Cloud Castles

by Michael Scott Rohan

  Chapter Eight

  Alison ground her teeth, audibly.

  ‘Well, it’s got to be one way or the other,’ I began, peering at the pavement where he’d jumped down. The rain-slicked tarmac was scuffed and slithered over, but one print stood out clearly in little streaks of muddy water. Suddenly Alison yelped and pointed to a smear of mud on the edge of the pavement further along. ‘So? Mud’s not exactly in short supply in this weather.’

  ‘Maybe – but with grass and flowers in it?’

  I glanced around at the arid industrial desert, new enough that nature hadn’t started to reassert herself through cracks in the concrete façade. ‘It’s better than nothing – come on!’

  But she was running already. The road was a short one, dog-legging left past a really impassable-looking fence and out into the main parking lot of the estate, empty now except for a few parked trucks. Beyond it was a main road into town, busy even at this time. Again we stared around wildly. ‘He can’t have gone out there!’

  ‘Why not?’ she said, and ran on. But she sheathed her sword, and I mine. The chances were that nobody would even notice them if we didn’t draw attention to them; the Core is like that. But in the glare of headlights, say, a naked blade, highly reflective, might be another story. I’d had cop trouble before now. We reached the roadside and leaped the low fence onto the cycle track alongside, still peering ahead.

  ‘He’ll be out of sight by now,’ said Alison bitterly. ‘Out of town, probably, into the dark—’

  I caught her shoulder. ‘No, by God! Look!’

  Her eyes glittered under the street lights. ‘Yes! Tally-ho!’

  She didn’t strike me as the fox-hunting type, so I guessed she knew that old joke too. And there the bastard went, right enough. A hefty figure in black, with one sleeve showing white and a gleam of metal under his arm, was running hell for leather along the cycle track towards town. Even as we saw him he vanished down into an underpass. We ran again, our feet slapping on the harder surface. ‘He should’ve been long gone!’ I panted. ‘I would have, and I think he’s in better shape! Did we hurt him?’

  ‘Never touched him!’ gasped Alison. Then without stopping she twisted and looked back at the glowing callbox we’d just passed. ‘You don’t think—’

  ‘What – the Brocken’s on the phone?’

  ‘No, idiot!’ she spat. ‘But the Baron is!’

  ‘Oh. Right. A hundred miles away, mind. Better keep our eyes open, all the same.’

  We ran down through the underpass and up, and suddenly we were out of the industrial wilderness and into a world of neon signs and shop windows and streets still quite full. A ripple of turning heads, a flash of metal, a flicker of black led our eyes straight to the dark figure zigzagging through the crowds, and we went pounding after him, soft-drink cans and discarded pizza boxes whizzing across the pavement from under our feet, the usual debris of an urban evening. We attracted less attention than the captain; my black piratical gear and gaudy sweatband could be mistaken for expensively sleek athletics kit, Alison’s uniform for a grey shell-suit. Most people probably just saw a pair of tall thirty-somethings out for their evening run, and anybody who noticed the swords had more sense than to say anything about it. We didn’t speak, for we needed all our breath for running; but one flashing glance from Alison confirmed what I thought. We were gaining on the captain, strong though he was. We were close enough to see the occasional glint of the metal case, his tattered sleeve trailing free, the whites of his bulging eyes as he darted frantic looks back. Instant death ran at his heels, minutes behind, and he knew it. But then everything changed.

  I felt it seconds before I saw it, and more seconds still before I could believe I saw it. I thought it was just exhaustion at first, the limits of my strength – much the way I’d felt on the last stretches of the Boston marathon. But I hadn’t even run a half-marathon yet, and here was this leaden-limbed, suffocating sensation clamping down on me, pushing against my chest like the resistance on a cross-country ski simulator. I didn’t say anything, I just pressed on, but I noticed Alison was looking tight-lipped and grey as well. But then, as the captain rounded a street corner, I did see something – something I remembered all too well. Hanging in the air like the ghost of a mist, tenuous, insubstantial, it filled the broad avenue from side to side; but it settled around me as I appeared, and the pressure grew worse. It clung as I ran, spreading out in streams from side to side like a wake. Now heads turned as we passed, and among some of those the mist seemed to settle, and the faces changed, struck by a sudden spasm, a flicker of sudden bestial anger. Not only a couple of skinheads, neo-Nazis probably, and a big hairy character in over-studded leathers, but also an ordinary young woman, Hausfrau type, a teenage girl with an ice-cream cone and a plump horn-rimmed Burgerlicher, an unlikely threat to anything except a second helping of Kalbsfleisch. Some of them only looked; but others moved out as if to follow. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination, but when I shot another look at Alison I got a glance of horrified alertness in return, and a confirming nod. My lungs were labouring, but I was about to say something sensible back when I saw the faint hazy streamers drift out among the traffic, and worm their way into the path of a police car passing on the far side.

  The reaction was instant: the driver stood on his brakes, the siren came on and the car pulled around in a screeching U-turn across the Strassenbahn tracks, straight towards us. Alison yelled in anger and clutched my arm, hauling me with her across the pavement to the shelter of a darker side-street. I didn’t need any persuading; we ducked around the next corner, vaulted a barrier into an underground car park and clattered between the petrol-scented rows to the exit opposite.

  ‘That – should – break our trail!’ she wheezed as we staggered up into another shadowy side-street. She hung onto the gatepost and gasped for breath.

  I doubled over to ease a developing stitch. ‘Right … got to get back … pick up captain’s …’ Then I hauled her back into the shadow of the wall and hissed, ‘Look!’

  The exit was near the corner of a wider street, more poorly lit than the main streets and completely empty. But from an alley two blocks down a man tottered into it, a man in worse shape than we were, reeling like a drunk. That far ahead of us it wasn’t easy to be sure; but somehow I was. He leaned against a lamppost for a moment, hugging something large to his chest; I didn’t need to see what. Our involuntary short-cut had second-guessed his escape route; we only had to move in quietly, keep in the shadows and we’d have him.

  But moving quietly is slow, especially when you’re as blown as we were; even limping and gasping he was gaining on us. It was beginning to look like a geriatric speed trial, and there was a T-junction ahead, beyond it a building site with a towering crane as skeletal sentinel over its high wire fence – too many opportunities to ditch us. ‘Sod this!’ I whispered, stalking out of a doorway. ‘Let’s rush him! With any luck he’ll trip and break his bloody—’

  She grabbed my arm. ‘Wait! He’s crossing the road! Get back in the shadow!’

  Too late, because he wasn’t crossing. He walked straight up to that forbidding fence, thrust the case into his jacket and began to climb. Only, as one does, he looked around first, and, of course, he saw us. Limping he might have been, but he was up that fence like a scared cat; still, he was only just at the top when we clattered up to the foot. I sprang up and slashed at him, but the blade passed a foot short as he swung himself off the top, over the razor-wire and onto one of the irregular heaps beyond, landing with a metallic clatter that seemed to go cascading away into the darkness. Alison was already clambering after him. I grabbed her heel and boosted her up to within reach of the top, she reached down an impatient hand and swung me up after her, then she sprang for the same heap, drawing her sword as she leaped. She landed with the same din and scrambled down the heap like a stair. I left my sword where it was, skidded as I landed and fell down onto metal that gave beneath me with a tinny thump. It was the bonn
et of a rusty old car, and it slid me down onto another one beneath. I jumped, expecting solid ground; but I landed on a slope, a steep unstable slope that gave beneath my heels like shale or scree. I clung to the car and scrabbled for a foothold; below me darkness pooled like a lake in Hell. Something touched my leg, and I lashed out in alarm.

  ‘Down here!’ hissed Alison, and tugged again. I let go, leaned on her and together we went slipping and sliding down into the dark on little shifting slides of metal. I got my feet, she lost hers and almost fell head first under a cascade of clattering things as we struck the bottom. I helped her up, retrieved her sword, and together we peered into the cluttered dimness, listening for any sound of movement. A thousand empty eyes stared back, a macabre charnel-house of vacant sockets and gaping grins. They glimmered faintly in the city glow reflected off the clouds in place of moon or star, darkly mirrored in the iridescent puddle that slapped gently at our feet. This wasn’t a building site, it was a graveyard, a communal plague-pit for the picked bones of planned obsolescence, the mouldering corpses of cars. Their dismantled guts coated the slope we’d slid down.

  ‘Dante would’ve loved this!’ I muttered, and then suddenly I snapped my fingers. ‘Stuttgart! A big scrap yard, not far from the city centre! Metallwiederaufbereitungs Amerningen! This belongs to one of Lutz’s recycling companies. There could be a rendezvous here—’

  The abrupt animal tension in Alison’s stance silenced me quicker than any gesture. I looked where she looked, and instinctively clutched my arm round her shoulders. The cloud was back, drifting like wafts of cobweb silk outside the fence; and it was thicker. Suddenly it seemed to gather itself and roll, not through the mesh as you might expect, but over the top, as if it were a complete thing that couldn’t stand separation. I noticed it avoided the razor-wire, too. We shivered, ready to run the moment it came after us. But it didn’t. It plunged down, growing thicker and whiter all the time, like a waterfall out of emptiness, straight into the ground beyond the fence; a few seconds it fell, then vanished.

  We weren’t stupid. We turned to run, plashing exhaustedly through that bloody puddle. But Alison skidded, then me, as if the metal buried beneath was snagging feebly at our ankles; when the noise came we were barely across. Behind us the whole slope was heaving as if there was an earthquake, or something burrowing underneath. Long streaks of scattered small parts were flung up into the air, in loose sprays at first, then geysers, then in long stringy ribbons that wavered and convulsed before disintegrating again – all that, in the space of a second or two, while we gaped, appalled. Then there was a swift decisive clash, and out of the metallic rubble, waving long metallic pincers, lifted something like a head. Not a human head; it had two glinting lenses, but they were many-faceted domes bulging out of each apex of a triangular, featureless snout. Something clacked beneath it, like wide mandibles. Behind it a humped body arched and lifted on six dully gleaming legs, shedding showers of rusty metal and dribbling streams of ancient oil and dirty rainwater. It was made entirely of the stack debris, this thing, metallic, clanking, grinding, squeaking; yet it looked a lot more organic than mechanical. It could have been eight or ten yards across, something between a spider and a flattened mantis; and with a spider’s gait it came scuttling forward through the churning pool.

  The thing moved so fast that in our hypnotized horror we almost got caught. A claw swiped at us; Alison’s sword barely parried it, and I hadn’t even drawn mine. As it rattled back I ducked, scooped up a heavy driveshaft from the ground at my feet and swung it hammer-fashion. The clang was deafening, and a shower of debris rained down on our heads. The thing reeled back, forelimbs flailing in the air. I flung the steel rod like a javelin at one bulging eye, and we ran like hell.

  The thing pattered after us, quieter now, the squeak and grind of rusty metal merging into a tooth-grinding hiss and chitter. Round the cars we ran, from one level of blind darkness to another, and always around a corner ahead or just at our heels that sinister chitter would sound. It would pounce suddenly from behind a stack, or clamber out into our path and stand there, waiting with nerve-fraying patience. No question, it was hunting us like a real animal, only with a more than animal cunning behind it. Twice I tried to strike at it, but it was ready now; once it caught the axle I was about to throw and very nearly dragged me in by it. Over and over we tried to dodge down narrow gaps between stacks, but the horrible thing simply squeezed itself up and pushed through with a grate and squeal of metal. We were tired already; now we were reeling, slipping, falling on our knees in the filth of automobile entrails. And far from reaching the fence, we’d been deftly driven deep into the heart of the huge yard, under the feet of the huge crane there.

  ‘Climb it!’ I yelled, but Alison shook her head slackly.

  ‘No good – it’d climb too – or just pluck us off—’

  It was then the darkness seemed to explode with light. I shook her, hard. ‘I’ll climb!’ I shouted. ‘You – circle! Keep dodging!’

  Her eyes glinted as she looked up, wildly; and then of all things a grin flashed at me through the darkness. She’d actually sensed my idea, this amazing woman; and what was more, she’d accepted it without a word, even though it left her in terrible danger. She hefted something heavy, a cylinder-head I think, and hurled it right at the oncoming thing. It was a throw that wouldn’t have disgraced an Olympic shot-put, and her aim was better than mine. One reflecting many-faceted eye went out in a scatter of broken headlamp lenses. You wouldn’t have thought it would matter, but it did; the thing went wild, blundering from side to side for a moment, then it fixed on her and pounced. She was already away, and I was half-way up the ladder or further, praying I could manage this. She dodged around the base as the thing rushed again, never moving far away; and I reached the little metal gallery at the side of the crane’s cab. It was old and battered, the door latch weak; but it might take seconds I didn’t have to get it open. My sword went through the windscreen in a shower of safety glass, I went after it and began ripping out the dashboard leads to hot-wire a connection.

  It felt like centuries before the engine spluttered and caught, and I slumped back into the greasy chair, working the levers as I went, kicking out for the pedals. For a moment my fuddled mind started flying a helicopter, but I’d been shown how to use a dockyard crane once, and this wasn’t too different – except that there should be one extra control. I peered over the dashboard at the dirt-obscured German legends, and finally found one, the big red switch. I snapped it over.

  Down below Alison shouted – or was it a scream? I leaned over, saw her scramble up on a car bonnet and crouch there, blade levelled before her. With terrible courage she stayed there as the thing advanced, slowly, as if suspicious of this sudden stand. And rightly so, for she’d given me just the position I needed. I didn’t even have to swing the crane; I released the winch, the heavy cable screamed over its pulleys, the great grab at its tip with its electromagnet activated arrowed down like a harpoon onto that obscene bulk and clanged in deep. The thing convulsed with a screech like abrading steel, rearing back; and I seized the moment to rev the motor to its maximum and slam out the winch clutch. This isn’t a good idea in normal circumstances; inertia being what it is, you might strip the gears or even pull the crane over. But I didn’t give a damn; and to move so lightly that monster had to be hollow. Off the ground it lifted, twisting, kicking, a metal spider snared by a single web strand of steel. Alison leaped down and away, round the base of the crane; and as she got clear I snapped the grab lever home, and twisted the red switch with the double lightnings to aus. The closing claw crushed and tore that kicking bulk; the magnet, turned off, let the mangled thing fall.

  Only about twenty feet, but it was ample. It hit the ground and disintegrated in a great ringing explosion of bits, like a percussion group on self-destruct. Nuts, bolts, washers, valve-heads, screws, springs, spark-plugs, shocks, half-shafts and millions of less identifiable components flew in all directions, some as high as
the crane cab, and came raining and rattling down like hail on the grinning automobile corpses. By the time the last one fell nothing even remotely spider-like remained. I hardly gave the scattered heap a glance; I was swinging down the ladder, and shouting for Alison.

  She was there, staggering up the lower rungs, clutching her forehead where some falling debris had caught it. But she let it go and grinned up at me, a wolfish grin, joying in mayhem, that made me want to hug her. ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ she carolled. I was just wondering whether to risk that hug when she grabbed me by the arms, and a deafening thudding roar shook the yard, as though all the ghostly engines were coming alive. It was another helicopter, a biggish, sleek machine coming in low between the buildings, dangerously low; and the searchlight at its shark-like nose nacelle snapped into searing life. For a minute I thought it must be the police; then the light struck the summit of a wide heap of cars at the far corner of the yard and hung there, circling slightly as the helicopter wavered. Up into the glare, keeping low, scrambled a human shape, and the light winked painfully off the case under one arm.

  ‘Come on!’ screamed Alison over the row, and together, staggering like drunks, we ran down the dark alleys of scrap. The figure looked around and cried out, gesturing urgently; a rope ladder came tumbling down, a short one, and he hooked his free arm onto it. As we stumbled closer hands reached down to grab him and haul him in, and suddenly the ‘copter began to turn on its axis, the light tracked across the shattered stacks of bodies and pinned us down like rabbits at a burrow mouth. We broke for cover as the hammering burst of an automatic rifle drowned even the ’copter engines; a stream of bullets popped through car bodywork and ricocheted screaming off chassis members and cylinder blocks, while the mud beyond flew up and danced. In that maelstrom we dived for what cover we could, cowering, while the ‘copter made one swift circuit of the yard; then its light snapped off, and it climbed away into the mirk.