Castle Perilous c-1 Read online

  “Over here.”

  “We just came through there.”

  “Couldn’t’ve. This doorway wasn’t here a second ago. I watched it appear.”

  “Damn. I’m getting confused.”

  Snowclaw followed Gene into a small foyerlike area with three more arched doorways leading to other rooms. The place was bare, as were most of the chambers they had been passing through for the last hour or so.

  “Which way?” Gene asked.

  “The floor’s still rising in here too.”

  “This way?”

  “Fine with me.”

  They chose the left exit, moved through another small room, this one with a single exit leading into a narrow corridor. Following it, they went straight for a good distance, then to the left at an L. The corridor then went into a series of lefts and rights, finally debouching into a room that looked identical to the one in which they had first noticed the rising floor — stone walled, bereft of furnishings, and somewhat trapezoidal.

  “Right back where we started.”

  “Maybe,” Snowclaw ruminated.

  “Well, we’ll just go back to that foyer and take another … oh, hell.”

  “What foyer?”

  “Great.”

  Snowclaw pointed to the doorway straight ahead. “Did you see that one appear … just now?”

  “No, I was looking —”

  “Look at it!”

  The doorway was moving slowing to the right, drifting over the stone like a reflection over the surface of a pond, yet carrying the room beyond with it. It began to pick up speed, sliding toward the far wall.

  “Run for it!” Snowclaw said.

  They did. As if to elude capture, the doorway put on a burst of speed and disappeared enigmatically into the corner. Now the room was exitless.

  “Wonderful,” Gene said.

  “Here comes another one.”

  They walked along the wall to meet it. This doorway was moving at a more leisurely pace. It opened onto a stairwell going up.

  “Should we?” Snowclaw asked.

  “Not my bus. Wait for the next one.”

  After the stairwell vanished, the wall remained blank. There came a rumbling sound. The floor quivered a little.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “We should have taken it,” Snowclaw said.

  “We have to get to the ground floor of this place, get the hell out of here.”

  “Agreed, but …” Snowclaw reached up and tapped the ceiling. “Look.”

  They waited. When Snowclaw was able to place the flat of his palm against the ceiling, the far corner generated another doorway, this one gliding across the wall at a brisk pace.

  “Get ready.”

  Suddenly, a sliding wall dropped from the ceiling, slamming down to cut the room in half. The moving doorway didn’t make it past the new corner.

  “Well, freeze my icicle,” Snowclaw said.

  “Hey, look.”

  Behind them a new door had materialized. They sprinted for it. As they did, the rumbling sound grew to a tremendous roar, rocking the flagstone floors, shivering the walls and deafening their ears. The next few minutes were a Keystone comedy of sliding walls, dropping partitions, narrow escapes, rushing from crazy room to crazier room.

  “Over here!”

  “No, this way!”

  “God.”

  Floors began to tilt, walls to list inward, outward, generating migraine-provoking angles and nauseating perceptual tricks. Walls bulged and ceilings drooped. Bottomless wells appeared in the floor.

  “Yahh!”

  “Watch yourself, Gene.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  They came to a sheer drop at the end of a corridor, and this time it was Snowclaw who almost went sailing over the edge. Gene grabbed a handful of white fur and yanked back, though he really wouldn’t have been of much good had Snowclaw actually been falling. The white beast must have weighed over three hundred pounds. Snowclaw grabbed the carved stone of the pilaster below the archway and swung himself back.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  They looked down. The doorway hung in the curving wall of a great circular shaft plunging endlessly into the heart of the castle. It seemed to go up just as far, lighted in both directions by arrays of jewel-torches every twenty or thirty feet.

  “I think I’m getting ill, Gene. I can’t tolerate heights.”

  “What, a big fellow like you?”

  “Drift crawlers too.”

  “What’re those?”

  “Little nasty things that … ahh, let’s get away from here.”

  They moved back down the corridor, which by this time had transformed itself from straight to serpentine, now twisting and coiling back on itself, leading nowhere. The floor still heaved, and sounds like huge bowling balls rolling came from within the walls. At long last the corridor ended, and they came out into a rotundalike room with a white polished dome ceiling. Here was the hub from which the spokes of at least a dozen other corridors radiated outward. Of course, the room had not been here when they had entered the corridor.

  “Eeny meeny miney moe. That one.”

  “What, exactly, is ‘eeny meeny miney moe’?”

  Gene didn’t answer. This corridor looked straight and stayed that way for a long while. There were no exits, However, after what seemed like a quarter of a mile it terminated in a stairwell leading down.

  And down. And down still. And when it finally ended in a small featureless stone chamber, the only way out — save for doubling back — was another doorway initiating a second stairwell, which led … up. And up.

  And up. They climbed for ten minutes.

  Gene said, “I’m bushed.” He sat down heavily; in the process he let go of his attaché case. It went sliding down the steps, caught a corner, flipped, and went tumbling. Gene watched it until it was out of sight, though the sounds of its crashing continued to be audible until long after.

  “Why did you hang on to that thing, that carrying box, whatever it was?”

  “Little piece of reality. I had it when I blundered into this place.”

  “I see. Me, I wasn’t carrying anything. I was at the bottom of a crevasse, having been stupid enough to push my sled across the ice bridge over it without testing the damned thing first. The sled went over, I clawed the wall all the way down until a ledge stopped me — crawled along that a ways until I came to the mouth of an ice cave. Carved by water, I guessed, and I was hoping to follow it back to the bed of an underground stream, but a little ways back it turned from ice to stone block … and I wound up here.” Snowclaw sat down next to Gene. “Good thing too. Never would have made it out of that crevasse.”

  “I was thinking …”

  “Eh?”

  “You say you didn’t understand ‘eeny meeny miney moe’?”

  “Well, I got the drift.”

  “The words were unfamiliar. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But you heard the words.”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “Which means that the magical running translation that goes on around here breaks down when you start using essentially untranslatable words and phrases.”

  “Makes sense. Does that phrase you used mean anything?”

  Gene thought about it. “Not really.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  Gene frowned. “Still don’t get it. I mean, to me you speak perfect English — better than that, completely natural colloquial American. But I damn well know you’re not speaking it.”

  “And you seem to have an unnatural command of Back-Ice Chawaharsee.”

  “You see? Chaw … Chawa …”

  “Chawaharsee.”

  “That’s mostly a growl to me. Okay, but … now, take that guy I first met when I came in. The one who almost knocked me over. He had a bit of an accent. Why? Why didn’t he speak colloquial American?”

  “I don’t know, Gene.” Snowclaw turned it over in his mind. “Maybe it has something t
o do with the fact that we became such good buddies so quickly.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. For some reason — though for the life of me I can’t think of what it could be — there’s a rapport between us.”

  “I agree. Maybe that’s it. If true, then I’d expect the guy who owns this place to speak in Elizabethan couplets.”

  “What? That came out as something like ‘snow queen poetry.’ ”

  “Close.” Gene scratched his head, then brushed dust off his rumpled gray three-piece suit. “You’re right. I didn’t like that little guy. Screaming all the time.”

  “Neither did I, though we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

  “We don’t know that he’s dead.”

  “If that leaping purple thing had grabbed me, I’d be dead, and I don’t die easily.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  Presently Gene said, “Hear that?”

  Snowclaw cocked a pointy ear. “What?”

  “Nothing. Things have settled down a bit.”

  “Good. Got your second wind?”

  “Fifth. Let’s get moving.”

  “Don’t you want to go retrieve your carrying box?”

  “Who needs reality?”

  They resumed mounting the stairs. Some distance up they came to a landing flanked by descending stairwells.

  “We should have a coin to flip for these occasions,” Gene said.

  “You mean cast bones, something like that?”

  “You don’t have coins where you hail from? Money?”

  “Some. Pretty scarce.”

  “Oh. Left?”

  “Right.”

  For some reason the stairwell, which descended in ninety-degree turns, was unlighted. They groped, tripped, and cursed in the darkness; came to landings, went up, came back down; traversed corridors that dead-ended, swore mightily; found another stairwell, continued down, went up yet again, and finally wound up clumping downward again, doing it all in pitch blackness.

  Lighting fixtures appeared again, and they found themselves descending a spiral stairwell.

  “Gene, look at the ceiling.”

  Gene stopped and looked up. The ceiling was in steps as well. “Odd.”

  Odder still, farther down, was the sight of a man in a long gown walking up them. Gene was hit by a sudden dizzy spell.

  The man tilted his head up, down, and did a double take.

  “My!” the man said. “You gentlemen seem to have gotten yourselves turned about, haven’t you?”

  Gene regarded the man standing on the ceiling. “What about you?”

  The man laughed. “Well, a matter of where one is, I suppose. Good day to you.” He went off, chuckling.

  “What do you make of that?” Snowclaw asked.

  “ ‘As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there …’”

  At long last …

  They debouched into a large room — a strange one. After crossing a columned portico that bordered the main area, they stood on the edge of what looked like an empty swimming pool with chandeliers rising like crystal trees from the bottom. A swimming pool … but if you twisted your head, it looked a great deal like a ceiling. Gene and Snowclaw slowly looked up.

  There was a group of people seated at a long table magically affixed to the ceiling.

  They were enjoying a very elaborate meal.

  Keep — East Wing — Queen’s Dining Hall

  “I say, you two up there! Had your breakfast?”

  Linda twisted her head around in an effort to see whom in the world Thaxton could be talking to. When she caught sight of the gray-suited man and the furry white monster standing on the ceiling, she dropped her coffee cup to the stone floor.

  “My God! How …?” She stared in amazement. After a moment she regained enough composure to look down at the mess on the floor.

  Jacoby was already handing her a fresh cup. “Here you are, my dear. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Th-thank you.” She took the cup.

  “Are you all right?”

  Linda gulped some coffee. “Yes, thank you. It’s just that I’ll never get used to this place. Surprises at every turn.”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it rather quickly. In time you’ll come to the realization that this is rather a wonderful place to stay. Our Host could make a fortune if he charged the going rates.”

  “If he could guarantee a way home,” DuQuesne said.

  “But think of the throngs of people who would pay anything to go on holiday here,” Jacoby said enthusiastically. “Surely with an organized effort, the major portals could be located and maintained. Why, then you’d —”

  “But that would be a task of major proportions, I’m afraid. Impossible, perhaps.”

  “Well, perhaps …” Jacoby said, suddenly deflated.

  “Hello, up there!” Thaxton was calling. “Coming down?”

  After much discussion it was agreed that the ceiling-hanging pair should make their descent by walking down a nearby column. This they did, with success. Applause. Then the gray-suited man tried to walk back up, and fell on his buttocks.

  Gene picked himself up. “I can’t figure it.”

  “Where do you think we got turned around?” Snowclaw said.

  “Who knows.”

  “Where did you fellows come from?” Thaxton wanted to know when the two arrived at the table. “Coffee, tea?”

  “Coffee, please,” Gene said, pulling up an ornate chair. “We took a tour through an Escher painting, I think.”

  “Oh, yes. The one who does the trick perspective things, isn’t he?”

  “That’s the one. Hello,” Gene said, nodding to various people around the table. “Hello, hello.”

  Snowclaw prowled around the long table examining the sumptuous assortment of fare. He grabbed a whole roast squab, bit off half of it, bones and all, and chewed. “Not bad,” he said, then reconsidered it. “Not good, though. Ptoohey! ” A spray of semimasticated bird flew forth. “Y’got anything to eat around here?”

  “Won’t you try the paté?” Thaxton offered, brushing fragments of bone and meat from the shoulder of his morning coat.

  “What’s that?” Snowclaw said, tearing off a leg of turkey.

  “Going back to your resort idea,” DuQuesne said sotto voce, leaning toward Jacoby, “you’d have to restrict the clientele.”

  “Of course.” Jacoby smiled.

  “This would be a nice hotel,” Linda said. “The area around here, I mean.”

  “Most of the Guests stay in the family residences,” Jacoby said.

  “The rooms are so nice,” Linda continued. “And the staff is helpful. They speak English too — which I can’t figure out. In fact, everybody around here —”

  “But, my dear, they don’t speak English,” DuQuesne told her. “As a matter of fact, neither do I.”

  Linda stopped chewing her mouthful of omelette. “Huh?”

  “Don’t listen to the sense of what I’m saying for a moment, listen to the sound. The sound of my voice. Am I speaking English?”

  “I don’t quite know what you mean,” Linda said, swallowing.

  “Listen carefully. Are you sure that the language I’m speaking is English? Listen.”

  Linda’s eyes narrowed, and she cocked her head to one side.

  “Ecoutez bien Donc Quelle langue est-ce que je parle maintenant? J’ai parlant français n’est-ce pas?”

  Linda’s jaw dropped. “You are speaking French! But I can understand you, and I don’t speak a word of French!”

  DuQuesne grinned at her. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, well, this is just too much. How could I not have noticed?”

  “Part of the spell,” Thaxton said, having overheard. “Part of the magic.”

  “Magic … yes.” Linda sat back.

  “You got any raw meat, something still kicking?” Snowclaw asked, tossing the half-chewed turkey leg into the tureen of escarole soup.


  A blue, shimmering cloud with a vague suggestion of a human form within it approached the table, having ghosted in through the main entrance. It glided to an empty chair and seated itself.

  “Good morning,” came a voice emanating from within the phenomenon. The voice was feminine, and sounded as though the speaker were underwater.

  “Merikona, how nice to see you,” Thaxton said. “Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  Gene, Linda, and Snowclaw were watching, mouths agape. The other Guests smiled and went back to eating.

  “I found an aspect opening onto a world somewhat in phase with mine. I spent some time there. It was pleasant to have spatiotemporal intercongruence with one’s environment again. But I missed my friends here, and … as you can see —”

  “How nice,” Thaxton said. “Tea and scones, as usual? Some over there, I think.”

  “What’s on the agenda today?” DuQuesne asked brightly.

  Linda had recovered from the shock of Merikona’s entrance enough to ask, “How did … how did Merikona get back from the world she went into? I thought someone said the doorways or whatever you call them shifted around.”

  “I’m for tennis. Up for a few sets, DuQuesne?” Thaxton called.

  “I’d rather golf today, if you don’t mind,” DuQuesne answered, and immediately went on speaking to Linda: “Marikona traversed an aspect, of which the castle has 144,000, or so rumor has it.”

  “Ah,” Jacoby said. “A number pregnant with mystic significance.”

  “Quite so.”

  “Best of three sets, then,” Thaxton proposed.

  “Not today, Arnold, thank you. As I was saying, my dear, many of the castle’s aspects are stable. One may pass to and from those worlds without trouble. Unfortunately, most are very unstable. They appear and disappear with disconcerting irregularity. Lord help you if you wander through one. It could close up and leave you stranded on the other side. That could be most unpleasant.”

  Thaxton wouldn’t give up. “How about you, Dalton, old boy?”