Collected short fiction, p.388
Collected Short Fiction, page 388
Amazing, fascinating, was the beauty of that flower.
Yet the first sleep-drugged glimpse of it filled Craig with monstrous dread. Shimmering with a blue that was cold as arctic twilight, the petals formed a wondrous ten-foot bowl of sapphire radiance.
A bowl of hellish fire!
Twin black filaments reached like living whips above the bowl’s rim. At their tips hung brilliant little spheres of frigid violet. The whips crawled and wavered. The little globes lifted and fell.
They lifted and fell.
Lifted—fell—
Craig watched them. He followed their slow, monotonous motion. They seemed presently to be returning his gaze. He began to wonder dimly if they were really eyes.
A vague alarm stirred him faintly.
HE WAS getting sleepy again. It must have been the swaying of the spheres that had made Ann sleep at her post. He tried to turn, to look at her. He was shocked with a cold sudden impact of apprehension, for Ann.
But he couldn’t move.
His eyes could not leave the little Violet orbs that rose and fell, waxed and waned, slowly rose and fell.
Then he preceived the perfume. It was sweet, almost insipid. Vaguely, he saw that it had been sprayed toward him. It came in a pinkish, shining cloud, from some unseen source within the giant, bright calyx. He drifted away into the roseate mist of it—
Into shining pinkish cloud-caverns of sleep.
He sighed and closed his eyes. The flower had commanded him to sleep. He was exhausted, from eternal effort with the paddle. It was Ann’s duty to keep watch. It was right for him to sleep—
But he heard Ann’s sleepy little whimpering sob. A sudden sharp alarm penetrated his deadened mind. He forced his eyes open, against a leaden weight of sleep.
And saw black horror crawling out of the water!
Like slender cruel black snakes, the roots of the plant writhed out from beneath the broad floating leaves, and lifted evil coils into the canoe.
The tentacles were creeping toward Ann.
Craig tried to shout a warning. But that strange perfume had paralyzed him. No sound came from his dry throat. And the cold light of the swaying, hypnotic orbs was suddenly stern.
They looked angry. They were like Maddrey’s insane glacial eyes. And Craig was afraid of them. It was fear that stiffened all his body with a paralytic rigor.
The black tentacles writhed about Ann’s white, sleeping body. Thin shining coils whipped around her limbs. Black circular suction disks—that looked like ugly serpent-heads—fastened to her soft flesh.
She woke, abruptly.
“Weston! Oh, West—”
The sheer, sobbing horror of her cry sent a ripple of agony through Craig’s tense, fear-chilled body. Desperately, with all his will, he fought that strange hypnotic rigor. But he could not break it.
As if clutched in some nightmare, he watched helplessly.
The black tentacles lifted Ann. She screamed again, and struggled frantically. The clinging black coils yielded to her struggles, and yet held fast. The suction disks clung, lifted her out of the canoe.
Nerveless, rigid, drenched with cold sweat of horror, Craig could only watch.
He saw the little horny black finger that opposed the suction disk, at the end of each thin tentacle. Those fingers began to explore Ann’s body, moving with a slow horrible undulant motion.
Deliberately, they stripped off her ragged clothing. Curiously, they carressed her long white thighs, all the smooth curves of her body, the full ivory bowls of her breasts.
Slowly, cruelly, the black coils grew tighter about her white, fighting loveliness. Like black wires, they cut into her flesh. Red drops oozed from about the black disks cupped against her long white limbs, her breasts, her throat.
Once more she screamed, with the breath forced from her lungs by that crushing pressure. It was a choked, bubbling, awful cry:
“West—Weston!”
The horror of that appeal, somehow, cleft Craig’s bonds of dread. Perhaps the hypnotic attention of those icy violet orbs had momentarily shifted from him. He dragged his eyes from them.
He was free!
Snatching the copper knife, that Ann had dropped in the bottom of the canoe, he surged to his feet. She made a last little sob of agony, as those torturing tentacles drew convulsively tighter, about her long nude body.
A black whip struck, snake-like, at Craig.
He ducked under it. Catching up the paddle, he drove the canoe with one deep stroke between those thick floating pads. And he leapt from it, into that great bowl of sapphire flame.
THE shining petals closed upon him.
They were like cold, boneless flesh. They were silken-soft. Yet they pressed about him with a crushing, smothering strength. And black filaments whipped about his throat, like garroting wires.
Craig gasped for breath. He kept his arms free of the whipping, clinging tentacles. The copper blade slashed again and again, ripping at the heart of the monster calyx.
The struggles of bright petals and black whips became convulsive, as if with agony. Craig was drenched in a viscid, sickly-sweet liquid. It was like unpleasant blood.
Abruptly the smothering petals opened again. He was flung out into warm red water. Maddened black limbs were beating it to crimson froth. A writhing coil gripped him, dragged him beneath the surface.
Strangling, he clutched it with one hand, hacked at it desperately. Something snatched at his foot—some deadly, unseen denizen of the river. He kicked free of it. The clinging tentacle parted.
Half drowned, he fought his way upward.
The sentient plant had become a frightful mass of agony and death. Black tentacles were rending the thick green pads. The giant, ice-blue bloom had toppled into the water. Swiftly, uncannily, the blue glow died. The petals withered, blackened.
“Ann!” Craig was breathless, hoarse with an awful apprehension. “Ann—Ann!”
The empty canoe was floating away. Bubbles broke out of the frothy crimson water. The dying tentacles had dragged Ann under.
CHAPTER IX
FLIGHT’S END
AGAIN Craig felt the brush of some alert, quick-moving thing beneath the unquiet water. Unseen jaws closed on his ankle, with an agonizing pressure, Once more he was drawn beneath the red-frothing surface.
He doubled himself, slashed down with the copper blade. It raked against an armored body. He kicked out desperately, came free. Back at the surface, gasping for breath, he searched for Ann again.
And still she was gone.
Chilled with apprehension, Craig caught his breath. He dived again. His eyes were open, but he could see only a few feet through the stinging murky crimson. Gripping the knife, he pulled himself down. Down. He felt the foul mud of the bottom.
Then a slender, greenly shining antenna touched him with stinging pain. He glimpsed the hideous, black-armored thing where frightful jaws had caught Ann’s naked body. A monstrous, crab-like crustacean.
Huge stalked eyes peered at him, above her feebly struggling limbs. They were crimson moons of evil. Craig swam toward them, stabbing with the copper knife. Green antennae whipped at him, agonizing as Maddrey’s venomed lash.
His dull blade failed to penetrate the tough black armor. His breath was gone. Fire was in his lungs. The water was a crushing, oppressive weight. It flowed into his nostrils, stranglingly.
Then a twisting mass of wire-like coils sank down through the dusky redness—black tentacles torn from the dying plant. They touched the hideous dark-armored crab-thing, struck, clung.
Frightful jaws released the nude girl, flashed at Craig. He slashed at the stalked eyes. One evil red moon was severed. The monster let him go, fighting the dying tentacles.
Craig seized Ann’s arm, fought toward the surface. They came up, at last. Ann still clung to consciousness. For a little time they floated in the oily red foam, gasping for breath.
Then Craig saw that the canoe’s anchor rope had been cut or broken, in the battle. It was drifting out, toward the swift current that swept back toward the crimson sea. He released the girl, overtook it, paddled frantically back to pick up Ann before she was attacked again.
She screamed in the red water, before he could reach her.
“Oh, West—something—”
He drove the canoe to her side, pulled her safely aboard. She was shivering with exhaustion and shock. One ankle was marked by the jaws of the giant crustacean. Her white throat, her back, and her breasts, all were marked with little red circles, from the sucking disks of the deadly flower.
Craig gave her his wet jacket.
“I think we had better paddle upriver a way, before we rest again,” he said breathlessly. “To a quieter vicinity.”
She saw his little weary grin.
“You aren’t angry, Weston?” she whispered. “It’s all my fault! I saw the flower coming. But something made me go to sleep.”
Craig managed to smile.
“I’m glad,” he gasped. “Almost glad it happened. You know, Ann—I wasn’t afraid when I dived after you. It’s the first time I haven’t been afraid.”
The troglodyte rose again. Squatting on a snag near the bank, it had watched the struggle in the river, blinking evil yellow-red eyes. It flew low above, as they paddled on, hissing and screaming.
BENEATH those green, ominous wings, Craig and Ann went ahead. They fought an ever-swifter current. It was impossible to advance against it in the middle of the stream. They were forced back into the perilous shallows, in the shadow of the walling, many-colored jungle.
Always they were tired, and always tense with an unresting alertness. They were often hungry. Always sleepless, cramped and aching. But they struggled on, beneath the evil wings.
A time came at last when their flapping follower was joined by two others. Looking back across a mighty bend of the dark river, they saw a wheeling swarm of the green-winged troglodytes.
On the water beneath was a little black dot.
Craig bent hard to the paddle, and Ann took turns. But the swarm gained on them. The dot grew larger. At last they could distinguish Maddrey’s great bulk, bent over his flashing paddle.
“Maddrey!”
Ann was hoarse with a chilling dread.
“We’ll never get away from him—and his whip!”
They had no measure of their flight’s duration. But they had eaten and slept imnumerable times. Their flesh had been wounded, healed, freshly wounded and healed again, until each of them bore many old scars.
Craig knew that his body had been hardened by his battle with the river. A kind of daring hardihood had been born in him, when he fought the black spiders on the hill of moons, and when he dived under the river for Ann, and on a hundred like occasions.
He had even hoped, sometimes, that fear was gone. But always, listening again to the hissing of the troglodyte above, he had felt that man’s grim heritage still clung to him. Now—when he saw that it was Maddrey indeed in the canoe behind—he knew that fear had been only sleeping.
It came upon him with a sickness that left him weak and trembling. Then it touched him with a terrible strength. He dipped the paddle again, and began a desperate race.
Maddrey, with his swarm of monstrous allies, gained steadily. Still he had a madman’s strength. But the race was not ended when, they reached the second fall.
Ann gasped at the spectacle that marched out of the arch of gloom ahead. A white pillar of water came down out of utter darkness. It made a cloud of snowy spray upon the center of a broad, jungle-rimmed lake. The surface of the lake was queerly mottled, with white froth and dull blood-red luminescence.
The voice of the water was a deafening thunder.
Craig stopped paddling. His eyes were fearful.
“Looks like the end,” he shouted to Ann. “It’s the end of the river.” He peered about, with frantic eyes. “And we can’t get through that jungle. We’re caught—between Maddrey and the fall!”
“There must be a way!”
Ann’s dark, frightened eyes looked at the white booming column that dropped through the roof of the cave. It must fall a thousand sheer feet. No way there!
Then hope stiffened her.
“There!”. Her eager cry cleft the voice of the waters. “Beyond the fall—”
Staring through that terrible, thundering curtain, Craig dimly saw the shore beyond. There was a break in the jungle. A mysterious dark slope mounted into black infinity.
“That’s the way!” he shouted. “If we can pass the fall—”
The flapping swarm of troglodytes was close behind him. Faintly, above the thunder of the waters, Craig could hear their sinister screaming. Paddling, he could not look back. But Ann’s white face was drawn and terrible with fear.
Dimly, above the roaring, he heard Maddrey’s voice. Rusty, it seemed, and strange, as if from lack of use. And it held all of the mad violence of an infuriated bull.
“Wire the disk—and you may live!”
CRAIG raced on. He read the warning in the streak of white that abruptly cleft the scarlet water. But there was no escape. Maddrey was too close behind. Craig bent his back, shot the canoe into the deadly current.
“Stop!”
Maddrey’s bellow was faint, beneath that tremendous sound, as the whisper of a child.
“Stop—or perish!”
Craig caught his breath, and drove ahead. A great hand flung the bow aside, so swiftly that he could hardly keep them upright. The deadly jungle swept past in a racing blur.
Ahead lay the swift white road of the current, running straight into the fearful, crashing turmoil of white water and smothering mist beneath the fall. Tossing mountains of spray hid all beyond.
Desperately, Craig fought to cross that deadly current.
The roaring drowned all sound of Ann’s voice. But he read the words from her pale, frightened lips “He came on—he’s close behind!” Fainter than a breath he heard a troglodyte’s scream.
His muscles cracked to the effort of his paddle strokes. Yet all his strength seemed in vain against the terrific force that hurled them toward the fall.
White foam broke Over the gunwales. Cold spray drenched them. Violent beyond the meaning of sound, the vibration of crashing tons of water battered and deafened and dazed them.
Ann was bailing frantically. Despite all Craig’s efforts, the canoe was swept aside. It spun like a top. He lost all sense of direction.
Snap!
The paddle was a useless stick in his hands. The splintered, smooth-worn handle dropped from nerveless fingers. Craig looked up helplessly, to face the white death of hurtling water.
But that pillar of supernal sound and fury was suddenly behind. Another freakish current had swept them away. One moment of safety!
Craig bent again. Frantically he paddled with his hands, toward the low dark shore. Another mad torrent caught the canoe. A white plume of spray gave him warning of the rock.
He stood up, swayed to grasp Ann’s arm.
Crash!
The canoe struck the rock, with a shocking, splintering force. Craig leapt at the impact, lifting Ann. Amid flying fragments of the shattered canoe, they were flung over the rock.
Cold black water swallowed them.
Still clinging to Ann, Craig battled back to the surface. He found himself in the eddy beyond the rock. Behind was the fall, with savage currents racing into the chaos of spray beneath it. Ahead was the dark slope they had glimpsed—
The way, might it be, to the world above?
His frantic feet touched bottom. Ann found her footing, and they waded ashore. Shivering with unaccustomed cold, they looked back. Ann uttered a little sobbing moan of fear.
A long canoe drove out of the mist, attended by a green-winged, monstrous horde.
“Maddrey!” whispered Ann. “He’ll never give up!”
They stumbled up the dark slope. It was barren of any luminiferous life. A faint light came up across it, however, from the dully shining jungle beyond the fall.
Rugged, water-carved rocks grew steeper ahead. The sheer, cragged walls narrowed upon them, and the black roof pressed lower. The way became an appalling, constricted maw of darkness.
“A tunnel?” Still Ann was hopeful. “A passage?”
“Once it was a passage.” Craig peered into the blackness, doubtfully. “Once the river flowed through here. But the water has stopped. The passage may be closed—”
Another apprehension turned his glance behind.
HE saw Maddrey’s canoe. The black-bearded giant steered it around the menace of the rocks, drove it across the eddy, beached it safely. Maddrey followed them up the slope, with his horde of flapping reptiles.
Craig broke icy fetters of fear. Gasping for breath, he seized Ann’s arm. Panting, they stumbled up the slope. Soon their bodies were aching from the unwonted effort of running.
A wall of black granite halted them.
Frantically, they searched to right and left, peered above. But the boulder blocked the way, with a million tons of stone.
“So this is the end!”
Craig’s whisper was faint and dry with dread.
“This was the way—once. Until that boulder fell—maybe a million years ago. The river found a new way—down through the roof.
“But we—we’re corpered!”
They waited beneath the rock, for Maddrey and his monsters.
CHAPTER X
THE MAN AFRAID
BATHED in a weird, flickering green, from the flapping wings of his hideous retainers, Maddrey came plunging up the dark slope. Blackened from exposure, scarred from old wounds, his huge hairy body was still powerful. His bearded face was seamed, haggard. Into his mad blue eyes had come a new feral wildness.
In one great hand he gripped a massive club of black wood, copper-studded. A copper knife gleamed in his broad crimson belt. The shining purple whip was looped at his side. Slung from his shoulders was the heavy rusted mechanism of the disruptor disk.
