Read Online Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams by C. L. Moore - Free Book Online

nodded. No need to look again upon the fear-ridden faces of the neighboring pair. He understood.
    “What's the job?” he asked.
    The little man hitched his chair closer and sent a glance round the room from under lowered lids. He scanned the faces of his two companions half doubtfully. He said, “There have been many gods since time's beginning,” then paused and peered dubiously into Smith's face.

    Northwest nodded briefly. “Go on,” he said.
    Reassured, the little man took up his tale, and before he had gone far enthusiasm drowned out the doubtfulness in his husky voice, and a tinge of fanaticism crept in.
    “There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten-hot, swung round a younger sun.
    Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it — they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty, world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors in mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshipped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become.
    Some say they were from beyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.
    “Those three gods were the origin and beginning of all other gods that mankind has known.
    All modern gods are echoes of them, in a world that has forgotten the very name of the Lost Planet. Saig they called one, and Lsa was the second. You will never have heard of them —
    they died before your world's hot seas had cooled. No man knows how they vanished, or why, and no trace of them is left anywhere in the universe we know. But there was a Third — a mighty Third set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet; so mighty a Third that even today, unthinkably long afterward, his name has not died from the lips of man. It has become a byword now — his name; that once no living man dared utter! I heard you call upon him not ten minutes past — Black Pharol!”
    His husky voice sank to a quiver as it spoke the hackneyed name. Yarol gave a sudden snort of laughter, quickly hushed, and said, “Pharol! Why—”
    “Yes, I know. Pharol, today, means unmentionable rites to an ancient no-god of utter darkness. Pharol has tunk so low that his very name denotes nothingness. But in other days — ah, in other days! Black Pharol has not always been a blur of dark worshipped with obscenity. In other days men knew what things that darkness hid, nor dared pronounce the name you laugh at, lest unwittingly they stumble upon that secret twist of its inflection which opens the door upon the dark that is Pharol. Men have been engulfed before now in that utter blackness of the god, and in that dark have seen fearful things. I know” — the raw voice trailed away into a murmur — “such fearful things that a man might scream his throat hoarse and never speak again above a whisper. . . .”
    Smith's eyes flicked Yarol's. The husky murmur went on after a moment.
    “So you see the old gods have not died utterly. They can never die as we know death: they come from too far Beyond to know either death or life as we do. They came from so very far that to touch us at all they had to take a visible form among mankind — to incarnate themselves in a material body through which, as through a door, they might reach out and touch the bodies and minds of men. The form they chose does not matter now — I do not know it. It was a material thing, and it has gone to dust so long ago that the very memory of its shape has vanished from the minds of men. But that dust still exists. Do you hear me? That dust which was once the first and the greatest of all gods, still exists! It was that which those men hunted. It was that they found, and fled in deadly terror of what they saw there. You look to be made of firmer stuff. Will you take up the search where