“You’re trying to tell me,” said Rafe, “that you’re the one who controls all the zombies.”
“I control the whole world! Because now it’s my time. The time of the Great He. The time of the Old Man, who’s older than the world is old. The time of Shaitan—because Shaitan is me.”
The child-mouth opened in a perfect oval as if it would sing. Suddenly from it came a booming, bass, thoroughly adult and masculine voice.
“I AM SHAITAN! Kneel to me! Kneel to me . . .”
With the first word the broadcast had come on again, and Rafe and Gaby found themselves involuntarily forced to their knees.
Reasonlessly the compulsion cut off again, leaving Rafe and Gaby still on their knees but in control of their bodies once more. They got to their feet.
“But”—now it was the child-voice speaking again, from a mischievous child-face—“you mustn’t think I rule by might alone. My power is love, the love of those who worship me. And you’ve both got to worship me, you know. You must love me and worship me—no, you stop that!”
The child-face of the self-named Shaitan was twisted with anger, staring at Rafe.
“Don’t you think I know?” Shaitan cried, in a high, tantrum-toned voice. “I know when you’re thinking bad things about me!”
“You’re getting readings on the electrical activities of our brains, are you?” Rafe asked.
The child-face of Shaitan fell into a look of blankness—a blankness that might have been astonishment and might not have been. Then it tightened up and grew sly.
“You are clever—clever,” Shaitan said. “Very clever, Mr. Rafael Harald. But just because I use my little toys doesn’t mean I need them. I can do anything I want, all by myself. Because I’ve lived longer than the whole world, and I know more than anybody or anything.”
“Why have the toys at all, then?” Rafe said. “If you don’t need to control people with a power broadcast—”
“Oh, clever! Cle-ver, clever, Rafe Harald! Clever little man who thinks he knows so much, but doesn’t understand. I use it because I want to use it. My reasons aren’t for explaining to little human men like you. Little human men who’ve turned on some lights and tell themselves now there never was a darkness—that darkness was all superstition. Only there really was a darkness. Always there’s been a darkness. And now, at last, now that my time’s come, darkness has come out again, too, to claim the world of little men. I was going to use you, Rafe Harald, I really was—and that’s why I called you all the way from the Moon to come to me here. But maybe it’s no use. Maybe you’re one of these little men who can’t learn. Wait. One more chance for you, Rafe, because I went to this much effort with you already. You don’t believe in Shaitan? Look at your girly woman, Rafe, and remember the power broadcast is off!”
Rafe turned to Gaby—and felt all his muscles tighten. She stood now like a child playing statues, her body unmoving, but with the tremors of a tension running all through her. Her face was fixed on the child-face of Shaitan, and the frozen expression on her face was one of unbelieving surprise, of horror and wonder mixed.
“Gaby . . .” crooned the creature on the throne.
Rafe turned in time to see the great flabby body stir, come upright, and lean forward. The child-head, cunning with malice, stared down into Gaby’s face. “Gaby . . . you love me, don’t you? You love and worship me, don’t you? Kneel to me, Gaby . . .”
Slowly, without any change in her expression, Gaby’s knees began to bend and her arms to rise. She sank floorward and lifted her hands to Shaitan, as if in longing. Rafe’s hair prickled on the back of his neck. The room seemed to have darkened about them, except on the platform where Shaitan sat. The darkness was not as if the lighting had dimmed, but—as back in the mountain stronghold—as if the air had somehow become a thicker substance through which light struggled to pass. Somewhere there was a humming like the monotone self-amusement of someone insane and withdrawn from the world, rocking out his life on some white-painted bench of a barred room in an institution. A smell like burning feathers and burning flesh together filled Rafe’s nostrils, and his body was as heavy as a piece of the Earth’s core.
And there was no broadcast power that he could feel being fed into the room.
Unreasoning, animal fear woke in him, exploding into fury. He reached for the calculus of his under-mind to grapple with the situation—
A snarl, deadly and wolf-born, cut across the still-murmuring voice of Shaitan.
The voice stopped. Suddenly the light was back; the humming and the odor were gone. Gaby’s arms hesitated and dropped to her sides. Still on her knees, she looked around her, bewildered. Shaitan was glaring about the room. He came back to glare at Rafe.
“What was it?” demanded Shaitan. “What noise was that?”
Rafe did not answer. Abruptly, before he could speak, it came to him that he had heard the snarl, not with his ears, but with his under-mind. And Shaitan had heard it, too. But evidently, not clearly as a snarl.
“What was what?” said Rafe.
“You know!” Shaitan’s child-face twisted. “You know! What was it?”
“Tell me what you think you heard,” Rafe said. “Then maybe I can tell you what it was. I thought you said there was nobody else here but the gateman and you?”
“No . . . body.” Shaitan’s vast bulk shrank back between the heavy arms of his throne, as if retreating into a shell of safety. “But if it was him . . .”
Slowly, the child-face tilted toward the light and shadows of the heavily beamed ceiling overhead.
“Was it your voice, Father?” The tones were thin, thinner and more babyish than Rafe had yet heard them. “Was it?”
Rafe reached down to help Gaby once more to her feet. In the throne, Shaitan sat staring at the ceiling, little head pulled down between hugely fat shoulders.
But there was only silence—to the ears and mind of Rafe, at least. And, plainly, to Shaitan also. Because after a full minute, the grotesque man shuddered, a convulsive shudder that quaked his whole enormous body. He lowered his eyes once more to fasten them on Rafe.
“You’re a fool,” he said. His voice was still the voice of a child, but now its tone and phrasing were completely adult. “You don’t believe.”
“That’s right,” said Rafe. “I only believe in what can be proved.”
“Proved? What more proof do you need?” The piping child-voice had a hard edge. “You’re here—here where I called you to come. I brought you here.”
“No,” said Rafe. “I think I found my own way to this place.”
“Found your way?” Shaitan’s lip twisted. “You heard my call and came. I laid a trail for you. If you’d been less than you are, you’d never have got this far. But you proved yourself good enough to come to me—to me! Only because I wanted it. And now that you’re here, you’ve got to learn what you are—and what I am.”
“I know what I am,” Rafe said. “As for you, you’re a freak—”
With the last word, he hurled himself onto the platform and at the figure in the throne, right arm stiffly outstretched, fingers rigid and aimed at the pyramidal neck joining the frail young head to the massive body.
A shock, like that of running full tilt into an immovable wall, knocked the breath from him. His fingertips had merely dimpled the neck of Shaitan. He found himself held by the middle, held by the seated man like a puppy in mid-air.
The hands of Shaitan were enormous. Together they wrapped completely about Rafe’s waist, and the strength of them was almost enough to prevent his regaining the breath that had been knocked from him as his attack was checked.
“Fool, as I said—” began Shaitan. Then he bellowed in sudden, mighty, bass-voiced pain. His hands let go, and Rafe caught himself from a fall to the floor as Shaitan’s massive left arm dropped nerveless to the throne arm, below it. Rafe had chopped down with the edge of his own left hand at that arm—a blow that should have been enough to snap a two by four of seasoned wood.
>
Immediately, Rafe was around the side of the paralyzed arm, standing half behind the throne. He threw his right forearm around the neck of Shaitan and pulled it up hard under the boyish chin in a strangle hold.
“Fool . . .” wheezed Shaitan, once again. Where he was getting the air to speak even that word was a mystery. “Kill me and I’ll live again. Hurt me, and I’ll find you and hurt you back. Can’t you understand? I’m Shaitan—Shaitan!”
“Never mind that,” said Rafe grimly. “Tell me—”
“Nothing . . .” wheezed Shaitan. “I’ll tell nothing. And you’ll let me go. You will because you love me, Rafe. You love me . . . and you worship me. You love . . . worship . . . me . . .”
Rafe tightened the pressure of his forearm against the pillowlike neck with all his strength, but the half-strangled whisper went on.
The very universe seemed to be changing around Rafe. An ugly warmth of emotion was mounting within him. It ate away at his will like acid, leaching the strength from the arm with which he held Shaitan. What had begun as a strangle hold was becoming, against his will, a caress. A sickly affection for the gross creature he was touching was drawing him down into its depths . ..
From the back of his mind came the suddenly wakened, ancient negative that had always refused to let him yield or be conquered. It woke his recently acquired strength in his under-brain area. Without warning, the familiar, gut-wrenching, empathic response was in him, but this time as a tool. He saw himself, and he saw Shaitan, as if from the outside; and he saw the pit of submission in which the other was trying to trap him by making its very ugliness and unnaturalness attractive.
The body response of the empathic reaction was like a flood of clean detergent scouring away filth that had threatened to clog his innermost self. He brought his forearm up against the pulpy neck with a new strength, and for the first time, the whispering of Shaitan choked into silence.
“Now,” said Rafe into the small, delicate, childlike ear before him. “I want answers. Where’s Ab Leesing?”
He released some of the pressure on Shaitan’s neck so that the other could answer. But the answer that came was gaspingly triumphant.
“Do you . . . think I’ll tell . . .” wheezed Shai-tan. “I told you . . . I can’t be killed. Even if I could, you wouldn’t kill me. . . it’s not your way, is it? And do you think anything else can frighten me? I’ve felt everything, seen everything, in this world and beyond. Give up, Rafe, give in.”
“One more chance,” said Rafe grimly. “Where’s Ab Leesing?”
“Kill me, then, if you think you can,” said Shaitan. “I still won’t die. My body will rot, but my soul will enter into your soul. Bit by bit, day by day, I’ll grow inside you—until I take you over, until you become me. Shaitan will come back to life in you, or in any man or woman who kills him. That’s why I won’t ever die. Whoever kills me, accepts me into him—to live forever!”
“That’s what you believe, is it?” Rafe laughed so harshly that he saw Gaby, standing now watching in front of the platform, turn strangely pale. Rafe raised his voice. “Lucas!”
“Lucas?” whispered Shaitan, above Rafe’s tight-held forearm.
“Lucas!” Rafe shouted again, and the wolf came into the room through the far, dark entrance, where the door still stood ajar.
He came slowly, one paw following the other, down the center of the room, his yellow eyes fixed on the platform where Rafe stood with Shaitan. Rafe released the pressure of his forearm and stepped back from the throne.
“This is Lucas,” he said.
He backed off until he came to the edge of the platform, and when he felt emptiness below his left boot sole, he stepped down to stand at one side with Gaby. Lucas came forward, his eyes fixed on Shaitan, singing with little growls in his throat, head held low and tail level behind him.
“Lucas has been made immune to broadcast power—all broadcast power,” said Rafe. “And he hasn’t got a human mind that you can make love and worship you. If he kills you, will you go on living in him, and take him over to live forever?”
Lucas came slowly forward, step by step, singing his growls.
“Doggie . . .” whispered Shaitan, his child-eyes staring fascinatedly at the four-legged shape approaching. “Good, good doggie . . .”
“He’s a wolf,” said Rafe.
“Wolfie ... Lucas. Good Lucas ...”
Lucas reached the platform and put one forepaw, then another, up on its edge. He stood up on the edge, his eyes still steady on Shaitan. Shaitan’s huge hands, like the massive, oversize white gloves of some circus clown, rose from the arms of the chair, and the fingers bent inward at the tips as if to catch something.
“He’s faster than I am,” Rafe said. “And all he needs is to reach you once with those jaws.”
“Lucas . . . good, good Lucas. You love me, Lucas—”
“No,” growled Lucas, chewing the words. “You would hurt my Gaby, and Ab has told me to kill whoever would try to do that.”
* * *
13
“Stop him!” cried Shaitan suddenly, in a high, thin voice. Lucas had already crouched, ready to spring.
“No, Lucas! Wait—” It was Gaby’s voice, crying out just as Rafe also spoke.
“That’s right—hold it, Lucas!” Rafe said. “Guard him. Just guard him. But don’t let him move.”
Slowly Lucas came out of his crouch. He stepped back so that his forepaws dropped once more from the edge of the platform. But he stayed where he was at the platform’s outer edge, his eyes still fixed on Shaitan. Shaitan’s great hands dropped soggily, heavily, on the arms of his throne.
Lucas growled.
“No,” said Shaitan. “No, Lucas. I’m not moving.” He turned his small face to Rafe. “The—Lucas talks?”
“And understands,” said Rafe.
“Understands? Oh, yes.” For a moment the child-eyes were half hidden under their lids, then they opened innocently once more. “But how much?”
“Enough,” said Rafe. “Now I’ll start asking. Where’s Ab Leesing?”
Shaitan’s eyes closed.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“You know,” said Rafe. He looked at the closed eyelids and the child-face that could have been sleeping. “Let’s not waste time. I’ll tell you a few things first to save time. The business of the power broadcasts putting people to sleep was only a side effect to begin with. But in the last three years that side effect’s come to be the most important thing about the broadcasts—no longer just a side effect but the most important effect. It’s been worked with and developed and refined by everyone who’s been hoping to conquer the world or run it to suit himself. And Ab’s work could counteract that effect.”
He paused, but Shaitan neither spoke nor opened his eyes.
“There must be half a dozen refinements of the power broadcast being used by different groups right now,” Rafe went on. “Some probably work a good deal better than others. Your version here works better than the version they were using back in that mountain hangout. That’s one reason you could send men to kill everyone there. You did say you were the one who sent the killers, didn’t you?“
Shaitan said nothing.
“Lucas,” said Rafe.
Lucas growled. Shaitan’s eyes opened suddenly.
“Oh, yes,” Shaitan said softly. “I was the one who sent them.”
“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Rafe. “Where did you get them?”
Shaitan’s face did not move. He continued to stare at Rafe without speaking.
“I’m waiting for the answer,” said Rafe. “You haven’t got anyone here but that gate-man, you said. Where did those planeloads of men come from?”
“From . . .” Shaitan hesitated. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I’ll understand, all right,” said Rafe.
“They come from an island . . . an island, that’s all,” Shaitan said. “I can summon them—I, who know things no one el
se knows. But what sort of men they are, or where that island is, even I don’t know. I only know how to summon and send them—and they go. That was how I sent them to the house of the Leesings, when you were there with Gaby. That was how I sent them to punish my unfaithful servants in the mountains—”
He lifted one huge hand again.
“I give you my word—”
Lucas growled.
Shaitan’s hand dropped. Rafe laughed.
“You’re lying,” Rafe said. “They’re ordinary men, and wherever it is they come from, you know where that place is.”
“Were they ordinary men when you fought them?” Shaitan asked, softly again.
“No,” said Rafe. “But there’ll be an explanation for that.”
“Will there?” Shaitan sighed. “Rafe, you’re brilliant—in all things but one. And that’s the thing that’ll destroy you in the end and leave Shaitan as the winner, the way he always wins, in the end. Do you know what that thing is?”
“Tell me,” Rafe said.
“Your one failing”—the child voice was serious now—“you’re determined not to believe in the supernatural. No, you won’t believe in it, no matter what. But you’re wrong, Rafe. I tell you truthfully, you’re wrong. Because I’m truly Shaitan, and I know the true darkness. As I told you, little men had it rolled back recently, for a century or two. But now it’s come again. It’s come to stay. The real darkness—from dusk to dawn, as the world turns around on its axis. And in that darkness there are real things—things that little men like you won’t ever control. Did you know that every night now, as each one in the world falls asleep, he or she goes to hell? The hell that’s my kingdom?”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Rafe. “But there’s nothing supernatural about your hell. It’s a by-product of the damage done them by the forced sleep of the broadcasts. Of course, you and others may be helping their nightmares along, with newer versions of the broadcast technique.“
Slowly, smiling cherubically, Shaitan shook his head.