The Map of the Sky (20 page)

Suddenly they saw an enormous figure pass a few yards in front of them. Without delay, MacReady raised his pistol in the air and ran toward where the creature had vanished. Reynolds, on the contrary, remained motionless, horrified by the monster’s new shape, as the darkness fell on him like a shroud. He had scarcely glimpsed the Martian as it darted across the passageway, but he had seen enough to know that the monster had reached another stage in its metamorphosis. What he had seen was a vaguely humanoid creature, more like one of the demons that had so terrified him as a child than like a spider. And although it appeared slightly hunched as it ran, he thought it looked bigger than Peters. That was all he could say about it. The darkness in the hold had made it impossible even to make out its color. A couple of loud reports interrupted the explorer’s reverie. He deduced from their proximity that the shots had come from MacReady’s gun. Reynolds swallowed hard, trying to overcome the fear that had seeped into his bones, and a few seconds later he found himself running in the same direction as the captain. When Reynolds reached his side, bathed in sweat and panting, he found MacReady peering furiously into the inky blackness stretching beyond the lantern’s glow.

“That bastard is fast,” he said.

“Did you hit it?” said Reynolds, trying to catch his breath.

“I think so, but I’m not sure. Did you see it, Reynolds? It looks like a goddamned orang-utan, but with a kind of forked tail—”

Before MacReady was able to go on, they heard the fire of muskets, followed by a din of shouts and crates crashing to the floor. When the rumpus ended, Reynolds could hear several sailors exclaiming excitedly that they had shot the creature, although their voices appeared to emanate from different areas of the hold. MacReady shook his head ruefully.

“Regroup at the door!” he yelled, the lantern light illuminating his vaporous breath.

With a nod of his head, he ordered Reynolds to follow him. They hurried back to the meeting place and found several of the men already there. The others arrived seconds later, and they were relieved to see that no one was missing. The men huddled near the narrow entrance to one of the passageways, and while the captain tried to form an idea of what had happened from their jumbled accounts, Reynolds leaned against what seemed like a solid pile of crates and observed the scene with a strange ambivalence: the creature he had glimpsed was far more powerful and terrifying than he had imagined in his worst nightmares, and his earlier euphoria at having escaped from his cabin alive was beginning to be eclipsed by the notion that all their attempts at survival would be in vain. But he must banish these morbid thoughts, he told himself; he had to carry on believing there was some hope of survival, however slight.

“I think I hit it,” Ringwald assured them excitedly.

Reynolds looked at him askance, as did the others, because they were all claiming the same thing. Suddenly, a drop of blood appeared on Ringwald’s brow, followed by another, and soon a small trickle was running down his face into the corner of his mouth. Ringwald touched his fingers to his forehead, puzzled, and, verifying that the blood was not coming from him but from above, he peered up at the ceiling. The others did likewise. On top of a very tall pile of crates they were able to make out what looked like a dead body, although all they could see was one leg sticking out at an impossible angle.

“Good God,” muttered Lieutenant Blair.

“Why did the monster put him up there?” Kendricks wondered, equally horrified.

They went on gawping at the leg, dangling like a question mark in the air, until a wave of comprehension began to wash over them. Then, the sea of heads swathed in scarves began bobbing this way and that as, with a growing sense of horror, the sailors confirmed over and over again that no one in the group was missing. Some even instinctively moved away from the man next to them.

“Damnation!” roared MacReady, enraged that the Martian refused to let itself be hunted like any other wild beast. “Who lost sight of his partner?”

The men shrugged as one and exchanged suspicious glances. Apparently no one. But someone must have, Reynolds thought. Then he remembered with a shudder that he had. He had lost sight of MacReady briefly, just after they glimpsed the creature. As though his gesture were a continuation of that thought, Reynolds turned and aimed his pistol at the captain, but MacReady must have reached the same conclusion, for Reynolds found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. The sailors looked on in horror at the two men pointing their weapons at each other. For a few moments there was silence.

“If I were the monster, Reynolds,” MacReady said, cocking his gun, “I would take on your appearance so as not to arouse suspicion.”

The explorer twisted his mouth in disgust.

“I don’t intend to waste my breath talking to you this time, whatever you are,” he replied. “Three.”

The shot from Reynolds’s pistol knocked MacReady’s head back. When it flopped forward again, he stared at Reynolds with a puzzled expression, as though unable to believe he had shot him. Finally, the captain’s legs crumpled and he fell to the floor, where he lay stretched out at their feet. Reynolds gazed at him, amazed at the ease with which he had dispatched the creature.

“Good God, he’s killed the captain!” Lieutenant Blair exclaimed.

Reynolds turned to the others, reassuring them with a wave of his hand.

“Keep calm. This is the monster, not the captain. I lost sight of MacReady for several minutes. Long enough for the creature to kill him and adopt his appearance,” he explained in a steady voice. Then he looked once more at the captain, who was lying faceup in the middle of the circle they had formed. “Pay attention and you will see how the creature’s true form reemerges.”

Their objections silenced, the sailors keenly contemplated MacReady’s body. He had a bullet hole right in the middle of his broad forehead, and death had finally erased his look of permanent irritation, replacing it with a surprisingly affable, almost kindly, expression, far more suited to entering the afterworld without arousing fear or loathing in his fellow spirits. But the minutes went by and the captain’s face failed to undergo any change whatsoever. Perhaps the monster preserved its disguise after death, Reynolds reflected, as the sailors’ anticipation quickly turned to disbelief, and he began to feel uncomfortable under their increasingly mistrustful gaze. He turned to them, shrugging foolishly.

“Well, we may have to wait a little longer,” he apologized.

Allan gave a timid cough.

“Don’t forget that when it changed shape in the cabin it was only wounded,” he reminded him.

“Yes, perhaps that’s it.” Reynolds smiled reassuringly at the men. “Perhaps it cannot change once it is dead.”

“In that case, how can we be sure it isn’t still among us?” Lieutenant Blair asked nervously.

“Because I am the only one who lost sight of his companion,” Reynolds explained.

“And Captain MacReady lost sight of you.” The gigantic Peters stepped forward, his huge machete swinging alarmingly at the end of his arm, his voice booming among the crates like distant thunder.

Reynolds looked uneasily at the suspicious, even angry faces staring back at him.

“Surely you don’t think . . . Oh, God, no,” Reynolds gulped with horror. “I am not the creature, for pity’s sake! Allan, please, tell them . . .”

The gunner gave him a beleaguered look, overwhelmed by the pace and madness of events.

Allan finally spoke in a muffled voice. “Listen, please. This man is Reynolds, believe me. I saw the creature change itself, first into Carson and then into me, and although the likeness is exact, I can assure you there is something that distinguishes it from the original!”

“And what is that, Sergeant?” Lieutenant Blair demanded, looking askance at Reynolds.

“I can’t say exactly . . . ,” the gunner replied apologetically, his hushed voice all but drowned out by the sailors’ anxious murmurs.

“Listen! There is a far easier way of resolving this.” Griffin’s voice pierced the darkness like a tiny ray of light. “We can take down the body and see who it is.”

For a few moments everyone remained silent, amazed that there should be such a simple solution.

“All right!” roared Peters, pointing his machete at the other sailors. “Two of you men see to that, but for the love of God, let it be two of you who know they didn’t lose sight of each other. In the meantime, we will watch Mr. Reynolds. I’m sorry, sir,” he apologized, waving his blade at the explorer’s throat, “but right now you are the other half of the only pair that became separated.”

Shepard and Wallace stepped forward as one.

“We’ll see to it,” said Shepard. “We’re sure we didn’t become separated, aren’t we, Wallace?”

“That’s right, Shepard. We were together all the time,” Wallace said, staring straight ahead with an alarmingly fixed gaze.

“Like Siamese twins we were,” Shepard joked in a peculiar voice that sounded like his but was slightly distorted, as though his tongue were too big for his mouth. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, that same hideous
voice chimed up once more, only this time in the mouth of Wallace. “You said it, Shepard. Closer than a wedded couple: together even in the afterlife.”

Bewildered, Reynolds looked from one sailor to the other, until he noticed with horror the mesh of slimy fibers joining Shepard’s right boot to Wallace’s left one. At that moment, he knew he had killed MacReady pointlessly. And from some vague part of his body, perhaps from the base of his spinal cord, he felt a wave of pure terror coursing through him, through every nerve ending, every ganglion, threatening to paralyze him, to drain all his energy or whatever it was that enabled him to move. The other men looked equally startled.

What happened next is hard to describe. Perhaps a more seasoned narrator would have no difficulty—I am thinking of Wilde or Dumas—but unfortunately it falls to me. Having said that, I shall be as precise as possible in my choice of words so as not to confuse you even more. What happened was that, all of a sudden, before anyone had time to react, the bodies of Shepard and Wallace began to dissolve until they slowly melded into one, their deformed features floating in a glutinous substance like chunks in broth, a hideous fusion of eyes, mouths, and hair. Terrified, Reynolds could not help watching the creature’s metamorphosis with fascination, and increasing alarm, as the issue of that gelatinous substance grew ever larger and more monstrous. And suddenly, like yeast bread in an oven, the slimy creature began to solidify, becoming more compact, its elongated body endowed with powerful muscles and covered in a reddish skin, as though draped in seaweed. When the transformation had finished, the explorer could see that its arms and legs did indeed end in long, razor-sharp talons. He also noticed that what he took to be its head, for no other reason than because it was sitting between its shoulders, had formed into a nightmarish countenance that looked like the result of an unnatural coupling between a wolf and a lamb: it had a pointed snout and a pair of spiral-shaped horns on either side of its massive skull. Then the thing appeared to smile, drawing back its lips like a dog, to reveal a row of small pointed teeth. Without delay,
it turned to Foster, the unfortunate sailor standing on its left, and with a rapid movement sank one of its claws into his stomach, only to pull it out a moment later trailing a slew of organs that spilled onto the floor with a dull plop. Allan’s face turned pale as he watched the jumble of entrails land at his feet, but he was scarcely able to retch politely before the monster wrapped its talons round his throat and lifted him off the floor like a doll. Luckily, Peters roused himself from the state of shock paralyzing all the men and moved toward the creature, swinging his machete. He plunged it forcefully into the creature’s shoulder. The blade sank into its flesh with astonishing ease, and it let out a loud high-pitched wail that echoed among the crates. It automatically released its grip on Allan, who fell to the floor, coughing and spluttering as Peters wrenched out the machete, splattering a greenish spray in all directions, and raised it to strike a second blow. But this time the monster reacted more quickly. It stopped the Indian’s arm by grabbing his wrist and bent it double as easily as a child snapping a twig. The color drained from Peters’s face at the sight of his arm, twisted at an impossible angle, the bone poking out at the elbow, but his suffering was brief, for with another incredibly swift movement, the creature decapitated him with one of its claws. Peters’s head hit one of the boxes with a dull thud before rolling across the floor, a look of bewilderment on his face at having met such a sudden death. Then the monster turned toward the rest of the men, but Griffin, with a composure that startled Reynolds, raised his musket, took aim, and fired straight at the creature’s chest. The impact at such close range propelled the Martian backward. This brought the struggle to a halt for a moment, and those still standing watched the monster writhing on the floor, desperately trying to change shape.

“Finish it off, Kendricks!” Lieutenant Blair ordered the sailor closest to the Martian.

But Kendricks, crouched beside the crates, face splattered with greenish blood, was slow to react. By the time he began moving toward the monster, it had changed itself back into the spiderlike creature that
had fled Reynolds’s cabin and was scuttling toward the hold door, where it quickly vanished into the darkness.

“Where do you think you’re going, you demon from Hell?” Kendricks cried, giving chase.

Lieutenant Blair, Griffin, and the others followed him, and Reynolds suddenly found himself in the hold, once more having survived, while the bodies of his fallen companions lay around him. By the light of the only lantern that had not been snuffed out during the commotion, he made sure there was nothing he could do for any of them, except for the young gunner, who was sitting propped against the wall of crates, a glazed look in his eyes, unaware of what was going on. Reynolds’s first impulse was to flee the hold and look for a safe hiding place, abandoning Allan to his fate. And yet something held him back. Only moments before, when everyone believed he was the creature and were preparing to kill him in cold blood, the gunner had stepped in to defend him against the entire crew. Nor could he forget that Allan had also agreed to hide in his cupboard. But was that display of loyalty reason enough for him to risk his life for the gunner? Since when was he moved by such considerations? He no longer needed Allan, so he could leave him there. Taking him along in his present state would make them both an easy target for the Martian. Just then the gunner raised his head, and Reynolds thought he had at least partially recovered his senses, because Allan managed to look straight at him and whisper his name.