The Walking Shadow. Brian Stableford
to him.
His eyes rested on the silent phone.
The speaker knew that Paul was awake, and also knew that someone at the stadium had called for help. How? He had warned Wishart to get out quickly, before the whole police force was mobilized, and Diehl’s security men with them. Why?
There had been other phone calls warning him of threats to the Movement, mostly from the investigations of Diehl’s men. Without those warnings, Diehl might have infiltrated his forces to a much greater extent, and might be ready to close him down by now. Instead...it seemed that his mysterious ally might take a hand in the chaos that was sure to follow the news of Paul’s awakening.
Wishart turned off the lamp again, and made his way out into the corridor. He didn’t need the light in the stairwell to guide him as he moved quickly through the darkness down three flights of stairs to the basement. He used the service stairs to get out of the building at the rear, emerging among the big plastic drums where the refuse was stored. He paused there for a few seconds to allow his eyes to readjust to the light.
There was no street-lamp in the alley but there was a reddish glow in the sky where airborne dust and water vapor reflected the lights of the city. The stars were hidden behind the colored haze. The coldness of the night air seeped through his coat and into his flesh, and he tensed himself to prevent shivering. Eventually, he moved out into the shadows, feeling his way and making hardly any sound. There was a rustling among the garbage that was piled up in a culvert, waiting to be lifted into one of the drums, but it was only a rat. It was not unduly worried by his proximity.
He threaded his way through a network of back streets, staying clear of the lighted roads. He listened for the sound of a car, but there was nothing nearby.
The thought that it might be a hoax niggled away at the back of his mind, but it was not a doubt that worried him unduly. His informant had been reliable in the past, and there could be no motive for the lie. Paul’s return was due, and perhaps overdue: the cult had been anticipating the imminent return of its prophet for nearly forty years, always convinced that the corrupt world could hardly endure through one more generation, and always certain that Paul, in some way no one could imagine, held the key to its rebirth. There were a great many people expecting the impossible from Paul, and they were the ones upon whom Wishart had to rely if he was going to save his protégé from Diehl and Lindenbaum. It wasn’t going to be easy.
The excitement was already growing inside him—the excitement of having something to sell again, a chance to manipulate the public, to control their ideas and their hopes, to milk them of their support. This time, he knew, there was more than a fortune at stake. This time, a whole nation was up for grabs. Maybe a whole world.
A hundred and twenty-seven years had added very considerably to Paul Heisenberg’s stock as a prophet and potential savior. Handled right—handled by Adam Wishart—he could inherit the world.
CHAPTER SIX
Paul felt himself thrust into the back seat of a small car. The cold seemed to reach into his very bones, and every touch sensation was fierce. He was wrapped in a blanket, but the blanket seemed to contain no warmth of its own, and there was little enough of his own as yet to be contained.
The engine spluttered into life, starting first time, and there was a judder as the gears engaged. The car lurched forward, turned sharply, and then accelerated rapidly.
“They didn’t see us,” said an even, mellow voice, “but they’ll have heard us. They won’t try to chase us. They’ll seal off the whole area north of the river and saturate it with policemen and security men. I can’t get you out in the car.”
Paul, in the grip of a fit of shivering, could not make any reply. He had not yet managed to assume command over his limbs; he had been carried out of the stadium in the blanket.
“There are clothes on the seat,” the voice went on. Paul could not tell from its tone whether it was male or female, but only a man—a very strong man—could have carried him at such speed through the derelict corridors of the stadium.
“Try to put them on,” the voice continued. “I’m going to have to drop you off somewhere nearby, where you can be hidden and someone can take care of you. We were lucky that they only sent one car; because the cage alarm didn’t go off, they assumed that it was sabotage or vandalism, but there’ll be a full-scale emergency now. I can only try to mislead them, and then try to reach you again in the morning, or tomorrow night.”
Paul could feel the clothing that lay beneath him on the seat, but he could not find the strength to do as the other asked. He tried to burrow into the angle of the seat, drawing the blanket around him more tightly, trying to cocoon himself in its folds.
A current of warm air was beginning to flow from a vent under the front seat, and gradually grew in force. He tried to catch it in the flap of the blanket and draw it in toward his body. His teeth chattered briefly and he had to clamp his jaw to hold them still.
The car cornered twice, sending him lurching first one way and then the other. The back wheels skidded, but the driver turned into the skid and kept control. The glare of street-lights cast sporadic haloes of light on the window, and the stroboscopic frequency suggested to Paul that they were moving very rapidly. The windows were already steaming up with condensation.
“Do you know your name?” asked the voice, trying to provoke some response.
“Paul,” he replied, very weakly.
“Good. You’ll feel sick for some time, and it might be difficult to remember, but it will all come back eventually. The cold doesn’t help. You timed your return rather badly.”
The words echoed in Paul’s head. He had no difficulty in understanding the immediate meaning, but the implications were quite unfathomable. He had no idea what had happened to him. His mind seemed to be seized up—frozen. He could not thaw it and force his thoughts to flow. He felt lonely, and very frightened, unable to remember how he came to be where he was—if, indeed, there was any memory that could tell him. He knew his name, but he could only wonder, for the moment, whether he knew anything else.
The steady current of warm air eddying over the contours of the blanket fought the cold, and began to expel the icy sensation from his flesh, except for the three stripes of pain across his back where he had collapsed against the bars of his cage. He found the power of movement, and was able to stretch his arms and test the muscles of his feet.
Above the ridge of the front seat he could see the silhouette of the driver’s head. It was rounded, and seemed quite featureless. The head half-turned to glance down at him, and by the light of a glaring street-lamp he saw that it was masked, partly by a balaclava helmet and partly by a plastic face-mask, molded to the contours of a human face. The only holes in the mask were the eye-holes, and the eyes were hidden in pits of shadow.
“Put the clothes on,” said the smooth, sexless voice. “Please. There isn’t much time.”
Paul tried to sit up, and as he did so he was struck by dizziness and the sudden sense that the perceived world was dissolving into another, sharper image of reality. He was aware of....
jagged rocks....
caustic sand blown by a terrible wind....
the pain of lacerated fingers....
the sensation of something slithering against his skin....
a current dragging at his sense of time, his sense of self....
He gasped. Then, as suddenly as it had been born within him, it died, and was gone.
He raised his hand to catch the dim light. It was whole and unscarred. He flexed the fingers to reassure himself. The dream was quite gone, washed away like footprints in sand erased by the returning tide.
He plucked at the clothing, trying to bring it out from beneath the blanket, where it was trapped by the weight of his body. Slowly, he began to dress himself, almost amazed by the fact that he could remember how. There was a thick shirt and a woolen pullover, underpants and denim