My sight dimmed. My sense of isolation got worse. The noise, the colours around me, everything my senses told me, seemed to make less and less sense, to add up to nothing, no coherent picture. I felt I had to keep moving at all costs, so this horrible inchoate world couldn’t close in around me and cut me off forever. But I was very tired now, and under my feet from time to time the ground would lurch suddenly and make me stumble. From overhead came a sound I knew, the whine of a circling jet; but I saw only a pattern of beating lights gliding over emptiness, and hid my eyes. Shadow and quiet drew me, and somehow, after hours, maybe, I found myself drifting along lesser ways, suburban streets lined with houses, more homely, less hostile. Yet the lit windows glared down balefully at me, and the cars still hissed by.
Until, with electrifying suddenness, one of them screeched in behind me, right to the sidewalk’s edge. I swung about in sudden fright, and grabbed at my sword – then froze, half-crouching, as a blue-white light flicked across my eyes. I saw nobody, but I heard the voices, hard and harsh.
‘
‘
‘
I started and jumped back as doors slammed hollowly.
‘Jesus, what’s that? Machete?’ I looked down. Instinctively I’d half-drawn the sword, and it spat back the blue light like icy fire.
‘Hey feller! We jes’ wanna word, nobody’s goin’get hurt! So you put that stickah ‘way now, hear?’
I backed off, kept on backing. My head was horribly clear all of a sudden. There was no way I’d get to the docks from a police cell – or a madhouse. I could see the policeman now, a burly middleaged black man with fierce grizzled whiskers; he was trying to sound reassuring, but his fat hand hovered near the unclipped flap of his holster. The other one would be covering him from the car, no doubt. I looked around desperately, and again it was darkness and shade that caught my eye; across the road a gap opened between the houses, its sagging wire fence overhung by spreading trees. I edged back some more, then relaxed a little, bowed my head, heard the fat man’s sigh of relief – and swept the sword right out of its scabbard in a hissing arc. I wasn’t as well in control of it as I thought; it must have nearly parted those whiskers. He leaped backward with a startled yell, tripped over a hydrant and sprawled on his back. That opened my way for a flying leap, right over him, onto the bonnet of the squad car and out into the road, luckily empty. I reached the grass strip in a couple of bounds, narrowly stopped myself running out into the path of a highly decorated van, then ran anyway because a bullet had just gone whistling past. The van screeched around in a tyrestripping arc, horn blaring, onto the grass between me and the squad car. I reached the fence, vaulted over it and landed ankle-deep in litter-strewn grass before I realized that – in a manner of speaking – I wasn’t alone.
If I’d known more about the city I might have been less surprised at landing in a graveyard – and at the aspect of it, vast stretches of huge and imposing tombs, vandalized, neglected and overgrown. Right now they didn’t worry me in the least. This ruined city of the dead looked like the safest place to hide I could imagine. I went belting off among the graves like someone desperate to get back to his own. Some way behind me I heard the sound of somebody else trying to vault the fence, and failing dismally. My conscience shrivelled again; I’d nothing at all against those cops. I didn’t like doing this one bit – but no way were they going to stop me now.
I wove and dodged among the ranks of the dead, ducking from path to path, turning and turning till I lost track of time and direction. Now and again I slipped in among half-fallen models of Greek and Roman temples, gasping for breath in the heavy air, to listen for pursuit till I was sure there wasn’t any. Nothing stirred, not even a breath of wind. I didn’t blame them for giving up; you could have played hide-and-seek all night in that place, and the weed-grown gravel paths didn’t show tracks. Come to think of it, I wasn’t too sure which way I’d come myself. I looked around. Tombs, tombs, tombs as far as I could see, a skyline of crosses and wreaths and sculpted angels and other less probable things. Nothing stirred, not even a breath of wind in this leaden air; no sign that there was a city of the living anywhere out there. It gave the cemetery a timeless, suspended feeling. I must be right in the heart of the place. At least it was pretty much flat. I set out, heading what I guessed was away from the way I’d come in. Nothing to do but walk till I hit a wall –
