The mouth of the path was a cave—it must be a cave, for it was not buttressed, nut built of block, or bored with hard tools. The Germans were at the mouth examining it, one apparently having been a hard rock miner in his youth, a bearded man of 50. Bing-Ham was ahead in the deeper gloom of the “cave” which in his concourse had been named ‘Caverns of the Cairn Keepers.’ Yet now, in his deepened mind, he realized, had been his translation of the fungal thought, as being a passage made by a will and a way not of his kind, not human.
The German sergeant lit a chemical torch, an illuminating cousin of the Congreve Rocket, an eye irritant of the first order, which Richard resented, especially since it ruined his vision. He could no longer see Bing-Ham down the way, making his way by scent and creeping feel into the mountain, along the rising path. His vision adjusted and he could see what so fascinated the men—except for LaFano and Pope, who were watching him with expectant wonder and also the forest down and behind them, a forest which seemed to quiver. This forest quivered; the great boughs of the cedars seemed to sway and shiver, the moss clothing their trunks and spent lower limbs hanging like mutt hair from its shivering owner, the ferns below shivering, birds of various kinds they had not noticed, hiding high and wide, shrieked, peeped, keened and took flight far above the tree tops, like bats up out of a chimney. As Levsky was noting that the tunnel appeared to have been carved by a great squid, which he fancied might have a lair below that connected with the lake or the ocean, the earth quaked. His feet felt the rock under him sing like a great, pain-racked thing.
Richard closed his eyes and concentrated…
In his deepened and expanded mind’s eye he saw a pyramid, the top of which supported a candlelabra of sorts. The arms of this thing were of great brazen pipes. Upon these pipes perched the Phoenix, roosting above the pinnacle of the pyramid in pairs. There were nine pairs of these beasts. A single one flew around them in wide angry circles. At the base of this pyramid gathered men and women, naked save for white headbands, bejeweled with belts, bracelets, anklets and necklaces of white beads, kneeling in prostration at the base of the pyramid, beneath their avian lords. These great and evil birds peeped into the brazen pipes, amplifying their already horrid, ear-splitting call. For all this terrible show of sound, causing the humans far below to writhe in pain and cover their ears, Richard knew that this was merely the mesmerist’s slight of hand, that the earth tremble, the quake, was being caused by the joint Phoenix Mind. He knew with his fungal sense, that the keening was in part a funeral for the ones the Phoenix had slain, and in part a means to cave in the mouth of this tunnel or knock rock down on the U-Boat…
“Back!” he yelled at his men, who stepped away from the tunnel mouth.
A deep rumble sounded above: dirt, timber, rock and moss crashed down before them, injecting debris into the cave.
Richard turned and covered his eyes, calling to Levsky, “Face me away from the torch, up the grade. Put the torch man at the rear.”
Richard held his palms, amazed that he had, without a thought, or even a recollection of it, sheathed his sword.
Levsky turned him like a blindfolded boy taking his turn at pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey while the mountain rumbled. He was pushed up the incline gently, the quaking subsided and the men filed behind, marching parade wise in high steps to the German sergeant’s cadence, a morale-maintaining NCO’s instinct to focus his men under fire.
Richard gradually uncovered his eyes and saw the gloomy world before him in signatures of heat, a lineal world terminating in a gray dot up and ahead. That gray dot, he knew, was the saurian sky, the half light of the Valley of the Phoenix where those terrible birds roosted atop their pyramid.
Marching in cadence with them men, for whom his Sergeant was keeping time with the strident clap of his hands, to the German’s count, Richard could see the savage, prowling outline of Bing-Ham, not far ahead. That retrograde soul was not looking back, but down and to the side into various holes that were about five feet across, where this tunnel was a good fifteen. The man prowled on his haunches, sometimes using his left hand as a third leg, the other cradling his tomahawk.
‘How far will he devolve?’
‘I hope not so far as to lose my opposable thumb!’ came a friendly thought.
“God Bless your savage soul, Bing-Ham,” Richard spoke in a low tone, a tone that filled the cave like an anthem to the cadence of boot heels, creaking leather, clanking and clinking metal and the slither of something awful from the tunnels off and below to either side.
“Triple-time!”
And like a machine made of men they sprinted in line.
Richard prayed for whichever kraut carried the Crank Gun on his shoulder, ‘God Bless that stout kraut.’
Richard did not have his heels scuffed by the man to his rear, whoever that was, as the line of men behind him was illuminated only by sound. The bobbing of the torchlight behind made for a stage-like sense of being a poppet in a play. The pride in his quick stride swelled in him as they ate up the steeply rising tunnel in triple-time. The gray dot became a hole, then a moon, then a bleak sun, then a great window on a world topped by ice-capped peaks.
In that window stood Bing-Ham, looking down and about, in his posture, warning them that they would find themselves high on an eminence accessible to wined foes. With 20 strides to go the torch went out behind him, the bawling of time was silenced by his raised hand, and they came to stand with Bing-Ham, on a towering mountain ledge, cut into a cliff face, above a forested valley. The valley was thirty miles round, roughly, another volcano it seemed. The center, a mile in either direction was richly cultivated crop land, bisected by a slow river, a river that circled the base of a pyramid—the one from his vision—as moat.
Levsky noted, “That river does not flow into he lake. We are a mile higher then that valley and only climbed half of that.”
Richard nodded as the men crowded around and Bing-Ham pointed down between two stone and stucco posts where the ledge projected from the cliff face, about which were fixed to thick lengths of rough rope. Richard stepped to the edge and looked down, to see that the only means of descent from this ledge was down a rope ladder, that Bing-Ham, tomahawk in teeth, was already climbing to another, bigger ledge, 200 feet below.
Richard saw a flight of Phoenix rising from the pyramid and barked, “Color Sergeant, Pope and Krauts, stay here and cover our descend, then retreat and mine out to the boat. Levsky, Suvarov, LaFono, on me!”
Over the edge of an alien world he swung, between those two posts. His boot heels hooked the rope rung below, and he instinctively looked up at Color Sergeant Major, who was saluting him. With a warm rush, through the mutton-chop window of the Sergeant’s face, he smiled at Mum, on her widow walk, waving off a cup of tea because he was not yet home from cards.
This ends the last open posting of A Gaslight Knight at jameslafond.com
To find out what happened to Richard Mogadishu Barrett in the deceptive depths of Antarctica there are a few options:
-1. Wait for the Graphomaniac Archive #2 to appear as an ebook on this site in January 2026.
-2. Go the Pulp Fiction Renaissance site where Richard may post the final two chapters.
-3. Wait for Richard to put the entire book in print, as it has been gifted to him for paperback publication by this writer.
Additionally, though Richard did survive his adventure, so far as Chester Pullman, editor of the Baltimore Daily Raven can ascertain from the news buoy capsule recovered, it appears that our young hero has been dealt a hand by wicked Fortuna worse than becoming a tasty repast for some wicked, ageless kite. He has been sucked through the ether, via some vortex, into a money hunting world, and held here, against his considerable will, a world away from Czarina Svetlana, where he stacks gardening supplies at a “Depot” that is not a base camp for some expedition into the unknown, but a supply dump for the inmates of a dissipation camp to decorate their prison cells. So, men, if you please, find a paperback copy of A Gaslight Knight and encourage our hero to complete the trilogy and toss those news capsule buoys into the Ocean so that the agents of Theography might hurry them back to their curator.
-JL, Portland, Oregon, 1/18/25
…
Remaining Scenes of A Gaslight Knight
A Mutinous Kind
Of Ageless Kites: Chapter 7: Part 2 of 3: Crew
A Muscular Mind
Of Ageless Kites: Chapter 7: Part 3 of 3: Crew
