Read Northwest of Earth for Free Online

he could see at first was a curious mound in the far corner … Then his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he saw it more clearly, a mound that somehow heaved and stirred within itself … A mound of—he caught his breath sharply—a mound like a mass of entrails, living, moving, writhing with an unspeakable aliveness. Then a hot Venusian oath broke from his lips and he cleared the door-sill in a swift stride, slammed the door and set his back against it, gun ready in his hand, although his flesh crawled—for he
knew
…
    “Smith!” he said softly, in a voice thick with horror.
    The moving mass stirred—shuddered—sank back into crawling quiescence again.
    “Smith! Smith!” The Venusian’s voice was gentle and insistent, and it quivered a little with terror.
    An impatient ripple went over the whole mass of aliveness in the corner. It stirred again, reluctantly, and then tendril by writhing tendril it began to part itself and fall aside, and very slowly the brown of a spaceman’s leather appeared beneath it, all slimed and shining.
    “Smith! Northwest!” Yarol’s persistent whisper came again, urgently, and with a dream-like slowness the leather garments moved … a man sat up in the midst of the writhing worms, a man who once, long ago, might have been Northwest Smith. From head to foot he was slimy from the embrace of the crawling horror about him. His face was that of some creature beyond humanity—dead-alive, fixed in a gray stare, and the look of terrible ecstasy that overspread it seemed to come from somewhere far within, a faint reflection from immeasurable distances beyond the flesh. And as there is mystery and magic in the moonlight which is after all but a reflection of the everyday sun, so in that gray face turned to the door was a terror unnamable and sweet, a reflection of ecstasy beyond the understanding of any who have known only earthly ecstasy themselves. And as he sat there turning a blank, eyeless face to Yarol the red worms writhed ceaselessly about him, very gently, with a soft, caressive motion that never slacked.
    “Smith … come here! Smith … get up … Smith, Smith!” Yarol’s whisper hissed in the silence, commanding, urgent—but he made no move to leave the door.
    And with a dreadful slowness, like a dead man rising, Smith stood up in the nest of slimy scarlet. He swayed drunkenly on his feet, and two or three crimson tendrils came writhing up his legs to the knees and wound themselves there, supportingly, moving with a ceaseless caress that seemed to give him some hidden strength, for he said then, without inflection,
    “Go away. Go away. Leave me alone.” And the dead ecstatic face never changed.
    “Smith!” Yarol’s voice was desperate. “Smith, listen! Smith, can’t you hear me?”
    “Go away,” the monotonous voice said. “Go away. Go away. Go—”
    “Not unless you come too. Can’t you hear? Smith! Smith! I’ll—”
    He hushed in mid-phrase, and once more the ancestral prickle of race-memory shivered down his back, for the scarlet mass was moving again, violently, rising …
    Yarol pressed back against the door and gripped his gun, and the name of a god he had forgotten years ago rose to his lips unbidden. For he knew what was coming next, and the knowledge was more dreadful than any ignorance could have been.
    The red, writhing mass rose higher, and the tendrils parted and a human face looked out—no, half human, with green cat-eyes that shone in that dimness like lighted jewels, compellingly …
    Yarol breathed “Shar!” again, and flung up an arm across his face, and the tingle of meeting that green gaze for even an instant went thrilling through him perilously.
    “Smith!” he called in despair. “Smith, can’t you hear me?”
    “Go away,” said that voice that was not Smith’s. “Go away.”
    And somehow, although he dared not look, Yarol knew that the—the other—had parted those worm-thick tresses and stood there in all the human