Hell's Gate

CHAPTER 5

Wednesday morning, iron Victor was merely a whisper deep in his mind, a haunting presence that almost seemed not to exist. Yet he was not normal. Despite the fact that he was not moving according to a program, he felt hollow, half-completed. He tried horsing around with Intrepid for a while, but was becoming bored with that, bored with waiting for something to happen, something to put meaning to the killing of Harold Jacobi, the computer in the trunk, and the mysterious distant hum of machinery in his cellar every night. The day could have been a total bust had not Lynda Harvey pulled into the drive in her copper Porsche.

He went down to greet her, called to her. She looked surprised at his conviviality, but smiled. “I told you Harold Jacobi was my uncle,” she said. “And I just about left everything in the house: silverware, dishes, sheets and towels. But there are some things in the attic, personal things, I suppose I should get out of here now.” She cocked her head, her green eyes flat with reflected sun. “Okay?”

“Sure,” he said, ushering her into the house, realizing that his actions were perhaps exaggerated compared with his formal iron Victor responses of two days earlier.

He offered to leave as she opened the first of the two cardboard cartons in the attic to sort out what she would leave to be discarded and what she would retain, but she told him that was not necessary. She would enjoy his company. That sounded stranger to her than it did to him, because she had been so irritated with him on Monday. Irritated, yes-but also intrigued. There was no sense hiding that from herself. Mr. Victor Salsbury was certainly an interesting man, big and handsome, supposedly a creative artist, with a personality that suggested a past of much variety and perhaps illicitness. In a way, she felt like a foolish schoolgirl for nurturing fantasies; but then she had to admit he helped them grow with his strange manner.

As they talked now, sitting on the bare attic floor, she realized he had changed since she had seen him. Those short bursts of warmth that had broken his icy facade on Monday were now the dominant trait of his personality. Yet he was still not like other, men. She could touch him with her mind, delve into him, but only a short way. It seemed as if he was a man made of water, and that his outward appearance was merely the shimmering reflection of someone else.

When she could no longer pretend to be interested in the junk in the cartons, she was reluctant to bring up the other matter that had brought her here. This morning, when the banker, Hallowell, had told her what he had discovered, she had jumped at the chance to break the news to Salsbury. She had wanted to see the blood drain out of his face, had wanted to see him on the spot and stammering. Now, talking with him, her feminine interest had been stirred; now that he had opened himself to her on this new friendly basis, to break this news was almost too cruel. But she had no choice. She had spent a great deal of time talking Hallowell into letting her ask Salsbury about the news clipping. She had to go through with it now or look like an idiot in the banker's eyes. “Mr. Hallowell asked me to give you this and ask you what it's all about,” she said, presenting him with the clipping as they descended from the attic into the living room.

Victor looked at the headline and felt alarms banging in his head.

He licked his lips, knowing what was coming next.

“There's some mistake,” he said, though he did not believe there had been the slightest mistake at all. “I'm Victor L. Salsbury.”

“They say it was suicide,” Lynda said. “He was feeling dejected for weeks because of his inability to sell his creative work.”

“But I broke that barrier,” Salsbury said lamely. “I sold my creative work.”

“Mr. Hallowell is very upset. It appears, to him, that he just made a twenty-two thousand dollar loan to a man who is not who he claims to be.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “There's been a mistake here. I'll go into the city tomorrow and straighten it out. You can tell him that.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “You seemed to take that with less shock than I thought you would. I mean, when you read about yourself being dead, it should shake you up considerably. Victor… are you really who you say you are?”

“Of course,” he said, and laughed to prove it. Though he saw the laugh did not sound right to her. “I'm Victor Salsbury. Of course I am.”

He didn't sleep well that night. He spent the night thinking about a body dredged out of a river and tagged with his name. Was he really Victor Salsbury, or was Victor Salsbury a decaying corpse? Did the real Victor Salsbury (if that was, in fact, who the dead man was) really kill himself, or did another black-suited man come in the night and do the job for him?

None of these were sleep-inducing thoughts.

At one-thirty in the morning, the vibrations echoed up from the cellar again. He slipped out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans he had purchased in town (since the computer had only furnished him with a single change of clothes). He stepped into his loafers, went into the hall, and down the stairs to the darkened living room. Intrepid followed, making god awful noises, half falling down the steps, then prancing excitedly to the cellar door.

In the cellar, with the lights out, they stood side-by-side, man and dog, equally scared. The circle was a lighter shade of blue, but that was not what frightened them. Beyond the circle, dim and indistinct, were gray, moving shadows. There were no features to be seen, nothing he could readily identify. There seemed to be a conglomeration of wires, struts, and tubes upon which one of the moving forms was perched. The other shadow stood beside this, legs quite skinny, feet abnormally broad, perhaps a foot wide. That and the shape of its head (narrow, half again as large as a human skull, with a high forehead) told Salsbury that the things beyond the blue glow were not men.

Intrepid sensed it too. He bounced around, snarling, the first ugly mood Salsbury had seen him in. He threw himself against the blue spot, bounced off the wall a few times. When he was sure there was no way to reach the gray forms, he contented himself with crouching against Victor's leg, teeth bared and eyes gleaming, spitting insults at the intruders.

Abruptly, the blue glow grew lighter, the shadows more distinct. There was a click, a sharp snapping sound like a dry twig breaking underfoot. The ringing ceased and was replaced by ghostly silence. The blue light disappeared altogether, leaving the circle which gave as clear a view as any window.

But the window was not looking out on Earth. Not on any Earth Victor had ever known.

The machine on the other side-apparently the one that had been establishing contact with this world, the one projecting the blue light-was an intricate jumble of condensers, sensors, wires, transistors. There was a chair atop it where the alien sat. The second demon stood beside the machine, looking through the window.

They were both looking directly at Salsbury.

Their heads were hairless, and, indeed, hinted at a rough gray cross-hatching of scales. The bony ridge of their foreheads shelved off as if on sudden impulse, leaving their eyes sunk two inches back in their heads. Their eyes… fire leaping, crimson flushing, rouge, cinnabar, scarlet

Victor pulled his gaze from those burning eyes, quickly examined the rest of the face. For a nose, there were five vertical slits arranged evenly above a sunken, pulsing hole that seemed to serve as a mouth. All of this was on a withered, leathery body whose muscles were drawn long and tight and lacquered over with a hundred coatings of varnish to make them look brittle.

Unconsciously, Victor backed against an old workbench. He wished iron Victor would surge up and take command. But iron Victor was gone. There was no trace at all of his alter ego. The programming had-perhaps temporarily-come to an end. He was on his own.

Intrepid cringed against his legs, trying to find some way of crawling up his pantlegs where he could not see the demons and would not be tempted to look.

Salsbury looked to the steps, realized belatedly that he would have to go right by the window where the demons waited. Just as he felt his spirits scrape the bottom of his splintered soul barrel, the shadow monster standing beside the machine, the one in clear view, raised a long, bony arm with six three-jointed fingers on the end and made as if to reach out and grasp him.

His horror did not motivate him to flight, but paralyzed him completely. His vital organs had turned to cast iron. Someone had even pinned open his eyelids so that he could not blink out the alien vision.

Then the lighted portal fluttered brighter, dimmer, and was suddenly gone as if some delicate electronic link between alien world and basement wall had been severed. He stared stupidly at the blank tile which had been a window into hell only moments ago. His feet grew lighter. His organs turned back into flesh. Someone removed the pins from his eyelids. Still, he was emotionally incapable of acting. He was gasping frantically for breath.

Intrepid recovered faster, leaped and slammed against the wall. He took a second running lunge, hit with his feet in a flying leap, fell away and looked at Victor with glistening eyes that demanded his master do something about the things in the walls.

Victor recovered his wits under that gaze. He shrugged his shoulders at the dog, then crossed to the steps, went up them two at a time. There was a tremendous thumping and scraping as Intrepid tried desperately to keep up with his master. Salsbury went to the second floor bedroom where he had stowed the three trunks. He opened the door a bit hard, sent it banging back against the wall where it shivered and quaked as if it were alive. He went to the computer trunk, gave it a solid kick. The stinging pain leaped up his leg, but he did not much care. He kicked it again. Intrepid had joined him by this time and he set to snuffling and whuffing, dancing around the computer trunk with a look of expectancy.

“Let's have a briefing,” Victor said to the 810-40.04.

It wasn't in the mood for conversation.

“Come on, damnit!”

Nothing.

He remembered the tool bench in the cellar and went back down. Intrepid followed to the head of the stairs and watched him descend, but did not follow. In the cellar, Victor found the tools racked on a pegboard wall. He chose a medium weight crowbar and took it back to the bedroom, moving like a caveman with his favorite stone axe.

He squared off before the computer trunk and brandished the weapon. “A briefing now, or I pry you up good!” There was a great deal of adrenalin pumping through his system, and all his nerves seemed to grate against each other, alive, aware and excited. There was something going on that he did not understand, something involving shrunken, leathery lizardmen with sucking eel mouths. It was definitely going to get dangerous, for those were dangerous looking customers, those scaly freaks. If he was expected to play a role in it, then he damn well better be informed.

But the 810-40.04 was unresponsive.

He stepped forward, swung the bar, smashed it against the top of the trunk. It bounced off, ringing his arm like a bell. His bones screamed at him to stop acting like an idiot, to have more respect for the fragile parts of him. He dropped the bar and massaged his arm until it started to fed like flesh again. Carefully examining the top of the trunk, he could not find the smallest dent or scratch where the bar might have struck. Thus ended round one.

“I'm getting mad,” he told the computer. And he truly was. He realized, not without a start, that this was the most heated emotional moment he had experienced since he had wakened in the orchard with iron Victor in command of his body. He felt more human than ever.

But the computer was inscrutable.

He picked up the crowbar again.

Intrepid snuffled and chortled like a mare in heat.

Victor knelt beside the trunk and examined the thin line where the lid met the body. Gently, he inserted the thin edge of the crowbar tip into the crack, worked it in a bit, then brought his weight down on it. For a moment, the increasing pressure seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the box. Then the bar slipped, popped out of the seam, and snapped a sharp blow alongside his head. He wobbled there on his knees, managed to keep from passing out. He nibbed his head where the bar had struck, felt an egg already beginning to rise. As soon as everything ceased spinning, he gritted his teeth and slipped the pry bar into the seam again, wedging it even farther back before rising and applying his weight. He bore down, grunting and sweating, putting every ounce of his strength into what he was doing. Just when he thought the metal must surely buckle, the frame most certainly give, just when he should have achieved success, there was a blinding flash of blue-green light, and a fist full of needles thumped him solidly across the head while a second fist grabbed a black curtain and pulled it down all around him.