The race-recollection died away. I heard the shouts of my twentieth
century foeman, who had found the two dead policemen. I walked to the
edge of the roof and gauged the distance to the next building, which
was several feet lower than this one. There was a gap of no more than
ten feet. I threw the suitcase across. Men appeared eighty feet below,
running through the alley. I watched them, leaning fearlessly over the
low parapet. Like single-minded hounds, they never looked up. I laughed
and gathered myself and jumped across the yawning void, alighting
easily on the next roof.
I was beginning to take a keen gratification in my agility. Even the
lifting of my Gladstone, the feel of sentient muscles gliding over one
another to apportion the work between them, gave me intense pleasure.
Thus must an animal feel when he moves about his small enterprises,
knowing his body will answer any call he cares to make upon it.
I crossed this roof and leaped again and crossed a third, and found
myself overlooking a wide street. The sky was growing more gray than
black, and the lamps were beginning to take on the futile appearance
they have in the half-light of earliest dawn. I wanted to put plenty of
distance between me and this city that was too aware of me within it.
There was a rickety ladder leading down the side to a fire escape. I
descended it one-handed, jumped to the metal framework, trotted-down
to the street. Cars lined it, and the third I checked was unlocked.
There are ways to start a car without the key. I hummed peacefully
out of town. The sun found me driving along a broad straight highway
between fields of shocked grain, singing a tuneless song. There was
happiness in the song, and hatred; and I thought suddenly that I was
happy because of the hatred, which I had found again after many years
of ignorance and futility.
CHAPTER VIII
I stopped on the crest of a knoll and got out of the car. Off to the
right lay the beginnings of a vast swampy tract of wilderness, green
and steaming in the early morning air. I had never known of it before,
had no idea of its name or nature, and yet I knew I had been heading
for it ever since I left the museum. Somewhere in its somber depths I
would find the voice that was calling to me.
I looked back the way I had come. I could see for miles. There was
nothing moving on the road but I had the feeling that pursuit was on
its way; there was a prickling at the nape of my neck that could not be
denied. Getting into the car again, I ran it to the edge of the knoll
opposite to the marsh. Stepping out, dragging my Gladstone after me, I
put my shoulder to the car's side and shoved it over. It hurtled down
and crashed into a tree at the bottom. Far beyond it, still shrouded
in the morning mists, was a town. My followers might presume I had
made for it. A primitive stratagem, the car, like the hat in the
alley--primitive, but perhaps effective.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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