Twilight Eyes (60 page)

I thought that chamber was deserted, and I was about to step forth when I heard a scrape and a click and another scrape. I studied the checkerboard of light with greater care.

To the right, eighty feet away, a goblin emerged from one of the blocks of shadow. It was unclothed in every sense: draped in neither garments nor a human disguise. It carried two instruments that I did not recognize. It repeatedly raised one of these, then the other, to its eyes, sighting up and down at ceiling and floor, then along the walls, as if taking measurements; or perhaps it was studying the composition of the walls.

Turning to look at Rya, who stood against the wall behind me in the secondary tunnel, I raised a finger to my lips.

Her blue eyes were very wide, and the whites of them were tinted the same muddy yellow as was her skin. The queer light of the tunnel also stained her white ski suit and gleamed on her hard hat, so she appeared to be a golden idol, the image of a helmeted and incredibly beautiful goddess of war with eyes of sacred, precious sapphires.

With thumb and first two fingers I repeatedly imitated the motion of depressing a hypodermic syringe.

She nodded, opened her jacket very slowly in order to make no sound with the zipper, and reached to an inside pocket where she had stashed a plastic-wrapped hypodermic and one of the vials of sodium pentothal.

Sneaking another look around the corner, I discovered that the goblin, preoccupied with its odd measuring instruments, had its back to me. Standing erect but bent somewhat forward, it was peering through a lens at the floor near its feet. It was either murmuring rhythmically to itself or humming a singularly peculiar tune, but in either case it was creating enough noise to mask my stealthy approach.

I slipped out of the secondary tunnel, leaving Rya behind, and eased toward my prey, striving to be both quick and silent. If I drew the beast's attention, it would surely let loose a cry, alerting others of its kind to my presence. I did not want to have to flee back through the subterranean maze with no head start, with a pack of those demons at our heels, and with nothing gained from our risky intrusion into the heart of the mountain.

From shadow to light to shadow I went.

The goblin continued to warble to itself.

Eighty feet.

Seventy.

My pounding heart made a sound that, to my ears, seemed as loud as the drills and pneumatic hammers that had once worked the coal veins of this mine.

Sixty.

Shadow, light, shadow . . .

Although I carried the pistol at the ready, my intention was to avoid shooting my enemy, to spring upon it in complete surprise, to get a grip around its neck, and to hold it still for ten or twenty seconds, until Rya could rush in with the pentothal. Thereafter we could question it, administering more of the drug as required, for though sodium pentothal was primarily a sedative, it was also sometimes referred to as a “truth serum” because under its influence one could not easily lie.

Fifty feet.

I was not certain pentothal would affect the goblins precisely as it did men. However, the chances seemed good because (except for their metamorphic talent) their metabolism was apparently similar to that of human beings.

Forty feet.

I do not think the creature heard me. I do not think it smelled or otherwise sensed me, either. But it stopped its curious warbling and turned, lowering the unknown instrument from its eyes, raising its hideous head. It saw me at once, for I was at that moment passing through one of the checkerboard's lighter squares.

Its luminous scarlet eyes blazed brighter at the sight of me.

Though I was within less than thirty feet of the beast, I could not cross the remaining ground in a great leap and come down upon it before it sounded an alarm. I took the only option remaining: I squeezed off two shots from the silencer-equipped pistol. Bullets left the muzzle with soft sounds like the spitting of an angry cat. The goblin pitched backward into a square of shadows, where it fell dead, the first hole in its throat, the second between its eyes.

The ejected brass cartridges went
tink-clink-tink
across the rock floor, startling me. Because they were evidence of our presence, I pursued them, snatched up one, then the other, before they could roll away into the shadows.

Rya was already kneeling at the dead goblin when I got to it, checking for a pulse but finding none. The transmutable creature had nearly concluded its reversion to human form. As the last of its demonic features faded, I saw that its disguise was that of a young man in his late twenties.

Because death had been sudden, the heart had ceased pumping within a second or two of the infliction of the wounds, so only a few spoonsful of blood had leaked onto the tunnel floor. I hastily mopped up these traces with a handkerchief.

Rya took hold of the goblin's feet, and I seized it by the arms, and we carried it to the far end of the chamber. There, twenty feet of darkness lay between the last of the lights and the back wall. We hid the corpse, the peculiar instruments it had been using, and the bloodstained cloth in the deepest part of that black cul-de-sac.

Would the demon be missed by its kind? If so, how soon?

On realizing that it was missing, what would they do? Search the mines? How thoroughly? How soon?

Standing on the borderline between a block of shadows and a block of light, leaning close to each other, Rya and I conversed in voices so low that hearing was less important than lipreading.

“Now?” she asked.

“We've started a clock ticking.”

“Yeah, I hear it.”

“If he's missed . . .”

“Probably not for an hour or two.”

“Probably not,” I agreed.

“Maybe longer.”

“If they find him...”

“That'll take longer still.”

“Then we go on.”

“At least a little farther.”

Retracing our steps, passing the spot where the goblin had died, we ventured to the other end of that wide corridor. It opened into an immense underground chamber, a circular vault at least two hundred feet in diameter, with a domed ceiling thirty feet high at the center. Banks of fluorescent lights were suspended from the ceiling on metal scaffolding; they cast a wintry glare over everything below. In more square feet of floor space than was occupied by a football field, the goblins had assembled a bewildering array of equipment: steel-jawed machines big as bulldozers, obviously designed to chew rock and spit out pebbles; huge drills, smaller drills; ranks of electrically powered conveyer belts that, lined up one after another, could carry off the excretions of the rock-consuming machines; a dozen forklifts; half a dozen Bobcats. In the other half of the room were huge piles of supplies: stacks of lumber; carefully arranged pyramids of short steel beams; hundreds of bristling bundles of steel reinforcing rods; hundreds—maybe thousands of sacks of concrete; several big piles of sand and gravel; car-sized spools of thick electrical cable, smaller spools of insulated copper wire; at least a mile of aluminum ventilation duct; and more, much more.

The equipment and supplies were arranged in evenly spaced rows with aisles between. As we slowly eased twenty yards around the circumference, looking into three of those avenues, we were able to determine that the place was deserted. We saw no goblins, heard no movement other than the ghostly whispers of our own cautious progress.

The gleaming condition of the equipment, plus the smell of fresh oil and grease, led to the conclusion that these machines had been recently washed and serviced, then lowered into this pit for a new project that had not yet begun but which had a start date in the near future. Evidently the goblin I'd just shot had been engaged in some final calculations required before the heavy work began.

Putting a hand on Rya's shoulder, pulling her close enough to put my lips to her ear, I breathed: “Wait. Let's go back to where we came in.”

Returning to the mouth of the wide corridor in which I had killed the goblin, I shrugged out of my cumbersome backpack, unsnapped the canvas flap, and withdrew two kilos of plastic explosive and a pair of detonators. I unwrapped the plastique and molded one block into a niche high in the wall, just a few feet back from the point at which that shaft opened into the domed chamber. I put the charge above head level, in shadow, where it was not likely to be seen even by search parties looking for the missing demon. I shaped the second kilo into another dark niche high in the opposite wall, so the two blasts might bring down enough of the walls and ceiling to close off the passage.

The detonators were battery-powered, and each had a one-hour clock. I plugged one into each of the plastic masses, but I did not set the timer on either of them. I would do so only if we came this way again, with our enemies in hot pursuit.

We returned to the domed chamber and quietly crossed, taking a closer look at the machines and supplies, trying to extrapolate the nature of the pending project from the equipment the goblins had stockpiled. At the far end of the giant room, having learned little of consequence, we arrived at a set of three elevators, two of which were cages designed to convey small groups of goblins up through a big shaft in the rock. The third was a large steel platform slung from four cables, each as thick as my wrist; it was of sufficient size to raise or lower the largest pieces of equipment we had seen.

I stood for a moment, thinking. Then, with Rya's help, I carried eight two-by-fours from the nearest stack of supplies and laid them on the floor, crossed like Lincoln Logs, to form a step stool of sorts.

Next I took two kilos of plastique from Rya's pack and separated them into three charges. Climbing the makeshift step stool, I molded the plastique into depressions in the roughly hewn rock directly above each of the elevator openings. There, the shadows were not deep, and though the plastic explosive resembled the rock enough to virtually vanish against it, the detonators were still visible. However, I figured this level of the mine was not much traveled at the moment; and even those goblins that passed this way were not likely to look up and study the stone above the elevators closely.

I did not set those detonators, either.

Rya and I returned the two-by-fours to the stack from which we had taken them.

“Now?” she inquired. Though we knew we were alone on this level, she still whispered, for we could not be sure how well our voices would carry up the elevator shafts. “Up? Is that what you have in mind?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Won't they hear the elevator moving?”

“Yes. But they'll probably think it's him, the one we killed.”

“And if we run into them upstairs, just as we're stepping out of the cage?”

“We put these pistols away, go up there armed with the shotgun and the automatic rifle,” I said. “That'll give us enough firepower to blow away any number of them that might be gathered around the damn elevators. Then we step right back into the cage, drop down here, and leave as we came in, setting the detonators as we go. But if we
don't
run into anyone up there, then we slip farther into the mine to see what we can see.”

“What do you think so far?”

“I don't know,” I said worriedly. “Except . . . well, they're sure as hell not just mining coal in this place. The equipment on this level hasn't been assembled to dig coal.”

“Looks like they're building a fortress,” she said.

“Looks like,” I agreed.

We had reached Abaddon, the deepest level of Hell. Now we were required to ascend through a few higher rings of Inferno, desperately hoping to meet neither Lucifer himself nor any of his demonic minions.

The elevator motor hummed loudly. With an unnerving amount of creaking and rattling, the open-fronted cage ascended. Although it was difficult to gauge the distance, I calculated that we climbed roughly seventy or eighty feet before coming to a stop at the next level of the . . . installation.

I no longer saw any point in referring to that huge subterranean complex as a mine. The Lightning Coal Company evidently extracted large quantities of coal from other parts of the mountain, though not from here. Here they were engaged in something altogether different, for which their mining operation merely served as camouflage.

When Rya and I came out of the elevator, we were at one end of a deserted two-hundred-foot-long tunnel with smooth concrete walls. It was twenty feet wide, twelve feet high at the center. Fluorescent lights were recessed in the rounded ceiling. Warm, dry air wafted from ventilator grilles high in the curved walls, while one-yard-square return vents, near the floor, gently pulled cooler air out of the passageway. Big red fire extinguishers were mounted alongside sets of burnished steel doors that were spaced approximately fifty feet apart on both sides of the corridor. What appeared to be intercom units were hung next to the extinguishers. An air of unparalleled efficiency—and ominous, enigmatic purpose—marked the place.

I felt a rhythmic throbbing in the stone floor, as if gargantuan machines were laboring at mighty tasks in distant vaults.

Directly opposite the elevators, that familiar but nonetheless mysterious symbol was on the wall: a black ceramic rectangle four feet tall and three feet wide was mortared into the concrete; centered in it—a white ceramic circle two feet in diameter; spearing jaggedly through the white circle—a bolt of black lightning.

Suddenly,
through
the symbol I saw that strange, immense, cold, frightening void that I had sensed when I'd first glimpsed a Lightning Coal truck a couple of days ago. An eternal silent nothingness, the depth and power of which I cannot adequately convey. It seemed to draw me as if it were a magnet and I were an iron shaving. I felt as if I would fall into that hideous vacuum, siphoned down and away as if into a whirlpool, and I was forced to avert my eyes and turn from the dark ceramic lightning.