Castle for Rent

Fourteen Keep — Lower Levels

Barnaby Walsh was exhausted. He was by nature a sedentary person, tending to avoid movement unless dire necessity demanded it, and this frantic chasing about, keeping one step ahead of the Bluefaces, was more than his ill-proportioned, overweight body could stand. In fact, he simply couldn’t take another step.…

“We can’t stop!” Deena Williams yelled at him.

“I gotta,” Barnaby told her, slumping against the wall.

Deena ran back and yanked at a handful of his shirt. “Come on, man! They’re right behind us!”

“I can’t … run … anymore,” Barnaby wheezed at her. “I’m completely … I can’t —”

“You gotta! The Bluefaces are comin’!”

“But … ” Barnaby tried to swallow the acrid dryness at the back of his throat. He choked and coughed, bending over double.

“Shhhh!” Deena looked worriedly back down the passageway. “Keep it quiet, or they gonna get us.”

Barnaby recovered enough to say, “I can’t go on. I’m done.”

“No, you’re not. Just keep puttin’ one foot in front of the other. Come on, man, you can do it.”

“No, honest.”

He looked at her. She wasn’t even breathing hard! But she’d been a trade athlete in high school, she’d said, before getting pregnant and dropping out. She had always dreamed of going to the Olympics. She was even dressed for the part, in a purple sweatshirt, red shorts, and white running shoes.

“Go ahead,” he told her. “Take off. I’ll just hold you up.”

Scowling, she shook him hard. “Don’t start that hero stuff with me, you hear? I’ll slap you silly. Now, let’s go, unless you wanna mess with them blue dudes.”

“Okay, okay,” Barnaby groaned. Grunting noises from behind gave him the added impetus to start moving again. He staggered forward, steadied himself with one hand on the wall, then boosted his pace to a painful, galumphing jog, his oversize wing-tip oxfords slapping against the flagstone.

They ran. The place was nothing but endless corridors shunting every which way, leading to nothing but more passageways and corridors and the occasional crypt or alcove, all of it giving the impression of having been laid out without design, purpose, or plan.

I’m no hero, Barnaby thought to himself. In fact, he was just the opposite. He was more afraid now than he had ever been at any time in his life. He had told her to go on without him as a sort of test. He didn’t know what he would have done had she left. Alone, he might have simply gone insane.

They made their way down the stone-walled corridor, Deena at a sprint, Barnaby loping along. She reached a cross-tunnel and stopped until he caught up.

“Stairs,” she said, pointing to the left.

Barnaby could barely see in the gloom. “Let’s go,” he said.

The stairwell was spiral. Deena started down the well, taking two steps at a time, her crisp white athletic shoes glowing in the darkness.

Barnaby said, “I can barely —” then stumbled and almost fell.

Deena halted a few turns down. “Watch yourself,” she warned. “It’s dark down here.”

“Yeah,” he said dully.

They continued down, and found to their dismay that the stairwell was endless. After five minutes of steady descent they stopped, not knowing what to do.

“Go back up?” Deena suggested.

Barnaby gave her an incredulous look.

“Guess not.” She shrugged. “They gotta end sometime.”

They kept on following the downward spiral for another ten minutes. The stairwell continued with no sign of a bottom.

“Shit?”

“It’s ridiculous,” Barnaby said.

“Silliest damn thing,” Deena complained, hands on her hips and a look of offended dignity on her dark brown face. She sneered up, then down. “Damn. Well, if we didn’t go back up before, we sure ain’t gonna do it now. Let’s go.”

They stumped down the stairs for another five or ten minutes. The stairwell was bare and featureless, except for an occasional glowing jewel-torch and the odd niche here and there.

“I’m really starting to get pissed off,” Deena said.

Barnaby couldn’t help laughing. Deena caught it and began to giggle. She continued doing so, intermittently, for the next few minutes, but as time wore on, she fell silent save for occasional grumbling and cursing.

They marched down the spiral for a quarter hour before the stairs eventually ended in a low-ceilinged tunnel.

“Finally,” Barnaby murmured, barely able to keep his legs moving. He was beyond fatigue now; he wondered how long his heart would last, how long it would keep feebly pushing blood through his bloated carcass, which now felt like something dead that had to be dragged along.

The tunnel went straight for a stretch, then made a forty-five-degree turn, followed by a right-angled corner. The passage continued for about sixty feet, ultimately feeding into another stairwell whose spiraling steps led nowhere but up.

“Oh, no!” Barnaby staggered backward.

“Damn,” she said. “They screwin’ with us!”

“Oh my God.” Barnaby collapsed against the cold stone wall of the tunnel. He sank to his haunches and closed his eyes.

Deena sat on the steps and began tenderly massaging her firm, almost muscular brown legs. “They jerkin’ us around.”

Barnaby didn’t speak; he couldn’t. They sat in silence for a long spell.

“Damn,” she said again, quietly. And then, after a long pause: “Well … ”

“Don’t even think of it,” Barnaby said.

“Okay,” she said. “Take your time. We ain’t exactly got anywhere to go.”

“Thanks.”

“But up.”

“Exactly.”

She craned her neck, peering up the spiral. “Maybe it don’t go up as far as the other one went down.”

“Why can’t I believe that?” Barnaby said.

“‘Cause theyscrewin’ with us, that’s why,” Deena said. Then she began giggling again.

Barnaby answered with a hideous laugh, which made Deena giggle all the more. Barnaby closed his eyes again and laughed till it hurt.

He choked it off when Deena suddenly yelped and jumped up from the steps as if from a hot stove.

“What the hell —?” She stared in disbelief at the steps, which, inexplicably, had begun moving upward of their own accord, like some impossible stone escalator.

Getting to his feet, Barnaby acted as though he wasn’t at all surprised. He caught the bottom step, mounted, and rose up the stairwell.

“Going up — lingerie, notions, merchandise return on the mezzanine.”

“I’m comin’,” Deena told him, stepping aboard. “I just wish this was Bloomingdale’s,” she added in a mutter.

They rose in silence, the paradoxical escalator making a barely audible humming noise. Gradually its speed increased, and the stairwell showed no sign of ending. Eyes wide with wonder, Barnaby and Deena continued their magical ascent. Air whistled past them down the spiraling shaft. The rate of climb kept steadily increasing. In a few minutes it began to take on alarming proportions.

“What was that you said about the mezzanine?” she asked nervously. “I want to get off.”

“Yeah,” he said, licking dry lips. “This seemed a peachy idea down at the bottom.”

The noise increased to a thunderous roar, and the escalator’s speed soon necessitated their getting down on all fours to fight a centrifugal force that threatened to push them into the stationary outside wall, which was rushing by at a rate guaranteed to impart a severe brush burn at the very least. But there was nothing to hold on to but bare stone.

It was like being inside a tumble-dryer. Soon, the walls became a blur and vertigo overtook both of them. Barnaby felt consciousness slipping away as his hands inexorably slid across the smooth stone of the steps.…

He reached the brink of oblivion, then came back, and he realized that the escalator was slowing down. He held on tightly until it came to an abrupt stop.

They lay motionless for a moment. Barnaby raised his head. There was a landing a few steps up. He slowly got to his feet, then looked back at Deena, who was rising. He held out his hand, and she took it.

“Come on,” he said.

They mounted the last few steps and came out into an expansive room with numerous windowed alcoves. Daylight streamed through some of the windows. There were a few tables and chairs lying about, and one leather-covered settee, which Barnaby collapsed across, stretching out facedown. Deena sat down on the backs of his legs, and, fashioned like this, they rested for a full ten minutes.

Eventually he said. “My legs are falling asleep.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t get up.”

“It’s okay.”

Deena rose and moved to a chair. Barnaby levered himself upright. “Jesus,” he sighed.

“Yeah, ain’t it the truth.”

Presently Deena got up and wandered over to one of the alcoves.

“What the hell is this shit?” she wanted to know.

“What?” he asked, still too tired to move.

“You gotta see this.”

“In a minute … or two, or three.”

“Barnaby, you gotta see this crazy shit! This is insane!”

“Oh. Well, for the merely crazy, I wouldn’t stir myself. But for the truly irrational … ” He cranked himself off the settee, went over to the alcove, and stood next to her, looking out the open window.

Outside the window, there was no castle. The window itself was simply a rectangular hole in the middle of the air, suspended about five feet above an arid plain. In the distance lay a gigantic egg-shaped crystal bubble covering the polyhedral buildings and tall towers of a wildly futuristic city. Something about it made it look deserted. A slow wind moved across the plain; all was silent.

“Jesus,” Barnaby said.

“Where the hell is that place?”

Barnaby shook his head slowly. “Who knows? Somewhere in time and space.”

Deena snorted contemptuously. “Time and space, huh? I think it’scrazy.”

“They told me about these floating aspects. They’re a little less stable than the kind you can just walk through. But they generally stay put.”

“I never seen one like this. Most of ’em have different scenery and stuff, but I ain’t never seen one with a space city in it.”

“You think it’s somewhere out in space?” he asked in wonderment. “On another planet?”

“Damn if I know. Sure looks like it.”

“I wonder … ” He swallowed and massaged his throat with a thumb and forefinger. “I wonder who — or what — lives in that city.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t wanna know. Let’s look through the other windows. It’s gonna be more crazy shit, I bet.”

It was. The window to the right looked out onto a vast desert of wind-furrowed sand, and the next one down was a breathtaking view of an alpine meadow, snow-capped peaks in the distance. The next was dark — there was nothing out there but the distant cries in the night. The fifth window looked out on brackish marshes, and the next presented the green and pleasant aspect of a park.

“This is pretty nice,” she said. “Let’s take a walk.”

He gulped. “Out … there?”

“Yeah, why not? Better than this crummy place.” Deena stuck her head out, looking down. “It’s only two foot off the ground. We can jump it easy. Come on.” She swung one meaty leg up over the stone windowsill.

Barnaby was hesitant. “Do you really think we should?”

Deena brought her other leg up, sat momentarily, then jumped off. She landed lightly, bouncing up and down a few times to test the footing. “It’s okay,” she said. “Come on.”

Barnaby climbed through the window and jumped down, falling to his knees in soft shoe-high grass. He got up. They were in a wide clearing; the surrounding woods were thick, but almost no underbrush grew between the tall, slender trees. The sky was soft blue, shading to yellowish white toward a bright sun directly overhead. The air was warm, and there was the smell of green and growing things in the air.

“Nice,” Deena said.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

They wandered together for a few paces, then went off separately, she to examine a bed of wildflowers, he to find a place to take a leak. He didn’t want to go off very far, but the only cover nearby lay among a grove of tall bushes at the edge of the clearing. He wished something better were available, but duty called, so he struck off for the woods.

Glancing about nervously, he relieved himself. It was one of those extended sessions, long delayed, that never seem to stop. Finally it did, and he was zipping himself up when he heard Deena yell for him. He dashed out from the bushes.

The clearing was full of animals that looked somewhat like lions, were it not for me elaborate coral-colored, antlerlike organs that blossomed from their shaggy heads. Their coloring was tawny, lionlike, but their legs and bodies were longer and thinner, and they had no tails. There were about eight of them, and one was advancing toward him, growling with saber-teeth bared.

Deena was standing near the spot where the floating window had been, but there was no chance of her escaping. The aperture now hung a good ten feet off the ground. Apparently it had drifted.

Four of the creatures had her encircled, and several more were stalking into position to do the same to him. There was nowhere to run, even if he could have run, which was hardly his strong suit.

“Deena?” he called in a tremulous voice.

“Yeah,” she answered. “We in deep shit now, baby.”