Horrors of the Dancing Gods

by Jack L. Chalker

A few cabins were open in one area, and they revealed interiors very opulently decorated but with what looked for all the world like polished coffins where the beds should have been. Others seemed to have cages that didn't appear to be able to be opened from the inside. Their own cabin, however, turned out to have a king-sized bed in the center, surrounded by a pentagram on the floor and holders for candles and incense. There was also a washbasin with a small pump that actually could feed cold or hot water depending on which way it was pressed. There was also a fairly standard chamber pot with sealable lid.

  "Why the pentagram?' Marge asked, looking it over. 'They call demons in the bed or something?"

  Irving chuckled. "The demons stay in the cabins on this boat! Remember, you can use a pentagram to keep demonic forces inside or to keep them outside. Doesn't matter which. I think this is for folks who just might not trust that they didn't catch all the fine print."

  "It is indeed mostly a psychological aid," Poquah agreed, examining it. "However, it might well be prudent to set it up, particularly for the night. Irving, you will have to decide if you want to sleep in or out before it is sealed, and Marge, I'm afraid that once it is sealed, you'll be as unable to cross as anything else. Of course, you can yell if need be."

  "Fair enough," she told him. "Still, I kind of wonder what protects me when I roam this ship at night."

  "Your wits," the Imir replied. "The same as protects you wandering the night skies of Husaquahr."

  "You really don't sound worried."

  "I'm not. The fact is, in this one and only this one instance, Hell and we are on the same side. Remember that there are more than two universes and that the others are even farther from the template of Earth than this one. The djinn you know; the other, reached through the worst depths of the Sea of Dreams, is that of Hell's nightmares. That is the one that now threatens to come here. If it does, it is going to find Hell no more kin than Heaven; I would admit that Leviathan versus Cthulhu would be fascinating, but I am not certain that I would relish being on the same dimensional plane as the contest."

  "Huh? You're saying Hell wants us to win?"

  "No, no. By no means. They want the current threat to us all ended. They would most certainly rather do it themselves, but so long as we are serving their ends, I do not believe we are in mortal harm from the great principalities and powers of the air. That does not, of course, mean that they wouldn't like to see us come over to their side and point of view and enter into their service or that they wouldn't get rid of us if they could triumph for sure without our help. Still, I will lose no sleep on this leg of the voyage from worry that some ghoulie or beastie or demonic form is going to get me. I believe we should all simply get as much rest as we can, for I can foresee many long and difficult times ahead." He yawned. "Indeed, I believe I shall nap right now."

  "Not me," Marge told him. "I'm in my prime time here. Irving?"

  "I want to see the rest of the ship and how it moves," he told her. "No way I'm gonna sleep now."

  They left Poquah and went back to the hall, then forward and out one of the doors to the outer deck. Things were getting very busy very fast, and they could feel the boat shift against its moorings as people and things were loaded on board. Marge shook her head in wonder. "Do you feel that this is strange somehow?'

  "Those windows? And coffins in the rooms? Sure," he admitted.

  "No, that's not it. You kind of expect that. It's that most of this is not bizarre. There's no feeling of dread, of monstrous evil, blood and gore, all the rest. This could be any large, new luxurious craft going anywhere on the ocean. There's just something wrong about it."

  "You mean you think we're being conned or something?' he asked.

  "No, no! I mean that this is pretty much what it is, that nobody's conning us, but it isn't what it should be. Demon ships to a horror continent that is the gateway to Hell? This?"

  "So you think they get people over to their point of view by scaring them to death?" Irving asked her. "Heck, I mean, you heard that demon. They're at war. They see all that evil power stuff, all that blood and gore, as striking at their enemy, but you wouldn't expect them to live that way. I bet you Satan's so beautiful, he'd make you cry, too."

  "Huh?"

  "He was in charge of all the angels, right? And he controls all the organized evil in at least two universes, right? That's power. These little guys, these demons or bad angels, they're just ones that got conned or suckered or maybe just talked into going with the revolt. No big deal. But I bet you the big ones, the princes, are something else—and their chief the grandest of all. You figure he's gonna sit back with the best wines and the finest foods and all the stuff anybody can enjoy in spades, right? Everything your preacher ever told you not to do, and no penalties, no aging, no guilt or nothin'. I bet he don't need a ship to be anywhere, but this is the kind you'd build for your people, right? Not the suckers—we saw them all chained up back there. The ones who really run things."

  Marge sighed. "Maybe. Still, it just doesn't seem right somehow. Not to me."

  Was it just her old cultural upbringing, she wondered, or was it the fact that she'd seen the evil those creatures could do and had learned of more? Hitler, Stalin, war, pestilence, disease, suffering—that was the business of those who owned and operated this craft. How terribly depressing to discover that they literally saw it as their business, nothing personal.

  Still ... "If they're so powerful, why do they need us at all?" she asked him. "You're so smart, kid, you answer that one. Why can't the big man who can corrupt nations and enslave whole worlds and chuckle over a nice Chianti about it, him and all his princes who run things, take care of this turf war with somebody else muscling in? What could a sixteen-year-old green kid on his first outing and two faerie do that all that power and glory and such can't?"

  It was Irving's turn to shake his head. "Sorry, I been thinking about that one myself. Maybe we'll find out if we make it."

  The ghostly, roaring sound of lost souls under amplification came from all around them.

  "The H.P. Hovecraft Eibon will depart in five minutes. All ashore that is going ashore. All passengers and freight for Red Bluffs, Innsmouth, and points beyond should now be on board"

  "Well, we might as well stick here and see how this thing works, anyway," Marge noted. "I still can't figure out why it's called a hovecraft or just how it moves. I don't see any masts, the huge inner tube that seems to surround it doesn't allow for oars, and nothing up front that seems to be used for pulling is broken out."

  They waited, hearing the clomping of inhuman feet below them and the shouts of many creatures in many tongues. There were also shapes, human and otherwise, on the docks and at the mooring lines. The gangplank aft and the loading ramp amidships were withdrawn, and they could hear the crew putting up the railings and bulwarks. There was a definite feeling of departure that quite abruptly struck both Irving and Marge in a way they hadn't expected.

  "Abandon hope all ye who enter here ..."

  Since coming to this world, they had both traveled to many lands, seen many things of good, evil, and in between, and experienced both magic and nature, but it had all been in Husaquahr. Now, for the first time, both of them were leaving the great northern continent, the largest on the planet, whose heart was the River of Dancing Gods, and heading southward, past the equator, to a place that they didn't know but that was billed as all the bad things of Husaquahr and Earth, with none of the good.

  Both felt suddenly very homesick, and Marge again had to suppress the urge to fly up and away, back toward home and familiar lands.

  "Eibon now departing," reported a somewhat spooky but far more solid and official-sounding voice. "All passengers remain away from the rails and mooring lines. Let go aft. Let go amidships. Let go forward"

  The huge boat drifted free of the dock, with the lines being pulled in from the lowest deck below them and secured. It didn't feel like it was powered by much of anything but rather was simply adrift, its pilot st
eering with a rudder, using only the outgoing tide to get well away from shore.

  "False dawn's starting," Marge noted, pointing. "They won't have much night left."

  "Probably not," Irving agreed. "Just enough to get them out to where they can pick up the krakens, I'd guess. Still, he's making pretty good time with just the tide here. At least I think it's the tide."

  They were well away from shore, and the lights of the H.P. Lines dock seemed extraordinarily distant. Pretty soon they were far enough out to see the whole coast stretching before them for many miles in both directions, and to the rear and the right they could see the resort town and its crowded harbor as a collection of miniature radiances in a gaudily lit gloom.

  Somewhere over there Macore was fast asleep, probably surrounded by his crew of nymphs, no longer exposed to the danger of yet one more quest.

  There was a sudden bump and lurch of the whole boat, almost as if it had struck something, and then the sound behind them of massive things rising up, up into the sky and the breaking of the still air by great downward rushes in a regular sort of beat.

  They were both almost knocked off their feet, and Irving grabbed the rail, leaned against it, and looked back and upward to see what was going on.

  Two great black shapes, each perhaps a quarter the size of the entire vessel, had risen from apparent resting places on top of the boat, between the bridge and the aft pilothouse. Giant, thick, yet amorphous beasts, they now seemed to loom above the ship and cover it, yet they matched its position relative to themselves and to each other perfectly.

  "What are they?" Marge shouted over the noise of their beating, great manta rays of the sky.

  "I dunno. I think they're some kind of night gaunt, but I never saw or heard anything that big or powerful before," the boy responded. He pointed. "Look! They're attached to the ship!"

  It was true; the two great beasts were linked by lines not of rope or chain but of the blackest magical forces so that each carried half the vessel. Now, very slowly but very deliberately, the ship seemed almost to come out of the water, suspended under the two creatures just above the waves.

  There was a sudden, heavy beating now, and the ship began to move forward at a rapidly increasing speed, leaving the shoreline of Husaquahr behind, moving off with extraordinary haste away from the threatening light of dawn and toward the still-inviting darkness.

  It was clear from the start that they would not beat the dawn, but they would make a game try of it.

  Daytime was definitely not the most comfortable time of passage. Kraken power involved lashing the great sea behemoths to lines from the bow and having them pull with great muscular snakelike motions. That did the job but caused a fair amount of rocking and definite discomfort during heavy seas. While the forward motion was enough to allow them to make time, the comfort zone for the Eibon was definitely slated for dusk to dawn.

  The dining room was everything the purser had promised, as well. The wines were superb, of legendary vintages, and whatever food you wished for, that mysterious never-seen kitchen could manage not only to come up with but to prepare it precisely the way you wanted it.

  There were few eating or wandering the decks by day, even in warm sunshine, and that made Irving in particular more sensitive to the feeling that he was being watched, and not by members of the crew. It wasn't constantly, and it wasn't anything he could pin down, either, but he had the distinct sense of being checked up on constantly by someone or something that was never that far away yet never quite glimpsed save in shadow or out of the corner of the eye. It was always faster than he and cleverer as well, and it was no paranoid delusion. Once he thought he had caught the watcher and almost had, but while there was nobody there when he made the challenge, the doorway was still sliding shut and the inner door was swinging back and forth as if someone had just run through.

  Both Marge and Poquah admitted to having the same sensation, although not quite as frequently and certainly with no better luck. "At first I thought it was some fellow passenger who had designs on a neck or thigh," Poquah noted, "but I get no sense of menace from this. Imir are very good at this sort of thing—sensing threats. Whoever or whatever it is, while I cannot be certain that it is friendly, it is certainly not our enemy. This suggests someone paid to keep tabs on us or watch our backs. It will be interesting to see what comes of this—or who."

  "Great. Just what we need," Marge grumped.

  Beyond the luxury of the restaurant and bedrooms there really was little to do on the boat for the average passenger. They did have a nighttime casino, as promised, but it was a rather subdued affair for anybody, let alone Hell, and looked even more impossible to beat than a regular casino. The library tended toward honor novels and collections, many from Earth, together with volumes in many languages of both Earth and Husaquahr on black magic, sorcery, Satanism, and other cheery subjects. Irving did find the complete, bound set of Tales from the Crypt, but it provided only a couple of hours diversion at best.

  It was more comfortable by night, when the giant night gaunts skimmed the ship over the waves regardless of seas or winds and kept things steady and very quick, but Irving in particular found that this was the best time for him to sleep. The constant pulsing and rocking from the two somewhat laboring and slightly out of sync daytime krakens were much easier to get used to walking about than sleeping in the cabin. That left Marge more to herself at night, which she didn't particularly like but had to accept, and Irving roaming around pretty much on his own during the day. Poquah was never a very convivial sort or great company and tended to use his time reading, studying, and meditating. Once or twice he did try to stalk Irving himself, hoping to catch the elusive shadowing figure in between them, but although he came close, the shadow proved resourceful and the most that could be gleaned was a small black-clad shape whose very race, let alone features, couldn't be determined by short glimpses.

  And then there was the girl.

  Irving first saw her in the restaurant at the second meal there, eating alone. She was striking in a number of ways, not the least of which was that she appeared dark-skinned and African-featured although quite different from his specific features in many ways. She also was dressed in a light cotton dress that seemed comfortable but hid little and was most remarkable because on Hell's dark ship it was the whitest of whites.

  Who was she, this first person of African-type features Irving could remember seeing since leaving Earth? What was she doing here, traveling to Yuggoth on this ship, wearing the plain white that usually signified purity and chastity and all that, and awake by day rather than by night? At first he thought she might be a Succubus; those creatures, after all, did have a tendency to take the form in the beholder's mind of some kind of ideal human. But it was never the same for any two people, and Poquah saw her, too.

  "There is a Moorish continent, but it is well west of our destination," Poquah noted. "Still, she certainly looks of that continent and place, and most likely the western delta region of that continent. I have no idea why she is here, but I can perhaps make some kind of nasty guess based upon what I see."

  "Yes?"

  "Note the spell. Not all that different from your own. Chastity, celibacy—she is a virgin. The spell keeps her that way, but it is the power of that unspoiled virginity that shines through and is almost painful in faerie sight. White cotton, virginal, unadorned, and alone. There can be but one possible explanation for this."

  "I don't understand," Irving said, frowning.

  "She is a gift. Someone made a bargain with a demon back where she came from to provide a firstborn virginal daughter. There is much potential for both good or evil sorcery in such a one. We can safely assume that if she's headed to Yuggoth on the Eibon, she is headed for an evil master, a payoff that will almost certainly be a tragedy."

  "Huh? What? You don't mean ... ?"

  "I fear so. She is intended as some sort of sacrifice to a power of the underworld. Whoever does it will gain something important,
possibly vital protection or even power. The underworld prince will gain a soul that can be used against others like a weapon of iron. There is a whole volume devoted to sacrificial virgins in the Rules, you know."

  Irving was shocked. "Hey! We can't let that happen! Particularly to her! I mean, it's not right!"

  The boy seemed so mature and so much an adult that it was a surprise sometimes when the naive kid in him surfaced as it did now. Poquah sighed and said, "Irving, we are on a ship owned by a principality of Hell heading toward, and I repeat, toward, the evil continent of Yuggoth. Aboard are a considerable number of lost souls as well as—almost certainly—demons in sufficient numbers that we could not stand against them if they decided they wanted all of us. To top it all off, we are in the middle of the ocean. Just what do you think we could do if indeed we had the right, the duty, or the obligation to intervene?"

  The boy was somewhat taken aback by the catalog of their weaknesses, but deep down there was a moral sensibility that couldn't walk away from this. Still, he had to think pretty fast.

  "I think we are supposed to," he replied a bit hesitantly.

  "Indeed? Why?"

  "Because she's black like me, and I don't ever remember seeing another around here, so the two of us being on this ship this trip has to mean something in the destiny department or something, right?"

  "Or it could be sheer coincidence. I suspect there are a hundred million or so of her race about, just not many that get to Husaquahr. And I'm unaware of any monopoly on dealings with Heaven, Hell, or the spirits in between by one race versus another. She is also brown, not black, and you are not only not black, either, you are only half-related to her in any genetic sense. Now, if she'd been a red Indian, I might well have agreed with you on the destiny business—we have some relatives here in a remote land but nothing all that close, and so someone of that type showing up would be highly unusual, if not unique. But a girl of one of the Moorish races—don't be absurd. A million times more common than an Int, for example."