Starcross (14 page)

‘Certainly not!’ I said. ‘You may not have noticed, but I am undressed. I shall have to have some decent clothes to wear if we are to travel to Modesty and raise the alarm! If I burst into the office of the Governor in my nightdress, complaining of assault by seaside amusement engines, he
may think me an eccentric!’

But how could we hope to catch the train now? Our mechanised pursuers seemed intent on driving us away from the hotel and its station! Each time we tried to veer in the right direction those wobbling booths began to gain on us.

Something whisked past me, and a rock exploded in a cloud of flying fragments.

‘An air gun!’ said Jack, and led me still further into the desert.

‘Have you no weapon of your own?’ I asked, feeling somewhat disappointed, for when I first knew him he had been positively bristling with swords and shooting instruments.

‘Got my knife,’ he grunted, ‘but that won’t be much good against automata …’

My words had acted as a challenge or spur to his manly nature, however, and after a few more steps he stopped and gathered up a few decent-sized stones, which he flung at the approaching booths. I saw the first strike a puppet of Mr Punch, which dropped out of sight like a coconut in a shy. The booth reeled sideways and toppled over, and an instant later a flash of flame leapt up into the Martian night as
some flammable substance within it exploded.

‘A hit!’ I cried, clapping my hands together. ‘A palpable hit!’ But my elation was soon extinguished, for the blazing contraption simply used its long arms to push itself upright again and came on as implacably as before, quite unconcerned by the flames which engulfed it. Indeed, Jack’s defiant stand had made our plight seem worse, not better, for the canvas which had shrouded the machine fell away in scorched rags and flaming tatters, until we were pursued not by a jolly red-and-white striped tent, but by a monstrous wheeled mass of scorched metal, which sometimes brandished aloft a blackened and half-melted puppet, crying out in a squeaking, creaking voice, ‘
Where’s Mr Punch? Eh? Where’s Mr Punch?
’

We came to the hilltop, and there ahead of us, just down from the summit on the further side, lay that fence, the
seaward portions of which Mother had pointed out while we were bathing the previous day – oh, it seemed a thousand years before! I nearly tumbled into its thick strands of wire, but Jack held me back.

‘Careful!’ he cried. ‘It is electrified!’

Almost as he spoke, the first of our pursuers crested the hill, only a few feet behind us! I shrieked (but in a refined way). Jack said something most unsuitable, and pushed me to the ground as the air gun concealed among those blackened struts and gears spat another bullet past us. The dress bag fell from my hand and, turning back to reach for it, I saw to my horror that its hanger had caught in the exposed metal framework of the machine, which was now almost upon us! I tugged at the bag to wrench it free, but succeeded only in pulling the machine towards me …

Yet in such apparent mishaps may Salvation lie, and sometimes even so small a thing as a coat hanger may be the instrument of Almighty GOD! For as it turned, the machine struck one wheel against a rock and lost its balance. I saw it teeter; I watched it fall past me towards the wires of that fence, through which the electrical fluid surged with a hum that was clearly audible. A vision of myself arriving at Modesty Station clad in nothing but my tattered
nightclothes rose dreadfully before my eyes, and with an almost superhuman effort I unhooked the coat hanger and whisked my precious dress bag to safety as the booth, arms whirling like helpless windmills, struck against the fence.

‘
That’s the way to do it!
’ it cried.

There was then such a crackling and sparking and hissing and shuddering as I have never heard before, and hope I never shall again! A blinding light made me shield my eyes and, when it was done and I could see again, the machine was a ruin indeed, a mere mass of half-molten scrap. The wires which had caught and fried it were blackened too, and several had parted, burned through by the force of the inferno.

‘Huzzah!’ I cried, sounding for all the world like Art in the momentary thrill of our victory. Then I recalled the two other machines. Sure enough they were just coming over the hilltop and advancing warily, as if they had noted the fate of their companion. From the gypsy woman’s booth extended arms equipped with sharp, whirling blades, while from the mouth of the crocodile puppet in the second Punch & Judy show emerged the gleaming black barrel of a gun.

‘Come on!’ shouted Jack.

I could not imagine where he meant us to run next, with
the machines behind us and the fence ahead. Personally, I had been beginning to wonder if a prayer or other small act of Christian devotion might not be our best recourse. But Jack pointed, and I saw that where the bottom wires of the electrified fence had burned away there was a space through which we might pass, but which our lumbering pursuers never could!

Quickly, yet without sacrificing any of my feminine dignity, I crawled through, taking care not to brush the wires above me with any portion of my anatomy. Jack followed. Shots from the air gun sent spurts of sand leaping up all around us, but the machine was no marksman, and we were able to drop down into a gully out of its sight, and rest there, listening to the crunch and squeak of its wheels as it went to and fro along the fence, searching in vain for a way to reach us.

Rosy-fingered dawn was touching the fringes of the eastern sky with delicate shades of pink and red. Jack pulled out his watch and studied it. ‘Five o’clock.’

‘Jack,’ I said, remembering something which Mother had mentioned, ‘I believe that monstrous Martian wildlife may lurk without that fence. Sand clams, and … oh, I’m sure there was something else.’

Jack looked resolute and full of vim, which is exactly how one’s gentleman companion
should
look when one is in a perilous predicament on an unearthly sphere.

‘Never fear,’ he said kindly. ‘As soon as those machines give up we’ll get back through the fence. I mean to make that train.’

There was a smudge of soot or ash upon his nose, which made him look like a naughty but loveable schoolboy. I longed to reach out and wipe it away, and began to wonder if I might not find it within myself to forgive him after all for his neglectfulness and his flirtation with Mademoiselle Beauregard.
¹²
But something about our close proximity
reminded me that I was still in my nightwear, so I said firmly, ‘Turn your back, please, Mr Havock,’ and he saw my intention and promptly did so. He does have
some
gentlemanly instincts, you see, (unlike certain people I might mention).

But, Oh! what a shock I was to receive when I unbuttoned my mothproof bag! And how I railed inwardly against my own folly and clumsiness! For in my haste to escape from our suite at the hotel I had taken from the closet not one of my day dresses,
but my bathing costume
!

‘Jack,’ I said, ‘we must return
at once
to the hotel!’

‘Shhh,’ he told me, cocking his head to one side and listening intently. I listened with him. I could not hear anything, but I quickly realised that that was what intrigued him. The sound of the waiting machines had died away!

‘Have they gone?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. It could be a trick.’ Motioning for me to remain hidden, Jack stood up. I watched his face change as he scanned the hilltop beyond the fence.

‘Are they gone?’ I asked again.

‘What? Oh, yes.’

‘Excellent,’ I declared. ‘But, Jack, it is most important that I call in at the hotel on our way to the station. I have
brought entirely the wrong outfit.’

‘Can’t do it,’ he said. ‘Look.’

I stood up. The machines were gone, as he had promised. But so too was the fence. Where its metal posts had stretched along the skyline there now lay nothing but the desert rocks and a few whispery clumps of Martian knotweed.

We walked together up the hill and looked over its crest, down to the darkness of the dawn sea. The fence, and all that had been contained within it, had vanished. The spot where Starcross had stood was empty. Along the curve of the bay, where the Starcross promenade had stretched so elegantly, and the flags of all nations had fluttered in the breeze, the waves now rolled in emptiness, making dainty lace doilies of foam upon the untouched sands of that ancient beach.

The hotel had returned without us to the Nineteenth Century, and I was marooned with Jack Havock on Pre-Historic Mars!

Chapter Nine

In Which Various Horrors Beset Myrtle in the Depths of Time, and Who Can Blame Them?

Gentle reader, you may imagine my distress! Even if you are not gentle, but are merely a housemaid or labourer who has borrowed this volume from a lending library (in which case do
try
not to get BEER all over it), you may, I hope, grasp some faint inkling of the despair which threatened then to overwhelm me. My mother and brother had been kidnapped, Jack Havock and I were
marooned on the planet Mars in the year 100,000,000 BC, we were without a chaperone and I had nothing to wear but my patent Nereid bathing dress!

Trying to make the best of our plight, I changed forthwith, for I reasoned that even bathing attire would be an improvement on the ripped, soot-speckled nightdress which was the only other garment I had brought with me into that remote era. And there was one small glimmer of good fortune, for in the bottom of the mothproof bag were my bathing slippers, so at least I would not have to walk any further barefoot across the sands of Mars.

‘That’s a pretty dress,’ said Jack gallantly, when I had finished changing and he was allowed to look.

‘You do not have to be kind,’ I replied. ‘I have learned not to expect kindness from you.’

He looked surprised, and then said, ‘Ah, you mean all those letters you sent, and I never replied to. I’m sorry for it. I’m not much of a one for letters, see, and … But anyway, it
is
a pretty dress.’

‘It is a bathing costume,’ I replied, refusing to be cheered.

‘Are you sure? It has a bustle.’

‘That is a safety feature. I believe it unfolds into a small life raft if you pull this tassel.’

‘Good G-d!’

‘Please do not blaspheme, Jack. This may be the year 100,000,000 BC but He Who Watches Over Us All is doubtless listening, and will be stung by the thoughtless way you take His name in vain. Who knows, at any moment a rampaging sand clam, or one of those other brutes which Mother spoke of, may charge us, and we shall have to call upon Him in earnest. And do you think He will be likely to notice our prayers if you go about saying His name just because you have seen an inflatable bustle?’

Jack shrugged.

‘And don’t shrug!’ I added snappishly. (I fear adventures always leave me feeling somewhat irritable.)

We walked together down the hill, towards the shore, where that white line of breaking surf shone in the halflight like a supercilious grin. As we reached the hill’s foot Jack noticed something in the sand nearby, and motioned for me to stop. I did so, and waited, with my heart beating swiftly beneath my bodice. Jack plucked a dead stalk from a nearby stand of Martian knotweed and poked the place which had caught his attention. Almost at once the ground heaved and something like a fanged trapdoor yawned open. Thin white teeth and strands of drool glistened in the
twilight, and a horrible stench of decay came from it, much like the smell which assails anyone rash enough to open Art’s sock drawer.