After an interminable length of time he stopped again, and
pointed.
'Seventh Avenue.'
*
Kalus remained, still as stone, but no longer in confusion and despair.
He stood rooted to the spot in horror.
The two shadows had met and become one, a broadsword of Death upon the
wounded earth. The sun was now directly south of the monolith. Yet it
was not the Shadow, but a patch of wicked, unexpected Light that showed
him in a searing instant the real danger into which his woman had
fallen, and the true Evil that walked upon the earth. A square-cut hole
high in the center of the monolith, hidden earlier by its vague,
uncontoured grayness, now let through a shaft of light, which came to
rest in impossible coincidence upon a single carving of the dwarfish
Obelisk: the face of a horned Devil, its lolling tongue six inches long,
was held in the internal pentagon of a ghoulish star, pointing downward.
Carved perhaps by some mutant from the days when half-men, like lepers,
still clung to the fire-pillaged rock, it looked down upon the slab of
altar at its feet, just large enough for a child, just deep enough to
contain its flowing blood. As remorseless and aroused, the Beast smiled
in the helpless light of day.
'Sylviana!' he cried aloud, knowing now that only he could save
her.
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