Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

There was an insistent pulsing somewhere below him, and he was afraid of it as he descended, the high-pitched whining of something threatening to shatter. He felt panic. Panic gripped him, flailed at him, his throat constricted, he tried to grasp the veil and it tore away in his hands; then he was falling, faster now, much faster, and afraid afraid!

Violet explosions all around him and the shrieking of something that wanted him, that was seeking him, pulsing deeply in the throat of an animal he could not name, and he heard her shouting, heard her wail and pitch beneath him and a terrible crushing feeling in him - . .

And then there was silence.

That lasted for a moment.

And then there was soft music that demanded nothing but inattention. So they lay there, fitted together, in the heat of the tiny room, and they slept for hours.

After that, Rudy seldom went out into the light. He did the shopping at night, wearing shades. He emptied the garbage at night, and he swept down the front walk, and did the front lawn with scissors because the lawnmower would have annoyed the residents of the lanai apartments, who no longer complained, because there was seldom a sound from The Hill.

He began to realize he had not seen some of the eleven young people who lived in The Hill for a long time. But the sounds from above and below and around him in the house grew more frequent.

Rudy’s clothes were too large for him now. He wore only underpants. His hands and feet hurt. The knuckles of his fingers were larger, from cracking them, and they were always an angry crimson.

His head always buzzed. The thin perpetual odor of weed was saturated in the wood walls and the rafters. He read newspapers all the time, old newspapers whose items were imbedded in his memory. He remembered a job he had once held as a garage mechanic, but that seemed a very long time ago. When they cut oil the electricity in The Hill, it didn’t bother Rudy, because he preferred the dark. But he went to tell the eleven.

He could not find them.

They were all gone. Even Kris, who should have been there somewhere.

He heard the moist sounds from the basement and went down with fur and silence into the darkness. The basement had been flooded. One of the eleven named Teddy was there. He was attached to the slime-coated upper wall of the basement, hanging close to the stone, pulsing softly and giving off a thin green light. He dropped a rubbery arm into the water, and let it hang there moving idly with the tideless tide. Then something came near it, and he made a sharp movement, and brought the thing up still writhing in his rubbery grip, and inched it up the wall to a dark, moist spot on his upper surface, near the veins that covered its length, and pushed the thing at the dark-blood spot, where it shrieked with a terrible sound, and went in and there was a sucking noise, then a swallowing sound.

Rudy went back upstairs. On the first floor he found the one who was the blonde girl, whose name was Adrianne. She lay out thin and white as a tablecloth on the dining-room table as three of the others put their teeth into her, and through their hollow sharp teeth they drank up the yellow fluid from the bloated pus-pockets that had been her breasts and buttocks. Their faces were very white and their eyes were like soot-smudges.

Climbing to the second floor, Rudy was almost knocked down by the passage of something that had been Victor, flying on heavily ribbed leather wings. It was carrying a cat in its jaws.

He found Kris in the attic, in a corner breaking the skull and sucking out the moist brains of a thing that giggled like a harpsichord.

“Kris, we have to go away,” he told her. She reached out and touched him, snapping her long, pointed, dirty fingernails against him. He rang like crystal.

In the rafters of the attic Jonah crouched, gargoyled and sleeping. Ihere was a green stain on his jaws, and something stringy in his claws.

“Kris, please,” he said urgently.

His head buzzed.

His ears itched.

Kris sucked out the last of the mellow good things in the skull of the silent little creature, and scraped idly at the flaccid body with hairy hands. She settled back on her haunches, and her long, hairy muzzle came up.

Rudy scuttled away.

He ran loping, his knuckles brushing the attic floor as he scampered for safety. Behind him, Kris was growling. He got down to the second floor and then to the first, and tried to climb up on the Morris chair to the mantel, so he could see himself in the mirror, in the light from the moon through the flyblown window. But Naomi was on the window, lapping up the flies with her tongue.

He climbed with desperation, wanting to see himself. And when he stood before the mirror, he saw that he was transparent, that there was nothing inside him, that his cars had grown pointed and had hair on their tips; his eyes were as huge as a tarsier’s, and the reflection of the light hurt him.

Then he heard the growling behind and below him.

The little glass goblin turned, and the werewolf rose up on its hind legs and touched him till he rang like fine crystal.

And the werewolf said with very little concern, “Have you ever grooved heavy behind anything except love?”

“Please!” the little glass goblin begged, just as the great hairy paw slapped him into a million coruscating rainbow fragments all expanding consciously into the tight little enclosed universe that was The Hill, all buzzing highly contracted and tingling off into a darkness that began to seep out through the silent wooden walls . . .

“By February the lump was the size of a bushel basket and had separated itself from him except for a gristly shining skin-covered tube, that pulsed with his heart like an obscene umbilicus. . . . ”

And so, after thirty-five years, they would be face to face again.

Andrew eased his car up under a big white pine and cut the motor. The place didn’t look like much. One old pickup truck parked between the two quonsets, a barn tucked against the forest, an unmowed meadow full of daisies and black-eyed susans on the south.

Andrew got out of the car and stood in the shade of the pine. His sense of uneasiness increased sharply. Of course, he was alone out here. He wasn’t used to being alone anymore. He was used to traveling with a swarm of secretaries, servants and assorted sycophants. He felt naked.

It ought to be refreshing. No planes, no cars, no engines of any kind. Nothing but the sputtering of summer insects. A wilderness. Anything could happen out here and no one would ever know.

Nonsense. Paul was a scientist. Men like him were too selfish, too single-minded to risk the interruption of their

work for anything so sterile as vengeance. Paul always had been secretive. It was characteristic of him to insist Andrew come alone.

Andrew crossed the brown pine-needled ground toward the huts.

“Hello!” he called.

A leggy brown-haired girl wearing trousers peeped through the door and vanished as silently as a deer.

“Paul?”

And there, suddenly, was Paul behind the screening. “Hello, Andrew.”

The nylon netting was a dazzle of white between their faces, too blinding to penetrate. Then the door opened and Andrew stepped through, his hand extended in greeting. But Paul had already turned away to lead him inside.

It was cool and gloomy and dimly sparkling with long rows of chemical glass, glass cabinets, two tall glass closets so steamed with interior humidity their contents could not be seen. A long work counter ran the entire length of the building, with sinks and shelves, burners, centrifuges and other equipment he did not recognize. Off in one corner, squeezed between two huge filing cases, was an old gray metal desk.