Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (29 page)

"I saw your dispatches in the
Illustrated Recorder and Dispatch
. Your reports and your sketches were excellent."

"I had hoped to collect them into a book."

"Your editors did so in your behalf, Clive. In both England and America you were an author of some fame. Alas, fame is fleeting, and after a few years you were forgotten. I fear that the readers of a later decade may never have heard of Clive Folliot. Still, scholars and collectors of volumes on exotic lands honor you."

"I was a famed author? My fame came and went, all unbeknownst to me, and I am now the pet of musty bibliophiles. Aye, so it ever was, I suppose." Clive shook his head, a wry smile upon his lips. His reports had been modest, his drawings crude and unpolished—at least in his own estimation. But apparently they were not so, in the judgment of others. Du Maurier's redactional services and Maurice Carstairs' promotional efforts must have done him better than ever he had guessed.

"And du Maurier?" he asked Annabella. "Did you ever hear from him?"

"He came to see me. He said that he had received emanations from you, from a distant and terrible realm. Clearly, that was the Dungeon, Clive."

"I visited him in London just days ago, Annabella. I saw him on his deathbed. He was attended by Clarissa Mesmer, the granddaughter of the famous—or infamous—Anton."

"George du Maurier was a good man, Clive. A visionary. A great soul who was born many years ahead of his time."

"And did any others come to see you?"

"Your father and brother."

"My
brother
! Neville came to see you?"

"He did."

"They came together to see me in Plantagenet Court. After a little while Neville sent the baron upon some errand, and then…" She turned away from him. As she did so, an errant tendril of dark hair fell across her bosom, drawing his attention to the tender valley of her breasts, where warm golden lamplight played.

"And then what?" Clive prompted.

She turned back but hid her face against his shoulder. "He told me that you were dead. He attempted to—to comfort me, Clive. He was so much like you, my darling, in every way. The curl of his hair, the features of his face, his hands, the very—the very smell of him, Clive."

"The monster!" Clive bounded to his feet. For the first time since Annabella's arrival, he thought of Muntor Eshverud. He looked for the Chaffri, but Eshverud had slipped from the room. Annabella had risen to her feet and now Clive placed his hands on her cheeks, peering deep into her eyes. "Did Neville…?"

"Yes," she whispered. "I felt such confusion at the time, such weakness and despair. And afterward, Clive, such shame. That was the real reason I left England. I would have stayed and proudly borne your child. But after Neville… I could not stay."

"Are you sure that the child—?"

"It is your child, Clive. That I
know
! And the girls who descended from her, even unto Annabelle Leigh, are your descendants. All of them carry the Folliot blood. For better or for worse, Clive. I do not carry it, but all of our descendants do."

With a start, Clive realized that he was hungry. Through the entire trip in the glass car, the battle in space, and the landing on Novum Araltum, he had not eaten a bite. Now the smell of the hot food that Annabella had brought assaulted his nostrils. And with his hunger came a great thirst, and he lifted the tall tankard of ale and held it between himself and Annabella.

"We are together again, my darling girl. Together again!"

With their eyes they exchanged further thoughts. Annabella lifted the second tankard, and they toasted with elbows linked, then set to on the still-steaming haunch and rolls. Between mouthfulls of food and hearty draughts of ale they exchanged kisses and looks and caresses, and before the meal was over Clive felt himself yielding to old attractions, and found Annabella returning his attentions with the passion that had locked him to her in Plantagenet Court in long-ago London.

He slipped a hand into her bodice and she pressed against him, pressing her cheek against his and whispering in his ear daring syllables that he had not heard for months or years or a quarter-century.

The room was set up for private assignations, and thus they used it, Clive all forgetful of the Dungeon and its horrors and its perils. Forgetful of the sultry Lorena Ransome and the strangely colored Lady 'Nrrc'kth with her pale skin and green-tinted hair and eyes. Forgetful of the spider Shriek and the alien cyborg Chang Guafe and the faithful, doglike Finnbogg and the top-hatted Baron Samedi with his sardonic laughter and the lumbering Frankenstein monster. Forgetful of the Muntor Eshverud and of Clive's own companions Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe.

Happy and sated, with his arms around the soft shoulders of Annabella Leighton and her breath warm and soft on his own unclad chest, Clive slept. He was happy at last, happy save for something that nagged at a distant corner of his mind even as he slumbered in the soft golden lamplight.

The warm, pliant flesh was the hard carapace of an Egyptian scarab.

The deep, loving eyes were the faceted and glittering organs of an insect.

The strong yet gentle hands were chitinous claws.

The voluptuous torso that had so inflamed his passions was the segmented body of an—

Of an—

Clive wakened in terror, his being drenched in cold sweat. The lamp had burned the last of its oil. The room was plunged into darkness. Clive had no way of telling how much time had passed, but no sounds came from the tavern.

He pushed himself to his feet, clumsily pulling his clothing into a semblance of order, and staggered to the wall. There were a few errant rays of light, not so much illuminating the little room as suggesting the faint possibilities of illumination.

Clive staggered toward the source of the light. He collided with the wooden table and reached out to catch himself. His hand slid across a heavy platter now thick with congealing grease. A tall tankard, still half-full of strong ale, flew from the table and smashed upon the crude plank floor. Its contents splattered upward, spattering Clive's face and clothing like mud splashed from a London gutter.

He crashed against the wall and stared back at the place where he had lain with Annabella, straining his eyes to see her there. It had to have been a dream! He had been through too much. The rug had been pulled from beneath his reality once too often. That was it—that had to be it!

The lovely woman whose lush body he had so enjoyed could not be other than real. She could not!

The faint light did not permit him to see her clearly.

"Annabella!"

She stirred—but her stirring carried to his ears the dry scrabbling sound of an exoskeleton. Clive could not believe that this was real.

"Annabella!" he repeated.

Again she stirred. He could see the vague, shadowy outline of her form rising.

He threw out his arms and one of his grease-coatied hands collided with a closed shutter. He whirled and struggled frantically with the latches, and finally was able to pull back the wooden panels.

He had no time to appreciate the sight of the night sky above Novum Araltum. He turned back to the room and saw Annabella in a state of flustered dishabille. Her skirt was still pulled up around her waist and one sweet breast was exposed above her disarranged bodice.

"Clive!" Even through the semi-darkness of the room she conveyed the impression of a blush. She pulled up her blouse and arranged her skirt decorously. "Clive, I am embarrassed."

He gawked.

"It was unladylike of me, I know, Clive darling. But it had been so long, I missed you and longed for you so, my darling. You cannot imagine the times I dreamed of you—entertaining fantasies of you as I lay on my mattress-pretending that each tread on the stair, each voice of a passerby in the street, each clatter of carriage-wheel on cobblestone, was the sign of your return. Oh, my darling!"

She moved across the room toward him.

He recoiled.

"Clive! Please, Clive! Have I lost you? Did my appetites of the night disgust you? Am I branded now a licentious harlot? Oh, please, my darling Clive!"

He backed away from her, blinking his eyes in the semi-darkness. For a moment she would be his own dear Annabella, the warm woman whose scents still filled his nostrils, whose flavor still roused his taste buds. Then he would blink and behold a creature of horror and revulsion, something like a beetle and something like a mantis and something altogether alien that made his scalp crawl and his skin shrivel at the thought of what had transpired between them.

He bolted for the door. He pushed against it and found it unyielding. Then he hurled himself against it, unmindful of the pain that shot through him with each impact. Finally he grasped the handle and found that the door opened toward him, into the room.

He did not look back as he sprinted through the still night-shrouded inn, searching for an exit. He stumbled into the common room he had seen hours earlier. The tables had been cleared, the occupants had long departed. A great stone fireplace that had held a roaring log now contained warm embers from which rose a thin stream of gray smoke.

Behind him, Clive could hear Annabella's voice, breaking with sobs. "Clive, my darling, my love!" There was a shuddering intake of breath, as would be appropriate to a heart-shattered woman. "Come back to me, Clive! What have I done? Why have you left me?"

But the sound that accompanied that voice was not the sound of unshod feet. It was the horrid, dry scraping and rasping of the carapace of a giant insect!

Clive plunged through the wooden door, pounding onto a grassy area. Who were the Chaffri? In the Dungeon he had thought them human—had thought both the Chaffri and the Ren were human. But if the Ren were really the same species as the tentacled monsters he had encountered on Q'oorna and then in the sky above Novum Araltum, and if the Chaffri were in truth horrifying giant insects…

He was struck by another thought.

In the battle between the Ren and the Chaffri, the Chaffri had appeared to be human. He had not actually seen any of them, but their baggy costumes had betrayed a clearly human form. What could this mean?

Chaffri and Ren alike seemed to have the ability to pull images from the mind. Both of them could then fool their victims into seeing what the alien races wished them to see. It was a power not unlike the power to create simulacra and invest them with an imitation of life. This was the power to mask themselves with illusions, and pass off their own actions as those of others. A victim might see himself, his brother, his lover—
anyonel
—when in fact he was in the presence of an alien monster.

"Clive, come back!"

He heard the voice of his beloved, coming from behind him. But he dared not turn, paralyzed equally by the fear that he would see a gigantic mantislike creature and that he would see Annabella—or the illusion of Annabella.

"Clive, please! Clive, last night was so wonderful! Oh Clive, I need you! Come to me, please, my darling!"

He shuddered so violently that he almost fell. He ran blindly from the inn. He knew that he was at the edge of the grassy field where both his own transparent car and the metallic ships of the Chaffri had landed. The sky was ablaze with distant stars and nebulae and with the reflected light of the uncounted miniature worlds that made up the asteroid belt.

He set off at a run, paralleling the edge of the woods that surrounded the landing field. He could not hear Annabella Leighton following, nor was there any indication of the presence of the Muntor Eshverud.

But ahead there loomed another low building not unlike the inn that Clive had fled. Was it another inn, or was it a structure of some wholly different sort, disguised by the mental powers of the Chaffri to seem an inn? He wished he could call upon George du Maurier to help him unravel the puzzle. This was du Maurier's kind of conundrum.

For a moment he tried sending a mental call to du Maurier. Then he remembered that du Maurier was dead. Dead and gone, forever beyond recall or communication from the living.

You are wrong, Clive Folliot.

He whirled. Where had the voice come from?

Don't look for me, Clive. You cannot see me.

"Du Maurier?"

Yes.

"Where are you?"

I am with your brother.

"With Neville?"

No.
I am with your brother Esmond
.

"But—Esmond was never born! Esmond spoke to me when I was in the Dungeon. Esmond was to have been the triplet brother of Neville and myself, and he died before birth."

That's right, brother.

"Esmond? Is it you?" Clive found himself swept by a rush of emotion unlike any he had felt in his life. "Are you my lost brother?"

I am.

"Where are you? Are you in Heaven? Does your soul reside with God?"

Heaven? God? What do I know of such things, brother Clive?

"But you are with du Maurier. He is dead. You must both be disembodied souls—the soul of the dead and the soul of the never-born."

Deep in Clive Folliot's mind there sounded the ghostly, psychic laughter of George du Maurier and Esmond Folliot. Then du Maurier's voice echoed once more, so that Clive could hear it but none other could.
There's no time to debate metaphysics, Folliot. You've got to get away from Novum Araltum. Rescue your friends if you can, but even if you cannot save them, you yourself must leave Novum Araltum
.

"Why, du Maurier? Leave Novum Araltum for where? Shall I return to Earth? To London? To Tewkesbury? To the Dungeon?"

None of these, Folliot. You yourself spoke of bearding the lion in his den. The lion is the Gennine, and you are the Master of the Ordolite. That must be the final battle in this monstrous war
—
and lecture me not on the virtues of peace. It takes two to make peace, only one to make war. When a warmaker and a peacemaker collide, the warmaker emerges covered with blood
—
the blood of his enemy
!