Chase the Morning

Shaking his head and cursing frantically, Cuffee tore open the next bale more carefully, but still skipped back and let the contents flow down; and for all Jyp’s curses and Frederick’s puffing he did just the same with the next one, and the seven or so after that. A sloping heap of roots grew and slumped out across the floor. I leaned heavily on the trident; I was already giddy with the shock of things, and the heavy fumes seemed to make it worse. But beyond a few mouldy-looking duds, Cuffee turned up nothing at all out of place. We all watched him. He was scared, all right; so scared that when he came to the beginning of the bottom row, he baulked again. Jyp wasted no word, but simply jabbed his swordpoint against Cuffee’s kidneys. The man yelped and jumped, unseamed the first bale right down the front, then as it slowly spilled its contents he flung himself away so fast he skidded on the hard round roots and crashed to the ground.

But beyond the rustling trickle of roots there was nothing – nothing at all. In idiotic puzzlement Cuffee stared at the little low heap that was left in the sagging net. He began to giggle hysterically with the reaction, and I felt like joining him. Then he reached out a tentative finger, and poked it.

Something pounced back at him. In all my life I’d never seen anything like it.

It was a hand, a huge one; but that makes it sound too human. Transparent, half-formed, fluid, it shone mistily from within, shimmering the colour of distant lightning through the dimness. It clutched at that probing finger and clenched shut. There was a crackle, a shriek, a puff of smoke – and a glare lanced down Cuffee’s arm, a brightness so intense I saw all the bones shine right through the flesh as if it was smoky glass. Light flared out between the roots as if a furnace blazed there; then before we could even blink the last of the bale burst outward. A blinding corona enfolded the hapless Cuffee like an anemone snaring a fish.

‘Dupiah!’ shrieked Frederick, in a voice that shivered the air. And, clapping both hands to his bald head he bolted, still shrieking, for the door.

‘Dupiah!’ Mall echoed him. Jyp dropped the lantern with a crash. As one, before I could move, they seized hold of my arms and flung themselves after him, dragging me along bodily between them, still facing backward. Out of the shadows came the deep boom of the door as Frederick reached it. Staring helplessly as my heels skipped over the boards, I saw the glaring glow rise and come after us, shifting and changing as it moved. It was a view I could have done without. I seemed to see all sorts of things in that ghastly orb of swirling smoke and light, eerie, horrible things that set my teeth on edge. I shook with a sense of sheer immanent malice I would never have believed; devouring hatred poured out of it like an acrid stream. Just one jump ahead of it, it seemed, we raced around the corner, and reached the door.

It was shut.

In his panic the old man had slammed it behind him. Jyp and Mall dropped me like a sack and threw themselves at it. I scrambled up, half hypnotized by that glowing, seething thing bearing down on us. It was sheer loathing and revulsion, nothing like bravery, that drove me to dash back and swing out at the thing with the trident I still held.

The shaft slowed suddenly, as if the air had thickened and grown glutinous; it jarred, stopped, stuck. Then the ghastly light danced upon the three tines, and came racing and sizzling down the shaft towards my hands. I dropped the thing with a yell, barely in time, as the door creaked open. The others seized me, flung me bodily out to crash across the cobbles, and themselves after me. Jyp pulled the door closed behind him with a crash, and Mall threw her weight against the handle while he fumbled with the keys. I sat up, dizzy and sick; my arm was agony again, I had struck my head badly on the cobbles, and acquired a whole new set of bruises. I watched Jyp trace a strange symbol with his swordtip in the thick paint of the door, a weird curlicued shape like a series of interlocking arcs ringing a compass rose. Then he reversed his sword and thrust it through the twin handles like a symbolic bar.

That done, he sank to his knees with a gasping sigh. ‘Damn!’ he muttered, in a shaken voice quite unlike his normal confident tones. ‘What a goddam crock! We’ll have to get old Le Stryge to this!’

‘Aye, well enough,’ said Mall, hitching up her tight pants. ‘But what of –’ And she jerked a thumb at me.

I swallowed. Words wouldn’t come, sensible words. ‘What … what was that bloody thing?’ was the best I managed.

‘Nothing!’ barked Jyp, so savagely I hardly knew him. Anger burned off any sign of his normal friendly self. He sounded almost contemptuous. ‘Nothing for you to meddle with! Nothing for an outsider!’