But the next night he was back again, twice as ugly as before. And for many a night after that.
Then I thought up another bright idea, or deemed it one until—
* * * *
It was summer, and the nights were warm, so we took to sleeping in a rose arbor in the garden. For the first night there was absolutely no sign of Athak. But on the second night, Rhoda wakened me from a sound slumber with the startled exclamation:
“Randall, what is that repulsive odor?’’
One sniff told me instantly that it was the acrid, decayed-cucumber scent of a copperhead snake! Very cautiously, holding my breath in stark fear, I pressed the switch of a flashlight and swept the near-by ground with its bright rays. Luckily I managed to reach a stick with which I broke the reptile’s back before it could—ugh! I shuddered at thought of what might have happened. And, somehow, in my mind, I associated that snake’s arrival into our garden of peace with Athak’s hatred. And instantly, although I heard no sound, I was aware of a burst of unholy glee that fully confirmed my conviction.
Next day I bought an automatic pistol equipped with a silencer, and a box of cartridges. Then I did that which would cause any alienist to suspect my mental condition; for I had every bullet extracted from the loaded shells and replaced by silver ones. I’d read somewhere that silver bullets are efficacious against such as Athak; and I was open to conviction. But when I laid in that equipment I unwittingly played into Athak’s hands, completely.
Nightly thereafter I kept the loaded pistol within reach, and for several nights we were undisturbed. Yet always we had an uncomfortable sense of Athak’s presence, albeit he kept himself invisible. Actually, I began to think that in some manner he’d sensed that I was organized for him with a potent weapon, and that he was correspondingly cautious about bringing matters to a definite showdown; which proves how little I know about the unseen world and still less about the abilities of those who dwell therein.
We had gotten so that we could fall asleep almost immediately after retiring in our rose arbor. It was around midnight one night that I awoke with the certitude that we had been outwitted and that even then we were exposed to some unutterably ghastly horror. Instinctively I grasped the pistol and threw off the safety catch. Rhoda had awakened at the same time, and we sat up simultaneously. She screamed, once, and I felt the cold sweat of fear break out all over me.
Not ten yards away was the phantom form of Athak. A leer of cruel, anticipatory triumph was on his ugly face, and he had reason for it, too; for although he himself was but a phantom, there was nothing intangible about the monstrous dog he had somehow introduced into our garden. It was just a dog; yes; but such a dog! It loomed as big as a calf! I learned, later, that the brute was a Tibetan mastiff belonging to a dog-fancier dwelling some twenty miles distant. And that breed of dog is one of the most ferocious of the entire canine species.
Its eyes were aflame with fury, and as they were fixed unwaveringly upon me, it was not difficult to imagine what was coming next. Its jaws dripped slaver, and its lips were drawn back in a soundless snarl. Its whole body was a-quiver with pent-up energy.
And even as I noted all this in one horrified glance, the phantom chief waved an arm in a gesture of command, and the huge beast launched itself straight at me!
One bound brought it half-way, but then I brought the pistol into action. I’d had a gunsmith do a little juggling with the inner works of that automatic; so that in a way, it was more a miniature machine-gun than a pistol. Once the trigger was pulled, provided it was held back, the shots were continuous till the magazine was empty. I intended, when I had it fixed like that, to put sufficient of those silver bullets into, or through, Athak, to make a thorough job of it, or him. But as things turned out, it was the dog that got the entire load; and it needed them all, too, squarely in its big skull, to stop its ferocious rush.
Even at that, the brute didn’t die instantly, but fell on the ground almost at the entrance to the arbor, writhing and twitching in a fast-spreading pool of blood.
Athak’s opportunity had arrived! That infernal savage had waited for just such a chance for ages! The blood furnished him with the medium for materialization, and he promptly utilized it. Before I could reload the pistol by inserting a fresh-charged magazine clip into the butt, the metamorphosis was achieved. It was, to all intents and purposes, a flesh and blood Savage from out the distant Ice Age who hurled his huge bulk at us, whirling a heavy bludgeon in one knotted fist!
Rhoda gasped, moaned feebly, and slumped to the floor of the rose arbor in a limp heap. And I, feeling that this was the end for us, and the consummation of Athak’s triumph, nevertheless flung myself off the bed in one wild leap, to meet him and have it over with.
I had naught save that empty pistol still in my hand wherewith to put up a battle, and that was but a poor and futile thing beside the club Athak flourished. Yet in some manner I dodged his first stroke, retaliating by throwing my empty pistol into his face as hard as I could slam it. Luckily for me, it landed just where eyebrows and nose meet. For a second it dazed him, and he paused, even in his frenzy, to shake his head to clear his sight, I suppose. And, in that one second of reprieve, a miracle and naught else came to my aid, or I should not be here now to tell this tale…
Out of nowhere, apparently, appeared the gnarled, twisted, crippled form of old Juhor the Snake! Into my hands he thrust the ivory handle of a green-stone war-ax!
“Heh-heh-heh!” laughed the incredible apparition. “Once he stole your wife! It is only fitting that now you should have his!”
What strange power lay in that ancient war-ax? I know not, even now. But this I do know: No sooner had my hands closed in a firm grip on the handle than a terrific surge of commingled hate and strength suffused my entire body! I felt that my muscles had doubled—nay! infinitely multiplied in power to smite. I heaved the heavy ax aloft and moved toward my enemy. He saw the weapon, and hell flamed in his face and eyes. In a low, dreadful tone he spoke:
“Now! Long have I waited for this day! Red Dawn, and the green ax! Once again are both within my reach! O Fool, who thinks to stand against Athak the Mighty with his own war-ax; now shall I slay thee, and take both weapon and woman! Then shall she and I together eat your heart, raw, torn from out your yet warm body…”
He had no time for further boasting. With all the new strength that had flowed into me, I struck out at him. Skilled warrior that he was, he parried the ax-sweep with his club. Very craftily he struck just back of the stone head, turning the stroke aside thereby. The shock of his blow jarred my arms clear to my shoulder-sockets. And swiftly following came his counterstroke. He delivered it horizontally at my head, but I bent my knees quickly, and the club barely grazed my hair. The momentum of his blow turned him a trifle, and I swiped back again with the ax, and that time, despite his backward leap, the ax drew blood from his side; not a deep cut, but still enough to madden him.
With a snarl of pure fiendishness he drove in a blow I could not evade, so lightning-swift it came. Fairly on my left arm it landed, and my whole side went numb as if suddenly paralyzed. I had only my right arm then with which to wield that ponderous stone war-ax, while my eon-old enemy still had two arms with which to swing his no less ponderous club.
The derisive sneer on his hateful face drove me beyond all semblance of caution. As if it had been naught but a light throwing-hatchet, I whirled up that great stone-headed ax in one hand and hurled it! So quickly did I move that he had no chance to raise his club in order to ward off that hurtling weapon.
Edge first it struck him in his barrel-like chest, driving deep in through flesh and bone. With a bubbling grunt the breath went out of his lungs, followed by a gush of bloody froth. He threw both arms across his torso, hugging the ax-handle in his agony…
The cracked voice of old Juhor rang out: “When Athak’s wife returns to Athak’s embrace, then shall the age-old curse lift; and Athak shall cease to dwell in outer darkness! Athak the Mighty, get t
hee hence to the place appointed for all such as thou!”
The giant stood swaying, his arms still clasping the handle of the ax. But as Juhor spoke his doom, he tottered and fell!
Unheeding aught else, I staggered wearily—for my strength left me even as Athak fell—over to where Rhoda lay, lifted her to the bed and turned—to see only a faint haze where a moment before had lain the gigantic materialized form of Athak the Terrible! As I looked, the haze vanished, too. Of old Juhor the Snake there was no sign. There remained only the carcass of an enormous, dead dog; an empty automatic pistol; and a great, ivory-handled war-ax lying where I had dropped it. Oh, yes! And a great bruise on my left arm…
What is real, and what illusion, in this universe? Nobody knows, I least of all.
Juhor handed me that ax. I used it. Next day I hung it on the wall in my study. And that same evening I read in the newspaper that a jade-headed, ivory-handled battle-ax had been mysteriously abstracted some time in the night hours from a glass case in a scientific museum located over eight hundred miles from where I dwell, and had been missed the same morning I hung it on my wall! And the glass case had not been broken into, nor unlocked.
The news article went on to state that the weapon owed its remarkable condition of preservation to the fact that it had been found fast-frozen in a huge fragment of ice that had “calved” from a glacier up under the Arctic Circle…
Oh, my very soul faints when I try to make coherence of my jumbled data! Yet out of it all, dimly I get this for my comfort: Time, and Space, both are as naught to the Self of man. Justice endures and Love is eternal; nor shall all the Powers of Darkness ever prevail against them!
THE SAPPHIRE SIREN
Originally published in Weird Tales, February 1934.
Suicide as a means of escaping trouble never appealed to me. I had studied the occult, and knew what consequences that course involved, afterward.
But I was fed up on life. I was destitute, and had no friends who might help, even were I to appeal to them. At forty-eight, one does not easily regain solvency. And, gradually, I’d lost all ambition. Not even hope remained.
If only there were some other road out—a door, for example, into the hypothetical region of four dimensions…it certainly couldn’t be worse there than what I’d borne in the last three years. Well, I could try…
I seated myself cross-legged on the floor. If I concentrated hard enough, perhaps the miracle might occur…at least I should have tried…a last resort… Gradually a vague state ensued wherein I was not unconscious, for I still knew that I was I: yet a queer detachment was mine—there was a world, but of it I was no longer a part…
Click!
Like a movable panel a section of the wall opened, revealing a most peculiar corridor—a strange Being stood smiling at me. It did not speak, yet I caught the challenge: “Dare you?”
With a single movement I rose and stepped into the opening…
Oh, the agonizing, excruciating torment of that transition! Every nerve, tissue and fiber flamed and froze simultaneously. My brain seethed like a superheated cauldron. My blood turned to corrosive, scaring acid. Tears suffused my aching eyes. I choked, unable to utter the groans my sufferings constrained me to emit…
Had I landed in Hell? It certainly seemed so!… Then abruptly it was all over. I was still I, yet vastly different. I was free—and with senses above the dull senses of Earth, with power beyond Earth’s muscular strength. I realized that I was in a different realm where the Laws were strange to me, and that I must be careful lest I be caught in some trap from whence escape might not be so easily achieved. But where, I wondered, was the Being who had dared me?
“Here!”
“But—you seem not the same…there was a vague, misty, red haze now you are distinct…”
“Many high-speed light-waves formed a veil through which earthly eyes can not see clearly.”
“Hence—the agony during transition?”
“Precisely! The vibrations altered your atomic structure. But you are still your true self.”
“Perhaps,” I assented. “But who are you, and why did you make it possible for me to come?”
“I am Zarf; and your subjects need you, to say naught of—”
We were interrupted by a most discordant howling, and abruptly some two dozen hideous dwarfs surrounded us. They bore long straight swords, were clad in iridescent scale armor, stood about five feet in height, and had the ugliest faces I ever saw.
“King Karan of Octolan—and the commander of his bodyguard, Zarf!” Their voices were shrill with maniacal glee. Evidently they considered our capture a big event.
I did not like their looks. I did not approve of their air of insolent triumph. Back on Earth I had lost all material ambitions, but suddenly I regained one, and proceeded to realize it.
With all my new strength, I drove my clenched right fist into the face of a particularly burly dwarf standing about two feet away. His head snapped back, he went limp; I snatched his sword from him and set to work. Once and again I struck, caught the true balance of the weapon and saw a head leave its body—shouted:
“A sword for you, Zarf!”
Before the blade touched ground he caught it, then set his back against mine… A wild delight filled me, yet through it I felt a vague wonder—where had I learned swordsmanship? For never on Earth had I held one in my hand!
Those dwarfs fought like fiends from Hell. More than once I felt the stinging kiss of dwarf steel. Once I heard Zarf gasp as a sword bit deep, and once he groaned in agony. It was a wild melee while it lasted; and never did I enjoy myself more… Through a red haze of slaughter I saw that only two dwarfmen remained facing my blade. Lunge—slash—parry—slash and lunge again—but one left—I gathered myself—dimly saw another blade than mine pass through that last dwarf—heard Zarf as from a far distance crying exultantly:
“Lord King, you fight even better than in the other days! It is well—for you will have many a fight ere you sit once more on the Chrysolite Throne of your race.”
Then I slid to a limp heap on the ground, exhausted from loss of blood—I could not speak—heard Zarf cursing furiously, virulently; then all consciousness flickered out…
* * * *
I regained my senses slowly. I lay on a pallet, a hand’s breadth off a hard-packed earthen floor. A feeble lamp barely showed walls of stone chinked with moss and mud. Obviously a hut—but where? Then I saw Zarf. He sat on a low stool, chin on fist, elbow on knee, head bandaged, and his left arm in a sling. Looking at myself. I saw I was swathed worse than he in bandages.
“Zarf,” I said weakly. “We look as if we’d been in a fight!’’
“We have been,” he nodded at cost of a twinge of pain. “But none of those Vulmins will ever take part in another—while we were just getting a little practice!”
“Zarf,” I demanded, insistent. “Who are you, and why did you call me Master? Surely there is some mistake. You know that I am but an Earth-man upon whom you took pity and opened for him a door into this realm of Space…
Somberly he stared at me’; then:
“King Karan, what pity was in the hearts of those Vulmin dwarf-devils when they strove to cut us into gobbets for their cook-pots? Yet they knew you and named you ‘Karan of Octolan, Zarfs royal Master’. Is it possible you have no memory of the past—no knowledge of who and what you are? Do you not remember the rebel sorcerer, Djl Grm, who blasted your body and drove your self through a bent corridor down to the Earth, where you acquired a new body as an Earthbabe? Have you no recollection of your Imperial Consort? Shall that regal lady—so loved by all in your far-flung realm that she was deemed a goddess—be unavenged?
“What disposal that accursed sorcerer made of her, none knows. It is known that he sought to seduce her, and when she withstood him in that, she vanished! Yet sure I am he did not force her to the Earth, for then you twain might have found each other, and so defeated his major purpose. Nay, King Karan, she is here! In the ni
ghts her spirit whispers to mine:
“Zarf, I am still your Queen. Find my lord, wheresoever he be…watch over him…whenever possible, open for him a door. He will find me—free me—out of his love… ”
“King Karan, must that regal lady’s spirit wait in vain, believing Zarf a traitor and you a recreant spouse?”
“I can not remember” I groaned. I was convinced—believed Zarf fully; and oh! the anguish that was mine in that moment! Amnesia, it is called back on Earth, this inability to remember, with its concomitant of lost identity… Then in the gloom of my mind, one insurmountable objection reared its ugly head, “If this sorcerer blasted my body, and drove my self down to the Earth, where through the medium of birth I regained a body and grew to my present stature—how shall any here recognize me as Karan the King of Octolan? Zarf, I still say you must be mistaken.”
“My King,” he replied pityingly, “you are sore bemazed! On Earth your body was shaped by parental influence; but here—when the agony shook you, the body reassembled about the self in its true semblance and substance. Nay! Karan of Octolan you are, and none who ever saw you during your reign would deny your identity, albeit there be many would gladly slay you to prevent you from regaining your throne.
“Lord, evil rules where once was good—and a fair, happy land has become a veritable antechamber of Hell. Vampyr and ghoul prey on the bodies of your people. Foes assail them from without, and devils plague them from within the borders. Your subjects, afraid, disheartened, hopeless, have fallen from their allegiance to the Karanate Dynasty. Scarce may we find a hundred loyal souls in all the eight provinces of Octolan. I myself am but a fugitive; and rich is the reward Djl Grm would pay for the head of Zarf the Proscribed! And as for our gracious Queen, Mehul-Ira—”
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 4: Nictzin Dyalhis Page 16