The City in the Clouds

"You take the heels – steady, heavo!" and then a splash and a thud. We heard some one vaulting lightly into the bath.

"Now, Morse, I hold you up for a minute. I shall press you down under the water until you are as near dead as a man can be. Have you anything to say?"

"Yes. Give me one moment."

"Ten if you like."

Then there came in a calm, penetrating voice, "Are you there?"

I reached upward and smote with my clenched fist upon the outside of the bath. I heard a muttered exclamation, a slight splash, and then Bill Rolston pulled over a lever, and half the ceiling of our room sank towards us with a noise like the winding-up of a clock.

Midwinter was standing in one end of the bath, which hid him almost up to his waist. His jaw dropped like the jaw of a dead man. Such baffled hate and infinite malevolence stared out of his eyes that I gave a shout of relief as Rolston lifted his arm and fired.

He must have missed the fiend's head by a hair's breadth, no more. Quick as lightning he fired again, but he was too late. Midwinter bounded out of the bath like a tennis ball, felled Rolston with a back-arm blow as he leapt, and fled down the passage.

The loud thunder of the explosions in that underground place had not died away before I had lifted Morse from under the water and dragged him over the side of the bath.

His face was very pale, but his eyes were open and he could speak.

Truly the man was marvelous.

"The other," he whispered, "the brute Zorilla! Juanita!"

I understood one of the devils, desperate now, was still at large, and even as I realized it, I saw a ghastly sight.

There was a noise above. I bent my head backward and looked up through the aperture in the ceiling.

A man was crouching over it and I saw his face and neck – a big, black-bearded face, with eyes like blazing coals, but reversed. His eyes were where his mouth should have been, his nostrils were like two pits, and for a forehead there was a grinning mouth full of gleaming teeth. Any one who, when ill, has seen their nurse or attendant bending over them from the back of the bed, will realize what I mean, though they can never understand the horror of that demoniac and inverted mask.

I was pretty quick on the target, but not quick enough. The thing whipped away even as I fired, and there was a thunder of feet running.

I think a sort of madness seized me, at any rate I was never in a moment's doubt as to what to do. I shoved my pistol in my pocket, leapt upon the edge of the bath, sprang upwards and caught the floor of the room above with my hands.

The rest was easy for any athlete in training. I pulled myself up, lay panting for a second and then stood upon the tiled floor of the bathroom.

The door leading into the library was open. I dashed through to find the place empty, rushed through the hall and out upon the steps of the main entrance. And then, joy! A morning wind had begun and instead of a white, impenetrable wall, a phantom army was retreating and, as if pursuing those ghost-like sentinels, was the black, running figure of Zorilla.

I had a clear glimpse of him as he plunged into the tunnel leading to Grand Square, and I was after him like a slipped greyhound.

In Grand Square it was clearing up with a vengeance. There were gleams of sunlight here and there and the mist had lifted for about twelve feet above my head.

I saw him bolt round the central fountain, hidden by an immense bronze dragon for a moment, and then legging it for all he was worth towards the way that led to the lifts for the second stage.

The wood floor had dried with the lifting of the mist and I was doing seven-foot strides. I was seeing red. There was a terrible cold fury at the bottom of my heart, but in my mind there was a furious joy. With every stride I gained on him – this powerful, thick-set, baboon-like man from the forests of the Amazon.

I gave a loud, exulting "View-halloo," and the black head turned for an instant – he lost ten good yards by that. I whooped again. I meant to kill, to rend him in pieces. And for the first time in my life I realized the joy of primeval man: the lust of the hunt, red fang, red claw, to tear, dominate and destroy.

Oh, it was fine hunting!

Damn him! He snapped himself into one of the little lifts when I was within six yards of him. I saw his ugly face sink out of sight behind the glass panels. I remembered that these small hydraulic lifts worked, though the big ones below didn't. But I remembered something else … there was a stairway.

I found it by instinct, a great broad stair with tiled walls like the subway of some railway terminus.

I didn't bother about the stairs. I leapt down – preserving my balance by a miracle – six or seven at a time. Pounding out into the great empty City at the foot, I swirled round and was just in time to see my gentleman bolt out of his lift like a rabbit from its hole and run to where I knew was the outside stairway which fell, in its corkscrew path, barred by many gates, right down to safety and the normal world.

It was the way by which dear old Pu-Yi had hoped to descend and raise the alarm. It was the perilous eyrie upon which this same bull-like assassin had picked him off like a sitting pigeon and boasted of it not half an hour before.

As he dodged and ran I fired at him, but never a bullet touched the brute and I flung the Colt away with an oath.

"Much better kill him with my own hands," I said in my mind, "much better tear his head off, break him up – "

I tell you this as it happened. For the moment I was a wild beast, in pursuit of another, but still, I think, a super-beast.

Well, never mind that. I saw him fumbling at a sort of fence, clearly outlined against an immense space of morning sky, and thundered after him – thundered, I say, because I was now running along an open steel grating, which seemed to sway…

Then I vaulted over where Zorilla had vaulted, and my heart leapt into my mouth as I fell – fell some eight feet on to a tiny platform, protected from space by a rail not more than three feet high.

I reeled, and caught hold of a stanchion and saved myself. Far, far below, London – London in color was unrolling itself like a map – and immediately below my feet, already a considerable distance down, was the slithering black spider that I had sworn to kill.

I could see him through the grid, and then I flung myself upon the corkscrew ladder, grasping the rails with my hands until the skin was burnt from them, disdaining the steps and spinning round and ever downwards like a great top.

As I went my head projected at right angles to my body. As I buzzed down that sickening height I saw that Zorilla had stopped. I knew that he had come to one of the steel gates, at which he was fumbling uselessly.

Then, as I came to the last step before the little gate platform I saw also, under the curve of the stair, a huddled figure, and I knew who that was, who that had been…

I threw myself at Zorilla with my knee in the small of his back. Instantly I caught him round the throat with my fingers just on the big veins behind the ear which supply the brain with blood, and my fingers crushed the trachea until the whole supple throat seemed breaking under the molding of my grip.

I felt that I had got him. That if I could hold out for a minute he would be dead, but I hadn't reckoned with the immense muscular force of the body.

I clung like the leopard on the buffalo, but he began to sway this way and that. In front of us was the steel gate and the motionless figure of Pu-Yi. We were struggling upon the steel grid, not much larger than a tea table. A slight rail only three feet high defended us from the void – a little thigh-high rail between us and a drop of near two thousand feet.

He lurched to the left, and I swung out into immensity, carried on his back. I was sure it was the end, that I should be flung off into space, when with one arm he gripped the gate, braced all his great strength and slowly dragged us back into equilibrium. It seemed that the whole tower trembled, vibrated in a horrible, metallic music.

I pressed down my thumbs, I strained every sinew of my wrist and arm in the strangle hold, and I felt the life pulsing out of him in steady throbs. There was nothing else in the world now but myself and him and I ground my teeth and clutched harder.

In his death agony he lurched to the other side of our tiny foothold space. This was where the circular stairway ended. He caught his foot, so I was told afterwards, in the last stanchion of the stair, fell over the rail with a low, sobbing groan, and then, weighted by me upon his shoulders, began to slip, slip, slip, downwards.

And I with him.

I had conquered. I don't think that in that moment I had any feeling but one of wild, fierce joy. He was going, I was going with him, but I never thought of that, until my right ankle was clutched in a vice-like grip. I felt the warm, heaving body below me rush away, tearing my grip from its throat by its own dreadful impetus, and then, as I was snatched back with a jar of every bone in my body, there was a shrill whistling of air for a second as Zorilla went headlong to his doom, and I knew nothing else.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Falling! Falling through deep waters, with a horrible sickening sense of utter helplessness and desolation; nerves, heart, mind – very being itself – awaited the crash of extinction. A slight jolt, a roaring of great waters in the air, and a voice, dim, thin and far away!

… In some mysterious way, the sense of sight was joined to that of sound and hearing. I was surrounded by blackness shot with gleams of baleful fire, shifting and changing until the black grew gray in furious eddies, the gray changed into the light of day, and a far-off voice became loud and insistent.

It was thus that I came to myself after the horror on the edge of the dizzy void.