"You don't suppose ... you don't believe that ... that he, too, is ... dead?"
Kendra couldn't bring herself to say what she believed.
-19-
Stroud was somewhere between darkness and light, life and death, but he did not know how far to one side or the other he stood, or rather lay--or was he swimming weightless amid the acrid odors of the death ship and all the horrors of the grave it represented? He only knew that he was being buoyed up and up, carried off and away by a power that was not his own. He smelled fire and yet he felt ice as it burned into his abdomen. The venom of the serpent coursing through his veins? Probing, squeezing his insides?
Stroud was eleven years old and trapped beneath the seat, the car aflame. His father's body was slumped over the wheel, the horn blaring. His mother's body was somewhere outside, thrown from the car despite her seat belt. Young Stroud had been asleep one moment and listening to the screams of his parents the next. They'd been on their way back to Chicago from Andover, from his grandfather's house. His parents had talked of one day taking charge of his grandfather's affairs in Andover, of taking control of the family estate there. And now they were dead. And now he was trapped in the burning vehicle, his arms pinned beneath him, his body half under the seat in front of him, where his father's body had now begun to burn.
He screamed and screamed and screamed and then some powerful hands reached in and hefted him from the fiery wreck. It had been a policeman, who had raced to the scene when he saw the flames.
He was taken in by his grandfather Annanias, raised by the old man, never knowing until long after his grandfather's own death at the hands of the Andover Devil that his parents had been murdered and that he, too, had been a target of the Andover Devil. Stroud had only learned the truth after years of being away, and after several visitations at Stroud Manse by the ghost of Annanias. He had taken so much on faith all his life from the old man; and then he had to take so much on faith from the old man's ghost.
He knew he must do the same now with Esruad; that Esruad was just another form of Annanias, working through the depths of other generations, other dimensions.
Stroud wondered if it was too late, however; if his lapse of faith had not breached their carefully tempered bond. He wondered if the demon had not already destroyed the delicate balance, and was not at this moment watching him squirm on a slowly revolving spit. That's how hot Stroud felt, as if he were roasting from the inside out.
Then he suddenly retched--a good sign, a sign of life. Spasms shook him with the strength of ice to the tenth power lodged in his bones. The stiff iciness was becoming a kind of paralysis, his stomach seeming to turn to lead, his backbone like iron as if in retaliation to the pumping stomach that spewed forth a sickening gelatinous substance. Tearful and spitting the acrid bile, Stroud wondered if it was not his very insides being ripped from him by Ubbrroxx.
He had gone blind from the venom. It tore at his every muscle, ballooned his every artery, and the pain was like a hundred twisted knots being turned inside him. The sensation of steroids on muscle, he imagined. His abdominals pinched his entrails, and for now it was as if he were shrinking on the inside, going within himself, deeper, deeper and deeper, as his mind crouched in a vain attempt to hide from the pain.
It was killing him.
It was everywhere ... around and inside him.
It held him as if he were a child, plucking him from one fire to place him in another.
It sent rivers of electric shock through his nerves.
Swimming in pain.
No lack of pain.
No lack...
"You will come to accept me as your god, Stroud," the ancient demon spoke.
Esruad now seemed powerless and far away, blocked.
And Stroud realized now that he was not swimming, but his mind was ... swimming away from the wizard from 793 b.c.
As a backdrop to his pain he heard the evil laughter of Ubbrroxx. He heard explosions and the mad rattle of bones. He imagined lightning bolts exploding all around him, and he wondered if it was bombs and explosives coming from above; wondered if he'd be buried here with the ancient bone pile created by the creature of creatures for all eternity.
Stroud fought for consciousness and for breath. He called on help from his grandfather, who seemed to have abandoned him as well, fearful of watching his end. Would it all come to this, an unheralded death in the bowels of a haunted, cursed ship that had sailed from out of the past of his ancestors?
"Stroooooud, Stroud." It was Esruad, and Stroud now realized that Esruad held him in his arms, in the protective shield around them both now. Just beyond them, timbers were bursting and bones cascading, but Stroud could not see this. Esruad communicated it through a strange telepathy.
"We have only one chance, Stroud," the ancient wizard told him. "You are badly hurt, and if you do not join with me, you will die."
"Join with you?" Stroud wasn't sure what that meant. "In the skull? Trapped there to wait for another thousand years, for another chance at Ubbrroxx?"
"No, if you join with me, I will live in the receptacle of your body. It may be our only chance."
"To join?"
"Are you willing?"
Stroud knew he had little choice. He was blind now and was losing feeling in all of his extremities. He'd die anyway. Esruad was offering him life for life. "Yes, we join."
"The choice is made..."
Stroud felt bitterly frustrated, unable to see. But he felt the intense fire that suddenly engulfed him, and yet it was not a burning fire. It was a fire of ice and it spread through his body, combating the numbness and deadness and poison inflicted by the serpent which had been just another extension of Ubbrroxx.
"Damn you, Esruad!" Stroud heard the angry roar of Ubbrroxx as if it, too, were inside him and all around him.
Stroud felt a calm filtering through him with the coolness of Esruad's being. He felt a crystal-like strength returning to his limbs and body. He found his blinded eyes opening to a cool, clear vision, and he felt the strength of his ancestors as they insinuated themselves in his every nerve and fiber. At his feet lay the crystal skull facedown, looking like a useless hulk of ice, and no sign of Esruad, for he was inside Stroud now ... in his head, his heart, his muscle. His brain was crowded with the souls of those who'd abandoned the crystal skull with Esruad, and it caused a jumble of confusion, noise, voices and sounds unfamiliar to Stroud. He was shaken and fearful of his own body now. For the first time in his life, he'd have settled gladly for the steel plate in his head. He imagined the lunatic, the schizophrenic he would soon become with so many spirits turned loose on his mind.
"I hope you know what we're doing, Esruad," he said to himself, for he, now, was Esruad in the flesh and Esruad was him.
"We can overcome this evil now, Stroud, as never before."
"Destroy it?"
"Completely."
"How?"
"Take up the empty receptacle and keep it with us."
Stroud bent to lift the crystal skull and return it to his shoulder pouch.
"Talking to yourself down in this hole, too, Stroud!" Sam Leonard's voice came as a shock, making Stroud think it was coming from the skull, before he wheeled to face Dr. Leonard. The other man had come out of the shadows.
"Where are the others? Why've you come alone?"
"Sorry, Stroud ... I tried to save them ... but ... but--"
"Kendra?"
"Taken off by the fiends!"
"Wiz?"