Ray Rollins fought to preserve the Space
Station--and Earth--from an enemy mankind had
forgotten. An enemy in hiding, awaiting its--
Vengeance From The Past!
By Geoff St. Reynard
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
September 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It started during the program. The little noises were there but I
didn't pay any attention to them, and I don't know now whether I
thought they were the wind and the rain or maybe some realistic sound
effects on tv. Of course they were the small sounds made by the two
things that wanted to get into my house. They tried the doors, turning
the knobs and pressing their bodies against the panels, and then they
prowled around testing the windows. They were as silent as cobras but
windows pushed or doors shoved will make some noise and so the little
creaks were there but I paid no attention to them.
Then I got the feeling that someone was looking at me.
Nuts. My background as a fiction writer was getting under my skin.
Someone watching me, my God, from where? The French windows behind
me? Who'd be out in this downpour? I was glad my wife Nessa was asleep
upstairs. With a baby on the way she needed her rest. Just to ease my
rippling spine, I'd give a quick glance over my shoulder.
I did.
I saw a face like a gigantic mask. Enormous skull, low brow, small
chin and thick-lipped mouth; wide cheeks and a mass of tumbled gray
hair crowning the hatless head. Suggestion of a body like a gorilla's
clad in dark broadcloth. Hands pressed flat on the glass, short thumbs
and long fingers thick as country sausages. Worst of all the ghastly
thing, two thinned eyes that caught the light of the tv lamp and shot
it back at me as glowing crimson oblongs of animal hate. This creature,
standing rock-steady beyond the full-length windows that were
streamed and blurry with the driving rain, this beast, this--
I closed my eyes tight and then opened them. It was gone into the rain,
an optical illusion! It had really spooked me there for an instant, the
old marrow was still cold from the first grisly shock.
I turned and started watching the set again. I started to chuckle to
myself. I heard the French windows snap and groan a little with the
wind. Then I heard the fretful sound of a strained and snapping bolt.
_That_ wasn't the wind! I jumped to my feet and whirled around. I froze
where I stood. A hulking brute with a mask for a face was coming for me
and then I saw the face was a face and not a mask at all.
Another man behind the horror said sharply, "Don't touch him, Old One!"
and those paws with the sausage fingers fell reluctantly. I backed up
two steps and the tv set held me from going any further. The second
intruder passed the horror and thrust out his hand, which was about as
big as a hand can be without becoming an outsize foot; it took me a
moment to realize that he meant me to shake it. When I didn't move, he
grinned and said in his deep voice, "Don't know me, Ray?" and then I
did know him. I was happier not remembering him, I wished I could stop
knowing who he was, but now I did and I knew I was likely going to be
dead before sunup, because he was Bill Cuff.
I did shake hands with him. I'm five-feet-ten and weigh one-sixty
and I'm about as rugged as the average guy, or more so, because I
play handball and used to be a pro footballer before I got married;
but if I'd angered Bill Cuff he might have picked me up and torn me
into little scraps like a piece of bond paper. He was the strongest
man I ever knew. And for a couple of years he'd been badly wanted by
the police, because he had murdered at least a dozen people. I shook
hands with him. I didn't like it but I wasn't going to pander to my
preferences just then.
"Sit down, Ray," Bill said, as if it had been his house. "Sit down, Old
One." This to his companion.
The thing with the face sat on the floor, folding down without effort
till his hams rested on his heels. I sat on the couch. Bill Cuff walked
up and down the room. He kept his voice pitched low as he talked and I
knew that Nessa wouldn't hear a thing if she happened to be awake. I
watched Cuff. He moved back and forth like a great panther brooding in
its cage and planning an escape. There was something so easy in those
movements of leg and body that the effect wasn't altogether human.
Which wasn't surprising, in view of what he proceeded to tell me....
CHAPTER II
"You remember, Ray, the week I disappeared? You remember how I killed
the two museum guards and the three cops, and afterwards the eight or
ten searchers who were pursuing me through the swamp? It made headlines
all over this country and the rest of the world too. Jack the Ripper
had a grandson. Bill Cuff the mad berserker was unleashed on the world,
breaking men's backs and twisting their heads in a nightmare of murder.
Where would he strike next?
"And then I didn't strike, and they said I must be dead, drowned in the
swamplands.
"I wasn't dead: obviously. I'd been discovered by a muster of the Old
Companions, and was living in their HQ, an ancient wooden house in the
center of the swamps. I was learning the history of my race, and the
plans that it had for its future.
"My race, yes....
"Ray we are the Neanderthals...."
I didn't laugh at him, hearing Bill Cuff say that so soberly. I
couldn't. Not with the _thing_ sitting on the floor watching me; the
thing that had stepped right out of a museum reconstruction of the
Stone Age! Cuff went on talking.
"My memories came at me in a flood, remembrances of the dawn of time. I
fled in retrospect from the encroachments of Man, he who was a little
like me but so vastly different; Man who gradually, painstakingly wiped
out my breed. Or so he thought. He forgot the matings, the myriad
couplings of Neanderthal bucks with human women. He forgot that dark
blood runs stronger than light, that the bestial is stronger than the
civilized, that a drop of wolf-blood will often make a dog a ravening
brute, that one small dilution of Neanderthal carries down through
years and centuries to crop up again, full-fledged and vigorous, time
after time in an otherwise placid strain.
"The Neanderthal died, but his seed was carried in the bodies of Homo
sapiens, and after a period cropped out in violent flowering as the
Pict. Luck brought out the great strain in force, and banding together
in the isles, we were a race apart once more. Then time conquered us
a second season; the Picts were vanquished and their pitiful remnants
bred once more into the watery outlander life-form, that of Man.
"Then in later ages we discovered ourselves as different, but never
could make of ourselves a dominant race: so we were hunted in ones
and twos, and when our ancient blood cried for vengeance on Man, we
slew him and died alone. We were the so-called werewolves and the
vampires, the ghouls, the ogres, the incubi and succubi, the Good Folk
and changelings and devils of the woods. We who always fought Man,
unknowing what we were or why we fought, we formed the basis of every
legend that told of horrible alien things lying in wait beside every
path and in every fen and bog and desolute place.
"In the eighteenth century we were the raging madmen of Bedlam.
"Late in the nineteenth, science unwittingly came to our aid. The
Neanderthal man emerged from dry bones as a beast, a manlike animal
who had fallen to make way for Homo sapiens. And gradually those of us
who had the dawn brain, the remembrance of glories far past, realized
that we were not mad, but poor deluded men who thought ourselves
different--we _were_ different. We were the descendants and inheritors
of the Neanderthal, he who came before man and was in many ways
better, stronger, more savagely intelligent and possessed of much
higher capabilities. We were not men, and the time was coming when we
would no longer need to masquerade as men. We were coming into our
inheritance!"
Bill Cuff halted in front of me and his face, broad, heavy-boned,
topped with thick black hair and carrying an expression of cruel and
truculent power, now lit up with malignant glee. I felt a cold chill.
"And all this I remembered in a space of two days!
"What I remembered best was the hate.
"We hated you--oh, God, how we hated! Imagine the hate you'd feel
toward a race from Mars that came and overran your planet and stamped
out your folk till only a pitiful handful were left. Man had come and
usurped _our_ earth, hadn't he? So the blood remembered, and hated."
Bill Cuff laughed suddenly.
"Ray, I'm not mad, as you were just thinking. I offer you that as
proof: we are to a degree telepathic. All of us. Yet _men_ are not.
"It's true. _We are the Neanderthals. We are not human. And we have
returned to take back our inheritance, which is the world!_"