Victor sat up, rubbing his head.
‘I caught myself aright crack when the chair fell backwards,’ he said.
Laddie sat looking expectantly, with the remains of the sheet in his mouth.
‘What’s he waiting for?’ said Victor.
‘You’ve got to tell him he’s a good boy,’ sighed Gaspode.
‘Doesn’t he expect some meat or a sweet or something?’
Gaspode shook his head. ‘Jus’ tell him what a good boy he is. It’s better’n hard currency, for dogs.’
‘Oh? Well, then: good boy, Laddie.’
Laddie bounced up and down excitedly. Gaspode swore under his breath.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’
‘Good boy, find Ginger,’ said Victor.
‘Look, I can do that,’ said Gaspode desperately, as Laddie started snuffling at the floor. ‘We all know where she’s headed. You don’t have to go and-‘
Laddie dashed out of the door, but gracefully. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and gave an eager, follow-me bark.
‘Pathetic,’ said Gaspode, miserably.
The stars always seemed to shine more brightly over Holy Wood. Of course, the air was clearer than Ankh, and there wasn’t much smoke, but even so . . . they were somehow bigger, too, and closer, as if the sky was a vast lens.
Laddie streaked over the dunes; pausing occasionally for Victor to catch up. Gaspode followed on some way behind, rolling from side to side and wheezing.
The trail led to the hollow, which was empty.
The door was open about a foot. Scuffed sand around it indicated that, whatever may or may not have come out, Ginger had gone in.
Victor stared at it.
Laddie sat by the door, staring hopefully at Victor.
‘He’s waitin’,’ said Gaspode.
‘What for?’ said Victor apprehensively.
Gaspode groaned. ‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘Oh. Yes. There’s a good boy, Laddie.’
Laddie yapped and tried to turn a somersault.
‘What do we do next?’ said Victor. ‘I suppose we go in, do we?’
‘Could be,’ said Gaspode.
‘Er. Or we could wait till she comes out. The fact is, I’ve never been very happy about darkness,’ said Victor.
‘I mean, night-time is OK, but pitch darkness-‘
‘I bet Cohen the Barbarian isn’t afraid of the dark,’ said Gaspode.
‘Well, yes-‘
‘And the Black Shadow of the Desert, he’s not afraid of the dark either.’
‘OK, but-‘
‘And Howondaland Smith, Balgrog Hunter, practic’ly eats the dark for his tea,’ said Gaspode.
‘Yes, but I’m not those people!’ wailed Victor.
‘Try tellin’ that to all those people who handed over their pennies to watch you bein’ ’em,’ said Gaspode. He scratched at an insomniac flea. ‘Cor, it’d be a laugh to have a handleman here now, wouldn’t it?’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Wot a comedy feature it’d make. Mr Hero Not Goin’ Into the Dark, we could call it. It’d be better’n Turkey Legs. It’d be funnier’n A Night At The Arena. I reckon people’d queue fo-‘
‘All right, all right,’ said Victor. ‘I’ll go a little way in, perhaps.’ He looked around desperately at the dried-up trees around the hollow. ‘And I’ll make a torch,’ he added.
He’d expected spiders and dampness and possibly snakes, if nothing worse . . .
Instead, there was just a dry, roughly square passageway, leading slightly downwards. The air had a slightly salty smell, suggesting that somewhere the tunnel was connected to the sea.
Victor took a few paces along it, and stopped.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘If the torch goes out, we could get horribly lost.’
‘No, we can’t,’ said Gaspode. ‘Sense of smell, see?’
‘Gosh, that’s clever.’
Victor went on a little further. The walls were covered with big versions of the square ideograms that featured in the book.
‘You know,’ he said, pausing to run his fingers over one, ‘these aren’t really like a written language. It’s more as if-‘
‘Keep movin’ and stop makin’ excuses,’ said Gaspode behind him.
Victor’s foot kicked against something which bounced away into the darkness.
‘What was it?’ he quavered.
Gaspode snuffled off into the darkness, and returned.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s just a skull.’
‘Whose?’
‘He dint say,’ said Gaspode.
‘Shut up!’
Something crunched under Victor’s sandal.
‘An’ that-‘ Gaspode began.
‘I don’t want to know!’
‘It was a seashell, in fact,’ said Gaspode.
Victor peered into the moving square of darkness ahead of them. The makeshift torch flared in the draught and, if he strained his ears, he could hear a rhythmic sound; it was either a beast roaring in the distance, or the sound of the sea moving in some underground tunnel. He opted for the second suggestion.
‘Something’s been calling her,’ he said. ‘In dreams. Someone that wants to be let out. I’m afraid she’s going to get hurt.’
‘She’s not worth it,’ said Gaspode. ‘Messin’ around with girls who’re in thrall to Creatures from the Void never works out, take my word for it. You’d never know what you were going to wake up next to.’
‘Gaspode!’
‘You’ll see I’m right.’
The torch went out.
Victor waved it desperately and blew on it in a last attempt to rekindle it. A few sparks flared and faded. There simply wasn’t enough torch left.
The darkness flowed back. Victor had never known darkness like it. No matter how long you looked into it, your eyes wouldn’t grow accustomed to it. There was nothing to become accustomed to. It was darkness and mother of darkness, darkness absolute, the darkness under the earth, darkness so dense as to be almost tangible, like cold velvet.
‘It’s bloody dark,’ volunteered Gaspode.
I’ve broken out into what they call a cold sweat, thought Victor. So that’s what it feels like. I’d always wondered.
He eased himself sideways until he reached the wall.
‘We’d better go back,’ he said, in what he hoped was a matter-of�fact voice. ‘There could be anything ahead of us. Ravines or anything. We could get more torches and more people and come back.’
There was a flat sound from far down the passage.
Whoomph.
It was followed by a light so harsh that it projected the image of Victor’s eyeballs on the back of his skull. It faded after a few seconds, but was still almost painfully bright. Laddie whimpered.
‘There you are,’ said Gaspode hoarsely. ‘You’ve got some light now, so everything’s all right.’
‘Yes, but what’s making it?’
‘I’m supposed to know, am I?’
Victor inched forward, his shadow dancing behind him.
After a hundred yards or so the passageway opened out in what had perhaps once been a natural cave. The light was coming from an arch high up at one end, but it was bright enough to reveal every detail.
It was bigger even than the Great Hall at the University, and must once have been even more impressive. The light gleamed off baroque gold ornamentation, and on the stalactites that ribbed the roof. Stairs wide enough for a regiment rose from a wide shadowy hole in the floor; a regular thud and boom and a smell of salt said that the sea had found an entrance somewhere below. The air was clammy.
‘Some kind of a temple?’ muttered Victor.
Gaspode sniffed at a dark red drapery hung on one side of the entrance. At his touch it collapsed into a mess of slime.
‘Yuk,’ he said. ‘The whole place is mouldy!’ Something many�-legged scuttled hastily across the floor and dropped into the stairwell.
Victor reached out gingerly and prodded a thick red rope, slung between gold-encrusted posts. It disintegrated.
The cracked stairway carried on up to the distant lighted arch. They climbed it, scrambling over heaps of crumbling seaweed and driftwood flung up by some past high tide.
The arch opened out into another vast cavern, like an amphitheatre. Rows of seats stretched down towards a – a wall?
It shimmered like mercury. If you could fill an oblong pool of mercury the size of a house, and then tip it on its side without any of it spilling, then it would look something like this.
Only not so malevolent.
It was flat and blank but Victor suddenly felt he was being stared at, like something under a lens.
Laddie whined.
Then Victor realized what it was that was making him uneasy.
It wasn’t a wall. A wall was attached to something. That thing was attached to nothing. It just hung in the air, billowing and rippling like an image in a mirror, but without the mirror.
The light was coming from somewhere on the other side of it. Victor could see it now, a bright pinpoint moving around in the shadow at the far end of the chamber.
He set off down the sloping aisle between the rows of stone seats, the dogs plodding along beside him with their ears flat and their tails between their legs. They waded through something that might once have been carpet; it tore wetly and disintegrated under their feet.
After they’d gone a few yards Gaspode said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of-‘