The Great White Space

by Basil Copper

  'You do not understand, Plowright,' he said again. 'There are fantastic things to be learned here, if only one has the courage. I must tell you. I beg you not to resist further.'

  I did not understand him and turned round, keeping my grip on his arm.

  Three of the slug-things were quite close now and moved hesitantly towards me, as though they sensed the dangers of the last grenade in my hand. When I looked back at Scarsdale he once again had his head averted.

  'Are you injured. Professor?' I said.

  He shook his head. I removed my eyes from him once more and then turned again to the menacing line of things that were spread out in front of us. They waved their tendrils slowly, their forms half-transparent in the brilliant light. I glanced at the group nearest to me and then my knees buckled and there came an uncontrollable trembling in my limbs. I glanced wildly over my shoulder, saw my retreat was clear into the blessed darkness.

  Scarsdale smiled at me encouragingly and then it happened. I glanced stupefied from him to the slug-things and then I shrieked and shrieked as though I would never stop. I tasted the bitter taste of blood and bile in my mouth and my brain was a seething cauldron of white-hot terror. I hurled the Professor from me and, with the mewing cries of the slug- things vibrating in my ears and with that unutterable stench in my nostrils I fled from the Great White Space and plunged headlong into the tunnels for my life.

  Twenty

  1

  I fled as though from nightmare. I ran until the breath was throbbing in my throat and the brilliance of the Great White Space had faded to the dim luminosity of the further corridors. Once or twice I must have cannoned into the walls because I later found my clothing torn and blood on my hands and fingernails. At some point I had the good sense to switch on my helmet lamp and its bright yellow beam sliced and bobbed along the corridor like a beckoning finger.

  Mercifully, I had dropped the remaining hand grenade and my pistol or I might have done myself an injury in my horrified and agitated condition. My head was a red-hot furnace, perspiration dripped down my face and I reeled and lurched like a man in fever. It was not until some time had passed that I thought to remove my goggles and then I hurled them behind me. I found myself back at the trolley but so great was my fear and the shrieking state of my nerves that I dare not stop there.

  My mind could not encompass the immensity of the journey which faced me so I thought only of getting through the next few hours; of surviving until then, when I would try to make plans. At least, I reasoned this out later; for my knowledge of the events while they were taking place is muddled and blurred. There was food on the trolley; I knew that. There were weapons and Very flares too; those meant survival, life and the sanity of the outside world. At the moment I cared not whether I lived or died but if I died at least let it be with the sweet skies of the outer earth above me and the kiss of the sun on my face.

  I longed for the fresh breezes of the upper earth and was terrified of dying like a rat in a hole down here, miles beneath the surface. So somehow, though normally I would have thought it beyond my strength at that time, I manhandled the trolley, defective and difficult to wheel as it was, and set off in the southward direction. Every so often I would stop and listen with straining ears for the faintest scratch of a footfall, the rasp of leathery wings or the sinister whispering that would have been the sign that I was pursued. My sanity hung by a thread at those moments and I would not, for all the money in the world, endure the tortures I endured during those next few days.

  Indeed my cheeks were sunken like an old man and my hair a shade or two whiter when I eventually ended my ordeal. But there was nothing moving in all the long corridors behind me; the warm wind blew from the north and the faint pulse, hourly growing feebler, again pumped out its sinister message. I put the sound at my back and it gradually died away though it persisted for many a long mile, just as it had on the inward journey.

  Mercifully, I had a small compass on me with which I could make sure I was homing southwards, for in my mental state and in the delirium which followed, I would surely have gone blindly back in the northward direction without it. My remaining portable camera too, supported on its strap round my neck, was banging against the walls as I pushed, until at last I took it off and laid it down on the trolley.

  The few shots in the camera itself and a dozen or so prints I had in an envelope and which had been brought with us from the tractor-base were the only things I was to bring out from the Great Northern Expedition intact, and the manner of losing the others I will speak of later. That first day I remained more or less coherent, though my physical condition gradually deteriorated. I was drenched in perspiration and the wind blowing on my back, warm as it was, must have set up a feverish condition as my skin was icy cold.

  At some time — I had long ago forgotten whether the how- on my wrist watch indicated day or night - I slumped down and ate a meal from the tinned provisions on the trolley. I was so far coherent at that stage, that I was able to sort out some of the stores. By jettisoning the heavier containers and a few of the more bulky elephant guns and weapons of that sort, I managed to lighten the load considerably. My biggest dread, something which gnawed constantly at the edges of my mind, was that the creatures would cut round behind me, through interconnecting caves, just as they must have done with poor Holden and Van Damm. I did not dare dwell on this overlong; but mercifully, I found a bottle of whisky on the trolley and swigged a good quarter of it, so that my mind must have been deadened and dulled about this time.

  There was no sign of pursuit, thank God, and as the hours passed I began to feel a little more security in my mind; of course, this may well have been due to the blunting of my sensibilities with the liquor but whatever the cause, I thanked the Almighty for it. In this way I suppose I must have covered a considerable distance before I finally slumped down and sleep mercifully took me.

  2

  I went on running. No-one came after me. Despite intense questioning from many eminent authorities in the field, I was never able to give any consequential explanation of my movements or explain coherently how many days it took me to regain civilisation again. Neither could I pinpoint the time when I finally broke down and fever claimed me. The dates between my re-appearance in the valley before the Black Mountains and my arrival at what cynics may describe as a 'civilised community' was something like six months.

  I am told also that I had been in fever for almost two months and if it had not been for the devoted efforts of a French doctor and a German nursing sister I should assuredly have died. Perhaps, under the stress of these dreary after days, it might have been better so. But I am drawing ahead of my narrative. I made my way onwards, still pushing the trolley, guiding myself by compass. I must have taken my meals automatically from the provisions in the cases, for I have no clear recollection after all this time of how I ate or what I ate.

  I could have had no formal routine and with my unkempt beard, wild, staring eyes, and haggard features I must have made an appalling sight for those who found me. But somehow, I made out along those hellish corridors until I at last found myself among features with which I had already become familiar. Truly, there is a providence which looks after fools and eventually, tired, sick and half-hysterical with the fading remembrance of the terrifying events through which I had passed, I at length found myself once more within the desolate City of Croth.

  The river, dank and sombre as the Styx, with its weird bridge was passed safely and shortly after this, among the suburbs, I must have abandoned the trolley which had served me so well. It must be there now, will surely remain there for all eternity, a mute witness to man's incredible folly. For looking back over the vast distance in time since I took part in the fated Great Northern Expedition, I have surmised that it could only have been incredible folly which led us there.

  Folly on the part of those who followed so blindly; and incredible folly on the part of the leaders, Van Damm and Scarsdale, who knew quite clearly what drea
d areas at the rim of human experience into which they were venturing. And yet I can only assume that great wisdom and great scientific knowledge go hand in hand with a mental blindness of a particularly virulent sort. Had any of us the merest inkling of the realities which were waiting at the end of those tunnels, nothing would have brought any of us within a hundred miles of the Black Mountains.

  I must have slept from time to time, though I have no knowledge of it; fear was ever at my shoulder, speeding me onwards through the dim luminescence and the weird perspectives of Croth. Here I found further supplies and stores and must have taken what I wanted for sustenance. Of the City itself, apart from the great central square, I recall nothing. Croth and its wonders; its fabulous library and all the teeming treasures of its thousands of fabled years, lies still beneath the pallid glow of those dim and vaporous vaults.

  I fled ever onwards. The pulse died away and the dry wind was now at my back, pushing me homewards. I must have stopped, eaten, slept and done a thousand and one other things yet I have still no clear idea how I passed my time. How many days this occupied I know not but from simple calculations I have since conjectured that the journey must have been a fraction of that spent on the inward trip. Fear gave me the strength and sustained me through the long ordeal which brought me close to madness but nothing stirred in the drear miles; the only sounds once the pulse had died away were the pounding of the blood in my head and the dry echo of my own feet rushing headlong through those corridors of eternity.

  I eventually came into the more blessed obscurity of the further caverns, picking up stores as I gained the various caches and depots, tragic reminders now of my colleagues who were no more; discarding other items as being too bulky or past their use. As the days passed and I was not pursued and saw no sign of any pursuer, so my resolve strengthened and with it my physical stamina. I gained the Embalming Gallery, doubly abhorrent to me with the knowledge of what lay within those row upon row of silent jars; my compass I retained and with it mercifully pointed myself towards the south and this, together with a small store of photographs and some food and provisions, was all I carried when I at last reached the underground lake.

  Here I fell in an exhausted stupor and must have slept for something like two days and nights; I had no means of recording dates but somehow I retained the presence of mind to re-wind my watch each night and morning and in the intervals of consciousness between my bouts of broken sleep I must have re-wound it automatically because I cannot once remember it having ever stopped. Indeed it contributed greatly to my sanity as I more than once woke to its soothing tick alongside my ear as I stretched on hard rock or the yielding sand of the shore.

  I bitterly regretted now that I had not been more selective in what I had chosen to take away. If anything had happened to the tractors or I could not start them, I should have to rely on the batteries in my helmet lamp to see myself home. And they would surely be exhausted many days before I could tramp the long miles and then should I indeed descend into shrieking insanity. I greatly regretted too not being able to bring back Scarsdale's thumbed notes or his typewritten copy of the Ethics of Ygor, which contained the key to the whole enigma. But they had remained with the Professor on that accursed clearance near the Great White Space and were surely lost for ever more.

  It must have been a week or longer after I began my headlong flight when I at last stepped into the rubber boat with my small store of necessities and paddled myself out into the mist and the strange radiant phosphorescence of that eerie Styx.

  It was here, or at some stage during the crossing that I lost or mislaid some of my photographic material; certainly, it appeared that water slopping into the bottom of the boat ruined a number of my precious photographic plates, notably those depicting the slug-creatures we had encountered in our first battle involving myself, Scarsdale and Prescott. I have often wondered since, in the lonely night watches, when the wind keens about the house, whether this was accident or design. Certainly, the possibility of some malignant, extraterrestrial force exerted by these creatures and which might have power at a distance, had not escaped my mind.

  Once on the opposite side of the lake I rested again, as before picking up fresh stores and discarding other material; my brain was still numb and frozen and I took care to drink just enough whisky to keep my mind deadened without affecting my faculties. Even so it was a journey carried out by an automaton, functioning through sheer good physical health, motivated only by fear and the desire to survive.

  I had hardly dared to hope that the tractors would be undisturbed but there they were, beneath their sheets, each a poignant reminder of the companions I had lost. Automatically, my brain functioning mechanically, I threw switches and animated dynamos until the caverns once again echoed to the throbbing pulse of the motors. Secure beneath my metallic shell I set back along the tunnels, fortified by the throbbing hum of the machinery and the limpid brilliance of the searchlights.

  I went at top speed, without stopping, and eating at the controls; it was a remarkable performance and the concentration required was so fantastic that I doubt if I could ever do it again. When I saw the thin sliver of daylight at the entrance to the Mountains, leading to the blessed outer air, my hands faltered on the controls and I wept.

  3

  So I live now, a shadow of my former self, companioned only by my old friend Robson, to whom I have related this narrative not once but a hundred times. The night wind keens about the earth and taps at the blind in these latitudes and I live again my experiences on the Great Northern Expedition and I am afraid. I owe my life to certain tribesmen who found my tractor wandering in the desert and who guided me and set me in the right direction for the Plain of Darkness and the welcoming huddle of the town of Nylstrom.

  Here I paused only a day and then, guided by emissaries of the Headman, and leaving our spare tractor as payment for his services, I set out once again and at last reached Zak. There the story blurs and dies altogether. I fell very ill there. I have already told something of this; my illness and fever lasted for months and when I at last came to myself I was in the sickbay of a P. and O. liner ploughing its way England bound through the Bay of Biscay.

  Of all the equipment with which I had set out only my camera, a few plates and a few personal items remained. But I was alive; that was all that mattered — then.

  I live much out of the world; my health is irretrievably wrecked, my nights sleepless, my form spectral. I fear dreaming. Sometimes on moonlight nights I stand at my window and look out at the silver disc riding serenely above the treetops and think it shines down upon the Black Mountains so far away and I cannot repress a shudder at the thought of the blasphemous abominations that lurk beneath.

  Latterly the lights in the sky have been seen again; I fear the coming cannot be long delayed now and my heart is sick for the welfare of mankind. Yet I am not believed, will never be believed, though Robson and a few others scientifically- minded have an inkling of the end. For there must come an end.

  Why was I allowed to survive? Who knows? The ways of beings from an alien world are strange to us and beyond mortal comprehension. I have thought about it year on interminably weary year. And I cannot fathom a thousandth part of the complexities involved. But that there are horrors beyond human bearing is an irrefutable fact. Did I not myself see with my own eyes?

  Those ponderous, monadelphous forms undulating hideously in the baleful light from the Great White Space. And my former colleagues, even Zalor, smiling devilish smiles of welcome. So that I broke and fled screaming from those blasphemous abodes of hell. Who would not have followed my example?

  For there, ingested in some vile and unfathomable manner were my friends Holden, Prescott and Van Damm, ALIVE AND PART OF THE SLUG-CREATURES THEMSELVES! Small wonder my sanity tottered. And as if in answer to Zalor's greeting the great Clark Ashton Scarsdale had bowed and turned his head. And from his features had fallen A WAXEN MASK REVEALING UNKNOWABLE BLASPHEMIES BENEATH!

 
As God is my witness I swear this is the truth. I had not realised their essence had been removed for a purpose. But what made the doctors fear for my sanity was the supposition at the back of my mind which almost overturned my reason. For the question has been with me since then and is even more persistent of late. The waxen mask was so plausible in its perfection, so brilliant in its personification of Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale, that it brings other possibilities to mind.

  Possibilities that haunt me in the dark hours and nibble at the edges of my reason. At what stage did Scarsdale become transformed? Or was he, long before the Great Northern Expedition began, already ONE OF THEM?