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Post By Here's the last already-written chapter, so any encouragement to write some more tomorrow on my day off would be useful to... the Hooded Hood. Mon Jun 21, 2004 at 02:17:26 pm EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Twenty-Second: The Kiev Line and the Nightwraith Terminus | |
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| Part the Twenty-Second: The Kiev Line and the Nightwraith Terminus While the human mind sleeps it wanders. Dreams come from many places, within and without. But far from the waking world we know is a realm where nightmares are power, and that exists like a parasite to prey upon sleepers unfortunate enough to stray into its demesnes. This is the eternal empire of Frightmare, Lord of the Night Terrors. Fortunately, the human mind has evolved defences against Frightmare’s worst touch, and normally he can only harm in passing as we slumber. But if a fanatical Nazi genius and his amoral surgeon were to experiment on prisoners of war, cutting away those parts of the brain that keep a sleeper from full exposure to Frightmare’s malice, and if the horror that caused was harnessed in psionic gestation vats to brew creatures of pure malice, what then? And if those psychic marauders were set on the spoor of a time-manipulating intruder aboard a train to the Eastern Front, then how could they be denied? It was the third day of travel East into occupied Soviet territory, and the Russian winter was doing its best against the invaders. Horizontal sleet rattled against the windows of the compartment and visibility was zero. The train crawled along at no more than thirty miles an hour. The tracks were in poor condition even without the possibility of sabotage. The cold had got to the carriage electrics and the lights flickered with every jerk and turn. “Hardly the Simplon Orient Express is it?” Sir Mumphrey asked his travelling companion. “Don’t tell me,” Miss Canterbury replied, looking up from the Chekov she had bartered for at some nameless halt a day and a half ago. “You were there on the first run of the Orient Express, and there was a murder.” “Actually yes,” admitted Mumphrey. The vicar’s daughter sighed. “I always loved to travel,” she confessed, “but father always went to the old, dusty places by second class. It was all we could afford.” Then she shot a spontaneous, dazzling smile. “But that was better than never seeing anything.” She looked up as the train skittered over another set of ill-maintained points and the lights flickered again. “Even this is wonderful in its way.” The eccentric Englishman coaxed a little more heat from the paraffin radiator. “I have good company for the journey, at least.” He paused and asked cautiously, “Is there anything you want to talk about?” Miss Canterbury counted off the spirited debates she’d had with the Brish agent over the last three days. “Apart from the Industrial Revolution, horned spoonbills, the doctrine of signatures, Mozart, pixies, Voltaire, the Irish Question, Chinese cuisine, Ben Franklin, the decline of cricket, the periodic table, Maskylin, Alice in Wonderland, and why Gracie Fields should be shot?” “I meant regarding Mr Farharquar-Phelps. His death, you know.” “Ah. Well, I’m sorry he’s dead of course, but under the circumstances I find I’m bearing up, thank you. To be honest I don’t know if I ever really loved him so much as wanted to be in love. I’ll have to write his mother a very kind letter though, because she’ll be frightfully upset.” “I’d have saved him if I could, y’know,” Mumph assured her. “But I knew I only had the chronal charge to follow you, and I had to choose.” “Good choice,” Miss Canterbury assured him. As the train passed into night and the blizzard continued, the Nightwraiths slid through the tempest unimpeded, their immaterial silhouettes impervious to cold or wind or any force of nature. They sniffed the psychic spoor of the one they had been set after, and gradually gained upon the slow-moving locomotive as it struggled over the snows. “Mumphrey? Are you awake?” Miss Canterbury heard the lower bunk creak. “Yes? Is there anything you need?” “Not really. I just couldn’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes I see the Expediter, or Wertham, or Hertzhog. And it’s so cold.” “Would you care for an extra blanket, m’dear?” “We don’t have any extra blankets,” the vicar’s daughter pointed out. “What you mean is do I want one of your blankets?” There was a rustle of wool and a light thump as she dropped to the floor of the compartment. “Move across,” she demanded and slipped into the bunk with Mumphrey. “This is a time-honoured tradition of travellers in alien lands, sharing body heat for survival,” she told him. “Absolutely,” agreed Sir Mumphrey. “I approve no end.” Miss Canterbury nestled into the comfortable warmth of his arm. “Goodnight then,” she told him. Mumphrey wrapped her tenderly and kissed her on the forehead. “Goodnight,” he told her. She caught his head and pulled him back for a kiss on the lips. Again the spark ran between them, a racing of pulse as ancient fires woke. After a half minute or so she pushed him back. “I’m sorry!” she gasped. “I didn’t mean to… I’m not like…” She caught her breath and blushed in the darkness. “I didn’t mean to be a tease. But I’m not… I’d better go.” Mumphrey kept her folded in his arms. “I understand,” he assured her. “Of course I do. Stay warm. You’ll be quite safe.” Then the train jolted and the window of the compartment shattered in. The engineer slumped unconscious on the footplate, trapped in a dream about his childhood fear of spiders. The fireman lay beside him, lost in visions of his flesh rotting away. They were burying him, and they couldn’t hear him screaming that he was alive. The unregulated locomotive gathered speed on the downward stretch. The runaway train went down the hill. In the crowded cattle trucks where the shivering soldiers bound for the Front dozed and shivered the nightmares began. It only took one man to wrench himself awake from a dream of hate-filled Slavs with sharp skinning knives. Half-aware, he reached for his machine gun and began to empty it. The forward guard was awoken by the rattle of bullets and the screams of dying men. He rose very carefully, staggered to the paraffin cylinder, and fumbled for his lighter. “What’s going on?” Miss Canterbury shouted over the force of the tempest that threatened to buffet the carriage off the track. “Some kind of attack,” speculated Sir Mumphrey Wilton, dragging on his borrowed uniform and strapping its Luger to his hip. “Stay close to the floor. I’ll try and find out…” The compartment door broke open then as the first of the sleepwalking passengers burst in. The first class travellers were still in their night attire, but every one of them had managed to find something sharp to carry. Mumphrey shot the intruders with a clinical coldness as icy as the wind that ripped through the train. “They were sleepwalking!” protested Miss Canterbury, shivering as she pulled a coat over her nightgown. “Sleepwalking Nazis,” Mumph growled. “With aggressive tendencies.” “Something very odd is going on,” worried the vicar’s daughter. “And have you seen how fast we’re going?” There was another crash and the whole carriage lurched. Mumphrey caught Miss Canterbury as she tumbled towards the broken window. The guard’s van had exploded, and was now a burning platform next to the ammunition boxes of the anti-aircraft gun. “Time to move,” Mumphrey said determinedly. “Forwards.” Miss Canterbury picked her way over the gristly remains of the sleepwalkers and followed Mumphrey to the front of the train. “Time to lose the excess baggage,” he called over the wind as he opened the forward door. He helped Miss Canterbury scramble over the gap onto the back of the coal tender, where a ladder granted access to the top of the truck. Then he followed, uncoupling the cars behind by the simple expedient of shifting the coupling into the future. Freed of its load, the engine spurted forwards with renewed speed, heading across a high trestle bridge at breakneck pace. Miss Canterbury crawled over the coal towards the engine. Then the nightmares hit her. She was buried beneath the coal, unable to even breathe to call for help. She was trapped and she was going to die and no-one would ever find her. Mumphrey reached for her but he was all alone. Miss Canterbury aged and crumbled to dust before his eyes like all those he cared for did in the end, until he was the last living thing on a charnel graveyard Earth. “No,” he gasped, choking on tears. “Don’t leave me!” The Nightwraiths clustered round for the feast. “Get off him!” shrieked Miss Canterbury – the real miss Canterbury, who would overcome any horror of her own to save him. “Get back!” Her hand curled in his as if she would never let him go. And suddenly Mumphrey was not alone. The Nightwraiths surged forwards again, but now Mumph was ready. He phased himself and Miss C out of time to give him the moments he needed to reset his Chronometer of Infinity. “Dream-feeders, eh?” he rasped angrily staring at the blurred silhouettes. “Let’s see you feed after this?” “Mumphrey?” “Remember how I told you once I could set my watch to not correct for the movement of the planet through space when it shifts things through time?” the livid warrior reminded Miss Canterbury. He thumbed stud on his timepiece and the Nightwraiths vanished to the future. “See what dreams they can use to survive when they find themselves five million miles from Earth!” Then the eccentric Englishman shuddered from more than the hail that pelted him. That fear had been very real. “It’s alright,” Miss Canterbury assured him. “I’m here.” “Yes… yes you are. You saved me.” Time to snap him out of it, thought Miss Canterbury. “And now, if you could kindly deal with the runaway train?” she asked Sir Mumphrey. In our next exciting episode: Mumphrey meets a fascinating lady, but doesn’t get on with her husband. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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