Dean Koontz - (1985)

by Twilight Eyes(Lit)

  27 The Doorway to Hell In the morning, just before dawn, snow flurries still fell in fits and starts, and the pending storm seemed to be clogged in the lowering sky. Daybreak came with reluctance too. A feeble thread of wan gray light appeared along the irregularly crenelated mountains that formed high ramparts to the east. Slowly other dull threads were added by the loom of dawn, barely brighter than the blackness across which they were being woven. By the time Horton Bluett arrived in his four-wheel-drive Dodge pickup; the fragile fabric of the new day was still so delicate that it seemed as if it might tear apart and blow away in the wind, leaving the world in perpetual darkness. He did not bring Growler with him. I missed the dog. So did Horton. Without Growler the old man seemed somehow . . .incomplete. All three of us fit comfortably in the cab of the truck, Rya between Horton and me. We had room at our feet for the two backpacks that were crammed full of gear, including forty of the eighty kilos of plastic explosives. There was room, as well, for our guns. I did not know if we would actually gain entrance to the mines, as Horton assured us we would. And even if we did get inside, we would most likely find things in there that would require a secret exit, stealthy withdrawal to give us time to assimilate discoveries and plan our next step. The chances of our needing the explosives today did not seem great. However, based on past experience with the goblins, I intended to be prepared for the worst. The pickup's headlights tunneled through the coal-black flesh of the recalcitrant night. We followed one county route, then another, up into narrow mountain valleys, where the equivocating dawn had not yet reached even one dim, glimmering finger. Snowflakes as big as half-dollars spun through the headlights. Only flurries. Modest treasures of them stirred across the pavement like coins sliding across a table. "Man and boy and baby," Horton said as he drove, "I've lived here all my life, birthed by a midwife in my folks' little house right up here in these hills. That was back in 1890, which probably seems so long ago to you that you're wondering if there was still dinosaurs in them days. Anyway, I grew up here, learned this land, got to know the hills, fields, woods, ridges, and ravines as well as I've ever known my own face in a mirror. They been mining these mountains since back in the 1830s, and there's abandoned shafts, some sealed up and some not, all over the place. Fact is, some mines connect up with others, and underground there's something of a maze. As a boy, I was a great spelunker. Loved caves, old mines. Intrepid, I was. Maybe I was.intrepid about exploring caves because I'd already smelled out all the bad people-the goblins-around about, had already learned that I had to be cautious out in the wide world, cautious in the rest of my life, so I was more or less forced to satisfy the usual boyish urge for adventure in solitary pursuits, where I didn't have to trust anybody but myself. Now of course it's downright dumb to go cave haunting alone. Too much can go wrong. It's a buddy sport if there ever was one. But I never laid a claim to genius, and as a kid I didn't even have my full share of common sense, so I went underground all the time, became a regular mine rat. Now maybe it all comes in handy. I can point you a way into the mountain through abandoned mines dug in the 1840s, which connect up with mines from the early part of this century, which in turn eventually snake all the way into some of the narrower side tunnels of the Lightning digs. Dangerous as hell, you understand. Reckless. Nothing I'd recommend for sane folks, but then, you're mad. Mad for revenge, mad for justice, mad just to do something." Horton swung the truck off the second county road, onto a dirt lane that was plowed although occasionally obstructed by new drifts. From there we turned onto a less well cleared but still passable lane, then drove overland across an up-sloping field that would not have been negotiable even to a four-wheel-drive vehicle if the wind had not conspired to sweep most of the snow away and pile it up at the line of trees. He parked at the top of the hill, as close to the trees as he could get. "We go on foot from here." I took the heaviest backpack, and Rya took the other, which was not exactly light. We each carried a loaded revolver and a silencer-equipped pistol; the former were worn in shoulder holsters under our ski jackets, while the latter were kept in deep, open pockets in our white, quilted, insulated pants. I also carried the shotgun, and Rya carried the automatic rifle. Though decidedly well armed, I still felt like David carrying a pathetic little slingshot and scurrying nervously forward into Goliath's shadow. Night had finally relented, and dawn had found the courage to exert itself. Shadows were everywhere still deep, lingering, and the storm-choked sky of day was not dramatically brighter than it had been at night; nevertheless, Sunday was fully upon us at last. Suddenly I remembered that I had not yet telephoned Joel Tuck to-tell him that Cathy Osborn, ex-professor of literature at Barnard, would be arriving on his doorstep, seeking shelter and friendship and guidance, perhaps as early as Tuesday or Wednesday. I was annoyed with myself but only briefly. I still had plenty of time to call Joel before Cathy rang his door bell-as long as nothing happened to us in the mines. Horton Bluett had brought a canvas duffel bag with a drawstring top. He hefted it out of the bed of the pickup and dragged it after himself as he kicked through the drifted snow at the edge of the woods. Something clattered softly inside the canvas. Stopping just beyond the perimeter of the forest, he slipped one arm into the bag. He withdrew a spool of red ribbon, cut a length of it with a very sharp penknife, and tied it around a tree at eye level. "So you can find your way back on your own, " he said. He quickly led us onto a winding deer trail where no underbrush and only a few tree branches interfered with our progress. Every thirty or forty yards he stopped to tie another length of red ribbon around another tree, and I noticed that you could stand at any marker and see the one that he had left before it..We went downward on the deer trail to a long abandoned dirt road that cut through the low-lying part of forest, and we followed that for a while. Forty minutes' after we had set out, at the bottom of a broad ravine, Horton led us to a long, treeless area for the service of which the road had apparently been constructed. There the land was badly scarred. Part of the face of the ravine wall had been sheared off, and other parts of it looked chewed. A large, horizontal mine bore pierced the heart of the looming ridge. The entrance was only half hidden by an avalanche that had come down so long ago that silt had filled in the spaces between the stones; good sized trees had grown up with their roots webbed through the jumbled rockfalls Having stepped around strangely bent and gnarled trees, around the wing of fallen rock, and into the horizontal shaft, Horton paused and withdrew three high-powered flashlights from the duffel bag. He kept one, gave the others to Rya and me. He shone the beam of his light over the ceiling, walls, and floor of the tunnel into which we had come. The ceiling was only a foot above my head, and I had the crazy notion that the uneven walls of rock-arduously carved out with picks and chisels and shovels and blasting powder and oceans of sweat in another century-were slowly closing in. They were lightly veined with coal and with what might have been milk-pale quartz. Massive, tar-coated support timhers were evenly spaced along both walls and across the ceiling as if they were the ribs inside the carcass of a whale. Though massive, they were in poor condition, cracked and sagging, splintered, crusted in some places with fungus, probably half hollowed out by rot, and some of the angle braces were missing. I had the feeling that if I leaned against the wrong beam, the roof would come down on me in an instant. "This here was probably one of the first mines in the county," Horton said. "They worked it by hand for the most part and hauled out the coal cars with mules. The iron rails were removed to some other shaft when this one played out, but here and there you'll stumble across what's left of some of the ties sunk halfway in the floor." Looking up at the moldering timbers, Rya said, "Is this safe ? "Is anything?" Horton asked. He squinted at the rotting wood and at the moist, seeping walls, and he said, "Actually this here's as bad as it gets because you'll be moving from older to newer mines as you go, though if you're wise, you'll step careful all the way and not rest no weight on any of the supports. Even in the newer shafts-say, those that're only a decade or two old-well . . . a mine's just
a void, really, and you know what they say about nature's tendency to want to fill a void." From his duffel bag he brought forth two hard hats and gave them to us with the admonition that they must be worn at all times. "What about you?" I asked as I slipped the hood of my jacket off my head and put on the metal helmet. "I could only lay my hands on two," he said. "And since I'm just going a short ways with you, I'll be fine without. Come along." We followed him deeper into the earth. In the first few yards of the shaft, piles of leaves had blown in on dry autumn days and had drifted against the walls where they had been slowly saturated by seepage and had compacted into dense masses under their own wet weight. Near the entrance, where winter's chilly touch still reached, the moldering leaves and the fungi on the old timbers were frozen and odorless. Farther back, however, the temperature climbed well above freezing, and a foul odor repeatedly rose and.subsided as we advanced. Horton led us around a corner, into an intersecting tunnel that was much roomier than the first, its width in part dictated by the rich vein of coal that had occupied the space. He stopped at once and took an aerosol can of paint from his canvas bag. He shook the can vigorously; the hard rattle of the ball-type agitator echoed off the walls. He sprayed a white arrow on the rock, pointing toward the direction from which we'd come, though we were only one turn away from the exit and could not possibly get lost here. He was a careful man. Impressed by his caution and emulating it, Rya and I followed him a hundred yards along that tunnel (two more white arrows), turned into a shorter but even wider corridor (fourth arrow), and went fifty yards farther, where we finally stopped at a vertical shaft (fifth arrow) that led down into the lower bowels of the mountain. That hole was just a black square of a subtly different shade than the black floor of the tunnel and was virtually invisible until Horton stopped at the edge and shone his light down. Without him, I might have blundered straight into the shaft, dropping to the chamber below and b reaking my neck in the fall." Raising his flashlight from the vertical shaft, he directed the beam toward the end of the tunnel in which we stood. The corridor appeared to open into a man-made room of considerable size. "That's where the vein of coal just petered out, but I guess they had reason to suspect it turned downward and that a wide swath of it could be profitably dug on a lower level. Anyway, they sank this vertical shaft about forty feet, then went horizontal again. Not much farther now before I set you loose, all on your own." After warning us that the iron ladder rungs embedded in the wall of the vertical shaft were old and untrustworthy, he switched off his flashlight and descended into the gloom. Rya slung the shotgun over her shoulder and went where Horton had gone. I brought up the rear. Downward bound, with the ancient rungs wobbling in their sockets as I put my weight on them, I began to receive clairvoyant images from the long abandoned mine. Two or possibly three men had died here before the middle of the past century, and their deaths had not been painless. However, I sensed only ordinary mining accidents, nothing sinister. This had not been a locus of goblin-engineered suffering. Four stories below the first level I entered another horizontal tunnel. Horton and Rya were waiting for me, eerily illuminated by the beams of their flashlights, which lay on the floor. In these lower reaches of the mine the heavy tar-coated support timbers were virtually as old as those on the previous level, but they were in somewhat better shape. Not good. Not reassuring. But at least the walls weren't as damp as those in the higher tunnels, and the wood was not crusted with mold and fungus. I was suddenly struck by how quiet it was in this deep vault. The silence was so heavy that it had weight; I could feel the cool, insistent pressure of it against my face and against the bared skin of my hands. Church-quiet. Graveyardquiet. Tomb-quiet. Breaking that silence, Horton revealed the contents of the big duffel bag, which he was turning over to us. In addition to the red ribbon that we no longer required, there were two cans of white spray paint, a fourth flashlight, plastic-wrapped packs of spare batteries, a couple of candles, and two boxes of weatherproof matches. "If you ever want to find your way back out of this dismal hole," he.said, "you'll use the spray paint just like I showed you." He employed one can now to draw an arrow on the wall; it pointed up to the vertical shaft over our heads. Rya took the paint when he offered it. "That'll be my job. Horton said, "Maybe you think the candles are here in case the flashlights give out, but they're not. You got enough spare batteries to cover that. What the candles are for is if maybe you get lost or if there's-God forbid-a cave-in behind you, cutting off the way out. What you do then is you light a candle and really study the bend in the flame, watch where the smoke goes. If there's a draft, the flame and the smoke will seek it, and if there's a draft, that means there's bound to be an outlet to the surface, which may just be big enough for you to squirm through. Got it?" "Got it," I said. He had also brought food for us: two thermos bottles full of orange juice, several sandwiches, and half a dozen candy bars. "You got a full day of spelunking ahead of you, even if you just work into the Lightning Company shafts and take a quick peek and head straight back the way you come. Of course, I suspect you'll do more than that. So it's likely, even if all goes well, that you won't be coming out until sometime tomorrow. You'll need to eat." "You're a sweetheart," Rya said sincerely. "You put all this stuff together last night . . . and I bet that didn't leave much time for sleep." "When you get to be seventy-four," he, said, "you don't sleep much, anyway, 'cause it seems like such a waste of what time you got left." He was embarrassed by the loving tone of Rya's voice. "Heck, I'll be up and out of here and all the way home in an hour, so I can nap then if I've a mind to. I said, "You told us to use the candles in case there's a cave-in or we get lost. But without you to guide us, we'll be lost in about one minute flat." "Not with this, you won't," he said, producing a map from one of his coat pockets. "Drawed it from memory, but I got a memory like a steel trap, so I don't suspect there's any wrongness in it." He hunkered down, and we did the same, and he spread the map out on the floor between us, picking up a flashlight and tilting the beam down on his handiwork. It looked like one of those maze puzzles in the Sunday newspaper's comics pages. Worse, it was continued on the other side of the paper where the rest of the maze was, if anything, even more complex. "At least half the way," Horton said, "you can talk like we're talking now, with no fear of it carrying into shafts where the goblins might be working. But this here red mark . .. that's the spot where I think maybe you'd better go quiet, whisper to each other and only when you have to. Sounds do carry a fair piece along these tunnels." Looking at the twists and turns of the maze, I said, "One thing's for sure-we'll need both cans of paint." Rya said, "Horton, are you certain about all the details of what you've drawn here?" "Yep." "I mean, well, maybe you did spend most of your boyhood exploring these old shafts, but that was a long time ago. What-sixty years?" He cleared his throat and seemed to be embarrassed again. "Oh, well, wasn't all that long ago." He kept his eyes focused on the.map. "See, after my Etta died of cancer, I was sort of adrift, lost, and I was full of all this terrible tension, the tension of loneliness and of not knowing where my life was going. I didn't see how to work it off, how to ease my mind and spirit, and still the tension built and built, and I said to myself, 'Horton, by God, if you don't soon find something to fill the hours, you're going to wind up in a rubber room,' and that was when I remembered how much peace and solace I'd gotten out of spelunking when I was a kid. So I took it up again. That was back in '34, and I prowled these here mines and a lot of natural caves every weekend for the better part of eighteen months. And just nine years ago, when I reached mandatory retirement age, I was faced with a similar situation, so I went spelunking again. Crazy thing for a man my age, but I kept it up for almost a year and a half before I finally decided I didn't need it no more. Anyway, what I'm saying is that this here map is based on memories only about seven years old." Rya put a hand on his arm. He finally looked at her. She smiled and he smiled, and he put his hand over hers and lightly squeezed it. Even for those of us fortunate enough to avoid the goblins, life is not entirely smooth and e
asy. But the myriad methods we employ to get ourselves across patches of rough ground are a testament to our great will to survive and to get on with the act of living. "Well," Horton said, "if you don't soon pick up your boots and head on, you'll be old codgers like me before, you get out of here." He was right, but I did not want him to leave. There was a chance that we would never see him again. We had known him less than a single day, and the potential of our friendship had been barely explored. Life, as I might have said before, is a long train ride during which friends and loved ones disembark unexpectedly, leaving us to continue our travels in ever-increasing loneliness. Here was another station on the line. Horton left the canvas duffel bag and its contents, taking only a flashlight. He climbed the vertical shaft down which he had recently led us, and the rusted iron rungs rattled and creaked. At the top he grunted as he heaved himself out onto the floor of the tunnel. Once he had gotten to his feet, he paused, peering down at us. He seemed to want to say a great many things, but finally he merely called softly to us: "Go with God." We stood at the bottom of the dark shaft, staring up. Horton's flashlight faded as he moved away. Then it was dark up there. His footsteps grew softer, softer. He was gone. In thoughtful silence we gathered up the'flashlights, batteries, candles, food, and other items, packing them carefully in the canvas duffel bag. Carrying our backbacks, with the larger weapons slung over our arms, dragging the duffel bag, carving the darkness with flashlights, consulting the map, we moved out, heading farther into the earth. I perceived no immediate threat, yet my heart pounded as we followed the tunnel toward the first of many turns. Although I was determined not to retreat, I felt as if we had stepped through the doorway to Hell. 28.tourney to Abaddon Descending . . . Somewhere far above, a sullen sky roofed the world, and blackbirds swooped through a sea of air, and somewhere wind rustled trees, and snow blanketed the ground and new flurries fell, but that life of color and motion existed overhead, beyond so many meters of solid rock that it increasingly seemed to be not real but a fantasy life, an imaginary kingdom. The only thing that seemed real was stone-a mountainweight of stone-dust, occasional shallow pools of stagnant water, crumbling timbers, with rusted iron braces, coal, and darkness. We disturbed coal dust as fine as talcum powder. Nuggets and a few big chunks of coal lay along the walls, and small islands of coal formed archipelagos through the puddles of scum-coated water, and in the walls the sheered edges of nearly exhausted veins of coal caught the frost-white flashlight beams and gleamed like black jewels. Some subterranean passages were nearly as wide as highways, some narrower than the hallways of a house, for they were a mix of actual mining shafts and exploration tunnels. Ceilin gs soared to twice and thrice our height, then dropped so low that we had to hunch down in order to proceed. In places the walls had been carved with such precision that they almost seemed poured of concrete, while in other places they were deeply scored and peaked. Several times we found partial cave-ins, where one wall and sometimes part of the ceiling had come down, cutting the tunnel in half or even forcing us to crawl through the remaining space. Mild claustrophobia had taken hold of me when we'd first entered the mines, and as we proceeded deeper into the labyrinth, that fear gripped me tighter. However, I successfully resisted it by thinking of that world of soaring birds and wind-stilled trees far above-and by constantly reminding myself that Rya was with me, for I always drew strength from her presence. We saw strange things in the silent bosom of the earth, even before we got close to the goblin territory that was our destination. Three times we came upon heaps of broken and abandoned equipment, random yet queerly artful piles of metal tools and other artifacts designed for specialized mining tasks that were as arcane to us as the laboratory devices of an alchemist. Welded together by rust and corrosion, those items rose in angular agglomerations that were not merely chaotic, as if the mountain were an artist working with the detritus of those who had invaded it, creating sculpture from their trash to mock their ephemeral nature and as if intending to construct monuments to its own endurance. One of the sculptures resembled a large figure, less than half human, with a demonic aspect, a creature bedecked with spurs, razored barbs, and a bladed spine. Irrationally but with disturbing certainty, I expected it to move with a rattle and clatter of metal bones, open a now hidden eye formed by the fractured pane of an ancient oil lamp used by miners in another century, and crack an iron mouth in which bent screws would protrude like rotten teeth. We also saw mold and fungus in a panoply of colors-yellow, bile green, poisonous red, brown, black-but mostly in dirty shades of white. Some were exceedingly dry, and they burst when touched, spewing clouds of dust-perhaps spores-from the ruins. Others were moist. The worst forms glistened repulsively and looked like the things a surgeon, on an exploration of another world, might find within the carcass of an alien life-form. Some walls were crusted with crystallized accretions of unknown substances secreted by the rock, and.once, we saw our own distorted images moving across those millions of dark, polished facets. Abyss-deep, more than halfway to Hades, in a sepulchral hush, we found the gleaming white skeleton of what might have been a large dog. The skull lay in a half-inch-deep puddle of black water, jaws agape. As we stood over it, our flashlight beams were mirrored by the underlying puddle, so an eerily reflected light shone out from the empty eye sockets. How a dog could have gotten to these depths, what it had been seeking, why it had been driven to such a strange pursuit, and how it had died-those were all mysteries that could never be solved. But there was such a strong element of inappropriateness to the existence of this skeleton in this place that we could not help but feel it was an omen, though we didn't wish to dwell on its message. At noon, nearly six hours after entering the first mine with Horton Bluett, we paused to share one of the sandwiches he had left with us and to drink a little of the juice from one of the thermos bottles. We did not speak over our meager and uncomfortable lunch, for we were close enough to the Lightning Coal Company's operations that our voices might have carried to the goblins working in those shafts-though we heard nothing of them. After lunch we had proceeded a considerable distance before, at twenty minutes past one o'clock, we turned a corner and saw light ahead. Mustard-yellow light. Somewhat murky. Ominous. Like the light in our shared nightmare. We crept along the narrow, dank, crumbling, lightless tunnel that led toward the intersection with the illuminated shaft. Although we moved with exaggerated caution, each footstep seemed thunderous and each breath like the exhalation of a giant bellows.. At the tunnel junction I stopped and put my back to the wall. Listened. Waited. If a minotaur inhabited this labyrinth, it was evidently wearing crepe-soled shoes as it prowled the passageways, for the silence was as deep as the locale. But for the light, we seemed to be as alone as we had been for the past seven hours. I leaned forward. Looked into the illuminated tunnel, first left, then right. No goblins were in sight. We stepped out of concealment, into a fall of yellowish light that lent a jaundiced waxiness to our faces and eyes. To the right the tunnel continued only twenty feet, narrowing dramatically and terminating in a blank wall of rock. To the left it was more than twenty feet wide and ran on for about a hundred and fifty feet, growing wider as it went, until it must have been sixty feet across. At its widest point it appeared to intersect another horizontal shaft. The electric lamps, strung on a cable fixed to the center of the ceiling, were spaced about thirty feet apart; conical shades over medium-wattage bulbs directed light down in tightly defined cones, so there was a stretch of ten or twelve feet of deep shadows between each pool of brightness. Just as in the dream. The only appreciable differences between reality and nightmare were that the lamps did not flicker and that we were not, as yet, pursued. Here Horton Bluett's map ended. We were entirely on our own. I looked at Rya. I suddenly wished I had not brought her down into this place. But there was no going back. I gestured toward the far end of the tunnel. She nodded..We drew our silencer-equipped pistols from the deep pockets of our insulated pants. We switched off the safeties. We jacked bullets into the chambers, and the muted snick-snick
of well-oiled metal against metal whispered along the coal-veined rock walls. Side by side we advanced as noiselessly as possible toward the wide end of the shaft, passing through light and shadow, light and shadow. At the intersection of horizontal shafts I again put my back to the wall and eased forward, cautiously peering into the connecting tunnel before proceeding. It was also about sixty feet wide, but it was two hundred feet long, three quarters of its length lying to our right. The timbers were old but still newer than any - we had seen heretofore. Considering the width, this was more an immense room than just another tunnel. There were not one but two rows of amber electric bulbs hung parallel under metal hoods, which created a checkerboard pattern of light and darkness on the floor. I thought that chamber was deserted, and I was about to step forth when I heard a scrape and a click and another scrape. I studied the checkerboard of light with greater care. To the right, eighty feet away, a goblin emerged from one of the blocks of shadow. It was unclothed in every sense: draped in neither garments nor a human disguise. It carried two instruments that I did not recognize. It repeatedly raised one of these, then the other, to its eyes, sighting up and down at ceiling and floor, then along the walls, as if taking measurements; or perhaps it was studying the composition of the walls. Turning to look at Rya, who stood against the wall behind me in the secondary tunnel, I raised a finger to my lips. Her blue eyes were very wide, and the whites of them were tinted the same muddy yellow as was her skin. The queer light of the tunnel also stained her white ski suit and gleamed on her hard hat, so she appeared to be a golden idol, the image of a helmeted and incredibly beautiful goddess of war with eyes of sacred, precious sapphires. With thumb and first two fingers I repeatedly imitated the motion of depressing a hypodermic syringe. She nodded, opened her jacket very slowly in order to make no sound with the zipper, and reached to an inside pocket where she had stashed a plastic-wrapped hypodermic and one of the vials of sodium pentothal. Sneaking another look around the corner, I discovered that the goblin, preoccupied with its odd measuring instruments, had its back to me. Standing erect but bent somewhat forward, it was peering through a lens at the floor near its feet. It was either murmuring rhythmically to itself or humming a singularly peculiar tune, but in either case it was creating enough noise to mask my stealthy approach. I slipped out of the secondary tunnel, leaving Rya behind, and eased toward my prey, striving to be both quick and silent. If I drew the beast's attention, it would surely let loose a cry, alerting others of its kind to my presence. I did not want to have to flee back through the subterranean maze with no head start, with a pack of those demons at our heels, and with nothing gained from our risky intrusion into the heart of the mountain. From shadow to light to shadow I went. The goblin continued to warble to itself. Eighty feet. Seventy. My pounding heart made a sound that, to my ears, seemed as loud as the drills and pneumatic hammers that had once worked the coal veins of.this mine. Sixty. Shadow, light, shadow . . . Although I carried the pistol at the ready, my intention was to avoid shooting my enemy, to spring upon it in complete surprise, to get a grip around its neck, and to hold it still for ten or twenty seconds, until Rya could rush in with the pentothal. Thereafter we could question it, administering more of the drug as required, for though sodium pentothal was primarily a sedative, it was also sometimes referred to as a "truth serum" because under its influence one could not easily lie. Fifty feet. I was not certain pentothal would affect the-goblins precisely as it did men. However, the chances seemed good because (except for their metamorphic talent) their metabolism was apparently similar to that of human beings. Forty feet. I do not think the creature heard me. I do not think it smelled or otherwise sensed me, either. But it stopped its curious warbling and turned, lowering the unknown instrument from its eyes, raising its hideous head. It saw me at once, for I was at that moment passing through one of the checkerboard's lighter squares. Its luminous scarlet eyes blazed brighter at the sight of me. Though I was within less than thirty feet of the beast, I could not cross the remaining ground in a great leap and come down upon it before it sounded an alarm. I took the only option remaining: I squeezed off two shots from the silencer-equipped pistol. Bullets left the muzzle with soft sounds like the spitting of an angry cat. The goblin pitched backward into a square of shadows, where it fell dead, the first hole in its throat, the second between its eyes. The ejected brass cartridges went tink-clink-tink across the rock floor, startling me. Because they were evidence of our presence, I pursued them, snatched up one, then the other, before they could roll away into the shadows. Rya was already kneeling at the dead goblin when I got to it, checking for a pulse but finding none. The transmutable creature had nearly concluded its reversion to human form. As the last of its demonic features faded, I saw that its disguise was that of a young man in his late twenties. Because death had been sudden, the heart had ceased pumping within a second or two of the infliction of the wounds, so only a few spoonsful of blood had leaked onto the tunnel floor. I hastily mopped up these traces with a handkerchief. Rya took hold of the goblin's feet, and I seized it by the arms, and we carried it to the far end of the chamber. There, twenty feet of darkness lay between the last of the lights and the back wall. We hid the corpse, the peculiar instruments it had been using, and the bloodstained cloth in the deepest part of that black cul-de-sac. Would the demon be missed by its kind? If so, how soon? On realizing that it was missing, what would they do? Search the mines? How thoroughly? How soon? Standing on the borderline between a block of shadows and a block of light, leaning close to each other, Rya and I conversed in voices so low that hearing was less important than lipreading. "Now?" she asked. "We've started a clock ticking." "Yeah, I hear it.."If he's missed . "Probably not for an hour or two." "Probably not," I agreed. "Maybe longer." "If they find him . "That'll take longer still." "Then we go on." "At least a little farther." Retracing our steps, passing the spot where the goblin had died, we ventured to the other end of that wide corridor. It opened into an immense underground chamber, a circular vault at least two hundred feet in diameter, with a domed ceiling thirty feet high at the center. Banks of fluorescent lights were suspended from the ceiling on metal scaffolding; they cast a wintry glare over everything below. In more square feet of floor space than was occupied by a football field, the goblins had assembled a bewildering array of equipment: steel-jawed machines big as bulldozers, obviously designed to chew rock and spit out pebbles; huge drills, smaller drills; ranks of electrically powered conveyer belts that, lined up one after another, could carry off the excretions of the rock-consuming machines; a dozen forklifts; half a dozen Bobcats. In the other half of the room were huge piles of supplies: stacks of lumber; carefully arranged pyramids of short steel beams; hundreds of bristling bundles of steel rein forcing rods; hundreds-maybe thousands-of sacks of concrete; several big piles of sand and gravel; car-sized spools of thick electrical cable, smaller spools of insulated copper wire; at least a mile of aluminum ventilation duct; and more, much more. The equipment and supplies were arranged in evenly spaced rows with aisles between. As we slowly eased twenty yards around the circumference, looking into three of those avenues, we were able to determine that the place was deserted. We saw no goblins, heard no movement other than the ghostly whispers of our own cautious progress. The gleaming condition of the equipment, plus the smell of fresh oil and grease, led to the conclusion that these machines had been recently washed and serviced, then lowered into this pit for a new project that had not yet begun but which had a start date in the near future. Evidently the goblin I'd just shot had been engaged in some final calculations required before the heavy work began. Putting a hand on Rya's shoulder, pulling her close enough to put my lips to her ear, I breathed: "Wait. Let's go back to where we came in." Returning to the mouth of the wide corridor in which I had killed the goblin, I shrugged out of my cumbersome backpack, unsnapped the canvas flap, and withdrew two kilos of plastic explosive and a pair of detonators. I unwrapped the plastique and molded one block into a niche high in
the wall, just a few feet back from the point at which that shaft opened into the domed chamber. I put the charge above head level, in shadow, where it was not likely to be seen even by search parties looking for the missing demon. I shaped the second kilo into another dark niche high in the opposite wall, so the two blasts might bring down enough of the walls and ceiling to close off the passage. The detonators were battery-powered, and each had a one-hour clock. I plugged one into each of the plastic masses, but I did not set the timer on either of them. I would do so only if we came this way again, with our enemies in hot pursuit. We returned to the domed chamber and quietly crossed, taking a closer.look at the machines and supplies, trying to extrapolate the nature of the pending project from the equipment the goblins had stockpiled. At the far end of the giant room, having learned little of consequence, we arrived at a set of three elevators, two of which were cages designed to convey small groups of goblins up through a big shaft in the rock. The third was a large steel platform slung from four cables, each as thick as my wrist; it was of sufficient size to raise or lower the largest pieces of equipment we had seen. I stood for a moment, thinking. Then, with Rya's help, I carried eight two-by-fours from the nearest stack of supplies and laid them on the floor, crossed like Lincoln Logs, to form a step stool of sorts. Next I took two kilos of plastique from Rya's pack and separated them into three charges. Climbing the makeshift step stool, I molded the plastique into depressions in the roughly hewn rock directly above each of the elevator openings. There, the shadows were not deep, and though the plastic explosive resembled the rock enough to virtually vanish against it, the detonators were still visible. However, I figured this level of the mine was not much traveled at the moment; and even those goblins that passed this way were not likely to look up and study the stone above the elevators closely. I did not set those detonators, either. Rya and I returned the two-by-fours to the stack from which we had taken them. "Now?" she inquired. Though we knew we were alone on this level, she still whispered, for we could not be sure how well our voices would carry up the elevator shafts. "Up? Is that what you have in mind?" "Yes," I said. "Won't they hear the elevator moving?" "Yes. But they'll probably think it's him, the one we killed. "And if we run into them upstairs, just as we're stepping out of the cage?" "We put these pistols away, go up there armed with the shotgun and the automatic rifle," I said. "That'll give us enough firepower to blow away any number of them that might be gathered around the damn elevators. Then we step right back into the cage, drop down here, and leave as we came in, setting the detonators as we go. But if we don't run into anyone up there, then we slip farther into the mine to see what we can see." "What do you think so far?" "I don't know," I said wontedly. "Except . . . well, they're sure as hell not just mining coal in this place. The equipment on this level hasn't been assembled to dig coal." "Looks like they're building a fortress," she said. "Looks like," I agreed. We had reached Abaddon, the deepest level of Hell. Now we were required to ascend through a few higher rings of Inferno, desperately hoping to meet neither Lucifer himself nor any of his demonic minions.