Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

Since there was no sign of the spider to advise him which side to descend, Niall sent out a telepathic signal that was the equivalent of a shout. This brought the captain catapulting out of a tunnel. It apparently had not struck him that Niall might have any difficulty climbing the last fifty feet.

By this time, Niall had examined the surface of the plug for any projection round which he could loop the rope, but had found none. The only solid-looking projection was thirty feet above him, on the wall of the chimney.

The captain solved the problem by climbing the side of the plug with absurd ease, taking the rope in his pedipalp, and climbing the wall to the projection. Niall was then able to lower himself the final distance to the ground. When he was down safely, the spider unlooped the rope and walked down the wall as easily as a fly.

Niall asked: “Where now?”

The captain led the way into a low tunnel, and Niall’s fatigue disappeared when he saw crude steps carved in its surface, the first sign they had seen so far that other men had preceded them.

Twenty feet farther on there was something that excited him even more. Where the tunnel turned a corner, he could see light reflected off the rock. Moments later they were standing at the top of a long slope, in a pale light that tinged everything blue. Niall was startled by a flash like lightning, accompanied by a crackling sound; for a second, everything became brighter. He was puzzled when the lightning flash was not followed by the usual burst of thunder.

The sky was full of a blue-green vapor that rolled and billowed like mist, and which made visibility poor — it was like standing on a hillside covered in fog. Above the tunnel from which they had emerged, the slope continued upward until it was lost in mist. Niall noticed that the rocks higher up the slope, where it vanished into the cloud, were covered in blue moss.

The temperature was warm, the equivalent of a spring day. There was a strange, sharp smell in the air, which reminded Niall both of the smell of the sea and of burning sulfur. When, a moment later, another flash occurred, the smell increased, and he realized it had something to do with these electrical discharges.

He sat down on the ground, his back against a moss-covered rock, and allowed himself to relax for a few minutes, until his legs ceased to ache. The moss was thick and spongy, and when Niall tore off a handful, he was able to squeeze a cloudy liquid out of it.

He replaced the flashlight in his backpack, drank a mouthful of water, and followed the captain down the rocky slope. Visibility was about the equivalent of a bright moonlit night on Earth. The steady blue-green light cast no shadows, and Niall found himself wondering why this place had become known as Shadowland.

Ten minutes later they were below the ceiling of cloud, and he caught his first clear glimpse of the landscape. Half a mile below him there was a bleak plain that stretched into the distance, and that looked like the kind of rocky terrain that extended for miles around Skollen. Somewhere in the middle distance there was a flat expanse of blackness that might have been a lake, although in this light it was hard to tell.

Visibility here was roughly equivalent to a rainy day on Earth, although the cloudy sky was blue rather than gray. It was strangely even, like some artificial light, and the only sounds were the periodic crackling of the lightning and distant cries that sounded like birds. But if birds could live in this bare landscape, what did they eat?

Niall found that it was necessary to walk carefully to avoid twisting his ankle on the uneven surface. He tried to imagine how all this must have seemed to Sathanas and his companions when they first came here, looking for some place of refuge from the spiders. Basically, Shadowland seemed to be a giant chamber or cave, like the land below the sacred mountain, formed by volcanic activity. It should have been as black as night, but some unknown electrical activity kept the air glowing like an aurora.

Curious to know whether this was some form of magnetism, Niall sat down on a rock and removed the expanding metal rod from his haversack. He had been intending to use it as a dowsing rod, but now observed that it was tingling as if with a mild electric current. He pressed the button to open it, and instantly regretted it as there was a blue flash that gave him a powerful shock and made him drop the rod with a clatter. He hastily pressed the button to make it retract. In its expanded state, it obviously acted as an aerial to the electric force.

Instead, he looked at his watch, then at the compass. The watch showed that it was half past eleven in the morning. The compass needle swung around wildly and refused to settle.

And what, he wondered, would the Magician and his companions have done when they found themselves in this place of unvarying blue light? They must have decided to go on, hoping that this bleak land could afford them some kind of refuge, and presumably some form of nourishment. And since they had settled here, they must have found both. This meant that not all Shadowland was as a bare and inhospitable as the landscape he could see.

The thought spurred his curiosity, and he marched on downward, reaching the foot of the slope half an hour later.

There, for the first time, he observed a vapor rising out of a crack in the ground; he placed his hand in it, and it felt warm and steamy. A quarter of a mile further on, he saw a pool that bubbled, with steam rising from its surface. He dipped his hand in it and found that it was warm. And since his feet were aching, and both were sore from the chafing of the rope as he climbed down, he asked the captain to wait while he sat down and dipped his feet into it. It made him sigh with pleasure, then yawn. If there had been something to lean on, he would have fallen asleep. He was tempted to remove his tunic and take a bath — the captain, as usual, was waiting with apparently inexhaustible patience — but he decided that it would be more sensible to move on.

As he swung the pack onto his back, the stick came loose and clattered on the ground. He picked it up by the metal band, and he felt a tingle that reminded him it had been many hours since breakfast and that his stomach was rumbling with hunger. He unscrewed the cup and half filled it with water, added a few drops of the zacynthus essence, and gulped it down.

The nausea was so powerful that it caused his sight to blur. This lasted about half a minute, causing him to concentrate on not being sick. But when the nausea subsided, he realized immediately that the effect of the zacynthus was far stronger then on the previous day. It filled him with such zest and vitality that he felt like turning somersaults. And when he shook the crystal out of the stick and held it in the palm of his hand, it flickered as if it contained a blue fire.

There was a sizzling hiss that made him jump, and lightning struck the ground a dozen feet away, leaving a strong smell of ozone. Suddenly he became aware of a blue, shining ball about a foot in diameter, bouncing toward him. He shrank away, and it rolled past with the light motion of a bubble and burst soundlessly. As it did so he felt a faint electric shock, and the blue crystal in his hand glowed like a spark. Niall had never seen, or even heard of, ball lightning, but he knew instinctively that it could be dangerous.

He replaced the crystal inside the stick and screwed on the head. But as they walked on, the energy began to make him feel uncomfortable. It was too strong, and began to give him a headache. As soon as he tied the stick across the top of his pack, this disappeared.

Looking at the lightning that illuminated the blue clouds, he began to formulate a theory to explain the phenomenon. Was it possible that Shadowland, this gigantic cave beneath the Gray Mountains, was an amplifier of the Earth-force — not the vital force that filled the Great Delta, but some magnetic energy that sprang from the rocks? In that respect it would be like the crystal cave of the trolls, but far more powerful. He knew that in some sense he could not even begin to understand, the Earth was a vast dynamo whose current was spread unevenly. Perhaps in this enormous bubble called Shadowland, some freak of geology had created a concentrated vortex of force that discharged spontaneously in flashes of blue lightning and caused a permanent thunderstorm.