James Enge - This Crooked Way

"Ah," said the listener vaguely, clearly considering the point irrelevant.

"The darkness on your face is tal," Morlock explained. "But it is not your own, at least not originally. It is a sort of colony from an alien awareness, and it serves the ends of that awareness."

"How?" the listener demanded. His visible features displayed both alarm and skepticism.

Morlock had some ideas on that subject, but he did not intend to discuss them. Anything he told the listener he would also tell the darkness. "That is not germane. If you want the darkness removed from your face, I will undertake to do it."

The listener looked both hopeful and anxious. "Would you …If you could leave part of it? Say, under the ear, or …or even on the temple-"

"I am not a barber," Morlock interrupted sharply. "Nor do I undertake half-works or not-quite-accomplishments. I do a thing or I don't. Choose."

The choice was clearly far from easy. The struggle on the listener's visible features lasted for some time. But finally he muttered in the hesitant "second" voice, "Yes. Remove it."

Morlock did not hesitate. He clasped his hands and summoned the rapture of vision, forcing his consciousness from his body and into the tal-world.

The listener burst into a quiet green-gold fire. Morlock himself became a monochrome torrent of black-and-white flames. The stone and dirt about them, having no tal, sank away almost to invisibility in Morlock's vision. But he felt the warm many-centered glow from a nest of mice in the wall of the cave, and through the stones he caught the brief flash of a passing night-bird, like the streak of a meteor in the lifeless sky.

The darkness lay across the green flickering fire of the listener's face. Morlock reached out with the black-and-white flames of his hands and laid hold of it.

In fact, Morlock did not move. But he commanded his tal-self to move, without his body (which it normally overlaid). To his awareness, it was as if he had laid his hands on the darkness.

And the darkness was alien. He knew that as soon as he came into contact with it. And it knew him. Not by name, perhaps (though it did not say what it knew, it can be difficult to tell what such darknesses may know). But it knew his kind. It had been lured here and trapped by a master maker of the dwarvish race, after the darkness had attacked and devoured several members of the maker's family. This all happened millennia before Morlock was born.

The dwarvish maker, after his great victory over the darkness, became its next victim. He had been the first of many who had lain on the stone and put his face in the darkness: listening there for the voices of his lost beloved ones. He had lain there until his life was drained away. Morlock heard his voice, among many others, whispering in the dark. But the only secret he learned was the untellable sorrow of their eternal agony.

This he learned as the darkness confronted him through the medium of Morlock's vision. Then Morlock seized hold of the darkness that had implanted itself in the listener's face and tried to tear it loose.

The listener screamed. Morlock heard it dimly through his ears. He heard it, more directly and more terribly, through his unmasked awareness. The green fire that was the listener's talic self writhed like a serpent and seemed to grow dim, as if he were dying.

After a moment's hesitation, Morlock redoubled his efforts. But the resistance was too great: he saw that the sessile darkness had deep barbed roots in the light of the listener's being. As he strained, his inner vision perceived that many of the green flames of the listener's tal had dark centers, reminding him of the myriad staring eyes in a peacock's tail.

He let his grip relax, and the nauseating rapport with the darkness was broken. The green flames of the listener's being leapt up again. It seemed to Morlock, though, that they were not as bright as they had been before.

He reimposed his talic self upon his body, and his awareness inhabited his flesh again. He came out of the trance like a swimmer surfacing after a dive through deep water. His face was clammy with sweat, and his clenched hands were shaking.

The listener lay unconscious on the floor of the cave, his visible features twisted in convulsive agony. The darkness seemed to cover more of his face than it had. Morlock made sure he was still breathing (and likely to go on doing so). Then he carried the listener to his pallet and put him to bed.

Morlock didn't like the feeling in the cave, so he laid his bedroll outside on the hill. From the time that he withdrew from the vision until he fell asleep, and afterward, his thoughts were unrelievedly dark.

It was not just that he had failed. He had actually made matters worse. And he had no idea what he should do next.

The next day dawned, chill and bloodless: the new sun was hidden by high clouds. Morlock rose, stretched his sore muscles, and took a meditative walk around the listener's hill, which was planted with an alarming variety of poisonous herbs.

Returning finally to the cave entrance, he found the listener standing there, smiling with the right side of his face. "So," he said in the commanding voice with which he had first addressed Morlock, "how do you like my garden?"

"It seems to run to poisons."

The listener, stung, replied hotly, "It is all `poisons' as you call them. But, to those-who-know, a handful of the right `poisons' can bring life out of death. You found my wolfbane useful enough last night, didn't you?"

Morlock did not reply. It occurred to him again that the listener's two voices were not merely manners of speech, but two almost totally different personalities. The matter had an obvious explanation: one voice expressed the listener's true personality; one voice spoke for the invading shadow. He wondered if the explanation was true.

"Would you care for some breakfast?" the listener asked diffidently, in his second voice.

"Yes, indeed," Morlock replied. "Thank you." He was suddenly quite hungry.

He was less hungry when he saw that "breakfast" was a squirming bowlful of seven-legged mushrooms from the deeper cave. The listener took a wriggling mushroom from the bowl and, ignoring its chirp of protest, spitted it on a pointed stick and held it in the fire until it stopped moving or screaming. Then he offered it to Morlock.

"No, thank you," Morlock said. "Some water perhaps."

The listener shrugged indifferently and tossed the blackened mushroom into the flames. He handed Morlock a warm drinking jar and drew a live mushroom from the bowl. He pulled its writhing stalks off and ate them one by one as its chirps of pain subsided into silence.

The water in the jar was dark; an oily substance rode the surface and he could see dark leaves drifting in the fluid below. There was a bitter, familiar reek: the nightleaf plant, he thought-used by the Anhikh mind-sculptors to prepare their victims.

"I asked you for water," he said to the listener, who paused in his mushroom dismembering. "This appears to be an infusion of nightleaf."

"The water from the well is poisonous," the listener explained, in his overly ingenuous second voice. "The darkness told me how to purify it with herbs."

"Why don't you seek out another source?" Morlock asked.

"There is none on the hill."

Morlock saw the way things were drifting, but (to see what reaction he would get) asked, "Why not look further? There must be some nearby."

"It is not safe to leave the hill!" stated the listener in the first voice's harshest tones.

Morlock put the jar of drugged water down like a gavel, ending the discussion. "I'm going to find water," he told the listener. "I should be back by nightfall. Good day."

The listener gave vent to a chirping protest, not unlike one of his own mushrooms. Morlock paid it no heed, pausing only to gather the empty water bottles from his pack before walking down the hill.