Almuric - Robert E. Howard (trending books to read TXT) 📗

a distinct aura of evil, of lurking menace. I felt the

glare of hidden eyes.

 

But I began casting about the plaza, and came upon a trail of blood

drops, lying blackly in the moon, leading through a maze of drunken

pillars, and for want of better occupation, I followed it. At least it

might lead me to the slayers of the winged men.

 

I passed under the shadows of leaning pillars which dwarfed my human

frame with their brute massiveness, and came into a crumbling edifice,

overgrown with lichen. Through the broken roof and the gaping windows

the moon poured a fungus-white light that served to make the shadows

blacker. But a square of moonlight fell across the entrance of a

corridor, and leading into it, I saw the sprinkle of dark clotted

drops on the cracked vine-grown marble. Into the corridor I groped,

and almost broke my neck on the stairs that lay within. Down them I

went, and striking a level, hesitated and was about to retrace my

steps when I was electrified by a sound that stopped my heart, and

then sent the blood pounding madly through my veins. Through the

darkness, faint and far away, sounded the call: “Esau! Esau Cairn!”

 

Altha! Who else could it be? Why should an icy shuddering pass over

me, and the short hairs bristle at the back of my neck? I started to

answer; then caution clutched my tongue. She could not know I was

within hearing, surely. Perhaps she was calling as a frightened child

will cry for someone far out of hearing. I went as swiftly down the

black tunnel as I dared, in the direction I had heard the cry. And was

gagged by a tendency toward nausea.

 

My groping hand encountered a doorway and I halted, sensing, as a

wild thing does; a living presence of some sort near me. Straining my

eyes in the pitch dark, I spoke Altha’s name in a low urgent voice.

Instantly two lights burned in the darkness, yellowish glows at which

I stared for an instant before I realized that they were two eyes.

They were broad as my hand, round and of a scintillance I cannot

describe. Behind them I got a vague impression of a huge shapeless

bulk. Simultaneously such a wave of instinctive fear swept over me,

that I withdrew quickly into the tunnel and hastened along it in the

direction I had been going. Back in the cell I heard a faint movement,

like the shifting of some great pulpy mass, mingled with a soft

rasping sound, as of bristles scraping against stone.

 

A few score paces more and I halted. The tunnel seemed endless, and

besides, judging from the feel, other tunnels branched off from it in

the darkness, and I had no way of knowing which was the right one. As

I stood there I again heard the call: “Esau! Esau Cairn!”

 

Steeling myself against something, I knew not what, I set off once

more in the direction of the ghostly voice. How far I went I do not

know, until I stopped once more baffled. Then from nearby the voice

rang out again: “Esau! Esau CairNNNN!” It rose to a high-pitched note,

trailing off into an awful burst of inhuman laughter that froze the

blood in my veins.

 

That was not Altha’s voice. I had known all the time that it was

not—that it could not be. Yet the alternative was so inexplicable

that I had refused to heed what my intuition affirmed and my reason

denied.

 

Now from every direction, on every hand rose a medley of shrill

demoniac voices, all shrieking my name with the mockery of devils. The

tunnels that had been so silent now rang and re-echoed with strident

clamor. I stood bewildered and terrified, as the damned must stand in

the clamorous halls of hell. I passed through the stages of icy

terror, bewildered horror, desperation, berserk fury. With a maddened

roar I plunged blindly at the sounds that seemed nearest, only to

collide with a solid wall, while a thousand inhuman voices rose in

hideous mirth. Wheeling like a wounded bull, I charged again, this

time into the mouth of another tunnel. Racing down this, mad to come

to grips with my tormenters, I burst into a vast shadowy space, into

which a beam of moonlight cast a ghostly shaft. And again I heard my

name called, but in human tones of fear and anguish:

 

“Esau! Oh, Esau!”

 

Even as I answered the piteous cry with a savage bellow, I saw her.

Altha, etched in the dim moonlight. She was stretched out on the

floor, her hands and feet in the shadow. But I saw that at each

outstretched member squatted a dim misshapen figure.

 

With a blood-thirsty yell I charged, and the darkness sprang into

nauseous life, flooding my knees with tangible shapes. Sharp fangs

gashed me, apish hands clawed at me. They could not halt me. Swinging

my sword in great arcs that cut a path through solid masses of

writhing shapes, I forged toward the girl that twisted and screamed on

the floor in that square of moonlight.

 

I waded through a rolling, surging mire of squirming biting things

that washed about me waist-high, but they could not drag me down. I

reached the moonlit square, and the creatures that held Altha gave

back before the whistling menace of my sword edge, and the girl sprang

up and clung to me. Even as the shadowy horde rolled in to drag us

down I saw a crumbling stair leading up, and I thrust her upon it,

wheeling to cover her retreat.

 

It was dark on the stairs, though they led up into a chamber flooded

with light through a broken roof. That battle was fought in utter

darkness, with only my senses of feeling and hearing to guide my

strokes. And it was fought in silence, too, except for my panting, and

the whir and crunch of my blade.

 

Up that drunken stair I backed, battling every inch of the way, the

skin between my shoulders crawling with the expectancy of an attack

from the rear. If they had come upon us from above, we had been lost,

but evidently all were below me. What manner of creatures I was

fighting I did not know, except that they were taloned and fanged.

Otherwise, from the feel of them, they were stunted and misshapen,

furry and apish.

 

When I came out into the chamber above the tunnels I could see

little more. The moonlight streaming through the broken roof made only

a white shaft in the darkness. I could only make out vague forms in

the dimness about me—a heaving, writhing and lashing of shadows, that

surged up against me, clawing and tearing, and fell back beneath my

lashing sword.

 

Thrusting Altha behind me, I backed across that shadowy chamber

toward a wide rift that showed in the crumbling wall, reeling and

stumbling in the whirlpool of battle that swirled and eddied about me.

As I reached the rift through which Altha had already slipped, there

was a concerted rush to drag me down. Panic swept over me at the

thought of being pulled down in that shadowy room by that dim horde. A

blasting burst of fury, a gasping, straining plunge, and I catapulted

through the rift, carrying half a dozen attackers with me.

 

Reeling up, I shook the clinging horrors from my shoulders as a bear

might shake off wolves, and bracing my feet slashed right and left.

Now for the first time I saw the nature of my foes.

 

The bodies were like those of deformed apes, covered with sparse

dirty white fur. Their heads were doglike, with small close-set ears.

But their eyes were those of serpents—the same venomous steady

lidless stare.

 

Of all the forms of life I had encountered on that strange planet,

none filled me with as much loathing as these dwarfish monstrosities.

I backed away from the mangled heap on the earth, as a nauseous flood

poured through the rift in the wall.

 

The effect of those vermin emerging from that broken wall was almost

intolerably sickening; the suggestion was that of maggots squirming

out of a cracked and bleached skull.

 

Turning, I caught Altha up in one arm and raced across the open

space. They followed fleetingly, running now on all fours, and now

upright like a man. And suddenly they broke out into their hellish

laughter again, and I saw we were trapped. Ahead of me were more

emerging from some other subterranean entrance. We were cut off.

 

A giant pedestal, from which the column had been broken, stood

before us. With a bound I reached it, set the girl on the jagged

pinnacle, and wheeled on the lower base to take such toll of our

pursuers as I might. Blood streaming from a score of gashes trickled

down the pedestal on which I stood, and I shook my head violently to

rid my eyes of blinding sweat.

 

They ringed me in a wide semicircle, deliberate now that their prey

seemed certain, and I cannot recall a time when I was more revolted by

horror and disgust, than when I stood with my back to that marble

pillar and faced those verminous monsters of the lower world.

 

Then my attention was caught by a movement in the shadows under the

wall through which we had just come. Something was emerging from the

rift—something huge and black and bulky. I caught the glitter of a

yellowish spark. Fascinated, I watched, even while the furred devils

were closing in. Now the thing had emerged entirely from the rift. I

saw it crouching in the shadow of the wall, a squat mass of blackness

from which glimmered a pair of yellowish lights. With a start I

recognized the eyes I had seen in the subterranean cell.

 

With a clamor of fiendish yells the furry devils rushed in, and at

the same instant the unknown creature ran out into the moonlight with

surprising speed and agility. I saw it plainly then—a gigantic

spider, bigger than an ox. Moving with the swiftness characteristic of

its breed, it was among the dog-heads before the first had felt my

lifted sword. An awful scream rose from its first victim, and the

rest, turning, broke and fled shrieking in all directions. The monster

raged among them with appalling quickness and ferocity. Its huge jaws

crunched their skulls, its dripping mandibles skewered them, it

crushed their bodies by its sheer weight. In an instant the place was

a shambles, inhabited only by the dead and dying. Crouching among its

victims, the great black hairy thing fixed its horribly intelligent

eyes on me.

 

I was the one it was trailing. I had awakened it underground, and it

had followed the scent of the dried blood on my sandals. It had

slaughtered the others simply because they stood in its way.

 

As it crouched on its eight bent legs, I saw that it differed from

Earthly spiders not only in size, but in the number of its eyes and

the shape of its jaws. Now Altha screamed as it ran swiftly toward me.

 

But where the fangs and claws of a thousand beast-things were futile

against the venom dripping from those black mandibles, the brain and

thews of a single man prevailed. Catching up a heavy block of masonry,

I poised it for an instant, and then hurled it straight into the

onrushing bulk. Full among those branching hairy legs it crushed, and

a jet of nauseous green stuff gushed into the air from the torn torso.

The monster, halted in his rush, writhed under the pinning stone, cast

it aside and staggered toward me again, dragging broken