The ground was often covered with cockroaches and small black beetles. The dendrites provided a perfect home for a vast host of starlings and other, unknown species of birds which were hardly ever seen in the human lands of the Underworld.
In between the forests were wet regions, where the ground was either sodden or completely submerged. Here there was a different kind of vegetation, dark green in color and predominantly filamentous, though everywhere that moderately stable mud was available the puffballs and chytrids clustered, climbing upon one another’s backs, forming grotesque conglomerates of form and feature, bristling with the ascocarps and the hyrdroids of two or three dozen different species. The water here was acidic, and it burned their skin, as well as hastening the rot which had already set into Joth’s clothes. There were no replacements, and as time passed he grew gradually more naked. Even the spore-free air of the wetlands was no relief to them, because it carried vitriolic vapors which irritated the tissues inflamed by the spores.
They never dared rest in the wetlands, even where the soil was matted into plate-like ridges by the dense algal filaments. They had to share such refuges with a large variety of inimical creatures which, though small, were not negligible. Crabs in particular abounded in such regions.
There were also large plants whose gigantic rubbery leaves lay atop the moist surface, offering a refuge of a kind, but if they stayed on such a leaf for more than a few moments it would begin to sink beneath their weight, and they would be flooded. From time to time, when they walked over such platforms, they would be tipped sideways into the morass, which was more like deep slime than mud.
The wetlands also sheltered flesh-eating plants like soft sea-anemones, with tentacles which never ceased to writhe through the air and through the mud. The plants never stopped consuming victims of one kind or another—they had to keep moving in order to catch prey, and they had to catch prey in order to keep moving.
In the swamps they were occasionally alarmed by the sight of large animals. But the animals were always equally alarmed, and often they would know of the presence of the larger beasts only by the loud splashing of a creature in full retreat.
More dangerous, and on one occasion all but deadly, were the four-foot flatworms which lurked invisibly in the fluid subsurface. One of these wrapped itself around Huldi’s ankle and tripped her. She fell full length, but caught herself on her hands, and did not allow her head to go into the mud. The worm flopped up on to her back like a great wet blanket. Huldi tried to shrug it off, but was too firmly imbedded in the mud. Joth grabbed it but couldn’t hold it. Its head was between her shoulder blades, and it seemed to spit at her, everting its whole gut. Glands in the gut were churning out digestive juices like bubbling fountains, and the villi of the blind intestine could be seen flapping like a thousand tiny flags.
Joth eventually managed to get a hold as Huldi writhed and screamed, and between them they tossed the creature sideways so that the flood of corrosive liquid was lost in the slime. There was an audible hiss as the acids sank into the algal soup. Huldi was burned about the neck, and had to abandon what was left of her jacket, but she escaped without any serious injury.
Joth stamped hard on the worm, but the ground was so slushy that it came to no real harm. It writhed and sucked its gut back into itself and oozed away into the glutinous subsurface.
Eventually, they came to the edge of a land which seemed to have rusted away. Joth guessed immediately that here were the partially unreclaimed ruins of a city, and he wanted to go into this land in search of relics of an older mankind. But Nita stopped him, saying that it was too dangerous, and that such lands were deadly. She pointed away to the west, and Joth saw a strip of darkness in the further sky. The stars, which were clustered less densely even in the roof directly above, petered out completely in that direction.
“The black land,” she said. “Perpetual night.”
“Not quite,” said Joth, straining his metal eyes, and then adjusting them with his thumb to give him better vision. “I can see a thin line of light, like a road of stars. It goes straight out into the black land. Where does it lead? It can’t be there without a reason. It points a way...somewhere.”
“No one knows where it goes,” said Nita. “We have come far to the west. We are away from our true direction. We must turn away from this country. We must not cross it, and we would die if we tried.”
They went on, away from the region where echoes of an older civilization still lingered. On towards the metal wall. They all became tired and sick, and ultimately neither Nita nor Huldi enjoyed any kind of an advantage over Joth, nor the one over the other. Whereas in the early times it had been Nita and Huldi who gathered most of the food, now they all shared equally in the work. They slept in turn, fitfully and uneasily, and they were all troubled in some measure by the quality of their dreams. They questioned neither the purpose of the journey nor the distance which they covered. There was no suggestion, at any time, that Nita might prefer to turn back and search for her father, or that Huldi might want to go her own way. They were united, by a kind of love. And also by a kind of fear (though love itself has always a component of fear, no matter what kind it might be). But their fears were quiet fears, which they neither voiced nor faced.
Chapter 67
In the end, they found the metal wall.
Chapter 68
Carl Magner went down.
Alone.
Neither Abram Ravelvent, nor Julea, had come into the plexus after him. They had not tried to stop him, though perhaps they might have had they realized what was happening. They did not follow him. Julea had broken down into tears, and simply collapsed like a rag doll, as if it had all been inevitable from the very beginning, and now was finished. Ravelvent had been momentarily torn between them, but there had been no real choice to make. He had stayed with Julea, and with the world that was his, and Magner had gone into the plexus alone, with a bullet lodged in his body.
Perhaps there was the faintest of possibilities that if it had not been for the bullet Magner would have turned back. But any impetus which he might have lacked the bullet had most certainly provided. It was the final settlement, the coup de grâce. It left nothing else for Carl Magner but a descent to the Hell he had named.
There was no more help now. There was no more reality except the world of sleep (perpetual sleep) and dreams (are there dreams in death?).
Carl Magner was running. Down.
He was coming face to face with Heaven and Hell. Running between the worlds, he was their marriage—the only marriage they would ever know.
He went down.
And down.
And down.
Crystal eyes winked at him. Plastic mesh ears caught the sound of his coughing, the rattle of his clattering feet, the slow slap, slap, slap of the tiny drops of blood on the stairs. The blood would have clotted if only he would have let it, but instead he went down, and tore himself apart a fraction farther with every step that he took, tore the corners of the wound again and again, until a tiny rounded bullet hole became an ugly gaping mouth. Blood drooled.
Slap, slap, slap.
Down, and down.
The plexus could feel him as well. It could feel his vibrations, his hurry, his urgency, his need. And his slowly draining life. The plexus was conscious of him. It knew him. Impassively, it crouched around him and watched him, studied his scurrying figure.
He was very tiny.
He was tasteless. The machine could not smell him. It could only see and hear and feel. It had no direct emotional/sensory links. Its organometallic synapses were geared to a functional régime of an altogether different character.
He was not thinking. Not really. He had nothing to think about, nothing to keep his mind active except the simple routine of operating his motor nerves. After the bullet, the future had disappeared. In a puff of smoke. The past was dwindling and fading. In a puff of blood.
The whole consciousness of time and its meaning (past/ pres
ent/future) which Carl Magner had used to fuel his life recoiled into him like a snapped watchspring. The past was kneeling on the grass up above, Julea in Ravelvent’s arms. The future....
He was caged in the present, caged and confined by bars which pressed on his being like the laces of a straightjacket. His meaninglessness meant nothing, here. He was only acting a part as he ran down the staircase to throw wide the door which opened the Underworld.
He hurled himself down, trying to outrun the running of the blood.
And down.
And down.
And down.
Chapter 69
When Carl Magner reached the door to the Underworld he found that it was open. All he had to do was push it and it swung out. There was no lock, no apparent catch, and the hinges were not stiff. It required only the effort of his feeble fingers to push it open.
The door opened to reveal the land of his dreams.
There was silence and starlight.
Carl Magner realized that the door had been open for thousands of years.
Chapter 70
Joth watched the door in the metal wall swing slowly outwards. They had been walking beside the wall for some miles. Joth did not know how many. He did not know—he literally had no idea—whether it had been three minutes or three hours or three weeks since they had first sighted the wall towering above the Swithering Waste and occluding the far stars.
Nita and Huldi paused, and then stayed still. But after momentary hesitation Joth went on. He did not know what hid behind the door, but he knew that it had come from above, from his own world, and he knew that there could be no reason to be afraid.
By the time Joth reached the door, Carl Magner was stretched out on the damp earth. His face was in the dirt. His feet were still on the steel sill of the final step.
Joth turned him over, and cradled his head in his own lap. Carl Magner’s eyes were open, and he was looking up at the still, pearl-white stars. Joth could not be sure that his father could still see.
“Joth?” said Magner. Magner knew that he was not dreaming. There was no Joth in the dreams. There never had been. There never could be. Not even a dream of death could bring Joth into the world of frozen stars. This was reality, of a kind.
“It’s me,” said Joth. “I was coming back. I found the way. If you’d waited, I would have come. There was no need.”
Joth did not know there was a bullet in his father’s back. He could feel the slight wetness where his father’s spine rested against his thigh, but he assumed that the dampness was in his own clothing. He did not know that his father was on the brink of death, even though he looked down into eyes which stared, and which would soon be quite sightless.
“I came...,” said Carl Magner.
“It’s all right,” said Joth. “You can see. It’s all right. Look at the stars. The world is real. The people...only the people....”
“I was wrong,” said Magner.
“Yes,” said Joth, “you were wrong.”
They were talking about two very different kinds of wrongness. But neither of them knew. They thought that they understood.
Then Carl Magner died.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.
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