Into The Out Of

by Alan Dean Foster

  They were heading toward a long, low escarpment of dark stone that resembled a gray whale resting on the earth. Another twenty miles revealed the source of the Mdonya: a gorge cut by flood waters through the basalt cliffs.

  "We go up there," Olkeloki informed them. "Up above, the waters of the Mdonya rise to the surface and form the Matopotopo swamp. It is not large when compared to the basin of the Amazon or your own Mississippi delta, but it is wild and remote enough to preclude visits. Up there, in the shadow of a mountain called Kibiriti, we should find the place we seek."

  Eyeing the damp, vegetation-covered slope, Oak was afraid they were going to have to walk, but there was enough dry ground for the Rover to negotiate and the river fell gradually to the plains below. Once they gained the crest of the escarpment, he was able to relax a little.

  About time we got a break, he mused.

  Olkeloki, too, seemed pleased. "We will be able to drive through. That will be much better than walking."

  Oak looked over at him. "What, into the Out Of? In this thing?"

  "I do not see why not. The shetani live here. Why should this machine not live there?" He was tapping on the dash with his long fingers. They reminded Merry of the fingers of a pianist. What silent melody was he playing, in which she and Joshua Oak were merely notes thrown in for spice?

  "Besides, the English company which makes this vehicle insists it will go anywhere."

  "If it doesn't, we'd have a hell of a time collecting on the warranty."

  "Fear not, Joshua Oak. Magic will not stop us. Shetani will not stop us. Not now, not here, not this close. If the gap in reality is wide enough for so many shetani to pass through, it will surely be large enough to admit one Land Rover." He said nothing about the possibility of two of them dying, Oak noted.

  Several miles ahead the river vanished into the outskirts of the swamp. Oak worked the Rover around isolated baobabs and boulders, keeping the broad expanse of sand on his right.

  "Laibon," wondered Kakombe, "if we are so near, why do the shetani not attack?"

  "Perhaps they are afraid of us, or perhaps their attention is concentrated elsewhere. We have moved fast and in unexpected ways. They may not realize we are so close. We should not be here, in this place, at this time. No human being should. The shetani are clever and dangerous, but they are not organized. They are too wild to track well."

  "How are we doing on time?" Merry asked him.

  The old man looked out the window at the last stars. "I cannot tell for certain, Merry Sharrow. I have said often that we had little time left. Now we have less than little time. Certainly we must be done and away by nightfall."

  The character of the terrain changed as they neared the swamp. Baobabs gave way to dense forest. Complaining noises came from the vicinity of the Rover's transmission, but they had no time to make a mechanical check. It didn't matter anyway. They would go on until the car quit. Then they would have to walk.

  A mile east of the first open water the woods grew too dense even for Oak to navigate. Olkeloki gestured anxiously to his right.

  "Turn off here."

  "What, into the river?"

  "We must continue to go westward. We walk only if we have no other choice." The sun was high in the sky now, bright and reassuring.

  Oak cast a dubious eye on the sand river. "You're the boss, but there's no telling how soft it is under that sand."

  Down a steep bank they plunged. Oak turned upriver, the rear tires throwing up yellow fountains behind them. They got another hundred yards before forward momentum ceased.

  No one spoke as they piled out of the car. Turacos shouted at them from the trees. Squawking raucously, a trio of ground hornbills glided past overhead, their enormous bills making them appear too top-heavy for flight. Still higher soared a Balateur eagle, hunting for reptiles and rodents with telescopic eyes. A single tsetse fly buzzed Merry, who stood still until it gave up and flew off in search of something moving.

  Just your average June morning in East Africa, Oak mused, with the fate of the world resting not-so-lightly on your shoulders. He knelt near the rear left wheel. It was completely buried in warm, fine sand.

  "What about the winch?" Kakombe was peering over his shoulder. Oak looked toward the riverbank.

  "I don't think the cable's long enough, not even if we add that emergency rope to it. Stuff growing on the bank would pull right out and the big trees are too far away.

  "Then we will have to try and pull it out, like we did near Chalinze."

  "I don't think even you can do that, Kakombe." Merry was on hands and knees digging at the sand. "It's right up against the floorboards. We're in too deep." She sat back on her legs and shaded her eyes to look up at Olkeloki. "How far?"

  The old man scanned the empty riverbed. "We are very near. I sense it. I would rather drive, but if we must walk, we should get started."

  Packs and spears were removed from the back of the Rover. They'd hardly had time to shoulder their loads when Oak turned sharply to face back the way they'd come.

  "What is it, Josh?" Merry moved up close to him and joined him in staring downriver. "Shetani?"

  "No, though you'd think this close to the break we'd have seen some by now."

  "They come through at night," Olkeloki told him. "They are not yet confident enough to move about in the daytime in large numbers. For a little while longer yet they are restricted to moving in the dark places."

  "Another vehicle," said Kakombe abruptly.

  "I'll be damned." Oak could see it now, bouncing toward them. "What's it doing up here?"

  It was a Suzuki four-wheel drive, much smaller than. the massive Land Rover. Weighing a thousand pounds or so less, it scooted along like a water bug atop the sand without sinking in. As they watched, it rolled to a halt, sat there in the middle of the river.

  "Hey!" Merry waved at it. "Can you give us a hand?"

  The driver appeared to be debating whether to turn around and go back the way he'd come or to continue his path upriver. Oak whispered to Olkeloki.

  "What do you think?"

  "Unusual to see tourists in this place, but not impossible. We are still within the park boundaries, though most ilmeet are afraid to stray off the indicated tracks."

  The Suzuki's engine revved and it started toward them again.

  "They see us," Merry said. Which also meant that those inside the four-wheel knew they'd been seen, Oak mused, but since he had no conclusions to jump to, there was no point in worrying about them. Yet.

  The Suzuki coasted to a halt a few yards away. Two men emerged. The driver knelt to examine the imprisoned Rover. "Stuck, good. If you'll all get back inside we'll try to pull you out." His tone was cool, carefully neutral, Oak thought, the English lightly accented. "You need to keep a lookout for the gray-colored sand. That's where the soft spots are."

  "We'll keep that in mind." He nodded toward the front of the Suzuki. "Want some help with the winch?"

  "We'll handle it." The man managed a thin smile. "Just get back in."

  "We must hurry." Olkeloki looked nervous. Oak had seen him worried before, but never nervous. And if Mbatian Olkeloki had reason to be nervous, everyone else in the immediate vicinity ought to be trembling in their boots. "It is dangerous to stay long in one place so near the Out Of. We must move quickly."

  The driver stood and frowned. "What's he talking about?"

  Oak tried to make light of the laibon's comments. "Who knows? I mean, how can anyone figure what they're talking about? We just happened along these two walking through the park and agreed to give them a lift."

  "Uh-huh, sure." The man was frowning as he started back to his vehicle.

  He stopped cold. His assistant, a tall Bantu dressed in shorts and a cut-off T-shirt, was frantically trying to intercept Merry as she approached the Suzuki.

  "What a cute little four-wheel drive," she was saying. "Back home we don't have any—" She stopped in mid-sentence, staring into the car.

  Several thi
ngs happened very fast. The Bantu pulled a rifle from inside the vehicle and pointed it at Merry. The driver broke into a trot, reached inside, and brought out an automatic weapon which he turned to point at Oak.

  "You shouldn't have done that, miss. Didn't you hear about what happened to the cat?"

  "Cat?" She was staring open-mouthed at the gun. "What cat?"

  "The one curiosity killed." The man looked very unhappy.

  "What's wrong?" Oak was trying to see past the man. "What's with the guns?"

  Kakombe was nodding to himself. "I know this kind of ilmeet. He is no tourist, this one. He is like the hyena that sneaks into the village to steal the cream from the top of the milk bucket and then pisses into what he leaves behind."

  "Cheeky one, your tall friend," said the driver. He stepped aside and gestured tiredly at his vehicle. "Might as well have a look yourself. It doesn't matter now."

  Oak took a couple of cautious steps forward until he could see inside the Suzuki. The back end was filled with animal skins. He recognized zebra and wildebeest, but what caught his attention immediately were those of several big cats. Leopard and cheetah. From what little he knew about regulations concerning the killing of endangered species, there were enough pelts in the back of the Suzuki to put the man and his assistant behind bars for the rest of their natural lives.

  And Merry, curious, cheerful Merry, had to go and see them.

  "Poachers," muttered Olkeloki. "Lice on the skin of Africa."

  "Cheeky and colorful." The hunter gestured with his gun. Oak nodded at it.

  "Kalishnikov. Very sporting."

  "I'm not in the sporting game, friend. Move over there. You too, miss."

  A disbelieving Merry stumbled back through the sand to stand next to Oak. "You—you're not going to shoot us?"

  The man muttered something in Swahili to his assistant, who came around from the far side of the Suzuki with his own weapon raised.

  "I'm afraid I'm going to have to, miss. I can't very well let the lot of you finish up your sightseeing and then drive back to inform the local game warden that I've been working his territory, now can I?"

  "We won't tell anyone, honestly. Besides, we're not sightseeing. We're here on important business."

  The poacher affected an ingenuous expression. "Business? Two whites and two Maasai have business out here?" He looked around at the empty sand river and the brushland beyond. "Now what kind of business could you have out here, miss?"

  Quite indifferent to the fact that he was about to be shot, Olkeloki was staring up at the sky. "This foolishness must end. The sun continues to move."

  "You have to let us go," Merry told the poacher, "because if you don't, billions of things called shetani are going to break through into this world from a place called the Out Of and everybody's going to die horribly."

  The poacher looked at her askance for a minute, then chuckled. "That's very good, very good indeed, miss. Maybe you're all escapees from an institution somewhere, but it doesn't matter. In my business, you see, you can't take chances and you can't do things by halves. I am truly sorry, but witnesses to my business are the one thing I can't afford."

  Oak knelt, picked up a handful of sand, and let it run through his fingers, savoring its warmth and consistency. So life was a joke after all, with irony the punch line. The poachers could have cared less what they were doing there in the obscure sand river. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that they had seen the forbidden pelts in the back of the car. Enough to murder four people over. They had come all the way from the U.S., had helped to defeat an advance army of shetani on the slopes of a sacred mountain, had made their way past snakes and crazy Italians and everything else to get to this point right on the edge of the Out Of, only to have it all end because of some opera buffa encounter with a paranoid poacher who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or were they the ones in the wrong place at the wrong time? Not even Olkeloki knew that.

  The ground shifted slightly underfoot. The poacher frowned and glanced back toward his companion. As he did so, Oak flung his handful of sand. It caught the man right in the eyes. Oak was on top of him in an instant and they rolled over and over in the sand while the poacher's assistant tried to get a clean line on Oak so he could shoot him without shredding his boss. Quite aware of this, Oak tried to keep the man he'd tackled between himself and the other. If he could just get a hand on the hunter's gun…

  The earth erupted and he felt himself falling toward the sky.

  He knew he wasn't dead yet because he could hear Merry screaming and Kakombe bellowing in Maasai. Then he was lying on his back looking up, paralyzed by the sight before him.

  Two immense black pillars were rising out of the ground on either side of the poacher's assistant. Deep ridges scarred the inside of the pillars. The man had been knocked off his feet and now struggled erect as his boss tried to get control of his weapon. The pillars slammed together with an explosive crunch. A thin scream came from between, followed by a spurt of blood.

  Oak wiped sand from his own eyes. The ridges he'd seen lining the insides of the pillars were teeth, the pillars themselves enormous massive jaws rising from the sand. They swallowed convulsively, shaking the ground again, and continued to emerge from beneath the sand river.

  An eye the size of a number six washtub popped out of the sand less than a yard from Oak's kicking legs. Olkeloki was dragging Merry clear while Kakombe fought to keep his feet. The poacher was staggering backward and trying to circle around the behemoth which was rising from the depths between him and his vehicle.

  Most of it was out of the sand now. The body was as big as an elephant, the jaws those of a whale. From deep within its chest came a booming noise like the breathing of an idle steam engine.

  The poacher unleashed his Kalishnikov on it. Shells struck the dark rubbery flesh without visible effect. It was impossible for that comparatively small body to support those gargantuan crocodilian jaws, but somehow the monstrosity managed the necessary leverage in defiance of common sense and gravity, swinging them easily from side to side like the tip of a three-story-high construction crane.

  "Quickly!" Olkeloki made a run for the Suzuki while the colossus stalked the hysterical poacher. The man was running away now, firing wildly back over his shoulder and babbling incoherently. Long fingers trailed in the sand as the shetani hunched rather than walked forward.

  Then it reached out with twenty-foot-long arms and let out a sound that made Merry's skin quiver. She knew she'd stained her pants but that didn't matter. Nothing mattered now except getting away, away from that horrible giant that had emerged from the earth beneath their feet. Smoke and fire spewed from nostrils at the tip of those immense jaws. At that moment she recognized the otherworldy mutant for what it was. Because they'd seen it before.

  "Spirit of the Earth!" Olkeloki was already tossing gear and weapons into the back of the Suzuki, taking advantage of the shetani's preoccupation with the unlucky poacher. "Hurry, my friends, hurry!"

  By now the poacher had been reduced to a gibbering madman as he raced for the forested riverbank.

  "It came for us." Olkeloki yanked the front seat forward so Merry and Kakombe could pile in the back. The disgusted senior warrior immediately began throwing the still odoriferous pelts out the side window. "It came for us and found others with weapons to occupy it, but it will not remain so occupied forever."

  Oak had piled into the driver's seat and was studying the dash with an intensity he hadn't known he possessed. There were fewer gauges and dials than in the Land Rover, but only one or two whose function wasn't obvious. He turned the key and threw the shift forward.

  The Suzuki started to kick up sand. For an awful moment he thought the addition of their extra weight would cause it to dig in and stick as tightly as the heavier Rover, but as Kakombe continued to toss out pelts the tires started to bite. The little vehicle slid sideways. Oak wrestled the wheel and managed to straighten them out.

  "Whic
h way?" he yelled at Olkeloki.

  "Straight ahead, Joshua Oak!" The old man was leaning out the window on his side and looking behind them. "Straight ahead and turn for nothing this side of hell! We are very close."

  Merry was leaning over the shift console and straining to see ahead. "There's nothing there. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary." The sand river stretched unbroken before them.

  Far behind them now, the poacher ducked and rolled as cavernous jaws slammed shut over his head, missing him by inches. Unable to scramble up the steep riverbank, he ran back out into the middle of the river, chasing after the retreating Suzuki.

  "Wait, please, oh God, wait!" When his words had no effect he let loose with the Kalishnikov.

  He managed to get off a couple of bursts before gigantic jaws swooped down to snip him neatly in half at the waist. The Spirit of the Earth gulped flesh and bone with a single birdlike swallow as the bottom half of the man's body remained upright for another moment, squirting blood in all directions. It took a few seconds for the circulatory pressure to give out. Then hips and legs keeled over into the sand.

  Emitting another blast of flame and smoke, the abomination lifted its immense skull and struck out in pursuit of the fleeing four-wheel drive with thirty-foot-long strides.

  "Faster, Josh," Merry pleaded, looking back through the rear window, "for God's sake, faster!"

  "I'm doing the best I can!" In the slick sand the Suzuki slewed two feet sideways for every foot it advanced. "You want me to roll us?"

  The gargoylish shetani was making up the distance between them rapidly. Too rapidly. As it leaned toward them noisome flame gushed from its running nostrils. Merry shrieked as the fire licked at the back of the car and ducked toward the floorboard while Kakombe uttered a quiet prayer.

  The fiery exhalation slammed into the back of the Suzuki like napalm. Oak felt the heat of it sear the hair on the back of his neck as the blast blew in the flimsy rear window. Glass exploded around him. Instinctively he shut his eyes.