They weren’t the only ones to hear it. “Gill, Turnbull!” Anderson’s fearful voice came echoing. “Get back here—quick!”
They returned to the main party. As they went Gill advised, “Jack, just forget about Bannerman for now. Stay vigilant, but not up front, if you follow me. If we were wrong about him, fine. If not—well, we may have his measure anyway. Forewarned is forearmed.” He allowed Turnbull a glimpse of the silver cylinder before thrusting it back into his pocket.
By the time they got back, the night was alive with the howling, some of it echoing from afar and some from quite close at hand. Too close. “What do you make of it?” said Anderson, obviously a mass of nerves.
“Don’t ask them,” said Varre, “ask me.” And without any hesitation: “Wolves! There is no other sound quite like the howl of a wolf. I have relatives in Canada—in the far north, where I’ve visited them—and that was where I heard it. Timber wolves.”
Anderson grabbed his arm. “Are you serious? Timber wolves—in a world with no trees?”
“None that we’ve seen.” Varre angrily shook him off. “But so far we’ve seen nothing—not even the other side of this range of mountains. They are wolves, I tell you. I would stake my life on it!”
“How about all of our lives?” Turnbull’s voice was grim, heavy with foreboding. “Look up there.”
They looked. In the darker cracks and crevices of the mountain’s flank, many pairs of eyes burned yellow as tiny triangular lamps. A shaggy shape was silhouetted where it loped between outcrops of rock. Now there could be no doubting it. “My God!” Anderson backed off a pace on legs like jelly. “A pack of the bloody things!”
“I don’t understand this.” Even Turnbull was unnerved. “I mean, we’ve seen nothing to explain how—”
“And look down there!” Angela’s shuddering gasp cut him short. Down on the floor of the desert, converging upon the same trail which had led the party of human beings to this place, strange streams of flickering lambent fire—like massed ignes fatui or sentient St. Elmo’s light—eddied and flowed where it (they?) followed their trail like bloodhound trackers.
“Sniffing us out,” said Varre in a series of gulps. “But what are they?”
“Who cares?” said Turnbull. “Me, I think it’s high time we decided which door we’re taking out of this place!”
“I vote for Angela’s door,” said Gill, backing towards the House of Doors. “Door number two-twenty-two.”
Anderson hopped from one foot to the other, dancing like a girl in his anxiety. “But we can’t be sure,” he said.
“One thing’s certain,” said Turnbull. “We’re not using six-sixty-six or seven-seventy-seven. Angela, what do you think?”
She made no answer. They looked at her where she sat beside Bannerman, clutching his hand. Her eyes were wide and terrified; they were fixed on the scree slope which they’d all descended from the spur. And coming down that slope—a naked man! The light of the alien moon was full upon him. He smiled as he stepped easily, unerringly down through the sliding scree. And behind him came other human forms. All naked, all smiling.
“Clayborne’s world!” Varre suddenly hissed. “A world full of supernatural powers. Gill, Anderson—these are not men. And the wolves are not wolves. They’re—”
“Werewolves!” said Gill … .
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Gill’s reaction—the way his voice had filled with horror and disbelief as he said the word “werewolves”—wasn’t merely a shot in the dark; for he had seen with his own eyes the first of many transformations. So had the others. The first of the naked men (the leader of the pack?) where he stepped down from the slope, had fallen into a crouch, then gone to all fours; and in place of a man, there had hunched a great grey wolf! The metamorphosis had been instantaneous: man to beast in less time than it took to think about. And snarling, the flame-eyed creature slinkingly advanced.
“Gill! Turnbull!” Anderson cried, all pretence of leadership utterly flown.
The leading werewolf paused; others, changing from men to beasts, took up their places on his left and right flanks; the shadows of cliffs and slopes all around were alive with their bright three-cornered eyes.
“Gill?” Turnbull echoed Anderson.
“Back off,” said Gill. “But slowly. Towards the House of Doors. Can you get Bannerman?”
Turnbull said, “Jon, try to relax. We have something of a problem here. It will be easier if I carry you.” He grunted as he hoisted the other man onto his back in a fireman’s lift.
Varre’s deeply ingrained scepticism and sarcasm were quickly evaporating. Reality had all but disappeared here, and the Frenchman felt himself vanishing with it. “Those corpse-fires,” he babbled, and paused to utter a brief, breathless prayer in his own tongue, “they’re coming up the mountain!”
“But what are they?” Angela clung to Gill, backed with him towards the great crystal.
“Clayborne’s powers of evil,” Gill answered. “Ghosts, malevolencies, evil spirits.”
“There are no such things!”
“He believed there were.”
“We have to use the door!” Anderson shrieked. He turned and headed straight for door number 222. “Follow me!”
The werewolves edged closer; their fangs were yellow as their eyes, dripping saliva; the ruffs of fur along their backs were ridged, erect, threatening. Then one of them barked!
It wasn’t a howl but a bark. A smaller animal was tobogganing down the scree slope, bringing an avalanche of dust and pebbles with it.
Gill backed up to Anderson at door number 222. “What are you waiting for?” he said. But Anderson could only stand there and gurgle inarticulately. Gill risked taking his eyes off the closing circle of werewolves, glanced at Anderson—then at door number 222.
It was 222, then 333, then 444, 555, and so on! The numbers were flashing and changing like strobe lights, transferring themselves from door to door, circling the great crystal’s perimeter facets and speeding up with every passing second. Then 222 came flashing onto the door again, and Anderson lifted a trembling hand to the knocker—but already the number had changed. 333, 444, 555, 666 …
It was like a crazy carousel. Gill shoved Anderson out of the way. Faster and faster the circling numbers winked on and off, until they began to blur. “Take a chance!” someone, Turnbull, yelled in Gill’s ear.
Do it! Gill told himself. Take a chance—while there’s still a chance to take!
Cries of horror reached him as he grasped and lifted the great gargoyle knocker. He held it, turned his head and looked back. Beyond the sloping field of scree where it fell into shadows and darkness, a curtain of fluorescent blue and green light like aurora borealis sprang up from the desert’s floor. It lit up the entire shelf of scree in an eerie, flickering weave of pastel patterns. And in the shifting, dancing folds of the curtain, vast faces were forming themselves of its energies: faces with eyes that leered, and gaping mouths and nostrils black as pits. Human faces, and yet inhuman faces, and upon their foreheads—horns!
Again there came the barking; something scampered, yelped, came bounding high over the circling wolves; it crashed into the group of humans where they cowered at the door. Gill felt himself jostled. The numbers were a blur before his eyes. He let the knocker fall.
Upon the instant, the numbers stopped revolving—at 555. Gill’s door, according to Angela—which in the next moment cracked open like giant jaws to snatch them all inside … .
Gill had hit his head against something. Not hard enough to cause him serious or lasting damage, but sufficient to raise a lump like an overripe plum about to split its skin on the left side of his forehead at the hairline. Angela was sobbing, cradling him in her arms. He lay in a pile of sharp, hard, angular debris and gritty, flaky stuff. Opening one eye where his upper torso lay across Angela’s thighs, head lolling, he saw that the flaky stuff was reddish brown and knew that it was … rust?
Varre was screaming. “Mon D
ieu! Mon Dieu! For the love of God, get it off me!”
Anderson was answering him, “Keep still, Jean-Pierre. Give us a chance.”
“The pain!” the Frenchman howled. “My leg, my leg!”
“Listen, Frog!” Turnbull’s voice growled. “You have a choice: keep still and we’ll get this bloody thing off you, or keep leaping about and wear it for the rest of your fucking life!”
Bannerman was quieter, almost plaintive, saying, “Where are we? What happened? Are we safe? Won’t someone please tell me what that was all about?”
Gill moved, tried to sit up and see what was going on; and Angela cried: “Spencer? Spencer!” She hugged him to her and sobbed all the harder. “I thought you were seriously hurt. Tell me you’re not.” She kissed his neck, his ear, the bump on his forehead.
“I’m not,” he croaked, hoarsely, and paused to spit more of the rust out of his mouth. Then: “Hey!” he said. “I thought I was supposed to be the sexy one?”
As Gill’s head stopped spinning he looked about, tried to take in something of their surroundings. At first he thought they’d emerged in some sort of cave. In fact they had, but no kind of cave Gill or any of the others might ever have imagined. Light, a sort of hazy, dusty daylight, entered the place through a gaping oval hole in one wall, also in smoking beams through holes in the ceiling. A cave? Gill wondered. Or a nuclear shelter that took a direct hit from a big one?
There were pipes and cables, and broken plastic and metal conduits hanging everywhere, like twentieth-century stalactites, and the floor was littered with rusting levers, nuts and bolts, pistons and jacks and metallic scrap of every and all descriptions. A junkyard?
“A junkyard!” This time he shouted it out loud, tried to struggle to his feet.
But Angela kept a tight hold on him. “Take it easy, Spencer,” she pleaded with him.
“But don’t you see?” he said. “This place is a junkyard! I mean, this is the debris of civilization. Can you imagine all this on an alien world? This has to be Earth!”
She shook her head, carefully got up and helped him to his feet. “No,” she said. “No it doesn’t. And it isn’t. I thought so, too—until I looked out there.” She nodded towards the great oval gash of an opening in a wall of piled mechanical bits and pieces.
Gill would have gone to the opening at once, but now he’d seen Bannerman propped in one corner, trembling and asking his blind, pitiful questions where he leaned against what looked like a great engine block. And he’d also seen what Anderson and Turnbull were doing—or trying to do—to Varre. They’d torn away his trouser leg from his right thigh. Fastened through the fleshy part of his leg, a great wolf’s muzzle was clamped there in death. The creature’s head, shoulders and forelegs were intact, but beyond that it had been guillotined clean through its trunk. Its blood slopped everywhere.
Turnbull looked up as Gill stumbled over. “Are you okay?” he asked, and Gill nodded. Anderson was sitting on Varre, trying to hold him down where he writhed in his agony. Turnbull’s fingers were bloody, locked in the jaws of the wolf, straining to force them open.
Gill guessed what had happened: this creature had attacked the Frenchman as he came through the door—which had then closed on it, cutting it in half. Now … sweat rivered Varre’s agonized features; his teeth were grinding behind lips drawn back in a rictus of pain. Gill grimaced and took out the thorn hypodermic from his pocket.
But at that moment Turnbull hissed his horror and jerked up and away from Varre. Anderson too. The Frenchman gave a scream of sheer terror. The wolf’s head where its teeth were locked on his thigh … was now a man’s head! A man’s bust, with arms intact, that flopped obscenely as it crashed down where Varre tossed it. “Jesus! Jesus!” he cried shrilly, his fingers fluttering over his lacerated thigh.
Gill and the others stared wide-eyed at the inhuman remains, at the grinning death mask of a face, shoulders and trailing arms—which at once dissolved away, turning to dust and smoke in a moment.
“What … ?” Anderson and Turnbull mouthed the word almost in unison.
“It had no place here,” Gill hazarded a guess. “It was something spawned in Clayborne’s world, a thing of his imagination. This place is … somewhere else, where creatures like that don’t exist.”
As if to defy his logic, something came bounding in through the oval gash in the wall. Gill gave a massive start and drew air in a gasp—but Turnbull grabbed his arm and steadied him. “A dog,” the big man told him. “Only a dog.”
“Eh?” Gill still wasn’t sure. Then he remembered the barking, scampering creature in Clayborne’s world. “A dog? It came through with us from there?” The other nodded.
In a frenzy of joy, the animal jumped and frolicked around Angela’s legs. It barked excitedly, wagged its stump of a tail madly, then left the girl and came snaking for Gill. He stooped to give it a tentative pat on the head and it got up on its hind legs, licking his face with a wet, feverish tongue. Then it got down again and backed off. Between bouts of barking it whined, skittered nervously, sidled this way and that. “He’s finding us just as unbelievable as we find him!” said Gill.
He sat down on a pile of junk and fondled the dog’s ears, and it at once curled itself into his lap, whining for all it was worth. Angela said, “He has a collar.”
She was right; there was an identity tag, too. “Barney,” said Gill wonderingly. And the black and white mongrel barked and wagged his stump that much harder. “He lived in Lawers … .” Gill frowned. “That rings a bell.”
“So it should.” Anderson nodded. “The first man to report the presence of the Castle on Ben Lawers was one Hamish Grieve. He complained that the Castle had ‘taken’ his dog, called Barney!”
“And he’s been here ever since?” Angela’s voice was full of compassion. “In … in this place? Here, Barney,” she called. “Here boy!”
“What about me?” Varre cried out. The junkyard cave was weighing on him and his claustrophobia was surfacing again. “Damn it, that’s only a dog!” Turnbull had fixed the Frenchman’s leg with a bandage torn from his shirt. He growled low in his throat as he tied the final knot, jerking it tight. “Ow!” the Frenchman protested.
“I’m really going off you, pal,” said Turnbull warningly. “Only a dog? But he’s stayed alive a couple of years longer than we’re likely to last. We might be able to learn things from this dog—which means he’s worth a sight more than you! Anyway, he’s an Earth dog. Where I’m concerned that makes him next to human.”
“Idiot!” Varre muttered.
“Can you walk?” Turnbull asked him sharply.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well get sure, because I’m not going to carry you and Bannerman both!” Turnbull was coming to the end of his tether.
Gill said, “Easy, Jack. We’ll take turns with Bannerman. And we’re all in the same boat, remember?”
Turnbull looked at him and the harsh lines in his face grew a little softer. “Yes, we are,” he finally agreed, nodding. “But we’re not all trying to sink the fucking thing!” Angela looked away and Turnbull rubbed his chin, shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Polite conversation was never my forte, anyway … .”
Varre had got to his feet. He limped a little but seemed mobile enough. And he was eager to be out of this enclosed space. “Very well,” he said to the others, “let’s get out of here and see where we’ve landed … .”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Where they had landed” was possibly the strangest of all worlds, and Gill knew what Angela had meant when she’d said—the way she’d said—that this wasn’t Earth. A junkyard is one thing, but a planet-sized junkyard is quite another. Standing on the rusting iron rim of the broken wall and looking out on a skyline which would have been quite impossible and therefore totally unbelievable just a few days ago, still he knew exactly what he was looking at and felt the wrenching effect of several terrors combined. Later he might find himself compelled to acknowledge them, but
for now:
“Well?” Angela said, breaking the silence of Gill’s awe and astonishment, drawing his mind back from the precipitous brink of fear.
And in a little while he nodded, but his voice was still shaking when he answered, “I’m still not sure about your numerology thing, but you were certainly right the first time.”
“The first time?” She failed to understand.
“What are you talking about, Spencer?” Anderson was still trying to be king of the castle—or Castle?
“She said maybe the last place was shaped by Clayborne because he was first through the door.” Gill answered without turning his head, continuing to study the skyline. “It seems to me she was right. This time I was first through.”
“What is it, Gill?” said Bannerman tremulously. “What can you see?”
It’s more what I can feel, Gill thought; but out loud he answered, “I can see a machine world, most of it falling into decay. A world crammed full of machines, with nothing of grass or trees or anything so healthy as stone; no mountains except mountains of machine junk, and no streets except giant iron catwalks, and skyscraper gantries spanning everything like bridges to the end of the world. We’re up high and the horizon’s a long way off, but as far as I can see there’s only metal and some plastic and dead machinery, and—” He paused for a moment for breath, focused his eyes on part of a nearby skyline, and in a quieter voice continued, “And some machinery that isn’t dead!”
The others traced his line of sight and he felt Angela’s fingers tighten on his arm. “Spencer,” she whispered, “what is that … thing?” It might be a crane on tracks, or a steam shovel, or a giant mechanical woodpecker—but Gill didn’t answer because that was a part of the terror: the fact that he didn’t know. It was his worst nightmare come true, to be surrounded by machines or machine parts and not understand the workings or principles or purpose of a single one of them—including that nodding monstrosity! That was part of it. And the rest of it was that this was—