THE GAUDY SHADOWS

by John Brunner

  “I like driving at night!” Courcy exclaimed.

  “Right, we’ll keep you in reserve. But next time we have to pull in for gas I’ll let Dagmar spell me. There’s about a quarter of a tank to go.”

  The signs said N10 Poitiers, and the sun was going down.

  At a gas-station where they took the chance to use the toilets, he swapped places with Dagmar. Seeming nervous, she edged into the traffic and accelerated south at fifty-five.

  “You’ll have to do better than that!” Courcy said.

  “Shut up and let her get the feel of it,” Laird ordered. “This is more car than I’ve handled before, I tell you straight.”

  Courcy subsided. She said after a pause, “You know, Sammy wouldn’t let me drive this thing. Said you had to be old and wise to handle it.”

  Laird remembered that Pentecost had said it wasn’t for someone who let a girl drive him in a Bentley. But all of a sudden he was weary. He slumped back in the rear seat. Giving a glance at Polly, he said, “And how do you like ‘abroad’?”

  With an access of pawky Scots humour, she said, “It’s all right so far.”

  The signs had begun to name Bordeaux. Laird closed his eyes. It made sense to rest his vision for a while… It was dark. Astonished, he moved to stretch cramped limbs and found a tousled head leaning on his shoulder: Polly, friendly in sleep. Up front, silhouetted by the lights of oncoming cars, two fair heads the wrong way round: Dagmar on the left, Courcy at the wheel. The wipers were going slap-slap.

  Laird said, “Where are we? What’s the time?”

  “You finally woke up, hm?” Courcy said. “You’ve been out for nearly four hours.” She swerved the car around a slow-moving truck. “I swapped with Dagmar when it got dark. We’re nearly at Bordeaux, but I’m having to take it easy—the road’s wet.”

  By the light of yet another oncoming vehicle, Laird checked his watch. Bordeaux, and not yet ten o’clock—hmm! He ran a quick mental calculation.

  “I guess we should take a bite to eat and maybe wash up,” he said. “Tileman only has one driver—we’re almost bound to get ahead of him during the night. We can spare half an hour for a meal.”

  “I’ll look out for the next Routiers sign,” Courcy said.

  The signs still said N10, but now some of them were indicating Espagne.

  To the dismay of an affable hostess proud of both her cuisine and the local Bordeaux wines, they hastened through a meal at the first Routiers restaurant they came across. Thirty-five minutes saw Laird back at the wheel and once more sliding the Jensen into the southbound lanes. N10 was less busy than N6 or N7, but nonetheless at this season it carried a huge volume of traffic. Patient, letting himself ease back towards the sense of union with the car which he had achieved earlier, Laird threaded his way through using every ounce of power the engine granted him, then the fierce grab of the disc brakes to slot back into gaps he half-expected to find too short.

  Beside him, bright-eyed, Courcy chuckled and gestured at the rear-view mirror. “Golly! Did you ever see such a pair as those two?”

  Laird saw from the corner of his eye what she meant: Dagmar and Polly with their heads together, nodding to sleep.

  “Must be the wine,” he grunted. “Polly’s supposed to be a teetotaller, but she had three glasses with her dinner. Besides not sleeping too well last night.”

  “Know something?” Courcy said after a pause. “Polly isn’t in the least what I expected Sammy’s sister to be like. I mean, she’s so much more like Sammy than I’d imagined from what little he told me! I really admire the way she decided to cut loose from everything and join in with us.”

  “Don’t be patronising,” Laird said.

  “I’m not! I mean it! I think it’s wonderful to be able to sort of throw yourself into something you’ve never done before.” She giggled. “Like last night. I’ve never done that before.”

  “Then you carried it off very well,” Laird said, pulling out past a line of slower cars. “Anyone would have thought it was your regular weekend hobby.”

  “More likely yours… But I’d heard about it and I thought it might be fun. And it was, wasn’t it?”

  Laird nearly laughed at the faint shadow of doubt that coloured her voice. He said, “Sure it was! I guess maybe it explained to me for the first time why some men get a harem complex.”

  “And girls get the short end of the stick,” Courcy countered tartly. “You know, I used to poke fun at Sammy about the endless string of girls he worked his way through. Maybe that’s what put such a crazy idea into my head. But I like Dagmar anyway. Of course she is terribly shy, although I suppose you can’t wonder after what she must have been through. But she’s awfully attractive, isn’t she?”

  “Sure she is,” Laird said. “And so are you.”

  “Thanks.” Courcy tried to stifle a yawn, and failed. “Goodness, I’m sorry!”

  “Doze off if you want to,” Laird invited.

  “Are you all right? Won’t you need to be navigated?”

  “Put the map where I can see it and I’ll be fine. Yes, there’s another signpost saying Spain. I’m still fresh from my nap, and it should be easy going for a while yet.”

  “If you’re sure…” Courcy said, twisting around more comfortably in her seat.

  The car leapt on down the wet-gleaming ribbon of road towards the Spanish frontier.

  THIRTY-SIX

  After a while the cover of the night closed in his thinking, shrank the world to that swathe of brightness which the headlamps cut into the rushing air. The land began to arch its back preparatory to forming the slopes of the Pyrenees, and the road doubled on itself as it curved among the hills. The rain must have diverged from the route they were following; shortly the road was dry again.

  Warily, but confident that he was attuned to the car so that he was thinking at the same pace he could make it respond, Laird allowed his mind to drift over the fantastic situation in which he had become involved. The girls were quiet and still, but inside his skull he spoke to the fourth passenger.

  Hi, Sammy. This is a hell of a machine you picked!

  A remembered chuckle, as clear as though it were inside the car.

  Above, stars; ahead, mountains. Close at hand the thrumming power of the car with oil-pressure and engine temperature steady, the revolutions ranging over the zone of maximum torque as he used the manual shift to slam through hairpin bend after hairpin bend, the whole process feeling as natural as ordering one’s feet to run. A setting on the edge of naked reality, where absolute words like “life” and “death” came to possess meaning instead of being mere sounds in the ear.

  Far below in the starlight, a brawling river over a bed of rocks.

  I could lose a tyre on this bend, and…

  But he didn’t.

  I’m glad, Sammy. I want to see Tileman’s face when he gets where he’s going and finds this car of yours has got there first!

  Skating about on the road ahead, the lights of a baby SEAT, the Fiat made under licence in Spain. He shot past it as though it were standing still.

  I wonder what you were like when you came out of your Scottish scrapyard, Sammy! Did you already have whatever it is that’s brought us here—a friend, a mistress, a sister and someone who only met you once?

  Probably not. That guy couldn’t have married Medea. He’d have seen straight through to her marble heart.

  Maybe you owed her that much, baby. Maybe it was Medea who taught you not to judge by appearances!

  Was she somewhere on this road? Were they going to catch up with the Bentley she was driving? It didn’t matter. Sooner or later things were going to pan out. Laird felt that with calm certitude. The constellation of events was right, as though Sammy could still cast his shadow in the world.

  Ahead, across a narrow river-gorge nearly dry after the long summer, the twin rearlights of another car gleamed like the eyes of a devil.

  I wish they hadn’t cheapened the word, Sammy!

  A
ll of a sudden his mind was full of black regret.

  Because usually now “I love you” means “I want to get you in the sack!” Think Courcy wants to crawl in your coffin with you, man? Dagmar? Polly? Me, for chrissake? Baby, you know that’s not my scene! But what else can you say to account for our being here? It has to be because, each of us in our own way, we found we loved Sammy Logan—

  He exclaimed so loudly he startled the others in the car awake, and at the same time braked, cancelling his intention to overtake the car ahead.

  “What’s wrong?” Dagmar said muzzily from the rear seat.

  “Look!” Laird commanded, and pointed at the registration number revealed in the sharp cut-off of his headlights, which he had reflexively dipped as he pulled in behind the other car.

  “Du lieber Gott, it’s Tileman’s,” Dagmar said. “You found them, Laird. What are you going to do now?”

  For a long while Laird withheld his answer, slowing to the pace set by the Bentley, watching for the tell-tale signs of fatigue which its driver—presumably Medea—must be showing. Just as he was about to speak, Courcy said, “But you don’t have to do anything.”

  “What?” He wound the car around the latest of uncountable sharp turns.

  “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to sit on their tail. It’s what the police do in England—I read about it. They don’t have guns or anything, so when they’re chasing a stolen car they just follow behind, until the thief makes a mistake and runs out of road.”

  “They don’t seem to have recognised us,” Laird said. “I guess these headlights could belong to any car.”

  “There’s bound to be a lighted patch between here and the frontier,” Courcy said. “Even if it’s only a filling station. And there can’t be many silver-plated Jensens.”

  “Right, we’ll try it your way,” Laird said, and eased the car forward until it was almost nosing up the Bentley’s exhausts.

  For a while there was nothing in the world except the hypnotic glow of the tail-lights in front, while he matched the Bentley’s speed and line through every bend. Then it swung too wide on a curve and its rear wheels splattered gravel on the Jensen’s radiator.

  Courcy bounced up and down with excitement. “Laird, you’re a marvellous driver!” she exclaimed.

  Delicately skirting the edge of a drop, a hundred feet or more to the same rocky end-of-summer river, he said, “Thanks. But this is touch-and-go—best not to talk!”

  Courcy shrugged, and glanced behind her. “Polly, you all right?” she inquired.

  “I… I’m a bit scared,” Polly admitted.

  “Think how Medea must be feeling, then! Look, there’s a garage ahead, with lots of lights on!”

  Like a huge solitary fruit on a concrete tree with only one branch, the yellow gleam of a Shell sign loomed out of darkness. Laird eased his foot off the accelerator.

  “I think,” he murmured, “they’re pulling in for gas. Now isn’t that fortunate?”

  Twenty miles an hour—fifteen… the Bentley swung to the off-side of the road just as the glow of the filling-station’s lamps began to light the silver shape of the pursuing car. Laird blinked his lights, and that was when Medea realised not only that she was being followed, but who was doing the following.

  In her alarm, she must have twisted the wheel, for the Bentley jerked and almost ran into the line of pumps. Lounging in his all-night office with a newspaper, the attendant raised his head just in time to see the two cars, one trailing the other as though they were chained together, swerve past him and back on the road.

  “They certainly changed their minds about filling up!” Courcy exclaimed.

  “Probably didn’t need to. Probably wanted to get rid of the car behind which wouldn’t overtake—meaning us.” Laird juggled the wheel through a bend that was sharper than he’d expected. “Why don’t you shut up and let me drive?”

  “They know who’s following them now, don’t they?” Dagmar asked.

  “If not, they’re driving with their eyes shut. Now be quiet!”

  The climax came with dreadful suddenness. There were only a few miles to go before the frontier when the road took yet another of its violent twists, among steep crags that loured down mean-faced in the night. Laird had been deliberately crowding the Bentley, using all the force of the brakes when he risked ramming into it, so that the passengers were only saved by their belts from sliding off the seats. Then the curve, and joining it a sideroad with the name of a lonely village on a post at the junction.

  The Bentley raced into the bend too fast. For a second he expected it to skid off the road; then Medea managed to master the wheel and sent it down the sideroad unscathed. Laird was already poised to follow the main road. Instead he made the Jensen’s tyres scream and set off in renewed pursuit.

  And, at another bend less than half a mile beyond, when the main road was screened by rocks and trees, there was an overhanging wall of rock.

  It was like watching an image in a dream as he braked, pulled his own wheel over, meticulously judged the surviving distance and slid through with inches to spare on either side, seeing the Bentley broadside across the road and catching one glimpse of Tileman’s terrified face as the Jensen’s lights sprayed the windows.

  With the colossal inertia due to having come down the road at over seventy, the two tons plus of the Bentley rammed the rock wall. A scream of shearing metal rent the air above the roar of engines, and the entire tail-end of the convertible crumpled. Laird could see the steel folding like a cardboard box being crushed between a strong man’s hands. He streaked by and used the next short straight piece of road to kill his speed. He was almost at a halt when a glow leapt up in his rear mirror, trapped and reflected by the roadside rocks.

  “They’re on fire!” Polly shouted, twisting to stare through the back window.

  Laird slammed the Jensen into reverse, swung hard over, found the encircling rocks jeering at the nose of the car. Forward—back—forward—back again, while the flames from the Bentley glinted on the windows like a warning of hell.

  I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, to be burned alive. Not even Tileman, the bastard.

  The front bumper just touched the rock wall as he made the last stage of the turn; he heard it grate. Then they were headed the way they had come, and he could see he had been right about the Bentley’s need for gas. The flames were spearing out of the tank with a noise like a blow-torch, lighting the hillside, the trees, the roadway. He slammed on the brakes and flung open his door.

  Pray it doesn’t explode!

  He shielded his face with his arm, for the heat was fearful, and stumbled forward, half-tripping on lumps of rock that the collision had shattered clear of the overhang. It was like going into a cavern with a furnace at the far end, for the cloud of smoke above the flames was blacker than the night, roiling like foul stagnant water.

  Sweat sprang out all over his skin, but not quickly enough. The fury of the fire scorched his cheeks and made the backs of his hands tingle, and his eyes watered from the fumes. The impact had turned the Bentley end for end so that it faced the direction from which it had come, but the front fender on this side was bent in against the wheel and the tyre had burst. Even without the fire the car could not have gone back on the road.

  He groped towards the nearest door-handle—the passenger’s, he thought foggily, until he recollected that this was an English car with the driver on the right. He clawed the handle down and reached in, blinking away the tears that blurred his vision and imagining that they turned to steam as they ran down his face. Crumpled over the wheel, held in by her safety-belt and apparently stunned by the collision: Medea.

  Behind him someone said, “She’s not dead, is she?”

  His hands—independent of decision—found the half-slick half-rough surface of the nylon belt around Medea, located the buckle, opened it, hauled out the unbelievable weight of this one slim woman. His throat rasped with the foulness of the smoke.

 
“Here!”

  He turned, his burden making his movements terrifyingly slow, and thrust her towards whoever had spoken the word: Courcy, he saw between his stinging lids.

  “Drag her out of the way,” he croaked. “Quick! If that gas tank explodes—!”

  Vaguely, two other figures in the background, Polly and Dagmar covering their faces from the raging heat. He almost fell across the front seat of the Bentley, fumbling at the gross inert bulk of Tileman tipped forward so that his head rested against the dash, cursing the impossible angle at which he had to try and force the man’s weight back in order to free the belt-buckle.

  At Laird’s touch Tileman uttered a groan and blinked his eyes, but he was still too dazed to do more. He allowed himself to be shoved roughly into a sitting position while Laird found his belt-buckle and opened it, then tried to drag him by the arm or leg or coat-tail free of the blazing car. The touch of his coat was like contact with the skin of a toad: chill, warty. On Tileman’s lap, revealed in shadow and indistinct, something square that was getting in the way but which he clung to frantically, a case of some kind, one corner crushed. Laird seized it and thrust it behind him, merely to get it out of the way, and it was taken from him and Dagmar’s voice said, “But this is—”

  And Polly’s voice: “Let me help you.”

  And Laird elbowed her angrily away as she tried to reach past him and somehow he got a purchase on Tileman and his hands reported that he was going to lose his grip because what he had hold of was slimy and slippery and…

  He staggered back as the gross weight of Tileman fell to the ground on the driver’s side of the car and he pawed the roadway and began to haul himself to his feet. Against the hell-red glow of the blaze the outline of the dark ponderous figure loomed like a shadow-puppet. The stench, the heat, the deformed shapes moving on the rock walls that shut in the road, the doors of hell opened and there were devils rattling their chains.

  Bewildered, Laird turned half around and saw that Medea was struggling loose from Courcy’s grip panicking, arms flailing, dress tearing almost to the waist. Pale skin showed above her black narrow bra. Ripped fabric answered her movements like lax wings. Nearer, clutching something, another figure (Polly?) letting go what she had held and screaming, fists raised and clenched against cheeks turned to the infernal glow of a furnace door. A voice that could not possibly be his said with his mouth and tongue, “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” three times on a single flat breath. The rock wall lurid gaped a brazen gate and the beasts came out, vast, clawed, hoofed, their bat-wings rattling with the voice of wind-moved leaves, oozing the stench of brimstone. A silent hand closed on Laird’s soul, drawing it from his body and exhibiting it naked before the throne of judgment: worm, this is death—thing less than nothing, this is eternity.