As he gained the lip of the gully, he saw the city, a fanciful grouping of domes, spires, and free-form shapes sitting on the plain. The buildings were of a single color, a faded blue-green. That it was a ruined city was not so much apparent as sensed. Silence sat on the plain, an ancient, empty silence.
He regarded the city for a long moment.
“The cover of
He checked to the right, then to the left. Nothing else in sight.
He struck out across the plain.
Five
Castle
Jeremy was not quite sure when the dream had begun. Call it an extended hallucination. Was it when he had heard the police? Had the wild delusions started then? Or had he actually jumped off the roof? Maybe it was like that story he read (Jeremy had not read much fiction beyond comic books, but what he had read he remembered), the one by Ambrose Bierce — “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Yeah, that was it. Maybe he was hallucinating this whole thing in one flash as he plummeted.
If he was in the middle of falling to his death, he sure was taking his good old time about it. His best guess was that he had been in the castle at least two days.
He knew it was a castle, because it looked like one on the inside, and also because he had seen bits and pieces of the outside through a few of the windows. Through other windows … well, he wasn’t quite sure what he had seen. Alien worlds, maybe. Crazy stuff. But not the craziest. The real nutty stuff happened when a window or doorway would pop up anywhere, right in front of you, maybe, and you found yourself about to step into a primeval swamp, or a jungle, or a spooky city, or any number of other curious locales.
But that wasn’t all that was insane about this place. There were creatures here. Something purple and multi-armed had chased him yesterday — halfheartedly, he suspected, because the thing could move fast, and probably could have caught him if it had wanted to. Maybe the thing was as lost as he was and wanted company. Jeremy had got that feeling, but had been too scared to stop running. Maybe today. If he saw the thing again today, maybe he would stop and try to communicate.
But maybe not. Jeremy was still scared, scared even of the humans. The humans had spoken to him, asking him to come with them. Something about meeting the “other Guests.”
“Yeah, right, lady!” he had yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted away. They weren’t going to throw him into any dungeon. “Guests,” his butt.
But maybe he shouldn’t have run. Maybe they really had been trying to help him. They looked harmless enough — if you believed that people running around in funny costumes could be harmless.
But it was possible. After all, who had put the food outside the door of the strange room he had slept in last night? He had assumed the tray had been left there by mistake, but now he wasn’t sure. The food had been great, although he would have eaten a dead skunk by then.
He had to do something sooner or later; soonest, if he wanted to preserve his sanity. He had given a great deal of thought to turning himself in. It made him laugh. Turning himself in. He was wanted in Fantasyland, too. Mickey Mouse had a warrant for his arrest. No, he hadn’t seen any Disney characters — yet — but there was no telling in this place.
He was walking along one of the castle’s endless hallways when another costumed castle inhabitant stepped out of an intersecting passageway. It was a man with a beard and a funny haircut and funny, floppy shoes. Still clutching his laptop computer, Jeremy skidded to a stop.
The guy looked Jeremy up and down. “Ah, there you are! You really should come along with me, young man.”
But Jeremy wasn’t quite ready yet and dashed off in the other direction.
“But you might sustain grievous injury, son! Please, listen to me!”
Jeremy was tempted, but when another man stepped out into the hallway, he panicked.
“Stop him, Wildon!” the first man shouted.
Wildon, a big hulking dude, went into a crouch and threw out his arms, ready to catch the running Jeremy.
Jeremy executed a textbook-perfect slide into home, slipping between Wildon’s legs. Wildon didn’t touch him. Jeremy sprang to his feet and ran on.
But the corridor ended in one of those crazy doorways, this one letting out into bright sun backdropped by dense greenery.
Jeremy slowed a bit, looking back over his shoulder. Sure enough, Wildon was in pursuit. Jeremy put on speed and tore through the opening.
A wave of heat hit him as he ran through a clearing and hit the edge of a dense rain forest. He plunged into the trees, leaves whipping at his face, his Reebok hightops trampling the undergrowth. Strange cries echoed all around. It sounded like convincing Tarzan soundtrack stuff: whooping, chittering, creeing, and so forth. It was scary. He stumbled, tripped up by a thorny vine that had snagged his pants. For a heart-stopping second he thought that something hiding in the weeds had got hold of him. He gave a high-pitched yell, yanked his leg free, and jumped away. He tripped again, staggered, got turned around, and tried running backward. His ankle twisted on a hidden stone, and he went crashing headlong through a wall of vegetation.
After rolling down a high grassy bank, he hit soft ground and stopped. He was in the clear, out of the forest.
Spitting sand, he sat up. A beach?
No, not a beach. Just a kidney-shaped depression with sand in it. It looked a little like a sand trap in a golf course. Well, no. As a matter of fact, it looked
“I say!”
Jeremy blinked, looked around.
“You there! Mind awfully getting out of the way? I’m making my approach shot.”
Jeremy saw him now. It was a man in his thirties, light-haired and thin, dressed in shirt, sweater vest, and old-fashioned baggy knee pants — knickers — complete with high stockings and golf shoes. He looked like something out of an old movie. An older man stood behind him, watching.
Annoyed, the first man took a step closer. “Can’t you bloody hear?”
“Yeah, I can hear,” Jeremy said.
“Well, look, I hate to be rude — but piss off, will you? We’d really like to play through, if you don’t mind awfully much.”
“Uh … sorry.” Jeremy got up and moved out into the fairway.
“A bit more,” the man directed, gesturing imperiously with his seven iron. “A few more steps. Right there. Yes, yes, there’s a good fellow.” He returned to his ball and addressed it. “Right! Well, then …”
After a few tentative swings, the man made his shot. The ball arched toward the nearby green, hit smack on, narrowly missing the pin, then skidded across the manicured grass and rolled off the other side into another bunker.
“Oh, bloody hell!” the man shouted, throwing down his club in disgust.
Dragging his golf bag on a two-wheeled dolly, the older man approached Jeremy.
“Just fell in, son?”
“Huh?”
“Fell into the castle. You arrived very recently, didn’t you? Like day before yesterday?”
“Uh, yeah, I did. Are you from the castle, too?”
“Sure am. A little scared? Don’t be. It’s called Castle Perilous, but once you learn the ropes, it’s a very nice place indeed. All it takes is some getting used to.”
“Sure is crazy.”
“Yeah, it gets that way sometimes.” The man extended his hand. “Name’s Dalton. Cleveland Dalton. Cleve, if
