Guilty Smith the runesmith. Back then, here, to the room where the runes had begun, to trap a girl he sensed would come. He set a noisetrap at the outer door (it opened outward so he propped a 4 x 4 against it and an old tin washtub under it; open the door and whamcrash!) and next to it a rune-trap (which cannot be described here) and he settled down to wait.
The nixie to the incubus:
What have you been doing? I’ve lured him back to the focus location. You fool! He may suspect now. He suspects nothing. I’ve implanted a delusion, a girl. When he sleeps we take him and rip the veil completely. What girl? What have you done? You can ruin it all, you egomaniac! There is no girl. A succubus. I tried earlier, but it went wrong. This time he’s weaker, he’ll sleep, we’ll take him.
What makes you think he’ll succumb this time, any more than he did the last time? Because he’s a human and he’s weak and stupid and lonely and filled with guilt and he has never known love. I will give him love. Love that will drain him, empty him. Then he’s mine.
Not yours…ours.
Not yours at all, nixie. The Masters will see to you.
He stood in a dark corner, waiting. And sleep suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world to him. He wanted to sleep.
Sleep! Should a man live threescore years, one of them must go to this inert stupidity, a biochemical habit deriving from the accident of diurnal rotation. The caveman must huddle away behind rocks and flame during the hours of darkness because of the nocturnal predators who can see better in the dark than he can. They, in turn, must hide from him. Hence the habit, long outmoded but still inescapable. A third of a life spent sprawled out paralyzed, mostly unconscious, and oh vulnerable. Twenty years wasted out of each life, when life itself is so brief a sparkle in a surrounding immensity of nothingness. Brief as it is, still we must give away a third of it to sleep, for no real reason. Twenty years. Smith had hated and despised sleep, the cruel commanding necessity for sleep, the intrusion, the interruption, the sheer waste of sleep; but never had he hated it so much as now, when everyone in the world was his enemy and all alone he must stand them off. Who would stand sentry over Smith? Only Smith, lying mostly unconscious with his own lids blinding him and his ears turned off and his soft belly upward to whatever soft-footed enemy might penetrate his simple defenses.
But he could not help himself; he wanted to sleep.
He lay down fully dressed and pulled a blanket over him. He murmured his goodnight words, which for a long time had been (as he slid toward the edge of slumber’s precipice and scanned the day past and the weeks and months since that first terrible rune-work), “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…” and as he tumbled off the edge of waking, he would catch one awful glimpse of tomorrow—more of the same, but worse.
But not tonight. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, the long thirty-six-hour flight up the Empire State Building, trying, out of guilt and compassion, not to use his terrible weapon (how many times had he made that firm resolution… how many times, falling sickly asleep, had he determined to walk out unarmed, to build an attention aura around himself, to get from the new barbarians that which his guilt deserved?), or perhaps he had reached a new peak of terror and shame, and feared especially the vulnerability of sleep.
As he approached the dark tumble into oblivion, something made him claw at the edge, hold fast, neither asleep nor awake, just at that point through which he usually hurtled, unable to stay awake, on guard no more.
And he heard voices.
Now I send her to him. Now when he’s weakest. Wait! Are you sure? This man…he’s…different. There’s been a change in him. Since we last manipulated him? Don’t be ridiculous. No, wait! There is…something. Sleep. Yes, that’s it. It has to do with sleep. I’m not waiting; my Principals want through now, in this tick of time, now! I want success more than you, that is why the triumph and the rewards will be mine. The twelve generations it took to breed this Smith as a gateway and the lifetime it took to train him. It’s all come down to me, to me to fail or succeed, and I’ll succeed! I’m sending the succubus, now! He’s never been loved…now he’ll be loved.
No! You fool! Your ego! Sleep is his strength. You have it all wrong. Nothing can harm him when he sleeps!
Success!
Smith had a brief retinal impression of something…it was being a gateway, and what it was like. Mouth open till the flesh tore at the corners. Darkness pouring from within him, then flames that expanded and rolled over the land, filling the sky, and himself burning burning burning.
Then it was gone. Smith clung for one more amazed moment to this place, this delicately limned turnover point between waking and sleeping. This line was a crack in—in something incomprehensible, but it was a crack through which his mind could peep as between boards in a fence.
Something began to beat in him, daring to move, hope. He quelled it quickly lest it wake him altogether and those—those others—know of it. Slipping, slipping, losing his clutch on this half-wakefulness, about to drop end over end into total sleep, he snatched at phrases and concepts, forcing himself to keep and remember them: twelve generations it took to breed this Smith as a gateway…lifetime it took to train.
And: nothing can reach him, nothing can harm him while he’s asleep.
Sleep.
` Sleep the robber, sleep the intruder, sleep the enemy—all his life he had tried to avoid it, had succumbed as little as possible, had fought to live without it. Who had taught him that? Why did he want to unlearn it so desperately now? And what did the doctors and poets say about sleep: surcease, strengthener, healer, knitter-up of the raveled sleeve of care. And he had sneered at them. Had he been taught to sneer?
He had. For their purposes, he had been taught. More: he had been bred for this—twelve generations, was it? And why? To be given the power to decimate humanity so that something unspeakable, something long-exiled could return to possess this world? Would it be the Earth alone, or all the planets, the galaxies, the universe? Could it be time itself? Or other sets of dimensions?
The one thing he must do is sleep. Nothing can harm him when he sleeps.
Then she came to him. The girl from the stairwell, alive again, a second time, or how many times back to the inky beginnings he could not even imagine? She came to him through the door, and there was no sound of crashing washtub; she came through the room and there was no stench and death from the rune-trap.
She came toward him, lying there, without clothes, without sound, without pain or anger, and she extended her flawless arms to him in love. The pleasure of her love swept across the room. She wanted to give herself, to give him everything, all she was and all she could be, for no other return than his love. She wanted his love, all of his love, all of him, everything, all the substance and strength of him.
He half-rose to meet her, and then he knew what she was, and he trembled with the force of losing her, of destroying her, and he murmured words without vowels and a slimy darkness began to eat at her feet, her legs, her naked thighs, her torso, and she let one ghastly shriek as something took her, and her face dissolved in slime and darkness, and she was gone…and he fell back, weak.
Smith the runesmith let go his shred of wakefulness and plunged joyfully into the healing depths. It was not until he awakened, rested and strong and healthily starving, that he realized fully what else he had let go.