CHARLIE RULL HAD been dead for three days. He had been crossing through the cattail swamp adjacent to his shack shelter in the city dump when the heart attack struck. Thirty years of cheap whiskey, greasy food and general physical abuse had finally caught up with him. He toppled into a scum-covered pool; there he lay, unmourned and unremembered.
Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. Someday, of course, a muskrat hunter or another derelict might have run across a skeleton with a few shreds of cloth adhering to its discolored bones. Even that was unlikely; the enormous marsh rats had teeth like steel chisels.
But Charlie Rull’s bulky corpse was not doomed to such prosaic oblivion, for Charlie had pitched forward into a pool of such fiery, ferocious energy, the strongest, rawest alcohol he ever drank would have seemed like watered milk beside it.
By day the pool shimmered with its fierce concentrated life; after dark it glowed white, as if a thousand phosphorescent will-o’-the-wisps had suddenly converged.
Two miles away, across the route skirting the swamp, some of the best scientists in the nation were conducting electron experiments of a nature so secret even the plant guards were not allowed inside the main laboratory. The buildings were entirely surrounded by towering steel-mesh fences wired for instant electrical charges. Armed guards maintained a twenty-four hour vigil.
Although nothing could get into the plant laboratories, something did get out; deadly electronic waste. Liquid thimblefuls were carelessly dumped. Only a few drops at a time. But day after day the lethal drops trickled down the laboratory drains. Even then nothing much might happened if the waste had mixed with the city sewage in the big disposal plants and been carried out to sea.
But, unknown to the laboratory maintenance men, a near-by sewage pipe had cracked. Instead of running off into the main sewage system of the city, the deadly drops seeped through the crack into the swamp. Here they entered a sluggish stream which culminated in the pool where Charlie Rull had toppled dead. Drop by drop, the radiant waste collected, until the pool itself seemed alive.
The frogs, the mud turtles, and the snails which originally inhabited the pool had long since died. The first dose of radiation had killed them within hours. Everything else had died also—even the cattails and the algae.
The waste could not kill Charlie Rull because he was already dead when he struck the scummy water. His corpse, blue and bloated, floated head down in the deadly bath. After three days and nights the radiation had permeated every disintegrating cell of his body. His corpse became saturated with it. It might be said that his swollen carcass, dead as it was, became alive with radiation.
And then a very strange and a very terrifying thing happened. It was an event which would have surprised even the scientists in the plant laboratory. Eventually, perhaps, they could have explained it, but even they would have been incredulous witnesses to the nightmare.
Although the radiation had swiftly killed the frogs, the turtles, and snails, it had had an opposite effect on the corpse of the alcoholic derelict, Charlie Rull. The fierce, fearfully concentrated pool of radiation surrounding the cadaver of the hobo finally penetrated and saturated every atom of it. Radiation, instead of oxygen, quickened the ruined brain cells. Radiation energized the shredded nerve ends, pulsed through the slack sinews.
The corpse of Charlie Rull began to vibrate in the pool as if a giant fish had hold of it. At length it began to twist and writhe. If it felt anything, it must have been in agony. At first it clawed downward toward the mud. Finally it spun over on its back and threshed to the surface. For just a second it floated motionless, its bulging white eyes staring straight up.
Then it started to kick and lunge. By design or accident it attained the edge of the pool and jerked forward through the dead cattail stalks.
When it reached relatively solid ground, it paused as if uncertain how to navigate. After scrambling forward a few feet on its knees and elbows, it stopped again, hesitating. Then it stood on its hands and began to walk, its glassy-eyed head reared up out of the grass like that of a monstrous snake. Eventually it lost balance and toppled over. But soon it rose again, and this time it found its feet.
With this improved form of navigation, its energy, its strength, and what might be called its purpose intensified. Basically, it possessed no human hungers or desires; it did not even retain memory.
But it had one fearful, fixed compulsion. That compulsion was to rid itself of the tremendous dose of radiant energy which coursed and ripped through its fibers like white-hot flame. And the only way to discharge that energy was to exert it, to expend it.
Shambling swiftly through the swamp grass, it approached the nearby parkway. At intervals it stopped, ripped up great tufts of grass by the roots and slammed them back to earth. Once it tore up a small maple tree, bent it double, and hurled it yards away.
Stopping at the edge of the highway, it thrust its bloated fish-belly face through the brush and surveyed the road with fixed filmy eyes which did not even appear to see. Then it slid down the embankment onto the macadam.
At that particular time of morning the parkway was not heavily traveled. The first car, isolated from any others, came along at a good clip, rounded a curve and headed straight toward what appeared to be a drunken tramp, careening along in the middle of the road.
Although the driver slammed on his brake and hit the horn, the crazy hobo did not even attempt to leap aside. The car slowed, but not nearly enough; it rammed into the derelict, knocking him down. When the car finally came to a stop, the tramp was out of sight underneath.
Cursing, the salesman driver shot a quick glance at his rearview mirror, saw that there was no one behind him, and decided to keep on going. Why get into a peck of trouble over a drunken derelict who was actually far more at fault than he himself?
But the car did not respond when the salesman pressed the accelerator. Something seemed to be holding it back. The driver stuck his head out of the window just as the rear end of the car rose into the air. A second later it flipped over, landing on the highway upside down.
Miraculously, the driver was not hurt. His first thought was that he had struck some freak circus strong man out on a drunken spree. A moment later, ultimate terror ended all coherent thought.
The puffy, gray-white face which appeared at the window was that of a corpse which had been long immersed in water. Its glazed, out-of-focus eyes were the eyes of a corpse. And yet it seemed to shine and pulsate with a kind of inward energy.
When it reached through the window with its long hairy arm, the driver was already half-dead with fright, unable to move. The thing’s claw-like fingers, armed with heavy black nails, closed over his face and tore the flesh away from his cheek bone. He screamed in agony. Then it seized him by the throat and dragged him toward the window. His head came out but the rest of him, sprawled awkwardly inside the overturned car, stuck.
The thing grabbed him by the head with both huge hands and began to pull and twist in a kind of maniacal fury. His shrill screams quickly turned to strangled gurgles.
When the thing finally got him through the window, his head was attached by little more than a shred of muscle and bone. In a matter of minutes his body was no longer recognizable. The thing tore it to pieces. Then it repeatedly lifted up the car and slammed it down in the highway. At length, after the wreck burst into flames, it moved away.
A few yards further along, a big brown rabbit dashed into the road, stopped squarely in the center and inquisitively eyed the approaching pedestrian.
In life, the tramp would have looked on the rabbit as a potential ingredient for that evening’s mulligan stew. An attempt would have been made to catch it for culinary purposes. In death, all this was forgotten. Whatever residual impulses remained in the derelict’s wrecked brain cells were impulses only of viciousness and hatred. The negative emotions which had smoldered throughout a lifetime of frustration and bitterness now flickered crazily and uncontrollably in the artificially stimulated cerebral structure.
The rabbit lived; it looked healthy and happy. Therefore, it was an object which aroused instant hatred and fury. It must be caught and crushed to death. Also, some of this horror’s searing, unbearable energy might be consumed in the process of destruction.
With a great leap, the thing lunged toward the rabbit. For a second the small animal froze in terror; then it shot off the highway into the adjacent swamp area, escaping capture by inches.
The thing hurtled after it, ploughing through vines, weeds, and clumps of cattails. At one point the maniacal pursuer nearly caught the trembling beast. Shortly afterward however, the hunter lost it in the brush tangle. Trampling and flailing its arms in berserk fury, it continued along the fringe of the swamp not far from the highway.
Meanwhile, a number of cars had passed and seen nothing—nothing, that is, until they came upon the burning wreck and the hideously rent corpse of the unlucky driver. A few who were not too ill to resume driving, rushed off to report the ghastly find.
The thing sloshed through the swamp border for nearly a mile before it again emerged onto the highway. It had forgotten the rabbit but it was still consumed by lethal savagery and by a ferocious impulse to expend the monstrous energy which pulsated inside it like streaking fire.
At this point it saw the hitchhiker.
He was lounging along the edge of the road, rather perfunctorily extending a thumb toward whatever traffic appeared. An olive-skinned young man, sporting a neat toothbrush moustache, he was the picture of vagabond Latin insouciance. His flashing black eyes and brilliant smile were a temptation to most of the lady motorists. Of course they had no way of knowing about the switchblade and the length of strong cord artfully concealed in the young man’s pockets.
The hitchhiker was startled, but not frightened, by the appearance of the derelict who shambled out of the weeds alongside the road.
Shrewdly inspecting the newcomer, the young man concluded the tramp was reeling away from an all-night “alki” session in the nearby hobo jungle. The bum might be mean, but he looked too drunk to be dangerous.
The hitchhiker was flip. “Hi, sport. Looks like you really tied one on!”
The tramp did not reply. His red-rimmed, fish-belly eyes regarded the young man with a baleful stare. Disregarding the possibility of oncoming traffic, he lunged across the road.
The hitchhiker jumped aside, scrambled halfway up the highway embankment and whipped out his switchblade.
He, too, was a killer. But he preferred to kill quietly in the darkness while his female victims lay securely bound and gagged.
Nevertheless, he was not as yet unduly alarmed. The bum was crazy drunk, but he didn’t seem to have any weapon, and he looked clumsy.
The sight of the switchblade did not stop the derelict. He began climbing the embankment, awkwardly but swiftly.
There was something about the tramp’s swollen, death-like face, something about his glazed bulging eyes, which the young man found unaccountably disconcerting. But he suppressed an impulse to run and instead slashed forward and down with the switchblade.
He was quick as a cobra. The razor-sharp blade sliced through the puffy flesh of the vagrant’s face. The hitchhiker struck again; the blade slashed alongside the drunk’s head, nearly severing an ear.
The hitchhiker then leaped quickly backward, ready to cut again if need be. He assumed that the bum, punished as he was, would back off down the embankment. In this he was mistaken. In spite of his wounds, the derelict kept coming.
Just before the tramp sprang toward him, the young man noticed something which drained him of every last drop of what might charitably be called courage. Although his attacker had been slashed twice, severely, in the face and alongside the head, not a drop of blood flowed out of the cuts. The left ear itself dangled upside down, bloodless.
With a wild yell of terror, the hitchhiker dropped his knife, spun about, and sprinted toward an open field which extended along the embankment.
The tramp bounded after him.
The field was separated from the top of the embankment by a low stone wall. In his frantic haste to scramble over the wall, the hitchhiker did not see the single strand of barbed wire which had been stretched just above the stones of the wall as a deterrent to trespassers. Catching his foot on the wire, he fell headlong.
Before he could gain his feet, the drunken tramp had pounced on him. Galvanized by ultimate terror, he struggled frenziedly. But he was doomed. He was in the grip of a thing which possessed the strength and ferocity of a great animal, of a maddened gorilla or a tiger driven by fury.
The thing began to tear him apart piecemeal. His shrill tortured screams echoed up and down the highway, across the entire width of the field to the edge of the distant trees.
When the tramp finished, what remained in his hands resembled something fresh out of a butcher’s shop. He turned, shambled back to the edge of the embankment and hurled the red bundle down onto the highway.
Something swinging against his face irritated him. Reaching up, he wrenched off his dangling left ear and tossed it down after the shapeless remains of the hitchhiker.
Then he climbed over the wall and started across the field.
Little three-year-old Cynthia was playing in the big meadow back of her house when she glanced up and saw the bogeyman. He was hiding in the trees at the edge of the meadow, watching her.
She ran screaming toward the house, her chubby legs churning, her blonde head seeming to bounce among the buttercups and daisies.
Hearing her frightened cries, Mrs. Mellett met her at the back door. She assumed the little one had seen a snake, a toad, or some such creature.
Cynthia rushed into her arms, sobbing with fear. “Mommy! Mommy! Bogeyman! Bogeyman!”
Puzzled, Mrs. Mellett gazed across the meadow. It looked empty. A barn swallow skimmed over the wild flower tufts and that was all.
As she watched, frowning, something lurched out of the trees at the edge of the meadow. It was a man, streaked with blood, advancing swiftly in a grotesque sort of shambling run.
The thing had been watching little Cynthia for some time. It had been puzzled. Her small blonde head, barely level with the tops of the buttercups, had seemed to be something growing in the field like a big yellow flower. But suddenly the big flower had darted away, making noises, and now the thing finally realized that it was something alive which might be torn apart.
Leaping into the meadow, it lunged after the little one.
Mrs. Mellett’s first impulse was to hurry forth and meet the man. He looked as if he had been severely injured; he would need help.
But something made her hesitate. Some obscure prompting of fear, whose source she could not have named, held her in the doorway, clutching the child.
The thing was nearly across the meadow before she got a clear look at it. Its bloated, blood-splattered face was gray and shapeless like that of a dead man; its filmy cataleptic eyes did not resemble those of a sentient human being. One ear was missing. The thing’s clothes were torn, wet and filthy, crusted with what appeared to be dried blood.
It saw them both now and rushed through the meadow’s last fringe of grass and flowers.
Mrs. Mellett wavered no longer. Snatching up little Cynthia, she sprang inside, slammed and bolted the door.
Reaching the door, the thing scrabbled at it briefly and then hurled itself against the panels.
Guided by an instinct beyond her knowledge, Mrs. Mellett had already hurried through the house. As the splintering crash of wooden panels reached her ears, she slipped quickly through the front door, closed it as soundlessly as possible, and cradling Cynthia in her arms, hurried toward an adjacent hay field on the opposite side of the house, where the tall grass afforded cover.
She was gambling that the tramp would first search the house. Yet she was afraid to go far for fear the intruder might see her through the windows and rush out. As soon as possible she stretched prone in the deep grass of the field. Whimpering, Cynthia crouched beside her.
It sounded as if a cyclone were tearing at the house. She could hear the rending of wood, the crash of glass, the heavy thump as plaster struck the floor. For nearly half an hour the roar of destruction continued, seeming to advance from room to room, from floor to floor.
At length the racket ceased. Mrs. Mellett was sure the invader had finally come out of the wrecked house. She hugged the earth, praying, pressing her hand over little Cynthia’s mouth to stifle the sound of her whimpering.
For a minute or two there was silence. Then Mrs. Mellett heard the horse in the nearby corral neighing nervously. In a moment she heard its flying hooves, heard its shrill trumpeting of terror.
The hooves raced around and around, furiously, frantically. Abruptly they stopped, and the horse screamed.
Mrs. Mellett thought she was going to faint; she had never heard a horse scream before.
Clutching little Cynthia, she lay in the tall grass weak with fright for nearly an hour.
At last she dared look up. There was no one in sight. Inch by inch she moved out of the field toward the path which led to the highway. Cynthia huddled in her arms, tear-stained, but now too tired to cry.
She got into the path which passed the corral. She didn’t want to look toward the enclosure, but felt she must. She decided not looking might be worse.
When she saw what the thing had done to the horse, she did faint.
After ripping the horse apart, the blood-spattered corpse of Charlie Rull wandered back into the meadow where it had noticed little Cynthia. She was not to be found in the house; possibly, therefore, she was back where she had first been seen.
Not locating her, the thing lost interest in the Mellett farm and wandered back into the woods. Occasionally it seized one of the smaller trees and either tore it up by the roots or broke it in two.
Coming out of the woods farther along, it entered another field. Here, either because of an aimless impulse or because of a retrogressive tendency of its ruined brain cells, it decided to crawl.
It was crawling along the edge of the field, like a great truncated serpent, when it saw the culvert. Perhaps because it was already dead, the dark round hole intrigued it. At any rate it entered the culvert and crawled through.
The culvert led under the highway to the borders of the cattail swamp adjacent to the city dump. Soon the thing was crawling through the cattails in an area which had been previously familiar to it. Because it began to sink and flounder in the scum-covered pools of this swamp strip, it rose and walked on its feet again, just as if it were alive.
The three tramps were warming up a tin can full of mulligan stew when they heard a crackling in the nearby bushes.
Grumbling, one of them stirred the coals of their rank camp fire. “I bet that’s Crazy Zack come for supper. Never brings a scrap, but ’e spots a cook fire a mile away!”
Another spat into the surrounding darkness. “He can sit and watch. He ain’t gettin’ my share.”
All three of them looked up as the bushes parted and someone stepped into the outer fringe of feeble firelight.
The uninvited supper guest looked strangely white. He seemed to shimmer and glow as if his entire body and clothes were coated with some kind of phosphorescent powder.
The tramp who had spoken first scowled into the shadows. “That you, Zack? What makes you shine like that?”
Instead of replying, the newcomer lurched swiftly toward the fire.
Instinctively, the three of them leaped up and spread apart.
With an expression of awed recognition, one of the tramps exclaimed: “It’s Charlie Rull! Hurt! Hurt real bad!”
Charlie Rull swung his head to survey the speaker with malignant, fish-belly eyes in which there was no faint glimmer of recognition.
The tramp backed off, trembling. “Now Charlie, I ain’t never crossed you. ’Member the pint we split, last New Year’s? ’Member—”
Charlie, apparently, remembered nothing. His blue lips twisted in a snarl of fury as he sprang forward.
The tramp whirled to run, but Charlie Rull, terribly injured as he appeared to be, was too fast. His great hands fastened on his ex-drinking partner like the claws of some raging beast of prey gone mad with rabies or pain. The terrible, taloned hands, glowing with white fire, began to rip the flesh from the bones as if it were loose, wet putty.
The blood-chilling shrieks of the victim rang in the ears of the other two derelicts as they shot off through the cattails. They were hardened hoboes to whom brutality was a way of life, yet they pressed their hands over their ears as they careened away crazily through the underbrush.
At last the thing desisted. Staring down at the red stump which it held in its hands, it hurled it away into the darkness.
Then it noticed the fire. Here in the darkness the fire appeared to be something alive. The thing seized it, but the little red dancers broke away and fell on the ground.
In a renewed burst of fury, the thing kicked savagely at the red dancers, scattering them in all directions.
They disappeared briefly, but then they started dancing in the darkness again. The more they danced the bigger they got, and finally they were dancing all around the dead thing. Some dim, vestigial apperception told the corpse of Charlie Rull that the red dancers could not be grasped and torn apart.
As he pushed through them, they seized the shredded remains of his clothes and danced all over him. He felt little or nothing, but he struck at them because they irritated and confused him. At length they dropped away and he headed back the way he had come, toward the highway.
By the time he reached it, the cattail swamp behind him was a roaring wall of flame.
Terrified parkway drivers, sick with horror, had long since notified the police of nearby Newbridge of what might be found out on the road skirting the city dump. And then Mrs. Mellett, weak with shock, had stumbled into a neighboring farmhouse and gasped out an incredible story.
At first the police had been skeptical. But their skepticism vanished when they saw the shredded, mutilated remains on the highway. And an examination of the Mellett house added to their apprehension. The inside of the house was a shambles—gutted as thoroughly as if a tornado had whirled within. The dismembered carcass of the horse, scarcely more than a series of red smears scattered around the corral, added further confirmation.
Both ends of the highway which extended alongside the dump and the adjacent swamp area were shut off by roadblocks, manned by police armed with high-powered rifles. At one end a machine gun was set in readiness. Helicopters were sent up in the hopes that they might be able to locate the lethal thing of madness which lurked in the vicinity.
Residents of suburban Newbridge were warned to remain in their houses behind locked doors. Fearfully, the citizens of the entire city huddled by their television and radio sets, listening to the frequent reports sent out by the newscasters and police who were guarding the roadblocks.
As darkness descended, a report came in that the swamp near the highway had caught fire. Hurrying to their windows, people saw a red glare reflected on the sky. It seemed like a macabre stage prop set up for the thing from Hell which had suddenly appeared in their midst.
The helicopters came in as night settled down. They had seen nothing except streaking tongues of fire in the burning cattail marsh.
Searchlights were turned on at the roadblocks. The police checked their rifles and waited.
The thing appeared without warning. A reporter noticed something white and shining veer onto the highway. A moment after he had alerted the police guard, the white shape shambled into the searchlight’s glare.
A collective murmur of incredulity and revulsion arose. The nightmarish, blood-drenched thing which stumbled into the light resembled a disinterred corpse. Most of its clothes had been ripped or burned away. It had only one ear. Its glazed, baleful eyes stared out of a bloated face which might have been painted by Goya.
A hellish halo surrounded it, as if every cell was suffused and alive with radium.
For a moment it blinked in the sudden light. Then a snarl of fury twisted its mottled, puffy face. Awkwardly, but with unexpected and terrifying speed, it rushed toward the roadblock.
The police captain in charge of the roadblock had time only for the single command: “Fire!”
The crash of rifles broke the night. The thing spun around, staggered backward and then, although half of its face appeared to be shot away, leaped forward again.
The police captain touched the shoulder of the sergeant crouched behind the machine gun. A staccato chatter mingled with the heavier crash of rifle fire.
The first concentrated burst cut the thing in two. The upper torso fell forward completely detached from the lower trunk and legs.
And then a thing happened which made the police guards freeze with horror, even though most of them were war veterans to whom carnage was not unknown. Two of the reporters fainted on the spot.
Detached as it was, the severed upper torso began to hitch itself along the highway on its hands, the glare of hatred in its eyes entirely undimmed. The legs, attached to the lower trunk, toppled onto the road, yet they continued to scrape forward like some giant, scissoring, two-legged crab.
The police captain, the brittle edge of near-hysteria changing his voice, swore at his men. “Keep firing, you fools! Keep firing! Did I tell you to stop? Finish it! Finish it!”
Once more heavy rifle slugs lashed into the advancing twin horrors. The machine gun resumed its deadly chatter.
The thing’s head spun off. One arm was ripped away. The scrabbling legs threshed crazily as rifle fire all but tore them apart.
At length the indescribable glowing remains could only twist and hitch in aimless circles on the highway. Fierce radiation kept them moving, but merely as detached helpless fragments. A hand, severed by machine-gun fire, crawled sideways off the highway into a ditch. The inhuman glare in the fish-belly eyes gradually faded away.
When the police captain finally gave the order to stop firing, the scattered radiant remnants of the thing had almost ceased to move. For a little while longer some of them continued to twitch and jerk.
Eventually all motion ended. The tortured, shredded corpse of Charlie Rull at last lay still.