The Black Tower

by Phlip Jose Farmer

  "Seffer?" Clive asked.

  "Uh, seffer. Uh, Wells, Verne, Heinlein, those. Seffer equivalent, uh, science fiction writer." She grinned. "I love seff. All Crackbelles love seff. Everybody loves seff."

  "George du Maurier is my friend, Annie. He believes that mental communication is possible, between planets."

  She grinned. "Clive believes, too?"

  "I don't know. I really don't know. But I wonder— your electrofield device—"

  "Baalbec A-nine."

  "Could it—help me? If I attempted to send a message to George du Maurier . . . I've no real idea what kind of electrical or etheric or mesmeric waves might carry such a message. But perhaps your device could assist. Could serve as some sort of etheric telegraph."

  Annie smiled. "Indeterminate, Clive. Make the attempt. Here." She took his hand with a gesture so rapid and unexpected that he had no chance to resist, and placed it so that the pad of his thumb rested on a spot directly above her sternum. He expected to feel warm, yielding flesh at that point, but he did not expect the peculiar texture and shape that he felt beneath her flesh. That must be the Baalbec A-9, implanted there within her bodice.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, conjuring the image of George du Maurier.

  He thought, Du Maurier, I have no idea whether you can hear me or not. If you can, I beseech you to act.

  I have fallen into another world, du Maurier. I have no idea where I am. Another planet . . . another plane of being . . . some altered state of existence that lies outside our usual notion of time and space.

  I traveled from England to the Sudd, the region in Equatoria where my brother Neville was last seen. From there I passed through a strange gateway, one concealed in a great rock whose heart of ruby glowed and pulsed like a living organ. I was accompanied by Quartermaster Sergeant Horace Hamilton Smythe, of my own Guard unit, and by the East Indian, Sidi Bombay.

  We found ourselves in a strange realm known as the Dungeon. Who rules this place, what their purpose may be, I have yet to fathom. I believe that Neville is here. At one point I thought that I had found his body, but I believe now that was a mere simulacrum, and that Neville is still alive and somewhere in the Dungeon.

  Within the Dungeon there are realms and realities, worlds beyond fathoming, beyond even counting. Sergeant Smythe is with me yet, Sidi Bombay has disappeared. With me also are a being named Finnbogg, like a man yet not a man . . . and a beautiful young woman who seems to come from the year 1999, and is helping me to send this message to you. Her name is Annie.

  Du Maurier, I beseech you, in the name of our friendship, in the name of your own psychic researches, in the name of common humanity, do these things for me.

  Contact Maurice Carstairs at The Recorder and Dispatch. Prepare a report for him based on what I have told you. I will try to send you further details and later developments. If I ever do find my way back to England, I will be rich and famous as a result of this adventure!

  Contact my father at the family estate. Tell him that I am still on Neville's trail, and that the title of Baron Tewkesbury shall never become extinct.

  Contact the lady who accompanied me to the theater at the opening of "Cox and Box. ' You will find her dwelling on the top floor of the tallest house in Plantagenet Court. I suspect that you know the street. If not, it is easy enough to find. Tell her that I love her, and that I shall return to keep my promise.

  And then, du Maurier, the last and greatest favor of all. You must get word back to me. Get material assistance to me if you can, but if you cannot, then at least get word back to me. Physically or mesmerically, however you can do it. Let me know that I have reached you. Let me know that I am not utterly and forever stranded here in the Dungeon. Please, du Maurier—do this for me. When I get back to London, you shall share in every bit of the wealth and glory that I expect to reap.

  God bless you, du Maurier! I can only hope that you hear me, somehow. If you hear me in your sleep, know you that this is not a dream! If you hear me while you wake, you are not mad! I am real, I live, and I pray that this message reaches you.

  Farewell, du Maurier! Farewell! Do not let me down, my friend! You are my only contact in the world I knew for thirty-three years!

  He dropped his hand back into his lap. How long had he and Annie and Horace and great Finnbogg remained in their semicircular formation?

  Annie looked pale, drained. She said, "I think—I think—but I'm so tired, Clive."

  Clive had been in a fuguelike state himself. He blinked. The sun—or suns—of this world had sunk behind the woods that surrounded the mouth of the cave. A blazing dusk colored half the sky. In England, Folliot would have stopped to admire the picture painted from nature's magnificent palate, but here in the Dungeon he could only gaze at the eight- limbed being that yet blocked the entrance to the cave.

  From somewhere deep within the cavern there came a single, agonized scream, followed by scraping and chomping sounds. The strange, eight-limbed creature that blocked the mouth of the cave nodded and slowly emerged from the opening.

  Even as Clive watched the creature, fascinated, he first heard and then saw a few of the savages begin to creep back from the woods into which their tribe had disappeared.

  The four-armed creature emitted another of its appalling shrieks, and with several of its hands tore patches of long, spiky hairs from itself, and hurled the hairs toward the woods. The hairs hurtled like miniature javelins, and where they struck the primitives those beings began almost instantaneously to swell and discolor. In seconds they fell to the earth and their bodies were transformed into dreadful, distended travesties of the human form, writhing and puffing and discoloring and finally falling away into pools of horrid noisome fluids in which their bones lay like biscuits in bowls of cream.

  Perhaps we would have been better off with the savages,

  Clive thought. But the companions had no control over that choice. At least, they no longer had any.

  Now something was happening to the face of the spider-being. Clive stared in fascination. He knew there was no point in attempting to flee, and as he watched, he realized that in some fantastically alien, arachnoidal way, the being was smiling at him. Smiling at him and his three friends.

  The creature's four arms darted out, and with one hand for each it took Clive and Annie and Smythe and Finnbogg by their hands. Annie's electrofield had been changed from a weapon of defense to a tool of communication for Clive's benefit, and Annie had been too drained by the transmission of Clive's message to du Maurier to remember to switch it back!

  With surprising gentleness but with a strength that overwhelmed even squat, massive Finnbogg's, the spider-being drew the others along as it scuttled on its four legs toward the mouth of the cave that the savages had previously surrounded.

  And as the spider creature's hand grasped Clive Folliot's, Clive felt a strange sense of communion, both with the spider-being and, through it, with his three companions. Perhaps this was the mental telepathy that George du Maurier spoke of, or perhaps it was something else, some sort of electrical exchange of the brain waves of the three humans and the doglike being and the spider creature.

  Clive could feel himself drawn into the mind of the great spider. He found that he could know the creature, not as if he were hearing it speak but as if, in some miraculous manner, he had become the spider creature.

  The being had no name as Clive would have known the term, but it thought of itself as the source of the great blood curdling shriek that Clive had heard time and again, and to him that became the creature's name: Shriek. There was no other possible name for the creature, no other name that Annie or Finnbogg or Smythe could possibly apply.

  And even as he was identifying the being by that name he realized that the creature was not a neuter it but a being of astonishingly powerful sexuality. Unquestionably, a she.

  He was plumbing the mind of a sexually aware, perhaps even a sexually aroused, female spider—and what had he learned of the mating
habits of arachnids? He tried to recall a Cambridge lecture on natural history. Yes, he could see the side-whiskered, pink-cheeked, bespectacled don, could hear the quavering, aged voice. Yes. The female spider mated, and having mated, she devoured her consort.

  But—Shriek was not a spider, any more than Finnbogg was a dog or Clive and Annie were orangutans. They were the evolved descendants of those ancestral species. He prayed that Shriek was civilized, that in the course of her species' evolution they had abandoned the grisly practice of their ancestors. And in a surge of pure mentation he received his answer from the being that held him by the hand in a grip as powerful as the one in which a nanny holds her toddling charge.

  And through Shriek, Clive found himself in a strange mental contact with Finnbogg and Horace Hamilton Smythe.

  In Finnbogg's mind he found odd memories. Memories of the doglike being's childhood. Finnbogg's earliest recollections were of his mother and his sisters and brothers. These creatures were indeed doglike; and doglike, Finnbogg's earliest and most powerful recollections were olfactory. The warm, comforting odor of his dam, of her familiar flesh, of the milk of her dugs. The rasping feel of her tongue as she cleaned him and his brothers and sisters. The odors of his litter mates, similar to one another and quite different from that of their dam, and yet as sharply distinguishable from one another as the faces of Clive's own friends. First the males could be distinguished from the females, but beyond that no two of the pups could be taken for each other. And the odor of his sire, strong and dominating, tinctured with the tang of a thousand tantalizing creatures and substances that the great male encountered outside the cozy kennel where the dam kept and nursed her pups ...

  Clive knew that he was getting led across the clearing, that he was entering the cave. He knew that the whole act must take mere seconds of time, and yet in the mental exchange that took place with and within Shriek, years of memories and experiences were being exchanged.

  He entered the mind of Horace Hamilton Smythe, and suddenly he had access to all of Smythe's memories and all of his feelings. He had a whole new set of recollections. A childhood that had its beginnings on an idyllic little farm in the south of England. Smythe and his bustling, cheerful mother. His father was more taciturn, more stern, far less pleasant than his mother, but still a good and loyal and reliable man who cared for his home and his family and his nation. And there were others. Little Horace had his littermates too, his brothers and sisters. And a dog, a great affectionate creature.

  It became clearer in Clive's mind. It was a bulldog, exquisitely ugly and massively affectionate. It was like Finnbogg, greatly like Finnbogg. But somehow there came blight, and the failure of the farm, and the death of Smythe's father. His mother, driven from the land, had gathered her children about her and gone northward. The great bulldog had been put to death—the saddest event of Horace Hamilton Smythe's life: the boy had wept for days, inconsolable. No wonder, Clive realized, Smythe had taken so to Finnbogg.

  Then the widow Smythe and her offspring had sunk from genteel deprivation in London's suburbs to abject poverty in the metropolis's slums. The mother had drifted to more and more menial forms of work, the daughters to lives of shame and the sons to lives of crime, until young Horace had found a new home for himself in Her Majesty's service. But for a recruiting sergeant who had seen a deep-hidden strength and potential virtue in the youth, Smythe would probably have wound up floating in the Thames with a knife gouge in his belly, or swinging from a gallows at Dartmoor, long before now.

  Clive shared Smythe's memories of his campaigns. He saw himself as Smythe had seen him—a not altogether flattering view, but one colored by a certain affection. He recalled with Smythe the latter's earlier encounters with Sidi Bombay and he saw Smythe's American adventure, much as the sergeant had explained it not long before.

  There were other interludes in Horace Hamilton Smythe's life, odysseys and events that startled Clive Folliot. He saw Smythe bundled in furs, buffeted by icy winds and stinging sleet, struggling to climb the peaks of the Himalayas, approaching the sacred precincts of the secretive lands of Tibet and Nepal. He saw Smythe in the jungles of Amazonia, probing the lost civilizations of the empire of Brazil.

  What was a simple quartermaster sergeant of Her Majesty's army doing in these remote climes? With a jolt, Clive realized that there was far more to Horace Hamilton Smythe than ever he had realized.

  If Clive had such sudden and deep access to the minds and memories of his companions, he realized, they must have the same sort of access to his own mind. There were events in his life of which he was not proud, but nothing could be done now to protect himself from mental scrutiny. Things he would never think of revealing in his articles for Maurice Carstairs, these others would learn, whether he willed it or not.

  Until now he had not approached User Annie in this strange mental communion, and for the moment he wondered if he ought to do so. His brush with the mind of Horace Hamilton Smythe had been surprisingly easy to deal with. He and Smythe were natives of the same country, of course, and they were nearly of an age (Smythe being the older of the two). He might have expected greater difficulty in making mental contact with Finnbogg. The dwarf, after all, was a being of another species, the product of another world. But perhaps the very doggishness of the massive Finnbogg, and the natural affinity between human and canine, had made the contact possible.

  But Annie ... He approached her mentally, and it was like approaching a beautiful, subtle light. As weary as she had been after the attempt to communicate with du Maurier, she moved now—if that was the word—with ineffable and untired grace. She drew him to herself, and he found himself floating toward her, eager, excited. But before he could touch the light that was Annie, she slipped away, dancing before him, dodging his mental touch like a will-o'-the-wisp.

  Later, she seemed to whisper in his ear. The time will come, Clive, the time will come. He thought he saw her dancing, dancing nude. He reached for her again, but instead he came up against the mind of Shriek.

  What were Shriek's memories? What were her thoughts? Clive could sense them, share them somehow, even as Shriek probed and picked through his own mind. He felt an intelligence greater than his own, an older and wiser one. But whereas the alienness of Finnbogg was that of a warm-blooded, doglike mammal—or something very much like one—Shriek was far more alien to Clive. She was an arachnoid, a cold-blooded, egg-laying, eight-legged, eight-eyed creature.

  The chemistry of her body was far different from his own. She secreted chemicals that permeated the stiff bristles on her body, and when she chose to do so she could vary that chemistry to bring about the results she desired, from terror and submission to willing cooperation, to uncontrollable lust, to death.

  She had not used this chemistry on Clive and his friends because there had been no need for it.

  She wanted Clive and Annie and Finnbogg and Smythe for something. Clive could see the purpose in Shriek's mind, but it was a purpose so remote from his experience and his comprehension that it came to him as a meaningless blur of impressions.

  Shriek shoved Clive and the others through the low mouth of the cave. The strange spell of communion with the others snapped as Shriek released each of them, but in the final moment of that communion something else happened.

  Clive received the distinct impression that he and the others could regain that communion, with or without Shriek's intervention. Under her spell their minds and their infinitely complex networks of nerves had been altered. Willingly or not, knowingly or not, Shriek had given Clive and Annie and Smythe and Finnbogg the power to share their minds simply by lacing their fingers together and permitting themselves to flow into one another.

  Behind Clive the mouth of the cave was blocked by Finnbogg's massive torso—Annie and Horace Hamilton Smythe had already followed him inside. The light from outside returned as Finnbogg emerged inside the cave, then darkened again as Shriek's spiderish shape filled the opening for a moment.

  Then
Shriek, too, was inside, and Clive and the others beheld the world that they and the spider- being had entered.

  FIVE

  THE NESTED

  WORLDS

  CHAPTER 20

  Into the Nest

  It was an oval, cavernous enclosure, its shape like the inside of an egg. The very air seemed to scintillate with glowing particles, so that the chamber was as bright as day although it contained no single, identifiable source of light.

  Because of the odd illumination, Clive realized, he and his companions cast no shadows: every atom of air glowed!

  Clive turned to see Shriek apparently blocking the circular opening through which they had entered the chamber. There should be a disk of daylight and a glimpse of the outer world, but Clive could find none such. Instead, the walls of the chamber were dotted with openings. Some of them were above his head, even in the ceiling of the chamber. Others were in the walls, and still others in the floor of the chamber.

  All of them were illuminated, and all were of different—and brilliant—colors. Reds and greens and shimmering yellows and gaudy purples and shades of blue and of every other color Clive could identify. And many he could not.

  Clive examined the options optically. "What do you think?" he asked the others.

  "I think we've no future inside this Easter egg," Sergeant Smythe said.

  "Precious little anywhere else," Clive responded.

  User Annie had edged beside him. He felt the warmth of her body, and a slight tremor that passed through it. He held her to him. He was relieved that her electrofield was turned off.

  "Exit program," Annie suggested.

  Clive was tempted to lace his fingers into hers, to attempt to gain communion with her, but this was not the moment.

  Shriek made a clicking sound with her mandibles. It was the first sound she had made—at least the first that Clive knew of—other than her uncanny screaming. She gestured toward the holes in the ovoid chamber.