Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 7
They ran between the trees. The sun, a golden, friendly sun, gleamed and glimmered down through gaps and aureoled leaves and cast a soft undersea warmth into the forest.
The colors changed.
Brightening up through the spectrum, the light altered. Greens gave place to yellower tints. Oranges and reds began to drip down. Trees shone with orange trunks and golden leaves. Fire dripped. Brilliant violets and mauves coruscated blindingly. Actinic light blinded them. Dark dyes stained their vision; scintillating patches of brilliance stabbed hard fingers of radiance at them.
“What is it?” screamed Val.
Redfern saw that the smoky orange glow from her aerials was flickering, was greening, was blueing as she gave way once more to fear.
He shook her roughly. “They’re trying a new trick! Polarized light, radiation on different wavelengths—don’t trust what you see, Val! It’s all a trick! We must break through to the city! Come on!” He dragged her on, the silky white shirt a ripped rag, her legs trembling, her face a mask of sweat and fear.
She stumbled after him.
“Don’t give in, Val! Fight them! We can win! Just remember: they’re trying to scare us as though we were stupid children. We’re not children! We’re adult—stop feeling frightened of remote authority and use your own eyes and judgment!” The feel of her arm beneath his fingers, warm and soft and firm, reassured him. “And—Val—run!”
Through the swirling maddening wrong colors of the alien forest a fresh light grew ahead, a pale yellow radiance that washed down like amber lights seen through fog. All around them the forest writhed in impossible colors—and now a sound rose about them. A keening, moaning, sighing that sought to draw them back into the deadly embraces of the trees.
His ears rang with that eerie sound. His blood thrashed and pounded around his body and he could feel the slogging pump of his heart as a tocsin within his chest. He panted for air. But he did not stop running and he did not stop dragging the fainting form of the girl after him. He was by now good and mad, was Scobie Redfern.
The yellow light ahead washed up over the trees. He could see crimson and orange trunks and violet and mauve branches stark against that wan radiance. He forced his way on.
They fairly fell out of the forest.
Directly to their front stretched the turrets and domes and walls of a city made, it seemed, from gems. It sparkled and crackled with light in that all-pervading yellow brilliance. Then Redfern realized he was standing in sunshine, ordinary, if alien, sunshine, rendered into that ghastly amber glow by contrast with the virulent riot of strong colors within the forest.
“They tried to herd us the other way with their revolting giant cockroaches,” he panted. “But that’s the way we’re going! Right ahead—right into their damned city!”
He started off, walking fast, dragging Val.
A few trees and clumps of bushes grew between them and the city. All beyond beneath the sky, a sky of yellow and blue and white cloud, stretched the grassland over which they had tramped, it seemed, so long ago.
A group of cockroaches appeared to their left and another to their right. The black and yellow and the black and white horrors began to pace them, shrilling at the hunt.
“Ignore them, Val.”
She started to answer, but saved her breath for walking and running.
A thing, reared itself ahead of them. Redfern stopped. A tree grew to his left and he made a half-step toward it, watching the thing ahead. It might once have been human.
It wore a travesty of armor, rusted steel breastplate and morion, greaves to cover the skeletal nakedness of its legs. It waited for them. Its face, like a mad jumble of a mantis’s head with some human features superimposed, glared at them with large faceted eyes.
Val screamed and blue sparks shot from her aerials.
Still the angry red glowed from Redfern’s. The thing lifted a crossbow and a bolt hissed into the ground at Redfern’s feet. He hesitated. The thing methodically rewound the bow, using a windlass clamped to the bow stock. Again the head lifted, the quarrel pointed at Redfern.
He lifted the rifle and charged.
His foot caught in an obstruction and he pitched over and down. The rifle spun from his fingers. He clawed up, still angry, still fuming.
The thing clicked its jaws and the bow moved to cover Redfern.
“They don’t want to kill us, Val, remember!” he shouted. He hadn’t fired the rifle because of that, but now he began to scrabble toward the Springfield with a grim determination to shoot his way through.
Val screamed again. Redfern jumped for the rifle.
The bow thunked solidly and the bolt swished through the space where he had been, smacked meatily into the tree. He checked, shocked. That shot had been aimed directly at him—aimed to hit.
“Scobie! They are trying to kill us now! They are!”
VIII
The crossbow looked like a solid hunting job. The windlass creaked. As Redfern pitched forward on hands and knees, stared up with the reality of the final act and his imminent death upon him, he saw three more of the graveyard ghouls march from a thicket, swing toward him, their bows leveled, the sunlight a tongue of flame on each bolt-head.
From the sides the furred roaches closed in.
Val’s sobbing nearly unnerved him. He spared her a quick glance.
“It’s going to be all right, Val! If they want to change the rules they made, then we’ll go along with that.” He started off for the rifle again. “I don’t know what graveyard they dug these things from; but a rifle bullet will send them back there again, damn quick!”
He understood now that the wizards of Senchuria had maintained a strict control on the happenings in the forest. He realized that he could only have comprehended what they intended through their own wavelengths impinging on his brain. He just knew, somehow, that they wanted to run and faze these humans, to bottle the extracted emotions of fear from them for subsequent use.
But now the humans had broken out of the ring. They had refused to run. They had not been herded in a wild chase through the weird forest but had broken back toward the city. The wizards of Senchuria must guess what Redfern intended.
So now the game was over. The play was done. The humans had consistently refused to pay, so now they would be killed.
Their deaths would not go uselessly abegging; Redfern knew without knowing how he knew that the collection of their emotions as they died represented a great and delectable tidbit for the wizards of Senchuria.
The rifle was in his hands now, slick and hard and reassuring. He had never been a man to go to war. He realized that he had been left the rifles as part of the ploy. Maybe the things wouldn’t shoot. Maybe the pins had been removed. Maybe all the cartridges had been emptied of powder. Maybe, even, the wizards of Senchuria wouldn’t mind if he shot a few of their pet hunting cockroaches. They would be expendable in the hunt.
And these graveyard ghouls? Were they expendable, too?
Redfern lifted the rifle and squinted down the sights. He’d find out right now.
He pressed the trigger and heard and felt the satisfying explosion and jolt. The bullet hit the thing high in the chest as it was about to loose the crossbow.
It went over sideways, skirling a weird call, the bow flinging high into the air and the bolt spinning crazily in the sunlight.
Without giving it a second look Redfern slammed the bolt out and in and lined up on the first of the advancing three things from the thicket.
He hit it first time off. As targets, they had the humanity of clay pipes at a fairground. That, in a tiny fraction of sanity amid the turmoil, comforted Redfern. Shooting a fellow human had always seemed to him an act beyond his capabilities.
He missed with his third shot and took three more to dispose of the remaining two ghouls.
He gave a shaky laugh and stood up.
“I wondered if they’d stay down when they were dead.”
As soon as he’d said it he wished the words unspoken. Val’s face crumpled.
“No, Scobie! That would be—”
“They’re dead, Val! It’s all right.”
But the furred hunting cockroaches closed in.
The sight of the girl’s haggard face, all that saucy brown aliveness sered and drawn, angered him. He began to feel the rage in him flower. If these wizards of Senchuria turned out to be fat happy little Father Christmas men he’d feel little compunction in dealing with them as he had with the graveyard ghouls. Men should not perform this kind of obscenity on other men and girls.
He started off for the city slamming a fresh clip into the magazine. The cockroaches paralleled their movement.
The next looming problem would be the crystals and their emerald beam of force.
The roaches kept herding in on the left, opening out on the right.
“They’re trying to run us again,” Redfern said grimly. “A rule-of-thumb procedure: do diametrically opposite what the big boys tell you. That way you get results, if your head isn’t chopped off first.”
Val gave him a scared half-smile.
“We’re still alive, Scobie.”
Almost, almost he said: “That’s my girl.” But the line appeared to him flat and unreal in this context. He thought of the ghoulish things falling away beneath his rifle bullets and wondered if he shouldn’t feel some remorse for killing them. Animals also deserved serious thought before destruction.
He kept stubbornly on directly toward the city. Now, over to his left where the roaches pressed ever closer, running with a flowing motion of black and yellow and white, he saw a tall building isolated from the main balanced mass of the city. Tall windows lanced the walls of the building.
“That’s where we came from,” he panted. “So they don’t want us to go back there. That’s fine! Neither do we!”
Between that tall building and the outskirts of the city grew an extended arm of the forest. Soon it interposed between them and the building. The roaches, scuttling, broke into disorder as they dived into the forest. Feeling savage amusement, Redfern angled off to his right and selected the nearest gate in the city wall. Between it and him lay only a road paralleling the wall, a graveled road lined with bushes loaded with small, starry yellow flowers. He ran straight ahead to cross the gravel road.
A yellow flower spun into the air from a bush and like a miniature buzz saw swished toward him. He caught a quick glimpse of it from the corner of his eye and ducked. The thing rasped like a giant bluebottle. It rotated so that the starred shape blurred into a disk. It sliced a long hank from his untidy mop of fair hair.
Another one twisted off its stem and flew toward him. He beat it away with the flat of his hand with a fine free-flowing tennis forehand drive and felt it slice into his palm like a razor blade.
Val yelped as another one scored a line of blood along her rounded naked shoulder.
Once a flower had sprung from a bush it carried on in a straight line and then, if it missed, fluttered to the ground. Those that did not miss drew little nicks of blood and gasps of pain from the two humans. Soon they were running through a cloud of lancing flowers as though running through a swarm of mindlessly-incensed butterflies.
“We’ve got to go back!” screamed Val.
“No! Keep on!”
Redfern felt his body being nicked and cut and scored. He flailed with his arms. Then he put the rifle down, ripped off the tattered remains of his shirt, slung his rifle back over his shoulder and used the shirt like a fly-whisk, swirling it about him. He swished it through the air about Val, giving her what protection he could. Already her brown skin shone with a myriad of tiny blood flecks. They were being bitten to pieces in tiny, unceasing pricks and jabs.
Like a dancing dervish he leaped and cavorted and swung his shirt, and like a seven-veils dancer Val swayed and swung and kicked with him. Surrounded by the whirling scraps of yellow, being nicked and pinched and slashed, they broke across the gravel road.
Whatever these things were, they were not soft-petaled flowers. Silicon had gone into their hard crystal edges. What motive power could thus lift, spin and hurl them, Redfern didn’t know. But the wizards of Senchuria would have the answer. Scobie Redfern more and more looked forward to the interview with them he had promised himself.
That the wizards possessed tremendous scientific powers was obvious: the crystals, the emerald ray, the psychic and psychological pressures, and now these lethal spinning razor-sharp yellow flowers.
Yellowness swam about them. As though trapped in a cupped flower amid blowing golden pollen they stumbled and staggered across the gravel path. Their bodies puckered with flecks of blood as though they had run naked through crimson raindrops.
Beating at the darting, spinning flowers with his shirt in one hand and dragging Val along with the other, Redfern somehow reached the grass on the opposite side. His skin felt as though he had been rubbed against a nutmeg grater of giant size and excruciating sharpness. His lungs pained him. Blood dropped from his forehead and turned his vision crimson. He forced himself to go on.
“Keep going, Val! Only a few paces more—keep on!”
The shirt was a red and yellow smear over its grayness. His head was pounding some offbeat refrain. He was aware of Val only as a weight pulling at his arm. A few more paces…
Stung as though by a myriad of maddened hornets, stung like truth, stung by flung contemptuous silver coins, they pitched down onto grass and watched with bloodied eyes as the last few flowers drifted to the ground two feet short.
Weakly, Redfern laughed.
Although he knew that these events were really happening about him he was powerfully aware of the attraction of believing himself within a hallucination. How simple the answers would be then! But the world in which he now existed, the world of the wizards of Senchuria, really and truly was—all this was real.
“We need medical attention.” He stood up, panting still, his skin like a coat of penitence, feeling light-headed.
“You look awful, Scobie.”
“You don’t look so great yourself. But I still love you—” He checked her immediate response. “We’ve got to get into the city and get cleaned up. I feel as though I’ve just dived into boiling water.”
She tried to be brave now, for his sake; and, seeing the success he had had, for the sake of her own pride and for womanish spite against the wizards of Senchuria.
“Like a lot of people before them,” Redfern said as they headed for the gate, “these wizards of Senchuria are going to find that violence is not the answer to everything. It has its place; make no mistake about that. But it is not the final arbiter.”
Val said, “Those… things… are still following.”
The roaches moved over the gravel road and past the yellow-flowered bushes. Not a star-shaped flower stirred.
“One evil knows another,” Redfern grunted. He moved on faster. It would have been a debatable point whether or not he was moving faster to get into the city quicker or to get away from the roaches.
Four graveyard ghouls marched out of the gateway.
They each lifted a crossbow and the first two loosed.
Redfern, his body pressed into the grass, lined up on each ghoul in turn. This time, even with bolts prying the ground near him, he took only five shots to dispose of the four cemetery strays.
He thought about that for a moment before he stood up and began to urge Val on. Dispose of. A neat, cataloguing, euphemistic way of saying he’d shot them in the guts and their backbones had been blown out in a shower of blood and intestines.
He looked down at the bodies as they passed.
The things were tall, gangling, sprawled laxly in death and, he had to admit, for all their look of insect-cum-human face, must be living beings. Their macabre resemblance to the walking dead from graveyards was a mere chance. The thought made Redfern no happier.
The gateway rose above him, a fantastic jumble of arabesques, curlicues, crenellations, all picked out with studded jewels and brightwork. The arch itself was of Moorish shape, well retracted, and with many pierced stellar openings to either side. The grass petered out about a dozen yards from the gate and packed dust took its place. The runnel beneath the gate would be a quagmire when it rained.
The loss of blood was now becoming serious. He felt detached from the earth, as though his lightened body were about to take off. A continuous shirring, as of waves on a pebbled beach, sounded metronomically in his ears.
Val hung on his arm, limp, her eyes closed, scarcely breathing.
A sound made him turn. He moved very slowly; even to his own slack senses he moved with a bloated weariness.
Three roaches, two white and black, and one, the center one, yellow and black, stood looking at him. Their cavernous jaws clicked open and shut. He backed up until he was within the gate. He tried to lift the rifle and, for some reason, the weight defeated him. Annoyance fought in his mind with an emotion he could not identify, an emotion he thought might be fear, but could not be sure of. He had decided, some time ago, hadn’t he, not to have any more truck with fear? Something to do with spiting the wizards of Senchuria. He didn’t like that little lot, that was for sure. Poor Val, she did look a mess, her body a mass of little flecks of blood. Like his own, really. Now the rifle had dropped into the dust. Bolt side down, too. Bad, that. It was dark. Cloudy. Fuzzy. Better sit down. Val’s asleep. Sleep. Good idea-very tired, very tired…
IX
Alone and lonely, aloof and final, the Wizards of Senchuria maintained their city on the edge of the forest at the intersection of the dimensions.
With roaming crystals of faceted power armed with emerald rays of destruction and flowing floods of hatred, they marshaled the sea of grass. With half-insect, half-human ghouls they policed their forests, and their hunting cockroaches slipped slinkingly to hound and pull down and devour. Their flowerbeds of yellow-starred bushes grew in ranked phalanxes to hurl blood-drinking darts of spinning stars.
Alone and lonely, aloof and final, the Wizards of Senchuria lived in their city of gems. Alone, lonely, and aloof— yes. And frightened. Terribly frightened. Isolated and terrified, the Wizards of Senchuria existed in their wonderful gemmed city at the edge of the forest protected by super-science and wizardry, and they trembled at each passing tremor of the fabric stretched between the dimensions.
