Kenneth Bulmer: Demons' World

They found him sprawled on the edge of a projecting aerial platform, white, lax, unconscious and as helpless as a baby.

“Push him over the edge,” counseled Old Chronic, the veteran Forager. His pouchy eyes moved restlessly in the unceasing survey of all Foragers, his leathery neck creasing and uncreasing like an animated concertina.

“We-el,” said Thorburn, hesitantly. This was his first trip as lead Forager and the onus of responsibility had fallen on him with unwelcome surprise. Now he shook his massive head, trying to think and plan, conscious of the six others and contriving not to show the uncertainty he felt was a personal weakness. Tentatively he reached out for assurance from the others, and all the time his eyes moved up and down, left and right, around the back, searching, watching, apprehensive. A Forager out on a trip scarcely ever looked at his companions.

Old Chronic cackled, clicking his dentures, his eyes bright with gleeful malice. “What frightens you, Thorburn? He won’t step on you.”

The five others—three men and two girls—nodded and laughed at the sally. There was truth in that. Old Chronic might be past leading a foraging group, but he had lived a long time in a trade where men and women died frequently and they saw the wisdom of his words. All the time their eyes were moving, moving, moving.

Without looking at it, Thorburn jerked a horny thumb at the strange shining machine, lying mute and dumb beside the equally quiescent figure on the cold marble.

“And what about that?”

Julia, the blonde with the big body and agile, slender limbs, glanced down over the edge of the platform, her camouflage cape rustling in the breeze. She turned lithely, looked back at the others, raised a quizzical eyebrow at Old Chronic.

“Go on,” he said, wheezing a little in the fresh air.

Thorburn said, “Hold on, now—” and stopped. His eyes, in their ceaseless roaming, had glanced up at the Outer Sky, all a dazzling white-blue glare, far away and infinitely remote. A mile or so away across the concrete plain other buildings rose, black-outlined, colored cliffs of metal and stone and plastic. Every shape lay clearly before him in the brilliant light; yet every outline was encrusted in a blue mist of distance, a soft haze that subdued color and detail, lent the usual blurring to visual inspection. “I don’t know—”

The marble aerial platform trembled suddenly, a gentle, skin-felt vibration, a sensation of bodily swinging movement.

At once the Foragers reacted.

The four men and two women flung their camouflage capes more securely about them and dashed with scuttling speed for the shadow behind the doorway towering into dizzy perspective two hundred feet above.

Thorburn hesitated. The tight knot of puzzlement chaining these people had been dissipated and unraveled by that gentle vibration. His way, it seemed to him, had been marked out for him. Effortlessly, he picked up the man lying still and twisted by his strange machine, slung him over his shoulder, raced after his comrades with the long sure stride of an athlete in perfect training.

He reached the concealing shadows of the architrave as the Demon stepped out onto the balcony.

The stranger wore no camouflage cape and the odd material of his one piece coverall that had so puzzled the Foragers gave no clue to his origin, but its color, a drab greeny-gray, blended well enough with the shadows to give concealment from the enormous but erratic eyes of the Demon.

Holding himself perfectly still a few yards from his rigid companions, Thorburn watched the Demon stride out into the sunshine.

Displaced wind buffeted him as one gigantic leg swished by. He was thankful to see that Julia’s cape now clipped tightly to her without any betraying flutter. The noise of a monstrous foot descending sent shock waves through the feet-thick solid marble; a rushing wall of bright crimson going past, seemingly unending, slithering and scraping across the floor, drew excruciating pangs from his eardrums. The very air shivered as the Demon passed.

Thorburn did not look up now, did not move, stood graven, huddled, holding in the screaming panic within him, fighting the ages-old fear of the Demons that had haunted Mankind from the Beginning.

Thud, thud, thud, crashed the Demon’s feet. At each gigantic blow, sound blasted at Thorburn’s eardrums. Then that rippling avalanche of glowing crimson passed and he could flicker his eyes furtively within the shelter of his cape, and stare at Honey’s white, tensed, panic-drawn face; the rigidity of her pose told eloquently of deep primordial fear rather than an ordered and controlled stillness.

He shivered a little. Honey was young, on her second Forage; he should have stayed at her side. But this stranger who now so laxly hung over his arm had claimed his first attention. Why, he didn’t know. Rules of conduct were arbitrary enough for no one to misunderstand and a Forager’s first duty was to his comrades. If once a Demon caught sight of a man or a woman, the story might be different.

On the thought Thorburn swiveled an eye at the Demon.

Enormous, crushingly huge, the Demon stepped out onto the aerial platform, and leaned on the balustrade that lofted eighty feet. Something bright glinted up from a corner; a subdued splintering crash sounded.

Slowly a black shadowed foot lifted, rising like the black belly of a thundercloud swept down in ponderous might. The stranger’s queerly shining machine vanished over the edge of the platform. Before it shattered into meaningless fragments on the ground beneath, it must have fallen through three thousand feet of nothingness.

An explosive, blustering snort exploded from the Demon, a rolling, rushing tornado of sound that dwarfed anything that had gone before. Thorbum clenched his teeth and waited through the paroxysm. Staring in that swift, fleeting, camera-efficient, comprehensive glance of all Foragers, Thorburn checked that the Demon was not looking their way, flicked the retire signal to his companions and, on the instant, sprang from the architrave shadow to the shadow of the wall within.

The others joined him, six explosively moving and then stone-still people, in a line, sheltering in the shadows beneath the fifteen-foot-high skirting board.

At their leader’s imperious gesture Sims and Wallas, both young and agile, quick-witted, fleet-limbed, moved out ahead along the floor paralleling the crack where wooden skirting board and tiled floor untidily met. As well as an eye for the Demons, roaring and striding ponderously in the upper air, a Forager must spare an eye for every dark crack and cranny, every crevice and corner of his own world.

Bringing up the rear of the group, Cardon, a little older than Sims and Wallas, a little younger than Thorburn, a fierce, dark-eyed black-browed man with a notoriously filthy temper marched, it seemed, with a permanent crook in his neck, his head tilted back, his eyes forever searching the way they had come. The group depended on the rear marker.

Now that the Daemon had been left behind Honey had regained some color; her dark eyes flashed no less swiftly and intelligently as she, like everyone else, maintained a constant vigil. She pushed a hand beneath her cape, touched the warm metal of the walkie-talkie strapped to her back. The touch reassured her. Her job this trip as radioman gave her an importance, at least in her own eyes, and a task to which she could devote her attention and try, albeit with indifferent success, to shut out those screaming primordial fears that would not be denied in the actual physical, dreaded presence of a Demon.

Julia said, “Hold it. That’s the entrance; we came through flattened out. There’s a beam full-width a foot above the floor. Everybody down.”