Robert W. Walker (33 page)

Stroud didn't know what to believe, and yet
Esruad
had warned that it would come to this.
Ubbrroxx
was deliberately placing doubt in his mind, dividing their combined strength.

And here stood
Esruad
as Stroud had never seen him before, his sword gone back inside the body from which it had materialized, standing in tattered yet royal
raiments
that hung limply on a once noble frame below the mummified creature that had stepped from the ages.

"You have no reason to fear me,"
Esruad
almost shouted, angry at Stroud's reluctance. "If you fear me, if you doubt me, the venom of the creature will take you. Fight your eyes, Stroud. Use that mind of yours! That will."

Stroud had been warned by the skull time and again about appearances and deceptions, but he had not been prepared for
Esruad's
graveyard exterior.

Esruad
came closer. Stroud flinched involuntarily. Overhead and surrounding them
came
the laughter of
Ubbrroxx
as if he were watching the scene unfold. The demon's voice said,
"You have lost your human helpmate,
Esruad
. Now you are alone."

Stroud pulled away but
Esruad
draped himself over Abraham. Stroud saw the flesh-peeled body black out everything else; simultaneously, he felt an overwhelming weakness overtake his vision and his mind as he slipped helplessly into unconsciousness, falling deep into what he sensed was his last sleep as the venom reached toward his brain.

"No! No! No!" shouted
Esruad
at Stroud.
"
Nooooooo
!"

Ubbrroxx's
laughter shook the ship, shook its own whale belly.

Esruad
looked around him, trembling so badly that the loose tatters of his death shroud shivered like leaves. But as he trembled, he put his hands through and into Stroud's midsection.
Esruad's
entire frame lit with a yellow to gold to orange light. As he worked over Stroud's body, he appeared to be mourning a terrible death.

Kendra lashed out with everything remaining to her. They'd come in bands, the little rodent things scurrying along the ship walls, rafters, floor, like an army of crawling bugs. There were too many of them and some had escaped the gas and darts long enough to get at their protective wear, ripping into the cloth with vicious shrews' teeth, opening all of them up to the danger of the unholy infection. She'd been talking to Stroud when the first attack occurred.

Now she was separated from Dr. Leonard and Wiz and searching for them. Wiz called out on seeing her light. "Here, over here!"

They'd retreated to the tunnels, and in the gas fog and confusion she hadn't. Now she saw that her suit pants were torn open by the awful little beasts sent to torment them and make of them three more victims to the horror here.

Stroud remained their only hope, but now she couldn't raise him on the
comlink
, and the eerie silence at the other end sent shivers of fear through her along with the vile virus that must surely be coursing through her now.

"Dear God, dear God," Wiz was saying when she reached him and collapsed beside him. "Leonard is not good."

Wiz's clothes, too, had been torn asunder. The fact they were still on oxygen helped, but for how long? The oxygen was fast being depleted with each scare thrown into them in this horror house. Kendra knew that a normal respiratory rate was fourteen to sixteen breaths per minute. A mental check of her own rate had her up around thirty-five. She hadn't lost any blood, had taken no bites, and for this she considered herself lucky when she saw the blood splotches over much of Leonard's body. The vile things had gotten to him, and their poisonous bites had thrown him into shock. She went desperately, perhaps futilely, to work over him, injecting him with what she prayed was a proper antidote, but as she did so Leonard, his eyes wide and without pupils, attempted to tear away what remained of her mask, snatching at her air hose, trying to get at her face any way he could.

Wiz pulled Leonard's arms from her, shouting uselessly at Leonard, who suddenly slumped over, dead. "My God, my God," repeated
Wisnewski
, whose remark was answered by a horrifying, building laughter that seemed to come from everywhere around them and then from Leonard's body, which was suddenly moving as with a mechanical life of its own. Leonard's frame lifted and he came at Wiz, extending his hands toward the other man, saying, "Help me, Wiz ... help me ... My God ... My
Gawwwwwwwwwd
!" This was followed by a bloodcurdling laugh.
"Your God does not exist here! I am your god here! Kneel before your new god!"

Kendra fired one of her last darts into Leonard's body, causing it to crumple.

She rushed to a shaken
Wisnewski
, who could not bring himself to look on Leonard.

"We're next ... we're next," Wiz mumbled and blubbered.

"No, we're out of here. Come on, Dr.
Wisnewski
, come on!" She began to lead him back toward what she believed to be the way they had come to this part of the ship. "We'd best do as Stroud said. I ... I can't raise him any longer on the communicator."

"You don't suppose ... you don't believe that ... that he, too, is ... dead?"

Kendra couldn't bring herself to say what she believed.

-19-

Stroud was somewhere between darkness and light, life and death, but he did not know how far to one side or the other he stood, or rather lay--or was he swimming weightless amid the acrid odors of the death ship and all the horrors of the grave it represented? He only knew that he was being buoyed up and up, carried off and away by a power that was not his own. He smelled fire and yet he felt ice as it burned into his abdomen.
The venom of the serpent coursing through his veins?
Probing, squeezing his insides?

Stroud was eleven years old and trapped beneath the seat, the car aflame. His father's body was slumped over the wheel, the horn blaring. His mother's body was somewhere outside, thrown from the car despite her seat belt. Young Stroud had been asleep one moment and listening to the screams of his parents the next. They'd been on their way back to Chicago from Andover, from his grandfather's house. His parents had talked of one day taking charge of his grandfather's affairs in Andover, of taking control of the family estate there. And now they were dead. And now he was trapped in the burning vehicle, his arms pinned beneath him, his body half under the seat in front of him, where his father's body had now begun to burn.

He screamed and screamed and screamed and then some powerful hands reached in and hefted him from the fiery wreck. It had been a policeman, who had raced to the scene when he saw the flames.

He was taken in by his grandfather
Annanias
, raised by the old man, never knowing until long after his grandfather's own death at the hands of the Andover Devil that his parents had been murdered and that he, too, had been a target of the Andover Devil. Stroud had only learned the truth after years of being away, and after several visitations at Stroud Manse by the ghost of
Annanias
. He had taken so much on faith all his life from the old man; and then he had to take so much on faith from the old man's ghost.

He knew he must do the same now with
Esruad
; that
Esruad
was just another form of
Annanias
, working through the depths of other generations, other dimensions.

Stroud wondered if it was too late, however; if his lapse of faith had not breached their carefully tempered bond. He wondered if the demon had not already destroyed the delicate balance, and was not at this moment watching him squirm on a slowly revolving spit. That's how hot Stroud felt, as if he were roasting from the inside out.

Then he suddenly retched--a good sign, a sign of life. Spasms shook him with the strength of ice to the tenth power lodged in his bones. The stiff iciness was becoming a kind of paralysis, his stomach seeming to turn to lead, his backbone like iron as if in retaliation to the pumping stomach that spewed forth a sickening gelatinous substance. Tearful and spitting the acrid bile, Stroud wondered if it was not his very insides being ripped from him by
Ubbrroxx
.

He had gone blind from the venom. It tore at his every muscle, ballooned his every artery, and the pain was like a hundred twisted knots being turned inside him. The sensation of steroids on muscle, he imagined. His abdominals pinched his entrails, and for now it was as if he were shrinking on the inside, going within himself, deeper, deeper and deeper, as his mind crouched in a vain attempt to hide from the pain.

It was killing him.

It was everywhere ... around and inside him.

It held him as if he were a child, plucking him from one fire to place him in another.

It sent rivers of electric shock through his nerves.

Swimming in pain.

No lack of pain.

No lack...

"You will come to accept me as your god, Stroud,"
the ancient demon spoke.

Esruad
now seemed powerless and far away, blocked.

And Stroud realized now that he was not swimming, but his mind was ... swimming away from the wizard from 793
b.c
.

As a backdrop to his pain he heard the evil laughter of
Ubbrroxx
. He heard explosions and the mad rattle of bones. He imagined lightning bolts exploding all around him, and he wondered if it was bombs and explosives coming from above; wondered if he'd be buried here with the ancient bone pile created by the creature of creatures for all eternity.

Stroud fought for consciousness and for breath. He called on help from his grandfather, who seemed to have abandoned him as well, fearful of watching his end. Would it all come to this, an unheralded death in the bowels of a haunted, cursed ship that had sailed from out of the past of his ancestors?

"
Stroooooud
, Stroud."
It was
Esruad
, and Stroud now realized that
Esruad
held him in his arms, in the protective shield around them both now. Just beyond them, timbers were bursting and bones cascading, but Stroud could not see this.
Esruad
communicated it through a strange telepathy.

"We have only one chance, Stroud," the ancient wizard told him. "You are badly hurt, and if you do not join with me, you will die."

"Join with you?" Stroud wasn't sure what that meant.
"In the skull?
Trapped there to wait for another thousand years, for another chance at
Ubbrroxx
?"

"No, if you join with me, I will live in the receptacle of
your
body. It may be our only chance."

"To join?"

"Are you willing?"

Stroud knew he had little choice. He was blind now and was losing feeling in all of his extremities. He'd die anyway.
Esruad
was offering him life for life. "Yes, we join."

"The choice is made..."

Stroud felt bitterly frustrated, unable to see. But he felt the intense fire that suddenly engulfed him, and yet it was not a burning fire. It was a fire of ice and it spread through his body, combating the numbness and deadness and poison inflicted by the serpent which had been just another extension of
Ubbrroxx
.

"Damn you,
Esruad
!"
Stroud heard the angry roar of
Ubbrroxx
as if it, too, were inside him and all around him.

Stroud felt a calm filtering through him with the coolness of
Esruad's
being. He felt a crystal-like strength returning to his limbs and body. He found his blinded eyes opening to a cool, clear vision, and he felt the strength of his ancestors as they insinuated themselves in his every nerve and fiber. At his feet lay the crystal skull facedown, looking like a useless hulk of ice, and no sign of
Esruad
, for he was inside Stroud now ... in his head, his heart, his muscle. His brain was crowded with the souls of those who'd abandoned the crystal skull with
Esruad
, and it caused a jumble of confusion, noise, voices and sounds unfamiliar to Stroud. He was shaken and fearful of his own body now. For the first time in his life, he'd have settled gladly for the steel plate in his head. He imagined the lunatic, the schizophrenic he would soon become with so many spirits turned loose on his mind.