Abe smelled smoke and saw that their protective wear was being seared by the heat, a thin smoke rising off them all. It threatened to burst the material into flame. The shield of safety around them seemed to be eroding, when suddenly the threat retreated and the air cooled.
"You like it coooooold?" came a voice that barreled down the cavern just before a rush of frigid air, followed by demonic laughter.
"Hold to the circle, all your hands on the crystal!" Stroud shouted, and the crystal turned warm and then hot beneath their touch until they could hold it no longer, and Stroud bent to place it at their feet. The circle crouched with him and withheld the freezing temperatures hurled at them, although their protective clothing was laden with ice.
"It's expending a great deal of energy over this game," said Stroud.
"So is our skull," said Wiz.
Then the brutally cold storm was suddenly lifted. There was not so much as a sensation it was ever there, save for the falling glasslike pieces of ice as their suits thawed. The skull, too, returned to normal.
"Uncanny," commented a shaken Leonard, "simply uncanny."
An unearthly, ungodly stench began to filter through the tunnels. It was so ghastly that they could even smell it through the protection of the oxygen masks they wore.
"What the hell is that?" asked Wiz.
Leonard was pointing a bony finger at the things that now suddenly appeared to block their way. Stroud saw what was to him a nightmare, the vision of several vampires that he had personally killed in Andover a year ago. Their bodies were fully intact, but they walked upright with the metal stakes he had driven into them. The sight unnerved Stroud as he watched the white maggots feeding on the wounds of the vampires who now opened their mouths wide, baring their fangs.
Leonard was seeing some other horror altogether, a creeping, spiderlike creation. Wiz shouted something about anthropomorphids--creatures with human limbs and organs jammed into their anatomy--while Kendra saw giant insects of the praying mantis variety. The creatures gained the distance between them, scattering Stroud and the others. Stroud shouted, "It's using our own worst nightmares against us! It's rummaging around in our heads for our worst fears!"
It seemed to be true, because now one of the awful vampires had turned into the kind of cannibal werewolf Stroud had once combated in the deep woods of Michigan. "Control your fears, people! Control your fears!"
The darts didn't have any effect on the monsters that pushed them back and back along the corridor, returning them to the hole that would send them once again below the ship to weaken the energy of the skull. Stroud could not believe the precision with which the evil Ubbrroxx re-created the fearsome creatures that had been stored in Stroud's mind, down to the sickening "O" pucker of the vampire wishing only to kiss him about the throat, and the slavering of the werewolf. All around him, Stroud heard the members of his party shouting in terror at their own fearsome visions.
Stroud suddenly reached for his weapon, firing the gas at the menacing monsters. They seemed impervious to it. "What do we do?" shouted Kendra, separated from Stroud by four or five feet. Wiz and Leonard, too, were shouting that their weapons were useless.
The skull levitated from Stroud's pouch, spraying the images of the monsters with a strange ray, creating holographic mists of them into which Stroud stabbed his hand. It went through the vampire image. The images continued to threaten, lunge and attack, but they were as harmless as celluloid. Stroud and the others laughed at the effect and their own fears as they now simply stepped through them.
"And it was going to devour us whole. Each of us!" Kendra was telling Leonard, explaining what her eyes told her was there.
Stroud gently caught the skull in his hands. He feared losing Esruad now; he feared having to sacrifice the skull and its potent contents to this demon. Suppose it gave the demon hyper-supernatural power, a kind of superconductivity in the underworld? Could the cure for Ubbrroxx be worse than the disease? Esruad's crystal-imprisoned spirit had said nothing about the chance possibility, yet it now struck Stroud like a hammerblow, and then the voice of Esruad came clearly rolling through the coils of Stroud's brain, as if brought by the flow of his blood. "I have not come this way to strengthen my enemy, but to destroy him."
"How? How can swallowing the power you have do anything but empower him with more strength?"
The other members of the hunting party turned to see to whom Stroud was speaking, and in the shadows, just beyond Stroud and the skull, was an enormous gargoyle like those seen in medieval texts. If not a gargoyle then a vulture with bat's eyes and snout, winged by virtue of a membrane of skin that stretched between talons, its body covered in fine, ratlike hair.
It lurched forward over the skull and Stroud, knocking Stroud into a reeling cartwheel as he tried to maintain control of the skull. But he lost his grip, and the skull floated to the ceiling and the gargoyle took flight, pursuing it, trying to take hold of it and race off with it. The skull moved about the darkness like a small UFO, dodging the gargoyle as the others helped Stroud to his feet. Kendra fired on the gargoyle, striking it with one of the darts, sending the thing into a spiral before it rammed into the side of the cavern, bursting into flame and screeching an unholy wail. In the glow of its burning, Ubbrroxx revealed his eyes amid the smoke, fixing the party in place and demanding they return the way they had come, leaving the skull behind. The eyes were spewing snakes.
It was a horrid sight and it made them back off, gasping, but when the smoke cleared they saw that the gargoyle's impact had opened a hole in the veneer of the wall, a hole that was marked by timbers. Stroud, the skull returned to his pack, went to the opening and fingered the rotted wood. "We've found it, the ship."
-16-
A strikingly warm, vivid, sun-bathed waking dream of heat and wind sweeping over a gleaming pearl amid a desert by the sea filtered through Stroud's mind. It was so powerful an image, so lovely by comparison to the dark hole below Manhattan, that Stroud found himself unable to resist it. It seemed amplified by his own desire to see more of it. He felt himself with a foot in two worlds, two times...
But the scene in his mind, playing like a flower over a silver sea, held him firm, a moth to its glow. He instinctively feared that it was a trick, a feint, but the subterfuge was brilliant in both light and fascination, for as the windswept desert cleared on the jewel, it became a city by the sea ... a long-ago place out of time, shimmering with a remarkable beauty and strength, enticing him closer and closer.
Yet he stood still, aware of the fact he was in the company of three others who were suddenly concerned for his well-being, three fellow travelers on another plane who were counting on his staying with them, remaining strong and vigilant, to protect them. He didn't feel either Wiz's or Kendra's hands on him, nor truly know that they helped him to a sitting position, for he was half a world away now, in another place, captive to the play in his mind ... No longer was he in a confined earthen tube below a great city with a demon anxious to tear out his throat; no longer was he the sword that swayed before the crusade he led here. At the moment, he was not even a weak shield for the others.
Part of him knew this, wished desperately to claw his way back, to not let himself slide down the belly of the beast within, and he mentally twisted back, a contortionist and a masochist, for fighting back only brought on the pain of horrid memories. Still, he fought, not now wanting to let down all his defenses, or to let Kendra and the others down. He had also let himself down. The demon would come and he would be in his own little black hole when it arrived, never knowing, until it was too late ... too late.