by Brian Lumley
As the echoes of his voice died away in that grim place, Hero tried to shrug and couldn't, so simply answered: `Beats me. Except ...'
`Yes?'
`Except I keep thinking we'll be finding out soon enough. Too soon, if you take my meaning. For it has to do, I think, with this volcano — or rather, this ex-volcano.'
Even as he spoke there came echoing up from below a dull, distant booming or pounding, as if some Colossus of inner earth had chosen that precise moment to commence banging away on demon drums. The reverberations from unguessed abysses caused the air to vibrate, brought down rills of dust and pumice from crevices and small ledges; and slowly the pounding took up a steady rhythm, like that of some huge and nameless engine throbbing away in bowels of nether earth.
'Umm!' said Eldin thoughtfully. `I take it that's what you were talking about, eh?'
`Well it's hardly volcanic activity, now is it?' Hero returned. 'Which in turn begs the question: just what the hell is it? I mean, it must go down deeper than Pnoth, this great black flue, and yet something's alive down there ...'
`Like Oorn in het pit, you mean? That horrible gastropod mate of Mnomquah's, where we sealed her under Sarkomand at the end of the Mad Moon war?'
`Maybe even worse. than Oorn,' replied Hero, darkly.
`Worse than Oorn?' the Wanderer grimaced. `That's a hell of an imagination you've got there, lad!. But I know what you mean: if not real life down there, pseudo-life — right?'
`Real, pseudo, whatever!' said Hero. 'Nasty-life, anyway. And — '
`Hold your breath!' Eldin cut him short.
Hero heeded the older dreamer's warning at once. This subterranean pounding wasn't new to them; so far they'd hung here for an afternoon and a night, and this was the third time that ominous thundering had rumbled up from below. By now they were well acquainted with what came with it. First the smell:
Yurghhh! said Eldin, screwing his eyes shut, clamping his lips together, even trying to pinch his nostrils in upon themselves against a reek that would make the Charnel Gardens smell good. And then:
ArghhhP agreed Hero, likewise suppressing his sensory tackle, as a hot, stinking black smoke ring came whooshing up from dreamland's core. It dung to the wall of the pit, that rolling ring of noxious steam and smoke and lordknows-what, billowing over the questers, enveloping them, and hurtling on up the shaft in the mountain's heart to the skies above. Overhead the glimmer of stars fading in the coming dawn was shut out as the smoke ring eclipsed them; while down below the pounding continued its, driving, maddening beat, accompanied by subterranean shuddering.
The pair opened their stinging eyes, breathed tentatively at first, then gulped with their mouths at the still foetid air, gradually relaxing the pressure on their nostrils. Eldin was first to speak. 'Lord, what I'd give right now for a clothes peg!' he moaned.
`Save your breath,' Hero gasped. 'You need it, for as we've seen before this is likely to go on for some little time.'
But the Wanderer wasn't listening; instead he was frowning down into the gulf, his chin jutting forward onto his broad chest. 'You'd think there were machines down there,' he said. 'And this the chimney of some monstrous mill, some foul factory of hell!'
`That's rather poetic,' said Hero, who had a good ear for such. But he had a fairly decent memory, too, and now his eyes narrowed. 'What's more, it's rather reminiscent of something I've heard before.'
'Oh? And what's that?' queried Eldin — but before Hero could answer: 'Watch it — here we go again!'
Another smoke ring whooshing past, grimy and slimy and yet hot as the breath of some dragon of darkness. And in its wake, as Hero coughed and spluttered and blinked his eyes open:
`Old lad, is it my —' (cough!) — imagination, or is it —' (cough!) — suddenly a bit lighter around here?'
`Not your imagination, no,' Eldin choked back. 'Before these damned smoke rings started up I'd been lying back my head and staring up at the stars. Of course, from down here there'll always be stars up there — even when it's daylight outside — but for a fact they've been getting dimmer this last hour. It's the dawn, that's what you're seeing: the cold light of dawn come a-creeping down this funnel and along these tunnels of rock. Can't you feel it in your bones? I can, even now the sun, lifting his golden rim up over the edge of the dreamlands. The sun we'll likely never see again ...'
`Whoah, there! Hang on, old lad!' Hero cried. 'What's all this then? The sun we'll likely never see again? Where's that old indefatigable Eldin gone to the never-say-die spirit, the stiff upper lip?'
`As for that last,' said Eldin, 'it's a lip and a bit above this weak wobbly chin! Anyway, you were about to tell me what I'd -reminded you of — you know, "foul factories of hell", and such?'
'Ah yes, that!' said Hero. 'It was Kuranes, I think, or maybe old King Carter himself in Ilek-Vad — can't remember for sure. It was at a banquet or some such, and I'd had a bit to drink. I was on muth-dew and you were on your back somewhere or other. But I do recall the subject.
It seems that scattered about in certain of dreamland's darker regions, there are these pits of nightmare that go down into unfathomed depths of madness. And l quote: "down there in the burrows at the bottom of these pits, engines of horror pound, where the souls of lost dreamers feed the blackest dreams of the Great Old Ones and fuel the nightmares which They send to plague human dreamers!'
Eldin's voice was much subdued when finally, after a short silence, he said: 'And you think this is one such pit, eh?'
Hero chewed his lip. 'Well, we'll not be the first Gudge has dropped down into darkness, will we? And knowing his lot - their feeding habits, that is - surely that would seem to constitute one hell of a waste of good meat. Unless the pit's needs are greater, more important.'
`Engines of horror, eh?' Eldin mumbled, licking lips grown suddenly dry. And: 'Oh, oh! Here comes an -'
other smoke ring, he would have finished, except the stench and steam and smoke shut him off as the ring of foul vapour rolled over the questers and hissed up toward the new day. And with that third monstrous exhalation of unknown earth, sudden as it had started up, so the subterranean pounding faltered and shut down; and silence reigned once more in that gloomy, reeking place. But only for a little while. Then -
'You hear that?' said Hero. 'Footsteps! A good many of them, and coming this way.'
'From the north tunnel,' said Eldin. 'Aye, and growing louder by the minute. Gudge and his gang coming to send us to hell. Or to dreamland's black core, to fuel Cthulhu's machineries of nightmare!'
`Eldin, I -' Hero struggled to find words. 'I just wanted to say - I mean ...'
'Yes, yes - I know, I know,' the Wanderer's voice was gruff. 'It's all right I forgive you.'
'What I'm trying to say is ... what?' Hero couldn't conceal the surprise in his voice. 'Forgive me? For what?'
'For all the bad turns you've done me, bad thoughts you've thought about me, bad things you've said to me. I forgive you for all of them.'
For long moments Hero was struck dumb. But then he began to grate: 'Well that's damn big of you - you blustering, beer-swilling, black-hearted, quirky old ...'
Including that one,' said Eldin, unruffled. 'And not so much of the "old", if you don't mind.' And before Hero could explode: `Now then, d'you know any half-decent gods we might try praying to? If so trot 'em out, for it looks like that's all that's left to us now ...'
`Horned ones, aye, what else?' said Zura of Zura to Moreen and de Marigny aboard Shroud II. 'One of their black ships spotted Hero and Eldin wandering afoot along Zura the land's western border toward the hinterlands. They hoisted the Jolly Roger, dropped down out of the sky, picked 'em up. Now that's doubtless as the questers wished it - to get in with the pirates, find out about them, possibly arrange a bit of sabotage but as soon as they were aboard they must have seen what they were up against. Lengites! Their squat little bodies would have given the almost-humans away: their wide shoes hiding cloven hooves, their too-wide mouths, the tricorn h
ats concealing their horns. But no way out of it: too many of them to fight and nowhere to flee, and the black ship already gaining altitude and heading for Gudge's volcano. A-ha! - and the horned ones playing along with the game, pretending Hero and Eldin were welcome aboard (which they were, of course, but not as pirates!) and the questers yo-ho-hoing and acting all piratical - but all of them knowing it for a sinister charade, which must come to an abrupt end as soon as they reached their destination ...
'Anyway, as fate would have it I was aboard Shroud that
evening and spied them a-sailing. I closed in and hailed them, and spotted that pair of great clowns on the black ship's deck. I called them by name — but the Lengites already had a good idea who they were, I'm sure. And then I demanded that they be handed over to me. Oh, yes, for I had scores to settle with those two!
`But the almost-humans wouldn't hear of it, not now that they knew for certain who their new "recruits" were; Gudge would want to see them, and he'd doubtless have plans of his own for them. And that was that. I should scarper, they said, and stop "interfering" — and never so much as a "by your leave, 0 Princess!" Well, I had only the crew aboard and no fighters to speak of the Lengites held all the cards; I could only let them go.'
`Where exactly is this volcano, Gudge's hideout?' de Marigny was eager to be off, desperately afraid that he was already too late.
`Why, it's right ... there? said Zura, pointing. 'See?'
It was dawn. The sun was one third up and the dreamlands were turning golden except Zura the land far below, which was gloomy as ever in the shade of misted, moss-grown, leaning tombstones. But far away to the north where Zura pointed, there the hazy peaks of mountains stood faintly purple over a sea of grey mist; and even now one of those peaks shot up a curling black smoke ring toward dreamland's last stars. Also, on the north-western horizon, a pale moon was suddenly blotted out by something near-invisible, some alien cloud that writhed and put out feelers to draw itself down across the sky toward that same range of mountains.
And now de Marigny began to understand. His eyes widened; he grasped Moreen's hand and hastened her toward the time-clock. Only as they entered into that weird vessel did he think to call back: 'Good luck, Zura. Give 'em hell!'
`Luck to you, Searcher,' she called back, nodding. 'And my regards to that pair of scoundrels when you see them if you're in time!'
De Marigny simply pointed his strange vehicle at the distant volcano and 'went there'. In a vessel like the time-clock, that was perfectly feasible: to be able to see your goal was to make that goal almost instantly accessible. He got there as the third and last black smoke ring was on its way up the mountain's ancient funnel, came to a hovering halt directly over the crater as that expanding vapour-ring whooshed up, briefly encompassed the clock, headed for the sky. And he knew now for a fact exactly what lay below, down in the dead volcano's heart.
'The last time I was in the dreamlands,' he told Moreen, `Titus Crow was in much the same fix as Hero and Eldin, I fancy. He and Tiania were scheduled- to suffer Nyarlathotep's inquisition before being fed into the engines of horror where the Great Old Ones fashion mankind's worst nightmares. And this volcano, which it undoubtedly once was, must now be the exhaust vent of just such engines. Once you've seen those evil black smoke rings you can never mistake them for anything else. Last time it was a pit in the underworld, in a fantastic underground cavern where few dreamers had ever ventured; this time it's here on the surface, and so its gases must have been disguised as the uneasy stirrings of a long-slumbering volcano.'
'And that strange eclipse we saw?' Moreen's excitement was growing. 'Didn't Atal also mention this Nyarlathotep, the Great Messenger?'
De Marigny nodded. 'The massed telepathic mind of the Great Old Ones. They're invading the dreams of men again, in preparation for that same uprising which threatens Elysia! Hero and Eldin are special, important dreamers; Cthulhu will learn what he can from them, through
Nyarlathotep, before grinding them to pulp in his nightmare machines. Look!'
Enlarged by the time-dock's scanners, the lower slopes of the mountain to the west seemed suddenly enveloped by a sickly, crawling mist. Except this mist writhed and put out feelers, then drew itself into the mountain via the extinct, half-choked lava run which opened on that side. 'Nyarlathotep, in just one of his "thousand forms"!' de Marigny rasped. 'Well he hasn't come here for nothing, and so there has to be time yet.'
Then, without further pause, The Searcher dropped the time-clock vertically down the shaft, at the same time scanning the darkness below as the crusted lava walls rushed upwards at a terrific pace and dawn's natural light narrowed to a pallid circle receding high overhead ...
'Well then, what are you waiting for?' Eldin roared up at the massed ranks of wide-mouthed faces leering down on Hero and himself. 'On you go, hack away! Or better still let me up off this cross, give me a sword and I'll hack away — but not at any ropes, be sure! Ha! Scummy sons of Leng — your fathers were spawned in moonlit mud and your mothers went on all fours! You weren't born but spawned! And when you die — which you all will, and soon if there's any justice — why, not even Zura would welcome such as you to the Charnel Gardens! What? I've seen handsomer night-gaunts!'
`Much handsomer-' agreed Hero, if a bit less boisterously, and not a little envious of Eldin's inspired taunting, — and they've no faces at all!'
Their comments bothered the almost-humans not one bit, but Gudge, on the opposite side of the pit from where they were hanging, now pushed wobblingly forward. As he neared the rim, so the Lengites hastily made room. Hero and Eldin had met Gudge when the black ship brought them here in the first place. He hadn't fooled them then and made no attempt to do so now.
Robed in red silk, but loosely for there was no longer any need to conceal himself, not down here under the volcano Gudge was far less than human. As Eldin had once long-since pointed out: 'Whoever dreamed a thing such as that must have been a madman!' And only half-hidden behind the shuddering folds of his robes, Gudge was indeed a leprous white anomaly; vaguely toadish yet able, within limits, to contract or expand his jellyish body at will; eyeless, yet obviously very clearly sighted; with a blunt snout that sprouted a vibrating mass of short pink tentacles in twin bunches, whose purpose was purely conjectural. Or perhaps not; for certainly the thing's hood, thrown back now, was equipped with wide-spaced eye-holes. So perhaps the pink tentacles served as 'eyes' of a sort. But voiceless beyond any doubt, Gudge conversed by means of a whining ivory flute which he carried in a mushy paw. His interpreter as he played or 'spoke' was one of the Lengites, a more than usually puffy horned one whose position puffed him up more yet.
'Questers,' he translated now, while the torches of his massed brothers flared up evilly all around, — you, Hero of Dreams and Eldin the Wanderer Gudge wishes you to know that you are singularly honoured. Nyarlathotep himself comes to examine you. Even the Great Messenger of Them Gudge is pledged to serve! How say you? Are you not overwhelmed?'
`I vomit on Nyarlathotep!' cried Eldin. 'If he smells and looks half as disgusting as Gudge, I vomit twice on him! Even Hero vomits on him, and he's not as fussy as me!'
`In short,' Hero added, 'we're not impressed.'
The cloven-hooved interpreter tootled their comments back to Gudge, whose form at once commenced a rapid shrinking and swelling and fluttering which the questers took for an expression of some fury. And before he could bring himself properly under control —
'Not impressed?' came a new voice, and all heads turned toward the mouth of the west-facing lava run, from which poured a sickly mist that lapped like sour milk and pulsed with a life of its own. The voice — a young voice, whose tones were rippling and mellow, so languorous as to be almost hypnotic — had issued from this bank of seemingly sentient mist. And as the Lengites drew back toward the east- and north-facing tunnels, so the mist began to thicken or to be sucked in toward a focal point, to form -
The shape of Nyarlathotep!
Tal
l and slim, clad in bright cloth of gold and crowned with a luminous pschent, the human-seeming figure became more solid as the mist merged into it. He was (or appeared to be) a man with the proud face of a young Pharaoh of ancient Khem — but his eyes were those of a Dark God, full of a languid, mercilessly mordant humour.
'So, questers,' he stepped forward a pace or two, causing Gudge himself to draw back in wobbly alarm, 'you are not impressed And he smiled a very awful smile. 'But you soon will be, believe me.'
For once Eldin was lost for words. Head level with the floor of that central cavern, where the crosses were roped with their tops projecting, he tried to speak but the words stuck in his throat. For there was that about the sinister newcomer, quite apart from his method of arrival, which was infinitely more frightening than Gudge and his horned ones could ever be. It was an alien something which Eldin didn't quite know how to handle.
Hero, who hadn't done so much shouting and whose spit was still comparatively fresh, stepped into the breach:
'Nyarlathotep, who or whatever you are, I don't know why you're so interested in us, but you'll get nothing Out of us while we're hanging here. Have us hauled up and cut down from these crosses, and then we'll consider chatting to —'
'Be quiet!' the Pharaoh-figure hissed, his lacquered eyebrows arching in a scowl. Gudge and his pirates drew back farther yet, and now Nyarlathotep approached to the very rim of the pit, from where he glared across at the two helpless dreamers. 'You dare to attempt to bargain with me? I am the very mind of Cthulhu! I carry the seething thoughts of Yogg-Sothoth! I speak with the tongue of Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, and thus know all the secrets of the winds that howl between the worlds! I am Yibb-Tstll, Atlach-Nacha, - Tsathoggua the toad-thing, Nyogtha and Shudde-M'ell! My mind is Their mind, acrawl with Their thoughts. I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!'
