Shambleau and Others M

by C. L. Moore

  He saw the branches twist out and lengthen towards the sacrifice, quivering with eagerness. Then with a tiger’s leap they darted, and the victim was swept out of the priestess’s guiding hands up into the branches that darted round like tangled snakes in a clot that hid him for an instant from view. Smith heard a high, shuddering wail ripple out from that knot of struggling branches, a dread cry that held such an infinity of purest horror and understanding that he could not but believe that Thag’s victims in the moment of their doom must learn the secret of his horror. After that one frightful cry came silence. In an instant the limbs fell apart from emptiness. The little savage had melted like smoke among their writhing, too quickly to have been devoured, more as if he had been snatched into another dimension in the instant the hungry limbs hid him. Flame-tipped, avid, they were dipping now towards another victim as the priestess paced serenely forward.

  And still Smith’s rebellious feet were carrying him on, nearer and nearer the writhing peril that towered over his head. The music shrilled like pain. Now he was so close that he could see the hungry flower-mouths in terrible detail as they faced round towards him. The limbs quivered and poised like cobras, reached out with a snakish lengthening, down inexorably towards his shuddering helplessness. The priestess was turning her calm white face towards his.

  Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were sketching lines of pure horror whose meaning he still could not understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as he neared. For the last time that urgent wonder burned up in his mind why – why so simple a thing as this fabulous Tree should be infused with an indwelling terror strong enough to send his innermost soul frantic with revulsion. For the last time – because in that trembling instant as he waited for their touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable, brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment before the flower-mouths seized him – he saw. He understood.

  With eyes opened at last by the instant’s ultimate horror, he saw the real Thag. Dimly he knew that until now the thing had been so frightful that his eyes had refused to register its existence, his brain to acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been too terrible to see, though his instinct knew the presence of infinite horror. But now, in the grip of that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant before unbearable terror enfolded him, his eyes opened to full sight, and he saw.

  That Tree was only Thag’s outline, sketched three-dimen-sionally upon the twilight. Its dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thag’s barest contours, yet even they had made his very soul sick with intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, his mind was too numb to do more than register its presence: Thag, hovering monstrously between earth and heaven, billowing and surging up there in the translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree’s bending stem and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that his calling brought helpless into his clutches. One by one he snatched them up, one by one absorbed them into the great, unseeable horror of his being. That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously, sucked into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to see.

  The priestess was pacing forward. Above her the branches arched and leaned. Caught in a timeless paralysis of horror, Smith stared upward into the enormous bulk of Thag while the music hummed intolerably in his shrinking brain – Thag, the monstrous thing from darkness, called up by Illar in those long-forgotten times when Mars was a green planet. Foolishly his brain wandered among the ramifications of what had happened so long ago that time itself had forgotten, refusing to recognize the fate that was upon himself. He knew a tingle of respect for the ages-dead wizard who had dared command a being like this to his services – this vast, blind, hovering thing, ravenous for human flesh, indistinguishable even now save in those terrible outlines that sent panic leaping through him with every motion of the Tree’s fearful symmetry.

  All this flashed through his dazed mind in the one blinding instant of understanding. Then the priestess’s luminous whiteness swam up before his hypnotized stare. Her hands were upon him, gently guiding mechanical footsteps, very gently leading him forward into – into—

  The writhing branches struck downward, straight for his face. And in one flashing leap the moment’s infinite horror galvanized him out of his paralysis. Why, he could not have said. It is not given to many men to know the ultimate essentials of all horror, concentrated into one fundamental unit. To most men it would have had that same paralysing effect up to the very instant of destruction. But in Smith there must have been a bed-rock of subtle violence, an unyielding, inflexible vehemence upon which the structure of his whole life was reared. Few men have it And when that ultimate intensity of terror struck the basic flint of him, reaching down through mind and soul into the deepest depths of its being, it struck a spark of force enough to shock him out of his stupor.

  In the instant of release his hand swept like an unloosed spring, of its own volition, straight for the butt of his power-gun. He was dragging it free as the Tree’s branches snatched him from its priestess’s hands. The fire-coloured hot branches burnt his flesh as they closed round him, the hot branches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree was hot and throbbing with a dreadful travesty of flashy life as it whipped him aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate horror above.

  In the instantaneous upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith fought like a demon to free his gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the first time Thag knew rebellion in his very clutches, and the ecstasy of that music which had dinned in Smith7;s lumino;s ears so strongly that by now it seemed almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches tightened with hot insistency, lifting the rebellious offering into Thag’s monstrous, indescribable bulk.

  But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to manoeuvre his hand into a position from which he could blast that undulant tree trunk into nothingness. He knew intuitively the futility of firing up into Thag’s imponderable mass. Thag was not of the world he knew; the flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the twilight. But at the Tree’s root, where Thag’s essential being merged from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, he should be vulnerable if he were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the tight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought to free his hand.

  The music that had rung so long in his ears was changing as the branches lifted him higher, losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a hum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in intensity as the limbs drew him upward into Thag’s monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force thundering through every atom of his body, he twisted his hand in one last, convulsive effort, and fired.

  He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below. It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunk quiver convulsively from the very roots, and the whole fabulous Tree shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver up the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closing round his body shrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thundering silence.

  Then without a moment’s warning the world exploded. So instantaneously did all this happen that the gun-blast’s roar had not yet echoed into silence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear exploded outward from the very centre of his own being. Before the awful power of it everything.

  reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself falling. …

  A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith by degrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upward into the unwinking eye of Mars’ racing nearer moon. He lay there blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse him. Then he sat up painfully, for every fibre of him ached, and stared round on a scene of the wildest depiction. He lay in the midst of a wide, rough circle which held noth
ing but powdered stone. About it, rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten Illar loomed.

  But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man’s explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling them into dust. And in the very centre of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.

  He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations. And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought such destruction upon the ancient stones. No was there any explosive known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.

  Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the twilit world, and nothing but Thag’s living power could have held it so bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.

  Then when the Tree’s roots parted, Thag’s anchorage in the material world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers into – into—His mind baulked in the effort to picture what must have happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have vanished.

  Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag’s very essence, the intolerable power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve ceased to be, and Thag’s hold upon reality failed, he must have been dropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree had stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land’s dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.

  Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly to his feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assume that the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across the circle of havoc towards the nearest shelter which Mar offered. The dust rose in ghostly, moonlit clouds under his feet.

  SCARLET DREAM

  Northwest Smith bought the shawl in the Lakkmanda Markets of Mars. It was one of his chiefest joys to wander through the stalls and stands of that greatest of market-places whose wares are drawn from all the planets of the solar system, and beyond. So many songs have been sung and so many tales written of that fascinating chaos called Lakkmanda Markets that there is little need to detail it here.

  He shouldered his way through the colourful cosmopolitan throng, the speech of a thousand races beating in his ears, the mingled odours of perfume and sweat and spice and food and the thousand nameless smells of the place assailing his nostrils. Vendors cried their wares in the tongues of a score of worlds.

  As he strolled through the thick of the crowd, savouring the confusion and the odours and the sights from lands beyond counting, his eye was caught by a flash of that peculiar geranium scarlet that seems to lift itself bodily from its background and smite the eye with all but physical violence. It came from a shawl thrown carelessly across a carved chest, typically Martian drylander work by the exquisite detail of that carving, so oddly at variance with the characteristics of the harsh dryland race. He recognized the Venusian origin of the brass tray on the shawl, and knew the heap of carved ivory beasts that the tray held as the work of one of the least-knownraces on Jupiter’s largest moon, but from all his wide experience he could draw no remembrance of any such woven work as that of the shawl. Idly curious, he paused at the booth and asked of its attendant.

  ‘How much for the scarf?’

  The man – he was a canal Martian – glanced over his shoulder and said carelessly: ‘Oh, that. You can have it for half a cris – gives me a headache to look at the thing.’

  Smith grinned and said: ‘I’ll give you five dollars.’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Six and a half, and that’s my last offer.’

  ‘Oh, take the thing.’ The Martian smiled and lifted the tray of ivory from the chest.

  Smith drew out the shawl. It clung to his hands like a live thing, softer and lighter than Martian ‘lamb’s-wool’. He felt sure it was woven from the hair of some beast rather than from vegetable fibre, for the electric clinging of it sparkled with life. And the crazy pattern dazzled him with its utter Strangeness. Unlike any pattern he had seen in all the years of his wanderings, the wild, leaping scarlet threaded its nameless design in one continuous, tangled line through the twilight blue of the background. That dim blue was clouded exquisitely with violet and green – sleepy evening colours against which the staring scarlet flamed like something more sinister and alive than colour. He felt that he could almost put his hand between the colour and the cloth, so vividly did it start up from its background.

  ‘Where in the universe did this come from?’ he demanded of the attendant.

  The man shrugged.

  ‘Who knows? It came in with a bale of scrap cloth from New York. I was a little curious about it myself, and called the market-master there to trace it. He says it was sold for scrap by a down-and-out Venusian who claimed he’d found it in a derelict ship floating around one of the asteroids. He didn’t know what nationality the ship had been – a very early model, he said, probably one of the first space-ships, made before the identification symbols were adopted. ‘I’ve wondered why he sold the thing for scrap. He could have got double the price, anyhow, if he’d made any effort.’

  ‘Funny.’ Smith stared down at the dizzy pattern writhing through the cloth in his hands. ‘Well, it’s warm and light enough. If it doesn’t drive me crazy trying to follow the pattern, I’ll sleep warm at night.’

  He crumpled it in one hand, the whole six-foot square of it folding easily into his palm, and stuffed the silky bundle into his pocket – and thereupon forgot it until after his return to his quarters that evening.

  He had taken one of the cubicle steel rooms in the great steel lodging-houses the Martian government offers for a very nominal rent to transients. The original purpose was to house those motley hordes of spacemen that swarm every port city of the civilized planets, offering them accommodations cheap and satisfactory enough so that they will not seek the black byways of the town and there fall in with the denizens of the Martian underworld whose lawlessness is a byword among space sailors.

  The great steel building that housed Smith and countless others was not entirely free from the influences of Martian byways, and if the police had actually searched the place with any degree of thoroughness a large percentage of its dwellers might have been transferred to the Emperor’s prisons – Smith almost certainly among them, for his activities were rarely within the law and though he could not recall at the moment any particular flagrant sins committed in Lakkdarol, a charge could certainly have been found against him by the most half-hearted searcher. However, the likelihood of a police raid was very remote, and Smith, as he went in under the steel portals of the great door, rubbed shoulders with smugglers and pirates and fugitives and sinners of all the sins that keep the space-ways thronged.

  In his little cubicle he switched on the light and saw a dozen replicas of himself, reflected dimly in the steel walls, spring into being with the sudden glow. In that curious company he moved forward to a chair and pulled out the crumpled shawl. Shaking it in the mirror-walled room produced a sudden wild writhing of scarlet patterns over walls and floor and ceiling, and for an instant the room whirled in an inexplicable kaleidor-scope and he had the impression that the four-dimensional walls had opened suddenly to undreamed-of vastness where living scarlet in wild, unruly patterns shivered through the void
.

  Then in a moment the walls closed in again and the dim reflections quieted and became only the images of a tall, brown man with pale eyes, holding a curious shawl in his hands. There was a strange, sensuous pleasure in the clinging of the silky wool to his fingers, the lightness of it, the warmth. He spread it out on the table and traced the screaming scarlet pattern with his finger, trying to follow that one writhing line through the intricacies of its path, and the more he stared the more irritatingly clear it became to him that there must be a purpose in that whirl of colour, that if he stared long enough, surely he must trace it out. …

  When he slept that night he spread the bright shawl across his bed, and the brilliance of it coloured his dreams fantastically. …

  That threshing scarlet was a labyrinthine path down which he stumbled blindly, and at every turn he looked back and saw himself in myriad replicas, always wandering lost and alone through the pattern of the path. Sometimes it shook itself under his feet, and whenever he thought he saw the end it would writhe into fresh intricacies ….

  The sky was a great shawl threaded with scarlet lightning that shivered and squirmed as he watched, then wound itself into the familiar, dizzy pattern that became one mighty Word in a nameless writing, whose meaning he shuddered on the verge of understanding, and woke in icy terror just before the significance of it broke upon his brain. …

  He slept again, and saw the shawl hanging in a blue dusk the colour of its background, started and stared until the square of it melted imperceptibly into the dmness and the scarlet was a pattern incised lividly upon a gate … a gate of strange outline in a high wall, half seen through that curious, cloudy twilight blurred with exquisite patches of green and violet, so that it seemed no mortal twilight, but some strange and lovely evening in a land where the air was suffused with coloured mists, and no winds blew. He felt himself moving forward, without effort, and the gate opened before him. …