Ham nodded. “She did and I’ve got it all together. Won’t take us long to load it up for you—” He glanced to Nick who obligingly moved away from the counter again. He was willing to give Ham a hand. Though they should be in no hurry to speed this one off.
This Linda was almost as tall as Nick. A lot of girls were tall nowadays. Her hair had been tied back from her face with a twist of bright red wool, but it was still long enough to lie on her shoulders in very dark strands. Her skin was creamy pale. If she tanned she had not started that process yet this season.
Her jeans were as red as her hair tie and she had a sleeveless blouse of white with blue dolphins leaping up and down on it. Sunglasses swung pendant from another red tie about her neck and she wore thong sandals on her feet. He was not usually so aware of a girl’s clothes, but these fitted her as if to complete a picture.
Nick shouldered one of the melons Ham pointed out and took a second under his arm, carrying them out to the waiting jeep. Ham was busy stowing in Coke.
“Wait ’til I get some sacks,” he told Nick. “Shake those melons around and you’ll get them stove in.”
Linda Durant had followed them out. “That sounds,” she commented, “as if I have a rough road ahead. You’ll have to give directions, Jane’s are vague.”
For the first time Nick realized that she meant to travel the Cut-Off. He glanced at Ham who looked sober. After what Ham had just been saying—to send a stranger, and a girl, down the Cut-Off—But if there was no other way in now—only Nick had a queer feeling about it.
There was one thing—he could take that way, too. It was really shorter to his own cabin when you came to think about it. And it had been almost his whole lifetime since Ted and Ben had disappeared. This was broad daylight and these Ridgeways must have been up and down there maybe a hundred times since they moved in. So, why look for monsters that did not exist?
“Look here,” Nick suggested as Ham reappeared with sacks and newspapers and proceeded to wedge in the cargo. “I’m heading that way. It’s rough and we’ll have to take it slow, but if you’ll match your speed to mine”—he motioned at the waiting bike—“I’ll guide you in. I’m Nick—Nicholas Shaw—Mr. Hodges here knows me. My people have had a cabin on the lake for a long time.”
Linda gave him a long, intent survey. Then she nodded and smiled.
“That’s fine! From what Jane said the road’s pretty rough and I could miss it. I’m very glad of your company.”
Ham packed the last of the papers in, and Nick gathered up his own purchases and bagged them in a bundle he could tie over the saddlebags. Several indignant yowls from the storeroom brought an instant sharp response from the Peke.
Linda adjusted her sunglasses and got behind the wheel. But Ham spoke to Nick in a low voice.
“Take it easy now. I have a funny feeling—”
“Not much else we can do if she’s going to get to the Wilson place,” Nick pointed out.
As he gunned the bike to life he wondered what looming danger one could watch for along the Cut-Off. No one who had ever met whatever peril lurked there had ever returned to explain what he or she had faced. No, Nick was not going to let his imagination take over. He’d end up seeing a UFO or something lurking behind every tree, he waved to Linda and swung out. She nodded and followed.
They turned off the highway about a half-mile farther on and Nick cut speed, concentrating on the rough surface ahead. He had come this road enough times to memorize every rut and bump, but the heavy rains last week would have done damage, and he had no intention of being spilled through carelessness.
A mile and a half to the Cut-Off. In all the years he had been coming up here he had always looked for the overgrown entrance to what had become a sinister road to nowhere. Could she get the jeep in there at all? But they had been using it, so they must have cleared a passage through. July 24, 1970—he’d been too little then to realize what had gone on. But he’d heard plenty about it ever since. All that searching—the neighbors, the sheriff and his deputies. And not so much as a track to tell them why two young men in the best of health had vanished from a half-mile strip of road one sunny morning.
They had been seen entering, had stopped and talked to Jim Anderson about the best place to fish. Jim had been going into the store. He had watched them turn into the Cut-Off. But they never came out at the lake where a couple of guys were waiting to join them.
Mouth of the Cut-Off—like a snake with jaws wide open to swallow them down.
Nick took firm control of his imagination. If he did not see Linda to the lake she would go by herself. And he somehow could not let that happen and be able to look at himself in the mirror when shaving tomorrow.
It was only a half-mile, perhaps a little more. They could run it in minutes, even if it were rough. The sooner they got through the better. He wondered what this Linda would say if she knew his thoughts. She’d probably decide he’d been smoking pot. Only when you heard about the Cut-Off all your life—well, you had a different point of view.
He had borrowed a lot of Ham’s books, bought some of his own, knew all the things that did happen now and then that nobody seemed able to explain. Maybe Fort and those other writers who hunted out such stories had the right of it. The scientists, the brains who might have solved, or at least tried to solve, such puzzles, refused even to look at evidence before their eyes because it did not fit in with rational “facts.” There could be facts that were neither rational nor logical at all.
There was the turnoff ahead. And there certainly had been changes since the last time he was here. Looked as if someone had run a bulldozer in to break trail. Nick gave a sigh of relief at the raw opening. There was a healthy difference between wriggling down an almost closed and ill-reputed trail and this open scraped side road, which now looked as good as the one leading to his own cabin. He flagged the jeep as he came to a stop.
“This is it,” he called. Something in him still shrank a little from entering that way, but he refused to admit it.
Only he continued to feel that odd uneasiness, which had come to him earlier as he had seen Rufus watch something invisible that Nick had been convinced against his will was there.
“Take it slow,” he cautioned, also against his will. He wanted to take that road at the best speed they could make. “I don’t know how good the surface is.”
“Yes.” The dark glasses masked her face. She surely did not need them here in the shade of the trees, but she had not let them slide off as she had at the store. The Peke was on the seat, his forepaws resting on the dashboard, looking ahead with some of Rufus’ intensity. He did not bark, but there was an eagerness in every line of his small, silky body, as if he wanted to urge them on.
Nick gunned his motor, swung into the Cut-Off, his speed well down. The jeep snorted along behind him at hardly better than a walking pace. The road crew had run the scraper along, but the rain had cut gullies across, here and there, and those had not been refilled.
The lane was all rawly new, bushes and even saplings gouged and cut out and flung back to wither and die on either side. It looked ugly—wrong, Nick decided. He supposed it had to be done to open up the road, but it was queer the road crew had not cleaned up more. Maybe the guys who had worked here knew about the sinister history of the Cut-Off and had not wanted to stay around any longer than they had to.
That broken stuff walled them in as if it were intended to keep them in the middle of the road, allow them no chance to reach the woods. Nick felt more and more trapped. Uneasiness was rising in him so that he had to exert even more control. This was plain stupid! He must keep a grip on his imagination. Just watch the road for those ruts and lumps so he would not hit something—do that and keep going. They would be there in no time at all.
It was still, not a leaf moved. But the trees arched over well enough to keep out the sun. Probably it was very quiet, too, if the noise of the bike and the jeep had not advertised their coming. Advertised it to what? Nick hoped
only to those in the Wilson place.
Right ahead was the turn, a blind one. And this was a narrow road. No place to meet anyone coming the other way. But surely they were making enough noise—
Noise! The Peke had begun to yap, almost as when he had challenged Rufus. Nick heard the girl call out: “Down, Lung! Down!”
He half-turned his head, the bike hit something and wobbled. Nick had to fight to keep it away from a mass of dying brush. But there was something else, a cloud—like a fog trapped under the trees. It was thickening, coming down like a blanket—fast!
Nick thought he cried out. Behind him he heard an answering scream and a crash. Then he hit something, was thrown, and skidded painfully into total darkness.
2
Nick lay with his feet higher than his head, the whole left side of his face smarting. Groggily he levered himself up on his hands and blinked, then shook his head to banish the queer not-here feeling. He could hear a whimpering sound from behind, but at first he was so much occupied with his own aches and pains that it had no meaning.
He looked around.
The bike lay entangled in broken brush into which it must have slammed with force. Nick sat up farther. Bike—the jeep! Where was the jeep? Now the whimpering alerted him to what might be a serious accident. He had no idea what had happened—memory seemed at fault. They had just come around the turn in the Cut-Off and then . . .
Nick got shakily to his feet.
There was no road.
He staggered toward the jeep. That was there, yes, slammed against a tree. A tree that had no business being there at all, for seemingly it had sprung up right in the middle of what had been a newly cleared road.
There was no road!
He reached the jeep, supported himself against it. His aching head still seeming foggy. Fog—mist—cloud—there was something about that he could faintly remember. But that did not matter now. What did was the girl behind the wheel of the jeep.
She was supported partly by her seat belt, partly by the wheel itself. Her eyes were still covered with those sunglasses. With an effort Nick reached over and jerked them off. She was unconscious, he decided.
The whimpering came from the Peke huddled against her, licking at her arm. Lung growled at Nick but only halfheartedly, as he slid in beside Linda.
As far as Nick could see she had no open wounds, but—broken bones? His hands were shaking with a tremor he found hard to control, as he eased her back in the seat so he could get at the fastening of the seat belt.
“What—what—” She opened her eyes but, though they were turned in his direction, they did not seem to focus on him.
“Hold still!” Nick ordered. “Let me get this open—”
A few minutes later he sighed with relief. She had no broken bones. The side of his face, where it had scraped gravel, was raw, but that was minor. They could have been killed. Looking about him now, with eyes entirely aware, he wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.
Killed—if they had been going any faster—slammed up against these trees. But where—where did the trees come from?
They were huge, giants, and the underbrush beneath them was thin as if their mighty roofing overhead of leaves and branches kept any weaker growth from developing. The jeep was trapped between the one against which its nose was stuck, and a log of a fallen giant behind it, boxed in neatly so there was no hope of getting it out. Impossible, but that was the way it was.
Nick moved slowly around the machine, ran his hands across the top of the log, dislodging moss and fallen leaves. It was very apparent that this had been here, half sunk in the mucky soil, for a long, long time. But—there was the jeep—and—where was the road?
“Please—” Linda had edged around on the seat and was looking at him, her eyes very wide and frightened. “Please—where are we—what—happened?” She cuddled Lung against her. Now and then the small dog whined. He was shivering.
“I don’t know,” Nick answered slowly. Only he suspected what was so frightening he did not want to face the fact that it might be the truth.
“But—there’s no road.” Linda turned her head from side to side, searching. “We were just driving along and then—Where is this?” Her voice slid up the scale; Nick judged she was close to panic.
He was not far from that himself. But they had to hold on, to lose control would do no good. He hurried back to climb into the jeep.
“You—you know—!” She did have her voice under control now, was watching him narrowly. “What has happened? If you know—tell me!”
But he still hated to face what must be the truth. “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “It is only a guess.” He hesitated. Those trees there were certainly good evidence. What more did he want? They were out of the Cut-Off, in such woods as had not been seen in this part of the country for two hundred years or more when the first settlers had attacked the great forests to carve out mastery of the land.
“Did your friends know anything about the history of the Cut-Off?” he began. How could you explain to anyone what might have happened, something so bizarre, so improbable?
“No.” Linda cradled Lung in her arms, murmuring soothingly to him now and again. Her one-word reply was uncompromising. It was apparent she wanted the truth, or what he thought might be the truth.
“Well, the Cut-Off has a history of disappearances—running back as long as records were kept around here—”
(“Around here.” But surely this “here” was not the “here” of a short time ago.)
“The last time it happened was in 1970, two men going out to the lake to fish. But before that there were others. That’s why the Cut-Off wasn’t in use. Not until they built the new freeway and closed off the other road in.”
“Disappearances to where?” Linda demanded sharply.
“That’s it, nobody knows—knew. There are places . . .” Nick paused again. Would she believe him? She had to believe the evidence now before them at least. “Places where people do disappear—like the Bermuda Triangle—a whole flight of Navy planes went there, and the rescue ships after them. There have been planes and ships and people—and on land, in other places, army regiments even.” Though he did not want to remember, all the stories he had read flooded back into his mind. “They just flew, or rode, or walked into—nowhere.”
Linda sat very still. She no longer watched him. Her gaze was straight ahead at that giant tree trunk against which the jeep was nosed.
“What—what is the theory about it then?” Her voice quivered a little. Nick could sense her effort at control.
“One is that there is a magnetic field like a whirlpool—that anything caught in it may be thrown into another space-time continuum.”
“And—that may be what has happened to us? How do we get back?”
There was no answer to that. There never had been through all the centuries of such disappearances. Nick stared at the tree too now, fiercely willing it to vanish, for them to be back in the Cut-Off.
“There is no return.” Linda made that a flat statement rather than a question. “We—we’re trapped in this—this place!”
“No!” Nick exploded. “We’re not sure of that! Anyway we can try—we can always try—but”—he regarded the dim, shadowed places under the trees uneasily—“let’s get out of here. On to the lake—”
He had a feeling that they were under observation, not that he could detect any movement, any sign they were not alone. To get out of this place of trees, where a man was dwarfed and lost, into the open was a desire goading him to action.
“We can’t take the jeep.” Linda stated the obvious.
“No, but I can the bike—push it now—and we can ride if the road gets better and you are willing to hold on.”
“Yes! Yes, let’s get out of here!” Her reply was feverishly eager.
She opened her shoulder bag, took out a leash she hooked to Lung’s collar. “My bag—it’s small.” She reached into the back of the jeep, pulled out a canvas duff
el bag. Then she laughed, though that sound was a little ragged. “All that stuff back there for the party tonight. Jane—Jane may have to wait some for it.”
Nick’s foreboding lightened. Linda was taking it well. Did she really believe him? Did he believe himself? But his first panic had subsided. And action drew him. Maybe if they could just find the lake, a familiar landmark—Don’t think of any future beyond the next few minutes, he warned himself.
Mentally he inventoried the contents of his saddlebags—first-aid kit, sweater, swimming trunks, matches, a hunting knife, flashlight, chocolate bars, water canteen, two shirts, tool kit for the bike—transistor radio—Radio!
He was out of the jeep, hurrying back to the bike. Radio—if they could hear anything on that—Nick fumbled with the buckles of the saddlebag as Linda joined him.
“What is it?”
“My radio—if we can pick up anything—”
“Oh, hurry!” She shifted from one foot to the other impatiently as he untangled the gear and brought out the small transistor.
Three stations, he flipped the switch from one to the next. Only silence. Then—A gabble of sound, not static, more like speech. But not in any language he had picked up before.
“There! Turn it up!” Linda urged. “You’ve got something!”
“But what?” Nick asked.
“But what” was right. This sounded like gasps, clicks, and even a gabbled singing, but it made no sense. He thumbed the set off.
“Whatever that was, it was no broadcast of ours,” he said bleakly.
“But somebody was broadcasting,” Linda pointed out. “Which means we aren’t alone here. Maybe if we can find people they will be able to help us.”
Nick was not too sure. The language, if language that had been, was far removed from anything he had ever heard in his life and he had monitored a lot of foreign broadcasts with Gary Langford when Gary had his ham outfit. But Linda was right about getting out of here. He had the small compass and the lake was northeast—or it should be—if there was still any lake at all.