trees, where water crept into green secret rivulets, and echoes were softed, and the song of birds was hushed.
“Ho, see what we have here I” She came to a stop in delight, and pointed. “The old place.”
And there was the castle, ancient and perfect as a Dead Sea apple, still unfallen after four centuries of rain and animal and time. It was a place spoken of by grandmother tongues and grandfather tongues. It was a place of the rustling night and the fancied wraith. Sometimes people came to look at it and were never seen again. Or so the tales went. Not a nose nor a limb nor an eye of them was ever to be found, ever again.
“But I am quite brave,” laughed Lisa.
“So am I,” cried Robert Warram. “Let’s go in.”
For hours they climbed about, awed by the great statues and old, dim paintings. They climbed wide, winding stairs leading up to cloistered tower rooms. They examined huge furniture, and tremendous hanging draperies. They peeked into vast rooms, excited and happy over their little discoveries.
Then Robert found a great stone stair that led downward. They descended quietly, whisperingly, into the ancient cellars.
Here was wonder after new wonder. Huge storerooms filled with old armour and the arms of ancient warriors. Great carven chests filled with the rotting but still gorgeous clothing of the former lords and ladies of the castle. Gloriously beautiful, though faded, tapestries and carpets. More furniture, some broken, some merely stored.
For long they investigated the many dusty, cob-webby passageways and dark rooms. Where it was too dark to see, they used torches made of the resinous wood which they found about the place.
In their preoccupation they forgot time, forgot hunger, forgot weariness. The unnoted minutes multiplied themselves. Finally they came to a great crypt. They could dimly make out a number of old coffins resting here and there on the dusty floor.
There was a strange and musty odor here that differed from the smell of the other long-unused rooms and passages. It had a curious, foetid quality to it that caused them to stop, stand uneasily, not moving.
“Let’s go back,” Lisa looked behind her, trembling.
“Nonsense.” Robert Warram laughed quietly and threw an arm across her shoulders. He walked her forward into the room, their feet made soft shuffling sounds in that immense space of silence. “It is only a burial place. The tombs of the people who once lived here, I suppose.”
“I don’t care, I don’t like it here. I want to go home now. It’s late, and it’s cold. The air feels different. Our folks are probably keeping supper for us by now.”
“All right, “he agreed. “We’ll find the stone stairs and go.”
He led her through several halls and rooms. Slowly some of his confidence left him. He glanced back over his shoulder from time to time. His mouth grew dry, his eyes smarted. Occasionally he held high his torch as he peered down some cross-passageway.
At last he turned to her. “There’s no use lying, Lisa. We’re lost.” They gripped hands tightly, looked into each others’ eyes, noting the white, strained face. “But we’ll find the way, although it may take time. Believe me, Lisa, we’ll get out.”
She nodded in mute agreement, and on they went, their flickering torches making strange patterns along the dark walls, sometimes showing fitfully some great armoured figure, or an ancient tapestry with its pictured fighting men, whose faded eyes now glinted dully.
The air grew colder, with a peculiarly penetrant chill. The cold filtered into their hands, their chests, their fingers. It settled in their bones, and in their hearts.
“There must be a way out,” he said, stopping.
“Must be a way out, a way out, out,” the echoes taunted them.
“There is a way out.”
A voice said it, from somewhere in the darkness. A voice, not an echo. They whirled about, lifting high their torches. The light from the burning wood leaped and turned aside the gathering shadows. Some yards beyond a tumbled archway, a thing of tall darkness, of shining eyes and smiling mouth, white of face, caped in somber black, was moving toward them.
“Robert.” Lisa stumbled toward him, half fell. He caught and held her in his arms. The figure continued its advance, with not a whisper of foot, as if drifting on a tide.
“Who is it?” Robert cried, waving his torch higher. “Can you help us?”
“Of course,” said the voice. The man stood before them, his thin face luminous in the torchlight, which also glinted from jewels on shirt front and hands. His eyes were fixed steadily upon them. “If you will but follow, I shall lead you out.”
“We were lost,” Lisa whispered, hesitantly.
“Yes,” the man answered. “I know.”
“We hope we were not trespassing. Was it all right to come?”
“Yes, it was all right. Quite all right. Come.” He turned and strode away.
“What shall we do?” Lisa asked in a whisper.
“What can we do?” Robert looked at her, perplexed. “We want to get out, don’t we? Come along.”
Without a torch, the man was confidently leading them where they had before found only echoes, faint slitherings, unknown fears. Through the ancient cellars, across heaps of ancient rubble, he led.
“Tired,” murmured Robert after a bit. “So tired, Lisa.” He put up a hand to his trembling eyelids. “Tired. Tired.”
“What?” Her faint voice floated around, around in the shadows. He saw her draw ahead, closer to the strange man. “Lisa, don’t run. Come back with me, dear. Don’t run away.”
He was walking in a kind of nightmare sleep. His feet were heavy, as though he was walking through thick, clayed mud. Now and again he saw the coal-fire eyes of the man, as he turned to stare at him. He saw Lisa moving as in a drift of vapor.
“Can’t walk faster, “Robert protested, drowsily. He stopped, heard the footsteps dwindling off into a dark emptiness.
“Lisa.”
No answer.
“Lisa.”
He was held in a stupor, reasonless. He heard his heart timing away the minutes in his head, in his wrists. Lisa was gone. His tired eyes could see her nowhere.
The scream awakened him where he stood.
He leaped forward, through a half-fallen doorway. Confronting him was the dark man, Lisa held tightly in his arms, his head bent over her. As Robert Warram reached out toward them, he sensed a difference, a lifelessness about her.
Robert jumped at the man’s back. He clawed to pull him away from the girl’s body. Crying out, the man dropped Lisa. He swung about. “So, you want it too, do you? Well, so much the better. Tonight I feed well, indeed.”
He struck Robert, a great blow that sent the boy to his knees. As he struggled to his feet, Robert felt a grip about his throat, a grip as of the talons of a great bird. He fought back as best he could. He got in a few, feeble blows. Then another great cuff beside his head sent him reeling to the stone floor. The man flung himself upon the youth. That wild, pale face came nearer. Robert saw that it was flecked with blood, that the lips were pulled back to expose long, white, moving teeth.
The grip about his throat tightened. His head rocked from side to side with the heavy slaps of that bony hand. Robert surged upward, his knee in the other’s groin. The dark man groaned.
They rolled about the floor, and again the elder was on top. The cold, white face moved downward, closer. The cold breath struck at Robert like an icy gale. His head dizzied with the blood smell, the stench of death in the exhalations of the strange man.
There was one last movement, one wrenching blow, and the sharp bite of pointed teeth into Robert Warram’s neck.
After that . . . darkness.
Much, much later, some subtle sixth sense led Robert War ram to open his eyes widely. It was black, blacker than he had ever known.
“Am I dead, then?”
He moved his hands, and felt a hard substance on either side, like a wall. His fingers explored further, and their questing showed he was confined in some sort of a box. There was an over-powering scent of dead earth about him.
“I’m buried alive I”
It was a silent scream, done with heart and soul and mind. He beat upward with frantic fists. To his surprise, the lid of the box above him moved upward easily. In the dim twilight he saw that he was in a coffin, whose top was not fastened, save for hinges along one side.
“Lisa.”
Quickly he sat erect, then sprang out, looking wildly about. He saw the top of another coffin opening. He hurried toward it, for the hand he had seen protruding was that of a woman.
It was Lisa.
But such a different Lisa. This was a woman touched with age, white faced, body half-emaciated.
How long had they lain thus in those coffins? Suddenly he held out his own hands. They were little more than claws. He felt of his face. It was, he could tell, creased and leathery, but unwhiskered, nor yet freshly shaven.
Lisa was looking wildly about. “Oh, God,” she cried. “This taste of death in my mouth, this smell of decay about me.” She noticed her hands, held them unbelievingly before her eyes, then felt of her face. She groaned in agony. Robert called her name.
She saw him then. A little half-smile of recognition lighted her face. Yet still puzzled. She pushed herself into a sitting position, then stepped from the casket and stood on her feet. Half-running, she threw herself into his arms. Her lips sought his. Her arms went about him, half in protection, half seeking protection and solace.
They were interrupted by a sound behind them. They turned. The dark man stood there, smiling ironically at them. “Imagine, love here, in this place, between two such as you now are.”
“How long have we been here?”
“What are we now?”
Questions asked simultaneously, their arms still entwined about each other.
“It is merely the next night,” he replied quietly. “And as for what you are—you are now the Walking Dead. You will walk the night, you will desire blood, you will live herewith me and obey me. By placing your blood-drained bodies at once in the earth-filled coffins where you remained asleep during the day and until I called you when night had fallen, I have made you true members of the confraternity of the Undead.”
Lisa gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. Robert tightened his hold on her as she shivered in his arms.
Robert Warram half-uttered an oath, and stepped forward. He was stopped by an imperious gesture from the strange man. A subtle giddiness gripped him.
Suddenly War ram knew he could not advance, unless the Master allowed it.
“Yes, you have no chance against me,” the elder said. “I have powers of which you do not dream. Behave yourselves, obey my commands, and I shall teach you many secrets, give you many such powers.”
“Please, let us go home. Our friends and families will be looking for us. Let us go, please.”
The man merely shrugged away the woman’s plea. “Escape is not that easy,” he said. “You are what you are . . . and always shall be. Now, come along.”
He strode off into the darkness. They could but follow him. Amazed, they found they could now see in the dark.
As the shrouded figure ahead of them climbed the great stone stair, they saw a tenuous change. In place of the climbing figure of a man, first there was a shadow that writhed and shrank, and then a great bat was seen winging its way up the well of the stair.
Emerging upon the main floor of the castle, the bat fluttered in the air before them. Into their minds came knowledge. Means of mentally controlling the structure of their very body cells. Methods by which they, too, could change their physical form as he had done.
Soon three small, dark, winged things fluttered in the dim light of the dust-moted room.
At a silent wordless command, the three figures flew away, out of a window embrasure. Into and through the dense blackness of the Big Wood they flashed. They passed over their former homes, but could not stop. Over moon-drenched fields and rivers and across sleeping towns. They came to a remote cottage many miles away.
A dim light shone fitfully through one small open window, the remnant of a hearth-fire. It cast a ruddy glow about the interior. There was a foreboding, perhaps a prophetic color to its dying light.
Through the opening window the three hovering, fluttering figures saw several silent forms on the straw pallets. The house was slumbering and peaceful.
“Come.”
The two newly-fledged ones fluttered away. “No, ah, no.”
