Loama came up suddenly from below and pressed against his side.
“They mean so much to you, don’t they?” she said. “Tell me about them.”
Her presence brought realization of his plight, and he was silent for a moment of hopeless despair.
“The big one,” he said at last, “carries airplanes. They fly.”
“They are fighting the ships over yonder?”
“Yes. The smaller ships circling about are destroyers.”
“Destroyers? What do they destroy?”
“Submarines mostly. Submarines travel under water.”
“Like the one following us?”
Evest became quickly alert. “Is there a submarine following us?”
“There is a ship which travels under the water. I swam around it once. It is not so big as these others.”
“Are you sure?” he asked suspiciously.
“Oh, yes. It had a kind of house in the middle. The house has a big red spot on it. Is that some kind of sign?”
Evest threshed to a halt. If this were true…he knew it was true by the manner in which she answered his questions. How else could she describe a Jap submarine, unless she had seen one?
“I must destroy that submarine,” he told her grimly. “If I do not, they will destroy my friends on the ships.”
Alarm suffused Loama’s rounded features.
“No, no, Blaine. It—it looked wicked. Let the destroyers destroy it.”
“They would in a minute,” he said, “if they knew it was near. But they don’t, and it will destroy my friends, and perhaps slip away unharmed. Show me this submarine.”
Strange as Evest’s emotion was to her, she seemed to understand. Somehow, this man’s friends meant more to him than she did—or his own life and safety. She acquiesced in silence.
Evest gained evidence that the enemy force was in flight by the fact that the convoy had straightened out and was steaming on toward Sanan. Fortunately for the crew of the lurking submarine, the convoy was a slow-moving one. The undersea raider skulked along, biding its time. Snaking through the blue-green sea, two grim, gray shapes bore alongside, she remaining due to a queer sense of loyalty which he had somehow imparted to her, he vainly searching for some means of interrupting the submarine’s progress.
The bloated hull commenced to rise past them, and they followed it up. The beat of the screw idled and stopped. The submarine poked its periscope above the surface.
Inside, a wizened yellow commander scanned the surface, barked stuttering syllables that were echoed and re-echoed the length of the vessel. Something thumped inside the iron hull, and a moment later the submarine rocked as it vomited an eighteen-foot torpedo in a cloud of compressed air.
Hate, rage and helplessness welled up in Evest in a blinding, agonized cloud. He flung himself against the steel conning tower, struck with a bruising jar and bounced away. The enemy began to submerge.
* * * *
On the surface, the huge carrier turned aside, and the bubbling wake of the torpedo passed ahead, a complete miss. Instantly the entire convoy snapped to alertness. Destroyers belched black smoke and swept down upon the point of origin.
Far below, Evest felt the numbing concussion of a depth bomb that exploded a quarter of a mile away.
The submarine turned its nose aside and down, diving for safety. Close to the bottom, it would level off, and slip quietly away while the destroyers fruitlessly zigzagged above. Evest had only a split-instant to decide what to do. He jammed the diving fins with his body.
The steel fins began to level off, bit deep into his flesh. Hot streams of agony laced through him. In another moment the nose struck bottom, drove down hard. The Jap commander lost his head. Engines spun full speed astern. The violent beat of propellers was picked up by the listening “ears” of a destroyer.
Evest had known what he was doing. It was the kind of decision a Marine always makes. With the end only seconds away, Loama clung to him.
“Go,” he panted. “Go.”
From this man she had learned too well the lesson of loyalty. She still struggled to loosen him as a dark, can-like object sank down upon them. A destroyer’s screws roared overhead and dwindled.
A foaming geyser shot up astern of the destroyer, splashed back into the sea. Black upon the tossing water, oil came up and made a slick, shiny patch. The destroyer spun about and came back. A seaman shouted suddenly and leaned over the rail. Another followed his gaze with curious glance.
“What’s up, Mac?”
“Funny thing,” grunted the sailor. “I thought I saw a couple of naked bodies, a woman and a white man. Just a couple of dead sharks, though, that got blasted by the same can that got the Japs. Ain’t it funny how you sometimes think you see somethin’, and it’s really somethin’ else?”
SIX FLIGHTS TO TERROR
Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1946.
The building was known in the city as the Heathcliff. No one could tell, without consulting the records, just how long it had been empty. It stood six stories above a corner lot, and for a couple of generations had frowned down upon the ebb and flow of city traffic at the cross-street. Its red brick facing, once grand, was weathered now; sandstone cornices, copings, and window-sills were chipped and eroded by the elements, crusted with an accumulation of pigeon-droppings.
Roman-arched windows stared blindly with grimed panes. The corner was semi-cylindrical, topped with an angle-tower. Its bizarre style of Romanesque architecture made of the Heathcliff an alien thing, as though it had been lifted bodily and transported here from its haunted place deep in a mysterious part of Europe.
Clem Lewis hated the building. It was a dead thing, and dead things should be buried. He hated it, too, because whenever he lifted his eyes from his work, it was there, cater-corner across the street, immense, brooding, somber, and its many-windowed stare challenged his own with a sullen and unspeakable hastiness.
In Clem’s mind, the Heathcliff had assumed a personality; rather the building had impressed its personality upon Clem’s consciousness. There were dozens of buildings in the city he could look at and admire. There were hundreds he could scorn for meanness. There was one he could hate for the inimical life he fancied pulsed in its weathered structure.
Not that Clem Lewis believed the building lived. Not at first; Clem didn’t have that much imagination. But it seemed to him that a spirit of malignance permeated the gloomy pile, reached across the street between them, and locked his uplifted glance in a silent struggle of will. He was repelled by it.
A glance at that somber facade produced a response that was almost irresistible, an elemental urge that appealed to the baseness of his soul, to the part of him that could forswear light and reason and could grovel abjectly with fear of something unknown. The surface of his mind rejected the urge. The deep, murky coils of his subconscious responded to the eldritch call of the building as a violin string responds to the rasp of the fiddler’s bow.
“Weird old pile of bricks,” Clem one day told the office at large. “It ought to be torn down.”
He fell silent from the sudden thrill that shot through him. Did the thought delight him? Or was the thrill a warning, an acknowledgment that he felt the subtly expressed resentment of a thing, an entity, that could read his thoughts?
Clem’s attitude toward the building did not really congeal into a concrete feeling of loathing until the night he met Ann Summers. He didn’t know that was her name at the time. He found it out later. She plummeted into his arms out of the lobby of the Heathcliff, a part of the building still in occasional use. She struck him with such hurried force he had to fling his arms about her to keep them both from tumbling to the sidewalk.
It was as late as ten o’clock, and the wan shine of the street lamps made glittering highlights
on the rain-wet street, piled moist shadows in the roman-arched entrance to the Heathcliff. He saw her face in this light, pale and strained-looking beneath its essential prettiness. Her large, dark eyes were opened wide, fixed with an expression of terror that was familiar to his experience. And while he held her momentarily she clutched tiny, white hands at the sleeves of his topcoat, and her knuckles stood out whiter still than the flesh around them. The drizzling rain moistened chestnut curls, gathered in a damp film upon her fear-grayed cheeks and pertly turned up nose. It stood in glistening beads upon the little red felt hat she wore. Clem caught his breath first.
“Uh, I beg your pardon, miss.”
The girl drew back at the sound of his voice. She still clutched the topcoat, and her arms began to shake while her eyes searched his face and the fear slowly went out of them.
“You’re cold,” he said for lack of anything better to say.
She cast a quick, still-frightened glance into the yellow-lit lobby of the Heathcliff, looked back into his face and forced a pallid smile.
“No. I—I’m sorry I bumped you. I wasn’t looking.”
She made as if to draw away, but he held her.
“Something is wrong,” he said flatly. “You came dashing out of that place like a league of devils was after you. Maybe you need the police?”
She laughed shakily. “No…certainly not the police! They might arrest me…for trespassing!” She took a quick breath and released it with a flutterly sigh. “I’m being silly. You’ll never forgive me. Now, let me go, please.”
Clem let her go. She walked unsteadily a few steps, then seemed to gather assurance in her pace and continued rapidly, high heels tap-tapping on the pavement. The wind whispered softly along the weathered facade of the ancient building. The city stirred and grumbled around him in nocturnal passivity. He shrugged and continued his way, thinking of the dismal structure and of the strangely beautiful young woman it had expelled into his arms.
He waited at the next corner for a street car. When one came along, he found that, for no accountable reason, he was shaking. He was still shaking twenty minutes later, when he let himself into his darkened apartment.
A couple of slugs of whiskey claimed him sufficiently for a shower and a try at sleep. He dreamed. He dreamed the girl again came flying out of the repulsive maw of the building into his arms. He held her, held her tightly against an insidious force that pulled and worried at her, tried to drag her back into hideous darkness fraught with a pulsing menace of unguessable horrors.
He awoke with a start, pajamas sweat-soaked, and got shakily out of bed. Before he could twist the lamp and shed comforting light upon the room, his glance strayed to the pale oblong of the window. His chest tightened with foreboding. Something was out there—something he had to see. He went to the window and stared…and reeled…and he could not stop staring. The space across the street, usually occupied by a row of small bungalows, bulked now with black shadow, a gruesomely distorted shape that fanned upward against the stars in a clearing sky…a faint fantasmic illusion that bore the unmistakable outlines of the Heathcliff building.
As Clem Lewis stared, eyes frozen with terror in the pallid mask of his face, the building stared back, grim, many-eyed, eerie and threatening.
The air whistled from Clem’s lungs, and he staggered back, thrusting himself away from the sight. But he had to look. He dragged his eyes around in their sockets. The light of a crescent moon glittered on the damp roofs of a row of neat little bungalows…
* * * *
The office staff whispered behind Clem’s back. They talked about his service in the war, and I wondered if it had affected him. He’s so strange. He’s so nervous, do you suppose he’s got combat fatigue, or whatever it is veterans of the combat zone are supposed to have? Clem needs a rest. Maybe he went back to work too soon, after he got out of the service.
The whispers reached the main office. Job Mortenson, general manager, had Clem in his office and off-hand gave him a week’s vacation.
“You’re working too hard,” he said in a kindly tone, “and not getting enough sleep. Get away from the city. Spend a week in the country and rest up. The company can spare you right now, and your pay will go on as if you were here.”
Clem was tempted to refuse. But you didn’t refuse a week’s vacation with pay. And you didn’t tell the boss you weren’t overworking, even when you had hardly enough work to keep you busy; certainly not enough to keep your mind from gnawing at the dreadful startling knowledge that you had a building following you!
Was his mind slipping, Clem wondered? He remembered men carried screaming from the battlefield, minds more horribly fissured and bleeding than their bodies could be and live. For a week now, the Heathcliff building had mercilessly stalked him. At least once each night it positioned itself across the street from his apartment and watched him, called to him through the tangled communication maze of his subconscious until he responded by going to the window and reveling in horror at the sight.
Once he had dressed hurriedly and bolted from the illusion. Down the street was an all-night hamburger stand, and he had closed himself within its steamy warmth and tried to calm his shaking nerves with hot, black coffee. And while he sipped at the thick lip of the mug, the building had searched him out. Looking out through the misted windows, he saw it there across the street, looking in upon him with its many-windowed gaze.
He was never alone any more. The building always pursued him. He could neither avoid it nor leave it behind. Going away from the city might bring relief. Where should he go? He closed his mind on the thought. He dared not think the name of the place that sprang to his mind. The building would read his mind and follow him there.
He packed, called a taxi, and directed the driver upon a roundabout course toward the station.
He met her again there…lovely, frightened Ann Summers. He looked at her and recognition was swift. She stood out from the crowd of shuffling, hurrying travelers. She crouched, rather than sat, in the waiting room seat, and her white-knuckled hand was clenched tightly on the stub of a railroad ticket. A small bag rested on the floor at her feet. He dropped into the seat beside her with the familiarity of an old acquaintance.
“We meet again,” he said, with an attempt at lightness.
Dark, liquid eyes searched his face, glimmered, and the light went out.
“I don’t know you,” she said stolidly.
“Come now,” he said shrugging. “We’re both running from the same thing. Why shouldn’t we run together?” He noticed shrewdly her sudden start of fright. “Does it follow you, too?” he asked.
“I don’t—don’t know what you mean,” her tone was dry, thick. She darted quick glances about, as if seeking an exit, then her eyes came back to his face. There was resignation in her expression. “You know all about it,” she said tonelessly.
He kicked his suitcase. “I don’t think we can run away from it, either,” he confessed. “Wherever we go, that damned building will hound us out. It does follow you, doesn’t it?”
“I—oh, yes! You couldn’t know, unless…”
“Unless it follows me, too,” he finished for her. “It does. And unless we’re both crazy, it’s more than I can understand. Meeting you here has given me a better idea than running away.”
Her eyes grew large with hope.
“Suppose you cash in your ticket and let me take you home,” he suggested. “Well stick it out…together.”
She stiffened momentarily, then relaxed and nodded pitifully. He said no more, even after she got a refund on her ticket and came back, and he took her to a cab, and the cab took them to the address she gave. “Will you come up?” she asked shyly.
Clem looked down at his suitcase.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You haven’t told me your name,”
she reminded him.
He told her, and learned what she was called.
“You need a good sleep,” he said. “Don’t look out the window tonight, y’hear?”
She shuddered. He forced a grin.
“Chin up. I’ll be around tomorrow evening…early. We’ll do the town. Promise you won’t try to run out on me?”
“If I do,” she smiled sadly, “I’m afraid it—it will bring me back!”
He waved to her as the cab drove away. She looked little and alone standing beside her bag on the pavement.
So he knew her name and he knew her fear. The fear was real. It was his own fear. Not madness. Malignance. The evil life of the building was something beyond his understanding. One is so helpless in the face of a thing one does not and can not understand. To whom could he go for an explanation? Nobody. They would call him mad. Where could he run? No place. The monster would seek him out. What could he do? Stay and fight! How? That was his problem.
* * * *
They had seen a show and had a drink at El Kasbah. He took her home in a cab. He was only going to stay a minute. He was confident everything would be all right. He could not know that the building was…jealous.
Ann’s compartment was small and neat, like herself. You could see that at one time or another she had relegated most of the landlord’s furniture to the basement or to other, less fortunate apartments. The tastefully arranged furnishings reflected her own temperament and character. Clem settled comfortably in a lounge chair. Ann mixed cocktails in the diminutive kitchen, chatted brightly with him through the open door. She brought him the mixed drink.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, lending an ear to the clink of ice in the glass.
Her expression became drawn. All evening she had been trying to be gay, trying to forget the incredible onus of their lives. There was a genuine attraction between these two. The evening’s association had deepened the hold each had upon the other’s feelings. They both knew it.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 8
