Lifeforce by Colin Wilson Page A

sign of it. “Was she so attractive?”
    The desire not to go on was so strong that he was silent for almost a minute. He said finally: “It’s difficult to explain.”
    “Would you say, for example, that she had some hypnotic effect?”
    Carlsen felt angry with himself for feeling so embarrassed. He said, stumbling over the words: “You know, it’s… difficult… I mean it’s strange how hard it is to talk about it.”
    Fallada said quickly: “But it’s important to talk about it. This is something I want to understand.”
    “Okay.” Carlsen swallowed. “Did you ever read a poem called ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ when you were at school?”
    “No, but I know the legend. My mother was born in Hamelin.”
    “Well, in the poem, the piper leads all the kids away into the side of a mountain. And they all follow him willingly. Only one gets left behind because he’s lame. And he describes what the music seemed to promise… something about… I can’t remember the words exactly, but a joyous land where everything is new and strange. A marvellous, ideal kind of place where mince pies grow on trees and the rivers are made of ice cream soda.” He swallowed a drink, feeling the dry heat burning his cheeks and ears. ” That’swhat it was like.”
    “And can you describe what she seemed to promise?”
    “Well… nothing. In that sense. But it was the same kind of thing — a kind of vision of an ideal woman, if you like.”
    “The Ewig-weibliche? ”
    Carlsen looked blank; Fallada explained: “Goethe’s eternal-feminine principle. He ends his Faust: ‘The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on.’ ”
    Carlsen nodded. He was now experiencing a strange sense of relief. “That’s it. That’s true. I suppose Goethe must have met a woman like this. The kind of thing you dream about as a child. You look at your sister’s friends, and you think they must be goddesses. When you’re older, you get more realistic and you think women aren’t like that at all.”
    Fallada said softly: “But the dream remains.”
    “Yes, the dream. And that’s why I couldn’t believe it. Dreams don’t just die like that.”
    “There is only one thing you must remember.” He waited until Carlsen looked up from his glass. “This creature was not a woman.” As Carlsen made an impatient gesture, he went on quickly: “I mean that these creatures are totally alien to everything we mean by human.”
    Carlsen said stubbornly: “They’re human oid.”
    Fallada said sharply: “No, not even that. You forget that the human body is a highly specialised piece of adaptation. A quarter of a billion years ago, we were fishes. We developed arms and legs and lungs to move about on land. It is a million-to-one chance that creatures from another galaxy could have evolved along the same lines.”
    “Unless conditions on their planet were similar to earth.”
    “Possible, but unlikely. We now have a pathologist’s report on the bodies of the three aliens. Their digestive systems are identical to those of human beings.”
    “So?”
    Fallada leaned forward. “They live by draining the life of other creatures. They don’t need food.”
    Carlsen shook his head. “I suppose so. But… I don’t know. We just don’t know, do we? We don’t really know a damn thing — not one single definite fact.”
    Fallada said patiently, like a professor coaching a backward student: “I think we have a few facts. For example, we are fairly certain that the girl on the railway line was killed by one of these creatures, whatever they are. We also know that the fingerprints found on her throat belonged to a man called Clapperton.” He paused; Carlsen said nothing. “That suggests two possibilities. Either that Clapperton was acting in obedience to the vampires, or that one of them had gained possession of his body.”
    It was what Carlsen had known he was going to say; nevertheless, it made his scalp prickle, and a wave of coldness ran over his