He lit the lamp and paced the floor in a cold, careless mood. One thing be had determined. He said it over and over to himself.
“This is my home. It has been the home of my family for two hundred years. No devil or beast or worm can make me leave it.”
He said it again and again. He felt that if he said it often enough, he would believe it, and if he could only believe it, he might make the Worm believe it. He knew now that it was a Worm, just like the night crawlers he had used so often for bait, only much larger. Yes, that was it. A Worm like a night crawler, only much larger, in fact, very much larger. That made him laugh—to think how much larger this Worm was than the ones he had used for fishing. All through the night he walked the floor and burned the lamp and said, “This is my home. No Worm can make me leave it!” Several times he went down the steps, just a few of them, and shouted the message into the pit as though he wanted the Worm to hear and understand, “This is my home! No Worm can make me leave it!”
Morning came. He mounted the ladder that led to the trap door in the roof and opened it. The rain beat in. Still that might be a place of refuge. Crying, he took his Burton and his Rabelais and wrapped them in his raincoat and put them out on the roof, under a box. He took the small pictures of his father and mother and put them with the books. Then in loving kindness he carried the dog up and wrapped him in a woolen blanket. He sat down and waited, and as he did so he recited poetry—anything that came to him, all mixed up, “Come into the garden where there was a man who was so wondrous wise, he jumped into a bramble bush and you’re a better man than I am and no one will work for money! And the King of Love my Shepherd is”—and on—and then—
He heard the sliding and the slithering rasping and he knew that the Worm had come again. He waited till the Hrrrrrr—Hrrrrrr told that the wooden floor he was on was being attacked and then he went up the ladder. It was his idea to wait till the Thing had made a large opening, large enough so the eyes could be seen, and then use the fifty bullets—where they would do the most good. So, on the roof, beside the dog, he waited.
He did not have to wait long. First appeared a little hole and then it grew wider and wider till finally the entire floor and the furniture had dropped into the mouth, and the whole opening, thirty feet wide and more than that, was filled with the head, the closed mouth of which came within a few feet of the roof. By the aid of the light from the trap door, Staples could see the eye on the left side. It made a beautiful bull’s eye, a magnificent target for his rifle and he was only a few feet away. He could not miss. Determined to make the most of his last chance to drive his enemy away, he decided to drop down on the creature, walk over to the eye and put the end of the rifle against the eye before he fired. If the first shot worked well, he could retire to the roof and use the other cartridges. He knew that there was some danger—but it was his last hope. After all he knew that when it came to brains he was a man and this Thing was only a Worm. He walked over the head. Surely no sensation could go through such massive scales. He even jumped up and down. Meantime the eye kept looking up at the roof. If it saw the man, it made no signs, gave no evidence. Staples pretended to pull the trigger and then made a running jump for the trap door. It was easy. He did it again, and again. Then he sat on the edge of the door and thought.
He suddenly saw what it all meant. Two hundred years before, his ancestors had started grinding at the mill. For over a hundred and fifty years the mill had been run continuously, often day and night. The vibrations had been transmitted downward through the solid rock. Hundreds of feet below the Worm had heard them and felt them and thought it was another Worm. It had started to bore in the direction of the noise. It had taken two hundred years to do it, but it had finished the task, it had found the place where its mate should be. For two hundred years it had slowly worked its way through the primitive rock. Why should it worry over a mill and the things within it? Staples saw then that the mill had been but a slight incident in its life. It was probable that it had not even known it was there—the water, the gristmill stones, the red-hot stove, had meant nothing—they had been taken as a part of the day’s work. There was only one thing that the Worm was really interested in, but one idea that had reached its consciousness and remained there through two centuries, and that was to find its mate. The eye looked upward.
Staples, at the end, lost courage and decided to fire from a sitting position in the trap door. Taking careful aim, he pulled the trigger. Then he looked carefully to see what damage had resulted. There was none. Either the bullet had gone into the eye and the opening had closed or else it had glanced off. He fired again and again.
Then the mouth opened wide—wider—until there was nothing under Staples save a yawning void of darkness.
The Worm belched a cloud of black, nauseating vapor. The man, enveloped in the cloud, lost consciousness and fell.
The Mouth closed on him.
On the roof the dog howled.
THE BONELESS HORROR
Originally published in Science Wonder Stories, July 1929.
The Emperor of Gobi sat proudly on his marble throne. Below him, on the Steps of the First Magnitude, sat the Seven Wise Men, on whom the Emperor depended for the welfare of his realm, and the continued power of his dynasty.
And, on the other Steps of Magnitudes Two down to Seven, stood the nobles of the realm, all of them selected because of some brilliant achievement adding to the splendor of Gobi.
One after the other, the Seven Wise Men read from parchment scrolls, the record of their departments for the past month, and the Emperor praised them for all they had done. Especially did he give credit to the Royal Mathematician, the Royal Engineer, and the Royal Geographer; for these three men, separately and in unison, read of the plans they had prepared for the destruction of the Land of Mo, that great kingdom of the south, which dared to dispute with Gobi the supremacy of the world.
For the Emperor of Gobi had issued orders that Mo not only must be conquered, but also actually destroyed; and for months the three Wise Men in charge of the Departments of Mathematics, Engineering, and Geography had studied over the problem, and now they had a plan. It was a good plan; and, at the end of it, Mo would be no more.
There was one flaw in the beauty of the plan, and that was the long time needed to accomplish it. Tunnels had to be dug under the sea, and under the great gulfs of water separating Mo from Gobi; and even though all of the slaves and all the machinery and great skill of Gobi—though all of these were put to work—still years would pass before the desired end would be accomplished.
So the face of the Emperor darkened, for he was now passing his fifty-ninth birthday; and he knew that ere thirty more years faded away, he and his Seven Wise Men and all who had helped him make Gobi great would be worm food and dust in their golden coffins, or else so old that their greatest worry would be the dragging of broken bodies through another day. He thought back over all the great men who had served the kingdom in past ages, and he saw that about them all only one fact remained certain; and that was that they lived a while and then died.
And thinking thus, his face grew hard and sad; and he chewed the end of his mustache in such a way as to make the Royal Barber tremble. Finally, he cried:
“All of your plans are folly and your thoughts foolish vain, for who of us will be here to see this ending of our enemy thirty years from now? And what comfort if a few of us live on, yet lack the mental power to glory in our triumph? Give us youth! Take away from us the weight of the years gone by, and there would be satisfaction in the perfecting of your plans. Give me youth! Take from my shoulders the weight of years, from my head the whitened hair, from my face the little wrinkles—fateful handwriting of Time, the Conqueror—and then you can destroy Mo. Which of you Seven Wise Men can make a man young?”
Silently, the Seven looked at each other, fiddling their fingers and toying nervously with their dragon rings, emblems of the immortality they believed in but lacked. The Emperor, too, had a ring li
ke theirs, only his was carved from a single garnet, while theirs were just made of gold. The dragon swallowing his tail—the never ending, ever beginning symbol of fadeless youth—made the rings sacred to the Seven and to their Emperor.
From his throne, the ruler commanded that seven of his slaves be brought in. These he had his Chief Executioner kill in seven different ways—by the silken cord, and decapitation, and the bleeding from the wrists, the pouring of molten lead in the ear, the golden needle stuck slowly past the eyeball, the placing of a drop of poison on the tongue, and, finally, the frightful death by command, wherein the mighty Ruler need but command a man to die, and the man dies from fear of being disobedient.
And the seven dead bodies of the slaves lay stretched out on the floor of the palace; and the Emperor rose and whispered:
“I can give death, but I cannot make myself live on till I see the end of Mo. Hear me, you Seven Wise Men! Am I ruler, or am I not?”
The Seven bowed before him and assured him that he was indeed their Lord and King.
“Then attend to what I say. Meet me in three months, and at that time tell me how to prolong my life ten-fold so I can glory in the conquest of this country I hate so much. Do this, or I shall kill you Seven Wise Men, and other men will take your place and wear the dragon rings. The manner of your deaths will not be easy like the deaths of these seven slaves, but you shall be weeks in the ending of your lives. All that time you shall have due cause to reflect over your lack of intellect, in that you could not make me live on for long enough to glory in the fall of Mo. You are all wise men, and you have worked well for the Land of Gobi, but all of your wisdom will not suffice, unless you give this immortality to me.”
They bowed their heads and withdrew from his presence, stepping aside so their silken robes should not touch the dead bodies of those who had died to teach them how they could go on living.
Other slaves came and removed the carrion, and the Nobles left the great hall. At the last, only the Emperor sat there. He rang a gong. At that summons, came the High Priest, a man who knew all the wisdom of the God; and what he did not know, he would not admit. The Emperor permitted the Priest to sit near him.
“Tell me again, Norazus,” the Emperor asked, “about the dragon whose ring I wear.”
“This dragon lives far to the north of Gobi,” the High Priest began. “He lives perpetually with his tail in his mouth, thus never reaching either an ending or a beginning, but going in a circle, which is thus an emblem of eternity, a symbol of immemorial, immortal life. Yet is he nothing like everlasting, for every seventh year he lays seven eggs in the sands of the desert; and, of these seven, he selects one which he swallows, hatching it out in the heat of his stomach. When it ripens, the new dragon eats the old one and emerges from his inner gut; but in his body is the soul of the old dragon, and in his head the wisdom of the ages. Thus is the life of the dragon renewed every seven years by means of a new body; but the skin of the old dragon lies dried and bloodless on the ever-shifting sands.”
“A pretty tale, Norazus; but is it true?”
The two men looked at each other. Then the priest whispered:
“What if I showed you eggs of the dragon, some of the six he discards and leaves to turn to stone in the sand?”
“Eggs or stone, what boots it? How can you tell the dragon egg from the giant awk, or the dodo, or other birds my wise men prate of?”
“Some things must be taken on faith.”
“What is that? A bubble for children. We are wise. I wear this dragon ring because it is the emblem of power. My father and his before him wore this ring, but we must seek elsewhere for life everlasting. The dragon may know how to renew himself, but we cannot use his power.”
“Have you benefited from the daily blood of a newborn child?”
“Not much. In fact, I fear that it has harmed my appetite. The meals are not as good as they were before I took this tonic. Several times I have belched, making necessary the death of my cook. No, Norazus, let us wait till the Seven Wise Men report on their method of prolonging life. Whatever they advise, I will share it with you and with them. But we will never learn the secret of the Dragon or of the Salamander or of the Phoenix, who buildeth a fire for a new life through the burning of the old body. Not in such forms must we seek added years. Yet I must live to see the ending of Mo.”
At that time, there were three great Empires in the world. Atlantis occupied all the land west of Ireland, an island reaching far west till, from its farthermost shores, the coast of America showed as a purple haze on the horizon. From this country went emigrants to Egypt, Greece, and the other countries of the Barbarians bordering on the Great Sea.
The Empire of Mo filled in all the great waste that is now covered by the waves of the Pacific. To the west, it was separated from Asia by three hundred miles of water, but on its eastern borders it was almost in touch with Central America. It had colonies all through North and South America, but the largest of these were in Central America. Some of these colonies were commercial, others led toward the spreading of the service of the All-Good-God whom they worshipped diligently, and one, in the valley of the Colorado river, where Arizona now stands, was intended for a city of refuge if, at some future time (as the dismal priests believed), all of Mo should be destroyed.
The third great Empire was Gobi. This kingdom occupied all of Asia, at that time a lowland covered with fertile plains and dark forests. There were little rolling hills, but the Himalayas still slumbered unborn, in the womb of the earth.
Of these three countries, one, before its destruction, gave of its learning to Egypt, which in turn made the culture of Greece possible. Mo, most brilliant of all three as far as learning was concerned, died so quickly that nothing remained save a dim memory in the places where once her peoples had ruled in their might; while Gobi, shattered by a grim cataclysm, managed to live on in the desperate cold and barbarous country of Thibet. The three lands died together, but men lived on, forced by circumstance to forget all they ever knew, and learn it all over again. Gradually, man rose again in the scale of civilization, and by the time fourteen thousand years had passed, the human race had relearned perhaps half of what it knew before they had destroyed the three fairest empires the world had ever known.
At the end of three months, the great men of Gobi met again, but this time no plenteous splendor marked their gathering. Secretly, they met by night in the bowels of the earth, many feet under the Palace, in a room that only a few of each generation knew of and which none ever dared to name above a whisper. It was a room of black marble. Around the walls were nine dragons of red stone from whose eyes came a glow that lit the room. In the belly of each dragon was a seat. Thus there was a seat for the Emperor and one for each of the Seven Wise Men and one for the High Priest. On the floor sat a blond man of about thirty. His eyes were blue and his hair flaxen, and there was an unafraid look upon his face. On him there were neither bonds nor fetters.
The Chief of the Navy of Gobi began the tale of the stranger.
“O most illustrious Emperor, Representative of the Dragon in human form, Wearer of the Ring, when you commanded us to find for you the secret of longevity, if not even that of immortality, each of us went our varied ways to find the answer to your command. To me came the inspiration to search the sea between our land and Mo in the hope that among the prisoners I might capture would be a man of learning in the art and sciences of the cursed country of our enemies. In order to examine those we captured, I took in our fleet one of our learned men, and also men skilled in obtaining the truth from such persons, no matter how unwilling they are to disclose it. We cruised for some weeks and took several vessels which had sailed too far from Mo for their safety. Of the men we captured, we killed most, either as ignorant folk or else stubborn ones who died when the tormentors began to work on them. However, we were fortunate in obtaining one of their physicians, who, when he found out what we wanted, claimed the power to lengthen life. This man you see here. If
his ability is equal to his boasts, he can satisfy our desires to prolong the life of your Highness.”
The Emperor looked thoughtfully into the face of the young man.
After a long pause, he asked:
“Have any of you Seven Wise Men questioned him to find wherein his power to prolong life lies?”
“We have done so, Your Highness,” replied the Royal Physician, he who knew more about the healing arts than any other man in the realm. “I talked over the matter with him.”
“And what opinion did you arrive at concerning his method?”
“It has all the elements of philosophical truth in it.”
“But will it really work in the lengthening of life?”
“That cannot be said without a trial.”
Again silence, filled with suspense, covered those in the mystic room, the sacred Hall of the Dragon.
And then the Emperor asked the young man:
“Are you a man from the land of Mo?”
“No, I come from far away Atlantis.”
“How came you in a ship of Mo?”
“Years ago, as a child, I was taken prisoner from my home; and since then I have lived in Mo. They thought they saw in me astonishing aptness to be a physicker and a dealer in drugs and magical healings, so they taught me all they knew; and of all the young men in their college of medicine none knew more than I did. When I was taken by your ship, I was voyaging to a far land to heal a mighty man of his disease.”
“So you have no tie of love for Mo?”
“Why should I, when they killed my family and took me from the home of my childhood.”
“Would you stay with us?”
“One place is as good as another, since I cannot be a free man.”
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack, Volume 5 Page 4