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mooned night of horror so very long ago. And having found it, having assured himself of eternal
sleep, not merely physical death from a silver bullet, he would stop his heart--how, he did not know,
but he would--and it would all be ended for Lawrence Talbot, who had become what he had beheld.
There, in the tail of the pancreas, supplied with blood by the splenic artery, lay the greatest treasure
of all. More than doubloons, more than spices and silks, more than oil lamps used as djinn prisons
by Solomon, lay final and sweet eternal peace, a release from monsterdom.
He pushed the final few feet of dead vein apart, and his head emerged into open space. He
was hanging upside-down in a cave of deep orange rock.
Talbot wriggled his arms loose, braced them against what was clearly the ceiling of the cave,
and wrenched his body out of the tunnel. He fell heavily, trying to twist at the last moment to catch
the impact on his shoulders, and received a nasty blow on the side of the neck for his trouble.
He lay there for a moment, clearing his head. Then he stood and walked forward. The cave
opened onto a ledge, and he walked out and stared at the landscape before him. The skeleton of
something only faintly human lay tortuously crumpled against the wall of the cliff. He was afraid to
look at it very closely.
He stared off across the world of dead orange rock, folded and rippled like a topographical
view across the frontal lobe of a brain removed from its cranial casing.
The sky was a light yellow, bright and pleasant.
The grand canyon of his body was a seemingly horizonless tumble of atrophied rock, dead
for millennia. He sought out and found a descent from the ledge, and began the trek.
There was water, and it kept him alive. Apparently, it rained more frequently here in this
parched and stunned wasteland than appearance indicated. There was no keeping track of days or
months, for there was no night and no day--always the same even, wonderful golden luminescence--
but Talbot felt his passage down the central spine of orange mountains had taken him almost six
months. And in that time it had rained forty-eight times, or roughly twice a week. Baptismal fonts of
water were filled at every downpour, and he found if he kept the soles of his naked feet moist, he
could walk without his energy flagging. If he ate, he did not remember how often, or what form the
food had taken.
He saw no other signs of life.
Save an occasional skeleton lying against a shadowed wall of orange rock. Often, they had
no skulls.
He found a pass through the mountains, finally, and crossed. He went up through foothills
into lower, gentle slopes, and then up again, into cruel and narrow passages that wound higher and
higher toward the heat of the sky. When he reached the summit, he found the path down the
opposite side was straight and wide and easy. He descended quickly; only a matter of days, it
seemed.
Descending into the valley, he heard the song of a bird. He followed the sound. It led him to
a crater of igneous rock, quite large, set low among the grassy swells of the valley. He came upon it
without warning, and trudged up its short incline, to stand at the volcanic lip looking down.
The crater had become a lake. The smell rose up to assault him. Vile, and somehow terribly
sad. The song of the bird continued; he could see no bird anywhere in the golden sky. The smell of
the lake made him ill.
Then as he sat on the edge of the crater, staring down, he realized the lake was filled with
dead things, floating bellyup; purple and blue as a strangled baby, rotting white, turning slowly in
the faintly rippled gray water; without features or limbs. He went down to the lowest out thrust of
volcanic rock and stared at the dead things.
Something swam toward him. He moved back. It came on faster, and as it neared the wall of
the crater, it surfaced, singing its blue jay song, swerved to rip a chunk of rotting flesh from the
