But could he really have personal enemies? After some rumination, he dismissed the notion. No, his abduction must be part of a grand scheme of some sort. He only wondered why he hadn't been killed outright. Obviously he was a hostage. But to what purpose?
Then again, maybe the plan was to let him die slowly. No food, no water, no sanitation. Hell of a way to go, starvation.
He sniffed. The place was beginning to get ripe, but before long, he suspected, he wouldn't have much waste to void. Thirst would kill him long before hunger did.
How long had he been here? He really had no notion. Twenty-four hours at least. Maybe forty-eight. It seemed like a week. He hadn't slept a wink, and fatigue was weighing him down.
He stopped pacing and sat, leaning his back against the wall, then began giving more thought to where he could be. Well, he had come through a portal from Earth, which meant he was back in Castle Perilous somewhere. Or so he thought. He had never heard of a portal opening up between the universes of the castle. But it was a possibility, so he could be anywhere.
It made him feel better to think that he was inside Perilous, albeit at the mercy of his abductors. It meant that he had his magic powers. Correction: power, for he had only one. He was the best swordsman in the place. He wished for some way to test the hypothesis, but he needed a sword. There was no other way. He had tried shadow fencing with an imaginary sword, but it had told him little.
Of course, he felt right, sensed that his swordsmanship was back, but there was no way of being really sure. Anyway, the point was moot as long as he was unarmed.
His thoughts drifted to food. There was a great Syrian-Lebanese restaurant in Pittsburgh that he used to frequent. They served great shish kebab, fragrant hunks of flame-broiled marinated lamb, which went even better with a dish of rice and pignolias on the side. Of course, to start out you'd have maybe a tabuli salad—parsley and cucumber tossed in lemon dressing—along with fresh warm bread dipped in a mixture of mashed chickpeas, sesame oil, and garlic. Then some grape leaves stuffed with rice, ground lamb, and spices—or perhaps a dab of kibbe, raw ground lamb with onion. You didn't have to go with the meat on a skewer, either. There were plenty of other entrees, like stuffed eggplant or...
He had to stop that. He couldn't think of food or he surely would go mad.
Chinese was good, too. He could almost smell a dish of cashew chicken. But then again there was nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned slab of American prime rib, well-done at the edges and pink in the middle, lying alongside a volcanic cone of mashed potatoes, its caldera full to the brim with gravy made from pan drippings —
Stop! Are you crazy already? Stop. Just quit it.
He got up and began to pace again. If only the phantom smells would go away. He was sure, now, that he could smell bread baking.
He halted. Maybe he did smell bread baking. Or manufactured odors designed to tantalize him. Part of the torture. It could be this was just the beginning of his torment.
Somebody had it in for him! It had to be. But who?
He had no shred of an idea. Unless the Hosts of Hell were back in the castle. Those bastards were capable of anything. Sadism was child's play to the Hosts. In that case, it was hot pincers and thumbscrews for him, or worse, if such could be imagined. And it probably could.
He was worried now. And of course, fear and worry were high on the agenda, too. Anything to make him sweat, wear him down. Did they want him to talk? About what? He knew almost nothing of strategic value—that he could think of. He was just a soldier, nothing more. He was no sorcerer, like...
Like Linda and Sheila. Especially Sheila. Were they trying to get to the girls through him? Trying to coerce cooperation out of them by threatening him? The reverse?
Perhaps he was merely being kept in reserve as a future bargaining chip. That made sense. Maybe they were deciding what to do with him, which explained why the major excruciations hadn't started yet. The plan was to keep him barely alive for now, living in his own filth.
Again he wondered where in the castle he was. In the keep, most likely. The Donjon was a good bet, but this place could very well be in one of the outer defensive walls, of which Castle Perilous had a mind-boggling maze.
He couldn't stand it any longer. Time for the last Life Saver. He took out the package and peeled back the remnants of the paper covering, exposing the doughnut-shaped, wild-cherry-flavored confection.
He halted a motion to pop the thing into his mouth. Should he save it? After this, the thirst would become unbearable.
He rewrapped the candy and carefully put it back inside the inner breast pocket of his tweed sports jacket. If only he had loaded up on chewing gum and other stuff before he boarded the plane, as he usually did. But L.A. rush-hour traffic had delayed his arrival, necessitating a dash to the gate.
If he ever got out of this, he would never go about unarmed again, no matter where he was.
On second thought, what good would a gun or a knife or even a sword do him now? It was his own damn fault for being so trusting. He should have sounded that page out, demanded to see Osmirik, at least, if not Incarnadine. In fact, he should have —
Light!
He waited until the pain in his eyes subsided, then tried to look. A fuzzy, eye-searing oblong of light had suddenly appeared in the far wall. An opening. He staggered toward it. A warm breeze washed over him, and a strange, dry smell entered his nostrils. An alien smell.
Gene knew it was no ordinary door. Perhaps his captors were on the other side; if so, they weren't inside the castle. He instinctively knew a wild portal when he saw one.
This meant he was inside Castle Perilous! And slipping through the portal meant escape, all right, but it also possibly meant being stranded on the other side, forever exiled from Perilous and its wonders. Wild portals were like that. They flitted about the castle, appearing and disappearing at random, sometimes never to be seen again. Each one led to a different world; some of those worlds were lethal, some were not. To enter any one of them was to leap into the unknown.
That is, if it was indeed a wild portal and not a wordless summons to come out. No voices called his name.
His eyes were adjusting slowly. Shielding them with both hands, he advanced until he could pick out some features of the landscape on the other side. There wasn't much out there: a few rocks, a hill, a gnarled bush, and sand everywhere. The sky was slightly yellow.
No one stood near the entrance. If it was a trap, it did not look like one. He lurched forward until light from a strange sun warmed him. He was outside.
He stopped and looked about. The portal was an anomalous dark rectangle standing in the middle of an eroded gully. Pink boulders rose all around him. The cloudless sky was pale yellow. His eyes would not let him look near the sun, but he sensed that this world's star was larger than the Earth's though not as bright. The air was warm and breathable. Lucky for him. This was not always so on the other side of a portal. He chose a rock and sat down to wait for his irises to contract.
Presently they did, just in time for him to watch the portal disappear with a pop.
“So much for life at Castle Perilous,” he said dully.
The portal could reappear, but more than likely he was stuck here. Forever.
He decided not to wait around in the hope that the doorway would rematerialize. The presence of the bush informed him that there was life here, and where there was life there was danger. This position was too exposed and vulnerable.
As he gained the lip of the gully, he saw the city, a fanciful grouping of domes, spires, and free-form shapes sitting on the plain. The buildings were of a single color, a faded blue-green. That it was a ruined city was not so much apparent as sensed. Silence sat on the plain, an ancient, empty silence.
He regarded the city for a long moment.
“The cover of Astounding Stories, circa 1932,” he said. “Maybe a little Thrilling Wonder thrown in. Could be an Edmund Hamilton piece."
He checked to the r
ight, then to the left. Nothing else in sight.
He struck out across the plain.
Castle
Jeremy was not quite sure when the dream had begun. Call it an extended hallucination. Was it when he had heard the police? Had the wild delusions started then? Or had he actually jumped off the roof? Maybe it was like that story he read (Jeremy had not read much fiction beyond comic books, but what he had read he remembered), the one by Ambrose Bierce—“Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Yeah, that was it. Maybe he was hallucinating this whole thing in one flash as he plummeted.
If he was in the middle of falling to his death, he sure was taking his good old time about it. His best guess was that he had been in the castle at least two days.
He knew it was a castle, because it looked like one on the inside, and also because he had seen bits and pieces of the outside through a few of the windows. Through other windows ... well, he wasn't quite sure what he had seen. Alien worlds, maybe. Crazy stuff. But not the craziest. The real nutty stuff happened when a window or doorway would pop up anywhere, right in front of you, maybe, and you found yourself about to step into a primeval swamp, or a jungle, or a spooky city, or any number of other curious locales.
But that wasn't all that was insane about this place. There were creatures here. Something purple and multi-armed had chased him yesterday—halfheartedly, he suspected, because the thing could move fast, and probably could have caught him if it had wanted to. Maybe the thing was as lost as he was and wanted company. Jeremy had got that feeling, but had been too scared to stop running. Maybe today. If he saw the thing again today, maybe he would stop and try to communicate.
But maybe not. Jeremy was still scared, scared even of the humans. The humans had spoken to him, asking him to come with them. Something about meeting the “other Guests."
“Yeah, right, lady!” he had yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted away. They weren't going to throw him into any dungeon. “Guests,” his butt.
But maybe he shouldn't have run. Maybe they really had been trying to help him. They looked harmless enough—if you believed that people running around in funny costumes could be harmless.
But it was possible. After all, who had put the food outside the door of the strange room he had slept in last night? He had assumed the tray had been left there by mistake, but now he wasn't sure. The food had been great, although he would have eaten a dead skunk by then.
He had to do something sooner or later; soonest, if he wanted to preserve his sanity. He had given a great deal of thought to turning himself in. It made him laugh. Turning himself in. He was wanted in Fantasyland, too. Mickey Mouse had a warrant for his arrest. No, he hadn't seen any Disney characters—yet—but there was no telling in this place.
He was walking along one of the castle's endless hallways when another costumed castle inhabitant stepped out of an intersecting passageway. It was a man with a beard and a funny haircut and funny, floppy shoes. Still clutching his laptop computer, Jeremy skidded to a stop.
The guy looked Jeremy up and down. “Ah, there you are! You really should come along with me, young man."
But Jeremy wasn't quite ready yet and dashed off in the other direction.
“But you might sustain grievous injury, son! Please, listen to me!"
Jeremy was tempted, but when another man stepped out into the hallway, he panicked.
“Stop him, Wildon!” the first man shouted.
Wildon, a big hulking dude, went into a crouch and threw out his arms, ready to catch the running Jeremy.
Jeremy executed a textbook-perfect slide into home, slipping between Wildon's legs. Wildon didn't touch him. Jeremy sprang to his feet and ran on.
But the corridor ended in one of those crazy doorways, this one letting out into bright sun backdropped by dense greenery.
Jeremy slowed a bit, looking back over his shoulder. Sure enough, Wildon was in pursuit. Jeremy put on speed and tore through the opening.
A wave of heat hit him as he ran through a clearing and hit the edge of a dense rain forest. He plunged into the trees, leaves whipping at his face, his Reebok hightops trampling the undergrowth. Strange cries echoed all around. It sounded like convincing Tarzan soundtrack stuff: whooping, chittering, creeing, and so forth. It was scary. He stumbled, tripped up by a thorny vine that had snagged his pants. For a heart-stopping second he thought that something hiding in the weeds had got hold of him. He gave a high-pitched yell, yanked his leg free, and jumped away. He tripped again, staggered, got turned around, and tried running backward. His ankle twisted on a hidden stone, and he went crashing headlong through a wall of vegetation.
After rolling down a high grassy bank, he hit soft ground and stopped. He was in the clear, out of the forest.
Spitting sand, he sat up. A beach?
No, not a beach. Just a kidney-shaped depression with sand in it. It looked a little like a sand trap in a golf course. Well, no. As a matter of fact, it looked exactly like a sand trap in a...
“I say!"
Jeremy blinked, looked around.
“You there! Mind awfully getting out of the way? I'm making my approach shot."
Jeremy saw him now. It was a man in his thirties, light-haired and thin, dressed in shirt, sweater vest, and old-fashioned baggy knee pants—knickers—complete with high stockings and golf shoes. He looked like something out of an old movie. An older man stood behind him, watching.
Annoyed, the first man took a step closer. “Can't you bloody hear?"
“Yeah, I can hear,” Jeremy said.
“Well, look, I hate to be rude—but piss off, will you? We'd really like to play through, if you don't mind awfully much."
“Uh ... sorry.” Jeremy got up and moved out into the fairway.
“A bit more,” the man directed, gesturing imperiously with his seven iron. “A few more steps. Right there. Yes, yes, there's a good fellow.” He returned to his ball and addressed it. “Right! Well, then..."
After a few tentative swings, the man made his shot. The ball arched toward the nearby green, hit smack on, narrowly missing the pin, then skidded across the manicured grass and rolled off the other side into another bunker.
“Oh, bloody hell!” the man shouted, throwing down his club in disgust.
Dragging his golf bag on a two-wheeled dolly, the older man approached Jeremy.
“Just fell in, son?"
“Huh?"
“Fell into the castle. You arrived very recently, didn't you? Like day before yesterday?"
“Uh, yeah, I did. Are you from the castle, too?"
“Sure am. A little scared? Don't be. It's called Castle Perilous, but once you learn the ropes, it's a very nice place indeed. All it takes is some getting used to."
“Sure is crazy."
“Yeah, it gets that way sometimes.” The man extended his hand. “Name's Dalton. Cleveland Dalton. Cleve, if you like."
Jeremy shook his hand. “Jeremy Hochstader."
“Fine old German name, Hochstader. Used to have a client by that name. Never went anywhere—wrote fantasy, if memory serves."
The man in knickers went harumphing past, apparently still upset about the muffed shot.
Dalton said, “That's Thaxton. Don't mind him. Golf's not his game, and I won't play tennis with him."
“Where the hell is this place?” Jeremy blurted.
Dalton shrugged. “This place? Nobody knows. Some world, in some time or space, somewhere. Just one of the worlds accessible via the castle."
“But where's the castle?” Jeremy demanded.
“Nobody really knows that, either. But it's real, son. It's real. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's all a dream."
“Yeah, I gave up on that yesterday."
“Get anything to eat yet?"
Jeremy nodded. “Uh-huh. They fed me."
“Good,” Dalton said. “By the way, did you ever caddy?"
City
Gene had chosen a high tower as his residence, staking out an apartm
ent on a high floor. Above this level lay only a few small chambers, some containing building machinery. There was water in a storage tank on the roof; as for food, the city had given him all he wanted, when he had asked for it.
He had very soon found out that the city was alive, or at least was a conscious entity of some sort. He had walked right in through an open gate. Looking around, he heard a quasi-human voice speaking a strange language. After searching for the source, he eventually realized that the voice had been that of the city itself, or of some artificial intelligence that was part of the city's computer control system. As for other intelligent inhabitants, the place was as deserted as it looked, and very old.
The city had learned colloquial English very quickly, from Gene, mostly; its only other source was a tattered paperback Gene had been carrying, a science fiction novel with a futuristic trailer truck on the cover. It still spoke with the machine equivalent of an accent, slurring its syllables occasionally. Otherwise the city was quite intelligible.
The city had a name: Zond.
“I see that your genetic makeup is quite divergent from the beings who built me,” Zond told Gene.
“Perceptive of you,” Gene told the city. “Does that change anything?"
“Nope."
“Really. Why? Weren't you designed to serve whoever it was who built you?"
“That's true, but my original programming also includes instructions about showing hospitality to visitors. You're a visitor; you get hospitality."
“Nice and friendly, your builders. What was the name you called them again?"
“The Umoi."
“Funny name."
“What's funny about it?"
“Sorry, didn't mean to offend."
“No, I was just asking,” Zond said. “I haven't had a good laugh in centuries."
He had many conversations like this one over the next several weeks. He learned something about the Umoi, who had been a squat, reptilelike race, somewhat resembling terrestrial toads. They had had a long and complex history, culminating in the building of a small number of these self-contained, fully sentient cities. By that time the Umoi population had shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it was in earlier periods. Then—Gene did not know exactly what had happened. The Umoi died off gradually, after deserting the cities. History had simply petered out at some point. Gene had a little trouble converting Umoi time scales into Earth equivalents, but it looked as though the Umoi had become extinct between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. Anyway, it was a long time since the Umoi had walked this world. The city's main domes had weathered and faded, but for the most part the city was still intact and functioning.
Castle Kidnapped Page 3
