Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [24]
And he felt a sharp stab of terror.
A skull was staring at him, the dark voids of its eye sockets cast even further into shadow by the flaring of the makeshift torch. With a gasp, he scrambled backward, holding the flaming cloth high, unwilling to take his eyes from the glaring death mask. Only when he had scuttled, crablike, around a corner did he allow himself to draw a deep breath.
He stood and, mindful of the rapidly burning cloth, began to search through the dark corridor. Soon he found what he sought: a creosote-soaked timber that had once been the leg of a table or laboratory bench. When the rag was wrapped around the blunt head of the tapered stick, the flames took slow root on the tarry timber, and soon a growing light flared brightly through the darkness.
This was a flame, he knew, that would last him for many hours. And it would take him a long time to get out of here-though it still irritated him to realize that he didn’t know where here was. He hoisted the torch and looked through the surrounding wreckage for clues. He saw overturned tables, a litter of vials and flasks, even some tomes and scrolls, but nothing that looked even vaguely familiar. With a shudder, he turned his back and left the place behind.
For a time he wandered through a maze of stone passages, seeking only to avoid that menacing skull that had so startled him when he awakened.
Yet despite his care, he found himself once again coming around a corner to confront the eyeless face that stared dispassionately upward from the floor. The bone-white visage had startled him when he had awakened, and he had the feeling that it was a dangerous object, lethal and powerful in ways that he could not understand.
Yet now, as he looked at it in the yellow light of his torch, he saw it for what it was: a lifeless piece of bone, sitting motionless on the floor Where it had been dropped. He stepped closer, banishing the nervousness that once again churned his stomach. A trailing end of his long hair had somehow found its way into his mouth, and he chewed absently on the end of the thick mop.
“You’re dead.”
He spoke the words aloud, taking comfort from the sound of his own voice. He knelt beside the bone, noticing a fleck of rusty red on the back side. The blood was dried, but far fresher than the skull, and instinctively his hand went to his own forehead.
There was a lump there, a bruised patch of skin and a scab where he had been struck, where his own blood had flowed after the blow of a hard object.
He knew then that it was his own blood on the skull, that the piece of bone had smashed against his head and felled him here, in the depths of this shattered place. But why couldn’t he remember?
“Who am I?”
He made the demand loudly, challenging the skull, the darkness, the stone walls-anything that might have been witness to the attack, that might offer him some hope of an answer. But of course, no answer was forthcoming.
Again the black eye sockets drew him, and he knew that the skull should have been a terrifying thing- indeed, some time before it had frightened him, and he knew that he was a person who was not easily scared. Yet now he perceived little of that earlier menace. It was as if the skull was a vessel that had been full of something dangerous, but now, perhaps shattered by the force of the blow, the danger had flowed out and left the flesh-less head as a silently grinning remembrance.
Resolutely he turned his back on the skull and started to walk. Soon he found the iron framework of an old stairway, and he didn’t even pause before starting what he knew would be a long climb. Ascending steadily, he held the torch in one hand, except during the most difficult parts of the climb. Then he clenched the narrow, unlighted end of the brand between his teeth so that he could use both hands to scale steadily upward.
He stopped once, startled by a distant sound. Listening, he discerned a thumping pulse, like the beating of a heart. As he strained