“Please, chief!” the man insisted, catching Carrington’s arm as he went to pick her up. “For one thing, you can’t go down into the deep end by yourself! All the Fugitive Mistakes live down there, and—”
Carrington dropped the torch, spun and drove his fist into the man’s belly, and the man sat down hard and rolled over on his side. Carrington looked up at the rest of the men. “I’ll be back,” he said, “in plenty of time. Is that clear?”
“Sure, chief,” a couple of them muttered uncomfortably.
“Fine.” He picked up the torch and hoisted Jacky to her feet and walked away from the lighted end of the vast chamber, down the increasing incline into the darkness. His torch flickered in a damp breeze from below, and lit only the wet stones of the ancient pavement right around them; whatever walls and ceiling there might have been were lost in the solid blackness.
After they’d been walking down the slope for several minutes, and each of them had twice slipped on the wet and ever-steeper paving stones and done short, sitting slides, and the wall torches by the entry arch were not even a faint glow over the hump of the floor behind and above them anymore, Carrington tripped Jacky, knelt beside her and shoved the butt of the torch into a wide patch of mud between two of the flagstones.
“Be nice and I’ll kill you quick afterward,” he said with an affectionate grin.
Jacky drew her legs back and kicked at him—he blocked it easily with his forearm, but as her heels rebounded they knocked the torch loose; it rolled away downward, picked up speed, began cartwheeling and then abruptly went out far below with a wet sizzle.
“Want the lights out, eh?” said Carrington in the now absolute darkness. He seized her shoulders and knelt on her knees to hold her down. “That’s fine—I like shy girls.”
Jacky was weeping hopelessly as Carrington shifted his position above her; he paused for a long several seconds, and then jerked and began making a peculiar muffled groaning. He shifted again, his hand scrabbling weakly at her face, and a moment later he lurched off of her and she heard a sound like a pitcher of water slowly being poured out; and when she caught a smell like heated copper she realized that it was blood splashing on the stones.
Because she’d been crying she hadn’t heard the things approach, but now she heard them whispering around her. “You greedy pig,” giggled one, “you’ve wasted it all.”
“So lick the stones,” came the hissed reply.
Jacky started to get up, but something that felt like a hand holding a live lobster pushed her back down. “Not so fast,” said another voice. “You’ve got to come deeper with us—to the bottom shore—we’ll put you in the boat and push you out, and you can be our offering to the serpent Apep.”
“Take her without her eyes,” whispered another of them. “She promised them to my sister and me.” Jacky didn’t begin screaming until she felt spidery fingers groping at her face.
What he found in the cages pretty much confirmed Coleridge’s suspicion that he was having another opium dream—albeit an extraordinarily vivid one.
When the pain of his headache and stomach cramps had receded a while ago he’d found himself in a dark room with no recollection of how he’d arrived there, and when he sat up on the bed and reached for his watch and couldn’t even find the table—and noticed how profoundly dark the room was—he realized he was not at his room at Hudson’s Hotel; and after standing up and blind-man’s-bluffing his way around the tiny chamber, he’d realized he wasn’t in John Morgan’s house either, or Basil Montagu’s, or any other place he’d ever been before. Eventually he’d found the door, and opened it, and for a full minute just stood in the doorway, staring up and down the dimly torchlit stairwell, whose architecture he recognized as debased provincial Roman, and listening to the distant wails and roarings that he didn’t recognize at all.
This Fuseli-esque scene, together with the familiar—though extra strong this time—balloon-headed feeling and the warm looseness in his joints, made him certain that he had once again taken too strong a dose of laudanum and was hallucinating.
In Xanadu, he’d thought wryly, did such a morbid dungeon world decree.
After a while he had wandered out onto the stairwell landing. The folk notion that a house explored in a dream symbolically represented one’s mind had always struck him as having a grain of truth in it, and while in many dreams he had explored the upper floors of his mind house, he’d never before seen the catacombs beneath. The nightmare noises were coming from below, so, bravely curious about what sort of monsters might inhabit the deepest levels of his mind, he carefully picked his way down the ancient steps.
Despite a moderate apprehension about what he might run into, he was pleased with himself for conjuring up such a detailed fantasy. Not only were the weathered stones of the stairwell done in painstaking chiaroscuro detail, and the scuffing of his shoes producing a faint echo, but the cold air rushing up from below was dank and stale and smelled of mold, mildew, seaweed and—yes, that was it—a zoological garden.
It had grown darker as he’d descended, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he was in an absolute blackness relieved only by occasional faint flickerings that might have been distant torchlight reflected around more than one corner, or might just have been the random star patterns provided by a bored retina.
He had walked slowly out across the uneven floor in what seemed to be the direction the groaning and cawing came from, but when he’d still been a few yards short of finding the cages he’d been frozen by an echoing scream that had as much weariness and hopelessness as agony in it. And what was that? he’d wondered. My ambition, fettered and all but starved by my sloth? No, that’s misleading; more likely it’s the embodiment of my duties—not the least of which is talent—ignored by me and imprisoned in this bottommost oubliette of my mind.
Now he continued forward, and in a moment he felt the cold bars of the nearest cage. Something slapped heavily on the floor within, then there was a sound like a wet mop being slowly dragged over stones, and presently Coleridge realized that the intermittent breeze on his hand was the breath of something.
“Hello, man,” it said in a profoundly deep voice.
“Hello,” said Coleridge nervously. After a bewildered pause he said, “You’re locked up?”
“We are… all locked up,” assented the unseen thing, and there were grunts and chirps of agreement from other cages on each side.
“Are you, then,” muttered Coleridge, mostly to himself, “vices that I have actually managed to shackle? I wouldn’t have thought there were any.”
“Free us,” said the thing. “The key is in the lock of the cage at the end.”
“Or are you,” Coleridge went on, “as is more likely, strengths, virtues I’ve been too lazy to exercise, warped by long confinement and inattention down here?”
“I don’t know… these things, man. Free us.”
“And would not a twisted strength be a thing more to be feared than an atrophied vice? No, my friend, I think I’d be wise to leave you caged. I must have had good reason to make these bars so solid.” He started to turn away.
“You cannot just ignore us.”
Coleridge paused. “Can’t I?” he asked thoughtfully. “That might be true. Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error. But surely these cages represent a—rare!—manifestation of my will, my control. I must already have taken you into account.”