Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (31 page)

The thing was one of the monsters that Clive had first encountered at the bridge of black obsidian on Q'oorna. That one had shown him the face of his brother Neville and had spoken to him in an obscene parody of Neville's voice.

This one showed him the face of…
Sidi Bombay
.

Clive was thunderstruck. But even as he stood gawking at the hideous sight, the face melted and ran like soft wax, reforming itself into the pale beauty of the Lady 'Nrrc'kth. The white skin, the emerald eyes, the shining, green-tinted hair were so real that Clive involuntarily raised his hand to touch the lady's cheek.

But 'Nrrc'kth was dead!

But George du Maurier. was dead also, and yet du Maurier spoke to Clive and told him not to be distracted by the triviality of death!

" 'Nrrc'kth!" Clive cried out.

The emerald eyes pierced his own. The lips opened. A hideous roar emerged, not from the lips of the lady, but from the round membrane of a monster, that vibrated like the head of a drum.

Clive recoiled—but for a mere instant. He was armed with the sword he had taken from the Muntor Eshverud; and with a determination that the old Clive Folliot could never have exhibited, he lunged at the monster.

It snapped its trunk away from him and scuttered across the room with astonishing agility, propelling itself with its rows and clusters of tentacles.

"Enough, Clive Folliot! Enough!"

The voice was that of Sidi Bombay, and the words were followed by the distinctive laughter that Clive had so many times heard from the Indian.

Even as Clive stood, pop-eyed and open-mouthed, the monster began again to melt and reform itself in a manner not unlike that of the alien shape-changer Chang Guafe. It changed its form, its size, its coloration. It became a man, dark-skinned and nearly naked, garbed only in a white turban and spotless breechclout.

"Clive Folliot," Sidi Bombay said. He bowed extravagantly, giving the gesture a touch of irony that robbed it of all obsequy.

"The monster," Clive gasped, "the Chaffri! They're hideous things, Sidi Bombay, hideous great insect-things that can reach into our minds and steal the images of those we hold dear, and fool us into thinking that they're humans themselves!"

"I know that well, Clive Folliot."

"But—are you Sidi Bombay? Or are you one of them?"

"Here is the Chaffri who tried to work that deception on me, O Major." The African turned and with a graceful gesture indicated a rough cage. Where Sidi Bombay had obtained the cage, or how he himself had constructed it from scrap, Clive had no idea—nor any time to worry.

He took the few strides that brought him close to the cage. It was no larger than the carrying case that a lady would use to transport a pampered miniature spaniel on a country outing. It appeared to be constructed of ordinary wood, but the creature that it held made no effort to break its way free.

When Clive caught his first glimpse of the creature it resembled the Chaffri scarab-mantises with which he was already unpleasantly familiar. But even before he could catch a clear image of the thing, it changed. For a moment it was a miniature figure of the Lady 'Nrrc'kth, all pale skin and shimmering forest green hair and flashing emerald green eyes. And nude, utterly nude, its milk-white flesh the very image of cold yet voluptuous grace.

And then before Clive's eyes it turned to the image of his father, Baron Tewkesbury. But the baron as Clive had known him as a fierce and terrifying tyrant of middle years, not the pitiable husk of a man Clive had last seen in the library at their Devonshire estate.

Clive recoiled.

The baron raised a fist, and in a shrill voice began to berate him for treason to the House of Folliot.

And then he wavered again, and melted, and reformed into an image of a great hair-covered spider.

"Shriek!" For an instant Clive was filled with a pang of longing and yearned for reunion with the alien arachnid who had been his companion on so many adventures in the Dungeon. But he had left Shriek, along with Finnbogg, on the planet Djajj. Could this be the alien?

But then the spidery Shriek changed again and was the nameless monster created by the cursed experimenter Frankenstein, the monster last seen by Clive climbing aboard a compartment of the space-train near Earth's polar ice cap.

"Enough!" Clive cried out. "Stop it! Reveal your true form!"

The monster shook its fists at him, then lowered them slowly to its sides. It wavered several more times, offering suggestions of Annabelle, of the tentacled monster once more, of Clive's brother Neville—or perhaps of Clive himself—before lapsing into the scarab-mantis configuration that Clive at last knew to be its true form.

"A lovely creature, is it not, Clive Folliot?" Sidi Bombay stood near Clive, smiling at him. He lifted the wooden cage in one dark-skinned hand and held it close to his face, smiling benignly at the creature within.

Clive saw the creature gesture helplessly at Sidi Bombay—once, then again—then relapse onto the wooden bottom of its prison.

"Is this the true Chaffri?" Clive asked.

"So it is, Clive Folliot. When we are fooled by it, a terrifying enemy. When we see through its deceptions, when we realize that it draws all its power over us from the recesses of our own minds—a piteous, helpless bug."

He placed the cage on the floor.

"But Sidi Bombay… when I arrived in this room, I saw one of the tentacled monsters that we now know are Ren. And it turned into
you
! Are you a Ren? Were you transformed?"

"No, Clive Folliot." Sidi Bombay shook his head. "I am nothing but a man, nor have I ever been other than a man. I can only guess that the Chaffri"—he nodded his head toward the insect in the cage—"plucked
that
image from your mind. Instead of creating the illusion that it was a Ren, it fooled you into thinking that I was one."

Clive leaped. "Sergeant Smythe!"

Sidi Bombay looked inquiringly at him.

"He is across the hall. He entered another room, Sidi Bombay. Smythe and I were looking for you. We feared that you had been taken in by the trickery of these monsters."

"Hardly." Sidi Bombay smiled.

"But we must see what happened to Sergeant Smythe!"

With Sidi Bombay in his wake, the Indian stopping only to snatch up the wooden cage that held the now seemingly helpless Chaffri, Clive plunged from the room, crossed the hall in a hurried stride, and thrust open the door opposite.

Quartermaster Sergeant Horace Hamilton Smythe lay on his back. His eyes were closed, and blood dripped from the corner of his mouth.

Clive peeled back his eyelids. The man moaned and struggled. Clive helped him to a sitting position.

"What happened, Sergeant?"

"Uh… uhh," Smythe tried to speak.

Sidi Bombay placed the wooden cage on the floor and took Horace Hamilton Smythe's hands in one of his own. The other he placed gently on the sergeant's forehead. The Indian muttered a few words. Clive could not make sense of them. Sidi Bombay released Smythe's hand, then removed his palm from the sergeant's forehead.

Smythe blinked and looked at Clive Folliot and Sidi Bombay. He was clearly suffering still from the effects of shock, but his eyes were clear and his manner was lucid.

"I think someone hit me, sah," he said to Clive.

Clive could barely restrain a smile. "I believe so, Sergeant. Did you catch a look at your assailant?"

Smythe blinked with effort. "I'm sorry, sah. All I can remember is setting foot inside the room and—
crash
!—if the Major knows what I mean, sah. All the usual effects that the sensation-mongers speak of, sah. Rushing darkness, sparkling stars, and so forth, sah: Next thing I knew, there you were, sah. Your Majorship and Sidi Bombay."

The Indian was leaning from behind Clive, smiling reassuringly at Sergeant Smythe.

"Sidi Bombay!" Smythe exclaimed. "You're all right, my old friend."

"But of course, Horace."

"They didn't fool you, Sidi Bombay? The Chaffri didn't cast a glamour over your mind?"

"They tried," Sidi Bombay said. "I was not fooled by their childish prank, Horace."

Smythe grunted. "Me 'n Major Folliot was fooled for a bit. I wouldn't call that a childish prank, Sidi Bombay!"

"Someday you Europeans will catch up with the rest of the world, Horace. I pray only that you do not destroy it first!"

Clive asserted his leadership. "We'll leave such debate for a night's conversation over the campfire, men. For now, we've got to get away from this place and get on with business."

The others assented.

"Come along, then."

They exited the inn, Sidi Bombay carrying the wooden cage with the apparently subdued Chaffri in it.

Clive peered between the slats of the Chaffri's cage. "Are they really that size, Sidi Bombay? Hardly bigger than a housecat!"

"They are, Major Folliot."

"But their spacecraft—they seemed to be of a size to be manned by ordinary folk. People such as we. And even after I fought off the spell of the Chaffri that tried to destroy me—"

"I congratulate you on fighting off that spell, Clive Folliot." Sidi grinned. "Would you reveal to me how you did it?"

Clive reddened. "Perhaps later, Sidi Bombay. We have not the time for details now. Please to answer my question."

Sidi Bombay held up the Chaffri. It raged ineffectually against the bars. "They vary, Clive Folliot. They vary." He lowered the cage.

A bolt of vivid verdure flashed past them. Without a word, the three men flung themselves to the ground. Clive peered ahead. Full morning—or what passed for full morning on the planetoid Novum Araltum—had overtaken them. In the dim light Clive could make out the form that he recognized as that of the Muntor Eshverud, crouched some fifty yards away.

But Clive had seen Eshverud lying dead, his head very nearly severed from his trunk. But if Eshverud's living form had been an illusion, a glamour cast over Clive's mind to conceal the Chaffri's true monstrous appearance… if that had been the case to begin with, then the sight of Eshverud dead might equally have been a deception. But if… but if…

Clive squeezed his eyes shut, striving to clear his mind.

He opened his eyes again.

The Muntor had raised a rifle to his shoulder. In Novum Araltum's morning light, Clive identified it as a Snider, one of the Royal Army's breech-loading conversions based on the old Enfield muzzle-loader. It was a weapon Clive knew well. But instead of its normal ball ammunition, the Muntor's Snider seemed to be firing the powerful ordolite ray!

Muntor Eshverud loosed another ray that sizzled the very air as it whipped past the three Earthmen. Then the Chaffri was on his feet again, fleeing.

A single Chaffri spacecraft stood ready on the field, and Eshverud leaped into it, slamming the metal port behind himself.

Clive gave chase, Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe following in his wake. But before they could reach the craft, it had lifted from the field and flashed into Novum Araltum's asteroid-sprinkled sky.

"Major, sah! I can see our own car! Let's get out of here, sah!"

For a moment, Clive stood his ground, surveying the situation. The Muntor Eshverud—presumably, one of the scarab-mantis creatures himself, despite his astonishingly persistent disguise as a human—had made good his escape.

Had not Clive seen Eshverud's nearly decapitated corpse lying near the erstwhile inn? Another illusion, he mused bitterly, another illusion on this planet of illusions. The Chaffri must have plucked another image from Clive's own brain and reflected it back to his sensorium so that he perceived the corpse of a martyr when he actually beheld a foul and definitely living monstrosity. The Chaffri must have known that it was incapable of standing up to a man such as Clive Folliot in honest combat, so had chosen to hide behind a glamour and thus avoid the fight.

But even if Eshverud had escaped, the three Earthmen had still captured one of the Chaffri, and the three comrades were largely unharmed.

How many more of the enemy might surround them, what fate lay in store should they remain on Novum Araltum, could only be guessed.

But the three had left London on a mission to the home not of the Chaffri nor of the Ren, but of their common enemy, the mysterious and mighty Gennine. Why should they become bogged down here on Novum Araltum? There was little to be gained in this place!

"Right, Horace! Sidi Bombay, bring that Chaffri along—it may come in handy later on."

He set out, cutting the distance that separated him from the glass-walled car that had brought them here from Earth.

 

The ship had apparently been left unmolested and unguarded. The entire aerodrome, in fact, seemed to be deserted, and Clive found himself wondering once again where the Chaffri had gone. Two he had killed, one Sidi Bombay had captured, and the Muntor Eshverud had made good his escape.

But there had been scores, perhaps hundreds of the Chaffri at this base. There must be thousands on Novum Araltum. Many thousands, perhaps. Where had everyone gone?

"Are we agreed, my friends? Do we resume our mission?"

Horace Hamilton Smythe and Sidi Bombay exchanged glances.

"You are our leader, Clive Folliot," the turbaned Sidi Bombay replied.

Horace Smythe merely nodded his assent.

Clive tried the door of the car in which they had traveled from Earth to Novum Araltum. It was not fastened. He opened it and climbed inside.

Horace Smythe followed Clive and busied himself with checking the car's controls, while Sidi Bombay circled the car examining its exterior, now scrambling across its top like a squirrel, now squirming beneath it like a ferret. Eventually he entered the car and sealed the door behind himself.

Sidi Bombay said, "Clive Folliot, the car seems unharmed."

"Everything's on the up-and-up," Horace Smythe put in.

Once again Clive Folliot felt the weight of leadership upon his shoulders. This was a position he had not sought, nor was it one that he wished to fill. But it had been thrust upon him. Were he a Fabian addressed by Malvolio, he could not have felt more heavily his responsibility.