The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Champ says to get back!” The whisper grapevined through the stymied mob. “It’s too much sacrifice. You can’t win till you get guns.”

  The message had come through Elsa.

  She had somehow wormed back of the Disps for her last word. Hopeless for Wayne Champlin as that word was, she relayed it faithfully. Champ’s people would be hers from now on.

  “No more sacrifice for Champ!” the whisper went the rounds. “We’re to let him go.”

  In a moment the sadistic ritual was in full swing. It took an unexpected turn from the start but not a hopeful one.

  To the chanting of the Higher-ups, the hollow mockery of a debased pagan worship, the fallen Grubbers were picked up, one by one, and conveyed to the feeder. Whether they had been shot dead, or whether they were beating their fists on the ground from the agony of their wounds, one by one they slid down the open chute to disappear in the greedy maw of the Shrine.

  With each victim’s turn, the chanters stopped for a moment of silence in mock reverence, and in that moment the hideous smoky monster could be seen dimly above the flames, reaching with his clawlike hands. His growl would sound forth. Then he would disappear; and likewise his victim—forever.

  At last Wayne Champlin was ushered out of his prison cell. Elsa was close enough to see that his face was dark and brooding; his hands and arms were crusted with blood; his clothes were in tatters. But there was still that certain light in his eye—to the bitter end. They led him toward the unholy machine.

  Elsa tried to hide her face in her hands; instead she moved in blind response to some instinct she didn’t fully understand. Champ was to have been her mate. Wildly she ran after him.

  “Champ! Champ! Oh, God, don’t let them—”

  She did not see Ivan Scorpledge turn toward her and raise his gun; neither did she see the mocking young Summiteer cut through in front of the gun to thrust her back. But when she fought and pounded and clawed at the Disps who blocked her path, she was dimly aware that it was the surly Summiteer who struck her down. In the white dust of the hillside she lay dazedly, to witness the rest of the tragic sacrifice.

  Elsa saw Shorty Joe following along at the outskirts of the execution party. She was uncertain whether he caught Champ’s eye. Champ had no time for farewells.

  Once in a final burst of fury Wayne Champlin threatened to crash the ring of spears. In quick dodging motions he leaped back and forth. He plunged low, but three spears dropped down to hem him in. The ring tightened around him. He was forced into the high-walled chute.

  No one could tell when the tense chanting died out, for the Grubbers roared their protests to the last.

  The outer end of the long chute began to rise, Champlin with it. He was not bound, but armed Disps standing on little elevated platforms on either side of him held him in position with spears as his rise began.

  Brown arms whirled the great crank. The polished trough wheeled upward swiftly.

  Just before Wayne Champlin slid helplessly into motion he made a vain leap upward. His effort was lost, for he dropped back into the chute—but not altogether lost, for he caught out of the air the corn knife that Shorty Joe hurled to him. A final token of an undying friendship!

  Down the incline he flew, holding the knife high. A swift streak of descent was the last that the fascinated throngs saw—the streak that was Wayne Champlin. Down the open slide he shot to disappear through the circular wall of flame.

  CHAPTER V

  Elsa’s Fatal Choice

  The Grubbers grew silent. They caught a momentary glimpse of the gargantuan demon, but they did not flinch. They were too stunned, helpless.

  Again the hollow voices of the Higher-ups picked up the mocking chant. The uniformed executioners ran circles around themselves, performing sword and spear rituals that were supposed to be favored by the god after a hearty meal. Abruptly the service ended.

  Elsa lay where she had fallen. Torchlights descended to various levels down the hillside. Echoes of skirmishes and harsh commanding voices of the Disps fell meaningless on her ears.

  “He’s gone . . . He’s gone . . . Gone.” Her inner cry clung to the words. Her mind could go not further.

  Sometime in the night the young Summiteer who had slapped her down came back to see her lying there. He gazed at her with a lustful eye. He sneered at the thought of Ivan Scorpledge, who would easily have killed her rather than lose her to his superior.

  But young Clay Malcinder lived nearer the summit than Ivan Scorpledge; so the latter for all his importance as Captain of the Disciplinarians, had to play second fiddle. Clay Malcinder and his parents were in direct communication with the smoky monster. The young Summiteer’s lips curled with evil glee at the thought.

  Malcinder picked up the limp girl, carried her to his mansion, dumped her on the porch. He went to call his parents to take care of her, for there were other important duties awaiting him . . .

  Elsa came to herself dimly, as if out of a long sleep. She looked into the torchlit faces of the elder Malcinders—the gaunt mystic face of the father and the bewildered, too-soft countenance of the mother. The elaborate furnishings of the porch told Elsa in an instant that this was a Summiteer’s home.

  She fled. Down the hillside she ran, as if by some unerring instinct, shaking the dust of the treacherous Higher-ups from her feet. It was all a mere interval of which she was scarcely conscious. She collapsed on her bed in a Grubber’s shanty, still crying to herself, “He’s gone . . . Gone!”

  Nor did she regain a grip on herself with the coming of the day. She breathed, her lips spoke words, she ate the food that friendly people brought to her, but her nerves were only floating dust after an explosion.

  “We can’t stop now!” was the war-cry from Shorty Joe Sanburn.

  The Grubbers picked up the slogan. Round and round the island it went, lighting the eyes of the downtrodden people with the same indomitable vision that had kept them going for bitter years in the past. But there was a new terror mingled with that vision.

  “Our days are numbered,” said some. “They mean to make an end of us.”

  “The only thing left is to migrate,” said others.

  But migration was forbidden; boat-making was forbidden; and even now the Disps circled the shorelines, lest their enslaved toilers should try to swim away.

  A mania of fear gripped the Grubbers. Every shout or shot, every sight of a flashing sword or a fluttering silk uniform drilled them through with horror.

  “I’m going somewhere, I don’t know where,” Shorty Joe whispered to his fellow workers, “but when I come back I’ll have weapons!”

  But the people had no confidence in Shorty Joe. He made extravagant statements, claimed that the Purple Fury was thin air, claimed that he had hurled a knife through it.

  And when, two days later, he swam back from the mainland bearing no weapons—bearing nothing, in fact, but the outlandish tale that he had seen corpses of Grubbers that the Purple Fury was supposed to have eaten—his people declared that he had gone crazy.

  He sought out Elsa to tell his adventure to her. She listened apathetically. He embellished his story with details. He had seen the naked bodies of the very Grubbers who had been shot a few nights before. Through a crack in a blackened window he had seen them, lying on a basement floor—and he had seen their very bullet marks.

  “On the mainland—miles across the water from here?” Elsa asked listlessly.

  Shorty Joe nodded eagerly. “In a big house near the seaport. There were some men in the room, packing the corpses into boxes.”

  “You—you saw Champ?”

  Joe’s eyelids fell. “I—I’m not sure.” The lights were so bad, he said, and the shadows so black—and it was all so dizzy and unbelievable.

  “Unbelievable,” Elsa echoed dazedly, and turned away. The people were right. Joe Sanburn had gone crazy.

  That morning Elsa wandered outside for the first time since the night of the feeding. Though her nerves were still
benumbed, physically she was feeling a little better.

  From high up on the hillside a spyglass caught sight of her. But Clay Malcinder did not send Ivan Scorpledge and his Disps flying down the food slides to get her. There were other methods, a little slower but just as sure.

  Before noon a relayed order got to the bottom of the hill.

  “The shoemaker’s wife,” said one of Elsa’s Grubber friends innocently, “wants you to be her guest for today.”

  “Is it all right?” Elsa asked dubiously.

  Of course it was all right, the Grubber assured her, being ignorant of the trickery which the invitation involved. The shoemaker lived on the very next level, and he sometimes did slight favors for the Grubbers. A visit could do no harm.

  Elsa went, accordingly; but before she had time to accustom herself to her surroundings, a noisy spear-and-implement maker from the next higher level dropped down to ask the shoemaker’s family and their guest up to his place for the noon meal.

  The shoemaker, himself being ignorant as to where this chain had started or where it would end, yielded to social pressure and accepted.

  Soon Elsa found herself being towed up the blinding, gushing social waterfalls like a hooked fish. Before she realized that this was an insidious trap, she had risen, step by step, to the level of the Disps.

  She recoiled, Terror seized her. She tried to break and run; but this time running was out of the question. The trap had been too cunningly laid. Disps took her by the arms.

  Ivan Scorpledge looked on jealously from a distance while the squad of Disps marched the girl up to the highest level of all. She would be the honored guest of one of the island’s proudest families, the Malcinders!

  The elder Malcinders fed her and put her to bed, locking the door after her.

  Days passed—days of tender, overcordial imprisonment.

  Clay Malcinder’s presence soon became as terrorizing as Scorpledge’s had been. His manners were smoother, his talk more subtle, but his true nature was far more treacherous. Gradually these facts came home to Elsa.

  Little by little it dawned upon her that Clay Malcinder and his parents were a world apart. The son was completely devoted to the Purple Fury. His single-track mind led him to constant worship. He spent hours, daily and nightly, at his own chosen listening post, awaiting the fearsome whispers that he thought he heard so clearly.

  “The Purple Fury will soon answer my prayers,” he would say with mock piety.

  “I’m sure he will, my son,” the father would answer; and the mother would smile, and glance toward the girl to see what impression this “sincere” appeal had made.

  Elsa, terrified mouse that she was, did not fail to understand. This family was urging her to accept their faith so that she would be a suitable mate for Clay. They believed that their son’s long hours of communion in his private little sanctum would soon bring results.

  But all the while, Elsa knew, the Purple Fury was no more than a gigantic hoax to Clay Malcinder. He and a few of his Summiteer friends too obviously relished all their sanctimonious airs as so much comic byplay, when they were out of hearing of such sincere worshipers as Clay’s father. They lived in sham and loved it.

  Still, Elsa was mystified that Clay Malcinder would actually spend so much of his time within his prayer cave. Many of his confidential friends likewise went to their private hillside caves for hours of pretended devotion.

  Once she spoke of following him, for a glimpse of his prayer sanctum. Mrs. Malcinder was horrified. Prayer chambers were hallowed and private; and even Clay’s parents had never intruded upon their son’s sacred cave.

  This left Elsa more curious than ever. At the first opportunity she ventured to the stone-arched entrance. She found that the narrow passage turned sharply and led to a solid door. The door was locked. She came away more mystified than before . . .

  Someone must have seen her! That evening at the dinner table the atmosphere was tense.

  “Until today, Elsa,” the father began, after the dinner things had been cleared away, “our all-wise god has been patient with you. But this afternoon he has spoken a sharp command.”

  The words fell like blows from a hammer. Clay Malcinder and his mother eyed the girl impersonally.

  “The Purple Fury has decreed that your trifling must cease,” the old man said, his mystic eyes gleaming into the distance. “You must choose!”

  Elsa waited, afraid to breathe. Clay Malcinder cocked his head, confident that the trick was already won.

  “You must choose to follow one path or the other,” came the sledgehammer words. “Either the path of Wayne Champlin or that of my own dear son. The Purple Fury advises that you go at once to my son, become his wife, cling to him, and make his ways your ways.”

  The house was deathly still. Only the dull roar from the purple flame at the hilltop seeped in upon the stillness.

  Then Elsa sprang up so suddenly that her chair clattered to the floor.

  “Let the Purple Fury tell me that!” she screamed.

  “Silence! You have no cause to be infuriated,” said the old man in his cold, unemotional voice. “If you trifle with sacred things, the Purple Fury is bound to grow impatient—and impatience always whets his appetite. Which do you choose?”

  “Wayne Champlin, of course!” the girl blurted.

  The Malcinders paled. They crowded closer around her. They did not wish to see her damned, as Wayne Champlin had been, for uttering blasphemy. She must not choose so hastily. Her life was at stake. Champlin’s way was the way of the rebel, the unbeliever.

  “The news of this momentous whisper has already gone out to all the islanders,” Clay Malcinder explained detachedly. “If you make an unfortunate choice—” he paused for effect—“they will gather on the hillside this very night.”

  The girl saw the game clearly now. Wayne Champlin’s path led straight into the fires of the Shrine. While Clay Malcinder’s path—

  For an anguished, tormented moment Elsa tried to glimpse herself sitting here at the top of the world, steeped in sham, winking and mocking at the oppression and starvation and cruelty and heartbreak that descended upon the toiling Grubbers.

  The Grubbers! Champ’s people—and hers!

  “I’ll still follow Wayne Champlin,” she answered, breathing quiet defiance.

  Clay Malcinder rose. His face, though it wore a surly smile, was flushed with inner rage. He bit his words.

  “You’re stalling just to make a play for me. You’re pretending not to be overwhelmed by your good fortune of winning me so easily—”

  “Good fortune!” Elsa echoed in a bitter voice. She picked up her chair and held it to her defensively. She shrieked with outraged feelings and shrank to the farthest corner of the room, laughing and crying hysterically.

  “Good fortune! Death is the best fortune I could hope for, now that you’ve taken Champ!”

  Under the shocked eyes of his parents, Clay Malcinder stormed out of the house. He was a power unto himself. The Purple Fury was putty in his hands, and he couldn’t stand to be defied by any mere human being.

  Supreme cynic that he was, he couldn’t endure mockery in any form, even if it were only an hysterical laugh.

  But his rage would have a ready outlet. Not simply a quick, drab murder, but another spectacular public sacrifice, adorned with all those cruel splendors that were his food and drink.

  Tonight—tonight! And on the impulse Clay Malcinder dispatched a corps of guards.

  Then as he stood on his porch, drinking in the wine of pleasurable anticipation, a slightly disturbing note jarred upon his consciousness—a bit of news that made him eager to rush the sacrifice through with all possible haste.

  The disturbing note approached in the form of Ivan Scorpledge.

  “I wish to see your father,” Scorpledge growled.

  “What about?”

  “A rumor.”

  The elder Malcinder appeared on the porch.

  “What is it?”
r />   “Another ghost has shown up,” Scorpledge answered. “The Disps sighted him along the shore cliff. There’s no question about it this time. He was one of our late sacrifices.”

  The old man shook his head and turned away.

  “Hallucinations!” he scoffed. “Nothing but crack-brained hallucinations!”

  No one could make a sincere worshiper like the elder Malcinder believe any such lies. There was no shaking his faith. He knew that when the sacred monster devoured a victim, not even a ghost of that victim was left. He drew up his shoulders self-righteously and marched back into the house.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Scorpledge muttered, turning his eyes toward Clay. “And if you want to know who it is—”

  “Stop!” Clay Malcinder shouted. He hadn’t any intention of letting any damaging rumors reach the ears of Elsa, who was only a wall away. “Go take charge of your Disps. And see that there’s no lagging on this job.”

  Up the hillside the Higher-ups came with their torches to attend the hideous ritual.

  Soon Scorpledge was back at the Malcinder mansion with a squad of Disps. They stood like sentinels of death against the white evening sky. Scorpledge marched up to the porch. He and Clay Malcinder again glared at each other, like two poisonous snakes.

  “Haven’t changed your mind?” Scorpledge rasped in a surly undertone.

  “Does the Fury ever countermand a whisper?”

  Scorpledge sneered. “So you’re going to destroy her instead

  Malcinder’s lips curled hatefully.

  “I yield to the will of the Purple Fury—with pleasure,” he mocked.

  The Disps snapped bands upon Elsa’s arms and led her away. In her hand was a highly perfumed handkerchief which Malcinder’s ever-loving mother had given her to keep her from fainting.

  Looking back, she saw the elder Malcinder still kneeling upon the slab of white stone—his private listening post. Lost in devotions to a god of murder! Blind, gullible soul! All the sham in the world might parade before his eyes and he would forever deny it!