Finally, the slick mass swelled over his head, and he collapsed, still clutching at it.
While the Duke was convulsing, Ralf rolled off, bucked to his feet, and ran headlong into the clumsy hooked arms of something loathsome. The claspedforebrains of its head swung from side to side, and its mandibles swivelled with maniacal joy. But before it could crush him, Ralf unsprung his butterfly blade and slammed it into the shimmering bulk. He spun backward, wheeled crazily to get his balance, and then kicked off into a cloud of leaves.
On the other side was a steep bank, and Ralf plunged down it, head over heels, in a clatter of stones and dust. He splashed through rocky shallows and crashed to a stop against a thrust of boulder, his head and shoulders underwater. The cool current revived him, and he shuddered to his feet, teetered like an old man, and plopped back into the water.
Above him, among the high bank's shrubbery, he could see humps of things lumbering in and out of view. Quickly, he rolled to his belly and dragged himself out to the deeper water. The stream buoyed him and carried him off.
Hours later, he came out of a faint and found himself washed upon a gritty shore. Pale ferns fronded nearby, and beyond them he could see the tin roofs and cardboard doorways of a trenchtown. He pulled himself to his feet, slowly, painfully, and limped towards higher ground. His ears were still whining, and his head felt heavy, but he could make out the shadow of sounds: the stream rushing over pebbles with a murmur that was almost song, the curse of gravel under his feet.
He staggered towards the town mindlessly, in a daze, his eyes small and shiny as a reptile's. His mind was shut, and he moved mechanically. The people who saw him coming shied away, except for the children who pelted him with stones and ran close enough to snag him with wire-strung tin cans and garbage. Ralf shuffled on, unaware, his face empty, his eyes drifting. He had sunk into his mind.
A day later, the local police picked him up outside North End. He was being baited by a pariah dog and kids with slings and crude blow darts. Though he had been lurching frantically from street to street, occasionally lashing out with a pitiful cry, he gave the police no trouble when they cuffed him to take him away.
Days afterward, his mind shuttered into place. It took a long minute for him to take in the stained and pitted walls. Then the cretinous look drained entirely from his features, and he hunched over, weeping.
When he had got hold of himself, he stood up by the bars of his cell. He could see in the faces of the police and his cellmates that he had been raving. They wanted to know what had happened to him, if it had been mushrooms or village anis that had gone bad.
Ralf waved all speculation aside, and in a halting, fragmented way, told them what he had seen in the hills. The police laughed, but his cellmates were quiet, eyes averted.
The next day they freed him. By then he regretted telling them anything. An officer from Port-au-Prince had been called to hear his story, and Ralf was afraid they'd somehow find out about the heroin and detain him. But the officer was only concerned about the exact location of the star pools, and Ralf told him.
The man was different from the local police. He was stocky, with quiet eyes and long intelligent fingers. And he believed Ralf. Enough, at any rate, to send four men up along the trail Ralf had followed days earlier. Actually, they wanted Ralf to go along and direct them, but when he refused, melting before them to a quaking old man, they left him behind.
That night, Ralf stayed in the prison cell. The suggestion that he go back up into the hills had so shattered him that he had needed a shot to quiet him down. In his sleep, he dreamed of a sun, black but shining, with strange stars tapping in the dark blue of the sky around it. He was alone in a damp alley, greasy brick walls rising on either side of him towards the alien sky. There was a stain on the air of something burnt, and his stomach closed at the smell of it.
Then, from the far end of the alley where an icy light was wavering, a figure approached. It was a man, thin and long as a stick, and he was carrying something. As he drew closer, Ralf could see that his face was cushiony, his chin slippery with drool, and his eyes remote, bright as needles. An idiot's face. His swollen lips were moving in a whisper: Shut your ears big, Ralf.
Ralf's whole body clenched at the sound of that withered, barely audible voice. But he couldn't turn away. He was transfixed by what the idiot was carrying: a black cistern with a wide mouth. His eyes were locked on it, watching it approach, tilt forward, and reveal a blackness gem-lit by a splatter of tiny lights, pin-bright, like stars.
The lights were wheeling, and watching them curve through the dark, Ralf succumbed to a lurch of vertigo, keeled over, and fell, howling, into the depthless black.
He shrugged awake and sat still a long time before accepting coffee and bread. The four men who had gone up into the hills had not returned. The officer had wired for a helicopter to cover their trail and see if it could turn up any sign of them. When Ralf was strong enough to leave the police shack, he emerged in time to see the helicopter return. The pilot and his partner were excited. They had seen something, but Ralf didn't lag around to find out what.
The walk into Port-au-Prince was long and tedious, and in the condition he was in, it would take him most of the day. But when he got there, the American consul would wire his sister in Stony Brook for money. Then he could leave, get out before Gusto sent down more of his boys or the hills sent down what they were festering.
He walked to the edge of the trenchtown and stopped at the side of the road that led to the capital.
One last time, he looked back. The helicopter had gone up again. Its insectlike body glinted in the distance as it dropped towards the horizon, sunlight splintering off its domed glass, a wandering star burning alone above the hills.
The Second Wish by BRIAN LUMLEY
The scene was awesomely bleak: mountains gauntly grey and black-towered away to the east, forming an uneven backdrop for a valley of hardy grasses, sparse bushes, and leaning trees. In one corner of the valley, beneath foothills, a scattering of shingle-roofed houses, with the very occasional tiled roof showing through, was enclosed and protected in the Old European fashion by a heavy stone wall.
A mile or so from the village - if the huddle of timeworn houses could properly be termed a village leaning on a low rotting fence that guarded the rutted road from a steep and rocky decline, the tourists gazed at the oppressive bleakness all about and felt oddly uncomfortable inside their heavy coats. Behind them their hired car - a black Russian model as gloomy as the surrounding countryside, exuding all the friendliness of an expectant hearse - stood patiently waiting for them.
He was comparatively young, of medium build, darkhaired, unremarkably good-looking, reasonably intelligent, and decidedly idle. His early adult years had been spent avoiding any sort of real industry, a prospect which a timely and quite substantial inheritance had fortunately made redundant before it could force itself upon him. Even so, a decade of living at a rate far in excess of even his ample inheritance had rapidly reduced him to an almost penniless, unevenly cultured, high-ranking rake. He had never quite lowered himself to the level of a gigolo, however, and his womanizing had been quite deliberate, serving an end other than mere fleshly lust.
They had been ten very good years by his reckoning and not at all wasted, during which his expensive lifestyle had placed him in intimate contact with the cream of society; but while yet surrounded by affluence and glitter he had not been unaware of his own steadily dwindling resources. Thus, towards the end, he had set himself to the task of ensuring that his tenuous standing in society would not suffer with the disappearance of his so carelessly distributed funds; hence his philandering. In this he was not as subtle as he might have been, with the result that the field had narrowed down commensurately with his assets, until at last he had been left with Julia.