High up in the curved wall, one such sat with its shrivelled legs dangling over the rim of a magmass hole. The thing was mummified, where dripstone had fused its legs to the wall and commenced covering them with gleaming calcium. An eyeless skull, hideously misshapen, leaned out. Frozen in death, its gaping jaws were wolfish, toothed like a carnivore. The creature seemed to leer at Harry with a permanent, imperishable malignancy. He wasn't much worried; it had leered like that for a long, long time. Vampire killer! it suddenly accused.
Harry shrugged. 'I can't deny it. But on that score, it seems you at least have no worries. Nor any of you here.'
Now other voices joined the first: Impudent pup! And: This is a private place of the Wamphyri — begone! And: Who are you, to disturb our sleep of centuries?
'Sorry,' Harry shrugged, 'but I'm not dressed for conversation — polite or otherwise. But I'd better inform you: I know that to a man you're all exiles. You may have been high and mighty Wamphyri in your own world, but here you're just crumbling old dead things! That's how it goes. Now me, I won't hold your past against you, as long as you don't hold mine against me.'
After a moment of blank astonishment: You dare — !? they cried in one voice.
'Now it's cold in here,' Harry continued unperturbed. 'So I'm going to pick up a change of clothing. If by the time I return you're feeling more sociable, we can start over and no hard feelings. If not — ' again his shrug. 'It's your loss, as the teeming dead would doubtless testify — if they'd waste their time talking to such as you!'
Before they could answer he took up his torch and flippers, slipped back into the water. It was icy cold but it would only be for a moment. He let the river bob him downstream to a safe distance, then conjured a slightly warped door and floated through it. He fixed the location firmly in his mind, went back to the copse and his kit-bag.
There he took a long deep swig from a hip flask of brandy, tossed the flask away. He tied a fifty-foot length of nylon cord to the neck of the waterproof bag, went back to the midnight river and exited the Mobius Continuum into the water at the required location. As the kit-bag sank he swam furiously for the cave of the sphere. Climbing back onto the ledge, he hauled in the kit-bag and quickly changed into warm clothes. The bag also contained a heavy, special-issue machine-gun, which he now checked against the possibility of damp or damage. Everything seemed OK.
Ahhh — ! He was aware of a concerted mental sighing as he stood on the ledge and paused to wonder if he'd forgotten anything. He comes and goes like a ghost! He has a deal of magic!
Harry smiled. 'Oh, I've got some magic, all right,' he agreed. 'But as for being a ghost… I'm flesh and blood, and it's you fellows who — '
Harry! said a different voice, a very frightened, very primitive, guttural, almost animal voice in his mind. Be careful, Harry Keogh. It's dangerous to speak to the Wamphyri as you have spoken to them!
Harry found the speaker — a squat, dwarfish aboriginal creature — crouched in a cramped cavity apart from the others. A stalagmitic sheath had almost completely enveloped him, so that it seemed to Harry he conversed with what was very nearly a stone statue.
'You're not Wamphyri?' he said.
Hah! The others were part amused, part outraged. Him — that! — Wamphyri? A trog, you fool!
Trog?' Harry glanced from the trog to the others and back. 'Oh, yes, I remember! I was told I might find a trog or two here. Travellers, too, perhaps?'
Travellers, too, Harry, said yet another voice, much more human. But it sounded very distant, that voice, very faint and fading. Alas, we don't have the same durability as trogs and Wamphyri. I'm afraid we're little more than memories now.
'So, several sorts of people from the world beyond the Gate,' Harry mused. 'And none of you willing to help me, eh?' He adjusted his goggles, tightened the strap of his weapon across his shoulder. 'What, dead these thousands — or at least many hundreds — of years, you trogs and Travellers, and still the Wamphyri oppress you? I'd hoped to ask your advice.'
He looked up, gazed at the glaring white surface of the sphere. If he reached up a hand he could touch it.
Only ask it! Several Traveller voices spoke up. In our time we fought the Wamphyri. We staked them through their black hearts and burned them. But when they came to power, this is how they avenged themselves. Still, we have no regrets. So speak to us, Harry. We were not primitive, fearful trogs but men!
There was pride in their fading voices — then sudden panic as Harry stood on his toes, stretched a straining hand toward the surface of the glaring sphere where its huge globe bulged downward from the ceiling. HARRY — DON'T!
Too late — his hand had touched the sphere, broken the surface of its skin. He tried to snatch the hand back, which was about as much use as asking a hurled stone not to return to earth.
Harry heard the grim laughter of the Wamphyri, the groans of trogs and Travellers alike — felt himself grasped, drawn up, passed into the sphere. And in a moment the cave and gurgling river had disappeared from sight, and he floated up, up, weightless as a feather in a beam of white light, toward a different place -
— A different world!
21. The Dweller — The Problem at Perchorsk — In the Garden
Perhaps inspired by the reaction of the sphere-cave's ossified inhabitants, Harry's first reflex was to panic. Instinctively, he came close to conjuring — almost attempted to fashion — a Mobius door, and only just retreated from that action in time to avert a disaster. God alone knew where, or how, he would end up if he tried to use Mobius mathematics here, inside the grey hole!
And so he floated, drawn irresistibly upward — or passed — through the Gate; and almost before he knew it…
… His resurgence was almost as big a shock as his entry: he passed through the skin of the sphere, then slid down its curve crashingly onto a jumble of stony debris between the sphere and the crater wall. For indeed he saw that the sphere was inside a crater, and directly overhead — a second sphere!
So that now Harry could see almost all of the picture. The jigsaw was very nearly complete. The Gate he had just traversed was the original. The one above, seated in the mouth of the crater, had appeared here simultaneous with the creation of its twin — its other 'end' — in Perchorsk. Perhaps the presence of the first had somehow influenced the location of the second, Harry couldn't say. Maybe Mobius would know.
Except -
If that decapitated corpse in the cave had come through comparatively recently, and also the walkie-talkie… were the Wamphyri now using the original sphere as a dumping site? And why dump a radio? But one thing was certain: they had passed through. They had entered the sphere — this sphere — from this side. And if they had found their way down here, then he could make his way up. No sooner had the thought occurred than he saw the magmass wormholes running through the rock. They were everywhere, cutting smoothly through the solid rock at all angles.
Under his duffle-coat, Harry still had his torch clipped to his belt. He took the torch out, chose a horizontal shaft and wriggled in. In a little while the hole turned to the right, then bent sharply into a descent. Harry abandoned it, came out backwards. Other holes were no better. But then, at his fifth attempt…
… He found a hole which climbed gently, not so steeply as to cause him to slide back. In a little while it, too, bent to one side, the left, following which it rose marginally more steeply. Then it levelled out and swung right. But beyond the level bend it shot almost vertically upward. Harry stood up, switched off his torch. After the claustrophobia of the hole this was a little better; for now it was as though he stood at the bottom of a shallow well. Up there, strange constellations of stars glittered brightly in a black, jewelled sky. He reached up a hand… the rim of the hole was at least twenty-four inches beyond his grasp.