Northwest Smith

by C. L. Moore

  Smith heard Yarol catch his breath in a gasp behind him. He heard no other sound, though the whiteness floated swiftly forward through the rocky floor. He was sure of that now—a part of it extended farther down than his feet, and they were planted upon solid rock. And though his skin crawled with unreasoning terror, and the hair on his neck prickled with the weird, impossible approach of the impossible thing, he kept his head enough to see that it was apparently solid, yet somehow milkily translucent; that it had form and depth, though no shadows of that darkness lay upon it; that from where no face should have been a blind, eyeless visage fronted him impassively. It was very close now, and though the extremities of it trailed below the floor line, its height lifted far above his head.

  And a nameless, blind force beat out from it and assailed him, a force that somehow seemed to be driving him into unnamable things—an urge to madness, beating at his brain with the reasonless buffeting of insanity, but a wilder, more incomprehensible insanity than the sane mind could understand.

  Something frantic within him clamored for instant, headlong flight—he heard Yarol’s breathing panicky behind him and knew that he too wavered on the verge of bolting—but something insistent at the roots of his brain held him firm before the whiteness bearing down in its aura of madness—something that denied the peril, that hinted at solution…

  Scarcely realizing that he had moved, he found the heatgun in his hand, and on a sudden impulse jerked his arm up and sent a long, blue-hot streamer of flame straight at the advancing apparition. For the briefest of instants the blue dazzle flashed a light-blade through the dark. It struck the floating whiteness full—vanished—Smith heard a faint crackle of sparks on the invisible floor beyond and knew that it had passed through the creature without meeting resistance. And in that flashing second while the blue gaze split the thickness of the dark he saw it shine luridly upon a splinter of rock in its path, but not upon the white figure. No blaze of blueness affected the deathly pallor of it—he had a sudden conviction that though a galaxy of colored lights were played upon it no faintest hint of color could ever tinge it with any of man’s hues. Fighting the waves of madness that buffeted at his brain, he realized painfully that it must be beyond the reach of men—and therefore—

  He laughed unsteadily and holstered his gun.

  “Come on,” he yelled to Yarol, reaching out blindly to grasp his comrade’s arm, and—suppressing a tingle of terror—plunged straight through that towering horror.

  There was an instant of blaze and blinding whiteness, a moment of turmoil while dizziness swirled round him and the floor rocked under his feet and a maelstrom of mad impulses battered through his brain; then everything was black again and he was plunging recklessly ahead through the dark, dragging a limply acquiescent Yarol behind him.

  After a while of stumbling progress, punctuated with falls, while the white horror dropped away behind them, not following, though the muffling dark still sealed their eyes—the almost forgotten light in Smith’s hand suddenly blazed forth again. In its light he faced Yarol, blinking at the abrupt illumination. The Venusian’s face was a mask of question, his black eyes bright with inquiry.

  “What happened? What was it? How did you—how could we—”

  “It can’t have been real,” said Smith with a shaky grin. “I mean, not material in the sense that we know. Looked awful enough, but—well, there were too many things about it that didn’t hitch up. Notice how it seemed to trail through the solid floor? And neither light nor dark affected it—it had no shadows, even in that blackness, and the flash of my gun didn’t even give it a blue tinge. Then I remembered what that little fellow had told us about his three gods: that, though they had real existence, it was on such a widely different plane from ours that they couldn’t touch us except by providing themselves with a material body. I think this thing was like that also: visible, but too other-dimensional to reach us except through sight. And when I saw that the floor didn’t offer any resistance to it I thought that maybe, conversely, it wouldn’t affect us either. And it didn’t. We’re through.”

  Yarol drew a deep breath.

  “The master-mind,” he gibed affectionately. “Wonder if anyone else ever figured that out, or are we the first to get through?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t get the idea it was just a scarecrow, though. I think we moved none too soon. A minute or two longer and—and—I felt as if someone were stirring my brains with a stick. Nothing seemed—right. I think I know now what was wrong with those other two—they waited too long before they ran. Good thing we moved when we did.”

  “But what about that darkness?”

  “I suppose we’ll never really know. Must have had some relation to the other—the white thing, possibly some force or element out of that other dimension; because just as dark couldn’t touch the whiteness of that thing, so light had no effect on the dark. I got the impression, somehow, that the dark space is a fixed area there, as if a section out of the other world has been set down in the cave, for the white thing to roam about in—a barrier of blackness across the way. And I don’t suppose that it can move outside the darkness. But I may be wrong—let’s go!”

  “Right behind you!” said Yarol. “Get along.”

  The cave extended for another fifteen-minute walk, cold and silent and viciously rough underfoot, but no further mishap broke the journey. Tomlinson-lights gleaming, they traversed it, and the glow of cold day at the far end looked like the gleam of paradise after that journey through the heart of the dead rock.

  They looked out upon the ruins of that city where once the gods had dwelt—ragged rock, great splintered teeth of stone upflung, the bare black mountainside folded and tortured into wild shapes of desolation. Here and there, buried in the debris of ages, lay huge six-foot blocks of hewn stone, the only reminder that here had stood Mars’ holiest city, once, very long ago.

  After five minutes of search Smith’s eyes finally located the outline of what might, millions of years ago, have been a street. It led straight away from the slope at the cave-mouth, and the blocks of hewn stone, the crevices and folded ruins of earthquake choked it, but the course it once had run was not entirely obliterated even yet. Palaces and temples must have lined it once. There was no trace of them now save in the blocks of marble lying shattered among the broken stones. Time had erased the city from the face of Mars almost as completely as from the memories of man. Yet the trace of this one street was all they needed now to guide them.

  The going was rough. Once down among the ruins it was difficult to keep in the track, and for almost an hour they clambered over broken rock and jagged spikes of stone, leaping the crevices, skirting great mounds of ruin. Both were scratched and breathless by the time they came to the first landmark they recognized—a black, leaning needle of stone, half buried in fragments of broken marble. Just beyond it lay two blocks of stone, one upon the other, perhaps the only two in the whole vast ruin which still stood as the hands of man had laid them hundreds of centuries ago.

  Smith paused beside them and looked at Yarol, breathing a little heavily from exertion.

  “Here it is,” he said. “The old boy was telling the truth after all.”

  “So far,” amended Yarol dubiously, drawing his heat-gun. “Well, we’ll see.”

  The blue pencil of flame hissed from the gun’s muzzle to splatter along the crack between the stones. Very slowly Yarol traced that line, and in spite of himself excitement quickened within him. Two-thirds of the way along the line the flame suddenly ceased to spatter and bit deep. A blackening hole appeared in the stone. It widened swiftly, and smoke rose, and there came a sound of protesting rock wrenched from its bed of eons as the upper stone slowly ground half around on the lower, tottered a moment and then fell.

  The lower stone was hollow. The two bent over curiously, peering down. A tiny breath of unutterable antiquity rose in their faces out of that darkness, a little breeze from a million years ago. Smith flashed his light-tube downward an
d saw level stone a dozen feet below. The breeze was stronger now, and dust danced up the shaft from the mysterious depths—dust that had lain there undisturbed for unthinkably long ages.

  “We’ll give it a while to air out,” said Smith, switching off his light. “Must be plenty of ventilation, to judge from that breeze, and the dust will probably blow away before long. We can be rigging up some sort of ladder while we wait.”

  By the time a knotted rope had been prepared and anchored about a near-by needle of rock the little wind was blowing cleanly up the shaft, still laden with that indefinable odor of ages, but breathable. Smith swung over first, lowering himself cautiously until his feet touched the stone. Yarol, when he came down, found him swinging the Tomlinson-beam about a scene of utter lifelessness. A passageway stretched before them, smoothly polished as to walls and ceiling, with curious, unheard-of frescoes limned in dim colors under the glaze. Antiquity hung almost tangibly in the air. The little breeze that brushed past their faces seemed sacrilegiously alive in this tomb of dead dynasties.

  That glazed and patterned passageway led downward into the dark. They followed it dubiously, feet stirring in the dust of a dead race, light-beams violating the million-years night of the underground. Before they had gone very far the circle of light from the shaft disappeared from sight beyond the up-sloping floor behind them, and they walked through antiquity with nothing but the tiny, constant breeze upon their faces to remind them of the world above.

  They walked a very long way. There was no subterfuge about the passage, no attempt to confuse the traveler. No other halls opened from it—it led straight forward and down through the stillness, the dark, the odor of very ancient death. And when at long last they reached the end, they had passed no other corridor-mouth, no other openings at all save the tiny ventilation holes at intervals along the ceiling.

  At the end of that passage a curving wall of rough, un-worked stone bulged like the segment of a sphere, closing the corridor. It was a different stone entirely from that under the patterned glaze of the way along which they had come. In the light of their Tomlinson-tubes they saw a stone door set flush with the slightly bulging wall that held it. And in the door’s very center a symbol was cut deep and vehement and black against the gray background. Yarol, seeing it, caught his breath.

  “Do you know that sign?” he said softly, his voice reverberating in the stillness of the underground, and echoes whispered behind him down the darkness, “—know that sign…know that sign?”

  “I can guess,” murmured Smith, playing his light on the black outline of it.

  “The symbol of Pharol,” said the Venusian in a near-whisper, but the echoes caught it and rolled back along the passage in diminishing undertones, “—Pharol…Pharol…Pharol!”

  “I saw it once carved in the rock of an asteroid,” whispered Yarol. “Just a bare little fragment of dead stone whirling around and around through space. There was one smooth surface on it, and this same sign was cut there. The Lost Planet must really have existed, N.W., and that must have been a part of it once, with the god’s name cut so deep that even the explosion of a world couldn’t wipe it out.”

  Smith drew his gun. “We’ll soon know,” he said. “This will probably fall, so stand back.”

  The blue pencil of heat traced the door’s edges, spattering against the stone as Yarol’s had in the city above. And as before, in its course it encountered the weak place in the molding and the fire bit deep. The door trembled as Smith held the beam steady; it uttered an ominous creaking and began slowly to tilt outward at the top. Smith snapped off his gun and leaped backward, as the great stone slab tottered outward and fell. The mighty crash of it reverberated through the dark, and the concussion of its fall shook the solid floor and flung both men staggering against the wall.

  They reeled to their feet again, shielding blinded eyes from the torrent of radiance that poured forth out of the doorway. It was a rich, golden light, somehow thick, yet clear, and they saw almost immediately, as their eyes became accustomed to the sudden change from darkness, that it was like no light they had ever known before. Tangibly it poured past them down the corridor in hurrying waves that lapped one another and piled up and flowed as a gas might have done. It was light which had an unnamable body to it, a physical, palpable body which yet did not affect the air they breathed.

  They walked forward into a sea of radiance, and that curious light actually eddied about their feet, rippling away from the forward motion of their bodies as water might have done. Widening circles spread away through the air as they advanced, breaking soundlessly against the wall, and behind them a trail of bright streaks steamed away like the wake of a ship in water.

  Through the deeps of that rippling light they walked a passage hewn from ragged stone, a different stone from that of the outer corridor, and somehow older. Tiny speckles of brightness glinted now and again on the rough walls, and neither could remember ever having seen just such mottled, bright-flecked rock before.

  “Do you know what I think this is?” demanded Smith suddenly, after a few minutes of silent progress over the uneven floor. “An asteroid! That rough wall bulging into the corridor outside was the outer part of it. Remember, the three gods were supposed to have been carried away from the catastrophe on the other world and brought here. Well, I’ll bet that’s how it was managed—a fragment of that planet, enclosing a room, possibly, where the gods’ images stood, was somehow detached from the Lost Planet and hurled across space to Mars. Must have buried itself in the ground here, and the people of this city tunneled in to it and built a temple over the spot. No other way, you see, to account for that protruding wall and the peculiar formation of this rock. It must have come from the lost world—never saw anything like it anywhere, myself.”

  “Sounds logical,” admitted Yarol, swinging his foot to start an eddy of light toward the wall. “And what do you make of this funny light?”

  “Whatever other-dimensional place those gods came from, we can be pretty sure that light plays funny tricks there. It must be nearly material—physical. You saw it in that white thing in the cave, and in the dark that smothered our tubes. It’s as tangible as water, almost. You saw how it flowed out into the passage when the door fell, not as real light does, but in succeeding waves, like heavy gas. Yet I don’t notice any difference in the air. I don’t believe—say! Look at that!”

  He stopped so suddenly that Yarol bumped into him from behind and muttered a mild Venusian oath. Then across Smith’s shoulder he saw it too, and his hand swept downward to his gun. Something like an oddly shaped hole opening onto utter dark had appeared around the curve of the passage. And as they stared, it moved. It was a Something blacker than anything in human experience could ever have been before—as black as the guardian of the cave had been white—so black that the eye refused to compass it save as a negative quality, an emptiness. Smith, remembering the legends of Pharol the No-God of utter nothingness, gripped his gun more firmly and wondered if he stood face to face with one of the elder gods.

  The Thing had shifted is shape, flowing to a stabler outline and standing higher from the floor. Smith felt that it must have form and thickness—at least three dimensions and probably more—but try though he would, his eyes could not discern it save as a flat outline of nothingness against the golden light.

  And as from the white dweller in darkness, so from this black denizen of the light there flowed a force that goaded the brain to madness. Smith felt it battering in blind waves at the foundations of his mind—but he felt more than the reasonless urge in this force assailing him. He sensed a struggle of some sort, as if the black guardian were turning only a part of its attention to him—as if it fought against something unseen and powerful. Feeling this, he began to see signs of that combat in the black outlines of the thing. It rippled and flowed, its shape shifted fluidly, it writhed in protest against something he could not comprehend. Definitely now he felt that it fought a desperate battle with some unseen enemy, an
d a little shudder crawled down his back as he watched.

  Quite suddenly it dawned upon him what was happening. Slowly, relentlessly, the black nothingness was being drawn down the passage. And it was—it must be—the flow of the golden radiance that drew it, as a fish might be carried forward down a stream. Somehow the opening of the door must have freed the pent-up lake of light, and it was flowing slowly out down the passage as water flows, draining the asteroid, if asteroid it was. He could see now that though they had halted the wake of rippling illumination behind them did not cease. Past them in a bright tide streamed the light. And on that outflowing torrent the black guardian floated, struggling but helpless.

  It was closer now, and the beat of insistent impulses against Smith’s brain was stronger, but he was not greatly alarmed by it. The panic of the thing must be deep, and the waves of force that washed about him were dizzying but not deep-reaching. Because of this increasing dizziness, as the thing approached, he was never sure afterward just what had happened. Rapidly it drew nearer, until he could have put out his hand and touched it—though instinctively he felt that, near as it seemed, it was too far away across dimensional gulfs for him ever to lay hand upon it. The blackness of it, at close range, was stupefying, a blackness that the eye refused to comprehend—that could not be, and was.

  With the nearness of it his brain seemed to leave its moorings and plunge in mad, impossible curves through a suddenly opened space wherein the walls of the passage were shadows dimly seen and his own body no more than a pillar of mist in a howling void. The black thing must have rolled over him in passing, and engulfed him in its reasonless and incredible dark. He never knew. When his plunging brain finally ceased its lunges through the void and returned reluctantly to his body, the horror of nothingness had receded past them down the corridor, still struggling, and the waves of its blinding force weakened with the distance.