Rumbelows

(July 14, 2016)

13

Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and Ford had done everything they could to get ready for the ordeal. In addition to donning their gas masks, the four humans had removed as much clothing as decently possible, had wrapped discarded shirts and handkerchiefs and such around their heads, and had soaked those and everything else they wore in water from one of the canteens.

The Wandering Dude took no special precautions, made no preparations, because as he said, it wouldn't matter, anyway.

For most of the trudge back, the ambient temperature in the Crawlspace stood a tad over fifty degrees Celsius—about 123 in Fahrenheit degrees—and the evaporation of the water in their soaked garments helped to cool them a little. Ford knew, but none of the others (except possibly Dipper—you never could tell with him) that humans could just manage to survive temperatures in that range if they moved slowly and carefully and rested whenever they could.

At a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, though, the body began to give up. Nobody could take that for more than ten minutes or so. And the temperature very probably would get at least that high as they neared their goal.

On the other hand, it was, as they say, a dry heat. Dry heat is supposed to be more bearable and comfortable than heat coupled with high humidity, but as the old prospector remarked one sunny day in the Mojave Desert while looking at his poor sweating donkey, "Dry heat, my ass!"

Ford had explained they needed to go through the main market cavern and then into the just slightly smaller one called Sadist Square—that was where the monster armaments-and-ammo shops were, as well as the stands that sold things like badly-printed pamphlets with titles like What To Do on a Rainy Day: 1001 Fun Uses for a Stiletto, Join the Club: The Journal of Cudgels, and Crossbows Compared. And the shops also stocked camouflage hunting clothes and printed targets meant to be nailed to a post or pinned onto the backs of your prey. Stuff like that.

The journey wasn't really all that far, but they took it slow in the swelter. Ford had warned it was vital to stay hydrated, so they all took repeated swigs from the canteen that Wendy carried, the water increasingly unpalatable as it warmed. Even so, they swallowed it, though their lips began to feel dry moments after a drink.

After passing through another short, arched tunnel into what felt like a blast furnace, they finally emerged in Sadist Square, the off-chamber of the Crawlspace where the creature wallowed in its pool of liquid rock, a crater some four yards in diameter—and the glare from the bubbling, superheated lava was so fierce that they couldn't approach any closer than about a hundred feet, and then to bear it, they had to hunker down behind a jumble of fallen rock (it had been I'M STEEL STANDING, an armor shop, before it collapsed).

As they huddled there, the Wandering Dude spoke: "This is as far as you can make it. I'll go up and take a closer look."

"Won't it hurt you?" Ford asked him, gasping.

"Oh, sure," the Dude said in a flat voice. "But life hurts, doesn't it? And I'll heal even if I burn away to a teeny pile of ashes. It's happened before. Just takes time"

Mabel took his hand. "Hey, I like you. Let's be careful out there." The ancient man nodded solemnly.

Ford thought for a moment. "I've become extremely accurate with my quantum destabilizer," he said. "At this range, if I can get a clear shot at its—I suppose it has a head—then I can probably fatally wound it with one shot, perhaps even dispatch it outright. Can you induce it to raise its head over the crater rim, do you think?"

The Dude stood and shrugged. "I can try."

"Then good luck."

The wispy old man walked forward, treading carefully to avoid the worst of the fallen, shattered rock. They watched him go.

"Man," Wendy said. "I wish I could get one good whack at it with my axe!"

"I'm not sure even a paranormal axe could take the direct heat," Dipper said. "Not the handle, anyhow. Look at all the stalls and booths."

He had noticed that every wooden structure in the place had charred—not actively flamed, from the look of it, but had blistered, blackened, cracked, and shattered under the steady radiance of heat.

Something hot dripped on his arm, and he reflexively brushed an oozy black spot off. "What is that?"

Ford turned a narrow-beamed flashlight upward. The whole ceiling glistened black. "My hypothesis," he said, "is that the shops augment the natural illumination down here with tallow candles and lamps. Over hundreds of years, a layer of greasy soot has built up on the ceilings. Now it's all melting away."

"Yuck," Wendy said. "It's getting all on my skin."

"Mine, too," Mabel said. She raised up and peeked over the edge of the rocks before ducking down again, away from the dazzling heat and light. "He's almost there."

Dipper risked a quick look, too. The Dude came to a halt within twenty feet of the molten pool, an arm shielding his eyes. His body was visibly smoldering. He stooped, picked up a rock, and threw it into the pool, with no visible reaction. He did so twice more, then stood on tiptoe, took a long look, and then, surprisingly, turned his back on the pool and came hurrying back, even stumbling a little.

He ducked behind their low rampart, groaning. His few clothes had burned away, and his exposed skin showed corrugated, red-blistered in places and blackened in others. "Sorry to be indecent," he murmured, covering himself with his ravaged hands. "First, may I have another sip of water?"

Wendy held the canteen to his cracked lips, then when he had drunk, she took off the green shirt she had worn like a turban over her head. "Use this," she said kindly.

"Thank you," the Dude said, wrapping it around him. "Stanford Pines, I can't make the creature raise its head. It does have one, but it won't look at me. Or anything, I think. It's like an enormous snake made of nearly molten rock. And it's all coiled up tight now, not moving, not intending to move. And it's not alone."

"There are two of them?" Ford asked. "Wait—are they mating?"

"No, there's only one," the Dude said. "Wait—mating—where did you get that idea?"

"One researcher posits that some supernatural creatures, like ordinary ones such as eels or salmon, return to the places where they were born to mate and spawn. What was the researcher's name? Kamen? Darren Kamen? Daremo? This heat makes it hard to think—I just can't recall at the moment."

"It's not mating," the Dude said. "But I know what it is now, and I think what will happen soon will make it easier to kill."

The area around the teleportation hut had been cleared, for a certain definition of "cleared." The place still looked like a toddler's bedroom after he or she had finished obeying the parental command, "Pick up your toys!" In other words, the big stuff was mostly rolled out of the way. The little stuff, rocks and pebbles you might call the green Army guys and matchbox cars of the geological set, still littered the floor.

Mr. What's-His-Face was on his last legs. Even the oxygen he had stored in his skin sacs had been used up, and he tottered and staggered. "Mr. Mister Kobold," Bikfahrt said, "I don't think Mr. What's-His-Face can do the transportation ritual. You go with him and see if you can take him up to the surface. Once you go, Phrappf will take Horker."

"Boss, you're coming, too!" Phrappf said.

"No. You heard the Daughter of Men. We leave no man behind. But I'll be along directly. Go, Mr. Mister Kobold, quickly! Mr. What's-His-Name can't last long!"

They more or less shoved the two into the hut, or outhouse—this was a duplicate of the one on the surface—and after a heartbeat, the whole thing juddered and a flash of actinic blue-white light, like a pet lightning bolt, leaped out of the cracks between the old boards. Pfrappf opened the door. "They've gone," he said. "Hope they reached the surface."

"You next," Bikfahrt said. "Take Horker. If you make it, set him down somewhere concealed to rest and then come back and let me know for sure that it's working."

"Yessir!"

Again the hut shuddered and flashed. And then a few moments later, it did so one more time. Phrappf opened the door, beaming. "We did it, sir! Straight to the top, and you won't believe how fresh the air is, how cool!"

"Then go back. And Pfrappf—if you never see me again, you've been a good Chop. Find my wife and daughter if you can and—help them any way possible."

"Sir," Phrappf said, his expression one of dismay, "let me stay here with you."

The Kersanzi Kuzpa shook his head. "You don't want that."

The Chop officer swallowed hard. "No, sir, I don't. But sometimes, uh, well, you know, doing what you hate to do is just the thing you ought to do."

"Sorry, Phrapph. You gotta get back to the surface and make sure the Gnome, and the whatever Mr. What's is, and Horker, they all get to safety. Take them to the Mystery House that Stanford Pines talked about. That's a direct order. I'll get out with the rest of our—" he paused and then, not having found a preferable word, said, "our . . . friends, Phrappf! I'll come back with our friends, or not at all."

"Sir—I'll see Horker and them safe to that Mystery Shack, right, but then I'll come back and stand by the hut up top. Help you all when you get back. Oh—when you come through, jump outside as soon as you get there. The damn thing topside really stinks." He opened the door of the hut and then paused to look back. "Sir—sorry, got to say it—it's been an honor serving with you."

"JUST GO!" screamed Bikfahrt in his loudest, most unpleasant way. But he was grinning, and his eye streamed not just from the stinging fumes.

Phrappf smiled, stood at attention, saluted—and then just went.