Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (5 page)

But when they reached the edge of the ice floe and saw the green-black sea spreading unbroken to the horizon, Clive was filled with a mixture of joy and dread unmatched in his long days in the Dungeon. Was he merely exchanging one death for another? Was it going to be a contest between starvation and drowning instead of death from exposure on the ice floe?

He could not permit himself to dwell upon this. Action, movement, that was what he needed. For well or for ill, he would meet his fate struggling to the last. Surrender was not an acceptable option.

They managed to construct their boat of ice as Clive had suggested. The monster stood morosely watching and listening as Clive and Chang Guafe discussed their plans. Chang Guafe was an ideal mechanician, having not only the skills requisite to the task but a complete set of tools either built into his body or subject to his own fabrication.

Clive had not formally studied marine architecture, but he had sailed small craft as a boy and traveled on both sailing ships and the new steamers as a man, and together the two of them were able to plan an ice shell capable of bearing the three companions and surviving on the northern sea.

With Clive's plans scratched onto the smooth surface of the ice, Chang Guafe carved out the rough body of their boat, then melted and cut at the ice until the boat was completed. Chang Guafe was even able to create a sail of a thin sheet of ice, and to manufacture oars for them to use should the sail melt away. He attached a rudder at the rear of the boat and pronounced it ready.

Clive christened the boat
Victoria
in honor of the monarch he hoped still to serve. They climbed in and shoved their cockleshell away from the ice.

Even now, Chang Guafe's amazing toolshop came into play. At Clive's urging, the cyborg found that he could manufacture a crude compass. "I can sense the planet's lines of magnetic force," Chang Guafe protested, "there is no need for this toy."

But Clive had pleaded. "It isn't that I mistrust you, Chang Guafe. But I will feel more confident if I can look at a compass and tell for myself the direction of our movement."

"As you wish, Being Clive." They set a curving course, sailing in an ever-expanding spiral southeast from their point of departure.

A course due south might have brought them to land sooner than this spiral, but it might also have sailed them to their doom. By sailing in their spiral course they inferred that they would sooner or later reach the northerly coast of a continent.

Sooner or later
, Clive thought to himself.
Well, it had better be sooner than later, or our dead bodies will wash ashore rather than our boat making land
!

He knew they were making good progress, for now the sun did dip beneath the horizon, giving them periods of true night, and it did rise well into the sky to give them periods of true daylight. They took watches, turn and turn-about, keeping
Victoria
on her compass course.

Chang Guafe spun a lengthy filament and crafted a fishing lure, sending the line overboard to troll behind
Victoria
, if they could catch fish they could all obtain nourishment from it, consuming its cold raw flesh, in the fashion of the exotic Japanese.

The thought of the Japanese sent Clive's mind spanning the time to their arrival in the Dungeon, and his encounter, along with his early companions, with a Japanese Imperial Marine detachment. He and Horace had already been joined by the doglike Finnbogg and by young Annabelle Leigh, and Annabelle had been captured briefly by the Japanese.

She had made good her escape in a flying machine brought to Q'oorna by the same aliens who had abducted the marines, snatching them from an island redoubt in the Pacific Ocean in the midst of a war nearly a century in Clive Folliot's future.

And Clive had seen her, had seen Annabelle, flashing her wings above the polar ice cap.

Or had he? He had seen the Nakajima 97, and had assumed that Annabelle was piloting the aeroplane. But was the pilot Annie? Or had she been taken prisoner again, either by the Imperial Marines or by someone other, who in turn had commandeered the aeroplane? And what had happened to the flying machine when it disappeared above the ice cap?

Clive and Annie, Chang Guafe and Finnbogg, Horace Hamilton Smythe and Sidi Bombay… the adventures they had shared, the perils, and the triumphs!
And now
, he wondered,
now what was to be their fate? Dear God
! He stole a covert glance at Chang Guafe, and at the stolid, pallid form of the Frankenstein monster.

What was to be their fate?

 

Clive was awakened by the weight of a massive, corpse-gray hand shaking him by the shoulder.

He blinked into the red, hating eyes of Frankenstein's monster. Although the hideous creation had claimed his maker's name as his own, Clive refused to think of him as Frankenstein. That was the name of a natural philosopher or scientist, a man of noble instincts and lofty aspirations.

According to the Widow Shelley's narrative, Frankenstein had achieved more through his experiments than he had bargained for. Unable to cope with his own creation, he had fallen prey to fear and craven impulse, to the weakness that besets any man, however well intentioned. Frankenstein had been a weak man, perhaps, but not an evil one. His name ought not to be a synonym for horror and destruction.

To Clive, the creature was now and would always be simply the monster.

"Folliot, you are dying," the monster's bass tones rumbled.

"I am not," Clive managed. "I am merely hungry and cold."

They had caught a single fish on the end of Chang Guafe's line. That was, what—two days ago? Three? It had been a small fish, and its flesh had furnished precious little nourishment for Folliot and Chang Guafe and Frankenstein's monster. Chang Guafe had divided the fish, scrupulously doling out the precious food to the others. They had wolfed down the cold flesh, and Clive decided after the fact that though the meager meal had given him a little more strength with which to survive, it had done still more to whip up his flagging appetite and increase the pangs of his hunger.

Their need for water was more easily tended to. Chang Guafe had indicated that he thought he could distill the choppy brine into potable water, but rather than risk that, the companions had loaded blocks of ice into their boat before leaving the floe. Now, when thirst demanded, Chang Guafe could carve off small slivers for the three of them. The slivers of ice, melting slowly in their mouths, slaked the thirst of all three.

"You are dying," the monster intoned over Clive Folliot. "I care but little should you perish, insect. But Chang Guafe values your continued existence. This, for some reason inexplicable to me. And so for his sake I will try to keep you alive."

"I am not dying," Clive repeated angrily. He pushed himself upright and realized, with horror, that the monster had been right. It would be all too easy to permit himself to lapse into a cold- and hunger-induced trance, and to slip thence gently from life into death, hardly taking notice of the transition himself.

The monster seized him by both shoulders and shook him. "Do not die, Folliot!" it roared. It drew back a massive, death-pale hand and slammed it, open-palmed, across Clive's cheek. The blow set his head to ringing. The humiliation of being so treated by this subhuman creation brought the blood flaming into his cheeks.

"Put me down!" he commanded.

"You may sit, but your eyes will remain open and you will move frequently, insect. Or I will give you a thrashing to make that slap seem like a lover's caress." A sneer spread over the monster's face and he released Clive.

Clive collapsed onto the bottom of the boat. He drew himself up to one of the seats that spanned its narrow width and rubbed his cheeks with both hands. A brisk breeze was shoving the boat along, pressing on its sail of ice sheeting. Chang Guafe sat in the stern, one eye fixed on the crude compass he had fabricated, guiding
Victoria
by her rudder of ice.

It had seemed like a good idea. For a time, Clive had halfway expected them to make land within a few hours of setting sail… or if not within a matter of hours, then surely within the first day or two.

But they sailed on, and on, and only dark water stretched in every direction.

Clive fixed his eyes on a point at the distant horizon, a point that seemed to bob up and down before the stationary boat, even though he realized that it was the boat's own bobbing that created the illusion of the moving horizon. He used that point at the horizon as a focus for his own consciousness, and attempted to place himself in a mental state to communicate with his friend George du Maurier, safely working away as cartoonist and critic for
Punch
magazine in London. He had tried innumerable times since entering the Dungeon to establish mental communication with du Maurier. It was amusing in an ironic fashion that back in London, du Maurier had expressed his belief in the possibility of life on other worlds, direct communication and the establishment of invisible mental bonds by sheer force of will, and other such mystical stuff.

Clive Folliot, by contrast, had scoffed at du Maurier's theories. Sensible materialist that Folliot had been, his experiences of recent times had convinced him that there were worlds within worlds, realities beyond realities, and that the skeptic spoke at his own peril when he scoffed at even the most exotic of beliefs.

Several times he had felt that he was indeed in mental communication with du Maurier—or at least that he was on the verge of establishing such contact. If only he could reach the cartoonist, he could ask
da
Maurier to pass word to Clive's editor, Maurice Carstairs of the
Illustrated Recorder and Dispatch
: his sweetheart, Miss Annabella Leighton of Plantagenet Court, London; his father, Baron Tewkesbury; his commanding officer, Brigadier Leicester of Her Majesty's Imperial Horse Guards.

At the very least, he might offer them some solace, the knowledge that as yet, at least, he had survived, and might someday, by some means, manage to return to England. And perhaps, just perhaps, they might mount an expedition into the Dungeon to rescue him and his descendant Miss Annabelle Leigh from their predicament.

"Oh, du Maurier," he whispered half-aloud, "my friend, can you hear me? Is there any hope, any connection, any link between us other than in my recollection of you?"

He felt hot tears welling in his eyes, and wiped at them with a hand now white with cold and near frostbite, cracked and peeling with exposure.

Is that you, Folliot?

He started and looked in all directions. Chang Guafe attended impassively to the management of their boat while the black-clad monster glared from his red-rimmed eyes. There was no sign of a speaker.

Du Maurier?

Yes! Clive Folliot, it is I! Where are you? How have you reached me?

I am adrift in the Polar Sea, accompanied by two such as you would never believe!

And you have reached me without physical or mechanical assistance?

By application of my mind alone, du Maurier.

In Clive's mind there was a ghostly suggestion of a laugh.

You were right all along, du Maurier. But, to reach you at last after so many years, so many attempts
—

This is not the first time you have reached me, Folliot. Are you unaware of your former successes?

I thought we were close, Folliot. Many times, it seemed that we were close. I could sense your presence, sense the energy of your mind striving to reach my own. I tried each time to respond. Did I succeed? Did you feel the touch of my mind in your own?

More than that, my friend
, du Maurier continued. You
have sketched the many sights and the strange beings you have encountered on your adventures, and those pictures have reached me here in London
.

But
—
I never sent you sketch-paper, du Maurier. How could my pictures reach you
?

As mental images, Folliot. Perhaps because I have myself worked as a sketch artist, I was attuned to your drawings. I have received no words from you. And for all that I tried to send messages back, I had no indication of success.

No. No, my dear friend, I never knew whether I had reached you or not. At times I had vague feelings, undefined inklings of companionship. But I never knew. I could only hope. Only faith in you sustained me, du Maurier.

Faith. How amazing to hear you speak so, my friend. Faith can move mountains, Folliot, can it not?

Clive paused to collect his thoughts, yet striving to maintain the link that had been established between himself and du Maurier.

Du Maurier's silent voice resumed.
What a comfort to me, after all these years, Folliot, to know this. What a comfort it is to a dying man
.

Dying
? The word hit Clive like a thunderbolt.

Dying peacefully, Folliot. I am an old man, and I lie now on my deathbed. I wonder if that helped to establish our bond. As my mind prepares to separate itself forever from my flesh, it is able to rove the dimensions and connect itself to yours. Or perhaps it is the work of Dr. Mesmer that had succeeded. I must summon her to my side while still I breathe.

I don't understand, du Maurier. You are not an old man. When I left London
—
do you remember that last night at your club, du Maurier, after the premiere performance of
Cox and Box—
how you entertained Miss Leighton and myself, our encounter with Carstairs of the
Recorder and Dispatch?

Very well, Folliot. Indeed do I remember that night very, very well.

But you were a man of but middle years, du Maurier.

I was fifty.

And that was some months ago. Why do you call yourself old?

Months ago? Months
! Again the laughter rang in out perfect silence.
That was 1868, Folliot
.