by Zombie Eyes
Nathan had spoken to the commander. He had spoken to the mayor, and Bill Leamy had spoken to Washington, D.C., the President.
At the moment, all was poised to give Abraham H. Stroud his chance. Failing this, they’d move in and wipe out every man, woman and child who stood protecting and feeding the heart of this evil.
Nathan had tried on several occasions to contact Stroud’s party, to no avail. Something kept jamming the communication line, and so far Stroud had not contacted him. Nathan was growing jumpier by the minute. But the damnable, murderous zombies were as still and as stiff as cut-out cardboard people, like the things Nathan fired on at the range. More and more, Nathan felt he’d have no trouble using a bomb on them.
But now he had the Stroud party in there, in the core of this unholy reactor, and he didn’t know what to do about that.
He tried to hail Stroud again. He got a faint voice, going in and out with the static. It sounded like Stroud.
“How are you progressing?” he pleaded.
“Stroud is your enemy,” said the voice. “Do not trust him.”
“Who is this? Who’s on this line?”
“My name is unimportant,”came the wavering whisper. “Do not trust Stroud”
“Bastard, identify yourself.”
But it was gone. Nathan shouted for Stroud to come in. Suddenly Stroud’s voice came over, saying, “We’ve had some difficulty down here.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“All are fine, and we’re pushing on.”
“Where are you? Have you penetrated the ship?”
“Not yet.”
“What? You’ve been in there an hour.”
“We’ve met with several obstacles thrown up in our way.”
“Are you near your target?”
“Why, is there a problem up there?”
“Army is here, and chomping at the bit, ready to open fire, and I can’t blame them.”
Stroud hesitated at his end. “You’ve got to give us time, Commissioner. We’re closing in, but—”
“You’ve got till dawn, Stroud.”
“Dawn?”
“Three hours. And then we unleash the heavy artillery.”
“I can’t promise we’ll be out by then.”
“And I can’t promise you that it will make a damned difference, Stroud. Too many people up here have lost too many friends and relatives to this thing. They want action, not a ghost hunt on a ship buried below the city.”
“We’re wasting time, then. Stroud out.”
Nathan frowned. He’d hoped that he could convince the fool that he must get his people out of there now. But Stroud was a stubborn son of a bitch. And either brave or stupid. Either way, James Nathan had come to admire the man.
Abe Stroud clicked off the communicator, their only link with the outside, informing the others that they had less than three hours before the Army meant to flatten the place. “Can’t stop ignorance,” he told the others. “Everyone thinks the disease can be ended if they just bomb the site. We know better.”
All of them felt it now as Stroud had felt it right along; they were not alone. They could not see it so much as they could feel it: the definite presence of Ubbrroxx. It was like the fire of a furnace. You didn’t have to stand at the furnace to feel the heat.
And the temperature was rising in the pit, rising by leaps and bounds. Inside their protective wear the temperature was rising to ninety, ninety-five and a hundred. Kendra was the first to notice her temperature gauge and ask the others if they were also experiencing difficulties.
They were. All of them. And the tunnel they had chosen to step into was now a river of superheated air. Stroud shouted for them to form a circle, to huddle together and hold on.
The others, not knowing what else to do, did as Stroud instructed. Holding firmly to one another, Stroud shouted, “No one must break the circle. Hold on! Hold on!”
The heat flew over and around them, swirling in a torrent of electrified hatred from the thing in the ship.
Inside the circle of their bodies, Stroud held the skull at the very center of them, which had suddenly become a freezing orb, an icy vapor rising from it. It was a silent conversation to them all, not just Stroud, a visual dialogue among them all as the others saw what Stroud saw: the skull was fighting the fire wind of the damnable tunnel with a preternatural wind of its own. Stroud understood the magical power and sanctity of the circle, that it closed out evil and kept in good. The church with its brethren of believers was the circle.
There were, apparently, all manner of nasty creatures in this underworld, many of which had taken up a long residence here in the pit. Abe had learned of his ancestry, of his special genetic makeup, which had only been enhanced by the steel plate in his cranium. He knew that he alone had the capacity to detect and put an end to the creature in the ship, and that he was indeed the distant ancestor of the brave and curious Esruad.
Abe smelled smoke and saw that their protective wear was being seared by the heat, a thin smoke rising off them all. It threatened to burst the material into flame. The shield of safety around them seemed to be eroding, when suddenly the threat retreated and the air cooled.
“You like it coooooold?” came a voice that barreled down the cavern just before a rush of frigid air, followed by demonic laughter.
“Hold to the circle, all your hands on the crystal!” Stroud shouted, and the crystal turned warm and then hot beneath their touch until they could hold it no longer, and Stroud bent to place it at their feet. The circle crouched with him and withheld the freezing temperatures hurled at them, although their protective clothing was laden with ice.
“It’s expending a great deal of energy over this game,” said Stroud.
“So is our skull,” said Wiz.
Then the brutally cold storm was suddenly lifted. There was not so much as a sensation it was ever there, save for the falling glasslike pieces of ice as their suits thawed. The skull, too, returned to normal.
“Uncanny,” commented a shaken Leonard, “simply uncanny.”
An unearthly, ungodly stench began to filter through the tunnels. It was so ghastly that they could even smell it through the protection of the oxygen masks they wore.
“What the hell is that?” asked Wiz.
Leonard was pointing a bony finger at the things that now suddenly appeared to block their way. Stroud saw what was to him a nightmare, the vision of several vampires that he had personally killed in Andover a year ago. Their bodies were fully intact, but they walked upright with the metal stakes he had driven into them. The sight unnerved Stroud as he watched the white maggots feeding on the wounds of the vampires who now opened their mouths wide, baring their fangs.
Leonard was seeing some other horror altogether, a creeping, spiderlike creation. Wiz shouted something about anthropomorphids—creatures with human limbs and organs jammed into their anatomy—while Kendra saw giant insects of the praying mantis variety. The creatures gained the distance between them, scattering Stroud and the others. Stroud shouted, “It’s using our own worst nightmares against us! It’s rummaging around in our heads for our worst fears!”
It seemed to be true, because now one of the awful vampires had turned into the kind of cannibal werewolf Stroud had once combated in the deep woods of Michigan. “Control your fears, people! Control your fears!”
The darts didn’t have any effect on the monsters that pushed them back and back along the corridor, returning them to the hole that would send them once again below the ship to weaken the energy of the skull. Stroud could not believe the precision with which the evil Ubbrroxx re-created the fearsome creatures that had been stored in Stroud’s mind, down to the sickening “O” pucker of the vampire wishing only to kiss him about the throat, and the slavering of the werewolf. All around him, Stroud heard the members of his party shouting in terror at their own fearsome visions.
Stroud suddenly reached for his weapon, firing the gas at the menacing monsters. They seemed impervio
us 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, sunbathed 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 peo
ple, 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.