Robert W. Walker (28 page)

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 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.