Demons' World

Chapter Twelve

The terrors that leered and gibbered at Stead then, as paralysis locked his fingers into gripping fists in the blue material, he afterwards remembered with as much clarity as he remembered his former life.

That last receding glimpse of Honey staring up in horror from her hole in the floor had stirred uneasy trains of thought in Stead’s sluggish mind, had made him think of blasphemous thoughts no sane man could possibly entertain. All he could see of the Demon he was riding was a vast curve of blue. On either hand stretched a lofty chamber, a place so vast that rooflessness would surely have by now struck him down if he had not been immunized by previous experience.

The Demon kept snorting and snuffling and blowing in a most disconcerting way.

It pulled the blue material higher around it and Stead hugged the cloth and was drawn up until he perced atop a massive shoulder in the shadow of the puffed tureen-shaped skull. A pulse beat in an artery the size of a water main. Thick, coarse hairs grew downward in greasy bundles. The Demon’s skin, pitted with pore craters, its yellow flushed with the red of subcutaneous blood, wafted a pungent perfume that dizzied his senses. But he hung on. He hung on for he could not yet, not just yet, will his muscles to release their catatonic grip.

The room was a bedroom. That reddish wall was the bed, the vast sheet of whiteness the bedclothes. From the eminence of his vantage point atop a Demon’s shoulder, he saw the objects of the room in flat, sharply angled perspective, but everything appeared to him whole. The old and familiar way of looking at the items in the world “of buildings on a size-scale in relation to himself and thus seeing only the details had gone—gone for ever. Now he saw the whole picture.

The immortal being had created the world of buildings. But why had the immortal one created everything of a size that suited the Demons? Why? Why?

Strange clanging thoughts echoed in Stead’s bemused brain.

The Demon moved towards the window.

The blind went up with the noise of a thousand cave-ins. Air tore at him. He closed his eyes and hung on, determined now to see this thing through, and to discover if the macabre thoughts struggling into coherent life in his brain could possibly be the truth.

For if they were, if they were— Then everything he had been taught and believed was a hollow mockery, a gigantic blasphemy, a callous joke of the immortal being’s incomprehensible humor.

At first he had not believed in Demons, had considered them figments of the imagination to frighten men and women into abiding their consciences’ dictates. Then he had been forced to accept the unpalatable fact that Demons were real and existed. Now… now he was being rubbed in the mire of humiliation, of race humiliation, struggling against an understanding that screamed sheer bedlam at him and would not be denied.

The Demon’s shoulder twitched and Stead clung on as the movement rolled thick flesh beneath the blue covering. He stared past the enormous shell curve of the Demon’s ear, with tufts of hair like clustered broom handles thrusting out, stared past and out the window.

A pale, washed out, all pervasive light splayed down out there. The dawn of the Demon’s day must be only a few moments away, that electric flickering in the air their long-prolonged multi-second vibration of their lighting. The one second flickering of the electric light that served to demarcate time periods in mankind’s world would be too small for Demons—too small… too small.

Slowly, reluctantly, with agony and despair, Stead’s eyes focused on the illimitable distances through the window. Outlines showed hazy and indistinct, but he saw monstrous square blocked shapes, miles away: cliffs that hung peppered with the random scattering of lighted windows, yellow oblongs glowing against the pallid radiance and the blackness of mighty buildings.

Those buildings out there, structures created by the immortal one for mankind to inhabit, were all of a size with the Demons. Mankind had shrunk in Stead’s understanding. Mankind had shrunk and he thought he understood and he did not want to understand.

With a wide spinning movement that swung the room about him, he felt the Demon turning, leaving the window, walking with a ponderous undulation for the door. And for the first time the thrill of fear contained an inward-directed core: how long could he perch here before the Demon became aware of him?

Through the door he was carried, down in a series of steeply precipitous lunges, shuddering shocks as each tread halted, followed by a further dizzying descent, down step after step as they went down the stairs.

A number of conflicting emotions kept him where he was. Fear predominated. But also a slow, stubborn will-to-knowledge possessed him, a teeth-grinding will that he knew would sustain him now through whatever might befall. There remained little in that dogged conviction of his earlier eager, naive rushing after knowledge for the sake of it; now he wanted to know so that he could alter and change both himself and the truths of men.

The Demon entered a room where on a wooden table stood a glass vase containing a flowering shrub. All down one side of the shrub the scarlet berries had been picked away, scarlet drops like sprinkles of blood lay trailed haphazardly across the table.

A Demon with a broom was brushing up a couple of mangled bodies—bodies of men, men caught stealing the red berries. Jan and Moke would never return to the safe world of the warrens.

From Stead’s Demon volumes of noise poured out in crashing and stunning waves of sound; a great vein in the Demon’s squat throat vibrated; Stead could clearly hear the blood rushing through those distended veins.

A shining drop of cloudy liquid oozed through the flesh just before him; the smell of sweat stank in his nostrils.

Were the Demons, then, frightened of men?

The broom wielding Demon, the Demon who had struck so savagely with that monstrous rolled up paper at them on the table, turned to face the newcomer, moving with an undulating grace abruptly disconcerting to Stead, crouched, shivering and hating, in the shadows atop a Demon’s shoulder. He knew what he must do, but the messages shrilling from his brain to his muscles met impenetrable blocks of fear; his muscles locked. He had to leave this Demon’s shoulder. He must plunge out and up on antigrav—he must! But he couldn’t.

The callous broom disposed of Jan and Moke, swept them away, broken and bloody, into a dustpan. The Demon turned that massive flattened head; the two good eyes focused on its companion; the Demon screamed.

A hand like the hand of doom swept down on Stead’s Demon’s shoulder. Broad and curved, cupped for a stunning buffet, that hand slashed down to knock the puny human being from the blue robe, send it dashing to destruction on the floor so far below.

The hand flashed down, and Stead was shooting up on antigrav, spinning, numbed, shaken with the violence of his reactions, purged of fear as his brain forced its messages savagely past the blocks locking his muscles.

He cavorted in the air, trying to regain his balance, trying to evade the enormous lethal swipes of broom and paper.

A larder door stood open by the wall. On the topmost shelf a shadow moved, metal glinted. Stead looked down.

Down there, peering around the open door on the top shelf, glistening whitely, a row of tiny faces—men’s and women’s faces. His comrades!

Honey was there. She waved at him, a gesture so brave and so defiant that it stung him. Her voice lifted, a squeak in the vastness of the Demon’s room.

“I got back all right, Stead. We had a run-in with a gang of Yobs. Drop down here with us. But hurry! Hurry!”

That strange and inexplicable feeling for Honey seized him now with the desire to ensure that she, of all people, should never again have to face the fear and terror of the Demon myth. He wanted to break the barrier of lies surrounding his comrades. The Foragers—mere rats stealing food from this Demon’s larder.

Now Stead wanted more than ever to live and return to the world, and tell the people what he had discovered, what he knew.

As he lifted his splutter-gun he wondered if anyone else had made this discovery before, if anyone else had gone through the blasting of pride and honor in race, had discovered that brave humanity was but a parasite scuttling behind the walls in the darkness of the earth behind this great Demon-created world.

He thought of the Regulations. And he denied them. He aimed the splutter gun very carefully at the Demon’s looming monstrous eye.

The gun made a loud sound. But to the Demon it must have made a very tiny, very pitiable spitting.

Even so, a full clip blinded the beast.

The Demon’s roars were now so great and reverberating that great billows of sound made Stead clap his hands over his ears. A door opened. Another Demon walked in with that slow graceful movement imposed by their size.

But Stead had dropped on antigrav to the shelf of the larder and had scuttled in among his friends.

He remembered the choking fear he had felt, that all Foragers must feel, as they set off for Outside. That inhibited exploration. Had anyone ever reached the same conclusions as he had been forced to this day? Surely they must have done!

Someone grabbed his arms, ran them up his back. Someone else snatched away his splutter-gun.

Thorburn said, “We won’t kill you now, Stead. You’ll go back to H.Q. where you will stand trial. We’re not barbarians any more. You have violated the Regulations.”

“Of course!” Stead’s brain seethed now with his vision. “I did it to save my own life, but I found out—”

’Take him along!” said Old Chronic with a new and frighteningly savage voice.

These people who had been his comrades had changed. He was met with only hostile stares, vicious eyes glaring at him; he was a pariah, an outcast.

“But—” he said, pleadingly, not believing. “But I believe in Demons, and I know what they are!”

“We believe in them too. And the Regulations expressly forbid a man to shoot at them.” Thorbum hurried the party along, through the food quarry, out the exit hole, along the dark way littered with dead Yobs. “You’ve committed the worst crime a man can commit, Stead. You’ll see! At your trial not one voice will be raised to defend you; you’ll die, Stead, because you broke the Regulations.”

“All I did was save my life.”

“Your life! Your life! Don’t you see, you imbecile, the Demons will hunt us down mercilessly now. We’ll have no peace for generations to come.”

That shocked and sobered Stead. He hadn’t thought of that.

The fiery importance of his discovery chilled suddenly.

Grimly, silently, the Forager group marched on. The need for hurry possessed them all, Stead no less than the others. An overhanging doom seemed pressing in on them, stultifying thought, making them cast apprehensive glances over their shoulders far more frequently than they covered the way ahead. Cardon scowled and closed up and his face was as black as the nether depths. Cardon, this time, didn’t relish his rear marker position.

When at last they marched into the temporary depot, consternation greeted them. Honey, having already passed on news of Stead’s deed over the radio, had not been able to meet his eye since. Her pert face was now as downcast as a rock slide.

The Commander’s men and Purvis’s men had been formed up and rows of sullen, hostile, frightened faces glowered on Stead. The parade watched him in frigid silence. Then everyone boarded the trucks and the convoy pulled out.

Stead, his hands tied together, rode in the back of Purvis’s truck, two Forager guards with ready guns eyeing him halefully all the ride.

But that ride was dramatically interrupted.

The first volley riddled the point truck. Men screamed and toppled. Splutter-guns crashed from the slot of darkness up which the convoy had been rolling, headlights cutting a path of radiance ahead. A soldier swung a searchlight and it was shot out at once, exploding in a screech of glass and a shower of fragments.

The two Forager guards grabbed Stead, and in a rolling, tangled bundle, they dropped over the tailboard. Two of the electric trucks had collided. All along the line bullets pocked the dirt. Fire stabbed pitilessly from the blackness.

“Enemy all around!”

Stead heard the orders ringing out, the forming of lines, defense posts, first-aid for the wounded, the trucks’ electric motors whining as gallant volunteers tried to drive them into a defensive ring. The noise cracked down in the dark slot beneath the ground.

Beneath the houses of a race of people so giant that mankind was a mere pest to them, Stead still clung to that knowledge as the battle raged and roared about him.

One of the Forager guards yipped abruptly, turned over and lay still. Stead saw the blood seeping, bright in the fire glow from a burning truck. He crawled off a little, inching along with his bound hands. The second Forager guard followed. He, too, was reluctant to be caught under a truck that might explode at any minute.

A dark form, camouflage cape glittering against the fire at its back, glided up to Stead.

“Hold steady.”

A knife slashed his bonds.

“What’s going on?” The guard moved across, his face wild, gun up.

“We need everyone in the fight,” snapped Thorburn, sheathing the releasing knife. “Get into the line.” He turned to Stead, gripped his arm. “You, too.”

Intermittently caught in the quickly stabbing bursts of Archon searchlights, hooded on the instant, men’s figures flitted out there, enemies closing in for the kill. Fleetingly, Stead glimpsed the insignia of Trychos. He lined up his sights quite automatically, the gun thrust still warm into his hands by Thorburn, grim-faced, smoke-grimed, dusty.

Where yesterday Stead would have seen in those soldiers of Trychos only enemies to be shot and disposed of, now a reluctance held his trigger finger in a stasis his conscious efforts could not break. They were men; why kill a fellow human being when there were so many ravening monsters in this underworld inimical to everything human?

Through the darkness lurid bolts of light leaped and crossed. Men screamed and died, the shriek bubbling from lips already doomed, limp bodies falling all atangle across the lights. The livid beams circled and swept the battlefield, silhouetting maniacal figures in antic motion, marionette of death. The lights threw distorted shadows, picked out the sudden lethal gleam of steel, threw drifting war smoke into silvery beautiful streamers, writhing like gossamer veils. The stench of battle beat up palpably. The feel of it scraped his nerves raw.

Thorbum paused and sagged back, reaching for a fresh clip, smacking the rounds in savagely. His powder-streaked face turned to Stead, all crouched and immobile.

“Why aren’t you fighting? There are a lot of ’em. They caught us flat-footed. Sims is already wounded.” The breath caught in Thorburn’s throat. “We’ve got to fight, man, if we’re to come out of this.”

His teeth and eyes gleamed ferally.

“They’re men,” Stead said, foolishly, as though that was answer enough.

“You mean you’ve nothing to live for, when we get back. That’s understandable. But think of Honey—she’s in here, fighting.”

Stead shook his head, helplessly, like a dumb animal.

“I thought,” Thorburn said, sighting and firing in a winking beam of light, dropping back to earth, “I expected—we all did—that you’d see the way Honey felt about you even if you’re not supposed to be talked to about… about—” He lifted his shoulder, hunched, fired again, flopped back. “They’re getting closer.”

“About what?”

“Never mind now. You shot at a Demon. Oh, sure, I understand why you did. He’d have swatted you like you swat a ily if you hadn’t. But the Regulations were made to protect all men, not just one Forager stupid enough to be caught in the open in the light.”

“You talk… as though you do… might… understand.”

“I’ve seen what you’ve seen, Stead. More, probably. I know the position of men in the world of buildings. A number of us do. But what is there to be said, let alone done about it?” He hunched up, fired, cursed, fired again, dropped back with the return fire crackling past his ear.

“You see? You made me forget how to fight—one shot a time, son—otherwise they’ll take your head off.”

The bedlam of noise hammered on. Smoke reeked in their nostrils, racked their throats. Stead’s eyes were streaming again, as they had done when the Demon’s light struck them. He coughed, bitterly.

“You mean you know? And yet you go on?”

“You forget. We’re Foragers. The high and blasted mighty Controllers don’t even believe Demons exist. If they thought that man was just a parasite, living on the scraps from a giant’s table—no, Stead. It just couldn’t get through to them.”

“But we ought to try! We’ve got to show them.”

“What for?” Thorburn’s tones were brutal. “What good would it do? Racial inferiority? No, son, no. Mankind has got to believe in himself in some things. Just the stupid, down-trodden Foragers have to bear the load.”

“Wilkins—he’s a Controller.”

“Half a Controller, the others call him. And he doesn’t know. Even if he did, what could he do?”

“What I must do, Thorburn!” A blazing conviction rang now in Stead’s words. He felt uplifted, shorn of fear, dedicated. “I must go into the world and preach the truth! Men must know, and then, then, Thorburn,” I will instigate a great crusade against the Demons!”

“You’ll what?” Sheer surprise at the audacity of Stead’s words brought Thorburn down in a rush from his slow aiming. “You’ll do what?”

“Tell the world, the world of men! Then we can come up out of our runnels, take over the greater world outside, the world of Demons, and make it rightfully our own!”