THE FACE IN THE ABYSS: Sci-Fi Classic. Abraham Merritt
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blunt needles of bone. They clutched and drew forward. Behind them appeared spindling, scarlet-haired arms.
Over the edge peered a face, gray as the hands. Within it were two great unwinking round and golden eyes.
A man’s face—and not a man’s!
A face such as he had never seen upon any living creature . . . yet there could be no mistaking the humanness of it . . . the humanness which lay over the incredible visage like a veil.
He thought he saw a red rod dart out of air and touch the face—the red rod of Suarra’s motley-garbed attendant. Whether he saw it or not, the clutching claws opened and slid away. The gray face vanished.
Up from the hidden slope arose a wailing, agonized shriek, and a triumphant hissing. Then out into the range of his vision bounded the black dinosaur, its golden-haired rider shouting. Behind it leaped the pack. They crossed the plain like a thunder cloud pursued by emerald and sapphire lightnings. They passed into the forest, and were gone.
Suarra stepped out of the tree shadows, the three adventurers close behind her, white-faced and shaking. She stood looking where the dinosaurs had disappeared, and her face was set, and her eyes filled with loathing.
“Suarra!” gasped Graydon. “That thing—the thing that ran—what was it? God—it had the face of a man!”
“It was no man,” she shook her head. “It was a—Weaver. Perhaps he had tried to escape. Or perhaps Lantlu opened a way for him that he might be tempted to escape. For Lantlu delights in hunting with the Xinli—” her voice shook with hatred—“and a Weaver will do when there is nothing better!”
“A Weaver? It had a man’s face!” It was Soames, echoing Graydon.
“No,” she repeated. “It was no—man. At least no man as you are. Long, long ago his ancestors were men like you—that is true. But now—he is—only a Weaver.”
She turned to Graydon.
“Yu-Atlanchi by its arts fashioned him and his kind. Remember him, Graydon—when you come to our journey’s end!”
She stepped out upon the path. There stood the cowled figure, waiting as tranquilly as though it had never stirred. She called to the white llama, and again took her place at the head of the little caravan. Soames touched Graydon, arousing him from the troubled thought into which her enigmatic warning had thrown him.
“Take your place, Graydon,” he muttered. “We’ll follow. Later I want to talk to you. Maybe you can get your guns back—if you’re reasonable.”
“Hurry,” said Suarra, “the sun sinks, and we must go quickly. Before tomorrow’s noon you shall see your garden of jewels, and the living gold streaming for you to do with it as you will—or the gold to do as it wills with you.”
She looked the three over, swiftly, a shadow of mockery in her eyes. Soames’ lips tightened.
“Get right along, sister,” he said, sardonically. “All you have to do is show us. Then your work is done. We’ll take care of the rest.”
She shrugged, carelessly. They set forth once more along the rimmed path.
The plain was silent, deserted. From the far forests came no sound. Graydon strove for sane comprehension of what he had just beheld. A Weaver, Suarra had named the scarlet thing—and had said that once its ancestors had been men like themselves. He remembered what, at their first meeting, she had told him of the powers of this mysterious Yu-Atlanchi. Did she mean that her people had mastered the secrets of evolution so thoroughly that they had learned how to reverse its processes as well? Could control—devolution!
Well, why not? In man’s long ascent from the primeval jelly on the shallow shores of the warm first seas, he had worn myriad shapes. And as he moved higher from one form to another, changing to vertebrate, discarding cold blood for warm, still was he kin to the fish he caught to-day, to the furred creatures whose pelts clothed his women, to the apes he brought from the jungles to study or to amuse him. Even the spiders that spun in his gardens, the scorpion that scuttled from the tread of his feet, were abysmally distant blood-brothers.
When St. Francis of Assisi had spoken of Brother Fly, Brother Wolf, Brother Snake, he had voiced scientific truth.
All life on earth had a common origin. Divergent now and Protean shaped, still man and beast, fish and serpent, lizard and bird, ant and bee and spider, all had come from those once similar specks of jelly, adrift millions upon millions of years ago in the shallow littorals of the first seas. Protæbion, Gregory of Edinburgh had named it—the first stuff of life from which all life was to develop.
Were the germs of all those shapes man had worn in his slow upward climb still dormant in him?
Roux, the great French scientist, had taken the eggs of frogs and, by manipulating them, had produced giant frogs and dwarfs, frogs with two heads and one body, frogs with one head and eight legs, three-headed frogs with legs numerous as centipedes’. And he had produced from these eggs, also, creatures which in no way resembled frogs at all.
Vornikoff, the Russian, and Schwartz, the German, had experimented with still higher forms of life, producing chimeræ, nightmare things they had been forced to slay—and quickly.
If Roux and the others had done all this—and they had done it, Graydon knew—then was it not possible for greater scientists to awaken those dormant germs in man, and similarly create—such creatures as the scarlet thing? A spider man!
Nature, herself, had given them the hint. Nature from time to time produced such abnormalities—human monsters marked outwardly if not inwardly with the stigmata of the beast, the fish, even the crustacean. Babies with gill slits in their throats; babies with tails; babies furred. The human embryo passed through all these stages, from the protoplasmic unicell up—compressing the age-long drama of evolution into less than a year.
Might it not well be, then, that in Yu-Atlanchi dwelt those to whom the crucible of birth held no secrets; who could dip within it and mold from its contents what they would?
A loom is a dead machine upon which fingers work more or less clumsily. The spider is both machine and artisan, spinning and weaving more surely, more exquisitely than can any lifeless mechanism worked by man. What man-made machine had ever approached the delicacy, the beauty of the spider’s web?
Suddenly Graydon seemed to behold a whole new world of appalling grotesquerie—spider-men and spider-women spread upon huge webs and weaving with needled fingers wondrous fabrics, mole-men and mole-women burrowing, opening mazes of subterranean passages, cloaca, for those who had wrought them into being; amphibian folk busy about the waters—a phantasmagoria of humanity, monstrously twinned with Nature’s perfect machine, while still plastic in the womb!
Shuddering, he thrust away that nightmare vision.
5
THE ELFIN HORNS
The sun was halfway down the west when they came to the end of the oval plain. Here the mountain thrust out a bastion which almost touched the cliff at the right. Into the narrow cleft between the two they filed, and through the semi-gloom of this ravine they marched over a smooth rock floor, their way running always up, although at an easy grade. The sun was behind the westward peaks and dusk was falling when they emerged.
They stood at the edge of a little moor. Upon the left, the arc of the circular mountain resumed its march. The place was, indeed, less a moor than a barren. Its floor was clean white sand. It was dotted with hillocks, mounds flat-topped as though constantly swept by brooms of wind. Upon the slopes of these mounds a tall grass grew sparsely. The hillocks arose about a hundred feet apart, with a singular regularity, like tumuli, graves in a cemetery of giants. The little barren covered about five acres. Around it clustered the forest. He heard the gurgling of a brook.
Suarra