A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  It was inevitable that some of those who had left would return on hearing the firing. I emptied my machine gun down the steps and blew three apart. When a man stuck his head out through the door below, I threw the machine gun at him. He dodged back in time to avoid being hit.

  “There must be more than one outside that door,” I said. “We could go around them; there are at least five other staircases to the next story. But I don’t like to have them behind us. I think I’ll use the grenade.”

  I went down the stairs while Trish, from above, kept her .45 pointed at the door. She had insisted that she was an expert in using the big powerful weapon, but I have no faith in its accuracy, especially if handled by a woman who, though strong, is still not a strong man. I did not want to be shot by the .45 while she was trying to hit our enemies.

  I listened a while and determined that at least three men were talking out there. I could not detect the odor of more than three, but the gunpowder was so strong I was handicapped.

  “Jesus Christ!” a man said. “He can’t have much ammo left, even if he did get all the stuff from the blokes upstairs. I say we ought to rush him.”

  “Don’t be a dumbshit,” another said.

  “Well, hell, if we stay here, he can go down another flight of steps and come up behind us. Or just leave us sitting here.”

  “Fine,” said a third. “Let Noli and his bunch handle him.”

  “Hell, they ain’t got any ammo left! What’ll they handle him with?”

  “We got all that’s left,” the first man said, “and that ain’t much. Six rounds between us three. Don’t waste no more.”

  “If they got more than we think they got, our goose is cooked,” the second said.

  “We could take off,” said one who sounded like a Yankee. “Shit, this ain’t panning out like it was supposed to. This was supposed to be a breeze, a pushover. I ain’t seen anything like this since I was in the Congo.”

  “We took Noli’s money, and so we’re staying,” said another. “Besides, if we run out now, we’ll lose the other five thousand and maybe a hell of a lot more. There’s that gold he promised us.”

  “How you gonna spend all that money if you’re six feet under?”

  I pulled the pin on the grenade, counted to three, and tossed it. It struck with a metallic sound. There was a silence, then a series of yells and scuffle of feet. I flattened against the wall, turned my head away, and jammed my fingers in my ears. Even so, the roar half-deafened me, and the smoke billowing through the arch set me to coughing.

  When the smoke was cleared, I looked in.

  All three were dead against the walls, their clothes and parts of their bodies blown off. Unfortunately, the explosion had ruined two guns, bending their barrels slightly and set off the ammunition in the third and blowing it apart.

  38

  The crossbow bolts and the remaining bullets were disposed of inside the next two minutes. We were on the ground floor and crossing the great entry room, lit by a number of bulbs in artificial torches in sconces, when a shadow fell across us from above. I jumped and whirled; Trish screamed. A suit of armor that belonged to my 15th-century ancestor, John Loamges de Clizieux William Cloamby, Baron of Grandrith, struck the floor beside Trish. She fired up at the dark gallery, and a shadowy figure ran along the hall of the gallery, hugging the wall as it crouched. The .45 was emptied, but a richochet must have hit the man, because he staggered over and fell across the railing. A man appeared at the far end of the entry room with a pistol in his hand and fired. My bolt took him in the shoulder and he whirled with the impact and fell. I loaded the crossbow again, while another man ran out from the hallway and dived to get the fallen automatic. He fired and missed, too, and I did not. That was his only chance, because the gun was now empty.

  The wounded man was gray with shock. I said, “How many more ambushers?”

  He stared at me with big pain-glazed eyes and said, “None. Everybody else is down there with Caliban and his men.”

  “Any guns among them?” I said.

  “No. Noli let us have what was left because you were still armed. He’s got enough men to run over three Calibans and then some.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” I said, and I cut his throat.

  Trish became even paler and swayed. “Do you have to do that?” she whispered.

  “I don’t want live enemies at my back,” I said.

  We went through three rooms and down a hall towards the rear of the castle and then down a tightly corkscrewing case of stone steps. This led to the dungeon, which was a huge room with a number of cells with iron bars, some old torture machines, and, in one wall, the stone door to the atom bomb shelter. The room was well lit by a number of electric torches in sconces and several batteries of lamps overhead. It was a dead end room. The stone door to the shelter was pitted and gouged with Noli’s efforts to blast it open.

  The room was a babel of shouts and screams and a chaos of struggling men. I paused a few seconds. The chaos became a pattern, fluid, but still a pattern.

  At the far end of the room was Caliban. He was not totally visible because he was immersed in bodies. About 14 men were trying to get at him. Some were trying to get away, however, I quickly saw. They held knives, the butts of pistols, brass knuckles, and one had a mace taken from the wall upstairs. Some were armed only with their fists or were trying to use their feet or their hands, karate style.

  The goal of their weapons seemed to be a whirlwind. He could not be halted long enough for anybody to get in a crippling blow or thrust. The flesh around him was a bag trying to contain one man, and when the man pushed, the bag swelled out on one side and collapsed on the other. His hands were a blur; they chopped, poked, and his elbows rammed, and his feet kicked frontwards and backwards. He did not seem to be holding a knife, but blood was spurting from stabs of his fingers. Shrieks of agony rose as he snapped wrist bones and fractured shinbones, crushed insteps, punctured an eye, tore an ear off, slammed a man so hard against three others that they all fell.

  I have never seen a man move so swiftly or powerfully or skillfully. He seemed to be more of a natural force than a mere man. Yet, he was doomed. In a matter of seconds, a knife would go through a soft part or the butt of a gun slam into his skull and momentarily make him open to other weapons. Most of his clothes had been torn off, and he was splashed with blood everywhere.

  There were unconscious or dead men on the floor around him. Eight at least. And six sitting up on the floor, too hurt to get up.

  The two old men were halfway down the room, their backs against the wall. They were clubbing at the five men against them. Four men lay on the floor.

  Simmons and Rivers went down even as I took stock of the situation. The slender Rivers succumbed to brass knuckles against his temple. The apish Simmons, bellowing as if he were enjoying the fight, fell several seconds later. A huge, black-haired, blue-jawed man stepped in just as Simmons brought the barrel of his weapon down on the head of a bandy-legged red-haired man. The huge man slammed Simmons on the side of the neck with the butt of a pistol. Simmons dropped his gun, and another man thrust a knife into the white-haired gorilla chest.

  The old men were covered with blood, and their clothes were half-torn off. But they had given a battle of which young men would have been proud.

  There was blood on the walls, on the floor, and on almost everybody in the room. Only Noli seemed untouched. He stood in the center of the room, his back to me, waving a long knife and bellowing orders, unheard, at those around Caliban. The men who had downed Simmons and Rivers joined the others. Nobody saw us standing at the foot of the stairs.

  Trish, behind me, said, “Doc!”

  “You stay here,” I said.

  I handed her the.crossbow.

  “One bolt only left.”

  I did not tell her not to waste it. It would have been an insult and a stupid thing to say.

  I roared out like a male of The Folk challenging a leopard or defying a ma
le of a strange band. I lacked the throat sac, but I have very powerful lungs.

  That froze everybody except Caliban, who took advantage of the paralysis to twist a man’s head until the neck snapped.

  Nobody paid him any attention. Noli turned slowly as his bald head and face lost much of its redness.

  I roared again and charged. Noli crouched with his knife up.

  I don’t really know what happened next. I did a bad thing, that is, a nonsurvival thing. I succumbed to my rage, to my desire to kill the man who had assaulted me and had endangered my wife. I saw through a red shot with black. And I recovered my senses only at the end.

  Why his men did not interfere, I do not know. Perhaps things went too swiftly. Perhaps they, who had suffered so much from Caliban and his men while Noli stood aside, wanted to see how he would handle himself.

  They saw.

  I had taken his knife away from him. I had ripped his clothes off. He was entirely naked. Somehow, whether with the knife or with my fingers, I had cut around his anus, and severed it from the surrounding connecting tissues. And then, while he screamed, I raised him with one arm by a buttock, while holding the end of his bloody anus with the other. And I shot him away with my arm, giving him a half-spin.

  Screaming, he soared. Every bit of adrenalin possible to my body must have surged through me, I threw him so far.

  His intestines, approximately 24 feet long, trailed out behind him and then tore loose from his body.

  He landed on his face and sprawled with arms out. He was still living, though gray with shock. His intestines were strung out on the floor behind him.

  He jerked once and died.

  I dropped the bloody end.

  I had shocked even myself. I was not aware until then that I had ejaculated.

  Since I had copulated with Irish, I had not had an orgasm. The several killings in between her and Noli had not, as before, resulted in ejaculations. I had been aware of semi-erections during them but had grown so accustomed that I had ignored them. If I thought about them at all, I hoped that the aberration was weakening.

  I knew now that my unconscious forces had been summoning up a store, and conserving it, for just this.

  The ecstasy had been missing or I had been so overcome with rage that I was unconscious of it.

  39

  Nobody moved. They could not accept what they had seen. And, when their senses thawed, they began to realize what they faced.

  They were eighteen effectives. Behind them was Doc Caliban and before them was someone who, at that moment, must have seemed even more terrible.

  Caliban, during the scene with Noli, had been as stone-struck as the others. He regained his volition first and struck twice, once with a kick in the base of a spine and immediately after with a chop on the side of a neck. The eighteen had become sixteen.

  Nine turned towards him. I charged the remaining seven with a knife, and the room became a melee again. My knife went into a belly, but I took a gash from another across my shoulder. A throat got the first two inches of my knife, and a pair of brass knuckles banged and bloodied my cheek. The third man to get my knife took it in the solar plexus, and then it was knocked out of my hand by a blow from the butt of a rifle. The hand was paralyzed for a minute despite which I grabbed a wrist with my left hand while kicking a man’s kneecap loose with my foot, jerked, and tore the man’s arm loose from his socket. I whirled him around and into the bodies of two rushing me. All three went down. I leaped past a mace—but not without being gashed—kicked one of the men getting up off the floor and broke his neck, whirled, and leaped at the man with the mace.

  He swung mightily; I dodged back and then in, felt the mace crack along one shoulder, rammed into him, and carried him backwards against the wall where his skull was cracked. The mace was close enough for me to leap at it like a cat after a mouse and pick it up before the survivor could get it. He had a knife, but he backed away, and then flipped it up and caught it, adjusted it; and threw it. My mace was on its way; it hit the knife and both went off course. The man was enabled to duck the mace, and immediately thereafter he decided he had had more than enough. He tried to run away, but I caught him by the back of the neck and squeezed. His face turned purple, and he dangled at arm’s length while I rammed him twice with my fist in the kidneys. When he was released, he sprawled motionless on the floor.

  I whirled. Three of the nine were down. A man was stepping back, preparing to throw a knife at Caliban. Now that there were fewer to crowd around, the danger for Caliban was, paradoxically, greater. There was room to throw knives and wield rifles as clubs.

  The man threw his arm back, and then he stiffened. The knife fell from his hand, and he was on the floor. I had heard the twang of the string and the zzzt! of the bolt. Trish had not wasted her one shot.

  I was glad that it was gone, because I did not want her to have it when the end would come.

  I charged in, ripped the ears off a man, and, as he turned screaming, chopped his ribs with the side of my palm. He fell forward, and I drove his chin up with my knee and cracked his neck.

  Caliban had seized the wrist of a man stabbing at him with a knife, run ahead, turning the man, twisting the wrist so the knife dropped, and then stopped and pulled him over his back. The man cartwheeled through the air and slammed up against a wall.

  Three were left. One charged me although I think he was more interested in getting by me than at me. I might have let them go but I did not think there should be anybody left who could testify about the events here. The man charging me was short but enormous of girth, weighing an estimated 340 pounds and with the short arms and legs of a champion weight-lifter. His nose had been smashed and he was bleeding from his chest. I ran towards him and kicked him in the belly. He went oof! as his air left him. Before he could recover, I broke three of his fingers and then chopped him again across the nose. Blood spurted from his nose and mouth. My knuckle drove his eye back into the socket, and my knee knocked him unconscious. I picked up a knife and split open the huge belly.

  The other two had been caught by Caliban, who had smashed their heads together. They dangled at the end of each hand, while he held them by the necks and squeezed. When their life was gone, he dropped them.

  Only then did I realize that he was wearing a metallic, razor-edged, sharp-pointed device on the middle finger of both hands. It was this that made so much blood spurt when he seemed to have barely touched them.

  The only sound in the huge room was the labored breathing of Caliban and myself. Both of us were naked except for our shoes, bloodied all over, and bleeding from a dozen deep or minor gashes. The stench of sweat, blood, piss and shit was strong, exceeded only by the not-yet-gone odor of terror from the now dead men.

  40

  Trish started towards Caliban. He gestured, indicating she should stay away, and said, “No matter what happens, Trish, you are not to interfere! Do you understand? You are not to interfere in any way until it’s over!”

  She shrank back, her bloody hand covering her bloody mouth. Her eyes were wide and fixed.

  I backed away because I wanted a little time to try to bring him to his senses. He followed me, stalking like a huge bronze-skinned tiger.

  “Caliban,” I said, “there is your cousin. Our cousin. Alive and safe. She will tell you I had nothing whatsoever to do with her abduction. Or her rape. On the contrary, I saved her. Ask her! She will tell you what a terrible mistake you have made.”

  I did not care that the Nine had decreed that one must bring back the head and genitals of the other. In that moment, I had made the decision that I was no longer a servant of the Nine. I was their enemy, even if it meant losing immortality. I could no longer pay the price. Faust, you might say, wanted his soul back.

  He said nothing but moved closer. Then he stopped and removed the finger-ring-knives and his shoes and socks. He wanted us to meet, naked and bare-handed, fighting as two males of The Folk fought for the chieftainship.

  “Cal
iban,” I said, “do not misunderstand me. I would never plead for myself. But I do not want us to be the tools and playthings of the Nine. I believe that the Nine have done us great evil for their own cryptic reasons. They arranged for Trish to be abducted by that man pretending to be me. They arranged for the body of a woman to be found, and they probably had her killed just for that reason. The Nine probably had something to do with the Kenyans’ attempt to obliterate me. You know what enormous, if invisible, power they have.

  “Listen! I am convinced that my own birth, in its very extraordinary circumstances, was due to the Nine’s machinations. There are some very puzzling things in my uncle’s diary. I think he was the victim of the Nine, and that I am the result of an experiment by the Nine. I think that they arranged that I should be adopted by a female of The Folk and raised as a wild boy in the jungle among the subhumans.

  “I am convinced that their designs have been even deeper. I think they had something to do with the madness of our father.”

  Trish gasped and said, “Your father? Your father?”

  I moved a step backwards. Caliban advanced by one step. His great hands, seemingly muscled with bridge cables beneath the glistening red-brown skin, were out and half-clenched. He was saying, as he had said on the natural bridge over the chasm, “No judo or karate or tricks. Power and speed only. We shall see who is the strongest and swiftest.”

  I wondered if he had heard anything I had said.

  I refused to back any more. I waited.

  I said, “Caliban, you haven’t read the Grandrith family records. Your family’s record. You don’t know of the mystery surrounding our paternal grandfather, do you? He shot himself at the age of 55. He looked as if he were thirty. He had three sons, but his wife, when she was very sick and thought she was dying, told an aunt that her husband had been sterile. The aunt wrote this in a diary in a code, which I cracked easily. The aunt said that she suspected a very tall, very powerful, very handsome but elderly gentleman from Norway who visited them quite frequently. The aunt wrote that she would think her suspicions insane, because the old gentleman looked as if he were over 90. But he had a very strong personality, a strange, compelling, and sometimes repelling, radiation. Radiation is the word she used, I suppose, to communicate an outpouring of psychic strength. And she knew that he had seduced one of the maids in the wine cellar. The maid testified to that.