The Ardath Mayhar MEGAPACK®

by John Maclay

  The floor of the cave was uneven with old falls of earth from the roof, as well as with the remains of middens and anonymous heaps from the debris of those whose old dwelling this had been. It was only luck that had set Azilio digging in this particular spot of hummocked dirt. Now the loose layer that had underlaid the hardened top layer seemed to slide away from the skeleton.

  The man had been set into a hole dug into harder soil. The bony hands had first come into view, then the skull, still cupped in their clasp. Breathless, Tennant wielded his brush and trowel, feeling the suppressed excitement of those who stood behind him as he worked. Azilio quietly drew away the extra soil he was dislodging, struck a light blow with his pick when the harder layer got in the way, and passed Tennant the tools he needed with the accuracy of a surgical nurse.

  Now the figure was coming into view. It was sitting, legs drawn against the chest. It had probably been bound into position, Tennant thought, for the hole wasn’t tight enough to have squeezed the legs so close against the torso. It was obviously the body of a grown man—a big one. Long bones, big feet, long-fingered hands indicated as much.

  It had also been a terrified man. The attitude, now that the shape was free of the concealing soil, was something between that of the “see no evil” monkey and a terror-stricken child. Those hands were shutting away from the empty eye-sockets some vision too frightening to admit.

  The body was almost mummified. Large patches of leathery skin still adhered. The backs of the hands were partially covered with it, the finger-bones thrusting through like fingers through worn-out gloves. It was so nearly a man, still, that the living men fell back a step or two, shaken by the fear implicit in the pose.

  Even Tennant moved out of the shallow hole and stood away. There was a moldy smell—too faint now to hold the taint of death, yet unpleasant enough. He brushed the dust from his hands and breathed deeply of the musty cavern air.

  Turning to Dr. Peridot, he asked, “Well, what do you make of him, Ted? We’d hoped for some bones, and here we’ve found an entire specimen. Something rare too. Did you ever see anything like this before?”

  Peridot gazed into the pit, his glasses twinkling in the torchlight. “I find him frightening,” he said. “Fetal position is not unusual—but this isn’t quite that. Not precisely. I would say that the man was alive when he was placed in the hole. Partially tied, possibly, but his hands were free. Dead hands never gripped anything as tightly as those still hold that skull. He was seeing something when he died. Something that he couldn’t bear to see.”

  “A torturer? I can’t see any marks on what skin’s left.”

  “I think not. These people were not hung up on things like that, as you Americans say. Pain was a natural part of their lives—with death itself. I don’t think he was hiding from a hot iron or even is own death. Something else. Something not nearly so human and understandable.” Peridot shivered.

  Tennant looked at him, surprised. Ted’s getting old, he thought. I’ve never seen him so affected by anything.

  But Peridot had stepped into the hole and was brushing at something on the stone that formed a wall behind the crouching figure. Something like an inverted v came into sight. Beside it something else, big-eyed and round-faced, with two small—horns?

  “What in the world is that?” Tennant bent to see. “An owl?”

  “I think it was originally a carving of Tlazolteotl,” said the older man. “The stone was soft. It has crumbled quite a lot. But I think, yes, Tlazolteotl. Which might explain the poor man’s terror.”

  “Tla...the Mexican witch-goddess?”

  “You were there when I gave the class in ancient Mexican witch cults. You saw the cuttings in the stones. There….”—he touched the v—“...is her pointed hat that so puzzled the archaeologists. And her owl. Perhaps her little house, with its dangling herbs, was originally cut into this, as it was into that other rock-face.”

  “But that is thousands of miles north! A cult wouldn’t have come so far!”

  Peridot stood and stepped from the pit. “You think not? It traveled to Europe—or from Europe westward. Pointed hat, broom-riding and all. Why not southward, down its own continent? If it crossed the Atlantic, why not a few thousand miles of dry land?”

  Tennant looked at the shape in the hole. Something outré had happened. It was implicit in the frozen posture. The teeth, bared by time, had most likely been bared by terror in the beginning. In his turn, he shuddered.

  Azilio touched his shoulder from behind, and he jumped before he could control it.

  “Sun going down,” said the Indian. His face, usually a study in taciturn brown, held a deep crease between the brows. “Time to go from here. Not good here at night.”

  Tennant reached down to set the torch in its case at his belt. He realized that every afternoon about this time the Indians had gently but firmly brought their work to a halt, cleaned their tools, and steered the two white men toward their waiting suppers. Nothing had been said, and he had thought these people to have inflexible work habits. Now he wondered.

  A red glow entered the westward-facing mouth of the cavern. The sun, setting behind the forest far below, was catching the hillside opening, sending the beams into the depths of the tunnel. It caught the head of the skeletal man, tingeing his hands with a bloody color, staining the skull with red.

  Azilio sucked in his breath. “¡Manos rojas!” he muttered, almost inaudibly. “We go now.” He turned and set his tools into place, lifted his pack onto his back, and set the strap across his forehead. His companions did the same, leaving the white men to follow as they would.

  Tennant found himself unaccountably restless that evening. Uneasy and dissatisfied with himself; he had reacted almost as strongly to the find as the superstitious Indians. He couldn’t account for Peridot’s attitude either. The man had seemed almost frightened, though he had found skeletons and parts of them by the dozens in his long career. That irrational unease had affected even Tennant’s objectivity. It disturbed him.

  The moon was high. He wasn’t at all sleepy. He looked about the sleeping camp. Peridot’s lamp was burning, his silhouette staining the side of his tent as he wrote up his notes for the day. The Indians were recumbent shadows. Tennant went into his own tent and took his pocket pistol, a fresh hand light, and his notebook. He went quietly up the slope in the moonlight. Toward the dig.

  The cave was totally dark, the moonlight blocked by the boulder that interrupted its angle. He kindled a couple of the pitch torches and switched on his hand light, then moved into the big cavern. Setting the torches into their notches in the wall, he took his own light and stepped into the hole.

  Inch by inch he examined the new find, making notes as he worked. He touched the bony figure as lightly as possible, making measurements with calipers, noting the number of teeth remaining in the skull. He knew that Ted would be pleased. With the preliminaries out of the way, they could take the in situ photographs and begin arranging to remove the body for shipment to Ted’s museum.

  He was whistling softly between his teeth, busy and happy, when he heard it. Something was whistling along with him. Softly, then louder. Louder. Until it seemed that the rocky walls vibrated with the shrilling. It was strident, frightening.

  He laid his torch on the edge of the hole and looked toward the entrance. The torchlight, added to the beam of his flash, lit the alcove inside the opening. He stepped from the hole and took up his hand light, moving toward the entrance. The whistling knifed through him, making his head hurt, piercing his head. Addling his wits. He put his left hand to his head, pressing against the pain, and turning his flash back toward the alcove. Something was coming... into the cavern.

  He reeled back, dropping the light onto the rocky floor. Both hands went to his ears, trying to stop out the keening whistle that was stabbing directly into his brain. Staggering, he backed toward the rear wall. Suddenly there
was nothing beneath his heel, and he fell into the pit, jostling its other tenant aside. The whistling grew louder.

  The newcomer was inside the cave. It was loud enough to daze him—to unsettle his vision.

  He shrieked and cowered against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with the skeleton. The old woman in the peaked hat moved toward him, making the air tremble with the force of the shrilling that seemed to surround her.

  Tennant pressed against the stone, feet drawn tightly to his buttocks, hands gripping his ears with all their might. Eyes wide, staring at that wavering shape in the torchlight, he waited. Her gray lips were motionless. Her bottomless eyes were without light. Her hands were moving. Beckoning.

  He screamed. His flesh shrank upon his bones—all his vitality was draining from his body as he cringed in the hole. The bony shoulder against his was shuddering—or was it his own, shivering?

  Something tugged insistently at his mind, drawing him out... out....

  Then the light went out.

  A NIGHT IN POSSUM HOLLER

  This story is just a symptom of my innate pure meanness.

  It took eight years to pay off all our debt. It took another seven to save enough for a down payment on the house we’d wanted for years And then inflation took a hand, and we realized that we were like the frog in the well—crawl up two feet, and fall back three. That’s when we decided that instead of doing the sensible thing and holding on to our jobs in Houston, we were going to take that sum and buy us a place up in Poor Man’s Country, which is the accurate name of East Texas, when folks are feeling honest.

  We knew we’d be broke and stay that way, but what the hell—it was better than knocking ourselves out playing Russian roulette with Houston traffic every morning and evening, breathing carbon monoxide and the effluents from the petroleum plants in Pasadena, as well as things less easily identified. We’d been poor before. There wasn’t any great trick to that, and we’d learned all the dodges by the time we were weaned.

  We spent a spring traveling up into the woodsy hills and poking around, both with and without real estate agents. We wanted a bit of ground, which came well within the capabilities of the cash we had. Land in East Texas costs a fraction of what it costs in Houston, believe me. A house we could fix up would suit us very well. We found, once we got to looking hard, that we could pay cash for a place that our little hoard wouldn’t even make a down payment on where we were.

  Maudie almost laughed herself sick when she saw the name on the road sign the first time we went into Possum Holler. But she quit laughing when she was looking at the place we went to see. It was a little gem—to us, at least. Ten acres on a hill slope, with an all-season creek branch running across the low end. Lots of big hickories and a few oaks and a ring of huge pines circling the knoll where the house stood. And the house was nice. Shabby, yes. Run down for years without paint. But the tin roof had saved it from leaks.

  It was an old dog-run house—two halves separated by a wide hallway running from front to back, open to the air. But that had been enclosed some time in the past, a kitchen built across the rear of it, and a nice screened porch across the front. The rooms had ten-foot ceilings and were big and square and solid. The thing was built of cypress and there’s just no decay in that stuff.

  Because it was old-fashioned and would take a lot of work or money or both to get into shape, we bought it for a pittance. Also because it was in Possum Holler, which was a bit behind the back of beyond. Also for other reasons, but we didn’t know about them at the time, and it’s too late to worry about them now.

  We moved up in a borrowed camping trailer and set it up down by the road. There wasn’t a really flat spot to put it anyplace else, and that was handy for getting in and out, as we had to run into the Holler for nails and barbed wire and all the things it was so easy to forget when you do things like fixing up a place that’s been neglected for twenty years.

  Maudie and I both grew up on shirt-tail farms. We knew how to work, and we made the fur fly. I rented a tractor first off, and cut all the weeds and persimmon sprouts and sassafras clumps that had been making free with the pasture land for umpteen years. Maudie scrubbed woodwork and slapped on paint and put up new screen wire on the windows and around the porch. By the time I had fences mended and the land in shape, she was ready for some help fixing the roof. Some of the tin was loose, and all of it needed a good thick coat of aluminum paint. Maudie’s a willing old gal, but she had trick knees like you wouldn’t believe, which made getting up on roofs nervous work for her.

  We were getting pretty tired of that camp trailer by the time things were so that we could move into the house. Our stuff came out of storage on a Friday morning, and we hauled it out in four loads of a U-Haul trailer and parked it out on the front porch. Arranging it took most of Saturday. Sunday morning we headed back for Houston to return the trailer, Maudie following me in our ’78 Ford station wagon. We got back to the Holler about eight in the evening.

  It took us most of the summer to do all that fixing up, and it was late September. An early norther was blowing through the woods, and we were glad to get back home. Maudie had a fire all set in the living room fireplace, and we looked forward to lighting that and sitting in our own, by God, house, by our own fire and owing no man a thin dime.

  We ate sandwiches by firelight and made coffee in an ancient granite pot we’d found at the General Merchandise store in the Holler. Pushed it right up into the coals, and it turned out the best cup of coffee I ever swallowed in my life. Then we just sat there, almost purring with satisfaction and smugness.

  What did the Greeks call that? Hubris? The kind of pride that goeth before a fall....

  And we got worse. All through September and October we kept working—there’s always more to do when you take on a project like that. The tacky little job I got fifteen miles away at Nichols was a snap, and while I was working at it I was thinking about all the things I was going to do when I got home. Maudie was worse. She put an ad in a writer’s magazine to do typing, and that let her stay at home all day. She’d type a while and work a while, and when I got home she’d be full of satisfaction.

  You wouldn’t think there’d be anything about that to bring a Wrath down on anybody, now would you? But what else could it be...? Well.

  Anyway, the fall wore itself out, and winter came on stronger than usual in that part of the world. Northers chased each other through the pine country, one right after another, and we were mighty glad of our fireplace and the big woodpile that I’d accumulated while trimming and cleaning up our woodlot. Those thick cypress planks were good insulation by themselves, and we’d gone inside the floors and the walls and blown more insulation too. We were snug as bugs in a rug.

  Other critters liked the setup too. At night we’d hear scrufflings and gruntings under the house. Armadillos, the neighbors told us. And probably skunks. Mort Feldon gave us a pointer pup he said would be good at scaring away varmints, and we fixed him up a burrow under the porch. Then we stopped up all around the foundation—but those noises kept right on. Digging sounds. Grunting and snuffling sounds.

  “You think there’s a bear wintering under there?” Maudie asked one night when things were unusually noisy.

  “There’s no bears left closer than the river,” I said. “And precious few there. No, it’s some tiny little old animal that can slip through the chinks. You can bet on that.”

  Funny thing, though: Pat, the pointer, didn’t say a word, no matter how loud the critter got. He’d look up at me if I’d go out to check on him, and something in his eyes told me he knew exactly what that was digging away down there, and he hadn’t the faintest intention of meddling with it.

  We finally went to see Mr. Heaton at the store and laid our problem before him. He turned away and scrabbled among the packages of rat poison for a box of stuff he said would kill anything up to a rhinoceros. But I noticed all the time we we
re talking that he looked a little funny and shaky. He came out onto the porch of the store when we drove off. Waved goodbye, as if he didn’t expect to see us again. Of course, I didn’t put it together and realize that until later.

  We followed directions to the dot, put out old tuna fish cans of the stuff mixed with everything from cornmeal to hamburger, all under the house as far as we could push it with poles. Then we tied Pat up short, so he couldn’t get to any of it. And then we waited to see what would happen next.

  Nothing did. The noise went on exactly as it had before, night after night. When a month went by without any results I went under and took out all that stuff and buried it deep and put a big flat rock over the hole so Pat couldn’t dig it up.

  Just after Christmas the hearth began to buckle. Did I tell you the house had two fireplaces? One for each of the original halves of the house, you see. One was in our living room, and that was the one we used. The other was in the room we took for our bedroom. When it was particularly cold we’d build a smudge in the fireplace to take the chill off the room, but we never had roaring fires there as we had on the other side of the house.

  Maudie noticed the way the bricks were out of line one night when she was about to lay a fire there. When I came to her call, I could see that something had dug out under the hearth, so all the thicknesses of brick had sagged down into the hole. That was the only thing that could cause something like that—the hearth was a good three feet thick from top to bottom.

  We knew that for certain, since we’d been so happy that someone had redone both fireplaces, filling in new brick from top to bottom beneath the firebox. It seemed as if whatever was giving us all the trouble at night had done it before now, digging out under fireplaces. Who knew how many times? And who could tell what it might be?