Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (17 page)

Clive bowed his head as the hansom pulled away from the kerb. He closed his eyes and pressed his forefinger and thumb against their lids. How to tell reality from illusion? Whom to trust? Were these two, Horace Smythe and Sidi Bombay, truly his companions of old, or were they illusions placed here to mislead him? If Smythe could pose as a mandarin, an Arab boy, a nearsighted publisher—could not an enemy pose as Smythe?

The hansom's wheels rumbled over cobbled streets.

Another question perplexed Clive. If it was George du Maurier's mental power, as augmented by Madame Mesmer's influence, that had drawn Clive across time and space to this London of 1896… then how had Smythe and Sidi Bombay arrived here? They said nothing of having traveled across the years, but if they had lived continuously for these twenty-eight years, they should have aged, as had Clive's brother. And yet, neither seemed older than he had when last Clive had seen them in the Dungeon.

A shudder passed through Clive's body. There seemed no ready solution to his dilemma. He drew himself upright, dropped his hand, and looked around. The partly familiar, partly altered vista of London still surrounded him.

The hansom pulled to a halt in front of a building Clive had not seen since 1868—the gentleman's club where George du Maurier had brought him and Miss Leighton for a celebration following the premiere of
Cox and Box
,

and where Clive had also last seen the senior Maurice Carstairs.

The front door of the club bore a black wreath.

"Carstairs" sent the cab on its way and the three men , stood for a moment before the wreath. A small card, edged also in black, was affixed at its center. It read, GEORGE DU MAURIER, 1834-1896.

"Carstairs" rapped at the polished wood beside the wreath with his gold-headed walking stick. A liveried footman opened the door and bowed them inside, giving a series of startled glances, first at Horace Smythe, then at Sidi Bombay, and finally at Clive.

Sergeant Smythe peered nearsightedly at the footman. "Is that you, Browning?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is anything the matter, man?"

"No, sir. I just—I…"

"Out with it, man!"

"I could have sworn that you entered the club just a few minutes ago, sir. But that's impossible, for here you are." The footman managed a feeble smile.

"My associates and I will be using my private room for a short while. We are not to be disturbed."

Smythe stepped resolutely past the baffled footman, blundered off an overstuffed chair, grumbled at the staff for moving the furniture, collided with an elderly gentleman who tried frantically—but unsuccessfully—to avoid his pebble-visioned progress, and succeeded at last in leading the others to an inconspicuous corridor. This brought them to an even more inconspicuous room.

Bringing a key from his weskit, Smythe unlocked the door and ushered the others in. He locked the door behind them.

"No one is allowed in here," he explained. "No one, ever." As Clive looked around, Smythe said, "Dreadfully sorry about that encounter with the door-dragon. The real Carstairs must be in the building. This has never happened before—my fault, Major. Careless. No excuse for that."

"Spilled milk, Smythe. What now?"

"Now we change our identities, Major. I told you that we take precautions, and this is one such."

"Won't it appear odd, three persons entering this room and three others leaving?"

"We've a different way out, sah."

Minutes later three figures emerged from a florist's shop in a street not far from Carstairs' club. One was an officer of the Tsarist diplomatic service. The second appeared to be a laboring member of one of the darker races. The third was a jauntily costumed gentleman whose mustaches were waxed and twirled with self-indulgent care and whose right eye was magnified grotesquely by the thick lens of a monocle.

"Thus, in the fashion described so skillfully by the American author Mr. Poe, we hide ourselves from our enemies by making ourselves conspicuous." Horace Smythe nodded approvingly at the appearances of the others. "Come then, my friends. There's a marvelous game afoot!"

 

The three ill-assorted figures—the Tsarist diplomat who was really a quartermaster sergeant, the unimposing workman who was really a master of intrigue and of esoteric studies, and the Continental dandy who was really the younger son of a Gloucestershire nobleman—cast eerie shadows in the lights of the strange instruments that covered a full wall of the room.

They had entered one of London's most splendid hostelries, made their way to a room kept in the name of Count Splitofsky, and descended by private elevator car to a chamber buried deep beneath the streets of the metropolis.

"This is a strangely timeless place," Sidi Bombay commented. "I find it peaceful to visit, it renews my soul. Here there is neither night nor day, neither summer nor winter. The illumination, the temperature, the degree of moisture here never vary. One can attune oneself to the infinite and the eternal."

"Good for the equippage, also," Smythe put in pragmatically. "This comes from a later time—p'raps Miss Annie would find herself at home here. Might even recognize some of the devices. The experts who installed this said that unchanging temperature and humidity would be best for all the gear."

"What about Annie?" Clive asked. "She is my own descendant, Smythe, as you learned when we encountered her in the Dungeon. Has she been hoodwinked by the enemy? Is she under a mesmeric spell?"

"When did you see Miss Annie last, Major?"

"Why, mere hours ago. She was at Tewkesbury Manor. She remained there when I came to London to see Mr. Carstairs. The real Mr. Carstairs, that is—Maurice Carstairs, senior."

"Quite understood, sah. I'm very sorry, sah. That could not have been Miss Annie. You were dealing with a simulacrum. Where did you first encounter her, sah, if I might inquire?"

"She appeared in a very peculiar sort of railway car, in a tunnel beneath a saloon where I had previously encountered Mr. Philo Goode. The publican in that saloon was… yourself, Sergeant Smythe."

"Yes, sah. As I mentioned, sah, there are simulacra to be dealt with. I assure the Major, I have no recollection of the incident he describes. Nor have I been under the controlling influence of the Ransomes and their mesmeric talents. My mind has been cleared. I worked long and hard with Sidi Bombay, and there is no longer the cobweb of mesmeric influence left in my cranium. I assure you of that, sah!"

Horace Smythe swept the hair from his brow to show a surgical scar, stark and white against the darker skin. "It took the skills of the ancient Egyptians to remove those devices from my brain, sah. It was a painful procedure and a risky one. But I am rid of them, and it was all worth the trouble to me, sah."

Sidi Bombay nodded his endorsement of Smythe's statement.

Clive put his head in his hands. "Oh, my God! And my brother and father—at Tewkesbury?"

Smythe exchanged a glance with Sidi Bombay. "One cannot be certain," the Indian replied, "but there is reason to believe that neither of those men was real. The Folliots are at the center of the struggle of Chaffri and Ren, Gennine and Neighbors."

"Neighbors?"

"A little joke, sah," Smythe said. "A taste for irony. The grand alliance that is forged to oppose the Chaffri, Ren, and Gennine, is known as the Universal Neighborhood Improvement Association. As I mentioned to the Major earlier, sah. Wherever you travel, sah, if you can locate an office of the association—its members are known simply as the Neighbors—you are in communication with our alliance."

"But Annabelle, Neville, the old Baron—if those are merely simulacra in Tewkesbury, where are the real persons? How can I find them?"

"That's a difficult problem, sah. You're sure you saw Miss Annie only in that underground railway, and then at Tewkesbury, afterward?"

"When I first emerged—Sergeant, Sidi Bombay—
is
this the ninth level of the Dungeon? Is Earth the ninth level?"

The Tsarist official and the Indian workingman exchanged glances. Sidi Bombay said, "You must try to understand, Clive Folliot, that the levels of the Dungeon are not simple things. Your progress through them—the progress of all of our party—was not accomplished as simply as one would descend from story to story in a tall building here in London. How did you reach London? Where were you last, in the Dungeon?"

"I—it's all so confusing." Clive clutched his head. "On the eighth level, everything seemed to be building to a climax. The Ren and Chaffri had shown their hands at last. On the other levels, they operated through agents and surrogates. But on the eighth level they were present in
propriae personae
. Then, almost miraculously I found myself stranded on the polar ice cap."

He paced the room, looking up at the great instrument panel that covered a wall. What was the purpose of the meters with their swinging pointers, the tiny lamps that flashed on and off in various colors, the panels upon which enigmatic messages flashed into and out of being, some of them in the English language, some in other languages which Clive at least recognized, still others in symbols so alien to his eye that he was able only to infer that they were language at all?

"There on the ice I saw Annie. You remember the Japanese marines we encountered in the Dungeon?"

"Indeed, sah!" Smythe responded.

"And surely you remember the flying machine—the aeroplane—in which Annie escaped from them, and with which she joined us at the castle of N'wrrb. Smythe, Sidi Bombay—I saw Annie flying overhead at the pole, flying in that Japanese aeroplane. I waved to her and I'm sure she saw me. She waggled the wings of the aeroplane. I believe she intended to land and rescue me, only to disappear in the wink of an eye!"

The recollection brought a lump to his throat. He was convinced that the woman in the aeroplane was the
real
Annabelle Leigh. The woman in the subterranean car, the woman he had left at Tewkesbury Manor with a promise to return after visiting Carstairs in London—that woman was almost certainly a fraud. He tried to recall: Had he mentioned their polar encounter to her? Had she remembered it? Or had she feigned the recollection, permitting him to mislead himself in his eagerness to believe in her?

Where was the real Annabelle Leigh? Trapped in the Dungeon? Here on Earth, but stranded in the year 1868 while Clive and Horace Smythe and Sidi Bombay were in 1896, hardly a day older than they had been twenty-eight years before?

"Let's take this carefully, sah." Horace Hamilton Smythe had seated himself before a small panel of buttons and keys not unlike those used by the typewritists employed by newspapers and publishing firms. Clive had seen the like during his visit to the
Illustrated Recorder and Dispatch
.

"What do you intend to do, Smythe? This machine brings to mind those that Chang Guafe and I saw on the eighth level. Wondrous machines capable of storing amazing amounts of information, sorting through it and arranging it in many ways, then returning it to us upon request. Whole libraries and staffs of researchers concentrated like the Lord's Prayer engraved on the head of a pin!"

"Yes," Smythe said. "I know whereof the Major speaks. I know of such machines. And this here's the greatest of 'em all. Or, at least, it connects us to the greatest of 'em. Where the grand master machine is, I don't rightly know, sah. But what we've here is good enough for most jobs, and connects to the
real
big 'un if it's given a task it can't handle."

"And you're going to, ah, tell this machine my story? And ask it the meaning of my experiences?"

"Something like that, sah."

Even as he spoke, Horace Hamilton Smythe's dexterous hands had been flying over the face of the panel, tapping at keys, setting and resetting switches. The lights on the wall above him flared and flickered in bewildering patterns. The message board upon which Clive had seen so bewildering an array of languages carried on a dialogue of its own with Smythe's little panel.

"Perhaps the Major would be so good as to tell us what happened after the aeroplane disappeared." These words came from Sidi Bombay. Clive found himself wondering at the Indian's unfailing equanimity. When first Clive had met him, Sidi Bombay had been an ancient, wizened husk of a man. He had emerged from the horrors of the Dungeon a third his former age—young, virile, energetic. He had been dressed, in the time Clive had known him, as a humble trader, a morning-coated gentleman, a ragged workman. And yet he never lost his calm.

Clive recounted his experiences with Chang Guafe, describing the alien cyborg's disappearance beneath the Arctic waters. He described his encounter with the horrendous monster built by Dr. Frankenstein, the arrival of the space-train, the way that the two of them, Clive Folliot and the lumbering monster, had entered widely separated cars on the train. Horace Smythe's fingers flew over the keys and buttons. The message panel flashed a response, cryptic and unreadable to Clive but apparently meaningful to Smythe. The pseudo-Count Splitofsky said, "Chang Guafe survived that experience, Major, and is busy and well. What then, sah?"

"What then, Smythe? Is that all you have to say? 'Chang Guafe is busy and well.' Where is he, man? What is he doing? How did he escape from beneath the ice cap?"

"Easy, sah, easy," Horace Smythe said, attempting to calm Clive.

But Clive would not be soothed. "And how do you know where he is? I demand that you tell me, Sergeant Smythe, before we do anything else." When Smythe was slow to respond, Clive seized him by the lapels. "Tell me, man!"

Before Smythe responded, Clive felt the hand of Sidi Bombay on his shoulder. "Calm yourself, Clive Folliot. There is nothing to be gained by treating one's friend as one's enemy."

Clive relaxed his grip. He was shaking. "You're right, Sidi Bombay. Sergeant Smythe, I apologize. I shouldn't have—have acted in such a manner. But if you know what became of Chang Guafe, you must tell me. At once."