The Homeward Bounders

  I lay for a while when I woke up, thinking it was lucky the Bounds hadn’t called in the night. I’d been too fast asleep to hear them.

  “How are you?” said Joris, when he saw I was awake.

  I felt good. My arm hardly hurt at all. “All right,” I said. “Joris, what do you think of Vanessa’s idea for getting rid of Them? Do you think it could be that simple?”

  Joris considered. I could see in his face the horror of Them. He’d had Them a good bit more recently than me, after all. “No,” he said. “It can’t be right. Helen says your world is next one on. I think we should go there.”

  “Thanks!” I said. I was really relieved. “Let’s sneak off straight after breakfast then.”

  But we never got a chance. Joris and I were just coming downstairs, wondering what people ate for breakfast in this world, when the doorbell rang. We didn’t know it was the doorbell. It made a gentle chime—ping-pong. We only realized what the noise was when Adam drifted across the hall, looking like someone from Creema di Leema in yellow pajamas with purple spots, and went out of sight round the corner to open the front door….

  We heard Adam make a sort of glunk-noise. Someone outside said, “Forgive me. I have a hot reading for this house.” And then a man dressed just like Joris leaped energetically into the middle of the hall.

  Joris let out a huge shout of “Konstam!” and came rushing downstairs so fast that I had to rush too in order not to be knocked over.

  Yes, it was Konstam Khan. Ten-foot Konstam himself. I didn’t believe it at first, any more than you do. But he was really there, standing just in front of Fred the skeleton, with his white boots planted wide apart on the hall carpet, looking anxiously at Joris. But when he saw Joris rushing at him in one piece, he smiled, showing amazingly white teeth, and his face sort of glowed. He put the little square instrument he had been carrying away in the front of his white leather jerkin—which had the same black sign on it as Joris’s—and began stripping off his white leather gauntlets. He hung the gloves in his belt, beside the curved sword and the holstered gun which were already there.

  “Joris, I’m sorry to have been so long coming to fetch you,” Konstam said.

  By this time, Vanessa was in the doorway of the kitchen in a trailing blue dressing-gown, and Helen was on the stairs behind me. We all stared at Konstam.

  Because the amazing thing about Konstam Khan was that he really was all the things that Joris said he was. You only had to look at him to see he was. You could tell he was brave and strong and heroic from the way he held his head and the way he moved—he moved so lightly that it was plain he had muscles most people don’t even get born with. He had godlike good looks too. His skin was very brown, browner than Helen’s. And one of the things which made Konstam so handsome was the faint glow of pink through the brown of his cheeks. I always liked that in Helen, but she only had that when she was in a good mood. Konstam glowed with health all the time. His blue-black hair waved crisply from his face. His black eyes flashed with health and keenness. He was considerate, and he was nice. You could tell that from the way he looked at Joris. He had that nice, straight way of looking that Joris had. In fact, he was as godlike as Joris had said—except for one thing. He was nothing like ten feet tall. He was about an inch shorter than Joris was.

  I saw Joris notice Konstam’s height as he rushed at Konstam. It obviously surprised him. Behind Joris’s back, Adam put one hand as high as he could in the air, and then lowered it expressively to dwarf-height. I had to turn away and snore. Vanessa hid her face in the doorjamb.

  “But Konstam, how did you do it? How did you get here? How did you find me?” Joris clamored.

  “I knew you’d no means of getting back on your own,” Konstam said. “The trouble was, Adrac took you through so many worlds that you went right off the range of the portable tracker. I had to fly home and trace you from Khan Valley. That’s what took the time. But you must have known I’d come and fetch you.” Konstam obviously didn’t feel it was worth explaining how he had come skipping from world to world. I suppose he’d done it like we did with Joris.

  “I—” Joris began, beaming with delight. Then he went all anxious and looked at me. “I—I can go Home, can’t I? Does being a Homeward Bounder stop you?”

  “Of course you can go,” I said. “Didn’t you listen to Them? If you can get Home, you can reenter play.” I envied Joris. Oh, I envied him. Envy turned my stomach round, the moment I saw Konstam. No one had been able to come and fetch me.

  Up to then, Konstam had obviously been thinking of nothing but Joris. You could see he had been worried sick about him. Now he looked round and made a little bow to us all, with a lower bow to Vanessa. He thought she was probably the lady of the house. Joris looked embarrassed again. I could tell he was thinking of the sixty thousand crowns.

  “I’m afraid I rather barged in,” Konstam said. “Do forgive me.”

  “We’re very glad to see you,” Vanessa said politely. “We’ve heard such a lot about you. Would you care for some breakfast now you’re here?”

  “Could I have some breakfast, Konstam, before we go?” Joris asked humbly.

  “Of course,” Konstam said. And he said to Vanessa, “I’d love a cup of tea, if your world has such a thing.”

  We were all rather sad, I think. We knew Konstam meant to take Joris Home straight after breakfast. But, as it turned out, he didn’t. That was because, over breakfast, Joris told Konstam about Them.

  XII

  At first the story came tumbling out of Joris, all mixed up and helter-skelter, in the same way Joris had talked about Konstam. But Konstam said, “For goodness sake, Joris. Take a deep breath and then tell it logically.” And Joris did.

  I’d noticed before that when Joris had talked about demon hunting, or Boundaries, or anything to do with his trade, he always told it much more clearly. I think that was Konstam’s doing. But Konstam only corrected Joris in the way anyone older than Joris would have done. That was another thing that turned out to be true—Konstam really didn’t treat Joris like a slave. He seemed to like Joris a lot. It was quite clear, from the first minute when Joris came rushing downstairs, that Konstam had not come after Joris just because he was valuable property gone missing. No. The slave-stuff was all in Joris’s head. Or, if you like, in a small anchor-shaped mark on his arm.

  “What?” Konstam said, when Joris got to Them.

  Joris repeated it as he had said it to us. “It must have been in the spirit world. And I knew I was done for. There were so many of Them, and I could see They were all demons.”

  Konstam shook his crisp black head. “You were never in the spirit world. The tracker would have registered it. What is this? A place of demons—greater than Adrac!—gaming with worlds!”

  “I swear it’s true,” said Joris. “Helen and Jamie have seen it too.”

  Konstam turned to me, looking almost feverish, his eyes glittered so. I saw the main thing about Konstam then. He was obsessed with demon hunting. It was his passion. The thought of a whole new set of demons he hadn’t known about nearly drove him mad. He was as bad as Adam over the sixty thousand crowns.

  Adam, by the way, spent the entire breakfast looking from Konstam to Vanessa and practically licking his lips.

  So I told Konstam that it was indeed true about Them. Helen bore me out, without so much as letting the tip of her nose out through her hair. She was afraid Konstam was going to start hunting her too. I decided to have a word with Konstam about that. By then it was clear that Konstam was not going home yet. He had prodded and questioned at me so feverishly about how I came to see Them, that I ended up admitting that this city was very like the one which was my Home. Then it was no trouble at all to get me to admit that I could probably find the place where They were here too.

  He leaped up and whirled to the middle of the kitchen. He was a great leaper, was Konstam. He never just walked if he could leap. “Come on then. Let’s go and take a look at Them, Jamie!”

&nb
sp; “Wait a minute!” Vanessa said, jumping up too. “Let me get dressed. I want to come.”

  “And me,” said Adam.

  “I beg your pardon,” Konstam said to Vanessa, laughing a little. “I thought you were already dressed. I’ve been admiring your gown.”

  “I’m going to wear trousers,” Vanessa said, and raced off, rather pink.

  Adam paused in the doorway, to ask Konstam bluntly, “Are you very rich?”

  “Fairly,” Konstam said, looking puzzled.

  “Good!” said Adam, and raced off too.

  In the end, we all went to find Them. I don’t think Joris and Helen wanted to in the least, but Joris was back to being Konstam’s slave and he had to go, and Helen was afraid the Bounds might call while she was alone. I was glad of their company. I didn’t want to see Them either. But Konstam was like that. He could make you do things wild horses couldn’t drag you to.

  Vanessa said she would drive us. There was a little old vehicle in a shed beside the house. Vanessa called it her car. In my world, car is a poetic word for a chariot. I stared at the thing. There was nothing poetic about it that I could see—my father’s precious tricycle was more poetic. Joris was staring at it too. I remembered that he had said Konstam drove an expensive fast car, and I had thought he had meant something golden, drawn by a team of Thoroughbred horses. So I asked him whether this car was anything like Konstam’s. Not really, Joris said, though he thought they both worked the same way.

  “Is Konstam’s more poetic, would you say?” I said. And Joris said, with great feeling, that it was, much more.

  How six of us got in that unpoetic car, I shall never know. I was crammed in, in front, on top of Adam, as guide. My arm was really hurting again, from the crush, even before we were moving.

  It took ages to find the place. For one thing, that city was quite a bit different from mine, in the place where it mattered, down by the canal arches. For another, it was annoyingly over-organized. I hate places with so many rules. You could only go one way along half the roads. We kept having to turn right, away from the canal, whenever I wanted to turn towards it. Vanessa drove round and round, and I began to think that Their place didn’t exist here in her world. I ought to have felt glad, but I didn’t, because Konstam got so dreadfully polite. Konstam was one of those who gets polite instead of angry. He frightened me to death.

  We found it in the end. It was just round the corner from the new concrete station where we got off the train. I craned to look up at it as we buzzed past, and it was uncannily like the Old Fort in my Home. It was triangular, and made of pinkish stone with fort-like castellations, and it had the same shut, massive door. But there were no harpoons in front. Vanessa stopped the car when I shouted, just past the side street that ran beside Their park or garden. We all got out and went down the side street. That took me right back. It was so much the same that I almost expected to see a box of groceries standing beside the pink stone wall. I was scared.

  They had to help me over the wall. My arm wouldn’t work well enough for me to climb by myself. But that was no trouble to someone as strong as Konstam. He could have thrown me over it.

  Over the wall, the silence hit us. There was a triangular park there too, with the same sort of dip in the middle, but there were not so many trees. The place was a mass of bushes, particularly up near the wall. And, as soon as we were standing among the bushes, all the instruments Konstam and Joris had began to register wildly. Their demon-indicators went right up to the ends of their scales and stayed there. The queer silence was broken by a faint tut-tutting from Joris’s Boundary-finder too, and when he took it out, the needle was jumping faintly. But when he turned it over, the Boundary needle on the other side was swirling round almost too fast to see.

  “This is very odd,” Konstam whispered. “I’ve never met anything like this!” He could hardly wait to clap eyes on Them. He went so fast among the bushes that the rest of us had a hard time keeping up. At least, we could have kept up if we had gone further down the dip where there was open grass and run, but Konstam wouldn’t hear of that. He turned and looked at Adam, when Adam tried to, and Adam didn’t try again.

  That way, we missed seeing all but a glimpse of the small white statue down in the dip. I was glad. By the time we were level with it, we were all distracted anyway because the demon hunters’ instruments were making such a noise, whining and clicking and tut-tutting. Konstam stopped and switched them all off. Then he crept on, really cautiously. I am ready to swear that none of Them saw us.

  There They were, almost as I saw Them at Home, across the gravel and dimly behind the reflections in the glass. Two of Them in gray cloaks. One of Them was delighted by what the machines seemed to tell him. He rubbed his hard-to-see hands. The other one seemed annoyed. From the look of Them, and from what Adam and Vanessa had been saying about their world, I thought They were playing small skirmishes as moves to lead up to a big war. But I don’t know for sure, because I couldn’t see the table through that window, and there was no point asking Adam. Adam couldn’t see Them at all.

  “I can’t see anything! There’s only reflections in the glass!” he kept whispering, over and over again, until Konstam turned round and frowned. That shut Adam up.

  I have seen cats watch mouseholes the way Konstam watched Them. He was alert and quite still, and tense and greedy and murderous. Until he had suddenly seen enough and signaled all of us to get back. When we were all by the wall again, he said, “Right. Council of war. May we return to your house, Vanessa?”

  “Of course. But it’s my parents’ house really,” Vanessa said. She had gone white. Most people look ghastly like that, but Vanessa actually looked prettier. “We’ve got to stop Them!” she whispered. “I could feel how awful They were, even through the window.”

  “Could you? In that case you would make a good demon hunter,” Konstam whispered.

  Vanessa was very surprised. “Can women be demon hunters?”

  “Gracious, yes!” Konstam said, as we all began to struggle over the wall. “Most of the best demon hunters are girls. Joris’s friend Elsa is almost as good as Joris is. Isn’t that so, Joris?”

  Joris was on top of the wall, trying to haul me up. He was being all pale and businesslike. I suppose, now Konstam was here, They were like just another job to him. But he went a bit pink as he answered. “Elsa’s pretty good,” he said. I did wish there were no people called Elsa. The name made me sick for Home.

  I don’t know how Helen felt. She stayed inside her hair whenever Konstam was anywhere near her. But Adam was really peevish. As soon as we had scrambled down into the sudden noise of the side street, he started going on about not being able to see Them. “It’s not fair!” he said. “I thought it was going to be Vanessa who couldn’t, not me. I suppose it proves I was right that most people can’t see Them, but I thought it was going to be Vanessa who proved it. It’s not fair!”

  When we were all crammed into that car and Vanessa was driving us back, Konstam made me tell him, several times over, exactly what I had seen when I went into the Old Fort in my world. When we got to the house, he gathered us all round the kitchen table and did his flashing smile at us.

  “Now,” he said. “Council of war. Joris and I are going to have to go in after Them. We wouldn’t be demon hunters if we didn’t. They are clearly a new kind of extremely powerful demon. They have a massive corporeal part, which is usually quite unheard-of in demons that strong, and that’s going to mean thinking up a new approach. I’d welcome any suggestions the rest of you can give us. For a start, there’s the question of where They are. They’re not in the spirit world. I’m not even sure They could get into the spirit world in Their present corporeal state. On the other hand, They’re not in this world either.”

  “Then where the blazes are They?” I said.

  “In the Real Place,” said the voice behind Helen’s hair. “Remember? I told you about the place of glass and reflections, Jamie. I’d always thought the Real Place
was a person’s own world. I thought that each world was the Real Place for the people living in it. But I looked at Them in that building and I suddenly knew it wasn’t. They were in the Real Place there. I think They’ve stolen it from people.”

  “Thank you,” Konstam said respectfully. But Helen wouldn’t speak to him. “I’m sure Helen’s right. And it looks as if this Real Place of Theirs seems different in different worlds. You all saw different versions. But this Place suits us quite well. If, as Jamie says, it’s divided into triangular compartments in this cluster of worlds, we can go in and clean Them out of this triangle, and perhaps the next few, without taking on the whole lot. Then, when we’ve done that, and worked out the right way of dealing with Them, we can go home and muster all the demon hunters—Khans, Altunians, Smiths, Obotes, everyone—and start a major campaign.”

  That was another thing about Konstam. The idea of failing never occurred to him. He had looked at Them. He had seen Them as a problem and he set about solving it. His face glowed. I did try to suggest that They were a little more than just a problem, but I got swept away in the general enthusiasm. Konstam was like that. His confidence was catching.

  Before long, we had all agreed to take part in the assault on Them. I even found that I had. Konstam was very pleased. That meant we would be three to each of Them. That way, Konstam thought we might be able to kill the bodily part and the spirit part both at once, and prevent Them taking a dive to the spirit world, where, even Konstam admitted, we would have our work cut out to do anything with Them. The stumbling block was that They were in the Real Place and not likely to come out. We would have to go in. No one was sure quite how to do that—we had to suppose, you see, that They would know we were trying to get in and be ready to stop us. But Konstam was sure we could solve that. Meanwhile, he set about getting us all properly equipped. He drew up a list.