S14 Ep23: S14E23 - "Vast and Unsympathetic" - Horror Hill

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[Music] Greetings dear listeners and welcome back to Horror Hill. I'm Eric Peabody, your host and narrator. Tonight, I've got a story for you that is truly one of the strangest tales I've ever come across and believe it or not, it's over 100 years old.

This is the thing from outside by George Allen England, first published in 1923. Our setup is fairly straightforward, a group of five researchers returning from the wilderness.

As is to be expected in stories like these, things don't go exactly as planned, but it's how things go awry that really makes this one work. This is weird fiction with a capital W folks and has some horror concepts that are decades beyond what was being written at the time. You'll have to deal with some antiquated language, but stick with it. This one chose to the bone. You're listening to the free edition of this program. If you'd like to help support Horror Hill and also remove these pesky ads, head to chilling tales for darknights.com and click Patrons in the upper menu to sign up today. You'll get instant access to hundreds of ad free stories, so what are you waiting for?

Also, if you're watching on YouTube, do us a favor and drop a like and subscribe, become part of our dark circle listeners. And now, from author George Allen England, I give you the thing from outside. They sat about their campfire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the oncoming menace of the Great Cold. Sat there, solid under the awe of the north, under the uneasiness that the days track had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked, the two women huddled close to each other, fire glow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf furs, a splashing murmur told of the Albany River's haste to escape from the wilderness and reach the bay.

"I don't see what there was in the mere circular print on a rock ledge to make our guides desert."

They knew what it was all right, answered Jandrin, geologist of the party. "So do I."

“He rubbed his cropped mustache, his eyes glinted greatly. "I've seen prints like that before, that was on the Lambrador, and I've seen things happen where they were."”

Something surely happened to our guides before they got a mile into the bush, put in the Professor's wife, while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough knit sweater. Men don't shoot wildly in scream like that, unless they're all three dead now anyhow, put in Jandrin, so they're out of harm's way. While we, well, were 250 wicked miles from the CPR rails.

"Forget it, Jandrin," said Mar, the journalist. "We're just suffering from a attack of nerves, that's all. Can you fill a backie?" "Thanks."

"Well, I'll be better in the morning." "Oh, huh."

“Now, speaking of spooks and such, he launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving to his own satisfaction.”

That nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind's everyday life, but nobody gave him much heed, and silence fell upon the little night encampment in the wilds, a silence that was ominous. Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man's trivial world. Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles upstream, Jandrin discovered another of the prince. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print while the women folk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing, the marking seemed, only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.

“Jandrin Nelt, a well-knit figure and bright macanon, canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.”

"We'd better get along out of this as quick as we can," said he in an unnatural voice. "You've got your wife to protect Thorburn and I. Well, I've got Vivian, and you have." Nipped Mar, the light of an evil jealousy gleamed in his heavy-litred look. "But you need as an alienist." "Really, Jandrin? The professor had mornished. He mustn't let your imagination run away with you." "I suppose it's imagination that keeps this print cold," the geologist retorted. His breath made faint swirling coils of vapor above it. "Nothing but a pot-hole?" judged Thorburn, bending his spare angular body to examine the print.

The professor's vitality all seemed centered in his big bulge skull that sheltered a marvelous thinking machine. Now, he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock. "By jove, but it is cold," he admitted, and looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone, extraordinary. "Dizolved out," you mean, corrected the geologist. "By cold," the journalist laughed mockingly. "When I tell I write this up," he sneered, noted geologist declares frigid ghost "Dizolved's granite."

"Jandrin ignored him," he fetched a little water from the river and ported into the print. "Ice," ejaculated the professor.

"Soladize," frozen in a second, added Jandrin, while Mar frankly stared, and it'll never melt either.

I tell you, I've seen some of these rings before, but every time horrible things have happened, incredible things. Something burned this ring out of the stone, burned it out with the cold interstellar space, something that can import cold as a permanent quality of matter, something that can kill matter, and totally remove it. Of course, that's all sheer poppy cock. The journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb. This something, this thing, continued Jandrin.

A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandrin had been saying.

“"Nonsense," she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering, so she could hardly speak.”

That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging, laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare, they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river. After all, said the professor when supper was done. "We mustn't get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out raving. But we, by jove with our superior brains, we are going to let nature play us any tricks."

And, of course, added his wife, her arm about Vivian. Everything in the universe is a natural force. There's really no supernatural at all.

“Admitted, Jandrin replied, "But how about things outside the universe?" "And they call you a scientist, jibbed Mar, but the professor leaned forward, his brow is net." "He grunted, a little silence fell."”

"You don't mean really," asked Vivian, "that you think there's life and intelligence outside."

Jandrin looked at the girl. Her beauty, hallowed with ruddy gold from the firelight, was a pain to him, as he answered.

"Yes, I do, and dangerous life, too. I know what I've seen in the North country. I know what I've seen."

“Silence again, save for the crevitation of the flames, the fall of an ember, the murmur of the current. Darkness narrowed the wilderness to just that circle of flickering light ringed by the forest and the river, brewed it over by the pale stars.”

"Of course, you can't expect a scientific man to take you seriously," commented the professor. "I know what I've seen. I tell you there's something entirely outside man's knowledge." Parfello, scoffed the journalist, but even as he spoke, his hand pressed his forehead. "There are things at work," Jandrin affirmed with dog-ed persistence. He lighted his pipe with a blazing twig, its flame revealed his face drawn, lined. "Things, things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants, less perhaps." The flame of the twig died, night stood closer, watching.

"Suppose there are," the girl asked. "What's that got to do with these prints and the rock?" "They," answered Jandrin, "our marks left by one of those things. Foot prints, maybe. That thing is near us here and now." "Mars laugh, broke, a long stillness." "And you," he exclaimed, "with an AM and a B asteroid after your name." "If you knew more," retarded Jandrin. "You'd know a devilish sight less, it's only ignorance that's coxer." "But," dogmatized the professor. "No scientist of any standing has ever admitted any, outside interference with this planet." "No, and for thousands of years, nobody ever admitted that the world was round either. What I've seen, I know."

"Well, what have you seen?" asked Mrs. Thorburn, shivering. "You'll excuse me, please, for not going into that just now." "You mean," the professor demanded, "dryly." "If the, this suppositous thing wants to, it'll do any infernal thing it takes a fancy to, yes, if it happens to want us." "But what could things like that want of us? Why should they come here at all?" "Oh, for various reasons, for inanimate objects at times, and then again for living beings, they've come here a lot of times," I tell you. Jandrin asserted with strange irritation.

"And got what they wanted, and then gone away to somewhere, if one of them happens to want us, for any reason, it will take us, that's all. If it doesn't want us, it will ignore us, as we would ignore guerrillas in Africa if we were looking for gold. But if it was guerrilla for, we wanted. That would be different for the guerrillas wouldn't it."

"What do men want, say, of guinea pigs, men experiment with them, of course, superior beings use inferior for their own ends, to assume that man is the supreme product of evolution as gross self-conceit, might not some superior thing want to experiment with human beings.

“"The how?" demanded Mar. The human brain is the most highly-organized form of matter known to this planet, suppose now, nonsense, interrupted the professor.”

All hands to the sleeping bags, and no more of this, have got a wretched headache, let's anchor in blanket bay. He and both the women turned in, jandron and Mar sat a while longer by the fire. They kept plenty of wood piled on it, too, for an unnatural chill transfixed the night air. The fire burned strangely blue, with greenish flicks of flame.

At length, after vast observities of disagreement, the geologist and the newspaper men sought their sleeping bags. The fire was a comfort.

Not that a fire could avail a pin's weight against a thing from interstellar space, but subjectively it was a comfort. The instincts of a million years centering around protection by fire cannot be obliterated. After a time worn out by a day of nerve strain and of battling with swift currents, a flight from something invisible, intangible. They all slept. The depths of space star sprinkled, hung above them with vastness immeasurable, cold beyond all understanding of the human mind.

“I'm Theresa, and my experience in all entrepreneurs started a choppy fire at full-time.”

I know choppy fire is already the first day, and the plan for making me no problem. I have a lot of problems, but the plan for it is not a step from it.

I have the feeling that choppy fire can only be optimized, everything is super simple, integrally and balanced. And the time has passed and the money that I can no longer invest in it. Now, let's test the choppy fire.de. I chose choppy fire with choppy fire. And to the point of view, with the check-out with the world, the best conversion. The check-out with the world, the best conversion. The legendary check-out of choppy fire is just the chop-off of your website.

“This is in the social media and over-eye-dots vision. That's the music for that one.”

Videos of the rest of the vendors made choppy fire, considered to be an ancient hip band,

started to test not only for you, but also for your promotion of choppy fire.de/recorded. As if some gigantic extinguisher had in the night been lowered over it. Growl, Jandron, he glanced about him on the ledge. Prince II, I might have known. He aroused Mar, despite all the journalists mocking hostility, Jandron felt more in common with this man of his own age than with the professor who was close on 60. "Look here now," said he. "It has been all around. See? It put out our fire. Maybe the fire annoyed it in some way.

And it walked round us everywhere. His grey eyes smoldered. I guess by God you've got to admit facts now. The journalist could only shiver and stare. "Lord, what a hat I've got on me this morning. He chattered. He rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand and started for the river. Most of his assurance had vanished. He looked badly done up." "Well, what say?" demanded Jandron.

"See these fresh prince? Damn the prince," retorted Mar, and fell to grumbling some unintelligible thing. He washed unsteadly, and remained crouching at the river's lip, inert. Numbed." Jandron, despite annoying at the base of his brain, carefully examined the ledge. He found Prince scattered everywhere, and some even on the river bottom near the shore. Wherever water had collected in the prince on the rock, it had frozen hard.

Each print in the river bed, too, was white with ice, ice that the rushing current could not melt. Oh, by God, he exclaimed. He lighted his pipe and tried to think horribly afraid.

Presently, as a little power of concentration came back, he noticed that all the prints were in straight lines.

Each mark about two feet from the next.

“It was observing us while we slept, said Jandron.”

What nonsense are you talking to? Demanded Mar, his dark, heavy face, sang. Fire, now, and grub. He got up and shuffled unsteadly away from the river. Then, he stopped with the jerk, staring.

Look, look at that axe. He gulped, pointing. Jandron picked up the axe by the handle, taking good care not to touch the steel. The blade was white, furred with frost, and deep into it, punching out part of the edge. One of the prints was stamped.

"This metal," said he, "is clean gone, it's been absorbed. The thing doesn't recognize any difference in materials, water, and steel, and rocker, all the same to it." Here, crazy, snarled the journalist.

“How could a thing travel on one leg hopping along, making marks like that?”

It could roll, if it was disk-shaped, and a cry from the professor turned them. Thor burn was stumbling toward them, hands out and tremulous. "My wife," he choked. Vivian was kneeling beside her sister, frightened, dazed. "Something's happened," stammered the professor.

"Here, come here!" Mrs Thor burn was beyond any power of theirs to help. She was still breathing, but her respirations were sturderness, and a complete paralysis at stricken her. Her eyes, half open, and expressionless, showed pupils startlingly dilated. No resource of the party's drug kit produced the slightest effect on the woman.

The next half-hour was a confused panic, breaking camp, getting Mrs Thor burn into a canoe, and leaving that accursed place with a furious energy of terror that could no longer reason.

“Upstream, ever up against the swirl of the current the party fought, driven by horror.”

With no thought of food or drink, paying no heed to landmarks, last forward only by the mad desire to be gone. The three men and the girl flung every ounce of their energy into the paddles. Their panting breath mingled with the sound of swirling at ease. A missed blurred sun brewed it over the northern miles, unheeded hosts of black flies,

sang high-pitched canings all about the fugitives. On either hand, the forest waited. Watched. Only after two hours of sweating toil had brought exhaustion to the stop, and the shelter of a cove where black waters circled, foam-flacked.

There, they found the professor's wife. She was dead. Nothing remained to do, but bury her.

At first, Thor burn would not hear of it,

like a madman he insisted that through all hazards he would fetch the body out. But no, impossible. So, after a terrible time, he yielded. In spite of her grief, Vivian was admirable. She understood what must be done.

It was her voice that said the prayers. Her hand that, lacking flowers, laid the fur bows on the can. The professor was dazed past doing anything, saying anything. Toward mid after noon, the party landed again many miles of river. Necessity forced them to eat. Fir's would not burn.

Every time they lighted it, it smoldered and went out with a heavy, greasy smoke. The fugitives ate cold food and drank water. Then shoved off in two canoes, and once more fled.

In the third canoe, hauled to the edge of the forest,

lay all the rock specimens, data, and curios, scientific instruments. The party kept only Mars Diary, a compass, supplies, fire arms, and medicine kit. We can find the things we've left. Sometime, said Jandron, noting the place well. Sometime, after it has gone.

And bring the body out, added Thorburn, tears for the first time what his eyes. Vivian said nothing. Mars tried to lie to his pipe. He seemed to forget that nothing,

Vivian and Jandron occupied one canoe.

“The other carried the professor and Mars.”

Thus, the power of the two canoes was about the same. They kept well together upstream. The fugitives paddled and portaged with a dumb, desperate energy. Toward evening, they struck into what they believed to be the mamatawan. A mile up this, as the blurred sun faded beyond a wilderness of ominous silence.

They can't. Here, they made determined efforts to candle fire, not even alcohol from the drug kit would start it. Cold, they mumbled a little food. Cold, they huddled into their sleeping banks,

there to lie with darkness, leadon on their fear.

After a long time, up over a world void of all sound saved the river flow,

slid an amber moon, knocked by the ragged tops of the connoisseurs. Even the whale of a timber wolf would have come as welcome relief, but no wolf howled. Silence and night enfolded them.

“And everywhere, they found that it was watching.”

Foolishly enough, as a man will do foolish things in a crisis. Jandron laid his revolver outside his sleeping bag in easy reach. His thought blurred by a strange drawing headache was, if it touches Vivian, I'll shoot. He realized the complete absurdity of trying to shoot a visit

and from interstellar space, from the fourth dimension, maybe. But Jandron's ideas seemed tangled. Nothing would come right. He lay there, absorbed in a kind of waking nightmare. Now and then, rising on an elbow, he harkened.

All in vain, nothing so much assert. His thought drifted to better days when all had been health, sanity, optimism, when nothing except jealousy of Mar, as concerned Vivian, had troubled him. Days when the sizzle of the frying pan over friendly coals had made friendly wilderness music, when the wind and the northern star, the war of the real, the whispering vortex of the paddle and clear water,

had all been things of joy. Yes, and when a certain happy moment had through some word or look of the girl, seemed to promise his heart's desire. But now, Dammit, I'll save her anyhow.

He swore with savage intensity, knowing all the while that what was to be would be unmetically. Do ants, by any waving of antenna, stay the down crushing foot of man. Next morning and the next, no sign of the thing appeared.

Hope revived the possibility it might have flitted away elsewhere. Back, perhaps, to outer space. Many were the miles the urging paddles spurned behind. The fugitives calculated that a week more would bring them to the railroad. Fire, burned again, hot food and drink helped wonderfully.

But where were the fish? Most extraordinary. All at once said the professor at noon day camp. He had become quite rational again.

“Do you realize, Jadron, we've seen no traces of life and some time?”

The geologist nodded. Only, too, clearly, he had noted just that, but he had been keeping still about it. That's so, too. Trimed in Mar, enjoying the smoke that some incomprehensible turn of events

was letting him have. Not a must-grad or beaver, not even a squirrel, more bird. Not so much as a Nat or black fly, the professor added. Jadron suddenly realized that he would have welcomed even those. That afternoon, Mar fell into a suddenly vile temper.

He mumbled curses against the guides, the current, the partages, everything. The professor seemed more cheerful, Vivian complained of an impressive headache. Jadron gave her the last of the aspirant tablets,

and as he gave them to her hand in his. "I'll see you through, anyhow," said he. "I don't count now, nobody counts, only you." She gave him a long silent look. He saw the sudden glint of tears in her eyes,

felt the pressure of her hand,

and knew they too had never been so near each other

as in that moment, under the shadow of the unknown.

for none of them could be quite sure about the passage of time.

They came to a deserted lumber camp,

“even more than two days might have passed,”

because now their bacon was all gone, and only coffee, tobacco, beef cubes, and pilot bread remained. The lack of fish and game had cut alarmingly into the duffel bag. That day, whatever day it may have been, all four of them suffered terribly from headaches

of an odd ring-shaped kind, as if something circular were being pressed down about their hands. The professor said it was the sun that made his headache. Vivian laid it to the wind, and the gleam of the swift water,

while Mar claimed it was the heat. Ginger and wondered at all this, in as much as he plainly saw that the river had almost stopped flowing,

and the day had become still and overcast.

They dragged their canoes upon a rotting stage of fur poles and explored the lumber camp, a mournful place set back in an old slash, now partly overgrown with scrub poplar, maple, and birch.

“The log buildings covered with tar paper”

partly torn from the pole roofs, were of the usual north-country type. Obviously, the place had not been used for years, even the landing stage where once logs had been rolled into the stream had sang to decay.

I don't quite get the idea of this, Marx claimed. Where did the logs go to? Downstream, of course, but now would take him to Hudson Bay,

and there's no market for spruce timber or pulpwood at Hudson Bay.

He pointed down the current.

Here entirely mistaken, put in the professor. Any fool could see this river runs the other way, a log thrown in here would go down toward the St. Lawrence. But then, asked the girl, "Why can't we drift back to civilization?"

The professor retorted. Just what we have been doing all along,

“extraordinary that I have to explain the obvious.”

He walked away in a half. I don't know, but he's right at that, half admitted the journalist. I've been thinking almost the same thing myself the past day or two, that is, ever since the sun shifted.

What do you mean shifted from jandron? You haven't noticed it? But there's been no sun at all for at least two days. Hanged if I'll waste time arguing with a lunatic, who's far growled.

He vouched saved no explanation of what he meant by the sun's having shifted, but wandered off grumbling. What are we going to do? The girl appealed to jandron. Aside of her solemn, frightened eyes of her palm outward hands,

and, at last, her very feminine fear, constricted jandrons hard. We're going through, you and I. He answered simply. We've got to save them from themselves, you and I have.

Their hands met again, and for a moment held. Despite the dead calm, a fur tip at the edge of the clearing suddenly flicked aside, shriveled as a frozen. But neither of them saw it.

The fugitives, badly spent, established themselves in the bar room, or sleeping shack of the camp. They wanted to feel a roof over them again, if only a broken one. The traces of men comforted them.

A couple of broken peeves, a pair of snow shoes, with the thongs all nod off. A cracked bit of mirror, a yellowed almanac dated 1899. Jandron called the professor's attention to this almanac, but the professor thrusted aside.

What do I want of a Canadian census report? He demanded, and fell to counting the bunks over and over again. His big bulge of his forehead that housed the massive brain of him was oozing sweat. Mark cursed what he claimed was sunshine through the holes in the roof,

though Jandron could see none. Claimed the sunshine made his head ache. But it's not a bad place, he added. We can make a blaze in that fireplace and be comfy. I don't like that window, though.

What window asked Jandron? Where? Mar laughed and ignored him. Jandron turned to Vivian, who had sunk down on the deconsee and was staring at the stove.

Is there a window here? He demanded. Don't ask me. She whispered. I...

I don't know. With a very thriving fear in his heart. Jandron peered at her a moment.

I'm... Wallace Jandron.

Wallace Jandron, 37-ware-street Cambridge Massachusetts.

I'm quite sane. And I'm going to stay so. I'm going to save her. I know perfectly well what I'm doing. And I'm sane.

Quite. Quite sane. After a time of confused and purposeless wrangling, they got a fire going and made coffee. This, and cube, boolean, with hardtack, helped considerably.

The camp helped, too. A house, even a poor and broken one, is a wonderful barrier against a thing from... outside.

Presently, darkness folded down.

The men smoked, thankful that tobacco still held out. Vivian lay in a bunk that Jandron had piled with spruce bows for, and seemed to sleep. The professor, Freded, like a child over the blisters, his paddle had made upon his hands.

Mar, laughed, now and then. Though what he might be laughing at was not apparent. Suddenly, he broke out. After all, what should it want of us? A brains, of course.

The professor answered sharply. That lets Jandron out, the journalist mocked. But, added the professor,

I can't imagine a thing callously destroying human beings.

And yet, he stopped short, with surging memories of his dead wife. And what was it, Jandron asked,

“that destroyed all those people in violin-lead Spain?”

That time so many of them died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it. Perfor, beyond Mar. I tell you, insist to Jandron.

There are forms of life, a superior to us as we are to ants. We can't see 'em. No ant ever saw a man, and did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These things have left thousands of traces all over the world.

If I had my reference books, tell that to the Marines. Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena, persisted Jandron. Gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can't explain

in his book of the Dan. He claims this earth was once a no-man's land where all kinds of things explored and colonized and fought for possession, and he says that now everybody's warned off, except the owners.

“I happen to remember a few sentences of his.”

In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here. Have come singly, have come in enormous numbers, have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They've been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.

Poor fish to believe that, mocked the journalist, while the professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead. I do believe it, insist a Jandron. The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.

Rubbish. How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places? Peru, Yucatan, and so on, which certainly no primitive race ever built? That's thousands of years ago, said Mar,

and I'm sleepy, for heaven's sake, can it? Oh, alright, but how explain things then? What the devil could one of those things wand of our brains? Suddenly put in the professor. After all, what?

Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food, again, some product or other, or just information. Maybe it is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant hill.

“There's always this to remember that the human brain tissue is the most highly organized form of matter in this world.”

Yes, admitted the professor. But what? It might want brain tissue for food for experimental purposes. For lubricant, how do I know? Gender and fancied, he was still explaining things. But all at once, he found himself waking up in one of the bunks.

He felt terribly cold, stiff, sore. A sift of snow lay here and there on the camp floor, where it had fallen through holes in the roof.

He croaked horsely. Thor burn. Mar? Nobody answered.

There was, nobody to answer.

“Gender and crawled with immense pain out of his bunk and blinked round with blurry eyes.”

All of a sudden he saw the professor. And galloped. The professor was lying stiff and straight in another bunk on his bag. His wax and face made a mask of horror. The open, staring eyes with pupils immensely dilated,

sent jandron shuddering back. A vivid ring marked the forehead that now sagged inward as a femtine. Vivienne croaked jandron staggering away from the body. He fumbled to the bunk where the girl had lain. The bunk was quite deserted.

On the stove, in which lay half charred wood, woods smothered out as if by some noxious gas, still stood the coffee pot. The liquid in it was frozen solid.

A Vivienne and the journalist, no traced remained.

Along one of the sagging beams that supported the roof, Jandron's horror blasted gaze perceived a straight line of frosted prints, ring-shaped, bitten deep. Vivienne! Vivienne!

No answer.

“Shaking, sick, gray, half blind with a horror not of this world,”

Jandron peered slowly around. The duffel bag and supplies were gone. Nothing was left but that coffee pot and the revolver at Jandron's hip. Jandron turned then, a stare, his skull feeling empty as a burst drum, he crept lamely to the door and out.

Out, into the snow. Snow.

It came slanting down from a gray sky it steadily filtered.

The trees showed no leaf. Birch's poplar's rock maples all stood naked. Only the conifer's drooped, sickly green, in a little shallow across the river, snow lay white on thin ice. Ice.

Snow? Brapped with terror. Jandron stared. Why?

“Then he must have been unconscious three or four weeks.”

But how? Suddenly, all along the upper branches of trees that etched the clearing, puffs of snow flicked down. The geologist shuffled after two half obliterated sets of footprints that wavered toward the landing.

His body was letten. He weased as he reached the river. The light, dim as it was, hurt his eyes. He blinked in a confusion that could just perceive one canoe was gone. He pressed a hand to his head, where an iron band seems screwed up tight, tighter.

Vivienne? Mar? Hello? Not even an echo. Silence clamped the world.

Silence and a cold that nod. Everything had gone a sinister gray. After a certain time, though time now possessed neither reality nor duration. Jandron dragged himself back to the camp and stumbled in. Heedless of the staring courts.

He crumpled down by the stove and tried to think. But his brain had been emptied of power. Everything blunt to a gray blur. Snow kept slithering in through the roof. Well, then why don't you come and get me thing?

Suddenly snarled, Jandron. Here I am. Damn you come and get me. Voices. Suddenly, he heard voices.

Yes, somebody was outside there. Singularly agrived, he got up and limped to the door. He squinted out into the gray, sought two figures down by the landing. With numb indifference, he recognized the girl and Mar. Why should they bother me again?

He nebulously wondered. Can't they go away and leave me alone? He felt pivish irritation. Then, a modicum of reason returning. He sensed that they were arguing.

Vivian, beside a canoe, freshly dragged from thin ice, was pointing. Mar was just accumulating. While at once, Mar snarled, turned from her, plauded with bent back toward the camp. But listen, she called, her rough knit sweater all powdered with snow.

That's the way she jestered downstream.

Mar retorted. I'm going to stay right here. He came on, bare headed. Snow grade, his stubble of beard. But on his head, it melted as it fell.

“As if some fever there had raised the brain stuff to improbable temperatures.”

I'm going to stay right here, all summer. His heavy lids sagged. Puffy and evil, his lips showed a glint of teeth. Let me alone. Vivian lagged after him, kicking up the ash like snow.

Within difference, Jandran watched them. Trivia, human creatures. Suddenly, Mar saw him in the doorway and stopped short. He drew his gun, he aimed a Jandran. "You, get out!"

He mouthed. Why, and can't you stay dead? Put that gun down, you idiot. Jandran managed to retort. The girl stopped and seemed trying to understand.

We can get away yet if we all stick together. Are you going to get out and leave me alone? Demanded the journalist, holding his gun steadily enough. Jandran, wholly indifferent, watched the muscle. Vague curiosity possessed him.

“Just what, he wondered, did it feel like to be shot?”

Mar pulled the trigger. Snap. The cartridge misfired. Not even powder would burn. Mar laughed horribly and shambled forward.

Serves him right, he mouthed. He'd better not come back again. Jandran understood that Mar had seen him fall. But still, he felt himself standing there, alive. He shuffled away from the door.

No matter whether he was alive or dead, there was always Vivian to be saved.

The journalist came to the door, paused, looked down, grunted, and passed into the camp. He shut the door. Jandran heard the rotten wooden bar of the latch drop. Within echoed a laugh, monstrous in its brutality.

“Then, quivering, the geologist fell to touch on his arm.”

Why did you deserve us like that? He heard Vivian's reproach. Why? He turned, hardly able to see her at all. Listen, he said thickly.

I'll admit anything, it's all right, but just forget it for now. We've got to get out of here. The professor's dead in there, and Mar's gone mad and barricaded himself in there. So, there's no use staying. There's a chance for us yet.

Come along. He took her by the arm and tried to draw her toward the river, but she held back.

The hate in her face second him.

He shook in the grip of a mighty chill. Go with you, she demanded. Yes, by God, he retorted in a swift blaze of anger. Or how kill you where you stand, hit shank at you anyhow. Swiftly piercing, a greater cold smoke to his inner merrows.

A long row of the cup-shaped prints had just appeared in the snow beside the camp. And from these marks, wafted a faint, bluish vapor of unthinkable cold. What are you staring at, the girl demanded? Those prints, in the snow there, see? He pointed a shaking finger.

How can there be snow at this season? He could have wept for the pity of her, the love of her. On her red tam, her tangle of rebel hair, her sweater, the snow came steadily drifting. Yet there she stood before him and prayed it of summer. Jandron heaved himself out of a very slough of down-dragging lasitudes.

He whipped himself into action. Summer, winter, no matter, he flung at her. You're coming along with me. He seized her arm with a brutality of desperation that must hurt, to save. And murdered, too, lay in his soul.

He knew that he would strangle her with his naked hands, if need were. Before he would ever leave her there, for it to work its horrible will upon. You come with me, he mowed, her by the almighty. Mars scream in the camp, world him toward the door. That scream rose higher, higher, even more and more piercing,

just like the screams of the runaway Indian guides, and what now appear the infinitely long ago.

It seemed to last hours, and always it rose, rose, as if being wrong out of a human body

Higher, higher, than it stopped.

“Jandron hurled himself against the plank door.”

The bar smashed, the door shivered inward. With a cry, Jandron recoiled. He covered his eyes with a hand of the quivered claw-like. Go away, Vivienta, don't come here, don't look! He stumbled away, babbling.

Out of the door, crept, something like a man. A queer, broken, bent-over thing.

A thing crippled, shrunken, and flabby that wind.

This thing. Yes, it was still mar.

“Crouched down at one side, quivering, whimpering.”

It moved its hands as a crushed ant moves its antenna, jerkly, without significance. All at once, Jandron no longer felt afraid. He walked quite steadily to mar, who was breathing in little gasps. From the camp issued an odor unlike anything terrestrial. A thin, grayish grease covered the sill.

Jandron caught hold of the crumbling journalist's arm. Mars' eyes leared, filmed, unseeing. He gave the impression of a creature whose back has been broken. Whose whole essence and energy have been wrenched to sunder.

“Yet, in which life somehow clings, palpitant.”

A creature, vivisacted. Away through the snow, Jandron dragged him. Mars made no resistance. Just let himself be led, whining a little, pulsied, rickety, shattered. The girl, her face widely cold as the snow that fell on it, came after.

Thus, they reached the landing at the river. Come now, let's get away. Jandron made shift to articulate. Mars said nothing. But when Jandron tried to bundle him into a canoe, something in the journalist revived with swift, mad, hatefulness.

That's something lashed him into a spasm of wiery, incredibly venomous resistance. Slavers of blood and foam streaked Mars' lips. He made horrid noises like an animal. He howled, dismaly and bit, clawed, writhed and groveled. He tried to sink his teeth into Jandron's leg.

He fought appallingly, as men must have fought, and the inconceivably remote days even before the Stone Age. And Vivian helped him. Her fury was a tiger cat. Between the pair of them, they almost did him in. They almost dragged Jandron down, and themselves, too, into the black river that ran swiftly sucking under the eyes.

Not till Jandron had quite flung off all vague notions and restraints of gallantry, not until he struck from the shoulder to kill if need were. Did he best to them? He beat the pair of them unconscious, trust them hand and foot with the painters of the canoes, rolled them into the larger canoe, and shoved off. After that, the blankness of a mesherless oblivion descended. Only from what he was told weeks after in the royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal, to Jandron ever learn how and when, a field squad of Dominion foresters had found them drifting in Lake Musa-Wamkek,

and that knowledge filtered slowly into his brain during a period in Coat as Iceland Fogs. That Mar was dead and the girl alive. That much at all events was solid. He could hold to that. He could climb back with that to the real world again. Jandron climbed back, came back, time healed him, as it healed the girl. After a long, long while they had speech together. Causiously, he sounded her wells of memory. He saw that she recalled nothing. So, he told her white lies about capsized canoes and the sad death in realistically described rapids of all the party except herself and him.

Vivian believed. Fate, Jandron knew, was being very kind to both of them.

But Vivian could never understand in the least why her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding ring or any ring, whatever.

Life, for Jandron, life, softened by Vivian, knit itself into some reasonable semblance of a normal pattern.

“But when, at lengthening intervals, memories even now awake, memories crawling amid the slime of cosmic mysteries that it is madness to approach,”

or when at certain times, Jandron sees a ring of any sort, his heart chills with a cold that wreaks of the horrors of infinity.

And from shadows past the boundaries of our universe seemed to back in things that, "God grant, can never, till the end of time, be known on earth."

You've been listening to "The Thing From Outside" by George Allen England. George Allen England, February 9, 1877 to June 26, 1936, was an American writer and explorer, best known for his speculative fiction. There is so much cool shit in this story. Lost time, characters contemporaneously experiencing different seasons, fluctuations in perceived reality that might not just be hallucinations.

“It's almost as if the characters start living in parallel versions of the same event, details slipping into and out of their increasingly divergent experiences.”

This is stuff that would seem forward thinking even in the 1970s, but in the 1920s, get out of here.

You know I love my lovecraft, but I gotta say, as far as truly weird fiction goes, this blows the pants off almost all of Lovecraft's offerings. I hope that you enjoyed this strange time capsule as much as I did. Though I'm about 90 years too late, I extend my thanks to George Allen England for one hell of a story. Also, thanks to you fine folks for joining me.

I'll be back with more horror-hill next week, and until then, stay spooky.

You've been listening to the horror-hill podcast, a production of chilling entertainment and the creative team at chilling tales for Dark Nights. Tonight's episode was hosted, narrated, scored and finalized by yours truly, Eric Peabody, additional music by Nikki McSorley.

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