CHAPTER 27

Hell

John Knight stood with his daughter and grandchildren, Merlain and Charles, in what was to his Earth-educated mind a large cage formed entirely of invisible force fields. They could not get out; they were as much prisoners in here as though there had been material walls and bars. When he approached either side of the square he had paced off, an energy pushed him back. In the large crystals arrayed just outside the square he could see scenes that had to interest him. Mentally he numbered the crystals and alternated his viewing of them. Crystal one: Kelvin all alone now, looking down a path and seeming bewildered. It had to be some spell Zady had cast on him that Helbah hadn't been skilled enough to counter or quick enough to avoid.

Crystal two: Charlain, his unpredictable predicting wife. Beside her on a couch sat beautiful Glow, who had once been a sword and was now his grandson's loving, telepathic wife. To the side of Glow were the slowly maturing kinglets, Kildom and Kildee, her charges of the past twenty years. In a chair all by themselves sat Helbah and her familiar. Helbah was moaning as though in great pain, and the cat was staring into her face as if to give her some of his feline strength. Considering the linkage of witch and familiar, the cat might have been in fact helping her.

The third crystal showed an apparent man with polished horns growing from his forehead. John only now saw the face where before there had been a swirl of darkness. He saw and he recognized.

"The devil?" he whispered, questioning only himself. "Old Nick? Satan? I thought you were myth."

"Mythtaken, weren't you?" the imaged creature replied. The words took John mentally back across the years, to when a robot in another frame had used those words under appalling circumstances. Had the horned one access to his memory?

John blinked his eyes to clear them of what had to be illusion. He was going mad, he had to be. He hadn't felt so overwhelmed by anything for years. There was just no way, his rational mind assured him, that this could really be happening.

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It couldn't be, even though in this frame and others there was magic, and though witches and warlocks and wizards and necromancers did exist here. Even though here there be dragons, he thought wryly, and even though his son had started an incredible career by killing one.

Even though he had traveled to worlds almost identical to this one. Even though he had encountered doubles of people he knew who on similar worlds had almost opposite characters. Though he had met a chimaera and a robot, both with advanced superiority complexes.

Though he remembered all his previous adventures, starting when he and his men had been ordered out on maneuvers where they had somehow survived an atomic explosion. Or had they? Could his entire life after the explosion have been bogus? Could all have been a dream in a mind as the mind disintegrated?

Could all have happened in the instant of explosion?

"So you remember me from my Earth visit?" the creature asked. Its tone was rasping, as of the points of iron nails scraped across mortarless flagstones.

John shuddered. Old Testament imaginings and the ignorant posturings of those who insisted they believed everything. Mythical creature, mythical terrors. But suppose it wasn't quite. Suppose—?

"Oh, hell," the creature said, "allow me to introduce myself. I'm Professor Devale here."

"Professor of—"

"Necromancy, of course. I train all the witches and warlocks—the ones you call evil."

"Of course. Very logical."

"You want to see hell?"

"Not particularly."

The creature snapped its fingers. In the crystal were flames and rivers of lava and people he had killed and people he had seen die and had wept over.

"No, no, no!" John cried, though he knew it for illusion. "I don't want that."

"Then I'll move it closer." Devale, alias the devil, alias Satan and Old Scratch, double-snapped his fingers: snap, snap.

Instantly flames sprang up around them. Everywhere on him, on his grandson and granddaughter, on Jon. The air was choking and sulfurous. The heat was blistering. He was burning, he was burning.

Merlain and Charles and Jon were—

"Granddad, what is it?" Charles' voice.

"The crystal! The crystal!" Couldn't the boy see?

"You mean Dad? Helbah and the pains?"

"The other."

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"There's nothing in it."

His eyes saw them burning, twisting, ghastly. His mind knew that reality was different.

Grandfather! Charles inside his head.

See it, Charles, see it? See him there in the crystal?

Yes. Maybe—

Charles, no, no, don't!

Charles reached for a mind and encountered one. Instantly it was like being in a quagmire of unpleasant feelings and lusts. He felt himself swallowed by the maelstrom, spun, tossed. He reached out, trying for a mind-hold.

Welcome, little telepath!

You are going to vanish me? Like Throod?

No. I find you amusing.

You did what Zady took credit for?

Of course. She was one of my successful graduates.

You let us go!

Why should I do that?

Because of Mouvar.

Mouvar? You know nothing about Mouvar.

Don't I? I know plenty!

Let me see.

You can't! I won't let you.

Don't be absurd.

It was like a steely rod driving deep into his consciousness. Charles tried to push it out but it only penetrated the more mercilessly.

Stop! Stop! Stop!

Oh, quit your noise! The rod withdrew, leaving him feeling drained. Before his mind's eye as well as his corporeal eyes Devale's horned head appeared.

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Just as I thought, nothing. A few hints, a few superstitions, nothing more!

Helbah told me, and before that the chimaera—

The chimaera. Oh, yes, Mouvar was clever using it for his purpose. But what was produced? Only you and your sister and your dragon brother. What kind of success is that?

You'll find out! You'll find out when Mouvar wants you to find out!

I doubt it. Whatever foolish notion Mouvar may have had he didn't confide. As for you and your sister and your aunt and your grandfather, I can destroy all without effort. You know I vanished a kingdom. I can do the same with you.

Why don't you, then?

Why should I? I can have fun yet.

Charles, what's it doing?

Out Merlain, out!

I want to help!

You can't!

Welcome, young unbelievers, came the thought of the creature who called himself Professor Devale, to the boundless pains and agonizing torments of your grandfather's self-created hell.

Jon had never suffered such pain in her life. It had been bad enough back on the battlefield when Zady made her experience the pain of terrible wounds inflicted on others. That had been ghastly, worse even than having her blood almost drained when she was a child. But then she had been alone in her sufferings, though thanks to the wizard magic her brother had felt some of her pain and horror. Now—

She burned! She burned! She burned!

Now her father and her nephew and niece suffered with her. They were suffering, all of them, and there was little comfort in knowing that it was illusionary and that their bodies were not really being consumed by fire. The flames crackled all around. The smoke choked her and brought tears to her eyes with its strong smell of sulfur. She could see the others suffering as she was suffering, and that made it worse, far worse.

Her father was staring into the big crystal even as he appeared to her to burn. Inside the crystal a face was wrapped in apparent flames and seemingly enjoying it—part of the illusion, surely. The horns on the creature's head seemed like goat horns. Something her father had told them in childhood but warned them not to believe as he had believed in his own childhood. A dark, fallen angel, whatever that was, with horns and a tail. A creature responsible for evil thoughts and deeds on Earth, living as it did beneath an imagined shell of Earth. Her father had envisioned such a creature and such a place. It had shocked her childish mind to know that even as a child her father had believed in its reality. Now the reality seemed Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

here. A part of her father still believed the source of his childhood torment was real. His parents and their parents had believed it real as well.

She burned! She burned! She burned!

Horace looked about at the familiar surroundings of their sunnymoon spot as Ember slid from his back.

She emitted a high squeal of pure delight at being here again. Creatures with one dragon head and two human heads and a copper-sheathed body were not her idea of fit company.

Now, Horace? Now we can love again?

Not now, Ember. There are things I have to do first.

More important than me? Her thought pouted as it came into his. In this her thinking pattern resembled one of Merlain's.

Have to. Have to. I'll be right back.

That's what you said before! She was so appealing, now that he could again see her in her true form, that he wanted nothing so much as to clasp her and forget all that had happened. But Zady, terrible being that she was, could not be forgotten so easily.

Ember turned her tail to him and lay prostrate in the sand. Her head turned to look back at him, and it was all the enticement any male dragon should surely need.

Merlain had told him about hate. It was something people had and dragons hadn't. Dragons killed and destroyed because it was their nature. Humans, who were supposed to know better, killed and destroyed because of hate.

Horace had never understood what Merlain had been talking about. Rage he understood, but the longer-lasting, all-commanding hate? Merlain had believed there to be a difference.

Zady had caused him to see his kin as enemies and his mate as a competing male. He would have followed Zady and killed for her because he would have seen her not as herself but as Helbah, or Charles, or their father or mother or even Merlain.

Ember's slim tail swished. Come on, big boy! Come! Mama's ready for loving!

After all his waiting and yearning he dared not take the time. That was the cruelest bite of all! He had to remember what Zady had done to him and the chimaera's warning that he dare not delay helping his father.

Horace, recipient of human emotions, was beginning to feel hate.

"Please, Helbah, please," Lester begged. "She's suffering so—you've got to help her!"

"I would if I could," Helbah replied. In the main crystal Jon's drained face with the sweat glistening on it Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

was hardly bearable. She was screaming again now, screaming for what relief it afforded. Beside her young Charles and Merlain and even John Knight were suffering and screaming as well.

"Be thankful that we can't hear them," Charlain said. Kelvin's and Jon's mother was holding Lester's hand, inviting him by gesture to cry on her shoulder. Lester, not untypically, would have none of it. He appreciated his mother-in-law's intent but he wanted only to get at those causing his wife's torment. There was nothing that he could have done, and that made it worse. A fighting warrior in one revolution and three wars, he was as powerless now as an infant. If only it could be something man-to-man, with swords and shields and maybe spears.

"Please, Lester," Glow urged him in turn. The lovely young blond who had once been a sword and was now Charles' wife looked at him beseechingly from the opposite side of the couch. She and his mother-in-law had taken turns at Lester-calming all day. If he only had a way of going there! If he only had a weapon that would work!

If only that idiot dragon was around! But in the crystal that showed Kelvin there was no dragon, only a bewildered middle-aged man who had protested all along that he didn't want to be a hero. What kind of an Alliance head and keeper of the opal was the dragon! If Lester could have transformed into a dragon he would be there now, rescuing his beloved.

"Don't ask," Helbah said, seemingly reading his mind, though she didn't. "I will not transform into a swoosh. Yes, I could change you and yes, you could fly, but you couldn't change back into a man unless I was there. I'm not going into dragon territory. Together the two of us could do nothing. We're better here, watching and waiting."

"For what?" It was petty of him, but he couldn't help snapping at Helbah. The dear old witch had given her best, and he knew it, but still this waiting helplessly was getting on his nerves.

"For whatever develops," Helbah said.

"Maybe we could ride there," St. Helens suggested from where he and his not very small waitress friend filled a large chair. "We could round up some troops and—"

"Hush," St. Helens' waitress friend said, pressing her lips near to the old warmonger's best ear. "Hush, you know the worthlessness of that. The Roundear of Prophecy will soon make true all that has been predicted about him, or else—"

St. Helens looked at her puzzledly, his arms not changing position where they held her. Lester felt as puzzled, watching them.

"—or else, dear Sean Reilly, we and the world will vanish as did Throod, as surely as any of us are sitting here."

"It's like something Grandfather used to say," young Kathy Jon said from across the room. She looked so much like a younger version of her mother that looking at her now Lester almost had to pinch himself.

"You remember, don't you?" she asked her brothers.

The young scamps nodded energetically, though Lester felt certain that none of them had the faintest idea of what their sister was getting ready to spring on them.

"Speaking of the wars he had experienced and almost experienced he used to say that the people at Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

home had it hard. They had to wait and watch and look at their televisions and read their newspapers.

That's all they could do, ever, and still the popular saying was that those who waited still served."

"Wartime propaganda," St. Helens said. "It hardly applies here." His affectionate waitress friend shut his mouth with her hand, then pressed it into unresisting silence with the application of her own. Tomorrow might after all never come.

Lester admired the little show and thought that, like Charlain and Glow, the girl was taking their minds off their pain. But what of young Kathy Jon? Was she just speaking to be heard?

"We can't help them, so we just have to hope for them and wait," his daughter continued. "I know I'd like to pop that witch again with a rock—a bigger rock! But we all know how powerful she is. It will take a really strong hero to overcome her."

"I'll say!" one of the boys said. It was Alvin, the eldest. Lester wondered if he too had once always looked upon any disaster as a challenge and thought that perhaps he had. Boys would be boys, as the saying went, and it was a boy's nature to think that all could be solved with determination. Unfortunately he didn't quite feel that way anymore. Fighting an army or a monster maybe, but being confronted by Zady was considerably worse.

"I wish I were Kelvin!" young Teddy Crumb said. "I'd take that old sting of his and ram it up—"

"By the way, where is the sting?" Lester found himself interrupting. "Come to think of it, where's Glint?"

Helbah sighed. "I was afraid you'd ask that. Glint went into the woods when Kelvin was talking to the air. Kelvin's looking for him now. Zady must have been there in an invisibility cloak and she may have vanished him."

"Vanished? You mean like—"

"Yes. I didn't have a crystal tuned to him. Now I've tried and tried and I can't tune to him anywhere. We may have lost Glint already. Merlain may be a not-widow because his vanishing means he really never was."

"I don't believe it!" Glow said. "I believe my brother still exists and is alive."

"I hope you're right, Glow. But we have to accept the possibility. Whatever Zady did with him, she didn't take him to the others."

"Maybe he's doing something with the sting?" the oldest scamp suggested.

"I hope you're right, Alvin, but I can't imagine you are. He disappeared too fast."

"Kelvin disappears fast," the scamp argued. "So does Horace."

"Alas," Helbah said, "Glint hasn't either Kelvin's boots or levitation belt and he certainly hasn't Horace's opal."

"Oh! Oh, yeah. I guess."

The boy subsided into gloomy, embarrassed silence, as did the rest of them.

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In the crystal the painful-to-watch ordeal continued on and on. It seemed to Lester that there could never be an end to it, Kelvin or no Kelvin.