by B. L. Morgan
It might be dead, but despite appearances I was guessing the place wasn’t deserted.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Welcome To Strangeland
I reached over giving Johnny a hand and pulled him over the top of the wall onto the walkway. We both sat down on the dry stones and took a moment to rest.
It was only a moment later when Johnny’s eyes suddenly got wide and he stuck his hand out in front of him like he was trying to catch a rain drop. But no drop hit his palm.
I looked up into the sky.
No rain was falling inside the walls of Csejthe Castle.
We both scanned with our eyes everything around us.
We were about fifteen feet from a stone stairway that lead down to the main buildings of the castle. Down at ground level there were a few old rotting wagons. There was a coiled rope lying near the entrance of the main building. That was probably left by one of the guys Rozer mentioned who came out to do what we’re going to get done.
There were no signs of life.
Everything was desolate.
Everything was ... dry.
We both got to our feet. I stuck my hand out over the edge of the wall and my palm was instantly hit by drops. Inside the castle, no rain fell.
Johnny shook his head and whispered, “Yeah I know. It’s fucking strange.”
I pulled the rope up looping it from my hand to my elbow. The grappling hook had caught on the ledge on the inside of the walkway. After I gathered it up I dropped it where we stood.
I didn’t figure we’d need the rope to get out of here. If all went well we’d just lower the drawbridge and walk out.
If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be leaving at all.
A silence hung over the entire place that was oppressive and weighed down on us. Always in day to day life, in the normal world we hear the sounds of life going on around us constantly. But here, there was nothing.
Not a single bird chirped. The wind did not rustle a single leaf. There was no wind. Not one of the rain drops that beat down on us outside this place could be heard from inside the castle walls.
We went down the stairs as quietly as we could, matching the silence of what was around us.
Our feet made no sound on the stones as we walked. It was almost like the vibration from our steps was being absorbed as we took each step.
We didn’t say a thing. Even a whisper at that moment would have sounded like a scream.
I pointed toward the main entrance of the main building.
Johnny nodded in agreement. We passed a decaying wagon with a broken wheel leaning to the side like an old dog with a lame leg. We passed the rope lying near the entrance we were going into.
The rope looked surprisingly new, like it had only recently been dropped there.
Around, this door, a huge heavy wooden door fit for a palace, there were strewn bricks and loose mortar rocks.
It was easy to see that this door had been bricked up when Elizabeth was sentenced to be walled up in her castle.
It was obvious that whoever lived there now came and went as they pleased.
We pulled our swords.
I grasped the handle to the massive wooden door and pulled it open.
The hinges shrieked like a thousand fingernails scratched across a blackboard. Musty, stale air whooshed out at us.
This main building, the meeting hall I assumed, was somewhere around four stories tall. It was a large empty structure that was bizarrely lit by light streaming in through weird stained glass windows that were set three and four stories up.
Heavy dust shimmered in the multi-colored light beams making weird patterns in the air and on the black tiled floor. The stained glass windows at the first and second story height were bricked up. The others showed scenes of blood orgies and battles between demons and angels. In these pictures the demons appeared to be winning.
The entire place had the general look and feel of being some sort of a cathedral of the dammed where evil was worshipped.
From where we came into the room there was a walkway tiled in what looked like was black granite. The walkway lead forward a good fifty feet and ended at three stairs that lead up to a large unoccupied throne.
All around us the place was dusty and in ruin. Dry rotting tapestries hung in tatters from the walls.
But the throne was intact. It was clean. The gold armrests glimmered just like they’d been polished this morning.
In front of us a single set of footprints marked a trail in the heavy dust that covered the floor. The tracks lead toward the throne then veered off toward the side to a darkened exit with a partially opened steel door at the side of the chamber.
I tapped Johnny on the arm and pointed to the tracks.
He nodded and we started forward.
Neither of us spoke. We almost felt like we shouldn’t even breathe. The entire atmosphere of this place shouted at us that we were somewhere, some place that we didn’t belong.
We’d been in these kinds of places before, places where we were unwelcome. We went forward.
We traversed the room, moving as silently as possible with every one of our footsteps sounding like a hammer striking an anvil when we heard a rustling from over our heads.
I glanced up just in time to see a thing from a nightmare lowering itself slowly over the top of us. It was a spider, but it was the size of a Shetland pony. Its eight legs stroked the air as it silently slid down its silken thread.
I yelled, “Watch out!” and jumped backward as the thing dropped and knocked Johnny from his feet.
Johnny hit the floor and rolled to the side.
The thing landed on all eight of its legs and hissed at us.
Johnny slashed at it with his sword as he scrambled backward.
The thing hissed and arched its back like an angry cat. I could see it clearly then and what I saw was that this wasn’t any spider but it was some sort of perversion of a man that closely resembled a spider.
It had a man’s head and face at the front of a large sack-like bulbous body. The thing had either eight arms or legs. I couldn’t tell which they were. And its face expression was one of pure mindless hatred.
It bared its teeth and made a sound like a high pressure hose with a hole in it. The teeth in the thing’s mouth were pointed like sharks teeth and something green oozed from the points of those teeth.
I had no doubt that oozing stuff was deadly venom.
But as ugly as this thing was the worst part of it, the single feature that made goose bumps jump up and run up and down my spine were its eyes. The eyes were large black things fully covering a quarter of its face. There were no whites to those eyes at all. They were oily black shimmering globes.
The thing hissed at us and hissed some more. It was making as much noise as a fleet of trucks all setting their air brakes one after another. It reared up on its hind legs and beat the air with its six other legs threatening us and it appeared to me that this creature was making way too much noise.
If it was going to attack it would have already charged.
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw three more of the spider things sliding down on threads.
Johnny saw my glance so he snatched a look past me and if a dark skinned black guy can get pale, he sure as hell did.
“Oh shit!” he said. “There’s a bunch of them coming down.”
This was going from bad to worse fast.
Spiderman on the floor in front of me leaped and I met his outstretched arms with a side slash of steel.
My blade sliced through two of his arms cleaving them completely in half and through his face splitting his grin open from jawbone to jawbone.
It screeched and fell to the floor. Green blood spurted out from its severed arms and gashed face.
I rushed forward and slashing downward split the thing’s skull wide open.
The sounds of thumping like dozens of men is soft shoes running filled the hall.
I turned and saw that Johnny was now facing of
f with two of the things that were on their hind legs waving their six other arms at him.
He leaped forward and decapitated one of them and we found out right then why these things were leaning back and waving their arms at us. From the stomach area of the second one a thin spray that came out in a single string shot out and struck Johnny’s leg.
The string stuck to him and he was jerked forward.
It was lucky that I was close to him because I sliced the silken thread in half as the creature tried to pull Johnny from his feet.
That creature waved its arms at me and as an answer I leaped in and thrust my sword point straight into its belly then ripped to the side sending green guts plopping to the floor.
Behind those two there were at least ten more that were getting set to charge us. These things weren’t all that fast. It must have been their size that slowed them down. But I knew if they came at us all at once spraying that web-shit, we were fucked.
“The door,” I yelled indicating the dark exit we were heading to anyway.
Johnny’s answer was to take off running.
I sprinted right behind him.
The spider men came after us, their feet making weird rhythmic thumps on the black tiles.
Johnny rushed through the dark exit and I followed him slamming the steel door shut behind us.
There was a slide bar latch on the inside of the door that I found by touch. I slid that into place.
We stood there on stone steps that lead downward into pitch blackness.
Chapter Fifty
Into the Underworld
Standing there at the door with the spider-things beating on the steel there was nothing else for us to do but go down those steps into the dark. We could barely make out little bits of light thrown in from the seams of the door at the top and bottom. But that wasn’t enough light to show us anything.
We started down the steps very slowly. It was so dark that we couldn’t even see our hands in front of our faces.
We descended down into the pitch blackness.
The stone stairs scraped beneath our feet. I reached above my head to try and get a sense of how high the ceiling was in this stairway and could feel nothing.
I strained my ears to try to detect any movement ahead of us but all I could hear was the beating on the door behind us.
Pitch blackness is hard to move through. It’s almost like something that has substance that holds you back. I was leading the way down the stairs and it wasn’t because I’d really decided to go first. That was just the way it ended up being.
My left hand, I used feeling my way along the wall. In my right hand I held my sword. I was actually using it as a blind man’s cane tapping the next step down to make sure there was something below to step on.
In this kind of darkness you could step out into nothingness and wouldn’t know it until you were in freefall.
Johnny’s hand was on my back to make sure that he didn’t bump into me from behind.
I whispered back over my shoulder, “Do you still have your sword out?”
“Dam right I do,” Johnny answered.
“Well, try not to stick me in the ass if I have to stop.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got it pointed down.”
We crept our way down into the pitch blackness without any idea of where we were going. The air got cool and moist. The pounding on the door behind us got fainter and farther away. It sounded like someone strumming their fingers on a tabletop.
I hadn’t been counting the steps we were going down but I knew it was a very long way. The steps downward had to be way over a hundred.
My sword point told me that there were no more steps in front of us. The floor had leveled off.
“Hold up,” I told Johnny.
I squatted and reached down and felt of the even floor that was now beneath my feet. This floor had a layer of thick dust. Beneath that it was slick.
In my minds eye I visualized the flooring as being almost the same stuff as what covered the floor back in the meeting hall.
I told Johnny what I’d found.
“So who gives a shit,” Johnny said. “A floor is a floor man.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “I think that if this was only an escape tunnel the entire floor would just be dirt. This is a passageway that the Countess used to get to another part of this castle.”
“Well great deduction Sherlock Holmes. I still don’t give a shit,” he said. “Let’s get our asses moving to get there.”
We started forward again just as slowly as before because we still couldn’t see shit.
In the pitch blackness Johnny asked me, “What do you think those things were back there?”
“You mean those spider-things?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, are they like vampires or werewolves?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. Were-spiders maybe,” I told him.
“They are some ugly mother-fuckers.”
“That’s for sure.”
It was impossible to know how far we were going especially in the dark. Distance and time measurement get all messed up when you don’t have any visual cues to go by. All I know is that after what seemed like a long while the tunnel we were in made a turn to the right. After that turn faint light could be seen in the distance.
We went on and soon I was able to see my hands out in front of me again.
When I looked at the floor I found out that I was right. The floor under a thick coating of dust was the same black tile as what was up in the audience hall.
We moved ever forward and the tunnel turned again. This time it was to the left.
My sense of direction was completely screwed up. I couldn’t tell if we were going North, South, East or West. We were in an underground world so I guess it didn’t really matter anyway.
Weird soft chanting drifted out from in front of us to my ears. At first it was so soft that it almost seemed like the sound came from inside my head.
The sound was soothing to the senses, calming to the nerves.
We went forward and I felt like closing my eyes and just moving forward in some kind of half sleepwalking trancelike state. I felt almost weightless, almost floating. I felt good, warm and secure.
The chanting carried me along, made me put one foot in front of the other.
The chanting, the rhythmic singing washed over me. It filled my ears, my head, and my mind.
I could see now that the gradually brightening light was golden in color. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was going forward, going toward the sound of the beautiful voices that were now reaching in and touching my soul.
We came to another turn in the tunnel and I saw clearly just ahead a large chamber that was lit by at least ten torches sticking out of the walls. Those torches are what gave off the golden light.
The chamber itself looked like a large crystalline cave. The ceiling was low hanging highly reflective crystals. The walls of the cave looked like they were made of shimmering diamonds. The floor of the cave was made of the same black tile as the rest of the tunnel.
A single thick golden chain attached to a steel ring embedded in the floor ran across the width of the cave into a side tunnel.
At the far side of this massive chamber there was a pool of water. The water in that pool glowed soft radiant pink. Dark shapes glided slowly back and forth beneath the surface of the rosewater pool.
To the left of the radiant pool there was a raised platform that looked almost like a walkway or maybe a sacrificial altar. At the end of this raised platform there was a large stone oval with weird symbols carved into it just like the one beneath the Masonic Lodge in Cahokia Illinois. The major difference between that one and this one was that this one had a huge statue of Satan with clawed hands and a grinning fanged mouth standing behind it.
The oval was alive and active inside the stone portal. The symbols carved into the stone were flashing on and off different glowing colors, yellow, blue, and red. In
the center of this doorway to other worlds a vast distance shone. Galaxies that were unfamiliar winked in the starry emptiness of the spaces between realities.
On the other side of the glowing waters there was a woman sitting on a large crystal throne. She was the most beautiful woman that I’d ever seen. She was Elizabeth, just as I had seen her back in East St. Louis the night I’d met her, but somehow she also looked younger.
Elizabeth held her hands out beckoning me forward. Over the distance between us she whispered and the words were clear because I heard them directly inside my brain.
“Come to me,” she murmured. “Come to me and I will show you ecstasy the like of which you have never dreamed was possible. Pass the test and come to me and all your dreams will come true.”
I stepped forward into the chamber. My attention was completely focused on she who sat on the throne. She was exquisite. Her black hair shone like the finest silk, her white skin glowed flawlessly like porcelain.
She was perfect. She was everything that I’d always wanted.
Absently, I noticed a hand clutching my arm trying to pull me back. I shook it off.
I was knocked forward thrown from my feet. My head struck the tiles hard and the fog lifted for a moment.
Behind to my right a thing rushed at us from out of the side tunnel. It was the thing that was manacled to the floor by the golden chain.
The thing had a whole hell of a lot of heads, somewhere around ten of them, too many to count as it came out at us. Each of the heads was at the end of a long snakelike neck.
All the mouths were open, hissing and snapping at us.
Johnny saved my life by knocking me to the side as I walked like a blind man past the thing’s lair. Now he was standing in front of it slashing back and forth as the heads took turns lunging in and snapping at him.
“Get back mother-fucker!” he yelled and chopped one of the heads in half.
I rolled to the side and shook the cobwebs out of my head and wobbled to my feet.
One of the heads darted up and Johnny sliced up at it. At the same time one of its other heads struck and nicked him on the calf. It didn’t withdraw fast enough though because Johnny’s down stroke cleaved that head clean off.