by Zombie Eyes
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.
Wiz raised Nathan, telling him that Stroud was fine, just a temporary thing, he called it. Stroud got on the line, using his comlink. “Commissioner, we’re just penetrating the exterior of the ship now. We’ve run into … obstacles.”
“Understood, Stroud, and make it as fast as possible. People up here getting real antsy.”
“We expected obstacles,” he said, “and we’ve gotten them.”
“The tunnels?”
“Took us away from the ship.Long arm of the beast within.”
“So what does that make the ship itself? The damned bowels?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re sure you all want to step into its gut?”
“Not a whole lot of choice, Commissioner. This … this event is rather complicated, and you might say I had my ticket reserved about three thousand years ago.”
Nathan chuckled nervously into the radio, not understanding the implications of Stroud’s remarks. Static was beginning to break up the communication. Nathan said that he was pulling for them, and if Stroud made it back alive he’d buy him a New York pizza and a beer.
“You’re on, sir. Just plea…”
“What’s … at?”
“…keep … pack off for … time we … greed … pon.”
“Roger … til dawn. Do every … in my power.”
“Thanks, Commissioner.”
“You’re thank … me? Stroud, e … you’re the bravest … I ever met, or the … idiotic … goes for your traveling companions-sss-well … til next … Stroud, over’n…”
Kendra went about monitoring everyone’s gauges and giving a full report. Everything was in working order, but they had only half the oxygen supply they had entered with. The physical turmoil and emotional stress had taken its toll. Leonard was looking very weak, and even Wiz sat in a depressed slump against the wall just staring at the hull of the ship that now confronted them.
Stroud was fatigued himself, and he did not find fault with the others. He wondered now if perhaps he should not have come alone, but the skull had said three good men with faith and courage were required. He had two men and a woman with him, but he wasn’t at all sure of their faith, despite their obvious courage in coming so far with him.
“Once we’re inside the ship, gentlemen,” said Stroud calmly, “you can turn back at any time.”
It was said with such simple sincerity that Kendra and the others just stared at him. Kendra glimpsed the old Stroud in him now, the man she had slept with.
“Is that what your skull tells you?” she asked.
“It is what my heart tells me.”
“We just may take you up on that,” said Leonard. “My own heart is flapping like a chicken trying to take flight.” He tried a laugh but it became a cough.
“If that’s the case, what’re we sitting around here for?” said Wiz. “Not that I have any intention of leaving you here alone, Abe.”
“You face no shame in turning back once we penetrate the hull. It’s the reason I was so … upset when you all ran from the first entranceway we found. So far, we’ve been playing the demon’s game. Now we begin to play our chess pieces.”
Kendra stared across at Stroud. He was once again distant, distracted. He was playing some kind of mental game with the demon of the ship. It was as if that byte of information had come straight from his mind to hers earlier when she had thought of it in exactly those terms. She wondered if she and the other two doctors weren’t Esruad’s pawns in this bizarre war game.
“Yes, let’s get on with it, Dr. Stroud,” she said.
Before them stood the smooth wall of the ship showing no planking marks, nothing to pin the eye on. It looked like the great belly of a whale. Her eyes used to the dark, her nose used to the damp and clay, she still thought that she could smell the leviathan’s rotting carcass, and that she could see the nearly imperceptible, inaudible breathing as the ribs of the whale moved in and out. She eerily wondered if they were about to be swallowed up by the whale.
It was as if the thought had been spoken aloud, for Stroud stared at her, drawing near to her mask so that she could see the expression on his face when he said, “Yes, Kendra, the beast has become the ship, and the ship the beast; we are about to step inside the beast once we lance a hole in its belly.”
What he was saying, and the way he said it, frightened her more than anything she had seen down here. “You must all return after you enter,” he said.
“What about you? Do you expect to die here?” she asked.
“Leave me to my fate.”
Deceptive appearances had made of the ship wall an impenetrable leviathan, but it was far from impenetrable. It gave at the touch. Breathing heavily on it made it move like cardboard.
Decay was the operative word here in the bowels of the ancient ship. Immediately the archeologists went to work, examining the petrified wood that had become like stone to the touch, almost like charcoal. Yet covering the exterior, was a layer of living fungus and mushroomlike growths which turned into a profusion of flying spores at the slightest touch. “What holds the damned thing together?” asked Stroud.
“The earth here is almost pure clay. It has retarded the natural decay of the wood, and the wood itself—teak would be my guess—” began Wiz.
“Yes, teak beams, imagine it,” agreed Leonard, staring.
“The Estrucans were master shipbuilders.”
They had stepped inside the ship, and the moment they did so the Etruscan skull, which had somehow fallen into the hands of the pharaoh of Egypt, and had been buried with him, began to glow with a singular orange-to-yellow light. It went bright with the color, dimmed and became bright again, dimmed and brightened, dimmed again, as if breathing, until it finally settled on a glow similar to the sodium-vapor light of a modern streetlamp.
“Damned thing gives me the creeps almost as much as this ship,” said Kendra.
“Don’t you see that the closer we get to the true cause of the evil here, the stronger Esruad’s power becomes?” asked Stroud.
“All I know is that our time is running out.”
“Look, look here,” said Wiz, pointing. It was a stack of terra-cotta bowls, ladles, jugs, cups. “These will help to date the ship,” suggested Wiz.
“Very similar to the terra cotta taken from the Kyrenia ship,” said Leonard, “somewhere about 700 b.c.”
“Closer, then, to the Yassi Ada ship discovered—”
“We haven’t time, gentlemen,” Stroud told them.
“Over here,” said Leonard. He led them to a collection of double-headed axes, pickaxes, a hoe, a shovel, billhooks, pruning hooks, hammers, knives, punches, gouges, files, chisels, bits and thousands of wooden peg nails.
“Such instruments prove vividly that the Etruscans were most certainly an independent empire, Stroud.”
“Count on it,” said an elated Leonard, who pulled forth a camera he had smuggled in. He began snapping picture after picture with the 35mm. “We must record this.”
“God, if we could only do this right,” said Wiz, “with stereophotography, with care and—”
“Gentlemen, this isn’t a typical archeological site,” shouted Stroud. “It’s possessed of the father of evil. I understand your professional concerns, but we must be realistic.”
“Take as many overlapping photographs as you can here, Leonard,” said Wiz. “We are not coming away from this empty-handed, Dr. Stroud.”
Frowning, Stroud said, “I have to push along, for the center of the ship.” The others didn’t have the slightest idea that the entire staging of this event was somehow meant for Stroud and Esruad to come together at this point in time, to face the evil of the ship together, that it was all somehow predetermined when Esruad had worked his magic to imprison himself and thousands of other souls in the crystal skull.
“Get so
me pictures of the timbers, Leonard,” Wiz was saying now.
Stroud cleared away some of the debris along the bottom and found the keel, which was a forearm’s width. It ran into the next cabin and the next, down through the ship. Leonard clicked off pictures of the find. “The keel will be attached to a stern piece and presumably a similar bow piece. Then the builders added the teak planks,” said Stroud, his own archeological interests peaked now.
Kendra Cline looked into the ominous maw of the next cell of the ship, wondering what lay in wait for them there.
“Yes,” Wiz was agreeing with Stroud, “the builders added the teak to the ribs on each side, secured in the classical fashion by tenons set into the thickness of the adjoining planks. Such workmanship!”
“And thought to be known only by the Greeks and Romans,” added Leonard.
“So that places the waterline at the approximate level of two decks above us,” said Stroud.
“Right reasoning,” agreed Wiz.
“All right, so we have our direction for up, but which way is stern and which is bow, and how close are we to the center?” asked Stroud.
“Almost impossible to say.”
“Time is running on, Abe,” said Kendra, getting antsy, “and why’s it been so … so calm?”
“Licking its wounds, perhaps,” he suggested. “We’ve penetrated the ship for a second time. That’s got to worry the bastard thing.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Well, we have a direct corridor that way,” said Stroud, “but should we take it?”
“It could be another trap,” agreed Kendra, staring at the black hole ahead of them.
Stroud checked a gyrocompass he’d brought with him. “It’s pointing north, and if the bow was, as you say, pointing east, then we must go a little north to get to the center.”
“Let’s go,” said Wiz.
Leonard nodded. Stroud led them, his light immediately picking up the markings on the wall here. They were like rock carvings, crude yet detailed, of a whale, a lizardlike creature and some strange markings. Stroud indicated the markings to the others and his light picked them up clearly, causing Wiz and Leonard to tarry more. The representations meant nothing to Kendra, and yet she, too, was drawn to them: