Beyond by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction Collection
Publisher: Avon Books
Published: 1970-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Barry had been a strong man, but after two years of nursing from flat bottles, you wouldn’t have known it. He was no beauty. He had a long leather face and purple nose. His eyes were nearly as red as their lids, and his broad shoulders were built of toothpicks and parchment. Skin that had been taut with the solid muscle under it was now loose and dry, and fitted him as badly as the clothes he wore. He was a big fellow—six feet three at least, and he weighed all of a hundred and twenty-seven pounds.

The scorpion was the start of it, and the crack on the skull brought it on full strength. That’s right—the horrors. The good old creeping, crawling horrors. When he came to and hauled his ragged body back up to the sidewalk, he found himself in a new world, horribly peopled by things he couldn’t understand. There were soft white wriggling things —a carpet of them under his feet. Standing at bay in the doorway of a general store down the street was a gryphon, complete with flaming breath, horns and tail, frighteningly real, lifted bodily from an old book that had frightened him when he was a child. He heard a monstrous rustle over his head, and there was a real life prototype of Alice-in-Wonderland’s buck-toothed Jabberwock, and it was out to get him. He shrieked and tried to run, and fell choking and splattering into the Slough of Despond from “Pilgrim’s Progress.” There was a someone else in there with him— a scantily clad girl on skis from the front cover of a Paris magazine. She laughed and turned into a six-legged winged snake which bit at him viciously and vanished. He scrambled to his feet and plunged sobbing down the dusty road, and people on the sidewalks turned and stared and said, “Crazy with th’ heat,” and went on about their business, for heat madness was common among beached sailors in that country in August.

Barry staggered on out of town, which wasn’t very far, and out among the sand dunes and scrub and saw grass. He began to see things that he could not describe, devils and huge spiders and insects. In the angry blaze of the sun he slumped to his knees, sobbing, and then something clicked in his mind and he collapsed from sheer psychic exhaustion.

It was night, and very cool, when he woke again. There was half a moon and a billion stars, and the desert-like dunes were all black velvet and silver. The black and the gleam were crowded with strange life, but it was worse now than it had been in the daytime, because now he could feel what he couldn’t see. He knew that twenty feet away from him stood a great foul buzzard that stared steadily at him, and yet he could not see it. It was more than a fearsome sensation that the thing was there; he could feel each feather, every wrinkle of the crusted, wattled neck, each calloused serration on its dry yellow legs.

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