The Shadow People

by Margaret St. Clair

  After I had eaten, I caught water in my hands from a small, angry stream, and after I had drunk, my next high came on.

  There is not much point in describing it. All the highs the corn produces are alike in plan, and all are different in detail. This one put me in surroundings appropriate to the kind of animal I was at the moment, which my earlier high had not. But when the period of elevated misery set in, it was exactly the same. This part of the experience is almost invariable, even to the quantity of misery.

  I found another cleft, crawled into it, and let the cold torpor wash over me. I had incautiously left my arm near the opening, and not long before I was ready to emerge I felt a burning pain in the fleshy part of my thumb.

  Still somewhat sluggish, I pulled my hand back to safety, blood running from a long open wound. Fortunately, it was in my left hand. After a little while, I roused myself to crawl out of the crevice and confront my attackers. From the noises of sniffling and whining, I judged there was more than one of them.

  It was not elves this time, but the elves' animal parasites, that had gathered around my rock bed. They were about the size of large cats and, I suspect, originally of the cat kind. If I did not mention them among the elves' food resources, it is because their flesh is too rank-flavored for even the strong-stomached Silent People to eat.

  There were four of them. When they saw me, they began an excited mewling, leaping far off the rock floor to slash with their claws at my face. One of them I cut in the chest, and another I wounded deeply under the foreleg. The other two got through my defense to slit my clothing and scratch my hands. They seemed to have no fear of the sword. I suppose they had never seen an elf armed with metal before.

  I was afraid of getting one of them spitted on the sword so I used it to slash, keeping the edge in front of my face. After I wounded the third, they all ran away, leaving a lot of their blood on the rock.

  My thumb was bleeding freely. Drops splashed down on the rock, on top of the blood the black cat-creatures had left. For some reason, the thought of my blood mingling with theirs filled me with nausea, and I hastily tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of my shirt to tie up my hand. The bandage was an awkward one, but it did stop the bleeding. If my blood had continued to flow, much would have been changed.

  I tore another strip to use to clean the sword. Handling the sword, with only cloth between me and the metal, made me thoroughly uncomfortable. But I had a notion that the animals' blood would corrode the steel.

  I was still scouring gingerly at the metal when something made me look up. An elf, perhaps a woman, was standing in front of me.

  There were chunks of fox fire in its hair. For the first time, I realized that elves arch their eyebrows because they have to support the weight of an imaginary crown of horns. The being before me mewled and beckoned because it was dancing its way through the mazes of some animal fantasy.

  I don't know what it—she—had in mind. Her intentions seemed to be less violent than those of the Silent People usually are. But when her eyes fell on the sword, now gleaming clean, her mouth opened in a wide, ugly O. She turned and ran incontinently, while the chunks of fox fire tumbled to the rock.

  Once more the sword had put an elf to flight. And yet I could handle it. Of elf stock though I was, I could carry its naked steel through the corridors of this Arctic hell. I began to feel a certain perverse pride in myself.

  I was getting hungry. Where should I go now? Toward the next saucer of atter-corn, I supposed, and the next period of hallucinated misery. The whole of Underearth lay open before me. I could go wherever my feet would take me. It was for me to choose.

  Yes, but since Underearth was everywhere the same, my choices meant nothing. Wherever I went, I would always be in the same place. Underearth might be of enormous extent. But it was always the same place.

  There was an exception to this, as I was shortly to find out.

  Chapter Nine

  I kept on eating atter-corn. There was really nothing else for me to eat, unless I wanted to fight one of the elves for the poor loot he had brought from Upper Earth. The meal is not only a potent hallucinogen, it is also extraordinarily nutritious and sustaining, though its exclusive ingestion gives rise to long-term deficiencies.

  I kept on having hallucinations, too. Their range extended somewhat. Sometimes I flew, or swam, or crawled, as well as trotted or pranced. The new hallucinations had the same extraordinary vividness as the old. It seems that the meal has the power to send consciousness up and down the ladder of evolution at random. I could never find any inner logic to my transmigrations. It may be significant that much of the time I seemed to hear the roaring of an angry sea.

  The saucers of meal were getting closer together. My hunger could be satisfied immediately; beyond that, the spacing of the saucers meant nothing to me. I had speculated once before on how they were filled. Now, quite by accident, I was to witness it.

  I happened to be lying in a cleft with my eyes open, facing outward, in the first stage of torpid misery. I saw a shadow flit by, a distillation of darkness, carrying something in its hand.

  I was not yet so torpid but that I could raise my head to watch. The being poured from what it was carrying into a saucer thirty or so feet down the passage from my hard bed. I thought I saw it go on down the passage and halt at another saucer, but I could not be sure.

  I put my head down and let misery wash over me. When I came out of the torpor, a good many hours later, I visited the saucers and found them roundly full of the reddish meal. They really had been replenished, then, but by a being so silent and so invisible that I could doubt having seen it. Even its skin had lacked the faintly phosphorescent gleam of most Underearth denizens. I had, in fact, seen a black elf, intent on its task of atter-corn distribution. There was more significance than I realized in the increasingly close spacing of the saucers of the corn.

  I had been going generally downhill. When I came to a choice of ways, I tended to take the lower one. The sword had been inert in my hand since I had parted from Carol. Now I found a triple branching, where all three ways seemed to descend.

  I took the one on the left. After I had gone along it a little while, it began to rise. This by itself would not have made me retrace my steps, but I heard faint noises ahead of me. After I groped my way around a twist in the passage, I saw three or four elves ahead, armed with clubs and standing across the way.

  I could, of course, fight them for passage and probably get through. Get through to what? There seemed to be no point in provoking a conflict, and I turned back, though I wondered a little why they had laid such an obvious ambush for me. My high came on about that time, and I had other mental occupations than speculation about the motives of elves. They had seemed to be of the black kind.

  More highs, more atter-corn eating, more elevated misery. Otherworld is a montage of hallucination, violence, and grinding physical wretchedness. I found another parting of the ways, and took, for a whim, the passage that seemed to lead slightly up. Once more, after I had gone along the passage a few hundred feet, I was opposed by an armed band of the Silent People.

  I turned back this time, too. But the incident set me to thinking, between bouts of illusion and torpor, and I decided that, if my going upward was opposed once more, I would challenge the opposers. It began to look as if my moving in a particular direction were objected to. By whom? And for what reason? That was what I would find out. I wasn't particularly afraid of the Silent People, even in larger groups than the two that had opposed me. More than anything else, I disliked the idea of getting their blood on the sword.

  More time passed. I may have been moving in a big circle, though I don't think so. For the third time, I began to walk along an upward-sloping passage; and once more I found, after a certain distance, that a group of elves was opposing me.

  I happened to be at a point in my atter-corn cycle where I was having the hallucination of being a wolf. When I saw the black group of elves ahead of me, carrying
clubs and wavering uncertainly against the rock, I decided they were a bunch of Middle European villagers on their way home from church at midnight. I charged them, growling horribly (this in itself must greatly have disconcerted them, since the Silent People almost never make a sound in their atter-corn fits), and swinging the sword over my shoulder at them. I think I believed it was some sort of fifth paw.

  I leaped among them, yelping, snapping, and swinging the sword. They tried to keep out of the reach of the scalding metal, while striking repeatedly at me with their clubs. The clubs were formidable enough, but I was bouncing about like a rubber ball, and most of the time they missed or hit themselves.

  I cut one of them deeply where the neck meets the slope of the shoulder. He gasped, dropped his club, and ran down the passage, bleeding, as I later found, very freely indeed. The other two managed not to be seduced by the smell of his blood; they kept on striking at me, and one of them hit me fairly on the top of the head. I might have dropped the sword, except that at that moment my hallucination changed to being a very large serpent, something on the order of a python, and I clutched the sword avidly in my coils.

  I suppose I hissed, but serpents are not much in the way of fighters. Fortunately for me, I became a lion almost immediately. I got one of the attackers in his right wrist; he dropped the club and ran, and the third, after a creditable moment of hesitation, followed him.

  The whole episode illustrated the Silent People's astonishing lack of enterprise and savvy. If they had stationed a fourth elf behind me, to attack me from the rear, I would have been done for. But I suppose they never thought of it.

  For a while, nothing happened. I continued to go forward, wondering, in the gaps between animal hallucinations, why the elves had tried so hard to bar my way. (All my thoughts and perceptions occurred in rifts in the atter-corn intoxication. It was like looking at a landscape through flurries of thick-falling snowflakes.) Then a man came staggering out across my path as abruptly as if he had been pushed—as, indeed, I later found he had.

  He was human, not an elf. I could tell by his stature, his bearing, his lusterless skin, his lack of fear of the sword. The first thing he said was, "There's a poison mouse in the wall up ahead."

  "What?"

  "A poison mouse. Come on. I'll show you." He put his hand on my left wrist and tried to pull me ahead.

  I hung back. Neither his mien nor his words inspired confidence. Besides, I was getting to the point in my high where high-falutin' Wehschmerz and torpor replace the animal illusions. I was beginning to want to find a crack in the rock where I could lie down.

  "Come on," he repeated.

  "No."

  "You've got to! It's dangerous. When you walk under it, it'll jump down on you. People—get bit."

  Once more he laid his hand on my wrist. I was too languid to throw it off this time, and I let him lead me on for twenty or so feet, when he stopped.

  "It's up there," he said, pointing. "You can see it if you look."

  I craned my neck, but could see nothing except a crevice in the rock overhead. The ceiling was unusually low at this point. "There's nothing there," I said after a moment.

  "Yes, there is! It's up inside the crack. All you have to do is poke up after it. You can kill it with one good poke." He made a stabbing gesture with his arm.

  I don't know what made me so docile. Perhaps it was a wish to get rid of him so I could find a place to lie down. At any rate, I thrust the sword deep into the crack as he was motioning me to do.

  "There's nothing there," I said, still with the sword above my head.

  "Yes, there is. You just didn't push hard enough. Go on, try again."

  Once more, I obeyed. This time, as I started to withdraw the sword, still having met nothing, I felt the tip of it lifted and held.

  The meaning of the obstructing force came to me instantly. My torpor left me. With both hands on the hilt of the sword, I pulled downward for all I was worth. I suppose the elves who, hiding in the ceiling, had been fishing for my blade with rope nooses, hadn't managed to tighten up on it yet. Or I may have begun to resist sooner than they had thought I would. Anyhow, after a bad minute or two, when it seemed the blade would be jerked out of my hands, I was able to cut downward sharply. The sword came free. There was still a length of rope knotted about the blade.

  I turned to the exile, who was leaning back against the wall with a vacant expression on his face. "Well?" I demanded. "The rope doesn't look much like a poison mouse."

  "They made me do it. They wrenched my arms—it always hurts so—and then they pushed me out in the passage in front of you."

  "Who's 'they'? Elves?"

  "Yes." He was rubbing his shoulders, as if they were hurting him.

  "Why would elves want the sword? They can't stand being near steel."

  "He didn't want it to have," the exile explained. "He just wanted to get it away from you. He's afraid of it."

  "Who is?"

  "The Gray Dwarf." He sounded surprised. "I hope they don't get angry at me because they didn't get the sword." He sighed and swallowed apprehensively.

  I had heard the Gray Dwarf mentioned before, in connection with something he had or knew the location of. It had been a long time ago, before I had found—and again lost—Carol, before I had had to turn back from the water barrier.

  I couldn't remember what I had been told, and it didn't seem to matter. I was getting so torpid that it would have been physically impossible for me to question the exile further. I left him leaning back against the rock, rubbing his shoulders, and walked on very slowly until I found a cleft I could get into. I dropped into torpor as a stone falls into a dark well.

  As usual, I was hungry when my lethargy withdrew. I would smell atter-corn somewhere near; when I put my head out of the crevice, I found a saucer of it on the floor almost under my nose.

  I didn't think the meal had been there when I had crawled into my retreat. That made me wary and, though I wanted more, I scooped up only a few fingersful of the meal before I stopped eating. I felt that danger lay ahead, and I didn't want to be any higher than necessary when I encountered it.

  The passage ascended slowly. It was lighter, too. Chunks and slabs of fox fire had been laid against the walls. And as I went ahead warily, sword ready in my hand, I became aware of a new thing: the stink of rotting flesh was heavy on the air.

  For all its squalid misery, Underearth is a place of few smells. This is partly because the temperature is so low, and partly because any shreds or gobbets of flesh are immediately gobbled up by the elves' parasitical animals. Clean-picked bones have little smell.

  The stink of flesh was mingled with the smell of atter-corn. There must be an abundance of both, for the smell to come to me so strongly. Plenty of meat, and plenty of the intoxicant meal—to elf eyes, the place to which the upward-sloping passage led must seem a sort of land of Cockaigne.

  Somebody was coming toward me, somebody extraordinarily tall.

  The figure drew closer. I saw it was not one creature, but two—a black-clad elf, thicker-set than is usual for its lithe, boneless tribe, and a gray, squat being mounted on the elf's shoulders, Old-Man-of-the-Sea style.

  I held the sword warily, ready for what might come. The elf's head was bowed, but the face of his rider was aglitter with phosphorescent sweat. He seemed to be smiling, and when he got close enough to me to be heard readily, he spoke.

  "Hello," he said. He had a high, rather squeaky voice. "I thought I'd come out to meet you. Welcome to my humble abode!"

  "You're the Gray Dwarf?" I asked.

  "Yes, of course. Keep that thing away from me, can't you? I mean that sword. I don't know how you can stand to carry it."

  "Sorry," I said, but I didn't lower the sword. The Dwarf's hand was resting unostentatiously on a kind of holster on his right hip. It was made of what looked like fur, and it had curved edges. I thought that what it held must have a lunate shape.

  "May I offer you a little refreshment?"
the Dwarf said.

  "Refreshment?" I echoed. My hallucinations were beginning, but I resisted them.

  "Yes. Corn, or perhaps a nice steak?" He leered at me ingratiatingly. I didn't realize it, but he was counting on my having developed the protein hunger which a prolonged diet of atter-corn usually brings. It is one of the excuses for the cannibalism of Otherworld.

  "No, thank you. I'm not hungry."

  "Oh. Well, come and take a look around, anyhow, why don't you?" He kicked his bearer twice in the chest. Never, then or later, did I hear him address a word to one of his shadowy servitors. He used blows or finger signs.

  The elf turned obediently and started back in the direction from which it had come. The Dwarf grinned cordially over his shoulder at me and beckoned. I followed, and we entered the cavern almost side by side.

  I looked about me curiously. It was a largish place, very well lighted, by Underearth standards, by all the pieces of glowing wood placed around the walls. Two or three carcasses, partly dismembered, lay on the floor at my left. From their smallness, I judged them to be elf, not human. There was an enormous heap of atter-corn to the right. And in the middle of the rear wall, directly opposite me, was the Dwarf's nest.

  It was made of mineral concretions, stony icicles, intricately laced together so that they formed a large pod, a sort of bristly egg. There was a hole about two feet above the floor that I supposed the Dwarf used for entering and leaving; through it I could see that the floor of the pod was lined with varicolored patches of fur, mainly black. In a world whose softest bed was rock glazed with ice, the nest looked remarkably soft and attractive—until, that is, I reflected that the patchwork of fur must be the scalps of dead elves. The air stank with the smell of dead flesh.