between cortical integration of input and the consequent neu
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ral output shaping response. It had interposed its brain between, sharing consciousness while solely commanding the pathways of reaction. The host, the bottled personality, was
mute and limbless for any least expression of its own will,
while hellishly articulate and agile in the service of the parasite’s. It was the host’s own hands that bound and wrenched the life half out of his prey, his own loins that experienced
the repeated orgasms crowning his other despoliations of their
bodies. And when they lay, bound and shrieking still, ready
for the consummation, it was his own strength that hauled
the smoking entrails from them, and his own intimate tongue
and guzzling mouth he plunged into the rank, palpitating
feast.
And the doctor had glimpses of the history behind this
predation, that of a race so far advanced in the essential-
izing, the inexorable abstraction of their own mental fabric
that through scientific commitment and genetic self-
cultivation they had come to embody their own model of
perfected consciousness, streamlined to permit the entry of
other beings and the direct acquisition of their experiential
worlds. All strictest scholarship at first, until there matured
in the disembodied scholars their long-germinal and now
blazing, jealous hatred for all “ lesser” minds rooted and
clothed in the soil and sunlight of solid, particular worlds.
The parasite spoke of the “ cerebral music,” the “ symphonies of agonized paradox” that were its invasions’ chief plunder. The doctor felt the truth behind this grandiloquence: its actual harvest from the systematic violation of encoffined personalities was the experience of a barren supremacy of means over lives more primitive, perhaps, but vastly wealthier in the
vividness and passionate concern with which life for them
was imbued.
Joe Allen’s hands had scooped up the bunched skeins of
alien nerve, with the wrinkled brain-node couched admidst
them, and for some time had waited the slow retraction of a
last major trunkline which seemingly had followed the spine’s
axis. At last, when only a slender subfiber of this remained
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Michael Shea
implanted, the corpse, smiling once more, held up for him
to view its reconcatenated master. The doctor looked into its
eyes then and spoke—not to their controller, but to the cap-
,tive who shared them with it, and who now, the doctor knew,
neared his final death.
“ Goodbye, Joe Allen. Eddie Sykes. You are guiltless.
Peace be with you at last.”
The demon smile remained fixed, the right hand reached
its viscid cargo across the gap and over the doctor’s groin.
He watched the hand set the glittering medusa’s head—his
new self—upon his fiesh, return to the table, take up the
scalpel, and reach back to cut in his groin a four-inch incision—all in eerie absence of tactile stimulus. The line that had remained plunged into the corpse suddenly whipped free
of the mediastinal crevice, retracted across the gap and shortened to a taut stub on the seething organism atop the doctor.
Joe Allen’s body collapsed, emptied, all slack. He was a
corpse again entirely, but with one anomalous feature to his
posture. His right arm had not dropped to the nearly vertical
hang that would have been natural. At the instant of the
alien’s unplugging, the shoulder had given a fierce shrug and
wrenching of its angle, flinging the arm upward as it died so
that it now lay in the orientation of an arm that reaches up
for a ladder’s next rung. The slightest tremor would unfix the
joints and dump the arm back into the gravitational bias; it
would also serve to dump the scalpel from the proferred,
upturned palm that implement still precariously occupied.
The man had repossessed himself one microsecond before
his end. The doctor’s heart stirred, woke, and sang within
him, for he saw that the scalpel was just in reach of his
fingers at his forearm’s fullest stretch from the bound elbow.
The horror crouched on him and, even now slowly feeding
its trunkline into his groin incision, at first stopped the doctor’s hand with a pang of terror. Then he reminded himself that, until implanted, the enemy was a senseless mass, bristling with plugs, with input jacks for senses, but, until installed in the physical amplifiers of eyes and ears, an utterly
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deaf, blind monad that waited in a perfect solipsism between
two captive sensory envelopes.
He saw his straining fingers above the bright tool of freedom, thought with an insane smile of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and then, with a lifespan of surgeon’s fine
control, plucked up the scalpel. The arm fell and hung.
“ Sleep,” the doctor said. “ Sleep revenged.”
But he found his retaliation harshly reined-in by the alien’s
careful provisions. His elbow had been fixed with his upper
arm almost at right angles to his body’s long axis; his forearm
could reach his hand inward and present it closely to the face,
suiting the parasite’s need of an eye-hand coordinative check,
but could not, even with the scalpel’s added reach, bring its
point within four inches of his groin. Steadily the parasite
fed in its tapline. It would usurp motor control in three or
four minutes at most, to judge by the time its extrication from
Allen had taken.
Frantically the doctor bent his wrist inwards to its limit,
trying to pick through the strap where it crossed his inner
elbow. Sufficient pressure was impossible, and the hold so
awkward that even feeble attempts threatened the loss of the
scalpel. Smoothly the root of alien control sank into him. It
was a defenseless thing of jelly against which he lay lethally
armed, and he was still doomed—a preview of all his thrall’s
impotence-to-be.
But of course there was a way. Not to survive. But to escape, and to have vengeance. For a moment he stared at his captor, hardening his mettle in the blaze of hate it lit in him.
Then, swiftly, he determined the order of his moves, and
began.
He reached the scalpel to his neck and opened his superior
thyroid vein—his inkwell. He laid the scalpel by his ear,
dipped his finger in his blood, and began to write on the
metal surface of the gurney, beginning by his thigh and moving towards his armpit. Oddly, the incision of his neck, though this was musculariy awake, had been painless, which
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Michael Shea
gave him hopes that raised his courage for what remained to
do. His neat, sparing strokes scribed with ghastly legibility.
When he had done the message read:
MIND PARASITE
FM ALLEN IN ME
CUT dll TILL FIND
1500 GM MASS
NERVE FIBRE
He wanted to write goodbye to his friend, but the alien had
begun to pay out smaller, auxiliary filaments collaterally with
the main one, and all now lay in speed.
He took up the scalpel, rolled his head to the left, and
plunged the blade deep
in his ear.
Miracle! Last, accidental mercy! It was painless. Some
procedural, highly specific anesthetic was in effect. With
careful plunges, he obliterated the right inner ear and then
thrust silence, with equal thoroughness, into the left. The
slashing of the vocal cords followed, then the tendons in the
back of the neck that hold it erect. He wished he were free
to unstring knees and elbows too, but it could not be. But
blinded, with centers of balance lost, with only rough motor
control—all these conditions should fetter the alien’s escape,
should it in the first place manage the reanimation of a bloodless corpse in which it had not yet achieved a fine-tuned interweave. Before he extinguished his eyes, he paused, the scalpel poised above his face, and blinked them to clear his
aim of tears. The right, then the left, both retinas meticulously carved away, the yolk of vision quite scooped out of them. The scalpel’s last task, once it had tilted the head sideways to guide the bloodflow absolutely clear of possible ef-facement of the message, was to slash the external carotid
artery.
When this was done the old man sighed with relief and
laid his scalpel down. Even as he did so, he felt the deep,
inward prickle of an alien energy—something that flared,
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307
crackled, flared, groped fo r but did not quite find its purchase. And inwardly, as the doctor sank towards sleep—
cerebrally, as a voiceless man must speak—he spoke to the
parasite these carefully chosen words:
“ Welcome to your new house. I ’m afraid there’s been some
vandalism—the lights don’t work, and the plumbing has a
very bad leak. There are some other things wrong as well—
the neighborhood is perhaps a little too quiet, and you may
find it hard to get around very easily. But it’s been a lovely
home for me for fifty-seven years, and somehow I think you’ll
stay. . . . ”
The face, turned towards the body of Joe Allen, seemed
to weep scarlet tears, but its last movement before death was
to smile.
E. Nesbit
J ohn Charringtons Wedding
Edith Nesbit is a dominant figure in children’s literature,
but her horror and supernatural fiction is less well known.
‘‘John Charrington’s W edding” seems at first just a little
romantic fantasy about love conquering all, but there is
more than a touch of Le Fanu’s "Schalken the Painter”
and Ivan Turgenev’s "Clara Militch” in this short piece
by a woman who was at the center of the intellectual
movements of her era.
I J o one ever thought that May Forster would marry John
1 a Charrington; but he thought differently, and things
which John Charrington intended had a queer way of coming
to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went up to
Oxford. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again
next time he came home. Again she laughed, tossed her
dainty blonde head, and again refused. A third time he asked
her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and
laughed at him more than ever.
John was not the only man who wanted to marry her. She
was the belle of our village coterie, and we were all in love
with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like heliotrope
ties or Inverness capes. Therefore we were as much annoyed
as surprised when John Charrington walked into our little
local Club—we held it in a loft over the saddler’s, I remember—and invited us all to his wedding.
308
John Charrington’s Wedding
309
“ Your wedding?”
“ You don’t mean it?”
“ Who’s the happy fair? When’s it to be?”
John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he
replied. Then he said, “ I ’m sorry to deprive you fellows of
your only joke—but Miss Forster and I are to be married in
September.”
“ You don’t meant it?”
“ He’s got the boot again, and it’s turned his head.”
“ No,” I said, rising, “ I see it’s true. Lend me a pistol
someone—or a first-class fare to the other end of Nowhere.
Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-
mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a love potion, Jack?”
“ Neither, sir, but a gift you’ll never have—perseverance—
and the best luck a man ever had in this world.”
There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all
the chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further.
The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated
Miss Forster, she blushed and smiled and dimpled, for all
the world as though she were in love with him, and had been
in love with him all the time. Upon my word, I think she
had. Women are strange creatures.
We were all asked to the wedding. In Brixham everyone
who was anybody knew everybody else who was anyone. My
sisters were, I truly believe, more interested in the trousseau
than the bride herself, and I was to be best man. The coming
marriage was much canvassed at afternoon tea-tables, and at
our little Club over the saddler’s, and the question was always
asked: “ Does she care for him?”
I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their
engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never
asked it again. I was coming home from the Club through
the churchyard. Our church is on a thyme-grown hill, and
the turf about it is so thick and soft that one’s footsteps are
noiseless.
I made no sound as I vaulted the low lichened wall and
threaded my way between the tombstones. It was at the same
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E. Nesbit
instant that I heard John Charrington’s voice, and saw her.
May was sitting on a low flat gravestone, her face turned
towards the full splendor of the western sun. Its expression
ended, at once and for ever, any question of love for him; it
was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face.
John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the
stillness of the golden August evening. “ My dear, my dear,
I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted
me!”
I coughed at once to indicate my presence, and passed on
into the shadow, fully enlightened.
The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to run up to town on business. The train was late, of course, for we are on the South-eastern, and as I stood
grumbling with my watch in my hand, whom should I see
but John Charrington and May Forster. They were walking
up and down the unfrequented end of the platform, arm in
arm, looking into each other’s eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.
Of course I knew better than to hesitate a moment before
burying myself in the booking-office, and it was not till the
train drew up at the platform, that I obtrusively passed the
pair with my suitcase and took the comer in a first-class
smoking-carriage. I did this with as good an air of not
seeing
them as I could assume. I pride myself on my discretion, but
if John was travelling alone I wanted his company. I had it.
“ Hullo, old m an,” came his cheery voice as he swung his
bag into my carriage. “ Here’s luck; I was expecting a dull
journey!”
“ Where are you off to?” I asked, discretion still bidding
me turn my eyes away, though I felt, without looking, that
hers were red-rimmed.
“ To old Branbridge’s ,” he answered, shutting the door and
leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart.
John Charrington’s Wedding
311
“ Oh, I wish you wouldn’t go, John,” she was saying in a
low, earnest voice. “ I feel certain something will happen.”
“ Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me,
and the day after tomorrow our wedding-day?”
“ Don’t go,” she answered, with a pleading intensity which
would have sent my suitcase onto the platform and me after
it. But she wasn’t speaking to me. John Charrington was made
differently; he rarely changed his opinions, never his resolutions.
_
He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the
carriage door.
“ I must, May. The old boy’s been awfully good to me,
and now he’s dying I must go and see him, but I shall come
home in time for—” The rest of the parting was lost in a
whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting train.
She spoke as the train moved: “ You’re sure to come?”
“ Nothing shall keep m e,” he answered; and we steamed
out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the
platform, he leaned back in his comer and kept silence for a
minute.
When he spoke it was to explain to me that his godfather,
whose heir he was, lay dying at Peasmarsh Place, some fifty
miles away, and had sent for John, and John had felt bound
to go.
“ I shall surely be back tomorrow,” he said, “ or, if not,
the day after, in heaps of time. Thank Heaven, one hasn’t to
get up in the middle of the night to get married nowadays!”
“ And suppose Mr. Branbridge dies?”
“ Alive or dead I mean to be married on Thursday!” John
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 38
