The stench of death was thick. How many cadavers were crushed and decaying inside all these wrecks was something Remo didn’t want to think about. “This one is still alive,” Chiun remarked.
“But he doesn’t smell any better,” Remo noted. “Who’re you?”
The grimy young man was sitting on the ancient rock perimeter wall. He was filthy, and his head was a mass of blackening scabrous tissue. His personality was as pleasant as his physical presence. “I ask the questions around here. Who are you jokers?”
Remo shrugged. “Just a couple of jokers.”
“You pulled a neat little trick coming ashore. Nobody’s made landfall like that before.”
“Who’s that?” Remo nodded at the naked girl lying nearby, head pillowed on one extended arm. She, too, had a crusted head wound.
“I told you. You don’t ask questions. I ask the questions. For your information, that’s my girlfriend, Sandy. She’s the hottest babe on the island and she’s mine. You don’t touch.”
“We do not practice necrophilia,” Chiun sniffed.
The young man stared at the little old Korean. “Huh?”
“We don’t do it with dead people,” Remo said. “Your girlfriend bought the farm a few minutes ago.”
The young man stood up, squinted at them, then put his hand on the girl’s neck. He gave her a shake, then felt for a pulse.
“Huh. How’d you know?”
“The smell,” Remo said. “She’s already starting to decay.”
‘Yeah. Well, I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did. You guys want to see the city?”
Remo didn’t know what it was specifically, but the young man repulsed him. Everything about the man was disgusting. His wound, his filth, his nakedness, but mostly his mental state. This man was broken. He was something so devoid of humanity, he couldn’t even be said to be evil.
They followed him into the ruined city.
“He who we shall not name has taken him as a servant,” Chiun observed, speaking too quietly for their guide to hear.
Remo was horrified. “Could he make me into something like that?” The young man stopped to look at them, trying to understand their words. His eyes were dull.
And the rock was dull, crusted with a patina of algae desiccated during the days since it had emerged from the ocean. The stones piled upon one another to make the shapes of walls and buildings. Remo felt his mind recoiling from the familiarity of the shapes. The city repulsed him just as the loathsome young man repulsed him.
More abhorrent was the familiar shape of the three-sided pyramid, which was resolving itself out of the gray surroundings of the island. Remo had seen the pyramid before, as he swam down into it years ago to introduce himself to Sa Mangsang. That was during his Rite of Attainment, when he set about performing the series of tasks that made up the ritual that made him a Master of Sinanju.
He hadn’t felt like a Master of anything when he encountered Sa Mangsang. He felt afraid. And he felt afraid now.
Chiun was quiet. Remo looked at him, and it occurred to him that Chiun had seen the thing for himself when he, too, went through his Rite of Attainment. That was decades and decades ago.
“The pyramid has opened,” Remo noted.
The young man stopped short and whirled on the Masters. “How do you know that?”
“We’ve been here before.”
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“Cleaning up,” Remo said. “We’re garbage collectors. This place is a mess.”
The dam seemed to burst inside the young man. He charged Remo, screeching.
Remo honestly didn’t want to lay his hands on that unclean flesh. He stepped back, allowed the man to charge by him, then Remo snagged him with a single expensive Italian shoe. The young man swallowed his anger and flew into the solid stone wall of a nearby structure. The thick crust of scabrous tissue didn’t cushion the impact enough to save Henry Lagrasse. He rolled on his back and his eyes went blank, his feet kicking at the air. They left him, still kicking.
Remo and Chiun stopped at the gap in the wall. Before them, the ground descended into a courtyard that covered thousands of acres, and in every direction the paved floor was covered in the sucked bones of human beings.
The base was stone and raised above the courtyard, but the skewed angles of the pyramid walls were made to appear even more asynchronous by their partially opened state. They had opened enough to expose the interior—but from where they stood, they saw nothing.
“I go alone,” Remo declared.
“You certainly shall not.”
There was no arguing with that. They went together. They descended into the courtyard and felt themselves engulfed by the putrid air, filled with the decomposition of countless humans.
They mounted the hill of human bones, compacted by the marching feet of even more victims.
At the top of the hill they stood on the lip of the pyramid and regarded the great bulk of the Dream Thing.
Remo wasn’t a man who frightened easily, but Sa Mangsang terrified him, and the Octopus Squid was indeed far more huge, than the monster Remo had faced years ago. Its flabby body, bulbous like an octopus but also winged like the mantle of a squid, pulsated atop a submerged platform in the green, slime-filled lake. Its twin, oily eyes glistened on either side of the mantle, and the huge beak snapped at them.
At their appearance, the great beast Sa Mangsang bunched itself out of the water, elevating its face over the Masters of Sinanju. It reproached them with a baleful look, then the beak fell open and a long hiss emerged. A single tentacle reached out of the water.
Remo knew what it was saying.
Ah, you have arrived at last!
The words manifested themselves in his head. Chiun heard them, too.
You have much to account for, Masters of Sinanju.
The great tentacle slapped at the surface of the water, and Sa Mangsang regarded them balefully. It shifted its great torso—reminding Remo of seeing a plastic sack full of semisolid filth being moved around. Underneath its great bulk was a crushed and mangled starfish—Sa Mangsang’s seat cushion, as large as an aircraft. The thing had two of its five vast arms remaining, until Sa Mangsang wrapped a tentacle around one of them and dragged it off the starfish body. Black liquid spurted from the wound and the starfish trembled.
The starfish arm went into Sa Mangsang’s beak, and it crunched the arm. Its body trembled, as well, as if the agony of its victim instilled a new trickle of vitality.
Why have you broken your pact, Master of Sinanju?
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Remo answered. He felt terror bubbling in his very core, but the anger was bigger, and the anger glowed hot and orange.
The answer didn’t satisfy Sa Mangsang. It dipped into the waters again with one tentacle after another, scooping up human beings—limp, but alive. Sa Mangsang snapped their heads off with its beak and gagged on the taste, but swallowed them.
He’s starving, Remo thought. He’s growing weak from lack of human sustenance.
“Take me!” It was the young man who had escorted them into the city. He was staggering into the courtyard, blinded by his head wound, but he managed to blunder up the ramp of bones and down again into the pyramid, where he trembled into the steep-sided lake. He splashed into the thick water and was instantly snatched up by a monstrous tentacle. Sa Mangsang snapped off Henry Lagrasse’s head, sucked the sour juice from his brain and let the cadaver tumble into the water again carelessly.
Master of Sinanju, send me that sweet sustenance.
Remo looked at Chiun and smiled a shallow smile. Chiun appraised Remo emotionlessly.
“He means me,” Chiun stated.
“I know. He can go hungry.”
I require nourishment for my brain—it does not keep pace with this body.