object:1f.lovecraft - The Challenge from Beyond
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
By C.L. Moore, A. Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft,
Robert E.Howard, and Frank Belknap Long
[C.L. Moore]
George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing
out of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before
he roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the
keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any
drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the
delicious borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an
unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect
ease. These were vacation’s most delightful moments, after all—rest,
after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night.
Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured
himself once more that three long months of freedom lay before
him—freedom from cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the
University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology he
earned his daily bread by dinning into their obdurate ears. Freedom
from—
Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside
the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George
Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed
and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom
outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous
little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped
about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers
closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.
But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in
the dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull
rounded corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers
was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned
its rays upon the thing he held.
All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his
idle groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube.
Quartz, unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized
form. Somehow—he could not guess the method—it had been wrought into a
perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For
it was incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until
its corners were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the
outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond
counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.
But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out
dimly in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a
little disc of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised
deep upon its quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly
reminiscent of cuneiform writing.
George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little
enigma in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as
this have imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated
through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice
which had frozen too hard to melt again. Ice—and wedge-shaped
cuneiforms—yes, didn’t that sort of writing originate among the
Sumerians who came down from the north in history’s remotest beginnings
to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense
regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the
earliest of earth’s geological periods, when there was nothing anywhere
but heat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens of millions of
years after this thing must have been formed.
And yet—that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were
unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could
there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language
who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped
disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of
space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it—
Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the
luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the
queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common
sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet,
switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring
him an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.
But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he
flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as
if with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or
perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had been only his dazzled eyes that
seemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing in the
enigmatic deeps of the thing with queer persistence.
He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered
questions over and over in his mind. There was something about this
crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all
history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.
[A. Merritt]
He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering
light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his
mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened,
stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert . . . and intent upon him.
Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon
his watch. Close to one o’clock; three hours more before the dawn. The
beam fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there
closely, for minutes. He snapped it out, then watched.
There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to
the darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny
fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings.
They were at its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale
disk with its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming
larger . . . the markings shifting shapes . . . the cube was
growing . . . was it illusion brought about by the tiny
lightnings. . . .
He heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of
harp strings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It
came from the cube. . . .
There was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an
agonized wailing like a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some
small tragedy of the wilderness, killer and prey. He stepped over to
where it had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off
the flash and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue
glimmering. It was the cube. He stooped to pick it up; then obeying
some obscure warning, drew back his hand.
And again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings
flashing fitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come.
There was no sound from it.
He sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but
steadily becoming dimmer. It came to him that two elements were
necessary to produce the phenomenon. The electric ray itself, and his
own fixed attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself
upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until . . . what?
He felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien
thing. It was alien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth’s
life. He conquered his shrinking, picked up the cube and took it into
the tent. It was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he would
not have known he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch
turned from it; then stepped to the flap of the tent and closed it.
He went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash
directly upon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart.
He sent all his will, all his concentration, along it; focusing will
and sight upon the disc as he had the light.
As though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst
from the disc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back,
bathing the disc and the markings. Again these began to change,
shifting, moving, advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They
were no longer cuneiform. They were things . . . objects.
He heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the
sound and louder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their
rhythm. The crystal walls were melting, growing misty as though formed
of the mist of diamonds. And the disc itself was growing . . . the
shapes shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door had been
opened and into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter,
more bright grew the pulsing light.
He felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the
flash. The cube had no need now of the ray . . . and he could not
withdraw . . . could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked
into that disc which was now a globe within which unnameable shapes
danced to a music that bathed the globe with steady radiance.
There was no tent. There was only a vast curtain of sparkling mist
behind which shone the globe. . . . He felt himself drawn through that
mist, sucked through it as if by a mighty wind, straight for the globe.
[H. P. Lovecraft]
As the mist-blurred light of the sapphire suns grew more and more
intense, the outlines of the globe ahead wavered and dissolved to a
churning chaos. Its pallor and its motion and its music all blended
themselves with the engulfing mist—bleaching it to a pale steel-colour
and setting it undulantly in motion. And the sapphire suns, too, melted
imperceptibly into the greying infinity of shapeless pulsation.
Meanwhile the sense of forward, outward motion grew intolerably,
incredibly, cosmically swift. Every standard of speed known to earth
seemed dwarfed, and Campbell knew that any such flight in physical
reality would mean instant death to a human being. Even as it was—in
this strange, hellish hypnosis or nightmare—the quasi-visual impression
of meteor-like hurtling almost paralyzed his mind. Though there were no
real points of reference in the grey, pulsing void, he felt that he was
approaching and passing the speed of light itself. Finally his
consciousness did go under—and merciful blackness swallowed everything.
It was very suddenly, and amidst the most impenetrable darkness, that
thoughts and ideas again came to George Campbell. Of how many
moments—or years—or eternities—had elapsed since his flight through the
grey void, he could form no estimate. He knew only that he seemed to be
at rest and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation
was the salient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness
seem less solidly black—suggesting as it did that he was rather a
disembodied intelligence in a state beyond physical senses, than a
corporeal being with senses deprived of their accustomed objects of
perception. He could think sharply and quickly—almost preternaturally
so—yet could form no idea whatsoever of his situation.
Half by instinct, he realised that he was not in his own tent. True, he
might have awaked there from a nightmare to a world equally black; yet
he knew this was not so. There was no camp cot beneath him—he had no
hands to feel the blankets and canvas surface and flashlight that ought
to be around him—there was no sensation of cold in the air—no flap
through which he could glimpse the pale night outside . . . something
was wrong, dreadfully wrong.
He cast his mind backward and thought of the fluorescent cube which had
hypnotised him—of that, and all which had followed. He had known that
his mind was going, yet had been unable to draw back. At the last
moment there had been a shocking, panic fear—a subconscious fear beyond
even that caused by the sensation of daemonic flight. It had come from
some vague flash or remote recollection—just what, he could not at once
tell. Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a
cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity was fraught
with dim terror. Now he tried to remember what the familiarity and the
terror were.
Little by little it came to him. Once—long ago, in connection with his
geological life-work—he had read of something like that cube. It had to
do with those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the
Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern
England thirty years before. Their shape and markings were so queer
that a few scholars hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures
about them and their origin. They came, clearly, from a time when no
human beings could exist on the globe—but their contours and figurings
were damnably puzzling. That was how they got their name.
It was not, however, in the writings of any sober scientist that
Campbell had seen that reference to a crystal, disc-holding globe. The
source was far less reputable, and infinitely more vivid. About 1912 a
deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings—the Reverend
Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall—had professed to identify the markings on
the Eltdown Shards with some of the so-called “pre-human hieroglyphs”
persistently cherished and esoterically handed down in certain mystical
circles, and had published at his own expense what purported to be a
“translation” of the primal and baffling “inscriptions”—a “translation”
still quoted frequently and seriously by occult writers. In this
“translation”—a surprisingly long brochure in view of the limited
number of “shards” existing—had occurred the narrative, supposedly of
pre-human authorship, containing the now frightening reference.
As the story went, there dwelt on a world—and eventually on countless
other worlds—of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose
attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the
range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of
interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every
habitable planet in their own galaxy—killing off the races they found.
Beyond the limits of their own galaxy—which was not ours—they could not
navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and
time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs
with their minds. They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized
cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in
space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could
be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which
would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.
These, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited
worlds in outside universes, formed the ether-bridges needed for mental
communication. Atmospheric friction burned away the protecting
envelope, leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by the
intelligent minds of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the
cube would attract and rivet attention. This, when coupled with the
action of light, was sufficient to set its special properties working.
The mind that noticed the cube would be drawn into it by the power of
the disc, and would be sent on a thread of obscure energy to the place
whence the disc had come—the remote world of the worm-like
space-explorers across stupendous galactic abysses. Received in one of
the machines to which each cube was attuned, the captured mind would
remain suspended without body or senses until examined by one of the
dominant race. Then it would, by an obscure process of interchange, be
pumped of all its contents. The investigator’s mind would now occupy
the strange machine while the captive mind occupied the interrogator’s
worm-like body. Then, in another interchange, the interrogator’s mind
would leap across boundless space to the captive’s vacant and
unconscious body on the trans-galactic world—animating the alien
tenement as best it might, and exploring the alien world in the guise
of one of its denizens.
When done with exploration, the adventurer would use the cube and its
disc in accomplishing his return—and sometimes the captured mind would
be restored safely to its own remote world. Not always, however, was
the dominant race so kind. Sometimes, when a potentially important race
capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the
cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would
extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons—using the exploring minds as
agents of destruction.
In other cases sections of the worm-folk would permanently occupy a
trans-galactic planet—destroying the captured minds and wiping out the
remaining inhabitants preparatory to settling down in unfamiliar
bodies. Never, however, could the parent civilization be quite
duplicated in such a case; since the new planet would not contain all
the materials necessary for the worm-race’s arts. The cubes, for
example, could be made only on the home planet.
Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and
response on an inhabited world—since there was no such thing as aiming
them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had
ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of
these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion
years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world
near the centre of the galaxy. The third—and the only one ever known to
have invaded the solar system—had reached our own earth 150,000,000
years ago.
It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly
dealt. When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial
species was a huge, cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or
since in mentality and achievements. This race was so advanced that it
had actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the
cosmos, hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube
fell from the sky and certain individuals had suffered mental change
after gazing at it.
Realising that the changed individuals represented invading minds, the
race’s leaders had them destroyed—even at the cost of leaving the
displaced minds exiled in alien space. They had had experience with
even stranger transitions. When, through a mental exploration of space
and time, they formed a rough idea of what the cube was, they carefully
hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace. They
did not wish to destroy a thing so rich in later experimental
possibilities. Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would
furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the
consequences—but all such cases were discovered, and safely and
drastically dealt with.
Of this evil meddling the only bad result was that the worm-like
outside race learned from the new exiles what had happened to their
explorers on earth, and conceived a violent hatred of the planet and
all its life-forms. They would have depopulated it if they could, and
indeed sent additional cubes into space in the wild hope of striking it
by accident in unguarded places—but that accident never came to pass.
The cone-shaped terrestrial beings kept the one existing cube in a
special shrine as a relique and basis for experiments, till after aeons
it was lost amidst the chaos of war and the destruction of the great
polar city where it was guarded. When, fifty million years ago, the
beings sent their minds ahead into the infinite future to avoid a
nameless peril of inner earth, the whereabouts of the sinister cube
from space were unknown.
This much, according to the learned occultist, the Eltdown Shards had
said. What now made the account so obscurely frightful to Campbell was
the minute accuracy with which the alien cube had been described. Every
detail tallied—dimensions, consistency, hieroglyphed central disc,
hypnotic effects. As he thought the matter over and over amidst the
darkness of his strange situation, he began to wonder whether his whole
experience with the crystal cube—indeed, its very existence—were not a
nightmare brought on by some freakish subconscious memory of this old
bit of extravagant, charlatanic reading. If so, though, the nightmare
must still be in force; since his present apparently bodiless state had
nothing of normality in it.
Of the time consumed by this puzzled memory and reflection, Campbell
could form no estimate. Everything about his state was so unreal that
ordinary dimensions and measurements became meaningless. It seemed an
eternity, but perhaps it was not really long before the sudden
interruption came. What happened was as strange and inexplicable as the
blackness it succeeded. There was a sensation—of the mind rather than
of the body—and all at once Campbell felt his thoughts swept or sucked
beyond his control in tumultuous and chaotic fashion.
Memories arose irresponsibly and irrelevantly. All that he knew—all his
personal background, traditions, experiences, scholarship, dreams,
ideas, and inspirations—welled up abruptly and simultaneously, with a
dizzying speed and abundance which soon made him unable to keep track
of any separate concept. The parade of all his mental contents became
an avalanche, a cascade, a vortex. It was as horrible and vertiginous
as his hypnotic flight through space when the crystal cube pulled him.
Finally it sapped his consciousness and brought on fresh oblivion.
Another measureless blank—and then a slow trickle of sensation. This
time it was physical, not mental. Sapphire light, and a low rumble of
distant sound. There were tactile impressions—he could realise that he
was lying at full length on something, though there was a baffling
strangeness about the feel of his posture. He could not reconcile the
pressure of the supporting surface with his own outlines—or with the
outlines of the human form at all. He tried to move his arms, but found
no definite response to the attempt. Instead, there were little,
ineffectual nervous twitches all over the area which seemed to mark his
body.
He tried to open his eyes more widely, but found himself unable to
control their mechanism. The sapphire light came in a diffused,
nebulous manner, and could nowhere be voluntarily focussed into
definiteness. Gradually, though, visual images began to trickle in
curiously and indecisively. The limits and qualities of vision were not
those which he was used to, but he could roughly correlate the
sensation with what he had known as sight. As this sensation gained
some degree of stability, Campbell realised that he must still be in
the throes of nightmare.
He seemed to be in a room of considerable extent—of medium height, but
with a large proportionate area. On every side—and he could apparently
see all four sides at once—were high, narrowish slits which seemed to
serve as combined doors and windows. There were singular low tables or
pedestals, but no furniture of normal nature and proportions. Through
the slits streamed floods of sapphire light, and beyond them could be
mistily seen the sides and roofs of fantastic buildings like clustered
cubes. On the walls—in the vertical panels between the slits—were
strange markings of an oddly disquieting character. It was some time
before Campbell understood why they disturbed him so—then he saw that
they were, in repeated instances, precisely like some of the
hieroglyphs on the crystal cube’s disc.
The actual nightmare element, though, was something more than this. It
began with the living thing which presently entered through one of the
slits, advancing deliberately toward him and bearing a metal box of
bizarre proportions and glassy, mirror-like surfaces. For this thing
was nothing human—nothing of earth—nothing even of man’s myths and
dreams. It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around
as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless,
cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its
rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or
at least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was
a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane
ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes
around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking,
twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms.
Here, indeed, was outré nightmare at its height—capricious fantasy at
its apex. But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George
Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more
thing—one final, unbearable touch—to do that. As the nameless worm
advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the
mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body.
Yet—horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations—it was
not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal.
It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great
centipedes.
[Robert E. Howard]
From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full
understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of
a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other
side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s
personality.
He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint,
why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were
the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present
body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and
revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.
What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at
death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which
he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty,
continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered
no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered
more—much more.
With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked
fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the
physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all
the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held
no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt
promises of strange, exotic joys.
A lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, free of
all conventions or inhibitions of Earth, or of this strange planet,
free of every artificial restraint in the universe. He was a god! With
grim amusement he thought of his body moving in earth’s business and
society, with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows
that were George Campbell’s eyes on people who would flee if they knew.
Let him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and
its races no longer had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had
been one of a billion nonentities, fixed in place by a mountainous
accumulation of conventions, laws and manners, doomed to live and die
in his sordid niche. But in one blind bound he had soared above the
commonplace. This was not death, but re-birth—the birth of a full-grown
mentality, with a new-found freedom that made little of physical
captivity on Yekub.
He started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he
known? Then he knew, as he knew the name of him whose body he
occupied—Tothe. Memory, deep grooved in Tothe’s brain, was stirring in
him—shadows of the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in the physical
tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George
Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them
to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to the power
his soul, stripped to its primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slave
would he dwell on Yekub, but as a king! Just as of old barbarians had
sat on the throne of lordly empires.
For the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He
still lay on the couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room,
and the centipede man stood before him, holding the polished metal
object, and clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbell
knew, and what it said he dimly understood, through the implanted
thought processes of Tothe, just as he knew the creature was Yukth,
supreme lord of science.
But Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan
so alien to the ways of Yekub that it was beyond Yukth’s comprehension
and caught him wholly unprepared. Yukth, like Campbell, saw the
sharp-pointed metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth it was only a
scientific implement. He did not even know it could be used as a
weapon. Campbell’s earthly mind supplied the knowledge and the action
that followed, driving Tothe’s body into movements no man of Yekub had
ever made before.
Campbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely
upward. Yukth reared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor.
In an instant Campbell was streaking for a door. His speed was amazing,
exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physical
sensations.
As he ran, guided wholly by the instinctive knowledge implanted in
Tothe’s physical reflexes, it was as if he were borne by a separate
consciousness in his legs. Tothe’s body was bearing him along a route
it had traversed ten thousand times when animated by Tothe’s mind.
Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved
door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had
found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from
which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose in the middle
of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid
color. The ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a
blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere that poised in mid-air—a
sphere that shone like translucent ivory.
This, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of
Yekub, though why the people of Yekub feared and worshipped it had been
forgotten a million years. A worm-priest stood between him and the
altar which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it could be touched
was a blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The
worm-priest stood in frozen horror until Campbell’s shard ripped the
life out of him.
On his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of
its sudden quiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in
the floating sphere, heedless of the smoke that now billowed out in
blue clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared the
superstitions of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that
globe in his hands he would be king of Yekub. The worm men would dare
deny him nothing, when he held their god as hostage. He reached a hand
for the ball—no longer ivory-hued, but red as blood. . . .
[Frank Belknap Long]
Out of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George
Campbell. It moved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of
enormous trees, over a forest path strewed with sweet scented pine
needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl of
frosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the Aurora
Borealis splashed streamers of fire.
The head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From
the corners of his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth,
which fluttered in the night breeze. He walked upright at first, as a
man would walk, but gradually as the tent receded, his posture altered.
His torso began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to
shorten.
In a far-off world of outer space the centipede creature that was
George Campbell clasped to its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as
blood, and ran with insect-like quiverings across a rainbow-hued hall
and out through massive portals into the bright glow of alien suns.
Weaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the
awkward loping of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was
fulfilling a mindless destiny. Long, claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves
from a carpet of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wide expanse
of gleaming water.
In the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm people, George
Campbell moved between cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long,
fern-planted avenues holding aloft the round red god.
There was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake
on earth where the mind of a worm creature dwelt in a body swayed by
instinct. Human teeth sank into soft animal fur, tore at black animal
flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliation into a
furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted.
Slowly the body of George Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh
blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it moved towards the waters of
the lake.
As the variform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the
black blocks of stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in
the scintillating dust before it. A godlike power seemed to emanate
from its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motion toward a
throne of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.
A trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the
tent where the worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came
to the gleaming waters of the lake and discerned something dark
floating there. He had been lost in the woods all night, and weariness
enveloped him like a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.
But the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the
edge of the water he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the
floating bulk. Slowly he pulled it to the shore.
Far off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god
ascended a throne that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under
an alien vault of hyper-suns. The great deity that he held aloft
energized his worm tenement, burning away in the white fire of a
supermundane spirituality all animal dross.
On earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened
and hairy face of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively
anthropoid in contour, and from its twisted, distorted mouth black
ichor poured.
“He who sought your body in the abysses of Time will occupy an
unresponsive tenement,” said the red god. “No spawn of Yekub can
control the body of a human.
“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with
unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a
bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively
conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the
human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth,
seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it
can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the
death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it
will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it
sprang.”
Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the
space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human
desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more
wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an
empire of men.
Return to “The Challenge from Beyond”
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