following the trail blazed by something that I didn't want to think about. The vital question 24
that burned in my mind was whether it had Vicki or was still trailing her. If it had her...
My question was answered by a piercing scream not too far away from me. Faster now, I ran and suddenly burst into a clearing. Perhaps it is because I want to forget, or perhaps it is only because the night was dark and beginning to become foggy, but I can only remember how Vicki caught sight of my flashlight, ran to me, buried her head against my shoulder and sobbed. A huge shadow moved toward me, mewing horribly, driving me almost mad with terror. Stumblingly, we fled from the horror in the dark, back toward the comforting lights of the lab, away from the unseen terror that lurked in the dark. My fear-crazed brain was putting two and two together and coming up with five. The three cases had contained three somethings from the darkest pits of a twisted mind. One had broken loose. Rankin and Weinbaum had been after it. It had killed Rankin, but Weinbaum had trapped it in the concealed pit. The second one was floundering in the woods now and I suddenly remembered that whatever-it-was, was huge and that it had a hard time lifting itself along. Then I realized that it had trapped Vicki in a gully. It had started down easy enough! But getting up? I was almost positive that it couldn't. Two were out of commission. But where was the third? My question was answered very suddenly but a scream from the lab.
And...mewing.
Chapter Eight
We ran up to the lab door and threw it open. It was empty. The screams and the terrible mewing sounds came from the garage. I ran through, and ever since have been glad that Vicki stayed in the lab and was spared the sight that had wakened me from a thousand awful nightmares. The lab was darkened and all that I could make out was a huge shadow moving sluggishly. And the screams! Screams of terror, the screams of a man faced with a monster from the pits of hell. It mewed horribly and seemed to pant in delight.
My hand moved around for a light switch. There, I found it! Light flooded the room, illuminating a tableau of horror that was the result of the grave thing I had performed, I and the dead uncle. A huge, white maggot twisted on the garage floor, holding Weinbaum with long suckers, raising him towards its dripping, pink mouth from which horrid mewing sounds came. Veins, red and pulsating, showed under its slimy flesh and millions of squirming tiny maggots – in the blood vessels, in the skin, even forming a huge eye that stared out at me. A huge maggot, 25
made up of hundreds of millions of maggots, the feasters on the dead flesh that Weinbaum had used so freely. In a half-world of terror I fired the revolver again and again. It mewed and twitched. Weinbaum screamed something as he was dragged inexorably toward the waiting mouth. Incredibly, I made it out over the hideous sound that the creature was making.
'Fire it! In the name of heaven, fire it!'
Then I saw the sticky pools of green liquid which had trickled over the floor from the laboratory. I fumbled for my lighter, got it and frantically thumbed it. Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to put a flint in.
I reached for matches, got one and fired the others. I threw the pack just as Weinbaum screamed his last. I saw his body through the translucent skin of the creature, still twitching as thousands of maggots leeched onto it. Retching, I threw the now flaring matches into the green ooze. It was flammable, just as I had thought. It burst into bright flames. The creature was twisted into a horrid ball of pulsing, putrid flesh. I turned and stumbled out to where Vicki stood, shaking and whitefaced.
'Come on!' I said, 'Let's get out of here! The whole place is going to go up!'
We ran out to the car and drove away rapidly.
Chapter Nine
There isn't too much left to say. I'm sure that you have all read about the fire that swept the residential Belwood District of California, leveling fifteen square miles of woods and residential homes. I couldn't feel too badly about that fire. I realize that hundreds might have been killed by the gigantic maggot-things that Weinbaum and Rankin were breeding. I drove out there after the fire. The whole place was smoldering ruins.
There was no discernable remains of the horror that we had battled that final night, and, after some searching, I found a metal cabinet. Inside there were three ledgers. Once of them was Weinbaum's diary. I clears up a lot. It revealed that they were experimenting on dead flesh, exposing it to gamma rays. One day they observed a strange thing. The few maggots that had crawled over the flesh were growing, becoming a group. Eventually they grew together, forming three separate large maggots. Perhaps the radioactive bomb had speed up the evolution.
I don't know.
Furthermore, I don't want to know.
In a way, I suppose, I assisted in Rankin's death; the flesh of the body whose grave I had robbed had fed perhaps the very creature that had 26
killed him. I live with that thought. But I believe that there can be forgiveness. I'm working for it. Or, rather, we're working for it.
Vicki and I. Together.
27
THE GLASS FLOOR
From
INTRODUCTION by Stephen King
In the novel
That's the way I felt after re-reading 'The Glass Floor,' the first story for which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell Schweitzer, the editor of
'The Glass Floor' was written, to the best of my recollection, in the summer of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my twentieth birthday. I had been trying for about two years to sell a story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who edited two horror/fantasy magazines for Health Knowledge (
