Lawyers in Hell (31 page)

Leaving the ropes in place for their return, they ventured into the tunnel.  The tunnel fed into a wide circle; the circle in turn opened into yet another passageway, sloping sharply downward.

While Powell staked a piton for a safety line to facilitate a hasty rappel down the sharp incline, in the light from his headlamp, Pythagoras noticed something strange.

A dead thing, so far below ground?  The carcass was not fossilized, yet somehow preserved.  And it was grotesque.  Perhaps it was a deformed ker or harpy, or a stunted erinys, some supernatural personification of the anger of the dead.  But no, it was too ugly for that.  Perhaps it was a baby phorcyde, one of Phorcys and Ceto’s monstrous children.  Or a member of some more ancient demon race?  A pair of wings was attached to its headless round body; its belly had a gaping mouth, frozen open in death; its leathery flesh was grayish, almost invisible in the light of their headlamps.

Houdini prodded it gingerly with the tip of his survival knife and said quietly, “What in the underworld is this?” to Pythagoras.

Pythagoras shrugged, saying, “It might be some unknown species of subterranean bat.  Don’t let it bother you, Harry.  We have more immediate concerns.  Look there.”

Ahead was a steep incline of about a hundred meters, opening into an intermittently self-illuminated cavern.  Stalactites and their shadows appeared to dance in uneven rhythm, as if the light was moving randomly.

Powell, up ahead, slowed to a stop where the tunnel opened onto a ten-foot ledge.

When Pythagoras joined Powell, he discovered the source of the eerie light.

*

Below Powell was a pool about a hundred feet in diameter, with a phosphorescent glow and a thousand eyes.  Beside Powell was Pythagoras, frozen in shock at what they both saw.  Was this pool alive?  Cognizant?  The thousand eyes on its surface roved in every direction.  The ground around the pool was shrouded in mist.  Lights bobbed around its edges.  Its surface became agitated as its eyes looked up at them.

Now the pool’s surface moved constantly – creating creatures, limbs, organs at random in horrific combinations:  winged eyes; clawed tendrils; fleshy feet and arms, all spewed into the air above, only to be swallowed up as the protoplasmic pool created razor-teeth to devour the grotesques as fast as it created them.  Some few creatures escaped the beastly pool that mothered them.

These landed on the cavern floor, flopping helplessly.  Some oozed back into the swirling protoplasm.  Others, self-propelled, wandered into the several tunnels that dotted the base of the cavern surrounding the roiling lake of pandemonium.

The horror below Powell was whispering to him, crooning at him to come join the fun.  In the pool, he’d never be alone again, it promised.  The thing in the pool had gotten into the mind of a solitary man and was promising his heart’s desire…. 

Powell had to get out of here.  Now.

He tackled Pythagoras, dropping the philosopher to his knees on the ledge, then slammed into Merkerson’s chest, hoping to escape into the tunnel.

Merkerson shook him, but Powell just shrieked, “Got to get out!  Out!!” and tried to push past, more terrified than he’d ever been before.  On the narrow ledge, Merkerson stepped aside to let Powell get past, then cold-cocked him.

Powell barely felt it when they dragged him into the tunnel’s mouth and left him there.

*

Merkerson watched Nichols sweating the result:  one man short, with Powell out of commission.  Nichols wasn’t happy.

Pythagoras scrambled to his feet, less interested in the protoplasmic being below than in a circular area scintillating on the far wall of the cavern at roughly the height of their ledge.  Turning to Nichols and Merkerson, Pythagoras said, “Mister Nichols, if you please, ignore the beast below us.  Rather, have your Captain Merkerson fire a stake into that turbulence over there.”

“Do it,” Nichols ordered.

Merkerson was happy to oblige.  As he painted that nebulous region of space on his smoothbore piton projector with its laser rangefinder, the laser registered infinity.

Merkerson fired.  His “plain-vanilla” piton shot forward and out of sight as it entered the suspended circle of ever shifting space on that rock wall.

Pythagoras whooped.  “Just as I thought!  I believe
that
is the dimensional doorway or time portal we seek, and I’m fairly sure it is the source of the time perturbations that have Satan tied in knots – or if not the source, the
way
to the source.  Come, we must be like my frater Aristotle:  ‘espy, see, behold, remark and observe.’”

*

Discipline was breaking down.  Nichols was now shifting to Plan B, his go-to-shit plan, as fast as he could, stuck on this six-by-ten ledge with a bunch of fools.  Powell, the stolid major, had turned out to be the liability, not the batty old-dead philosopher, who was now giving orders as if this was his mission.  Hell of a note.

“Friend Merkerson,” Pythagoras commanded, “use your rangefinder to give me a distance to that large stalactite there in the center.  Also, to the far wall of the cavern.”

Then Pythagoras sat down cross-legged at the ledge’s edge and opened his hellpad on his lap.

Houdini in tow, Nichols edged forward to get a better look at this ‘dimensional doorway or time portal,’ as Pythagoras called the glitter on the far wall.  Dimensional gateway or time portal be damned:  hell was full of anomalous regions.  You didn’t name them and claim them; you avoided them.

Houdini stared blankly, awestruck.

Nichols let out a strained, almost inaudible whisper:  “Devil take me.”

Nichols’ concerns about team stability and Powell’s breakdown were instantly overshadowed.  Satan’s demons could make a strong man void his bowels, but this…?

What in all the blazing netherworlds of creation was this?  A willful incursion into hell – from the outside?  Who’d want to do such a thing; more to the point, who
could?

Nichols promised himself that the next time Welch looked at intel and told Nichols:  “None of this means shit to me,” Nichols was going to take sick leave, not volunteer to find out what was what.  Welch was an operational master and the smartest damned soul that Nichols had ever met.  But Welch had stayed home on this one, sending Nichols in his stead because Welch was busy trying to keep a lid on Satan’s troubles.  So, being Welch's right-hand man, Nichols got command on this operation, because he was accustomed to being sent on missions requiring field experience and Welch trusted Nichols to ride herd on whomever, whenever.”

Harry Houdini knelt beside Pythagoras and asked him what the next step would be.  Pythagoras said,
sotto voce,
a single word, “Freedom.”

But Nichols heard it, loud and clear.  Great.  Mutiny.  Here it was, the hidden agenda he’d been sensing:  fools in hell are three-for-a-penny.

Still, mission trumps all.  As the two conspirators talked, Nichols set up a multipurpose video surveillance camera to record multispectral digital images of the portal as well as the pool for analysis later.  To insure that the information would survive even if they didn’t, he sent the digital data back via ruggedized fiber-optic cable over the VHF line-of-sight data link to Achilles on the
Yamato.

Have fun, Achilles. Only an ego of heroic proportions like yours could be jealous about missing this cluster. 
Pythagoras meanwhile, finished computing the exact length of rope needed to swing from the ledge to the twinkling point in space.  Merkerson fired a depleted uranium piton, with climbing rope attached, into the base of the twinkling rock outcropping.

On impact, the rock-penetrating piton imploded at the base of the stalactite, embedding a brace that would hold if the rock was solid.

Putting his hellpad into his backpack, Pythagoras stepped forward, grabbed the rope and said, “Fraters, we extend the boundaries of knowledge from hell itself!  I salute you!”

And the old dead Pythagoras stepped off the rock and swung, like a decrepit Errol Flynn, until he reached the nadir of his arc....

A large tentaclelike pseudopod shot straight up from the pulsating mass of flesh and congealed around Pythagoras, pulling the philosopher into its gelatinous mass.  The climbing rope, rated for eight thousand pounds, snapped.

Pythagoras screamed.

Powell had regained consciousness.  Now, seeing Pythagoras consumed, he crawled to the edge of the ledge.  Before Nichols thought to intervene, Powell grabbed his entire satchel full of explosives, affixed a det cord and tossed the bag into the heart of the beast.

It ‘swallowed.’

Then there was a phantasmagoric display as flesh and limbs and organs exploded into the air in a deafening mix of concussion and screeching.  Writhing bits of flesh showered the pool, wriggling and pulsing as they returned to their source.

The pool devoured each and all, hungrily sprouting new razor-toothed mouths.

Everyone in the party fired at will, unloading several clips before realizing that the rounds, slamming mercilessly into the writhing protoplasm, had no effect.

Nichols watched Powell, not the pool, until Powell collapsed against the wall of the ledge, eyes glassy.

Nichols realized that the pool creature probably considered them a threat as it deliberately spewed forth a gilled and scaly humanoid, about seven feet tall, with a face like a carp, who proceeded to climb the sheer wall to their ledge.

Nichols fired his Desert Eagle into the scaly creature’s crested head.

The creature fell back into the writhing pool and was lost.

Merkerson and Houdini were shouting that the only way to reach the time portal was to build a one-rope bridge and crawl across before the monster tried something else.

The protoplasm pool below spawned a man-sized lump of flesh, with arms and legs for locomotion but no other visible organs, which scrabbled across the cavern floor, away from its progenitor and down a tunnel at the cavern’s base.  Two more followed it.

Nichols let them go.  He was conserving ammo, playing sentry while the other two readied the rope bridge.  If the bridge failed, they’d all be dumped into the protoplasm pool, where they wouldn’t exactly get dead.  Not getting dead meant no express trip to Slab A, no way out of that pool.  And Nichols had no intention of being stuck here in a pool of spare parts.

Something Nichols recognized crawled out of that pool:  an ogre demon, with red skin, rippling muscles, a black spade beard, two horns on his head, fangs and claws.  It too stormed out into one of the cave openings. 

Nichols absently noted that each time a creature emerged from the pool, the glowing lights in the surrounding mist flickered and danced.  Then he’d shoot each creature.  It would fall down or fall back, more like a video game or training film than real life.  After staking his line to the ledge with his piton and tying it down, Merkerson fired a depleted uranium piton at a stalactite about six meters out, and pulled himself, hand over hand, across to the stalactite.

Below, the creature spewed out two more gill-men.  Nichols was grinning as he changed magazines and shot the gill-men before they could climb more than a few meters up the cliff face.  He was counting rounds now.  Each Desert Eagle clip had eight .44 magnum rounds, and he had only two clips left of the six he’d brought….

Merkerson took aim on the second stalactite that had been used by Pythagoras in his failed attempt across.  His piton hit home, and he quickly tied off the end of the rope to a freshly-embedded spike.  Re-attached, he painstakingly began the second leg of his trip.

Nichols kept one eye on Merkerson, the other on his targets and the rest of his team.  Houdini had begun his commando crawl out from the ledge.  When he was three-quarter of the way across to the first stalactite, trouble raised its damned head.

This menace was standard hellish issue:  nine-foot, night-black, taloned, bat-winged and horned, it reminded Nichols of a Tartarosian.  Its smooth skin glistened like fresh tar, and its body muscles rippled with great apparent strength.

As it rapidly climbed into the air toward Houdini, Nichols fired.  Magnums fire dirty:  smoke and flame belched from the Desert Eagle’s muzzle.  The single magnum round ripped through the ebony demon’s wing and it tumbled helplessly into the protoplasmic pool below.

Merkerson took the safety off his Ingram; the Mac-10 was now ready to rock and roll.  He sank another piton into a stalactite about ten meters away.

The portal in the air shimmered like a summer’s day.

Nichols saw Merkerson secure the piton just as he was targeted by a Heikegani crab with a human-faced carapace and the wings of a hummingbird.  In life, Nichols had pulled duty in Japan:  according to legend, each Heikegani held the soul of a samurai warrior killed in the battle of Dan-no-ura.  It moved toward Merkerson.  Nichols fired and missed, leaving him only six rounds.

“Merkerson, heads up!” Nichols yelled.

Merkerson grabbed his Ingram and followed the Heikegani’s progress toward him through the MAC-10’s scope.  When the giant, winged crab was about ten feet away, Merkerson fired a continuous burst.

Nichols always loved the sound of a machine pistol burping:  the creature, torn to shreds, tumbled headlong into the pool below.

As Merkerson resumed his crawl and Nichols shot four more hybrid crabs (leaving him two rounds in his clip); Houdini reached the first anchor point, and Merkerson got to the third stalactite and attached a safety line to it.

Eight feet from the opening.

Merkerson hammered a new spike and tied off the line that would complete the last leg of their journey.  Houdini was at the halfway point.  Merkerson had just begun his next crawl when another bat-winged demon arose from the abyss, followed by yet four more hybrid horrors.

Nichols immediately fired on the large demon, which left him one round and not much time to change clips when fractions of a second could mean an eternity as protoplasm in the pool below.

The other four hybrid horrors attacked Nichol’s two suspended companions, two on one. 

Houdini, anchored to the stalactite, fired his .45 at the winged crab closest to him.  It shattered and fell.  The second blind-sided him, slamming Houdini into the rock outcropping.  He dropped his gun and his mouth opened wide as he gulped for air.