Creirwy, Cerridwen and Tegid stood just as he had left them. A different aura seemed to surround them.
“It was too heavy for the first try,” he said with a smile. “But I’ll get it on my next attempt.”
Tegid shook his head; sadly, it seemed to MacNair.
“There will be no next attempt, Robbie.”
Wonderingly, MacNair looked at Cerridwen, at Creirwy. His gaze lingered on the girl’s sweet face, marveling at the compassion there. Then she was beside him, and her arms were about his neck, arms he could feel. And there was mingled grief and joy, and something warm and tender in his eyes.
“Can you not see, Robbie, that now you are—as we are?”
He stepped back, dumbly, looked down at himself, saw the glow of an aura. For an instant he could not think. Then thoughts struggled through his mind.
His lifeless body anchored to the Cauldron at the bottom of the lake—his Uncle Jock who had felt he could “mak’ guid use o’ some o’ the Watter o’ Life”—he would never see him, though he’d sit beside him in his wee hame—the broken bottle of heather ale which might have been a means of communication between them—
Rob MacNair looked down into the face so close to his own. And his arms encircled a form that was warm and alive and very real, because both now dwelt in the same strange realm. He smiled gently.
“Now we can sit upon the great rock together, Creirwy, and wait for another who can see and hear—and you need not be lonely for a long, long time.”
“THE SHADOWS FROM HESPLON”
Out of the weird realm of another dimension come the looming Shadows that spell a terrible fate for the people of Earth! Hal Kinkaid finds himself battling the forces of an alien life-form—Shadows that suddenly materialize into nightmare beings!
CHAPTER I
DREAMS OF THE SHADOWS
HAL KINKAIU frowned Before him hovered something dark and tenuous, like a shadow—a shadow suspended in midair. Yet there was nothing within ten feet of the formless haze that could cast a shadow.
He glanced across the spacious living room at dark-haired Rita Rand, his lips puckered in a soundless whistle. He must look idiotic, staring into the almost-empty air—but she was reading a newspaper, hadn’t noticed.
He looked back at the shadow. It still hovered there, but now it seemed to have thickened! He watched fixedly, whistling a faint, tuneless monotone. Within that haze, life seemed to pulse, an energy striving for something just beyond its reach—striving mightily, then waning abruptly to vaporous shadow. A growing tension tautened the heavy silence—a vast blind struggle which, though unheard and unseen, was terribly real.
The whistle checked. Hal held his breath. There was movement there! Movement—conscious, purposeful—as though a wisp of smoke had suddenly come to life! And within the shadow something grew—a monstrous distortion . . .
“Hal.” Rita’s clear voice spun him around. “The queerest thing happened last night.”
“What—sleep-walking again?” He tried to sound casual, though he could feel his ears flaming. He’d better snap out of it—imagining shadows hanging in the air.
“No wise cracks, please.” Rita hesitated, her blue eyes troubled. “You see—well—I was just reading an article here about something which some reporter calls ‘group hallucination’. The family of Dr. Kerigan, the math instructor at the University, has been seeing things—shadows—shadows everywhere, where there was no earthly reason for shadows to be!” She hurried on half-defiantly. “Don’t laugh, Hal—but last night I saw a shadow, too, hanging right above my bed! It didn’t move—just hung there. And when I got up to call father, it disappeared. I know it sounds silly—that’s why I didn’t mention it before, but—” Rita caught her breath, and her eyes widened.
“Hal—there’s one now!”
Hal Kinkaid nodded, smiling with one side of his mouth. His words came jerkily.
“Yeah. I’ve been watching it for the last five minutes. Figured I was seeing things—but it’s there.”
He arose, squinting at the nebulous intruder, that tuneless whistle on his lips again. He moved toward it slowly, broad shoulders hunched slightly forward—and it vanished.
With a faint shrug, Hal turned to the girl. “Hmmm! Now you see it—now you don’t. I’d give a lot to know the answer.”
“So would I,” Rita said.
For moments neither spoke. Hal was aware of a sense of relief completely out of proportion with the danger—if there was any danger. After all. what harm could a shadow do?
At length Rita said, “Hal, let’s tell dad about this. If anyone can explain it, he can. His dreams—” She hesitated.
Hal looked at her queerly. “Dreams?”
“Never mind. It’s probably a coincidence. Let’s go—he’s up in his lab.”
“Okay. It’s a good idea.”
Dr. Lucius Rand, his future father-in-law, knew plenty—and no one had more respect for his knowledge and intellect than Hal.
AS THEY hurried through the long, thickly carpeted hallway and up the rear stairs toward the scientist’s laboratory, Hal tried to shake off a feeling of uneasiness. He felt about the same as he had felt that time in Brazil, just before the native porters had tried to mop up the entire party—only now there didn’t seem to be any reason for feeling that way.
They reached the lab and Rita rapped lightly on the door. They waited a moment, then pushed it open and stepped into the room.
At the other end of the big chamber the short, rotund mathematician toiled with what appeared to be a huge electric motor. Above him loomed an immense mass of glass, as tall as two men—a queer composite of cubes, prisms and queerly indescribable angles. Dr. Rand’s fat, usually genial face was rigid with complete concentration, and as he worked, he chewed his upper lip, a sign of suppressed impatience. He hadn’t heard them enter.
“Maybe we’d better wait,” Hal suggested softly. “He’s so completely lost in the thing. . . .”
Rita shook her head decisively. “He’s been in here long enough today, anyway. He’s been working on that awful thing for a full month now, day and night. He’d starve if I didn’t interrupt him.”
At that instant, Dr. Rand straightened, and triumph shone in his bloodshot eyes. Hal and Rita waited. With one pudgy hand the scientist slowly stroked the bald spot on the back of his head.
“By—calculus!” he exclaimed jubilantly. “That does it!”
He stopped and closed a knife-switch, then stepped back. A low whine crept through the room—mounted steadily to a shrill shriek—higher and higher till it was thin as a thread—and then it could not be heard. Now something happened in the great pile of glass. Silvery radiance awakened in its metal base, creeping slowly upward, and seeping through cubes and prisms and cones till the mass glittered and flashed like an enormous, unearthly jewel.
Lucius Rand’s stroking fingers covered his bald spot with criss-cross trails of grime. After moments of silent contemplation, he stepped toward his creation and thrust his hand into the pulsing radiance. Held it there—and withdrew it, unharmed! He grinned gleefully.
“Knew it! The first tessaract! Now for a real test.”
Grasping a wrench, he tossed it into a triangular opening like a doorway in one side of the pile. Hal waited for the crash, but he heard only the chuckling of the scientist.
“It’s gone! Will this make Horton and Welker and Dracha open their eyes!” His brow lowered reflectively, then he mumbled: “Guess I’ll have to try it myself now.”
“Dad—don’t you dare go into that—thing!” Sharply Rita’s voice cut through the laboratory.
Rand whirled, his expression confused. “Why, Rita—when did you come in? And Hal! Ah—how are you young folks?”
Rita shook her slender finger. “You know we’re all right—but I won’t be, and neither will you unless you promise to stay out of that crazy affair!” She saw a stubborn look forming in her father’s eyes, and her attitude changed instantly. “Please, dad—
at least until you’re certain it’s harmless—and that you can—come back.”
A slow, affectionate smile crossed Rand’s features. Rita meant everything to him since her mother’s death.
“Of course I’ll wait, Rita. It’ll be safe when I try it myself.” He glanced at the thing he had made, then looked at the two with poorly concealed impatience. “Did you have any special reason for—ah—interrupting me?”
Rita nodded, and with Hal prompting, told what she knew about the strange shadows. When she finished, Dr. Rand smiled indulgently—though Hal thought he saw doubt lurking in his eyes.
“It’s barely possible that you saw something, my dear—but really, what you describe is an apparent impossibility. Hallucination—as the newspaper said. However, to satisfy you, I’ll investigate these—shadows—as soon as I find time. But now—” He half turned toward his apparatus.
“But now,” Rita finished, “you want us to go.”
At the top of the stairs. Rita gripped Hal Kinkaid’s arm. He stopped short and looked down into a face grave with doubt.
“What’s wrong, Rita?”
“I—I wish I knew! I’m afraid it’s something dreadful. Hal, though daddy scoffed at what we saw—he believed us. I know he did. He knows more about it than either of us, because—well—the idea of his tessaract—that glass thing—came to him in a series of dreams—told to him by shadows! Hal—I’m afraid!”
His arm went around her shoulder and he looked steadily into her blue eyes. A shadow, a formless thing, in a dream—and now shadows were appearing out of nothing in broad daylight.
“Exactly what did your father dream?” he asked gently. “And what’s the purpose of that pile of glass?”
QUICKLY she told him. The first dream had come to the scientist months ago—a vague vision of an endless void, silent, lightless. No stars—nothing. Then dimly, a hazy gray mass moved in the blackness, formless, yet somehow alive. Only that.
He had awakened with the strange thought that he had seen a vision—not a dream.
Night after night other dreams had followed, visions of the same lightless void with its cloud of alien life—a cloud that gradually became a throng of grotesque creatures whose form his mind refused to grasp. And from that horde had come strange voiceless whispers revealing the secret of a thing of electricity and glass: mathematical formulae; plans for the motor; details of the wiring—everything. And afterward came a ceaseless urge to build it.
“And the result, Rita concluded, “is a tessaract, a hyper-solid, a four-dimensional cube—or so father says. He says it’s a door between our three-dimensional world and some world in the higher fourth dimension, though how it works, he doesn’t really know himself.” She hesitated. “He plans to use it to go into this other world, but—”
“But,” Hal finished, “maybe the things that planned this figured on coming into our world—out of the void. Maybe they—those shadows—are trying even now.”
He remembered something he’d read during his studies under Dr. Rand—the work of a Professor Oumoff[*]. The professor had estimated that in the known universe, the volume occupied by matter compared with the void surrounding it, was comparable to a second in a million years. Or, if all the matter contained in all the stars that were visible through the world’s most powerful telescopes were rolled into a single sphere, this single sphere would float amidst as many milliards of other spheres, which would contain only the vacuum of intersidereal gulfs, as there were seconds in ten thousands centuries, very little matter in a lot of emptiness.
If this were so, why couldn’t there be a fourth-dimensional realm co-existing with the three-dimensional universe, helping to fill that waste space? In fact, why not a fifth or sixth dimension—or why not an almost limitless number of spheres of existence?
His thoughts reverted to the tessaract. It might lead into the fourth dimension—but it seemed more logical to think it opened a way into the void Dr. Rand had seen in his dreams—the space between the dimensions.
The sudden shrill whim of the motor back in the laboratory cut short Hal’s thoughts, a strangely different sound that jangled on his nerves. He felt Rita stiffen in his arms.
There came a scream—the voice of Dr. Rand!
With a bound, Hal reached the door, flung it open. Rita darted past him, into the laboratory. And both stood stunned, staring into a hell of light.
Like a white-hot sun, the tessaract flared, flooding everything with intolerable radiance. Beside it crouched the scientist, pudgy hands pressed over his eyes. Spirals and tendrils of bursting light leaped from the glass—cascaded over the floor—lashed out and drew back like coiling springs. Again Rand screamed—and a swirling light-tendril whipped around him!
“Dad!” Wildly Rita sprang into the blinding chaos, Hal beside her. A yard from the scientist—and the tentacle coiled—lashed back—bearing him into the tessaract! And Rita, lunging forward, was caught in a backwash of energy—vanished with him into the crystal pile!
Hal hurled himself headlong toward the opening. He must—stop them! Dimly he felt his foot brush something solid, twisting him aside. He heard a click—and his head crashed against a smooth, hard surface. Even as blackness blotted out the light, he heard the whine of the motor check—fade . . . die . . . and he knew he had kicked open the switch that charged the tessaract.
CHAPTER II
OUT OF THE ALIEN REALM
HAL KINKAID opened his eyes and shook himself. What a dream! He’d been in a stifling black fog infested with formless things that swarmed over him, fastening invisible lips to his skin. He looked upward weakly, pain thudding against his skull. Some hangover! Then he saw the shadow!
An inch from his face—so close that he had been staring through it—the thing hovered, wrapped around his head like a veil! It was choking him—draining the life from his mind and body—like the thing in the dream.
Clumsily he rolled aside and struggled to his feet, his arms flailing at the clinging mists. For a second he felt a stab of fear. How could he fight a shadow? How—hell! He dropped his arms, clamped his jaws together, and stood perfectly still. Nothing—vaporous or solid, three, four or ten dimensional—could take his mind from him!
His lips puckered in that habitual silent whistle—and he saw something misty float away from him toward a dark corner to lose itself among other, normal shadows Shaking his head to clear it, Hal faced the tessaract, an innocent-looking mass of angular cubes and poly-sided blocks of glass on a black base, with an opening in one side. It seemed transparent—but he couldn’t see the wall beyond it. . . . And that was queer! He looked into the opening—only an empty shell.
Hal drew his hand across his furrowed forehead, reliving the moments before his lapse into unconsciousness. There was only one thing for him to do. He’d start the dynamo and follow Rita and her father through that opening, wherever it led. He had to do it! He’d find her somehow—and try to bring her back.
Turning to the switch, he made contact, and again faced the tessaract. The whim of the motor cut the silence, and a faint glow grew out of the black metal base. Whistling faintly, he watched with narrowed eyes for the whirlwind play of energy and light which had torn Rita from him but it did not come. Slowly the radiance crept through the block till it glittered as it had when he first saw it.
Abruptly his muscles tensed. Something was materializing in the tessaract—a dark form, crouching. Hal watched, his hand on the switch. Then, even as he cut off power, he stepped back, horror on his face.
Out of the opening stumbled a cringing, broken creature—Dr. Lucius Rand, transformed into something unnatural by a damnable, hellish power. His face twitched with a changing play of warped emotions, and his head was cocked curiously sideways, in a strained attitude of attention, as though listening . . . listening . . .
“What’s that? What’s that I hear? Oh—the shadows! The shadows!” His voice fell to a whisper. “The shadows.” Then suddenly he burst into empty laughter that crashed and ja
ngled through the laboratory.
A shudder ran through Hal’s big frame. Crazy as a bat! A damned shame. He gripped the scientist’s shoulders and shook him.
“Snap out of it, Doc! Tell me—where’s Rita?”
The man seemed not to hear. His eyes darted everywhere. Suddenly he thrust out a stiffened finger.
“There’s one now—a shadow!”
Hal spun around. The thing with which he had struggled—it had left the corner to dart toward Dr. Rand a ghost of sound drifting with it. Scowling, Hal stepped into its path.
AS THOUGH he had not been there, the tenuous cloud swept past him and enveloped the scientist. Hal hesitated. What could he do? Then abruptly there was nothing to be done. . . . A faint cry escaped Rand—he pressed crooked fingers against his eyes—and collapsed. Hal caught him, his eyes mechanically following a deeper, thicker shadow that darted away to vanish in some gray-black corner.
Angrily Hal shook his head. Damn it—he was still foggy! Seemed he couldn’t think . . . A doctor—that would be first. But Rita was out there somewhere in that place which had driven her father mad. Alone! Hal’s face tightened. With one last glance at the tessaract, he raised the limp figure of the scientist and sprang toward the door. The old servant could call a doctor.
Down the stairs, two steps at a time, he dashed, shouting:
“Phillips! Oh, Phillips!”
No answer. Again he called, and an old white-haired man, half deaf, shuffled from the rear of the house. Placing Rand on a davenport, Hal spun to the wide-eyed servant.
“He’s had a terrible shock,” he said hastily “It’s serious. Get a doctor—quick! I’ve got to go back to the lab—Rita’s in danger. Stay with Dr. Rand—don’t come near the laboratory. Something terrible there! But don’t worry—everything will turn out all right.”
With that, Hal turned and dashed up the steps, leaving the old man staring after him in consternation. As he ran, Hal’s thoughts raced. The shadow was still up there. And somehow it had seemed changed after its attack on Dr. Rand—more tangible. What had it done to the scientist? And what—what had happened to Rita?
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