The Dancers of Noyo (19 page)

             
I glanced at Franny. Now that my eyes had grown accustomed to the dim bluish light, I saw she was looking frightened. It was an expression she was to wear as long as we were in this part of her father's domain; and it made me realize how frightened of the Avengers she must have been to choose this dubious refuge as an alternative to falling into their hands. But then, I hadn't been chained to a rock by the Avengers and left to drown in the rising tide. She had good reason to be afraid.

             
What would they have done if they'd caught us? They probably wouldn't have shot us so close to town, in the face—so to speak—of all Boonville. They'd probably have bound and gagged us, have told any curious onlookers that we were motorbike thieves who were being taken back to the coast for trial, and ridden away with us. I doubted that we'd ever have reached the coast. They'd have shot us under the trees on some dry hillside.

             
I thought of Bill on his push bike, pedaling slowly along the detour, and cursed myself. Why hadn't I behaved more like a medicine man? I ought to have gone after him, forced him to swallow a suitable drug from my medicine bag, and then hypnotized him. It would have been
simplicity
itself to have given him a post-hypnotic command to forget that he'd ever seen Franny and me. Instead, to avoid "trouble" with an unarmed man on a push bike, who happened to be "not a bad sort," I'd let myself in for this uncomfortable place. It seemed to me that Franny had rather wanted to go to Boonville, and I wondered why.

             
"Why do we have to be so careful?" I asked in a low voice.

             
"
Ssssh
!
Because
...
father made this place to replicate the bad part of one of his drug experiences."

             
"Why?" I asked. "Why would anybody want to do a thing like that? It doesn't seem reasonable."

             
"No. I'm not sure why he did it, really. Maybe he wanted to make a place of refuge for himself where only he would dare to go. There are some nasty things here."

             
"You said this was his laboratory. Is this where he grew the Dancers?"

             
"No, that's in the other wing. Father was a kind of a genius, Sam. But he took a lot of drugs, and he was full of crazy streaks."

             
I thought of O'Hare as I had seen him when I had been Bennet. He hadn't seemed particularly crazy then. But no doubt Francesca was right.

             
I heard a soft lapping somewhere off to the right. Was it water? I didn't think so. And it seemed to be coming nearer.

             
"What's making that noise?" I asked.

             
"The lapping sound?
It's a big slime mold."

             
I felt a clinging, chilly dampness around my moccasins that seemed to be working its way up through the leather toward my knees. "What do we do?" I asked.

             
"Nothing," Francesca answered, always in a whisper. "Just
be
patient. It won't go much higher, and it can't do any harm, really. In a while it'll go away."

             
Her passivity and stoical acceptance of this miserable place were getting on my nerves. "What would happen if we just turned on the lights?" I asked in almost a normal voice. I suppose I was trying to belittle the uneasy feeling the slime mold inspired in me.

             
"
Ssssh
!
There aren't any lights."

             
"
...
How do we get out of here? There must be some way out."

             
"Yes, several.
We can't go back the way we came
—
well, I guess we could, but it would be awfully difficult. We'll try to find a time when none of the Hunters are out, and get through to the other wing. It's odd there too, but not nearly
so
bad as this. Can you sing?"

             
"
Hunh
?"

             
"Don't make so much noise! I mean, do you know any chants, tribal music,
things
like that?
Indian-style singing?
Being a medicine man, I'd think you would."

             
"I
know some chants, yes," I said.

             
"That keeps them off," she said as if satisfied. "But of course there are other things here that aren't discouraged by singing."

             
The slime mold seemed to have withdrawn. Either that or I had grown accustomed to its chilly grasp. Francesca took my hand and we began to move forward slowly. She kept stopping and listening. She told me afterward that while the things O'Hare had set to roam the corridors of this miserable place were, in general, too stupid to be acutely dangerous if one knew their
habits,
they were all malevolent and capable of being blindly murderous. On top of that, O'Hare had set a number of booby traps, and she wasn't sure what or where all of them were. So our progress was slow.

             
We got through the big concrete-walled room without further incident, but as we moved into a short corridor I realized there was a soft "pad-pad" from behind us. It seemed to be keeping pace with our tentative footsteps and echoing them.

             
"What's that?" I said into Franny's ear. Being followed by a soft pad-pad was more of the corny gothic-horror atmosphere O'Hare had built for himself. I resented it; and I more than resented my being affected by it. I could, of course, have ignored any amount of gothic horror if I'd been convinced of its essential harmlessness. But I wasn't. Franny's anxiety, plus my own experience, as Bennet, of O'Hare's ruthlessness, assured me that the danger here was uncomfortably real.

             
"A Hunter," she breathed. "Don't move. Don't make a sound. It may go away."

             
It didn't. The padding came nearer. Poor as the light was, I got a look at the creature that was causing it.

             
It was a tall, skinny thing, human-shaped—Franny said that her father had made the Hunters as a preliminary study for his masterpiece, the Dancers—and it moved in a way that reminded me of an inchworm. It bent over, felt around on the floor in front of it with its arms, stra
i
ghtened up, moved on a couple of pads, and repeated the process. It didn't seem to have any face.

             
"Get ready to sing," Franny said into my ear.

             
I fumbled over my repertory of Indian-style chants. Most of them seemed to have deserted me. The best I could call to mind was a silly little chant, rather like what Al Riggs had heard when he had joined the dancers in their commune. Pomo Joe had taught it to me, translating it roughly into English. "Bring us back our arrows! Bring us back our arrows! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu!" it ran. "Give us the scalp to dance over! Give us the scalp to dance over! Hu! Hu! Hu!
Hu!"
The four lines were repeated indefinitely.

             
Pomo Joe had seemed to think a lot of it, but I didn't much care for it. I wished I could have thought of something else. The reference to "scalp" bothered me, since
a
couple of pad-pads more would bring the Hunter feeling around on the top of Franny's and my head.

             
"Sing!" she whispered. "Loud!"

             
I began the chant. My voice was thin and rusty, and the first effect was to bring the Hunter moving more quickly and surely toward us.

             
"Louder!" Franny said. I tried to oblige, and as soon as Franny got the hang of the song she joined her voice to mine. The walls of the corridor began to echo to our "Hu! Hu! Hu!
Hu!"

             
The thing withdrew slightly. We increased our volume and—reluctantly, it seemed—the Hunter bent over in the other direction and moved away from us on its blob-by feet.

             
Franny was panting. "There're a lot of them," she said, "but we scared that one away."

             
"What would it have done i
f
it had caught us?
"

             
"
Crushed us to death."

             
No wonder, I thought, Franny's hand felt cold in mine.

             
From the corridor we moved into another big room, as big as a concert hall or a skating rink. Its acoustics were oddly muted and echoless.

             
It was filled with things that looked like eroded or bulbous versions of more normal laboratory equipment—cabinets filed to thin edges, or plump and bulging with what seemed like soft decay, lab benches slumping softly to the floor, a sharp-edged sink filled with lusterless liquid, a refrigerator bulging below the middle with some strange edema, office chairs with arms five feet wide,
a
stool whose seat was far above my head. It was like walking through a forest where the trees bulged with fungal rot, or had been worn gaunt by a constant sand-laden wind.

             
"Don't touch anything," Franny cautioned me again.

             
"Aren't we going backward?" I asked after a little.

             
"Yes, but we have to. This is the best way out."

             
We made a wide circuit through the big room. I heard the dripping noise, a long way off, and another slime mold lapped coldly at our feet for a few minutes. That was all, and yet I was so keyed-up I felt I would almost have welcomed the pad-pad of a Hunter following us.

             
How cunningly O'Hare had known how to
exploit
the archetypal terrors of the human mind! Corny and
gothic
his horrors may have been; they were certainly never crude or bathetic. He made no use of spiders or bats: his agents of fear were strange shadows, and darkness, and danger and pursuit in the dark. What a nasty man O'Hare must have been! And yet Franny, who was in many ways an admirable girl, was his daughter.

             
We reached the end of the enormous room. There was a blank wall before us. "It's a maze," the girl whispered, "but it's simple, easy enough. You always turn right."

             
We made a couple of right turns. We never went more than a few feet without a change of direction being offered to us. Then I began to hear a sharp noise, a sort of clicking tap, coming after us.

             
Franny heard it as soon as I. Her face changed frighteningly. I thought she was going to faint.

             
She looked about her wildly for a moment. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me through right turn after right turn until we reached a little niche, a recess in the wall whose entrance was almost closed by projecting walls on both side. "Get in," she said. "Get as far back as you can and flatten against the wall as much as you can. Get in!" She pushed at me desperately.

             
I worked myself into the crevice, taking some skin off my chest and buttocks in the process, and flattened myself against the rear wall. Franny followed, flattening her pelvis and arching her neck to get through. The crevice, though shallow, was broad enough for us to stand side by side, plastered hard against the rear wall.

             
Just in time. The clicking taps were getting louder, and an instant later another of O'Hare's inventions was standing before us.