Agent of Vega and Other Stories by James H. Schmitz

She whispered: “It could come right through the trees!”

Hogan swallowed.

“It could be right outside the house!” Julia’s voice wasn’t a whisper any more; and he put his hand over her mouth.

“Don’t you smell it?” he murmured close to her ear.

* * *

It was Greenface, all right; the familiar oily odor was seeping into the air they breathed, growing stronger moment by moment, until it became the smell of some foul tropical swamp, a wet, rank rottenness. Hogan eased Julia off his knees.

“The cellar,” he whispered. “Dark—completely dark. No moonlight; nothing. Understand? Get going, but quietly!”

“What are you—”

“I’m putting the fire out first.”

“I’ll help you!” All Julia’s stubbornness seemed concentrated in the three words, and Hogan clenched his teeth against an impulse to slap her face hard. Like a magnified echo of that impulse was the vast soggy blow which smashed at the outer lodge wall above the entrance door.

They stared, motionless. The whole house had shaken. The log walls were strong, but a prolonged tinkling of glass announced that each of the shuttered windows on that side had broken simultaneously. The damn thing, Hogan thought. It’s really come for me! If it hits the door—

The ability to move returned to them together. They left the couch in a clumsy, frenzied scramble and reached the head of the cellar stairs not a step apart. A second shattering crash—the telephone leaped from its stand beside Hogan. He checked, hand on the stair railing, looking back.

He couldn’t see the entry door from there. The fire roared and danced in the hearth, as if it enjoyed being shaken up so roughly. The head of the eight-point buck had bounced from the wall and lay beside the fire, glass eyes fixed in a red baleful glare on Hogan. Nothing else seemed changed.

“Hogan!” Julia cried from the darkness at the bottom of the stone stairs. He heard her start up again, turned to tell her to wait there.

Then Greenface hit the door.

Wood, glass, metal flew inward together with an indescribable explosive sound. Minor noises followed; then there was stillness again. Hogan heard Julia’s choked breathing from the foot of the stairs. Nothing else seemed to stir.

But a cool draft of air was flowing past his face. And now there came heavy scraping noises, a renewed shattering of glass.

“Hogan!” Julia sobbed. “Come down! It’ll get in!”

“It can’t!” Hogan breathed.

As if in answer, the lodge’s foundation seemed to tremble beneath him. Wood splintered ponderously; there was the screech of parting timbers. The shaking continued and spread through the entire building. Just beyond the corner of the wall which shut off Hogan’s view of the entry door, something smacked heavily and wetly against the floor. Laboriously, like a floundering whale, Greenface was coming into the lodge.

* * *

At the bottom of the stairs, Hogan caught his foot in a roll of wires, and nearly went headlong over Julia. She clung to him, shaking.

“Did you see it?”

“Just a glimpse of its head!” Hogan was steering her by the arm along the dark cellar passage, then around a corner. “Stay there. . . .” He began fumbling with the lock of the cellar exit.

“What will we do?” she asked.

Timbers creaked and groaned overhead, cutting off his reply. For seconds, they stared up through the dark in frozen expectation, each sensing the other’s thoughts. Then Julia gave a low, nervous giggle.

“Good thing the floor’s double strength!”

“That’s the fireplace right above us,” Hogan said. I wonder—” He opened the door an inch or two, peered out. “Look over there!”

The dim, shifting light of the fireplace outlined the torn front of the lodge. As they stared, a shadow, huge and formless, blotted out the light. They shrank back.

“Oh, Hogan! It’s horrible!”

“All of that,” he agreed, with dry lips. “You feel something funny?”

“Feel what?”

He put his fingertips to her temples. “Up there! Sort of buzzing? Like something you can almost hear.”

“Oh! Yes, I do! What is it?”

“Something the thing does. But the feeling’s usually stronger. It’s been out in the cold and rain all week. No sun at all. I should have remembered. It likes that fire up there. And it’s getting livelier now—that’s why we feel the buzz.”

“Let’s run for it, Hogan! I’m scared to death here! We can make it to the boat.”

“We might,” Hogan said. “But it won’t let us get far. If it hears the outboard start, it can cut us off easily before we’re out of the bay.”

“Oh, no!” she said, shocked. She hesitated. “But then what can we do?”

Hogan said, “Right now it’s busy soaking up heat. That gives us a little time. I have an idea. Julia, will you promise that—just once—you’ll stay here, keep quiet, and not call after me or do anything else you shouldn’t?”

“Why? Where are you going?”

“I won’t leave the cellar,” Hogan said soothingly. “Look, darling, there’s no time to argue. That thing upstairs may decide at any moment to start looking around for us—and going by what it did to the front wall, it can pull the whole lodge apart. . . . Do you promise, or do I lay you out cold?”

“I promise,” she said, after a sort of frosty gasp.

* * *

Hogan remained busy in the central areas of the cellar for several minutes. When he returned, Julia was still standing beside the exit door where he’d left her, looking out cautiously.

“The thing hasn’t moved much,” she reported, her tone somewhat subdued. She looked at him in the gloom. “What were you doing?”

“Letting out the kerosene tank—spreading it around.”

“I smelled the kerosene.” She was silent a moment. “Where are we going to be?”

Hogan opened the door a trifle wider, indicated the cabin immediately behind the cottonwood stand. “Over there. If the thing can tell we’re around, and I think it can, we should be able to go that far without starting it after us.”

Julia didn’t answer; and he moved off into the dark again. Presently she saw a pale flare light up the chalked brick wall at the end of the passage, and realized Hogan was holding a match to papers. Kerosene fumes went off with a dim BOO-ROOM! and a glare of yellow light. Other muffled explosions followed in quick succession in various sections of the cellar. Then Hogan stepped out of a door on the passage, closed the door and turned toward her.

“Going up like pine shavings!” he said. “I guess we’d better leave quietly. . . .”

* * *

“It looks almost like a man in there, doesn’t it, Hogan? Like a huge, sick, horrible old man!”

Julia’s whisper was thin and shaky, and Hogan tightened his arms reassuringly about her shoulders. The buzzing sensation in his brain was stronger, rising and falling, as if the energies of the thing that produced it were gathering and ebbing in waves. From the corner of the cabin window, past the trees, they could see the front of the lodge. The frame of the big entry door had been ripped out and timbers above twisted aside, so that a good part of the main room was visible in the dim glow of the fireplace. Greenface filled almost all of that space, a great hunched dark bulk, big head bending and nodding slowly at the fire. In that attitude, there was in fact something vaguely human about it, a nightmarish caricature.

But most of Hogan’s attention was fixed on the two cellar windows of the lodge which he could see. Both were alight with the flickering glare of the fires he had set; and smoke curled up beyond the cottonwoods, rising from the far side of the lodge, where he had opened other windows to give draft to the flames. The fire had a voice, a soft growing roar, mingled in his mind with the soundless rasping that told of Greenface’s returning vitality.

It was like a race between the two: whether the fire, so carefully placed beneath the supporting sections of the lodge floor, would trap the thing before the heat kindled by the fire increased its alertness to the point where it sensed the danger and escaped. If it did escape—

It happened then, with blinding suddenness.

The thing swung its head around from the fireplace and lunged hugely backward. In a flash, it turned nearly transparent. Julia gave a choked cry. Hogan had told her about that disconcerting ability; but seeing it was another matter.

And as Greenface blurred, the flooring of the main lodge room sagged, splintered, and broke through into the cellar, and the released flames leaped bellowing upwards. For seconds, the vibration in Hogan’s mind became a ragged, piercing shriek—became pain, brief and intolerable.

They were out of the cabin by that time, running and stumbling down toward the lake.