by Brian Lumley
“Really dark?” said Gill. “With stars like these?” He glanced at the sky, which was beginning to blaze. “It doesn’t get really dark! We’ve seen that.”
“It gets dark enough.” Haggie shivered. “The howlers are … black things. A dull, rubbery black. They don’t reflect the starlight. You’ll see what I mean.”
“When will we see?” Gill pressed him.
“Soon. They hunt in packs, and what they hunt might head this way. Last time I was here, I caught one of them. Then, like now, I was starving. And in this whole damned place—in this entire fucking maze of horrible places—there’s only a handful of things you can eat that will stay eaten! But you can eat what the howlers hunt, and it’s good. Right now my belly button’s making love to my spine. I need to eat, and soon! If I didn’t … believe me, I’d already be out of here.”
Gill stared hard at him. “You’d face down howlers, bats—even take your chances with that thing that’s hunting you—all for a bite to eat?”
“Face them down?” Haggie shook his head. “Take chances with that damned thing that’s tracking me?” He looked nervously all about, and his bloodied face was frowning. “What the hell’s wrong with you people, anyway? Don’t you ever eat? I told you, the only reason I’m still here is the chance of a free meal. But if anything nasty comes too close, I’ll just duck right out of it!”
“Through which door?” Gill was quick off the mark, giving no warning of what was on his mind. And he watched Haggie’s eyes.
The little man didn’t even blink. “You’re standing right in front of it,” he said.
Gill glanced over his shoulder at the nearest of the marble-slab doors. “This one, number seven?”
Haggie shrugged. “Why else would I be this close to it?”
“Just be sure you don’t try to get any closer,” Turnbull warned. “Not just yet, anyway.”
Throughout this conversation the howling in the forest and on the plain had been drawing closer, louder and more insistent. Suddenly, from somewhere out in the scrub, there sounded a thundering of small hooves and a shrill, terrified shrieking, all accompanied by renewed peals of howling and a savage grunting. For a little while, just out beyond the sphere of vision, the night seemed alive with activity; but after a few moments the sounds of the stampede—the hunt?—faded into distance.
Haggie seemed disappointed and struggled in Turnbull’s grasp. “Let go of me!” he demanded. “That’s our supper out there—meat on the hoof—and if any more of it heads this way, I want to get my hands on some!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“What about Anderson and the others?” Despite the circumstances, Angela was almost herself again. Something of hope had returned, and with it anxiety for the safety of the majority. “Didn’t they come with you?”
“They were … incapacitated,” Gill answered. “That’s putting it mildly. They tried eating some of the fruit back there, which apparently didn’t want to be eaten! They were okay when we left, but not up to moving just then. If they’re coming, it should be anytime now. I would think the fall of night—seeing it coming—would spur them on.”
Haggie was logical for once. “If they set out an hour after you,” he said, “then they should take an hour longer. Maybe more. That Anderson’s a bit on the heavy side … .”
“We were delayed a bit on the way,” said Turnbull. Then he saw the warning on Gill’s face and said no more. Pointless and even foolhardy to scare Haggie right now by mentioning the hunter. They didn’t want him bolting again.
“But will they be able to see this place in the dark?” Angela was concerned for them.
Gill glanced at the mansion. “I should think so. It’s like a great blob of snow with the starlight on it.” Then his voice changed. “Oh-oh!”
The others looked up. The bat things had come down a tier, were perched shoulder to shoulder, a row of them, all along the rim of the second storey. Their feral eyes were unblinking, fixed firmly on Gill and the rest.
“We could do with lighting a fire,” said Turnbull. He immediately felt Haggie stiffen a little in his grasp. “Oh, and you have the makings, do you?”
Haggie wriggled again and Turnbull caught up his hands. Gill searched the little man’s soiled suit pockets. In the inside jacket he found a book of matches—and recognised it. “Clayborne’s,” he said.
“I … I picked them up from where he left them.” Haggie searched for a way to excuse himself. “They were beside the fire in the cave. They’d dried out. I … I didn’t want the fire to set them off and waste them. Precious things, matches.”
“You thieving shit!” Turnbull growled. He released Haggie, shoved him away from him. “God, you’re probably contagious! But I’m telling you: run for it if you like, but if you do—and if and when I see you again—you’re a goner.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Haggie answered. “Not yet.”
Gill and Angela got a few dry branches and bits of heather together. He tore a strip of lining from his jacket, set fire to it. In a little while the heather caught, then the twigs and branches. Flames leaped. Turnbull found some heavier branches. In little more than five minutes they had a blaze going. Now the only problem would be to keep it fuelled. Meanwhile, however, the bats had retreated to the topmost tier again.
Through all of this Haggie could only protest, “Jesus, you’ll frighten them off!”
“We want to frighten them off,” Gill told him.
“Not the bats and howlers,” Haggie snorted. “The things the howlers hunt!”
Turnbull rounded on him. “We lit this fire as a beacon. Now what’s more important to you? Your stinking guts or the lives of Anderson and the others?”
Gill looked at Haggie and thought: That’s easy: his guts! Haggie has to be one of the lowest forms of—
Abruptly, his thoughts were interrupted. From far out in the night, a frenzied renewal or addition to the howling—in screams which could only be human!
“Jack!” Gill grabbed the big man’s arm. “Help me up onto the roof there.” Turnbull made a cup of his hands; Gill stepped into it, was thrust aloft, grabbed the rim of the parapet and drew himself up and over the low wall. Inside his head, he told himself: I don’t believe I’m doing this! Maybe Turnbull’s dream theory isn’t so wild after all. Where am I getting all of this strength? Or is this the final flare-up before the candle expires? “Toss up a brand.”
Turnbull yanked a fat, burning branch from the fire, carefully lobbed it up to Gill. He reached out, snatched it from the air. “This way!” he shouted then into the night. “We’re over here!” And he waved the blazing branch over his head, this way and that as a signal. As his voice rang out and came echoing back, silence fell like a cloak on the starlit plain and the silvered forest beyond. Gill heard a shuffling and scraping, a flapping of wings from behind and above. He whirled, thrust out his sputtering torch …
… But no problem. The bat things were cowering back from the rim of the top tier, using their wings to shield their eyes from the burning yellow light. He thrust the torch at them, shouted, “Hah!” And they drew back more yet.
But … the howlers were still now, utterly silent. And in the threatening night, where the crackling of the fire was the only sound, Turnbull quietly said, “Well, if they didn’t know we were here before, they certainly know it now!”
“Listen to that,” said Haggie softly. “Silence, yes—but you can almost hear the bastards thinking … .”
Gill propped up the branch against the wall to light the way for the three men—if they still lived—and shouted again into the silence, “This way! Follow the fire!” Then he stepped over the wall, lowered himself to arm’s length and jumped down. And straightening up, he heard again out in the wild the first faint howlings starting up, and the answering calls from other howlers as they recovered from their astonishment.
Now, too, from out of the night, they heard a human voice, Varre’s voice, shouting, “Gill, Turnbull—we see you! W
e’re coming!” They could hear Clayborne, too, but he was incoherent, yelling and gibbering like a madman. But if Varre and Clayborne were coming, so too was something else; for no sooner had Varre stopped calling to them than the drumming of the earth started up again, the mad thundering of hooves.
“This time!” said Haggie excitedly. “Maybe this time!”
Gill had been developing an unconscious nervous habit: at times of stress he would reach into his jacket pocket and clasp the cylinder there. He did so now as the sound of the stampede grew louder and frightened shapes were seen bounding in darkness. He clasped the cylinder and squeezed it, and turned it in his dry, nervous fingers. And … what?
There was no dent; the “bruise” of Turnbull’s bullet had disappeared, smoothed itself out of existence! Gill’s jaw fell open. He remembered the self-sufficient hunting thing. Machines that refuelled and repaired themselves. And wonderingly, he drew the cylinder out of his pocket. He looked at it in the firelight, a liquid silver cylinder—and knew!
Liquid, yes—but liquid which could imitate a solid! It would work now, could be used as a tool or a weapon. And Gill knew how to use it … .
He was snatched back to the present in a blast of wild, panicked screaming as Haggie’s “food” came on the scene. A small herd of four-footed deer creatures burst into the firelight, split up, and went bounding like springboks to left and right. But one of them wasn’t so fortunate or so surefooted; screaming, it leaped high over the fire, smacked headlong into the mansion’s wall between two of the doors. And it crumpled to earth there.
Angela, Turnbull and Gill had crouched down low, with their arms held up over their heads for protection; Haggie, on the other hand, had known more or less what to expect. He was on the stunned creature in a flash. Maybe it wasn’t just stunned but already dead, Gill couldn’t say, but Haggie was taking no chances. He held the animal between his legs, twisted its head and neck until something snapped and there was no more resistance.
He was jubilant. “God!” he gasped. “God—I can eat!”
But these things were only the hunted. And now came the hunters!
Perhaps because Haggie knew a little of what to expect, he was the first to see them. All of the jubilation went out of him in a moment. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he moaned. And clutching his prize like a pet dog to his chest, he backed up against the mansion, the House of Doors.
As the sounds of the stampede died away, the others peered fearfully into the gloom where Haggie had fixed his gaze. Gill saw … something —several of them—and thought: God! Except where Haggie had blasphemed, with Gill it was a prayer. But where the little redhead was concerned, Gill had learned to be sharp. Now was exactly the time when the little man might try to make a break for it. “Jack,” Gill said, low-voiced, never for a moment taking his eyes off the black things that squatted and shuffled and crept closer out there beyond the fire’s glow, “watch Haggie!” And to Angela: “Get behind me, quick!”
She crept behind him, trembling like a leaf; and Gill faced front, held the cylinder weapon out before him. It was a close-combat weapon, yes, but deadlier by far than teeth and claws. The howlers shuffled closer still, and out in the night their brothers and cousins kept a deadly silence, with no more howling to cause a distraction. Word had gone out that there would be strange, rich fare tonight.
The fire sputtered and threw up sparks, then sank low. And the howlers advanced again, beginning to grunt quietly among themselves, slowly closing their circle towards the little knot of humans. There were … a good many of them.
Gill stared hard at the one closest to the fire, who also seemed to be the biggest of the bunch. Haggie was right: the thing’s hide looked black, rubbery. It walked upright on two legs, but crouching low, shambling. Three and a half feet tall, anthropoid but scarcely manlike, the howler was as broad as he was tall and shaggy as a sheep. An alien Neanderthal covered in masses of ropy, matted hair or fur.
It was hard to discern faces, just slanting, red-glowing eyes in black rubber masks—until the one Gill was watching opened its jaws. And then he saw that the great shaggy head of the thing was mainly jaws!
Somewhere to Gill’s right Haggie sobbed, and Turnbull’s voice was tight, urgent when he whispered, “Spencer, I—”
Gill stooped, picked up a brand, tossed it towards the tightening circle.
And in that same moment, from beyond the circle: “Gill! Turnbull!” It was Varre. He came at a stumbling run, heading straight for the fire and seeing little else but the flickering flames and the knot of familiar human forms and faces. Behind him, raving, staggered Clayborne.
“Hell!” the American babbled and shrieked in the night. “The infernal regions. The very confines of hell! For I have seen Satan shambling in the dark and hovering on bat wings, and I have seen his eyes yellow and red and lusting for my soul. Yea, though I walk in the shadow of the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for … for … for God’s sake!” He seemed entirely unhinged.
To the howlers it must seem they were under attack from the rear. Gill’s firebrand had landed amongst them, scattering both sparks and the creatures themselves, and now these shouting, lurching figures were coming straight at them out of the darkness! Hooting their alarm, the howlers broke and ran—or rather bounded—in all directions; how far couldn’t be determined.
Varre and Clayborne came on, collapsing to their knees in the firelight. Gill and Angela searched in the immediate vicinity for more branches to fuel the fire, and Turnbull continued to guard Haggie.
“Mon Dieu!” Varre gasped, wild-eyed in the fire’s glow. “I thought we were finished. The things we have seen! Great spiders in the forests, and that monstrosity which pursues Haggie, stuck in a bog and sinking. We skirted it and came on. On the heath things thundered by us, and great bats flew overhead. There were eyes everywhere. And the howling, that dreadful howling … I think Clayborne is mad.”
Clayborne jumped to his feet. “Mad? I’m as sane as any man. Saner than most. Speak for yourself, Frenchie. What? It was my prayers carried us through! Now you people have seen these devils with your own eyes. Surely it’s obvious to you by now that this is no place of science but the supernatural!”
“You’re raving.” Turnbull was blunt, as always.
Clayborne growled low in his throat, charged at the big man. Turnbull had not witnessed Clayborne’s attack on Bannerman at the pool under the waterfall, but he knew trouble when he saw it. Clayborne was blocky, powerful. And half-crazy, he’d be strong as hell. Releasing Haggie, Turnbull ducked under Clayborne’s wildly swinging fists, folded him with a blow to the stomach, then straightened him with another to the chin. Clayborne was sent sprawling with all the wind knocked out of him.
But Haggie, freed, had immediately begun sidling towards door number seven. Gill saw him; if it wasn’t for the carcass Haggie carried, he’d have been through the door before. anyone could stop him. What advantage this would give him was hard to say: the rest of them would surely follow him through at once. This was the thought that puzzled Gill as he put himself between Haggie and the door, blocking his escape.
And at that point Anderson arrived … .
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Anderson came stumbling, trembling, utterly exhausted, out of the dark and into the firelight. Gone for now any semblance of his old guise of authority; the power in which he’d cloaked himself for most of his life had been stripped away; he was only a man fending for himself, and by no means best equipped or in the best possible condition. But seeing Varre crouched there beside the fire, and Clayborne where he sat dazed from Turnbull’s blows, he rallied himself and tried to throw out his chest a little.
“That was sheer treachery!” he accused, pointing a shaking hand first at Varre, then Clayborne. “If I hadn’t made it, then it would have been nothing less than murder!”
Gill didn’t know what any of this was about, but before tempers could flare any further, he said, “Save your outrage for later, Anderson. You’
re not out of trouble yet. None of us are.” He turned to Haggie. “It seems we’re all here—those of us who are going to be, anyway. Now what about these doors?”
“I’ve told you about them,” Haggie answered. His mouth had swollen up and he mumbled his words. “I only ever used one of them, this one.” And he looked at door number seven. “What’s in there?” Gill asked him.
“Another place.” Haggie shrugged. “Same as always. But there’s water to drink, a few vegetables you can eat, and the climate won’t kill you. Don’t ask me about the rest of the doors, for I don’t know. But I’d chance any one of them against this place at night!”
Gill looked at the others. “That’s it then. So what’s it to be?”
The howlers had meanwhile started up again. Red-and-yellow gleaming eyes crowded the darkness beyond the fire’s sphere of light. From out on the heath there came many small thunderings, shrieks of terror, howls of elation, triumph.
“I’m with you,” said Turnbull. “It’s why we’re here. And if we don’t go through, what then? No way we can live here. Not for very long, anyway.”
“He is right,” said Varre. “Who cares where we go as long as it is away from here?”
Clayborne agreed. “A door out of hell? Let’s chance it. The Lord shall provide!”
Angela said nothing but simply stayed close to Gill, and Anderson was already at the door, staring up at the knocker. “Are we agreed, then?” he said, as if he were solely responsible for the arrangements. “Is everyone ready?”
Clayborne shoved him roughly aside. “Let me be first,” he said. “I have the strength of my knowledge, the armour of my faith. If there are demons, I shall know them.” He opened his arms wide, threw back his head and cried, “In the name of the Lord I make pure, I exorcise this gateway out of hell!” And he reached up and knocked.
