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 th
ree-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 … .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In fact it didn’t take that long. First they took a rock each, straining and grunting them to the edge of the crack and letting them fall where Gill had prescribed. The next boulder fragment in line was too big for one man on his own, however, so between them they wrestled it to the rim, where they paused for breath before standing it up on its heavier end and toppling it down. And watching it fall, they shouted their appreciation when sheer good fortune caused it to jam halfway down, where the walls bottlenecked a little.
As the hunter put down its pincer claws and tested them on the wedged boulder, so Gill and Turnbull backed off. They saw the carapace straining upwards as clouds of talc erupted from points all around its perimeter. Strangely jointed legs scraped and clattered, and the stinger pushed itself down into the talc on the far side of the crack like the snout of a mechanized jack.
As more talc billowed and became a churning cloud, the men backed off farther yet. But in a little while the dust began to settle, and the hunter dragged itself out from the flurries. Its movements were very slow now, and to starboard it trailed a pair of crippled legs.
A little distance from the riven bed of the river, the thing came to a standstill and shook itself. White dust drifted from its flanks like powdered snow, leaving its surface all blue- and black-gleaming chitin, white bone and yellow ivory. In a strange way (and if it wasn’t so monstrous) the thing might even seem beautiful.
“A … a machine?” Turnbull obviously couldn’t quite believe it. “It shook itself like … like a dog!”
“I don’t blame you for doubting it,” Gill told him, “but take my word for it anyway.”
The hunter lowered its carapace to earth on its good left side, lifted up its right on half a dozen stiffened legs. The two useless ones dangled twitching from damaged sockets. Turnbull looked from the monster to Gill, who seemed to be waiting for something. “Well? Time’s wasting”
Gill held up a hand. “I’d like to watch this,” he said. “It could be important.”
It was. Gobs of the grey liquid came spurting and sputtering from the sockets and displaced joints of the damaged limbs, and at the same time Gill jerked stiffly upright as he sensed something happening. Turnbull looked at him and asked, “What is it?”
Again Gill held up a hand. Then he reached slowly into his jacket pocket and brought out the cylinder weapon. He looked at it, weighed it, rubbed it in his hands like it was a lucky stone. He turned his gaze on the hunter, then back to the cylinder in his hand. And a strange light came into his eyes.
“Spencer?” Turnbull was anxious.
Gill nodded towards the hunter. “That thing’s drawing power from somewhere. It’s fuelling itself. And some of the energy is leaking off—being leeched, maybe—by this!” He held the cylinder up, held it out towards the hunter.
Turnbull licked his lips, shook his head. “I don’t understand. But, you know, I think I can feel something, too!”
“They’re charging themselves,” Gill said, “like rechargeable batteries.”
Through all of this the hunting thing had stood there in its lop-sided pose, frozen like stone, with its crippled legs dangling. For a few seconds more Gill held out the cylinder towards it, then slowly drew back his arm. “That’s it,” he said. “All charged up.”
Turnbull made no answer, continued to observe the hunter.
For long moments the thing remained static in its jacked-up mode. Then, suddenly, more gobs of the thick grey liquid were ejaculated from its torn sockets. They flowed outwards over the crippled legs, sheathing them in goo. But in a little while, like nets drawn in, the sheaths of living liquid retracted, drawing the damaged hard parts back up under the carapace and into the body and sealing them in position again in their sockets. Then the goo itself was withdrawn and some of it, where it covered the raw joints, hardened rapidly into a flexible leathery plastic. The entire process had taken perhaps twenty seconds.
Turnbull gulped. “Now if only my car could do that!” he said.
But Gill only said, “Time to go.”
They turned and hurried as best they could for the far bank. Looking back as they climbed to the withered, mineral-streaked plain, they saw the hunter lower its carapace into a mobility stance and commence trundling after them. Or if not “after them”, at least in their general direction. All of its legs appeared to be working, those on the right perhaps a little stiffly, lacking something in coordination. Even so, it was still something to see.
“Just how fast can that thing move?” Turnbull asked nervously. “I’ve got this awful feeling I’ve just helped reactivate Frankenstein’s monster!”
“Pretty fast,” said Gill, “but not as fast as us. Not over short distances, anyway. We sprint pretty well, but it has stamina. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about it—it isn’t interested in us.”
He turned his face to the powdery plain where its grasses grew more lush towards the final belt of forest. If nothing else delayed them, another hour should see them approaching the mansion, the House of Doors. It was an “if” Gill couldn’t be certain about. Only time would tell, and right now there was little enough of that to waste. An image of Angela’s bloodied blouse kept filling the mirror of his mind. “Let’s go,” he said … .
The House of Doors was like some strange, square, squat mastaba, a modern step-pyramid constructed of precise, white stone blocks. Three-tiered, its base was perhaps sixty by sixty feet, twelve high, balustraded at the top with stark square pillars supporting a square rail. It had doors, too, plenty of them: huge numbered slabs of flush-fitting marble, with no hinges or other mechanisms apparent except for the square stone door knockers. And there were no windows.
The second tier was stepped back maybe seven or eight feet on all sides, making it forty-five by forty-five; likewise the third and topmost tier, a featureless plateau of white stone some thirty-seven feet square. In its entirety the structure might well have been designed by some geometrical purist. It was like a giant wedding cake, even to the detail of a bride—but there the similarity ended. For she didn’t stand atop the cake but protected its bottom tier against the advances of Smart Alec Haggie, the would-be bridegroom.
There she stood in the slowly fading light—scratched and dishevelled, wild-eyed and primitive in ski pants reduced almost to tight-fitting Bermuda shorts, a flimsy bra, and (mercifully) sensible shoes—silently challenging him to try, just try, to climb up to her. And while Haggie taunted in his fashion from below, so Angela thought back on some of the details of their nightmare flight from the thing on the ledge under the waterfall … .
She remembered very little of their scramble down from that place; only that before finding
a wide, overgrown, descending fault in the cliff, there had been too many times when she’d believed she must surely fall. Indeed, it was a miracle she hadn’t fallen—but not, as she’d later discovered, a blessing.
Then they’d been at the bottom, and Haggie half-crazy with terror where he rushed here and there in the gloom; one minute peering at the unknown forest ahead, and the next looking back and up at the escarpment, fearing at any moment to see their pursuer descending towards him. But eventually dawn had started to come, staining the eastern horizon a pale silver with its flush, and the howling of the things in the forest had tailed off, so that at last Haggie was satisfied they could proceed.
She’d held back then, asking about Gill and the others. Shouldn’t they hide and wait for them? But he’d told her they would be lucky if they still lived; by now the crab-lobster-scorpion might well have taken them; that no one could hide from it because it would always sniff them out. If Gill and the others had somehow survived, they’d surely meet up with them again at the House of Doors. Indeed, he’d promised they would wait for them there.