The actual nightmare element, though, was something more than this. It began with the living thing which presently entered through one of the slits, advancing deliberately toward him and bearing a metal box of bizarre proportions and glassy, mirror-like surfaces. For this thing was nothing human—nothing of earth—nothing even of man’s myths and dreams. It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or at least two pairs of them, there serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms.
Here, indeed was outre nightmare at its height—capricious fantasy at its apex. But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more thing—one final, unbearable touch—to do that. As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet—horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations—it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the giant centipedes.
IV / ROBERT E. HOWARD
From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was prisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s personality.
He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.
What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration, and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more—much more.
With the honesty possible only when life is stripped of its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities of pleasure contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.
A lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, free of all conventions or inhibitions of earth, or of this strange planet, free of every artificial restraint in the universe. He was a god! With grim amusement he thought of his body moving in earth’s business and society, with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows that were George Campbell’s eyes on people who would flee if they knew.
Let him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and its races no longer had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had been one of a billion nonentities, fixed in place by a mountainous accumulation of conventions, laws, and manners, doomed to live and die in his sordid niche. But in one blind bound he had soared above the commonplace. This was not death, but rebirth—the birth of a full-grown mentality, with a newfound freedom that made little of physical captivity on Yekub.
He started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he known? Then he knew, as he knew the name of him whose body he occupied—Tothe. Memory, deep-grooved in Tothe’s brain, was stirring in him—shadows of the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to the power his soul, stripped to its primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slave would he dwell on Yekub, but as a king! Just as of old barbarians had sat on the throne of lordly empires.
For the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He still lay on the couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room, and the centipede-man stood before him, holding the polished metal object, and clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbell knew, and what it said he dimly understood, through the implanted thought processes of Tothe, just as he knew the creature was Yukth, supreme lord of science.
But Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan so alien to the ways of Yekub that it was beyond Yukth’s comprehension and caught him wholly unprepared. Yukth, like Campbell, saw the sharp-pointed metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth it was only a scientific implement. He did not even know it could be used as a weapon. Campbell’s earthly mind supplied the knowledge and the action that followed, driving Tothe’s body into movements no man of Yekub had ever made before.
Campbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely upward. Yukth reared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor. In an instant Campbell was streaking for a door. His speed was amazing, exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physical sensations.
As he ran, guided wholly by the instinctive knowledge implanted in Tothe’s physical reflexes, it was as if he were borne by a separate consciousness in his legs. Tothe’s body was bearing him along a route it had traversed ten thousand times when animated by Tothe’s mind.
Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisting stair, through a carved door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose in the middle of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere that poised in midair—a sphere that shone like translucent ivory.
This, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of Yekub, though why the people of Yekub feared and worshiped it had been forgotten a million years. A worm-priest stood between him and the altar which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it could be touched was a blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The worm-priest stood in frozen horror until Campbell’s shard ripped the life out of him.
On his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of its sudden quiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in the floating sphere, heedless of the smoke that now billowed out in blue clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared the superstitions of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that globe in his hands he would be king of Yekub. The worm-men would dare deny him nothing when he held their god as hostage. He reached a hand for the ball—no longer ivory hued, but red as blood . . .
V / FRANK BELKNAP LONG, Jr.
Out of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George Campbell. It moved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of enormous trees, over a forest path strewed with sweet-scented pine needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl of frosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the aurora borealis splashed streamers of fire.
The head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From the corners of his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth, which fluttered in the night breeze. He walked upright at first, as a man would walk, but gradually as the tent receded his posture altered. His torso began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to shorten.
In a far-off world of outer space the centipede-creature that was George Campbell clasped to its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as blood, and ran with insect-like quiverings across a rainbow-hued hall and out through massive portals into the b
right glow of alien suns.
Weaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the awkward lopings of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was fulfilling a mindless destiny. Long, claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves from a carpet of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wide expanse of gleaming water.
In the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm-people, George Campbell moved between cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long, fern-planted avenues, holding aloft the round red god.
There was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake on earth where the mind of a worm-creature dwelt in a body swayed by instinct. Human teeth sank into soft animal fur, tore at black animal flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliation into a furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted. Slowly the body of George Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it moved toward the waters of the lake.
As the veriform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the black blocks of stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in the scintillating dust before it. A godlike power seemed to emanate from its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motion toward a throne of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.
A trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the tent where the worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came to the gleaming waters of the lake and discerned something dark floating there. He had been lost in the woods all night, and weariness enveloped him like a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.
But the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the edge of the water he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the floating bulk. Slowly he pulled it to the shore.
Far off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god ascended a throne that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under an alien vault of hyper-suns. The great deity that he held aloft energized his worm-tenement, burning away in the white fire of a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.
On earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened and hairy face of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively anthropoid in contour, and from its twisted, distorted mouth black ichor poured.
“He who sought your body in the abysses of time will occupy an unresponsive tenement,” said the red god. “No spawn of Yekub can control the body of a human.”
“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”
Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely, kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.
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THE FLYING LION by Edison Marshall
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Those who viewed the motion pictures The Viking with Kirk Douglas and, earlier, Son of Fury, starring Tyrone Power, were being treated to the work of Edison Marshall. During the forties and fifties, critics frequently cited him as the nation’s leading historical novelist, of which his best-known work is probably Yankee Pasha.
As early as 1920, Edison Marshall’s short stories were included among the fifteen best of the year in the annual O’Henry volume. In 1921 another short story, “The Heart of Little Shikara,” a tale of a brave Indian boy who saves an injured white man from a tiger, also won an O’Henry prize as one of the finest short stories of the year and was the title yarn of a successful collection of his works that followed.
Edison Marshall, in addition to being master of a rich, captivating writing style, was a great traveler and his story backgrounds held real authenticity. His ability at characterization was outstanding, and his skill at making animals emerge as personalities in their own right may be favorably compared to that of Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
He was born in Rensselaer, Indiana, August 28, 1894, and died in Augusta, Georgia, October 30, 1967. Son of a newspaperman, he began writing at the University of Oregon in 1915, and seems to have been unable to accumulate enough funds to complete his fourth year of education there.
The first story he sold was titled “When the Fire Dies,” and appeared in The Argosy for May, 1915 under his full name of Edison Tesla Marshall, with the title changed to “The Sacred Fire.” His first work of science fiction, “Who is Charles Avison?,” which is regarded as a minor classic in its theme of a twin earth which revolves always out of sight on the other side of the earth with parallel people and events, appeared to be written under a nom de plume because of the two very famous scientists he was named after. This may very well have been a contributing factor in the dropping of his middle name in future stories. The original title for “Who is Charles Avison?” was “Here and There.”
In the field of fantasy he has done four major novels. The best known, “Og, The Dawn Man,” tells of a pilot injured when his plane crashes in the Canadian wilds, whose mind, through ancestral memory, relinquishes control to a caveman ancestor. Originally published in four installments in the March 24 to April 14, 1928 issues of The Popular Magazine, it was published in hardcover by Kinsey in 1934 as “Ogden’s Strange Story” and eventually reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for December, 1949. Almost as popular was “Dian of the Lost Land,” which appeared in hardcover from Kinsey in 1935 and was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for April, 1939 and deals with a lost race of Cro-Magnons in an Antarctic valley ruled over by Dian, blonde daughter of a previous explorer.
“The Flying Lion” is one of Edison Marshall’s least known works, listed in no bibliography of the fantastic, despite the fact that it was the first in a truly outstanding series which began in the August, 1919 issue of The Blue Book Magazine. Searchers after the fantastic and horrifying may have been fooled by the overall title of the series, which was “From a Frontiersman’s Diary,” but this masterpiece does not deserve to remain in obscurity and unreprinted. It has a dual appeal both to the lovers of the true horror story and for those who dote on the Tarzan-like tales which Edgar Rice Burroughs made so popular and of which school it is a variant. In fact, the entire series of which it is the first, is of the Kipling and Burroughs tradition.
The second story in the series, “The Blood of Kings,” in the September, 1919 issue is built around a frontiersman who tames a baby mountain-lion; “The Son of the Wild Things” in October, 1919 is a superlatively human and imaginative story of an Eskimo boy raised with the musk-oxen; “The Serpent City,” November, 1919 is a frightening masterpiece of a man who discovers a “city” of snakes and masters their customs and “speech”; and “Jungle Justice” in December, 1919 tells of an Indian who raises a bear cub and the feeling that develops between them.
It is safe to say that “The Flying Lion” will whet the appetites of its readers to secure some of the other stories in this fine group.
THE FLYING LION
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by
EDISON MARSHALL
When my old friend gave me the letter of introduction, he made a number of promises that I think would be grounds for a lawsuit. “You’ll find complete rest for nerves and muscles,” said he. “You’ll find mountain air and the smell of balsam and wild huckleberries served with cream and the best trout-fishing in the world.” He was right in some particulars. I found lakes and streams where the trout leaped for the fly before it ever struck the water. I ate mou
ntain food, and the smell of balsam was an unceasing delight when the wind blew from the forests. The mountain air stole into every capillary, and made a man feel as if he could stride from peak to peak. But instead of complete rest for nerves and muscles—I have a limp that will remain in my body till I die, and a story no sensible man on earth will believe.
It doesn’t make any difference, one way or another, whether or not anyone believes it. I believe it. The old mountaineer who was my host believes it. You may say I was delirious; and of course I had been. But what the moon showed me on the cliff-top was just as distinct, just as real, as the sun in the sky or my hand that I hold before my face.
Rest for nerves and muscles! I can laugh at the phrase now. But it wasn’t so easy to laugh on that strange, moonlit night in April.
The long shadows of the mountains had dropped down on Dead Indian Ranch when the stage left me at the gate. I will never cease wondering at those mountain shadows. They fall all at once, like a curtain, and they seem to be a strange blue in color. They make the hills look purple instead of green, and the sky a queer lavender for which there is no name. It is the signal for the gaunt wolves to leave their coverts, and for the deer to steal out like shadows themselves, and feed along the narrow deer-trails.
The house was typical for a mountain ranch—square, comfortable, with big fireplaces and a white sweep of unadorned walls. Jelt, my host, was a typical mountain ranchman, sinewy, silent, rather grim and severe.
He welcomed me to supper. After supper we sat before a log-fire. And we went together to the window, and saw the moon hanging over the dark woods.
Horrors Unknown Page 3