A BIT OF THE DARK WORLD, by Fritz Leiber

Originally published in Fantastic Science Fiction, Feb. 1962.

“There was a crack in his head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death.”

—Rudyard Kipling, The Phantom ’Rickshaw

The antique-seeming dip-nosed black Volks touring car with its driver and two other passengers besides myself was buzzing up a saddle ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains, swinging close past the squat brush-choked peaks with their strange up-jutting worn rocky pinnacles that looked like primeval monoliths or robed and hooded stone monsters.

We were moving with top down and slowly enough to glimpse sharply the occasional little pale lizard skitter or grasshopper whir up out of our way over the grey crushed stone. Once a shaggy gray cat—which Viki, clutching my arm in mock alarm, insisted was a wild cat—trotted across the narrow road ahead and disappeared in the dry aromatic underbrush. The whole area was a perfect fire hazard and none of us needed to be reminded of the no-cigarette rule.

It was a brilliantly clear day with compact clouds that emphasized the dizzying inverted depth of the blue sky. Between clouds, the sun was dazzlingly bright. More than once, as we headed straight toward the low-trending distant incandescent orb along a switchback stretch, I was stung by its beams and suffered the penalty of black patches swimming in my vision for a minute or so. Next time we’d all remember sunglasses.

We had met only two cars and glimpsed only half a dozen houses and cabins since leaving the Pacific Coast Highway—a remarkable loneliness considering that Los Angeles was a scant hour’s drive behind us. It was a loneliness that had drawn Viki and myself apart with its silent intimations of mysteries and revelations, but not yet driven us together again by reason of its menace.

Franz Kinzman, sitting in front to the left, and his neighbor who had volunteered to do this stretch of the driving (a Mr. Morton or Morgan or Mortenson, I wasn’t sure) seemed less affected by the landscape, as one would expect seeing they were both rather more familiar with it than Viki or I. Though it was hard to gauge reactions merely from the attitude of the back of Franz’s close-cropped gray head or Mr. M.’s faded brown duck hat pulled low to shade his eyes.

We had just passed that point of the Little Sycamore Canyon road where all the Santa Barbara Islands—Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, even distant San Miguel—are visible like an argosy of blue-gray, faintly granular clouds floating on the surface of the pale blue Pacific, when I suddenly remarked, for no profound major reason that I was aware of at the time, “I don’t suppose it’s any longer possible today to write a truly gripping story of supernatural horror—or for that matter to undergo a deeply disturbing experience of supernatural terror.”

Oh, there were enough minor reasons for the topic of my remark. Viki and I had worked in a couple of cheap “monster” movies, Franz Kinzman was a distinguished science-fantasy writer as well as a research psychologist, and the three of us had often gabbed about the weird in life and art. Also, there had been the faintest hint of mystery in Franz’ invitation to Viki and myself to spend with him the weekend of his return to Rim House after a month in LA. Finally, the abrupt transition from a teeming city to a forbidding expanse of nature always has an eerie sting—as Franz immediately brought up without turning his head.

“I’ll tell you the first condition for such an experience,” he said as the Volks entered a cool band of shadow. “You’ve got to get away from the Hive.”

“The Hive?” Viki questioned, understanding very well what he meant, I was sure, but wanting to hear him talk and have him turn his head.

Franz obliged. He has a singularly handsome, thoughtful, noble face, hardly of our times, though looking all of his fifty years and with eyes dark-circled ever since the death of his wife and two sons in a jet crash a year ago.

“I mean the City,” he said as we buzzed into the sun again, “The human stamping ground, where we’ve policemen to guard us and psychiatrists to monitor our minds and neighbors to jabber at us and where our ears are so full of the clack of the mass media that it’s practically impossible to think or sense or feel anything deeply, anything that’s beyond humanity. Today the City, in its figurative sense, covers the whole world and the seas and by anticipation the spaceways. I think what you mean, Glenn, is that it’s hard to get out of the City even in the wilderness.”

Mr. M. honked twice at a blind hairpin turn and put in the next remark. “I don’t know about that,” he said, hunching determinedly over the wheel, “but I should think you could find all the horror and terror you wanted, Mr. Seabury, without going away from home, though it’d make pretty grim films. I mean the Nazi death camps, brainwashing, Black-Dahlia sex murders, race riots, stuff like that, not to mention Hiroshima.”

“Right,” I countered, “but I’m talking about supernatural horror, which is almost the antithesis of even the worst human violence and cruelty. Hauntings, the suspension of scientific law, the intrusion of the utterly alien, the sense of something listening at the rim of the cosmos or scratching faintly at the other side of the sky.”

As I said that, Franz looked around at me sharply with what seemed an expression of sudden excitement and apprehension, but at that moment the sun blinded me again and Viki said, “Doesn’t science fiction give you that, Glenn? I mean, horrors from other planets, the extraterrestrial monster?”

“No,” I told her, blinking at a fuzzy black globe that crawled across the mountains, “because the monster from Mars or wherever has (at least as visualized by the author) so many extra feet, so many tentacles, so many purple eyes—as real as the cop on the beat. Or if he’s a gas, he’s a describable gas. The exact sort of goon that men will be meeting when the spaceships start traveling the starways. I’m thinking of something…well…ghostly, utterly weird.”

“And it’s that thing, Glenn—that ghostly, utterly weird thing—that you believe can’t be written about effectively any more, or experienced?” Franz asked me with an odd note of suppressed eagerness, eyeing me keenly although the Volks was traveling a jouncy section. “Why?”

“You started to sketch the reasons yourself a moment ago,” I said. My newest black globe was slipping sideways now, pulsing, starting to fade. “We’ve become too smart and shrewd and sophisticated to be scared by fantasies. Most especially we’ve got an army of experts to explain away the supernatural sort of thing the instant it starts to happen. The physicist boys have put matter and energy through the finest sieves—there’s no room left in it for mysterious rays and influences, except for the ones they’ve described and catalogued. The astronomers are keeping tabs on the rim of the cosmos with their giant telescopes. The earth’s been pretty thoroughly explored, enough to show there aren’t any lost worlds in darkest Africa or Mountains of Madness near the South Pole.”

“What about religion?” Viki suggested.

“Most religions,” I replied, “steer away from the supernatural today—at least the religions that would attract an intellectual person. They concentrate on brotherhood, social service, moral leadership—or dictatorship!—and fine-drawn reconciliations of theology to the facts of science. They’re not really interested in miracles or devils.”

“Well, the occult then,” Viki persisted. “Psionics.”

“Nothing much there either,” I asserted. “If you do decide to go in for telepathy, ESP, hauntings—the supernatural sort of thing—you find that territory has all been staked out by Doctor Rhine, riffling his eternal Zener cards, and a bunch of other parapsychologists who tell you they’ve got the whole benign spirit world firmly in hand and who are as busy classifying and file-carding as the physicists.

“But worst of all,” I went on, as Mr. M. slowed the Volks for a potholed uphill stretch, “we’ve got seventy-seven breeds of certified psychiatrists and psychologists (excuse me, Franz!) all set to explain the least eerie feeling or sense of wonder we get in terms of the workings of our unconscious minds, our everyday human relationships, and our past emotional experiences.”

Viki chuckled throatily and put in, “Supernatural dread almost always turns out to be nothing but childhood misconceptions and fears about sex. Mom’s the witch with her breasts of mystery and her underground baby-factory, while the dark hot bristly demon dissolves to Dear Old Dad.” At that moment the Volks, avoiding another dark spill of gravel, again aimed almost straight at the sun. I dodged it in part but Viki got it full in the eyes, as I could tell from the odd way she was blinking sideways at the turreted hills a moment later.

“Exactly,” I told her. “The point is, Franz, that these experts are experts, all joking aside, and they’ve divvied up the outer and inner worlds between them, and if we just start to notice something strange we turn to them at once (either actually or in our imaginations) and they have rational down-to-earth explanations all ready. And because each of the experts knows a lot more about his special field than we do, we have to accept their explanations—or else go off our own merry way, knowing in our heart of hearts that we’re behaving like stubborn romantic adolescents or out-and-out crackpots.

“The result is,” I finished, as the Volks got past the potholes, “that there’s no room left in the world for the weird—though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it, as shown by the floods of corny “monster” films, and the stacks of monster and madness magazines with their fractionally-educated hip cackling and beatnik jeers.”

“Laughing in the dark,” Franz said lightly, looking back where the thin dust the Volks raised was falling over the cliff toward the thorny dark ravines far below.

“Meaning?” Viki asked.

“People still are afraid,” he stated simply, “and of the same things. They’ve just got more defenses against their fears. They’ve learned to talk louder and faster and smarter and funnier—and with more parroted expert-given authority—to shut their fears out. Why, I could tell you—” He checked himself. He really did seem intensely excited beneath the calm philosopher’s mask. “I can make it clear,” he said, “by an analogy.”

“Do,” Viki urged.

Half turned in his seat, Franz looked straight back at the two of us. A quarter of a mile ahead or so the road, climbing a little again, plunged into a stretch of heavy cloud-shadow, I noted with relief—I now had no less than three dark fuzzy globes crawling along the horizon and I yearned to be out of the sun. From the way Viki was squinting I could tell she was in the same fix. Mr. M. with his pulled-down hat and Franz, faced around, seemed less affected.

Franz said, “Imagine that mankind is just one man—and his family—living in a house in a clearing in the midst of a dark, dangerous forest, largely unknown, largely unexplored. While he works and while he rests, while he makes love to his wife or plays with his children, he’s always keeping an eye on that forest.

“After a while he becomes prosperous enough to hire guards to watch the forest for him, men trained in scouting and woodcraft—your experts, Glenn. The man comes to depend on them for his safety, he defers to their judgment, he is perfectly willing to admit that each of them knows a little more about one small nearby sector of the forest than he does.

“But what if those guards should all come to him one day and say, ‘Look, Master, there really is no forest out there at all, only some farmlands we’re cultivating that stretch to the ends of the universe. In fact there never was a forest out there at all, Master—you imagined all those black trees and choked aisles because you were scared of the witchdoctor!

“Would the man believe them? Would he have the faintest justification for believing them? Or would he simply decide that his hired guards, vain of their little skills and scoutings, had developed delusions of omniscience?”

The cloud-shadow was very close now, just at the top of the slight climb we’d almost finished. Franz Kinzman leaned closer to us against the back of the front seat and there was a hush in his voice as he said, “The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter…the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.”

With an exhilarating chilling and glooming, the Volks rolled into the sharply-edged cloud-shadow. Switching around in his seat Franz began eagerly, instantly, rapidly to search the landscape ahead, which seemed suddenly to expand, gain depth, and spring into sharper existence with the screening off of the blinding sun.

Almost at once his gaze fixed on a smoothly ridged gray stone pinnacle that had just come into view on the opposite rim of the canyon valley beside us. He slapped Mr. M. on the shoulder and pointed with his other hand at a small parking area, surfaced like the road, on the hillside bulge we were crossing.

Then, as Mr. M. swung the car to a grating stop in the indicated area just on the brink of the drop, Franz raised himself in his seat and, looking over the windshield, pointed commandingly at the gray pinnacle while lifting his other hand a little, fingers tautly spread, in a gesture enjoining silence.

I looked at the pinnacle. At first I saw nothing but the half dozen rounded merging turrets of gray rock springing out of the brush-covered hilltop. Then it seemed that the last of my annoying after-images of the sun—dark, pulsing, fringe-edged—had found lodgement there.

I blinked and swung my eyes a little to make it go away or at least move off—for after all it was nothing but a fading disturbance in my retina that, purely by chance, momentarily coincided with the pinnacle.

It would not move away. It clung to the pinnacle, a dark translucent pulsing shape, as if held there by some incredible magnetic attraction.

I shivered, I felt all my muscles faintly chill and tighten at this unnatural linkage between the space inside my head and the space outside it, at this weird tie between the sort of figures that one sees in the real world and the kind that swim before the eyes when one closes them in the dark.

I blinked my eyes harder, swung my head from side to side.

It was no use. The shaggy dark shape with the strange lines going out from it clung to the pinnacle like some giant clawed and crouching beast.

And instead of fading it now began to darken further, even to blacken, the faint lines got a black glitter, the whole thing began horridly to take on a definite appearance and expression, much as the figures we see swimming in the dark become faces or masks or muzzles or forms in response to our veering imagination—though now I felt no ability whatever to change the trend of the shaping of the thing on the pinnacle.

Viki’s fingers dug into my arm with painful force. Without realizing it, we’d both stood up in the back of the car and were leaning forward, close to Franz. My own hands gripped the back of the front seat. Only Mr. M. hadn’t raised up, though he was staring at the pinnacle too.

Viki began, in a slow rasping strained voice, “Why, it looks like—”

With a sharp jerk of his spread-fingered hand Franz commanded her to be silent. Then without taking his eyes away from the crag he dipped in the side pocket of his coat and was next reaching things back toward us.

I saw, without looking at them directly, that they were blank white cards and stub pencils. Viki and I took them—so did Mr. M.

Franz whispered hoarsely, “Don’t say what you see. Write it down. Just your impressions. Now, quickly. The thing won’t last long—I think.”

For the next few seconds the four of us looked and scribbled and shivered—at least I know I was shuddering at one point, though not for an instant taking my eyes away.

Then, for me, the pinnacle was suddenly bare. I knew that it must have become so for the others too at almost the same instant, from the way their shoulders slumped and the strained sigh Viki gave.

We didn’t say a word, just breathed hard for a moment or so, then passed the cards around and read them. Most of the writing or printing had the big sloppiness of something scribbled without looking at the paper, but beyond that there was a visible tremor or shakiness, especially in Viki’s notes and my own.

Viki Quinn’s:

Black tiger, burning bright. Blinding fur—or vines. Stickiness.

Franz Kinzman’s:

Black Empress. Glittering cloak of threads. Visual glue.

Mine (Glenn Seabury’s):

Giant Spider. Black lighthouse. The web. The pull on the eyes.

Mr. M., whose writing was firmest:

I don’t see anything. Except three people looking at a bare gray rock as if it were the door to Hell.

And it was Mr. M. who first looked up. We met his gaze. His lips sketched a tentative grin that seemed both sour and uneasy.

He said after a bit, “Well, you certainly had your young friends pretty well hypnotized, Mr. Kinzman.”

Franz asked calmly, “Is that your explanation, Ed—hypnotic suggestion—for what happened, for what we thought happened?”

The other shrugged. “What else?” he asked more cheerfully. “Do you have another explanation, Franz?—something that would account for it not working on me?”

Franz hesitated. I hung on his answer, wild to know if he’d known it was coming, as he’d seemed to, and how he’d known, and whether he’d had any comparable previous experiences. The hypnotism notion, though clever, was pure nonsense.

Finally Franz shook his head and said firmly, “No.” Mr. M. shrugged and started the Volks.

None of us wanted to talk. The experience was still with us, pinning us down inside, and then the testimony of the cards was so complete in its way, the parallelisms so exact, the conviction of a shared experience so sure, that there was no great immediate urge to compare notes.

Viki did say to me, in the offhand way of a person checking a point of which he’s almost certain, “‘Black Lighthouse’—that means the light was black? Rays of darkness?”

“Of course,” I told her and then asked in the same way, “Your ‘vines’ Viki, your ‘threads,’ Franz—did they suggest those fine wire figures of curved planes and space you see in mathematical museums? Something linking a center to infinity?”

They both nodded. I said, “Like my web,” and that was all the talk for a bit.

I took out a cigarette, remembered, and shoved it back in my top pocket.

Viki said, “Our descriptions…vaguely like descriptions of tarot cards…none of the actual tarots, though…” Her remarks trailed off unanswered.

Mr. M. stopped at the top of a narrow drive that led down sharply to a house of which the only visible part was the flat roof, topped by pale jagged gravel. He jumped out.

“Thanks for the lift, Franz,” he said. “Remember to call on me—the phone’s working again—if you people should need a lift in my car…or anything.” He looked quickly toward the two of us in the back seat and grinned nervously. “Good-bye, Miss Quinn, Mr. Seabury. Don’t—” he broke off, said simply, “So long,” and walked rapidly down the drive.

Of course we guessed he’d been going to say, “Don’t see any more black tigers with eight legs and lady’s faces,” or something like that.

Franz slid across into the driver’s seat. As soon as the Volks got moving I knew one reason the steady competent Mr. M. might have wanted to drive the mountainous stretch. Franz didn’t exactly try to make the old Volks behave like a sports car, but his handling of it was in that direction—skittish, a bit dashing.

He mused aloud, “One thing keeps nagging me: Why didn’t Ed Mortenson see it?—if ‘see’ is the right word.”

So at last I was sure of Mr. M.’s name. It seemed a triumph.

Viki said, “I can think of one possible reason, Mr. Kinzman. He isn’t going where we’re going.”

II

“Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by this appalling effigy.”

—M. R. James in Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook

Rim House was about two miles beyond Mr. Mortenson’s place and likewise on the downhill (down-cliff, rather!) side of the road. It was reached by a decidedly one-lane drive. On the outside of the drive, edged by white-painted stones, was a near-vertical drop of over one hundred feet. On the inside was a forty-five degree brush-dotted rocky slope between the drive and the road, which was climbing sharply along this stretch.

After about one hundred yards the drive widened to become the short, narrow, jutting plateau or terrace on which stood Rim House, occupying about half the available space. Franz, who had taken the first part of the drive with confident briskness, slowed the Volks to a crawl as soon as the house came in view, so we could scan the outside layout while still somewhat above it.

The house was built to the very edge of the drop, which here plunged down further and even more sharply than it had along the drive. On the uphill side of the house, coming down to within two feet of it, was a dizzily expansive slope of raw earth with hardly a thing growing on it, as smoothly geometrical as a little section of the side of a vast brown cone. Along the very top of it a row of short white posts, so distant I couldn’t see the cable joining them, marked the road we had left. The slope looked forty-five degrees to me—these things always look impossibly steep—but Franz said it was only thirty—a completely stabilized landslide. It had been burned over a year ago in a brush fire that had almost got the house and still more recently there had been some minor slides started by repairs to the road above, accounting for the slope’s unvegetated appearance.

The house was long, one-storey, its walls finished in gray asbestos shingles. The nearly flat roof, finished in gray asbestos sheets, sloped gently from the cliff side in. Midway the length of the house was a bend, allowing the house to conform to the curving top of the cliff and dividing it into two equal sections or angles, to call them that. An unroofed porch, lightly railed (Franz called it “the deck”) ran along the nearer angle of the house fronting north and thrusting several feet out over the drop, which at this point was three hundred feet.

On the side of the house toward the drive was a flagstone yard big enough to turn a car in and with a lightly roofed carport up against the house on the side away from the drop. As we drove down onto the yard there was a slight clank as we crossed a heavy metal plate bridging a small neat ditch that ran along the foot of the raw earth slope, carrying off the water that would come down it—and also the water that would drain from the roof—during Southern California’s infrequent but sometimes severe winter rains.

Franz backed the car around before we got out. It required four movements—swing to the corner of the house where the deck started, back with a sharp turn until the rear wheels were almost in the ditch, forward with a reverse turn until the front wheels were at the cliff edge by the metal bridgelet, then back into the carport until the rear of the car was almost up against a door that Franz told us led to the kitchen.

The three of us got out and Franz led us to the center of the flagged yard for another look around before we went inside. I noticed that some of the gray flags were actually solid rock showing through the light soil cover, indicating that the plateau was not an earth terrace cut by men but by a rocky flat-surfaced knob thrusting out of the hillside. It gave me a feeling of security which I especially welcomed because there were other impressions—sensations, rather—that were distinctly disturbing to me.

They were minor sensations, all of them, barely on the threshold of awareness. Ordinarily I don’t think I’d have noticed them—I don’t consider myself a sensitive person—but undoubtedly the strange experience of the thing on the pinnacle had keyed me up. To begin with there was the hint of the nasty smell of burnt linen and with it an odd bitter brassy taste; I don’t think I imagined these things, because I noticed Franz wrinkling his nostrils and working his tongue against his teeth. Then there was the feeling of being faintly brushed by threads, cobwebs, or the finest vines, although we were right out in the open and the nearest thing overhead was a cloud a half mile up. And just as I felt that—the faintest feeling, mind you—I noticed Viki lightly and questingly run her hand across the top of her hair and down the back of her neck in the common gesture of “feeling for a spider.”

All this time we were talking off and on—for one thing Franz was telling us about buying Rim House on quite inexpensive terms five years back from the heir of a wealthy surfing, and sports-car enthusiast who had run himself off a turn in Decker Canyon.

Finally there were the sounds that were, I thought, breathing on the verge of audibility in the remarkably complete silence that flowed around us when the Volks’ motor was cut off. I know that everyone who goes from the city to the country is troubled by sounds, but these were on the unusual side. There was an occasional whistling—too high-pitched for the ear’s normal range—and a soft rumbling too low for it. But along with these perhaps fancied vibrations, three times I thought I heard the hissing rattle of fine gravel spilling down. Each time I looked quickly toward the slope, but never could catch the faintest sign of earth on the move, although there was admittedly a lot of slope to be scanned.

The third time I looked up the slope, some clouds had moved aside so that the upper rim of the sun peered back down at me. “Like a golden rifleman drawing a bead” was the grotesque figure of speech that sprang to my mind. I looked hurriedly away. I wanted no more black spots before my eyes for the present. Just then Franz led us up on the deck and into Rim House by the front door.

I was afraid that all the unpleasant sensations would intensify as we got inside especially somehow the burnt-linen smell and the invisible cobwebs—so I was greatly cheered when instead they all vanished instantly, as though faced-down by the strong sense of Franz’s genial, sympathetic, wide-ranging, highly-civilized personality that the living room exuded.

It was a long room, narrow at first where it had to give space to the kitchen and utility room and a small bathroom at this end of the house, then broadening out to the full width of the building. There was no empty wall-space, it was completely lined with shelves—half of books, half of statuary, archeological oddments, scientific instruments, tape recorder, high-fi set and the like. Near the inner wall, beyond the narrow section, were a big desk, some filing cabinets, and a stand with the phone.

There were no windows looking out on the deck. But just beyond the deck, where the bend in the house came, was a big view window looking out across the canyon at the craggy hills that completely cut off any sight of the Pacific. Facing the view window and close to it was a long couch backed by a long table.

At the end of the living room a narrow hall led down the middle of the second angle of the house to a door that in turn let out into a most private grassy space that could be used for sunbathing and was just big enough for a badminton court—if anyone felt nervy enough to leap about swatting at the bird of the edge of that great drop.

On the side of the hall toward the slope was a big bedroom—Franz’s—and a large bathroom opening into the hall at the end of the house. On the other side were two only slightly smaller bedrooms, each with a view window that could be completely masked by heavy dark drapes. These rooms had been his boys’, he remarked casually, but I noted with relief that there were no mementoes or signs whatever left of youthful occupancy: my closet, in fact, had some women’s clothes hanging in the back of it. These two bedrooms, which he assigned to Viki and myself, had a connecting door which could be bolted from both sides, but now stood unbolted but shut—a typical indication, albeit a minor one, of Franz’s civilized tactfulness: he did not know, or at least did not presume to guess, the exact relationship between Viki and myself, and so left us to make our own arrangements as we saw fit—without any spoken suggestion that we should do so.

Also, each door to the hall had a serviceable bolt—Franz clearly believed in privacy for guests—and in each room was a little bowl of silver coins, no collector’s items, just current American coinage. Viki asked about that and Franz explained deprecatingly, smiling at his own romanticism, that he’d copied the old Spanish California custom of the host providing guests with convenience money in that fashion.

Having been introduced to the house, we unloaded the Volks of our trifling luggage and the provisions Franz had picked up in LA. He sighed faintly at the light film of dust that had accumulated everywhere during his month’s absence and Viki insisted that we pitch in with him and do a bit of house-cleaning. Franz agreed without too much demurring. I think all of us were eager to work off the edge of this afternoon’s experience and get feeling back in the real world again before we talked about it—I know I was.

Franz proved an easy man to help house-clean—thoughtful for his home but not at all fussy or finicky about it. And while wielding broom or mop Viki looked good in her sweater, toreador pants, and highbound sandals—she wears the modern young-female’s uniform with style rather than the customary effect of dreary intellectuality mated to a solemnly biologic femaleness.

When we’d done, we sat down in the kitchen with mugs of black coffee—somehow none of us wanted a drink—and listened to Franz’s stew simmer.

“You’ll want to know,” he said without preface, “if I’ve had any previous eerie experiences up here, if I knew something was apt to happen when I invited you up for the weekend, whether the phenomena—pretentious term, isn’t it?—seem to be connected with anything in the past of the region or the house or my own past—or with current activities here, including the scientific-military installations of the missile people—and finally whether I have any overall theory to account for them—such as Ed’s suggestion about hypnotism.”

Viki nodded. He’d adequately stated what was in our minds.

“About that last, Franz,” I said abruptly. “When Mr. Mortenson first made that suggestion, I thought it was completely impossible, but now I’m not quite so sure. I don’t mean you’d deliberately hypnotize us, but aren’t there kinds of self-hypnosis that can be communicated to others? At any rate, the conditions were favorable for suggestion’s operating—we’d just been talking about the supernatural, there was the sun and its after-images acting as an attention-capturer, then the sudden transition to shadow, and finally you pointing decisively at that pinnacle as if we all had to see something there.”

“I don’t believe that for one minute, Glenn,” Viki said with conviction.

“Neither do I, really,” I told her. “After all, the cards indicate we had remarkably similar visions—our descriptions were just different enough to make them convincing—and I don’t see where that material could have been suggested to us during the trip out or at any earlier time when we were together. Still, the idea of some obscure sort of suggestion has crossed my mind. A blend of highway hypnosis and sun-hypnosis, maybe? Franz, what were your earlier experiences? I take it there were some.”

He nodded but then looked at us both thoughtfully and said, “I don’t think I should tell you about them in any detail, though. Not because I’m afraid of your being skeptical or anything like that, but simply because if I do, and then similar things happen to you, you’ll be more likely to feel—and rightly—that the power of suggestion may have been at work.

“Still, I ought to answer your questions,” he continued. “So here goes, briefly and in a general way. Yes, I had experiences while I was up here alone month before last—some of them like this afternoon’s, some of them different. They didn’t seem to link up with any particular folklore or occult theory or anything else, yet they frightened me so that I went down to LA and had my eyes checked by a very good oculist and had a psychiatrist and a couple of psychologists I trust give me a thorough check-up. They pronounced me fit and unwarped—likewise my eyes. After a month I had myself convinced that everything I’d seen or sensed had been hallucinatory, that I’d simply had a case of nerves, a fit of the horrors, from too much loneliness. I invited you two along partly to avoid restarting the cycle.”

“You couldn’t have been completely convinced, though,” Viki pointed out. “You had those cards and pencils all ready in your pocket.”

Franz grinned at the neatly-scored point. “Right,” he said, “I was still keeping in mind the off-trail chance and preparing for it. And then when I got in the hills the set of my ideas changed. What had seemed completely inconceivable in LA became once more a borderline possibility. Queer. Come on, let’s take a turn on the deck—it’ll be cool by now.”

We took our mugs along. It was moderately cool, all right; most of the canyon-valley had been in the shadow for at least two hours and a faint breeze flowed upward around our ankles. Once I’d got used to being on the edge of the terrific drop I found it exhilarating. Viki must have too, for she leaned over with deliberately showy daring to peer.

The floor of the canyon was choked with dark trees and undergrowth. This thinned out going up the opposite face until just across from us there was a magnificent upthrusted and folded stratum of pale tan rock that the canyon wall cut in cross-section and showed us like a geology book. Above this fold was more undergrowth, then a series of tan and gray rocks with dark gullies and caves between them, leading by steps to a high gray summit-crag.

The slope behind the house completely cut off the sun from us, of course, but its yellow rays were still striking the tops of the wall across from us, traveling up them as the sun sank. The clouds had blown away east, where a couple were still visible, and none had come from the west to replace them.

In spite of being in a much cheerier “normal mood,” I’d braced myself just a bit for the eerie little sensations as we’d come on onto the deck, but they weren’t there. Which somehow wasn’t quite as reassuring as it ought to have been. I made myself admire the variegated rocky wall opposite.

“God, what a view to wake up to every morning!” Viki said enthusiastically. “You can feel the shape of the air and the height of the sky.”

“Yes, it’s quite a prospect,” Franz agreed.

Then they came, the little ones, faint-footed as before, feather-treading the sensory thresholds—the burnt-linen odor, the bitter brassy tang, the brushing of skyey cobwebs, the vibrations not quite sound, the hissing rattling spill of ghost gravel…the minor sensations, as I’d named them to myself…

I knew Viki and Franz were getting them too, simply because they said no more and I could sense them both holding very still.

…and then one of the last rays of the sun must have struck a mirror-surface in the summit-crag, perhaps an outcropping of quartz, for it struck back at me like a golden rapier, making me blink, and then for an instant the beam was glitteringly black and I thought I saw (though nothing like so as clearly as I’d seen the black all-knowing spider-centipede on the pinnacle) a black shape—black with the queer churning blackness you see only at night with your eyes closed. The shape coiled rapidly down the crag, into the cavern gullies and around the rocks and sank finally and utterly into the undergrowth above the fold and disappeared.

Along the way Viki had grabbed my arm at the elbow and Franz had whipped round to look at us and then looked back.

It was strange. I felt frightened and at the same time eager, on the edge of marvels and mysteries about to be laid bare. And there had been something quite controlled about the behavior of all of us through it. One fantastically trivial point—none of us had spilled any coffee.

We studied the canyon wall above the fold for about two minutes.

Then Franz said, almost gaily, “Time for dinner. Talk afterwards.”

I felt deeply grateful for the instant steadying, shielding, anti-hysterical and, yes, comforting effect of the house as we went back in. I knew it was an ally.

III

“When the hard-boiled rationalist came to consult me for the first time, he was in such a state of panic that not only he himself but I also felt the wind coming over from the side of the lunatic asylum!”

—Carl Gustav Jung in Psyche and Symbol

We accompanied Franz’s stew with chunks of dark pumpernickel and pale brick cheese and followed it with fruit and coffee, then took more coffee to the long couch facing the big view window in the living room. There was a spectral yellow glow in the sky but it faded while we were settling ourselves. Soon the first star to the north glittered faintly—Dubhe perhaps.

“Why is black a frightening color?” Viki put before us.

“Night,” Franz said. “Though you’ll get an argument as to whether it’s a color or absence of color or simply basic sensory field. But is it intrinsically frightening?”

Viki nodded with pursed lips.

I said, “Somehow the phrase ‘the black spaces between the stars’ has always been an ultimate to me in terror. I can look at the stars without thinking of it, but the phrase gets me.”

Viki said, “My ultimate horror is the idea of inky black cracks appearing in things, first in the sidewalk and the sides of houses, then in the furniture and floors and cars and things, finally in the pages of books and people’s faces and the blue sky. The cracks are inky black—nothing ever shows.”

“As if the universe were a gigantic jigsaw puzzle,” I suggested.

“A little like that. Or a Byzantine mosaic. Glittering gold and glittering black.”

Franz said, “Your picture, Viki, suggests that sense of breaking-up we feel in the modern world. Families, nations, classes, other loyalty groups falling apart. Things changing before you get to know them. Death on the installment plan—or decay by jumps. Instantaneous birth. Something out of nothing. Reality replacing science-fiction so fast that you can’t tell which is which. Constant sense of déja-vu—‘I was here before—but when, how?’ Even the possibility that there’s no real continuity between events, just inexplicable gaps. And of course every gap—every crack—means a new perching place for horror.”

“It also suggests the fragmentation of knowledge, as somebody called it,” I said. “A world too big and complex to grasp in more than patches. Too much for one man. Takes teams of experts—and teams of teams. Each expert has his field, his patch, his piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but between any two pieces is a no man’s land.”

“Right, Glenn,” Franz said sharply, “and today I think the three of us have plunged into one of the biggest of those no man’s lands.” He hesitated then and said with an odd diffidence, almost embarrassment, “You know, we’re going to have to start talking sometime about what we saw—we can’t let ourselves be gagged by this fear that anything we say will alter the picture of what the others saw and warp their testimony. Well, about the blackness of this thing or figure or manifestation I saw (I called it ‘Black Empress,’ but Sphinx might have been a better word—there was the suggestion of a long tigerish or serpentine body in the midst of the black fringy sunburst)—but about its blackness, now, that blackness was more than anything else like the glimmering dark the eyes see in the absence of light.”

“Right,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Viki chimed.

“There was a sense,” Franz went on, “that the thing was in my eyes, in my head, but also out there on the horizon, on the pinnacle I mean. That it was somehow both subjective—in my consciousness—and objective—in the material world—or…” (He hesitated and lowered his voice) “…or existing in some sort of space more fundamental, more primal and less organized than either of those.

“Why shouldn’t there be other kinds of space than those we know?” he went on a shade defensively. “Other chambers in the great universal cave? Men have tried to imagine four, five and more spatial dimensions. What’s the space inside the atom or the nucleus feel like, or the space between the galaxies or beyond any galaxy? Oh, I know the questions I’m asking would be nonsense to most scientists—they’re questions that don’t make sense operationally or referentially, they’d say—but those same men can’t give us the ghost of an answer to even the question of where and how the space of consciousness exists, how a jelly of nerve cells can support the huge flaming worlds of inner reality—they fob us off with the excuse (legitimate in its way) that science is about things that can be measured and pointed at, and who can measure or point at his thoughts? But consciousness is—it’s the basis we all exist in and start from, it’s the basis science starts from, whether or not science can get at it—so it’s allowable for me to wonder whether there may not be a primal space that’s a bridge between consciousness and matter…and whether the thing we saw may not exist in such a space.”

“Maybe there are experts for this sort of thing and we’re missing them,” Viki said seriously. “Not scientists, but mystics and occultists, some of them at any rate—the genuine few among the crowd of fakers. You’ve got some of their books in your library. I recognized the titles.”

Franz shrugged. “I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religions too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, or an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have inner things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no manmade theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing.”

I stood up and moved close to the window. There seemed to be quite a few stars now. I tried to make out the big fold of rock in the hillside opposite, but the reflections on the glass got in the way.

“Maybe so,” Viki said, “but there are a couple of those books I’d like to look at again. I think they’re back of your desk.”

“What titles?” Franz asked. “I’ll help you find them.”

“Meanwhile I’ll take a turn on the deck,” I said as casually as I could, moving toward the other end of the room. They didn’t call after me, but I had the feeling they watched me the whole way.

As soon as I’d pushed through the door—which took a definite effort of will—and shoved it to without quite shutting it behind me—which took another—I became aware of two things: that it was much darker than I’d anticipated—the big view window angled away from the deck and there was no other obvious light source except the stars—; two, that I found the darkness reassuring.

The reason for the latter seemed clear enough: the horror I’d glimpsed was associated with the sun, with blinding sunlight. Now I was safe from that—though if someone unseen should have struck a match in front of my face, the effect on me would have been extreme.

I moved forward by short steps, feeling in front of me with my hands at the level of the rail.

I knew why I’d come out here, I thought. I wanted to test my courage against the thing, whatever it was, illusory or real or something else, inside or outside our minds, or somehow as Franz had suggested, able to move in both regions. But beyond that, I realized now, there was the beginning of a fascination.

My hands touched the rail. I studied the black wall opposite, deliberately looking a little away and then back, as one does to make a faint star or a dim object come clear in the dark. After a bit I could make out the big pale fold and some of the rocks above it, but a couple of minute’s watching convinced me that it was possible endlessly to see dark shapes crossing it.

I looked up at the heavens. There was no Milky Way yet, but there would be soon, the stars were flashing on so brightly and thickly at this smog-free distance from LA. I saw the Pole Star straight above the dark star-silhouetted summit-crag of the hillside across from me, and the Great Bear and Cassiopeia swinging from it. I felt the bigness of the atmosphere, I got a hint of the stupendous distance between me and the stars, and then—as if my vision could go out in all directions at will, piercing solidity as readily as the dark—I got a lasting, growing, wholly absorbing sense of the universe around me.

Lying behind me, a gently swelling, perfectly rounded section of the earth about a hundred miles high masked off the sun. Africa lay under my right foot through the earth’s core, Australia under my left, and it was strange to think of the compressed incandescent stuff that lay between us under earth’s cool mantle—blindingly glowing plastic metal or ore in a space where there were no eyes to see and no millionth of a free inch in which all that dazzling locked-up light could travel. I sensed the tortured ice of the frigid poles, the squeezed water in the deep seas, the fingers of mounting lava, the raw earth crawling and quivering with an infinitude of questing rootlets and burrowing worms.

Then for moments I felt I looked out glimmeringly through two billion pairs of human eyes, my consciousness running like fuse-fire from mind to mind. For moments more I dimly shared the feelings, the blind pressures and pulls, of a billion trillion motes of microscopic life in the air, in the earth, in the bloodstream of man.

Then my consciousness seemed to move swiftly outward from earth in all directions, like an expanding globe of sentient gas. I passed the dusty dry mote that was Mars, I glimpsed milkily-banded Saturn with its great thin wheels of jumbled jagged ice. I passed frigid Pluto with its bitter nitrogen snows. I thought of how people are like plants—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distances barring them off from each other.

Then the speed of expansion of my consciousness became infinite and my mind was spread thin in the stars of the Milky Way and in the other gauzy star islands beyond it—above, below, to all sides, among the nadir stars as well as those of the zenith—and on the trillion trillion planets of those stars I sensed the infinite variety of self-conscious life—naked, clothed, furred, armor-shelled, and with cells floating free—clawed, handed, tentacled, pinchered, ciliated, fingered by winds or magnetism—loving, hating, striving, despairing, imagining.

For a while it seemed to me that all these beings were joined in a dance that was fiercely joyous, poignantly sensuous, tenderly responsive.

Then the mood darkened and the beings fell apart into a trillion trillion trillion lonely motes locked off forever from each other, sensing only bleak meaninglessness in the cosmos around them, their eyes fixed forward only on universal death.

Simultaneously each dimensionless star seemed to become for me the vast sun it was, beating incandescently on the platform where my body stood and on the house behind it and the beings in it and on my body too, aging them with the glare of a billion desert moons, crumbling them all to dust in one coruscatingly blinding instant.

Hands gently grasped my shoulders and at the same time Franz’s voice said, “Steady, Glenn.” I held still, though for a moment every nerve cell in me seemed on the verge of triggering, then I let out an uneven breath edged with laughter and turned and said in a voice that sounded to me quite dull, almost drugged, “I got lost in my imagination. For a minute there I seemed to be seeing everything. Where’s Viki?”

“Inside leafing through The Symbolism of the Tarot and a couple of other books on the arcana of the fortune-telling cards, and grumbling that they don’t have indexes. But what’s this ‘seeing everything,’ Glenn?”

Haltingly I tried to tell him about my “vision,” not conveying a hundredth of it, I felt. By the time I finished I could see the blur of his face against the black wall of the house barely well enough to tell that he nodded.

“The universe fondling and devouring her children,” his brooding comment came out of the dark. “I imagine you’ve run across in your reading, Glenn, the superficially sterile theory that the whole universe is in some sense alive or at least aware. There are lots of terms for it in the jargon of metaphysics: cosmotheism, theopantism, panpsychism, panpneumatism—but simply pantheism is the commonest. The idea that the universe is God, though for me God isn’t the right term, it’s been used to mean too many things. If you insist on a religious approach, perhaps what comes closest is the Greek idea of the Great God Pan, the mysterious nature deity, half animal, that frightened man and woman to panic in lonely places. Incidentally, panpneumatism is the most interesting to me of the obscurer concepts: old Karl von Hartmann’s notion that the unconscious mind is the basic reality—it comes close to what we were saying inside about the possibility of a more fundamental space linking the inner and outer world and perhaps providing a bridge from anywhere to anywhere.”

As he paused I heard a faint spill of gravel, then a second, though I got none of the other minor sensations.

“But whatever we call it,” Franz went on, “there’s something there, I feel—something less than God but more than the collective mind of man—a force, a power, an influence, a mood of things, a something more than subatomic particles, that is aware and that has grown with the universe and that helps to shape it.” He had moved forward now so that I saw his head silhouetted against the thick stars and for a moment there was the grotesque illusion that it was the stars rather than his mouth that was speaking. “I think there are such influences, Glenn. Atomic particles alone can’t sustain the flaming inner worlds of consciousness, there must be a pull from the future as well as a push from the past to keep us moving through time, there must be a ceiling of mind over life as well as a floor of matter beneath it.”

Again, as his voice faded out, I heard the feathery hisses of gravel running—two close together, then two more. I thought uneasily of the slope behind the house.

“And if there are those influences,” Franz continued, “I believe that man has grown enough in awareness today to be able to contact them without ritual or formula of belief, if they should chance to move or look his way. I think of them as sleepy tigers, Glenn, that mostly purr and dream and look at us through slitted eyes, but occasionally—perhaps when a man gets a hint of them—open their eyes to the full and stalk in his direction. When a man becomes ripe for them, when he’s pondered the possibility of them, and then when he’s closed his ears to the protective, mechanically-augmented chatter of humanity, they make themselves known to him.”

The spills of gravel, still faint as illusions, were coming now in a rapid rhythm like—it occurred to me at that instant—padding footsteps, each footstep dislodging a little earth. I sensed a faint brief glow overhead.

“For they’re the same thing, Glenn, as the horror and wonder I talked about inside, the horror and wonder that lies beyond any game, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will.”

At that instant the silence was ripped by a shrill scream of terror from the flagged yard between the house and the drive. For an instant my muscles were chilled and constricted and there was a gagging pressure in my chest. Then I lunged toward that end of the deck.

Franz darted into the house.

I plunged off the end of the deck, almost fell, twisted to my feet—and stopped, suddenly at a loss for my next move.

Here I couldn’t see a thing in the blackness. In stumbling I’d lost my sense of direction—for the moment I didn’t know which ways were the slope, the house, and the cliff edge.

I heard Viki—I thought it had to be Viki—gasping and sobbing strainingly, but the direction of that wouldn’t come clear, except it seemed more ahead of me than behind me.

Then I saw, stretching up before me, a half dozen or so thin closed-placed stalks of what I can only describe as a more gleaming blackness—it differed from the background as dead black velvet does from dead black felt. They were barely distinguishable yet very real. I followed them up with my eyes as they mounted against the starfields, almost invisible, like black wires, to where they ended—high up—in a bulb of darkness, defined only by the patch of stars it obscured, as tiny as the moon.

The black bulb swayed and there was a corresponding rapid joggling in the crowded black stalks—though if they were free to move at the base I ought to call them legs.

A door opened twenty feet from me and a beam of white light struck across the yard, showing a streak of flagstones and the beginning of the drive.

Franz had come out the kitchen door with a powerful flashlight. My surroundings jumped sideways into place.

The beam swept back along the slope, showing nothing else, then forward toward the cliff edge. When it got to the spot where I’d seen the ribbony black legs, it stopped.

There were no stalk, legs or bands of any sort to be seen, but Viki was swaying and struggling there, her dark hair streaming across her face and half obscuring her agonized expression, her elbows tight to her sides, her hands near her shoulders and clawed outward—exactly as though she were gripping and struggling against the vertical bars of a tight cage.

The next instant the tension went out of her, as though whatever she’d been struggling against had vanished. She swayed and began to move in blind tottering steps toward the cliff edge.

That snapped my freeze and I ran toward her, grabbing her wrist as she stepped on the verge, and half-dragged, half-whirled her away from it. She didn’t resist. Her movement toward the cliff had been accidental, not suicidal.

She looked at me, one side of her blanched face twitching, and said, “Glenn.” My heart was thudding.

Franz yelled at us from the kitchen door, “Come on in!”

IV

But the third Sister, who is also the youngest—! Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden… This youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding with a tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.”

—Thomas de Quincy in Suspira de Profundis

As soon as we got Viki inside she recovered rapidly from her shock and at once insisted on telling us her story. Her manner was startlingly assured, interested, almost gay, as if some protective door in her mind were already closed against the absolute reality of what had happened.

At one point she even said, “It all still could have been a series of chance little sounds and sights, you know, combined with suggestion working powerfully—like the night I saw a burglar standing against the wall beyond the foot of my bed, saw him so clearly in the dark that I could have described him down to the cut of his mustache and the droop of his left eyelid…until the dawn coming on turned him into my roommate’s black overcoat with a tan scarf thrown around the hanger and the hook.”

While she’d been reading, she said, she’d become aware of the ghost-spills of gravel, some of them seeming to rattle faintly against the back wall of the house, and she’d gone out at once through the kitchen to investigate.

Groping her way, moving a few steps beyond the Volks toward the center of the yard, she had looked toward the slope and at once seen moving across it an incredibly tall wispy shape that she described as “a giant harvestman, tall as ten trees. You know harvestmen, some people call them daddy longlegs, those utterly harmless pitifully fragile spiders that are nothing but a tiny brown inanimate-looking ball with eight bendy legs that are like lengths of stiffened brown thread.”

She’d seen it quite clearly in spite of the darkness, because it was “black with a black shimmer.” Once it had vanished completely when a car had turned the bend in the road above and its headlights had feebly swept the air high above the slope (that would have been the faint brief overhead glow I’d sensed)—but when the headlights swung away the giant black glimmering harvestman had come back at once.

She hadn’t been frightened (wonderstruck and terribly curious, rather) until the thing had come treading rapidly toward her, its shimmering black legs drawing closer and closer together until before she realized it they were a tight cage around her.

Then, as she discovered they weren’t quite as thin and insubstantial as she’d imagined, and as she felt their feathery, almost bristly touch against her back and face and sides, she’d suddenly snapped and given that one terrific scream and started to struggle hysterically. “Spiders drive me wild,” she finished lightly, “and there was the feeling I’d be sucked up the cage to the black brain in the stars—I thought of it as a black brain then, no reason why.”

Franz didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he began, in a rather heavy, halting way, “You know, I don’t think I showed much foresight or consideration when I invited you two up here. Quite the opposite, in fact, even if I didn’t then believe that… Anyway, I don’t feel right about it. Look here, you could take the Volks right now…or I could drive…and—”

“I think I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Kinzman, and why,” Viki said with a little laugh, standing up, “but I for one have had quite enough excitement for one night. I have no desire to top it off with watching for ghosts in the headlights for the next two hours.” She yawned. “I want to hit that luxurious hay you’ve provided for me, right this minute. Night-night, Franz, Glenn.” With no more word she walked down the hall and went into her bedroom, the far one, and closed the door.

Franz said, in a low voice, “I think you know I meant that very seriously, Glenn. It still might be the best thing.”

I said, “Viki’s got some kind of inner protection built up now. To get her to leave Rim House, we’d have to break it down. That would be rough.”

Franz said, “Better rough, maybe, than what else might happen here tonight.”

I said, “So far Rim House has been a protection for us. It’s shut things out.”

He said, “It didn’t shut out the footsteps Viki heard.”

I said remembering my vision of the cosmos, “But Franz, if we’re up against the sort of influence we think we are, then it seems to me pretty ridiculous to imagine a few miles of distance or a few bright lights making any more difference to its power than the walls of a house.”

He shrugged. “We don’t know,” he said. “Did you see it, Glenn? Holding the light I didn’t see anything.”

“Just like Viki described it,” I assured him and went on to tell my own little tale. “If that was all suggestion,” I said, “it was a pretty fancy variety.” I squeezed my eyes and yawned; I was suddenly feeling very dull—reaction, I suppose. I finished, “While it was happening, and later while we were listening to Viki, there certainly were times when all I wanted was to be back in the old familiar world with the old familiar hydrogen bomb hanging over my head and all the rest of that stuff.”

“But at the same time weren’t you fascinated?” Franz demanded. “Didn’t it make you crazy to know more?—the thought that you were seeing something utterly strange and that here was a chance really to understand the universe—at least to meet its unknown lords?”

“I don’t know,” I told him wearily. “I suppose so, in a way.”

“What did the thing really seem like, Glenn?” Franz asked. “What kind of being?—if that’s the right word.”

“I’m not sure it is,” I said. I found it difficult to summon the energy to answer his questions. “Not an animal. Not even an intelligence as we understand it. More like the things we saw on the pinnacle and the crag.” I tried to marshal my fatigue-drugged thoughts. “Halfway between reality and a symbol,” I said. “If that means anything.”

“But weren’t you fascinated?” Franz repeated.

“I don’t know,” I said, pushing to my feet with an effort. “Look, Franz, I’m too beat to be able to do any more thinking now. It’s just too hard to talk about these things. G’night.”

“Goodnight, Glenn,” he said as I walked to my bedroom. Nothing more.

Midway getting undressed, it occurred to me that my dazed sleepiness might be my mind’s defense against having to cope with the unknown, but even that thought wasn’t enough to rouse me.

I pulled on my pyjamas and put out the light. Just then the door to Viki’s bedroom opened and she stood there, wearing a light robe.

I had thought of looking in on her, but had decided that if she were sleeping it was the best thing for her and any attempt to check on her might break her inner protections.

But now I could tell from her expression, by the light from her room, that they were shattered.

At the same moment my own inner protection—the false sleepiness—was gone.

Viki closed the door behind her and we moved together and put our arms around each other and stood there. After a while we lay down side by side on the bed under the view window that showed the stars.

Viki and I are lovers, but there wasn’t an atom of passion in our embraces now. We were simply two, not so much frightened as completely overawed people, seeking comfort and reassurance in each other’s presence.

Not that we could hope to get any security, any protection from each other—the thing looming above us was too powerful for that—but only a sense of not being alone, of sharing whatever might happen.

There wasn’t the faintest impulse to seek temporary escape in love-making, as we might have done to shut out a more physical threat, the thing was too weird for that. For once Viki’s body was beautiful to me in a completely cold abstract way that had no more to do with desire than the colors in an insect’s wing-case or the curve of a tree or the glitter of a snowfield. Yet within this strange form, I knew, was a friend.

We didn’t speak a word to each other. There were no easy words for most of our thoughts, sometimes no words at all. Besides, we shrank from making the slightest sound, as two mice would while a cat sniffs past the clump of grass in which they are hiding.

For the sense of a presence looming around and over Rim House was overpoweringly strong. Dipping into Rim House now too, for all the minor sensations came drifting down on us like near-impalpable snow-flakes—the dark burnt taste and smell, the fluttering cobwebs, the bat-sounds and the wave-sounds and once against the feathery spills of gravel.

And above and behind them the sense of a black uprearing presence linked to the whole cosmos by the finest black filaments that in no way impeded it…

I didn’t think of Franz, I hardly thought of the things that had happened today, though now and then I would worry at the edge of a memory…

We simply lay there and held still and looked at the stars. Minute after minute. Hour after hour.

At times we must have slept, I know I did, though blacked-out would be a better expression for it, for there was no rest and waking was a nightmarish business of slowly becoming aware of dark aches and chills.

After a long while I noticed that I could see the clock in the far corner of the room—because its dial was luminescent, I thought. The hands pointed to three o’clock. I gently turned Viki’s face toward it and she nodded that she could see it too.

The stars were what was keeping us sane, I told myself, in a world that might dissolve to dust at the faintest breath from the nearer presence.

It was just after I noticed the clock that the stars began to change color, all of them. First they had a violet tinge, which gradually shifted to blue, then green.

In an unimportant corner of my mind I wondered what sort of fine mist or dust drifting through the air could work that change.

The stars turned to dim yellow, to orange, to dark furnace-red, and then—like the last sparks crawling on a sooty chimney wall above a dead fire—winked out.

I thought crazily of the stars all springing away from earth, moving with such impossible swiftness that their light had shifted beneath the red into invisible ranges.

We should have been in utter darkness then, but instead we began to see each other and the things around us outlined by the faintest glimmer. I thought it was the first hint of morning and I suppose Viki did too. We looked together at the clock. It was barely four-thirty. We watched the minute hand edge. Then we looked back at the window. It wasn’t ghostly pale, as it would have been with dawn, but—and I could tell that Viki saw this too by the way she gripped my hand—it was a pitch-black square, framed by the white glimmer.

I could think of no explanation for the glimmer. It was a little like a whiter, paler version of the luminescence of the clock dial. But even more it was like the pictures one imagines in one’s eyes in absolute darkness, when one wills the churning white sparks of the retinal field to coalesce into recognizable ghostly forms—it was as if that retinal dark had spilled out of our eyes into the room around us and we were seeing each other and our surroundings not by light but by the power of imagination—which each second increased the sense of miracle that the shimmering scene did not dissolve to churning chaos.

We watched the hand of the clock edge toward five. The thought that it must be getting light outside and that something barred us from seeing that light, finally stirred me to move and speak, though the sense of an inhuman inanimate presence was as strong as ever.

“We’ve got to try and get out of here,” I whispered.

Moving across the bedroom like a shimmering ghost, Viki opened the connecting door. The light had been on in her room, I remembered.

There wasn’t the faintest glimmer came through the door. Her bedroom was dead black.

I’d fix that, I thought. I switched on the lamp by the bed.

My room became solid black. I couldn’t even see the face of the clock. Light is darkness now, I thought. White is black.

I switched off the light and the glimmer came back. I went to Viki where she was standing by the door and whispered to her to switch off the light in her room. Then I got dressed, mostly feeling around for my clothes, not trusting the ghostly light that was so much like a scene inside my head trembling on the verge of dissolution.

Viki came back. She was even carrying her little overnight bag. I inwardly approved the poise that action indicated, but I made no effort to take any of my own things. “My room was very cold,” Viki said.

We stepped into the hall. I heard a familiar sound: the whir of a telephone dial. I saw a tall silver figure standing in the living room. It was a moment before I realized it was Franz, seen by the glimmer. I heard him say, “Hello, operator. Operator!” We walked to him.

He looked at us, holding the receiver to his ears. Then he put it down again and said, “Glenn. Viki. I’ve been trying to phone Ed Mortenson, see if the stars changed there, or anything else. But it doesn’t work for me. You try your luck at getting the operator, Glenn:”

He dialed once, then handed me the receiver. I heard no ringing, no buzz, but a sound like wind wailing softly. “Hello, operator,” I said. There was no response or change, just that wind sound. “Wait,” Franz said softly.

It must have been at least five seconds when my own voice came back to me out of the phone, very faintly, half drowned in the lonely wind, like an echo from the end of the universe. “Hello, operator.”

My hand shook as I put down the phone. “The radio?” I asked. “The wind sound,” he told me, “all over the dial.”

“Just the same we’ve got to try to get out,” I said.

“I suppose we should,” he said with a faint ambiguous sigh. “I’m ready. Come on.”

As I stepped onto the deck after Franz and Viki, I felt the intensified sense of a presence. The minor sensations were with us again, but far stronger now: the burnt taste made me gag almost, I wanted to claw at the cobwebs, the impalpable wind moaned and whistled loudly, the ghost-gravel hissed and splashed like the rapids of a river. All in near absolute darkness.

I wanted to run but Franz stepped forward to the barely glimmering rail. I held on to myself.

The faintest glimmer showed a few lines of the rock wall opposite. But from the sky above it was beating a dead inkier blackness—blacker than black, I thought—that was eating up the glimmer everywhere, dimming it moment by moment. And with the inkier blackness came a chill that struck into me like needles.

“Look,” Franz said. “It’s the sunrise.”

“Franz, we’ve got to get moving,” I said.

“In a moment,” he answered softly, reaching back his hand. “You go ahead. Start the car. Pull out to the center of the yard. I’ll join you there.”

Viki took the keys from him. She’s driven a Volks. There was still enough glimmer to see by, though I trusted it less than ever. Viki started the car, then forgot and switched on the headlights. They obscured yard and drive with a fan of blackness. She switched them off and pulled to the center of the yard.

I looked back. Although the air was black with the icy sunlight I could still see Franz clearly by the ghost light. He was standing where we’d left him, only leaning forward now, as though eagerly peering.

“Franz!” I called loudly against the weirdly wailing wind and the mounting gravel-roar. “Franz!”

There reared out of the canyon, facing Franz, towering above him, bending toward him a little, a filament-trailing form of shimmering velvet black—not the ghost light, but shimmering darkness itself—that looked like a gigantic hooded cobra, or a hooded madonna, or a vast centipede, or a giant cloaked figure of the cat-headed goddess Bast, or all or none of these.

I saw the silver of Franz’s body begin to crumble and churn. In the same moment the dark form dipped down and enfolded him like the silk-gloved fingers of a colossal black hand or the petals of a vast black flower closing.

Feeling like someone who throws the first shovel of earth on the coffin of a friend, I croaked to Viki to go.

There was hardly any glimmer left—not enough to see the drive, I thought, as the Volks started up it.

Viki drove fast.

The sound of the spilling gravel grew louder and louder, drowning out the intangible wind, drowning out our motor. It rose to a thunder. Under the moving wheels, being transmitted up through them, I could feel the solid earth shaking.

A bright pit opened ahead of us on the canyon side. For a moment it was as if we were driving through veils of thick smoke, then suddenly Viki was braking, we were turning into the road and early daylight was almost blinding us.

But Viki didn’t stop. She completed a near-full turn, so we were headed up the Little Sycamore Canyon road.

There was no trace of darkness at all, anywhere. The thunder that had shaken the ground was dying away.

She drove close to the edge where the road turned away at the head of the slope and she stopped the car there.

Around us were the turreted hills. The sun hadn’t yet climbed above them but the sky was bright.

We looked down the slope. It was hollowed by the earth it had lost. No dust clouds obscured it anywhere, though there was dust rising now from the bottom of the canyon-valley.

The shrunken slope swept down straight from us to the cliff edge without a break, without a hummock, without one object thrusting up through. Everything had been carried away by the slide.

That was the end of Rim House and Franz Kinzman.