Abruptly his slithering torch beam passed over, and immediately returned to, something in the wall. Szalny’s ‘cyst’: a fine eggshell sheath of magmass stone, like a man-sized blister clinging there, but broken open now and dripping black stuff on the nightmarish floor. Even with their masks filtering out any poisons, still they could smell it; their movements and Luchov’s muffled, echoing voice had disturbed it; as they stared, so sticky black bones came lolling out of it.
After that –
– the Major didn’t stop moving and mouthing, panting and gasping, until he was back through the wormhole to the white-glaring core; where finally, at the foot of the ladder, he paused, removed his mask and threw up. Having followed him, Luchov stood off at a safe distance and watched. And as the young officer finished but continued to kneel there, hanging like a limp rag on the lower rungs, so the Projekt Direktor said: ‘So now you begin to understand. You understand something of the horror this place has seen, inherent in its atmosphere, indeed in its walls! Down here, sealed in by the magmass – and in other places bricked up by men who couldn’t bear to contemplate it – there is much horror. Ah, but up there -‘ he lifted his eyes to the belly of the steel disc with its overlapping plates ‘ – on the other side of that madly glaring Cyclops Gate, there is so much more. An entire world of horror, for all we know, which is still alive!’
The Major wiped his mouth.
‘I could see it in your eyes that you thought I’d cracked,’ Luchov told him. ‘Well, of course I have! Do you really think I’d be here if I was entirely sane?’
The Major coughed into his hand, and mumbled, ‘My God! My God!’
Luchov nodded, and without malice said, ‘Nice thought … but what has He to do with this place, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘Very little, I fear. And the longer you’re here, the more godless it gets to be.’
Not even attempting to answer, the other continued to cling tightly to the ladder’s rungs . . .
Below the caldera of an ancient volcano, in a place not unlike subterranean Perchorsk and yet an entire universe away – a place of wormhole lava-runs and sulphur walls, where ages ago superheated gas had expanded to form caverns like bubbles in chocolate, and the liquid guts of a planet had first forced and then made permanent a spider-web network of channels in the permeable rock – this was where the monstrous Lord Shaitan had made his ‘home’ in a time immemorial. And here, just four years ago, his descendant Shaithis of the Wamphyri had discovered him alive and plotting still.
Now, standing tall but dramatically insignificant against the dark uppermost fangs of the caldera’s broken walls -like a statue there on the old cone’s lava rim under writhing auroral vaults shot through with the occasional scar of a meteorite’s suicide, and gazing south upon a far, faint horizon – Shaithis selected and highlighted memories of those years: of how they’d passed, of what he’d seen and learned, and of what had been planned. By his ancestor Shaitan and by himself. Plans which purported to coincide, though not necessarily. Indeed, not at all.
And guarding such thoughts (ah, but jealously, fearfully!) Shaithis remembered his journey here from Star-side on the rim, across surly iceberg oceans and vast wintry wastelands. He and the other survivors of The Dweller’s wrath: the giant Fess, hideous Volse, squat Arkis and various thralls, all fled here, self-exiled under threat of a vampire’s death, which is far more terrible than that of any mere man and not just from an entirely physical point of view. For a man knows he must die, but a vampire knows he need not.
Four years ago, aye . . .
After the whelky Volse’s loathsome demise, Shaithis in his treachery had directed Arkis Leperson called Dire-death and the acromegalic Fess Ferenc into the clutches of Shaitan the Unborn where, in the shrieking sulphur shadows of an ancient lava-run, that immemorial monster had struck out of his own mind-silence!
Even now remembering how it had been, Shaithis gave an unaccustomed start: the lightning-swift, shadow-silent attack of the siphon-snout (as Shaithis thought of such creatures now); then Arkis speared and held aloft on nimbly skipping tiptoes, jerking and throbbing on the hollow bone blade where it pierced him to the heart, eyes bulging and cheeks going in and out like a bellows, puffing out a fine damp scarlet mist. Extremely fine that life-mist, for Shaitan’s ingurgitor had been loath to lose or spill a drop. And Fess the giant rounding on Shaithis in a fury, all intent upon tearing out his heart; but Shaitan to the rescue, flowing out of the darkness like a tide of evil, wrapping the berserker in a nest of tentacles while Shaithis swung his gauntlet to burst his head in.