“I’ll deal with you later,” said Sherret between his teeth. “Is there any kind of a doctor in this damned village, anyone who could help?”
“No one can come here. No one can help. Your friend is dying.”
Sherret groaned and rushed back to Lee. The blood was a rapidly enlarging pool. He knelt in it regardless.
“Lee!”
Lee’s face was deathly white, but much calmer. His eyes were still glassy, but now half-closed. A shade of recognition appeared in them.
“It’s gone,” he whispered thickly. “Go, Earthman… before it… returns… Go to Rosala. Give her my love.”
The voice became a faint bubbling sound.
There was a final, choked whisper. “Earthman… I never knew… your name”
Then he died.
Although he’d known him but briefly, this was the only real friend among men whom Sherret had made since he left Earth. He felt desolated. Gently, he closed Lee’s eyes. He continued to kneel, motionless, praying only for control over the murderous anger pouring through him.
Then he got up and went over to Canato.
“Now, explain this.”
“Do as your friend told you. Go now, quickly. I shall see that he is decently buried.”
“I shall not leave this house until you tell me—”
“All right, but you take a terrible risk. Listen, and don’t question, then go.”
Then Canato went on earnestly, urgently, “My kind have become cursed with a severe mental disorder. A major split in the psyche—no time to theorize now. The body-mind relationship has always been inexplicable; it’s far more complex than we ever imagined. In short, the raw antagonistic side of our nature has split away from us. It exists independently, a disembodied entity. Such things are possible, believe me.
“And now, whenever two of us meet, after a short while the two crude entities fuse and form a third being. This amalgam is real and material, but only in relation to those from whom it has sprung. It is concentrated antagonism, the killer in all of us. It tends to attack that one of us whose baser emotions form the greater part of it…
fear, anger.
“Your friend was full of hate and revenge at that time. It helped to kill him. He was terribly frightened, and yet he was brave. He fought the thing with his bare hands.
“You didn’t see it. You couldn’t; it wasn’t part of you. The amalgam dissolved when you came. This sometimes happens when another person joins the group suddenly —it’s as though he upsets a balance of forces. But usually the larger the group, the more power the antagonist derives from it.
“We infect others. Therefore we have voluntarily put ourselves in isolation. My kind are doomed to live and die alone. Each in his own house, keeping his distance, tending his own garden, trying to make some kind of bearable life for himself. Painting, writing, composing, handicrafts. I like making my own furniture.
“But no two of us dare linger together for more than a few—Oh! Go. Please go. I have talked too long.”
Uneasily, Sherret turned to go. But something was forming itself rapidly between him and the door.
“Too late!” cried Canato in despair, and turned his face away. Fear swept through Sherret like a cold wind. He tried to outflank the darkening, cloudy shape and reach the door. And then, all at once, it leapt into shape focus like a stereoscopic moving picture.
But it was no recorded shadow. It was here, now, real as himself, and pulsing with energy.
There were traces of Canato in it, but predominantly it was a nightmare version of himself. Every feature was enlarged and distorted as though by some virulent glandular disease. The body was taller, bulkier, and grotesquely misshapen. The thing was mad and blind and had no conscious control over its actions. Somehow he knew that. It was senseless and without pity. It was an embodied destructive urge.
