Zombie Eyes

But it was gone. Nathan shouted for Stroud to come in. Suddenly Stroud's voice came over, saying, "We've had some difficulty down here."

"Anyone hurt?"

"All are fine, and we're pushing on."

"Where are you? Have you penetrated the ship?"

"Not yet."

"What? You've been in there an hour."

"We've met with several obstacles thrown up in our way."

"Are you near your target?"

"Why, is there a problem up there?"

"Army is here, and chomping at the bit, ready to open fire, and I can't blame them."

Stroud hesitated at his end. "You've got to give us time, Commissioner. We're closing in, but--"

"You've got till dawn, Stroud."

"Dawn?"

"Three hours. And then we unleash the heavy artillery."

"I can't promise we'll be out by then."

"And I can't promise you that it will make a damned difference, Stroud. Too many people up here have lost too many friends and relatives to this thing. They want action, not a ghost hunt on a ship buried below the city."

"We're wasting time, then. Stroud out."

Nathan frowned. He'd hoped that he could convince the fool that he must get his people out of there now. But Stroud was a stubborn son of a bitch. And either brave or stupid. Either way, James Nathan had come to admire the man.

Abe Stroud clicked off the communicator, their only link with the outside, informing the others that they had less than three hours before the Army meant to flatten the place. "Can't stop ignorance," he told the others. "Everyone thinks the disease can be ended if they just bomb the site. We know better."

All of them felt it now as Stroud had felt it right along; they were not alone. They could not see it so much as they could feel it: the definite presence of Ubbrroxx. It was like the fire of a furnace. You didn't have to stand at the furnace to feel the heat.

And the temperature was rising in the pit, rising by leaps and bounds. Inside their protective wear the temperature was rising to ninety, ninety-five and a hundred. Kendra was the first to notice her temperature gauge and ask the others if they were also experiencing difficulties.

They were. All of them. And the tunnel they had chosen to step into was now a river of superheated air. Stroud shouted for them to form a circle, to huddle together and hold on.

The others, not knowing what else to do, did as Stroud instructed. Holding firmly to one another, Stroud shouted, "No one must break the circle. Hold on! Hold on!"

The heat flew over and around them, swirling in a torrent of electrified hatred from the thing in the ship.

Inside the circle of their bodies, Stroud held the skull at the very center of them, which had suddenly become a freezing orb, an icy vapor rising from it. It was a silent conversation to them all, not just Stroud, a visual dialogue among them all as the others saw what Stroud saw: the skull was fighting the fire wind of the damnable tunnel with a preternatural wind of its own. Stroud understood the magical power and sanctity of the circle, that it closed out evil and kept in good. The church with its brethren of believers was the circle.

There were, apparently, all manner of nasty creatures in this underworld, many of which had taken up a long residence here in the pit. Abe had learned of his ancestry, of his special genetic makeup, which had only been enhanced by the steel plate in his cranium. He knew that he alone had the capacity to detect and put an end to the creature in the ship, and that he was indeed the distant ancestor of the brave and curious Esruad.

Abe smelled smoke and saw that their protective wear was being seared by the heat, a thin smoke rising off them all. It threatened to burst the material into flame. The shield of safety around them seemed to be eroding, when suddenly the threat retreated and the air cooled.

"You like it coooooold?" came a voice that barreled down the cavern just before a rush of frigid air, followed by demonic laughter.

"Hold to the circle, all your hands on the crystal!" Stroud shouted, and the crystal turned warm and then hot beneath their touch until they could hold it no longer, and Stroud bent to place it at their feet. The circle crouched with him and withheld the freezing temperatures hurled at them, although their protective clothing was laden with ice.

"It's expending a great deal of energy over this game," said Stroud.

"So is our skull," said Wiz.

Then the brutally cold storm was suddenly lifted. There was not so much as a sensation it was ever there, save for the falling glasslike pieces of ice as their suits thawed. The skull, too, returned to normal.

"Uncanny," commented a shaken Leonard, "simply uncanny."

An unearthly, ungodly stench began to filter through the tunnels. It was so ghastly that they could even smell it through the protection of the oxygen masks they wore.

"What the hell is that?" asked Wiz.

Leonard was pointing a bony finger at the things that now suddenly appeared to block their way. Stroud saw what was to him a nightmare, the vision of several vampires that he had personally killed in Andover a year ago. Their bodies were fully intact, but they walked upright with the metal stakes he had driven into them. The sight unnerved Stroud as he watched the white maggots feeding on the wounds of the vampires who now opened their mouths wide, baring their fangs.

Leonard was seeing some other horror altogether, a creeping, spiderlike creation. Wiz shouted something about anthropomorphids--creatures with human limbs and organs jammed into their anatomy--while Kendra saw giant insects of the praying mantis variety. The creatures gained the distance between them, scattering Stroud and the others. Stroud shouted, "It's using our own worst nightmares against us! It's rummaging around in our heads for our worst fears!"

It seemed to be true, because now one of the awful vampires had turned into the kind of cannibal werewolf Stroud had once combated in the deep woods of Michigan. "Control your fears, people! Control your fears!"

The darts didn't have any effect on the monsters that pushed them back and back along the corridor, returning them to the hole that would send them once again below the ship to weaken the energy of the skull. Stroud could not believe the precision with which the evil Ubbrroxx re-created the fearsome creatures that had been stored in Stroud's mind, down to the sickening "O" pucker of the vampire wishing only to kiss him about the throat, and the slavering of the werewolf. All around him, Stroud heard the members of his party shouting in terror at their own fearsome visions.

Stroud suddenly reached for his weapon, firing the gas at the menacing monsters. They seemed impervious to it. "What do we do?" shouted Kendra, separated from Stroud by four or five feet. Wiz and Leonard, too, were shouting that their weapons were useless.

The skull levitated from Stroud's pouch, spraying the images of the monsters with a strange ray, creating holographic mists of them into which Stroud stabbed his hand. It went through the vampire image. The images continued to threaten, lunge and attack, but they were as harmless as celluloid. Stroud and the others laughed at the effect and their own fears as they now simply stepped through them.

"And it was going to devour us whole. Each of us!" Kendra was telling Leonard, explaining what her eyes told her was there.

Stroud gently caught the skull in his hands. He feared losing Esruad now; he feared having to sacrifice the skull and its potent contents to this demon. Suppose it gave the demon hyper-supernatural power, a kind of superconductivity in the underworld? Could the cure for Ubbrroxx be worse than the disease? Esruad's crystal-imprisoned spirit had said nothing about the chance possibility, yet it now struck Stroud like a hammerblow, and then the voice of Esruad came clearly rolling through the coils of Stroud's brain, as if brought by the flow of his blood. "I have not come this way to strengthen my enemy, but to destroy him."

"How? How can swallowing the power you have do anything but empower him with more strength?"

The other members of the hunting party turned to see to whom Stroud was speaking, and in the shadows, just beyond Stroud and the skull, was an enormous gargoyle like those seen in medieval texts. If not a gargoyle then a vulture with bat's eyes and snout, winged by virtue of a membrane of skin that stretched between talons, its body covered in fine, ratlike hair.

It lurched forward over the skull and Stroud, knocking Stroud into a reeling cartwheel as he tried to maintain control of the skull. But he lost his grip, and the skull floated to the ceiling and the gargoyle took flight, pursuing it, trying to take hold of it and race off with it. The skull moved about the darkness like a small UFO, dodging the gargoyle as the others helped Stroud to his feet. Kendra fired on the gargoyle, striking it with one of the darts, sending the thing into a spiral before it rammed into the side of the cavern, bursting into flame and screeching an unholy wail. In the glow of its burning, Ubbrroxx revealed his eyes amid the smoke, fixing the party in place and demanding they return the way they had come, leaving the skull behind. The eyes were spewing snakes.

It was a horrid sight and it made them back off, gasping, but when the smoke cleared they saw that the gargoyle's impact had opened a hole in the veneer of the wall, a hole that was marked by timbers. Stroud, the skull returned to his pack, went to the opening and fingered the rotted wood. "We've found it, the ship."

-16-

A strikingly warm, vivid, sun-bathed waking dream of heat and wind sweeping over a gleaming pearl amid a desert by the sea filtered through Stroud's mind. It was so powerful an image, so lovely by comparison to the dark hole below Manhattan, that Stroud found himself unable to resist it. It seemed amplified by his own desire to see more of it. He felt himself with a foot in two worlds, two times...

But the scene in his mind, playing like a flower over a silver sea, held him firm, a moth to its glow. He instinctively feared that it was a trick, a feint, but the subterfuge was brilliant in both light and fascination, for as the windswept desert cleared on the jewel, it became a city by the sea ... a long-ago place out of time, shimmering with a remarkable beauty and strength, enticing him closer and closer.

Yet he stood still, aware of the fact he was in the company of three others who were suddenly concerned for his well-being, three fellow travelers on another plane who were counting on his staying with them, remaining strong and vigilant, to protect them. He didn't feel either Wiz's or Kendra's hands on him, nor truly know that they helped him to a sitting position, for he was half a world away now, in another place, captive to the play in his mind ... No longer was he in a confined earthen tube below a great city with a demon anxious to tear out his throat; no longer was he the sword that swayed before the crusade he led here. At the moment, he was not even a weak shield for the others.

Part of him knew this, wished desperately to claw his way back, to not let himself slide down the belly of the beast within, and he mentally twisted back, a contortionist and a masochist, for fighting back only brought on the pain of horrid memories. Still, he fought, not now wanting to let down all his defenses, or to let Kendra and the others down. He had also let himself down. The demon would come and he would be in his own little black hole when it arrived, never knowing, until it was too late ... too late.

Part of him struggled back, but it was too late. The dream overtook him, and he was locked in the seizure that claimed him.

No longer in control of his own mind, Stroud felt a familiar disquiet. He had all these years fought always to be in control. His infrequent, unaccountable blackouts were chaos and mental mayhem, from which an occasional glimpse of inspiration and knowledge might be had, but not always. Far from being psychic tools which he could adroitly maneuver, most of his blackouts amounted to difficulties in his physiological makeup, the "war" between his brain and the metal encasing it. He had come to believe that slight increases in his blood pressure, for instance, set off a corresponding irritating pressure in his cranium due to the pinching of a minuscule dagger from a frayed edge of the aging metal below the scalp. He thought of it as a slipped disk pinching on a nerve, except that his disk was man-made, and the nerve was a central pathway to his brain.

"Give in to me," he heard the black hole inside him say, and it had the familiar voice of peace and tranquillity that he had heard all his life, the voice of Annanias, his grandfather. It was either a sign that he should give in or a clever ruse of the demon here. But where was here? While his body lay inert against a wall of the cave, his mind was in a time nearly three thousand years ago, a time of tranquillity and prosperity for the people of Etruria, and everywhere was the lilting sound of their flutelike instruments, even in the noisy marketplace along the wharf, clanging also with bells and hammers, where haggling merchants sent up a music of their own. A busy place, teeming with life, it was a city that attracted ships from all over the known world, an axis by which others measured time and place and distance.

High on a plateau, above it all, stood the massive temple, some seventy feet high from its base, stretching in a growing spiral of gleaming stone. It shone like moonstone in its sunbath there on the plains of Etruria. From the hills surrounding, looking down on the temple, it might appear to be a fortress to strangers moving in caravans past the city where Esruad had played in the mud-caked passageways as a child.

Esruad had been born with the gift of sight and he had a vision of the temple, even as a child, but he was the son of a shepherd, hardly capable of building such a shrine, and yet he knew that it would one day be built and that he would largely be responsible for its having been built.

As a young man he drew on the knowledge of his mother and grandmother, an ancient who knew the uses of crushed minerals, heated roots and herbs for medicinal purposes. From his father's side, he nurtured what was called a third eye, for the boy actually saw into the souls of men and into the future. He had foreseen the temple where it now stood, and he had foreseen his place in the temple as magician. He worked in cohort with the religious leaders, using his wizardry for nurturing, healing, sweeping away droughts and locusts.

He wore the finest vestments. He prayed before the Etruscan goddess of healing, and as he grew more powerful he produced insights on the future of all mankind, telling fantastic tales of a place where men would fly through the air in great mechanical birds, of cities that would dwarf the temple, of towers that would cut holes in the belly of the heavens and of sailing ships that would one day penetrate to the moon and the stars beyond. The ancient religious center of Etruria had fought Esruad for fear of him and his visions, and the city was split between those at the temple and those at the old site, and the people, too, had divided.

Over one hundred rooms, the temple was a maze through which people made pilgrimages, seeking the healing power of the temple erected to the goddess Eslia, who promised fertile lands and fertile bodies and good health. With them, visiting pilgrims brought small clay figurines of humans, either replicas of themselves or of aged or sick relatives or friends. They came in caravans, day after day after day, lining up outside the gates of the temple, awaiting Esruad and the new order of religious leaders who did not fear him. Esruad would take in the people to his infirmary, dousing them with herbal waters, prescribing medicines, sometimes lancing and cleaning wounds and on occasion performing the miracle of surgery which he had learned of in his visions. Meanwhile, the religious men would convey the small figures of the ailing masses and place them before the altar for several days before they were given a permanent home in a room filled with such figures. The patient was sent away after a time, but the figures remained behind to continue to tell the goddess where it hurt.

The goddess's own likeness was that of a beautiful woman in robes, surrounded by a company of stone lions. An inscription in lapis lazuli was at the base of the statue, proclaiming in the ancient letters of the Etruscans that Eslia was the queen of all the worlds of the universe. Men worked about the temple documenting the business of the temple, of the religious leaders, and they wrote on their clay tablets of Esruad, who was becoming something of a living god among his people. Herbal treatments, recipes known previously only to Esruad, were being set down on stone in the now-familiar wedge-shaped characters used in ancient Etruscan, lettering which Leonard had called cuneiform in nature. Stroud thought of temples discovered near Baghdad and Nippur which had given up rich lodes of Sumerian and Akkadian documents written on clay tablets. Stroud was reminded of figurines left in Mexican churches even now, as cues to the saints to help cure someone.

Stroud knew that some forms of herbal treatments went back as far as the Stone Age, but it was generally felt that the Babylonians and the Egyptians had been the first people to develop a systematic practice of medicine, and most certainly the first to use surgery. Now Stroud knew better.

Esruad shared his knowledge freely, placing himself at the disposal of the historians, giving them specific recipes of herbs to treat various conditions, from eye infection to diarrhea, constipation and fevers, leaving even a restorative for gray hair and baldness. He also left strict directions for surgical procedures of various kinds. He had even left magical incantations to drive out demon spirits and evil gods that threatened the peace and comfort of Etruria, as well as the lesser demons that afflicted individuals. In fact, Esraud had left a complete medical text in the temple which attempted to clarify the complex and delicate relationship between the religious healers, herbalists and magicians quartered at the temple.

Esruad was not the only magician living at the temple by this time. There was a hierarchy of leadership, a council of members, and on large issues, no one man--not even Esruad--had complete say. The Etruscan temple was democratic, allowing conflicting views and much room for intrigue. While Esruad was busy with patients one morning on a sun-baked day in 793 b.c., he felt the earth below the temple shudder. In fact, the earth below the entire city was shuddering like an earthquake. But it was no earthquake. It was Ubbrroxx, the ancient god of destruction and denial, somehow brought to the surface after eons of sleep. His power shook the temple so badly that the statue of Eslia toppled, crumbling about her fearsome-looking lion guard in the manner of cake. Men Esruad had known all his life had gone deaf and dumb, and they walked out to the desert where a gaping hole had broken open in the earth and they began to pray to the voice that they heard emanating from the pit; they forsook all else for the thing in the hole which wanted a temple built to worship it.

It also wanted the sacrifice of 500,000 humans. And so it built its army and Esruad hid in the temple and worked day and night at whatever alchemy he could devise to combat the monster until he realized he hadn't the power to defeat it, because it drew its power from the faith--or lack of faith--of the others. Everyone in the temple had gone by now, and Esruad stood alone--the only man immune to Ubbrroxx's sway. It sent others to drag Esruad down into the hole with it, to end his puny life, but for a time Esruad fought these off with magical weapons that he had devised that were effective against the human zombies.

Then Esruad lost the battle and was dragged to stand before Ubbrroxx, a sight that blinded Esruad there in the pit. Ubbrroxx ordered Esruad to build a temple that would serve as a place where men would worship only the god that fed on them, telling Esruad that when next he came, he would devour five million men, if his wishes were not met.

Esruad agreed to build the temple, saying that he would build it as a great monument to the power of his god, Ubbrroxx. "I will make it easy for you," Ubbrroxx had said to the Etruscan wizard. The demon then turned to stone before Esruad, who, sensing the change, felt around in the dark pit and touched the scalding stone that was left behind. It was a stone likeness of the hideous, enormous, two-headed demon that had spikes and scales over its body.

Esruad gradually regained his sight, a gift from Ubbrroxx, his new god, he assumed. All of those men who had been used by the demon--some of them Esruad's former enemies in the temple--had fiendishly had a hand in feeding the monster its sacrifices. These men, from religious leaders to beggars, from merchants to midwives, were now clear-eyed and coming out of their forced condition of unknowing and uncaring; out of the fog to the terrible and shattering realization of what they had done and had been made to do.

Still, fear reigned. They feared Ubbrroxx and they fell to their knees at his stone self. It took another generation and much planning on Esruad's part to gather the courage and strength required to dare put his plan into operation, but he did it. Ubbrroxx wanted a temple built to surround his stone image. So be it.

But the temple was built in the form of a ship, and the ship, along with all of Ubbroxx's remains, was let loose from its gantry and out into the ocean. Ubbrroxx was taken to a land that was not populated and there buried with his ship beneath a restraining pyramid that covered him. The work took years upon years, but Esruad, using up all of his psychic energy, had read the meaning of the stone demon and it told him that the god inside must remain at rest, and he had convinced his nation of this.

With this done, Esruad had one final duty before he should pass away, before he should never see his sons and grandsons again. In his alchemist cell in the ruins of the old temple, he fashioned the molds with the help of a young and patient apprentice, a grandson who was very good with metals and stones. The boy had fashioned the molds precisely as Esruad had ordered, seven of them in all, to go with the nine smaller ones and the three larger ones. Using the magical numbers of the year when Esruad had come face-to-face with Ubbrroxx, 793, he now mixed the molten crystal and touch of desert earth over which the demon had stood, and he carefully filled the final molds with the steaming, thick soup. The demon-touched sand would ensure the success of his magic, he was sure...

The veterans of the evil time, those who fed Ubbrroxx blindly and without resistance, began dying away, and as each man, woman and child did so, Esruad visited their bedside like a doting priest giving last rites, but Esruad's rites were those of a powerful magical nature which called on the goddess Eslia to assist him in the deliverance of the souls of such men as himself--weak men who had fallen prey to fear, falling into the pit of the unfaithful. Where should such souls reside for the rest of eternity but inside the crystal skulls that would refract and reflect back their gross sins for all eternity? But more important, so that they might have one final chance at redemption by fighting Ubbrroxx the next time it rose against mankind.

Esruad's grandson, sworn to perform the ceremony he had witnessed thousands of times over, now did so over the silent form of Esruad himself. The skull in the boy's hands lit with a shimmering, yellow-to-gold fire for a moment before it went dormant. He then solicitously placed the skull in the deep ruins of the temple.

Years upon years passed and the crystal stones were discovered and traded to kings and pharaohs for their amusement, little knowing that they housed the souls of men and magicians.

-17-

For Stroud, returning was like coming out of a black vortex that spun him around at a dizzying speed, but in an instant, he had returned to the others there in the tunnels. They'd made him as comfortable as possible, propping him against a wall, Kendra being solicitous over him, the concern creasing her face. Stroud began blinking and it drew them all around him. They were at exactly the place he had left them.

"How long have I been out?"

"Ten minutes, maybe less," Kendra said. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine ... and you? Wiz, Sam?"

"No problems."

Esruad had selected his time wisely, Stroud thought as he stared at the outer hull of the ship, the belly of the beast, the temple that had become the demon.

"We've had a report from Nathan," said Kendra.

"Did you tell him about my condition?"

"We were afraid you'd slipped back into a coma, Abe," said Wiz. "We had to tell him."

"Well, radio him now; tell him I'm on my feet." With that, Stroud got to his feet, saying, "I'm really all right."

"We were worried," she said.

"Frightened," added Leonard.

"What's going on aboveground?" he asked, changing the subject, embarrassed over what must appear to the others as a weakness.

"Nathan says he can only stall so long before the military takes complete control."

Leonard added, "Those CBS and NBC film crews got the tunnel digging on tape, at least what they could make out of it--the slag heaps outside. At any rate, everyone up there is terrified, Abe ... everyone. And you can't blame them."

Stroud was impressed by the intricacies of the tunnels dug by hand by the legion of zombies.

Wiz raised Nathan, telling him that Stroud was fine, just a temporary thing, he called it. Stroud got on the line, using his comlink. "Commissioner, we're just penetrating the exterior of the ship now. We've run into ... obstacles."

"Understood, Stroud, and make it as fast as possible. People up here getting real antsy."

"We expected obstacles," he said, "and we've gotten them."

"The tunnels?"

"Took us away from the ship. Long arm of the beast within."

"So what does that make the ship itself? The damned bowels?"

"Something like that."

"You're sure you all want to step into its gut?"

"Not a whole lot of choice, Commissioner. This ... this event is rather complicated, and you might say I had my ticket reserved about three thousand years ago."

Nathan chuckled nervously into the radio, not understanding the implications of Stroud's remarks. Static was beginning to break up the communication. Nathan said that he was pulling for them, and if Stroud made it back alive he'd buy him a New York pizza and a beer.

"You're on, sir. Just plea..."

"What's ... at?"

"...keep ... pack off for ... time we ... greed ... pon."

"Roger ... til dawn. Do every ... in my power."

"Thanks, Commissioner."

"You're thank ... me? Stroud, e ... you're the bravest ... I ever met, or the ... idiotic ... goes for your traveling companions-sss-well ... til next ... Stroud, over'n..."

Kendra went about monitoring everyone's gauges and giving a full report. Everything was in working order, but they had only half the oxygen supply they had entered with. The physical turmoil and emotional stress had taken its toll. Leonard was looking very weak, and even Wiz sat in a depressed slump against the wall just staring at the hull of the ship that now confronted them.

Stroud was fatigued himself, and he did not find fault with the others. He wondered now if perhaps he should not have come alone, but the skull had said three good men with faith and courage were required. He had two men and a woman with him, but he wasn't at all sure of their faith, despite their obvious courage in coming so far with him.

"Once we're inside the ship, gentlemen," said Stroud calmly, "you can turn back at any time."

It was said with such simple sincerity that Kendra and the others just stared at him. Kendra glimpsed the old Stroud in him now, the man she had slept with.

"Is that what your skull tells you?" she asked.

"It is what my heart tells me."

"We just may take you up on that," said Leonard. "My own heart is flapping like a chicken trying to take flight." He tried a laugh but it became a cough.

"If that's the case, what're we sitting around here for?" said Wiz. "Not that I have any intention of leaving you here alone, Abe."

"You face no shame in turning back once we penetrate the hull. It's the reason I was so ... upset when you all ran from the first entranceway we found. So far, we've been playing the demon's game. Now we begin to play our chess pieces."

Kendra stared across at Stroud. He was once again distant, distracted. He was playing some kind of mental game with the demon of the ship. It was as if that byte of information had come straight from his mind to hers earlier when she had thought of it in exactly those terms. She wondered if she and the other two doctors weren't Esruad's pawns in this bizarre war game.

"Yes, let's get on with it, Dr. Stroud," she said.

Before them stood the smooth wall of the ship showing no planking marks, nothing to pin the eye on. It looked like the great belly of a whale. Her eyes used to the dark, her nose used to the damp and clay, she still thought that she could smell the leviathan's rotting carcass, and that she could see the nearly imperceptible, inaudible breathing as the ribs of the whale moved in and out. She eerily wondered if they were about to be swallowed up by the whale.

It was as if the thought had been spoken aloud, for Stroud stared at her, drawing near to her mask so that she could see the expression on his face when he said, "Yes, Kendra, the beast has become the ship, and the ship the beast; we are about to step inside the beast once we lance a hole in its belly."

What he was saying, and the way he said it, frightened her more than anything she had seen down here. "You must all return after you enter," he said.

"What about you? Do you expect to die here?" she asked.

"Leave me to my fate."

Deceptive appearances had made of the ship wall an impenetrable leviathan, but it was far from impenetrable. It gave at the touch. Breathing heavily on it made it move like cardboard.

Decay was the operative word here in the bowels of the ancient ship. Immediately the archeologists went to work, examining the petrified wood that had become like stone to the touch, almost like charcoal. Yet covering the exterior, was a layer of living fungus and mushroomlike growths which turned into a profusion of flying spores at the slightest touch. "What holds the damned thing together?" asked Stroud.

"The earth here is almost pure clay. It has retarded the natural decay of the wood, and the wood itself--teak would be my guess--" began Wiz.

"Yes, teak beams, imagine it," agreed Leonard, staring.

"The Estrucans were master shipbuilders."

They had stepped inside the ship, and the moment they did so the Etruscan skull, which had somehow fallen into the hands of the pharaoh of Egypt, and had been buried with him, began to glow with a singular orange-to-yellow light. It went bright with the color, dimmed and became bright again, dimmed and brightened, dimmed again, as if breathing, until it finally settled on a glow similar to the sodium-vapor light of a modern streetlamp.

"Damned thing gives me the creeps almost as much as this ship," said Kendra.

"Don't you see that the closer we get to the true cause of the evil here, the stronger Esruad's power becomes?" asked Stroud.

"All I know is that our time is running out."

"Look, look here," said Wiz, pointing. It was a stack of terra-cotta bowls, ladles, jugs, cups. "These will help to date the ship," suggested Wiz.

"Very similar to the terra cotta taken from the Kyrenia ship," said Leonard, "somewhere about 700 b.c."

"Closer, then, to the Yassi Ada ship discovered--"

"We haven't time, gentlemen," Stroud told them.

"Over here," said Leonard. He led them to a collection of double-headed axes, pickaxes, a hoe, a shovel, billhooks, pruning hooks, hammers, knives, punches, gouges, files, chisels, bits and thousands of wooden peg nails.

"Such instruments prove vividly that the Etruscans were most certainly an independent empire, Stroud."

"Count on it," said an elated Leonard, who pulled forth a camera he had smuggled in. He began snapping picture after picture with the 35mm. "We must record this."

"God, if we could only do this right," said Wiz, "with stereophotography, with care and--"

"Gentlemen, this isn't a typical archeological site," shouted Stroud. "It's possessed of the father of evil. I understand your professional concerns, but we must be realistic."

"Take as many overlapping photographs as you can here, Leonard," said Wiz. "We are not coming away from this empty-handed, Dr. Stroud."

Frowning, Stroud said, "I have to push along, for the center of the ship." The others didn't have the slightest idea that the entire staging of this event was somehow meant for Stroud and Esruad to come together at this point in time, to face the evil of the ship together, that it was all somehow predetermined when Esruad had worked his magic to imprison himself and thousands of other souls in the crystal skull.

"Get some pictures of the timbers, Leonard," Wiz was saying now.

Stroud cleared away some of the debris along the bottom and found the keel, which was a forearm's width. It ran into the next cabin and the next, down through the ship. Leonard clicked off pictures of the find. "The keel will be attached to a stern piece and presumably a similar bow piece. Then the builders added the teak planks," said Stroud, his own archeological interests peaked now.

Kendra Cline looked into the ominous maw of the next cell of the ship, wondering what lay in wait for them there.

"Yes," Wiz was agreeing with Stroud, "the builders added the teak to the ribs on each side, secured in the classical fashion by tenons set into the thickness of the adjoining planks. Such workmanship!"

"And thought to be known only by the Greeks and Romans," added Leonard.

"So that places the waterline at the approximate level of two decks above us," said Stroud.

"Right reasoning," agreed Wiz.

"All right, so we have our direction for up, but which way is stern and which is bow, and how close are we to the center?" asked Stroud.

"Almost impossible to say."

"Time is running on, Abe," said Kendra, getting antsy, "and why's it been so ... so calm?"

"Licking its wounds, perhaps," he suggested. "We've penetrated the ship for a second time. That's got to worry the bastard thing."

"I hope you're right."

"Well, we have a direct corridor that way," said Stroud, "but should we take it?"

"It could be another trap," agreed Kendra, staring at the black hole ahead of them.

Stroud checked a gyrocompass he'd brought with him. "It's pointing north, and if the bow was, as you say, pointing east, then we must go a little north to get to the center."

"Let's go," said Wiz.

Leonard nodded. Stroud led them, his light immediately picking up the markings on the wall here. They were like rock carvings, crude yet detailed, of a whale, a lizardlike creature and some strange markings. Stroud indicated the markings to the others and his light picked them up clearly, causing Wiz and Leonard to tarry more. The representations meant nothing to Kendra, and yet she, too, was drawn to them:

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"Sperm whale," said Leonard, Wiz agreeing with a grunt as both men studied the markings. Leonard snapped more photos. Then, at their feet, they saw scattered piles of human bones and skulls. Stroud held Kendra back as the two scientists climbed over the find, studying the bones with quick eyes.

"Ancient human bones."

"Frequent bony growths on the surface of the joints," said Wiz. "Our Etruscan friends, young and old, suffered badly from arthritis. Probably the cool and damp of Etruria." Among the bones, Wiz picked out a long necklace of carefully perforated whale teeth.

"Well, we begin to know a little more about these people," said Leonard, taking the beautiful necklace from Wiz and staring through his face mask before Wiz placed it into a pouch and put it away.

Then suddenly all the bones in the place began to rattle and move and rise. They were now being hurled at the party of the living that had dared to enter this death ship. The bones struck with great force, the skulls hurtling at them with such ferocity that they backed from the area, unable to go on. From the portal of the other room, they watched the dance of the bones, which was more like flight of the bones as they hurled round and round the room, creating a dense curtain, a kind of energy field that held Stroud's party in check.

"What do we do now?" asked Kendra.

"Take out a wall," said Stroud, angry. He hurled himself at a wall and it was like going through cardboard. He was on the other side, drenched in spores and fungi that had exploded into a shower of dust with his effort. "We need to move up from here," he told the others, jabbing at the overhead planks. It took only the slightest hit to bring down the roof over them. Cascading debris rained around them, the dust creating a fog that was eerily lit by the skull as Stroud lifted it and held it up, moving it in a circular fashion here. The light penetrated the dust cloud only so far and gave them no warning of the hellish creatures the other side of the dust. Flying at them from nowhere came some thirty enormous moths, the size of cub bears, with huge mandibles, trying desperately to tear away their masks, perforate their clothing and get at the flesh inside. Their wings beat like small claps of thunder, and a screech at a piercing level filled the room as the power of their wings stirred the grainy dust cloud into an even greater pitch of confusion; this cut their sight so badly that they could not see one another.

"Stroud!"

"Kendra! Kendra!"

"Leonard, are you there!"

"Use your weapons! The gas!" shouted Kendra, who fired away.

"Don't let them get your clothing!"

"Son of a bitch!"

The gas sent one and then another and another of the batlike moths crashing to the floor and into the walls, sending up an ever-thicker curtain of mold and flying bacteria and dust particles. Stroud searched the darkness blindly, feeling his way, careful not to let the skull from his grasp. He called out to Kendra, and she to him, until they found one another. Wiz and Leonard joined them.

"Is everyone all right?" asked Kendra.

"One of them tore a rent in my suit," said Leonard, shaken.

"I've patched it," said Wiz, "but I'm not so certain that will help."

"How do you feel, Dr. Leonard?" asked Kendra.

"Aside from having my brains and my bowels emptied by fear?" he replied. "All in one piece. So far, I'm all right."

Kendra examined Leonard's gear, giving a thumbs-up sign, but saying, "At the first sign of trouble with your breathing, Doctor--"

"I'll let you know, Dr. Cline."

"Be certain that you do."

"We've got to get above," said Stroud.

"How will the timbers hold us?"

"Good question. Maybe we'd best hold up here a moment, take time to gather our bearings," suggested Wiz.

"Yeah, time for a rest," said Leonard, flopping down.

Kendra watched Leonard closely, concerned about his condition. It may be more than fatigue, in which case he'd have to come out of his protective wear to take a hypodermic.

"All of you stay put. I'm going ahead with the skull."

"But, Stroud!" began Wiz.

"No arguments! It's between Esruad and that thing in there now. Remain here. It's likely to concentrate its efforts on me and the skull if you stay back."

Kendra rushed to him, holding on. "Come back to us, Abe Stroud."

Ignoring her plea, he tossed a rope overhead and caught a large wooden beam. It looked as if it would hold as he put his weight against it, pulling himself up and up until he was through the opening. He called down, "If I'm not back within the hour, you're all to vacate the ship and the tunnels, get back to the surface any way you can."

"We won't leave you, Stroud!" she cried.

"You do as I say, do you hear! Dr. Wisnewski, Leonard."

"We will do what we must," said Wiz, a sadness in his voice.

"Contact Nathan. Bring him up to date," said Stroud to them. "Plead for more time." He looked at his gauges: air was running out along with time.

"Take some extra of the gas," said Kendra.

But Stroud declined, saying, "No, you may need it to ward off any further attacks."

"You're sure you want to play it this way?"

"Absolutely, yes."

"Alone ... you'll be all alone," said Kendra.

He hefted the orange-glowing skull of crystal. "Not entirely"

Stroud had found some side timbers which were almost firm, but he slipped again and again, and the sounds coming from beneath his feet threatened to send him crashing through to the deck below, when suddenly he felt a strange weightlessness and he realized that he was hovering above the boards over which he walked, and that Esruad's crystal skull was at his feet, guiding his steps, creating the magic of walking on air.

He moved along the black wall of the ship, thinking of his ancestry: his grandfather, a great man whose dark secret was that he stalked and killed vampires. Stroud's grandfather had descended from the man who had destroyed Dracula, Van Helsing, whom the world remembered as a fictional character. Stroud's family knew better. Stroud's thoughts of his grandfather brought a quiet calm, and then his grandfather's voice rose from within his mind, saying, "Trust Esruad ... for he is one of us."

Stroud knew that he could trust his grandfather's voice as he had in the past. All of his own inner fears and doubts about the power inherent in the crystal skull began to fade as he realized that he, Stroud, carried the genes of the Etruscan who had committed himself to the eternity of the skull.

In an excited state now, Stroud recalled the teachings of his grandfather. That which seemed impossible, even incomprehensible to most men--supernatural beings at work in the world--was in fact quite simple, strangely, even "natural." How else to explain the transmigration of the souls of men, how that very soul could be stripped from a man, or encased in crystal as had become the fate of Esruad? The battle for the soul was the oldest and most fundamental fought by mankind.

And now it was being fought again...

Christ's own soul had risen from the blood of the man he had become. In man's own veins lies his final destination.

Somehow, via some unnatural, sinister alchemy, dark forces had appeared in the world, beings taunted the soul and chipped away at it; their ultimate aim was not carrion or even the red life's blood. With the stolen flesh and blood, these things stole the souls of men and women ... That is what Ubbrroxx demanded. And with each soul conquered, its dark evil flourished greater and greater. Ubbrroxx, satanic genius, natural- and supernatural-bound and inextricably mixed, like God and Satan. This was the battle being fought here now. Good and Evil, evolution and mutation and all that lay between the two...

Then Stroud was suddenly on a hard surface which was less than solid ground. For the brittle pieces that made up his floor skittered away and rattled across one another as he stepped, threatening to send him over the side. It was a truly enormous boneyard that reached up from the bottommost depths of the evil ship at the juncture where he stood, the remains of 500,000 carcasses. Stroud's booted feet sent bones cascading down the sides of this mountain into what appeared the way to Hell. The bones formed a wobbling mass over which he now climbed on all fours. He had no idea how large this mountain of bones was, or how far it went beyond the beam of his light, and time was running out...

He must surely find his enemy, the enemy of all men, somewhere out there on the other side. But which way? And was he up to it? Did he really have the courage to go on, even if he knew which direction to take, and most important, if he really knew and understood the enormity of the evil waiting just beyond the dark side for him? Why him? Because he was a Stroud? Was being a Stroud reduced to this--a curse? What would happen if he should fail? What would have happened had he not been pulled off that plane by Leonard and Wisnewski, if he had gone quietly home to Andover, Illinois, and from there on to a new archeological adventure on the other side of the globe, leaving New York to be sacrificed to Esruad's evil god?

How very strangely life worked, Stroud thought, as if in the same pattern that emanated from the earth over which water rapidly carved its movement. At the moment, Abe Stroud felt like a mere crystal of sand over which time itself was washing.

"Esraud cannot save you," whispered Ubbrroxx in his ear, and yet the voice filled the room. "You are mine now ... as he was mine once..."

"Never!" shouted Stroud, tumbling loose particles from the ship with the sheer energy of his own voice. "Never, you bastard thing."

"Be strong in your belief, Stroud. Hold firm to what you know of me." It was Esruad's voice, the voice of the skull. "Trust in me, not in anything else--not even your own eyes. I trusted my eyes, and for it, I had my eyes and my soul put out."

"You are ... blind?" Stroud quaked with the idea.

"Those imprisoned in the skull are all blind fools ... fools who did not see in life, and so who do not see in death."

"So I am to trust a blind fool?"

"Yes."

Stroud wondered what Esruad was trying to tell him. Much of their discussion here in the ship had to be in a cryptic kind of code of half-truths and innuendo, as the skull had alerted him to the fact that their enemy would monitor all their communications, just as it would monitor any communication through any modern devices he used with the others and those on the outside. Ubbrroxx would then use whatever information it could gather from these communications against Stroud.

"You may have to sacrifice the woman," Esruad had told him again, and once again Stroud said that he could never bring himself to do so.

"You must if it means winning. You must win against this evil, Stroud."

The inner monologue welled and waned inside his head like the sea tides, and there was a faint echo, also inside his head, as if bouncing off the steel plate which was acting as a kind of radar. The echo was Ubbrroxx, or that part of him that he sent out to infiltrate Stroud's mind, to gather in his thoughts, desires, fears and anguishes. Ubbrroxx was there now picking over the beaches of his memories, both good and bad, beautiful and ugly. He sensed it inside his head, but fortified with the warning that this would occur, he expected many seductions would follow. Stroud girded himself up.

The idea that Esruad knew every step the demon would take might have instilled a keen suspicion in Stroud if it were not for the shared secrets of the Etruscan's own worse nightmare: that Ubbrroxx would continue on and on and on through eternity feeding off mankind in ever greater numbers.

It appeared that Esruad's nightmare and Stroud's own coincided, and for this reason Stroud had decided to place his complete faith in the ancient wizard. But giving over Kendra to the beast ... Stroud still wondered if he could do it.

"You must," Esruad whispered in his ear, sounding now as demanding as the demon. "You have no choice."

-18-

Commissioner James Nathan could not believe the eerie calm that had come over the site of the devastation where 500,000 zombies stood against them, frozen in place. Some of his key people felt this was the time to attack, and so did the military brass, but he had made a promise to Stroud and he intended to keep his word. But holding off the others was getting increasingly difficult, especially since they had heard nothing from Stroud in an hour.

Then the communication came through from Kendra Cline, informing him of their situation, and that Stroud had gone on alone.

"How is Dr. Leonard now?" Nathan asked.

"Holding."

"And Wisnewski?"

"We're alive," said Wiz in response. "Our spines are like rubber, but otherwise we are fine. You must keep your people out, Nathan, do you understand? They wouldn't survive even a moment down here, son, believe me."

"What is Stroud doing, going on alone?"

"He has his reasons. We're counting on him, all of us," said Leonard, "possibly the entire human race, as it is shaping up. Because this thing will come again in the future, and each time it returns, it will devour more and more and more..."

"You people have a little over an hour before you've got to get clear of there, do you understand? The Army intends to shell the entire site at dawn."

"Stroud needs more time than that, Commissioner," Kendra pleaded.

Nathan shook his head and said, "I can't buy him a minute more. You people best start back now."

"No, Commissioner," said Leonard. "We stay until Stroud returns."

"Don't be fools!"

"You heard Dr. Leonard," said Kendra. "If you intend to bury Stroud here, we'll be buried with him." She hoped her bluff would buy the time Stroud needed.

"Wisnewski, you can't be as idiotic as your friends!"

"I've long been noted for my idiocy, Commissioner." He laughed into the communicator before they shut Nathan off.

Topside, Nathan seethed with frustration and anger, the feeling of helplessness so overwhelming as to make him see red.

"You should never have allowed those fool scientists in," said a Captain McDonald of the U.S. Armed Forces Special Services who was itching to turn his men loose on the zombies and his mortars loose on the pit.

"All I know is that we had a deal, McDonald, and you're going to stick to it, to the last minute!" Nathan knew that negotiating another second with McDonald and the others was useless. He stormed away from the other man to have another look through his field glasses at the calm before the storm.

He thought about his last conversation with Stroud, and the grim feeling that he would never hear the other man's voice again settled over him like a shroud. But he must resist the impulse to assume that Stroud and the others were doomed to failure, that there was no hope for them, for without that hope, James Nathan believed there was no other hope on the horizon. He didn't for a moment believe that the battery of tanks and howitzers being moved into place by the military was any match for the kind of power he had seen firsthand.

New York was his city, and on a normal night, he'd be able to look out over the harbor, maybe take his sixty-footer out for a night cruise to turn her to leeward and stare back at the jeweled necklace of the city in lights, following the constellations along the sensuous path where she lay snug against the harbor, winking ... always winking. To most people, in and out of the city, New York was a sprawling madhouse built on the shoulders of an Atlas whose main interest was commerce; to James Nathan the city was a graceful lady lounging as carelessly as a disinterested goddess like those you might see in a Babylonian temple, all-powerful and all around, and yet unseen ... just out of sight and out of range of the dimension of mankind. Until you wounded her. She could be as dangerous and unyielding as the ocean, as treacherous as a mountain glacier, callous, cold, warm as her mood dictated.

James Nathan had felt the pulse of the sensuous living thing that was New York City, and even with all her ills, she was a towering woman of substance--never to be taken for granted--and as for beauty, a modern Mesopotamia where most lived out their lives, nestled in her bosom, but never knowing her. Like lice on a mammoth elephant, krill in the presence of the whale. Most busy with their little ruts, their minds frantic with schemes that centered on themselves...

People ... what else was to be expected?

What can I take from her, from this goddess called New York? That is what people wanted to know. Take from her, always taking, stripping, biting out large chunks of her, but here was Stroud, a stranger to her, come to unselfishly give his life for her. Amazing...

Nathan, a native of the goddess, had spent his life below the temple of her lights, even as a small boy in a two-room flat with his mother, helping to support her through illness and alcoholism. He recalled nights on end, looking out his dirty little window over that grocery store at the towering monoliths that looked like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, the lights gleaming so proudly that they sent shards of themselves as far away as here, to him. He saw the towers, the lights she held out to him in the darkness, and dreamed of one day taking something from her as well. All his life had been a struggle to become, and now he had reached his goal.

Now it was time to give something back to the city, and that prize was a man named Abraham Stroud. His home was threatened, and he had had to trust in a man who was more than just a man, a man who had some hold over the evil from below. Nathan found a dark corner in the bunker he shared with the radioman, gave a passing thought to his dead mother and prayed silently for Stroud's success.

Abe Stroud decided it was time to communicate with the others left behind, to be certain they were all right, and to tell them it was time they began back toward the surface, to get as far from the ship as possible. He reached Kendra, who had been for some time trying to get his attention on the comlink.

"Abe, why didn't you answer? We were worried sick--"

"Never mind that now. Did you reach Nathan?"

"Yes, but--"

"Did you gain any more time?"

"You'd best not bank on it, but we told him we weren't leaving you."

"Well, you are leaving, right now. All of you, out."

"Abe, the moment they see us surface, your life's forfeit! We won't do that. We can't."

Stroud suddenly heard screams coming through. Kendra and the others were under attack once more. He shouted for clarification but the static and the shouts ended and he knew no more than he did before. He was about to rush back when suddenly he tripped as he scurried over the bone pile. He got up readily and continued, but he fell once more, his feet plunging into holes opening up in the pile below him moments before he felt the quake that sent him onto his stomach again.

Stroud heaved to free himself of the bones, which seemed now to be tugging at his feet, pulling him down, ripping at his protective wear, snatching at his boots. Looking down, he saw that fleshy arms had risen from the bone pile and were tearing at him, attempting to pull him under where he would suffocate below the bones. He kicked out at them, but they seemed to be without feeling. He snatched at the wand to fire the gas, but he was hauled down and was being sucked into the quicksand of the bones.

"Esruad! Esruad!" he called out for help as he clambered for his footing. The skull rolled from the pack on Stroud's back, sending out a searing light that instantly covered the bones in a kind of radiation that stung the fleshy hands and arms reaching up for Stroud, making them loosen their grip. Stroud scrambled to his feet, finding his suit had been ripped in several places. The bulky outfit was of no further use, and so he began to tear it away. He stood in the light of the skull, bathed in it, and he somehow knew it would protect him far better than the synthetic clothing, and the paltry remainder of his oxygen tank.

Suddenly the bones opened up, and Stroud found him-self on the other side of the "feast" leavings of the creature, cascading down and down, falling with a powerful thud, the skull lost somewhere atop the mountain of bones. Stroud struggled to maintain consciousness, the glow of the orange aura of the skull weak but still a shimmering outline around him.

"Esruad ... Esruad," he moaned, but the skull did not respond. He was stunned and fought for clearer vision.

Stroud saw a hideous creature burning with fire leap into view, coming straight for him. Stroud instinctively recoiled, believing the touch of the creature would set him instantly aflame. The monster reeked of decay and it burned as if made of gaseous materials, and yet it bore the look of a desiccated body. Stroud recognized the apparition as what Wiz called a lich, the single most powerful form of the undead. It greatly resembled a mummy in its tattered appearance, but those tatters and hanging strips of cloth were once flesh. The creature's eye sockets were empty, dead blackness with a green pinpoint of piercing light at each center that served for eyes. It was obvious this thing saw best in the dark. An aura of death and coldness radiated from it despite the fire all around it.

According to Wiz's books, the lich had been a wizard or priest in life, damned to an eternal hell. The bits of cloth still dangling from the soupy, lumpy body were supposedly magical. But also, according to Wiz's books, the touch of the creature could send a living man into a frozen state of paralysis, to make him utterly unable to move.

It lunged at Stroud and missed as he sidestepped, averting its touch. The bone pile it careened into turned to burning rubble, so intense was the heat of its touch. Somehow this lich had reversed the potency of its touch and commanded enough heat to sear bone or to cremate Stroud.

Stroud didn't know what to do. The creature advanced and he fired the gas, fearing the gas would also kill himself should he inhale enough of it. But Stroud found that the magical light surrounding him acted to keep the gas out. But the lich, too, was protected by the fire around it, which consumed the gas, dissipating it. It was immune even to modern charms, Stroud thought. The lich sent out a green light from its center, which took the shape of a dragonlike snake, enormous and weaving between them, readying to strike. Stroud saw human eyes in the snake-dragon's hideous head, and he knew the creature at the center of the ship was now placing all its energies into destroying Abraham Stroud, and taking possession of the skull on its own terms.

With the formation of the dragon-snake, which was as large as a helicopter, the lich's fire dimmed and receded.

Stroud backed away from the serpent creature that began to strike, first at his left, then his right. Stroud felt out of control, felt as if he were on the verge of defeat. He saw the lich circling to his other side. The two creatures were backing him along a dark corridor that no doubt would end in his death.

"Esruad!" He invoked the name again and again, searching the darkness for the lost skull when suddenly behind him there appeared another lich, more vicious and ugly than the first, but whose vestments were in much better repair, showing a nobility about them. This lich's eyes spewed forth an orange fire and its skull was neither dirty or filth-ridden, as there was no skin, hair or gooey soup streaming from it. In fact, the skull looked absolutely sleek now that Stroud could see clearly as this one neared him.

Completely surrounded now, Stroud heard the second lich speak his name. "Stroud, I am with you. It is I, Esruad."

Stroud feared it was a trick, but he looked more closely at the lich's features, and alternating with the dead skull was that of the crystal skull. The orange-eyed lich was smoking like the first one, except that it smoked with a freezing-cold air that frothed off it, and inside of this, at the heart of it, there was a visible fire.

"Defend yourself!" shouted Esruad's new form, a form that required all of the energy of the skull. In Esruad's hand appeared a sword of ice that he plunged at the fiery lich, which now backed carefully away, a fire sword appearing suddenly in its grasp, materializing from within it.

Esruad attacked, the two swords pounding overhead, ringing with a spectral clash, fire and ice shattering in all directions as the serpent with its dragon body leaped onto Stroud, whose protective outer current was losing its charge.

Stroud saw the serpent head come at him with its fangs about to strike when his own scream mingled with that of the first lich. Esruad had stabbed it through its center and turned it to stone, and then the serpent dragon fell atop Stroud like a gunnysack, dead and reeking of years of decay, molten with an oozy layer of soup that sent waves of disgust through Stroud. Barely had he gotten to his feet when another snake-dragon attacked from behind, knocking him to his knees. This one had dropped from overhead where it had been clinging to the ceiling. Stroud felt the fangs lock into his throat like two enormous meat hooks; he felt the blood gush up and out, draining down his back and chest. He was in its clutches, and it had him near death when Esruad lobed it in half with his ice sword.

Stroud, weak and trembling from the venom coursing through him, knew that he was a dead man, that there was no way out from this point on. He didn't even have the strength to push away the monster that spilled its insides over him. Esruad had to do this, too, for him.

But as Esruad did so, Stroud found the strength to drag himself away from the ugly, desiccated features of his ancient ancestor, for Esruad's appearance was as gruesome as the other lich. Esruad was a lich, a long-dead wizard who had come back to life, and he seemed to grow in strength here amid the horrors of his avowed enemy, Ubbrroxx. In fact, he almost seemed to draw his new existence from the creature, as if he was in cohorts with it and had played Stroud for a fool.

"Yes, I draw strength from this place, but not from the demon," said Esruad, reaching a spindly, dead hand to him. "You have brought me to the realm where I can flourish in order to fight our common enemy, Stroud. You must continue to believe, for if you fail to do so, I can't protect you any further."

Stroud didn't know what to believe, and yet Esruad had warned that it would come to this. Ubbrroxx was deliberately placing doubt in his mind, dividing their combined strength.

And here stood Esruad as Stroud had never seen him before, his sword gone back inside the body from which it had materialized, standing in tattered yet royal raiments that hung limply on a once noble frame below the mummified creature that had stepped from the ages.

"You have no reason to fear me," Esruad almost shouted, angry at Stroud's reluctance. "If you fear me, if you doubt me, the venom of the creature will take you. Fight your eyes, Stroud. Use that mind of yours! That will."

Stroud had been warned by the skull time and again about appearances and deceptions, but he had not been prepared for Esruad's graveyard exterior.

Esruad came closer. Stroud flinched involuntarily. Overhead and surrounding them came the laughter of Ubbrroxx as if he were watching the scene unfold. The demon's voice said, "You have lost your human helpmate, Esruad. Now you are alone."

Stroud pulled away but Esruad draped himself over Abraham. Stroud saw the flesh-peeled body black out everything else; simultaneously, he felt an overwhelming weakness overtake his vision and his mind as he slipped helplessly into unconsciousness, falling deep into what he sensed was his last sleep as the venom reached toward his brain.

"No! No! No!" shouted Esruad at Stroud. "Nooooooo!"

Ubbrroxx's laughter shook the ship, shook its own whale belly.

Esruad looked around him, trembling so badly that the loose tatters of his death shroud shivered like leaves. But as he trembled, he put his hands through and into Stroud's midsection. Esruad's entire frame lit with a yellow to gold to orange light. As he worked over Stroud's body, he appeared to be mourning a terrible death.

Kendra lashed out with everything remaining to her. They'd come in bands, the little rodent things scurrying along the ship walls, rafters, floor, like an army of crawling bugs. There were too many of them and some had escaped the gas and darts long enough to get at their protective wear, ripping into the cloth with vicious shrews' teeth, opening all of them up to the danger of the unholy infection. She'd been talking to Stroud when the first attack occurred.

Now she was separated from Dr. Leonard and Wiz and searching for them. Wiz called out on seeing her light. "Here, over here!"

They'd retreated to the tunnels, and in the gas fog and confusion she hadn't. Now she saw that her suit pants were torn open by the awful little beasts sent to torment them and make of them three more victims to the horror here.

Stroud remained their only hope, but now she couldn't raise him on the comlink, and the eerie silence at the other end sent shivers of fear through her along with the vile virus that must surely be coursing through her now.

"Dear God, dear God," Wiz was saying when she reached him and collapsed beside him. "Leonard is not good."

Wiz's clothes, too, had been torn asunder. The fact they were still on oxygen helped, but for how long? The oxygen was fast being depleted with each scare thrown into them in this horror house. Kendra knew that a normal respiratory rate was fourteen to sixteen breaths per minute. A mental check of her own rate had her up around thirty-five. She hadn't lost any blood, had taken no bites, and for this she considered herself lucky when she saw the blood splotches over much of Leonard's body. The vile things had gotten to him, and their poisonous bites had thrown him into shock. She went desperately, perhaps futilely, to work over him, injecting him with what she prayed was a proper antidote, but as she did so Leonard, his eyes wide and without pupils, attempted to tear away what remained of her mask, snatching at her air hose, trying to get at her face any way he could.

Wiz pulled Leonard's arms from her, shouting uselessly at Leonard, who suddenly slumped over, dead. "My God, my God," repeated Wisnewski, whose remark was answered by a horrifying, building laughter that seemed to come from everywhere around them and then from Leonard's body, which was suddenly moving as with a mechanical life of its own. Leonard's frame lifted and he came at Wiz, extending his hands toward the other man, saying, "Help me, Wiz ... help me ... My God ... My Gawwwwwwwwwd!" This was followed by a bloodcurdling laugh. "Your God does not exist here! I am your god here! Kneel before your new god!"

Kendra fired one of her last darts into Leonard's body, causing it to crumple.

She rushed to a shaken Wisnewski, who could not bring himself to look on Leonard.

"We're next ... we're next," Wiz mumbled and blubbered.

"No, we're out of here. Come on, Dr. Wisnewski, come on!" She began to lead him back toward what she believed to be the way they had come to this part of the ship. "We'd best do as Stroud said. I ... I can't raise him any longer on the communicator."

"You don't suppose ... you don't believe that ... that he, too, is ... dead?"

Kendra couldn't bring herself to say what she believed.

-19-

Stroud was somewhere between darkness and light, life and death, but he did not know how far to one side or the other he stood, or rather lay--or was he swimming weightless amid the acrid odors of the death ship and all the horrors of the grave it represented? He only knew that he was being buoyed up and up, carried off and away by a power that was not his own. He smelled fire and yet he felt ice as it burned into his abdomen. The venom of the serpent coursing through his veins? Probing, squeezing his insides?

Stroud was eleven years old and trapped beneath the seat, the car aflame. His father's body was slumped over the wheel, the horn blaring. His mother's body was somewhere outside, thrown from the car despite her seat belt. Young Stroud had been asleep one moment and listening to the screams of his parents the next. They'd been on their way back to Chicago from Andover, from his grandfather's house. His parents had talked of one day taking charge of his grandfather's affairs in Andover, of taking control of the family estate there. And now they were dead. And now he was trapped in the burning vehicle, his arms pinned beneath him, his body half under the seat in front of him, where his father's body had now begun to burn.

He screamed and screamed and screamed and then some powerful hands reached in and hefted him from the fiery wreck. It had been a policeman, who had raced to the scene when he saw the flames.

He was taken in by his grandfather Annanias, raised by the old man, never knowing until long after his grandfather's own death at the hands of the Andover Devil that his parents had been murdered and that he, too, had been a target of the Andover Devil. Stroud had only learned the truth after years of being away, and after several visitations at Stroud Manse by the ghost of Annanias. He had taken so much on faith all his life from the old man; and then he had to take so much on faith from the old man's ghost.

He knew he must do the same now with Esruad; that Esruad was just another form of Annanias, working through the depths of other generations, other dimensions.

Stroud wondered if it was too late, however; if his lapse of faith had not breached their carefully tempered bond. He wondered if the demon had not already destroyed the delicate balance, and was not at this moment watching him squirm on a slowly revolving spit. That's how hot Stroud felt, as if he were roasting from the inside out.

Then he suddenly retched--a good sign, a sign of life. Spasms shook him with the strength of ice to the tenth power lodged in his bones. The stiff iciness was becoming a kind of paralysis, his stomach seeming to turn to lead, his backbone like iron as if in retaliation to the pumping stomach that spewed forth a sickening gelatinous substance. Tearful and spitting the acrid bile, Stroud wondered if it was not his very insides being ripped from him by Ubbrroxx.

He had gone blind from the venom. It tore at his every muscle, ballooned his every artery, and the pain was like a hundred twisted knots being turned inside him. The sensation of steroids on muscle, he imagined. His abdominals pinched his entrails, and for now it was as if he were shrinking on the inside, going within himself, deeper, deeper and deeper, as his mind crouched in a vain attempt to hide from the pain.

It was killing him.

It was everywhere ... around and inside him.

It held him as if he were a child, plucking him from one fire to place him in another.

It sent rivers of electric shock through his nerves.

Swimming in pain.

No lack of pain.

No lack...

"You will come to accept me as your god, Stroud," the ancient demon spoke.

Esruad now seemed powerless and far away, blocked.

And Stroud realized now that he was not swimming, but his mind was ... swimming away from the wizard from 793 b.c.

As a backdrop to his pain he heard the evil laughter of Ubbrroxx. He heard explosions and the mad rattle of bones. He imagined lightning bolts exploding all around him, and he wondered if it was bombs and explosives coming from above; wondered if he'd be buried here with the ancient bone pile created by the creature of creatures for all eternity.

Stroud fought for consciousness and for breath. He called on help from his grandfather, who seemed to have abandoned him as well, fearful of watching his end. Would it all come to this, an unheralded death in the bowels of a haunted, cursed ship that had sailed from out of the past of his ancestors?

"Stroooooud, Stroud." It was Esruad, and Stroud now realized that Esruad held him in his arms, in the protective shield around them both now. Just beyond them, timbers were bursting and bones cascading, but Stroud could not see this. Esruad communicated it through a strange telepathy.

"We have only one chance, Stroud," the ancient wizard told him. "You are badly hurt, and if you do not join with me, you will die."

"Join with you?" Stroud wasn't sure what that meant. "In the skull? Trapped there to wait for another thousand years, for another chance at Ubbrroxx?"

"No, if you join with me, I will live in the receptacle of your body. It may be our only chance."

"To join?"

"Are you willing?"

Stroud knew he had little choice. He was blind now and was losing feeling in all of his extremities. He'd die anyway. Esruad was offering him life for life. "Yes, we join."

"The choice is made..."

Stroud felt bitterly frustrated, unable to see. But he felt the intense fire that suddenly engulfed him, and yet it was not a burning fire. It was a fire of ice and it spread through his body, combating the numbness and deadness and poison inflicted by the serpent which had been just another extension of Ubbrroxx.

"Damn you, Esruad!" Stroud heard the angry roar of Ubbrroxx as if it, too, were inside him and all around him.

Stroud felt a calm filtering through him with the coolness of Esruad's being. He felt a crystal-like strength returning to his limbs and body. He found his blinded eyes opening to a cool, clear vision, and he felt the strength of his ancestors as they insinuated themselves in his every nerve and fiber. At his feet lay the crystal skull facedown, looking like a useless hulk of ice, and no sign of Esruad, for he was inside Stroud now ... in his head, his heart, his muscle. His brain was crowded with the souls of those who'd abandoned the crystal skull with Esruad, and it caused a jumble of confusion, noise, voices and sounds unfamiliar to Stroud. He was shaken and fearful of his own body now. For the first time in his life, he'd have settled gladly for the steel plate in his head. He imagined the lunatic, the schizophrenic he would soon become with so many spirits turned loose on his mind.

"I hope you know what we're doing, Esruad," he said to himself, for he, now, was Esruad in the flesh and Esruad was him.

"We can overcome this evil now, Stroud, as never before."

"Destroy it?"

"Completely."

"How?"

"Take up the empty receptacle and keep it with us."

Stroud bent to lift the crystal skull and return it to his shoulder pouch.

"Talking to yourself down in this hole, too, Stroud!" Sam Leonard's voice came as a shock, making Stroud think it was coming from the skull, before he wheeled to face Dr. Leonard. The other man had come out of the shadows.

"Where are the others? Why've you come alone?"

"Sorry, Stroud ... I tried to save them ... but ... but--"

"Kendra?"

"Taken off by the fiends!"

"Wiz?"

"Dead ... dead, Stroud! I knew we shouldn't've tried to follow you. I knew it was wrong!"

"Get hold of yourself, Dr. Leonard." It was Esruad talking while Stroud was grieving for Kendra.

"You say they made off with her? That Kendra was alive when you last saw her?" Stroud pressed for details. He then searched on his person for the communicator and tried desperately to reach her.

Her voice came over in screams. She was being tortured.

"We've got to help her."

Inside his head Stroud heard Esruad tell him it was a trap. But Stroud didn't care what it was. He couldn't think of anything beyond helping Kendra out of her pain.

"We've got to go on! This way!" said Stroud sternly, pointing the way. But it was Esruad who was speaking and pointing through Stroud. Stroud wanted to race back in the direction from which Leonard had come.

"My way," Esruad was saying. "If I know Ubbrroxx, the woman will be ahead. It will use your woman to get to you. It knows this is your weakness. Don't allow it, Stroud."

Leonard was looking at him strangely, listening to his conversation with himself.

Finally, Stroud said, "We go this way, straight ahead."

"But Dr. Cline is behind us," said Leonard.

"The only way to help her now is to destroy Ubbrroxx."

"You're not going to help her? Listen to those screams! How can you stand it?" shouted Sam Leonard.

"Where're your weapons, Dr. Leonard?"

"She is calling for our help."

"Your weapons?"

"Lost, dammit! I was lucky to escape with my life!"

"All right ... stay close behind, and take this." Stroud gave him his dart gun.

"What do you propose to use?"

"Magic."

"Good ... most comforting, Stroud."

Stroud also hefted what was left of the gas in his canister.

Stroud no longer breathed from the spent oxygen tank, and neither did Leonard. It was likely only a matter of time before Leonard succumbed to the contaminated air. But Esruad's magic kept Stroud protected, so far. With Leonard following, Stroud continued ahead while in his head Esruad talked to others there about strategy. There, seemed to be some whispering discord over Leonard. Something about his being untrustworthy. Stroud was being given a signal to ditch the poor man. Stroud fought the suggestion.

"It will use Leonard and the others against you, Stroud. You must be strong and vigilant."

Stroud assured Esruad that with their new-found strength and disguise, that he would be stronger.

Kendra and Dr. Wisnewski had reached the mouth of the cavern where the bow of the ship stared back at them. Strangely, they had encountered no further setbacks or attacks. It was as if the creature was satisfied with Stroud's life, and that theirs were unnecessary now to its design.

She tried again to raise Stroud but all she got for her trouble was static.

"We're running out of oxygen," Wiz told her. "We haven't any choice. We must save ourselves, Dr. Cline."

Kendra tearfully assented and they stepped from the confines of the underground world into the predawn where the army of zombies was still held in check.

As they made their way up the incline, they stopped to stare at the legion of the dead, their thousands of eyes like one eye, the eye of Ubbrroxx trained on them. Firmly resolved, they began the long march through the fearfully silent, stony guards one step at a time, unable to utilize the helicopter that had brought them here. "Journey of a thousand miles," whispered Wiz.

Down through the parting rows of zombies, Kendra thought of Stroud, feeling guilty at having abandoned him inside, yet certain that he had met with the same fate as Leonard. Wisnewski, too, thought of the friends they had left behind, and how very little they had accomplished. He took Kendra's hand in his and their touch bolstered one another amid the zombies standing row upon row, parting like disturbed pigeons to let them pass.

Commissioner Nathan had seen Kendra Cline and Wisnewski exit the pit via monitoring cameras from above, beamed to his location. He was shaken when he saw that only the two of them had come out alive. It signaled the end of a long and hopeless night and the beginning of a long and hopeless day.

Nathan was about to send in a chopper to pick up the two survivors when he saw them turn into the crowd of zombies and join them. He believed they had become zombies themselves.

There was no holding back the Army now. As soon as the first sun ray cut through from out over the ocean, all hell was going to break loose here, and thousands upon thousands of citizens--diseased as they were--would be annihilated to protect those who weren't. And still no guarantees...

Kendra's screams now sounded close as Stroud and Leonard made their way through the dark passageways of the ship, going deeper and deeper to its center. Stroud felt the respiration of the evil Ubbrroxx all around him, and he realized that they were truly in the belly of the beast. Something stood in their way ahead. Stroud lifted his weak light to reveal an enormous crab-faced, molten black form. The beast had smaller, parasitic creatures crawling about it, feeding off its black skin, ripping parts of it off, slavering, chewing.

"Ubbrroxx!" shouted Stroud, lifting his gas canister and firing. "Fire, Leonard! Fire!"

Leonard froze, not using the dart weapon, instead turning it on Stroud, firing. The dart hit an invisible shield around Stroud and fell harmlessly at his feet, but it made Stroud turn and stare at Leonard's apparition as it became a giant cat that started to pounce. Stroud swung the gas around, choking the sight and the enormous throat of the creature cat, causing it to writhe in pain.

"Stroud!" Esruad called in warning.

Stroud turned back to see long tentacles wrapping about the invisible shield that encased him, pulling Stroud and his shield, and all that was inside it with him, toward the gaping, enormous maw of the crab-faced thing ahead of them.

Stroud fired all he had of the gas. The monster drew him closer, closer, closer, and in its mouth Stroud saw the bottomless pit.

"Strike! Strike, Stroud!" his inner ally told him.

Stroud found the sword of ice emanating from his body and he struck out at the tentacles, slicing through them and sending up a sulfuric, gaseous cloud with the wounds he inflicted on the demon.

The monster advanced on him with the speed of a flying witch, a banshee howl filling Stroud's ears, drowning out Esruad's shout. But Stroud instinctively jumped to one side, realizing how effective the envelope around him was when the huge, fleshy thing slammed into a wall that had been behind him. There was a resultant tearing away of that whole side of the ship and the creature somehow swallowed itself up and disappeared, leaving behind a scattering of the parasites that had been feeding off it.

"Must keep your wits about you, Stroud," his counterpart told him. "Leonard was never here."

"A trick."

"It sends out little parts of itself to form these creatures, and it used Leonard's image. Leonard is--was--most likely dead all along."

"And the others?"

"Most likely the same."

"And Kendra's cries?"

"You must ignore them, Stroud. Trust me."

"Trusting you has kept me alive." But Stroud still feared for Kendra.

"Keep control of your fears, your emotions, Stroud."

"I will, if you will."

"It feeds on fear, grows stronger in the face of it. It will do anything to unnerve you."

"Apparently."

"Including using the girl."

Stroud stopped to sit down and gather his breath there in the dark, his hand going to his head. All the voices there behind Esruad's were unsettling. Kendra's fate, and how little he knew of it, too, was unsettling. And he was supposed to keep his composure.

Stroud pulled out his communicator and tried to reach Nathan outside, but the signal was weak and all he got in return was static. He kept trying for a moment when once more Kendra's screams reached his ears. She was now calling out his name, pleading with him to come to her rescue. This made him shut down the radio and get to his feet, determined to carry on. His watch told him he had less than half an hour remaining before they would blow the place to kingdom come.

"It was him, I tell you." Kendra had tried to answer the signal Stroud had sent up, but once more it was cluttered with Static. "He's still alive," she shouted amid the zombies.

"But we can't go back," Wiz told her.

"No, but we can get to Nathan. We can plead for more time." She tried to reach Nathan by radio but it remained jammed.

They were halfway through the zombies, fearful yet of being attacked by them. Several had reached out to them with pleading eyes as well as hands. Some moaned as if trapped deep within themselves, pleading for release. If the creature wanted to kill Kendra and Wiz, all it had to do was turn these people loose on them, and yet it had not done so. Kendra had wondered why and she'd put it to Wiz.

When he had no answer, she pushed him for a theory.

"I should guess that it is reserving all its power to ... to combat Stroud and his crystal spirit."

"And if that is so, it's further proof that he's alive ... that the battle down there is still going on."

"Yes, yes ... that would make sense."

"We've got to get to Nathan."

"Yes, hurry ... hurry."

They rushed on to the strange beating of an underground heart, the pounding rising in their ears until they felt their very souls shaken.

-20-

Kendra Cline's plaintive cries in the dark were like daggers plunged into Stroud's soul. Esruad tried desperately to hold him back, to tell him he must ignore the pitiful pleas of the woman, if he were to survive this day. Stroud, unable to listen anymore to Esruad, tore away and raced down the intricate, involved labyrinth now laid out for him by the demon. The walls of this maze were hard-packed clay molded together with the bones of men. Stroud rushed along its narrow and narrowing course to a point where his shoulders scraped the walls and his clothing tore on the outcroppings of bone. He then reached a point where the bones had taken on flesh and life and were reaching out at him, tearing at him as if they belonged to prisoners in cells who just wished to touch another human being.

Stroud tore loose from the wall of hands and found himself standing before a stairwell of stones. He heard again Kendra's screams and he rushed up the stones only to have them crumble below his weight, taking him to the floor once again, and now the stones were, one by one, hurled at him.

Esruad's shield around him held. He drew on Esruad's magical strength, making the leap to the next level, pulling himself up as if he were weightless, a kind of angel, he thought, an avenging angel.

"Let the woman go! Ubbrroxx! Take me, and let the woman go!" he shouted at the darkness around him. In the distance, through what appeared to be a tunnel that went on through eternity, he saw a light, a green, glowing light which touched off a fire.

"You want the woman ... so come for her," Ubbrroxx said, his voice curled by a laugh.

Esruad struggled with Stroud to use his head. "Another sacrifice is nothing to ending the power of this evil, Stroud!"

From the records uncovered by Leonard and Wisnewski, in the very written words of Esruad, Stroud had learned that he must locate the geographic center of the ship. He now stared down the tube of flame ahead of him. "But this is it ... this is where it lives, Esruad."

Esruad had no argument for this.

Stroud knew that momentarily he and Esruad would come face-to-face with the true demon...

No more vile little familiars, beasts with tarantula bodies or tentacles, no more substitute horrors. Once Stroud penetrated the center, Ubbrroxx had no place else to hide and could take no more camouflage, create no more apparitions. It wasn't anything Esruad had said, nothing that Stroud had learned from the records, only a peaceful inner power called knowledge. The offshoots of the creature, its telepathic powers, its havoc, all emanated from here, and at the very back of this chamber it had Kendra.

It had come down to Stroud and the Satan of the Etruscans, Ubbrroxx.

Stroud felt fortified, however. He did not feel alone, not with Esruad within him, cloaking him in his impressive magic.

Stroud started across the dark interior of the new cell he had reached when out of the dark on his right side a flying creature loped by his head, almost striking him. Stroud saw only the black wings of the beast as it swooped, until his light hit it, and he saw that it was an enormous vampire bat, not unlike the ones that he had done battle with in the caverns outside Andover, Illinois. Stroud heard others screeching in the dark, piercing the blackness with their beady, blind eyes.

"Ubbrroxx is drawing on your fears, your worst nightmares, Stroud," he told himself.

Stroud tried desperately to get a grip, but it was like looking into the graves of the many vampires he had personally driven into eternity with the long-spiked, chemically poisoned stakes he had used. Something roared like a beast to his left and then a den of snapping, snarling beasts rose up in Stroud's light, approaching. It was Kerac and his band of werewolves, monsters that Stroud had wiped out in the northernmost woods of Michigan the year before, after tracking one of their number from the streets of Chicago. All here, along with the vampires ... unreal, and yet so real and threatening. Then they pounced in unison with an attack from the vampires.

"Hold to your faith in me, Stroud!" Esruad fired his mind with the message as Stroud saw all of the monsters of his mind flattened out against the invisible but powerful shield that Esruad continued to display.

The werewolves and the vampires came in again and again, trying desperately to destroy the shield, to put a dent in it, but it was useless. "So long as you believe in me," Esruad told him in a whisper deep within his mind.

The creatures outside the protecting cube now became people, and in their faces, Stroud began to realize who they were. Ubbrroxx now was sending forth the images of all of the people whom Stroud had come into contact with--innocent people--who had lost their lives around him, some due directly to their association with him, some indirectly. Among them were Leonard, soldiers he had known in the war, fellow cops he had known in Chicago when he was on the streets there, Magaffey, who was so instrumental in helping him uncover the vampire colony in Andover, the band of mercenaries he had paid to die in their effort to help him wipe out the werewolf herd in Michigan. All those who had lost their lives in Stroud's various crusades now stared in at him, asking him to join them. Even his grandfather's apparition was among the specters.

Ubbrroxx was working on a very different level now, but Stroud remained firm in his convictions and his trust in Esruad. He noted that among the dead who wandered about the cube, pleading with him to come join them, there was no sign of Wisnewski or Kendra, and this gave him hope for their well-being.

"How long are we going to stand still for this?" Esruad asked from within.

Stroud took his meaning, stepping through the horde of ghosts who had for so long inhabited his nightmares.

They reached out, flattening their ethereal hands against the cube enveloping him, and where this occurred their limbs disappeared into a wispy mist. Stroud stalked on, shouting, "I'm coming for you, Ubbrroxx! Nothing will keep us apart ... nothing."

Stroud spoke a silent dialogue with Esruad as he continued on.

Why did you imprison yourself in the crystal skull for all these years?

To be here now...

To fight the beast again, after failing the first time?

We failed the first time because we were weak, fearful ... worse, we became willing accomplices.

Not you.

All of us.

And that is what will occur now if the evil is not ended by us?

I fear so, yes.

Then we won't let it happen. Armed with what we know now about Ubbrroxx, its character ... and your magic--

It has great powers of its own.

But we have a chance.

Yes.

Because this thing fears you greatly.

It fears us greatly ... us.

Tell me what to do.

The discussion was interrupted by another bout of piercing cries from Kendra.

Stroud stared ahead from where the sounds continued to roll down the corridors of the black ship. "God, I can't stand that."

Put her out of your mind.

I can't do that.

You must.

Just tell me what to do next!

Stroud listened to Esruad's communications as they spun about the coils of his brain, pinging off the metal strip below his scalp. As he did so, he looked again in the direction from which the screams continued. Horrible, nerve-ripping screams, like the cries of a bobcat locked in a bloody trap. It was heart-wrenching to think that Kendra Cline was in so much pain.

Kendra Cline and Dr. Wisnewski continued aboveground through the throng of zombies, and as they neared the final end of the human wall of flesh, they began to see a difference in the zombies at the far exterior of the circle around the pit. Some of the zombies were moving, searching, looking lost and confused, even asking questions of a weak nature. Many were amazed to find themselves here, confused beyond words. Others had begun to race away, seeking cover, and this caused some gunfire which was immediately halted by screaming shouts on the soldiers' side of the barricades ahead of Kendra and Wiz.

"Christ, we could be shot ourselves!" shouted Wiz to her.

Kendra tried desperately to reach Nathan over the radio and thankfully, she found the radio clear of static. She got an operator on the other end and shouted, "Get me the commissioner."

"Who is this?"

"Dr. Cline and Dr. Wisnewski! Hold your fire!"

"No shit!"

"We're back from the pit."

"Holy shit! We thought you were--"

"Get Nathan for me, now!"

"Right, right ... will do! Over."

Only a few minutes passed while Wiz and she were held up at the barricade where others, former zombies, also wanted through, some pawing at one another, still quite out of their heads.

Nathan shook the scene when his powerful voice was amplified through a bullhorn. "Let those people through! All of them! Let them pass!"

Like refugees, the line of migrating, former zombies began moving further away from the center of their troubles. As soon as Wiz and Kendra cleared the barricades, Nathan pulled them aside.

"We had thought you'd become one of them," Nathan said. "Thank God we were wrong. How did you bring these others around?"

"We didn't," said Wiz.

"But ... what does this mean?"

"Only one possible explanation," said Wiz.

"So many coming out of their forced condition," continued Nathan, quite amazed.

"It seems to be only those at the fringes on the wall," said Kendra, "but it's a sign, a wonderful sign."

"What kind of a sign?" asked Nathan.

"It means that whatever is in control of these people has been considerably weakened by Stroud."

"Are you telling me Stroud is still alive and that he has actually affected this--"

"Yes, very much alive. We've been trying to get to you by radio, but we were jammed."

"And Stroud? Have you been in radio contact with him?"

She hesitated only a moment before lying. "Yes, I tell you he is still alive, and he has made a great impact on this thing, as you can see."

"Those people coming to ... are they clean of the disease?"

"Yes, you must take them in. You must open your lines to them," she insisted.

"It will lessen the strength of the creature," added Wiz, who found a place to fall out, weakened by his experiences in the pit and the loss of his good friend, Leonard.

Nathan saw the sun coming over the horizon in the far distance. He instantly got on the horn, shouting for calm, declaring that Stroud had managed a minor miracle and that the outer edges of the zombie line had come out of the spell they were under, due directly to Stroud's efforts in the pit. "Let those people through. Have ambulances and evac vehicles ready to take them out of here!"

The process began, the lines opening, people spilling through, being helped along by armed soldiers and policemen. Medical wagons were instantly filled. A coffee line was begun and the Army began handing out blankets.

Still, a wall of zombies remained, but even so the individual members of the wall began to crumble, fading away from the pit and toward the troop line. Each one was now welcomed by cheers from the combined forces here.

"Where is Stroud now?" Nathan asked, the military brass breathing down his neck.

"He is at the geographic center of the ship, where the influence of this creature emanates from," said Wisnewski from his sitting position.

"And what about Dr. Leonard? Is he with him?"

Kendra said, "Yes. Dr. Leonard remained with Dr. Stroud."

"We got a garbled message saying he was with Stroud," Wiz instantly added to the lie.

Kendra realized, as did Wiz, that if the officials thought there were two men down there alive, they'd think twice as hard before blowing the place with howitzers.

"We were separated from them," said Kendra. "We were all fending off the vilest creatures imaginable."

"They tore our protective suits away from us, and yet here we are, alive and well," said Wisnewski. "Further proof of Stroud's success."

"I beg you men to give him a little more time, please," Kendra pleaded.

Nathan was nodding but the military men were frowning, shaking their heads, one saying, "We will take it under advisement."

"Well, take this under advisement, too!" Kendra shouted.

"What?"

Wiz put a hand on her, but she pulled away. "If Abraham Stroud is successful, and every newspaper in this country's going to know that he was, and you fools kill him in a thirteenth-hour bid for glory for yourselves, I'll see your asses fry for it!"

They marched away from her and Wiz, Nathan now frowning at her and chasing after the military men, trying to calmly reason with them for another hour for Abe Stroud.

-21-

Stroud felt no fatigue and no pain whatsoever, so convincing was Esruad's control over him, along with the protection the wizard provided. They'd traversed a strange tunnel created before them by Ubbrroxx, and in all this time it was as if they had gotten nowhere, the light at the end as far away to the eye as it had been from the moment they entered. It was a kind of underground wormhole that was without beginning and without end, and only those who knew how to traverse it could find an outlet. Stroud began to feel as if he were in a bottle, the demon looking on at what he had captured. It was like being in a total whiteout that only made you more fitful as you plunged on and on, except here the reigning color was black.

Then suddenly Esruad shouted for Ubbrroxx to take him. He shouted through Stroud, chanting the words: "Take me, take me, take me, take me, take me."

As if waving a wand, the cry through the ages of an Esruad who asked to be sacrificed to the demon changed the territory all around them. The tunnel and its never-ending length, the unreachable goal at the end, all gone, replaced by a smoldering sludge heap over which hung Wisnewski and Kendra Cline, their flesh slowly boiling, bubbles rising over their nude forms, roasting alive, broiling. No wonder the screams of terror and pain.

"This is how you will be repaid, Esruad," said the demon, whose very body was heating the humans that were strung over it. "Do you anticipate the moment as much as I?" It laughed its demonic croak.

The slag heap of the creature awakened every nerve in Stroud and he could feel the intense heat of it scalding the outer layer of the protective shield afforded by Esruad.

Stroud began to feel--literally feel--the pain that Kendra was suffering. He felt it in every fiber of his being. The slag heap rose and fell, the swells of its breathing forming an ocean wave of intense, volcanic fire.

"You came a long way to find me," it said, snickering. "What for you is thousands of years ... for me is the time it takes to roast this man thing!"

Wisnewski's body lit in flame and went up like a torch when a fluid, fiery finger from Ubbrroxx touched him. Stroud found his eyes dimming. It was torture to look on the ugliness of the monster, for in its center floated the remains of half-digested human parts. The demon was a shark of the underworld, swallowing its prey near whole, able then to reproduce any form it wished, capable of controlling lesser forms from afar.

"My God, I'm going blind again," Stroud said.

"Don't look on it!" Esruad replied from within.

The demon heard both voices and slowed in its progress toward Kendra.

"Now! Now! As planned!" shouted Esruad.

Stroud raced toward the gelatinous fire before them, watching snakes, huge lizards, spiders and rats raining down on him as he did so, bouncing off him as they hit the shield that was blazing red now from the heat. Stroud's form stopped before the demon, and the shield around him glowed, ablaze with the energy war going on between Esruad and Ubbrroxx, turning to a white-hot glare. Inside, Stroud felt his own flesh burning when the cube protecting him began to spin and spin and spin, so fast now that it resembled an enormous diamond in the darkness, a small crystal closet.

"Swallow me whole, mighty Ubbrroxx! Swallow me up now!" Esruad's voice wafted over the creature.

Now the demon moved toward Stroud, but it was confused at the sight before it. Stroud himself could hardly see through the spinning veil before him when suddenly he felt himself being wrenched apart, turning into two separate, distinct but identical beings. Stroud saw himself separating, dividing like a duplicating cell, and there were two spinning brilliant lights in the darkness, he and Esruad.

Ubbrroxx watched, hesitant, confused.

So far, so good, Stroud thought. "Come for me now!" he shouted.

At the same instant Esruad shouted from his vantage point the same words. Stroud could not believe the mirror image they had become of one another there in the pit of darkness before the fiery demon, still breathing its hot breath against their shields.

Ubbrroxx swung its entire bulk at them, sweeping them down, a pair of broken bowling pins as the shields came crashing down around them. Stroud felt now at his most vulnerable and he tried desperately to do what was required, as Ubbrroxx, taunting now, raised a spurting jet of itself directed at Kendra and set her aflame!

On cue, Stroud screamed and raced madly at Ubbrroxx, cursing it for having burned the screaming woman alive, just as Esruad had promised he would. The other Stroud drew forth an enormous sword, a knight prepared to slay the dragon, but the sword took shape away from Esruad and grew larger and larger, forming an enormous steel mirror, and for the first time ever Ubbrroxx gazed on itself, sending a river of fire at the steel mirror created by the ancient magician.

Stroud saw the river of fire coalesce into a river of light, and it shone back at Ubbrroxx, blinding him, reflecting back a burning light that began eating away at it, parts of its fiery exterior falling away, raining down over Stroud like screaming bombs.

Stroud reached for the crystal skull and held it firmly up to the creature and he felt the jolt of light reflected off the crystal now, and in the struggle the three points of light and energy formed a kind of supernatural transponder network. It was Esruad's plan to reverse the field of energy from which the demon drew its evil magic, to transpose and interchange his own power for the demon's, and to ultimately neutralize it. His calculations and his faith in the triangulation of their three energy fields were an incredible risk, but it was the only risk worth taking anymore. It must work.

Stroud was now completely blind. The light, heat and energy charging down at him from the mountain of fire that was Ubbrroxx, pounding into the crystal skull, by all reckoning ought to have exploded the crystal. Stroud found himself beaten back by the sheer force directed at him as it beamed off the steel mirror to Ubbrroxx's essence and back to him. The energy surge had sent him to his knees, and he was being doubled over, his hands burning as if frozen in ice where he held firm to the skull. The skull turned into the hideous head of an ogre, but he held firm.

He heard no more laughter, no more screams, all the sounds that gave the demon comfort. He heard no more rending of flesh, no more flesh popping with heat, for all the power was now directed as with a laser at and into the eyes of the silvery, crystal skull. It was being drained away and stored like a battery in the skull and Ubbrroxx sensed this and for the first time began a whining, sniveling screechy noise like a keening bird that was going hungry.

Stroud felt now the heat polyps on his own face and hands bubbling, and for the first time he realized how badly he had been charred, but he was relieved to once again be feeling something, anything. For a time he had gone completely numb, blocking out everything, and his sight remained lost. He could only see now through the ethereal "eyes" of Esruad, who had regained the form of a lich once more and had come to Stroud, taking the skull that was burned into his flesh out of his hands and placing it into his own.

"I, too, must go now," said Esruad, holding on to the skull.

Stroud stared through Esruad's eyes at the spongy, moldering residue of mossy material left behind where Ubbrroxx had been. There were no smoldering skeletons hanging from the wall, no sign of Kendra or Wisnewski ever having been here; not so much as a shackle. There was only the wavy, fading apparition of Esruad, the skull he held in his hands and the fire inside the skull--electrical impulses, miniature shooting stars.

"Any further battles with the demon god," said Esruad in a reassuring voice, "will be fought inside the skull."

"Wait!" said the blind Stroud, stumbling toward Esruad but in the wrong direction as Esruad's spirit flew into the skull and the skull fell to the planks of the ship and rolled to Stroud's feet.

Esruad, too, was gone ... possibly forever.

Stroud gathered up the skull which had saved them all--all but Leonard, Wisnewski and dear Kendra, he feared. He had been willing to sacrifice himself for them all, but that apparently was never the demon's wish. Ubbrroxx had wanted them all, and especially Esruad. The demon had wanted to swallow the skull and make its energy source part of its own.

Watch what you wish for, Stroud silently told Ubbrroxx, wherever the damnable bastard now was. "And watch yourself, Esruad..."

Stroud stumbled about trying to find his way, unable to see, as blind now as a man could be, banging against dangerous tiers in his way, belowdecks of a ship sunken beneath earth. He was blind inside a black hull.

Then he remembered the radio. He couched the skull in the crook of one arm and tried to raise James Nathan, and it seemed that all static had been created by the demon. He got directly through to Nathan. An agitated female voice came over before Nathan got to the radio.

"Abe! Abe, you're alive! You're okay!" It was Kendra.

"And you? You're topside?"

"Yes, Wisnewski and I made it back when--"

"I thought you died. In fact I thought I saw you die, both of you. Illusions, deception ... all along."

"Thank God you're okay."

Nathan must have snatched the receiver away, for he was suddenly on. "Stroud, it's like a miracle. Everyone here, the zombies--"

"All free, I know ... I know."

"Thanks to you."

"I need help down here. Can you send help?"

"We're on our way."

Kendra got back on. "You must be awfully lonely down there by yourself. How ... how did you do it, Abe?"

"Kendra, I ... I've lost my eyesight."

"Your eyes?"

"Burned badly ... can't see ... stumbling."

"Stay where you're at. I'm coming back with the team. We're on our way."

He wanted to shout that he didn't want her to set foot in the pit or the ship again, but she was gone, replaced by Wisnewski, who said, "Now, Abe, just sit tight. Stay right there. Stumbling around inside that debris field could get you killed, and after all you've gone through--"

"I know, a terrible irony now to have a beam fall on my head, or to suffocate below a mountain of bones."

"What about the ... your ... ah--"

"Have the skull with me, and thank God and Mamdoud in Egypt that we had it with us."

"I keep thinking of poor Leonard."

"Yeah ... yeah ... me, too."

Stroud soon heard them coming and thanked Wisnewski for staying on the radio with him. "Not afraid of the dark, are you?" asked Wiz.

"Now I am ... afraid of blindness."

"What do you think of our doing something archeologically sound with the ship now, Stroud? Now that the cursed demon has vanished?"

"I say let sleeping demons lie."

"Ahhhh ... thought you'd say that."

The others finally reached him, Kendra throwing her arms around him, Nathan helping guide him along. It took some time maneuvering out of the ship and through the tunnels. When Stroud took in the first breath of fresh air he'd had in hours, it was a great relief, moving him near to tears. He'd thought on several occasions that he would be buried forever in the tomb.

Kendra tightened her grip on him, and he held firm to the crystal skull, asking her to see that it be kept in an absolutely safe and unassailable place as they put him into the waiting ambulance. She climbed in with him, telling him he wasn't getting rid of her so easily. In the absence of his eyes, unable to see the destruction to his torso, limbs and arms, Stroud sensed her apprehension on seeing him in the light of the outdoors. The medics were calling in with the report to the hospital, second- and third-degree burns over two thirds of his body. Most of his clothing had been torn away. Stroud wondered if Kendra thought he was going to die when he went off into a drifty little boat that carried him into unconsciousness.

Three months later

Abraham H. Stroud's bandages had come off his eyes the week before, and after some initial distress, he was able to see through darkly shaded sunglasses, and by now he knew he would regain full use of his eyesight. This week some sections of the burn bandages were being peeled away and the skin given treatments. His body was a mangle of scars from various other encounters with beasts of the night and cave dwellers, not to mention the war. He felt like a man who had gone in for full-body tattoos, except that he hadn't gone in voluntarily.

Still, all his limbs were intact and in working order, and he hadn't gone out of his mind, although some people would question that--especially the nurses on the floor.

Kendra had suffered through the worst of the agonies with him, to the point of exhausting herself, and was for days tearful and easily agitated. She continued to come to see him and sit with him every single day, letting her career go and angering him for doing so. She'd put everything on hold for him, unable to return to the CDC until she was sure that he would be all right. For a time, he flirted with the idea of making her his wife, but the near mention of the idea backfired, and now she was rushing off for Georgia to get back into life there and the career she had almost abandoned for him. Kendra could not see herself waiting up nights wondering what new banshee or beast he was combating next. Like most of the people who knew or read about the circumstances surrounding the bizarre New York legion of zombies that had fed live people to a gaping hole in the earth, Kendra didn't know quite what to make of Abraham H. Stroud, or his strange crystal skull; even now the fact that he had survived engendered more awe and fright than respect or love.

He couldn't completely blame her. Why should she wish to spend a lifetime with a man who was called by the tabloids a modern "vampire hunter"?

Wisnewski visited with chocolates and flowers like a man going on a first date. He discussed in detail with Wiz the events leading up to the final demise of the demon, a story that Kendra did not want to hear. Stroud was glad to tell it, but it had left Wisnewski a little estranged, too, as if Stroud had some kind of communicable disease. In time, Wiz would come around again, he told himself, but the old doctor got busy again in his Museum of Antiquities and never returned.

A surprise visit by Commissioner Nathan proved testy at first, Stroud assuming the man wanted nothing more than a hasty whitewash done, a rationalization that would make the truth go away, a rationalization of the events that would be more farfetched than the actual horror that had occurred in the city. But Nathan surprised Stroud again as they went through every detail of the events that had occurred below Manhattan.

"I don't expect you'll be sorry to see me go," Stroud finished. "Seems everyone would like that."

"On the contrary, Stroud. If you need anything, want anything at all, I'm at your disposal. You gave this city a second chance at life, and I'll never forget that, ever."

Stroud had heard that song and dance before, from the commissioner of police in Chicago for one. Nathan would likely deny any connection with Stroud after today, he had thought.

But the following day, on public television, Nathan defended Stroud, who was being crucified in the tabloids as a modern-day Rasputin who charmed city officials into allowing an elaborate seance as extravagant as a David Copperfield magic stunt to go on for days in the city. Nathan warned others across the nation that men like Abraham Stroud were scarce, men who were willing to sacrifice life and limb for total strangers. People ridiculed him afterward.

An official inquiry into what was being termed the "Zombie Disease" incident was in full swing, and it appeared the questions would go on endlessly. Stroud was subpoenaed to appear before a board of inquiry that had been set up primarily by political hacks who were interested in getting their faces on the tube and their names in the columns.

Stroud, in a wheelchair, still in great physical pain, wearing a pair of black Oakley dark glasses, playing the blind man part to the hilt, since it afforded some protection from both press and public, answered politely the questions put to him. He did so knowing that few of the people here wanted to know the truth. That no one wanted to hear about human accomplices involved in human sacrifices to an unheard-of demon. He simply repeated again and again such tired phrases as, "There is more between Heaven and Hell, dear Horatio, than we know" and "Suffice it to say that we were dealing with supernatural elements beyond our control and human understanding."

He was debunked in most circles, held up as a hero by fringe elements in the community, invited to speak at any number of functions that involved psychics and Wicca people. He wound up hiding in the sanctuary of the hospital feeling a lot like Quasimodo without a bell to swing. The papers and most of the editorials regarded him as a freak of some sort. It was the same sort of publicity he had run ahead of in the past, the reason he had forsaken American continental archeological pursuits for foreign digs such as the one in Egypt.

Strangely, he had gotten more well-wishing letters from foreign ports than home. He had even gotten a telegram from Mamdoud who seemed to understand best what he was going through. Most well-wishers here had a hand out, a thousand requests to visit some haunted place in the heartland of America to vanquish some evil spirit that was causing harm and destruction to a community or a single family.

Haunted America, he had thought, no end of work for a Peter Hurkos or other ghost hunters, but he was not a goddamned ghost hunter, or a vampire stalker. He was an honest archeologist with the credentials to prove that he had worked hard to become who he was. But the press twisted who he was and what he was beyond recognition, to the point where sometimes now he was wondering himself.

He had to seek safer ground. He must go home to Andover, Illinois, sort out his feelings there amid his grandfather's presence in the old manse, a positively haunted place indeed. He wondered if his best friends after all were not among the dead ... his grandfather, his parents, Esruad...

They would not question him, deride him. They alone understood. Stroud reached for the crystal skull and gazed into its smoothly fashioned indented eyes, watching the fire refracted by light slicing through the opened blinds there in the hospital. The inquiry hadn't gotten to the root of the evil, hadn't placed it where it rightly belonged, as Esruad and Stroud knew.

In all this time none of Stroud's champions or detractors had any idea of the shameful causes of the body count racked up by Ubbrroxx and the terrible human accomplices of the demon. It seemed only Nathan, Kendra, Wiz and a handful of others appreciated the true horror of the day, the guile and the fear residing in the species called man. There was no undoing what people had done to one another here, given the catalyst of the ancient god of the Etruscans.

Mankind's only hope, it seemed, was to keep the genie in the bottle, or in this case, to keep Ubbrroxx in the skull ... In the wrong hands, the skull could be a true Pandora's box, unleashing untold powers.

Some days later Stroud was on a 747 jet, bandages still encircling half his body, the arrangements made between his doctors in New York and doctors in Chicago. James Nathan had taken more time from his busy schedule to see him to the airport in the limousine that had driven him that first day to the Gordon Construction site. He'd told Stroud that despite Gordon's death, the tower was going up, getting back on schedule. Gordon had many associates who were anxious to take over his tower and they'd formed a pool to do so.

Stroud was simply glad to be on his way home, anxious to see his Andover prairie and home again, Stroud Manse. It had become a haven for him, a place to hide away from the publicity-seeking that not even the hospital had been able to completely stay. It had also been a long time since he had sat by the pool, and a long time since he had opened his mail. No doubt stacked to the chandelier by now.

He thought of his people at the manse, his housekeeper, gardener, his butler and stable man, his helicopter pilot ... all people he had, at one time or another, saved from some black form of demonic evil. The only people who didn't fear him.

Even the stewardess who had approached him some weeks before on his flight from Egypt to New York, flirting with him then, pretended now to not know him at all.

Stroud wondered what effect it would have on her if he asked her for a date; wondered what effect he'd have on the pilot if he dropped in on the cockpit and announced himself.

"People," Nathan had said in exasperation, "damned people. Most fear themselves, their own shadows, Stroud. Can you really blame them if they fear you? Can you? A man like you? A man who has grappled with the supernatural and won?"

"No," he said quietly to himself now. "Can't blame people..."

As for Kendra, she promised to keep in touch, and she had promised to visit him in Andover soon. He knew that she wasn't like most people. He knew that she would make good her promise and that soon, very soon, they would be in one another's arms again. For now, couched in his arms was the carry-on luggage he had hugged to himself the entire way, and inside it, the crystal skull, a "supernatural" gift which had made him feel immortal for a time down there in the boiler room of the demon's own hell. Esruad's power had coursed through his veins and part of that power still lingered like salt spray in the pores after a walk on the deck of a ship. Stroud had also come away with a new knowledge of his ancestry, and he was a better man for knowing the noble Esruad.

"I ... I didn't know you ... you were the Abraham Stroud when we first met," said the stewardess, who'd come to him with a pot of tea, remembering how he liked tea. "Maybe when we reach Chicago ... you ... I ... perhaps..."

"A meal, a show?" he asked, surprised at her sudden turn.

"Yes, yes ... I'd like that."

"You don't mind living ... dangerously?"

"Try me."

Stroud smiled inwardly as he watched the beautiful woman return to her duties, giving him another glance as she did so. She was sultry and naturally pouting unless she smiled, and her smile was like moonbeams. Perhaps he had misjudged her after all ... or perhaps she was part of an Egyptian plot to recapture the skull on the seat beside him, wrapped in linen and wedged into a carry-on. It had managed to draw curiosity when it was run through the video display at the metal detector baggage check, but Nathan had calmed the guard with a few words. It belonged at Stroud Manse with him, with the ghosts of that place, below his grandfather's portrait.

But Mamdoud had already wired him that the Egyptian government believed the "missing" skull belonged in their country and had begun a worldwide search for it. Stolen by common criminals, passed through hand after hand until it was brought to the court of the Pharaoh, Stroud now reclaimed it for his lineage, and damn the Egyptian government.

But there were any number of Egyptians on the plane...