by James Axler
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Doc awoke, he was standing by the fetid lake-side, tethered by the waist to John Barrymore Dix with a length of nylon rope. He felt that a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders, if only temporarily. It wasn’t the first time that he had shaken free from a nightmare of grief and personal tragedy.
Nor the hundredth.
Even when he was fully functional, Dr. Theophilus Tanner walked an emotional tightrope.
The whitecoats of Operation Chronos had trawled him from the bosom of his family, from his wife, Emily, from his young children, Rachel and Jolyon, in November 1896. They had removed him against his will to the year 1998, and had kept him prisoner while they experimented with him. He was never to see his loved ones again or to know their fates.
After two years of poking and prodding, of drawing blood and giving him electrical shocks, the whitecoats had decided to be rid of him and his infuriating truculence. In December 2000, just before the world flamed out forever, Doc was sent forward in time to a destination unknown. The grim future he found himself trapped in was called Deathlands.
In terms of his own biological age, Doc Tanner was still in his thirties, but he looked twice that old. A man could only take so much pain, so much loss, so much truth about the real nature of existence. The lack of control over anything that mattered. Once that limit was reached, the only refuge was the abyss of madness. And it was over that bottomless chasm that Doc’s tightrope was stretched.
Though his memories of the most recent events were largely blurred, he retained a few clear images. He recalled the nameless ville the companions had happened upon, and the pit of the dead marked by the upraised hand of the female corpse. He recalled the infant and its mother, whose final, desperate agonies had shocked him into reliving his own mind-shattering loss.
Less clearly, he remembered the start of the companions’ long overland pursuit of the carny villains, and how with every step along that trail, his anger at being trapped in a universe so infinitely perverse seemed to build, and finally to turn inward. More vaguely, he recalled J.B. towing him and caring for him like a child.
Gradually, over the next few minutes, Doc’s full power of thought returned to him. He was a man with a classical education. A highly accomplished scholar of the nineteenth century, a trained scientific observer. As such, he saw that all of his companions seemed to be stricken by the same malady: Ryan, Dean, J.B., Jak, Krysty and Mildred appeared dazed and confused, as did the little girl. And the others, the coldhearts from the carny, were in the same state. The immature stickie was in the worst shape of any of them. Doc had never seen a terrified stickie.
It was an unnerving sight.
He untied the rope from his waist and reached down to help J.B. up from where he lay sprawled in the mud. For his trouble, he was roughly shoved away.
“What’s wrong, John Barrymore?” he said with concern. “Are you injured?”
As he rose, the Armorer pointedly turned his back on Doc.
Doc tried to thank the man who had saved his life, who had protected him, but the Armorer refused to acknowledge his existence. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, J.B.’s eyes were narrowed to slits, and his jaw was set hard. Doc looked at Mildred and Krysty, hoping to get a more friendly reception, if not some sympathy or an explanation for the rejection.
“Dr. Wyeth, Krysty, what in heaven’s name has come over John Barrymore?” he asked.
Evidently the same thing had come over them.
Neither of the women would speak to him. Not a word. They looked through him as if he weren’t even there.
Muttering to himself, Doc bent and retrieved his precious ebony swordstick. J.B. had dutifully carried the antique weapon for him this far, only to let it drop on the bank when he fell. Its ornate silver lion’s-head handle had landed in the mud along the waterline. He carefully wiped it clean on the hem of his frock coat. Doc then removed himself from the company of his infuriatingly silent friends and leaned against the trunk of one of the stripped trees. For a painful moment he considered the possibility that what he was experiencing was just another mental aberration, another waking nightmare, that this time he had perhaps slipped even more deeply into madness. He was jolted by the memories of seeing the yellow snowfall and the bizarre storm on the lake—snowfall and storm that no longer were in evidence. Memories that supported a diagnosis of insanity.
Doc had to know whether he was still dreaming. He unsheathed the sword hidden in his stick and drew its razor edge ever so lightly across the back of his middle finger just above the knuckle. The blade tugged at his skin, then cleanly sliced through. He grimaced at the pain. And the wound bled.
He wasn’t dreaming. This was all real, all horribly real.
From the distance there came an insistent, repetitive banging. It was accompanied by an odor that Doc couldn’t place, but something unpleasant was burning. The combination of stimuli seemed to animate both the companions and the carny chillers. Everyone started moving slowly away from the bank, in the direction of the banging and the caustic smell.
Doc caught up with Ryan as he, too, fell into line. Taking hold of his broad shoulder, Doc said in a pleading voice, “Ryan, dear boy, can you understand me? I fear we are all in terrible danger. We must get away from this place at once. Can you hear what I am saying?”
The one-eyed man roughly pushed his hand away. The expression on Ryan’s face made Doc draw back. Ryan had never given him a look like that. It said Touch me again and I’ll chill you.
As hurt to the core as he was puzzled, Doc let all the others shuffle past him like zombies. Why was he alone unaffected? he wondered. He could come up with no answer to the question.
Bringing up the rear, Doc followed the ragged line down the mountainside. The steep limestone slope had fractured into huge, smooth blocks, and it had been eroded from within, hollowed and honeycombed by centuries of seeping groundwater. As Doc descended, he kicked loose an avalanche of rock that tumbled into one of the gaping potholes. After a few seconds, he heard splashes and clunks as the stones hit bottom. It was a long way down, and a hard landing.
At the base of the slope was a ville of sorts. To Doc it looked like a trash midden heaped up around an ancient concrete blockhouse. Ahead of him, the others crossed the dirt square and lined up in front of the flaming burn barrel and the wildman pounding on its side with a round chunk of firewood. Doc stepped wide to the right and moved closer so he could get a better look at the goings-on.
Shouting and dancing to his own erratic rhythms, the black giant bent to pick up a big gray glob from a pile sitting in the dirt, and threw it on the grate where other globs sizzled and smoked. The objects being seared were the size and shape of predark bowling balls. Or adult human heads. The black flies seemed especially partial to the ones on the ground.
When Doc’s turn came to partake, he quietly gathered up his share of the charred stuff. He wasn’t hungry, just curious. Moving away from the others, he used his swordstick to cut the glob in two. Even on close inspection of one of the halves, he couldn’t identify the material as animal or vegetable. It had a slippery, rubbery texture like raw liver, and it was laced with branching veins and tough sheets of sinew. The powerful aroma of urea it gave off so turned his stomach that he had to hold it at arm’s length.
Then something moved on the cut surface.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?”
With the edge of his fingernail, Doc pried loose a translucent, wormlike creature. Eyeless and spineless, it was eight inches long when fully stretched, and when released, it sprang back into a tight coil.
Doc dropped the parasite in the dirt and with difficulty—it was tougher than it looked—crushed it to a pulp under his heel. He pushed the two halves of the glob back together and rolled them into the doorless entry of a lean-to made of tattered, opaque plastic sheeting.
Turning back to the square, the sight of his dearest friends eagerly gorging
on the contaminated food made his skin crawl. He hurried over to Krysty and tried to take her half-eaten meal away from her.
“It’s full of parasites!” he said as she mightily resisted.
For his concern, Doc received a quick, hard punch in the solar plexus that doubled him up and sent him staggering away. As he gasped for breath, Krysty tore off another greasy chunk with her teeth and poked it into her mouth with her fingertips.
Chastened and humiliated, Doc retreated to the scant shade along the front of the blockhouse, where he could observe and absorb, and perhaps form a plan of action. It appeared that his companions were suffering from some kind of sudden-onset mass mental illness. They all presented the same symptoms, which could have been caused by a shared trauma or by exposure to some infectious agent. Doc knew he had to uncover the cause before he could come up with a cure.
After the huge, if monotonous meal, everyone in the square except for Doc and Jackson fell asleep where they lay. As it turned out, the only other creature who wouldn’t eat the awful stuff was the young stickie, which was most curious. A picky stickie was something Doc had never seen nor heard tell of. The naked mutie stood resolute guard over its snoring, red-coated master.
After a few minutes, Doc heard the sound of a wag approaching from the north, apparently traveling a different route than the one he and the companions had taken.
A battleship-gray Baja Bug rumbled over a rise and roared over to the square. Like a pack of dogs, the sated diners stirred from their beds in the dirt. They rose to their feet as the Bug stopped. Its doors opened and four men piled out. Doc’s attention was drawn and held by the driver, a tall thin man in a tattered straw cowboy hat and scratched wraparound sunglasses. He wore his dark hair in a long braid and had a snaggly goatee beard. His clothes were ripped and filthy. His hands were filthy, too.
From the way the black cook prostrated himself in greeting the driver, Doc assumed that he had to be the hammered-down ville’s headman.
Doc was struck by the way the faces of the companions and chillers lit up in his presence. Everyone seemed thoroughly delighted to see the man for no reason that Doc could fathom. As far as he knew, none of them knew him from Adam.
If Ryan beamed at the driver as if he were a lifelong hero, Mildred’s response was even more surprising, and unsettling. The middle-aged black woman sidled up to the man in the cowboy hat and slipped her arm around his lanky waist. She fawned on him in an overtly sexual way that was absolutely contrary to her nature, as Doc thought he understood it. The Dr. Mildred Wyeth that he knew was a self-contained and self-sufficient human being, whose stoic and clinical reserve was the stuff of legend, and she never fawned over anything or anyone.
While Doc pondered this development, the crowd moved away from the Baja Bug, leaving it unguarded. With no one to stop him, the old man wandered over to the driver’s door and looked inside the open window. There were no keys in the ignition. Keys weren’t needed. The ignition had been pulled apart, leaving the ends of two bare wires hanging under the dash.
Doc straightened and looked over the Bug’s roof. Before anyone could stop him, he knew he could easily slip behind the wheel, start it up and drive away. And once he got rolling, he was free. Doc had the means to escape, but he made no move to do so. He couldn’t abandon his friends to whatever fate had in store. No more than they could leave him when he was out of his mind.
The situation he faced was much more difficult, however. He couldn’t simply lasso the companions and tow them away. There were too many of them. And it appeared from recent events that they would resist his intervention, and do so with all their might. His predicament was colossal, yet he was determined to succeed. From the middle of the square, the driver addressed the rapt crowd in a soothing voice. “My name is Kerr,” he said. “I am baron here. Now that you have been fed and rested, there is work to be done. Most rewarding work, as you will soon discover. Follow me.”
The throng set off to the foot of the limestone slope. Everyone but Doc was animated, even cheerful at the prospect.
Baron Kerr stopped at a wide gash in the rocky hillside, the entrance to a natural tunnel. “Everything comes from the burning pool above us,” he said. “It is the wellspring of our existence here. Its flesh becomes our flesh, and our flesh becomes its flesh. Our meaning and destinies are intertwined.
“Everything you will see inside the caves belongs to the pool. It lives both inside and outside the mountain. Its miraculous filaments wind through solid rock. Growing. Nourishing. Enlightening.”
From his academic experience at Harvard and Oxford, Doc guessed that they were being treated to a stock speech that had been given many times before. The baron was like an aged professor droning out the same lecture for decades. Kerr’s deadpan delivery didn’t bother any of the others; on the contrary, they hung on his every word and appeared eager for more.
Kerr removed his sunglasses and seated them firmly on the brim and crown of his straw hat. It was then that Doc noticed the man’s eyes were different colors, one yellowish-brown, the other blue, which gave him a decidedly deranged look as he waved his arm and led the flock into the huge grotto.
Jackson refused to enter the cave. No one tried to coax the stickie in. No one seemed to care or notice his extreme agitation. Doc found it difficult to feel sympathy for the creature, knowing full well its genetic predilection for violence and bloodshed. Like the others, he wished the stickie would just go away.
Inside the cave, what with the white limestone walls and the fissures in the ceiling, there was plenty of light to see by. Water steadily trickled across the floor; in the depressions it pooled ankle deep. Along the right-hand wall, caught in a shaft of sunlight, was a stack of wooden implements. They reminded Doc of flensing knives, the tools used in the whaling trade to carve blubber. Only these had short handles. The outwardly curving, scimitar-like blades were sharpened on one edge.
“These are your tools,” Baron Kerr said. “With them you will tend the bounty of the pool. They are made of wood because the touch of metal taints the bounty and makes it unfit to eat. Take one and come with me.”
Doc was the last to pick up a tool. He tested the edge, which was barely sharp and nicked in many places. Whatever it was meant to cut was very soft indeed. He and the others tracked the baron deeper into the hillside. The passage grew narrower and much darker. So dark that Kerr paused to light a torch, one of many that lay on a ledge well above the waterline. After more torches were lit, they proceeded down the winding tunnel.
Beads of strange, faintly luminous moisture appeared on the cave walls. Doc felt a tightness building in his chest that had nothing to do with the torch smoke or the dank-smelling cave or the rapid rise in the air temperature. He sensed that he was walking into the core of something more powerful and more evil than his mind could grasp. An evil that cast a shadow in the darkest corners of the dripping cave. The only thing that kept him from turning and running for daylight was the knowledge that his companions walked ahead of him, unaware, perhaps bewitched, and at the mercy of that selfsame evil.
Deep under the mountain, the cave widened into a low-ceilinged antechamber that was roughly circular. It was there that Baron Kerr stopped and gave instruction on the harvesting of the pool’s “bounty.”
Only when the baron actually pointed out the tendrils did Doc see them. They were mottled gray, and in the dim and flickering torchlight, they blended in with the colors of the stained and shadowy bedrock. The glistening, interlacing, tapering growths pushed through splits in the stone; they encased the walls and roof of the antechamber. Some were as big around as a man’s waist, others the size of little fingers.
At least at present they were immobile, and Doc was thankful for that.
“Go on and touch them,” the baron urged the crowd. “Feel the pool’s majesty.”
When Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Jak, Dean and Leeloo laid hands on the tentacles, they uttered gasps of delight. The carny chillers had exactly the sa
me reaction.
Doc touched one, as well, to satisfy his scientist’s mind. He got no particular thrill from the contact. He found the tendril moist to his fingertips, either from something secreted through its pores or from the water dripping down the wall, and the outer skin was coarse, like shark hide. When he pressed on the tendril, the flesh beneath yielded, but it didn’t contract or in any other way respond to his touch. From this, he concluded that it was either vegetable or fungal in nature.
The baron brandished his wooden flensing knife and said, “This is how we tend the bounty.”
Carefully he used the edge of the knife to pry a thigh-sized tendril free of its grip on the rock. He lifted it up and draped it over his shoulder in order to show his audience the thousands of tiny, hairlike, adhesive-coated fibers on the underside that allowed it to cling to and grow along the solid surface. Thin strands of clear liquid drooled from the broken fibers, soaking through the back of his shirt. At the place where the tentacle exited the rock there was a large nodule. Doc recognized it as one of the globs.
“For the bounty to form and fully ripen,” Kerr continued, “the filament must be freed. Part of your work is to search the caverns for mature filaments of this size and loosen them from the rock.”
Heads nodded all around.
“The other part of your work is to harvest the bounty,” the baron said. “In doing this, you must be careful not to damage the filament. The edge of the blade should slide in this way.” He placed the knife along the underside of the tentacle he had freed, then pushed its edge against the join of nodule. “If the bounty is ripe,” he continued, “it will come off easily. Like this.”
With a wet pop, the glob separated from the tendril and Kerr caught it in his free hand.
A sudden waft of highly concentrated urea filled the antechamber. Doc averted his head and smothered a cough with his fist, but the sharp, unpleasant stench brought smiles to the faces of the others. Clearly, Doc thought, something had altered their most basic perceptions.
