The door was jerked open. For a moment the barbarians stood there, puzzled. Then one—perhaps he had seen molten lead poured on his fellows when they stormed the march fortresses—lunged forward and with one great swipe of his notched yet razor-sharp longsword cut off Nuthmekri’s head.
In the pulsing crimson fountain that arched up lazily fell finally straight upon the mold. There was a hissing and a puff of steam. The barbarian drew back a step. Then something tickled his primeval sense of humor. He laughed loud and harshly and long.
The sand mold split from its bloody drenching and fell away from the tiny, black scaled figure, still faintly glowing, of a slim, and robed and hooded woman, who regarded the intruders enigmatically. Her head was complete yet no spike of waster metal stuck up from it—Nuthmekri had poured just enough and no more.
Nuthmekri’s body stopped writhing. His fingers uncurled from the tongs. A tiny branch of the metal from the fallen crucible ran along his arm, hardening almost instantly.
But the slayer of the sculptor was laughing at one of those circumstances. What had struck him as very funny was that the slim shining stream of the statuette’s pouring had been neatly twitched off by his victim a full three red-jetting heartbeats after the Hyborean’s sword had shorn through Nuthmekri’s neck.
DIARY IN THE SNOW
Jan. 6: Two hours since my arrival at Lone Top, and I’m still sitting in front of the fire, soaking in the heat. The taxi ride was hellishly cold and the breathtaking half-mile tramp through the drifts with John completed my transformation to an icicle. The driver from Terrestrial told me this was one of the loneliest spots in Montana, and it surely looked like it—miles and miles of tenantless, starlit snow with mysterious auroral splotches and ghostly beams flickering to the north—a beautiful, if frightening sight.
And I’ve even turned the cold to account! It suggested to me that I put my monsters on a drearily frigid planet, one that is circling a dead or dying sun. That will give them a motivation for wanting to invade and capture the Earth. Good!
Well, here I am—a jobless man with a book to write. My friends (such as they are, or were) never believed I’d take this step, and when they finally saw I was in earnest, they tried to convince me I was a fool. And toward the end I was afraid I’d lose my nerve, but then—it was as if forces beyond my knowledge or control were packing my bag, insulting my boss, and buying my ticket. A very pleasant illusion, after weeks of qualms and indecision!
How wonderful to be away from people and newspapers and advertisements and movies—all that damnable intellectual static! I confess I had a rather unpleasant shock when I first came in here and noticed the big radio standing right between the fireplace and window. How awful it would be to have that thing blatting at you in this cabin, with no place to escape except the tiny storeroom. It would be worse than the city! But so far John hasn’t turned it on, and I have my fingers crossed.
John is a magnificent host—understanding as well as incomparably generous. After getting me coffee and a snack, and setting out the whiskey, he’s retired to the other armchair and busied himself with some scribbling of his own.
Well, in a moment I’ll talk as much as he wants to (if he wants to) though I’m still reverberating from my trip. I feel as if I’d been catapulted out of an intolerable clangor and discord into the heart of quietness. It gives me a crazy, lightheaded feeling, like a balloon that touches the earth only to bounce upward again.
Better stop here though. I’d hate to think of how quiet a quietness would have to be, in order to be as much quieter than this place, as this is quieter than the city!
A man ought to be able to listen to his thoughts out here—really hear things.
Just John, and me—and my monsters!
Jan. 7: Wonderful day. Crisp, but no wind, and a flood of yellow sunlight to put a warmth and dazzle into the snow banks. John showed me all around the place this morning. It’s a snug little cabin he’s got, and a good thing too!—because it’s quite as lonely as it seemed last night. No houses in sight, and I’d judge there hasn’t been anything down the road since my taxi—the marks where it turned around stand out sharply. John says a farmer drives by, though, every two days—he has an arrangement with him for getting milk and other necessities.
You can’t see Terrestrial, there are hills in the way. John tells me that power and telephone wires have never gotten closer than six miles. The radio runs on storage batteries. When the drifts get bad he has to snowshoe all the way into Terrestrial.
I confess I feel a little awestruck at my own temerity—a confirmed desk-worker like myself plunging into a truly rugged environment like this. But John seems to think nothing of it. He says I’ll have to learn to snowshoe. I had my first lesson this morning and cut a ludicrous figure. I’ll be virtually a prisoner until I learn my way around. But any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!
And there’s a good side to the enforced isolation—it will make me concentrate on my book.
Well, that does it. I’ve popped the word, and now I’ll have to start writing the thing itself—and am I scared! It’s been so long since I’ve finished anything of my own—even attempted it. So damned long. I’d begun to be afraid (begun, hell!) that I’d never do anything but take notes and make outlines—outlines that became more and more complicated and lifeless with the years. And yet there were those early fragments of writing from my school days that ought to have encouraged me. Even much later, when I’d developed some literary judgement, I used to think those fragments showed flashes of real promise—until I burned them. They should have given me courage—at any rate, something should have—but whatever promising ideas I’d have in the morning would be shredded to tatters by that horrible hackwriting job by the time night came.
And now that I have taken the plunge, it seems hilariously strange that I should have been driven to it by an idea for a fantasy story. The very sort of writing I’ve always jeered at—childish playing around with interplanetary space and alien monsters. The farthest thing you could imagine from my wearisome outlines, which eventually got so filled up with character analysis (or even—Heaven help me—psychoanalysis) and dismal authentic backgrounds and “my own experience” and just heaps of social and political “significance” that there wasn’t room for anything else. Yes, it does seem ludicrously paradoxical that, instead of all those profound and “important” things, it should have been an idea about black-furred, long-tentacled monsters on another planet, peering unwinkingly at the earth and longing for its warmth and life, that so began to sing in my mind, night and day, that I finally got the strength to sweep aside all those miserable little fences against insecurity I’d been so painfully long in building—and take a chance!
John says it’s natural and wholesome for a beginning writer to turn to fantasy. And he’s certainly made a go of that type of writing himself. (But he’s built up his ability as courageously and doggedly through the years as he has this cabin. In comparison, I have a long, long way to go.)
In any case, my book won’t be a cheap romance of the fabulous, despite its “cosmic” background. And when you get down to that, what’s wrong with a cosmic background? I’ve lived a long time now with my monsters and devoted a lot of serious thought to them. I’ll make them real.