Jamie’s weapon lay half a dozen paces behind him, and he stood rubbing his wrist, facing the man with the neat beard and the amused expression, the man who held one hand in his pocket and twirled a shillelagh with the other.
“I’ll kill you,” I heard Jamie say.
“No, Jamie! No!” Zeemeister cried. “Don’t go near him, Jamie! Run!”
Zeemeister backed away, pausing only to slash one of M’mrm’mlrr’s tentacles, as if knowing the source of his mental anguish.
“He’s not much,” Jamie called back.
“That’s Captain Al!” Zeemeister shouted. “Run, you fool!”
But Jamie decided to swing instead.
It was instructive to almost behold. “Almost,” I say, because the cudgel moved a bit too fast for me to trace its passage. So I was not certain exactly where or how many times it touched him. It seemed only an instant after Jamie began his swing that he was falling.
Then, still twirling the stick, casually, jauntily now, the hallucination moved past Jamie’s crumpled form and headed on toward Zeemeister.
Not taking his eyes from the advancing figure, Zeemeister continued to retreat, holding the knife low before him, edge upward.
“I thought you were dead,” he finally said.
“Obviously you were mistaken” came the reply.
“What interest have you in this thing, anyway?”
“You tried to kill Fred Cassidy,” he said, “and I’ve invested a lot in that boy’s education.”
“I did not associate the name,” Zeemeister replied. “But I never really intended to harm him.”
“That is not the way that I heard it.”
Zeemeister continued to back away, passing through the gate in the guardrail, moving until the rotating platform of the Rhennius machine brushed the backs of his pant legs. He spun then and slashed at Charv, who was passing by, brandishing a wrench. Charv bleated and fled the platform, dropping to the floor near M’mrm’mlrr and Nadler.
“What are you going to do, Al?” Zeemeister inquired, turning back to face the other.
But there was no reply, only a continued advance, a continued twirling of the club, a smile.
At the last instant, before he came into shillelagh range, Zeemeister bolted. Raising one foot to the platform, he sprang back on it, turning, and rushed forward all of two paces. Its rotation, however, had so positioned the apparatus that he collided with the central unit, which faintly resembled a wide hand cupped as in the act of scratching.
His momentum and angle of incidence were such that his stumbling rebound bore him down atop the belt. His knife and the towel-swathed star-stone flew from his hands as he tried to stay his fall. They bounced from the platform down onto the floor as he was borne on into the tunnel. His scream was cut short with an ominous abruptness and I looked away, but not in time.
It apparently turned him inside out.
Which of course delivered the contents of his circulatory and digestive systems to the floor.
Also, it seemed to have inverted all of the organs which were now exposed.
The contents of my own stomach sought egress, reinforced by the noises which had begun about me. Like I said, I looked away. But not in time.
It was Charv who finally managed to get up stomach enough to get to them and throw someone’s coat over the remains, where they had fallen from the belt as it advanced toward the perpendicular. Then, and only then, did Ragma’s practicality return, punctuated by his near hysterical “The stone! Where is the stone?”
Through watering eyes, I sought for it and then beheld the racing form of Paul Byler, bloody towel clutched beneath his arm, on his way across the hall.
“Once a jolly swagman,” he called out, “always a jolly swagman!” and he was gone out the door.
Pandemonium reigned. Over the just and the near just.
My hallucination then gave a final spin to his stick, turned, nodded in my direction and approached us. I rose to my feet, nodded back, found a smile and showed it to him.
“Fred, my boy, you’ve grown,” he said. “I hear you have acquired a high degree and a responsible position. Congratulations!”
“Thank you,” I said.
“How are you feeling?”