"Careful, Wisnewski!" Leonard scolded his colleague and friend, but Wiz seemed now lost in thought, an eerie, mad look flitting across his face which vanished with the noise of someone's approach, rattling the requested tools.
Along with two picks and shovels were a few sticks of dynamite, which Wiz promptly, and in no uncertain terms, refused and sent back. "We're not here to destroy either ourselves or the integrity of this grand ship," he told the men aboveground while Stroud went to work with a pickax. The claw dug into the spongy, ancient wood like a battering ram against cardboard, and soon the three men were using their gloved hands, setting aside the assault weapons the axes had become. A man-sized hole was necessary and the black maw gaping back at them from the interior of the ship grew larger and larger, looking as if it welcomed swallowing them whole. They had to be certain no splintering pieces could catch on their suits and cause tears. The greatest fear at this point was being contaminated with whatever had plagued the old man named Weitzel, the guard and the two policemen, all of whom were in a state of unconsciousness, languishing in hospital beds.
On their return there would be an irradiation shower to destroy any bacterium or spore that might cling to their bodies. The portable decontamination unit was in position now just below street level.
The three of them stared at the empty well of darkness before them. The hull of the ship, the very bottom, the hold. Stroud wondered if it still contained any of its original cargo, whatever that might be. He wondered if they would find treasures and jewels, but he'd settle for Etruscan pottery, amphorae, tools, artifacts of this sort. Leonard flashed a light into the interior from which emanated a stench so powerful it threatened to send them back. The light strobed over bundles and boxes and barrels ostensibly filled with rotted matter, rotten flax and other grains, rotten fish in salted kegs and something akin to the smoldering odor of rotting flesh that Stroud had come to know during his tour of duty in Vietnam.
"What the hell is that?" asked Leonard, whose eyes darted behind him. "That's no goddamned rat."
"What? What did you see?"
"Same thing Stroud saw, I think ... but it wasn't any rat like I've ever seen. Looked like it had more than four legs."
Stroud went toward the area that Leonard pointed to, but he saw nothing; not until his light brought into focus the footprints, or more appropriately, the claw prints of a rather large centipede. "Look at this, Dr. Wisnewski."
Wisnewski did so.
"What do you suppose could make such a track?"
"Nothing in my experience."
"Leonard? Leonard? Where is he?"
They looked around to find Leonard gone. He had entered the hull alone. Wisnewski hurried through, catching Leonard's silhouette ahead of him in his light while Stroud grabbed the only pickax left. Leonard had taken the other one.
Stroud rushed through, catching up to Wisnewski at the moment his light picked up the fact that Leonard was tearing away at the wall in front of him. It gave way easily and then Leonard's ax came back over his shoulder with a large bone stuck to it moments before the wall caved in in front of the doctor, burying him in human bones, sending up a scream from him.
Stroud and Wiz rushed to his aid, trying to tug him free from the avalanche of bones.
"God damn it!"
"Helllllp!"
The hull echoed with their shouts and at the same instant Stroud saw something leap onto Wisnewski's back. It was hairy and multilegged with enormous eyes that glowed red in the dark, its spindly claws and teeth trying to rend Dr. Wisnewski's suit as if it wished to burrow in. Stroud back-handed the demon and when his gloved hand touched it, it left a searing smoke on the glove. Stroud threw down the ax claw at it immediately, missing as it scurried into the blackness. A second such creature scampered over the bones and came at Leonard's helmeted face. Wiz lifted a femur and knocked the creature hard into the wall of the ship. A third demonic menace was now on Stroud's shoulder, digging in with its teeth for the throat. Stroud grabbed it about the scrawny neck and held it up for the point of the pickax that he rammed into its throat. This caused the thing to go up in a ball of flame that burned nothing but itself, a kind of spontaneous combustion, making Stroud drop it. No blood, no bodily juices, just this: flame that burned out as quickly as it appeared, leaving an ashen outline of the living thing that had attacked him.
"Jesus! Jesus!" Wiz was pulling Leonard free of the heavy bones and skulls covering him.
"You getting this above? Above, are you reading this?" Stroud pleaded without answer. "We've been cut off. We've got to get out of here, Dr. Wisnewski, retreat, now!"
"Better part of valor, yes, quite agreed."
Leonard regained his feet and his composure and they started back the way they'd come. All around them they heard the scratching, ratlike noises of the creatures that had attacked them. Stroud feared they would be defenseless against an army of such creatures, and he feared that the ones that had been brave enough to attack had torn a hole in one or more of their suits, thus exposing them to whatever deadly germ lay down here with the corpses of what must be literally hundreds of ancients.
"What the hell are those things?" Leonard wanted to know.
"Devils of some sort," said Wiz, breathing heavily. "Lesser demons, the pets of a more powerful demon."
"Demons," panted Leonard, "demons protecting an ancient ship, cursing those who dare come near it, and we're inside the damned thing, breaking down walls ... my God."
"Hurry!" Stroud shouted at the porthole, helping the others through as he looked back into the darkness where a thousand pairs of red eyes stared back at him. The eyes were dizzying in their number and movement, as if they were revolving, and behind each pair of eyes was a monkey-rat with six legs and horrid claws and gnashing teeth. Had these demons fed on the men whose bones had somehow come to this end? Who was this sacrificial crew placed aboard a ship sunk in the earth forever, until now?
Stroud, following the other two now, staving off the red eyes that moved on them, saw that Wiz held several of the bones in his hands as he rushed along. Leonard had something in his hand as well, some kind of parchment. Both men had noticeable rents to their protective wear, as did Stroud himself. They'd lost two of the lights and one of the picks inside the strange ship filled with apparitions and demonic creatures.
Just outside, at the tunnel mouth, they agreed to explain away their difficulties inside on the basis of structural collapse. At this point in time, it seemed useless to speak of demonic power emanating from the ship, so powerful that it could affect the human mind. What worried Stroud, however, was the very real possibility that they might all die with the information locked inside them, given the nature of the beast and the fact they had come into contact with it. Would they now become human vegetables like the others? Earlier, rumors had come that even more cases of the rare disease were quickly filling up the hospital beds about the city. If so, they must put down their findings in writing, and quickly.
Yet Stroud felt no illness, no slowing down of his mental faculties. Still, as with Weitzel, it might come on gradually like a creeping disease, slowly taking over his mind. The idea was enough to frighten even Abraham Stroud. "If I become a zombie, please see to it that my life is terminated," he told the other two men as the crowd overhead cheered them on toward the decontamination chamber set up outside the pit.
Wiz and Leonard agreed, only if he'd do the same for them.
The light rain had continued, and for some unaccountable reason it was creating a misty steam about the three men as it made contact with their protective clothing. The fog seemed to be seeping from them, and it smelled rank with sulfur.