Cycle of Nemesis Read Online Free Page B

think I know my own sister, and her children like me—adore me, is what Sally says—so I’m quite prepared to take the chance.”
    Before I could make a suitable reply the sound of running feet clapped in sharp staccato counterpoint from the far end of the long picture gallery and we both turned casually, interrupted in our verbal fencing.
    Toward us over the dark planks ran a naked girl, her long reddish-blonde hair streaming out behind her, her arms imploring succor, her mouth open and red and gaping. Following her in a crouching loathsome waddle and yet covering the ground with ferocious speed ran a -I did not have the words to describe it. Furred, fanged, ferocious, feral. With deep crimson pits for eyes and with thick and heavy iron boots strapped to its feet, each boot—there were four of them—tipped with a long, sharp, ugly and obscene spike, the thing squattered over the floor after the girl.
    She saw us. Her eyes widened and her heaving chest expanded as she dragged in a last despairing breath for a final scream. The scream began.
    The girl and the thing vanished.
    Only the scream remained, echoing on in my brain.
    I felt Phoebe Desmond’s arm touch mine and her hand grasp my wrist. She trembled. I glanced quickly at her and put my other hand on hers.
    “I saw it, too, Miss Desmond. Whatever it was, it happened—but it’s gone now. It’s gone!”
    “Yes.” Her voice was a colorless whisper. “It’s gone.” She turned suddenly inward and buried her face in my lapels. “Oh—it was—it was—”
    My hands were both caught up somewhere about the level of her shoulders and I could not move them. I said, “It was not pleasant. But it can’t harm us.”
    After a time, she pulled back, put a hand through her hair, and, tossing her head back defiantly, said, “We’d better get back to the ballroom. My doll’s house will be gone.”
    “Yes Miss Desmond. Well do that.”
    I held her arm as we descended the stairs. She did not object. I received the firm conviction that she needed that human support.
    The very normalcy and respectability of die atmosphere in the cluttered ballroom came to both of us as a shock. How could these very correct people immersed in their world of art and culture be sitting here so self-centered when above their heads naked girls ran for their lives and slobbering monsters pursued them with evil designs?
    Finding a seat for Phoebe Desmond I stood behind her chair and looked about. Everything seemed the same; nothing had altered except the item under the hammer.
    The bidding for a natural coral sculpture from an abandoned reef off the northeast coast of Australia crept up and up, the colored labiations of the coral sparkling from its plastic water-filled container. The sculpture certainly was a fine one, the directions of growth of the coral well-organized and directed, but I had at least six far finer at home and, pettishly, I grant, for a moment I savored a superiority to these grasping, avaricious, bidding drylanders.
    A dry, meticulous, thin-haired man bought the coral sculpture. I could not imagine it gracing his bathroom; on the other hand, he could run to form and present it lo his mistress for mutual delighted study. The auctioneers robot wheeled off the coral and another wheeled on my globe.
    That globe fascinated me. Manufactured before the South Pole Estate had been conceived, before, even, the continental shelves had been cultivated and aquiculture had transformed the living standards of the worlds, it portrayed a world dead and gone. But that world had once been real and real people had inhabited its continents and islands and had fought one with the other for I heir possession. The globe showed a world that had produced well over half of the treasures thronging this mom.
    “Lot Forty-five. A globe of the Earth. Pre-space age and pre-sub - oceanic. In perfect condition with the single exception of a pin hole in a Kentish seaside resort called (heatstone—evidently