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might well lead to panic and loss of the control that he had with difficulty
won. Second, he had so few activities open to him in his constricted
circumstance that he would do well to hoard them and dole them out like a
miser, lest he fall victim to a boredom that might well become literally
maddening, a suicidal tedium.
Taking the same precautions as he had before, he got his eyes open without
incident and once again found himself facing a blurred grainy wall, only this
time streaked with white and dull blue, as though there were an admixture of
chalk and slate in the soil hereabouts. And once again he discovered that the
longer he stared at it, to the accompaniment only of his measured silent ex-
and inhalations, the deeper he was able to see into it by some power of occult
vision.
For a while this time there were no definite objects to be seen, such
as the worm and the pebbles, yet there were fugitive glimmerings and tiny
marching movements such as the eyes see when there is no light, making it hard
to determine whether they were happening inside his eyes or out in the reaches
of cold ground.
Eventually, at a distance, he judged, of eight or ten feet out from him, the
blue-shadowed white streaks began to organize themselves into a slender female
figure, upright as he was and facing him, as pale as death, with eyes and lips
serenely shut as though she were asleep. A strange quality in the
blue-shadowed whiteness seemed familiar to him and this daunted him, though
where and when he had encountered it before he could not tell.
His intimate yet somehow mystic view of this quiescent figure seemed not so
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much obscured by the three intervening yards of solid dirt as softened by
them, as though he were viewing it (her?) through several of the finest
imaginable veils, such as might grace some ethereal princess's boudoir rather
than these cruel cemetery confines.
At first he thought he was imagining the whole vision and told himself how apt
the human eye is to see definite shapes of things in smoke, expanses of
vegetation, old tapestries, simmering stews, slow fires, and similars --
and especially apt to interpret pale indistinct shapes as human bodies. But
the longer he looked at it, the more distinct it got. Looking away and then
back didn't banish it, nor did consciously trying to make it seem something
else.
All this while the figure remained in the same attitude with visage serene,
never changing as a creation of the imagination might be expected to do, so in
the end he decided she must be an actual piece of statuary buried by some
strange chance at just this spot, though the style seemed to him not at all
Rimish. While her glimmering whiteness still seemed unpleasantly familiar.
Where? When? He racked his brains.
Then there came a flurry of those small glimmering marching forms that were so
hard to pin down as to location. They resolved themselves into a number of
fine-beaded white lines connected to points on the quiescent naked female form
-- its eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, and privacies. As he studied them they
grew more distinct and he saw that the individual beads were creeping along in
single file, toward the figure in about half the lines and away from it in the
others. The word "maggots" came into his mind and stayed despite his efforts
to banish it. And the finely beaded busy lines became more real, no matter how
vehement his self-assertion that they were but strayed figments of his
imagination.
But then it occurred to him that if he truly were watching maggots devour dead
buried flesh, there would inevitably be diminuations and other changes for the
worse in the latter, whereas the slim blue-shadowed she-figure now appeared
more attractive, if anything, than when he had first glimpsed her, in
particular the small, saucy, unsagging breasts, medallions of supreme
artistry, whose large azure nipplets implored kisses. Were the situation
otherwise he would surely be feeling desire despite their unromantic and
highly constrictive surroundings. He coldly imagined hand-capturing her dainty
tits and tormentingly teasing them to their utmost erection, tonguing them
avidly -- gods! Could nothing break his constant awareness of the dreadful
Mouser-shaped _mold_ encasing him? (But to not get too far afield, wit-
worshipping dolt, he told himself -- recall to breathe!) Old legends said
Death had a skinny sister denominated Pain, passionately devoted to the
loathsome torture that often was Death's prelude.
But she was only a statue, he reminded himself desperately.
Her lips parted and a lissome blue tongue ran round them hungrily.
Her eyes opened and she fixed her red-glinting gaze upon him.
She smiled.
Suddenly he knew where he had seen her opalescently white complexion before.
In the Shadowland! Upon the slender face and neck and hands and wrists of
Death himself, whom he had twice beheld there. And she resembled Death
facially and in her slenderness.
Then she puckered her lips and, through all the dirt that buried them both, he
heard the thrilling soft seductive whistle with which a Lankhmar streetgirl
invites trade. He felt the hair lift on the back of his neck while an icy
chill went through him.
And then, to his extremest horror, this pale ghoul-waif, Sister of
Death, seemingly without effort extended both her glimmering narrow hands
toward him, blue palms turned invitingly upward and opalescent fingers
rippling tremulously, and then gathering those same fingers together cuppingly
and kicking back her left and right legs successively, began slowly to swim
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toward him through the harsh earth everywhere closely encasing them both, as
if it offered no more resistance to her blue-shadowed starkly naked form than
it did to his occult vision.
Despite all his good resolutions to avoid panicky overexertion while buried,
he strained convulsively backward, away from the dirt swimmer, in a spasm like
to burst his heart. Then, just as his effort reached an excruciating peak and
he abandoned it, he felt emptiness behind him and launched himself into it --
with an instant spurt of reverse fear: that he might fall forever into a
bottomless pit.
He could have spared himself that last terror. He had barely retreated a half
yard, no more than one short step, when he felt himself everywhere backed
again from head to heel with cold grainy earth.
But now there was an emptiness in front of him, the space from which he'd just
withdrawn his trunk, head, and one leg. And there was time to draw a deep,
big, glorious breath -- one worth twenty of his cautious air sips -- and to
retreat the other leg before the forward dirt caught up with him again, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]