The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (27 page)

King darted in. This blow had to be good—and it was good. Jurth, question frozen on his lips, toppled to the floor. He was so stiff that he did not make any instinctive move to break his fall.

King jerked Foma to her feet, and hustled her to the laboratory door. He ignored her question as to his escape and his possession of the key. It fitted the lock. He booted the panel open, and spent a moment looking and thinking.

There were coils and alembics, the strange devices which in some ways were primitive, in others ways, far advanced of twentieth-century instruments; at a glance, he sensed that many of the arts he knew had never been known to the ancients, and that on the other hand, a wealth of science had been lost, hopelessly perhaps, in thirty-thousand-odd years.

Looking, and thinking. There was his time machine. There was the war-vibrator whose infra-sonic humming made the room shiver. It had dials and levers and controls, it had focused projectors, traversing wheels; its concentration could be turned in every direction. King saw this, saw all these other things, and wondered whether he should escape, or whether he should patch up a truce with Jurth, and finally go back into the twentieth century with a full knowledge of all the lost arts.

But how to get Ania? Only Foma could enter the cell, or pass the guards.

“Jurth is going to stay unconscious for some time. Run down and get—” He fumbled at his belt. “My pistol.”

That was a bad guess. Foma’s eyes hardened and her lips curled. “You’re trying to trick me! You know you never had those belt-weapons in your cell, there they are—see them—”

He followed her gesture. His pistol was on a bench, apparently ready for an examination Jurth had not yet had time to make. If that demon learned the power of gunpowder! Horror drove King across the laboratory for his weapon.

“How did you get that key?” Foma screamed, dashing after him. “Sending me on a crazy chase—when you had it—trying to get rid of me—after I’ve been beaten on your account—oh, I know, it’s that Ania, that slave girl, that—no wonder she’s been playing up to Jurth, you fool, he’ll kill her when he finds out!”

He caught her by the shoulders. “Shut up! Shut up!” She thought he was merely trying to sidetrack her; Foma did not realize that Ania was in King’s cell, waiting for release. “Wait a second—no, come with me, there are things I have to get, we’ll need them in the future.”

The war-machine’s devilish vibration was whipping King to wrath, and it stirred Foma’s sultry temper. If either had been calm, the impending rage would have been drowned in reason, but as it was, she believed nothing that he said. She shrieked, “You’ll not go down, you’ll not desert me, you’ll not get her!”

“Shut up!” King slapped her; she tumbled end for end, cracked her head against the wall, and lay there, moaning.

He had to kill the guards, or he could not get Ania, and he needed a weapon. He dashed about the spacious laboratory, and found one of the axes that Jurth was perfecting. He snatched it from the bench, whirled it. His legs had limbered up again, and he could settle any two soldiers who ever lived! He’d chop Jurth lengthwise and crosswise on the way down to get the guards! He spun, eyed the war-vibrator: ought to chop that to pieces, that was Jurth’s work, he hated everything that made him think of Jurth.

Then his frenzy of plans was scrambled by surprise. He had fate in his hands; he had the power to change every day of the following thirty-odd thousand years; but only a god could have done the right thing at the right time.

He paused to buckle on his gun. Something compelled that. Oh, of course, mustn’t leave any specimen of gunpowder for Jurth to analyze. Then he heard Ania’s voice from the doorway: “John-king! I bribed the guard—I’m free!”

King lowered the axe. “There it is!” He pointed at the time machine. “Get in! I’ve got to see a man out in the hall!”

Kill Jurth; to wreck the war-vibrator would only make him invent another one. King was confused by the number of things he had to do. He felt that he must hurry, lest enraged fate destroy a man who upset thirty thousand years of history.

Kill Jurth. Then he saw Foma was on her feet. She tugged at a lever, and a great gong rolled and boomed. On the floor just below, men shouted, armor clanged. The guard was turning out. Kill Foma! An insane thing to do, but King was dizzy with hate. Stupefied by his own fury, he stood there, and neither struck Foma nor ran into the hall to finish Jurth.

Foma bounded to the time machine, screaming. Ania, gentle Ania bounded out to meet her; eyes green with rage, nails raking, teeth exposed, she closed in with Foma. The war-vibrator had been too much for her, and she knew all about the dark woman’s love for King.

White limbs and tawny, flailing and threshing; brunette with fresh nail marks, blonde with darkening bruises, a tangle of hair and shredded garments. King shouted, “Stop it, you fools, I’ll take you both!”

He went to shake sense into them, and dropped the axe. Already, the guards were clanging up the stairway into the hall. And Jurth was bellowing. Shaken by his ever quickening sense of nightmare failure, King picked up the axe. Jurth dropped his whip, and reached for the ray-scepter. King hurled the ponderous axe.

A good throw, but not quite good enough. It made Jurth shake his head. The glancing axe-head bit into the masonry, sparks flew, and the weapon clanged against the opposite wall. Jurth levelled the paralyzer. King ducked. The struggling girls rolled against his calves; he tumbled over them, backwards in a heap.

Jurth shouted to the soldiers, “There he is, paralyzed! Grab him!”

The column of fours came pounding in, tridents levelled. King whirled to seize Ania. But she was locked in Foma’s grip; the brunette, catching the full blast of the power that would have paralyzed King had he not tripped, could not let go of her rival. King could not pry them apart, nor lift the two; not through that narrow hatch.

The ray projector blazed again over the heads of the guards, who ran at a crouch. Panic drove King into the time machine. He pulled the hatchway. The blast was wasted on massive metal, and tridents vainly chipped at the port covers and the walls. He thrust the reverse lever home, pushed the starter.

The howling soldiers blurred in a grey haze. When King’s senses became normal again, he was in his own laboratory again, and not showing any sign of battering or struggle. But he was not quite the same. He stared at the emptiness between the two hands he held just far enough apart to have pressed the curve of a slender girl’s waist. He shook his head, and hated himself.

Outside, newsboys called war extras. He had failed because he had been incited by the same fury he had gone out to destroy. But since the Golden Age people had succumbed to the hate wave, how could he, with the heritage of a thousand warring generations, have resisted it? He let his empty hands meet, and closed his eyes.

No man can alter that which has been, he now realized; inevitably he could not have brought either Ania or Foma back into this century. But he had brought back a memory, and Ania’s loveliness blossomed in his fancy. And he thought of Foma as a sense-stirring fragrance, an ardor whose very reflection made him restless.

He went out to eat. He could not believe his watch. Allowing for his period of bewilderment, it seemed that no time had been consumed. His shirt, all torn, could have been damaged by his involuntary struggle against fading consciousness.

An illusion? Then it had in some way given him peace, and the knowledge that no man can undo what has been done. That scent in his nostrils… go out, it told him, look around… that fragrance had come from no laboratory.…

Then he saw the girl, blonde and slender and shapely; the breeze whipped a print skirt against her lovely legs, and tugged at her shimmering hair. Something about her walk made him think of Ania, and so did her profile. Her side glance and her almost-smile. He knew that he would soon meet her, and find what he had almost brought from the dawn of discord.

As King watched the setting sun play tricks with the girl’s skirt, he knew that scientific experiments do have practical results. If she had not reminded him of Ania, he’d never have looked long enough to want to follow her.…

H
OUSE OF THE
M
ONOCEROS

  hen the 5:37 stopped at Pengyl, I wasn’t surprised to see I was the only passenger who got off at that clutter of old masonry houses with thatched roofs; this was the loneliest corner of Cornwall. No one ever arrived there, and no one ever left, except those who disappeared, which was the business that brought me from London. A monster was eating the peasants. Anyway, that was what Lord Treganneth said in his letter.

A fifteen-year-old Rolls-Royce pulled up, and a big man got out. His face was as rugged as the Cornish coast: heavy chin, broad mouth, jutting nose; and his shaggy tweeds made him look even rougher. He said, brusquely, “I’m Treganneth. You’re Mr. Dale, I fancy?”

His voice had a rumble like the surf that was shaking the ground under my feet, and filling the air with fine spray. What a place! Even the sea hated it, and tried to pound it to pieces.

If he wanted to be superior, okay; his check for twenty guineas, a hundred bucks in American money, made him a nice guy.

I heaved my bag into the car. He said, “Get in the back seat.” Then he took the wheel. That was funny. It made no sense, an earl or something of the sort, not having a chauffeur. I wondered for a second or two whether the monoceros had eaten all the servants.

Judging from the coat of arms on Treganneth’s stationery, a monoceros is a kind of a sea monster with a horn like a unicorn; a sea-going dragon with a long spike coming out between his eyes. The motto on the engraving was funny, too: WE SERVE THE MONOCEROS.

In the couple minutes I’d waited in Pengyl, I figured that it was a ghost town. Now I began to see the people, and I wondered where they’d been up till the time Treganneth drove up.

A man in an oilskin coat and hat shook his fist from a doorway. Before we reached the edge of the village, another man popped out. He heaved a cobble stone and yelled, “Where’s Harry Penfield, you bloody bastard?”

The rock smashed against the door. A bit higher and, and it’d have knocked Treganneth from the wheel. This struck me as an odd way to treat the earl who owns the country for miles around. Maybe that was why he had sent for me, an American.

I had a sort of reputation wished on me.

I’d come to London to nail an embezzler; bonding company business, you know. The gent couldn’t run further, so he hung himself with the cord of his bath robe. The papers made a play of me hounding the man to his death. That must have pleased Treganneth, so here I was.

A rock crashed against the rear quarter. Another knocked out the rear glass, though no pieces hit me. The people did not like Treganneth.

Cornish miners are the best in the world, I’ve heard, and the most superstitious; too many generations under ground, and the earth whispered to them. And the fishermen are as bad. Whether Treganneth did or did not have a monster around his castle, the peasants all thought he had.

We climbed a brisk grade, and got up through the mist. I was almost shocked to see how much light there was, for I’d gotten the feeling that the sun never shone here. A grey masonry fortress loomed up from a hill; it had a castellated turret, with little windows out through thick walls. For all the light, the place made me think of a second-hand coffin.

“Hold it!” I said to Treganneth. “I want to look from here. If there is funny work, whoever does it is leaving trails. The monoceros comes out of the castle and goes over the hills, or the natives go over the hills to the castle. Like in France, aviators used to spot batteries because some dumb artilleryman cut across a meadow.”

Treganneth pulled up, but did not answer; he just sat there. I dug into my bag and got out a pair of highpower glasses. Anyone used to ordinarily fine glasses would never imagine how these binoculars gathered light. This time they surprised me; that was when I saw the girl in the turret.

She was gripping the bars, and her face was pressed against the metal. A blanket was over her shoulders. That was all she wore, and it covered her back. She was high-breasted, and her waist was slim, and her hips had a luscious flare. The sill reached up high enough to block observations on her legs and so forth, but I was ready to okay her, from the sample displayed. Judging from the way she pressed against the bars she gripped, she was a prisoner.

Lucky she moved away before his lordship got wise that I wasn’t studying hillsides. I said, “No, no signs of trespassers here. But who’s Harry Penfield?”

Treganneth started. “The last man who vanished.”

The road curved, dipped, swooped first inland, then along the sea; for a few miles, we were further from the castle than we’d been when I got that not-quite-enough of a look at the blonde with the nice curves pressed against the bars. The road became tougher, the crags wilder; the full roar of the sea burst upon us, and spray drenched the car. And then we were heading for the arched gateway of the castle.

Grass sprouted between the flagstones of the courtyard. The big iron hinges of the door that opened into the donjon were rusty. The whole place was run down. Ivy grew wild, blocking window after window.