The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Xandibaum’s devices for instantaneous, silent murders were the last word in man’s thousand of years of death-dealing inventions. Trapdoor Monster’s proficiency at post mortems was slight. The Trapdoor Monster was no scientist.

  No, he was simply an imitator and an adaptor. His only inventions ran to trickery, and his wits ran to numbers and rapid calculations. He had taken over many of man’s facilities that he could not understand, or repair, much less improve upon.

  This amplified chirping that Xandibaum now listened to, coming from the doorway where Six-six-six stood beside a microphone, was simply a steal from vanquished Cro-Magnon man. If these communication systems ever got any overhauling it was done by the monsters’ highly developed arts of imitation, thought Xandibaum, not by any intelligent understanding of—

  That was his number!

  Yes, Xandibaum’s number had been called!

  The announcement was repeated . . . It was an order for a duty . . . Guard duty. . . Tomorrow, on the northern boundary . . .

  There was more to the order, though Xandibaum was far from clear on all that was said. He was sure the guard duty would last several days, perhaps weeks. He thought that he was commanded to have shed his old season’s shell and appear in his fresh one for this job.

  Five thousand monster spiders slipped out of sight—a few of them having dumped their cast-off shells outside their trapdoors—and five thousand heavy trapdoors clicked shut. Assembly was over for today.

  Xandibaum slipped back to this living quarters, disposed of his shell. He wrote a few lines in his diary, then picked up his paint brush and worked furiously on the new shell he would don for tomorrow’s job.

  All of that inner mechanism would have to be transferred, but that would be a quick job. The fastenings for that job had been fixed weeks ago.

  And he must remember to load up with plenty of death bolts.

  A curious game, he smiled to himself—this business of being the only man on earth! One of these days they would get him; his game was certain to end eventually.

  But Xandibaum still had his own personal zest for living; and if another murder or so was the price of a few more days of life, he was good for it!

  While the dark paint dried on his fresh spider shell he returned to his diary and wrote:

  “Once more I am to expose myself, in disguise, of course, to these creatures in whose midst I am a hidden prisoner. This may be my last entry (as I have often written before). I write, knowing full well that there is no man alive to read it. I can conceive of only one possibility by which any man might find his way to this place; namely, by means of the time chain which escaped from me (through my error) to return to a future century.

  “If any maxi should come upon this underground refuge, that man is welcome to what he finds here. The chemical processes for manufacturing food and clothing are his to use. He will do well to keep to the protection of this cave, for the deadly Trapdoor Monsters hold sway throughout the land.

  It is strange that once I wrote a book, ascribing this era to the future, to 102,000 A.D. But I had miscalculated, struck the wrong light in the time chain, and it took many trips to discover my error and to return here. When I finally discovered this insect era was in 20,000 B.C., and that the civilization destroyed was that of Cro-Magnon man, after 5,000 years of amazing progress, two great mysteries were solved for me; the answer to the Cro-Magnon enigma—they were destroyed by the trapdoor monsters—and the mystery of the future of man himself. Now I have no hope to correct the error I made in 1940, when I published my book on the FUTURE of man. It is really not the future, but the PAST!

  “Once this was a city—a city that extended both above the ground and beneath, and was vibrant with the warmth of Cro-Magnon life. But Cro-Magnon man’s wars that drove him underground made him the victim, .first to his own shortsightedness, next to the mercilessness of the deadly insects that thrived in these underground habitats, and multiplied, and organized and killed.

  “Once this was a city. Now it is desolation and death.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Death Beneath the Trapdoor

  When Penzi came screaming, “A spider . . . following me!” Hunzk and Vincent leaped to their feet. Hunzk grasped his poisoned spear in his hand.

  “Where?” gasped Vincent.

  Penzi flung herself into his arms. “In the clearing,” she sobbed. Then she turned and stared back in the direction she had come, and pointed.

  But she had no need to point, for there, advancing beneath the trees, was a monster spider, its horrible legs clacking along with almost mechanical jerkiness, its horrid, half-human head turning questioningly about as it came.

  It clattered up to within ten yards of them, then stopped. It stood there, eyeing them. Hunzk lifted his spear threateningly, and aimed. The muscles of his great arm tensed. Then, suddenly, the spider spoke.

  “Hold it! Don’t throw that thing at me. I’m your friend.”

  Stunned, Hunzk dropped his spear arm to his side.

  Lindova uttered a little cry, and Hunzk once more flashed his spear up.

  “Wait!” cried Vincent, recovering from his astonishment. “That spider talked to me in my own language!”

  “It is magic,” growled Hunzk. “I will kill. This thing is our enemy; it is the insect that destroyed my people . . .”

  “No, wait,” commanded Vincent, laying hand on Hunzk’s arm. “Let me ask it a few questions first. It doesn’t seem to intend to harm us—just yet anyway.”

  He faced the monster insect.

  “Who are you?” he asked, feeling rather foolish. It was obvious this thing was a spider, and could not possibly have spoken. And yet, there came an answer.

  “You speak English too! Then you are from my own time! I am your friend . . .”

  Suddenly into the forest came two more of the giant spiders, and the spider who faced them half whirled around.

  “Trust me,” it hissed. “These are enemies. Make no move. Simply fall in in front of me, and go as I direct you.” Vincent hesitated, and Hunzk bristled, although he could understand no word of what the spider was saying.

  “Quick!” hissed the spider. “Before it is too late. I will make believe I have captured you and are returning you to Six-six-six.”

  Abruptly Vincent decided. “We will walk before him, as though we were prisoners,” he shot at Hunzk. “You keep your spear ready, for the first treacherous move.”

  Hunzk snarled. “Why not kill now, before those other two get here. We will be helpless . . .”

  But it was too late now. The other two spiders clattered up. Suddenly, as though frozen, they stopped. They seemed lifeless.

  Vincent was puzzled. But he said nothing as the spider who talked English led them away. For perhaps half an hour they walked along, in silence, and finally they drew up beside a sandy bank. The spider advanced, and a trapdoor opened.

  “Go down there,” whispered the spider. “And stay hidden until I come back. You will find food, and you will find weapons. Make no moves, because there are five thousand other trapdoors about here, all with spiders either in them, or returning to them. My notes will tell you what this is all about. Read them.”

  Wonderingly, as he allowed himself to be herded into the trapdoor, Vincent stared at the giant insect.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Name’s Xandibaum,” snapped the spider. “Now get in there. I can’t stay another minute.”

  The trapdoor snapped shut.

  And Vincent, his mind reeling, led the way into the depths of the spider’s home.

  “So they went back to caves,” Hunzk muttered in his quaint Cro-Magnon words, surveying the place. “It doesn’t look quite so inviting as the homey caves of five thousand years ago.”

  “Keep your spears ready until we’ve explored,” Vincent warned, still dazed at what he had heard.

  “I’m scared,” said Penzi, following close beside him. She managed to laugh as she said it, but her nervousne
ss was evident. The shock of coming into this new age, to find themselves at once confronted by a huge spidery monster approaching them—speaking to them—in a language that Vincent evidently understood, was all very unnerving.

  Then to be ordered about, the moment those other two spiders came up, as if the human-speaking spider had suddenly turned cold and hateful—what could one make of that?

  “He changed his attitude because those other monsters came up,” Vincent declared. “It was his only way to save face. He pretended to them that he was leading us to the authorities.”

  “Then we are in danger?” Lindova asked, being very calm about it all.

  “Extreme danger,” Vincent answered, and went on with his search through the artificially lighted chambers, the others staying close by him.

  “Maybe he was our friend,” Hunzk was not altogether convinced, having been mystified and confused by the monster’s conversation. “But those other two—they will tell the authorities.”

  “No. You saw them go motionless where they stood? They were dead. The first one killed them with mysterious death-bolts. He is not a spider, he is a man in disguise. He told me. He is Xandibaum.”

  “Xandibaum!” exclaimed Hunzk.

  Penzi gave a little cry and drew back at the sight of three or four huge spidery shells heaped in a corner. Material for Xandibaum’s disguises and perfectly harmless, but spine-chilling.

  “I’m not going to be frightened,” Lindova said staunchly, trying to bolster Penzi’s courage. “I’ve Hunzk to protect me, and you’ve Ponpo. We should know by now that our men can always protect us.”

  “We can do it,” said Hunzk.

  “The dangers here may be greater than we expected,” was Lindova’s soft-spoken reply. “But even if death were in our path, there is no place we would rather be than at the side of our men when they need us.”

  An hour later Lindova was dead.

  It all happened so quickly that no one was sure how it happened.

  No one had heard the trapdoor open. Everyone had been browsing about through the curious equipment of Xandibaum’s underground world. They had paused over the open diary. Vincent had started to read aloud. The written words had quickened the sense of danger.

  Hunzk, Vincent remembered, was the first to turn, and the sudden whiteness that came into his face was a forerunner of death itself.

  Vincent whirled at almost the same moment. He saw the two monsters approaching. One of them was upon Lindova before anything could be done. Its fangs struck the back of her neck.

  Hunzk’s spear lashed out—then Vincent’s. Poison-tipped spears they were. The two Trapdoor Monsters fell with a crunching sound against the composition floor.

  And Lindova sank into Hunzk’s arms, her expression not one of pain but of bewilderment, as if to say, “What is this strange thing that has happened to me?”

  She died without knowing . . .

  They found ways to reinforce locks on the trapdoor, by which these intruders had entered. It was difficult to know just how powerful these gigantic spiders might be. Vincent knew that the tiny trapdoor spiders of his own twentieth century could counteract a pull of ten pounds upon the cork-like entrances to their homes. He knew from his study of Xandibaum’s notes that the larger specimens became terrifically powerful, and he had no doubt that these two intruders had lifted door, casing and all.

  Even after Vincent discovered the heavy emergency metal doors a little ways down from the entrance, he was careful never to leave the cylinder unguarded. Either he or Hunzk stood by constantly with poison-tipped spears.

  They were sure that before long other monster visitors would come in search of the missing two.

  And if that talking spider was indeed Xandibaum in disguise, and he had in reality killed two monsters to protect them, he might be coming here soon to hide. Evidently he was very clever. If he could get away with murder on a small scale, perhaps—

  But no, at best they were only four against thousands and perhaps millions of monster spiders. Man was a thing of the past. They had proved Hunzk’s worst fear—at what a cost!

  They cremated the two dead monsters.

  They also thought it best to dispose of Lindova’s body in such a way that no insect monster could ever disturb it—and they did so with the gentleness and tenderness that was Hunzk’s—his heritage from an age in which the love of a man for his mate had attained its first blush of sacredness.

  They discovered the periscope.

  They found that they could look out on the barren crumbs of disintegrated skyscrapers. They could see the strange comings and goings of the Spiders’ domesticated grasshoppers. They saw these big bright yellow creatures flap down out of the skies to deposit food on the ground.

  And then, to their amazement, they saw trapdoors fly open here and there. In the flash of a second’s time a door would open, the monster spider would leap halfway out to grab the food and leap back again, and the door would go shut.

  Except for this intermittent activity, the landscape in the periscope was only a barren open plaza of finely ground debris. All signs of the trapdoors and the life beneath them were completely disguised.

  “But there is one building,” Penzi said, “away to the left, toward those wooded hills.”

  Vincent and Hunzk located it through the periscope, and Vincent considered in silence. In his day a building such as that would have been a sure refuge from any storm but war. Obviously it was not safe to stay here a minute longer than daylight necessitated. As soon as night fell they would go.

  Vincent mentally chartered the course. Hunzk and Penzi got their luggage gathered up for quick moving.

  A shadow fell over the periscope.

  Vincent looked out to see the cocky purplish eye of a huge grasshopper. The animal stood as if in obedience to some command that had stationed it here.

  On either side of the grasshopper hung a sign and both signs carried the same hand-printed message:

  “I’ll return to you at midnight. Be ready to move.—X.”

  The grasshopper paced about impatiently for an hour. It nibbled at the stones, pried around over the barren ground in a fruitless effort to find something to eat, finally kicked the paper signs off its sides and masticated them.

  CHAPTER X

  Flight by Grasshopper

  It was a hard decision to make. Vincent knew, without asking, what Hunzk and Penzi thought. They believed that this speaking spider was a cunning creature that had led them straight to a pitfall. He had faked a murder of the other two spider guards to give them confidence.

  Then he had conducted them to this place to make prisoners of them.

  Finally, he had delegated two spiders to rush in and take care of them. It was almost miraculous that all four of them had not been killed.

  Vincent himself was wavering in his faith in this creature who had said, “I am Xandibaum. Trust me. Don’t mind my disguise . . .”

  Were those words simply the imitations of man’s speech? Every writing of Xandibaum, from the spider book to the diary, had stressed the spider’s cunning at imitation.

  But there was one thing that made Vincent hold fast to his determination to stay till midnight: The last entry in the Xandibaum diary had been made recently. And it was dated only two days before the equinox.

  “Xandibaum is alive unless he’s died in the last two days,” Vincent declared. “We’ve come here for facts, Hunzk. He’s the man who can give them to us.”

  “We’ll wait if that is your wish,” said Hunzk.

  “We’ll wait,” echoed Penzi, folding Vincent’s arms, around her. Poor little Penzi was scared to death, but she was trying with all her might to take on the wonderful courage Lindova had shown.

  “We’d better pack as many of Xandibaum’s things as we can,” said Vincent. “If I read the signs right he’s got to move too.”

  At midnight they let the creature in, locking the trapdoors securely behind it. They kept their spears ready. But it spoke,
as before, in a warm confidence-restoring voice. And in a moment the inner man stepped out of the shell to give them a friendly, if hasty, greeting.

  “As I told you, I am Xandibaum of the twentieth century . . .”

  While the man talked swiftly to Vincent, the two Cro-Magnons studied him. Penzi gave Hunzk a nudge. There was something she remembered—something that Lindova’s father had said about the strange man who left the copper plate—

  “This is the one Vorsto described,” she whispered. “See the dark blotch on the left check, the sharp face, the long pointed nose—”

  Now there was a tension in the talk between Vincent and this elderly, keen-faced old man, and the listeners tried to break in on Vincent for an interpretation.

  “He’s just learned that inspection of homes has begun,” Vincent explained, “and that two monsters will come here—” He broke off, returned to his English, “Two monsters have come, Mr. Xandibaum.” The scientist went white. “I had no way of knowing such a thing would happen—What did they—How did you escape with—” His broken questions dogged against his tightened lips. “There were jour of you. Where—”

  Vincent’s eyelids lowered. Hunzk and Penzi understood what tragic news was passing between these men. Hurried words of explanation from Vincent quickened the elderly man’s determination to action. He paused to place an arm across Hunzk’s muscular bare shoulders and utter some sympathetic words that Hunzk could not misunderstand.

  Then, lifting them out of their sorrow with a quick smile, he beamed on Penzi and touched the blue velvet dress she was wearing.

  “You’re the prettiest thing alive, my child. Womankind could not ask for a more beautiful final representative.”

  Vincent interpreted his speech to her later as they were hiking along through the darkness.