by Jerry
At present, I find myself in the interplanetary penal colony of Phobos where I am being held for reasons peculiar to the Hayko Unit. I expect death most any day. In the meantime, I spend much of my numbered hours gazing out of my prison into the realms of space. The rotating sphere of Mars stands prominent against starlit skies. Occasionally, I see Phobos’ companion moon, Deimos. Beyond the transparent facing of my prison cell stretches an airless void. There is but one escape. I await it, absorbed in fatalistic reflection.
THE END
1933
DWELLER IN MARTIAN DEPTHS
Clark Ashton Smith
Into the planet’s bowels they went in search of fabulous wealth . . . but they found waiting for them the grim Dweller . . .
• Only when we begin to explore other worlds will we experience fully the innumerable forms of life, and the mysteries of the world of living things. No one, perhaps, is so competent to write about these mysteries as Clark Ashton Smith. With his scientific knowledge, and his imagination, rivalling that of Poe, he creates strange and bizarre worlds.
He takes for his problem that of Mars, and pictures a series of events that are perfectly plausible. He deals with a world of sensation that we experience perhaps only in dreams, yet one, given new conditions that might be part of everyday existence.
And then, if you like, there is a little moral to this story that our acute readers might discover. It is a moral that has a great deal of meaning in our present day earthly troubles.
• Swelling and towering swiftly, like a genie loosed from one of Solomon’s bottles, the cloud rose on the planet’s rim. A rusty and colossal column, it strode above the dead plain, through a sky that was dark as the brine of desert seas.
“Looks like a blithering sandstorm,” commented Maspic.
“It can’t very well be anything else,” agreed Bellman rather curtly. “Any other kind of storm is unheard of in these regions. It’s the sort of hell-twister that the Aihais call the zoorth—and it’s coming our way, too. I move that we start looking for shelter. I’ve been caught in the zoorth before, and I don’t recommend a lungful of that ferruginous dust.”
“There’s a cave in the old river bank, to the right,” said Chivers, the third member of the party, who had been searching the desert with restless, falconlike eyes.
The trio of earthmen, hard-bitten adventurers who disdained the services of Martian guides, had started five days before from the outpost of Ahoom, into the uninhabited region called the Chaur. Here, in the beds of great rivers that had not flowed for cycles, it was rumored that the pale, platinum-like gold of Mars could be found lying in heaps, like so much salt. If fortune were propitious, their years of somewhat unwilling exile on the red planet would soon be at an end.
They had been warned against the Chaur, and had heard some queer tales in Ahoom regarding the reasons why former prospectors had not returned. But danger, no matter how dire or exotic, was merely a part of their daily routine. With a fair chance of unlimited gold at the journey’s end, they would have gone down through Hinnom.
Their food supplies and water barrels were carried on the backs of three of those curious mammals called vortlups, which, with their elongated legs and necks, and horny-plated bodies, might seemingly have been some fabulous combination of llama and saurian. These animals, though extravagantly ugly, were tame and obedient, and were well adapted to desert travel, being able to go without water for months at a time.
For the past two days they had followed the mile-wide course of a nameless ancient river, winding among hills that had dwindled to mere hummocks. They had found nothing but worn boulders, pebbles, and fine rusty sand. Heretofore the sky had been silent and stirless; and nothing moved on the river-bottom, whose stones were bare even of dead lichen. The malignant column of the zoorth, twisting and swelling toward them, was the first sign of animation they had discerned in that lifeless land.
Prodding their vortlups with the iron-pointed goads which alone could elicit any increase of speed from these sluggish monsters, the earthmen started off toward the cavern-mouth descried by Chivers. It was perhaps a third of a mile distant, and was high up on the shelving shore.
The zoorth had blotted out the sun ere they reached the bottom of the ancient slope, and they moved through a sinister twilight that was colored like dried blood. The vortlups, protesting with unearthly bellows, began to climb the beach, which was marked off in a series of more or less regular steps that indicated the slow recession of its olden waters. The column of sand, rising and whirling formidably, had reached the opposite bank when they came to the cavern.
This cavern was in the face of a low cliff of iron-veined rock. The entrance had crumbled down in heaps of ferro-oxide and dark basaltic dust, but was large enough to admit with ease the earthmen and their laden beasts of burden. Darkness, heavy, as if with a weaving of black webs, clogged the interior. They could form no idea of the cave’s dimensions till Bellman got out an electric torch from his bale of belongings and turned its prying beam into the shadows.
The torch served merely to reveal the beginnings of a chamber of indeterminate size that ran backward into night. It widened gradually, with a floor that was worn smooth as if by vanished waters.
The opening had grown dark with the onset of the zoorth. A moaning as of baffled demons filled the ears of the explorers, and particles of atom-like sand were blown in upon them, stinging their hands and faces like powdered adamant.
“The storm will last for half an hour, at least,” said Bellman. “Shall we go on into the cave? Probably we won’t find anything of much interest or value. But the exploration will serve to kill time. And we might happen on a few violet rubies or amber-yellow sapphires, such as are sometimes discovered in these desert caverns. You two had better bring along your torches also, and flash them on the walls and ground as we go.”
His companions thought the suggestion worth following. The vortlups, wholly insensible to the blowing sand in their scaly mail, were left behind near the entrance. Chivers, Bellman and Maspic, with their torch-beams tearing a clotted gloom that had perhaps never known the intrusion of light in all its former cycles, went on into the widening caves.
• The place was bare, with the death-like emptiness of some long-deserted catacomb. Its rusted floor and walls returned no gleam or sparkle to the playing lights. It sloped downward at an easy gradient, and the sides were water-marked at a height of six or seven feet. No doubt it had been in earlier aeons the channel of an underground offshoot from the river. It had been swept clean of all detritus, and was like the interior of some Cyclopean conduit.
None of the three adventurers was overly imaginative or prone to nervousness. But all were beset by certain odd impressions. Behind the arras of cryptic silence, time and again, they seemed to hear a faint whisper, like the sigh of sunken seas far down at some hemispheric depth. The air was tinged with a slight and doubtful dankness, and they felt the stirring of an almost imperceptible draft upon their faces. Oddest of all was the hint of a nameless odor, reminding them both of animal dens and the peculiar smell of Martian dwellings.
“Do you suppose we’ll encounter any kind of life?” said Maspic, sniffing the air dubiously.
“Not likely.” Bellman dismissed the query with his usual curtness. “Even the wild vortlups avoid the Chaur.
“But there’s certainly a touch of dampness in the air, persisted Maspic. “That means water, somewhere; and if there is water, there may be life also—perhaps of a dangerous kind.”
“We’ve got our revolvers,” said Bellman. “But I doubt if we’ll need them—as long as we don’t meet any rival gold-hunters from the Earth,” he added cynically.
“Listen.” The semi-whisper came from Chivers. “Do you fellows hear anything?”
All three had paused. Somewhere in the gloom ahead, they heard a prolonged, equivocal noise that baffled the ear with incongruous elements. It was a sharp rustling and rattling as of metal dragged over rock; and also it w
as somehow like the smacking of myriad wet, enormous mouths. Anon it receded and died out at a level that was seemingly far below.
“That’s queer,” Bellman seemed to make a reluctant admission.
“What is it?” queried Chivers. “One of the milli-pedal underground monsters, half a mile long, that the Martians tell about?”
“You’ve been hearing too many native fairy tales,” reproved Bellman. “No terrestrial has ever seen anything of that kind. Many deep-lying caverns on Mars have been thoroughly explored; but those in desert regions, such as the Chaur, were devoid of life. I can’t imagine what could have made that noise; but, in the interests of science, I’d like to go on and find out.”
“I’m beginning to feel creepy,” said Maspic. “But I’m game if you others are.”
Without further argument or comment, the three continued their advance into the cave. They had been walking at a fair gait for fifteen minutes, and were now at least half a mile from the entrance. The floor was steepening, as if it had been the bed of a torrent. Also, the conformation of the walls had changed: on either hand there were high shelves of metallic stone and columnated recesses which the flashed rays of the torches could not always fathom.
The air had grown heavier, the dampness was unmistakable. There was a breath of stagnant ancient waters. That other smell, as of wild beasts and Aihai dwellings, also tainted the gloom with its clinging fetor.
Bellman was leading the way. Suddenly his torch revealed the verge of a precipice, where the olden channel ended sheerly and the shelves and walls pitched away on each side into incalculable space. Going to the very edge, he dipped his pencil of light down the abyss, disclosing only the vertical cliff that fell at his feet into darkness with no apparent bottom. The beam also failed to reach the further shore of the gulf, which might have been many leagues in extent.
“Looks as if we had found the original jumping-off place,” observed Chivers. Looking about, he secured a loose lump of rock, the size of a small boulder, which he hurled as far out as he could into the abyss. The earth-men listened for the sound of its fall; but several minutes went by, and there was no echo from the black profound.
Bellman started to examine the broken-off ledges on either side of the channel’s terminus. To the right he discerned a downward-sloping shelf that skirted the abyss, running for an uncertain distance. Its beginning was little higher than the channel-bed, and was accessible by means of a stair-like formation. The shelf was two yards wide; and its gentle inclination, its remarkable evenness and regularity conveyed the idea of an ancient road hewn in the face of the cliff. It was over-hung by the wall, as if by the sharply sundered half of a high arcade.
“There’s our road to Hades,” said Bellman. “And the down-grade is easy enough at that.”
“What’s the use of going further?” said Maspic. “I, for one, have had enough darkness already. And if we were to find anything by going on, it would be valueless—or unpleasant.”
• Bellman hesitated. “Maybe you’re right. But I’d like to follow that ledge far enough to get some idea of the magnitude of the gulf. You and Chivers can wait here, if you’re afraid.”
Chivers and Maspic, apparently, were unwilling to admit whatever trepidation they might have felt. They followed Bellman along the shelf, hugging the inner wall. Bellman, however, strode carelessly on the verge, often flashing his torch into the vastitude that engulfed its feeble beam.
More and more, through its uniform breadth, inclination and smoothness, and the demi-arch of cliff above, the shelf impressed the earthmen as being an artificial road. But who could have made and used it? In what forgotten ages and for what enigmatic purpose had it been designed? The imagination of the terrestrials failed before the stupendous gulfs of Martian antiquity that yawned in such tenebrous queries.
Bellman thought that the wall curved inward upon itself by slow degrees. No doubt they would round the entire abyss in time by following the road. Perhaps it wound in a slow, tremendous spiral, ever downward, about and about, to the very bowels of Mars.
He and the others were awed into lengthening intervals of silence. They were horribly startled, when, as they went on, they heard in the depths beneath, the same peculiar long-drawn sound or combination of sounds which they had heard in the outer cavern. It suggested other images now: the rustling was a file-like scraping; the soft, methodical, myriad smacking was vaguely similar to the noise made by some enormous creature that withdraws its feet from a quagmire.
The sound was inexplicable, terrifying. Part of its terror lay in an implication of remoteness, which appeared to signalize the enormity of its cause, and to emphasize the profundity of the abysm. Heard in that planetary pit beneath a lifeless desert, it astonished—and shocked. Even Bellman, intrepid heretofore, began to succumb to the formless horror that rose up like an emanation from the night.
The noise grew fainter and ceased at length, giving somehow the idea that its maker had gone directly down on the perpendicular wall into nether reaches of the gulf.
“Shall we go back?” inquired Chivers.
“We might as well,” assented Bellman without demur, “It would take all eternity to explore this place anyway.
They started to retrace their way along the ledge. All three, with that extra-tactile sense which warns of the approach of hidden danger, were now troubled and alert. Though the gulf had grown silent once more with that withdrawal of the strange noise, they somehow felt that they were not alone. Whence the peril would come, or in what shape, they could not surmise; but they felt an alarm that was almost panic. Tacitly, none of them mentioned it; nor did they discuss the eerie mystery on which they had stumbled in a manner so fortuitous.
Maspic was a little ahead of the others now. They had covered at least half of the distance to the old cavern-channel, when his torch, playing for twenty feet ahead on the path, illumined an array of whitish figures, three abreast, that blocked the way. The flashlights of Bellman and Chivers, coming close behind, brought out with hideous clearness the vanward limbs and faces of the throng, but could not determine its number.
The creatures, who stood perfectly motionless and silent, as if awaiting the earthmen, were generically similar to the Aihais or Martian natives. They seemed, however, to represent an extremely degraded and aberrant type; and the fungus-like pallor of their bodies denoted many ages of underground life. They were smaller too, than full-grown Aihais, being, on the average, about five feet tall. They possessed the enormous open nostrils, the flaring ears, the barrel chests and lanky limbs of the Martians—but all of them were eyeless.
In the faces of some, there were faint, rudimentary slits where the eyes should have been; in the faces of others, there were deep and empty orbits that suggested a removal of the eyeballs.
“Lord! what a ghastly crew!” cried Maspic. “Where do they come from? and what do they want?”
“Can’t imagine,” said Bellman. “But our situation is somewhat ticklish—unless they are friendly. They must have been hiding on the shelves in the cavern above, when we entered.”
Stepping boldly forward, ahead of Maspic, he addressed the creatures in the guttural Aihai tongue, many of whose vocables are scarcely to be articulated by an earthman. Some of the people stirred uneasily, and emitted shrill, cheeping sounds that bore little likeness to the Martian language. It was plain that they could not understand Bellman. Sign-language, by reason of their blindness, would have been equally useless.
Bellman drew his revolver, enjoining the others to follow suit. “We’ve got to get through them somehow,” he said. “And if they won’t let us pass without interference—” the click of a cocked hammer served to finish the sentence.
As if the metallic sound had been an awaited signal, the press of blind white beings sprang into sudden motion and surged forward upon the terrestrials. It was like the onset of automatons—an irresistible striding of machines, concerted and methodical, beneath the direction of a hidden power.
Into the Depths
• Bellman pulled his trigger, once, twice, thrice, at a pointblank range. It was impossible to miss; but the bullets were futile as pebbles flung at the spate of an on-rushing torrent. The eyeless beings did not waver, though two of them began to bleed the yellowish-red fluid that serves the Martians for blood. The foremost of them, unwounded, and moving with diabolical-sureness, caught Bellman’s arm with long, four-jointed fingers, and jerked the revolver from his grasp before he could press the trigger again.
Curiously enough, the creature did not try to deprive him of his torch, which he now carried in his left hand; and he saw the steely flash of the Colt, as it hurtled down into darkness and space from the hand of the Martian. Then the fungus-white bodies, milling horribly on the narrow road, were all about him, pressing so closely that there was no room for effectual resistance. Chivers and Maspic, after firing a few shots, were also deprived of their weapons, but through an uncanny discrimination, were permitted to retain their flashlights.
The entire episode had been a matter of moments. There was only a brief slackening of the onward motion of the throng, several of whose members had been shot down by Chivers and Maspic and then hurled expeditiously into the gulf by their fellows. The foremost ranks, opening deftly, included the earthmen and forced them to turn backward. Then, tightly caught, in a moving vise of bodies, they were borne resistlessly along. Handicapped by the fear of dropping their torches, they could do nothing against the nightmare torrent. Rushing with dreadful strides on a path that led ever deeper into the abyss, and able to see only the lit backs and members of the creatures before them, they became a part of that eyeless and cryptic army.
Behind them there seemed to be scores of the Martians, driving them on implacably. After awhile, their plight began to paralyze their faculties. It seemed that they moved no longer with human steps, but with the swift and automatic stalking of the clammy things that pressed about them. Thought, volition, even terror, were numbed by the unearthly rhythm of those abyssward-beating feet. Constrained by this, and by a sense of utter unreality, they spoke only at long intervals, and then in monosyllables that appeared to have lost all proper meaning, like the speech of machines. The blind people were wholly silent—there was no sound, except that of a myriad, eternal padding on the stone.