“Not my bus. Wait for the next one.”
After the stairwell vanished, the wall remained blank. There came a rumbling sound. The floor quivered a little.
“Uh-oh.”
“We should have taken it,” Snowclaw said.
“We have to get to the ground floor of this place, get the hell
“Agreed, but …” Snowclaw reached up and tapped the ceiling. “Look.”
They waited. When Snowclaw was able to place the flat of his palm against the ceiling, the far corner generated another doorway, this one gliding across the wall at a brisk pace.
“Get ready.”
Suddenly, a sliding wall dropped from the ceiling, slamming down to cut the room in half. The moving doorway didn’t make it past the new corner.
“Well, freeze my icicle,” Snowclaw said.
“Hey, look.”
Behind them a new door had materialized. They sprinted for it. As they did, the rumbling sound grew to a tremendous roar, rocking the flagstone floors, shivering the walls and deafening their ears. The next few minutes were a Keystone comedy of sliding walls, dropping partitions, narrow escapes, rushing from crazy room to crazier room.
“Over here!”
“No, this way!”
“God.”
Floors began to tilt, walls to list inward, outward, generating migraine-provoking angles and nauseating perceptual tricks. Walls bulged and ceilings drooped. Bottomless wells appeared in the floor.
“Yahh!”
“Watch yourself, Gene.”
“Jesus Christ.”
They came to a sheer drop at the end of a corridor, and this time it was Snowclaw who almost went sailing over the edge. Gene grabbed a handful of white fur and yanked back, though he really wouldn’t have been of much good had Snowclaw actually been falling. The white beast must have weighed over three hundred pounds. Snowclaw grabbed the carved stone of the pilaster below the archway and swung himself back.
“Thanks,” he said.
They looked down. The doorway hung in the curving wall of a great circular shaft plunging endlessly into the heart of the castle. It seemed to go up just as far, lighted in both directions by arrays of jewel-torches every twenty or thirty feet.
“I think I’m getting ill, Gene. I can’t tolerate heights.”
“What, a big fellow like you?”
“Drift crawlers too.”
“What’re those?”
“Little nasty things that … ahh, let’s get away from here.”
They moved back down the corridor, which by this time had transformed itself from straight to serpentine, now twisting and coiling back on itself, leading nowhere. The floor still heaved, and sounds like huge bowling balls rolling came from within the walls. At long last the corridor ended, and they came out into a rotundalike room with a white polished dome ceiling. Here was the hub from which the spokes of at least a dozen other corridors radiated outward. Of course, the room had not been here when they had entered the corridor.
“Eeny meeny miney moe. That one.”
“What, exactly, is ‘eeny meeny miney moe’?”
Gene didn’t answer. This corridor looked straight and stayed that way for a long while. There were no exits, However, after what seemed like a quarter of a mile it terminated in a stairwell leading down.
And down. And down still. And when it finally ended in a small featureless stone chamber, the only way out — save for doubling back — was another doorway initiating a second stairwell, which led … up. And up.
And up. They climbed for ten minutes.
Gene said, “I’m bushed.” He sat down heavily; in the process he let go of his attache case. It went sliding down the steps, caught a corner, flipped, and went tumbling. Gene watched it until it was out of sight, though the sounds of its crashing continued to be audible until long after.
“Why did you hang on to that thing, that carrying box, whatever it was?”
“Little piece of reality. I had it when I blundered into this place.”
“I see. Me, I wasn’t carrying anything. I was at the bottom of a crevasse, having been stupid enough to push my sled across the ice bridge over it without testing the damned thing first. The sled went over, I clawed the wall all the way down until a ledge stopped me — crawled along that a ways until I came to the mouth of an ice cave. Carved by water, I guessed, and I was hoping to follow it back to the bed of an underground stream, but a little ways back it turned from ice to stone block … and I wound up here.” Snowclaw sat down next to Gene. “Good thing too. Never would have made it out of that crevasse.”
“I was thinking …”
“Eh?”
“You say you didn’t understand ‘eeny meeny miney moe’?”
“Well, I got the drift.”
“The words were unfamiliar. Right?”
“Right.”
“But you heard the words.”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“Which means that the magical running translation that goes on around here breaks down when you start using essentially untranslatable words and phrases.”
“Makes sense. Does that phrase you used mean anything?”
Gene thought about it. “Not really.”
“Well, there you are.”
Gene frowned. “Still don’t get it. I mean, to me you speak perfect English — better than that, completely natural colloquial American. But I damn well know you’re not speaking it.”
“And you seem to have an unnatural command of Back-Ice Chawaharsee.”
“You see? Chaw … Chawa …”
“Chawaharsee.”
“That’s mostly a growl to me. Okay, but … now, take that guy I first met when I came in. The one who almost knocked me over. He had a bit of an accent. Why? Why didn’t he speak colloquial American?”
“I don’t know, Gene.” Snowclaw turned it over in his mind. “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we became such good buddies so quickly.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. For some reason — though for the life of me I can’t think of what it could be — there’s a rapport between us.”
“I agree. Maybe that’s it. If true, then I’d expect the guy who owns this place to speak in Elizabethan couplets.”
“What? That came out as something like ‘snow queen poetry.’ ”
“Close.” Gene scratched his head, then brushed dust off his rumpled gray three-piece suit. “You’re right. I didn’t like that little guy. Screaming all the time.”
“Neither did I, though we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
“We don’t know that he’s dead.”
“If that leaping purple thing had grabbed me, I’d be dead, and I don’t die easily.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
Presently Gene said, “Hear that?”
Snowclaw cocked a pointy ear. “What?”
“Nothing. Things have settled down a bit.”
