The Best of C. L. Moore

by C. L. Moore

  But somehow he kept his head—somehow, dizzily, he was gripping his gun in his upflung hand—somehow, incredibly, crossing the narrow room with averted face, groping for Smith’s shoulder. There was a moment of blind fumbling in emptiness, and then he found it, and gripped the leather that was slimy and dreadful and wet—and simultaneously he felt something loop gently about his ankle and a shock of repulsive pleasure went through him, and then another coil, and another, wound about his feet. -

  Yarol set his teeth and gripped the shoulder hard, and his hand shuddered of itself, for the feel of that leather was slimy as the worms about his ankles, and a faint tingle of obscene delight went through him from the contact.

  That caressive pressure on his legs was all he could feel, and the voice in his brain drowned out all other sounds, and his body obeyed him reluctantly—but somehow he gave one heave of tremendous effort and swung Smith, stumbling, out of that nest of horror. The twining tendrils ripped loose with a little sucking sound, and the whole mass quivered and reached after, and then Yarol forgot his friend utterly and turned his whole being to the hopeless task of freeing himself. For only a part of him was fighting, now—only a part of him struggled against the twining obscenities, and in his innermost brain the sweet, seductive murmur sounded, and his body clamored to surrender. .

  “Shar! Shar y’danis . . . Shar mor’la-rol—” prayed Yarol, gasping and half unconscious that he spoke, boy’s prayers that he had forgotten years ago, and with his back half turned to the central mass he kicked desperately with his heavy boots at the red, writhing worms about him. They gave back before him, quivering and curling themselves out of reach, and though he knew that more were reaching for his throat from behind, at least he could go on struggling until he was forced to meet those eyes. . .

  He stamped and kicked and stamped again, and for one instant he was free of the slimy grip as the bruised worms curled back from his heavy feet, and he lurched away dizzily, sick with revulsion and despair as he fought off the coils, and then he lifted his eyes and saw

  the cracked mirror on the wall. Dimly in its reflection he could see the writhing scarlet horror behind him, cat face peering out with its demure girl-smile, dreadfully human, and all the red tendrils reaching after him. And remembrance of something he had read long ago swept incongruously over him, and the gasp of relief and hope that he gave shook for a moment the grip of the command in his brain.

  Without pausing for a breath he swung the gun over his shoulder, the reflected barrel in line with the reflected horror in the mirror, and flicked the catch.

  In the mirror he saw its blue flame leap in a dazzling spate across the dimness, full into the midst of that squirming, reaching mass behind him. There was a hiss and a blaze and a high, thin scream of inhuman malice and despair—the flame cut a wide arc and went-out as the gun fell from his hand, and Yarol pitched forward to the floor.

  Northwest Smith opened his eyes to Martian sunlight streaming thinly through the dingy window. Something wet and cold was slapping his face, and the familiar fiery sting of segir-whisky burnt his throat.

  “Smith!” Yarol’s voice was saying from far away. “N. W.! Wake up, damn you! Wake up!”

  “I’m—awake,” Smith managed to articulate thickly. “Wha’s matter?”

  Then a cup-rim was thrust against his teeth and Yarol said irritably, “Drink it, you fool!”

  Smith swallowed obediently and more of the fire-hot segir flowed down his grateful throat. It spread a warmth through his body that awakened him from the numbness that had gripped him until now, and helped a little toward driving out the all-devouring weakness he was becoming aware of slowly. He lay still for a few minutes while the warmth of the whisky went through him, and memory sluggishly began to permeate his brain with the spread of the segir. Nightmare memories. . . sweet and terrible. . . memories of— “God!” gasped Smith suddenly, and tried to sit up. Weakness

  smote him like a blow, and for an instant the room wheeled as he fell back against something firm and warm—Yarol’s shoulder. The Venusian’s arm supported him while the room steadied, and after a while he twisted a little and stared into the other’s black gaze.

  Yarol was holding him with one arm and finishing the mug of segir himself, and the black eyes met his over the rim and crinkled into sudden laughter, half hysterical after that terror that was passed.

  “By Pharolr’ gasped Yarol, choking into his mug. “By Pharol, N. W.! I’m never gonna let you forget this! Next time you have to drag me out of a mess I’ll say—”

  “Let it go,” said Smith. “What’s been going on? How—”

  “Shambleau.” Yarol’s laughter died. “Shambleau! What were you doing with a thing like that?”

  “What was it?” Smith asked soberly.

  “Mean to say you didn’t know? But where’d you find it? How—”

  “Suppose you tell me first what you know,” said Smith firmly. “And another swig of that segir, too, please. I need it.”

  “Can you hold the mug now? Feel better?”

  “Yeah—some. I can hold it—thanks. Now go on.”

  “Well—I don’t know just where to start. They call them Shambleau—”

  “Good God, is there more than one?”

  “It’s a—a sort of race, I think, one of the very oldest. Where they come from nobody knows. The name sounds a little French, doesn’t it? But it goes back beyond the start of history. There have always been Shambleau.”

  “I never heard of ‘em.”

  “Not many people have. And those who know don’t care to talk about it much.”

  “Well, half this town knows. I hadn’t any idea what they were talking about, then. And I still don’t understand, but—”

  “Yes, it happens like this, sometimes. They’ll appear, and the news will spread and the town will get together and hunt them down, and after that—well, the story doesn’t get around very far. It’s too—too unbelievable.”

  “But—my God, Yarol!—what was it? Where’d it come from? How—”

  “Nobody knows just where they come from. Another planet— maybe some undiscovered one. Some say Venus—I know there are some rather awful legends of them handed down in our family—that’s how I’ve heard about it. And the minute I opened that door, awhile back—I—I think I knew that smell. . . .“

  “But—what are they?”

  “God knows. Not human, though they have the human form. Or that may be only an illusion - . . or maybe I’m crazy. I don’t know. They’re a species of the vampire—or maybe the vampire is a species of

  —of them. Their normal form must be that—that mass, and in that form they draw nourishment from the—I suppose the life-forces of men. And they take some form—usually a woman form, I think, and

  key you up to the highest pitch of emotion before they—begin. That’s to work the life-force up to intensity so it’ll be easier. . . . And they give, always, that horrible, foul pleasure as they—feed. There are some men who, if they survive the first experience, take to it like a drug— can’t give it up—keep the thing with them all their lives—which isn’t long—feeding it for that ghastly satisfaction. Worse than smoking ming or-or ‘praying to Pharol.”

  “Yes,” said Smith. “I’m beginning to understand why that crowd was so surprised and—and disgusted when I said—well, never mind. Go on.”

  “Did you get to talk to—to it?” asked Yarol.

  “I tried to. It couldn’t speak very well. I asked it where it came from and it said—’from far away and long ago’—something like that.”

  “I wonder. Possibly some unknown planet—but I think not. You know there are so many wild stories with some basis of fact to start from, that I’ve sometimes wondered—mightn’t there be a lot more of even worse and wilder superstitions we’ve never even heard of? Things like this, blasphemous and foul, that those who know have to keep still about? Awful, fantastic things running around loose that we never hear rumors of at all!

 
; “These things—they’ve been in existence for countless ages. No one knows when or where they first appeared. Those who’ve seen them, as we saw this one, don’t talk about it. It’s just one of those~ Yague, misty rumors you find half hinted at in old books sometimes. . . . I believe they are an older race than man, spawned from ancient seed in times before ours, perhaps on planets that have gone to dust, and so horrible to man that when they are discovered the discoverers keep still about it—forget them again as quickly as they can.

  “And they go back to time immemorial. I suppose you recognized the legend of Medusa? There isn’t any question that the ancient Greeks knew of them. Does it mean that there have been civilizations before yours that set out from Earth and explored other planets? Or did one of the Shambleau somehow make its way into Greece three thousand years ago? If you think about it long enough you’ll go off your head! I wonder how many other legends are based on things like this—things we don’t suspect, things we’ll never know.

  “The Gorgon, Medusa, a beautiful woman with—with snakes for hair, and a gaze that turned men to stone, and Perseus finally killed her—I remembered this just by accident, N. W., and it saved your life and mine—Perseus killed her by using a mirror as he fought to reflect what he dared not look at directly. I wonder what the old Greek who first started that legend would have thought if he’d known that three

  thousand years later his story would save the lives of two men on another planet. I wonder what that Greek’s own story was, and how he met the thing, and what happened. -

  “Well, there’s a lot we’ll never know. Wouldn’t the records of that race of—of things, whatever they are, be worth reading! Records of other planets and other ages and all the beginnings of mankind! But I don’t suppose they’ve kept any records. I don’t suppose they’ve even any place to keep them—from what little I know, or anyone knows about it, they’re like the Wandering Jew, just bobbing up here and there at long intervals, and where they stay in the meantime I’d give my eyes to know! But I don’t believe that terribly hypnotic power they have indicates any superhuman intelligence. It’s their means of getting food—just like a frog’s long tongue or a carnivorous flower’s odor. Those are physical because the frog and the flower eat physical food. The Shambleau uses a—a mental reach to get mental food. I don’t quite know how to put it. And just as a beast that eats the bodies of other animals acquires with each meal greater power over the bodies of the rest, so the Shambleau, stoking itself up with the life-forces of men, increases its power over the minds and the souls of other men. But I’m talking about things I can’t define—things I’m not sure exist.

  “I only know that when I felt—when those tentacles closed around my legs—I didn’t want to pull loose, I felt sensations that— that—oh, I’m fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that

  —pleasure—and yet—”

  “I know,” said Smith slowly. The effect of the segir was beginning to wear off, and weakness was washing back over him in waves, and when he spoke he was half meditating in a low voice, scarcely realizing that Yarol listened. “I know it—much better than you do—and there’s something so indescribably awful that the thing emanates, something so utterly at odds with everything human—there aren’t any words to say it. For a while I was a part of it, literally, sharing its thoughts and memories and emotions and hungers, and—well, it’s over now and I don’t remember very clearly, but the only part left free was that part of me that was but insane from the—the obscenity of the thing. And yet it was a pleasure so sweet—I think there must be some nucleus of utter evil in me—in everyone—that needs only the proper stimulus to get complete control; because even while I was sick all through from the touch of those—things—there was something in me that was—was simply gibbering with delight. . . . Because of that I saw things—and knew things—horrible, wild things I can’t quite remember—visited unbelievable places, looked backward through the

  memory of that—creature—I was one with, and saw—God, I wish I could remember!”

  “You ought to thank your God you can’t,” said Yarol soberly.

  His voice roused Smith from the half-trance he had fallen into, and he rose on his elbow, swaying a little from weakness. The room was wavering before him, and he closed his eyes, not to see it, but he asked, “You say they—they don’t turn up again? No way of finding— another?”

  Yarol did not answer for a moment. He laid his hands on the other man’s shoulders and pressed him back, and then sat staring down into the dark, ravaged face with a new, strange, undefinable look upon it that he had never seen there before—whose meaning he knew, too well.

  “Smith,” he said finally, and his black eyes for once were steady and serious, and the little grinning devil had vanished from behind them, “Smith, I’ve never asked your word on anything before, but I’ve—I’ve earned the right to do it now, and I’m asking you to promise me one thing.”

  Smith’s colorless eyes met the black gaze unsteadily. Irresolution was in them, and a little fear of what that promise might be. And for just a moment Yarol was looking, not into his friend’s familiar eyes, but into a wide gray blankness that held all horror and delight—a pale sea with unspeakable pleasures sunk beneath it. Then the wide stare focused again and Smith’s eyes met his squarely and Smith’s voice said, “Go ahead. I’ll promise.”

  “That if you ever should meet a Shambleau again—ever, anywhere

  —you’ll draw your gun and burn it to hell the instant you realize what it is. Will you promise me that?”

  There was a long silence. Yarol’s somber black eyes bored relentlessly into the colorless ones of Smith, not wavering. And the veins stood out on Smith’s tanned forehead. He never broke his word—he had given it perhaps half a dozen times in his life, but once he had given it, he was incapable of breaking it. And once more the gray seas flooded in a dim tide of memories, sweet and horrible beyond dreams. Once more Yarol was staring into blankness that hid nameless things. The room was very still.

  The gray tide ebbed. Smith’s eyes, pale and resolute as steel, met Yarol’s levelly.

  “I’ll—try,” he said. And his voice wavered.

  * * *

  The Bright Illusion

  Through the blinding shimmer of sun upon sand, Dixon squinted painfully at the curious mirage ahead. He was reeling with thirst and heat and weariness, and about him the desert heaved in long, blurred waves, but through the haze of his own weakness, and through the sun haze upon the desert, he peered anxiously at the thing and could not make it out.

  Nothing he had ever seen or heard of could cause such a mirage as this. It was a great oval of yellow light, bulging up convexly from the earth like some translucent golden egg half buried in the sand. And over its surface there seemed to be an immense busyness, as if it was covered with tiny, shimmering things that moved constantly. He had never seen anything remotely resembling it before.

  As he toiled through the sand toward the bright illusion, he became aware of darker specks around it haphazardly, specks that as he approached took on the aspect of men grotesquely sprawled in attitudes of death. He could not make it out. Of course it was a mirage, yet it did not recede as he advanced, and the details of those sprawled bodies became clearer and clearer, and the great translucent oval loomed up against the sky mystifyingly.

  He thought he must be dreaming, or perhaps a little unbalanced by the heat and thirst. He had been struggling through this burning sand under this burning sun for a long while now, and there were times when the rush of illusion swallowed him up, and he could hear water splashing and fountains tinkling in the empty desert about him. This must be a hallucination, then, for it could scarcely be a mirage. He was almost upon it, and it had so real a look—those bodies, sprawling— He stumbled over the first, for somehow his muscles did not co-ordinate very well now. It was the sun-withered body of an old man in the Legion uniform, his kepi fallen forward over his face. The next was that of an Arab in
a tangle of dirty white garments, and beyond him was the almost-fresh corpse of a boy in khaki shorts and sun helmet.

  Dixon wondered duly what had happened to them and why the bodies were in such varying stages of decomposition. He lifted a dragging head and peered at the great egg-shape thing bulging up from the sand. It reminded him of a huge bubble of golden water, save that bubbles were round, and— Belatedly, caution returned to him. These dead men must have met

  their deaths somehow through the presence of the great egg. He had better advance more cautiously or— And then the pull seized him. He had come too near. Something inexorable and slow was dragging him forward-or was it that the great bubble was advancing toward him?

  Sky and sand reeled. And the distance between him and the great egg-shaped thing lessened and lessened and—and somehow he found himself flat against a great golden translucency that shivered against him with the strangest motion, as if it was alive and hungry for— He felt that he should be afraid, yet somehow he was not aware of fear at all. The golden light was closing over him and around him with a queer, engulfing motion. He shut his eyes and relaxed utterly in the impassive grip of the thing.

  Dixon was lying motionless in the midst of a golden radiance that seemed crystal clear, yet so obstructed his vision that he could see only a few yards away, and the desert landscape outside was as unreal as a dream. The most delicious sensation of rest and well-being was surging through him in slow waves that succeeded one another like ripples on a shore, each leaving an increasing residue of serenity and luxurious comfort. Thirst and hunger and weariness had vanished in a breath. He knew no fear or anxiety. In a trancelike calm he lay there, feeling the waves flow through him unbroken, staring up into the lucid golden light without wonder or surprise.