Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (30 page)

Behind Clive he could hear a dry scraping, and a sweet voice crying out. "Beloved! Come back, my beloved!"

He raced through the night. The lights of distant stars and nearby asteroids cast a myriad of shadows on the grassy plain. Clive found himself studying them distractedly while he ran. He could hardly tell which was his own shadow, which that of a high clump of grass or a bush.

With a crash, he tumbled to the ground. He had tripped over something. He pushed himself to his hands and knees and stared in horror at the body of Muntor Eshverud.

The Muntor lay face-up, staring glassily at the star-ribboned sky. His eyes were wide and filled with horror. There was no apparent wound on his body, yet when Clive felt his chest there was neither heartbeat nor respiration, and when Clive felt his skin it was cold. Eshverud had been dead for hours—probably, Clive inferred, the Muntor had left the inn at the moment of Clive and Annabella's first ecstatic embrace. He must have been killed almost immediately.

And he was, to all discernible evidence, truly human.

Clive seized the body by one shoulder and a trouser leg and turned Eshverud onto his face. The cause of death was immediately apparent—his neck had been severed from the rear, so that only a flap of skin held his head in place. Something incredibly sharp and driven with overwhelming force had come within a hair's breadth of decapitating Eshverud.

There was a rustling behind Clive. He pushed himself to his knees and took a final look at Eshverud. The man's ceremonial shortsword still rested in its ornate scabbard. Clive grasped the sword, drew it from the scabbard, and ran once more. Behind him the sound of Annabella's cries grew feint and then ceased.

Clive halted, thunderstruck, when he found himself standing at the inn once again. Or was it the same inn? The architecture was similar but some subtle difference in the building's situation told Clive that it was not the same one he had left behind. He circled it, Muntor Eshverud's shortsword at the ready. He found a shuttered window and shoved carefully at the weathered wood.

The shutters had been left unbarred! Within the room Clive could see a few guttering candles, and in their orange-tinted light, a sight that sent horror coursing through him.

Horace Hamilton Smythe, erstwhile military man, mandarin, Arab boy, and Tsarist nobleman, now in his garb as a London scrivener, sat in a rough-hewn wooden chair. A beatific smile lighted his doughty face, and he was speaking with animation. Clive could make out only a portion of his words, but they were clearly a long, detailed recitation of his adventures in the Dungeon. From time to time he would speak in direct address, calling his listener "Mother," or "Ma'am."

The listener, sedulously sharpening serrated claws upon each other, was a giant insect that looked like a cross between a scarab and a gigantic wasp!

Even as Clive clambered through the window, the insect launched its attack on Horace Hamilton Smythe. The battle lasted mere seconds, but to Clive it might have been hours.

Clive crashed shoulder-first against the carapace of the insect, knocking it sideways mere fractions of an inch short of inflicting a horrendous wound on Horace Hamilton Smythe. The insect recovered its balance and came at Clive, striking out with razor-edged claws. Clive lunged at it, using the Muntor Eshverud's shortsword as if it were a dueling saber. The insect was as tall as Clive, and its claw-tipped limbs flicked at him with amazing speed.

Years of training by his father, Baron Tewkesbury, and his brother Neville, had given Clive a command of technique with the blade. On Earth he had never been a match for Neville, but years of adventuring in the Dungeon had hardened his muscles, quickened his reflexes,' and given him the attitude needful to the fighting man whose every engagement can mean his life or his death.

A feint at the insect's face brought its claws up to protect glittering, faceted eyes. Like lightning, Clive dropped his point and lunged instead at the thin, muscular target that connected segments of the insect's thorax.

In the blink of an eye, Clive switched his tactics from those of a foil-wielding duelist to those of a broadsword-wielding yeoman. He flicked left with the honed edge of the sword, then right.

The insect fell to the floor, neatly severed in two.

To Clive's horror, both segments continued to twitch and to strike out at him.

Horace Hamilton Smythe stood by in a daze. Clive leaped over a razor-sharp claw as the insect continued to snap and swipe at him. He grasped Smythe's elbow and hustled him from the room.

 

Horace Hamilton Smythe stumbling at his side, Clive Folliot made his way back into the night. Novum Araltum's sky was still suffused with the ghostly glow of the asteroid belt, and in that light the two men staggered from the inn.

"She was—she was my—" Horace Hamilton Smythe stammered half-incoherently, permitting himself to be guided by the more determined Clive. Clive permitted himself to slow his pace and peer back at the building. There was no sign of pursuit.

Smythe was still muttering and mumbling.

Clive grasped him by the shoulders and shook him. "Sergeant Smythe! Come to order, man! You cannot permit yourself this kind of conduct!"

Slowly the light of reason grew in the Smythe's eyes. He raised a trembling hand and drew it across his face, then dropped the hand to his side and brought himself to a modified form of attention. "I'm sorry, Major, sah. I must have been—I thought I'd been freed of the Ransomes' mesmeric control, but I fear I was mistaken, sah."

Clive shook his head. "I don't think it was the Ransomes, Sergeant. They've enough evil to answer for, should we succeed in hauling them before the bar of justice… but I don't think they can be blamed for the evil that is taking place here on this world of Novum Araltum. I think the Chaffri are to blame for that!"

"But I could have sworn, Major, that I was back on the family farm, in the arms of my dear mother. She lived a horrid life, Major, a horrid life."

"I understand that, Horace."

"And here she was, restored to me, as pure and beloved as when I was a boy."

"Don't you see, Horace, what has happened? The Chaffri—they seem to be a race of giant, intelligent insects. A cross between a scarab and a mantis." Clive shuddered. "And they have an ability that permits them to reach into a victim's brain and draw from it whatever image most powerfully controls that victim."

"Then it wasn't my ma'am at all, Major?"

"It was a monstrous insect that would have slaughtered you as coldly and deliberately as a mantis slaughters an aphid! And as likely drained your vital fluids for its own delectation, into the bargain!"

"Phaugh!"

"Indeed, Sergeant Smythe.
Phaugh
. I couldn't have put it better myself."

"And you saw your own ma'am, too, Major Folliot?"

"No, Smythe. I saw… another. A woman who gave me her best, her tenderest, and most honest faith and service. And I gave her—well, never mind that. It was not she. It was merely another of these murdering Chaffri."

"You killed that one, too, did you, sah?"

"I escaped it, anyway."

Smythe turned, surveying the horizon. On this tiny world it lay close by, and the turnings of day and night were quick.

Clive followed Smythe's example. The first blush of morning was coming upon them. He could see the Chaffri's landing field, the warlike ships, and the complicated equipment used to fuel and service them. What should Clive's next move entail?

Horace Smythe interrupted the nobleman's musings. "Sah—Major Folliot, sah! What of Sidi Bombay?"

"Good heavens! The Chaffri must have him yet! Quick, Smythe, did you see any other building—other than the one where I found you?"

"I'm not sure, sah. I think there was another structure beyond yon stand of trees. I was in my childhood home, in our little cottage on the farm. There would have been a shed for the animals not far off, sah."

"Take me to it. At once!"

They ran there quickly. As they drew to a halt, Smythe pointed. "There it is, sah! I'd swear, it was just the shed we had in Sussex back in the twenties!"

"And to me it resembles a rustic inn, such as would stand in Devonshire in the sixties. But it's neither, Horace! It's one of the Chaffri's horrid nests, and poor Sidi Bombay is inside it, at this very moment falling victim to God knows what terrible fate."

"Do you see two doors to it, sah?"

The question went through Clive like a bolt of galvanic electricity. If he and Sergeant Smythe saw the building differently, could they coordinate their efforts to rescue Sidi Bombay? Or would they blunder about helplessly, each entrapped by his own set of illusions, neither capable of penetrating his true surroundings?

"I do see two doors, Horace! A main entrance to the inn, and another that must be the means of access to the kitchen."

"I'll take the one to our right, sah. You take the other. Well find our way to poor Sidi—somehow."

"Stout man, Sergeant Smythe!" He clapped the other on the shoulder and set off, sword still in his hand, for the more distant of the two entrances to the building.

Even in the instant that Clive paused before plunging into the building, he was struck by the perfect imitation—or illusion—that the Chaffri had achieved. The walls were of timber and rough white plaster, the roof was thick rustic thatch, the windows fitted with diamond-paned glass. There was even the scent of the English countryside.

He shoved open the door and plunged into the common room of a typical Devonshire inn. The hearth, the rough tables and sturdy benches, the serving bar, even the wall decorations were chosen and arranged to perfection. But, Clive realized, they had not been chosen and arranged by the Chaffri themselves so much as they had been constructed by his own mind, functioning under the arcane compulsion of the Chaffri. Clive had summoned images from the half-remembered, half-idealized world of his young manhood as the cadet son of a country baron.

What reality lay behind the illusion of rustic woods and rough-hewn stone, he shuddered even to guess.

Clive had no time to stand and ponder. Sidi Bombay, for all he knew, lay in another room of the structure, in dire peril of his life. His mind might at this very moment be under the control of a mantislike Chaffri. The Hindu might be seeing a scene from the days of his youth, might imagine that he was in the village of his childhood, somewhere in the jungles of the Punjab or on the plains of Equatoria. Or he might be reliving a past experience that had involved him in the doings of the convoluted politics of the Indian subcontinent.

For an instant there flashed through Clive Folliot's own mind the horrifying thought that the mesmeric control and frightening responses of the otherwise stalwart Horace Hamilton Smythe might be the product of the same sinister powers of the Chaffri that he himself had experienced a few hours past.

Philo B. Goode… the self-styled Reverend Amos Ransome… the seductive Lorena Ransome, she of the shimmering black hair and dark liquid eyes and willowy figure so ill-concealed beneath her seemingly modest but subtly provocative costumes. Were any of them what they seemed? Were any of them even humans? Or were these three nothing more than hideous chitin-covered monstrosities masquerading in human society?

And if Philo Goode and the Ransomes were hideous monsters making for themselves the most effective of all disguises—the disguise of their own victims' minds and memories—then who else might be monsters as well? Clive's brother Neville? His father, the Baron Tewkesbury? His closest friend, the recently deceased George du Maurier? Annabella Leighton and her descendant Annabelle Leigh, the dear, eccentric "User Annie" of the year 1999?

Clive shuddered.

A voice seemed to whisper from within his mind.
Hold fast
, it urged him.
Hold fast to your grip on reality, Clive Folliot
!

Clive looked around. "Is that you, du Maurier?"

It is I.

"But you're dead."

Again you point out the obvious, Folliot. Do not let yourself be distracted by such trivialities as death. Plot your course, my friend. Do what you must. Much rests upon your shoulders, Clive Folliot. The fate of millions. Whole worlds, Clive! Do not be distracted by trivialities!

Clive heard a popping and crackling.

He peered around the common room and saw embers still glowing in the great hearth, threads of smoke rising slowly from the glowing embers of a huge backlog that must never grow fully cold and dark.

Was it truly a log, or a simulacrum of a log?

He rushed through the opening that led to the private rooms of the inn. He thrust open the first of them and found nothing of interest within. The second room proved equally unrewarding.

The sound of heavy boots captured his attention and he saw Sergeant Smythe approaching from the opposite end of the inn, checking rooms just as Clive was, snorting and slamming doors in impatience and disappointment as he found each chamber untenanted.

"Sergeant!"

They had met at the center of the hallway. Two doors remained to be tried, one on either side of the passage. Without a word, each man reached to open the door on his right.

Clive heard a grunt of surprise from Sergeant Smythe, followed by a sound of impact, as of a blunt and heavy object connecting with a human cranium. But Clive had no time to go to Smythe's assistance. He had already shoved open the door of the room to his own right, and he stood thunderstruck by the sight it contained.

A thing as alien and terrible as any Clive had ever beheld towered above him, its gargantuan trunk and massive crown bent to avoid scraping the beamed ceiling of the room. Great masses of tentacles writhed and snapped about it, rows and clusters of them dripping a noisome gelatinous slime. Clawed appendages, suction rings, and pseudopods appeared and disappeared, twisting sickeningly. Clive's stomach heaved.

The thing tilted in an arc so that its top was pointed at Clive. It was a circular membrane surrounded by waving, reaching tentacles.