He didn’t understand. He stood there transfixed, feeling the automatic unreasoning urge to turn and run the other way, but still aware enough to wonder: why should demons run from him?
The third demon still lay where it had fallen. Warily, one step at a time, Bass approached it.
It was dressed, like the other two, in fantastic garments—a fringed green cape, shoes with calf-high tops, a bulky thing like a purple shirt worn outside the green-and-saffron-striped trousers. A crutch with a heavily padded top lay on the pavement a foot away from one outstretched hand.
The shape of the thing was almost human. A fold of the cape was tossed over the side of the head, shadowing the face, but Bass could make out the arched, old-man shape of the nose, and the pinched mouth. The eyes were squeezed tight shut.
It was breathing; Bass could hear the noisy, whistling insufflations, each followed by along pause and then a gasp as the thing let out its breath again. Cautiously, he poked it with his foot.
The thing squeaked and flinched away. Bass saw the gleam of its eyes as they flickered open for an instant. It was awake, then.
Poised, ready to run, Bass waited for a long count of five; then he nudged it again, harder. The thing flinched again and a weak old-man’s voice came out of it. He couldn’t make out the words.
He leaned over. “What?”
The voice came again, and this time Bass thought he understood. In a hideously slurred and distorted parody of Glenbrook Consumer dialect, the demon was saying, “Oh Inf’nite help us… I can’t stand it … don’t let the dirty thing touch me.”
The more he thought about that, the less sense it made. He felt a prickling along his spine, and the impulse to run came back, stronger than before. He fought it down. His intuition of danger was inarguable—as specific and meaningful as the perception of heat or pressure—but the obvious, automatic answer might be the wrong one. You can run away from a fire or a blow, but not from a paradox.
And, Bass realized abruptly, this sense of danger that he felt was twenty years late. He had been like a blindfolded man on a tightrope all his life, and he was just finding it out.
Deliberately, with a gigantic effort, he put aside all his preconceptions. He was standing on a sidewalk under a street-lamp, and at his feet there was a—man —who gave every evidence of being half-paralyzed with shock and fear. He bent over the sprawled figure again.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
The weak voice piped, “Oh Inf’nite, oh Infinite, I can’t—”
“Answer my questions,” Bass said sharply, “and I won’t hurt you. Who are you?”
There was a long pause. “Only old George Parsons,” said the voice hesitantly, “who never hurt anybody. Only old George—”
“Why are you afraid of me?”
The creature’s eyes blinked open incredulously, then squeezed shut again. “You’re a demon,” he said faintly.
Bass felt as if his head were about to explode. “How do you know?”
The creature began babbling again. Bass nudged him sharply with his foot. “How do you know?”
The old man shrieked. “By your clo’es,” he said, “By your clo’es. Oh Inf’nite in Heaven help us …”
Time slowed to a trickle as Bass stared down at the cringing body. You shall know a demon incarnate by his clothing… Bass leaned down and carefully, hesitantly, took a fold of the old man’s cape between his finger and thumb. It was not iron, it was soft fibrous cloth. To you I am a demon to me —he thought wildly.
When he heard the sirens begin, faint and far down the way the other two had gone, it was almost an anticlimax. Danger was not an event, it was a medium ; it spread out all around him, a still current, a silent scream, to the farthest limits of his universe.
BASS had nothing to do with it; his body moved all by itself. He watched with a curious sort of detached interest as his fingers’ stripped off the old man’s fringed green cape, worked at the lacings of the calf-high shoes, tugged at the green and saffron trousers, while the old man squeaked and shuddered.
The sirens were nearer—too near. Bass rolled the garments together into a bundle that he tucked under his arm, and then he was running headlong down the street to the right, away from the sirens that howled in crescendo behind him.
Halfway down the block, he turned abruptly and hurtled across a lawn into the darkness between two houses. He kept going, around the back of the house to the right, across a dark yard, through a hedge and another and another until the glare of a streetlight stopped him: he was at the end of the block.
He paused an instant to listen. Behind him the sirens had stopped; to his left, far away, he thought he could hear others wailing up out of a confused murmur of other sounds. He took a wary step forward, peering to left and right. He was about to take another when a blur of metallic scarlet whirled into view around the corner.
He leaped back and flattened himself against the wall of the house. The red car rushed silently past and was gone.
Somewhere behind him, down the long row of hedges, there was a faint sibilant sound and then the unmistakable snap of a twig.
Bass’s heart was trying to shake itself loose inside his ribs. He edged around the house-corner, careful even his terror to make no more silhouette an he could help against the streetlight, made two leaping strides to the right and then ran for all he was worth straight across the frighteningly empty street.
Relief weakened his knees when he reached the other side safely; but two minutes later there was another street cross, and after that another. Just before he reached the third street, one of the red cars whisked across the light-gap ahead:
The question was, he thought as he started across the street a moment later—the question was, when would it be safe to stop running long enough to put on the “demon’s” clothes ? And, conversely, how long did he dare to wait?
He crossed two hedges, carefully, trying not to make a sound; then he stopped and listened for a long count of ten, holding his breath. There was nothing closer than the faint sirens and the ether mingled sounds far to the east.
He dropped his bundle to the ground and, working feverishly, pulled off his pouch, surcoat and jacket, his bangles and rings, and finally, with ineffable shame, his trousers. He put on the old man’s baggy pants hurriedly, fighting down the queasiness their touch gave him, and then the cape. He picked up one shoe and knelt, groping for the other. It wasn’t there—he must have dropped it somewhere without realizing it. Never mind; the intricate lacings would definitely have taken too long, anyhow.
As an afterthought, he pulled out the tail of his overshirt and let it hang over his trousers: it was a poor imitation of the loose purple garment the old man had worn, but it would have to do.
He gathered up his discarded jewelry, stuffed it into the pouch, and rolled the pouch up in the surcoat, jacket and trousers. He moved along the rear wall of the nearby house, found an open window, and dumped the bundle through. So far, so good.
After a moment’s hesitation, he turned and pushed through the hedge to his left. His instinct was to keep on in his original direction, but if he did that he’d be heading straight into the wall again. He had to work his way east, out of this pocket of demon territory that was surrounded on three sides by Glenbrook. But that was the direction the sirens had come from… .
Suddenly sick with apprehension, he lengthened his stride as much as he dared in the half-light. The next street was empty, but he waited, pulse pounding heavily in his throat, for a long moment before he started across.
As he crossed the curb, a man in a red uniform stepped out of the shadows across the street.