Read Online Destiny Doll by Clifford D. Simak - Free Book Online

we'd be getting weaker all the time and if we couldn't get it open in the first several tries, I knew that we were sunk. So I tried the harder and I seemed to get some small hold on it and pulled with all my might and could feel the others pulling, too—and the door began to open, swinging back toward us on invisible hinges until there was room enough for a man to get his hand into the crack, that is, if the door had been really there. But I knew, even as I pulled and sweated mentally, that the door had no physical existence and that it was something a man could never lay a hand on.
    Then, with the door beginning to open, we failed. All of us together. And there was no door. There was nothing but the dune climbing up the sky.
    Something crunched behind us and I jumped up and swung around. The wheel loomed tall above us, crunching to a halt, and swarming down from the green mass in the center, swinging down the silvery spider web between the rim and hub was a blob that dripped. It was not a spider, although the basic shape of it and the way it came scrambling down the web brought a spider to one's mind. A spider would have been friendly and cozy alongside this monstrosity that came crawling down the web. It was a quivering obscenity, dripping with some sort of filthy slime, and it had a dozen legs or arms, and at one end of the dripping blob was what might have been a face—and there is no way to put into words the kind of horror that it carried with it, the loathsome feeling of uncleanliness just from seeing it, as if the very sight of it were enough to contaminate one's flesh and mind, the screaming need to keep one's distance from it, the fear that it might come close enough to touch one.
    As it came down the web it was making a noise and steadily, it seemed, the noise became louder. Although it had what one could imagine was its face, it had no mouth with which to make the noise, but even with no mouth, the noise came out of it and washed over us. In the noise was the crunch of great teeth splintering bones, mixed with the slobbering of scavenger gulping at a hasty, putrid feast, and an angry chittering that had unreason in it. It wasn't any of these things alone; it was all of them together, or the sense of all of them together, and perhaps if a man had been forced to go on listening to it for long enough he might have detected in it other sounds as well.
    It reached the rim of the wheel and leaped off the web to land upon the dune-spraddled there, looming over us, with the filthiness of it dripping off its body and splashing on the sand. I could see the tiny balls of wet sand where the nastiness had dropped.
    It stood there, raging at us, the noise of it filling all that world of sand and bouncing off the sky.
    And in the noise there seemed to be a word, as if the word were hidden and embedded in the strata of the sound. Bowed down beneath that barrage of sound, it seemed that finally I could feel—not hear, but feel—the word.
    "Begone!" it seemed to shout at us. "Begone! Begone! Begone!"
    From somewhere out of that moonlit-starlit night, from that land of heaving dunes, came a wind, or some force like a wind, that hammered at us and drove us back—although, come to think of it, it could not have been a wind, for no cloud of sand came with it and there was no roaring such as a wind would make. But it hit us like a fist and staggered us and sent us reeling back.
    As I staggered back with the loathesome creature still spraddled on the dune and still raging at us, I realized that there was no longer sand underneath my feet, but some sort of paving.
    Then, quite suddenly, the dune was no longer there, but a wall, as if a door we could not see had been slammed before our faces, and when this happened the creature's storm of rage came to an end and in its stead was silence.
    But not for long, that silence, for Smith began an insane crying. "He is back again! My friend is back again! He's is in my mind again! He has come