The major nodded again.
Clive ordered his thoughts, turning the journal over and over in his hands, studying its binding as if to learn something from it. "You knew my brother, Neville Folliot?"
The major and his wife both nodded, conceding the fact.
But how could that be? Clive had regained his outward calm, but inwardly he was stunned, seething with shock and mystification. The major and his wife knew Neville? They had obtained the journal from him?
But Neville was dead. Clive had seen him, had opened his bier by his own efforts, had gazed upon Neville's cadaver, had pried the journal—this same journal!—from Neville's very hands!
No!
Neville's mind jumped from pole to pole like an iron filing in some experiment conducted by the late Mr. Faraday.
Neville must be alive, must be somewhere ahead of Clive and his companions, egging them on, drawing them on to some hidden purpose of his own! And the enigmatic journal with its messages, sometimes helpful, sometimes treacherous, had now reappeared!
Clive seated himself. He drew a small table toward himself and laid the book upon it. He opened it to the last entry he had read.
On the following page, there were new words. It was written in ink the color of freshly spilled blood, ink a color Clive had never seen before except in the heat of sanguinary battle. But the hand in which the new entry was written showed Neville's inimitable penmanship. The entry was brief and the words were clear even if their meaning was not:
Little brother, you astonish me. I never expected you to reach this place. I never expected you to live this long. You can still go back. You can still save yourself. Your companions are lost, but you can be saved. Turn back. TURN BACK NOW! Else the Lord of the Castle will have his glee. Turn back, brother, and tell Father that his will is being done, the Lord has seen the sign, the swirl approaches its vertex, and timing is correct, the formula spells true. Turn back, brother, or the Lord will toast your liver!
Clive was aghast. Turn back? How could he, even if he wished to comply? There was no returning through the colored tunnel, no flying back through the void to the strange trainlike vehicle, no recrossing the chasm, no. . . .
There was simply no turning back. Even if he were willing to give up his quest and return to England, he could not abandon Sidi Bombay and Annie. He could not abandon Annie!
Clive raised his eyes. He locked his gaze with that of the major. The look that he saw in the official's eyes he now realized was mirrored in his own.
The sign...the swirl...the vertex...the timing...the formula...
What did it mean? Was Baron Tewkesbury somehow involved in the strange plot? Clive's father and his brother, together?
Clive rocked in his seat. Instinctively, he reached his hand toward Horace Hamilton Smythe for aid or simply for the calming comfort that communion could provide. But before Smythe could respond, Clive leaped to his feet. He shut Neville's journal with a clap that made the others jump.
"We will go to the castle!" he ordered.
"No!" the major pleaded. "You do not know what you are saying!"
"We will go! How far is it? How long will it take to walk?"
"You cannot walk there, sir. It is impossible!"
"Then we will require horses, sir!"
"We have no horses in this village."
"What do you use?"
"We use—other beasts. We have carts and we have other beasts to draw them. Not horses."
"Very well," Clive snapped.
"Please," the major began again, but the look in Clive's face convinced him that the case was hopeless. "At least," the official amended, "not at night. We cannot take you in the night, and you would never get there without guides. At least wait for the morning, sir. Please."
Clive hesitated, exchanged silent glances with his companions, trying to read their thoughts. Then he made his decision. "No. Prepare the cart. Will it hold us all? Prepare the beasts. Then we will go!"
The major rose slowly to his feet, his face ashen, his hands trembling. Nearby, his wife collapsed to the floor, sobbing without shame.
CHAPTER 27
The Hall of the Mountain Lords
A squad of villagers, working by torchlight, prepared the cart. While they went about their tasks, Clive conferred with his colleagues.
Horace Hamilton Smythe was the most articulate, and the most determined to push on. "We've come this far, sah! I feel that I led the major into this situation. I wish to tender my apologies for so doing, sah."
Clive Folliot clasped Smythe by the hand. Everybody was apologizing tonight. "Not your fault, Sergeant. I was suspicious of your motives for a time, that I will admit. But once I learned of your experiences in New Orleans—your encounter with the sharpers, your duel—I realized that you were not at fault. You have not acted as a free agent at all times, during this adventure."
Smythe bobbed his head. "Grateful that the major understands."
"I do wish I could be sure that you are the old Horace Hamilton Smythe right now."
"I am, sah!"
"And not going to lapse back into a mesmeric trance, Sergeant? Are you fully free of Philo Goode's influence—Philo Goode and whoever may be his partners or his principals?"
"That I cannot say, sah." Smythe looked up as if searching the heavens for some clue. "I feel entirely myself, at this very moment. But if Mr. Goode has his invisible net over me, I don't know but that he'll try to haul it in once more."
The man looked stricken. Clive's heart went out to him, but there was nothing he could do to help.
They stood in the square outside the major's house. The constellation of miniature suns above them glowed and pulsed dimly at the midnight hour. They had arranged themselves into the all-too-familiar spiral.
Like Smythe, Clive peered up at the heavens. Somewhere beyond those swirling stars lay the inner shell of this tiny world. Perhaps each of the tunnels they had tried to choose among led to a different world, each miniature, each self-contained, each unique.
"Besides, I can't just abandon old Sidi Bombay," Horace Hamilton Smythe resumed. "He's a good chap. I'm convinced he's alive, and if we keep on, we may find some sign to tell us where he's gone. Sidi's my oldest comrade, Major. We served together even before you and I met that very first day. If I was your mentor when you were a green lieutenant— you've said as much, and I feel honored that you did, sah—why, consider that Sidi was my own mentor. My initiator and my guide in a whole wide world, Major. I know it in my bones, Major, that old Sidi is alive. And I can't abandon the man."
"I understand." Clive nodded. "As you feel about Sidi Bombay, so feel I—about Miss Annie." The two soldiers stood silently, musing. Then, quite suddenly, Clive said, "Smythe, I am certain that my brother is alive. As sure as you that Sidi Bombay lives, so am I that Neville Folliot does."
"Are you, sah?"
"Well, I must admit that I am of two minds. When we found the casket containing his cadaver, I of course thought it was all up with Neville. But by some power he continues to add messages to his journal."
"The major read a new message tonight," Smythe commented.
Clive had not shared the latest entry with Smythe. Now he admitted as much. "Indeed. A disquieting one, at that. Still and all, it shows that Neville is able to communicate with us."
"Does the major believe in the spirits, sah? Not to be discouraging, but p'raps Major Neville Folliot has, how shall I put it, eh, passed over to the next plane of existence. Could it be that he's sending back ectoplasmic tendrils to write in his journal?"
Clive held the journal under his arm. He patted it. "Anything is possible, Sergeant. Anything at all. But—somehow I don't believe that Neville is dead. The body in the casket was a simulacrum. A mechanical thing, perhaps, or a dummy. Perhaps even a real cadaver—a corpse chosen for its superficial resemblance to Neville."
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them and said, "Dress the double in the right uniform, style its mustache a
nd hair to resemble Neville's, apply a little makeup. See to it that the lighting is dim and the moment is brief and stressful. Voilà! The ruse could hardly fail!"
He kicked absently at a clod of dirt, then turned his gaze once more toward the enigmatically swirling stars. Who was behind all this? Whither did it lead? "I don't know," he answered his own question, "but I'm going to find out. And when I do, I know I shall find my brother again. Find him alive. And in all likelihood, I shall find my lost Annie and you too shall find your comrade, Sidi Bombay."
The cart rolled from its shed, a heavy wooden vehicle reminiscent of a London dray. The major/mayor of the village rode on a high wooden seat. He cracked a whip viciously against the rumps of the harnessed team that drew the cart.
A flickering oil lantern swayed at each corner of the cart, and a torch burned in a holder beside the driver's seat.
Finnbogg and Shriek followed Clive and Smythe to the cart.
Clive stared at the team. The major had said that the cart would not be drawn by horses. Clive therefore expected to find some other beasts used for the purpose—oxen, buffaloes, even giant canines.
But these draft animals were human beings. Giant, naked humans. One male, one female.
Clive emitted a scream of rage and lunged at the major, meaning to do no less than hurl him from his perch. But the official dodged his effort, and instead Clive ran to the front of the cart.
He peered into the pathetic faces. The man and woman must each have weighed half a ton at least, the male probably as much as twelve hundred pounds. "What have they done to you?" Clive gritted.
There was no response.
He took the head of the male in his hands and peered into the eyes. They were dull, with little sign of intelligence or awareness.
"You're a human being, man, not a dumb beast! Speak! What have they done?"
There was no response. He stepped to the female. Her features were only slightly less massive and crude than those of her consort. Long hair hung down on the sides of her face. A harness was fixed to her body, and a bit to her mouth exactly as if she were a horse. Her companion was similarly outfitted.
Clive's eyes shifted from the dull, spiritless faces to the bodies of the two. Their arms were long and heavily fleshed, their hands foreshortened into clublike appendages. They stood on all fours, rumps elevated, but only slightly so, for their legs were short and stumplike in shape. Their shoulders were massively muscled.
Tears of rage and of pathos came to Clive's eyes. "Speak!" he shouted at the human beasts. "Stand upright! Clothe yourselves! They have turned you into animals!"
The male and female stirred uneasily, as if somewhere, in a dim recess of their brutalized brains, some dim spark glowed in response to Clive's impassioned speech. They shifted on their hands and made a sound, a heartbreaking, sighing sound that contained the last, hopeless vestige of their lost humanity.
The major hopped down from his perch. He reached into a pocket and extracted an apple and a rude knife. He sliced the apple in half and jammed a piece of it into the mouth of each of the human beasts. Despite the bits in their mouths, they managed to chew on the apple. The dim light that had appeared in their eyes disappeared.
"You shouldn't ought to do that, sir," the major appealed to Clive. "You'll only get 'em upset. Let 'em be, sir, please. For their own sake. There's nothing you can do for 'em. Nothing anybody can do for 'em. So just let 'em be."
Clive looked into the major's face. The pain and the grief and the hopelessness that he saw there were too real to dispute. "All right," he said. "Let's go, then."
"Thank you, sir." The major helped them all onto the cart. Finnbogg insisted on sniffing at the team first. He cocked his head to one side, then to the other, then hurried away from them and climbed laboriously onto the rearmost position. Shriek hopped toward the human beasts but they reared and backed away, until she, too, climbed onto the back of the cart.
Clive and Sergeant Smythe sat nearer the major.
The ride to the castle was quiet and chilly and in large part uneventful. There were occasional sounds from the darkness, sounds that sent a shudder through Clive Folliot. He had placed Neville's journal on the seat beside himself. Now, to keep it safe, he shifted his weight and slid the black-bound book beneath his leg.
The cart rolled and jounced along. No one spoke, and even Finnbogg's musical impulses seemed to have been dampened. How long the cart rolled, Clive could not tell. The creaking of its wheels, the fresh odors of the countryside, and his own tension and fatigue combined to place him in a condition of semiconsciousness.
How perfect this moment would be, had he Annie beside him instead of the stolid Sergeant Smythe!
In his strange, half-waking dream, he held Annie in his arms. Beneath the swirling stars her face was singularly beautiful. The points of light from above were reflected in her eyes. Her hair swung gracefully. He wondered how women managed to tend to their hair in the midst of circumstances like these, but even in his semidream he conceded that there were mysteries utterly beyond male comprehension, of which this was one.
He lowered his face to hers, and their lips met.
They were unimaginably far from home, trapped in a world they had surely never made and would probably never understand. They traveled in the company of beings undreamed of in Clive's London. Each day—each moment— might be their last.
Some inchoate instinct drove Clive to press his lips harder against those of Annie, to hold her closer to him, straining the power of his hands to press her body against his own. And she responded, responded in ways that might be commonplace in her own strange world of the year 1999 but that were shocking—and delightful—to a man of Clive's staid era.
In that moment Clive felt a strange stirring. It was his brother Neville's journal,, which he had placed beneath his leg. It shifted and squirmed like a living thing. He tried to ignore it, tried to hold his full attention upon Annie. This might be the last opportunity either of them would ever have to share a moment such as this one. He did not wish her to be deprived of it.
But the book demanded his attention. It grew hot, then cold. It sent the sensation of needles running into his leg. It stung like an injection of deadly acid.
With a moan, Clive released Annie and reached for the book. With a start he realized that Annie was not there at all. He was fully awake, seated on the hard seat of a jouncing, creaking conveyance. He drew the journal from its place on the seat beneath his leg.
Dawn had broken—or its equivalent in this hollow world. The galaxy of stars overhead had brightened. The castle loomed before them, little more than a mile ahead.
The book opened itself in Clive's hand, opened to the page after the last entry had read. There was a new entry, this time in ink the color of a cobra's eyes—a deadly, hypnotic green!
The gem of beauty is the diamond and the gem of sin is the emerald. Seek out the diamond. Seek out the emerald. You have traveled farther than was simple and farther than was wise. Your peril is only beginning and yet it is ending. Beware the sin that rests upon the peak of beauty. Beware the emerald set upon the peak of diamond. BEWARE, CLIVE FOLLIOT, BEWARE!
Unaided by volition on the part of Clive Folliot, the book shut itself with a snap. He tried to open it again, to reexamine this newest message, but the book refused to yield.
A squad of heavyset, gnomelike troopers barred the pathway. The major's cart had come close to the castle now, and he drew the human beasts to a halt.
The commander of the guards wore a heavy helmet, massive armor, and thick padding. He carried a huge double-headed battle-ax, and other weapons hung from the belt that circled his broad waist.
"You!" he snarled. He held his enormous ax in one hand as if it were an instructor's pointer in some sunlit classroom at Cambridge. He pointed the ax unmistakably at Clive. "Climb down! Come ahead!"
He pointed at the others in the wagon and made a contemptuous gesture. "You others, the rest of you—go home. Or wait here. Or be
eaten by—" He made a sound, uttered a word, obviously the name of a beast to be found hereabouts.
"Die anyway," the commander growled. He pointed again at Clive. "You come, quick!" He turned his back without waiting for a response and trudged up the dirt road toward the castle.
Still seated, Clive turned and looked at his companions and tried to read what he saw in their faces. He held the journal toward Horace Smythe. He was not sure why he did it, but he felt somehow that the journal might more likely survive in Smythe's custody than in his own.
Clive climbed down from the wagon. He followed the guard commander up the hard-packed path toward the castle. He would face whatever the castle held, alone. Alone, the word echoed in his mind. He repeated with each step he took. Alone. Alone. Alone.
The castle, upon closer approach, was a perfect example of the medieval keep. It could have been an illustration' from some volume of folktales gathered by the Brothers Grimm—perhaps the one containing the story of Hansel and Gretel! High towers rose gloomily above massive battlements. Notched walls and narrow windows would facilitate the defense of the castle against any besieging army. The only visible entrance to the pile was a great arched opening sealed by an iron portcullis that could be reached only by crossing a broad moat.
Through the portcullis Clive could see a broad, open courtyard—the kind of courtyard that in centuries past would have been used as a marshaling area for parties of traders—or of warriors.
It was something out-of-date by hundreds of years, a nightmare from the Middle Ages. Yet here it stood.
Clive's guide had not spoken another word once they had left the cart and Clive's companions behind. There was only the loping, gnomish stride of the commander leading Clive up the path and the heavy shuffling of the other guards behind him, to accompany his melancholy march.
The drawbridge was raised when they reached the moat. The guard commander found a heavy stone and dragged it from the earth with filthy fingers. He drew back and hurled it against the bridge; as the stone splashed into the moat, the sound of its impact on the bridge boomed through the air.
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