“The snakes!” screamed Poe.
And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red plumage on the sand, a mile away.
“At it!” shrieked Poe. “The plan’s changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it! Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!”
And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down the empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the furthest hollow. As if a great charred cauldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms!
“Kill them!” screamed Poe, running. “Perhaps,” murmured Mr. Hawthorne, left behind, alone, at the edge of the ancient sea.
THE ROCKET MEN LEAPED OUT of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.
The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.
“A new world,” he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. “The old world left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.” He nodded crisply to his lieutenant. “The books.”
The ancient books were brought forth.
Firelight limned the faded gilt titles: The Willows, The Outsider, Behold the Dreamer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar Allan Poe and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the old names, the evil names, the black names, the blasphemous names.
“A new world. With a gesture, we burn the last of the old!”
The captain ripped pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.
A scream!
Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the encroaching and uninhabited sea.
Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan’s sea drain down the shingles and evaporate.
It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before, was something.
The clean rocket men faced the directions from which the scream had come rushing forward like a tide.
The captain neatly disposed of the last book.
The air stopped quivering.
Silence.
The rocket men leaned and listened.
“Captain, did you hear it?”
“No.”
“Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A black wave. Big. Running at us.”
“You were mistaken.”
“But the sound?”
“I say you heard nothing.”
“There, sir!”
“What!”
“See it? There! The castle! Way over! That black castle, near that lake! It’s splitting in half. It’s falling!”
The men stared. “I don’t see it.”
“Yes, it’s falling! It’s all fire and rock.”
The men squinted and shuffled forward.
Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a thought there. “I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child. A book I read. A story. Usher, I think it was. Yes, Usher. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’—”
“By whom?”
“I—I can’t remember.”
“Usher? Never heard of it.”
“Yes, Usher, that’s what it was. I saw it fall again, just now, like in the story.”
“Smith!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir!” A brisk salute.
“Be careful.”
The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.
“Why,” whispered Smith, disappointed, “there’s no one here at all, is there? No one here at all.”
The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.
Carnival of Madness
“During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher …”
Mr. William Stendahl paused in his quotation. There, upon a low black hill, stood the house, its cornerstone bearing the inscription: 2249 A.D.
Mr. Bigelow, the architect said, “It’s completed. Here’s the key, Mr. Stendahl.”
The two men stood together, silently, in the quiet autumn afternoon. Blueprints rustled on the raven grass at their feet.
“The House of Usher,” said Mr. Stendahl, with pleasure. “Planned, built, bought, paid for. Wouldn’t Mr. Poe be delighted?”
Mr. Bigelow squinted. “Is it everything you wanted, sir?”
“Yes!”
“Is its color right? Is it desolate and terrible?”
“Very desolate, very terrible!”
“The walls are—bleak?”
“Amazingly so!”
“The tarn, is it ‘black and lurid’ enough?”
“Most incredibly black and lurid.”
“And the sedge—we’ve dyed it, you know—is it the proper gray and ebon?”
“Hideous!”
Mr. Bigelow consulted his architectural plans. From these he quoted in part: “Does the whole structure cause an ‘iciness, a sickening of the heart, a dreariness of thought?’ the House, the lake, the land, Mr. Stendahl?”
“Mr. Bigelow, your hand! Congratulations! It’s worth every penny. My word, it’s beautiful!”
“Thank you. I had to work in total ignorance. A puzzling job. You notice, it’s always twilight here, this land, always October, barren, sterile, dead. It took a bit of doing. We killed everything! Ten thousand tons of DDT. Not a snake, frog, fly or anything left! Twilight, always, Mr. Stendahl, I’m proud of that. There are machines, hidden, which blot out the sun. It’s always properly ‘dreary’.”
Stendahl drank it in, the dreariness, the oppression, the fetid vapors, the whole ‘atmosphere,’ so delicately contrived and fitted. And that House! That crumbling horror, that evil lake, the fungi, the extensive decay! Plastic or otherwise, who could guess?
He looked at the autumn sky. Somewhere, above, beyond, far off, was a sun. Somewhere it was the month of May, a yellow month with a blue sky. Somewhere above, the passenger rockets burned east and west across the continent in a modern land. The sound of their screaming passage was muffled and killed by this dim, sound-proofed world, this ancient autumn world.
“Now that my job’s done,” said Mr. Bigelow, uneasily, “I feel free to ask what you’re going to do with all this?”
“With Usher? Haven’t you guessed?”
“No.”
“Does the name Usher mean nothing to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, what about this name: Edgar Allan Poe?”
Mr. Bigelow shook his head.
“Of course.” Stendahl snorted delicately, a combination of dismay and contempt. “How could I expect you to know blessed Mr. Poe? He died a long while ago, before Lincoln. That’s four centuries back. All of his books were burned in The Great Fire.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Bigelow, wisely, “One of those!”
“Yes, one of those, Bigelow. He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future, were burned. Heartlessly. They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. Centuries ago it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures, there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”
“I see.”
“Afraid of the word politics (which eventually became a synonym for communism among the more reactionary elements, so I hear, and it was worth your life to use the word!), and with a screw tightened here, a bolt fastened there, a push, a pull, a yank, Art and Literature were soon like a great twine of taffy strung all about, being twisted in braids and tied in knots, and thrown in all directions, until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it. Then the film cameras chopped short and the theatres turned dark, and the print presses trickled down from a great Niagara of reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of ‘pure’ material. Oh, the word “escape” was radical, too, I tell you!”
“Was it?”
“It was! Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in midair! So, they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning twenty years ago, in 2229, they lined them up, Saint Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose, oh, what a wailing! and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for, of course, it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!) and Once Upon A Time became No More!
“And they spread
