Robert Walker - Zombie Eyes

"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.