Between Worlds

by Garret Smith

  Again I called in vain.

  Now almost beside myself, I took several heedless steps in the direction in which my instinct told me Weaver had last been.

  And I collided sharply with another human body. I nearly wept with relief as we clutched each other by the shoulders.

  “Is this you, Weaver?” I gasped.

  “No, this is Baker,” he replied. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Scribner. Weaver was at my side an instant ago, and now he’s gone.”

  “Weaver!” I called aloud, throwing all caution aside.

  Only a mocking echo answered.

  By now I felt the presence of our company about me, and my panic subsided enough for cool thought.

  “Is it possible this thing has driven him mad and he has wandered off beyond our reach?” I asked.

  “Perhaps the cold has overcome him,” suggested a voice in the group. “I feel nearly done for, myself.”

  “That is possible,” I asserted. “He may be lying helpless at our feet.”

  Then a suggestion flashed into my mind.

  “Let’s all join hands in a line,” I proposed, “so that we cannot be separated, and we will move about in a circle over the ice. I’ll stand here in the center as a pivot. If he has fallen, he must be near by, and we will come on him.”

  THIS scheme we carried out, but though we circled cautiously several times, each time shifting my pivot position so as to cover a new area, we found nothing.

  We paused at length, in dismay, and again we listened as though the darkness might perchance betray this new secret.

  And again came that soft, shuffling sound here and there around us, now unmistakably outside of our group.

  “Do the rest of you hear anything?” I questioned.

  “I do!” came in awed whispers from here and there.

  “That must be he!” said one.

  “It’s someone walking, feeling his way!” declared another.

  “He has gone mad and wandered off!” cried a third.

  “But!” I exclaimed. “There is more than one thing out there. They are all around us. Who else has gone?”

  There was a sudden stir of panic among the men at this suggestion, and a calling of names here and there.

  “Tanner, are you there?”

  “Is this you, Baker?”

  “Where is Carpenter?”

  “Just a moment, men!” I called out. “I’ll call the roll from memory.”

  One by one, I recalled and pronounced the names of our original company, with some promptings toward the end of the list when my overwrought mind failed to function readily.

  To our horror, six of the group failed to answer.

  We stood stunned.

  We had become prepared to meet our fate manfully together, but this mysterious separation of our forces again unnerved us.

  For a long time, we remained thus, the silence broken now and then by someone chafing and thrashing his chilled body, and in between, at intervals, by that soft, insidious shuffling around out on the ice.

  “Tanner! Tanner!” cried someone suddenly.

  “Tanner is gone! Tanner is gone!” he exclaimed.

  This time we were too stunned to react. “We were standing hand in hand,” shouted the man frantically. “He jerked his hand out of mine, and he’s gone. Tanner, where—”

  The voice broke off suddenly, as though the man had been choked.

  “Who was that speaking?” I demanded. No answer came.

  Madness, indeed, was overcoming our company.

  From then on I became oblivious to the passage of time. I would beat my arms about me till I felt my sluggish blood stirring again, and then listen till I heard once more those eerie and ominous shuffling sounds.

  Then, driven by the need of action, I would circle around the group of shuddering men, feeling my way from shoulder to shoulder with a word of encouragement to each.

  As I completed one of those rounds I became convinced that the group, had grown smaller since my last round. I groaned hopelessly. No use to warn them again. The madness was evidently seizing them one by one.

  I had not the heart to make another round. I could not bear any closer realization of the passing of my brave comrades.

  I drew off a pace and, momentarily yielding to a dragging sense of exhaustion, I sank to the ice. It may have been only a moment as I thought then. It may have been much longer that I lay there. I suddenly realized that I was yielding to a leaden drowsiness.

  With a supreme effort of the will, I staggered to my feet and shook my body into life again. I must keep moving till my fate overtook me. Was it possible that the madness that had invaded our company had at last found me out?

  I determined to make the round of the group once more.

  I felt out where I supposed them to be, and touching nothing, took a faltering step forward. Still I touched no one.

  I stopped in my tracks and waited for a movement or a word to set me right.

  For moments I listened, but heard not the slightest sound. Moreover I was now oppressed by a sensation of being completely alone.

  Now, beside myself with fear, I began running frantically, calling first one name then another. All in vain.

  At length, completely exhausted, I stopped, faint with absolute despair.

  I was alone with this eternal silence!

  CHAPTER III

  THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

  I STRUGGLED against a sense of giddiness, partly due to physical collapse and partly to sheer horror. I swayed and stumbled. Finally, after recovering myself two or three times, my shaking limbs refused longer to sustain me.

  I pitched forward, but instead of striking the ice I was caught firmly by a pair of muscular arms and jerked back on my feet.

  For an instant I was too surprised to speak. When I did open my mouth to demand the name of my rescuer, I was suddenly half choked by a mass of nauseating, foul-smelling hair thrust into it.

  My hope that one of my companions had been restored to me was short-lived.

  While the ironlike arms still clasped me about the chest, binding my own arms to my side, someone else behind me was adjusting the gag, evidently a strip of raw fur, and tying it at the back of my head.

  Then another band was passed about my arms. These precautions taken, all without spoken word and with scarcely a sound, the two unseen beings, whatever they were, seized me on either side, and with swift strides, marked only by the soft, shuffling sound that had but new so bewildered our party, began half guiding, half propelling my involuntary footsteps through the blackness.

  Instead of being rescued, I was a helpless captive. What fate awaited me I could only imagine, but I strongly suspected it would have been better to perish from cold on the empty ice.

  This, then, explained the mysterious vanishing of my companions; a stealthy foe had snatched them one by one out of the midst of our group and borne them away.

  Could it be that the blind savages who had boarded our vessel had escaped from it and surrounded us? Or were our captives another group of the same tribe?

  We had not proceeded far before I felt a change in the nature of the footing. It was no longer firm and slippery. I seemed to be walking on some soft, yielding substance that crunched crisply under feet. At times I sank into it to my knees and walking became increasingly difficult. I guessed that we had left the sea’s frozen surface and were on land.

  I also noted an increasing unevenness and change of the level over which we strode. It had been smooth as a floor. Now we frequently went up and down sharp inclines. We stumbled over hummocks. My guides as well as I seemed to find the way difficult, for they proceeded more slowly and at times paused as if studying their bearings.

  At each of these pauses my ears, which were with recent practise becoming more and more acute, caught the crunching of an increasing number of footsteps. I heard now occasional guttural shouts or the exchange of words in more conversational key. I realized that my captors had been joined
by a considerable number of their kind. I wondered if the rest of our ship’s company were with us, gagged and helpless captives like myself.

  I became more and more confident that our captors were members of the same blind race of savages who had taken possession of our vessel. The thought of the gruesome and ugly faces of those human beasts as we had seen them under the glare of our ship’s lights, and their still uglier actions, made me sick with dread of what might be in store for us.

  But as time went on and I came to no harm nor was subjected to any deliberate brutality, I began to take an interest in trying to learn something of these beings. One may well imagine I made little headway at such study when I had nothing by which to go but my memory of a brief glimpse of their faces and such sounds as I heard around me.

  I reasoned that this race must have inhabited the realm of eternal darkness from time immemorial. Either the race had originated here and, there being no use for eyes where light was not, it had never developed eyes, or else it was descended from beings like ourselves who had originated in the Land of Light and became lost in the Land of Darkness countless ages ago. Having no further use for eyes, evolution might have gradually eliminated them in the descendants.

  After listening closely to their fragmentary speech, I leaned to the latter theory. Every now and then I caught a word that was strikingly similar in sound to one in the language of the Land of Light. I noted too many of these to believe they could be mere coincidences. It indicated a common origin in speech between this race and ours.

  But my attention was shortly diverted from speculation back to my own immediate troubles. It was during one of these frequent pauses. There was an unusual amount of talking and movement about me.

  After a word or two of apparent command from a third person, I was led to one side by my two captors and faced about. As they brought, me to rest I brushed against another person immediately behind, me. One of my captors began attaching some sort of tackle to my shoulders, v While he was doing this, I felt a second man in front of me.

  Presently, both of my captors left me. I made a tentative move forward, more to test my freedom than with any futile idea of escape. I bumped into the person in front. He immediately dodged away, and as he did so, I felt a forward tugging at the contraption attached to my shoulders.

  At the same time there was a slight backward pull as though I were attached to something behind me that yielded slightly to the strain.

  MY ARMS were still bound down so that could not feel about with my hands, but a little further twisting of my body convinced me that I was connected by some sort of a harness both with the man in front of me and the man behind me.

  A moment later, from off at the side, came a sharp command that unquestionably meant “go” in our tongue. Simultaneously I heard a swishing in the air and felt a stinging blow as of a bit of rope being flayed over my head and shoulders.

  I lunged forward in pain. After a moment of strain I felt the tackle give a little, followed by the grinding of some heavy body being dragged over the ground.

  Twice more I heard the whip cut the air and fall first on the man behind me and then on the man in front. We were moving forward briskly together now, and the dragging sound behind continued, as did the pull at my shoulders. It dawned on me that I was one of a team of three captives harnessed to some burden which our captors meant to have us drag home for them.

  We were not, then, mere captives of these blind men of darkness. We were their slaves.

  It was clear now why we had not been summarily killed as I had expected. Our new masters had useful drudgery for us to perform.

  Up-hill and down, we labored on. Again and again I would have dropped exhausted had I not been spurred on by the stinging whip and the hoarse shouts of our driver.

  At length, when it seemed that I could not take another step, we were halted. I was freed from the harness. The thongs about my arms were removed, but my gag was allowed to remain. Nor, for a single instant did my driver let go of my arm.

  He had led me forward some half dozen steps, then suddenly, by main strength, forced me to my hands and knees and began pushing me ahead in that position. Almost immediately I realized that I had left the free air. I was scrambling along like an animal on all fours over a hard, smooth surface.

  I tried once to rise to my feet, but immediately thrust my head against a roofing less than a pace’s distance from the flooring. I was in a low, tunnel-like passageway.

  But after I had been driven forward two or three paces farther, my captor jerked me to my feet and removed the gag from my numbed Jaws. I had scarce time to clear my mouth of the filth left there by the gag when another nasty object was thrust into it. At the same time my master guided one of my hands up to the stuff, and then let go.

  “Eat,” he said.

  Then I realized that I was being fed.

  It seemed to be a bit of raw flesh. To this moment I cannot think of it without being nauseated. I will not inflict a description of it upon the reader.

  But I “was famished from long lack of food, violent exercise, and exposure to the cold. So I managed somehow to choke down the fearful stuff.

  I was so preoccupied for the moment in satisfying my craving for food that I did not realize when my captor left me, but when I came to take stock of my new surroundings I was alone.

  I called aloud, but no one answered. I felt my way about. I was in a little cell, rounded in shape and a bare four paces across. The roof just missed my head. I found the passage through which I had come, but it was blocked. The air, though close and foul, was not so cold as the windswept wastes without.

  Satisfied at length that I was in no immediate physical danger, I gave up to the extreme weariness that beset me, and throwing myself on the hard floor, at once fell into a deep sleep.

  I must have slumbered long, for I awoke naturally, feeling greatly refreshed, though stiff and sore from my unwonted exertions and exposure.

  I had paced back and forth for some time, limbering my creaking limbs, when a sound behind me caught me up short. I whirled about and saw to my astonishment in the wall of my cell an upright oblong of dim light.

  As soon as my unused vision became accustomed to functioning again, I made out that it was an. open door beyond which extended a short passage on whose walls a fitful radiance flickered.

  Then for the first time I saw the dim form of a man beside me. He grasped me firmly by the arm and propelled me toward the opening.

  Some ten paces forward I found myself suddenly thrust out into a great domeshaped chamber, whose walls shone and sparkled under the light of innumerable flaming torches set in brackets all about.

  There was a motley multitude assembled.

  A glance showed me the same grotesque, fur-clad, lance-equipped figures with hideous, sightless faces that we had seen sweeping down out of the darkness upon our ship.

  But the sight that at once caught my attention and held me fascinated and amazed was a raised platform in the center of the cave, covered with heavy furs, on which reclined the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And she had eyes, two dark orbs that were just now searching my face with deep curiosity.

  It was a long moment before my fascinated gaze wandered in embarrassment from her lovely face. And then I almost shouted aloud in further amazement, Reclining on the fur carpeting beside her, with the air of one very much at home, was our lost leader, Hunter.

  I RECALL a fleeting feeling that I was still sleep in my cell and having a fantastic dream. The sudden appearance of light among this eyeless people whom I had become accustomed to think of as having no knowledge of light and no use for it; the presence of a beautiful woman with perfect eyes among these brutal savages, and above all the miraculous reappearance in such strange surroundings of our leader, who, I supposed, had long since perished out in the frozen seas some sleeps away—all gave a dreamlike atmosphere to the scene.

  I was still staring, astounded, when Hunter, who had been gazing interestedly abou
t, caught my eye and smiled greeting. He spoke no word, and taking my cue from that, I, too, remained silent, though I was eager to shout a score of questions.

  Presently the woman on the dais turned to Hunter with every show of deference and addressed him, speaking clearly in our tongue, though with a strange, guttural accent.

  “Look, O great chief,” she said, “and take count of these two-eyed ones before you and see if they be all of your men. If there be one missing, or if so much as one little finger of them be hurt, these hunters of mine shall pay dearly.”

  “I have counted, O queen,” he made reply. “All are here. Before I determine If they have been harmed I must go into the darkness with my councilors and learn further of what has happened.”

  I had glanced about me at the queen’s first words, and was greatly relieved to see the rest of our ship’s company standing about the dais, each with a sinister guard at his side armed with ready spear.

  As he spoke, Hunter had risen to his feet. Simultaneously the queen stood up and stretched out a warning hand.

  “I must crave your pardon for restraining you,” she protested. “You shall be safe and comfortable while you are with us, and I would keep you for some time, for I have much to learn from you. Meanwhile, I cannot have you from my sight, for you have shown that you have strange powers over these simple, eyeless people of mine.”

  Hunter simply smiled indulgently in reply.

  And the next instant I felt perfectly sure that I was dreaming. I could swear that I had not moved or so much as winked an eye. Yet the whole scene had vanished—the great hall, the crowd, the beautiful queen.

  I was back in my cell, but this time it, too, was lighted. Half reclining on the floor beside me was Weaver, looking as amazed as I felt. Standing over us, a torch in his hand, wearing the same indulgent smile he had just turned on the queen, was Hunter.

  “Well, old comrades,” he exclaimed. “Get up and let me look you over. I didn’t think a little while ago that we’d ever see each other again alive. No, you are not dreaming. I can see you both think you are.”

  Still half doubting our senses we: arose and began a duet of eager questions.