The Deadliest Alien Artifacts (Story Collection) (3 page)

He again started to realize the implications
of the find and that they would have to check what was there, no
matter what.

He
quickly shouted up: “You
investigated all these
walls?
”

“
Yes!
” Norgrove replied. “
We used all the
best equipment.
”

“
We
’
re the only ones here and that know about
it?
”
he
replied, still trying to find out more about what was happening,
and they were allowing him to know. Basically it was just them
three there at the great old immense haunted castle, buried away in
the wood, at the location that they had traced the treasure
to.

Yet they could have left the task until the
morning but they could not wait. They had waited too long and had
gone too far to get their hands on it, and he just wanted to get
it.

What the hell difference did it make if it
was morning or night? It was dark there in the tunnel at both
times!

He wondered why the lights were above,
and why he never had one, and shouted up,
“
Are you two coming down here or
what?
”

The two archeologists shifted into the shaft
and made their way down, with the lights, and he observed them, and
realized why they had not given him a light, and that he was like a
worm on a fishing line, and there to check what the score was. The
two also had trouble climbing in and down, and were overweight and
bulky, and he was better at climbing than they were. They would
have a hard time getting back up again! And he even wondered if
they would camp the night at the bottom or something, if they were
too tired and sleepy, which made him gasp again when he thought
about it, and he lodged his boot into a gap between two of the
boulders, to rest his tired body.

“
What
did they find out?” he muttered, mainly to himself, and wondered
what he was missing again.

“
There are other small shafts running
through here ...
” Henrik
called down, dangling overhead, who had stopped to examine a small
hole in the shaft, he had missed in the darkness there.

“
Ventilation s
hafts that connect
together,
” Norgrove
continued. “T
hey must run through most of the
building.
”

“
I agree! I
’
m sure they are for an ancient
ventilation ...
” Henrik
continued, sticking his head up close, and shining his light in the
hole and looking along it.

“
What
else could it be?” Pendleton asked.

“
They
could have been used to build it ...” Henrik replied, moving away,
looking for something else.

Pendleton
wondered how high up they were, as the height of the castle was
immense, and they had been on the top floor, and they never knew
how far underground it went, and the blackness there looked like an
abyss.

The height of
the castle was incredible, as well as the length being massive with
rooms and corridors going out everywhere, especially with there
being no proper lighting, and he had not thought such a
construction was possible at the date that they had given. It was
also unbelievable that somebody had managed to ship the thing over
to America, and when it must have happened, in such large sections
and fit them together.

How could
people spend so much on such things and leave them derelict, out in
such desolate woods? Why had it not even been put out in the open
for everyone to see?

Pendleton
gasped as he recalled the legends and what had already happened,
and wondered if this would be his death, in a death or glory
situation.

For a moment
he wondered if it had actually come from Transylvania and had
vampires, and realized that if it were at least he would be still
around as a vampire. At times he had thought it had similarities to
castles over there.

“
So are
we
going down ...?
”
Henrik asked firmly, watching
Pendleton’s peculiar
expressions in his light, from overhead
.

“
You
could
send down a camera with a light
attached?
”
Norgrove moaned sarcastically, and Pendleton started to move
off from the wall where he was resting against, and prepared
himself, and took glances at what was below as he started going
down, but even with the lights being closer it never revealed
anything new.

The rope suddenly started swaying and
vibrating furiously, giving the impression that Henrik was
frantically doing something against
Pendleton’s
rope, and he glanced up
and realized Henrik was climbing up for some reason, and he gasped
when he realized Norgrove
’
s face was frantic and that the two were
actually desperately trying to escape from there, almost slipping
trying to climb up, which amused him for a moment, bewildered at
their sudden change of attitude.

As he tried to see what was going on he
noticed that light across his front was not coming downwards from
them but shining upwards from something below, and his eyes fixed
onto a strange orb of light floating upwards.

“
Get me out of here!
”
Henrik hollered,
making
Pendleton
shudder and try to escape for his life.

Pendleton
even thought of removing his harness
and plunging down, and perhaps allowing him to have the fate of
dying on the ground below, and having a normal human
death.

With a loud thud Norgrove came crashing down
to his original position after slipping, and clouds of gray dust
flew up and blinded Pendleton as it went into his face and lungs,
and he went crashing into the wall.

He groaned and dangled about on the rope,
glimpsing parts of the shaft around him, mentally exhausted,
needing sleep, allowing himself just to go into sleep state,
wondering if he could somehow wangle his way out of it. But it was
not a matter of persuading himself of anything, it was really
happening, and he wished what was going to happen would just
happen.

If he had only known all those years ago
what would end up happing, he would have forced himself to forget
about such ventures.

Sounds were now screaming out at him and he
realized how loud they had become, from the abyss below, as if a
gateway into hell were there, with him suspended over it on a thin
rope, spinning endlessly, waiting to descend into its hideous
reaches.

How had they managed to talk him into this?
One minute they had been chasing treasure and the next a castle
mysteriously appears into it, and he had been dumped with their
theories, and then with the shaft.

He jerked, startled, hearing a sort of
scream, almost human but somehow different, as though out of a
distant strange place, and he visualized it out in space, in
blackness.

There were traces of rotted vegetation
floating in the light coming down from overhead, as they still
continued to climb out.

Some of the blocks of stone about him
resembled the stones in Egyptian pyramids. They were strange things
to use to build, but they were hard to penetrate, and needed in a
good castle.

He realized sounds were now not emerging
from under him but coming were from somewhere above, and then they
started emerging about him and he listened intensely with
confusion.

Sounds
manifested everywhere as though invisible creatures were
surrounding them, and strange glowing and swirling forces formed
and went about them and telepathic figures like spirits with
shrouds swirled about it, wailing and screaming, and he partially
entered a dream state, and as it increased he believed he was
holding onto reality.

A bright explosion of colors exploded out
making him come to, and realized the thing below him had reached
him and he opened his eyes wide and examined his surroundings and
saw that he was no longer in the shaft, and dazed and confusedly he
examined his surroundings and an immense whirlpool of shifting
outlines magically shifted by, and he studied everything and
realized that he had no body or proper presence and was some form
of energy formation shifting around with other similar formations,
and that he was swirling out into a vortex of reshaping energy
patterns that replaced reality, with transforming elements altering
to something that he could not recognize.

If he had died and gone into the afterlife
why was it so strange? Why it was there mesmerized him! Was he
classified as being anything? Where was it? Reality was no more
than magically spinning patterns and he wondered how worse the
situation could get, realizing that he could be trapped there for
all eternity!

II

The Transcendent
Voyager

For billions of years the transcendent
voyager had existed never wholly knowing what had created it or
where it had originated, carrying out its mission of searching
through time and space in its universe for abnormalities, unknown
civilizations and species, and transcendent entities with colossal
powers and capabilities and to destroy them if they were dangerous
to reality and what its programming considered dangerous.

It had been designed and given technology
beyond anything else that it had encountered and had the abilities
to search its universe in a degree and with abilities that would
not have been believed to exist by the most advanced transcendences
and civilizations, and would have been thought of as magical
powers, and it had the ability to search its universe throughout
time.

Its form had been an invisible complex mass
of energy, stored in many dimensions, that had been built to last
forever, and it directly entered stars to energize itself and store
its vast powers for extensive amounts of time.

Its stores of information had been vast and
it had the ability to collect as much information on what it had
been programmed for eternally and improve its defenses and other
abilities, and it had become the ultimate weapon of destruction
against the destruction of its universe.

It had stored the technology and abilities
of zillions of species and had the ability to recognize and handle
what it had been searching for within a range of its universe.

At one point it had unintentionally left the
universe and had entered an outer universe that it had not known
the existence of, where colossal amounts of universes had existed,
and on its entrance there its programming had accepted it as the
real universe and that it had to accept it as the universe that it
had to carry out its mission in.

At first it had been unable to enter the
universes and properly detect anything in them and it used all its
information and studied how it had entered the outer universe and
found a way to enter them and locate particular things in them, but
infinite amounts of things of unknown origins existed in them.

In supernatural universes it had learned to
open and use gateways that shifted it accurately to destinations.
It discovered far more than it had ever realized could exist and it
gave itself colossal magical abilities and energies and it had
analyzed everything in a greater degree.

On its first entrances to the universes it
had been left staggered when it had encountered something of
unknown origins that had drained its energy from it!

Something had virtually absorbed all
its power instantly on its entrance of the Earth
’
s atmosphere, only leaving
it with some of its energy in other dimensions, which it had not
considered possible as it had not been possible in its own
universe, and it could not get proper amounts of power in other
dimensions and had to fight to survive and had continuously tried
to alter and adapt to something that it could survive as, and it
had to create dormant states and ways of collecting energy from
small sources and storing it until it had enough to reactivate
itself, and work on finding a source powerful enough for it to use
to leave there.

Even though it had not done much in its
damaged condition, with its vast abilities virtually unusable, it
had been able to explore things through supernatural gateways into
universes, going out into the strangest places, and it had even
considered if there had been others such as it in the endless
universes and if they had created it, and if it could contact them
to help it, and it had gained abilities to explore inconceivable
dimensions and powers in the universes, far beyond its original
knowledge and powers.

The humans had helped it and it had used its
powers to help them and it had created things for them, including
defenses and entities to protect them, and it had created things to
hide itself away, even though it had almost damaged itself by
splitting itself into two halves.

The humans had become far more advanced and
it had been surprised that they had actually found a way for it to
restore itself!

On entering the outer universes it had
repaired itself and immediately made sure nothing could drain it of
energy again and gave itself abilities to create energy in new ways
anywhere, and it altered most of its programming to adapt.

It created colossal supernatural powers,
going beyond anything known, and used its magical powers to
transform it into something beyond anything that it had ever
encountered and it gained powers to build universes, and others,
and found far more than it had ever realized could exist and
another universe beyond there.