The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  He listened to the sound of Boulton’s footsteps as the other policeman paced away. Subconsciously, he must have been counting the steps, because when they stopped he knew immediately that something was wrong. Boulton had not had time to cross the concrete apron and step out on to the turf which would muffle his further steps.

  Sheehan reached inside his greatcoat to pick out the walkie-talkie lodged in his breast pocket. It was already in his hand when he stepped out of the tunnel again.

  He saw the body slumped on the frost-glittered concrete, and looked about wildly, already pressing the call button on the radio. He gave his call-sign twice before his eyes caught a glimpse of the black shadow that paused on the barrier enclosing the rusty seats before leaping at him. He let loose a wordless cry of alarm, not knowing whether his call had been heard, and then was bowled over by the shadow.

  He had to meet the attack hand-to-hand; there was no time now to go for his gun.

  The hands that gripped his arms seemed unnaturally strong, and despite his attempt to kick the other below the knee he felt himself whirled around and clasped in a secure hold. Something was clamped over the lower part of his face and he felt something heavy and sickly fill his nasal passages as he inhaled. One more startled breath was all it took before he tumbled into dizzy oblivion. The one fugitive image captured by his eyes was a sight of a candlelit plastic mask, which hid every feature of his assailant’s face.

  * * * * * * *

  He seemed to have been unconscious for bare seconds when cold air blew away the sickly sleep. The readiness with which he had succumbed to the drug had prevented him from inhaling too much, and the first thing that his bleary eyes showed him when he awoke was Boulton, still inert on the concrete some fifteen meters away.

  Sheehan was lying on his belly, and he found something hard beneath his left hip. It was the walkie-talkie, and he snatched it up immediately, but it had broken when he dropped it, and he could get no life from it. His head reeled as he lifted himself from the ground.

  His gaze was drawn to the summit of the pillar supporting the steel cage enclosing Paul Heisenberg’s inert form. An eerie blue light was dancing around the lower part of the bars on the near side, partly blocked out by the silhouette of a kneeling human figure. It took several seconds for Sheehan’s head to clear sufficiently for him to make sense of what he saw.

  Someone was using a cutting tool to slice through the bars of the cage.

  Sheehan groaned. It had happened before and it would no doubt happen again. The cult members resented the fact that a cage had been built to trap their messiah if ever he should return—whenever he should return. There was constant sabotage of the cage and its environs. The alarm system must have been short-circuited, for no alarm bells were ringing. His one thought was: Why did it have to happen to me?

  He drew the gun from the belt that gathered in the waist of his greatcoat. The butt was cold, and his joke about freezing his hand to the weapon drifted back into his mind.

  He pointed at the figure bent over the cutting tool, and yelled: “Stop that!”

  The other looked round, but the tool continued to do its work.

  “Stop or I shoot!” threatened Sheehan.

  The other grabbed one of the bars and wrenched it out, having cut through it at the top and all-but severed it at the base. For a moment, Sheehan thought the saboteur was going to hurl the steel bar at him, and he fired in immediate response.

  The shot missed, but the man in the mask didn’t hurl the bar. Instead, he dropped it to the concrete and jumped. The cage was a long way up—all of six meters—and Sheehan expected the other to buckle up on landing, probably with a broken leg. That wasn’t what happened, though.

  Instead, the masked man landed on his feet, as lightly as if he’d vaulted a low gate, and he ran at Sheehan without so much as a moment’s pause. The policeman was startled enough to miss his chance of a second shot. The gun was plucked from his hand and hurled away up into the stand.

  Sheehan was hit hard just above the heart and knocked backwards by the blow. He fell heavily, feeling as if he’d been kicked by a horse. He looked up at his assailant, who was no more than a silhouette with all the light behind him.

  Then something else caught his eye, and he gasped.

  The other stopped, and followed the direction of Sheehan’s gaze, looking back over his shoulder to the top of the pillar, where the light of the candles showed that the naked body of Paul Heisenberg, no longer reflecting all the light that fell upon it, had suddenly slumped back against the uncut bars.

  The stillness of the night was interrupted by the sound of a siren, and Sheehan knew that his first attempt to call for help had been successful after all.

  Then he was hit again, this time to the side of his left eye, and he lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The phone rang.

  The sound pulled Wishart back from deep sleep. A dream exploded briefly into consciousness and dissolved quickly as his mind hastened through the phases of sleep towards wakefulness. At the fourth ring he snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  “Yes?” he said.

  There was a moment of silence, and then a curious crackling hum. A voice spoke over the hum, sounding smooth and sexless; not loud, but quite distinct. He recognized it immediately—he had no idea whose voice it was, but he had heard it before.

  “Paul’s awake,” it said. “The alarm didn’t go off but one of the policemen at the stadium managed to call for help. There’ll be a full alert any minute, and they’ll send a car to pick you up. Get out quickly.”

  There was a click, and the phone went dead, before Wishart even had time to draw back the breath that had caught in his throat. He swallowed, and was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that he was suddenly sweating.

  He eased his bulk over the edge of the bed and reached for his clothes, then switched on the bedside lamp. His hand was shaking.

  A hundred and twenty-seven years, he thought. The new world record.

  It was, of course, inevitable that Paul should come out of stasis as the record-holder, simply because he had been the first to go in. Wishart himself, on his own leap through time, had managed only a hundred and eight years. He was nineteen years older now than when he had last seen Paul. He was over seventy, and in spite of the kilos he’d shed, he was still overweight and lucky enough to be alive. It was only now, though, that he realized quite how desperate his fear had been that he might not last out until Paul’s return. The relief was almost painful, drowning all anxiety and all thought, not letting him begin the business of planning what to do next.

  Mechanically, he dressed himself; it was not until he had finished that the peculiarity of his own situation was brought home to him.

  His eyes rested on the silent phone.

  The speaker knew that Paul was awake, and also knew that someone at the stadium had called for help. How? He had warned Wishart to get out quickly, before the whole police force was mobilized, and Diehl’s security men with them. Why?

  There had been other phone calls warning him of threats to the Movement, mostly from the investigations of Diehl’s men. Without those warnings, Diehl might have infiltrated his forces to a much greater extent, and might be ready to close him down by now. Instead...it seemed that his mysterious ally might take a hand in the chaos that was sure to follow the news of Paul’s awakening.

  Wishart turned off the lamp again, and made his way out into the corridor. He didn’t need the light in the stairwell to guide him as he moved quickly through the darkness down three flights of stairs to the basement. He used the service stairs to get out of the building at the rear, emerging among the big plastic drums where the refuse was stored. He paused there for a few seconds to allow his eyes to readjust to the light.

  There was no street-lamp in the alley but there was a reddish glow in the sky where airborne dust and water vapor reflected the lights of the city. The stars were hidden behind the colored haze. The coldnes
s of the night air seeped through his coat and into his flesh, and he tensed himself to prevent shivering. Eventually, he moved out into the shadows, feeling his way and making hardly any sound. There was a rustling among the garbage that was piled up in a culvert, waiting to be lifted into one of the drums, but it was only a rat. It was not unduly worried by his proximity.

  He threaded his way through a network of back streets, staying clear of the lighted roads. He listened for the sound of a car, but there was nothing nearby.

  The thought that it might be a hoax niggled away at the back of his mind, but it was not a doubt that worried him unduly. His informant had been reliable in the past, and there could be no motive for the lie. Paul’s return was due, and perhaps overdue: the cult had been anticipating the imminent return of its prophet for nearly forty years, always convinced that the corrupt world could hardly endure through one more generation, and always certain that Paul, in some way no one could imagine, held the key to its rebirth. There were a great many people expecting the impossible from Paul, and they were the ones upon whom Wishart had to rely if he was going to save his protégé from Diehl and Lindenbaum. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  The excitement was already growing inside him—the excitement of having something to sell again, a chance to manipulate the public, to control their ideas and their hopes, to milk them of their support. This time, he knew, there was more than a fortune at stake. This time, a whole nation was up for grabs. Maybe a whole world.

  A hundred and twenty-seven years had added very considerably to Paul Heisenberg’s stock as a prophet and potential savior. Handled right—handled by Adam Wishart—he could inherit the world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Paul felt himself thrust into the back seat of a small car. The cold seemed to reach into his very bones, and every touch sensation was fierce. He was wrapped in a blanket, but the blanket seemed to contain no warmth of its own, and there was little enough of his own as yet to be contained.

  The engine spluttered into life, starting first time, and there was a judder as the gears engaged. The car lurched forward, turned sharply, and then accelerated rapidly.

  “They didn’t see us,” said an even, mellow voice, “but they’ll have heard us. They won’t try to chase us. They’ll seal off the whole area north of the river and saturate it with policemen and security men. I can’t get you out in the car.”

  Paul, in the grip of a fit of shivering, could not make any reply. He had not yet managed to assume command over his limbs; he had been carried out of the stadium in the blanket.

  “There are clothes on the seat,” the voice went on. Paul could not tell from its tone whether it was male or female, but only a man—a very strong man—could have carried him at such speed through the derelict corridors of the stadium.

  “Try to put them on,” the voice continued. “I’m going to have to drop you off somewhere nearby, where you can be hidden and someone can take care of you. We were lucky that they only sent one car; because the cage alarm didn’t go off, they assumed that it was sabotage or vandalism, but there’ll be a full-scale emergency now. I can only try to mislead them, and then try to reach you again in the morning, or tomorrow night.”

  Paul could feel the clothing that lay beneath him on the seat, but he could not find the strength to do as the other asked. He tried to burrow into the angle of the seat, drawing the blanket around him more tightly, trying to cocoon himself in its folds.

  A current of warm air was beginning to flow from a vent under the front seat, and gradually grew in force. He tried to catch it in the flap of the blanket and draw it in toward his body. His teeth chattered briefly and he had to clamp his jaw to hold them still.

  The car cornered twice, sending him lurching first one way and then the other. The back wheels skidded, but the driver turned into the skid and kept control. The glare of street-lights cast sporadic haloes of light on the window, and the stroboscopic frequency suggested to Paul that they were moving very rapidly. The windows were already steaming up with condensation.

  “Do you know your name?” asked the voice, trying to provoke some response.

  “Paul,” he replied, very weakly.

  “Good. You’ll feel sick for some time, and it might be difficult to remember, but it will all come back eventually. The cold doesn’t help. You timed your return rather badly.”

  The words echoed in Paul’s head. He had no difficulty in understanding the immediate meaning, but the implications were quite unfathomable. He had no idea what had happened to him. His mind seemed to be seized up—frozen. He could not thaw it and force his thoughts to flow. He felt lonely, and very frightened, unable to remember how he came to be where he was—if, indeed, there was any memory that could tell him. He knew his name, but he could only wonder, for the moment, whether he knew anything else.

  The steady current of warm air eddying over the contours of the blanket fought the cold, and began to expel the icy sensation from his flesh, except for the three stripes of pain across his back where he had collapsed against the bars of his cage. He found the power of movement, and was able to stretch his arms and test the muscles of his feet.

  Above the ridge of the front seat he could see the silhouette of the driver’s head. It was rounded, and seemed quite featureless. The head half-turned to glance down at him, and by the light of a glaring street-lamp he saw that it was masked, partly by a balaclava helmet and partly by a plastic face-mask, molded to the contours of a human face. The only holes in the mask were the eye-holes, and the eyes were hidden in pits of shadow.

  “Put the clothes on,” said the smooth, sexless voice. “Please. There isn’t much time.”

  Paul tried to sit up, and as he did so he was struck by dizziness and the sudden sense that the perceived world was dissolving into another, sharper image of reality. He was aware of....

  jagged rocks....

  caustic sand blown by a terrible wind....

  the pain of lacerated fingers....

  the sensation of something slithering against his skin....

  a current dragging at his sense of time, his sense of self....

  He gasped. Then, as suddenly as it had been born within him, it died, and was gone.

  He raised his hand to catch the dim light. It was whole and unscarred. He flexed the fingers to reassure himself. The dream was quite gone, washed away like footprints in sand erased by the returning tide.

  He plucked at the clothing, trying to bring it out from beneath the blanket, where it was trapped by the weight of his body. Slowly, he began to dress himself, almost amazed by the fact that he could remember how. There was a thick shirt and a woolen pullover, underpants and denim trousers.

  “I don’t want to take you to any place Diehl’s likely to raid before morning,” said the driver. “Somewhere out of the way will be best, in order to give me time to find some way of getting you out. I don’t want you to tell them who you are. Hopefully, they might not recognize you. They’re used to looking after awakeners. Trust me.”

  The words flowed over and around Paul, who could find nothing in them to which to connect himself. It was all incomprehensible.

  “There’s no time to explain,” said the other. “I’m sorry. If only that policeman hadn’t....”

  The voice broke off. The car swung around a tight bend, skidded, and stopped. Paul tried to push his feet into a pair of elastic-sided shoes, and had just accomplished the unreasonably-difficult task when the door at his shoulder was wrenched open and a gloved hand reached in to help him out. As he climbed out, he realized that he was terribly weak and sluggish, but he was now feeling a great deal better in himself. He felt alive, and ready to begin the business of living.

  A street of tall terraced houses stretched for about a hundred meters either way. There were street-lamps every twenty meters or so, but only one in three was operative. He looked up at the tall buildings but he could only see two windows where light shone behind heavy blinds. One house revealed by a street-l
amp had its windows boarded up and its door battered down, but he could not tell how many other dwellings had suffered similar dereliction. All the brickwork looked very old.

  Beside the car, which had stopped in one of the darkened regions of the street, there was a low wall and a set of rotted iron railings. There was a gateway without a gate, and a flight of steps leading down into a deep well of shadow. Paul had to make a grab for the railings as he stumbled on the pavement. His companion caught him, and allowed him to pull away from the burning touch, supporting his weight effortlessly.

  “Easy,” breathed the voice.

  They paused, but only for a moment, while Paul collected himself. Then he felt himself hustled through the gateway and down into Stygian darkness.

  At the bottom, when they stopped again, Paul had to lean on the shoulder of his companion, his head resting gently against the edge of the plastic mask. He heard the ringing of a bell inside the house, loud and continual, as the other pressed the doorbell intermittently and insistently.

  The door opened, spilling the light of an electric torch out into the well. Paul blinked, aware only of a vague humanoid shadow.

  He heard the familiar voice speak rapidly, without waiting for a question or a challenge: “Awakener. Came out less than half an hour ago. Look after him until morning. I’ll try to collect him then.” Then the support was gone, and Paul had to lean against the door-jamb. Though he heard no sound, he knew that the man in the mask was disappearing into the night.

  “Wait! “ said a female voice, low and urgent. “Who are you? Wait!”

  There was no answer.

  A new hand reached out to take his arm and draw him into the corridor beyond the door. She didn’t ask any questions of him, but simply said: “Come on. It’ll be all right.”

  He managed to get inside, so that she could close the door. Somewhere up above, sounding strangely remote, the engine of the car growled into life.