by Fritz Leiber
I nodded.
The steward leaned toward me and gripped my arm. The flesh of his face was completely destitute of luster. From the parchment-white oval his two eyes, tumescent with fright, stared wildly down at me.
“It’s the black, dead thing,” he muttered. “The monkey-face. I knew it would come back. It always comes aboard at midnight on the second night out.”
He gulped and his hand tightened on my arm.
“It’s always on the second night out. It knows where I keep the chairs, and it takes them on deck and sits in them. I saw it last time. It was squirming about in the chair—lying stretched out and squirming horribly. Like an eel. It sits in all three of the chairs. When it saw me it got up and started toward me. But I got away. I came in here, and shut the door. But I saw it through the window.”
The steward raised his arm and pointed.
“There. Through that window there. Its face was pressed against the glass. It was all black and shriveled and eaten away. A monkey-face, sir. So help me, the face of a dead, shriveled monkey. And wet—dripping. I was so frightened I couldn’t breathe. I just stood and groaned, and then it went away.”
He gulped.
“Doctor Blodgett was mangled, clawed to death at ten minutes to one. We heard his shrieks. The thing went back, I guess, and sat in the chairs for thirty or forty minutes after it left the window. Then it went down to Doctor Blodgett’s stateroom and took his clothes. It was horrible. Doctor Blodgett’s legs were missing, and his face was crushed to a pulp. There were claw marks all over him. And the curtains of his berth were drenched with blood.
“The captain told me not to talk. But I’ve got to tell someone. I can’t help myself, sir. I’m afraid—I’ve got to talk. This is the third time it’s come aboard. It didn’t take anybody the first time, but it sat in the chairs. It left them all wet and slimy, sir—all covered with black, stinking slime.”
I stared in bewilderment. What was the man trying to tell me? Was he completely unhinged? Or was I too confused, too ill myself to catch all that he was saying?
He went on wildly: “It’s hard to explain, sir, but this boat is visited. Every voyage, sir—on the second night out. And each time it sits in the chairs. Do you understand?”
I didn’t understand, clearly, but I murmured a feeble assent. My voice was appallingly tremulous and it seemed to come from the opposite side of the saloon.
“Something out there,” I gasped. “It was awful. Out there, you hear? An awful odor. My brain. I can’t imagine what’s come over me, but I feel as though something were pressing on my brain. Here.”
I raised my fingers and passed them across my forehead.
“Something here—something—” The steward appeared to understand perfectly. He nodded and helped me to my feet. He was still self-engrossed, still horribly wrought up, but I could sense that he was also anxious to reassure and assist me.
“Stateroom 16D? Yes, of course. Steady, sir.”
The steward had taken my arm and was guiding me toward the central stairway. I could hardly stand erect. My decrepitude was so apparent, in fact, that the steward was moved by compassion to the display of an almost heroic attentiveness. Twice I stumbled and would have fallen had not the guiding arm of my companion encircled my shoulders and levitated my sagging bulk.
“Just a few more steps, sir. That’s it. Just take your time. There isn’t anything will come of it, sir. You’ll feel better when you’re inside, with the fan going. Just take your time, sir.”
At the door of my stateroom I spoke in a hoarse whisper to the man at my side. “I’m all right now. I’ll ring if I need you. Just—let me—get inside. I want to lie down. Does this door lock from the inside?”
“Why, yes. Yes, of course. But maybe I’d better get you some water.”
“No, don’t bother. Just leave me—please.”
“Well—all right, sir.” Reluctantly the steward departed, after making certain that I had a firm grip on the handle of the door.
The stateroom was extremely dark. I was so weak that I was compelled to lean with all my weight against the door to close it. It shut with a slight click and the key fell out upon the floor. With a groan I went down on my knees and groveled apprehensively with my fingers on the soft carpet. But the key eluded me.
I cursed and was about to rise when my hand encountered something fibrous and hard. I started back, gasping. Then, frantically, my fingers slid over it, in a hectic effort at appraisal. It was—yes, undoubtedly a shoe. And sprouting from it, an ankle. The shoe reposed firmly on the floor of the stateroom. The flesh of the ankle, beneath the sock which covered it, was very cold.
In an instant I was on my feet, circling like a caged animal about the narrow dimensions of the stateroom. My hands slid over the walls, the ceiling. If only, dear God, the electric light button would not continue to elude me!
Eventually my hands encountered a rubbery excrescence on the smooth panels. I pressed, resolutely, and the darkness vanished to reveal a man sitting upright on a couch in the corner—a stout, well-dressed man holding a grip and looking perfectly composed. Only his face was invisible. His face was concealed by a handkerchief—a large handkerchief which had obviously been placed there intentionally, perhaps as a protection against the rather chilly air currents from the unshuttered port. The man was obviously asleep. He had not responded to the tugging of my hands on his ankles in the darkness, and even now he did not stir. The glare of the electric light bulbs above his head did not appear to annoy him in the least.
I experienced a sudden and overwhelming relief. I sat down beside the intruder and wiped the sweat from my forehead. I was still trembling in every limb, but the calm appearance of the man beside me was tremendously reassuring. A fellow passenger, no doubt, who had entered the wrong compartment. It should not be difficult to get rid of him. A mere tap on the shoulder, followed by a courteous explanation, and the intruder would vanish. A simple procedure, if only I could summon the strength to act with decision. I was so horribly enfeebled, so incredibly weak and ill. But at last I mustered sufficient energy to reach out my hand and tap the intruder on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I murmured, “but you’ve got into the wrong stateroom. If I wasn’t a bit under the weather I’d ask you to stay and smoke a cigar with me, but you see I”—with a distorted effort at a smile I tapped the stranger again nervously—“I’d rather be alone, so if you don’t mind—sorry I had to wake you.”
Immediately I perceived that I was being premature. I had not waked the stranger. The stranger did not budge, did not so much as agitate by his breathing the handkerchief which concealed his features.
I experienced a resurgence of my alarm. Tremulously I stretched forth my hand and seized a corner of the handkerchief. It was an outrageous thing to do, but I had to know. If the intruder’s face matched his body, if it was composed and familiar all would be well, but if for any reason—
The fragment of physiognomy revealed by the uplifted corner was not reassuring. With a gasp of affright I tore the handkerchief completely away. For a moment, a moment only, I stared at the dark and repulsive visage, with its staring, corpse-white eyes, viscid and malignant, its flat simian nose, hairy ears, and thick black tongue that seemed to leap up at me from out of the mouth. The face moved as I watched it, wriggled and squirmed revoltingly, while the head itself shifted its position, turning slightly to one side and revealing a profile more bestial and gangrenous and unclean than the brunt of his countenance.
I shrank back against the door, in frenzied dismay. I suffered as an animal suffers. My mind, deprived by shock of all capacity to form concepts, agonized instinctively, at a brutish level of consciousness. Yet through it all one mysterious part of myself remained horribly observant. I saw the tongue snap back into the mouth; saw the lines of the features shrivel and soften
until presently from the slavering mouth and white sightless eyes there began to trickle thin streams of blood. In another moment the mouth was a red slit in a splotched horror of countenance—a red slit rapidly widening and dissolving in an amorphous crimson flood.
* * * *
It took the steward nearly ten minutes to restore me. He was compelled to force spoonfuls of brandy between my tightly locked teeth, to bathe my forehead with ice water and to massage almost savagely my wrists and ankles. And when, finally, I opened my eyes he refused to meet them. He quite obviously wanted me to rest, to remain quiet, and he appeared to distrust his own emotional equipment. He was good enough, however, to enumerate the measures which had contributed to my restoration, and to enlighten me in respect to the remnants:
“The clothes were covered with blood, sir. I burned them.”
On the following day he became more loquacious. “It was wearing the clothes of the gentleman who was killed last voyage, sir—it was wearing Doctor Blodgett’s things. I recognized them instantly.”
“But why—”
The steward shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe your rushing up on deck saved you. Maybe it couldn’t wait. It left a little after one the last time, sir, and it was later than that when I saw you to your stateroom. The ship may have passed out of its zone, sir. Or maybe it fell asleep and couldn’t get back in time, and that’s why it—dissolved. I don’t think it’s gone for good. There was blood on the curtains in Dr. Blodgett’s cabin, and I’m afraid it always goes that way. It will come back next voyage, sir. I’m sure of it.”
He cleared his throat.
“I’m glad you rang for me. If you’d gone right down to your stateroom it might be wearing your clothes next voyage.”
Havana failed to restore me. Haiti was a black horror, a repellent quagmire of menacing shadows and alien desolation, and in Martinique I did not get a single hour of undisturbed sleep in my room at the hotel.
LIQUID SKIN, by Gareth Owens
Originally published in Quercus One: The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories (2008)
She would be walking down the street, the grey concrete of a normal day. She would look down, the pavement a muted and colourless paste of brick, spotted with bleached chewing gum and seagull droppings. She would be struck by how much the runnels between the square tiles looked like the gaps between the chunks on a bar of chocolate, and then she would hear the crack.
It always sounded like a rifle shot, like ice breaking beneath her feet. She could always feel the surface give a little first, as if it had not quite broken all the way through. Looking down, the pavement would be crazed, like a smashed car window, circular and web-like, and oozing stickily through the cracks, welling up as though from a slow wound, came the dark, deliberate, blood.
Stepping away she would look down, shocked and bewildered, then the crack would happen again under her feet, but this time she could not stop herself, and her foot would always go right through into the blood below, warm and sticky.
Pulling herself free, dripping and nauseous, she takes another step…crack…and another…crack. The concrete world is giving way under her. The breathless terror mounts, and she is overwhelmed with inchoate, primeval panic. Suddenly she is running, the floor under her feet cracking and crunching like the icing on a cake, cracking like ice, and crunching like snow.
In panic she looks over her shoulder as she runs, and she can see her foot prints as dark wounds on the skin of reality, as if the whole world was nothing but a thin crust of insubstantial bone, below which waits a vast and unquiet ocean of blood, heaving beneath the surface.
She tries to scream, but her voice is lost. She can’t seem to make any noise. She can’t remember how to speak. She is too terrified. It feels like a great weight on her chest, and no sound comes. From away in the distance she can hear a pathetic whistling, peeping sound, she can hear it as a panic stricken and breathless whisper; she can hear the tears in it, even though she is not crying.
As she runs, she looks down, and the blood makes pat pat pat noises like the splash of a shallow puddle, like a child in bright red boots, playing in the rain, the rain becomes blood, the sky is bleeding.
She can feel its weak tackiness every time she lifts a foot to take a step, as if the blood is trying to hold on to her, to pull her down.
And then she would wake, tears in her eyes, and anger in her heart. The tears of terror, and the anger of frustration. These dreams had plagued her as long as she could remember. Doctor Eams, the expedition psycher, had told her that they were either a function of stress, or a symptom of demonic possession.
Beale Voynitch lay panting on her camp bed, and wondered how it was that Walput had managed to drag her out to this god forsaken rim-world. She was a cryptographer pressed into the service of paleoxenology. Left to her own devices she would never have left the Earth, but Nageon Walput, the expedition leader, had insisted on her, and her alone, and what Walput wanted, Walput always got.
She swung her legs over the side of her cot and caught a glint as the pale sunlight reflected off the edge of one of her skates.
She had pitched her tent near the shore of Crystal Lake, two days hard travel from the main dig site at Alorep. Walput had been right, the writing of the Fairlight culture was a puzzle that had grabbed her imagination straight away. There was meaning in the strangely swirling figures, but without knowing anything about the species that had made them, or the language that they used, there was no way to derive that meaning.
Her obsessive compulsive nature had ensured that she had been sucked into the puzzle so totally that she barely noticed she was working eighteen hour days, never taking a day off.
Frequency analysis showed that the script was in part a small selection of repeating patterns that resembled letters or perhaps syllables, and other signs that seemed to appear less often, but seemed to have some kind of modification on the following group of signs.
She had been on Fairlight for close to two years now, and Dr. Eams had ordered her to take some time out.
“Why not go out to Crystal Lake, do some skiing, or some sky-boarding? It will be a break for you.”
Beale had just shaken her head; she was too busy to be ill. She could not afford the time off. She had finally made a breakthrough with the written script of the Fairlight culture.
The language had been used to write down thought, directly, and as such was independent of language. If she could find the key, she would be able to read it directly, read the minds of a lost race.
She already had fragments, but they didn’t seem to make much sense. The massive complex at Alorep appeared to be some kind of penal colony, but the vast machine that underpinned the structure was described by an idea that seemed to suggest fantasy engine.
She ate a slow breakfast, alone on a deserted world. Walput had supported the doctor, and practically forced her out of her office. She looked at the large tent behind her, and turned to survey the milky ice of the lake spread out before her. As she sipped her coffee, the silence of a world without birds made the cold seem like the exciting winters of her childhood. Being so alone made her feel, she struggled to find the right word, and then realised it was…naughty.
She picked up her skates and walked down to the edge of the lake. The scenery was spectacular. An open heath in the orange of bracken and the purple of sagebrush, low trees, a light dusting of snow, in patches, and in the distance, gentle hills rising to blend in with a giant golden mountain.
She had called this louring peak, Mount Warder. This place had been a prison, she knew that from the writing that inscribed almost every surface that the Fairlight culture had made, but she could see no bars. And somehow the machine under the surface of the planet was supposed to make fantasy a reality, to make wishes come true.
She found a fallen log and put on her skates. She lac
ed them tightly, watching her breath come out in a plume of vapour as she bent to reach her feet. Gingerly she manoeuvred out onto the ice. Her progress was ungraceful as she held onto the branches of the bushes that grew at the side of the lake.
She was not worried about the thickness of the ice, a planetography crew had been there the previous year. They had taken an ice core that was more than three kilometres deep.
The ice was so smooth, it felt like plastic under the blades of her skates. With an unsteady push she set off from the bank and headed out into the lake. The great tobacco coloured flanks of Mount Warder ahead of her, its snow covered peak gave it the clarity of a child’s drawing of a mountain.
The sound of her skates over the ice cut into her thoughts. She let it become almost mesmeric. The surface was so smooth, it was like shark skin, and her skates left two perfect lines behind her, like razor-blades drawn across the milky flesh of a corpse.
Behind her, underneath and deep, something moved. In the cracks, flowing slowly as if released from slumber, the blood began to rise. As her skates sliced through the skin of the ice, clouds of diluted and watery blood bloomed under the surface. Complex as rose petals.
She skated on, unaware of the twin tracks of red that kept pace with her, marking her progress across the alien lake.
Fantasy was such an odd word, she thought, perhaps wish would be closer to the concept. “For your crimes against us we sentence you to having your wishes come true”. She tried the words out loud, but still could not see that it would be any great threat.
Behind her the blood had spilled out across the surface of the lake, pooling where her skates had liberated it, and where it had not, it boiled below, in angry clouds of crimson. She leaned into a turn, and faced back the way she had come.
Curtains of red moved under the ice, rolling this way and that, like a caged animal looking for escape. She looked down at her feet, the ice was now a thin and clear layer, like a pane of glass, and ravenous beneath her an unfathomable welling of blood. She took a deep shocked breath and turned back. The rest of the lake was suddenly the same. She was surrounded.