“I
don’t understand,” Anderson gasped, jogging alongside Varre and Clayborne. “An hour ago we were crippled, bent double, from eating those damned apple things. But it passed almost as quickly as it came. How could we get so ill, and yet recover so rapidly? It makes no sense. Also, I’ve lost my spectacles somewhere, but my sight hasn’t suffered. Now how can that possibly be?”
“Save your breath,” the Frenchman told him. “Gill’s advice was good: make it to the mansion before nightfall. The sun is past its zenith, slipping down towards the escarpment. How long have we got? Three, four hours?”
“Both of you save it,” said Clayborne. “Why try to understand anyway? Even our striving may be futile. This is the world of the supernatural, evil given embodiment in a landscape, the place of fear. The whole situation is satanic, can’t you see that? And we’re the playthings of hell’s dark forces.”
“I can’t believe in your spooks!” Anderson snapped. “While this place may be subtropical, it certainly
isn’t
a furnace—fiery or otherwise! This is no place of fire and brimstone! But if you’re so convinced, then why don’t you quit right now?”
“Evil takes all forms,” said Clayborne. “Are you tempting me to quit? Temptation is evil. This place has already tainted you. Without even considering what you’re saying, you advise me to lie down and let evil overtake me! Now who put those words in your mouth, eh? No matter—I know well enough—but I’ll tell you why I won’t take your devil’s bait. We’ve all had nightmares, haven’t we? Yes, and we woke up from them. If I see a man or a woman knifed to death in the street, I don’t lie down and die with them, do I? No, I face up to it and say ‘evil exists, but I have to live with it.’ While there’s that in me which is good—even a small part—I can’t surrender all of myself to evil. Life is good and it’s precious, mine included, and that’s why I don’t quit. So keep your advice to yourself and let me live till I die!”
“Well, if we fail to catch up with Gill and Turnbull,” Anderson replied, “you might well end up doing your dying sooner than you think. Together they could be our salvation. Gill has a unique mind. If there’s an answer to all of this, he’s the one most likely to find it. As for Turnbull: he’s a survivor. Before he was a minder he was … something else. When his nerve started to go, he was taken out of it. But he’s stepped naked out of places and situations where you wouldn’t go in armour plate!”
Varre glanced at Clayborne, and both of them looked hard at Anderson where he ran on their right flank. He was out of condition, but still doing surprisingly well. But as the three came out of the first belt of forest onto the plain—as if at a signal, though none was given—Varre and Clayborne put on a little speed and began to draw ahead. Anderson tried to match them, quickly gave up and stumbled to a halt.
“What are you doing?” he called after them. “I can’t keep up that sort of pace!”
“Try,” Clayborne shouted back. “Don’t let the devil pull you under.”
Puffing and panting, forcing his lungs to draw air and his legs to get moving again, Anderson came on. “You’re leaving me behind!” he gasped, panic lifting his voice. “Why are you doing this?”
“We’re doing nothing,” Varre answered him. “It’s you who is not doing enough. But you have managed to convince us, Minister. About Gill and Turnbull. So the sooner we team up with them again the better. Now tell me, should we let you slow us down?”
“Bastards!” Anderson whined through his clenched teeth. He begged his heart, his lungs, his legs for more power—and amazingly they responded. He was still being left behind, but not so badly. Really, he hadn’t known he’d got this in him. It was all a matter of willpower, that was all. But they were treacherous dogs, these, to try and deprive him of his leadership. All of them, treacherous. He’d make sure they paid for it if it was the last thing he did.
“Bastards!” he said again, and glanced back once, fearfully, over his shoulder. Already the sun seemed so much closer to the rim of the frowning escarpment … .
Gill and Turnbull found the crab-lobster-scorpion—the machine that imitated life and hunted Haggie—stuck in a crack in the bed of a once river. Oddly enough, it gave Gill hope. The thing was fallible. So maybe its makers—or the ones who controlled it—maybe they were fallible, too.
But in that period just prior to finding it:
… As Gill reckoned it, they were on the last narrow strip of heath before the final forest barrier. Beyond that, maybe two more miles through the trees, they’d find the big green plain and the mansion. The way had been harder than they’d anticipated, and they’d underestimated the distance by at least three miles. The heather wasn’t easy to run on and their shoes, not designed for this sort of work, were hurting their feet. Also, since the episode with the web of the rattling thing (whatever
that
had been) they’d proceeded with a lot more caution. The seven or eight miles they’d covered since leaving the foot of the escarpment had taken maybe a little less than two hours. But the sun was still an hour or two from the escarpment’s rim, and even after that there would be a twilight, a brief dusk.
Both of them worried, albeit over different things. Turnbull worried about their next move: when they reached the mansion, what then? Another door? Where to this time? But Gill was worrying more about Angela than anything else. Angela, with Haggie. About her blouse back there, torn and a little bloodied. Maybe she’d just ripped it on the thornbush, and her flesh a little, too. But if Haggie had had anything to do with it …
And Gill had thought:
Alec, my lad, if you’ve hurt that girl, you’ll have more than the hunting thing to worry about. Believe me, Hacksaw Harry would be like an angel of mercy compared with—
“Look!” Turnbull had grabbed his arm, drawn him back to the present.
Chests heaving from their exertions, they had arrived at a dry, crumbling riverbank. For some little while there’d been a dearth of grass where the soil was streaked with a white crystalline deposit, possibly salt. The river had not been wide; its bed lay roughly north and south, wobbling away into hazy distance in both directions. The dry bed was glittery white and dazzling in the sunlight, riven by deep, wide cracks in its centre. And stuck in one of these cracks, there they’d seen the hunter.
Even at a glance it was plain that the machine had a problem. And as the two men scrambled down the crumbling bank and began to cross the powdery bed, it became obvious just what that problem was. The silted mineral deposits underfoot were about as substantial as talc! Their feet sank in up to fifteen inches deep before finding more solid ground underneath where the stuff had hardened or compacted itself into a chalky consistency. White powder puffed up and drifted like fine ash as they plodded carefully towards the distressed thing. And testing the way before them as they went, it took them some little time to get there.
Finally they stood at the edge of the crevice and looked down on the trapped thing. It was wedged quite firmly, but still trying to free itself from the jaws of the crack. Many of its legs along the left underside of the carapace hung down uselessly into the hole, with nothing to give them purchase. On the thing’s right side, farthest away from Gill and Turnbull, two legs had been trapped awkwardly between the carapace and the side of the crevice. They stuck up in the air and waved jerkily, brokenly, doing nothing much of any use. The eye stalks turned this way and that, with their gleaming faceted eyes ogling here and there, apparently seeking a solution.
The great stinger kept leaning first to one side, then the other, elongating itself, pressing down on the rim of the crevice like a lever and straining to raise the carapace up. To no avail. The talc stuff simply crumbled under that sort of pressure. At the thing’s front its claws clashed and fought with thin air; its head was tilted downwards into the crack, and the pincers couldn’t lift themselves high enough to find the rim.
“Knackered!” said Turnbull with finality.
“So would we be,” said Gill, “if we fell down there. No purchase. It would be like digging your way upwards through an hourglass—you’d end up burying yourself! But … he makes a pretty handy bridge.” He stepped tentatively onto the hunter’s back.
“Are you trying to get yourself stung again?” Turnbull was alarmed.
“Just the opposite,” said Gill. The eye stalks swayed and swivelled to point the faceted eyes in his direction; the stinger commenced to swing inwards and its dust-coated navel tip opened up; as the needle appeared, Gill stepped quickly to one side and grasped it at its root, wrenching it loose. A fist-sized gob of gooey grey liquid squelched from the “wound” onto his sleeve-then ran up his wrist and hand where he leaned a little against the carapace and transferred back to the hunter! In another moment the thing’s solid chitin shell had absorbed the stuff.
“Did you see that?” said Gill. He crossed to the other side and Turnbull followed him. The stinger tried to bat the big man aside but he was too quick for it, and his weight served to push it even further down into the crack.
“I saw it,” he answered. “That stuff ran like mercury—but uphill? What the hell—does this thing have living blood?”
Gill looked at the “hypodermic” in his hand. It was simply a large, bony thorn, six inches long, with a three-inch retractable tip made of stuff like flexible glass. Inside the base of the thorn was a rubbery bulb. Gill put a finger inside and squeezed gently. A tiny squirt of glistening fluid sprang from the tip and turned to mist in the air.
Gill looked at Turnbull. “Got any use for that shoulder holster of yours?”
The other shrugged. “I’ve been hanging on to it out of habit, I suppose.” He took off his jacket and the holster, and gave the latter to Gill.
Taking off his own jacket, Gill said, “We now have a weapon—of sorts. Not as powerful or as permanent as your gun, but better than nothing.” He pushed the thorn down into the holster until its tip bedded itself in the soft leather cup at the pointed end. Then he put the holster on, and shrugged back into his now badly torn and dishevelled jacket. “Roles reversed, see? Now I’m the minder.”
“For myself,” Turnbull grunted, “I’d hope we don’t get that close to anything!”
Gill glanced down at the holster and thorn hanging under his right armpit. Unnoticed until now, he saw a ring of silver metal protruding from a thin scabbard stitched into the holster’s leather. “Eh?” he said, drawing it out. It was a cleaning rod: five inches of steel rod three-sixteenths of an inch through, with the ring at one end and a slot or “eye” at the other, like the eye of a large needle.
“For cleaning the gun,” Turnbull explained. “You thread a piece of lightly oiled cloth through the eye, stuff it up the barrel. It collects any dirt, burnt powder, carbon.”
“Might make a stabber,” said Gill, “if it can be sharpened. Mind if I keep it?”
“Be my guest.”
They began to make for the other side of the dry riverbed, but after only two paces Gill stopped. He looked back at the trapped hunter, which waved its eye stalks at him. And he stood there uncertainly, frowning.
“Something?” Turnbull enquired.
“That bloke is hunting Haggie,” said Gill, nodding at the trapped monster. “Or he was until the side of that crack caved in when he was making his crossing. And I’ve a feeling that wherever Haggie goes, this fellow will know where to find him.”
“So?”
“And Haggie knows things about this place that we haven’t discovered yet. There are entire worlds in here, where Haggie can lose himself from us, but not from this broke.”
Turnbull sighed. “You want to set it free?”
“I think we better had,” said Gill, “if it’s at all possible.”
“Won’t that be murder?”
“He’s escaped justice so far—in more ways and more worlds than one!” Gill answered. “And maybe he’ll keep right on doing it. But meanwhile this thing can be our tracker dog.”
“But it must weigh a ton!”
“Several, I should think.” Gill looked around. Close to hand, a cluster of sharp boulder fragments lay half-buried in the talc. “Do you want to help?”
Turnbull sighed again. “As long as you know what you’re doing, of course I’ll help. But I ask myself, what happens when this thing gets through with Haggie? Will it be our turn? And anyway, are we okay for time?” The sun was falling ever closer to the rim of the distant escarpment, whose face was now black and frowning.
Gill nodded. “I think it’s in our best interests to make a little time. It may save us a lot later. Now listen, if we can lob these boulders down right under his nose, sort of pile them up, he might be able to push down on them with his claws. They’re pretty powerful, those claws … .”