Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (20 page)

"Not quite? If you please, then…"

Miss Smithers exchanged glances with Smythe, Smith, and Smithson. "There are more worlds than you dream of, M'sieur Terremonde."

"I have learned much in the Dungeon, Miss Smithers."

"Of that I have no doubt, Monsieur. I have read your dispatches with enjoyment and admiration."

Clive felt himself coloring, yet feeling considerable pleasure at the recognition of his efforts. "Then you are aware of my adventures."

"Your adventures, Monsieur, have made you famous on more worlds than you can imagine. Those who know of them—of you—and of your companions… are widespread. You might walk down a street in Buenos Aires, in St. Petersburg, in Istanboul, or in Tokio, and barely one person in ten thousand would know of you. But yet there would be that one in ten thousand. And such is true not only in every great city of this planet, but also of Mars, of the worlds circling the great stars Procyon and Deneb, of planets circling suns so far from here that the very galaxies of which they are members are invisible to the unaided eye. Oh, yes, M'sieu Terremonde. Oh, yes. Wherever human foot treads—and indeed on worlds where no human being has ever set foot, but where the spark of awareness has blazed in forms more strange than any you have ever encountered—you are known."

"But about the Smiths," Count Splitofsky put in. "Would a word of explanation not be apt?"

"Indeed it would." Oliver Oscar Smithson, florid of face and fulsome of manner, took center stage.

"Each station of the U.N.I. A. is set up to serve a sector of some world. Except for those in more sparsely populated regions of the universe. There, a station may serve an entire planet—or many planets. And each such station, whenever possible, is staffed by persons of sanguinary connection. The association has long since learned that bonds of blood serve to reinforce bonds of political or other loyalties. Thus, this station is staffed by Smiths, and Smythes, and Smithsons, and Smithers…"

"Our station in the American city of New York," Dorothy Daphne Smithers took over, "is staffed by Joneses. Joneses, Johns, Johnsons, Johansons, Jacksons."

"And our station at Marsport Central…" Matthew McAteer Smith added. The others turned to face him. "Well, the Martians' names are not easy for human tongues to pronounce."

"Are the Martians not themselves human?" Terremonde inquired.

Smith smiled. "Not—ah, not quite, M'sieur Terremonde."

"Ah, well—but then, I have made alliance in the past with creatures not of human form, nor of earthly origin. What form do these habitants of the red planet manifest?"

Smith shot an inquiring look at Smithson. The latter nodded an affirmative and the erstwhile publican struck a concealed stud worked into the woodwork of the wall. A section of solid walnut seemed to become transparent, as transparent as clear window glass. Terremonde found himself staring at a creature shaped something like a tropical jellyfish, floating high in the thin atmosphere of another world.

"As nearly as I can pronounce the station manager's name," Matthew McAteer Smith resumed, "it sounds something like this—" and he made a sound unlike any Terremonde had heard in his life, a cross between a rasp and a hiss and a dry, tortured rattling. "Every member of that station is related to the manager, and their names so indicate—although you will pardon me if I do not attempt to reproduce them for you."

Terremonde made a sound of acquiescence.

"And thus you see, sir, the importance of the Folliot family to the Universal Neighborhood Improvement Association." It was Count Splitofsky who spoke. "And perhaps," he added, "we would do well to make our way back to the place where our associate waits."

Terremonde blinked. "Yes. Yes, ah, let us do that."

"Are you well enough?" Splitofsky asked solicitously.

Terremonde indicated that he was. With the Russian at his side, he started for the door. Oliver Oscar Smithson and Matthew McAteer Smith offered their hands to each of the visitors. Dorothy Daphne Smithers did the same—to Splitofsky. Terremonde she treated differently, holding him in her arms and offering lush lips, breathlessly parted. Terremonde hesitated but a fraction of a second, then lowered his face to hers. The warmth of her reaction stirred him. He drew back. Some unspoken message passed between them.

He exhaled, released her. He wondered if he would ever see her again—and if he did, what would be the result.

Oliver Oscar Smithson placed his hand on the elaborately worked brass door handle. "Before you go, my friends…"

Terremonde and Splitofsky halted.

"… I must warn you. This building is located on an instability."

"Yes. That I know," Splitofsky said.

"When last I was here—" Terremonde began, but a look from Smith told him that there was no need to continue.

"I shall serve as M'sieur Terremonde's guide," Splitofsky said.

"Very well. Just… be careful, my friends. And Godspeed!" Smithson turned the metal handle and Clive Folliot and Horace Hamilton Smythe stepped through the portal of hell.

I've been here before
, Clive thought. Flames leaped about him. Puffs of smoke erupted from miniature volcanoes that spread across a landscape unlike any on the Earth. The stench of sulfur stung his nostrils and the acrid atmosphere brought hot tears to his eyes. There was no visible sky. Instead, overhead, where leaping flames and roiling clouds of black vapor broke upon jagged points, a hellish inversion of the monstrous landscape that surrounded him loomed angrily, terrifyingly, threatening to fall and crush all that lay below it.

Somewhere in the distance a shriek rang out. Truly and literally, it was the despairing cry of the damned.

Clive Folliot felt a hand grasping his sleeve. He turned and looked into the face of Horace Hamilton Smythe.

"Say it ain't so, Major! Sure as me ma'am warned me, it's Satan's own realm and we're doomed. We'll cook for the devil's own dinner!"

The cosmopolitan manner of Count Splitofsky had fallen away, and though the man still wore the formal garb of the Tsarist diplomat, his manner was once again that of his true identity.

In like manner, M. Terremonde had become once again Clive Folliot, younger son of a country nobleman, major in the service of Her Majesty the Queen.

"It's hell, surely enough, Sergeant. But we are hardly damned! Get hold of yourself, man! You passed through the Dungeon; you know that Hell—
this
Hell, at any rate—is merely another level of the Dungeon."

"I remember, sah." Smythe was visibly calmer now. He released Clive's sleeve. "I'm sorry, sah."

"It's all right, Horace. I quite understand."

"I knew that this was a variable location, Major Folliot, but I never expected to find myself stepping from an Association office directly into Hades itself."

"Quite all right, Smythe. But now we've got to find our way out of here. You don't suppose Sidi Bombay has an eye on us, by any chance?"

"Don't think so, sah. He was going to try and locate our missing companions. Still, if we don't return…"

"All right. But we won't count on assistance from that quarter."

Their conversation was interrupted by a shriek as a devilish figure hurled a flaming trident at them. Clive dived to the right, Horace to the left. The trident whizzed between them, sizzling and crackling, leaving behind it a trail of noxious vapor.

Clive had landed on his hands and knees. Even as he scrambled to regain his feet, he spotted Horace in dire peril. The two had found themselves on a walkway of stone, hardly wider than a man is tall. When they had dived to avoid the flaming trident, Clive had landed at the edge of the walkway, but Horace, opposite him, had slipped from the edge of the path and was hanging by his fingertips, scrabbling to retain his weakening grasp on the stone.

If he lost his grasp he would tumble into a pit of roaring flames.

Clive literally threw himself across the pathway, flying through the roiling, sulfur-laden air. He crashed to the edge of the walkway just as the fingers of Horace's left hand lost their purchase. Clive grabbed Horace's right hand.

"Hold on there, Horace! I've got you!"

Clive held on to Horace's right hand with both of his own.

Horace reached with his left and grasped Clive's wrist. "Help me! Major, help me!"

Clive tugged at Horace's arm, shoving backward with his elbows, dragging Horace back onto the walkway. "Don't worry, my friend. Don't panic."

He was already half the length of a forearm from the edge of the walkway. He could see the look of panic beginning to fade from Horace Smythe's face. Behind and beneath Smythe he could see the leaping flames and, amazingly, the fiendish forms that pranced and capered among them, howling their frustration at the loss of prey that they had thought their own.

"Shift your hand now! Grasp my shoulder, Horace!"

Smythe obeyed.

Clive now had one hand free. He braced it against the pathway, heaved himself to his knees, and simultaneously managed to pull Horace Smythe fully back over the edge. The two men clambered to their feet. Horace's face bore an expression of relief; Clive's, one of satisfaction.

In the pit behind Horace, a furious demon screeched his rage and hurled a trident at his departing prey. Clive shoved Horace aside—there was no time for a warning shout and the latter's reaction—and with reflexes speeded by long and arduous exposure to peril, snatched the trident from the air, even as it whizzed past them.

"Let us see what we have here." Clive studied the weapon. The shaft was as long as a man is tall; the tines as long as a sapper's carbine bayonet and as wickedly barbed as an Equatorian hunting spear. The weapon was made all of metal, and its heat pulsed through Clive's hands—but he did not yield it.

"Sergeant Smythe—can we return to the U.N.I.A. office?"

Horace turned in a circle. "I don't see how, sah. I don't see any doorway to take us back."

Clive nodded. "Nothing so surprising to that. We've encountered doorways before that seem to lead only one way and that disappear once you've stepped through them. Well then, there's only one thing to do—push on! We'll find our way out of this place and get on with our mission."

They set off down the pathway. There was nothing to either side but scenes of horror and torment. Flames shot upward, jets of noxious fumes assaulted their nostrils, the screams of the damned and the gleeful screeches of their tormentors tore at their eardrums.

The brightness of the flames and the blackness of the clouds of filthy smoke that arose from the pits obscured their vision, but now and then a vagrant current of foul air would part the flames and the rising fumes, and Clive and Horace could peer into the pits. The faces of the tormented tore at their heartstrings, their pleas for succor eloquent even in pantomime.

Clive stopped and leaned over the edge, the trident resting on its hilt, tines upraised.

"Can't stop, sah! Can't help them! We'd best move on!"

"But—I recognized a face! Those eyes, that hair! I cannot leave her to—"

"We can't help them, sah! And for all we know, those are either simulacra or illusions. We've encountered plenty of those, have we not, sah?"

A beautiful face peered up at Clive, appeal written in its eyes.

"She's on her knees, Horace! Look at her torment! We cannot—"

"We must, sah!" Horace was tugging at Clive's elbow, dragging him by main force from the tormented woman. Before they had taken half a dozen steps the flames roared up with renewed intensity. The woman disappeared.

"That was—"

"Never mind who it was, sah! Don't torment yourself, Major Folliot."

A huge batwinged form detached itself from the roof far overhead and swooped at Clive and Horace. Only the beating of its wings, the thump of their opening and folding, the hot rush of stinging sulfur fumes as it plummeted, warned the two men.

Clive turned his face upward, facing the apparition with new shock. "Tomàs!"

The thing pulled up half the height of a man above Clive and Horace. It had a hair-covered body that was an obscene parody of a human's trunk, but its legs were truncated and ended in feet like those of a great, ugly bird, in razor-sharp claws. Instead of arms it had wings like those of a bat, the rudimentary fingertips armed also with scythelike claws.

And its face—oh, its face was that of man.

"Tomàs!" Clive moaned a second time.

The thing swooped away and rose back toward the foul flame pits and hideous rookeries of the roof of Hades. It was as small as a calf, then as small as a duck, then it turned again and dived straight at the two men.

"Fight it, sah!" Horace Hamilton Smythe had broken his stunned paralysis and regained his voice. "It's going to kill us, sah—and I have no weapon!"

The monstrosity was diving toward them, driving itself to ever greater speed with its bat wings. Its form filled Clive with a mixture of horror and revulsion, its face was filled with demonic rage and an insane hatred, its eyes glared like living yellow-white coals.

And its voice—its voice screamed in a tone as loud and as piercing as the screeching brakes of a great steam locomotive: "
Die, Clive Folliot! Die and be damned here among the damned
!"

Clive ducked as the monster passed over him, and from the corner of his eye he could see Horace Hamilton Smythe do the same.

The monster pulled up and swooped away again, but not before raking the backs of both men with its talons. The claws ripped Clive's garments and tore at the skin of his back. He felt as though he had been scourged with two sets of white-hot barbs. He emitted an involuntary scream of pain, and heard Horace Hamilton Smythe echo that scream.

"It will come again, sah! It will come again! Fight it!"

"But it is Tomàs! He is my own kin! Horace, how can I—"

There was no time for the rest of Clive's question. The hideous being had flapped and stroked its way upward again, and now it dipped once more and plunged toward the walkway, its claws extended to rake and rip, its mouth open in a scream of rage half-human and half-demonic.