And Afterward, the Dark

by Basil Copper

  These and other thoughts, notably the increasing uneasiness of all at K4, linked with the personal fears of Karla and Rort, were filtering through my mind as we stumbled and slithered painfully across the rough ground rising from the marshes and came out onto the downs and eventually to the post.

  All was as I had left it. The last of the stores had been stowed and the observation tower showed blind red and green eyes east and west into the darkening landscape as we came down the track towards it. I stopped by the entrance a moment longer as Rort went inside and looked once again across the wild landscape of jagged cliffs and pale green sea, which never failed to impress and awe me. There was nothing unusual in sight and no smoke or other indication of the village round the cove.

  As I went in over the smooth flagged approach to the door I slipped and only my hand on the metal guard rail saved me from a nasty fall. As it was I bumped the wall and grazed my shin. I swore loudly which brought Rort out. When I turned to see what had caused the mishap, I was surprised to observe little patches of jelly-like substance on the ground and then noticed that there were other traces of it; in fact the whole area was dotted with slimy fragments. I had not noticed them on my last visit and was puzzled to account for the phenomena. There was also an unusual smell hanging on the air—musty, choking, and putrescent. Rort's eyes narrowed when I pointed this out to him. He said nothing but looked keenly around in the gathering dusk and a quarter of an hour later went out with a portable flame-thrower and thoroughly scorched the area. The slime seemed to shrivel into spores which went dancing off to seaward in the wind which was now springing up.

  Inside our own quarters all had been made clean and cheerful and a few minutes later I was on the transmitter to Masters. His calm voice out of the darkness, only a few miles away across the ridge, provided a comforting reality in our lonely situation and gave the necessary life-line we needed. I told him nothing but routine matters. In any case my thoughts made no sense even to myself and there was no point in putting doubts into his mind as to the advisability of letting me loose on my own.

  When I had switched off the radio—we were to have a vision-tube link-up when Rort got the tower apparatus in working order—we ate a huge supper with an appetite born of our long walk. The wind, which had been rising steadily, began an unpleasant buffeting against the plate-glass ports. Our living room and bedrooms were on the second floor which was fairly high up, and the ground floor was given up to stores, a factor which was to have some importance later.

  Soon afterwards Rort slipped quietly out and I heard the squeak on the metal treads of the staircase, though whether he went up or down I couldn't make out. There was a short pause and then a rasping noise as he shot the massive bolts of the main door which led into the post, an eminently sensible precaution which I should have thought of myself. Then he was in the room again, a wry smile on his face, which needed no explanation. After we had stowed the supper things, he unpacked and reassembled his flashgun and carried it with him when he went up to look at the tower.

  He whistled as he saw the state of some of the instruments and then rubbed at the observation panels so that we could see out into the palely green, writhing darkness before us. To the south and eastwards and westwards there was nothing but a misty blackness but the sea always had light, except when there was rain or thick fog.

  There was obviously little we could do that night but we lingered up there in the eyrie, reluctant to go lower down. It was not only the wind, which was making ugly, fanciful noises as it roistered about the cliffs and the tower, but something in our minds, like a shadow vaguely seen out of the corner of one's eye, which made us uneasy and a prey to slight scalp crawl—another of the research man's occupational diseases. Though we strained our eyes seaward and landward we could see nothing. Eventually we went down at a late hour, brewed some coffee, and went to bed. We had an uneventful night and both slept well.

  VII

  The next morning was cold and Rort and I spent almost two hours getting the heating system working, nearly missing our early contact with K4 in our absorption. I was particularly anxious to get the whole place up to scratch so that I could start on my work without delay; once we had achieved that I could leave routine matters to Rort; he had generously given up his own research projects in order to accompany me as general assistant, as he felt that a more active life for a week or two would do him good.

  As for myself, I had been deeply impressed by the extraordinary condition of the breeder I had seen by the seashore; in all my experience I had never encountered anything like it and though the circumstances surrounding the episode were far from natural, I still had the feeling that there was some perfectly logical explanation, medical or environmental—possibly a combination of both.

  We had a late breakfast and then went up to the tower to unsheath some of the instruments and inspect their general condition. They included a powerful telescope on a gyro-operated stand which I was particularly anxious to get into action. This would be most useful in both directions along the coast and its infrared twin in the same housing would help guard against surprise by night.

  The landscape was normal when we looked out of the tower observation panels and there was nothing unusual; no movement except that of the sea and the flutter of an occasional bird. We did not get outside until almost midday and the door had remained bolted during that time. We then reconnoitred for a while along the rocky cliff path towards the eastwards in a region I had not seen before, but there was little of interest; the same rugged landscape, the same black sand and rocks, the same oily, sullen sea. It was almost an hour later when we returned and I was annoyed to see, as we made to enter the main door, a recurrence of the slime patches on the ground outside.

  I made some comment to Rort and was about to go inside when he grasped my arm and brought me to a stop. I then saw a similar outbreak of the peculiar patches on the metal guard rail. The large door of the tower was of an old-fashioned pattern. It had been firmly secured by the authorities to guard against any incursion by the local inhabitants, but that special sealing had been removed when we took up our duties there.

  Instead, the door was opened from the outside merely by a large metal ring operating a conventional latch. The door was now ajar. With an incredibly swift movement Rort's gun was unsheathed and in the aim position. I just had time to see that the metal ring was covered in slime before the panels went screaming back on their hinges at his kick and Rort had bounded over the sill. I followed, breathing fast, and our feet made a great deal of unnecessary noise as we took the metal stairs two at a time. There was nothing in the storeroom but more slime on the floor and similar patches on the treads.

  The marks continued to the ramp outside the observation room and then ceased in a large patch on the floor, with the same sickening stench I had smelled before. There was no one—or rather I should say, nothing—in the tower and the other rooms were empty. I deliberately use the word nothing, because I think we both had a feeling that whatever came up those stairs was not human in the sense that we understood it.

  We looked at one another and then Rort turned to the windows and gazed out across the bleak landscape of the island. He then stated something which I found difficult to dislodge from my mind for the rest of the day.

  "Whatever it was," he said,"could have seen us coming back and made its escape before we arrived."

  Lunch was an uneasy meal and the big door remained locked, though it was full daylight....

  VIII

  It was early afternoon when we went down to the village. I felt we had spent enough time that day on restoration work and No. 1 Post was fully operational so far as my own sphere was concerned. We had neither of us said much about the happenings of the morning and Rort had carefully expunged the slime left by our visitor with a chemical solution. Neither had we informed K4 of the position by radio. There was no sense in raising an unnecessary alarm, and we could incorporate the information with our report of the day's doings du
ring the evening call.

  It was an interesting trip for us both. Rort had not been so far afield since arriving at the island, and I had not seen the village by daylight. It grew lighter or rather seemed to, as we came down the rough extent of track to that strange corner of land squeezed in between sky and sea. My eternal impression of this place was of the far off, long ago, extinct Eskimo villages that existed in former times; here again were the igloo dwellings domed, humped, and whorled, but instead of blocks of ice, concrete, presenting a ghastly, bleached effect from the constant action of the weather.

  Here too were fungoid forms like fibroids overgrowing them and green, leprous stains that striated their surfaces into fantastic shapes. I supposed, correctly as it happened, that the government had erected these houses, for the technical problems involved were beyond the reach of these people. The domes were approached through a sliding metal door which led into a short corridor beyond which were two other doors, forming air-locks. Once inside, protective clothing was discarded and left in the last chamber before the house proper, chemical action automatically cleansing the material.

  I had expected some activity on the village track and in what passed for its streets, but once again the place seemed to be deserted. There were the screams of sea-birds, the chumble of the sea between the massive shoulders of rock that descended from the hills, and the yellow-green foam thundering up the black sand, but nothing more. We bore straight up the street for a large building that looked like a meeting place or village seat of government. The method of entry into this type of dwelling is by the conventional way—that is, by the insertion of a finger or any other obstruction into a metal slot alongside the door, which operates a solenoid and slides back the entrance.

  The method is repeated, with variations, on the air-locks, except that these can be controlled from the inside and anyone in the interior can lock the doors by instrument control and prevent another person from entering. On this occasion we were unlucky; we were stopped at the entrance to the middle chamber but the telescreen over the second door, which was operating, showed us that the council chamber or conference room it depicted was empty. This meant that the occupants were away but had locked the doors. The method of gaining entry from the outside would be known only to them and we had no means of discovering the combination. It would be little use to us if we were inside, as we had come to see the people of the village and could make no investigations until we had spoken with them.

  Rort said nothing as we came out from the main porch, but his eyes turned back to seawards and after a moment he pointed. Then I saw what had caught his attention. It seemed as though the entire population of the village had gone down to the beach.

  There were small knots of figures clustered about the shore and others were spread out towards the eastwards, disappearing towards a cape which depended from the shoulder of black rock on the seaward side. The remainder of the villagers, if there were any more, were hidden from us by the shoulder of the hill.

  As we skirted the shingle away from the village and gritted our way onto the sand, I wondered idly what had brought them all down there at that time of the afternoon. They were not fishing, that was certain, for many of their boats, ponderous metal affairs with painted numbers on their bows, were winched up towards the foreshore or riding heavily alongside the dusty red pier that contrasted so vividly with the glowing green and yellow of the sea.

  It was this pier which first attracted my attention, as a great mass of people I now saw were striding up and down its length, some like ants upon the metal ladders that depended from the spindly legs into the water itself, while still more were busied about the boats. They did nothing with the cables which secured them but poked about under canvas covers or scuttled in and out of the doors of the larger craft. As we came closer we were unconsciously veering towards the east. The people had not been aware of our presence, but now some of them hastened forward with shrill cries of welcome and a few kept pace with us as we walked.

  They were clustered more thickly along the foreshore here, among the black rocks between which the sea was riding sombrely with an awe-inspiring swell, and I could see still more men and women, with long hooked poles fishing about aimlessly in pools and among the rocks, sometimes sliding precariously about until they were arrested by a fissure or projection which prevented them from falling into the water. The centre of attraction seemed to be a region of even darker sand and rock which compressed itself into a narrow wedge bounded by the sea on one side and an almost perpendicular wall of rock on the other.

  Where one's eye looked for the narrow passage thus formed to end in the cliff face, instead there was a large curved archway of solid rock, perhaps a hundred feet wide, and the path of black sand, already beginning to be washed by the sea, veered away around a corner and disappeared towards the east. As though an invisible line had been drawn across the area, the groups of people from the village had halted about a quarter of a mile from the arch and were standing gazing intently across the sand. As we came up we could see that McIver and other village elders were the centre of the group and that they had evidently been directing the afternoon's activity.

  There was, it must be said, something foreboding and repellent about this quarter of the shore, even more so than the remainder. A curious stench borne on the wind had little to do with the clean wholesomeness of salt and there were strange dragging marks in the sand at this point, stretching away towards the rock archway, which even as we watched were being quietly erased by the action of the water. I soon saw that this entire area must be submerged at high tide.

  McIver came up as soon as he heard we had arrived and his large, sombre face looked worried. His red beard and wild eyes reminded me of some pagan god of the dawn of the world as he stood there in the grey light of that weird shore, surrounded by his people, many of whom were as fantastically dressed and outre in their appearance as he.

  As Rort and I hurried towards him, McIver gestured towards the great arch in the distance and his companions commenced to draw back a little, keeping pace with the rise of the tide. They seemed to take heart from our presence, though why I cannot say, as Rort and I were only mortal men like themselves; but to these poor souls we seemed armed with all the authority of the Central Committee and in those days the Committee represented law and hope for beings who had lived too long on the edge of the dark unknown.

  McIver explained as we walked towards the tide-line; the village had been aroused because of the disappearance of one of the women. She had been traced as far as this wild shore. The area was a bad one and the people of the village kept away from it. McIver shook his head as we continued to question him; he feared the worst. The woman—she in fact was no more than a girl—had left trails in the sand. There were other things also; McIver preferred not to go into detail.

  Rort and I soon saw what he meant. Across the sand, in bizarre and fantastic patterns, the girl's imprints—I would not say footsteps, as they were more like drag-marks—were accompanied on either side by great swathes of disturbed sand. I hesitate to be more fanciful than need be, but they resembled nothing so much as huge tracks such as a slug might make. The surface of the sand glittered dully in the light of the dying day and once again we saw traces of the nauseous jelly which had so disturbed us at No. 1 Post. The wind was rising and it cut to the bone as McIver, Rort, and I stood on the black sand and gazed towards the arch of the vast cave, whose entrance was aswirl with the incoming tide.

  The tracks disappeared into the dark water. It was useless to follow and the place was such that I would have hesitated to enter with the Central Committee itself at my back. I already knew the answer to the next question I put to McIver. Though I compared the breeder's number in my notebook with the one McIver gave me, I was not at all surprised to hear it was my girl—the one I had already met on the path in such dramatic fashion a short while earlier; who was afflicted with the curious green fungi; and on whose behalf we had really mounted the small expedit
ion of Rort and myself to No. 1 Post.

  I knew, as I looked towards the arch, that the secret of her disease had disappeared with her, most likely forever, and that apart from the humanitarian considerations involved, a promising line of research had been lost to us. Rort swore savagely when I told him and McIver's face was downcast. I gave him instructions to prepare the whole village for medical examination. I was anxious to check whether there were any further manifestations of this unusual disease among the inhabitants. In the meantime Rort and I had a manifest duty to radio K4 with our report immediately. I knew Masters would place great importance on this.

  I warned McIver to make certain all in the village was secured at night and told him to place lookouts if that were at all possible. He promised, with a touching degree of faith in our omniscience, to carry out such precautions as we thought necessary. I asked him to send a man with us to collect a portable radio transmitter from No. 1, so that Rort and I could keep in touch with the village after dark. We all felt this to be a good idea; after two visits to the post by unknown intruders and now the disappearance of the girl, it was obvious that there was something gravely wrong on the island. McIver went off to give the necessary orders. After another look at the black mouth of that uninviting cave, Rort and I, together with one of the villagers, started back en route to our post. Though neither of us said anything about it, we both wanted to get the heavily bolted door of the post behind us well before the advent of nightfall.