Children of the Gates (2 page)

She had a list ready now. “If I can just make out Jane’s writing. She really ought to print, at least with that you can make educated guesses. That’s right, two cases of Coke, one of Canada Dry, one of Pepsi. And she said you’d be holding melons—oh, I should have told you, I’m Linda Durant and I’m picking all this up for Jane Ridgewell—they’ve taken over the Wilson place. She said she’d call and tell you.”

Ham nodded. “She did and I’ve got it all together. Won’t take us long to load it up for you—” He glanced to Nick who obligingly moved away from the counter again. He was willing to give Ham a hand. Though they should be in no hurry to speed this one off.

This Linda was almost as tall as Nick. A lot of girls were tall nowadays. Her hair had been tied back from her face with a twist of bright red wool, but it was still long enough to lie on her shoulders in very dark strands. Her skin was creamy pale. If she tanned she had not started that process yet this season.

Her jeans were as red as her hair tie and she had a sleeveless blouse of white with blue dolphins leaping up and down on it. Sunglasses swung pendant from another red tie about her neck and she wore thong sandals on her feet. He was not usually so aware of a girl’s clothes, but these fitted her as if to complete a picture.

Nick shouldered one of the melons Ham pointed out and took a second under his arm, carrying them out to the waiting jeep. Ham was busy stowing in Coke.

“Wait ’til I get some sacks,” he told Nick. “Shake those melons around and you’ll get them stove in.”

Linda Durant had followed them out. “That sounds,” she commented, “as if I have a rough road ahead. You’ll have to give directions, Jane’s are vague.”

For the first time Nick realized that she meant to travel the Cut-Off. He glanced at Ham who looked sober. After what Ham had just been saying—to send a stranger, and a girl, down the Cut-Off—But if there was no other way in now—only Nick had a queer feeling about it.

There was one thing—he could take that way, too. It was really shorter to his own cabin when you came to think about it. And it had been almost his whole lifetime since Ted and Ben had disappeared. This was broad daylight and these Ridgeways must have been up and down there maybe a hundred times since they moved in. So, why look for monsters that did not exist?

“Look here,” Nick suggested as Ham reappeared with sacks and newspapers and proceeded to wedge in the cargo. “I’m heading that way. It’s rough and we’ll have to take it slow, but if you’ll match your speed to mine”—he motioned at the waiting bike—“I’ll guide you in. I’m Nick—Nicholas Shaw—Mr. Hodges here knows me. My people have had a cabin on the lake for a long time.”

Linda gave him a long, intent survey. Then she nodded and smiled.

“That’s fine! From what Jane said the road’s pretty rough and I could miss it. I’m very glad of your company.”

Ham packed the last of the papers in, and Nick gathered up his own purchases and bagged them in a bundle he could tie over the saddlebags. Several indignant yowls from the storeroom brought an instant sharp response from the Peke.

Linda adjusted her sunglasses and got behind the wheel. But Ham spoke to Nick in a low voice.

“Take it easy now. I have a funny feeling—”

“Not much else we can do if she’s going to get to the Wilson place,” Nick pointed out.

As he gunned the bike to life he wondered what looming danger one could watch for along the Cut-Off. No one who had ever met whatever peril lurked there had ever returned to explain what he or she had faced. No, Nick was not going to let his imagination take over. He’d end up seeing a UFO or something lurking behind every tree, he waved to Linda and swung out. She nodded and followed.

They turned off the highway about a half-mile farther on and Nick cut speed, concentrating on the rough surface ahead. He had come this road enough times to memorize every rut and bump, but the heavy rains last week would have done damage, and he had no intention of being spilled through carelessness.

A mile and a half to the Cut-Off. In all the years he had been coming up here he had always looked for the overgrown entrance to what had become a sinister road to nowhere. Could she get the jeep in there at all? But they had been using it, so they must have cleared a passage through. July 24, 1970—he’d been too little then to realize what had gone on. But he’d heard plenty about it ever since. All that searching—the neighbors, the sheriff and his deputies. And not so much as a track to tell them why two young men in the best of health had vanished from a half-mile strip of road one sunny morning.

They had been seen entering, had stopped and talked to Jim Anderson about the best place to fish. Jim had been going into the store. He had watched them turn into the Cut-Off. But they never came out at the lake where a couple of guys were waiting to join them.

Mouth of the Cut-Off—like a snake with jaws wide open to swallow them down.

Nick took firm control of his imagination. If he did not see Linda to the lake she would go by herself. And he somehow could not let that happen and be able to look at himself in the mirror when shaving tomorrow.

It was only a half-mile, perhaps a little more. They could run it in minutes, even if it were rough. The sooner they got through the better. He wondered what this Linda would say if she knew his thoughts. She’d probably decide he’d been smoking pot. Only when you heard about the Cut-Off all your life—well, you had a different point of view.

He had borrowed a lot of Ham’s books, bought some of his own, knew all the things that did happen now and then that nobody seemed able to explain. Maybe Fort and those other writers who hunted out such stories had the right of it. The scientists, the brains who might have solved, or at least tried to solve, such puzzles, refused even to look at evidence before their eyes because it did not fit in with rational “facts.” There could be facts that were neither rational nor logical at all.

There was the turnoff ahead. And there certainly had been changes since the last time he was here. Looked as if someone had run a bulldozer in to break trail. Nick gave a sigh of relief at the raw opening. There was a healthy difference between wriggling down an almost closed and ill-reputed trail and this open scraped side road, which now looked as good as the one leading to his own cabin. He flagged the jeep as he came to a stop.

“This is it,” he called. Something in him still shrank a little from entering that way, but he refused to admit it.

Only he continued to feel that odd uneasiness, which had come to him earlier as he had seen Rufus watch something invisible that Nick had been convinced against his will was there.

“Take it slow,” he cautioned, also against his will. He wanted to take that road at the best speed they could make. “I don’t know how good the surface is.”

“Yes.” The dark glasses masked her face. She surely did not need them here in the shade of the trees, but she had not let them slide off as she had at the store. The Peke was on the seat, his forepaws resting on the dashboard, looking ahead with some of Rufus’ intensity. He did not bark, but there was an eagerness in every line of his small, silky body, as if he wanted to urge them on.

Nick gunned his motor, swung into the Cut-Off, his speed well down. The jeep snorted along behind him at hardly better than a walking pace. The road crew had run the scraper along, but the rain had cut gullies across, here and there, and those had not been refilled.

The lane was all rawly new, bushes and even saplings gouged and cut out and flung back to wither and die on either side. It looked ugly—wrong, Nick decided. He supposed it had to be done to open up the road, but it was queer the road crew had not cleaned up more. Maybe the guys who had worked here knew about the sinister history of the Cut-Off and had not wanted to stay around any longer than they had to.

That broken stuff walled them in as if it were intended to keep them in the middle of the road, allow them no chance to reach the woods. Nick felt more and more trapped. Uneasiness was rising in him so that he had to exert even more control. This was plain stupid! He must keep a grip on his imagination. Just watch the road for those ruts and lumps so he would not hit something—do that and keep going. They would be there in no time at all.

It was still, not a leaf moved. But the trees arched over well enough to keep out the sun. Probably it was very quiet, too, if the noise of the bike and the jeep had not advertised their coming. Advertised it to what? Nick hoped only to those in the Wilson place.

Right ahead was the turn, a blind one. And this was a narrow road. No place to meet anyone coming the other way. But surely they were making enough noise—

Noise! The Peke had begun to yap, almost as when he had challenged Rufus. Nick heard the girl call out: “Down, Lung! Down!”

He half-turned his head, the bike hit something and wobbled. Nick had to fight to keep it away from a mass of dying brush. But there was something else, a cloud—like a fog trapped under the trees. It was thickening, coming down like a blanket—fast!

Nick thought he cried out. Behind him he heard an answering scream and a crash. Then he hit something, was thrown, and skidded painfully into total darkness.

2

Nick lay with his feet higher than his head, the whole left side of his face smarting. Groggily he levered himself up on his hands and blinked, then shook his head to banish the queer not-here feeling. He could hear a whimpering sound from behind, but at first he was so much occupied with his own aches and pains that it had no meaning.

He looked around.

The bike lay entangled in broken brush into which it must have slammed with force. Nick sat up farther. Bike—the jeep! Where was the jeep? Now the whimpering alerted him to what might be a serious accident. He had no idea what had happened—memory seemed at fault. They had just come around the turn in the Cut-Off and then . . .

Nick got shakily to his feet.

There was no road.

He staggered toward the jeep. That was there, yes, slammed against a tree. A tree that had no business being there at all, for seemingly it had sprung up right in the middle of what had been a newly cleared road.

There was no road!

He reached the jeep, supported himself against it. His aching head still seeming foggy. Fog—mist—cloud—there was something about that he could faintly remember. But that did not matter now. What did was the girl behind the wheel of the jeep.

She was supported partly by her seat belt, partly by the wheel itself. Her eyes were still covered with those sunglasses. With an effort Nick reached over and jerked them off. She was unconscious, he decided.

The whimpering came from the Peke huddled against her, licking at her arm. Lung growled at Nick but only halfheartedly, as he slid in beside Linda.

As far as Nick could see she had no open wounds, but—broken bones? His hands were shaking with a tremor he found hard to control, as he eased her back in the seat so he could get at the fastening of the seat belt.

“What—what—” She opened her eyes but, though they were turned in his direction, they did not seem to focus on him.

“Hold still!” Nick ordered. “Let me get this open—”

A few minutes later he sighed with relief. She had no broken bones. The side of his face, where it had scraped gravel, was raw, but that was minor. They could have been killed. Looking about him now, with eyes entirely aware, he wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.

Killed—if they had been going any faster—slammed up against these trees. But where—where did the trees come from?

They were huge, giants, and the underbrush beneath them was thin as if their mighty roofing overhead of leaves and branches kept any weaker growth from developing. The jeep was trapped between the one against which its nose was stuck, and a log of a fallen giant behind it, boxed in neatly so there was no hope of getting it out. Impossible, but that was the way it was.

Nick moved slowly around the machine, ran his hands across the top of the log, dislodging moss and fallen leaves. It was very apparent that this had been here, half sunk in the mucky soil, for a long, long time. But—there was the jeep—and—where was the road?

“Please—” Linda had edged around on the seat and was looking at him, her eyes very wide and frightened. “Please—where are we—what—happened?” She cuddled Lung against her. Now and then the small dog whined. He was shivering.

“I don’t know,” Nick answered slowly. Only he suspected what was so frightening he did not want to face the fact that it might be the truth.

“But—there’s no road.” Linda turned her head from side to side, searching. “We were just driving along and then—Where is this?” Her voice slid up the scale; Nick judged she was close to panic.

He was not far from that himself. But they had to hold on, to lose control would do no good. He hurried back to climb into the jeep.

“You—you know—!” She did have her voice under control now, was watching him narrowly. “What has happened? If you know—tell me!”

But he still hated to face what must be the truth. “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “It is only a guess.” He hesitated. Those trees there were certainly good evidence. What more did he want? They were out of the Cut-Off, in such woods as had not been seen in this part of the country for two hundred years or more when the first settlers had attacked the great forests to carve out mastery of the land.

“Did your friends know anything about the history of the Cut-Off?” he began. How could you explain to anyone what might have happened, something so bizarre, so improbable?

“No.” Linda cradled Lung in her arms, murmuring soothingly to him now and again. Her one-word reply was uncompromising. It was apparent she wanted the truth, or what he thought might be the truth.

“Well, the Cut-Off has a history of disappearances—running back as long as records were kept around here—”

(“Around here.” But surely this “here” was not the “here” of a short time ago.)

“The last time it happened was in 1970, two men going out to the lake to fish. But before that there were others. That’s why the Cut-Off wasn’t in use. Not until they built the new freeway and closed off the other road in.”

“Disappearances to where?” Linda demanded sharply.

“That’s it, nobody knows—knew. There are places . . .” Nick paused again. Would she believe him? She had to believe the evidence now before them at least. “Places where people do disappear—like the Bermuda Triangle—a whole flight of Navy planes went there, and the rescue ships after them. There have been planes and ships and people—and on land, in other places, army regiments even.” Though he did not want to remember, all the stories he had read flooded back into his mind. “They just flew, or rode, or walked into—nowhere.”

Linda sat very still. She no longer watched him. Her gaze was straight ahead at that giant tree trunk against which the jeep was nosed.

“What—what is the theory about it then?” Her voice quivered a little. Nick could sense her effort at control.

“One is that there is a magnetic field like a whirlpool—that anything caught in it may be thrown into another space-time continuum.”

“And—that may be what has happened to us? How do we get back?”

There was no answer to that. There never had been through all the centuries of such disappearances. Nick stared at the tree too now, fiercely willing it to vanish, for them to be back in the Cut-Off.

“There is no return.” Linda made that a flat statement rather than a question. “We—we’re trapped in this—this
place!
”

“No!” Nick exploded. “We’re not sure of that! Anyway we can try—we can always try—but”—he regarded the dim, shadowed places under the trees uneasily—“let’s get out of here. On to the lake—”

He had a feeling that they were under observation, not that he could detect any movement, any sign they were not alone. To get out of this place of trees, where a man was dwarfed and lost, into the open was a desire goading him to action.

“We can’t take the jeep.” Linda stated the obvious.

“No, but I can the bike—push it now—and we can ride if the road gets better and you are willing to hold on.”

“Yes! Yes, let’s get out of here!” Her reply was feverishly eager.

She opened her shoulder bag, took out a leash she hooked to Lung’s collar. “My bag—it’s small.” She reached into the back of the jeep, pulled out a canvas duffel bag. Then she laughed, though that sound was a little ragged. “All that stuff back there for the party tonight. Jane—Jane may have to wait some for it.”

Nick’s foreboding lightened. Linda was taking it well. Did she really believe him? Did he believe himself? But his first panic had subsided. And action drew him. Maybe if they could just find the lake, a familiar landmark—Don’t think of any future beyond the next few minutes, he warned himself.

Mentally he inventoried the contents of his saddlebags—first-aid kit, sweater, swimming trunks, matches, a hunting knife, flashlight, chocolate bars, water canteen, two shirts, tool kit for the bike—transistor radio—Radio!

He was out of the jeep, hurrying back to the bike. Radio—if they could hear anything on that—Nick fumbled with the buckles of the saddlebag as Linda joined him.

“What is it?”

“My radio—if we can pick up anything—”

“Oh, hurry!” She shifted from one foot to the other impatiently as he untangled the gear and brought out the small transistor.

Three stations, he flipped the switch from one to the next. Only silence. Then—A gabble of sound, not static, more like speech. But not in any language he had picked up before.

“There! Turn it up!” Linda urged. “You’ve got something!”

“But what?” Nick asked.

“But what” was right. This sounded like gasps, clicks, and even a gabbled singing, but it made no sense. He thumbed the set off.

“Whatever that was, it was no broadcast of ours,” he said bleakly.

“But somebody was broadcasting,” Linda pointed out. “Which means we aren’t alone here. Maybe if we can find people they will be able to help us.”

Nick was not too sure. The language, if language that had been, was far removed from anything he had ever heard in his life and he had monitored a lot of foreign broadcasts with Gary Langford when Gary had his ham outfit. But Linda was right about getting out of here. He had the small compass and the lake was northeast—or it should be—if there was still any lake at all.

They could not keep to a straight line, but the lack of heavy underbrush was a help. And with the compass to steer by they wove a path among the towering trees, rounding boles that the two of them together could not have hoped to span with out stretched arms.

The bike seemed uninjured, but Nick had to wheel it along, walking beside it. There was no opening through which they dared ride. Linda carried her duffel bag slung over her shoulder by its cords and had let Lung down to patter along over the thick layers of countless years of fallen leaves. The little dog seemed to have lost his fear. But, while he sniffed at a moldering branch now and then, or snuffled into a pile of last season’s leaves, he made no effort to pull to the end of his leash, staying close to Linda.

Though the trees about them were awe-inspiring, there were sounds in this forest familiar enough to allay some of their distrust. For there were not only birds to be heard and sometimes seen, but those winged inhabitants appeared unusually fearless as well as curious about the intruders.

Intruders Nick felt they were. This was a place that did not know man and had no idea of his species’ destructiveness. The barked giants about them had never felt the bite of axe and stood in arrogant pride. Had it not been for that gabble from the transistor, Nick would have suspicions that the phenomena which haunted the Cut-Off had brought them to a space where his kind had never existed at all.

“It—it is so quiet.” Linda moved closer, laid one hand on the bike near his. “Except for the birds. I never saw woods like this before. The trees—they are huge! When I was little my aunt had an old copy of
Swiss Family Robinson
—there was a tree in it that they turned into a house. You could do that with most of these.”

Nick had one eye on the compass. They had had to make a good many detours, but they were still heading for the lake. Only here among all these trees it was hard to judge distance. Surely they couldn’t be too far away from it now. But—what if there was no lake here?

He wanted that lake, he
had
to see it. The body of water was a promise of security somehow—without the lake they would be lost entirely. Nick hardly heard Linda’s comment, he was so intent on willing the lake to be waiting for them, hoping that the stand of trees would soon thin so they could glimpse it.

“Nick!” Linda’s hand flew from the bike to his wrist, tightened about it in a convulsive grip.

But he had seen it too.

They closed ranks, the bike between them. Lung lunged to the full length of his leash, set up a frenzied barking, not unlike that with which he had challenged Rufus. It was plain what he saw he resented.

Where it had come from was a minor mystery. For it was such a shimmering, dazzling white in this greenish gloom that it caught and held the eye almost at once. Yet they were so suddenly aware of it that it might have emerged from the tree against whose bark it was now framed.

“I—don’t—believe—” Linda’s voice trailed away. She saw it, Nick saw it. And so did Lung, still dancing on two hind feet at the farthest reach of his leash, jerking the strap in her hands, waving his forepaws in the air with his furious desire to be at this new enemy.

“What do you see?” Nick’s wrist was still in her tight grasp. They had both taken knocks back there in their rough transition into this alien world. Perhaps this was a collective hallucination. Only—would the dog share it?

“A unicorn,” she answered. “Don’t—don’t you see it, too?”

The creature was about the size of a large pony, not a horse, Nick thought. Its coat was that dazzling white, almost a source of light. The mane and tail were also white. But that single spiraled horn set just between and above the creature’s wide dark’ eyes was golden. And it, too, glowed. This was certainly the fabled unicorn, as Nick had seen it in reproductions of medieval paintings.

It stared back at them and then tossed its head, so that the forehead fringe of mane about the base of the incredible horn lifted. Then the creature pawed the earth with one slender hoof, lowered its head, and snorted at Lung as if replying to the Peke’s shrill challenge. To all appearances, Nick thought it real enough.

Once more it tossed its head and then turned and paced away among the tree trunks, its white glow speedily lost.

“But unicorns—they are not—they never were alive,” Linda said in a voice hardly above a whisper.

Something he had read came to Nick’s mind then. All the old legends of dragons and griffins, the People of the Hills, the very core of folklore and myth—men had believed in them for a long time, had sworn oaths in court that they had seen such, had had converse with the more humanlike figures of an unnatural, magical world. Could it have been that, just as he, Linda and Lung had been caught up in some force that had deposited them here, some of the creatures native to this world had been dropped into theirs? But a unicorn! Now that it was gone Nick had already begun to doubt what he had seen, to try to rationalize it.