The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Despite the frost Curtis still refused to wear clothes. He was playing his new role properly. When we reached the bottom he scurried and leapt like a wild goat. I wondered how long it would be before he trimmed his beard into a point or fork. With his previous experience he constructed a new ramp in astonishingly fast time. The fireplace we had to tend was a cavern as wide and high as the crater we had originally entered that fateful night. The amount of fuel needed to warm this house was staggering.

  I flicked through some of the books on the multitude of shelves that stretched for miles to the end of the furnace room. They were written in an alphabet which contained at least sixty letters. Very few words were pronounceable, let alone meaningful. I was called away by Curtis.

  He had already started a fire in the hearth. He had plans to dynamite part of the stairs and next highest floor, bringing tons of wood down on the rollers of the ramp. I took cover in the kitchens, searching for food and voices.

  I consumed most of a bottle of brandy, calling for the unseen people to stop hiding. But they always eluded me. Far away, like a storm in an adjacent valley, the rumble of an explosion vibrated the floorboards. In a series of trapezoid studies I discovered collections of musical instruments. There were no telephones here but I found the inlets and outlets of speaking tubes. They connected different sections of the intolerably large house. From one I heard Curtis singing as he worked. I kept silent and didn’t reply to him. I tried to estimate the dimensions of the house but the answers were always ridiculous.

  I knew I had to find Curtis before we reached the next balcony. I was lost in a tangle of corridors and galleries. The laughter of my companion was no clue as to which direction to choose, for frequently it emerged from the trumpet of a speaking tube. I took long detours for little or no profit. I came across rooms decorated with wallpaper so freakish it infected my dreams. The yellow of stained cups and mummified eyes, the orange of dying suns and the blushes of executioners. I strummed a lute as I went, attempting to teach myself tunes at the back of my memory.

  There were too many unanswerable questions. If the frozen lake was bottomless how could it be contained within the sphere of our world? How many houses existed in the lake? Who had built them and would they continue to get bigger indefinitely? I wondered if I would ever lose count of them, forgetting the exact number of balconies, bedrooms, stairs and hearths. Already there were more clocks in the furnace room than rooms in the original mansion. Such pointless repetition deeply oppressed my sanity.

  At last the anticipated lurch came and the house began to slip into the ice. I sat on the floor as it accelerated to a horrible speed. It had taken Curtis a long time to make a hot enough blaze to set this building on its way. Even with my assistance I thought it unlikely we could get the next house moving. This possibility had evidently occurred to him. I finally found him squatting on the apex of a pyramid of broken furniture. His lips were curved in a smile but his eyes were humourless.

  “I used too much dynamite. Brought down more than I expected.”

  “We’re dropping at a fearsome rate.”

  He maintained his false smile. “There’s an inferno in the hearth.”

  “Do you believe that explosives and accelerants will be enough for the fifth house? It might be the size of a continent!”

  “Fifth did you say? Don’t you mean the thirteenth?”

  “I don’t follow you,” I replied.

  He peered at me more closely and rubbed his eyes with blistered knuckles. “You’ve lost count somewhere. This is the twelfth mansion. We’re heading towards number thirteen now. If you weren’t so young I’d say you had gone a little senile! Maybe it was that fever you caught a while back? I don’t get things like that anymore. I’m the devil. My immune system is too strong.”

  I shrugged. I was convinced the error was his but I didn’t care to argue with a madman. I was mildly amused to note he had trimmed his beard. Curtis always did the most with what he had, but nothing would ever cause him to grow horns and a tail. His face was less round now. He was learning real hardness, the bake of the furnace and constant physical exertion. He fell silent and probed a tooth with his tongue. I saw that two or three of his incisors were chipped. Then I noticed the gash on his neck, probably an effect of the blast. Even the devil should be careful with explosives.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” I said.

  He leaned his head to one side. “What doesn’t?”

  I frowned. I had forgotten the subject of our conversation. Flinching from his earlier remark about senility I countered, “Don’t you remember?”

  He sighed. “Listen Warren, I’m really looking forward to reaching the next house, whatever its number. I want to keep going for as long as we can. Do you know why? Because one day we’ll reach a mansion so vast it will be as big as the world! If we can’t get back to the surface, that will be the next best thing, a perfect substitute. A house with as much surface area as the world but more compact because all that space will be arranged on many levels. Like tectonic plates stacked above each other.”

  “But we’ll never be able to make fires big enough to reach it.”

  “Not on our own, true.”

  I answered slowly, “I don’t think we are alone here. I believe there are other beings, possibly people, in some of the rooms. There may even be a great many of them. A tribe. A civilisation, hiding or waiting. I don’t know if we could enlist their help but it might be worth a try. We don’t have a choice really. If we don’t find them our next stop will be our last. Our final destination.”

  “I don’t want that. I want to keep going until we reach a house as big as an entire world. It will be my equivalent of going home.”

  I nodded but I suspected his real motives were different from his stated ones. I imagined he wanted to rule a private empire, a personal pandemonium, a replica of hell in the ice. In our position our ambitions were understandably warped. But at least Curtis had a definite wish. My own desires were vague, as if they sought without success to crystallize in a brain of sluggish lava. I turned away but I didn’t embark on another minor expedition yet. I went down into the nearest cellar and crouched with my fingertips on the flagstones, foolishly hoping to feel the presence of the next house as we hurtled towards it.

  A BRAND NEW WORLD

  And Curtis led the way again through the windows into the bedroom. We despaired of reaching the ground floor even by ropes and distracted ourselves from thinking about starting the voyage by searching the wardrobes arranged along the wall. They stood like hollow megaliths in the shadows all the way to the remote door which led to the landing, each sixty foot tall and yet only a fraction as high as the ceiling. As we walked past, the vibrations of our feet set the wire coathangers inside tinkling, a soft sound like the stilts of insane acrobats wading through lagoons of mercury.

  We opened doors indiscriminately. Most were empty or contained a few jackets and trousers, undecayed but useless, for they all had at least three arms and legs. But in the interior of one I discovered another wardrobe and inside this another. We passed through a nest of concealed boxes.

  Inside the final one I noticed a lever and a key set into the floor. I remarked that this wardrobe resembled a primitive elevator and Curtis nodded thoughtfully. Then he stooped next to me, grasped the key and twisted it.

  “A clockwork device,” he grunted.

  “Wind it tight and then I’ll pull the lever. Maybe this is what all those clocks are kept for? Spare cogs and springs.”

  When he had finished I released the brake. We dropped down a hidden shaft, the wardrobe rattling and screeching. I wanted to clasp Curtis for reassurance but his nudity repulsed me. After a long time we began to slow and finally came to a halt. We stumbled out into the murk at the base of the stairwell, our ears ringing. The portal to the furnace room was less than one hour’s walk from here. I don’t know which of us was most confused. I had started to believe this was the thirteenth house but Curtis now insisted it wa
s only the fifth. We had swapped delusions.

  “You have a reasonable excuse for your forgetfulness,” I said. “Memory is something that evolved for its survival value. Learning from experience is a useful tool. But the devil didn’t evolve from anything. He was always the way he is now. I can’t defend my own senility in the same way. I’m just a weak mortal.”

  We entered the furnace room and gasped. At the very limit of the beams of our flashlights the immense cliff of the hearth reared up. The frost on the mantelpiece glittered like perpetual snows on the peaks of a high mountain range. In vain I looked for tigers and smugglers loaded with chests of tea. I mopped my face with my sleeve. I was perspiring despite the low temperature. My fever had not entirely dissipated. Curtis took a few steps forward, paused and looked back over his shoulder.

  “This fireplace will defeat us. However hard we work we’ll never fill it. There’s no point even trying on our own. I’m not a giant.”

  “Nor I. There’s only one thing we can do.”

  There was an uneasy silence, then we clasped hands.

  “We’ll split up. We must promise not to return here until we find some other beings to help us. It might take weeks, months, years.”

  “Goodbye Curtis. Best of luck.”

  “Thanks Warren. Take care of yourself. Sorry for getting you into this fix in the first place. I took your world away from you. I’ll do my best to replace it. You’ll be my deputy in pandemonium. I’ll make you my successor.”

  I released his hand. Before I left the furnace room I decided to satisfy my curiosity in one other regard. I set off on the trek towards the region of bookcases. When I reached it my suspicions were confirmed. Every letter in each word in the volumes I inspected was completely different from all the others. They had descended into pure gibberish. I couldn’t imagine what creatures might speak such a language, but I didn’t need to, for neither Curtis nor myself stood a chance of actually encountering them. Until that moment I would do my best not to speculate. There was no point wasting thoughts.

  I passed out of the furnace room through an obscure side door. I found myself in a corridor that constantly altered its width from very narrow to very wide and which ran straight for no more than fifty paces at a time before sloping or veering off at an acute angle. My flashlight died. I ran in darkness, bruising my knees and elbows against the walls. There must have been speaking tubes here also or else the passage itself possessed its own weird acoustical properties, for as the days passed I infrequently heard the voice of Curtis as if the man or devil himself stood behind one of my shoulders.

  He was calling out, “Anyone at home?”

  At last the corridor spluttered me out into light. I stood on the landing of an upper level. Candles as high as power pylons blazed far above me, the wicks hissing like coal suns. Curtis must have already passed this way. I ascended a short staircase and roamed through a warren of ovoid rooms.

  The final one contained an observatory. A powerful reflecting telescope rested on a tripod with legs as thick as girders. I climbed a ladder to the eyepiece and adjusted the focus. The chamber was studded with windows but none faced out onto the endless ice. The observatory was located near the centre of the building. I studied burning candelabra in unimaginably remote rooms with the interest an astronomer might reserve for nebulae. I swung the telescope and explored other vistas, the distant reaches of carpeted corridors and spiral stairways.

  Once I thought I detected a cluster of moving shapes. They vanished before I could be sure of their nature. Equally hopelessly I looked for Curtis.

  Abandoning the telescope I vacated the room and continued my journey. Within a week I heard the voices again. It was still impossible to catch up with them.

  On a whim I decided to violate the pact I had made with Curtis and return to the furnace room alone. The passages blended into one and all I could rely on to estimate the distance I walked was the complex unearthly melody I created from the squeaky floorboards I occasionally trod upon, each one a slightly different note, sometimes less than one thousandth of a tone apart. Or so I guessed. And then I discovered a bicycle leaning against a hatstand. My average speed increased dramatically.

  The unseen voices returned and grew louder. This time they didn’t seem to be hiding from me. I rang my bell but they were still a journey of several days ahead. I was pedalling a course I had already examined with the telescope, a channel of inner space. The air slowly became warmer around me. I felt sick. My smugness melted with the ice that pressed upon the house. Curtis had done something truly diabolical. I forced myself to dismount and rest, sheltering under a table in a recess of the panelled wall. Beneath the hissing pylons I slept fitfully.

  I woke and resumed my race into the cacophony and heat. The sounds of industry were ferocious, an unbearable clatter of hammering and sawing. I bounced down a staircase and crossed an immense carpeted plain. Shadows danced across the threshold of a portal. I braked and came to a halt on the edge of this room. It pulsed with fire. It was the furnace room and it was full. Nightmare figures capered everywhere, cutting up furniture and casting it into the fire. Sometimes they threw in one of their own kind by mistake. And the house was sliding down, building up speed. I knew for sure our inertia was sufficient to carry us beyond the gravitational centre of the planet. And I suddenly understood something Curtis hadn’t even suspected.

  I felt an arm on my shoulder.

  “Speak of the devil,” I joked feebly.

  “I was wondering when you’d come back. Look at what I’ve created, Warren! Just like hell now, isn’t it? We’re on our way to the next house. I’ve discussed it with my demons and they all disagree on which number this one is. I’ve decided to take the average of five and thirteen and call it the ninth.”

  “You’ve become a wise ruler,” I said.

  “Why not? There’s no reason for the devil to be obtuse. Come in and I’ll introduce you. The next house down will be as big as our world.”

  “I’ll pass on that offer. It’s too crowded in here for comfort.”

  He made no effort to detain me. “Very well. Tell you what, I’ll appoint you my envoy to the farthest reaches of my realm. That way you can go off exploring without feeling you have let me down. What do you say?”

  I turned and wheeled my bicycle away. As I mounted it the barely concealed rage in my former companion’s voice seemed to push me along. I accelerated from the mouth of a domestic tartarus.

  Still he boomed after me, “You are a useful servant of the crown of hell. I salute you, my trusted envoy. Who knows what regions and tribes you might come across? May your mission succeed!”

  I laughed to myself as I escaped him forever.

  I had plans of my own, less grandiose than his but no less surprising. The development of a puncture halfway across a room so large it contained clouds and entire weather patterns did nothing to deter me. I continued on foot. I sheltered from the rain under a glass coffee table as wide as a lake. One by one the candles were extinguished. Lightning relit them and moved behind a range of sofas. My beard grew ragged as I pressed on. I was looking good for my age, but my skin felt thirsty for the sun. The simple pleasures of life on the surface haunted me. Autumn leaves, the moon.

  There were no more houses below us. I was confident of this fact. This was the last one. I had worked it out carefully.

  Each time we touched down on the roof of a building we slid sideways. Part of our motion had been horizontal as well as vertical. This horizontal displacement had added up to many miles. It was something we had mostly overlooked. And yet the consequences were remarkable and exciting.

  If a man moves horizontally across the face of the globe he will eventually find himself at the antipodes, on the far side of the world, but he won’t fall off because the direction called “down” is determined by the centre of the planet, the point of greatest gravitational attraction. The deeper into the earth he goes the less horizontal movement he will need to circle this point. Th
is also holds true for houses.

  We were falling back up.

  We had reached a position opposite the crater in which had stood the Baron’s mansion. We had reached a point directly below the far side of the world. The antipodes were above us. Now our inertia would carry us beyond the centre of the earth and back through the ice the way we had come. But we wouldn’t collide with any houses as we went because this house had already collected them. The way was clear. We would break through into the crater and the real world. Upside down.

  At any rate this was my theory.

  There were problems with it but I chose not to dwell on those. For instance Curtis had seriously underestimated the dimensions of this building. From my experience in the observatory I calculated it as already several sizes larger than the planet that contained it. One of life’s awkward paradoxes, I guess. Thus it was impossible to imagine what might happen when the house surfaced.

  But whatever the result I felt deep pity for the owner of the antique store who had sold Curtis his cabinet. The devil was bound to want revenge on the man who tricked him. The fool would be completely defenceless. And yet if the Baron was really still alive he surely would have employed his magical or scientific powers to disguise himself with the appearance of youth. There was no better way to divert suspicion, even if his desiccated brain did make the occasional mistake.

  I had always been very clever and senility would take some getting used to. Fortunately I had been clever enough to foresee my own senility and take it into account. I had forgotten my own identity and abode, even my original language and desires, but I was still being controlled by a plan I had invented in my youth. I was my own puppet. At least this was the best option remaining to me. I might as well embrace it. The role of devil had already been taken.

  I chuckled to myself. Everything had come together very well. I would resolve the inconsistencies at my leisure. Only one difficult task remained to make my satisfaction complete. I would return to the original mansion. Stored at the end of a sequence of diminishing balconies, forgotten by the devil and unsuspected by his minions, beyond innumerable stairways and corridors and rooms, it waited modestly for me to take up my rightful residence at last.