“Caarrl,” the voice moaned. The voice was louder than it had been last night, and deeper. Oddly strong and resonant. Almost a rumble across the damp grass to him. But it was Violet, without question. Violet.
East staggered forward, a smile flickering on the electrified muscles of his face...and yet he still gripped the bread knife and held it before him as he went.
“Violet,” he said. “Violet,” as he reached the dark mouth of the barn. He reached only his arm inside to paw for the lights. “Violet...”
For a moment before he hit the switch, his eyes made out shapes across the barn floor. The carnage of his fury; the shattered tanks, splintered shelves, the slaughtered giants too primitive to be either plant or amoeba but so large that he had barely chiseled them down. Dark blobs glowing so very dimly in the blue light from outside. And even as his finger tips found the switch, East saw several of the hulking mounds move...
At the revelation in the full light from overhead, East screamed. Not a cry. Not a shout. A scream...
The pale masses of primal flesh lay where he had left them, for the most part. They rested in the splinters of glass and wood on the floor. But the floor as he had left it had been awash in nutrient solution from the shattered tanks and overturned pools. Now it was dry, the spilled nourishment greedily absorbed.
A small mass twitched by his foot, but his eyes flicked horrified between several of the larger pallid blobs. From one – twisted in anguished knots – there protruded a slim, nearly skeletal arm which clawed at the floorboards in an attempt to pull itself along. An almost spherical mass nearer to him was smooth except for the outlines of bones pressing at its skin; humped vertebrae like the horny spine of a dinosaur, ribs like prison bars picked out in vivid relief.
The once inviting cradle of her pelvis was now some sharp and hateful animal skull yawning to tear through the flesh of another blob, this one with glass shards stuck in it. Somehow, several pseudopods like grotesque flippers slapped at the floor to draw this horror along.
A thumping drew East’s streaming eyes to the greatest of his crop, still hulking despite his attack. Though rent and cleft by his blows, it loomed, and a rudimentary human leg hung from its side, stamping at the ground in an obscene convulsion.
“Ohh, God...oh, Violet...oh God!” East sobbed. It was the vodka, the vodka and insanity...
“Carl,” Violet’s voice rattled, to his side.
He dare not look dare not look...
He looked.
The 140-pound vessel he had set out to catch her soul. The clay for her to mold. The voice, of course, came from that. From the mockery of vocal cords shaped from that primordial matter.
He met Violet’s eyes there. Not much else of her showed in that too white rubbery flesh. The light from above made her eyes dark skull socket pools, made pools under the jutting of her bony cheeks. Her mouth was a wide, gnashing orifice. It was a face wasted by cancer, this now her subconscious conception of herself. It was a face of suffering. The mouth worked, the eyes blinked. They were white like the flesh, no color left in them.
“Carl...” the deep, sepulchral voice groaned.
Had she started with the destination mass he had cultivated as her spirit’s receptacle? Found it lying on the boards and taken it anyway...but then needed more cells to take full form, to duplicate the great complexity of her former body? Or had her spirit become confused in transit, sent forth as it was in the delirium of her pain? Had he acted prematurely, and in smashing his experiment, shattered her focus? Had he done this to her?
Or had the cancer in her brain had its own tenacity for life...also imposed its will in the making of this tormented sculpture? And might it continue to make its will known; its hunger?
“Caaarrl.”
A number of the blobs had variations on those crude flippers, used them or a single distorted limb to drag themselves along, and East realized their intention. They were hopelessly attempting to converge, to meet. To unite. It was futile. Several blobs were already floundering against each other helplessly. It was good that they couldn’t link. Their mass, united, would only result in one great monster in the place of these many.
East thought of the hypothetical monster of Dr. White. Growing to the orbit of Pluto, and beyond. In his mind, he saw these creatures drawing on more nutrients, growing without his diligent pruning and burning, dragging their bulks out into the world, a herd of cancerous titans, hungry...so hungry to live. A herd of gods. Idiot gods. He began to laugh...laugh and wag his head. Laugh and wag his head and shake with wrenching sobs that pummeled him inside.
“Carl,” Violet moaned. Her face implored him from one blob, a beseeching arm reached for him from another. He stumbled back into the threshold, thinking that the creatures meant to seize him, engulf him, absorb him, grow larger and hungrier yet.
“Carl...kill me...”
“Yes,” he sobbed.
“Kill me.”
“I will. I will, darling.”
The fear went out of him at those words, washed out of him in his tears, and with a purity of purpose, East went to the reaching hand and took hold of it. The fingers were cold but strong as they clasped his. He pulled the blob into the center of the floor...then went to push another of them closer. Another. The leg of the great hulk did its best to assist him in sliding itself along.
Last, the mass with her face. East avoided looking at it as he lifted the thing in his arms. Ignored her mouth as it worked in dry sobs against his chest. Gently, reverently, he set this creature down with the others.
He walked across the floor boards to where several cans of gasoline were lined up along the inner wall by the lawnmower. “I love you, darling,” he choked, returning to splash the fluid across the hideous congregation. “Oh, God...I love you...”
She shook now with sobs herself, painful retches that made most of the fragments of her quiver and spasm, and with their combined bulk made the floor tremble. East could only bear it long enough to complete his task.
He poured the last of the second gasoline can over his own head and shoulders. Then he went to her, unafraid, and knelt down for her to gently enfold him. An arm from this mass wrapped around his back, most of a hand from that mass clutched at his sleeve. He met her eyes again, and though they appeared blind he felt their contact. He clasped himself against her for a few moments, both of them now hushed, strangely calmed, before he dug the lighter from his pocket.
He smiled against her white flesh, pressed his lips into it. This was not a tragedy, he realized. It was a revelation.
The spirit lived on. It could escape its cells, live free of them. But he had been wrong in trying to ground it in matter once more.
Now, they would escape those bonds together.
The House on the Plain
The black ship lay steaming on the plain, more a globe than a ship, like a great spherical meteor which had magnetized to it a thousand odd-matched fragments of machinery, all of it now scorched black by the hurtling speeds which had dropped it here. But the ship was made more of ceramics than metal, and the baroque details of its shell all served their practical functions. Probes extended to sniff the air, to test the temperature, camera eyes panned, skeletal arms unfolded to dig into the bland colorless soil.
For it was a boring enough planet. The sky was a dull heavy platinum. The horizon was as flat as an ocean’s, though there were no oceans on this unnamed world. While in orbit, the ship had scanned no life.
The temperature was moderate and the gravity Earth-like, but the air was thoroughly unbreathable, so the three humans who set out from the globe wore full protective suits and helmets, their suits uniformly black but the helmets individually colored – neon green, orange and yellow – to make the explorers identifiable to each other and to the other two who remained aboard, should communications fail. These three were the most vital instruments the globe had extended.
It was a drab landscape, as stated. There was barely even a breeze to stir the bone dus
t grit beneath their boots. It was this chilling salt-flat emptiness, in addition to the mind-shaking incongruity itself, that made the old wooden house looming before them all the more startling.
“It’s a Victorian, I think,” said J’nette over her helmet mike. She tipped her head back to gaze up at the third floor, evidently an attic level. The house seemed taller than it might have in a less desolate setting.
“It can’t be Terran,” chuckled Dennis, wagging his head. “It can’t be. Seth, man, let’s go back in and get some guns, huh?”
“No way, I told you.”
“This could be a trap! Who knows what built this place! Somebody wants to entice us inside...”
“They’d fabricate a space craft or at least a contemporary structure.”
“Not if they were observing Earth through a time lapse. Could be they think this is contemporary.”
“Could be they built it as a trap back when it was contemporary,” mused J’nette.
“The scans show no life,” Seth, the expedition leader, reminded them both. “Not even inside.”
“No life that our scans can recognize,” Dennis advised.
“Whatever it is,” J’nette commented, “it could use a paint job.” She moved forward toward the dilapidated structure but Seth caught her lightly by the elbow. She looked to him puzzledly.
“Denny,” he muttered, “go back in the ship and bring me one hand gun.”
J’nette was running her hand along the clapboards of the house, once apparently painted white but the wood now as bone-bare as the plain the house rested on like some great many-eyed cattle skull. “It isn’t an illusion,” she said. “Or else it’s a better illusion than we thought.”
Dennis was holding a device against the outside of the house, watching the small screen set into it. “My scan isn’t hallucinating. It’s real. And it’s real wood.” He turned his head to Seth. “There are no trees on this planet, boss.”
Seth had been gazing in through a window. The glass of every window seemed intact but the shades were drawn in all the ground-floor windows except for this one. Too gloomy inside to see much; indistinct shadows, presumably furniture. He had been afraid, perhaps irrationally, that he would see one of the hunched shadows suddenly move. At Dennis’ words he nodded as if distracted by other thoughts. The pistol was clipped on his belt and now he unsnapped the holster. “Let’s go inside.”
J’nette went about the spacious livingroom raising the shades, letting in the lifeless silvery light, while Dennis lifted a TV Guide from the cheap pressed-wood coffee table. Seth had picked up a remote control device and pointed it toward the blank screen of a television set. Nothing happened. Dennis glanced over. “No electricity, chief. They didn’t own individual power cells then, but were all linked up to a municipal utility system.”
Seth noticed the electrical cords snaking from the TV and ancient videotape recorder into a wall outlet. A lamp was plugged into this outlet also but nothing happened when he tried its switch. He wasn’t surprised.
“Well, the house was already old before these things were added,” J’nette observed, her pretty brown face pinched with intensity. She moved to a built-in bookcase, and plucked out volumes at random to check the copyright or printing date in their fronts. The most recent book she found was one from 1992, and most of them were older. Some much older. Titles in English, Latin and German. There were books on non-Euclidean geometry, “rubber-sheet” geometry, Klein bottles and Moebius strips and the studies that had made possible at last the traversal warpage that had brought their ship here through compressed folds of space, crossing distances that otherwise would be impossible for them to cover in mortal life spans.
But in addition to these scientific volumes there were those quite old books with odd titles, all of them apparently studies of mysticism and magic, witchcraft or something much darker. J’nette hefted one heavy tome and it fell open to a page where a sheet had been inserted as a book mark. Seth drew closer to look over her shoulder.
“Weird,” he said, reading the scribbled incantations the owner of the book, of this house, had copied from the discolored pages. The incantations were modified, however, on the notebook sheet, altered and with new sections inserted. Geometric figures had also been inserted as illustrations, and some resembled the simplified diagrams of Klein bottles and worm holes Seth had studied in his academy days.
The book was replaced, the three drifted on into other rooms, pointing their flashlights and lifting shades. In the kitchen, J’nette knelt by a dog dish and a water bowl, the water long since evaporated.
Dennis gestured to the two doors in here. One, with lacy curtains over a window, obviously was a back way leading outside. The other probably led into the basement. He moved toward this one.
J’nette rose, approached Seth to show him something she had gathered from the floor. “Dog hairs, sir. We could make up a clone when we get back to base.”
“We’d have a dog, all right, J’nette. But I don’t think it could tell us much. Even if we find a hair from a human...we can’t clone its memories.”
“We could at least prove that he or she was a human. A human being from Earth.”
“J’nette,” Seth said, “I don’t think that needs to be proven anymore.”
“Look,” called Dennis, and the other two rushed to his side at the tone of his voice.
The cellar stairs seemed to disappear into the ash-like dirt of the plain after only several steps. As if the basement had flooded in sand.
“This house was displaced here,” Seth breathed. “Transplanted here intact. Without so much as a window cracked or a cup knocked over in a cabinet.”
“How?” Dennis chuckled, wagging his head again. “By whom? I don’t see a traversal warp engine under the kitchen sink.”
“Another way, but the same result. This house came from Earth before us. Before we’d even invented warp travel.”
“You think the owner did it? Come on. Do you see any machines he might have built? Unless they were in the basement and got left back in the foundation on Earth a hundred years ago.”
“Maybe he didn’t use a machine,” Seth half whispered.
“What?" Dennis had scrunched his face.
“The books in the parlor...”
“Oh. Right. He used magic...”
“One generation’s magic is the science of the next.”
“Hey,” J’nette said. She had moved to the back door and opened it. The two men went to her.
“What are those?” Dennis asked. “Tree stumps?”
The trio stepped back onto the vast plain. The objects of their attention must have been previously hidden from their sight behind the house, they decided. When the globe had descended, they must have been too shocked at the house itself to take notice. Now they approached the tree stumps, as Dennis had called them.
They stood around the closest of the three. Dennis said, “No life here, huh?”
“They don’t register as life,” J’nette observed, pressing her hand scanner to the thing. “It must have been alive once.” It did indeed resemble a tree stump even this close up, the stump of a very large tree, with a star-shaped deep opening in the top. The roots were thick and forked, trailing away into the dirt, the bark a glossy black and wrinkled, grooved, hard. Her scanner bit into the tough bark and collected a sample for more detailed study.
Dennis sighed, sat on the table-like top of the stump to gaze out across the plain. It taunted him with its mysterious emptiness, a mood so persuasive that the cryptical house seemed a crystallized personification of it. “Well, boss, maybe you’re right. But I think some other force or intelligence reached out to Earth and dragged this house here.”
“Why, though, a house that just happened to have books anticipating traversal warpage?”
Dennis had no further replies ready. They returned to the interior of the house, moved upstairs. There was a bedroom. Framed photographs on a bureau. Seth lifted one. A man with an intense face and
thinning hair with his arm around the shoulders of a plain but warmly smiling woman. From a drawer, J’nette removed a scrapbook. The two men flanked her to peer at it also.
“James Ward,” J’nette said. “That was his name.”
School pictures. As a boy, Ward had looked no less intense. He had done well in school; pasted honor rolls cut from newspapers. Later pictures showed Ward enrolled in a university. Still later, photos of the woman from the framed picture in Seth’s hand. Then, toward the end, an obituary for Margaret Ward, aged 42, dead from cancer back before they had a cure for it, obviously.
“This must have been their dog,” J’nette noted, tapping a photo of a German Shepherd. “The one whose hairs I found.”
“If Ward and the dog were teleported here with the house,” Dennis observed, “they both would have died within minutes at the most. They wouldn’t be able to breathe. Right?”
“Right...” said Seth.
“So where are the bodies?”
Now it was Seth who had no reply at hand. Across the landing was another bedroom, and they passed into this. There was no bed, however, the room having obviously been used by Ward as a study. Book shelves overflowing, stacks piled on the floor. On the desk blotter was a notebook filled with more of the indecipherable nonsense that had filled the sheet in the old book on magic. Seth lifted an odd paper weight and turned it over in his gloved hands; black crystal with striations of red streaked through it. Symbols had been carved into its many faces.
“Check this,” J’nette told him. He joined her and Dennis at the center of the room, where a pentagram or some such geometric figure had been burned into the otherwise lovely golden boards of the hardwood floor. Between the arms of the star were reproduced some of the symbols Seth recognized from the black crystal.
“I’m not much on twentieth-century religion,” Dennis said, “but I’d say Mr. Ward was into some very unorthodox practices.”
“Maybe he was just an explorer,” Seth said softly. “Like us.”
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