natural if jumbled stairway up the inwards-curving wal of the cavern to a level area some eighteen feet wide by twelve deep, where stood - a table? An altar? Some kind of neolithic sarcophagus?
But Harry knew, that his last 'guess' was right, and that it hadn't been a guess; knew that he had been here before, and that indeed this solid-seeming block of stone standing central in the levelled, paved area under the alcove in the rough rock wall was ... a massive stone coffin!
Now his sweat ran colder still; it stood out in droplets on his brow, and stuck his shirt to his back between his shoulder-blades. He paused to look around, to hold his breath, listen, absorb something of the atmosphere of the place. He had a feeling that he wasn't alone, and was offered evidence to confirm his suspicion; evidence, at least, that someone else had been here, and recently.
As dreams (even precognitive dreams) are wont to do, this one was unfolding itself sequentially, adding details along the way. Now Harry saw the torches - or became aware of them - in their brackets in the walls, and especially at the base of the great stone coffin. Oil or resin-soaked faggots, bedded in gaps in the flags of the floor, and burning so close to the sarcophagus that their flames were blackening its base.
And there was this sweet smell in the air. A scent remembered from ... Zante? Or Samos? From the Greek Islands, definitely. It was in the smoke: a smell of... pine forests? Wel, at least the torches accounted for the smoky atmosphere. As to who had set them burning: that would soon be made clear, Harry was certain. They would be back, those ... worshippers? Those acolytes, anyway. Back to witness the Great Return.'
What? A Great Return?! The Necroscope grimaced and felt a strengthening of his resolve. Hah! The reanimation of an alien abomination, more like - the resurgence of an ancient evil. And that was why he was here: to prevent it! Moving more naturally now, but sweating still, and anxious, he commenced climbing the jumble of stone to the dais and sarcophagus -and was arrested by a mournful sound echoing in the confines of the great cave. Mournful, yes ... a sobbing ululation ... a howling! At which he felt the short hairs at the back of his neck stiffening in spontaneous recognition.
Time was short and Harry forced himself to climb faster. The steps leaned this way and that, some of them almost as tall as himself, so that he must actually and physically climb them, and at each level adjust his stance and balance. But forty feet up the log jam of fallen blocks and toppled columns, finally he stood at the corner of the ominous mausoleum.
Where the high dais backed up to the side of the cave the wall was formed of a series of black, near-vertical stacks compressed together into the almost crystalline forms of hexagonal columns. A horizontal fault had caused weak sections to topple, creating zig-zagging chimneys and, deeper still, cracks or windows passing right through the rock to the open air of the outside world. The rims of these vents or fissures were lined in pallid starlight, so that Harry imagined the entire cavern complex as located at the edge of a crumbling ravine. Except... he more than merely imagined it, he knew -
- That he was in fact in Scotland, somewhere in the high Grampians, the Cairngorms east ofKingussie!
The knowledge came ... and was gone again, as quickly as that. But the Necroscope's urgency - those sensations of nameless anxiety -remained the same. And as a second bout of howling sounded, he gave a start, ran his tongue over dry lips and approached the great stone cofin. The heady smel of resin was much stronger here, curling up in the smoke from the torches at the base of the sarcophagus.
It was then, for the first time, that Harry noticed the 'decorations' of two-inch diameter holes bored through the botom edges of the four slabs that made up the coffin's sides. He saw them, and at once recognized their function: not merely as a crude decoration, but as outlets for the contents of the sarcophagus. There were six of them along the nine-foot-long coffin's front edge, and three along each of its almost five-foot-long end panels. Warmed to a thick fluidity by the heat of the torches, a glutinous yelow substance was oozing