Keepers of the Secrets
Page 9
'Where are you going?’ Cobbs said.
'I intend to get into Iwaldi's place again. I could find the place where you two fell in when you were digging, but it would be quicker if you pointed it out for me.'
‘I’ll be glad to!' Cobbs said. He lit up an American cigarette. 'I owe that insane goblin a debt. But I still don't know why you don't just call in the authorities.'
"They would just come in and look around and then depart without doing a thing,' Doc said. 'Unless we had some evidence that they could not overlook. You can bet that Iwaldi has cleaned up the mess in the castle and buried the bodies some place. And you can bet that he would bring pressure to bear in the highest political circles to keep the police out. What must be done will be done by us.'
'Or by this organisation that von Zarndirl belongs
to?'
They may try again tonight, storm or no,' Doc said.
The car rocked with the wind's buffets. The half-rain, half-snow splopped on the windshield and was carved away by the wipers. Doc was driving at about fifteen miles an hour because of the limited visibility and the wetness of the road.
'I don't want to be left behind just because I'm a woman,' Barbara said.
'The invitation included you.'
He turned on the headlights.
She patted Caliban's huge arm and said, 'I like your trusting a frail vessel such as myself.'
Doc flicked a sidewise look at her but he did not reply. She had not shown the slightest sign of fear or hysteria, and outside the house she had picked up an automatic rifle and checked it out as if she were a veteran soldier.
He drove for several miles more in silence, wondering why they did not ask more questions. He was taking a chance by bringing them along if they were agents for the Nine. They might get an opportunity to trip him up. But if he left them at the village, he would not be able to keep his eye on them.
The storm continued for hours after they got back to the inn in Gramzdorf. Cobbs and Villiers went to their rooms. Barney immediately set up the radio in the bathroom. The contact man in Paris reported that no word from Lady Grandrith had been received. But he did have a message from Lord Grandrith. It had been sent by an operator for the Nine while Grandrith held a gun to his head.
Grandrith's communications, as usual, were more than cut to the bone. They went all the way to the marrow. He had been met by a big party of men out to kill him, and he had eluded them so far. He would be going on, as planned, on foot. It was doubtful that Caliban would hear from him again for several months. Caliban wished that Grandrith had added more details. Then he smiled slightly. His half-brother was no more taciturn than he was. Both talked as little as possible. But his brother did so because he had been raised in the jungle with sentients who did not converse much after they became adults. And he had spent much time with himself during the formative years. Grandrith's close- mouthedness was 'natural.' Caliban's was the result of his father's training and was 'artificial.' And also 'neurotic.' There were times when it was clearly to every- one's benefit to talk much, and he found it difficult to do so then. He did, however, talk vicariously through the pseudo-hateful banter of Barney and Pauncho, as he had done with their fathers. Though their insults sometimes irritated him, he needed the two men.
Von Zarndirl, having received another injection, slept on Doc's bed. Pauncho brought up more food from the kitchen after observing its preparation. He grinned as he told about the curious looks that the chefs gave him and how he had pacified a waiter with a huge tip.
'They think we're crazy, and of course they're talking about us. Half the village must know we're acting very peculiarly.'
'We'll move out at nine o'clock,' Doc said. 'According to Cobbs, the cave-in is only two miles from here, on the north side of the mountain and about 2,000 feet below the castle.'
At nine o'clock the storm had been dead for an hour. The wind was gentle but icy; the clouds were ragged, passing below the moon slowly as if they were battle-torn veterans on parade.
Von Zarndirl, taped and gagged, slept on the floor of the bathroom. The others, bundled up in climbing clothes, carrying alpenstocks and various boxes, went out a side door of the inn. They tromped through the slushy streets to where they had left the cars. After examining them for booby traps, they opened the doors and got out their rifles. They put on the caps with the blacklight projectors and their goggles and began tramping up the mountain, Cobbs leading. Water fell on them as they passed under the low branches of trees or by bushes. The earth was often slippery under them, but they dug in with their stocks and slogged on up.
Cobbs stopped for a moment and said, 'It's about a quarter mile ahead.'
'We'll go more cautiously now,' Doc Caliban said. 'Iwaldi is no dummy. He'll have back-tracked after he caught you and either shut up the entrance or stationed a guard there.'
They started walking again. The moon came out. Doc, looking up, saw the first of the big winged shapes. The broad beam from the projector revealed lammergeiers, the eagles of the Alps. There seemed to be dozens, and all were heading toward them.
He said, 'Look out above!' and shifted the metal box he had been carrying on a strap around his shoulder to a position on his chest. 'Don't fire!' he said. He pressed a button on the top of the box and held it there.
None of the humans could hear the noise that was broadcast from the box, but the eagles turned and flapped away swiftly to escape the eardrum-paining frequencies.
Immediately after, Barney said, 'Doc! Wolves!'
Doc looked up and saw the first of the big beasts bounding over a bush to their left. But it was not a wolf. It was a large blackish German shepherd dog. Behind him came three more and behind them six big Doberman pinschers. Their mouths were open, revealing their sharp teeth, but they uttered no sounds.
A few minutes later, they turned and bounded away as if they had seen a pack of tigers.
Doc and his party climbed on toward the excavation, taking advantage of every bit of cover. The eagles and the dogs would undoubtedly be back. The noise had momentarily overcome the stimulus of the micro-current in the hostility area of their brain. But once they were out of the influence of the supersonic frequencies, they would return.
'How can they see us, Doc?' Pauncho said. 'I mean, how can the operators of the control boxes see much through the eyes of the animals in this dark?'
‘I doubt they're using TV tonight,' he said. 'It's too hard to keep the narrow beams locked in under these conditions. They probably are just transmitting the code that turns on the juice to the aggression areas of the brain and letting the animals attack whatever they come across.’
'I hope so, Doc,' Pauncho said. 'If they can spot us through the eyes of the birds, we're going to have a hard time.'
'Here they come again,’ Caliban said. He had turned the sound generator off so that the animals would not be affected until they got close.
The eagles, their only noise the flapping of their wings, and the dogs, their only noise the brushing aside of the wet rain-covered plants, came in swiftly. They had but one intention: to tear apart these strangers in the dark.
Then Doc pressed the button, and the dogs whirled so fast they slipped in the mud and fell on their sides or scrabbled desperately to keep from sliding on down the slope. The eagles veered away and were swallowed by the night.
A minute later, the birds and the dogs were charging in again.
Thirty seconds later, they were frenziedly trying to get away from the invisible agony. 'How long's this going on, Doc?'
'Until something - or somebody - breaks,' Caliban said.
Pauncho knew it was useless to ask him to elaborate.
The next time, the birds came in first and the dogs did not appear until the birds had been turned away.
‘They're catching on,' Barney muttered.
'And probably moving in on us,' Pauncho said.
'Isn't it really too risky to stay in this one spot?' Cobbs said. 'I think we should be moving about a bit.'
The dogs bounded down the slope again, just as the birds turned away. Doc said, 'Hold your fire on these, too, unless you can stick your guns down their throats.'
The whites of their eyes, heh, only closer yet? Pauncho said.
Some of the dogs slipped in the mud and slid into them. The others turned away just before the final leaps and went crashing into or over the bushes and down the hill.
Three dogs hurtled in, sidewise or fangs first, and Pauncho and Barney slammed one each over the head or the back and then kicked them on down the hill. Cobbs and Villiers hit a dog at the same time with the barrel of their rifles, breaking its ribs.
Doc said, 'It ought to be over soon, one way or the other.'
'What makes them voiceless?' Pauncho said. 'I looked in the neck of a bird with its throat cut open back at the house on the mountain, and its vocal cords were all there.'
'I saw you,' Doc said. 'But I supposed you'd guessed the answer. There are a number of electrodes at various areas of the brain. During the time that the animal is released for attack, its voice centres are inhibited.'
'I wondered about that,' Cobbs said. 'But things have been happening so fast, I didn't have time to ask about it.'
'I just supposed their vocal cords had been cut,' Barbara said.
The others did not comment. Pauncho had asked Doc about the lack of voice after the attack by the wolves in the castle and Doc had given his opinion. But after the attack of the birds at the house on the mountain, he had told his colleagues not to mention anything about the characteristics of the animals. He had wanted to determine if the English couple would be curious about the strange lack of cries from the animals. If they did not comment, they might refrain because they knew the reason.
On the other hand, it was true that events had come one after the other and might have distracted them. But Barbara seemed to be a very stable and self- possessed person, and Cobbs, though he showed some apprehension, was far from hysterical.
The birds came first and the surviving dogs, going much slower because they had to climb uphill in muddy earth, attacked simultaneously. This time the wings of the eagles beat so close that the tips of some touched their faces. But the birds swerved again and shot back overhead. The dogs turned tail when they were still a few feet from closing with the party.
Td think they'd go crazy,' Barney said. 'They're being pulled apart by the opposing drives.'
They may yet,' Doc answered.
About two minutes later the birds came in again, and this time Caliban turned off the sound generator for a few seconds after they had wheeled around to go in the other direction. The dogs then had nothing to stop them except the weapons of the party. While the others knocked the dogs on the head as they struggled uphill to get at them, Doc Caliban pressed a button on the other box, which had been on the ground by him. He had rearranged its circuits so that the aggressive areas of the brains would be stimulated.
The others did not notice what he was doing since they were concentrating on smashing in the dogs' skulls or backbones and doing a good job of it. He had not told them his plan, since he never confided to anyone unless he needed co- operation.
There were yells and screams to the right up the mountain, and then rifles and pistols banged away. Doc indulged himself with a broad smile. The others had their backs turned and would not be able to see him.
He switched off the aggression transmitter and turned on the sound generator. The two surviving dogs leaped backward down the hill as if they had stepped on a red-hot plate. One turned over and kept on sliding. The other regained his feet and fled.
'What's going on, Doc?' Pauncho said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the gunfire.
'As soon as the birds were deflected again, and presumably heading back toward the men who'd launched them, I switched off the noise generator and turned the aggression stimulation on. The birds, of course, attacked the first living things they saw, which were our enemies.'
'Fabulous!' Pauncho rumbled. 'I wish I had one of those hemispheres stuck on Barney's head. Then I could keep him from making a monkey of himself.'
'Since when does a monkey's uncle know anything about proper behaviour?' Barney said.
‘The conflict of noise generator versus aggression stimulation might have driven them mad, anyway,' Doc said. He led the way toward the groanings and whimperings drifting ghostily through the bushes. Approaching cautiously, they found six men on the ground, all alive but three totally unconscious and the others semi-conscious. The birds were all dead, since they had not ceased to attack until killed. The onslaught had been so unexpected that none of the men had had time, or opportunity, to turn off the aggression stimulator. The birds had tried for the face and the throat and had blinded four. One man died of a ripped jugular vein while Doc was examining him.
After giving the survivors a shot to ensure that they would be unconscious for a long time, the party picked up some more magazines for their rifles and stuffed them in their capacious pockets. Pauncho and Barney threw the extra rifles down the mountain, and they continued climbing. They did not have far to go. Cobbs stopped suddenly, grunted, and said, ‘There it is.’
In the blacklight of their projectors they could see the trenches that the two archaeologists had dug.
'Where's the cave-in?' Pauncho said.
'It's not there any more,' Barbara Villiers said.
Doc began to poke his alpenstock into the bottoms of the trenches but stopped. He had heard the far-off chutter of helicopter vanes. He resumed probing and then said, 'It's been walled up.'
'Where'd those men come from?' Villiers said.
Doc did not reply. He took from a side pocket of his vest a tiny instrument and, holding it in his hand, began to walk back and forth for twenty yards each way. He worked his way up the mountain while she wondered aloud what he was doing. Since neither of his colleagues were sure, they did not answer her.
Ten minutes later, Caliban reappeared so suddenly from behind a tree that Barbara jumped and Cobbs wheeled around swiftly, bringing his rifle up.
Doc stepped back behind the tree and said, 'Don't shoot.'
'Doc, you shouldn't do that,' Cobbs said. 'You're likely to get shot.'
Caliban said, 'Follow me.'
He led them upward to the right for about twenty yards and stopped. They were facing a fairly smooth outcropping of rock. Doc Caliban walked forward on the apron of the rock extending from its base and pushed on a small boulder at one side. The boulder rocked; there was a grinding noise and a section of the outcropping slid to one side.
'How'd you find it, Doc?' Pauncho said.
Doc tapped at the pocket which now held the small device he had used when casting back and forth. 'It indicates small changes in the local magnetic fields. It detected the hollow behind that rock, and so I looked for something that would be the entrance activator.'
They went into the chamber which had been cut out of the solid granite. Doc pulled a lever sticking out of a box in a corner, and the ponderous section of rock slid back into place. Immediately after, electric light bulbs fixed to brackets about four feet from the floor, and about thirty feet from each other, lit up. These were connected to wires which, in turn, occasionally descended the wall to the generator on the floor. Doc recognised the foot-square metal boxes as his own invention. They stored electricity derived by amplification of the flux of the earth's magnetic lines of force. They could not provide much current for very long, but the bulbs probably did not get much use in these corridors. They became extinguished as soon as the last person passed them, and they lit up as soon as the first person got within ten feet of them.
Each one in the party held his rifle across his belly. Doc held his with one hand while the other was extended with the magnetic-field discrim
inator.
Whenever it was a question of going to left or right, Doc looked at the juncture of floor and wall. Cobbs had carefully made tiny markings with a pen the first time he had come here. These indicated their previous route so that they would be able to find their way out.
They went up steps cut out of stone to upper levels four times before Cobbs finally called a halt.
'We're getting close to the place where the dwarf captured us.'
They were standing in a round chamber about forty feet across. It contained a dozen large boxes of oak on which were carved hunting and battle scenes. The costumes of the dwarfs and the humans in the scenes were those worn circa 800-900 A.D.
'They look like coffins,' Pauncho said to the woman.
They are coffins,' she said.
She tried to raise a lid but could not manage it. 'It's so heavy,' she said. 'But you should see the mummified body and the jewellery and gold it's decorated with.'
'Here, let me help you!' Barney and Pauncho said. They collided with each other in their eagerness to get to the coffin.
'Leave it alone!' Doc said. 'They might be booby-trapped now!'
But Pauncho, grinning because he had shoved Barney out of the way, had started to raise the lid. Barney dived for the floor as if he expected the coffin to explode. Barbara gave a small scream. Pauncho had stepped back and dropped the lid, which was raised about eight inches. It did not drop. Instead, it continued to rise, and the figure in it sat up. He held an automatic pistol in one hand.
At the same time, the lids of the other coffins screeched upward, and other figures sat up aiming automatic pistols at them.
A voice behind them said, 'Freeze!' A voice ahead of them said, 'Not a move!'
'A beauty of a trap!' Pauncho whispered. He looked at Doc Caliban. The huge man was obeying instructions. He had no choice. The fire from three sides would have cut them all down within a few seconds.
Ten minutes later, their hands cuffed behind them, they went up stone steps onto another level. The twenty men who accompanied them kept pistols pressed against their backs. They marched down a long tunnel on the walls of which were hung many paintings done in a very primitive but forceful manner. It looked as if this were the place Iwaldi had chosen as his ancestral gallery. The paintings were mainly of long-bearded fierce-faced men with beetling brows, bushy eyebrows, round blobs of noses, and very broad shoulders.