The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

She leaned forward and looked over my shoulder, shading her eyes. "There's somebody on the detour," she said after a second. "I think I know who it is."

  "I don't see anybody—"

  "Look hard."

  I looked. Eventually I made out a dot, far ahead, moving slowly away from us. After a moment I realized it was a man on a push bike, looking from side to side as he pedaled. "Who is it?" I asked.

  "It's Bill, one of my tribesmen. He's looking for us."

  "Is he an Avenger?" I asked.

  "Hunh-unh."

  I squinted. The man on the bike seemed unarmed, and for a moment I considered overtaking him, menacing him, and leaving him tied up beside the road. But it would take time, I might be interrupted, and I really didn't have anything suitable to tie him with.

  "Let's go to Boonville," Franny said, as if she read my mind. "Bill's a good sort, relatively. You don't want trouble with him."

  She was probably right. "OK," I said rather ungraciously. "Boonville it is."

  The road was hilly and winding, and in only fair repair, though a small truck could have got through. I couldn't help thinking, as we slid along, that while Francesca might be the ally Pomo Joe had foreseen for me, having her sitting behind me on the motorbike had complicated my life considerably. I liked her, and found her attractive. But I wished I could leave her in some safe place and get back on the coastal highway.

  We had been riding for about half an hour when Franny said in my ear, "Some people are coming. We'd better hide."

  "Coming where?" I asked. "Up ahead?"

  "No, behind us. We've got to hide."

  I turned around, but I couldn't see anything. She was so positive, though, that she compelled credence. We were going down into one of the tortuous dips, among tall evergreens, that we had already gone through so many of. I turned the bike off to one side, helped Franny dismount, and hid the bike under a drift of brownish needles and branches. Fran had gone on down into the hollow, and was lying stretched out behind a fallen rough-barked pine. I joined her. The good smell of pine and spruce was in my nose, but I wasn't enjoying it. I hoped no glint of metal from the bike would be visible from the road.

  We waited. In about five minutes there was a faint rushing noise from the road's upper slope. I looked through a bushy tuft of needles. Four men, all on motorbikes, were riding by. They all had bows slung over their shoulders; and they turned their stolid faces inquiringly from side to side as they slid along.

  "Who are they?" I said softly to Franny when they were well by.

  "Two of them are Avengers from my tribe. Mike is one of them. I don't know who the other ones are. I never saw them before."

  "Where'd they get all those motorbikes?"

  "I haven't any idea."

  We waited a little longer. Then I got our own bike out from under the pine needles. "Say, how'd you know somebody was coming?" I questioned as we were getting back on. "You couldn't possibly have heard them."

  "Unh-unh, I didn't hear them ... I don't know how I knew. I just did. My hunches are always good, Sam. But I don't always have them when it would be convenient or desirable. When the Mallo Pass Avengers tied me up, the first thing I knew about it was when one of them clapped his hand over my face."

  I felt better as we started up. It wasn't likely that the men on the bikes would turn back before they got to Ikiah, and they would probably go on to Santa Rosa. We were so far behind that I thought we were pretty safe, at least for a while.

  We got to Boonville about three in the afternoon, with still a little fuel left in the tank. Boonville is, of course, smaller than it was before the plagues, but Franny said there was a little store where we could probably buy fuel for the bike. We left it leaning up against the worn paint of the storefront, and went in.

  "Three liters of denatured alcohol," I said to the storekeeper. He was a small, sandy-haired man with an inquiring face.

  "Three liters of deenal?" he said. He handed me the jugs from under the counter. "That'll be forbes each."

  "Four bits," Franny translated. "People at Boonville have a special way of talking. It's called Boontling."

  I paid the man. "You folks fixing to pike over to Uke and down 101?" he asked, "If you are, you're dished. There's a roadblock ahead, with a lot of cocked darlies and high heelers holding it."

  I glanced at Fran. "Uke" was easy enough—Ukiah, where we were headed. And "pike" probably meant to travel. But I didn't understand the other words.

  She was looking upset. " 'High heelers' are cops, and 'cocked darlies' are men with guns," she said. And then, to the storekeeper, "What's the roadblock about? How long has it been there?"'

  "There's a smallpox epidemic in Uke," he said. "They won't let anybody through who hasn't got a vaccination certificate or a recent vaccination scar. The block's been there since yesterday."

  "Have you ever been vaccinated, Sam?" Francesca asked. "Because I haven't."

  "Me neither," I said.

  The storekeeper was listening sympathetically. 'It's a tuffer," he said. "You can't get onto 101 from Cloverdal, either. At least that's what I heard. I guess you two wanted to get down to Santa Fosa and then over to the Briny at Bodega. Quite a few bribers have been doing it these last few sunnies."

  I didn't pay much attention to this. I was thinking that Franny's expression of concern was well-warranted. If the four men on motorbikes hadn't been able to get through the roadblock, they were either still in town—they hadn't gone back over the Boonville road, or we'd have seen them—or they had gone off on one of the minor roads, which seemed unlikely. What were we to do? Simply turn around and head back for the coast? If they followed we were sure to be overtaken, since my bike would be carrying two.

  "You might try to get to Philo," said the storekeeper. "If you don't want to go back the same way, that is. And then back up 128 and over to the Briney Highway." I thought it was a rotten suggestion—it would put us back on Highway One a little below Albion, on ground I'd already covered and had no desire to cover again.

  "The road's poor," he went on, "but I wouldn't tell anybody which way you'd gone." He gave Franny and me a small smile.

  "Father lived at Philo," the girl said, "but I don't want to go there."

  I looked around the shelves of the little store for inspiration. Canned food, dried milk, a bolt or two of yard goods—nothing gave me any ideas. Perhaps it would be best to head for Philo; if we stayed in Boonville, we were pretty sure to be spotted by one of our four pursuers.

  I was just opening my mouth to say so when there came a shout from outside. "There's my bike! They must be inside!"

  "Where's the back way?" I asked the storekeeper.

  He pointed silently, his eyes big. Francesca and I dived through a door, past a storage area, and out into the sunshine. An instant later four men came pelting around the side of the store and were running after us.

  We ran. The sunshine was hot on my back. Franny kept bearing to the right. She ran up a grassy knoll, into a hollow and up the other side. Once she motioned to me to follow her.

  An arrow came whizzing past my ears. I wondered how it would feel to have it go thudding into my back between my shoulderblades. I wanted to tell Franny to keep more in the open, to try to get back on the street, where the Avengers might be relatively shy about shooting at us. I lacked the breath. We ran.

  Was Franny running into a cul de sac? Why? It looked as if she were heading deliberately for some particular spot. I didn't think she was the kind of girl to lose her head.

  Low hills began to close in on us. She was running slower now, stumbling a little. The Avengers had gained on us a few feet.

  We had got into a cleft with steep sides. Franny grabbed my hand—she was panting furiously—and made a complicated motion with the other hand. I seemed to hang suspended. Then there was a soft click! in my ears. To our pursuers, it must have seemed that we had vanished into thin air. Actually, we had dropped into the earth.

  We landed with a bump. The change from
the hot sunshine to cool darkness was startling. There was an odd smell that I later came to know was formaldehyde. I heard a glugging of pipes not far away.

  We were standing in a large, dim concrete-sided room, like an empty swimming pool. It was not utterly dark; mottled shadows moved on the floors and across the walls. From a corridor ahead there came a pale blue light.

  "Where are we?" I asked. "What happened?"

  "Shhhsh! We're in my father's laboratory. Don't talk so loud."

  "Your father's laboratory? I thought he lived at Philo."

  "He did. He moved the laboratory last year. It even got on his nerves finally. This is a nasty place.

  "Don't move. Don't touch anything. It's all right if we're careful. And we're safe from the Avengers, anyhow."

  I looked around me in silence. The glugging of pipes was accompanied by a distant dripping noise. Franny was probably right, and we were safe from the Avengers. But I wondered whether we hadn't, after all, exchanged the frying pan for the fire.

  -

  Chapter XIV

  The smell of formaldehyde was strong in my nose. As far as I know, I'd never smelled it before, but it brought the thought of the cadaver Alice, lying flaccid on her brightly lighted bed in the dissecting theater, into my mind. It was a smell that made one think of cadavers—the smell of a preservative, but an unwholesome one.

  I glanced at Franny. Now that my eyes had grown accustomed to the dim bluish light, I saw she was looking frightened. It was an expression she was to wear as long as we were in this part of her father's domain; and it made me realize how frightened of the Avengers she must have been to choose this dubious refuge as an alternative to falling into their hands. But then, I hadn't been chained to a rock by the Avengers and left to drown in the rising tide. She had good reason to be afraid.

  What would they have done if they'd caught us? They probably wouldn't have shot us so close to town, in the face—so to speak—of all Boonville. They'd probably have bound and gagged us, have told any curious onlookers that we were motorbike thieves who were being taken back to the coast for trial, and ridden away with us. I doubted that we'd ever have reached the coast. They'd have shot us under the trees on some dry hillside.

  I thought of Bill on his push bike, pedaling slowly along the detour, and cursed myself. Why hadn't I behaved more like a medicine man? I ought to have gone after him, forced him to swallow a suitable drug from my medicine bag, and then hypnotized him. It would have been simplicity itself to have given him a post-hypnotic command to forget that he'd ever seen Franny and me. Instead, to avoid "trouble" with an unarmed man on a push bike, who happened to be "not a bad sort," I'd let myself in for this uncomfortable place. It seemed to me that Franny had rather wanted to go to Boonville, and I wondered why.

  "Why do we have to be so careful?" I asked in a low voice.

  "Ssssh! Because ... father made this place to replicate the bad part of one of his drug experiences."

  "Why?" I asked. "Why would anybody want to do a thing like that? It doesn't seem reasonable."

  "No. I'm not sure why he did it, really. Maybe he wanted to make a place of refuge for himself where only he would dare to go. There are some nasty things here."

  "You said this was his laboratory. Is this where he grew the Dancers?"

  "No, that's in the other wing. Father was a kind of a genius, Sam. But he took a lot of drugs, and he was full of crazy streaks."

  I thought of O'Hare as I had seen him when I had been Bennet. He hadn't seemed particularly crazy then. But no doubt Francesca was right.

  I heard a soft lapping somewhere off to the right. Was it water? I didn't think so. And it seemed to be coming nearer.

  "What's making that noise?" I asked.

  "The lapping sound? It's a big slime mold."

  I felt a clinging, chilly dampness around my moccasins that seemed to be working its way up through the leather toward my knees. "What do we do?" I asked.

  "Nothing," Francesca answered, always in a whisper. "Just be patient. It won't go much higher, and it can't do any harm, really. In a while it'll go away."

  Her passivity and stoical acceptance of this miserable place were getting on my nerves. "What would happen if we just turned on the lights?" I asked in almost a normal voice. I suppose I was trying to belittle the uneasy feeling the slime mold inspired in me.

  "Ssssh! There aren't any lights."

  "... How do we get out of here? There must be some way out."

  "Yes, several. We can't go back the way we came—well, I guess we could, but it would be awfully difficult. We'll try to find a time when none of the Hunters are out, and get through to the other wing. It's odd there too, but not nearly so bad as this. Can you sing?"

  "Hunh?"

  "Don't make so much noise! I mean, do you know any chants, tribal music, things like that? Indian-style singing? Being a medicine man, I'd think you would."

  "I know some chants, yes," I said.

  "That keeps them off," she said as if satisfied. "But of course there are other things here that aren't discouraged by singing."

  The slime mold seemed to have withdrawn. Either that or I had grown accustomed to its chilly grasp. Francesca took my hand and we began to move forward slowly. She kept stopping and listening. She told me afterward that while the things O'Hare had set to roam the corridors of this miserable place were, in general, too stupid to be acutely dangerous if one knew their habits, they were all malevolent and capable of being blindly murderous. On top of that, O'Hare had set a number of booby traps, and she wasn't sure what or where all of them were. So our progress was slow.

  We got through the big concrete-walled room without further incident, but as we moved into a short corridor I realized there was a soft "pad-pad" from behind us. It seemed to be keeping pace with our tentative footsteps and echoing them.

  "What's that?" I said into Franny's ear. Being followed by a soft pad-pad was more of the corny gothic-horror atmosphere O'Hare had built for himself. I resented it; and I more than resented my being affected by it. I could, of course, have ignored any amount of gothic horror if I'd been convinced of its essential harmlessness. But I wasn't. Franny's anxiety, plus my own experience, as Bennet, of O'Hare's ruthlessness, assured me that the danger here was uncomfortably real.

  "A Hunter," she breathed. "Don't move. Don't make a sound. It may go away."

  It didn't. The padding came nearer. Poor as the light was, I got a look at the creature that was causing it.

  It was a tall, skinny thing, human-shaped—Franny said that her father had made the Hunters as a preliminary study for his masterpiece, the Dancers—and it moved in a way that reminded me of an inchworm. It bent over, felt around on the floor in front of it with its arms, straightened up, moved on a couple of pads, and repeated the process. It didn't seem to have any face.

  "Get ready to sing," Franny said into my ear.

  I fumbled over my repertory of Indian-style chants. Most of them seemed to have deserted me. The best I could call to mind was a silly little chant, rather like what Al Riggs had heard when he had joined the dancers in their commune. Pomo Joe had taught it to me, translating it roughly into English. "Bring us back our arrows! Bring us back our arrows! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu!" it ran. "Give us the scalp to dance over! Give us the scalp to dance over! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu!" The four lines were repeated indefinitely.

  Pomo Joe had seemed to think a lot of it, but I didn't much care for it. I wished I could have thought of something else. The reference to "scalp" bothered me, since a couple of pad-pads more would bring the Hunter feeling around on the top of Franny's and my head.

  "Sing!" she whispered. "Loud!"

  I began the chant. My voice was thin and rusty, and the first effect was to bring the Hunter moving more quickly and surely toward us.

  "Louder!" Franny said. I tried to oblige, and as soon as Franny got the hang of the song she joined her voice to mine. The walls of the corridor began to echo to our "Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu!"

  The
thing withdrew slightly. We increased our volume and—reluctantly, it seemed—the Hunter bent over in the other direction and moved away from us on its blob-by feet.

  Franny was panting. "There're a lot of them," she said, "but we scared that one away."

  "What would it have done if it had caught us?"

  "Crushed us to death."

  No wonder, I thought, Franny's hand felt cold in mine.

  From the corridor we moved into another big room, as big as a concert hall or a skating rink. Its acoustics were oddly muted and echoless.

  It was filled with things that looked like eroded or bulbous versions of more normal laboratory equipment—cabinets filed to thin edges, or plump and bulging with what seemed like soft decay, lab benches slumping softly to the floor, a sharp-edged sink filled with lusterless liquid, a refrigerator bulging below the middle with some strange edema, office chairs with arms five feet wide, a stool whose seat was far above my head. It was like walking through a forest where the trees bulged with fungal rot, or had been worn gaunt by a constant sand-laden wind.