Free The Paradise War by Stephen R. Lawhead Page B

like gravel churning in a cauldron and realized it came from the animal’s throat. We stood looking at one another across a distance of no more than fifteen or twenty feet. I decided to make a rush for the door, and was just working myself up to it when the door swung open and someone came out of the shop. I half turned, flung out a hand to the stranger to stop him. “Wait!” I said. The fellow grimaced at me—I suppose he thought me a beggar after loose change—and pushed brusquely past. When I looked again, the wolf was running up the Turl toward Broad Street. I saw its gaunt sides gleam silver in the streetlights, and then it was gone.
    I told myself I hadn’t actually seen it, that the episode with the giant dog had unnerved me. But the next morning the Daily Mail carried a story about a wolf seen running loose in the streets of Oxford. Numerous people had witnessed it. Police had been called out, and animal control, but they couldn’t locate the beast. Speculation was that the wolf had escaped from someone’s illegal menagerie and had fled to the open countryside.
    I was afraid to leave my rooms for three days after that—afraid of what I might see next. And when I did screw up my courage to go out again, almost immediately I stepped off the sidewalk on the High Street smack in front of an Oxford Experience bus. I got knocked down, but not run over—those tourist buses do not move very fast and the drivers are skilled at bumping into unwary pedestrians.
    It came to me . . . as I lay in the street . . . staring up into the ring of ripely disgusted faces gathered above me . . . that something had to give. A bus today, a train tomorrow. Or would it be a screaming free fall from one of the dreaming spires? More to the point: was this denial really worth my sanity, my life?
    One gets a singular perspective on life while gazing up from the gutter. When the policeman who helped me to my feet asked, “You all right, then, son?” I was forced to consider the question in all its greater philosophical implications. No, I decided, I was definitely not all right. Not by any stretch of logic or imagination.
    I spent the rest of the day wandering around the streets, aimless and sick at heart. I lost myself in the usual stream of shoppers and simply drifted. I shuffled here and there; I watched chalk artists and street musicians without heeding what they drew or played. I knew something was happening. I knew it had something to do with me. I knew also that I could not hold out against it much longer. But what was I to do? What was required of me?
    These and other questions, barely formed, occupied me all afternoon. And when I finally gave up and headed back to my rooms, it was nearly dark and the weather had turned rainy. The streets were all but deserted. At Carfax I stopped for the traffic light, though there were no cars on the street. I felt silly standing in the rain, so I ducked under a nearby awning.
    As I stood there, waiting for the light to change, a very strange feeling came over me. I was suddenly light-headed and weak in the knees, woozy and unsteady as if I might pass out any second. Perhaps getting knocked down by the bus had hurt me more than I knew, I thought. Perhaps I’ve injured myself after all. I grabbed my head with both hands. I gulped air, and my throat felt tight. I couldn’t breathe.
    The pavement beneath my feet seemed to buckle and heave. I glanced down, and my heart skipped a beat. For I was standing in the center of an elaborate Celtic circle drawn on the sidewalk squares with chalk. The street artists—I had seen them working earlier in the day and paid them no attention—had drawn a primitive maze pattern surrounded by a knotwork border of interwoven colored lines. I had often seen sidewalk portraits and landscapes. But never anything like this. Why had they drawn this particular design? Why, of all things, a Celtic maze?
    I stood there, clutching my head, staring at the intricately