Baal by Robert R McCammon

Author:Robert R McCammon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

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DOWN THE DIM CORRIDORS Virga followed the blond man who had moments before ordered the execution of three men.

They climbed a long marble staircase where Virga saw food and excrement smeared about; he wondered if the dogs were allowed to run free. They reached a narrow hallway that stretched on past a dozen closed doors. Here and there the hallway turned off into huge rooms or widened into alcoves. They moved through an area that had been decorated with elaborate Islamic art; Virga saw the remnants of pictures, now shredded as if by maddened claws, and of bits of ancient and probably priceless pottery. Now the once beautiful objects crunched beneath their feet.

Virga felt alarm at being in a hostile environment. Everywhere eyes seemed to be following him; he was conscious of being watched from all sides, though they never passed anyone or saw anyone. He had felt, or rather sensed, the ominous presence that was part of this place. The notion of something lurking, something staring from the shadows at his back, was unshakable. And he noticed, in the dankness of the hallway, things scrawled on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling. Triangles and circles and strange scribblings that made no sense to him at all, yet filled him with a dread he could not even begin to grasp. He was trembling and he hoped the other man would not notice.

And there was something else. An odor, a stench. Part of it was the excrement smeared everywhere, even on the walls; part of it was rotted food. But there was something else, something that was whirling around his head, clinging to his clothes as if it were a solid but decaying presence. It was the stench of death, of something perhaps long past death.

“Are you also an American?” Virga asked the man. His voice echoed in the hallway.

“I was born in America,” the man said without turning.

Virga had hoped he would. He wanted to see what it was up on the man’s forehead. “What’s your name?”

“Olivier,” the man said.

“That’s all?”

“Yes. That’s all.”

Ahead the hallway ended at a pair of gold-ornamented closed doors. On the walls and ceiling were the same strange symbols, triangles and circles. Centered directly above the doorway, Virga noted, was an inverted cross.

The man turned abruptly. “I assume we’ll be meeting again. I’ll leave you now.” He opened the doors and Virga stepped through, his eyes trying to pierce the gloom that leaped at him from the silent chamber. The man firmly shut the doors behind him.

He felt, with the closing of the door, a tremendous and awful sense of being imprisoned in a place from which he had no chance of escape. He shivered; it was actually cold in the room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw that he stood in a library of some sort. Around him were shelves packed with books, thousands and thousands of them. Not wanting to betray his fear, he attempted to control his trembling.

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