Robert W. Walker (15 page)

"Wonderful news, Dr.
Wisnewski
," Stroud told him, detailing the story that Kendra Cline had given him about Leonard's recovery.

Wisnewski
hadn't slowed in his work at all until now. He slumped into a chair and said, "Thank God. I'd thought we had lost our dear friend."

"Perhaps it's time you got some rest, Doctor."

Wisnewski
didn't fight the suggestion. "Yes, need my wits about me ... all my wits..."

"Whatever this thing is, Dr.
Wisnewski
, it's very potent, very powerful."

"The evil of the ages," he said thoughtfully.
"The core of the evil of all our ills, Stroud.
That's what it is shaping up to be."

"Satan?"

"Satan, if you wish ... It has as many names as there are religions and races on the planet. The Etruscans had a name for it, most certainly, but so far, I have not been able to find it in the writings."

"What do you make of the bones?"

"Sacrifices to this deity."

"How can you be certain?"

He lifted one of the bones. It was a tibia with large spurs at the bottom. Wiz said, "This is representative of the entire lot we found in the ship. See the spurs? Broken and beaten and herded, those people were put aboard that ship, without provisions, to starve to death as they were being fed to this ... this bestial god."

"These markings appear to be numbers ... the number of sacrifices, perhaps?"

"Leonard will translate the numbers when he returns. But that is how I read the parchment, also."

"This ... this thing somehow infiltrates a man's mind ... turns him into a walking dead man to come unto its altar and worship it and be made fodder for it?"

"As far as I can tell, yes.
Without Leonard, well ... he knows these characters so much better, you see."

"Time for rest, Doctor.
You've done more than enough tonight."

"Great news, that about Leonard.
I'd feared the worst."

"I, too."

"You know, Stroud, I saw it."

"What?"

"I saw
its
face. That is what drove me to madness."

"You saw it?
Where, how?"

"It was in the chamber with you when you fell out. I looked in and there it was. Then it lay down beside you, whispering in your ear--this ugly, hideous creature--unspeakable, and I ... I snapped."

Stroud realized it was on seeing this demon that Wiz had lifted the pickax. That he hadn't intended to strike Stroud, but that this creature had somehow created a hologram in Wiz's mind, placed it over Stroud and taunted the man to strike it. Had he done so, Wiz would have killed Stroud. The thing wanted Stroud dead, no doubt of that.

Dr.
Wisnewski's
quarters in the museum were home for now, a pair of black leather couches, a coffee urn and a small refrigerator and bath.

"If you had left me in that prison, I would still be mad now," the older man told Stroud as they made their way to the couches when the phone rang.

It was Nathan, wanting a progress report. Stroud told him the news of Leonard, and that was all so far. No sooner had he hung up than the phone rang again. It was Kendra Cline. She sounded strange, upset.

"I need ... must see you. Can you come here?"

"Where are you? It's almost two a.m."

"My lab at the hospital.
Please, it's urgent. Please hurry."

"I'll have to make arrangements here, but I'll be right over, Kendra."

"Hurry, please ... hurry."

"Are you all right?"

"No ... no, I am not."

"I'm on my way. Hang on."

Stroud told
Wisnewski
of the emergency. "Something go sour with Dr. Leonard's recovery?" Wiz asked.

"No, no! She said nothing about Leonard.
Something else entirely."
He lied because he didn't know, and he didn't wish to unduly upset
Wisnewski
. "Go to bed, and I'll return as soon as I can."

"Don't worry about me, Stroud. Go ... do what you must."

"There'll be guards at your door, should you need anything, Wiz, anything."

"For God's sake, Abe, go ... go."

Stroud nodded, turned and rushed out, fearful of the strange tone he had heard in Kendra's voice.

Abraham Stroud had had a police squad car drive him to the hospital, and when he asked the driver if he could speed it up, the siren roared into life. He reached St. Stephen's within twenty minutes of Kendra's call. She was waiting for him in her lab, and he had to don the protective gear that she wore. He now stepped into the isolation chamber where she explained that she had the sample of organic matter that had filtered from Dr. Leonard's orifices as he came out of coma. The sample she wished him to look at was under her microscope. She was, for her, agitated.

Stroud felt cumbersome in the suit, and looking over the comparison microscope with its double vision capability was a chore through the face mask. Stroud saw a great deal of teeming life on both sides of the scope, but nothing that meant anything to him. He lifted his eyes away and asked, "What does this mean? What am I looking at?"

"Don't you see it ... those ... the things in there?"

"I see ordinary bacteria, protozoa. Why are you so upset?"

"
Dammit
," she said, looking into the scope herself and gasping. "Don't you see the souls there? You're supposed to be the seer, the prophet, the
parapsychological
genius, Dr. Stroud. Can't you see what's before your eyes?" She was shouting, out of control.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Don't treat me like a child or a fool!"

"Kendra, something is not right here."

"Don't you think I know
that!
" She pushed him away and insisted he look again. "Look hard. Open up that mind of yours."

Stroud saw nothing more than the microbes he had seen earlier, but he said calmly, "Where did this come from?"

"Substance on the left is from
Weitzel
."

Stroud saw that it was identical to that on the right.

"Substance on the right is from Leonard."

"Leonard?"

"Yes. Dr. Leonard.
From his ear.
Stuff just seeped out of him." Stroud gasped, realizing it was from the beast.

"Do you see the eyes?" she asked.

"Eyes?"
He raised his shoulders, unsure what she meant by this.

"Mouths ... noses, ears, pained faces? All tangled and swirling in that microscopic world?"

Stroud wondered how long it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. He wondered if she was hallucinating.

"I see Dante's Hell when I look into the microscope," she said. "Which means I've either caught the disease myself and am going mad, or ... or your supernatural theory is ... is true."

Stroud put an arm around her and said, "You need some rest. Let's get out of here. I'll see you home."

"No, first you've got to see this." She pulled away and went to a table with a clear container that sat over a burner. She heated the brown slime and gases immediately rose and swirled inside the large container, creating a swirling, angry cloud that seemed bent on escaping the container. In the swirls, Stroud saw strange shapes come and go, come and go. He thought he saw a hand but it was immediately replaced by a fingerlike extension that was swept away by something resembling a half-formed eyeball that quickly disappeared, replaced by a scalp, a foot, a chin.

"Do you see it now?" she pressed.

"I see something."

"That's not all," she said, turning off the heat and allowing the gas to dissipate, returning the substance to its original state. "Look at this."

She led him to a curtained window which was actually a viewing port for a chamber within the chamber of the isolation lab. A scraping of the substance had been placed on a steel slab inside the chamber.

"Watch," she instructed him, and then pressed a button that sent a shower of water down over the brown scum. The water hitting the material caused a steam to rise off it and there rose a yellow fog that discolored the pane before them. In the fog more shapes ... more
souls,
as she had termed them.

"Whatever this is, it takes an airborne form when it is heated, or when it comes into contact with H2O. It penetrates the skin in the form of dampness, enters at the pores and gets to the nerve endings, and finally to the brain, traveling along the neurological pathways."

"Sulfur trioxide,
sulfonethylmethane
, narcotic--"

"And we've found mephitis is also part of the potent poison."

"Mephitis?
What is that?"

"A foul-smelling, poisonous gas emitted from the earth--"

"Like methane with a stench?"

"Enough to do some damage to the neurological processes."

"It's a miracle any of us came out of that pit alive, then."

"Your protective wear, the clear oxygen you were breathing saved you. Neither you nor the other archeologists received the kind of dosage that others have gotten. Somehow it's transmitted from one person to the next. We haven't learned the mystery behind its transmittal yet, but it would appear from our tests that those infected, with the normal body heat, breed the bacterial infection, and there is a kind of invisible-to-us gas created around their bodies. This disease is expired through their breathing, through their sweat, through their pores. We're all very much in danger..."

"It's a wonder I didn't get it from
Weitzel
."

"I've thought about that quite a lot," she said.

"And?
Any conclusions?"

"Luck, or simply that
Weitzel
had to expend so much energy trying to strangle you as you say that he ... the thing inside him ... simply spent itself. Perhaps the spitting up at you was its last hope of infecting you."

"Then you are now willing to believe that something from inside
Weitzel
spoke to me?"

"Yes ... yes, I am."

She shut down the shower and soon the writhing cloud of yellow steam and the bizarre forms within it dissipated.

"Why?
Because of what you see here?"

"That, yes ... but also something happened with Leonard, just before I injected him with the antidote."

"Would you like to talk to me about it?"

"Take another look in the scope now."

He did so, and this time he saw what had so frightened her. In the
Weitzel
sample there existed amoebas and bacteria skittering all about, but now in the Leonard sample the same creatures had strange, humanlike appendages and eyes. It so startled Stroud that he pulled his eyes away.