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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: Mad Moon of Dreams
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“No sculptor, Lord,” the man replied. “Goldsmith, perhaps!”
Eldin stepped forward and grabbed the attendant by the satin lapels of his jacket. “Are you saying that this—this
statue
—is fashioned of gold?”
“Indeed, Wanderer, that is what I am saying …”
Eldin released the man and wheeled to face the others. “The last time something like this happened the horse was of wood,” he gasped. “If I remember aright the name of the city was Troy—and she was doomed no less than Ilek-Vad!”
The King in Gold
“This statue, where is it now?” Eldin snarled. His face was a mask of mixed emotions—mainly fear, but not for himself. For the city, for Ilek-Vad.
“In the gardens, Lord Wanderer,” the bewildered attendant haltingly answered. “By the great fountain.” And he shrank back before the four, unable to understand and unnerved by the tensions he had thrown into them.
“Show us,” cried Hero. “Come on, man, quickly—lead the way!” And he thrust the little man out of the room ahead of him into the corridor.
“Arra,” said Limnar to the old counsellor, “Do you think you can find this metallurgist friend of yours? I would like him to see this statue before we move it back out of the city.”
“I know where he is,” Arra nodded, glad to be of service. “I'll bring him at once.” He turned on his heel and headed in the opposite direction.
“And what time is moonrise?” Eldin cried after him.
“An hour or so at most,” Arra called back. “You'll find it's grown quite dark outside.”
“Arra.” This time it was Hero calling. “Can you muster the Master of the Dome, whoever he is? The chief technician or magician or whatever, the one who controls the shield about the city?”
“There are several,” the answer came back as the counsellor
passed around a bend in the corridor and disappeared from view. “I'll send the top man to see you in the gardens,” his voice trailed off.
Now the three friends clattered along hot on the heels of the small but fleet-footed attendant; and though they ran for all they were worth, still the way through the great central palace seemed far longer than it had been when they entered. At last they burst into the gardens and headed for a mighty fountain where it jetted water to a height of a hundred feet or more.
Unfortunately
Gnorri II
was moored some hundreds of yards away, her sails furled, crew gone “ashore”; it would take some little time to get the men recalled and the ship ready for the skies. And as Arra Coppos had pointed out, it was now quite dark and the moon would soon be up. The ship which had brought the statue into Ilek-Vad had already left to carry on with its patrol; it stood off in the sky, a dark silhouette that sailed for the invisible wall of the dome where soon it would signal its need to exit.
And now the three saw the statue itself: a massive, crudely structured thing. Obviously the golden figure which sat the golden horse was that of King Carter, but he was in no way flattered. There was something sardonic about the statue: the King's lips displayed a spiteful curl, and the horse's nostrils flared viciously while its ears lay flat along a lumpy, less than elegant head.
“The thing's a mockery!” cried Limnar. “The king is not like that—nor would he sit so mean a beast. No, this work should be destroyed.”
“First it must be shifted,” Eldin grunted, his eyes keenly scanning the as yet quiescent horizon. “You can destroy it later if you wish, but not until we've moved it. Aye, and if we don't move it right now—why,
it
will very likely destroy
us
!”
Limnar needed no further urging. He was already running toward
Gnorri II,
his voice ringing through the muted lighting of the gardens, calling his skeleton crew to him and ordering that they get into the city at once and return
immediately with as many of his men as they could muster. Hero and Eldin were close behind him, offering their help, full of a hideous frustration, a monstrous urgency. And even as they ran, so the mad moon's pitted rim rose like the notched blade of some cosmic scythe behind a distant range of mountains.
“Ropes!” Limnar was shouting. “Hawsers and nets, tackle to lift ten tons of gold!” Then, as a new thought struck him: “No, belay that. I'll have ropes, yes, but get me a dozen of the ship's flotation bags. There are plenty of spares below. Fire the flotation engines and get 'em filled at once.” He turned to the waking-worlders to explain, but Hero cut him short:
“By the time the crew gets back we'll have the statue roped up to your flotation bags. We can tow the thing out of the city!”
“Right,” Limnar answered, “but not with
Gnorri.
She'd never make it, for the wind has died away. No, we'll have to manhandle it.”
“What?” cried Eldin. “Why, it's two or three miles to the wall of the dome!”
“So?” Limnar turned on Eldin with a snarl which would do the Wanderer himself justice. “We tow the damn thing, I said, and so we do. And we start before the crew gets back. When they return they can spell us. It will be a hard job and a slow one—agonizingly slow. So the sooner we get started the better.”
By now a small party of men was hurrying out of the palace gardens and into the city proper, and others aboard the ship were dragging balloon-like flotation bags onto the deck, attaching mooring ropes and tossing the loose ends down to the three. Others of the crew came clambering down rope ladders to lend a hand, and soon the first two bags were being hauled across and roped to the statue. Amazingly buoyant (and despite the fact that they were only part-filled), each bag took three men to hold it down, so that in the darkness they
looked like massive kites in tow behind frantically toiling, grotesquely bounding children.
Seeing their struggle, many of the city's people came into the palace gardens to offer their help. These were mere passers-by, folk on evening errands eager to be home before the moon was full risen. But the urgency of Hero, Eldin, Limnar and his men was infectious. The common folk of Ilek-Vad could not help, however, but only served to get in the way. They were truly
Homo ephemerans
and now, where physical bulk and muscle were needed, they seemed more insubstantial than ever and all of their efforts less than useless.
But at last members of the crew of
Gnorri II
were returning from their brief excursion in the city, and under orders from their Captain they were soon far more effective. Something of the waking world's vitality had rubbed off on them from Hero and Eldin (particularly onto Limnar Dass), giving them an unaccustomed purpose and direction in the land of Earth's dreams. And so at last the massive golden statue of man and horse began to move, suspended beneath a cluster of flotation bags, dragged along behind a gang of men, through the palace gardens and into the city's streets. And all of this taking place as Limnar had said it would; agonizingly slowly. The great statue kept getting stuck in narrow alleys where the balconies of houses jutted out over cobbled streets; the ropes would make themselves fast to ornate stonework; the flotation bags threatened time and again to burst against the spiny ironwork of balcony rails or wrought iron signs above the many shops. But somehow, after what seemed like several hours, the sweating, swearing, weary gang maneuvered the clumsy aerial thing out through the suburbs and toward the wall of the force dome where it reared invisibly to the west of the city.
Now out in the open, the toilers could see just how high the moon had risen—the vast pitted orb of it, whose lower edge was just clearing the horizon of hills—and the sight renewed their flagging strength and drove them to further excesses
of muscle-wrenching labor. A slight breeze had sprung up which caused no end of trouble: being enclosed by the dome, the gusts of air came from no certain direction but tugged the balloon-borne mass of metal this way and that, willy-nilly. And now the gold of that awful work was a sickly yellow to match that of the clammy moonbeams which fell in nauseous waves from on high; and the sardonic face of the golden King of Ilek-Vad seemed demonic in the terrible light, and the eyes of his steed full of moon madness.
“Damn it!” cried Eldin in a rage, putting his massive strength to work and hauling on a rope until the muscles bulged in his back, arms and legs. “We're not going to make it!”
“We
must
!” Hero answered, straining just as hard, his teeth gritted against the night and yellow with sickly moonlight. Then, exhausted for the moment, the pair handed over their ropes to a team of
Gnorri II
's crewmen and rested a while. Limnar joined them, and a moment later a figure came running from the city where it sprawled behind them on its great glass promontory.
“Lord Hero,” gasped the man, struggling to draw air, “Lord Eldin and Limnar Dass. I am Eeril Tu, the Master of the Dome. Arra Coppos sent me …”
“Listen, Dome-Master,” Hero grabbed hold of the newcomer. “I've a feeling your dome is useless against the mad moon. Its beams come through unaffected, and there's a special moonbeam which might yet suck us all up to hell! Now tell me, how may the dome be strengthened?”
“Strengthened?” The man had his wind back. “It may not be strengthened! All available power is already in the dome, but it will not shut out the light—it will not shut out moonbeams.”
Hero gripped him tighter and almost shook him. “There
must
be something else you can do. Think, man!”
“I am thinking, Lord,” the other gulped and wriggled in Hero's grasp. “Perhaps—”
“Yes?”
“The city has a battery of ray-projectors, Lord. The batteries store energy—the energy of the sun—during the day, and so may be used at night. They were used in the Bad Days. Their clean light draws the life out of foul and evil things, burns them up, removes them utterly.”
“But moonbeams have no life!” Hero cried, his frustration mounting. “Of what use—”
“Fight light with light!” Eldin snapped his fingers. “It might just work.”
“What?” Hero and Limnar asked in unison. “What might work?”
“Let the ray-projectors play their beams onto the ceiling of the dome,” Eldin grunted, “into the descending moonbeam when it comes. Diffuse the damn thing, scatter its evil rays, destroy its power!”
“You,” Hero turned back to the Master of the Dome. “Eeril Tu. Do you follow the Wanderer's reasoning? Good! Now get back to the city. Have the ray-projectors manned and prepared. It's worth a try. Only run now, run!” And he released the Dome Master and propelled him on his errand with a hearty shove, sending him hurrying back in the direction of Ilek-Vad.
By now a second stranger had joined the party. He introduced himself as Jahn Killik, Arra Coppos' metallurgist friend. “I've seen the statue,” he told them, peering up at its yellow bulk where it rocked in its cradle of ropes beneath the flotation bags. “Leng gold for certain. You can tell by its sickly sheen. Fine and rich by daylight, but damp and strangely oily in the night. Anything else you'd like to know?”
“No,” Limnar shook his heed. “We already guessed as much. Thanks anyway, and no-thanks. For in your confirmation you may just have sealed the doom of Ilek-Vad!”
“Four hundred yards to the dome's wall!” came a cry from somewhere in the darkness ahead. “And look,” the crewman's voice continued, “a ship approaches!”
“A patrol ship,” said Limnar, his eyes taking in the silhouette
of the vessel where it sailed the night sky beyond the invisible dome of force. “One of the King's ships. Look, there go its signal rockets!”
Twin streaks of fire raced up the sky like ascending meteorites, bursting in crimson balls high on the dome and showering sparks down its mighty curve. Deep in the city the signal was seen and the night air seemed momentarily to shiver as the dome went down. The ship came sailing in, and in its wake—
“What?” cried Hero, his hand pointing skyward. “Do you see that?”
For a split second, limned against the moon's ogre face, it had seemed that a flock of great silent birds followed the patrol ship through the de-energised screen. In the next second the air shivered again—and was instantly astir with a throbbing of great wings. But wings fanning the night: a sound that Hero, Eldin and Limnar would recognize anywhere, any time.
“Gytherik!” Hero breathed. “The gaunt-master has arrived in answer to Randolph Carter's summons.”
“Aye,” Eldin agreed with a similar sigh. “And not a moment too soon!”
The Doom That Came to Ilek-Vad
“Ahoy up there!” shouted Limnar Dass, cupping his hands to his mouth and using his Captain's hailing voice. “Gytherik—we're down here!”
The throb of wings, momentarily receding, immediately resounded. “Is that Limnar Dass?” came a youth's strong but surprised voice above a sudden stir of air and a whirling of dust.
“Aye,” now Eldin gruffly called. “And Eldin the Wanderer.”
“And David Hero, too,” Hero added his voice to the hailing, glaring at his companions for omitting to mention him.
The air became a tumult of small, rushing winds as a grim of gaunts, all horns, barbed tails and leathery wings, landed close by. Leaping down from his saddle on the largest of the faceless beasts, a slim, pale-faced youth—a lad barely out of his teens—stepped forward through the glare and the dust. “Hero?” he queried. “Eldin? Limnar?”
“All present and correct, Gytherik,” Hero answered, taking his arm. “Come into the shadow of this rock. Give your eyes a chance to get used to this hellish yellow dazzle. It will only take a moment.”
“We may only
have
a moment,” said Limnar. “The mad moon rides high—look!”
A few wisps of cloud hurried across the face of the bloated monster in the sky, as if eager to be gone and out of harm's way. Looming in the heavens, the great pitted disk looked like some ancient golden coin, bruised and abused by time, and its “face” of mountains and craters wore a look of pure malevolence as it seemed to gaze down upon Ilek-Vad.
Eldin shivered in spite of the sweat which made his clothing hot, heavy and sticky. “By all that's holy,” he said, “—I swear I'll never more cuddle a girl by moonlight. Not so long as I remember this night!”
“Which may not be for very long,” Limnar repeated his warning. He turned to Gytherik. “Lad, can you get your gaunts to tow this golden blasphemy out through the force-dome? At once, before it's too late?”
“A dome of force!” cried Gytherik. “So that's what it is! Come to think of it, I've heard of Ilek-Vad's force-dome. It was used in the Bad Days. My gaunts sensed it was there, of course, but it completely baffled me. Fool I may be, but not my gaunts. They followed yonder ship of their own accord, under no instructions of mine! And you wish that statue taken outside the dome, eh?”
“Indeed,” Limnar answered, “and urgently!”
“So be it,” said Gytherik. He turned to where the grim, eight strong, clustered together in the scrub. The creatures were ill at ease in the mad moon's glare, shuffling uncomfortably and using their membrane wings like vast umbrellas to keep the moonlight off their bodies. Gytherik gestured, no more than that, and at once the gaunts spread their wings and sprang skyward. In a second they had snatched up the ropes from astonished, struggling teams of crewmen, and in the next they were towing the statue straight for the invisible wall.
“But how are they to get out?” Hero asked of no one in particular. “What about the signal?”
“I thought of that back in Ilek-Vad,” Limnar answered, drawing out a pair of rockets from his jacket.
“Gnorri
carries signal rockets, too, you know.”
He jammed the sticks of the rockets in the crumbly soil, angling them toward the dome. Eldin produced firestones and struck sparks, which soon ignited the touchpapers of the fireworks. And as the rockets sputtered, spewed fire and leaped skyward, so the gaunts reached and were brought up short by the invisible wall; at which very moment—
“Trouble!” Hero saw it first: that heightening of the yellow glare about the crater which formed the mouth of the monstrous moon-face, the throbbing pulse of it, like the vast heart of some alien living thing. And rising (it seemed out of the very night), there came that note struck from some great golden tuning fork, that nerve-scraping single note that went on and on and on.
“
Big
trouble!” roared Eldin, throwing up his hands before his face as the brilliance of the moonlight increased so as to become painful. “Where the hell are those ray-projectors?”
High overhead the rockets burst in crimson splashes, and on the very instant there came that curious trembling of atmosphere which signified the screen's subtraction. The gaunts shot forward, dragging their aerial burden after them across the now open threshold.
“Now tell them to let go the statue,” Hero shouted in Gytherik's ear above the brain-numbing whine (which, it suddenly dawned on him, were it colored, would have to be bright yellow!) “—and if you want to keep them, get them back on this side of the line before the screen goes up again!”
Gytherik asked no questions; the near-frenzied urgency so visible in his friends had finally communicated itself to him. Instead he put fingers to mouth and blew a great blast of a whistle, and moments later the gaunts were landing in their ungainly fashion like faceless pterodactyls and cowering once more beneath their own arcing wings.
“Now we'll feel the dome go up,” shouted Hero, his voice barely audible over the sudden rush of winds which struck
downwards
from the sky, “and after that—then we should see these much-mentioned ray-projectors in action, and—” He
paused uncertainly. Something was wrong … Desperately wrong.
“No dome!” roared Eldin. “Do you think some fool in the city misinterpreted Limnar's signal? And how could it be misunderstood anyway? What in hell is going on? And by all that's …
look at the moon
!”
But in fact they could no longer bear to look at the moon. Its sick brilliance was such that the entire sky was a saffron dazzle that seemed to flow like some mighty aerial ocean of steaming bile. And at last there came that sound they had all dreaded—that change in the
tenor
of the dinning single note—that gradually rising whine which they knew was harbinger of the monstrous moonbeam.
“Doomed!” groaned Eldin. “The beam descends!”
Then, through seconds which seemed to last for hours, all was a nightmare of languorous slow-motion, of senses suspended almost to the infinite. A vast sigh went up like a wind rising over a forest; and despite the blinding brilliance of the sky, all eyes turned up to that epicenter of horror, the mad moon. A nameless longing—a hideous fascination—filled every heart; arms were raised to the sky as to a promise of splendors and delights beyond endurance.
Hero knew in his inner being that this was wrong, an utterly unholy adoration, but could do nothing about it. The others were the same, even Gytherik's gaunts, lifting their wings for flight and craning their rubbery necks skyward. In the city, lured by that magnetic beam and unable to still the craving, people erupted from their houses and crowded into the streets; and even the blind gazed into the moon's sick Cycloptic eye, and cripples stumbled in the glare and raised their arms to a deliverance of doom.
Back on the desert in the scrub and rock, Hero and friends were now filled with a peculiar lightness—not only of heads but of bodies, too—and from somewhere deep within himself, fighting the hypnosis which gripped his mind and body in rigid iron (golden?) bands, Hero found the strength to croak: “Eldin—damn, I'm floating! My feet are off the ground!”
“Me too, lad,” came an answering groan, “—and all the others. We're in the beam, moon-bound!”
And slowly they floated free of the desert, inches at first, then feet as the stony ground receded—at which point the night seemed to give itself a mighty shake, brilliant beams of white fire sprang upward like dazzling searchlights from the city, and gravity returned in a tumbling of bodies and a thumping of earth as by a shower of mammoth hailstones! The force-dome was up, the ray-projectors in action, the doom averted.
No one had fallen more than six or seven feet, some much less, and casualties would be light. There would be broken bones in the city, especially among the aged; here on the desert it was all bumps and bruises and the occasional groan or moan, but mainly thankful sighs.
Hero, dusting himself down, strode purposefully for the city, his face contorted with rage. Eldin, limping a little from a sprained ankle, hurried to keep up. He understood his young friend's muttered curses and complemented every one of them with a few choice remarks of his own. Limnar Dass, too, where he came running up behind.
“I've a bruised behind, a fat ankle and a lumpy elbow,” Eldin growled. “Someone will pay for it!”
“What the hell was the delay?” Hero demanded of no one. “Another second or two and we wouldn't have survived the fall. Ten seconds and we'd have been sucked right up to the moon! I've a few questions for Eeril Tu, you may be sure …”
Gytherik's slightly shaken voice floated down to them from where he once more rode his great gaunt. “Want a lift, you three?” He spoke a word to the strange creatures he controlled. Gaunts paired off, two apiece to Hero and Eldin, and picked them up. A fifth, second largest of the grim, grabbed up Limnar. Not a man of them was able to suppress the not unnatural shudders they felt at contact with the silent, faceless night-gaunts; despite the fact that they were accustomed to this mode of travel, still there was that about the creatures which repelled and disgusted. Old myths and legends die
hard, and Gytherik's gaunts were a living denial of dreamland lore from ages immemorial.
Now the ray-projectors were in repose—their brilliant beams no longer illumined the mighty dome's ceiling—and the night had returned to normal … or as normal as might be expected with that bloated moon sailing the sky, its sickly, all-enveloping light coloring the desert, the city and the ocean beyond the promontory a sweaty yellow. Up above, retreating like the snatched-back tentacle of some frustrated, golden god-octopus, the mesmeric moonbeam shrank down into its source in the mouth-like crater and dulled into quiescence. The terror had passed—
—For the moment.
And beneath that moon of madness, the human-burdened grim sped cityward, and jut-jawed men clung tenaciously to prehensile paws which alone kept them from gravity's jealous grasp …
 
A surging, cheering, lanthorn-bearing crowd—a mob of delirious people—greeted the aerial party as it passed overhead and across the rooftops of the suburbs into the city. Plainly the people had connected the golden statue's removal from Ilek-Vad with the barely averted doom; and they knew that they had Hero, Eldin and Limnar to thank for a timely intervention. As for Gytherik Imniss: since Zura's defeat at Serannian, most everyone in the dreamlands had heard of the young man with power over gaunts. And since Gytherik was with the trio he must be that man, for they had all fought for Kuranes in that same war against Zura.
A second, smaller crowd waited in the palace gardens. These were mainly palace staff, but among them Eeril Tu was supported by a pair of hefty guardsmen. As the grim landed Hero saw the Master of the Dome—saw too the blood-stained bandages which swathed his head and the sling which supported his right arm. Close followed by Eldin, Limnar and Gytherik, Hero ran to Eeril's side where he was greeted by the counsellor Arra Coppos.
“A near thing,” said Arra. “And indeed I stand amidst heroes this night!”
“What happened?” Hero growled. And to Eeril: “Who bloodied you?”
“They did,” the Dome-Master answered, and he pointed painfully to where a pair of shrouded bodies lay upon stretchers in the grass. “I was with one other engineer in the tower which houses the dome's machinery. I saw your signal and switched off the force-field. Then, when I would have switched it on again—”
“These two jumped you, eh?” Eldin bent down and tore aside the sheets which covered the strangely squat bodies of the traitors. The two were quite dead—their slant eyes closed, their faces waxen—but still their too-wide mouths seemed to grin as at some evil secret, and the shapes formed by their peaked turbans were terribly suggestive. Eldin ripped away the turbans and his lips drew back in a snarl of loathing. “Horned ones of Leng!” He spat out the words.
Limnar nodded. “King Carter was right about the Lengites. Well, we can make a safe guess as to how these two got into the city: they must have waited for a patrol ship to enter and slipped through while the screen was down. We know where they came from, too: that party we saw out in the desert as we flew in aboard
Gnorri
.”
“Right,” Hero growled again. “And by the same token we know where to go to get some answers! But tell me, Eeril—if this pair jumped you, who jumped them?”
“As you can see,” Eeril answered, “they didn't quite finish me off. I took a clout on the head and a knife thrust in the back, and they must have thought me done for. The lad I was with got the worst of it, but I'm told he'll recover … Anyway, when I came to—it could only have been seconds—the horned ones were peering out of the tower windows and grinning evilly, and I could see that the dome was still down.”
“And even injured you managed to take them?” Eldin's voice was full of admiration.

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