_The Lake of Fire_
Before a barrier of gold, waist-high, Dean Rawson stood tense and
rigid. Behind him the great cave-room swarmed with warriors, leaders,
doubtless, of the unholy hordes. But beyond the barrier were the real
leaders of the Mole-men tribes--Phee-e-al, ruler in chief, and his
clustering guard of high priests. In the flooding light from the wall,
their eyes were circles of dead-white skin. A black speck glinted
wickedly in the center of each.
Phee-e-al was speaking. His artificially whitened face grimaced
hideously; the shrill whistling voice made no comprehensible sound.
But in some manner Rawson gathered a dim realization of what his
gestures meant.
Phee-e-al pointed at the captive; and one lean hand, with talons more
suggestive of a bird of prey than of a human hand, pointed downward.
"Gevarro," he said. The word was repeated many times in the course of
his whistling talk.
"Gevarro"--what did it mean? Then Rawson remembered. It was the word
he had heard in his dreams, the name of the lake of fire.
The voices of the priests rose in a shrill chorus of protests, and
even Phee-e-al stood silent. They crowded about their ruler, and
Rawson knew they were demanding him for themselves. Then the one who
still held a human body in his arms sprang forward and his long talons
worked unspeakable mutilation upon the body and face.
Rawson averted his eyes from the ghastly spectacle. For, swiftly, he
was seeing something more horrifying than this desecration of a dead
body; he was seeing himself, still living, tortured and torn by those
same beastly hands. The dead face of Sheriff Downer was staring at him
from red, eyeless sockets as with one leap Rawson threw himself over
the golden wall. Ten leaping strides away was his gun. In that instant
of realization, he knew why his life had been spared.
In the room of fire he had destroyed their priest. They had saved him
for further torture.
* * * * *
To get his hands on the gun, to die fighting--the thought was an
unspoken prayer in his mind. Behind him the room echoed with demoniac
shrieks. Before him was the metal stand. His outstretched hands fell
just short of the blue .45 as he crashed to the floor. The copper ones
were upon him.
Half stunned by the fall, he hardly knew when they dragged him to his
feet. He was facing the golden figure of Phee-e-al, but now the
ruler's indecision had vanished. He was exercising his full authority
and even Rawson's throbbing brain comprehended the doom that was being
pronounced.
"Gevarro!" he was shrieking. "Gevarro!"
Beside him a priest swept the metal table clear. Rawson's clothing,
the gun, the radio receiver, all were snatched up and hurled into one
of the massive chests. Phee-e-al was still shouting shrill commands.
An instant later Rawson was lifted in air, rushed to the barrier and
thrown bodily from the sacred premises he had invaded. Then the hands
of the red guard closed about him before he could struggle to his
feet. A shining object swung down above his head. It was the last he
knew.
* * * * *
His dreams were of falling. Always when he half roused to
consciousness he was aware of that smooth, even descent, and he knew
it had continued for hours.
Once he saw black walls slipping smoothly past, upward, always upward.
Gropingly he tried to marshal his facts into some understandable
sequence. He was falling, falling toward the center of the earth, and
this that he saw was not rock, or any metal such as he knew.
"It's all different," he told himself dully, "new kind of matter. Rock
would flow; this stands the pressure." But he knew the air pressure
had built up tremendously. The blood was pounding in his ears. He
wanted to sleep.
It was the heat that awakened him. The air was stifling him,
suffocating. He was struggling to move his heavy body, fighting
against this nightmare of heat when he opened his eyes and knew that
he was in a place of light. First to be seen were walls, no longer
black, no longer even with the characteristics of rock, or even metal.
Here, as Rawson had sensed, was new material to form the core of a
world. It would have been red in an ordinary light. It was transformed
to orange, strangely terrifying in the blazing flood of yellow
brilliance that came from the tunnel's end.
Rawson's brain was not working clearly. An unendurable weight seemed
pressing upon him--the air pressure, he thought, to which he had not
yet become accustomed. And the air, itself, hot--hot!
A breeze blew steadily past toward that place of yellow horror at the
tunnel's end. Yellow, that reflected light; but its source was a
searing, dazzling white in the one brief instant when Rawson dared
turn his eyes.
Hands held him erect, red, gripping hands. One, whose body seemed
molten copper in that fierce glare, approached. His hand described a
circle over Rawson's bare chest. Straight lines radiated out from the
circle, lines of stabbing pain for the helpless man. He had seen the
same emblem in the temple of fire, again in the big room where
Phee-e-al had stood.
* * * * *
The living sacrifice was prepared. Burned into his bare flesh was the
emblem of their legendary sun-god. The priests, their bodies coated
with a flashing coppery film that must somehow be heat-resistant, had
him in their grasp.
The red warriors had fallen back. Then Phee-e-al appeared; he joined
the march of death of which Dean Rawson formed the head. Voices were
chanting--somewhere a trumpet blared. Then Rawson, moving like one in
a dream, knew the priests were guiding him toward that waiting,
incredible heat.
The tunnel's end was near. About him was an inferno where heat and hot
colors blended. The whole world seemed aflame, but beyond the tunnel's
end was a seething pit upon which no human eyes could look and live.
One glimpse only of the unbearable whiteness beneath which was the
lake of fire, then the chains of his stupor broke and Dean Rawson
struggled frenziedly in the grip of two copper giants.
They had been chanting a shrill monotonous refrain. They ceased now as
they fought to throw the man out past that last ten paces where even
they dared not go.
Rawson was beyond conscious thought. Eyes closed against the
unendurable heat, he fought blindly, desperately, then knew his last
strength was going from him. Still struggling he opened his eyes; some
thought of meeting death face to face compelled him.
* * * * *
A hideous coppery face glared close into his own. Miraculously it
vanished, disappeared in a cloud of white. Then the blazing walls were
gone--there was nothing in all the world but rushing clouds of
whiteness, shrieking winds, the roar of an explosion--and cold, so
biting that it burned like heat.
Vaguely he wondered at the hands that still clutched at him. Dimly he
sensed other bodies close to his, other hands that tore him free where
he lay, still struggling with the priests, upon the floor. A narrow
opening was in the wall, a blur of darkness in the billowing white
clouds. They were dragging him into it, those others who held him, and
they were white--white as the vapor that whirled about him.
Ahead, the girl of his former dreams was guiding him, her hand cool
and soft in his. Others helped him; he ran stumblingly where they led
down a steep and narrow way.
The White Ones! In a vision they had reached out to him before. Was
this, too, a dream? Was it only the delirium of death? That burst of
cold--had it truly been liquid fires, wrapping him around?
Dean Rawson could not be sure. He knew only that his fate lay wholly
in the hands of these White Ones--and that hideous eyes in the coppery
face of a priest had glared at them as they fled.