Free Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle by Richard Lupoff Page A

Maurier." She carried an ornate silver tray to the massive desk across the room. On the tray were cups and saucers, a steaming silver pot of tea, and a crystal decanter. As she prepared du Maurier's cup, she said, "Mr. Folliot, may I offer you refreshment?"
    Clive declined the offer.
    Clarissa Mesmer carried a cup of gold-trimmed china to du Maurier's bed. Whatever else had befallen him in twenty-eight years, Clive thought, George du Maurier had surely prospered in things material.
    But his friend and mentor's words had put new worries into Clive's mind. New worries, and a new sense of urgency.
    He must return to the Dungeon and see about Annie, Horace, Sidi Bombay, and the rest. But what was it that du Maurier had said about Neville Folliot's being back in England? And Father O'Hara!
    Obviously, the transition from the mundane world to the Dungeon was one that could be made in either direction. Clive had known that—or at least suspected it—since his early days on Q'oorna. There he had visited a town that bore an astonishing resemblance to a bucolic English village. And there, in the home of the elderly mayor and his wife, he had seen a wedding portrait that showed not only the happy couple but the officiating clergyman as well.
    And that clergyman, also younger by many years but unmistakable nevertheless, was Timothy F. X. O'Hara. The same Father O'Hara whom Clive had encountered in the East African village of Bagomoyo!
    To this point, O'Hara was the only individual whom Clive had been certain—or almost certain—to be capable of traveling between the Dungeon and the surface of the Earth. Clive didn't even know where the Dungeon was. For a time he had thought of it as a series of spheres similar to the pre-Copernican notion of spheres surrounding the Earth and carrying upon their transparent surfaces the moon, planets, and distant stars.
    Only the Dungeon was a series of spheres that lay
beneath
the surface of the Earth. As one penetrated each, one approached closer and closer to the ultimate center of the Dungeon—which might or might not coexist with the geological center of the Earth.
    That was a theory that Clive had entertained. But later experience had caused him to doubt its validity. It was comfortingly graspable to the mundane mind. But, alas, the more Clive experienced of the Dungeon, the less was he able to maintain his belief in that notion.
    Q'oorna itself had proven, in due course, to be a planet comparable to the Earth. But it was one that existed on the very edge of being, a rogue world whose rotation brought it to face the vast sea of astral objects known to nineteenth century man for half Q'oorna's diurnal cycle. And for the other half, Q'oorna faced an unplumbable blackness wherein only the enigmatic spiral of stars offered any relief at all.
    And if Q'oorna was truly a planet at the edge of all being, then what of the other levels of the Dungeon, worlds of jungle and desert, of rolling sea and granite peak? And what of the ultimate level of the Dungeon, the ninth level? Was it truly the Earth itself? Was the whole terrifying geometry of the Dungeon but a loop that returned after its wild coursings to its own point of origin?
    Father O'Hara seemed to hold a clue to that riddle!
    And now Clive had learned that his brother Neville, in search of whom he had set out upon his adventure, had also returned from the Dungeon. If Neville was back, then what of that other baffling trio, Philo B. Goode and Amos and Lorena Ransome?
    Clive leaped from his chair and bolted for the door.
    "Mr. Folliot!" Clarissa Mesmer called after him. "Mr. Folliot, where are you going? Mr. Folliot!"
    Clive paused in the doorway but a moment. "To Tewkesbury! I must go to Tewkesbury! Farewell, du Maurier! I hope you are not disappointed with the answer you find to death's mystery! And you, Madame Mesmer—it has been a pleasure making your acquaintance!"
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    The blackness outside was as nothing