"I've heard," the boy responded. "But we've been looking for hi— her, and you am the first one in quite a while to report that she got this far. She's a relative. It's my hope we can find her."
"Lots of luck if yer headin' down that way," Latimer told him. "Me, I'd rather stick with the usual demons, vampires, ghosts, that kind of thing. Even the boss thinks that way, although he's so damn brainy, he still wants to see what in hell comes through. Me, I say leave 'em."
"Us, too," Marge assured him.
Joel Thebes yawned and stretched. "It is amazing how doing nothing for hours and hours can make you more tired than running many miles," he commented. "Come, friends. The hotel is the finest on this world and perhaps the finest anywhere, and its bar is like no other as well. They will tell His Majesty about us when he wakes up. Let us relax and enjoy what may be the only luxury we have left this trip. I have a feeling that once we leave here, it is going to be very rough indeed."
That at least made sense. "Lead on," Marge told him.
After breakfast they got word from the hotel that the King would indeed receive them and that a messenger would come to take them over. The messenger proved to be a small boy with a very pale complexion even in the daylight.
"He's pretty busy right now," said the strange little boy, who said his name was Sammy, at the door of the King's palace, "but I think he'll fit you in. Just follow me. We don't stand on nearly the ceremony here that most folks expect, but you do have to have a good stage setting to keep the locals impressed."
He led them to a large tower on the far end of the top of the rock. Around the sinister-looking spire, sitting on black ledges, were huge birds of a kind none of them had ever seen before. Each was the size of a man and had the face and neck of a vulture, yet they all wore dark humanlike suit jackets, top hats, and glasses and clutched battered leather cases in their hands. Every once in a while someone would come to an open window and call, and the nearest of the huge birds would come over, take something from the person at the window, stuff it into the case using its feet, and fly off.
"Lawyer birds," Sammy explained kind of nonchalantly. "We need a ton of 'em around here, both goin' after others and defending ourselves. Seems like it never ends. Hey, here we are! Come on in and enjoy the show!" With that he opened a large wooden door, revealing a vast and otherworldly corridor.
The great entrance corridor that took you into the presence of the King of Horror looked like nothing so much as a Grand Guignol version of the Wizard's palace in The Wizard of Oz movie. The motifs were blood red and sickly green streaked with blacks and browns, though not emeralds, and the statuary and tableaux along the way were gruesome in the extreme.
At the end was an enormous piece of statuary, a great demonic idol whose ruby-red eyes blazed down on them. It was right in character, reminding Marge of the demonic figure atop the mountain in Fantasia, and when it actually moved, as if it were a living thing itself, it was pretty damned scary.
"Who disturbs the King?" the creature demanded in a deep, spooky voice that echoed down the broad entrance hall.
"The ones from Husaquahr," Sammy told it, unimpressed and underawed. "About that stuff goin' on down south."
"Oh, yes. Ruddygore's group. Very well; bring them in."
To everyone's surprise, Sammy ran right up to the demonic figure, pushed something in the base, and made a keystone pop out. He then turned it, and there was a noticeable click and a door was framed in the base. It opened, blasting light into the room, and with it also something else.
Marge at least recognized it as sixties rock music. It sounded in fact like Jim Morrison.
Following the boy through, they emerged not in some creepy place but in a rather modern-looking office with a nice computer sitting on a desk and built-in bookshelves all around containing lots and lots of reference works, classic horror novels, science fiction, history, geography, you name it.
A fairly normal looking human man of average size was at the computer, typing away. He didn't stop when they entered, and they stood there quietly as he continued on, until he filially completed whatever he'd been typing and looked up at them.
"Sorry. When you're going good, you can't just stop. You have to finish the thought or you lose it," he explained in a very friendly American-accented voice.
Irving frowned and blinked. "You are the King of Horror?" he asked.
"At your service, at least for, oh, for ten or fifteen minutes or so. Best I can spare today. Lots to get done. It's not easy being the foundation for all contemporary horror on Earth, you know. The imitators drive you nuts, then there's the sycophants, all the folks wanting your money or your endorsement for something, and even strangers deciding you're so damned public, they can tramp through your house. It was that damned Amex commercial that started it. Never should have done that one. I've had to hide half the time over here ever since." He seemed lost in his own world, then suddenly remembered his guests. "Sorry. Just what am I supposed to do for you?"
"Uh, Your Majesty, there are eldritch horrors about to emerge from a crack in space-time near Mount Doom," Poquah said as respectfully as possible. "We're supposed to stop them within the Rules."
The King nodded, sat back in his chair, and sighed. He pointed to one wall of the room. "Those Rules drive you nuts sometimes. Worst part is, when you wind up in this job, you find that the next volume's all your Rules that everybody's stuck with. What a burden! Still, okay, it's probably not eldritch horrors — they're pretty passé. Most likely the Ancient Ones, I'd guess. That mythos never went out of style and keeps inspiring more and more of our best. Inspired me, too. That's the only reason they're still around at all, still a threat as an alternate opposition, see. They're useful, they're valuable, and a lot of Earth still really gets into them."
Irving cleared his throat. "Um, excuse me. Do you mean that all these horrors .only exist or have great power because Earth still believes in them?"
"Oh, no. I doubt if anybody sane on Earth believes in 'em. But folks still sit down and read the stories they inspired, that they communicated to the best of the bunch, starting with Chambers and Bierce, and folks still find the stories scary. When you're scared, then for that period you believe. See? And that's enough to keep anything or anybody alive in the Sea of Dreams."
Marge should have been between groggy and comatose, but she was wide awake for some reason here. "But I thought it was the reality here that influenced the dreams and nightmares over there."
"It's both. No communication is ever just one-way, and this is no exception. The difference is that what we take from here over there is a dream; what we take from there over here becomes reality. We go back and forth like that. It's what connects us together. The only way to destroy these Ancient Ones is by destroying all vestiges of them in the imaginations and literature of Earth, which is very unlikely. It would be really interesting if they took over here, I have to admit. It would make things easier for people like me back on Earth. Think of the universal dreams and nightmares that would travel then!"
"And yet you are willing to aid us in blocking their coming?" Poquah prompted hopefully, not at all pleased at how this was developing.
"Oh, sure. Take me, for example. Everything you see here isn't what's real, it's what enough of Earth thinks of as a kind of fantasy. When all is said and done, I kind of like the job. When people like you, they can make things very nice in their imaginations. I'd find them coming through interesting but not enough to risk all this. So you want me to unlock the gates of the Garden Wood for you. That about right?"