The Shadow People

by Margaret St. Clair

  The Dwarf hopped down off his bearer's back. He was squat and short-legged, with a powerful frame, especially in the arms and chest. He looked like a gray elf who had been compressed horizontally.

  "Sure you won't have something to eat?" he asked, cocking his head up at me.

  "No."

  "Sit down and rest a while, then." He snapped his fingers, and an elf in the background went to the nest and came back with a small particolored fur rug. The Dwarf squatted down on it and motioned me to sit down by his side. I remembered the probable source of the fur and declined.

  "Sit opposite me, then," he said. He giggled politely. "Tell me, what brings you here?"

  It was an incredible conversation. I was getting more and more hallucinated, though I was resisting it as much as I could; I decided I might as well tell the truth. "I came because you didn't want me to," I said.

  "Oh."

  I looked around. There were a lot of elves around the walls of the cavern, more than I had noticed at first. I began to wonder if I had put my head in a trap. Elves are so incapable of concerted action that I dismissed the idea.

  "What are they doing with the atter-corn?" I asked.

  He pursed up his lips. "Putting it in sacks, so they can distribute it."

  "Why do they bother to distribute it?"

  He didn't answer for a moment. Then, "It's automatic," he said.

  This was no answer, but I was at the moment changing from an anaconda to a badger and couldn't object to it. (Later, when I mulled over the question, I decided that this automatism might be a relic of earlier elf habits, a kind of communal sharing that had managed to survive from a time when the inhabitants of Underearth were more social than they are now. Or it might be that the Dwarf began the distribution to assure himself of a steady supply of elf meat; the saucers are thicker near his lair, and this certainly acts as an attraction. At any rate, as far as my observation is valid, the distribution goes on all through Underearth, and that is a very large stretch.)

  The Dwarf moved a little restlessly on the fur rug. His right hand still rested on the holster that might hold a weapon. "Like a little water?" he asked.

  He seemed determined that I take something. I nodded, feeling my antlers too heavy to nod very hard. There was a feathery fungus—puffball, really—growing up through the pine needles on the forest floor. I looked at it thoughtfully with my agate eyes. Agate. Green stone.

  One of the elves brought water. My hallucinations had stopped for a moment, but the words "green stone" stayed in my mind. I picked up the cup (plastic—they must have stolen it from the Bright World), and put it down again. Abruptly I said, "I was told you have a talisman. It's called the Glainstone."

  "You were told wrong. Don't you like your drink?"

  "I'm not thirsty. Do you know where the Glainstone is?"

  "No, I—watch out!"

  His gesture of warning was not very well done, but involuntarily I looked in the direction he was pointing. Deftly the Dwarf unhooked his weapon from its holster and tossed it overhand at me.

  It was a stone axe, thrown with force. But the sword, only partly by my volition, had gone up to parry the axe even as the Dwarf launched it at me. Stone struck on metal, and the metal won. The axe fell back heavily. The edge grazed the Dwarf's knee.

  It was the tiniest of scratches. But he began to scream and buck about on his fur rug, hissing like a snake. "I knew it! I knew it! Oh, it hurts! Oooh, ooooh! It hurts me so!"

  I could hardly believe that such a minute wound could cause so much pain. "What's the matter?" I said.

  "Poison," he replied bitterly. "On the edge of the axe. I knew the sword would cause trouble for me. Oooh, oooh."

  I refrained from pointing out that the sword wouldn't have bothered him if he hadn't tried to kill me with a poisoned weapon, but I was getting angry. He bumped around on the rug for a moment longer, and then turned abruptly and writhed across the floor like a worm to his nest He pulled himself up to the opening with his strong arms, balanced a moment, and fell onto the fur with a plop.

  "I may die," he said from within the nest in a biting voice. "At the very least, I'll be sick for a long time. It's your fault."

  The sword seemed to thrill in my hand. Well, I was angry myself. I'd spared Hood, over Carol's warning. I wasn't going to let this poisonous cannibal survive.

  I ran to the nest and struck through the opening at him. But he had curled himself against the cushioned sides; the sword was too short to reach him, though an angry humming was running along its blade. And, though I hunted for a chink in the bristling, stony pod, I couldn't find any. He seemed to be safe.

  He was laughing, between spasms of hissing and pain. "Yah! You failed! For all your wonderful sword, you failed! Yah, Yah!" He puckered up his face and spat at me.

  He was an elf; I might not be able to kill him, but he would still dislike proximity to the sword. I held it as close to him as I could get and said, "Do you know where the Glainstone is?"

  "I know where it's said to be," he answered, grinding his teeth.

  "Where?"

  "Do you think I'd tell you?" He laughed nastily. "You can't get in after me with that thing, and I hurt so much already I don't mind having it near me. You've no way of making me tell." He shut his lips with an air of gratified malice, though he opened them occasionally to scream and hiss with pain.

  It was a stalemate. I couldn't get through to kill him, but he was wounded and probably would be harmless for a long time. Finally, I turned to leave the cavern, looking around warily for a possible attack by the elves. They had seemed to ignore the whole episode, and kept on stolidly at their work around the heap of meal.

  I passed between the decaying carcasses and the meal heap. There was no attempt to stop me. The Dwarfs final words were, "Don't be so pleased with yourself! I'll find an answer to Merlin's sword!"

  Chapter Ten

  After my encounter with the Gray Dwarf, I began to descend once more. Faced by his malice, I had had something like purpose and motive; now they were gone, and all I had left was the drive to keep on going down.

  Why did I keep moving? All places were alike: I might as well stay near one saucer, drink from one torrent, be torpid in one cleft. But Otherworld is a restless place. Its inhabitants are always in agitated motion. There may be a periodicity to this. Kirk, who wrote about it, says that there is and affirms that the elves are most restless at the time of the Bright World cross-quarter days. I had no means of measuring time and, in any case, was too absorbed in my ambulant misery to care.

  I was coming to have hallucinations of size as well as of animal identity. If I met an elf—I believe I met some white elves about this time—he might be the size of an ant or tower above me like a tree. Also, the whole cycle seemed to have speeded up, so that the interval from atter-corn high to high was much shorter than it had been.

  I rarely thought of Carol or anything else. The drive to descend had taken over my mental horizon. There was no goal, only a drive. Down, down, and down.

  There may have been incidents to color this long descent. If there were, I no longer remember them. Things blur.

  I still retained some feeling for the sword, my one link with the Bright World. The Dwarf had called it "Merlin's sword". I didn't speculate about what he had meant by this. But I was still resolved that Hood—whoever he might be—should never have the sword. And that resolve may have been one of the components of my drive to descend. Hood would never be able to follow me so far and so deep.

  The fox fires were fewer. I moved in absolute blackness much of the time, not caring what chasm might wait for my next step, if only it were deep enough that Hood could not regain the sword. I think that once or twice the blade did warn me back from an abyss. It is probable.

  The saucers of meal were farther and farther apart. Sometimes I felt I had come to the last one, but there was always a saucer beyond. But the meal in them grew increasingly stale, crusted as if it had not been disturbed for a long
time. Perhaps the elves' rounds rarely brought them this far, perhaps this part of the distribution of the meal had been discontinued for years.

  And still I went down.

  I came at last to the end of everything. I had gone so deep that there was an uncomfortable pressure in my ears. No passages led on down from this place. The skull-shaped hill, glazed as smooth as a bald man's head by its coat of ice, was Otherworld's end. Nothing lay beyond it. This was it.

  The skull rested on its chin, with tufts of blackish moss growing in the eyeholes. The cranium was faintly luminous, glowing like thin, yellowish bone. The hill was so lofty that I had to tip my head far back to see its crest. And yet, by the confusion of size I had experienced for several weeks in my hallucinations, it was simultaneously a rather undersized human skull lying at my feet.

  I contemplated it indifferently. Was the moss in the eyeholes really moss, or was it a bristle of dark forest trees? The air was thick and stale, and I found I was panting for breath. It didn't matter. In a little while I would sit down on the rock floor and begin my waiting. I didn't have to go any farther. Hood would never find me here.

  An ice-louse crawled out of the mouth of the skull. It was flat and gray, shaped like a pear and segmented like a hand grenade. In a sudden surge of revulsion—the last emotion I might have been expected to feel—I swung Merlin's sword at it.

  My foot slipped as I struck, and I overbalanced. I put out my hand to break my fall. Somehow—the sword seemed to jump forward—somehow I cut myself deeply on the left wrist.

  I scrambled to my feet. The cut didn't hurt, though it was bleeding freely. I stuck the sword in the holster I had made for it so many weeks before, and gripped my wrist with the other hand to try to stop the blood.

  The gash kept on bleeding. Blood began to trickle down between my fingers and drip on the floor. It grew to a rivulet, a little stream that ran along the ground and lapped at the edges of the ice-rimmed skull.

  There was a low hissing sound, and then a whitish smoke. The light from the cranium waned. Something strange was happening. My blood was melting the ice on the skull.

  I felt lightheaded and giddy, not so much because I was losing blood as because something heavy was being sloughed off. After a moment, I realized what it was. The atter-corn intoxication in me was ebbing away. Otherworld had been in me, a cold and heavy part of me. Now I was bleeding it out.

  I looked around me like a man wakening from a dream. I stood in a real place, bitter cold, with an ice-glazed hill in front of me. Otherworld was still there, as detestable, as wretched as ever. But its coldness and misery had become external. However much they might still press on me, it was from the outside.

  My wrist was still bleeding. Absently I tore another strip from my shirt and tightened it hard around the cut. A dazzling knowledge had come to me: I could go back to the Bright World. The water barrier would no longer repel me. I could cross it and go back to daylight, to the blessed light of the sun.

  I drew a deep breath. I think I was smiling. The mound before me was a hillock, not a skull. I turned from it, holding the sword once more, to grope my way upward. I felt that Merlin's blade, for the first time since I had found it, was entirely happy in my hand.

  It was a long way up. I had resolved to eat no more of the corn, for fear of being trapped again in the bitter cycle of hallucination, exalted misery, and torpid repose. But the weeks of physical hardships—sunlessness, cold, poisonous food—had worn me. And if I did not eat the reddish meal, what was I to eat?

  The elves seemed to avoid me. If I had found one carrying food spoils from the Bright World, I would certainly have fought him for them. Perhaps the elves read my thoughts and, knowing I was armed with the sword, wisely avoided me.

  I kept going for a long time. I forded streams, dodged waterfalls, trudged the endless corridors of Otherworld. My shoes fell off my feet, which rather surprised me. I didn't think I'd done enough walking to wear them out. But perhaps they hadn't been particularly good shoes.

  Water was always available, and I drank freely. But I knew I was moving more and more slowly. I had stomach cramps and fits of retching. Even the sword was getting too heavy for me.

  I had to stop to rest every few feet. I was sitting under a patch of fox fire, resting, when I realized I was going to have trouble getting up again. I was, in fact, confronted by a bitter choice: I could find a saucer of atter-corn, eat from it, and run the risk of a new addiction. Or I could stay where I was, fasting and getting weaker and weaker. Eventually I would keel over or an elf would kill me. I'd never be able to get back aboveground. And Hood, of course, would get the sword.

  Put that way, there was no real choice. I levered myself up leaning on the sword and wobbled along the passage to the next saucer of meal. I scooped it up in big pinches. It tasted bitter, bitter as gall, and it rasped my throat like fire as it went down.

  I waited. I retched a little, but not enough to bring up the meal I had eaten. Finally, it became plain I wasn't going to have any more hallucinations. I could eat atter-corn.

  I flexed my arms experimentally. Yes, I was feeling stronger. I left the saucer and began to go upward again. My legs felt light and nimble. I'd had the green light. I could get back to Middle Earth.

  All the same, I still had a problem. The corn nourished me, but I began to be vexed by a gnawing protein hunger. When I rested, I was haunted by visions of slabs of beef, puffy omelets, grilled salmon, chicken liver, even lowly lentil soup. After one of these barren orgies, the corn in the saucers tasted bitterer than ever. I found I was gnawing the insides of my lips and swallowing the snippets of flesh with avidity. It was time to do something. I was getting into the more frequented parts of Underearth. I decided to try to rob an elf of what protein he might have brought back from our world.

  I found what seemed a good place to hide, behind a rock at a place where there was a choice of passengers. My stomach was rumbling: I hoped my potential quarry wouldn't be able to hear it. The exile I had encountered so many weeks before had said elves could hear a pin drop.

  I kept sniffing. Atter-corn—was that what the characteristic smell of Underearth was, the gradient I had followed to get here?—came to my nose in bursts of acridity. An elf or two went past the rock where I crouched. And then, from upward, I smelled something good. Protein. Real food.

  I peered out very cautiously. It seemed to be a gray elf, with a gunny sack slung over his shoulder. He was looking about him alertly, as if he expected attack. From time to time he would reach around and put a hand in his bag—elves are as boneless as eels—and draw out something he popped into his mouth. Then he munched.

  When he was quite close, I stepped out in front of him, pointing the sword at his throat. He jumped back, showing the automatic aversion for steel these beings have. I grabbed the sack from him and fumbled in it, my eyes fixed on him. His lips puffed out, and he blubbered noiselessly.

  I found what seemed to be an opened package of hot dogs. I took it out and gave the sack back to the elf. The transaction made me ashamed, and I didn't want anything except the hot dogs.

  Losing the packages must have been a real tragedy in his eyes. He found his tongue abruptly and said, in a rusty, booming voice, "If I had—Glain, you couldn't." It was the only time I ever heard any of the Silent People speak.

  "The Glain?" I asked. "Do you know where it is?"

  He shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together. He might have meant that he didn't know, or that he knew and wouldn't tell.

  I was in no mood for interrogating elves just then. I lowered the sword, and he bounded on past me, ricocheting from wall to wall. I suppose he thought I might change my mind and take the whole sack.

  The hot dogs, though they were a little the worse for wear from having been carried so far in a gunny sack, woke a diapason of flavors in my mouth. I thought I could taste sunlight in them, blue skies, green grass—all the sweetness and savor of Earth. I munched all six of them as I trudged along: never
did tournedos with Bearnaise sauce taste more delicious to a gourmet than those clammy cylinders of protein tasted to me. My stomach, alienated by so much bitterness, sent up waves of gratitude. I felt extraordinarily restored. It seemed to me I could leap over an Alp. I made really good progress from then on.

  No elves came near me. My last contact with the Silent People occurred almost within earshot of the water barrier, when I came on two of them copulating dog style. It was the only time I ever saw elves engaged in sexual activity. They seemed to me younger than the general run of elves, and I got the strong impression—though I couldn't have said from what—that they were both having hallucinations of being of the lion sort.

  As I got abreast of them, the male left the female. Almost before she could straighten herself, he grabbed for her throat. She twisted away from him and ran, in the typical bouncing fashion, with him furiously after her. Neither of them made a sound, and their expressions, both during the copulation and after it, were sullen and morose.

  I was too concerned with crossing the water barrier to speculate about the demographic patterns of the inhabitants of Otherworld. Despite my confidence that I'd be able to cross, I couldn't help feeling anxious. I stepped into the roaring water—much colder than I remembered it from last time—and probed ahead of me with the sword.

  There was no trouble. I moved from shallow spot to shallow spot, with the full cooperation of my legs and no more than the normal resistance of angry water tugging at me. But when I got to the other side, I had to sit down on the rock for a while to rest. Relief had made me weak.

  I was up again in an instant. The Bright World lay before me. I could rest later, when I'd got back.