Turncoat

IV

HE STOOD, panting a little, with his back to a wall. It was a six-foot wall, stuccoed on the other side, raw brick on this. He had crawled the last thirty yards, along a hedge that grew between two houses, before he could reach it and climb over.

Now he was safe, because he was dead. On the other side of that wall he had a name and a place, relationships, duties, obligations and rewards. On this side, he was nothing: so far as Glenbrook was concerned, he did not exist. In effect, he had committed suicide by climbing the wall. There had been nothing else he could do; he had left himself no other way.

He thought of the single moment when he had Gloria in his arms. That had probably been the world’s least satisfactory kiss, he thought bitterly, and he had given his life for it. His lips tightened. What was it about the world hat made it possible for such cruelty to explode in a moment out of tenderness?

She wasn’t to blame for screaming when he kissed her; anyone would have done the same—but what about the gusto in her voice when she was telling her parents to call the Guard quickly, because poor Arthur was possessed?

Bass turned and slammed his knotted fist against the wall. The pain helped. Massaging his bruised knuckles, he turned again and looked around him.

Beginning where he stood, a bleak wasteland stretched for fifty yards ahead—a wilderness of hummocks and boulders, furred over with the brittle black skeletons of burnt underbrush, At his feet, and all along the wall in either direction, lay a sparse litter: soaked and wadded papers, a faded rubber ball, the fragments of a kite, broken glass, broken wood, broken plastic. There was even, Bass saw with a queer absence of shock, an occasional reclaimable article —a tin can, a spike, a tangled mass of wire. Children below the angel must have done that.

The wasteland ended at another wall, convex as the first one was concave. To right and left, the burnt strip disappeared around the curve, but Bass knew that if he set out along it in either direction, the curve would turn the other way after a mile or so, and eventually he would come back to his starting point. Glenbrook was an island.

Beyond the second wall was—terra incognita.

On the maps, Glenbrook and its suburbs were enclosed in a wavering outline, shaped roughly like a lopsided kidney bean, or a fat boomerang. Around it was a blank area approximately three times as large; then, to the northeast, came Norwalk, minutely detailed, with all its rivers and roads; and to the west, White Plains. The whole map of the continent was like that: islands of civilization in an ocean of blankness, or in some places, large civilized tracts with blobs of white in them, like the spots of leprosy. To north and south, civilization dwindled away; the map became all white.

It was disconcerting to see the other wall so near. Somewhere, long ago, he had heard a story passed on from someone who had glanced through when a section of the Glenbrook wall was being repaired; and the story was that the wasteland went on and on, indefinitely.

But of course it couldn’t be so; now that he thought of it, Bass realized that he had often looked over from the top of the hill, and seen the Others’ phantom rooftops, looking almost near enough to touch. Anyhow, Glenbrook was larger now than it had been when he was a child; three or four new streets had been added on the periphery to house the growing population. Perhaps the Others had been doing the same on their side; until now there was hardly room left in between for one more block of houses.

The Others: the bat-winged monsters, who dressed in clothes of iron that never wore out; and ate their own children; and lived in caves that they scraped out of rock with the tines of their terrible hands …

Bass hesitated, suspended between one motion and the next. For a moment it seemed incredible that he was here at all; what was the known terror of the Guard compared to the marrow-chilling emptiness that lay ahead of him?

His body had tensed itself, as if he were standing at the edge of an abyss, nerving himself to jump. Deliberately, he took the first step forward. Then the next. Gray flaky ash puffed up around his feet as he walked; black char grimed his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers.

HALFWAY across the ground began to slope upwards as he climbed, a gray triangle appeared over the wall ahead. More and more of the thing rose into view as he approached it; he was watching it so intently that he did not notice the other things to right and left of it until he had almost reached the wall. They were tilted brown planes—like the roofs of houses. The triangle in the middle might easily be another house, seen end-on; but Bass was not deceived.

These appearances were part of the screen of illusion the Others had set up; evidently they were not simply pictures painted on a roof of canvas, as Bass had always half-consciously assumed ; they might be wickerwork structures; painted to resemble houses from a distance ; but that was not important. In a moment he would be over the wall, under that screen, however it was made; and he would see things that men were never meant to see.

The base of this wall, too, was strewn with discarded objects. Bass did not let himself hesitate again. He climbed recklessly onto the sagging ruin of a barrel hoisted himself to the top of the wall and dropped over.

He was in a yard.

Yellowed grass straggled over bare earth, worn hard and smooth under the clothesline. Beyond that, a house: screened back porch with hoe-and rake-handles leaning against it, blank upper story—no windows facing the Wall—garden hose coiled around a standpipe al the corner.

It was a replica, in all but the smallest details, of the house it faced across the Wall in Glenbrook. To left and right across the low hedges, Bass saw other houses, equally prosaic, equally familiar.

An orange tiger-striped cat got up from under a bush, stretching lazily, Bass started convulsively and backed up against the Wall. The cat hesitated a moment, one forepaw lifted, then came over and rubbed itself against his legs, purring raucously.

Bass stared at it. Cats, he realized abruptly, had no angels; and it was a poor tom that couldn’t leap a six-foot wall. It was odd to think that he might have seen this very animal in the streets of Glenbrook, never dreaming where it had come from… .

Or was it a cat?

If that house was not a house, then the garden hose might be a serpent, and the cat might be—

He backed away from it cautiously. It followed him for a couple of steps, then sat down and began licking its chest.

Bass worked his way out to the front of the house, pausing after every step to listen. He heard nothing. Through a kitchen window he saw a long bare table with chairs of a vaguely disturbing pat tern ranked around it. In the dark room were the angular bulks of a sofa and easy chairs, the pale gleam of a mounted picture on the wall. There was no footfall or murmur of voices; the house was empty.

So was the street. House after identical house, down the long declining perspective into the last sunlight in one direction, the gathering twilight in the other.

Bass turned left and followed his endless shadow toward the darkness. It seemed incredible, but. if it was going to be like this all the way, why couldn’t he work his way around Glenbrook to the eastward and then head north up the coast—stealing food, sleeping in ditches —until he reached Boston? It wouldn’t be as good as Los Angeles, of course, but surely he could find a ship bound for some Central American port, then cross the Isthmus to the Pacific.

In his excitement, Bass forgot that there would be no food to steal in the Others’ territory—that the Others, being demons incarnate, ate nothing but dirt, rusty iron, stones and their own offspring. He strode along faster and faster down the empty street; the darkness and the silence and the unburdened motion of his own body made him feel so secure that, by the time he reached the end of the street, where it ran into the curving wall, he had lost all caution.

He turned to his right up another dim, vacant street. He was actually whistling when, just before he reached the fifth corner, two things happened simultaneously:

The street lights flared up.

Three grotesque travesties of human beings walked into view from the cross-street, looked over their shoulders, and saw him… .

THERE was an unmeasured, and, for Bass, immeasurable period of time when he couldn’t move. He saw the goggle-eyed parchment faces of the three etched sharply under the street-lamp. He saw their mouths bulge into tall black O’s; he heard their screams. Then, unaccountably, two of them were running away—jumping-jack figures trundling their oval black shadows far down the street—and the third was lying quietly on the pavement at the corner.

The two running figures were gone. Bass heard their shrieks, faint and fainter down the street, then silence.

He didn’t understand. He stood there transfixed, feeling the automatic unreasoning urge to turn and run the other way, but still aware enough to wonder: why should demons run from him?

The third demon still lay where it had fallen. Warily, one step at a time, Bass approached it.

It was dressed, like the other two, in fantastic garments—a fringed green cape, shoes with calf-high tops, a bulky thing like a purple shirt worn outside the green-and-saffron-striped trousers. A crutch with a heavily padded top lay on the pavement a foot away from one outstretched hand.

The shape of the thing was almost human. A fold of the cape was tossed over the side of the head, shadowing the face, but Bass could make out the arched, old-man shape of the nose, and the pinched mouth. The eyes were squeezed tight shut.

It was breathing; Bass could hear the noisy, whistling insufflations, each followed by along pause and then a gasp as the thing let out its breath again. Cautiously, he poked it with his foot.

The thing squeaked and flinched away. Bass saw the gleam of its eyes as they flickered open for an instant. It was awake, then.

Poised, ready to run, Bass waited for a long count of five; then he nudged it again, harder. The thing flinched again and a weak old-man’s voice came out of it. He couldn’t make out the words.

He leaned over. “What?”

The voice came again, and this time Bass thought he understood. In a hideously slurred and distorted parody of Glenbrook Consumer dialect, the demon was saying, “Oh Inf’nite help us… I can’t stand it … don’t let the dirty thing touch me.”

The more he thought about that, the less sense it made. He felt a prickling along his spine, and the impulse to run came back, stronger than before. He fought it down. His intuition of danger was inarguable—as specific and meaningful as the perception of heat or pressure—but the obvious, automatic answer might be the wrong one. You can run away from a fire or a blow, but not from a paradox.

And, Bass realized abruptly, this sense of danger that he felt was twenty years late. He had been like a blindfolded man on a tightrope all his life, and he was just finding it out.

Deliberately, with a gigantic effort, he put aside all his preconceptions. He was standing on a sidewalk under a street-lamp, and at his feet there was a—man —who gave every evidence of being half-paralyzed with shock and fear. He bent over the sprawled figure again.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

The weak voice piped, “Oh Inf’nite, oh Infinite, I can’t—”

“Answer my questions,” Bass said sharply, “and I won’t hurt you. Who are you?”

There was a long pause. “Only old George Parsons,” said the voice hesitantly, “who never hurt anybody. Only old George—”

“Why are you afraid of me?”

The creature’s eyes blinked open incredulously, then squeezed shut again. “You’re a demon,” he said faintly.

Bass felt as if his head were about to explode. “How do you know?”

The creature began babbling again. Bass nudged him sharply with his foot. “How do you know?”

The old man shrieked. “By your clo’es,” he said, “By your clo’es. Oh Inf’nite in Heaven help us …”

Time slowed to a trickle as Bass stared down at the cringing body. You shall know a demon incarnate by his clothing… Bass leaned down and carefully, hesitantly, took a fold of the old man’s cape between his finger and thumb. It was not iron, it was soft fibrous cloth. To you I am a demon to me —he thought wildly.

When he heard the sirens begin, faint and far down the way the other two had gone, it was almost an anticlimax. Danger was not an event, it was a medium ; it spread out all around him, a still current, a silent scream, to the farthest limits of his universe.

BASS had nothing to do with it; his body moved all by itself. He watched with a curious sort of detached interest as his fingers’ stripped off the old man’s fringed green cape, worked at the lacings of the calf-high shoes, tugged at the green and saffron trousers, while the old man squeaked and shuddered.

The sirens were nearer—too near. Bass rolled the garments together into a bundle that he tucked under his arm, and then he was running headlong down the street to the right, away from the sirens that howled in crescendo behind him.

Halfway down the block, he turned abruptly and hurtled across a lawn into the darkness between two houses. He kept going, around the back of the house to the right, across a dark yard, through a hedge and another and another until the glare of a streetlight stopped him: he was at the end of the block.

He paused an instant to listen. Behind him the sirens had stopped; to his left, far away, he thought he could hear others wailing up out of a confused murmur of other sounds. He took a wary step forward, peering to left and right. He was about to take another when a blur of metallic scarlet whirled into view around the corner.

He leaped back and flattened himself against the wall of the house. The red car rushed silently past and was gone.

Somewhere behind him, down the long row of hedges, there was a faint sibilant sound and then the unmistakable snap of a twig.

Bass’s heart was trying to shake itself loose inside his ribs. He edged around the house-corner, careful even his terror to make no more silhouette an he could help against the streetlight, made two leaping strides to the right and then ran for all he was worth straight across the frighteningly empty street.

Relief weakened his knees when he reached the other side safely; but two minutes later there was another street cross, and after that another. Just before he reached the third street, one of the red cars whisked across the light-gap ahead:

The question was, he thought as he started across the street a moment later—the question was, when would it be safe to stop running long enough to put on the “demon’s” clothes ? And, conversely, how long did he dare to wait?

He crossed two hedges, carefully, trying not to make a sound; then he stopped and listened for a long count of ten, holding his breath. There was nothing closer than the faint sirens and the ether mingled sounds far to the east.

He dropped his bundle to the ground and, working feverishly, pulled off his pouch, surcoat and jacket, his bangles and rings, and finally, with ineffable shame, his trousers. He put on the old man’s baggy pants hurriedly, fighting down the queasiness their touch gave him, and then the cape. He picked up one shoe and knelt, groping for the other. It wasn’t there—he must have dropped it somewhere without realizing it. Never mind; the intricate lacings would definitely have taken too long, anyhow.

As an afterthought, he pulled out the tail of his overshirt and let it hang over his trousers: it was a poor imitation of the loose purple garment the old man had worn, but it would have to do.

He gathered up his discarded jewelry, stuffed it into the pouch, and rolled the pouch up in the surcoat, jacket and trousers. He moved along the rear wall of the nearby house, found an open window, and dumped the bundle through. So far, so good.

After a moment’s hesitation, he turned and pushed through the hedge to his left. His instinct was to keep on in his original direction, but if he did that he’d be heading straight into the wall again. He had to work his way east, out of this pocket of demon territory that was surrounded on three sides by Glenbrook. But that was the direction the sirens had come from… .

Suddenly sick with apprehension, he lengthened his stride as much as he dared in the half-light. The next street was empty, but he waited, pulse pounding heavily in his throat, for a long moment before he started across.

As he crossed the curb, a man in a red uniform stepped out of the shadows across the street.

Bass jolted to a halt, hearing the man’s unintelligible shout, seeing the glint of metal in his raised fist. He half-whirled toward the shelter of the houses behind him, then stopped, hopelessly. It was too far.

He was fairly caught. He’d have to stand where he was and hope that bluff, and his demon clothing, would save him.

The red-uniformed man came forward, moving with an odd stiffness. He held the gun rigidly trained on Bass’s body. With the other hand he took a tiny instrument from his belt, spoke a few words into it and put it back again, all without shifting his glance from Bass for an instant.

Two yards away, he stopped.

Except for its revolting color, his uniform was an almost-exact duplicate of a Guardsman’s, from the flat, visored cap to the polished shin-guards and heavy boots. Bass’s heart leaped painfully as he saw one of the differences: in each of the mirror-bright buttons, instead of the familiar “GP,” was another insigne—the same one he had seen once before, in Manager Wooten’s office—U/M.

He wanted to digest the implications of that, but there was no time. His perception of danger, already at an unbearable intensity, had risen to a shrieking crescendo—and after an instant he understood why.

The pseudo-Guardsman had not asked him a single question.

Under the red half-mask, the man’s lips were thinned to a pale line. His whole body was tense, his right forefinger white-knuckled behind the trigger-guard.

Desperately, Bass concentrated on the remembered sound of the old man’s voice—the elided vowels, the harsh consonants, the rhythm of his speech. Reproducing them as well as he could, he said, “Please, sir, what’ve I done? I’m George Parsons, everybody knows me—”

The Guard made a sharp, jerky motion with his gun-barrel. “Shut up!” he said.

A red car whirled silently around the corner, hurtled to within a dozen yards of them and stopped. Almost instantly, another appeared from the opposite direction. Red-uniformed men poured out of them and moved forward with exaggerated caution, guns in their fists. Every one of them stared at Bass unblinkingly, not glancing aside even when they spoke to one another.

“Any trouble?” called one. Like the others, he spoke in a flat brogue that gave Bass no difficulty; he had heard it often enough from the Guardsmen in Glenbrook.

“Not so far, sir,” said the first Guardsman. “It tried to talk to me, but I soon shut its mouth for it.”

The ring of men closed in a little. “What’d it say?” one of them asked.

The first man shuddered. “Tried to tell me it was a man.”

A ripple of disgust swayed the circle.

Bass’s mind was turning frantically, trying to discover how he had betrayed himself. They didn’t suspect, they knew he was the “demon” they were after. But how? His shirt was well covered by the green cape; his shoes were alien, but surely the difference was not so obvious as that under his cuffs

“With that hat on the filthy head of it!” said the first man in a strained voice.

Bass’s hands lifted automatically toward his head, a fraction of an inch then dropped. Of course, he though sickly, that was it. The old man had not been wearing a hat; he had not even thought of a hat—but he remembered now that the other two, the ones who had run when they saw him, had been wearing tall peaked constructions of their heads. And he himself was still wearing his flat, eight-segmented Glenbrook cap—so used to the touch of it that he’d been no more conscious of it than of part of his own body.

Another red car pulled up, and then another. More men joined the ring.

“All right, we can start now,” said one. “McGovern, we’ll use your car. You and Clintock ride back with somebody else.”

A lane formed, leading to the open rear door of a car… Hopelessly, following the nearest Guardsman’s gesture Bass began to walk down it.