Northwest of Earth (15 page)

“But—you wish to die, then?”

“Better the real thing than a living death like this,” he said. “At least I’ll have a little more excitement first.”

“But, what of your food? There’s nothing to keep you alive, even if you escape the greater dangers. Why, you’ll dare not even lie down on the grass at night—it would eat you alive! You have no chance at all to live if you leave this grove—and me.”

“If I must die, I shall,” he said. “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve made up my mind. I could explore the Temple and so come on
it
and die. But do
something
I must, and it seems to me my best chance is in trying to reach some country where food grows before I starve. It’s worth trying. I can’t go on like this.”

She looked at him miserably, tears brimming her sherry eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say a word her eyes strayed beyond his shoulder and suddenly she smiled, a dreadful, frozen little smile.

“You will not go,” she said. “Death has come for us now.”

She said it so calmly, so unafraid that he did not understand until she pointed beyond him. He turned.

The air between them and the shrine was curiously agitated. As he watched, it began to resolve itself into a nebulous blue mist that thickened and darkened … blurry tinges of violet and green began to blow through it vaguely, and then by imperceptible degrees a flush of rose appeared in the mist—deepened, thickened, contracted into burning scarlet that seared his eyes, pulsed alively—and he knew that it had come.

An aura of menace seemed to radiate from it, strengthening as the mist strengthened, reaching out in hunger toward his mind. He felt it as tangibly as he saw it—cloudy danger reaching out avidly for them both.

The girl was not afraid. Somehow he knew this, though he dared not turn, dared not wrench his eyes from that hypnotically pulsing scarlet … She whispered very softly from behind him.

“So I die with you, I am content.” And the sound of her voice freed him from the snare of the crimson pulse.

He barked a wolfish laugh, abruptly—welcoming even this diversion from the eternal idyl he had been living—and the gun leaping to his hand spurted a long blue flame so instantly that the girl behind him caught her breath. The steel-blue dazzle illumined the gathering mist lividly, passed through it without obstruction and charred the ground beyond. Smith set his teeth and swung a figure-eight pattern of flame through and through the mist, lacing it with blue heat. And when that finger of fire crossed the scarlet pulse the impact jarred the whole nebulous cloud violently, so that its outlines wavered and shrank, and the pulse of crimson sizzled under the heat—shriveled—began to fade in desperate haste.

Smith swept the ray back and forth along the redness, tracing its pattern with destruction, but it faded too swiftly for him. In little more than an instant it had paled and disembodied and vanished save for a fading flush of rose, and the blue-hot blade of his flame sizzled harmlessly through the disappearing mist to sear the ground beyond. He switched off the heat, then, and stood breathing a little unevenly as the death-cloud thinned and paled and vanished before his eyes, until no trace of it was left and the air glowed lucid and transparent once more.

The unmistakable odor of burning flesh caught at his nostrils, and he wondered for a moment if the Thing had indeed materialized a nucleus of matter, and then he saw that the smell came from the seared grass his flame had struck. The tiny, furry blades were all writhing away from the burnt spot, straining at their roots as if a wind blew them back and from the blackened area a thick smoke rose, reeking with the odor of burnt meat. Smith, remembering their vampire habits, turned away, half nauseated.

The girl had sunk to the sand behind him, trembling violently now that the danger was gone.

“Is—it dead?” she breathed, when she could master her quivering mouth.

“I don’t know. No way of telling. Probably not.”

“What will—will you do now?”

He slid the heat-gun back into its holster and settled the belt purposefully.

“What I started out to do.”

The girl scrambled up in desperate haste.

“Wait!” she gasped, “wait!” and clutched at his arm to steady herself. And he waited until the trembling had passed. Then she went on, “Come up to the Temple once more before you go.”

“All right. Not a bad idea. It may be a long time before my next—meal.”

And so again they crossed the fur-soft grass that bore down upon them in long ripples from every part of the meadow.

The Temple rose dim and unreal before them, and as they entered blue twilight folded them dreamily about. Smith turned by habit toward the gallery of the drinkers, but the girl laid upon his arms a hand that shook a little, and murmured, “Come this way.”

He followed in growing surprise down the hallway through the drifting mists and away from the gallery he knew so well. It seemed to him that the mist thickened as they advanced, and in the uncertain light he could never be sure that the walls did not waver as nebulously as the blurring air. He felt a curious impulse to step through their intangible barriers and out of the hall into—what?

Presently steps rose under his feet, almost imperceptibly, and after a while the pressure on his arm drew him aside. They went in under a low, heavy arch of stone and entered the strangest room he had ever seen. It appeared to be seven-sided, as nearly as he could judge through the drifting mist, and curious, converging lines were graven deep in the floor.

It seemed to him that forces outside his comprehension were beating violently against the seven walls, circling like hurricanes through the dimness until the whole room was a maelstrom of invisible tumult.

When he lifted his eyes to the wall, he knew where he was. Blazoned on the dim stone, burning through the twilight like some other-dimensional fire, the scarlet pattern writhed across the wall.

The sight of it, somehow, set up a commotion in his brain, and it was with whirling head and stumbling feet that he answered to the pressure on his arm. Dimly he realized that he stood at the very center of those strange, converging lines, feeling forces beyond reason coursing through him along paths outside any knowledge he possessed.

Then for one moment arms clasped his neck and a warm, fragrant body pressed against him, and a voice sobbed in his ear.

“If you must leave me, then go back through the Door, beloved—life without you—more dreadful even than a death like this …” A kiss that stung of blood clung to his lips for an instant; then the clasp loosened and he stood alone.

Through the twilight he saw her dimly outlined against the Word. And he thought, as she stood there, that it was as if the invisible current beat bodily against her, so that she swayed and wavered before him, her outlines blurring and forming again as the forces from which he was so mystically protected buffeted her mercilessly.

And he saw knowledge dawning terribly upon her face, as the meaning of the Word seeped into her mind. The sweet brown face twisted hideously, the blood-red lips writhed apart to shriek a Word—in a moment of clarity he actually saw her tongue twisting incredibly to form the syllables of the unspeakable thing never meant for human lips to frame. Her mouth opened into an impossible shape … she gasped in the blurry mist and shrieked aloud …

IV

Smith was walking along a twisting path so scarlet that he could not bear to look down, a path that wound and unwound and shook itself under his feet so that he stumbled at every step. He was groping through a blinding mist clouded with violet and green, and in his ears a dreadful whisper rang—the first syllable of an unutterable Word … Whenever he neared the end of the path it shook itself under him and doubled back, and weariness like a drug was sinking into his brain, and the sleepy twilight colors of the mist lulled him, and—

“He’s waking up!” said an exultant voice in his ear.

Smith lifted heavy eyelids upon a room without walls—a room wherein multiple figures extending into infinity moved to and fro in countless hosts …

“Smith! NW! Wake up!” urged that familiar voice from somewhere near.

He blinked. The myriad diminishing figures resolved themselves into the reflections of two men in a steel-walled room, bending over him. The friendly, anxious face of his partner, Yarol the Venusian, leaned above the bed.

“By Pharol, NW,” said the well-remembered, ribald voice, “you’ve been asleep for a week! We thought you’d never come out of it—must have been an awful brand of whisky!”

Smith managed a feeble grin—amazing how weak he felt—and turned an inquiring gaze upon the other figure.

“I’m a doctor,” said that individual, meeting the questing stare. “Your friend called me in three days ago and I’ve been working on you ever since. It must have been all of five or six days since you fell into this coma—have you any idea what caused it?”

Smith’s pale eyes roved the room. He did not find what he sought, and though his weak murmur answered the doctor’s question, the man was never to know it.

“Shawl?”

“I threw the damned thing away,” confessed Yarol. “Stood it for three days and then gave up. That red pattern gave me the worst headache I’ve had since we found that case of black wine on the asteroid. Remember?”

“Where—?”

“Gave it to a space-rat checking out for Venus. Sorry. Did you really want it? I’ll buy you another.”

Smith did not answer, the weakness was rushing up about him in gray waves. He closed his eyes, hearing the echoes of that first dreadful syllable whispering through his head … whisper from a dream … Yarol heard him murmur softly,

“And—I never even knew—her name …”

I

“P
ASS THE WHISKY
, NW,” said Yarol the Venusian persuasively.

Northwest Smith shook the black bottle of Venusian
segir
-whisky tentatively, evoked a slight gurgle, and reached for his friend’s glass. Under the Venusian’s jealous dark gaze he measured out exactly half of the red liquid. It was not very much.

Yarol regarded his share of the drink disconsolately.

“Broke again,” he murmured. “And me so thirsty.” His glance of cherubic innocence flashed along the temptingly laden counters of the Martian saloon wherein they sat. His face with its look of holy innocence turned to Smith’s, the wise black gaze meeting the Earthman’s pale-steel look questioningly. Yarol lifted an arched brow.

“How about it?” he suggested delicately. “Mars owes us a drink anyhow, and I just had my heat-gun recharged this morning. I think we could get away with it.”

Under the table he laid a hopeful hand on his gun. Smith grinned and shook his head.

“Too many customers,” he said. “And you ought to know better than to start anything here. It isn’t healthful.”

Yarol shrugged resigned shoulders and drained his glass with a gulp.

“Now what?” he demanded.

“Well, look around. See anyone here you know? We’re open for business—any kind.”

Yarol twirled his glass wistfully and studied the crowded room from under his lashes. With those lashes lowered he might have passed for a choir boy in any of Earth’s cathedrals. But too dark a knowledge looked out when they rose for that illusion to continue long.

It was a motley crowd the weary black gaze scrutinized—hard-faced Earthmen in space-sailors’ leather, sleek Venusians with their sidelong, dangerous eyes, Martian drylanders muttering the blasphemous gutturals of their language, a sprinkling of outlanders and half-brutes from the wide-flung borders of civilization. Yarol’s eyes returned to the dark, scarred face across the table. He met the pallor of Smith’s no-colored gaze and shrugged.

“No one who’d buy us a drink,” he sighed. “I’ve seen one or two of ‘em before, though. Take those two space-rats at the next table: the little red-faced Earthman—the one looking over his shoulder—and the drylander with an eye gone. See? I’ve heard they’re hunters.”

“What for?”

Yarol lifted his shoulders in the expressive Venusian shrug. His brows rose too, quizzically.

“No one knows what they hunt—but they run together.”

“Hm-m.” Smith turned a speculative stare toward the neighboring table. “They look more hunted than hunting, if you ask me.”

Yarol nodded. The two seemed to share one fear between them, if over-the-shoulder glances and restless eyes spoke truly. They huddled together above their
segir
glasses, and though they had the faces of hard men, inured to the spaceway dangers, the look on those faces was curiously compounded of many unpleasant things underlying a frank, unreasoning alarm. It was a look Smith could not quite fathom—a haunted, uneasy dread with nameless things behind it.

“They do look as if Black Pharol were one jump behind,” said Yarol. “Funny, too. I’ve always heard they were pretty tough, both of ‘em. You have to be, in their profession.”

Said a husky half-whisper in their very ears,

“Perhaps they found what they were hunting.”

It produced an electric stillness. Smith moved almost imperceptibly sidewise in his chair, the better to clear his gun, and Yarol’s slim fingers hovered above his hip. They turned expressionless faces toward the speaker.