by C. L. Moore
“So I die with you, I am content.” And the sound of her voice freed him from the snare of the crimson pulse.
He barked a wolfish laugh, abruptly—welcoming even this diversion from the eternal idyl he had been living—and the gun leaping to his hand spurted a long blue flame so instantly that the girl behind him caught her breath. The steel-blue dazzle illumined the gathering mist lividly, passed through it without obstruction and charred the ground beyond. Smith set his teeth and swung a figure-eight pattern of flame through and through the mist, lacing it with blue heat. And when that finger of fire crossed the scarlet pulse the impact jarred the whole nebulous cloud violently, so that its outlines wavered and shrank, and the pulse of crimson sizzled under the heat—shriveled—began to fade in desperate haste.
Smith swept the ray back and forth along the redness, tracing its pattern with destruction, but it faded too swiftly for him. In little more than an instant it had paled and disembodied and vanished save for a fading flush of rose, and the blue-hot blade of his flame sizzled harmlessly through the disappearing mist to sear the ground beyond. He switched off the heat, then, and stood breathing a little unevenly as the death-cloud thinned and paled and vanished before his eyes, until no trace of it was left and the air glowed lucid and transparent once more.
The unmistakable odor of burning flesh caught at his nostrils, and he wondered for a moment if the Thing had indeed materialized a nucleus of matter, and then he saw that the smell came from the seared grass his flame had struck. The tiny, furry blades were all writhing away from the burnt spot, straining at their roots as if a wind blew them back and from the blackened area a thick smoke rose, reeking with the odor of burnt meat. Smith, remembering their vampire habits, turned away, half nauseated.
The girl had sunk to the sand behind him, trembling violently now that the danger was gone.
“Is—it dead?” she breathed, when she could master her quivering mouth.
“I don’t know. No way of telling. Probably not.”
“What will—will you do now?”
He slid the heat-gun back into its holster and settled the belt purposefully.
“What I started out to do.”
The girl scrambled up in desperate haste.
“Wait!” she gasped, “wait!” and clutched at his arm to steady herself. And he waited until the trembling had passed. Then she went on, “Come up to the Temple once more before you go.”
“All right. Not a bad idea. It may be a long time before my next—meal.”
And so again they crossed the fur-soft grass that bore down upon them in long ripples from every part of the meadow.
The Temple rose dim and unreal before them, and as they entered blue twilight folded them dreamily about. Smith turned by habit toward the gallery of the drinkers, but the girl laid upon his arms a hand that shook a little, and murmured, “Come this way.”
He followed in growing surprise down the hallway through the drifting mists and away from the gallery he knew so well. It seemed to him that the mist thickened as they advanced, and in the uncertain light he could never be sure that the walls did not waver as nebulously as the blurring air. He felt a curious impulse to step through their intangible barriers and out of the hall into—what?
Presently steps rose under his feet, almost imperceptibly, and after a while the pressure on his arm drew him aside. They went in under a low, heavy arch of stone and entered the strangest room he had ever seen. It appeared to be seven-sided, as nearly as he could judge through the drifting mist, and curious, converging lines were graven deep in the floor.
It seemed to him that forces outside his comprehension were beating violently against the seven walls, circling like hurricanes through the dimness until the whole room was a maelstrom of invisible tumult.
When he lifted his eyes to the wall, he knew where he was. Blazoned on the dim stone, burning through the twilight like some other-dimensional fire, the scarlet pattern writhed across the wall.
The sight of it, somehow, set up a commotion in his brain, and it was with whirling head and stumbling feet that he answered to the pressure on his arm. Dimly he realized that he stood at the very center of those strange, converging lines, feeling forces beyond reason coursing through him along paths outside any knowledge he possessed.
Then for one moment arms clasped his neck and a warm, fragrant body pressed against him, and a voice sobbed in his ear.
“If you must leave me, then go back through the Door, beloved—life without you—more dreadful even than a death like this ...” A kiss that stung of blood clung to his lips for an instant; then the clasp loosened and he stood alone.
Through the twilight he saw her dimly outlined against the Word. And he thought, as she stood there, that it was as if the invisible current beat bodily against her, so that she swayed and wavered before him, her outlines blurring and forming again as the forces from which he was so mystically protected buffeted her mercilessly.
And he saw knowledge dawning terribly upon her face, as the meaning of the Word seeped into her mind. The sweet brown face twisted hideously, the blood-red lips writhed apart to shriek a Word—in a moment of clarity he actually saw her tongue twisting incredibly to form the syllables of the unspeakable thing never meant for human lips to frame. Her mouth opened into an impossible shape ... she gasped in the blurry mist and shrieked aloud ...
-
IV
Smith was walking along a twisting path so scarlet that he could not bear to look down, a path that wound and unwound and shook itself under his feet so that he stumbled at every step. He was groping through a blinding mist clouded with violet and green, and in his ears a dreadful whisper rang—the first syllable of an unutterable Word ... Whenever he neared the end of the path it shook itself under him and doubled back, and weariness like a drug was sinking into his brain, and the sleepy twilight colors of the mist lulled him, and—
“He’s waking up!” said an exultant voice in his ear.
Smith lifted heavy eyelids upon a room without walls—a room wherein multiple figures extending into infinity moved to and fro in countless hosts ...
“Smith! NW! Wake up!” urged that familiar voice from somewhere near.
He blinked. The myriad diminishing figures resolved themselves into the reflections of two men in a steel-walled room, bending over him. The friendly, anxious face of his partner, Yarol the Venusian, leaned above the bed.
“By Pharol, NW,” said the well-remembered, ribald voice, “you’ve been asleep for a week! We thought you’d never come out of it—must have been an awful brand of whisky!”
Smith managed a feeble grin—amazing how weak he felt—and turned an inquiring gaze upon the other figure.
“I’m a doctor,” said that individual, meeting the questing stare. “Your friend called me in three days ago and I’ve been working on you ever since. It must have been all of five or six days since you fell into this coma—have you any idea what caused it?”
Smith’s pale eyes roved the room. He did not find what he sought, and though his weak murmur answered the doctor’s question, the man was never to know it.
“Shawl?”
“I threw the damned thing away,” confessed Yarol. “Stood it for three days and then gave up. That red pattern gave me the worst headache I’ve had since we found that case of black wine on the asteroid. Remember?”
“Where—?”
“Gave it to a space-rat checking out for Venus. Sorry. Did you really want it? I’ll buy you another.”
Smith did not answer, the weakness was rushing up about him in gray waves. He closed his eyes, hearing the echoes of that first dreadful syllable whispering through his head ... whisper from a dream ... Yarol heard him murmur softly,
“And—I never even knew—her name ...”
-
DUST OF GODS
Northwest Smith 04
Weird Tales – August 1934
I
“PASS THE WHISKY, NW,” said Yarol the V
enusian persuasively.
Northwest Smith shook the black bottle of Venusian segir-whisky tentatively, evoked a slight gurgle, and reached for his friend’s glass. Under the Venusian’s jealous dark gaze he measured out exactly half of the red liquid. It was not very much.
Yarol regarded his share of the drink disconsolately.
“Broke again,” he murmured. “And me so thirsty.” His glance of cherubic innocence flashed along the temptingly laden counters of the Martian saloon wherein they sat. His face with its look of holy innocence turned to Smith’s, the wise black gaze meeting the Earthman’s pale-steel look questioningly. Yarol lifted an arched brow.
“How about it?” he suggested delicately. “Mars owes us a drink anyhow, and I just had my heat-gun recharged this morning. I think we could get away with it.”
Under the table he laid a hopeful hand on his gun. Smith grinned and shook his head.
“Too many customers,” he said. “And you ought to know better than to start anything here. It isn’t healthful.”
Yarol shrugged resigned shoulders and drained his glass with a gulp.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“Well, look around. See anyone here you know? We’re open for business—any kind.”
Yarol twirled his glass wistfully and studied the crowded room from under his lashes. With those lashes lowered he might have passed for a choir boy in any of Earth’s cathedrals. But too dark a knowledge looked out when they rose for that illusion to continue long.
It was a motley crowd the weary black gaze scrutinized—hard-faced Earthmen in space-sailors’ leather, sleek Venusians with their sidelong, dangerous eyes, Martian drylanders muttering the blasphemous gutturals of their language, a sprinkling of outlanders and half-brutes from the wide-flung borders of civilization. Yarol’s eyes returned to the dark, scarred face across the table. He met the pallor of Smith’s no-colored gaze and shrugged.
“No one who’d buy us a drink,” he sighed. “I’ve seen one or two of ‘em before, though. Take those two space-rats at the next table: the little red-faced Earthman—the one looking over his shoulder—and the drylander with an eye gone. See? I’ve heard they’re hunters.”
“What for?”
Yarol lifted his shoulders in the expressive Venusian shrug. His brows rose too, quizzically.
“No one knows what they hunt—but they run together.”
“Hm-m.” Smith turned a speculative stare toward the neighboring table. “They look more hunted than hunting, if you ask me.”
Yarol nodded. The two seemed to share one fear between them, if over-the-shoulder glances and restless eyes spoke truly. They huddled together above their segir glasses, and though they had the faces of hard men, inured to the spaceway dangers, the look on those faces was curiously compounded of many unpleasant things underlying a frank, unreasoning alarm. It was a look Smith could not quite fathom—a haunted, uneasy dread with nameless things behind it.
“They do look as if Black Pharol were one jump behind,” said Yarol. “Funny, too. I’ve always heard they were pretty tough, both of ‘em. You have to be, in their profession.”
Said a husky half-whisper in their very ears,
“Perhaps they found what they were hunting.”
It produced an electric stillness. Smith moved almost imperceptibly sidewise in his chair, the better to clear his gun, and Yarol’s slim fingers hovered above his hip. They turned expressionless faces toward the speaker.
A little man sitting alone at the next table had bent forward to fix them with a particularly bright stare. They met it in silence, hostile and waiting, until the husky half-whisper spoke again.
“May I join you? I couldn’t help overhearing that—that you were open for business.”
Without expression Smith’s colorless eyes summed up the speaker, and a puzzlement clouded their paleness as he looked. Rarely does one meet a man whose origin and race are not apparent even upon close scrutiny. Yet here was one whom he could not classify. Under the deep burn of the man’s skin might be concealed a fair Venusian pallor or an Earthman bronze, canal-Martian rosiness or even a leathery dryland hide. His dark eyes could have belonged to any race, and his husky whisper, fluent in the jargon of the spaceman, effectively disguised its origin. Little and unobtrusive, he might have passed for native on any of the three planets.
Smith’s scarred, impassive face did not change as he looked, but after a long moment of scrutiny he said, “Pull up,” and then bit off the words as if he had said too much.
The brevity must have pleased the little man, for he smiled as he compiled, meeting the passively hostile stare of the two without embarrassment. He folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. The husky voice began without preamble,
“I can offer you employment—if you’re not afraid. It’s dangerous work, but the pay’s good enough to make up for it—if you’re not afraid.”
“What is it?”
“Work they—those two—failed at. They were—hunters—until they found what they hunted. Look at them now.”
Smith’s no-colored eyes did not swerve from the speaker’s face, but he nodded. No need to look again upon the fear-ridden faces of the neighboring pair. He understood.
“What’s the job?” he said.
The little man hitched his chair closer and sent a glance round the room from under lowered lids. He scanned the faces of his two companions half doubtfully. He said, “There have been many gods since time’s beginning,” then paused and peered dubiously into Smith’s face.
Northwest nodded briefly. “Go on,” he said.
Reassured, the little man took up his tale, and before he had gone far enthusiasm drowned out the doubtfulness in his husky voice, and a tinge of fanaticism crept in.
“There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten-hot, swung round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it—they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors of mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshipped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become. Some say they were from beyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.”
“Those three gods were the origin and beginning of all other gods that mankind has known. All modern gods are echoes of them, in a world that has forgotten the very name of the Lost Planet. Saig they called one, and Lsa was the second. You will never have heard of them—they died before your world’s hot seas had cooled. No man knows how they vanished, or why, and no trace of them is left anywhere in the universe we know. But there was a Third—a mighty Third set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet; so mighty a Third that even today, unthinkably long afterward, his name has not died from the lips of man. It has become a byword now—his name, that once no living man dared utter! I heard you call upon him not ten minutes past—Black Pharol!”
His husky voice sank to a quiver as it spoke the hackneyed name. Yarol gave a sudden snort of laughter, quickly hushed, and said, “Pharol! Why—”
“Yes, I know. Pharol, today, means unmentionable rites to an ancient no-god of utter darkness. Pharol has sunk so low that his very name denotes nothingness. But in other days—ah, in other days! Black Pharol has not always been a blur of dark worshipped with obscenity. In other days men knew what things that darkness hid, nor dared pronounce the name you laugh at, lest unwittingly they stumble upon that secret twist of its inflection which opens the door upon the dark that is Pharol. Men have been engulfed before now in that utter blackness of the god, and in that dark have seen fearful things. I know”—the raw voice trailed away into a murmur—“such fearful things that a man might scream his throat hoarse and never speak again above a whisper ...”
Smith’s eyes flicked Yarol’s. The h
usky murmur went on after a moment.
“So you see the old gods have not died utterly. They can never die as we know death: they come from too far Beyond to know either death or life as we do. They came from so very far that to touch us at all they had to take a visible form among mankind—to incarnate themselves in a material body through which, as through a door, they might reach out and touch the bodies and minds of men. The form they chose does not matter now—I do not know it. It was a material thing, and it has gone to dust so long ago that they very memory of its shape has vanished from the minds of men. But that dust still exists. Do you hear me? That dust which was once the first and the greatest of all gods, still exists! It was that which those men hunted. It was that they found, and fled in deadly terror of what they saw there. You look to be made of firmer stuff. Will you take up the search where they left it?”
Smith’s pale stare met Yarol’s black one across the table. Silence hung between them for a moment. Then Smith said,
“Any objection to us having a little talk with those two over there?”
“None at all,” answered the hoarse whisper promptly. “Go now, if you like.”
Smith rose without further words. Yarol pushed back his chair noiselessly and followed him. They crossed the floor with the spaceman’s peculiar, shifting walk and slid into opposite chairs between the huddling two.
The effect was startling. The Earthman jerked convulsively and turned a pasty face, eloquent with alarm, toward the interruption. They drylander stared from Smith’s face to Yarol’s in dumb terror. Neither spoke.
“Know that fellow over there?” inquired Smith abruptly, jerking his head toward the table they had quitted.
After a moment’s hesitation the two heads turned as one. When they faced around again the terror on the Earthman’s face was giving way to a dawning comprehension. He said from a dry throat, “He—he’s hiring you, eh?”
Smith nodded. The Earthman’s face crumpled into terror again and he cried,
