Lung broke into a wild barking, facing the bush
screen from behind which that order had come. Nick halted, though
Linda took a step or two as if the plunging of the now aroused Peke
pulled her ahead.
Nick touched her arm with one hand, with the other he steadied
the bike.
“Who are you?” he demanded of the bush and was
inwardly glad his voice was so even and controlled. Ted—Ben? Some
other who had preceded them into this alien world?
There was a moment of silence, so prolonged that Nick wondered
if the challenger had faded into deeper cover, tricking them into a
halt while he withdrew. But why would anyone be so elusive? The
stranger in hiding could certainly see they were harmless.
Then the bushes parted and a man came into the open. He was very
ordinary looking, a little shorter than Nick, but broader of
shoulder, his bulk of body enhanced by the garment he wore, a
coverall. Perched on his head was a helmet rather like an inverted
basin, and he had on thick boots.
His face was round and there was a thick brush of moustache,
grayish red, half hiding his mouth. In one hand he carried—
A slingshot!
Viewing that, Nick could have laughed, except there was
something in the stranger’s attitude that did not permit such
a reaction to his childish weapon. And there was a very faint stir
of memory deep in Nick’s mind. Somewhere, sometime, he had
seen a man wearing just such clothing. But where and when?
As yet the newcomer had given no answer to Nick’s
question. Instead he eyed them narrowly. Lung, straining to the
very end of his leash, was sniffing, his barking having subsided,
sniffing as if to set this stranger’s scent deep in his
catalog of such odors.
If the stranger intended to overawe them with such a beginning,
Nick refused to yield.
“I asked,” he said, “who are you?”
“And I heard you, chum. I ain’t lost the use of
m’ ears, not yet. I’m Sam Stroud, Warden of Harkaway
Place, if it’s anything to you. Which, I’m laying odds,
it ain’t. There’s just the two of you?”
He watched them closely, almost as if he expected them to be the
van of a larger party. Linda broke in:
“Warden! Nick, he’s dressed like an air raid warden—one of those in the picture about the Battle of Britain they showed
in our history course.”
English! That explained his accent. But what was an Englishman
in the uniform of a service thirty years in the past doing here?
Nick did not want to accept the suggestion the discovery
brought.
“Is she right?” He added a second question to the
first. “You are that kind of warden?”
“That’s so. Supposin’, m’lad, you speak
up now. Who are you? An’ this young lady
here?”
“She’s Linda Durant and I’m Nick Shaw.
We’re—we’re Americans.”
Stroud raised a thick hand and rubbed his jaw. “Well,
now—Americans, hey? Caught right in your own country?”
“Yes. We were just heading for a lake—like this lake—then
suddenly we were here. Where is here?”
Stroud made a sound that might have been intended for a bark of
laughter, except there was very little humor in it.
“Now that’s a question, Shaw, which nobody seems
able to answer. The Vicar, he’s got one or two ideas—pretty
wild they are—but we’ve never been able to prove them one way
or another. When did you come through?”
“Not too long ago,” Linda answered. “Is that
your fire making the smoke? We’re awfully hungry and we were
just going to eat when we saw it and came along . . . ”
“You have some supplies?” Stroud rammed the
slingshot back under the belt of his boiler suit. “All right,
come ahead.” He turned a little toward the bush from which he
had emerged, put two fingers to his lips and gave a low, but
carrying whistle. “You ain’t bait as far as I can
see.”
“Bait?” Nick did not like the sound of that.
Again Stroud gave his crow of laughter. “Bait, yes.
You’ll learn, m’lad, you’ll learn. This way now,
an’ mind the bushes . . . ”
He pushed ahead and they followed in a way which to Nick’s
eyes used all available cover. But if there was such a need to
hide, why then did they allow smoke to rise like a banner in the
air? Only a moment later, he realized that they were not heading
toward the site of that fire, but well to the left of it.
Linda must have made the same discovery, for now she asked:
“Aren’t we going to your camp?”
“Right ahead—” Stroud’s deep voice reached
them. “Mind this vine, enough to trip a man up it
is.”
Nick had to mind the vine, a tough cover on the ground, with
attention. It caught at the bike, as well as at his feet, with such
persistence one could almost believe it a set trap. Twice he had to
stop and untangle it, so that Stroud and Linda had disappeared and
he had only the marks of their passing to guide him on a trail that
took them farther and farther from the site of the fire and then
curved again toward the Run.
He came out at last in a clearing walled by what seemed a solid
siding of thick brush. And there he found Stroud, Linda, and three
others. Two were men, the third a woman. They had been facing
Linda, but, as Nick pushed his way through with a crackling of
brush, they turned almost as one to stare at him.
The men were in contrast to each other as well as to Stroud. One
was elderly, very tall and gaunt, his white hair in a fluff about
his head as if it were too fine to be controlled. He had a great
forward hook of a nose that was matched by the firmness of the jaw
beneath. But his eyes, under the shadow of bushy brows, did not
have the fierce hawk glare Nick expected. They were intelligent and
full of interest, but they also held an acceptance of others, not
the need for dominance that the rest of his face suggested.
He wore a dark gray suit, much the worse for hard usage, and a
sweater underneath its coat that did not come high enough to hide a
clergyman’s roundabout collar. On his feet were rough hide
moccasins, which were in strange contrast to the rest of his
clothing, shabby as that was.
The younger man was an inch or two taller than Nick and, like
Stroud, he was in uniform, but not that of a warden. His blue tunic
was much worn, but there were wings on its breast, and he had
pushed to the back of his blond head a pilot’s cap.
Their feminine companion was almost as tall as the pilot and
she, too, was in uniform, with badges Nick did not recognize on the
shoulder. A helmet like the Warden’s crowned a mass of unruly
dark hair. Her figure was almost as lean as that of the clergyman,
and her face, weathered and brown, made no pretense to good looks.
Yet there was an air of competence and authority about her that was
impressive.
“Americans,” she commented. “Then,” she
spoke to the clergyman, “you were entirely right in your
surmise, Adrian. We did travel farther than we thought in that
cage.”
The blond pilot also fingered a slingshot. “We’d
better shove off.” His eyes had gone from Nick to the brush.
He had the attitude of one listening. “No use watching the
trap any longer—”
“Barry is correct,” the clergyman nodded. “We
may not have had the kind of success we hoped to obtain. But by
attracting our young friends here we have had excellent
results.”
“Better introduce ourselves,” the woman said
briskly. “Adrian Hadlett, Vicar of Minton Parva.” The
clergyman gave an old-fashioned and rather majestic inclination of
his head. “Pilot Officer Barry Crocker, and I’m Diana
Ramsay—”
“Lady Diana Ramsay,” Stroud growled as if that was
important.
She made an impatient gesture with one hand. The other, Nick
noted, held a third slingshot.
“There’re a couple more of us,” she continued.
“You’ll meet them at the camp.”
Once more, this time with Nick and Linda in the midst of this
energetic group, they pushed on, to come out on the bank of the
Run. And not too much farther on was their camp.
Logs had been rolled into place and reinforced with rocks,
forming what was half-hut, half-cave. Lung set to barking as a
huge, gray-furred shape, which had been sunning by the entrance,
reared back and showed a brush of tail. With ears flattened to its
skull, the cat faced the excited Peke with a warning hiss that
deepened into a growl. Linda dropped her bag to catch up the
willing warrior, holding him despite his struggles.
“Now then, Jeremiah, m’dear, that be no proper way
to say good day, not at all it ben’t.”
From the door issued a small woman, to catch up the cat, a hefty
armload, and soothe him gently with hands crook-jointed by
arthritis, patched with the brown spots of age. Her hair, as white
as the Vicar’s, was twisted into a tight little bun above a
round face with a mere knob of a nose that gave very precarious
perch room to a pair of metal-framed glasses.
She lisped a little as she spoke, perhaps because her teeth
seemed uncertainly anchored in her mouth, but there was a bright
and interested welcome in the way she regarded the newcomers. Her
dress was covered in part by an apron of sacking and an old
macintosh which swung cloak-wise from her shoulders. On her feet
were the same kind of crude moccasins as the Vicar wore.
“Jean,” she called back over her shoulder.
“We’ve got company.”
The girl who came at that summons was perhaps only a little
older than Linda herself. She also wore a dark blue uniform, though
over it she had pinned apron-like a piece of dingy cloth, as if she
hoped so to protect the only clothing she had. Her hair was brown
and sprang in waves about her tanned face, a face that was pretty
enough to make a man look a second time, Nick thought.
“Americans.” Lady Diana again carried through the
ritual of introductions. “Linda Durant, Nicholas Shaw. And
this is Mrs. Maude Clapp and Jean Richards, who is a
WREN.”
“WREN?” repeated Nick, a little bewildered.
The girl smiled. “Women’s Royal Naval Service—I
believe you call yours WAVES.”
“Well now, didn’t I tell you that the dream I had me
last night was a true one?” Mrs. Clapp’s voice was
cheery with open friendliness. “Company comin’, that it
was. An’ we’ve fish all ready to fry out nice’n
crisp. Couldn’t have been luckier, now, could it?” she
asked of the company at large, but not as if she expected any real
answer. “Jeremiah here, he won’t take at your little
dog, Miss, if the dog don’t take at him. Jeremiah, he
ain’t a quarrelsome beast.”
“I hope Lung isn’t.” In Linda’s hold the
Peke had become quiet. Now she swung him up so she could view him
eye to eye. “Lung, friend, friend!” She spoke with
emphasis, then turned the dog around to face the big cat whom Mrs.
Clapp had put on the ground once more. “Friend,
Lung!”
The Peke flashed his tongue across his own nose. But when Linda
set him down he settled by her feet, quiet, as if he had not been
only moments earlier in a frenzy against a tribal enemy.
Nick offered his own supplies.
“Bread!” Mrs. Clapp opened the bag and sniffed
ecstatically at its contents. “Fresh bread! Lands, I almost
forgot what it smells like, let alone tastes.”
Nick had grounded the bike. Now he stood a little to one side
glancing from the pilot Crocker to the girl Jean, then on to Stroud
in his warden’s uniform. Crocker, unless Nick was a very poor
judge of ages, was in his early twenties, Jean even younger. They
could not be as old as Stroud’s uniform suggested.
But—
“Something bothers you, my boy?” It was the Vicar.
And without thinking Nick asked his question baldly:
“Do you mind telling me, sir—how long have you been
here?”
The Vicar smiled wearily. “That—that may be impossible. We
tried to keep a record in the beginning, but after they captured us
and brought us here—” He shrugged. “By a matter of
seasons, I should judge about four years. The raid hit Minton Parva
the evening of July 24, 1942. I think we all have reason to
remember that. We were in the crypt shelter of the church. Mrs.
Clapp is, was, my housekeeper. Lady Diana had come to see me about
the hospital fund. Jean and Barry were on their way down to the
station to take the train back, they were both returning from
leave. And Stroud had come to check up on our supplies—when the
alert sounded and we all went into the crypt. There was a
sound—frankly, Shaw, we all believed it was the end. And
then—somehow we were out of the church, out of even the England
that we knew . . . ”
He hesitated. Those tired, but very keen eyes had been watching
Nick’s face. Now the Vicar’s expression changed.
“You know something, don’t you, my boy? Something
that is disturbing you. What is it?”
“Time, sir. You say you think you have been here about
four years. But today is—was—July 21, 1972.”
He expected the Vicar to challenge him on that. It was not
believable, not if Hadlett had been speaking the truth. And Nick
was sure he had.
“July 21, 1972,” repeated the Vicar slowly.
“No, I do not doubt you, my boy, as I think you are
expecting. It is too apt, it bears out all the old tales.
But—1972—thirty years—What happened there—thirty years
back?”
“Thirty years what? . . . ” Crocker lounged over to
them. He had been more intent on the motorbike than he had on their
conversation, but now he looked at Hadlett alertly. “What is
this about thirty years?”
“Tell him your date,” the Vicar said to Nick as if
his saying it would make the deeper impression.
“The date today—it’s July 21, 1972,” Nick
returned. Hadlett had accepted that without question, but would the
others?
“Nineteen seventy-two,” repeated the pilot blankly.
“But—it’s impossible—Padre, it’s about 1946,
unless we counted wrong, and a man can’t tick off thirty
years that way without knowing it!”
It was Lady Diana who had listened this time. “Adrian,
then you were right. It’s like the old tales, isn’t it?
Thirty years—” She looked beyond them to where the water
curled around the stones in the even flowing Run.
“Eighty-five—but I’m not, Adrian, I’m no
older—”
“That, too was part of those same old tales, Diana,”
he said.
“No!” Crocker protested. “This kid has it all
wrong, he’s one of Them maybe. How do we
know—” He was backing away from Nick, the slingshot again in
his hand. “He’s working for Them, sent to
break us down with a story like that!”
“Here—what’s goin’ on?” Stroud bore down
on them. “What’s this talk about
Them?”
Crocker burst out with his accusation. And there was open anger
in his voice as he turned on the Warden. “We brought these
two here—next They will be coming! Tell us that
we’ve been here thirty years! That’s a lie no
one’s going to believe.”
“Now, then.” Stroud’s hand was on
Crocker’s shoulder. “Take a reef on that there tongue of yours, Barry. These
don’t smell like the Herald do they? An’ when did the
flying devils use bait? They zooms right in an’ takes what
they wants, no frills about it. All right, you say it’s 1972
back there—what happened to the war?”
Stroud’s rumble had drawn them all. They made a
semicircle, looking at Nick, some with speculative, Crocker with
accusing, eyes.
“That ended in ’45.” Nick searched memory for
an account of the conflict that had ended before he was born, but
that to this handful was still vividly a threat.
“Who won?” demanded Crocker angrily, as if by his
answer Nick would be judged.
“We did—the allies. We invaded and took Germany from one
side, the Russians came in from the other—they got Berlin. Hitler
killed himself before they got to him. And we dropped the atom bomb
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—then the Japanese surrendered that same
year.”
“Atom bomb?” Crocker no longer sounded angry, but
rather dazed.
“Yes. Wiped out both cities.” Nick remembered the
accounts of that and hoped he would not have to go into
details.
“And now—?” the Vicar asked after a pause, while his
companions stared at Nick as if he were speaking a foreign
language.
“Well, there’s still trouble. The Korean War and now
the one in Vietnam, we’re standing off Communist expansion.
China has gone Communist, and Russia still has half of Germany
under control—the eastern part. But we’ve made two manned
landings on the Moon.” He tried to think of what had been
progress and not just dreary wrangling. “And now we are
planning to put a station into space. But—I can’t tell you
everything that happened. England—they’ve given up the
Empire, and they had a Labor government for a long time—it’s
been tough over there—awfully high taxes and slipping
back—”
“Thirty years, yes, a lot can happen.” The Vicar
nodded. “And still wars—”
“Please.” Linda broke into the quiet that followed
his comment. “If you came here from England and we from Ohio—Did you get across the ocean some way? Or is this all just one
country?”
The Vicar shook his head. “No, the general contours of
this world seem geographically aligned to those of our
own. This continent and England appear much as they must have in a
very remote past before men began to tame the land. We were brought
to this continent as prisoners. Only by the grace of God were we
able to escape. Since then we have been trying to devise a way to
return. Only I fear that this world has no ships to offer us. But
ours is a very long and complicated story and I would suggest we
tell it by degrees, perhaps over some of Mrs. Clapp’s
excellently cooked fish. Shall we?”
Perhaps it was the return to tasks they all knew and had shared
for some time that relieved the tension. They got ready for the
meal. And passing around the bread Nick had brought apparently made
this a feast.
Hadlett turned a roll about in his fingers. “You never
know how much you miss the small, things of life”—he used a
cliche to express the truth—“until they are taken from you.
Bread we cannot produce here. Though Mrs. Clapp has experimented
with ground nuts and seeds from a wild grass not unlike oats. It is
good to eat bread again.”
“You said you were brought here as prisoners.” Nick
wanted to know the worst of what might now menace them.
“Ah, yes. It is best that you be warned.” The Vicar
swallowed a bite of roll. “This is a very strange world and,
though it has not been for want of trying, we have not penetrated
very far into its secrets. But we believe that it is somehow
parallel with our own, though obviously different. Sometime in the
past, we do not know how far past, there was apparently a force set
into being, that could reach into our own world at special places
and draw out people. There are many stories in our own world of
mysterious disappearances.”
Nick nodded. “More and more of those have been collected
recently into books. We came from a place that has such a
reputation—many disappearances over the years.”
“Just so. And our church at Minton Parva was situated near
a fairy mound—”
“Fairy mound?” Nick was startled. What was the
meaning of that?
“No, I am not trying in any fashion to be amusing, my boy.
In Britain we have a very long history—considered today to be
legend—of disappearances near such sites. People ‘fairy
taken,’ who sometimes reappeared years, even generations,
after their disappearances, with an explanation of spending a day,
or a month, or a year in another world, these are common in our
folklore.”
“Then,” Linda broke in, “we can go
back!” She had been holding Lung, and perhaps her hands
closed too tightly on the small dog, for he gave a whine of
protest.
“That,” the Vicar told her gravely, “we do not
know. But our own efforts have failed. And—we have seen enough here
during our wanderings to suggest that such escapes, or returns,
must be very exceptional.”
Linda, still holding Lung in her arms, was on her feet. She
stood so for a moment, her glance sweeping from face to face,
ending with Nick. And it was to him that she spoke directly, as if
she was prepared to believe him over whatever the others might
say.
“Do you think we can get back?”
He had the choice of lying, of trying to be easy with her. But
somehow he could not do it.
“No one ever went back through the Cut-Off that we knew
of.” In his own ears his voice sounded harsh.
Her face was blank of expression. She turned abruptly and began
to walk away, her walk becoming swifter as she went. Nick got up to
start after her.
“No.” She did not turn to look at him, but it was as
if she knew he would follow. “Let me alone—just let me alone
for a while!”
And such was the force of the way she spoke that he stopped,
uncertain as to whether he should force his company on her or
not.
“Jean.” It was Hadlett who spoke. “See that
she is safe, but let her be. We must all face our truths as best we
can.”
The English girl passed Nick. He turned to the others.
“See that she is safe?” he repeated. “And you
were prisoners. Who and what do you have to fear? Let’s have
it straight!”
“Good enough.” Stroud had been eating stolidly. Now
he leaned back against one of the logs helping to form their
shelter. “We’re not alone here, you must have guessed
that. And as far as we’ve been able to find out there’s
three kinds of people—or things—or whatever you want to name
’em.
“There’s some like us who have been caught. We tried
to make talk with a couple of crowds like ours—or we think
they’re like us. But they don’t understand. The last
time it was soldiers, an’ we got shot at. Not our
soldiers—they looked Chinese.
“Then there’s the Herald an’ those who listen
to him an’ change—” He spat out that last word as if it
were some obscenity. “The Herald—he may always have been
here, native to this world. He has the cities an’ the People
with him. He wants us. Soon as he finds out about you two he will
come snoopin’. All we know is if you take what he has to
offer, then you change. After that you’re not a man or a
woman any more, you’re something different. We aren’t
havin’ any of that. You won’t either, if you have
sense.
“Third—there’s the flyer hunters. They ain’t
o’ this world anymore than we are. Only in their flyers they
can get in an’ out. One of their planes winks into the air
an’, ’fore you know it, they have you netted. I
don’t know what they do with the poor devils they catch,
outside of shut ’em up in cages like we was. But we were
lucky. The ship that caged us, it got something wrong. Made a crash
landin’ here an’ we escaped ’cause the crew were
wiped out. That’s when we found out they’d brought us
out of England.”
“But your smoke—you talked about bait. What—or who—were
you trying to catch?”
Stroud grunted. “Not the flyers or the Herald, you can
bet. No, we came across some tracks yesterday, mixed, women
an’ children. We got to thinkin’ it was another crowd
we could meet up with an’ not get shot at. Of course, they
might be dream things. But we figured it wouldn’t do no harm
to set up a signal an’ see what came
lookin’.”
“They set traps,” Crocker commented. “We
thought we’d try one, but not for Them.”
“You meant the hunters?” Nick was confused. After
Stroud’s story of the flyers he wondered that these people
wanted to pull such a menace down on them.
“No, either the other drifters, or else the changed
ones—if they were changed an’ not just born that
way.”
“We saw—or thought we saw,” Nick said slowly,
“a unicorn when we were back in the woods. Was that what you
mean by changed ones?”
“Not quite,” the Vicar answered him.
“We’ve seen a good many strange beasts and birds and
things that combine two or more species. But such do not threaten
us, and we believe they are native here. Perhaps from time to time
in the past they strayed into our world to leave legends behind
them. We have yet to meet a dragon, but I would not swear that none
exist here. The changed ones—they are human for the most part in
general appearance. It is the small details—certainly their
‘powers,’ which is the best word to use for their
abilities—that betray them. The People of the Hills are very
old.”
“We stay near the woods”—Stroud nodded at a stand of
trees not more than a few strides away—“because the flyers
can’t get in under those to reach us. So far we haven’t
seen many of ’em. They come in waves like—we’ll have a
sky full of them for a few days—then they’re gone. An’
as long as we keep away from the cities we’re all right. The
flyers got a hate for the cities—try to bomb ’em.”
“Not bomb, I told you, Stroud!” Crocker cut in.
“They don’t bomb. In fact I don’t see what they
do—though it must be some type of raid the way they come over.
Whatever they try to accomplish, it doesn’t cause any
damage—none that we can see. The cities are safe.”
“For them as wants to be changed,” Mrs. Clapp
observed. “But we ain’t them.”
Nick felt as if his head was spinning. It would seem that life
here was complicated past even the many perils that now threatened
his own time and space. This band, which had continued existence
together as a group, displayed great hardiness and determination.
Undoubtedly he and Linda had been lucky in this meeting. What if
they had wandered on, on their own, to face all these threats
without warning?
He tried to express his relief at their good fortune, and the
Vicar smiled gently.
“You, yourself, have a part in your future, my boy. You
have managed to adjust to a situation that might indeed have
threatened your reason. We have seen the pitiful ending of one man
who could not accept his transition. Acceptance is
necessary.”
Nick saw Linda and Jean coming back along the bank of the Run.
So much had happened. Had he really accepted as Hadlett said, or
was this all some kind of crazy dream from which he could not wake?
Would there come a time when it would hit him as it had Linda, and
he must make his peace with what seemed insanity?
Lung broke into a wild barking, facing the bush
screen from behind which that order had come. Nick halted, though
Linda took a step or two as if the plunging of the now aroused Peke
pulled her ahead.
Nick touched her arm with one hand, with the other he steadied
the bike.
“Who are you?” he demanded of the bush and was
inwardly glad his voice was so even and controlled. Ted—Ben? Some
other who had preceded them into this alien world?
There was a moment of silence, so prolonged that Nick wondered
if the challenger had faded into deeper cover, tricking them into a
halt while he withdrew. But why would anyone be so elusive? The
stranger in hiding could certainly see they were harmless.
Then the bushes parted and a man came into the open. He was very
ordinary looking, a little shorter than Nick, but broader of
shoulder, his bulk of body enhanced by the garment he wore, a
coverall. Perched on his head was a helmet rather like an inverted
basin, and he had on thick boots.
His face was round and there was a thick brush of moustache,
grayish red, half hiding his mouth. In one hand he carried—
A slingshot!
Viewing that, Nick could have laughed, except there was
something in the stranger’s attitude that did not permit such
a reaction to his childish weapon. And there was a very faint stir
of memory deep in Nick’s mind. Somewhere, sometime, he had
seen a man wearing just such clothing. But where and when?
As yet the newcomer had given no answer to Nick’s
question. Instead he eyed them narrowly. Lung, straining to the
very end of his leash, was sniffing, his barking having subsided,
sniffing as if to set this stranger’s scent deep in his
catalog of such odors.
If the stranger intended to overawe them with such a beginning,
Nick refused to yield.
“I asked,” he said, “who are you?”
“And I heard you, chum. I ain’t lost the use of
m’ ears, not yet. I’m Sam Stroud, Warden of Harkaway
Place, if it’s anything to you. Which, I’m laying odds,
it ain’t. There’s just the two of you?”
He watched them closely, almost as if he expected them to be the
van of a larger party. Linda broke in:
“Warden! Nick, he’s dressed like an air raid warden—one of those in the picture about the Battle of Britain they showed
in our history course.”
English! That explained his accent. But what was an Englishman
in the uniform of a service thirty years in the past doing here?
Nick did not want to accept the suggestion the discovery
brought.
“Is she right?” He added a second question to the
first. “You are that kind of warden?”
“That’s so. Supposin’, m’lad, you speak
up now. Who are you? An’ this young lady
here?”
“She’s Linda Durant and I’m Nick Shaw.
We’re—we’re Americans.”
Stroud raised a thick hand and rubbed his jaw. “Well,
now—Americans, hey? Caught right in your own country?”
“Yes. We were just heading for a lake—like this lake—then
suddenly we were here. Where is here?”
Stroud made a sound that might have been intended for a bark of
laughter, except there was very little humor in it.
“Now that’s a question, Shaw, which nobody seems
able to answer. The Vicar, he’s got one or two ideas—pretty
wild they are—but we’ve never been able to prove them one way
or another. When did you come through?”
“Not too long ago,” Linda answered. “Is that
your fire making the smoke? We’re awfully hungry and we were
just going to eat when we saw it and came along . . . ”
“You have some supplies?” Stroud rammed the
slingshot back under the belt of his boiler suit. “All right,
come ahead.” He turned a little toward the bush from which he
had emerged, put two fingers to his lips and gave a low, but
carrying whistle. “You ain’t bait as far as I can
see.”
“Bait?” Nick did not like the sound of that.
Again Stroud gave his crow of laughter. “Bait, yes.
You’ll learn, m’lad, you’ll learn. This way now,
an’ mind the bushes . . . ”
He pushed ahead and they followed in a way which to Nick’s
eyes used all available cover. But if there was such a need to
hide, why then did they allow smoke to rise like a banner in the
air? Only a moment later, he realized that they were not heading
toward the site of that fire, but well to the left of it.
Linda must have made the same discovery, for now she asked:
“Aren’t we going to your camp?”
“Right ahead—” Stroud’s deep voice reached
them. “Mind this vine, enough to trip a man up it
is.”
Nick had to mind the vine, a tough cover on the ground, with
attention. It caught at the bike, as well as at his feet, with such
persistence one could almost believe it a set trap. Twice he had to
stop and untangle it, so that Stroud and Linda had disappeared and
he had only the marks of their passing to guide him on a trail that
took them farther and farther from the site of the fire and then
curved again toward the Run.
He came out at last in a clearing walled by what seemed a solid
siding of thick brush. And there he found Stroud, Linda, and three
others. Two were men, the third a woman. They had been facing
Linda, but, as Nick pushed his way through with a crackling of
brush, they turned almost as one to stare at him.
The men were in contrast to each other as well as to Stroud. One
was elderly, very tall and gaunt, his white hair in a fluff about
his head as if it were too fine to be controlled. He had a great
forward hook of a nose that was matched by the firmness of the jaw
beneath. But his eyes, under the shadow of bushy brows, did not
have the fierce hawk glare Nick expected. They were intelligent and
full of interest, but they also held an acceptance of others, not
the need for dominance that the rest of his face suggested.
He wore a dark gray suit, much the worse for hard usage, and a
sweater underneath its coat that did not come high enough to hide a
clergyman’s roundabout collar. On his feet were rough hide
moccasins, which were in strange contrast to the rest of his
clothing, shabby as that was.
The younger man was an inch or two taller than Nick and, like
Stroud, he was in uniform, but not that of a warden. His blue tunic
was much worn, but there were wings on its breast, and he had
pushed to the back of his blond head a pilot’s cap.
Their feminine companion was almost as tall as the pilot and
she, too, was in uniform, with badges Nick did not recognize on the
shoulder. A helmet like the Warden’s crowned a mass of unruly
dark hair. Her figure was almost as lean as that of the clergyman,
and her face, weathered and brown, made no pretense to good looks.
Yet there was an air of competence and authority about her that was
impressive.
“Americans,” she commented. “Then,” she
spoke to the clergyman, “you were entirely right in your
surmise, Adrian. We did travel farther than we thought in that
cage.”
The blond pilot also fingered a slingshot. “We’d
better shove off.” His eyes had gone from Nick to the brush.
He had the attitude of one listening. “No use watching the
trap any longer—”
“Barry is correct,” the clergyman nodded. “We
may not have had the kind of success we hoped to obtain. But by
attracting our young friends here we have had excellent
results.”
“Better introduce ourselves,” the woman said
briskly. “Adrian Hadlett, Vicar of Minton Parva.” The
clergyman gave an old-fashioned and rather majestic inclination of
his head. “Pilot Officer Barry Crocker, and I’m Diana
Ramsay—”
“Lady Diana Ramsay,” Stroud growled as if that was
important.
She made an impatient gesture with one hand. The other, Nick
noted, held a third slingshot.
“There’re a couple more of us,” she continued.
“You’ll meet them at the camp.”
Once more, this time with Nick and Linda in the midst of this
energetic group, they pushed on, to come out on the bank of the
Run. And not too much farther on was their camp.
Logs had been rolled into place and reinforced with rocks,
forming what was half-hut, half-cave. Lung set to barking as a
huge, gray-furred shape, which had been sunning by the entrance,
reared back and showed a brush of tail. With ears flattened to its
skull, the cat faced the excited Peke with a warning hiss that
deepened into a growl. Linda dropped her bag to catch up the
willing warrior, holding him despite his struggles.
“Now then, Jeremiah, m’dear, that be no proper way
to say good day, not at all it ben’t.”
From the door issued a small woman, to catch up the cat, a hefty
armload, and soothe him gently with hands crook-jointed by
arthritis, patched with the brown spots of age. Her hair, as white
as the Vicar’s, was twisted into a tight little bun above a
round face with a mere knob of a nose that gave very precarious
perch room to a pair of metal-framed glasses.
She lisped a little as she spoke, perhaps because her teeth
seemed uncertainly anchored in her mouth, but there was a bright
and interested welcome in the way she regarded the newcomers. Her
dress was covered in part by an apron of sacking and an old
macintosh which swung cloak-wise from her shoulders. On her feet
were the same kind of crude moccasins as the Vicar wore.
“Jean,” she called back over her shoulder.
“We’ve got company.”
The girl who came at that summons was perhaps only a little
older than Linda herself. She also wore a dark blue uniform, though
over it she had pinned apron-like a piece of dingy cloth, as if she
hoped so to protect the only clothing she had. Her hair was brown
and sprang in waves about her tanned face, a face that was pretty
enough to make a man look a second time, Nick thought.
“Americans.” Lady Diana again carried through the
ritual of introductions. “Linda Durant, Nicholas Shaw. And
this is Mrs. Maude Clapp and Jean Richards, who is a
WREN.”
“WREN?” repeated Nick, a little bewildered.
The girl smiled. “Women’s Royal Naval Service—I
believe you call yours WAVES.”
“Well now, didn’t I tell you that the dream I had me
last night was a true one?” Mrs. Clapp’s voice was
cheery with open friendliness. “Company comin’, that it
was. An’ we’ve fish all ready to fry out nice’n
crisp. Couldn’t have been luckier, now, could it?” she
asked of the company at large, but not as if she expected any real
answer. “Jeremiah here, he won’t take at your little
dog, Miss, if the dog don’t take at him. Jeremiah, he
ain’t a quarrelsome beast.”
“I hope Lung isn’t.” In Linda’s hold the
Peke had become quiet. Now she swung him up so she could view him
eye to eye. “Lung, friend, friend!” She spoke with
emphasis, then turned the dog around to face the big cat whom Mrs.
Clapp had put on the ground once more. “Friend,
Lung!”
The Peke flashed his tongue across his own nose. But when Linda
set him down he settled by her feet, quiet, as if he had not been
only moments earlier in a frenzy against a tribal enemy.
Nick offered his own supplies.
“Bread!” Mrs. Clapp opened the bag and sniffed
ecstatically at its contents. “Fresh bread! Lands, I almost
forgot what it smells like, let alone tastes.”
Nick had grounded the bike. Now he stood a little to one side
glancing from the pilot Crocker to the girl Jean, then on to Stroud
in his warden’s uniform. Crocker, unless Nick was a very poor
judge of ages, was in his early twenties, Jean even younger. They
could not be as old as Stroud’s uniform suggested.
But—
“Something bothers you, my boy?” It was the Vicar.
And without thinking Nick asked his question baldly:
“Do you mind telling me, sir—how long have you been
here?”
The Vicar smiled wearily. “That—that may be impossible. We
tried to keep a record in the beginning, but after they captured us
and brought us here—” He shrugged. “By a matter of
seasons, I should judge about four years. The raid hit Minton Parva
the evening of July 24, 1942. I think we all have reason to
remember that. We were in the crypt shelter of the church. Mrs.
Clapp is, was, my housekeeper. Lady Diana had come to see me about
the hospital fund. Jean and Barry were on their way down to the
station to take the train back, they were both returning from
leave. And Stroud had come to check up on our supplies—when the
alert sounded and we all went into the crypt. There was a
sound—frankly, Shaw, we all believed it was the end. And
then—somehow we were out of the church, out of even the England
that we knew . . . ”
He hesitated. Those tired, but very keen eyes had been watching
Nick’s face. Now the Vicar’s expression changed.
“You know something, don’t you, my boy? Something
that is disturbing you. What is it?”
“Time, sir. You say you think you have been here about
four years. But today is—was—July 21, 1972.”
He expected the Vicar to challenge him on that. It was not
believable, not if Hadlett had been speaking the truth. And Nick
was sure he had.
“July 21, 1972,” repeated the Vicar slowly.
“No, I do not doubt you, my boy, as I think you are
expecting. It is too apt, it bears out all the old tales.
But—1972—thirty years—What happened there—thirty years
back?”
“Thirty years what? . . . ” Crocker lounged over to
them. He had been more intent on the motorbike than he had on their
conversation, but now he looked at Hadlett alertly. “What is
this about thirty years?”
“Tell him your date,” the Vicar said to Nick as if
his saying it would make the deeper impression.
“The date today—it’s July 21, 1972,” Nick
returned. Hadlett had accepted that without question, but would the
others?
“Nineteen seventy-two,” repeated the pilot blankly.
“But—it’s impossible—Padre, it’s about 1946,
unless we counted wrong, and a man can’t tick off thirty
years that way without knowing it!”
It was Lady Diana who had listened this time. “Adrian,
then you were right. It’s like the old tales, isn’t it?
Thirty years—” She looked beyond them to where the water
curled around the stones in the even flowing Run.
“Eighty-five—but I’m not, Adrian, I’m no
older—”
“That, too was part of those same old tales, Diana,”
he said.
“No!” Crocker protested. “This kid has it all
wrong, he’s one of Them maybe. How do we
know—” He was backing away from Nick, the slingshot again in
his hand. “He’s working for Them, sent to
break us down with a story like that!”
“Here—what’s goin’ on?” Stroud bore down
on them. “What’s this talk about
Them?”
Crocker burst out with his accusation. And there was open anger
in his voice as he turned on the Warden. “We brought these
two here—next They will be coming! Tell us that
we’ve been here thirty years! That’s a lie no
one’s going to believe.”
“Now, then.” Stroud’s hand was on
Crocker’s shoulder. “Take a reef on that there tongue of yours, Barry. These
don’t smell like the Herald do they? An’ when did the
flying devils use bait? They zooms right in an’ takes what
they wants, no frills about it. All right, you say it’s 1972
back there—what happened to the war?”
Stroud’s rumble had drawn them all. They made a
semicircle, looking at Nick, some with speculative, Crocker with
accusing, eyes.
“That ended in ’45.” Nick searched memory for
an account of the conflict that had ended before he was born, but
that to this handful was still vividly a threat.
“Who won?” demanded Crocker angrily, as if by his
answer Nick would be judged.
“We did—the allies. We invaded and took Germany from one
side, the Russians came in from the other—they got Berlin. Hitler
killed himself before they got to him. And we dropped the atom bomb
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—then the Japanese surrendered that same
year.”
“Atom bomb?” Crocker no longer sounded angry, but
rather dazed.
“Yes. Wiped out both cities.” Nick remembered the
accounts of that and hoped he would not have to go into
details.
“And now—?” the Vicar asked after a pause, while his
companions stared at Nick as if he were speaking a foreign
language.
“Well, there’s still trouble. The Korean War and now
the one in Vietnam, we’re standing off Communist expansion.
China has gone Communist, and Russia still has half of Germany
under control—the eastern part. But we’ve made two manned
landings on the Moon.” He tried to think of what had been
progress and not just dreary wrangling. “And now we are
planning to put a station into space. But—I can’t tell you
everything that happened. England—they’ve given up the
Empire, and they had a Labor government for a long time—it’s
been tough over there—awfully high taxes and slipping
back—”
“Thirty years, yes, a lot can happen.” The Vicar
nodded. “And still wars—”
“Please.” Linda broke into the quiet that followed
his comment. “If you came here from England and we from Ohio—Did you get across the ocean some way? Or is this all just one
country?”
The Vicar shook his head. “No, the general contours of
this world seem geographically aligned to those of our
own. This continent and England appear much as they must have in a
very remote past before men began to tame the land. We were brought
to this continent as prisoners. Only by the grace of God were we
able to escape. Since then we have been trying to devise a way to
return. Only I fear that this world has no ships to offer us. But
ours is a very long and complicated story and I would suggest we
tell it by degrees, perhaps over some of Mrs. Clapp’s
excellently cooked fish. Shall we?”
Perhaps it was the return to tasks they all knew and had shared
for some time that relieved the tension. They got ready for the
meal. And passing around the bread Nick had brought apparently made
this a feast.
Hadlett turned a roll about in his fingers. “You never
know how much you miss the small, things of life”—he used a
cliche to express the truth—“until they are taken from you.
Bread we cannot produce here. Though Mrs. Clapp has experimented
with ground nuts and seeds from a wild grass not unlike oats. It is
good to eat bread again.”
“You said you were brought here as prisoners.” Nick
wanted to know the worst of what might now menace them.
“Ah, yes. It is best that you be warned.” The Vicar
swallowed a bite of roll. “This is a very strange world and,
though it has not been for want of trying, we have not penetrated
very far into its secrets. But we believe that it is somehow
parallel with our own, though obviously different. Sometime in the
past, we do not know how far past, there was apparently a force set
into being, that could reach into our own world at special places
and draw out people. There are many stories in our own world of
mysterious disappearances.”
Nick nodded. “More and more of those have been collected
recently into books. We came from a place that has such a
reputation—many disappearances over the years.”
“Just so. And our church at Minton Parva was situated near
a fairy mound—”
“Fairy mound?” Nick was startled. What was the
meaning of that?
“No, I am not trying in any fashion to be amusing, my boy.
In Britain we have a very long history—considered today to be
legend—of disappearances near such sites. People ‘fairy
taken,’ who sometimes reappeared years, even generations,
after their disappearances, with an explanation of spending a day,
or a month, or a year in another world, these are common in our
folklore.”
“Then,” Linda broke in, “we can go
back!” She had been holding Lung, and perhaps her hands
closed too tightly on the small dog, for he gave a whine of
protest.
“That,” the Vicar told her gravely, “we do not
know. But our own efforts have failed. And—we have seen enough here
during our wanderings to suggest that such escapes, or returns,
must be very exceptional.”
Linda, still holding Lung in her arms, was on her feet. She
stood so for a moment, her glance sweeping from face to face,
ending with Nick. And it was to him that she spoke directly, as if
she was prepared to believe him over whatever the others might
say.
“Do you think we can get back?”
He had the choice of lying, of trying to be easy with her. But
somehow he could not do it.
“No one ever went back through the Cut-Off that we knew
of.” In his own ears his voice sounded harsh.
Her face was blank of expression. She turned abruptly and began
to walk away, her walk becoming swifter as she went. Nick got up to
start after her.
“No.” She did not turn to look at him, but it was as
if she knew he would follow. “Let me alone—just let me alone
for a while!”
And such was the force of the way she spoke that he stopped,
uncertain as to whether he should force his company on her or
not.
“Jean.” It was Hadlett who spoke. “See that
she is safe, but let her be. We must all face our truths as best we
can.”
The English girl passed Nick. He turned to the others.
“See that she is safe?” he repeated. “And you
were prisoners. Who and what do you have to fear? Let’s have
it straight!”
“Good enough.” Stroud had been eating stolidly. Now
he leaned back against one of the logs helping to form their
shelter. “We’re not alone here, you must have guessed
that. And as far as we’ve been able to find out there’s
three kinds of people—or things—or whatever you want to name
’em.
“There’s some like us who have been caught. We tried
to make talk with a couple of crowds like ours—or we think
they’re like us. But they don’t understand. The last
time it was soldiers, an’ we got shot at. Not our
soldiers—they looked Chinese.
“Then there’s the Herald an’ those who listen
to him an’ change—” He spat out that last word as if it
were some obscenity. “The Herald—he may always have been
here, native to this world. He has the cities an’ the People
with him. He wants us. Soon as he finds out about you two he will
come snoopin’. All we know is if you take what he has to
offer, then you change. After that you’re not a man or a
woman any more, you’re something different. We aren’t
havin’ any of that. You won’t either, if you have
sense.
“Third—there’s the flyer hunters. They ain’t
o’ this world anymore than we are. Only in their flyers they
can get in an’ out. One of their planes winks into the air
an’, ’fore you know it, they have you netted. I
don’t know what they do with the poor devils they catch,
outside of shut ’em up in cages like we was. But we were
lucky. The ship that caged us, it got something wrong. Made a crash
landin’ here an’ we escaped ’cause the crew were
wiped out. That’s when we found out they’d brought us
out of England.”
“But your smoke—you talked about bait. What—or who—were
you trying to catch?”
Stroud grunted. “Not the flyers or the Herald, you can
bet. No, we came across some tracks yesterday, mixed, women
an’ children. We got to thinkin’ it was another crowd
we could meet up with an’ not get shot at. Of course, they
might be dream things. But we figured it wouldn’t do no harm
to set up a signal an’ see what came
lookin’.”
“They set traps,” Crocker commented. “We
thought we’d try one, but not for Them.”
“You meant the hunters?” Nick was confused. After
Stroud’s story of the flyers he wondered that these people
wanted to pull such a menace down on them.
“No, either the other drifters, or else the changed
ones—if they were changed an’ not just born that
way.”
“We saw—or thought we saw,” Nick said slowly,
“a unicorn when we were back in the woods. Was that what you
mean by changed ones?”
“Not quite,” the Vicar answered him.
“We’ve seen a good many strange beasts and birds and
things that combine two or more species. But such do not threaten
us, and we believe they are native here. Perhaps from time to time
in the past they strayed into our world to leave legends behind
them. We have yet to meet a dragon, but I would not swear that none
exist here. The changed ones—they are human for the most part in
general appearance. It is the small details—certainly their
‘powers,’ which is the best word to use for their
abilities—that betray them. The People of the Hills are very
old.”
“We stay near the woods”—Stroud nodded at a stand of
trees not more than a few strides away—“because the flyers
can’t get in under those to reach us. So far we haven’t
seen many of ’em. They come in waves like—we’ll have a
sky full of them for a few days—then they’re gone. An’
as long as we keep away from the cities we’re all right. The
flyers got a hate for the cities—try to bomb ’em.”
“Not bomb, I told you, Stroud!” Crocker cut in.
“They don’t bomb. In fact I don’t see what they
do—though it must be some type of raid the way they come over.
Whatever they try to accomplish, it doesn’t cause any
damage—none that we can see. The cities are safe.”
“For them as wants to be changed,” Mrs. Clapp
observed. “But we ain’t them.”
Nick felt as if his head was spinning. It would seem that life
here was complicated past even the many perils that now threatened
his own time and space. This band, which had continued existence
together as a group, displayed great hardiness and determination.
Undoubtedly he and Linda had been lucky in this meeting. What if
they had wandered on, on their own, to face all these threats
without warning?
He tried to express his relief at their good fortune, and the
Vicar smiled gently.
“You, yourself, have a part in your future, my boy. You
have managed to adjust to a situation that might indeed have
threatened your reason. We have seen the pitiful ending of one man
who could not accept his transition. Acceptance is
necessary.”
Nick saw Linda and Jean coming back along the bank of the Run.
So much had happened. Had he really accepted as Hadlett said, or
was this all some kind of crazy dream from which he could not wake?
Would there come a time when it would hit him as it had Linda, and
he must make his peace with what seemed insanity?