Free Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison Page A

trident, sending a thin, stinging spray into Niven’s face. Niven blinked back tears from the dirt.
    The creature’s gimlet eyes were as red as the ground it stomped. Head of a bull, gigantic body of an Atlas, something out of a child’s fable, it stepped carefully toward him, prodding the air with the blood-encrusted trident.
    The minotaur bellowed, a sound of rage almost human but ending as a beast’s groan. The eyes. The malevolent little red eyes. Red and vengeful; not merely with volcanic hatred, but with something else...something incredibly ancient, primeval, a rage born of loss and frustration from a time before men had walked the Earth. A time when the minotaurs and their fellow-myths had ruled the world. A world where they no longer belonged, a world that did not believe they had ever existed.
    And now, somehow, in some inexplicable fashion, Niven—a man with no particular talents—had been thrown crosswise and slantwise through universes into a place, a time, a continuum (an Earth?) where the minotaur still roamed. Where the minotaur could at last have his full revenge on the creatures that had replaced him. It was the day of reckoning for Homo sapiens.
    Niven backed around the bowl, feeling the dirt of the wall crumbling in his fingers as he felt behind him; in his other hand he brandished the rough-wood club he had found underfoot as he ran from the beast. He let it droop in his hand a moment, the weight of it difficult to keep at the ready for very long. The minotaur’s face of frenzy glowed with heat. It leaped. Niven swung the club with a bunching of muscles that sent him whirling half-around. The minotaur dug the trident deep in the dirt and ground to a snorting halt, two feet in front of the flat arc swing of the club. Niven spun around completely, and the club struck the wall and shattered to splinters.
    The minotaur’s half-growl, half-snort bore traces of triumphant amusement as it exploded behind the dark-haired man, and Niven felt sweat come to his back. The impact of the blow against the wall had sent a tremor through his entire body; his left arm was quite numb. Yet it had saved him. There was an opening in the wall, an opening in the rock-wall of the deep valley bowl, an opening he would not have seen backing around the wall. Now there was a scant hope of staying alive.
    As the minotaur gathered itself for a leap that would send its gigantic body plunging into Niven, the man slipped sidewise, and was inside the mountain.
    He turned then, and ran. Behind him the light from that weird place—vaguely blue and light—mote laden—faded and was abruptly lost as he caromed around a sharp turn in the passage. It was dark now, pitch absolute dark, and all Niven could see was the scintillance of tiny sparks behind his eyes. Suddenly he found himself longing to see even that light behind him, that snippet of blue and cadaverous gray in a sky that had never been roof of any world he had known.
    And then he was falling....
    Suddenly, and without any sense of having moved, between one step and the next, he plunged over a lip of stone, and was falling. Down and down, tumbling over and over, and the walls of moist slippery stone reeled around him, unseen but cold, as he tried to grab some small hold.
    His fingertips skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating...for a long moment...but was lost in the next instant as a gasp that became a shriek was torn from him. He plunged sickeningly, impacting painfully against an unseen out-cropping with his shoulders and the back of his neck...he felt his spine crack...and continued falling, and suddenly was submerged in water...black and viscous...bottomless...closing over him, filling his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.
    Vapors of night. Echoes of never. Niven thrashed in a whirlpool vortex of total unawareness. Memories—released from their crypt beneath