Behind him, a pathway led toward the perimeter of the garden, arched over with green leaves and red blossoms that smelled like oranges. He started for that and was halfway to the walk entrance when he saw the leaves snake quickly forward, growing at a fantastic rate. In two seconds the exit had been sealed off by vegetation.
"What the hell—"
He turned right, starred for another walkway, watched the same thing happen, except that this time it was the grass that grew swiftly to cover the entrance. The blades widened as they grew, toughened, twined rapidly in and out of the side-poles of the rose arbor which framed the entrance to the walk, forming an impassable barrier.
St. Cyr turned and faced the other way.
The hedge behind which he had hidden only a few minutes ago had begun to join in with the harmony of growth — no, the cacophony. It sprouted new branches. Actually, they looked more like vines, highly flexible vines covered with wicked inch-long thorns. A dozen of these ropy tentacles had almost reached him. As he watched, they rose from the ground like snakes responding to the music of a flute, stood higher and higher still until they towered over him.
At the last instant he realized what they intended. They would fall and embrace him, squeeze him firmly in a crosshatch of thorns. He screamed, fell, rolled to the left barely fast enough to avoid them as they dropped where he had been.
The vines thrashed agitatedly.
He could hear things growing all around him, bursting forth like gardens he had seen filmed with stop-action photography.
He got up and ran.
He passed through the entrance to another walkway before he noticed it, and he was elated that, unconsciously, he had fooled the garden. He was on his way out of it.
Hallucinations.
He paid no attention to the bio-computer now. He was in no mood to listen to anything except the incredible roar of growing things, which he fancied was as loud as the continuous explosion at the base of a major waterfalls.
Be calm. Hallucination.
On both sides the trees shot up, growing so fast that they would soon punch out the sky.
"Sky" is basically an abstract term. You are hallucinating.
He had gone a hundred feet down the flagstone path when, immediately before him in the leaping, dancing chaos of the garden, a silver and black wolf appeared. It was larger than he was, and it was bearing down on him.
He tried to side-step; could not.
Silver claws slashed down across his shoulder, dug deep, ripped loose, carried away a spray of blood.
He stumbled and fell.
The wolf swept by him, turned to attack again.
This is no hallucination, St. Cyr thought. Not this part about the wolf. The wolf is real.
Affirmed.
He didn't need to have it affirmed. He felt as if he had lost his arm, though he could look at it and see that it was still there, gushing blood but still attached.
The wolf swooped in at him, moving so quickly and gracefully that it seemed almost to have wings.
He twisted.
The claws caught his shirt, ripped it, passed by.
"Help!"
The word sounded alien, as if someone else had spoken it. He looked around, saw he was alone, realized it was himself that had called out. "Help! Help!"
He had no way of knowing how loud it was. His voice might have been a whisper. His altered perceptions, however, told him it sounded like an amplified scream. Indeed, each time he shouted he could see the sound waves spiraling outward from his mouth, some of them catching on the trees and shattering there, others spearing right through the growth and carrying on, seeking ears. The shattered sounds lay on the grass like broken bottles, gleaming green and yellow.
The wolf came back, got its claws into him again, into the same shoulder as before, tore, twisted, snarled loudly as its grip broke and blood spattered.
He remembered that Dorothea had one arm torn off and was missing several toes.
Suddenly, above the sound of the growing plants and above the hissing, growling fury of the wolf, something boomed with the impact of a ton of rock dropped on a sheet of tin.
He felt the sound of it smash down on all sides, covering up the broken-bottle sounds of his own voice.
The glittering fragments of this sound were bright red, like blood, broken sound… on all sides of him…
He looked up from the glass blood that was really sound, and he saw that the wolf was gone. He looked behind, but he did not see it in that direction either. Of course, as rapidly as the grass was growing, and considering all the violence with which the thorned vines had attacked St. Cyr, the garden might very well have swallowed the beast.
When he turned front again he saw Hirschel running toward him, carrying what appeared to be a rifle. So it was Hirschel, after all. It was that simple. Somehow, Hirschel had obtained a trained wolf that he was using to do his dirty work — straight out of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Any self-respecting detective should have been familiar with the ruse. Of course, in that story there had been no shattered sound lying around like broken glass, and there had not been trees growing right up through the top of the sky… He had a lot more to contend with here than Holmes ever had.
Hirschel stopped and bent over him.
"Very neat," St. Cyr said.
Then he passed out.
NINE: Bloodhounds
When he sat straight up in bed, chased awake by the stalker on the broken road, Tina was there to quiet him. She pushed gently against his chest until he lay down again, then sat on the edge of the water mattress.
"How do you feel?"
He licked his lips and found them salty. The inside of his mouth was dry and tasted like dust. "A drink?" he asked.
She got him water, watched him drink, asked if he wanted more, took the glass back into the bathroom when he said he was done. He watched her go, well enough to be fascinated by the movement of her tight round behind.
When she returned, he said, "Where's Hirschel?"
"In the garden, with Inspector Rainy. They've been scouring the area where it happened."
"Is he under arrest?"
She looked surprised. "Whatever for?"
"Wasn't he the one who tried to kill me — he and his trained wolf?"
She started to smile, stopped, said, "If it hadn't been for Uncle Hirschel, you might be dead. He heard you screaming for help, and when he thought he might not reach you in time, he fired his rifle in hopes he would scare off whatever was after you."
''What was he doing there with a rifle in the first place?" He didn't want to sound quarrelsome, but he did. His head ached so badly that he almost reached up to see if it was all there.
"He was on his way across the gardens. He intended to go down into the valley to hunt for deer, some of the small fast ones that he's never been lucky with so far."
"He saw the wolf?"
"He says not. It was gone when he reached you."
St. Cyr raised his right hand and reached for the wounded left shoulder; he encountered a thick mass of bandages. He did not have any pain in his shoulder. All the pain was in his head, smack in the center of his forehead. He raised his good hand and felt his forehead, but couldn't find anything out of place, any hole or foot-long arrow sticking out of his skull.
He said, "What did the doctor say about my arm? Claw wound?"
"There wasn't any doctor here," Tina said. "Not, at least, in the sense you mean. We have an autodoc in the library. We fed you into it, asked for a diagnosis, and let the robotic surgeons do the rest."
"How long have I been out?"