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Post By The Hooded Hood presents the last chapter he has currently written Fri Jun 25, 2004 at 11:16:05 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Twenty-Sixth: The Ancient Wyrm and His Ancient Foes | |
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| Part the Twenty-Sixth: The Ancient Wyrm and His Ancient Foes A creature from another world stalked the darkened tunnels of his former prison, raking stronger-than-steel talons along the corridor walls. His eyes burned madly and his wings scraped along the vaulted roof arches. And as he walked he called: “Mortals? Little humans? I can smell you. I can smell your fear. Soon I’ll hear your heartbeats.” He rounded a corner, flecks of flame snorting from his nostrils. Fin Fang Foom stood nine feet high in his current humanoid shape, but he was still winged and scaled like the dragon he truly was. “I’m not going to kill you,” he promised. “Not for a long time. It’s been hundreds of years since I was last awake. Those damned monks and their chanting and their bells, they maintained the hypnosis those Abhuman creatures placed upon me. After such a long time I’m not going to waste my first prey by devouring you quickly.” He sniffed the air again, his draconic senses alert for even a shift of wind, a muffled footfall, a dip of sweat. “I’m especially looking forward to you, Miss Canterbury,” he called. “A genuine virgin! What a treat. Dragons like virgins. We like them very much. I’m going to enjoy finding you, my lovely.” He paused to see if that might prompt a cry of fear or a protestation of outrage, but the prey were clever than that. “Keep hiding,” Foom advised the mortals. “You’re not going to like it when I find you.” “This way,” Mumphrey called to Miss Canterbury quietly but urgently. The vicar’s daughter held back. It wasn’t long since a very different Mumphrey had tried to assault her. “You go first,” she said warily. “Of course,” agreed Mumph. “We’re headin’ downstairs. There’s a newly collapsed gallery down there. It’s not been destroyed by explosives. Looks like it was concealed and Wertham and his thugs might have missed it. It’s been brought down since then.” “By that thing that’s hunting us?” guessed Miss Canterbury. A suspicion assailed her. “That’s what you told me about finding, just before…” “I found it when I explored,” Sir Mumphrey assured her. “And that beastie that threatened you wasn’t me. It was whatever the monks were keepin’ quiet down here.” “So you said.” Miss Canterbury followed miserably and nervously after the eccentric Englishman. At one junction Mumphrey froze, then carefully reached for his pocketwatch. He blinked both of them a couple of minutes into the future to avoid the searching dragon. Then they resumed their journey into the bowels of the lamasery. The collapsed tunnel was quite impassable, with heavy stones toppled in from the roof. “Better stay here,” Mumphrey advised Miss Canterbury. “I’m going to shift those rocks a few moments into the future so I can run through there. But the roof above will collapse more as soon as I do that. Then the shifted rocks will blink back in and be shifted to avoid the new masonry that’s occupying the space where they were. There’ll be shrapnel everywhere.” “I’m not staying behind,” Miss Canterbury told him. “If it’s too dangerous for me to go then i[‘s too dangerous for you.” “By Jove,” Mumph admired. “Right then. Be ready to run like billy-o.” He thumbed the stud on his Chronometer of Infinity and the two of them raced up the suddenly-clear corridor. Behind them the roof tumbled in with a huge crash. They pelted along the tunnel three paces ahead of the falling stonework. Beyond the passage was a domed chamber of soapstone and malachite. Incense burners were scattered and crushed, and the walls were scorched. Massive chains were scattered across the floor. “What is this place?” Miss Canterbury wondered. Mumphrey looked worriedly at the remaining charge on his Chronometer. This was not a good location to run out of temporal energy. “Hmm? I’d say it was the place where the demon or whatever was held. The monks did rituals and thingies, didn’t they, to keep it asleep I suppose.” “Could we send it back to sleep?” “From what it was callin’ earlier, it was those strange Abhuman chappies that built that city on the moon who beat him and confined him here,” Mumphrey reasoned. “Don’t think we can do the same.” Behind them the rubble shifted, as if something was burrowing its way through. “It’s a shapechanger,” Mumphrey remembered. “It could worm its way through tiny spaces.” Miss Canterbury’s face was filled with dismay. “Then we’re trapped here! We can’t get out!” “Apparently not,” agreed Mumphrey. “But,” he added, “I am going to save you. I swear it.” Miss Canterbury swallowed hard. “Perhaps there was a secondary safeguard of some kind?” she suggested. “An emergency failsafe for if the thing awoke? Maybe it collapsed the tunnel for a reason?” “Makes sense,” agreed Mumph. He glanced around the wrecked gongs and horns and then at the scorched walls themselves. “Scorched but not scarred,” he noticed. “What? I’m sorry?” “The walls. The beastie tried to break ‘em and he couldn’t. I’m bettin’ they have that same weird circuitry in them that the other stuff had. Those chains aren’t broken either. They weren’t being used when it woke up. And I bet they could hold in the monster.” “You think they might be the safeguard? The monks’ backup plan?” The rocks in the passageway shook and began to roll away. “Miss Canterbury,” Mumphrey asked urgently. “Do you trust me?” “T-trust you?” the vicar’s daughter stammered. “Yes. If you do, then stand over there in the middle of the room an’ let the beastie see you.” Miss Canterbury had only a moment to make a decision. Then she raced over to the middle of the chamber and turned to face the wyrm. “Ah,” Fin Fang Foom noted as he rose up into his full, draconic form. “The sacrificial virgin.” Mumphrey leaped on him from behind, and looped a chain around his neck. “Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” he shouted as he pulled the chain tight. “You think that’s going to stop me?” snorted the Makluan dragon. “You have no way of fastening the neural restraint fetters to me, mortal.” Then Mumphrey used the last of the chronometer’s temporal charge to shift a massive chunk of the monster’s neck into the future. Fin Fang Foom screamed and shook the eccentric Englishman loose. “You miserable maggot!” he screeched in agony. “Now you die!” The wyrm instinctively shifted his shape to heal up the wound at his throat, but that sealed the chain beneath the dragon’s flesh. “Aaaaaghhhhhh!” roared Foom, spraying nuclear fire over the roof of the cavern. Golden strands embedded in soapstone began to glow, drawing energy from the dragon’s flame. Fin Fang Foom resisted the neural pulses but the chain was embedded deep within his body. “No!” he thundered. “I will not be beaten! I will not sleep! I will not succumb to.. to.. mortal… maggots… To mere… I am Fin… Fang…” Miss Canterbury leaped aside as the sleeping dragon hammered to the ground. Foom! “That… was harder than I anticipated,” admitted Sir Mumphrey Wilton, rubbing his neck and feeling himself stiffening. “Didn’t quite expect a dragon. A real dragon, by Jove!” “Mumphrey, did you just use me as dragon-bait?” Miss Canterbury asked him. “Yes,” Mumphrey confessed. “Miss Canterbury I must apologise…” “Oh shut up. It was a wonderful compliment. You trusted me like you trust yourself. Don’t go spoiling it now.” She looked over at the dishevelled eccentric Englishman. “I’ve never had anyone fight a dragon for me before.” Mumphrey looked doubtfully at the slumbering wyrm. “Perhaps I should try and kill it?” he wondered. “No tellin’ how long that Abhuman whatever-it-is will keep him out. If they’d thought it was reliable they wouldn’t have left him with the monks and whatnot.” “I think we’d best let sleeping dragons lie,” advised Miss Canterbury. “Nobody can get in to disturb him once you get us out of here after your chronometer’s recharged. If we try to harm him he might wake up.” “Fair enough,” agreed Mumphrey. “We’d better warn the locals though, what?” “Yes,” agreed Miss Canterbury. “So can you get us out of here, Sir Mumphrey, and back on our adversaries’ trail?” “Trust me.” “I do.” In our next exciting episode:Herr Wertham and the Expediter get to the Black Dome. Can anybody stop them now? 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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