Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (36 page)

Neville sneered. "After so many years, Clive, you still maintain your invincible innocence! Very well—"

But before he could say another word, the engine was shrouded in absolute blackness and filled with a chill that penetrated to the very marrow of its occupants' bones.

"What—?"

The engine shuddered, but it seemed still to be moving forward. Clive peered outside. He could see nothing. Not the gray, distant plain below. Not the swirling spiral of stars above. The very air within the compartment seemed heavy, chill, and dark. The only light in the compartment was that emitted by the instruments before Horace Hamilton Smythe. They gave off an eerie glow, a pallid yellow that tinted everything into a monochromatic picture.

The cultured voice of Sidi Bombay said, "Major Folliot! Sergeant Smythe! Behold!" He pointed at the caged Chaffri. The others stared.

The Chaffri, which had previously subsided into a formless white puddle in the corner of its cage, now adopted a new form. It had grown arms and legs, and stood upright like a foot-tall mannequin. Its face was human, or more properly, demonic. Its nose was sharply pointed, its eyebrows arched. Its glossy black hair came to a widow's peak upon its forehead. A pair of perfectly formed horns grew from its forehead.

Its feet were cloven hoofs. It seemingly wore a scant, skin-tight costume, but as Clive strove to see it clearly in the yellow-tinged murk, he realized that it was not wearing tights at all. It was completely naked. It pranced and capered in its cage, and as it turned, Clive could see that it had a long, barb-tipped tail. In one fist it held a wicked-looking trident.

"Lor' 'elp us! What is it?" Horace Smythe gasped.

"We've already been through Hades in the Dungeon!" Clive exclaimed. "Not once, but twice."

"Aye." Horace nodded. "But I see no Baron Samedi to pull our chestnuts from the hearth this time, Major."

The caged creature had begun screaming at its captors, moving its free hand in a series of mystical-looking gestures and pointing its trident first at one, then at another.

"It's placing a curse on us!" Neville said.

The demon pointed an accusing finger as well as its trident at Neville. Its eyes glinted in the faint yellow light. Watching, Clive suspected that the demon would not have appeared yellow in a normal light.

Its incantation drew to a crescendo. A bolt of lurid-tinted lightning crackled from the centermost tine of its trident and spanned the distance from its cage to Neville Folliot.

Neville clutched himself where the bolt had struck. There was a peculiar scent in the air, discernible even in the dank, heavy atmosphere that filled the cabin. A wisp of smoke rose from a charred spot on Neville's gold-braided military tunic.

"You little bugger! You whippersnapper!" Neville slapped a hand on the wounded spot, rubbing vigorously. "I'll break you in two, you little fiend!"

He leaped toward the Chaffri's cage but Sidi Bombay stepped between him and the cage. "Please, Baron."

Mollified by the acknowledgment of his title, Neville drew up. The smoke had ceased to rise from his tunic, but when he took his hand away from the offended spot a circle of singed and blackened cloth remained.

"Why shouldn't I crush that little monster beneath my heel?" Neville demanded of Sidi Bombay.

"Because, Baron, he has told us something. His mind is tuned to the vibrations that surround us, and he has warned us of that which is to come. I had feared to take the Chaffri back into our company, but I see now that Clive Folliot was right to do so."

As if on cue, the engine lurched forward. The blackness that surrounded it and the dank, heavy atmosphere that filled it were gone. For a moment the compartment was filled with light, but before the travelers could take heart, the light assumed a reddish hue and a terrible howling and crashing filled the air.

"Oh, my lord!" Horace exclaimed.

A great roaring, rushing sound surrounded and penetrated the engine. Clive felt the floor shift beneath his feet. The cabin began to spin like a bullet emerging from a rifled gun barrel. Clive felt his weight increase as the centrifugal force pressed him down.

In the new light, the formerly yellow-tinted demon in its cage turned a dark, menacing red. Beyond the windows and doors of the cabin, Clive could see almost-human figures swirling and revolving along with the engine. Beyond them dancing flames and puffs of smoke made an unbroken background that surrounded the engine in all directions.

At first there were dozens of the demons flying around the engine, then Clive realized there were hundreds, thousands, countless hordes.

Lake the transformed Chaffri in its prison, the demons were completely naked. And in their nakedness there was no mistaking the degree of perfection with which their anatomy mimicked that of humans. They were male and female.

A female demon approached the whirling cabin. She posed before a window, smiling invitingly and gesturing. Clive's eyes popped. She was not Annabella nor Annie nor the Lady 'Nrrc'kth. She was not Anna Maria Folliot, nor was she Clarissa Mesmer. But she possessed the female essence of each and every one of those women, and of the temptresses Clive had encountered in the saloon on his first night back in London, and of the women he had encountered on many levels of the Dungeon, and of those he had met in East Africa and in Zanzibar and aboard the ship
Empress Philippa
at the beginning of this whole incredible adventure.

She was every woman he had ever loved, every woman he had ever desired, every woman after whom he had ever lusted.

He stepped toward her.

She smiled at him. Her mouth was generous, her lips soft. Her eyes were huge and dark. They looked black until he peered into them deeply and realized that an ember glowed dark and red deep within each of them.

It was the color of Hell.

But Horace Smythe had been right, Clive thought. This was not the hell they had visited twice before, nor was there any Baron Samedi in this Hades to help them.

Clive Folliot was the leader of this party. He was the survivor of uncounted perils in his journey through the nine levels of the Dungeon. He was the Master of the Ordolite! That above all should have given him the strength and resolve that he needed to survive this moment of peril.

And yet, like a schoolboy desperate to have his first woman, he had clambered through the window and was about to launch himself at the female demon when he felt a huge, heavy hand grasp him by the ankle. He was drawn back bodily into the car.

He wanted desperately to join the female outside. He had to join her. In a moment of madness all recollection of Annabella Leighton, of the Lady 'Nrrc'kth, of Annabelle Leigh, and of Anna Maria Folliot were wiped from his brain. It was as if he had never known love, never known happiness in his life; the realization was strong upon him and he struggled to escape from the mighty grasp that restrained him, struggled to get to the one being in all of Creation capable of bringing him satisfaction.

"Insect! Hold still!"

The voice was enough to interrupt his obsession, to bring the focus of his eyes back within the car. He realized that he was in the clutches of the Frankenstein monster.

"Foolish creature! Think for a moment with your pitiful excuse for a brain! Use the feeble intelligence that the God in Whom you claim to believe provided you! What do you think you see outside this machine?"

"My love! The most desirable creature in the universe! Monster, let me go! Her face is the most beautiful I have ever gazed upon! Her breasts are of a beauty to make Venus weep with envy! Her body is flesh that will melt beneath my hands! The honey of her loins—"

"Enough, fool!" The monster shook him until Clive Folliot's very teeth rattled. Holding him a foot off the floor at arm's length, the monster balled his fist and struck Clive in the face.

Stars danced around Clive's head. His ears rang.

"Now, weakling, look!"

The monster turned him like a helpless infant, so that he was facing out the window. For a moment the creature of demonic temptation was replaced by a male demon, rage written across his face, his trident raised as if to pierce and disembowel an enemy.

Clive Folliot blinked, shook his head like a dog emerging from a stream.

The demon was female again.

Then it was male once more.

"Know you not the tale of Incubus and Succubus, weakling?" the monster's voice ground mercilessly. "Do you wish to leave here and go with the demon?"

"No!" Clive cried. Then, "Yes!" He struggled but the monster's grip was like that of a hundred. "Let me go to it!"

"O man of India," the monster intoned, "but reach into some cabinet or chest of this machine and fetch for me a line."

Sidi Bombay complied.

Without releasing his grasp on Clive, the monster tied the line to his ankle and threw him bodily from across the compartment.

In a moment of astonishing clarity, Clive saw the car around him, the looks of amazement on the faces of Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe, the captive Chaffri prancing and gesturing in its cage.

As he flashed past his brother Neville, Clive saw Neville reach upward to pass him a sword.

Clive grasped the weapon's hilt. Then he was outside the car, surrounded by a raging inferno that singed his costume and raised a sweat on his brow but that somehow failed to harm him even as his hands and feet passed through dancing flames of orange and crimson.

The creature that confronted him was in its female form. The beauty of the temptress seemed greater than ever. She smiled and advanced toward Clive, arms outstretched.

He held the sword low at his side.

The female demon slid her arms against Clive's neck. She pressed her cheek to his, her lips to his. Did he gasp for breath, or did he part his lips in excitement? He felt her passion as if it were a tongue of pure flame piercing his lips and probing his mouth. The agony was unlike any he had ever experienced, ever imagined, and yet it was sweet beyond description. He found himself filled with a longing compared to which the most voluptuous of experience or of fantasy faded.

He felt her slide her hand from his neck to his shoulder, his arm, his hand. He felt—

He raised his other hand and smote himself a blow as powerful as he could manage. His head rang. The demon sprang away from him, tugging with a powerful arm at the sword his brother had given him. But Clive managed to retain his grasp on the weapon.

He blinked and stared at the demon.

It was male.

It thrust at him with its trident.

He was barely able to dodge aside. One tine of the weapon snagged his jacket and tore away a fragment of cloth.

The demon swept past him.

He turned to face it.

The demon recovered, raised its trident again, and charged toward him.

Again he was able to dodge aside, but only at the expense of a painful scratch that burned with a pain worse than the bite of a giant spider.

A third time the demon thrust its trident at Clive, but this time Clive was able to gather himself sufficiently to parry the trident with the sword his brother had given him.

The demon halted and grasped its trident in both hands, advancing like an infantryman with fixed bayonet.

The demon thrust, and Clive parried, then recovered.

Again the demon struck with its trident, forward and upward from below waist height. If the three tines embedded themselves in Clive's belly he knew that the demon could twist and pull, the barbs would hold in his flesh, and his entrails would be yanked from their cavity.

He lunged with his sword. It was shorter than the demon's trident, and Clive knew he was at a disadvantage.

He recovered, not having come anywhere near the demon in his lunge.

As the demon raised its trident to prepare for another attack on him, Clive stepped boldly forward. He was past the tip of the trident, and now the added length of his opponent's weapon was an impediment rather than an aid in the struggle.

He thrust at the demon.

The demon swung his trident in a clumsy attempt to parry. There was no contact with Clive's sword, but the shaft of the trident knocked against Clive's arm and torso, hurling him sideways. He regained his footing. For an instant, for the barest fraction of a second, there flickered across his brain the question of what he was standing on at all.

Clive saw that the demon had raised its trident in both hands and was launching a downward blow that would take him in the chest, but he hurled himself beneath the trident, striking upward with his sword, feeling it jolt against the heavier shaft of the trident, feeling the trident ride down the length of his sword and rebound off its basket.

The demon was disarmed.

It was defeated.

The flames around the engine flickered, guttered, disappeared.

Clive was floating some twenty feet from the engine, the long line that the Frankenstein monster had tied to his ankle all that held him in place. Far beneath the cabin he could see a universe of points and swirls of light, infinitely huge, infinitely distant, infinitely grand.

Above him, so close that he felt he could reach up and touch them, was a spiral of swirling stars.

 

He felt himself turning, floating and twisting gently. Something was tugging at his ankle. He looked to see what it was and recognized the engine, saw the monster in its window. He experienced a moment of insane hilarity, imagining the monster as an angler and himself as a mountain trout being reeled in to serve as a fisherman's breakfast. He would be gutted and boned and laid out in a pan of melted butter and broiled over a woodfire beside a country stream. It would all be so peaceful and pleasant—for the fisherman.

For the fish, another story.

Neville's sword was still in his—Clive Folliot's—hand, and as his boots thudded against the frame of the engine and he climbed carefully back into the car, he held the weapon toward his brother, hilt first. Neville took the sword from him and slipped it into its scabbard.