Dear All, The idea of a face may have come, (either consciously or subconsciously to the writers) from a Jack Vance short story initially published in a collection called (appropriately enough) 'The Dying Earth' I read it a long time ago (not going to tell you how old I am). However, I recommend his books, if you're interested, and I found this summary of the story I recalled from so long ago...
Hi Sf Fans,
this is probably more "fantasy" than s-f, but I have a memory of
a
story with some sort of huge supernatural being whose face is
stuck in a wall(I think a cave wall)--the idea being if he can
come all the way through, we're in huge trouble. Somehow (small
SPOILER) the protagonist manages to banish him through the OTHER
side of the wall. Ring any bells?
Sounds like the last story collected in THE DYING EARTH
by Jack Vance.
Yep, "Guyal of Sfere".
That's the title of Jack Vance's story, but I'm inclined to doubt
that
it's the story the OP is looking for. SPOILERS AHEAD. Yes, the
demon-
lord Blikdak appears as a huge face in the wall: "A great face
looked
from the wall, a face taller than Guyal, as tall as Guyal might
reach
with hands on high. The chin rested on the floor, the scalp slanted
back into the panel." But it was not a *cave* wall, it was the wall
of
a building, the Museum of Man. And the OP would surely have
remembered
that the demon was destroyed by one of the silliest methods ever,
namely, they unravel the demon by pulling a loose thread, until:
". . . sixty shining bobbins lay stacked neat; the evil so
disorganized glowed with purity and iridescence." Nothing about "the
other side of the wall."
That quote is from the original _Dying Earth_ version of the story.
In the 1969 revision:
"Sixty bobbins, seventy bobbins: Blikdak was no more. The breach in
the wall gave on barren rock, unbroken and rigid. And in the
Mechanismus seventy shining bobbins lay stacked."
