ADVANCED SEARCH  

Support WWEnd

WWEnd Blog

WWEnd BookTrackr™

Synopsis

Ted Hilary had gone for a jaunt in the hills just outside the little town of Plummetsville, California, with his fiancée, Eileen Vernon. They were in love, and neither of them was thinking of the three strange Alashes of light that had startled townsfolk three evenings before. Then, suddenly, Eileen thought she sa w something- like something out of a story book, she said. It Iooked like a big lizard, with a long tail, but very pale, almost a shadow. It was taller than she, and it seemed to fade out like a light that had been turned off.

Then it seemed as if they were both swept in a whirlwind, Aung about, and hurled up through space. They heard clattering sounds, followed by a swishing and threshing. And sud- denly, as if blinders had been pulled from their eyes, they could see.

They were in a closed com partment, on a foor that swayed gently, like the deck of an anchored ship. The curving walls, not more than seven feet high, were clothed in a glowing purplish substance, which also coa ted the Aoor and the inverted u of the ceiling. There were no windows, no furniture, and no source of light, except a purplish glow. But when Ted started forward to explore the compartment, some uncanny force stopped him after about a dozen feet, and an order thundered in his mind: "Go back! Go back! Go back!"

Then other captives were brought into the room--Police Chief Michael Y. Callahan, who had been leading a search party for Hilary and Eileen, and later, a detective, George Orson Harwood, whom the elder Hilary had hired. But before these two arrived, Eileen found that she hadn't sufered from hallucinations, back there in the woods. Their captors were, indeed, non-human creatures.

"Be not surprised, Earthlings," came the voice of a creature who appeared suddenly in the room. It was well over five feet tall and covered with shimmering scales. Lizard-shaped, with long arms, each tipped with seven-clawed hands, it had a thick body which, standing almost upright on its two seven-clawed legs, ended in a long, flat tail. Its wedge-shaped head glittered with four variously colored eyes, one pair placed far forward, and one behind; a fifth blinked weirdly near the tip of its tail. Half a dozen octopus-like tentacles twisted and waved between the narrow orifices of the ears and nose, which lay level with the face. The mouth was wide and toothless, the heavy lips of a bluish tint.

And as the prisoners stared, the creature's silvery hue gave way to a pearly glow, then to lemon yellow, and then to almost every other color from bright orange to palest lavender, and from jade-green to glimmering pink, while firefly fashes appeared and faded in its tail-eye. Then vanished.

But the voice continued, in somewhat peculiar, though understandable English. "We Drumgradians," it said, "being able to make ourselves unvisible, have a long time been moving among your people, studying your ways, listening to your speech, and practicing it by ourselves. This is our way whenever we come to a new planet for specimens."

And when Chief Callahan and George Orson Harwood were brought in, the four Earthlings learned that they were in a spaceship, anchored under the sea, which would shortly start on its voyage back to Drumgrade, over nine hundred light-years distant. Yet, due to these creatures' mastery of anti-gravity and anti-matter, once the ship was out of Earth's atmosphere, the passage would be virtually instantaneous!

Excerpt

No excerpt currently exists for this novel.

Reviews

There are currently no reviews for this novel. Be the first to submit one! You must be logged in to submit a review in the BookTrackr section above.

Images

No alternate cover images currently exist for this novel.