Doc Ardan and The Abominable Snowman

by Guy d'Armen

  The Queen continued to gaze at him in silence, resolve showing in her cold eyes.

  “Take her away,” he ordered the guards, gesturing to the cavern entrance, and buried his head in his hands, exhausted.

  Antinea went willingly. Before she stepped into the carved entryway, she paused and looked back.

  “Ah, Monsieur Killer?”

  He looked up.

  “Ilhinen!”

  The Wandarobo started howling and jumping again, and Killer plugged his ears, screaming in frustration.

  Deep in the bowels of the Mountain of Evil Spirits, a group of Killer’s Wandarobo guards sat at a long table with wooden benches running along each side. They slurped watery gruel from Antinea’s scullery and grunted back and forth about their rapidly disappearing comrades.

  One of Antinea’s Arab servants, a larger man in hooded robes, set down a large tray at the end of the table, handed out fresh bowls, and began to load up the empties. Despite what must have been long years spent laboring in the dim cavern complex, the muscular hands extending from the robe’s sleeves appeared to be dusky and tanned.

  The beast-men ignored him, their faces pressed in their bowls, long tongues scouring for every last drop.

  When they looked up, a few of them sensed something was amiss. Were their numbers fewer? Perhaps one or two had left to relieve themselves…

  One Wandarobo, a shade more intelligent than his companions, whispered, “Ilhinen…”

  Antinea was face down on a stone pedestal, held on the left by one of Killer’s beast-men, her right arm extended straight out and held down at the wrist by another. Killer held a long sword poised above her splayed fingers.

  “Last chance, my Queen.”

  Antinea sighed. “Very well.”

  “What?”

  “I said, very well. I will show you.”

  Killer signaled and the Wandarobo let her loose. Antinea sat up, rubbing her wrist. She wrinkled her nose at the stink of the nearby beast-men. “Would it hurt for them to bathe occasionally?”

  “Quit stalling.”

  “As you wish.” Antinea rose to her feet–still chained, as were her wrists–and shambled toward her throne.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Killer asked.

  “Getting you what you want. Shall I stop?”

  “No, get on with it.”

  Killer watched as Antinea stood before the throne and uplifted her arms, as if praying to an altar. The throne began to rise, stone scraping on stone. The base then slid backward on unseen mechanisms, revealing a staircase below. She began to descend but Killer shoved her aside and went first. He heard her follow him down, as best as her chains would allow.

  At the base of the stairs was a small, cubicle chamber carved into the stone. Killer saw a small stone dais, upon which rested a simple metal bowl. A single item lay within the bowl. It resembled a broken and lifeless tree branch, or root, peppered with dulled silicate crystal.

  That was all.

  He turned to the smiling Antinea, enraged. “This? This is the mighty secret of everlasting life?”

  “It is,” Antinea replied.

  Her calm infuriated him even more. He turned back to the branch, his frustration mounting. “It’s not working. It looks nothing like what I saw years ago.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Glowing light. Crystalline. These mountains. You.”

  Antinea raised and lowered her shoulders. “You said yourself there is no way I could be so youthful. I sit above this every day, on my throne, to ensure my exposure to it. It is the secret you seek, I assure you.”

  Harry Killer contemplated the branch for a long time. Then he turned, grabbed the chain that hung between her wrists, and hobbled up the stairs, tugging her behind him. At the top, he called over one of the Wandarobo.

  “Take her away.”

  Before the order could be carried out, however, there was commotion and shuffling outside the throne chamber. The rich tapestries covering the carved entranceway were thrown aside, and four beast-men entered the cavern, grasping between them a man, either European or American, in well-worn khakis, jodhpurs, and dark brown boots, accompanied by a native African.

  “Master,” one of Wandarobo rumbled in guttural tones, “an intruder!”

  “Who the Hell are you?”

  The man removed his safari helmet and held it in his hands.

  “Hareton Ironcastle, at your service.”

  The heavy iron door shut, leaving Hareton and N’desi in utter blackness.

  “Don’t say it, I know, it’s the cursed ax.” Hareton’s humorless voice sounded muted in the confined space. He began tracing his hands over the rough basalt walls of their cell, thinking of how Muriel would react if he failed to return from Africa. His spirited daughter wouldn’t just send her husband Phillippe and her cousin Sydney Guthrie to search for him–she would come along herself… and fall into the very trap he had.

  Hareton had just about completed a circuit of their tiny prison, cursing as he tripped and overturned a half-filled, stinking chamber pot on the floor, when a dim light suffused the chamber from above. At the same time, he heard a door groan on metallic hinges, shuffling feet on the stone floor, and then the deep boom of the door slamming closed. The faint light emanating from a hole near the ceiling disappeared.

  “Who’s there?” Hareton shouted, hoping his voice would carry to what was obviously an adjoining cell.

  For a moment, silence; and then, in haughty, feminine tones: “A queen without a throne.” The words, though English, belied the speaker’s native Arabic.

  “Antinea!” Hareton breathed. He had thought reports of the woman and her spider-trap in the desert to be mere fiction, although his doubts had soon evaporated as he crossed the very distinctive terrain in the Hoggar which he recognized from Ferrières’ famous account. And now here lay the queen spider herself, trapped by the treachery of her own web.

  “What goes on here?” he asked, resolving not to judge the woman on hearsay. “Who is this man who has invaded your lair and imprisoned us?”

  “A man, like any other,” came the silken voice. “Except for one thing. He has no soul.”

  “Otherwise he would have fallen under the spell of your beauty, no doubt.” He could not help himself. He had to probe her motivations, get a sense of her character.

  “You have heard of me? I should not be surprised. I would have left this grotto long ago and avoided those who would seek me out, had these tunnels not housed the very thing which brings the man known as Killer. But I am patient. Soon enough will he make his home in the Hall of Red Marble.”

  Hareton repressed a shudder in the darkness, recalling what he had read of the woman’s predilection for killing her former lovers–once she had tired with them–and embalming their bodies with orichalcum, that rare element utilized by the metallurgists of the dead civilization described by Plato in the Critias.

  “Atlantis!” Hareton said aloud, feeling awed. He could hardly believe it, but had he not seen the seven dried-up canals surrounding the city, exactly as Plato had written? To think, the lost culture that so many had sought in the Atlantic lay buried here–high atop the Hoggar in the middle of the Sahara! The first thing he would do if he ever made it back to his private library in Baltimore would be to burn his copy of Donnelly’s Atlantis–so what if it was one of Aunt Rebecca’s favorite tomes.

  “This land was not always desert,” Antinea said, as if reading Hareton’s thoughts. “Once a great water lapped the sides of my mountain home, which was then but one city in a vast and powerful empire. But if other cities survived the Reaver of Worlds, I have not heard of it. My fortress alone endures.”

  At hearing the phrase “the Reaver of Worlds”–the same words used by the local tribes to describe the ax he and N’desi had uncovered in the Tibesti–Hareton’s entire frame buzzed as if he’d been struck by a god’s hammer. But local folk tales did not matter–he could not allow his curiosity to distract
him. The man who had imprisoned them meant business.

  “What is this thing you say brought this Killer fellow to the Hoggar? And now that he has it, why hasn’t he gone on his way?”

  A low laugh purred in the darkness. “Have I said that he has it? No, only that he seeks it. And as for what it is, I know not myself, although long have I gazed into its mystery. And what I have seen–”

  From the hole connecting the two cells Hareton heard the sound of metal grating against metal–the iron bolt sliding open in the door to Antinea’s prison. Then metallic hinges groaned and again a dim light came from above. A moment later, the door to Hareton’s cell opened. A large robed figure filled the narrow tunneled hallway outside, a white burnoose hiding the towering newcomer’s face.

  “I took the liberty of retrieving these,” the man said in surprisingly well-modulated American English. The Reaver of Worlds appeared from beneath a robed sleeve, proffered to Hareton handle-first in a large, deeply tanned, corded hand. Then, from beneath his robes came N’desi’s square-ended iron sword.

  Hareton took the ax, glittering in the orange light of the tall man’s torch, while N’desi’s teeth gleamed like a vista of snow-peaked mountains as he grasped the hilt of his own weapon.

  The giant robed man turned to Antinea. “We must move quickly. Killer has found the secret way down into to the temple.”

  A sickly look overcame Antinea’s regal features. Her stiffened arm pointed down the tunnel and the burnoosed man whirled, heading into the darkness with Antinea following at his heels. Hareton and N’desi raced after them.

  They passed through a warren of crisscrossing, rock-hewn corridors, climbing any number of winding staircases until Hareton lost all sense of the way.

  “It’s enough to drive one mad!” he said to N’desi.

  “We trod the path into madness,” the warrior replied, “when we climbed the reaches of the Tibesti. Now we only tread deeper.”

  Hareton did not argue with the man. The sense that fate had laid a trap for them all nearly smothered him.

  Finally the nauseating twists and turns ceased and they entered a large circular chamber, in the center of which a plume of fresh water fountained from a rounded basin. The spurting water glistened redly in the light of twelve massive copper lamps that crowned the chamber’s circumference, ensconced in a golden framework that disappeared into the yawning darkness of an impenetrable ceiling. Around the basin curved a number of oversized, deeply cushioned divans, which faced outward in the chamber overlooking a series of low, broad niches set in the highly polished, red marble walls. In front of one of the niches lay three unmoving bodies of the hairy half-men. It was to this alcove which Antinea’s large servant led them.

  “Your handiwork?” Hareton asked the man.

  The fellow seemed not to hear him. Instead, he cast his torch out into the chamber, where it lay smoldering on the marble floor. Then he stepped over the bodies and, crouching on hands and knees, crawled into the niche. Antinea followed suit, sobbing angrily at the sight of a metallic statue toppled from a low-lying pedestal in the alcove. A shallow wooden case lay next to the statue on the ground.

  “Ah, my poor Captain, what have they done to you!” Antinea caressed the silvery male face of rigid effigy.

  The robed man turned the dark hole of his burnoose toward Antinea. “Nothing worse than what you have done to him.”

  “I cared for him! As I have cared for all of my lovers!”

  “I am not sure the Captain’s family will be so grateful when I describe to them the manner of your loving attentions.” Then Antinea’s defiant servant crawled onto the pedestal and dropped into a square hole in its center, disappearing from sight.

  “What lies below?” Hareton asked Antinea, whose face still flushed with an anger not hidden by the room’s long shadows.

  “Eternity!” she hissed, and with no further explanation slipped onto the pedestal and vanished.

  Hareton shrugged. Hefting the Reaver of Worlds, he looked to N’desi with a wry smile. “To eternity!” he cried, and entered the hole.

  Hareton dropped two meters down to land on a stone floor. Ahead, faint light cast upward from yet another tunneled, winding staircase. He began descending, hearing N’desi’s feet clap the cold stone behind as he jumped into the passage.

  The stairway corkscrewed for perhaps thirty meters before passing through a nine-sided doorway, which opened upon the first of three connected antechambers. Shadows obscured the exact size and shape of the rooms, although the dim, pulsating light cast from the doorway at the end of the farthest one gave Hareton the impression that each successive antechamber was of greater size than the previous.

  Seeing Antinea about to enter the room from which the light emanated, Hareton raced ahead, gripping his ax tightly. Though a relic of a bygone age, it seemed sturdy enough to do the trick in a fight. Besides, it was the only weapon he had.

  He slowed as he reached the last doorway. Then, bracing himself for whatever he might find, he passed through.

  Though he had prepared himself, he gasped. But it was not the strangeness of what loomed before him that surprised him–although it was indeed strange–but rather its familiarity. For the breathtaking sight that rose from the center of the enormous oval chamber he had seen before. Or at least something like it. No, it was not humanoid in form like in his dreams. But its rippling, plantlike skin did indeed glisten with the same crystalline mica deposits, which seemed to glow with an inner light. There could be no mistaking the monstrous plant-being from his taduki-inspired dreams.

  The thick, towering trunk of the plant grew tree-like from the cracked mosaic-tiled floor in the center of the subterranean temple, rising into the darkness of the cavernous ceiling, its many green-leafed branches fanning out over the room and rustling as if blown by a wind that was not there. Great copper lamps like those in the Hall of Red Marble circled the temple, their thin red flames catching in the plant’s crystal-mottled exterior. Did the plant glow with its own light? He could not say, although if he looked closely enough he thought he could make out dark forms moving beneath the translucency of the silica.

  Hareton and N’desi walked forward to join Antinea and her giant servant as they stood looking up, mesmerized by the colossal tree.

  Then, from behind the massive trunk of glittering cellulose, walked a man. Harry Killer. With him came a half dozen of his fierce beast-men. But this was not the same feeble man who had been carried about on a litter by his half-human entourage. No, this man did not stoop or shuffle, or need assistance of any kind to move about. He did sway as he walked forth, but certainly it was with arrogant swagger, not frailty.

  “How?” Hareton whispered.

  “It is the Tree of Dreams,” Antinea said at his side. “I know only that it is, and the youth and vitality it brings, not by what magic it operates.”

  “I cannot explain it either.” Killer stopped a half dozen paces before Hareton, his grin uneven and sneering. “But I do know one thing. Now that I have explained to my friends that the ilhinen that killed their fellows is nothing more than a robed native, they have gotten over their love affair with you, my Queen.

  “Now!”

  With his last word, Killer’s beast-men surged forward, their large wooden-knobbed clubs raised high and swinging.

  As Hareton raised his own ax, Antinea’s giant servant moved like lightning. Already he was amid the howling mass, somehow jujitsuing two of the hairy half-men at once, knocking the club of one attacker to the ground, while snatching up that of the other for himself. N’desi and Hareton advanced together, the former dispatching one of their fallen opponents with a cruel slash of his sword. But Hareton felt no pity for the enemy. It was kill or be killed.

  With a savage yell, he swung the Reaver of Worlds, cleaving in two the thick skull of a beast-man.

  For a moment, the chaos of battle consumed Hareton. Now he was the feral beast-man, fighting as his kind had done for eons before civilization’s futi
le attempts to weed out the strain of violence from the species.

  But savage fury could blind one to danger as quickly and surely as the somnolence of civilization. And so it was that Hareton Ironcastle failed to notice that Harry Killer had slipped behind him in the furious bedlam.

  Killer spun around behind Hareton and grabbed the Reaver of Worlds out of his hands.

  In a last burst of energy, he had Antinea by the neck and, trembling, held the ax blade to her throat.

  Antinea’s servant, no longer hooded, moved toward him.

  “Just stop,” Killer hissed.

  Antinea uttered a small cry as the ax made a thin cut at her throat. A small trickle of blood ran from her neck and down between her breasts.

  “You won’t make it out. You’re trembling. You’re at the end of your rope,” Antinea’s man said.

  Killer saw, now that the man’s burnoose was drawn back, that he was no Arab, despite the sun-bronzed skin. The man’s hair was reddish-bronze and fit his head like a skull-cap. His face was expressionless, although the odd gold flecks in his eyes seemed to swirl with energy.

  “Who are you?”

  The man ignored his question. “Killer, you’d better look behind you.”

  “Haw, the oldest trick! How stupid–”

  “Fairly stupid, I’d say,” Hareton broke in. “He’s not lying. That…’Tree of Dreams,’ whatever it is, is moving toward you.”

  “You’re mad, you’re both mad.” Killer pressed the ax blade deeper into Antinea’s neck, and she squealed. “Any closer, any more of that, and Hoggar’s going to have one headless Queen!”

  “Killer–” the bronze man tried once more.

  “Quiet! Not one more word. Now, the Queen and I here, we’re just going to walk out, and you two are going to stand right here in this temple or whatever it is, and not move an inch. Or I’ll kill her, I promise you. Understand?”

  The bronze man stood unmoving. Hareton shrugged in apparent acknowledgement.

  “Good, then we all agree. Come on my Queen, you’re my safe passage out of here.”