Lands of the Earthquake by Henry Kuttner

Author:Henry Kuttner [Kuttner, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi Short Story
Publisher: Startling Stories
Published: 1947-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

DOORS opened all along the street to receive them. Here and there someone beat impatiently at closed panels, calling in a low voice to those within. No one called loudly. It seemed to Boyce that within a moment after the first shrilling sounded from overhead, there was no one left upon the street.

The bright crowd had scurried by under the stone images and then, in a twinkling, the wet street was empty except for a straggler or two who glanced curiously at Boyce standing there alone and then vanished into the nearest shelter.

There was a patter of feet on stone. Boyce looked down. The brown girl was motioning impatiently to him.

“Come,” she said urgently. “Come—hurry! There’s no time!”

He went uncertainly toward her over the wet pavement It was not fast enough to suit his guide. She swooped down on him, seized his arm and pulled him along at a run toward a door behind one of the stone beasts.

“What is it?” Boyce demanded. “I don’t understand—”

“They come,” the girl said. “Hurry! In here—quick, before They reach this street!”

The door creaked ons its hinges. Within was darkness and Boyce remembered Guillaume’s warning to go carefully. He held back a little, not sure whether it would be more dangerous to enter or to stay outside.

Then from the street before him a little breath of cold air blew past, fluttering his cloak. It was a cold that seared like heat. And terror came with it—terror and such a revulsion as he had not known since the moment in the fog when he first came to this land and saw from a hilltop the dark procession winding down toward the City gates.

It was They indeed—those who walked among a twinkle of lights and a twinkle of tiny bells and a cloud of darkness that veiled them mercifully from sight. They who went upright like men, and were not men—They whom he knew he had seen once with the woman whose name and face he could not remember—or forget.

The old sickness came over him when he thought of Them. He turned swiftly and stumbled down three steps and fell against the door the brown girl held for him. He was shaking hard. He felt the cold burning down the street as the door shut behind him, heard the first thin tinkling of the bells. And the high shrilling from overhead was like a ringing in the ears, maddening, impossible to shake away.

The door shut out most of the noise. It was dark now, but a firm hand took his elbow and he hurried down an unseen hall beside the pattering steps of his guide.

What kind of a woman is it “I’m hunting? he wondered, when all I know about her is that she once went familiarly with Them?

“The King summoned Them again,” the girl in the dark beside him volunteered, speaking in her strangely accented patois. “There must be strange things happening among the tents tonight. A rumor is that the lords have attacked that castle in the mountains you can sometimes see from our walls.

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