Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (11 page)

But Goode
had
revealed a safe means of egress. Or such was his claim. The longer Clive pondered, the more convinced he became that Goode's suggestion was the only reasonable course of action for him to follow.

He rose from his chair, adjusting his tunic, saber, and cap, and stood over the open trapdoor. "If this is a trick, Goode, I warn you, sir—I have survived perils that you would not believe."

"I must differ with you, sir. I know more than you could possibly realize. I would believe everything you could tell me. That is the only reason you are here this night, sir, and the only reason that I offer you the opportunity that now stands at your feet."

"Nonetheless, if this staircase represents still another act of treachery on your part, Goode, I will extract from you a dear price indeed!"

"And I shall pay it gladly, Major Folliot. Now, if you see no further need to delay…"

Clive set his polished brown boot upon the first step of dank gray stone.

 

The steps led downward into darkness, curving in a spiral that swiftly carried Clive into the unknown. He paused for a moment to glance upward. The open trap had shrunk to a tiny square, had done so far more rapidly than Clive would have expected.

Even as he stood gazing up, the square of light disappeared. Apparently Philo Goode had slammed shut the trapdoor, if he turned back, Clive suspected, and climbed the steps once again, he would find the door unmovable from below.

Not that he had any intention of turning back. He had committed himself to a course of action, and if there was one thing he had learned through his adventures in the Dungeon, it was to press ahead. Always, to press ahead. Peril might lie in his path, doom might await him. But no matter what the odds, there was always a chance of success. There was nothing to be gained by turning back. Surely not now.

Although the steep staircase led through darkness, there was a sufficient emanation of luminosity from the steps themselves to guide his feet. Clive set a steady pace for himself, neither counting steps nor attempting to calculate the passage of time. Eventually he would come to the end of his descent, and then he would find out what lay beneath Philo Goode's establishment.

Something brushed against his face and was gone. He wondered what it could be—a bat, perhaps. Some dark-adjusted creature flying through the blackness here, as much at home in the subterranean gloom as Clive would have been on his father's estate in Tewkesbury.

At length he emerged onto a level patch of flagstones. Here panels of illumination in one wall revealed that the stone flooring ended abruptly. There was a low drop, then a roadbed of sorts.

As if in response to Clive's presence, although he wondered if the timing were coordinated or merely happenstantial, he felt a rush of cold wind and heard a sound that grew from a soft
whooshing
to the scream of fast-driven wind.

He turned to see a lighted car barreling up the roadbed. It appeared to be made of glass or some similar transparent substance, molded over a framework of metal. He could see within the car a passenger compartment bearing a solitary traveler. The car resembled those of the train he had encountered first on the plain of Q'oorna and then again in the arctic waters of Earth.

The car slid to a halt. Clive could hear its engine pulsating like a living heart.

He looked toward the passenger compartment, started violently, then ran at top speed to the car. The passenger swung the door open and called to him. "Clive!"

"Annie!"

Without hesitation he jumped into the car. The young woman stood and Clive swept her into his arms, whirling her in a joyous circle. "Annie, my darling girl! My dear great-great-granddaughter Annie!"

"Put me down, Clive. Grandpa!" She used the term rarely, preferring to remain on a given-name basis. Her time was one of informality, and besides, in real age Clive was but a dozen years older than she, although through the twisted chronology of the Dungeon she was in truth his descendant, born some 144 years later than he.

"The joy I feel!" Clive exclaimed. "At first I feared that you were lost forever on the eighth level of the Dungeon. Lost forever—or worse! And then, when I stood upon the polar ice floe and saw the sun glinting off the wings of the aeroplane in which you escaped from the Japanese… There is so much I yearn to ask you, my darling Annie! But for now, all that matters is that you are unharmed. You have not been… ?"

"No, I am well—as you can see, Clive." She curtsied before him. "And don't you look splendid in your scarlet tunic and clean-shaved cheeks!"

Although her attitude was still that of a woman prepared to make her way in the twenty-first century, she had been done up as a proper young lady of the nineteenth. Her hair was arranged in a crown of braids that coiled around her white forehead. Her face was modestly made up. Her gown was of a light color and material, cut modestly across the bosom and tightly at the waist. She was a contrast of one sort against the two harlots who had cozened up to Clive in the drinking den, of another against the severe Madame Mesmer in her high-necked, long-skirted outfit.

"Annie! You must tell me everything, everything that has happened."

"That will take a long time, Clive."

"But first—what is this car? What is this all about? How did you get back to England, to 1896? This is 1896, is it not? I saw du Maurier. I last saw him as a vigorous man of fifty. Now he is old. He says he is dying. He says I have been away for twenty-eight years."

"It is indeed 1896, Clive. Sit now, or you'll be knocked over!" The pulsation of the car's engine had increased in force and frequency, and Clive and Annie indeed had barely time to seat themselves, cozily side by side, before the car slid forward, pressing them against the padded back of their couchlike seat.

The car accelerated until Clive calculated that it was proceeding at a high rate of speed. It moved through a nearly featureless tunnel. Now and then a lighted panel cast a dim glow through the gloom. Now and then Clive caught sight of a branch or side passage curving away from their own. Where these branches led, he had no idea save for the wild conjecture that they were connected to different levels or sectors of the Dungeon.

For that matter, he had no idea where the car was bearing them. They were alone in it, and neither he nor Annie did anything to control its progress or its course. There were no visible controls to be seen.

"My dear child, Annie—" Clive began.

Before he could continue, Annie said, "Clive, tell me—do you still have Neville's journal?"

Clive patted his tunic, investigating its pockets for the precious volume. "I fear not," he said. "When I was translated to London, I—" He paused to gather his thoughts, then began again. "On the eighth level—you remember that some of us were reduced in size to Lilliputian proportions, others enlarged to Brobdingnagian."

"How could I forget!"

"Fortunately, well before I was transported to the ninth level—or back here to Earths—perhaps they are the same—I had regained my normal stature."

She nodded, encouraging him to continue.

"I found myself on the arctic ice cap, along with Chang Guafe. It was just before I found him that you flew over in the Nakajima."

She made no comment on the aeroplane. Instead she inquired only about Chang Guafe. "And he, Clive?"

"He is there on the sea-bottom, as best I can surmise. What will become of him, I know not."

"And you?"

"The, well, I shall call it the space-train, arrived, and I climbed aboard, and found myself here in London. In 1896. Surrounded not by phantoms but, as far as I can tell, by reality. Including yourself." He paused to catch his breath and to gather his thoughts. He peered through the transparent wall of the car.

To appearances, the car had emerged from its long tunnel and was making its way along a wholly ordinary railway line. The long night was ending; Clive could detect the rosy blush of dawn to the east, behind the car, which sped along the tracks in a westerly direction.

As the car passed an early-rising farmer driving his hay-laden wagon along a dirt track beside the railroad bed, Annie took Clive's wrist. "He cannot see us, Clive. We can see all the world from this car, but we are protected from being seen."

"What is this car?" Clive demanded. "Have you made league with… whoever is behind this? With Philo Goode and his confederates?"

She smiled up at him. "All in good time, Clive. You were telling me what happened to Neville's journal."

"The messages we received were seldom reliable anyway. I question both Neville's motivation in writing them and the authenticity of at least a number of them."

"You met Neville in the Dungeon."

"Yes. Neville—or a simulacrum."

"Did he acknowledge that he truly wrote all the messages in his journal?"

"He denied them all!"

She looked stunned, struck speechless.

Clive continued. "But now—was it truly Neville who denied writing the journal entries? And even if it was, can we believe him?"

Annie frowned. "Maybe we'll be able to find that out, somehow. But for now, where is the journal, Clive?"

"As I was explaining to you—when I entered the space-train, I was ragged, unshaven, half-starved, half-drowned, and half-frozen. When I found myself in London—in the bedchamber of my old friend du Maurier—I was nourished, shaven, magnificently togged, and bone dry. I do not understand what happened. I can only attribute it, like so many other mysteries, to the Dungeon."

"And Neville's journal?"

"I have no idea."

"Did you have it on the ice cap, Clive?"

"I don't know. I don't remember having it there, but I had other things to occupy my attention than thinking about my brother's notebook."

"Then it might still be on the ice cap. Or on the train. Or in George du Maurier's home, I suppose."

"Or back on the eighth level, in fact."

"Never mind. Never mind. We must cope with our situation as we find it."

The light from the east had increased, and Clive's observation of the green fields and budding trees that lined the railroad bed told him that it was a spring morning in the English countryside. One of nature's most beautiful creations—an English country spring.

"Where are we headed?" Clive asked.

Annie smiled. "Don't you recognize the landscape?"

Clive studied the vegetation and the lay of the land. "It looks like Gloucestershire."

"Right on the first response!"

"We're going to Tewkesbury!"

"Correct."

"Who is there, and what is your connection with them, Annie?"

"Why, your family seat is there, Clive. At Tewkesbury Manor!"

"I know that. I did not ask
what
is there. I asked
who
is there."

"We'll access that data when our cursor reaches the designated address."

Oh, Lord
, Clive thought,
she's lapsing into that strange futuristic jargon of hers
. "Annie, please—can't you speak in everyday language? Is the Queen's English inadequate to meet your needs?"

"Sorry, User. Uh, Clive. I forget myself. We'll find out when we get there, okay?"

"Very well. But Annie—so much has happened! Where are the others? Finnbogg and Shriek, Tomàs and Sidi Bombay…"

"You didn't mention Horace, Clive."

"I have seen Horace."

"At the North Pole?"

"No. In London. I was with him, although briefly, not more than an hour ago."

Annie's manner grew far more serious than it had been since their reunion in the transparent car. "You must tell me exactly where you saw him. How he looked. What he was doing."

"Well—" Clive hardly knew where to start. While he strove to set his thoughts in order, he peered through the glass wall of the car. Morning was well along by now, the English sky a brilliant shade of blue, dotted with tiny puffs of cloud. The railroad passed through farming country, and happy countrymen followed horse-drawn plows putting in their summer crops.

Before Clive had answered Annie's question, their little car slowed precipitously. Annie peered ahead of them. "It's a roadblock, Clive! Quick, we'll have to defend ourselves."

She leaped from the seat and shoved the startled Clive Folliot from it. Despite her wide skirt she quickly knelt before the seat and raised its padded cushion to reveal an arsenal of astonishing weapons stowed beneath.

"Here, Clive—you can use one of these!" She handed him a machine that bore a certain resemblance to a carbine. He held it to his shoulder and lowered his face to peer through its sights. To his astonishment, he seemed to be looking through a telescope of some incredible, unfamiliar sort.

Annie took another of the weapons from its place, slammed shut the seat, and turned to take Clive's elbow.

"Annie—I should have thought to ask you—do you still have your Baalbec?"

"It's here, Grandpa!" She tapped a thumb against her bodice, indicating the place beneath her sternum where the versatile device was installed. She ran her other fingers over the skin of her forearm where the controls of the machine had been installed in the strange world of the future whence she came.

"Are we being attacked, Annie? Who is the enemy? Can you use the Baalbec to protect us?"

"Quick, out of here!" She swung open the door through which Clive had previously entered the car and gave him a vigorous shove. He tumbled from the car and onto soft English grass and felt her collide briefly with him as she landed.

There was a flash of brilliant green from a point ahead of their car, and the machine went up in a flash that blinded Clive for a moment. As he recovered his sight he saw bits of bent metal, fragments of shattered glass, odd pieces of wrecked machinery scattered over and around the railroad tracks.

"The next train to pass will be derailed!" he exclaimed.

"No it won't, and that's not our worry anyhow, Clive. Here comes our worry!"