Read Ebook: Woman from another planet by Long Frank Belknap Gogos Basil Illustrator

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Ebook has 981 lines and 51125 words, and 20 pages

"You think so? I don't. What did he do then?"

"He just turned without saying another word and walked straight out of the door. He opened the door and walked out, and I could hear his footsteps dying away on the stairs. He didn't come back."

Loring let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. Then he seemed to regret having allowed himself to feel relieved. He tightened his lips and his voice became that of an angrily bewildered man who has a great many questions to ask and is not at all sure that the answers will satisfy him.

"And the instant he left you dressed and came rushing over here to tell me all about it, in a condition bordering on shock. Why were you so terrified? Why do you still look so frightened? You've done nothing but make apologies for him. You keep telling me that you weren't offended in the least. Then why--"

"David, darling, there's something I haven't told you."

"What was it? For God's sake, don't keep me in suspense."

"I--I felt myself being embraced."

"Felt his arms about me, felt him lifting me up. Of course it had to be just something I imagined. He was gone. I'd seen him walk out of the room, and close the door. But for an instant I could see him again. The outlines of his head and shoulders were very hazy, and--well, ghostly isn't just the right word. Not ghostly. Shifting, smokelike--like an image in a mirror wrapped in mist. But I could feel the strength of his arms, his hands moving across my back, even fumbling with the shoulder strap of my nightgown, crushing the lace--"

"Stop it, Janice! Keep quiet! You don't know what you're saying. If I thought for a moment...."

Loring's face was very white, and his fingers clamped tightly on Janice's arm, causing her to cry out in pain. He released her instantly, stroking the arm with his hand.

"I'm sorry, Janice," he said contritely. "I got a little carried away. Let's get out of here and get some breakfast. Maybe we can talk more sensibly about this. What you are saying is too confusing to take on an empty stomach."

"All right, darling. That sounds like a fine idea." She followed him to the dressing room and leaned against the doorjamb as he stripped off the bathrobe without any self-consciousness, revealing the compact, finely muscled body she knew and loved. He appeared so agitated that Janice's own hysteria left her, and she felt a sudden, overwhelming tenderness sweeping over her, making her forget her own need for reassurance.

She walked over to him, and reaching up, drew his head down and opened her lips, murmuring endearments and running her fingers through his hair to enhance the ardor of her embrace. His arms tightened about her and for an instant he was not only holding her close, but saw her as if she were standing a little apart from him in warm sunlight, with whispering tropical palms at her back, and the trade winds ruffling her red-gold hair above the exquisite beauty of her face. To him it was the loveliest of all faces, and he had painted it a dozen times, from the stubborn, loyal chin to the slightly tilted nose and the precious, adorable brow with its sprinkling of enchanting freckles.

When he released her, her eyes were shining. Then, slowly, the look of near rapture faded and her face clouded over. She shuddered and took a slow step backwards. He had the feeling that she had more to tell him, that she was more deeply disturbed than he had imagined. Suddenly, he didn't want to hear it.

He lost his head then completely. It was a strange time for lovemaking, but he couldn't help himself. He gathered her in his arms and carried her across the living room to the couch that could be folded back into the wall when he had no occasion to stop painting and turn his attention to a different kind of artistry.

He put her gently down and unfastened her dress, easing the zipper over the places where the cloth fit tightly. He drew the dress down over her shoulders, freeing her brassiere-ensheathed breasts and allowing the light to caress the soft, white skin of her truly lovely back, and the shadowed recess in the small of her back from which it was so easy for a hand to glide downward over the smooth roundness of equally lovely hips.

He could not quite persuade himself to do more than run his fingers lightly along the curve of her neck for an instant, to nibble at her ear, and then plant a single firm kiss in the middle of her back. It was not, he reminded himself, with an effort, quite the right time for reckless abandon. She was still too nervous and upset and was trembling violently.

It was only when it slowly dawned on him that she was not trembling because her nerves had been strained to the breaking point but for a quite different reason that he ceased to be constrained and scrupulous, and embraced her with so fierce an ardor that it put a complete end to all restraint, and led them both along pathways of rapture in a continuously unfolding intimacy....

Later, eating Danish pastry and tasting steaming coffee in the coffee shop a block away from Loring's apartment, the world seemed normal again. Their eyes met across the table, and they smiled, a little sheepishly, at one another.

"Feel better, sweetheart?" Loring asked.

"You know I do," she said softly. Then her smile abruptly disappeared and she frowned slightly. "But David, I have to tell you the rest of it, even though I want to forget it, and I know you would. After I had this feeling of being embraced--"

"You had an erotic fantasy, Janice." David interrupted firmly. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's an honest, sound objective appraisal of a scientific reality that every man has experienced a good many times in his life, and every woman too."

Janice shook her head.

"It would be all right if my erotic fantasy involved a man with no particular cast of features, just a man in the abstract. But it involved a living man, a man whom I'd just met and described to you. He's alive and a rival and you have to think of him in that way. You can't help yourself--no matter how scientifically enlightened you may try to be."

"I know," Loring said. "I was lying to myself and to you. I'd be jealous if it was just a man in the abstract. I'd be jealous if that man wasn't me."

She tried to laugh, tried to force gaiety into her voice. "You don't have to carry it quite as far as that," she said. "The man would be you, without all of the very dear, very special details filled in. You create a mental image first, in the abstract, a kind of unconscious clay model. Then you meet the only man in the world for you, and fill the details in.

"It was a terrifying experience. I knew he couldn't be real but his strength was so great I couldn't free myself. Even if I'd struggled violently and clawed at his face he'd have caught me again before I could reach the door."

Loring's face had gone very white. "But he was so attractive to you that you didn't struggle. Is that it?" Even before the words left his lips he hated himself, but he had to say them.

She shook her head, her eyes firmly denying it. "He was attractive, yes. The handsomest man I've ever seen. But his attractiveness had nothing to do with it. Oh, if he'd been an ugly-faced brute I suppose it might have seemed worse. But not much worse. I couldn't struggle because I'd gone numb all over. I couldn't even raise my arms."

"A man doesn't have to have an ugly face to be a brute!"

"There's nothing more, so you can stop torturing yourself. Quite suddenly he was gone, almost as if he'd never been there. It was all like some hideous nightmare, one of those dangerous, utterly terrifying dreams from which you awaken just in time. They're dangerous because people have died in their sleep just from shock. But I did awaken in time. You'll never know how relieved I felt, how inwardly glad."

"Then why are you still so frightened? Nothing happened to you. It's over and done with. Even his actual presence in your room, when you heard him speak, may have been an hallucination. Perfectly normal people can have hallucinations. What else is bothering you, Janice?"

She toyed with her coffee cup for a moment before answering, then spoke in a low voice. "An even stranger, more terrifying, thing happened. Harder to explain and ghastly in a completely non-human way. I don't think I was in quite as much danger, because it just stood there in the hall watching me without moving at all. But I had the feeling that if it did move I'd be in even greater danger."

"Just give me a moment, darling. I'll tell you, but please don't rush me. Let me tell it in my own way. It was so frightening, so unbelievable that the mere thought of it makes me almost physically ill. In a way, it could be an hallucination, because I did have the shock of the other experience before I saw it. No shock preceded the first experience, as I told you, but this one--"

"All right now, try to stay calm. You're in no danger now. You're safe here with me. Remember that."

"I'll try."

"I love you very much."

"I know you do, darling. Well, I calmed myself down so successfully that I believe I could have gone back to sleep again. But I decided instead to get dressed and go out. I thought the fresh air might help to clear the cobwebs out of my brain.

"My nerves had stopped screaming, but I couldn't shake off the feeling that there were still cobwebs deep in my mind crisscrossing, forming a hideous pattern. Down one of the gleaming strands a black widow spider was crawling slowly toward me."

"Black widow spiders devour their own mates," Loring said. "But the female is about fifty times as large as the male. Only the males have to worry."

It was the wrong way to ease her tension, and he instantly regretted that he hadn't kept silent.

She went on quickly, her voice tightening. "It took me only a moment to get some clothes on and I didn't waste any time with make-up. But I was trembling so I kept dropping things, and I thought I'd never get the door open. I didn't realize just how badly shaken I was, though, until I got out into the hall. There was a dim light bulb at the end of the hall and there were shadows everywhere, large dark shadows that seemed to change shape as I stared at them. Then I saw it."

Her voice shook and she looked quickly around the nearly deserted restaurant, as though expecting someone to be eavesdropping.

TWO

Ten minutes later they were back in Loring's apartment again. David had thought it best to hear the rest of Janice's revelation there. As they entered the large studio living room an oppressive pall seemed to burden the atmosphere; as though they had stepped from the cheerful bustle of the Village street into a place where fear and uncertainty dwelled. David shook off the feeling resolutely; this was his own apartment, and no one dwelled here except himself, and he was a realistic, if somewhat romantic fellow.

They sat down together on the couch which had held them rapturously entwined in one another's arms such a short time ago.

"Now Janice," he said, trying to keep his voice calm and patient, as though he were a doctor dealing with a difficult patient. "You probably had an hallucination. But tell me about this Thing you saw. And remember I am right here beside you."

She spoke with an effort. "I saw it distinctly enough to be sure it was alive and watching me. I saw its face. It was flat, coldly impassive, hideous. No animation in the features at all. The nose was bulbous. Like the nose of an alcoholic. Oh, I know that sounds almost ludicrous, but it's the right description. I can't think of a more accurate one. Its eyes--"

"Go on."

"They were small, dark and smouldering, buried in folds of pinkish flesh. I said no animation, but the eyes were alive, riveted on me as if it were--yes, a ghoul. As if it wanted to pounce on me, sink its teeth in my flesh and suck all the marrow from my bones. There were two little knobby outgrowths protruding from its forehead, one from each temple. They were pinkish too, and if they had been a little longer they would have looked like horns."

"Let me get this straight, Janice. Its face was flat and yet the nose was bulbous. And when the eyes are animated they have a great deal of expression. It makes the other features seem animated too. Aren't there contradictions there?"

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