Beyond the golden stair Read online

  Scarlatti took his arm from aroimd Carlotta. *Hey, your he bellowed. *'Come back here, do you hear me?**

  Hibbert was almost within the light. Scarlatti shouted again and started after him, kicking up sapphire spray.

  Carlotta dropped on her knees at the pool's rim as if her joints had melted. She held out her hands. "No, don t you go tool'' But the giant splashed angrily onward.

  Hibbert barked his shins on something he could not see. He felt for it. The movement brought his face into the radiance, and the obstacle was immediately revealed. As Burks had told them, there was a stairway. It angled up through the light as though through a slanting golden tunnel. As far as Hibbert's fingers could ascertain, it was of stone—the same pitted coral stone of the stairway in the garden—^but stone transmuted to yellow lightl

  Blurred curtains of yellow vines obscured the higher steps. Through their tatters, he could see Burks still climbing, no longer a man of gold but a shadow against the glowing stone.

  Down in the garden, he had imagined its flowers the treasures of forest gods, but here was treasure more suited for men, for the golden stair was walled by tiers of golden flowers.

  Scarlatti stumbled on the first step. He bent as Hib-bert and Burks had and fingered it. He swore incredulously. He gazed up the stair, a specter of fear haunting his face. Then he squared his shoulders for Hibbert's approval and grunted scornfully.

  "Steps, huh? Well, what do you knowP

  He crooked a finger to summon Carlotta. She had arisen and was running back and forth at the water s edge Hke a distracted hen clucking at the duckling which it had thought a chick. The light partially screened out sound. Her cries were muted as though coming through heavy glass.

  Scarlatti beckoned again, then growled, and went back for his woman. She thought he was heeding her warning and flung herself toward him rejoicing. He seized her welcoming hands and dragged her into the pool beside him. She screamed and fought him with increasing hysteria, her feet braced but skidding on the pool's sHck pave. The giant wrenched her off stance, swept an arm around her waist, and struck down her beating hands. He forced her whimpering into the light; dropped her on the yellow steps and mounted beside her.

  "Hell, there ain't nothing to be scared of I Biu"ks and the kid here ain't got hurt, have they? Look, baby— there's flowers—gold flowersi We got us a goldmine!"

  She would not raise her head. She lay sobbing with her face hidden on her arms. Finally she gasped: T don't care if they're rubies! I want to get—out of here!"

  As Hibbert expected, the giant gave way to one of his customary fits of temper. He kicked at Carlotta. Hibbert pushed him back. For a moment, Scarlatti stared at him, then mastered himself. He stooped and pulled at Carlotta, but gently.

  She looked up, wiping a hand over her cheeks and smearing her tears. '^We got to get out of here, Frank, lover—^we got tol It told us to beat it, when it looked at me. It said we wasn't good enough— **

  He drew her up. She hugged him, her face close to his. She whispered: "It told me it would call the Ught from the sky if we didn't shove oflFI And it told me we'd go up the light if we Uked it or didn'tl And it told me we wasn't good enough, and we'd get worse than killedl That's what it said—^worse than killedl"

  ^'Who said so?"

  **Don t look at me like you hate mel The blue flamingo said so, that's who!"

  "Ah, you're off your nut!"

  ^'Honest, Frank, I heard it plain as a sock in the snoot when it looked at me. It sounded Uke an old grandpal I heard it, honest to God—it said we can't face what's up therel"

  He brooded darkly. She whimpered: T promise 111 take you right out of the swamp and not try to take you the long way— '' She gasped and put a hand to her mouth.

  So she really had led them astray! Scarlatti's eyes opened vdde. "That's what you donel"

  "I just wanted to stay by you as long as I couldl"

  He cursed her—so c-oarsely that even she recoiled. Once again Hibbert nudged the giant. He started, stared, then checked himself.

  '*Well, it's done now," he conceded. "Stop the waterworks and come on."

  She swallowed. 'Tou ain't turning back?" "Turning back? Hell, nol I guess if Burks and the kid here got the guts to go on up, I got 'em, tool"

  She pawed away the last vestiges of her tears, reso-

  lutely tightened her mouth and clutched one of the giant's hands. ''Then I'm going with you!'*

  "That's the stuffr

  Scarlatti reached for one of the flowers. He snatched his fingers back as though bee-stung, a drop of blood gemming one of them—he sucked it. Hibbert won-deringly pulled on a petalled branch and could not stir it. He felt one of the leaves, razor thin and razor sharp.

  "Scarlatti—haven't you noticed? This stair is a perfect repHca of the one down in the gardenP

  But the big man was struggling to tear loose a flower. He shook his head and gave up. ^Whatever this guck is, it ain't gold. Gold's soft. These flowers is thinner than tissue paper and I can't even bend theml"

  They went upward, their feet not sinking into the moss in spite of its velvety appearance. It looked like moss, yes, and felt like it—but moss petrified to diamond adamant. And it made the climb one long sequence of stumbles, Hibbert's weight being thrown so frequently on his bad leg that it began to ache.

  For aU his efforts, the first screen of bamboo vine would neither budge nor bend. He had to crouch and bore his way through an opening, as he had seen Burks do. Why, he wondered, was this stair such a faithful duplication of the other, down to each last infinitesimal detail? As if it were a three-dimensional photographi

  A photograph? Now here was a duel

  Hibbert thought of the stereoscope and of motion-pictures based on the stereoscopic principle—the refractive blending of two pictures of a common object was seen from varying angles, producing the effect of soHdity. Deluded spectators had gasped at the stop-camera magic of a rose budding, blooming, and with-

  ering away in a matter of seconds; had shrieked with deHghted horror as the lensman s trickery had enabled a skeleton to pluck off its skull and roll it like a bowling-ball straight into the watchers' faces.

  Could this duphcate stair be a vastly more intricate type of stereoscopic projection, reproducing not only light but matter itself?

  It seemed so, for as Hibbert came up to a second web of the hanging Hanas, it was stirred by a gust that he did not feel—a gust, it must be, that was on that other stair down in the garden.

  A golden butterfly skimmed out of the flower walls, crossed before him, and disappeared—a moving yet lifeless copy of a butterfly on the lower stairl No fragile thing with easily crumpled wings, he knew, but veined with substance less pliable than metal if pliable at all. He wondered what it weighed and how it managed to keep aloft.

  He did not try to capture it. Grasping those flickering wings would be like catching the whirling blades of an electric fan!

  The lianas swayed together and fell away, and he knew that were he to thrust his hand among them when they met, they would crush it.

  The giant and the woman were nearing that first curtain of vines. Hibbert shouted: *'Scarlatti, Carlottal Stay as you are—don't movel"

  He scrambled down to them slipping and stumbling, disregarding the agony in his crippled leg. The flowers against which he brushed were imyielding and ripped his clothing.

  He tried to explain what he had reasoned out to the giant and Carlotta, but doubted that they could understand. Yet while theories might be beyond them, they reacted to cold fact. They passed through the

  curtains of the vines, alert for any threatening movements from it.

  ^'This sure is one hell of a place!'' Scarlatti grunted.

  Hibbert said: 'The Seminoles missed another legend in describing it—the Usipatra Vana, the sword-leaved forest of the Hindu hell/'

  The giant grimaced. T guess if a dragon fly come past, it would drill us hke a bulletl"

  Carlotta said, "If somebody is making th
is here chink torture-chamber with a movie camera, like you seem to think, what I want to know is who is he, and why if he's so smart he can make steps out of nothing, why don't he make nice clean ones? Is he one of those kinds that likes to see people get hurt?"

  The light thickened as they arose into a yellow haze which separated them, close together though they were, by intervening ocherous veils like gilded distance. Like dust, it hampered their breathing. It began to resist their progress—they pushed through it as though through successive cobwebs.

  'Where's Burks?" Scarlatti asked, his breath shining yellow as if steaming in chilly air, though the mist was pleasantly warm. "Hey, Burksl"

  The answer seemed to come from very far away. "I'm here, waiting for you." Then: ''Something's wrong —I think I'm going deaf."

  They hurried toward the sound. With every step, the haze increased in both density and brilliancy, as if its particles were radiance sohdified—a vapor composed of billions of tiny sunsl Hibbert could no longer see the giant nor the woman, nor the hand which he raised to his eyes. Golden blindness ...

  He bumped into something fortunately yielding— Burks. The man's voice was faint as an echo from a

  I

  The Shining Stairway 47

  ghost. "Can you hear me? I can hardly hear myself— and I'm yellingl''

  Hibbert called: "The mist absorbs somid, Bm-ks, that's all."

  Perhaps Bm-ks answered, perhaps not. There was only silence and yellowness as if Hibbert lay smothered under gold dust.

  Slowly—maddeningly slowly—^they inched forward. The stairs stopped at last on a landing which they could not see. Was it a dupHcation of the parapet holding the flamingo's pool? If so, it must extend only thirty feet ahead, and when it ended they must fall. Just as Hibbert realized this, he emerged from the golden sightlessness into a purpHsh murk veined with frantic lightnings—a bewildering chaos of polychrome fires which zigzagged insanely; dazzHng opalescences engaged in countless conflicting duels— the shivering lances of the aurora crossing each other in prismatic tilt!

  Hibbert's eyes seemed to hiss steaming when the blazing javelins slashed them; he was deafened by a tumult of thunders Hke the cx)llisions of brazen suns; the fires he breathed scorched his nasal passages and shriveled the taste buds of the tonguel He recovered from it less than that he became accustomed to it, passing that degree of toleration where Nature mercifully deprives the sufferer of all feeling, numbing and destroying the nerves.

  His senses cleared, but a vibration shivered throughout every atom of his body, tingling faster than the twinkling of a star—like the circulation being restored in a cramped limb, though infinitely more rapid.

  And now he saw that the purpHsh murk was less dim than he had supposed. He could see through it

  as though through a distorting lens, for it quivered constantly and made things tremble like reflections on a restless pond. Soon, however, he had adjusted himself to this optical peculiarity as one becomes accustomed to, and no longer is aware of, the ticking of a clock.

  Burks, the giant, and Carlotta were standing rigid in violently distorted poses—Biurks bent backward and clutching his throat as if to strangle the lightning-pains Hibbert had felt; Scarlatti so tense that every bunched muscle bulged exaggeratedly, making him seem in the scarlet flush of his sufferings like a cadaver flayed and frozen for the study of some fiendish anatomy class; Carlotta twisted in what looked like the beginning of a faint but saved from falling by her hold on the giant's arm, her white parchment face a screed of uncharted emotions.

  Hibbert gave them only a cursory glance, for there were much more interesting things to claim his attention.

  What place was thisi And where, not on earth but in God's name, was it?

  Chapter Five

  Threshold of Khoire

  The floor was perhaps thirty yards square, but walls arose to such heights that they met illimitably far overhead in a vanishing-point of perspective. They glimmered like pearl and were covered with hairline traceries of smoldering vermilhon, blazing green, and phosphorescent blue which might have been merely decorative arabesques, but which reminded Hibbert unpleasantly of the flaming handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's feast.

  The floor was the clearest of mirrors, so true in its reflections that it was air itself. Hibbert and his companions, standing apparently balanced on the feet of their inverted images, looked like tiunblers practiciQg an especially eccentric routine.

  Directly ahead was an archway sealed with ponderous leaves of brass. Drawn double its size by the mirror, it looked like a vast flattened sun. At each side of it, on pedestals like embers compressed into gigantic cubes of red heat and ash, crouched two of the most singular sculptures that Hibbert had ever seen.

  They were fully forty feet tall as they crouched on their bases, and how much taller if standing erect, Hibbert did not hke to conjecture. If truly they were only porcelain figures, their maker had been artist

  indeed, for aside from the practical miracle of firing their heroic hulks, he had glazed them with a marvelous feeling for textural quality. Hibbert could distinguish every hair of the long and matted manes, the bristling, frowning brows.

  In shape, they resembled, as closely as they resembled anything known to Hibbert, the Fu dogs of the Chinese—those monstrous beasts into whose stone had been charmed the souls of warriors as reward for high valor, dedicated to guard the treasures of the gods in their temples, to leap into life on sign of sacrilege, to pounce, and slay.

  They did not move, yet they were alive if only in dynamic lines and color. Hibbert fancied that they breathed, hastily told himself that they could not, and hoped that he had not erred. Their gigantic eyes were human, devilishly out of character with their beast-bodies, and they glared down with a hideous intensity which surely must be life.

  Hibbert cringed from their motionless menace. He turned to find the door through which he had entered. But there was no doorl Instead, he now saw something which was at first sight very much like a tremendous golden gong hanging from an ebon frame. The metal of the gong he realized was the golden glory from which he and the others had come—the black frame was carved with flowers and fantastic beasts intricately intertwined as the sculptures of the Khmers, and studded with cabochon jewels. Red, green, and blue, the jewels were as dull and lifeless as if they had been deserted by the devas whose vitality fires each precious stone with its magnetic lure. The squat pillars upholding the ebon circle and its yellow disc were quaintly ornamented, but without the gems.

  Behind this—gong?—stood four figures in flowing robes and lowered hoods of shimmering blue. They were motionless as the Fu dogs and more menacing, because they were completely shrouded not only with the blue garments but with mystery. What were those faces hidden under those cowls? And what perhaps barbarous code of thought and custom must these enigmatic beings represent?

  On each side of the disc knelt other figures, but these were not veiled. They were a man and woman and save for the necessary structural distinctions, as Hke as twins. Both were loosely clad in diaphanous blue and bent low with their hands crossed on their breasts, their heads bowed, their faces hidden. The dawn pink of their flesh was so deHcate that, like a camellia, it seemed that the sHghtest touch might bruise and discolor it.

  Their hair streamed upward weightlessly like veritable flames. Standing, they must be taller even than huge Scarlatti—yet their incredibly slim lines gave an effect of elfin smallness.

  Why were they so silent? Did they expect the intruders to make a first move? Hibbert stood formulating conversational openings which he had to discard as inept, as fast as he conceived them. Finally, he gave up and stepped over to the ebon frame. He held up the flat of a hand to the yellow disc and it went into the glowing surface as if thrust into water.

  He withdrew his hand and walked behind the gong, carefully sidestepping its—guardians?—^who did not stir. The back of the yellow disc looked no different from its front, but he was unable to touch it
: his fingers were repelled as though he pushed them against a powerful spring. He concluded that if indeed

  the shining stair had been both light and matter ingeniously projected, the jeweled black circle constituted the projector's mechanism and lenses.

  He hesitated before the hooded figures. He was almost tempted to lift one of the cauls to glimpse the face behind it, but then the fabric bulged with an exhaled breath. He shivered and started back toward Burks and the others.

  Burks* eyeHds flickered—^his hands relaxed at his sides. He gazed around dazedly, absorbing one by one the details of the place as Hibbert had done before him. Then he pivoted and shook Scarlatti. The big man yawned and stretched as if emerging from a long sleep. Carlotta swayed, rescued herself from her long-delayed fall, and goggled about.

  "Godl'* Scarlatti grunted, his voice still as muflBed as it had been in the golden mist. From his mouth spurted a jet of writhing colors!

  Burks* comment came as weakly: **Well, what the hell—" He chopped off his exclamation, for from his mouth the streaming opalescence also spewed. Carlotta gave the faintest of cries, and with it the wreathing colors billowed from her Hps.

  The place was too comfortably warm for these colors to be their steaming breaths. Hibbert thought that he had a partial answer to the enigma. His words arose in a piebald wall of light as he spoke, shutting off sight of the others.

  'Tm no physicist, but I learned in high-school that sound and Hght are related because they're both manifestations of tiie same basic energy. Theoretically, it's possible to convert one into the other by speeding up or slowing down their wave lengths, and that's what seems to be happening here. But if it is, then

  this place must conform to natural laws vastly diflFer-ent from those of our own world.**

  Anxiously, he chewed on his underlip.

  *'No wonder we felt such pain when we stepped into here! Our bodies had to adjust to an entirely diflFerent kind of Nature; it's a miracle that they didn^t disintegrate into puddles of goo or worse! Speed up sound enough and it becomes those supersonic vibrations that scientists have found can play havoc with the emotions and the body itself. Accelerate them still farther and they become Hght, then heat. Probably the only reason that we weren't charred to cinders is that there seems to be some sort of retroactive principle here that retards or inverts all the faster wave lenghts, neutralizing or balancing the speed up tendency."