DG5 - Horrors of the Dancing Gods

by Chalker, Jack L

  IT WASN'T DIFFICULT TO SEE CASTLE ROCK, THE HEART, soul, and center of Yuggoth. It rose up out of the vast, basically flat desert floor like a gigantic black monolith, dominating all it surveyed.

  Everyone was impressed, and Irving's eyes narrowed. "Hey! Those look like lights up there! Earth-type lights!"

  Poquah nodded. "I believe you are correct. I never expected to see such a thing here. It is against the Rules."

  "Not right there," Irving shouted over to them. "I remember that from the Rules volume before creepy pants dropped it! The reigning monarch of Yuggoth has a dispensation: almost anything he or she wants, as long as it's limited to this area and only this area. This is real power, the kind even Ruddygore can't do!"

  "He doesn't have to," Poquah noted. "He can go to Earth any time he chooses, and he still chooses to live here."

  "What happens when we get there?" Lame asked them. "I mean, I thought you already knew where you were going."

  "True, but nobody else knows that," Irving explained. "Besides, it'll be easier with the passes and blessings from this character."

  "Be respectful to the King if you should get into his presence and remember to remain respectful about him while in his immediate area. Remember, everybody up there works for him and is totally dependent on him for their present and their future. Anyone who can reach this status has enormous power, at least the equal of the continental powers of all the other great Council members, and in addition, just like them, undoubtedly has a somewhat well-deserved ego. You don't get and keep such a position without it. Just let me do most of the talking and keep a low profile otherwise! We have come very far in a very short period of time. It wouldn't do to screw it up now, and I have the very strong impression that this fellow almost doesn't care if Hell or the invaders win. He's apparently so powerful, he can work with either one! He's doing this strictly as a favor."

  Marge had the most brilliant night vision, and she stared at the great rock in wonder. It did look like a gigantic castle on top, a function not only of buildings there but also of the rocky spires and prominences, but the rock itself was very odd, too, and amazingly regular. In fact, if she didn't know better, she thought, she'd swear that it was a gigantic Earth beer can. It was almost as if she could see the label on it. S-T-R—nope. Couldn't make out any more.

  Had to be her imagination, she told herself. That was absurd. Good lord! Was that a lighthouse on top? In the middle of the desert they needed a lighthouse?

  The top did in fact resemble a rocky coastline, except that the drop was sheer and there were buildings all over the place, mostly old and Victorian style, which brought back unpleasant recent memories of a similar if smaller place at the end of the jungle. Fortunately, this was well lit, looked nicely maintained, and had what were clearly mostly real people going to and fro on top. She wondered how they got up there and where they came from.

  Well, at least there isn't a gigantic pull tab, she thought with some relief.

  The carpets slowed, turned, banked slightly, and began to settle down in a nice pattern on a broad grassy area right in the center of the mountaintop.

  There was a welcoming committee of several serious-looking men and one or two women all dressed as if they shopped at L. L. Bean. It was kind of like landing at a heliport except that there weren't any engine noises or down-draft from rotor blades.

  A man of about fifty with a graying beard, long-sleeved work shirt, faded jeans, and boots came up to them, a corncob pipe puffing in his mouth. "Howdy!" he greeted them in a clipped, straightforward accent that sounded of extreme New England more than of this world. "Welcome to Castle Rock! Name's Latimer. I'm the first secretary here. What brings you out here?"

  "I am Poquah, an Imir in the service of Ruddygore of Terindell," the elf responded, standing in relief and bowing slightly. "My companions are Marge, a Kauri; Master Irving, Ruddygore's ward; and Larae Ngamulcu, who has joined us and, um, proved quite useful. The fellow coming over now from the other carpet is Joel Thebes, who might already be known here."

  "Yeah, I know him," Latimer almost spat. He clearly knew him in a way that most people didn't want to be known. "How'd you get hooked up with the likes of him?"

  "He is in our employ. Native guide, as it were. The rest of why we are here I shall have to discuss with His Majesty if it is at all possible and with the utmost urgency. I believe he has been expecting us."

  Latimer nodded. "Could be. I'll have to contact him and see. He's asleep right now, but he should be up in a few hours. In the meantime, why don't you all come with me. We have a nice hotel here, the Overlook, which has spectacular views by day and all the amenities."

  Poquah looked uncomfortable. "Um, I fear that friend ben Hazzard has managed to deplete our fortunes far more than we anticipated."

  "Oh, there's never a charge for our guests. Not at the Overlook," Latimer assured them. "However, the rules are quite different here from the whole rest of the world, and we tend to assign some regular staff to newcomers until they can get used to things here."

  "If you mean electrical power, we are pretty well familiar with it," Poquah assured him. "I have been to Earth many times with Master Ruddygore, who can do it whenever he wishes, as you might know, and the lad was born there and probably remembers enough. Even the Kauri is from Earth; she is a changeling. Of them all, only the lady there is native; so as long as she remains close to us, I see no problems."

  "From Earth, eh? So am I, in fact. So are a bunch of folks here. I'm from Portland myself, a long time back."

  "I'm from a small town in west Texas nobody ever heard of," Marge told him. "The boy's from Philadelphia."

  "You don't say! Small worlds, I suppose. Outside of the Rock here, you usually run into Earth types only after they've been dead a while. Stay away from the folks in the fourth-floor west wing of the hotel, though. They're all from Hollywood, and you ain't seen sleaze until you set down with some of 'em." He looked around. "You see how the machinists work, so I don't have to tell you their limits. Boss wants some maids, he materializes some maids. Right impressive, but that's all they are. You probably won't have much of a problem, but you always got to watch people and things round here. Boss has a stray thought, almost anything can happen."

  "Comforting," Irving muttered.

  Latimer thought for a moment "You know, young feller, come to think of it, you ain't the first one through these parts from Philadelphia."

  "Huh?"

  "Yep. Never got to Castle Rock, of course, but we pretty well know who comes through the land round here. Didn't see her myself, but she was some kinda changeling, too."

  Irving felt his stomach knot slightly. "A wood nymph?"

  Latimer shrugged. "Could be. Didn't get that much detail. Lost track of her a few weeks ago, though. She went down toward the south. You might have heard we're havin' a bit of a disturbance down them parts lately."

  "I've heard," the boy responded. "But we've been looking for hi— her, and you am the first one in quite a while to report that she got this far. She's a relative. It's my hope we can find her."

  "Lots of luck if yer headin' down that way," Latimer told him. "Me, I'd rather stick with the usual demons, vampires, ghosts, that kind of thing. Even the boss thinks that way, although he's so damn brainy, he still wants to see what in hell comes through. Me, I say leave 'em."

  "Us, too," Marge assured him.

  Joel Thebes yawned and stretched. "It is amazing how doing nothing for hours and hours can make you more tired than running many miles," he commented. "Come, friends. The hotel is the finest on this world and perhaps the finest anywhere, and its bar is like no other as well. They will tell His Majesty about us when he wakes up. Let us relax and enjoy what may be the only luxury we have left this trip. I have a feeling that once we leave here, it is going to be very rough indeed."

  That at least made sense. "Lead on," Marge told him.

  After breakfast they got word from the hotel that the King would indeed receive them a
nd that a messenger would come to take them over. The messenger proved to be a small boy with a very pale complexion even in the daylight.

  "He's pretty busy right now," said the strange little boy, who said his name was Sammy, at the door of the King's palace, "but I think he'll fit you in. Just follow me. We don't stand on nearly the ceremony here that most folks expect, but you do have to have a good stage setting to keep the locals impressed."

  He led them to a large tower on the far end of the top of the rock. Around the sinister-looking spire, sitting on black ledges, were huge birds of a kind none of them had ever seen before. Each was the size of a man and had the face and neck of a vulture, yet they all wore dark humanlike suit jackets, top hats, and glasses and clutched battered leather cases in their hands. Every once in a while someone would come to an open window and call, and the nearest of the huge birds would come over, take something from the person at the window, stuff it into the case using its feet, and fly off.

  "Lawyer birds," Sammy explained kind of nonchalantly. "We need a ton of 'em around here, both goin' after others and defending ourselves. Seems like it never ends. Hey, here we are! Come on in and enjoy the show!" With that he opened a large wooden door, revealing a vast and otherworldly corridor.

  The great entrance corridor that took you into the presence of the King of Horror looked like nothing so much as a Grand Guignol version of the Wizard's palace in The Wizard of Oz movie. The motifs were blood red and sickly green streaked with blacks and browns, though not emeralds, and the statuary and tableaux along the way were gruesome in the extreme.

  At the end was an enormous piece of statuary, a great demonic idol whose ruby-red eyes blazed down on them. It was right in character, reminding Marge of the demonic figure atop the mountain in Fantasia, and when it actually moved, as if it were a living thing itself, it was pretty damned scary.

  "Who disturbs the King?" the creature demanded in a deep, spooky voice that echoed down the broad entrance hall.

  "The ones from Husaquahr," Sammy told it, unimpressed and underawed. "About that stuff goin' on down south."

  "Oh, yes. Ruddygore's group. Very well; bring them in."

  To everyone's surprise, Sammy ran right up to the demonic figure, pushed something in the base, and made a keystone pop out. He then turned it, and there was a noticeable click and a door was framed in the base. It opened, blasting light into the room, and with it also something else.

  Marge at least recognized it as sixties rock music. It sounded in fact like Jim Morrison.

  Following the boy through, they emerged not in some creepy place but in a rather modern-looking office with a nice computer sitting on a desk and built-in bookshelves all around containing lots and lots of reference works, classic horror novels, science fiction, history, geography, you name it.

  A fairly normal looking human man of average size was at the computer, typing away. He didn't stop when they entered, and they stood there quietly as he continued on, until he filially completed whatever he'd been typing and looked up at them.

  "Sorry. When you're going good, you can't just stop. You have to finish the thought or you lose it," he explained in a very friendly American-accented voice.

  Irving frowned and blinked. "You are the King of Horror?" he asked.

  "At your service, at least for, oh, for ten or fifteen minutes or so. Best I can spare today. Lots to get done. It's not easy being the foundation for all contemporary horror on Earth, you know. The imitators drive you nuts, then there's the sycophants, all the folks wanting your money or your endorsement for something, and even strangers deciding you're so damned public, they can tramp through your house. It was that damned Amex commercial that started it. Never should have done that one. I've had to hide half the time over here ever since." He seemed lost in his own world, then suddenly remembered his guests. "Sorry. Just what am I supposed to do for you?"

  "Uh, Your Majesty, there are eldritch horrors about to emerge from a crack in space-time near Mount Doom," Poquah said as respectfully as possible. "We're supposed to stop them within the Rules."

  The King nodded, sat back in his chair, and sighed. He pointed to one wall of the room. "Those Rules drive you nuts sometimes. Worst part is, when you wind up in this job, you find that the next volume's all your Rules that everybody's stuck with. What a burden! Still, okay, it's probably not eldritch horrors—they're pretty passé. Most likely the Ancient Ones, I'd guess. That mythos never went out of style and keeps inspiring more and more of our best. Inspired me, too. That's the only reason they're still around at all, still a threat as an alternate opposition, see. They're useful, they're valuable, and a lot of Earth still really gets into them."

  Irving cleared his throat. "Um, excuse me. Do you mean that all these horrors .only exist or have great power because Earth still believes in them?"

  "Oh, no. I doubt if anybody sane on Earth believes in 'em. But folks still sit down and read the stories they inspired, that they communicated to the best of the bunch, starting with Chambers and Bierce, and folks still find the stories scary. When you're scared, then for that period you believe. See? And that's enough to keep anything or anybody alive in the Sea of Dreams."

  Marge should have been between groggy and comatose, but she was wide awake for some reason here. "But I thought it was the reality here that influenced the dreams and nightmares over there."

  "It's both. No communication is ever just one-way, and this is no exception. The difference is that what we take from here over there is a dream; what we take from there over here becomes reality. We go back and forth like that. It's what connects us together. The only way to destroy these Ancient Ones is by destroying all vestiges of them in the imaginations and literature of Earth, which is very unlikely. It would be really interesting if they took over here, I have to admit. It would make things easier for people like me back on Earth. Think of the universal dreams and nightmares that would travel then!"

  "And yet you are willing to aid us in blocking their coming?" Poquah prompted hopefully, not at all pleased at how this was developing.

  "Oh, sure. Take me, for example. Everything you see here isn't what's real, it's what enough of Earth thinks of as a kind of fantasy. When all is said and done, I kind of like the job. When people like you, they can make things very nice in their imaginations. I'd find them coming through interesting but not enough to risk all this. So you want me to unlock the gates of the Garden Wood for you. That about right?"

  "The Garden Wood? Is that what you call the forest near Mount Doom?" Irving asked him.

  "Well, yeah, it's what I call it, not what everybody else calls it. See, there's one part of it on every continent here. The trees of the ancient Garden, all split up. This is the part with the mean one, the Tree of Knowledge that screwed everything up but gave us all the plots. Pretty tough to build interest or suspense if you can't tell the difference between good and evil. Of course, it also introduced pain, death, all the things that make life exciting. Used to be a great place for snakes, too, but this business has chased them all out. They're mad as hell about it, too. Just what will you do once you're in there?"

  "We'll use the McGuffin," Poquah told him. "I have a basic formula provided by Master Ruddygore. It will seal the rift and restore things to a normal equilibrium without doing much else. It is thought that the status quo is the best possible resolution."

  "Okay, I'll buy that. You might have some problems, though. Nobody knows where the McGuffln is in there; the hiding place can be seen only by mortals, and no mortals have survived that place that I know of. There's also a lot of turncoats and surreptitious followers of the Ancient Ones all through there. That's a lot of power and a lot of danger roaming around the woods while you go hunting for the sucker." A watch alarm began to beep steadily, and the King shut it off. "Look, that's it. I have a lot to do here. I'll make sure that you're authorized, and that's all I can do. You should also speak with Prince Mephistopheles and see if you can figure a quick and dirty way in. Sammy
can show you the way."

  "Meph—the Mephistopheles?" Marge was amazed.

  "Sure. The idea of there being two of them is too terrible to think about. At least he's used to dealing with humans. Go on down and talk it out. Good luck. I really hope you make it."

  He turned and was soon absorbed once more at his computer keyboard, oblivious to their presence. They knew they had been dismissed.

  Sammy came in and looked at them. "Follow me," he piped, and they had no choice but to follow.

  The contrast between the opulence and comfort level of where they'd been and the spartan, monastic-looking medieval room where they were taken by the boy couldn't have been more marked. There wasn't even electricity in this underground chamber, just oil lamps.

  Marge felt quite comfortable in the cold, stony place, but less so mentally as she realized that this was where they were to meet with the prime minister of Hell. She'd met a demon face-to-face before, one far more minor than this august presence, and it had been among the scarier things she'd ever experienced.