Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  Don was sitting on an oblong slab of moss-coated rock. Thad ran his hands over it, and even through the rain-slippery moss and the water cascading over his fingers, he could feel the ridges of ancient writing. Every possible inch was filled with hieroglyphs. A section of one end had broken off, and one of the two pieces was missing. Thad had a hunch that the missing piece now lay up against a wall in his father’s house. He guessed this to be a stela, lying on its side, and probably Mayan.

  “So what?” Harry said when Thad made a point of this. “Probably not called Mayan Cay for nothing.”

  The rain came down in sheets as they made a bumbling threesome trying to stay on the trail. But eventually they emerged from the jungle near the power plant. Few people were out in the weather to see Don running through the streets in his odd outfit.

  It rained on into the afternoon. The surf crashed against the reef, and waves lapped up into the cemetery, leaving foam on the sarcophagi. My Lady crept into a dry spot under the overhang of the bathroom jerry-rigged onto the second story, and Thad pretended not to notice.

  “Are there any ruins, Mayan ruins, on the island, Rafaela?”

  “A few old broken things is all. Not important.”

  Several of his father’s books on Mayans implied that they were a mainland culture only, and with no more than small boats to ply trade within sight of the coast. He hunted again for that clipping his father had saved about the discovery of what was believed to have been a coral-encrusted segment of a Mayan galley in the Metnál. He went back to the chapter in his father’s manuscript that discussed the Maya, but found no clue to any on the island. Edward P. merely made his usual diatribe against established scientific fact. In this case he pooh-poohed archaeological claims that the great pyramids and road systems of Chichén Itzá, Copán, Tikál, and others had been built by a race who had yet to discover the wheel or make use of draft animals.

  “We are expected to believe,” wrote Edward P. Alexander III, “that blocks of stone weighing up to twenty tons were quarried, hauled, and dragged into place in ever-higher piles of pyramid by conscripted peasants using the lever, ropes, pulleys, and a succession of rolling logs à la Cecil B. De Mille. One would think that the rolling logs alone might suggest the wheel to a race already well versed in astronomy, mathematics, and using a calendar superior to our own. But no, apparently there were so many disposable peasants about, one had no need to invent.

  “And why raise these monstrous monoliths anyway? The professional archaeologist will tell us, as he will anything else he can’t explain otherwise, that these huge stone works most certainly had something to do with religion. Is he not merely explaining something ancient and magnificent in the light of our own primitive culture?”

  Thad researched while the rain poured and surf pounded. But about midafternoon the weather departed, the sun arrived, and Mayan Cay steamed. It was like being suddenly tossed into a teakettle. He put down the papers, notes, and books and walked over to the Hotel de Sueños for a cool Belican. He told himself he was really investigating Roudan.

  Rafaela had to hunt him up again for dinner, and Thad accused Stefano of hitting him over the head. Stefano Paz scooped some of his dinner onto a tortilla and looked superior. “This island, Mr. Alexander, has not been good for your head since you came. Do not blame me for what happens in the cabeza.”

  “Stefano!” Rafaela spooned more black beans and rice onto his plate, and he answered her with a torrent that held a lot of the word “loco,” and Thad caught many “padres” as well. He assumed this all meant that he was to be considered as crazy as his father.

  A packet arrived finally, containing the finalized paperwork on that part of his father’s estate which was in the country of Belize. Thad confirmed his airline reservation and set to packing in earnest.

  He was eating a late, solitary lunch and glancing over some of the bills Edward P. had not paid before vanishing, when the screen door leading to the cemetery burst open and the woman from his dream walked into the room.

  She stood with lips parted and eyes unblinking as the blood drained from her face. Shadows darkened the skin beneath those eyes. She was solid. Real. Breathing, but with difficulty. She put a hand out to the refrigerator to steady herself. Still she stared at him without speaking.

  Thad, too, was shocked into silence, but so many questions ran through his mind, they would have formed an incomprehensible glut on his tongue had he tried to ask them. Instead he stood and walked over to her, a sense of unreality making his breathing shallow and too rapid. He reached out to touch her face, half-expecting her to vanish.

  “Oh, God, where is she?” the dream woman whispered. She began to cry and to beat against Thad’s chest with her fists.

  Interim

  Lost Lifetime

  The engineer wanted only to be left alone with his sorrow, but the old man’s curiosity could not be curbed, and angering him created only pain for them both. “Do control your anger, primitive. I’m very sensitive to strong emotion.”

  “Name’s Edward,” the old man snapped. “Quit calling me primitive. You have a name?”

  “Herald.” Herald knew he would question too if he were this Edward. The creature’s unrestrained brain waves wielded an astonishing force. He searched for the simplest manner of speaking to this curiosity, in order to gain himself some peace.

  But a sense of his own lost life interfered, and despair at missing the youth of his granddaughter. Her mother and grandmother would name her at the celebration. Now he would never know that name.

  “And you use these terminals and the funnel thing merely for travel?”

  “And for transporting goods.” Herald recognized the decay of the flesh-eater in the man’s perspiration. He’d encountered a similar odor on visits to preservations ringing the human cities of his own world, where beast-predator and victim roamed freely, killed and consumed one another at will or at need. What need had a human to consume flesh?

  “Flesh is matter,” Herald attempted to explain, “and the brain is energy. When traveling at the speed of time, therefore, they must be separated and transported individually. The mind is intelligent energy that automatically stores its own code, keeps itself in a form of … altogether, let’s say, while transporting.”

  “You sound like a cross between a scientist and a computer programmer.”

  “Matter in any form, including that of the body,” Herald continued patiently, “must be coded at the terminal of departure, and the receiving terminal then translates from the received signal to reassemble the matter.”

  “How do you get the mind back into the body once you’ve got the person where he’s going? And why doesn’t the body die when separated from the mind?”

  “The mind naturally reunites with its body at the end of the funnel, just as a dreaming mind returns to its body upon awakening or rising from a deep level of sleep to a lighter one.”

  “Are you responsible for all the dreaming that goes on around here?” Edward drank from an oddly shaped metal flask, and Herald could smell spirits.

  “All creatures dream, Edward. They always have.”

  “Well, your machines sound like material for a nightmare to me. What if mind and body don’t arrive at the same time?”

  “Eventually the body dies. The mind continues to search for it.”

  IV

  Night of the Blooming Cereus

  28

  Russ Burnham didn’t wait for his underground manager before entering the six-hundred-foot portal the morning after the cave-in. He’d had trouble sleeping the night before, and one of the things he thought about while lying awake was that if he was ever going to get to the bottom of the disturbing mysteries of Iron Mountain, he’d have to go in there alone without the influence of Jerusha Fistler’s stories working on Saul Baggette.

  By morning he was convinced that he would see nothing but a cave-in. Fears of the night always look silly in the morning sunshine, and after scrambling himself a couple of eg
gs he walked down to the mine entrance alone. Some of last night’s meat still stuck in his teeth, and he worried it with a toothpick as he followed his lantern light down the tracks toward the core of Iron Mountain.

  Russ could see no sign of further slippage or debris about. The soles of his work boots crunched on the grit along the tracks, sending hollow echoes off to return from all directions. If a guy didn’t know better, he’d think other boots paced his along the side tunnels. Russ knew better.

  The sound of water plinking into a puddle somewhere close. Nothing unusual. If strange things did happen in this world, and Lord knew they appeared to, they didn’t happen to people strong and stubborn enough to ignore them. Only when the levelheaded were in a weakened state did creepy things dare to bother them. He didn’t feel any power flowing like a river from this mountain, as old Jerusha claimed she did. Nor did he hear any machinery running like Saul Baggette had. Russ didn’t hear anything but the echo of himself moving through an empty mine.…

  And the gentle brushing sound of air. Almost a sigh. Not quite a whistle. Like a breeze moving through dried weeds. Higher-pitched than a whisper. Russ Burnham stopped, flashed the lantern around, and wished to hell he’d never seen all those scary movies when he was a kid. “Son-of-a-bucket full of high-grade monkey tits, Burnham,” he chided himself, and walked on. “Talk yourself into being scared, why don’t you?”

  An electric ore car sat waiting and empty at the end of the tracks. Russ continued on, deeper into the mountain. There was a light coming from somewhere ahead.

  Russ stopped again. He bit down so hard the toothpick between his teeth snapped in two. He turned off his lantern to be sure. It was a dim light. But it was there. It was possible that one of the men leaving in such a hurry the day before had left a lighted lantern behind and its battery wasn’t dead yet. Not likely, but possible.

  He moved toward the light at the end of the tunnel. There was rock down in several places here, and a good pile of rubble at the end. But no lanterns left behind. Just a shovel leaning against a wall. No dust on the scant air. Things seemed stabilized and would have seemed normal if not for the dull light coming from a fair-sized crack in the wall above a jumble of rock and dirt. And if not for the funny airy hum coming from the same direction. Russ spit out the broken toothpick and wiped his mouth on his jacket cuff.

  He crawled over the pile of rubble to peer through the crack, and saw what looked to be a lighted room with a large metal object in its center. The object was encased in glass or clear plastic. And it was shiny, just like his underground manager had said.

  Now, who would bring something like that inside the mountain, and how? The air seemed fresher up next to the crack than it was back away from it. Could there be an entrance to the center of the mountain that he didn’t know about? He stuck his hand into the crack and accidentally knocked some dirt out on the other side. Russ reached for the shovel and poked carefully along the opening, watching for signs of a more general cave-in.

  “B & H leases this mountain,” he fought it out with his good sense. The crack widened. The roof didn’t fall in on him. “And I am the company’s representative here.”

  He had a hole big enough to crawl through, and still the roof hadn’t caved in. “It is my duty to investigate anything funny going on concerning the company’s interests in Iron Mountain.”

  He set down the shovel, turned off his lantern. There was plenty of light without it now. He stared at the hole, and before his good sense could talk him out of it, Russel Burnham made a dive for the opening.

  The floor on the other side was lower, and the limestone here looked cut, laid, and polished. He worked his feet through and righted himself in a tumble of panic, half-expecting someone or something to rush him. But the room was empty. Just Russ and the large metal object. There were steps leading up to it. Although there was plenty of light below, the ceiling was lost in darkness. The air was cold, faintly fresh. The cave smell of the tunnels was gone. A different smell here. He couldn’t place it.

  Keeping his back to the wall, he circled the metal object in the center of the room. There was absolutely nothing else in there with them. When he reached the hole he’d made, he put a hand up into it for reassurance, but kept an eye cocked at the thing on top of the steps.

  That sound like rushing air was coming either from the thing or from something on the ceiling Russ couldn’t see. He could always go back and get Johnson, he decided. Now, Darrell Johnson was levelheaded enough, stolid, dependable, unimaginative.

  “I oughta go back and get Darrell,” he said even as he moved toward the center of the room.

  He put his foot up on the first step. Nothing happened. The thing did look like a machine of some kind. And there was an indentation in it like Baggette reported. It could fit a human body of almost any shape, it was so nebulous. But that didn’t mean that’s what it was meant to do. Russ took another step, and a section of the see-through casing (too clear for plastic, too thin for glass) parted noiselessly along a crack, which hadn’t been there before, to make an opening about the size of a high doorway.

  “Holy shit!” And Russ was off the stairs and back to the hole to the tunnels practically before he’d had a chance to think about it.

  The doorway remained. What could the damn thing be for, anyway? He circled the room again, inched his way back toward the steps. He couldn’t see anything on them to activate the opening of the shield or whatever it was. He stepped onto the second step again to see if the doorway would close, but nothing happened. The third and last step brought no change either.

  The doorway lurked before Russ like a trap. “I ain’t that dumb.”

  Someone came in here regularly to dust, that was certain. The place was surgically clean except for the pile of dirt he’d knocked in while making the hole larger.

  This setup must be for some kind of criminal purpose. But what, he couldn’t imagine. He pulled out his pocketknife and tossed it through the opening. It lay unharmed on the shiny aluminumlike floor of the machine.

  Russ watched his pocketknife for a while and then threw in his helmet. Again nothing reacted. He put his hand into the opening, and when he was able to withdraw it without mishap, he tossed in his jacket. He knew he was playing with fire, but he couldn’t help it. He was able to hook the jacket around the helmet and pull them out.

  He knelt in the doorway and leaned into the machine, expecting it to try to close up on him, trap him. Like he used a good lure to trap animals on the family farm in Nebraska. He could remember a few getting caught, with the trapdoor snapping shut on their middles.

  The knife was situated so that Russ had to crawl forward to reach it, and only his feet and ankles were outside the doorway. Why put a trap in the center of a mountain where nobody came? He grabbed the knife and stood so suddenly that he forgot and brought his feet inside rather than backing out and onto them. Panic took his breath away when he realized what he’d done.

  But the doorway remained open for him to pass through. No hole opened in the floor to swallow him up, no blade dropped from above to pin him. None of the worries that came upon him in that instant of panic materialized. He walked out and down the steps unscathed.

  Shivering from the coating of sudden sweat that had sprung out everywhere in reaction to his crazy fantasies, Russ groaned a halfhearted chuckle. He’d never claimed to possess great intelligence.

  His hand was still in his pocket, replacing the rescued knife, and he was over halfway to the hole that led to the tunnels, with his back to the machine for the first time since he’d entered the room, when the machine made a noise. The light on the wall in front of him blinked. He turned, to see the cylindrical metal object revolving slowly inside its clear casing. It would have been a perfect cylinder if not for the curved-in place.

  It revolved more rapidly and the light flickered instead of blinked, and Russ watched his jacket billow toward it, felt something tugging at his helmet, and watched it fly through the doorway and att
ach itself to the indented place in the cylinder. His short hair stood up and bent in the same direction.

  All his commands to his body to run for the escape hole went unheeded as Russ was sucked across the room, up the steps, and into the swirling cylinder, along with the dirt he’d knocked into the room. He was barely able to turn so that his back pressed into the depression that could have been meant to fit a human body. The pressure flattened him into it, increased as the spinning speeded up.

  The whirring sound revved itself into a scream. The hole to the tunnels stretched into a black band that appeared to circle the room. The only other time Russ had been too shocked and overcome to swear at himself was when he’d been in an automobile accident. The suddenness and complete loss of control over his environment had been the same. He’d expected to die then, as he did now. He melted into the cylinder, his body feeling like jelly, and the cylinder spun so fast on screaming air that it no longer seemed like movement, and against all reason, he could see the circular room. Russ felt amazingly comfortable, lulled and floating.

  Russ floated over a wooden building, the size of a small warehouse, with a tar-paper roof. It had an attached dock area next to a set of railroad tracks, and a man in tan pants with only red long underwear above hoisted a block of ice over his shoulder with giant tongs and walked down some steps. The old-timer with the five-foot stride. A white horse, spotted, with heavy legs and matted mane, pulled a wagon out of the three-hundred-foot portal and along the tracks to the old crusher building Russ had seen only in pictures. The wagon was loaded with limestone. The man on the wagon seat lifted his hat to the man with the ice. Neither of them paid any attention to Russ.

  “Malfunction, malfunction,” a calm voice repeated mechanically in his head. “Malfunction, mal—”

  “Primitive in the funnel,” another voice said, and Russ was spinning with the cylinder once more. “Full body …” and there followed a series of word sounds that meant nothing to Russ.