The Demons

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Gigantic were The Demons who terrorized the underground kingdom of Archon. Yet, who were they? Whence came their fantastic power? Why did they wage ruthless and relentless war against Archon? These were questions to which there was no answer until Stead arrived in Archon, apparently from nowhere. Only after he had been a Forager for some months, and had experienced the spine-chilling dangers of The Outside did Stead arrive at a solution. Even then he had a difficult task convincing the Controllers, who, for generations, had insulated themselves against the harsh truth. Only those who had actually seen The Outside - the Foragers, Soldiers and Workers - could properly understand.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 190

Sample

THEY found him sprawled on the edge of a projecting serial platform, white, lax and unconscious—helpless as a baby.

“Push him over the edge,” counselled Old Chronic, the veteran Forager. His pouchy eyes moved restlessly in the onceasing survey of all Foragers, his leathery neck creasing and uncreasing like an animated concertina.

“We-ell;” said Thorburn, hesitantly. This was his first trip as lead Forager and the extent of responsibility had fallen on him with unwelcome surprise. Now he shook his massive head, trying to think and plan, conscious of the six others arid contriving not to show the uncertainty that, to him, felt a personal weakness. Tentatively he reached out for assurance from the others—and all the time his eyes moved up and down, left and right, around and back, on a searching, watching, apprehensive. A Forager out on a trip scarcely ever looked at his companions.

Old Chronic cackled, clicking his dentures, his eyes bright with gleeful malice. “What frightens you, Thorburn? He won’t step on you.”

The five other—three men and two girls—nodded and laughed at this sally. There was truth in that; Old Chronic might be past leading a foraging group, but he had lived a long time in a trade where men and women died with-distressing frequency—and they saw the wisdom of his words. And all the time their eyes were moving, moving, moving.

Without looking at it, Thorburn jerked a horny thumb at the strange, shining machine, lying mute and dumb beside the equally quiescent figure on the cold marble. “And what about that?”

Julia, the blonde with the big body and agile, slender limbs, glanced down over the edge of the platform, her camouflage cape rustling in the breeze. She turned lithely, looked back at the others, raising a quizzical eyebrow at Old Chronic.

“Go on,” he said, wheezing a little in the fresh air.

Thorburn said: “Hold on, now …” Then stopped. His eyes, in their ceaseless roaming, had glanced up at the Outer Sky, all a dazzling white-blue glare, far away and infinitely remote. A mile or so away across the concrete plain other buildings rose, black-outlined, coloured cliffs of metal and stone and plastic. Every shape lay clearly before him in the brilliant light; yet every outline was encrusted in the blue mist of distance, a soft haze that subdued colour and detail, lending the usual blurring to visual inspection. “I don’t know …”

The marble aerial platform trembled suddenly—a gentle, skin-felt vibration, a sensation of bodily, swinging movement.

At once the Foragers reacted.

The four men and two women flung their camouflage capes more securely about them and dashed with scuttling speed for the shadow behind the doorway towering into dizzy perspective two hundred feet above.

Thorburn hesitated. The tight knot of puzzlement chaining these people had been dissipated and unravelled by that gentle vibration. His way, it seemed to him, had been marked out for him. Effortlessly, he picked up the man lying still and twisted beside his strange machine, slung him over his shoulder and raced after his comrades with the long, sure strides of the athlete in perfect training.

He reached the concealing shadows of the architrave as the Demon stepped out onto the balcony.

The stranger wore no camouflage cape, and the odd material of his one-piece coverall that had so puzzled the Foragers gave no clue to his origin; but its colour, a drab, greeny-grey, blended well enough with the shadows to give concealment from the enormous but erratic eyes of the Demon.

Holding himself perfectly still a few yards from his rigid companions, Thorburn watched the Demon stride out into the sunshine.

Displaced wind buffeted him as one gigantic leg swished by. He was thankful to see that Julia’s cape now clipped tightly to her without any betraying flutter. The noise of a monstrous foot descending sent shock-waves through the feet-thick solid marble; a rushing wall of bright crimson going past, seemingly unending, slithering and scraping across the floor, drew excruciating pangs from his eardrums. The very air shivered as the Demon passed.

Thorburn did not look up now. He did not move but stood graven, huddled, holding in the screaming panic within him, fighting the ages-old fear of the Demons that had haunted Mankind from the Beginning.

Thud, thud, thud, crashed the Demon’s feet. At each gigantic blow, sound blasted at Thorburn’s eardrums. Then that rippling avalanche of glowing crimson passed and he could flicker his eyes furtively within the shelter of his cape, stare at Honey and her white, tensed, panic-drawn face. The rigidity of her pose told eloquently of deep, primordial fear rather than an ordered and controlled stillness.

He shivered a little. Honey was young, on her second Forage; he should have stayed at her side. But this stranger who now hung so laxly over his arm had claimed his first attention. Why? He didn’t know. Rules of conduct were arbitrary enough for no one to misunderstand and a Forager’s first duty was to his comrades. If a Demon once caught sight of a Man—or a Woman—then the story might be different.

On the thought, Thorburn swivelled an eye at the Demon. Enormous, immense, crushingly huge, the Demon stepped out onto the aerial platform and leant on the balustrade that lofted eighty feet. He heard the metal stanchions creak with squealing thunder—came slowly to a majestic calm. Something bright glinted up from a corner; a subdued splintering crash sounded.

Slowly a black-shadowed foot lifted, rising like the black belly of a thundercloud, then swept down with ponderous might. The stranger’s queerly-shining machine vanished, over the edge of the platform. Before it shattered into meaningless fragments on the ground beneath, it must fall through three thousand feet of nothingness.

A roaring, blustering snort exploded from the Demon; a rolling, rushing tornado of sound that dwarfed anything that had gone before. Thorburn clenched his teeth and waited through the paroxysm. Staring in that swiftly fleeting, camera-efficient, comprehensive glance of all Foragers, he checked that the Demon was not looking their way, then flicked the retire signal to his companions and, on the instant, sprang from the architrave shadow to the shadow of the wall within.

The others joined him, six explosively moving and then, stone-still people, in a line, sheltering in the shadows beneath the fifteen-foot high skirting board.

At their leader’s imperious gesture, Sims and Wallas—both young and agile, quick-witted, fleet-limbed—moved cart ahead, going at a licking pace along the floor paralleling the crack where wooden skirting board and tiled floor met untidily. As well as an eye for the Demons, roaring and striding ponderously in the upper air, a Forager must spare an eye for every dark crack and cranny, every crevice and corner of his own world.

Bringing up the rear of the group, Cardon—a little older than Sims and Wallas but a little younger than Thorburn; a fierce, dark-eyed, black-browed man with a notoriously filthy temper—marched it seemed with a permanent crook in his neck, his head tilted back, his eyes forever searching the; way they had come. The group depended on the rear-marker.

Now that the Demon had been left behind Honey had regained some colour, her dark eyes flashing no less swiftly and intelligently as she, like everyone else, maintained constant vigilance. She pushed a hand beneath her cape, touched the warm metal of the walkie-talkie strapped to her back. The touch reassured her. Her job this trip as radio-man gave her an importance, at least in her own eyes, and a task to which she could devote her attention and try, albeit with indifferent success, to shut out those screaming, primordial fears that would not be denied in the physical; dreaded presence of a Demon.

Julia said: “Hold it. That’s the entrance—we came through flattened out. There’s a beam full-width a foot above the floor. Everybody down.”

“You first, Sims—Wallas,” Thorburn ordered, so that there could be no mistake about who was running this patty. For Julia, as radar-op, tended to get above herself. “When you give the all clear we’ll follow. Julia, you and Old Chronic give me a hand with the stranger.” Thorburn laid the limp form out flat on the floor a foot from the beam, watched as Julia re-checked her meters. He quizzed her with a glance.

“Still the same.” Julia phrased the query beginning to dominate all men’s minds. “They aren’t any better yet—the beam’s still too high—but when they are? Our grandparents didn’t have detector beams to worry about—”

“But we have,” Thorburn said, cutting her off. “Come on, there’s the signal from Sims.”

Julia flashed him a glance which said eloquently: ‘Go get trodden on!’ and then obediently flattened out—with her figure it was no easy task—and squeezed through. Pushing and pulling, the three eased the stranger under the detector beam.

Why was he bothering with this man? Thorburn didn’t know the full answer to that; but he saw clearly that some of the reasons were bound up in that quick glance from Julia.

Apprehensively but quite firmly, Honey slithered through, with her lissom figure finding the task simple. Then Cardoin, with a last long look back, followed.

Outside the door, they skirted the tiled landing, seeing their goal, the banister-flanked head of the stairs, remote and yawning, three hundred feet away. They took time negotiating the shadow-fringed skirting board, checking each point and then clearing it in a controlled rush that ended in frozen immobility.

“This is a small house,” Thorburn said irritably. “And poor. I’m surprised the Demons have a detector beam here at all. And—” he finished with the age-old sarcasm of the Hunting Forager for his commanders—“H.Q. briefed us entirely incorrectly. Not a scrap of steel in the whole place.”

Sims and Wallas, being young, automatically patted their empty sacks. “Steel weighs heavy,” Sims said. “Make an easier touchdown without it,” said Wallas.

And both smiled as though they had said something profound.

Old Chronic cackled at them, clicking his dentures. “We five in a poor Empire, my lads. Every scrap of whatever it may be is useful. Don’t be gleeful over empty sacks.”

Only half-repentant, Sims and Wallas led out to the stairhead. Here Thorburn, as regulations demanded, checked batteries. This time it was a mere formality; he knew that they’d only used their antigravs once on the incoming trip to ascend the stairs down which they must now drop. “All right,” he said, grasping the stranger more firmly over a shoulder. “Honey—you’re the lightest. Give me a hand with him.”

Help in dropping down with a burden on antigrav was not really necessary—they could drop under adequate control with a three hundred-pound sack—but he felt the need for giving orders. This trip had not resulted in any way as he had expected. And Old Chronic, almost in abandon from what a proper Forager should do, kept watching him, cackling and mumbling to himself. Let the old fool get stepped on!

The seven Foragers and the inert passenger dropped, plummeting past the floor levels, even this long plunge unable to give them a comprehensive outline of what this place was like. It was far too big to be understood as a single unit. This house—they knew it to be that from careful architectural drawing by their leading geographers—appeared to them as a vast number of individual places; a dark corner, a beamed doorway, a landing, a long plunge downwards on antigrav, a convenient hole—a succession of convenient holes—into which they could dart the moment the snorting and blowing and ground vibration of a Demon warned them.

You couldn’t grasp the entire scene. Only if you stood off-preferably in a high vantage nook—and surveyed a distant prospect could you understand that the world was a succession of buildings. Not many people ever had that opportunity and fewer of those really understood, as Thorburn had only recently understood, just what the world realty was.

A man laboured his life away at his task down below; only the Foragers and the Hunters were ever likely to see a Demon, and many a man and woman was born, lived and died without once hearing or seeing a Demon. Thorburn knew that he was glad he was not one of those. But the price came high.

The group landed in the shadow of the lowest stair, checked, froze, then sprinted hard for the slot beneath the five hundred foot-tall front door. Vague and misty, that doorway towered up, the glow of Outer Sky shining through vast areas of coloured glass. All seemed quiet. They tumbled through the slot where wood and tile failed to meet with precision, stumbled down in faintly reflected light. A man could see in almost pitch darkness just so long as there was light enough to strike back from corners and projections, giving him orientation. Now Thorburn ordered their lamps switched on alternately, each two stepping along in the radiance from one headlamp. He wanted to get this limp stranger home. The responsibility so rashly undertaken now weighed him down, adding to the loss he felt at the failure of the trip. H.Q. were bound to have nasty things to say about that.

The light of Outer Sky had not been bright today and the Foragers had not worn their dark glasses as, usually, they were forced to do. Even so, it was a relief to return ‘from the stark nakedness of outside to the safe runnels of the familiar human world.

“Keep closed up,” Thorburn said. The order was unnecessary; but still that compulsion lay on him. He had ‘been chosen leader, and as leader he had taken the decision to bring this stranger in. He wanted the others to know and keep on knowing that he was leader.

So far there had been no time to examine the stranger, lay, white and breathing shallowly, a limp weight on Thorburn’s shoulder. Old Chronic voiced the doubt preying on Thorburn’s mind.

“He’s not one of us,” Old Chronic said, sucking a tooth so that his dentures palpitated clickingly. “He’s an enemy sure as sure. What you going to do when he wakes up, Thorburn?”

. . .