The gulf, too, was silent; and the circles of phosphor had ceased to widen on the waters. Yet somehow the silence was a thing that clogged the senses, retarded the limbs. It rose up around Bellman like the clutching slime of some nethermost pit, in which he must drown. With dragging effort he began the ascent, hauling, cursing and kicking his companions till they responded like drowsy animals.
It was a climb through Limbo, an ascent from nadir through darkness that seemed palpable and viscid. On and up they toiled, along the monotonous, imperceptibly winding grade, where all measure of distance was lost and time was meted only by the repetition of eternal steps. The night lowered before Bellman’s feeble shaft of light; it closed behind like an all-engulfing sea, relentless and patient; biding its time till the torch should go out.
Looking over the verge at intervals, Bellman saw the gradual fading of the phosphorescence in the depths. Fantastic images rose in his mind: it was like the last glimmering of hell-fire in some extinct inferno; like the drowning of nebulae in voids beneath the universe. He felt the giddiness of one who looks down upon infinite space… Anon there was only blackness; and he knew by this token the awful distance they had climbed.
The minor urges of hunger, thirst, fatigue, had been trod under by the fear that impelled him. From Maspic and Chivers, very slowly, the clogging stupor lifted, and they too were conscious of an adumbration of terror vast as the night itself. The blows and kicks and objurgations of Bellman were no longer needed to drive them on.
Evil, ancient, soporous, the night hung about them. It was like the thick and fetid fur of bats: a material thing that choked the lungs, that deadened all the senses. It was silent as the slumber of dead worlds… But out of that silence, after the lapse of apparent years, a twofold and familiar sound arose and overtook the fugitives: the sound of something that slithered over stone far down in the abyss: the sucking noise of a creature that withdrew its feet as if from a quagmire. Inexplicable, and arousing mad, incongruous ideas, like a sound heard in delirium, it quickened the earthmen’s terror into sudden frenzy.
‘God! what is it?’ breathed Bellman. He seemed to remember sightless things, abhorrent, palpable shapes of primal night, that were no legitimate part of human recollections. His dreams, and his nightmare awakening in the cave — the narcotic idol — the half-eaten body of Chalmers — the hints that Chalmers had let drop — the rings of wetness, leading toward the gulf — all returned like the figments of a teeming madness, to assail him on that terrible road midway between the underworld sea and the surface of Mars.
His question was answered only by a continuation of the noise. It seemed to grow louder — to ascend the wall beneath. Maspic and Chivers, snapping on their lights, began to run with frantic leaps; and Bellman, losing his last remnants of control, followed suit.
It was a race with unknown horror. Above the labored beating of their hearts, the measured thudding of their feet, the men still heard that sinister, unaccountable sound. They seemed to race on through leagues of blackness; and yet the noise drew steadily nearer, climbing below them, as if its maker were a thing that walked on the sheer cliff.
Now the sound was appallingly close — and a little ahead. It ceased abruptly. The running lights of Maspic and Chivers, who moved abreast, discovered the crouching thing that filled the two-yard shelf from side to side.
Hardened adventurers though they were, the men would have shrieked aloud with hysteria, or would have hurled themselves from the precipice, if the sight had not induced a kind of catalepsy. It was as if the pale idol of the pyramid, swollen to mammoth proportions, and loathsomely alive, had come up from the abyss and was squatting before them!
Here, plainly, was the creature that had served as a model for that atrocious image: the creature that Chalmers had called the Dweller. The humped, enormous carapace, vaguely recalling the armor of the glyptoden, shone with a luster as of wet white metal. The eyeless head, alert but somnolent, was thrust forward on a neck that arched obscenely. A dozen or more of short legs, with goblet-shapen feet, protruded slantwise beneath the overhanging shell. The two proboscides, yard-long, with cupped ends, arose from the corners of the cruelly slitted mouth and waved slowly in air toward the earthmen.
The thing, it seemed, was old as that dying planet: an unknown form of primal life that had dwelt always in the caverned waters. Before it, the faculties of the earthmen were drugged by an evil stupor, as if it were composed, in part, of the same opiate mineral as its image. They stood with their flashlights playing full on the terror; and they could not move nor cry out when it reared suddenly erect, revealing its ridged belly. and the queer double tail that slithered and rustled metallically on the rock. Its numerous feet, beheld in this posture, were hollow and chalice-like, and they oozed with mephitic wetness. No doubt they served for suction-pads, enabling it to walk on a perpendicular surface.
Inconceivably swift and sure in all its motions, with short strides on its hindmost legs, levered by tbe tail, the monster came forward on the helpless men. Unerringly the two proboscides curved over, and their ends came down on Chivers’ eyes as he stood with lifted face. They rested there, covering the entire sockets — for a moment only. Then there was a wild, agonizing scream, as the hollow tips were withdrawn with a sweeping movement lithe and vigorous as the lashing of serpents.
Chivers swayed slowly, nodding his head, and twisting about in half-narcotized pain. Maspic, standing at his side, saw in a dull and dreamlike manner the gaping orbits from which the eyes were gone. It was the last thing that he ever saw. At that instant the monster turned from Chivers, and the terrible cups, dripping with blood and fetor, descended on Maspic’s own eyes.
Bellman, who had paused close behind the others, comprehended what was occurring like one who witnesses the abominations of a nightmare but is powerless to intervene or flee. He saw the movements of the cupped members, he heard the single atrocious cry that was wrung from Chivers, and the swiftly ensuing scream of Maspic. Then, above the heads of his fellows, who still held their useless torches in rigid fingers, the proboscides came toward him…
With blood rilling heavily upon their faces, with the somnolent, vigilant, implacable and eyeless Shape at their heels, herding them on, restraining them when they tottered at the brink, the three begm their second descent of the road that went down forever to a night-bound Avernus.