Authors: George England
"Scant pint, maybe!" said he. "And I've got to have a gallon, at the
very least. To say nothing of drink for two people!
And
the horde,
there, camping round the spring. Je-ru-salem!"
Softly he whistled to himself; then, trying to solve this vital,
unexpected problem, fell to pacing the floor.
Day, slowly looming through the window, showed his features set and
hard. Close at hand, the breath of morning winds stirred the treetops.
But of the usual busy twitter and gossip of birds among the branches,
now there was none. For down below there, in the forest, the ghoulish
vampire revels still held sway.
Stern, at a loss, swore hotly under his breath.
Then suddenly he found himself; he came to a decision.
"
I'm
going down," he vowed. "I'm going down, to
see!
"
Now that his course lay clear before him, the man felt an
instant and a huge relief. Whatever the risks, the dangers, this
adventuring was better than a mere inaction, besieged there in the
tower by that ugly, misshapen horde.
First of all, as he had done on the first morning of the awakening,
when he had left the girl asleep, he wrote a brief communication to
forestall any possible alarm on her part. This, scrawled with charcoal
on a piece of smooth hide, ran:
"Have had to go down to get water and lay of the land. Absolutely
necessary. Don't be afraid. Am between you and them, well armed. Will
leave you both the rifle and the shotgun. Stay here, and have no fear.
Will come back as soon as possible. ALLAN."
He laid this primitive letter where, on awakening, she could not fail
to see it. Then, making sure again that all the arms were fully
charged, he put the rifle and the gun close beside his "note," and saw
to it that his revolvers lay loosely and conveniently in the holsters
she had made for him.
One more reconnaissance he made at the front window. This done, he
took the water-pail and set off quietly down the stairs. His feet were
noiseless as a cat's.
At every landing he stopped, listening intently. Down, ever down,
story by story he crept.
To his chagrin—though he had half expected worse—he found that the
boiler-explosion of the previous night had really made the way
impassible, from the third story downward. These lowest flights of
steps had been so badly broken, that now they gave no access to the
arcade.
All that remained of them was a jumbled mass of wreckage, below the
gaping hole in the third-floor hallway.
"
That
means," said Stern to himself, "I've got to find another way
down. And quick, too!"
He set about the task with a will. Exploration of several lateral
corridors resulted in nothing; but at last good fortune led him to
stairs that had remained comparatively uninjured. And down these he
stole, pail in one hand, revolver ready in the other, listening,
creeping, every sense alert.
He found himself, at length, in the shattered and dismembered wreckage
of the once-famed "Marble Court." Fallen now were the carved and
gilded pillars; gone, save here or there for a fragment, the wondrous
balustrade. One of the huge newel-posts at the bottom lay on the
cracked floor of marble squares; the other, its metal chandelier still
clinging to it, lolled drunkenly askew.
But Stern had neither time nor inclination to observe these woful
changes. Instead, he pressed still forward, and, after a certain time
of effort, found himself in the arcade once more.
Here the effects of the explosion were very marked. A ghastly hole
opened into the subcellar below; masses of fallen ceiling blocked the
way; and every pane of glass in the shop-fronts had shattered down.
Smoke had blackened everything. Ashes and dirt, ad infinitum,
completed the dreary picture, seen there by the still insufficient
light of morning.
But Stern cared nothing for all this. It even cheered him a trifle.
"In case of a mix-up," thought he, "there couldn't be a better place
for ambushing these infernal cannibals—for mowing them down,
wholesale—for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!"
And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward Madison
Forest and the pine-tree gate.
As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butt
tightened.
"They mustn't see me—
first!
" said he to himself.
Into a littered wreck of an office at the right of the exit he
silently crept. Here, he knew, the outer wall of the building was
deeply fissured. He hoped he might be able to find some peep-hole
where, unseen, he could peer out on the bestial mob.
He set his water-pail down, and on hands and knees, hardly breathing,
taking infinite pains not to stir the loose rubbish on the floor, not
even to crunch the fallen lumps of mortar, forward he crawled.
Yes, there
was
a glimmer of light through the crack in the wall.
Stern silently wormed in between a corroded steel I-beam and a cracked
granite block, about the edges of which the small green tendrils of a
vine had laid their hold.
This way, then that, he craned his neck. And all at once, with a sharp
breath, he grew rigid in horrified, eager attention.
"Great Lord!" he whispered. "
What?
"
Though, from the upper stories and by torch-light, he had already
formed some notion of the Horde, he had in no wise been prepared for
what he now was actually beholding through a screen of sumacs that
grew along the wall outside.
"Why—why, this can't be real!" thought he. "It—must be some damned
hallucination. Eh? Am I awake? What the deuce!"
Paling a little, his eyes staring, mouth agape, the engineer stayed
there for a long minute unable to credit his own senses. For now he,
he, the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century, was
witnessing the strangest sight that ever a civilized being had looked
upon in the whole history of the world.
No vision of DeQuincey, no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for
grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all the
fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish
bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man
of science and cold fact.
"Why—what
are
these?" he asked himself, shuddering despite himself
at the mere sight of what lay outside there in the forest. "What? Men?
Animals? Neither! God help me, what—
what are these things?
"
An almost irresistible repugnance, a compelling aversion, more
of the spirit than of the flesh, instantly seized the man at sight of
even the few members of the Horde which lay within his view.
Though he had been expecting to see something disgusting, something
grotesque and horrible, his mind was wholly unprepared for the real
hideousness of these creatures, now seen by the ever-strengthening
light of day.
And slowly, as he stared, the knowledge dawned on him that here was a
monstrous problem to face, far greater and more urgent than he had
foreseen; here were factors not yet understood; here, the product of
forces till then not even dreamed of by his scientific mind.
"I—I certainly did expect to find a small race," thought he. "Small,
and possibly misshapen, the descendants, maybe, of a few survivors of
the cataclysm. But
this—!
"
And again, fascinated by the ghastly spectacle, he laid his eye to the
chink in the wall, and looked.
A tenuous fog still drifted slowly among the forest trees, veiling the
deeper recesses. Yet, near at hand, within the limited segment of
vision which the engineer commanded, everything could be made out with
reasonable distinctness.
Some of the Things (for so he mentally named them, knowing no better
term) were squatting, lying or moving about, quite close at hand. The
fire by the spring had now almost died down. It was evident that the
revel had ceased, and that the Horde was settling down to
rest—glutted, no doubt, with the raw and bleeding flesh of the
conquered foe.
Stern could easily have poked his pistol muzzle through the crack in
the wall and shot down many of them. For an instant the temptation lay
strong upon him to get rid of at least a dozen or a score; but
prudence restrained his hand.
"No use!" he told himself. "Nothing to be gained by that. But, once I
get my proper chance at them—!"
And again, striving to observe them with the cool and calculating eye
of science, he studied the shifting, confused picture out there before
him.
Then he realized that the feature which, above all else, struck him as
ghastly and unnatural, was the
color
of the Things.
"Not black, not even brown," said he. "I thought so, last night, but
daylight corrects the impression. Not red, either, or copper-colored.
What
color, then? For Heaven's sake, what?"
He could hardly name it. Through the fog, it struck him as a dull
slate-gray, almost a blue. He recalled that once he had seen a child's
modeling-clay, much-used and very dirty, of the same shade, which
certainly had no designation in the chromatic scale. Some of the
Things were darker, some a trifle lighter—these, no doubt, the
younger ones—but they all partook of this same characteristic tint.
And the skin, moreover, looked dull and sickly, rather mottled and
wholly repulsive, very like that of a Mexican dog.
Like that dog's hide, too, it was sparsely overgrown with whitish
bristles. Here or there, on the bodies of some of the larger Things,
bulbous warts had formed, somewhat like those on a toad's back; and on
these warts the bristles clustered thickly. Stern saw the hair, on the
neck of one of these creatures, crawl and rise like a jackal's, as a
neighbor jostled him; and from the Thing's throat issued a clicking
grunt of purely animal resentment.
"Merciful Heavens! What
are
they?" wondered Stern, again, utterly
baffled for any explanation. "What
can
they be?"
Another, in the group close by, attracted his attention. It was lying
on its side, asleep maybe, its back directly toward the engineer.
Stern clearly saw the narrow shoulders and the thin, long arms,
covered with that white bristling hair.
One sprawling, spatulate, clawlike hand lay on the forest moss. The
twisted little apelike legs, disproportionately short, were curled up;
the feet, prehensile and with a well-marked thumb on each, twitched a
little now and then. The head, enormously too big for the body, to
which it was joined by a thin neck, seemed to be scantily covered with
a fine, curling down, of a dirty yellowish drab color.
"What a target!" thought the engineer. "At this distance, with my .38,
I could drill it without half trying!"
All at once, another of the group sat up, shoved away a burned-out
torch, and yawned with a noisy, doglike whine Stern got a quick yet
definite glimpse of the sharp canine teeth; he saw that the Thing's
fleshless lips and retreating chin were caked with dried blood. The
tongue he saw was long and lithe and apparently rasped.
Then the creature stood up, balancing on its absurd bandy legs, a
spear in its hand—a flint-pointed spear of crude workmanship.
At full sight of the face, Stern shrank for a moment.
"I've known savages, as such," thought he. "I understand them. I know
animals. They're animals, that's all. But
this
creature—merciful
Heaven!"
And at the realization that it was neither beast nor man, the
engineer's blood chilled within his veins.
Yet he forced himself still to look and to observe, unseen. There was
practically no forehead at all. The nose was but a formless lump of
cartilage, the ears large and pendulous and hairy. Under heavy
brow-ridges, the dull, lackluster eyes blinked stupidly, bloodshot and
cruel. As the mouth closed, Stern noted how the under incisors closed
up over the upper lip, showing a gleam of dull yellowish ivory; a
slaver dripped from the doglike corner of the mouth.
Stern shivered, and drew back.
He realized now that he was in the presence of an unknown semi-human
type, different in all probability from any that had ever yet existed.
It was less their bestiality that disgusted him, than their utter,
hopeless, age-long degeneration from the man-standard.
What race had they descended from? He could not tell. He thought he
could detect a trace of the Mongol in the region of the eye, in the
cheek-bones and the general contour of what, by courtesy, might be
called the face. There were indications, also, of the negroid type,
still stronger. But the color—whence could
that
have come? And the
general characteristics, were not these distinctly simian?
Again he looked. And now one of the pot-bellied little horrors,
shambling and bulbous-kneed, was scratching its warty, blue hide with
its black claws as it trailed along through the forest. It looked up,
grinning and jabbering; Stern saw the teeth that should have been
molars. With repulsion he noted that they were not flat-crowned, but
sharp like a dog's. Through the blue lips they clearly showed.
"Nothing herbivorous here," thought the scientist. "All flesh—food
of—who knows what sort!"
Quickly his mind ran over the outlines of the problem. He knew at once
that these Things were lower than any human race ever recorded, far
lower even than the famed Australian bushmen, who could not even count
as high as five. Yet, strange and more than strange, they had the use
of fire, of the tom-tom, of some sort of voodooism, of flint, of
spears, and of a rude sort of tanning—witness the loin-clouts of hide
which they all wore.
"Worse than any troglodyte!" he told himself. "Far lower than De
Quatrefage's Neanderthal man, to judge from the cephalic index—worse
than that Java skull, the pithecanthropus erectus, itself! And I am
with my living eyes beholding them!"