Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (22 page)

"Yes." N'wrbb Crrd'f nodded. He wore a silky mustache and a thin beard. In thought, he raised a long-fingered hand and slid bejeweled fingers the length of the beard. "Yes, she is dead. There is no way you can return her to me, but I will take some satisfaction from you instead."

He circled Clive's chair. Unable to rise or to use his hands, Clive could only follow his captor with his eyes. Finally N'wrbb Crrd'f stood before Clive once more. "Tell me, Folliot—how did you find me? How did you come to Djajj?"

"That's the name of this place?"

"It is. I thought you knew that."

Clive said nothing.

"I learned a wonderful expression from a fellow native of your world, Folliot. It is,
cat got your tongue
? I fear, I have no cat. But I have a wonderful kennel of dogs, Folliot. Very large, very hungry dogs. Do you like the beasts?"

Clive continued to study his captor. He would say nothing; instead of speaking, his mind raced.
Djajj
, yes, that was the world from which the beautiful 'Nrrc'kth had come to the Dungeon. She had been the captive and unwilling mistress of this N'wrbb Crrd'f. Clive had rescued her from her bondage, had fought and defeated Crrd'f. The Lady 'Nrrc'kth had joined Clive's band in their adventures, had become his own lady love—and had died in the Dungeon.

He had believed Crrd'f dead as well. Instead, here the man had returned to the world called Djajj, and Baron Samedi had sent Clive to that world! Why? Samedi had always been friendly—but he was also notoriously mischievous. And what merrier mischief than to send the unsuspecting Folliot to the world of Djajj!

Clive said, "What do you want, N'wrbb Crrd'f? You've got me at your mercy—at least for the moment! Are you going to do something about it, or are you just going to gloat?"

"Oh, I'm going to do something, my friend. You will not like what I do, but you will not suffer for long. Or from boredom!" The taller man's laughter was harsh.

Crrd'f stretched to his full height and paced once more around Folliot's seat. He paused again, hands clasped before his straggly beard. There was something about him that reminded Clive of a praying mantis. "I have something wonderful in mind for you, Folliot. But I don't want to dirty my hands. I'll have someone else help out."

He turned away and shouted, "Nvv'n! Nvv'n Yrr'll!"

There was a rustling, slithering sound, and from a doorway Clive saw a hideous parody of a man creep into the room. Was he unable to stand and walk like a normal human, or was it merely the fellow's manner that made him creep and twist forward like a snake? He was stocky, with shaggy unkempt hair that ran directly into a filthy, spade-shaped beard. Even across the stone chamber, Folliot could detect the stale odor of burnt weeds that clung to the man's ragged clothing of some pale shade that might once have been crimson.

"Master, master," the creature whined. It knelt before Crrd'f, fawning and cringing.

Unlike Folliot, Crrd'f carried a leather pouch slung by a strap over one shoulder. He opened the pouch and reached inside to draw a scrap of greasy, half-rotted flesh and throw it to the depraved wretch at his feet.

Nvv'n fell to his knees, scooped the disgusting scrap into his mouth, and swallowed noisily. A noisy eructation came from him. "Kind master! Good master!"

Crrd'f placed a heavily booted foot on Nvv'n's back and shoved hint toward Folliot. "Put that in the shrinkage machine. And be quick—and I want you out of my sight, filth!"

Clive shouted questions and demands at Crrd'f but the latter had nothing to say. He merely stood, smiling cruelly, as the degenerate Nvv'n dragged Clive, chair and all, through a stone archway.

Folliot was astonished. This was another surprise on top of all the surprises he had already experienced. The chamber in which he found himself was tiled in white and fitted with tables and apparatuses such as he had seen only in the laboratories of natural philosophers at Cambridge.

What was this world of Djajj? It had seemed at first a virtual Eden wherein Clive was a lonely alien. Then he was captured by N'wrbb Crrd'f—or by the latter's unseen henchmen—and brought to a castle out of a past century.

And now… now he found himself in a modern laboratory. What had N'wrbb Crrd'f in mind?

The vile Nvv'n giggled and muttered to himself, half-intelligible words that told Clive nothing sensible or useful. Clive could see a strange apparatus on one laboratory table, a peculiar mechanism of glass retorts and metal parts, with a variety of oddly colored fluids and a pair of wires leading to something that he identified only distantly as a galvanic battery.

Nvv'n lifted the cover of a round, opaque container and scooped a handful of ground, greenish-brown strands from it. He packed these into a bowl connected to a thin, hollow tube. There was a flickering flame beneath one of the retorts; Nvv'n used this to draw fire into the bowl of earth-colored strands. He turned and blew a disgustingly odorous cloud at Folliot.

Clive turned his head away, clenched his lips shut, and strove mightily to avoid breathing in the disgusting smoke. But the bestial Nvv'n drew again at his makeshift pipe and sent cloud after cloud of noxious fumes at Clive.

At length, unable to hold his breath any longer, Clive inhaled a single wisp of the smoke. His head grew light, a roaring filled his ears, lights danced and spiraled before his eyes. He felt his stomach clench in an involuntary retching reflex, and all was once more black.

How long a time passed while he was unconscious, he could not tell. Strange dreams came and went, dreams in which the Lady 'Nrrc'kth was restored to him only to die again and again, dreams in which the Frankenstein monster grasped him by the throat and plunged his head time after time into ice-rimed brine, dreams in which detachments of Japanese marines equipped with buzzing aeroplanes attacked Mississippi River steamers.

He did not lapse into a normal slumber and then waken gradually. Instead, from the grips of a nightmare image in which a monstrous Philo Goode and Lorena Ransome batted him back and forth between them like a shuttlecock, he awoke into instant and crystal clarity.

"Being Clive!"

He looked and saw Shriek, the arachnoid alien who had shared so many of his adventures in the Dungeon, but whom he had not seen since his return to Earth and to the London of 1896. "Shriek!" he cried. He reached for the spidery creature and grasped one of its pincers between his hands, as he would have grasped the hand of a long-lost comrade.

Once he would not have reacted so to the alien. Once he would have recoiled in fear and revulsion. But his experiences in the Dungeon had taught Clive Folliot many lessons. Among them was the truth that the appearance of a creature had little to do with its inner nature.

Whereas the cruelly calculating N'wrbb and the disgusting degenerate Nvv'n both looked like men, they were at heart little more than vile beasts. While the spidery Shriek—as well as the half-mechanical Chang Guafe and the doglike Finnbogg—possessed the most admirable of human traits.

"Being Clive," Shriek grated again, "you live! I had abandoned hope for you, yet you live!"

"As do you, Shriek." Even in the dire situation that confronted him, Clive rejoiced. "Where are we now—and what have these beasts done to us?"

The arachnoid made that weird grating sound that passed for her as laughter. "Do I look any different to you, Being Clive, from the way I looked in the Dungeon?"

Folliot studied the arachnoid. He recalled, with a shudder that he hoped was not too visible, Shriek's expressed affection for him. He thought of the bizarre mating ritual of some spiders—perhaps of Shriek's kind—in which the female beheads and devours the male at the completion of their union. Shriek had shown her attraction to Clive, and he had managed as adeptly as he could to repel her advances. He managed to say, "You look just the same to me."

Shriek made her grating noise again. "And you, to me, Being! But look around you. Has anything changed?"

Clive realized that he was no longer in the laboratory. He had been returned to the chamber in which he had previously confronted N'wrbb Crrd'f. Only he stood on a wooden surface instead of the stone floor of the room. N'wrbb Crrd'f stood near his thronelike seat, smiling maliciously at Clive.

And there was something strange. Clive looked up at the ceiling, and saw wooden beams and blazing cressets. Only they appeared to be hundreds of feet in the air. He looked at the walls, and they seemed as distant as the stone pilasters and stained-glass windows of a cathedral.

And N'wrbb Crrd'f…

N'wrbb Crrd'f strode ponderously toward Clive. Each step seemed to send shock waves through the air, each stride brought Crrd'f closer and made him appear larger and larger until he loomed over Folliot and Shriek like a titan.

He raised a fist the size of a boulder and brought it smashing down on the wooden surface. Clive managed to leap away just in time to avoid being crushed like a mouse beneath a mallet. The wood rebounded at the impact, throwing Clive into the air.

Shriek emitted a bloodcurdling cry and began snatching clusters of barblike hairs from her back. Folliot remembered her ability to alter the chemical content of her own glands and create substances that could produce many reactions in any victim who chanced to be stuck by the barbs.

Screaming at the top of her voice, Shriek hurled cluster after cluster of barbs at the giant hands of N'wrbb Crrd'f. Clive heard Crrd'f shout with pain and rage, saw him dance away, shaking the entire wooden surface with each ponderous step. But now Clive realized that the giant Crrd'f did not stand on the same level with himself and Shriek.

There was an edge to the wooden surface, and Clive ran to reach it. Half a dozen strides from the edge he realized that it was a platform raised many times the height of a man above the stone floor of the chamber. He approached the edge gingerly, careful of losing his footing and toppling from the edge. But before he could reach the edge of the platform he felt a terrible surge of pain. He was literally knocked backward and off his feet. He stood dizzily. Shriek was at his side.

"You understand now, Being Clive?"

"Has N'wrbb Crrd'f become a giant?"

"No, Being Clive. You and I are as mites."

Clive sunk to his haunches, holding his head in despair. "Is there no hope for us, then?"

"Who knows, Being Clive? I was already shrunken when I arrived here. But I have seen N'wrbb Crrd'f and his disgusting lackey Nvv'n shrink others. He throws them to his Finnboggi for sport."

"Finnboggi? He has Finnboggi here? Is
our
Finnbogg here, then?"

Shriek made a gesture that could almost have passed for a shrug. "If he is, he has been so beaten down mentally that he is as a dog. They all are as dogs. I have seen other victims of Crrd'f's treatment… some who regain their size, if they live long enough. I think you would regain your size, Being Folliot. I might even regain mine—if he does not shrink us again, and if his Finnboggi do not kill us first."

"They're bloodthirsty, then?"

"I don't know. More likely, playful. But their play—on your own Earth, Being Folliot, did you ever see two puppies playing tug-of-war with a strip of rawhide?"

Clive closed his eyes. "If only there were some way to—to reawaken the intelligence in Finnbogg. I know he is as smart as many a man I have known. But like a dog he is subject to control. When I first met him he was serving as a guardian, serving masters who held him in contempt. But with my friends, he was awakened to his own nature, and he served with us long and well. Now, he is reduced again, almost as if he were a victim of mesmerism."

"You have an idea?"

"All we can do is prepare ourselves. Our opportunity will come, my friend Shriek."

And it was not long before that opportunity came.

The despicable Nvv'n came first. Clive Folliot and Shriek had been kept on the wooden platform—Clive realized that it was nothing more than a tabletop—for days. Nvv'n came each day to throw them scraps of food and to offer them sips of water. Sometimes N'wrbb Crrd'f stood and watched; sometimes he stood close over them, taunting and laughing.

Shriek tore her hair and threw it at him, but N'wrbb Crrd'f dodged aside, laughing all the more. Shriek and Clive together tried to escape from their tabletop prison, but the zone of pain that surrounded it halted them. Even when they tried to hurl themselves through it, leaping from a distance half their own height, the force threw them back.

But today Nvv'n approached them wearing heavy gauntlets. He stood over the table, reached for them from above, and caught Clive first in one gloved hand. With crude skill he held Clive, bound him hand and foot, and dropped him helpless upon the stone floor. Briefly he repeated the exercise, this time making Shriek his victim.

N'wrbb Crrd'f sat in his thronelike chair, gloatingly overseeing the operation.

Now Nvv'n disappeared from the room. There was a sound of snuffling, of claws scratching on flagstone, of baying. Nvv'n reappeared, the leads of half a dozen slavering hounds grasped in his grimy fingers.

"Let the nice doggies go, Nvv'n," N'wrbb Crrd'f purred.

"Uh, yuh, yuh," Nvv'n slobbered. He unsnapped the leads from the collars of the hounds. With a chorus of howls and yelps, the half-dozen dogs, each of them ten times Clive's present height, charged forward.

"They aren't dogs!" Clive exclaimed. "Not real dogs. They're Finnboggi. They've lost their humanity—they've reverted!"

The nearest canine was almost upon Clive and Shriek. Clive twisted from side to side, desperately searching for a weapon—and not finding one. Even bound as he was, if he had a sword or a knife he might free himself and then try to stand off his gigantic attackers. But there was nothing—nothing! It would have to be his bare hands, then. Bare hands, and bound hands at that, against a pack of hounds as big as elephants.

But no—Shriek had weapons of her own! The clumsy-fingered Nvv'n had done a poor job on Shriek, and she was able to writhe and scramble until her claws were free of her bonds. She reached for clusters of quill-like hairs growing on her back. With pincerlike claws she hurled them at the leading hound. The hairs struck with unerring accuracy, planting themselves in the creature's soft, tender nose.