Read Online Necroscope 9: The Lost Years by Brian Lumley - Free Book Online

to a spot where the light was stronger. Looking up, he saw a rough-contoured ceiling of unusual stratification, as if the pressured bedrock had been tilted almost on end. Up there, like rows of jagged teeth set in the closed jaws of the ceiling, several harder, impervious layers projected downwards where softer strata had falen away. Higher still, where even more loose stone had weathered out, narrow, uneven gaps reached up to daylight - or as Harry now saw, to starlight. These crevasses, filled with mainly unwinking stars on a backdrop of diamond-sprinkled sky, were the light-source. The lack of scintillation could be caused by the Necroscope’s subterranean viewpoint, or by a thin atmosphere, or both. He was loath to hazard a guess.
    Still sweating (despite that he sensed the coldness of the place), Harry looked around on his own level. And now that his eyes were more accustomed to the smoky gloom, he could make out massively slanting columns, wals and chimneys of rock that climbed from floor to ceiling, and slabs of falen rock tumbled into tiers and tangles in every direction. The cave was a veritable labyrinth of upended, mainly fractured strata; a geological freak whose ceiling seemed held aloft only by those mighty columns formed of harder layers. While around and through this Giant’s Causeway of natural, angular supports - glooming over the rubble of shatered rock like empty, stony eye-sockets - a network of fissures, leaning lintels and gaping crevices formed doorways to uninviting, unknown routes through a forbidding and probably treacherous maze of doubtful extent. In a nutshel, it would be an easy place to get lost in.
    Except… Harry seemed to know where he was going. Certainly he did; for if this was a precognitive glimpse, then he had already been here -but in some near-distant future time. Not so strange; for time, as the Necroscope was wel aware, is relative. But in any event he had no time to ponder it, for he was moving on. On through the jumble, seeming to drift in his dream-state over the debris of falen ceiling stones which had been deliberately rearranged, laid in a rough-and-ready crazy-paving style to form a pathway or ways through the great maze. And because it seemed the safest way to go, Harry folowed the main pathway.
    And suddenly he was there, at his destination … his rendezvous? A place where the tiers of falen slabs and columns of rock formed a 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