Eena stirred languidly. Her expression mimicked a wolfish grin. Hot blood surged into Joel’s cheeks. He caught up a dressing gown and flung it to her;
“Put it on,” he ordered.
Eena sobered, regarded the garment, and swung her level glance back to the man.
“Haven’t you ever seen clothes before?” he asked sarcastically. He crossed over and adjusted the robe hastily about her shoulders. “Suppose one of the neighbors came by?”
The possibility was not likely, he knew. He said things simply to cover up his own shock and embarrassment. He sat down heavily in a leather club chair and stared at her. Eena stared back with friendly indifference.
Joel’s mind boiled with fantastic questions. The girl remained silent. Only her eyes spoke, and their meaning was not quite clear to the beleaguered man.
He gave up trying to draw a word from her. Was she a deaf-mute? Who was she? Why was she here? He recalled stories he had heard of white savages; but those were found only in the wilds of the South American jungle, or in some hidden Shangri-La of Tibet. He tried to place her racial type, and was unsuccessful. There was something familiar about the shape and look of her eyes, but what it was eluded him.
He knew only that she was very beautiful, that he wanted her as he had never wanted another human being before. He could not know that Eena was not quite human.
“I can’t sit here all night, just looking at you,” he said at last. He grinned with wry, humor. “It’s an idea, though, at that!” He stood up. “Lady, if you will consent to occupy the guest room tonight, the hotel can accommodate you.”
Joel held out his hand to help her rise. Eena moved like a flash, shaking off the encumbering dressing gown. She paused at the door and smiled at him. The lamplight made molten gold of her body, a tawny silhouette against the moon-silvered outdoors.
Then she was gone, like a wolf goes, on swift, silent pads.
And with her, the warmth went from the cabin. Joel felt a chill, followed by a helpless feeling of immeasurable loss.
* * * *
In the cold, gray light of dawn, the cabin shivered to a thunderous knocking. Joel tumbled from bed, threw on a dressing gown, and greeted Pete Martin at the door. Martin was backed by half a dozen husky homesteaders.
“Thought I’d let you know we’re headin’ along the wolf-trail.”
Joel grumpily asserted the idea was a fine one, he was glad to know it, and now would they go away and let him sleep?
“We wouldn’t have stopped,” Martin apologized, “except we wondered about your visitor last night.”
Joel’s jaw cracked in the middle of a yawn. He swallowed hard and flushed blackly.
“Visitor? What visitor?” he hedged.
The homesteader crooked a finger, and Joel followed out upon the porch. Martin pointed out the wolf-tracks that crossed and re-crossed the yard.
“Those are the tracks of your white bitch, Joel. She came home last night. Didn’t see her, did you?”
Joel closed his eyes. He felt a swimming sensation in his head.
“No. No, I didn’t see her.” Fantastically, he thought of the visitor he had seen, and thought of her body mutilated and torn by sharp wolf-fangs. He shuddered.
The homesteader shrugged. “Keep a lookout for her, Joel. She’ll be back again…if we don’t git her first!”
He gestured to his companions, and they filed off into the forest. Joel stood alone, looking down at the tracks…at one track that had gone unnoticed by the others—the single print of a woman’s shapely foot.
* * * *
Joel Cameron was pleased with his own industry. He finished proofreading the final chapter of his book, gathered the manuscript together, and wrapped it for shipment. There, it was off his mind.
He took the manuscript down to the village post office, collected a few necessary supplies. Toward sunset, he legged into his car and chugged away up the county road toward home.
Night shadows fell swiftly. The sky turned smoky, then sequined. The moon came up full over the roof of the forest.
Joel turned into the ruts that meandered through the woods, to his cabin. Wobbling headlamps bored a tunnel through the gloom. The night was eerily still throughout the pine woods. Joel slewed the machine around a bumpy turn. The wolf-woman stood starkly illumined in the glare of the headlights.
Joel jammed a foot on the brakes. He scrambled from his seat, calling. Eena flashed into the shadows. After two minutes struggle with the whipping underbrush, Joel gave up and went back to his car.
He was suddenly lonesome and despondent. He ground the coupé through the final furlong and killed the motor in front of the cabin.
Eena sat quietly upon the porch.
Even with the lights off, Joel could see her there. Her form was tawny gold in the moonlight. Her hair was a flashing, silver aura enhaloing her laughing face.
Joel started toward her, thought better of it, and sat on the running-board. Eena was less than ten feet away. Joel said nothing. Eena answered in kind.
After a while, Joel began to talk to her, softly. He mused and wondered aloud, letting his thoughts drift with the association of his words. Eena cocked her head attentively. She appeared to be listening, but he knew that his words held no meaning far her.
What language would serve him? What syllables would convey to her knowledge of the tumultuous beating in his breast her simple presence evoked?
He moved toward her, murmuring softly. He took the firm, golden flesh of her arm in his grasp. Eena looked up into Joel’s strong, kindly face. Her eyes spoke the thought her tongue could not.
Joel drew her gently to her feet. She swayed, and he caught her to him. Her lips were as tender and responsive as he had dreamed they would be. He took them, hungrily…
* * * *
Eena prowled the forest resentfully. She hated to be hunted. Twice now, the coming of the full moon had brought her only pangs of frustration. The hunters who swarmed in the woods prevented her going to the man she loved.
The pine woods shimmered in the heat of midsummer. Hunters from-all over the state, attracted by the enormous price on Eena’s hide, came to blunder among the hills. When they went away, defeated, others came instead of them.
Eena had no rest. She was hounded and harried. By night, the forest twinkled with campfires.
Once, a hunter reckless enough to hunt alone, had cornered the she-wolf. Braving the fire of this weapon, Eena attacked and ripped the man to shreds of bloody ruin. The price on Eena’s life doubled overnight.
Once, too, she had been trapped by a horde of hunters and their dogs at the lip of a precipice, overlooking Wolf Lake. The she-wolf leaped, and swam to safety through a hail of lead. The rock thereafter was called Wolf Leap and Eena’s character became legendary.
The swelling moon nightly presaged the approach of the change. Eena longed for it, longed for the pleasure of her human form and gladly paid with the pangs of her return to the wolf. All the savage ferocity of her wolf nature rebelled at the restriction the presence of hunters imposed. Then cunning asserted itself.
Joel’s cabin lay westward. Eena turned her pointed muzzle into, the east. On silent pads she fled through the silver and dross of the moonlit forest. At dawn, she rested.
Facing northward, she took up her way for a number of hours; then she turned into the west.
It was not easy running. The way led up steep mountainsides, down precipitous declivities. She swam mountain torrents, crossed ravines on fallen pines. When she hungered, she pulled down a white-tailed deer and gorged on the kill.
In mid-afternoon, Eena made her way southward. She had completely encircled the hunters that swarmed in the forest.
The white wolf came at last into familiar territory at the west end of the lake. She slackened h
er pace, although a frantic urge to hurry assailed her. She knew the limitations of her human form, and with moon-rise tonight the Change would be visited upon her. She wanted to be close, by the cabin when that came to pass.
She had slightly more than an hour to span the miles that yet lay between.
Eena skulked along in the shadowy underbrush, pausing at intervals to scent for danger. She soon paralleled the lakeshore, a hurrying white wraith in the green-gray shadows of the forest. The wind brought a smell of dampness off the lake, a formless breath of stale fishiness. The pines cast long shadows upon the water. The sky darkened in the east.
A rifle cracked. The whistling missile spent itself far out over the lake, and Eena gathered her muscles with the instant response of spring steel and lunged ahead. A man yelled, and dogs began to bark frantically. Eena doubled away from the lake, putting on a fresh burst of speed…
The wind had betrayed her. It had come to her nostrils from the sterile face of the water, while her danger lay on the other hand.
A rifle spat livid flame in the green gloom ahead. Eena leaped, snarling and snapping at the trenchant pain in her shoulder. Spurting blood reddened her muzzle, stained the snowy pelt of her side. Other rifles cracked all around her. Rifle balls whined nastily through the woods. The yelping of dogs was bedlam.
The white wolf recovered her stride in spite of her searing wound. She ran with desperation and terror hounding her, her goal an idea interlocked with the memory of a kindly face and a soothing voice.
Eena fled for the protection of the one being in all the forest whom she loved, the one man among men who loved her.
Joel Cameron heard the flat racketing of gunfire, the distant shouting and yelping. A strange uneasiness held him motionless, listening. He caught up his rifle and hurried to the door.
The noise swelled louder by the moment. Twilight pressed down upon the forest, swirled into the clearing about the cabin. Joel saw the men, then flitting silhouettes between the pines, limned against the tarnished silver of the lake. The forest trembled with the belling of the dog-pack.
His ears caught another sound, nearer…more terrifying. He heard the swift whisper of racing pads, the sound of a heavy body hurtling through the undergrowth.
The enormous, pale form of the wolf leaped from the forest edge, charged relentlessly toward him. A mental gong sounded in the man’s clamoring brain. Joel’s rifle snapped automatically into the hollow of his shoulder. The report ripped echoes from the hills.
The murderous shock of the ball lifted the white wolf, flung her with bleeding breast back upon her haunches. Gathering the last atom of her strength, Eena lunged and fell kicking at Joe Cameron’s feet.
The man sighted carefully for the mercy shot that would send a bullet crashing into Eena’s brain. The moon came up full over the shoulder of the mountain, bridged the lake with its golden track, thrust a questing beam through a gap in the pines.
The effulgent glow caressed Eena’s wolf-form. Eena died with the ecstasy of the Change soothing the agony of her hurts.
Joel stared, uncomprehending. The rifle fell from his nerveless grip. Slowly, his knees buckled. He dropped beside the huddled girl-shape, gathered limp, tawny shoulders against his chest and buried his face in the silver cloud of her hair.
He was holding her like that when the hunters burst into the moonlit clearing. He did not look up, even when they went silently away.
THE GREEN THING
By Manly Banister (as Gregg Powers)
Originally published in The Nekromantikon, 1950.
Jonathan Crane saw out of the corner of his eye the long, skinny green arms snatch at him from the dark cave of a doorway. He leaped aside, just in time, and paused, shaking.
No use looking in the doorway now, he knew. The green thing was gone. It was always gone, whenever he looked.
He cast a wary glance around him. The street was dimly lit and a cold fog wreathed smoke-like tendrils around the streetlamps, making of each a glowing silver cocoon. Ahead, two men slouched along…obviously gunmen, he thought.
He crossed over and continued his way on the other side of the street, circumspectly avoiding pools of shadow. He reached his hotel without further incident although once or twice he had thought he detected a stirring in the shrubbery that lined the way, as if someone—some thing—paced him relentlessly.
Once in his room, he would be safe. His room was the only safety Jonathan Crane knew.
He wondered how civilized men could live in the world that lay beyond the threshold of his room. It was a world of nightmare terrors, of haunting grues, of disembodied nothingnesses that suddenly became something when your back was turned, of lurking gunmen, thieves, footpads, stranglers.
He never went out unless he had to. It had been thoughtless of him to run out of cigarettes, necessitating a trip to the drugstore a block down the street. For anything else, Jonathan would not have stirred from his room. Cigarettes he must have. He smoked four packs a day.
The creaking elevator left him at his floor, and he inserted the key in his lock with shaking fingers. The door opened, and a pair of long, green arms snatched out of the darkness at him.
Jonathan Crane ran screaming.
* * * *
“Kind of a quiet guy, usually,” the room clerk mumbled to the policeman. “Don’t know whether he drinks or hits the hop.” He made circles with his finger against his temple. “Ran down six flights hollering about a skinny green thing in his room.”
The officer pursed his lips and nodded. He glanced at Jonathan huddled in a broken down leather chair. Crane shook spasmodically.
“Sure, ye’ll be wantin’ to go back up to yer room now, mister,” the officer said soothingly. “Everything’s a-goin’ to be okay.”
Jonathan Crane made a strangling sound.
The cop turned to the room clerk.
“I don’t think he’ll give us any more trouble. Take him back up to his room. You might—er—” he winked broadly, “chase out the ‘green thing’ first.”
Crane looked up eagerly.
“Would you? If you only would!”
“Sure,” said the room clerk kindly. “C’mon, Mister Crane. I’ll rout him out and you can go to bed safe and sound. How’s that?”
Crane got up shakily. He thanked the police officer and followed the room clerk into the elevator.
The room blazed with light.
“See?” said the clerk. “The blinkin’ thing’s gone. Nothin’ under the bed. Nothin’ in the closet. Nothin’ in the bath ’cept what belongs there. Okay, Mister Crane?”
Crane pressed a dollar into the expressively outstretched hand.
“Thanks,” he said tiredly. “Thanks…a lot.”
He sat on the edge of the bed after the clerk had gone, scanning the room minutely.
Was the thing really gone? Or was it right here in the room with him, invisible. How had it got into his room in the first place? It had never got into his room before.
He slept poorly the remainder of the night.
* * * *
In the morning, a knock on his door aroused him. The man in the hall was a stranger, spare of build, efficiently professional looking. He tendered a card.
“Dr. Averill Medas, Psychiatrist,” Crane read. “You can’t come in.”
“Of course not,” said Medas pleasantly, “I am a long skinny green thing, waiting to snatch you right out of your overcoat.”
Crane shrank back, then straightened. He looked the man in the eye.
“You are not. Somebody sent you here. You think I’m crazy.”
“Certainly not,” Medas returned. “I am a friend of Officer Flannery. Remember Officer Flannery—the policeman on this beat?”
“He told you I was crazy,” said Jonathan Crane.
<
br /> Dr. Medas pursed thin lips.
“Let us be frank, Mr. Crane. I am from police headquarters. You have been having trouble. I am here to help you. But I can’t do anything here in the hall. Officer Flannery recommended that I look into your case. When you feel that you need my help, please come in to see me. A professional address is on that card.”
He turned and walked away.
Crane closed the door and remained a long time, leaning against it in thoughtful silence.
He had accepted his construction of the world too long to disbelieve in it. He knew all about the thieves, murderers and footpads that lurked, he knew all about the spirits, demons, and monsters, and the long, skinny green thing that pursued him relentlessly, that waited—just waited—for him to relax his guard.
Medas knew, too. Why had he said, “Snatch you out of your overcoat? Crane knew that once those skinny, horribly knobby green hands closed upon his flesh, he would be snatched right out of his overcoat, out of his suit and shoes and underwear, and the clothes would be left lying there, and he would be…someplace else.
He pondered a good deal that day, and smoked a great many cigarettes. Could he be crazy…too?
* * * *
Jonathan Crane wrote things and sent them away to magazines. Sometimes the magazines bought the things he wrote. More often they did not. The article he had written about the green thing, for instance. It was written in truthful, straightforward style. Not an editor would touch it. Jonathan had come to believe that the editors were in league with the green thing. Naturally they would not want the public to know about it.
He had done scarcely a tap of work all day long. He read through his article on the green thing three times and laid it aside very thoughtfully. The day clerk had been kind enough to get cigarettes for him, and he had called the restaurant downstairs to send up his dinner. It was just after seven.
There came a knock at his door. That must be the boy with his tray, he thought. He opened the door quickly, and a pair of long, skinny green arms snatched at him.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 21
