Carter reached into his shoulder bag and brought out the object he had called a divining wand. Laying the star-stone on the rocky floor of the tunnel, Carter held the wand in front of him, muttering something in a tongue that sounded like Latin.
“What’s he doing?” asked Michael, holding his automatic rifle on his hip. Provenza had already raised his weapon, drawing a bead on the nearest of the hunchbacked figures.
Lya shrugged. “Probably trying out some of the spells or rituals, I don’t know.”
“He probably doesn’t either,” said Michael.
At that moment several of the figures stepped out of the shadows, and Lya could see that they were human, although dwarf-sized. In the light of the lamps, their skin was paper-white and almost translucent; it stretched tightly across the planes of their faces. They were almost beautiful, like ceramic pieces of sculpture. It was difficult to imagine that these little people could be agents of the kind of evil Carter spoke of.
One of the gnomes spoke rapidly in clipped, guttural tones. Again, the language sounded like Latin, although Lya could understand none of it.
Carter was nodding his head, a strange little smile on his lips, his eyes dancing as though he were watching a ballet.
“What’s he saying?” asked Provenza.
“I’m not catching everything,” said Carter. “His Latin must have become dialectized … but the gist of it is that we are all doomed, and that only death awaits us.”
“Tell him we don’t see it that way,” said Provenza.
Carter smiled, and carefully spoke to the nearest of the dwarfs in a droning voice. At one point he brandished the divining wand, and Lya noticed that several of the little men drew back at the sight of the talisman.
“Are they running the show down here?” asked Provenza softly.
“I don’t think so,” said Carter. “They seem to have some understanding of the forces at work down here, and have learned to coexist with them.”
“Are they going to try anything?” asked Michael.
“Not sure,” said Carter. “Let’s find out a few things, shall we?” And with that, he stepped forward, holding the wand out in front of him like a benediction chalice. Several of the closest hunchbacked men scurried down from their positions and backed away down the tunnel. But the one who had first spoken to them held his ground.
Up until that point, Lya had felt no fear, only fascination with the discovery of the small men. That they could have been living under the streets of a modem city for so many centuries was incredible. But as she watched the confrontation unfolding and the dwarf in the dark robes raised his hands menacingly above his head like a stage magician, she felt the fear touch her mind.
Suddenly an orange, glowing sphere of light formed between the dwarfs hands, and he hurled it at Carter. Across the expanse of the wide tunnel, it drifted like ball-lightning. Provenza grabbed the professor’s windbreaker, yanking him out of the path of the thing as they both fell. It struck the cave wall and there was a soundless explosion and a cascade of rocks and debris amidst the sun-white flash of light.
Provenza jumped up and leveled his rifle, but Carter touched his shoulder. “Wait! Not yet!”
“Are you crazy?” yelled Provenza.
Another glowing sphere was forming between the dwarf’s hands.
“I must try something first!” cried Carter, and Lya noticed that there was something of a glazed aspect to the professor’s eyes. He was beginning to look a bit crazed.
Jumping up and holding the wand in front of his body, Carter called out a phrase in Latin. Instantly, Lya felt something changing in the atmosphere of the tunnel. The air felt charged and she could almost hear a droning sound like a million bees in their hive. A bolt of cyan-blue light leaped from the divining wand, striking the glowing sphere above the dwarfs head like a laser beam. Immediately the orange ball vanished in a conflux of light and energy and an aura of shimmering light formed around the body of the little man, who seemed paralyzed by the forces that danced around him.
Suddenly there was a great explosion of light and a loud cracking sound. The dwarf disintegrated in the conflagration, and then the tunnel was again swathed in shadows, pierced only by the beams of their torchlamps. Seeing this, the other dwarves swarmed back into the tunnel in full retreat, gamboling away into the darkness.
For a moment, Lya was so stunned by the display that she did not notice that Carter had collapsed into Provenza’s arms. As Michael rushed up to help him, she followed quickly.
“Is he all right?” asked Michael, staring down at the professor.
Carter appeared to be unharmed. His face as he looked up at them was a curious blend of exhaustion and elation. “I … I don’t think anything quite like this has ever happened to me!” he said excitedly.
It was just the right tension-breaker, and everyone laughed just a little too loudly. As Provenza helped the professor to his feet, Lane babbled on.
“I can’t describe how this feels! So … so amazing!” He waved the wand in front of everyone, still staring at it with a reverent expression. “This damned thing works! You know, I don’t think that I really believed it would, that it was—gods, I’m babbling on, aren’t I?”
“Take it easy, Professor,” said Provenza. “We get it, okay. We’re with you a hundred percent.”
“Yes! Yes! But don’t you see what this means?! We have some power down here! We’re not as helpless as I feared, don’t you see?”
Lya watched Carter carefully. His words and actions were almost manic. She hoped that he was not becoming unhinged by the whole experience; they had to trust his judgments down here, and it was no time for him to freak out on them.
Picking up the star-stone in one hand and the wand in the other, Carter gestured in the direction in which the dwarves had retreated. “Onward!,” he cried and stepped forward, the others following.
They soon came upon another large, cavernous place, with ceilings so far above that the rays of the torches dispersed before reaching anything. There was a subsonic thrumming in the air and the feeling of great tensions building around them, as if their presence was a catalyst for the coming together of antipodal forces.
Then, out of the shadows, they all saw the mist forming. It was by now a familiar phenomenon, only this time it was different: more transparent, and like a window through which Lya could see looming shapes moving as if in slow motion. Flying things and strangely colored skies, dark forests and distant peaks.
Carter held up the star-stone, and it was burning with a sunlike ferocity, although it remained cool to the touch. He announced that they were very close indeed to their objective: his voice was a bit too high-pitched, a bit too strident. Carter was beginning to scare Lya almost as much as the place he had taken them to.
They carefully circumvented the mist and followed a worn path through the cavern which gradually narrowed to a single ledge bounded by a sheer wall on one side and a bottomless abyss on the other.
“Don’t look down,” Michael said several times as they negotiated the ledge, Lya looking ahead, fighting the urge to peer into the mouth of darkness. She felt very vulnerable.
Michael and Provenza also seemed to share the feeling, and Lya could feel their wariness, almost smell the sweat of their anxiety. Only Professor Carter seemed to be free of the growing sense of danger. He forged ahead of them with the recklessness of a child playing a grand game.
The droning sounds were increasing. The air in the cavern was growing thick and there was a musky, animal scent to it. The ledge widened and began curving to the left, beginning to form a great, downward-turning spiral, an immense static whirlpool carved into the rock. Looking down into the depths of the black gyre, Lya could hear the sounds of the droning growing louder. The star-stone was so bright now that they did not need their torchlamps, and there was a low trembling in the earth. It was as if they were descending into the heart of a volcano, but instead of the fury of heat and molten rock, they were advancing upon
a collection of cosmic forces far greater.
Then, out of the depths, up from the darkness, they came …
Like Dante’s Hell, like the biblical Pit, the vision came together for Lya, and she could hear the flapping of leathery wings, the scrabbling of claws upon rock. Michael and Provenza heard it too, and they paused, raising their automatic rifles. Below them boiled a glowing fog, and she could sense the teeming legions of demons and creatures from a thousand realities pouring in from a thousand worlds.
They had found it, of that she was sure. The focal point of the cosmic forces, the nexus-point, the gateway. It was all of those things, and the most horrible of Lane Carter’s fears and speculations were proving correct.
“Oh, my God,” she heard Provenza say weakly. He was pointing down into the mist, into the center of the spiraling pit.
“Get back, Lya!” said Michael, putting a hand on her shoulder as he moved past her, peering down over the ledge.
It was like a demented vision from the mind of Blake or Bosch, a gigantic cauldron of things from which nightmares were born, a seething storm of motion, of legs and claws and teeth and eyes, stalks and antennae, wings and other things unnamed and unseen till now.
Carter stood before them, shouting into the growing storm of sound like a madman. He was waving the divining wand toward the rising mass of entities, and as he cried out, pulses of blue light jumped from the wand, hurtling downward like thunderbolts into the rolling mists.
Something large and dark flew past him shrieking, and he fell back a step. There was a burst of gunfire as Michael tracked it with his weapon, and the thing collapsed like a broken kite, wheeling down into the depths from which it had come. Long, slithering things like snakes or tentacled men-of-war were traversing the spiral ledge. Hard, shining carapaces and pincers reflected the burning sun of the star-stone. The bursts of the wand seemed to affect some of them, but not others. Carter moved farther down the spiral, ranting into the now storm-level cacophony of screaming and droning.
“Get back!” shouted Michael, barely audible above the noise. “John! We’ve got to get back! Get Carter, and come on!”
Provenza had unhooked a concussion grenade from his belt; he nodded calmly as he heard Michael, and hurled the weapon into the depths. The explosion ripped through the fabric of the mist, setting off a new level of shrieking and howling. Provenza followed it with his second grenade, which exploded in the midst of the rising mass of creatures, briefly devastating the horde. But their places were soon filled by more of the endless pack of nightmares. Lya had run back up the sloping path; she was a full hundred yards above Lane Carter, who still stood his ground although the swarm of dark beings was now almost at his heels. She could see Michael halfway between her and Carter, and Provenza moving in on the professor.
Provenza was shouting something at the professor, but she could not hear what it was. She didn’t need to. Carter was trying to shrug off the detective’s urging grasp, and as the two men confronted one another, a long-necked, dragonlike creature rose up from the amorphous mass of climbing bodies. Before Michael could react, it bolted like a serpent striking, its fine-toothed jaws clamping about Provenza’s leg, slamming him back against the wall of the spiral path. Carter stood paralyzed from the shock of the attack, unarmed and helpless. The rifle fell from Provenza’s hands, tumbling down into the pit, as he was thrashed about in the creature’s jaws, worried violently like a rag doll in a puppy’s mouth. He was screaming, but Lya could not hear him.
And then Michael fired a staccato burst into the creature’s flanks, the slugs stitching through its scaly flesh, shocking it with multiple impacts. It convulsed and fell backward into the abyss, carrying Provenza still in its jaws. Lya screamed out in helpless terror as she watched Michael running down the curved slope. Without thinking, she raised the shotgun, flipped off the safety, and fired into the mass of things now at the very lip of the ledge where Carter was slumped against the wall. Her only coherent thought was of Michael as she tried to banish the image of Provenza’s death from her mind. It was inconceivable that he was gone, that he had died right before her eyes. She couldn’t allow it to be true.
As she ran downward, a single thought jumped into her mind: I am going to die now. It seemed to be repeating itself slowly, calmly as she ran. She wondered if she would see her life flash before her, like they all said it did, but there was nothing like that happening now. The idea of death was more of a cold, relentless fact, a monolithic obstacle to thinking that seemed to cancel out everything else, even fear.
Michael had reached Carter and was pulling at him, dragging him up the spiral path. When they reached Lya, he screamed at her to run ahead of him, to keep moving, and she did so as though she were a marionette being jerked along by unseen wires.
When they reached the top of the spiral, the horde of creatures had climbed past their original point. Carter was yelling that he must stop them now, that there was no time to run, and that it must be done. Dropping the star-stone, he hurled the divining wand into the midst of the rising nightmare, where it flared briefly and was absorbed by the pack of bodies.
“The ‘key’!” screamed Carter. He pulled the ancient object from his bag. Michael was ripping a spent clip from his rifle and replacing it with a fresh one as Carter turned to face the center of the spiral.
Staring past him into the concentric rings of the stone whirlpool, Lya could see the hideous images of all the things that give our fears shape and definition as they came up from the darkness. Things that crawled, and things that flew, skeletal faces, bony claws, and darker, larger reptilian shapes; dragons and beasts from long-ago mythologies; chimeras and gryphons, basilisks and banshees, hydras and minotaurs. She could see them all scrambling upward, scaling each other for purchase and advantage.
It was hypnotic to watch the progress of the dark horde, and Lya managed to pull her gaze away from the advancing column only by thinking of Michael and making herself look back to him.
He was firing into the center of the pack, while Carter held the “key” above his head. Staring into the professor’s face, Lya could hardly recognize him. His hair flew wildly about, his eyes burned under his shining brow, and his mouth was open in a rictuslike grin that was a combination of a scream and a maniacal smile. He was shouting something into the storm of bellows and screams, but she could not hear him.
Despite Michael’s savage gunfire, the creatures of nightmare were almost upon them, had practically gained the lip of the spiral pit. As he paused to snap another clip into his rifle, a tentacled body rose up, snaking its arms about Carter’s legs and lifting him off the ledge. Lya screamed; Michael fired into the body of the creature, but it was too late. In a final act of desperation, Carter heaved the mythical key outward, away from him.
As though in slow motion, Lya watched the carved piece of stone arc away from the ledge, floating almost effortlessly downward. She watched it until it disappeared into the mass of bodies below, almost forgetting that Professor Carter had been pulled from the ledge and was now lost in the midst of the rising swarm. Michael was backing away steadily, getting closer to her.
When the explosion came, she was not looking at the pit, and the light of a dozen suns burned at the periphery of her vision. The force of the blast was like an earthquake, viciously slamming her and Michael to the rocky ledge. She felt something crack in her forearm and there came a sharp flood of pain up into her shoulder. She could hear Michael calling her name, but he sounded very far away.
Carter was gone, too. The thought lay heavily in her mind, refusing to leave, despite the pain from her arm. The earth tremors ceased, along with the blinding light of the explosion. Suddenly, Lya realized that nothing but silence surrounded her.
“Michael?” Her voice sounded alien, changed. “Where are you? All you all right?”
“I’m right here.” He touched her shoulder, pulled himself along the floor of the cavern to come up even with her. He kissed her cheek, her lips, and it fe
lt so good to her, so real, as though everything else had been nothing more than a bad dream. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She told him about her arm, and he touched it gingerly. When she winced, he suggested that it was probably broken. He helped her cradle her arm in a sort of sling made from her sweater. Slowly he got to his knees and stood, then helped her to stand beside him. Their voices echoed across the vast chamber; the silence was eerie, threatening in its own special way.
“What happened? Do you know?” she asked.
“Not really. Lane’s gone … he’s down there somewhere, I guess. When he threw that artifact into the pit, something happened …”
“He said it was a key to close the gate,” said Lya. “It must have worked.”
“I don’t want to think about it right now,” he said. “I just want to get out of here. Can you walk okay?”
She nodded. “I think so, but my arm is killing me.”
“We’ll get you fixed up when we get out of here.”
“Can we find our way back?”
He shrugged, and looked around the dimly glowing cavern. “We got in. We’ll get out.” He put his arm around her shoulder, his eyes still scanning the area. “Wait a minute,” he said, staring at something.
“What is it, Michael?”
“Are you okay? Hold on for a second, I’ll be right back.”
He walked away toward the silent shadows of the pit, still carrying the automatic rifle warily. The sound of his footsteps crunching upon the loose stones seemed very loud now. Only moments before the cavern had been alive with the sounds of hell, yet already she found it hard to believe, already her rational mind was trying to discount everything. She thought of Lane Carter and Provenza. They weren’t really dead, were they? All so hard to believe, to accept. It hadn’t happened, had it?
Michael reached the point where the lip began to spiral downward. Bending close to the earth, he picked up the star-stone, still lying where Carter had dropped it. He carried it in his free hand as he returned to Lya.
Night-Train Page 32
