6 Fantasy Stories by Robert T. Jeschonek Read Free Book Online Page A

tensed, preparing to make a fight of it. Bess and Mrs. Whitaker-Bunyan had already disappeared down the hallway. Perhaps, if I knocked the nun unconscious, I could yet follow my wife and ascertain her secret.
    Fortunately, I was spared the trouble. "It's just...you're so very tall. " The nun smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "You remind me of my mother. "
    Relieved, I smiled and shrugged. The nun gave my elbow one last squeeze before releasing her grip.
    "People thought she was an awful woman," said the nun. "But she wasn't at all what they expected."
    "How unlike Henrietta here," said Lady Crenshaw as she drew me away. "She is exactly what you'd expect her to be."
    *****
    Lady Crenshaw and I hurried down the plastered hallway in the direction Bess and Mrs. Whitaker-Bunyan had gone. I'd lost sight of the both of them, though I suspected Lady Crenshaw had some idea of where they'd gone.
    We passed door after door along the hall, many of them closed. Open doorways revealed tiny, candlelit rooms, little more than convent-style cells, each with one bed, one chair, and one woman. The women, glancing up as we rushed past, looked utterly lost and forlorn. Were they the victims of cruel circumstance, cruel men, or their own cruel natures? I had no way of knowing.
    The hall hooked right at its far end, and Lady Crenshaw led me around the corner. More doors lined this leg, all of them closed but for one which was in the process of falling shut. Lady Crenshaw bolted ahead, moving remarkably fast for all the crinoline piled around her legs, and caught the door before it could meet the jamb.
    Holding it open, she made a little bow and waved for me to enter. "After you, milady."
    "Jolly good." I headed for the reddish light streaming out of the opening. "Bit of a role reversal, wouldn't you say?"
    "Not if you judge a book by its cover," said Lady Crenshaw.
    *****
    The red light was pouring up from below, from a spiral stone staircase descending into the earth. I hesitated at the top, wondering what awaited us at the bottom...and then I started down. Lady Crenshaw followed behind me.
    The smell of incense wafted up as I hobbled down the steps, clumsy in the high heels of the boots I was wearing. I kept one hand on the iron railing along the stone wall at all times, bracing myself in case my balance faltered.
    It turned out to be a long way down. I counted twenty steps, then thirty, then forty, screwing ever downward into the underground. Always, the red light grew brighter, the incense stronger as we descended...and a clamor of voices rose to greet us, the sound of a crowd. Strange music also swirled up from below, a swell of skirling pipes and fiddles and instruments I couldn't identify.
    By the time we reached the bottom, I'd counted ninety-nine steps. Thus ensconced in the bowels of the earth, I stepped forward, casting my eyes over the startling scene before me.
    How many times had I set foot in utterly strange settings far removed from everything I knew and held dear? How many times had my heart shuddered in my chest as I gazed upon a bizarre tableau that cast a queer new light on all my assumptions about the universe?
    Yet here I was again.
    Lady Crenshaw and I stood on an elevated rim at the edge of a vast cavern hewn from the rock. The bowl-like floor of the cavern was filled with an enormous crowd of people, stretching from wall to wall.
    All of them, from what I could see, were women...women of all shapes and sizes and colors and nationalities. Women dressed in every style of feminine garb I could imagine, from the corseted dresses of London and Western Europe to the sarongs of India, from the kimonos of Japan to the fur coats of the Eskimos, from the bowlers and serapes of South America to the buckskins and feathers of the American Indians. It was a veritable international army of women, all of them suffused with the crimson light that had drawn us from above.
    I could not hope to count them all in that moment, but I