Alexandru looked at Bill with watery blue eyes.
"At least we thought it was destroyed. Now I am not so sure."
"How was it destroyed?"
"A red-headed stranger came and slew it with a magic sword—"
…a magic sword…
"—then he limped off with a Jewish woman from Bucharest and was never seen again. I wonder whatever happened to him."
"He's old and gray like you now," Bill said, wondering what Glaeken had looked like in his prime. He must have been magnificent. "And he and the woman are still together."
Alexandru nodded and smiled. "I am glad. He was a brave man, but terrible to see when he was angry."
With the aid of Alexandru's directions, Glaeken's notes, and a flashlight, Bill led Nick down through the utter blackness of the subcellar to the lower segment of the tower. A narrow stairway wound down to the base where an iron ring was set in the stone block. Bill pulled. Part of the wall separated from the rest and swung inward. Light flooded the base of the keep's tower. Bill wondered when was the last time sunlight had shown on these stones.
"All right, Nick," he said, leading him outside. "Do your thing. Where are they?"
Nick stood blinking in the light. Thin, and paler than ever, he didn't look well. And he'd crawled back into himself.
Bill scanned the ground, looking for the shards Nick had said he'd seen. It was like river-bottom here, fist-sized stones jumbling down a gentle slope to a sluggish stream. Bill looked to his right up at the mountains soaring skyward behind the keep. This gorge was probably all water in early spring when the snows melted. Half a century had passed since the sword blade had shattered here. How could anything be left? How could they hope to find the remnants even if any still existed?
"Well, Nick?" he said. "Where are they?"
Nick said nothing, only stared ahead.
Desperate, Bill knelt and picked among the stones and gravel. This was impossible. He'd never find anything this way.
He straightened up and brushed off his hands. It had been earlier, in the dark, when Nick had said he'd seen the pieces, glowing "with bright blue fire."
Maybe he could only see them at night.
"Damn!"
He'd risked their lives rushing to get here so he could get back to Ploiesti as soon as possible so they could start their homeward journey in the light. Now he was going to have to wait until dark.
He turned and aimed a kick at the tower's granite-block hem. The keep, a dark, brooding, lithic presence looming over him, took no notice.
Bill led Nick back inside the tower to a gloom as deep and dark as his spirits. The delay meant it would be Wednesday before he got back to Carol. He wondered how she was doing, and if she'd heard from Hank?
Where had he run off to, anyway?
The Movie Channel
Joe Bob Briggs' Drive-In Movie—A Special All-Day Edition.
Eaten Alive (1976) New World
Day Of The Nightmare (1965) Herts-Lion
Nightwing (1979) Columbia
Raw Meat (1972) AIP
The Devils of Darkness (1965) Twentieth Century Fox
Tentacles (1977) AIP
Phase IV (1974) Paramount
It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) United Artists
They Came From Beyond Space (1967) Amicus
The Last Days Of Planet Earth (1974) Toho
The Flesh Eaters (1964) CDA
They Came From Within (1975) Trans America
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) Lippert/Twentieth Century Fox
THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE
Hank wasn't sure if he was awake or dreaming. He seemed to be awake. He was aware of noises around him, of a stale, sour odor, of growing light beyond his eyelids, but he could not get those eyelids to move. And he could feel nothing. For all he knew, he no longer had a body. Where was he? What—?
And then he remembered. The millipedes…their queen…a scream bubbled up in his throat but died stillborn. How can you scream when you can't open your mouth?
No. That had been a dream. It had all been a dream—the holes, the flying horrors, storing up the food, deserted by Carol, the rest stop, the trooper, the gun, the bullet, the millipedes—a long, horrible nightmare. But finally it was at an end. He was waking up now.
If he could just open his eyes he'd see the familiar cracks in the ceiling of their bedroom. And then he'd be free of the nightmare. He'd be able to move then, to reach out an arm and touch Carol.
The eyes. They were the key. He concentrated on the lids, focusing all his will, all his energy into them. And slowly they began to move. He didn't feel the motion but he saw a knife-slit streak of light open across his eyes, pale light, like the glow on the horizon at the approach of dawn.
Encouraged, he doubled his efforts. Light widened around the horizon as the edges of his lids stretched the gummy substance that bound them, then burst through as they broke apart. Not the blaze of the rising sun, but a wan, diffuse sort of light. He forced his lids to separate further and the light began to take form through the narrow opening, breaking down into shapes and color. Vague shapes. A paucity of color. Mostly grays. His pupils constricted, bringing the images into sharper focus.
He was looking down along a body. His own body, lying in bed, naked atop the sheets. Hazy, but he knew his own body. Thank God, it had all been a dream. He tried to turn his head to the left, toward the light, but it wouldn't move. Why couldn't he move? He was awake now. He should be able to move. He slid his eyeballs leftward. The bedroom window was over there somewhere. If he could just—
Wait…the walls—rounded. The ceiling—convex. Concrete. Concrete everywhere. And the light. It came from above. He forced his eyelids open another millimeter. No window—the light was coming through a grate in the concrete ceiling.
The stillborn scream from a moment ago came alive again and rammed up against his throat, pounding at his larynx, crying to be free.
This wasn't the bedroom. It was the pipe—the drainage pipe! It hadn't been a dream. It was real. Real!
Hank fought the panic, beat it down, and tried to think. He was still alive. He had to remember that. He was still alive and it was daytime. The things from the holes were quiet in the daylight hours. They hid from the light. He had to think, had to plan. He'd always been good at planning.
He shifted his eyes down to his body. His vision was clearer now. He saw the gentle tidal rise and fall of his sparsely haired chest, and further down, on his belly, he spotted the bloody wound where the queen millipede had spiked him and injected him with her poison. The neurotoxin was still working, obviously, paralyzing his voluntary muscles while it let his heart and lungs go on moving. But it didn't have complete control of him. He'd managed to open his eyes, hadn't he? He could move his eyeballs, couldn't he? What else could he move?
He pulled his gaze away from his abdominal wound and searched for his hands. They lay flopped out on either side, palms up. He checked out his lower limbs. They were intact, slightly spread with the toes angled outward. He could have been a sun bather. His body was the picture of relaxation…the relaxation of complete paralysis. He returned his gaze to his arm and followed it down to the hand. If he could move a finger—
And then he noticed the webbing. It was all around him, running in all directions, crisscrossed like gauze. It curved away from each arm and leg like heavy-duty spiderweb and ran out to the wall of the drain pipe where it melted into a glob of some sticky looking gelatin smeared on the concrete. He looked down as much as his slit perspective would permit and realized that he wasn't lying in the pipe, he was suspended in it. From the horizontal lie of his body he guessed that he was resting on a hammock of web across the diameter of the pipe.