Stroud thought about this and recalled the demon's saying that it was legion, that it was everyman. The similarities were eerie, save for the voice. The voice that had spoken through Weitzel rattled demonic; the voice in the skull sounded desperate and terribly sad.
"I am you," said the voice.
Stroud shook his head in confusion. It was the sort of thing his grandfather's ghost might say, but it wasn't his grandfather's voice. "I don't understand."
"I am Esruad."
"The Etruscan?"
"Follow my dictates."
Stroud felt somehow connected to the spirit of the crystal, and that it was no accident that Mamdoud was moved to get the crystal into Stroud's possession; in fact, Stroud wondered if his having gone to Egypt in the first place hadn't been somehow "preordained" by Esruad, who, in the netherworld of the spirit, had known that the ancient ship would be unearthed long before Stroud or the others knew.
"You are to take me with you, into the pit," said the shining, silvery crystal skull in the half-light of the candle. "You must do it."
Stroud wondered how. How were they possibly going to get past the army of guards without themselves becoming victims? He wondered if he should reenter alone with the skull, somehow holding off the zombies.
"They will part for you, Stroud, so long as I am in your possession." It read his mind, his thoughts. For a moment, he wondered if this was not all a trick of the satanic power menacing the city. He recalled how Weitzel's body had been used in an attempt to kill him, recalled the claw hammer that had come down at his own skull, recalled the attack on him, Kendra and Nathan.
"Trust me, Stroud, as I must trust you."
"How will we destroy Ubbrroxx?"
"Ubbrroxx must choke on the crystal."
"Down its throat? But what will happen to you?"
"I will only rest when it is done. I and the 500,000 other souls trapped in this crystal."
"Five hundred thousand?"
"Our souls give the crystal its life and energy."
Stroud marveled at the revelation. "You ... you are the ones who sacrificed the others to Ubbrroxx?"
"To our eternal shame and damnation, yes."
Stroud was finally beginning to understand the Etruscan seer in the crystal.
Stroud rejoined the others to find Kendra on the telephone, with someone from the hospital, it seemed. They were still searching for and talking about a medical cure, now something to do with brain chemistry. Stroud went to Wiz and Leonard, cradling the crystal skull in the crook of his arm. The other two men stared at it, seeing the silver shimmer of lights that seemed to race through it like the electrical synapses in the human brain. It unnerved the two archeologists while at the same time fascinated them.
"I need to know all that you have on this man Esruad, Wisnewski," he told them.
"I'll make it available to you--"
"At once."
"--at once, yes."
"What about the skull, Dr. Stroud? What does it mean?" asked Leonard.
"That's what I've been trying to learn. It could prove to be our most powerful weapon, or our downfall."
Kendra hung up the phone and said, "What's left of my team at the hospital has discovered on autopsy that the levels of serotonin in the brains of the zombies is at extreme levels; that this thing acts on the human mind through a narcotic effect much stronger than anything we've ever seen. We have drugs that can counterattack the serotonin levels, but it's dicey staging a chemical war inside a man's head. The 'cure' could be as dangerous as the disease."
"Put together whatever you can, Dr. Cline," Stroud told her. "We're going to need all the weaponry at our disposal when we reenter the pit."
"Not me," said Leonard. "I'm not going back down there. If you fools--"
"Suit yourself," said Stroud. "I've got some research to do." He then joined Wisnewski, who led him to the books and pamphlets he wished to see.
There Stroud hunched over the material, with the skull beside him as if reading along with him, the eyes sparkling below the light. Wiz thought he saw movement inside the crystal, forms and shapes, but perhaps it was the light as it played over the thing.
"In an hour," Stroud informed Wiz, "we're all to meet and form a strategy against this thing. Tell the others. There's no more time to lose."
"Yes, of course, Dr. Stroud," said Wiz, closing the door on Stroud.
In Wisnewski's darkly furnished, book-lined office, Abe Stroud gathered the others around him and told them what he had learned from the crystal skull.
"The Etruscans could not destroy or even contain the evil. Their backs to the wall, as ours are now, they fed it instead, giving in to its demands, much as we are now."
"But we haven't given in to its demands!" shouted Wiz.
"No, you haven't, Dr. Wisnewski, nor did Dr. Leonard, but every man out there at the pit tonight has."
"But they're helpless to do otherwise," said Kendra. "They've been--their bodies have been invaded, taken control of by this thing."
"Every single one of them has the choice," he corrected her. "They may be unaware of the choice, or afraid to face it, but each one of those zombies out there can either die or serve this devil. That is the choice given them. But in serving, they must feed the unholy beast."
"You learned this from staring into that skull?" asked Leonard.
"The zombies will sacrifice the rest of us, just as you said, Dr. Leonard. The zombies are not the sacrificial lambs, we are--those left uninfluenced by the monster. It feeds on our pain, our fear, our being and our senses. It does not enjoy feeding on the emotionless automatons it has created of the others. They'd feel no terror, no suffering, as we who remain whole and intact do. The zombie herd is created to ensure that the demon gets its due, and according to the skull, it has raised the ante, as you've said, to five million souls."
"How can you be sure of all this?" asked Kendra, coming toward him to resolutely stand before him. "Suppose it's a trick ... this ... this skull spirit. Suppose it was sent here by the thing in the pit?"
"It is bound up with the demon, yes. It holds the lost souls of those who committed the others to the demon's tortures so many hundreds of years ago, and those trapped souls in the skull belong to the men, women and children who sacrificed their brothers, sisters, mothers to the creature in Etruscan times. The principal voice in the skull was that of this man named Esruad."
"The soothsayer?" asked Wiz. "The one much mentioned in the records?"
"It was no coincidence that we found his document in the ship," added Stroud, pacing now. "The creature has confused me with Esruad on more than one occasion." Stroud stopped before the skull, his hand lightly moving over the object as he said, "Esruad was a magician of sorts and a physician in his day. He dabbled in what we might call alchemy and witchcraft. In fact, it was he who discovered a method of fashioning pure crystal into skull molds, a technique which is unknown and considered impossible today. He molded the skulls to house the souls of men like himself for a dual purpose."
Wiz, Leonard and Kendra were now held in rapt attention, as he continued. "One, the skull acts as a receptacle for the souls of men filled with greater remorse than can be contained anywhere else in the universe. Two, the skull acts as a kind of beacon or transmitter through history."
Wiz took a deep breath and came around to Stroud, saying, "My impression of Esruad was that he was some sort of Rasputin, or Merlin--"
"He sacrificed many lives to learn of the mysteries of the universe," said Stroud, "but this one mystery was more horrible than he had begun to suspect until it was too late. He was quite likely the first surgeon, the first man to cut into a cadaver to unravel the mysteries of the human body. He also dabbled in the occult, and it led to Ubbrroxx."