The Science-Fantasy Megapack: 25 Classic Tales From Fantasy Adventures

by Philip Harbottle (ed. )

  At the bottom end of Church lane, the open portals of the church face the road, and the spire of St. Margaret’s casts its shadow across the little cul-de-sac. I do not know what happened; I can only relate what my wife told me. As we parked the car opposite the church, I had a fit. They rushed me to hospital, where I awoke recalling nothing except an insane dream which left the memory of only one word in my brain: death.

  * * * *

  You cannot keep conditions such as mine secret in a small community. I knew that our neighbors were shaking their heads sadly, and talking about me as ‘that poor mad fellow.’ Even my beloved Elizabeth looked drawn and careworn, for my allergies, my strange nocturnal habits, and my constant feeling of coldness—for my skin had become clammy to the touch—distressed her and frightened her.

  All the specialists we saw, all the doctors—and there were many—could find no physical reasons for my sickness, my daytime comas, my night-time alertness, my strange revulsion for the church. (A visit from our vicar, a kind and gentle mean, had driven me into a frenzy, my teeth clenched, spittle and foam drooling from my lips, and that unearthly keening sound issuing from my corded throat, and—so I am told—a look of utter terror upon my face.)

  So, as time passed, I became more and more a recluse, haunted by strange dreams of night, where I would soar unaided through soft darkness to some predestined place where warmth and love and affection would be mine, where there would be people who understood my affliction, and who would consider only those not like ourselves as abnormal. And I eventually resigned myself to the fact that sooner or later my wife would consign me to a mental institution and that there I would go quickly mad.

  And then tonight, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, probably with some surprise showing on my face. For it was late—my wife was already in bed.

  He stood there in the darkness, the small yellow light throwing vertical, unearthly shadows down his long, pale face, and in an instant a small thrill of recognition scuttled through my mind, only to be instantly dismissed as a trick of the darkness, a way of standing, some coincidence.

  Before I could speak, he said, in a voice so deep that I wondered whether he had really spoken or whether I had merely imagined his words:

  “It has taken me a long time to find you.”

  “Who are you?” I asked hesitantly, “and what do you want?”

  “I want nothing but to see you, and to bring you truth,” he replied.

  Logic rushed to overcome the chill these words struck into me. A religious quack, one of those door-to-door peddlers of instant salvation!

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I told him, “I’m not well and I cannot stand.…”

  “I know,” he said, and proceeded to describe to me every one of the many symptoms which had baffled all my doctors—and I have described, lest I bore you, but a few of the symptoms which had for so long cursed me.

  “How do you know all this?” I managed to whisper.

  “Because it was I who caused you to have them.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. How could this man, standing upon my doorstep in the late evening, with cars passing occasionally up and down the lane, not only to know about my illness—and far more about it than any other than my personal physician had been told—but claim that he had caused it? I asked him as much.

  He told me who he was and I think I laughed. His face did not change, however, and my laughter died stillborn.

  He told me that the others were all gone, that his last victim had been cremated at death and that now he was alone, and knew that sooner or later he would be found and destroyed by the old and proven methods, and that he had suddenly struck upon a way to propagate his kind. And he had done it.

  He told me how to went to the national Blood Transfusion Service and gave a pint of his blood. How he ascertained to which hospital the blood was sent, and how he had stealthily prowled the hospital night after night until he had discovered the names of all the patients who had been given blood transfusions.

  He had visited every one of them until he found me, and giving seen me, he knew. He told me what I was and what I was becoming and he told me also that there was no hope, no cure; and I knew, as my heart died and my soul shrivelled that what he told me was the truth and that the books I had read for a cheap shudder, the films I had seen and laughed at as my fair Elizabeth clutched my hand in horror were no fiction but the truth, the evil, awful truth.

  * * * *

  He has just gone, although his haunted face seems still to hang in the silent space before my eyes…and now Elizabeth is standing at the head of the stairs in her nightdress, asking me who it was and what he wanted.

  The light from the porch throws a faint light up the stairs, and her fair hair is tousled from sleep.

  The slim column of her throat draws my eyes like a magnet and within me stirs a compulsion do intense, so awful, and so complete that I can only obey it.

  I realize now that he is right, and only when all of them are like us will there be any escape from my terrors.

  “Go to bed,” I tell my wife. “I’ll come up and kiss you goodnight.”

  ASSASSIN, by Andrew Darlington

  The wall is two thousand kilometres long, one kilometre high, and half a kilometre thick. But walls are no obstacle. He’d known of the walls of Babylon in ziggurat mudbrick tiers, the walls of Tiberian Rome guarded by the geese sacred to Juno, the aluminium walls of Mao-Citadel in Zhongguo fifth millennium. Yet in terms of permanence this wall is impressive, as if grown from the musculature of Earth beneath, an extrusion of basalt stratum, of ruptured millstone. With the flimsy city about its base as ephemeral as skin, to be sloughed off in flakes, its loss neither missed, nor affecting topography to the slightest degree.

  Adsiduo Sicarius, the assassin, enters the city as night falls, thick streamers of veined cloud boiling above the abrupt horizon, spliced and subdivided by geometric columns of fading light. His skin, in the visor penumbra of his titanium helmet, is ebon, his jerkin of reflecting vinyl molded into thick ridges mimicking bone structure, a deliberate exoskeleton to exclude all attempted penetration. But despite the psychological armor it is difficult to staunch the tide of foul-smelling memories, cities of the Tigris, of the Ganges, of the Delaware, of the Seine, alike in their squalor. This city—a detritus of triple-layered hovels, lean-to’s and shanties interspersed with the stone-built holds of the merchant trader class—laps at the foot of the wall like the diseased tongue of minions.

  The constant murmur of voices hangs in the air, pale-skinned people, vendors disseminating small containers of human flesh grown in vats fed on embryonic fluids, selling sinscmilla marijuana from Ukai on the world’s edge, selling mandalas and hexes from the sunken continent Merique, selling renewable virginities, or opium derivatives for astral projection. Beggars, dwarfs and mutants clawing from cages suspended from pantile roofs, or from grilles set into the runneled paving, grasping at legs or loose drapes of clothing in the names of charity, Zoroaster, Thai, Guatama, the Crize, or the fifteen mercies and 305 sub-mercies of penance. But Sicarius does not pause. He wears anonymity deliberately, like a cloak, an invisibility adopted by subtle nuances of slouch, posture, physical alignment, and fluidity of movement learned by experience.

  He halts briefly, at the intersection of a central thruway where a laden chain of ox carts groans by. Have oxen always had six legs, or is this just a locally induced mutation to achieve greater strength? It’s difficult to recall. Heavily armed military escorts pace beside the sweating beasts. The assassin notes the age and range of projectile artillery, selecting potential modes of entering their armor, and the preferred weapons he’d use in case of armed encounter. As he does so, a leprous hand seizes his leg pleadingly. The assassin glances down, and crushes the beggar’s single limb with his heel.

  He looks up. Twilight thickening, the shadow of the wall clinging to him like slime, like accusation, like guilt. Congealing into mere loss. Now the ox train has gone. He can see acros
s the cart-tracks, and directly beneath the wall the decaying row of cubist buildings strung together with precisely angled struts disguising the equatorial bulge of settling architecture. His eyes spider first along the elaborate facade, then up one, two, three stories, across the steeply sloping slate roofs, to the now Erebus-black wall itself. A vacuity under the lesser darkness of sky, the first stars, and the pulsing amber beacons of a drifting dirigible.

  He crosses the rutted thruway, fireflies forming hieroglyphs across buildings backing directly onto the wall, glow-worm lights twisting and transmuting into trade-names, or proclaiming attractions. ‘THE ANDROGYNE CATHOUSE’ flicks at his attention, between a plethora of ragged political posters. He approaches the egress, entering through a low multi-arched corridor. The globular room beyond, divided into stepped levels by thin perspex floors, is awash with repetitive atonal music. Roils of heady smoke are cast clinical blue by light coming tip from the floor. This is the place they’ve agreed. Sicarius needs to eat, to drink, and concentrate his energies, but first there are connections to be made. He paces uneasily round the circumference of the room ignored by its other occupants, some shrouded and masked orientals, others naked, but all earnestly furtive and intense.

  At length the assassin crosses to an alcove formed by the protuberance of grotesquely erotic sculptures, and sits down across from three figures. After a pause of some seconds, the music, emanating sourcelessly from the empty core of the gallery, completes its complex phase and begins to destucture in preparation for its next cycle, and as though this is a signal, the man in the center slides his hand beneath the elaborate folds of his dark synthsilk robe. The assassin focuses on him, tracing the physiognomy, ghosted as it is by blue shadow. The forehead is unnaturally high, domed by fringed black hair elegantly beaded. The nose almost non-existent, yet double-helixed with small jewels drawing attention from the surrounding features which are smoothly planed—artificially so, eyes paling almost to white, inset correction lenses giving them a glazed glaucomatous appearance.

  He produces a small holographic icon and nudges it across the table.

  “You know this man?”

  Sicarius recognises the idealized image moving within. “It is Vhed Varah. I know his face from the posters.” A diminutive man—one third of the city’s ruling Presidium. This is to be his target.

  “The image in this holo is deliberately slanted, as though viewed from beneath, as if he is seen through the eye of an insect, don’t you think? The artist has done that to flatter Varah’s vanity, to compensate for his lack of stature,” he continues conversationally. “The artist was one of many commissioned. He was subsequently honored, and the icon widely distributed. The unsuccessful candidates were ruthlessly abacinated as a matter of course.”

  The assassin absorbs detail which is already becoming blurred, merging with the thousand shifting faces of other victims—dictators, tyrants, libertarian benefactors, slaves, lovers and deposed pleading gods incarnate.

  “My name’s Erason,” says the man tonelessly. “And Vhed Varah is an encumbrance. Our trade suffers.”

  The assassin strains to recall the wedge-shaped cuneiform script on the posters. “I thought he claimed a policy of neutrality, non-alignment with either of the warring protagonists. Trade with both sides?”

  “Is it important you should know our motivation?” A voice—female, but distorted by the white porcelain mask she wears, the atmosphere filters visible beneath its lower lip, and the vocal synthesizer set into her throat. An off-worlder? He’d heard stories of dimensional portals. But there are always stories. And then again, the human form is infinitely pliable, particularly in this wretched age. Sicarius himself—he smiles wryly—is more than proof of that.

  “No, it’s not important. I merely ask.”

  “Curiosity is less than a requirement. Indeed, it is a trait to be discouraged,” Erason snaps, impatient to bring the subject to an end.

  “It matters not. But if you care to know, Varah’s policy is an entrenched, ruthlessly defended anti-interventionism, his ambitions as diminutive as his stature,” the words spat. “Freed from such dilettante posturing we would be able manipulate the war, engineer victory for whoever we choose to support. Free of Varah’s timidity we can assume real power.”

  Sicarius conjures an image of the lumbering tripedal war machines involved in the continent-wide War of Holy Liberation five thousand K’s away. “You need offer no justification. My contracts are not dependent on moral considerations.”

  Sicarius disconnects attention from the argument, their words igniting unbidden memories that are irritatingly incomplete. The wall is old. But there had been a time before it had been constructed when the plain from which it grows had been crossed only by the drifting dirigibles of mercantile trade en route for the New Soviets of the West or the Hives of the South, or the caravanserai of missionaries bearing the claims of one transient messiah or another. A plain where vast dust clouds ebb in meteorological turbulences, eroding surreal formations of granite into the contours of fractured skulls and frozen limbs, a place inhabited by a few world-evading aesthetes squatting in cave complexes beside watering holes. The wall had come later.

  West or the Hives of the South, or the caravanserai of missionaries bearing the claims of one transient messiah or another. A plain where vast dust clouds ebb in meteorological turbulences, eroding surreal formations of granite into the contours of fractured skulls and frozen limbs, a place inhabited by a few world-evading aesthetes squatting in cave complexes beside watering holes. The wall had come later.

  “Vhed Varah shelters behind the wall?” he says suddenly.

  “No. Inside the wall. Never emerges. He’s impossible to reach.”

  “I can reach him.” The assassin signifies the end of the transaction by standing and approaching an induction register. Once a room has been reserved for him he finalizes price and ‘identification procedures’ with his new employers, and retreats to the upper floors of the Cathouse. The establishment’s androgynous whores are individually structured through genetic implantation to suit diverse tastes.

  As she services him he considers symmetries. Whore and assassin. The impulse to life and the impulse to destroy life. The passage of millennia changes little, the two professions inextricably linked.

  The room is small. A gable window opens out onto the lichen-pitted roofscape. As the whore sleeps, he dresses, then prizes open the window and climbs easily onto the precarious slates.

  Wind howls around him, a subliminal susurration constant since the eruption of the wall, a monument to protect what lies beneath its vast foundations. The city is silent. He slithers down to the roof lip, bare metres from the obsidian blackness of the wall, its surface melted into a smooth glaze sucking all into it and giving back nothing. It had been fused by the intense heat of the holocaust wars which, two thousand years before, had left the plain a wasteland, and had simultaneously uncovered the secret the wall had been constructed to keep, leading to the first discovery of the substance named for Pluto sunk deep into the substratum of the Earth. It was then that the prospectors had clustered like ants, their footprints widening into broad highways of creaking laden wagons feeding new military technologies five thousand K’s away. Creating this city of hideous genetic mutations.

  But the wall is not solid. Washed by the incandescent heat of nuclear suns its skin had rippled, boiling like liquid, developing capillaries and smooth interconnecting bubble chambers that solidified gradually into an igneous network covering large areas of the monolithic barrier. A maze mapped and colonized as the most impregnable of fortresses, access points concealed and jealously guarded. The assassin allows himself a week to prepare his assault, piecing together and comparing fragments of information, checking over the equipment of his ancient trade, exercising physically and spiritually for die oncoming ordeal.

  About a fifth of the way from the base of the wall to its crest is a small aperture, a chimney of rock set into featureless glaze.
As the sun sets Adsiduo Sicarius begins to scale the wall, sheltered by the shrouding darkness of the Cathouse. From beyond the plain, from a technology over two thousand years dead, he’d brought a small laser transducer with which he laboriously cuts a series of small ascending recesses. Once the epidermis glaze is thus penetrated it is possible to sink stressed steel pegs into the less dense material beneath, connecting the pitons with thick hawsers, then retrieving both pegs and rope as he climbs.

  The method is slow and backbreaking but Sicarius moves methodically through the long night, with exactly spaced rest periods during which he secures himself firmly to the face, and self-induces a hypnotically relaxing trance. By sunrise he’s reached a sufficiently lofty elevation that his presence passes unnoticed in the bustling city below him. Then, with the last of the fading light, it is possible to obtain a visual fix on the aperture, and work more swiftly towards his objective, shrugging off the deliberately low-key dogmatism he’d assumed to make the climb tolerable, to dampen fear, assuage die pain and vertigo.

  Then he was reeling in the hawser for the last time, reaching the lip of the chimney, and hauling himself into its waiting darkness. The capillary slants steeply upwards, but is narrow enough for the assassin to brace himself across its restriction and gradually work upwards. There is artificial light beyond, and he slows, crawling forward as die chimney narrows. A grille separates him from an elaborately decorated corridor, the tunnel obviously serving as a ventilation duct or sluice for the disposal of waste materials.