Monsters and Magicians Page 2

  Sitting there, Fitz was appalled to see a pair of big, black-nailed hands appear on the verge of the cut; he gauged the depth of the gully at least twenty feet and not even something on the order of this outrageous predator should have been able to leap so high straight up . . . but it clearly had done just that. He could hear the feet clawing the clay wall for support and the debris of that frenetic clawing cascading down to rattle among the pebbles below.

  Realizing that there was no time to unship either the double rifle or the carbine and knowing from the first encounter the fatal folly of trying to outrun one of the things on his bike, Fitz instead drew his big magnum revolver, levelling the long barrel just as the gigantic, toothy head came into sight above the rim of the cut. He rapid-fired, double-action, at the horrible head. On impact of the weighty slugs, the hairy skull above the beast's eyes dissolved into winking-white bone splinters, grey-pink globs of brain and a spray of bright-red blood, the remainder of the

  head tilting far, far back under the impacts of the bullets. His fifth and final shot missed as the dying creature's grip slackened and the body tumbled back down the side of the cut to sprawl among the pebbles and send little lizards streaking in every direction.

  Although the visible body's only movements were twitching muscle-spasms, Fitz still felt the pressing need to reload. He was able to open the revolver and eject the brass all right, but found himself fumbling out a speed-loader, dropping it, and having to use the second one to recharge his handgun. Replacing the pistol loosely in its holster, he unslung the Holland and Holland, and it was as well he did.

  Preceded by a roaring howl that echoed back from the walls of the cut, another of the Teeth-and-Legs, this one if anything larger than the dead one, issued from somewhere to bounce onto the blood-flecked pebbles, race along the bed to a lower stretch of bank and mount to the same level as the man, only some score of yards distant . . . and rapidly closing, teeth flashing and long fingers hooked for clawing.

  Fitz stood up, one foot still on either side of the cycle, brought the rifle to his shoulder—some part of his roiling mind surprised at how the very heavy weapon seemed now almost weightless—sighted on the hair-covered chest of the nearing monster, and squeezed off the load in the right barrel.

  Not really braced as he should have been before firing a piece with such brutal recoil, it was all that he could do to stay on his feet at all, so he did not witness the moment of impact of outsized bullet with oversized killer-beast. But when he looked down the barrels again it was to see the Teeth-and-Legs on its

  back on the ground—though still thrashing, roaring and trying repeatedly to arise.

  After briefly considering putting the left barrel's load into the downed creature, too, he decided that the rifle's butt had done him enough injury for one day, slung it, and instead drew his revolver, sending three of the 240-grain, soft-point .44 bullets into the beast's head. Not until he clearly heard the death-rattle did he reload and holster the revolver, reload the rifle, pick up the dropped speed-loader, then head for the distant hills at full throttle, lest more of the monsters should suddenly make an appearance.

  As he neared the pond he swung well clear of the ponies, rounded a smallish body of water to the site of the bubbling spring that fed it, and refilled his two waterbags, after first rinsing them of the remaining residue of that other-worldly water. A glance into a blue sky flecked with wisps of lacy white clouds showed him that the sun was barely past its meridian and so, knowing that he had plenty of time to get back up to the cave where he had left his companions, he indulged himself in stripping and wading out to a deeper section of the icy-cold pond to swim and lave off the sweat. For he knew that the pony herd would give him adequate warning of the approach of Teeth-and-Legs or any other dangerous beasts.

  When finally he waded out of the frigid, refreshing water to air-dry himself beneath the patchy shade of some palms and cycads, the ponies were still there on the other side of the pond, the young ones frisking about while their elders gorged on the short, tender grasses. Not intending to halt again until he

  had reached his destination, Fitz took advantage of the opportunity to eat a brace of tomato-and-lettuce sandwiches, washing them down with a cup of the cold, clear water from the spring.

  Shortly he was setting his machine to the slope of the first hill, threading his way between the trees and thick shrubs up a gradual incline toward the point at which the incline abruptly became more preciptious. But luck was with him, for where the slope steepened and the underbrush thickened, he chanced across the path that he and the Norman knight, Sir Gautier, had hacked through it when they had manhandled the motorcycle down from the higher hills two or three days previously. Staying to this path made the ascent faster and much easier than had been his first climbing of the hill; it meant that he could ride, though in low gear, rather than push the bike while hacking a way through the dense brush with his machete.

  Although he remembered, knew just what to expect at the top, he still felt surprise when the bushy, natural wooded and steep slope abruptly became level, grassy, parklike land with a vast assortment of hardwood and fruit trees growing in so uncrowded a manner as to appear unnatural. As before seen, both in ascent and descent, the expanse was virtually alive with birds and game of all descriptions.

  On his last ascent he had seen two deer, spotted, adult deer, one of them bearing an impressive rack of palmate antlers. They were nowhere in sight this time, but a group of four smaller and unspotted cervines of some sort were visible, browsing some yards off to his left as he came up into the level

  ground and headed toward the hill that loomed beyond it. These deer—if that is what they truly were—were much smaller, the biggest no more, he estimated, than a bit over two feet at the withers antl with antlers about the size and shape of wooden slingshots. What he could see of them as they slowly moved around under the thiek-boled trees showed bodies all of a solid reddish-brown color and rear legs looking to be a bit longer than forelegs.

  The big persimmon tree was not, this time, being raided by an opossum and birds, but rather by six or eight big, tailless, dog-faced monkeys or apes of some sort—all a yellow-brown on the back and sides, shading to a yellowish-white on the chest and belly. Fascinated, Fitz halted and idled the bike fairly close to the spreading tree, hoping to get a better look at these, the first primates—unless one considered the savage Teeth-and-Legs to be of that order—he had seen in this world.

  One of the larger of the beasts ran out along a limb high above, until it began to sag under his weight— Fitz estimated that the big one weighed in the neighborhood of forty to forty-five pounds—keeping a secure grip on his elevated avenue with both his hands and hand-shaped feet. Halting, he looked down at the upward-looking man, showed a mouthful of good-sized teeth, then barked.

  Fitz started at the completely unexpected noise. The ape had the exact sound and timbre and pitch of an Eskimo Spitz once owned by a friend of Fitz. He still was laughing at himself when the big beast cupped one hand behind him, defecated into it, brought the hand up long enough to regard and sniff at its con-

  tents, then hurled said contents down at the unwanted observer.

  The foetid mess missed . . . barely, and Fitz decided to move on. Even over the noise of his engine, he could hear the raucous, triumphal barks of the most inhospitable apes in the persimmon tree.

  Following the blazes he had hacked into tree-trunks when he and Sir Gautier de Montjoie had crossed on the way back down to the Pony Plain, he once more passed close to the hollow full of blackberry bushes. Repeated shakings of the tops of these showed clearly that some thing or things fed within the depths of the prickly thicket, but he could not see it—possum, raccoons, that long-legged and skinny bear or whatever.

  Remembering that the ascent of the knife-sharp ridge was far too steep for the engine of the loaded bike, he dismounted and pushed it to the narrow summit, being a bit amazed that the near exhaustion he recalled from the last ti
me he had had to do it alone failed to this time materialize.

  "Not bad for a man over a half-century old," he thought. "This roughing it in the boondocks Tve been doing in recent weeks must be good for me. I don't think Tve felt this good, this fit since ... oh, hell, since I was in my twenties, anyway."

  In the grassy glen beyond the ridge he stopped, dismounted and sprawled on the pebbly bank of the little, fast-flowing rill to drink of its icy water, then gathered a handful of round stones before he arose and uncased the drilling, loading its two smooth-bore barrels with birdshot and its rifled barrel with a hollow-poined .22-caliber magnum. The two shot-

  loads garnered him as many plump pheasants and a lucky shot from the rifle barrel dropped a peculiar, hornless cervine or antelope—he could not be certain which the creature, little larger than a large hare and equipped with upper cuspids that projected well below the lower jaw, really was, but it was well fleshed and, if Sir Gautier did not immediately claim it, it would make a nice tidbit for Cool Blue.

  After very roughly field-dressing his mixed bag, Fitz added them to the load of the motorcycle and headed up the next hill, aware that before he reached the rendezvous at the small, hillside rock-overhang, he would perforce be once again afoot and pushing the conveyance due to the steepness of the rocky ascent.

  But when arrive at the rendezvous he finally did, it was to find himself completely alone, neither the 12th-century Norman knight nor the baby-blue lion being anywhere in sight and the ashes in the firepit being dead-cold and dampish. Such supplies and equipment as he had left far back in the shallow cave appeared just as he had placed them prior to his departure, only a canteen being missing.

  Shaking his head, Fitz set about doing the necessary—first cleaning out the firepit, gathering squaw-wood and laying a new fire, then fully dressing the ruminant and the two birds for cooking. He was not in the least worried about Sir Gautier for, if any man could take care of himself in this primitive world, it was certainly that doughty, medieval Anglo-Norman warrior. As for Cool Cat, strands of baby-blue fur showed that the ensorcelled, one-time bopster musician had slept at least once in the rock overhang and

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  most likely was out hunting, his lion-body requiring sizable amounts of high-protein food.

  While the wood burned down into cooking-coals, Fitz unloaded the bike and side-car, sorted out the supplies and equipment and stored it in the cave with the shrouded bike at the rear, for his previous sojourn had emphasized the impracticality of trying to use the bike in the broken, rocky, heavily wooded or swampy country that lay beyond to east, west or north. His required journeying must be on shank's mare, perforce.

  Taking into account the Norman knight's ingrained senses of honor, duty and loyalty, Fitz doubted that his liegeman had gone far from the rendezvous point and likely would be returning soon, so he would just await that return. Even had he not had a plentitude of supplies, the land abounded with game of all types and descriptions, berries, nuts, wild fruits and other edible wild plants, with springs and brooks and rills almost everywhere. The rocks still were lying nearby with which he could partially barricade the rear area of the overhang at nights so that, with the banked fire and the weapons he always took into his sleeping bag, he felt himself safe from nocturnal predators even without Sir Gautier or the baby-blue lion nearby.

  By the time he had done to his satisfaction all that was needful, the first logs were become coals, so Fitz spitted one of the pheasants over the firepit, nestling two canteen cups of water near the edges—one for boullion, one for tea—then sat before the coal-bed watching the bird cook. The other pheasant and the dressed hoofed-beast had been hung high enough to be safe from the predations of anything save insects.

  "Odd," he thought, "but after the weeks here, then the last couple of days . . . and the nights— those beautiful, rapturous, very strenuous nights— with Danna; after the stresses and strains of today, even, I'm still not really tired. Used to be, two or three years ago, before all of this started, a normal day of peddling those damned vacuum cleaners would often leave me exhausted. I burned more than one TV dinner through just nodding off in my chair while the blasted thing was cooking."

  As he sat, relaxed, watching the spitted fowl brown over the bed of coals, the first tenuous wisps of steam arise from the kidney-shaped steel cups of crystal water, his mind went racing back to the bad old times, when war and mischance had slain his son, made a hopeless alcoholic of his wife, driven his daughter away from their home and then brought her back—drug-addicted, diseased and pregnant. Driving drunk, his wife had had an accident fatal to her and the unborn child. His daughter had been rendered a human vegetable—kept alive only by machines and seeming miles of tubing—and when the greedy physicians and even greedier hospital had made of him a virtual pauper, had taken the worth of the house and everything else he had managed to accumulate throughout a lifetime of work, he had made the opportunity to do that which he had felt he must do: had granted his daughter, the husk that once had contained her, the boon of a dignified death.

  They had branded him "murderer," of course, but everyone had seemed to feel sorry for him—a good, decent, hard-working sales executive who had suf-

  fered far more than most, for a very long time and completely through no fault of his own—and his very last assets had secured him the services of a competent attorney who had managed to convince the court and jury that so much suffering over so protracted a period had finally brought about a moment of insanity. But the verdict had cost him his job, his position, his career. They had been kind about it: they did not fire Fitz, just retired him, complete with gold watch and pension, for stated "reasons of health." But the sizable loan he had felt constrained to take out with the firm's credit union had had to be repaid, of course, and the monthly installments left damned little pension on which to try to live.

  With his record of a felony trial and a finding of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, he quickly discovered that he might as well forget employment in his previous field and in most others for which he was otherwise eminently qualified. He wound up selling vacuum cleaners on a straight-commission basis out of a rusty clunker of a car, living in a rented, ill-furnished and dilapidated tract-house in a rundown neighborhood, his only companion being Tom, his big grey tomcat, last survivor of his one-time happy family, last reminder of the good times that then seemed gone forever.

  Then, to pile Ossa atop Pelion, a sadistic juvenile delinquent armed with at cheap, battered, .22-caliber rifle had senselessly shot Tom. Gutshot and dying in hideous agony, the creature had still managed to make it back to the foot of the crumbling, concrete rear stairs, where Fitz had found his body, the eyes just beginning to assume the glaze of death.

  In the back yard of the rented house was a peculiar, oval mound of overgrown earth, said to have existed as long as white men had inhabited the area. Tom had liked in life to snooze atop the mound under a bush, and so, when the grieving Fitz had washed and arranged the stiffening body, had shrouded it in his best, threadbare bath towel, he had sought out a rusty spade and begun to dig a cat-size grave atop the mound, under the bush.

  But only a foot or so down into the black loam he had struck stone. Afraid to risk the flaking blade of the venerable spade in any attempt to pry up the obstruction, he had essayed to dig around it, only to discover that it was more than just a stray boulder beneath the soil of that mound. At the end of his labor, he had disclosed a rectangle of worked stones, precisely fitted one to the other by a skilled stonemason. And fitted within that rectangle was a much larger single stone that, he had quickly found, was so balanced as to pivot up and down within its lodgement.

  His curiosity piqued, equipped with a flashlight and the old snake-gun from out his tackle box, fortified with a couple of fingers of neat Irish whiskey, he had entered the damp, earthy-smelling stone vault, descended stairs with peculiarly small, shallow treads and arrived at last in a bare, stone-walled chamber well below the surface. C
areful search having revealed nothing of any sort in the crypt, his flashlight beginning to dim, Fitz had started back up the slimy stairs, lost footing and balance and felt himself falling backward.

  Steeled for the impact of his unprotected head against the hard, cold stone, he had instead landed

  with a breathless thump on a hard, but tvarm, surface. Even before he opened his eyes he was certain that he was badly injured: lying, despite sensations of warmth and dryness, on that damp, cold floor of the crypt and hallucinating from trauma and pain. Then he became dead certain of the fact.

  His vision and other senses indicated that he lay on the sand of a sunlit beach . . . well, at least most of him did. His eyes* testament was that his legs ended abruptly a bit above the knees, beyond the spot whereon his thighs rested athwart a near-buried, weathered and bleached log of driftwood. But he still could move the unseen limbs, could feel with them the cold, slimy stones whereon they rested.

  When his mind had ceased to whirl, his incipient hysteria been forced down, Fitz had slid forward far enough to make the discovery that just beyond the log was an invisible portal of some kind—on the one side the cold, stygian stone crypt, on the other the warm, sunny beach—and solid as the stonework appeared to his eyes, he still was able to pass back and forth through it as freely as through empty air.

  That discovery made, he decided to just accept the patent impossibility of the situation, to save the reasoning-out of it for another time. After carefully marking the location of the invisible portal on the thick, heavy log, he set out to explore the strange new world.