Back on the main road, they turned a corner and were at once greeted with chaos. Peace and normality faded at the sight of six cars piled up together across the street. A light blazing from an empty window lit the scene, emphasising its ghastliness. There had been a stand-up battle with the enemy here. Human and alien corpses lay about the area. Furniture had been flung out of windows. A tank had ploughed through two gardens and now stood motionless against a smashed house wall. Over everything lay the nets and guide lines of the enemy, trailing across flower beds and roof tops indiscriminately.
‘This happened not so long ago, I’ll bet you,’ Davies observed. ‘The bloody bastards are beyond reason.’
‘Avoid the guide lines and we can get round this way,’ the lieutenant said, taking the lead, happy to reflect that he was showing no emotion before his men.
As he skirted one of the crashed cars, Hogg grabbed his arm.
‘Just look there!’ he said in a constricted voice, pointing to the lighted window. They could see the ceiling of the room. Over it shadows moved, shadows here spindly, there bulky. Next minute, one of the enemy appeared at the window above them.
Its palps waved into the dark. With sudden agility, it heaved itself up onto the sill. Its head or cephalic region was the size of a dustbin. Hardly hurrying, it stretched up tarsal claws and dragged itself up onto the roof. Its body was the size of a bath. For a moment the watchers saw it outlined against the peak of the roof; then it disappeared.
‘God, man, why didn’t we shoot the filthy thing?’ Davies enquired.
‘Better to let it go; shooting might only attract others,’ the lieutenant said. His mouth had gone dry, he wanted a drink; but he kept his voice level.
An hour later, they had most of what they wanted. The centre of the town was empty of people, though doubtless a few still crouched in barricaded houses. Enemy nets lay thickly everywhere; the sounds of the enemy and the choking smell of them gave the night air menace. The lieutenant felt a vague alarm to think how carelessly he had chosen to camp so near to danger.
Several shops had been broken into by looters. They found an unopened general store in a side street. Davies charged the door. At his second thrust, they heard the side lip of the lock break from the wood, and the door opened. Closing it, they worked by shielded torchlight. The place was piled with tinned goods.
‘We ought to carry as much of this stuff as we can,’ the lieutenant said, in sudden excess of greed. ‘Food may be short at Stow HQ. Hogg, have a look round the side and see if you can find a cart or barrow of some sort.’
Unlocking a side door behind the counter, Hogg found himself in a back yard. Masking his torch with his fingers, he saw the end of a shed ahead. It was open to one side. On rounding the corner, he tripped and stumbled over something. It was a guide line, no thicker than a piece of thin string but infinitely stronger, and sticky.
Hogg jumped quickly to his feet. At the same time he saw the great net in the shed. From the black centre of it gleamed the six eyes of an enemy. The eyes were coming forward, shining salmon pink. Hogg was very frightened.
Even as he raised his nuc-gun, he heard a scuttling behind him. He turned, saw nothing. Down, springing down, sailing down from the roof came an enemy, knifed legs gleaming. Hogg whirled back to the thing in the shed, fired hastily, fired again. As he fired a third time, big poisonous fangs sank into his shoulder.
Dropping their provisions, the lieutenant and Davies ran through the shop and into the yard. With a twist of line around him, Hogg was being hoisted up to the chimneys.
As they tramped back to ‘Apres Midi’ with sacks of supplies over their shoulders, Davies said angrily, ‘If only they weren’t just insects, spiders, you wouldn’t mind so much. It’s terrible to think we’re being overrun just by spiders.’
The lieutenant was silent for a second, organising what he had to say.
‘They’ve been so lucky on this planet, Davies,’ he answered. ‘The egg-clutch that drifted here was lucky to land in a warm and desolate bit of Africa. Then look at the way they can multiply! They have no natural enemies here except man – one bite from their jaws can fell a tiger. They’ve evidently come from a planet bathed in hard radiation from its sun, because their tolerance is much higher than ours. They can’t be indiscriminately H-bombed because they’re too dispersed. Every factor’s on their side.’
‘Well it’s terrible to think we’re being overrun just by spiders.’
Irritated by the repetition of this remark, the lieutenant said, ‘They aren’t really spiders, though they often act and look like spiders. They have lungs and a circulatory system like ours. If they have no actual intelligence, their instinct is of a very high order.’
‘I know, sir, but it’s terrible to think we should be overrun just by spiders!’
The lieutenant lapsed into silence. Davies in all his stupidity was right. Davies had hit the nail bang on the head. Not only was it a bitter blow to have civilisation threatened, but the enemy itself was an unknowable and unaccountable natural machine, more frightening than the most formidable intelligence.
They arrived at ‘Apres Midi’. The civilians had disappeared. The elderly corpse from upstairs had been heaved over the hedge into the next door garden. Merdock’s house downstairs was a shambles. The men, prompted by some unknown malice, had ruined all the rooms. The furniture had been broken up into firewood; the carpets had been sliced up to make blankets; the pictures had been smashed; the walls were covered with names and obscene remarks. Viewing it all, the lieutenant was both shaken and pleased.
When a guard duty roster had been arranged and a meal eaten, the lieutenant ordered lights out and returned upstairs to sleep. He had the double bed so recently vacated by Mr. and Mrs. Merdock. Pleasurably he climbed beneath the sheets, leaving his boots on. His last waking thought was a picture of himself in Buckingham Palace, living like a lord or a pig and shooting gigantic spiders from an upper window.
At two o’clock in the morning he was roused by Corporal Bow.
‘Enemy outside, sir, lots of little uns the size of coal buckets. Shall we shoot them, sir?’
‘I’ll come down,’ the lieutenant said. He spoke kindly; he was pleased to be woken, so that he could demonstrate how easily he roused, how quickly he swung his legs out of bed.
All the men were roused downstairs, where gigantic fires still roared in the grates, demolishing chairs and sideboards. The dining–room smelt frowsty. They had switched the lights out; peering through the curtains, the lieutenant could see a certain amount of furtive and hunchbacked activity in the back garden. Thin moonlight glittered occasionally on a guide line.
‘They’re more versatile than any of our species of spider,’ the lieutenant observed. ‘They can hunt by day or night. And in an area like this they won’t find much to feed on except …’
‘Can we have a pot at them, sir?’ someone asked.
‘It’s safer to leave them alone. They’re too small to break windows and get in and bother us. Have the guards come indoors? Good. This lot will have moved on by morning. Nothing to worry about. Guards continue duties inside, rest of you get your heads down again. They won’t bother us if we don’t bother them.’
But as he returned upstairs his thoughts ran on. The arachnid race showed no desperate eagerness to attack man. Meanwhile, in its remorseless search for food, it was attacking everything else, from cattle to birds. Another few months and Earth’s ecology would be seriously upset.
He lay on his bed without climbing into it. A scratching, slithering noise sounded overhead. The creatures were crawling over the house, scampering over the tiles. Reluctantly getting up, the lieutenant went into the back bedroom where he had discovered the dead woman and peered out of the window.
The dead woman peered in at him. Even as he jumped back in horror, she moved, banging her nose against the pane. Her torso was visible, glistening whitely as if in a frosty shroud. Again she tapped, like a summons to the petrified man inside. S
eeming to grow taller, she loomed up in the window.
A small enemy climbed over her and disappeared.
That broke the spell. Sweating, the lieutenant forced himself forward again. He stared out past the dangling body. The enemy had retrieved the corpse from the next door garden. Now, having woven a cocoon round it, they were hauling it up onto the roof before devouring it. Without thinking, he opened the window and peered up past the dangling corpse. A row of palps and legs could be seen over the guttering of the roof, waving and beckoning like seaweed in a fierce current. The lieutenant slammed the window shut.
As he ran down the stairs he noticed detachedly that there was panic in his voice.
‘Burn the house down!’ he was shouting. ‘Set fire to everything! Burn the house down!’
The Other One
I
CABLEGRAM
In the dark, someone was struggling and pleading, threatening and pleading for release, someone ugly and hurt, helpless but powerful.
Eric Lazenby woke, groaning. He pressed his face into the pillow, letting his chin rasp on the soft nylon. As his mind cleared, he was aware of the warmth of his wife, Linda, beside him. He sighed heavily, lifting his head to listen to her quiet breathing. At this moment, he felt no tenderness for her, only anger – anger that she could sleep so peacefully while he suffered so much.
Because the vision of someone struggling had been no dream. Now Eric was awake, the Other still struggled and called, bullied and whined.
Shivering, Eric sat up. The luminous dial of his watch told him that it was 2.30 in the morning. Tuesday. Five days more, and he had to rejoin his spaceship, Regent Park, as First Astrogator, for the year-long trip to Pluto Station and back. Only five days … he reached out instinctively to touch Linda, scarcely able to stop himself crying aloud at the thought of leaving her.
Yet in a way it might be better aboard the Regent Park. The Other might not be able to get at him once they were spaceborn. He might be able to leave the Other behind, just as he had to leave Linda.
The Other had only been after him for seven days. All the time, it gained steadily in power. At first, Eric could ignore its whisper. Then this had grown more insidious and persistent. It had developed from a mere voice into a presence. Already, it had the power to rouse him from his sleep. By tomorrow …
‘Darling, what is it?’
Even as he heard the fear and compassion in his wife’s voice, Eric realised he had been sobbing aloud. Her arm came round his shoulders as she rolled over towards him.
‘I’m sorry I woke you, Lindy,’ he said. Yet it was a lie; his sense of utter desolation faded at the sound of her voice.
‘You don’t want to go back to that ship, do you?’ Linda guessed. ‘Why don’t you throw it up and get an Earth job, darling? You were worried all last week, I could see …’
‘It’s something more than that,’ he said, chokingly. As she switched on the bed light, Eric slid from between the sheets and paced up and down the room. He had to tell her. It was right to tell her – and imperative.
‘Something’s after me,’ he said, looking away from his wife. ‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to frighten you. And because it’s hard to describe. It’s … I think it’s an enemy, the worst enemy I ever had. Yet in a way it’s a friend. It’s – it’s very tiny and helpless … but at the same time it’s a giant which has – the power to kill me. I know that sounds nonsense, Lindy, but this thing has all these qualities at once. It’s so intangible – you see, sometimes it seems right close to me, and another time it might be millions of miles away … You’ll think I’m crazy. The sense of being surrounded, it’s almost impossible to put it into words …’
His voice petered out. The Other was there still, trying to listen, lurking behind a flimsy barrier. It was like having the wolf at the door – the swing door; in a moment, it would figure that it just had to pu-u-u-ush to get in.
Silence fell in the bedroom. He looked at her, huddled nervously in the bed.
‘Is this … thing Human?’ Linda asked at last, in a tiny voice.
‘No,’ Eric said. ‘No. I don’t think it can be Human.’
Her eyes stared. In the dim light, she no longer looked her beautiful self. Her face was flat, Mongoloid. Eric flicked his gaze away, aware he would have to take care to keep all his movements and thoughts under control.
‘I call it “the Other”,’ he said.
After what seemed a long while, Linda climbed out of bed, slipped on her blue robe and announced shakily that she would go down and brew coffee. Eric listened furtively at the top of the stairs, afraid she might call the police on the visiphone. He could see he had scared her. No doubt she thought he was going crazy. So did he.
Standing there rigidly, he became aware of how chilly it was. The breeze stirred his pyjamas. The light seemed to flicker. Looking up, Eric saw that this was because tattered clouds fled across the moon. Their shadows scampered over the bleak waste all round him. Nothing lived but those shadows, not a bush, a weed, a blade of grass.
Wrapping his arms round his chest for warmth, Eric looked anxiously about. Loneliness flooded in from all sides. Here, he was exposed and defenceless. Here, the Other could get him.
The great, dreary circle of the horizon was punctuated by only one landmark. Two miles away, his own house stood, dark but welcoming against the sky. Thankfully, Eric began to run towards it. He could not think why he had left it.
As he ran, he peered back over his shoulder. Nothing followed but the scudding shadows. They were harmless, yet they alarmed him in his near-panic state. Resolutely, he kept his eyes on his own home. There, lights were coming on, patching the black shape with squares of illumination.
‘Lindy!’ he called. He seemed to be swimming rather than running. His house was now a blaze of light, light surrounded it like a halo. The house gleamed at him like an owl’s eye. It was occupied.
The Other was there, waiting for him!
Eric stopped suddenly, filled with horror. He tripped and fell, tumbling among the shadows, down the stairs, fighting to slow his descent. Crazy patterns jigged before his eyes. Something crooked was running to meet him.
As he hit the bottom of the stairs, the thing seized him. He could not make it out; it seemed to have no face. He fought it, shouting. It shouted back, a high mewing note.
Gradually, Eric realised it was calling his name. He relaxed, trying to understand what else it was saying. His vision cleared as the thing’s grip tightened round him. Now he could see its face. It was Linda, his wife. She was crying as she called to him. He was too far gone to feel any relief at the sight of her.
A terrible lethargy stole over him, as if his limbs had been sunk in concrete. He could make out neither what had happened nor where he was. Dull pain chased the crazy patterns from his head.
‘You fell down the stairs,’ he heard her saying. ‘You fell down the stairs. Did you hurt yourself, Eric? Are you all right, darling?’
‘Just a minute,’ he whispered.
She went and fetched the coffee. They drank it crouching at the foot of the stairs. With the warm liquid came recovery, and life and intelligence soaking back. Eric sat up, his head clearing.
‘I had a sort of hallucination,’ he confessed. ‘I must have tripped down the staircase. I’m okay. No bones broken. My left leg hurts a bit, that’s all.’
‘You cried out so loudly, darling!’ she said.
He knew it had been more than an hallucination. The Other had now found a way to tamper directly with his brain. It was getting stronger. ‘I need help,’ he whispered to himself.
Linda held his hand. Her face was as pale as Eric’s, her fingers as cold.
‘I’ll drive you down to the Ferrisway Central Clinic in the morning,’ she said. ‘Young Clark Siddall, my old boss’s son, works there. I’m sure he’d help. He’s an expert in mental disorders.’
She broke off, shocked at having phrased it so bluntly to Eric.
; He wanted to protest. The protest bubbled within him, but found no outlet. When they had drunk up their coffee, Eric let himself be led upstairs to bed. His left leg pained him so much that he knew he would spend the rest of the night awake. As soon as his head pressed down on the pillow, he was asleep. It was as easy as falling off a cliff.
In the morning, he felt better; the Other gave no sign of its existence. The night was just another nightmare, something to be discarded and forgotten as soon as possible. His leg hardly ached at all. His head was clear. When Linda spoke again of going to see Dr Siddall, Eric laughed it off.
‘We’ve only five more days’ leave,’ he said. ‘Let’s not waste them hanging round clinics.’
At breakfast, the mail arrived. With the letters came a cablegram, addressed to Eric. Conscious of a constricted feeling round his heart, Eric opened it and read:
YOU CANNOT WIN STOP SURRENDER OR DIE STOP ERIC LAZENBY.
His jerking hand knocked a plate flying from the table. The cable fluttered to the floor. Linda jumped up but – he noticed it in the middle of his fear – did not come over to him. Instead, she reached down, scooped up the piece of paper from the floor and surveyed it blankly. When her eyes turned again to her husband, they were empty of all understanding.
‘Don’t stare at me like that, you fool!’ Eric said harshly, gripping the edge of the table. ‘Can’t you see what it is? It’s a cable – from me to myself, warning me I’m going to die!’
She shook her head slowly, horror flooding into her face. The paper trembled in her grasp.
‘It’s just a circular for a new detergent,’ she whispered. ‘It’s an advert, nothing more. Eric, you’re – you’re really going crazy!’
He hardly comprehended what she was saying. She was backing towards the door. The circular fluttered to the floor unnoticed. Suddenly he realised what was happening, and jumped up, ignoring the stab of pain in his left leg.
‘Linda!’ he cried urgently. ‘Linda, don’t leave me! For heaven’s sake – ’
Again his vision was blurring. Her face seemed to wear that terrifying Mongoloid look again. She turned and ran from the room. Eric blundered after her. Linda ran down the corridor, through the hall, wrenched open the front door, slammed it behind her. Eric crashed aganst it, standing helplessly with his forehead and the palms of his hands pressed hard against the panels. Tremors shook him.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 92