Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

What sobered him he never knew. But something did. One moment he was in a golden paradise with no memory of how he had come to be there and no desire to depart and the next he saw a woman with glazed eyes arising from his side, and movements so blind and purposeless that they chilled him and made his blood run cold. He saw her arise from the bed and step swayingly to the floor and move away from him across the room, her shoulders held rigid, her arms pressed stiffly to her side.

He called out to her and she turned and stared at him for a moment, the veins in her white throat pulsing, her moist red lips slightly parted. Her cheeks were still flushed and her bosom rose and fell with her breathing, rose and fell with a slow trembling and she seemed aroused still and if he had pleaded with her he was sure she would have come running back to him. But he did not plead, because there was no recognition in her eyes.

Her eyes were cold, empty, drained now of all expression. But it was not only her eyes that chilled him. It was the jerkiness of her movements, the stiffness, the rigidity. He had never seen a woman move in that way before.

The woman who stood facing him was not dead and yet she was moving. Not as a living man or woman would move, but as an automaton would move if it were clothed in garments of flesh, and knew more about life than an automaton should know and had perhaps even held converse with the dead.

She did not wait for him to call out to her again, but turned and continued on until she stood before the door. She remained for an instant motionless, staring at the white panels on both sides of the door and then raised her head and stared up at the ceiling, as if the room was totally unfamiliar to her and she was puzzled and disturbed to find herself imprisoned within it.

Then slowly, jerkily, her hand went out and fastened on the knob of the door and it turned in her clasp. She opened the door and went out into the hall and closed it very firmly behind her.

The instant the door closed Loring started to get up from the bed. He quickly discovered that he could scarcely move at all. His limbs seemed weighted and when he tried to raise his arms agonizing stabs of pain darted through them.

He sank back against the pillows, feeling alarmingly light-headed, his vision beginning to swim. The room seemed to waver and recede, the floor to tilt, the furniture take on grotesque and unfamiliar contours. The chairs elongated, the mirror above the mantel misted and seemed to melt, the pictures on the wall changed color. Blues became yellows, yellows blues, the purples deepened, the reds and greens faded out. Landscapes changed their pattern, hills dissolved, rivers widened or broke up into dozens of small streams that snaked in all directions over a gray and desolate plain.

The walls seemed to converge and increase in height and then to sweep away from him like the sides of a towering wave receding from a crippled ship, caught in a gigantic storm-wind and whirled helplessly about.

He saw the door opening as in a glass darkly, the knob a glowing ember amidst a weaving wilderness where nothing else glowed except the faint outlines of dissolving shadow-shapes.