Free The Incredible Melting Man by Phil Smith Page B

stumbled towards it. He was breathing like a man who’d swallowed petrol.
    He rested against the marble flank of the angel and stared up at the spire. The moon broke free and came out to watch him, watch one of the sky children.
    The thing raised his cruel claw towards the black cross and shook it. He wept molten tears which glistened on his wrecked face in the pale moonlight.
    It was a signal for the sky to clear. Beyond the cross the pagan constellations ranked and infinity came out to taunt his poor mortality.
    His lipless mouth hung open and his sunken eyes grew round with wonderment. A deep longing stirred in his heart. The awful claw was again raised, but this time like a child he tried to pick the stars as if they were white flowers.
    From his burning throat a word struggled to form. “Mi—Mine.”
    But he was only to be allowed a brief glimpse of his new inheritance. More clouds were spreading through the sky, blotting out the stars, his stars. A film of blood smeared his eyes and the red mist grew. Panic welled inside his breast and he answered it in the only way he could, in the way the clamouring cells had taught him. He lunged at the human figure beside him, gouging at the hard flesh till the blood ran warm, his own blood.
    He struggled there with his agony in the churchyard until he fell exhausted to the ground, clutching the black marble head of the broken angel.

The dust storm seethed around him like a plague of locusts. The distant sun shrank to a red ball and was blotted out. The red desert collapsed around him, swallowing him into the dark depths of her dry throat.
    He covered his head to still the crescendo of drumming as the thousands of tiny claws explored the strange form of the visitor to their planet. Locked in his suit he felt the mounting panic of claustrophobia. It was as if the fine dust had seeped into his life-support system and instead of breathing air he was breathing the burning sand of Mars.
    He tried to pluck off his helmet, wrestling with the screws, and when they wouldn’t move, tugging, like a man trying to pull off his own head. He was suffocating, and like a drowning swimmer he kicked and threshed. But the distant voice of his reason, of his training as an astronaut, called out to him to be still. Not to panic. And with a terrible effort of will he unlocked his cramped muscles, regulated his breathing. Slowly he fought back against the madness which had seized him, and he relaxed.
    The storm was still, but when he tried to open his eyes he thought he’d been struck by blindness. A huge red blot obscured his vision.
    Again he felt the tide of panic rising within him, and again he had to push it down. The sand had blocked the air supply and his brain had been starved of oxygen. He’d suffered a retinal haemorrhage. The possibilities flashed before his mind, and his reason rejected them all. He stared again straight before him. The blot was still there.
    Then it dawned on him with cold horror. There was something stuck to his face mask, and it was looking in at him.
    He tried to strike it off with his hand, brush it off. But he couldn’t move his arm, it felt like lead. He steeled himself to look on it.
    However hard he tried it was just out of focus, too close to the eye for his straining ciliary muscles to accommodate. But he could tell that it was moving, within itself, like the molecular movement of a liquid excites the tiniest particles suspended there. It was a jelly pulsing with life.
    As he stared, straining to read some message in the random movements, vivid pictures began to flash before his mind.
    He saw the mauve sky and the distant sun, a faint blue star with an attendant moon, the new configuration of the sky he’d so recently learnt to recognise.
    Phobos hung there too, pale and haggard on the horizon.
    But there were clouds moving steadily across the sky, and as the light began to grow they thickened, white and substantial like clouds on earth. And beneath them