The Face In The Abyss

Chapter XVI The Painted Chamber

KON'S FACE was distorted by what was undoubtedly intended for a reassuring smile. Graydon, limp with reaction from his ordeal, dropped to his hands and knees. Kon reached over the side of the dais and lifted him up as easily as though he had been a puppy. Grotesque though he was, Graydon saw him then as more beautiful than any of those phantom women who had almost lured him into the Shadow's net. He put his arms around the hairy shoulders and clung tightly to them. The spider–man patted him on the back with his little upper hands, making odd comforting clicking sounds.

From the garden came a shrill humming as of thousands of bees in swarm. Its flowers and trees were bending and twisting as though blown by a strong wind. Kon's huge eyes scanned it doubtfully, then, with Graydon still held close, he slipped around the edge of the screen. The humming in the garden rose octaves higher in pitch, threatening and—summoning.

As they turned its edge, Graydon saw that the screen was not detached as he had supposed. It was in reality a sculptured alcove, cut from the front of a buttress which thrust into the red cavern like the prow of a ship. A smooth cliff of black rock angled back from it.

Crouching at the base of this cliff, their scarlet hair causing them to be barely discernible in the rubrous haze, were two more spider– men. They arose as Kon swung toward them. Graydon had a sense of weird duplication as they regarded him with their sorrowful golden eyes—as though not one Kon had come for him, but three. Clutched in the terminations of their four middle arms, or feet, were long metal bars like that which Regor wore, but unlike his, they had handgrips and ended in spiked knobs. Two of these bars they passed to Kon. Mingled now with the insistent humming of the garden was a faint hissing undertone, far away, and rapidly growing closer; the clamor of the Urd.

Graydon wriggled in Ken's arm, and motioned to be set down. The spider–man shook his head. He clicked to the others, gripped his two bars in the opposite hand, and dropping upon four of his stilts turned sharply from the wall of rock. He scuttled toward the wall of murk half a mile away. His comrades ranged on each side of him. They ran bent almost double, with the speed of a racing horse. They entered the rusty murk. The humming and hissing lessened to a faint drone, were swallowed by the silence.

Ahead, a barrier of reddish rock sprang out of the haze, vanishing in the heights above. At its base were great bowlders, fallen from the cliff, and among them hundreds of smaller ones, smooth and ochreous, and shaped with a queer regularity. The spider–men slowed to a walk, scanning the face of the precipice. Suddenly Graydon smelled the reek of the lizard–folk, knew those oddly similar bowlders for what they were—

"Kon!" he cried, pointing. "The Urd!"

The bowlders moved, sprang up, rushed upon them—a pack of the lizard– men, hissing, slaver dripping from ranged jaws, red eyes glowing.

Before they could turn, the pack was all around them. Kon dropped upon three stilts, out swung two other stilts whirling the great bars. His comrades rose on their hinder legs, a bar gripped in each of their four free hands. They flailed through the first ranks of the encircling pack, mowing them down. They re–formed into a triangle, back to back. Into the center of this triangle Kon set Graydon with an admonitory click. Out swung the bars again, cracking the pointed skulls of the Urd, unable to strike with their stumpy arms under that deadly ring, or to break through it.

The spider–men retreated slowly along the base of the cliff, cutting their way as they went. Graydon could no longer watch the fight, intent upon keeping his feet as he walked over the writhing bodies which paved the way. He heard a sharp clicking from Kon, felt his arm embrace and lift him. There was a quick rush forward. They had waded through the waves of the Urd. Down upon four stilts they dropped, and raced away, clicking triumphantly as they sped along. The hissing of the pack and the pad of their pursuing feet died.

Their pace decreased, they went more and more slowly, Kon studying the scarp. He halted, set Graydon down, and pointed to the cliff. High above the floor of the cavern, set in the red rock face, was an oval black stone. The spider–man scuttled up to it, raised his long arms, and began feeling delicately around it. He gave a satisfied click, and keeping his talons upon a spot at the side of the stone, beckoned to Graydon.

He took his hand, and placed it against the cliff with the fingers spread wide and the heel of the hand pressing hard against the rock. Thrice he did this, and then, lifting him, carefully placed his fingers where his own claws had rested. Graydon understood. He was showing him where some mechanism was located which Kon's sharp–pointed digits could not motivate. He pressed fingers and heel of hand as directed.

A stone moved slowly upward like a curtain, revealing a dark tunnel. Kon clicked to his comrades. The pair passed warily through the black opening, bars ready. Soon they reappeared and conferred. The spider– man patted Graydon on the back, and pointing to the tunnel, followed him into it. Here Kon again felt along the inner edge of the opening until he had found what he sought, and again he pressed Graydon's hand upon a spot which seemed to his touch precisely the same as the surrounding surface, as had the outer lock. The curtain of rock dropped, leaving him in utter blackness.

Darkness evidently meant no more to the spider–men than it did to the lizard–folk, for he heard them moving on ahead of him. Momentary panic seized him that they might not be able to understand his limitations and would leave him behind. Before he could cry out, Kon's arm was around him, had lifted him up and carried him away.

On they went, and on, through the darkness. Graydon felt rise around him a fine, impalpable dust, so fine that only by the millstones of incalculable ages could it have been ground to such tenuity. It told him that this passage was one unused by the lizard–folk or any other, and evidently it told the spider–men the same thing, for they went on confidently, with increased speed.

The darkness began to gray; now he could see the walls of the tunnel; and now they passed out of it into an immense chamber cut in the living rock. Dim within it as the light might be, it seemed glaring daylight to Graydon after the rust haze of the Shadow's cavern and the blackness of the passage. It came through fissures in the far side of the place. The impalpable dust was thick upon its floor.

In its center was a huge oval pool in which glimmered water, and around whose raised rim squatted a score of figures like gray gnomes. They were motionless, rigid. The spider–men drew together and clicked busily to each other, looking about them with obvious perplexity. Graydon walked over to the pool and touched one of the squatting gnomes. It was stone. He looked at the figures more closely. They were carven effigies of hairless, tailless, gray ape–men. Their long upper lips dropped to mouths beneath which were well–defined chins. The sinewy hands of their long arms knuckled the stone on which they sat. Their foreheads, though retreating, were semi–human. In the stone sockets of their eyes were gems resembling smoky topazes. With these topaz eyes they stared at the pool with something of that same puzzled melancholy which filled the golden eyes of Kon and his mates.

Walking around them, Graydon saw that they were both male and female, and that each wore a crown. He bent closer. The crowns were miniature sculptures of serpent–people, serpent–men and serpent–women, their coils twisted round the heads of the gray ape–men like the sun–snake upon the Uraeus crown of the Pharaohs.

Down into the still pool a flight of yellow marble steps fell, vanishing in its depths.

Wondering, he walked over to a fissure, and as he drew near he saw that this whole face of the chamber had been broken away by the same force, earthquakes or subsidences perhaps, which had opened up the fissures. He peered out. He looked over the plain of the monolithic stones beyond the barrier. The chamber was at the very edge of the skyreaching wall.

The sun was low—was it rising? If so, the time he had spent with the Shadow had been but a night. He had thought it much longer. He watched for awhile—the sun was setting. His ordeal had lasted a night and a day.

He turned back to Kon, suddenly aware that he was both thirsty and hungry. Under the direct light from the fissures, the wall through which they had come stood out clearly. Looking at it he halted, forgetting both hunger and thirst.

Along all its thousand–foot length it was covered with paintings. Paintings by lost masters, as rich in detail as Michelangelo's Last Judgment, landscapes as mystically beautiful as those of El Greco or Davies, portraiture as true as Holbein's or Sargent's, colorful as Botticelli, fantastic—but only so, he knew, because they pictured an unknown world; nothing in them of the fantasy of the unreal. He ran back to examine them.

Here was a city of rose–coral domes whose streets were bordered by scaled trees red and green, with foliage like immense ferns. Along them the serpent–people were borne in litters upon the heads of the gray ape–men. And here was a night scene with the constellations looking serenely down upon smooth fields covered with rings of pale green radiance through which the serpent–people moved in some strange ritual.

There was something peculiar about those constellations—he studied them. Of course, the outline of the Dipper, the Great Bear, was not the same shape as now. The four stars of its bowl were closer for one thing, a perfect square. And there was Scorpio—its claws not an arc but a straight bar of stars.

Why, if that picture of them were true, it showed the heavens as they must have been hundreds of thousands of years ago. How many ages before those distant orbs could shift to the position they seem to occupy today? It dizzied him.

And there was something peculiar about the pictures of the serpent– people. They lacked that human quality, so marked and so weird, of the Mother. Their heads were longer, flatter, reptilian. Their bodies above their coils were plainly development of the saurian; unmistakably evolved from a reptilian stem. He could accept them as realities—since in varying environments the evolution of almost any kind of intelligent creature is possible. He realized that it was the abrupt transition from serpent to woman that made the Serpent–woman incomprehensible; unreal.

Again he knew the haunting doubt—was she in reality as he had seen her, or, by some unknown power of will, did she create in the minds of those who looked upon her, illusion of childish body and heart–shaped face of exquisite beauty? He went back to the pool and scanned more closely the crowns upon the gray ape–men. They were like the serpent–people upon the wall. He compared them with the bracelet on his wrist. Well, whoever had carved that had seen the Serpent–woman as he had.

Wondering, he went back to his study of the painted wall. He looked long at the painting of a vast swamp in which monstrous bodies floundered; from its mud hideous heads peered, and over it great winged lizards flapped on leathery bat–like wings. He stared even longer at the next. It was the same swamp; in the foreground was a group of the serpent–people. They lay coiled behind what appeared to be an immense crystal disk. The disk seemed to be swiftly revolving. And all over the morass, battling with the monsters, were winged shapes of flame. They held a core of brilliant incandescence from which sprang two nebulously radiant wings, like those of the sun's corona seen during some eclipses. These winged shapes appeared to pulse abruptly out of empty air, dart upon the monsters and fold their lambent wings about them.

And there was another city…the city across the lake from the cavern of the Frog–woman was a miniature of it, but there were no mountains around it. It came to him that this was the Yu–Atlanchi of the immemorial past, from which the serpent–people and those they had fostered had fled before the flood of ice whose creeping progress all their arts could not check…He saw a fleet of strange ships, one of them fighting off the attack of a group of gigantic seasaurians whose heads reared high above its masts…

The history of a whole lost world was within that painted cavern. It held the pictured record of a lost era of earth's history.

He saw that at one time the paintings had covered all four walls. They were almost obliterated on two sides, completely so on that of the fissures. Only where the passage had opened were the pictures complete.

What had this chamber been? Why abandoned? He was again aware of thirst. He walked back to the pool. He heard a warning click from Kon. Graydon pointed to the pool and to his throat. For full measure, he rubbed his belly and made the motions of chewing. The spider–man nodded, scuttled to the yellow steps and down them. He dipped a hand in the water, smelled of it; cautiously tasted it He nodded approvingly, bent down and sucked in a huge draft.

Graydon knelt and scooped up handfuls. It was cold and sweet.

Kon clicked to his comrades. They went searching about the fissures, and presently returned with large pieces of brown fungi. Kon took a bit, dipped it into water, bit off a corner and handed the balance of it to Graydon. He accepted it doubtfully, but tasting it found that it absorbed the water like a sponge and was somewhat like bread with a pleasant yeasty flavor. He took another piece and dipped it. The three Weavers squatted beside him. All solemnly sopped their fungi in the pool and chewed it.

And suddenly Graydon began to laugh. Surely no man had ever dined as he was dining—squatting there beside the weird pool with the three scarlet grotesques, dipping mushrooms in the water with topaz–eyed, hairless, gray ape–men looking on, and the history of a lost epoch spread out before him for his entertainment. He laughed and laughed, with swiftly growing hysteria.

Kon looked at him, clicking inquiringly. Graydon could not stop his laughing, nor the sobbing hiccoughs that now began to punctuate it. Kon took him up in his long arms, and swung him to and fro like a baby.

Graydon clung to him; the hysteria passed away. And in passing it took with it all the taint of the Shadow's whispers, all the hateful lure of the evil garden. The film of evil which lay upon his mind passed away like scum on water under a strong cleansing wind.

He was sleepy, he had never felt so sleepy! Now he could sleep without fear of the Shadow creeping into him. Kon wouldn't let anything like that happen. The light was dimming fast…sun must be almost down…he'd sleep for a few minutes…

Cradled in the arms of the spider–man, Graydon dropped into deepest, dreamless sleep.