The Greatest SF Classics of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Stanley G. Weinbaum
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from his emergence from a tomb in the form of a living scarecrow. He stared up at the sky.
The vault of heaven was blue and fleecy with thewhitest of clouds. The sun was shining as he had never thought to see it shine again. The grass was green. The ground was normally earthy. Everything was as it should be—but there was a strangeness about it that frightened him. Instinctively he knew that something was direfully amiss.
It was not the fact that he failed to recognize his surroundings. He had not had the strength to explore; neither did he know where he had been buried. It was that indefinable homing instinct possessed in varying degree by all animate things. That instinct was out of gear. His time sense had stopped with the throwing of that electric switch—how long ago? Somehow, lying there under the warming rays of the sun, he felt like an alien presence in a strange country.
"Lost!" he whimpered like a child.
After a long space in which he remained in a sort of stupor, he became aware of the sound of footsteps. Dully he looked up. A group of men, led by one of the children, was advancing slowly toward him. They wore brightly colored shirts—red, blue, violet—and queer baggy trousers gathered at the ankles in an exotic style.
With a desperate burst of energy, Connor gained his knees. He extended a pleading skeletonlike claw.
"Help me!" he croaked in his hoarse whisper.
The beardless, queerly effeminate–looking men halted and stared at him in horror.
"'Assim!" shrilled the child's voice. "'S a specker. 'S dead."
One of the men stepped forward, looking from Connor to the gaping hole in the hillside.
"Wassup?" he questioned.
Connor could only repeat his croaking plea for aid.
"'Esick," spoke another man gravely. "Sleeper, eh?"
There was a murmur of consultation among the men with the bright clothes and oddly soft, womanlike voices.
"T' Evanie!" decided one. "T' Evanie, the Sorc'ess."
They closed quickly around the half reclining Connor and lifted him gently. He was conscious of being borne along the curving cut to a yellow country road, and then black oblivion descended once more to claim him.
When he regained consciousness the next time, he found that he was within walls, reclining on a soft bed of some kind. He had a vague dreamy impression of a girlish face with bronze hair and features like Raphael's angels bending over him. Something warm and sweetish, like glycerin, trickled down his throat.
Then, to the whispered accompaniment of that queerly slurred English speech, he sank into the blissful repose of deep sleep.
Evanie the Sorceress
There were successive intervals of dream and oblivion, of racking pain and terrible nauseating weakness; of voices murmuring queer, unintelligible words that yet were elusively familiar.
Then one day he awoke to the consciousness of a summer morning. Birds twittered; in the distance children shouted. Clear of mind at last, he lay on a cushioned couch puzzling over his whereabouts, even his identity, for nothing within his vision indicated where or who he was.
The first thing that caught his attention was his own right hand. Paper– thin, incredibly bony, it lay like the hand of death on the rosy coverlet, so transparent that the very color shone through. He could not raise it; only a twitching of the horrible fingers attested its union with his body.
The room itself was utterly unfamiliar in its almost magnificently simple furnishings. There were neither pictures nor ornaments. Only several chairs of aluminum–like metal, a gleaming silvery table holding a few ragged old volumes, a massive cabinet against the opposite wall, and a chandelier pendant by a chain from the ceiling. He tried to call out. A faint croak issued.
The response was startlingly immediate. A soft voice said, "Hahya?" in his ear and he turned his head pain–fully to face the girl of the bronze hair, seated at his side. She smiled gently.
She was dressed in curious green baggy trousers gathered at the ankle, and a brilliant green shirt. She had rolled the full sleeves to her shoulders. Hers was like the costume of the men who had brought him here.
"Whahya?" she said softly.
He understood.
"Oh! I'm—uh—Thomas Connor, of course."
"F'm 'ere?"
"From St. Louis."
"Selui? 'S far off."
Far off? Then where was he? Suddenly a fragment of memory returned. The trial—Ruth—that catastrophic episode of the grim chair. Ruth! The yellow–haired girl he had once adored, who was to have been his wife—the girl who had coldly sworn his life away because he had killed the man she loved.
Dimly memory came back of how he had found her in that other man's arms on the very eve of their wedding; of his bitter realization that the man he had called friend had stolen Ruth from him. His outraged passions had flamed, the fire had blinded him, and when the ensuing battle had ended, the man had been crumpled on the green sward of the terrace, with a broken neck.
He had been electrocuted for that. He had been strapped in that chair!
Then—then the niche on the hill. But how—how? Had he by some miracle survived the burning current? He must have—and he still had the penalty to pay!
He tried desperately to rise.
"Must leave here!" he muttered. "Get away—must get away." A new thought. "No! I'm legally dead. They can't touch me now; no double jeopardy in this country. I'm safe!"
Voices sounded in the next room, discussing him.
"F'm Selui, he say," said a man's voice. "Longo, too." "Eah," said another. " 'S lucky to live—lucky! 'L be rich."
That meant nothing to him. He raised his hand with a great effort; it glistened in the light with an oil of some sort. It was no longer cracked, and the ghost of a layer of tissue softened the bones. His flesh was growing back.
His throat felt dry. He drew a breath that ended in a tickling cough.
"Could I have some water?" he asked the girl.
"N–n–n!" She shook her head. "N' water. S'm licket?" "Licket?" Must be liquid, he reflected. He nodded, and drank the mug of thick fluid she held to his lips.
He grinned his thanks, and she sat beside him. He wondered what sort of colony was this into which he had fallen—with their exotic dress and queer, clipped English.
His eyes wandered appreciatively over his companion; even if she were some sort of foreigner, she was gloriously beautiful, with her bronze hair gleaming above the emerald costume.
"C'n talk," she said finally as if in permission.
He accepted. "What's your name?"
"'M Evanie Sair. Evanie the Sorc'ess."
"Evanie the Sorceress!" he echoed. "Pretty name—Evanie. Why the Sorceress, though? Do you tell fortunes?" The question puzzled her.
"N'onstan," she murmured.
"I mean—what do you do?"
"Sorc'y." At his mystified look, she amplified it. "To give strength—to make well." She touched his fleshless arm.
"But that's medicine—a science. Not sorcery."
"Bah. Science—sorc'y. 'S all one. My father, Evan Sair
the Wizard, taught me." Her face shadowed. "'S dead now." Then abruptly: "Whe's your money?" she asked. He stared. "Why—in St. Louis. In a bank."
"Oh!" she exclaimed.