Read "The Flight to Lucifer" by Harold Bloom online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The cave mouth led unaccountably to some rough steps cut in the rock. They descended in a slow turning, and the passageway remained just high enough for Perscors to move through it without stooping. The light from above soon gave out, but as he moved deeper inward and downward, he noticed that a cold reddish glow seemed to illuminate the steps ahead of him. He followed the scarlet cord into a chamber. This wide, twelve-sided space, with twelve corridors opening off it, revealed to him where the light came from. His own armor was glowing, but without heat; the gold and jewels combined to release an intense light.
He went up to one of the corridor openings, and then another and yet another. They all led down into darkness; choosing one, he proceeded down it for a short while until he reached another chamber, one of twelve, like the earlier one but, since uncrossed by the trail of the red cord, clearly as different from the first as it seemed identical to it. Perscors retraced his steps, reentered the first hall, and tried another of the exits, sensing that the result would be the same. It was, as it was with all the others. Finally he spun himself around, entered a corridor at random, and proceeded hastily and without rational choice from chamber to chamber.