TWENTY-ONE
Silently, with deliberate strides, the distant figure was pacing toward them.
Poach moved then, with such quickness that for a moment his great bulk seemed an illusion. Before Joe could react, the giant had reached the fireplace, and in an instant the eight-foot wooden spear mounted above it had come down into his hands. Morgan meanwhile backed up slowly, until one hand extended behind her rested on the table’s edge.
For a long moment no one else stirred. Then, with a broken cry, gray-haired Dickon broke out of the group and stumbled into the next room. There he threw himself at the feet of the one approaching, who halted rather than step on him.
“Master!” Dickon cried out. “Master, I have never betrayed you. I would not believe that you were dead.”
“Stand up, fool.” For Joe’s eyes, the face of the speaker was still in darkness. The voice, resonant and commanding, was like Corday’s, and yet unlike. It went on: “This is the new world now, Dickon, have you not heard? Such sniveling ill becomes one who is ready to take his rightful place as a member of the superior race of beings.”
Dickon’s collapse became total. With his face down on the thick carpet, his words fell into muffled howls. The man whose path he had blocked stepped round him, and continued his advance.
The fashion model was next to fall upon her knees. “Vlad Tepes,” she choked out, “we did not know . . . we never believed that you were . . .”
“When have I ever asked for groveling?” the newcomer interrupted. “From any of you?” He took one more step, and Joe could see that he wore Corday’s face—and yet he did not. Like the voice, the face had been transformed. He who was not that old man Joe had known—and yet was—took yet another step. He stopped there, in a position from which he could see Poach and Morgan both.
In Morgan’s left hand, held behind her back as if for support against the table, there had somehow appeared a long knife. In the table lights it looked to Joe as if it had been fashioned blade and all from one piece of some dark and oily wood. Near the fireplace, Poach stood poised like a harpooner with his wooden spear. The bloody mark on his forehead was throbbing now, looking almost raw.
For the moment, the two breathing people in the room were being ignored by everyone else. Joe saw that Kate’s eyes were fixed, calculatingly, on the knife in Morgan’s hand; all right, let Kate do something about that. Joe’s left hand moved out stealthily over the surface of the table in front of him. His fingers touched and picked up a stub of pencil. If only it were not too big around—
“Watch out!” he yelled, and heard Kate’s voice ring out in chorus with his own.
Had their warning been needed, it would have come too late, for Morgan’s swift strike had taken them both by surprise. The old man had been ready, though. He was out of the path of the knife-blow when it arrived, and with a whiplash of his arm he slapped Morgan staggering back. Joe saw him vanish then. Poach’s lunge with the spear found only air.
An explosion of frightened voices filled the room. All around, solid bodies were going out like candle flames. There was a howling exodus in the air. Joe had drawn his gun at last, and now he got himself in front of Poach. The giant was looking past Joe, holding the spear ready, seeking for Corday. Joe slid the pencil stub eraser-first down the snub barrel of the .38, felt it check in place, rubber against chambered load.
Poach’s eyes widened, discovering something behind Joe. Keeping the spear for bigger game, Poach lifted a free hand to sweep the irritation of a mere armed policeman from his path.
The revolver blasted once, and Joe’s mind registered that at least it had not blown up in his hand with a jammed barrel. The hammerblow of the wooden impact slammed Poach’s head backward, one side of his forehead disappearing in a great smear of jellied blood. The spear fell from the giant’s hands, and the roar he uttered drowned out other shouting voices.
Though staggered, Poach somehow kept his feet. A second later, one eye showing clear and horrible in a face half masked in gore, he was coming after Joe.
Joe stumbled backward. With eyes and mind and hands he scrambled to locate some possible weapon made of wood. The table was too big for him to lift. He crawled beneath it, but a moment later it was knocked away. Lights went smash. In the deeper darkness, screaming and rushing seemed to go on without end. Joe, on his back, despairing of reaching useful wood, raised his pistol toward the huge form that bent toward him with hands outstretched to grab.
A different kind of rush went past him in the air, as of a grazing blow. Something struck Poach with disembodied but elemental power, lifting him to his feet. Joe could feel the floor vibrate when the big body struck the wall.
Automatically holstering his gun, Joe got to hands and knees and crawled toward the fireplace. Sparks were visible there, and there were streaks of luminosity in the air, screaming, fluttering gigantic shapes and shadows. One went right up the chimney with a shriek. A panic, as of whipped animals unable to break out of a pen, filled the place like fog. Joe groped his way amid crazy smashings, outcries, smells unlike anything he had encountered in his life before. What was he doing? Yes, looking for the spear. But he couldn’t find it.
Turning away from the fireplace, he saw Kate. She was halfway across the room, trying to hold on to Morgan.
Joe charged, in mid-stride grabbing up a wooden chair.
He swung the chair with all his strength. It cut through empty air as Morgan’s figure disappeared.
The chair landed on the floor, as Kate almost fell into his arms. Both of them were swaying with exhaustion. The darkened apartment was quiet now. They were alone.
Joe gripped Kate, looked hard at her while she looked back. He started twice to try to speak.
“We’ll talk later,” Kate said at last.
He nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”
Now, with a moment in which to look for it clear-headedly, he found the spear without difficulty. Kate, thinking along with him, had already picked up Morgan’s wooden knife from where it lay on the floor.
They went out the front door of the apartment, at the bottom of a carpeted stair going down beside the elevator. Joe led the way, spear ready. It was a simple door that opened to the sidewalk—
Or to where the sidewalk was supposed to be. Joe had to push the door hard to make it open, and at first the knee-deep snow that had blocked it from outside seemed to him only one more artifact of the evil nightmare from which he and Kate were trying to fight free.
The night air was clear, the snowfall stopped at last. A keen wind was busy drifting whiteness over buried streets, impassable to cars. The old man, standing where the curb should be with his hands in his topcoat pockets, was gazing over a half-buried auto toward the other end of the street. There, almost directly under a bright streetlamp, a pair of figures waited, looking back at him. Morgan in her torn party suit, her cloud of red hair blowing free, looked tiny beside the giant man in evening dress, with the half-ruined face.
The old man did not turn to look at Joe or Kate when they came out of the building behind him. But he said to them calmly: “They will not fly now, or change their form. My hand is on them.” He raised his voice. “Morgan, you see that my allies have not deserted me. Where are yours?”
Whether in answer to him or not, the woman across the street tilted back her beautiful face to the invisible sky above the electric lights. Then from her throat there burst a long, keen, eerie cry. It echoed away among the dark and lifeless buildings, above the brilliant snow, and was followed by deep silence. Joe, listening, could not recall such quiet in the city at any time of day or night. Far away somewhere, diesels were laboring, doubtless either plowing snow or dragging emergency loads through it. Poach was listening too, turning his raised face this way and that. Already his fresh wound was healing. Both of Poach’s eyes were open again, and the blood that covered one side of his forehead was congealed in the frigid air.