The Martian Falcon (Lovecraft & Fort) (22 page)

CHAPTER 31
Conversation with a Dero

Crystalman stood in front of the telaug machine, looking through the eyes of Rusty Links, watching and listening as the meeting with Al Capone progressed. He hadn’t counted on Sanguine and his vampires intercepting the police wagon. He realised that that was a mistake, but not a particularly serious one. With hindsight, it would have been better to have Carter go to Fort’s office alone and kill him and the others there. But no matter: they would be coming here, and it would be here that they met their fates.

In fact, the option which had presented itself was neater than Crystalman’s original plan: there would be no bodies requiring a cover story; Fort, Lovecraft, Links and O’Malley would simply vanish from the world. No one else knew their plan. No one else would ever know. As for Johnny Sanguine… what he called the Primal Mind had spoken to him; Crystalman had listened to the echoes of his dreams and was well aware of what he wanted. Well, the prize would be given to him, but not quite in the manner he was expecting…

‘Vampires!’ said Crystalman contemptuously. ‘What a tiresome lot you are. So many worse things than you!’

He manipulated the controls of the telaug, switching the psychic connection from Rusty Links to John Carter. The detective had been Crystalman’s guest in the Dero caverns some time ago – not that he remembered, of course – as had the Chief of Police. They had been placed, unconscious, in the telaug machine and their brain patterns recorded, so that they might serve as Crystalman’s spies in the Police Department. Carter had no memory of being taken over by Crystalman, or of pointing his gun at Fort’s head and speaking with a voice that was not his. From his point of view, he had been taking Fort and the others in – that was all – until they had been ambushed.

Carter was sitting in a hospital examination room, being attended to by a doctor.

‘Mild concussion, Lieutenant,’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing to worry about, but I’d take it easy for the next day or so.’

‘Wish I could, doc,’ Carter replied, ‘but that’s not going to be possible.’

The doctor sighed. ‘Well… try, huh?’

Crystalman watched as Carter left the hospital and drove back to the stationhouse, where Dave Wiseman was waiting for him. Once he had assured his partner that he was all right, he asked Wiseman where he had put the rock book.

‘In the evidence room, like you told me to,’ Wiseman replied.

‘Okay, good.’

‘Listen, John,’ said Wiseman. ‘Concussion, the doc said, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Why don’t you call it a night? We’ve got things covered here; got patrol cars out looking for Fort and the others. You need some rest, and there’s not a whole lot more you can do here.’

Carter sighed and tentatively rubbed his aching head. ‘I guess you’re right, Dave. I’ll go and grab some shuteye. You’ll call me if anything happens?’

‘I sure will.’

‘Okay.’

Carter walked along the corridor leading to the main entrance. As he approached the stairs leading to the basement containing the evidence room, Crystalman reached for one of the controls of the telaug.

‘No sleep for you just yet, Lieutenant Carter,’ he murmured. ‘I need the rock book, and I need it now. You will take it from the evidence room and bring it to me.’

He flipped the lever that would switch the telaug from its observation mode to the more profound connection that would allow him to control Carter’s actions.

Carter changed direction suddenly and took the stairs down to the basement. He walked swiftly along a corridor and entered the Evidence Room. The duty officer behind the counter looked up from some paperwork and said: ‘Evening, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?’

‘Evening, Hank. Dave Wiseman brought an item in here not too long ago.’

Hank nodded. ‘Uh huh. The Falcon case, right?’

‘Right. I need it. The Chief wants to take a look.’

‘Okay, hold on.’

Hank went through into another room, and returned a few moments later with a large, brown evidence bag, which he placed on the counter.

Carter signed for it, said goodnight and left the Evidence Room.

Crystalman smiled, and said in barely more than a whisper: ‘Now… bring it to me, Lieutenant Carter… bring it to me.’

He threw some more switches and watched the display screen. Presently, a face appeared – or rather, a twisted caricature of a face: bloated, pockmarked, slobbering, a landscape of malice and depravity from which stared two pitch-black, soulless eyes.

The face of a Dero.

‘What you want?’ grunted the apparition.

‘You have visitors coming soon.’

‘When you leave? When you give us back places you took?’

Crystalman sighed. ‘When I’m ready, and not before.’

‘You stole from us. You stole places from us. When you give back?’

‘We have had this conversation before.’

The hideous face sneered at him.

‘I tell you again, you have
visitors
coming
soon
.’

‘Visitors?’

‘People from the surface. Food for you. Playthings for you.’

The wide, flabby mouth twisted into a leering travesty of a smile. ‘We like people. People taste good. People scream loud when we play.’

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Why they come? They not know Dero? They not know be scared?’

‘Oh, they know about you. They’re coming to take more things from you, more caverns, more machines. They’re coming to kill you.’

The face of the Dero twitched several times and then twisted into an expression of utter, mindless rage and hatred. ‘They come to take? They come to kill?
No!
They not take, not kill.
We
kill! We kill and eat! But first we play… we show them games… games to make them scream loud! Scream for long time! We eat them while they live! Ha! We eat them while they live and scream!’

The Dero lifted something into view. Crystalman peered at the screen, unsure at first of what he was looking at. It took him a few seconds to realise that it was part of a man’s head. Probably some poor derelict they had snatched from the street under cover of night, as was their habit. The Dero fingered the shattered skull, scraping out the last few gobs of brain, which it shoved into its slavering mouth.

‘He play long time. He scream long and loud, like music. We sex him long time, many of us.’

Crystalman grimaced behind his mask.

‘We sex him hard! And he scream!’

‘And you can do all that to the visitors who are coming. The visitors who are coming to kill you and take your places and your machines.’

The Dero’s face suddenly became expressionless. ‘When they come?’

‘Tonight. They will descend from Long Island into the caverns.’

‘Long… Island.’

‘The island where I live, where my house stands. The island containing the caverns I took from you. Do you understand?’

The Dero nodded. ‘The caverns you took from us.’

‘And you will be waiting for them, yes?’

‘We will wait for them.’

‘And when they enter the caverns, they will be yours.’

‘Ours, yes, and we play and eat and sex.’

‘They are yours to do with as you please. You can spare me the details.’

The tragic remnants of a once-great race
, Crystalman thought.
How the mighty can fall, when the universe decides it has no further use for them. I almost feel sorry for you and your kind. Were the Atlans to return from their great exodus into the cosmic depths, they would annihilate you without hesitation, even though you be their kin
.

‘When you go?’ demanded the Dero again. ‘When…
you
… go?’ The question had bubbled up once again in the creature’s quagmire of a brain. They never tired of asking it, even though the answer was always the same.

On this occasion, however, Crystalman said something he had never said to the Dero before: ‘If you kill these visitors… I will give your caverns back to you. I will leave and never return. You will never see me again.’

The Dero looked at him, its maw hanging open in stupefaction. ‘True, this?’

‘True,’ said Crystalman.

The Dero uttered a gurgling cackle. ‘Then we kill! We kill and eat and play and–’

Yes yes yes, and so on and so forth!
Crystalman thought as he broke the connection with the deeper caverns.

His promise would, he was sure, spur the Dero to even greater efforts to capture Fort and the others when they entered the caverns. The promise, of course, was quite genuine. When all this was over, when the rock book had been secured and the spirit of Haq ul’Suun released from the Martian Falcon, Crystalman would have no further need for these caverns.

The Dero could have them.

He hoped that they would enjoy them in the brief span of existence remaining to them.

CHAPTER 32
The Dero Cavern

They headed out to Long Island in O’Malley’s car, all the while keeping watchful eyes on the other traffic, on constant lookout for a cop car slowing or changing direction suddenly. They saw several squad cars during the journey, but none of the cops recognised them, and they passed without incident.

Manorville was a small, unprepossessing town on the eastern edge of the Pine Barrens Preserve, a 100,000-acre swathe of pine forest on the eastern side of Long Island. They had no trouble finding the exploratory shaft that had been sunk there in 1895: it was about a mile outside of town and was enclosed within a circular chain link fence topped with barbed wire and sporting a sign every hundred feet or so that said:

DANGER!

DO NOT ENTER

PENALTY FOR UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY:

$10,000 FINE AND FIVE YEARS IMPRISONMENT

As O’Malley brought the car to a halt and switched off the engine, Fort took the case from between his feet, opened it and took out the Teleforce Projector and the Anomalous Oscillation Detector. He put the AOD in his jacket pocket.

The headlamp beams of another car cut through the darkness. The gigantic limousine pulled up alongside them and Capone got out, followed by his zombies.

‘Right on time,’ said Fort. He turned to look at the others. ‘Ready?’

‘We’re ready, Charles,’ said Lovecraft.

‘Then let’s go.’

They got out of the car and approached Capone.

‘How’d you get your car back?’ asked Fort. ‘You left it on the Expressway… totalled, as I recall.’

‘Think I only got one limo?’ said Capone. ‘What kinda deadbeat you think I am?’

‘He probably got it from his hideout, Charles,’ said Lovecraft quietly.

‘Gee, thanks for putting me straight, Howard,’ said Fort.

Capone gestured to one of his zombies, who took three Tommy guns from the limousine and handed them to Lovecraft, O’Malley and Rusty. ‘I take it you won’t be needing one,’ said Capone to Fort, with a nod at the Projector.

‘Not likely,’ Fort replied.

The zombie reached into the limousine again and withdrew a large knapsack, which he slung over his shoulder.

‘What’s in the bag?’ asked Rusty as she checked her Tommy gun.

‘Hand grenades,’ said Capone. ‘Thought they might come in useful.’

Fort nodded his approval and glanced at Lovecraft, who was examining his gun in the same way an archaeologist might examine a strange artefact. ‘You okay there, Howard?’

‘I… well, I must confess that I’ve never used a firearm before.’

Capone laughed. ‘Nothin’ to it, librarian; just point and fire, but watch out for the recoil. It’ll jump around like a rat in a sack. And speakin’ of rats, where’s Sanguine?’

‘Nice to see you, too, Al,’ said a voice from the darkness. Sanguine sauntered into the island of light from the cars’ headlamps.

‘And your men?’ said Capone.

‘Oh, they’re around.’

‘What do you mean “around”?’ asked O’Malley.

‘Never mind. They’re here – that’s all you need to know. Now, let’s get on with this.’

There was a gate in the chain link fence, which was secured with a stout padlock. Capone reached for it, but Fort stopped him. Brandishing the Projector, he said: ‘I want to try this out.’

As Capone stepped aside, Fort switched on the Projector. Remembering what Tesla had shown him, he adjusted the beam to its narrowest setting, took aim at the padlock and pressed the trigger.

A glowing blue wire of energy leaped from the muzzle and struck the lock, which fizzed and crackled, and then popped like a kernel of corn in a skillet. It dropped to the ground in incandescent orange pieces.

‘Not bad,’ said Capone. ‘Hey, Charlie, if we get outta this, I wanna buy that gizmo off of you, okay?’

Fort grinned at Capone.
Yeah, and my uncle’s the King of England, you crazy metal bastard
, he thought. He pushed open the gate and walked towards the bunker-like concrete structure that stood at the centre of the enclosure. The structure was a squat cylinder about twenty feet in diameter and ten high, and was featureless save for a single steel door. Fort made short work of the lock and pushed open the door, which gave with the loud screech of long-disused hinges. From the nearby tree line, the pinnacles of the pines exploded with the dark shapes of startled birds.

O’Malley had pilfered a couple of flashlights from the maintenance room of the Visitation Rectory. He took them out and handed one to Lovecraft, who took it and glanced uncertainly at it and his awkwardly-held Tommy gun. Rusty sighed and took the flashlight from him. Capone had his own light, bolted to his left shoulder.

They played the beams around the room, which contained nothing but a ten-foot-wide circular hole in the centre of the floor.

‘Looks inviting, don’t it?’ said Capone as he leaned over the edge of the concrete maw and looked down, his shoulder-mounted flashlight moving back and forth. ‘Can’t see the bottom.’

‘It goes down about three hundred feet,’ said Fort, walking around the edge until he reached a line of steel rungs set into the concrete. ‘Inspection ladder. Come on.’ Shouldering the Teleforce Projector, he sat and swung his legs over the edge, then began to descend.

Capone moved forward, but Rusty jumped in front of him. ‘You last,’ she said. ‘You must weigh half a ton. I don’t want you ripping the ladder out before the rest of us get down there.’

Capone grunted and moved aside.

One by one, they followed Fort into the depths, their flashlight beams playing across the curved wall of the shaft and picking out discoloured vertical streaks of water-stained concrete and patches of dark green lichen that glinted wetly. The only sounds were those of their breathing and the echoing clicks of their shoes on the steel rungs.

Ten minutes later, they all reached the bottom of the shaft, including Capone, who was holding several of the inspection ladder’s rungs in his massive metal hands. ‘They came loose,’ he said. ‘Might have a job getting out this way. Didn’t let them drop. Didn’t want to make a noise.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Fort. ‘And don’t worry about getting out. If all goes to plan and we manage to survive the night, we’ll get out through Crystalman’s house.’

They looked around at the cavern into which the exploratory shaft had penetrated twenty years previously. It was large – about as big as a good-sized cathedral. In fact, it reminded Fort of a cathedral, with its high, fluted walls which met in a series of misshapen arches about a hundred feet above their heads. The similarity was further strengthened by the gigantic statues which stood against the walls, some upright, some partially toppled on the uneven ground – although any resemblance to human art was fleeting at best.

The statues were grotesque representations of strange beings, perhaps gods, or perhaps the inhabitants of distant and unknown worlds. They were the nameless denizens of the night of prehistory; of the time of the Atlans, when the Australopithecine ancestors of humanity barked and jabbered and looked uncomprehendingly at the godlike beings who had made the world their home.

‘Highly stylised,’ whispered Lovecraft, as he regarded the statues with their etiolated forms, their bulbous eyes and strangely-shaped heads. ‘At least, one would
hope
that they’re stylised.’

Fort took a small compass from his pocket and consulted it. ‘We need to head east,’ he said. ‘Come on. This way.’ He moved off across the boulder-strewn floor of the cavern, slowly sweeping the darkness ahead with the barrel of the Teleforce Projector. ‘Light!’ he whispered harshly. ‘I need more light! Cormack! Miss Links!’

Rusty and O’Malley fell in beside him. He glanced at Rusty. ‘Can you shift yet?’

She hesitated and then shook her head. ‘Still nothing. Damn that Carter and his stupid little gun!’

‘Odds are it’s not his. He must have got it from Crystalman. God knows how many other people he’s got up his sleeve.’

Rusty glanced around, her eyes darting fearfully at the walls and ceiling of the cavern.

‘That’s right,’ said Fort. ‘Keep a lookout for the Dero. That goes for the rest of you,’ he added over his shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Rusty replied. ‘I’m watching for them… but I’m also watching for the air elementals…’

‘I don’t think you need to worry too much about them,’ said Fort.

She glanced at him. ‘Why not? They’ve been hounding me up the entire eastern seaboard.’

‘But they left you alone once you got to New York, didn’t they? Once you came to me. Crystalman called them off. He knows we’re coming, and he’s got us exactly where he wants us.’

‘
What?
When were you planning on telling the rest of us?’

‘I’ve only just figured it out, dummy that I am!’ Fort replied disgustedly.

‘Figured what out, Charles?’ asked Lovecraft, who had fallen in behind them.

‘I’m afraid there’ll be no element of surprise, Howard. Crystalman’s onto us. He knows what we’re planning. He’s known all along that I was involved with the Falcon case; he got that from Carter, of course. Once he knew that Rusty here was coming to see me, he called off the air elementals and let her do just that. Maybe that was a change of plan on his part, but it suited his purposes. Apart from Carter, we’re the only people who know about his plan, the only people who have the slightest chance of stopping him. And now…’

‘Now we’re heading directly for him. And he’s prepared,’ said Lovecraft. ‘That is rather… vexing.’

Fort came to a halt. ‘I’ve made a mistake – a bad one. We shouldn’t have come here. We should have gone after the rock book. Shit! We should have gone after the rock book!’

‘And tried to raid a stationhouse full of cops?’ said Rusty. ‘We wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

‘We’d have stood more of a chance than we do here.’

‘It’s all my fault,’ said Rusty miserably. ‘Somehow… somehow Crystalman’s inside my head. He knows what I’m going to do as soon as I decide to do it.’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Miss Links,’ said Lovecraft. ‘After all, you were the one who told us Crystalman’s plan. You also provided us with the means to defeat him… if only Lieutenant Carter hadn’t arrived when he did.’

Rusty glanced back at him and smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr. Lovecraft.’

‘You’re most welcome, madam.’

Fort gave Lovecraft a sharp glance. ‘Don’t get all mushy on me, Howard. This dame’s still trouble with a capital T.’ He fell silent, thinking.

‘So why did you let me come along, if I’m so much trouble?’ said Rusty huffily.

‘You know why. You’re a shapeshifter. As a weapon, you’re at least as powerful as this Teleforce Projector…’

‘Assuming I get my ability back sometime soon.’

‘Yeah… assuming that.’

‘Hey, what’s the hold up?’ demanded Capone. ‘Keep movin’, ya buncha numbnuts!’

Fort turned to answer him, and then stopped, open-mouthed. Capone saw the expression on his face, and turned to look behind them, as did O’Malley.

The way back was blocked by at least fifty Dero, with more scuttling into the cavern from unseen recesses in the walls. Completely naked, their genitals dangling obscenely between their bowed, thickly-muscled legs, the creatures began to shamble towards them. Their filthy, distorted faces grinned, revealing blackened and broken teeth.

‘Welcome!’ they cried in their ragged, gurgling voices. ‘
Welcommme!
’