Twilight Eyes (61 page)

Rather than follow the tunnel to its end and explore the next horizontal shaft, which might offer nothing more than this one, I went to the first set of steel doors on the left. No knob, no handle. I pushed the white button in the frame, and the halves of the heavy portal instantly slid open with a
whoosh
of compressed air.

Rya and I went through fast, prepared to use the shotgun and the automatic rifle, but the chamber was dark and apparently unoccupied. I fumbled for a switch inside the door, found it, and brought banks of fluorescent lights flickering to life. It was a huge storeroom filled with wooden crates stacked nearly to the ceiling and arranged in orderly rows. Each bore the manufacturer's shipping label, so in a few minutes, quietly prowling the aisles, we established that this place was filled with spare parts for everything from lathes to milling machines to forklifts to transistor radios.

Extinguishing lights and closing doors behind us, we went along the tunnel silently from one room to the next.

In every chamber we found more caches of supplies: thousands of incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs in stacks of sturdy cardboard cartons; hundreds of crates holding thousands of small boxes that in turn contained millions of screws and nails in every size and weight; hundreds of hammers in all designs, wrenches, socket wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, electric drills, saws, other tools. One cathedral-sized room, paneled in moth-repellent cedar that somewhat took our breath away, contained tier upon tier of huge bolts of cloth—silk, cotton, wool, linen—spooled on storage racks that towered fifteen feet above our heads. Another vault contained medical supplies and equipment: X-ray machines snug in plastic sheeting; ranks of EKG and EEG monitors, also tightly covered; cases of hypodermic syringes, bandages, antiseptics, antibiotics, anesthetics; and much more. From that tunnel we entered another like it, equally deserted and well maintained, where additional rooms were filled with more supplies. There were barrels of whole grain—wheat, rice, oats, rye. According to the labels, the contents were freeze-dried and then vacuum-sealed in a nitrogen atmosphere to insure freshness for at least thirty years. Hundreds—no, thousands—of similarly sealed barrels of flour, sugar, powdered eggs, powdered milk, vitamin and mineral tablets, plus smaller drums of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, oregano, and bay leaf, had been provisioned.

The vast facility seemed like a Pharaoh's tomb, the very grandest tomb in all the world, fully stocked with everything the king and his servants would require to insure his perfect comfort in the afterlife. Somewhere in hushed chambers as yet unexplored, there must be temple dogs and sacred cats that had been mercifully killed and lovingly wrapped in tannin-soaked bandages to make the journey into death with their royal master, and somewhere treasures of gold and jewels, and somewhere a handmaiden or two preserved for sexual joy in the world to come—and somewhere, of course, the Pharaoh himself, mummified and reposing atop a solid-gold catafalque.

We stepped into an immense armory stocked with firearms: sealed crates full of pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns packed in grease, enough weapons to outfit several platoons. I saw no ammunition, but I was quite sure that millions of rounds were stored elsewhere in the facility. And I would have bet there were rooms stocked with deadlier instruments of violence and war.

A library, consisting of at least fifty thousand volumes, was housed in the last room off that second tunnel, just before the second junction on that level. This was also deserted. As we moved along the shelves of books I was reminded of the Yontsdown County Library, for the two places were like islands of normality in a sea of infinite strangeness. They shared an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity—albeit an uneasy peace and a fragile tranquillity—and the air had a not unpleasant smell of paper and binding cloth.

However, the collection of volumes in this library differed from that in town. Rya noticed that there was no fiction here: gone were Dickens, Dostoyevski, Stevenson, and Poe. I could not find a history section, either: banished were Gibbon, Herodotus, Plutarch. We were likewise unable to spot even a single biography of any famous man or woman; neither could we find poetry nor humor nor travel writings nor theology nor philosophy. Shelf after groaning shelf held dry texts solemnly devoted to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, geology, biology, physiology, astronomy, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, electronics, agriculture, animal husbandry, soil conservation, engineering, metallurgy, the principles of architecture. . . .

With only this library, a quick mind, and occasional assistance from a learned instructor, you could learn to establish and manage a bountiful farm, repair an automobile or even build one from the ground up (or a jet aircraft or a television set), design and erect a bridge or a hydroelectric power plant, construct a blast furnace and foundry and mill for the production of high-grade steel rods and beams, design machinery and factories to produce transistors. . . . Here was a library specifically assembled to teach everything needed for the successful maintenance of every
physical
aspect of modern civilization but which had nothing to teach about important emotional and spiritual values upon which that civilization rested: nothing here of love, faith, courage, hope, brotherhood, truth, or the meaning of life.

Midway through the stacks of books Rya whispered, “Thorough collection.” What she meant was “frightening.”

I echoed, “Thorough,” but what I meant was “terrifying.”

Although we were swiftly arriving at an understanding of the dark purpose to which this entire underground installation was dedicated, neither of us was willing to put that understanding into words. Some primitive tribes, though having a name for the devil, refuse to speak that name in the belief that giving voice to it will instantly call forth the beast. Likewise, Rya and I were reluctant to discuss the goblins' purpose in this elaborate pit, afraid that doing so would somehow transform their hateful intentions into immutable fate.

From the second tunnel we cautiously entered a third, where the contents of additional rooms confirmed our worst suspicions. In three immense chambers, under banks of specially designed lights that were surely meant to promote photosynthesis and rapid growth, we discovered large stores of fruit and vegetable seeds. There were big steel tanks holding liquid fertilizers. Neatly labeled drums were filled with all the chemicals and minerals required for hydroponic farming. Rows of large, shallow troughs, empty now, waited to be filled with water, nutrients, and seedlings, whereupon they would become the hydroponic equivalent of bountiful fields. Considering their enormous stores of freeze-dried vacuum-packed foodstuffs, and considering their plans for chemical farming, and considering that most likely we had seen only a fraction of their agricultural preparations, I felt safe in assuming that they were prepared to feed thousands of their kind for decades if, come Armageddon, they were required to take shelter down here for a long, long time.

As we progressed from room to room and from tunnel to tunnel, we frequently saw their sacred symbol: white sky, dark lightning. I had to look away from it, for on each encounter I was ever more forcefully assaulted by clairvoyant images of the cold, silent, and eternal night that it represented. I had the urge to attach a charge of plastique to those ceramic images and blast them—and all they represented—to pieces, to dust; but I did not waste the explosives that way.

From time to time we also saw pipes appearing out of holes in the concrete walls, traversing portions of a room or corridor, then disappearing into holes in other walls. Sometimes there was a single pipe, sometimes sheaves of six running parallel to one another, of various diameters. All were white, but symbols were stenciled on them for the benefit of maintenance crews, and each symbol was quite easily translated: water, electrical conduit, communications conduit, steam, gas. These were points of vulnerability in the heart of the fortress. Four times I lifted Rya while she hastily molded a charge of plastique between the pipes and plugged a detonator into it. As with previous charges we'd placed, we did not set the detonator, intending to start it ticking only on our way out.

We turned the corner into the fourth tunnel on that level and went only twenty or thirty feet when, immediately ahead of us, a set of doors
whooshed
open with a hiss of compressed air, and a goblin stepped out, five or six feet from us. Even as its piggish eyes widened, even as its wet, fleshy nostrils fluttered and as it gasped in surprise, I stepped forward and swung the automatic rifle, slammed the barrel across the side of its skull. It dropped hard. As the beast was falling, I reversed my grip on the rifle and brought the heavier butt straight down against the demonic forehead, which should have shattered but did not. I was going to strike again, hammer its head to bloody pulp, when Rya seized my arm to stop me. The goblin's luminous eyes had dimmed and rolled back in its head, and with that familiar sickening
crunch-crackle-snap
of bones and with the mucous-wet surging of soft tissues, it had begun to metamorphose into human form, which meant it was either dead or unconscious.

Rya eased forward, pushed the button on the door frame. The steel portal hissed shut behind the crumpled form of our adversary.

If there were other goblins in the room beyond, they evidently had not seen what had happened to this one on the floor before me, for they did not rush out in its defense or set off an alarm.

“Quickly,” Rya said.

I knew what she meant. This was perhaps the opportunity that we had been hoping for, and we might not get another like it.

I slung the rifle over my arm, gripped the goblin by the feet, and dragged it backward into the tunnel we had just left. Rya opened a door, and I hauled our victim into one of the chambers fitted out with equipment for hydroponic farming.

I felt for a pulse. “It's alive,” I whispered.

The creature was cloaked entirely in the pudgy body of a middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and close-set eyes and a wispy mustache, but of course I could see its true nature through that disguise. It was naked, which seemed to be the fashion here in Hades.

Its eyelids fluttered. It twitched.

Rya produced the hypodermic needle with the syringe full of sodium pentothal that she had prepared earlier. Using a length of elastic tubing of the sort nurses employed in hospitals for the same purpose, Rya tied off the captive's arm, forcing a vein to pop up just above the crook of the elbow.

In the brassy light of the imitation suns that hung above the empty hydroponic tanks, our captive's eyes opened, and although they were still dim and unfocused, the beast was coming around fast.

“Hurry,” I said.

Rya squirted a few drops of the drug onto the floor to insure that no air remained in the needle. (We couldn't question the creature if it died of an embolism seconds after injection.) She administered the rest of the dose.

Seconds after the drug was administered, our captive went rigid, every joint locking tight, every muscle taut. Its eyes popped open wide. Its lips skinned back from its teeth in a grimace. All of this dismayed me and confirmed my doubts about the effect of pentothal on goblins.

Nevertheless I leaned forward, staring into the enemy's eyes—which seemed to peer through me—and I attempted to interrogate it.

“Can you hear me?”

A hiss that might have been yes.

“What is your name?”

The goblin gazed unblinkingly and made a gargling, grudging noise through clenched teeth.

“What is your name?” I repeated.

This time its tongue came untied, and its mouth slipped open, and a meaningless knot of sounds unraveled from it.

“What is your name?” I asked.

More meaningless sounds.

“What is your name?”

Again it produced only a queer noise, but I realized this was precisely the same reply with which it had responded to the question before: not random sound but a multisyllabic word. I sensed that this was its name, not the name by which it was known in the world of ordinary men but that by which it was known in the secret world of its own species.

“What is your human name?” I asked.

“Tom Tarkenson,” it said.

“Where do you live?”

“Eighth Avenue.”

“In Yontsdown?”

“Yes.”

The drug did not sedate their kind quite as it would one of us. However, the pentothal produced this rigid, mesmeric state and appeared to encourage truthful responses far more effectively than it would have done in a human being. A hypnotic glaze clouded the goblin's eyes, whereas a man would have slept and would have spoken thickly and ramblingly in response to any inquiry put to him—if responding at all.

“Where do you work, Tom Tarkenson?”

“The Lightning Coal Company.”

“What is your job there?”

“Mine engineer.”

“But that's not really the work you do.”

“No.”

“What work are you really engaged in?”

A hesitation. Then: “Planning...”

“Planning what?”

“Planning . . . your death,” it said, and for an instant its eyes cleared and focused on mine, but then the trance recaptured it.

I shivered. “What is the purpose of this place?”

It did not respond.

“What is the purpose of this place?” I repeated.

It emitted another, longer chain of strange sounds that fell on my ear with no meaning whatsoever but with complex patterns that
indicated
meaning.

I had never imagined that the goblins might have a language of their own, which they used when there was no danger of our kind overhearing them. But that discovery did not surprise me. It was almost certainly a human language that had been spoken in that lost world of the earlier age, before civilization had succumbed to an apocalyptic war. The few human beings who had survived that long-ago Armageddon had reverted to savagery and had forgotten their language along with so much else, but the larger handful of surviving goblins had evidently remembered it and had kept the ancient tongue alive as their own.