by Brian Lumley
had no weight at all. This place was real enough; no metaphysical continuum this but a physical reality, the crossover between parallel universes. And where the Mobius Continuum might have been that Element in which God said: ‘Let There Be Light’, this might well be the Light itself. A misty light, white as snow but of an even temperature, so that the cold of the cavern was soon left far behind.
And so the seven fell upwards into an apparently endless white somewhere. And such was the silence, each of them could hear the uneven, nervous breathing of the others, and perhaps even the beating of their hearts …
Even knowing it must come, their resurgence was something of a shock. Anna Marie first: she passed through the skin of the Gate, then half-slid, half-rolled down the curve of the resilient dome on to the heaped jumble of Nathan’s armoury, where his weapons had come to rest on a bed of stony debris that formed a shelf around the sphere’s perimeter. And in those same few moments she saw that the sphere of white light was lodged like a plug in a massive hole, or a child’s marble pushed down into sand by the weight of a finger.
Directly overhead, the lower hemisphere of a second globe seemed suspended in the same shaft, looking almost identical to the Gate as it had appeared in the ceiling of the cavern of petrified monsters. A distance of only five or six feet separated the two singularities. So that Anna Marie couldn’t help wondering: or should I think of it as a duality? But in any case, she knew that the top half of that uppermost Gate stood open to the air, glaring out on the vampire world of Starside.
And all around her in the scree and rubble, and cut in the wall of the shaft itself, were those alien energy wormholes that she had seen in the cavern of the Romanian Gate - so that as Trask came through she found wind to shout, ‘Ben, look out! The wormholes!’ For they were glass-smooth; only fall into one … it might take a long time to get out again. If ever.
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But in a moment Trask was on his feet, assisting the disorientated cavers as they came through, and finally Chung and Nathan. Then, as they dusted themselves down:
‘From now on we have to mind how we go,’ Trask told them, his voice steady but echoing. ‘When Harry Keogh came this way he tried several of these wormholes before he found one that connected with the surface. But he was only one man and there are seven of us. Avoid holes that slant downwards; they twist and turn, could easily make a sudden descent. Look for upward-leading holes. But in any case go slowly, and take no chances. And the first man to see daylight overhead -‘
‘- or starlight,’ Nathan put in grimly.
Trask looked at him and nodded. ‘Or starlight, yes …’ And he left it at that.
They separated along the scree ledge, chose wormholes, went headfirst into them, first in the glare of the Gate, then in the light of pencil pocket torches. And Trask was the one who found the way up. There were probably several, but he was first, and the route that his wormhole took fitted Harry Keogh’s description (which Trask had read time and again) precisely.
It climbed gently at first, not so steeply as to cause him to slide back. In a little while it swung left, then rose marginally more steeply. A short, claustrophobic climb, before the bore levelled out and swung right. Following which … it shot up almost vertically! And looking up as from the bottom of a shallow well -
- Starlight.
Trask backed off, returned to the main shaft and the glare of the Gate, called for the others. Anna Marie, Nathan and one of the cavers were already there. Chung and the other two cavers soon came crawling backwards out of wormholes.
‘This is it,’ Trask told them, indicating the mouth of the exit into Starside. ‘As to how we go about it: Nathan goes first, and I’ll be right behind him. I’ll help him up out of the
well onto the surface. The rest of us string ourselves out along the route, and pass the weapons along and up to him. Finally he helps us to get out, me first, then Anna Marie, and the rest of you in whatever order you prefer.
‘On the surface, we each take what weapons we can carry and get clear of the upper Gate. That might take more than one trip, but it has to be done. It’s not simply that the weapons are important - of course they are - but it’s also that Nathan can’t … er, he can’t work to best effect too close to the Gate. But I warn you now: we won’t have any time to look about and gawp. When I looked up the last nine or ten feet of wormhole, looked into the sky of Starside, I saw stars up there. If it isn’t sundown it’s pretty damned close! Now, are there any questions?’
The caver spokesman said: That second Gate, on the surface? That’s our return route, right?’
‘Right, but not yet. Oh, we could use it all right, but we can’t guarantee our reception at the other end. In Perchorsk, they’ve learned to be extremely cautious of things that come through the Gate. So cautious they might easily kill you in half a dozen different ways before you even got to say hello! Especially now. You’ve seen that stuff back in the Refuge, down in the sump? Well by comparison, that’s pretty tame .. .’
‘And once we’re away from the Gate - what then?’
Trask looked at Nathan, who said, Then it’s my problem. But this is my world and I know … oh, several routes out of here into Sunside.’
And before they could ask any more questions, Anna Marie said, ‘We’re wasting time. And there’s also something you may have forgotten.’
‘Oh?’ Trask looked at her.
Turkur Tzonov and his men could well be in the vicinity. How long is it since you saw him enter the Gate in Perchorsk? And how long would it take him to walk through? Or haven’t you worked it out?’
Trask did so, and quickly. ‘Maybe three and a half hours
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since we saw him go through — it’s hard to gauge. But we know he was walking, while we were transported. Also, my watch stopped during transit, and -‘
‘- All of our watches stopped,’ the caver spokesman told him.
And Anna Marie said, ‘Whichever way we look at it, Tzonov can’t be too far away from us.’ She inclined her head upwards. ‘Either he and his men are closing with the Gate’s exit right now and will soon come through onto the boulder plains … or they’re already here, somewhere overhead, perhaps heading for the barrier mountains and the great pass into Sunside.’
Trask nodded. ‘First priority, then: as soon as we’re out, we choose personal weapons and hang onto them. But the last thing we need is a firefight on Starside! Okay, let’s
Twenty minutes later they were out, and Nathan’s single glance all about had confirmed the fact that he was home, or close to it. For, of course, Starside of the barrier mountains could never be considered ‘home’ in the real sense of the word. Not to men, anyway.
As for the six newcomers to this place:
All very well for Trask to warn against gawping. But this was a different world, and weird. Staring all about, what Trask and the others saw was this:
First, the Gate.
The dazzling white hemisphere was perhaps thirty feet in diameter and set in a crater like the raised rim of a volcanic blowhole. All around its perimeter, penetrating the earth and the crater walls alike to a radius of over sixty feet, magmass wormholes gaped everywhere. The seven had emerged from one such hole and now must be careful where they stepped; the walls of the holes were glass-smooth, and some were very nearly perpendicular. Their depth was entirely conjectural.
Away from the Gate itself:
The perceptions of the visitors were at first baffled, disorientated by the contrasts of what might easily be considered a surreal or even hallucinogenic landscape; except it was all too real. Perhaps because of the alien nature of the place, their eyes were first drawn to those one or two features which were most readily acceptable. Like the mountains.
Behind the Gate, maybe two miles south, the barrier mountains rose gaunt and grey from foothills and scree escarpments, up sparsely-clad slopes, over crags and buttresses, through ravines and saddles to
sloping plateaux and sharp-fanged peaks that were rapidly fading from amethyst to ash-grey silhouettes in the twilight before true night. The immense range sprawled east on the one hand, west on the other as far as the eye could see; its peaks marched away to far horizons, merged with them, passed into purple velvet distances and disappeared at the rim of the world. But for all that the range displayed many of the mundane features of Earthly mountains, still these peaks were most obviously alien; they felt cold and alien. And Trask found himself thinking, as at least one other had thought before him: Only take away the trees under the timberline . .. these could well be the mountains of the moon!
Closer, maybe two to three miles south and a little east, the mouth of a canyon - the great pass - opened onto the barren boulder plains. Apart from this pass, where in ages past the barrier range had cracked open, the march of the mountains seemed entirely unbroken. And so the mountains and the great pass through them, and the hush of twilight, were in the main acceptable to human perceptions. But as for the rest of Starside:
To the west there was only the sparsely-wooded flank of the mountains, and at the foot of the range the boulder plains rolling north, turning blue then dark blue into a mainly featureless distance. But directly to the north, to the far north, the blue turned smoky black and the earth was a darkness shot through with dull silver streaks. There, under
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the weird weave of ghostly aurora and the glitter of unknown constellations like blue ice-shards frozen in the vaulted dark of the skies, the surface of what might be a sullen sea, or possibly a sheet of glacial ice, made a misty mirror-image of the alien heavens. And if the mountains belonged on the moon, then this was a picture of some cold and dying planet way out beyond Arcturus .. .
A chill wind had come up; blowing from the north, it was gradually eating its way through the clothing of the seven to their very bones. They felt it and shivered, but not only on the outside … for it was a chill of the soul.
Sensing (or perhaps reading) their thoughts, Nathan told them:
That wind blows off the Icelands. In the olden times, when a vampire Lord was found wanting, sometimes the others would banish him north. Such errant Lords suffered various forms of punishment: to be driven north, possibly to a freezing death; or to be buried alive out on the boulder plains; or maybe to be hurled into the hell-lands Gate, from which no one ever returned. Well, not until now.’
The seven had taken up Nathan’s weapons. As he led them away from the hemisphere of white light, he paused for a moment to point east and a little north. Now that the painful glare of the Gate was behind them and their eyes had grown accustomed to Starside’s preternatural gloom, their view of the boulder plains was that much clearer. And there to the north-east of the Gate, of all they had seen so far, the barren boulder plains - and what stood or lay in a vast jumble upon them - were the most surreal of all.
The boulder plains were just what the term implied: seemingly endless plains reaching out from the barrier mountains to the northern horizon under its writhing dome of shimmering auroras. They might be the bed of some aeon-dead ocean, like the misnamed mares of the moon. But scattered far and wide across them, like clods of earth thrown haphazardly down on the bed of a dried up lake, boulder piles and individual rocks stood starkly silhouetted
in the glare of the Gate, casting concentric rings of shadows outwards from the central point of illumination. Well away from the Gate they were like eerie white sentinels, and farther still they were grey ghosts gradually merging into the powder-blue background.
Weathered into weird shapes, many of the boulders were grotesque as gargoyles, so that the overall effect was surreal, like a painting by Salvador Dali. All it would seem to lack was a focal point, an ‘object’ of form or structure so striking as to distract the eye from what might otherwise be considered its monotony. And out there, some eight or nine miles east and two to three north, indeed that singularity existed.
For even at that distance the seven could make out a nest of squat, mist-wreathed columns like some immense Stone-henge - like the stumps of a ring of gigantic, petrified mushrooms, or the mighty pedestals of toppled, cyclopean statues - rising up from vast heaps of scree and stony debris. And tumbled down on the alien earth itself, half-buried in the riven soil, the shattered bodies of the fallen gods, all formed into tumuli or strewn into dog-legged mounds of rubble about the bases of the naked stumps.
But central in this primal fossil forest a mighty stack remained, unscathed by earthquake or any device of man or monsters: the last great aerie of the Wamphyri! And: ‘Karen-stack,’ Nathan whispered, in awe of that incredible fang. ‘Or whatever they’ve named it… now.’
And Trask and the others gazed their fascination, however morbid, across all the misted miles to that lone kilometre-high sentinel rock, still standing there in the east among the rubble of the fallen aeries, where Harry Keogh had brought them crashing down onto the boulder plains. Then Trask, Chung and Anna Marie were given to wonder: But if this is only the last of the aeries - and not the greatest by any means - then how must it have looked when all of the stacks were standing? And all of their inhabitants alive … or undead?
Trask couldn’t take his eyes off that alien skyscraper
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tower, so that he stumbled over small rocks as Nathan led the way even farther from the Gate’s glare. Possibly the stack (or stacks, as once were), had weathered out from the barrier range and been left standing there like a series of mighty buttes as the mountains themselves retreated. Certainly, they had been a natural feature of this place, at least until the first of the vampire Lords had commenced work on them. But now, especially in its upper sections or levels, this last great aerie of the Wamphyri looked anything but natural. What? With all of those chimneys and causeways? Those towers, turrets and flying buttresses? Those landing-bays, balconies and … windows? Behind which, even as Trask gazed, faint glimmering lights were flickering into being one by one!
Or was that simply a whim of his imagination, a trick of the spectral light, a mirage of the twining mists which draped the distant menhir?
‘No mirage, Ben,’ Nathan told him. ‘Look the other way, across the barrier mountains.’ Trask and the others, they all looked, and saw that the sky over the mountains was now indigo, shot with fading shafts of gold, and that the shafts formed a slowly turning fan like the spokes of a phantom wheel. Then the fan seemed to fold in upon itself, and faded in a moment to a memory in the mind’s eye. And:
‘Sundown,’ Nathan told them. ‘The true night. And time we were gone from here. Those lights in Karenstack … the Wamphyri are up and about. Perhaps they’re already abroad in Sunside. But if not they soon will be, and we stand directly in their path. Now wait a moment…’
He conjured a Mobius door, which shrank a little from the proximity of the Gate, then firmed up and stood steady. ‘Good, we can go.’ He turned to the cavers. ‘You first. If not for me, you wouldn’t be here. So I want to make sure you’re safe. Form a ring and hold on to each other … and, well, just hold on. But no questions, and no talking. Just . .. bear with me.’
Then, expanding his door, he guided them through it, and
stepped in after them - And Trask, Chung and Anna Marie were left alone on the boulder plains.
But not for long; maybe a minute and a half, at most. And then —
‘Jesus!’ Trask gasped, as a ragged shadow flitted close overhead. His eyes scanned skyward and his machine-pistol made its typical metallic ch-ching sound as he instinctively cocked it. And: ‘Bats!’ he whispered, as he spied what spied upon them.
‘Desmodus.’ Anna Marie’s breath was ragged. ‘Pretty much the same as the vampires of Earth, but big.’ She, too, cocked her weapon.
‘Big?’ David Chung was quick to follow suit. ‘Why, those things must be three feet across, wing-tip to wing-tip!’
‘But not especially dangerous.’ Anna Marie had regained her composur
e. ‘Oh, if there was only one of us, injured, then they might attack. But right now they’re merely curious. We’re strange to them. They didn’t expect to find us here. Shh! Listen!’
There were half a dozen of the giant bats, and now they were circling, calling to each other with shrill, barely audible whistles; barely audible to human ears, that is. But miles across the boulder plains their cries would certainly be heard by others of their ilk … and perhaps by others not quite of their ilk. And maybe not too many miles away, at that.
‘The advance guard,’ said Trask, his throat suddenly dry. ‘Aerial observers, trackers, bloodhounds.’
‘Right,’ Chung choked the word out. ‘And look, here come the masters of the hounds!’ He pointed a shaking hand.
In the sky, barely half a mile away, a pair of weirdly pulsing manta shapes blotted out the stars as they descended from on high … and they were headed directly for the three espers where they stood, frozen like rabbits in the glare of headlight beams, on the cold uncaring plain of boulders …
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II
On the Plain of Boulders
Twenty-five to thirty minutes earlier, in Turgosheim:
It had been that Maglore the Mage was down in Mad-manse, or what had been Madmanse when the Killglance brothers, Wran and Spiro, had resided there; down in that haunted, cobwebbed, bat-shrouded mausoleum of a place, inspecting it as a prospective extension of his own Rune-manse. He’d been there with his lieutenant, Karpath Seersthrall, making diagrams of the manse and measuring certain of its rooms which he might use as metamorphic vats. For Maglore had many monsters to fashion, and the space in Runemanse was all but used up.
But down in Madmanse - where even now the dread spirit of its murdered one-time master, Eygor Killglance, seemed to waft on a gloomy aether - suddenly the grey fur at the back of Maglore’s neck had tingled and stood erect, and for a moment, however brief, a symbol had blazed up bright in the eye of his seer’s mind. This symbol:
