“Which mess? Arthur’s dad exacting righteous vengeance upon us? The cultists after our blood? Corporate skinning us alive when they figure out what happened with Nancy? Or whatever horrible unforeseeable planet-destroying outcome will result from launching her in the first place?”
“Take your pick. Our presence here isn’t happenstance. More like destiny. Mom would say the same.”
Mac weighed the possibilities. “Can’t say I subscribe to destiny. Even so, neither can I deny a strong hunch that you’re right. Dr. Bole theorizes the Dreamtime program is a conduit. This . . . device may have tapped in somehow.”
“Dreamtime empowers the subconscious. The subconscious is a doorway to the infinite.”
The boys stood close together and smiled innocuous, lying smiles. The adults paid them not a shred of attention.
“Tonight, then” Mac said.
“Tonight,” Dred said. “I’ll rustle supplies. Beans, bullets, band aids.”
“
Booze
, bullets, and band aids.”
“By the way, and I’m just asking—but when we first came through the entrance, did ya happen to notice anything peculiar about the mercs?”
“Hmm. The captain has a lazy eye?” Had Ustinov’s pupils been too large, the irises distorted when the man flirted with Dr. Bravery? It seemed eminently possible.
“The entire squad does.”
A dozen Russian commandos charged onto the landing and proceeded to gut the nearest technicians. Several soldiers advanced upon the lab station. The Tooms boys acted without conscious thought—they turned tail and raced across the wildly swaying rope bridge. Sifu Kung Fan had taught them, if feasible, to always run away when confronted with overwhelming force, especially if their retreat could be screened by disposable peons. Meanwhile, Nestor drew and fired and one of the Spetsnaz pitched over in his tracks. Captain Ustinov hurled his spear. The tip missed its mark by a hair, however the haft caught Nestor’s arm and knocked his pistol aside. Bullets zinged harmlessly.
The advancing soldiers skewered Dr. Slocum and Mr. Kowalski. Dr. Bravery flung a portable lamp at the attackers. Nestor grabbed her around the waist and leaped backward over the edge. The pair plummeted into the mist. Dislodged by the gunplay, random ice stalactites sheared free of the cavern roof and exploded in the depths.
Upon gaining the far side of the bridge, the boys hacked through the rope. Telemachus Crabbe evidently understood the dire nature of the situation; he’d skidded down the treacherous steps and gotten a head start with his own hatchet. Two Spetsnaz who’d made it halfway across in pursuit clung desperately as the bridge swung free and collided with the far ice wall. The soldiers tumbled to their deaths. The boys exulted in the fading shrieks with celebratory backslaps.
The Spetsnaz dispatched the remaining technicians with the callous vigor of hunters butchering a passel of baby seals. Captain Ustinov approached the cliff-edge. His white anorak and pants dripped red. His men assembled and gazed wordlessly across the gulf. Some blew kisses.
Behind the soldiers, a prone figure stirred. Mr. Kowalski gained his feet, swaying and bloodied. His winter clothes were tattered. Blood leaked from multiple slashes and punctures. The man saluted the boys. He gathered himself and kicked two commandos over the edge before the rest twigged to the threat. He scuttled backward at alternating angles to avoid the retaliatory spear thrusts of his foes, who had recovered from his assault with mechanical discipline. Mr. Kowalski’s grievous wounds had no apparent effect as he ran three full steps up the ice wall and somersaulted over the onrushing squad and landed near their left flank. A blade flashed in his hand and drove into the spine of the nearest Spetsnaz. The rest pounced and buried Mr. Kowalski under a threshing pile of stabbing arms and stomping jackboots.
The boys didn’t linger to observe the gruesome outcome. They fled to the opposite side of the structure.
THE GATE
Telemachus Crabbe organized the ragtag group of laborers who were also trapped on the ziggurat. He said to Mac and Dred, “Those Red bastards can’t get to us for a while. What’s our plan?”
Dred appreciated that Crabbe didn’t waste vital seconds demanding to know why the Russians had turned coat. First came escape and evasion; later, explanations, accusations, and payback. He pointed to the archway on the upper tier. “Mac and I are going to breach. Danged pyramid has to be chock full of alien artifacts. Nobel, here I come.”
“There’ll be no prizes,” Mac said. “Think clearly. Think as a Tooms above the age of nine.”
Stung, Dred crossed his arms. “Sheesh, why do ya have to crack smart?”
“Granddad will drop a hundred million tons of ice onto this thing before he permits our rivals to learn of its existence, much less get their mitts on it.” Mac winced and brushed away blood trickling from his nostrils. He paled.
“Oh, like that, eh?” Crabbe said. “Didn’t Slocum tell you? An energy curtain blocks the entrance. Repels everything—you won’t make it five feet. Doc Slocum planned to bring a sonic emitter and disperse the field.”
“Slocum is history,” Mac said. “We don’t have the luxury of a sonic emitter, or dynamite—”
“Say, ya
don’t
have any dynamite handy?” Dred interrupted.
“Are you insane?” Crabbe gave him a look.
Mac climbed the steps and stood before the metal arch. Its sole adornment was an indentation at the apex of the arc suggestive of an O-mouth. A veil of scintillating darkness barred the way. He chucked several shards of ice into the barrier and watched them shatter. “There must be a way to open . . . to open the way . . . ” He groaned and fell to his knees and clutched his skull.
“Macbeth!” Dred knelt, unsure how to comfort his brother.
“I remember, Dred. I remember what the man told me...He’s no man.”
“The man? Talk sense!”
“The man in the suit.” Mac’s gazed into the distance. He struggled to form each word. “Tom Mandibole flew to the Mountain Leopard Temple and whispered the Way into my ear.” His eyes focused again and he grated, “A dark seed has nested in my mind and now it blooms with terrible purpose.”
Dred appealed to Crabbe. “Telly, my brother has cracked or he’s havin’ an aneurysm.”
The tendons of Mac’s neck rippled. He shrugged off Dred’s hand and stood. Fear and pain were replaced by stony coldness. “Cover your ears. I will utter the profane syllables.”
“Uh-oh,” Crabbe said.
Dred obeyed an overwhelming compulsion to stick his fingers into his ears as Mac shouted a guttural oath at the arch. Crabbe did likewise. The workers weren’t quite as savvy. The poor sods went stiff, as if shot through the brain, then toppled one after another like a chain of dominos and slid down the icy slope of the ziggurat.
“Poor devils,” Crabbe said with real lament.
The barrier vanished. Faint yellow light flickered somewhere far ahead in the throat of the revealed stone passage. Mac gestured for the others to follow, which Dred did with great reluctance. He reflected that the second-born truly got a raw deal. He was doomed to traipse after Mac like a puppy. “Hypnosis,” he muttered to himself. Whomever this “man in the suit” had been, he’d implanted a suggestion in Mac’s subconscious with a specific trigger. This raised a number of unpleasant questions that would have to keep for the moment.
“It won’t stay open long,” Mac called over his shoulder as he staggered for the arch. At least color filled his cheeks again and his eyes were human, although a trifle crazed. Dred caught him and took some of his weight onto his own shoulder. “Jeezum crow, I’m not a wilting violet,” Mac said. He smiled, though. The brothers crossed over without hesitation. Dad often said, once committed, damn half measures and strike straight for the jugular.
Crabbe hesitated at the threshold. “I’m not keen on this, fellows. When that curtain reactivates, we’re trapped. No food, no water . . . ”
“Your choice, pal,” Dred said. “Welcome to the horns of a dilemma. Unknown dangers versus known devils. Who knows what awaits us inside? Ustinov’s pack will tear ya apart.”
“Aye. The hell we waitin’ for?”
The trio moved into the low-ceilinged passage that stretched before them, all gentle angles and worn surfaces scored by cuneiform characters. Yellow light seeped from everywhere, although it coalesced always before them, just beyond reach. Traces of sand gritted underfoot. The air tasted of a dead volcano. Shirtsleeve warm as well, and so the boys removed their outer garments.
“There goes the seal.” Dred glanced back every few seconds and he saw the veil drop like the curtain at the AMC. Pure darkness penned the boys in.
“The dimensions are wrong.” Dred traced a wall as he walked. The cuneiform seemed ominous in its repetition of monstrous figures and jagged symbols. “Should be stairs or a ramp down.”
“You’re right,” Mac said.
They reached an intersection. The north tunnel continued in an unbroken line while the others appeared to dead-end within a few yards. Several paces down the east and west passages lay articles of clothing that Mac and Dred recognized. The discarded items perfectly matched their own.
“Those are my britches. My hat . . . ” Crabbe started to the left.
Mac caught his arm. “Hold on a second. This has occurred before.” He muttered to himself, “Causality . . . Paradox?”
“Fellas, we’re in Dutch.” Dred pointed back toward the distant entrance. The curtain silently advanced upon them like water filling a pipe.
“These aren’t dead ends. The tunnels make right angle turns,” Mac said in a numb tone. “Our corpses will lie around the corner. We died here.”
Crabbe frowned in bewilderment. “I don’t take your meaning.”
“Causality,” Dred said. “Sorry, Telly. Now you’re in the soup too.” Blackness crept steadily nearer. “Mac, we have to decide.”
“Straight on. Has to be straight on.”
“Fine. Forward march.”
As they proceeded, Crabbe said, “The curtain might be a defense mechanism. An antipersonnel device.”
“It’s alien, which means it could be incomprehensible to our intellect,” Mac said.
“Well, the aliens have opposable thumbs,” Dred said, tapping the cuneiform. “So we’ve something in common.”
“Sure, that would be nice. Except they could have used indigenous types for slave labor. Plenty of opposable thumbs among those lads, eh?”
Eventually the passage made a ninety degree turn. Ten more paces and it turned again. Ten paces again in a different direction. Crabbe defaced ancient, likely priceless cuneiform with chalk arrows. The echoes of their movement floated around them, strangely distorted and lagging as if emanating from much farther off.
“It’s a maze,” Crabbe said.
Dred licked his lips. Chapped already. “Dr. Bole says time is a ring. Sifu Kung Fan says it’s a maze.”
“Time is a contradiction of our senses,” Mac said. “They’re both correct.”
“Don’t let Sifu hear you babble heresy.”
The yellow light dimmed. Shadows fluttered. Bony hands emerged and clutched the edge of another blind corner—inhumanly large hands, pallid and veined with black, black nails grinding into plaster as if dragging a massive weight.
“And here’s the Minotaur.” Dred unsheathed the kukri strapped to his hip.
There were two Minotaur, in fact. The first heaved itself into view—an infantile giant hunched to accommodate the confines. Naked and gaunt, except for a bulbous skull and distended belly, knob-knees outthrust, snowshoe feet gray as marble, talons broken and oozing claret. Wet, lank hair obscured its features. Nonetheless, Dred recognized a mutant and corrupt incarnation of himself grown to the hideous dimensions of an emaciated grizzly bear reared on its hind legs. The creature paused to survey them with a crimson eye. Its companion emerged and there was a nightmare version of Mac, drooling and smirking through a jawful of needle fangs.
The boys fled backward the way they’d come. A few steps only—they met the creeping wall of darkness head-on and it engulfed them.
HERE COMES THE SUN
Mac stepped across an improbable void (he beheld the arm of a spiral galaxy whirling beneath him!) and onto a high desert plain. A black sun dominated the horizon above a range of spiky peaks. The disc swallowed a third of the heavens. Lambent flame seethed along its rim. The remainder of the sky curved away, starless black streaked pink as the nipples of a burlesque queen he’d known.
A breeze filled his nostrils with odors of ash as he walked toward the eclipsed sun. His feet hurt despite the conditioning exercises of the Mountain Leopard Temple. Mukluks weren’t designed for rocky terrain. His stomach hurt too. The chunk of Nancy’s data core crystal had burned through layers of clothes and fused with the flesh of his navel as though his belly button struggled to disgorge a misshapen seed. The crystal pulsed crimson and dripped blood through his shirt. He tugged at it gently. The corresponding bolt of agony indicated this was not a dream.
He trudged past the petrified skeleton of a bison. Its familiarity nagged him. In another life the bison plodded past the boy’s picked bones. “I’ve been here. Again and again.”
In a million other lives,
said the black sun. It bulged with each word and emitted lances of fire as it spoke inside Mac’s brain. It sounded exactly the same as Big Black the fabulous crystal computer.
I am curious if now of all moments is appropriate to entertain fantasies of dancing girls.
“Beats me when there’d be a better time. Have you looked at this place lately?” The boy hoped the being couldn’t pick apart his thoughts or sense his terror.
Vast ethereal visages tumbled across the sky as the black sun chuckled.
Many light years stand between us, Macbeth Tooms. I peep at you through one lens of a magic lantern that magnifies a dead past. Be grateful for this disk you apprehend as an occulted star. Those who gaze upon my true form undergo startling transformation. By the way—does anyone ever call you four-eyes?
Mac clenched his scarred fists involuntarily. “Once.” He exhaled. “Azathoth, is that you?”
Azathoth? So insist fools and donners of tinfoil. There are better appellations. Emperor of Ice Cream. Old One. Eminence Grise. The celestial object that looms before you? It is my microphone. I reside far from this rural locale. Wouldn’t do to shred your sanity by revealing myself
au naturale
.