"I hope so."
"I'll go with you."
"You're sure that you're not saying that because you think I might question your courage, look down on you?"
"I'm sure."
"Very well."
He went to his apartment and stayed there alone until 8:30 P.M. He did not even see the servants who brought his meals, They put the trays on the floor, knocked on the door, and were gone before he could get to the door. Lamblo did not come because Glinda would have told her to stay away. He was not to have any sexual relations or to talk to anyone. He exercised, and he lay on the bed trying to visualize the Palace Hotel and its environs. Though he had thought that he was too excited to sleep, he did so while visualizing.
He awoke just as the sun set. Nine minutes past seven. His watch was on standard time, so it would be 6:09 P.M. in California, which was on daylight saving time. The moon was approaching its last quarter here and also in Kansas and San Francisco. Glinda had said that she would have preferred a full moon, but this was better than an all-dark moon. She had not told Hank why.
He brushed his teeth after eating, bathed, washed his hair, and cleaned his toenails and fingernails. Glinda had told him to make sure that he did that. When he was dry, he put on only cloth slippers and a robe. The housekey and the wrist-watch were on a table.
He was surprised when he answered the knocks on the door. He had not expected that the queen would come for him. She was wearing cloth slippers and a robe with a monk's hood shadowing her face. She gestured for him to come with her. Silent, Hank walked beside her along hallways, down stairs, and into the southwest arm of the X-shaped castle. There was not a person, animal, or bird in sight, an unusual event. Glinda must have ordered everybody to stay away from this route.
She stopped before a very tall but very narrow door and unlocked it with a massive wooden key produced from a pocket of the robe. She went in, and Hank squeezed through it. He looked around while she shot a thick wooden bolt and laid the key on a table. This was the room into which he had looked when Glinda had gone through that wild ritual. It was vast and dark except for a few tiny lights on the walls and the torch on top of the four-faced sphinx. He felt a chill as if a winter draft was blowing over him.
Glinda led him to the far end where one of the little lights shone. A transparent sphere embedded in the stone held a glowing dust.
There was a huge low bed near the light, a bed the like of which existed nowhere else in the two worlds except in the castles of the Witches of the South and of the North and the castles which had been those of the Witches of the East and of the West. Even these were not quite like Glinda's. It had white sheets and covers and pillows and was canopied by a silvery dome from under which hung an intricate array of mirrors. These would catch the "essence" of the travelers— whatever "essence" meant—and would reflect them from mirror to mirror—building up the velocity and density of the "essences," so Glinda said—and would eject them through a silvery funnel.
The legs of the bed were silver and went through the floors of this room through the ceilings and floors of all below it and deep into the earth into a pool of mercury enclosed in thick glass.
Glinda touched a sphere on the wall, and it glowed as suddenly as an electric light turned on.
She signalled to Hank that he should remove his slippers and robe. He did so and put them on the floor where Glinda had shed hers.
Then she hooked her fingers into her mouth and removed a complete set of false teeth.
Oh, my God! Hank thought. How ugly that fallen face looks!
He should have expected this if he had been thinking clearly. Her body cells might renew themselves, but three centuries of wear would erode her teeth to stumps. Even she, with all her seemingly magical powers, could not grow new teeth.
She smiled at him as if to say, "See! I am no longer the beauty you craved, lusted for, burned with love for. I am, though a queen, also a subject of the worm."
She put the false teeth on the pile of clothes and crawled into the vast bed. Hank went on all fours after her and lay down by her side. She rolled to the edge and lifted from the floor a thin wooden object carved in the form of a three-pointed star. There was a faintly glowing writing on it, but Hank could not make it out clearly in the dimness. She reached out her left hand and took his right. Holding the wood up before her, she looked at it while her lips moved silently. She read the characters on one ray of the star, then whirled it in the air, caught the next ray, read the forms on it, and then repeated the procedure to read the inscriptions on the third ray.
She must have known them by heart, but perhaps the ritual or operation required that she hold the object.
Sighing almost inaudibly, she placed the star on her magnificent breasts and closed her eyes. Hank had been told to close his eyes when she shut hers, and he did so.
He had just begun to visualize the Palace Hotel when he sank—or seemed to sink—through the bed. Though he opened his eyes—or thought he did—he could see only a grayness that seemed to twist in corkscrew fashion. For a moment, he screamed with terror as a baby fallen from its mother's arms might scream. He could not hear his voice, but the crimson square waves pouring from his mouth and speeding ahead of him—downwards—must be screams. They looked like terror transformed into vibrations, a wavy watery route to Hell.
He did not know why he knew or felt that he was falling. Perhaps the silver shafts and the mercury pool were a sort of cannon firing him like a shell toward the glowing nickel-iron core of the planet. Though he had no reference point, he knew that he was hurtling downward.
He stopped screaming. At least, he was no longer consciously screaming. But the crimson waves still spewed out and raced ahead of him, narrowing far in the distance and forming a sharp point. As if they made the blade of an ice-breaking ship which was cutting a way for him through the grayness. He might be wrong in thinking that the waves were a "visible" projection of his terror. They could be something else. Or it might be that something unconscious in him was doing the screaming.
He slowed down, though he did not know why he knew that.
Glinda was not with him. But just as he "stopped" and began floating, the crimson waves dwindled, shooting back towards him like a cataract in a movie film running backwards. They did not disappear in his mouth, however, but stopped before him and curved upwards and down to form a bright sphere. And then the sphere became a shadowy semi-transparent Glinda.
She smiled and moved towards him, expanded, and enveloped him. The thought that he was inside her rolled his mind like a snowball racing down a slope.
She had taken him into her "womb" just in time. Something that he did not want to see or even hear about was moving about them now. Only Glinda kept the thing from closing its "jaws" around him. And she was in extreme peril, though he did not know how he knew.
"Up we go," her voiceless voice said softly.
They "rose," but the thing was close behind them. Hank felt that he was trembling and sweating, though not physically. He could not feel his body. All his Terrestrial senses seemed to be shut down or left behind him, but there were other senses that he could not define.
The grayness became a deep purple through which he could see or sense what seemed to be the intricate network of tree roots, moles digging, and writhing nests of worms and snakes. And there was a flash of a hollow in which the dim wavering shapes of gnomelike things hewed stone and hacked out metal and one seemed to be sitting in a stone chair and listening through earphones to something far below it.
They ascended from the crust of the earth and were inside the hotel, quivering ghostly stuff. He was no longer in Glinda; she was a phantom by him but more solid than the floors through which he was rising like metaphysical smoke.