Тэд Уильямс: Go ask Elric

Pete Townsend suddenly appeared beside them, his whippet face screwed up with anxiety. “You said you’d get high with me, Pogo, and tell me about Jimi. You promised.”

Beck’s angry, proprietorial reply was interrupted by a squeak and crunch. Pogo looked down to discover he had trodden on one of the furry scuttlers. In the torchlight he could see it was not a rat, but the bloody mess on his bootsole was not amenable to a more precise identification.

Jeff and Pete and the rest did not return, but that scarcely mattered: Pogo’s thoughts were quite taken up with what stood before him.

The black iron door was flush with the wall of the corridor, taller than Pogo and covered with bumpy designs — writhing demons and monsters, he saw when he leaned closer. It was quite solid beneath his hands, and quite immovable. Yet the feeling of being needed pressed him even more strongly, and he had no doubt that its source lay on the other side.

“Anybody in there?” he called, but even with his ear at the keyhole he heard no reply. He stepped back, looking for a crowbar or other heavy instrument (or even better, a spare key), but except for the torches and the scuttlers, which seemed more numerous now, the corridor was empty.

Jimi Hendrix stood on the far side, Pogo felt sure, with a message just for him from beyond the grave. And free guitar lessons thrown in. The situation was weird enough already that a simple locked door couldn’t stop him — could it?

“When logic and proportion / have fallen sloppy dead....“

The tune had been running through his head off and on, largely unnoticed,

V

since Sammy had sornof sung it — but now the words of the old Airplane drug song seemed peculiarly appropriate. Down a hole, like Alice in Wonderland, caught in a bad acid trip. What did Alice do? For a little girl who’d probably never heard of Owsley or Haight-Ashbury — Pogo bad the dim idea the original book bad been written a long time ago, like around World War One or Two — she’d always seemed to get through all right. Of course she’d had magic cookies and stuff, which made her...

...shrink....

Suddenly, the door was getting bigger. The keyhole was several feet above his head and climbing. At the same time, water was rising around his knees. And the walls were getting farther and farther away....

Holy shit! I’m shrinking! Bitchin’!

If he could stop the process at some point, that was. If not, it might become a bummer of major proportions.

As the crack at the bottom of the door rose up past him — the black iron portal itself now loomed as large as the Chrysler Building — Pogo waded through the puddle beneath it, making a face as the scummy water sloshed around his chest. Once the broad expanse of door was past, he floundered out of the bilge onto a spit of muddy dirt and thought very hard about growing. When it worked, he was almost as surprised as the first time.

Pogo watched his surroundings draw down around him like a film run in reverse, the walls shrinking like a sweater-sleeve washed in hot water. When the process slowed and then halted, he ran his hands over himself to make sure everything had returned to its correct size — he briefly wondered if he could enlarge just selected parts of his body as well, which might help him finally get some chicks — and then looked around.

There was only one torch here, fighting hard against the dank air; the wide room was mostly sunk in shadows. A few clumps of muddy straw lay on the floor; out of them, like Easter eggs in plastic grass nests, peeped skulls and other bits of human bone.

Pogo could tell a bad scene when he saw one. “Whooo,” he said respectfully. “Torture chamber. Grim, man.”

As if in response, something rattled in the shadows at the far side of the chamber. Pogo squinted, but could see nothing. He slid the torch out of the bracket and moved closer. The feeling of being summoned was stronger than before, although in no way unpleasant. His heart heat faster as he saw a shape against the wall... a human shape. Jimi, the Man himself, the Electric Gypsy — it must be! He had summoned Pogo Cashman across time and space and all kinds of other shit. He had... he had...

He had the wrong color skin, for one thing.

The man hanging in chains against the stone wall was white — not just Caucasian, but without pigment, as white as Casper the Friendly Ghost. Even his long hair was as colorless as milk or new snow. He did wear a strange, rockstar- ish assortment of rags and tatters, but his eyes, staring from darkened sockets, were ruby red. It was not Hendrix at all, Pogo realized. It was...

“...Johnny Winter?”

The pale man blinked. “Arioch. You have come at last.”

He didn’t sound like Johnny Winter, Pogo reflected. The blues guitarist was from Texas, and this guy sounded more like Peter Cushing or one of those other guys in the old Hammer horror movies. But he wasn’t speaking English, either, which was the weirdest thing. Pogo could understand him perfectly well, but a part of his brain could hear words that not only weren’t English, they didn’t even sound human.

“Do not torment me with silence, my lord!” the whiteTaced man cried. “I am willing to strike a bargain for my freedom. I will happily give you the blood and souls of those who have prisoned me here, for a start.”

Pogo goggled, still confused by the dual-language trick.

“Arioch!” The pale man struggled helplessly against his chains, then slumped. “Ah, I see you are in a playful mood. The length of time you took to respond and the bizarre shape you have assumed should have warned me. Please, Lord of the Seven Darks, I have abided by our bargain, even at such times as you have turned it against me. Free me now or leave me to suffer, if you please.”

“Ummm,” Pogo began. “Uh, I’m not... whoever you think I am. I’m Pogo Cashman. From Reseda, California. And I’m pretty high. Does that make any sense?”

Elric was beginning to believe that this might not be Arioch after all. Even the Hell-duke’s unpredictable humors did not usually extend so far. This strange, shabby creature must then be either some further trick by Elric’s tormentors, or a soul come unmoored from its own sphere which had drifted into this one, perhaps because of his summoning. Certainly the fact that Elric could understand the language the stranger called Pogokhashman spoke, while knowing simultaneously that it was no human tongue he had ever encountered, showed that something was amiss.

“Whatever you are, do you come to torment oft-tormented Elric? Or, if you are no enemy, can you free me?”

The young man eyed the heavy iron manacles on the albino’s wrists and frowned. “Wow, I don’t think so, man. Sorry. Bummer.”

The meaning was clear, though some of the terms were obscure. “Then find something heavy enough to crush my skull and release me from this misery,” breathed the Melnibonean. “I am rapidly growing weaker, and since apparently I am unable to summon aid, I will be helpless at the hands of one who has not the right to touch the shadow of a Dragon Emperor, much less toy with one for his amusement.” And as he thought about Badichar Chon’s grinning, gap-toothed face, a red wave of hatred rolled over him; he rocked in his manacles, hissing. “Better I should leave him only my corpse. An empty victory for him, and there is little in this life I will miss.”

The stranger stared back at him, more than a bit alarmed. He brushed a none- too-clean hank of hair from his eyes. “You want me to... kill you? Um... is there anything else I could do for you instead? Make you a snack? Get you something to drink?” He looked around as though expecting the Priest-King to have supplied his dungeon with springs of fresh water.