And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (24 page)

Or was it? He brought himself up short. He was still alive because Boreas was better at the wizard game than he was. At any time the sorcerer could simply have left him and sped the seven easy kilometers up Broadway, leaving him in his dust, par-ticularly after the strange man had vanished as the cops closed in. Boreas hadn't-that was too easy for him. He'd stayed, playing with exploding police cars and the like, enjoying himself and rejoicing in his total superiority over Mac Walters, bumbling amateur.

Boreas would be on that subway only if he
knew
his opponent was, too-and perhaps not even then. If he lost Mac he'd head straight for the jewel to protect himself. Maybe he was already heading there now!

Mac felt momentary panic. The only way to make sure that Boreas didn't get there before he did was to expose himself, keep the other man intent on playing with him rather than attaining the objective. Boreas's arrogant overconfidence was the only thing Mac had going for himself. With a discorporate sigh, he ma-terialized as himself in the crowd waiting for the subway.

Mac glanced nervously around, aware of his extreme vulnerability as a target and of his opponent's almost total anonymity. He felt more naked and helpless than he had in the primitive world. What was even worse was that he had to pray for an attempt on him to occur; if he peacefully boarded the train and had an uneventful ride, then the odds were he had already lost.

The train stopped and he got on with a group of men and women and grabbed a metal strap.

All the seats were taken, and a fair crowd of standees pressed against him. It was uncomfortable, particularly since in every face he seemed to see the sardonic eyes of Boreas.

The experience was unnerving, the feeling that all around you were ready to pounce, to kill you in any one of a thousand different ways, coupled with the fervent prayer that they truly
were
evil and malevolent and would try to do that very thing.

The train was rolling barely a minute when he got his wish. A little old lady who must have been eighty if she was a day lurched into him, looked up with pure meanness in her eyes, and spat into his face. The action was so unexpected that he didn't recover for a couple of seconds.

"Pooh and fie on you!" she cackled. "You're a bad, bad man!"

Several other standees nodded in agreement, and in a matter of a few seconds more they were all looking at him with pure hatred in their faces and chanting, "Bad man! Bad man!"

Then the little old lady stomped on his foot. Somebody else poked him in the stomach-he was being attacked from all sides. It gave him little chance to think or concentrate, but it added a quick sense of desperation to his moves. He went back to mist again, and the crowd fell into itself, still chanting, kicking, poking, and shoving.

Boreas wouldn't be taken aback for very long, he knew. Suddenly he heard a sound as if someone had switched on a giant vacuum cleaner, and he felt himself being pulled back, out of the train, back toward the Battery. He became solid once again, standing in the darkened tunnel as the lights of the subway train receded rapidly.

The giant suction continued for a minute or so, then abruptly stopped, leaving instead an eerie silence. He looked around, considering what to do next. There seemed to be no openings to the street from wherever he was, making the mist routine suddenly less useful. No teleporting had been the rule; he couldn't just wish himself to the surface. He shrugged and started walk-ing after the now-vanished train, searching for an outlet to the surface.

There was a humming noise and he realized after a moment that it was the third rail that supplied the electrical power for the trains. He shied away from it.
Wouldn't do to escape Boreas and do
yourself in,
he thought nervously.

Suddenly the tunnel ahead of him constricted; the tube was now closed, but centered in the pinched area was a pair of human-looking but gigantic lips. They smiled at him.

He stopped and stared at them, trying to think.
Boreas-he must be here, somewhere, in the
tunnel with me!

"This has been most entertaining," the giant lips told him in a ghostly parody of the sorcerer's voice that echoed down the subway tunnel. When the mouth opened he could see the rest of the tunnel through its "throat."
That should mean something,
he told himself, but he couldn't grab onto it.

"Yes, most entertaining indeed," the lips continued. "However, it is time to end this now-you are so incompetent, my dear fellow, that you take the chal-lenge out of it!"

He glanced around for the real Boreas but saw nothing. A rat, probably, skulking in the darkness, smiling at him.
Well-why not?

So Mac became a rat. Everything, the giant lips included, loomed huge around him, and he started running at high speed for the dark corner. As he almost reached the deepest part of the shadows a pair of large, luminous yellow eyes leered back at him. He barely had time to cut and run before a huge cat was upon him. He felt a sting in his tail and desperation set in as he was yanked up into the air, held by the cat's sharp, toothy grip on his rat's tail.

He made himself into a Saint Bernard dog. The cat, taken unawares, almost choked on the monstrous, furry tail it grasped, and its smaller jaw was almost wrenched from its socket by the huge thing it now no longer could grip.

Mac's victory was short-lived, however. He barely had time to turn to face his assailant when the cat was replaced by a giant, monstrous spider, a hairy taran-tula nearly filling the tunnel, facing him down, holding him between the wall of lips and any kind of escape.

There was silence for a moment as Boreas savored his victory. The giant spider's sting dripped with deadly, paralyzing venom. Mac realized that he could never best the man in a contest like this; experience and confidence in his powers and abilities automatically made the sorcerer his superior.

He thought desperately for a solution, a way out, as the lips opened to reveal nasty-looking teeth.

The spider began a slow advance. He could still see the intact tunnel through the open mouth of the wall of lips, emergency lights trailing off into the distance. So near and yet so far.

Or was it? He remembered the subway map once again. The line branched off quickly from the other lines that also started at the Battery. But although other lines might join this one and run parallel to it, that tunnel on the other side of the gaping, mocking mouth was a direct line to where he needed to go.

As the first of the spider's huge legs almost touched him and the mandibles of the creature snapped in obvious relish, Mac knew what he had to do. He ran sideways toward the third rail, and as he reached it there was a brilliant white light and he vanished.

The lips vanished as well, as did the spider, leaving an enraged Boreas suddenly puzzled.

Where could Walters have gone? Not to mist-he had guarded against that. Not to invisibility-he would hear and sense the breathing. That brilliant flash . . . What could it have meant?

Instantly the answer was clear to him and he cursed himself for a fool. Walters had become a creature of pure energy and was riding the third rail in electrical form!

Damn!

Stalled by his lack of knowledge of just where the tunnel led and unwilling to take a chance on following the man without knowing the byways of the electrical system, Boreas summoned a special subway car and started riding at top speed toward Times Square Station.

Mac Walters cursed as he became himself once again. At the speed electricity traveled, he had traversed the entire line from beginning to end and back again over thirty thousand times in the few seconds he had ridden the rail. He picked a station, material-ized, emerged, and found himself across from Central Park.

A quick check told him that he was some sixteen or seventeen blocks north of his goal. He ran from the park into Columbus Circle, willed a police car at the curb and jumped in, following his original plan.

He quickly discovered that a police car with lights and siren going full blast meant absolutely nothing to New York traffic. It took him a precious two minutes to calm down enough to see and be able to use the solution.

He willed the streets clear of all traffic and ordered the lights to obey him. It took less than two more minutes to roar into Times Square.

Emerging on 43rd Street, Boreas realized immedi-ately by the absence of automobile traffic that Walters had already gotten there. As for Mac, he stopped short at 46th Street, staring into the square. There should have been a statue of Abaddon there, the jewel ready for plucking. There wasn't. Times Square, although bereft of auto traffic, was as it always had been, and there was no sign of a statue of Abaddon anywhere.

Wisely deciding to abandon the police car short of his goal, Mac Walters made his way quickly down Seventh Avenue toward its junction with Broadway that formed Times Square. He was glad he hadn't also banned pedestrians; the crowds gave him some protection without slowing him up very much, since they had the streets as well as the broad sidewalks to use.

If Mac was confused, the confusion was mirrored on the face of Boreas, who looked around at the square from the opposite side, searching for the statue. It
had
to be there, it just
had
to be-and Walters hadn't reached it yet, that was clear, since the demon's metropolitan construction was still there.

There were ads all over the place, huge billboards for everything from Broadway shows to coffee, cig-arettes, airlines, and the like. He scanned them, hoping that, perhaps, the statue might be concealed within one of the giant displays, or as an ornament on the side of one of the buildings.

Mac had the same thought and stopped just short of the square to figure out where the clever demon might have hidden it. For a second he feared that he had been double-crossed, that Abaddon had gone back on his word, but he quickly dismissed that thought from his mind, if for no other reason than that the alternatives were unthinkable.

It was Boreas who saw the key first by virtue of his slightly southern orientation. As it had always had, back when it had been the Allied Chemical Building and even earlier, as a newspaper headquarters, the triangular building jutting into the square from the north had an electronic sign around it which sup-posedly displayed the headline news. The sign was there all right-and it was, in a way, performing its usual function.

In flashing lights across one side, around the tri-angular edge and down the other side of the building, the words flashed:

"MAC WALTERS AND BOREAS BOTH REACHED TIMES SQUARE JUST MOMENTS

AGO," the sign read. "SKYTOP BATTLE EXPECTED ATOP THIS BUILDING ANY

MOMENT NOW."

Boreas grinned and looked up. High atop the build-ing was a polelike structure that was used, although he didn't know it, to signal the coming in of the New Year. Atop that pole was, recognizably, a large man-like shape in jet-black.

Boreas looked around nervously. He couldn't spot Walters, and if he negated the people in the square he would expose himself as well.
The other man,
he thought,
could be speeding to the top
of the building in its elevator right now! If not, he is here in the street somewhere. Better to take
the shortcut that would accomplish an insurance rear-guard action and forestall the possibility
of an elevator rush now.

He chose the giant spider again, first because it could climb the outer walls of the building in a flash, and also because its horrible visage would induce panic in the crowds, panic that might engulf a Mac Walters should he still be in the street. It was a good plan, but it had a major flaw: it would work totally to his advantage only if Walters was, even now, trying to race for the statue.

The truth was that Asmodeus's man was still half a block back from the square itself and hadn't noticed the electronic writing. Suddenly the horror that was the giant tarantula rose in front of him about two blocks down and started moving his way.

There were terrible screams and shouts of sheer panic, and the crowds started trampling themselves in their flight from the terrifying creature. They ran in all directions, and there were a lot of exits from Times Square, but a solid wall of people nonetheless threat-ened to engulf Mac in another few seconds.

Boreas was taking no chances, though. As soon as he became the creature he headed straight for the proper building and started to climb. This activity told Mac exactly where the statue had to be.

If Boreas wanted to play horror movies, then hor-ror movies it would be. In a flash Mac Walters became King Kong, a larger-than-the-movies King Kong, towering over the buildings, almost half as tall as the structures of Rockefeller Center only a few blocks away. He could see all the way to the Hudson to the west, though, and noted, in the back of his mind, that the world seemed to end there, leaving only a blank grayness beyond the river. He wondered for the briefest of seconds whether or not New Jersey was actually there or whether the construct merely ended at the river. With New Jersey it was impossible to say.

He actually looked down slightly to see the statue perched atop the building and adjusted his height accordingly. At that second the giant spider came up over the other side and onto the roof.

Boreas hadn't seen the giant ape materialize: he'd been much too busy climbing. Now he watched as a huge ape's hand started to close on the entire statue, jewel and all. There was little time to lose. With the hand almost on the object of the search, jet fighters roared out of the sky and shot rockets at the giant ape.

The explosions and sounds startled Mac Walters; one rocket almost hit his rear end and he roared in pain. The hand that was about to grasp the statue jerked reflexively and knocked the whole thing over. It toppled into Times Square itself, deserted now of people, and landed with a crash. The statue itself separated from the mast and flew through the front window of a restaurant.