by Brian Lumley
The hive-like caverns, burned-out burrows, and haunted magmass levels of the Perchorsk projekt had seen a period of intense activity. Six days since Harry Keogh’s night visit with Projekt Direktor Viktor Luchov, and his subsequent invasion of the core riding a powerful American motorcycle; as a result of which, a final, terrifying scene had now been set. The pieces were all in place for what Luchov could only hope would be the permanent closure of the Gate.
Down in the core, standing on the now deactivated, recently cleaned and polished fish-scale plates where they encircled the dimensional portal, Luchov’s unblinking gaze fell in silent awe on the would-be instruments of that disconnection: a pair of top-secret Tokarev Mk II short-range missiles (in more common parlance, nuclear exorcets), mounted atop the compact, caterpillar-tracked carriage of their grey-metal launching and guidance module. Behind the smoked lenses of his plastic eye-shields, the Projekt Direcktor’s eyes were mere slits, as if frozen in a wince or grimace; for it had been his responsibility, passed down from Moscow, to order the Tokarevs armed and programmed. He knew only too well what he had here: knew that obscene slugs of toxic metal had been loaded into the slender steel bellies of the missiles, where now they lay quiescent but ready on the instant to spring shrieking awake. All it required was the push of a button.
A group of military technicians in white smocks were busy in the vicinity of the Tokarevs, checking and double-checking electrical hookups, semiautomatic and computerized systems, radiation levels, other instrument readings. Their senior man, directly responsible to the Projekt Direktor, touched Luchov’s arm and caused him to give a start. Vainly trying to conceal his nervous reaction, the Direktor barked, “Yes, what is it?”
The man was young, no more than twenty-six or -seven but already a Major; he wore upon his lapels the crown of his rank inside the stylized atomic nucleus insignia of the Special Artillery Arm. “Sir,” he formally reported, “we’re all ready here. From now on or until these weapons are required for use, there will always be two of us on duty here … armed, of course, as a safeguard against sabotage. We are aware that the Projekt has a history of, er, intruders?”
Luchov nodded. “Yes, very good.” But he’d scarcely been paying attention. Turning jerkily away from the Tokarevs and pointing towards the glaring sphere-Gate, he said, “And do you know what you’re on guard against—from that, I mean? Are you sure that if ever it’s required, you’ll know just exactly when to press the button?”
The other stiffened. He knew his duty well enough. A pity he now found himself in a position where he must take orders from a damned civilian, that’s all! He was tempted to answer Luchov in just such terms and from the heart, except it had been made adequately clear to him that the senior scientist was a power in his own right. And so:
“I’ve acquainted myself with the Projekt’s history, certainly, sir,” he said coldly. “Also, we’ve watched all of the films. But in any case, the firing sequence may not be initiated except on your instructions.”
“Listen.” Luchov turned more fully towards him, fixed him with a wide-eyed glare, and grasped his arm in a trembling claw. “That’s your brief, yes, but it doesn’t say everything. Indeed, it says very little. You’ve seen the films? Good! But you can’t smell them, can you? They can’t spring out from the screen and swallow you whole, can they?” Nodding wildly, and again pointing at the glaring white upper hemisphere of the Gate, he continued hoarsely:
“In there, a curse, a plague, something to make Chernobyl seem of no consequence whatsoever! If it, they, whatever, got out into the world … that’s the end, I mean of everything! Mankind joins the dinosaurs, the trilobites, the dodos—gone! So don’t get snotty with me when I ask if you know what you’re dealing with.”
Pale with barely suppressed anger, the young officer came to attention and his thin mouth cracked open; but Luchov wasn’t finished with him, hadn’t yet told him the worst. “Listen,” he said again. “One week ago a man, or something which was once a man, went through that Gate into whatever lies beyond. When he went, the world breathed a sigh of relief—since when it’s been holding its breath! We were glad to see the back of him because he was tainted, a carrier. Only now we wonder: How long before he finds his way back here? And if he does, what will he bring with him? Do you follow me so far?”
Something of the color had returned to the Major’s face. He sensed the importance of what the Projekt Direktor was saying, the enormous stresses playing on his mind. “I follow you so far,” he said.
“Very well,” said Luchov, “and now something which wasn’t in your brief. You mentioned our previous problem with intruders. Quite right; we did have this problem; we could have it again. So now I’m going to add to your brief and issue a new order.” He pushed his face closer. “This one:
“If I should get taken out—if anything weird or inexplicable should happen to incapacitate me or even, yes, exclude me permanently from the scheme of things—then you’re the next in line. Consider yourself appointed, here and now.”
“What?” The officer looked at Luchov’s pale, shining face, his hideously scarred skull, and wondered if he was entirely sane. “You are … appointing me, Projekt Direktor?”
“Indeed I am!” Luchov was vehement. “As Guardian of the Earth, yes!”
“Guardian of … ?”
“Press it!” Luchov whispered, cutting him short. “If anything should happen to me, press the bloody thing! Don’t delay—don’t waste time phoning Gorbachev or those mumbling cretins who so poorly serve him—but press the button! Get it over and done with and send your exorcets on a real mission of exorcism, into the world beyond the Gate, before the devil himself comes spewing out of there right into your face! Have you got that?”
The Major took a pace to the rear. His eyes were very wide now, very concerned; and still Luchov held his arm in a steel grasp. “Sir, I …”
Abruptly, Luchov released him, straightened up a little, and stiffened his back and shoulders, then glanced away. “Say nothing.” He gave a curt, almost dismissive nod. “For the moment, don’t say anything at all. But neither must you forget what I said. Don’t you dare forget it, that’s all!”
How to answer him? With a smile, which might be misinterpreted? With words? But Luchov had advised him to say nothing, and anyway, the Major had no words. Perhaps it were better if he simply forgot the whole incident. Except Luchov had warned him about that, too. And anyway, would it be a wise move: to forget that this possibly dangerous man was in charge here? And in so doing, to forget what he was in charge of …
Saving the Major from further embarrassment and possibly worse, a hatch in the fish-scale plates clanged back on its hinges and a maintenance engineer came up from below. Staggering a little as he stood up in the glare of the Gate, he wrenched breathing apparatus from his pale damp face and put on plastic goggles. Then he reached out a groping hand, as if seeking support, and staggered again.
Luchov recognized him, went to him at once with the Major following on behind. “Felix Szalny?” The Projekt Direktor took the man’s arm, steadied him. “Is it you, Felix?” (He could be familiar when he thought the situation required it.) “But you look like you saw a ghost!”
The coveralled maintenance man, small, balding, smudged with grime, nodded. He blinked his eyes rapidly and glanced back towards the open hatch. “The next best thing, anyway, Direktor,” he muttered almost to himself, wiping cold sweat from his brow with a rag.
“What is it?” Luchov felt the short hairs rising at the back of his neck, which they were wont to do all too often in this place. “Something below?”
“Down there, in one of the sealed shafts which was part of the original complex, yes,” Szalny answered. “I was checking a wormhole hotspot. Curiously, the radiation has decreased almost to background; it’s no longer dangerous, anyway. So I opened up the seal and … and entered. Eventually, the wormhole came out into the old abandoned reactor maintenance level. In there … I found magmass, of cours
e.”
“Ah!” Now Luchov knew what had happened. Or thought he did. “There were bodies!”
“Bodies, yes,” Szalny answered, nodding. “That was part of it, at least. They’d been roasted, inverted, transformed. Some were half in, half out of the magmass, like mummies wrapped in warped rock, rubber, and plastic. And even after all these long years of entombment, Lord, still I fancied I could hear their screams!”
Luchov was well able to picture it. He had been a scientist here in Perchorsk when the hideous accident happened; he still bore the scars, both upon his seared parchment skull and more permanently in his mind, which was why he now shuddered. “It’s as well you came up out of there,” he said. “Later you can go down, seal the place up again. But for now …”
“I … I tripped over something.” Szalny was still dazed, still talking almost to himself, because as yet he hadn’t told it all. “Something crumbled into dust where I stepped on it, so that I stumbled and crashed against a cyst—which immediately shattered!”
The young Major touched Luchov’s elbow, but this time very carefully. “Did he say something about a cyst?”
The Direktor glanced at him. “Oh, and are you interested?” And without waiting for an answer, nodding grimly, he continued, “Then you must see it for yourself.”
He called over a private soldier and sent him hurrying off on an errand. And while they waited: “Can we borrow a couple of these radiation tags from your staff here?” And then to Szalny: “Felix, I want you to go and sit in one of those chairs on the perimeter.” And finally, to a second soldier: “You there—go and get this man a mug of hot tea. And hurry!”
Luchov and the Major clipped radiation hazard tags to their clothing; the first soldier returned with a pair of gas masks; slinging these over their shoulders, the pair descended through the steel hatch into the lower half of the chamber. Down there, the Gate glared on them from where it hung suspended, weightless in the center of spherical space.
Reaching the bottom of the steel ladder, Luchov stepped carefully down between the gaping mouths of circular shafts cutting at all angles into the giant stone bowl of the floor. These were “wormholes”: energy channels which had been eaten through the solid granite in the first seconds of the Perchorsk accident, when previously rigid matter had taken on the consistency of dough. “Watch how you go,” he called up to the young officer. “And give a wide berth to wormholes with their radiation seals intact. They’re still a little hot. Of course, you’d know all about that sort of thing, wouldn’t you?” He set out to negotiate the perfectly smooth, cold stone floor, following corrugated rubber “steps” which had been laid down to provide for a firmer tread.
And climbing away from the hub, they were soon obliged to use iron rungs where these had been grafted into a sloping “floor” which gradually curved into the vertical; which was also when Luchov drew level with a three-foot-diameter shaft whose lead-lined manhole seal had been left standing open. He’d first spotted the open hatch as he came down the ladder and guessed that this was where Szalny had been working. For corroboration, a pocket torch with the maintenance engineer’s name scratched into its plastic casing lay where Szalny had left it in the wormhole’s gaping mouth.
Luchov took up the torch, and lighting the way ahead he crawled into the hole. “Still interested, are you?” His almost sardonic voice echoed back to the Major, who followed on hands and knees. “Good. But if I were you I’d put on that gas mask.”
Szalny had left a rope attached to the last rung; it snaked out of sight into the wormhole, which wound first to the left, then tilted into a gentle descent for maybe thirty feet before leveling out, and finally turned sharply right … into darkness. Into the permanent midnight of a place long abandoned.
“In the old days,” Luchov breathed, where he pierced the smoky darkness with a shaft of light and lowered himself carefully to the lumpy, uneasy-feeling floor, “they used to service the pile from down here.” His voice, mask-muffled, had become a susurrating echo. “But of course, that was before the pile ate itself.”
The young officer was close behind; clambering awkwardly out of the wormhole, he stood up and caught hold of Luchov’s smock to steady himself. But Luchov was pleased to note that the Major’s hand shook and his breathing was a little panicked. Probably from unaccustomed exertion; indeed, mainly from that … until Luchov let the beam of the torch creep across the walls, the floor, the magmass inhabitants of the place.
Then the Major’s breathing turned to panting and his shaking got a lot worse, until after a while he gasped, “My God!”
Luchov stepped carefully, fastidiously over anomalous and yet homogenous debris. Over debris which had tried to be homogenous, anyway. “When the accident happened,” he said, “matter became very flexible and flowing. A melting pot without the heat. Oh, there was some heat—a lot, in places—but that was mainly chemical reaction or nuclear residual. It had little to do with the way rock, rubber, plastic, metal, flesh, and bones melted together into this. This was a different sort of heat, an alien sort, the result of the forging of the Gate. As you can see, things get tangled at the crossroads of universes.”
Abruptly, his slithering torch beam passed over, and immediately returned to, something in the wall. Szalny’s “cyst”: a fine eggshell sheath of magmass stone, like a man-sized blister clinging there, but broken open now and dripping black stuff on the nightmarish floor. Even with their masks filtering out any poisons, still they could smell it; their movements and Luchov’s muffled, echoing voice had disturbed it; as they stared, so sticky black bones came lolling out of it.
After that—
—the Major didn’t stop moving and mouthing, panting and gasping, until he was back through the wormhole to the white-glaring core; where finally, at the foot of the ladder, he paused, removed his mask, and threw up. Having followed him, Luchov stood off at a safe distance and watched. And as the young officer finished but continued to kneel there, hanging like a limp rag on the lower rungs, so the Projekt Direktor said:
“So now you begin to understand. You understand something of the horror this place has seen, inherent in its atmosphere, indeed in its walls! Down here, sealed in by the magmass—and in other places bricked up by men who couldn’t bear to contemplate it—there is much horror. Ah, but up there,” he lifted his eyes to the belly of the steel disk with its overlapping plates, “on the other side of that madly glaring Cyclops Gate, there is so much more. An entire world of horror, for all we know, which is still alive!”
The Major wiped his mouth.
“I could see it in your eyes that you thought I’d cracked,” Luchov told him. “Well, of course I have! Do you really think I’d be here if I was entirely sane?”
The Major coughed into his hand and mumbled, “My God! My God!”
Luchov nodded, and without malice said, “Nice thought … but what has He to do with this place, eh?” He shook his head. “Very little, I fear. And the longer you’re here, the more godless it gets to be.”
Not even attempting to answer, the other continued to cling tightly to the ladder’s rungs …
Below the caldera of an ancient volcano, in a place not unlike subterranean Perchorsk and yet an entire universe away—a place of wormhole lava-runs and sulphur walls, where ages ago superheated gas had expanded to form caverns like bubbles in chocolate, and the liquid guts of a planet had first forced and then made permanent a spiderweb network of channels in the permeable rock—this was where the monstrous Lord Shaitan had made his “home” in a time immemorial. And here, just four years ago, his descendant Shaithis of the Wamphyri had discovered him alive and plotting still.
Now, standing tall but dramatically insignificant against the dark uppermost fangs of the caldera’s broken walls—like a statue there on the old cone’s lava rim, under writhing auroral vaults shot through with the occasional scar of a meteroite’s suicide, and gazing south upon a far, faint horizon—Shaithis selected and highlighted memories of those
years: of how they’d passed, of what he’d seen and learned, and of what had been planned. By his ancestor Shaitan and by himself. Plans which purported to coincide, though not necessarily. Indeed, not at all.
And guarding such thoughts (ah, but jealously, fearfully!), Shaithis remembered his journey here from Starside on the rim, across surly iceberg oceans and vast wintry wastelands, he and the other survivors of The Dweller’s wrath: the giant Fess, hideous Volse, squat Arkis, and various thralls, all fled here, self-exiled under threat of a vampire’s death, which is far more terrible than that of any mere man and not alone from an entirely physical point of view. For a man knows he must die, but a vampire knows he need not.
Four years ago, aye …
After the whelky Volse’s loathsome demise, Shaithis in his treachery had directed Arkis Leperson, called Diredeath, and the acromegalic Fess Ferenc into the clutches of Shaitan the Unborn, where, in the shrieking sulphur shadows of an ancient lava-run, that immemorial monster had struck out of his own mind-silence! Even now remembering how it had been, Shaithis gave an unaccustomed start:
The lightning-swift, shadow-silent attack of the siphon-snout (as Shaithis thought of such creatures now); then Arkis speared and held aloft on nimbly skipping tiptoes, jerking and throbbing on the hollow bone blade where it pierced him to the heart, eyes bulging and cheeks going in and out like a bellows, puffing out a fine damp scarlet mist. Extremely fine that life-mist, for Shaitan’s ingurgitor had been loath to lose or spill a drop. And Fess the giant rounding on Shaithis in a fury, all intent upon tearing out his heart; but Shaitan to the rescue, flowing out of the darkness like a tide of evil, wrapping the berserker in a nest of tentacles while Shaithis swung his gauntlet to burst his head in. And the one final scene which remained fresh as steaming blood in Shaithis’s mind to this day:
The great pulsing mass of the Ferenc held fast for long and long in Shaitan’s many-armed embrace, until at last the giant’s throbbing ceased and elastic cobra jaws released his head, leaving it wet and smoking and apparently whole—except it was seen how the eye sockets were empty and trickling, with similar dribbles escaping from the nostrils and slack yawning mouth. And Shaithis thinking a thought so cold it burned him still: