Demons' World

Chapter Nine

A hollow distant roaring beat at the air and vibrated it heavily. Great sluggish waves of sound billowed about him, threateningly, rolling in gargantuan echoes across his ears, dizzying him. He stared up, unmoving, as that gleaming knife blade descended.

He crouched pressed against the food mountain fragment. His cape wrapped itself tightly about him, responding to the chemicals released into his blood stream by panicky glands. Millions of tiny chromatophores on the cape’s back rapidly altered their pigment disposition by dispersion or concentration. The crumbly yellow food against which he pressed was studded with large glistening red-brown fruits. One showed under him. Where the yellow ceased and the brown began a neat circular demarcation line ran also across his cape, the camouflage was near perfect.

But that ominously descending knife swooped down on him. It turned over in the air so that the flat of the blade spread five feet wide above him. The rushing displacement of anas it shrieked down tortured his eardrums.

Cape or no camouflage cape, the Demon had seen him!

And it was bringing down a knife on his back.

Action released itself in Stead like a spring lock being tripped. His feet stamped, bent and lunged. He skittered sideways a fractional moment before the knife hit the white china.

The noise, the buffeting of wind, the stunning detonation as the china broke, bruised and flayed him, tossed him end over end out onto the bright material plain, flicked him, ignominiously, out into the open.

His cape went through miraculous color changes as he sprawled headlong, adapting itself dazzlingly to the patterns of the cloth.

In a sucking welter of air, the knife rose and swishing, monstrous, paralyzing, whacked down again.

Stead leaped all haphazardly across the cloth.

Scuttling, he ran, and, scuttling, felt and heard the knife beat sickeningly down three more times before in his half-blinded escape, he felt nothing and pitched out headlong into the air.

The floor below may have been a long way down, but it swooped up at him now with frightening speed. His nervy fingers found his antigrav switch, clicked it on. Abruptly, his descent halted its mad plunge; he swayed for a second, seeking for safety.

In a roaring sliver of murderous speed, the knife sliced through the air where he would have fallen. He felt himself whirling over and over; he released the antigrav and went up on it, shooting up, up and up, soaring away from that ghastly-gleaming wicked knife.

Only when his head bumped comfortingly against the ceiling was he satisfied. He looked down. Vertigo now had passed. The Demon moved ponderously. It did something to the wooden construction which, from his altitude, Stead recognized as a chair. The Demon was climbing on the chair. Two legs lifted, then the other two. The Demon swayed, its broad round puffy face lifted up, the knife spearing up like a probing metal arm. Four arms, the Demon had, four eyes, two of these, small and dimmed and half-hooded. But the other two stared up unblinkingly. Stead began to push himself along the ceiling, heading for the far wall.

The Demon couldn’t reach him. It kept straining up and swiping with the knife. Then it descended, the noise rolling around the room in wave on wave of uproar. Stead had reached the corner, now, and had realized why the light had not been bothering him. Its source, in the center of the ceiling, was shaded to him up here.

Remembering his dark glasses at last he fumbled them on. The intensity of his fear through the last few moments of horror and discovery had paralyzed his natural Forager instincts, and, really, there was little wonder in that.

He could not look at the Demon. Raging, furious, bellowing, it cavorted on the edge of his vision like a nightmare spilling over into the day. The dark glasses picked out for him the cupboard where he had been at work mining food. He had to get back there. But the Demon thirsted for his blood; Stead began to remember some of the more lurid stories told by old Foragers and his fear increased.

The Demon began throwing things at him. They were easy enough to dodge at first—a monstrous book that flapped its pages and clapped with murderous intent, the knife, a shining barbed fork, a rattling brightly colored box—and they all dropped back, back down all that enormous drop to the floor beneath.

A voice, a human voice, shrill with distance, pierced up from below.

“Stead! Down here! Hurry!”

Honey’s small figure appeared on the very edge of the cupboard shelf, her arms waving and her silky black hair shining under that cruelly bright light.

At sight of her, a queer physical pain jabbed through Stead’s chest, as though his fears for himself had swollen, turned into a ball and clogged his heart and breath with fears for Honey. If the Demon saw her—

Straight down Stead dropped. Like one of those long barbed Yob arrows he plunged down, his camouflage cape gripping tightly to him and streaming away in the violence of his descent, swooped down to the shelf. His feet hit the paper-covered wood sickeningly but in his state of fear lie scarcely noticed the jar of landing.

“Come on!” Honey screamed, and reached out to him with slender gripping fingers.

She dragged him inwards as the bar of metal smashed clown onto the shelf, raising a stinging cloud of dust. The wood shivered under them, throwing them to their knees. The knife lifted, gleaming, turning, rising to come down again to crush them flat.

Stumbling over dislodged crumbs of food fallen away from the food mountains, dodging into the shadow of those tall gleaming metal columns, hurdling obstacles, the two humans fled from the wrath and violence of the Demon. Hand in hand, they fled, the mutual contact a warm and sustaining force between them.

Twice more that cruel seeking blade snapped at the floor behind them; twice more racketing sound waves bruised their ears; twice more the shock pitched them tumbling onward. Then Vance grasped Stead’s arm and with savage, released violence, hauled him down and through the slot beneath the wall. Honey pitched after them.

“You complete, utter, idiot! You deserved to be trodden on!” Thorburn fumed with all his leader’s susceptibilities aroused. He’d nearly lost a man. He would have felt sorry lor the man, but more sorry for himself when he reported in to Controller Wilkins.

“That’s finished this mine for a time, anyway,” cackled Old Chronic, wheezingly.

“And won’t Controller Wilkins be pleased about that.” Julia flashed Stead a look that shriveled him.

As for Stead, he stumbled along with his comrades and nil through his body the shakes trembled everywhere, dinning in his head, splitting his skull with pain, stinging his flesh with the thousand needles of remembered fear. He j’jipped his fists together so tightly that his nails stung, but lie couldn’t throw off the effects of that nightmare experience.

The Demons were real!

The Demons existed.

They were no phantasms, no creatures of the dark recesses of the imagination; they lived and breathed and stalked the Outside, waiting to maim and kill any human being rash enough to venture there.

By all the Demons of Outside—no wonder that was never a curse-phrase for the Foragers. They lived too near its actuality, its very existence, to use it so lightly and unthinkingly.

Down the dark crannies slogged Thorbum’s Foraging party, one lamp between two, capes neatly wrapped, full sacks bulging, weapons ready, heads turning, turning, turning, eyes never still. Through the narrow slots, scrambling up irregular concrete junctions, leaping dark and echoing gaps, clawing up rough dirt slides, moving always steadily onward, the men of Earth returned to their temporary advance depot.

Dumping their full sacks with the Quartermaster’s assistants, giving them a helpful shove up onto the stacks aboard the trucks, Thorbum’s group could at last seek their own cubby and strip off their armor, lay down their weapons, wash themselves and walk along to the mess for food.

But Stead could not forget his first sight of the Demon.

He never would; he felt that an experience like that would remain with him through any memory-erasing experience such as he had already gone through. He just knew he’d never seen a Demon before. If he had, he knew he’d never forget it.

“You’ll soon forget it, Stead.”

He turned sharply, surprised, imagining for a weird instant that the voice had echoed in his mind. Honey smiled demurely up at him. They were entering the marked off cubicle used as a mess and her face looked cleaned and scrubbed and fresh, her eyes friendly, her red mouth soft.

“Forget it?” He laughed harshly. “I doubt it.”

She sat down and, after a momentary hesitation, he sat beside her.

Awkwardly, he said, “Honey, I want to thank you. You risked your life. If you hadn’t— Anyway, thank you. I’m not worth much to anyone, but thank you very sincerely.”

“You’re worth a great deal!” she flashed. Then she picked up her knife and fork and set to with a resoluteness that stifled any further conversation.

A bright color burned in her face.

Women! Stead told himself with a sour little chuckle. He might take the Demons for granted as a fact of life—all the other Foragers did and he meant to be as good a Forager as any one of them—but women! Women—no. But no!

All the same, life couldn’t be the same now he knew that Demons did exist and were not an immaterial shadow working in opposition to the immortal being.

Only then, sitting thinking in the mess with his comrades about him, did Stead remember Simon and Delia. What would they say? He remembered the long discussions and arguments, with Delia tossing her red curls and Simon stroking his shrunken cheeks, as they thrashed out the meaning behind the imagination-conjured Demons.

Well. He’d be able to inject some common-sense into any similar discussions in the future.

If there were any, that was.

A signals orderly came in, shouting over cutlery noise and talk and laughter, silencing them.

“We’re pulling out. Manager Purvis and the Commander have decided that with the Yobs’ betrayal of our routes and mining areas, and the sighting of one of us by a Demon, this lode is worked out. We return to the warrens at once. Everyone to load.”

In a welter of relief and excitement, the forward depot was packed up and in a long column of vehicles the men pulled out, headed back for the warrens.