Last Conflict
Page 12
So he ate his none-too-perfect evening meal by himself with Verona lounging nearby and completely disregarding him.... The evening was one of continued silence and, on Bruce’s part, suppressed emotions. He was thankful when the time approached for retiring— Then, to his surprise, there came a sudden and violent commotion from the terrace outside. There were wild shouts in French, the crack of a gun, then swiftly running feet.
In a matter of seconds Bruce had hurtled to the still open French windows. To his amazement he saw one of the gendarmes firing savagely at something across the grounds in the twilight. The other gendarme lay sprawled on the terrace, his throat mangled and bleeding from some ferocious attacker.
“What the devil...?” Bruce whispered, then saw that Verona had crept to his side and was gazing with him. He ignored her and strode to the gendarme with the gun.
“M’sieu!” The gendarme had only just caught sight of Bruce and Verona. “A monster attacked—killed Pierre. See—here are the signs.”
Bruce followed the excited man quickly and presently found himself looking at a churned-up mass of soil amidst a multitude of crushed flowers and bushes. Though the light was fast dying, the evidence of enormous feet was there. Three-toed feet, and in proportion the owner of them must have been close on eight or nine feet high.
“Was it—a man?” Bruce asked haltingly.
“No, no, m’sieu!” The gendarme gesticulated. “Somethink I nevaire see before! Huge! I cannot describe it— it was grey.”
Bruce frowned worriedly. The immediate thought leapt into his mind that this monstrous unknown thing must have been trying to get at Verona and attack her. That automatically swung him around towards her to demand an explanation—but she had gone completely from the terrace
“Damn!” he yelled in fury. “My wife’s gone whilst we’ve looking here— Where is she? Verona! Verona!”
He blundered back to the terrace and looked desperately about him. Then he turned back to the gendarme and snatched his gun. At the same moment there were sounds on the terrace, and Bruce immediately swung round, his weapon levelled. His feelings were definitely mixed. Coming up in the twilight was the burly form of Captain Anderson.
“Well?” Bruce spat at him. “What the hell do you want?”
“A word with you—a word that may settle your ridiculous suspicions about Verona—”
“I’ve no time for ’em, or for you. As for Verry, she’s just run off somewhere, and if I don’t find her quickly she’ll be killed! Out of my way—”
“Killed?” Anderson held Bruce’s arm tightly. “What are you talking about?”
Bruce explained briefly, then turned to go on again.
“Hold it a minute!” Anderson commanded, his voice dead level. “It’s about this very monster that I came to talk to you.”
Bruce hesitated, surprised. “The monster? But I thought you’d come to get your own back for my laying you out in that café—”
“Lord, no! You don’t think I’d bother to fly from England on a matter as trifling as that, do you? Look, Bruce, there’s something you’ve got to know about Verry—”
“I think I know it already. She’s in love with you—Now get out of my way.”
Anderson only tightened his grip. “Hear me out, you impetuous idiot! You take all mention of this monster far too lightly. It isn’t of this country! Understand?”
“I’d gathered that, therefore it must have come from South America. How, I don’t know—but it’s obviously after Verry and I’ve got to find her—”
With that Bruce broke free of Anderson’s grip and began running desperately in the dying light, searching the ground, finding traces of Verona’s high heel prints, and then going on again. Anderson caught up with him in a matter of moments and helped him, but this time he made no attempt to restrain him.
“It looks,” Bruce said finally, breathing hard and still holding the gendarme’s gun, “as though the monster caught up with her here because this is where her footprints vanish— But the monster’s go on.”
He followed the unmistakable prints, visible in the sandy soil of the open land beyond the grounds of the villa, and finally paused as he came to a rising stretch of ground that was not very far from the seashore. Here, in common with most of this coast, there were numberless craters and underground entrances, probably casting back to pirate days. The light had almost gone, but what there was of the western afterglow cast upon the giant prints leading straight into one of the many surface openings.
“Thinking what I’m thinking?” Bruce demanded, as Anderson stopped beside him.
“Uh-huh—that Verry’s been carried into that cave opening by the monster.”
Bruce thought swiftly, then: “It’s only ten minutes to the villa and back. Hop over and get my torch from the bureau. We can’t investigate properly without it.”
“Okay.” Anderson gave a bitter smile. “Even now you don’t trust me alone with Verry, do you? Even now you think I might find her and—”
“Oh, get moving, for God’s sake!”
Anderson shrugged and then broke into a swift, athletic run. Bruce waited in desperate impatience, calling Verona by name meanwhile, but he got no answer from the cave’s depths....
The night had completely dropped by the time Anderson came running into view again, the torch beam blazing. Instantly Bruce grabbed it from him and plunged into the cave opening, following thereafter a narrow tunnel in the dust of which were the plain imprints of a monstrous pair of feet and also, strangely enough, those of a man and woman. Bruce stared at the prints and then caught Anderson’s taut smile.
“You know something about this?” Bruce demanded.
“Certainly I do. I helped Verry to bring the monster in here.”
“You did what?” Bruce’s brain was going round in circles. “You mean that monster is threatening her because you planned it?”
“Of course not! I—”
Bruce didn’t wait for any more. He lashed out with his fist and the blow was powerful enough to knock Anderson to his knees. Bruce gave him one glance, then again shouting the girl’s name he raced on down the tunnel, following prints—and all of a sudden he came upon a sight which his blood freeze.
At this point the tunnel widened into a small-sized cave and in the depths of this cave was an object similar to an octopus as far as its bladder-like body was concerned. It had an incredible number of tentacles, yet stood upon two massive three-toed feet. This was bad enough, but in the midst of tentacles there lay sprawled the body of Verona. At first she appeared to be unconscious, but after a second or two the light of Bruce’s touch aroused her. Instantly she screamed, even though she could not see who was behind the glare.
“Don’t shoot—!” Her cry came a split second after Bruce had fired deliberately at the loathsome monstrosity. “Don’t! Don’t!”
Bruce took no notice. He fired again, straight to the main sac of the monster. Evidently .the bullet went home, for the ‘creature’ quivered, dropping Verona, and then began to sag and deflate like a balloon with the air escaping. Just in time she dragged herself clear of the collapsing body and staggered over to where Bruce was standing. He caught her tightly.
“Evidently just in time,” he muttered.
“You—you shouldn’t have killed him,” Verona whispered. “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t!”
Bruce found her becoming a dead weight in his grasp and quite naturally assumed she had fainted from reaction. He laid her on the floor, deflecting the torch beam so the glare did not shine directly upon her.
“Shouldn’t have killed him?” he repeated, astonished. “But he was all set to devour you—!”
“He wasn’t—he wasn’t. That’s where you’re so wrong. He was just about to feed me. Now—now he can never do it....”
Verona’s words trailed off and she became silent. Bruce stared at her, her head pillowed on his arm, then he glanced up as he heard the slow footsteps of Captain Anderson entering the cave.
“Parasite?” Bruce mouthed the word. “How—how do you mean?”
“I mean that Verona’s race have no true life of their own. They are compelled at intervals to absorb a life-fluid from a parent creature, of which there is one to each of them. No one parent can possibly feed another parasite. When you killed this one, you killed Verona too.”
Bruce was deadly silent. Anderson’s voice seemed to echo.
“I knew about it, but would have married Verona had she agreed. Just as we need oxygen sometimes to save us in crisis, so Verona’s people have to absorb life-fluid from their parent monster to keep them alive. One doesn’t notice that in the ordinary way since it’s a thing they keep themselves. That’s why they remained hidden from the rest of the world—until your expedition discovered them. Verona had enough fluid in her to stay reasonably well until England was reached, and she was hoping to try and use synthetic fluid to take the place of her ‘parent’. I’ve been in contact with scientists who are secretly working on that—but so far they’ve failed. She got rid of you in Scotland and enlisted my help to fly to South America and get her monster-parent. It was not difficult. I helped her get it back here. The other times Verry and I met were pure coincidence and not planned. She suggested coming back to the villa so she could be near the monster.”
“So that was why she wanted to walk out alone?”
“Yes. But your damned jealous disposition wouldn’t let her!”
“Why couldn’t she have told me?”
“Because she was afraid of losing you. She felt you would so nauseated at the facts that you’d throw her overboard, and she loved you very dearly.”
“Loved? Loved? Why do you say that? Why the past tense?” Bruce demanded; then without waiting for the answer, “You’re lying, Jack! You rang up while I was in Scotland. If you went to South America, you couldn’t have done that!”
“Hudson was well paid to play his part,” Anderson replied quietly, taking Verona’s wrist.
Bruce was silent. He stared at the ashy-faced girl, then at the monster that he had slain. He could not be blamed for having assumed the creature was deadly.
“A little less jealousy, Bruce, and a little more understanding would have made your union with Verona a wonderful thing,” Anderson said slowly. “As it is, she will walk no more. No other ‘parent’ can provide life-fluid. There is no interchange. The monster knew it was time for Verona to have the fluid, hence it came to her, since didn’t come to it.”
“You—you mean it knew where to look for her?”
“Certainly—with all the instinct of the homing pigeon. If she had had the fluid last night, she’d be alive and well now.”
“I stopped her,” Bruce whispered. “I stopped her! I was obsessed with the belief that she was having an affair.”
“Jealousy,” Anderson said slowly, “has brought empires in the dust. You need be jealous no more, Bruce. Verona is dead.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
British writer John Russell Fearn was born near Manchester, England, in 1908. As a child he devoured the science fiction of Wells and Verne, and was a voracious reader of the Boys’ Story Papers. He was also fascinated by the cinema, and first broke into print in 1931 with a series of articles in Film Weekly.
He then quickly sold his first novel, The Intelligence Gigantic, to the American magazine, Amazing Stories. Over the next fifteen years, writing under several pseudonyms, Fearn became one of the most prolific contributors to all of the leading US science fiction pulps, including such legendary publications as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Weird Tales.
During the late 1940s he diversified into writing novels for the UK market, and also created his famous superwoman character, The Golden Amazon, for the prestigious Canadian magazine, the Toronto Star Weekly. In the early 1950s in the UK, his fifty-two novels as “Vargo Statten” were bestsellers, most notably his novelization of the film, Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Apart from science fiction, he had equal success with westerns, romances, and detective fiction, writing an amazing total of 180 novels—most of them in a period of just ten years—before his early death in 1960. His work has been translated into nine languages, and continues to be reprinted and read worldwide.