Chapter 15: The Lake of Fire

Before a barrier of gold, waist-high, Dean Rawson stood tense and rigid. Behind him the great cave-room swarmed with warriors, leaders, doubtless, of the unholy hordes. But beyond the barrier were the real leaders of the Mole-men tribes--Phee-e-al, ruler in chief, and his clustering guard of high priests. In the flooding light from the wall, their eyes were circles of dead-white skin. A black speck glinted wickedly in the center of each.

Phee-e-al was speaking. His artificially whitened face grimaced hideously; the shrill whistling voice made no comprehensible sound. But in some manner Rawson gathered a dim realization of what his gestures meant.

Phee-e-al pointed at the captive; and one lean hand, with talons more suggestive of a bird of prey than of a human hand, pointed downward. “Gevarro,” he said. The word was repeated many times in the course of his whistling talk.

“Gevarro”--what did it mean? Then Rawson remembered. It was the word he had heard in his dreams, the name of the lake of fire.

The voices of the priests rose in a shrill chorus of protests, and even Phee-e-al stood silent. They crowded about their ruler, and Rawson knew they were demanding him for themselves. Then the one who still held a human body in his arms sprang forward and his long talons worked unspeakable mutilation upon the body and face.

Rawson averted his eyes from the ghastly spectacle. For, swiftly, he was seeing something more horrifying than this desecration of a dead body; he was seeing himself, still living, tortured and torn by those same beastly hands. The dead face of Sheriff Downer was staring at him from red, eyeless sockets as with one leap Rawson threw himself over the golden wall. Ten leaping strides away was his gun. In that instant of realization, he knew why his life had been spared.

In the room of fire he had destroyed their priest. They had saved him for further torture.

To get his hands on the gun, to die fighting--the thought was an unspoken prayer in his mind. Behind him the room echoed with demoniac shrieks. Before him was the metal stand. His outstretched hands fell just short of the blue .45 as he crashed to the floor. The copper ones were upon him.

Half stunned by the fall, he hardly knew when they dragged him to his feet. He was facing the golden figure of Phee-e-al, but now the ruler’s indecision had vanished. He was exercising his full authority and even Rawson’s throbbing brain comprehended the doom that was being pronounced.

“Gevarro!” he was shrieking. “Gevarro!”

Beside him a priest swept the metal table clear. Rawson’s clothing, the gun, the radio receiver, all were snatched up and hurled into one of the massive chests. Phee-e-al was still shouting shrill commands. An instant later Rawson was lifted in air, rushed to the barrier and thrown bodily from the sacred premises he had invaded. Then the hands of the red guard closed about him before he could struggle to his feet. A shining object swung down above his head. It was the last he knew.

His dreams were of falling. Always when he half roused to consciousness he was aware of that smooth, even descent, and he knew it had continued for hours.

Once he saw black walls slipping smoothly past, upward, always upward. Gropingly he tried to marshal his facts into some understandable sequence. He was falling, falling toward the center of the earth, and this that he saw was not rock, or any metal such as he knew.

“It’s all different,” he told himself dully, “new kind of matter. Rock would flow; this stands the pressure.” But he knew the air pressure had built up tremendously. The blood was pounding in his ears. He wanted to sleep.

It was the heat that awakened him. The air was stifling him, suffocating. He was struggling to move his heavy body, fighting against this nightmare of heat when he opened his eyes and knew that he was in a place of light. First to be seen were walls, no longer black, no longer even with the characteristics of rock, or even metal. Here, as Rawson had sensed, was new material to form the core of a world. It would have been red in an ordinary light. It was transformed to orange, strangely terrifying in the blazing flood of yellow brilliance that came from the tunnel’s end.