The throng set off to the foot of the limestone slope. Everyone but Doc was animated, even cheerful at the prospect.
Baron Kerr stopped at a wide gash in the rocky hillside, the entrance to a natural tunnel. “Everything comes from the burning pool above us,” he said. “It is the wellspring of our existence here. Its flesh becomes our flesh, and our flesh becomes its flesh. Our meaning and destinies are intertwined.
“Everything you will see inside the caves belongs to the pool. It lives both inside and outside the mountain. Its miraculous filaments wind through solid rock. Growing. Nourishing. Enlightening.”
From his academic experience at Harvard and Oxford, Doc guessed that they were being treated to a stock speech that had been given many times before. The baron was like an aged professor droning out the same lecture for decades. Kerr’s deadpan delivery didn’t bother any of the others; on the contrary, they hung on his every word and appeared eager for more.
Kerr removed his sunglasses and seated them firmly on the brim and crown of his straw hat. It was then that Doc noticed the man’s eyes were different colors, one yellowish-brown, the other blue, which gave him a decidedly deranged look as he waved his arm and led the flock into the huge grotto.
Jackson refused to enter the cave. No one tried to coax the stickie in. No one seemed to care or notice his extreme agitation. Doc found it difficult to feel sympathy for the creature, knowing full well its genetic predilection for violence and bloodshed. Like the others, he wished the stickie would just go away.
Inside the cave, what with the white limestone walls and the fissures in the ceiling, there was plenty of light to see by. Water steadily trickled across the floor; in the depressions it pooled ankle deep. Along the right-hand wall, caught in a shaft of sunlight, was a stack of wooden implements. They reminded Doc of flensing knives, the tools used in the whaling trade to carve blubber. Only these had short handles. The outwardly curving, scimitar-like blades were sharpened on one edge.
“These are your tools,” Baron Kerr said. “With them you will tend the bounty of the pool. They are made of wood because the touch of metal taints the bounty and makes it unfit to eat. Take one and come with me.”
Doc was the last to pick up a tool. He tested the edge, which was barely sharp and nicked in many places. Whatever it was meant to cut was very soft indeed. He and the others tracked the baron deeper into the hillside. The passage grew narrower and much darker. So dark that Kerr paused to light a torch, one of many that lay on a ledge well above the waterline. After more torches were lit, they proceeded down the winding tunnel.
Beads of strange, faintly luminous moisture appeared on the cave walls. Doc felt a tightness building in his chest that had nothing to do with the torch smoke or the dank-smelling cave or the rapid rise in the air temperature. He sensed that he was walking into the core of something more powerful and more evil than his mind could grasp. An evil that cast a shadow in the darkest corners of the dripping cave.
The only thing that kept him from turning and running for daylight was the knowledge that his companions walked ahead of him, unaware, perhaps bewitched, and at the mercy of that selfsame evil.
Deep under the mountain, the cave widened into a low-ceilinged antechamber that was roughly circular. It was there that Baron Kerr stopped and gave instruction on the harvesting of the pool’s “bounty.”
Only when the baron actually pointed out the tendrils did Doc see them. They were mottled gray, and in the dim and flickering torchlight, they blended in with the colors of the stained and shadowy bedrock. The glistening, interlacing, tapering growths pushed through splits in the stone; they encased the walls and roof of the antechamber. Some were as big around as a man’s waist, others the size of little fingers.
At least at present they were immobile, and Doc was thankful for that.