The starter whirred. Whirred again. The engine caught — and died… Starter again, whirr, whirr, whirr… Then the engine caught and held and he slammed into gear and moved forward. The mirror showed him the leading monster a scant twenty yards away. The tires spun.
He slithered to a stop beside Polly.
“Jump!” he shouted. They were racing forward again. “This petrol by rights should have evaporated in the years the truck’s been here. You must be right. Time doesn’t function here.”
“Hurry, Rolley! Hurry!”
He hurled the car along the road, the accelerator banged to the floorboards and the clangor of the tracks behind began to fade. Yes, he began to think with tremulous hope, yes, they’d make it. He even began to look ahead, such was the elation of relief filling his brain, to the stories they might or might not tell about this mad escapade. And, there were always the gems…
A light outrivaling the sun grew in the air. Shadows wavered and then fleeted all together away from a blinding spot somewhere above the car. Polly shouted. Crane twisted to see but the car roof obscured his vision — a part of his mind recognized his luck — light of that intensity would blind him.
“Don’t look up!” he shouted.
The car lurched and careened from side to side, tires screeching. He was flung cruelly against the door, his wrists cracking hard on the wheel. More pieces of glass dislodged and fell with a tinkle lost in the bedlam. A tire blew. The car slewed right around with a sickening sensation of loss of control, skidded backwards, vibrating, then toppled in a clangorous crunch into the ditch. The hood pointed at the sky. One wheel still revolved.
And Crane and Polly, unhurt, cowered in their seats as the fiery glow smote upon them. For a heartbeat that might have lasted an eternity nothing happened. Crane risked cracking one eyelid. The light still beat strongly, still coruscated powerfully so that his eyes watered; but he could see enough to chance a quick slither to the road. He hunkered in the shadow of the wrecked car. In quick lurid glimpses he tried to make out what was happening. The first and most important was the sight of the leading tank bearing down on him with arms outstretched, its vermilion hide glistening in the glow. Big grapnel-like jaws swung purposefully. He reached for a grenade, feeling the heat of the metal, and tossed it as well as he could.
The blast fell short of the charging tank.
Panic clawed at Crane. He had to get out of here, fast. “Polly! You can risk half-opening your eyes now. Come on. We’ve got to run for it.”
Polly slithered out, her short leather coat flaring.
“Those damned things—”
“Run, Polly. For the torn edge and the mist. Run!”
The glow in the air beat all about them. They ran struggling over the road, their shadows black and distorted, fleeing before them, and to Crane the feeling of being an insect scuttling along the beam of a torch exploded the boil of anger. He stopped deliberately to turn and hurl another grenade. The violence of the fire in the sky made as nothing the grenade blast. But the pursuing tank slowed and skidded, shedding a track, and a writhing arm struck the car’s roof with a note like a gong, sheared it away in gleaming metal. They ran on, panting.
Unsure of his landmarks Crane could not know when they would reach the mist, as yet invisible to them in that limbo between worlds; all he could do was run on, willing, hoping, desperately urging the mist to form around them at each fresh step. As far as he could see before him, with eyes that were adjusting to the intolerable glare, stretched the road and the countryside. A countryside, he was aware, he might never reach with the torn map in his possession.
“Oh, God!” Polly screamed. “Look!”
In the air, hovering a few feet above the ground directly before them, a pale lozenge of fight winked into being. It shone with a pallid reflection of the monster glow in the sky.
He tried to halt his stumbling feet, to draw back, to recoil from the eerie phantasm. Slower than Polly to pull up, he collided with her and his left hand wrapped around her waist as they both staggered forward. He could hear her breathing, a tearing, rasping sucking for breath that drove him into savage action. He fumbled out a grenade and with vicious intent prepared to hurl it straight at the lambent oval of light.
His hand was raised, the pin out, the lever already easing up as his palm flexed forward, when the voice struck through to him. The lozenge of fire vibrated in time to the words. “Do not struggle longer, little man. We are taking you away—”
Crane hurled the grenade with all the lost desperation in him.
The lozenge of fire swelled, grew, bloated with a chiaroscuro of living color rippling over it like tinted waters of a fountain. Crane knew — knew — that the alien oval of light had absorbed the bursting energy of the bomb within itself, feeding on it, containing it, neutralizing it.
Then the living fire swooped down to engulf them both.
Blackness shot through with the fire of agony and defeat crushed down on Crane so that he cried out in futile wrath. Polly lay in his arms, her body beneath the wide-opened leather coat firm and soft against him, her head lax on his shoulder. He gripped her tightly in blind defiance of what might happen. The blackness muffling them now must lie in the core of the living light as an alien paradox defying human nature.
The voice said: “Misunderstanding is always the lot of those who seek to improve the worlds.”
Crane tried to answer and proclaim his defiance; but no words came. He could feel his heart thumping, deeply and painfully, against Polly. Then a wind caught at him, a wraith wind blown down no Earthly skies, and he felt with profound shock and panic Polly’s body slipping from him.
The voice said: “Who is this man who possesses the Amullieh?”
And a voice answered from a great distance: “He is not Trangor… He is a man like the others… But he possesses the Amullieh….”
And Crane’s arms circled emptiness and Polly had gone.
His feet rang on the road surface. He stumbled as though clumsily dropping from a wall. Through water-brimming eyes he saw the road white with dust in the light of the sun. Thoughts pirouetted through his dazed mind. An ominous clank from somewhere to the rear swung him around, lurching, one arm half-raised defensively.
A tank rattled along the road towards him, another following in the tracks of the first. He saw the wrecked Austin in the ditch; beyond, Colla’s smashed truck and the ditched tank showed half around the curve. But of the livid light in the sky and the lozenges of fire no sign remained to show they had brought with them terror and taken with them — Polly.
Crane did not think. The terror of the unknown festering in him drove his muscles into action and propelled him in a desperate lunge away from these onrushing monsters of destruction. He ran along the white road and he ran as a mindless idiot, gibbering in fear. The leather grenade satchel thumped against his hip and had there been time to take it off he would have done so, and flung it from him so as not to impede his flight.
All thought of Polly, and the map, and the gems, and of his avowed intentions, fled from his brain. He ran and ran and ran.
With the grinding of tracks and the horrible swishing of grapnel-armed tentacles in his ears he plunged headlong away from madness.
When mist swirled feathery tendrils about him he did not stop but careened on, lurching drunkenly like a man in a seizure, still hearing the metallic clanking behind him, loud and resonant through the beating of blood in his head. The mist thickened, coagulated, clotted into fog that roiled about him, thick and greasy and heavenly.
Mouth open and gasping, nostrils distended, hair tangled and sticky with sweat, he stumbled on, a scarecrow figure from the pits of hell, haunted, driven, tortured, a man running from himself.