But maybe not. Jeremy was still scared, scared even of the humans. The humans had spoken to him, asking him to come with them. Something about meeting the “other Guests.”
“Yeah, right, lady!” he had yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted away. They weren’t going to throw him into any dungeon. “Guests,” his butt.
But maybe he shouldn’t have run. Maybe they really had been trying to help him. They looked harmless enough — if you believed that people running around in funny costumes could be harmless.
But it was possible. After all, who had put the food outside the door of the strange room he had slept in last night? He had assumed the tray had been left there by mistake, but now he wasn’t sure. The food had been great, although he would have eaten a dead skunk by then.
He had to do something sooner or later; soonest, if he wanted to preserve his sanity. He had given a great deal of thought to turning himself in. It made him laugh. Turning himself in. He was wanted in Fantasyland, too. Mickey Mouse had a warrant for his arrest. No, he hadn’t seen any Disney characters — yet — but there was no telling in this place.
He was walking along one of the castle’s endless hallways when another costumed castle inhabitant stepped out of an intersecting passageway. It was a man with a beard and a funny haircut and funny, floppy shoes. Still clutching his laptop computer, Jeremy skidded to a stop.
The guy looked Jeremy up and down. “Ah, there you are! You really should come along with me, young man.”
But Jeremy wasn’t quite ready yet and dashed off in the other direction.
“But you might sustain grievous injury, son! Please, listen to me!”
Jeremy was tempted, but when another man stepped out into the hallway, he panicked.
“Stop him, Wildon!” the first man shouted.
Wildon, a big hulking dude, went into a crouch and threw out his arms, ready to catch the running Jeremy.
Jeremy executed a textbook-perfect slide into home, slipping between Wildon’s legs. Wildon didn’t touch him. Jeremy sprang to his feet and ran on.
But the corridor ended in one of those crazy doorways, this one letting out into bright sun backdropped by dense greenery.
Jeremy slowed a bit, looking back over his shoulder. Sure enough, Wildon was in pursuit. Jeremy put on speed and tore through the opening.
A wave of heat hit him as he ran through a clearing and hit the edge of a dense rain forest. He plunged into the trees, leaves whipping at his face, his Reebok hightops trampling the undergrowth. Strange cries echoed all around. It sounded like convincing Tarzan soundtrack stuff: whooping, chittering, creeing, and so forth. It was scary. He stumbled, tripped up by a thorny vine that had snagged his pants. For a heart-stopping second he thought that something hiding in the weeds had got hold of him. He gave a high-pitched yell, yanked his leg free, and jumped away. He tripped again, staggered, got turned around, and tried running backward. His ankle twisted on a hidden stone, and he went crashing headlong through a wall of vegetation.
After rolling down a high grassy bank, he hit soft ground and stopped. He was in the clear, out of the forest.
Spitting sand, he sat up. A beach?
No, not a beach. Just a kidney-shaped depression with sand in it. It looked a little like a sand trap in a golf course. Well, no. As a matter of fact, it looked exactly like a sand trap in a …
“I say!”
Jeremy blinked, looked around.
“You there! Mind awfully getting out of the way? I’m making my approach shot.”
Jeremy saw him now. It was a man in his thirties, light-haired and thin, dressed in shirt, sweater vest, and old-fashioned baggy knee pants — knickers — complete with high stockings and golf shoes. He looked like something out of an old movie. An older man stood behind him, watching.
Annoyed, the first man took a step closer. “Can’t you bloody hear?”
“Yeah, I can hear,” Jeremy said.
“Well, look, I hate to be rude — but piss off, will you? We’d really like to play through, if you don’t mind awfully much.”
“Uh … sorry.” Jeremy got up and moved out into the fairway.
“A bit more,” the man directed, gesturing imperiously with his seven iron. “A few more steps. Right there. Yes, yes, there’s a good fellow.” He returned to his ball and addressed it. “Right! Well, then …”
After a few tentative swings, the man made his shot. The ball arched toward the nearby green, hit smack on, narrowly missing the pin, then skidded across the manicured grass and rolled off the other side into another bunker.
“Oh, bloody hell!” the man shouted, throwing down his club in disgust.
Dragging his golf bag on a two-wheeled dolly, the older man approached Jeremy.
“Just fell in, son?”
“Huh?”
“Fell into the castle. You arrived very recently, didn’t you? Like day before yesterday?”
“Uh, yeah, I did. Are you from the castle, too?”
“Sure am. A little scared? Don’t be. It’s called Castle Perilous, but once you learn the ropes, it’s a very nice place indeed. All it takes is some getting used to.”
“Sure is crazy.”
“Yeah, it gets that way sometimes.” The man extended his hand. “Name’s Dalton. Cleveland Dalton. Cleve, if you like.”
Jeremy shook his hand. “Jeremy Hochstader.”
“Fine old German name, Hochstader. Used to have a client by that name. Never went anywhere — wrote fantasy, if memory serves.”
The man in knickers went harumphing past, apparently still upset about the muffed shot.
Dalton said, “That’s Thaxton. Don’t mind him. Golf’s not his game, and I won’t play tennis with him.”
“Where the hell is this place?” Jeremy blurted.
Dalton shrugged. “This place? Nobody knows. Some world, in some time or space, somewhere. Just one of the worlds accessible via the castle.”
“But where’s the castle?” Jeremy demanded.
“Nobody really knows that, either. But it’s real, son. It’s real. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all a dream.”
“Yeah, I gave up on that yesterday.”
“Get anything to eat yet?”
Jeremy nodded. “Uh-huh. They fed me.”
“Good,” Dalton said. “By the way, did you ever caddy?”
Six
City
Gene had chosen a high tower as his residence, staking out an apartment on a high floor. Above this level lay only a few small chambers, some containing building machinery. There was water in a storage tank on the roof; as for food, the city had given him all he wanted, when he had asked for it.
He had very soon found out that the city was alive, or at least was a conscious entity of some sort. He had walked right in through an open gate. Looking around, he heard a quasi-human voice speaking a strange language. After searching for the source, he eventually realized that the voice had been that of the city itself, or of some artificial intelligence that was part of the city’s computer control system. As for other intelligent inhabitants, the place was as deserted as it looked, and very old.
The city had learned colloquial English very quickly, from Gene, mostly; its only other source was a tattered paperback Gene had been carrying, a science fiction novel with a futuristic trailer truck on the cover. It still spoke with the machine equivalent of an accent, slurring its syllables occasionally. Otherwise the city was quite intelligible.
The city had a name: Zond.
“I see that your genetic makeup is quite divergent from the beings who built me,” Zond told Gene.