Kenneth Bulmer: The Key to Irunium

“What do you mean—where? I just lose them, that’s all.”

“Oh, no, Bob. They go somewhere. And now, because you must have gone through a nodal point at the right time, you Porteured Miss Upjohn across. You sent her, Bob. I’m willing to help you get her back, but not if you hand around here to fawn on the Montevarchi and deal with her Trugs. Oh, no. I’ll denature you first!”

Prestin’s first impressions of David Macklin returned with that hypnotic sparkle and that radiating good humor. Once having set his mind to a course of action, Macklin would enjoy it. That alone should have told enough, for Macklin, it seemed, would not enjoy a course of action that would harm anyone else. At least that’s what Prestin, undecided, worried, and dead-tired, tried to tell himself.

“Yes, well—” he said, fumbling for coherent thought.

A slashing slice of sound ripped from the door. Both men flinched around to look. A gleaming axehead grinned through a panel and, as they watched, it withdrew and then smashed loud and tearingly through again, splitting and splintering the wood. The axe wrenched around and, squealing, pulled back for another blow.

“Do Contessas usually,” David Macklin said softly, “come visiting in the middle of the night with an axe to open the door?”

“You must be right.” Prestin’s tiredness weighed on him now, pulling him down with indecision and fear. “All right. I’ll come with you. But I want to—”

“Sure, laddie, sure. You’ll want to know all manner of things and I’ll be telling you. But, right now, we scarper flo.”

Macklin slid the window blinds up and pushed the casement open. He hopped up with sparrow-agility onto the sill, then turned with a smile to Prestin. “The ladder’s in position. Come on.”

Up until that moment Prestin hadn’t considered how Macklin expected them to leave by the window. Poking his head out as the door resounded to more axe blows, he saw the long ladder reaching up from a balcony three stories below. A dark shape stood at its foot and Prestin caught a glimpse of a white wedge of face staring up. Macklin began to descend the ladder, his cloak and hat billowing in the night wind.

“Come on, Bob! The Trugs will be through soon!”

He put a foot on the top rung and then turned to look back into the room. The panel nearest the door’s handle had broken fully open now, splintered and gaping.

As he looked a hand reached in—a hand that glistened green and yellow with scales, that possessed two fingers and a stub thumb with long blood-red claws.

He stared, frozen, his mouth half open.

That blasphemous hand groped around for the bolt. As the hand turned the green and yellow scales caught the light and burned with a curious violet edging as though each scale were limned in radiation. The two fingers clicked against the thumb as the hand reached the bolt head.

Prestin felt sick. Macklin’s hand caught his calf.

“Come on, Bob! Hurry up! They’ll have us off this ladder!”

Prestin shut his mouth and swallowed hard. He wanted to see what came through the door; but Macklin was undoubtedly right. He began, stiffly and with a queasy sensation threatening to flood not only him but Macklin as well, to climb down the ladder.

Wind tore at him. He had to cling with a deliberate effort to each rung on the way down.

At last his foot was gripped and guided the last couple of rungs and he could stand on the stone of the balcony. He looked up, breathing hard, expecting to see—what?

“Don’t gawp, laddie! In with you!”

Macklin and the other man, so far not consciously identified by Prestin, bundled him through the window opening. With one foot stepping through and the other lifting up to follow, he felt a hand pull him urgently and he toppled forward. As he fell he heard a loud and authoritative crack. It sounded like a branch splitting in frost, or a whip licking across a naked back.

“Only just in time, thank God,” Macklin said.

The other man said in a firm, controlled voice, “I thought you were never going to make it, Dave.”

Macklin straightened up and smiled, helping Prestin to his feet. They were just in another hotel bedroom. The only object in the room to make Prestin look twice was the sawn-off shotgun on the bed.

He glanced at the stranger. “Aye, you can laugh,” the man said. “But you don’t know what we’re up against.”

“This is Alec,” said Macklin. “Further introductions later. Now we must decamp. They’ll be cramming the elevator down to this floor right now.”

“I saw a claw hand,” said Prestin.

The other two nodded.

“Well. Now you’ve some idea. Let’s go.”

They went out the door fast, Alec lifting the shotgun and stuffing it beneath the normal hacking jacket he wore. His open-necked shirt framed a tough bronzed throat and his face looked as though he had seen a few lifted corners on the problem-spots of the world. Evidently, he was the muscleman for Macklin.

The elevator lights indicated a car was on its way down.

“That’s them, the black-souled hellions,” growled Alec.

“We can take the other elevator. We’ll be out the front door fifteen seconds before them… If we’re lucky.”

Macklin slid the gates shut and punched the buttons. The car dropped. Prestin swallowed. Strange contessas, men who talked wildly of impossibles, a climb down a ladder from one hotel window to another in the middle of the night—it would all have been madness but for that single fleeting glimpse he’d gotten of that gruesome yellow and green scaled, two-finger and thumb hand with the blood-red claws.

The elevator stopped and the doors and gates slid back. Alec eased his bulky body out into the dimly-lit foyer. “All clear,” he said in his growly voice. He cocked an eye at the adjacent elevator indicator. “They’re almost here.”

“Let’s run!” snapped Macklin, and set off like a sprinter for the swinging doors.

Alec took off after him, and Prestin, thinking that they always seemed to leave him for last, tailed on.

Despite all that had happened—because of it, in all probability—Prestin had to keep forcing himself to take the affair seriously. He kept wanting to burst out laughing. Even that scaled claw could have been a plastic model from a tricks and jokes shop and in his heightened frame of mind, with excitement and fatigue addling his thinking, he had been taken in like a fool.

He halted stubbornly on the pavement. Rome lay breathing all about him, the air fresh but not cold, the wind only a minor breeze down at ground level. He caught hold of Macklin’s elbow, forcing the older man to stop.

“Now look here, Macklin. I—”

He did not go on.

A dark shape had appeared from the hotel doorway behind them. He could not see it clearly for it was wrapped in an enveloping raincoat, most unfashionably long, and with a down-drawn hat that might have doubled for Macklin’s own floppy one. Alec looked back and shouted, hard and high, “Get out of the way, Dave! It’s a Trug!”

Alec flung open his coat and dragged out the shotgun. Before Prestin could move or even shift his stance, Alec had lifted the sawn-off shotgun, aimed it, and pressed one of the triggers.

The explosion sounded like a house falling down.

The shotgun blast cut the dark form in two. Appalled, Prestin saw green ichor oozing from the falling body, saw the widespread green and yellow clawed hands, a deep and feral blood-red glitter from the place he expected eyes to be. He did not see the thing’s face. The body hit the pavement.

Then he was running away—running hard, feet slapping pavestone, head high, gasping for breath. He could hear Macklin running with him, then Alec, feet echoing his own. They ran and ran. One or two late-night passersby stared; Prestin ignored them. He wanted to get away and hide.