The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  An Unidentified Flying Object! At no time since the circle of radiance had formed in the darkness had the thought been entirely absent from her mind. She could hardly have failed to associate a mystery that had been constantly in the newspapers and about which many books had been written with a shattering, first-hand experience of the same general nature.

  She had suspected the truth the instant her husband had revealed how relentlessly he had been set upon in the garden by hooded figures who had caused him to vanish and reappear through some miracle of technology beyond the scope of modern science. She had, in fact, been nine-tenths sure that the hooded figures could only have come from a UFO.

  But she had kept the appalling thought to herself, had refused to increase her husband’s torment by letting him know that she shared a fear that must have rested upon him like a leaden weight, crushing him to the earth.

  If he had been taken captive and she had not yet joined him, how could he be sure he would ever see her and the children again? No matter what the hooded figures had told him there could have been no certainty in his mind.

  It would have been so easy for them to change their minds, angered perhaps by her resistance, and take him away from her forever.

  She had not wanted that to happen and had remained silent solely to spare him, had kept telling herself that she could be mistaken, that what she was almost sure of might not be true at all.

  But now she was absolutely sure. The circular shape that rested on a ledge high up on Thunder Mountain could still take him from her, and she must hurry, hurry to make sure that she did not anger the hooded figures. Better to live enslaved than never to see again the father of her children, whom she loved more than he would ever know, because she was not a demonstrative woman.

  She knew now why the sight of the UFO—she had stopped thinking of it as anything else—had filled her with such overwhelming dread.

  There was another reason as well. “You will feel,” he had said, “an emanation of power, an invincibility that’s like nothing you’ve ever known before.”

  She was aware of that now, as she had been aware of it the instant the mountain slope had come into view. But now there was something about the shining disk that brought two lines from Blake into her mind, two lines that had chilled her from childhood, because they had always seemed to her the strangest, most frightening lines in the whole of English poetry.

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Framed thy fearful symmetry?

  Blake had never seen an UFO and it had been a tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night” that had made him address that question to the unknown. But the symmetry of the shining disk was just as fearful, just as difficult to explain. Only a race that had fathomed the twin mysteries of time and space and could exercise immense power, immense dominance over the forces of nature could create that strange complex on the mountain top.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The light began slowly to brighten, making every rock and tree and barren patch of soil on the mountain slope stand out with a startling clarity. But the brightness was less blinding than it had been when the circle of radiance had first formed in the room. It seemed to be more diffuse and wide-spreading, for it dispelled the darkness where it had previously remained dense.

  For the first time Bobby came clearly into view and the kitchen stove, the refrigerator, and the long row of copper utensils hanging on the wall directly above the stove became brightly illuminated.

  For an instant the stiff, completely motionless figure of Helen Wentworth’s son, emerging so swiftly from the darkness into the light, caused her to stop staring at the mountain slope and look directly at him.

  Bobby’s face was a frozen mask of horror. For a moment she thought that the enormous shining disk that rested on the slope had widened Bobby’s eyes and that he was staring at it very much as she had done, unable to tear his gaze from a sight that, to a small boy, could well have seemed so new to his experience that his fright had soared to undreamed of heights.

  Then she realized that he wasn’t staring at the circle of radiance at all. He was staring at something the light was slowly bringing into view on the far side of the stove.

  The instant Helen saw what that something was, she screamed, feeling a weakness in her legs that would have toppled her to the floor if the paralysis had not kept them rigid.

  There is a degree of rigidity that even paralysis cannot produce, a rigidity that has only to be seen to be recognized instantly as the stigmata of death. Mrs. Jackson had not slumped completely to the floor in the terrible moment when death had overtaken her, but had remained in an almost kneeling position, her hands turned palms outward as if warding off whatever it was that her eyes had looked upon before she had ceased to draw breath.

  Her eyes were wide open and glassily staring, her bloodless lips snagged by her teeth. Her thinning white hair looked like an ill-made wig that failed to cover more than the back of her aging scalp, which gleamed in the spreading glow in a wholly hideous way. Her feet were bent sharply inward, the toes almost touching, making her whole body seem more twisted and bent than it would have been otherwise and giving her a grotesquely gnome-like look.

  It has been said that fright alone can kill and Helen had never doubted it. In view of Mrs. Jackson’s age such a possibility, she knew, could not be ruled out. But whether it had been fright or one of the hooded shapes from the great circular disk that rested on the slope, bending above her and laying more violent hands on her than had been laid on her husband in the garden, she had no way of knowing. She only knew that she found herself hoping that it had been more than fright, because physical violence could sometimes be withheld, but from a sight that could kill there was no escape.

  The paralysis that had been keeping her arms and legs constricted was gone, she could move about freely. But there was nothing that could lesson the horror which she now shared with Bobby. As the paralysis vanished, a convulsive trembling shook her entire body, threatening to send her staggering forward toward the dead woman.

  Her legs had become so unsteady that she could no longer depend on them to support her. The trembling made it impossible for her to shift her weight quickly enough to maintain her balance.

  It was the shock of seeing the circle of radiance dim and vanish, plunging the kitchen in total darkness again, that saved her. It caused her to stiffen abruptly, and lurch backward instead of forward, and the wall at her back came rushing toward her to keep her from falling.

  In another moment she was leaning against the wall for support, and pleading with her son not to become too frightened.

  “Mrs. Jackson was very old, Bobby,” she said. “And her heart just…well, gave out. That often happens with people her age. Sometimes just a little too much excitement…”

  She stopped abruptly, straining her ears to catch a possible repetition of a faint sound that had seemed to come from somewhere upstairs. It had been too faint to be called a clattering. It was as if the wind had caused a windowpane to rattle two or three times in some distant part of the house.

  It could only have been the wind, she told herself. But then the sound came again, much louder, and she realized it could easily have been made by footsteps crossing the floor of an upstairs room with a distinct clattering.

  It almost immediately ceased to come to her ears muffled by distance. First it was directly overhead and then in the middle of the house and then descending a creaking flight of stairs to the ground floor. It descended so swiftly that before it stopped echoing through the darkened house it was right in the kitchen with them, making the floorboards creak loudly.

  Helen Wentworth stood very still and spoke as calmly as she could. “Bobby! Susan! We must go with them. That is what your father wants us to do, and unless we do exactly as they say we will never see him again. Remember, my darlings, how much we both love you. You must try to be brave.”
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br />   CHAPTER FOUR

  The four children were missing again. There were ninety-seven children in the orphanage, but to Joyce Drake the Trilling twins and Dorothy and Richard Thacker were never just four of the children. She thought of them as a group, apart from the other youngsters, even though they were not always together when they got into mischief or disappeared.

  Sometimes they would vanish for as long as three days, and the sheriff would have to conduct a search for them. They were so accident-prone that it was incredible that they hadn’t given the orphanage a bad name.

  She’d given up try to make a list of the terrible things they did to themselves and to others, such as mistaking Mr. Wilcock’s prize-winning orchids for tiger lilies and plucking them up by the roots, upsetting a hayloft that could have smothered them if they hadn’t clawed their way out fast, and falling off the wharf at Gleason’s Point into the ebb tide silt, and climbing back looking more like mudhens than children spotlessly dressed for a Sunday picnic.

  Most children did things like that at times, of course. But every day in the week the Four Children put on a kind of ritual performance in the juvenile misbehavior department.

  In a way, it could be contagious, and there were times when Joyce Drake actually found herself envying their ability to shrug off all social responsibility and wishing that she could…well, lean forward, as she was doing now, and tell the gaunt, stern-faced woman sitting opposite her in the sunny administration office to go plumb to the devil.

  “It’s your fault, Joyce,” Miss Grayson was saying. “You just don’t exert enough discipline.” She not only accented the last word, but drew it out until it sounded like the swish of a whiplash uncoiling.

  Miss Grayson paused for a moment, as if to make sure that what she was about to say would be as cutting as possible. “I sometimes wonder,” she went on relentlessly, “why you took this position in the first place. Unruly children require rigorous discipline and you favor ‘permissiveness.’

  “Oh, I know. You’re going to tell me I’d change my mind about the methods we employ here if I read John Dewey. But I don’t intend to read a single line of John Dewey. All I have to do is look around me and see what your theories are doing to young people today. Long hair, student riots, all kinds of outlandish costumes…”

  “The children here are hardly old enough to be categorized in that way,” Joyce Drake heard herself protesting, not as assertively as she could have wished.

  “They will be, in a few years,” Miss Grayson assured her, with an icy intonation. “Can you imagine what our children will be like in 1980?”

  “It would be foolish to try,” Joyce said. “If they grow up determined not to accept ready-made ideas even though they’ve been disciplined not to ask questions about anything, they’ll be far wiser than we are. I’m sure of that, if I’m sure of nothing else.”

  “I see. You’d rather have children brought up on ideas that do nothing but get them into trouble. What those delightful brats did last week adds five years to my life every time I dwell on it. And now they’ve strayed off into the woods again. I’m afraid to think how close it may bring me to an enforced retirement. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?—To see all the years I’ve spent—”

  Before she could continue the door opened and Sheriff Traubel came into the office. He crossed to where the women were sitting, his heavy tread making the geraniums by the window quake a little.

  His tread was heavy and there was a weariness in the way he carried himself which conveyed a impression of ponderousness, as if he were dragging a massive ball and chain across the floor with him.

  “Well…they’ve been seen, at least,” he said, without preamble. “About an hour ago, heading for Burnett’s Cove.”

  He paused for an instant to stare with undisguised admiration at the younger woman, whose attractiveness he clearly found beguiling, despite the fact that he was a married man with six children. Then his gaze passed to the sternly disapproving countenance of Miss Grayson and his big, rough-hewn face hardened.

  “This is the fourth time I’ve had to go searching for those problem kids,” he complained. “Twice I brought them back with only a few scratches, and it wasn’t so bad the third time. I could have gotten myself killed crawling on my hands and knees into an abandoned mine shaft that caved in a few years ago on two levels. But that’s all part of a sheriff’s job, and I’m not complaining. Only—”

  “Only what?” Miss Grayson asked, with a look that confirmed what Joyce had always suspected—that Miss Grayson had no great liking for Sheriff Traubel.

  “This time I’m seriously worried,” the sheriff said. “We’ve searched the woods for close to an hour without finding a trace of them. And there are a lot of quicksand bogs in the vicinity of the cove that could swallow up four small youngsters mighty fast.”

  Miss Grayson swallowed hard and Joyce could see that the sheriff’s bluntness had shocked her. It shocked Joyce less because she admired honesty, and the sheriff just happened to be one of those bluff, plain-spoken men who preferred the truth to evasiveness.

  “You mean you’ve given up the search?” Miss Grayson asked, “after only one hour?”

  “Naturally not,” Sheriff Traubel said. “There are a half-dozen men combing the woods right now, looking into every nook and cranny. But I had to come back to town to put through an urgent phone call and I just thought that you’d like a report on our progress so far.”

  “Lack of progress, you mean. But since you’ve given up all hope it was your duty, I suppose, to tell me.”

  “I didn’t say I’d given up all hope, Miss Grayson,” the sheriff protested.

  “Of course he didn’t,” Joyce said quickly, feeling it was her duty to come to the sheriff’s defense. “His concern is natural enough, under the circumstances. I’ve explored every foot of the woods on both sides of the cove and there are a number of quicksand bogs—”

  “Of course, of course,” Miss Grayson said. “We’re very grateful, Mr. Traubel. You’re going back now, I suppose, and rejoin the searchers.”

  “Until we find them,” the sheriff said. “And I’ve a feeling they will be found.”

  As soon as the door had closed behind him Miss Grayson said: “How could anyone be so crude? He should have kept what he feared to himself. There’s a harsh streak of cruelty in him.”

  “I don’t think so,” Joyce said. “He just speaks his mind, the way I wish more people would do.”

  When she left the administration office she could barely control her trembling, and she hoped Miss Grayson wouldn’t think of something additional to say, and summon her back before she could reach the end of the corridor. She hurried, scarcely daring to breathe, not quite sure what she would do or say if Miss Grayson’s harsh voice were to bring her to an abrupt halt.

  But it didn’t happen and after a moment she was her natural self again, recovering from the assault Miss Grayson usually made on her personality.

  She was almost sure she knew now where the children had gone. “Our secret place,” they’d called it. Three or four times she’d overheard them talking about it, in end-of-the-corridor whisperings. She’d kept the knowledge to herself because she hadn’t wanted them to accuse her of eavesdropping. She was, after all, the only adult friend they had and if their faith in her was shattered their mischief-making might get completely out of hand. Not that it hadn’t already, but still…

  She had reached the end of the corridor and was only a few feet from her own tiny office when her gaze traveled, quite by accident, to the red-lighted emergency exit through which she was duty-bound to guide her small charges as swiftly as possible, whenever a fire drill brought them flocking about her.

  For a moment the red glare seemed to her an evil omen that bore so close a relationship to the disappearance of the children that it struck a chill to her heart. Their disappearance had certainly created an
emergency, and there might well be no exit through which she could safely guide them, for the peril that could surround four small children alone in the woods was quite different from that of an orphanage in flames.

  She forced herself to remember that the Four Children had given her many such bad moments in the past and she had always managed to keep panic at arm’s length.

  She stood very still directly opposite the red-lighted emergency exit, telling herself that she had done the right thing so far.

  The moment the sheriff had mentioned Burnett’s cave she had been on the verge of telling him about the “secret place” but had quickly decided there was nothing to be gained by interfering with a search that was still going on. If the Four Children had gone to the “secret place” they would be in no immediate danger and bringing them safely back to the orphanage would not require the assistance of a half-dozen weary men with surly tempers and mud-spattered boots.

  It was primarily her responsibility, as Miss Grayson would have been quick to point out. While the “secret place” was in the general direction of the cove it was on solid ground a considerable distance from the quicksand bogs, and the children had been warned repeatedly not too venture too far into the woods. Perhaps the warning had fallen on deaf ears. But if it had…well, the sheriff and his men could be depended upon to keep right on searching.

  Her confidence wavered for an instant, but she forced herself to remain calm. There was a better than even chance that the Four children were, at that very moment, sitting inside a hollow oak tree with a hole so enormous that a woodland playhouse built of logs could not have protected them in a more exciting way from wind and rain and the mysterious voices of the forest.