Instantly the glistening black giant behind me let out a shriek of terror. I spun round, letting the steaming poker fall, to witness that monstrosity from the ocean floor rocking to and fro, tentacles wrapped protectively round its head. After a few seconds it became still, and the rubbery arms fell listlessly away to reveal the multi-mouthed face with its ruined, rotting eyes.
“You’ve killed him, I know it,” Julian’s voice said, calmer now. “He is finished and I am finished — already I can feel them recalling me.” Then, voice rising hysterically: “They won’t take me alive!”
The monstrous form trembled and its outline began to blur. My legs crumpled beneath me in sudden reaction, and I pitched to the floor. Perhaps I passed out again — I don’t know for sure — but when I next looked in its direction the horror had gone. All that remained was the slime and the grotesque corpse.
I do not know where my muscles found the strength to carry my tottering and mazed body out of that house. Sanity did not drive me, I admit that, for I was quite insane. I wanted to stand beneath the stabbing lightning and scream at those awful, rain-blurred stars. I wanted to bound, to float in my madness through eldritch depths of unhallowed black blood. I wanted to cling to the writhing breasts of Yibb-Tstll. Insane — insane, I tell you, I gibbered and moaned, staggering through the thunder-crazed streets until, with a roar and a crash, sanity-invoking lightning smashed me down …
You know the rest. I awoke to this world of white sheets; to you, the police psychiatrist, with your soft voice … Why must you insist that I keep telling my story? Do you honestly think to make me change it? It’s true, I tell you! I admit to killing my brother’s body — but it wasn’t his mind that I burned out! You stand there babbling of awful eye diseases. Julian had no eye disease! D’you really imagine that the other eye, the unburnt one which you found in that body — in my brother’s face — was his? And what of the pool of slime in the cellar and the stink? Are you stupid or something? You’ve asked for a statement, and here it is! Watch, damn you, watch while I scribble it down … you damn great crimson eye … always watching me … who would have thought that the lips of Bugg-Shash could suck like that? Watch, you redness you … and look out for the Scarlet Feaster! No, don’t take the paper away…
NOTE:
Sir,
Dr. Stewart was contacted as you suggested, and after seeing Haughtree he gave his expert opinion that the man was madder than his brother ever had been. He also pointed out the possibility that the disease of Julian Haughtree’s eyes had started soon after his partial mental recovery — probably brought on by constantly wearing dark spectacles. After Dr. Stewart left the police ward, Haughtree became very indignant and wrote the above statement.
Davies, our specialist, examined the body in the cellar himself and is convinced that the younger brother must, indeed, have been suffering from a particularly horrible and unknown ocular disease.
It is appreciated that there are one or two remarkable coincidences in the wild fancies of both brothers in relation to certain recent factual events — but these are, surely, only coincidences. One such event is the rise of the volcanic island of Surtsey. Haughtree must somehow have heard of Surtsey after being taken under observation. He asked to be allowed to read the following newspaper account, afterwards yelling very loudly and repeatedly: “By God! They’ve named it after the wrong mythos!” Thereafter he was put into a straitjacket of the arm-restricting type:
—BIRTH OF AN ISLAND—
Yesterday morning, the 16th November, the sun rose on a long, narrow island of Tephra, lying in the sea to the north of Scotland at latitude 63° 18’ North and longitude 20°361/2’ West. Surtsey, which was born on the 15th November, was then 130 feet high and growing all the time. The fantastic ‘birth’ of the island was witnessed by the crew of the fishing vessel Isleifer II,” which was lying west of Geirfuglasker, southernmost of the Vestmann Islands. Considerable disturbance of the sea — which hindered clear observation — was noticed, and the phenomena, the result of submarine volcanic activity, involved such awe-inspiring sights as columns of smoke reaching to two and a half miles high, fantastic lightning storms, and the hurling of lava-bombs over a wide area of the ocean. Surtsey has been named after the giant Surter, who — in Norse Mythology — “Came from the South with Fire to fight the God Freyr at Ragnarok,” which battle preceded the end of the world and the Twilight of the Gods. More details and pictures inside.
Still in the ‘jacket,’ Haughtree finally calmed himself and begged that further interesting items in the paper be read to him. Dr. Davies did the reading, and when he reached the following report Haughtree grew very excited:
—BEACHES FOULED—
Garvin Bay, on the extreme North coast, was found this morning to be horribly fouled. For a quarter of a mile deposits of some slimy, black grease were left by the tide along the sands. The stench was so great from these unrecognizable deposits that fishermen were unable to put to sea. Scientific analysis has already shown the stuff to be of an organic base, and it is thought to be some type of oil. Local shipping experts are bewildered, as no known tankers have been in the area for over three months. The tremendous variety of dead and rotting fish also washed up has caused the people of nearby Belloch to take strong sanitary precautions. It is hoped that tonight’s tide will clear the affected area …
At the end of the reading Haughtree said: “Julian said they wouldn’t take him alive.” Then, still encased in the jacket, he somehow got off the bed and flung himself through the third-story window of his room in the police ward. His rush at the window was of such tremendous ferocity and strength that he took the bars and frame with him. It all happened so quickly there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.
Submitted as an appendix to my original report.
Sgt. J.T. Muir
Glasgow City Police
23 November 1963.
David’s Worm
The last of my witch’s dozen, David’s Worm was written in 1969. At first I couldn’t find a buyer. Then it went into Year’s Best Horror Stories No. 2, and from there must have gone into translation for eventually it was adapted for both German and Italian radio. Anyway, it’s had a long outing, and it’s only right that the trail of the slimy beast ends here!
Professor Lees — chief radio-biologist at the Kendall nuclear research and power station — was showing his son some slides he had prepared weeks earlier from pond and seawater in irradiated test tubes. David was only seven, but already he could understand much of what his famous father said.
“Look,” the professor explained as the boy peered eagerly into the microscope. “That’s an amoeba, quite dead, killed off by radiation. Just like a little jellyfish, isn’t it? And this …” he swapped slides, “… is a tiny-wee plant called a diatom. It’s dead too — they all are — that’s what hard radiation does to living things …”
“What’s this one?” David asked, changing the slides himself.
“That’s a young flatworm, David. It’s a tiny fresh-water animal. Lives in pools and streams. Funny little thing. That one’s a type with very strange abilities. D’you know, when one planarian (that’s what they’re called) eats another—” David looked up sharply at his father, who smiled at the boy’s expression. “Oh, no! They’re not cannibals — at least I don’t think so — but if a dead worm is chopped up and fed to another, why! The live worm “inherits” the knowledge of the one it’s eaten!”
“Knowledge?” David looked puzzled. “Are they clever, then?”
“Noooo — not strictly clever, but they can be taught simple things: like how a drop in temperature means it’s feeding time; stuff like that. And, as I’ve said, when one of them is dead and chopped up, whatever he knew before he died is passed on to the planarian who eats him.”
“And they’re not cannibals?” David still looked puzzled.
“Why, no,” the professor patiently explained. “I don’t suppose for one minute they’d eat each other if they knew
what they were eating — we do chop them up first!” He frowned. “I’m not absolutely sure though … you could, I suppose, call them unwilling cannibals if you wished. Is it important?”
But David was not listening. Suddenly his attention seemed riveted on the tiny creature beneath the microscope.
“He moved—!”
“No he didn’t, David — that’s just your imagination. He couldn’t move, he’s dead.” Nonetheless the scientist pulled his son gently to one side to have a look himself. It wasn’t possible — no, of course not. He had been studying the specimens for three weeks, since the experiment, watching them all die off; and since then there had not been a sign of returning life in any of them. Certainly there could be none now. Even if the sustained blast of hard radiation had not killed them off proper (which of course it had), then colouring them and fixing them to the slides certainly must have. No, they were dead, all of them, merely tiny lumps of useless gelatin …
The next day was Saturday and David was not at school. He quit the house early saying he was going fishing at the pool. Shortly after he left, his father cleaned off his many slides, hardly missing the one with the tiny planarium worm — the one in David’s pocket!
David knew he had seen the worm move under the microscope; a stiff, jerky movement, rather like the slug he had pinned to the garden with a twig through its middle one evening a few weeks earlier …
David’s pool was his own. It lay in the grounds of the house, set far back from the road, in the copse that marked the boundary of his father’s land. In fact it was a run-off from the river, filled nine months of the year by high waters flooding the creek running to it. There were fish, but David had never caught any of the big ones; not with his bent pin. He had seen them often enough in the reeds — even a great pike — but his catches were never any bigger than the occasional newt or minnow. That Saturday it was not even his intention to fish; that had only been an excuse to his mother to allow him to get down to the pool.
The truth was that David was a very humane boy really and the idea that the flatworm had been alive on that slide, no matter how, was abhorrent to him. His father had said that the creature was a fresh-water dweller; well, if it was alive, David believed it should be given another chance. Immersion in water, its natural habitat, might just do the trick!
He put the slide down on a stone in a part of the pool not quite so shaded by the surrounding trees, so that the creature upon it might benefit from what was left of the late summer sun. There he could see it just beneath the surface of the water. He kept up a watch on the tiny speck on the slide for almost an hour before growing tired of the game. Then he went home to spend the rest of the day in the library — boning up on planarian worms …
In defiance of everything the books said, “Planny’ (as David christened the creature the day after he saw it detach itself from the slide and swim almost aimlessly away) grew up very strangely indeed. Instead of adopting a worm-shape as it developed, with a lobey, spade-shaped head, it took on one more like an amoeba. It was simply a shapeless blob — or, at best, a roundish blob.
Now one might ask: “Just how did David manage, in such a large pool, to follow the comings and goings of such a small animal?” And the answer would be that Planny did not stay small for very long. Indeed no, for even on that morning when he got loose from the slide he trebled his size: that is, he converted many times his own weight in less wily, even smaller denizens of David’s pool. In just a day or two he was as big as a Ping-Pong ball; and David had taken to getting up very early, before school, so that he could go down to the copse to check the creature’s rate of growth.
Two weeks later there was not a single minnow left in the pool, nor a stickleback, and even the numbers of the youngest of the larger fish were on a rapid decline.
David never discovered just how Planny swam. He could see that there were no fins or anything, no legs, yet somehow the animal managed quite nimbly in the water without such extensions — and especially after dining on the first of the larger fish. It had been noticeable, certainly, how much the freakish flatworm ‘learned’ from the minnows: how to hunt and hide in the reeds, how to sink slowly to the bottom if ever anything big came near, things like that. Not that Planny really needed to hide, but he was not aware of that yet; he only had the experience (‘inherited’ of course) of the minnows and other fish he had eaten. Minnows, being small, have got to be careful… so David’s worm was careful too! Nor did he get much from the bigger fish; though they did help his self-assurance somewhat and his speed in the water; for naturally, they had the bustling attitude of most aquatic adults.
Then, when Planny was quite a bit bigger, something truly memorable happened!
He was all of five weeks reborn when he took the pike. David was lucky enough to see the whole bit. That old pike had been stalking Planny for a week, but the radiation- transformed worm had successfully managed to avoid him right until the best possible moment: that is, until their sizes were more or less equal … in mass if not in shape.
David was standing at the pool-side, admiring Planny as he gently undulated through the water, when the ugly fish came sliding out of the reed-patch; its wicked eyes fixed firmly on the vaguely globular, greyish-white thing in the water. David’s worm had eyes too, two of them, and they were fixed equally firmly on the pike.
The boy gawked at the way it happened. The fish circled once, making a tight turn about his revolving ‘prey,’ then flashed in to the attack at a speed that left David breathless. The boy knew all about this vicious species of fish, especially about the powerful jaws and great teeth; but the pike in question might never have had any teeth at all — might well have been a caviar sandwich — for all Planny worried! He simply opened up, seeming to split down the middle and around his circumference until David, still watching from the poolside, thought he must tear himself in two. But he did not. David saw a flash of rapidly sawing rows of rasp-like teeth marching in columns along Planny’s insides — and then the creature’s two almost-halves ground shut on the amazed pike.
Planny seemed to go mad then, almost lifting himself (or being lifted) out of the water as the fish inside him thrashed about. But not for long. In a few seconds his now somewhat elongated shape became very still, then wobbled tiredly out of sight into deeper water to sleep it off…
For a full four days after this awesome display David’s worm was absent from its rebirth-place. There had been some rain and the creek was again swollen; which was as well for the oddly mutated flatworm, for there were no fish left in the pool. In fact, there was not much of anything left in the pool — at least, not until the afternoon of the pike’s vanquishment, when heavy rain brought the river waters to restock the Planny-depleted place. For that ugly, sadly vulnerable fish had been the pool’s last natural inhabitant, and until the rain came it would have been perfectly true to say of David’s pool that it was the most sterile stretch of open water in the whole world!
Now it is probably just as well that the majority of tales told by fishermen are usually recognized for what they usually are, for certainly a few strange stories wafted up from the riverside during that four-day period, and not all of them from rod-and-liners. Who can say what the result might have been had anyone really tried to check these stories out?
For Planny was coming along nicely, thank you, and in no time at all he had accumulated all the nastiness of quite a large number of easily devoured pike of all sizes. He had developed a taste for them. Also, he had picked up something of the unreasonable antagonism of a particularly unfriendly, yappy little dog whose master called for him in vain from the riverbank until late into the fourth night.
On the fifth morning, having almost given up hope of ever seeing the curious creature again, David went down to the pool as usual. Planny was back, and much bigger! Not only had he put on a lot of weight but his capacity for learning had picked up too. The little dog had gone down (or rather in!) almost without a burp, and Planny’s very effic
ient digestive system had proved only slightly superior to his ‘natural’ talent for, well, picking brains …
But while the animal’s hidden abilities were not so obvious, his growth assuredly was!
David gaped at the creature’s size — almost two feet in diameter now — as it came sliding out of the reed-patch with the top three inches of its spongy, greyish-white bulk sticking up out of the water. The eyes were just below the surface, peering out liquidly at the boy on the bank. It is not difficult to guess what was going on in Planny’s composite knowledge-cells … or brain … or ganglia … or whatever! The way he had been hiding in the reeds and the way he carefully came out of them undoubtedly highlighted a left-over characteristic from his earlier, minnow period; the gleam in his peculiar eyes (of which David was innocently unaware) was suspiciously like that glassiness, intense and snide, seen in the eyes of doggies as they creep up on the backsides of postmen; and there was also something of a very real and greedy intent in there somewhere. Need we mention the pike?
Up into the shallows Planny came, flattening a little as his body edged up out of the water, losing something of its buoyancy; and David — innocent David — mistakenly saw the creature’s approach as nothing if not natural. After all, had he not saved the poor thing’s life? — and might he not therefore expect Planny to display friendship and even loyalty and gratitude? Instinctively he reached out his hand …
Now dogs are usually loyal only to their rightful masters — and minnows are rarely loyal at all, except perhaps to other minnows. But pike? Why the pike is a notoriously unfriendly fish, showing never a trace of gratitude or loyalty to anyone …
Approximately one hundred and thirty yards away and half an hour later, Professor Lees and his wife rose up from their bed and proceeded to the kitchen where they always had breakfast. A rather pungent, stale-water smell had seemingly invaded the house; so that the scientist’s wife, preceding her husband, sniffed suspiciously at the air, dabbing at her nose with the hem of her dressing gown as she opened the kitchen door and went in.