The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  I didn’t disappoint him by objecting to this.

  Instead I stood and strode to the window. It was a way of avoiding further conversation. I expected to see just the tedium and horror of endless ice, but I was confronted with something startling. I made no comment but waited to observe what might happen. I shut my eyes tight and took a dozen deep breaths. Then I opened them again. What I had seen was no illusion. At last I felt ready to share the revelation.

  “There’s a shape down there. It’s getting bigger.”

  “The bottom?” suggested Curtis.

  I shook my head and held tightly to one of the curtains. My shallow breathing was loud in my ears but it didn’t mist the glass. By its very nature a bottomless lake was infinitely deep. I wondered if we might be entering a region of opaque ice, impure and toxic. Not that this made much difference to our situation. I watched as the shape slowly filled my field of vision with blackness. I bit my lip.

  The collision was milder than I feared. Every ornament on every surface jumped once and then there was silence. Even the logs on the fire seemed to stop crackling. I turned and exchanged a long glance with Curtis. He smiled weakly and I relinquished my hold on the curtain. I began to walk over to him, but before I was halfway to his chair the house gave another lurch. The sound was terrible. I imagined the cellar under our feet had become filled with pigs, but I knew that our stones were sliding over slates.

  “What’s going on?” whimpered Curtis.

  “There’s another house below us. We’ve touched down on its roof. That’s the only explanation.”

  “Be sensible. It would have to be gigantic.”

  “I’m sure it is. And it has a sloping roof. We’re sliding to the edge.”

  “And after that? Down again!”

  I nodded and counted away the minutes. After so much plunging, this lateral movement came as a shock. I think we both felt nauseous. Then the sliding stopped and we resumed our purely vertical motion. But within less than an hour we stopped again. I knew this was the final destination of this particular house. Beneath us now was stone, not ice, and however hot we made the fire our mansion was stuck here. I ran through the room and the hall beyond to a window in the far wall. Curtis protested weakly behind me.

  “Let’s get some fresh air!” I called back to him.

  “What are you doing, Warren?”

  I opened our window and reached for the handle of the window beyond. Fortunately both swung inward. I heard the sudden intake of breath of my companion. He had followed me reluctantly and now attempted to restrain me by clutching my arm. I shrugged him off and climbed through the two windows into an enormous room. In design and furnishings it was similar to one of our own bedrooms but it was much bigger. I drank the clean air with delight and howled in celebration.

  A VAST PALACE

  Our own house had come to rest on one of its upper balconies. The structure was so large it confounded the senses but most of the objects it contained had normal dimensions. They were simply more numerous. A few, such as the candles, were scaled up. We lit a pair as thick as big men that stood in a corner. The light they provided was generous and enabled us to understand we didn’t wish to remain here. We wanted to explore. We ventured onto the landing and reached an immense staircase.

  We repeated the procedure of lighting candles on the way down. The individual steps were large but not unmanageable. This palace had not been created for giants. It had a more complex layout than the Baron’s home and we found ourselves crossing open galleries suspended above the distant ground floor or passing through sequences of unusually shaped cells, some circular or polygonal, a few trapezoid and disturbing. I can’t describe the place as deliberately confusing but it possessed some of the playful malevolence of a labyrinth.

  It was unbearably cold. We had become used to working near the mouth of a furnace and the frost that coated every surface was like an unwelcome memory. The voyage to the ground floor was heroic or pathetic, I am unsure which, but we eventually reached the base of the staircase. A thought had occurred to us and we searched for the kitchens. Here was the obligatory ham and biscuits, but also cheese and bowls of dried fruit. They were more perfectly preserved than their counterparts in the Baron’s mansion had been.

  Out of habit we bore as much as we could carry to the chamber that contained the fireplace. We gasped on the threshold of this room. It resembled a gutted cathedral. There were chairs and silent clocks and dozens of cabinets but only one fireplace. It was a monster. A man might erect a tent inside it and set up camp. It was so tall the ornaments on its mantelpiece were beyond my reach, but from previous experience I surmised they were porcelain vases and jade animals and framed photographs blurred by age and chemical decay to sepia blooms of pure abstraction. I sat and waited for our food to thaw, knowing it never would.

  “I’m much happier here,” I remarked.

  “The air is fresh. But it’s so cold! This isn’t our fate.”

  “I know what you mean,” I conceded.

  “Eventually this oxygen will go stale too and the food and drink run out. We’ve only bought a little time coming in here. A few weeks.”

  I cast an eye at the anticipated bookcase. Curtis interpreted this gesture as permission to fetch a few volumes and pass them to me. I opened one. It was an encyclopedia but written in a form of English that was almost incomprehensible. I felt too emotional to attempt reading further. With a mixture of resignation and delight I ripped out a handful of pages and ignited them with a match. Then I stood and approached the hearth and cast them in. At this signal, Curtis went to work.

  He added the other books and splintered a chair. This was followed by a table and several cabinets. His enthusiasm was contagious and I joined in, but the gurgling above the hearth was slow to begin. A building this size would require a fiercer blaze to heat up sufficiently. We worked harder, hurling in entire pieces without breaking them up. We even added one of the clocks. It burned away to a skeleton of cogs and springs and loomed upright through the flames like a phantom of the lost cycles of day and night, now dead to us. We no longer bothered to search anything for treasure first.

  The palace shuddered and we felt it begin to melt the ice that encased it. We continued to pile on the fuel. Then the descent commenced. With an eerie crackling, we accelerated into the frozen abyss. It was peculiar and horrible but also something of a relief. We quickly attained a velocity greater than the maximum of the Baron’s mansion. Whether this was connected to our greater mass, the outer shape of the palace or a change in the nature of the ice, I couldn’t say. Curtis became cheerful in the presence of the furnace, standing closer to it than I would dare.

  “It’s my proper environment now.”

  “It’s not yet proven you’re the devil,” I responded.

  He sighed. “How far do you think we’ll go? Surely we can’t go beyond the centre of the planet? That’s the point of greatest gravitational attraction. Whether this lake is bottomless or not, we’ll have to come to a stop there. Will it be like hitting an invisible barrier?”

  “No. Our momentum will carry us beyond it.”

  “How far beyond? All the way to the other side? If so, will we be inverted when we come out? How much momentum will we need?”

  “There’s no other side to infinity,” I replied.

  This kept him quiet. We returned to work, adding fuel to the inferno. When we were confident we could leave it unattended for a short time, we vacated the room and located the kitchens. We passed through them to the room beyond. We wanted to see if there was a telephone here as well, but the layout was different. It wasn’t a study but a storeroom. No telephone but a large selection of tools. Some of these were a great help in breaking up the furniture. We helped ourselves to a pair of axes, a big hammer and a wheelbarrow. Now we were equipped to rip up floorboards and demolish bannisters if necessary.

  Our habit so far had been to stay close together, even sleeping in the same room. But with a larger fire to
tend it became more convenient to sleep in shifts and more peaceful for one of us to bed down in the hall or a side room while the other worked. Slowly we grew more independent of each other but without any resentment or bad feelings. What he did when I wasn’t around, apart from work and sleep and eat, was unknown to me. I never asked. Nor did he show much curiosity about my own methods of passing time. I began a systematic exploration of the lower levels of the palace. I planned to make a map.

  I was reluctant to stray too far from the furnace room for obvious reasons. The fire required a lot of physical toil to keep the building at a sufficient temperature to melt the ice. In the end my project proved impossible. There was simply too much space to chart. But I did make a complete circuit of the cellars. Flinging back a trapdoor I climbed down into a network of stone cells. I took my flashlight with me, for there were no candles here. Hundreds of bottles of wine in racks mocked our previous lengthy searches in corners of ordinary rooms. Beneath the floor I heard the grinding and hissing of the ice.

  It was in this honeycomb of untrodden dust and unlabelled vintages that I first thought I heard a voice ahead of me. I passed into the next cell, expecting to discover that Curtis had preceded me, but it was empty. Now the voice was still ahead, one cell further on. It was faint and unintelligible. I stepped forward again and once more found only emptiness. I decided it was an echo, an acoustical trick which meant its source might be miles distant. I also concluded it was not a human voice but a wall flexing under the enormous outside pressure and acting like a membrane, pumping weird but random sounds into the basement hive.

  I returned from this minor exploit with as many bottles as I could carry, one slipping from under my armpit and smashing on the flagstones. I delivered them to Curtis. He had gone back to the storeroom for a pitchfork and was standing next to a mound of chairs, pieces of tables and all manner of flammable objects. With a fluid motion he forked them into the blaze, pausing only occasionally to wipe the sweat from his brow with a grimy hand. I didn’t mention the illusory voice. It was my turn to take over but he insisted on working a double shift. My protests were ineffectual.

  I wandered off again. It occurred to me that if I could find a laboratory among the innumerable rooms I might be able to make air from ice. I knew there were methods of releasing oxygen from water. The possibility of suffocation was still one of my major concerns despite the vastness of the palace. I entered at least fifty new rooms. My energies were wasted, for suddenly a powerful jolt hurled me to the floor. Then the building started sliding sideways. I knew what was coming. I rose and seated myself in a chair to await the second vertical drop to the next balcony. This amplification of my previous experience was both satisfying and grotesque.

  A LOST CITY

  This is how it seemed to us as we passed through the windows into the distorted bedroom and from here down the stairway to the ground floor. A metropolis under the ice, enclosed by walls and covered with a roof. The building was so large it couldn’t be described as a palace. At the very least it was a collection of palaces fused together, but in truth a capital city was a closer analogy. Enough rooms to house several million people.

  The eccentricities in the design were more pronounced than in the edifice we had just left. The angles and the layout were utterly strange. A multitude of lesser staircases intersected with the main one, curving away like spare horizons, and the candles resembled pillars, the columns of an ancient temple. More agile than me, Curtis swarmed up them to light the wicks.

  I remember reading a story about a man trapped in a deserted city. He also felt horror at its design, the product of whim rather than function. He described the routes between its cupolas as the paths of an “exiguous and nitid” labyrinth. At the time I imagined a garden maze with woollen hedges. I had taken the book that contained this story on a hiking trip and had no dictionary to reveal the meanings of unknown words, but now I was in a similar situation for real and although this new sequence of rooms and corridors could never be defined as exiguous it certainly became nitid, for the wicks in the candles were as thick as ropes and flared brightly.

  Tiring of the descent, Curtis grasped the bannister and swung one leg over. He whooped as he let himself go and slid out of sight. For some reason this action unnerved me. I toppled a giant candle and soaked one of my handkerchiefs in the pool of wax under the wick. Then I squeezed the cloth into a ball, ignited it and dropped it over the side of the stairwell. It hissed as it streaked down into the pit like an economy comet. I watched as it briefly illuminated each level it passed. Finally I glimpsed the form of Curtis far below. The flames bathed his laughing cheeks a sooty orange. He was travelling at a perilous velocity.

  I heard his shrieks as he thundered around each corner, unable to brake. If he wasn’t killed by this foolish impulse he would reach the bottom long before me. I debated whether to follow his example. In truth I was scared. I continued to walk down as normal, but I was less proficient at climbing the candle-pillars than Curtis and soon I was groping in thick dusk, the light of the higher levels fading more slowly than the shrieks below but with graver consequences for my progress. At last it was a choice between tripping or sliding. I gripped the bannister between my thighs and attempted to control my speed by tensing my muscles, but I was too tired and abandoned the struggle.

  I rushed into the cold depths. The friction was welcome, warming me to a comfortable temperature. Curtis had already melted much of the frost from the bannister with his own descent but the polished wood beneath was almost as slippery. After a long while I saw twinkling stars below.

  He had reached the bottom and ignited dozens of candles. But I felt no blast of heat. He had not yet started the fire in the grate. For a moment I feared that perhaps this house was different from the others and lacked a fireplace. We were taking the similarities between the buildings for granted. But in fact the hearth was there. Curtis had found another reason for not creating an immediate blaze.

  He was engaged in constructing a ramp from tables and cabinets. With the tools he had carried with him he was nailing lengths of wood together. Part of this ramp consisted of rollers made from the circular legs of certain chairs. The ramp led from the base of the gargantuan hearth and out of what we now always called the furnace room. He worked like a demon, cutting and hammering. I helped him and eventually the end of the ramp terminated some ten feet above the ground, directly under the stairwell. Then we returned to the furnace room and I selected a shelf of books. I examined a few. They were written in a very peculiar English which included a handful of extra letters. We ignited them in the hearth and hastened back to the other end of the ramp.

  “This building is so immense I don’t think we can warm it up the usual way. We simply can’t work that hard.”

  I nodded. “So the ramp will help us?”

  Curtis looked down. He had trodden in the ash of my extinguished handkerchief. “Absolutely. We can climb to higher levels and push items of furniture over the edge. They will land on the ramp and slide into the fire. Whether they smash or not with the impact doesn’t matter. This fire will be very hungry.”

  We set to work and his system proved remarkably effective. First we knocked out the struts of the bannister and cast them on, then we roamed the rooms of the floor one level above the ground. It was no longer necessary to break up wardrobes and beds and carry the pieces back. We simply shoved them out of their corners onto the landing and over the side. Finally the familiar lurching motion came again and we knew we had done enough to earn ourselves a rest. The continuous impacts had damaged the ramp and Curtis decided to repair it. I took this chance to wander off alone.

  I was troubled by voices again. Louder than they had been in the cellars of the previous house, they seemed both mocking and profound. I almost caught the meanings of some of the words. Then I realised they were talking in the language of the books, an evolved or decayed version of my own natural tongue.

  I called after them, “Anyone at home?”r />
  But they remained always ahead, out of reach. I felt increasingly reluctant to rejoin Curtis. I preferred the companionship of the voices, malicious as they sometimes seemed. I stopped by one window and watched the ice sliding past. The inertia of such an enormous building was incalculable to one so little schooled in physics as myself but I guessed it would be more than sufficient to carry us beyond the centre of the planet. I fell into a reverie. I wondered if I had caught a fever. I decided to return to the ramp and enter the furnace room. If I was ill I would welcome the attentions of Curtis despite my growing distaste for his presence. It was a question of priorities.

  I was nearly there when the collision happened. I had been wandering in a delirium for a week. I called out to Curtis and he answered from afar. We were sliding sideways across an unseen roof. Hours later we began the shorter drop to the next balcony. I felt my companion lift me under the arms. I shouted that I didn’t want to be hurled onto the ramp. He laughed and I saw he had removed all his clothes. He was dressed only in oily sweat and grime. A mad stoker.

  “Fresh air is what you need. Lean on me and I’ll take you across to the next house.”

  A SUNKEN NATION

  I recovered quickly. Curtis had made elaborate preparations for entering a building as large as a small country. Once through the windows he lit the candles in the bedroom with a device he had constructed himself, a taper fixed to the end of a telescopic pole. Out on the plaza of the landing we didn’t bother starting down the steps. Curtis attached ropes to the bannister and dropped them into the stairwell.

  During my fevered absence chasing voices he had discovered storerooms containing not only climbing and mining equipment but explosives and inflammable liquids. We lowered a selection of choice items into the darkness. We followed like spiders on threads. This house was so vast and the stairwell so deep there was a substantial difference in air pressure between the level of the balcony and the ground.