by Tim Powers
“You’re overdoing it,” came Horrabin’s Mickey Mouse voice from behind him. “It’s not as easy or quick as just ripping open a crate. You’re just killing him.”
“He may think that too,” gasped Romanelli. The sorcerer stood in an evidently painful net of miniature lightning bolts.
“But listen to me, Ashbless—you won’t die until I let you. I could cut your head off—and I may—and still keep you alive in it by magic. You probably imagine you’ll be dead by dawn. Let me assure you I can prolong your death agonies decades.”
The doorway was directly behind the two magicians, and Ashbless forced himself not to move his eye or show any reaction when he saw the monstrous forms appear in it and steal silently forward into the dim room. Whatever they are, he thought, I hope they’re real, and kill us all.
But there was a flicker of motion on the shelf above the pump—one of the little dolls twitched, pointed its tiny arm and shrilled, “The Mistakes are loose!”
Horrabin spun on one stilt like a compass and, poking out his tongue until it touched his nose, produced a piercing two-tone whistle that jarred Ashbless’ remaining teeth. At the same moment Romanelli took a deep breath—it sounded like an open umbrella being dragged down a chimney—and then barked three syllables and flung his bloodstained hands out, palms forward.
One of the Mistakes, a long, lithe furry thing with huge ears and nostrils but no eyes, launched itself in a cat-like leap at Horrabin, but thudded against a barrier and tumbled back to splash in the mud of the wet floor.
“Get… rid of them,” sobbed Romanelli. Blood was welling freely from his nose and ears. “I can’t do… another one of these.”
Half a dozen of the Mistakes, including one amphibian giant with an underslung lower jaw and multiple ranks of wedge-shaped teeth, were noisily hitting and clawing at the barrier.
“Open little holes along the floor,” said Horrabin tensely. “My Spoonsize Boys will make ‘em glad to get back in their cages.”
“I… can’t,” Romanelli said in a faint whine. “If I try to alter it… it will just… break.” Blood had begun running from his eyes like tears. “I’m… falling to pieces.”
“Look at the clown’s trousies,” boomed the thing with all the teeth.
Horrabin automatically glanced down at himself, and saw by the torchlight that his baggy white pantaloons were spattered with mud from the furry Mistake’s splash in the puddle.
“Mud goes through,” the creature bellowed, prying up a fist-sized stone from the floor and flinging it.
The stone thudded into Horrabin’s belly, and he reeled gasping on his stilts until two more struck him, one on his polka dot ruffled wrist and one on his white forehead, and he folded backward, his face a mask of horrified wrath, to sit down with a loud splat in the mud.
The Spoonsize Boys bounded down from their shelf like oversized crickets, drawing their tiny swords in midair, splashed and tumbled in the mud and then bounded through the barrier, stabbing the ankles and swarming up the legs of the Mistakes.
Romanelli folded Ashbless’ ruined leg back and belted the ankle to the thigh, then, with an effort that crumbled the teeth between his hard-clenched jaws, the sorcerer lifted the dying poet and lurched across the floor to the far archway.
Every step down the hall produced further snaps and internal burstings, but Romanelli plodded on, the breath shrieking in and out of him, as crashes and shouts erupted from the hospital behind them, to the archway that led into the descending cellar.
* * *
Carrington’s men, huddled against the wall below one of the torches, had been getting increasingly impatient for the return of their chief, and swearing to each other in whispers that they would damn well go in there without him, but they blanched and stepped back when the grisly spectacle of Romanelli and his burden walked in through the arch and passed them.
“Jesus,” whispered one of them, fingering the grip of a dagger, “shouldn’t we go after him and kill him?”
“What are you, blind?” growled one of his fellows. “He’s dead already. Let’s go get the clown.”
They had just started toward the arch when a gang of the Mistakes burst hopping and slithering through, hotly pursued by a leaping swarm of the Spoonsize Boys.
Ashbless had, despite all the chemical and sorcerous consciousness maintainers, sunk into a semi-comatose state from which he roused only for moments at a time. At one point he was vaguely aware that he was being carried down a steep incline; at another he noticed that his bearer was mindlessly and in a bubbling voice singing some jolly little song; then things became confused: there was a lot of yelling behind them, and by the light of his bearer’s personal electrical storm he saw a thing like a huge toad wearing a three-cornered hat bound past on one side while a six-legged dog with a man’s head galloped by on the other, and then the air was full of leaping bugs which weren’t bugs at all but tiny angry men waving little swords.
Then his bearer had stumbled, and everyone was tumbling down the increasingly steep slope, and the last thing Ashbless glimpsed before losing consciousness one more time puzzled him even through his death-fog: he saw Jacky’s face, streaked with tears and shorn of its moustache, staring at him in surprise as he rolled past.
* * *
The sparking, flickering thing that tumbled against Jacky collided with the Eyeless Sisters too and sent them spinning away into the darkness, chittering in disappointment, and Jacky scrambled to her hands and knees in time to see that the blue-flashing thing was a man, and that William Ashbless, evidently dead, was sliding down the slope right behind him; then Jacky ducked her head and dug her fingers and toes into the mud between the stones, for a rush of barking and mewling forms, invisible in the darkness, spilled heavily past and over her, closely followed by a horde of what felt and sounded like large locusts. A few moments later the Hell’s circus rush was receding below her, and she began crawling back up the slope.
There were noises from above too, faint screams and shouts and maniacal laughter that echoed weirdly through the cavern, and she wondered dazedly what madness had struck Rat’s Castle this night.
After many minutes she felt the floor level out beneath her, and looking up she saw the distant torches and the archway. Carrington’s men no longer lurked there and whatever the action was, it was taking place somewhere else, so Jacky got up and ran madly toward the light.
When she’d got there she crouched panting for several minutes in the semicircle of wonderful yellow light, enjoying the delusion of safety it gave her, like the King’s X in the games of tag she’d played not that many years ago, and it was with reluctance that she finally got up and stepped through the arch and into darkness again.
She could hear nervous voices from the direction of the dock, so she padded silently up the corridor that led to the ascending stairway, but halted when she heard voices there too.
Guards, she thought—Carrington’s men, probably, making sure nothing gets out of this ant’s nest.
She decided to go back and hide somewhere until the guards returned to the surface, and then swim down the waterway to the Thames, and she’d just turned and started back when the steady shouting doubled in volume and a dim, reflected glow sprang up in the corridor. It quickly waxed brighter, as if men with torches were just about to appear around a corner ahead. Jacky looked around in panic, hoping to see a doorway she might duck into, but there was none. She flattened herself against a wall.
The yelling grew louder still, and she could hear a fast wooden knocking, and then from out of one of the farther tunnels burst Horrabin, completely ablaze and running on his stilts, flanked and followed by what seemed to be a horde of bounding, chittering rats; a moment later his pursuers skidded around the same corner and came bounding after him, flinging rocks and baying like hounds.
Jacky looked back at the stairs, and dimly saw two men crouching just outside the archway, aiming some sort of guns at the approaching rout. No help in that direction, sh
e thought. In desperation she flung herself down against the wall with one arm over her face, in the faint hope of being mistaken for a corpse by all parties.
The two guns went off with one prolonged roar and a flash that brightened the tunnel for a full second, and as stone chips flew from the walls and ceiling, the burning clown rocked to a stop—but caught his balance, evidently unhurt by the blasts; their impact did, though, stop him long enough for his bestial pursuers to catch up with him.
A number of the Spoonsize Boys and their foot-tall counter-parts had been blown away by the sprays of shot, but the survivors turned and flung themselves into the faces of the ravening Mistakes, who had knocked the flaming, screaming clown over against the wall and were tearing at his legs with mud-stained claws. The miniature men leaped right in past the talons of the Mistakes and drove their little swords into eyes and throats and ears, totally careless of their own survival; but the Mistakes were fighting to the death and were willing to risk the blades of the Spoonsize Boys, and a scorching, in order to get close enough to Horrabin to take a bite out of any reachable part of him with muddied teeth, or to pull one of the stilts farther out from under him.
The lunatic spectacle was taking place only a few yards in front of Jacky, and she couldn’t help lifting her head a little to watch. The blackened, whimpering clown wasn’t burning as brightly as before, but there was still enough flame to see some individual struggles: Jacky saw one of the Mistakes, a poodle-sized thing with tentacles all over it and both eyes ruined by the homunculi’s swords, latch a toothy mouth onto Horrabin’s clutching right hand, and, with a horrible snapping, bite most of it off; and a couple of things like unshelled snails, dying under the fierce attentions of a dozen of the little men, had got in between the wall and the left stilt, and managed with their last, expiring efforts to push it out past the supporting point, so that the clown came crashing down onto them; most of the light went out when Horrabin hit the floor, so that all Jacky could see was a heaving, tortured mass of dying shapes, and all she could hear was an ever-weaker chorus of gasps, crunchings, whimpers and long, rattling exhalations. A nasty smell like burning garbage choked the tunnel.
Jacky got up and ran past the mass of death, deeper into the maze, and after twenty paces in the darkness she lost her footing and tumbled, and when she slid to a dazed stop a hand closed firmly on her wrist.
She writhed around, wondering if she had the strength left to strangle something, but she halted when she heard her unseen companion’s voice. “I say, excuse me. Sir Thought or Whimsy or Fugitive Virtue, but could you possibly direct me to the waking levels of my mind?”
* * *
Ashbless had been dimly aware for some time that he was lying in the bottom of a boat that was being weakly rowed by Doctor Romanelli, but he came fully awake one more time when he noticed that the surface he was lying on had changed. The last time he’d been aware of it, it had been hard, angular wood, but now it seemed to be soft leather stretched loosely over some kind of flexible ribs. He opened his eye and was mildly surprised to find that he could see, though there was no light. The boat was passing through a vast ruinous hall, along the walls of which stood upright sarcophagi that shone with an intense blackness.
He heard Romanelli gasp, and looked in his direction. The gaunt sorcerer too shone in the anti-light; he was staring in awe at something over Ashbless’ shoulder. Ashbless dragged an elbow under himself and managed to turn his head, and saw several tall, dim figures standing at the stern, and a little shrine in the center of the boat, encircled by a snake with its tail in its mouth, and in the shrine stood a man-high disk that blazed so darkly with the radiant blackness that it hurt Ashbless’ eye, and he had to look away; though he thought he had seen dimly the pattern of a kephera beetle inscribed on the disk. When he could see again he noticed that Romanelli was smiling with relief, and that tears were slicking his eroded cheeks.
“The boat of Ra,” he was whispering, “the Sektet boat, in which the sun journeys through the twelve hours of the night, from sunset to dawn! I’m in it—and at dawn, when we emerge into the world again, I’ll sail in the Atet boat, the boat of the morning sky, and I’ll be restored!”
Too ruined to care, Ashbless slumped back down onto the leather—beneath which, he noticed, he could hear a pulse beat. The wailing that he’d seemed to be hearing all night was louder now, and had a supplicating tone. He rolled his head and looked out over the low gunwale to the bank of the river and saw vague forms stretching out their arms toward the boat as it passed; and when it had passed them he could hear their despairing weeping. There were poles standing in the bank at intervals—marking the hours, he thought—with snakes’ heads stuck on the top of them, and as the boat passed each one it became, just for an instant, a bowed human head.
Ashbless sat up, and noticed for the first time that the boat was a huge snake, broadened in the middle like an exaggerated cobra’s hood, and that at both stern and bow it tapered up in a long neck to a living serpent’s head.
This is the poem, he thought—the twelve hours of the night. This is what I was writing about. I’m in the boat that only dead men see.
He sensed that the disk was alive—no, very dead, but aware—but that it was uninterested in the two stowaways. The tall figures in the stern, which seemed to be men with the heads of animals and birds, also ignored them. Ashbless slumped back again.
After a time the boat floated through a dim gate flanked by two sarcophagi as tall as telephone poles, and the shore figures on the other side were screaming and shifting from side to side along the shore and over their frightened cries he could hear a slow metallic slithering. “Apep!” the ghosts were shouting. “Apep!” And then he saw a shape of blackness rising, and realized it was the head of a serpent so vast that it dwarfed their freakish boat. Man-shaped forms dangled from its jaws, but it shook its ponderous head, sending them spinning away, and arched slowly forward over the river.
“The serpent Apep,” whispered Romanelli, “whose body lies in the deep realms of the keku samu where pure darkness becomes an impenetrable solid. It senses that there is a soul on this boat that… doesn’t qualify for emergence into the dawn.” Romanelli was smiling. “But I don’t need you any longer anyway.”
Unable even to prop himself up on his elbow anymore, Ashbless watched the absolutely black head blot out every other thing above him. The air became bitterly cold as the thing bent down closer, and when it opened its vast jaws he thought he could see negative stars shining in a remote distance, as if Apep’s mouth was the gateway to a universe of absolute cold and the absence of light.
Ashbless shut his eye and commended his soul into the care of any benign god there might still somewhere be.
A thin screaming drew his attention outward again, and he looked up for what he hoped would be the last time… and saw the disintegrating figure of Doctor Romanelli falling upward into the vast maw.
* * *
Just to be sure, Jacky stared into the dark west, where the broad Thames curled to the south past Whitehall before straightening out westward, and then she looked east again.
She smiled with relief. Yes, the sky was definitely paling. She could see the dark arches of Blackfriars Bridge against the tenuous pre-dawn glow.
She relaxed and sat back on the low stone wall, aware now that it was chilly out on the mud bank above the Adelphi Arches. She pulled her coat closer about her shoulders and began shivering. Hopeless as this vigil is, she thought, I’ll nevertheless wait here until somewhat after dawn to see if Ashbless might drift out here—it’s just conceivable that he wasn’t dead when he fell past me in the deep cellar, and that he reached the subterranean river and was well along it before the dreadful … solidification began.
She shuddered and glanced for reassurance at the waxing eastern light, and then allowed herself to remember the ascent from the deep cellars.
She had taken Coleridge’s hand and cautiously begun to pick her way back up the lightless corrido
r when she noticed the silence. Not only had the distant wailing stopped, but the subtly complex resonances in the air, the echoes of the perpetual breeze through all the cubic miles of subterranean corridors and chambers below them, had ceased.
She’d pressed against the right-hand wall as they went past the place where she knew Horrabin’s corpse lay—and she nearly screamed when a startlingly deep voice spoke to them out of the darkness.
“This is not a place for people, my friends,” it said.
“Uh… right,” squeaked Jacky. “We’re leaving.” She heard a heaving and thudding—and several metallic clinkings—and when the voice spoke again, it was from over her head. “I’ll escort you,” it said heavily. “Even dying from the pinpricks of the clown’s little men, Big Biter is a protector few would care to cross.”
“You’ll… escort us?” asked Jacky incredulously.
“Yes.” The thing sighed ponderously. “I owe it to your companion, who freed my brothers and sisters and me and gave us the chance to revenge ourselves on our maker before we died.”
Jacky had noticed that the thing’s voice was not echoing, as though they stood in a room instead of a tunnel.
“Make haste,” Big Biter said, moving forward, “the darkness is hardening.” The peculiar trio made their way to the stairs and plodded up them. At the first landing Coleridge wanted to rest, but Big Biter told him there wasn’t time; the creature picked Coleridge up and they continued.
“Don’t hang behind,” their escort cautioned Jacky.
“I won’t,” Jacky assured it, for she realized that now there was no sound or echo from the corridor they’d vacated, or even from the flight of stairs they’d just ascended. What was it, the eyeless Sisters had said to her half a year ago? The darkness is hardening, like thick mud, and we want to be away when it turns as solid as the stones… we mustn’t be caught forever in the stones that are hardened night! Jacky made sure she matched Big Biter’s pace, and was glad he moved so quickly.
