“Does it have a name?” I said.
“It’s old,” said Polly. “Names come and go, but the church remains. It is a place of power, and it has been here for a very long time. So long that people have forgotten who it was originally created to venerate and preserve.”
“The Lady of the Lake?” I said. “She’s here?”
“Help me open the dimensional gate, and you’ll see,” said Polly.
There were no guards, no protections to get past. The door wasn’t even locked, opening easily at Polly’s touch. There wasn’t actually a sign over the door saying Enter at Your Own Risk, but there might as well have been. I could feel all the hackles rising on the back of my neck as I followed Polly in.
The interior was no bigger or smaller than it should have been, an open, empty space surrounded by four stone walls, heavy with shadows, only the barest light seeping in through a narrow-slit window at the far end. No pews, no altar, just the open space. The air was still and uncomfortably warm, as though some great furnace were still operating down below. There was no sign anyone had been here in ages, but no dust either, or any sign of neglect.
Whatever might have been worshipped here in the past, it hadn’t been a good or a wholesome thing. I could feel it, in my bones and in my water. Bad things had happened here. The horror of them still vibrated on the air, like the echoes of a scream that never ended. I looked at Polly, but she seemed entirely unaffected by the atmosphere. She trotted happily down the length of the empty church, with me stumbling along in the gloom behind her, trying to look in all directions at once. She dropped suddenly to one knee, and her fingers scrabbled against the floor for a moment before finally closing around the metal ring of a large trap-door I would have sworn wasn’t there a moment before. The trap-door itself was solid metal and must have weighed half a ton, but she pulled it open easily with one hand before letting it fall back onto the stone floor. It landed hard, but even so, the echoes were strangely muted, as though the grim atmosphere was soaking up the sound. I looked at Polly, only a pale gleam in the gloom. There was no way a woman of her size could have handled that much weight so easily. I’d suspected she was keeping things from me, and now it seemed I was about to find out what.
Beneath the hole in the floor was a set of bare stone steps, leading down and down into darkness. Polly produced her Looking Glass and started down them without even looking to see if I was following. She knew I wouldn’t hang back, not now I’d come so far.
I followed Polly and her light down into the dark, and wasn’t at all surprised when the trap-door slammed shut again, over our heads.
The steps were rough and unmarked. The bare stone walls to either side were close enough to touch, hot enough to burn the fingers. The air was hot enough to bring a sheen of sweat to my face. I had to wonder exactly how far down we were going. My legs were aching from the strain of continuous descent when the stairway finally came to an end, and Polly stopped abruptly. She held up the Looking Glass, but its light couldn’t penetrate more than a few inches into the dark. She laughed lightly, made the Glass disappear, and snapped her fingers imperiously. A harsh light sprang up, illuminating a huge cavern dug out of the bedrock far beneath the Street of the Gods. It wasn’t any normal light; long streams of electrical fire crackled up and down the stone walls and crawled across the ceiling like living lightning. The fierce light hurt my eyes, but didn’t seem to bother Polly at all. She looked back at me, and smiled.
“What are you waiting for, sweetie? This is it. This is what you came here for. Come on down, Larry Oblivion, and claim your prize.”
She bestowed her most winning smile on me and batted her eye-lashes, but it looked grotesque now, clearly artificial, and practised. All of the attraction I once felt for her was gone, perhaps because I was seeing her clearly for the first time. But I went down to join her anyway. Because I’d come this far, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what treasure had been buried here if it wasn’t the Lady of the Lake. Polly took me by the hand, and my flesh actually crawled at her touch. I went with her, deep into the cavern, until finally she stopped, let go my hand, and indicated with a warm smile what she’d brought me all this way to see.
It hung on the wall before us, opened up and stretched out over twenty feet or more. I couldn’t tell whether it had been a man or a woman originally, but the guts and organs had been spread out and pinned to the stone with silver daggers. The skin had been stretched terribly without tearing, to make a background. The face had been expertly peeled from the skull, and extended so far I couldn’t recognise any features in it but the eyes, wide and gleaming and very aware. The whole thing was still alive, despite its state. That was the point. The suffering was fuel for the magic, feeding and maintaining the gateway that pulsed like an alien wound deep in the exposed guts of what had once been a man or a woman.
Not a dimensional gate. Not a dimensional gate at all. A hellgate. A doorway into Hell itself.
Awful sounds burst briefly from the gate, screams and howls and endless destruction.
“What is that?” I said. “Is that Hell?”
“No, sweetie,” Polly said happily. “That’s the future. That’s what the future will sound like, in the hell on Earth we’re going to make for all Humankind.”
We stood facing each other before the hellgate. Her smile was wide with anticipation, her face alive with enjoyment at the secret she’d kept from me, now to be revealed. I should have known it would end up like this. I’ve always had rotten luck with women.
And when you can’t see the patsy in the deal, it’s almost certainly you.
“So, Polly,” I said, calm as calm could be. “No Lady in the Lake, and the pretty face was just a come-on. So what’s the deal? What do you need a hellgate for?”
“Sometimes, the living can be cast down into Hell,” said Polly. “Damned to the Houses of Pain, forever. Unless you can send down a worthy replacement.”
“That’s why the scavenger hunt,” I said. “You didn’t need any of those things to open a hellgate. You wanted to test my mettle, see if I was ... worthy.”
“Exactly. I knew your reputation, but I needed to see you in action. After all, reputations are ten a penny in the Nightside. And the items we acquired will make a fine tribute for my long-lost mistress.”
“Who?” I said. My mouth was dry, though my face was streaming with sweat, and I had to clench my hands into fists to stop them trembling. “Who are you planning to raise up out of Hell?”
“Can’t you guess?” she said, and just like that she didn’t look like Polly Perkins any more, or anything human.
She was tall and supernaturally slender, her glowing skin pale as the finest porcelain. Her ears were long and pointed, and her eyes had slitted cat pupils. She wore a simple white shift with the arrogance of nobility and a necklace of human fingers. Delicate elven script had been branded in a straight line across her forehead. Just looking at her now roused a kind of arachnid revulsion in me. There’s nothing worse than something that looks like human, but isn’t.
“You’re an elf,” I said, and my voice sounded dull and defeated, even to me. “Never trust an elf.”
“Exactly,” she said, and her voice was rich and sweet and cloying, like poisoned honey. “You’re here to help me bring back our lost mistress, Queen Mab. Oldest and greatest of our kind, thrown down into Hell by the traitors Oberon and Titania. But any living thing damned to Hell can be rescued or redeemed by another living thing. One of the oldest rules there is .. She stopped, and looked at me, thoughtfully. ”I wonder if the same rule applies to Heaven? What sport, what joy, to drag a noble person back from Paradise! But that’s a thought for another day. Bye-bye, sweetie. Give my regards to the Inferno. It’s been fun; but now it’s over.“
She lunged at me while she was still speaking, moving inhumanly quickly, expecting to catch me off-balance. But I was ready for her. I had the wand. She’d been so caught up in her moment of triumph that she’d forgotten to take it from me. I said the Words, and the wand stopped Time. Polly hung in mid air before me, her elongated alien form suspended between one moment and the next. I looked at her for a while. Thinking of what might have been. We’d worked well together, and I had enjoyed her company. But I’m nobody’s patsy. So I took careful hold of her, turned her around in mid air so that she was facing the hellgate, and started Time up again.