Sure enough, as Bill looked to the spot that Rick had indicated, he saw the cottony sheath of gray clouds lifting like a curtain on the next section of a play, revealing the battlements of a particularly flat-looking castle with stubby towers and a droopy flag dangling from a droopy mast.
"Surely we can knock on that castle's doors and ask for directions!" Rick suggested, his spirits plainly rising.
After a quick, if soggy trek, they found themselves standing before the portcullis of the castle.
"Yoo-hoo!" called Rick. "Is anyone home? We are but weary, hungry and thirsty travelers searching for a warm fire, a cold drink of — water, maybe a hot meal and simple directions!"
A door opened behind the guardian bars of the portcullis. A nose peeked out. "Who's there!" whined a nasal voice, reminiscent of a chipmunk with a bad head cold.
"Rick and Bill!" said the Supernal Hero in the friendliest, most diplomatic voice he could manage.
"Rick and Bill aren't here!"
The door slammed shut. Bill pounded on the metal-studded wood slats of the portcullis. "Hey, bowbhead. We're Rick and Bill! We need some help!"
"Please, Bill," hissed Rick. "We need to be a little friendlier if we want to get anywhere. We're not exactly in a Trooper barracks, you know."
Thank Zoroaster for that, thought Bill, who had taken to wearing body armor to bed after that spate of D.I. murders by recruits in the Beta Dacroni Sector. Officials claimed it was the effect of Zeta-wave radiation from the primary that had driven the killers out of their teeny-tinys — but Bill knew the truth. After all, he'd been a recruit once, under the heel of the much-loathed, always-feared, Deathwish Drang. One of his dearest dreams during those months of grueling torture, a dream undoubtedly shared by everyone else in the barracks, had been to preside over the torture and eventual execution of Drang.
The door creaked open and the nose peered out again. "Oh! You're Rick and Bill. And ye say you want directions? Well, heh-heh, you go to hell — and I'll tell you how to find that!"
"Actually," cried Rick, desperately, "we're salesmen! Right! And we're selling Grandma Goldfarb's Old Fashioned Monkey-Liver Hair Restorer, along with a special offer, today only, on Grandpa Goldfarb's Guardia Gorilla-Gland Potency Serum! Think about that — have you ever seen an undersexed gorilla? The answer, of course, is no. And it — it —" said Rick, running out of inspiration.
The door squeaked back open tentatively, and the nose stuck out again. "Don't need hair restorer much," it wheezed (and Bill could see from the tangled growths of hair coming from the nostrils that this statement was quite true). "But there has been a slight problem around here lately that the latter potion might resolve." A moment of silence; Bill could almost hear the rusty gears grinding. "Very well, strangers. Put down your weapons, and I'll take you in for an audience with the master."
Gladly, Bill and Rick removed their swords and daggers and threw them on the ground. The door of the castle swung open all the way, and a narrow man in a shapeless hat from which a tangle of limp hair hung down to his shoulders leaned out. Seeing that they were disarmed he hit a lever, and with a cranking wheeze and a rattle of chains the portcullis slowly clanked up. "Walk this way," he said through a protuberant nose, his small badger eyes gesturing them to follow. The tall thin man spun round and stumbled rapidly away, clicking his heels against the stone floor with every step.
Bill and Rick attempted the strange loping shuffle and click, but to little effect. By the time they'd reached the courtyard of the castle, they'd given up entirely.
"Did you read that sign?" asked Rick.
"Sign?" said Bill. "What sign? I'm was too busy trying to walk this ridiculous walk."
"Maybe it's significant. I better just run back and take a look."
Bill continued on after the strange-looking man, stepping out into the gray daylight of the courtyard. The first thing that he was aware of was that the man who'd let them in had disappeared. The second was the dozens of unsheathed swords and arrowheads pointed toward his most vulnerable body. Connected to said weapons was a collection of the ugliest creatures Bill had ever seen in his life, and Bill had seen some very ugly things, especially after a good drink and looking into the mirror. Orcs and trolls crouched and slobbered, brandishing pointed weapons. Gnomes and dwarves raised axes and knives.
"Here we go, Bill!" said Rick from back in the passageway. "It's a bit dim back here, but I think I can read it. Says, 'Abandon ... Hope ... All ... Ye ... Who ... Enter ... Here.' Now what do you suppose they mean by that, Bill?"
Bill didn't answer. He was too busy spinning about in a circle, looking for a way out.
Unhappily, with very little success.
CHAPTER 13
IN LOW DUNGEON
The dungeon was the pits. Certainly not the most pleasant place in the universe, though there was a good possibility that it was fighting for bottom place as the worst. To help alleviate his black depression Bill tried to find a good side to look upon. It took some time. He finally came up with the feeble argument that, basically, perhaps he had to admit it was better than boot camp. The swill they fed him was superior, mixed up with the occasional cockroach for protein. In fact, since the mixture had apparently been left lying around for weeks after preparation, underneath the mold he scratched off, it tended to be fermented, which left Bill with a most satisfactory buzz. Though it didn't exactly make him drunk since he was only presented with this repulsive feast at intervals, at least he didn't have to stay sober all of the time.
Cruel fate! Would he never have a chance to see his cherished Irma again?
Bill despaired of the very hope of it, muttering and moaning damp-eyedly to himself in self-pity. It was very cathartic.
The one thing that irked him the most here though, were the chains. There were rings around his neck, his wrists and his arms, and these were connected to thick, heavy chains that were in turn connected to the wall. When he was sleeping or when he was just sitting, they weren't too bad, but they made moving around very difficult. Since it wasn't likely that he'd be able to get through the non-existent windows, or the narrow bars, he didn't see the purpose of the chains, so they were particularly annoying. He complained about them every time the hunchback came to feed him and change his slop-bucket, but since the bent little dwarf seemed to be deaf, as well as simple, it did little good.
Too bad about that business in the courtyard.
By hindsight, 20-20 hindsight, it looked like it really hadn't been such a great idea to come to this particular castle after all. It had seemed such a harmless enough castle, and who could have predicted the army of creatures awaiting them in the courtyard. If only they hadn't come up with that Gorilla-Gland business — then the shambling servant wouldn't have let them in, and they wouldn't have had to try and prove its efficacy, with dozens of weapons trained on them. Naturally, since it did not exist, Rick had the really wonderful idea of pretending that his flask full of wine was the special medicine they were hawking. "To be rubbed on locally," he'd explained. "Arrrrrr! As a matter of fact, this is a sample. Why don't you just keep it and use it at your leisure. Meanwhile, my companion and I must push off and be about our business."
Unfortunately, the assembled bestiary had insisted upon a demonstration of the efficacy of the medicine then and there, stripping their captives of their trousers and then splashing the "Gorilla-Gland" fluid on the appropriate parts.
Predictably, the results were less than impressive. If anything, the chilled wine had the reverse, shrinking effect. The muttering grew in volume, nor were they at all convinced when Rick shouted out that it sometimes took a while to take effect.
Alas, not one troll, not one dwarf, nor even an orc, bought this line. The duo were dutifully marched off to separate dungeons without even the dignity of the return of their trousers.
So here was Bill, rotting away in the dark. He'd no idea at all how many days had passed, since there was no difference here in the smelly hay-strewn cell between day and nig
ht. There was just the occasional serving of fermented swill to mark the crawling passage of time.
Oh well, thought Bill. This wasn't exactly the Vulcanian Riviera, but at least he could loaf around all day on his back and get some much-needed rest. For as long as he could remember, his life had been just go-go-go! If there wasn't a group of raw recruits to train and mutilate, it was some hare-brained emergency to deal with. Besides, here he could actually do something that he hadn't done much in years and years.
Sleep.
Ever since that recruiter had come stumping along with that one-robot band and signed him up for the service, Bill had forgotten how very much he truly enjoyed a good bit of the good old sack time.
Now, without electronic reveille electrically juicing up every fiber of his being, not to mention his body, at some repulsive early hour of the morning, he found that he could drift in the restful pools of somnolence for delirious long stretches, and so for awhile he did just that, putting paid to his sleep debt. But when Bill got his fill of sleeping, it really did get boring after awhile; he realized that there really wasn't much else to do down here!
Fortunately, after the first day or two (three? five? twenty?) of mildly alcohol-numbed tedium, Bill remembered that he'd brought along a book. Or rather, many books, come to think of it! Yes! For still there in his sinus cavity was the BLEEDER'S DIGEST he had so fortuitously lifted from the Terminal Ward at the Hospital on Colostomy IV.
And one of the books, it turned out, was a very large shared-universe theme collection entitled HERETICS IN HADES. As Bill had thoroughly enjoyed a previous shared-universe anthology he'd read entitled DEBTOR'S WORLD, he dove into the spine-connected readout with great glee:
HERETICS IN HADES
"Gilganosh Meets Two Pulp Fiction Writers"
by
Robot Goldilocks
"War is Hell"
Popular military expression.
If Gilganosh was truly born with the dead lo! so many centuries ago, then now he truly was bored of the dead.
With his mighty Chewed limbs he ran ahunting amongst the wild Outhouses, wantonly skewering hell-beasties with his bow and his sharp arrows, conversing with famous Caesars of Rome and Kings of Africa and other dead folk condemned to the perditious gray lands of Hades, and flexing his biceps for the New Tourists and their new-fangled electronic Nikons and Leicas, their Sony videocams. See how the Great King of Uruk prances about half-naked for these strange people in their Bermuda shorts and their Hawaiian shirts and their dark sunglasses. Oh mighty King of cities that are now dust! Oh hairy, wild King! Thy head is as a lion's with a glorious mane; thy feet are like the tanks of the neo-Nazi who would defeat the mighty Pluto himself; thy droppings are as great as logs.
Socrates! Plato! Augustus Caesar! Agamemnon! Sumeria! Babylonia! Greece! Now that the historical name-dropping fit is quit from these rapid keyboarding fingers to show off the erudition and sophistication of yours truly, I, the author, Robot Goldilocks, not wasting a drop of research from my historical novel, I, GILGANOSH, nor from one of my early non-fictional efforts, A GUIDE TO EARLY SOFTCORE PORN MYTHS, I shall plunge forward on the tides of my beautiful, facile prose and segue most expertly (like a ballerina pirouetting to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake? Like Joseph Conrad, or Philip Roth or, better yet, those fabulous writers of yore, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore!) into just why Gilganosh was bored.
Oh Gilganosh! Oh mighty hero of millennia past! You're bored, you putz, because you have been alive for century after century, here in Hades where you can't really die! You're bored because you miss your good buddy, Inky-Dinky-Doo, with whom you've had a quarrel and who promises to hack off and serve you up your barrelwide backside on a platter if you ever cross chariots again!
However, harken! A great adventure lies just around the corner! Coming down that hill yonder! Is that a great mythological beast pawing and snorting up dust as it spumes across the wilderness?
No! Why, the thing is as anachronistic as the digital Mickey Mouse watch upon thy mighty wrist!
Lo! It's a Ford Bronco four by four!
The mighty vehicle roared along through the bush of the Hades Outhouse territory, while the driver and his passenger argued amicably, chewing over a favorite old subject, like Cthulhu chews his cud.
"Lordy, H.P!" drawled the beefy, red faced one, sweating and grinning as he kept the wheel of the truck under control. "I don't think there's a shee-eet of a lot of a contest! I was a hell of a lot weirder than you were!"
"Were not!"
"Was too!"
They were speaking, of course, these dead fantasists, of their days on Earth before they had died and gone to Hades, that great mythical hole in the ground curiously mutated now as though by some techno-thriller writer's imagination on downers, coupled perhaps with some warped Latin teacher's lust for Roman history (there was a curious preponderance of the Roman Empire hereabouts, it seemed). They were talking about the halcyon days of yore, the nineteen twenties and the thirties, when both strode like colossi through the pulpy pages of ARGOSY, INSCRUTABLE ORIENTAL SPICY YARNS and, of course, that paragon of the tale of the outré, WEIRD TALES. Both had died in 1936, Howard of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head upon learning that his beloved Ma was dying; Lovecraft of cancer of the esophagus, almost surely brought about by his curious diet, and perhaps the secret indulgence in certain fungi. Yes, yes, stable characters indeed, both of them; their one-way trips to Hades had done them both a load of good. Howard had his Ma around now forever; Lovecraft a feast of history, the outré — and fungi, and the total certainty that behind all this strange business were none other but the Old Ones themselves!
Living myths in a land of mythic living! Ah! Sic transit gloria mundi, Tuesday, or something like that.
"Shee — eet, H.P. Ah'm from Texas," proclaimed Bob Howard proudly. "We just grow everything bigger there, and my weird's bigger than yours! Did you pound out reams and reams of oriental mysteries, westerns, spicy romances, supernatural monster stories and finally, did you help invent that pin-ay-cull of literature, sword and sorcery, featuring a hero swiped directly from Rousseau and Burroughs, the classic character Conan?" He paused for a deep breath. "Did you off yourself at the age of thirty after years of espousing the heroic life in penny-a-word pulp rags because you couldn't live without Mommy? Did you drool over bare-chested goddesses and amazons in your thumping, pumping prose when you didn't have the nerve to go out and lose your cherry to a two-dollah whore in Houston?" Howard shook his corpulent head, a lop-sided grin on his wide face. "Now, H.P., we corresponded lots back in those days. Now, I admit, mebbe your stories were a mite weirder than mine at times — but deep down, I'm in a different class of weird. Big weird. Texas weirdo. Living weird! Dead now, of course, but weird dead is weird. There ain't nothin' more way out than that!"
Howard Phillips Lovecraft shook his head with etiolated pity.
"Ah, my poor Robert E.! Tsk and tsk again. You died much too young to have the opportunity to truly perfect the subtle points of weirdness, as I did. I realize, Robert, that you were basically a racist, but that was purely cultural, a product of your backward pigsty Texan environment. My racism was truly a moldy bacterial culture, tended and pruned carefully in my decaying Providence basement! You were very fuzzy headed about your Aryan sympathies, Bob. I openly proclaimed the superiority of the white race. In fact, I'm sure you are aware that much of my actual paltry income was earned as a ghost writer. But did you realize that in the twenties, I had a student in a correspondence course for the Famous Bigot Writer's School who paid me to ghost a book called MEIN KAMPF? Yes, as a matter of fact, I met the fellow back in New Berlin a few months ago down here. As soon as he finishes his present thirteen millennia neck deep in sulfuric acid, while suffering terminal athlete's foot, and before he starts a thousand year swim in the main cesspit, he wants to get in some fast outlining. Looks as though he's in the market for another book!
"Anyway, did you live on cornflakes and milk half your life? Did
you create, possibly the sickest fictional mythology known to man? Did you live in a rotting old house in a particularly diseased state, slowly festering away on the putrid fumes of illness, cranking out loony letters to fellow pulp writers when you should have been doing some honest penny-a-word westerns? Like you, Bob, who made more money than your local doctor. Now, admit it, Bob. You were most definitely weird, but I, my friend, to put it in one syllable words that even a Texan can understand, I was not only much weirder — I was the fruitcake of the century!"
Their argument was suddenly cut short as the four by four plowed into the solid form standing staunch and unafraid before it.
The Bronco stopped dead.
When H.P. and Robert E. recovered, they found themselves staring up into the frowning face of the biggest man that either of them had ever seen.
"Hey, slimeball," roared Gilganosh affectionately, tearing off a fender angrily. "Don't you watch where you're going?"
Gilganosh was dying inside.
Oh, not because he had just been hit by a four by four of the automotive persuasion; there were far greater thorns in his side, routine passengers of life. Bemusedly he plucked out some of the thorns and discarded them. No, it was because he grieved at the anger that his greatest friend, Inky-Dinky-Do held for him. He felt worse than Shadrach in the furnace must have felt; no starry ascent to the heavens for Great Gilganosh; it was all purely downward to the Earth for this Son of Man, borne on failing nightwings, perhaps to be impaled on some awful tower of glass below.
Gilganosh looked upon the two occupants of the Bronco with distaste. "You've got the whole wide open plains of the Outhouse to roam in, and you pinheads manage to drive with your eyes shut and hit me."
The soft, fat, largish man with a crew-cut and a ruddy complexion managed to struggle out from his seat behind the wheel, to waddle corpulently forward. "Jumpin' Jehosophatical jack rabbits! It's Conan!" he hollered. "Conan of Cimmeria, I swear, right down to the corpuscles!"
On the Planet of Tasteless Pleasures Page 10