Strange Ports of Call Read online

  When he looked into the basement he was little reassured. The water was still going down, though slowly. It was rising in the basement and this meant that it was now running in faster than it was running down.

  Leaving his coat and boots on the first floor, he ran up the stone steps to the second floor, built a fire in the living room and started to smoke—and think. The machinery of the mill was in ruins; of course it could be fixed, but as there was no more need of it, the best thing was to leave it alone. He had gold saved by his ancestors. He did not know how much, but he could live on it. Restlessly he reviewed the past week, and, unable to rest, hunted for occupation. The idea of the gold stayed in his mind and the final result was that he again put on his boots and coat and carried the entire treasure to a little dry cave in the woods about a half mile from the mill. Then he came back and started to cook his dinner. He went past the cellar door three times without looking down.

  Just as he and the dog had finished eating, he heard a noise. It was a different one this time, more like a saw going through wood, but the rhythm was the same—Hrrrrrr—Hrrrrrr. He started to go to the cellar but this time he took his rifle, and though the dog followed, he howled dismally with his tail between his legs, shivering.

  As soon as Staples reached the first floor, he felt the vibration. Not only could he feel the vibration, he could see it. It seemed that the center of the floor was being pushed up. Flashlight in hand, he opened the cellar door. There was no water there now. In fact there was no cellar left! In front of him was a black wall on which the light played in undulating waves. It was a wall and it was moving. He touched it with the end of his rifle. It was hard and yet there was a give to it. Feeling the rock, he could feel it move. Was it alive? Could there be a living rock? He could not see around it but he felt that the bulk of the thing filled the entire cellar and was pressing against the ceiling. That was it! The thing was boring through the first floor. It had destroyed and filled the cellar! It had swallowed the river! Now it was working at the first floor. If this continued, the mill was doomed. Staples knew that it was a thing alive and he had to stop it!!

  He was thankful that all of the steps in the mill were of stone, fastened and built into the wall. Even though the floor did fall in, he could still go to the upper rooms. He realized that from now on the fight had to be waged from the top floors. Going up the steps, he saw that a small hole had been cut through the oak flooring. Even as he watched, this grew larger. Trying to remain calm, realizing that only by doing so could he retain his sanity, he sat down in a chair and timed the rate of enlargement. But there was no need of using a watch: the hole grew larger—and larger and larger—and now he began to see the dark hole which had sucked the river dry. Now it was three feet in diameter—now four feet—now six. It was working smoothly now—it was not only grinding—but it was eating.

  Staples began to laugh. He wanted to see what it would do when the big stone grinders slipped silently down into that maw. That would be a rare sight. All well enough to swallow a few pavement stones, but when it came to a twenty ton grinder, that would be a different kind of a pill. “I hope you choke!” he cried, “Damn you! whatever you are! I hope you choke! !” The walls hurled back the echo of his shouts and frightened him into silence. Then the floor began to tilt and the chair to slide toward the opening. Staples sprang toward the steps.

  “Not yet!” he shrieked. “Not today, Elenora! Some other day, but not today!” And then from the safety of the steps, he witnessed the final destruction of that floor and all in it. The stories slipped down, the partitions, the beams, and then, as though satisfied with the work and the food, the Thing dropped down, down, down and left Staples dizzy on the steps looking into a hole, dark, deep, coldly bottomless surrounded by the walls of the mill, and below them a circular hole cut out of the solid rock. On one side a little stream of water came through the blasted wall and fell, a tiny waterfall, below. Staples could not hear it splash at the bottom.

  Nauseated and vomiting, he crept up the steps to the second floor, where the howling dog was waiting for him. On the floor he lay, sweating and shivering in dumb misery. It took hours for him to change from a frightened animal to a cerebrating god, but ultimately he accomplished even this, cooked some more food, warmed himself and slept.

  And while he dreamed, the dog kept sleepless watch at his feet. He awoke the next morning. It was still raining, and Staples knew that the snow was melting on the hills and soon would change the little valley river into a torrent. He wondered whether it was all a dream, but one look at the dog showed him the reality of the last week. He went to the second floor again and cooked breakfast. After he had eaten, he slowly went down the steps. That is, he started to go, but halted at the sight of the hole. The steps had held and ended on a wide stone platform. From there another flight of steps went down to what had once been the cellar. Those two flights of steps clinging to the walls had the solid stone mill on one side, but on the inside they faced a chasm, circular in outline and seemingly bottomless; but the man knew there was a bottom and from that pit the Thing had come—and would come again.

  That was the horror of it! He was so certain that it would come again. Unless he was able to stop it. How could he? Could he destroy a Thing that was able to bore a thirty foot hole through solid rock, swallow a river and digest grinding stones like so many pills? One thing he was sure of—he could accomplish nothing without knowing more about it. To know more, he had to watch. He determined to cut a hole through the floor. Then he could see the Thing when it came up. He cursed himself for his confidence, but he was sure it would come.

  It did. He was on the floor looking into the hole he had sawed through the plank, and he saw it come: but first he heard it. It was a sound full of slithering slidings, wrathful rasping of rock against rock—but, no! That could not be, for this Thing was alive. Could this be rock and move and grind and eat and drink? Then he saw it come into the cellar and finally to the level of the first floor, and then he saw its head and face.

  The face looked at the man and Staples was glad that the hole in the floor was as small as it was. There was a central mouth filling half the space; fully fifteen feet in diameter was that mouth, and the sides were ashen gray and quivering. There were no teeth.

  That increased the horror: a mouth without teeth, without any visible means of mastication and yet Staples shivered as he thought of what had gone into that mouth, down into that mouth, deep into the recesses of that mouth and disappeared. The circular lip seemed made of scales of steel, and they were washed clean with the water from the race.

  On either side of the gigantic mouth was an eye, lidless, browless, pitiless. They were slightly withdrawn into the head so the Thing could bore into rock without injuring them. Staples tried to estimate their size: all he could do was to avoid their baleful gaze. Then even as he watched the mouth closed and the head began a semicircular movement, so many degrees to the right, so many degrees to the left and up—and up—and finally the top touched the bottom of the plank Staples was on and then Hrrrrrr—Hrrrrrr and the man knew that it was starting upon the destruction of tiie second floor. He could not see now as he had been able to see before, but he had an idea that after grinding a while the Thing opened its mouth and swallowed the debris. He looked around the room. Here was where he did his cooking and washing and here was his winter supply of stove wood. A thought came to him.

  Working frantically, he pushed the center burner to the middle of the room right over the hole he had cut in the floor. Then he built a fire in it, starting it with a liberal supply of coal-oil. He soon had the stove red hot. Opening the door he again filled the stove with oak and then ran for the steps. He was just in time, the floor, cut through, disappeared into the Thing’s maw and with it the red-hot stove. Staples yelled in his glee, “A hot pill for you this time, a hot pill!”

  If the pill did anything, it simply increased the desire of the Thing to destroy, for it kept on till it had bored a hole in this
floor equal in size to the holes in the floors below it. Staples saw his food, his furniture, the ancestral relics disappear into the same opening that had consumed the machinery and mill supplies.

  On the upper floor the dog howled.

  The man slowly went up to the top floor, and joined the dog, who had ceased to howl and had begun a low whine. There was a stove on this floor, but there was no food. That did not make any difference to Staples: for some reason he was not hungry any more: it did not seem to make any difference—nothing seemed to matter or make any difference any more. Still he had his gun and over fifty cartridges, and he knew that at the last, even a Thing like that would react to bullets in its eyeballs—he just knew that nothing could withstand that.

  He lit the lamp and paced the floor in a cold, careless mood. One thing he had determined. He said it over and over to himself.

  “This is my home. It has been the home of my family for two hundred years. No devil or beast or worm can make me leave it.”

  He said it again and again. He felt that if he said it often enough, he would believe it, and if he could only believe it, he might make the Worm believe it. He knew now that it was a Worm, just like the night crawlers he had used so often for bait, only much larger. Yes, that was it. A Worm like a night crawler, only much larger, in fact, very much larger. That made him laugh—to think how much larger this Worm was than the ones he had used for fishing. All through the night he walked the floor and burned the lamp and said, “This is my home. No Worm can make me leave it!” Several times he went down the steps, just a few of them, and shouted the message into the pit as though he wanted the Worm to hear and understand, “This is my home! No Worm can make me leave it!!”

  Morning came. He mounted the ladder that led to the trap door in the roof and opened it. The rain beat in. Still that might be a place of refuge. Crying, he took his Burton and his Rabelais and wrapped them in his rain coat and put them out on the roof, under a box. He took the small pictures of his father and mother and put them with the books. Then in loving kindness he carried the dog up and wrapped him in a woolen blanket. He sat down and waited, and as he did so he recited poetry—anything that came to him, all mixed up, “Come into the garden where there was a man who was so wondrous wise, he jumped into a bramble bush and you’re a better man than I am and no one will work for money and the King of Love my Shepherd is”—and on—and then—

  He heard the sliding and the slithering rasping and he knew that the Worm had come again. He waited till the Hrrrnr—Hrrrrrr told that the wooden floor he was on was being attacked and then he went up the ladder. It was his idea to wait till the Thing had made a large opening, large enough so the eyes could be seen, and then use the fifty bullets—where they would do the most good. So, on the roof, beside the dog, he waited.

  He did not have to wait long. First appeared a little hole and then it grew wider and wider till finally the entire floor and the furniture had dropped into the mouth, and the whole opening, thirty feet wide and more than that, was filled with the head, the closed mouth of which came within a few feet of the roof. By the aid of the light from the trap door, Staples could see the eye on the left side. It made a beautiful bull’s eye, a magnificent target for his rifle and he was only a few feet away. He could not miss. Determined to make the most of his last chance to drive his enemy away, he decided to drop down on the creature, walk over to the eye and put the end of the rifle against the eye before he fired. If the first shot worked well, he could retire to the roof and use the other cartridges. He knew that there was some danger—but it was his last hope. After all he knew that when it came to brains he was a man and this Thing was only a Worm. He walked over the head. Surely no sensation could go through such massive scales. He even jumped up and down. Meantime the eye kept looking up at the roof. If it saw the man, it made no signs, gave no evidence. Staples pretended to pull the trigger and then made a running jump for the trap door. It was easy. He did it again, and again. Then he sat on the edge of the door and thought.

  He suddenly saw what it all meant. Two hundred years before, his ancestors had started grinding at the mill. For over a hundred and fifty years the mill had been run continuously, often day and night. The vibrations had been transmitted downward through the solid rock. Hundreds of feet below the Worm had heard them and felt them and thought it was another Worm. It had started to bore in the direction of the noise. It had taken two hundred years to do it, but it had finished the task, it had found the place where its mate should be. For two hundred years it had slowly worked its way through the primitive rock. Why should it worry over a mill and the things within it? Staples saw then that the mill had been but a slight incident in its life. It was probable that it had not even known it was there—the water, the gristmill stones, the red-hot stove, had meant nothing—they had been taken as a part of the day’s work. There was only one thing that the Worm was really interested in, but one idea that had reached its consciousness and remained there through two centuries, and that was to find its mate. The eye looked upward.

  Staples, at the end, lost courage and decided to fire from a sitting position in the trap door. Taking careful aim, he pulled the trigger. Then he looked carefully to see what damage had resulted. There was none. Either the bullet had gone into the eye and the opening had closed or else it had glanced off. He fired again and again.

  Then the mouth opened—wide—wider—until there was nothing under Staples save a yawning void of darkness.

  The Worm belched a cloud of black, nauseating vapor. The man, enveloped in the cloud, lost consciousness and fell.

  The Mouth closed on him.

  On the roof the dog howled.

  Donald Wandrei (1908—) is a native of St. Paul, where he now lives. He has contributed to magazines ranging from Esquire to Astounding Science-Fiction, and is the author of two volumes of poems, Ecstasy and Dark Odyssey; of one collection of short stories, The Eye and the Finger; and of a novel, The Web of Earth, which Arkham House is publishing this year. His most recent work was the editing, with August Derleth, of H. P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters (Arkham House, 1948).

  THE CRYSTAL BULLET

  Donald Wandrei

  A WARM WET WIND BLEW FROM THE south with whispers of wakening spring and the return of green things growing. The wild geese had long since gone honking at dawn up the river valley toward Canada. Already the meadowlarks were nesting, while day by day came the fleet-winged orioles and tanagers, and the darting flash of hummingbirds. Into fields crept mice from winter refuge under cornshed and straw-stack. With pattering of feet and rustling in underbrush and tearing of branches, the squirrels, the badgers, and the stately skunk took over the woods.

  Morning light lay softly upon the land, warming the moist black loam that rilled aside in long furrows from the blade of the plow. When steel grated upon stone with a dull clang, the man at the handles shouted and lifted the plow by a powerful heave. The team halted. He tore a boulder loose and carried it to the edge of a forested hill that rose a hundred yards northward.

  Returning across freshly plowed ground, he saw the pair of Belgian grays stand like lordly inheritors of all earth. The fields stretched south to woods and low hills. No farmhouse or buildings of any sort lay within the vista. Only the big horses, waiting patiently, the hand plow, and his tracks on the soil marked the presence of man.

  Amid this peaceful scene, the sudden rumble from a sky without clouds sounded utterly strange. The man stopped, perplexed, his head lifting away from the sun. A streak of dazzling fire plummeted out of space. Something crashed upon the hill that he had just left. Then a greenish glow enveloped the hilltop, and an instant later came a sharp, thunderous report.

  He began running away from the hills. His team had whinnied shrilly, rearing in panic. The plow’s drag retarded the plunging horses until he seized the halter and quieted them. They stood trembling. He talked to them with strong, soothing affection.

  When he resumed plowing, the team jerked, and fi
fty yards of furrow spilled out before the grays pulled together. A glow still hovered above the trees on the hilltop, a palpable, greenish bloom in the yellow-bright sunshine. There was no smoke or sign of fire. Every time he reached the field’s edge and reversed the plow, he looked at the light on the hill. It did not spread. Neither did it lessen. The freakish radiance persisted as if it had come to dwell forever. The sun rose higher. At noon a woman walked around the side of the hill. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat that shaded her face. Still young, not pretty, but with roundly attractive features and roundly muscled arms and a sturdy figure against which the wind pressed her blouse and slacks, she stopped at the field’s edge. She carried a lunch box with a pint thermos of coffee.

  The man left his plow where the grays could munch bags of oats.

  As he strode toward her, she turned to stare at the pale-green light. “What’s afire up the hill?”

  He opened the lunch kit and took out a cold chicken sandwich as thick as a mailorder catalog. “I don’t see no fire.” He spoke with deliberate flatness and bit into the sandwich.

  “A light’s back there all the same. It’s been there ever since I come out of the kitchen. And a while back—”

  He washed the sandwich down with a swallow of coffee. “Shooting-star fell. Ain’t cooled off yet.”

  “Shooting-star!” she exclaimed in quick alarm. “Red-hot—it’ll start a fire!”

  “On what? Woods are too wet.”

  “But it’s burning, up there. I’d better go see—”

  “Leave it be. It’s got to cool off first.”

  He finished the sandwiches and coffee, ate a quarter-section of apple pie, and gave her the empty containers. She walked away, her eyes straying toward the strange glow.

  He watched her till she was out of sight, and remained motionless for some minutes longer. A feeling of wrongness that he could not account for had begun to trouble him. Not until she had gone did he become conscious of the change: song of lark and scurry of woods-creatures had left the hilltop. He heard them in the distance, but not here, where now a curious quiet reigned, like a vacuum in nature.