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 right, then to the left. Nothing else in sight.
He struck out across the plain.
Five
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.