The World Below

“Applied science,” said the Professor, “is always incredible to the vulgar mind.”

“You know, George, they really did go⁠—disappeared absolutely⁠—and there’s only one door to the room, and we sat round it. There’s no kid about that,” young Danby added⁠—perhaps recognising that his father lacked somewhat in the amenities of social intercourse.

“If I go at all, I shall take an axe,” I remarked irrelevantly.

Bryant leant forward, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

“Templeton went like a Pirate Chief,” he said, smiling slightly.

It was the first time he had spoken.

“Look here, Bryant,” I said, “tell me what really happened, and I’ll do my best to believe it.”

He hesitated a moment, and then answered slowly, “It’s true enough, what they’ve told you, as far as we can tell it. As to theories of time and space, I know no more than you do. I used to think they were obvious. I’ve heard the Professor talk two nights a week for three years, and I’ve realised that it isn’t all quite as simple as it seemed, though I don’t get much further. But the next room’s a fact. We lay things down on the central slab, and the room goes dark, and we go back in two minutes, and it gets light again, and they’re still there. And the Professor says he’s projected them 500,000 years ahead in the interval, and they don’t look any the worse for the journey.”

The room which the Professor had constructed for his experiments was circular, walled in an iron-grey metallic substance, empty, and, when the door closed upon me, it was in absolute darkness.

Waiting there, I had a curious and disquieting consciousness, as of absolute vacancy, such as a disembodied spirit might feel before its next incarnation, but nothing happened, neither did the Professor return as he promised. I knew that the two minutes were long past, but there was no movement in the room, and no break in the darkness. Had he misled me, I wondered, and was I the victim of some quite different experiment⁠—perhaps of how much strain the human mind could endure, and yet retain its sanity? And why was the room so much colder?⁠—and the air against my face was damp, as though a mist were rising.

I looked round, and saw nothing⁠—upward, and the three great stars of Orion’s belt showed through the fog, and the upper part of the constellation; and other stars were in the central heavens, but lower down the mist hid them.

Anyone who, on a strange and lonely road, has reached a place where it branches in two directions, without knowledge or sign to guide his choice, will understand my feeling. Still in doubt, I walked back to the cave-mouth, and then, down the middle of the opal way, came something very swift and light. Someone who was neither man, nor beast, nor monkey. Someone who ran without effort, but as in urgent and silent fear.

She did not see me until she was level with the gap from which I watched her, and when she did, she leapt sideways with incredible agility. The leap took her to the very edge of the opal way, and her left foot pressed for a second on the purple soil beyond. As it did so, with the speed of light itself, the nearest of the bright-green globes shot open in a score of writhing tentacles, of which one caught the slipping foot, and dragged its victim down.

There came one scream, intense and dreadful, high and shrill, and then I watched a lithe furred human-seeming body which struggled against the clinging, twisting arm which dragged her in.

The tentacles were very long and thin, and of a brick-red colour. The one which reached her first was not thicker, toward its end, than a man’s finger, but for a moment only was there any doubt of the issue.

Then a stronger tentacle got a firm grip of its victim’s body, and as it did so the scream came again, but shriller, louder, and more exultant, and I realised that it was the plant that screamed, and not the prize it had captured.

So I went on, never knowing what might open before me at the next step of the turning way, but with a mind which became dulled with the monotony of the passage, so that I went on at last in a semiconscious, dreamlike condition that took no count of time⁠—there was a sound behind me. There was something with a heavier tread than mine that pursued me downward. With an instinct of unreasoned terror I commenced to run. And so doing, I kept ahead, but I gained little. I looked back, but the curving passage was bare. Only I heard the tread, which I could not distance.

A sense of the uselessness of flight steadied me, and I recalled my resolution to meet the unknown boldly, as the safest way.

I stopped, stepped back against the wall, and waited. Then he strode past, and was gone in a moment. He was a man of giant size, with a skin yellower than old ivory, and of a curious smoothness. He wore no clothes, but had a sack or basket hanging upon his back, and round his waist a belt with bright metal studs or clips, from which, three on each side, six of the frog-like apes that had pursued me hung by a leg, swinging and writhing, and snapping with fierce teeth against the flanks of their captor⁠—teeth which made less mark on the polished smoothness of the skin than if it had been the ivory to which its colour compared it.

So much I noticed as he passed. He gave no sign that he saw me.

I was still standing there when I heard him returning.

Then a swell came from the left hand, as though a large boat were passing at no great distance.

I looked round in wonder, but for a moment I could see nothing to cause it.

Then a huge black body rose from the water, like an enormous porpoise, and turned a somersault which sent a heavier swell across the level surface of the lake.

My stroke quickened without conscious effort as I beheld it. But at the first moment I was not greatly frightened. It was evident that it did not pursue me, and my course was not toward it. Fortunately, I called my companion, and the answer, “I am coming now,” was unperturbed in its promptness. I had an instant’s vision of her, as the loose fur contracted, and the slim swift body shot forward.

But the next minute was rapid in thought and action.

My mind called urgently, “There is another one that has risen nearer.”

“They may not see you while they are on the surface. Their eyes look upward only.”

“They may do so, as they roll in their gambols⁠—I think they have done so now. They are both coming.”

“I am coming quickly.”

“It is useless. What can you do against them?”

The two huge brutes were racing over the surface in their competition to secure me, with a speed which would have left a motorboat behind very quickly. I could not doubt that in twenty seconds they would be quarrelling over my divided body.