Gather Darkness

by Fritz Leiber

  Through the narrow, uneven streets hurriedly bobbed the two violet halos, straining toward the beacon-glow of the Sanctuary.

  If only the girl wouldn't walk so slowly! Of course, they could hurry her up—each had an elbow in one of his puffed hands—but somehow Chulian didn't like the idea of hurting her, especially since she was otherwise so docile. After all, that thing of hers was somewhere on the roofs, perhaps following them. At any moment he might look up and see a tiny anthropoid muzzle poked over an edge, outlined against the stars.

  When they got to the Sanctuary, things would be different!

  Lightless doorways, lightless mouths of other streets, marched past them. At the next corner they must turn to the left to avoid the haunted house, Chulian reminded himself.

  But when they got to the turn, the street to the left was walled—stuffed solid—with blackness.

  Not the star-hazed blackness through which they had been passing, but blackness utter and complete, making the rest seem gray.

  Nothing more.

  Chulian looked sideways past the girl at Brother Arolj's face, sickly under the glowing halo, and caught an answering panicky glance.

  In a rush, so they wouldn't be able to flinch, they plunged into the blackness, the girl between them.

  Their halos were extinguished. There was no light whatever.

  As if out of a wall of ink, they scrambled back again, gasping. For one horrid moment Chulian feared they would be trapped in the blackness forever.

  They turned to the right. Blackness filled that street mouth to brimming, too.

  Yet Sharlson Naurya still stood obediently between them. She could have escaped merely by staying in the blackness—they had both let go of her. Of course, she might be afraid of the blackness, too. But Chulian did not think so.

  From the corner of his eye he darted a backward glance. It was as he feared. The blackness had followed them down the street by which they had come.

  The only way open was directly ahead, past the haunted house. Something wanted them to pass the haunted house. But it was that or nothing—before the blackness should decide to encroach still farther and swallow them up.

  That last fear must have occurred simultaneously to Brother Arolj, for they started forward at a panicky trot, fairly dragging their prisoner between them.

  Behind them steadily flowed the wall of blackness, lapping round their heels when they faltered. By the time they reached the little neglected square and the haunted house, they were running.

  Much taller than the other houses it stood, a landmark of desolation. But Chulian only caught a glimpse of its entirety of crazily sagging, strangely slack walls and drooping circular windows, like pouched and leering eyes. For the blackness suddenly closed in from several directions, like a huge sack, cutting off the way ahead, blacking out the stars, driving them across the rubbly ground toward the mouth of the sack and the wrinkled, oval doorway of the house itself.

  There Chulian had his one burst of desperate, fear-inspired courage. He pointed his finger at Naurya.

  "In the name of the Great God, if you don't make it go away, I'll blast you!" he threatened through trembling lips.

  Instantly the blackness swooped inward, closing about them like an envelope, bare inches away, half blotting out their view of each other.

  "I won't! I won't!" Chulian cried out, dropping his hand.

  The blackness retreated somewhat.

  And now Sharlson Naurya finally smiled at him with her lips. She reached out, and before he realized what she was going to do, slapped his chest smartly at a certain spot.

  His inviolability field went limp. His halo winked out. His scarlet robe hung loosely.

  She patted his cheek, as one pats the cheek of a child. His flesh crawled at the gentle touch.

  "Good-by, Little Brother Chulian," she said, and slipped through the sagging doorway into the haunted house.

  The blackness shot back, was not.

  And up from the street Cousin Deth came running.

  "Your prisoner! Where is she?" he demanded curtly of Chulian.

  "Didn't you see it? That awful blackness?" Chulian countered unsteadily.

  Cousin Deth drew back from him. "I wasn't aware you priests were afraid of the dark."

  For a moment Chulian was conscious only that he had been insulted by a mere deacon.

  "She went in there!" he retorted angrily. "And if you're so eager to get her, why don't you go in after her yourself?"

  Cousin Deth turned toward the street.

  "Rouse commoners!" he shouted to someone. "Set a cordon round the house!"

  Then he turned back to Chulian.

  "I shall probably be asked to enter this place tomorrow to cleanse it of evil," he said. "Since you are so desirous of seeing me enter it, your reverence, I will petition that you be made my priestly director, to guide me."

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  Chapter 4

  The hands left Jarles' elbows after a slight, momentary tightening of their grip, which seemed to mean, "Stay there!" He felt the edge of a box or bench against the calves of his legs, but he did not sit down.

  Gradually the faintest suggestion of his surroundings was revealed, like a midnight picture deftly painted by a master artist in brief phosphorescent strokes against a black surface tinged with violet.

  He was in an extensive, very low-ceilinged room. Air currents and the way his footsteps sounded told him that.

  At what seemed the far end of the room, on a low dais, was a kind of chair or throne, faintly glowing, with a squat table in front of it, and on the table something that might have been a huge, old-fashioned book, open. Little creatures of some sort seemed to be playing around the throne, for he could discern a scampering movement close to the floor and hear an indistinct scratching and scuffing—and once or twice a faint plop, as if something suctorial had been pulled away from a flat surface.

  Then one of the creatures sprang up on the throne, squatting there impishly—a tiny, very lean, vaguely monkeylike silhouette.

  What came next sent a dry shiver up Jarles' back and started his scalp pricking. For the creature spoke. Or at least whispers came from the direction of the throne in voices too threadlike and shrill and oddly mumbling to be human—and yet human nevertheless. He could only make out a little here and there.

  "… been tonight, Mysie?"

  "… inside his robe… a Fourth Circle priest… scared… wits."

  "Jill?"

  "… on a visit far away, to tell…."

  "Meg?"

  "… on his chest, as he slept…."

  "And Puss? But I know…."

  "Yes, Dickon."

  The one perched on the throne seemed to be asking, the others to be answering the questions, as if in parody of human beings making reports to a leader or chairman. The last voice had a disturbing familiarity which set Jarles quivering.

  "Who are you?" he called loudly—and with more confidence than he felt. "What do you want of me? Why this mystery?"

  The echoes died hollowly. There was no reply—only a sudden scurrying. In a moment the dais was empty.

  Jarles sat down. If they chose to play this sort of game with him, there was nothing he could do about it—save refuse to be impressed, or at least refuse to show it.

  But what could be the purpose of their game? In an effort to find some clue to his rescuers—and captors—he rehearsed in his mind what had happened since he had stood awaiting death in the Great Square.

  The first section of his memories was clouded by shock. The impression of something solid, semi-transparent, and blackly streaked closing around him. Blinding blue light and a crackling, howling, laughing pandemonium of sound. A nauseating swoop upward and then down again into a black hole that suddenly yawned.

  After that, a brief period of waiting in absolute darkness. Then hands. Hands which eluded him when he sought to catch hold of them. Hands which guided him for an indeterminate distance and then left him in what ca
utious exploration showed to be a small cell. A long period of waiting. Again hands, bringing him here.

  For a long time he peered toward the ghostly dais and throne, until he began to think he could make out other silhouettes, much fainter even than those of the small scampering creatures, so faint that they vanished when he looked at them directly. Larger silhouettes of figures seated midway between him and the violet-tinted blackness of the far wall, though none directly between him and the throne.

  Suddenly his eye was caught by a fleeting smudge of phosphorescence on one of the silhouettes—where the teeth should be. Then brief yellowish tracks in the air, as if made by the waving of fingertips dipped in phosphorescence.

  He looked at his own hand. Each fingernail glowed yellow. The room must be bathed in ultraviolet light. Perhaps the others were wearing some sort of transformer goggles.

  "The Black Man is delayed, Sisters."

  He started violently. Not because the voice—a woman's—was the first undeniably human one he had heard. Not because the words were mysterious and darkly suggestive. But because it was so devilishly akin to one of the shrill, subhuman voices he had heard mumbling earlier. As if this were the voice which the weaker one had been mimicking.

  "Dickon is here. The Black Man cannot be far away."

  Another woman's voice. Another impression of shuddering similarity.

  The first woman: "What work did you do tonight, Sister?"

  The second woman: "I sent Mysie to trouble a Fourth Circle priest—may Sathanas torment him eternally! She crept in his robe and scared him into white fits—if I can believe her. She's such a sweet little liar when her mind is away from mine. Whatever happened, Mysie was famished when she came back. She'd drain me green if I let her. The little glutton!"

  Abruptly his mind grasped the thread linking together all this shivery confusion.

  The Witchcraft of the Dawn Civilization.

  This would be a meeting of witches to report their exploits—a coven meeting. The Black Man—that would be the chief of this group or coven. And those little servant-creatures supposedly suckled on witch's blood, drawn through the witchmark. What were they called? Familiars!

  But he had told the commoners, and he believed it, that there was no Witchcraft, save the debased and harmless remnant which the Hierarchy preserved for its own purposes.

  This seemed debased enough, in a sense, with those bestial little manikins—phantasms of retrograde evolution. But harmless? He did not get that impression.

  He turned again toward the dais, intending to address further demands to the darkness and seek to force an answer.

  But the throne was no longer empty. A dead-black, manlike shape was sitting in it.

  And then a voice from the shape—a silky, steely voice, bubbling with malefic mirth.

  "Your pardon for my delay, Sisters. But tonight I was as busy as a priest. First must I guide the Hands of Sathanas to snatch a renegade priestling from under the very nose of the Great God. He almost sneezed in surprise, Sisters! Next Puss came scampering to tell me that the Hierarchy had seized our Sister Persephone and was conveying her to the Sanctuary. So Dickon and I must float over the roofs and drop down the Black Veil to fuddle her captors and persuade them to escort her to a safe place of refuge."

  The voice was at once attractive and repellent to Jarles. He felt that he would like the man—and hate him!

  "It tickles me, Sisters, now and then to use the priests' science against them. And no doubt our master is grateful to be relieved of a bit of extra work. Do you know the Black Veil, Sisters? One of the little tricks we have developed from the Hierarchy's solidograph. Two lights can make a darkness, Sisters, if they're of the same frequency—interference, it's called. The projector of the Black Veil sends out multiple frequencies which automatically adjust to neutralize all light in the focal region. That's the only real darkness for you, Sisters—one that is born of two conflicting lights!

  "But I monopolize the conversation, while all of you have doubtless as amusing tales to tell. First, though, our reverences to our masters!"

  The Black Man rose, stretching his arms outward and upward in invocation—a batlike shadow against cloudy phosphorescence.

  "To Black Sathanas, Lord of Evil, our eternal allegiance!"

  "To Sathanas, our allegiance," echoed the shadowy ring of witches—a dozen voices at least.

  And with those voices, like a parody of a boys' choir, the shrill falsetto parrotings of the familiars.

  "To Asmodeus, King of the Demons, on earth our master, our lifelong obedience!"

  "To Asmodeus, our obedience." Again that half-chanted response with its piping overtones.

  "To the covens and the Witchcraft, to our sister witches and brother warlocks, both here on Earth and secretly dwelling in heaven, to the little ones, and to the commoners sweating under the Hierarchy's yoke, our loyalty and love!"

  "To the covens, our love."

  "For the Great God, self-styled ruler of the universe, fat and impotent phantom, our laughter and hate!"

  "For the Great God, our hate."

  "For the Hierarchy, his underlings, puffed red parasites, our devices and doom!"

  "For the Hierarchy, our doom!"

  Then the Black Man's voice went low and ominous—a far-carrying, shivery half-whisper.

  "Creep, night, and enshroud the earth! Come, fear, and shake the world!"

  "Gather, darkness!"

  The next moment the Black Man was again reclining in the throne. And now his sardonic voice was more leisurely.

  "Before we proceed to our regular business, there is the matter of new members. Persephone?"

  From just beside him in the darkness, Jarles heard Sharlson Naurya answer.

  He was triply confounded—by her unsuspected close presence, by a realization of what had made the voice of the creature called Puss disturbingly familiar, and by what she went on to say.

  "I propose for membership the former First Circle priest, Armon Jarles! He has proved himself by publicly blaspheming the Great God and daring the Great God's wrath. He should make a cunning and potent warlock."

  "Bring him forward," commanded the Black Man, "first taking from him that which must be taken!"

  A pair of hands gripped each of Jarles' arms. He felt something needle-sharp prick his back deeply. He gasped and floundered forward, struggling.

  "Be not alarmed," called the Black Man, mockingly. "We have what we want—the seed for that which must be grown. Bring him to the altar, Sisters, that he may bow his head to the Book and be baptized by me with his new name—his witch-name—Dis!"

  At that Jarles found his voice.

  "Why should I join with you?"

  A startled silence. Then, close to his ear, Sharlson Naurya's whisper, "Be quiet!" And a sharp pressure from the fingers on that side.

  The warning only stung him on. "What makes you so sure I'll enter your Witchcraft?"

  Again Naurya's whisper, "Where else do you think you can find refuge, you fool!"

  There was a flurry of murmurings, human and subhuman.

  But the Black Man had risen. "Softly, Persephone," he called. "Remember, no one may become witch or warlock save of his own uninfluenced free will. It seems that your recruit has certain reluctances. Let him tell us about them."

  "First tell me what you would expect of me," Jarles replied.

  The Black Man's voice was faintly edged with derision. "I thought you had guessed. To abjure the Great God. To give yourself, body and soul, into the service of Sathanas. To sign your name in his book by touching your forehead to it, so that it will receive the individual and unique pattern of your thought waves, which cannot be counterfeited. To submit to certain other formalities."

  "Not enough!" retorted Jarles. "I might be entering the Hierarchy, in view of all this supernatural mummery! What are the aims of this organization, whose slave you ask me to become?"

  "Not ask, Armon Jarles," said the Black Man. "And not a slave—only a
free man who has contracted certain obligations. As for our aims—you heard our ritual. Overthrow of the Great God and his Hierarchy!"

  Jarles' bitter reply started another flurry of murmurs.

  "In order that you may raise up your own degraded superstitions to be the decalogue of a new Hierarchy, and tyrannize over the world in your turn? The scientists of the Golden Age had good aims, too, but they forgot them as soon as they tasted power. For that matter, how do you know that you yourselves are not the dupes of the Hierarchy? True, you rescued me. But the methods of the Hierarchy are devious. They let me speak to the commoners when they could easily have silenced me. Perhaps they also let me be rescued, for some indecipherable purpose."

  "I do not quite know how to satisfy you. Armon Jarles—if you can be satisfied," replied the Black Man with amused perplexity. "Regarding the ultimate intentions of the Witchcraft, when and if the Hierarchy is overthrown—that involves matters of high policy which I may not discuss.

  "But, Armon Jarles, if there is anything within reason which I can do to satisfy you of our purposes, name it!"

  "There is!" Jarles declared hotly, disregarding the imperative pressure of Naurya's fingers. "If you are sincere in your opposition to the Hierarchy and your love of the commoners, drop all this mummery and deception! Don't add to the commoners' superstitions. Can't you see that their ignorance is at the root of everything? Tell them the truth! Rouse them against the Hierarchy!"

  "And suffer the consequences?" the Black Man mocked. "Have you forgotten what almost happened to you in the Great Square—and how the commoners took your words?"

  "I ask a favor," interjected Sharlson Naurya hurriedly. "This man is a thick-headed idealist. He is suspicious and fault-finding by nature. Make him a warlock by force! He'll come around to our way of seeing as soon as he's had time to think things over."

  "No, Persephone. I am afraid we cannot make an exception—even for a thick-headed idealist."

  "Lock him up safely, then, until he sees the light!"

  "Nor, Persephone, may we use force—whether compulsion or restraint. Though I confess there are times when I itch to!" And he laughed.