“Bob, according to the book, it’s too late!”
“We gotta do something!” Howard rushed forward toward Glory.
Just then, the two odd men dematerialized and reappeared standing over Glory. Howard was hardly halfway there.
“Tekeli-li!” said the larger shadow.
A puzzled expression crossed Howard’s face. He hesitated momentarily.
“Tekeli-li!” said the other shadow.
“Oh, my God!” cried Lovecraft. “It’s true. It’s true!”
“Tekeli-li!” the odd men said in unison, and they leaped forward.
No human power could have stopped them, but as they attacked, and Lovecraft’s will melted before them, some primitive fury awoke in Howard. His vision went red, and a battle madness came over him, leaving him unrestrained as only those without hope can be. He met the odd men’s onslaught head-on, grabbing their shadowy limbs with all his animal strength, ripping at their torsos, digging rigid fingers into their strange papery flesh.
Howard’s grip held firm in one odd man, but the other literally tore away from him, leaving pieces of himself dangling in Howard’s clenched fist. The nearness of death woke a frenzy in him, and Howard fought like a mortally wounded beast. He had no illusion of winning the fight, but intended only to expend all his fury and hatred-everything hateful he had ever felt for anyone, all the anger and resentment toward the world he had lived with until now-he extinguished on the odd man.
There was little resistance. The odd man’s body seemed to absorb all the physical and emotional intensity Howard could produce; it grew thick and heavy, as if it were waterlogged, and then it began to press upon Howard from every direction though it engaged him from the front. Howard struggled with a new fury, but felt his strength beginning to flag. It could not last much longer.
Lovecraft was pressed against a wall of stone by the other odd man’s unnatural weight. He felt as if the darkness itself were crushing the breath from his lungs; his vision began to dim. With his last remaining energy and will, he reached into his trouser pocket and, producing his flint dagger, brought it up and around with all his might into the odd man’s left eye. Lovecraft collapsed, fully expecting, even in his diminished state, that he was dead, but then, unexpectedly, there came a peculiar sound from above him. The pressure on his chest and lungs relented, and Lovecraft opened his eyes to see the odd man rearing back, clutching at the mangled shadows where once his eye had been. Part of his face seemed to have become smoke, and it was curling away, leaving an eerie, flat black convolution of tissue where the eye socket should have been. Lovecraft quickly grabbed a stone and smashed it into the odd man’s head. When the form fell, he lifted another, larger stone and bashed its skull until it did not move again.
Howard concluded his fierce wrestling match by using the last iota of his brute strength to lift his odd man off the ground. He held him crushed to his chest in a bear hug, and when he felt something give in the shadow’s torso, he quickly stepped back, and like a weight lifter doing a clean and jerk, he hoisted the odd man up to shoulder level and shoved upward with all his might, impaling him on a low-hanging stalactite. He heard the sickening sound of crunching gristle, but what truly disturbed Howard was the fact that he could feel the vibration of the rock grinding through the odd man’s body. He let go and stepped aside, watching the odd man give a few weak twitches before he hung limp and his deadweight pulled him down to the ground, leaving the stalactite dripping his dark blood.
Lovecraft could not help but queasily watch the driblets of blood splash onto the shadowy form. Howard quickly lifted another large rock and brought it down solidly on the skull of the shadowy man. The dull explosive thud startled Lovecraft, bringing him out of his distraction.
Now the men turned their attention to the portal, which was more than half-open. Something was emerging from the other side, something oddly indistinct like the faces of the odd men. To Lovecraft, the thing had the appearance of a giant tentacle, like the monstrous appendage of a prehistoric sea creature oozing primordial slime. To Howard the thing was a gigantic black serpent with glistening scales. Both of them saw it slithering toward Glory’s still form.
“Glory! Glory!” Desperately, they called out to her to awaken from her trance, but she could not hear them. They rushed to her and grabbed her from either side, pulling her from the dark serpentine thing, but she was frozen in place. Now the dark tentacle suddenly sprouted other, smaller appendages, and these coiled around the two men, entangling them before they could disengage. In moments, they were gasping, their breaths crushed from their lungs.
The giant tentacle touched Glory’s body and then, instead of encircling her, it began to envelop her like a fluid. Had it begun at her head, it might have appeared to be a black oil dripping down her body, but it started at the bottom and crept upward in a spiral, tendrils sprouting the way pseudopodia of water stream out of a droplet blown in a heavy wind.
In a few moments, Glory’s entire body had taken on the black sheen of the tentacle. To Howard, she had become a statue covered in gleaming, black serpent’s scales. To Lovecraft, she appeared to have become infinitely faceted like the sculpted compound eye of a gigantic insect. The surface moved and pulsed as, inside, Glory somehow began to struggle. As the men watched, helpless, Glory began to squirm and twist inside her black shell; they could not imagine what agony she must be enduring, but her openmouthed scream was clearly visible, though covered in the faceted stuff that killed all sound. Glory’s struggle became more and more violent, and then, quite suddenly, the texture and color of her covering. changed. The form inside-they could not believe it was Glory-spun at an incredible speed, and then, as if the covering were the final stages of a chrysalis, it exploded away_ and what remained of the tentacle drew back in a sudden twitch that was clearly pain.
Glory stood there, covered in a grayish, gelatinous slime. Her eyes opened, and she blinked, still stunned by what had just transpired.
“Glory!” called Howard. “Glory! Wake up!”
She turned toward his voice. Her expression changed into one of recognition and then, unexpectedly, she smiled. It was a smile so out of place that it somehow undid all the terror of the moment, and both Lovecraft and Howard felt themselves suddenly full of hope and energy and life. The pulse of the Artifact behind her seemed to grow dull.
“Now!” cried Lovecraft. “The Artifact! Place it in the other slot!” Glory looked back in confusion, and then, with a visible act of will, she thrust the Artifact into the rough-hewn slot and violently averted her eyes when it exploded with an entirely different sort of light.
The Artifact’s cold light and the light surrounding the portal seemed to come from inside the cavern, but this light, which was warm and full of a living energy, clearly came from outside. It was sunlight or somehow born of the sun-and it blazed in not from the slot, but through the strange Stone-Age technology that the old Hopi and Anasazi had rigged over the centuries. The containers of fluid on the wooden tripods were aligned so that when the Artifact’s cold glow reached them, a beam of blue light shot out into the darkness of the cavern. And then, as if pulled in by the blue beam, a blast of yellow white light returned like an echo from the sun. It was blinding in an entirely different way: where the Artifact’s light was intrusive, their bodies welcomed this light, wanted to open up to it as if they were flowers in a field. As the light leaped from tripod to tripod, amplified each time, it also brought a dull rushing sound with it. When the beam touched the Artifact, the slot turned black and the Artifact fell out, having changed from its cold form into something bright and golden.