“God!” gasped Smith suddenly, and tried to sit up. Weakness smote him like a blow, and for an instant the room wheeled as he fell back against something firm and warm—Yarol’s shoulder. The Venusian’s arm supported him while the room steadied, and after a while he twisted a little and stared into the other’s black gaze.

  Yarol was holding him with one arm and finishing the mug of segir himself, and the black eyes met his over the rim and crinkled into sudden laughter, half-hysterical after that terror that was passed.

  “By Pharol!” gasped Yarol, choking into his mug. “By Pharol, N.W.! I’m never gonna let you forget this! Next time you have to drag me out of a mess I’ll say—”

  “Let it go,” said Smith. “What’s been going on? How—”

  “Shambleau.” Yarol’s laughter died. “Shambleau! What were you doing with a thing like that?”

  “What was it?” Smith asked soberly.

  “Mean to say you didn’t know? But where’d you find it? How—”

  “Suppose you tell me first what you know,” said Smith firmly. “And another swig of that segir, too, please. I need it.”

  “Can you hold the mug now? Feel better?”

  ‘‘Yeah—some. I can hold it—thanks. Now go on.”

  “Well—I don’t know just where to start. They call them Shambleau—”

  “Good God, is there more than one?”

  “It’s a—a sort of race, I think, one of the very oldest. Where they come from nobody knows. The name sounds a little French, doesn’t it? But it goes back beyond the start of history. There have always been Shambleau.”

  “I never heard of ’em.”

  “Not many people have. And those who know don’t care to talk about it much.”

  “Well, half this town knows. I hadn’t any idea what they were talking about, then. And I still don’t understand, but—”

  “Yes, it happens like this, sometimes. They’ll appear, and the news will spread and the town will get together and hunt them down, and after that—well, the story doesn’t get around very far. It’s too—too unbelievable.”

  “But—my God, Yarol!—what was it? Where’d it come from? How—”

  “Nobody knows just where they come from. Another planet—maybe some undiscovered one. Some say Venus—I know there are some rather awful legends of them handed down in our family—that’s how I’ve heard about it. And the minute I opened that door, awhile back—I—I think I knew that smell …”

  “But—what are they?”

  “God knows. Not human, though they have the human form. Or that may be only an illusion … or maybe I’m crazy. I don’t know. They’re a species of the vampire—or maybe the vampire is a species of—of them. Their normal form must be that—that mass, and in that form they draw nourishment from the—I suppose the life-forces of men. And they take some form—usually a woman form, I think, and key you up to the highest pitch of emotion before they—begin. That’s to work the life-force up to intensity so it’ll be easier … And they give, always, that horrible, foul pleasure as they—feed. There are some men who, if they survive the first experience, take to it like a drug—can’t give it up—keep the thing with them all their lives—which isn’t long—feeding it for that ghastly satisfaction. Worse than smoking ming or—or ‘praying to Pharol.’”

  “Yes,” said Smith, “I’m beginning to understand why that crowd was so surprised and—and disgusted when I said—well, never mind. Go on.”

  “Did you get to talk to—to it?” asked Yarol.

  “I tried to. It couldn’t speak very well. I asked it where it came from and it said—‘from far away and long ago’—something like that.”

  “I wonder. Possibly some unknown planet—but I think not. You know there are so many wild stories with some basis of fact to start from that I’ve sometimes wondered—mightn’t there be a lot more or even worse and wilder superstitions we’ve never even heard of? Things like this, blasphemous and foul, that those who know have to keep still about? Awful, fantastic things running around loose that we never hear rumors of at all!

  “These things—they’ve been in existence for countless ages. No one knows when or where they first appeared. Those who’ve seen them, as we saw this one, don’t talk about it. It’s just one of those vague, misty rumors you find half hinted at in old books sometimes … I believe they are an older race than man, spawned from ancient seed in times before ours, perhaps on planets that have gone to dust, and so horrible to man that when they are discovered the discoverers keep still about it—forget them again as quickly as they can.

  “And they go back to time immemorial. I suppose you recognized the legend of Medusa? There isn’t any question that the ancient Greeks knew of them. Does it mean that there have been civilizations before yours that set out from Earth and explored other planets? Or did one of the Shambleau somehow make its way into Greece three thousand years ago? If you think about it long enough you’ll go off your head! I wonder how many other legends are based on things like this—things we don’t suspect, things we’ll never know.

  “The Gorgon Medusa, a beautiful woman with—with snakes for hair, and a gaze that turned men to stone, and Perseus finally killed her—I remembered this just by accident, N.W., and it saved your life and mine—Perseus killed her by using a mirror as he fought to reflect what he dared not look at directly. I wonder what the old Greek who first started that legend would have thought if he’d known that three thousand years later his story would save the lives of two men on another planet. I wonder what that Greek’s own story was, and how he met the thing, and what happened …

  “Well, there’s a lot we’ll never know. Wouldn’t the records of that race of—of things, whatever they are, be worth reading! Records of other planets and other ages and all the beginnings of mankind! But I don’t suppose they’ve kept any records. I don’t suppose they’ve even any place to keep them—from what little I know, or anyone knows about it, they’re like the Wandering Jew, just bobbing up here and there at long intervals, and where they stay in the meantime I’d give my eyes to know! But I don’t believe that terribly hypnotic power they have indicates any superhuman intelligence. It’s their means of getting food—just like a frog’s long tongue or a carnivorous flower’s odor. Those are physical because the frog and the flower eat physical food. The Shambleau uses a—a mental reach to get mental food. I don’t quite know how to put it. And just as a beast that eats the bodies of other animals acquires with each meal greater power over the bodies of the rest, so the Shambleau, stoking itself up with the life-forces of men, increases its power over the minds and the souls of other men. But I’m talking about things I can’t define—things I’m not sure exist.

  “I only know that when I felt—when those tentacles closed around my legs—I didn’t want to pull loose, I felt sensations that—that—oh, I’m fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that—pleasure—and yet—”

  “I know,” said Smith slowly. The effect of the segir was beginning to wear off, and weakness was washing back over him in waves, and when he spoke he was half meditating in a low voice, scarcely realizing that Yarol listened. “I know it—much better than you do—and there’s something so indescribably awful that the thing emanates, something so utterly at odds with everything human—there aren’t any words to say it. For a while I was a part of it, literally, sharing its thoughts and memories and emotions and hungers, and—well, it’s over now and I don’t remember very clearly, but the only part left free was that part of me that was all but insane from the—the obscenity of the thing. And yet it was a pleasure so sweet—I think there must be some nucleus of utter evil in me—in everyone—that needs only the proper stimulus to get complete control, because even while I was sick all through from the touch of those—things—there was something in me that was—was simply gibbering with delight … Because of that I saw things—and knew things—horrible, wild, things I can’t quite remember—visited unbelievable places, looked backward through the memory of that—creature—I was one with, and saw—God, I wish I could remember!”

  “You ought to thank your God you can’t,” said Yarol soberly.

  His voice roused Smith from the half-trance he had fallen into, and he rose on his elbow, swaying a little from weakness. The room was wavering before him, and he closed his eyes, not to see it, but he asked, “You say they—they don’t turn up again? No way of finding—another?”

  Yarol did not answer for a moment. He laid his hands on the other man’s shoulders and pressed him back, and then sat staring down into the dark, ravaged face with a new, strange, undefinable look upon it that he had never seen there before—whose meaning he knew, too well.

  “Smith,” he said finally, and his black eyes for once were steady and serious, and the little grinning devil had vanished from behind them, “Smith, I’ve never asked your word on anything before, but I’ve—I’ve earned the right to do it now, and I’m asking you to promise me one thing.”

  Smith’s colorless eyes met the black gaze unsteadily. Irresolution was in them, and a little fear of what that promise might be. And for just a moment Yarol was looking, not into his friend’s familiar eyes, but into a wide gray blankness that held all horror and delight—a pale sea with unspeakable pleasures sunk beneath it. Then the wide stare focused again and Smith’s eyes met his squarely and Smith’s voice said, “Go ahead. I’ll promise.”

  “That if you ever should meet a Shambleau again—ever, anywhere—you’ll draw your gun and burn it to hell the instant you realize what it is. Will you promise me that?”

  There was a long silence. Yarol’s somber black eyes bored relentlessly into the colorless ones of Smith, not wavering. And the veins stood out on Smith’s tanned forehead. He never broke his word—he had given it perhaps half a dozen times in his life, but once he had given it, he was incapable of breaking it. And once more the gray seas flooded in a dim tide of memories, sweet and horrible beyond dreams. Once more Yarol was staring into blankness that hid nameless things. The room was very still.

  The gray tide ebbed. Smith’s eyes, pale and resolute as steel, met Yarol’s levelly.

  “I’ll—try,” he said. And his voice wavered.

  DOROTHY GERTRUDE QUICK (1896–1962) was the pen name of Dorothy Gertrude Quick Mayer, a prolific writer of horror, detective fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Born in Brooklyn to a wealthy family, Quick met Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) in 1907 while on board the SS Minnetonka, and the two became close friends. Later, Quick gave credit to Twain for encouraging her to write, and she lectured extensively on their friendship. Her 1961 memoir of the great American author, Mark Twain and Me, was the basis for a 1991 Disney television movie of the same name. Quick married John Adams Mayer in 1925 (a society event noteworthy enough to merit mention in Time magazine’s “Milestones” column) but published under her maiden name throughout her life. She made her first genre fiction sale to Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Oriental Stories, in 1932 and went on to contribute stories and poems to Wright’s more successful editing venture, Weird Tales, for more than twenty years.

  Most of Quick’s early genre work was standard horror fare, but in the mid-1930s she began experimenting with more science fictional offerings. In 1938 the New York Post announced the publication of her first novel, a planetary romance called Strange Awakenings, which, as the unnamed author of the article enthusiastically notes, “curiously enough is not biographical” but instead relates the “fantastic tale of a young woman who wakes up to find herself on the planet Venus, something in the manner of some of Jules Verne’s heroes” (“Mrs. John Adams Mayer” 7). Other notable SF works from Quick include the Patchwork Quilt sequence, a series of short stories written for Unknown between 1939 and 1945 “whose potential seems obvious, [but] may have suffered” from that magazine’s demise, and her first SF sale, “Strange Orchids” (Clute).

  “Strange Orchids” appeared in the March 1937 issue of Weird Tales accompanied by a cover that celebrated genre artist Margaret Brundage painted for the story (see chapter 5, “Artists,” of this anthology for more details). It is a Gothic tale characteristic of the “weird-scientific” style that Wright preferred for his magazine. Like other stories of this type—including Clare Winger Harris’s “The Evolutionary Monstrosity,” featured elsewhere in this anthology—“Strange Orchids” explores the dark side of Enlightenment rationality, especially as it is figured in the character of the physically and socially isolated mad scientist. However, while other authors associated with this tradition (including Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, and Harris) endowed their mad scientists with extraordinary and almost admirable ambition to create new races or conquer evolution, Quick’s protagonist is more decadent than grand in his scheme to create the perfect hothouse flower. As such, her story seems to comment on the instrumental ends to which much scientific theory is applied and the horror that ensues when human lives are sacrificed in the process.

  Quick’s story also pays homage to two other traditions of popular women’s writing that flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the female Gothic and domestic fiction. In an era when most SF stories were narrated from the perspective of a male character, Quick draws on the rich history of the female Gothic to cast her female narrator as both victim and heroine of the story. She also invokes the conventions of domestic fiction by pitting her vain and condescending mad scientist—who, incidentally, claims to love Quick’s narrator but then treats her like a slow child—against the levelheaded, confident government agent who knows his own limits and actively enlists the narrator to help him stop their evil nemesis. In doing so, Quick makes clear the type of new man who is appropriate to accompany the New Woman of the twentieth century on even her most dangerous adventures.

  “Strange Orchids”

  Weird Tales, March 1937

  If I had not gone to Muriel’s party, I wouldn’t have met Angus O’Malley and I would have been spared the horror and despair of the tragic events in which the strange orchids played so terrible a part.

  Often as I look at my white hair—the legacy that those happenings left me—I wonder if my life would have been happier had I followed my first impulse and remained away from Muriel’s. But almost instantly the question is answered for me and I know that despite the white hair—despite the horror that put it there—I am glad I went to Muriel’s.

  For even if I did meet Angus O’Malley that night, I also met Rex Stanton, and if the one brought me terror beyond comprehension the other brought me such joy that it overbalanced everything else. And the very fact that neither Rex nor I can quite forget the things that happened has only served to bring us closer together.

  The reason I hesitated about going to Muriel’s was that one never knew whom one would meet at her studio. I’m not a snob, but I do dislike being thrown into close contact with a gangster or the leading female impersonator who talks with a lisp and rouges his cheeks. I had on previous occasions been introduced to both at Muriel’s. On the other hand, there were rumors that Splondowski would be at the party with his violin, and it was because of Splondowski that I finally went. I couldn’t resist hearing him play even though I had to sit next to Public Enemy Number 1 to do it.

  It was while I sat listening to the magic notes of Splondowski that I saw Angus O’Malley for the first time.

  He was standing near the door when I happened to look up. His eyes caught mine and held them with strange magnetism. I felt as though they were stripping my body bare of the Paris gown I was so proud of—as though I must snatch something to cover myself with, even though I knew I was perfectly clothed. The impulse was almost overpowering, but much as I wanted to give in to it, I couldn’t. His eyes, deep black like a mysterious unfathomed pool, would not have let me. I sat staring into them as though I had been a bird fascinated by a snake.

  Then an even worse thing happened. I felt as though he had exhausted the possibilities of my body, that now that he knew every line I possessed he must probe still further. With a kind of mental anguish I felt him probing my soul, until eventually he knew that, too. Then he released my eyes and I was completely myself again.

  At the same time I realized that Splondowski had played at the most only four bars of music, although it seemed ages ago that I had first looked up at the handsome stranger. I told myself I was a fool with an overactive imagination. The music got me all stirred up and I began feeling things, I thought, and out of the corner of my eye stole another glance at the man who had produced such an extraordinary effect upon me. He was very tall and very slim, with thick black hair that waved back from a rather low forehead. He wore it longer than most men, and there was a suspicion of curl at the end that gave him a Byronic look. His eyes were, as I have said, black under heavy brows and lids. His nose was fine, chiseled Greek, as were the lines of his face. His mouth was well cut, but easily the most sensuous I have ever seen. Was it this that had made me imagine things? If so, I’d better consult a psychiatrist immediately. Nice, well brought up girls of twenty shouldn’t have such thoughts of their own volition. I’d never had them before, but I’d never seen anyone like Angus O’Malley, either. I noticed that his skin was very white, extraordinarily fine in texture for a man, and his hands were slender—the hands of an artist or a dreamer. I wondered who he was, and then remembered how I had felt looking into his eyes and decided I didn’t want to know.

  A few minutes later Splondowski had finished playing and Muriel came up to me, the man I didn’t want to know beside her.

  “Mr. O’Malley wants to be presented,” Muriel said as if Mr. O’Malley were the King of England conferring a favor.

  Muriel made the necessary remarks, “Louise Howard, Angus O’Malley,” and rushed away.

  Angus O’Malley extended his hand. Reluctantly I put mine into it. He bent low over my fingers and touched them with his lips. It was as though a flame had brushed across my hand.