natural bulk. Not only they, but the left heart and the superior
mediastinal veins—all the regions that should have been
grossly engorged with blood—were utterly drained of it.
The doctor swallowed his drink and got out the photographs again. He found that Jackson had died on his stomach across the body of another worker, with the upper part of a
third trapped between them. Neither these two subjacent
corpses nor the surrounding earth showed any stain of a blood
loss that must have amounted to two liters.
Possibly the pictures, by some trick of shadow, had failed
to pick it up. He turned to the Investigator’s Report, where
Craven would surely have mentioned any significant amounts
of bloody earth uncovered during the disinterment. The sheriff recorded nothing of the kind. Dr. Winters returned to the pictures.
Ronald Pollock, Jackson’s most intimate associate in the
grave, had died on his back, beneath and slightly askew of
Jackson, placing most of their torsos in contact, save where
the head and shoulder of the third interposed. It seemed inconceivable Pollock’s clothing should lack any trace of such massive drainage from a death mate thus embraced.
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The doctor rose abruptly, pulled on fresh gloves, and returned to Jackson. His hands showed a more brutal speed now, closing the great incision temporarily with a few widely
spaced sutures. He replaced him in the vault and brought out
Pollock, striding, heaving hard at the dead shapes in the shifting of them, thrusting always—so it seemed to him—just a step ahead of urgent thoughts he did not want to have, deformities that whispered at his back, emitting faint, chill gusts of putrid breath. He shook his head—denying, delaying—and
pushed the new corpse onto the worktable. The scissors undressed Pollock in greedy bites.
But at length, when he had scanned each scrap of fabric
and found nothing like the stain of blood, he came to rest
again, relinquishing that simplest, desired resolution he had
made such haste to reach. He stood at the instrument table,
not seeing it, submitting to the approach of the half-formed
things at his mind’s periphery.
The revelation of Jackson’s shriveled lungs had been more
than a shock. He felt a stab of panic too, in fact that same
curiously explicit terror of this place that had urged him to
flee earlier. He acknowledged now that the germ of that
quickly suppressed terror had been a premonition of this failure to find any trace of the missing blood. Whence the premonition? It had to do with a problem he had steadfastly refused to consider: the mechanics of so complete a drainage
of the lungs’ densely reticulated vascular structure. Could the
earth’s crude pressure by itself work so thoroughly, given
only a single vent both slender and strangely curved? And
then the photograph he had studied. It frightened him now to
recall the image—some covert meaning stirred within it,
struggling to be seen. Dr. Winters picked the probe up from
the table and turned again to the corpse. As surely and exactly as if he had already ascertained the wound’s presence, he leaned forward and touched it: a small, neat puncture,
just beneath the xiphoid process. He introduced the probe.
The wound received it deeply, in a familiar direction.
The doctor went to the desk, and took up the photograph
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again. Pollock’s and Jackson’s wounded areas were not in
contact. The third man’s head was sandwiched between their
bodies at just that point. He searched out another picture, in
which this third man was more central, and found his name
inked in below his image: Joe Allen.
Dreamingly, Dr. Winters went to the wide metal door,
shoved it aside, entered the vault. He did not search, but went
straight to the trestle where his friend had paused some hours
before, and found the same name on its tag.
The body, beneath decay’s spurious obesity, was trim and
well-muscled. The face was square-cut, shelf-browed, with a
vulpine nose skewed by an old fracture. The swollen tongue
lay behind the teeth, and the bulge of decomposition did not
obscure what the man’s initial impact must have been—
handsome and open, his now-waxen black eyes sly and convivial. Say, good buddy, got a minute? I see you cornin’ on the swing shift every day, don’t I? Yeah, Joe Allen. Look I
know it’s late, you want to get home, tell the wife you ain’t
been in there drinkin’ since you got off, right? Oh, yeah, I
heard that. But this damn disappearance thing’s got me so
edgy, and I ’d swear to God just as I was coming here I seen
someone moving around back of that frame house up the
street. See how the trees thin out a little down back of the
yard, where the moonlight gets in? That’s right. Well, I got
me this little popper here. Oh, yeah, that’s a beauty, we’ll
have it covered between us. I knew I could spot a man ready
for some trouble—couldn’t find a patrol car anywhere on the
street. Yeah, just down in here now, to that clump of pine.
Step careful, you can barely see. That’s right. . . .
The doctor’s face ran with sweat. He turned on his heel
and walked out of the vault, heaving the door shut behind
him. In the office’s greater warmth he felt the perspiration
soaking his shirt under the smock. His stomach rasped with
steady oscillations of pain, but he scarcely attended it. He
went to Pollock and seized up the post-mortem knife.
The work was done with surreal speed, the laminae of flesh
and bone recoiling smoothly beneath his desperate but un
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erring hands, until the thoracic cavity lay exposed, and in it,
the vampire-stricken lungs, two gnarled lumps of grey tissue.
He searched no deeper, knowing what the heart and veins
would show. He returned to sit at the desk, weakly drooping,
the knife, forgotten, still in his left hand. He looked at the
window, and it seemed his thoughts originated with that
fainter, more tenuous Dr. Winters hanging like a ghost outside.
What was this world he lived in? Surely, in a lifetime, he
had not begun to guess. To feed in such a way! There was
horror enough in this alone. But to feed thus in his own grave.
How had he accomplished it—leaving aside how he had fought
suffocation long enough to do anything at all? How was it to
be comprehended, a greed that raged so hotly it would glut
itself at the very threshold of its own destruction? That last
feast was surely in his stomach still.
Dr. Winters looked at the photograph, at Allen’s head
snugged into the others’ middles like a hungry suckling nuzzling to the sow. Then he looked at the knife in his hand.
The hand left empty of all technique. Its one impulse was to
slash, cleave, obliterate the remains of this gluttonous thing,
this Joe Allen. He must do this, or flee it utterly. There was
no course between. He did not move.
“ I will examine him,’’ said the ghost in the glass, and did
not move. Inside the refrigerator vault, there was a slight
noise.
&
nbsp; No. It had been some hitch in the generator’s murmur.
Nothing in there could move. There was another noise, a
brief friction against the vault’s inner wall. The two old men
shook their heads at one another. A catch clicked and the
metal door slid open. Behind the staring image of his own
amazement, the doctor saw that a filthy shape stood in the
doorway and raised its arms towards him in a gesture of supplication. The doctor turned in his chair. From the shape came a whistling groan, the decayed fragment of a human
voice.
Pleadingly, Joe Allen worked his jaw and spread his purple
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hands. As if speech were a maggot struggling to emerge from
his mouth, the blue, tumescent face toiled, the huge tongue
wallowed helplessly between the viscid lips.
The doctor reached for the telephone, lifted the receiver.
Its deadness to his ear meant nothing—he could not have
spoken. The thing confronting him, with each least movement that it made, destroyed the very frame of sanity in which words might have meaning, reduced the world itself around
him to a waste of dark and silence, a starlit ruin where already, everywhere, the alien and unimaginable was awakening to its new dominion. The corpse raised and reached out one hand as if to stay him—turned, and walked towards the
instrument table. Its legs were leaden, it rocked its shoulders
like a swimmer, fighting to make its passage through gravity’s dense medium. It reached the table and grasped it exhaustedly. The doctor found himself on his feet, crouched
slightly, weightlessly still. The knife in his hand was the only
part of himself he clearly felt, and it was like a tongue of
fire, a crematory flame. Joe Allen’s corpse thrust one hand
among the instruments. The thick fingers, with a queer, simian ineptitude, brought up a scalpel. Both hands clasped the little handle and plunged the blade between the lips, as a
thirsty child might a popsicle, then jerked it out again, slashing the tongue. Ihrbid fluid splashed down to the floor. The jaw worked stiffly, the mouth brought out words in a wet,
ragged hiss:
“ Please. Help me. Trapped in this.” One dead hand struck
the dead chest. “ Starving.”
“ What are you?”
“ Traveler, Not of earth.”
“ An eater of human flesh. A drinker of human blood.”
“ No. No. Hiding only. Am small. Shape hideous to you.
Feared death.”
“ You brought death.” The doctor spoke with the calm of
perfect disbelief, himself as incredible to him as the thing he
spoke with. It shook its head, the dull, popped eyes glaring
with an agony of thwarted expression.
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“ Killed none. Hid in this. Hid in this not to be killed. Five
days now. Drowning in decay. Free me. Please.”
“ No. You have come to feed on us, you are not hiding in
fear. We are your food, your meat and drink. You fed on
those two men within your grave. Their grave. For you, a
delay. In fact, a diversion that has ended the hunt for you.”
“ No! No! Used men already dead. Form e, five days, starvation. Even less. Fed only from necessity. Horrible necessity!”
The spoiled vocal instrument made a mangled gasp of the
last word—an inhuman, snakepit noise the doctor felt as a
cold flicker of ophidian tongues within his ears—while the
dead arms moved in a sodden approximation of the body
language that swears truth.
“ No,” the doctor said. “ You killed them all. Including
your . . . tool—this man. What are you?” Panic erupted in
the question which he tried to bury by answering himself
instandy. “ Resolute, yes. That surely. You used death for an
escape route. You need no oxygen perhaps.”
“ Extracted more than my need from gasses of decay. A
lesser component of our metabolism. ’ ’
The voice was gaining distinctness, developing makeshifts
for tones lost in the agonal rupturing of the valves and stops
of speech, more effectively wresding vowel and consonant
from the putrid tongue and lips. At the same time the body’s
crudity of movement did not quite obscure a subtle, incessant
experimentation. Fingers flexed and stirred, testing the give
of tendons, groping the palm for the old points of purchase
and counter-pressure there. The knpes, with cautious repetitions, assessed the new limits of their articulation.
“ What was the sphere?”
“ My ship. Its destruction our first duty facing discovery.”
(Fear touched the doctor, like a slug climbing his neck; he
had seen, as it spoke, a sharp, spastic activity of the tongue,
a pleating and shrinkage of its bulk as at the tug of some
inward adjustment.) “ No chance to re-enter. Leaving this
take far too long. Not even time to set for destruct—must
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extrude a cilium, chemical key to broach hull shield. In shaft
my only chance to halt host.”
The right arm tested the wrist, and the scalpel the hand
still held cut white spaiks from the air, while the word “ host”
seemed itself a little knife-prick, a teasing abandonment of
fiction—though the dead mask showed no irony—preliminary
to attack.
But he found that fear had gone from him. The impossibility with which he conversed, and was about to struggle, was working in him an overwhelming amplification of his
life’s long helpless rage at death. He found his parochial pity
for earth alone stretched to the trans-stellar scope this traveler
commanded, to the whole cosmic trashyard with its bulldozed multitudes of corpses; galactic wheels of carnage—
stars, planets with their most majestic generations—all trash,
cracked bones and foul rags that pooled, settled, reconcatenated in futile symmetries gravid with new multitudes of briefly animate trash.
And this, standing before him now, was the death it was
given him particularly to deal—his mite was being called in
by the universal Treasury of death, and Dr. Winters found
himself, an old healer, on fire to pay. His own, more lethal,
blade tugged at his hand with its own sharp appetite. He felt
entirely the Examiner once more, knew the precise cuts he
would make, swiftly and without error. Very soon now, he
thought and cooly probed for some further insight before its
onslaught:
“ Why must your ship be destroyed, even at the cost of
your host’s life?”
“ We must not be understood.”
“ The livestock must not understand what is devouring
them.”
“ Yes, doctor. Not all at once. But one by one. You will
understand what is devouring you. That is essential to my
feast.”
The doctor shook his head. “ You are in your grave already,
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Traveler. That body will be your coffin. You will be buried
in it a second time, for all tim e.”
The thing came one step nearer and opened its mouth. The
flabby throat wrestled as with speech, but what sprang out
was a slender white filament, more than whip-fast. Dr. Winters saw only the first flicker of its eruption, and th
en his brain nova-ed, thinning out at light-speed to a white nullity.
When the doctor came to himself, it was in fact to a part
of himself only. Before he had opened his eyes he found that
his wakened mind had repossessed proprioceptively only a
bizarre truncation of his body. His head, neck, left shoulder,
arm and hand declared themselves—the rest was silence.
When he opened his eyes, he found that he lay supine on
the gumey, and naked. Something propped his head. A strap
bound his left elbow to the gurney’s edge, a strap he could
feel. His chest was also anchored by a strap, and this he
could not feel. Indeed, save for its active remnant, his entire
body might have been bound in a block of ice, so numb was
it, and so powerless was he to compel the slightest movement
from the least part of it.
The room was empty, but from the open door of the vault
there came slight sounds: the creak and soft frictions of heavy
tarpaulin shifted to accommodate some business involving
small clicking and kissing noises.
Tears of fury filled the doctor’s eyes. Clenching his one
fist at the starry engine of creation that he could not see, he
ground his teeth and whispered in the hot breath of strangled
weeping:
“ Take it back, this dirty little shred of life! I throw it off
gladly like the filth it is.” The slow knock of bootsoles loudened from within the vault, and he turned his head. From the vault door Joe Allen’s corpse approached him.
It moved with new energy, though its gait was grotesque,
a ducking, hitching progress, jerky with circumventions of
decayed muscle, while above this galvanized, struggling
frame, the bruise-colored face hung inanimate, an image of
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detachment. With terrible clarity it revealed the thing for what
it was—a damaged hand-puppet vigorously worked from
within. And when that frozen face was brought to hang above
the doctor, the reeking hands, with the light, solicitous touch
of friends at sickbeds, rested on his naked thigh.
The absence of sensation made the touch more dreadful
than it felt. It showed him that the nightmare he still desperately denied at heart had annexed his body while he—holding head and arm free—had already more than half-drowned in
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 36
