Darkness and Dawn

by George England

  But Stern cared nothing for all this. It even cheered him a trifle.

  "In case of a mix-up," thought he, "there couldn't be a better place for ambushing these infernal cannibals—for mowing them down, wholesale—for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!"

  And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward Madison Forest and the pine-tree gate.

  As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butt tightened.

  "They mustn't see me—first!" said he to himself.

  Into a littered wreck of an office at the right of the exit he silently crept. Here, he knew, the outer wall of the building was deeply fissured. He hoped he might be able to find some peep-hole where, unseen, he could peer out on the bestial mob.

  He set his water-pail down, and on hands and knees, hardly breathing, taking infinite pains not to stir the loose rubbish on the floor, not even to crunch the fallen lumps of mortar, forward he crawled.

  Yes, there was a glimmer of light through the crack in the wall. Stern silently wormed in between a corroded steel I-beam and a cracked granite block, about the edges of which the small green tendrils of a vine had laid their hold.

  This way, then that, he craned his neck. And all at once, with a sharp breath, he grew rigid in horrified, eager attention.

  "Great Lord!" he whispered. "What?"

  Though, from the upper stories and by torch-light, he had already formed some notion of the Horde, he had in no wise been prepared for what he now was actually beholding through a screen of sumacs that grew along the wall outside.

  "Why—why, this can't be real!" thought he. "It—must be some damned hallucination. Eh? Am I awake? What the deuce!"

  Paling a little, his eyes staring, mouth agape, the engineer stayed there for a long minute unable to credit his own senses. For now he, he, the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century, was witnessing the strangest sight that ever a civilized being had looked upon in the whole history of the world.

  No vision of DeQuincey, no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all the fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man of science and cold fact.

  "Why—what are these?" he asked himself, shuddering despite himself at the mere sight of what lay outside there in the forest. "What? Men? Animals? Neither! God help me, what—what are these things?"

  Chapter XIX - The Unknown Race

  *

  An almost irresistible repugnance, a compelling aversion, more of the spirit than of the flesh, instantly seized the man at sight of even the few members of the Horde which lay within his view.

  Though he had been expecting to see something disgusting, something grotesque and horrible, his mind was wholly unprepared for the real hideousness of these creatures, now seen by the ever-strengthening light of day.

  And slowly, as he stared, the knowledge dawned on him that here was a monstrous problem to face, far greater and more urgent than he had foreseen; here were factors not yet understood; here, the product of forces till then not even dreamed of by his scientific mind.

  "I—I certainly did expect to find a small race," thought he. "Small, and possibly misshapen, the descendants, maybe, of a few survivors of the cataclysm. But this—!"

  And again, fascinated by the ghastly spectacle, he laid his eye to the chink in the wall, and looked.

  A tenuous fog still drifted slowly among the forest trees, veiling the deeper recesses. Yet, near at hand, within the limited segment of vision which the engineer commanded, everything could be made out with reasonable distinctness.

  Some of the Things (for so he mentally named them, knowing no better term) were squatting, lying or moving about, quite close at hand. The fire by the spring had now almost died down. It was evident that the revel had ceased, and that the Horde was settling down to rest—glutted, no doubt, with the raw and bleeding flesh of the conquered foe.

  Stern could easily have poked his pistol muzzle through the crack in the wall and shot down many of them. For an instant the temptation lay strong upon him to get rid of at least a dozen or a score; but prudence restrained his hand.

  "No use!" he told himself. "Nothing to be gained by that. But, once I get my proper chance at them—!"

  And again, striving to observe them with the cool and calculating eye of science, he studied the shifting, confused picture out there before him.

  Then he realized that the feature which, above all else, struck him as ghastly and unnatural, was the color of the Things.

  "Not black, not even brown," said he. "I thought so, last night, but daylight corrects the impression. Not red, either, or copper-colored. What color, then? For Heaven's sake, what?"

  He could hardly name it. Through the fog, it struck him as a dull slate-gray, almost a blue. He recalled that once he had seen a child's modeling-clay, much-used and very dirty, of the same shade, which certainly had no designation in the chromatic scale. Some of the Things were darker, some a trifle lighter—these, no doubt, the younger ones—but they all partook of this same characteristic tint. And the skin, moreover, looked dull and sickly, rather mottled and wholly repulsive, very like that of a Mexican dog.

  Like that dog's hide, too, it was sparsely overgrown with whitish bristles. Here or there, on the bodies of some of the larger Things, bulbous warts had formed, somewhat like those on a toad's back; and on these warts the bristles clustered thickly. Stern saw the hair, on the neck of one of these creatures, crawl and rise like a jackal's, as a neighbor jostled him; and from the Thing's throat issued a clicking grunt of purely animal resentment.

  "Merciful Heavens! What are they?" wondered Stern, again, utterly baffled for any explanation. "What can they be?"

  Another, in the group close by, attracted his attention. It was lying on its side, asleep maybe, its back directly toward the engineer. Stern clearly saw the narrow shoulders and the thin, long arms, covered with that white bristling hair.

  One sprawling, spatulate, clawlike hand lay on the forest moss. The twisted little apelike legs, disproportionately short, were curled up; the feet, prehensile and with a well-marked thumb on each, twitched a little now and then. The head, enormously too big for the body, to which it was joined by a thin neck, seemed to be scantily covered with a fine, curling down, of a dirty yellowish drab color.

  "What a target!" thought the engineer. "At this distance, with my .38, I could drill it without half trying!"

  All at once, another of the group sat up, shoved away a burned-out torch, and yawned with a noisy, doglike whine Stern got a quick yet definite glimpse of the sharp canine teeth; he saw that the Thing's fleshless lips and retreating chin were caked with dried blood. The tongue he saw was long and lithe and apparently rasped.

  Then the creature stood up, balancing on its absurd bandy legs, a spear in its hand—a flint-pointed spear of crude workmanship.

  At full sight of the face, Stern shrank for a moment.

  "I've known savages, as such," thought he. "I understand them. I know animals. They're animals, that's all. But this creature—merciful Heaven!"

  And at the realization that it was neither beast nor man, the engineer's blood chilled within his veins.

  Yet he forced himself still to look and to observe, unseen. There was practically no forehead at all. The nose was but a formless lump of cartilage, the ears large and pendulous and hairy. Under heavy brow-ridges, the dull, lackluster eyes blinked stupidly, bloodshot and cruel. As the mouth closed, Stern noted how the under incisors closed up over the upper lip, showing a gleam of dull yellowish ivory; a slaver dripped from the doglike corner of the mouth.

  Stern shivered, and drew back.

  He realized now that he was in the presence of an unknown semi-human type, different in all probability from any that had ever yet existed. It was less their bestiality that disgusted him, than their utter, hopeless, age-long degeneration from t
he man-standard.

  What race had they descended from? He could not tell. He thought he could detect a trace of the Mongol in the region of the eye, in the cheek-bones and the general contour of what, by courtesy, might be called the face. There were indications, also, of the negroid type, still stronger. But the color—whence could that have come? And the general characteristics, were not these distinctly simian?

  Again he looked. And now one of the pot-bellied little horrors, shambling and bulbous-kneed, was scratching its warty, blue hide with its black claws as it trailed along through the forest. It looked up, grinning and jabbering; Stern saw the teeth that should have been molars. With repulsion he noted that they were not flat-crowned, but sharp like a dog's. Through the blue lips they clearly showed.

  "Nothing herbivorous here," thought the scientist. "All flesh—food of—who knows what sort!"

  Quickly his mind ran over the outlines of the problem. He knew at once that these Things were lower than any human race ever recorded, far lower even than the famed Australian bushmen, who could not even count as high as five. Yet, strange and more than strange, they had the use of fire, of the tom-tom, of some sort of voodooism, of flint, of spears, and of a rude sort of tanning—witness the loin-clouts of hide which they all wore.

  "Worse than any troglodyte!" he told himself. "Far lower than De Quatrefage's Neanderthal man, to judge from the cephalic index—worse than that Java skull, the pithecanthropus erectus, itself! And I am with my living eyes beholding them!"

  A slight sound, there behind him in the room, set his heart flailing madly.

  His hand froze to the butt of the automatic as he drew back from the cleft in the wall, and, staring, whirled about, ready to shoot on the second.

  Then he started back. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened and limply fell his arm. The pistol swung loosely at his side.

  "You?—" he soundlessly breathed, "You—here?"

  There at the door of the great empty room, magnificent m her tiger-skin, the Krag gripped in her supple hand, stood Beatrice.

  Chapter XX - The Curiosity of Eve

  *

  At him the girl peered eagerly, a second, as though to make quite sure he was not hurt in any way, to satisfy herself that he was safe and sound.

  Then with a little gasp of relief, she ran to him. Her sandaled feet lightly disturbed the rubbish on the floor; dust rose. Stern checked her with an upraised hand.

  "Back! Back! Go back, quick!" he formed the words of command on his trembling lips. The idea of this girl's close proximity to the beast-horde terrified him, for the moment. "Back! What on earth are you here for?"

  "I—I woke up. I found you gone!" she whispered.

  "Yes, but didn't you read my letter? This is no place for you!"

  "I had to come! How could I stay up there, alone, when you—were—oh! maybe in danger—maybe in need of me?"

  "Come!" he commanded, in his perturbation heedless of the look she gave him. He took her hand. "Come, we must get out of this! It's too—too near the—"

  "The what? What is it, Allan? Tell me, have you seen them? Do you know?"

  Even excited as the engineer was, he realized that for the first time the girl had called him by his Christian name. Not even the perilous situation could stifle the thrill that ran through him at the sound of it. But all he answered was:

  "No, I don't know what to call them. Have no idea, as yet. I've seen them, yes; but what they are, Heaven knows—maybe!"

  "Let me see, too!" she pleaded eagerly. "Is it through that crack in the wall? Is that the place to look?"

  She moved toward it, her face blanched with excitement, eyes shining, lips parted. But Stern held her back. By the shoulder he took her.

  "No, no, little girl!" he whispered. "You—you mustn't! Really must not, you know. It's too awful!"

  Up at him she looked, knowing not what to think or say for a moment. Their eyes met, there in that wrecked and riven place, lighted by the dull, misty, morning gray. Then Stern spoke, for in her gaze abode questions unnumbered.

  "I'd much rather you wouldn't look out at them, not just yet," said he, speaking very low, fearful lest the murmur of his voice might penetrate the wall. "Just what they are, frankly, there's no telling."

  "You mean—?"

  "Come back into the arcade, where we'll be safer from discovery, and we can talk. Not here. Come!"

  She obeyed. Together they retreated to the inner court.

  "You see," he commented, nodding at the empty water-pail, "I haven't been to the spring yet. Not very likely to get there for a while, either, unless—well, unless something pretty radical happens. I think these chaps have settled down for a good long stay in their happy hunting-ground, after the fight and the big feast. It's sort of a notion I've got, that this place, here, is some ancient, ceremonial ground of theirs."

  "You mean, on account of the tower?"

  He nodded.

  "Yes, if they've got any religious ideas at all, or rather superstitions, such would very likely center round the most conspicuous object in their world. Probably the spring is a regular voodoo hangout. The row, last night, must have been a sort of periodic argument to see who was going to run the show."

  "But," exclaimed the girl, in alarm—"but if they do stay a while, what about us? We simply must have water!"

  "True enough. And, inasmuch as we can't drink brine and don't know where there's any other spring, it looks as though we'd either have to make up to these fellows or wade into them, doesn't it? But we'll get water safe enough, never fear. Just now, for the immediate present, I want to get my bearings a little, before going to work. They seem to be resting up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree. Now, if they'd only all go to sleep, it'd be a walk-over!"

  The girl looked at him, very seriously.

  "You mustn't go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "I just won't let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much have you really found out about them—whatever they are."

  "Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks are immune to several germ-infections that destroy other races."

  "Yes. And you mean—?"

  "It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other time."

  "So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?"

  "Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history! If my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you can easily imagine what must have happened."

  "For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while—"

  "Yes? What then?"

  "Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all. It must have! History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice—to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And we—have had a thousand, Beatrice, since the white man died!"

  She thought a moment, and shook her head.

  "What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horribly fascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, or written! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned and falling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, language and arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a few patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything changing, dying, stopping—and the ever-
increasing yet degenerating people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild—taking to the fields, the forests, the mountains—going down, down, back toward the primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery, to—what?"

  "To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals, retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this, according to one theory."

  "Is there another?" she asked eagerly.

  "Yes, and I wish we had the shade of Darwin, of Haeckel or of Clodd here with us to help us work it out!"

  "How do you imagine it?"

  "Why, like this. Maybe, after all, even the entire black race was swept out along with the others, too. Perhaps you and I were really the only two human beings left alive in the world."

  "Yes, but in that case, how—?"

  "How came they here? Listen! May they not be the product of some entirely different process of development? May not some animal stock, under changed environment, have easily evolved them? May not some other semi-human or near-human race be now in process of arising, here on earth, eventually to conquer and subdue it all again?"

  For a moment she made no answer. Her breath came a little quickly as she tried to grasp the full significance of this tremendous concept.

  "In a million years, or so," the engineer continued, "may not the descendants of these things once more be men, or something very like them? In other words, aren't we possibly witnessing the recreation of the human type? Aren't these the real pithecanthropi erecti, rather than the brown-skinned, reddish-haired creatures of the biological text-books? There's our problem!"

  She made no answer, but a sudden overmastering curiosity leaped into her eyes.

  "Let me see them for myself! I must! I will!"

  And before he could detain her, the girl had started back into the room whence they had come.