Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5

by Brian Lumley

  ‘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 course.’

  ‘Ah!’ 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 take a team down and clean the place out, 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 centre 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 levelling 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 homogeneous debris. Over debris which had tried to be homogeneous, 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 disc 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 spider-web 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 meteorite’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 just 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: Oh, yes, surely hell’s gate! Where I’ve just witnessed a so-called ‘ancestor’ of mine emptying the Ferenc’s head like a rat sucking out a stolen egg.

  And: ‘Indeed you have!’ Shaitan had at once, gurglingly, agreed, while his crimson eyes in their yellow orbits glared out from the darkness beneath the black, corrugated flesh of his cobra’s hood. ‘My creature siphoned off his blood — for safekeeping, until later, you understand — and I sucked out his brain. But you’ll note how we left the best for you, eh?’

  With which he’d made a small effort to propel the corpse in Shaithis’s direction, so that it had appeared to take two stumbling, flopping steps towards him before crashing at his feet. And of course he’d known exactly what the other meant. For hiding in the Ferenc’s huge, pale, dehydrated shell, his vampire (ah, sweetmeat of sweetmeats!) was still to be discovered and reckoned with.

  And: ‘Won’t you join me?’ Shaitan had offered a clotted, gurgled invitation — before wrenching Arkis from the bubbling blade of the ingurgitor and throwing him down to the lava floor, there falling or flowing over him as he commenced to search for his frantic, cringing parasite.

  To this point events had left Shaithis somewhat stunned — but not for much longer. He was after all Wamphyri, and all of this had been much as anticipated. And of course, the blood was the life. Dining with Shaitan may even have sealed something of a bond between them.

  It might have, anyway.

  After that…

  There was a lot to remember and events contrived to jumble. A good many fractured scenes and conversations overlapped their jagged edges in Shaithis’s memory. As contrary breezes blew up off the cold blue star-and aurora-lit waste, bringing nodding snow-devils to swirl around the bases of the glittering, plundered ice-castle tombs of anciently exiled Wamphyri, so he attempted to arrange these fragments in chronological order, or failing that to separate them at least.

  Shaitan’s cavernous workshop, for example, located immediately beneath the volcano’s hitherto unseen north-facing scarp, where soon after Shaithis’s advent the Fallen One had escorted him upon a guided tour.

  Apart from the high-ceilinged, stalactite-adorned vastness of the place — with its near-opaque windows of ice looking out upon and lending grotesque distortion to the very roof of the world, and its deep permafrost pits where Shaitan was wont to confine in ice his more volatile, less manageable experiments — the workshop had seemed much like any other. Shaithis, too, was a master of just such creative metamorphism; or so he had always considered himself, until he saw his ancestor’s work.

  Gazing down on one such piece through ice clear as water, he had offered his opinion: ‘This alone would suffice to have you denounced and banished afresh, or destroyed outright, if this were Starside and the Old Wamphyri still held sway. Why, it has reproductive organs, which were forbidden!’

  ‘A bull, aye,’ Shaitan had answered with a nod of his cowl. ‘Alas but procreation, the act of copulation, its contemplation — even the possession of organs, of the means — drives creatures to rage. I made this one a mate, female, which for thanks he at once tore to pieces! But even if she’d lived and brought forth, what then? I cannot see that he’d permit offspring to survive but would surely devour them at the first opportunity. Just look at him, and as yet half-grown! But so untrustworthy, at last I was obliged to freeze him here. The fault was his sex. It made him prideful and pride is a curse. It’s the same with men, of course…’

  ‘And therefore with the Wamphyri.’ Shaithis had nodded.

  ‘More so!’ Shaitan cried. ‘For in them all such urges are amplified by ten!’

  ‘But they don’t tear their odalisks in pieces. At least, not always.’

  ‘More fool them,’ said Shaitan. ‘For if you can live for ever, what sense to breed that of your own flesh which may one day usurp and destroy you?’

  ‘And yet you sought out women in which to spend yourself,’ Shaithis had been quick to point out, ‘else I’d not be here.’

  And at that their eyes had met and locked across Shaitan’s creature frozen in its pit of ice, and after a while the Fallen One had answered: ‘I did, it’s true — and perhaps for that very reason…’

  It had been their first argument or discussion as such, but only one of a great many to come. And while it would soon become Shaithis’s complaint that his ancestor conversed with him in terms more befitting a child, generally he accepted that the ancient, evil Being was trying to instruct him. Perhaps he considered his great age gave him the right; for after all, he was Shaithis’s senior to the extent of seven spans.

  … Another time: Shaithis had been shown a developing siphon-snout, absorbing liquids where it gradually took on shape and substance in a vat. The thing was much similar to the guardian ingurgitors (of which the volcano’s master had three) but the siphon was longer, more flexible, and bedded at its roots in great walls of flesh, so that the creature’s tiny, greedily glittering eyes were almost entirely hidden in bulging bands of grey, gleaming muscle.

  Shaithis had known immediately what the thing was, enquiring of Shaitan: ‘But don’t you have enough of these? It surprises me you trouble yourself to make more. By now you’ve surely had the best of the ice-encysted Wamphyri… th
ose of them who were readily got at, anyway. So what use to persist?’

  Shaitan had cocked his cobra’s head on one side, coiled up his arms and inquired: ‘And have you fathomed it all, my son? Do you know the precise use to which they’re put, these things of mine?’

  ‘Certainly. They are variations on a theme: ingurgitors not unlike that or those which stopped Volse and Arkis, but rather more specialized. Their slender, bone-tipped cartilage snouts vibrate in ice to shatter it, whereby paths are drilled to the suspended exiles in their otherwise impenetrable sheaths. Once a channel has been cut, then the beast drains off its victim’s liquids through its snout, which siphoned fluids — ‘

  ‘ — Are then regurgitated into my reservoirs!’ Shaitan, perhaps peeved with Shaithis’s ingenuity, had finished it for him. ‘Yes, yes — but aren’t you curious to know how? How may the driller siphon off solids, eh? For of course his victims are mainly frozen, whose fluids gurgle like glue.’

  ‘Ah!’ Shaithis had been fascinated.

  ‘I will explain… in a moment. As to why I bother myself with these Old Lords, when (as you’ve pointed out) they’re now so few in number and invariably low in sustenance, the answer to that is simple: because it pleases me to do so. The terror in the minds of those of them who can still think at all is so rare and delicious as to be exquisite. If I had not them, then whom would I terrify, eh? Could I even exist, without my measure of tyranny and terror?’

  And Shaithis had understood. Evil feeds on terror; without one the other cannot exist; they are inseparable as space and time. And reading his thoughts, Shaitan had whisperingly, gurglingly, chortlingly agreed, ‘Aye, it’s simple as that: I like it, and I need the practice!’

  So that was why; and the how of it was likewise simple:

  The drillers squirted metamorphic acids into their victims, whose desiccated tissues then dissolved into liquids which were drawn off before they could resolidify.