Death Quotient and Other Stories

by John D. MacDonald

  The arched back was like an enormous steel spring. He whirled dizzily, fell heavily on his shoulder and hip. He was looking up at the deep blue of the sky through a wild plum hedge loaded with fruit. He got to his feet, heard Steve Fowler’s distant yell, saw the recapture of his horse.

  John Logan had hoped that the horse wouldn’t be recaptured. It was Steve’s idea that they take the trail up into the massive wilderness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains so that Logan could “learn the country.”

  He had no desire to learn the country. The air-conditioned bar down in the hotel in the valley suited him perfectly. He wanted nothing to do with horses, campfires or the out-of-doors.

  But Steve had been insistent. The insides of his thighs were sore after only a few hours slow riding.

  Steve came back down the trail leading the renegade horse. He was grinning broadly.

  “Didn’t hurt you none, Johnny?” he asked.

  “The damn thing tried to bite me,” John said petulantly.

  “Hell, he was just a-playing. But you shouldn’t ought to dug them spurs into him. They’re just there so you can threaten him a little. He ain’t a bad pony, you treat him right. But don’t let him know that maybe he can get to be boss. Now get up on him and teach him some manners.”

  “All horses are stupid.”

  “They just like children, Johnny. Come on.”

  He swung up into the saddle. The horse was very docile. John Logan grinned crookedly. He thought: Just waiting for another chance. The same as this damn country. Unfriendly. Evil. Deadly.

  He sighed. Steve had started again. Fat chance of making anyone like Steve understand the cruelty and menace of the mountains. No imagination. Man was a soft animal. Man belonged down in the cities where he could protect himself. Anybody who trusted his flesh and bones to the mountains was kidding himself.

  Burro and rabbit brush rubbed against the stirrups. As they climbed even higher toward the misted blue of the mountains, the air became aromatic with the thin, clear touch of sage.

  Steve reined in and, when John Logan urged his horse up beside Steve’s, the leather-tough man said, “Them over there are Rocky Mountain Red Cedar. That stuff is juniper. The dark trees is pinon. Pine to you, Johnny. Smell how the air gets thinner. Pretty, ain’t it?”

  Steve went on ahead after John had agreed grumpily. He thought: Might as well humor the man. He’s been reading too many Western stories. Thinks he likes this stuff. Makes me uneasy to look at a landscape and see no sign of man. Ought to be signs. Roads. Buildings. Ice-cold soft drinks.

  A deep arroyo was marked by a line of huge cottonwoods, and in the foreground a stand of September squaw corn, the stalks stunted, the ears bulging. And ahead rose a towering wall of pines.

  The dim trail wound into the cool blue shadows of the forest, out of the warm golden sunshine. A wild turkey disappeared into the red-bronze of the scrub oak underfoot. The shaggy pines stood tall and silent, squirrels chattering on the high limbs.

  * * * *

  The horses began to heave as the trail narrowed and steepened. Steve stopped frequently to rest them and John Logan was glad of the chance to rest himself. The air in the pine forest was cool, and he seemed to sense an air of waiting, as though some grim spirit crouched back in the blue shadows and silently watched their progress with enigmatic smile. John Logan shivered and wondered why Steve Fowler seemed so untouched by the atmosphere of the place.

  John Logan thought of Druid rites, of gnarled and evil wood spirits. His palms began to sweat in spite of the cool of the forest. He felt the spell of the ancient and the unknown.

  They came to a cañon and, looking over the steep edge, saw the roaring stream dashing itself to snowlike whiteness against the rounded boulders. Steve dismounted and they led the horses cautiously down to an open glade where the stream made a perfect curve.

  The sunlight shone in the glade, but it was a watered yellow, devoid of warmth. John shivered and when Steve built the fire he moved gratefully close to it.

  “Tired, are you?” Steve asked. John nodded. “This ought to be far enough for today. I’ll get the saddles off the beasts and you fix spots for the bedrolls. Find hollows and fill them with pine boughs. Spread ‘em upside-down and get the fluffiest-lookin’ ones. No call to hopple the horses in this spot. They won’t climb out.”

  John Logan’s body was filled with an aching weariness. Steve whistled as he worked. As dusk came, the tall pines at the top of the ledge seemed to grow even taller, and the blue shadows under them turned to velvet black.

  * * * *

  Steve cooked and John was almost too weary to eat. They sat by the fire and it was night. The stream roared around them and something far back in the pine forest seemed to be laughing at them, slyly.

  “You’ll get to like this country,” Steve said.

  John smiled grimly in the darkness. “I hardly think so.”

  “What brought you out here, anyhow?”

  “Lungs. Had to come out here.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough so I’ll have to stay out here the rest of my life.”

  Steve clucked sympathetically. “Well, I couldn’t nohow stand seeing anybody sit around down there and look up at the mountains with that kind of sneering look you got. I feel like I own these mountains and like I got to show people what they’re like.”

  “I appreciate your interest,” John said politely.

  “Maybe I ought to do guiding.”

  They were quiet for a little time. Steve tossed a chunk on the fire and the sparks fled upward.

  “There’s something cruel about these mountains,” John said softly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, they’re so big. Mankind hasn’t made a scratch on them. There are thousands of square miles that have never been seen by man. Actually they are the same as they were back in the dawn of history. Who knows what you might run across up in these hills.”

  Steve chuckled. “The great stone lizard, maybe?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, foolish Indian talk. Their old men talk about some great stone lizard that lives up above the timberline. Been up here for centuries, the way they tell it.”

  “It could be,” John said softly.

  “Hell, man! You beginning to sound like the Indians. This here is rugged country, but it ain’t spooky.”

  “It seems that way to me.”

  “That’s like I was telling you. It seems that way to you because you don’t understand it.”

  “I feel as though I understand things about it that you can’t see, Steve. You’ve been here all your life. Maybe you’ve been too close to it. It seems primeval to me. As though there was something in it that is full of implacable, stolid evil. Something that waits and watches and waits some more.”

  “Man, you could almost give me the horrors with that talk. What did you used to do? Write ghost stories?”

  “I worked in a stock and bond house in New York.”

  “Maybe you should have writ ghost stories, Johnny. You let your mind run away with you. There’s bear up here, but they’re timid. Big cats sometimes, but they stay out of the way. Snakes in the rocks, but not up above timberline. ‘Course, the floods can get you if you get careless about the arroyos, and sometimes they’s a big rock slide, but nothing evil like you say.”

  “It’s something in the atmosphere.”

  “I was in New York once, Johnny. I stood on Times Square and got shoved around by a couple million people all hurrying off someplace. I didn’t know where they were going or what they were going so fast for. Raised hell with me, you know? Give me the shudders. They all had that tight look on their faces. Had to go back to the hotel and I felt like hiding under the bed. Same thing as you up here, Johnny. You ain’t used to it, that’s all.”

  John Logan saw the n
ative wisdom of his words. “Guess you’re right, Steve.” He yawned.

  But a half hour later he looked up at the unwinking stars and the roar of the stream seemed to be whispering something to him in hoarse, damp words. Words he couldn’t quite understand. He huddled down deeper in the bedroll and licked dry lips. Far off in the pine forest something screamed in distant, futile horror. The sounds sent feathers of ice crawling up his spine. Deadly is the long night.

  In his dreams he was pursued by the great stone lizard. He awoke bathed in icy sweat and it took a long time to go back to sleep.

  * * * *

  In the morning his fears were nearly gone. They were tucked back in some cold chamber of his mind. The coffee had a wonderful smell and the water of the stream was an icy shock that awakened him completely. He was still stiff and sore, but not as much as he had expected. The horse didn’t seem as unfriendly and, when he mounted after leading it up the narrow cut in the face of the ledge, he even slapped it on the shoulder in a friendly fashion and said, “Good morning, you miserable beast.”

  Steve rode on ahead, and it was a good two hours before John Logan noticed that the huge pines were beginning to thin out. Slowly the mood of the day before crept over him. Even a line of aspens, flaming with the touch of the first high frost, did nothing to cheer him.

  The trees thinned, became gnarled dwarfs, spurring his imagination. They huddled against the rocks, clinging with rheumatic limbs to the cruel stone, huddled as though convulsed with secret laughter. Their reaching limbs were twisted arms, bearing gnarled fingers. It seemed as though they pointed at the two riders and carried on a hushed and furtive conversation about the foolish visitors from the world below.

  Lichens and mosses scabbed the rocks. The frost-cracked boulders shaded patches of fresh snow, and also the veined fatty gray of last year’s ice. The horses panting in the high, thin air labored over a rocky rise and John Logan gasped.

  Ahead, stretching up and up was an unbroken expanse of jumbled harsh rock and, almost overhead, was the snow-capped peak of the mountain.

  “Pretty?” Steve asked.

  “It’s … breathtaking, Steve.”

  “This is timberline, Johnny. Now we ride parallel to timberline along this here shoulder of the mountain and maybe we find a better place to go a little higher so we can look back down across the country. Ought to see a hundred miles on a day like this here.”

  A moving speck disappeared high among the rocks.

  “What’s that?” John asked.

  “Mountain goat, I guess. Maybe we can get a shot at one. You know how to handle that carbon you got there?”

  “Yes. I looked it over before we started.” He grinned. “I look the part even if I don’t act it.”

  The going was very difficult and, in spite of the frigidity of the air John Logan found that he was sweating. The horses were cautious, afraid of the loose rocks. The timberline was on their left.

  They came to a deep gash down the face of the mountain. It was about forty feet deep, but only five feet wide. Steve looked it over. Johnny pulled up beside him.

  “How do we cross that?”

  “Guess we jump it. I was just looking at that far side there. Might be slippery. Hate to have this critter stop sudden and pop me down that there cut.”

  John saw what he meant. The near side of the cut was rough, but reasonably level. The far side was smooth, and gray-green with moss. The smooth area, gently rounded, was an oval about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. Two humps of rock, twenty feet apart, parallel to the cut, jutted up out of the smooth, greenish oval about forty feet beyond the far edge.

  “I can make it okay,” Steve said, “but I don’t want you trying it. I get over there and I can see some place where you can circle around to me. Okay?”

  “Fine,” John said.

  He edged his horse over to one side. Steve rode back the way they had come, spun the horse around. It was then that John Logan noticed the utter stillness. It was too quiet. In the forest there had been small, murmuring noises, frequent rustlings. Up here on the rocks there was the stillness of the tomb. He could hear each pebble displaced by the nervous hooves of Steve’s horse.

  His increasing fear of the landscape rapidly turned to a crescendo. He realized that he was trembling. Cold sweat ran down his ribs.

  He wanted to call out, to tell Steve not to try the jump, but he was afraid Steve would think him foolish. The whole high, cruel world of rock and pale sunlight seemed to gather obscene force, to pause, tight and malevolent.

  Steve clucked to the horse, lifted it into a gallop toward the edge of the deep cut. His brown face was intent, his eyes narrowed as he clattered by John Logan.

  As he neared the cut, John Logan felt the screen bubbling up in his throat, felt his nails biting into his palms.

  The red-brown horse arced up.

  The far side of the cut, the mossed oval, smooth surfaced, tilted up with reptile speed, tilted up away from the gap while horse and rider were in midair. John heard the scream, but it came from Steve’s throat.

  Horse and rider fell sprawling down into a red, wet cavity that was lined with sharp, yellow-brown fringes of rock. The great upper jaw shut with a thick, wet chomp that shook the solid rock.

  In the second before his horse reared and screamed, John Logan saw that the two knobs of rock he had noticed were in truth eyes. Great, blooded pupils stared at him with massive indifference, and, as his horse wheeled away, he saw the crusted lids slide slowly up, turning the bulging eyes back to two knobs of stone.

  The horse fled at suicide pace across the shattered rock. The flight lasted for ten seconds before a foreleg was jammed down into a crack, the bone splitting cleanly as John Logan was catapulted into blackness.

  * * * *

  He swam slowly back to consciousness. His cheek was against the rock and blood was crusted across his lips. He vomited from shock, then painfully got up onto his knees. There seemed to be no broken bones.

  His wristwatch was shattered. The sun had changed, and he judged that it was midafternoon. He stood up, reeled and fell, stood up again. The horse was fifteen feet away. Dead. The head of the animal was at an odd angle.

  He stood very still and listened. No sound broke the silence. The clear air daggered his throat and lungs. The horse lay on its left side. He pulled the carbine clear of the boot, slammed a shell into the chamber and walked drunkenly back toward the cut where Steve Fowler had jumped into the red mouth of death.

  John heard a hoarse voice in his ears, found that with blood-caked lips he was saying, “The stone lizard. The stone lizard.”

  His mind had retreated so that it seemed he was watching himself go through motions that should have been impossible because of his fear.

  He stood, swaying, ten feet from where Steve had jumped into nothingness. He wondered why they hadn’t seen the telltale shape of it. The rounded oval of the head, caked with green moss. The eyes that bulged. The long back, ridged with rock, the obese bulging sides, the stumps of legs buried in the loose rock.

  It was like a mirage. At one moment he could see, clear and evident, the shape of horror—and the next moment it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. Mosses grew on it. Last year’s ice was runneled down a fold in the rock of its flank.

  He remembered Steve’s clear eyes and his smile and he stood in the desolate stillness and cursed the monster, cursing with a fury that made saliva run down his chin.

  Kneeling then, he took aim at one of the rock knobs. He took aim at the film of thin rock he had seen slide slowly up to cover the blood-red left eye.

  He tightened slowly on the trigger. The slug smacked dead center and he heard the thin, high whine of the ricochet. He squinted at the place where the slug had hit. It seemed to have scabbed off some of the rock, left a cleaner place where the rock was raw.

 
All fear had left him and his hands were slow and steady. Aiming at the paler spot on the incredible eyelid, he fired again. Once again the ricochet, but the movable film was pocked a bit deeper.

  His teeth sank painfully into the inside of his underlip as he fired again. A splinter of rock buzzed close to him.

  The fourth shot did not ricochet. He knelt, his fingers white on the stock, saw the black hole in the rock, saw the viscous fluid jet from the hole, running down the eyelid film like melted tar, mixed with blood.

  Motionless he crouched, saw the quiver that shook the mound of rock, heard the clatter as fragments of rock scabbed off, rolled down the sides of the bulging belly. The far edge lifted, but not so far as when Steve had jumped. A gout of rank, nauseating air billowed around him, air with a taint of sulphur and a hint of rot.

  The great rock lizard heaved slowly up, and for a moment the huge head swung from side to side as the remaining eye opened. He was waiting for that. Quickly he lifted the gun, pumping the slug deep into the center of the blood-red pupil.

  The rock five feet from him was torn away with a great rasp as the gigantic clawed foot struck at him. He rolled violently to one side, scrambled to his feet and backed wearily away.

  The rock cracked and groaned as the great bulk heaved itself up over the edge, and he turned and ran. But it ignored him. The great jaws clomping, the rock-horned tail writhing, it moved with ponderous haste diagonally across the slope, passing so near him that he saw the rock-ripple of its flanks. It became more visible to him for what it was as it lumbered away.

  Blindly it rammed head on into a towering overhang of rock a quarter-mile away, scrabbling with the claws that could rend solid rock. The overhang was a good three hundred feet high. As John Logan watched, the rock wall wavered, then fell in slow, graceful majesty, millions of tons of solid rock, smashing down on the creature, the great rock slide rolling it over, hammering it down. He got a glimpse of it being flipped like a child’s toy, then it disappeared in the thundering river of rock, buried for all time.