by John Brunner
Before him a monstrous misshapen creature fought to stand upright on legs that melted and ran into disgusting ichor, foul stink that choked the nostrils as it burned. Toad-wide mouth opened, forcing out words that lost meaning even as they trespassed on the air. Loomed overhead on the black underside of the canopy of smoke shadows that took form and substance, groping loathsomely down to snatch and bear away. The ultimate bodies of the universe could be heard grinding down paths made gritty with hate and fear so that the smooth rolling of planets became the harsh complaint of ill-matched botcher-cut gears.
Breeze cleared—something. Staggering back, Laird’s foot encountered an obstacle and sank on it, crushing, stealing his balance. An instant of clarity as a grip was taken on him by—hands? Talons, trailing loathesome shreds of wing like a bat afflicted with a fungoid disease. A mouth lipped with the brilliance of the fire spoke at him and said nonsense.
Laird cried out and thrust away the clutching claws, not knowing or caring what they belonged to. He tried to utter familiar friendly names himself, called the passengers he had travelled with in another world, on a different plane from this Avernus.
“Courcy!”
The monster before him slobbered and spat, heaving in horrible irregular spasms like an octopus dying on a sun-stark rock. Violently he beat at its chest and thrust it away, feeling again the slimy toadness of it.
“Dagmar!”
Heat licked his skin with the hurtful caress of a torturer, filled his nose with the odour he identified with that of his own skin crackling like roasted meat.
“Polly!”
The bat-creature raked his face with sharpnesses and he felt flesh come naked where the skin had been, to let in the heat more anguishingly, to suggest flaying and the touch of red iron knives. His arm rose and struck aside the horror plaguing him while devil-parodies of both of them danced on the hot rocks, flattened to silhouettes. No answer had come to his despairing cries, no help for the helpless lost in an eternity of suffering. One last name remained, the extra passenger, the one unseen.
“Sammy!”
And there came the scream.
From the throat of the toad-thing it boiled out, solid as a spray of metal, shaped into contortions Laird could see and touch, stumbling back, fending off what threatened his face and eyes. Through his unclosable ears, touching him on the raw agony of his essential being; through his eyes, printing its image into his retinas so that his brain wanted to curl up and sever its connection with his optic nerves; through his skin, so that his very muscles crawled with a sense of loathing, and sought to writhe away from the insensitive bone, leaving behind a clean invulnerable skeleton; by every path of sense the scream penetrated the personality he knew as Laird Walker, myself.
Yet at the same time he perceived with another part of his mind: the toad-thing sinking into a puddle of its own filthy substance, as though one put a jellyfish on a stove and watched it dwindle, and the creature—Person? Being?—that intruded now between him and it. It could have been a stray waft of smoke. But it grew black-solid, achieved identity, declared itself. Also, around, the hellish wall, the roof whose underside glimmered with reflected flame, the frame within which the Being could exist.
A voice: suffer suffer die, suffer and die…
He was doing something he had not meant to, walking forward when all he wanted to do was flee, into space, into time, into any refuge where this horror could not follow him. Arm raised as though from the hand it upheld could be shed fury, punishment, justice.
His hand, the nerves reported. Yet simultaneously they were reporting fire-scorch, bruising, pain; on his face he felt the wet of trickling blood and the parallel lines of scratches. Toad, a creature of the lost horrible past, obsolete and to be expunged, infecting every place it went with miasmal plagues, abominable madness from a primal swamp. And this since the Being came, and the Being since the invocation of the other passenger…
The shrivelling personality called Laird Walker groped inside a battered skull for logic in that chain of reasoning, and found none, and surrendered. Light bloomed, a flower of a heartbeat’s lifetime, and the toad-thing gave a final ululating cry. A hand grasped his, turned him away without resistance, and there was darkness, and, eventually, peace.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Stars. On his face clear cool air. Under his back and shoulders hard rough ground. He stirred in bewilderment and had to touch himself to be sure he still held his own physical shape. Fingers sought temples, cheeks—this one tender to the touch, rough-crusted with something still a little less than dry.
He moved and the movement was an act of sitting, hand behind to thrust his weight upwards, legs drawn in to counterbalance body. An eastward flush of dawn showed on the sky and revealed the skeleton of unreality under the images of hell that still burned vivid as the cleanly fire in his memory. There was a smooth silver form like a fish a little way off; he foggily put a label to it and whispered car. Also there was a distorted lump with one round shape at the nearest corner, to which the same name belonged. But the whole rear part of it was deformed and ragged shreds of leather flapped in the breeze under licking smears of smoke-black that sprawled up the overhanging rock.
I—I…
The thought stopped there, and seemed to be an achievement, the regaining of identity after it had been driven almost to the brink of the abyss. He licked his lips and tasted the sourness of smoke on them. Forcing himself to his feet, he found his companions. Close by, inert, her skimpy dress around her waist and her legs pathetically exposed to the sky like those of a doll cast aside by a careless child, Courcy. Dagmar a few paces distant on the roadway, fair head pillowed on one arm, cheek turned to show that tears had runnelled smoke-grime over the skin. And, sitting on her heels like a savage, rocking back and forth: Polly. When she grew aware of him, she raised a face from which all the humanity had drained away and uttered words without emotion to make them meaningful.
She said, “I saw hell. God preserve me. I saw into the mouth of hell.”
There was a thing beside her against which Laird brushed his foot, as yet awkward in his movements. Glancing down, he found it was a leather case with a broken lock, crushed at one corner and stained as though oil had been spilled on it there.
But his eyes passed on, and he finally perceived the things that lay closer to the burned-out car. First, her expensive dress torn from shoulder to hip, her fine shapely bosom raised to heaven as though the accident of perfection could excuse no matter what: Medea Logan.
Now the perfection was marred. Across those lovely pale breasts lines had been drawn, lines of blood matching the claw-curved nails that rested against her shoulders, red turning to brown on the fingertips. A nail was broken, caught in the misplaced edge of one of her bra-cups.
And beyond her was…
Laird sought through the dull passages of his brain for a term to fit. A body? No, a heap. Smashed till it was hardly recognisable as human, a beaten pulp of flesh with a grinning eye-shut face at its top, lips drawn back and back from the teeth until the gums were so naked there might have been no lips at all, in the incredible rictus left by a convulsion that had—
He doubled over and vomited between his feet. After a while he was able to stand upright again, spitting the filthy taste away, and take another cold look at what he had not been able to believe the first time. Forcing his muscles to obey him, he reached out and took the limp fingers that sprawled at the edge of what had once been Emmerich Tileman. When he lifted the arm, it curved, and not at the elbow.
I couldn’t have wished that on anybody! No one could!
The balance it had achieved by chance disturbed, Tileman’s corpse toppled, pouring backward. Letting go the hand he had grasped, Laird touched the chest with his foot and pressed on it. A fresh surge of nausea threatened to overcome him.
The chest was soft. And not because of its layers of fat, either. Because of what happened in the last minutes before merciful death.
Behin
d him a voice said shakily, “Laird?”
He didn’t turn, only grunted an acknowledgment. Shortly, hair tangled, coughing a little, Courcy was beside him and looking down. She said, “But…”
And was silent again, until she settled on the right words and said, “But it looks as though he was stuffed with sawdust and it’s—it’s leaked out!”
“Come away,” Laird said gruffly. “Let’s see to the others.”
Together they roused Dagmar, brushed the dirt from her, then went to Polly and found that her eyes—wide, mad eyes—were fixed on a place they could not see. She said once more, “I saw hell. Yes. Yes.”
“Polly?” Laird’s voice was half a croak. She stirred and turned her head.
“Laird? Is—? Are we—?”
The questions would not be completed. They helped her to her feet and guided her towards the comfort of the Jensen, Dagmar stumbling in their wake. Laird fumbled for his cigarettes and found the pack was crushed by being lain on; nonetheless he was able to get one out and light it and pass it first to Courcy, then to Dagmar. He was shivering, and not only because he had spent the night unconscious on a cold mountain road.
There was about a quarter of a litre of wine left in the bottle they had bought for their lunch yesterday. They shared that, and it helped. Just a little.
“What happened to—him?” Courcy said at last. It was the question Laird had been trying not to have to answer, even in his own mind. But now he had to.
He said after a pause, “Dagmar, that case over there—you see it, with one corner crushed. What is it?”
“It’s Tileman’s,” Dagmar said. “He used it to take his drugs to Apricots.”
Laird crossed the road and picked it up. The lock had given way; lifting the lid, he found inside a dozen flat glass flasks neatly arranged on a velvet lining. Most of them were intact, but where the corner of the case had been smashed in, two had cracked and released the heavy, oily liquid they contained.
He held his breath until he had removed the broken flasks and thrown them into the burned-out wreck of the Bentley. Then he displayed the case to Dagmar, who nodded comprehension and clenched her teeth so hard her jaw-muscles lumped.
Courcy said, “I still don’t…”
“Understand?” Laird shrugged. “Maybe I don’t. But I think this makes sense. When the Bentley slammed into the rock there Tileman was nursing this case, the most precious thing in the world for him. And the crash broke the two flasks I just threw away. One of them held the hallucinogen, the other the depressant. The same recipe he had used to kill Sammy.”
The dawn leaked a little more light on to the grey road. Distantly a bird called and was answered. Polly’s teeth began to chatter audibly; Courcy put her arm around her shoulders and whispered comforting words.
“So, inside the car with the top up…” Laird made a vague gesture as though taking a handful of air and moulding it into an image. “Those flasks must hold a good half-pint apiece. Both he and Medea must have inhaled a lethal dose before we managed to drag them clear.”
“But he’s so soft!” Courcy cried.
“I think a worse thing happened to him than what he did to Sammy,” Laird said. “I’ve heard about this, but I never saw it before. I know there are some kinds of fits people can go into where the tension of their muscles can break their bones, even the strong ones like the long bone in the thigh. And the only possible explanation for what’s become of Tileman—well, he must have gone into convulsions that broke every bone in his body, and then broke the pieces again, and again, and again…”
I remember seeing: in the midst of visions, where this innocent roadway turned into a medieval Hades with all the decorations, he sank down into himself like a jellyfish dropped on a stove.
There was a fearful stillness for a moment. Dagmar said suddenly, “But what did he see? I—”
“Yes?” Laird prompted.
Dagmar licked her lips. “I saw what I have only heard about. The ovens at Auschwitz. I thought I saw people being fed to the flames.”
“And you, Courcy?”
For a moment he thought she was going to break out weeping. Her mouth trembled and she grew pale. But she mastered herself.
“I can’t tell you,” she muttered. “I daren’t even think about it because it was so horrible. I— No.”
Laird dragged his eyes away from her tortured face, somehow ashamed of having looked so deep into a private agony. He said gruffly, “Polly?”
“I saw hell,” Polly repeated for the third time, and then seemed to gather her self-control. She blinked and became aware of Courcy’s arm over her shoulder, and some of the normal warmth came back into her voice. She said, “But it wasn’t real, was it? It was all an illusion. It came out of the things they used to frighten me with when I was a little girl, to make me lie in bed in the dark without crying. It was just a car on fire, and something in the air that made me see things.”
“That’s right,” Laird said. “That’s all it was.” He hesitated. “But I think I know what Tileman saw,” he went on. “And maybe Medea saw it, too.”
“What?” Courcy demanded.
“Well…” Laird had to swallow hard. “When I put my head into the car I guess I must have got a powerful whiff of the drugs, and my mind went completely out of gear. All the way, across France, you know, I’ve had this crazy notion that there was someone else in the car with us, and—”
“My brother,” Polly said simply.
“You felt it too?” Laird gave her an astonished glance. “How the—? Ah, skip it. It doesn’t matter. But when the depressant hit me, you see, I felt I was—was condemned. I wanted to be helped. I guess maybe I must have screamed for help because I was so desperate. And I called all your names and nothing happened, so I called Sammy’s name. That was when it started.”
Unseeing, he raised his head towards the smoke-stained overhang of rock. “Maybe that was what did for Tileman. Maybe whatever he was seeing crystallised around the name of the man he’d killed. Like that, it makes for a kind of—”
“A kind of justice,” Dagmar said. She stared at the barely human mound on the far side of the road. After a moment she blinked as though fighting tears. “But whatever he did to me, or Mr Logan, to be made to suffer that…!”
“And you think Medea may have seen the same?” said Courcy.
“Who knows?” Laird said. All of a sudden he was intolerably weary. He closed the case containing Tileman’s drugs and laid it on the floor of the car. “Ought to be enough in there for analysis,” he muttered. “Get it to someone who knows what to do with it. Shannon, maybe.”
“What?” Courcy glanced at him. “I didn’t hear that.”
“Forget it.”
At the edge of hearing there was a roar of engines: something slow-moving struggling up a steep hill, probably a tractor. Laird twisted the ignition key and started the car.
“Are you just going to leave them?” Polly said.
“I can’t argue with police or anyone right now,” Laird sighed. “Let’s get away. Let’s go home.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
From the keys of the white and gold piano Bitchy evoked a parody of a hillbilly banjo strum, and sang to the tune of The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven:
“Up in the mountains one hot summer midnight
On a narrow winding lane
The Bentley skidded and its tank exploded,
So we’ll never see Tileman again!”
At the best table, a waiter poised the champagne bottle over Polly’s glass. Diffidently she allowed him to refill it. As she raised it to take a sip, she grew aware that Bitchy was gazing at her and gave a little bob of her head, a sketch for a toast.
“I have a full statement here from the American, Walker,” Inspector Lewis informed his superintendent. “It all seems to hang together.”
“Shouldn’t have run away from the scene like that,” the superintendent grumbled. “The French police have been kicking up a hell of a stink
about it.”
“Well, sir, according to this fellow Shannon at the Brankside Hospital, after a violent dose of the drug Tileman died from he wouldn’t have been completely in control of himself. But unless they want to book him for driving under the influence, there’s not much they can make of that.” Lewis hesitated. “Matter of fact, sir, I thought we could possibly pop over there—give the French authorities the inside dope.”
The superintendent brightened a little. “That might be a good idea,” he approved. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”
Bitchy sang:
“How they’ll miss the doctor when the drones foregather
And the party grows a bore!
They’ll have to make do with pot and acid
For they won’t see Tileman any more!”
The pathologist studied the documents which Dr Shannon had handed him. Having read them through with close attention, he said, “So it’s almost certainly the last trace of this stuff that I found in Logan’s spinal fluid, hm?”
“That’s right,” Shannon agreed. “It breaks down very rapidly in the body after death—our tests on lab animals have confirmed that.”