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Post By Horror in the Himalayas, as we move from Merchant Ivory to Hammer, courtesy of the cruel Hooded Hood Thu Jun 24, 2004 at 11:17:15 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Twenty-Fifth: The Temple of the Dragon and the Soapstone Amulet | |
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| Part the Twenty-Fifth: The Temple of the Dragon and the Soapstone Amulet “Welcome, travellers, to the Temple of the Dragon. You have journeyed far and hard to reach our sanctuary, and we pray that your blessings herein with be in measure with your trials without. Enter in peace and let us share fellowship together.” Herr Wertham raised his machine gun and shot the abbot down with a quick lethal rattle. “Kill everybody,” he ordered. “Keep a few alive,” the Expediter countered. “We need someone to question.” The Nazis swarmed out of the blizzard and began to destroy the ancient temple with ruthless purpose. It was the worst time of the year to travel across the Himalayas. The drifts were sixty feet high and the snow only stopped when it turned to hail. Herr Wertham had to abandon his original idea of flying all the way to the Temple of the Dragon on the cliffs above Sakya, where Blanchford Bertram had deposited the strange amulet he had discovered on Mount Shishapangma. Instead he commandeered half a dozen tanks, twenty trucks, and three hundred man from the Afghan front, marched them through Nepal with brutal directness, and pressed through the passes heedless of loss of life or equipment. He still had half his men alive when he reached Sakya. That was more than enough to take the temple and murder fifty unarmed monks. “You… you do not understand…” one of the dying priests gasped. “We have a duty here… work that cannot be neglected. Who will chant the songs? Who will…?” “Who cares?” shrugged the Expediter, shooting him in the head. He turned to one of the cowering captives, a shaven-headed boy scarcely twelve years old. “You. You will tell me where I can find a soapstone amulet off Mount Shishapangma. It was left here by a traveller seventy years ago.” The boy closed his eyes to avoid the compelling stare of the brutal mercenary. “I will tell you nothing,” he declared, resisting the Expediter’s power. “Sometimes these strong-willed mental discipline types can resist,” sighed the Expediter. “Your department I think, Herr Wertham?” “Of course,” agreed the Nazi torturer. “Muto, go fetch me my instruments.” It was two days later when Sir Mumphrey Wilton and Miss Canterbury were escorted to the ledge where the decimated temple stood. The local people would take them no nearer. The frozen snow was still stained red with blood. “Nobody survived?” Miss Canterbury shuddered, as they passed through the open door into the corpse-strewn interior. “No-one at all?” “So the villagers say,” Mumphrey answered. “Fits Wertham’s previous modus operandi, I’m afraid. That’s a chap who needs wipin’ off God’s clean Earth.” Miss Canterbury looked over the ruin. Virtually nothing had escaped destruction, from the delicate prayer-wheels to the temple bells. “I suppose they got what came for,” she surmised. “Bertram’s amulet.” “I’d say so,” her companion admitted. “But it can’t hurt to have a look round, what?” The vicar’s daughter shuddered. “I don’t know. I don’t mean to sound foolish, and maybe I’m just spooked by all the dead men, but… can’t you feel something here? Something evil?” Mumphrey looked around. “Another trap left behind by the opposition, perhaps?” “Perhaps,” Miss C considered. “Or something else. Didn’t those sherpas say that the Temple was built here to keep evil from the valley? To stop some terrible power awakening and bringing destruction to the world?” “That’s the gist of it, yes,” admitted the eccentric Englishman. “You’re wondering if that was more than superstition, what?” “We’ve seen so many strange things as we’ve travelled, Mumphrey. So yes, I’m wondering.” Then the blizzard began anew with killing force. Mumphrey struggled to push the temple doors shut and finally managed to bolt them against the wind. “Well, m’dear, it looks like we’re stuck for a while until the storm blows out. Let’s hope that we’re not going to find out.” Miss Canterbury found some tallow candles and laid them in dishes to light the refectory. She turned as Sir Mumphrey returned from scouting the lower terraces. “Find anything interesting?” she asked him. “There’s a whole tunnel that’s recently collapsed down there,” he noted. “Quite impassable I’m afraid. Nothing else of interest.” The vicar’s daughter sighed and put some more branches in the brazier. “So we’re just stuck here until the blizzard plays out.” “Afraid so,” agreed Mumphrey. “Still, there’s a bright side, isn’t there?” “There is?” Miss Canterbury frowned in puzzlement. “Oh yes. Come on, my dear. You, me, a warm fire, romantic candlelight.” Miss Canterbury’s mouth formed a surprised O. “So why not slip out of those unflattering furs and we’ll make out own entertainment, yes?” “Sir Mumphrey!” objected the vicar’s daughter. “I’ve told you before…” “Oh, come on,” scorned her companion. “Who do you think you are? What’s so special about what you’ve got between your legs that you can’t share it with a fellow-traveller on a cold lonely night?” Miss Canterbury backed away. “Sir Mumphrey, I don’t think that you’re quite yourself…” Her companion stopped smiling. “Who cares what you think, wench? Just strip off and come over here before I have to teach you some obedience.” That was when Miss Canterbury hurled the grain jar at Mumphrey’s head and fled off into the darkness. Sir Mumphrey Wilton returned to the refectory carrying a pile of blankets. “Found these, m’dear and I thought they’d be useful,” he began. Then he stopped because he saw Miss Canterbury’s shredded corpse laid out beside the brazier. “Wh-wha…” he gasped, dropping the rugs and staggering forward. “What is…? Miss Canterbury…?” His stomach turned to ice as he saw the deep rents in her flesh. Her dead eyes stared into the darkness. “No,” Mumphrey growled, fumbling for his pocketwatch with numbed hands. “No!” “Yes,” said Miss Canterbury in a rasping corpse voice. Her cold bloody fingers flexed and she looked up at her companion with a charnel smile. “I’m afraid you are too late to save me.” Mumphrey backed off in horror. Miss Canterbury staggered to her feet, trailing some of her innards as she rose. “I said there was evil in this place,” she noted, “and I was right. And it found me and took me and you weren’t here to protect me!” The Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity froze time then, and used the pause to spin back images of what had gone before. He saw himself enter the chamber, and before that saw the corpse of Miss Canterbury lying herself down ready to greet him. And before that… Before that the corpse looked different, looked just like him. He replayed its confrontation with the real Miss Canterbury, and though he couldn’t hear the dialogue he sensed the intent. He saw the vicar’s daughter race off into the darkness of the lower galleries. Then Mumphrey stopped viewing the past. While the time-stop held he kicked the brazier over so the burning logs would spill over the shape-shifter. Then he let the world flow forwards again. “You failed me…” the corpse gurgled before noticing it was now on fire. “Not failin’ this time, I think,” noted Mumphrey as the torn body became a pillar of flame. The thing in the inferno laughed. “Fire? Is this supposed to bother me?” it challenged. Suddenly it shifted shape again and now it had far more legs and a shining black carapace and the flames skittered off it without any harm. Mumphrey emptied his Webley service revolver into it then used his pocketwatch to race off after Miss Canterbury. It was easy to find the vicar’s daughter using the pocketwatch’s ability to show recent images of the past. Miss Canterbury knew of that power too though, and she had prepared an ambush involving barrels and a two-by-four plank to the back of Mumphrey’s head. “Hold it!” Mumphrey gasped, stopping time a fraction of a second before the impact cracked his skull. He pushed the makeshift club forward five minutes so that when time restarted Miss Canterbury found herself holding nothing. Off-balance she toppled into Mumphrey’s arms. “It’s alright,” Sir Mumphrey assured her, righting her then stepping back as she stiffened and shuddered. “This is the real me.” Miss Canterbury had been weeping. “How do I know?” she demanded. “How can I trust you?” Sir Mumphrey shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “I’m so sorry, m’… Miss Canterbury. I think there’s a shapechangin’ thingie on the loose in this temple. Maybe a demon or something. It took your form to terrorise me, and mine to try and hurt you.” Miss Canterbury looked around wildly. “Maybe. We’re trapped here by the storm. We… we can’t even trust each other. What are we going to do? What am I going to do?” And on the upper terraces the awoken wyrm Fin Fang Foom stretched his wings and prepared to enjoy the hunt. Notes: Some readers may be confused by shapeshifting dragon Fin Fang Foom being the bad guy. In the contemporary Parodyverse Finny’s usually a hero, a member of the Lair Legion. However, there’s a complicated backstory to that. Originally, Fin Fang Foom was a criminal on his home planet of Makluos. The starship taking him to eternal imprisonment crashed on Earth and the evil dragon escaped. However, after an epic battle with the Abhumans, Foom was defeated and sent to sleep for generations. Only after the wyrm awoke at the start of the modern heroic age and was sent to exile in Comic-book Limbo was the dragon’s form permanently possessed by human boy Andrew Dean. Thereafter Finny returned as a hero, and has been fighting the good fight ever since. But our story takes place in 1942. At this point Foom is still the mass murderer that doomed his homeworld and has been held in sleep since his defeat and capture by the Abhumans many centuries past. But now he’s awake. In our next exciting episode:Fin Fang Foom. 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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