"It was him, I tell you." Kendra had tried to answer the signal Stroud had sent up, but once more it was cluttered with Static. "He's still alive," she shouted amid the zombies.
"But we can't go back," Wiz told her.
"No, but we can get to Nathan. We can plead for more time." She tried to reach Nathan by radio but it remained jammed.
They were halfway through the zombies, fearful yet of being attacked by them. Several had reached out to them with pleading eyes as well as hands. Some moaned as if trapped deep within themselves, pleading for release. If the creature wanted to kill Kendra and Wiz, all it had to do was turn these people loose on them, and yet it had not done so. Kendra had wondered why and she'd put it to Wiz.
When he had no answer, she pushed him for a theory.
"I should guess that it is reserving all its power to ... to combat Stroud and his crystal spirit."
"And if that is so, it's further proof that he's alive ... that the battle down there is still going on."
"Yes, yes ... that would make sense."
"We've got to get to Nathan."
"Yes, hurry ... hurry."
They rushed on to the strange beating of an underground heart, the pounding rising in their ears until they felt their very souls shaken.
-20-
Kendra Cline's plaintive cries in the dark were like daggers plunged into Stroud's soul. Esruad tried desperately to hold him back, to tell him he must ignore the pitiful pleas of the woman, if he were to survive this day. Stroud, unable to listen anymore to Esruad, tore away and raced down the intricate, involved labyrinth now laid out for him by the demon. The walls of this maze were hard-packed clay molded together with the bones of men. Stroud rushed along its narrow and narrowing course to a point where his shoulders scraped the walls and his clothing tore on the outcroppings of bone. He then reached a point where the bones had taken on flesh and life and were reaching out at him, tearing at him as if they belonged to prisoners in cells who just wished to touch another human being.
Stroud tore loose from the wall of hands and found himself standing before a stairwell of stones. He heard again Kendra's screams and he rushed up the stones only to have them crumble below his weight, taking him to the floor once again, and now the stones were, one by one, hurled at him.
Esruad's shield around him held. He drew on Esruad's magical strength, making the leap to the next level, pulling himself up as if he were weightless, a kind of angel, he thought, an avenging angel.
"Let the woman go! Ubbrroxx! Take me, and let the woman go!" he shouted at the darkness around him. In the distance, through what appeared to be a tunnel that went on through eternity, he saw a light, a green, glowing light which touched off a fire.
"You want the woman ... so come for her," Ubbrroxx said, his voice curled by a laugh.
Esruad struggled with Stroud to use his head. "Another sacrifice is nothing to ending the power of this evil, Stroud!"
From the records uncovered by Leonard and Wisnewski, in the very written words of Esruad, Stroud had learned that he must locate the geographic center of the ship. He now stared down the tube of flame ahead of him. "But this is it ... this is where it lives, Esruad."
Esruad had no argument for this.
Stroud knew that momentarily he and Esruad would come face-to-face with the true demon...
No more vile little familiars, beasts with tarantula bodies or tentacles, no more substitute horrors. Once Stroud penetrated the center, Ubbrroxx had no place else to hide and could take no more camouflage, create no more apparitions. It wasn't anything Esruad had said, nothing that Stroud had learned from the records, only a peaceful inner power called knowledge. The offshoots of the creature, its telepathic powers, its havoc, all emanated from here, and at the very back of this chamber it had Kendra.
It had come down to Stroud and the Satan of the Etruscans, Ubbrroxx.
Stroud felt fortified, however. He did not feel alone, not with Esruad within him, cloaking him in his impressive magic.
Stroud started across the dark interior of the new cell he had reached when out of the dark on his right side a flying creature loped by his head, almost striking him. Stroud saw only the black wings of the beast as it swooped, until his light hit it, and he saw that it was an enormous vampire bat, not unlike the ones that he had done battle with in the caverns outside Andover, Illinois. Stroud heard others screeching in the dark, piercing the blackness with their beady, blind eyes.
"Ubbrroxx is drawing on your fears, your worst nightmares, Stroud," he told himself.
Stroud tried desperately to get a grip, but it was like looking into the graves of the many vampires he had personally driven into eternity with the long-spiked, chemically poisoned stakes he had used. Something roared like a beast to his left and then a den of snapping, snarling beasts rose up in Stroud's light, approaching. It was Kerac and his band of werewolves, monsters that Stroud had wiped out in the northernmost woods of Michigan the year before, after tracking one of their number from the streets of Chicago. All here, along with the vampires ... unreal, and yet so real and threatening. Then they pounced in unison with an attack from the vampires.
"Hold to your faith in me, Stroud!" Esruad fired his mind with the message as Stroud saw all of the monsters of his mind flattened out against the invisible but powerful shield that Esruad continued to display.
The werewolves and the vampires came in again and again, trying desperately to destroy the shield, to put a dent in it, but it was useless. "So long as you believe in me," Esruad told him in a whisper deep within his mind.
The creatures outside the protecting cube now became people, and in their faces, Stroud began to realize who they were. Ubbrroxx now was sending forth the images of all of the people whom Stroud had come into contact with--innocent people--who had lost their lives around him, some due directly to their association with him, some indirectly. Among them were Leonard, soldiers he had known in the war, fellow cops he had known in Chicago when he was on the streets there, Magaffey, who was so instrumental in helping him uncover the vampire colony in Andover, the band of mercenaries he had paid to die in their effort to help him wipe out the werewolf herd in Michigan. All those who had lost their lives in Stroud's various crusades now stared in at him, asking him to join them. Even his grandfather's apparition was among the specters.
Ubbrroxx was working on a very different level now, but Stroud remained firm in his convictions and his trust in Esruad. He noted that among the dead who wandered about the cube, pleading with him to come join them, there was no sign of Wisnewski or Kendra, and this gave him hope for their well-being.
"How long are we going to stand still for this?" Esruad asked from within.
Stroud took his meaning, stepping through the horde of ghosts who had for so long inhabited his nightmares.
They reached out, flattening their ethereal hands against the cube enveloping him, and where this occurred their limbs disappeared into a wispy mist. Stroud stalked on, shouting, "I'm coming for you, Ubbrroxx! Nothing will keep us apart ... nothing."
Stroud spoke a silent dialogue with Esruad as he continued on.
Why did you imprison yourself in the crystal skull for all these years?
To be here now...
To fight the beast again, after failing the first time?
We failed the first time because we were weak, fearful ... worse, we became willing accomplices.