Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

And through the radiance, through the burning glare that could not be shut out, you saw it coming toward you, its wings thrumming as it closed in with clashing mandibles, while the light turned red around it.

No, no—those were not his thoughts! He straightened and looked at Janice and was glad that she was not being tortured as he was. She was moving ahead of him now, very swiftly, but there was no wavering in her steps, nothing to indicate that a direct attack was being made on her mind.

For some reason they were attacking him only. And almost unendurable as the torment was he could still recognize it as a mental distortion, a coldly merciless assault on his sanity.

He forced himself to resist panic, to remember that darkness was worse than brightness. It was always worse, because in total darkness unconscious fears, hidden and instinctive fears, became monstrous. Darkness was the natural breeding ground for such fears; light, no matter how blinding, an aid in dispelling them. Man's remote ancestors had lived in dread of the coming of night, had huddled together in the darkness of the forest, in the depths of caves, fearing that another dawn would never come for them, knowing how sinister the night could be.

Night fears, hideous and distorted, haunted the dreams of every normal child. It haunted the dreams of savages, and cavemen far back in the Ice Age had crouched around rude fires, fearing an attack from shapes of the night both imagined and real. Cave bears, lions and tigers, invisible demons, the ghosts of the dead. It was darkness they feared, not light. Light, fire, and the dawn were all protections.

The light widened and the pillars on both sides of the building's entrance-way dwindled and fell away. A vast interior swept into view. All about them enormous shadow-shapes loomed, beneath a ceiling so high that it had the depth-beyond-depth look of a stretch of open sky.

The ceiling was ablaze with light and the floor threw back the brightness in concentric circles of shimmering radiance, so that they seemed to be looking at the shadow-shapes through a wavering prism that half blinded them. Then, gradually, their eyes adjusted to the glare and they saw the shapes clearly.

They were no longer shadow-shapes. They were articulated animal skeletons, so large that they would have dwarfed the largest of terrestrial dinosaurs. No Brontosaurus floundering through a Cretaceous swamp in the Age of Reptiles on Earth, no Triceratops or Trachodon had ever loomed so gigantic in Earth's primeval past. But in general aspect the skeletons were unmistakably reptilian, some with shrunken forelimbs, rearing postures and massive skulls armed with sharp teeth, others armor-plated and horned, with bony spikes projecting from their spines, long, angular skulls and short legs of uniform length.

There were three winged skeletons, flying monsters much larger than the horned monsters and a tortoise-like creature eighty or ninety feet in length. At its side stood one of its newly hatched young, with remnants of fossilized flesh still clinging to the splintered egg from which the far from tiny creature had emerged at some remote period in geologic time. The egg was also fossilized and so massive that it would have taken the combined strength of two men to lift it.

For an instant the sheer wonder of it drove all thought of danger from Loring's mind. He forgot where he was and was aware only of that long vista of gigantic skeletons stretching away into brightness. The exhibit dazzled and awed him, made him feel inconsequential, of no importance, a stunned human interloper on a drama of stupendous dimensions. For an instant nothing mattered except the almost hypnotic fascination which Nature imparts to everything colossal in scope and formidable in design.