The Source by Brian Lumley

But then, where had the bat and the wolf come from, and the magmass creatures, and the warrior? No, it had to go somewhere.

He had also paused to take the rusty magazine off his SMG and throw it away, and fit a good one from his packs. If he had to use the weapon, the last thing he wanted to happen was for a duff round to jam itself in the breach.

It was then, just after he’d fitted the new magazine, that he learned something else about this weird Gate place. Fastening the straps of his pack, he’d looked up -and discovered that he didn’t know which direction was which. He had a compass on his wrist, but it was a little late for that; he should have checked it immediately after entering the sphere. He’d looked at it anyway – and seen the hand circling aimlessly, just as lost as he was! And then again he’d looked all about him, slowly turning in a full circle, or what he believed was a full circle. But he couldn’t even be sure of that.

It was all the same everywhere he looked: whiteness stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. Even a white floor and a white sky, making no distinction anywhere, no horizon, nothing but himself. Himself and gravity. And thank God for gravity, for without the sensation that there was something solid underneath him – he knew he would have very quickly gone mad. With it … at least he knew which way was up!

Then he’d looked back over his shoulder. Had he really come from over there? Or from over there? Difficult to tell. How did he know he was still heading in the right direction? What the hell was ‘direction’ in this Godforsaken place?

But when he’d tried to move off again there had been resistance, a wall of invisible foam that pushed him back with a force equal to that which he mustered against it. To the right it wasn’t so bad, but still difficult, and to the left likewise. There was only one way to go, which meant that that had to be the right way. That was why he hadn’t noticed it before; because he’d automatically chosen, or been guided, along the path of least resistance. And after that there’d been more plodding, more sweating, until now – time for another swig at his bottle. Staring ahead, and as he pulled at the bottle and let the water cool his mouth, Jazz suddenly realized that things were no longer pure white. That came as a shock, so that he almost choked on his water. Now what the hell . . .? There in the distance . . . mountains? Silhouettes of crags? A dark-blue sky and . . . stars? It was like looking through a sea-fret; better, like looking down a tunnel at a misty morning. Or at a scene faintly etched on a white silk screen. But how far away?

Jazz plodded on, more eagerly now – and at the same time somewhat more apprehensively. The scene came closer, growing brighter as the stars blinked out and were replaced by weak beams of sunlight seeming to strike through the mountains to the right of the picture’s frame. And that was when Jazz heard the sound.

At first he associated it with the emerging scene, but then he realized that it came from behind him. And no sooner that than he recognized it for what it really was: a motorcycle! He turned and looked back.

Karl Vyotsky rode with the sling of his SMG across his right shoulder, the gun itself hanging under his arm, muzzle forward. As yet he couldn’t see the distant scene that Jazz had spotted, but he could see Jazz. The big Russian gritted his teeth into a snarling grin, guided the bike with his left hand and his knees and took the handgrip of the gun in his right fist. He laid his index finger along the trigger-guard, turned up the throttle and felt the bike surge forward. ‘British,’ he grunted to himself, ‘your time’s up. Kiss it all goodbye!’

For a moment Jazz was stunned. A motorcycle! And here he’d been knocking himself out walking it! The problem was, how to turn Vyotsky’s advantage into a disadvantage? But as he’d walked, so Jazz had been giving the Gate’s weird physics a thought or two. Now he believed he had the answer. ‘OK, Ivan,’ he murmured to himself, ‘so let’s see if you’re as smart as you think you are.’

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