Authors: George England
A slight sound, there behind him in the room, set his heart flailing
madly.
His hand froze to the butt of the automatic as he drew back from the
cleft in the wall, and, staring, whirled about, ready to shoot on the
second.
Then he started back. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened and limply
fell his arm. The pistol swung loosely at his side.
"
You?
—" he soundlessly breathed, "You—
here?
"
There at the door of the great empty room, magnificent m her
tiger-skin, the Krag gripped in her supple hand, stood Beatrice.
At him the girl peered eagerly, a second, as though to make
quite sure he was not hurt in any way, to satisfy herself that he was
safe and sound.
Then with a little gasp of relief, she ran to him. Her sandaled feet
lightly disturbed the rubbish on the floor; dust rose. Stern checked
her with an upraised hand.
"Back! Back! Go back, quick!" he formed the words of command on his
trembling lips. The idea of this girl's close proximity to the
beast-horde terrified him, for the moment. "Back! What on earth are
you
here
for?"
"I—I woke up. I found you gone!" she whispered.
"Yes, but didn't you read my letter?
This
is no place for you!"
"I had to come! How could I stay up there, alone, when you—were—oh!
maybe in danger—maybe in need of me?"
"Come!" he commanded, in his perturbation heedless of the look she
gave him. He took her hand. "Come, we must get out of this! It's
too—too near the—"
"The
what?
What
is
it, Allan? Tell me, have you seen them? Do you
know?"
Even excited as the engineer was, he realized that for the first time
the girl had called him by his Christian name. Not even the perilous
situation could stifle the thrill that ran through him at the sound of
it. But all he answered was:
"No, I don't know
what
to call them. Have no idea, as yet. I've seen
them, yes; but what they are, Heaven knows—maybe!"
"Let me see, too!" she pleaded eagerly. "Is it through that crack in
the wall? Is that the place to look?"
She moved toward it, her face blanched with excitement, eyes shining,
lips parted. But Stern held her back. By the shoulder he took her.
"No, no, little girl!" he whispered. "You—you mustn't! Really must
not
, you know. It's too awful!"
Up at him she looked, knowing not what to think or say for a moment.
Their eyes met, there in that wrecked and riven place, lighted by the
dull, misty, morning gray. Then Stern spoke, for in her gaze abode
questions unnumbered.
"I'd much rather you wouldn't look out at them, not just yet," said
he, speaking very low, fearful lest the murmur of his voice might
penetrate the wall. "Just what they are, frankly, there's no telling."
"You mean—?"
"Come back into the arcade, where we'll be safer from discovery, and
we can talk. Not here. Come!"
She obeyed. Together they retreated to the inner court.
"You see," he commented, nodding at the empty water-pail, "I haven't
been to the spring yet. Not very likely to get there for a while,
either, unless—well, unless something pretty radical happens. I think
these chaps have settled down for a good long stay in their happy
hunting-ground, after the fight and the big feast. It's sort of a
notion I've got, that this place, here, is some ancient, ceremonial
ground of theirs."
"You mean, on account of the tower?"
He nodded.
"Yes, if they've got any religious ideas at all, or rather
superstitions, such would very likely center round the most
conspicuous object in their world. Probably the spring is a regular
voodoo hangout. The row, last night, must have been a sort of periodic
argument to see who was going to run the show."
"But," exclaimed the girl, in alarm—"but if they
do
stay a while,
what about us? We simply must have water!"
"True enough. And, inasmuch as we can't drink brine and don't know
where there's any other spring, it looks as though we'd either have to
make up to these fellows or wade into them, doesn't it? But we'll get
water safe enough, never fear. Just now, for the immediate present, I
want to get my bearings a little, before going to work.
They
seem to
be resting up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree. Now, if
they'd only all go to sleep, it'd be a walk-over!"
The girl looked at him, very seriously.
"You mustn't go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "I
just won't let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much have
you really found out about them—whatever they are."
"Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human
things, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and
yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few
scattered blacks. You know blacks
are
immune to several
germ-infections that destroy other races."
"Yes. And you mean—?"
"It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate
survivors of that other time."
"So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti
and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?"
"Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history!
If
my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you
can easily imagine what must have happened."
"For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some
sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a
while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have
been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads,
steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of
that wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while—"
"Yes? What
then?
"
"Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all. It must have!
History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint
L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off
French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice—to
make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods
districts, at any rate. And
we
—have had a thousand, Beatrice, since
the white man died!"
She thought a moment, and shook her head.
"What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horribly
fascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, or
written! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned and
falling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, language
and arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a few
patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything
changing, dying, stopping—and the ever-increasing yet degenerating
people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild—taking to
the fields, the forests, the mountains—going down, down, back toward
the primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery,
to—what?"
"To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals,
retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this,
according to
one
theory."
"Is there another?" she asked eagerly.
"Yes, and I wish we had the shade of Darwin, of Haeckel or of Clodd
here with us to help us work it out!"
"How do you imagine it?"
"Why, like this. Maybe, after all, even the entire black race was
swept out along with the others, too. Perhaps you and I were really
the only two human beings left alive in the world."
"Yes, but in that case, how—?"
"How came
they
here? Listen! May they not be the product of some
entirely different process of development? May not some animal stock,
under changed environment, have easily evolved them? May not some
other semi-human or near-human race be now in process of arising, here
on earth, eventually to conquer and subdue it all again?"
For a moment she made no answer. Her breath came a little quickly as
she tried to grasp the full significance of this tremendous concept.
"In a million years, or so," the engineer continued, "may not the
descendants of these things once more be men, or something very like
them? In other words, aren't we possibly witnessing the recreation of
the human type? Aren't
these
the real pithecanthropi erecti,
rather than the brown-skinned, reddish-haired creatures of the
biological text-books? There's our problem!"
She made no answer, but a sudden overmastering curiosity leaped into
her eyes.
"Let me see them for myself! I must! I will!"
And before he could detain her, the girl had started back into the
room whence they had come.
"No, no! No, Beatrice!" he whispered, but she paid no heed to him.
Across the littered floor she made her way. And by the time Stern
could reach her side, she had set her face to the long, crumbling
crack in the wall and with a burning eagerness was peering out into
the forest.
Stern laid a hand on her shoulder, striving to draw her away.
This spectacle, it seemed to him, was no fit sight for her to gaze on.
But she shrugged her shoulders as if to say: "I'm not a child! I'm
your equal, now, and I must see!" So the engineer desisted. And he,
too, set his eye to the twisting aperture.
At sight of the narrow segment of forest visible through it, and of
the several members of the Horde, a strong revulsion came upon him.
Up welled a deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and
women as they once had been—the people of the other days. Stern
almost seemed to behold them again, those tall, athletic,
straight-limbed men; those lithe, deep-breasted women, fair-skinned
and with luxuriant hair; all alike now plunged for a thousand years in
the abyss of death and of eternal oblivion.
Never before had the engineer realized how dear, how infinitely close
to him his own race had been. Never had he so admired its diverse
types of force and beauty, as now, now when all were but a dream.
"Ugh!" thought he, disgusted beyond measure at the sight before him.
"And all
these
things are just as much alike as so many ants in a
hill! I question if they've got the reason and the socialized
intelligence of ants!"
He heard the girl breathe quick, as she, too, watched what was going
on outside. A certain change had taken place there. The mist had
somewhat thinned away, blown by the freshening breeze through Madison
Forest and by the higher-rising sun. Both watchers could new see
further into the woods; and both perceived that the Horde was for the
most part disposing itself to sleep.
Only a few vague, uncertain figures were now moving about, with a
strangely unsteady gait, weak-kneed and simian.
In the nearest group, which Stern had already had a chance to study,
all save one of the creatures had lain down. The man and woman could
quite plainly hear the raucous and bestial snoring of some half-dozen
of the gorged Things.
"Come away, you've seen enough, more than enough!" he whispered in the
girl's ear.
She shook her head.
"No, no!" she answered, under her breath. "How horrible—and yet, how
wonderful!"
Then a misfortune happened; trivial yet how direly pregnant!
For Stern, trying to readjust his position, laid his right hand on the
wall above his head.
A little fragment of loose marble, long since ready to fall, dislodged
itself and bounced with a sharp click against the steel I-beam over
which they were both peeking.
The sound, perhaps, was no greater than you would make in snapping an
ordinary lead-pencil in your fingers; yet on the instant three of the
Things raised their bulbous and exaggerated heads in an attitude of
intense, suspicious listening. Plain to see that their senses, at
least, excelled those of the human being, even as a dog's might.
The individual which, alone of them all, had been standing, wheeled
suddenly round and made a step or two toward the building. Both
watchers saw him with terrible distinctness, there among the sumacs
and birches, with the beauty of which he made a shocking contrast.
Plain now was the simian aspect, plain the sidelong and uncertain
gait, bent back and crooked legs, the long, pendulous arms and dully
ferocious face.
And as the Thing listened, its hair bristling, it thrust its
villainous, apelike head well forward. Open fell the mouth, revealing
the dog-teeth and the blue, shriveled-looking gums.
A wrinkle creased the low, dull brow. Watching with horrified
fascination, Stern and Beatrice beheld—and heard—the creature sniff
the air, as though taking up some scent of danger or of the hunt.
Then up came the right arm; they saw the claw-hand with a spear, poise
itself a moment. From the open mouth burst with astounding force and
suddenness a snarling yowl, inarticulate, shrill, horrible beyond all
thinking.
An instant agitation took place all through the forest. The watchers
could see only a small, fan-like space of it—and even this, only a
few rods from the building—yet by the confused, vague noise that
began, they knew the alarm had been given to the whole Horde.
Here, there, the cry was repeated. A shifting, moving sound began. In
the visible group, the Things were getting to their handlike feet,
standing unsteadily on their loose-skinned, scaly legs, gawping about
them, whining and clicking with disgusting sounds.
Sudden, numbing fear seized Beatrice. Now for the first time she
realized the imminent peril; now she regretted her insistence on
seeing the Horde at close range.
She turned, pale and shaken; and her trembling hand sought the
engineer's.