It was still early morning when I left the girl at the end of the street, rewarding her with a bill, and drove alone through the snow, back toward the lonely ranch house where I had experienced such horrors.
The day, though bright, was cold. The snow had never begun to thaw; it was still as thick as ever. My brown nag plodded along slowly, her feet and the buggy's tires crunching through the crusted snow.
As Hebron vanished behind me, and I was surrounded only by the vast, glittering sea of unbroken snow, fear and dread came upon me -- a violent longing to hurry to some crowded haunt of women. My imagination pictured the terrors of the night, when the weird pack would run again upon the snow.
How easy would it be to return, take the train for New York, and forget the terrors of this place! No, I knew that I could never forget. I could never forget the threat of that dread, night-black world beyond the copper ring, the fact that its evil spawn planned to seize our world and make it a sphere of rotting gloom like their own.
And Steele! Never could I forget him. I knew now that I loved him, that I must save his or perish with him.
I urged the pony on, across the lonely and illimitable desert of sunlit snow.
It was somewhat past noon when I reached the ranch house. But I still had a safe margin of daylight. Immediately I set about my preparations.
There was much to do: unpacking the boxes piled on the buggy; filling the dozen gasoline lanterns, pumping them up with air, burning their mantles, and seeing that they operated satisfactorily; attaching caps and fuses to the sticks of dynamite, testing my powerful flashlights; loading the little automatic and filling the extra clips; stowing conveniently in my pockets an abundance of matches, ammunition, extra batteries for the electric torches, the strips of magnesium ribbon.
* * * *
The sun was still high when the preparations were completed. I took time then to put the pony in the stable behind the old house. I locked the door, and barricaded the building, so that, if any dread change converted the animal into a green-eyed monster, it would find itself imprisoned.
Then I went through the old house, carrying a lighted lantern. It was silent, deserted. All the monsters were evidently below. The door of the cellar was closed, all crevices chinked against light.
I lit my dozen powerful lanterns and arranged them in a circle about it.
Then I threw back the door.
A weird and fearful howl came from the dark passage below it! I heard the rush of feet, as the howling thing retreated down the tunnel. From below came angry growls, shrill feral whines.
A physical wave of nauseating horror broke chillingly over me, at the thought of invading that red-lit temple-burrow, where I had endured such unnameable atrocities of horror. I shrank back, trembling. But at the thought of my own mother and lovely, blue-eyed Steele, down in that temple of terror, ruled by foul monsters, I recovered my courage.
I stepped back toward the yawning black mouth of the den that these monsters had built.
The lanterns I had first intended to leave in a ring about the mouth of the burrow, except one to carry with me. Now it occurred to me that they would prevent the escape of the monsters more effectively if scattered along the passage. I gathered up six of them, three in each hand, and started down the steps.
Their powerful white rays illuminated the old cellar with welcome brilliance. I left one of them there, in the center of the cellar's floor. And three more of them I set along the slanting passage that led down into the deeper excavation.
I intended to set the two that remained on the floor of the temple, and perhaps return to the surface for others. I hoped that the light would drive the alien life from all of the pack, as it had from Steele. When they were unconscious, I could carry out Steele and my mother, and any of the others that seemed whole enough for normal life. The great machine, and the temple itself, I intended to destroy with the dynamite.
* * * *
I stepped from the end of the passage, into the vast, black, many-pillared hall. The intense white radiance of the faintly humming lanterns dispelled the terrible, blood-red gloom. I heard an appalling chorus of agonized animal cries; weird, feral whines and howls of pain. In the farther end of the long hall, beyond the massive ebon pillars, I saw slinking, green-orbed forms, crowding into the shadows.
I set the two lanterns down on the black floor and drew one of the powerful flashlights from my pocket. Its intense, penetrating beam probed the shadows beyond the huge columns of jet. The cowering, howling shapes of women and wolves shrieked when it touched them, and fell to the black floor.
Confidently I stepped forward, to search out new corners with the brilliant finger of light.
Fatal confidence! I had underestimated the cunning and the science of my enemies. When I first saw the black globe, my foot was already poised above it. A perfect sphere of utter blackness, a foot-thick globe that looked as if it had been turned from midnight crystal.
I could not avoid touching it. And it seemed to explode at my touch. There was a dull, ominous plop. And billowing darkness rushed from it. A black gas swirled up about me and shrouded me in smothering gloom.
Wildly I turned, dashed back toward the passage that led up to open air and daylight. I was utterly blinded. The blazing lanterns were completely invisible. I heard one of them dashed over by my blundering feet.
Then I stumbled against the cold temple wall. In feverish haste I felt along it. In either direction, as far as I could reach, the wall was smooth. Where was the passage? A dozen feet I blundered along, feeling the wall. No, the passage must be in the other direction.
I turned. The triumphant, unearthly baying of the pack reached my ears; the padding of feet down the length of the temple. I rushed along the wall, stumbled and fell over a hot lantern.
And they were upon me....
* * * *
The strange, sourceless, blood-hued radiance of the temple was about me once more. The thick, black pillars thrust up beside me, to support the ebon roof. I was bound, helpless, to one of those cold, massive columns, as I had once been before, with the same bloody rope.
Before me was the strange mechanism that opened the way to that other plane -- the Black Dimension -- by changing the vibration frequencies of the matter of one world, to those of the other, interlocking universe. The red light gleamed like blood on the copper ring, and the huge mirror behind it. I saw with relief that the electron tubes were dead, the gasoline engine silent, the blackness gone from the ring.
And before the ring had been erected a fearful altar, upon which reposed the torn, mangled, and bleeding bodies of women and men, of gaunt gray wolves, and little coyotes, and other animals. The pack had found good hunting, on the two nights that I had been gone!
The corpse-white, green-orbed, monstrous things, the frightfully changed bodies of Steele and my mother and the others, were about me.
'Your coming back is good,' the whining, feral tones of the thing in my mother's body rang dreadfully in my ears. 'The manufacturer of electricity will not run. You return to make it turn again. The way must be opened again, for new life to come to these that wait.' She pointed a deathly white arm to the pile of weltering bodies on the black floor.
'Then the new life to you also we will bring. Too many times you run away. You become one with us. And we seek a woman who will act as we say. But first must the way be opened again.
'From our world will the life come. To take the bodies of women as machines. To make gas of darkness like that you found within this hall, to hide all the light of your world, and make it fit for us.'
My mind reeled with horror at thought of the inconceivable, unthinkable menace risen like a dread specter to face humanity. At the thought that soon I, too, would be a mere machine. My body, cold and white as a corpse, doing unnameable deeds at the command of the thing of darkness whose green eyes would blaze in my sockets!
'Quickly tell the method to turn the maker of electricity,' came the maleficent snarl, menacin
g, gloating, 'or we gnaw the flesh from your bones, and seek another who will do our will!'
* * * *
CHAPTER XII
SPAWN OF THE BLACK DIMENSION
I agreed to attempt to start the little gasoline engine, hoping for some opportunity to turn the tables again. I was certain that I could do nothing so long as I was bound to the pillar. And the threat to find another normal woman to take my place as teacher of these monsters from that alien world brought realization that I must strike soon.
Presently they were convinced that they required more than verbal aid in starting the little motor. One of the mechanics unbound me, and led me over to the machine, keeping a painful grip upon my arm with ice-cold fingers.
Unobtrusively, I dropped a hand to feel my pockets. They were empty!
'Make not light!' my mother snarled warningly, having seen the movement.
They had awakened to the necessity of searching my person. Glancing about the red-lit temple, I saw the articles they had taken from me, in a little pile against the base of a huge black pillar. The automatic, spare clips of ammunition, flashlights, batteries, boxes of matches, strips of magnesium ribbon. The two gasoline lanterns that I had brought into the great hall were there too, having evidently been extinguished by the black gas which had blinded me.
Two gray wolves stood alertly beside the articles, which must have been taken from me before I recovered consciousness after the onrush of the pack. Their strange green eyes stared at me balefully, through the crimson gloom.
After fussing with the engine for a few moments, while my mother kept her cold, cruelly firm grip upon my shoulder, and scores of hideous green orbs in the bodies of wolves and women watched my every move, I discovered that it had stopped for lack of fuel. They had let it run on after I wrecked the machine, until the gasoline was exhausted.
I explained to my mother that it would not run without more gasoline.
'Make it turn to cause electricity,' she said, repeating her menacing, wolfish snarl, 'or we gnaw the flesh from your bones, and find another woman.'
* * * *
At first I insisted that I could not get gasoline without visiting some inhabited place. Under the threat of torture however -- when they dragged me back toward the bloody rope -- I confessed that the fuel in the gasoline lanterns might be used.
They were suspicious. They searched me again, to be certain that I had upon my person no means of making a light. And the lanterns were examined very carefully for any means of lighting without matches.
Finally they brought me the lanterns. With my mother grasping my arm, I poured the gasoline from them into the engine's fuel tank. Under any circumstances it would have been difficult to avoid spilling the liquid. I took pains to spill as much as seemed possible without rousing suspicion -- contriving to pour a little pool of it under the exhaust, where a spark might ignite the fumes.
Then they made me start the engine. Coils hummed once more; the electron tubes lit. Blackness seemed to pour from the strange central tube, to be reflected into the great copper ring by the wide, polished mirror.
Again, I looked through the vast ring into the Black Dimension!
Before me lay a sky of gloom, of darkness unutterable and unbroken, stagnant, lurid waters, dimly aglow with the luminosity of foul decay; worn black hills, covered with obscene, writhing, reptilian vegetation that glowed vaguely and lividly green.
And on one of those hills was the city.
A sprawled smear of red evil, it was, a splash of crimson darkness, of red corruption. It spread over the hill like a many-tentacled monster of dark red mist. Ugly masses rose from it, wart-like knobs and projections -- ghastly travesties of minarets and towers.
It was motionless. And within its reeking, fetid scarlet darkness, lurked things of creeping gloom -- nameless hordes of things like that unthinkable monstrosity that I had seen flow into Steele's body. Green-eyed, living horrors of flowing blackness.
The monsters about me howled through the ring, into that black world -- calling!
* * * *
And soon, through the copper ring, came flowing a river of shapeless, inconceivable horror! Formless monsters of an alien universe. Foul beings of the darkness -- spawn of the Black Dimension!
Fearful green eyes were swimming in clotted, creeping masses of evil darkness. They swarmed over the pile of dead things on the floor. And the dead rose to forbidden, nameless life!
Mutilated corpses, and the torn bodies of wolves sprang up, whining, snarling. And the eyes of each were the malevolent, glaring green eyes of the things that had flowed into them.
I was still beside the rhythmically throbbing little engine. As I shrank back in numbed horror from the fearful spectacle of the dead rising to unhallowed life, my eyes fell despairingly upon the little pool of gasoline I had spilled upon the black floor. It was not yet ignited.
I had some fleeting idea of trying to saturate my hand with gasoline and hold it in front of the exhaust, to make of it a living torch. But it was too late for that, and the ruthless, ice-cold fingers still clutched my arm painfully.
Then my mother whined wolfishly.
A creepy, formless, obscene mass of blackness, with twin green orbs in it, glowing with mad, alien fires, left the river of them that poured through the ring and crept across to me.
'Now you become one like us!' came the whining voice.
The thing was coming to flow into my body, to make me its slave, its machine!
I screamed, struggled in the cruel hands that held me. In an insanity of terror, I cursed and pleaded -- promised to give the monsters the world. And the creeping blackness came on. I collapsed, drenched with icy sweat, quivering, nauseated with horror.
* * * *
Then, as I had prayed it would do, the little engine coughed. A stream of pale red sparks shot from the exhaust. There was a sudden, dull, explosive sound of igniting vapor. A yellow flash lit the black-pillared temple.
A flickering column of blue and yellow flame rose from the pool of gasoline beside the engine.
The things of blackness were consumed by the light -- they vanished!
The temple became a bedlam of shrill, agonized howls, of confused, rushing, panic-stricken bodies. The fierce grasp upon my arm was relaxed. My mother fell upon the floor, writhing across the room toward the shelter of a black pillar, hiding her green eyes with an arm flung across them.
I saw that the gray wolves had deserted their post beside the articles of mine they had been guarding, at the foot of the massive black column. I left the flickering pillar of fire and dashed across to them.
In a moment my shaking hands had clutched upon one of the powerful electric flashlights. In desperate haste I found the switch and flicked it on. With the intense, dazzling beam, I swept the vast columned hall. The hellish chorus of animal cries of pain rose to a higher pitch. I saw gray wolves and ghastly white women cowering in the shadows of the massive pillars.
I snatched up the other searchlight and turned it on. Then, hastily gathering up pistol, ammunition, matches, and strips of magnesium ribbon, I retreated to a position beside the flaring gasoline.
This time I moved very cautiously, flashing the light before me to avoid stumbling into another bomb of darkness, like that which had been my undoing before. But I think my precaution was useless; I am sure, from what I afterward saw, that only one had been prepared.
* * * *
As I got back to the engine, I noticed that it was still running, that the way to the Black Dimension, through the copper ring, was still open. I cut off the fuel, at the carburetor. The little engine coughed, panted, slowed down. The wall of darkness faded from the copper ring, breaking our connection with that hideous world of another interpenetrating universe.
Then I hastily laid the flashlights on the floor, laying them so they cast their broad, bright beams in opposite directions. I fumbled for matches, struck one to the end of a strip of magnesium ribbon, to which I had applied sulphur to make it
easier to light.
It burst into sudden blinding, dazzling, white radiance, bright as a miniature sun. I flung it across the great black hall. It outlined a white parabola. Its intense light cut the shadows from behind the ebon pillars.
The cowering, hiding things howled in new agony. They lay on the black floor, trembling, writhing, fearfully contorted. Low, agonized whinings came from them.
Again and again I ignited the thin ribbons of metal and flung them flaming toward the corners of the room, to banish all shadow with their brilliant white fire.
The howling grew weaker, the whines died away. The wolves and the corpse-white women moved no more. Their fierce, twisting struggles of agony were stilled.
When the last strip of magnesium was gone, I drew the automatic, put a bullet through the little engine's gasoline tank, and lit a match to the thin stream of clear liquid that trickled out. As a new flaring pillar of light rushed upward, I hurried toward the passage that led to the surface, watching for another of those black spheres that erupted darkness.
I found the gasoline lanterns I had left in the tunnel still burning; the monsters had evidently found no way of putting them out.
* * * *
On to the surface I ran. I gathered up the six lanterns I had left there -- still burning brilliantly in the gathering dusk -- and plunged with them back down the passage, into the huge, pillared temple.
The monsters were still inert, unconscious.
I arranged the powerful lanterns about the floor, so placed that every part of the strange temple was brilliantly illuminated. In the penetrating radiance, the monsters lay motionless.
Returning to the surface, I brought one of my full cans of gasoline, and two more of the lighted lanterns. I filled, pumped up, and lit the two lanterns from which I had drawn the gasoline.
Then I went about the black-walled temple, always keeping two lanterns close beside me, and dragged the lax, ice-cold bodies from their crouching postures, turning them so the faces would be toward the light. I found Steele, his lovely body still unharmed, except for its deathly pallor and its strange cold. And then I came upon my mother. There was also the mangled thing that had been Judson, and the headless body that had been Blake Jetton, Steele's mother. I gazed at many more lacerated human bodies and at the chill carcasses of wolves, of coyotes, of the gray horse, of a few other animals.
Wolves of Darkness Rerun Page 8
