He was amazingly strong for a hallucination, and he continued dragging on my arm until I fell forward onto all fours. I was shaky, but I held the pose.
“Good,” he said, patting my shoulder. “Come on.”
“Wait! I’m dying of thirst.”
“Sorry. I am traveling light. If you will follow me, however, I can promise you a drink.”
“When?”
“Never,” he snarled, “if you just sit there. In fact, I think I hear some noises back at the camp now. Come on!”
I began crawling toward him. He said, “Keep low,” which was rather unnecessary, as I was unable to get to my feet. He moved away from the camp then, heading in a generally easterly direction, roughly parallel to the ridge beside which I had been working. My progress was slow, and he paused periodically to allow me to catch up.
I followed for several minutes, and then a throbbing began in my extremities, accompanied by flashes of feeling. This collapsed me, and I croaked some obscenity as I fell. He bounded toward me, but I bit off my outburst before he could repeat the paw-in-mouth trick.
“You are a very difficult creature to rescue,” he stated. “Along with your circulatory system, your judgment and self-control seem to be of a primitive order.”
I found another obscenity, but I whispered this one.
“Which you continue to demonstrate,” he added. “You need do only two things-follow and keep silent. You are not very good at either. It causes one to wonder-“
“Get moving!” I said. “I’ll follow!”
“And your emotions-“
I lunged at him, but he darted back and away.
I followed, ignoring everything but the desire to throttle the little beast. It did not matter that the situation was patently absurd. I had both Merimee and Marko to draw upon for theory, an opposing pair of fun-house mirrors with me in the middle, hot on the trail of the wombat. I followed, muttering, burning adrenalin, spitting out the dust he raised. I lost track of time.
The ridge grew lower, broke up. We moved inward, upward, then downward, passing through rocky corridors into a deeper darkness, moving over a way that was now all stone and gravel. I slipped once, and he was beside me in an instant.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I started to laugh, controlled it.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
He was careful to stay out of reach.
“It is just a little farther,” he said. “Then you can rest. I will fetch you nourishment.”
“I am sorry,” I said, struggling to rise and failing, “but this is it. If I can wait up ahead, I can wait here. I’m out of gas.”
“The way is rocky,” he said, “and they should not be able to track you. But I would feel better if you could continue just a little farther. There is an alcove off to the side, you see. If you were in there, chances are they would pass without seeing you if they should happen to stumble on this trail. What do you say?”
“I say it sounds good, but I don’t think I can do it.”
“Try again. One more time.”
“All right.”
I pushed myself up, wobbled, advanced. If I fell again, that was it, I decided. I would have to take my chances. I was feeling lightheaded as well as heavy-bodied.
But I persisted. A hundred feet perhaps …
He led me into a hidden drive of a cul-de-sac off to the side of the rift we had been traversing. I collapsed there and everything began to swirl and ebb.
I thought I heard him say, “I am going now. Wait here.”
“Sure thing,” I seemed to reply.
Another blackness. Absolute. A parched, brittle thing/place of indeterminate size/duration. I was in it and vice versa-equally distributed and totally contained by/in the nightmare system with consciousness at C-n and chillthirstheatchillthirstheat a repeating decimal running every/anywhere on the projective plane that surrounded …
Flashes and imaginings … “Do you hear me, Fred? Do you hear me, Fred?” Water, trickling down my throat. Another blackness. Flash. Water, on my face, in my mouth. Movement. Shadows. A moaning …
Moaning. Shadows, a lesser black. Flash. Flashes. A light through parted lashes, dim. The ground below, passing. The moaning, mine.