Food for demons, p.4
Food for Demons, page 4
But Fergus Judson grew more uneasy and perturbed as the months flashed by. The period between feedings seemed impossibly short, even though his calendar told him it continued steady at six weeks.
Also, it seemed impossible that he should not become suspected . . . nor were his fears unjustified. It came when he had turned away from the house where the demon had completed its sixth feeding. He had not gone more than two blocks down the still, night-shaded street, when a police car drew up alongside the curb. Two uniformed men sprang out to confront him.
“You Professor Fergus Judson?”
“Why, yes,” surprised.
“Dr. James Locksley just died. You’ll have to come along with us.”
At the police station it was soon apparent that the officers were baffled. There was no evidence of murder in this death. Yet they had had an anonymous note warning them to be on the lookout for Judson if and when any member of the college faculty died unexpectedly.
When the flash came in that Dr. Locksley was dead, the cruising cars started looking for Professor Judson, and found him only two blocks away.
They questioned him for hours, but could get nothing useful from him. He had merely been out for his usual evening walk, a health measure for a man whose occupation kept him cooped up so much of the time.
As he returned home, freed at last of their questionings, Fergus Judson knew he had Abe Caldwell to thank for his arrest and inquisition. Knew, too, that Caldwell had done his worst, and was no longer important.
Yet now Professor Judson had worse worries.
For when Judson was taken to the police station the demon had not yet fallen into that strange digestive stupor and unconsciousness that claimed it after each feeding. It had forced itself to stay awake, a silent witness to the questioning. Had sometimes prompted the answers which Judson was forced to make. Had established a more complete mental control, which made it impossible for the Professor to make a complete confession of the guilt he felt so keenly, as he had wished to do; as he had so valiantly tried to do.
Now, on the way home, the demon prosecuted its own inquisition of Judson. Slowly, relentlessly, it turned the man’s mind inside out in the process of finding out what was back of all this sudden inquiry into the relationship between Judson and these many deaths.
Fight and struggle as he might, Fergus Judson was powerless before the uncanny mental abilities of the demon.
“So . . . you’ve told the whole story to this Professor Roberta Tooker?” Judson flinched under the exquisite pain. “And . . . this woman has as great a mind as any in this community? Ah, that is excellent. It is seldom I get a really fine female mind for food. They have a . . . a delicacy . . . that is marvelous. I shall use her as the next of my repasts.”
There was a last spasmodic but deliberate stricture, then Judson was released from the torture. The demon slept.
A week later, when he felt sure the demon could not awaken before it again hungered, Judson made it a point to waylay Roberta and demanded that she listen to him for a moment. Rapidly he related the recent events, the scene with the demon.
“So you see, my dear, you are definitely on its list. But here is something I feel may help. It is the translation of that ancient manuscript you saw. I was stuck on it until after I began knowing more after each of the demon’s feedings. That was your plan, was it not? Well, now I feel positive that I have the correct translation. I believe it will protect you. Keep it, study it carefully, and use it when necessary.”
He hurried away, lest the occurence make such a strong impression on his mind the demon would notice it upon awakening.
Nor did he see Roberta, at close-up, until about a month later, when she passed him swiftly, without speaking, but once more a slip of paper changed hands.
On it he read an address, but no name. Wondering, he shook his head.
When the demon awoke a week later, it demanded to be taken to Roberta Tooker’s home. Then Fergus Judson rebelled.
“I won’t go near her,” he stormed. “I’ll kill myself before I’ll let you have her.”
He tried to open the drawer of his desk where his revolver lay, but the demon seized his motor nerves, and his hand would not move.
“You weak, childish fool,” the demon sneered. “How can you stop me? Do you not yet realize my powers? Haven’t you even realized that I do not need you as my host? That having been evoked, I can now transfer to any body I desire? I have felt a small gratitude to you for opening the Way. But try not my patience too far, or I shall feed on your own not-too-unintelligent mind, and find myself another host. Now, no more of your futile, idle arguments. Take me to Roberta Tooker—this instant.”
Raging but impotent, viciously scourged with sadistic mental whips, Fergus Judson was impelled out of his house. As his unwilling feet dragged along, the shrill, sneering laughter of the demon reverberated through the channels of his mind.
But suddenly a desperate calm came over Fergus Judson. “Now,” he thought, “now or never!”
He stood stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk, and began repeating the words of incantation of which he had given Roberta a copy.
In spite of the raging attempts of the demon to interrupt him—it almost seemed as though its vast powers were in abeyance to some extent while he was saying the words—Judson’s voice grew more and more steady and unhurried. He fumbled once, but recovered and went on. Word by word he recited the whole of it.
Finished, he waited. There was silence. For a long, long moment the whole world seemed still and hushed. Even the demon seemed to be holding its breath in expectant dread.
Then there was a raucous bellow of contemptuous laughter that seemed to split Judsonn’s head. He reeled, as a blinding mushroom of corruscating light flamed behind his eyes.
“What are we wasting time for?” the demon shrieked triumphantly. “You can’t even stop me that way, with the name of the dread Sufrani. Come on, get going.”
Beaten, Fergus Judson stumbled along the elm-shaded street. The usually beautiful lawns and flower-beds seemed sere and lifeless. The comfortable, cheerful homes but empty and tumbled shadows.
Closer they came to Roberta’s home. Each step was fiercely contested still, yet Judson knew the certainty of defeat. The aloes-bitter taste of it was in his mouth.
Stopping at last on the walk leading to the house where Professor Tooker had her lodgings, Judson waited for the now-familiar, orgiastic thrill that told him the demon was feeding.
But none came. Instead, he felt the rising, furious anger of his tenant. He sensed it was unable to find Roberta’s mind within the house.
“You have tried again to trick me,” it declared, while again Fergus Judson felt its awful constriction about his mind.
“No, please,” he wailed. “This is where she lives . . . at least where she did the last I knew. Perhaps she is merely not at home.”
At the demon’s insistence, Judson went up and rang the bell. The housekeeper, when she appeared, informed him that Miss Tooker was away.
“She goes away every six weeks now,” she stated. “I believe she visits her folks.”
“Pretty smart, “the demon growled. “Well, it really does not matter. We shall have her another time. Now, take me to the address she gave you.”
Fergus Judson was stunned to find that the demon knew of those slips of paper. But again he was being forced along the street, still trying to resist with every force of ingenuity, of will and of mind . . . but futilely.
Finally they arrived at the house whose address Roberta had furnished. It was a little house, painted white, set deep in its wooded acre. Fergus Judson sank ever more deeply into a desponding gloom as he trudged wearily along the willow-lined driveway. He stopped at the foot of the steps leading up to the verandah.
Suddenly he grew aware that the demon within him was vastly disturbed, uneasy. This uneasiness grew even while Judson was going up the steps and into the house, which he entered without even bothering to knock.
Roberta Tooker stood in the center of the living room, dressed entirely in white. Her figure was tense, but she had a very slight smile on her lips.
Professor Judson felt a distinct awareness of the demon’s surprise at sight of her. It seemed disconcerted and puzzled that it had not—still could not—sense the presence of her mind.
Roberta gazed at her fellow professor with tense earnestness. “You’ve got to say that repeated word, Fergus,” she cried in a piercing tone. “I can’t pronounce it correctly. I’ve spoken the entire incantation properly, but that one word I can not say correctly. And I know the spell is working—something powerful is protecting me already. But it apparently has to have that name-word to materialize completely. So, Fergus, quickly. Say that word!”
“W-w-word?” he stuttered, seemingly at a loss.
He could feel the demon frenziedly squirming and writhing within him, trying to blank out his memory. Its desperation was terribly obvious. “I’ll feed on your mind,” it thundered. “Get us out of here . . . fast.”
The Professor knew a compulsion, felt his legs moving frantically. Yet the demon’s very panic heartened Judson. He threw himself on the floor. “I will not go,” he yelled.
“That’s right, darling, fight it. Don’t yield,” Roberta called out hearteningly.
Aided by her love and her own very considerable abilities, Fergus Judson found himself fighting with all his strength, with all his will. He was desperately trying to increase his powers by a direct and steadfast negation of the demon’s ability to control him or harm him.
His hands tried to hold onto the rug, then the living room furniture, the doorway, the hall rug.
There was a slaverous threshing inside his mind, and then—horrible sensation—the unmistakable gnawing at the fringes of his mentality.
Judson nearly fainted at that. Still, as from a great distance, again and again he heard the shrill demanding of Roberta’s voice:
“Fergus, oh, Fergus darling, speak . . . the . . . word!”
Word? he thought numbly. He had believed there were no difficult words in the incantation, at least not for him, not for the new-found knowledge he had gained.
And that thirteen-times repeated word, about which Roberta seemed so concerned, was one of the easiest. “Sufrani.”
Suddenly he remembered. The demon had said the word, back there when Judson had tried the incantation and had failed. But the demon had pronounced it differently . . . ah, that was it. He and Roberta, were giving the “u” the ordinary pronunciation used in English. The demon had given it more the sound of “ae”.
“SAEFRANI!” Judson shouted, and kept shouting it.
It was an illusion of substance, a shadow in an unlighted world. It was a whisper where there was no sound, a movement in a motionless dimension.
It was born, It was created, It was self-created, It was a product of evolution—terms meaningless because mutually exclusive. And still, impossibly somehow, incomprehensibly yet intrinsically true.
It was a thought, an idea, a concept, a perception, and an apperception.
It was Being, and it was non-Being. It was Positiveness, and It was Negation. It was Matter, and It was Void.
It was micro-cosmic, and It was Macro-Cosmic.
Time and Space had no meanings as far as It was concerned. So there was no way of telling when or where It first came into Consciousness. It might have been a million million million aeons ago; it might have been Today . . . or Tomorrow. It might have been in some unknown and unknowable dimension or far universe; it might have been HERE.
Its knowledge was starkly inconceivable, yet It was greedy and thirsty for more and greater knowledge. Everything everywhere everywhen was of interest to It. And as Its knowledge increased, so did Its powers.
Nor was it hungry only for knowledge.
Suddenly it received a summons!
Almost instantaneously, as the word left Professor Fergus Judson’s lips, a great peace came to him. The torture, the lashing pain ceased. He was suffused with a sublimity, a greatness, an awed wonder as though the whole cosmos had unfolded itself to his innermost understanding.
For one grandeured instant it seemed as though he possessed all knowledge. There was an ineffable blessing of deep content and repose, of knowledge that he had been healed mentally, psychically and physically; an assurance that he would be no longer troubled.
Then he was alone.
The demon had vanished, utterly gone, and Judson knew it could never return. It had been used . . . as food.
So, too, had departed as tracelessly that . . . that mighty . . . Essence . . . which had come so fortuitously at their summons.
Professor Fergus Judson saw then the face of Roberta Tooker bending over him, her eyes bright with happy tears, her lips soft and tremulous.
Unable at the moment to rise from the floor, he yet felt and fumbled for her hand, which she clasped in his. Their lips touched. Sighing, his head relaxed against the rug.
Contentedly, he slept.
Ev has always been, for me, that most rare variety of human being (especially among authors), the child raised to the stature and dignity of a man; and furthermore, that of a man of feeling and imagination. He could build worlds of the far Universes, stride the immensities of interstellar travels with ease and familiarity, and yet remain, through both his fictional heroes, and his own personality, as simple and as clean a man as I have ever met. In this age of slatternly manners and meaningless first-namery, Ev wrote out his own character in each of his books and stories. You’ll find him in here, the gentle Victorian with the winged mind.
Mel Hunter
THE MARTIAN AND THE VAMPIRE
The Branch County Medical Association meeting was in an uproar. The members had been pouter-pigeoning until old Doc Ferguson pricked their bubble.
“Sure, I know The Doctor’s Journal gave Batavia a write-up as ‘The City Death Forgot’, because we have so many real old folks, and so few of our youngsters die. But you fellows got no call to get stuck up about it. It isn’t any of your doings.”
“How d’you get that way?” a portly physician from Coolwater rose in protest.
“ ’Cause it all started ’way, ’way back, several centuries ago, and in Europe, not here, when a vampire ran foul of a Martian.”
There were gasps, a startled laugh, and then big-eyed astonishment for a moment. Then a voice from the rear stage whispered, “Non compos mentis.”
“I heard that, Doc Schultz. I’ve got more mentis than you’ll ever compos.” Old Doc Ferguson glared a moment, then sobered down and asked quietly. “By the way, Schultz, how’s Tim Hogan getting along these days?”
“Hogan? Why, he’s middle-weight champion.”
“Kind of puny as a boy, wasn’t he? Had pernicious anemia, didn’t he?”
Memory stirred. “That’s right, he did.”
“As I recall, he was one of your first patients.”
“Yes, and after I’d tried all the things I’d been taught in medical school, and they wouldn’t work, I came and asked your advice,” Dr. Schultz admitted.
“And I told you to get Jed Crawford to give him a transfusion.”
“I never could figure out why that worked,” thoughtfully.
“I just told you—a vampire met a Martian.
There was an excited buzz in the hall. All the doctors there knew and respected old Doc Ferguson, yet he was such a peculiar fellow. Always saying and doing unorthodox things—like now. That silly thing about a vampire . . .
And a Martian?
“You’ve said too much to stop now, Doctor,” one of the older physicians spoke. “How about explaining . . . if you really can? None of us believe in vampires, naturally, and as for a Martian being here on earth . . .”
Ferguson’s eyes twinkled suppressed merriment. “I figured the time had come to tell about it. It all happened something like this.”
He half-set on one corner of the speaker’s table on the rostrum, and the others either resumed their seats or crowded closer. If nothing else, old Doc was a good storyteller.
“It was back in Carpathia, several hundred years ago. One black night this vampire was out after the blood he needed to keep him living . . . if you can call it living. He’d gone some distance when he saw a boy sleeping under a tree.
“A quick swoop onto the prone body, his sharp teeth sunk into the tender neck, and then he was sucking the youth’s blood. It seemed particularly tasty blood, and he drank and drank, far more than was usual.
“But when he finally rose, sated, there was a taunting laugh inside his head. He distinctly got the thought, ‘Too bad, my friend. Now you’ll never be able to drink blood again.’
“This surprised the vampire so much he looked more closely at his victim, who was now sitting up and grinning at him.
“Why, this wasn’t a lad. It was just a boy-like form . . . with subtle differences.
“ ‘Who . . . what . . . are you?’
“ ‘I’m a Martian,’ the other telepathed, and went on to explain how, for millennia, Martians had been sending observers to Earth every fifty of their years, watching the growth of civilization.
“ ‘But what did you mean about my never being able to drink blood again?’ the vampire asked anxiously. ‘Am I, then, to die after all?’
“ ‘Oh, no, nothing that fortunate. You’ll probably live a long, long time,” the Martian chuckled. Then he twisted a knob on his belt, and disappeared in a hazy sphere.
“It was a very puzzled vampire who went back to the castle in whose vault he lived, and who crawled into his dirt-filled coffin. And at sundown the next day, when he awoke after a very restless day, he was even more so.
“For when he went out on his nightly foray for fresh blood, he found he couldn’t bear the taste after he’d pricked his victim’s neck and drank the first mouthful. Nor could he hold down what he had swallowed.
“Instead, he was hungry—hungry for food! It was unbelievable . . . until he passed a pool of clear water, and saw his reflection. Then he knew he was becoming human—again.
