Chapter 5: page 2 of 3
 

A MOMENT LATER a thin voice from the heights called down:

"Could someone let us know what's happening?"

Tex recognised the voice of his friend Captain James Gideon.

"All's well down here, Captain Gideon," he shouted back, and the echo continued 'giddy-on, giddy-on, giddy-on...' until it was spent.

Sir Seaton Begg continued to stare thoughtfully down into the fissure.

"Are you planning to follow them, Sir Seaton?" asked the young vigilante, half-joking.

"Not immediately," replied the detective, "though it is my duty. I know my limitations. I lack certain fundamental equipment. I have no instinct for the underworld." He took a long pull on his pipe. "Yet that creature, that demon, as some believe him to be, can negotiate the most alien landscapes without any hesitation. He has that ability to sense routes and avenues which you and I could never find, even with maps. He is not the only one of his family to have that talent, of course. But it is why he can so easily pass between one realm and another. Few possess such skills."

"But what is he?" Jenny Brady wanted to know.

"They are sometimes called 'eternals'," the detective replied slowly, "and they are able to walk the roads between the worlds. The entire multiverse is theirs, yet some of them are still prisoners, still victims of their own stories."

"I am really not quite following this, Sir Seaton," said Jenny.

The detective gestured with his reins. "That is why, dear Mrs Brady, I make so few attempts to offer explanations. It is nothing to do, I assure you, with your intelligence. Your intelligence, as you know, is extraordinarily high. But there are some things about our realities which only a certain number of people seem to be able to comprehend. And there is no persuading them. They simply cannot see what I see or indeed what that poor white-faced creature who has just left us can see."

"I do not believe I would want to see what he sees," said Don Lorenzo, lightening the atmosphere a little. "Especially at this moment."

"Oh, my dear sir," said Seaton Begg feelingly, "you do not know the beauty he experiences as he wanders the impossible caverns of the Grey Fees where the organic and supernatural infrastructure of the planet intertwine. He will see gorgeous jewelled halls so high and vast that twenty great cities stand in them, each upon a peak, high above the mercury rivers and bronze mists of the valleys which draw their light from phosphorescent rain dripping steadily from the distant roofs, making fresh formations everywhere, through which move the native folk of the Grey Fees, the Offmoo, so tall and thin and silent, drifting like phantoms through their whispering rock forests and jangling crystal gardens, practising their rituals and legalities with obsessive, mindless insistence. And you have not heard the great natural organs playing. That is when all the cities make music at the same time and dying travellers come from thousands of miles to spend their last ecstatic hours borne upon so many wonderfully weaving melodies. There is no music more sophisticated nor more moving."

"Then should we not follow him this minute?" said Don Lorenzo a little drily. "Who could resist such a paradise?"

But Seaton Begg shook his head, refusing levity. "It remains, for all that," he said, "an alien paradise. It is an alternative. The Realm Below is a compendium of lost dreams. All the defeated people arrive there, vowing return, revenge and those other satisfactions with which we seem to perpetuate our miseries. But when they have been there for some time they become infected with a peculiar sadness. It is Pierrot's world, after all, without sunlight. That melancholy is characteristic of almost every denizen of the Realm Below. They live, they flourish, they have pride and their achievements are spectacular.

"The great American civilisations are there, as well as the African, the Indian, even the Etruscan. For the Realm Below is where the defeated know triumph, where the disenfranchised and the marginilised find renewed power, where noble memory is made concrete. Where justice exists. Yet all but the Offmoo know that they are not native to the Realm, that they are forever exiled."

They were riding back up the canyon now. They could hear military voices raised in command, the busy clatter of equipment.

"Do none of them ever yearn to return?" Jenny asked the detective.

"Some dream of it. Some even make plans for conquest of the Realm Above. But that pervasive melancholy usually informs their decisions. It is hard to make war while enjoying such emotions. They compensate for their lack of martial vigor by aspiring to a high standard of civilisation."

   
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