The A. Merritt Megapack

by Abraham Merritt

  On her face which was both face of woman and face of serpent—and in some strange fashion neither serpent nor woman—there dwelt side by side an awesome wisdom and a weariness beyond belief—

  The Serpent-woman—memory of whom or of her sisters may be the source of those legends of the Naga Princesses whose wisdom reared the cities of the vanished Khmers in the Cambodian jungles; yes, and may be the source of those persistent stories of serpent-women in the folklore of every land.

  May even be the germ of truth in the legend of Lilith, first wife of Adam, whom Eve ousted.

  It was thus that Graydon saw her—or thus he thought he saw her. For again and again that question of whether she was as she seemed to him to be, or whether he saw her as she willed him to see her, was to rise to torment him.

  He thrilled to the beauty of that little heart-shaped face, the glistening argent glory of her hair, the childish exquisiteness of her.

  He gave no heed to her coils, her—monstrousness. It was as though she reached down into his heart and plucked some deep hidden string, silent there since birth.

  And in that dream—if dream it was—he knew that she was aware of all this and was well pleased. Her eyes softened, and brooded upon him; the rose-pearl coil upon which was her body raised until her head swayed twice the height of a tall man above the alcove’s pave. She nodded toward him. She raised her little hands to her forehead and cupped them; then with oddly hieratic gesture lowered them, tipping the palms as though she poured from them.

  Beyond her was a throne that seemed cut from the heart of a colossal sapphire. It was oval, ten feet or more in height, and hollowed like a shrine. It rested upon, or was set within, the cupped end of a pillar of milky rock-crystal It was empty, although around it clung, he thought, a faint radiance. At its foot were six lesser thrones. One was red as though carved from ruby; one was black as though cut from jet; the four thrones between the two were yellow gold.

  The crimson lips of the Snake Mother opened; a slender, pointed, scarlet tongue flicked out and touched them. Whether she spoke or did not speak, Graydon heard her thought.

  “I will hold up the hands of this man. Suarra loves him. He pleases me. Except for Suarra, I have no interest in those who dwell in Yu-Atlanchi. The desire of the child flies to him. So let it be! I grow weary of Lantlu and his crew. For one thing, Lantlu draws closer than I like to that Shadow of Nimir they call the Dark Master. Also, he would take Suarra. He shall not.”

  “By the ancient compact,” the Lord of Folly spoke—“by that compact, Adana, you may not use your wisdom against any of the Old Race. Your ancestors swore it. It was sworn to long and long and long ago, before the ice drove us north from the Homeland. The oath has never been broken. Even you, Adana, cannot break that oath.”

  “S-s-s-s!” the Snake Mother’s scarlet tongue flickered wrathfully—“Say you so! There was another side to that compact. Did not the Old Race swear never to plot against any of us, the Serpent-people? Yet Lantlu and his followers plot with the Shadow. They plot to free Nimir from the fetters which long ago we forged for him. Free, he will seek to destroy us…and why should he not…and perhaps he may!

  “Heed that, Tyddo! I say perhaps he may! Lantlu plots with Nimir, who is our enemy; therefore he plots against me—the last of the Serpent-people. The ancient compact is broken. By Lantlu—not by me.”

  She swayed forward.

  “Suppose we abandon Yu-Atlanchi? Pass from it as did my ancestors, and the Lords who were your peers? Leave it to its rot?”

  The Lord of Folly did not answer.

  “Ah, well, where there is little left but folly, you of course must stay,” she nodded her childish head toward him. “But what is there to keep me? By the wisdom of my people! Here was a race of hairless gray apes that we took from their trees. Took them and taught them, and turned them into men. And what have they become? Dwellers in dream, paramours of phantoms, slaves of illusion. The others—swinging ever toward the darkness, lovers of cruelty; retainers of beauty, outwardly—and under their masks, hideous. I sicken of them. Yu-Atlanchi rots—nay, it is rotten. Let it die!”

  “There is Suarra,” said the Lord of Folly, softly. “And there are others who are still sound. Will you abandon them?”

  The Serpent-woman’s face softened.

  “There is Suarra,” she whispered, “and there are—others. But so few! By my ancestors, so few!”

  “If it were their fault alone!” said the Lord of Folly.

  “But it is not, Adana. Better for them had we razed the barrier that has protected them. Better for them had we let them make their own way against the wilderness, and what of enemies it held. Better for them had we never closed the Door of Death.”

  “Peace!” answered the Serpent-woman, sadly. “It was my woman’s tongue speaking. Yet there is a deeper reason why we may not abandon them. This Shadow of Nimir seeks a body. What this Shadow is, how strong Nimir still may be, what he has forgotten of his old arts, or what new arts he has learned through the ages—I do not know. But this I do know—if this Shadow seeks a body, it is to free Nimir from the stone. We must prepare for battle, Old One. Nimir freed, and victorious—we must go! Nor would our going be orderly and as we may desire. And in time he would spread his dominion over all the world, as other ages ago he planned to do. And that must not be!”

  The Lord of Folly stirred upon the red throne, flapping about like a great red and yellow bird, uneasily.

  “Well,” said the Serpent-woman, practically, “I am glad I cannot read the future. If it is to be war, I have no desire to be weakened by knowing I am going to lose. Nor to be bored by knowing I am going to win. If one must exert oneself to such a degree as such war promises, one is surely entitled to the interest of uncertainty.”

  Graydon, for all the incredible weirdness of what he seemed to be seeing and hearing, chuckled involuntarily at this, it was so amazingly feminine. The Serpent-woman glanced at him, as though she had heard him. There was a half-malicious twinkle in her glowing eyes.

  “As for this man who seeks Suarra,” she said, “let him come and find me! There is much in what you have said of our error in making life too easy for Yu-Atlanchi, Tyddo. Let us not repeat it. When this man, by his own wit and courage, has found the way to me, and stands before me in body as now he stands in thought, I will arm him with power. If we win, Suarra shall be his reward. In the meantime, for sign, I shall send my winged Messengers to him, that they may know him—and also that he may know he need fear them no more.”

  The temple faded, and disappeared. Graydon seemed to hear around and above him a storm of elfin buglings. He thought that he opened his eyes, threw off the blanket and arose—

  And that all around him, glimmering with pale silver fires, were circles upon circles of the silver-feathered serpents! Whirling and wheeling in countless spirals; hundreds upon hundreds of them, great and small, their plumes gleaming, fencing gayly with long rapier beaks, horn notes ringing—

  And were gone.

  At dawn he threw together a hasty breakfast, caught the burro and adjusted the packs upon it. Whistling, he set forth, up the mountain. The ascent was not difficult. In an hour he had reached the summit.

  At his feet the ground sloped down to a level plain, dotted with huge standing stones. Up from this plain and not three miles from where he stood arose the scarps of a great mountain. Its precipices marched in the arc of an immense circle, on and on beyond sight—

  The ramparts of Yu-Atlanchi!

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Lizard Men

  There could be no doubt of it. Behind the barrier upon which he looked lay Yu-Adanchi—and Suarra! The plain studded with the giant menhirs was that over which the spider-man had scuttled. The path along which Graydon had trodden on his way to the Face must be just below him.

  He heard high overhead a mellow bugle-call. Three times the notes sounded, then thrice again—from the base of the slope whose top he trod; from far out on the plain; and, last cl
ose to the mountain wall.

  He began to descend.

  It was early afternoon when he reached the mountain. The rock was basaltic, black and adamantine. Its scarps thrust almost perpendicularly from the plain. They were unscalable; at least, those before him were. Which way should he go? As though answering his question he heard once more the mellow horn note high in the air, and southward.

  “South it is,” said Graydon, cheerfully, and resumed his march.

  His eye caught a verdancy, a green banner streaming down the face of the escarpment a hundred feet or more above its base. As he drew near, he saw that there had been a shattering of the rock at this point. Rubble studded with immense bowlders lay piled against the cliff. Bushes and small trees had found foothold and climbed to the top of the breast.

  Studying the breast to determine its cause, Graydon saw a narrow crack in the rock wall above the mound. Curiosity drove him to examine it The burro watched him until he was half-way up the hill, and then with a protesting bray scrambled after him.

  He pressed on. He pushed, through the last of the bushes. Here he found that the end of the fissure was about four feet wide. It was dark within it. He knelt and shot around the rays of his searchlight. Rocks littered the floor, but the place was dry. He came out, and began to collect his firewood.

  When he had thrown down the last armload of faggots, he walked back along the fissure. A hundred paces and his light fell upon a rock wall—the end of it, he supposed. But he found when he reached it that the cleft made an abrupt turn. He heard water dripping, at his left, drops were exuding from the stone, were caught in a small natural basin, then trickled away in a thin stream. He turned his flash upward. He could see no roof, but neither could he see the sky.

  Well, he would do some exploring next morning. He drove the burro into the shelter, and tethered it to a spur of rock. After he had eaten, he rolled himself up in his blanket and went to sleep.

  He awakened early, the desire hot within him to see where the fissure led. Without bothering to breakfast, he swung down it. When he had gone about three hundred paces past the tiny spring, the passage turned sharply, this time resuming its original direction. Not far ahead was a gray, palely luminous curtain. He snapped off his flash, and crept forward—It was daylight.

  He looked down a rift in the mountain, a hundred feet wide, with smoothly precipitous walls. It ran due east, facing the rising sun. There was no other way to account for the volume of light that filtered down into the narrow canyon. Its floor was level and smooth. Along one side it ran the trickle of the spring. There was no vegetation—not even the hardy, rock-loving lichens.

  Graydon went back, watered the burro and tethered it among the bushes.

  “Eat hearty, Sancho Panza,” he said. “God alone knows when you get your next meal.”

  He made a fire and broke his own fast. He waited until the burro had filled itself, fastened on the packs, and finally, with considerable difficulty, got the little brute to the canyon door. After that, it ambled along ahead of him contentedly enough.

  For a mile the canyon ran as straight as though laid out by a surveyor’s level. Then it began to turn and twist, widen and narrow, dip and climb. Small rocks and bowlders appeared in ever-growing numbers on its floor. The trickle, augmented by other seepages from the cliffs, had grown into a small brook. The rocky walls had changed from black to a reddish-yellow. A stunted, pallid vegetation grew sparsely beside the flowing water and among the broken stones.

  From time to time he caught glimpses of roughly rounded holes high up the cliffs at his right, apertures that seemed to be the mouths of tunnels or caves. They stared at him from the ocherous rock like huge pupilless eyes. With that sharpening of the faculties the wilderness effects, Graydon sensed that something deadly lurked there. He watched them warily, rifle ready. There was a taint in the air, a faintly acrid, musky odor, vaguely familiar. It was like—now what was it like? It was like the reek of alligators in some infested, sluggish, jungle creek.

  The taint in the air grew stronger. The number of the cave mouths increased. The burro began to show nervousness, halting and sniffing.

  The canyon made another of its abrupt turns. From beyond the angle that hid the way from Graydon there came an appalling outburst of hissings and gruntings. At the same time gusts of the musky stench smote his nostrils, nauseating him. The burro stood stock-still.

  He heard the cries of men. He sprang forward; turned the corner. Just ahead of him were three Indians like the one who had led him to the frontier of the Forbidden Land, but in yellow instead of blue. Circling them, tearing at them with fangs and claws, were a score or more of creatures which at first glance he took for giant lizards. And at second, realized that they were, if not men, at least semi-human.

  The things stood a little over four feet high. Their leathery skins were a dirty yellow. They balanced themselves upon squat, stocky legs whose feet were like paws, flat and taloned. Their arms were short and muscular. Their hands were pads, duplicates almost of their feet, but with longer claws.

  It was their faces that chilled Graydon’s blood. There was no mistaking the human element in them. They were man and lizard inextricably, inexplicably, mingled—as man and spider had been mingled in the scarlet thing Suarra had named the Weaver.

  Beyond their narrow, pointed foreheads their heads were covered with scarlet scales which stood upright like multiple cockscombs. Their eyes were red, round and unwinking. Their noses were flat, but under them their jaws extended in a broad six-inch snout armed with yellow fangs, strong and cruel as a crocodile’s. They had no chins, and only rudiments of ears.

  What sickened him most was that around their loins were filthy strips of cloth.

  The three Indians stood back to back in a triangle, battering at the lizard-men with maul-headed clubs of some shining metal. That they had given good account of themselves a half dozen of the creatures, heads crushed in, gave proof. But now in rapid succession first one Indian and then a second was pulled to the ground and hidden by the loathsome bodies.

  Graydon threw off his paralysis and shouted to the remaining Indian.

  He raised his rifle, took rapid aim, and fired. The lizard-man he had picked out staggered under the impact of the bullet, then dropped. At the report, echoing like a miniature peal of thunder from the rocky walls, the pack turned as one toward him, fanged mouths open and staring, bodies crouched, glaring at him with the unwinking red eyes.

  The Indian stooped, lifted the body of one of his comrades, and sprang clear. Freed from fear of hitting him, Graydon emptied his rifle into the creatures. He rapidly reloaded his magazine. Then, as he began dropping them, they broke from their stupor, leaped for the walls, and like true lizards swarmed up the sheer faces of the cliffs. Hissing and screeching, they darted into the black mouths of the caves. They vanished into their dark depths.

  The Indian stood with his wounded comrade in his arms. There was amazement and awe on his finely featured brown face. Graydon threw the rifle thong around his neck, and held out both hands in the universal gesture of peace. The Indian gently lowered the other to the ground, and bowed low, the backs of his hands to his forehead.

  Graydon walked toward the Indian. He stopped for a moment to look more closely at the creatures his bullets had dropped. He saw that only those whose skulls had been pierced by the high power bullets lay there. And the limbs of these drew up and down spasmodically as though they still lived. One of them had been shot straight through the heart. But still that heart beat on. He could see the leathery yellow chest throb with its pulsations. Only those whose skulls had been crushed by the clubs seemed quite dead.

  And again the perverted humanness of these things shook him.

  One of them lay face down. The stained breech-clout had slipped off. At the base of its spine was a blunt, scaled tail.

  He was aware of the first Indian beside him. He saluted again, and methodically began to crush with his club the heads of those Graydon had sho
t.

  “This,” he said in the Aymara, “so they cannot live again. It is the only way.”

  Graydon walked over to the second Indian. He was unconscious and badly mauled, but not necessarily fatally, so he thought, going carefully over the wounds. He took his emergency kit out of the saddle-bag, treated and bandaged the worst of them. He looked up to see the other Indian standing over him, watching with eyes in which the awe was stronger, “If we can get him to some place where those brutes can’t interrupt, I can do more for him,” said Graydon, also in the Aymara tongue, rising.

  “A little way,” answered the Indian, “and we shall be safe from them, Mighty Lord!”

  “Let’s go,” said Graydon, in English, grinning at the title.

  He bent down and lifted the wounded man’s shoulders. The Indian took his feet. Burro once more in the lead, they made their way down the canyon.

  The openings of the caves watched them. Within them nothing stirred, but Graydon felt upon him the gaze of malignant eyes—the devil eyes of the lizard-men hidden in the shadow of their dens.

  CHAPTER IX

  In the Lair of Huon

  The cliff burrows of the lizard-men became fewer; at last the precipices were clean of them. The Indians gave them no attention whatever, satisfied apparently of Graydon’s ability to handle any fresh assault by the monsters.

  The man they were carrying groaned, opened his eyes, and spoke. His comrade nodded, and set his feet on the ground. He stood upright, looking at Graydon with the same amazement his fellow had shown, and then, as he saw the bracelet of the Snake Mother, with the same awe. The first Indian spoke rapidly, too rapidly, for Graydon to understand. When he had finished, the second took his hand, laid it first upon his heart and then upon his forehead.

  “Lord,” he said, “my life is yours.”

  “Where is it that you go?” Graydon asked.