Screaming Science Fiction (7 page)

He gunned the motor, spinning the car wildly round in a spray of gravel chips. Up on the hill at the top of the drive, Kent was vaulting the fence, and a figure in white was waiting in the garden for him, open arms held wide. George tore his eyes away from them and roared down the hill. For the second time that night he headed for the Meadington road.

The check lay on the empty passenger seat now where he’d dropped it, and money was quite the last thing in George’s mind as he drove his car in an unreasoning panic, leaping the low hills like some demon hurdler as he tried to make it back to the main road before—before what? A hideous doubt was blossoming in his mind, growing like some evil genie from a bottle and taking on a horrible form.

All those stories about queer dislocations of space and time—the signpost for Middle Hamborough that was, then wasn’t, then was again—and of course Kent’s story, and his…rejuvenation?

“I will be very glad,” George told himself out loud, “when I reach that junction just outside Meadington!” For one thing, he could have sworn that it wasn’t this much of a drive. He should surely have been there by now. Ah, yes, this would be it coming up now, just round this slight bend….

No junction!

The road stretched straight on ahead, narrow and suddenly ominous in the sweeping beam of his lights. All right, so the junction was a little further than he’d reckoned. George put his foot down even harder to send the big car racing along the narrow road. The miles flew by without a single signpost or junction, and a ground mist came in that forced George to slow down. He would have done so anyway, for now the road seemed to be exerting a strange pull on his car. The big motor felt as if it were slowing down! George’s heart almost jumped into his mouth. There couldn’t be anything wrong with the car, could there?

Braking to a halt and switching off the car’s engine and lights, George climbed out of the driver’s seat. He breathed the damp night air. On unpleasantly rubbery legs he walked round to the front of the car and lifted the hood. An inspection light came on and he cast a quick, practiced glance over the motor. No, he’d worked in a garage for many years and he knew a good motor when he saw one. Nothing wrong with the car, so—

As he straightened up, George felt an unaccustomed suction on his shoes and glanced down at the road. The surface was rubbery, formed of a sort of tough sponge. A worried frown crossed George’s face as he bent to feel that peculiar surface. He’d never seen a road surfaced with stuff like that before!

It was as he straightened up again that he heard the tinkling, like the sound of tiny bells from somewhere off the road. Yes, there, set back from the road, he could make out a row of low squat houses, like great mush-rooms partly obscured by the mist that swirled now in strange currents. The tinkling came from the houses.

The outskirts of a village? George wondered. Well, at least he’d be able to get directions. He stepped off the road on to turf and made for the houses, only slowing down when he saw how featureless and alike they all looked. The queer tinkling went on, sounding like the gentle noises that the hangings on a Christmas tree make in a draught. Other than that there were only the billowing mist and the darkness.

Reaching the first house, stepping very slowly now, George came up close to the wall and stared at it. It was gray, completely featureless. All the houses looked alike. They were indeed like enormous mushrooms. No windows. Overhanging roofs. Flaps of sorts that might just be doors, or there again—

The tinkling had stopped. Very carefully George reached out and touched the wall in front of him. It felt warm…and it crept beneath his fingers!

Deliberately and slowly George turned about and forced one foot out in front of the other. Then he took a second step. He fought the urge to look back over his shoulder until, halfway to the mist-wreathed car, he heard an odd plopping sound behind him. It was like the
ploop
you get throwing a handful of mud into a pond. He froze with his back still turned to the houses.

Quite suddenly he felt sure that his ears were enlarging, stretching back and up to form saucer-like receivers on top of his head. Everything he had went into those ears, and all of it was trying to tune in to what was going on behind him. He didn’t turn, but simply stood still; and again there was only the utter silence, loud in his strangely sensitized ears. He forced his dead feet to take a few more paces forward—and sure enough the sound came again, repeating this time:
ploop, ploop, ploop!

George slowly pivoted on his heel as muscles he never knew he had began to jump in his face. The noises, each
ploop
sounding closer than the last, stopped immediately. His legs felt like twin columns of jelly, but he somehow completed his turn. He stumbled spastically then, arms flailing to keep himself from falling. The nearest house, or cottage, or whatever, was right there behind him, within arm’s reach.

Suddenly George’s heart, which he was sure had stopped for ever, became audible again inside him, banging away in his chest like a trip-hammer. All in one movement he turned and bounded for the car, wondering why with each leap he should stay so long in the air, knowing that in fact his body was moving like greased lightning while his mind (in an even greater hurry, one his body couldn’t even attempt to match) thought he was in reverse!

Not bothering, not
daring
to look back again, he almost wrenched the car door from its hinges as he threw himself into the driving seat. Then, in an instant that lasted several centuries, his hand was on the ignition key and the engine was roaring. As he spun the car about in a squeal of tortured tires and accelerated up the rubbery road, he looked in his rearview mirror—and immediately wished he hadn’t!

The “houses” were all
ploop
ing down the road after him—like great greedy frogs—and their “doors” were wide open!

George nearly went off the road then, wrenching at the wheel with clammy hands as he fought to control his careening car on the peculiar surface. A million monstrous thoughts raced through his head as he climbed up through the gears. For of course he knew now for certain that he was trapped in an alien dimension, that the space-time elastic had snapped back into place behind him, stranding him here. Wherever “here” was!

It was only several miles later that he thought to slow down, and only then after passing a junction on the right and a signpost saying: middle hamborough 5 miles. His heart gave a wild leap as he skidded to a halt on a once more perfectly normal tarmac road. Why, that sign meant that just half a mile up the road in front he’d find Meadington, and beyond Meadington…Bankhead and the Ml!…Except that Meadington wasn’t there…. Instead, the mist came up again and, worse, the road went rubbery. And no sign of Meadington. When he saw a row of mushroom “houses” standing back from the road, George did an immediate, violent about-turn, rocking the car dangerously on the rubbery road. Trouble with this weird surface was that it gave too much damn traction.

Amazing that he could still think such mundane thoughts in a situation like this. And yet, through all of this protracted nightmare, a ray of hope still shone. The road to Middle Hamborough!

Back there, down that road, there was a house on a hill and beyond that a real, if slightly different, world. A world where at least two of the inhabitants owed him a break. From what Kent had told him, it seemed to George that the other world wasn’t much different from his own. He could make a go of things there. He gunned his motor back down the road and out of the mist, back on to a decent tarmac surface and into normally dark night, turning left at the leaning signpost on to the now familiar road to Middle Hamborough.

Or was it familiar?

The hedges bordering the road were different somehow, taller, hiding the fields beyond them from the car’s probing headlights, and the road seemed narrower than George remembered it. But that must be his imagination acting up after the terrific shocks of the last ten or twenty minutes; it had to be, for this was the road to Middle Hamborough.

Then, cresting the next hill, suddenly George felt that hellish drag on his tires, and his headlights began to do battle with a thickening, swirling mist. At the same time he saw the house atop the next hill, the house set back off the road at the head of a long winding drive. High House!

There were no lights on in the place now, but it was George’s refuge none the less. Hadn’t Kent told him to come back here if he couldn’t find his way back to Meadington? George gave a whoop of relief as he swept down into the shallow valley and up the hill towards the wrought-iron roadside gates. They were still open, as Kent had left them; and as he slowed down fractionally, George swung the wheel to the left, turning his car in through the gates. They weren’t quite open all the way, though, so that the front of the car slammed them back on their hinges.

Up the drive the front lights of the house instantly came on; two of them glowed yellow as though shutters had been quickly opened—or lids lifted! George had no time to note anything else—except perhaps that the drive was very white, not the white of gravel but more of leprous flesh—for at that point the car simply stopped as if it had run head-on into a brick wall! George wasn’t belted in. He rose up over the steering wheel and crashed through the windscreen, automatically turning his shoulder to the glass.

He hit the drive in a shower of glass fragments, screaming and expecting the impact to hurt. It didn’t, and then George knew why the car had stopped like that: the drive was as soft and sticky as hot toffee. And it wasn’t a drive!

Behind George the wide fleshy ribbon tasted the car and, rising up, flicked it easily to one side. Then it tasted George. He had time to scream, barely, and time for one more quite mundane thought—that this wasn’t where Kent lived—before that great white chameleon tongue slithered him up the hill to the house, whose entire front below the yellow windows opened up to receive him.

Shortly thereafter the lights went slowly out again, as if someone had lowered shutters, or as if lids had fallen….