Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams by C. L. Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

floor, hideously alive, heaving and rippling and striving to lift itself into a semblance of humanity again. And as he watched, it lost even that form, and the edges melted revoltingly and the mass flattened and slid down into a pool of utter horror, and he became aware that it was pouring slowly through the rails into the sea.
    He stood watching while the whole rolling, shimmering mound melted and thinned and trickled through the bars, until the floor was clear again, and not even a stain marred the stone.
    A painful constriction of his lungs roused him, and he realized he had been holding his breath, scarcely daring to realize. Vaudir had collapsed against the wall, and he saw her knees give limply, and staggered forward on uncertain feet to catch her as she fell.
    “Vaudir, Vaudir!” He shook her gently. “Vaudir, what's happened? Am I dreaming? Are we safe now? Are you — awake again?”
    Very slowly her white lids lifted, and the black eyes met his. And he saw shadowily there the knowledge of that wallowing void he had dimly known, the shadow that could never be cleared away. She was steeped and foul with it. And the look of her eyes was such that involuntarily he released her and stepped away. She staggered a little and then regained her balance and regarded him from under bent brows. The level inhumanity of her gaze struck into his soul, and yet he thought he saw a spark of the girl she had been, dwelling in torture amid the blackness. He knew he was right when she said, in a far-away, toneless voice,
    “Awake? . . . No, not ever now, Earthman. I have been down too deeply into hell . . . he had dealt me a worse torture than he knew, for there is just enough humanity left within me to realize what I have become, and to suffer. . . .
    “Yes, he is gone, back into the slime that bred him. I have been a part of him, one with him in the blackness of his soul, and I know. I have spent eons since the blackness came upon me, dwelt for eternities in the dark, rolling seas of his mind, sucking in knowledge . . . and as I was one with him ,and he now gone, so shall I die; yet I will see you safely out of here if it is in my power, for it was I who dragged you in. If I can remember if I can find the way. . . .”
     She turned uncertainly and staggered a step back along the way they had come. Smith sprang forward and slid his free arm about her, but she shuddered away from the contact.
    “No, no — unbearable — the touch of clean human flesh — and it breaks the chord of my remembering. . . . I can not look back into his mind as it was when I dwelt there, and I must, I must. . . .”
    She shook him off and reeled on, and he cast one last look at the billowing sea, and then followed. She staggered along the stone floor on stumbling feet, one hand to the wall to support herself, and her voice was whispering gustily, so that he had to follow close to hear, and then almost wished he had not heard.
    “—black slime — darkness feeding on light — everything wavers so — slime, slime and a rolling sea — he rose out of it, you know, before civilization began here — he is age-old — there never has been but one Alendar. . . . And somehow — I could not see just how, or remember why — he rose from the rest, as some of his race on other planets had done, and took the man-form and stocked his breeding-pens. . . .” 
    They went on up the dark hallway, past curtains hiding incarnate loveliness, and the girl's stumbling footsteps kept time to her stumbling, half-incoherent words.
    “—has lived all these ages here, breeding and devouring beauty — vampire-thirst, a hideous delight in drinking in that beauty-force — I felt it and remembered it when I was one with him — wrapping black layers of primal slime about — quenching human loveliness in ooze, sucking — blind black thirst. . . . And his wisdom was ancient and dreadful and full of power — so he could draw a soul out through the eyes and sink it in