Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

At the end of the terrace there was a tall, heavy rock set in a hole in the ground, obviously placed there to prevent children from falling off the end. The raven was standing on it, but flew away as they approached.

They turned and went back the other way. Beyond the stairway were more dwellings, one larger and with four rooms instead of three — probably the home of a chieftain. Next to this there was the largest room so far, with a ceiling ten feet high and at least thirty feet deep. Niall guessed this to be some kind of assembly room, or perhaps even a church.

He turned the thought mirror away from his chest, to increase his sensitivity to the atmosphere; since he knew the kind of people who lived here, he felt he could dimly sense their presence: the strongly built women with big breasts, the bearded men with shaven heads and faces resembling the assassin of the hospital.

The captain obviously found all this uninteresting, and wondered why Niall was wasting his time. So Niall decided against exploring further, and turned back along the terrace.

About to start the reascent, he paused for a moment to glance at the “store room.” It was obvious at once that special attention had been devoted to it. The doorway, which was ten feet high and wide, had been carved and smoothed with care, and two feet inside it, a six-inch-deep groove had been chiseled into the wall on either side — Niall guessed that it had once held some thick wooden door that could be lowered like a drawbridge. A long rectangular hole in the ceiling seemed to confirm this assumption.

This place, Niall guessed, had been a cave before the cliff dwellings were carved, for its walls were rough and full of hollows, obviously created by nature, not by human hands. At the rear, against the wall, were a number of large clay jars which had probably held oil or wine, and a large cubic object made of wood. The flashlight beam revealed a skillful carving that showed a man with his feet braced apart, and his arms, spread wide above his head, as though supporting some enormous weight. The wide-open mouth created an appearance of agony.

Niall peered inside; it had been carved out of a piece of solid wood, evidently the trunk of some tree that must have been four feet across; the sides had been cut straight, and the inside carefully hollowed out. But what had it been for? What had it held? Its smooth interior offered no clue.

Niall knelt to study the underside of the vessel. It was below floor level, standing in a square depression in the stone. But why, he wondered, bother to chisel into the floor?

His immediate suspicion was that the vessel covered a hole — or even a descending passage.

He placed both hands against one side, and pushed to test its weight. It was unexpectedly heavy — far heavier than its size warranted; even Niall’s full strength could lift it only an inch from the floor. He released it with a gasp and stood back.

The captain watched this effort curiously, then came and stood in Niall’s place. He placed his front legs against the wood, braced himself, and pushed. Having six legs to exert pressure, he was in a stronger position than a human being. The vessel tilted, revealing a hole underneath it.

Before Niall could shine his flashlight inside it, there was a violent crash that jarred his teeth, and they were plunged into total darkness. The doorway was blocked with some obstacle, and the light beam showed it to be a door, which obviously had descended from above.

Closer examination revealed that the barrier was made of a single piece of smooth stone, which sealed the entrance tightly; the only daylight that showed through was a few inches at the top. Niall now recalled the six-inch groove carved into the wall on either side of the doorway. He had assumed that it had been made for a wooden door that had long since disintegrated; in fact, this stone door must have been poised above their heads.

Niall realized that it would be pointless to give way to panic. If the door slid down from above, then it must be balanced by some kind of counterweight mechanism. In that case, it ought to be possible to find how it worked. Perhaps the answer lay in the wooden vessel they had moved. If moving it had caused the door to close, then moving it the other way ought to open it.

He now cursed himself for leaving his backpack behind. He might have used the expanding rod to make contact with the white tower, and asked the old man to look up information about counterweights. His own knowledge of them was nonexistent, since he had never before encountered them.

On the other hand, perhaps the mechanism was simple and straightforward. He was relieved, at any rate, that he had the flashlight. Without it, their situation would have been truly alarming.

He tried to push over the wooden vessel, and again had to give up and ask the captain to do it. As the bottom lifted, he shone his light underneath. Just as he suspected, a heavy chain was attached to the bottom, explaining why it had been so hard to move. This must be the mechanism that had lowered the door.

The captain could not support its weight for long. What was needed was something to prop up the bottom. The only thing that suggested itself was one of the clay jars. Niall tried moving the nearest one; it was almost his own height, but by tilting it, he was able to roll it like a wheel on its bottom rim. The spider meanwhile had been forced to release the wooden vessel. But when Niall had positioned the jar next to it, he raised it again, and Niall tilted the jar almost to the floor and pushed it forward. The gap was not quite wide enough, and the captain had to make an additional effort to raise it another few inches. Then Niall pushed the jar forward, and succeeded in wedging its bottom into the gap. When the spider released the weight, there was an ominous cracking sound, but the jar held, and the wooden vessel remained tilted at an angle of thirty degrees. Niall and the captain both relaxed with a gasp.

Next he stretched out on the floor, and shone the flashlight underneath the wooden vessel. Its bottom must have been six inches thick, and the final link of the rusty chain was held by a metal half-ring that was embedded in the wood. The chain was rigid, and disappeared into a hole in the floor.

Niall moved into a sitting position and tried to reason it out. The chain disappeared downward, yet it must be part of a mechanism that somehow ran overhead and lowered the door.

He crossed the cave, turned off the flashlight, and studied the top of the door. The thin sliver of daylight was broken by a small, dark shape that he had not noticed before. When it moved, Niall’s intuition told that it was the raven. He focused his attention and performed once more the mental act of identification that allowed him to share the bird’s consciousness.

At once he was outside in the sunlight. The raven was perched on top of the stone door, wondering what had happened to the human it regarded as its benefactor. The door itself, he could now see, was six inches thick, and must have weighed many tons.

Niall caused the bird to fly down to the ground; it now obeyed his suggestions without hesitation. From there, Niall could survey the wall beside the doorway. He was hoping to observe some device like a lever that controlled the mechanism. But there was nothing. Next he made the bird fly to the top of the door. From there he was able to see that the door had been lowered into place by two heavy chains on either side, both coated with thick rust, and sunk into the stone. But when he tried to get the bird to fly upward into the dark slot from which the door had descended, it panicked and began to squawk, then flew away. Aware that this experiment had provided no answers, Niall transferred his attention back to his own body, and was once again in darkness.

He next shone the light over the ceiling, then the walls, hoping to find some clue to what controlled the door. Again he found nothing. After that he returned to the hole below the wooden vessel, which was square and about eighteen inches deep. It had been carved out of the solid rock, but again, offered no clue to the door mechanism.

The spider was standing patiently, waiting for Niall to reach some decision. Knowing that Niall was the chosen of the goddess, he did not have the slightest doubt that they would soon be out of this trap.