Free Strange Eons by Robert Bloch Page A

lugging up the depth charges behind him, but he did not glance back. His heart was pounding, not merely with exertion but with anticipation and expectation.
    At last he and Abbott reached the great door above, set in ornate stone molding, which did not yield to pressure at any point.
    Then recollection came. “Remember the story?” Keith murmured. “It’s like a panel, balanced on top.”
    Abbott crawled up along the carven side, then pressed the slimy surface of the stone lintel at a point high above. The door tilted inward, and as he slid down the stile, the gaping aperture widened to reveal the ebon depths beyond.
    From the opening issued an odor of corruption that stunned the senses, a stench so overpowering in its intensity that Keith almost fainted.
    Gasping for breath, he regained control and saw that Captain Sato and the members of his crew had now reached the top of the stairs and stood empty-handed beside him.
    He frowned at Abbott. “The depth charges—where are they?”
    “In the bloody ordnance depot at Papeete,” Abbott said. “You didn’t think I’d actually pinch them, did you? There’s been enough trouble as it is—if you’d only gone round to my place as I wanted, we’d not have needed to go through with all this.” He shrugged. “Then again, I’d have had to come out here anyway to open the door.”
    Keith gasped, then turned to Sato. As he did so, he heard a sound of squishing movement from deep within the darkness beyond the gigantic doorway.
    Sato heard it too, but his expression did not alter. Instead he inclined his head. The crew’s mate, a burly dark-skinned native, moved up to peer intently at Keith from unblinking eyes set in a wide-mouthed face.
    Captain Sato nodded at the man. “Him b’long Cthulhu,” he said.
    Then the crew was swarming around Keith, clutching at him with clammy hands to lift him up and over the yawning opening of that demon-fashioned doorway from which something was rising, reaching.
    Keith could not bear to behold what lurked below; his eyes closed as he fell forward into the blackness.
    His final glimpse was of the crew-men’s fish-eyed faces. Too late he recognized the Innsmouth look.

P A R T   II
    L A T E R

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it,” said Danton Heisinger. “He’s dead.”
    Kay Keith didn’t answer. She sat there in the bank manager’s office, inventorying her reactions. Kay was acutely aware of the chill from the air-conditioner, the reek of Heisinger’s cigar, the squint of his astigmatic eyes imprisoned behind the thick barrier of bifocal lenses, the rustling of the papers he shuffled as he peered down upon them upon his desktop.
    Her responses seemed to be in order—auditory, tactile, olfactory, visual.
    But the actual news of Albert Keith’s death produced no conscious reaction at all.
    “Here are the reports from the Consulate,” Heisinger was saying. “Eyewitness statements by the captain and several members of the crew. They were questioned separately by police and French governmental authorities, and their stories check in every detail! Heisinger pushed the onion-skin carbon copies forward. “If you’d like to examine them—”
    Kay shook her head. “I’ll take your word for it. But getting drunk and falling overboard on a boat in the middle of the South Pacific—that doesn’t sound like Albert. Are they sure the identification is correct?”
    “Positive.” Heisinger stubbed the cigar butt in his ashtray, much to Kay’s relief. “They’ve traced his movements all the way back to the time he bought the airline ticket here.”
    Kay shook her head, then brushed back the blonde curls with a self-conscious sweep of splayed fingers. “It’s just that it doesn’t seem like something he’d do. Running off to the middle of nowhere. I can’t imagine Albert acting on impulse.”
    Heisinger shrugged. “Frankly, neither can I. Your ex-husband struck me as a very methodical man.”
    “So there must be a