by Talbot Mundy
“How should I know? You haven’t tried it. I might find it much more difficult to ask. I don’t know what would happen.”
He got out of his chair and stood in front of her, holding his left wrist in his right hand behind his back, there being some emotions that demand more than mental restraint. He knew she would not resist if he should throw his arm around her. She was almost openly inviting him to do it. But he was one of those men whom temptation makes more obstinate the more it tortures. His shadow darkened her. Her gaze met his. Beyond or within her violet eyes he seemed to see Wu Tu’s. He remembered what Wu Tu wanted him to do. If Henrietta had been any other woman—
“Are there terms on which you would tell?” he demanded suddenly.
“No. None.” Her voice broke and he felt like a devil, so he spoke to her gently, not appreciating that the only merciful thing he could have done would have been to unleash anger and act like a cad. Then, perhaps, she might have ceased to love him.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Perhaps in the morning you’ll feel able to talk. I’ll order the ponies saddled.
“Not yet.”
He supposed she wanted time to recover self-control, so he walked to and fro in the moonlight, keeping his face averted each time he turned. When he stopped and stood in front of her again she was holding her hands before her eyes, but she was not sobbing.
“I wish to God you weren’t you,” he said grimly. “If you were any other woman—”
“Yes, I know,” she answered. She was dry-eyed. “If I were any other woman you would make love and coax me to tell what I know. I wish you had tried that, so that I could despise you. But you’re an honorable brute. Why are you here, not some other man?”
“Damned if I know.”
“I will tell you. You can no more help yourself than Pontius Pilate could. There are forces that—”
He interrupted with a gesture of anger.
“See here, Henrietta. We had all that out a year ago. Your mysterious forces are not what I’m here to talk about. I don’t believe in them. You may keep all those secrets. Tell me what has happened to your father.”
“But I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you think has happened to him.”
“No. You wouldn’t understand me.”
Nothing enrages a man more than to be told that by a woman. But self-control was almost automatic with Blair; he answered quietly, in a gloved voice that had no resonance:
“Very well. You’ll have to take the consequences. You and I will both regret that. I’ll order the ponies.”
She stood up: “Blair, I’d rather not ride, if you don’t mind. Mayn’t your servant see me home? I don’t want to talk to you any longer. I couldn’t bear it.”
“I won’t talk.”
“I would rather go alone, but you may send as many servants as you please.”
“Oh, all right.”
All the servants were asleep, or pretending to sleep. None answered his shout. He strode savagely around the tent and awakened them—gave his orders—eight men and four lanterns.
He did not return to Henrietta until they were all near the tent in a sleepy group, staring and silent.
“Protection?” she asked. “So many? Or is it—”
“They make the good-by less embarrassing.” he said stiffly. “Good night. Henrietta. I am sorry I had to ask questions—much more sorry you didn’t answer them.”
“Good night, Blair.” They did not even shake hands. She walked away, two tall men with lanterns leading, two men on either side of her armed with ancient Rajput swords, and two more men with lanterns bringing up the rear. She looked like a prisoner, and the garlands hanging in long loops from her shoulders unexplainably increased the effect. Her hands, clasped behind her, might have been tied. Her fair hair, loose and untidy, shone where the moonlight sprayed its straying ends.
Blair took hold of the pole of the tent awning, and his eyes followed her, even after she had vanished in the gloom beyond a veil of moonlit dust, until he realized that the pain in his hand came from squeezing the pole. Then he swore and sat down.
He sat for two hours, almost without moving, trying to ponder the problem but thinking about her all the time, until the servants returned and reported her safe in her tent in the Graynes’ camp.
“Did she say anything?”
“No, sahib.”
“No message for me? Are you sure?”
“No, sahib. She entered her tent and came out again to give each of us a little money. Then we asked permission to return hither and she nodded. It is your honor’s pleasure that we return now to our beds?”
“Yes.”
Blair sat still, watching the purple shadows lengthen and grow darker as the, moon descended toward the high hills on his left hand. He felt lonely and weird. His anger, long ago evaporated, had left a sense of mental emptiness and futility. Gaglajung, on the right, became a soot-black, solemn fang upreared against the stars. After a while it resembled an enormous woman’s face in profile—coarse nose pointed skyward—coarse, impudent lips.
The stars grew brilliant on the darkening sky. Blackness crept into the shadows. The sparse trees grew one with the night. Then, in front of him, again he saw Wu Tu’s eyes, but he marked a change. They seemed farther away than usual—less human—more real— larger—too large and too high from the ground to be hers or an animal’s. They became pale green, moving against a background of impenetrable gloom. He had not before seen them move in that way, independently of the movement of his own eyes. They made him shudder.
He felt for the bruise on the back of his head, suspecting that the blow received at Wu Tu’s might have affected his vision: he had heard of that happening to a man. But the bruise had healed, and his eyes felt all right. Then he reached for a cigarette, but instead of lighting it he went into the tent and brought out a service revolver. He sat down again and examined the loading. Then he looked again for those eyes in the dark. They were there.
They were enormous—no longer in the least like Wu Tu’s. Their movement was irregular. It was stealthy. They were coming toward him—high up—twenty feet from the ground. He could see nothing beneath them—no head —merely eyes, of a luminous, disgusting, cruel green, like a light he had once seen in a cavern where a fakir wrought obscene miracles. They suggested a dank smell, but he knew that was imagination because he could smell the good earthy scent of the dew on the dust.
He could hear nothing except ordinary night sounds, such as the wing-whirr of insects and the high, excited, almost inaudible squeak of bats. An owl hooted two or three times. The eyes came nearer. He began to feel deathly afraid and thought of summoning the servants, but dismissed that thought the moment it crossed his mind.
The moon vanished beyond the hump of a hill and utter darkness swallowed the last shadows. Then the pale light of the monstrous eyes increased. He could see they were set in a man’s head—or a head like a man’s—a giant’s, but too small for a man twenty feet high. It seemed to be suspended in air. Its movement was slow, elastic, partly from side to side with a swaying effect.
The face was thin, mean, livid. It had a straggling beard. It resembled the face of a tortured and decapitated hillman he had seen near Quetta, its beard matted with blood; only this one was alive and moved haggard lips. It drew nearer. The eyes glared malign intelligence of unintelligible horrors; their loathsome irises looked dull blood-red; but it was difficult to tell their real color because the ghoulish green predominated. Presently the gloom beneath the head grew vaguely luminous, and then horror crept up Blair’s spine until his short hair rose and he sat rigid, not breathing, with his heart thumping.
He could see the thing’s body. It resembled a slimy black bag, shaped like a stomach. The thing was an octopus. It walked on six snake-like tentacles of prodigious length. There were suckers on them that opened and closed with rhythmic movement, each one separately. The two foremost arms reached and writhed slimily green through the dark. He could
feel one of them stirring the air within ten paces. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t take his eyes off the face. It seemed to see him and yet not to see him—to be conscious of him—to be feeling for him. Perhaps it was blinded by the light of the tent, but it stared like a ghoul in the depths of a dark sea.
Suddenly he thought of Wu Tu—saw a mental picture of her coiled on her lounge in Bombay. He dismissed that with an almost panic-effort of will, he did not know why; but he felt urged to think of her and he rebelled against it. The face was coming nearer. One of the long arms almost touched him. The thing danced—as an octopus does—as big spiders do—with the pitiless, absolute rage of malice—slowly—on the tips of its outspread tentacles. He could see the thing’s teeth.
Suddenly he thought of Henrietta. He was instantly bathed in relief that she was not there. The relief relaxed him. He remembered the revolver then. He cocked it, rested it on his left elbow, aimed carefully and fired straight at the thing’s face. It vanished. There was utter and instant darkness where it had been. The noise of the shot awoke his servants: he could hear them scurrying out of their tents. But Blair’s attention was riveted on something else.
Ten feet away, directly in front of him in the glow from the tent lamp, a man stood smiling. Blair, sweating, trying to control his muscles that wanted to tremble, covered the man with the revolver and held it fairly steady. It was several seconds before he could force himself to speak.
“Come here,” he commanded then. “Idherao.”
Then he recognized the man from the Salween country, Taron Ling, who took service with the police commissioner in Bombay on the strength of a forged testimonial.
“You?” he said, getting command of his voice. “What are you doing here?”
Taron Ling strode forward with quiet insolence, making no salaam or any gesture of respect. Two of Blair’s servants, looking scared, with their turbans awry, approached the man from either side, and there were other servants peering around the tent, but he ignored them all.
“Doing?” he answered. “Doing nothing. Am come seeking service.”
“What as?”
“Guide. Without me, you not finding Henrietta.”
“Damn your impudence! Is that the way you speak of her? Where are your manners? Where’s your chit from the commissioner?”
“Not have any.”
“Ran, eh?”
“No, not running. Seeing you shoot tiger—good shot—shooting me, no—bad shot. You like what you just now see?” The man’s smile was that of a blackmailer; there was threat behind it.
Blair’s servants, observing the revolver, drew their own deductions and surrounded the man from behind. Nothing increases a man’s panic like a weapon ready to be used. Blair uncocked the revolver and laid it on the table to calm his own nerves. He beckoned to the man to come closer and sat studying him in the lamp glow. He was dressed in a khaki tunic suit and a nondescript turban that offered no clue to his classification. His slightly Mongolian eyes were as bright as a snake’s and alive with amused intelligence.
“So you followed me, eh?”
The man nodded.
“How did you know where I went?”
“Knowing also where Sahiba Henrietta went. Why not? Knowing Wu Tu. Knowing Zaman Ali. Knowing where to look for Frennisham Bahadur. Knowing too much.”
“Do you know Chetusingh?”
The man nodded again. Somehow or other his nod suggested tragedy, but Blair was not quite trusting his imagination at the moment. He decided that he would follow that suspicion later.
“What do you mean by saying you will guide me to the Sahiba Henrietta? Do you mean to her tent?”
“You knowing soon enough,” he answered, insolent—confident.
Blair decided to reduce that confidence. He needed time, too, to replenish his own. He gave orders to a Rajput retainer, whose mission in life was to clothe obedience with the cloak of courage and to adorn both with dignity:
“Keep this man under close observation until I send for him again. Give him a tent to himself and don’t let him speak to anyone.”
“Shall I tie him, sahib?”
“Only if he makes trouble. Tell the cook I’ll take chota hazri now.”
“Hookum hai.” (It is an order.)
Taron Ling offered no resistance.
Tea came twenty minutes later. Blair drank it hot, grateful that it scalded his throat and made life real again, while he watched the false dawn glimmer on the broken fanged summit of Gaglajung.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX
It is useless to try to descend into knowledge or to seek it except we ascend toward it. They who are reputed to know most and who demand to be honored accordingly, are gatherers of shadows. They who truly know, know this: the known is but the shadow of the Unknown. It is therefore nothing.
—From the Eighth of the Nine Books of Noor Ali.
THE Rangar came at dawn, his old eyes looking as if they lacked sleep. Beneath his formal courtesy there lurked a hint of foreboding. He nervously avoided Blair’s gaze. He turned his back on Gaglajung. He sat on a camp-stool in the delicious cool light of early morning and watched Blair but pretended not to, croakily criticizing the camp servants.
“By God, when I went soldiering we cleaned camp at cock-crow. By daybreak, if there was dung left in the horse-lines, someone heard about it.”
Other than the customary politeness about Blair’s health, he asked no questions. His eyes did not rest for more than a moment on the tent where Taron Ling lay, but he sat where he could detect a movement of the tent-flap without turning his head. The Indian night that has a hundred thousand eyes had evidently kept him well informed. He awaited events. Thirty minutes after daybreak his young grandson arrived, on a lean pony from the direction of the ford, dismounted and squatted at the old man’s feet. A servant led the pony away. The boy said nothing, but the old Rangar seemed to understand his silence, although he, too, made no remark.
Grayne came a few minutes after that, cantering. His horse’s legs and belly were wet from splashing through the ford, but he reined in as if in no hurry at all, when he drew near the camp. He looked peculiarly unofficial in polo helmet, shirt and riding-breeches. He wore smoked spectacles, but removed them before shaking hands, which he did rather diffidently, as if not quite sure it was expected of him. He merely nodded to the Rangar, who stood up and bowed.
Blair received him with the smile of old acquaintance: “Having a good time? Enjoying your leave?”
“So, so. Making the best of it. Couldn’t afford England. Bought too many expensive books the last year or two.”
That looked probable. He had the eyes of a bookish man—searchers of others’ opinions—friendly, sympathetic, intelligent, not dynamic —perhaps lazy in some ways.
“Shooting?” Blair asked as they sat down together.
“Not much. Reading and writing mostly. Hear you shot a tiger last night.”
“Yes. How’s Henrietta Frensham?”
“Apropos of tigers? I don’t know how or where she is. I came to speak about her.”
“Isn’t she in your camp?”
“No. She should be, but she didn’t sleep there. My servant told me your men brought her home, long after midnight. As a matter of fact, I heard her. It was so damned hot I was lying without a stitch on, so I couldn’t come out to speak to her. My wife was’ asleep in her own tent. I imagine I. fell asleep pretty soon afterwards.
“I like to watch the sunrise, so the boy has orders to call me in plenty of time for it, and I take tea in pyjamas outside the tent. My wife usually joins me, and Henrietta sometimes does. This morning I wanted to talk to her, so I sent to see if she was awake. She wasn’t there. Nobody has seen her leave camp. So I rode over to ask what you know.”
“Funny time to want to talk to her,” Blair suggested.
“Better time than any other. She sometimes actually talks at daybreak, instead of listening and saying nothing. Doris and I have respected her silenc
e, of course. It’s comprehensible. She probably feels much worse about her father’s disappearance than she cares to reveal to anyone—even her friends. I’ve let her do pretty much as she pleases.”
“So I hear,” Blair answered. “What did you have in mind to say to her at daybreak?” Grayne looked vaguely uncomfortable. He did his best to look judicious—leaned back. lighted a cigar, pursing his lips on the butt.
“There’s a limit,” he said. “She’s a damned nice girl, although unusual. To put it mildly, she’s unconventional. But I’d trust her anywhere, in nearly any circumstances.” He blew smoke through his nose. “I don’t believe there’s a soul on this countryside who’d harm her. But she overdoes it. I mean, for instance, where the hell is she now? Home in the early hours—off again before daybreak without a word to anyone—tigers, you know? snakes—besides, who’d bet there aren’t dacoits in the hills? There probably aren’t, but there might be. Doris and I don’t mind her missing meals or anything like that, but—well, I ask you.”
Blair waited. He was not there to be asked, but to find out. Grayne continued:
“Between you and me, I object to her going where I myself couldn’t go without a special warrant and probably couldn’t get that. To give you an idea of what I mean—when I put in for long leave and told ‘em I meant to spend it here, I was cautioned—just as it I’d been a probationer fresh from home—on no account to poke my nose into places regarded as sacred.
“They knew I’m interested in that kind of thing and they ticked me off like a recruit. I haven’t even been up on Gaglajung. You know the legend? I’d intended to look for the secret passage that the three kings forced Ranjeet Singh to betray. Of course I couldn’t in the circumstances. However, I’ve reason to believe that Henrietta goes into all sorts of places, Gaglajung included. Crypts. Caverns. God knows,where she goes.”
“You say you’ve reason to believe it?”
“Good reason. One of my specials saw her, week before last, being led by a local priest into a place at the back of a shrine near here that only Brahmins are supposed to enter. What does that mean?”
