Somebody was playing an organ. It was stupid, but he could hear it, a sort of creepy, deep sonorous background note that rolled up the passageway towards him and chilled his blood. It put a sort of Phantom of the Opera picture in his head: a mad-looking masked man in evening dress pounding on a keyboard while he laughed insanely. Not that there was any laughter, or real music come to that, but the sound did it to you, made you see pictures in your head, made you feel very much afraid. He wanted to stop. He wanted to go back. He wanted to run and keep running until he emerged into the sunlight.
Henry pushed through his fear and kept going.
There was a light up ahead, a greenish, reddish glow that had the same feel as the organ note. It made you think of things that crawled through crypts or creatures from space that burst out of John Hurt’s chest when you least expected it. The light and the organ note intertwined with each other to increase his fear, but he ignored it and kept on going.
Henry stepped out of the passage into a cavern illuminated by the creepy greenish, reddish glow. The organ-note sound swelled to a crescendo.
There was a dragon in the cavern.
The creature was as tall as a double-decker bus, but considerably longer, snout to tail. It was silver in colour with overlapping armoured scales. It looked like every dragon he’d seen in the picture books of his childhood, but without the cutesy quality the artists always managed to introduce. There was nothing cutesy about this monster, nothing at all. It was rippling muscle and reptile smells and savage teeth, vast jaws and cold, bleak eyes. The great head turned towards him, snorting smoke, and breathed a tiny plume of flame. It was far and away the most terrifying thing he had seen in his life. It was mind-numbingly, petrifyingly fearsome.
For a long moment Henry stood immobile, aware he should be running for his life but utterly unable to move a muscle. Then his eyes drifted of their own accord and he saw Blue.
She was chained to a pillar of stone on a raised platform just behind the dragon. Her blouse was ripped to shreds and there was a look of panic in her eyes.
‘Henry, go back!’ Blue shrieked. ‘Run! Please run!’
Henry gaped at her. There was a narrow river of lava running round the platform, sending up shimmering waves of heat. There were beads of sweat on her forehead and the uppermost swell of her breasts. She twisted her body violently, jerking at her chains. ‘Henry, get out of here! It will kill you!’
He suspected she was right. One of his hands had tightened involuntarily around the flint blade Lorquin had given him, but even if he’d been carrying a bazooka, he knew he was no match for the dragon. The creature was a biological killing machine, a mass of sinew, muscle, bone and blood with a hide beyond penetration. In a moment it would race across the cave floor and engulf him in a single bite.
The scene was like a fantasy magazine cover. A lurid magazine cover. The colouring was lurid: a leprous green illumination intermingled with the red glow from the lava. The silver dragon was lurid – it actually breathed fire, for cripe’s sake! But most of all, Blue was lurid. Her clothing was ripped to give tantalising glimpses of her body. She was chained, abused, frightened, sweaty. She was heart-stoppingly beautiful and she was sexy. Everything inside the cavern looked… contrived.
Henry became suddenly aware there was someone by his side and glanced down to find Lorquin had joined him. The boy was staring at the dragon with a look of awed delight. ‘Kill it, En Ri,’ he hissed in a whisper, ‘I will back you up.’
And there it was, the moment where his entire life coalesced, the point of ultimate decision. Run or kill. Flee or fight. Save himself or save his love. Except that he could never save his love, not from that thing. There was no way he could kill it, no way he could even injure it.
But Lorquin thought he could.
‘Stay here!’ Henry snapped at Lorquin savagely, then ran towards the dragon.