Nelson Doubleday, Inc. Garden City, New York
Copyright © 1980 by Doris Piserchia All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with DAW Books, Inc. 1633 Broadway New York, New York 10019
Printed in the United States of America
The Spinner
Mordak stank like an old corpse. The tractor scooped him up with a load of alien soil, cracked him out of his comfortable incubator and dumped him into the living world.
Gusty didn't know what the place was or how it had come to be there. The sky was gray and full of lowering clouds that seemed to dissolve into the forbidding horizon. There wasn't much to look at on the ground save for rocks of various sizes and a dusty surface that blew into the air in spirals each time the big mechanical shovel thrust down into it.
The old man wandered about kicking up dust, now and then glancing at the sky to see if it had changed. It paid a fellow to stay alert while trodding unfamiliar sod. Tidal waves, conflagration, mud slides or general disaster were not inconceivable in strange territory, and that was where he was, somewhere out from reality in a spot where everything was crazy.
Unmissed, undesired, like the space debris adrift in" the orbit of Earth, the human stood up to his ankles in stardust and watched a tractor gobble up a portion of dirt. He observed the horizon, the machine, the ground, the hill of rocks behind which that odd hole in the building yawned and all the while he was thinking that he might not really be experiencing this, that he was still back in the cave asleep and snoring.
He was looking right at the shovel when it unearthed a bubble of glass two meters high and as many meters across. Of course the sphere couldn't have been glass or the machine would have crushed it to powder, but it was transparent and obviously not too fragile since it merely cracked under the pressure of the metal jaws. They lifted the egg out of its shallow grave and split it open, allowing the contents to drop onto the dust a short distance from where Gusty stood.
Mordak stank and shrieked and tried to see but the sky was still light and his eyes preferred darkness. Large and set far back in his face, they gleamed like blue lamps as they moved here and there from horizon to horizon, blinking, nearly blind. How long he had been living and growing in the bubble-like egg was unknown, but his body had a human form of sorts while the hair on his head was long and stringy.
Gray except for his eyes, Mordak was shockingly lean and alien in appearance. He uncurled from his position on the ground in a slow and dazed sequence of motions that made Gusty think of a mound of writhing maggots. The alien could move in a hurry when he wanted to or when he was angry, which he was then, murderously so. Wasn't Gusty to blame for the precious life cycle having been interrupted?
Before plunging into the obscurity of rock mounds and craters, Mordak peered closely at the enemy, tried to get rid of the man in that very instant by raising a hand and leaping forward. He was weak and would remain so for a few hours and his vision was inferior in daylight, so all Gusty had to do was step aside and the creature went on past, groping with savage gestures, shrieking as though fate had made off with his stairway to Heaven. As he hurtled away the human image burned on the retinas of his hateful eyes.
Seldom had Gusty been passionately loved by anyone, but to his knowledge no living person harbored in his or her breast an inordinate hatred for him. During the last few decades he had accepted the fact that he was an almost invisible cipher in reality. Now he came to know that Mordak loathed him, atom and molecule.
More than anything he wanted to go back the way he had come, longed to exit from this unholy place and get back into that big lighted tunnel with the rock wall on one side. Home and safety lay beyond that wall and if he could reach the crevice through which he had come, he could fade away like a shadow and be among the caves where his friends lived. Only a little while ago he had been idly wandering through granite rooms that were as familiar to him as his own hands, and then he decided to squeeze through the crevice and discovered something besides the basement of a building. Stupid curiosity made him walk down the tiled tunnel toward that blazing hole of light, and now look where he was. When it came to that, where was he?
Back the way he had entered the gray world he went, skipping and hopping in his haste to find the bright hole leading into the tunnel. He made himself move as nimbly as possible in case the ugly stinker came anywhere near him again. With any luck the bright light of the hole had scared it away and now it was sniffling and snorting among the dunes off to his right.
The hole was as big as a house, glittering like a giant searchlight, smack in the middle of what looked like a solid mountain except that this couldn't be right since there had to be a building there. Sore-footed, Gusty took a hesitant step into the shattering illumination and was simultaneously relieved and amazed. It didn't matter that he felt crazy. The tiled tunnel was back again and so was the rock wall to his left. Ahead was the same old carpeted vestibule but he hadn't any intention of going that far because he could see the special crevice he planned to use as an escape route. It wasn't very large but he was accustomed to skinning in and out of narrow places so it was like second nature for him to know where this one was.
He looked back and was gratified to see that the gray world had disappeared. Now there was only the bright hole. He couldn't even hear the sounds of the tractor.
Suddenly two men dressed in pale-blue uniforms walked out of the vestibule. They saw Gusty and both dropped into a crouch while they cocked their rifles at him. Too far away to make out their faces, Gusty scowled and kept moving forward and to his left. They might shoot him before he reached the crack in the wall.
"What'd I do?" he yelled. "You gonna kill me for nothing?"
They seemed to relax right away, stood up and started coming down the tunnel at a run, and all the while Gusty was trying to get to the crevice. They were no more than halfway when he saw the ugly stinker above them. The ceiling was high and they weren't looking up, but he spotted it because he was still worrying about where it had gone.
Mordak looked like a big spider spread out flat on the tiled ceiling. Rapidly and with craft he crawled a little farther along until he was in position to drop on the men.
"Watch out, watch it, over your heads!" Gusty bawled. At that moment the crevice was there within easy reach and in a flash he flattened himself against the rock wall and faded out of sight.
Tully had been hired by Gee Rumson who gave him a rating of private and sent him to guard the lower levels of his building. Though it wasn't much of a job, Tully was young and ambitious and desired to become indispensable to his employer.
Now he stood in his clean blue uniform, gripped his black gun and wondered what the old man had been yelling about. Also he was wondering how the old man had gotten through one of those cracks in the wall. Tully had personally checked out every one and would have been ready to swear that nothing other than a snake could use any of them as a doorway into or away from the tunnel.
When he first saw the old man, Tully thought he had come out of the hole. That alone would have been reason to shoot the skinny buzzard but then he started yelling and Tully knew right away he was human except he was so excited that what he yelled was mostly a jumble of high sounds.
Going over to the wall, Tully tried to find the crack. He went up and down the tunnel looking for it but every line and gouge in the granite looked alike. Just as he laid his gun down so that he could run his hands along a particular crevice, he heard Bates scream. Whirling, he saw something sticking to the front of his companion. It was gray and for a second he thought it was a naked man but then he saw the streaks of red running down its arm and realized it was attacking Bates.
Something happened to Tully when the sure knowledge hit him that the gray thing came out of the hole. It had come through the dimensional opening created by the Rumson Bore and here it was not twenty meters away from him gnawing off his friend's head.
There in the tunnel he discovered that his worst terror was of the foreign, and by that he meant something that didn't belong to Earth. Had it been an animal clinging to Bates and attacking him, Tully would have grabbed up his gun and used it like a club, but the gray thing was just that, a thing, sticking to the screaming man like an oversized insect.
As soon as Bates went down, the thing turned on Tully. Fortunately for him, he staggered backwards up the tunnel and paused directly beneath a bright light. Unaware that he had moved at all, he stood with his eyes opened wide and his brain emptied of nearly every thought or emotion as he waited for the rotten monster to come and take him. His only sensation was that of coldness.
It gradually dawned on him that the thing was hesitant to close in on him. It circled him, reaching out with first one hand and then the other, obviously longing to come closer and use its dripping fangs on him yet something stopped it and made it remain beyond reach. It never occurred to him that it might not be able to see him.
Shock after shock ripped through his brain as he observed Mordak in all his alienness: sunken blue eyes, slitted nostrils, mouth stretching from ear to ear, gray and slick all over with only a full round pouch where the genitals should be, bony knees, a lump in the center of the chest, feet that were mere pads with many wispy protrusions, like brushes. Hands the same, brushes with each bristle curling and moving independently.
Loud rumblings came from somewhere up above. It was the Bore preparing to shut down for the night. Tully cried out in his mind, cursed and threatened, pleaded with them not to turn it off. They surely wouldn't leave this thing in here. Not in this world. They had to take it out, make it go back to its own. They mustn't leave it here where he could see it.
He didn't know why Mordak decided not to stay in the tunnel and kill him. The thing could have since he wasn't putting up any defense but stood bonelessly waiting for this creature that was too ugly for him ever to accurately describe to come and rend him.
Without comprehension he watched as it leaped all the way up to the ceiling and scurried away, not toward its own home but into a hallway which had several forks leading to other parts of the building. Its arms and legs moved so rapidly it seemed to him that it possessed more than two pairs. More like it had six or eight. Yes, eight. Like a spider.
Ekler bore a faint resemblance to a hound as he sniffed the air of the conference room into which he had been ushered by a servant several minutes before. He sniffed again. There was the smell of expensive wooden furniture, air cleaner and rank fear.
"The anonymous phone call which I received at the station," he said, repeating himself. "Everyone thought it was so outlandish. We all sat down and talked about it in order to see what we could come up with. We arrived at some odd conclusions which I'm certain will interest you once you hear them."
"I'm a busy man," said Rumson, clasping his hands. They were pale, like the rest of him.
"No one is above the law."
"Certainly not I."
"The world knows about the Rumson Bore. The world remembers you were restrained by the Court from using it because it was potentially dangerous."
"Plainly a lunatic made that phone call to you."
"It was suggested in my office conference that perhaps some government or private agency coerced you into building the
Bore and using it. We all know the country needs ore and chemicals."
The look of fear and annoyance deepened on Rumson's face. "If you know so much you don't need me and I don't see why we need this conversation. Arrest me if you have any evidence of guilt on my part."
Shrugging, Ekler said, "The old man told me one of the guards was killed; had his head bitten off."
Rumson sat down at the end of the long, glistening conference table and looked toward the undraped window. Suddenly he shivered and lowered his gaze. Not once did he look toward the light again. "The duty roster isn't confidential. I can tell you Tully and Bates guarded the lower halls Tuesday night but I'm afraid you can't talk to them. They're both on leave."
"What do you have in the building that requires protect-ing?"
"My privacy and my property."
"The two men left addresses where they can be reached."
Rumson shrugged and clasped his hands. "I tried to get in touch with them as soon as you called me. They left nonexist-ing addresses and numbers. That isn't at all unusual. Too often my people get called back before their vacation time is up. Of course Tully and Bates will get some demerits for making their whereabouts unknown."
Ekler sat down uninvited at the head of the table and propped his chin on his hands. He was a big, muscular man with a shock of dark hair. "Naturally no alien came out of that place. By the way, do you still maintain you don't know where it is?"
"No, I don't know where it is."
"Not Venus or Mercury or Mars?"
"Only a policeman could be so careless about the sciences. Anyone else would point out to me that conditions on those planets are not conducive to life as we know it."
"It's a place so it has to be someplace." Ekler's chair was equipped with motorized wheels. Silently he rolled away from the table, approached the high, broad window and slowed. He could see the spires of Eastland's only cathedral. Brass plated, they glittered in the sun like a crown. "It's somewhere out there, maybe just on the other side of an invisible wall or conceivably light-years away in space."
Momentarily startled, Rumson said, "I always maintained it didn't matter where it was as long as it had resources. However you're mistaken about my having used the Bore. Not since my experimenting days. It's part of my past."
"Most business installations have tv cameras built into the hallways or ceilings."
"Sorry, no. There are no cameras on the lower floors."
"Our artists composed a sketch from the old man's description," said Ekler. "You have a problem, Mr. Rumson. Your agency will dump you when you tell them a murderous alien came out of that Bore, your security people will walk off the job and the citizens of Eastland will try to hang you from a lamppost."
"It's all nonsense."
"A killer in the streets. Like Jack the Ripper all over again."
Out on one of those streets a few minutes later, Ekler breathed deeply to get rid of the smell of deodorant and wealth. He frowned when he realized that he still smelled fear. It seemed to be all over Eastland.
Rumson had been thorough in his panicked haste. The lower floors of his building were a pile of rubble so search warrants didn't mean anything. If there had been a Bore down there, it was now covered with tons of debris.
Elder's men would be present when the digging crew went to work. The lies were beginning to irritate him. If Rumson had broken the law Ekler wanted to know about it. He was curious to learn what had motivated an old man to call the police and tell such unusual whoppers. Perhaps just to get Rumson in trouble.
Not for a moment did Ekler believe the part about the alien. He hated science fiction. Besides, he knew a bit about the Bore. It supposedly opened into a planet or a world empty of intelligent life. That much was well established fact. In several areas a great deal of vegetation and small mammals had been spotted but there were no high-level animals of any kind. Period. Except that he had put out tracers on Tully and Bates and came up with exactly nothing. But that had nothing to do with aliens. Somebody might have killed Bates. Maybe Tully did it. Maybe the old man did it.
No matter. Ekler would find out. He was a hound when it came to his work.
Mordak knew what he was doing. He was getting his revenge. He hadn't wanted to come to his place and indeed had no idea how or why he had arrived, having been blinded by a severe bright light moments before plunging through a hole. Since he was here and didn't know how to get out he would discover necessary things to do.
Anyone who even faintly resembled the old creature in the garden at home would go down before his fangs and his spite; any erect organism walking on two legs and swinging two arms would fit the spinner's description of the enemy.
When Mordak wasn't gnashing his teeth he was grieving. The garden was lost to him forever and he was an outcast in a land which was stranger to beauty and pleasant sound. He liked silence and bland colors. At the moment he climbed down one of the cathedral's spires, hurrying toward a clanging noise that reverberated up and down his body. As he moved, his hands slid across the brass like brushes, painted it with a thin lacquer that came from inside his body. Within seconds the lacquer seethed, bubbled, thickened.
Opening a trapdoor he went down the rope so quickly the bell ringer at the bottom hadn't time to open his mouth to scream. Mordak dropped onto the unprotected shoulders and laid his hands on the head. Suddenly the wispy fingers stiffened, became strong and rigid, dug deeply and easily into the flesh, the eyes, the nose, ripped them away.
Upon completing his task the spinner twisted the rope around the man's neck and left the mutilated carcass hanging there. In the dark his eyes glowed fiercely. He was in his element now. When his environment was lightless it was almost as if he were back in the egg again where life was black and the dreams came one after another. So full of promises those dreams had been.
He discovered that he was scarcely noticeable when he stood upright and walked down the street. Avoiding areas illuminated by overhead globes, he stayed close to the buildings as he took up the trail of a man with an armful of packages.
For a while the man ignored the slapping little footsteps behind him but at last he turned and confronted his pursuer. All he saw was a dim blue light that gradually separated into two blue lights below which was a slight human form. A child with a pair of blue bulbs?
All at once there was the stink and the swift aura of deadly danger, both arriving too late to do the man any good since Mordak sprang upon him in the exact moment that he dropped his packages. He was young and strong but the thing clutching him and sinking its teeth into his throat was made of steel. Its fingers were razor blades destroying his shoulders, its toes sliced his thighs to tatters and all the while its fangs groped for his jugular.
He drowned in his own blood, fell across the sidewalk into the gutter, thrashed and crawled to the end of the block where a series of screens determined that he wasn't something to be deposited in the underground pipe. The screens handled him gently, kept him from sliding away, held him in the trough so that he couldn't escape. All the while he tried to cry out for someone to come and help him.
Gusty was fishing from the rocky shore when someone threw a body off the cliff. It came hurtling down to land in the ocean not ten yards away from him. He knew a second party was involved because he heard a door slam and tires squeal as a car pulled away up on the bluff.
Expert with rod and reel, he snagged the shirt on the bobbing form, hauled his catch in and rolled it on its back. A young man with an egg-sized knot near the hairline on his forehead lay there scarcely breathing. Leaving his gear on the beach, Gusty began climbing through a wall of rocks that cut off the passage south of him. Only someone familiar with the maze could have found his way through the nooks and crannies pounded out by the high tides.
The first cave he entered was both high and deep with a shallow pool to the left and gradually ascending flat stones on the right. The pool would rise above the cave mouth when the tide came in, cutting off normal access to the rooms above and beyond.
He went looking for Hitty, found her in the bathroom sitting on the purple commode he had brought especially for her. "Fellow got dumped off the cliff and is croaking out there on the sand. I don't think we should leave him out there. He might be spotted from above."
He waited and at last she went along with him, at the same time signaling to various others to accompany them. It took them a while to carry the young man through the maze after which he was transported into the warm recovery room and laid on a clean cot.
"He reminds me of a dog I had once, name of Rune," said Hitty. "Is he dead?"
"Soon, probably," said Gusty. "Unless whoever threw him was strong enough to get him out over all those rocks jutting up there."
"Can't you tell if anything's broken?"
"Not without X-rays. I felt him all over and except for that bump on his head I can't find anything."
"They hit him with a loaded sock. Otherwise the skin would be split."
Around the cot wandered old men and women in varied states of mental alertness and physical strength. Cappy touched the unconscious man's blond curls with curious fingers, Pathia merely stared into his still face, Nox methodically began undressing him.
"Get some long johns on him," said Gusty. "Some thick socks, a pair of sneakers, maybe a heating pad on his belly. A cold rag on that bump."
"He looks a whole lot like my dog," said Hitty. "We have to call him Rune."
They didn't want the youth to live, they didn't want him to die, but rather it was their manner to observe phenomena and patiently wait and see how they turned out. In the granite doorway rested a large battery-operated heater that blew hot air inside. There were a dozen empty cots in the room, usually immaculately made except when someone forgot and sat on one or crawled into one or had a fit on one or did something the others were forced to pretend he didn't. Rows of shiny white cabinets lined the walls, furnished with the most modern medicines the caves' inhabitants had been able to steal. Since they were accomplished thieves the cabinets lacked little if anything.
Pathia shuffled up to Gusty, poked him in the ribs and told him Bindle was ready for surgery.
"Good thing, too, since I'm beginning to feel fuzzy headed," he said. "Hope I don't lift his liver by mistake. Be sure I don't wander off once I open him up."
In surgery the patient was laid out on a high slab of rock which was covered with clean sheets. Gusty's instruments lay nearby in a metal pan.
"Sterilized?" he said to Pathia. He washed his hands and arms in a small hot spring that bubbled from the mountain in one corner.
"Perfectly."
"You sure?"
"Ask me again and I'll quit being your nurse."
"I have to make certain you haven't got your days mixed up. Yesterday I did a skin scraping on Jesse's infected toe. Remember that?"
Pathia was little and skinny except for her belly which showed a bulge. "Sure I remember," she said, her voice squeaky. She was ninety-two.
"What did you do with my tools when I was done?"
"Dumped 'em in the pot and boiled the devil out of 'em. In fact I just fished 'em out before you walked in. Good enough?"
Bindle didn't fight the anesthetic, allowed the doctor to drape his lower face with the pad and by and by his mind went peacefully away. It took Gusty approximately twenty minutes to make a small incision, fish for the appendix which was five inches long and curled around the lower rib, snip, suture, close the wound and slap a pad on it. While Bindle was still asleep, his friends lifted him onto a wheeled cot and took him to recovery.
"Is he gonna be all right?" said Hitty.
"Which one?" said Gusty.
"Both."
"Bindle will be fine. I don't know about the kid."
"Rune."
"Yeah."
Far back in the mountain steam and smoke rumbled and fought for release in the shafts, exited two miles away at the edge of the swamp.
Fuzzy minded all of a sudden, Gusty set out to see his brother Arthur, walked far back into the mountain because the tide had come in which meant he couldn't go out the front. Sometimes he could locate the series of tunnels leading to a narrow opening in the ground almost directly outside of Eastland, and today he found it. No one would see him come out, not even children since the area was inhabited by wild dogs that chased everyone except Gusty. They ran away from him, seemingly alarmed by the thin apparition in flapping clothes who hopped from out of the rocks to chatter at them.
He was walking down an alley in the city proper when he remembered Arthur had died a couple of decades ago. Almost at the same time he recollected his call to Ekler. Crossing to a phone booth on the curb at the mouth of the alley, he punched a button to the main police station. After sucking his teeth for a nervous minute and mumbling, "How do you do?" he said. "You gone after that ugly stinker I told you about?"
"It's you! Oh, sure, you bet. Why don't you come on over here so we can discuss it."
"Discuss what?"
"How the man was killed. His name was Bates or Tully."
"What do I care what his name was? The only reason I told you about that creature is that I detest him more than some of my fellow men, which is saying a good bit. And you're a liar."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's near dusk, now, isn't it?" said Gusty. "Early in the morning I want you to stand in the middle of Main Street and take a look up at the cathedral."
"How about now?" said Ekler.
"I don't know if you can get here before dark, but I don't plan to stay around and find out if you or I can still see him then." Since his brother wasn't anywhere around where he could be visited, Gusty went on down the street toward the Retreat. It was a semicircle of eight-story apartment buildings created specifically for the elderly—comfort and security guaranteed, with high rent and unbreakable leases. It looked like several motels stacked one upon another, powder blue in color with pink trimming, surrounded by artificial turf that never looked scuffed in spite of traffic.
All the open porches on ground level were occupied by gray-haired or bald men and women who sat in swings, chairs, wheelchairs, lounges or on the stoops. For so many people there was very little noise.
Gusty looked for Kruge among them, didn't spot him and went inside to the elevators. Choosing an empty one and making certain there was no youth in the hallway ready to pop inside with him at the last moment, he rode to the sixth floor.
Kruge's stroke had left his right side paralyzed. He sat perpetually bent over in his wheelchair, and in order to see in front of him he had to jerk his head up. Only for a second or two could he hold it up and then it dropped again, so when he looked at Gusty he did it by bobbing like an apple in a barrel. He was unable to speak.
Now he sat with a lapful of dog droppings and continued to hit the arm of his chair with his left elbow. His wrist was tied down with a piece of wire.
Gusty untied him, found a piece of paper and pencil in the ransacked apartment and placed them where Kruge could make use of them. "Told you to get out of here and come with me," he said.
Kruge wrote: Firstly, his son had run out on him six days ago, claimed he wasn't staying another hour and for the old man to call welfare or the police to come and get him. The son had to be out of his head for he knew the old man couldn't reach the phone without getting out of the wheelchair which Kruge couldn't do without help. Secondly, yesterday Jerome had come in and torn up the place, stole the tv and everything else worth more than a dime. Instead of beating Kruge up or killing him, Jerome tied down his good hand, brought in a sack full of dog crap and put it in his lap.
"Stay here a little while longer," said Gusty. "I'll be back for you before midnight."
Kruge began to cry and slapped the arm of his chair.
"I know. You've been sitting there for six days. I'll be back with friends. You won't know we're coming until we're all around you. We'll handle you like a baby, take you home with us and give you a hot bath, a good meal and a clean bed. Shut up. Wait for us."
Rumson felt best when he was at the bottom of his building wherein not a particle of natural light filtered. Since the two lowest floors were rubble he had to settle for the third, but it was good enough for his purpose which was to feel as surrounded as possible by obstacles, any kind of obstacles, the more cumbersome the better. He was sick and needed everything but open space. At the moment he was on the phone.
"You can't expect me to bail you out," said the man at the other end. "I'm a corporation head, not a politician. Any member of any security agency has more influence than I."
"I'm not gullible enough to believe that. And you didn't have that whining tone in your voice when you asked me to build the Bore."
"For which you were well paid."
"It seems to me you and your company collected several million dollars for the oil, so don't talk about money right now. If you don't mind I'd like you to suggest something that makes me optimistic."
"Sorry, I can't."
"You aren't thinking of your own legal defense already, I hope," said Rumson. "I also hope you don't have it in mind to claim I approached you. It won't wash, not at all."
"You keep to yourself too much. You ought to come out of that place and get a breath of fresh air."
"Never mind—"
"What I'm trying to tell you is that you don't hear enough unless you walk the streets. It's becoming one of my favorite methods of picking up information. The country needs the ore and the oil."
"What does that mean?" said Rumson.
"What the people need and want supersedes court orders."
"You can believe junk like that but not I."
"Forget it, forget it, nothing will come of this, mark my words."
"Why should I? You've personally made a fortune off this deal but now you won't even come to Eastland to talk to me."
"Patience. I will."
"When?"
"When you get rid of that alien."
The lacquer from Mordak's body formed what looked like a broad web that stretched from one of the cathedral spires to the tip of the Drake building next to it. Expanding under its own power, the substance reached across space like fingers of mist that felt and probed, touched the other structure and began to toughen.
There was now a large web between the two buildings and Mordak hung in the center staring blindly at the fading sun. He tried to dream but couldn't. He thought of the egg, tried to return to it in his mind but it was no good. An outcast, he grieved. One day he would have come naturally out of the incubator, would have discovered a gray paradise, would have sowed his fruit everywhere so that his species could thrive. Now there was nothing on his world to enjoy the paradise. The tractor had unearthed the only egg on the spinner's planet. As far as home was concerned he had been and would always be alone of his kind.
He hung in the Earth web and grew angry with his thoughts. The wind rushed from the valley west of Eastland to shake the strands but they were strong so that he was gently rocked.
Back and forth, back and forth he went, his eyes closed while the light in the sky waned and finally died, at which point the blue lamps shot open. The feral mind grew alert. It was night. Time to pay for all those spinners who would never see their homeland.
Silken were the strands beneath him and how perfectly they fit into the ridges that formed along his belly and chest, his knees, toe bristles, arms, even his chin. Skyrocketing away jto-ward the high Drake building, he grinned at the full moon,
changed his mind and climbed high into the darkness. Wherever he went the web grew ahead of him as if it were an extension of his mind.
He came down when the air thinned, zoomed like fluid until he was standing on an iron balcony on a rooftop. It was a business establishment, empty at night save for a lone guard; black and silent rooms stinking of humanity.
He took the guard and placed him alive and well in the center of the web, stuck him backwards so that he could look down on his city. It was good. The guard screamed continuously.
"Oh, God, God, no!" cried Hitty, out of the blue, scaring the others.
"Now what?" said Nox.
"All those people we killed! He'll get us for that. God don't forgive killing."
"What are you talking about?" said Gusty. "Whoever killed a solitary soul?"
Hitty grasped her knees and rocked back and forth. "As if that wasn't filthy enough, what'd we do with them after but cook them in the big pot and eat them?"
Jesse stared at her in anger. "You flipped! You're out of your bleeding mind."
"Gusty, Gusty, why'd you let me?" she cried.
"What, honey? Settle down. Get your mind calm."
"Tell me I never took Marlowe's bones in a pretty box to the post office Wednesday and mailed them to the F.B.I.!"
"Certainly I'll tell you you never did such a thing. Why, you haven't been out of this cave for at least two weeks."
Hitty stopped rocking. The flames from the fire illuminated the tears on her cheeks. Her pale-blue eyes searched his face for the truth. "Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"It's another nightmare?"
"Yes, it is."
"Is that possible? Can I have a bad dream when I'm wide awake?" "You aren't wide awake," said Pathia. "None of us has been wide awake since we passed our eighty-fifth birthdays. We're all simpleminded."
"But we ain't killers," said Hitty.
The conversation upset Gusty. For a while he simply sat staring into the fire. Did there come a time in a senile mind when revenge was the only thing that mattered?
He went on the hunt for some evidence of any kind of crime but found none. The cave was clean, wholesome, healthy, provisioned, inhabited—what else? No corpses, though there were plenty of weapons.
"Where did these guns come from?" he said to Nox who was feeling his way past the artillery room. Nox was nearly blind.
"Don't you remember? We got 'em for target practice."
"Oh, yeah. But what about all these knives?"
"Mumblety-peg."
"There're blackjacks, clubs, loaded socks, axes, saws and swords in here too. What did we get them for?" He didn't mention the explosives.
"I'll think about it on the way to the bathroom and tell you when I come back," said Nox.
Gusty waited for him for a while and then decided to go fishing.
Ekler was talking on the phone to a state trooper, Captain Vita, whose office was forty miles up the main highway.
"What I can't understand is why you called me," Vita said. He was a big man gone to fat, a former body builder who almost made it into major competition a decade before.
"I can't understand it either," said Ekler, "except that for some reason anyone who lives out of this city seems a better bet to me than someone in it. I talked to Captain Bailey but you know how he is. He hasn't even gone to look at the web."
"There isn't much I can do other than come and look at it myself but if I wait a while I'll be seeing it in all the papers."
"Probably," said Ekler. "There are a lot of reporters coming "You say somebody took a shot at that creep?"
"In broad daylight, a perfect target, best marksman on the force."
"What happened?"
"Nothing," said Ekler.
"I mean to the bullet?"
"I mean nothing. The man's name is Pond. He was on the roof of the court house, had the thing right in his sights."
"Why don't you set up a cannon and give it a blast? I expect more than nothing will come from that."
"Maybe you can recommend something else. Say, an expert."
"In what?" said Vita.
"Life, I guess. Maybe insects. That web—"
"Sure I can recommend someone and he's right there in your town. Gee Rumson."
Ekler was surprised. "Is that a fact?"
"I know a little bit about him. For one, he's the closest thing to a genius I've ever heard of and for another, he has such a bad case of being scared out in open spaces that he spends his life in dark rooms inventing things and becoming expert in all sorts of fields."
"Thanks for the information. One other thing on my mind —that web is big, stretches all the way from high above the two buildings clear down to the street."
"So?"
"That street is the main highway. It's the only one leading out of the city."
Vita made a chuckling sound. "You've always got the other direction if the situation gets too grim. Forget what you're thinking. It's only coincidence that the web was built where it was. That creep can't have any brains. By the way, have you thought of ramming through?"
"Pond tried it when his rifle didn't do the job. He has a thing about crawling creatures and says the creep is a bug. His pickup is still stuck."
"Did he get out?"
"He's fine. Climbed free and hightailed it somewhere. I haven't seen him for two days." "So long, Ek. Keep cool."
"Wait a minute, I haven't mentioned what I called you for in the first place."
"Yeah?"
"Do you have any big machines with high cranes or ladders or buckets up there at your place?"
"What for?"
"There's a man stuck in the middle of the web. We can't get him down. We can't even reach him."
Vita sounded angry. "Get some people with knives and blowtorches up after him."
"We have. So far I've lost four men, two torches, a saw and an ax. They're all stuck up there. One of the men is only fifteen feet above the street. He says the web is growing into him."
Rune lived in a vivid world of sound, image and sensation. Anticipation and apprehension were his companions as were confusion and wonder. He wandered through the caves or he crept or he crawled, not speaking, not seeming to give heed when called.
"He's a dummy," said Nox, causing the voiceless Kruge to slap the arm of his wheelchair.
"No, he's different," said Gusty. Rattling the newspaper he had been reading, he said, "Listen to this: 'Mr. and Mrs. H. Harvey of Baton Rouge, Louisiana are offering a reward of five thousand dollars for information leading to the whereabouts of their nineteen-year-old son Duane who disappeared five weeks ago.'" Gusty stopped reading. "Want to hear the description of the Harvey kid? Six feet-two inches tall, two hundred pounds, muscular, blond, blue eyes, brown mole on the back of his left hand."
"That sounds like Rune!" said Hitty.
"Whatever you call him, he isn't a dummy. If he's the kid, he was home on vacation from college; snatched off the street."
Hitty reached out to grasp the wandering Rune's leg, pulled on him until he knelt and settled himself in her arms. Rocking him and patting his cheek, she said, "What happened to make him like this?"
"You know as well as I do that this is an insane and dangerous age for anybody to be living in," said Gusty.
"Maybe whoever threw him off the cliff damaged his brain when he hit him with that sock."
"Could be, but I don't think so."
Hugging Rune to her, Hitty said in a querulous tone, "Why do you always sound as if you know everything?"
"I'm the only doctor you have around here. Would you like me to take a walk?"
"Don't get testy."
"Then don't get cranky. In my professional opinion someone's been inside that boy's head with a knife. Examine the back of his scalp. Spread his hair and keep feeling."
Hitty did so and after a while Rune tried to pull away from her probing fingers. "Don't, lamb, I'll be more gentle," she said and he quieted at once. "I feel something!" she said.
"Can you see it?"
"Of course I can't see it! Can you or any of us, even with our glasses? But I can feel it and it feels like a scar."
"What shape?"
"Rectangle. Like they cut him open and let a piece of his skull hang down like the back flap on his long johns."
"You gonna contact his folks?" said Nox.
Hitty shook her head. "You've been here longer than I have so you know we don't fraternize with any but our own. Besides, he isn't their boy anymore."
"That's right, he's a foundling," said Gusty. He only said it so they wouldn't argue but he meant to write a letter to the Harveys the first chance he got. Maybe he could leave the boy on some street corner for them to pick up.
Rune lay in Hitty's arms for a time but soon grew restless and went to explore the caves. He wore a pair of long red underwear, thin socks, sneakers and a red cap. His nature was new and due to that nature he was restive and in need of being on the move. Strong, healthy and intelligent, he answered the call of his environment by meeting it with enthusiasm.
He found where the cooking smoke wound its way to narrow fissures leading into the swamp, traversed those fissures by lying on his side and scooting along until he crawled out into the marshlands. While he was prowling through the damp grass some instinct warned him to fall flat. It was almost as if a voice screamed inside him. A moment after he fell a rifle bullet crashed above him and buried itself in a tree a few feet ahead. He began crawling backward toward the slug's origin, quietly and with stealth and by and by the hunter who didn't care what he hit so long as he hit it rushed past him, intent on finding the kill.
Rune circled to the left ahead of the man, climbed the tree and was waiting when the other came into view. The man saw a blond giant in a red suit hurtling down on top of him before Rune's body served as a bludgeon to knock him out.
Taking the rifle, Rune buried it in the swamp. Instead of entering Eastland via the road, he scaled the nearest building, walked across the flat roof and leaped ten feet to the next. He looked down at the street, noted the few hurrying people, parked cars, traffic lights, street cleaners. Three blocks eastward he saw a giant web stretched between two buildings. Several men were ensnared in it as were four vehicles and a pair of ladders. Police had cordoned off the street so that the crowd couldn't approach the gray strands but a few had gotten through and were talking to some of the prisoners. Food was tossed up to all but the man in the center who hung limp and motionless. The sound of squad car sirens filled the air as more policemen came to settle the crowd. A dozen photographers stood erect or leaned against the two buildings as they took pictures of the scene.
In order to get a better view Rune climbed the cathedral, which wasn't a difficult task for him since he had an uncanny feel for places to serve as hand and footholds. Between the spires was a flat roof and he was about to climb onto it when something warned him off, made him cross the outside of the spire. As he did so a gray shadow dispatched itself from a web growing between the northern spires, leaped across the roof and clung to the exact spot where he had clung a few seconds before.
Rune continued across the spire, ran along the narrow ledge to the adjoining spire, clawed his way across that wide distance and jumped onto the roof. By this time the gray thing was crossing the second spire. Running past the web Rune grabbed up the lid of the trapdoor, went through the opening and slid down the rope.
Leaping up to a decorative ledge some fifteen feet from the floor, he crouched and waited, and in a moment or two Mordak came down the rope. The blue lamps gleamed in the darkness, swung left, right, to the side and then upward, focused on the ledge and seemed to swim in space. Before Mordak's feet left the floor Rune jumped to another ledge directly above, waited to see how quickly the gray thing responded.
Mordak was fast and cunning but the human in the red suit was faster, seemed to know beforehand every move the alien intended to make. Up and down the wall red-pants scampered with strength and agility and the accursed foreknowledge, like a fly or a flea. From ledge to ledge in utter darkness he went, always just ahead of the spinner, scarcely panting from the exertion, his hands and feet confident and sure as he gripped or pushed off. Sometime during his gymnastics he had lost his hat. It didn't matter. He didn't even think about it. All his senses were focused on the strange creature on his trail. There came a whisper of sound as it leaped from a ledge, a thump and a grunt as it landed, a ragged intaking of breath, a snarl and then another whisper which meant it was time for Rune to take to the air.
He could have gotten away at any time but he remained in the dark area, moving, listening, obeying the signals that issued from new tissue in his brain. He wanted to know how much endurance the gray thing possessed. Which of them could keep up the pace the longest?
In the end Mordak slumped on a ledge and fought for breath, not moving, his eyes blue lamps of hatred. He showed no reaction as the human leisurely leaped from the ledge, grasped the rope and climbed out of sight and reach.
Jetta had short brown hair, brown eyes, a friendly smile and a fine figure. Ekler wanted to marry her. She was educated, intelligent, hadn't any money to speak of but was varied in her intellectual interests and came from respectable people.
"She's like all the rest," Duff said to him. It was Monday and he was scrubbing the kitchen floor. Ekler sat in the breakfast nook reading the afternoon paper.
"Not a chance. Jetta's different."
"She fits all your other girlfriends to a T."
Bitsy came in from the swings in time to track across the fresh wax.
"Mind you don't fall," Duff warned. "Why can't you look before you come in?"
Ekler moved to his big chair in the living room. He made room so Bitsy could sit close beside him while he finished the paper.
"That news is stale," said Duff, coming in to vacuum. He was wiry and gray, never too cheerful and never so dour that it annoyed anyone. He lived upstairs. "Anything that isn't about the alien is stale stuff," he added.
"Have you been over to the site?"
"Not on your life. Who needs to do that when every TV newscast shows me that web? And why doesn't the alien sleep in it anymore?"
"Probably getting tired of being shot full of holes."
"But it does it no damage."
Ekler paused in his reading. "Don't tell me you're worried?"
"I'm not. It's a night thing, isn't it, and its web is four miles on the other end of town, besides which this house is secure."
Time went by and then Jetta came, fresh and good looking, in a light mood and with a gift for Bitsy under her arm. "Ek," she said, taking away his newspaper and bending to kiss him. Her hand lingered for a moment on Bitsy's head. The girl took the package and carried it to Duff for unwrapping. It was a doll.
"I finally did it, finally went to town to see our visitor from outer space." Jetta sat on the arm of Ekler's chair. "Wain-worth is dead, you know? The guard in the center of the web?"
"Too bad."
"What killed him?"
"I'll know as soon as my expert finishes analyzing the bit of web I delivered to him."
"He couldn't have starved to death since food was lifted up to him by that crane. Well, then, what a mystery."
Ekler got up from his chair. "You're still going to visit your mother, aren't you?"
"There's no hurry."
"Yes, there is. I'll feel better when you're out of town."
She went into the kitchen and helped herself to orange juice. "That doesn't make sense," she said, coming back. "You'll feel better if I'm far away while everybody else you love is still right here in Eastland."
"I can't help it if I feel protective. It doesn't mean anything conspiratorial or sinister, it only means I'll be happier knowing you're well off."
They sat facing one another in the living room and he talked for a while. He didn't want to speak but it was this way every time he had a day off. She came and he told her what was being done. In fact it was nothing much. The men in the web were dying one by one but nobody could say exactly why other than that some property in the strands was penetrating their clothing and either poisoning them or doing something else lethal. The highway patrol was assisting as were all other authorities within a radius of a hundred miles. The Governor hadn't personally visited Eastland yet but his emissaries were everywhere taking notes and making suggestions to Captain Bailey who behaved as if he were more than fed up. Bailey still hadn't gone to see the web, wouldn't even look at it on tv and, in fact, wouldn't let anyone else watch it either. The Mayor was in the hospital being treated for a liver ailment and had given his authority to Bailey who claimed that the freak from wherever was just that, a freak, and the problem would be promptly dealt with. How? The crane operator was making certain the web captives were being fed and cared for while officers were scouring the neighborhood to find the night thing who had probably gone home and wouldn't be back.
In fact Mordak had been discovered in a new, smaller web between the cathedral spires on the north side. No one had gone up after him except some nut in a red suit who hightailed it away shortly after he was seen skinning up a brass spire like a monkey. Anyway and more to the point, Bailey ordered men with blowtorches to attack the lower parts of the web which burned slowly wherever heat was applied. The material turned black. However in the morning it was back again, gray and healthy looking and dangerously sticky. A crew went onto the roof of the Drake building and burned away a goodly portion of gray strands until one of the men tried reaching farther down than he should and fell, missing the web altogether and striking the pavement.
"They're half treating it like a joke," said Ekler. "Not the deaths, but all the rest."
"That's because it is a joke. Can't you see? Here we have a strange kind of life form popped out of a Rumson Bore, except that no one mentions the Bore. Some are saying the creature is a legendary oddball from the swamp. Like Sasquatch. A hundred photographers from a hundred newspapers are coming in and out of town taking pictures and writing stories and not one of them has said this thing is permanent. You don't like what I'm saying, do you?"
"Only the permanent part. Bailey won't let me tell the Governor about the Bore, says we can't until or unless we find it actually is in that building. That doesn't bother me too much. What does is that I don't think it will make any difference if the whole world knows the truth."
Jetta frowned. "One little alien?"
"There's that word: alien. We don't know any whats, whys or hows. Can we defend ourselves without them?"
"I was thinking of a flame thrower in a plane or helicopter."
"So was I and I can't tell anyone else that I hope those men in the web die before it's too late."
Bitsy came in and climbed into the chair beside him, curled against him, looked in his ear. He watched Jetta's expression, searched for change, saw none.
She swung in the swing outside while he repaired Bitsy's sliding board and then they watched tv. Finally he went upstairs and dressed for dinner. Driving to her house five blocks away, he waited for her to change and then they went to a Chinese restaurant twenty miles west of Eastland.
After dinner they danced. "Bit looks great," she said.
"Duff does a good job."
"You don't do so badly yourself."
Here it comes, he thought, not really expecting it, and then when it did come it was doubly jolting.
"There's a place in Healy," she said. "My cousin once worked there. She says it's marvelous."
Ekler danced and didn't say anything. Pretty Bit, he thought. What a brain she might have had if Mama had conceived her a few years sooner, say at age thirty rather than forty-seven.
"They don't have very many patients, which means the staff can give each one individual attention," said Jetta. "I mean, Bitsy's already doing great. Think of how much more they could do for her."
He was thinking of all those years, day after day, the hours and moments, with no hope of succeeding, but in the end he and Duff taught her to raise her hand when she had to go. It took them all that time but she finally got the idea, and how great it had been. A terrific achievement and she knew it. What a celebration they'd had, cake, candles, presents; like a birthday.
Jetta stirred in his arms, changed the tempo. He went along with her. "I haven't been up there but I hear the place is sparkling," she said. "The rooms are cleaned every day."
Every hour they had cleaned Bit's face, seen to it that her bib was clean, washed her hands. They never let time go by but what they cleaned up after her. It was a lot easier now because they had all that practice behind them. Duff did most of it.
"And they like them," said Jetta. "The staff, I mean. Chosen for their sensitivity besides their skill and training. She needs it, Ek. I wouldn't want to intimate that you've been depriving her of anything but they tell me a controlled environment gives them a deep feeling of security."
It wasn't late when he took her home. He kissed her at the door and left.
Bitsy was in his bed so he picked her up and carried her back into her own room where Duff lay snoring. Gently he kicked a leg of the old man's bed.
"Drifted off again," he said, raising up. "I'll have to sleep more during the day. He helped Ekler tuck Bitsy in. "How was your date?" he said.
"Good. Good."
"No mention of institutions?"
"Not a word."
"Don't get your hopes up. It'll come."
"Why is it inevitable?" said Ekler.
"Out of sight, out of mind. If you send this child away, then you won't be able to see her and that means she doesn't exist."
Mordak worked in the light of the full moon. Anatomy might not always be destiny but at times it pointed the way to interesting or natural pastimes, besides which there was nothing else for him to do. He might find a cave somewhere, plaster himself against a cool, dark wall and spend the rest of his life meditating, but it would be dull. Not that any of it mattered. He had work to do.
His initial passion was spent, his hatred dispersed. Now there remained in him a calculating intent to give humankind whatever he could in the way of torment and destruction. One of their kind had obstructed the course of an entire species. It would only be just if one of that species spread non-joy in the enemy camp.
It was a purely cerebral intent, or so the spinner preferred to tell himself. There was no virtue in curdling his repasts by entertaining acidic thoughts and emotions. Not once did he ever allow himself to think that he was in the singular position of doing whatever he pleased. No such heresy would ever pass through his brain. He was here and that was that, and let humanity beware. He could have gone out of the city to do what he had to do but he chose to remain.
The building on the north side of the cathedral was easy to web up. Daubs of lacquer here and there assured that in the morning a fine net would be spread from brass spire to balcony railing and all the way to the street where cats, dogs, rats, shopping carts and humans were welcome. Likely there wouldn't be any vehicles caught in the strands since it was only an alley between the buildings.
It annoyed him that the area became uninhabited at nightfall. The only human sounds came from one or two of the victims ensnared in number-one web. They wept because they knew by now that their trap was consuming them. So much for human loyalties. No one had remained here in the darkness to die with the unfortunates.
Several blocks away, nestled among tall structures and perhaps believing they were safe in shadows, a family of five dwelt in a stucco house. Mordak broke window after window by hanging from the upper sills and kicking with vigor, searching for easy entrance. They were all barred from inside. Scampering onto the roof he considered swooping down the long-unused chimney but it was filthy and some fastidious notion urged him to look elsewhere.
Now that he had awakened the household and had them all terrorized, he took more time hunting for a way in. He could have kicked down one of the doors but he didn't really want to. At his leisure he began lacquering the entire abode, up one side and down the other and across the roof, not touching every area but passing over, about and near, which was sufficient. Before he had finished he heard sirens in the distance. The police were on their way. Someone inside the house had summoned assistance.
He took his time and made certain he left no loopholes before speeding up the side of one of the tall buildings.
The police officers and firemen were reluctant to get out of their vehicles, but it wouldn't have mattered had they gone directly to the house. It was so near to the big web, it was night and they were human. After surveying the area until they felt more courageous, they at last went up the alley to try to help the prisoners. Unfortunately they couldn't get in. Worse, the family couldn't get out. One officer glued himself to the front doorknob by taking hold of it. Luckily for him a comrade grabbed hold of him and yanked so hard the skin on his hand tore loose.
Before the word could be spread that the alien had painted the place a fireman gripped the back doorknob with first one hand and then the other. Then he slammed his body against the panel so that the only parts of him not stuck fast were his right side, his head and feet. Someone else became ensnared halfway through a window that the woman inside had unbarred.
A ladder was propped against the side of the house only to become rigid in its position. A man climbed it, unrolled a strip of tarpaper on the roof and walked across it to see if there were any entries other than the narrow chimney. A bit of Mordak's lacquer oozed upon the tarpaper. The officer stepped on it and hastily removed his shoe. Carefully he retraced his steps to the ladder, climbed to the ground and reported to his superior. There was no way into or out of the house.
ChapJtsVL ty
Jerome crouched on the stairs and sneaked another look around the corner into the hallway. His interest heightened. Mrs. P. had her apartment door partly open. Any second now her ugly little head would poke forth so that she could see if the way was clear. He ducked back out of sight.
She hadn't been out for a week and every day the youth came up to the fifth floor to watch her door for a while. She had purchased practically nothing on her last trip to the market which meant that she must be out of everything by now. At last necessity was squeezing her out of her dingy hole. Mrs. P.; dreg; at least eighty-five years old, a shrunken hag, unattractive as sin, but she received a check every month besides which the street carried the word that her black purse held some extra bucks. She lived alone in her little hole except for a pink chihuahua that looked like a fat mouse.
The old lady fooled him, came out of her apartment like a cunning weasel, slammed her door behind her, scurried down the hallway and skipped into the waiting el before he could get around the corner.
Cursing and spitting, he attacked her door with his fists and boots, aware as he did so that he wasted his time against the metal-fortified panel. Even the walls were too tough to kick in.
It took him too long to get down to the street and by then the crone was at the end of the block and safely mingling with people. Perspiring in his rage, he went back to his hiding place in the stairwell. She was imbecilely slow in the market which meant he would have a considerable wait, but he intended to be rewarded for his labor.
The fact was that he dozed and awakened only when Mrs. P. was back from the market and unlocking her door. As he stared around the corner he was newly angered. She had actually found someone down on the street to come up with her, a big kid who could have mopped up the floor with Jerome, and look at all that stuff she bought! She had enough to last her a month in her stinking citadel!
Ferocious enough to slug the wall with his fist, he nursed the bruise and watched as she gave the boy a tip and slammed herself securely inside her apartment. There was no need hanging around here. Every other old buzzard in the building was locked up for the rest of the evening. No pickings available. The story of Jerome's life.
He caught a bus to the east side of town, debarked on Main Street, walked six blocks and was lured into an alley by loud noise. An incredible sight greeted him. There was a house surrounded by what looked like a web, there were people inside looking out and there were tractors and men working to make a tunnel underneath the web.
Right away he saw they weren't going to succeed, not unless they put more men to digging in the trench. Meanwhile he didn't have to stay there to see if they were going to reach those people who were making a good deal of noise in there.
The Drake building across the street from the cathedral attracted his interest, and scarcely looking at the huge web that seemed to be bracing the two structures he began hunting for a way in. Heights didn't discourage him so he climbed from one secure window ledge to the next until he was some eighteen stories up at which point he spotted what he had been looking for: an unlocked window. Using a screwdriver he pried at the frame until the pane slid up. A few seconds later he stood in a dark hallway, puzzled because of a bad smell that seemed to be coming from somewhere down the corridor to his left.
He went right, opened a door leading into a large room filled with shiny computers. The moon shone in the window and led him to a file cabinet approximately sixty feet from the door. He had just closed the top drawer and was reaching for the handle of the second when he heard the door open. Almost automatically he faded around the cabinet. When he sneaked a look to see who had come in it took all his will power not to gasp.
He had supposed it was a guard. It wasn't. The moon was full on it so that he got a clear look. Too clear. About his height, it was gray and strictly from a comic book, big eyes that glowed like blue fire, hideous face, stringy hair. The monster, the night thing from the Rumson Bore that everyone was talking about. The builder of webs. The killer. It had heard him out there in the hall or maybe when he was crawling through the window and now it was coming straight at him.
Wisely he behaved as if the creature creeping toward him were a human guard, leaned against the hefty cabinet at the proper moment so that it toppled onto Mordak. Not wasting a movement he bolted into the hall and found his open window. He had already decided against the els and the stairs. Business establishments lost most of their power after midnight and, as for the steps, the night thing was too fast to risk them. He would hate to be caught in an unlit stairwell.
Likewise he would hate to be caught on the unlit outside. Above him Mordak shrieked and began dropping down the window ledges so rapidly that he appeared to barely touch them for support. In fact he didn't come in contact with the last three windows but plummeted downward with his feet and hands aimed at Jerome exactly as a spider might drop on its prey, except that this time the prey had the mind to guess that the spider couldn't change direction in midair.
The window ledge to which Jerome clung was wide enough so that he scrambled hand over hand to the right and out of the path of the dropping predator. Mordak didn't stop but kept on falling eight stories to the street.
Jerome climbed the rest of the way down. Nothing could have survived such a fall yet he longed to be on solid ground and away from the dark form on the pavement below. To his horror it groaned and rolled over just as he touched down. The blue lamps opened to capture him, a hand came up to take hold of him.
He was gone, a cry ripping from his throat as rage, disgust and terror vied for supremacy inside him. When he looked back he saw Mordak getting slowly to his feet. For an instant he experienced regret. What sport it would have been to call the swine and tell them he had destroyed their enemy.
Olivia Rumson kissed him and then gave him close anxious scrutiny. Dressed in an expensive tweed suit and with her blond hair carefully set, she presented a startling contrast to the gloomy, plainly dressed man beside her. Her expression was one of genuine concern. She had always loved her maniacal spouse.
"Yes, I know," he said. "I've a ghastly pallor. But it isn't illness."
"You should have said ghostly."
He smiled and then winced as a ray of sunlight bulleted through a window to strike him.
"We can go downstairs, or at least close the drapes," she said.
"It's all right. I'm not doing it out of courage. Believe me, I haven't any of that to spare but then I needn't tell you such a thing when you know practically all there is to know about me. From time to time I must see some daylight, not too much but sufficient to remind me that the world and its people are out there and not locked away in dark dungeons like myself."
The room was furnished with high book shelves, overstuffed furniture, elegant tapestries; all the comforts of home. Olivia sat in a chair that looked curiously old fashioned while Rumson rested on a footstool and held her hand.
"I don't want you to come back here next month to see me, nor any month until I let you know it's safe," he said.
"Just this once make the effort. Get out of here. They can wrap you in a rug or nail you into a stupid box while they carry you outside. How about the trunk of a car for the trip?"
"Or a coffin?"
Born into poverty, Olivia always gave the impression that wealth came naturally to her. She had a gift for maintaining her composure. Mildly she said, "Don't joke."
"Why not? No matter where I go I have to live in holes and you can't abide them, so what does it matter where I hang my hat?"
"At least you can get away from this town."
"And my hideous, web-building creation?"
She knew about that just as she knew everything about him. Things they didn't discuss during her monthly visits were spoken of on the phone. She called him often. Once she had even walked through the Bore, though more properly it should be said that she walked through the opening made by the light of the Bore. It was more than he could do. He had never seen the other world into which his invention intruded. Olivia went through so that she could come back and give him a detailed description. She was like that, constantly telling him about reality while he hid inside his building as though daylight was a horizontal flying wall of glass aimed at him.
"The police have got me analyzing the night thing's web," he said, and she laughed.
"And all the while they want to haul you off to jail."
Each time he had built the Bore he also devised a destruct system above and around it so that a touch of a button in his living quarters upstairs controlled explosions buried the machine. Olivia knew about that, too.
"How close are they to getting it dug out," she said.
"Not at all. They dig for a few minutes each day and then they're called away to tend to victims or more webs."
"I've seen pictures of it. It doesn't even faintly resemble a spider."
"It isn't one. It's an alien."
Placing her hand on his, she said, "That sounds strangely-emphatic."
"That's the crux. It isn't a spider, insect or animal, it's an alien."
"Meaning it's beyond human comprehension?"
"More like it's beyond human anticipation. The only way to understand it is to study it and accept the findings without trying to compare it or them with something Earthly. There's only one hitch to that logic. If you don't make familiar comparisons then there can be no understanding."
Eventually he began shuddering so they retired to his dimly lit dining room in which there were no windows or doors leading directly to the outside. It was merely one of many of his burial places.
Over dinner he said, "This is my plan: You're to go abroad, London, perhaps, your own choice, and you aren't to come back until this is all over." He could see her eyes fastened on him across the wide table. Vivid and piercing, they seemed to penetrate all his facades.
"And when they begin evacuating the town, what will you do?"
"I hardly think they'll have to do that."
"There's the possibility."
"There's always that, just as there's a chance I can figure it all out in my lab. It's equipped with everything, you know."
"If it gets really bad you'll run with the rest?" she said. "You won't be too ill to save your life?"
"Of course I will, and of course I won't. There, does that settle your mind?"
"Not in the slightest."
The crew that had been trying to dig the family out of the webbed house built a trench ten feet deep. It extended to within a few feet of the web when the workers were called away. There had been alien activity at the hospital two miles west. Mayor Tucker was a patient in one of its rooms and called for city employees to make haste and get rid of the sticky material blocking all the doors.
Meanwhile the trapped family made a phone call to out-of-town relatives who came right away. They couldn't get there until morning, at which time they discovered a new web draping the trench. With a blowtorch they burned it away, descended into the hole and used picks and shovels to dig their way beneath the foundation. With a drill they bored through the floor and, one by one, the family of five escaped. In ten minutes they were across the city border, driving west as fast as the station wagon would go.
Eastland Memorial Hospital was besieged on the outside by officials and relatives, and patients and staff on the inside. Each group strove to reach the other. Police officers climbed through windows after it became apparent that there were also webs inside the doors. A search for corpses was instigated but none turned up. Mordak seemed to have been satisfied to leave his calling cards on the doorways. It occurred to someone that he might not have gone away at all, that he might still be inside the premises, so another search began but it too proved fruitless.
Getting rid of all the gray strands with blowtorches and clearing the doors was such a simple task that it made everyone uneasy. Many of the patients politely requested transfers to hospitals outside the city while others bluntly demanded the change. A mound of scorched webbing was placed in a box and taken to the station where Ekler took charge of it and commissioned a patrolman to transport it to Rumson.
Captain Bailey wanted to get rid of the big web on Main Street by using a giant flamethrower. The relatives of the dead men still trapped in it complained so vehemently that he hesitated. In the meantime he behaved erratically, ordered Ekler to forget the alien and attend to some other problems, such as locating the city's cannibals. Yes, the Lieutenant could be assured that he had heard correctly. Somebody was eating people and mailing the remains to the F.B.I., members of Congress and various other places.
Crises had a way of traveling in bunches. The majority of the police force would handle Mordak while Ekler and a few men were to take care of other gross problems. In the first place the Lieutenant was to locate the cannibals quickly and without any discernible fanfare, and in the second place too many old people were disappearing and they weren't being snatched by the alien. The landlord at the Retreat reported them missing. Thirdly and probably relative to the second, public mugging of senior citizens in the area of the Retreat was becoming scandalous. Ekler was ordered to clean up the streets. All of them. Never mind the alien. It presented no real threat.
The post office clerk couldn't solve the mystery of the bones for the Lieutenant.
"Long boxes, fat ones, skinny ones, we get all kinds every day. What's the problem."
"The one I'm interested in had a red ribbon on it."
"Helps me not at all," said the clerk. "They're supposed to use nothing but tape so the packages will go through the automatic sorter but they come in here with twine so bulky an earthquake couldn't damage what's inside. I take what they pay for, whatever or however it comes. It's easier than giving lectures."
"The person who brought it in might have looked unusual."
"Is that a fact?" The clerk looked curious but not overly so. "We had a pregnant girl in here last Friday couldn't have been more than twelve, only she didn't send any package, just bought some stamps. I remember her well. She was crying. Then there was a man yesterday with a Pekingese, bit my foot. No bigger than a powder puff but it had teeth like needles. He bought stamps too."
Out on the street Ekler mopped his face with a handkerchief and scrutinized the sky. Not a cloud in sight. No rain in weeks and plainly none today. A breeze lifted some dust from the gutter, sent it spilling across the sidewalk. He felt it blow up his pantslegs and settle into his socks.
The radio in his pocket beeped but he didn't answer it, continued walking while someone kept trying to contact him. Probably it was Pond, or maybe it was Bailey, but the subject would be the same no matter who it was: the big web on Main Street which had already been blasted twice by a flamethrower.
The night thing was fond of that web, evidently had a special feeling for it since he rebuilt it both times and a sight faster than it had been razed. The sides of the cathedral and the Drake building were scorched black which hadn't pleased Reverend Thomas and his flock or the several people who rented the Drake offices. They complained of the looks of the places, the stink that wouldn't go away and the fact that the fire had created several leaks in the walls. When it rained, if it rained, there would be cause for some lawsuits against the city, but naturally that last part could be avoided if Bailey would get his fire torches out of there so that the walls could be repaired.
Nothing doing and never mind, the web was going to be gotten rid of once and for all because someone had to prove that the alien couldn't put something over on so many trained experts. Besides the Mayor was still in the hospital which meant that Bailey still had the say, strange though it sometimes seemed to be.
Ekler's radio beeped, dust blew up his nose, the sun broiled the back of his neck, he headed for the Retreat. Arriving there, he collared Jerome who was coming out the right front door, took him by the neck of his T-shirt and stood him against the wall, not roughly and not too swiftly, held him there while he used his communicator to call for a car.
"You're a freak!" said the youth. "This whole dump is being wrapped in spider webs and you're making minor busts!"
Ekler didn't reply. He experienced no desire to do anything other than wait for the car, felt no urging to swat, smash or knee his prisoner. It had been a long time since he attempted to correct or enlighten his collars but only stopped them and hauled them in. They were mindless roaches who did unspeakable things and nine times out of ten the court put them back in their cupboards but no more did he allow himself to go through what he had suffered as a rookie.
"Hush," he said as Jerome opened his mouth. His knuckles touched the smooth jaw. He knew this roach, had known him all his life. Attempted rape on an eight year old, innumerable muggings of women and old people, wanton destruction of property, dozens of robberies, suspicion of murder; Jerome liked to do what other people never did.
"I have cause," said Jerome.
"Yes, I know. Pain and compulsion. You have more than anybody. No one else is as sensitive as you are. Thresholds and limits and slings and arrows."
Slumping against the fist he couldn't escape, the youth gasped. "When's it going to rain? I'll die if it doesn't rain."
A rookie came in a car and took him away. Ekler went along to the station, retained the vehicle and drove west beyond the city, gradually turned south and east. Driving to a bluff overlooking the ocean he got out and stood on the ledge, enjoyed the bit of spray that managed to reach all the way up to his height.
There was good fishing down there on the strip of shore, he knew, because he had anchored himself on a rope and climbed down once years ago. The still water between jutting mounds of boulders provided a sanctuary for fish to come in. The problem was that there was no way to reach the area except down a rope, as he had once done. Of course it might be possible to find an entrance through the north or south barricades of rocks and he had wanted to investigate, but his folks were always sending him to camps or schools. That was before Bitsy was born.
Pretty idiot. He had heard one of his classmates call her that. It was the only time he ever hit anyone because of her. He learned. People didn't appreciate contrast, another of their God-given rights.
An hour later he met Jetta for lunch at Yang's and while they ate wonton soup and shrimp chow mein she told him what was happening with the publicity angle.
Something was going on but she didn't know exactly what. Her column wasn't syndicated but that hadn't stopped the big outfits up the coast from taking everything she could write about the alien. At least not before yesterday. Today they didn't want a single word. Nobody wanted it, not even Eastland's two papers, but then they had stopped publicizing their own jeopardy soon after it began. That made sense, but the other papers putting a stopper on news didn't.
"There's only one answer," she said. "They're giving us up as lost."
Ekler smiled. "Who is?"
"The government. The world. Do you know how fast that thing can build a web? If it really wanted to it could encase the entire city in a month."
"If you're writing stuff like that I can't say I'm sorry it isn't being bought."
Abandoning her chow mein, she drummed her fingers on the table. "What if it's true? What if it's going to happen?"
"Then all publicity should stop. People here have first-hand information about what's happening and they don't need anything else to scare them."
"Even if they're doomed?"
"Especially then, but nobody's doomed. The Governor's sending in troops to tear down the webs and flush the thing into the open where it can be killed."
"We'd better be prepared for a lot more than troops."
"What does that mean?" said Ekler.
"People are coming down, up and over from every direction to take a look at us."
Having saved his egg roll Ekler popped the entire thing into his mouth and crunched on it, as usual probing for the taste or flavor of egg.
"Now what?" she said. "That bit of news doesn't upset you. Tell me what you know."
"Not to worry. Anyone coming within twenty miles of here will meet a barricade set up by the National Guard. He'll have to detour around us."
She hadn't resumed eating. "You're being wise and crafty. Don't think I've forgotten this is a free country where people may travel any place they want, and a barricade five miles out would do just as well." Pausing a few moments, she continued. "But the big junctions west are twenty miles out so if a group of us here, say a big group, say the whole population, wanted to get out in a hurry—when are we going to evacuate?"
"Ha! I don't know. The roads are clear, though, just in case."
"Why is it so difficult to catch that creature and kill it?" "It's faster than greased lightning and it can regenerate damaged tissue."
Jerome nailed a piece of plywood across Mrs. P.'s apartment door and retreated to the stairwell around the corner to watch and wait. Toward evening she opened up, quietly and furtively so that he might not be aware but he had keen senses and heard the faint scrapings. By the time her drill began to bite into the wood he was crouching nearby, ready to grab any part of her that showed. The drill bit came through to his side after which emerged a small saw that made a square in the wood. Silently, patiently he waited. The saw was pulled back out of the way and presently a quantity of Snooky's droppings were pushed out to fall on the carpetless floor beside him.
In a fury he attacked the plywood but by then Mrs. P. had slammed the door. He screeched threats and promises until he was hoarse but there was no sound from inside. He could envision her huddling against the wall as she waited to see what he would do next. Little hag in black dress, brown stockings, black shoes all cracked and shiny, gray hair in a tight net, shrunken face with tiny eyes. No doubt she was hugging the dog that looked like a fat mouse. Snooky. A beast and her beast.
He went down to the street, threw himself onto the curb, sat with his hands in his pockets and dreamed of revenge. Slim, handsome, friendless, he rested there until dark. He was about to get up when he remembered Kruge. Maybe the old man had forgotten to lock his door.
Kruge was gone, not bag and baggage since his rags and junk were all over the place but gone he was, as if he had never existed. As far as Jerome was concerned, he hadn't, really.
There was nothing in the apartment worth taking or destroying. The youth stood by the window, looked down at the street and suddenly shivered. For an instant he felt something ghostly trail past him. The spirit of Kruge? Had the old trash-hole died in this room?
Fear nibbled at his fleet heels as he went back down to the street. The thought of Kruge angered him. The thought of all his victims enraged him; all the old uglies who had been costumed and masked by the advancing decades.
Passing a jewelry store he coveted the contents of the velvet lined trays, imagined that he was their owner, compared himself with potentates and millionaires, judged himself to be superior or at least equal. He picked up a rock but hesitated to smash the glass. In its center was a layer of steel mesh, invisible but nearly unbreakable. Were he to obey his urge to let fly with not just the one rock but many rocks, the sparkling pane would bend and crack but it wouldn't open enough to allow the passage of his hand.
He threw anyway, picked up a few more missiles and tossed them. It would cost the proprietor to have the pane replaced.
Passing his mother's home on Glean St., he threw another rock, a big one that sailed through the living-room window. It didn't have an inner layer of mesh. She came out onto the porch to hurl curses at his retreating figure.
He walked, brooded and remembered things. He was always fighting in school so they threw him out; an A student but they didn't care, not that he studied or gave the future a second thought but the subjects came easily to him. Funny how his brains weren't earning him a dime. He was always broke, especially since he had left the old lady. What had she ever done for him but squeeze him into this rotten world and then beat up on him every day of his life?
His belly groaned and he realized he hadn't eaten since yesterday. Walking the four blocks back to the Retreat he kicked at the landlord's door. It was on the ground level, last apartment on the right of the semicircle. The bottom of the panel was scarred and dirty from his previous kicks. Balding Larry silently opened up and let him in, set food before him and didn't hang around in the kitchen while he ate. He seldom came to mooch here but when he did the landlord saw that he ate well, otherwise Jerome would set the building on fire.
"Where'd that old man go?" he yelled from the kitchen. "That Kruge? Where'd he go?"
"Where the rest of them went." Larry stood in the doorway. He was heavy and perspiring, unfriendly but careful not to be too uncivil.
"Where's that?"
"Let me know if you find out. I might split their unpaid rent with you."
Jerome ate with no manners. Larry was a good cook and the lasagne was fresh and hot. "What do you think about the webs and that alien?" he said, coming up for air.
"What do I care? They'll catch it and kill it so I don't even think about it."
"Except you lock yourself up like a corpse in a coffin every night."
"I'd do that even without the night thing. It isn't the only dangerous creature roaming the streets."
Jerome shot him an amused look and then went back to eating. Maybe Larry was insulting him, maybe not. What was the difference? The man knew it was profitable not to get in his way. Then, too, the landlord of these charming abodes didn't feel about him the way everybody else did. The fact was Larry didn't care about anything or anyone as long as he collected his rent on time.
The world looked better after he had something good inside him. Belching and squirting air between his front teeth to clean them he walked east and came across a man stuck to a strand of webbing. It hung from a protrusion on a telephone pole and the idiot must have been stone blind not to have seen it before blundering into it.
"Hey, bub, help me get away from this thing, hey, will you?" He was a little drunk, short and pudgy with a thick head of hair and a beard. His dark eyes were wide and full of fear.
"You're stupid, freak," said Jerome, circling him.
"You said it! Help me get loose."
"It isn't stuck to anything but your clothes. Why do you just hang there yelling? And every time you twist around like that you take a chance of getting your belly caught."
The prisoner grabbed at his stomach, felt bare skin where his shirt had pulled out of his pants. The strand of webbing was fastened to his left side, just missing the back of his arm and the side of his head. With his head tilted at an awkward angle, he couldn't exactly see where anything was.
"Pull your right pantleg down a little bit," said Jerome. "Hey, man, if you want to get out of this just listen to me. Your ankle's bare. Pull the leg down. Go on."
Eagerly the man bent farther and reached for his leg. A moment later he felt the cold touch of the web against his back. It was such a small bit of flesh that his motion exposed, only a minor portion of meat on his left side below his ribs. He cried out, perhaps more because of Jerome's expression than at what was happening to him.
It still wasn't too late for him to get away. Perhaps if he had thrown himself forward and downward, yanking on his shirt at the same time, that insignificant bit of webbing would have come loose. Panic had him now, though, and he became irrational and reckless. With his stark gaze upon Jerome's gleeful face, he yelled and leaped backward, thereby bringing his head into contact with the relentless gray tendril. Bellowing in terror, he twisted and grabbed it in his hands like a rope, pulled and hauled on it, his body never still as he tried to destroy the object with brute strength. Somehow his legs got into the act and before too many minutes had gone by he was wrapped like a cocoon or a Christmas package. Two feet off the ground, his strength played out and his doom sealed, he hung inertly and moaned while Jerome cautiously picked his pockets.
The youth bedded down in an abandoned building, lay on his back and stared into the darkness. He hated sleeping under the sink but it was the only place where marauders weren't likely to find him. He was on the fourteenth floor and the elevators didn't work which meant that thieves would be discouraged from climbing to this place.
He hoped there wouldn't be tears on his face and all over his pillow when he opened his eyes in the morning, but he knew there probably would be. During the night whenever he dreamed he would cry. He did it nearly every night but never knew why.
In the morning he awakened with a feeling of total satisfaction. No nightmares, no tears. Instead he'd had an illuminating revelation. How uncanny it was that the patterns had unfolded in logical sequence in his sleeping mind. His dream had showed him how to take care of Mrs. P.
The illness wasn't in Rumson's head but in his body. Not merely light crashed down on him but a tangible burden. No fangs, talons or weapons were there in open space, only a huge weight that wouldn't let him act human. His breath came in deep gasps, his pulse careened, mouth utterly parched, muscles feeling like rubber or something ethereal. Salvation wasn't simply a matter of striving to think down the problem, not when his body became a palpitating chunk of horror. The only thought he had was that it was happening and it was as bad as always. Undone, unhinged, let loose like Kharis in the crumbling crypt, he became something else that alarmed all those within his vicinity. He got down on his belly and crawled back into the building.
It was long ago that he had gone out for Olivia's sake, to test her faith in her feelings for him. Certainly he hadn't been trying out any new quirk in his own repertoire of hopes or impulses for he knew there was no such animal, having already tried everything.
Because she loved him she believed he would be able to walk in sunshine with her just as he unreasonably expected that after he fell in love with her he had the right to lock all the exits in order to keep her inside with him.
Olivia was delicate in body, tough of mind, youthfully inexperienced but knowledgeable enough to know what she wanted when she saw it. Having gone into the ludicrously un-lighted building to a dinner with an acquaintance several years before, having met and emotionally latched onto the weird host, she decided to cure him a little bit at a time. Ignoring his unusual reaction to the very sight of the front door of his building, she led him through to the back. This was a considerable time after she had trained him to tolerate having a daily lunch with her in a room full of wide-open windows.
Meanwhile he plied himself with pills. They had helped him at first. Maybe they would again. They didn't, however, and after his ignominious trip back into his sanctuary on his navel like a snake, he expected her to leave and never brighten his doorway again. She surprised him by saying she wanted to get married. Right away. He agreed and after the ceremony tried to lock her up.
"I never let on to you that I can't abide being closed in," she said to him later, when it was all settled that she would be in possession of a full set of keys to his property. Smiling somewhat ruefully, she said, "I wonder what a child of ours would be like."
"It's not funny!"
Not smiling anymore, she said, "I agree. It doesn't look as if our marriage will be one hundred per cent successful, does it? Well, we'll work hard to see that it's ninety-five per cent successful. We love each other and that's what counts."
Perhaps it was what counted but it did nothing for him when the need for her worried away at him like moths in a fur. The place would begin getting to her and then she would take a trip somewhere and leave him to writhe in his self-hatred and boredom. When she came back it was as if they had both been released from prison.
"That's what it was, a sentence," she said, embracing him with fierce strength. "I stayed away until the thought of you became more intense than the thought of this tomb you live in."
"Never mind, it doesn't matter, you're here."
Each time she had a new batch of pills for him, given to her by some new doctor she had dug up. There were times when Rumson thought that was really the reason she went away, to find someone else who offered her new hope.
It was a waste. They didn't work. They never worked. He would have been as well off had he swallowed vitamins.
They quarreled about whether or not she should have a child, but in the long run it didn't matter since she never conceived. Rumson privately believed it was just as well. With a child she would have taken more than just herself away when she left.
Once when she wasn't there he got drunk and went outside. Having imagined it was broad daylight he was astounded to find that the sun had set. A dry breeze came up the main highway to buffet him, dark shadows came from behind the cathedral and behind the shorter buildings farther down the street, the sky was a laden spatula about to land on his head. All his symptoms went full blown into action so fast he hadn't time to absorb them. He fainted dead away. When he awakened he knew he was inside his building. His servants had come out after him. His eyes were still closed, but he knew. His body knew. Even his rotten pores had eyes to see and as soon as they spied the least bit of open space they ordered his heart and glands to give him the business. Now he was safe. This time it was all right. No signals were given. He was in his tomb, safe and snug.
Duff was a retired policeman who had adopted Bitsy into his soul the way a sponge drew moisture into itself. She might as well have been blood kin. During the years he and Ekler were on the beat together Duff gradually and unintentionally worked his way into the girl's existence so that days, nights and being became synonymous or parallel not just with brother but also with grampy.
"Besides, it saves you paying a housekeeper or a nurse, doesn't it?" the old man said once in a while whenever Ekler reminded him who was running the place.
On the day Ekler came back from having lunch with Jetta at Yang's, Duff met him at the door.
"You keep telling me she's different from the rest of those females you thought about marrying, but she sure isn't. This morning she was over here with a kit full of tests."
"What kind of tests?"
"Dumb ones," said Duff. "Square pegs in round holes, windup robots, stuffed cats that growl or purr, different colored lights."
"Why didn't you save her a lot of time by telling her Bit's I.Q.?"
"Because it's none of her business. She's a very prying lady when you aren't around. Already I've seen her giving this whole place the once-over, looking to see what changes she intends to make. Naturally the longest look she takes is at me."
"You can always go find Gus Worth and take him up on that offer to live with him in the best digs in town, wherever they are."
Following him upstairs to his bedroom, Duff said, "She doesn't like my being here. She's good looking and decent and she'd make you a whale of a wife but Bit and I don't fit into her picture, not that I blame her too much for her opinion but there ought to be room in this house for more than just two people since she probably won't have kids. What is she, anyway, forty?"
"Will you cut it out?"
"I know how much you want to get married. Since you were twenty-two and pounding pavement with me you've been looking for somebody. If you want to know what I think, you aren't suited for matrimony. Some are and some aren't and—"
"How many times has Bailey called?"
"Five. I said you were out making busts on all those little roaches who mug for a living."
"Only one bust and he's out already," said Ekler.
"Where you going that you have to put on fresh clothes?"
"Back to work. The dust out there is unbelievable. If it doesn't rain soon we'll have to carry moisturizers around so we can breathe. I've worn this outfit five hours and it's worse than your floor mop."
"It isn't going to rain this week or the next or the one after that. The fellow on tv says there's no wind to blow away that cloud of pollution up there, and as long as it stays settled in we're gonna have dry weather."
Outside again Ekler went to collect dust in his socks. The air-conditioner in the car seemed to be working but the atmosphere it produced was warm and dry. Dr. Nate Zebb's abode, or lab, or whatever, had the best lawn in Eastland though it hadn't been watered in several days due to the conservation order from the police. A flowered walk led to seven steps beyond which stretched another long walk ending in a concrete stoop and a gray porch. The house was large, covered with white clapboard, gabled, even boasted a small steeple and shiny bell. White curtains decorated the two big lower windows by the porch. The rest were shaded with Venetian blinds.
A woman in nurse's uniform ushered him into a high-ceilinged room with an open fireplace, shelves laden with books and a long table that reminded him of Rumson's conference room.
Dr. Nate Zebb was elegantly attired in brown pinstripes and pale yellow shirt. Tall, he had a habit of tilting his head back, standing away from and looking down at those with whom he conversed. He tried it with Ekler who kept moving toward him until he gave up. He was handsome and well built, in his fifties and he reminded Ekler of Louis Calhern, one of his old film favorites.
"You must be getting more than your share of anonymous phone calls these days," the doctor said in a well-modulated and cultured voice.
"Not about vivisection and illegal brain surgery."
"Posh, pooh! You have the look of an intelligent, no-nonsense person."
"Sometimes I'm both, at other times I'm impatient."
Zebb lit up, raised his head to exhale cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, offered Ekler not so much as a polite glance. "I'm a licensed practitioner and I have a few laboratory animals in the back that are regularly checked by the Humane Society
"Let's have a look."
"I'm extremely busy. Do you have a warrant?"
"Where did you earn your license in psychosurgery?"
"Who on Earth said I had one?" Louis Calhern iced his glare with a quick flick of his little finger against the butt, stepped on the ash and looked at Ekler as if he had done something crude. When Ekler only stared at him he changed demeanor, became Gene Lockhart, anxious, cunning, transparent. "It's very difficult working in a community such as Eastland. Inhabited by the descendants of Puritan stock, it walls me up like a strip of insulation but I assure you I'm a benevolent item. And legal."
"You dissect animals?"
"Occasionally. Only those no more than a few pounds in weight. Rest assured I'm not cutting on anything human. I only do that in the hospital where I get paid for it."
"I can only rest assured after I see for myself."
"In my lab?" Gene Lockhart smiled an ingratiating smile, rubbed pudgy hands together, abruptly turned chill and snarly. "I don't have time for defenses of this sort. I can't help it if you take anonymous phone calls seriously, and you're overstepping legal boundaries. Go away. Come back with a warrant."
"Isn't it unfortunate that the judge stepped out?"
"Of town, yes. Won't be back for the duration, but won't say duration of what." Nate Zebb shrugged. "Shove me aside and have your look. There's not much law in this town anymore. Frankly, though, if I were doing anything illegal I'd not leave a shred of evidence on the premises for you or anybody else to find. Wouldn't that be the sane way?" He leaned toward Ekler, peered at him as if waiting to hear an opinion.
As Ekler walked out onto the porch an old woman who had been digging in the dirt beside the steps straightened. Without looking at him she turned and hurried across the lawn. He watched her go around the corner of the house and disappear.
Sitting on the last step he thought about the many faces of
Dr. Nate Zebb. There would be a disheartening amount of investigating to do. Was the doctor a licensed physician or had he purchased his most recent diplomas from a vending machine? Was he authorized by the A.M.A. or his own twisted desire? Was he a refugee from an institution as the old man on the phone had claimed, a raving nut who had already served time for snatching people off the street and opening their heads? He hadn't been in town long and he did look familiar. Ekler could have saved himself time and effort by making some phone calls of his own. He hadn't done so because he assumed the caller was a practical joker or a nuisance. He didn't want to talk to Bailey or see him and so he had come on over here to question Zebb. Just killing time. Now look at the situation. Now what?
Absently he poked his fingers into the spot where the old woman had been digging and all of a sudden he felt something long and hard. Pulling it loose from the dirt he held it up and sat for a full thirty seconds staring at the object before he recognized what it was. His first thought was that he had hold of a road flare but as he kept looking at it he realized it was a stick of dynamite.
Mordak had learned the difference between a man and a tractor, knew that a machine had dug him out of his womb on his own world. Had he been human he would have responded to this bit of knowledge by saying, "So what?" It was a man or men who sent the tractor through the light, was it not, besides which who cared about individuals?
More than once he had gone into the basement of the Rumson building where the debris had been carefully displaced and sifted by policemen. There was no homeworld at the end of the tunnel, not even the blinding light but only a large door beyond which were parked tractors and other machines. Somewhere between the door and the end of the tunnel was his home planet. He knew this without trying to understand it.
Having strung a web from both sides of Main Street south to the college, about a mile in distance, he proceeded to dot the netting with live people for his own future purposes and also so that the users of flame wouldn't work too diligently at razing his creation. Actually it was more than just an artistic object for, besides its having been fashioned for the approaching tomorrows, the maker preferred living or hanging on the beloved strands during the day rather than sticking himself against the wall of a building.
He needn't have worried and indeed he did not since the flame users were ridiculously slow even when there were no snared bodies to impede their progress.
Soon it became dangerous for humans to work on a particular piece of webbing for any length of time because the night thing cultivated the habit of zooming about on his homespun tapestry. He moved like an arrow, here one instant, there the next, crossing a mile's distance in a few minutes, disrupting, interrupting, disturbing, frightening. A man could look out his upstairs window at any time of evening and see the red-mouthed hellion either passing by on a silvery string or merely bobbing nearby.
It was nearly impossible to keep him out. Strong and crafty, he knew a dozen different ways to get inside a house or, failing all these, he dreamed up something unnerving to force the inhabitants to evacuate. One such method was to fetch a burning ember from some minor holocaust and lay it on a doorstep or roof; or he might dismember an animal or child on the front lawn thereby causing the watching adults to burst forth to be slaughtered.
It was a known fact that he was carnivorous, not exactly eating large portions of a body but chewing and worrying at it until there was great blood loss and mutilation.
Not for a month had many outsiders lived in Eastland. Voyeurs and the like holed up in a large, abandoned stable a few miles west of the city limits until one night Mordak paid them a visit. Twelve reporters and a dozen others were quietly murdered in their beds. One of the survivors got off a few rounds of .22 cartridges and swore to all who would listen that the creature was staggered and actually fell down and didn't move for a few minutes. Another man ran to the supposed corpse with the seeming intention of stabbing it with a knife whereupon Mordak sat up and bit his leg.
Both men lived to tell their tales though the bitten limb had to be amputated because infection set in. The truth of the matter was that one of the bullets struck a portion of the spinner's brain and heart which were stringy affairs running parallel up and down both sides of his back and down to his elbows and knees. Both organs had fine recuperative and regenerative facility. The damage to them had been slight and so by the time the knife wielder reached Mordak he was on the road to recovery.
The next day another of the survivors drove through the city and rammed the big web across Main Street. The threads stretched for some sixty or seventy yards after which they loosened, but not much was accomplished since stringy strands hung all the way to the street and still cut off traffic.
A net was laid over the car so that the driver was afraid to open the doors. He waited for someone to come and burn him free. As circumstance would have it there had been those who saw his car speeding through the western part of town but no one was in the eastern end as his vehicle plunged through the web.
After a few frantic hours the frightened man opened the driver's door. Myopic, he failed to see the fine, filmy stuff that had been created as the web stretched. It hung from tatters draped across the top of the car, as fine as dust and blowing overhead. The draft caused by the door opening sent a cloud of it upward, and the driver could have gotten clear had he dived out but he was cautious and spent a moment or two inspecting the way. He bolted headfirst into the descending cloud, immediately fighting what he couldn't see.
The material was all over his face, captured his hands as soon as he raised them, entered his mouth when he opened it to yell. Tumbling out onto the road, he took volumes of the nearly invisible stuff with him so that he soon became enmeshed, wrapped like a stick of cotton candy. No one came to help him, no one dared sneak through the dangling strands blocking the eastern exit. Those who knew where he was crossed him off their list of living acquaintances.
A few evenings later a number of troops came, causing the mood of the city to lighten. There were tanks, jeeps and grim-visaged soldiers whose stares sent chills of hope surging through the minds of the people. Most of the soldiers gave not an upward glance as the machines wound their way to the main attraction between the cathedral and the Drake building. Lately it appeared that all things began at this one location. Too often sundry of those things had also been ending here.
High overhead Mordak scampered about in his web, grinned down at whomever dared disobey orders by sneaking a look upward. The commander was a slight man with a voice like a cannon. He issued orders in a staccato fashion so that in no more than minutes the tank with its awesome flamethrower was in position, likewise the troops who would storm the ramparts with their ladders, hand weapons and torches. The intent seemed to be to blast the main web and to dismantle the rest by slower methods.
What the commander should have done was immediately to aim the tank's big gun straight at Mordak and hope for a lucky hit. Another ploy might have been to have every marksman try to capture the frenetic gray figure in his sights. As it was, the spinner had the first and the last say, sped south along the web for two blocks, disconnecting it from buildings as he went, crossed the sagging structure above the street and then moved east, again disconnecting the material with his own special facility. He worked so rapidly that the commander suddenly realized there wasn't time to order a change of target, a retreat or anything else. While men dropped their weapons and tried to reach the safety of the buildings the great section of web drifted downward, released from its moorings.
The sights and sounds that greeted Eastlanders who approached the scene the next morning were enough to inspire a major exodus through the west gate. Frustrating the desires of those who wished to flee was another mammoth web that had been constructed during the night, one curving upward some twenty feet and forming a canopy over both sides of the opening. Those who still wanted out had to climb down back fire escapes of the buildings that formed the city's northern and southern boundaries and drop onto a wasteland of rocks and swamps where wild dogs roamed.
While a few humans plotted and laid snares for him, Mordak made plans of his own that included a joyless victory over the species responsible for the destruction of his world. They might as well have blown it up as to rid it of its most significant inhabitants who would soon have come into being; they still would but in this unlovely place where there was only garish color and raucous noise.
He busily spun all night with little thought as to exactly how much time he had before he must help the others to come. Not by accident had he closed off the western gate with the thick canopy for he had no desire to allow any more flies to flee. There were of course those few who succeeded in climbing down the fire escapes but some killed themselves by falling after which he retrieved their bodies and hung them in various positions in webs.
Much as he wanted to indulge in nightly slaughter, he refrained from doing so, restricting himself to slaying only what he needed for food. To be sure there was an occasional someone who had to be annihilated because of his impudence, hostility or some other intolerable quality, such as on the previous night when a man deliberately trapped himself on a web near where Mordak was spinning. After the alien took note of him and then returned his attention to his work, the trickster pulled a gun and shot Mordak six times in the back. Naturally he deserved death for that and received as much.
"He's got the stink of the night thing on him," said Hitty, speaking of Rune.
Gusty took the boy by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. They were weird and shiny, as if the alterations in his brain were making contact with the outside world through them. Blue and light, large and clear, they made Gusty think of new marbles. "Child, you don't want to mess with that monster," he said.
Rune smiled, kissed his cheek, patted his head.
"I swear if he ain't a baby," said Hitty.
"You're jealous," said Gusty. Noting that she was beginning to look annoyed, he said, "When are you going to marry me? I'm tired of sleeping cold."
Somewhere along the way Hitty had walked out on her husband Charles who hadn't taken care of her and who had been fifteen years older than she. Hitty swore Charles hadn't filed for divorce which meant she couldn't remarry until he died. That must have occurred long ago, Gusty told her whenever the point crossed his mind, but she was adamant in insisting that she had to see the death certificate before taking the chance of committing bigamy. Gusty thought she was sometimes a fool but no more often than he, since all he had to do was write to the county courthouse for Charles' death record. He kept forgetting to do it, which fact occasionally caused him remorse. Hitty was so pretty. Age had come upon her like a gentle wind; no knock-down, drag-out fight here. Father time had made her skin soft and clear, brightened the green of her eyes, topped her head with unmarred snow, thinned her body while bending not a single bone. A shame it was that there had been no improvement in her voice which was scratchy and overly active.
She didn't answer his question so he went off to find Pathia and Nox. Together they dressed in fine street clothes, walked through caves until they found a fissure that exited in the crumbling basement of a building in an alley aboveground.
Dr. M. Tyne was the only medic in Eastland who wasn't overworked. This was due to the fact that he only accepted patients who could afford to pay high fees. He had always overcharged so no one believed him when he claimed the city crisis was the reason for his big bills; he had to make up for his losses, whatever they were. He took one look through his tv monitor at Gusty, Pathia and Nox and signaled his receptionist to turn them away. Though they were decently attired they were too old to have any money. He knew all the even half wealthy in the area by sight and these three weren't among that company.
"The lady has a tumor in her stomach and all I want is an X-ray to see exactly where it is," said Gusty. "I want to be sure she needs a hysterectomy."
The receptionist was middle-aged, attractive, perfumed and overweight. Either she had been to Florida or owned a sunlamp. She ought to have avoided a tan since she didn't take a golden one but a dingy, grayish kind. "Are you a physician?" she said, not permitting a smile to touch her lips. Though this man standing in front of her desk was ancient he probably had feelings.
"I was once."
"You should have tried somewhere else. Due to his specialized practice Doctor Tyne has a restricted clientele."
"We've tried everyone else but they're tied up with victims of the night thing and the crimes and all. I only want an X-ray of the lady's stomach."
"That takes time which is something we haven't any of to spare today." Lest the old man fail to understand, she added, "Nor for several months to come. I'm sorry we're all booked up. Try emergency at the hospital." She immediately regretted her suggestion since it could only prolong a pointless conversation. She had no opinion one way or the other about the three, having worked too long for Tyne.
"We already did. They're full up with sick people." Gusty looked over his shoulder at the waiting patients who sat on plush chairs in the sparkling waiting room. His practiced eye picked out a liver problem and a possible consumptive, otherwise there were a herd of healthy horses sitting here waiting to dump their money in the doctor's lap.
He took Pathia and Nox back home to the caves where they had a late lunch and slept until nightfall. Rune went with them when they retraced their steps to Tyne's fancy offices.
Gusty guessed correctly in that at the first touch of forced entry an alarm went off but it was a silent type that didn't bother the intruders. It wasn't answered by the police since all those on duty were already answering other calls, some desperate, some routine. When it came down to the fine line, at a time when people were being attacked by an alien or were dying from some other cause, who cared if a medic's establishment was being broken into, especially after the medic had been advised by Lieutenant Ekler to hire armed guards?
Nor did lights in Tyne's place in the dead of night attract any undue attention. Some saw the lights go on in the building and finally go off, but nobody went to see who was inside. It might be the night thing. Besides, only soldiers, police and maniacs went out of doors after sundown these days.
Gusty took all the X-rays of Pathia he pleased and even took the time to read them.
Back in the caves again, he and the others found their beds and retired. On the morrow the doctor would remove Pathia's womb. It was a fibroid, he was confident, a growing pest and not something she could live with anymore but by this time tomorrow night she would be fiat-bellied and on the road to good health. If she survived the surgery. Probably would. Tough old bird. Outlasted every one of her neglectful offspring.
He felt cranky and out of sorts at cutting time the following morning, halting and old, purposeless, ever attempting without succeeding. He got Pathia up on the operating table, anesthetized her, exposed her belly and discovered that Nox had wandered off. He went to find him.
"Stay here!" he thundered, once he had the old man stationed and explained to him how he should handle the instruments. Times, he considered, were surely at rock bottom when his only decent assistant had to go under the knife.
"Oh, look, that's Pathia's blood running all over like she's got a hole in her!" Nox cried.
"Which she has!" said Gusty. "I cut her. Are you so blind you didn't see me do it?"
"I saw it, all right, but I don't want to look at it."
"You have to look at it, otherwise how are you supposed to assist me?"
Nox was short, thin, bald, bespectacled, large of nose and wide of eye. "Why didn't you ask me to do the job instead of just bullying me into it? Had you asked I would have politely turned you down. Hate the sight of that red stuff. Makes me sick. Arc you sure you know what you're doing?" Nox fidgeted as Gusty went in after the bulging organ. "What's that yelling I hear out there in front? Who's making all that noise?"
"Ignore it," said the surgeon.
"I don't see how I can when they're so loud. Sounds like someone—"
Jesse and Cappy came hurrying in. "Kruge dumped into the drink and nearly drowned," said Jesse. "You'll have to come."
"Not now," said Gusty.
"If you don't he probably won't make it."
Gusty went on with what he was doing, yanked at the light so that it aimed straighter at the red cavity, expertly pushed things aside, requested instruments which he didn't receive. He suddenly swore aloud when he realized Nox wasn't there now but had gone out with the two men. Hesitating for a moment he quickly gave off what he was doing and went to find his assistant.
They were all in the recovery room working over Kruge, had him down on the floor on his front and were applying pressure to his back.
"That went out of style fifty years ago," said Gusty. "Get him up on a bed where I can tend to him." Absentmindedly he stripped off his cap, gown and gloves and poked into Kruge's mouth to see where his tongue was. Tipping back the damp head, he began giving resuscitation.
It didn't take long for the patient to come around. He hadn't taken in much water before Rune dived into the pool after him. He had been exploring his environment, wheeling one-handed from cave to cave, admiring the furniture and the stalagmites, the carved walls and carpeted floors, but then he approached the sea entrance which was hidden by high tide. The stone steps leading down to it were so wide, clean-look-ing and close together that Kruge thought he could ride down a few of them.
"A dumb thing," said Gusty. He wouldn't let the patient go back into his chair right away. "Don't be so hasty to compound your stupidity. A day in bed will fix your clock. After this pay attention to what you're doing. You should have remembered that your chair doesn't work well on wet steps. Try and remember that forgetting is your worst enemy."
Hitty was talking about Charles when he walked into the lounge so he walked right out again, went to the library and finished the last two chapters of Gone With the Wind.
"Gus, oh, golly, you did it this time!" Nox cried, coming into the room in such an excited state that his glasses were askew. Big tears streaked his cheeks.
Still savoring that last, fine, heroic statement made by Rhett Butler, Gusty looked up in mild interest. "Now what are you accusing me of?"
"Pathia!" said Nox.
For a blank moment the doctor only stared at him. Then— Pathia! He had forgotten Pathia!
Rumson sat in his conference room with the light of day-bursting in on him, sweating, rigid in his chair, loathing the large, shambling policeman who stood beside the window in a stance that said he enjoyed the sunshine.
Ekler was thinking that he hadn't hauled Rumson in because the other man was going to help him solve the dilemma of the night thing. Rumson was thinking that he hadn't been arrested because Ekler was a cat who believed he had cornered a mouse; prowl in the victim's vicinity long enough and he would dissolve into helpless terror and confusion, confessing to the crime of building a Bore in the basement.
"How can a plant do all the things that creature does?" said Ekler, turning from the light.
"I never told you it was a plant." Rumson fingered his forehead, was aware of the coolness of his perspiration. He was close to shock and he couldn't understand why. He had sat many times in this conference room knowing that at any instant he could walk out and enter one of the many els in the hall, immediately descend to darkened depths. Why did he sit here two or three degrees away from breakdown? "I've been
in this room too many times this week, that must be it," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Nothing. I never said it was a plant. I said it sometimes behaves like one."
"And the web is tree sap."
"The samples I examined possess some of the qualities of sap."
"A walking flower?" said Ekler, frowning.
Rumson spread his hands, concentrating on keeping them steady. They kept trembling so he ran them through his thinning hair. "This individual is from another world where different laws of physics apply. We don't claim anymore that those laws are the same throughout the universe." The trembling hands quietly came together. "I don't intend giving you a lecture about black holes, white holes or viruses, since I'm sure you neither want nor need one. Suffice it to say that mysteries are all around us in our own world and if we are to observe a living being from an alien dimension we shouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be weird."
"The web is carnivorous, eats or consumes or absorbs flesh."
"To a certain extent, yes, but not just bodily fluid such as an insect or a spider and not like a Venus flytrap which absorbs all of its prey."
"Do you think the web could maintain itself without flesh?"
"Yes, I've established that in my lab. All it needs is a few hours of light every day."
"Like a potted plant," said Ekler.
"No, it's alien."
"What about the night thing?"
"It's more complex but it isn't a walking plant or a man."
"A combination?"
"It is its own kind. It likes to hang in the web in the sun with its eyes shut yet it seems to do just as well in the shadows or even in darkness. It is intelligent, vengeful, resourceful."
"Like a man."
"Can you shoot it like a man?" said Rumson, impatient more with his own fear than Ekler's seeming obtuseness.
"It hasn't got a brain like ours or a heart like ours."
"Which is what I've been saying several different ways."
"You have many influential friends in high places," said Ekler, startling the other man with his change of pace. "We're being written off and I don't like it. Maybe it's because they think they can't kill the thing without getting rid of the town."
Rubbing his eyes to keep his hands occupied, Rumson said, "My phone calls don't mean anything these days. The senators are apologetic and defer me to other offices. But about the town, don't be too certain they won't do that."
"You mean blow us up?"
"I don't really believe it's that bad but think of it: we're veritably encased in a web from which no one has managed to escape for more than a week. All the back fire escapes, the roads, alleys and cracks are sealed with material that will kill a human once he gets caught in it. I don't know whether it introduces some foreign element or simply absorbs something vital."
"Doesn't make any difference. Surely there's someone out there who will listen to you."
"And if there is, what shall I say to them?"
"Tell them not to give us up!" said Ekler. "Tell them to keep sending people who'll try and get us out."
Later Rumson rested in a dimly illumined room downstairs and spoke quietly to Olivia. "No, I can't come with you. You know it so why ask? Not even if it means my life. I've lived here for twenty years and have learned of every dark place there is in the area. I can show you the entrance to some deep caves. They show up on some old blueprints I have of the building. On the lowest level where most of the rubble is there's a fissure through which you can fit. I'll give you a map. I've not explored any of the underground but I suspect there's an exit beyond the west gate. You know why I haven't made the caves a matter of public knowledge. Once I do that there will be an endless horde coming through here, fighting like savages. You might not get out. Besides I'm not positive the tunnels go far enough. But there's a good chance they do. You shouldn't have come to Eastland this time. I told you not to. Why do you never take my advice?"
In his laboratory that evening he lay on a cot and tried to still the quickening of his heartbeat. How could he get her to leave? If he succeeded in getting her to agree to try the caves, would they lead her outside the city?
Here in this room he had done amazing things yet few in the world had ever heard of him. The Rumson Bore was like any other tag that had been summarily attached to an incomprehensible machine. To the public the Bore was like a corporation. They didn't remember that it had been invented by an individual. Rumson had also made a telephone that a person could carry in his back pocket, there was a harmless diet pill that could make a glutton lose all the weight he desired, a prefabricated house with permanently heated walls, a pet collar with a built-in sender and receiver that functioned up to a mile; if you lost your dog or cat you called him and when he responded you followed his individual signal. Then there was the satellite that created such a gravitational force that the Atlantic Ocean receded northward a quarter-inch. Rumson was always inventing things no one wanted to use, such as, for instance, the damping arc emitted by twin satellites that sent missiles plunging into the Pacific.
He refused to accept assignments at research institutes or any government installation so that all thoughts of exploiting him personally were put to rest. He wouldn't go anywhere, preferring to live unheralded and relatively unknown locked up like a prisoner in his building. He was working with light beams when he penetrated the fabric of space, or he discovered an alternate universe just a thin layer away from his own, or he attracted another reality with his twisting light. He didn't truthfully know what he had done though he didn't advertise the fact. It was interesting and that was all that mattered. When the government used the Bore to mine ore on the alien planet he objected, pointing out that whatever went up must come down. No one wanted to see the analogy so he talked about black and white holes in space; what was forced out probably came back in somewhere else. In other words if they displaced matter from one spot it was liable to be drawn back in from another, perhaps from Earth. As a matter of fact a building in China blinked out of existence one day and after a great deal of investigation it was found out that an earthquake-like series of tremors had traveled in a straight line from Rumson's Bore to the building in China just prior to its disappearance. Incomprehensible, ridiculous, probably a coincidence, but the government ordered him to get rid of the Bore and banned its use until someone decided the loss of a building wasn't much of a price to pay for oil and other raw materials. They talked him into rebuilding his machine, which he did, and all went well until Mordak entered the picture.
Good or bad, none of it helped him to live like anything but a freak and the bad part was the vividness with which he recalled another time when open spaces didn't make him a groveling fool. That was before the accident. He ran headfirst into a tree on the skiing slopes of Colorado and had to have slivers of wood removed from his brain. A few times after that he had seizures, minor ones, petit mals that didn't last long. Then he had no more, or at least none of the kind that a medic could recognize. Instead he came down with a galloping case of agoraphobia which at first could be controlled with pills. No longer. There was an interruption in the rhythm of his brain waves that affected him in this strange fashion.
More than once he regretted not having concentrated on the medical sciences to learn how to cure himself. Over the years he grew accustomed to living away from the world and that was good enough until the day a young Olivia came to dinner with one of his acquaintances. Maybe he hadn't made contact with enough women, which was plain fact, and maybe he hadn't talked to them enough. How could he accurately judge the difference between other members of the female gender and this one individual who jolted him out of his morbid rut? For the first time in years he longed for sunlight, open fields and a sky that was more than an opening into hell. Whatever he wanted, he didn't get it, and he ought to have run her off as soon as it dawned on him that she cared as much for him as he cared for her.
Now he really had to run her off and he didn't know how to go about it.
At an early age Jerome was taken to church to learn religion. What he learned was that the benches were easy to scar, the little tiles on the vestibule floor could be pried loose, bathrooms could be vandalized, pockets begged to be picked. As to doctrine, it had no home in him. People were lying hypocrites, as far as he was concerned, especially his mother who spoke piously to everyone and then knocked his ears off when they arrived home.
He did all right for a while after dropping out of school, holed up in a cheap apartment with three roaches like himself and made money selling dope, pills mostly, since heroin was considered gross and gauche. Every day a veritable ticket line formed from the street to the front door of the place and then there was a raid. The money, dope and guns were confiscated by morons in blue who hadn't read them their rights, hadn't a search warrant in their possession and who swiped an expensive camera from a closet. Jerome and his friends went free but they naturally didn't get their dope back; nor the guns, nor the money. The other three decided he didn't fit into the group, left him high and dry and moved out of town.
He was handsome but the girls didn't go for him and in fact reacted to him as if he were a lizard crawling out from under a rock. Cathy with the astonishing body told him what she thought of him while she clutched a rock and stood ready to brain him if he didn't fade. Bella went to a movie with him occasionally but spent the whole time screaming at him to let her alone because she wanted to watch the picture. She was a film freak, he suspected, otherwise she wouldn't have gone with him.
He would stare at himself in the mirror and wonder what was wrong with his soul. His dark and curly hair framed his thin and attractive face, no? His body was good, no? Then it had to be something inside his facade, something that stuck out all over him like an inverted halo or a redolent cloak. His mother had told him he wore an aura of rot and since everyone knew what a corpse smelled like they took pains to avoid him.
"There are maggots in every future," she said to him, "but their rightful abode is a coffin. When people get to know you they're reminded of crawly white slugs."
"I came out of you."
"I'll try to live it down."
"You'll never succeed," he said, cheered at the thought of her feeling remorseful or bitter because of him.
"I will. Do you think I don't know that you alone are responsible for what you do, since you understood the difference between right and wrong. Every bit of it has landed right on your own head but you're too indifferent to realize it. A little bit of hell's fire will correct that."
Her words didn't bother him. He liked the thought of hell. Never mind the baloney about the fire and brimstone. He didn't believe that. Hell was outer space between the kingdoms or planets of heaven where unrecalcitrants like himself existed. It was fine with him if he didn't inherit any glory. He had never cared for duties or responsibilities in this phase of his being so he doubted that he would want any in the next. He could see it in his mind, himself in the vast and empty reaches of space, kept away from shiny worlds where all the pure people lived, all the mealy-mouthed scuts who hadn't enough sense to know how corrupt they were.
His thoughts made him frown. They sounded contradictory. Again he mentally placed himself out there in the hell of black and lonely space, empty save for those like himself while planets with rainbows around them drifted past him. Often he grew weary with drifting and fraternizing with his companions, longed to place his feet on firm ground, desired to smell air and growing things, remembered how the sun's rays felt on bare skin. The planet's inhabitants wouldn't let him land and they weren't at all like the people he knew. He could sense that. An aura of peace and holiness emanated from them and though they sympathized with him they refused to let him step onto their world. One of the worst parts was that they had the power to keep him off. Only a little thought pushed him away, a minuscule little thought. The fact was that they couldn't bear his presence. The qualities of his personality caused them pain and so he orbited high above their exquisite home, suffering, now and then hearing faint strains of laughter and music-
He didn't like it. It was all lies. What he wanted was the lake of fire and the raining brimstone.
The Retreat was in full noon sunshine when he began his climb up the back fire escape. Trust all the breathing cadavers who lived here to come out of their graves and behave as if there weren't webs strung all over the neighborhood. They sat on their chairs or tiny swings rocking to some inner cadence, eyes fastened unseeingly on images from the rotted past, bones huddled in mounds of rags.
He leaped up and pulled the ladder down as quietly as he could, but it wasn't quiet enough to deceive the man rocking on the first balcony. Right away he scurried inside and locked his door. All the way up to the third level men and women learned he was coming and ran to safety. On the fourth level a woman sat soundly sleeping in her rocking chair. Not even glancing at her Jerome went on past, climbed toward the next balcony.
No one else was out today now, only on the fifth sat Mrs. P. rocking in a chair that must have been as old as she. They looked a good deal alike, the woman and the piece of furniture, both having about them the appearance of antiques, both having lost their luster. The places where their parts came together showed similar weakness and wear.
It was hot and muggy and Jerome's pants stuck to his calves. There didn't seem to be any air in all the space around him while the sun was a torch flaming inside his head. From where he clung he could see the elementary school he had attended, the drug store he broke into when he was eleven, the house where Cathy with the great body lived. Over it all hung the webs like frayed pieces or tatters of sky, some long, some short, a few opaque while the rest were so filmy they were nearly transparent. There didn't seem to be any substance to those tatters yet they scarcely moved in the light wind, heavy and oppressive, omnipresent like the ghosts that had dogged Jerome's footsteps all his life.
She knew he was coming for he had given up trying to muffle his movements. It would have done him no good since she had a feral streak in her, nurtured by fear, but she waited until the last moment before going inside and bolting the door. There was a barred window beside which he crouched while he looked in. Good. She wasn't in the kitchen but had gone to another place in the apartment. She didn't want to look at him.
Throwing her rocker over the rail, he knelt again to catch his breath. It took effort to look upward at the web. Was the thing gobbling his oxygen? Back to the window he went to crouch low, peered inside. She had raised the pane before he came so there were only the bars in front of him but it was all right. He hadn't intended trying to get in.
The rat poison was wrapped in soft candy, little balls of sweetness, eight or nine in his pocket, easy to toss through the bars so that they rolled under furniture. Three went beneath the table and into a shadowed corner where she wouldn't see them until she cleaned. Tempted to throw them all in the same place, he refrained and aimed at different spots, under the fridge where a tiny paw might drag it out, on top of the floor molding where Snooky would have no trouble grabbing it up. Not a piece of death was left exposed where Mrs. P. might see it and be inspired to hunt for others.
Captain Bailey was discovered one morning draping a dead body high in the web behind the station house. He had a crane operator lift him up in the bucket after which he flung the mutilated corpse so that it landed spread-eagle about forty feet above the street, secure in the strands and hideous for all to see.
Ekler called Lieutenant Vita, the state trooper whose duty station was up the highway. "Bailey has cracked wide open, doesn't come near the office anymore, ignores us if he sees us on the street. He's helping the night thing."
"What do you mean?"
"Strews bodies in the web. Well, no, he does it neatly, one every two hundred yards or so and at about the same height."
"He'll quit soon enough when the thing catches him."
"Wrong," said Ekler. "It's had two dozen opportunities to slaughter him but lets him alone. In fact at this very moment he's working by the cathedral which is supposed to be where it sleeps during the day."
"Phew, this weather!"
"Have you got any suggestions?"
"We can't get in to help you, you can't get out. I don't know what to suggest other than that you keep me posted. I'm passing your information on to higher ups. They're bound to do something."
The tanks, jeeps and other residue brought in by the soldiers formed an impassable barricade across the eastern exit while the big canopied web sealed the western one. Alleys and byways leading from the city had been webbed so that the inhabitants were left to wander in a confined area. The stink rose high in the air to meet the pockets of pollution holding the valley in a hot and airless grip. No rain had fallen for months. It had to come soon and bring relief. Lawns weren't to be watered at all and the use of air-conditioners was restricted to night time. Rarely did anyone turn his on. Night was when Mordak prowled and if he was nearby the house occupants wanted to know.
Ekler had put out the order about the air-conditioners. "If you don't want to work for me that's okay," he said at a station meeting. Nearly the entire crew was present. "There isn't anything else for you to do but sit at home and worry your wives even more than they're already worried. As long as you're there at night, isn't that what counts?"
"Except for the ones who pull night duty," said Pond. He ran a beefy hand across his stubbled jaw. "What about that?"
"What about it? No matter what's happening the looters and thugs haven't retired. Nobody wants to do night duty but if someone doesn't there won't be much of a city left to be concerned about."
They didn't like it but they liked him and needed somebody to tell them what to do. He was next in line to Bailey whose brain had gone out of shape like the cerebral hemispheres of a pecan nut.
Pond cornered Ekler Monday morning. "Sills is working with Bailey now. Don't look so surprised. Hasn't it occurred to you that the only way to survive in this town might be by joining up with the enemy?"
It hadn't occurred to Ekler and he said so.
"Well, it has to Sills. His wife is dying of cancer so he went over to the hospital two days ago for her morphine. They wouldn't give him more than a couple of days' supply because they're getting low on everything so what does he do but pull his gun and take a whole boxful? Who are they gonna complain to? The cops? Sills is a cop. The Mayor? He's as yellow as a dandelion with his hepatitis—besides which who's gonna back him up? I'm not talking mutiny or anything like it, I'm just trying to fill you in on a few things, like, for instance, if you appoint a night squad don't be too shocked if they're not on the job at the appointed times."
"You talking about yourself, maybe?" said Ekler.
"My family's gone, remember?"
Ekler did, naturally, as who couldn't or wouldn't recall when Pond went on a sixty-day drunk and everyone on the squad covered for him? His wife left him, took the child and went where he couldn't find her. Ekler had always been tempted to ask him what he had done that fired her up to run. He never asked, though. "In that case you can pull all the night duty you want, and I hope it's a lot," he said.
That was Monday. By Wednesday Mordak had an entire work force out picking up bodies and sticking them in the web, which wasn't an altogether unprofitable enterprise since it soon became obvious that the alien strictly avoided those persons and their homes when he marauded.
Ekler received a call from Jetta after sundown. Her voice whispery and full of strain, she told him Mordak was outside her window. Within five minutes he was there with a big searchlight and a sharpshooter armed with bow and arrows. The tips of the missiles had been bound with balls of cotton and soaked in gasoline. The spinner was plastered against a window on the third floor of the apartment building, gray and buglike, flattened out with his red tongue lapping the glass. It was Jetta's apartment into which he peered. She was outside and in Ekler's car by the time the sharpshooter let fly with the first arrow. Mordak promptly became hard to hit, seemed to flit around the window like a fly, invited the archer to shoot at him and then swiftly moved out of the way but he plainly didn't like the searchlight beam or the flames and soon climbed on up the building and disappeared across the roof.
Jetta went home with Ekler and bedded down in the spare room. "What about water?" she said over breakfast the following morning.
"As a weapon?" said Duff. "We already tried that with fire hoses. Doesn't hurt him or that stinking web at all. He's like us in that you have to get off a good shot in a vital area. Only difference is I'm not sure he has one of those."
Mordak's work force increased in numbers.
"I told you," Pond said to Ekler. They were standing on Main Street watching Bailey and several other police officers place bodies in the web.
"Is this all?"
"You mean of defectors? No, Jackson and Mortensen are off somewhere but they're friends with this bunch. Then there's a crowd at the western gate. I swear they're keeping people from trying the fire escapes to get out of here."
"Why would they do that?"
"They're all nuts," said Pond. "If you ask me it's more than just fear for themselves and their families."
"Like what?"
"I saw Krassler fall backwards into a web by the library three days ago. There was no way he could have gotten loose of it, had strands all over the back of his head and his hands were in it."
"But that's Krassler over there with Bailey."
"Yeah. Supposing you tell me how he did it?" When Ekler didn't say anything Pond scratched his curly head and spoke again. "I always wanted to go quietly in my sleep with a heart attack when I was old, you know, not conscious that I was actually going. Then when I'd think it was too much to hope for I'd settle for maybe getting clobbered with a truck or a train. Quick, no pain, no thoughts. Lately I get the feeling I'm running out of luck or I never had any to begin with. I'm gonna be stuck up somewhere in that web like a fly on a pin and that gray creep is gonna come along and dip his fangs in my gut."
Dr. Nate Zebb called the police to complain that someone had placed a large check mark made of the night thing's webbing on his front door sometime Thursday afternoon. No, it didn't prevent him from going in and out of the house nor did it appear to be dripping or spreading but it was a nuisance and frightened his patients and he wanted it removed.
On Friday afternoon Ekler found time to pay the physician a visit. The body of a man with a web in his gaping mouth lay on the front porch. Dr. Zebb was inside, upstairs in his bed, his face eaten away. His repose was more or less peaceful with no other signs of violence in the room or the house. Obviously he had been asleep when Mordak came in and straddled him to feed and most likely he hadn't lived more than a few moments after the fangs mutilated him.
Ekler let all the rats and guinea pigs out of their cages in the lab before ransacking the place. The most significant thing he came across was the body of a young woman in a walk-in freezer. She was bald with many raw scars on her skull. Breaking open every safe he could find, he finally unearthed Zebb's private records, more than enough to show that the doctor had periodically snatched people off streets up and down the coast and operated on their brains. His specialty was implanting a bit of life material in the part of the cerebrum that controlled instinctual behavior. Evidently the girl in the freezer had been a failure, hidden there by Zebb when he couldn't think of a place to hide the body.
There didn't seem to be any records for post-operative patients which left Ekler wondering as to their whereabouts. Had there been any successes or had they all died? If there were any successes had Zebb allowed them to live? If so, where were they and what were they like.
On the other hand perhaps the box of magnesium powder in the back of a large upstairs closet was his most significant discovery. There was absolutely no reason for it to be where it was. Ignited, it would have made an inferno of the property.
After the chemist at the police lab told him what the box contained, Ekler sat down and tried to figure it out. Why had the stuff been in Zebb's house and why did Ekler keep thinking about the stick of dynamite the old woman buried by the front stoop?
Duff called him later in the day to tell him there was a check mark made of webbing on the front door. "I was in the living room practically all afternoon. I don't know how he could be so close and me not know it."
"It wasn't the night thing who did it," said Ekler.
"Then who was it?"
"One of his recruits."
"Bailey?"
"Or someone like him. Pack up and get out as fast as you ever did anything in your life."
Duff's voice was calm and clear of anxiety. "It's some kind of signal, isn't it? We're next. That thing's gonna pay us a visit at sundown."
"There's nobody living in the Barker's house. Go there." The Barker family had gone north for a vacation before Mordak came.
Duff said, "But that's only three doors away."
"You don't have time to do any better and it doesn't matter as long as there's no web on the house. Make sure before you go in. As soon as I get there we'll move somewhere else. What time is it?"
"Five o'clock. I have to have all of Bit's things or she'll be upset."
"Why are you wasting time talking?"
"Yeah, okay, Jetta can help. Don't worry, we're already gone."
Ekler was conscious of his body as he ran through the city on foot. There hadn't been a single squad car in the lot with gas in the tank, which meant he would have considerable chastising to do at the station in the morning. Of course morning would come like any other. Why hadn't he visited the gym more often? Why had he grown so large? One thing he had done was to keep his feet in shape which was important when you were first starting out as a street cop, and he had kept his lungs clear by swimming, not smoking or drinking and getting plenty of sleep. So why was he breathing like an asthmatic and why did the blood pound in his temples like a thousand hot drums? Because everything he cared about was in his house or, hopefully, at the Barkers' by this time.
Duff lay on the walk in front of the house with a bullet in his forehead. Ekler knelt beside him for the longest time just staring at the bubbling hole, thinking that all the secrets the old man owned were oozing out with his blood. He couldn't tell Ekler where Bitsy and Jetta were, couldn't explain why he had died of a bullet wound after having hung up his gun and violent lifestyle a decade before. Another thing to add to the stimuli bombarding Ekler's consciousness was the presence of the web on the walk above Duff's head. Somebody else might have thought it meant that the night thing had taken up the use of human weapons but Ekler knew better. One of the alien's servants had done this. Someone like Captain Bailey.
He hunted all the next day before he found Jetta. She hung in the web above him and called to him to help her. He looked up at her until it seemed the sun would burn out his eyes. They had taken everything off but her underpants and then they fastened her up there with her back deep into the strands, with not a wound on her unless you could call the fears in her eyes wounds. Having known her long enough, Ekler could identify her emotions as she looked at him first with joy because he was there and whole and part of sane reality and then with doubt because what he had to challenge seemed insurmountable.
"You can get me out, can't you?" she said. "Can you do it?"
He could barely reach her toes. "I'll do it." She was too close to the frozen machines by the big web, not too high and not directly above them but too near to them for him to reach her with anything like a crane or a ladder, not that there were any of those available and fueled anywhere. As for gas for a torch, there hadn't been any for several days. He stacked some boxes and climbed them to attack the web around her with a sword but the strands were mature and had grown thick. It was like trying to cut through honey-coated steel.
Down on the street again he stai ed up at her. "That won't work so I'll have to try something else. Don't worry. I think I can bargain for you."
Her back arched. She lunged forward, tried to yank her arms free, her legs, her head. She wasn't heavy enough to pull loose. "It's opening me up," she said. "No pain. It's just scaring me to death."
He went away without asking her about Bitsy, prowled through streets and alleys until he found Captain Bailey and his crew. They were dumping garbage into the basement stairwell outside an empty building.
Bailey saw him coming, grabbed up an object. Ekler came closer before he saw it was a little whorl of webbing on the end of a stick.
"Come on and I'll shove this in your eye," said Bailey. His men stopped working, found places to sit and watched without comment or change of expression. They looked beaten, hopeless.
Ekler came to a halt. A dozen feet from his one-time superior he stood and waited. If ammunition hadn't been so scarce Bailey probably would have shot him with the gun strapped to his waist.
"Well, you gonna stand there glaring all day? Why don't you just turn around and get out of here?"
"You took Jetta yesterday. You murdered Duff."
"Not me. I wasn't the one dropped him. It would have happened sooner or later, though. He was deaf when it came to being reasonable."
"Which is what you are, I suppose?" yelled Ekler. "Do you call yourself reasonable?"
"He put a web in my ear. One night when I was sleeping he came in and stuffed it in. It didn't do anything except let me know what he wanted me to do. Get away from me. I don't owe you any explanations."
"Oh, yes you do! You owe everybody in this city a reason for what you're doing!"
Bailey kept the stick up and ready. "Okay, stupid, I'll give you one. In exchange for my life and my family's lives I work for him, okay? My wife, my sons and my daughters are left unharmed."
"For how long?" Ekler was still yelling. He wanted to ignore the stick and leap forward and take the sunburned throat in his hands. "You can't do business with Hitler! Remember how they always used to say that?"
"Was I supposed to go down along with everyone else? Washington is watching us like a bug caught in a spider web. The tv stations tell the world about us but nobody comes to get us out."
"It was us against him," said Ekler. "Now it's him and all of you against us."
"No, it's me and my guys and him and the whole country against you. The country can't do anything to him without doing it to us."
"What's he going to do? What's he got in mind?"
"I don't know. He tells me what to do by communicating through the web in my head and I do it. He says we'll be okay."
Ekler braced himself. "Here's what I'm telling you to do. I want Jetta freed from the web you stuck her in. Do you understand that? If you don't, I'll get you myself. I have some ammo hidden away. You won't live to find out how badly the alien is conning you."
"Beat it. I'll ask him and see what he says. I'll call you."
"No, I'll call you. Don't look for me because you won't find me, but if you don't get Jetta out of there I'll find you in the sights of my rifle." Ekler started to walk away. He had to stop, had to turn back. "My sister?"
Bailey shrugged. "You can believe me or not believe me, but some kid in long red underwear grabbed her. We were coming out of the house and Duff started his hero act, went for his gun and earned himself a hole in the head. Your sister ran like everyone else and this blond kid came from behind a telephone pole, snatched her and took off. We chased him into the park and lost him. He must be strong as a horse."
Ekler went away and waited. Later in the day he was given his assignment. Bailey had wanted to know where he was. Holed up. It didn't matter where. In exchange for Jetta they wanted him to assassinate the mayor and five other men. Which men? They didn't care. If he did it he was on their side.
He went to see Jetta, climbed upon the boxes and fed her a hamburger and a pint of milk. "Are you cold?" he said.
Her teeth chattered. She shook her head. "Terror. Never mind that. Tell me about the deal you made with them."
"They don't want any more news going out so I'm to shut down the broadcasting station and the telephone switchboard."
"That's it?"
"Yes. They want me on their side. They don't have the manpower to station guards everywhere and they know if I put out the order people will listen."
She look relieved. "That's not so bad except that there ought to be plenty of news going out. Night and day people should be hearing about us. They can't just sit on their lard and watch us go down the drain."
"I'll be seeing you. The sooner I get the job done the faster we'll get you down here."
With a shudder she said, "Maybe it's too late. I told you it was opening me up."
"Krassler, you remember him, he was in it deeper than you and he's walking around this very minute."
"It's a kiss of death. So soft. I'd feel better if I did what I want to do which is to start screaming, but Fm afraid I won't be able to stop."
He walked two miles to the hospital. It seemed an amazing thing to him that a staff still remained. Mayor Tucker wasn't as yellow these days but he had lost weight and looked like a ghost. "It's the danger," he said, seemingly glad to have a visitor, even Ekler with whom he had quarreled more than once. He had his own ideas about how a police force should function and how a lieutenant should handle himself. Those ideas had seldom related to Ekler's. "I think about how so many are dying and then I can't eat. I'm lucky the nurses come to work every day. Every so often the night thing comes by and licks my window or some other window. I'm sure he does it to frighten us. He succeeds admirably."
Ekler related what was happening in the streets, talked briefly about some of the things that could be done to fight the creature and then left in a hurry. He went to the funeral parlor, helped himself to a lightweight pine box, drove it home in a truck and retrieved Duff's body from a linen chest where he had hidden it. There was no chance of getting to the cemetery outside the eastern gate. Going down into the basement, he used a pick to break through the floor, slammed the tool up and down with mighty strokes, pretended he was driving the point into Bailey's face. Somewhere during the ordeal his target became the spinner. Again and again he drove his weapon into the gleaming blue eyes.
He dug a deep grave and hauled the pine box down into it, covered it and flattened the earth so that no unevenness showed when he laid down new tile. This was one body the enemy couldn't have.
He called Bailey. "Give me something else to do besides killing."
"I knew you'd flunk. You aren't even tough enough to save people you love."
"Give me another assignment."
"The only thing he's interested in is bodies, alive or dead. Can you get that through your head? To him a trade for a body is another body. Do it or watch your girl friend hang up there till she croaks." Ekler made a strangled sound and Bailey yelled, "Don't expect me to help! What do you think I am? Am I supposed to die just because others do? Will that make me noble? If he sticks my family in the web will I look at them and be glad I saved you some grief? Quit crying to me. Go do your job."
The nurses at the hospital said the Mayor was on the road to recovery in spite of his gauntness. As a matter of fact he was eating better every day, said he was trying harder because the night thing would get him if he didn't get well and find a hiding place.
Mayor T. J. Tucker, politician, redneck, sometime-buffoon who, if he possessed a large amount of character or even dedication to his calling, did well in disguising the fact. Why hadn't the night thing killed him instead of assigning the chore? Ekler asked Bailey when he saw him.
"He doesn't care that much. He picks them out and we prop them in the strands. Only reason we haven't got Tucker is that we're so busy getting the garbage out of sight. He finds it offensive."
"Why doesn't he let you take it out of the city in trucks?"
Bailey's voice was hard. "Because he doesn't trust us."
"Why does he want Tucker?"
"Tucker's a leader, isn't he? Get rid of the leaders and the city is his."
"For what?" said Ekler.
"I don't know. Have you done your job?"
"Not yet. I will. Tell me another story about what happened to my sister."
"I already told you the real story."
Ekler yelled, "You expect me to believe that?"
"I don't care if you do or don't. Quit hassling me and go do what you have to."
Jetta was losing weight. Through her tears she ate the sandwich he brought her. "I think the web is eating what I swallow," she said. "Have you done what they asked?"
"Of course. They're going to check it out and then they'll get over here and take you down." He was shocked at how bad she looked. Her skin had lost its glow and was grayish white. Dark circles ringed her eyes. He didn't like the way she breathed at intervals with too much effort.
He called Lieutenant Vita. "What are they doing for us?"
"Who's they?"
"Anyone."
"Take the tv, for instance," said Vita. "You guys look like a big round dome with a net over it. We see plenty of pictures and the announcers have plenty to say but they don't give away a thing. They receive thousands of phone calls every day from people wanting to know what's being done. I tried calling myself, at the station up the road, but all I got was a recording saying Eastland is the site of a scientific experiment."
"That's ridiculous," said Ekler. "We have communications here. The telephones, Western Union, they're functioning. At least for the time being."
"How many of your people are making regular contact with the outside, though, and who cares anyhow? tv reaches millions who don't get news any other way. Who really trusts newspapers and newscasts, and does it make any difference in the long run? The government does what it does and we go along with them because that's what they get paid for. In this case they don't know what to do so they figure there's no use alarming the public unnecessarily. That's how I see it."
Ekler didn't say anything for a moment or two. "You sound pretty cool to me."
"I can afford it since I'm not inside that web. Keep me posted on how you're coming along and I'll pass it on. There are feds in and out of my office all the time so I know they aren't ignoring you."
Mrs. P. emerged from her apartment so fast Jerome couldn't get out of his hiding place in the corner stairwell. She had Snooky in her arms and she was screaming.
The noise startled Jerome because he hadn't believed she was capable of such strenuous bellows. The dog lay limply against her breast and the last thing he saw before she ran into the elevator was the animal's mouth, gaping wide with a good show of tongue.
The el made the usual clanging sounds at it traveled to the ground, and he stood listening to it, his mind empty. He hated it when things happened so fast. There wasn't sufficient time for glee and savoring.
When it dawned on him that the old woman hadn't shut her apartment door, that she had simply rushed uncaring into the open hallway he gave a cry of triumph. This he hadn't expected. What he had anticipated was that she would come out subdued and weeping and then he would have ransacked her place while she watched him, crying and begging.
He was disturbed by the cleanliness he found inside. The neatness was an offense to him. All the while he had supposed she lived amid her own garbage, but no, she had regularly lowered it to the basement via a dumbwaiter in a closet. The furniture was old but clean and free of dust. Starched white doilies lay on the arms and backs of overstuffed chairs, there was a footstool covered with new plastic shelfpaper, the bathroom floor was made of differently colored and differently styled tile, all new and sparkling; the chipped fixtures were antiseptic looking, the towels on the rails were neatly folded. It was all so clean and cared for.
On the bedroom bureau was a photograph of a middle-aged man with a rueful smile on his face; the surface was old and cracked, the glass shiny as if freshly polished. Tacked to the mirror frame was a faded blue ribbon from some forgotten horse show. Knickknacks of glass and porcelain adorned the table and nightstand, families of cats and deer, an elephant, swans. In the kitchen cupboards were a box of salt, a box of matches, a can of dried beans and a bottle of detergent.
A ten-dollar bill was tucked away in a coat pocket in a closet. In all the apartment there wasn't another cent. Not a quarter. No food, no money, nothing of any value. Even the tv set was worthless, full of static and snow. It made a deal more noise when he dropped it off the fire escape balcony.
Every item of furniture was pulled apart, likewise the few garments in the closets and drawers. The cats and deer and all the other pretties were crushed underfoot. Drapes and curtains went into the filled tub along with books and shoes.
He wrecked it all, left nothing coherent or even merely out of shape. It must be flattened, twisted, bludgeoned and when he was finished he was so spent that it took all his strength to go outside and resume his hiding place in the stairwell. He lay on the landing with his eyes closed, exhausted but more at peace than he had been for a long time. He slept without meaning to.
It angered him that dusk was coming in the long window above the stairs when he awakened. It enraged him. What was it about that old hag that fate seemed to go out of its way to protect her? He had intended to be ready and waiting for her when she returned from the vet, for of course that's where she had been heading when she ran outside with the dog. A waste of time. No one was in his office these days. Besides, two or three of those balls should have fixed the beast permanently.
He was further enraged by what happened next. The day's conclusion was less than he had anticipated. It wasn't a matter of not enough time but not enough glee, not sufficiently thick joy to be rolled around and around on the tongue.
Coming up out of his lair with eager breath and askew soul, he saw that her apartment door was, incredibly, still open. Where was she?
She wasn't inside and for a few minutes he believed she hadn't come back but then he was drawn to the fire escape. Standing on the balcony he looked down and saw the small crowd gathered about the body.
Mrs. P. had come back with dead Snooky. The vet hadn't been in his office. She walked into the apartment, took one look around and continued straight out onto the balcony. So said a neighbor who had accompanied her.
Ekler found the body in a wreck under the old bridge south of the park. The car hadn't been spotted because it fell into a cluster of high weeds. He only saw it because he was searching for something like it.
Her left arm had been severed by the door but he hoped it wouldn't be noticeable once he had her prepared. Dragging her up to the road and carefully placing her in a shopping cart, he wheeled her to the place he was calling home these days. He carried her down to the basement.
It was more difficult than he had supposed. The body wouldn't do what he wanted, bent when he wished it to be straight, stiffened and became unmanageable when he tried bending it. Somehow he got her jeans off, somehow he managed to remove the blouse which was heavy with dried blood. Without wanting to he noted that she had been young and well built. Whether or not she had been pretty he couldn't say since death had blackened her face and wrinkled her features so that she looked almost like a caricature of a human. Her face and neck were clean enough and that was a fact for which he was grateful as he didn't think he could have washed her. It would have meant holding her too intimately and the thought made him shrink. She hadn't been dead more than a day or two, which was a curiosity in itself considering that she had somehow found enough gas to run her car off the bridge. In the back of his mind was the fear that if he took hold of any part of her too firmly she would come apart like a roasted chicken.
He soon had her dressed like a man in work boots, blue pants and long-sleeved shirt. All that was left for him to do was to cut her brown hair. It was almost too much. Perhaps it was the strain of the crisis but he could scarcely bring himself to snip the first lock. The smell of shampoo drifted up from her hair and hit him worse than the odor of rot could have done. He didn't have to think of Jetta for his mind was already made up, but he worked as if on a living but wounded human being, carefully and with compassion, cut at the hair until it was a mere few inches in length. Then he dropped in small amounts of dust, just a little at the temples and along the line of the forehead to get rid of the freshly shorn look.
Propping her against the wall and from a distance of ten feet he took careful aim with his revolver before firing a bullet into her left cheek. One down and five to go.
It was unusual that so many people were outside at this hour. Or at any hour, for that matter, since survivors had taken to staying out of sight, but as Jerome left the el and kicked open one of the front doors of the Retreat he found himself suddenly pressed upon every side by a crone or a geezer.
Dimly it occurred to him that the odors of shaving lotion, perfume and washed bodies were out of place here but still these people were old and disgusting and he started striking out. He was taller than most of them and could see that the scorched lawn in front of the building wasn't at all populated but only around him were the confines too restricted for him to move. It wasn't even possible to bring up a crippling knee or fist.
He found himself being carried along by unminding and careless ancients who grinned at him or winked as they hung onto his arms so that he couldn't hit out. Cursing and spitting, he waited for them to disperse and give him some room, at which time he intended to break a few spines but the relatively small crowd persisted in squeezing against him so snugly that he felt suffocated. It was ludicrous, really, he thought, catching glances of furrowed countenances, shrunken heads with sparse hair, bony arms and fingers like twigs. Hollow they were with atrophied parts and just enough wind in them to keep them adrift like partially inflated balloons.
Hellions they were and ever increasing the pressure against him until he was a Vienna sausage moving across the lawn with the other sausages, rigidly upright and in possession of no volition.
From the corner of his eye he saw Larry standing in the doorway of his apartment and he shouted out to him. The landlord didn't move from his position, stayed slouched against the doorframe, ready to bolt back inside, his balding head glistening with perspiration as he watched the band of frail oldsters bear the strong youth away.
Someone sat on his back and forced him to bend over while at the same time his hands were taken and cuffed behind him. All at once the way ahead was clear. He saw the back seat of a car a moment before he was shoved inside. Something slipped around his ankles anchoring them together. Music from a transistor blared in his ear.
He sat cursing while he rode through the city to the barrier of felled tanks and jeeps on Main Street. It astonished him that only three people besides himself were in the car: two geezers and a crone. The crone drove, stopped beside the cathedral, opened the door as three or four other vehicles approached. Geezers and crones picked him up and took him into the Drake building, the one he had climbed, the one in which he met the night thing.
There was nothing in the basement furnace room but solid concrete walls. As he stared about him, baffled and furious, one of the men shoved on a brick and an entire section swung back to reveal a dark interior.
Never having ceased threatening from the moment he was first snatched, he didn't stop now. Flecks of foam formed on his lips as he vented his ire. "You brainless cruds, you maniacs, get me outta here!"
Flashlights showed the way through immense caverns sectioned off by stalactites and stalagmites, great and jagged pillars that looked indestructible As he looked at them, Jerome was rendered mute by his own amazement. All his life he had lived in Eastland but never once had he heard of this place. It was an ancient hideaway formed over millennia by the frantic sea, hollow nostrils damp from forgotten floods, passageways carrying air created by long-dead storms. Some of the walls they passed were deep copper in color, others frosty white, yellow, black with coal deposits or sanded gray by time, quiet and yet thundering with echoes of past deluges.
Here and there an old face peeped around a corner of rock, steady of stare and incurious. White haired, hairless, bespectacled or naked of eye, they reminded Jerome of unworlders with their wraithlike movements; restless ghosts roaming through catacombs waiting for the end of time.
"Stop!" he shouted, fighting against the clasps that bound him and he didn't know whether the unyielding objects upon him were steel or old flesh. Several others joined the first group to carry him along, seldom pausing to rest, forging through magnificent rooms that had existed before the parents of the human species first stepped onto the planet.
"Cruds!" he shrieked. "Creeps! Take me back! Let me go! I'll kill you, I swear it."
Actually he did nothing but make noise and by and by he ceased doing that. During the journey he saw several of the rooms where the outcasts of Eastland and nearby cities had taken up residence. There was the bathroom, and it was a fancy place indeed with everyone having his or her own commode, all of them fitting neatly and snugly over a crevice that fell away to a deep tide. The bedrooms were spacious and luxuriously furnished with the very best items available to practiced thieves, while the kitchen was provisioned with every kind of food a human could desire. Hallways were carpeted with the finest rugs offered in stores along the east coast, thick and wall to wall; incredible tapestries hung everywhere, vases and statues made of crystal, wood or metal were within easy reach. From the ceiling of one room hung a chandelier that blazed in the dimness like a cluster of fiery gems.
The room of festival was the most spacious, ten thousand or more square feet, a high cavern with dozens of seats made of sawed-off stalagmites. At the moment many of them were occupied. In the center of the room was a deep fireplace over which an empty spit rotated. Jerome was carried toward it and held fast while one of the men who had kidnaped him approached with a hypodermic in his hand.
The prisoner began howling like a dog for he suddenly knew what they were going to do. In their eyes senility vied with fanatacism but nowhere was there any sanity or reason to be seen. They were all in mind blank, that limbo of forget-fulness brought about by dying brain cells. Since they were human and functioning as such, more or less, they must be in some kind of reality. In this case it was their own made-up one. Today at this moment they rode the steeds of vengeance and Jerome was blessed or cursed with instant knowledge of their intent.
"You're dead, Dillinger," said Gusty, plunging the needle into the quivering flank of the criminal who had been tried in absentia, found guilty and sentenced, the same as had so many others in these halls. "Recall your sins in the few moments you have left to you, confess them to God and take at least one step into the repentance process. You're going to be in hell for a long time."
Jerome went to sleep standing up and with a curse in his throat.
He was stripped and gutted like a hog at slaughter time, hung over a crevice to drain and then fastened on the spit where he rotated over a hot fire.
Kruge grabbed the little toasted globes with his good hand and popped them down the hatch. Justice had been done. For all the victims of the executed, a bit of flesh went down several hatches.
In truth there was no festival in the great cave but only a quiet repast after which the leftovers were placed in a pot and boiled until the meat fell off the bones. The former were dropped into the sea through a crack, to feed the fishes, while the latter were packed in three boxes, tied with colorful ribbons and set aside to be taken to the post office. Address: the Governor of the state of Hawaii. Why? Why not?
Mordak arched himself against the web so that his belly was aimed straight down at Main Street. The sack at his groin blew open and released tiny spores that fell until the breeze picked them up to carry them in various directions. The alien willed them to their places on the web using a guidance system that saw not a single spore lost but took each and securely deposited it against the sticky structure so that it formed part of a symmetrical pattern. In a few days the web over Eastland would resemble a thick net evenly dotted with buttons.
On the homeworld Mordak would have done very much the same thing, built a web of comparable dimensions and then willed his species to be born. By then he would have found food and captured it in his home so that the young could feed. They would eat and grow and eventually leave the parent structure and go away where there was room to build individual domes. It would have been a beautiful gray planet with the sky full of intricate gray patterns that heated the surface below so that vegetation sprang up with wild abandon. Thriving insect and animal life could easily provide for all. There would have been fantastic dreaming, pleasurable sensations, satisfying knowledge that one was fulfilling the measure of his existence.
Then one day everyone would die, the demise brought about by the proliferation of webs, for as long as spinners existed they must create their hanging sculptures. Eventually the oxygen and carbon dioxide demands exceeded the supply and then the entire society of spinners expired, with one exception. A single individual survived, one who had been selected before birth. Shortly after his life span began, he dug a hole in the ground, buried himself in it and almost immediately his body produced the material to encapsulate him in an egg-like incubator.
All during the life span of his brethren the future father lay buried and sleeping. Through the death period he slumbered. Nature caused him to stir when the conditions above ground were ripe for a new birthing.
Main Street, Earth, was hateful and ugly, sent up wave after wave of blistering heat, dried the moisture in Mordak's eyes, made them burn, caused his soul to seethe with resentment. Where had home gone? Why did it not still lay beyond the rubble in the Rumson building and why hadn't he been able to locate the entrance? Soon he would return to the building to have another look in the basement. The trip would be worth it. Though he might not find the doorway into home there had to be a human somewhere nearby that he could kill.
It didn't matter to him that people hurried about in the city below him. He could have done away with every one of them or had his servants do it but now he only killed when he was very angry or when he was in the vicinity of the Rumson building. The people seemed to sense this and avoided the area.
He sent out a feeler to the small individual webs residing inside the heads of his servants, located Bailey whom he detested. From an alley came a harsh cry as he made the web expand and bring pain to the man who knew who his master was. Fool that he happened to be, all Bailey had to do was put a few drops of oil in each ear and the webs would dissolve, and he knew it but he didn't do it and neither did the others. Maybe they liked pain and shame.
Not knowing anything about relative worth Mordak didn't consider that humans had a right to exist. There was no one in evidence who possessed the power to back up such a claim nor had anyone even so much as proposed the idea. What mattered was the spinner's innate drive to survive in the most comfortable and natural manner possible and this night creature had taken the necessary steps to ensure the same for his kind. He did not consider the expense, never having considered worth. One had to come before the other if rationality was to abide.
The sight of garbage on a park walkway offended him and he directed the workers to go and dump it in the pond where it would be hidden. Meanwhile he kept track of the spores and made certain they blew in the right directions and fastened themselves in proper places on the underside of the web.
His eyes burned. Turning so that he faced the sky he closed them. As soon as he did so the sensation of heat ceased. Within, he was quiet and cool, very near to a state of dreaming but not quite. Dozing was appropriate at this point but he refused to shut down his brain. Tonight he wouldn't be sufficiently rested to give his domain a thorough going over. Eastland was his but there were still people who were out of hand and unbecalmed. Some were murdering others, while a few still sought to escape the confines of the web. In fact some were hidden away from him and his servants, the man in the red pants, for instance. An anomaly. However he would die in the same manner as any human.
Away to the west the sky was black with lowering clouds, nothing new since a storm had been threatening for many days, a deluge that never came. The rain kept blowing away and out to sea while much of the land seared. The streets of the doomed city absorbed the heat which failed to disperse at sundown for the web was growing too thick to allow free passage of air. It was becoming tent-like, no longer wispy and fragile, no more blown about by stray breezes, winding between and above buildings and even through those with open windows or doors.
Rune sat brushing Bitsy's hair while she held still and stared up at the roof of the cave. There was plenty of illumination but she seemed to have trouble seeing or comprehending what she saw. Occasionally she placed a hand on his so that he stopped grooming her while she turned to stare into his eyes. Once he held her face and stared back at her, a deep and earnest look that caused her to smile.
"Like a caveman," said Hitty. "He stole his mate right off the street, dragged her away to his cave—"
"Where he brushes her hair, washes her feet, spoon feeds her and kisses her so much it gets on my nerves," said Gusty.
Cappy was sitting on a chair close to the wall with an aluminum pot in his hand, and now he slammed the bottom against the rock partition so that the several people in the room were startled into giving him their attention. Eyeing Gusty and with no particular inflection in his voice, he said, "You killed Pathia by letting her bleed to death on the operating table, for which crime you were sentenced to one week of silence. Your crime was one of forgetfulness or addle-brainedness. Can't you even recollect that you're being punished?"
"Don't forget I'm your leader!" Gusty yelled.
"So you'll have to lead with your mouth shut. Everybody knows you hate yourself for having done the sin but we need to stir you up so you don't repeat it. We place our lives in your hands and every so often you slaughter one of us. It shouldn't happen."
"Get yourself another doctor!" It took but a few moments for Gusty to see that they were all staring at him in mild or sincere condemnation so he left their presence to go outside and sit on the carpeted corridor, not so far that he couldn't listen in on their conversation which suddenly switched to the night thing. His mind preoccupied with his evil, he bowed his head and grieved as he had done many times for many days. A part of the world had come to an end the day Pathia gave up the ghost and, ever since, it seemed to him that things grew gloomier. Nightmares disturbed his sleep as they hadn't since he was in his middle years, harrowing dramas that saw him fleeing up stark mountains or plummeting into bottomless chasms so that he awakened exhausted, benumbed and un-enthusiastic about taking up his cross.
He viewed himself as a wicked man these days where before he owned to being a persecuted and neglected one. Society had used him until his quavering voice and trembling hands signaled to them that it was time to pitch him out in the street. Two hundred a month, a collection of faded diplomas, memories and his savings were what they allowed him, except that he had no savings and didn't want to quit working. From the time he was old enough to grab a playmate and slap a bandage somewhere on him he was a doctor, and it made no sense to him when people told him to stop being what he had been all those years and sit in a chair with a rug across his knees until he died or became so senile he thought he was dead.
He hadn't been the discoverer of the caves. That distinction belonged to an old, hairy derelict named Herbert who wandered onto Main Street one day and was picked up for vagrancy. The police called Gusty in because the prisoner had a tick buried in the back of his scalp. Later Herbert paid a visit to the doctor's office.
"I ain't a drunkard, if that's what you think and I ain't entirely without capital, though I have no money," he said. His brown eyes were wide and wise.
"I'm not thinking anything except about how deep that tick dug down into you. Didn't you feel it before you came out of wherever you were hiding?"
"So what if I did? I'm a pariah and don't fraternize with the human race." Herbert was well-fed looking and he was clean enough but he had the look of another generation about him. "Quit staring at me like that," he said.
"You're a dead man."
Herbert laughed a little croaking sound and nodded.
"That's why you came out of your hole. It wasn't the tick. You're dying and you can't bear the thought of doing it all by yourself."
"Nothing could be further from the truth." The derelict had a way of narrowing his eyes when he was annoyed. "If I couldn't stand being with my own kind while I was doing such an unpleasant thing as living why would I seek out company when I'm fixing to do the most pleasurable thing there is? Don't tell me you're an atheist. You aren't going to lecture me about endless nothingness, are you?"
"I'm not planning to tell you anything," said Gusty. "What I'm doing is serving as your audience. I don't mind. I'm curious about unusual people. They're more interesting than the other kind."
"Yeah, well, I came out of my hole as you call it because its whereabouts are the only thing I have worth leaving to anyone and I came to the conclusion it would be sinful to die without doing it. As soon as you walked into my cell the other day I knew you were the likeliest candidate I'd find in the short time left to me."
"What does that mean?"
"I saw how you kowtowed to those younger gents."
"What younger gents?"
"The cops, Doc, the cops." Herbert leaned toward the desk. "You didn't know it. It's getting automatic so that you aren't aware, but back in your mind it's forming."
"What's forming?" All of a sudden Gusty decided that he didn't like Herbert. He had supposed the other was a harmless lunatic but now he realized there was a strange mind behind the furrowed forehead.
"The knowledge or the fear that your day is about done, that its end is just around the corner, and everybody else knows it and one day they're going to pick up your butt and throw it out into limbo."
Gusty's voice was husky. "Which is where?"
"Everyone asks the same question, Doc. They want to know where it is, only when you're in it you can't say exactly where it is. You can't prepare for it so don't try." Herbert took a folded piece of paper from his pocket, slipped it beneath a box of bandages on the desk. "You're mad at me now. Don't be. How old do you say I am?"
"Seventy, seventy-five."
"Eighty-six. I saw your hands shake a little bit in the cell while you were tending me. You don't want they should notice things like that but they always do. In fact they're way ahead of you, anticipating it as soon as they see you sprouting some gray hair or lines around your eyes. I was a research chemist believe it or not. They might have kept me on a little longer if it hadn't been for a young squirt who wanted my seat while it was still warm."
"I've treated the tick wound," said Gusty. "About the state of your mind, I doubt if I have any pills for that."
"I'm sorry. For the way things work I grieve. For the way we get old and the way they kill our souls with their cruelty I cry my eyes out. Good-bye, Doc. Don't throw that map away. Why should you sit in some lousy institution with a rug on your lap? Give 'em hell, boy. Do what I never had the guts to do."
How many years ago that conversation had transpired and he never saw or heard of Herbert again. He kept the map and when it happened exactly as the old man predicted it would, when they shook his hand and patted his back and told him to go away somewhere and die like a useless dog, he came down here to make use of what furniture and food there was. Sometime during the years he had gotten so lonely he began talking to the stalagmites, so he went topside and found Hitty sitting in the gutter of Main Street crying because she had forgotten how to get back to the Retreat. That's how it all began. Or that's how it all began to end.
Drying his tears he got up and went back into the conference room. Writing on a pad, he handed the notes to Jesse.
"Gusty says we need to have a wedding for the young ones."
Hitty snickered and gave her companions an amused glance. "What for? All he does is treat her like a doll."
"Are they in love?" said Jesse, still reading Gusty's notes. "Does Rune love Waif and does she love him?"
Everyone agreed that this seemed to be the case.
"Then they ought to get married. Do you think the idea will ever occur to either of them, he being out of this world and she being forever innocent?"
The man approximated Mayor Tucker's size and after Ekler hauled him from his death bed and took him home he propped the body against a bureau and gave it a blast in the face with a single shell from the shotgun. There. Now no one could say it wasn't Tucker.
It hadn't been difficult to shoot the corpse or to handle it. The other five had afforded Ekler sufficient practice to innure him to practically anything. Finding them had been easy. The city was filling up with dead.
"There!" he shouted at Bailey. Sitting in the truck cab he pulled the dump lever so that the corpses dropped out like a pile of wrapped bones.
Bailey came over and looked at them with a surprised expression. Using his foot to sort through them, he came across the one with the blasted face, the one whose arms and neck Ekler had painted with a weak solution of iodine. "Tucker?" said Bailey. "I'll be swamped if that ain't him. Insulting little squirt. Can't say I ever wanted him to end like this, though." The former captain looked up at the sky. His red face bore signs of infinite strain. The sun had burned his neck and arms. "The world has really gone nuts. I was always a peaceable man, content to kick rookie tails once in a while." His voice grew harsh. "There's a lot of dead I paid for my kids. They better be worth it." "Do I pass?" yelled Ekler. He had stayed in the truck, his eyes on Bailey's cohorts who were still an acceptable distance away but who showed signs of perhaps moving closer. "Well?"
"Far as I know you passed. You did what the night thing ordered. Welcome to the club."
"Forget it. I never liked your club, remember?"
"Oh, certain I remember. Mr. Educated Smarthead who wouldn't dream of coming up in the ranks. Listen, I never really held that against you."
"Don't waste your breath and don't whine about your family anymore. I have a tolerance level."
Bailey grew a brooding look on his face. "What does that mean?"
"It means Pond told me they're buried in your back yard and that they've been buried there for weeks."
"I could tell the boys to drag you out of that truck and stomp you to death."
Ekler showed him the nose of his revolver. "I wouldn't advise it."
"Then quit trying to rile me with lies."
"You're just talking because of the others. The truth is you don't have any real reason for what you're doing. Since you have to get up every morning and be a traitor, you get up."
Bailey laughed. "You're nuts. There's nothing wrong with my wife and kids. Not a hair of their heads."
"Looters," said Ekler. "Not the alien. Human beings. For your tv set and what money you had in the house. They killed your family and cleaned you out. But that's no reason for you to turn against your own kind."
"You're getting on my nerves. You shouldn't say things like that no matter how mad you are. I can't help anything that's happened. You do your thing, I do mine."
"I did my thing," said Ekler. "I want Jetta."
"You'll have her." Bailey looked at his watch. He was angry and gave Ekler a stare full of resentment. "Three o'clock. Come then."
Ekler turned the truck around and roared away, about two hundred yards before the gas ran out. Not waiting to see if they were lighting after him he leaped from the cab and poured on the speed.
Rumson knew that soldiers were stationed about two miles west of Eastland, many of them, only they did nothing but stand off and hope the alien left the city and came out to skirmish with them. Rumson had this knowledge because he possessed a radio that had only just stopped functioning. He was aware that now and then one or two men were sent in with orders to infiltrate the citizens' ranks and meet him. He had agreed to direct them to Ekler's main forces, not that he knew if there existed any such things. Evidently no one made it through the web, since not a single soldier had rapped on his door.
No one else rapped on his door, either, probably because they didn't think anyone was inside the building, it being dark and quiet in the day or nighttime, the same as always. Nobody had visited the place much during the days of peace and not many knew who lived there.
For the first time in years he longed for company, found the desire to hear the voice of someone besides Olivia plaguing him almost continually. She was forever haranguing him for having locked her up in his tomb, swore she preferred a face to face meeting with the night thing rather than one more with him. Frequently she attacked the barricades he placed across the building entrances but he didn't worry that she might get out because keen planning had gone into keeping his sanctorum safe for himself. Had any of his misguided friends attempted to drag him away to the gibbering insanity that waited for him outside, he would merely have touched an electronic control packet in his pocket and steel partitions slid over all doors and windows everywhere in the building.
One thing he did worry about was the craftiness of the spinner and so, level by level and apartment by apartment, his safety factor shrank until he and Olivia lived in three rooms on the third floor, adjoining the lab. His wife's consternation and agitation increased as her living space diminished. There were sheets of metal protecting the four ceilings; she climbed a ladder, took a screwdriver and hammer to the one in the living room and pried until her fingernails were chipped and unlovely. Rumson complained because he had always admired her hands. She responded by sanding her nails and biting off whatever edges were left. Lately she had become petty and spiteful.
"You don't love me anymore," he said to her one day as she tackled a wall partition with a hand drill.
"What I love is the outside world which I inherited by being born into it. I really should have objected when you closed off that last level. The trouble with you is that you usually manage to convince me beforehand that what you're about to do is good for me."
"I told you I'd get you out of here. I know where there are some caves that will take you beyond the west gate."
"I've heard that until I'm sick of it. I'm beginning to believe you're making it up."
"Please, Olivia, can't you maintain better control of yourself? These are perilous times and you've got to trust me."
"I can't control myself any more than you could if you suddenly found yourself out in the street. You have no right to keep me locked up."
"Calm down. It's for your own protection."
"Never did I suspect you were such a chauvinist."
One day Rumson heard someone clattering about in the hall outside the kitchen. Thanking his lucky stars that Olivia was sleeping, he immediately opened the door with the packet he had cleverly hidden in a vitamin bottle. Olivia didn't believe in them, hence the packet was safe when she daily rummaged through his belongings. He didn't worry about the noisemaker being the night thing since that alien adversary was a silent traveler nor did he believe any human would go to so much trouble to reach him for the sole purpose of robbing him.
He was shocked at sight of Lieutenant Ekler standing there holding an automatic hand drill.
"I knew which floor you were occupying because I followed the smells of cooking." Ekler looked with yearning at a steaming pot on the stove, sat down and dined on the bread and stew provided by his host. He was gaunt and hollow-eyed, thinner by at least forty pounds. Thrusting a damp package into Rumson's hands, he said, "Here, but be careful."
Opening it, Rumson recoiled in disgust. It was a shapeless gray lump crisscrossed with webbing. "What is it?"
Talking from the side of his mouth while continuing to eat, Ekler said, "Why do you think I drilled my way up here? I want you to tell me what it is. It took me three hours to hack it from its place."
Rumson felt the mass through the paper, fingered it until he was familiar with its shape, speculated as to its more solid core.
"They're all over the web," said Ekler. "Like footballs and all pretty much the same size. They appeared one morning about two weeks ago, evenly scattered. At first they grew rapidly but lately they've remained the same."
With a scowl Rumson tossed the package in a tall trash can. Ekler got up and retrieved it. Placing it back on the table he sat down and resumed eating.
"My lab is not the fully equipped place it used to be," Rumson said with obvious petulance. "What do you expect? I have to protect my wife and myself from the alien. We're stuck in here like a pair of miners in a caved-in shaft. You're the first other person I've seen in weeks."
"I need to know what that thing is."
"Why? What do you care? Will knowing what it is provide you with some kind of solution?"
"It and the others like it are there, which is enough reason to know what they are. Your stupid machine got us into this mess. For fame and bucks you let that thing loose on us. Now you'll perform the few tasks I ask of you or I'll drag you to the roof and throw you into the web."
"You'll do nothing of the sort. I know you. I'm telling you that what happened wasn't my fault. It wasn't anyone's fault. It simply happened."
"After you examine that lump tie your message to a rock and drop it out of a window on the north side." Ekler stuck a chunk of bread in his pocket. "I'll look every day until you contact me."
Rumson lowered himself into a chair and mopped his forehead with the back of his shirt sleeve. When he spoke his voice was full of despair. "Why did you waste our time coming here? You know what it is as well as I."
"It doesn't have to be. You said he was a plant."
"I did not say he was a plant."
"I have to know." Ekler went out the door and away, shortly after which Rumson gathered up the loathsome lump and made his way to the lab.
Olivia followed, having awakened while he was getting the living room door open, gave little cries of joy as she ran down the hall and into the antiseptic confines. They were soon blazing with light and she was all smiles until she tried opening windows and doors. They were sealed with his steel partitions.
"Just one little window," she said, ruining what nails she had left by tugging at unresisting edges.
"Go back to bed. The day of your deliverance is nigh."
"You aren't Moses and I'm not a slave. All I want is to see the sun." As she continued to tug at steel, her fingers bled.
"Go away, I tell you."
While her back was turned to him he plunged a hypodermic into her arm and when she fell he took her to bed.
She was weak and disoriented upon awakening. "We're free, aren't we? Out of it?"
"We certainly must be since that's the sun burning your face and creating wrinkles." He had placed a large lamp above her. Feeling guilty, he prepared the message for Ekler, worked his way north through the building. It was obvious to him that no one had been this way for a long time, not since he sealed the exits, for though he couldn't see the undisturbed dust in the dimness he could smell the absence of fresh air and human or alien bodies. There was only the odor of silence and staleness.
His breath caught in his throat as he walked through the final door and out into the sunny corridor. His old sickness captured him with lightning-like speed, made him feel as if he weighed 5,000 pounds, rooted him to the spot and threatened to hold him prisoner. Perspiration leaked into his eyes. His throat dry, he took the time to allow his mind to be assured that the only enemy in his vicinity was himself. Hyperventilating, he staggered to the nearest window, broke the glass with the wrench he carried, rared back and threw the rock as far outward as he could.
Almost weeping with the desire to race back the way he had come, to leap through the door, slam it behind him and once again be in close and confining darkness, he forced himself to walk slowly and savor his agony. There were demons in the light behind him, concocted by his sick brain, all preparing to leap on him and rend him with their fangs.
On the other side of the door he fainted, sank down against the panel and felt inner blackness claim him. Before he went all the way under he found himself thinking of Ekler and how the other man would feel when he read the message tied to the rock: as we both suspected, the mass is an egg. it contains
one rapidly developing specimen. i assume all the other eggs are similar. i can show you how to escape the city but you must take my wife with you. come as soon as possible.
Jetta lay on her back in the street directly below the spot in the web where she had been hanging for a week. She was dead and had probably been dead when they took her down. Now they waited for him at the end of the block. Ekler stood looking at her for the longest time. He was thinking that Bailey had kept his word about as faithfully as he himself had kept his. Both were liars, both were devious, both were desperate.
He brought the sawed-off shotgun from behind his back as three of them rushed him, gave them twin barrels and then, without looking to see in how many directions they flew, he turned and walked away.
Was it he against Bailey? Was that how it was going to be? He wondered, decided no. He had more against him than a crazy man who insisted that his family were at home and waiting for him when they lay rotting in a hole in the yard. Bailey he could shoot. Eventually he might get lucky and bring down the night thing. Where would that leave him and what would it do for him? Nowhere and nothing. He was alone and unable to identify his enemy. Most likely it was death or pur-poselessness. To him they were one and the same.
Phones, radios and tv's didn't work anymore. There was no longer any contact with the outside world. The survivors knew. The Army was parked somewhere out there and any day now they might figure a way to obliterate Eastland without destroying the adjoining countryside. Was it possible for them to do that? Those who skulked from hovel to hovel and who existed from moment to moment hoped not but they had no faith. Earth had always operated according to the principle of the sacrifice of the one for the many. It was a fact of mortality, a must be, and it didn't seem to matter that no one really understood why.
Hitty didn't understand why and her mind dwelt on the dilemma as she gathered up a box intended for Hawaii and headed for the Post Office. In years gone by, when the tide was low, she had braved the temperature of the ocean water by swimming through the large round entrance with her package held over her head. Once through, she used leg kicks to carry her past the rock barricades to a sandy shore where a Ford V-8 was camouflaged by heavy brush.
Not today though. She no longer trusted her old body. The fact that the western gate was encased in the night thing's web hadn't influenced her choice or mode of travel for she had forgotten all about crises, danger and deprivation. The only thing on her mind was philosophical intrigue.
Heading west she walked along the edge of a chasm, shuffled past granite walls remarkable for their antiquated art carvings, crossed a stone bridge without glancing at the glistening abyss beneath. As with the shores of her spiritual home, her knowledge of this underground world was intimate; so without taking a wrong turn in the winding labyrinths she strolled under the acreage of Eastland and exited from the basement of the Drake building. This time she wasn't walking but rode a minibike, which was just one of the vehicles fueled, in good condition and parked in the last cave before the exit.
She didn't worry about the noise of the bike. Main Street was perpetually clogged with cars and bikes so that an extra item was bound to go unnoticed. When she suddenly found herself in the midst of felled vehicles and webs, she wasn't unduly alarmed and indeed even failed to take proper note of them. Mind blank had become an old friend who so frequently showed up to occupy her reality that the substantial world grew more and more a nuisance to be tolerated. In, out of and around death traps she weaved, wheeled and swerved with practiced agility, making good time, blasting the deathly stillness with her motor and even glancing away from the hazardous course long enough to give a nod and polite smile to a man who was looting the pockets of a web prisoner. He had sandy hair and freckles and stared after the bike with his mouth agape. Hitty didn't know he was Captain Bailey.
Soon she began to fear the morning was to be a lost or crazy one. Standing outside the post office she blinked in the hot sun and wondered if a matter transmitter had whisked her away to an alternate Earth that only vaguely resembled her own.
There were no clerks in the post office. Further, there were no windows or doors to the place. Ransackers had picnicked inside. It was all very strange. Now that she took a steady look at the street and nearby buildings she was ready to agree that things were not as they ought to be.
It offended her when Bailey and his men, who had run two miles to catch up with her, approached and demanded to know who she was and what she was doing.
"My good man, that's none of your business."
What was in the package? Maybe Bailey hoped to find a treasure but it was only part of what was left of Jerome, clean and gray and clattering onto the street like pick-up sticks.
"Dear me," said Hitty.
Bailey hadn't confronted anyone so ancient and translucent as she, not ever, and he was afraid to punch or shove her which was what he always did with strangers these days. "Those are human bones," he said.
"Put your spectacles on your face, child. That happens to be a gift for my granddaughter."
"I know what they are because I used to work with a coroner. You got a pelvis, a femur and a humerus and some phalanges there, and I expect you're one of the cannibals I've been hunting."
Taking a fan from the pocket of her skirt, Hitty put it to good use trying to dry the perspiration on her brow. "I expect rain, don't you? Very soon now. I'd say it was imminent. It's a good thing, too, since my front lawn is in pitiful condition. What do you recommend for wood rot?"
"She's bats, boss, whatever else she is," said one of the men. "You want I should flatten her?"
Bailey scowled as if the question had been obscene. Maybe it was to him. Perhaps the thought of the woman's matchstick arms snapping or her paper-thin skull being crushed was more than even he could bear. Confiscating the bike he drew his people a distance away down the street. "She's so senile we'll never get any answers from her," he said. "When they're that old they do things by instinct or habit. We'll just get out of sight and follow her when she leaves."
"What for?" said a stocky man. "Why don't we stick her in a web?"
"She has to have friends," said Bailey. "Look how clean she is. How many do you know these days who bother to brush their hair neat like that and polish their shoes? Look at her. I want some of it. I want to know where the others like her are. Where in this hellhole of a city is there clean food and easy living? I want to know."
Hitty could have sworn she had been talking with a group of filthy men. Her nose wrinkled at the thought. One would think that even imaginary folks would refuse to allow themselves to fall into such straits. No matter, it was a decent day for a stroll, a fair morn in which to work up a good appetite for lunch. She stepped out with vigor, tromped on a handful of phalanges, gave not a downward glance but headed rather briskly east down the avenue.
It seemed hours later that she sat on the curb of Maine Street weeping because she couldn't remember who she was. Now and then she paused in her crying long enough to frown and puzzle over her curious sensation of deja vu. Was she so mad that she couldn't swear for certain she hadn't once sat on this very curb blubbering exactly as she did now?
The sun was making her melt inside her clothes like the wicked witch, boiling the eyes out of her head though she had them tightly closed. Her bonnet didn't protect her skull as well as a thick head of hair might have, but she hadn't owned more than a few miserly strands since—how long? There was a pain grinding away in her stomach, evidence that it had been too long since she had last eaten, a stink arose from somewhere nearby, a man overhead screeched with agony and frustration, life was raucous and due for an overhaul.
Again the past presented itself in her mind and she sat on the curb crying because she couldn't recall how to get back to her loathesome room at the Retreat. Cockroaches and damp cupboards waited there for her, likewise moldy wallpaper, cold draughts and a landlord who threatened her because her check never came on time. How she had wailed and bawled that day so that passengers in buses and cars gawked at her, and one woman even came up to her to prod her with a foot so that she would be silent.
Recognizing that what was going through her head were memories from the past, Hitty allowed the images to continue until the moment arrived when Gusty came to take her home to the caves. How handsome he had been then, but now as she raised her head to peer more closely at him she could see how drastically he had altered his appearance. A disguise, no doubt, but she was forced to admit that he looked silly in those long red underwear and how had he managed to erase the lines and wrinkles from his face and grow all that yellow hair? She was thinking of wigs when Rune scooped her up like a rag doll and ran away down the street with her.
Bailey and his men had been sick and tired of listening to the crone bellyache and now they were consumed with rage when the youth appeared from behind a wrecked tank and took her. Uttering curses and bellowing at the tops of their lungs they came from around a corner in hot pursuit. One rode the bike but made a bad maneuver almost at once, snagged the bumper of a car and pitched headlong into a web. The others ignored his cries and continued a chase that became more fruitless with every step. The youth was too well fed, in too good a condition to be outrun by a pack of flabby, undernourished, characterless rejects and they lost him amid buildings and debris.
With his back to the web Mordak skimmed along the highest points, guarding his city, watching for agitation. The strands were a part of him, accommodating his flesh in any position, fitting into the indentations that formed in him, yielding and supporting upon unspoken command. The air was hot and dry. The moon reared up into the clear, black sky, shone through the dome and made checkers of light on the streets and roofs.
A mile inside the west gate a light went on and since it was the only light in the city Mordak noticed it right away. Making swimming motions he glided across the distance in a few minutes, hovered above the warehouse while he looked and listened after which he built a vine-like rope and lowered himself to the roof. There was no sound but he utilized caution, fearing nothing and no one in his adopted country but choosing the intelligent way.
Red-pants with the yellow hair was inside the building busily stacking boxes of staples into a net which he apparently intended hauling up to the roof. From there he would toss his provisions over the web with which the alien had sealed the doorway and then place them in the cart parked on the ground. Where he would take them was no matter of interest to Mordak who desired his blood.
Uncannily the human raised his head to stare upward at the exact spot where the alien paused. He didn't turn off the beam of light, offending the adversary who preferred that he showed some sign of fear. It would be satisfying if the man screamed like the others and tried to run away. If he did so Mordak might let him live for a short time while he teased and tormented.
It was not to be. Rune stayed where he was until the spinner prepared to make the first move, at which instant he simply went elsewhere.
In spite of his slight weight, Mordak was extremely strong. As far as his agility was concerned he could be like an insect flitting hither and thither yet when he attempted to lay strange hands upon the youth he came off a poor second in ability.
With a wild leap he left the high wooden platform only to land in the space vacated by his prey. But a faint odor of man and a stirring of dust remained while Rune went up a pillar like a monkey and stood on the first platform, alert and prepared to go either way.
Mordak longed to catch him. The sole interesting specimen in the territory, red-pants was fit to be pulled apart. Perhaps his joints were fashioned differently or perhaps his muscles were more original than those of his fellows. Naturally the brain must be taken into account, but it was the alien's experience that mutation rarely if ever enhanced performance. No, the man in red had springs in his bones or beneath his shoes.
Mordak didn't really believe this. He was merely fishing in his confusion, which rapidly and inevitably turned to frustration as he chased Rune through the warehouse without bringing him down.
The man who never spoke was an acrobatic marvel, doing handsprings that took him between rows of merchandise far faster than he could have run; but when the spinner scrambled to the end of the aisle and stood waiting to gather him up he changed direction and bounded up onto the stacks. Fading without a whisper he turned up at the other end of the confines, standing in the open and seeming to mock his pursuer.
The darkness didn't seem to bother him. Mordak couldn't know that the human's sense of hearing was keener than that of a hundred wolves, that the alien thundered with sound in the mere act of preparing to move. Though he didn't breathe like a man the hairs in his body openings accepted air by scooping it up and drawing it inside. A normal person couldn't have heard these bodily functions but Rune wasn't normal. The piece of material in his brain which Zebb had secured there functioned at top capacity. Rune had more than the average amount of gray matter in his head, meaning he was more intelligent than most people, but the instinctual part of his being was in command at the moment, making him a reactor more than anything else.
Mordak stealthily climbed across a row of cartons toward a little yellow spot, roared in triumph as he leaped, roared again in anger when he picked up a single curl lying on a box. The man had cut off a piece of himself to annoy the enemy.
The hairs in the slits along the spinner's sides fluttered frantically, provided him with not nearly enough oxygen. He pushed himself, clambered up a vertical ladder and leaped into space in a desperate attempt to snare a foot as Rune dived from the platform. The alien missed and fell twelve feet onto a box of jars. The glass didn't break but his back was bruised. Sore and furious, he lay spread-eagle and contemplated the ceiling while he caught his breath, fully aware that it would take him the remainder of the night to recuperate from this foray. The man was a fiend without mercy, torturesome, taunting, intolerable.
Soon he got up and resumed the chase but his heart wasn't in it. As he had done in the cathedral, red-pants was deliberately wearing him out, running him breathless, straining his reserves to the breaking point. Still the spinner was stubborn and it was only when the weak light of dawn penetrated the warehouse that he gave off, climbed high into his web to rest and watch, hot-eyed, while Rune piled high his cart and shoved away with it.
Olivia dragged Rumson's body into the lab, managed to get it up on a wheeled cot and shoved it into the freezer. She had to do it. He had been dead from a heart attack for two days.
Mania seemed to want to claim her but by telling herself that her disorientation was the result of a steady diet of sedatives, she was able to stave it off. As it was, she had difficulty remembering her position in the scheme of things. Had he shrieked and slumped over the night they were in the screening room watching Superman, or was that the night she told him that once she got out of the building she would never see him again? Which kind of death had been served up to him during that film? He knew she meant what she said. With his last link with the world running out, fading, disappearing, slipping from his grasp, how had he felt?
As she closed the freezer door the fog in her brain began clearing. Maybe getting rid of the sight of him had a healing effect or perhaps the junk in her system was finally being expelled. She suddenly had an image of him standing in the living room with the most sorrowful look on his face. His left hand was in an odd, clawing position over his heart and he began scrabbling through a book, flipping pages with his free hand, coming up with a piece of flimsy which found its way onto the floor when he fell. He was saying she would survive, that she wasn't to be worried but that was exactly her state of mind due to the fact that he was always plying her with bromides of one kind or another. Then he fell and the world would never be the same.
Seclusion and stillness didn't bother her too much once the effect of the pills wore off. He had done it for her own good, she knew, but thinking of him forever silenced gave her a strange comfort. As long as he was living he reckoned in her daily existence. Now he wasn't and didn't.
She suffered convulsions and fell into a stupor. When she came to her senses she discovered that a pot of stew she had left on the stove was hard and desiccated. Like her mouth and head. Like her joints. She felt like a mummy revived for no purpose. He had been beloved, essential, but ultimately he had been a fool not to tell her his heart was going. At least he could have prepared her by mentioning it. Perhaps he had and she forgot.
The control device that would open the outside world to her was not to be found. Calmly, logically, she sifted through their belongings, the few clothes and personals, the many books, cereal boxes and machines, but it wasn't there. She remained calm. If he had suspected he was ill he wouldn't have made it impossible for her to find the mechanism. He who possessed so much foresight wouldn't have left her forever locked inside this tomb.
She had to wheel him out of the freezer in order to go through his pockets. After removing the sheet she had placed over him she ran out and sat down in a chair for a long time. Could a corpse move that much? Were muscle spasms capable of lifting a body from a flat position on the back, flipping it onto the stomach and drawing the legs and arms so high?
It was too much, surely, to expect human beings to behave normally in abnormal situations but she would always wonder and never know whether or not he was in a coma and still alive when she locked him into the cold.
Finally emptying his pockets, she carried the few items back to the warmth and comfort of the living room where she set them on a table and stared at each one. The vitamin bottle was her first choice. Unscrewing the cap, she tapped the tiny device out onto her palm.
She had always wanted to run or to jog and now she did, through long and echoing corridors and down endless sets of stairs as fast as she could go with bad memories behind her and sunlight ahead; then that old thing about the best laid plans, et cetera, reared in her path. Not even her escape was working out the way she wished. She burst from the front door into the dead of night, not daylight or anywhere near it and it was a peculiar kind of night filled with air so hot it was nearly unbreathable, air so dry it hurt her nose and throat.
The moon was high and broke through the web in square sections that made a checkerboard of the boulevard. There was dead silence and the scent of hopelessness all around her, far more desolate than her prison had been and she groaned because never once while she had hunkered in those foul rooms with her husband had she imagined they could be the best of all possible worlds.
Never before had she fancied how a city could be without the sounds of police sirens, birds, insects, wind, blowing leaves, a cat mewing, a dog barking. There was no sound at all, only heat. There was no city, really, but just a place for a liberated woman to stand. Where were all the people of Eastland, all the thousands of the buggers?
For the first time she realized she was barefoot. Rocks dug into her soles as she raced down the sidewalk toward the solitary figure standing beneath an unlit lamp. Someone waited for her, an individual with a heart and brain and voice, someone, someone, not an object or a dumb thing or a bodiless thought but someone.
She ran faster and the person heard her. He turned when she was no more than a few feet from him, in full grin with his scarlet mouth yawning in an expression of glee. His blue lamps gleamed in the black night as he opened his arms wide and took her for his own. His fangs severed her scream.
Creeping through the stifling gloom of mid-morning, Ekler crossed the boulevard or rather he scuttled like some refugee from a beetle's hideout, hurried over the narrow lawn back of the Rumson building. The web was only yards away, thick and menacing, the oozing sap collecting on the ground like lumpy stalagmites. The entire structure exuded a mist that hung in the already saturated air. It permeated everything and Ekler momentarily feared for his lungs. The irony in such an idea made him smirk.
He didn't see any rock with a note attached to it so he began to hunt, carefully at first and then recklessly. He had to have an immediate answer to his question, had to know if he and the others were to have any kind of chance.
Quickly wearied because of the low oxygen content in the air, he leaned against a drainpipe and then shifted when he felt it giving way. Something fell partway out of it. Leaning down he saw that something was secured inside the pipe. He worked at it with a stick until it fell out in his hand and as he stared at it he was thinking what a stupid place it was to hide a stick of dynamite.
While he looked for the rock he looked for more explosives, found a cardboard box filled with silvery powder tucked into a decorative niche in the brick wall. It looked like the stuff he had found in Doctor Zebb's closet. He discovered yet another box before he spotted the rock and Rumson's message.
The thought of being shown a way out of the city prompted him to break in the building through the passageway he had made before but he had no tools with him. As he walked around the north side and was about to pass the front door he was startled to see that it wasn't sealed. Beyond the broken glass was free space. Cautiously he went in. Glancing back outside he saw how nearly like darkness the city's sky had become. Soon the night thing wouldn't need to wait for sundown to become totally active.
Rumson lay dead in a lab freezer and his wife was gone. Ekler searched long enough to be convinced that she wasn't in the building. Having visited the place mere days ago he knew the couple hadn't been using many rooms. Starting in the kitchen he searched those that showed recent occupancy, even sifted through the junk on the floor and at last picked up the piece of flimsy paper upon which Rumson had drawn a map.
The basement was the place where the night thing had penetrated to Earth. Ekler shivered with cold as he crawled over the rubble. The wall, the wall with the cracks and crevices, where was it? He knew Rumson had turned off the Bore and even destroyed it but the hair on his scalp stood up as he made his way forward.
The crevice was there exactly where it was marked on the map and had he remained at his former weight he never would have made it through. As it was he skinned inside with room to spare, faced blank black space and felt his way around a curve. Abruptly there was light. Electric torches set into the walls showed him low tunnels that gradually widened into huge caverns. The chasms made him dizzy, the clashes of color and the formations in the rock astonished him. It was as though he walked in another world.
All went well until he came to the bridges. There were a series of them, all of different sizes, all with their far ends in darkness and all spanning an abyss a quarter-mile deep. There was no other way across except on one of the stone pathways; nor were there alternate tunnels which Ekler might have used to go deeper into the mountain.
Gingerly he tried the bridge nearest him, found it was more than wide enough so that he didn't feel as if he were walking a tightrope but there were no rails or anything to hold onto. He could see as he inched forward into the dimness that its end curved out of sight into utter blackness.
No one could have fashioned such a series of entrances to the large caves on the other side of the drop. They had been there for millennia and it was the trespasser's obligation either to find one that was solid all the way to the other side or turn around and go back.
Eventually he lowered himself to his hands and knees and crawled in the darkness along a path that kept getting more narrow until he could go no farther. He went back to the landing and tried the next span. This one not only grew narrow once he was out over the black gulf but it also ended abruptly. Either it had broken or it had never been complete.
Time passed and he grew exhausted. Bridge after bridge had proved to be a dead end and now that his eyes were accustomed to the faint light he saw he had been mistaken in his initial count. There weren't a dozen or so of them but scores stretching away in the distance. It would take him a week to try them all.
While he sat on the landing trying to conquer his frustration and feeling of hopelessness something out of the corner of his eye made him turn his head. To his right was a convex wall and below it was the chasm, but on around it was an illuminated shallow cave. Into that cave walked a girl and Ekler came off the floor slowly, disbelievingly. "Bit?" he said, watching, expecting her to disappear. "Bit?" he yelled and she raised her head and looked at him. She walked over to the edge of the drop. He called her name again. He had never believed that she could be alive. All this time he had imagined what her grave looked like but there she was two hundred yards away whole and sound.
A young man in red underwear came into the cave behind her. He didn't call to her but he had a rock in his hand with which he rapped the wall. Bitsy turned to look at him. He had his eyes on Ekler but still he did nothing but tap the rock. The girl made a move toward him.
"No, Bitsy, come to me! Over the bridge! Show me the right bridge, honey!"
The boy tapped the rock. Bitsy looked over her shoulder at Ekler.
"It's me, Bit! Come to me!"
She went with the boy. Ekler couldn't believe it. She took the blond youth's outstretched hand and together they went into a tunnel and Ekler waited for her to come and get him but she didn't. He couldn't believe it. She had chosen a stranger over him. It made no sense.
He took time to cry out in his rage or jealousy or whatever emotions racked him and that enabled the man who had stolen into the cave to take more careful aim. Had his vision been better Ekler would have died where he stood. The bullet crashed into the rock a hairsbreadth above him. Conditioned by long practice he dropped flat as another slug whined by. It was an old man who was shooting at him, a geezer who was as thin as a rope and white with time, dedicated to what he was doing but not adept enough to do a good job.
On his belly Ekler crawled out of the large cavern back the way he had come, jumped to his feet as soon as he rounded the first corner and ran until he reached the basement of the Rumson building. He lay face down in the rubble and wondered what he could do to help his sister. If she needed help. He doubted if the blond boy exercised any mental control over her. Bitsy wasn't fast enough to know if people meant what they said but she possessed fair instinct when it came to choosing those whom she could trust.
At least she was alive and well. The knowledge must suffice for him until his next visit to the caves.
There was Mayor Tucker stuck up in the web behind Hyatt Street like a paper doll, his skin the color of tarnished metal. He looked as if he had been attacked by a wolf, his throat open with a gaping wound that leaked gray fluid.
Ekler looked up at him for a while before shuffling on down
the block where he found an unlittered curb upon which to sit. By and by someone came up behind him.
"Turn around," said Bailey.
Ekler sat without moving. "Crud," he said. "Fascist. You want to shoot me? Is that why you've been following me all day."
Bailey shoved his gun back in his belt. All he wore was a pair of cut-off jeans. "Why should I want to shoot you?" he said. He worried at the dead brown grass with his bare toes. "We used to be friends."
"We were never friends."
"We were both men. That meant something." The red-haired man sat down on the curb, placed his arms on his knees, laid his head to rest and gave a strangled sob.
"Why don't you wash your ears?" said Ekler. "I did."
"How was it with webs in there?"
"An experiment, I think. He wanted to see how much control he could exert over me."
"And?"
"Not much. I got his messages sort of like a heat in my head. No words, but it was as clear as what you're saying."
"How's your family?"
Bailey sobbed again. "You know they're dead."
"So your insanity was all an act. What did you expect to accomplish?"
"I was hoping to make a deal with him. So help me, I figured to get some of us out of here."
Though he looked and sounded sincere, Ekler didn't believe him.
"Speaking about families," Bailey continued, "you recall Reverend Thomas?"
"What about him?"
"I saw him yesterday when we were raiding a store and I think he's cracked but he said if I saw you to tell you he married your sister to that dude who's been running around town in long johns."
Ekler ran his fingers through his unkempt hair. His eyes were hot as he stared across town at the dripping web.
"Thomas says he was snatched out of his hidey hole in the bowling alley, blindfolded and carried away, and when they uncovered his eyes he was in a cave with your sister, the dude and a flock of people so old it was a wonder they could stand up. He performed the ceremony; they blindfolded him again and took him back to the alley."
Ekler stared at the web and said nothing.
Bailey leaned toward him. "You know anything about that?"
"How could I?"
"I don't know but it sounds odd when we know there aren't any caves in Eastland. If they took Thomas out of the city limits it's sure something we want to know about, isn't it?"
"I'll hunt. I'll find out."
"And when you find out you're gonna spread the word, aren't you? You won't hold a grudge. I mean it wouldn't give you some kind of thrill to let us all get chewed up when those eggs hatch. If there's a way out—"
"I said I'd hunt. That's all I can do right now."
Bailey stood up and used his handkerchief to mop his burned face. The air was heavy and steamy, damp enough to leave moisture everywhere. Bailey breathed in short panting gasps. "We won't last long unless it rains but I think it's fixing to do that. Did you hear the thunder this morning?"
"You don't want it to rain."
"Why not?"
"Did you ever see what happened to a rosebud when it rained?"
Sounding anxious, Bailey said, "No, what happened?"
"It opened."
For a few seconds the other was silent. "Are we talking about bugs or flowers or what?"
"Sometimes the night thing acts like a bug but at other times he's a plant."
"Not to mention that he's a wild animal in between. Let me get this straight. You think those eggs are going to hatch when it rains?"
"Yes." Ekler got up.
"I'm sorry about your girl friend," Bailey said suddenly. "That wasn't my idea."
Ekler backed a few steps. Bailey stared at him before wheeling and striding away down the street. Ekler waited until he was out of sight before heading in the opposite direction. He had to find Pond. It was time for a meeting.
Rune gathered all the explosives from the munitions cave and dropped them into the abyss. It took him a long time because there was much that had been brought in over the years.
"Don't go talking to me about dynamite and magnesium powder," Gusty said to Cappy. "We have only benign supplies down here, always did."
"He dumped every bit of it, that kid did. I told him not to. I tried to pot shoot that intruder, too, but can't see for nothing and missed him a mile."
"What intruder?" said Gusty.
"I told you all about it but you forgot. You're slipping, fellow, and have been since you let Pathia bleed to death."
"I don't like the way your senility is developing."
"I don't like intruders trying to butt in here, and that Rune has bananas in his head. He can't talk but he can think."
"Hitty loves him."
"Oh, well, I like him all right myself but what with the crisis above I think he bears a little guidance."
"What crisis?"
Sighing, Cappy adjusted his specs. "I'd get impatient with you if I didn't know I can be in the same shape as you at the drop of a hat, but I'm clear-minded at the moment so I'm reminding you there's a crisis in the city above us. Rune has made some kind of decision because he dumped all the explosives in the chasm. You know what that means, don't you?"
"What I want to know is what explosives?"
Cappy looked exasperated. "The ones you brought down here, you idiot, not to mention all the crud we've been burying all over Eastland. Don't you remember the meeting we had where we decided to blow up the whole city? How can we so easily forget what we're doing? Each new day is a new life for us except when we remember, as I'm doing now. Gusty, we've set ourselves up as a band of avenging angels, been judge and jury and condemned our worst enemies to death. We're like the pagans who ate their captives to acquire their strengths.
God's going to burn us for a thousand years." Cappy mopped his brow with a big red handkerchief. "Okay, I can see none of that grabs you. How about this? If those poor saps up there in the city find their way down here like that intruder I missed, it'll be our tough luck because we won't be able to blast the bridges."
"Why not?"
Cappy yelled his answer. "Because Rune dumped the dynamite!"
Pond was going bald. Ekler stared in wonder at his companion's thinning pate. When the world was ending how could such an ordinary, commonplace thing occur?
"How come we're having this meeting?" Pond wanted to know. "What is it, a last ditch farewell or piece of advice?"
"It's important," said Ekler.
Harshly Pond spoke. "We haven't had a meeting for weeks! Why didn't we have this one a month ago when we were all eating better? Look at how much weight I've lost! I gotta go out and scrounge, man I don't have time to sit here listening to you."
Actually he wasn't sitting and neither was anyone else. There were plenty of chairs in the elementary school classroom but it was too hot. Bare skin stuck to whatever it contacted. It was as if the web was in the very air these days, floating everywhere in invisible droplets, landing and waiting to fasten onto someone.
There were six former policemen, a baker and his wife, three merchants and a pair of jailbirds in the group. One of the latter spoke up.
"I move that we don't start this meeting or say word one until that fink blows." He pointed at the doorway where Bailey slouched.
"Yeah, get him out of here," said one of the policemen. "He's a traitor to his own kind. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could kick him."
"Out, bum!" said another, glaring at the man in the doorway. "We don't care how often you change sides but we don't want to associate with you. Get lost before we carry you out to the web and tuck you up for the night."
Bailey went away and Ekler called the meeting to order. He reminded them that they had to hurry because it was nearly dark. He had made copies of the map which he distributed. Then he talked.
The drought was over. The sky burst open like a punctured balloon and the dry earth welcomed the rain. Water flooded over the web, found the openings and dived through, saturating the eggs.
Sitting by a window of his hideaway on the sixth floor of Eastland's hotel, Ekler considered that he hadn't taken real advantage of past opportunities. He couldn't have since he had nothing to show today. For instance anchovies and pickles made an interesting salad but not a decent breakfast. He might have remembered this from days gone by while he was picking up what cans were left in the hotel pantry. His arms laden with goods, he passed up pancake mix and went for the anchovies. Now they were all he had left and the pantry was empty. All the pantries were empty.
He scratched the stubble on his cheeks and felt the rash on his skin. What he needed was a hot bath to get rid of the mist sent out by the web. Another thing he needed was a clean room in which to sit. Perhaps another city in which to be residing would be a nice thing to have.
Eating without appetite he watched the rain drop past in large gouts. Coming down from the sky in torrents, it first hit the web after which it slid through the open squares, gathered and fell like dripping syrup, not everywhere but only here and there. From where Ekler sat he could see it flooding the streets. It had nowhere to go for the gutters were clogged.
He had never been able to lose the extra twenty pounds before this and had told himself and others that it hadn't anything to do with his eating habits. Now he knew the truth. It was the old calories going down the hatch in the form of a soda before and after lunch, the hamburger before dinner, the ice cream dessert washed down with lemonade.
His stomach leaped and quietly subsided. He weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds, his exact weight when he was a high school freshman and went out for the football team. For about a year he got knocked about and then suddenly he was five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. The extra twenty sneaked on after he became a cop.
Belching anchovy gas, writhing as pickles hit his aching gut, he stuck his head out the window and got wet. He didn't care if the rain carried enough web material to stick him in that position eternally but the water was clean and refreshing. For the first time in weeks he shivered with a chill.
Down in the street he threw his shorts away and bathed beneath the falling gouts, went back upstairs and dressed in sneakers, jeans and shirt. Their owner had been smaller than he. His old holster didn't fit anymore and he had picked up another which he now strapped around his waist. His pistol carried a full clip as did the rifle and shotgun. It was all the ammo he possessed.
He didn't look directly at the web as he walked down the street but without wanting to he saw sufficiently with his peripheral vision. There was much activity as the gray bundles opened like rosebuds. Some were faster than others so that already small creatures were stirring with seeming reluctance, turning to the web and clinging with their weak little bristles, crawling like sick babies. Everywhere. All over the web.
Infant spinners were awakening to prepare for living in their beautiful gray world that the father had made ready for them. Many fell and lay in the streets with the rain spattering their faces. By and by their eyes opened, blue lamps gleaming feebly, confused, searching for stability, revealing the hunger that grew like fire in their beings. A few crawled from their incubators and immediately found human corpses that had been left for their use. They hastily sank fangs into the flesh, dug in with hand and foot bristles made strong, secured a hold and lustily nursed like human babies at their mothers' breasts.
It was like walking around inside an enormous spider web. As Ekler neared the Rumson building a gray lump fell at his feet. The young alien opened its eyes and looked up at him, malevolence already there as though it was aware that every other life form was its prey. Rolling onto its side it made grasping motions toward his feet. He sidestepped it and went on. Had it been the only one or had it been one of a dozen or even a hundred he would have killed it by scattering it in pieces, but it was an item among thousands of items and so he left it there to stir and jerk about until it was strong enough to reach some of the food hanging everywhere.
In the basement of Rumson's building the men were waiting for him. "What kept you?" said Pond. His expression revealed his terror. "Did you see them out there?"
"I saw them."
"I hope I have the guts not to take the first exit I see in there in those caves. I only hope I have the guts not to bolt. Staying won't be easy."
There was no guard in the cave. The bridges stretched away into the shadows and there was the sound of water dripping down in the chasms but there was no sign of a human being, young or old. The small cavern to the right was well-lighted and as Ekler checked it before signaling for Pond to bring in the others he felt a wild stab of regret. It was another world now and Bitsy would have to take her chances along with everyone else. If he had the opportunity he would try to find her and show her a way out.
The old people had to be crazy not to place a guard somewhere. The fact that they might have forgotten never entered his mind.
Each man took to a bridge, lowered himself onto his hands and knees and inched his way forward until he ran out of path or it grew too narrow. Ekler had chosen the fifth. He was almost to the other side when the hard rock beneath him suddenly ended. The light from his flash revealed a smooth platform leading into a rock corridor, but it was ten feet away. Even if he backed up and ran at full speed he couldn't make such a jump in his condition.
A few minutes later he stood looking at bridge number twelve. It seemed to be straighter and wider than the others with more light than usual at its end. He was about to step on it when Pond, who was standing nearby said, "Everybody duck, there's a guy over there in that cave!"
Crouching, Ekler saw that someone was indeed in the cave, an old man, not the one who had shot at him the last time but another who showed no weapon and who stood silently watching them.
"They're letting us in," Ekler said.
"It could be a trap," said Pond.
Ekler stood up straight. "Which bridge?" he called to the old man. "Help us get across!"
"Look at him," said Pond. "You'd think he was a statue."
"Maybe they won't help but at least they aren't doing anything to stop us."
"Not yet but suppose they have a welcoming committee waiting for us when we find the right bridge?"
"Which we won't do while we stand here talking." Ekler stepped onto the span ahead of him and walked across while Pond did the same on number thirteen. Coming to the end of his in the shadows, he watched as his companion continued on into the darkness.
"This is it!" Pond called back. "This one goes all the way!"
"Wait for the rest of us!" yelled Ekler.
"What for? You anxious to get knocked off?"
"Are you?"
"What's the difference? I'd rather go with a good clean shot and so would you. One thing I know is I'm not going back up to the street."
It seemed to Ekler that it took him too long to get back to the starting point. He was just a step ahead of two others who jumped onto the thirteenth bridge behind him. His instinct was to order them off and let him cross alone but then he thought of the hordes of people who might be coming this way before too long. Would they be orderly enough to cross one at a time? He walked forward and hoped the stone held.
It did and he stepped into a low tunnel that exited into a large cave filled with more old people than he had ever seen in his life. None of them were armed and it seemed to him that they hadn't sufficient strength to support a weapon. Most of them were twisted and bent with arthritis. More than a few were in wheelchairs, some leaned on crutches, nearly all the others had canes in their hands.
"This is the dumbest mistake we ever made," one of them said, a short wiry man with large black spectacles.
"Quiet," said another. Tall and thin, white of hair and reminding Ekler of an old tree, he stepped forward and spoke in a dry voice. "How do you do? My name is Augustus Worth. Who might you be?"
"Lieutenant Ekler, police. These others are a few of the survivors from topside. You're Gus Worth? A friend of mine told me about you. I should have paid him more attention. He was Mike Duffy."
"Was, eh? Too bad. I respected Duff. Tried to recruit him but he said he had a better deal."
"If it's all the same to you we want to take over down here."
The man with the large spectacles snorted. Mildly Gusty-said, "Go ahead. We could have stopped you but we didn't. Help yourself."
"There's a young woman here, I think, twenty years old, brown hair and eyes. She's retarded."
"Waif. Rune's wife."
"She's my sister. Where is she?"
"With him. With Rune, wherever that is, or he's gone somewhere and has hidden her. If he hid her don't bother looking for her. He's too wise to outfox and he thinks the world of her."
Ekler glanced at Pond. "Get going. Find the exits. Locate the weapons. Get food ready." To Gusty he said, "We'll help you get away."
"You don't need to. We always knew how. We just never wanted to go."
"What kind of clown are you?" said the youth to Rune who stood in the doorway of the hotel safe and beckoned. The youth and his companions were waking from their sleep in the walk-in compartment.
Rune kept beckoning and they looked at each other as if they were sending out mental signals that were easily understood. Splitting, they rushed the red-clothed figure from both sides but he suddenly wasn't in the doorway any longer; he had leaped straight up into the air and out of sight. In fact he was on a ledge above the safe entrance. It curved around the counter and ended halfway up a flight of stairs. The boys stood in the lobby and stared up at him with surprised expressions.
"I think I heard about him," said a dark-haired one. "He runs races with the night thing."
Rune gestured for them to look behind them. Through the holes in the front door where the glass had been broken crawled half a dozen spinners. They climbed to their feet and toddled toward the boys who began circling in an attempt to get to the door. On the stairway Rune hit the railing with a rock to get their attention and when he had it he beckoned for them to come up the stairs where he was. They seemed to prefer the front door except that more spinners crawled through from the street, ten or twelve in number.
On the second floor Rune led the way to a window overlooking a house while they were apparently debating as to whether they should try to jump him or wait to see what he had in mind. Leaping to the roof, he waited for them to follow. One by one they did. From there they went down a drainpipe to the street where they dodged spinners and headed for the Rumson building. They got as far as the rock wall in the basement and then the three balked.
"What's on the other side of that fissure?" said one who had long hair and an emaciated body. "I don't know if we should just follow him in there like dumb cows. He's a simpleton."
"He got us out of the hotel and this far," said the one with dark hair. "He's helping us. Do you want to go back out to the street?"
"I don't know if we can take him. What if it becomes necessary? He jumps around like a grasshopper. What if there's more trouble in there than we already have out here?"
"You stay, then. I'm going in."
Through the crevice and the caves beyond they went with great reluctance, some wonder and very little discussion, and when they reached the bridges Rune showed them which ones to cross. When he made no move to go with them they didn't want to go either. He pointed to himself and then at the caves on the other side of the chasm.
"He's telling us there are people over there," said dark hair. "I'm going. Who's coming with me?"
After they were all safely across Rune returned to the basement where he fashioned a gate in front of the doorway. Even a human child would be able to open it but the handless spinners might not.
On the street again he headed for the school where some adults and a large number of children were hiding. The huge doors were bolted and he banged on one with the rock for nearly fifteen minutes before someone went out the back way, circled the building and tried to catch him unaware. He was waiting with his gestures and his innocent face and instead of attempting to brain him with a club the man, whose name was Trench, made the others open the door.
They went with him, about two dozen people in the wake of an unusual pied piper, scarcely speaking above whispers, shrinking from the spinners who blundered everywhere, their faces mirroring their hope or at least their acceptance of fate. If the blond youth with no voice led them anywhere it was agreeable with them. Their new destination couldn't be any worse than the one they had vacated. For two days there had been no food in the school and every night Mordak had come to worry at the screened windows, to grin in at them and drool.
At the intersection of Dunn and Wylie sat a cottage all wrapped in a web. Like the City itself the small structure resembled a hive or an ill-colored igloo with the only garish feature being the front door which stood wide. Ekler passed the place by, having been up and down Wylie dropping copies of the map on porch steps and sidewalks. He passed and then went back when the sounds of a skirmish reached him.
Shouldering his way inside he brushed hard against the edge of the door whereupon it slammed hard behind him, shoving him on into a disheveled living room where a woman battled a trio of persistent spinners.
"Now you've done it!" she said without looking around. "How are we supposed to get out if you've locked us in?" She had a small ball bat with which she methodically clubbed the spinners though it didn't seem to do them severe damage. It did, however, prevent them from getting their fangs into her legs and by and by they wearied of their efforts and lay down on the floor to stare up at her and Ekler with eyes of hostile indigo.
He meanwhile had wrapped his right hand and arm in a towel and was trying to open the door.
"I didn't need your help," she said, beside him and watching intently as he struggled with the unyielding knob. The door was stuck or latched from the outside.
"How was I to know? I heard the noise."
"Thanks. It doesn't matter, and stop wasting your time."
He threw the towel on the floor. "There's probably another way out."
"No, I hunted for one when I was trying to get away from these three." Making swiping motions with the bat, she drove the spinners across the room.
Ekler broke a chair apart and attacked the door with a piece but it splintered against the heavy panels. Going into the bedroom he took apart a bed and tried ramming his way out with a rail.
"That door is made of oak," said the woman. "Incidentally my name is Nina. I used to be a student evenings and a waitress days."
"I'm a cop," said Ekler.
"How quaint to find someone still living in the past. Sorry. I'm still mad because you made the door slam."
He didn't blame her. Neither did he stand still but went through the house looking for some kind of heavy tool, found a screwdriver and hammer and began on the steel frame of one of the windows in the living room. Now and then he kicked a spinner away. The four panes in the window were broken but the openings were too small to accommodate either him or Nina.
"If we had all day you might get somewhere," she said behind him.
"I see you're the type that holds a grudge."
She reached out to pull on the bottom part of the frame and then gasped as a strand of webbing fell from its place on the ceiling and dangled down far enough to reach her. It laid itself on the back of her arm.
Again protecting his hand with the towel, Ekler grasped the strand and tugged.
"It's no good," said Nina. "I wouldn't mind losing some superficial flesh but not that much."
"Yes, it's on there too solidly. Just stand still and don't move while I get something to take it off."
"This is the most cleaned-out place I've ever seen," he said, coming back with a bottle of alcohol in his hand. "This and a can of paint are all that's here."
"What good will that do?"
"Unfortunately for some people I used to know, I learned too late that the web doesn't like this stuff. Or perfume, but there's none of it around." It took several minutes but the alcohol finally loosened the strand enough so that he was able to yank it off without taking too much of her skin with it. All the while the spinners had been active, like machines that didn't feel pain or experience a sense of defeat, staggering after the humans as if their central computer had issued them but one directive.
Ekler sat on the dilapidated couch and watched while Nina tried beating one of them unconscious. It was only when she hit the creature on the back that it reacted by squeaking in a shrill voice. Again and again she hit it up and down the spine and on the ribs and each time a blow fell the thing squeaked.
Giving up and straightening with an expression of disgust, she said, "I tried beating a rat to death once. I couldn't do that either."
The healthy spinner toddled toward Ekler, its fangs ready, its blue eyes fastened on his legs. When it was close enough he used his foot to shove it away. "Where's my hammer and screwdriver?" he said.
"Thinking of monkeying with the window some more? Better not try."
As she spoke a half dozen spinners skinned through the broken panes and dropped one by one to the floor.
Situated near the front entrance was a closet with sliding wooden doors and in a flash Nina was inside. Ekler was behind her in a moment and together they closed themselves into darkness. Outside the spinners threw their light bodies at the partitions, attempted to climb them, brushed impotent bristles back and forth across them, pried at the cracks and even tried battering their way through with sticks and bottles. Their breathing was like the eager panting of dogs. It came in the sides and under the closet door, hot and rank.
"I ought to have tried prying off one of the back windows," Ekler said in a low voice.
"They're tighter than the front ones," said Nina. "I've lived here a week and I know. The place was a pretty good fortress until I opened the front door and went out to investigate a scream." She chuckled without humor. "After all this time and after all the slaughter a scream can still agitate me."
He grasped the edge of his side of the door. "There are too many out there. We're going to have to hold them off."
"Maybe they'll go to sleep. Do you suppose?"
"I hate comparing them with babies but that's how they do it, not for very long and never all together."
"Then how do we get out of here?"
"What shape is the chimney in?" he said.
"As plugged with junk as I could get it. Besides it's too narrow for us."
"Then we'll have to wait until they get tired and go away."
"They won't do that. They're like dogs with bones. Hungry dogs,"
"We'll have to think of something and we ought to do it quietly," he said. "Do you notice how our voices seem to excite them?"
Stopping an infant spinner who was climbing past him in the web, Mordak painted a bit of gossamer lightness across its brow and communicated with it. No, it didn't know the location of any of those special ones who had glands growing on their chests but it had heard that a few were in the vicinity of the east gate of the city. Incidentally all the young were grateful to the father for having provided them with life, though the dreams in the incubator had revealed a different home-world. This one was acceptable, though. There was space and food and the spinners could provide whatever else they needed.
Mordak didn't really want to find an infant with the gland because when he did it meant his death. To him the web was sparkling silver in the sunshine, artistic and lovely, a haven and an expression of his soul. For so many days he had dwelt with its perfection and now the young were creating havoc everywhere, haphazardly spreading parts of corpses across the strands, dropping them on the ground, creating garbage on every street corner, indulging in nothing but their avarice. Had the parent had his way they would have followed his instructions in all things, dined at regular intervals and with grace, picked up after themselves, deposited all trash inside buildings and above all they would have kept the web uncluttered and unlittered.
From here on life would be too short for him to indulge in all-day sleeping. Though the sun summoned him to slumber he would remain awake and active until the last moments. Changing his lifestyle would bring him no undue discomfort as he was an adaptor who could literally alter the course of his own blood. All he had to do was speak to his physical systems, instruct them to function at full capacity and they would obey. From now on he was no longer the night thing. Now he was the father.
Red-pants, the human with the yellow fringe, stood on the street below and beckoned to him but he ignored the challenge. The human wished to destroy him and the father would have preferred dying in combat but the special infant needed the contents of his gland and so he mustn't needlessly jeopardize his life.
The truth was easy to acknowledge but not so simple to utilize in one's everyday existence. So thought Mordak as he scurried down a strand of webbing to the street. Amazingly red-pants went up a rope of his own, speedily and like a rat, legs inert as his arms performed all the labor. The end of the rope was attached to a lamppost. Mordak nearly caught the sneakered feet in his fangs as he went up the length of hemp with as much or more facility but red-pants wasn't tired and ran along a dead tension wire like an acrobat.
Up to the roof of a building went the human with the spinner behind him and now they were quite high above the street. Red-pants leaped across a goodly span, but at an unusual angle. Instead of jumping straight out and grasping the generous concrete block on the adjoining roof he streaked well to the left and caught hold of a meager line of bricks, and instead of continuing his flight once he had hauled himself erect he turned to watch his pursuer.
Mordak knew he had made a mistake while he was in midair. The concrete block was the only thing he could reach for now and he realized it was the wrong thing to do but he had no choice because it was too late to turn back. Before he grabbed the block he saw that it had been gouged loose. He had blundered full-tilt into the trap of red-pants.
He had hold of the block and then released it as soon as it came away from the roof. By the time he realized it had happened he was ten feet nearer the street and falling with breakneck speed.
It was too high. The drop could cripple him. He mustn't allow himself to strike the pavement. Thrusting out his arm he forced fluid from his hand bristles, saw a strand form and loop around the grill of a window below him. Bracing himself, he came to the end of the strand, jerked up hard, crashed with stunning force against the building.
So intense was his rage and pain that he couldn't cry out. Instead he hung limply, dangled on his own web and watched the blood from his wounds drip onto the street a few yards below.
Above him on the roof red-pants waited and then began climbing down the side of the building. Mordak heard him coming. Deliberately he forced air into his lung pods, tried in the space of seconds to prepare for physical exertion. Red-pants had a rock in his hand and began clubbing him in the side with it. The human didn't bother hitting his head but aimed at his back which was pressed hard against the window grille. Above all the spinner must protect his brain.
It didn't work and red-pants chose not to waste his time. When he saw that he wasn't going to be able to damage the spinner with the rock he gave off, took the rope at his waist and tied Mordak's wrists and ankles to prevent him from following right away. Then he dropped to the street and ran.
Qhaphvc V4
Pond sought Gusty's help in the search for Ekler.
"Even if he was right here in front of me I might not recognize him," said Gusty. "What you need is the kid. He could find a hound's tooth in a corn crib."
"You're talking about the guy in the red underwear?"
"That's him."
Pond waited for Rune to show up in the caves and then tried to corner him.
"Not that way," said Nox. "Keep chasing him and he'll take off. Get a couple of rocks and hit them together until you get his attention and then look right at him and keep making noise."
"Will he come to me if I do that?"
"I don't know. He might or he might run away. You're still a stranger and he can sense you have wrong feelings about him."
Pond scowled. "It isn't that I don't like him."
The old man laughed. "I know. He scares the socks off you."
Rune didn't appear to be in a running mood, paid heed as
Pond played a rock medley, finally sidled across the dining room cave and partially concealed himself behind a stalagmite.
"He's the big guy who's been in charge for the last several days," Pond said, trying not to betray any emotion. The old man had been right. He was scared of this baby-faced spook. "His name is Ekler and I'd appreciate it if you found him for me. If he's dead, come back and let me know, okay?"
Rune stared at him in silence, one-eyed, arms hugging the rock stalk.
"Ekler," said Pond. "Black hair, taller than you, a mole on his right cheek. You've seen him down here plenty of times. Go find him for me, please. We all need him. He's on our side." Pond looked and blinked. One second he had been staring at that single blue eye and a piece of white face and .now all of a sudden there was nothing but the chunk of rock. The kid had faded better than anyone he ever tracked.
He went back to the bridges and watched the old people take the children across. The young ones trusted those grizzled antiques, allowed them to pick them up and walk across the stony pathways with them. At the moment there were no crowds, just stragglers who usually came in singly or in pairs. Toward noon a band of twenty or so entered through the building basement on Kent Street. Like everyone else, they came face to face with the bridges, but at the other end. They walked toward Pond and the others, didn't nod or take time to speak but went one after another across the correct spans and allowed themselves to be led away. They were taken through the caves and out to the swamps.
"Those people in wheelchairs can't do anything but hurt themselves," Pond said to Gusty.
"You mean Kruge?"
Kruge had been going back and forth across a bridge, one-handed and laboriously, his head bobbing like a cork, showing the way for anyone who cared to follow. Surprisingly he had regular takers. Most likely he shamed people into going along with him.
"He's going to fall," said Pond.
"Sooner or later, probably, but he knows it. He figures that's better than a nursing home. Isn't that where we're gonna end up? We're too old to go to jail."
"Hey, it's life isn't it?" Pond said, angry.
"How would you know? You have thirty or forty more years before you're entitled to first-hand experience."
Kruge was on the near side of the chasm, sitting quietly and contemplating nobody knew what when he suddenly let out a howl as a spinner ran out of the tunnel behind him and bit him in the neck. It straddled his chest and hugged him in a tight embrace while seeking his jugular. His head went back to make it easy for the thing. Meanwhile his good hand flailed the air.
Whether he did what he did to kill the creature or whether he was in such pain that he lost his good sense the spectators couldn't say, but while Pond was on a dead run toward him the old man gave his wheel a push and went over the edge between two bridges.
"You said he was gonna go over," said Gusty. He knelt at the edge with one hand shading his eyes.
Pond didn't reply. He stood wondering why it gave him such a pain in the chest to look down at the old man with the husky voice and trembling shoulders.
There was little difficulty recruiting helpers and a crew was chosen to take care of spinners who entered. It would be a matter of simply spreading a sheet of netting behind the intruders and running them into the chasm where they could join Kruge and all the others they had killed.
Again Gusty was called upon to be the doctor. No one cared that he hadn't practiced legally for decades. In fact nobody cared about anything other than that his treatment was deft and his knowledge sure. Not only this, he had a complete pharmacy at his disposal. Clean bandages were slapped on washed wounds, medicated soap was handed out to those with sores and minor infections, crutches went to the lame, morphine eased the pain of passage into death.
When he wasn't doing what was second nature to him the doctor passed the time in an out-of-the-way cave with his friends. Most of those hours were spent holding Hitty in his arms.
"Weak as water," she said. "What's wrong with me?"
"Touch of flu."
Gripping his hand tightly she said, "I haven't coughed once."
"You know how many different kinds of flu there are. Some don't even show except that you feel like a rat."
"That's how I feel, like an old sick rat."
"Did I ever tell you I love you?"
"So often I'm sick of hearing it. Can you hear that buzzing in my head?"
"It isn't loud enough."
"Like an old sick rat."
Ekler's body quivered from the exertion of holding his side of the closet door shut. Now and then he stuck out a foot to help hold Nina's side closed but she always shoved it away.
They lay on the floor and made no noise other than to breathe with hard effort. The spinners could have plugged the air spaces around the door and rendered their prey unconscious but their brains hadn't yet developed that much. Perhaps in a day or two. It wouldn't be long. They grew more rapidly than human children. Now they no longer toddled but walked erect and even ran without losing their balance. They had grown to two and a half feet tall and weighed sixty pounds.
They were not yet ready to make webs but their manipulation of the brushes on their hands and feet was improving so that instead of leaving wet marks on the outside of the closet door they were beginning to make scratches. Before long they would be powerful enough to slash through the wood with single swipes.
"There's someone out there!" Ekler whispered. He released some pressure on the door and then had to use extra strength when it opened a crack. Bristles came in to bruise his hands.
"About two hundred monsters, I'd say!" said Nina. She gave a groan.
"You need help."
"Mind your own side." "Let me shove your edge with my foot."
"No. If they stay out there I'm going to wear down eventually, but until then this side is mine."
"Did you hear gunfire?"
"All I can hear is their blasted squeaking."
There was the sound of gunfire, though, and both heard it when the shooter forced his way into the cottage. The spinners attacking the closet door turned on him and were blown to bits by a double-barreled shotgun.
Shoving his side of the door open, Ekler looked out. "You!" he groaned. "I could have hoped for a friend."
"You!" said Bailey, red of face, perspiring, firing his pistols before reloading the shotgun. He always aimed at the spinners' backs, adding to the corpses piled everywhere.
"I thought you had no more ammo." Ekler didn't move but lay where he was. Quietly he laid a leg across Nina's body and hoped she would understand that she mustn't make her presence known.
"I always told you we were friends," said Bailey. "My buddy. Get on your feet and get out of there."
Out in the room, Ekler nursed his sore finger. "You've had enough of killing aliens, is that it? Now you're in the mood for bagging some human game, eh?"
"Shut up." Bailey gestured with the shotgun. "Outside. It stinks in here." On the sidewalk next to the street, he looked up. It was raining again. "I don't know what I'm in the mood for."
"Maybe you just like killing."
"Maybe that's it. I keep switching sides without really helping either one. I know about the caves. If I go out that way one of the boys will hand me over to Captain Vita or who-ever's waiting up the road. But if I managed to get you all . . . there can't be many of you left."
"You could play a hero, get your badge back shinier than ever," said Ekler.
Tiredly Bailey swabbed the rain from his face. "I never liked the way the world ran. Everybody was too timid."
Ekler looked up the wrecked street. "This is more to your taste?"
Poking the barrels in his stomach, the other said, "You know why I never liked you? Because you're a warrior in lace petticoats. You could have done it either way but you always took the civilized road."
"I thought that was why we were born in the first place, to see how civilized we could become." Ekler breathed against the barrels, felt the heat of his own fear. "It wouldn't be a challenge if we weren't up against non-civilization."
"Dry up. I know what you're gonna say before you say it. If I could get rid of those who are left of the squad I might get away with everything I've done.
"If you can't be a Hitler you might as well be a Nathan Hale."
Bailey turned the shotgun onto some persistent spinners, blasted them to flying shreds, calmly reloaded while he watched Ekler. He was insane and perhaps he had been that way from the start.
From the corner of his eye Ekler saw Nina come out of the cottage with the bat in her hand. Bailey saw part of her too and let loose with the shotgun, pulling it away at the last moment. She didn't take the full force of the gun but took enough to be knocked back into the house among the spinner corpses.
With a cry of anger Ekler hurled himself at the red-haired man who hit him in the head with the gun butt and kicked him as he fell. The woman was bloody and dead-looking so Bailey went back outside and began hauling Ekler down the street by the heels. Unaware of exactly what he intended doing with his prisoner he toyed with the idea of loading him in a grocery cart and dumping him off the park bridge. Or he might stick him in the web in a prominent place where the daddy monster was bound to see him.
The fact was Bailey wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to kill Ekler slowly but wanted him to be alive so that the torture would never cease. He had always hated Ekler but now his negative passion for the other man seemed to have no bounds.
Pausing in the middle of the street with two heels hard against him, he glared up at the web. He had to be crazy. It must be that thing up there. It was giving off insanity gas or something, or maybe the oxygen content was screwy. And it was terribly hot. Even the swim trunks were too heavy.
Breathing in ragged gasps he dragged the body to a spilled cart and loaded it in, ran down the street with it, intending to head for the park. The temperature was 130 degrees, the humidity 100 per cent. He fell a few times, now and then lost his hold on the cart and let it go careening along in front of him. Spinners came from every direction to see what was the matter but he kicked them away even when they began approaching in bunches.
Once he cursed for a full minute when he realized he no longer had the guns. Flat on his back on the sidewalk, all he could see was the blazing sun and the thick, dripping web above. The rain had stopped. The sun was blotted out by a spinner's face, eyes glittering, fangs bared. He took it by the throat and wrenched as mightily as he could, raised up and turned and placed his knee in its back, leaned hard and listened to it shriek.
He believed he was near the park but he was actually on the sidewalk of Main Street. While he knelt on the suffering spinner, a figure on the rooftop above him climbed down the side of the building. Bailey's hands left the spinner and he started up with a bellow just as a leg shot out and a sneakered foot caught him full in the face. He flew backward, sore and stunned.
Raising his head he watched the blond youth in red underwear run down the street shoving the cart and Ekler ahead of him. Bailey started to curse because he couldn't move. A spinner squatted on his chest and kissed him, alien-style, on the neck. It was a hard kiss that hurt. Another spinner kissed his belly, another the insides of his arms, another his leg. He tried to scream but they were all over him, besides which something blocked his throat so that he couldn't make sound. The last view he had was of a mass of gray bodies bearing him down.
Gusty was just finishing splinting a broken leg when Cappy came to tell him that Hitty was dying.
In a few minutes he was there. "Where does it hurt?" he said, lying down on the cot beside her.
So weak she could scarcely move, she still struggled to make room for him.
"Lie still," he said. "Fm so skinny I only need an inch anyway."
"I don't hurt anywhere. I'm numb. Every part of me is like sagging springs."
He placed his arm under her head and pressed her close, spoke into her hair. "Rest. Relax. Think how well you're cared for and how much you're loved."
The caves were being affected by the heat above in the city but the rooms were still comfortable. Over Hitty's head he noted how clean the dying room was. For a moment he felt a stab of anger that Cappy had brought her in here but the emotion soon subsided, was drowned out and suppressed by grief. No hospital in the world nor any sharp young medic anywhere could help cure Hitty of her problem. Having lived two or three decades longer than she had wished, she was preparing to go where she wouldn't irritate anyone with her for-getfulness and frailty.
Sobs leaked from Cappy's throat as he came back into the room. "They want you out there. Girl full of buckshot."
"Shut up. I don't care what they need." Hitty's breath on his throat was so gentle he could scarcely feel it. With his practiced senses he knew when it stopped altogether. She lay like a little dead bird that seemed to grow smaller as he stood up. Kissing her cheek, he straightened, marveling that he could refrain from gathering her to him. "Leave her be," he said. "I'll be back." Giving Cappy a gentle glance, he added, "No, I won't forget. I want you to help me put her in a nice place."
In the operating room the woman named Nina lay on a table. Not literally full of buckshot, she was conscious and talking about pain. In surprise she stared up at the tall old man as he picked up her hand and felt her pulse.
"I see you didn't get the entire blast."
"No, man, and I don't think he wanted to hit me at all after he saw me but there wasn't time for him to completely change his aim."
"You're lucky. Okay, I'm going to put you to sleep with this hypo and then I intend to strip you and dig out those pellets."
"What if you miss one?"
"I expect to miss several. When you start hurting we'll know where they are."
"You remind me of my grandfather."
"Close your eyes and dream pretty dreams. You'll be all right. Don't worry about your face. Just be glad none of them hit your eyes. You'll have two or three tiny scars but they won't damage your good looks."
With Cappy's help he carried Hitty out of the front entrance of the caves and into the rock maze.
"Wouldn't she be happier in the ground where she can turn to dust?" said Cappy. Tearfully he squatted in the midst of black boulders and refrained from looking directly at Gusty.
"Right now she doesn't give a hang about her body. She's gone through the doorway and she's done it willingly. Anyhow where am I gonna find a patch of ground to bury her in?"
"What about inside?"
"That part of her existence is finished. Get off your dumb heels and help me find a narrow cubbyhole. She'll lie undisturbed until eternity calls her to get up."
On his way back into the cave, plowing through ebb tide with Gusty close behind, Cappy suddenly cried out and sat down in the water.
"What's wrong?" said Gusty and when the other just sat staring ahead like a statue, the water sucking at him with greedy tongues, he knelt and looked into the eyes. They were vacant like the head behind them. Cappy wasn't in mind blank or even suffering from a mild stroke. The old man was gone as if snuffed out. His heart still beat once in a while, his blood coursed, his organs functioned but there was nothing left of himself. In an instant or in the time Gusty took to lean over him Cappy shut down all the systems that had made him what he was. All that remained was the bespectacled, wizened little shell that would be cleaned and fed and put to bed a few times until it realized it was too uninhabited to persevere. Then it would keel over like an empty poke and eventually someone would come along and find a final resting place for it.
Outside the city, in the swamp, an army lieutenant named Hance waited for a group of survivors to squeeze from the crevice in the ground before squeezing in himself with eighteen men. They were the first troops to enter the premises since the captain's force had been covered over with a web on Main Street weeks before. Following the directions of people inside the caves they finally arrived in the large room with the bridges where Ekler and Pond waited for them.
"It will serve no purpose for you to go up there," Ekler said. It wasn't all he had said and it obviously made no more of a dent than any of his words.
On the contrary, Hance assured him, the army had to know how to deploy its troops when they were sent in.
"What troops?" said Ekler. "They already tried that once before, or have you forgotten? At that time there was only one alien. Now there are thousands and though they're young they're growing fast. Two of them are capable of bringing down a man."
The Army was making plans and of course the first intent was to take charge of the situation. It couldn't very well do that until it apprised itself of what kind of situation existed.
Ekler didn't think Hance was an idiot any more than he believed that the man who had ordered him in here knew anything about what was happening. "You have no authority. That's your problem, lieutenant. You think you do."
Whatever Hance hadn't, he would assume that it made no matter. Those were his orders.
"You've never even seen one of them. I'm telling you if you go up there you'll not come back. You need experience to fight them. You've got rifles and they're no good."
Not that the lieutenant asked for help but Ekler and his men would turn down any invitation to go up just now. It was early morning which was the aliens' most active time. The afternoon sun slowed them down somewhat and no doubt this meant that eventually they would become like the parent and roam only at night, but for the time being they seemed to sleep or rest scarcely at all. Ekler and the other survivors didn't feel like throwing their lives away and they wished the lieutenant felt the same.
He forgot to tell them about the heat.
It was extremely close in the basement of the Rumson building but it was tolerable. Remembering Ekler's remark about the rifles, the soldiers drew their pistols. For the first time in their lives they walked into an oven.
On the boulevard they staggered about like hicks in New York except that they weren't gawking up at the buildings. It was the dripping web at which they stared and glared, at the innumerable little gray shapes climbing and crawling everywhere, at the sweat diving into their own eyes.
Nobody suffered from instant mind stall or brain fry but a few went berserk when their light fatigues made the temperature rise a quick ten or fifteen degrees. Within thirty seconds not a helmet remained on a single head.
Hance was sickened by the heat. His first thought was of his earlier suggestion to his superior that the local survivors ought to be in charge, at least at first. His second thought was that the major was safe and comfortable in his tent and could never imagine what hell lay beneath the stinking web.
About to entertain his third thought, the young officer gave it up when a spinner swung through the air on a strand, grasped him by the head with its feet and continued swinging across the boulevard toward the roof of a high building. Before it reached its destination it deliberately let him go, watched him fall fifty feet where he lay on the concrete sidewalk with his skull crushed.
The eighteen soldiers never fired a single piece and in fact dropped their weapons as they scattered or were borne to the street beneath a load of spinners. None was sufficiently mindful to run back the way he had come but they all staggered blindly toward whatever their broiling brains told them was safety.
By now the spinners could make their hand and feet bristles rigid enough to gouge out eyes or pierce vital organs. Their favorite point of attack was the back of the neck where they toughened their fangs by gnawing on brittle vertebrae and limbered up their bristles by plunging them into soft throats or bellies.
The major in his comfortable tent on the hillside a few miles away would wait a long time before he received a report from Hance's little group.
Mordak felt a stab of pure terror as he saw the bump on the youngster's chest. It wasn't round and full like his own and he immediately relaxed. Beckoning the child to come to him across the web he held it with one arm while turning it so that he could poke his bristles into the top of its heart and brain. Holding it while it struggled, he raked two deadly prongs up one side of its back and down the other, cleaned his protrusions on its hair and then threw the lifeless carcass away.
Already he had dispatched several such defectives and in fact considered himself to have been merciful by destroying them. Their self-image would have remained worse than poor had they lived. This way the species was made more perfect. He would continue to search for and get rid of defectives until he came across the father of the future at which time he would hopefully fulfill his duty with dignity. Also with fear, probably. Life was worth living even on Earth which had turned out after all to possess the necessities.
Down below in the street red-pants stood beckoning. Fool, the alien thought. You risk your life when all you have to do is wait and let the future father kill me.
In an instant his thin blood chilled. Across the web came a fast child with a prominent bump on its chest. Keen of eye, Mordak could detect no lumpiness on the raised globe, no sagging of the center. Dignity flew wherever good intentions had a way of flying as the adult spinner created a ridge in his back and rode the web at lightning speed to another part of the city. Down below, red-pants watched him flee and frowned. Up in the web, the future father watched and grinned.
Like a good parent Mordak surveyed his domain for anything that might threaten the children. There was little he could do about the humans who were fortunate enough to fight for their lives. The young didn't have to kill for food since there was plenty clinging to the web and it was a fact that they required diversion during the weeks of their development so if any of them died at play this was also a fact, not a particularly regrettable one. As long as the father survived to nourish the future parent with the special nutrients in his chest gland the species lived and thrived.
Steam arose from the city streets to meet the steam exuding from the ornately fashioned canopy. The rain had stopped and already dry patches showed on rooftops and sidewalks. Mordak would have preferred that it rained until long after his demise. He had expended more than enough energy slapping webbing across domiciles that had begun to burn. Flash fires were especially exhausting because he had to labor with rapidity and without respite to prevent their spreading.
Had he the time he would spread his liquid over each and every building in Eastland thereby assuring that there would be no wholesale conflagration. No flames reckoned in his practical experience, and indeed he failed to recall his own infancy and father, but his dreams had taught him about threats and so he was prepared for every contingency. At least he believed so.
What was the purpose of life? He didn't know. It was simply there and one accepted it the same way one anticipated tomorrow, perhaps with little or no zest but with abiding faith. Endings were transitory, continuation inevitable. If there were a spinner afterlife, and the abiding faith took care of any questions that might arise on that count, then certainly Mordak figured to occupy space there but only after he heeded the call of nature. With all his soul, or nearly all, he desired to immolate himself at the feet of the future father and yet there burned in him the thought that once he did that he would never again slumber in the web, taste the sweetness of flesh, commune with the spirits. Death would be an old sore, a detestable infection, a pox.
A sun ray hit him in the eyes and blinded him. Closing them for a moment and shading them with an arm, he looked straight down at an alley and spied a multitude of people pouring down a basement stairwell and disappearing through the doorway. Excited, he swung to the street and accidentally fell into an open manhole. In the darkness his vision turned keen. He wasn't interested in Eastland's drainage system. It went nowhere, exited into a great deposit of gravel and soft earth.
Angered at his clumsiness he came up out of the hole with a snarl, searched for someone to rend, discovered that there was no horde of humans anywhere, not even so much as a single light- or dark-skinned loathesome in the stairwell. Bounding down to the door, he burst into an empty basement. Full and dark, it stretched around him smelling of humanity, secrets and perfidy yet he saw nothing out of the way. Far back in the shadows was a wall decorated with fissures, garnished with graffiti, patient in age. He admitted to himself that there was nothing here.
Up and out on the street with offended demeanor, he attempted once again to conjure the image of all those fleeing persons. Had he gone down the incorrect stairwell? Could it have been a neighboring one down which the enemy fled?
Searching among the dead lying here and there, he reassured himself that there were no pretenders by bestowing ghastly wounds upon those who displayed none.
Something was happening. He felt it. Something was occurring behind his back, beyond his attention span, under his nose. He hated that it was so and intended putting a halt to it.
"Mostly it was shock," Nina said to Ekler. She lay on a cot in the recovery cave and held onto his shirt-sleeve. "My wounds aren't too bad, but when that stuff hit me I thought I was dead. Felt as if I flew a mile."
He placed his hand on hers. "I woke up in here myself. One of my friends sent someone after me. As soon as I woke up I sent them after you."
"What happened to the man who shot me?"
"His name was Bailey and he's dead.
Her hand was restless, found its way out from under his. Again she tugged at his shirt sleeve. "I think I'm too bad to move, though."
"In a few hours. Everyone has a number. You'll be taken through the caves, lifted out in the swamp and carried to where the army is camped a few miles away."
"I don't think I'm well enough."
"Think of it," he said. "Freedom. Safety. Normal, fat, human people."
A smile and a scowl clashed on her face. "It was in that closet, when we were lying there telling each other we were going to make it. I don't want to go out of here without the only friend I've got."
"Sorry. We need a few able bodies so you could stay if you were well, but you aren't. You'll have to go when your number comes up."
Ekler walked into the old people's cave and stopped as shock after shock went through him in waves. After all this time and after all the pain he had suffered, there was Bitsy at last, there was his sister sitting calmly in her husband's embrace while he hugged and kissed her.
She gave a little glad cry when she saw him, came for an embrace but then left him and went back to the blond youth who received her without blinking an eye. He took a brush and passed it through her long hair, put a red ribbon around the tail, tied it securely.
Ekler felt as if he had wandered into the wrong world. The old ones and the odd young ones were inhabitants as unfamiliar to him as strangers. The kook in the red underwear—his brother-in-law—was built like a gladiator, fiercely handsome, gentle with Bitsy, while the old ones sat and dozed or watched the newcomer with quiet eyes.
He sat on his heels, didn't go too close. "Bit?" he said and when she looked at him he smiled. She smiled back. She was all right. Her clothes were clean, she was well-fed looking and in fact seemed a mite tubby about the waist. The thought startled him. She had been his responsibility for too long and now everyone in the cave, including Bitsy, expected him to turn her over to . . . her husband. He sighed aloud.
"Don't worry about her," said an old man—Gus, the doctor. "As long as he's breathing she'll be taken care of."
"I never considered that she would ever be a wife."
"Or a mother."
Ekler frowned in irritation.
"He loves her and she loves him. Doesn't that make it acceptable? We saw to it that they had a proper ceremony."
"She isn't ready."
Gus smiled. "Your problem is that you're prejudiced in favor of your own flesh and blood. Here's a man, Rune here, of sound body and unusual mind who took your sister to wife, and if he has good taste and she suits him and he didn't force her then any complaints about the situation are coming only from you. Do you want to keep her under your wing, is that it? You don't look like a hen to me."
"Why don't you jump in the chasm?"
"Instead of worrying about this child whose time is taken up why don't you go into recovery and hold the hand of that Nina girl who was all shot up? She won't mind. The only subject she's interested in is you."
Had Mordak regularly communicated with his offspring he would quickly have learned about the escape routes into the caves. As it was he chose to be aloof, took brief naps in well concealed places, usually inside buildings where the future father normally wouldn't venture, and at night rode the web like a sophisticated rat trap. That the rats appeared to be dwindling in number failed to dawn on him until one ebon nocturn when he went hunting for something to slay.
The hospital was a morgue. Many of the beds were occupied by decomposing corpses while the hallways were littered with equipment, body parts, a few dead spinners and debris that blew in through the open doors and windows.
There weren't many bodies in the school buildings, only the wreckage of desks, tables, chairs, books, chalk, audio-visual material, dirty socks, gym suits. Spinners swung on parallel bars, dangled from rings, bounced on trampolines, climbed ropes, pausing in their activities as the father came in through a window to glare about and then retreat like a frothing demon.
The cathedral was a maze of webs, outside and in. Climbing through a broken window, Mordak crawled onto a lacework of horizontal strands and looked about, saw artistic curves, loops, curliques stretching away in the distance, glanced down and saw the layers he had created two feet apart, broken here and there by a perpendicular pattern. Dust had caused the work to sag. It wasn't like the canopy over the city which had thickened and hardened until each strand was three inches in diameter and tough as pigskin.
He went topside and rang the bell but only the offspring came into the streets to look up. Where was the enemy? Where was someone to pursue? His anger intensified. He had deliberately left the majority alive, astutely cut off all exits. That was part of the plan, the natural course of action.
Up into the web in the sky he went to ride from end to end and side to side as he searched for human activity and finally found some in a small group preparing to sneak from a building on Main Street. Screeching like a triumphant devil he plummeted to the pavement and paused in confusion when the people ran into the adjoining domicile instead of retreating into the one they had exited.
Through an unbroken window he went feet first, landing on wrecked furniture. The back end of a child was just turning a corner at the end of a hallway. On fleet, flattened brushes he sped after it, turned the corner and burst into a room bare of everything but blank walls.
Not stupid like his children, he threw open the closet door and kicked down all the partitions inside, took to a wooden plank bridging a dirt culvert and climbed up a ladder into an office in the next building. Facing him were three doors leading into seemingly endless corridors. He didn't know which one to take. There was no noise to indicate in what direction the wretched humans were even then fleeing away from his kiss of death.
That wasn't the point. More eminent was their purpose and destination. Had they fashioned such an escape route merely to keep out of his clutches?
It didn't matter that much. He would soon die and there remained comforting hobbies for him to pursue, though none was so satisfying as killing one's mortal foes. High in the web again he stretched out with his back parts stuck to a heavy strand and malevolently guarded empty streets.
Nox and Gusty were the only old ones left and now a group were preparing to take Nox away with them. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he clung to the last friend he had in the world and begged to be left in his home.
"It's because of your bad leg, not because of your age," Gusty told him, letting the other paw him and even rip his shirt. His own eyes were wet. He and Nox went back many years.
"That don't make sense! I can walk!"
"But not well and you couldn't run if you had to, and I guess we're all going to have to run before this is over."
"They're gonna take me to one of those homes!" Nox said, sobbing with fresh grief. "Why can't I just die? Every day I say to myself, 'This is the day, you good for nothing old buzzard, the day you're gonna tell your heart to stop and it's gonna listen to you and do it.' But it doesn't! It never does! I just keep living and they're gonna take me to one of those dumps where everybody wears diapers. It'll be across the street from a cemetery. That's the way they are."
Gusty hugged him tight. "Go on, Nox. This isn't my idea. If I had my way we'd stay down here and live until we turned into a couple of toadstools. Go on and go with these kind folks."
Long after the wails of his friend died away, he heard them echoing in his brain, shrill and desperate and lonely like the unvoiced cries of a condemned convict as he sat his cold butt in an electric chair. There was no real home for Nox. That kind of belonging was only for part of the human race.
He went into the social cave and took Rune into his arms. The youth kissed his cheek, touched his brow.
"You take her and you run, Rune. Now listen to me and quit shaking your head. You know what has to be done but it isn't going to be you. What it requires is someone who's done, and I'm so done I can't wait for the flags to quit flying."
Rune hugged him, pulled his head down, kissed his hair.
"Don't be a baby," said Gusty. "I know you're hearing every word I say. You know out there in the hills? There are a lot of strangers waiting for the survivors to come out and they mean well but I don't want you to go to them. You hear me? You'll be better on your own, so you take your wife and you go north through the swamp where the woods are thick. Go north, Rune, and carry her if you have to but get clear of the city and the strangers. You got that?"
Giving him a final kiss Rune bounded over to Bitsy, scooped her up and ran, and Gusty hoped he was being obedient and running toward whatever weird life he would work out for himself in the sometimes inhospitable world of Earth.
From all over the city the survivors came to see if the maps were a cruel hoax. There were several different routes that led to the various buildings opening into the caves but only one route was drawn on each map. If there happened to be a heavy concentration of the enemy near an individual's destination then he retreated into his hole to wait until there came about a dispersal, unless of course he owned a shotgun or hot touch, which was seldom the case, but then he burned or blasted his way ahead.
They knew not to be obvious about the fact that they were bent on leaving the city. The growing spinners possessed poor deductive powers, not nonexistent ones.
A man and a woman headed for an alley by darting, crawling and clambering through a seemingly endless line of wrecked vehicles. The doors had been opened or removed and the couple silently moved between the enemy hosts congregating in the street. Sometimes they lay side by side in a bus beneath an open window and listened to the spinners squeal and squeak mere feet away, or at other moments they huddled on the floor of an auto waiting for the sun to come through the web and strike the eyes of a group of deadly youngsters. As soon as the spinners were blinded the couple ran between the open doors, entered another car before they were spotted, climbed through the open box placed there by a member of some escape crew. Beyond the box was an upended truck with open doors. They went in this fashion from one place of concealment to another until they crawled through a window into the littered basement of a building. Then they searched for the entrance into safety.
An elderly couple with no energy, weapons or apparent hope took to that same route, managed to get as far as the upended truck before the spinners set up a hue and cry. It wasn't the couple they had spied but a lone man crossing the rooftops above the street. Up strands of webbing and the sides of buildings went the children of Mordak in pursuit of the unfortunate, leaving the couple alone. They left the maze and sedately walked to safety. Meanwhile the spinners caught up with the man on the roof and threw him down to the street.
A small boy and his mother managed to get within a few yards of an open window of the Drake building, came sneaking through and across mounds of rubble beneath sagging webs. All of a sudden a cruel hand reached into a mound and snagged the mother by the hair, yanked her into the open. The spinner was strong and malicious, bore her high and stuck her in the web. When she was securely attached he spread himself along her body and buried his fangs in her throat. Her child wandered into the middle of the street and began to cry, attracted the attention of murderers in the vicinity, cried harder when they made haste to greet him. Out of the Drake building rushed Mordak's nemesis, the man in red, red-pants, to snatch up the child and carry him all the way around the building. By the time the pursuers arrived back at the starting place the two were nowhere in sight.
Down Main Street in broad daylight strutted three teens armed with swords and machetes. While they fought, a group of children fled along a nearby escape route. The three didn't pause to do combat but hacked and sliced while moving forward toward another way of escape. Two of them made it, climbed through a car and dropped into an open manhole under the back seat. The third was taken and slaughtered after which a search for the others was begun. Again and again the spinners climbed into the car as they had seen the humans do but there was nothing beyond the other door except solid piles of rubble.
The sick, the wounded, the crippled and the helpless made a last-ditch effort to save themselves. Bands of derelicts read the maps and followed them, carefully and at night, fearing the young spinners more than the parent. Mordak couldn't be everywhere at once and the young monsters were usually so exhausted by nightfall that they sometimes didn't react to the challenge of a moving human.
It usually meant death if Mordak spotted them but he didn't always and there was no one so adept at sneaking as a desperate human. Those who were trying to survive were starved and bone-thin, could accommodate their frames in the flattest of concavities, could pass through spaces with snake-like facility or hobble with frantic energy when the way ahead was clear. They were practiced at holding their breath, waiting for a crisis to pass or enfold them, taking advantage of the enemy's confusion.
Nothing frightened them if it held promise and so they poured through cracks and fissures in basement walls like liquid flesh, hesitated not at all upon finding themselves in a huge cavern filled with bridges spanning a frightful abyss. Scarcely waiting for the safe ones to be pointed out by their mortal saviors who stood waiting to greet them, they crossed over and were away. They fled from a pox the scars of which might never show but which would never fade no matter how long they lived.
The normal exit from the caves into the swamp was cut off to prevent more troops from coming in. After hearing what happened to Hance and his crew those who came after didn't want to go up into the city but got in the way by insisting upon knowing the purpose behind every maneuver on the part of Ekler, Pond and the handful of leaders. Though having no suggestions of their own, they attempted to assert control.
One aggressive colonel told Ekler pointblank that he was obligated to accept any help the government sent in. Ekler responded by urging him to take his people and go out in the swamp and assist a group of survivors who were doing battle with some spinners. The colonel was dubious that such a battle could be waged practically under the army's nose but he and his men went back outside whereupon the main fissure was closed. Gusty showed Ekler and the others how to remove a few well-placed boulders so that anyone trying to come in would face not a narrow passageway but a crevice whose bottom fell away into an abyss.
"We did it and I know they were in our hair but tell me why we really got rid of them," Pond said to Ekler. His expression brooding, he stood in the conference cave and leaned against a stalagmite.
"I didn't think they were the ones to do anything helpful," said Ekler.
"Someone has to. We work all day without saying it but the truth is there. We know how the aliens operate, right? This is our town and we've learned the facts. One of these days all those young ones will be grown and then instead of one night thing we'll have more than we can count. Maybe each one of them is planning to shower us with eggs only they won't be doing it in Eastland but in every city up and down the coast."
"And elsewhere," said Ekler.
"That's what we've all had in mind. If we had any sense we'd get out of here and dump it in the lap of people like that colonel."
"He can't do it. The aliens are contained inside the city limits for the time being. It has to be done now or we might as well forget it. Once they begin to spread not even the army can wipe them out."
"I'm surprised they don't drop an atom bomb on us," said Pond. "They probably would if they knew the true situation. The survivors are interested in getting saved and I doubt if the government knows what to make of their reports."
"So what do we do?"
"Too bad we don't have a bomb of our own."
"What if we have?"
"What do you mean?"
"I'm beat. Go hunt up Gus and bring him here and I think he can explain to both of us."
Gusty wasn't far away, came back with Pond and stood shifting from one foot to another. "I did most of it," he said with reluctance. "Usually I can't remember and I don't know whether that's just a convenience for my conscience. You see, we all had lapses of reason or knowing what world we were in and sometimes we believed the other inhabitants were savages. I guess that sounds like paranoia but it wasn't. It had to do with our failing memories. Our resentment toward society would boil over and then all of a sudden we'd forget everything but our emotions, and then we'd go topside and execute someone who had given us a hard time, or we'd bring in some more weapons and ammunition.
"Or you'd plant some incendiaries," said Ekler.
Gusty nodded. "We liked magnesium best because it'll make an inferno when it burns. Then there was dynamite and grenades. We even brought down a lot of fireworks."
"How come you remember so well now?" said Pond.
"I haven't had a lapse in several days. I've no doubt it's because of all the excitement. I'm sorry I'm remembering. It's a blessing when a man can forget his evil."
"You didn't know what you were doing."
The old man shook his head. "You mean I'm a multiple personality? What I am is a fractured one and when the parts are added up the sum is pretty rotten."
"Where's the stuff?" said Ekler. "I hope you haven't forgotten."
"Where we buried it? I remember everything, where mine is and where the others put theirs. They acted on my orders. All the evil is mind."
"That's one item I wish you would try and forget because we don't need it but we need everything else you're thinking. How would you describe the potential of the material you hid away in the town?"
After considering for a moment or two, Gusty said, "A terrific noise and enough heat to make the whole place a stubble."
Ekler turned to Pond. "So?"
"That's it, then. We wait for the rest of the survivors and then we do it."
"Not we," said Ekler. "Just me."
"No, I'm the one," said Gusty.
Red-pants didn't try to lure Mordak down to his level but stood on a rooftop and emptied a double-barreled shotgun at him. The adult spinner fell from his place in the web, grabbed at a single strand to dangle and drop, dangle and drop some more until he was prone in the street.
A hundred spinners raced to his side, a dozen bore him aloft. With their tongues they laved his wounds, sealed openings with their thin lacquer, soothed his outrage with their affection. Where tissue had separated it drew back together, where pellets nicked heart and brain or even severed connections the edges adhered.
Within minutes Mordak was his old vitriolic self. Pushing his children away and without so much as a word or thought of thanks he sped to the base of the building upon which red-pants still stood and began to climb. The adversary promptly dropped a boulder that hit a window ledge and bounced against Mordak's left shoulder. Immediately the arm lost its mobility. Clinging to the ledge with one brush hand, he looked up and bared his fangs.
Still he climbed, haltingly and laboriously and by and by the pain in his shoulder subsided. Tentatively he raised the arm, pulled with his hand, made headway. Once more he showed red-pants his fangs, this time in triumph. The former snarl had been a threat. Now time and circumstance were his. He would rend the alien in red, rip off his yellow-thatched head and toss it to the children who would suck out the eyes and brain and prop the empty skull on a fence post.
Down came another boulder which he avoided with ease. He leaned outward as far as he dared and made a throwing motion toward his enemy who was now quite close. A long string of lacquer came from his hand to hurtle toward red-pants who seemed to possess impossible foresight. Almost before the web shot in his direction he stepped aside so that it missed and went on past him.
Not thinking about the gun, Mordak made a mighty effort to bridge the last of the gulf and as he raised his head above the final line of bricks there were the twin barrels of the shotgun aimed at his eyes. Light was blasted into darkness and pain and the last thing he did before he fell was to grab hold of the end of the strand he had made.
Though he desired death to claim him he made his mind think of extenuating the strand so that he came up hard against the building instead of plummeting to the pavement. Thoughts of the future father made him save himself. Without the nutrients in his gland the child would perish in his sleep.
His eyes blasted to pulp, the top part of his head gone, he felt for and found an open window, climbed inside, began crawling toward deliverance which lay wherever red-pants was not. There was no point in his trying to outguess the human who wasn't like his fellows and knew beforehand things that were about to occur.
Toward the street and loud squealing Mordak hastened on his belly, feeling for stairs and walls, hastening around or over obstacles, listening with battered ears for the sound of triumphant feet on hallway floors.
Somewhere along the way he sensed that red-pants had retreated, had decided not to pursue because of the numerous children who were about. For several minutes he lay in terror that he was guessing wrong. Red-pants was guileful and full of treachery, single-minded and endowed with more than an individual share of talent and skill.
Whimpering in pain he pushed his way through the lobby and out the front door where he was besieged by his offspring. As they bore him away to the web where they would administer to him he knew that his day was done. Forever blind, he must never again expose himself to red-pants. It would mean his death and the end of his species.
When he was able to do so he raised a hand, moistened the forehead of a youngster and gave the order to seek out the special young one and bring him hither.
"How many are there left down here?" Ekler said and Pond grunted his reply.
"Forty-three."
"It's up to you to see that every one of them gets safely away."
"There might be more survivors coming down."
"We've waited three full days without seeing a single one."
Pond continued to scowl. He was glum and short of temper. "This started out as a cooperative effort."
"Nobody wanted to leave, remember? Not the old ones, not Nina, not Rune."
"You might not make it. Did you ever think of that?"
"This is one time when everybody in the territory will recognize a failure, right? For miles around it'll be dead quiet and then you'll know I missed."
"Then what?"
Ekler laughed. "Don't ask me. You'll be strictly on your own."
"Where's Gus? I don't trust that old man."
This time it was Ekler's turn to scowl. "He's long gone. You're stalling. Get going. While you're standing here gabbing the army is liable to be planning to lay a big one on us."
They shook hands and Pond went away, took the last of the crew and skinned through narrow fissures to the swamp, located the bivouac on the hillside.
Inside the cave Ekler packed the equipment on his back, tightened the special belt around his waist and headed through lighted tunnels toward dimmer, more obscure ones. He was following the directions Gusty had given him. Somewhere near the end of his route he would come to a narrow, damp tunnel through which he would have to crawl. At its end was a clump of boulders and above that was a manhole. Once he reached this he would be three blocks from the Retreat which was his ultimate destination.
Soon he was in total darkness and had to use his lamp. The ceiling was low, the walls wet and he tried not to breathe too rapidly as he moved along the uneven floor. In the back of his mind was the idea that there was always a way out of every danger. Right then he couldn't imagine what his would turn out to be but he wasn't so fatalistic that he was certain he wouldn't find one. He intended to start a conflagration on the Retreat's third floor that would spread until the city literally exploded. After he did his work an escape passage would reveal itself to him so that he needn't die.
First, though, he had to locate the tunnel leading to the Retreat, the one Gus had painstakingly described to him. They had gone over and over all the twists and turns he was supposed to make, and now there was no problem that he could see except his excitement and dread. Planning with his friends all around him was one proposition but creeping through darkness all by himself was another. His mortality was a heavy cloak weighing him down and for the first time in his life he realized how dependent he was and had always been upon fate. So long as he walked through reality without laying his life on the line he was taken care of, but now the situation had changed. By his decision to go up and set fire to Eastland amid thousands of enemies he had narrowed his odds to minuscule proportions.
At least he needn't worry about Bitsy. One of the crew had been out in the swamp when Rune went by with her, heading north away from the troops, heading into civilization with his bride, a pair of aberrations who had a better chance of surviving than anyone in Eastland.
He slowed as he approached a flat wall marred by five deep fissures. Number two from his right. That was the one Gus told him to take. He was supposed to be cautious and count correctly, get the lamp full on those cracks so he wouldn't make a mistake because number two from the right was the only fissure that went through.
Slipping into the opening, he had a decided sense of doom. A few minutes later he was blundering about in confusion. Around the bend had been a funny little opening that was impossible to find again when he decided to go back. A miniature amphitheater with dozens of openings had presented itself to him and he took the one nearest his left, as per instructions, but then he exited into another amphitheater, turned to see where he had been and spied six entrances or exits without being able to say which he had just come through. Walking straight ahead he went into number three from the right, entered a series of corridors with forks at every turn, changed direction to go back and realized he didn't know the way.
He was lost in a maze. For a while he wandered around attempting to locate something familiar but at last he sat down to rest. Having done business with a fox, he had been outfoxed. Gus had sent him this way so that he would get lost. Gus had done this, that treacherous old man. While he sat here in dank caverns anguishing over his own impotence Gus was going to haul his creaking carcass topside and make an attempt to perform a young man's mission.
The caves were as they had been when he first came into them decades ago, quiet and hollow, lonely like graves, shadowy and yet comforting to one who was unwanted by the world. He had gone about shutting off machines, dismantling generators, unswitching things. Hitty's rocker was placed against a wall, Pathia's cane was laid on her bureau, Cappy's spare specs were tucked in a drawer, Kruge's chocolates were stored in a cupboard. He went about tidying up, grateful that he had the work, glad for the companionship he'd had all those years. His friends, the one woman he had loved, people with whom he shared humor and tragedy—they constituted the last part of his life and it had been the better part for him and for them.
All their frustration and bitterness could have been left behind once they walked through these dripping portals but like most of their species they had insisted upon retaining all that which could corrode their joy.
He felt spry this day, perhaps because the image of Hitty was so clear in his mind. It was as if she were there beside him, her hand on his arm, light but so substantial.
"Not too close, honey," he said. "Got a job to do and then we'll sit down together for a chat."
He donned the same manner of clothing and gathered up the same type of equipment he had given Ekler before sending him into the maze, pants and shirt of light but tough material, sneakers, a light leather shield to fit around his neck in the event that any fangs nibbled there, a belt with niches, a quiver full of sparklers, quart of gasoline, sawed-off shotgun and box of kitchen matches. Now all he had to do was walk and crawl a ways before he could join Hitty.
Blood atonement was what he had in mind. Caring about the disposition of himself in eternity, he would do what he could to clear his record by shedding his blood so that others might live. Hope and grim determination must sustain him in this last hour for they were practically all he had going for him, those and the fact that he knew he was the man best suited to do the job. No amount of tutoring could have prepared Ekler or any other man for it.
When he had to crawl he dragged the stuff behind him in a bag. It wasn't tough going because he had done it innumerable times and knew when to rest and when to work. Here was a dip where he could take it easy and coast along, there was an incline requiring a short breather, to his right and left were brief ledges to help him shove onward.
Sometimes water sped past him at a furious pace, never touching him or deviating from a course it had chosen centuries or millennia ago, and at other times little gusts of air came from miles away to play across his perspiring face. He knew it would be much warmer upstairs but the thought didn't bother him. As soon as he stopped moving he would be cold.
How many years had it been since he crawled this way? Twenty? Twenty-five? Thoughts of the ocean having pushed its way into these secret chambers accompanied him as he pulled away rocks he had stacked decades ago after he found more comfortable passages into Eastland.
The last rock tossed behind him, he doused his light and listened for the sound of water or enemies and hearing neither he forced his body through the aperture. Into the pipe he went, dragging his bag after. For a while he waited. He arose to his knees, placed his back against the manhole and exerted pressure. There came a low creaking sound followed by a gust of hot air. The cover was clear and ready to open.
For a minute he rested, savoring his last moments of peace and sanity and then gathering his strength he lit a sparkler and lifted the cover aside. Feeling foolish he stood in bright daylight with half of him poking from the hole, blinking like a blind thing as he surveyed the empty street.
It was practically empty. As he fitted more sparklers into the niches in the belt and lit them, a half-grown hellion came swinging on a gray strand at him from somewhere up above. Only a single shot from the gun was sufficient to scatter it and then, sputtering and glittering like an exploding matchstick, he walked up the avenue. The sparklers were two feet long, children's toys that stuck out from the belt and captured him in brilliance.
Only minutes were required for spinners to be attracted to him. By the dozens they came from doorways, rooftops and gutters to witness this phenomenon and when they saw that it was only a human surrounded by fearsome light they slunk along in his footsteps. Sooner or later this specimen would become helpless and vulnerable like his brethren.
The Retreat was as it had appeared many times in his dreams, broken-windowed, peeling, a corrupt face maskless at last and with all its evil exposed. As he closed in upon it he moved the belt so that the rear sparklers were now in front of him. Two had burned out and he replaced them with fresh ones.
The gun was heavy. Turning, he discharged it into the ground just short of his pursuers. He was surprised by their size, having supposed them to be half as large. They looked very much like the father had looked that day long ago when it crawled through the Bore and attacked the guard. These young ones had the malicious, vicious personality of the parent.
Exhausted, he paused a few moments, stared across the sputtering light and noted how they gathered in separate groups so that he couldn't see them all. Most were behind him and occasionally he walked backward up the driveway so that they had to change their positions.
Not a single one barred his entrance into the main door but several were waiting on the landing above the first short set of stairs. Replacing more sparklers, he began climbing. At once the spinners ran on up the stairs or crawled along the railing to get away from the detestable glare of the lights. They were maturing rapidly and soon they would find even daytime nearly intolerable.
Now, though, they had a youth's curiosity and love for diversion so like monkeys they went up the stairways ahead of the white-haired, hated human who shone brighter than the stars and whose blood would surely stain the halls before the day was spent. He was in their territory and would not be permitted to pass out again. Even now the brethren were piling furniture in all the downstairs doorways in the event that he was fortunate enough to get near one of them again.
Gusty held out his right hand, shoved against the wall as he climbed. The gun under his left arm was like a cement block, likewise the can of gasoline in his free hand. The matches were in his shirt pocket except for two which he had stuck behind his ears. The quiver of sparklers was a heavy sack on his back beneath which collected a river of perspiration that ran down his legs. He felt every one of his years drag at him and imagined that a cemetery of dead all had a hand on him, tugging and pulling him down toward their beds.
Another landing was there under his feet and he took time to reload the gun, shot the steps out from behind him, blasted the wooden rail to shards and then reloaded.
He took time to inspect the hallway of the third floor; his destination, no doubt his final plot and there would be no flowers or eulogy for him. Once upon a time, and not in any fairy land, he had lived in the apartment on his left, if that was what one could call the time he spent there. Thinking of roaches and sinister loiterers, he uncapped the gasoline and trailed it along the floor. Something bit him on the leg causing him to kick out. The sparklers were only bright light and a little heat. Even immature minds were capable of learning such facts. The spinners learned and gained confidence.
He turned to blast with the shotgun as one swung from the ceiling and raked him across the scalp with a brush. A week earlier and he would scarcely have felt the blow but now the rigid hairs ripped five bloody furrows in his flesh.
Reacting from pain, he staggered, once again pulled the trigger and blew a hole in the ceiling, at the same time knocking the spinner into the apartment on the next floor. There was no time to light more sparklers to hold the others at bay. They weren't as afraid as they had been. A hardy specimen rushed in, grabbed one of the fiery sticks and yanked it from the belt.
Back to the wall he sloshed gasoline at a red mouth, kicked out and sent a few reeling. Yanking a burning stick from the belt, he poked it at a pair of blue eyes. Back and forth he waved the thing and drove them back, used his free hand to throw the gun at them.
One by one he pulled the sparklers from the quiver on his back and used them as spears. They wouldn't let him use the live one to light others but pressed at him from first one side and then the other.
Free of them for a moment, he worked his way into the middle of the aisle and with his back to the empty regions he stumbled along spilling gasoline. There was a wide patch of it running from the door of his one-time apartment to where he stood.
Even before the sparkler died in his hand they were upon him, weighing him to his knees, tearing at his clothes. They ripped away the belt, plucked up the box of matches, tried to loosen the neck guard, slashed at him until he fell on his face.
Hands ripped at him in an attempt to turn him over and for a moment he experienced the agony of failure. Then they left the way clear while they concentrated on his back and there were so many of them that they only got in one another's way. A few managed to rake his back or legs with their brushes but mostly they created damage upon spinner flesh.
His chin and nose gouging the stained wooden floor he saw the trail of gasoline with gr?at clarity, worked with desperation to raise one hand to his head, fumbled and fought until he felt of his right ear. The match he had placed there was gone. Across his forehead he moved the hand, longing to ease the pain of his jaw by raising it from the floor. A spinner bit his wrist and he yanked it away, felt blood run. With two fingers he plucked the match from behind his left ear and protecting it in his palm he moved it to where he could see it from the corner of his eye. Once, twice he scraped it across the floor and then a third time an instant before a set of fangs buried itself in his arm.
The match flew from his fingers like a minuscule atomic flash, white and yellow, blue and full of threat, landed in front of him in the damp fuel. The flare caught him in the face. He screamed not from pain but from rage because he couldn't see if the flame was feeding on the trail he had made. It wouldn't have mattered. The wooden floor was rotten and dry as dust.
In the wall beside an old apartment door through which Gusty had walked many times in sorrow, beneath a square of tape on the wallpaper, rested a container of silvery white powder. The gasoline was hungrily consumed by the flame from the match and the boards began to burn. On and on, farther and farther down the hall the small conflagration raced until finally it arrived at the apartment door. It licked at the wall, flew through the tape and discovered the box. Almost instantly there was a brilliant flare after which it seemed to Gusty that the hallway burst into a yellow inferno.
There were a hundred sticks of dynamite and a hundred pounds of magnesium buried in the walls of the Retreat. From a match the inferno began, spreading to a small amount of powder and on to a dry red stick that exploded with such fury that a hole was ripped through four apartments.
The second apartment had been particularly detestable to an old woman long dead. After she left the place to live in the caves she returned and left a sack of dynamite in a safe hidden behind wallpaper. This was knocked loose by the initial explosion, caught fire as a tongue of flame licked it, and when it went off it took the building with it.
Obscurc hiding places all over the city exploded and burned as the fire spread. Dynamite secreted in shallow ground outside buildings blew as fiery debris heated it. Hundreds of caches of magnesium burned with hot, brilliant flame. The inferno seemed to speed through the streets like falling dominos, from noisy explosions to the popping of silvery white caches catching the mood of destruction.
The cathedral melted after several barrels in the basement ignited from a piece of burning wood flying in the window. It didn't take long, about the same number of minutes it took the Drake building to burn.
The hospital and schools were blown to splinters when adjoining structures went. As it usually happened in a flash fire, the inhabitants were caught flat-footed. There was nowhere for the aliens to go. The web overhead trapped much of the smoke and heat, poisoning the air, making it hot enough in some places to burn the hair off heads.
As the severity of the explosions increased they began to be felt deep in the caves where Ekler stumbled about in the maze. He knew what it was at once. While he sat here fuming and wasting time, the old man had gone up and lit a match. Now if he didn't get out of here the city was liable to settle on his head.
Hoping Gus hadn't placed him up the river of no return, he started hunting again for a way out, finally took a tunnel that led him to familiar territory. A few more turns and he walked into the cavern of bridges. The wall next to the basement of the Rumson building was buckling and he ran past the quivering spans until he came to the best, raced out over the abyss, teetered once or twice and at last stepped onto the far landing just before the stone fell behind him.
All the bridges collapsed as the distant wall went down. Tons of rock dropped into the chasm, setting up a rumbling beneath Ekler's flying feet. The ground rocked and sent him crashing against a stalagmite. Stalactites fell from the ceiling as he hurried through the old dining room. It was high tide and the commotion caused the water to reach over the steps and come into the tunnels after him. The floor dropped under him a moment after he flung himself into the air and caught hold of a rising corridor. Clambering upon the ledge he crawled down a path that split and pitched in rhythm to the explosions occurring above ground.
Through a fissure he squeezed in desperation and, not looking back, he ran away from the caves and through the swamp for a quarter mile. Then he turned to stare, slumped in exhaustion against a tree.
The west wall of the city was gone, likewise the buildings that used to be there. He could peer into the heart of Eastland and see what was happening there. The spectacle was so bright he kept closing his eyes.
The next thing he noticed was that the web was on fire. Though damp and tough, it hadn't a chance of resisting the magnesium-fed holocaust raging against it. It turned black and melted.
Ekler had no desire to move or even live. Dry-mouthed, full of grief, he watched the demise of the place where he had lived for most of his life, imagined the end of at least one friend. Only when he spied the young spinner coming his way through the swamp did he stir.
Mordak had been carried to a low place in the web. After the explosions began he was transported to the street. He lay unseeing and uncaring, waiting only for the future father to be brought to him, and at last new flesh touched him, a new body lay upon his own while formerly unfelt brushes stroked the gland on his chest.
Moistening the youngster's brow, he said, "Thank you for your patience. Before you do the thing you came to do listen to my advice. Go away from here to find your pillow. Sleep not within the walls of this place."
"I will obey, my father," said the young one and gently sank his fangs into the gland, ingested what was there, turned without a word to his brothers and fled toward the western Wall.
By sheer luck he avoided being blasted in the explosions, gained the last bit of distance by swinging on old webs fashioned by his dead parent. The wall broke so that he didn't have to bother climbing it. Out into freedom he ran as fast as he could.
The mud in the swamp impeded his progress, bogged him down. Little by little he progressed, learned how to look for rocks and dry places upon which to step. Eventually he realized he was being followed. A human blundered behind him with a stick in his hand, a big and shaggy-haired enemy who finally caught up with him and began beating him on the back.
"You, there, stop!" cried a human voice and then repeated the order. When Ekler didn't stop, the sentry raised his rifle and shot him.
The child whom the crazed man had been attacking ran off into the woods. The sentry had one last glimpse of it before it disappeared, a strange elf, gray and long of hair, probably starved and terrified.
The soldier went back to his superior to report while the future father of the spinner species found himself a soft grave in a clearing deep in the forest.
The loam was rich and yielded to his little brushes. Deeply he dug until he could dig no more and after lowering himself into the hole he pulled as much of the dirt in upon himself as was possible.
Silence settled in upon him. His breathing slowed and then stopped. Already he was asleep. From out of his brushes came a lacquer that seeped and spread until he was encased in it. The substance thickened, hardened, became like a bubble. He was nourished and provided with comforting dreams.
The wind blew leaves from the trees and concealed the resting place.