The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  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