“You know,” said Hal, “I think he does want us to leave.”
“But why?” asked Gib, coming forward and catching what Hal had said.
“Maybe he knows something we don’t know,” said Hal. “Seems to me, if I remember, I said that just a while ago.”
“But there are Hounds out there!” gasped Mary.
“I doubt,” said Oliver, “that he would want to do us harm. We hauled him from the pit and he should be grateful.”
“How do you know he wanted to be taken from the pit?” asked Sniveley. “We may have done him no favor. He may be sore at us.”
“I think, in any case,” said Cornwall, “we should get the horses loaded and be set to raise the gate. Be ready to get out of here if anything happens.”
“What do you expect to happen?” Sniveley asked.
“How should any of us know?” snapped Hal. “There may nothing happen, but we play this one by ear.”
Gib and Oliver already were catching up the horses and bridling them. The others moved rapidly, getting saddles on the animals, hoisting and cinching on the packs.
Nothing happened. The horses, impatient at being hauled from the hay on which they had been feeding, stamped and tossed their heads. Tin Bucket stood quietly by the fire.
“Look at him,” said Sniveley, disgusted. “He started all this ruckus and now he disregards us. He stands off by himself. He contemplates the fire. Don’t tell me he expects anything to happen. He is a mischief maker, that is all he is.”
“It may not be time as yet for anything to happen,” Gib said, quietly. “It may not be time to go.”
Then, quite suddenly, it was time to go.
The wheel of fire came rushing up from the eastern horizon. It hissed and roared, and when it reached the zenith, its roar changed to a shriek as it sideslipped and turned back, heading for the castle. The brilliance of it blotted out the moon and lighted the courtyard in a fierce glow. The stone walls of the castle reared up with every crack and cranny outlined in deep shadow by the blinding light, as if the castle were a drawing done by a heavy pencil, outlined in stark black and white.
Cornwall and Gib sprang for the wheel that raised the castle gate, Hal running swiftly to help them. The gate ratcheted slowly upward as they strained at the wheel. The circle of fire came plunging down, and the screaming and the brilliance of it seemed to fill the world to bursting. Ahead of it came a rush of blasting heat. It skimmed above the castle, barely missing the topmost turrets, then looped in the sky and started back again. The horses, loose now, were charging back and forth across the courtyard, neighing in terror. One of them stumbled and, thrown off balance, plunged through the fire, scattering smoking brands.
“The gate is high enough,” said Cornwall. “Let us catch those horses.”
But the horses were not about to be caught. Bunched together, screaming in panic, they were heading for the gate. Cornwall leaped for one of them, grabbing for a bridle strap. He touched it and tried to close his fingers on it, but it slipped through his grasp. The plunging forefoot of a horse caught him in the ribs and sent him spinning and falling. Bellowing in fury and disappointment, he scrambled to his feet. The horses, he saw, were hammering across the drawbridge and out onto the plain. The lashings that bound the packs on one of the saddles loosened, and the packs went flying as the horse bucked and reared to rid himself of them.
Hal was tugging at Cornwall’s arm and yelling. “Let’s get going. Let’s get out of here.”
The others were halfway across the drawbridge. Coon led them all, scampering wildly in a sidewheeling fashion, his tail held low against the ground.
“Look at him go,” said Hal, disgusted. “That coon always was a coward.”
The plain was lighted as brilliantly as if the sun had been in the sky, but the intensity of the glow from the screaming wheel of fire played funny tricks with shadows, turning the landscape into a mad dream-place.
Cornwall found that he was running without ever consciously having decided that he would run, running because the others were running, because there was nothing else to do, because running was the only thing that made any sense at all. Just ahead of him, Tin Bucket was stumping along in a heavy-footed way, and Cornwall was somewhat amused to find himself wondering, in a time like this, how the metal creature managed the running with three legs. Three, he told himself, was a terribly awkward number.
There was no sign of the horses, or of the Hellhounds, either. There would, of course, he told himself, be no Hellhounds here. They had started clearing out, undoubtedly, at the first appearance of the wheel of fire—they probably wouldn’t stop running, he thought with a chuckle, for the next three days.
Suddenly, just ahead of him, the others were stumbling and falling, disappearing from his view. They ran into something, he told himself, they ran into a trap. He tried to stop his running, but even as he did, the ground disappeared from beneath his feet and he went plunging into nothingness. But only a few feet of nothingness, landing on his back with a thump that left him gasping for breath.
Sniveley, off a ways, was yelping. “That clumsy Bucket—he fell on top of me!”
“Mark,” said Mary, “are you all right?” Her face came into view, bending over him.
He struggled to a sitting position. “I’m all right,” he said. “What happened?”
“We fell into a ditch,” said Mary.
Hal came along, crawling on his hands and knees. “We’d better hunker down and stay,” he said. “We’re well hidden here.”
“There are a half a dozen wheels up there,” said Mary.
“I don’t believe,” said Hal, “they are after us. They seem to be concentrating on the castle.”
“The horses are gone,” said Gib from somewhere in the shadow of the ditch, “and our supplies went with them. We’re left here naked in the middle of the wilderness.”
“They bucked off some of the packs,” said Oliver. “We can salvage some supplies.”
Sniveley’s agonized voice rose in petulance. “Get off me, you hunk of iron. Let me up.”
“I guess I better go,” said Hal, “and see what’s wrong with him.”
Cornwall looked around. The walls of the ditch or hole, or whatever it might be, rose five feet or so above the level of its floor, helping to shelter them from the intense light of the spinning wheels of fire.
He crawled to the wall facing the castle and cautiously raised himself so he could peer out. There was, as Mary had said, more wheels now. They were spinning above the castle, which stood out against the landscape in a blaze of light. Their roaring had changed to a deep hum that seemed to shake his body and burrow deep into his head. As he watched, one of the castle’s turrets toppled and fell down. The grinding crunch of falling stone could be heard distinctly over the humming of the wheels.
“There are five of them,” said Mary. “Have you the least idea what they are?”
He didn’t answer her, for how was one to know? Magic, he thought, then forced the answer back, remembering how Jones had scoffed at him for saying magic whenever he faced a situation he could not comprehend. Certainly something not in the memory of man, for in all the ancient writings he had read, there had been no mention of anything like this—although wait a minute, he told himself, wait just a goddamn minute—there had been something written and in a most unlikely place. In the Book of Ezekiel, chapter one. He tried to remember what had been written there and was unable to, although he realized that there was a lot more to it than simply wheels of fire. He should have, he told himself, spent less time with ancient manuscripts and more time with the Bible.
The wheels had spaced themselves in a circle just above the castle and were spinning rapidly, one following the other, closing in and moving down until it seemed there was just one great fiery, spinning circle suspended above the ancient structure. The deep hum rose to an eerie howling as the ring of fire picked up speed, contracting its diameter and steadily settling down to encompass the castl
e.
Towers and turrets were crumbling, and underneath the howling could be heard the grinding rumble of falling blocks of masonry. Blue lightning lanced out of the wheel of fire, and the sharp crackling of thunder hammered so hard against the ground that the landscape seemed to buck and weave.
Instinctively Cornwall threw up his arms to shield his head but, fascinated by the sight, did not duck his head. Mary was huddling close against him and off somewhere to his right, someone—Sniveley more than likely, he thought—was squealing in terror.
The air was laced with lightning bolts, etched with the brilliance of the flaming wheel, the very earth was bouncing and the noise was so intense it seemed in itself a force that held one in its grasp.
From the center of the circle of fire, a great cloud was rising, and as Cornwall watched, he realized that what he saw was the dust of shattered stone rising through the circle as smoke from a fire rises through a chimney.
Suddenly it was over. The wheel of fire rose swiftly in the air and separated into five smaller wheels of fire that shot quickly upward, swinging about to race to the east. In seconds they disappeared.
As quickly, the world resumed its silence, and all that could be heard were the clicking and crunching sounds of settling masonry, coming from the mound of shattered stone that marked the spot where the Castle of the Chaos Beast had stood.
32
Late in the afternoon of the third day they came on water. The character of the land had changed. The bleak desert of the Blasted Plain had gradually given way to a still dry, but less forbidding, upland. On the evening of the first day they had seen far in the distance the great blue uplift of the Misty Mountains and now, as they went down to the little stream, the mountains stood, perhaps no more than a day away, a great range that climbed into the sky, leaping from the plain without the benefit of foothills.
They had run out of water before noon of the second day, having been able to salvage only a small skin bag of it from the packs the fleeing horses had bucked off. They had spent some futile hours trying to reach the well in the courtyard of the castle, but the way had been blocked by a mass of fallen stone and still-shifting rubble.
The campfire had been lit, and supper was cooking.
“There’ll be enough left for breakfast and that is all,” said Mary. “We’re down to the last of the cornmeal.”
“There’ll be game up ahead,” said Hal. “Rough going, maybe, but we won’t starve.”
Sniveley came down the hill and hunkered by the fire. “Nothing stirring,” he said. “I scouted all about. Not a thing in sight. No tracks, not even old tracks. No tracks of any kind. We’re the only living beings that have ever come here. And we shouldn’t be here. We should have gone back.”
“It was as far back as it was forward,” said Gib. “Maybe farther. And there is still the ax we’re carrying for the Old Ones.”
“The Old Ones,” said Sniveley, “if we ever find them, whatever they may be, will take that precious ax of yours and smash our skulls with it.”
“Quit your complaining, Sniveley,” said Hal. “Sure, we’ve had tough luck. We lost our horses and most of our supplies, but we came out of all that ruckus at the castle without a scratch, and this is more than we could have reasonably expected.”
“Yeah,” said Sniveley, “and I suppose that when He Who Broods Upon the Mountain comes down and takes the last stitch off our backs and boots us so hard he leaves the mark of footprints on our rumps, you’ll be saying we are lucky that he didn’t—”
“Oh, stop it,” Mary cried. “Stop this squabbling. We are here, aren’t we? We all are still alive. We found water before we suffered from the lack of it and—”
“I got thirsty,” Sniveley said. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I got so thirsty I was spitting dust.”
Bucket came ambling over to the fire and stopped. He stood there, doing nothing at all.
“I wish,” said Gib, “I could figure that one out. He doesn’t do a thing. He can’t talk, and I’m not too sure he hears.”
“Don’t forget,” said Cornwall, “that he was the one who warned us back there at the castle. If it hadn’t been for him, we might have been caught flat-footed.…”
“Don’t forget, as well,” said Hal, “that he carried more than his fair share of the supplies we salvaged. He ran out those ropes he uses for arms and latched onto the packs …”
“If it hadn’t been for him,” protested Sniveley, “we never would have got into this mess. Them wheels were after him, I tell you. Whatever they might have been, they never would have bothered with us or with that bunch of creeps who were living in the castle. None of us were that important to them. It was either the Chaos Beast or Tin Bucket that was important to them. They were the ones they were out to get.”
“If it hadn’t been for the wheels,” Gib pointed out, “we still would be penned back there in the castle. The wheels scared the Hellhounds off, and we took some roughing up, but it all worked out for the best.”
“It’s funny,” said Oliver, “how we now can talk so easily of the wheels. At the time we were scared out of our wits of them, but now we can talk quite easily of them. Here is something that we didn’t understand, something frightening, something entirely outside any previous experience, and yet now we brush off all the mystery of it and talk about the wheels as if they were common things you might come upon at any corner you turned.”
“Thing is,” said Hal, “there’s been too much happening. There has been so much strangeness that we have become numbed to it. You finally get to a point where you suspend all wonder and begin accepting the unusual as if it were everyday. Back there in the world we came from all of us lived quite ordinary lives. Day followed day without anything unusual happening at all, and we were satisfied that nothing ever happened. We were accustomed to nothing ever happening. On this trip we have become so accustomed to strangenesses that we no longer find them too remarkable. We do not question them. Maybe because we haven’t the time to question.”
“I have been doing a lot of wondering about the wheels,” said Cornwall, “and I’m inclined to agree with Sniveley that their target was either the Chaos Beast or Bucket. More likely the Chaos Beast, it seems to me, for they probably did not know, or those who sent them, did not know the Chaos Beast was dead. It would seem unlikely they would have known of Bucket.”
“They could have,” Sniveley objected. “Somehow they could have been able to calculate the time, if they knew about the Beast, when Bucket was about to hatch.”
“Which brings us to the question,” said Cornwall, “not only of what the wheels were, but what was the Chaos Beast, and what is Bucket? Is Bucket another Chaos Beast?”
“We don’t know what the Chaos Beast looked like,” said Gib. “Maybe Bucket is a young Chaos Beast and will change when he gets older.”
“Perhaps.” said Cornwall. “There is a man at Oxford, a very famous savant, who just recently announced that he had worked out the method by which, through some strange metamorphosis, a worm turns into a butterfly. It is unlikely, of course, that he is right. Most of his fellow savants do not agree with him. He has been the butt of much ridicule because of his announcement. But I suppose he could be right. There are many strange occurrences we do not understand. Maybe his principle is right, and it may be that Bucket is the worm that in time will metamorphose into a Chaos Beast.”
“I wish,” said Mary, “that you wouldn’t talk that way in front of Bucket. As if he were just a thing and not a creature like the rest of us. Just a thing to talk about. He might be able to hear, he might understand what you are saying. If that is so, you must embarrass him.”
“Look at Coon,” said Oliver. “He is stalking Bucket.”
Hal half rose from his sitting position, but Cornwall reached out and grabbed him by the arm. “Watch,” he said.
“But Coon …”
“It’s all right,” said Cornwall. “It’s a game they’re playing.”
The end of one of Bucket’s arms had dropped onto the ground, was lying there, the tip of it quivering just a little. It was the quivering tip of the tentacle that Coon was stalking, not Bucket himself. Coon made a sudden rush; the arm tip, at the last moment, flicked out of his reach. Coon checked his rush and pivoted, reaching out with one forepaw, grasping at the tentacle. His paw closed about it and he went over on his back, grabbing with the second forepaw, wrestling the tentacle. Another tentacle extruded and tickled Coon’s rump. Coon released his hold on the first tentacle, somersaulted to grab at the second one.
“Why, Bucket’s playing with him,” Mary gasped. “Just like you’d use a string to play with a kitten. He even let him catch the tentacle.”
Hal sat down heavily. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Bucket’s human, after all,” said Mary.
“Not human,” said Cornwall. “A thing like that never could be human. But he has a response to the play instinct, and that does make him seem just a little human.”
“Supper’s ready,” Mary said. “Eat up. We have breakfast left and that is all.”
Coon and Bucket went on playing.
33
Tomorrow, Cornwall thought, they’d go on toward the mountains, where they’d seek out, or try to seek out, the Old Ones. And after they had found the Old Ones, or had failed to find them, what would they do then? Surely they would not want to turn about and come back across the Blasted Plain, without horses and more than likely with Hellhounds in wait for their return. One could not be sure, he knew, that the Hellhounds would be waiting, but the possibility that they might be was not something that could be ignored.
He sat on a sandy slope of ground that ran down to the stream, leaning back against a boulder. Off to his left the campfire gleamed through the dark, and he could see the silhouettes of the rest of the party sitting around it. He hoped that for a while they would not miss him and come looking for him. For some reason that he could not completely understand, he’d wanted to be off by himself. To think, perhaps, although he realized that the time for thinking was past. The thinking should have been done much earlier, before they had gone plunging off on this incredible adventure. If there had been some thought put to it, he knew, they might not have set out on it. It had all been done on the impulse of the moment. He had fled the university once he learned that his filching the page of manuscript was known. Although, come to think of it, there had been no real need to flee. There were a hundred places on the campus or in the town where he could have holed up and hidden out. The imagined need to flee had been no more than an excuse to go off on a hunt to find the Old Ones. And from that point onward the expedition had grown by a chain of unlikely circumstances and by the same emotional response to them as he, himself, had experienced—responses that were illogical on the face of them. An unknowing fleeing perhaps, from the sameness of the ordinary life that Oliver and Hal had talked about just a few hours before.