Kenneth Bulmer by The Ships of Durostorum

Author:The Ships of Durostorum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-08-27T13:00:12+00:00

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"THE CONTESSA!" screamed J. T. Wilkie, struggling un-availingly to free his hand and grab his new gun. "These things will trap her next!"

All around him the rippling motion of tendrils coiling across the ground sickened him. The skin flushed an unwholesome pink, with mucous running freely from open pores to lubricate the things' passage, like snails.

"She's got to be stopped!"

Charnock yelled. He dodged a club that beat down viciously at him. "Gangly! Do your stuff! Ottorino!"

Ottorino, still entrapped in the net on the spot where the Gate existed, vanished.

"Thank God!" breathed J. T. Wilkie.

He shuddered at the thought of the Contessa's white body clutched in the writhing tendrils of these vile monsters.

A cudgel descended with shrewder aim, knocked Char-nock unconscious. Wilkie thrashed. He could reach his gun if—he felt the blow on the head as though from a long and hollow distance. The last thing he saw in this new and horrific Dimension was the coiling tendrils rippling along the ground beside his face, vanishing as a gray haze descended over his senses.

The things possessed extremities like the feathery limbs of barnacles. . . . Their sensory organs were carried on waving constructions like those of Plumose Anemones. . . . Their locomotion was carried on like enlarged and separated snails' lower rims. . . . Slowly, through nightmare and horror, J. T. Wilkie's senses returned.

Over the rocky ground a thin moist covering of algae grew with a livid and mocking greenness. The nets were jerked until their occupants groaningly understood and crawled erect to be herded into a line and prodded forward. Stumbling and tripping, the remnants of the safari jogged along the high shoulder of a mountain to descend with painful slowness into the spreading valley beyond. In all that panorama of algae-green rock and loose scree, of stunted pine and straggly gorse bush, not a single column of smoke, not a house, not a bridge, nothing told of human occupation.

Once off that high shoulder the rippling undulations of the things' tendrils slackened speed. They cautiously freed the nets and, stripping their prisoners of all weapons, stripped away their clothing also. Perhaps because they did not notice them in their hair the translator bands were left. Wilkie breathed deeply, feeling the cold damp bite of the wind. His flesh cringed and his goose pimples shuddered. Any fear he had left in him since being trapped down Old Smokey with Polak had been driven out by his subsequent experiences; but he knew he was afraid, deathly afraid.

Roped together by strands of the silky nets, the wretched people stumbled down the mountainside. Chamock, whose glittery chain had occasioned a thrumming keening of interest from their captors, perforce led Gangly, and Wilkie followed Gangly, to be followed in turn by a hideously frighened Honshi. After his "Hoshoo's," like those of his comrades, had been followed by savage beatings, he went on down, gasping and wheezing and cowed.

"Where is this, Gangly?" whispered Chamock.

"We took the wrong Gate from that world of polywater," said Gangly in his mangled words, the translator translating perfectly.

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