The Deadliest Alien Artifacts (Story Collection) Read Online Free

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