Screaming Science Fiction

  “’77, and stories leak out of the Ukraine of fifty thousand square miles turned brown and utterly barren in the space of a single week. Since then the spread has been very slow, but it hasn’t stopped. The Russians blamed ‘us’ and we accused ‘them’ of testing a secret weapon.

  “’79 and ’80, and oil tankers sinking or grounding themselves left, right and center. Miles-long oil slicks and chemicals jettisoned at sea, and whales washed up on the beaches, and Greenpeace, and the Japanese slaughtering dolphins. Another drought, this time in Australia, and a plague of mice to boot. Some Aussie commenting that ‘The poor ’roos are dying in their thousands—and a few aboes, too….’ And great green swarms of aphids and the skies bright with ladybirds.

  “Lots of plagues, in fact. We were being warned, you see?

  “And ’84! Ah—1984! Good old George!

  “He was wrong, of course, for it wasn’t Big Brother at all. It was Big Sister—Ma Nature Herself. And in 1984 She really started to go off the rails. ’84 was half of India eaten by locusts and all of Africa down with a mutant strain of beriberi. ’84 was the year of the poisoned potatoes and sinistral periwinkles, the year it rained frogs over wide areas of France, the year the cane-pest shot sugar beet right up to the top of the crops.

  “And not only Ma Nature but Technology, too, came unstuck in ’84. The Lake District chemically polluted—permanently; nuclear power stations at Loch Torr on one side of the Atlantic and Long Island on the other melting down almost simultaneously; the Americans bringing back a ‘bug’ from Mars (see, even a real Martian invasion); oil discovered in the Mediterranean, and new fast-drilling techniques cracking the ocean floor and allowing it to leak and leak and leak—and even Red Adair shaking his head in dismay. How do you plug a leak two hundred fathoms deep and a mile long? And that jewel of oceans turning black, and Cyprus a great white tombstone in a lake of pitch. ‘Aphrodite Rising From The High-Grade.’

  “Then ’85 and ’86; and they were strange, too, because they were so damned quiet! The lull before the storm, so to speak. And then—

  “Then it was ’87, ’88 and ’89. The American space-bug leaping to Australia and New Zealand and giving both places a monstrous malaise. No one doing any work for six months; cattle and sheep dead in their millions; entire cities and towns burning down because nobody bothered to call out the fire services, or they didn’t bother to come…. And all the world’s beaches strewn with countless myriads of great dead octopuses, a new species (or a mutant strain) with three rows of suckers to each tentacle; and their stink utterly unbearable as they rotted. A plague of great, fat seagulls. All the major volcanoes erupting in unison. Meteoric debris making massive holes in the ionosphere. A new killer cancer caused by sunburn. The common cold cured!—and uncommon leprosy spreading like wildfire through the Western World.

  “And finally—

  “Well, that was ‘When.’ It was also, I fancy, ‘Where’ and ‘How.’ As to ‘Why’—I give a mental shrug. I’m tired, probably hungry. I have some sort of lethargy—the spacebug, 1 suppose—and I reckon it won’t be long now. I had hoped that getting this down on paper might keep me active, mentally if not physically. But….

  “Why?

  “Well, I think I’ve answered that one, too.

  “Ma Nature strikes back. Get rid of the human vermin. They’re lousing up your planet! And maybe that’s what gave Her the idea. If fire and flood and disease and disaster and war couldn’t do the trick, well, what else could She do? They advise you to fight fire with fire, so why not vermin with vermin?”

  “They appeared almost overnight, five times larger than their immediate progenitors and growing bigger with each successive hatching; and unlike the new octopus they didn’t die; and their incubation period down to less than a week. The superlice. All Man’s little body parasites, all of his tiny, personal vampires, growing in the space of a month to things as big as your fist. Leaping things, flying things, walking sideways things. To quote a certain Irishman: ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’

  “They’ve sucked, all right. They’ve sucked the world to death. New habits, new protections—new immunities and near-invulnerability—to go with their new size and strength. The meek inheriting the Earth? Stamp on them and they scurry away. Spray them with lethal chemicals and they bathe in them. Feed them DDT and they develop a taste for it. ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’

  “And the whole world down with the creeping, sleeping sickness. We didn’t even want to fight them! Vampires, and they’ve learned new tricks. Camouflage…. Clinging to walls above doors, they look like bricks or tiles. And when you go through the door…. And their bite acts like a sort of LSD. Brings on mild hallucinations, a feeling of well-being, a kind of euphoria. In the cities, amongst the young, there were huge gangs of ‘bug-people!’ My God!

  “They use animals, too; dogs and cats—as mounts, to get them about when they’re bloated. Oh, they kill them eventually, but they know how to use them first. Dogs can dig under walls and fences; cats can climb and squeeze through tiny openings; crows and other large birds can fly down on top of things and into places….

  “Me, I was lucky—if you can call it that. A bachelor, two dogs, a parakeet and an outdoor aviary. My bungalow entirely netted in; fine wire netting, with trees, trellises and vines. And best of all situated on a wild stretch of the coast, away from mankind’s great masses. But even so, it was only a matter of time.

  “They came, found me, sat outside my house, outside the wire and the walls, and they waited. They found ways in. Dogs dug holes for them, seagulls tore at the mesh overhead. Frantically, I would trap, pour petrol, burn, listen to them pop! But I couldn’t stay awake for ever. One by one they got the birds, leaving little empty bodies and bunches of feathers. And my dogs, Bill and Ben, which I had to shoot and burn. And this morning when I woke up, Peter parakeet.

  “So there’s at least one of them, probably two or three, here in the room with me right now. Hiding, waiting for night. Waiting for me to go to sleep. I’ve looked for them, of course, but—

  “Chameleons, they fit perfectly into any background. When I move, they move. And they imitate perfectly. But they do make mistakes. A moment ago I had two hairbrushes, identical, and I only ever had one. Can you imagine brushing your hair with something like that? And what the hell would I want with three fluffy slippers? A left, a right—and a center?

  “…I can see the beach from my window. And half a mile away, on the point, there’s Carter’s grocery. Not a crust in the kitchen. Dare I chance it? Do I want to? Let’s see, now. Biscuits, coffee, powdered milk, canned beans, potatoes—no, strike the potatoes. A sack of carrots….”

  The man on the beach grinned mirthlessly, white lips drawing back from his teeth and freezing there. A year ago he would have expected to read such in a book of horror fiction. But not now. Not when it was written in his own hand.

  The breeze changed direction, blew on him, and the sand began to drift against his side. It blew in his eyes, glazed now and lifeless. The shadows lengthened as the sun started to dip down behind the dunes. His body grew cold.

  Three hairy sacks with pincer feet, big as footballs and heavy with his blood, crawled slowly away from him along the beach….

  No Way Home

  Like “Snarker’s Son”—but very unlike it, too—“No Way Home” is a parallel universe story, first published in the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) in September of 1975. I was still a serving soldier and had recently spent time back in the UK on leave (furlough). But many of the highways seemed to have been extended, rerouted, changed—some of them even appeared to have mutated!—while I’d been out of the country. Also, I was used to driving on the right-hand side of the road and back in the UK I was driving on the left again; or maybe I was just tired out and not taking enough care reading the road signs. Whatever, the fact is I’d gone and got myself lost. Now how in hell can you get lost in your own backyard? Well, actually it?
??s easy—even in your own backyard—and easier still in hell….

  If you motor up the Ml past Lanchester from London and come off before Bankhead heading west across the country, within a very few miles you enter an area of gently rolling green hills, winding country roads and Olde Worlde villages with quaint wooden-beamed street-corner pubs and noonday cats atop leaning ivied walls. The roads there are narrow, climbing gently up and ribboning back down the green hills, rolling between fields, meandering casually through woods and over brick- and wooden-bridged streams; the whole background forms a pattern of peace and tranquility rarely disturbed over the centuries.

  By night, though, the place takes on a different aspect. An almost miasmal aura of timelessness, of antiquity, hangs over the brooding woods and dark hamlets. The moon silvers winding hedgerows and ancient thatched roofs, and when the pubs close and the last lights blink out in farm and cottage windows, then it is as if Night had thrown her blackest cloak over the land, when even the most powerful headlight’s beam penetrates the resultant darkness only with difficulty. Enough to allow you to drive on the narrower roads, if you drive slowly and carefully.

  Strangers motoring through this region—even in daylight hours—are known occasionally to lose their way, to drive the same labyrinthine lanes for hours on end in meaningless circles. The contours of the countryside often seem to defy even the most accurate sense of direction, and the roads and tracks never quite seem to tally with printed maps of the area. There are rumors almost as old as the area itself that persons have been known to pass into oblivion here—like gray smoke from cottage chimneystacks disappearing into air—never to come out again.

  Not that George Benson was a stranger. True, he had not been home to England for many years—since running off as a youth, later to marry and settle in Germany—but as a boy he had known this place well and must have cycled for thousands of miles along dusty summer roads, lanes and tracks, even bridle-paths through the heart of this very region.

  And that was why he was so perturbed now: not because of a pack of lies and fairy stories and old wives’ tales heard as a boy, but because this was his home territory, where he’d been born and reared. Indeed, he felt more than perturbed, stupid almost. A fellow drives all the way north through Germany from Dortmund, catches the car ferry from Bremerhaven into Harwich, rolls on up-country having made the transition from right- to left-of-the-road driving with only a very small effort…. and then hopelessly loses himself within only a fistful of miles from home!

  Anger at his own supposed stupidity turned to bitter memories of his wife, then to an even greater anger. And a hurt….

  It didn’t hurt half so much now, though, not now that it was all over. But the anger was still there. And the memories of the milk of marriage gone sour. Greta had just upped and left home one day. George, employing the services of a detective agency, had traced his wife to Hamburg, where he’d found her in the bed of a nightclub crooner, an old boyfriend who finally had made it good.

  “Damn all Krauts!” George cursed now as he checked the speed of his car to read out the legend on a village signpost. His headlights picked the letters out starkly in the surrounding darkness. “Middle Hamborough?—Never bloody heard of it!” Again he cursed as, making a quick decision, he spun the steering wheel to turn his big car about on the narrow road. He would have to start back-tracking, something he hated doing because it seemed so inefficient, so wasteful. “And blast and damn all Kraut cars!” he added as his front wheels bounced jarringly on to and back off the high stone roadside curb.

  “Greta!” he quietly growled to himself as he drove back down the road away from the outskirts of Middle Hamborough. “What a bitch!” For of course she had blamed him for their troubles, saying that she couldn’t stand his meanness. Him, George Benson, mean! She simply hadn’t appreciated money. She’d thought that Deutschmarks grew on trees, that pfennigs gathered like dew on the grass in the night. George, on the other hand, had inherited many of the pecuniary instincts of his father, a Yorkshireman of the Old School—and of Scottish stock to boot—who really understood the value of “brass.” His old man had used to say: “Thee tak’ care o’ the pennies, Georgie, an’ the pounds’ll tak’ care o’ theysels!”

  George’s already pinched face tightened skull-like as his thoughts again returned to Greta. She had wanted children. Children! Damned lucky thing he had known better than to accept that! For God’s sake, who could afford children?

  Then she’d complained about the food—like she’d been complaining for years—saying that she was getting thin because the money he gave her was never enough. But George liked his women willowy and fragile; that way there was never much fight in them.

  Well, he’d certainly misjudged Greta, there had been plenty of fight left in her. And their very last fight had been about food, too. He had wanted her to buy food in bulk at the supermarkets for cheapness; in turn she’d demanded a deep freezer so that the food she bought wouldn’t go bad; finally George had gone off the deep end when she told him how much the freezer she had in mind would cost!

  She left him that same day; moreover, she ate the last of the wurstchen before she went! George grinned mirthlessly as he gripped the steering wheel tighter, wishing it were Greta’s scrawny neck. By God—she’d be sorry when she was fat!

  Still, George had had the last laugh. Their home had been paid for fifty-fifty, but it had been in George’s name. He had sold it; likewise the furniture and the few clothes she’d left behind. The car had been half hers, too—but again in George’s name, for Greta couldn’t drive. It was all his now: his money, his car, everything. As he’d done so often in the last twenty-four hours, he took one hand from the wheel to pat reassuringly the fat wallet where its outline bulged out the upper right front pocket of his jacket.

  It was the thought of money that sent George’s mind casting back an hour or so to a chance encounter at Harvey’s All-Night-Grill, just off the Ml. This drunk had been there—oh, a real joker, and melancholy with it, too—but he had been so well-heeled! George remembered the man’s queer offer: “Just show me the way home, that’s all—and all I’ve got you can have!” And he had carried a checkbook showing a credit of over two thousand pounds….

  That last was hearsay, though, passed on to George by Harvey himself, the stubble-jawed, greasy-aproned owner of the place. Now that earlier accidental meeting and conversation suddenly jumped up crystal clear in George’s mind.

  It had started when George mentioned to Harvey that he was heading for Bellington; that was when the other fellow had started to take an interest in him and had made his weird offer about being shown the way home.

  God damn! George sat bolt upright behind the steering wheel. Come to think of it, he had heard of Middle Hamborough before. Surely that was the name of the place the drunk had been looking for—for fifteen years!

  George hadn’t paid much attention to the man at the time, had barely listened to his gabbled, drunken pleading. He’d passed the fellow off quite simply as some nut who’d heard those fanciful old rumors about people getting lost in the surrounding countryside, a drunk who was making a big play of his own personal little fantasy. He would be all right when he sobered up.

  Now that George thought about it, though—well, why should anyone make up a story like that? And, come to think of it, the man hadn’t seemed all that drunk. More tired and, well, lost, really….

  Just then, cresting a low hill, as his headlights flashed across the next shallow valley, George saw the house with the big garden and the long drive winding up to it. The place stood to the right of the road, atop the next hill, and the gravel drive rose up from an ornamental stone arch and iron gate at the roadside. Dipping down the road and climbing the low hill, George read the wrought-iron legend on the gate: high house. And now he remembered more of the—drunk’s?—story.

  The man had called himself Kent, and fifteen years ago, on his tenth wedding anniversary, he’d left home one morning to drive to
London, there to make certain business arrangements with city-dwelling colleagues. He had taken a fairly large sum of money with him when he drove from High House, the home he himself had designed and built, and this had worked out just as well for him. Turning right off the Middle Hamborough road through Meadington and on to the London road at Bankhead, Kent had driven to the city. And in London—

  Kent was a partner in a building concern with head offices in the city…or at least he had been. For in London he discovered that the firm had never existed, that his colleagues, Milton and Jones, while they themselves were real enough, swore they had never heard of him. “Milton, Jones & Kent” did not exist; the firm was known simply as “Milton & Jones.” Not only did they not know him, they tried to have him jailed for attempted fraud!

  That was only the start of it, for the real horror came when he tried to get back home—only to discover that there just wasn’t any way home! George now remembered Kent’s apparently drunken phrase: “A strange dislocation of space and time, a crossing of probability tracks, a passage between parallel dimensions—and a subsequent snapping-back of space-time elastic….” Now surely only a drunk would say something like that? A drunk or a nut. Except Harvey had insisted that Kent was sober. He was just tired, Harvey said, confused, half mad trying to solve a fifteen-year-old problem that wasn’t. There had never been a Middle Hamborough, Harvey insisted. The place wasn’t shown on any map; you couldn’t find it in the telephone directory; no trains, buses, or roads went there. Middle Hamborough wasn’t!

  But Middle Hamborough was, George had seen it, or—

  Could it be that greasy old Harvey had somehow been fooling that clown all these years, milking his money drop by drop, cashing in on some mental block or other? Or had they both simply been pulling George’s leg? If so, well, it certainly seemed a queer sort of joke….