Children of the Gates (16 page)

But Linda came to Nick. “There can be a way back—” she told him, an eager note in her voice.

“Back where?” He was hardly aware of her.

“Back to our own world.”

“How do you mean?” She had his attention now.

“If we can only get out of here—back to where we came in. Once there, why can’t we make a door and go through? If we could make soldiers and a machine gun, as we did”—she waved to the cave entrance—“then we ought to be able to get back by willing hard enough—all of us together. Don’t you see? It could work—it has to!” She ended as vehemently as if at that moment she could see such a door, the safe past behind it.

“Even if it would work,” Nick countered, “how are we going to get back to the forest to try? If we leave here—do you realize what is waiting out there? We couldn’t fight our way across country—not with those things waiting for us!”

“We can”—she was stubborn—“use illusions. Don’t you see—it is all we can do.”

“What is the only thing we can do?” Jean’s voice, hostile in tone, cut in.

“We have to try to get back to our own world. I was telling Nick—we can do it! If we go back to where we first came through—to where the jeep is—then make a door—we can go through! It’s a way we’ll have to try. Don’t you see, we have to!”

Her excitement grew as she talked. That she was wrong, Nick was convinced. But to his surprise he saw an answering spark arise in Jean.

“If it would work—” The English girl drew a long breath. “Yes, if that worked and he—we—could be free of everything here! It would be wonderful! That forest is a long way from here and with all that out there—”

“We’ve just got to try,” Linda urged. “She—Rita—you heard what she said about worse coming. If we stay here we’re caught. But if we can make it back—”

“Can’t do it.” Crocker had been drawn to their group. “If the country was free, yes, it would be worth a try. But we can’t fight our way through now.”

“So we just stay here”—Linda rounded on him—“and wait to be caught by those horrors? Is that what you want? There ought to be some way we can get through.”

She looked eagerly from one to another. Perhaps in Jean she still had an ally, but Nick knew how impossible such a trek would be. He had come cross-country under Rita’s protection and he had a very good idea that had it not been for that he would not have lasted long no matter how stiff a fight he had put up. With Mrs. Clapp, the Vicar, the wounded Stroud, to slow them, they would not have a chance.

“We have to get back,” Linda repeated. “I—I don’t want to die. And you were right, Jean. Rita wished us to die there at the last. She—the People won’t do any more to help us. We’ll have to help ourselves and the only way is to get back to our own world. Maybe—maybe you don’t have to go to the place you came through after all. Maybe we could make a gate right here!” Her words came faster and faster.

Nick walked away. He was tired with a weariness that weighed on him like a heavy burden. He did not believe that Linda’s suggestion had any hope of realization. And he was too worn out to argue about it. He sat down on the floor and was only aware of Mrs. Clapp when she handed him one of the wooden bowls that held some liquid with a sharp scent.

“Get that down you, lad. It’ll perk you up. An’ I want you to tell me somethin’ true—no fancying it up because I’m an old woman as should be told only good things. I’m old enough to know that there are some things that have no good in ’em at all. Those are made for our bearin’ when the time comes. Do you think there is anything we can do—you have been out an’ seen it all—to help ourselves?”

Nick sipped the drink. It was slightly bitter, which was in keeping with the situation at hand. But as it slid down his throat it brought warmth—though it did nothing to banish the inner cold rooted in his mind and body.

“I don’t think there is any more we can do than has been done. She said that the Dark Powers can draw men to help them. And I saw some out there that might be such. I don’t know how long the barrier will last.”

She nodded. “It is not what you’ve said, but all you’ve not. Well, there were the good years. But you young ones—it would be fairer to you if you had had longer. I wish Jeremiah had gone with her, an’ the little dog, too. It’s not right that good beasts have to be with us.” She sighed and took the empty bowl he handed to her.

Nick longed to go and stretch himself out on his scanty bed. But who knew when the protection Rita had raised would fail? It might be well to check on what was happening out there.

He dragged himself to his feet and went to the entrance, pulling up to the sentry station. No phantom machine gun was there now. But before him, about five feet away, a shimmering cloud, very visible in the gloom, made a curtain. If anything moved beyond he could not see.

Not that he doubted they were still there. And there they would wait until the curtain failed. When that happened—illusions that could not be held and—

Nick put his arm across a rock, laid his head on it, and closed his eyes. But he could not close out his thoughts. Rita and the Herald were right; these stubborn English, he, Linda, were throwing away life for nothing. He did not believe that Avalon was evil.

The power radiating from the ankh in the city had nearly killed him. But there was nothing of evil in it. It was only that he, as he now was, was too frail, too flawed a thing to hold such energy.

Now the Dark Tide swept the land. Only in the city, in those places with the freedom of Avalon, would there be light. And those who did not accept the light opened a door to the Dark. They had tried to use the gift of the light to their own purpose, and in that, Rita said they brought worse upon themselves.

But why had Avalon, the Herald, given Nick the hint that had led him to the discovery of the power? Certainly there was a purpose in that, a test, perhaps—wherein he had failed by the way he had made use of his discovery. It could well be.

In any event he would now have to face what lay before him and make the best of it. Perhaps Rita was also right in wishing them a swift death as the best she could offer.

Nick thought about death. Was it an end or a beginning? No one knew, only hoped for the best with the part of him that feared absolute extinction above all else. Death could be peace, in such a land as this.

“Nicholas—”

He raised his head. By the glow of the wall he could see Hadlett, though he could not read the Vicar’s expression.

“Yes, sir?”

“You were in the city, Sam told us. What is it like there?”

Wearily Nick spoke of the walls and streets, of those doors with their pictures that came alive at the touch, and, finally, of the great ankh and the energy that could slay when one was unprepared to face its force.

“The looped cross,” said the Vicar. “Yes, the key to eternity, as the Egyptians called it when they put it into the hands of their gods. A source of energy that only those who have surrendered to it can absorb.”

“They are not evil,” Nick returned. “I have seen evil and it does not lie in the city.”

“No. It is not evil, yet it demands the surrender of one’s will, of what one is.”

“As is also demanded by our own way of worship.” Nick did not know from where he had those words.

“But that is an older way, from which we turned long ago. To surrender again to its power, Nicholas, is to betray all our own beliefs.”

“Or to discover that there is only one source after all, but from it many rivers—” Again Nick was not aware of his words until he uttered them.

“What did you say?” Hadlett’s tone was sharp, fiercely demanding.

16

Nick was not given time to answer. For, from beyond the shimmering barrier, now came a sound he had heard before—the compelling, head-hurting summons that had drawn his former captors. He clapped his hands to his ears, but the sound was in his head.

Only this time it was not so severe. Nick gritted his teeth, braced himself against obeying the summons. In the faint light he could see Hadlett doubled up against the rocks, his hands also to his ears, his white head bowed.

Fight it! Nick marshaled his will to do that. He did not know in whose hand was that weapon, but it was evil. Then he was aware of someone pushing past him. He threw out his arm, tried to deter that other, reeled back from a blow.

He watched Crocker head to the barrier. Behind him scrambled the others: Jean very close to the pilot; Lady Diana, her face twisted, her hands to her tortured ears; finally Stroud lurching along, his gait that of a drunken man, or one so weak only intense purpose kept him going.

The four came to the barrier before Nick could move from where Crocker had shoved him, passed through, to be hidden from sight. Hadlett wavered forward, but this time Nick was prepared. He sprang to tackle the Vicar, bearing the old man with him down toward the cave entrance.

Linda, Mrs. Clapp—he must stop them if he could. He pushed and pulled Hadlett into the cave. The torment in his head continued but he could master that—he had to. This time he was not tied to keep him safe.

By the light within Nick saw a scene of confusion. Mrs. Clapp lay on the floor, struggling to rise. Linda knelt beside her, not striving to aid her but with both hands on the woman’s shoulders, holding her down, while Mrs. Clapp writhed and flung her arms about.

Before them crouched the two animals. Lung snarled in anger, the cat growled and lashed his tail. Both of them faced the women as if at any moment they would join the struggle.

Linda’s face was twisted with pain, her mouth ugly as she moaned and cried out. Mrs. Clapp uttered meaningless sounds.

“Help!” Linda gasped as Nick came, pushing the staggering Vicar.

He gave Hadlett a last vigorous shove, this time taking no care, only heading the older man toward the interior of the cave. Then he ran to Linda.

“She—mustn’t—go—”

“No!” he agreed. But his help was not needed, for Mrs. Clapp, with a last cry, went limp and still.

“No!” Now the protest came from Linda. She lifted the woman’s head, held it against her, cradled in her arm, touched her face gently. “Nick, she can’t be dead!”

“I don’t think so. Watch her.” He returned to Hadlett.

The Vicar had slumped to the floor, sat there with his legs outstretched, his head sunk on his chest, his arms hanging limp so his hands lay palm up on either side of his body. He was breathing in heavy gasps, but that was the only sign of life.

The clamor without was retreating. Nick could think more clearly, relax a little. The cat and the Peke were still alert, but had ceased their active objection. It was as if they were to be given a breathing space.

“She’s—she’s alive, Nick!” Linda glanced up from her charge. “But the others—they went out—where?”

“I don’t know.”

“That was—was more of the Dark Ones’ attack?”

Nick had no answer to that either. “I don’t know. It was what took the drifters who captured me. But I never saw what caused it—only them going.”

“As they did here.” Linda settled Mrs. Clapp’s head more easily against her arm. “I wanted to go, Nick. But Lung tripped me, jumped at me. And Jeremiah pulled at Mrs. Clapp’s skirt, tangled her up so she fell. They—both of them—helped me think straight, know that I mustn’t go—she must not. But how did you and Mr. Hadlett get away, Nick?”

For the third time Nick had to admit ignorance. He only knew that, painful and compelling as that sound had been, he had been able to withstand it, not only that but somehow prevent Hadlett from being drawn also. He flinched away from imagining what might have happened to the others. For this moment it was enough to know that in so much they had beaten the enemy.

“Maybe because I heard it before and could not answer,” he speculated. “It may lose impact the second time around. And Hadlett was with me. He did not move out at once, which gave me a chance to—”

“To save me, Nicholas.” The Vicar slowly raised his head. His gaunt face was so haggard that he might have been mortally ill. As he spoke a twitch started beneath his left eye, a flutter of skin and muscle that drew his face into an unsightly grimace for a second. “To save me from the Devil’s own work, Nicholas.” He straightened and winced as if his body protested. “We must not allow the others to be taken by that—that thing! They are possessed—”

“Jeremiah!” Mrs. Clapp opened her eyes, looked up into Linda’s face, her expression dazed. “Jeremiah—he jumped at me! My own old boy—he’s gone mad!”

“No.” Linda soothed her. “He wanted to save you, and he did.”

The cat padded closer. Now he set both forepaws on Mrs. Clapp’s breast, leaned down to touch her nose with the tip of his own. His tongue came out and he gave her face a small, fastidious lick.

“Jeremiah.” Mrs. Clapp lifted one hand, laid it on the cat’s head. “Why—”

“To save you,” Linda repeated. “Just as Lung saved me, and Nick did Mr. Hadlett.”

“But—” Mrs. Clapp struggled to sit up and Linda aided her. The old woman looked about. “Where’re the others? Lady Diana—she was right here—and Jean—and Barry—”

“They have gone.” It was Hadlett who answered. “And we have to do what we can to aid them, as soon as possible.”

He struggled to his feet as if he would go running with the same unheeding recklessness as had taken the others. Nick moved between him and the entrance to the cave.

“We can’t, not until we know what we’re facing. It might be throwing away any chance we do have just to go blindly out in the dark.”

For a moment, he thought the Vicar would give him a hot argument, even try to push past him. Then Hadlett’s shoulders slumped and he answered dully:

“You are right, of course, Nicholas. But we must do something.”

“I intend to.” That was wrenched out of Nick. Again he was being forced to a decision he did not want to make, take a course he knew was dangerous. The sound had died away, his head was free of the pain. Did that mean that the menace had withdrawn with the prey it had so easily snared, or only that it had subsided to prepare for another and perhaps stronger assault? There was no use looking for trouble in the future, he had enough facing him now.

“Not alone.” The force and vigor that had always been in Hadlett’s tone was returning. “We must go together—”

“All of us,” Linda broke in, “all together.”

Nick was about to protest, and then he understood that perhaps she was wiser than he. To leave two women here alone, for he knew he could not argue the Vicar into staying, would be utter folly. When the barrier failed the Dark forces would overrun the cave. Linda and Mrs. Clapp would have no chance at all. And what he had seen of the besiegers made Nick certain that they must not face what had walked, loped, slithered out there.

Of course it was the height of stupidity to go out at all. But if he did not, he was sure Hadlett would set off by himself, or with the women. Nick must be as practical as this impractical situation allowed.

So he suggested that they make up packs, the heaviest to be for him and Linda, though both Mrs. Clapp and the Vicar insisted they shoulder their share. And the Vicar did offer experienced advice.

“Is there any other way out—besides the one I found earlier?” Nick asked.

“Along the stream, sir—” Mrs. Clapp looked to the Vicar.

Hadlett seemed doubtful. “That is a rough passage, Maude.”

“Rough it may be,” she answered stoutly, “but if it takes us out where those things ain’t watchin’, won’t that be for the best?”

“I suppose—” But he did not sound convinced.

“Along what stream, sir?” Nick pursued the matter.

“An underground one. We never explored it far. But there is a place, Sam assured me, where one can scramble out. I believe some distance from this—” He gestured at the entrance.

“All the better.” Nick was a little heartened. He would have suggested the back entrance he had found but he was sure that neither the vicar nor Mrs. Clapp could make it.

If they only had in truth the machine gun of the illusion, or weapons from their own world. He had the knife, and now he found in his saddlebags the camp knife he had almost forgotten. Since Hadlett had one of the daggers, he gave this to Linda. Iron—little enough for defense. They might as well, thought Nick savagely, go barehanded.

Mrs. Clapp looked about her. She had quietly stacked the wooden bowls, folded up some crudely woven mats. It was plain she believed it would be long before anyone returned here.

“A rough wild place it is, but it’s been good to us.”

“Yes, Maude,” Hadlett answered gently.

“Sometimes—sometimes I dream about walkin’ up the walk—seein’ the roses an’ those lilies Mrs. Lansdowne at the lodge gave me the settin’ of. There’s m’ own old door an’ Jeremiah’s sittin’ on the step watchin’ for me. I dream like that, sir. It’s as real as real for a while—”

“I know, Maude. I wonder if that bomb did hit St. Michael’s. Five hundred and fifty years—a long time for a church to stand. It still stands for me.”

“We got it all to remember, sir. That nobody can take away. An’ you can close your eyes sometimes, when you’re restin’ like, an’ see it as plain as plain. Maybe if we went back—Sometimes I think to m’self, sir, that I see it better’n it really was. You can do that, you know. Like lookin’ back down the years to when one was a little maid—everything was brighter an’ better then. The years were longer like, not all squeezed together like they seem to be now. An’ there was a lot packed into every one o’ ’em. Well, a clackin’ tongue ain’t goin’ to get me, nor anyone else, goin’. But for all its roughness, this has been a good place. Come on, Jeremiah!”

Her speech ended on a brisk note. Linda moved closer to Nick.

“She makes me want to cry. Oh, Nick, I don’t want to remember, not now. It does something to me, I get to feeling wild, as if I could just run about screaming, ‘Let me out!’ Don’t you ever feel like that?”

“It depends,” he answered as he shouldered his pack, “on what you have to go back to. Anyway there’s no use looking too far ahead now. We had better concentrate on getting out of here.”

“Nick,” she interrupted him, “what can we do—to help them? Can we even find them?”

“I doubt it. But those two”—he nodded to the Vicar helping Mrs. Clapp over the rough footing in a side alcove of the cave—“won’t give up trying. And we can’t leave them to do it alone.”

Linda caught her lip between her teeth, frowned. “No, I can see that. Will they ever admit it’s hopeless? What do you think happened to the others, Nick?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” was the best answer he could give her. He was trying to control imagination which was only too ready to present him with horrors.

The way Hadlett guided them into was rough, and soon they had to go single file. Lung and Jeremiah had the best of it as they padded along with far greater ease than the two-footed humans and soon outpaced them. Linda called anxiously now and then, and was always answered by a single bark from the Peke.

After a very short time they hit a downward incline, dropping them well below the surface of the larger cave. Twice they had to stoop, proceeding at a back-aching angle. Nick’s flashlight in Hadlett’s hand lit up the worst of the obstructions.

Now they could hear the gurgle of water. And a last scramble brought them into a wider tunnel, one that water over the centuries must have carved for itself, though the present stream running along it was much smaller than the space through which it passed.

“This way.” Hadlett turned left. Nick was pleased at that. Unless he was completely misled, any opening in this direction to the surface would be well away from the upper entrance. He wondered if the barrier there still held.

With that gone, would the enemy make a frontal attack? With no resistance they could enter the cave. At that thought, Nick turned uneasily to glance over his shoulder, tried to listen. But the sounds of the stream and their own journey effectively cloaked what might be behind. He wished that the Peke and Jeremiah had remained in closer contact. The animals had a far better range of hearing and could sound the alarm if it was needed.

Nick wanted to hurry, but he knew with Mrs. Clapp’s stiff and painful legs and the Vicar’s age, they could push on at no better speed than this. He drew his knife, always straining to hear any sound except that of the water and their going.

“Here—” Hadlett flashed the light to the left. There was a break in the wall of the tunnel. Then the light showed the surface of the water. They must splash through that to reach the cleft. Nick wondered how deep it was. He saw Jeremiah sitting on the other side. But Lung whimpered and ran to Linda, begging to be taken up. So the Peke thought the flood too deep or had some objection to splashing on. The cat must have jumped it. Nick took warning from Lung.

“Don’t try to wade!” He crowded up beside the Vicar. “Give me the flashlight.”

“You noticed Lung, yes.” Hadlett passed over the light.

Nick squatted on his heels. The rest had flattened against the wall of the tunnel. He turned the light directly on the water. There were no signs of a swift current, and it looked shallow, but he was not a trained woodsman to know. The stream might be a trap the animals knew by instinct. Yet it was too wide for their jumping—they did not have Jeremiah’s talents. It would be wade—

“Nick!” Linda dropped beside him. Now she swung her arm across his chest to point upstream.

The troubling of the current was plainly visible. And that was not caused by some rock nearly breaking the surface, for it moved toward them. Nick handed her the light.

“Hold that!” He was ready with his knife. For the sight made him believe he faced the alien.

The disturbance in the water ceased, but Nick breathed faster. That thing, whatever it might be, was not gone. Rather it had taken to what cover the water afforded.