The Moon Pool - A. Merritt (top novels .TXT) 📗

A slow, sweet smile curved the crimson lips. She stretched both hands out toward him again eagerly; a burning blush rose swiftly over white breasts and flowerlike face.

Like the clicking out of a cinematograph, the pulsing oval faded and golden-eyed girl and frog-woman were gone!

And thus it was that Lakla, the handmaiden of the Silent Ones, and Larry O’Keefe first looked into each other’s hearts!

Larry stood rapt, gazing at the stone.

“Eilidh,” I heard him whisper; “Eilidh of the lips like the red, red rowan and the golden-brown hair!”

“Clearly of the Ranidae,” said Marakinoff, “a development of the fossil Labyrinthodonts: you saw her teeth, da?”

“Ranidae, yes,” I answered. “But from the Stegocephalia; of the order Ecaudata⁠—”

Never such a complete indignation as was in O’Keefe’s voice as he interrupted.

“What do you mean⁠—fossils and Stego whatever it is?” he asked. “She was a girl, a wonder girl⁠—a real girl, and Irish, or I’m not an O’Keefe!”

“We were talking about the frog-woman, Larry,” I said, conciliatingly.

His eyes were wild as he regarded us.

“Say,” he said, “if you two had been in the Garden of Eden when Eve took the apple, you wouldn’t have had time to give her a look for counting the scales on the snake!”

He strode swiftly over to the wall. We followed. Larry paused, stretched his hand up to the flowers on which the tapering fingers of the golden-eyed girl had rested.

“It was here she put up her hand,” he murmured. He pressed caressingly the carved calyxes, once, twice, a third time even as she had⁠—and silently and softly the wall began to split; on each side a great stone pivoted slowly, and before us a portal stood, opening into a narrow corridor glowing with the same rosy lustre that had gleamed around the flame-tipped shadows!

“Have your gun ready, Olaf!” said Larry. “We follow Golden Eyes,” he said to me.

“Follow?” I echoed stupidly.

“Follow!” he said. “She came to show us the way! Follow? I’d follow her through a thousand hells!”

And with Olaf at one end, O’Keefe at the other, both of them with automatics in hand, and Marakinoff and I between them, we stepped over the threshold.

At our right, a few feet away, the passage ended abruptly in a square of polished stone, from which came faint rose radiance. The roof of the place was less than two feet over O’Keefe’s head.

A yard at left of us lifted a four-foot high, gently curved barricade, stretching from wall to wall⁠—and beyond it was blackness; an utter and appalling blackness that seemed to gather itself from infinite depths. The rose-glow in which we stood was cut off by the blackness as though it had substance; it shimmered out to meet it, and was checked as though by a blow; indeed, so strong was the suggestion of sinister, straining force within the rayless opacity that I shrank back, and Marakinoff with me. Not so O’Keefe. Olaf beside him, he strode to the wall and peered over. He beckoned us.

“Flash your pocket-light down there,” he said to me, pointing into the thick darkness below us. The little electric circle quivered down as though afraid, and came to rest upon a surface that resembled nothing so much as clear, black ice. I ran the light across⁠—here and there. The floor of the corridor was of a substance so smooth, so polished, that no man could have walked upon it; it sloped downward at a slowly increasing angle.

“We’d have to have nonskid chains and brakes on our feet to tackle that,” mused Larry. Abstractedly be ran his hands over the edge on which he was leaning. Suddenly they hesitated and then gripped tightly.

“That’s a queer one!” he exclaimed. His right palm was resting upon a rounded protuberance, on the side of which were three small circular indentations.

“A queer one⁠—” he repeated⁠—and pressed his fingers upon the circles.

There was a sharp click; the slabs that had opened to let us through swung swiftly together; a curiously rapid vibration thrilled through us, a wind arose and passed over our heads⁠—a wind that grew and grew until it became a whistling shriek, then a roar and then a mighty humming, to which every atom in our bodies pulsed in rhythm painful almost to disintegration!

The rosy wall dwindled in a flash to a point of light and disappeared!

Wrapped in the clinging, impenetrable blackness we were racing, dropping, hurling at a frightful speed⁠—where?

And ever that awful humming of the rushing wind and the lightning cleaving of the tangible dark⁠—so, it came to me oddly, must the newly released soul race through the sheer blackness of outer space up to that Throne of Justice, where God sits high above all suns!

I felt Marakinoff creep close to me; gripped my nerve and flashed my pocket-light; saw Larry standing, peering, peering ahead, and Huldricksson, one strong arm around his shoulders, bracing him. And then the speed began to slacken.

Millions of miles, it seemed, below the sound of the unearthly hurricane I heard Larry’s voice, thin and ghostlike, beneath its clamour.

“Got it!” shrilled the voice. “Got it! Don’t worry!”

The wind died down to the roar, passed back into the whistling shriek and diminished to a steady whisper. In the comparative quiet O’Keefe’s tones now came in normal volume.

“Some little shoot-the-chutes, what?” he shouted. “Say⁠—if they had this at Coney Island or the Crystal Palace! Press all the way in these holes and she goes top-high. Diminish pressure⁠—diminish speed. The curve of this⁠—dashboard⁠—here sends the wind shooting up over our heads⁠—like a windshield. What’s behind you?”

I flashed the light back. The mechanism on which we were ended in another wall exactly similar to that over which O’Keefe crouched.

“Well, we can’t fall out, anyway,” he laughed. “Wish to hell I knew where the brakes were! Look out!”

We dropped dizzily down an abrupt, seemingly endless slope; fell⁠—fell as into an abyss⁠—then shot abruptly out of the blackness into a throbbing green radiance. O’Keefe’s fingers must have pressed down upon the controls, for we leaped forward almost with