Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams Read Online Free PDF

gained knowledge there that no human soul could endure knowing and live.
    She looked him full in the face for a long moment, silently, and then turned away to the Alendar again. And Smith thought, just before her eyes left his, he had seen in them one wild flash of hopeless, desperate appeal.
    “Come,” said the Alendar.

    He turned his back — Smith's gun-hand trembled up and then fell again. No, better wait.
    There was always a bare hope, until he saw death closing in all around.
    He stepped out over the yielding carpet at the Alendar's heels. The girl came after with slow steps and eyes down-cast in a horrible parody of meditation, as if she brooded over the knowledge that dwelt so terribly behind her eyes.
    The dark archway at the opposite end of the room swallowed them up. Light failed for an instant — a breath-stopping instant while Smith's gun leaped up involuntarily, like a live thing in his hand, futilely against invisible evil, and his brain rocked at the utter blackness that enfolded him. It was over in the wink of an eye, and he wondered if it had ever been as his gun-hand fell again. But the Alendar said across one shoulder,
    “A barrier I have placed to guard my — beauties. A mental barrier that would have been impassable had you not been with me, yet which — but you understand now, do you not, my Vaudir?” And there was air indescribable leer in the query that injected a note of monstrous humanity into the inhuman voice.
    “I understand,” echoed the girl in a voice as lovely and toneless as a sustained musical note.
    And the sound of those two inhuman voices proceeding from the human lips of his companions sent a shudder thrilling along Smith's nerves.
    They went down the long corridor thereafter in silence, Smith treading soundlessly in his spaceman's boots, every fiber of him tense to painfulness. He found himself wondering, even in the midst of his strained watchfulness, if any other creature with a living human soul had ever gone down this corridor before — if frightened golden girls had followed the Alendar thus into blackness, or if they too had been drained of humanity and steeped in that nameless horror before their feet followed their master through the black barrier.
    The hallway led downward, and the salt smell became clearer and the light sank to a glimmer in the air, and in a silence that was not human they went on.
    Presently the Alendar said — and his deep, liquid voice did nothing to break the stillness, blending with it softly so that not even an echo roused,
    “I am taking you into a place where no other man than the Alendar has ever set foot before. It pleases me to wonder just how your unaccustomed senses will react to the things you are about to see. I am reaching an — an age” — he laughed softly — “where experiment interests me. Look!”

    Smith's eyes blinked shut before an intolerable blaze of sudden light. In the streaked darkness of that instant while the glare flamed through his lids he thought he felt everything shift unaccountably about him, as if the very structure of the atoms that built the walls were altered. When he opened his eyes he stood at the head of a long gallery blazing with a soft, delicious brilliance. How he had got there he made no effort even to guess.

    Very beautifully it stretched before him. The walls and floor and ceiling were of sheeny stone. There were low couches along the walls at intervals, and a blue pool broke the floor, and the air sparkled unaccountably with golden light. And figures were moving through that champagne sparkle.
    Smith stood very still, looking down the gallery. The Alendar watched him with a subtle anticipation upon his face, the pinpoint glitter of his eyes sharp enough to pierce the Earthman's very brain. Vaudir with bent head brooded over the black knowledge behind her drooping lids. Only Smith of the three looked down the gallery and saw what moved through the golden glimmer of the air.
    They were girls.