by Otto Penzler
Ann’s scalp was a tight cap on her throbbing skull. That which had crawled along the desert surface, how long had it lain there? How long had its shadow lain immobile like the other shadows, shorter now, of the water-starved, grotesque foliage of the barrens? How long had it watched there, buzzard-like? Had it now gone to call its fellows, certain that there would soon be carrion here for them to feed upon?
“Ten thousand men laboring an hour apiece! That slide rule’s warped. . . .” Gibberish in a hoarse, parched voice pulled her head around to Bob’s sweat-wet face, to his open, staring eyes. “DX over DY multiplied by cosine thirty degrees and you get two kilograms of Ag O Cl.” His hand was a burning coal in hers, his lips were black, cracked. He jerked up to a sitting posture, his other arm flung up over his head, and he screamed: “Ann! I’ve got it! I’ve got it, Ann! We’re rich. We’re rich!”
“Bob. Bob, dear. Lie down. Be quiet.” The young wife had both hands on the delirious man, was trying to wrestle him down. But fever-madness contorted his face, and with the strength of madness he tossed her about, fighting her.
“You can’t have it!” he screeched, in that awful voice that was not Bob’s voice. “You can’t have my secret. It’s for Ann. For Ann, I tell you. I won’t give it to you!”
The desert silence took his shrill cries and quenched them, but they rang on in Ann’s ears, and in her veins the blood ran cold with fear for her husband, her lover. Even as she fought to save him from his fever-demented self, tears streamed down her face, and sobs racked her. Oh, God! What was she to do? What could she do for him? If he got away from her . . .
As suddenly as it had come, the paroxysm of delirium passed. Bob slumped down. One word, one word more rasped from him. “Water . . .”
Water! He was burning with fever. Water would relieve him, water for his dry throat, water to bathe his torrid brow. Ann clawed to her feet, fought weakness, fought exhaustion to get to the car.
Water! The cans had torn loose from their straps on the crumpled running-board, the cans all travelers in the desert must carry. Here they were. Here in the sand was the red-painted one for gas, there the blue one for oil. The white one! Good Lord! Where was the white can, the water can? Breath sobbed from between Ann’s lips as she spied it, flung farther than the others, blending with the silver of the sands.
She tottered to it, bent to it, got hands on it and lifted it. It was light! Too light! Oh, God! Oh, merciless God! The depression it left in the sand was wet, though rapidly drying, and a gash in the white side of the round can showed where the water, more precious than a thousand times its weight of silver or platinum, had run out. There was no water!
THERE WAS NO water, and on the pallet she had improvised for him Bob, her Bob, tossed and rasped out his agonized demand for—water. “Ann,” he husked. “Ann. I’m burning. Water. Ann, give me water.”
The distracted girl licked her own dry lips, let the mocking canteen slip from her powerless fingers, stood statuesque, rigid, numbed by a disaster more overwhelming than all the intangible fears crowing around her had foreshadowed. To be waterless in the desert! Even now the fever-racked, thirst-tormented man was thrashing on his bed of pain, was crying for cooling liquid to assuage the fire within him. What would it be when the sun came blazing up over the horizon to pour down its torrid beams on the shadeless, waterless waste? What would it be when the air, so chill now, quivered with insupportable heat and the sands became a fiery furnace, a searing hell?
Water! Old tales crawled out of the past to trail their awful warning through her anguish. Tales leathery-visaged Uncle Horvay had told, come from the Purgatory of his depleted mine to find a year or two of brooding sanctuary in her home. They had haunted her dreams, those stories of men creeping, creeping through the thirsty, interminable miles of the desert, black tongues hanging from blackened mouths—stark, staring mad after hopeless struggle and ripping their own veins to drink relieving death at last. One gibbering, skull-like visage seemed to form in the ambient sheen of the vacant night as it had gibbered at her in nightmares then. It changed to Bob’s square-jawed, bronzed countenance, changed back again to a mask of horror. Her larynx constricted to a soundless scream.
“Ann!” Bob’s cry came like the cry of a frightened child, through the shell of despair encompassing her. “Ann! Where are you? Ann!” He was sitting up, was staring about him with glittering, frightened eyes. He stared right at her and did not see her.
She got to him, knelt to him. Her arms were around him. “Bob!” she sobbed. “Bob, dear. Here I am. Right here.”
“Ann,” he whimpered, clinging to her. “Ann. Why don’t you give me some water? I’m so thirsty. So terribly thirsty. And my foot hurts so.”
Fever and pain had made of her strong, brawny husband a little, frightened child. Agony tore at her heart, clawed her brain. “Help me, Ann. Help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you.” The girl got steadiness into her voice. “But you will have to be brave.” She loved him. Only now did she know how love strained in her every nerve, in her every sinew, how it yearned to him. She got his head down to her palpitant breast, held it there. He was quieter, his upturned eyes more reasonable. She would have to chance telling him. “Listen, dear. Our water is spilt. I’ll have to go and get some more. I’ll have to go and get help. I’ll have to leave you, but it will be only for a little while.”
“Leave me! Alone?” Fear flared in the pain-filled orbs that were fastened on her face. Then it died away. The lines of Bob’s face hardened, the lines of his mouth firmed. “Of course. Deadhope is only over the hill.” He lay more heavily against her breast. The fever was sapping what little strength he had left. “Kane . . . foreman. Tell him . . . hurry. I’ll be—all right—till he—comes.” Bob’s voice trailed into silence. His eyes were closed. He was asleep.
Ann slid him gently off her lap, onto the seat cushions, pulled his overcoat together, buttoned it with shaking fingers. She stood up and slipped out of her own warm garment to roll it and push it under his head for a pillow. Her lips brushed his and he smiled in his sleep. Muttered, “Ann. Darling.”
Then she was erect, was walking away from him, the desert sands clogging her footsteps. Walking toward the crest of the road-rise that now was silver-edged, shimmering as though it were the crest of a long sea-swell. Deadhope was over the hill. Deadhope from which two-fisted, hard-faced brawlers had fled in an extremity of blood-curdling terror. Deadhope where some awful menace lurked, more fearful because she could not know, could not guess its nature.
Deadhope where water must be, water and some conveyance, perhaps, that would enable her to carry Bob to shelter.
Behind lay mile upon mile of unpopulated, barren country. Only in the mystery ahead was there any reachable possibility of help for Bob. And so, although apprehension lay a leaden weight within her, and fear clawed her with gelid talons, and her veins were a network lacing her shuddering form with icy dread, Ann Travers stalked like a lonely specter through the ghost-grey moonlight. And far out on the desert another shadow that had lain motionless and watching, moved imperceptibly and slithered over the edge of the ground-swell to carry ahead word of her coming. . . .
ANN CLIMBED THE ground-swell as though she were moving through some transparent, thick liquid. Though quite invisible, it resisted her slow advance so that she had to force through it, fighting for every inch of progress. It was barely a hundred yards to the summit of the rise, yet it was an endless journey as within her fear shrieked, “Look out! Danger ahead! If those men could not fight it, how can you hope to? Turn back. Turn back before it is too late!” Thus fear. And love answered, “Go on! Go on! At whatever peril to yourself, you must go on. Bob will die if you do not. Bob will die.” Love, conquering fear. “Go on before it is too late.”
She reached the last tiny rise at last, hesitated a moment, shuddering with cold dread, took the final step that brought her up and over the summit. Stopped again.
The desert pitched more steeply tha
n it had climbed, so that it descended into a vast hollow filled with moonglow, ghostly, evanescent. It seemed brighter here, and momentarily Ann could see nothing but that all-pervading, silver-grey radiance investing sky and earth alike with brooding mystery. Then she made out the grey bowl of sand merging with the grey bowl of the heavens so that their joining was indiscernible. Far at the other side of the hollow, a maze of darker lines resolved themselves into gaunt, shattered timbers hazily outlining what once had been houses, dwellings.
Like silhouetted skeletons they rose, those ghastly beams, like stripped skeletons of a dead town. Here a tall chimney leaned askew, still faithful to a hearth that never again would gather about itself laughter and merriment. There the collapsed roof-poles of a more ambitious structure stabbed through a space that must have been a dance-hall, perhaps the very dance-hall Dan Horvay had cleaned out one mad and brawling night. . . .
Ann’s gaze pulled away from the ghostly town, pulled nearer. Midway across the lower plain an angular-edged black blot lay athwart the shifting, luminous sands, somehow incongruous to the color-drained, incorporeal, dreamlike scene. This was the long barracks, Ann guessed, erected by the men Bob had sent to prepare the mine for its reopening, the men who had been driven away from here by some supernal terror. And her heart leaped as she saw, in the ebony side of it facing her, a yellow oblong flash out, an oblong of light, and across it shadow move.
Someone had been left behind! Someone alive! Someone who could help her! The girl forgot her dread in exultation, sprang into motion. She was running down the side of the hill, her lips formed to a call. . . .
The call was never uttered. Ann’s heels dug into the sand, braked her to a halt. Her hand came up to her frozen lips, stifling that cry. A nightmare paralysis held her rigid on the hillside, and the affrighted blood fled the surfaces of her body, sought the warmth of her pounding heart. Only her eyes were alive, only her fear-widened, aching eyes that were focused on something that moved, there ahead of her in the phantasmal sand, something that crawled slowly toward her with loathsome life.
It was movement only, at first, and the lengthening shadow of a mesquite bush. Then an arm writhed into the lunar luminance, a long, shudderingly emaciated arm, livid and ghastly. It lifted inches from the ground, dropped, and the tentacular, fleshless fingers of its hand hooked into the dirt, dug deep, pulled, pulled head and body after it, out of the shadow.
A head! But it was a gargoylesque mask, livid, hatchet-edged, sunken-socketed. The head of a thing long dead, of a woman long dead, crawling out from the shadow on her belly, crawling with slow malevolence toward the staring, motionless Ann.
Bedraggled, grey hair was stringy about that dreadful countenance. Clearly in the moonglow Ann saw saliva drool from between lips drawn back to reveal blued and toothless gums. In the awful visage there was no expression, no sign of human intelligence, so that that which slithered toward her seemed a soulless imbecile thing, utterly brainless. But then the dragging, prostrate body came fully out into such light as there was, and a vagrant beam struck deep into the abysmal pits under the livid brow, and red hate stared out at Ann.
Power over her limbs came back to the girl in that moment, power to whirl, to run from the inexorable advance of that crawling, hateful, mindless thing. Sand spurted from beneath her feet. She plunged back up the slope down which she had come with hope and relief flaring within her. A queer low wail rose from behind her. . . .
Abruptly the hillcrest before her changed form, took on an outline that halted her in her tracks and wrenched a groan of ineffable fear from her parched throat. For another crawling creature seethed over the ridge, rustled slowly through the sand! Another gargoyle face peered at her with mad hate, the face of a man this time, pitted and scarred and with its flesh sloughed away as though the owner had been rejected from a nameless grave! . . .
CHAPTER THREE
THE WHIP
The horror slithered fearsomely down with a dread leisureliness that told how sure it was of its prey, how certain it was that it had cut her off. The woman behind, the man ahead—and Ann knew, knew without looking, without daring to look, that more of the crawling things were closing in on her from all sides, that they had enclosed her in a ring from which there was no escape!
Terror was a living thing in her breast, a thing that tore upward to her throat and burst from her mouth, in a piercing, shrill shriek she had not willed. Again she screamed. . . .
A shout from below whirled her around, a deep-throated shout that somehow she knew had responded to her outcry. The woman who crawled was nearer, fearfully nearer, though Ann had been certain she had outsped the creature’s slow advance. But beyond her, whence the resonant shout came again, a second oblong of light broke the black expanse of the barracks, an opened door—and in it was framed a tall thin figure that stood there peering out.
That stood! The girl’s whirling brain seized on that fact to distinguish the newcomer from the ringing grey creepers who closed about to capture her for an unguessable fate. He was erect!
“Help!” she shrieked. “Help!”
The man’s head jerked to her. Though he was only a slim black silhouette against the saffron luminance, Ann knew he must see her plainly. “Help!” she cried again.
He was motionless, and the woman was crawling always closer, and behind her Ann could hear the approach of the snaking man as sand sifted away from beneath his crawling advance. Oh, Mother of Mercy! “Help! Save me!”
An ululation of sound burst over the desert, a long-drawn crescendo filled with threat, with unspeakable menace. It stabbed the girl’s brain with new terror, chilled her, rocked her with a veritable apotheosis of fear. It rose to an apex of quivering sound, cut short—and the silence that followed it was aquake with the awful recollection. . . .
Good Lord! Ann came up out of the bottomless sea of horror into which that cry had plunged her and was startlingly aware that the desert crawlers no longer advanced upon her, that they were gone, completely gone as though they had been figments of her own distorted imaginings! Oh, Mother of Mercy! Was that truly what they had been? She shuddered at the appalling thought. They had seemed real, so real, and now they were vanished. Was she . . . ?
No! She would not even phrase that question to herself. They had been real, too real. And there was covert enough for them to have hidden now, covert enough in the black pools of shadow cast by mesquite and cactus, in the rolling, uneven terrain. That’s what it was, of course. They were hiding. . . .
Let it be enough that they no longer slid toward her, that their dreadful bodies writhed no longer toward her, that their skinny arms no longer reached for her with soul-shattering menace.
The man in the doorway beckoned to her. Had the strange outcry that had banished the grey creepers come from him? Ann started to him—froze once more. Who was he? What was he? Why was he here in this camp from which terror had driven all others? What mastery did he hold over the crawling people? Was he one of them? Fear flamed within her. She whipped around to run away, to run back to Bob. . . .
But slowly she turned back. Bob was injured, dying perhaps. Down there was water for Bob, help for him. She must go down there, whatever the peril, to get it for him. She had promised him to return with help.
She drew a long breath into her tortured, aching lungs, and willed herself to move. Then she was running down the hill, through the sand, running the gauntlet of the weird creatures she knew must be all about her, though she could see no trace of them. She was running interminably while the very soul within her cringed with fear that this instant, or this, would bring the clutch of bony fingers at her ankle, would see a crawling, slimy creature spring up at her out of the very ground.
INCREDULOUSLY, Ann reached the open door, plunged through. She whipped around as it banged shut behind her, as the tall man rattled a bolt into its socket. She stood gasping, shuddering, as he turned to her—and smiled.
“Hello,” the man said. “You’re Mrs. Travers, I k
now. I’m Haldon Kane, your foreman. Where is Mr. Travers?”
Ann gasped, catching her breath. “He’s out on the desert, hurt. We’ve got to get help to him, quickly. A truck came over the hill, driven by a maniac, and wrecked us, broke Bob’s ankle. He’s—”
“A truck. That must have been ours. Damn those fellows!” The oath ripped from between thin lips in a long, horse face. “When they’ve got their skins full of white mule they are a bunch of raving maniacs. I sent them down to Axton to get them away from here so you wouldn’t have to hear their caterwauls your first night in camp, and that’s what they’ve done.”
“They—they looked scared to me.” The explanation had been too pat. “As if they were running away from something.”
“Sure they were,” Kane responded smoothly. “Running away from the beatings I’d promised them if they were here when you and Mr. Travers arrived.”
A dark suit, complete with coat and vest and white collar, clothed his slender frame. Ann could not quite picture him victorious in a hand-to-hand tussle with the stalwarts of the truck. “But we oughtn’t to leave Mr. Travers alone any longer than necessary,” he said. “I’ll jump in the flivver and fetch him.”
“You have a car! How lucky! Come on.” Ann started to the door. “He was delirious when I left him. We’ve got to get to him quickly.”
Kane was somehow in her way, though he had not seemed to move. “It won’t take the two of us, Mrs. Travers. Hadn’t you better stay here and get things ready? Put up water to heat on the range?” He gestured vaguely toward the end of a long door-walled corridor that appeared to bisect the barracks. “Tear up some sheets into bandages and so on? From what you tell me he’s going to need plenty of attention, and we ought to be ready to act quickly.”
“But I can’t stay here alone.” Panic flared up in Ann once more. “Those awful creatures—”