Silverlock (Prologue Books)

  Although I did not like standing on so narrow a ledge, I can luckily do such without losing control of my faculties. The Abyss in itself, possessing dimensions, was less terrifying than the Void. I studied it as well as the limited visibility would permit, then looked at Faustopheles. He in turn was watching me keenly.

  “Do many people live down there?” Determined to give him as little satisfaction as possible, I spoke coolly.

  “A good few.”

  “I can’t say I blame them, but they don’t seem to enjoy it.”

  His eyes clouded, and I could see that he was concerned with his own thoughts rather than mine. “They do not, Silverlock, but you can’t blame it all on the accommodations. Put a halo on one of these; lap them in the sweet air of Elysium; let divine maidens serve them and love them — or if they themselves are women, let them be Houris or Valkyries; and still they would not be happy.” His expression grew sardonic. “And do you know why that is?”

  I wanted to be flippant, but couldn’t quite manage it. “No.”

  “Because they wouldn’t even know where they were. They don’t know where they are now; and if you asked an inmate of the crowded dungeons we’re about to visit, he would swear he was in solitary confinement. Can you give me the answer to that one?”

  “No,” I repeated.

  “Because they’ve reached the dead end of being, which is to be able to think of nothing but oneself. Let’s descend now.”

  Keeping a shoulder to the wall, I followed him as he circled downward. Soon I was breathing fumes; but my lungs seemed to have the power to digest them, for I didn’t cough. Nor did my eyes water, in spite of the fact that the smoke was thick enough to be opaque at a moderate distance. It was this which prevented me from seeing how a vast loft had been cut into the rock until we were on a level with it.

  Obeying my guide’s gesture, I left the path and paused with him to look around. Not much of the smoke which billowed in the Abyss entered here, so I was able to see that what I witnessed close at hand was in mass production on a huge scale. The sight was such that I would have fled to escape it, but Faustopheles grabbed me. Sick with horror, I accompanied him.

  Seated on each of the blocks of stone scattered at intervals throughout the place was a man or a woman. They sat with their heads in their hands, gazing at the floor and mumbling to themselves. Except when they were subjected to torture, that is. This was administered by one of a corps of demons, red and naked, tailed and horned. One would step behind a man, say, and begin drilling through the top of his head. The victim did not struggle, though he usually stopped mumbling and sat up, wide-armed and sightless. He would hold this mesmerized pose until his torturer removed the drill and poured something into the hole that had been made. Whatever it was, it had the effect of nitroglycerine on the door of a safe. It burst the lid of the skull, so that the four parts stood erect to display a red hot and pulsing brain. When this happened, the victim screamed and commenced babbling some wild confessional. At its conclusion the top flaps of the brain pan would close and knit again. Then the sufferer would quiet and go on talking to himself.

  I couldn’t help continuing to show my dismay, and as usual this put Faustopheles into what, with him, passed for a good humor. “This is the roost for birds who have done something which makes no sense when viewed with the rest of their lives in mind, and which, by the same token, renders the rest of their lives senseless.” He chuckled. “We’ll pick one out and hear it sing.”

  At this callous proposal my repugnance became anger. “No!” I shouted. “No, damn you!”

  Instead of taking offense, he snatched me to him and laughed in my face. “Listen, mannikin; I’ve been damned by an expert; and besides, you should never waste a curse on anything too big for it.” After giving me that advice, he peered about. “This one here,” he said, pointing to a lanky, handsome, young fellow seated on a nearby rock, “ought to serve our purpose as well as any.”

  Rather than be forced, I accompanied him, as he walked over and grabbed the youngster by the hair. “What’s your name and what are you in for?” he demanded, jerking up the head, so that the fixed eyes could focus on him.

  After a while they did. “You know me — all about me. You’ve talked with me before.”

  “Do you think I can keep you all straight? I can tell a pair of pants from a skirt, but aside from that you look as much alike as lice to me,” Faustopheles told him. He gave the fellow a shake. “Why are you here?”

  “But you’re bound to remember me,” the other protested. “Everybody knows, or suspects and soon will know. I’m an atrocious villain.”

  “You’re a first-class braggart,” Faustopheles stated. “Not many men have the consistency of purpose to be villains, and the gumption for it never lurked behind those stricken-doe eyes.” He released the hair to let the head flop down again. “Wait a minute,” he said to me, “and I’ll see if I can get us some service.”

  I could see why he used the phrase. Nearby, engrossed in conversation, there was a gathering of demons, close cousin to a group of store clerks chewing the fat while the customers vainly waited.

  “Who has charge of this case?” Faustopheles demanded.

  Nobody paid any attention; and he suddenly roared, “I’m asking — I, Faustopheles!” Echoes picked up the tremendous voice, and the shrieks of the inmates were smothered by a rumbling ‘Stopheles, Stopheles.’ Before those syllables could be thrown back, however, the demons my guide had addressed had leaped to stand in front of him. They were trembling and black with fear.

  “That’s better,” Faustopheles told them, after letting them sweat it out a minute. “All I want for the present is to have this fellow treated. Now!” he yelled, as they looked at the prisoner, then at each other.

  They stumbled over one another, but finally cleared out to leave one of their number at work. There followed the noise of the drill biting into bone, the hiss as the liquid was poured from a phial, then the dreadful tearing as the sutures of the skull gave way. When they did so, the young man rose with a scream.

  “I am Rodya Raskolnikov, a man of culture, a student of philosophy, heir apparent to the wisdom of the ages. That wisdom was to have been dedicated to the service of humanity, but all it led me to was the murder of an old woman for her money.”

  Faustopheles stifled a yawn. “I remember something of your case now. She was a cruel, miserly old bitch, wasn’t she — a vile packrat of a woman?”

  “You know.” Raskolnikov dropped his voice. “I was sure you did. But then you know, too, that her sister, whom I also killed, was none of these things. She was a poor, harmless creature, too witless to try to protect herself when I struck her down so that she could not report my guilt.”

  “That was only good sense,” Faustopheles said. He gave me a confidential wink. “Would you like to ask him anything?”

  Given the opening, I couldn’t resist. A morbid interest in the details of any crime is part of the make-up of humanity.

  “How much money did you get?”

  “I don’t know,” the fellow answered me. “There was a purse, but afterwards I couldn’t bring myself to look in it.”

  “What!” Faustopheles cried. “Murder to rob, and then not even bother to tot up the swag? I don’t believe it!”

  I myself was disappointed at such a tame and pointless end to burglary, but Raskolnikov had no interest in our reactions. “It wasn’t just the money, you see. I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of acting to change my destiny.”

  Faustopheles stopped looking so contemptuous. “That’s been done,” he said in a hard voice.

  “I didn’t do it,” Raskolnikov declared. “Instead of altering my life, by that act I stopped it in its tracks, so that ever since it has done nothing but mark time there.”

  The last words were blurred by the groan he gave as he reseated himself on his block of stone. There was a sucking sound as the skull bones closed and reknit. Raskolnikov bowed his head and resumed
talking to himself.

  “What do you think of a fellow,” Faustopheles laughed, as we stepped out on the path and walked farther down into the Pit, “who’ll chop an old hag up and then develop an ex post facto scruple that will prevent him from using the money he stole from her? You’d think that an ordinary sense of obligation to the corpse would make him want to spend the cash, wouldn’t you? How do you like that for comedy?”

  It was not comic to me. “Many people do things they think better of later,” I offered.

  “Surely,” he sneered. “And next you’ll add that his remorse quickened the meat around the old mare’s bones and repeopled her veins with corpuscles.”

  “It won’t resuscitate her,” I admitted, “but he’s paying, damn it! Can’t you see that?”

  “I can see that he’s an egomaniac who’s convinced that the rest of the world has nothing better to do than to worry about whether he’s committed a crime or not.” Faustopheles turned to look at me, and I hunched against the wall while I waited for him to go on. “Didn’t you hear him? He couldn’t make up his mind whether he was confessing his depravity or boasting about it.”

  Unexpectedly, I found myself seeing Raskolnikov’s point of view. “He wasn’t boasting. It’s just that he’s still trying to explain to himself why he let go of his controls.”

  “And does it help to beat your chest and moan and tell everybody what a sinner you are?”

  “Nothing helps,” I said, as a few deeds I had rather forget stirred uneasily in my recollection.

  “There’s only one act beyond helping.” My guide was proceeding, but his eyes glittered at me over his shoulder. “The only trouble with that grove of weeping willows is that they take themselves seriously. All they need is to forget about whatever they did, and they’re cured. It’s as simple as that.”

  “But it can’t be done!” For the first time in days I felt a faint surge of pride in my being. “What a man does is too important for that. His actions aren’t excrement to be cast off and left behind. They stay with him and go into his making. They’ve got to.”

  “Why?”

  “Well — I don’t know.” As quickly as it had come, the flash of spirit left me. Considering my own sorry estate and my attitude toward a world in which I moved without joy or aspiration, I couldn’t see that it made any difference, either. “It’s just that way,” I said, “but I suppose it doesn’t matter especially.”

  “Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” he said. “Here; step aside and see what we have on this level.”

  27

  Going Down

  THERE WAS MUCH going on in the cavern we now entered, though it took me a while to unravel the action. When I had done so, I found that I was looking at a series of desperate flights. Here and there throughout the premises a lone man was being pursued, sometimes by only one person but more often by a group. The hunters were a startling lot, in as much as most of them were bleeding from knife and bullet wounds in mortal places. A few carried their heads in their hands or ran with them twisted away from the hangman’s knot under their left ears.

  “You are watching the dance of those who betray others for spite and for gain,” Faustopheles said in answer to my questioning look. “Curiously, the two are seldom unpaired. All right, we’ll join this chase. Tally-ho!”

  Starting because I felt compelled to go where he wanted me to, I soon felt the heat of the hunt. The more our quarry turned and twisted, the more I enjoyed it. It was all the better because he was a powerful, strong-faced man who didn’t look accustomed to squirming flight. He doubled and dodged, growing more frantic by the second, while we of the pursuit shouted in the lust of our implacability.

  This is not to say that Faustopheles and I were leaders in the hunt. Rather we swelled the chorus of the ruck. The ones who followed close and turned the fugitive every time it looked as if he might have a chance to break away were long, bloody men in the shreds of armor.

  In the end they worked him into a corner and there blocked him off. When we two caught up and pushed our way to the front rank, he looked as if he needed the wall in back of him in order to stand.

  “Why do you hound me?” he was asking.

  At this the biggest man among the ten or a dozen of his chief pursuers laughed, spurting blood from his broken temples. “I shall not bring the charge, nor will my brother Oliver, lest it be put down to malice.” Lifting a horn made of an elephant tusk, he pointed the nozzle at a burly, middle-aged man. “You do it, bishop. Nobody will doubt that you speak for anything but Charlemagne and the good of the realm.”

  “And God,” the bishop reminded him. He stepped forward, thrusting assorted bowels back into a big tear in his abdomen. “Ganelon, the charge is treason.”

  To my surprise the accusation had the effect of stiffening the fugitive’s backbone. Ceasing to tremble, he straightened angrily. “It’s a lie! I’m as true a Frank as any of you.”

  A head held under the arm of its owner spat scornful contradiction, but quieted when the bishop gestured. “No one denies,” the latter said, “that you long held the right to such a boast, but we standing here know you changed.”

  After hesitating, Ganelon took a new tack. “To be hostile toward you was not to be hostile, let alone traitor, to the realm. You are my enemies.”

  There was a rumble of comment from his accusers. The bishop silenced this also.

  “Agreed, but was it necessary to strike at us at a time when we were in the field against the realm’s foes?”

  “They wouldn’t be our foes if it wasn’t for you — if you didn’t keep stirring them up. It is you who are the realm’s enemies, and not I. It was to make peace and save our country from the destruction of war that I wrought as I did, risking what you might do in reprisal.” Ganelon folded his arms. “You have the power to kill me, and I don’t fear death; but you can’t prove treason where it didn’t exist.”

  The blood spurted horribly from the temples of the man who carried the ivory horn, as he laughed a second time. “Where were you taking this risk of what we might do to you, while we were going down before the hosts you sicked on us?”

  “In my place at the emperor’s side.”

  “Having told him of your dealings?” the bishop suggested.

  “Naturally not. I didn’t want his foolish preference for you to interfere with his own or the realm’s good.”

  “Of course, you intended to tell him later — and would have if he hadn’t made it awkward for you by hurrying to the pass and avenging us?”

  “There was no sense in telling him after my good work had been undone.” Ganelon spoke more slowly than he had before, as if giving himself time to think. “But I wouldn’t have anyhow. It was no part of my plan to take credit for serving the realm.”

  This was too much for a man holding his unattached right hand in his left. “Not credit, but profit!” he yelled, holding out the severed member so that its stiffened fingers pointed at the accused. “Who, next to the emperor, would be the realm’s most powerful figure after we were done away with?”

  The other licked his lips. “An incidental and unavoidable advantage.”

  “Like the reward you accepted from the enemy!” The bishop had been speaking calmly throughout, but at this point he shouted. “Like the treasure you took; the money you were paid to hand over our lives while we were in the very act of defending the realm and the emperor. By God the Savior, and by God the Damner, Ganelon, you did not just betray us, you sold us!”

  At that something of the nerve and aplomb which had carried him through so far left Ganelon. “No!” he said. “I — I admitted everything else, so you know I’m not lying. They offered me money; I don’t say they didn’t. But I wouldn’t touch it.”

  “You’ll have another chance!” the bishop cried. He turned to his friends. “Let him see it!”

  With the words he reached around and unhooked a sizeable bag from the back of his belt, and they all followed suit. With one gesture they raised
the bags and with another cast them on the floor at Ganelon’s feet. There they all exploded like paper torpedoes, spilling out a mixture of gold pieces, blood, hunks of flesh, entrails, eyes, and some stuff I took to be brains.

  The look on Ganelon’s face made it unnecessary for him to confess that he recognized it, but he did so. “It’s the price!” he moaned, as his knees let him down amidst the money for which he had sold them and himself. “I didn’t think you really knew about the price.”

  For the third time the fellow holding the elephant tusk laughed. “Since he’s shown himself so greedy for it, I vote not to stand in his way. What do you say, gentlemen, my comrades?”

  “Let him eat it!” they growled. Or rather we did, for I heard the words issuing from my own throat.

  It was not a funny sight to see that man writhing and protesting in their gripe; but Faustopheles whooped at something — the last thing the fellow mumbled before they stopped his breath with the first bag full of blood-slick coins. “Did you hear what that rascal was saying just as they pried his mouth open?” he chuckled, as we started spiraling downward again.

  The glow of the pursuit and the interest aroused by the court martial had left me by the time they let Ganelon fall, stiff and stuffed as a sausage. “No,” I shrugged, “I didn’t get it.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t think a man would have an eye for whimsy at a time like that.” Faustopheles looked back to show me the sardonic mirth in his own eyes. “But he said: ‘Don’t tell anybody.’”

  “You’re going to step off into smoke if you don’t watch where you’re going,” I growled.

  “I did that long ago,” he declared; but all the same he faced forward. “You don’t grasp the drollness involved in those words, do you? Here’s a man who deliberately satisfies his malice and as deliberately profits by it. Such a one you would naturally judge to be above the superstitions of morality. Instead we find that his dying concern is for his good name. Still that’s typical of the place.”