Alan wondered if a deep tide of awareness was running among the three of them, shutting him out.
As for entering the building—he understood Mike Smith’s feelings poignantly. If even Mike could feel it, then there must be something more than imagination to the strange, sick horror that rose like a dark tide in his mind whenever he thought of entering. Why should he behave like a hysterical child, afraid of the unknown? Perhaps because it was not entirely unknown to him. He shut his eyes, trying to think. Did he know what lay within the black citadel?
No. No pictures came. Only the dim thought of the Alien, and a very certain sense that the colossal building housed something unspeakable.
Mike Smith’s urgent whisper broke into his bewildering memories.
“Someone’s coming.”
He opened his eyes. Waist-deep, the white mists swirled about them. In the distance, floating slowly toward the black citadel, a quasi-human figure moved through the fog.
“One of those bird-things?” Mike breathed, straining eagerly toward the distant shape. “I’ll get it—”
“Mike!” Karen cautioned.
“I won’t shoot it. I’ll just see it doesn’t get off the ground.” He crouched into the mists, and slid away like a smoothly stalking cat, vanishing into the grayness.
Alan strained his eyes after the moving figure. It was not, he thought, a bird-creature. His heart was pounding with the excitement of finding something other than themselves moving in human shape through this dust of all humanity. The distant figure flowed curiously in all its outlines—as if, perhaps, it were not wholly human.
A big dark figure rose suddenly beside it. Mike, with outstretched arms. The gossamer shape sprang away from him with a thin, clear cry like a chord struck from vibrating strings. All its filmy outlines streamed away as it whirled toward the citadel and the watching humans.
A wind made the mists swirl confusingly. They heard Mike yell, and through the rolling dimness saw his dark shape and the pale, mist-colored shape dodging and running through the fog. It was like watching a shadow-play. Mike was not overtaking his quarry, but they could see that he was driving it closer and closer to them.
Alan leaned forward, avid excitement flaming through him. Here was an answer, he told himself eagerly—a tangible, living answer to all the riddles they could not solve. What manner of being dwelt here in this last death of the world?
Suddenly out of the depths of a mist-wave that had rolled blindingly over them he heard a soft thudding and in the gray blindness something rushed headlong against him.
Automatically his arms closed about it.
CHAPTER II
CARCASILLA
HIS first impression was one of incredible fragility. In the instant while mist still blinded him, he knew that he held a girl, but a girl so inhumanly fragile that he thought her frantic struggles to escape might shatter the delicate bones by their very frenzy.
Then the fog rolled back again, and moonlight poured down upon them. Mike came panting up out of the mist, calling, “Did you catch it?” Karen and Sir Colin pushed forward eagerly, staring. Alan did not speak a word. He was looking down, speechless, at what he held in his arms.
The captive’s struggles had ceased when light came back around them. She hung motionless in Alan’s embrace, head thrown back, staring up at him. Not terror, but complete bewilderment, made her features a mask of surprise.
They were unbelievably delicate features. The very skull beneath must not be common bone, but some exquisite structure carved of ivory. Her face had the flawless, unearthly perfection of a flower. That was it—she had a flower’s delicacy, overbred, painstakingly cultured and refined out of all kinship with the coarse human prototype. Even her hair seemed so fine that it floated upon the misty air, only settling now about her shoulders as her struggles ceased. The gossamer robe that had made her outlines waver so strangely in the fog fell in cobwebby folds which every breath fluttered.
Looking down at her, Alan was more awestruck than he might have been had she been the wholly outré thing he expected. This delicate, hothouse creature could have no conceivable relation with the dead desert around them.
She was staring up at him with that odd astonishment in great dark eyes fringed with silver lashes. And as the deep gaze locked with his, he remembered for a swimming moment the instant of mental probing in the Tunisian desert, before the world blanked out forever. But he knew that it had been the Alien who probed their minds outside the ship. And the Alien could have no possible connection with this exquisitely fragile thing.
Sir Colin’s rasping voice was saying, “She’s human! Would ye believe it? She’s human! That means we’re not alone in this dead world!”
“Don’t let her go,” Karen cried excitedly. “Maybe she’ll lead us to food!”
Alan scarcely heard them. He was watching the girl’s face as she lifted her eyes to the heights of blackness above them. Alan’s gaze swept up to the fantastic turrets. Nothing—nothing at all. But the girl stared as if she could see something up there invisible to them. Perhaps she could. Perhaps her senses were keener than theirs.
And then suddenly, terrifyingly, Alan knew what it was she could see. There was a mysterious kinship indeed between her and the Alien. He could see nothing, but he felt invisible pressure about them all. A presence, intangible as the wind, filling the moonlit dark as it had filled the Tunisian valley by the ship. Something that watched from the great black heights—watched, but with no human eyes.
Karen said, “She’s not afraid any more. Notice that?”
Alan looked down. The girl was not searching the haunted heights of the citadel any more; she was searching Alan’s face instead, and all the terror had vanished from those exquisitely frail features. It was as if that alien being of the dark had breathed a word to her, and all terror had vanished. Something, somehow, connected her with this monstrous citadel and the Alien.
“Ye feel it, too, eh?” Sir Colin’s voice was a burring hush, his accent strong.
“Feel what?”
“Danger, laddie. Danger. This isn’t our own time. Human motives are certain to have altered—perhaps a great deal. The two and two of the human equation don’t equal four any more. And—” He hesitated. “We no longer have any gauge to know what’s human and what is not.”
Mike Smith was staring coldly at the girl. “She’s human enough to eat food, anyway. It’s our job to find out what and where she gets it.”
It was curious, thought Alan, that the girl who so certainly shared an indefinable affinity with the Alien did not make them shudder, too.
Now, she laid two hands like exquisite carvings in ivory upon Alan’s chest, and gently pushed herself free. He let her go half doubtfully, but she did not move more than a pace or two away, then stood waiting, a luminous query in her eyes.
On an impulse Alan tapped his chest and pronounced his own name clearly, in the immemorial pantomime of the stranger laying a foundation for common speech. The girl’s face lighted up as if a lamp had been lit to glow through the delicate flesh. Alan was to learn very well that extravagant glow of interest when something touched a responding facet of her mind.
“A-lahn?” She imitated the gesture. “Evaya,” she said, her voice like a tinkling silver bell.
Mike Smith said impatiently, “Tell her we’re hungry.” The girl glanced at him uneasily, and when Sir Colin muttered agreement she stepped back a pace, her gossamer robe wavering up about her. Alan was the only man there she did not seem to fear a little.
With surprising lack of success, he tried to show her by gestures that they wanted food. Later, he would learn why food and drink meant so little to this strange dweller in a dying world. Now, he was merely puzzled. Finally, at random, he pointed away across the plain. She must have come from somewhere . . . There was no response on Evaya’s face. He tried again, until a glow of understanding lighted suddenly behind her delicate features, and she nodded, the pale hair lifting to her motion.
“Which means exactly nothing,” Karen remarked.
Evaya gave her a glance of dislike. She had been almost pointedly ignoring the warm, bronze beauty of the other girl.
Sir Colin shook his head.
“Maybe the place she came from.”
“Not the citadel?”
“I think not. She was going toward it when we saw her, remember.”
“Why?”
The Scotsman rubbed his beard. “I don’t know that, of course. I don’t like it. Superficially, this girl seems harmless enough. But I have a strong feeling the citadel is not. And she seems to—to share a sort of affinity with it. See?”
Evaya’s eyes had followed the lifted gaze of the others, but she seemed to feel none of their aversion to the monstrous structure. Her eyes held awe—perhaps worship. But Alan sensed, for a brief, shuddering second, a feeling of unseen eyes watching coldly.
Perhaps Karen sensed it, too. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
With careful sign-language, Alan tried to tell Evaya what they wanted. She still hesitated, looking up at the unresponding heights. But presently she turned away and beckoned to Alan, setting off in the direction from which she had come. By her look she did not greatly care if the others followed or not.
“Fair enough,” Sir Colin muttered, swinging into step beside Alan.
THEY plodded on again in the pale moonlight of this empty world, through monotonous waist-high mists. The dead lands around them slid by unchanging. Once they heard, far away, the faint thunder they had noticed before, and the ground trembled slightly underfoot. Evaya ignored it.
Alan was growing tired. A faint throbbing in one arm had begun to annoy him, and glancing down, he realized with an almost vertiginous sense of time-lapse that the graze of a Nazi bullet still traced its unhealed furrow across his forearm. Nazis and bullets were dust on the face of the forgetful planet, but in the stasis of the ship even that wound had remained fresh, unchanging.
Sir Colin’s deep voice interrupted the thought. “This girl,” the Scotchman said. “She’s no savage, Drake. You’ve noticed that? Obviously she’s the product of some highly developed culture. Almost a forced culture. Unnaturally perfect.”
“Unnaturally?”
“She’s too fragile. It’s abnormal. I think her environment must be completely shielded from any sort of danger. It may be—”
“Carcasilla!” cried Evaya’s ringing silver voice. “Carcasilla!” And she pointed ahead.
Alan saw that what he had taken for some time past to be the reflection of moonlight on a polished rock was no reflection at all. A glowing disc, twenty feet high, slanted along the slope of a low hillock a little way ahead.
A disc? It was moonlight, or the moon itself, tropic-large, glowing with a lambent yellow radiance in the dust, like an immense flat jewel.
Evaya walked lightly to the softly shining moon, stood silhouetted against it, waiting for the rest to follow her. And as she stood there in bold outline, the mist of her garments only a shadow around her, Alan realized suddenly that fragile though she might be, Evaya was no child. He knew a moment of curious jealousy as the smooth long limbs of an Artemis stood black against the moon-disc before them all, round and delicate with more than human perfection. All her lines were the lovely ones of the huntress goddess, and the moon behind her should have been crescent, not full.
Evaya stepped straight into the shining moon and vanished.
“A door!” Alan’s voice was strained.
“Do you think we’d better follow?” Karen asked in an undertone. “I don’t quite trust that girl.”
Mike laughed, his strong white teeth showing. “I’m hungry and thirsty. Also—” He slapped his holster, and stepped forward confidently, pressing against the shining portal. And—it did not yield.
He turned back a face of frowning bewilderment. “It’s solid, Sir Colin—”
Alan and the Scotchman followed Karen to the threshold. The barrier seemed intangible, yet their hands slid along the disc of light as though it were glass. Alan thought briefly that the thing was like the substance of the citadel—materialized light, as that had been solid darkness. Had the same hands created them both?
“The girl went through it easily enough.” Sir Colin was gnawing his lip, scowling. “Curious. It may be a barrier to keep out enemies—but why did she lead us here, if she meant to lock us out?”
“Maybe she didn’t know we couldn’t follow,” Alan said, and—before anyone could answer, Evaya stepped back through the barrier. Her eyes searched them, puzzled. She beckoned. Alan pointed to the shining wall; then, despairing of explanations, pressed himself futllely against the strange barricade. Understanding lighted magically, as always, behind Evaya’s ivory face. She nodded at them confidently, and slipped like a shadow into the moon-disc.
“It’s no barrier to her, obviously,” Sir Colin grunted. “Remember what I said—that she may not be quite human, as we know the word?”
“She’s human enough to understand what’s wrong,” Alan snapped, curiously on the defensive for Evaya’s sake. “She won’t—”
He paused, startled. A sound had come out of the darkness behind them. A sound? No . . . A call in the brain, echoing from the desert they had crossed. All of them heard it; all of them turned to stare back the way they had come. It was utterly silent there, the starlight shining on low mists, dimmer now that the moon was gone. Nothing moved.
And yet there was—something—out there. Something that summoned.
Alan knew the feeling. It was coming—coming across the plain on their tracks, coming like a dark cloud he could sense without seeing. The Presence of the Tunisian valley, of the space ship, of the citadel. Each time nearer, stronger . . . this time—demanding. He could sense it sweeping forward over the dust of their tracks like some monstrous, shapeless beast snuffing at their footsteps, nearing, nearing . . .
And it summoned. Something deep within Alan drew him out, away from the others. But revulsion held him motionless. His brain seemed to move inside his skull at the urge of that unseen Presence coming through the darkness. The cold starlight revealed nothing. He heard Sir Colin breathing hard, heard Mike curse. A figure moved past him—Karen. He caught her arm.
“No! Don’t—”
She turned a white, drained face toward him.
Rainbow light sprang out from behind them. It glowed cloudily across the plain, their shadows standing long and dark across it. But it showed nothing more.
‘“The door—she’s opened it,” Mike said in a harsh, choked voice. “Come on, for God’s sake!”
ALAN turned, pulling Karen with him.
It was like turning one’s back on darkness where devils lurked. His spine crawled with the certainty of something deadly coining swiftly nearer. The great moon-disc was no longer flat now, as he faced It, but the open end of a long and glowing corridor of light. Sir Colin lurched through after Mike; then Alan and Karen stumbled In. Alan looked back just as the golden veil of the doorway swept down to blot out the desert. In that instant he thought he saw something vague and shadowy moving forward through the mist. Like a stalking beast along their tracks in the dust. Something dark in the moving fog-wreaths . . .
Alan put out his hand to touch the golden veil, and found the same glass-smooth barrier that had barred them from entering, stretched now across the doorway they had just passed.
Karen said shakily, “Do you think It can get in?”
Sir Colin, his voice unsteady, but his scientist’s brain keen in spite of it, said in the thick Scots of emotional strain, “I—I dlnna think so, lassie. Else it wouldna ha’ tried so hard to—to capture us before we passed the barrier.”
Mike Smith’s laugh was harsh. “Capture us? What gives you that idea?”
Alan said nothing. His eyes were impassive slits under the full lids, his mouth tight. There was no use in pretending any more about
one thing—the Presence was no figment of remembered dreams. It was real enough to be deadly, and it had followed them, with what unimaginable purpose he could only guess. But not, he thought—capture. Mike’s primitive instinct was right. Mike knew death when it came snuffing at his heels.
“A-lahn?” It was Evaya’s voice, beyond them. Alan looked over Mike’s shoulder and saw the girl’s exquisite gossamer-veiled figure in the full light of the strange golden corridor. But she was not looking at them now. Her eyes were on the closed barrier through which they had come, and her face was the face of one listening. For one quite horrible moment Alan guessed that the dark thing which had swept along their tracks in the desert was calling her through the barrier of solid light. Undoubtedly there had been some evanescent communion between her and the Presence at the citadel; was it speaking again here?
She was lovelier than ever, here in the full golden light, more flawlessly perfect, with the exquisite, inhuman perfection of a flower or a figurine. She had a flower’s coloring, rose and ivory white, with deep violet eyes. Here in the light her hair was a pale shade between gold and silver, and with a curious sort of iridescence when she turned her head.
She was turning it now, as if some faint call had reached her through the closed door. But it must have been very faint; because she shrugged a little and smiled up at Alan, pointing along the corridor ahead.
“Carcasilla,” she said, with pride in her voice. “Carcasilla—vyenne!”
The great golden passage swept up before them in a glowing arc whose farther end they could not see. Evaya gestured again and started up that glowing, iridescent incline.
As they advanced along the curved floor of the tunnel, Alan realized that this corridor had never been designed for human feet to travel. It was a tube, its curved floor smooth and unworn by passing feet. And its upward slant grew steeper. Human builders would have put steps here, or a ramp. Now they were clinging to the floor and walls with flattened palms, slipping between paces.
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