From London Far by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

detachment were out for blood.
    Blood… Meredith remembered that he had killed somebody. He had shot an unknown criminal called Vogelsang through the head as a sort of precautionary measure. And another criminal, Bubear, he had at least very decisively knocked out. These were definitive acts. That a little water would clear him of this deed was most assuredly untrue. But unspeakable as was his horror at having killed a man, the main result, he found, was to make him particularly determined not to be killed himself.
    He felt cautiously over the revolver and tried to remember how often it had already been fired. Even if he were to be killed – and the girl too – there would be some satisfaction in selling life dearly. Meredith frowned into the darkness as he discovered in himself the strength of this conviction. It was sufficiently pagan; nay, magical, even – for did it not proceed from some obscure comfort in the thought of drawing vanquished enemies with him into the shades? Meredith found that his fingers were no longer exploring the surface of the weapon to any practical purpose – his ignorance, indeed, was too complete to receive any intelligible information from their reports – but were simply caressing it as a hunter might caress a cherished hound… At this moment the girl grabbed him by the sleeve and, doubled up, once more began to run.
    Dodging round crates and shapeless canvas packages, he presently discovered that the thought of the hunter’s hound had come to him through the simplest prompting of sense. There was, in fact, a hound on the job. Perhaps, indeed, there were two. A very terrible baying, interspersed with slobberings, sniffings, and growls, now mingled with the shouted orders and the warehouse noises farther off. And the primitive sound released some fresh spring of chemicals in Meredith’s blood-stream. For the first time he felt afraid. It is true that fear came to him in a sudden apprehension of the true horror of Actaeon’s story – the youth by Artemis transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs. But although this was the image, the emotion was such as the rudest savage might feel. He was afraid. And he found that, although his joints were no longer supple and he had to run crouched near the floor, he was making better speed than the girl.
    Nature had had its moment; nurture supervened. He stopped and turned acknowledging that the rearguard was his place. And as he did so he sighted the bloodhound – for it was that – not six yards behind her. There was more light now, but he must have imagined more of the brute than he actually saw: a slavering, lolloping creature grotesquely compounded of the filmic Pluto and early impressions of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Meredith waited until the girl was abreast of him; then he carefully directed the revolver towards the oncoming creature and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately, the bloodhound did not respond at all as Vogelsang had done, but advanced with momentum upon the two of them. They dropped behind a packing-case and it pounded by.
    Again they ran, knowing that the creature was wheeling fast behind them. And now the noise was redoubled; a second animal was on the trail and bearing down upon them in flank. A moment later they had reached some boundary of the piled-up crates and packages and were stumbling helplessly across a nightmarishly empty floor.
    The hounds were behind them, and so close that the chase seemed pretty well over. Meredith remembered that in his waistcoat pocket was a penknife with a blade perhaps two inches long. By no stretch of delirious hope could it be conceived as of the slightest avail, but Meredith fumbled for it as he ran, glancing down as he did so. The motion was almost the end of him, for it distracted his attention from his headlong course and a moment later a collision with a skeletal object, upright and unyielding, knocked most of the breath out of his body. Then he realized that they