"No."
"Then we must go down," the other said. Somehow he sounded both pleased and disturbed-perhaps faintly jealous.
"Not without light."
The other immediately began to protest. "But a torch will simply muddy the air, which is stale enough. Besides, you will hear better in the dark." He continued for awhile in this vein.
Morlock said nothing. After the other had completed his cycle of protests and repeated a few of them he finally fell silent, expecting a rebuttal that never came. Morlock waited. Eventually the other went and fetched a lit lamp from his dwelling area.
The light revealed that the pit was about forty feet across. Broad stone steps spiralled downward along the wall of the pit. Sulkily the two-voiced, shadow-faced man handed Morlock the lamp and led him downward.
If nothing else, the lamplight helped Morlock avoid a kind of fungus that sprouted all along the dank stone wall. The fungus grew a cap, like a mushroom or a toadstool, but each cap had as many as seven stalks underneath it, giving them a sinister spiderish look. Each cap, too, had a slash across it like a lipless mouth, and some of these emitted chirping cries of protest as the circle of lamplight passed over them.
At the bottom of the pit was a rough stone floor at a fairly steep slope. The lower part of the slope was hidden by a darkness that the light of the lamp did not dispel. In the rough stone of the floor was a smooth hollow in the shape of a man lying prone. The head of the shape was eclipsed by the tidepool of darkness at the lowest part of the pit.
Morlock knelt and traced the unclear outlines of the shape. His maker's instincts told him that it had not been made, but worn into stone by long use, like cart tracks in the cobblestones of a busy street. He wondered how many times someone had lain there to wear away that template form, how many years, how many someones it had taken to make that shape.
Looking up, he caught the eye of the other, who was watching him eagerly. "Do you hear it now?" the other asked.
Morlock rose to his feet and concentrated. "I hear a sort of murmuring. I can make no sense of it."
The other sighed. "I first heard that voice …well, some years ago, I suppose. Difficult to say how many …I was travelling south to …to look for treasure in the mountains," he said, with a sudden blurt of boyish enthusiasm. "I hardly knew what real treasure awaited me," he said more slowly.
Morlock refrained from comment.
"I camped in the cave at the top of the hill-others had been there before me. I explored the passage, thinking the dwarves might have made it when they ruled these lands. It was there that I first heard the voice in the darkness. It guided me down the stairs and spoke to me as I sat here. Finally …after a while …"
"You put your face in it," Morlock said flatly, since the other seemed to be unable to come to the point.
"I listened to it," the other said defensively. "The pattern"-he gestured at the smooth form at Morlock's feet-"was here even then. Many people have sought wisdom here."
"Where have they gone, I wonder?" Morlock asked dryly.
"Not everyone has the passion for …for true knowledge," the listener said complacently. "It"-he gestured at the pool of shadow-"tells me I have lasted longer than many listeners."
"Impressive," Morlock acknowledged.
"After a while …I forget how long it was …it, the voice, it suggested that it leave a part of itself inside me, so that I could hear it better. I resisted for a long time, but …I finally agreed to let it …do it. There was just a little darkness at first; you hardly noticed it. And I did hear the voice better …much more clearly. I didn't realize the darkness would spread…."
Morlock waited for him to continue, but he seemed to be finished.
"What does the darkness tell you?" Morlock asked.
The listener fidgeted uneasily. "It told me you were coming," he said after a lengthy silence. "But usually it tells me …secrets. Ways of looking at …at things."
"Hm." Morlock wondered if the listener was hiding his hard-won secrets or hiding, even from himself, that they didn't exist.
"After all," the listener said in a rush of enthusiasm, "what you see is simply a vein or artery in a vast network of darkness that stretches far beyond the mountains and down into the heart of the earth. It is older than time and knows more."
Morlock doubted all this, although he didn't say so. He was beginning to have more definite, more local ideas about this darkness. He asked, "Why do you think the darkness tells you its secrets?"
The listener looked pleased but confused, as if the question had never occurred to him before. "Well …I'm not sure …Perhaps it was lonely."
The ringing naivete of this suggestion struck Morlock unpleasantly. He glanced at the mouth of darkness open in the lowest corner of the room. Lonely? Hungry was nearer the mark, he guessed.
"I can't breathe here," Morlock said then, and turned away to walk up the winding stairs. After a moment's hesitation the listener followed him upward.
When they had returned to the listener's squalid living quarters, Morlock put down the lamp and said, "I want to examine the darkness on your face. Sit down."
The listener obeyed him, a look of alarm on his visible features. Tentatively, Morlock put the fingers of his right hand into the darkness on the listener's face. The darkness formed no barrier; it was less substantial than fog. Almost immediately Morlock's fingers touched the surface of the listener's cheek. There were long gouges in the otherwise unlined skin of the listener's face.
"You have clawed at the darkness," Morlock observed.
The listener nodded, a little guiltily. "I was …frustrated. Frightened. I didn't think it would spread. I didn't know what would happen if it would spread further …I still don't. Did I hurt myself?"
The wounds felt swollen and hot to Morlock's touch. "Can't you tell?" he asked.
The listener shrugged. "It is …a little numb, under the darkness. I can't move that side of my face very well, either."
"Can you see from your left eye?"
"Sometimes," the listener replied truculently, and Morlock knew he was lying.
Morlock withdrew his hand and looked at his fingertips. No darkness adhered to them; he would have been surprised if it had. He rubbed his two sets of fingertips against each other meditatively, checking for any numbness. There was none. There had been almost no sensation at all as his fingers had entered the darkness, only a kind of feeling that was hard to define, because it was not felt by the fingers at all. Few could define that feeling or recognize what it implied, but Morlock was one of them.
"Do you know what tal is?" he asked.
"No," the listener replied.
Morlock nodded, unsurprised. "It is a medium," he explained, "nonphysical in nature, but capable of physical effects. It is the means by which consciousness works its will through the body. All conscious beings possess tal; some, like elementals, have no physical bodies at all, only tal-schemata which respond to the various elements."
"Ah," said the listener vaguely, clearly considering the point irrelevant.
"The darkness on your face is tal," Morlock explained. "But it is not your own, at least not originally. It is a sort of colony from an alien awareness, and it serves the ends of that awareness."
"How?" the listener demanded. His visible features displayed both alarm and skepticism.
Morlock had some ideas on that subject, but he did not intend to discuss them. Anything he told the listener he would also tell the darkness. "That is not germane. If you want the darkness removed from your face, I will undertake to do it."
The listener looked both hopeful and anxious. "Would you …If you could leave part of it? Say, under the ear, or …or even on the temple-"
"I am not a barber," Morlock interrupted sharply. "Nor do I undertake half-works or not-quite-accomplishments. I do a thing or I don't. Choose."
The choice was clearly far from easy. The struggle on the listener's visible features lasted for some time. But finally he muttered in the hesitant "second" voice, "Yes. Remove it."