Children of the Gates

by Andre Norton

  Linda, Mrs. Clapp—he must stop them if he could. He pushed and pulled Hadlett into the cave. The torment in his head continued but he could master that—he had to. This time he was not tied to keep him safe.

  By the light within Nick saw a scene of confusion. Mrs. Clapp lay on the floor, struggling to rise. Linda knelt beside her, not striving to aid her but with both hands on the woman’s shoulders, holding her down, while Mrs. Clapp writhed and flung her arms about.

  Before them crouched the two animals. Lung snarled in anger, the cat growled and lashed his tail. Both of them faced the women as if at any moment they would join the struggle.

  Linda’s face was twisted with pain, her mouth ugly as she moaned and cried out. Mrs. Clapp uttered meaningless sounds.

  “Help!” Linda gasped as Nick came, pushing the staggering Vicar.

  He gave Hadlett a last vigorous shove, this time taking no care, only heading the older man toward the interior of the cave. Then he ran to Linda.

  “She—mustn’t—go—”

  “No!” he agreed. But his help was not needed, for Mrs. Clapp, with a last cry, went limp and still.

  “No!” Now the protest came from Linda. She lifted the woman’s head, held it against her, cradled in her arm, touched her face gently. “Nick, she can’t be dead!”

  “I don’t think so. Watch her.” He returned to Hadlett.

  The Vicar had slumped to the floor, sat there with his legs outstretched, his head sunk on his chest, his arms hanging limp so his hands lay palm up on either side of his body. He was breathing in heavy gasps, but that was the only sign of life.

  The clamor without was retreating. Nick could think more clearly, relax a little. The cat and the Peke were still alert, but had ceased their active objection. It was as if they were to be given a breathing space.

  “She’s—she’s alive, Nick!” Linda glanced up from her charge. “But the others—they went out—where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That was—was more of the Dark Ones’ attack?”

  Nick had no answer to that either. “I don’t know. It was what took the drifters who captured me. But I never saw what caused it—only them going.”

  “As they did here.” Linda settled Mrs. Clapp’s head more easily against her arm. “I wanted to go, Nick. But Lung tripped me, jumped at me. And Jeremiah pulled at Mrs. Clapp’s skirt, tangled her up so she fell. They—both of them—helped me think straight, know that I mustn’t go—she must not. But how did you and Mr. Hadlett get away, Nick?”

  For the third time Nick had to admit ignorance. He only knew that, painful and compelling as that sound had been, he had been able to withstand it, not only that but somehow prevent Hadlett from being drawn also. He flinched away from imagining what might have happened to the others. For this moment it was enough to know that in so much they had beaten the enemy.

  “Maybe because I heard it before and could not answer,” he speculated. “It may lose impact the second time around. And Hadlett was with me. He did not move out at once, which gave me a chance to—”

  “To save me, Nicholas.” The Vicar slowly raised his head. His gaunt face was so haggard that he might have been mortally ill. As he spoke a twitch started beneath his left eye, a flutter of skin and muscle that drew his face into an unsightly grimace for a second. “To save me from the Devil’s own work, Nicholas.” He straightened and winced as if his body protested. “We must not allow the others to be taken by that—that thing! They are possessed—”

  “Jeremiah!” Mrs. Clapp opened her eyes, looked up into Linda’s face, her expression dazed. “Jeremiah—he jumped at me! My own old boy—he’s gone mad!”

  “No.” Linda soothed her. “He wanted to save you, and he did.”

  The cat padded closer. Now he set both forepaws on Mrs. Clapp’s breast, leaned down to touch her nose with the tip of his own. His tongue came out and he gave her face a small, fastidious lick.

  “Jeremiah.” Mrs. Clapp lifted one hand, laid it on the cat’s head. “Why—”

  “To save you,” Linda repeated. “Just as Lung saved me, and Nick did Mr. Hadlett.”

  “But—” Mrs. Clapp struggled to sit up and Linda aided her. The old woman looked about. “Where’re the others? Lady Diana—she was right here—and Jean—and Barry—”

  “They have gone.” It was Hadlett who answered. “And we have to do what we can to aid them, as soon as possible.”

  He struggled to his feet as if he would go running with the same unheeding recklessness as had taken the others. Nick moved between him and the entrance to the cave.

  “We can’t, not until we know what we’re facing. It might be throwing away any chance we do have just to go blindly out in the dark.”

  For a moment, he thought the Vicar would give him a hot argument, even try to push past him. Then Hadlett’s shoulders slumped and he answered dully:

  “You are right, of course, Nicholas. But we must do something.”

  “I intend to.” That was wrenched out of Nick. Again he was being forced to a decision he did not want to make, take a course he knew was dangerous. The sound had died away, his head was free of the pain. Did that mean that the menace had withdrawn with the prey it had so easily snared, or only that it had subsided to prepare for another and perhaps stronger assault? There was no use looking for trouble in the future, he had enough facing him now.

  “Not alone.” The force and vigor that had always been in Hadlett’s tone was returning. “We must go together—”

  “All of us,” Linda broke in, “all together.”

  Nick was about to protest, and then he understood that perhaps she was wiser than he. To leave two women here alone, for he knew he could not argue the Vicar into staying, would be utter folly. When the barrier failed the Dark forces would overrun the cave. Linda and Mrs. Clapp would have no chance at all. And what he had seen of the besiegers made Nick certain that they must not face what had walked, loped, slithered out there.

  Of course it was the height of stupidity to go out at all. But if he did not, he was sure Hadlett would set off by himself, or with the women. Nick must be as practical as this impractical situation allowed.

  So he suggested that they make up packs, the heaviest to be for him and Linda, though both Mrs. Clapp and the Vicar insisted they shoulder their share. And the Vicar did offer experienced advice.

  “Is there any other way out—besides the one I found earlier?” Nick asked.

  “Along the stream, sir—” Mrs. Clapp looked to the Vicar.

  Hadlett seemed doubtful. “That is a rough passage, Maude.”

  “Rough it may be,” she answered stoutly, “but if it takes us out where those things ain’t watchin’, won’t that be for the best?”

  “I suppose—” But he did not sound convinced.

  “Along what stream, sir?” Nick pursued the matter.

  “An underground one. We never explored it far. But there is a place, Sam assured me, where one can scramble out. I believe some distance from this—” He gestured at the entrance.

  “All the better.” Nick was a little heartened. He would have suggested the back entrance he had found but he was sure that neither the vicar nor Mrs. Clapp could make it.

  If they only had in truth the machine gun of the illusion, or weapons from their own world. He had the knife, and now he found in his saddlebags the camp knife he had almost forgotten. Since Hadlett had one of the daggers, he gave this to Linda. Iron—little enough for defense. They might as well, thought Nick savagely, go barehanded.

  Mrs. Clapp looked about her. She had quietly stacked the wooden bowls, folded up some crudely woven mats. It was plain she believed it would be long before anyone returned here.

  “A rough wild place it is, but it’s been good to us.”

  “Yes, Maude,” Hadlett answered gently.

  “Sometimes—sometimes I dream about walkin’ up the walk—seein’ the roses an’ those lilies Mrs. Lansdowne at the lodge gave me the settin�
�� of. There’s m’ own old door an’ Jeremiah’s sittin’ on the step watchin’ for me. I dream like that, sir. It’s as real as real for a while—”

  “I know, Maude. I wonder if that bomb did hit St. Michael’s. Five hundred and fifty years—a long time for a church to stand. It still stands for me.”

  “We got it all to remember, sir. That nobody can take away. An’ you can close your eyes sometimes, when you’re restin’ like, an’ see it as plain as plain. Maybe if we went back—Sometimes I think to m’self, sir, that I see it better’n it really was. You can do that, you know. Like lookin’ back down the years to when one was a little maid—everything was brighter an’ better then. The years were longer like, not all squeezed together like they seem to be now. An’ there was a lot packed into every one o’ ’em. Well, a clackin’ tongue ain’t goin’ to get me, nor anyone else, goin’. But for all its roughness, this has been a good place. Come on, Jeremiah!”

  Her speech ended on a brisk note. Linda moved closer to Nick.

  “She makes me want to cry. Oh, Nick, I don’t want to remember, not now. It does something to me, I get to feeling wild, as if I could just run about screaming, ‘Let me out!’ Don’t you ever feel like that?”

  “It depends,” he answered as he shouldered his pack, “on what you have to go back to. Anyway there’s no use looking too far ahead now. We had better concentrate on getting out of here.”

  “Nick,” she interrupted him, “what can we do—to help them? Can we even find them?”

  “I doubt it. But those two”—he nodded to the Vicar helping Mrs. Clapp over the rough footing in a side alcove of the cave—“won’t give up trying. And we can’t leave them to do it alone.”

  Linda caught her lip between her teeth, frowned. “No, I can see that. Will they ever admit it’s hopeless? What do you think happened to the others, Nick?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” was the best answer he could give her. He was trying to control imagination which was only too ready to present him with horrors.

  The way Hadlett guided them into was rough, and soon they had to go single file. Lung and Jeremiah had the best of it as they padded along with far greater ease than the two-footed humans and soon outpaced them. Linda called anxiously now and then, and was always answered by a single bark from the Peke.

  After a very short time they hit a downward incline, dropping them well below the surface of the larger cave. Twice they had to stoop, proceeding at a back-aching angle. Nick’s flashlight in Hadlett’s hand lit up the worst of the obstructions.

  Now they could hear the gurgle of water. And a last scramble brought them into a wider tunnel, one that water over the centuries must have carved for itself, though the present stream running along it was much smaller than the space through which it passed.

  “This way.” Hadlett turned left. Nick was pleased at that. Unless he was completely misled, any opening in this direction to the surface would be well away from the upper entrance. He wondered if the barrier there still held.

  With that gone, would the enemy make a frontal attack? With no resistance they could enter the cave. At that thought, Nick turned uneasily to glance over his shoulder, tried to listen. But the sounds of the stream and their own journey effectively cloaked what might be behind. He wished that the Peke and Jeremiah had remained in closer contact. The animals had a far better range of hearing and could sound the alarm if it was needed.

  Nick wanted to hurry, but he knew with Mrs. Clapp’s stiff and painful legs and the Vicar’s age, they could push on at no better speed than this. He drew his knife, always straining to hear any sound except that of the water and their going.

  “Here—” Hadlett flashed the light to the left. There was a break in the wall of the tunnel. Then the light showed the surface of the water. They must splash through that to reach the cleft. Nick wondered how deep it was. He saw Jeremiah sitting on the other side. But Lung whimpered and ran to Linda, begging to be taken up. So the Peke thought the flood too deep or had some objection to splashing on. The cat must have jumped it. Nick took warning from Lung.

  “Don’t try to wade!” He crowded up beside the Vicar. “Give me the flashlight.”

  “You noticed Lung, yes.” Hadlett passed over the light.

  Nick squatted on his heels. The rest had flattened against the wall of the tunnel. He turned the light directly on the water. There were no signs of a swift current, and it looked shallow, but he was not a trained woodsman to know. The stream might be a trap the animals knew by instinct. Yet it was too wide for their jumping—they did not have Jeremiah’s talents. It would be wade—

  “Nick!” Linda dropped beside him. Now she swung her arm across his chest to point upstream.

  The troubling of the current was plainly visible. And that was not caused by some rock nearly breaking the surface, for it moved toward them. Nick handed her the light.

  “Hold that!” He was ready with his knife. For the sight made him believe he faced the alien.

  The disturbance in the water ceased, but Nick breathed faster. That thing, whatever it might be, was not gone. Rather it had taken to what cover the water afforded.

  “Nick!” Linda’s cry scaled up to near a scream, but her quick reflexes saved them. The hand and arm flashing from beneath the water did not achieve its purpose. Webbed fingers grasped in vain. Linda now had the flashlight well out of reach.

  The American stabbed down into the water with the knife. There was a flurry there. Then the head and shoulders of the being that had tried to rob them of light arose. This was no human. In the first place the creature could not be much larger than Jeremiah. Secondly it was covered with fur as might be an otter or seal.

  It had great round eyes, a whiskered muzzle, a wild tangle of coarser hair like a mane reaching to its shoulders. The mouth opened, showing yellow fang-teeth. Then it snapped shut while it hissed much as might Jeremiah in a rage.

  Nick advanced the blade he held. The water thing sputtered, made mewling sounds, but it retreated. This was one of the natives of Avalon he was sure. But it did not seem as one with the Dark forces. That it was hostile to his kind was plain, but it was not strongly evil.

  “Wait, lad.” Mrs. Clapp came forward. “Iron will keep that off, but there is another way also.”

  Nick glanced up in surprise as she fumbled in her bag and drew out a small length of branch. Solemnly, as if performing some ritual in the Vicar’s vanished St. Michael’s, she recited:

  “Nixie, pixie—

  The water is draining,

  Your fine home awastin’.

  Comes now th’ cattle a-stampin’, a-trampin’,

  Naught will remain.

  By th’ elder, by th’ ash,

  Begone—thrice!”

  She struck the surface of the water three times with her branch.

  The thing stopped in mid-hiss, watching her warily. But as she said “thrice,” it gave an eerie cry and submerged. They could see it moving at lightning speed upstream. Lung ran along the edge of the water barking furiously, while Linda called him.

  Mrs. Clapp laughed. “There now, I never thought to say that in a lifetime. M’ old Aunt Meg, she was a proper one—more’n my auntie she was really, ’cause she was sister to m’ great-granny. But she lived a long time. A hundred ‘n’ more she was before she took to her bed the last time. She had the healin’ an’ the Second Sight. Folks use to go to her for wart charmin’ an’ the like, ’fore it got so the young folks laughed at such.

  “Aunt Meg, she could see the Gentry—that was what we called ’em in our bit o’ country in those days—though she never talked much of that. Offered me a bite of yellow cake stuff once when I was little. Said it was Gentry-baked. My Mum struck it out o’m’ hand an’ beat it right into the dust when I fetched it home. She said it was silly, but she knew right enough about dealin’ with the Gentry.

  “That there was a nixie. Auntie, she said they were mischiefmakers. Live in bogs, some of them do, an’ lead people
astray. She learned me that spell an’ told me about usin’ elder. There’s nothin’ like elder an’ ash to stand up to them of the Gentry as is for mischief. Yes, she learned me that when I was goin’ for the milk up to Barstow’s farm an’ had to pass over a bit of bog there if I took the quick way home. I was old enough to keep m’ tongue inside m’ teeth, an’ Mum never knew. Never saw a nixie, though, not there. But I always kept careful watch like Auntie said to.”

  “Will it be back?” Linda had caught Lung and was holding him.

  “Not if we do it right.” Mrs. Clapp appeared to have complete confidence in her method of routing the water thing. “First we see just how deep this is here.” She used the elder branch for a measure. “’Bout knee-high, I would say.”

  “Now,” she continued with authority, “we’d best take off our shoes, an’ pull up m’ skirt an’ your pants. We can take a wettin’ better than our clothes can, dry off sooner, too.”

  “A very wise precaution.” Hadlett was already pulling off his moccasins, rolling up his trousers.

  “An’ this”—Mrs. Clapp held out the branch—”I’m goin’ to stick in so.” She pushed it down into the water and it stood there upright. “That there elder is goin’ to be a cover for us.”

  Splash across they did, though Nick kept watch for any telltale line in the water that would mark the return of the nixie. He was the last across and Mrs. Clapp yelled to him:

  “Bring the wand with you, lad. Don’t know when I’ll get m’ hand on another good bit of elder. Don’t seem to grow too plentiful hereabouts.”

  He pulled the branch free, dragging it behind him through the water as an added precaution against an attack, to hand it back to its owner. Mrs. Clapp flipped it to shake off the droplets along it and stowed it briskly away as if her past performance was as ordinary as eating or sleeping.

  Now they climbed at a sharper angle than they had descended. It was difficult for Mrs. Clapp. At times all three of them boosted or pulled. She breathed heavily but she never complained. Sometimes she even made some cheery remark on their aid or her own clumsiness.