He wandered around, picking up and inspecting pieces of carved wood. They looked like the parts of an ornamental display case.
Then, shaking him to the core, a scream of awful terror came from the lower floor, swelled up the stairs, echoed along the corridor outside. It didn’t sound like a man’s voice. But he knew it was—and it was Lee’s.
A richly carved strip fell from Sherret’s hand. It rattled loudly on the wooden floor in the silent aftermath of that scream.
Snatching up the machete, he rushed outside and down the stairs, hearing strange, gasping sobs. He tore into the room where he had left Lee. The big man was lying in a corner, sobbing, arms crossed in front of his face, as if he were trying to ward off a murderous attacker. But the only other creature in the room was Canato, slumped in his chair, his face turned away from Lee and expressing infinite sadness.
“Lee, Lee, what is it?”
Sherret dropped on one knee beside Lee and gently forced his arms apart. Lee’s face was contorted with horror, his eyes bulging glassily. It reminded Sherret of Rosala’s painting of himself in the grip of the Melas tree. Then he dropped Lee’s arms and started back with a cry. For one side of Lee’s throat had been torn out and the blood was pumping out in spurts.
“Oh, my God!”
Sherret beat his knuckles together. He didn’t know what to do. Nothing could close that wound or staunch that flow.
He blundered across to Canato.
“You! Did you do that?”
“Partly. Not entirely,” said Canato in a low, tired voice.
“I’ll deal with you later,” said Sherret between his teeth. “Is there any kind of a doctor in this damned village, anyone who could help?”
“No one can come here. No one can help. Your friend is dying.”
Sherret groaned and rushed back to Lee. The blood was a rapidly enlarging pool. He knelt in it regardless.
“Lee!”
Lee’s face was deathly white, but much calmer. His eyes were still glassy, but now half-closed. A shade of recognition appeared in them.
“It’s gone,” he whispered thickly. “Go, Earthman… before it… returns… Go to Rosala. Give her my love.”
The voice became a faint bubbling sound.
There was a final, choked whisper. “Earthman… I never knew… your name”
Then he died.
Although he’d known him but briefly, this was the only real friend among men whom Sherret had made since he left Earth. He felt desolated. Gently, he closed Lee’s eyes. He continued to kneel, motionless, praying only for control over the murderous anger pouring through him.
Then he got up and went over to Canato.
“Now, explain this.”
“Do as your friend told you. Go now, quickly. I shall see that he is decently buried.”
“I shall not leave this house until you tell me—”
“All right, but you take a terrible risk. Listen, and don’t question, then go.”
Then Canato went on earnestly, urgently, “My kind have become cursed with a severe mental disorder. A major split in the psyche—no time to theorize now. The body-mind relationship has always been inexplicable; it’s far more complex than we ever imagined. In short, the raw antagonistic side of our nature has split away from us. It exists independently, a disembodied entity. Such things are possible, believe me.
“And now, whenever two of us meet, after a short while the two crude entities fuse and form a third being. This amalgam is real and material, but only in relation to those from whom it has sprung. It is concentrated antagonism, the killer in all of us. It tends to attack that one of us whose baser emotions form the greater part of it…
fear, anger.
“Your friend was full of hate and revenge at that time. It helped to kill him. He was terribly frightened, and yet he was brave. He fought the thing with his bare hands.
“You didn’t see it. You couldn’t; it wasn’t part of you. The amalgam dissolved when you came. This sometimes happens when another person joins the group suddenly —it’s as though he upsets a balance of forces. But usually the larger the group, the more power the antagonist derives from it.
“We infect others. Therefore we have voluntarily put ourselves in isolation. My kind are doomed to live and die alone. Each in his own house, keeping his distance, tending his own garden, trying to make some kind of bearable life for himself. Painting, writing, composing, handicrafts. I like making my own furniture.
“But no two of us dare linger together for more than a few—Oh! Go. Please go. I have talked too long.”
Uneasily, Sherret turned to go. But something was forming itself rapidly between him and the door.
“Too late!” cried Canato in despair, and turned his face away. Fear swept through Sherret like a cold wind. He tried to outflank the darkening, cloudy shape and reach the door. And then, all at once, it leapt into shape focus like a stereoscopic moving picture.
But it was no recorded shadow. It was here, now, real as himself, and pulsing with energy.
There were traces of Canato in it, but predominantly it was a nightmare version of himself. Every feature was enlarged and distorted as though by some virulent glandular disease. The body was taller, bulkier, and grotesquely misshapen. The thing was mad and blind and had no conscious control over its actions. Somehow he knew that. It was senseless and without pity. It was an embodied destructive urge.
There could be no appeal and no defense.
The sightless eyes stared at nothing. The mouth hung open like a dead man’s. The teeth were huge. There were spots of blood on them!
The hands, with fingers spread like claws, were the hands of a strangler. This thing had been born in his mind when he was born. It had been created out of the stark fear of strangulation. Always it had lived within him, imprisoned, suppressed, seeking the opportunity to break out into a form of its own. And then—to stifle that other which had stifled it for so long. Now, in the land of the Three-people, it had escaped at last. Now, here, somewhere, that tyrant was at its mercy.
The sightless eyes turned this way and that.
Then they became still, seeming to stare straight into Sherret’s eyes. And then, shockingly, they became sighted.
Sherrot’s mind was swimming as, blurrily, he was transformed into a three-fold personality. He was his fear-stricken, petrified self. He was also the drained out Canato in the chair, keeping his head turned away, trying to see nothing, abysmally unhappy, lonely, despairing.
And he was also—it.
It was just a pair of hands reaching for a throat to throttle to the accompaniment of an hysterical scream. Kill! Kill!
An insensate repetition.
The manifold viewpoint coalesced back to just one —the viewpoint of the hunted Sherret. The thing had used his vision to locate him. And now it was advancing to the attack, its eager hands outstretched.
Sherret reeled back against the wall. The hysterical scream still seemed to be going on, but now it was incoherent, wordless. It was Sherret himself screaming, as Lee had screamed before him.
He was grabbing wildly for security, anything to cling to, as he had grabbed at the grass tufts at the edge of the mud swamp. He clawed uselessly at the smooth wall. Then his fingers encountered Lee’s shield still leaning there. Like a hunted animal, seeking any sanctuary, however inadequate, he squirmed behind it. Dimly, he was aware he was crouching beside his rucksack on the floor. Then fear-sharpened memory flung up a wild hope. He scrabbled at the rucksack, found the little grenades, slid one from its band. His thumb nail tore off the capsule’s nipple.