Then they were gone, taillights fading into the dark. Harris shook his head after this parade of classic cars; then he checked both directions for traffic before trotting to the median as fast as his bad leg would let him.
It wasn’t fast enough.
“You, there!” The shout came from the way he’d come; it was the Scottish accent. Harris spun around to look.
The man who stood at the gates looked like a wrecking balclass="underline" short and squat and heavy. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. But he was built like an inverted triangle, his shoulders huge, his body narrowing down to his waist and incongruously lean legs. His clothes were brown, baggy, and featureless, his leather boots heavy and thick, like workmen’s garments from decades earlier, and were set off by his wiry gray mass of hair and heavy beard. On his head he wore a bright red beret.
As he shouted after Harris, his eyes seemed to glow red in the streetlights’ glow . . .
. . . and his teeth, long and white, were sharp. Pointed.
Harris felt a shudder across his shoulders. Of all the strange and wrong things he’d seen this night, sharp, pointed teeth on a squat man weren’t the worst. But they were his limit—one thing too many for him to accept.
“You, there!” the man called again. “You’re dead!” And the squat man with the beret bent over, dug his fingers in the gap between two concrete paving blocks . . . and pulled one block up, the effort breaking it away from its neighbor. He hefted it one-handed as though it were a paperback book.
Harris felt his world reel around him again. He heard more automobile traffic driving the wrong way on the street behind him, felt his injury burning along his thigh, tasted the unaccustomed sweetness of the air, but all he was aware of was the man in the beret and the huge block of concrete he handled.
The man drew the massive concrete square back over his shoulder. And threw it at him.
Harris dived behind the nearest tree, fetching up against the rough bark, and saw a gray-white flash as the concrete sailed past. The slab flew across the median and the street beyond. It smashed into a stone wall, the impact sounding like the world’s largest porcelain jar shattering, and threw gravel-sized chips in all directions.
Wide-eyed, Harris looked back at the man who’d thrown it. The stunted man was already in motion, running his way.
Harris bolted, running beside the median, cursing the pain in his leg as it slowed him. There was no question of him trying to defend himself against a man like that. A glance over his shoulder showed the short man catching up—damn, he ran fast. Like a sprinter, like an Olympic gymnast charging toward the vaulting horse.
But just beyond the short man was a truck, passing him by and headed Harris’ way. It looked like an Army truck, but dark crimson instead of green.
As it came abreast of Harris, he angled toward it, got his hands on the tailgate, and hauled himself into the rear.
Dragging himself over the tailgate and dropping into the truck bed sent fiery pain through his injured thigh. A gold-and-red haze obscured his vision. He lay on his back, gulping in air, waiting for the haze to fade.
He was either someplace very strange, or he was having a psychotic episode. After all his recent disappointments and all that vodka, he could believe the latter. But he didn’t; this was all too real.
After half a minute his vision returned to normal. He could see wooden crates lashed down to the front half of the truck bed. He sat up wearily and looked out over the tailgate.
The squat man was still there. About fifteen feet back, he was running hard and fast. And as he caught sight of Harris, his eyes gleamed redly again; he put on another burst of speed, gaining a couple of feet on the truck.
He’d lost his beret, sweat poured down his face and into his gray mustache and beard, his shirt was askew with its tails free of his pants, and he was still running faster than any man Harris had ever seen. Harris froze, shocked beyond thinking.
The truck bed beneath him vibrated and rumbled; Harris heard its gears shift. It slowed and the short man gained another half-dozen feet. Harris forced himself to rise to a half-crouch, ready for a futile fight against this unstoppable little man.
But the truck accelerated. The gap between two-legged pursuer and four-wheeled prey widened. Harris might have cheered, but all his air seemed to be going to fuel the pounding of his heart. The short man was twenty feet back, twenty-five and still running, then thirty . . . and at last Harris saw him give up the chase, stopping in the middle of the road, shaking a fist furiously after the truck and its passenger.
Then, finally, Harris felt he could slump back down behind the tailgate and get his heart under control.
The skyscraper loomed up fifty or more stories, but was round instead of square, with its upper floors shaped like the top of a medieval castle’s tower. Electric light poured out of round-topped windows on each story. Stone gargoyles lurked on ledges every few stories, and their neon light eyes blinked on and off. The building stood between other skyscrapers equally tall, equally strange. Then the truck left the building behind and a slight bend in the road hid it from sight.
More neon blinked, advertising storefronts: “Pingel’s Cafe,” “Gwenllian’s Beauty Salon,” “Drakshire Opera House.” Many of these signs were tall vertical marquees extending from the faces and corners of buildings. Harris saw signs with neon lines twisted like Celtic knotwork to frame glowing, blinking words.
“The Tamlyn Club. Featuring Addison Trow and His New Castilians. Light, Dark, Dusky Welcome.” Men in tuxedos and top hats, women in evening dresses and gloves reaching nearly to their shoulders, walked in and out of the club’s double doors, admitted by uniformed doormen. These patrons seemed short and slight, with unlined faces, so that it looked like a parade of acne-free teenagers out for a night on the town.
The tuxedos weren’t normal. Dark green, dark red, dark gray—no black. The women’s dresses were more brightly varied in hue, some of them in lamé that caught the light and held it, shimmering with color.
A newsboy—work shirt, shorts with suspenders, beret—hawked newspapers on a street corner, mere feet from a cart laden with fruit; its hand-lettered sign read, “Apples 1p, Pomegranates 5p.”
The buildings were all of stone or brick, many with ornately carved lintels or panels flanking the doorways. They bore no graffiti, no metal bars on the windows or across closed storefronts. Few buildings had windows on the first floor.
The cars, brightly colored blocky things with extended hoods and running boards, most with steering wheels on the right, all drove on the wrong side of the road.
Harris watched this parade of bewildering images whenever he could no longer resist, but most of his attention was focused on his injury. Bounced around by the motion of the truck, he managed to brace himself in the corner by the tailgate, then pulled off his shoes and pants to look at the wound.
There was a lot of blood, but the parallel slashes were not deep . . . just long. Swearing, he pulled off his denim jacket and shirt, then tore the latter into strips. As well as he was able, he bound his injury, cinching the impromptu bandages as tight as he dared. Then he pulled his clothes on again.
By now the street scenery had become monotonous: block after block of stone-faced residential buildings, curiously clean, the streets free of trash. Here, there were windows on the first floor, about eight feet off the ground, and Harris could see into the apartments. Occasionally he caught the smell of meat roasting.