Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (6 page)

Yes.

This is 1896. You have been gone for twenty-eight years.

 

The monster's clammy hand held Clive by the throat; his other hand held him by one leg. Clive felt himself lifted in the air. Before his eyes there was a swirl of darkness, a blur of the creature's death-white face and dead-black garments, of points of starlight glimmering on the polished metal that covered much of Chang Guafe.

"Stop! What are you doing?"

Clive was suspended over black water. Chill air swept his body, his inadequate costume providing little protection from the cold. A thin spray of frigid brine splashed his skin.

"You live, insect?"

The monster threw him into the air as a playful parent would toss a merrily squealing babe. To Clive the sensation was terrifying, and when the monster caught him again he clutched at the thick black cloth of his sleeve.

"I live, I live! Put me in the boat again!"

"I warned you, despicable creature." The monster's eyes glared with hatred, the little light that reflected from them coming from the stars that dotted the black sky above.

"You warned me to live, and I am alive!"

The monster threw him contemptuously back onto his seat. "What say you, Chang Guafe?" He turned his mighty frame to face the impassive cyborg. "Did this bug give any sign of life?"

The cyborg's mechanical voice grated, "No, Frankenstein. He looked as dead as anything I've ever seen. Deader than you," Chang Guafe added sardonically.

The monster laughed, a horrible, nerve-twitching sound.

"You are fools, both of you," Clive accused. "I was in communication with George du Maurier. He is my friend, and he is in England, and I had managed to establish a mental link with him."

"Looked dead to me," the monster grumbled.

"He might have sent an expedition to help us."

Chang Guafe raised his metal-capped countenance in interest. "Sent an expedition from where?"

"England!"

"To where?"

"To find us here upon the ocean."

"You are certain we are no longer in the Dungeon?" Chang Guafe prompted. "Does he know how to reach the Dungeon?"

"I don't know. Perhaps via the Sudd."

"And this expedition, do you expect it to trace your path through the nine levels of the Dungeon and come to your rescue?"

"I told you before that I am convinced we have returned to the Earth. I am thoroughly convinced of this," Clive asserted. "I thought you had accepted my reasoning."

"Tell me once again, Being Clive. You claim that you have spoken with your mind, to the mind of your friend?"

"Yes."

"If this is true, I suppose anything may be true. Still, Being Folliot, upon what evidence do you base the belief that we are upon the Earth?"

"Upon this evidence!" He rose from his place and pointed his finger at the monster. In the faint light of distant stars, he could see his own pale flesh and the paler flesh of the monster. "I realize now that Mrs. Shelley's tale was no mere romance, no fantasy. It was absolute truth, done up in trappings of fiction to make it acceptable to a skeptical world that would otherwise have recoiled in horror from the facts laid before its collective eyes."

"And so?"

"At the end of Mrs. Shelley's tale, the monster—
this
monster!—is seen pursuing his creator across the ice floes of the arctic region. What became of that tortured soul, that fantastic experimenter, we do not know. Perhaps we will find out, perhaps the answer will remain a mystery forever. That is to be seen."

He whirled and pointed once again. "But the monster remained in that polar realm, trapped and frozen in the very ice that caps our globe. There it was that we found him. Ergo, we are not in the ninth level of the Dungeon, but have been returned in some manner to the Earth."

He paused for the beat of a heart. "Or else, we may be led to conclude that the Earth itself is the ninth level of the Dungeon!"

Chang Guafe extended one telescoping, metallic eye-stalk toward the monster, another toward Clive. "Well, Frankenstein—what do you think? What became of your maker? And what do you know of the Dungeon and its contending would-be masters?"

The monster did not answer. Perhaps it would have, .

Clive thought, but a whirring, sizzling sound interrupted the conversation and drew the attention of the three upward.

There Clive saw once again a sight that he had first seen on Earth, in the sky above the coast of eastern Africa. On that occasion he had been en route from the island of Zanzibar to the mainland of the mysterious continent, in search of his missing elder twin, ignorant of the very existence of the Dungeon, the black world known as Q'oorna, the levels and layers of reality that lay hidden behind the veil of the Sudd.

Many times he had seen the sign: in the skies above Earth and Q'oorna, on the midnight-blue grip of Horace Hamilton Smythe's silver revolver, in the architecture of vaulting, ancient cities on worlds whose very existence he would never have imagined. And every time he saw that sign, it had foretold terrible events.

Now he saw it above Earth's black arctic sea.

The swirling, hypnotic spiral of stars.

And, as if coming from that spiral of stars, this peculiar, buzzing sound, remindful of a child's Guy Fawkes Day firework. Or, more sinisterly, like the sizzling, sputtering combustion of a fuse, or a powder trail that might lead to a barrel of black powder ready to explode and blow everything within range of its blast to kingdom come!

Clive stood transfixed, vaguely aware of his two inhuman companions doing the same, staring upward, attempting to locate the source of the sizzling sound.

The spiraling stars surrounded a patch of blackness far more profound than that of the ordinary polar sky that surrounded the spiral. And from the center of that blackness there now appeared the tiniest and faintest of embers, an ember that brightened and grew until it became apparent that it was itself a nearly circular figure of light.

The light grew and brightened until Clive realized that the change in its size and brightness was an illusion. It was not growing—it merely
appeared
to be growing.

It was approaching!

It was descending toward their boat!

It was speeding in a downward spiral, like a long railroad train making its way down the long course of a track that wound from the peak of a conical mountain to its base.

Downward the train moved, sizzling and flaring as it advanced.

"I've seen that before! I've seen it in the Dungeon! Chang Guafe, I cannot recall—had you yet joined our party when we encountered that train?"

"I have never seen its like," the cyborg grated.

"It is a railroad unlike any other, Chang Guafe—a railroad that travels between worlds, that picks up passengers from every locus of time and space, that moves between ordinary worlds and the Dungeon!"

"I have seen railroads," the monster boomed.

"But not such as this one!" Clive rejoined. His excitement was unbounded. If they could board this train, there was no telling where they might travel—to other levels of the Dungeon, to ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt, to far Cathay where Horace Hamilton Smythe had once traveled—perhaps to the world of the Finnboggi or even the planet where Chang Guafe had first come into being.

"Here!" Clive shouted. He seized an ice oar and waved it around his head, wishing that he had a flag of bright cloth, or better yet a flaming brand with which to attract the attention of the train and its crew.

But there was no need for that. The train continued to spiral downward, downward, circling all the time over the heads of the three oddly assorted companions.

When the bellies of the cars were a few yards above the surface of the black ocean, the very waters of the Arctic bubbled and steamed, sending clouds of vapor up into the night air to greet the circling cars.

Finally the train settled onto the face of the sea. The heat of its passage through Earth's atmosphere was transferred to the water itself, boiling away unmeasured thousands of gallons and heating the region within the circle of cars so that the ice boat Chang Guafe had carved from the arctic floe, already perilously thin and porous from its days and nights afloat, disintegrated into a hopeless scattering of icy particles that quickly melted away and disappeared.

Clive Folliot began swimming toward the nearest car of the train. Behind him he could hear the monster's clumsy but powerful strokes as it emulated his action.

But the grating voice of Chang Guafe emitted a single, despairing cry followed by a hopeless gurgle.

Clive Folliot turned to see what had become of the alien cyborg, but there was only a final flash of metal as Chang Guafe slipped beneath the surface, followed by a concatenation of bubbles. The black waters closed calmly over the cyborg.

He couldn't swim
, Clive thought.
He was built mainly of metal. He was so heavy that he couldn't swim
!

The sides of the train were lined with windows, and the, windows were ablaze with lights from within the train. As Clive stroked his way through the once more cooling waters, he peered at the cars of the train. One, he saw, was filled with couches and chairs where comfortable travelers inhaled fumes from long-stemmed pipes. He had encountered users of fumes in the Dungeon, intelligent men and women—and nonhuman creatures—who had found peace and happiness in the smoke-induced realm of the dreamers.

Theirs was a pleasant enough existence, but it was not for Clive. He could not give himself to an existence of idleness, however comfortable. In England and in remote military posts, he had known men who had given themselves to drink, spending their days and nights in the companionship of fellow idlers, accomplishing little. The smoke-eaters of the dungeon were no better than these!

Clive had started his long odyssey in search of his brother. He had encountered others and his' sense of responsibility had grown. He could not abandon Annabelle or Horace, Sidi Bombay or Finnbogg or Chang Guafe—for he could not believe that the cyborg was dead, either. Somewhere beneath him, buried by fathoms of icy water, Clive felt that Chang Guafe still lived. He would be heard from again!

And there were other characters here in the Dungeon about whom he was less certain. There was Tomàs, the Portuguese seaman. Annie herself claimed to have found evidence that Tomàs was a distant relative of the Folliots. There was the American Philo B. Goode, and there were Goode's two confederates, Amos Ransome and Lorena Ransome, who claimed at various times to be brother and sister or husband and wife. There was Baron Samedi.

And there were Clive's brother, Neville, and their father, Baron Tewkesbury… or the simulacra of Clive's brother and father. Until he had resolved their true identities, he would never know whether he could leave the Dungeon once and for all, for if they were imposters they could remain in the Dungeon and rot forever, for all Clive cared. But if they were real… if they were real, he could not abandon them. No, no matter how cold and unloving Baron Tewkesbury had been to Clive, blaming him for the death of his beloved baroness, and no matter how arrogant and churlish the bullying Neville might have been in their childhood and might be even now, Clive could not abandon them to the endless Gehenna of the Dungeon!

He swam to the next car. The water that the train's energetic arrival had heated to near boiling temperatures was cooling as rapidly as it had warmed, and a killing cold was seeping into his bones. Clive knew that he could not remain in the water for much longer. A matter of minutes, at most, and he would sink to the seabed. And, unlike Chang Guafe, he knew that he could not survive there.

He could hear the monster yet, floundering in the water behind him. The creature was a far from skillful swimmer, but Clive was confident that he would safely reach the train and haul himself from the brine.

And as for Chang Guafe, there was nothing he could do now for the alien. If he knew Chang Guafe, he would find a way to survive at the bottom of the sea, make his way back eventually to land, and then go on about his business.

But as for now—

 

Clive hauled himself up, using the railing that descended along with a short metallic staircase from each car of the train. He peered behind him, over his shoulder, and saw that Frankenstein's monster had somehow turned in the water. He seemed to understand little of what he was doing. He paddled clumsily away.

Even as Clive watched, the monster reached a distant coach. The train had drawn itself into a circle, like the legendary serpent of the Scandinavians that swallowed its own tail. Whatever direction the swimming monster took, he would still return to the train. The monster raised a corpse-gray hand flounderingly from the water and managed to grasp the nearest railing. Using the overwhelming strength of his huge muscles, the monster hauled himself bodily from the sea and clung to the side of the coach.

He fumbled at the car, eventually found the handle that unlocked the door, and disappeared within.

Clive Folliot was prepared to do the same, but even as he set himself to the task he was nearly thrown from his feet, for the train had started to move.

It gained speed with breathtaking rapidity, plowing its circular course upon the face of the arctic sea. Then, with a sudden shift of direction, the engine-car of the train straightened its movement. The following cars were tugged into perfect alignment and the train accelerated wildly, throwing up spectacular walls of foaming, boiling spray that stood taller than an obelisk on either side of the train.

Then the front of the train lifted from the water, and the remainder of the coaches followed suit, tugged from the grip of the sea. The train tilted ever more precipitously upward, until Clive realized that he could not hold on to the railing longer than a few seconds more. He tugged at the coach door to open it, hauled himself into the car, and slammed the door behind him.

He turned to see what kind of world he had entered, and staggered with shock.