Once the door swung closed behind us, we were plunged into suffocating gloom. We held on to the handrail, and groped our way downward stair by stair. Each shadow filled me with creeping fear, and every shuffle and echo made my heart tense up. I could have sworn I heard footsteps descending the stairs just out of sight below us, but there was no time to stop and listen.
"Singing Rock," I whispered. "What are we going to do?"
"I'm trying to think," said Singing Rock quietly. "But I can't judge the situation until I see it for myself. I just hope that I can invoke Unitrak's spirit at the right time, and in the right way. I just hope, too, that Unitrak isn't as hostile to us as it is to the Great Old One. There's always that risk."
I coughed. "Supposing we simply surrender? Wouldn't that save more lives? If we fight like this — God knows how many people are going to get hurt."
Singing Rock shook his head. "This is not a fight in the sense you think it is. This is an act of revenge by a Red Indian sorcerer in the name of all the pain and treachery and slaughter that his people suffered at the hands of the white man. You cannot surrender to someone who is seeking vengeance. Misquamacus will only be satisfied when we are all dead, and as for the Great Old One —"
"What about the Great Old One?"
Singing Rock shrugged. "I don't know what bargain Misquamacus has made with him. But the Great Old One is known in Pueblo culture as the Great Devourer. The Paiute had another name — He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit. You can draw your own conclusions."
As we descended through the darkness, the mournful whining and moaning of the wind that wasn't wind became even louder and even more depressing. I began to develop a pounding migraine, and I could hardly see straight. I felt itchy and uncomfortable, and I had the feeling that my clothes were riddled with lice. If I'd had any choice, I would have given up then, and let the Great Old One, He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit, do his worst.
Singing Rock said: "We're getting nearer. That's why you feel so bad. Here — take this bead necklace. It isn't much, but it should help to protect you against tricks and illusions."
Almost deafened by the shrieking wind, we reached the tenth floor. Singing Rock produced the piece of paper on which he had written the numbers from Unitrak, and peered at them closely through the gloom. Then he gave me the thumbs-up, and gently pushed open the door that led into the corridors where Misquamacus lurked, and where now the Great Old One, the terrible malevolent manitou of centuries past, was hideously coming to life.
The stench was sickening. Even though the corridors were empty, there was a scuttling, rat-like noise everywhere — a noise that even the moaning of the wind could not drown. It was as if the whole place was alive with invisible rodents, swarming and clustering around the decaying smell of the Great Old One. Singing Rock turned around to reassure himself that I was still behind him, and then led the way toward Karen Tandy's room — the room where Misquamacus had first made his obscene appearance.
The drone of the Star Beast's astral wind made me feel exhausted and irritable. As we came nearer to Karen Tandy's room, the noise grew louder and louder, until it sawed through all my senses with the coarse pain of a rusty blade. All around us, as we walked, there was the scuttling of ghostly rat creatures, as if we had a loathsome escort of parasites wherever we went. Once, I felt as if one of them had jumped on my back, and I found myself tugging at my shirt in disgust and fear.
Singing Rock had begun his incantations. He was calling on the spirits of the Sioux nation to protect us from the devouring evil of the Great Old One; on the manitous of the air, the rocks and the soil; on the demons of sickness and plague to strike Misquamacus down. I could hardly hear what he was saying above the shrieking of that unearthly wind, but I could feel that our rat escort was treating us with a certain amount of impatient respect.
We turned a corner — and suddenly, the corridor was laced with brilliant flashes of light, which crackled and spat all around us. Singing Rock raised his hands, palm outward, and the light poured against them and spent itself on the concrete floor. It was the lightning-that-sees — the first indication that Misquamacus knew we were here.
We reached the stretch of corridor in which Karen Tandy's room actually was. The lightning-that-sees seemed to have dispersed most of the phantom rat creatures, but the groaning wind continued, and now it was a real wind, that blew against our faces like grit. Singing Rock beckoned me onwards, and we fought our way nearer and nearer to our inevitable confrontation with Misquamacus and the Great Old One. The shrieking and howling of the wind made it impossible for us to speak, and out of the door of Karen's room we saw sizzling flashes of astral light — the cold blue energy that had created the gateway for the greatest and most terrible of all legendary beings.
Then — against a tearing hurricane — we reached the door itself. Singing Rock looked in first, and abruptly turned his head away in sheer terror, jerking his hand over his face like a man in the spasms of electrocution. I looked too, and I was stunned into such dread and fear that I felt as if I could never move from that doorway again.
The room was thick with evil — smelling smoke, pouring ceaselessly from two fires which Misquamacus had lit in metal bowls, and placed on either side of his astral gateway. On the floor was marked out the most sinister and bizarre circle of figures that I had ever seen, all elaborately drawn and colored in what must have been the gore of Lieutenant Marino's police officers. There were strange goats and hideous creatures like enormous slugs, and naked women with loathsome beasts emerging from their wombs. Presiding over this circle, hunched and deformed, his dark body blurry through the smoke, was Misquamacus. But it was not Misquamacus himself that struck the greatest terror in us — it was what we could dimly perceive through the densest clouds of smoke — a boiling turmoil of sinister shadow that seemed to grow and grow through the gloom like a squid or some raw and massive confusion of snakes and beasts and monsters.
What was so terrifying was that I recognized the Great Old One — I recognized how close he had always been to me. He was the fright of strange shapes in wallpaper and drapes; the terror of faces that appear in the grain of wooden wardrobes; the fear of darkened stairs or curious and half-seen reflections in mirrors and windows. Here, in the writhing shape of the Great Old One, I discovered where all my long-buried fears and anxieties had come from. Every time you hear disembodied breathing in your bedroom at night; every time the clothes you have carelessly left on your chair seem to take the form of a sinister and monkish figure; every time you think you hear footsteps behind you as you climb the stairs — it is the evil presence of the Great Old One, straining malevolently at the locks and seals which keep him on the other side!
Misquamacus raised his arms, and howled a chilling howl of triumph. His eyes seemed to be lighted from within, goat-like and satanic, and his body, on its stunted legs, was glistening with sweat. He had gloves of blood where he had torn bloodied bones out of Lieutenant Marino's men and used them to draw on the floor. Behind him, almost invisible in the smoke, the hideously frightening shape of the Great Old One twisted and squirmed.
"It's now, Harry!" screamed Singing Rock. "Help me now — it's now! It's now!"
He buried his face in his hands, and began to recite numbers and words, endless invocations to his own manitous and spirits, and the great spirit of white technology. I clung on to him, holding him tight, concentrating my terrified mind on Unitrak — Unitrak — Unitrak. The shrieking wind made it impossible for me to hear what Singing Rock was saying, but I pressed my mind into supporting him — into loving him — into keeping him safe while he tried to overwhelm Misquamacus and the murky presence of He-Who-Feeds-in-the-Pit.