I WONDER, NOW, if someone with a psychic birthright--someone who, in supraconsciousness, had traveled to this place--had named the English sanitarium Bedlam.
A noisome pestilence, the phrase occurred as we reached the bottom of the crater.
The air was rent by every horrible sound which man is capable of emitting.
Screams and howlings. Shouted curses. Laughter of every demented variety. Snarls and hisses. Bestial growlings. Unimaginable groans of agony. Shrill utterances of pain. Savage roars and lamentations. Screeches, bellows, wails, clamorings and outcries. The jangled tumult of countless souls in throes of derangement.
Albert leaned in close and shouted in my ear. "Hold on to me!"
I needed no encouragement. Like a child terrorized by every known and unknown dread in his mind, I clung to his arm as we started across the crater base, threading our way among forms that sprawled in almost every spot, some moving fitfully, some with spasmed jerks and hitches, some crawling virtually like snakes, some as motionless as corpses.
All of them resembled the dead.
What I could make out, through the feeble light we carried with us, cowed my soul.
A cloud of vapor hung above the rock-strewn ground, threatening to suffocate us until, once again--for what innumerable time--we adjusted our systems to survive it.
Below the vapor were the figures. Clothes in filthy rags which showed great gaps of gray and purple flesh. Glowing eyes in lifeless faces, staring at us.
And I heard a buzzing sound.
People sat on boulders, heads together as though they were conspiring. People copulated on the ground and on the rocks, screaming and laughing. People struck at each other, choked each other, battered each other with rocks, tortured each other. All with shouts and snarls and curses. A mass of crawling, twisting, wrenching, jerking, lurching, clashing, convulsive creatures filled the crater's basin.
And I heard this buzzing.
Now, as sight adjusted to the smoky gloom, I saw bands of apelike figures roving close together, talking to each other in guttural voices, moving--I could only guess--in search of some prospective evil, some brutal violence they might commit.
And the buzzing continued, an interminable drone from a source I couldn't spot.
Now I saw that, interspersed throughout the area we crossed, were pools of dark and filthy-looking liquid; I hesitate to call it water. A loathsome stench beyond that which I had ever been exposed to rose from these pools. And I was horrified to see movement in them as though unfortunates had slipped beneath the surface and were unable to rise.
And the buzzing continued, growing louder and louder, a haze of constant sound above the cacophony of human and inhuman noises.
A sudden burst of vicious thoughts struck violently at me!
But I thought we couldn't pick up thoughts, the idea came. I felt crushed beneath the weight of the assailing visions and could only assume that such thoughts were so rabid in their focus that telepathy was not required to absorb their vibrations. That such thoughts were actually tangible to the senses, more a wave of physical shock than a conflux of immaterial ideas.
Feeling that wave as it seared and sickened me, I looked around and saw a knot of people standing about ten yards from us, illuminated by a lurid, dirty-looking orange glow. Some had sneering grins on their faces, others expressions of savage hatred. It was a wave of their thoughts--
Suddenly, I cried out, stunned, the sound of it unheard beneath the lunatic din.
The buzzing I heard was that of flies.
Millions of them.
Everyone was covered with shifting clumps of flies. Faces moved with them. They were settled in the corners of eyes and crawling blackly in and out of mouths.
A ghastly vision filled my mind. Kit with a barbed wire cut on her face, a solid pack of flies collected on it like a lump of living coal, those on the bottom gorging on her blood, their bellies red and swollen with it. Even when I'd waved my hand at them, crying out in revulsion, those flies hadn't stirred.
The sickened horror I'd felt at that moment was nothing compared to this. My fingers dug into Albert's arm and I closed my eyes, trying to escape the sight.
That was worse.
The instant my eyes were shut, a rush of other sights, began to flash across my mind. White-faced ghouls devouring rotted flesh. Grinning vampires wallowing in gouts of dark blood from the throats of screaming children. Figures of garbage and excrement embracing in hideous union. Men and women--
I opened my eyes with a jerk. As ghastly as they were, the sights around us were preferable to the ones I'd been compelled to see with my eyes closed.
"Resist their thoughts!" Albert shouted. "Don't let them weaken you!" I looked at him in wordless dread. Had he known? I tried to resist. Robert, how I tried. Attempting to avoid the grisly sights and sounds those people constantly inflicted on me; the smells and tastes and feels of this place. Ann couldn't be here, I told myself.
I wouldn't allow myself to believe it.
Abruptly, now, as though there were some connection with my thought of Ann, the most elaborate of despairs and anguishes began to flood my consciousness.
I can only say that nothing in my life had come even remotely close. Because the physical brain is incapable of dealing with multiple thoughts at one time whereas the spirit mind can take on mass impressions. Even a mind as lowered as mine had become.
These impressions were like sprays of acid burning at my mind. Utter hopelessness and dolor vied for the very existence of my consciousness. A melancholia so vast it yawned beneath me like a pit without a bottom. Ann isn't here. The thought became my only defense. Not among these.
I started, crying out in shock, as a man came lurching up to us, wearing what appeared to be the remnants of a toga, now blackened shards hanging from his body. His limbs were so devoid of flesh as to be skeletal. The hands he stretched out toward us were like talons on a bird of prey, the fingernails like black claws. His face was scarcely recognizable as such, distorted and malformed. His glittering eyes were small and red, his open mouth repulsive, filled with teeth like yellow fangs.
Much of his face was decayed, gray bone showing through the rotted flesh. I cried out, horror-stricken, as he clutched my arm, his touch causing an intense nausea to billow up inside me.
"There!" he cried, pointing with one of his clawlike hands.
Involuntarily, I looked where he was pointing and saw a man dragging a woman toward one of the darkly viscid pools. She was shrieking in mindless terror, the sound of it cutting through me like razor slashes.
I cried out again as I recognized her.
"Ann!"
"Chris, no!" Albert warned.
Too late. I had, already, let go of his arm, already eluded his desperate grab for me. "I'm coming!" I shouted, lunging toward Ann.
All Hell broke loose.
I'd never truly known the meaning of that phrase till then.
In the instant I broke free of Albert, his protection vanished and a mass of figures rushed at me, howling with demonic glee.
As they closed in rapidly, I knew, with a bolt of horror, that I'd been tricked by the man. Had he known that I was searching for my wife? Was his mind that cunning?
Whatever it was, he'd only made me think that it was Ann. Already, I knew it wasn't. The moment I'd pulled away from Albert, the woman's face had altered to the ghastly look of all the others.
Jarring to a halt, I tried, in vain, to turn, twisting around in a frenzied panic.
No use. I'd barely begun to move when they were on me from every side, waves of shrieking figures clutching at me.
I staggered and lost balance, tried to catch myself and started falling. Howls of savage mirth enveloped me. I cried out, horrified, as I went toppling to the rocky ground, their bodies crashing down on top of me, hands clawing at my face and body, tearing at my clothes, my flesh.
Faces blurred across my sight, some charred, some fiery red, all disfigured by scars or burns or ulcerous sores. Some had no faces at all but something made of hair and bone where features should have been.
I screamed out Albert's name, then had the hideous sensation of a swarm of flies flooding into my open mouth, into my ears and eyes. They seemed aroused by my helplessness. I tried to spit them out I slapped at my eyes and ears with maddened hands.
Again, I tried to scream out Albert's name but the only sound I made now was a choking gurgle as a surge of flies began to clog my throat. I tried to wrench myself onto my stomach so I could vomit them up but the clamoring, screaming people wouldn't let me. They were hauling me across the ground on my back, yanking at my arms and legs, kicking me and screeching with insane delight at my impotence. The light I'd carried was virtually gone now. All I saw were twisted forms and shadows hovering all around me. All I heard were cries of demented joy as they dragged me over the ground, shredding my clothes and ripping my skin on razor-sharp rocks. That and the buzzing of flies. Albert! I thought in pleading anguish. Help me please! Total blackness now. The deafening buzz of fly swarms in my ears, the sensation of their crawling, by the hundreds, in my mouth and throat, across my staring eyeballs.
Abruptly, then, I felt myself being plunged into icy liquid, shoved beneath its surface.
Instantly, it flooded down my throat and pressed against my face, an indescribable sensation--a combination of every vile taste and smell conceivable.
I felt the clawlike hands forcing me down into the liquid, my horror increasing even more--how was that possible?-- as, below the surface, other hands began to clutch at me.
I tried to scream but only made a strangled, bubbling noise as hands kept pulling at me, passing me down from unseen grasp to unseen grasp, dragging me deeper and. deeper into the noxious depths.
Bodies started clinging to me now, skeletal, with streamers of rotting flesh. My eyes were tightly closed but I could see their faces nonetheless. The faces of the living dead regarding me with gleeful, burning eyes as I went down and down and down.
Ann! I thought. My consciousness began to fade. I've failed you!
I sat up with a shocked cry. Albert held his hand on my shoulder as I stared at him.
At last, I looked around.
We were sitting on a barren plain, all gray, its sky the color of muddy slate. A cold wind moaned across its stark, unending flatness.
Yet, I tell you Robert that, compared to where I'd been, that plain was paradise.
"How did you get me?" I asked. That I was with him seemed beyond my comprehension.
"You were only in their grasp a few moments," he told me.
"A few moments?" I knew I was gaping. "But they knocked me down and dragged me to a pool and pushed me underneath the surface where--"
He shook his head, smiling grimly. "You were in my sight the entire time, no more than several feet away. They touched you only with their minds." "God," I shivered uncontrollably. "That has to be Hell. It has to be."
"One of them," he answered.
"One!" I stared at him, appalled.
"Chris," he told me, "there are Hells within Hells within Hells."
