Screaming Science Fiction

by Brian Lumley

  He got pain. A burning pain, like his hands were roasting, but slowly.

  And as the pain gradually increased, so Pav remembered the lines he’d seen on Gaddy’s face, which he hadn’t supposed to be laughter lines. He went to take the gloves off—and couldn’t!

  They wouldn’t peel; there was no rim he could get hold of; his hands were hot as hell in there, and the gloves were sticking like glue! He ran cold water in a bowl; plunged his hands into it. No good. The gloves weren’t hot, they only felt hot. Hold them to his face and they were cool. It was his hands that were hot, and maybe not even that. It was the pain itself that was hot!

  Pav almost panicked then, but he remembered who he was and what he’d done, and the stakes he was playing for. This hurting was just part of the process, that was all. That must be right: the pain was the gloves transferring their power to him. It was his initiation. They wouldn’t come off till they were ready to, until he and they went together…hand in glove?

  But they must come off, eventually, because Gaddy had taken them off. So the frurking things weren’t permanent—were they? Were they? But the pain! The godawful, screaming, acid-etched pain! His hands felt like they were melting!

  Pav called the desk to send out for painkillers, and when they came he took three times the recommended dose. The pain eased off…a little, and when he’d stopped shaking and panting and could think straight, he tried once more to take the gloves off. Still they wouldn’t come. He tried tugging at the fingertips, rolling down the cuffs, sliding them off between his thighs—everything. And nothing. They wouldn’t budge.

  So…he would have to see what the morning brought. And morning was just three hours away now. Taking a second handful of pills, finally Pavanaz fell into a troubled sleep….

  V

  Pavanaz dreamed he held his hands up before his face, and the tips of his fingers and thumbs blew off like the lids of tiny volcanoes and shot boiling blood all over him!

  He started awake and the pain was back, and he lay in the sweat of his agonized tossing and turning. The pain had probably been there all the time, but like a toothache it wasn’t so bad when you were asleep. Pav swallowed the rest of his pills, got dressed, checked himself out in the mirror. His young face was lined like never before. God! he thought, I’m aging a day in an hour! Every hour of the pain in his hands.

  He examined the gloves. The way his hands felt in there, they should have melted down by now, developed into shapeless blobs. They should be pulsating, and issuing slop from blisters that came bursting right through the alien material. But…they weren’t. Nothing had changed. Pav’s hands in Gaddy’s gloves were the same size and shape as always. Just as dexterous, and just as—

  Pavanaz felt his flesh creep, the short hairs at the back of his neck stirring—in awe and wonder as yet. In something of triumph, too, however depleted by the pain. And his eyebrows came together and down in a scowling squint as he gazed at the gloves. Because his hands weren’t “just as” but more dexterous! Somehow, he just knew that he could use his fingers, thumbs and hands faster, more cleverly, than ever before. They were more supple, more alive, more…painful!

  He examined the gloves again. Last night there’d been no cuffs. The material had gripped the skin of his forearm like it was melded to them, without constricting or cutting. Like a wide elastic band, but without restricting his circulation. This morning, there were cuffs, gaps between the material and the flesh of his forearms, forming narrow bells into which his hands disappeared. Pav at once tried to take the gloves off by rolling down the cuffs, but they wouldn’t come. Two inches down towards the wrists, the material was joined to his flesh.

  He got his thumbnail in and tried slicing the material from his skin, which only increased the pain. Frustrated beyond endurance, he wrenched at the right-hand glove, bunching its cuff in the curl of the smallest and second fingers of his left hand and trying to tear it free—which really was painful! Weakened by the agony welling out of his hands and flooding his mind and body, he staggered back against the bed and fell onto it. And a trickle of red escaped from beneath the cuff of Gaddy’s glove! A few drops from a patch of torn skin, but to Pavanaz it was like his life leaking away. He knew he’d done the damage himself, but still it was as if those frurking gloves were eating him!

  At which, something snapped in Pav; not his mind but his resolve. Fear sprang up stronger than ambition, and agony overcame avarice. Only one man could get these terrible gloves off his hands without damaging them, and that was their owner, Gunner Gaddy….

  Pav left the hotel, found an all-night store and bought more pills and a gutting knife with an edge keen as a razor, and went right back to Gaddy’s place. In the misty dawn light he tied up his skimmer at the wharf, climbed to the bridge and crossed it. If Gaddy was up he might see him…so what? He was going to wake the bastard anyway. Wake him up, learn the secret of the gloves, slit his throat and sink him deep. The fish would do the rest. But thank God (in whom Pav never had believed) thank God he hadn’t killed him last night!

  He entered the house as before, put on shufflers, went straight to Gaddy’s bedroom. And there was the man himself: yawning, sitting up in his bed with his hands under the covers, peering all about in the dull dawn glow coming through the glass ceiling. Gaddy saw Pavanaz—and gave a huge start when he recognized the gloves he wore. He seemed to see only the gloves, not the ugly knife Pav carried in the one on the right. Then the startled look left Gaddy’s cat face and he glanced knowingly at his clothes piled on the bamboo couch. Following which he returned his gaze to Pavanaz.

  “Something I can do for you, son?” he inquired, softly.

  “You can tell me about these,” Pavanaz answered, holding up his gloved hands. Then he switched on the lamps and flooded the room with sunlight, and moved closer to the bed. “And you can do it quick before I pin you to that bedhead!” Now Gaddy saw the knife, or at least acknowledged it.

  “Murder?” he said.

  “Only if I have to,” Pavanaz lied through his teeth—and moaned through them too, as the pain started up again. Moaned like Gaddy had been moaning during his bad dream last night.

  “You don’t look too well, son,” said Gaddy, in a voice that really couldn’t care less.

  But the pain had subsided a little and Pav spun the knife in the air in a blur of sharp steel, and caught it expertly by the tip of its scalloped blade. “What the gloves did for you,” he said, “they’re doing it now for me. I could take off one of your ears from here, or punch a slot through one of your eyes, before you even registered that I’d moved.”

  “Are the gloves hurting you?” said Gaddy.

  “Don’t you just know it!” Pav grated. “So you can start by telling me why, and how long before it stops.”

  “I take it you know how I got them?” Gaddy sat up.

  Pavanaz nodded, stepped closer to the bed. “I know how,” he said. “Quit stalling. I asked you why they hurt, and when do they stop?”

  Suddenly Gaddy’s expression was sour. “Aliens fixed me up with those gloves,” he said. “An alien medic gave them to me, ’cos they were the best he could do in the short time he had. I’ve thought about it a lot. Maybe those guys don’t feel pain like we do. I mean, why would they save my life, and leave me in agony the rest of my days? So maybe pain isn’t the same to them. Or…perhaps their flesh is different, compatible with that sort of surgery.”

  “Surgery?” Pav shook his head a little, to chase the pain away. “You’re losing me. Are you telling me these things never stop hurting? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, you can stop them hurting,” Gaddy answered. “Sure you can! That’s as easy as taking them off.”

  “That was my next question,” Pav sighed his relief, “just how do I take them off?”

  But Gaddy’s face was suddenly white. Distantly, he said: “I remember when I had the same problem. But in your case…I’m not sure. I can only imagine they’d work the same for you as for me.”
>
  “And how’s that?” Pavanaz demanded.

  And Gaddy shrugged, grimaced, and lifted his arms out from under the covers, to show Pavanaz how.

  Pav’s brain searched for words but nothing came out of his wide-open mouth. He half-sat, half-collapsed onto the bed and looked at Gaddy’s hands, or what he had where hands should be: corkscrews of white flesh with blue veins showing through, ending in blunt points where sculpted bone had closed off the marrow cores! Gaddy’s “hands” had screw threads!

  “J…J…Jesus!” Pavanaz gasped then, letting his knife fall from nerveless (and what else?) fingers.

  “You unscrew them,” said Gaddy. “Left-hand thread….”

  “But—” Pavanaz gulped, gazing wide-eyed, morbidly at the gloves on his hands. “But…your hands were ruined, and mine are good, whole.”

  “You’re sure about that?” said Gaddy, logically. “Maybe the gloves assumed they weren’t. Maybe they needed fixing….”

  “Oh, Jesus!—Jesus!” Pav gabbled. He gave the right-hand glove a tentative twist—and it turned! And eyes bugging, Pavanaz unscrewed it all the way and let it fall. Even before it hit the covers the glove was just a glove again, limp and flexible and empty. But Pavanaz’s hand wasn’t a hand. It was one of the things Gaddy had—the thing he was now sliding into his glove, which filled out and swiftly screwed itself into place.

  If Pavanaz saw any of that it didn’t register; nothing registered but the fact that his good right hand was a screw. And…his left?

  Gaddy said: “Here, let me help you.” And he unscrewed the other glove from Pavanaz’s wrist.

  Pavanaz looked at both of his screws through eyes that threatened to come right out of his head. He gurgled and gasped and said nothing, and in the silence Gaddy got out of bed and dressed himself. And then Pavanaz’s senses returned to him, at least partially. He lunged for the knife and couldn’t pick it up, couldn’t grab at anything to stop himself flying headlong across the bed. And now, in the absence of pain, his brain was working perfectly again.

  “One of them,” he gasped finally, his eyes full of pleading. “You’ll give me—I’ll buy—just one of them…?”

  But Gaddy shook his head. “The gloves are mine, kid. I earned them. And anyway, you couldn’t stand it. The only time I don’t hurt is when I take them off and climb into bed. And then I dream I’m hurting.”

  “But you can stand it. So why not me?”

  “We’re not built the same,” said Gaddy. “And anyway, I’ve got used to it—almost.”

  “But—”

  “I’m taking you in,” Gaddy cut him off. “The police will have to figure out what’s to be done with you. And afterwards…they can do wonderful things these days, Pavanaz. You’ll have hands again. Clumsy, maybe, but hands. Of sorts….”

  Halfway across the bridge it all came crashing down on Pav. His dream blew itself away in his head. You can’t be a champion and win a million with plastic fingers that don’t feel anything. He turned abruptly and faced Gaddy, and without emotion said: “Frurk you.” And he lifted his arms high and brought his screws crashing down on the hardwood handrail.

  Hot blood splashed scarlet where altered flesh split open; and before Gaddy could do anything to stop it, if he wanted to, Pav flopped over the rail and down into the water. He surfaced once and screamed high and thin, went down in crimson foam and didn’t surface again. And Gaddy turned away….

  Drop a bent pin in the water on Shankov’s and you’ll pull out a fish. Put something edible on the hook…and the water boils.

  Big “C”

  Also written in 1988, “Big ‘C’ ” appeared two years later in a TOR Books anthology of stories written “after” the Old Gent of Providence, titled Lovecraft’s Legacy. In this tale our protagonist not only boldly goes but he also makes it back in one piece… albeit in one big and very terrifying piece.

  Now say, do you remember how H. P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space changed everything it touched? Of course you do, and I’ll say no more….

  Two thousand thirteen and the exploration of space—by men, not robot spaceships—was well underway. Men had built Moonbase, landed on Mars, were now looking towards Titan, though that was still some way ahead. But then, from a Darkside observatory, Luna II was discovered half a million miles out: a black rock two hundred yards long and eighty through, tumbling dizzily end over end around the Earth, too small to occlude stars for more than a blip, too dark to have been (previously) anything but the tiniest sunspot on the surface of Sol. But interesting anyway “because it was there,” and also and especially because on those rare occasions when it lined itself up with the full moon, that would be when Earth’s lunatics gave full vent. Lunatics of all persuasions, whether they were in madhouses or White Houses, asylums or the army, refuges or radiation shelters, surgeries or silos.

  Men had known for a long time that the moon controlled the tides—and possibly the fluids in men’s brains?—and it was interesting now to note that Luna II appeared to compound the offence. It seemed reasonable to suppose that we had finally discovered the reason for Man’s homicidal tendencies, his immemorial hostility to Man.

  Two thousand fifteen and a joint mission—American, Russian, British—went to take a look; they circled Luna II at a “safe” distance for twelve hours, took pictures, made recordings, measured radiation levels. When they came back, within a month of their return, one of the two Americans (the most outspoken one) went mad, one of the two Russians (the introverted one) set fire to himself, and the two British members remained phlegmatic, naturally.

  One year later in August 2016, an Anglo-French expedition set out to double-check the findings of the first mission: i.e., to see if there were indeed “peculiar radiations” being emitted by Luna II. It was a four-man team; they were all volunteers and wore lead baffles of various thicknesses in their helmets. And afterwards, the ones with the least lead were discovered to be more prone to mental fluctuations. But…the “radiations,” or whatever, couldn’t be measured by any of Man’s instruments. What was required was a special sort of volunteer, someone actually to land on Luna II and dig around a little, and do some work right there on top of—whatever it was.

  Where to land wasn’t a problem: with a rotation period of one minute, Luna II’s equatorial tips were moving about as fast as a man could run, but at its “poles” the planetoid was turning in a very gentle circle. And that’s where Benjamin “Smiler” Williams set down. He had wanted to do the job and was the obvious choice. He was a Brit riding an American rocket paid for by the French and Russians. (Everybody had wanted to be in on it.) And of course he was a hero. And he was dying of cancer.

  Smiler drilled holes in Luna II, set off small explosions in the holes, collected dust and debris and exhaust gasses from the explosions, slid his baffles aside and exposed his brain to whatever, walked around quite a bit and sat down and thought things, and sometimes just sat. And all in all he was there long enough to see the Earth turn one complete circle on her axis—following which he went home. First to Moonbase, finally to Earth. Went home to die—after they’d checked him out, of course.

  But that was six years ago and he still hadn’t died (though God knows we’d tried the best we could to kill him) and now I was on my way to pay him a visit. On my way through him, traveling into him, journeying to his very heart. The heart and mind—the living, thinking organism, the control centre, as it were—deep within the body of what the world now called Big “C.” July 2024, and Smiler Williams had asked for a visitor. I was it, and as I drove in I went over everything that had led up to this moment. It was as good a way as any to keep from looking at the “landscape” outside the car. This was Florida and it was the middle of the month, but I wasn’t using the air-conditioning and in fact I’d even turned up the heater a little—because it was cool out there. As cool as driving down a country lane in Devon, with the trees arching their green canopy overhead. Except it wasn’t Devon and they weren’t green. And in fact they
weren’t even trees….

  Those were thoughts I should try to avoid, however, just as I avoided looking at anything except the road unwinding under the wheels of my car; and so I went back again to 2016, when Ben Williams came back from space.

  The specialists in London checked Smiler out—his brain, mostly, for they weren’t really interested in his cancer. That was right through him, (with the possible exception of his gray matter), and there was no hope. Try to cut or laser that out of him and there’d be precious little of the man himself left! But after ten days of tests they’d found nothing, and Smiler was getting restless.

  “Peter,” he said to me, “I’m short on time and these monkeys are wasting what little I’ve got left! Can’t you get me out of here? There are places I want to go, friends I want to say goodbye to.” But if I make that sound sad or melodramatic, forget it. Smiler wasn’t like that. He’d really earned his nickname, that good old boy, because right through everything he’d kept on smiling like it was painted on his face. Maybe it was his way to keep from crying. Twenty-seven years old just a month ago, and he’d never make twenty-eight. So we’d all reckoned.

  Myself, I’d never made it through training, but Smiler had and we’d kept in touch. But just because I couldn’t go into space didn’t mean I couldn’t help others to do it, I’d worked at NASA, and on the European Space Program (ESP), even for a while for the Soviets at Baikonur, when détente had been peaking a periodic up-surge back in 2009 and 2010. So I knew my stuff. And I knew the men who were doing it, landing on Mars and what have you, and the heroes like Smiler Williams. So while Smiler was moderately cool toward the others on the space medicine team—the Frogs, Sovs and even the other Americans—to me he was the same as always. We’d been friends and Smiler had never let down a friend in his life.