Basil Copper - The Great White Space

I went at top speed, without stopping, and eating at the controls; it was a remarkable performance and the concentration required was so fantastic that I doubt if I could ever do it again. When I saw the thin sliver of daylight at the entrance to the Mountains, leading to the blessed outer air, my hands faltered on the controls and I wept.

So I live now, a shadow of my former self, companioned only by my old friend Robson, to whom I have related this narrative not once but a hundred times. The night wind keens about the earth and taps at the blind in these latitudes and I live again my experiences on the Great Northern Expedition and I am afraid. I owe my life to certain tribesmen who found my tractor wandering in the desert and who guided me and set me in the right direction for the Plain of Darkness and the welcoming huddle of the town of Nylstrom.

Here I paused only a day and then, guided by emissaries of the Headman, and leaving our spare tractor as payment for his services, I set out once again and at last reached Zak. There the story blurs and dies altogether. I fell very ill there. I have already told something of this; my illness and fever lasted for months and when I at last came to myself I was in the sickbay of a P. and O. liner ploughing its way England bound through the Bay of Biscay.

Of all the equipment with which I had set out only my camera, a few plates and a few personal items remained. But I was alive; that was all that mattered — then.

I live much out of the world; my health is irretrievably wrecked, my nights sleepless, my form spectral. I fear dreaming. Sometimes on moonlight nights I stand at my window and look out at the silver disc riding serenely above the treetops and think it shines down upon the Black Mountains so far away and I cannot repress a shudder at the thought of the blasphemous abominations that lurk beneath.

Latterly the lights in the sky have been seen again; I fear the coming cannot be long delayed now and my heart is sick for the welfare of mankind. Yet I am not believed, will never be believed, though Robson and a few others scientifically- minded have an inkling of the end. For there must come an end.

Why was I allowed to survive? Who knows? The ways of beings from an alien world are strange to us and beyond mortal comprehension. I have thought about it year on interminably weary year. And I cannot fathom a thousandth part of the complexities involved. But that there are horrors beyond human bearing is an irrefutable fact. Did I not myself see with my own eyes?

Those ponderous, monadelphous forms undulating hideously in the baleful light from the Great White Space. And my former colleagues, even Zalor, smiling devilish smiles of welcome. So that I broke and fled screaming from those blasphemous abodes of hell. Who would not have followed my example?

For there, ingested in some vile and unfathomable manner were my friends Holden, Prescott and Van Damm, ALIVE AND PART OF THE SLUG-CREATURES THEMSELVES! Small wonder my sanity tottered. And as if in answer to Zalor's greeting the great Clark Ashton Scarsdale had bowed and turned his head. And from his features had fallen A WAXEN MASK REVEALING UNKNOWABLE BLASPHEMIES BENEATH!

As God is my witness I swear this is the truth. I had not realised their essence had been removed for a purpose. But what made the doctors fear for my sanity was the supposition at the back of my mind which almost overturned my reason. For the question has been with me since then and is even more persistent of late. The waxen mask was so plausible in its perfection, so brilliant in its personification of Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale, that it brings other possibilities to mind.

Possibilities that haunt me in the dark hours and nibble at the edges of my reason. At what stage did Scarsdale become transformed? Or was he, long before the Great Northern Expedition began, already ONE OF THEM?