Excalibur And The Atom Part 7

"You idiot, you fool you," she crooned. "Darling, sit down. You must be tired. I thought you'd be in the hospital for another week. I've missed you so! You don't know, you just-oh, Garry, am I making a fool of myself? Am I?"

"Gosh," he said. "I don't think so." He put his hands awkwardly on her shoulders. "I think this is all right."

She spun in close to him, put her cheek on his chest. His heart was going like a riveting gun. They sat on the davenport and at last he kissed her.

At length he came up for air. "Ain't felt like this since I won the sack race at the county fair," he said. "Where's Had?"

"I don't know," she said.

"You working here now?"

She nodded. "He wanted me to, since that day. You know. He told me to call him and I did and he wasn't there. I felt real bad. And about ten in the morning old Sam came around. He brought me a note from Mr. Guinn and the keys. He said Mr. Guinn had sent him up to take care of Percival's goats-"

"He would," said Garry.

"Yes, and Mr. Guinn had come up early in the morning and told him to go."

"What did the note say?"

"I'll show you." She skipped into the office, opened a file drawer and came out with a rumpled piece of paper. "I'll read it."

" 'I've got some thinking to do. I'll be back shortly after I arrive. Don't look for me. Here are the keys. Straighten up the place for me. You'll find money in the top drawer of the desk. If you find any bills, pay them. If you get any calls, stall them. Take fifty a week for yourself and give Garry anything he needs.' Garry, I'm to give you anything you need."

"Haw!" grinned Garry. "He thinks of everything. That all?"

"No. 'If you see that Morgan girl, tell her I still don't believe her, but...' Here the writing gets all squiggly. '...but I'll keep looking until I find what she's after. And I almost think I might.' That's all."

"Have you seen the girl?"

"No. She hasn't so much as called. Who is she?"

"The most..." He flushed. "I like you better," he said lamely.

"You just better!"

"I bet I know where he is," said Garry. "Though maybe he wouldn't want to hang around there now. Still..."

"Where?"

"Still up there with the goats. He used to say that if ever he got mixed up in too much detail, that was the place to go. Said n.o.body could think little things up there."

"That's where we'll start looking," said a voice, and it laughed.

Garry and Lynn sprang apart, and then Lynn cowered up close against Garry.

Standing in the doorway was a dark, spare man with cold black eyes. His left arm was in a splint, though not in a sling. His jacket was draped over his left shoulder, and its drape gave him a chilling, vampire look. In his right hand was a heavy automatic.

"Mordi!"

"The whole thing suits me fine," said Mordi. "Nothing's going sour this time, buster. I want to be the first to congratulate you. You got a chick that will look at you, and I got a gun that will look at the chick. There's nothing you can do so fast that I can't-" He described the process of shooting Lynn in terms that made Garry's lips go white.

"What do you want?"

"Same thing your boss wants. Either I get it first or he does. If he does, I get it right afterward. Come on, lovebirds. We're taking a trip." His black eyes slitted. "And look, little smarty, you better just follow my instructions and not pull another fast one, because I'm not holding this gun for fun."

Garry took a step toward him and Lynn flung her arms around him. "Garry, don't, don't..."

Guinn threw the old book aside and stretched. "Morning, Matty," he smiled.

The nanny stretched her long neck further inside the cave. "Eh-eh-eh!" "Eh-eh-eh!" she answered. she answered.

"Okay, okay."

He rolled off the goat-hair mattress and stooped to go through the entrance. The nanny skipped away from him and stopped again a few feet out in the clearing. "Eh-eh." "Eh-eh."

"I'm coming, honey."

He followed the goat through the neck of woods to the meadow. "Oh, for Pete's sake! Can't you stay out of trouble? You want to grow up to be a detective?" He strode over to the ruins of an ancient fieldstone wall. Tangled in a whip-vine was a week-old kid. Its clumsy thrashings had brought it under a flat stone which had fallen across a rock and a stump in such a way that the little animal was caught, painlessly, but effectively, under the stone with its legs spraddled out and its silly head springing up out of the shrubbery like a barrage balloon. "Up you come," said Guinn, heaving the rock away. He picked up the kid and freed its legs from the vine. It bawled shrilly, and the nanny fretted impatiently beside him. He set the kid down and it staggered to the nanny and hooked on to a teat with exaggerated smackings and droolings and a series of frantic, contented little grunts. Guinn chuckled and walked away.

The mist was a sea which had turned the hills into a wind-borne archipelago. There had been sun up here for two hours, but the valleys were still submerged, asleep. Guinn breathed the good air and let his gaze reach and reach into the indeterminate area where mist and sky met. Eight days of this had brought a great peace and purpose to him, and for forty-eight hours now he had even forgotten that he was out of cigarettes.

The goats were company and a modic.u.m of trouble, anchoring him to a duty. The sky and the stars and the sun and rain were things he could drift in, but the goats never let him lose himself. It was a good place to be, a good way to be.

And the books...

"...There was a man sp.a.w.ned by the powers of darkness, born of a virgin, destined to be the antichrist. And the virgin Blaise told her confessor, who believed when others would not, and baptized the child, taking him from the control of his dark father..."

"...asleep under a rock in Barenton in Brittany amongst the hawthornes. And when the rain fails them, then do the peasants call to him, and strike the rock, and he calls down succor for the thirsty land."

(What was it he had heard about Barenton? Oh yes; when that Morgan girl had first come in: "Reckon it'll rain tomorrow?" and she had said, not in Barenton." And he had asked, "Where's Barenton?" and she had said "Sorry. Cla.s.sical reference. There's a hawthorne hush there.") "...a precious stone is brought to earth by angels, and committed to the guardianship of a line of kings. It is self-acting and food-providing, and the light issuing from it extinguishes the light of candles. No man may die within eight days of beholding it, and the weeping maiden who bears it retains perennial youth..."

(So if there's a drought at Barenton, he's no longer under the stone...) He went back into the cave to read some more. Lovely, lovely stuff, those legends. What had turned him from them?

(The echoes in his mind, the jeering kids at school. The smug young subst.i.tute teacher who had labeled his desk after an absence "The Siege Perilous"-the old name given the empty place at a great table when a knight was out searching for the...for the...) *******

Before noon he heard the scuttle of hooves and the sharp snort of the big billy called Bucko.

He ran outside. Bucko was on the high bluff behind the cave. Guinn scrambled up the rocks. "Easy, Bucko," he said. Bucko turned to him and back toward the forest, his great head high, his heavy horns curving down and back so that the tips all but touched his ma.s.sive shoulders.

Guinn stood up and peered. He could see nothing, hear nothing-wait; there was a sound. A distant groan, a complex sound.

It was the whining of a car in low gear, traveling rough ground so that the driver's foot bounced on the accelerator.

The sound came closer. Guinn automatically reached for his armpit and cursed. His gun was in the cave with his clothes. He hadn't had them on in four days; why bother? The goats didn't mind...

He turned to go down when a brilliant flash caught his eye-the sun on chrome. Then he knew that by the time he gained the cave again the car would be in the clearing. Strangers or friends-fine. He could put something on and come out to greet them. But if this visitor were no stranger, and no friend...

He'd take his chances out here in the open.

The car pulled into the clearing. Guinn knelt behind the gray peak of rock that jutted up like a chimney, and froze. From the ground he would look like another conformation of the rocks silhouetted against the bright sky.

The car door opened. It was a Nash sedan. Garry was driving. He got out and walked straight away from the car for perhaps ten feet when, at a low growl from the car, he stopped. He stood still, trembling. Even from that distance Guinn could see the sweat standing out on his forehead.

The rear door opened. Lynn got out. Her face was chalky, and her red-gold hair was vivid against it. She was staring straight ahead, and her eyes were as round as an auger-hole.

Behind her came Mordi, crouching, watchful. He kept an automatic steadily on the girl. Guinn could hear his voice clearly as it grated, echoed among the rocks.

"All right, cottonhead. Peek inside. If he's there, call him out."

Garry stood still, and the torment on his face was indescribable.

The automatic barked, and a slug whined twice in a crazy double ricochet. Garry whirled. Lynn s.n.a.t.c.hed at her skirt, whimpering. She fingered a bullet hole in her skirt, low on her hip. "No!" she cried to Garry. "It didn't touch me!"

"The next one will," promised Mordi faithfully. "Go on, cottonhead."

Garry stalked forward like a zombie. Mordi closed with Lynn, putting the muzzle of his gun against her back. They followed.

Garry stooped and disappeared in the cave. He was out in a moment. "He isn't there."

"He's been there," said Mordi.

"No."

"You're a liar." He shoved Lynn so hard with the gun that she stumbled. Mordi stood back until she was on her feet again. Then he snapped, "Inside, Sister!" He pushed her roughly into the opening. "You," he said to Garry, "stand right where you are, where I can see you. One step any way, and I start shooting." He ducked into the cave.

Guinn was suddenly conscious of pain in his hands, and he took them off the rock. One fingernail was broken and bleeding. He looked down. Garry was standing stiff and trembling in the clearing in front of the cave-mouth. Guinn thought of leaping down from the rock, landing on Garry, bearing him away from the cave-mouth, and then realized that it wasn't Garry that Mordi would start shooting at.

He looked around frantically.

There was a movement in the wood.

Someone, palefaced, slender, stood in the shadows. Clad in a mottled green cloak, she was all but invisible. When his eyes rested on her face, it relaxed visibly, as if she had been standing in an agony of tension, waiting for him to see her.

"Morgan!"

(The memory flitted through his tortured mind. '"What's your first name?" "Morgan." "All right, if you don't want to tell me.") "Morgan..." he breathed. "Morgan le Fay..."

She nodded. She raised something in her hands-a three-foot clump of evergreen with yellow-green flowers, a cl.u.s.ter of white berries...

("...and when the missal shall be found upon the oak, then shall the Druid sever it with a golden knife. And sacrifice shall be made, the living blood feeding the roots of the tree...") She stepped out into the clearing at the side of the outcropping, and with one clean sweep of her arm, she threw the mistletoe.

Guinn stood, stretched, and caught it. Two fierce thoughts collided in his mind. The first was that this was no time for kissing games; he'd a d.a.m.n sight rather had an automatic rifle than this shrubbery. The other sprang from the remembered pa.s.sage in Percival's old book: "...when the missal shall be found upon the oak, then shall the Druid..."

Druid. The Druid.

Percival had muttered, through his tattered tongue, something about the Druid. The one Guinn was to find. The one who had a golden knife, who had said "When you admit you know me, you shall seek me out."

His name! What in time was his name?

The hawthorne bush...under a flat stone in Barenton, in Brittany, he sleeps...But there is a drought in Brittany. He sleeps no longer.

Percival's b.l.o.o.d.y wreck of a mouth floated before his eyes. "Am-ghozhiush..." "Am-ghozhiush..."

"Amgro-Ambrozhi-Ambrosius. Merlin Ambrosius!"

In his mind, he screamed it, over and over.

Hollowly, Mordi's voice boomed out below. "You lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d! He was here! His clothes, his gun-I'll teach you to lie to me!"

The automatic roared once and again. Coming from the cave, it sounded like artillery. Garry put his arms out, and on his face was an expression of delighted amazement that distorted itself into a tormented, rubbery grimace. "But, Lynn," he said softly. He looked down at his chest, and suddenly there were two bright splotches on his shirt. Chin on chest, he vomited blood on the splotches and toppled.

A horrible garble of sound came from the cave-Mordi's roar of laughter and Lynn's terrible shriek. She bolted out into the open. Mordi was after, on her in two bounds. He twisted one arm behind her until she fell to her knees, then struck her on the back of the neck with his splinted forearm. She collapsed without a sound.

Guinn uttered a low growl-precisely the sound made by a furious mastiff. He tensed and sprang- And he couldn't move.

He looked up.

Standing beside him, with one gigantic arm extended and an expression of perfect calm on his dark face, stood the Druid-the man he had seen cut the mistletoe from the oak tree.

"You called me," he said. His tones rang, but somehow Guinn knew he couldn't be heard by Mordi.

"Let me go," said Guinn between his teeth. "d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l, let me go!"

The Druid was not touching him, but there was no question of the fact that the paralysis came from that extended arm. "Stand up," said the giant.

Slowly, Guinn stood up. "Let me go," he said again. "Garry's dying!"