by Guy d'Armen
He could not approach the web too closely, to test its thickness and solidity, because of the tarantula’s presence. This was a black tarantula of the phyxioschema species, one of the deadliest creatures on Earth. Its prodigious size was undoubtedly the result of one of the Red Wizard’s diabolical experiments, and he had deliberately placed it there to serve as the lethal guardian to his underground kingdom, certain to prevent anyone’s flight.
That madman must have found a way to keep the creature from attacking him, thought Ardan. After all, he crossed the lake just before I did, and the tarantula didn’t go after him. I must try to figure out how he did it...
Several hours went by, until Ardan heard the same bellowing noise that had first alerted him to the beast’s presence.
He cautiously stepped closer to the web and saw that the tarantula was retreating, going back to its lair. If he could get out of the cave, and manage to keep the beast away, he had a chance of either escaping, or, at worst, retracing his course and returning to the city.
The young man thought long and hard about his quandary. Escaping from the cave was not the most difficult part of his plan. Searching the ground, he had found a number of broken stones, the edges of which were sharp enough to slice through the web. But how to stop the monster from attacking him again?
Ardan watched the tarantula lazily going back to its lair and noticed that the beast was taking a wide berth to avoid the small pyramids of salt he had spotted before. But certainly salt itself could not be the reason for its behavior; after all, most of the cavern and the bottom of the lake itself were made of salt.
There was a mound of salt nearby, very close to the exit of the little cave where he was; if he could take a closer look, perhaps he could find the answer?
Cautiously, and making sure to not make any noise, Ardan used one of the sharpened hard rocks to slice a manageable hole in the web that held him prisoner, large enough for him to slip through unnoticed.
At first, it proved harder than he had thought, because the web strands were as if they were made of rubber; they stretched but did not break. Finally, he had to use the stone as saw to cut through the webbing.
He then crawled very slowly towards the salt mound and finally found the answer he was seeking: there were beetles crawling upon it, small insects which were extremely poisonous to the spider, hence its instinctual reflex to avoid them.
What irony! thought the young man. I’m going to owe my life to that stinking vermin!
Ardan tore off one of his sleeves and used it to grab as many beetles as he could. Then he mashed them into a pulp with the rock. Finally—as awful and disgusting as it was—he spread the resulting paste over his body.
If only father could see me. I must be quite a sight, he said to himself, smiling. Not to mention the smell!
Proceeding with caution, and keeping as far from the monster’s lair as possible, the young man returned to the bank of the lake where he had begun his venture. Deeming himself safe again, he used some of the water to clean himself.
At last, he retraced his path through the tunnels and, guided by his unerring sense of direction and prodigious memory, was soon back in Kyzyl Kaya’s city. There, he went straight to his “cottage” to wash himself more thoroughly and rest after this harrowing adventure.
When he felt clean and refreshed again, he ate the meal that had been left for him in his absence. He estimated that he had been away for five or six hours.
At some point during the evening, he saw the Red Wizard walk by. The Comte looked at him sardonically, burst out laughing, then walked away without saying a word.
Ardan understood that Kyzyl Kaya must have been aware that he had followed him, and possibly lured him towards the lair of the giant spider in order to demonstrate his powers and teach him a lesson he would never forget.
Indeed, it was possible that there were other, even more dreadful monsters, protecting the city and making any attempts at escaping utterly impossible!
In any event, the Red Wizard did not seem to blame his prisoner for his aborted escape attempt, because Ardan continued to be treated as an honored guest.
The young man was plagued by a series of awful nightmares involving being chased by giant spiders during his next rest period, and woke up several times, drenched in cold sweat.
The following day, a Tartar warrior came to tell Ardan the Red Wizard wished to see him.
The young man followed the Tartar to a place that looked like a luxuriant garden enclosed inside a glass dome, like a snow globe.
Kyzyl Kaya stood before the dome and gestured to Ardan to come closer.
“I want to show you something, Doctor Ardan,” he said.
The young man obeyed and looked at the garden inside the dome; it resembled a miniature jungle with trees, vines, bushes, tall grass and bright scarlet flowers.
Ardan noticed that something was moving inside the dome. It was a Chinese man; his brutish, haggard face reflected stark, pure terror such as the young doctor had never seen before. It was obvious that the man was screaming, begging for mercy, but the dome blocked the sounds of his cries, so he appeared to move as if in a silent movie.
Ardan shivered. He guessed correctly that the man was facing a horrible fate.
Indeed, another giant spider, this time of the latrodectus or black widow variety, black with red markings on its body, came out of a tree.
The Chinese man fell to his knees, virtually hypnotized by the arachnid that was slowly moving towards him.
Remembering his own predicament, Ardan felt a powerful wave of sympathy for the man. He turned to Kyzyl Kaya to beg for the victim’s life.
“This is monstrous,” he said. “You need not prove your power to me. Spare this man’s life.”
“This would be a most foolish thing to do, Doctor,” replied the Red Wizard. “The man you see before you, who is about to die, is himself a criminal, a monster—guilty of killing and raping many of the innocent villagers of this region. Worse, he challenged me and my rule. His death will serve both as justice—and as a reminder that none may defy my will!”
By then, the giant spider had reached its victim and its deadly mandibles were already at work on the body. Ardan was grateful that could not hear the sounds of the man’s skull breaking within the spider’s jaws, and could only hope that the beast’s deadly venom had killed its victim before he could suffer the unbearable agonies of being devoured alive.
CHAPTER VI
The Hideous Experiment
“I do not often have the opportunity of sharing my marvels with an educated man, Doctor Ardan,” said Kyzyl Kaya after the horrible spectacle was over. “You have seen my pet guardians, who must have convinced you that escape is all but impossible.”
The Red Wizard gave a burst of satanic laughter, seeing Ardan’s pale, still anguish-stricken face.
“Yes, I can tell by your expression that you are convinced now. The sight of my guardians has terrified more than one brave man, Doctor. They are but one small testimony to the wonders that I have been able to achieve. Follow me!”
Accompanying his command with a gesture, Kyzyl Kaya took Ardan to what at first glance seemed to be a bare stone wall. But the Red Wizard pressed a spot on the wall, and it slid sideways to reveal a modern laboratory behind it.
It was a white room about six meters long and eight meters wide. There was a work bench, the surface of which was occupied by all kinds of scientific and chemistry equipment: microscopes, beakers, oscillographs, electromagnetic radiation meters and many more, the purpose of which Ardan could not identify.
At the center of the room was a desk with two plush, French style armchairs, that oddly contrasted with the rest of the décor. The desk was covered with notebooks and sheaths of documents.
The Red Wizard invited Ardan to sit, while he himself sat in the chair next to the desk.
“Tell me what you see here?” he asked.
“It looks like a laboratory,” replied the young man.
<
br /> “Excellent! It is in this very laboratory that all the wonders you have seen so far—and many more—were first conceived. In order to understand what I have achieved here, you must first forget everything you know of official science. None of the things I have created follow what people like yourself consider the immutable laws of Science. Have you ever asked yourself why Nature created tiny living creatures as well as gargantuan ones? Probably not. Like all conventional scientists, you’ve been satisfied with studying them, categorizing them, but you never asked yourself that most fundamental of questions—why? Not so with me. In order to perfect my longevity process, I had to plunge myself into the study of living organisms, and amongst other things, what secret determined their growth and their sizes.
“I began with micro-organisms—microbes—because it is their very small size that makes them hard to detect and destroy. I corresponded with the famous Professor Tornada and, like him, I managed to use my own resources to perfect the creation of giant microbes—macrobes, as he called them. I will show you...”
He pressed a button on his desk and a part of the wall slid open, revealing the strangest sight any man had ever beheld.
Behind a thick plate of glass was an amazing creature the size of a sheep, which looked vaguely like a giant armadillo, with a trunk like an elephant.
“This is one of my latest experiments,” explained Kyzyl Kaya. “What you see before you is a macrobe—a microbe whose biological functions have been altered by me to make him grow beyond the size nature had preordained, and reach truly gargantuan proportions. During the course of this process, the thing evolved, mutated if you will, to gain new features. In a way, it is an entirely new form of life, and I created it!”
“That’s... monstrous,” muttered Ardan.
“I see that you’re as close-minded as the fellows from the Institut de France, to whom I sent a memorandum on the subject, and who rejected it as ‘preposterous.’ Fortunately, there are others who, unlike you, are more receptive. I have recently been corresponding with an American chemist named Pere Teston who... But I digress. Let me show you what Macrobe-LD07—that is its name—is capable of...”
Kyzyl Kaya got up, opened a cold chamber, pulled out a melon, went back to the glass window, and activated a trapdoor next to it, designed to feed the creature. He dropped the melon in and shut it.
The fruit landed in the cage; the Macrobe rushed to it and, with its trunk, literally sucked it dry in seconds.
“What a vacuum cleaner!” said the red Wizard with irony. “Mind you, it would have done the same to you if I’d dropped you in there, but so far, I am unable to feed it meat—only fruits and vegetables...”
“Why?” asked Ardan, who couldn’t repress his scientific curiosity.
“Because of a problem I haven’t yet solved,” replied the mad scientist. “As these microbes grow larger in size, they, in turn, become the hosts of new micro-organisms, which I am in the process of studying. If I fed them meat, they would fall prey to new diseases created by these micro-organisms, so they have to be strictly vegetarians—which is a shame. Fortunately, this is not the case with some of my other experiments, as you yourself witnessed earlier...”
Ardan shook his head in disgust remembering his encounters with the giant spiders.
“But there is a silver lining to this: these new micro-organisms formed during the transformative process could help cure many diseases—or possibly create new ones! You realize the potential, of course...”
Such science in the hands of a madman like the Comte de Bertheville was a prospect that terrified Ardan, but he was careful to not show his revulsion. He merely nodded, as if he was attending a particularly interesting lecture at the university.
“I will now grace you with a demonstration of my techniques,” continued Kyzyl Kaya. “Obviously, I am not going to grow a creature of the size of those which you have already met; that takes much longer than we have. I will content myself with taking an ordinary tarantula and doubling its size...”
The Red Wizard pulled a glass jar from a closet. Ardan could see that it contained several ordinary spiders, natives of the region.
Kyzyl Kaya shook the jar and the arachnids started to attack and devour reach other, until a black tarantula seemed to emerge as the winner.
“Evolution in progress, my dear Doctor! Isn’t it wonderful to watch!” gloated the mad scientist. “This one seems ideal to receive the gift I shall now bestow upon it.”
Carefully, wearing latex gloves and with the help of a pair of pincers, the Comte pulled the tarantula out of the jar and quickly placed it inside a glass cylinder. At the bottom was a puddle of white liquid, which the arachnid seemed to find very much to its taste. Above it was a piece of intricate machinery that, at the push of a button by the Comte, started to radiate a bright orange light that fell right upon the spider.
The arachnid froze on the spot and then, under Ardan’s amazed eyes, slowly began to grow in size.
In about ten minutes, it was double its initial size!
“I will complete the process later,” said Kyzyl Kaya, turning off the orange light emitter. “I can always use a few more guardians to keep the bandits who infest this region at bay. For some reason, they are particularly fond of human flesh. It helps with the disposal of the remains of the slaves I use for my experiments in immortality. Fortunately, I never seem to run out of them! Ha! Ha!”
The notion of the Comte creating armies of giant man-eating spiders while developing new, deadlier diseases was more than Ardan could bear.
His fury reached the boiling point and, deciding that the sacrifice of his life was a small price to pay to put an end of the menace of Kyzyl Kaya forever, he jumped on the mad scientist and grabbed his neck with both hands, intent on breaking it or strangling him.
For a minute, it looked as if Ardan was indeed going to succeed and kill his man. But something in him stopped him from finishing his grisly task and he released his grip slightly.
That was a mistake.
The Comte’s longevity treatments had not simply increased his vitality, but also his strength, which was almost double that of an ordinary man. He had been taken by surprise, but now he was able to break away from Ardan’s grip and deliver a blow that sent the young man rolling to the ground.
Kyzyl Kaya must have activated some kind of silent alarm he wore on his person, because two Tartar warriors immediately entered. While the Comte was massaging his neck, muttering curses under his breath, they grabbed Ardan and pinned him to the floor.
Kyzyl Kaya pulled a small vial full of a green liquid from inside his tunic, opened it and passed it under the young man’s nose.
Ardan inhaled briefly and immediately fell unconscious.
“What shall we do with him, master?” asked one of the Tartars.
“Shall we take him to the eight-legged ones?” suggested the other.
“No,” replied the Red Wizard, still rubbing his neck. “He is deceptively strong, that one... No, take him back to the cottage. I had hoped to bring him over to my side, but now I realize that may not be possible... Still, I have lived here alone for so long without an intellectual equal that I am reluctant to get rid of him so casually. Perhaps, in time...”
The look exchanged between the two Tartars showed that they neither understood nor agreed with their master’s incomprehensible gesture of mercy, but theirs was not the right to challenge his orders, so they merely nodded and obeyed.
Ardan was taken back to the cottage and dumped there.
He woke up two days later feeling extremely confused, and it took him most of the following day to remember what had happened.
CHAPTER VII
Escape!
Ardan was determined, more than ever, to find a way to escape from Kyzyl Kaya’s underground lair and put an end to the Red Wizard’s mad schemes.
If only his sentinels were humans, I could trick them, he thought, but how to get past those giant spiders? I was lucky enough to escape w
ith my life at the salt lake...
He spent the day pondering the issue, and finally came to the conclusion that there was no other way out but through the lake and past the monster guarding it. But how could he succeed? He had no weapons on him; there were nothing in the cottage that could be used as such; and stealing one from the Tartars would only raise an alarm.
After some more reflection, he hit upon an idea.
He went out into the garden and located a patch of bamboo. He selected one small enough to be broken easily; then, with the sharpened rock he had pocketed earlier, he cut off the extremities, and ended up with a follow tube about three feet long.
“With this,” he said, “I’ll get past that creature!”
Ardan’s plan was bold, but simple. During his last encounter with the giant spider, the young man had observed the monster was actually gliding over the surface of the lake, not walking through it. The transformation effected by the red Wizard did not appear to have altered the arachnid’s sense of balance, which compensated for its increase in weight on whichever surface it stood.
Ardan also knew that spiders were unable to go under water, hence his preparations.
He waited all day long and when one of the Tartars came to bring him his evening meal, he ate it heartily as if he had nothing else in mind.
As the artificial lights were dimmed to create the sensation of “night,” the young man slipped out of the cottage and retraced his steps through the maze of corridors, guided by his infallible memory, towards the salt lake.
When he got there, he strode boldly into the water, looking for the deepest channels in the bed. Because of its high salt content, he had no trouble swimming, being almost carried by the water. He held his bamboo in his right hand while carefully watching the banks.
This time, the young man was not surprised when he heard the bellowing sound of the giant spider. The monster approached as rapidly as it had the previous time, skimming over the surface like a deadly skater.
