Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “That could be a problem. Is it permanent?”

  “Nothing’s permanent. Next one’ll probably be more powerful.” He hurried on, eager to have Herald explain the machine to him before he awoke. Rain fell now in drops so sluggish they could see each one. They felt abnormally hard on his exposed face and head as Edward walked into them rather than having them falling about him as he was used to. He was almost running when he tripped on a dog in his path and knocked it on its side.

  “What sort of creature—?”

  “Animal, dog, canine, village stray. Hurry. This’ll be no ordinary storm if the dogs are heading inland. You’ve got to tell me about the machine in the pyramid.” Edward swerved just in time to avoid two more canines in a paralyzed slink, and he managed to warn Herald.

  “Pyramid? This is not the sector for what I think of as pyramids.”

  “Sector … yes, well, I suppose the Mayan temple pyramids aren’t strictly pyramids like in …” Edward stopped short, and again the giant was up against his back, with the see-through girl staring over his shoulder. “You have your machines in the East too? In Egypt and …” He could hear the fact in Herald’s thoughts that he didn’t know Egypt from Hades, and Edward thought of Africa, tried to visualize the shape of the continent, sensed that it didn’t register either, and then formed a mental image of an Egyptian pyramid.

  “Early implanters of terminals encouraged the building of natural rock structures to house the necessary equipment. And the more elaborate and mysterious, the more likely the primitives would not destroy them or remove the protective rock.”

  “My God, man, whole civilizations built religion and ritual around your ‘nonpolluting’ structures. You’ve polluted your own past!” Edward stomped on down the trail, truly angry and yet unable to reject the idea that due to this dream, his next book would be a sizzler. He stopped again and let the rain pelt him, instead of the reverse. “Did your people build all these protective structures, or did the people who came to worship in them or bury their kings or cut out hearts and sacrifice human beings there?”

  “We merely helped. They were so primitive. Someone had to—”

  “Did you cause this destruction thing you keep splitting up history with … by your interference? In the name of transportation?”

  “There are those … environmentalists”—that was the closest thought Edward could comprehend, but it was mixed with the word-thought “moralists” and a sort of distrust—“who suggest this as a possibility, but I noticed expressions among as-yet-unmixed races in that tiny village we just left that would suggest other reasons. Anyone would want to blame a catastrophe of that nature elsewhere, old man.”

  Edward was already composing sentences for an introduction to a new book, sifting through ideas in the old that he could adapt (all that work, surely he could use some of it), when Roudan Perdomo loomed up ahead of them.

  “What good will it all do if I don’t remember this dream when I awake?” he absently asked the proprietor of the Hotel de Sueños, and then noticed the expression-in-progress on the stilled features.

  Edward was more used to seeing the big black man grinning, joking, laughing in that high, improbable voice. But Roudan seemed not the least good-natured in this captured moment. He looked stricken, angry, grim, and on the verge of tears all at the same time. Muscles along his upper arms and chest flexed tight against his skin. Rain slid off the bill of his red-and-white cap so thickly and so slowly it appeared slightly clouded, sticky like honey.

  “Don’t touch him,” Herald warned, and stepped around Roudan, looking him over from all angles. “Fairly respectable specimen.”

  “He’s still young. I’m thinking he’s also one of the monkey wrenches in your machine.” And Edward described awaking in the jungle one night, apparently having sleepwalked. He’d found himself near the Mayan ruin, the existence of which he hadn’t suspected until then. A group of villagers was filing into a lighted chamber in the hillside. “And this specimen here was standing in front of a silver column with his arms raised and reciting some kind of jibberish, and all of a sudden the ghost of a woman who used to live on this island appeared in front of him and started dancing. I figured these people’d stumbled across a machine left behind by an ancient extinct race from Atlantis.”

  Someone had hit him over the head from behind, and Edward P. had come to, to find Stefano Paz dragging him past the generating plant and chiding him for sleepwalking.

  “Hurry, please. You’ve got to help me,” their phantom wailed.

  They left Roudan to his arrested walk and moved on. “If you’re so sure your fooling around with your history causes no harm, then why are you so afraid to have us touch anyone or change anything?”

  “Now that I’m here, I can see our calculations about your cultures and our effect on them have been inadequate.”

  “Inadequate! You plop massive stone structures down in the middle of ignorant villages and you call—”

  “We had no notion of the sensitivity, advancement, and great numbers of the species before the destruction. We’ve always thought of you as a lower form of animal, living in caves, tribal—”

  “Who managed somehow to develop such sophisticated weaponry that we could wipe out almost all trace of ourselves.” Edward P. Alexander was less and less impressed with the mental powers of this future race.

  “There was so little left to go by except for the legends that came down from the survivors, our ancestors, whom we think of as barbarians and don’t take too seriously. And the time funnel is so new. We’ve only just begun to appreciate the problems and try to correct them.”

  They reached the screen of night-blooming cereus and walked along it to the break leading to the clearing and the mound, and an echoing roar that resonated in Edward’s ears to make them tickle maddeningly. It took him a moment to realize it was a thunderclap. “If there was nothing left of us after this destruction, how’d you know about the internal-combustion engine?”

  It was not until the engineer smiled at him approvingly that Edward P. realized he couldn’t have spoken his last sentence aloud and been heard over the ongoing thunder, that he had instead expressed it as a thought, clear and directed perfectly.

  “There were a few artifacts carefully preserved by our ancestors.” The engineer looked from the broken stela to the mound. “What has happened here? The structure is overgrown and uncared-for.”

  “The culture you duped into maintaining these things died out centuries ago. I think there’s been more than one ‘destruction’ on this old planet.” He had to repeat that last thought three times before Herald got it. Edward had passed the age where he enjoyed the discomforts of the elements. Old bones ached like rotten teeth, and even the insides of his tickling ears felt rain-soaked. He’d been consistently amazed at the realistic detail of his dreams since arriving on this island. Now he even felt the extreme weariness all this dream walking and excitement would have in reality caused him.… “Could this machine of yours cause people to dream?”

  “The sleeping mind floats freely and is easily picked up on the tracer waves used to transport, especially when the terminals are not well-protected.” Herald started up the side of the mound, parting the rain before him, his suit shedding it like tarpaulin. “Primitives here would probably dream only of the Northern Terminal, which should not be too distressing, and then only those sleeping in a direct line with the tracer beams.”

  Edward sloshed along behind the phantom girl, who had faded to almost nothing in her excitement. He slipped on wet undergrowth which the engineer’s suited feet gripped with no problem. So many questions. Would there be time?

  46

  Thad was never to know how Roger the Baron found Mayan Cay that day, not to mention its minuscule airstrip.

  The Stinson lurched out of a downpour and into another, but the break was long enough for Thad to see treetops below them. The stink of Ralph Weicherding’s sickness saturated the cabin’s atmosphere.

&
nbsp; “Are you sure this is Mayan Cay?” Thad yelled over the Stinson, disbelief, doubt, and terror juggling for his immediate attention.

  “Well, it’s something.” Roger fought the wind for the wheel. “A little late for a one-eighty, friend.”

  He turned them around, and Thad could see nothing now, hoped they were far enough above the trees to miss them, but not so far as to lose the tiny island in the immensity of sea and storm. He’d rarely felt so helpless or so useless. They skidded sideways, sailed forward, dropped, leaped upward.

  “Next time I get one of my great ideas,” Ralph said, “shoot me. Okay, Baron?”

  “Right. Now, watch for landfall, folks.” And the Stinson turned again.

  One dial in front of Thad had a straight white line meant to show the horizon and another with two arches supposed to indicate their winged vehicle. The horizon rolled alarmingly from side to side.

  But once more, as if the ancient gods of Mayan Cay had decided to throw the game for the Stinson and against the storm, the passengers could see the island and its airstrip through a lift in the murk. The airstrip was clear. They weren’t lined up for it, but it wasn’t impossible. Roger made another pass, tried to raise the shack next to the airstrip on his radio. “What do you bet everybody’s battened up and gone home to hold their roofs down?”

  The break held, and the Baron fought crosswinds to head in, adjusting the flaps with an iron handle in the floor that resembled a crowbar. “Come on, Clyde, cut it out. I was only kidding.”

  Bucking palm trees rushed up on either side of them, and they touched down, bounced, touched down again. Thad turned to congratulate the man beside him. The busy pilot took no notice. They taxied, obviously too fast. But the Stinson was on land, and anything that could have delivered them where they were through the hell they’d survived could surely stop before it mashed them all into the schoolhouse. Thad couldn’t see ahead because the plane’s nose once again filled the windshield, and he was staring out his side window at layered palm-tree trunks when they parted for the one-room shack which served Mayan Cay as a terminal building.

  The clearing caused a crosswind that helped to slow their speed drastically. It also weathercocked the tail around and turned the prop into the wind. The Stinson was still moving when it was shoved backward off the runway. It careened along the roughness of the shoulder enough to tip the wing on Thad’s side so the wind could get under it.

  The wind picked up the Stinson and slammed it against a tree. The Stinson stood upright on its tail and one wing, the prop slicing futilely at palm fronds.

  “She’s going to burn! Jump!” And Roger was gone.

  His body had cushioned Thad, who was now left hanging by his seat strap, staring down at the ground through the pilot’s open doorway. There were no shoulder straps. He had no time to think, but must have, because he’d swung his legs down over the pilot’s empty seat before he released his own belt and dropped out feetfirst. He grabbed at something hanging out of the Stinson to break his fall, but it gave way with his weight and he hit hard, the pain in his ankles shooting to his knees before he fell forward onto his hands and chest.

  Thad rolled over, to see Weicherding dangling headfirst out of the cabin above him, arms waving wildly, eyes and mouth making giant O’s in his face. Standing and gripping the reporter’s hands, he pulled with all his weight, and Ralph came down on top of him. Thad was flat on the ground again.

  Ralph was off him in an instant, trying to crawl away, dragging one leg out to his side, his face screwed up as if he were crying. Thad was surprised to find the pilot lying still nearby. He grabbed Roger’s ankles on his way up, pulled him bumping along behind to the far side of the airstrip, wind and panic sucking at his breath. He raced back to help Weicherding, and was halfway to him when the Stinson blew.

  If the wind had not been blowing so fiercely in the other direction, the injured man would have been clothed in flame. As it was, the air was searing when Thad reached him, pulled one of Ralph’s arms over his own shoulder, and rushed them both to safety.

  The whole incident, from the time they had hung up in the plane against the tree, had taken seconds. But each second was so strung out by the fear that seconds couldn’t possibly be time enough that Thad was convinced he’d had time to die a thousand deaths.

  Dark smoke swirled off into thin curlicues, flattened into invisibility in the murk. Flame boiled and burbled up into the palm tree and hid all but a portion of one wing and the landing gear.

  Thad shuddered with reaction as he helped Weicherding over to the shelter of the shack and propped him against the leeward side. Bracing into the wind, he raced back to the pilot, only to find him dead.

  The man’s neck was broken, his white scarf wrapped far too tightly around that neck; one end trailed back toward the Stinson on the course Thad had hauled Roger the Baron in such haste he hadn’t thought to check the man’s condition. That end was badly ripped.

  Thad sat dumbly beside the body, wind hurtling sea spray and sand in blistering pellets against his skin. They sizzled on the Stinson’s pyre. He remembered grabbing hold of something on his free fall from the plane. It appeared Roger had already hung himself on his scarf, and Thad had pulled him down. Had there been time?

  A large section of plywood sailed along the runway, never less than five feet off the ground, and turned into the jungle as if cognizant of its destination and in full control of its direction. Roger didn’t blink bulging eyes when grit sprayed across his face, nor close an awful grin over his beautiful teeth. He took no notice as he and Thad and the airstrip were drenched in heavy rain.

  Only Ramon Carias and two men from the village braved the elements to investigate the crash. They helped Thad carry the injured reporter to the school, where there was a minimal first-aid station. Ralph complained of pain in his head and neck as well as his hip. Thad left him on a cot in the school and headed for the Mayapan through streets emptied of all but soggy people litter swept out into the open by the wind. The people of San Tomas hid behind their shutters. Chickens in a backyard hen house squawked their alarm.

  The roof of one cabana had blown off and lay scattered across the compound. Dixie had moved all her guests into the dining room, where gas lamps tried valiantly to liven up a group of very somber tourists.

  “Well, look who’s turned up like a bad penny,” Dixie said from across the room with scorn in her tone and a look to match it.

  Now, what’s that all about? Thad wondered as she swept down the aisle between tables and handed him a glass of champagne.

  “We’re having a storm party. Won’t you join us?” She put her hands on her hips and eyed the puddles he was making on the floor. “How’d you get here, swim?”

  “Small plane, bad landing.” Thad gulped at the champagne and wished it were brandy. “One man dead, another hurt. He’s at the first-aid station. You got a physician here?”

  A man in the corner groaned and stood up. The Mayapan always had M.D.’s.

  “Aubrey, take Dr. Mordhurst to the school, please.” Dixie turned back to Thad. “and not a scratch on you. There’s no justice.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I honestly believe you don’t know.”

  He followed her back down the aisle, where she uncorked another bottle. He didn’t see any of the faces he was looking for. “Where’re the boys from L.A.? And you had a Mrs. Whelan here when I left—Tamara. Has she left?”

  Dixie swung around, champagne bubbles foaming out of the bottle’s mouth and dripping down her fingers. “Is that why you came back?”

  She refilled his glass and moved among her guests. “Five of them went off into the jungle this morning. I’m worried sick. Told them a storm was on the way, but … Christ, she works fast!”

  “Where into the jungle?”

  “Oh, there’s some old hill in there, and this woman from Wyoming thought her missing husband was there because she found part of a pair of glasses like his. It’s all crazy
… Thad, where are you going?” She was right behind him when he reached the veranda. “You can’t go in after them in this weather.”

  “Probably safer inland than it is on the beach. What’re you going to do if there’s a storm surge? Will you have enough warning to evacuate your guests?”

  “We have storms every year, and I’ve never been swept off the beach yet. I can’t run all these people into the jungle to get lost and catch pneumonia.”

  “Why? Because if they survive they’ll sue the Mayapan?”

  “Thad, most of them aren’t in good enough shape to walk to the grocery store and back without having a heart attack. If Ramon turns on the siren, we’ll head for the trees, okay? As long as you’re here, come back in and help me keep the panic level—”

  “Siren’s down, lying across the basketball court.” Maybe Dixie was right. She’d lived here for years, but … “I’m going to go see what’s happened to the others.”

  “You’ll get soaked.”

  “I’m already soaked.”

  47

  Herald laid large perfect hands to either side of an arched-stone facing set in the side of the mound and so cunningly camouflaged by natural growth one had to stand on a level with it to see it. “Great erosion has occurred here. This should be buried.”

  Edward had identified remnants of an ancient temple several levels above this from the other side of the tangle of cereus vines but couldn’t make them out from here. Massive stones in the facing separated down the middle, slid back into the hillside without scraping or grating, only a smooth whirring that could have been gossamer wings on air. There were no runners on the floor to account for such silence.

  Inside, the wonderful machine revolved slowly. A candelabrum, with four candles whose flames were half-extinguished smoke trails entering an opening in the machine’s clear caging, lay on its side, suspended on air, about five feet from the gleaming cylinder.

  “Tell me, do you people and your machinery cause disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle too? And hurricanes and …? Why don’t you put these things deep in large mountains instead of—?”