Kellory the Warlock

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4THE CORRIDOR OF BLOOD

Here, too, in the inmost citadel, the portals stood open as if in silent invitation to the trespasser. Silent as a gliding shadow or a drifting ghost, the bare brown figure of the boy crept through the marble doorway, which was carven in the likeness of befanged and yawning serpent-jaws, and vanished into the gloom that lay beyond.

He paused in the dense shadows to take stock of his surroundings. And, as his eye flitted from here to there, a vast awe awoke within his savage young heart—and a cold, creeping dread, as well.

He stood at the edge of a colossal rotunda. The pave was all of snowy marble veined and laced with frozen veils of pallid rose. Around the circular wall of this rotunda, which was fitted with plates of brass that flashed like shining gold, rose slender and serpentine pilasters of lucent alabaster. Up and up the graceful spiraling pillars went, to support a vast dome of milky glass that flushed rich crimson with the fires of dawn.

It was not the purity of the rare stone that filled the lad with awe and dread, but the shocking and disquieting knowledge that this vast space was too huge. It must have been half a mile from one side to the other…and that was far too enormous for the size of the citadel. A weird thrill went through him, and he felt the touch of nameless and cosmic fear like a cold wind blowing on his neck from invisible gulfs.

The interior of the citadel was larger than the exterior! Icy globules of sweat burst out on his brow and on his naked breast. This seeming contravention of the very laws of the physical universe was, somehow, more disquieting than all the ghouls and monstrous mantichores with which his imagination had peopled the palace of the Enchanter. It was as if, here within the wizard’s house, space itself was twisted awry and subtly bent to new dimensions.

Somehow, he did not dare cross that vast mesa of snowy marble to its distant farther side. Instead he crept around the enormous floor, keeping well within the shadow cast by the pillars.

He came to a doorway hung with night-dark purples, and crept therethrough.

He found himself in a curious antechamber, the walls whereof were hung with a weird tapestry of woven sword-blades that swayed and swung with faint, clashing, silvery music to the breath of winds unfelt by him. The antechamber was carpeted with the skins of hippogriff and chimera.

Like a brown shadow he crossed the strange chamber where the arras of interlaced and razory steel slithered and sang to the touch of unknown winds, and came to a curious doorway.

It was an arch, a continuous curve, made of yellowed ivory, and the ivory was all of one piece. Seventeen feet high the ivory arch soared, and nine feet from side to side it was: the boy’s imagination shuddered away from attempting to conceive the vast enormity of the Beast from whose single tusk so incredible an archway had been cut.

The ivory arch was hung with a curious curtain of gold tissue. Thin and pallid and transparent as vapor was this delicate silken hanging, but the folds thereof were heavy as perdurable lead. For all his strength, the warrior lad could not budge the fold of that curtain by a finger’s breadth. He paused, panting, and searched the weird chamber with a frightened eye—and spied a second entranceway he had not at first perceived.

Of strange dark gold was this second doorway, and set terribly therein, like ghoulish and repulsive gems, were wet, glistening, naked human eyeballs.

From this terrible door he shrank in loathing. Slowly, painfully, laboriously, the living eyes swiveled in their golden sockets to stare at him. There was an uncanny desperation in the gazing of those bodiless eyes. They stared at him with a horrible and an awful urgency. A message was in the fixed staring of those eyes, a poignant beseeching, an unspoken warning.

But no curtain, save impalpable shadow, barred his path.

Pressing white lips tight against a spasm of nausea, the lad shiveringly passed through the horrid doorway and found himself suddenly standing knee-deep in crimson gore!

Almost he sprang back—but then he realized, with a quaver of terrible relief, that it was but illusion.

He stood at one end of a long hall. The walls thereof were hung with a strange arras whereon a phantasmagoria of nameless and hybrid monstrosities coupled and cavorted, snarled and brayed, squirmed and battled, in a curious travesty of life.

The floor of this grim corridor was paved with a lucent stone the hue of freshly-shed human gore. Blood-red light beat up from this loathsome stone, bathing his feet in horrid luminance. His flesh crept on his bones as he stepped cautiously forward. It was like wading through hot, wet blood. Warmth was in this stone, and light was captive there, as if radiant atoms burned within the scarlet crystal. Shivering with revulsion, he strode grimly forward, but at every step he half-expected to feel the crawling moisture of hot fluid bathing his naked flesh.

Down the corridor of blood he passed, step by reluctant step, averting his eyes hastily from the half-alive obscenities that writhed and bellowed on the queer tapestry.

At the end of the gory hallway lay a door draped in the blackest and softest of velvets. Above, on the amber architrave of the portal, the emerald Eye of Phazdaliom glittered watchfully.

And Kellory half-knew what awaited him beyond the black curtain.