Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 22
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The Wizards of Senchuria
by Kenneth Bulmer
I
The vision of a thick and juicy steak on a well garnished blue-plate special and a cup of hot and steaming coffee brought Scobie Redfern hurriedly through the snow. Black snow razored down from a black sky between gaunt black buildings and Scobie Redfern, whose tastes ran to baking-hot beaches and palm trees and creaming surf, shivered and hunkered more deeply into his overcoat.
Traffic was light this time of a dark and dirty night in Lower Manhattan. He clasped his tennis racket and sneakers tightly under his arm and ran for the corner. He’d played a number of games and still felt flushed. Wind and snow blinded him.
The traffic light changed to red and the color glimmered across the snow like technicolor blood. A single cab hauled up for the light and Scobie Redfern sighted on it and pelted slushily, head-down.
He snapped the door open and felt the warmth inside and bundled in. As he did so the opposite door swung open and a bulky overcoated figure shouldered in.
They collided mid-seat.
Redfern was a husky, broad-shouldered young man with a mop of tow hair and usually a pleasant expression and an obliging manner. Now he said, “My cab, I think.”
The newcomer hadn’t budged from the shock of contact. Redfern had been the one to bounce. Big as Scobie was, this man was bigger, heavier. In the traffic light’s glow, changing back to green now, his profile showed craggy-jawed and tufty-eyebrowed. He somehow eased himself in the seat and looked back as he slammed his side door.
“We hit it at the same time,” he said pleasantly; but Redfern clearly heard the overtones in the voice and thought they indicated uncertainty. This big man was worried.
“I’ve been exercising and I’m hot and sticky.” Redfern was in no mood for argument. “I could catch double-pneumonia in that snow.”
The man didn’t answer. He was still looking out into the snow across the street. The tenseness in him was unmistakable now.
The cabby leaned back.
“If you guys want to slug it out, okay. Otherwise, share the cab and tell me where you wanta go.”
“It is a filthy night,” the man said, as though prodded. He moved his thick shoulders.
“Check,” said Redfern, a little less bellicose. “I’m heading for a restaurant that’s—”
“That’ll suit me,” the newcomer interrupted.
“Yeah,” said the cabby, shifting gear. “I’m not cut out for the refereeing bit.”
Redfern gave him the restaurant address and sat back. The warmth in the cab, the smell of snow melting from thick cloth, the quick reaction, made him shiver again. He’d had a few fights in his time and had not particularly enjoyed them. He looked out into the slanting snow. All his life he had been fighting authority, kicking against stupidities, and that took more out of a man than any physical brawl.
Something big and dark and somehow unholy moved out there. The snow impeded his vision. He leaned forward.
He heard the man draw in his breath sharply. Then he reached into the inside of his overcoat.
Something struck the side of the cab. Leaning forward, his mouth half open, Redfern saw a hand reach up to the window. Enough light broke through the falling snow to show him that hand in blasphemous detail.
He saw a hand glistening green and yellow with scales, a hand with two fingers and a stub thumb tipped with long, blood-red claws. The hand turned to clench into a fist and the scales caught the light; as though limned in radiation each scale burned with a violet edging. The fist drew back to strike. Then the cab lurched as the cabby let in the clutch, and the fist struck and vanished with a loud metallic gong note.
“What the jumping Jehoshaphat was that?” yelled the cabby, jerking his head around.
“Hail,” grunted the man.
He relaxed, sinking back into the seat.
“Hail!” The cabby eased up. “I’d better—”
“Keep going,” the man said in a voice that snapped like a chain-saw.
“Well, now…” But the cab still ran; it was warm inside and the snow outside was unpleasant, and, anyway, he didn’t own the cab, did he? The cabby kept on.
“What,” said Scobie Redfern in a voice like a rusty bucket coming up from the bottom of a well, “was that?”
“You saw?”
Redfern swallowed. “Yes. Some nut with a fancy-dress—”
“Sort of.”
Then Redfern saw the Colt forty-five the stranger was sliding back into the inside of his overcoat.
Redfern felt queasy.
“If you like,” the big man said slowly and with grave emphasis, “you can get off at the next corner.”
Scobie Redfern wasn’t fool enough to imagine all this was a trick to make him give up the cab. After all, cold and unpleasant as it was outside, there were other cabs on New York’s streets at night.
And that hand! It must have been a brightly colored papier-mache amusement arcade gimmick. Nothing human had a hand with claws like that.
“Well?”
Redfern looked back through the rear window. The falling snow absorbed light and warmth, in a diminishing perspective already coating tire marks and powdering a handful of snowmen-pedestrians, heads down, shuffling. There was no sign of that dark shadow Redfern thought he had glimpsed.
“It’s… cold out there.”
The man grunted and, although he didn’t relax, some of that tautness left him.
The cab slushed through snow and swirled around the next corner. Redfern knew he hadn’t dreamed that stupid monster hand. But why was this big tough character so het up about it? One thing, so Scobie Redfern told himself firmly, that hand wasn’t for real.
Scobie Redfern had had a wide variety of fobs in his short business career, most of them terminated by his habitual confrontation with established authority. The cab stopped outside the middle-priced restaurant he patronized after pay day, before the hamburger days immediately preceding pay day, and both men alighted.
From the yellow glowing windows a cheerful radiance fell across the snow-covered sidewalk. The rich aromas of cooking food brought saliva to the tongue. He hitched the racket and shoes under his arm and started for the glass door.
“I’ll join you, if I may,” said the stranger.
“Surely.”
An automobile came sliding through the falling snow along the street as the cab took off. Redfern heard it coming but did not look up, since his mind was tenaciously grappling with that envisioned steak.
A thrust like a butt from a maddened billy goat smacked into the small of his back—and the next moment he was sprawling into the snow with white soggy flakes packing into his nose and eyes and mouth. He spluttered and choked. A great roaring, ripping sound blasted the icy air. A showering crash of tinkling, shattering glass was followed at once by the vicious revving of a car engine and a bedlam of screams and shouts yammering insanely. Sluggishly, Redfern rolled over and sat up.
At his side the stranger was picking himself up. His face showed hard and bleak and yet a hint of a satisfied smile curved the corners of his wide mouth.
“You all right?”
“You just about pushed my backbone through my—”
“When the Contessa’s bully boys play rough you have to play it back to them, only rougher.”
“Yeah, sure.” Redfern spat snow and wiped his eyes and ears. He looked at the restaurant, where men and women showed scared faces.
The whole front had been ripped away as though peeled off by a can opener.
Before he had time to try to sort things out the stranger grabbed his arm—just above the elbow and most painfully —and dragged him across the sidewalk and into the alleyway at the side of the restaurant. Forced to run, Redfern stumbled over lumpy snow and nameless objects from tipped-over garbage pails. Packing cases and cardboard boxes, broken and soggy, littered the alley. They ran hard, the breath pumping in clouds of steam from their mouths and noses.
Halfway down the alley, Redfern pulled back.
“Hey!” he panted, gulping for breath. “What is this? What are you—some kind of nut?”
“No. Come on. They’ve seen your face. They’ll know you now.”
A sudden sick fear hit Redfern in the pit of the stomach.
The stranger dragged him on. “I feel responsible for you now. I should have pushed you out of the cab. You’ll be sorry I didn’t, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“Come on! Look, my name is Alec Macdonald. You’ve dropped right in the middle of a bit of a mess. As soon as I meet up with a buddy of mine—fellow called David Macklin—it’ll be all right. What do I call you?”
Shivering, Redfern told him.
“Right, then, Scobie. Until we can knock out the opposition, the Trugs and the others, we’re in the position of the fox, with the hounds nipping our rumps. Got it?”
Redfern didn’t want it. But he nodded, weakly, and ran on. He’d always fancied he’d be good if any adventures came his way; but he’d never envisioned them quite like this—in the snow, of all things.
This man, Alec, now: he didn’t have the cut of a gangster; more likely he was working for the forces of law and order.
Trying to cheer himself with the reflection,
The mouth of the alley showed ahead, a snow-filled rectangle of hazy light from the street beyond. A dark shadow fell across the close-packed snow from an automobile waiting. Alec skidded to a halt. His strong face showed stubbornness and anger.
“Is that them?” asked Redfern. He breathed normally now, getting his second wind, his athletic training adjusting to quick action.
Alec nodded. “Yes. They saw us duck into the alley.”
He pulled a small transistor radio from his pocket and hauled up the aerial. His powerful hands were gentle with the small controls.
“This thing is refusing to work. But it’s worth another try.”
Putting his mouth close to the tiny mouthpiece, he said crisply: “This is Roughneck. Come in, Knifestone.” He twiddled the controls. The radio sizzled like a hotdog. “Nothing,” Alec said disgustedly. He slapped the aerial down and shoved the useless transceiver back into his pocket. In its place he produced the Colt forty-five.
“Might be more useful,” he growled in his bearish voice.
The sense of disorientation that at first had alarmed Scobie Redfern had changed somewhere along this alley into a cocky consciousness that in the presence of this big bear of a man called Alec he had to make out like a man, too.
Redfern sniffed and said, “We’d better cut through a side door. We can get out into the next alley, perhaps.”
Alec switched him a quick glance. Then the tough, crusty face broke into a smile. “They won’t beat us, Scobie,” he said in a voice curiously gentle.
They found a door and scuttled through a smelly and greasy back kitchen and came out into another alley where the snow lay thick and unmarked. Light splotched randomly from small windows along the alley. At the end the rectangle of light from the street glowed a welcome.
They set off fast, heads down and coat collars up. Alec kept the gun gripped in his fist in his pocket. Their footfalls made only soft squeaking sounds in the snow.
Before they reached the street Alec tried his transceiver again. “This is Roughneck. Where the hell are you, Knifestone?” The only answer was the frying-pan hiss. Alec shook the little radio. He tried again. No good. Redfern became jittery.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, not too carefully.
They moved on. Through the falling snow a strange sibilant keening drifted down. Redfern looked up, blinking his eyes against feathery snowflakes. The sky showed a black contorted mass of flakes. Alec gripped his arm. “Hold still!”
Something blacker than the night swayed above their heads. Redfern made out a squat shape gyrating at the end of a ladder whipping in pendulum swings. He gasped. Alec’s gun snouted up.
A squeaky, rustly voice chirruped, “Hey! Alec!”
Before either man could say anything a bull bellow rolled down the alleyway toward them. Redfern snapped his gaze to the end of the alley.
A figure in a long raincoat charged toward them. It wore a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over its face; but in the alley lighting Redfern could clearly see twin pits of scarlet where a face should be. He saw two hands lifted, two hands with scarlet-tipped claws and scales shimmering in the erratic snow-laden light.
“A Trug!”
Alec hauled Redfern to one side. The Colt went off in a series of rippling smashes like a cabinet of crockery falling down.
The Trug jerked but came on. It screeched high and viciously, like a punctured steam-boiler.
The small bouncing shape at the end of the ladder chirruped again, frantically. It swung down.
“Alec! You know better’n to tickle a Trug!” The bottom rungs of the ladder whipped across the snow. “Broken branches, Alec! Grab the ladder!”
The ladder lashed around like a live thing. Alec got his left hand to it and fired his last round at the bellowing Trug. The automatic disappeared into his pocket with wizard-like speed. He hauled the ladder across and hoisted himself up.
“Quick, Scobie!” he shouted.
Redfern grabbed the bottom rung, the metal cold to his hand. He felt the ladder start to rise. He kicked frantically at the ground and his foot slipped; he got the other hand on the rung, then he was being hoisted up into the air, swinging like a puppet.
Above him Alec clung to the ladder. “Away then, Moke!” he called up.
The cold bit into Redfern’s fingers. His weight dragged down on his arms, his racket and sneakers vanishing below, his arms straightening and feeling as though they were being pulled from their sockets.
The Trug danced below vengefully. It tipped its head up and twin spots of feral fire burned up.
Redfern felt himself slipping.
Those long talons below, that massive beast with its claws and its savage fury, raked at him. The cloth of his trouser leg tore at a vicious swipe.
He slipped more.
He couldn’t hold on. With a despairing cry he felt his fingers slip from the cold rung.
Helplessly he started to plunge down to the maddened beast below.
II
His feet hit the Trug’s head.
For a ludicrous insane moment of time he half balanced there like a crazy acrobat in a lunatic circus.
Up the alleyway two more monstrous raincoated forms plunged toward him. He caught the baleful fire from the shadowed caverns where their faces should be.
In the instant before he toppled he heard two voices above him.
A man’s voice, incisive, controlled: “Put us through, Sarah!”
And a girl’s, breathless yet unflurried: “We’re right in the Gate—but the Trug!”
Then, as he fell toward the snow, he heard Alec’s grizzly growl: “Damn the Trug! There are more coming! Put us through, Sarah!”
He felt a lurch as his feet slid from the Trug’s powerfully sloped shoulders. He tried to get his hands up to break the fall as he hit the snow—and he felt them smash into a hard interlacing tracery of tree branches. Leaves whipped at his face. His foot slipped from a branch and he fetched up against a crotch of the tree with a jarring thump.
Below him the Trug bellowed madly and swung taloned claws at him and slipped away, spinning over backwards as the gross body battered down through branches and leaves. With a diminishing howl the Trug fell clear of the gigantic tree, turning head over heels, the floppy hat spinning free, and vanished into a mat of growing tendrils below.
Scobie Redfern, for an incredible instant of self-disappointment, thought he’d gone mad.
“You all right, Scobie?”
He looked up at the hail.
“What?” He swallowed and started again. “What happened? Where… ?”
“It’s all right, Scobie.” The ladder dropped down, sliding on the tree branch. “Grab that and climb up.” Alec swung the ladder towards him. “We’ll tell you all about it but first get up here. You look as though you might fall off any second.”
Shakily, not believing, Redfern climbed up. Alec was sitting on a neat little wooden platform built in the angle of two branches and the trunk. Slowly Redfern took in the scene. His head ached. He felt hot and flushed and his overcoat suffocated him. It was hot.
“It’s quite a jolt, Alec,” said the girl, smiling at Redfern. He hadn’t quite got the composure to smile back, not just yet. She was small and alive, with honey-colored hair smooth and well-cared for, and a soft innocent face. She wore an outrageous zigzag striped emerald and orange and red psychedelic dress.
“Just take your time, Scobie,” said the man. He looked even stranger, wearing a very tight pepper-and-salt suit and a big black floppy hat. His hair, when he pulled the hat off to fan himself, was a crisply shining white. His face, lined and careworn, showed clear indications of a life spent absorbing life’s lessons. “I’m David Macklin, and this is Sarah.”
Redfern swallowed again. “You seem to have saved our lives.”
Alec laughed.
“Damn right. I had an idea there was a Portal around there; but—”
“But why didn’t you—” interrupted Sarah.
