Lucifer's Eye Read online

  LUCIFER'S EYE

  By Hugh B. Cave

  Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011

  Copy-edited by Patricia Lee Macomber

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  Background images courtesy of: Nick Facas

  http://nick-f.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  NOVELS:

  Serpents in the Sun

  Conquering Kilmarni

  The Cross on the Drum

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  1

  December 1979

  IT WAS DARK NOW, AND HE WAS LOST. HE KNEW HE was lost. Earlier, he had thought he recognized some of the misty peaks looming up around him—surely the one called Blackrock, which was the second highest in the whole island. But that was hours ago, when he first became separated from his companions—when he'd been calling out to them every few minutes, thinking it was all a big joke that they would talk about for weeks after they got back.

  He wasn't calling out now. He no longer thought it a joke. His voice was gone. His throat was raw and sore. He was scared. Somewhere back there, just after he lost contact with the other two, something had begun to happen to his mind. Something he didn't understand at all. As if he had sort of fallen asleep on his feet and begun dreaming. Like when you had a nightmare in which you couldn't do the simplest things, such as opening a door or climbing a flight of ordinary stairs or bending over to pick something up.

  As if he'd become a zombie and could only do what he was told to do. That was when he had stopped calling out to the others. And stopped thinking it was funny. When he had stopped even looking for the others.

  And just stumbled on. And on. And on. As if he were being told where he must go, and had to obey.

  Yes, he was lost now. Even before nightfall he had been lost because nothing around him looked the way it ought to look anymore. He and Danny and Wesley had studied maps and photos for days before embarking on this special wild-pig hunt, for God's sake. Had memorized every peak and ridge and gully. But the maps and photos had suddenly been all wrong. All at once nothing made any sense.

  He was asleep and having a nightmare; that must be it. One of the really scary bad ones, like when you heard footsteps and a sound of heavy breathing behind you in the dark but couldn't turn around to confront what was there.

  For a while now he had been stumbling through a jungle of vine-draped trees—really stumbling as if drunk on St. Alban's wicked white rum. He ought to stop and rest; he knew that. He had lost his rifle—must have dropped it one of the half-dozen times he'd fallen, and been too dazed to pick it up before stumbling on again. Feeling a hundred years old instead of twenty-six, he was now close to falling again and being too exhausted even to get up. But he couldn't stop. Whatever had control of his mind would not let him.

  All at once the jungle of hanging vines ended in a wall of stone. A cliff. He shouldn't have been able to see it in the dark, but he did—a black cliff, almost vertical, rising up before him with an opening at its base. A hole about a yard wide and four feet high.

  A cave? There were many in St. Alban's Morgan Mountains. On more than one occasion he had taken time out from hunting wild pigs or wild pigeons to explore them, out of curiosity. Not this one, though. He hadn't known there was one this high up.

  "Go on in," a voice was saying.

  A voice? Here in this godforsaken wilderness, in the dark? So he really must be trapped in a nightmare, then. He had to be, because the voice wasn't reaching him from in front, or behind, or off to one side; it was inside his head.

  "Go in!"

  He would have gone in anyway—a little way, at least—in hope of finding some relief from the cold wind that had come up in the last hour or so. God, it got cold up here at night. You'd think on a West Indian island . . . But he had been climbing for hours and must be above seven thousand feet here, where it could fall close to freezing on a winter night such as this. He had been shivering since the wind came up.

  He would need a light now. For some reason he'd been stumbling along without one all this time, but only a fool would venture into a wild cave without a light. He had one in his knapsack, he remembered. Sinking to one knee, he slid the strap from his shoulder and unbuckled the pack, and yes, thank God, he still had it. Clutching it in one hand, dragging the knapsack along with the other, he crawled on hands and knees into the opening.

  Now the voice inside his head, sounding like something from far away that he was hearing on a bad telephone, was telling him to "Come on in." Not to go in, but come in. Was he losing his mind?

  He was stupid to be doing this, some other part of his mind told him. Alone, at night—to be crawling into an unknown cave in the wildest part of St. Alban's infamous Morgan Mountains while exhausted? He was crazy. But he had to do it. He had to keep going. Then after a hundred feet or so the ceiling began to rise, and he could stop crawling and struggle to his feet.

  "Don't stop there! Come to me!"

  As he stumbled on down the tunnel, the wavering of his light beam showed him how unsteady he was on his feet. It showed him, too, an ongoing tunnel a couple of yards wide, with now a ten-foot-high ceiling that seemed to have no ending. "Jesus, man, stop this foolishness!" one part of his mind kept telling him. "Get out of this creepy place before you die in here!"

  But—"Come to me!" the voice in that other part of his mind was booming now, like a roll of mountain thunder.

  Sick with fear, he managed to stop and lean back against a wall of stone while his chest heaved with his struggle to breathe. "Who are you?" he whispered.

  "Never mind that. Obey me!"

  "What do you want with me? Why have you brought me here?" Because he knew now that he had not reached this place by accident. Since losing contact with Danny and Wesley, he had been told what to do, every step of the way. Maybe—yes, maybe the voice was even responsible for his being separated from them in the first place.

  "All right, all right!" Was that his own voice, babbling in surrender? "All right. . . please. . . I'm coming."

  "Put out your light. There is no need for childish things here."

  He thumbed the switch and the voice was right; he didn't need the flashlight anymore. Here, this far in from the entrance, the tunnel was lit by an eerie, greenish glow, as though the walls and floor and ceiling were coated with some kind of chemical.

  "Put your light away now," the voice instructed.

  Leaning against the wall again, he opened his knapsack and dropped the flash into it, because you had to do what the voice commanded. He knew that now. Something terrible was bound to happen if you didn't.

  "Now come, before I lose patience."

  He stumbled on again and presently, not knowing why, turned off the main tunnel into a side one, and after a few more minutes entered a third. This cave was longer and more complex than any other he had been in. It must be one of the longest in the island, and might run on for miles. But he would not have to walk for miles, he soon discovered. After another series of turns, which he made be
cause some remote control commanded him to, he found himself in a room that he knew instinctively was something special.

  This chamber was almost a perfect circle in shape, with walls that rose twenty feet or so to a roof nearly as smooth as its floor. In it, the green glow was more persuasive than in the corridors he had traversed to get here. The walls appeared to exhale it as though they were alive and breathing, and it formed a kind of whirlpool that seemed to suck him in despite a warning from some small part of his mind—some diminishing fragment that still belonged to him—that he should turn and run for his life no matter what the cost.

  The room was like a monstrous green eye that was watching him, but how could it be watching him when he was inside it?

  He was not able to turn and run. Even the thought of doing so dribbled away, and his dragging feet carried him to the center of the whirlpool of light. There he stopped and waited fearfully for instructions, and after a seemingly endless silence the voice said matter-of-factly, "Take off your clothes."

  He took them off and stood there naked, shivering.

  "Now sit."

  Terrified, clutching his shaking body with both hands, he sat. The stone floor was cold and clammy, as though the green mist or glow kept it forever damp.

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "No.

  "Or where you are?"

  "No.

  "Let me enlighten you, then. All over this planet on which you live are places like this. I have had them for centuries. Points of contact, let us can them. Not all are in caves. I have one at present in a certain so-called holy place in the country you call Iran. Another is in a dark corner of the New York subway system. Still another is in the home of a prominent person in what you call Libya. Do you realize the significance of what I am telling you?"

  He shook his head.

  "Then consider this. In the recent past I have been most successful in Idi Amin's Uganda. In Hitler's Germany. In Stalin's Russia. And long before that in lands ruled by the Khans. At present it amuses me to be developing new points of influence. Now do you comprehend?"

  "How can I? I don't know who you are! Or what this room is! Or why you have brought me here!"

  "You are here for instruction."

  "Instruction in what, for God's sake?"

  "In time you will know—and it will not be for God's sake. At least, not the god you mean. Sit, now, and wait."

  With the green mist slowly swirling around him, he waited. The cold of the room's floor crept up through his naked body and numbed his mind. After a time he became thirsty.

  "I need some water. Please."

  "Later."

  His thirst increased and he became hungry as well. He had not eaten for hours. But his pleas for water and food went unanswered, and he was unable to get up off the floor. Hours passed, while the green mist swirled around him and the silence became pure torment. Then when he thought he would die if he had to sit there a moment longer, he lost consciousness.

  When he came to, he had no idea how long he had been asleep. Nothing around him had changed. He was still alone in the circular chamber, with the green mist or fog slowly swirling around him. The silence was still that of a grave. But for some reason he was no longer thirsty or hungry and no longer felt he might die. Puzzled, he rose to his feet—and had no trouble doing that.

  "Now do you understand?" the voice said.

  "Yes."

  "Get dressed and go, then. But remember—from now on I will be a part of you always. You will do my bidding at all times."

  "I will do your bidding. Yes."

  He put his clothes and boots back on. Took in a breath and felt ten feet tall and full of new strength, new power. With long strides he left the room he now knew was indeed an eye—an eye of his new master—and marched through the maze of corridors that had led him to it. Crawling out of the cave on hands and knees, the way he had entered it, he discovered he was no longer lost.

  Knowing exactly where he was, and that he could come back at any time without faltering, he swung his pack to his shoulder and began the long hike home. Still a hunter, more than ever a hunter, but no longer a hunter of pigs or pigeons.

  2

  June 1987

  THEY WERE CHURCH PEOPLE FROM THE STATES. Ministers, their wives and husbands, their children. On holiday. But many were concerned about the poverty in the slums of St. Alban's capital, too, and hoping they would be able to do something to help.

  At the time it happened, they had been in St. Alban six days. Staying at an aged downtown hotel that was considered unacceptable by most tourists, they had walked about the city, visited its famous Royal Gardens, and shopped for the usual island-made handicrafts. Chartering a bus, they had spent one day visiting sugar and banana plantations on the island's coastal plain, another exploring old Great Houses built when St. Alban had been an English colony.

  Now, on the same big yellow bus, with the same St. Alban driver, they were well up in the mountains en route to a plantation that grew some of the world's finest coffee. Ten men, the youngest twenty-one, the oldest sixty-three. Nine women in the same broad age bracket. Eight children ranging in years from six to fourteen.

  Their destination was Armadale, whose young American manager had agreed to show them how the island's famous coffee was grown.

  The bus was full of talk as it neared its destination. "These mountains! I just can't believe them, they're so beautiful!"

  "But, oh, this road. I'm going to be sick, I swear. Just look down there!"

  "How far down is that stream, Calvin? Do you know?" Calvin was the driver, his questioner a girl of eight.

  "About nine hundred feet, ma'am. And the stream is called White River."

  As she again pressed her face to the window beside her, the child giggled—probably at being addressed as "ma'am." Gazing down into the steep-sided gorge along the brink of which the bus now crept, she shivered with delight as though in a roller-coaster car at the top of the first long drop. "Gosh!" she said. "It looks like a whole other world down there!"

  A wave of nervous laughter ran through the bus.

  "How much farther do we have to go, Calvin?" The leader of the group was tired this morning, and was one of several suffering from motion sickness. All day yesterday, in his hotel room, he had sought to prepare himself for a scheduled television interview in which he would try to explain just how his people hoped to help the desperate poor of the capital's slums. He was not a man to take such an opportunity lightly.

  "About half an hour, sir. But the road is only this bad for another short while."

  "Well, that's good to hear," said a woman at the rear. "Because some of us are getting carsick, as you can see. Or should I say bus sick? And besides, these people in the car behind us seem anxious to get by."

  Calvin had been peering into his mirrors and knew about the motion sickness. Quite a few of his passengers' faces were whiter than they ought to be, and he hoped to have the worst of the road behind him before any asked to get out. As for the car, he had been aware of that, too, for a good while now. It was an English Cortina sedan with two men in it.

  With a frown of annoyance Calvin said, "They would be foolish to try passing us here." Hacked out of the mountainside cliff, the road along this stretch was all curves. Between it and the nine-hundred-foot drop on the left was nothing except a yard-wide fringe of dusty weeds. St. Alban was too poor a country to afford safety railings on its unpaved rural roads.

  Aware that the Cortina was edging even closer, Calvin took his lower lip between his teeth and wagged his head. Damn fool driver, he thought. But if the man wanted to pass, why did he not sound his horn?

  Well, there was nothing anyone could do about it. With a shrug he fixed his gaze on the road and focused his thoughts on things more pleasant.

  These people, for instance. He had been their chauffeur since their arrival in St. Alban and was truly fond of them. They genuinely cared about his island and its people. They asked sensible questions. They tre
ated him like a friend, not just somebody being paid to drive them around.

  Not all visitors to his island were that considerate. He drove a taxi at times, and he knew.

  But why was the Cortina tailgating him like this on a road so dangerous? What was the matter with that idiot driver?

  The church people, too, were all aware of the car's strange behavior now. The chatter had stopped and the bus was unnaturally quiet. Almost everyone was looking back through the rear window, no doubt wondering what was going on.

  Was it the dust, maybe? You sometimes met drivers on these country roads who would take any kind of chance rather than eat the dust from a car ahead of them. But today wasn't all that dry, and anyway, there was a fair mountain breeze to quickly blow away what little dust the bus was churning up.

  Stupid, that's what those fellows were. Just plain stupid. Maybe he should stop and tell them so. But if it turned into an argument, they would be two against his one. So just drive on; that was the thing to do. Get past this stretch, then pull over and let them pass. Yes.

  In the car behind, the driver said to the man beside him, "You ready?"

  "Ready." This one held in his right hand a black object similar to and about the size of a television remote-control transmitter. It had only one button, however. A red one. The man's thumb hovered over it as he watched the bus ahead. "Just tell me when."

  "Wait for Dead Man's." It was a name the mountain people had given to an especially dangerous curve in this road.

  "Okay. How many would you say are in that thing?"

  "I make it twenty-eight with the driver."

  "Me too. He will like that. Up to now, the best anyone has done is seven."

  "Seven? I don't recall—"

  "Last year, in the church fire at Harmon Bay. Six died in the fire and one later in the hospital. Before that, the best score was four. Never mind. Where did Winslow plant it? You know?"