The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Marla leaves Kay. She goes inside to the bookshelves where all of Mama’s magic books live. They are virtually unreadable. She decides it is time for a bonfire. It might please Kay, distract her from unholy thoughts.

  “What you doing, Marla?”

  She makes a neat stack and starts to strike a match.

  “Firemen’ll come,” Kay says, smiling.

  Marla freezes. “Mama might get mad.”

  “Oh, don’t do that…” Kay pulls out her pocket knife and begins to cut her arm, just enough to make it bleed a little. Then Kay sucks the blood. A row of scars displays her predilection toward hurting herself is a constant in her young life.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “It feels good.”

  Silence descends as the darkness lightens. They’ve been up all night. Kay lies down on the old quilt in the porch swing and fluffs her old pillow. She never sleeps in the house anymore. “I’m going to sleep now.”

  Marla hasn’t slept in a good while. She wonders if she is a vampire but really, only Kay likes the taste of blood. Marla might be a ghost. And she might just be crazy. Mama was. “Maybe it’s time to leave Mama.”

  Kay has fallen asleep. Marla listens for Mama to make that almost breathless wheeze. She must listen very quietly. Mama only makes animal sounds now. Only silence answers. She creeps back to the fence. The light rises like fog off of the bayou.

  The TV broke last winter and they don’t get the newspaper. She can only guess what’s been going on out there. People don’t send them many letters, either. And Marla can only dream what it would be like to have a computer. Mama said computers were evil.

  Mama’s relatives gave up on them a long time ago. Just bills arrive and some circulars. The Reverend Cleveland used to come and try to save their souls till the winter Mama threw boiling water on him. The money is running out. She doesn’t want to stay any longer. Certainly it is time to leave Mama. She undoes the latch on the gate and pushes. She puts one foot out. Air, still air.

  You can’t leave me, understand -I am all you have in the world. I am power. I am the source of your life. You are nothing without me. I am God’s holy vessel, sent here to control things and you bastard chil’ren. I know everything. You must mind me.

  Some say I be a Goddess. There are no names in the darkness, just truth, Marla Faith. And the truth binds. It does not set you free. Do you understand, spawn of man, the evil one?

  Mama became like a devil at some point. She was always right. That’s why the money held out for so long. She was good at guessing games. Folk came all the way from New Orleans, Houston and Dallas to listen to her prophecies. Marla believes it’s not good to be right all the time. She thinks it does something to the heart, shrivels it somehow. Folks need to be surprised.

  Marla looks at the palm of her hand. Mama read palms, did cards, looked in crystal balls and played with numbers but they did not tell her what she saw. Marla thinks the tongue told her. And the tongue twists things mean-like every once in awhile. She got too proud of it. Pride Goeth Before a Fall. Marla knows that must be true. That’s why the fit came.

  The Spirit took Mama’s tongue. But she still speaks in Marla’s head sometimes, especially when she’s afraid she must do something Mama would not approve of.

  “I guess it’s time we told someone.”

  “No!” Behind her, Kay sticks her knife into Marla’s back, just enough to prick and draw a bead of blood that trickles, like sweat into her panties.

  “You’ve hurt me. Put that knife away.” Marla puts her arms out like Jesus on the cross, keeping her back to her little sister.

  “I’ve done decided the Spirit has entered me. Mama’s Spirit has given me the Tongue.”

  “You’re sleepwalking little sis.”

  “She’s starting to stink.”

  “You’re starting to stink.” Like the voice…

  MARLA FAITH and KAY ALBERTINE, I charge you with eternal damnation if you ever leave me. Kay Albertine, you are my youngest and the one who must watch the oldest. There is a darkness about her. I see her stepping into darkness and falling falling because she has no faith despite all I have tried to teach her. She thinks she has power. I own the power. She is nothing without me. Remember this.

  “Mama doesn’t need us anymore – we’ve got to fend for ourselves now,” Marla hurries, sidesteps the knife point and pushes the gate wider. One step. Two. She’ll have to run. Her joy mixes with pure relief to be getting away from the old dead witch.

  Kay screams like a banshee. If they only had neighbours to hear her, Marla could get help. “Mama is DEAD…” Marla says over her shoulder, “Come on, Kay, let’s run…”

  Dawn lifts the world into focus. Marla is thrilled with the light rising. The ground is strong. Her bare feet are free and then suddenly dropping into nothingness. Below her the cracked sidewalk becomes transparent with the promised void. “No…” Marla is sure the world is not an illusion. Mama can’t be right all of the time. She looks back at the fence in shock.

  Kay holds the bloodied knife aloft. “I told you – Mama told you – the fence is the only thing that be real, Marla. The world without Mama don’t exist…”

  Marla keeps falling.

  ELRIC AT THE END OF TIME

  Michael Moorcock

  From the end of the World to the end of Time. It was impossible to compile this anthology without something by Michael Moorcock. Moorcock (b. 1939) has been a renegade in the field of science fiction ever since he took over editorship of New Worlds in 1964 and revolutionized everything under the banner of the so-called “New Wave”.

  He had already been producing heroic fantasy since the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy had introduced the character of Elric of Melniboné. Although Moorcock was inspired by the works of Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Elric was no bulk-standard barbarian swordsman. Quite the contrary. He was a dispossessed prince and an albino who drew his strength from his sword, Stormbringer, which drank the souls of those it killed. Moorcock’s original sequence of stories were collected together as The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965) at the end of which Elric met his inevitable fate. Everyone expected that was the end of Elric but, thankfully not.

  In his other book sequences, Moorcock was developing the idea of the Eternal Champion, a hero who exists in various incarnations throughout the many dimensions of the Multiverse, and who battles to ensure a balance between Law and Chaos. This character is known by different names and includes, amongst Moorcock’s books, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum Jhaelen, Jherek Carnelian and Elric himself. In a complex sequence Moorcock wrote several interweaving series which brought most of the characters together at one or more points in time. He continued this game in a further sequence called the Dancers at the End of Time, and the following story features as part of that series.

  Sounds complex? It is, but it is immensely rewarding. Extreme? Well, when I put this to Moorcock his response was, “I’ve never thought anything I do is extreme. It’s other people who seem to think that.” See what you think…

  I

  IN WHICH MRS PERSSON DETECTS AN ABOVE AVERAGE DEGREE OF CHAOS IN THE MEGAFLOW

  Returning from China to London and the Spring of 1936, Una R Persson found an unfamiliar quality of pathos in most of the friends she had last seen, as far as she recalled, during the Blitz on her way back from 1970. Then they had been desperately hearty: it was a comfort to understand that the condition was not permanent. Here, at present, Pierrot ruled and she felt she possessed a better grip on her power. This was, she admitted with shame, her favourite moral climate for it encouraged in her an enormously gratifying sense of spiritual superiority: the advantage of having been born, originally, into a later and probably more sophisticated age. The 1960s. Some women, she reflected, were forced to have children in order to enjoy this pleasure.

  But she was uneasy, so she reported to the local Time Centre and the bearded, sullen features of Sergeant Alvarez who welcomed her in white, apo
logising for the fact that he had himself only just that morning left the Lower Devonian and had not had time to change.

  “It’s the megaflow, as you guessed,” he told her, operating toggles to reveal his crazy display systems. “We’ve lost control.”

  “We never really had it.” She lit a Sherman’s and shook her long hair back over the headrest of the swivel chair, opening her military overcoat and loosening her webbing. “Is it worse than usual?”

  “Much.” He sipped cold coffee from his battered silver mug. “It cuts through every plane we can pick up – a rogue current swerving through the dimensions. Something of a twister.”

  “Jerry?”

  “He’s dormant. We checked. But it’s like him, certainly. Most probably another aspect.”

  “Oh, sod.” Una straightened her shoulders.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Alvarez. “Someone’s going to have to do a spot of rubato.” He studied a screen. It was Greek to Una. For a moment a pattern formed. Alvarez made a note. “Yes. It can either be fixed at the nadir or the zenith. It’s too late to try anywhere in between. I think it’s up to you, Mrs P.”

  She got to her feet. “Where’s the zenith?”

  “The End of Time.”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s something.”

  She opened her bag and made sure of her jar of instant coffee. It was the one thing she couldn’t get at the End of Time.

  “Sorry,” said Alvarez, glad that the expert had been there and that he could remain behind.

  “It’s just as well,” she said. “This period’s no good for my moral well-being. I’ll be off, then.”

  “Someone’s got to.” Alvarez failed to seem sympathetic.

  “It’s Chaos out there.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  She entered the makeshift chamber and was on her way to the End of Time.

  II

  IN WHICH THE ETERNAL CHAMPION FINDS HIMSELF AT THE END OF TIME

  Elric of Melniboné shook a bone-white fist at the greedy, glaring stars – the eyes of all those men whose souls he had stolen to sustain his own enfeebled body. He looked down. Though it seemed he stood on something solid, there was only more blackness falling away below him. It was as if he hung at the centre of the universe. And here, too, were staring points of yellow light. Was he to be judged?

  His half-sentient runesword, Stormbringer, in its scabbard on his left hip, murmured like a nervous dog.

  He had been on his way to Imrryr, to his home, to reclaim his kingdom from his cousin Yyrkoon; sailing from the Isle of the Purple Towns where he had guested with Count Smiorgan Baldhead. Magic winds had caught the Filkharian trader as she crossed the unnamed water between the Vilmirian peninsula and the Isle of Melniboné. She had been borne into the Dragon Sea and thence to Sorcerers’ Isle, so-called because that barren place had been the home of Cran Liret, the Thief of Spells, a wizard infamous for his borrowings, who had, at length, been dispatched by those he sought to rival. But much residual magic had been left behind. Certain spells had come into the keeping of the Krettii, a tribe of near-brutes who had migrated to the island from the region of The Silent Land less than fifty years before. Their shaman, one Grrodd Ybene Eenr, had made unthinking use of devices buried by the dying sorcerer as the spells of his peers sucked life and sanity from them. Elric had dealt with more than one clever wizard, but never with so mindless a power. His battle had been long and exhausting and had required the sacrifice of most of the Filkharians as well as the entire tribe of Krettii. His sorcery had become increasingly desperate. Sprite fought sprite, devil fell upon devil, in both physical and astral, all around the region of Sorcerers’ Isle. Eventually Elric had mounted a massive Summoning against the allies of Grrodd Ybene Eenr with the result that the shaman had been at last overwhelmed and his remains scattered in limbo. But Elric, captured by his own monstrous magickings, had followed his enemy and now he stood in the Void, crying out into appalling silence, hearing his words only in his skull:

  “Arioch! Arioch! Aidme!”

  But his patron Duke of Hell was absent. He could not exist here. He could not, for once, even hear his favourite protégé.

  “Arioch! Repay my loyalty! I have given you blood and souls!”

  He did not breathe. His heart had stopped. All his movements were sluggish.

  The eyes looked down at him. They looked up at him. Were they glad? Did they rejoice in his terror?

  “Arioch!”

  He yearned for a reply. He would have wept, but no tears would come. His body was cold; less than dead, yet not alive. A fear was in him greater than any fear he had known before.

  “Oh, Arioch! Aid me!”

  He forced his right hand towards the pulsing pommel of Stormbringer which, alone, still possessed energy. The hilt of the sword was warm to his touch and, as slowly he folded his fingers around it, it seemed to swell in his fist and propel his arm upwards so that he did not draw the sword. Rather the sword forced his limbs into motion.

  And now it challenged the Void, glowing with black fire, singing its high, gleeful battle-song.

  “Our destinies are intertwined, Stormbringer,” said Elric. “Bring us from this place, or those destinies shall never be fulfilled.”

  Stormbringer swung like the needle of a compass and Elric’s unfeeling arm was wrenched round to go with it. In eight directions the sword swung, as if to the eight points of Chaos. It was questing – like a hound sniffing a trail. Then a yell sounded from within the strange metal of the blade; a distant cry of delight, it seemed to Elric. The sound one would hear if one stood above a valley listening to children playing far below.

  Elric knew that Stormbringer had sensed a plane they might reach. Not necessarily their own, but one which would accept them. And, as a drowning mariner must yearn for the most inhospitable rock rather than no rock at all, Elric yearned for that plane.

  “Stormbringer. Take us there!”

  The sword hesitated. It moaned. It was suspicious.

  “Take us there!” whispered the albino to his runesword.

  The sword struck back and forth, up and down, as if it battled invisible enemies. Elric scarcely kept his grip on it. It seemed that Stormbringer was frightened of the world it had detected and sought to drive it back but the act of seeking had in itself set them both in motion. Already Elric could feel himself being drawn through the darkness, towards something he could see very dimly beyond the myriad eyes, as dawn reveals clouds undetected in the night sky.

  Elric thought he saw the shapes of crags, pointed and crazy. He thought he saw water, flat and ice-blue. The stars faded and there was snow beneath his feet, mountains all around him, a huge, blazing sun overhead – and above that another landscape, a desert, as a magic mirror might reflect the contrasting character of he who peered into it – a desert, quite as real as the snowy peaks in which he crouched, sword in hand, waiting for one of these landscapes to fade so that he might establish, to a degree, his bearings. Evidently the two planes had intersected.

  But the landscape overhead did not fade. He could look up and see sand, mountains, vegetation, a sky which met his own sky at a point halfway along the curve of the huge sun – and blended with it. He looked about him. Snowy peaks in all directions. Above – desert everywhere. He felt dizzy, found that he was staring downwards, reaching to cup some of the snow in his hand. It was ordinary snow, though it seemed reluctant to melt in contact with his flesh.

  “This is a world of Chaos,” he muttered. “It obeys no natural laws.” His voice seemed loud, amplified by the peaks, perhaps. “That is why you did not want to come here. This is the world of powerful rivals.”

  Stormbringer was silent, as if all its energy were spent. But Elric did not sheathe the blade. He began to trudge through the snow towards what seemed to be an abyss. Every so often he glanced upward, but the desert overhead had not faded; sun and sky remained the same. He wondered if he walked around the surface of a miniature world, t
hat if he continued to go forward he might eventually reach the point where the two landscapes met. He wondered if this were not some punishment wished upon him by his untrustworthy allies of Chaos. Perhaps he must choose between death in the snow or death in the desert. He reached the edge of the abyss and looked down.

  The walls of the abyss fell for all of five feet before reaching a floor of gold and silver squares which stretched for perhaps another seven feet before they reached the far wall, where the landscape continued – snow and crags – uninterrupted.

  “This is undoubtedly where Chaos rules,” said the prince of Melniboné. He studied the smooth, chequered floor. It reflected parts of the snowy terrain and the desert world above it. It reflected the crimson-eyed albino who peered down at it, his features drawn in bewilderment and tiredness.

  “I am at their mercy,” said Elric. “They play with me. But I shall resist them, even as they destroy me.” And some of his wild, careless spirit came back to him as he prepared to lower himself onto the chequered floor and cross to the opposite bank.

  He was halfway over when he heard a grunting sound in the distance and a beast appeared, its paws slithering uncertainly on the smooth surface, its seven savage eyes glaring in all directions as if it sought the instigator of its terrible indignity.

  And, at last, all seven eyes focused on Elric and the beast opened a mouth in which row upon row of thin, vicious teeth were arranged, and uttered a growl of unmistakable resentment.

  Elric raised his sword. “Back, creature of Chaos. You threaten the Prince of Melniboné!”

  The beast was already propelling itself towards him. Elric flung his body to one side, aiming a blow with the sword as he did so, succeeding only in making a thin incision in the monster’s heavily muscled hind leg. It shrieked and began to turn.

  “Back!”

  Elric’s voice was the brave, thin squeak of a lemming attacked by a hawk. He drove at the thing’s snout with Stormbringer. The sword was heavy. It had spent all its energy and there was no more to give. Elric wondered why he, himself, did not weaken. Possibly the Laws of Nature were entirely abolished in the Realm of Chaos. He struck and drew blood. The beast paused, more in astonishment than fear.