Blade found more wood and built the fire up until he had a well-lit circle some forty feet in diameter. Inside the circle of light he piled a great reserve of wood. Fighting off sleep all the time, he selected a slim tree within his pale of light and began to hew away with his flint knife and axe. It was slow work, and tedious, but within a few hours he had wood enough for a bow and several arrows. They would be crude, and he must use vine for a bowstring, but they added enormously to his scant arsenal. He had flint for heads and they could be bound to the shafts with vine tendrils. He was at a loss for fletching — there were no birds in this damn forest.

By now sleep was winning — he could fight it off no longer. He stacked wood on the fire and, with axe and club in hand, made a cautious exploration just outside the circle of light. He found nothing. The forest brooded, as silent and empty as it had been in daytime. Apart from the giant hare he had seen no living creature. It should be safe to sleep, and sleep he must.

He lay down near the fire. Yawned. Struggled to think. Closed his eyes. Richard Blade fell crashing into oblivion.

Pain brought him gradually and reluctantly awake. Not one concentrated pain, not a wound nor a bite, but rather a series of small pains adding up to agony. And there was sound — a sucking sound. A drinking sound. Along with the pain and the sucking, his body was covered with an intolerable itch. He was aflame with itch, going mad with it. He came fully awake and dug his nails into his crotch and upper legs, scratching furiously. His fingers touched something unspeakably slimy and he snatched them away, In the dying firelight he stared at them. They were covered with blood. His blood.

Only then, as he came fully awake to horror, did he realize what had happened. He was covered with leeches! Enormous leeches. Swollen, bloated slugs, hundreds of them, sucking and sucking away at his life.

Blade screamed harshly and leaped to his feet. He staggered and nearly fell, weak and reeling, and knew that he had awakened only just in time. The pain was a blessing. Another few minutes and the leeches would have bled him to death.

Still they clung in their hundreds. Blade pulled them off and flung them away. He crushed them with nasty bladder-popping sounds. He had gotten over the worst shock and he fought back revulsion and frenzy and went about the grim business of extermination. It was not easy. They were a solid wriggling and sucking mass on his back, from his anus to his shoulders, and he could not get at them. They writhed around his groin and in his pubic hair.

Blade, near to fainting from loss of blood, reeled to the fire and plucked out a brand and began to sear his body with it. It worked. He did not feel the bite of flame in the blessed relief of being rid of the leeches. In any case, the burns would be superficial.

When he was free of them, though scorched here and there, he mustered his strength and went around stomping as many of the things as he could find. He was amazed to see them, once deprived of their host, screw themselves into the ground like worms. Earth leeches! For one grim and angry moment Blade wished that J and Lord L might be here to share in this adventure.

His body inflamed, covered with thousands of tiny bites, Blade staggered to the brook and lay down in the cold rushing water, unmindful of any greater danger. He lay in the water for a long time, feeling some of his strength come back, knowing that he would be all right in a day or so. But he would have to eat — and eat — and eat. There was plenty of the hare left and he could make broth in the firepot. Meantime he could finish his bow and arrows, make a spear and prepare for whatever new ordeals lay ahead. That there would be ordeals he never doubted. By now he had learned that life, and survival, in any Dimension X were chancy and that the odds were always against him. This particular Dimension X was not any different.

One thing he was positive about — he would build himself a platform in a tree and he would sleep there.

Chapter Nine

Blade made a stick calendar and notched the days on it. His crude bow worked well enough at short range and he fletched his arrows with the obovate leaves of a tree he could not name. He made a spear and hardened the point in fire. He killed two more of the giant hares and an iguanalike creature, a miniature dragon whose belly flesh — the only part he could eat — tasted like chicken. In three days of trekking through the interminable dark forest he did not see a single bird. There was always the silence, vast and brooding, broken only by the sound of his passage, of his footsteps on the springy undermass of needles and leaves and rotten vines.

He built large fires every night and slept in trees, binding himself into a crotch or fork with vines so he would not tumble down.

Always the terrain rose in a gradual slant. A rough calculation told him that he had climbed some three thousand feet since leaving the cliff rim.

On the morning of the fourth day he was awakened by a harsh cawing, similar to that of crows in H-Dimension, but louder and more abrasive. He stretched and groaned as he cut away the vines binding him — there was no comfortable way to sleep in a tree — and searched for the source of the strange noises.

Birds!

Gulls. Or gull-like, for they were huge and had transparent leathery wings and cruel hooked beaks One of them was carrying a fair-sized fish in its beak. They circled over him, apparently aware of his presence and not liking it, raucous in their disapproval. Blade thumbed his nose at them and cooked breakfast. Thoughtfully. Gulls meant a fairly large body of water. That could mean people, of some sort, and that meant danger. That day he traveled with more caution than usual.

About mid-afternoon he came to a path. Long disused, overgrown, faintly traced, but definitely a path. His caution increased. He lay in the brush for half an hour before venturing onto the path and stepping up his pace. The going was infinitely easier.

The path dipped suddenly into a long, narrow and dark ravine. As he traversed it, noting that it was his first descent since the trip began, he also noticed that the forest was beginning to thin out. When he emerged from the ravine, climbing again, the path made an abrupt right-angle turn and he saw the barrow, or tumulus, about a mile ahead. And saw what stood atop it.

The gulls had long since left him. Blade approached the high mound, covered with weeds and grass, with an arrow notched to his bow and his spear and knife ready. For this barrow, and the towering stone figure atop it, was definitely the work of men. Intelligent men. Engineering men. At a hundred yards he paused and contemplated it.

The idol, or statue, was some two hundred feet high. The great pillars of the legs, of cunningly worked stone, stood wide astride and the stone arms were crossed on the gigantic chest. The body faced Blade; the head looked away from him.

He made a wide circle around the mound and the idol, moving quietly and on the alert, and got into position to see the face of the thing. A chill traced down his spine. The stone visage still bore traces of paint, scarlet and blue, and the great empty eyes glared at him. It was a grotesque, a combination of skull and devil mask and something else he could not identify — an eerie and terrifying ethos of its own. Blade did not like the thing, nor his own reaction to it. He shook his fist at it and moved in closer. With each step the silence of centuries closed in on him, silence that was palpable, had weight and substance.

Blade strode between the colossal legs. In one foot, near the big toe, was a black rectangle. A door. Blade slung his bow over his shoulder and, with his knife and spear ready, stepped into semidarkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and sniffed about. After a moment he relaxed. Nothing but the musty, dusty smell of slow decay. There was nothing here. Nothing but the rotten detritus of the years.