The Shadow People

by Margaret St. Clair

  Carol sighed, a long, shuddering sigh. "Dick, you're making a great mistake."

  All the time we had been carrying on our whispered conversation, Hood had been walking toward us, at a tranquil, deliberate pace. By now he was so close that I could see the string of turquoises around his neck. Even if I had accepted Carol's suspicions of him, he looked so normal, so much a part of the Bright World, that I would have discarded them.

  "Hello," he said. "I see you found her and brought her back. It's quite an achievement. I don't believe it's ever been done before. Allow me to congratulate you." He held out his right hand to me.

  I took it mechanically. His fingers were cool and faintly gritty, as if with rock dust. "You have a right to be proud of yourself," he went on. "The new Orpheus! But you must both be hungry. I've brought food with me. How about having a picnic meal?"

  He produced a large paper bag from one of the parka's side pockets. "Hamburgers," Hood said. "And in the other pocket"—he tapped it—"I've got three cans of beer."

  Carol shook her head. Partly to him and partly to me, she said, "Let's go across the water first. We can eat on the other side."

  "The crossing's a bit of an ordeal," Hood answered. "You'd be in better shape for it if you ate first."

  He sat down on the rock and extracted three hamburgers from the bag. "Sit down," he said. "It's a long way back up, and there's no good place for a sit-down meal for hours."

  Carol looked at him appraisingly. At last, she sat down beside him and took one of the hamburgers. I seated myself, too, but when I reached out for one of the hamburgers, she pushed my hand away from it. "Don't you eat anything of his," she said.

  I remembered Fay's warning. The hamburgers smelled delicious, but I got out my last sandwich, and a cracked and battered candy bar. "O.K.," I said.

  Hood seemed not to notice the little incident. "And the beer," he said. He got three sealed cans from his pocket. "I hope it won't be shook-up and warm."

  An unopened can of beer seemed harmless enough, but I rejected it in favor of water from my canteen. While Carol and Hood ate the hamburgers and drank the beer, I munched stale bread and wolfed up the peanuts of my candy bar.

  Carol finished eating and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. "Hurry up, Dick," she said. "It may not be too late, even now." She got to her feet and started at a quick pace toward the end of the cavern, turning now and again to look over her shoulder at me.

  "All right," I said. I got up, picked up the sword, and started after her.

  "You might as well save yourself the effort," Hood said, without moving from where he sat on the rock. "You won't be able to cross the barrier."

  "What? Why not? What do you mean by that?"

  "I mean what I said," Hood answered. He upended his can of beer and let the last drops trickle down his throat. "There's no use in your going to the water barrier with her, Aldridge. You won't be able to cross."

  He sounded so self-confident that I felt an abrupt stab of fear. "Why won't I be able to?" I demanded. "What's going to stop me?"

  "You've tasted atter-corn," he answered. "You won't be able to get across now."

  "But—I haven't tasted it!"

  "Hurry up, Dick," Carol called from the end of the cavern. She had stepped off the bank and was actually standing knee-deep in the water, though it tugged at her. "Hurry up!"

  Hood rose to his feet. "Oh, yes, you have tasted the corn. It only takes a little, you know. It was on my fingers when I shook hands with you. You contaminated your own food."

  I remembered the grittiness of his fingers. "You're lying," I said, combating my growing fear. "The sword would have warned me."

  "The sword is mine," Hood said. "I hung it on the wall for you to find. Why should it warn you? It remembers its master."

  So the sword—the beautiful, faithful sword—I remembered how, when I first found it, it had seemed to mislike my hand.

  "I don't believe you," I said.

  "You are beginning to believe me," Hood answered tranquilly.

  "No. She"—I indicated Carol, who, from her cupped hands, was calling something at me—"has already started the crossing. Or do you mean she won't be able to leave Otherworld, either?" This was what I particularly feared.

  "Oh, she'd be able to make it all right."

  "Then I don't understand what you're driving at. She's eaten atter-corn constantly."

  "Yes. But it hasn't affected her as it has you. She is not of elf-stock."

  I stared at him. "Neither am I!"

  "Oh, are you not?" Hood's handsome, thin-lipped face crinkled up in a laugh. "Watch."

  He got a penknife from his hip pocket and opened it. I didn't know what he was going to do. Suddenly he thrust the flat of the blade toward my face.

  It was just as if he had thrust white-hot steel toward me. I winced aside involuntarily.

  "You see?" Hood said. "There were indications of elf descent in you before you tasted the meal, of course. Your name—'Aldridge' was originally 'eldrich', or elfish—and your ability to see in the dark, to mention a couple. But eating the meal has made what was latent manifest."

  "I don't believe you. I'm human."

  Hood raised his shoulders in a little shrug. "The elf blood in you is a long way back. But it's there. Go ahead and try to cross the water barrier. You'll see."

  With as much dignity as I could, I turned from him and started toward Carol. She had stepped out of the water and was standing on the bank waiting for me.

  "What were you talking about to him?" she asked. "Let's start across. Hood frightens me."

  "All right." I took her hand in mine. I was still holding the sword in my other hand, but well away from my body. Its proximity was making me increasingly uncomfortable.

  I stepped over the bank into the roaring stream. I don't know what I had feared might happen—perhaps that the water would feel red-hot, like the knife blade, or that I would be physically unable to enter it. But I got into the brawling water easily enough.

  It was when I tried to take the next step forward that the trouble came. I could thrust out with the sword and find a suitable shallow place, but the muscles in my legs were as useless as columns of sand. I couldn't make a step forward. The water did not seem particularly cold to me. But its touch had eroded my strength away.

  "What's the matter, Dick?" Carol asked. Her head was tilted questioningly. "Why don't we go on?"

  I felt both foolish and alarmed. Again and again I tried to swing my legs into the shallow I had found with the sword; they would no more move than if they had been wooden posts that I willed to move. The paralysis was not absolute. I could, I found, move my legs backward easily enough. But I couldn't go forward at all.

  "What's the matter?" Carol repeated, her voice rising.

  It occurred to me that I might be able to make the crossing if I moved up- or downstream a little. "Let's try farther down," I said. "The water's, unh, too rough here."

  "All right."

  We went a few feet downstream, but the story was still the same. I couldn't advance an inch to get across.

  Carol was staring at me with her lips parted. Before she could say anything, Hood came sauntering up, his hands in his pockets. "I told you you wouldn't be able to cross the water barrier," he said to me. "They never can."

  I was too angry and perplexed to reply, but Carol said, "Why can't he cross? What do you mean by 'they'?"

  "He can't cross because he's of elf descent and he's tasted atter-corn," Hood said. He explained how he had tricked me, ending, "He'll have to stay on this side."

  Carol said, in a rather wobbling voice, "Elves do cross the water barrier. They crossed when—they took me, and when they brought me back down with them."

  "There are different sorts of elves," Hood answered. "I myself, for example, am one of the green kind. We are sometimes considered the most dangerous of all, since we can go among men as men."

  There was a silence. I was still holding Carol's hand. It was trembling
.

  I got out of the water and helped Carol out. Hood did not move. He stood facing us perfectly at ease, with a faint smile on his lips, a smile that was more insulting than a grin of triumph would have been.

  "Give me the sword," he said after a minute, holding out his hand. "You won't be able to stand it near you in a little while. It's steel."

  "No. It's my sword now. I'm its new master. It doesn't make me too uncomfortable for me to be able to stand it." This was true; and I felt that if the sword was not perfectly happy in my hand, it yet disliked Hood more than it did me.

  "Very well," he said unemotionally. "I'll get it back after you're dead. Don't try to kill me with it, Aldridge. She"—he indicated Carol—"will never be able to get across the water barrier unless I show her the way."

  I looked at Carol. She had turned chalk-white. She put out her hand blindly and touched me on the wrist. "I told you to kill him," she said in a voice that was almost a groan. "Dick, I'll stay here with you."

  It was plain the words had cost her a great deal. She knew, almost better than I, what she was condemning herself to.

  It was not easy for me, either, to answer, "No. How could you stay here? You belong to the Bright World. What good would your staying with me do?"

  "I could comfort you," she replied, with a curious touch of humility.

  "No. How would it comfort me to see you suffering in this place? I don't believe I could stand it. If you want to comfort me, Carol, go back to the Bright World. Be happy there."

  "But—happy? Without you? After you saved me?"

  "You must try," I answered. "Go with him."

  "With him? Oh, Dick, you should have killed him!"

  "I know. But you can't get past the water barrier without him. After you're back, you can part company with him. Hood, will you take her back safely?"

  He nodded slowly, with more emotion than I had yet seen him show. "Yes. I swear by the blade of the sword."

  It was an oath I had confidence in. Carol's hand was still resting on my wrist. I took it and put it in Hood's hand. "Go with him," I said.

  She pulled loose and stood for a moment free. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips. "Good-bye, Dick," she said. Then she turned to follow Hood, who was waiting for her.

  "Good-bye, my—my love," I said. I raised the blade of the sword in salutation.

  Under Hood's guidance, she was already in the water. She turned and waved to me, a last greeting.

  Separate eternities lay before us. Though she was already too far away to hear me, I repeated, "Good-bye."

  Chapter Eight

  The cavern, now I was alone, was full of echoes. It seemed I could hear the echo of my breathing and of the beating of my heart. Hood had spoken of getting the sword back from me after my death; I wondered how long it would take me to die.

  In an ordinary environment, this thought would have been morbid. Here, it was only realistic. Yet I suppose that nobody, unless he is in acute pain, accepts the idea of his imminent death with much relish. Besides, I grudged Hood the sword. It deserved to have a better master than a green elf. I resolved to survive as long as I could, and, if I felt I was on the point of death, to try to put the sword forever beyond Hood's reach.

  All this sounds much more composed than I was. My heart, whose beating I could hear echoed from the cavern walls, was thudding with rage and grief. I was torn by angry emotions and, above all, regret that I had not obeyed Carol and killed Hood out of hand.

  Had he been responsible for her kidnapping? Why had he tricked me into eating the atter-corn? Had it been mere maliciousness, or had he been trying to get Carol away from me so he could have her for himself? He had never shown an interest in her when we had been in Upper Earth; mere maliciousness was a more probable motive. But I longed to know that Carol would get safely back and be able to rid herself of him. It was dreadful to think that I would never know what had happened. For me, the water barrier that separates the two worlds was a barrier almost as absolute as death.

  What ought my next move to be? The physical means of survival were easy. I could drink wherever I found water, and eat whenever I found a saucer of atter-corn. There was no need to abstain from it any longer. The sword, though I had to carry it well away from my body because of the uncomfortable sensation of heat it caused, would probably still defend me and rout the steel-hating denizens of Underearth as it had before. But what should I do with this ambiguous freedom? I could go anywhere I chose; but it didn't make the slightest difference where I went.

  I was still wondering what to do when the atter-corn intoxication came on.

  An atter-corn high consists of a few hours of furious, rushing animal hallucinations, and then settles down to a longer-lasting state of elevated misery. At any rate, that was how it was for me. I suppose someone of pure human stock, or who was all elf, would experience something different.

  The animal illusions are exceedingly vivid. While I was a stag that first time, I could smell my own dung and feel the fleas crawling through the close hairs of my hide. I appeared to be walking on my hind legs, carrying the sword in my armpit, and the position rather distressed me. My horns were broad and branched, and felt heavy, though in good balance.

  I stopped being a stag, and became a wolf. I had dense gray fur, soft padded paws, and fierce green eyes. Since I trotted on all fours I was carrying the sword in my mouth. I had to be careful not to cut my mouth on the edge.

  I've forgotten what I became after I stopped being a wolf. There was a flood, a spate, a near torrent, of animal incarnations. I stayed in one shape only a few seconds. I remember being a goat and after that a rat, but the stag and goat were recurrent forms I took.

  When I sobered up and entered on the stage of elevated misery, I found I had gone a considerable distance down the right-hand corridor, the corridor I had rejected as being too dark when I began my Underearth search for Carol. I was still carrying the sword, and its proximity made me no more uncomfortable than it had several hours earlier. On this point, at least, Hood was proving to be wrong.

  The corridor was very slightly less dark than I remembered it. But I had a reasonable awareness of my bodily location, and for an odd reason: the atter-corn I had eaten, though the amount had been so small, had made my skin secretions slightly phosphorescent. I could see my hands and the tip of my nose as a faint blue glimmer, and the hilt of the sword, where I had touched it, had the same faint blue sheen.

  I was to notice the same thing in the skins of other elves subsequently, though such a phosphorescence had been absent in their earlier attacks on me. I suppose atter-corn makes the vision more sensitive if one is of elf stock.

  I kept on moving down the corridor. After a while it was crossed by a broader channel, colder and a little better lighted, and I turned into it. I didn't care where I went.

  By now, the stage of elevated misery was setting in. The misery is at once a high-toned Weltschmerz, juvenile and romantic, and the most sordid and grimy of pains. There is a peculiar squalid, gritty, ugly quality in it. This quality of feeling makes it hard to bear.

  I was beginning to grow very tired. My steps came more and more slowly, until half a minute would elapse without my moving my feet. This fatigue—more accurately, torpor—increased until I felt I must put myself in a safe place where I could give in to it. Instinct drove me to seek a rift in the rock, some more or less horizontal fissure I could crawl into while the chilly torpor held on. Elves always hunt for such a place.

  I found a good one after a little searching. It was deep, long enough to accommodate me lying at almost full length, and too narrow for any elf to follow me in. The worst that could happen to me there would be to share my rock couch with some sluggish newt or eft.

  I crawled in. But I was not lying down to slumber, but to a period of chilly inactivity, a wide-eyed torpor in which all the grimy misery, the constant cold ache of Underearth would persist. The atter-corn I had tasted, small though the quantity was, made me
understand what Carol had meant when she said that, when she ate the corn, she took "this place" into herself.

  I had taken it into myself, it was a foreign body I had ingested. And yet, since it was a part of me now, it was my own and hence, in a way, dear to me. People who have experienced a great deal of physical pain will know what I mean. It is a part of the general psychological acuteness of Homer that he uses the same Greek word to mean both what is dear to one and what is one's own.

  I don't know how long I lay in the cleft. Atter-corn disturbs the perception of time. Nobody bothered me or even came near me. At last, I roused myself to crawl out. I was feeling hungry. I would hunt for a saucer of atter-corn.

  I sniffed. Until that moment it had not occurred to me that the meal would have a smell. Now I was sure of it. I sniffed again. And, after a moment, I found the characteristic smell—metallic, acrid, and yet cereal—coming to my nose. It wasn't far off.

  The smell made my mouth water. The flow of saliva was a little painful, but it increased my hunger. When I found the saucer, a hundred feet or so farther on, I was trembling with eagerness.

  I thought, of course, that eating the meal would probably give me another high. It didn't matter, really. The animal hallucinations were a diversion from the bleakness around me, and the subsequent misery seemed a part of the nature of things. I scooped up the reddish powder in big pinches between my fingers and ate it eagerly.

  It didn't taste bitter, then or afterwards. (I suppose Carol found it bitter because she was of human stock.) It had no taste at all, or, rather, it tasted exactly like the inside of my mouth. I suppose this incestuous identity was the reason for the appetite it inspired in me. But the eating itself was disappointing. And swallowing the meal was really painful. It seemed to cling to my throat and rasp and smart as it went down.

  I put the saucer down finally, satiated if not satisfied. It occurred to me to wonder who filled the saucers and where the meal in them came from. And did the elves subsist on the meal primarily, or had they other food? (The answer to this is that the inhabitants of Underearth steal a great deal from our world. Much of the damage we attribute to rats is really their doing. Cereals they particularly like, but they will also take cheese, meat and dried fruits. They never take cans, because the metal distresses them. In the parts of Underearth that are relatively near the surface, there are amphibians and reptiles the elves like to eat. Some of the streams contain blind fish. There is also the human flesh they prize so much. But the staple, the backbone of their diet, is the atter-corn.)