Stroud suddenly reached for his weapon, firing the gas at the menacing monsters. They seemed impervious to it. "What do we do?" shouted Kendra, separated from Stroud by four or five feet. Wiz and Leonard, too, were shouting that their weapons were useless.
The skull levitated from Stroud's pouch, spraying the images of the monsters with a strange ray, creating holographic mists of them into which Stroud stabbed his hand. It went through the vampire image. The images continued to threaten, lunge and attack, but they were as harmless as celluloid. Stroud and the others laughed at the effect and their own fears as they now simply stepped through them.
"And it was going to devour us whole. Each of us!" Kendra was telling Leonard, explaining what her eyes told her was there.
Stroud gently caught the skull in his hands. He feared losing Esruad now; he feared having to sacrifice the skull and its potent contents to this demon. Suppose it gave the demon hyper-supernatural power, a kind of superconductivity in the underworld? Could the cure for Ubbrroxx be worse than the disease? Esruad's crystal-imprisoned spirit had said nothing about the chance possibility, yet it now struck Stroud like a hammerblow, and then the voice of Esruad came clearly rolling through the coils of Stroud's brain, as if brought by the flow of his blood. "I have not come this way to strengthen my enemy, but to destroy him."
"How? How can swallowing the power you have do anything but empower him with more strength?"
The other members of the hunting party turned to see to whom Stroud was speaking, and in the shadows, just beyond Stroud and the skull, was an enormous gargoyle like those seen in medieval texts. If not a gargoyle then a vulture with bat's eyes and snout, winged by virtue of a membrane of skin that stretched between talons, its body covered in fine, ratlike hair.
It lurched forward over the skull and Stroud, knocking Stroud into a reeling cartwheel as he tried to maintain control of the skull. But he lost his grip, and the skull floated to the ceiling and the gargoyle took flight, pursuing it, trying to take hold of it and race off with it. The skull moved about the darkness like a small UFO, dodging the gargoyle as the others helped Stroud to his feet. Kendra fired on the gargoyle, striking it with one of the darts, sending the thing into a spiral before it rammed into the side of the cavern, bursting into flame and screeching an unholy wail. In the glow of its burning, Ubbrroxx revealed his eyes amid the smoke, fixing the party in place and demanding they return the way they had come, leaving the skull behind. The eyes were spewing snakes.
It was a horrid sight and it made them back off, gasping, but when the smoke cleared they saw that the gargoyle's impact had opened a hole in the veneer of the wall, a hole that was marked by timbers. Stroud, the skull returned to his pack, went to the opening and fingered the rotted wood. "We've found it, the ship."
-16-
A strikingly warm, vivid, sun-bathed waking dream of heat and wind sweeping over a gleaming pearl amid a desert by the sea filtered through Stroud's mind. It was so powerful an image, so lovely by comparison to the dark hole below Manhattan, that Stroud found himself unable to resist it. It seemed amplified by his own desire to see more of it. He felt himself with a foot in two worlds, two times...
But the scene in his mind, playing like a flower over a silver sea, held him firm, a moth to its glow. He instinctively feared that it was a trick, a feint, but the subterfuge was brilliant in both light and fascination, for as the windswept desert cleared on the jewel, it became a city by the sea ... a long-ago place out of time, shimmering with a remarkable beauty and strength, enticing him closer and closer.
Yet he stood still, aware of the fact he was in the company of three others who were suddenly concerned for his well-being, three fellow travelers on another plane who were counting on his staying with them, remaining strong and vigilant, to protect them. He didn't feel either Wiz's or Kendra's hands on him, nor truly know that they helped him to a sitting position, for he was half a world away now, in another place, captive to the play in his mind ... No longer was he in a confined earthen tube below a great city with a demon anxious to tear out his throat; no longer was he the sword that swayed before the crusade he led here. At the moment, he was not even a weak shield for the others.
Part of him knew this, wished desperately to claw his way back, to not let himself slide down the belly of the beast within, and he mentally twisted back, a contortionist and a masochist, for fighting back only brought on the pain of horrid memories. Still, he fought, not now wanting to let down all his defenses, or to let Kendra and the others down. He had also let himself down. The demon would come and he would be in his own little black hole when it arrived, never knowing, until it was too late ... too late.
Part of him struggled back, but it was too late. The dream overtook him, and he was locked in the seizure that claimed him.
No longer in control of his own mind, Stroud felt a familiar disquiet. He had all these years fought always to be in control. His infrequent, unaccountable blackouts were chaos and mental mayhem, from which an occasional glimpse of inspiration and knowledge might be had, but not always. Far from being psychic tools which he could adroitly maneuver, most of his blackouts amounted to difficulties in his physiological makeup, the "war" between his brain and the metal encasing it. He had come to believe that slight increases in his blood pressure, for instance, set off a corresponding irritating pressure in his cranium due to the pinching of a minuscule dagger from a frayed edge of the aging metal below the scalp. He thought of it as a slipped disk pinching on a nerve, except that his disk was man-made, and the nerve was a central pathway to his brain.
"Give in to me," he heard the black hole inside him say, and it had the familiar voice of peace and tranquillity that he had heard all his life, the voice of Annanias, his grandfather. It was either a sign that he should give in or a clever ruse of the demon here. But where was here? While his body lay inert against a wall of the cave, his mind was in a time nearly three thousand years ago, a time of tranquillity and prosperity for the people of Etruria, and everywhere was the lilting sound of their flutelike instruments, even in the noisy marketplace along the wharf, clanging also with bells and hammers, where haggling merchants sent up a music of their own. A busy place, teeming with life, it was a city that attracted ships from all over the known world, an axis by which others measured time and place and distance.
High on a plateau, above it all, stood the massive temple, some seventy feet high from its base, stretching in a growing spiral of gleaming stone. It shone like moonstone in its sunbath there on the plains of Etruria. From the hills surrounding, looking down on the temple, it might appear to be a fortress to strangers moving in caravans past the city where Esruad had played in the mud-caked passageways as a child.
Esruad had been born with the gift of sight and he had a vision of the temple, even as a child, but he was the son of a shepherd, hardly capable of building such a shrine, and yet he knew that it would one day be built and that he would largely be responsible for its having been built.
As a young man he drew on the knowledge of his mother and grandmother, an ancient who knew the uses of crushed minerals, heated roots and herbs for medicinal purposes. From his father's side, he nurtured what was called a third eye, for the boy actually saw into the souls of men and into the future. He had foreseen the temple where it now stood, and he had foreseen his place in the temple as magician. He worked in cohort with the religious leaders, using his wizardry for nurturing, healing, sweeping away droughts and locusts.
He wore the finest vestments. He prayed before the Etruscan goddess of healing, and as he grew more powerful he produced insights on the future of all mankind, telling fantastic tales of a place where men would fly through the air in great mechanical birds, of cities that would dwarf the temple, of towers that would cut holes in the belly of the heavens and of sailing ships that would one day penetrate to the moon and the stars beyond. The ancient religious center of Etruria had fought Esruad for fear of him and his visions, and the city was
split between those at the temple and those at the old site, and the people, too, had divided.
Over one hundred rooms, the temple was a maze through which people made pilgrimages, seeking the healing power of the temple erected to the goddess Eslia, who promised fertile lands and fertile bodies and good health. With them, visiting pilgrims brought small clay figurines of humans, either replicas of themselves or of aged or sick relatives or friends. They came in caravans, day after day after day, lining up outside the gates of the temple, awaiting Esruad and the new order of religious leaders who did not fear him. Esruad would take in the people to his infirmary, dousing them with herbal waters, prescribing medicines, sometimes lancing and cleaning wounds and on occasion performing the miracle of surgery which he had learned of in his visions. Meanwhile, the religious men would convey the small figures of the ailing masses and place them before the altar for several days before they were given a permanent home in a room filled with such figures. The patient was sent away after a time, but the figures remained behind to continue to tell the goddess where it hurt.
The goddess's own likeness was that of a beautiful woman in robes, surrounded by a company of stone lions. An inscription in lapis lazuli was at the base of the statue, proclaiming in the ancient letters of the Etruscans that Eslia was the queen of all the worlds of the universe. Men worked about the temple documenting the business of the temple, of the religious leaders, and they wrote on their clay tablets of Esruad, who was becoming something of a living god among his people. Herbal treatments, recipes known previously only to Esruad, were being set down on stone in the now-familiar wedge-shaped characters used in ancient Etruscan, lettering which Leonard had called cuneiform in nature. Stroud thought of temples discovered near Baghdad and Nippur which had given up rich lodes of Sumerian and Akkadian documents written on clay tablets. Stroud was reminded of figurines left in Mexican churches even now, as cues to the saints to help cure someone.
Stroud knew that some forms of herbal treatments went back as far as the Stone Age, but it was generally felt that the Babylonians and the Egyptians had been the first people to develop a systematic practice of medicine, and most certainly the first to use surgery. Now Stroud knew better.
Esruad shared his knowledge freely, placing himself at the disposal of the historians, giving them specific recipes of herbs to treat various conditions, from eye infection to diarrhea, constipation and fevers, leaving even a restorative for gray hair and baldness. He also left strict directions for surgical procedures of various kinds. He had even left magical incantations to drive out demon spirits and evil gods that threatened the peace and comfort of Etruria, as well as the lesser demons that afflicted individuals. In fact, Esraud had left a complete medical text in the temple which attempted to clarify the complex and delicate relationship between the religious healers, herbalists and magicians quartered at the temple.
Esruad was not the only magician living at the temple by this time. There was a hierarchy of leadership, a council of members, and on large issues, no one man--not even Esruad--had complete say. The Etruscan temple was democratic, allowing conflicting views and much room for intrigue. While Esruad was busy with patients one morning on a sun-baked day in 793 b.c., he felt the earth below the temple shudder. In fact, the earth below the entire city was shuddering like an earthquake. But it was no earthquake. It was Ubbrroxx, the ancient god of destruction and denial, somehow brought to the surface after eons of sleep. His power shook the temple so badly that the statue of Eslia toppled, crumbling about her fearsome-looking lion guard in the manner of cake. Men Esruad had known all his life had gone deaf and dumb, and they walked out to the desert where a gaping hole had broken open in the earth and they began to pray to the voice that they heard emanating from the pit; they forsook all else for the thing in the hole which wanted a temple built to worship it.
It also wanted the sacrifice of 500,000 humans. And so it built its army and Esruad hid in the temple and worked day and night at whatever alchemy he could devise to combat the monster until he realized he hadn't the power to defeat it, because it drew its power from the faith--or lack of faith--of the others. Everyone in the temple had gone by now, and Esruad stood alone--the only man immune to Ubbrroxx's sway. It sent others to drag Esruad down into the hole with it, to end his puny life, but for a time Esruad fought these off with magical weapons that he had devised that were effective against the human zombies.
Then Esruad lost the battle and was dragged to stand before Ubbrroxx, a sight that blinded Esruad there in the pit. Ubbrroxx ordered Esruad to build a temple that would serve as a place where men would worship only the god that fed on them, telling Esruad that when next he came, he would devour five million men, if his wishes were not met.
Esruad agreed to build the temple, saying that he would build it as a great monument to the power of his god, Ubbrroxx. "I will make it easy for you," Ubbrroxx had said to the Etruscan wizard. The demon then turned to stone before Esruad, who, sensing the change, felt around in the dark pit and touched the scalding stone that was left behind. It was a stone likeness of the hideous, enormous, two-headed demon that had spikes and scales over its body.
Esruad gradually regained his sight, a gift from Ubbrroxx, his new god, he assumed. All of those men who had been used by the demon--some of them Esruad's former enemies in the temple--had fiendishly had a hand in feeding the monster its sacrifices. These men, from religious leaders to beggars, from merchants to midwives, were now clear-eyed and coming out of their forced condition of unknowing and uncaring; out of the fog to the terrible and shattering realization of what they had done and had been made to do.
Still, fear reigned. They feared Ubbrroxx and they fell to their knees at his stone self. It took another generation and much planning on Esruad's part to gather the courage and strength required to dare put his plan into operation, but he did it. Ubbrroxx wanted a temple built to surround his stone image. So be it.
But the temple was built in the form of a ship, and the ship, along with all of Ubbroxx's remains, was let loose from its gantry and out into the ocean. Ubbrroxx was taken to a land that was not populated and there buried with his ship beneath a restraining pyramid that covered him. The work took years upon years, but Esruad, using up all of his psychic energy, had read the meaning of the stone demon and it told him that the god inside must remain at rest, and he had convinced his nation of this.
With this done, Esruad had one final duty before he should pass away, before he should never see his sons and grandsons again. In his alchemist cell in the ruins of the old temple, he fashioned the molds with the help of a young and patient apprentice, a grandson who was very good with metals and stones. The boy had fashioned the molds precisely as Esruad had ordered, seven of them in all, to go with the nine smaller ones and the three larger ones. Using the magical numbers of the year when Esruad had come face-to-face with Ubbrroxx, 793, he now mixed the molten crystal and touch of desert earth over which the demon had stood, and he carefully filled the final molds with the steaming, thick soup. The demon-touched sand would ensure the success of his magic, he was sure...
The veterans of the evil time, those who fed Ubbrroxx blindly and without resistance, began dying away, and as each man, woman and child did so, Esruad visited their bedside like a doting priest giving last rites, but Esruad's rites were those of a powerful magical nature which called on the goddess Eslia to assist him in the deliverance of the souls of such men as himself--weak men who had fallen prey to fear, falling into the pit of the unfaithful. Where should such souls reside for the rest of eternity but inside the crystal skulls that would refract and reflect back their gross sins for all eternity? But more important, so that they might have one final chance at redemption by fighting Ubbrroxx the next time it rose against mankind.
Esruad's grandson, sworn to perform the ceremony he had witnessed thousands of times over, now did so over the silent form of Esruad himself. The skull in the boy's hands lit with a shimmering, yellow-to-gold
fire for a moment before it went dormant. He then solicitously placed the skull in the deep ruins of the temple.
Years upon years passed and the crystal stones were discovered and traded to kings and pharaohs for their amusement, little knowing that they housed the souls of men and magicians.
-17-
For Stroud, returning was like coming out of a black vortex that spun him around at a dizzying speed, but in an instant, he had returned to the others there in the tunnels. They'd made him as comfortable as possible, propping him against a wall, Kendra being solicitous over him, the concern creasing her face. Stroud began blinking and it drew them all around him. They were at exactly the place he had left them.
"How long have I been out?"
"Ten minutes, maybe less," Kendra said. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, fine ... and you? Wiz, Sam?"
"No problems."
Esruad had selected his time wisely, Stroud thought as he stared at the outer hull of the ship, the belly of the beast, the temple that had become the demon.
"We've had a report from Nathan," said Kendra.
"Did you tell him about my condition?"
"We were afraid you'd slipped back into a coma, Abe," said Wiz. "We had to tell him."
"Well, radio him now; tell him I'm on my feet." With that, Stroud got to his feet, saying, "I'm really all right."
"We were worried," she said.
"Frightened," added Leonard.
"What's going on aboveground?" he asked, changing the subject, embarrassed over what must appear to the others as a weakness.
"Nathan says he can only stall so long before the military takes complete control."
Leonard added, "Those CBS and NBC film crews got the tunnel digging on tape, at least what they could make out of it--the slag heaps outside. At any rate, everyone up there is terrified, Abe ... everyone. And you can't blame them."
Stroud was impressed by the intricacies of the tunnels dug by hand by the legion of zombies.
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