Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “We do, but few are consistently inactive or undisturbed for the length of time we require. Adrian, child, I want you to stand well away from the terminal. Slip behind one of those rock shields until I can decide how to help you.”

  The engineer’s concepts of time might be the find of Edward’s century if only Edward could understand them. He’d about decided this dream was like one of those visions of old and that Edward P. Alexander was meant to prophesy to the world! “You didn’t answer the Bermuda Triangle question. Hurry, I might wake up at any moment.”

  “Calm down, old man, excitement around that terminal could activate processes there’d be no time to explain,” Herald warned sharply, and stepped over to the stone partition. “Adrian?”

  He stood like a half-perfect angel, half-haloed in the light of the terminal, half-shadowed by the rock wall. “We have a problem here, Edward.”

  Edward noticed a tugging attraction toward the machine as he moved in the other direction to join Herald. There was a sprawl of bodies behind the first partition, and he could see more behind the next one. He could not see Adrian. “Where is she?”

  “I must remove these creatures before they upset the funnel. Stand back, old man.” Herald placed long, blunt fingers to either side of his head and squinted without wrinkling the skin around his eyes.

  Edward watched the bodies lift one by one and levitate out of the archway and into the rain, without changing postures. They resembled store mannequins floating on invisible wires. All appeared to be tourists. “But where’s the girl, Adrian?”

  “There.” The last mannequin had a long fall of copper hair and a thin, haggard face that looked more like fifty years old than adolescent. “It seems her body was here after all, but certainly a far different one than she remembered. Let us hope it survives.”

  “You moved those people about with your mind, didn’t you? Could I do that?” So many questions. It was like being offered the granting of three wishes but having no time to select among hundreds of possible desires or to weigh the relative importance of each. “There’s an area of ocean north and east of here called the Bermuda Triangle. Many sea- and aircraft have disappeared without trace on or over those waters. Some passengers on others have found they’d lost periods of time or that time had speeded up somehow. Directional instrumentation was fouled up as well. Could a machine like this cause these things?”

  “Probably a space port. There’s one not far from here, and much more powerful than an ordinary terminal.” Herald pressed various areas on the wall where Edward could see nothing, and the stones whispered in from each side to fill up the arch.

  “Space port? Have you discovered life on other planets? Has it discovered us?”

  “Be still a moment, old Edward. I have work to do, and little to do it with.” Herald laid his forehead against one of the stones of the arch. His body tensed under his magic suit.

  Edward waited impatiently, trying to decide which question to demand he answer first. Had Edward begun to speak with his thoughts because of something the engineer did to him, or had he always had this ability but never concentrated on its use before?

  Did those who “implanted” the terminals, and then couldn’t get back to the future, did they show the Mayans or some select priests how to calculate, how to divine their magnificent calendar? Oh—and this was the most exciting of all—the stela outside. Could Herald decipher the carved language for Edward? Wouldn’t Edward P. Alexander be the envy of all those dried-up scholars who’d laughed—

  “Edward! No … control your emotions!” But Herald, the time engineer from the future, disappeared as he spoke, and so did the silvery machine … and the room … and everything else.

  Tamara fought beneath Russ Burnham, trying to push up far enough to get a look at the person who was under her. Whoever it was, she had Adrian’s hair, but the face and what she could feel of the body were far too slender. Their struggles knocked over a bowl next to the pallet on which the woman lay, spilling gritty contents onto the stone floor, and the overturned bowl began to slide past Tamara’s face toward the break in the partitions. She grabbed it, sniffed it, ran a finger around its rim, and licked her finger. Sweetened cornmeal and mashed banana. “Russ, I think this is Adrian. I think Roudan’s been trying to force-feed her.”

  He moved off her to flatten himself at her side, and had to pull a long-handled spoon and a section of clear tubing with a small plastic funnel on the end out from under him. “She’d have to have water first. Bet that’s what this is for. I saw the same setup on Abner Fistler’s night table the day he died.”

  “Choked to death, didn’t he? Because Jerusha was trying to feed him when he was unconscious?”

  “I thought it was the emphysema that choked him, but …”

  Tamara lay on soaking weeds instead of the pallet. She began to slide down the side of the temple mound headfirst. She pushed herself into a sitting position. At first she thought the tortured cries were her own. But it was Agnes Hanley, crouched a few feet above, her hands over her head as if she were still behind the stone barrier. Other forms appeared through a veil of rain, in various postures of unfolding or tumbling or sliding. A patter of surprised swearing mixed with Agnes’ wailing. Tamara crawled past her up the hillside on her hands and knees, rain and wind pelting her, toward one form—completely stilled and lighter in color than the others.

  The woman’s eyes opened as Tamara reached her, and then closed against the rain. Tamara leaned over to shield her. “Adrian?”

  Wind-whipped branches and sucking mud slowed Thad’s progress on the trail. Coconuts crashed in a deadly shower all around him. He almost stepped on the dog before he saw her wandering aimlessly along the path. He could feel her disorientation and fear. My Lady?

  She allowed him to pick her up, without growling or snapping, just a shivering acceptance that reminded him of the dream woman at the temple mound. Cradling the dog in his arms, he started running, only to be brought up short by a near-miss head-on collision with Roudan Perdomo.

  “Are you coming from the mound? Is she there?”

  “Your woman? Yes, backra, and a crowd of others.” He stood slack, reeling with the wind. “Go to her, and may you both fry in hell.”

  Roudan staggered past Thad and was lost in the rain.

  There was indeed a crowd assembled before the temple mound, a soggy, wilted crowd. Tamara sat holding the head of a woman in a long white nightgown who lay stretched out on the stela.

  But before he could reach her, Don Bodecker slid down the mound and rushed him. “Doc? God, I’m glad to see you. When did you get back? The door’s gone. Harry, the Doc’s here!”

  “What door?”

  “The door into the hill there.”

  The rain lightened suddenly, the wind calmed perceptibly, and the dream woman took no notice of him. She had eyes only for the form reclining on the stela.

  Harry Rothnel embraced him and My Lady. “Oh, Doc, you got your doggy. Listen, we saw your daddy’s machine. I’m reconsidering his stories about ancient civilizations, you better bet. Sucked my Budweiser hat right off my head. Somebody thousands of years ago is probably wearing it right now. We can’t find the way back into the mound. It’s so good to see you, boy. And all of a sudden we were outside. All I want now’s to get back to Mobile. I can’t take any more.” Harry kissed Thad’s cheek.

  Thad had witnessed a man’s death today. He’d survived a plane crash. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had decent sleep. His double lunch at Mingo’s had left him already. Don and Harry did not look the same when soaked by Hurricane Clyde as they did all wet in the Metnál.

  The rain had almost stopped. My Lady grew restless in his arms. The temple mound looked the same, but Thad found he had no trouble believing it contained some ancient machine. He’d joined the cockeyed set his father had belonged to. “Did you see any signs my dad had been in there?”

  “No. But there are graves around here, Doc. Wouldn’t hurt to have the
authorities in to search for him. Strangest part is, we found the persons these people came down to look for. One dead over yonder and one half-dead in this room with the machine.”

  Thad’s dream woman didn’t even seem happy to see him. “I told you she wasn’t dead,” she said, her look menacing. “What did you come back for, your dog?”

  It was hard to believe this skeleton with skin was the same heavy girl Thad had seen in his dreams, but he supposed a mother would know. A man with short-cropped hair knelt on the other side. Thad felt along a sunken neck to find a weakened pulse. “We’d better get her to some shelter, fast.”

  When the man lifted her, she folded up like a bag of sticks, but she opened her eyes. “Mom?” Her voice was weak Thad was amazed she could be conscious at all.

  “Oh, baby, I’m here.” Tamara Whelan walked beside them out of the clearing without a backward glance for Thad.

  48

  The eye of Hurricane Clyde passed seventy-five miles east of the island of Mayan Cay, turned, and slammed into Yucatán. It shattered three of the flimsy cabanas of the Mayapan Hotel, but the destruction to San Tomas generally was minimal—downed palms, roofs missing, damaged fishing boats. Some strings of lobster pots were torn loose outside the lagoon.

  No storm surge washed in over the reef to smash villagers under a wall of water and carry them out to sea, as Thad had feared. “What did I tell you? Both you and the dogs were wrong,” Dixie chided him. “Can’t count on anything in life. Not even the worst.”

  “It’ll never fly,” Ralph Weicherding declared when Harry explained the room and the cylinder in the mound and how it tied in with Edward P. Alexander’s theories of an ancient superrace.

  Investigators found nothing more than a previously undiscovered ruin, probably of Mayan origin, at the mound, and no more burials in the clearing.

  “The old gods are angry and won’t show themselves to backras,” was all they could pry from Stefano Paz.

  Roudan Perdomo had simply disappeared. Thad and the boys from L.A. ganged up on Seferino Munoz and finally badgered him into admitting he’d seen the “altar” in the mound. That Roudan had promised to someday discover its secret and be able to send him and the others who wanted to go to the United States by way of it. Roudan claimed to have already sent objects to Maria Elena in the United States, and said he and Maria Elena were experimenting to secretly send people as well. The couple would soon be reunited, and rich from the fare they would charge.

  Dr. Mordhurst diagnosed Adrian Whelan’s condition as critical, and she and her mother were airlifted to a hospital in Miami. He and his wife flew to New Orleans with Ralph Weicherding, who’d suffered a hip injury and a crushed disc in the crash of the Stinson.

  Dixie managed to coax seat space with Sahsa for her guests over the next few days, including Thad, Russ, and the boys from L.A. The Mayapan would close for repairs.

  On the day after the last of her guests departed, she took some scraps from her lunch into the cemetery on the beach and laid them near Thad’s stray. “Promised our erstwhile friend you wouldn’t starve.”

  The little dog was becoming quite tame with all this spoiling, even came close enough to sniff Dixie’s sandal after it had eaten. “Next thing I know, you’ll be following me home. Then what’ll I do?”

  The hotel would be awfully lonesome for a while.

  Sounds of hammers and power saws from every direction. It couldn’t be called a flurry of activity—nothing flurried here but an occasional weather front; still, it was obvious that the village was under repairs as well as the Mayapan. Scaffolding was even going up around the church. Padre Roudales would be stunned. That church had stood unfinished since before Dixie had come to the island. All she’d been able to gather was that the villagers had started it and then lost interest. Because of the “old gods” Stefano had spoken of?

  A halfhearted investigation of the temple mound was still in progress. The body of the man found there had been shipped home with his widow. Dixie knew things would quiet down now that those involved were gone. But archaeologists might well be interested in the new ruin found in the jungle. It was certainly more accessible than those lost in rain jungles on the mainland. And parties of researchers and diggers would have to eat, drink, sleep somewhere. The village was so close to the mound, it would be silly to put tents up on the mucky ground of the island’s interior.

  She eyed the Hotel de Sueños and wondered what were the chances of buying it up cheap. Was Roudan dead?

  Dixie Grosswyler had been so lost in thought, it wasn’t until she turned to leave that the jarring colors of the funeral wreath registered fully. It was shaped of gaudy orange mums, bright carmine roses, Chinese-yellow daisies—all with uniform forest-green leaves and stems, and mercifully muted with dust. This plastic monstrosity had hung from a beam of a general-merchandise store in the village for the last two years. Now it lay across the empty sarcophagus of Maria Elena Esquivel.

  Epilogue

  A Time to Live

  1

  Augie Mapes rolled up a newspaper whose headlines screamed “Mother Claims Dreams Told Her Where to Find Missing Daughter!” Then he unrolled it again for one last peek at the picture of the little schoolteacher and poor old Agnes Hanley. They looked decidedly frazzled. “Dreams Tell Widow of Location of Night Watchman’s Body!”

  He didn’t reread the article, which hinted at “reported extraterrestrial dream machines implanted in a Wyoming mountain and a Mayan ruin.” It wasn’t a local paper, but one of those weekly things out of California that went in for goofy news and lawsuits and usually dwelt on the scandalous lives of movie stars or the cancer-curing powers of ground-up avocado pits.

  Augie rolled up the newspaper again, smacked a recalcitrant hen on the tail feathers with it.

  He paused to wonder where they had buried Jerusha Fistler’s wasted body. “Come on, chickies. Built you a whole new beautiful house down at my place.”

  He’d visited Deloris Hope the night before and learned of Jerusha’s passing. The new hen house had been ready for days and was built of pilfered materials from the abandoned mining settlement. The Hanleys’ dog followed him instead of chasing chickens like any other self-respecting German shepherd would have. Augie had named him D.D. for “dumb dog,” but enjoyed his company in this empty place.

  Suddenly D.D. yipped and tore off past him, knocking over a few grouchy chickens in his scramble, and was gone. And Jerusha the witch walked through her closed back door and floated sightlessly over the steps in the heavy coat she’d worn when Russ Burnham and Saul had dragged her unconscious from the mine. Although transparent, her face was fully fleshed and not the wizened-mummy face he’d last seen her wear in a Cheyenne hospital.

  “Ghosts don’t like TV!” Augie yelled at her, and raced after D.D. and the chickens, slipping on snow and ice, past windows where curled brown tentacles were all that was left of the once-lush cereus vine.

  2

  Adrian Whelan lay in a white room, in a bed with bars at the sides, bottles with tubes hanging upside down.

  Gilbert Whelan, her father, sat by her bedside and watched her sleep. The doctors had told him she would recover, but she looked so old, so emaciated. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes sunken in dark shadows. He couldn’t believe that she’d once been forty pounds overweight or in the other nonsense her mother claimed to be true.

  As for Adrian, her dreams now were not of a Caribbean island but of Big Macs and french fries, pecan pies and frosted doughnuts, banana splits with three kinds of topping, boxes of chocolates with cream fillings, and sugar-coated cereals.

  Her hospital room was on the ground floor, and outside it was a walkway covered with flowering vines that fought nearby traffic for the dirty air. Tamara strolled this walkway with Thad Alexander.

  “The doctors say it’s delirium, Gil says she’s lost her mind—she keeps babbling about a giant in a pink suit and a tall silver machine. But I saw that machine too, and I don’t know what to tell her
. I feel like the walking wounded myself.”

  “You’ll never be able to explain things to her you can’t explain to yourself. She’s young and will get interested in other problems as she grows, be bothered by an occasional nightmare perhaps. It’s us I’m worried about. We don’t have the time to learn to live with our dreams that she does.”

  “So what do you suggest, Dr. Backra?”

  “I suggest, dream woman, that we combine our dreams and our—”

  “Adrian’s going to be a pickle to raise. She would have been even before all this happened.”

  “She might not like Alaska. It can be a very cold and shut-in place most of the year. We might consider a warmer climate.”

  “Not tropical, not full of sand and frigate birds and heat and stream and—”

  “How about a place that’s a little less lonely than those we’ve known?” He bent to hold her and picked her up off the walkway in the process. “And maybe just a trifle steamy.”

  3

  It was an almost automatic thing for Edward P. Alexander III to be walking along assuming his mind was concentrating on his journey and to discover instead that it was reworking an awkward sentence he’d written earlier in the day: “The bane of science, like that of religion, is not that which it explains but all that which it ignores.” No. Too many “thats.” How about: “… rather that which it ignores?” He was still stuck with the excess “that.” Edward was on his way to a point of craggy coral at the very tip of one end of the island.

  He arrived at last, camera and film dry, and set to reconstructing the blind he’d built several days before but which had fallen over—merely a batch of palm fronds stacked in such a way as to provide shade, hide his rather large form, and offer a suitable hole through which to poke a camera lens.