by Brian Lumley
`I'm listening,' said de Marigny eagerly. 'Whatever it is, it has to be better than groping in the dark. Just keep talking, and believe me I won't miss a word.'
`Very well,' said Crow. 'First, there are places you can try looking in Earth's dreamlands. Now we both know a little about the dreamlands but we're not expert dreamers, so don't go jumping to any wrong conclusions. It's just a place to start. Then there's — ' He paused, looked startled, grasped de Marigny's hand and held it tightly. For a moment his outline wavered, and at the same time his grip on de Marigny's hand seemed gentle as a girl's, but then he firmed up strong again.
`Titus, I — de Marigny was alarmed.
The warning I told you about,' Crow cut him off. We only have a minute now. So listen: back in Theem'hdra at the dawn of all Earthly civilization, there was a wizard called Exior K'mool. He, too, might know something — if you can find him. And finally —'
The light in the clock was pulsing faster now, and its colour was changing through all the shades of purple to a strange foxfire blue. Crow wavered again, grew wispy as smoke; tried to grab de Marigny and hang onto him. His hands went right through; de Marigny's and Silberhutte's, too, where they tried to hold fast to their old friend. And now, at the last, Crow's voice was thin as a reed:
` — Finally there's a cloud of luminous gas out beyond the Red Medusa Nebula,' he said, as from a million miles away; but on the last word his voice grew fainter still and petered out altogether.
`I know it!' de Marigny cried. `It has intelligence. It's fleeing from the Hounds of Tindalos
Crow was still mouthing something but the words were lost. Suddenly he seemed snatched up, whirled away. Pin-wheeling down a whirlpool of throbbing blue light, he grew small in a moment. But before he vanished completely, his voice came back one last time:
`But if you know that much, maybe you'd have discovered the rest, too. That's good! I don't feel so bad ... about . it ... now ...'
`About what?' de Marigny frantically called after him, but only echoes came back. Titus Crow had gone, drawn back on Kthanid's Great Thought to Elysia.
Gone too the whirlpool of blue foxfire, and the interior of the time-clock pulsed purple as before ...
6 Sssss!
Named after a creature of incalculable evil, nevertheless the Red Medusa Nebula was a thing of incredible beauty.
Way beyond the range of Earthly telescopes, in whose eyes it was the merest smudge of ochre light or series of faint radio blips, the Medusa was aptly named: not only did it have the outlines of that Gorgon's head, but also a mass of snaky filaments which could be her hair. More, it had a certain trick of hers, too: in a manner of speaking, it could turn things to stone.
The Medusa was a cancer which .was eating itself; its filaments had not been flung outwards but were being drawn out, by a ring of great black holes where they circled the nebula and sucked off its countless billions of tons of matter into nothingness. Theory has it that matter falling into a. black hole, as it approaches the speed of light, becomes motionless as time itself is frozen. And so it can be seen how this great cosmic Medusa `petrified' her victims. But of course that was only theory, and since coining to know the time-clock de Marigny was given to mistrust much of what theory says.
Nevertheless the Medusa was a place to avoid, and so now the time-clock winged around it, hurtling at many times the speed of light (and in so doing, ruining another theory) and heading for the far side. `Beyond the Red Medusa Nebula' had seemed to The Searcher's way of thinking to cover a very large and largely unknown region; but-at the same time he (the clock) was equipped with the most sensitive scanners, and so it should not prove too difficult to locate the luminous and comparatively slow-moving Sssss
When it had come to choosing a place to start there had seemed very little of choice. Theem'hdra, the Primal Land in the dawn of all Earthly civilizations? The land of Earth's dreams? But the sentient gas cloud was threatened by the Tind'losi Hounds; he (it) had called on' he Elder Gods for their aid; perhaps — and for all de Marigny knew.— this mission of his was simply Kthanid's way of answering that call. Another good reason was that Moreen had wanted it; indeed her love of all (or most) creatures, no matter how strange, had driven her to insist upon it. The Hounds of Tindalos were devouring the gas-being, and that was good enough for her. In the three years she had loved and travelled with The Searcher, Moreen had come to know the hounds very well; to know them, and to be repulsed by them — even Moreen.
In those same three years she'd learned something of the clock's handling, too, so that along with de Marigny she now exhilarated in its flight as they sped in that near-fabulous craft across the vast curve of space. And so at last, when the Red Medusa sprawled far in their wake: 'There!' she cried, first to detect the drama that lay ahead.
De Marigny saw it a moment later, drew it close in the clock's scanners: a glowing green cloud like some mighty comet, with a hard bright nucleus and a long gossamer 'tail flaring far behind. Fifty thousand miles long, Sssss, and seeming to expand enormously by the moment as de Marigny slowed the time-clock and brought it about in a great semi-circle to parallel the path of the nucleus. And back there in the tail —
The time-clock's rearward scanners left little doubt as to what was happening back there.
It was without question the hounds, but in such numbers — so vast a pack as de Marigny had never imagined in all his wildest hound-ridden nightmares! 'By all the gods in Elysia,' he whispered to Moreen then, 'just look at them!'
'I have looked,' she answered with a sob, 'and I've seen. They are like no other creatures, these hounds. They know only two things: destroy and devour.'
De Marigny nodded. 'They're the stuff of the Mythos, all right,' he agreed. 'The CCD's trackers across time's wastelands!'
To see the Hounds of Tindalos was to know them at once, but a man might see them a hundred times and still _find difficulty in describing them. They were that alien! Like some monstrous four-dimensional plague, they were vampires of time that haunted its darkest angles, foraging abroad from the temporal towers of wraithlike Tindalos to hunt down unwary travellers. An uncleanliness lacking any real, living form, yet they were embodied in vague batlike shapes. They were flapping rags of evil, thirsting drinkers of life itself. And insatiable.
But since their true habitation was time itself, de Marigny found a strange anomaly here. 'A weird pack, this,' he said to Moreen. 'They run in space! I knew that in certain circumstances they can cross the time-barrier into three-dimensioned space, but this is the first time I've actually seen: it. Maybe those black holes back there on the rim of the Red Medusa have something to do with it. Perhaps they've welded space and time into one here.'
'But Moreen was hardly listening. Rapt to her scanners, she murmured: 'He is alive! He is ... aware! And Henri, he is in pain! Not pain as we know it, but hurtful nonetheless.. The hounds are a slow acid that sloughs away his being reduces his life force, slows him down and ever more speedily devours him. They are a disease eating into him, corrupting him, killing him. It may take a thousand years, but what is that to them? Time is on their side. And all the time his agony increasing, until the hounds reach his nucleus. Then the final rending as they bring him down, the last spurting of the forces which power him, and the black debris of his passing seething forever in an endless orbit round the Red Medusa.' -
De Marigny found and squeezed her hand. 'Not if I have anything to do with it,' he told her. 'We'll see about that in a little while. But first ... Moreen, can you actually talk to it — to him?'
'Did you ever see a creature I couldn't talk to?' she asked.
`Only the hounds themselves,' he answered.
`Because they are not life,' she explained. 'Because they are anti-life. But Sssss is alive and beautiful. His colour, even his size is ... beautiful! Of course I can talk to him. Only adjust your receptors, Henri, and hear him for yourself.'
Receptors: another misnomer. Like the scanners, these were not wholly mechanica
l; both words were simply terms for devices almost beyond mundane comprehension. To meld one's mind with the clock was to enhance one's perceptions ten-fold, while to use its sensors was to achieve the square of that effect. Through the clock's scanners human eyes might well be telescopes, or on a different scale microscopes. Hearing was so sensitized that the human ear might detect the abrasive rasp of one snowflake against the next. Tuned to the time-clock's senses, a man might `smell' the scents of distant moons, or the decay of a dying star, or 'taste' the atmosphere and water of a planet while still a million miles away. The sixth, psychic, sense was amplified, too: a gifted telepath such as Hank Silberhutte would become a thought transmitter to the stars; and as for a woman like Moreen, whose empathy with all living creatures must surely be the result of a unique mutation ...
Oh, Moreen could `talk' to Sssss, most certainly, but all de Marigny got was a mush of mental static. He could not talk to the gas-being, not possibly. To the amphibian holothurians he'd met on a mainly water-world, yes, and to the pollen-gathering apoideans of a savannah planet in Aldebaran; but these had been alive as he understood and was physically aware of life. 'Fire' to him was fire to them, and likewise 'danger', 'good', 'bad', 'joy', 'flight', 'walking', 'pleasure', `food', and 'drink'. And of course 'life' and 'death'. Most creatures have some common ground, recognize parallel links in the chain of life. But Sssss? The gaps were too great, for The Searcher, anyway.
And so de Marigny could only shake his head in defeat. 'Then you'd better translate,' he said. 'Ask him if we can help.'
She did so, at once, and de Marigny heard her thoughts go out with crystal clarity to the fleeing gas-being and heard them answered. The mush of psychic static altered its pitch, tone, timbre, became more controlled, more purposeful. Moreen and the gas cloud Sssss conversed.
`You know,' de Marigny told her in something of awe, `I believe that if you'd wanted to you might even have talked to Armandra's familiar winds.'
'I would not have dared to try,' she told him in an aside. The plateau is Armandra's domain and her winds are loyal to her. No, I didn't try to talk to them; but when she had drawn them to her, I couldn't help but overhear a little of their conversation. Just a little, for indeed they're secretive things, winds .
Again de Marigny marvelled, and almost laughed. But just then wants to know if the Elder Gods sent us. The time-clock isn't entirely strange to him for he's seen one before, quite recently. It was piloted by a I don't know,' she paused briefly, — by a creature, anyway.'
De Marigny was elated... 'A time-clock was here, recently? Ask him what he can tell me about Elysia. Ask him if he knows the way there.'
Moreen put his questions to the gas cloud, and after a moment's listening said: 'He doesn't really understand the concepts of "ways" or "paths". He has only his orbit and can't remember when he might ever have deviated from it.
But he does appreciate the idea of places. He knows for instance that this place is usually fraught with hounds.'
`But didn't he talk to this visitor of his at all? What did the pilot of this other time-clock say to him?'
Moreen tried her best, and after a moment: 'They ... they passed a little time, that's all. Their concepts, too, were different, do you see? The creature in the clock talked in terms of pressure, temperatures and radiation, some of which Sssss understood. And he in his turn spoke in expressions of gravity, velocity, density and capacities.'
Frustrated almost beyond endurance, de Marigny gritted his teeth and cursed under his breath. One might as well try to make sense of a shooting star! 'He's talked to someone, something, from Elysia — and I can't find out what passed between them!'
Moreen ignored this very untypical outburst, continued to pour urgent thoughts in the direction of the green-glowing gas cloud. I'm telling him who, what we are,' she explained. 'Trying to get it over to him how important he may be to us. How far we've come and bow long you've been searching. It's not easy, but ... wait!'
`Yes?' de Marigny felt his spine tingling.
'He understands "search"!' said Moreen excitedly. 'He, too, searches. In his orbit he seeks out dead planetoids to draw in, food or fuel to power him on his way. Yes, and he asks ... he asks ... are you the one called The Searcher?!'
De Marigny's mind reeled. 'He's heard of me?'
'The other time-clock's pilot mentioned you, "one who searches". He said that if Sssss should meet you in his orbit, he should tell you to look inside yourself — that the answer you seek lies in your own past, and in your future, and in your dreams!'
`What? Are you telling me, now that a cloud of gas understands the concept of dreaming?'
'Of course! When he cruises in the outer attraction of great stars and pivots about them — when he has not the need to power himself but rides the forces of gravity — then he shuts down. And like all sentient beings, Sssss also dreams.'
'Look inside myself,' de Marigny repeated feverishly. The answer lies in my past, my future, my dreams. And Titus said much the same thing: that I should look in the land. of Earth's dreams ...'
Moreen nodded. 'Yes,' she said, `I'm sure that's right —but not until we've done what we can for him.'
'You're sure there's nothing more he can tell us?'
Moreen was almost in tears. 'There may be, I don't know. But I do know that the hounds are hurting him, Henri. And I know he's afraid.'
Something of her horror got through to de Marigny. For all the sentience of Sssss, he still seemed little more than a green comet to the Earthman, or would if Moreen were not there to remind him otherwise. And suddenly de Marigny felt like some merciless inquisitor. 'You tell him,' he- said, applying mental brakes, slowing the time-clock's forward velocity, 'that we're going to teach these Hounds . of Tindalos the lesson of their lives — or their un-lives. Tell him bon voyage, and I hope his orbit never decays.'
As the emerald nucleus shot forward in space, so Moreen passed on de Marigny's message. And while he primed the clock's incredible weapon, so she relayed the answer of the being called Sssss. 'He says, may your search be of short duration. Also, you're to give the Elder Gods his thanks .when you reach Elysia.'
The nucleus of Sssss was already thirty thousand miles ahead now, and his flaring tail rapidly drawing up alongside. With it came the hounds, their hellish, mindless bat-chitterings menacing in the sensors. Then the clock's scanners were full of them, a mighty pack of unprecedented size.
They feed on the substance of Sssss and they spawn,'
Moreen sobbed. 'They devour him, his goodness, and increase themselves.'
`Well, they're about to suffer one hell of a decimation!' de Marigny was grim. I'll never get a better chance than this to even up a few scores. It's impossible to miss them.'
Even before he opened fire the hounds recognized him. De Marigny, and Titus Crow before him, were matters of fearful legend now: they and the time-clock had openly defied whatever laws governed the Hounds of Tindalos. Lacking true life, the hounds could hardly 'die' as such, but they could certainly be destroyed. And this coffin-shaped clock had become a destroyer with a will!
Rotating the clock on its own axis like a top, de Marigny opened up. Pencil beams of the purest white light struck forth, shredding the evil, ethereal stuff of the hounds wherever it was met. The wispy green tail of Sssss became filled with hound debris, ragged black fragments flying in all directions, upon which others of the pack fell like a great shoal of frenzied sharks! But in a very short while de Marigny saw that he'd set himself a hopeless task; there were simply too many of them.
'This is like swatting flies in a field on a summer day!' he said. 'If we were a fleet of a hundred clocks, then we might make a dent in them. But we're not.'
`But we're going to try anyway?' Moreen was anxious. 'We won't leave Sssss to be devoured?'
Still firing, he answered, 'There has to be a better way than this. These hounds have broken the rules, left their own environment and come through into space.' He narrowed his eyes, opened his scann
ers on the distant Red Medusa Nebula. 'And maybe just maybe — that's where they've made a very grave error of judgment!'
`Henri?'
'Time's their element, isn't it? And back there near the Red Medusa, there are places where time itself is frozen. According to a certain theory, anyway. Well, such theories rarely apply to the time-clock, but as for the hounds ... ? It's worth a try, anyway.'
He stopped firing, deliberately sent the clock tumbling end over end, so that it must seem completely out of control, a simulated malfunction. This proved no discomfort at all to the clock's passengers: their space-time machine simply compensated, and it was as if space turned while the clock stood still.
The hounds closest to the clock had been fleeing in disarray, but now they paused, gathered in chittering clouds, began to fly in ever decreasing circles toward a common centre which was the time-clock. The rest of the vast pack did likewise.
'Henri, they're coming!' cried Moreen. 'What are you doing? Have you forgotten that they can break through the clock's angles?'
‘I know it,' he answered, 'and so do they. I'm far more important to them than poor old Sssss there, Moreen. They're Cthulhu's scavengers, remember? What a great prize we'd make, eh?'
Believing the clock crippled, the hounds closed in. Now de Marigny could sense their psychic feelers groping for the clock, soul-sucking tendrils of mental energy; and now, too, their chittering was a frenzy of lust and monstrous anticipation. And only at the last moment — when it seemed 'the closest of the nightmare things must surely fall upon, fall into the clock only then did de Marigny accelerate away from them. Not far, a short spurt, and then a pause as he let the clock tumble once more and waited for them to catch up. So he played them, the entire pack, like some vast and monstrous fish on a line.
And yes, they were hooked!
Sssss was free of them now, powering himself on and on along his orbit, his distance increasing by leaps and bounds. They could never catch him now, not in three-dimensional mace. But in fact they had lost a11 interest in Sssss. De
