“We can’t stay here.” Honey grasped his arm. “There’s a hole. Come on!”
Together they wriggled across the ceiling, away from the horrific giant broom, squirmed through a hole into a dark world they understood.
Here dust and plaster and dirt festooned everywhere. Their lights threw up wooden walls, rough floors, crevices littered with flang skins and with the red reflected glare from faceted watching eyes.
“Trigons,” Honey said, drawing her splutter-gun forward. “Nasty brutes. Spin webs. Got a filthy bite.” She stared around, cool now and calculating, back in the world she knew. “Thank the immortal being Scunners can’t get in here. But we can’t stay.”
A clinging strand of some sticky, soft substance brushed across Stead’s face and he jerked back, repelled. He brushed a hand to one side, saw in the radiance of his headlamp the white slithery strands trailing away like thrown ribbons at Bacchanalia. They caressed his hands and arms, stuck, clung, would not be stripped free.
“They’re shooting their webs at us. We’ll have to get out of here, fast.”
“Well, we can’t go back down the hole.” Stead said that with complete conviction. He couldn’t face the Demon again.
“We’ll go on up,” Honey said firmly. “Work our way through the runnels and rejoin the group.” She moved purposefully forward up a sloping mound of crumbling rubble leading to a wooden wall. “I hope Thorburn and the others got in all right.”
On hands and knees up the tricky slope, unwilling to drain their antigrav batteries, they scrambled along. The wooden wall had been split in the long ago and through the crack they could just edge carefully. Watching Honey’s slim figure determinedly pushing forward, Stead suddenly realized he no longer held his sack. He made a decision, then, that was another milestone along his path to independence.
“We’re in a tough situation, Honey. I think it would be best for you to drop your sack.”
“But,” said Honey. “But… full sacks?”
“I know. But our lives depend on quick movement. Drop it here. Now.”
She obeyed him without further protest. But a strange glow crept into her face. Stead thrust that aside, concentrated on bashing his machete through the flimsy last strands of wood and webs opposing him. A couple of Trigons stirred and spat. Honey ducked and the rustling webs stranded away above her head. Stead, flowing into action, triggered a quick burst. The splutter-gun in that confined space made nearly as much noise as a Demon.
Light, a bright but yellow light, spilled through the hole he had made. Cautiously, wearing his dark glasses, he put his head through.
Directly before him a bright blue wall towered away and up and curved over in a multitude of small folds, some fifty feet above. Behind him extended a highly polished, reddish, wooden wall. The yellow light lit everything softly through the dark glasses, and the floor, bare and shining, could not conceal danger.
“I’m going up,” Stead said. Confidence flowed back. He was going to fight his way out of this and rejoin the group, and that would show his comrades that he was a real Forager, full sacks or no blasted full sacks.
“Hurry. The Trigons are stirring.”
Stead put his hand down on the edge of the hole and pushed himself up. The bright blue wall lapped down over the floor and he trod on it, regaining his balance. It felt soft through his Hunting boots. He turned to reach out to help Honey. Her head showed through the hole, her face, white but resolute, staring at him.
The blue wall moved.
The ground trembled. The blue on which he stood jerked, throwing him on his face. Automatically, he hung on, digging his hands into the material. The blue wall (lowed. Above him it shifted aside, revealing a sudden disastrous vision of immense distances, a high white vastness raking away to a ceiling impossibly far away.
The blue material shifted beneath him. He felt its upward movement through every pore in his body. Sweat sprang, wet and dripping, upon his face. He hung on, looking down, seeing the floor sweep away, drop and dwindle. That reddish wall flowed downward too, appeared as a sudden white expanse extended away into the distance.
And still he was jerked up, hanging on, wondering, gripping the blue material.
Comprehension hit him with the subtlety of a gunbutt across the neck.
He was clinging to a Demon’s clothing.
He was being dragged up and onto the back of a Demon.
The yellow light blossomed into unbearable brilliance.
Far below—far, far below—he caught a last frenzied glimpse of Honey, staring up at him out of her hole in the floor.
Chapter Twelve
The terrors that leered and gibbered at Stead then, as paralysis locked his fingers into gripping fists in the blue material, he afterwards remembered with as much clarity as he remembered his former life.
That last receding glimpse of Honey staring up in horror from her hole in the floor had stirred uneasy trains of thought in Stead’s sluggish mind, had made him think of blasphemous thoughts no sane man could possibly entertain. All he could see of the Demon he was riding was a vast curve of blue. On either hand stretched a lofty chamber, a place so vast that rooflessness would surely have by now struck him down if he had not been immunized by previous experience.
The Demon kept snorting and snuffling and blowing in a most disconcerting way.
It pulled the blue material higher around it and Stead hugged the cloth and was drawn up until he perced atop a massive shoulder in the shadow of the puffed tureen-shaped skull. A pulse beat in an artery the size of a water main. Thick, coarse hairs grew downward in greasy bundles. The Demon’s skin, pitted with pore craters, its yellow flushed with the red of subcutaneous blood, wafted a pungent perfume that dizzied his senses. But he hung on. He hung on for he could not yet, not just yet, will his muscles to release their catatonic grip.
The room was a bedroom. That reddish wall was the bed, the vast sheet of whiteness the bedclothes. From the eminence of his vantage point atop a Demon’s shoulder, he saw the objects of the room in flat, sharply angled perspective, but everything appeared to him whole. The old and familiar way of looking at the items in the world “of buildings on a size-scale in relation to himself and thus seeing only the details had gone—gone for ever. Now he saw the whole picture.
The immortal being had created the world of buildings. But why had the immortal one created everything of a size that suited the Demons? Why? Why?
Strange clanging thoughts echoed in Stead’s bemused brain.
The Demon moved towards the window.
The blind went up with the noise of a thousand cave-ins. Air tore at him. He closed his eyes and hung on, determined now to see this thing through, and to discover if the macabre thoughts struggling into coherent life in his brain could possibly be the truth.
For if they were, if they were— Then everything he had been taught and believed was a hollow mockery, a gigantic blasphemy, a callous joke of the immortal being’s incomprehensible humor.
At first he had not believed in Demons, had considered them figments of the imagination to frighten men and women into abiding their consciences’ dictates. Then he had been forced to accept the unpalatable fact that Demons were real and existed. Now… now he was being rubbed in the mire of humiliation, of race humiliation, struggling against an understanding that screamed sheer bedlam at him and would not be denied.
The Demon’s shoulder twitched and Stead clung on as the movement rolled thick flesh beneath the blue covering. He stared past the enormous shell curve of the Demon’s ear, with tufts of hair like clustered broom handles thrusting out, stared past and out the window.