“Wire fencing,” he said, “and there’s no point in its being there unless it’s both electrified and alarm-rigged. It’s about ten feet high. Lucas, do you know how high that is?”
“Yes,” said Lucas.
“If I stand just in front of the fence and bend over—like this”—he demonstrated, putting his hands on his knees to brace himself—“can you take one jump to my back and then get over the fence with a second jump?”
“Yes,” said Lucas.
“All right. Then that’s what we’ll do. After you’re inside the fence, Lucas, stay close to it—there may be booby traps of some kind farther in, but there ought to be a clear track just inside the fence for inspection purposes. Follow around the inside of the fence, or any wall or hedge you come to, until you get to the front gate of this place. Then wait until I come up to the gate and try to get in.”
“But there may be someone there on guard!” said Gaby.
“That’s what I’m counting on,” said Rafe. “There has to be a guard on a place as important as this. I’ll try to get him right up against the inside of the gate, or whatever it is. Then, Lucas—you can take him out. Quickly, before he can make any noise. Don’t move until I say your name—then take him. You understand?”
“Understand,” said Lucas.
“Good. Now, let’s get you inside.”
They went up to the fence together. Rafe spread his legs and bent his shoulders, bracing himself firmly with his hands gripping his thighs just above his knees. The wire of the fence, glinting a little in the early moonlight, was less than a foot from his nose.
“All right, Lucas,” he said. “Go ahead.”
There was a faint breath, almost like a whine behind him, a rustle of grass that would be the wolf backing off, then a brief, rapid thud of running paws and a shock of impact on Rafe’s back that almost sent him lurching forward into the fence and knocked the breath half out of him.
With straining muscles he caught himself from that lurch and staggered erect. He looked through the fence but could see only darkness beyond.
“Lucas?” he whispered cautiously.
A whine came back from the far side of the fence. A second later a dark, moving shape occulted what little light was to be seen beyond the lower part of the woven wire that Rafe faced.
“Fine! Good L—” The words stuck in Rafe’s throat. He had been about to praise Lucas as he would a dog. But Gaby was right. Lucas was something more than a canine. He was too much of a person to be rewarded with a condescending word. “That’s a good job, Lucas.”
Once more the whine.
“I’ll go now,” Rafe said, turning right. “Follow level with me along the inside of the fence as long as you can.”
He moved off. It was a long hike through dimness, for the place was not small. He reached the road again and turned left, going down the belt of trees facing the highway, watching the faint sheen of wire fence between them out of the corner of his eyes. Sure enough, after a little distance, a high stone wall appeared, with stretched wire along its top, guarding even the trees from the outside world. Rafe followed the wall silently, until he saw it interrupted by what first appeared to be a vertical dark line, but which soon widened to take on the dimensions of a gate to a roadway entering the place.
Rafe slowed. As silently as possible, he moved over the rough grass at the foot of the wall to the near pillar of the entrance, and looked beyond it. As he had suspected, there was a gate, wrought-iron, designed as if for appearances only. He waited a few seconds longer, feeling the cool air on his face and hands, his heart beating. Then he stepped beyond the pillar and walked to the center of the entrance where the two wings of the gate joined together.
He pushed against the gate as casually as if in broad daylight, and found a bar lock securing its halves at the middle.
“Hold on! Stand still, there!” said a man’s voice from inside the gate and to the left. A door opened in a wall of blackness that revealed itself in the escaping light from within to be a gatehouse. The silhouette of a tall, wide-shouldered figure came toward him, the silhouette of a machine pistol in the crook of its left arm.
Rafe stood motionless on his side of the gate, squarely in front of the bolt that secured its two wings together. The twisted, black, wrought-iron bars were wide enough for his arms to pass through.
“Don’t move,” said the figure, coming up to the other side of the gate with the machine pistol pointed through the bars at Rafe. “Put your hands up!”
Rafe raised his arms in the air.
“Now,” said the guard, pausing against the inner side of the gate. “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”
“I belong to that plane that just landed behind you,” said Rafe. “I’ve got something to tell whoever’s in charge at this place. Take me in—”
“Oh, no!” The barrel of the machine pistol poked through the bars against Rafe’s stomach. “If you come through here, it’ll be feet first—”
“Lucas,” said Rafe quietly.
“Lucas?” echoed the guard. “Who do you think is Lucas? I’m—”
He was rammed forward against the gate suddenly, and his head snapped back. He sagged, but Rafe, reaching through the bars, caught him—a dead weight now, with his head lolling backward unnaturally on his shoulders.
Breathing heavily with the effort, Rafe managed to hold the body upright, first with one arm then another, while he went through the guard’s pockets. He found a wallet, some small personal items, but no key. He let the body drop and paused to think.
“Lucas,” he said.
The shadowy form of Lucas appeared close to the bars on the other side.
“Yes,” said Lucas.
Rafe pointed to where a thin, upright line of light showed the gatehouse door still ajar.
“Look around inside that building,” Rafe said. “See if you can find anything that looks like a key.”
Lucas turned and went. The brightness of the door widened, and Rafe saw the wolf slip inside. He waited, moving back a little so that the light escaping from the open door would not shine on him. It cut across the still figure of the guard inside, but he hoped that close to the ground as the body was, and some distance from the doorway, it would not be noticeable.
Lucas came back and shoved his muzzle through the bars. In his jaws was a steel ring with a single key on it.
“Thanks,” said Rafe. He took the ring and felt around the inside of the gate for a keyhole. But his fingers found nothing. The inside surface was bare. He gave up.
“Lucas,” he said in a low voice, “do you know what a keyhole looks like?” He held the key and pointed it toward the palm of his other hand, making a twisting motion.
“I can unlock things,” Lucas answered. “Ab taught me.”
Rafe passed the key back through the bars to the wolf.
“Take this back into the gatehouse, then,” he said. “See if you can find a keyhole somewhere in there that this works in.”
Lucas’s teeth closed on the ring. He went.
Rafe waited. He heard a slight sound behind him and whirled. He found himself looking down into Gaby’s face, whitened by the faint moonlight. Anger and self-reproach hit him at the same time. He had virtually forgotten about her in the tenseness of breaking into the place.
“Go back to the truck!” he whispered to her now. “Wait there!”
“No,” she answered.
“I said—”
“I said no,” she repeated. “There may be electronic traps or burglar alarms ahead. You may be good at some things, but I’ll bet I’m better at that sort of thing than you. Besides, I want to go with you and Lucas.”
“No,” he said.
“You can’t stop me,” she replied. “I’ll come with you—”
She broke off, staring past him. Rafe turned back to the gate and saw it opening. Lucas was standing just inside it. Rafe ran hastily past him to the gatehouse door and shut it, closing off the betraying light. He turn
ed about to find Lucas and Gaby together, facing him.
“It’s your funeral,” he whispered roughly to Gaby. “All right! Come on!”
He turned and led the way rapidly but quietly toward the house, in the shadows of some bushes lining one side of the driveway. When they came to the point where the bushes ended, they were less than fifty feet from a corner of the house and perhaps a hundred feet from its front doorway.
The house stood still and silent in the night. Strangely, there were no lights showing about it, neither on the grounds outside nor within. Almost any place of size and value nowadays was brilliantly lighted during the dark hours and had video cameras at work to record the presence of any zombie visitor—so that he could later be found and identified in daylight. But this house, this towering pile of construction, seemed utterly lightless, without protection or even the presence of waking inhabitants.
“Too easy,” breathed Rafe—half to himself, half to Gaby. He turned to whisper to Lucas.
“Lucas, do you smell anyone? Hear anything? Is there any sign of anyone anywhere around?”
“No,” said Lucas.
“Maybe we’re just lucky,” whispered Gaby.
“Can’t be.” Rafe shook his head. “The plane just landed here fifteen minutes ago. If they’ve checked, they’ve already found it empty and know there’s something wrong. If they haven’t checked, why haven’t they? That guard on the gate wasn’t there for no reason.”
Gaby did not answer. Lucas was silent.
“All right,” said Rafe. “It doesn’t matter. I have to go in anyway. Gaby, will you wait here?”
“No,” said Gaby, “and there’s no way you can make me stay.”
Rafe shrugged.
“Lucas,” he said, “if Gaby tries to follow me, knock her off her feet.”
“Lucas!” said Gaby. “You won’t do any such thing! Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” said Lucas. “But I will.”
“Lucas!” She stared at the wolf. “But it’s me—I’m telling you not to do it. Why would you listen to him?”
“It’s dangerous in there,” Lucas said. “I have to take care of you.”
“Who said?”
“Ab said,” answered the wolf, “I was to take care of you.”
“He didn’t mean—”
Rafe did not hear the last of her whispered argument. He was already running for the shadow at the front entrance of the house. He made it and leaned against the brick siding to catch his breath. He was shorter winded than he thought, and his legs were weak. The wound, which he had almost forgotten—he had really done an unusual job of healing by applying the new-found attention of the back of his mind to it—now pained him so deeply it made him catch his breath if he breathed more than shallowly.
But his wind returned. The pain faded. He went quickly up the front steps and found the door to the house not only unlocked but ajar. Pushing it just barely wide enough for him to enter, he slipped through.
He found himself in a high-ceilinged entry hall. There were doors in the paneled walls to right and left and at the end of the hall a wide stairway, curving upward into darkness, with a tall window halfway up through which the Moon now gave a little, faint light to the hall’s interior. He was able to see better than he had thought he would. One of the doors to his right was partly opened, revealing only blackness beyond. He went to it, but did not touch it—
A faint creak from the front doorway behind him brought him about.
The door was wide open now, and framed in its entrance were the silhouettes of a figure in what looked like baggy coveralls, and a dog. They came toward him even as he recognized them for Gaby and Lucas.
“Did you actually think you could make him disobey me?” Gaby whispered fiercely to Rafe as they came together.
“Sh-h . . . come on,” he said. He led the way through the open doorway into the absolute darkness beyond. “Just a second, while I find a light—”
The door closed itself behind them. The darkness was absolute.
“Will you walk into my parlor?” crowed a voice.
It was a child’s voice, high-pitched, triumphant, and full of laughter.
* * *
12
Lights blazed on all around them. The impact of a different and powerful broadcast force immobilized them. They stood blinded and blinking in the sudden glare, and the childish voice went on in their ears.
“Stay there,” it said. “Doggie? Where’s the doggie? You had him with you. Doggie, wherever you are, you come to me. Now! Do you hear me, doggie?”
Rafe began to get his eyes adjusted to the light. He looked down the thickly carpeted length of an overfurnished room, its walls crowded with paintings in ornate frames, its occasional tables loaded with lamps and bric-a-brac. Light poured over all these objects from lamps and fixtures in every corner and angle of the walls and ceiling. At the far end of the room was a huge, thronelike chair on a low platform, occupied by an oversize, rag-doll-like caricature of a swollen human body; between the huge shoulders of this caricature peeped forth—like the face of a customer above the cutout neck of a cardboard figure in an amusement park—the beaming features and small blond-haired head of a boy perhaps six or seven years old.
“You did, you did have a dog!” the child’s lips insisted now. “Where’d he go? Why doesn’t he come? He has to do what I say—just like you do. Don’t you? Take one step forward, Simon says.”
Involuntarily, Rafe felt his right leg swing forward, and he moved one more step into the room, Gaby in step beside him.
“There! Now, why doesn’t the doggie come?” The boy’s face scowled for a second, then broke into its sunny smile again as if smiling were imperative to it. “Never mind. I’ll get him later. Come on now, both of you. Come right up to the edge of my platform.”
Rafe and Gaby walked forward and stopped, now less than a dozen feet from the smiling child-face—and suddenly with his old, familiar, empathic twisting of the guts that put him unexpectedly in the mind and body even of an enemy, Rafe realized that what they were looking at was not some young boy peering at them from between the shoulders of some great, grotesque dummy-figure, but that the figure was a living body and that the child-head was actually attached to it. Behind that child-head, on the paneled wall, was a large, upside-down crucifix with something other than the Usual figure hanging on it. A furless, rat-size figure, now blackened and dried, but which had clearly once been some small and living animal . . .
Rafe looked back at the grotesque individual in the throne before him.
“You see?” it said through the bright lips of its clear young face. “You have to do what I say. Everyone does. That’s why I live here all alone except for a man at the gate. I’ll have to get myself another man now. Your doggie hurt him so bad he died. Where’s the dog?”
“I don’t know,” said Rafe. His own voice, in this brilliantly illuminated, cluttered room, before this unnatural figure, sounded strange in his own ears.
“He has to come back to me,” said the grotesque. “Everybody has to come to me when I call them. I called for you and you had to come to me, even though you thought you got away when I had to punish them there in the mountains for not sending you to me immediately. Now you’re here, aren’t you?”
Rafe did not answer.
“Don’t be sulky,” said the other. “I don’t like it when they sulk. And if I don’t like it, they don’t like it either. Stand on one leg—Simon says!”
Involuntarily, Rafe found himself lifting his right foot and putting all his weight on the left. His under-mind was searching urgently for the means of slipping out from the control of the broadcast now holding him. It was like the broadcast he had felt in the mountain stronghold, like that of the power broadcasts themselves, but much more effective and encompassing than either. Still, if he had been able to handle the others, he should be able now . . .
“I could make you both stand like that until you died,” said the creature—it was h
ard to think of it as a man in spite of its enormous body, as long as it kept talking in its fluting, little-child voice. The clear blue eyes focused on Rafe now. “You know that, don’t you? Say you do.”
“I do,” said Rafe involuntarily.
“Oh, but you’ve got to say it better than that!” The child-face was scowling again. “You’ve got to say it as if you knew it was true. Because it is. Don’t you know that?”
“Yes,” said Rafe, once more involuntarily. His single supporting leg was beginning to feel the strain. Beside him, there was a small noise, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Gaby fall. The attention of the creature in the throne turned to her.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded. “Is there something wrong with your leg, so you can’t stand on it? Tell me!”
The power broadcast suddenly stopped. They were free of compulsion.
“I’ve been a cripple for several years,” Gaby’s voice answered from the rug. “I just started walking again a few days ago.”
She climbed slowly to her feet. Rafe was measuring the distance of less than twelve feet between himself and the creature on the throne. If he could just get to the other fast enough . . .
“You would, would you?” said their captor suddenly, shifting his eyes back to Rafe. “You’d try to hurt me, would you? Don’t you know you can’t hurt me? Don’t you know who I am?”
“No,” said Rafe.
“Oh, yes, you do!” The child-face looked angry. “I’m the one you wanted to find because you think I’ve got your friend Ab Leesing. And I have, too. But I’m not going to give him back to you. I took him to make you come to me. Didn’t you know that? No, you didn’t. But I did. Can’t you guess who I am, now?”