Again we traversed the dark hall, and went out through a door in the rear of the frame building. As we stepped out upon the moonlit snow, I shuddered to hear once more the distant, wailing ululation of the pack, still with that terrible note which suggested strained human vocal organs.
A few feet from us was the door of a cellar. The basement had evidently been considerably enlarged, quite recently, for huge mounds of earth lay about us, filling the back yard. Some of them were covered with snow, some of them black and bare.
* * * *
The two led the way down the steps into the cellar, my mother still carrying the electric lantern, which faintly illuminated the midnight space with its feeble, crimson glow.
The cellar was large, neatly plastered. It had not been itself enlarged, but a dark passage sloped down beside the door, to deeper excavations.
In the center of the floor stood the wreck of an intricate and unfamiliar mechanism. It had evidently been deliberately smashed -- I saw an ax lying beside it, which must have been the means of the havoc. The concrete floor was littered with the broken glass of shattered electron tubes. The machine itself was a mass of tangled wires and twisted coils and bent magnets, oddly arranged outside a great copper ring, perhaps four feet in diameter.
The huge copper ring was mounted on its edge, in a metal frame. Before it was a stone step, placed as if to be used by one climbing through the ring. But, I saw, it had been impossible for one actually to climb through, for on the opposite side was a mass of twisted apparatus -- a great parabolic mirror of polished metal, with what appeared to be a broken cathode tube screwed into its center.
A most puzzling machine. And it had been very thoroughly wrecked. Save for the huge copper ring, and the heavy stone step before it, there was hardly a part that was not twisted or shattered.
In the end of the cellar was a small motor-generator -- a little gasoline engine connected to a dynamo -- such as is sometimes used for supplying isolated homes with electric light and power. I saw that it had not been injured.
From a bench beside the wall, my mother picked up a brief case, from which she took a roll of blue prints, and a sheaf of papers bound in a manila cover. She spread them on the bench and set the red lantern beside them.
'This machine, as you see, has been, most unfortunately for us, wrecked,' she said. 'These papers tell the method of construction to be followed in the erection of such machines. Your aid we must have in deciphering what they convey. And the new machine will bring such great, strong life as we have to all your world.'
'You say 'your world'!' I cried. 'Then you don't belong to this earth? You are a monster, who has stolen the body of my father!'
* * * *
Both of them snarled like beasts. They bared their teeth and glowered at me with their terrible green eyes. Then a crafty look came again into the woman's sinister orbs.
'No, my daughter,' came her whining, animal tones. 'A new secret of life have we discovered. Great strength it gives to our bodies. Death we fear no longer. But our minds are changed. Many things we do not remember. We must require your aid in reading this which we once wrote -- '
'That's the bunk!' I exclaimed, perhaps not very wisely. 'I don't believe it. And I'll be damned if I'll help repair the infernal machine, to make more human beings into monsters like you!'
Together they sprang toward me. Their eyes glowed dreadfully against their pallid skins. Their fingers were hooked like claws. Saliva drooled from their snarling lips, and naked teeth gleamed in the dim crimson radiance.
'Aid us you will!' cried my mother. 'Or your body will we most painfully destroy. We will eat it slowly, while you live!'
The horror of it broke down my reason. With a wild, terror-shaken scream, I dashed for the door.
It was hopeless, of course, for me to attempt escape from beings possessing such preternatural strength.
With startling, soul-blasting howls, they sprang after me together. They swept me to the cellar's floor, sinking their teeth savagely into my arms and body. For a few moments I struggled desperately, writhing and kicking, guarding my throat with one arm and striking blindly with the other.
Then they held me helpless. I could only curse, and scream a vain appeal for aid.
The man, holding my arms pinioned against my sides, lifted me easily, flung me over him shoulder. His body, where it touched mine, was as cold as ice. I struggled fiercely but uselessly as he started with me down the black, inclined passage, into the recent excavations beneath the cellar's floor.
Behind us, my mother picked up the little red lantern, and the blue prints and sheets of specifications, and followed down the dark, slanting passage.
CHAPTER VI
THE TEMPLE OF CRIMSON GLOOM
Helpless in those preternaturally strong, corpse-cold and corpse-white arms, I was carried down narrow steps, to a high, subterranean hall. It was filled with a dim blood-red light, which came from no visible source, its angry, forbidding radiance seeming to spring from the very air. The walls of the underground hall were smooth and black, of some unfamiliar ebon substance.
Several yards down that black, strangely illuminated passage I was carried. Then we came into a larger space. Its black roof, many yards above, was groined and vaulted, supported by a double row of massive dead-black pillars. Many dark, arched niches were cut into its walls. This greater hall, too, was sullenly illuminated by a ghastly scarlet light, which seemed to come from nowhere.
A strange, silent, awful place. A sort of cathedral of darkness, of evil and death. A sinister atmosphere of nameless terror seemed breathed from its very midnight walls, like the stifling fumes of incense offered to some formless god of horror. The dusky red light might have come from unseen tapers burned in forbidden rites of blood and death. The dead silence itself seemed a tangible, evil thing, creeping upon me from ebon walls.
I was given little time to speculate upon the questions that it raised. What was the dead-black material of the walls? Whence came the lurid, bloody radiance? How recently had this strange temple of terror been made? And to what demoniac god was it consecrated? No opportunity had I to seek answers to those questions, nor time even to recover from my natural astonishment at finding such a place beneath the soil of a Texas ranch.
* * * *
The emerald-eyed man who bore me dropped me to the black floor, against the side of a jet pillar, which was round and two feet thick. He whined shrilly, like a hungry dog. It was evidently a call, for two women appeared in the broad central aisle of the temple, which I faced.
Two women -- or, rather, malevolent monstrosities in the bodies of women. Their eyes shone with green fires alien to our world, and their bodies, beneath their tattered rags of clothing, were fearfully white. One of them came toward me with a piece of frayed manila rope, which must have been a lasso they had found above.
Later it came to me that these two must be the mechanics from the city of Amarillo, who, Judson had told me on the evening of our fatal drive, had been employed here by my mother. I had not yet seen Dr. Blake Jetton, Steele's mother, who had been the chief assistant of my own parent in various scientific investigations -- investigations which, I now began to fear, must have borne dreadful fruit!
While the man held me against the black pillar, the women seized my arms, stretched them behind it, and tied them with the rope. I kicked out, struggled, cursed them, in vain. My body seemed but putty to their fearful strength. When my hands were tied behind the pillar, another length of the rope was dropped about my ankles and drawn tight about the ebon shaft.
I was helpless in this weird, subterranean temple, at the mercy of these four creatures who seemed to combine infernal super-intelligence with the strength and the nature of wolves.
'See the instrument which we are to build!' came the snarling voice of my mother. Standing before me, with the roll of blue prints in her livid hands, she pointed at an object that I had not yet distinguished in the sullen, bloody gloom.
* *
* *
In the center of the lofty, central hall of this red-lit temple, between the twin rows of looming, dead-black pillars, was a long, low platform of ebon stone. From it rose a metal frame -- wrought like the frame of the wrecked machine I had seen in the cellar, above.
The frame supported a huge copper ring in a vertical position. It was far huger than the ring in the ruined mechanism; its diameter was a dozen feet or more. Its upper curve reached far toward the black, vaulted roof of the hall, glistening queerly in the ghastly red light. Behind the ring, a huge, parabolic mirror of silvery, polished metal had been set up.
But the device was obviously unfinished.
The complex electron tubes, the delicate helixes and coils, the magnets, and the complicated array of wires, whose smashed and tangled remains I had observed about the wreck of the other machine, had not been installed.
'Look at that!' cried my mother again. 'The instrument that comes to let upon your earth the great life that is ours. The plan on this paper, we made. From the plan, we made the small machine, and brought to ourselves the life, the strength, the love of blood -- '
'The love of blood!' My startled, anguished outcry must have been a shriek, for I was already nearly overcome with the brooding terror of my strange surroundings. I collapsed against the ropes, shaken and trembling with fear.
The light of strange cunning came once more into the glaring green eyes of the thing that had been my mother.
'No, fear not!' she whined on. 'Your language, it is new to me, and I speak what I do not intend. Be not fearing -- if you will do our wish. If you do not, then we will taste your blood.
'But the new life came only to few. Then the machine broke because of one woman. And our brains are changed, so that we remember not to read the plans that we made. Your aid is ours, to restore a new machine. To you and all your world, then, comes the great new life!'
* * * *
She stepped close to me, her green eyes burning malevolently. Before my eyes she unrolled one of the sheets which bore plans and specifications for the strange electron tubes, to be mounted outside the copper ring. From her lips came the curious, wolfish whine with which these monsters communicated with one another. One of the weirdly transformed mechanics stepped up beside her, carrying in dead-white hands the parts of such a tube-filaments, plate, grid, screens, auxiliary electrodes, and the glass tube in which they were to be sealed. The parts evidently had been made to fit the specifications -- as nearly as these entities could comprehend those specifications with their imperfect knowledge of English.
'We make fit plans for these parts,' my mother whined. 'If wrong, you must say where wrong. Describe how to put together. Speak quick, or die slowly!' She snarled menacingly.
Though I am by no means a brilliant physicist, I saw easily enough that most of the parts were useless, though they had been made with amazing accuracy. These beings seemed to have no knowledge of the fundamental principles underlying the operation of the machine they were attempting to build, yet, in making these parts, they had accomplished feats that would have been beyond the power of our science.
The filament was made of metal, well enough -- but was far too thick to be lit by any current, without that current wrecking the tube in which it were used. The grid was nicely made -- of metallic radium! It was worth a small fortune, but quite useless in the electron tube. And the plate was evidently of pure fused quartz, shaped with an accuracy that astounded me; but that, too, was quite useless.
'Parts wrong?' my mother barked excitedly in wolfish tones, her glowing green eyes evidently having read something in my face. 'Indicate how wrong. Describe to make correct!'
* * * *
I closed my lips firmly, determined to reveal nothing. I knew that it was through the wrecked machine that my mother and Steele had been so dreadfully altered. I resolved that I would not aid in changing other humans into such hellish monsters. I was sure that this strange mechanism, if completed, would be a threat against all humanity -- though, at the time, I was far from conceiving the full, diabolic significance of it.
My mother snarled toward the man.
He dropped upon all fours, and sprang at me like a wolf, his beastly eyes gleaming green, his bare teeth glistening in the sullen red light, and he was hideously howling!
His teeth caught my trousers, tore them from my leg from the middle of the right thigh downward. Then they closed into my flesh, and I could feel his teeth gnawing ... gnawing....
He did not make a deep wound, though blood, black in the terrible red light, trickled from it down my leg toward the shoe -- blood which, from time to time, he ceased the gnawing to lick up appreciatively. The purpose of it was evidently to cause me the maximum amount of agony and horror.
For minutes, perhaps, I endured it -- for minutes that seemed ages.
The pain itself was agonizing: the steady gnawing of teeth into the flesh of my leg, toward the bone.
But that agony was less than the terror of my surroundings. The strange temple of black, with its black floor, black walls, black pillars, vaulted black ceiling. The dim, sourceless, blood-red light that filled it. The dreadful stillness -- broken only by my groans and shrieks, and by the slight sound of the gnawing teeth. The demoniac monster standing before me in the body of my mother, staring at me with shining green eyes, holding the plans and the parts that the mechanic had brought, waiting for me to speak. But the most horrible thing was the fact that the gnawing demon was the body of dear, lovely Steele!
He was now digging his teeth in with a crunching sound.
I writhed and screamed with agony. Sweat rolled from my body. I tugged madly against my bonds, strove to burst the rope that held my tortured leg.
Fierce, eager growls came wolf-like from the throat of the gnawing man. His leprously pallid face was once more smeared with blood, as it had been when I first saw him. Occasionally he stopped the unendurable gnawing, to lick his lips with a dreadful satisfaction.
* * * *
Finally I could stand it no longer. Even if the fate of all the earth depended upon me -- as I thought it did -- I could endure it no longer.
'Stop! Stop!' I screamed. 'I'll tell you!'
Rather reluctantly, the man rose, licking his crimson lips. My mother -- I find myself continually calling the monster by that name, but it was not my mother -- again held the plans before my face, and displayed upon her palm the tiny parts for the electron tube.
It took all my will to draw my mind from the throbbing pain of the fresh wound in my leg. But I explained that the filament wire would have to be drawn much finer, that the radium would not do for the grid, that the plate must be of a conducting metal, instead of quartz.
She did not easily understand my scientific terms. The name tungsten, for instance, meant nothing to her until I had explained the qualities and the atomic number of the metal. That identified it for her, and she appeared really to know more about the metal than I did.
For long hours I answered her questions, and made explanations. A few times I thought of refusing to answer, again. But the memory of that unendurable gnawing always made me speak.
The scientific knowledge and skill displayed in the construction of the machine's parts, once the specifications were properly understood, astounded me. The monsters that had stolen these human bodies seemed to have remarkable scientific knowledge of their own, particularly in chemistry and certain branches of physics -- though electricity and magnetism, and the modem theories of relativity and equivalence, seemed new to them, probably because they came from a world whose natural phenomena are not the same as ours.
* * * *
They brought, from one of the chambers opening into the great hall, an odd, glistening device, consisting of connected bulbs and spheres of some bright, transparent crystal. First, a lump of limestone rock, which must have been dug up in the making of this underground temple, was dropped into a large lower globe. Slowly it seemed to dissolve, forming a heavy, iridescent, violet-colore
d gas.
Then, whenever my mother or one of the others wished to make any object -- a metal plate or grid, a coil of wire, an insulating button, anything needed in building the machine -- a tiny pattern of it was skillfully formed of a white, soft, wax-like substance.
The white pattern was placed in one of the crystal bulbs, and the heavy violet gas -- which must have been disassociated protons and electrons from the disrupted limestone -- was allowed to fill the bulb through one of the numerous transparent tubes.
The operator watched a little gauge, and at the right instant, removed from the bulb -- not the pattern, but the finished object, formed of any desired element!
The process was not explained to me. But I am sure that it was one of building up atoms from the constituent positive and negative electrons. A process just the reverse of disintegration, by which radium decomposes into lead. First such simple atoms as those of hydrogen and helium. Then carbon, or silicon, or iron. Then silver, if one desired it, or gold! Finally radium, or uranium, the heaviest of metals. The object was removed whenever the atoms had reached the proper number to form the element required.
With this marvelous device, whose accomplishments exceeded the wildest dreams of the alchemist, the construction of the huge machine in the center of the hall proceeded with amazing speed, with a speed that filled me with nothing less than terror.
* * * *
It occurred to me that I might delay the execution of the monsters' dreadful plan by a trick of some kind. Racking my weary and pain-clouded brain, I sought for some ruse that might mislead my clever opponents. The best idea that came to me was to give a false interpretation of the word 'vacuum.' If I could keep its true meaning from my mother, she would leave the air in the tubes, and they would burn out when the current was turned on. When she finally asked the meaning of the word, I said that it signified a sealed or enclosed space.
But she had been consulting scientific works, as well as my meager knowledge. When the words left my lips, she sprang at me with a hideous snarl. Her teeth sought my throat. But for a very hurried pretense of alarmed stupidity, my part in the dreadful adventure might have come to a sudden end. I protested that I had been sincere, that my mind was weary and I could not remember scientific facts, that I must eat and sleep again.
Wolves of Darkness Rerun Page 4
