by John Darnton
She knew she did not have much time. She fingered the blindfold in a nervous tic to make sure it was still around her neck. Should she put it on? Wouldn’t she know if she was being read? But by then would it be too late? Would the creatures know where she was? She stepped back to take in the whole pictograph, which was clearly a narrative of some sort. Figures in separate panels were engaged in actions and in what appeared to be battles, but the panels were not in linear sequence. She would have to rearrange them mentally; certainly there was no time to make a sketch.
She wished she could remember more of what she had heard about the Khodzant Enigma back in her graduate-student days. In fact it had been Kellicut who had delivered a lecture on it—a humorous one, she remembered thinking at the time, about archaeological dead ends. Some dead end! Who would have thought she would be risking her life trying to unravel its riddle? She scanned it, from top to bottom, from left to right, and from right to left. There were warriors in two groups, that much was clear; and there were those strange detached open eyes that seemed to be floating in the trees—symbols of the dead. She walked over and peered closely at one panel. One of the warrior groups was beetle-browed and clearly were Neanderthals; the other group was narrow-boned, with domed heads and thrusting chins: Homo sapiens. They were at war over what appeared to be a long period of time because there was not one but two or three battles. Then there was a gathering, or preparations for one—could it be a peace council of some sort?—and the two groups seemed to be walking toward each other with their weapons tossed aside. But then something happened to one group, the Neanderthals.
Susan had no way of knowing that at that precise moment, far away in the cave, Kee-wak felt a cloud form inside his head and a momentary vision intruded: The tableau flashed briefly onto his inner eye. He paused and raised his head, but it was gone.
Susan felt a wave of fear and put the blindfold on while she tried to think; which were the panels that were not known outside this chamber? There were moons in the painting, so perhaps the chronology was classified by the phases of the moon. She tried to recall the image of the Khodzant Enigma from that class so many years ago. Could it have been the lower right-hand segment that was gone? She decided to risk a quick glimpse and walked over to stand in front of that portion of the painting. She raised the blindfold and stared. A panel was directly before her; and what she saw she had never seen before, she was sure: a creature standing alone, looking up as rocks or something fell around him—they had little tails like meteors to suggest downward motion—with his mouth open and his features twisted in rage as if he had just comprehended some underlying bitter truth of nature or been witness to some satanic act. The artist had captured the emotion perfectly. She was enthralled and stared at it for some time.
Kee-wak knew, as soon as the vision returned. This time there was no mistaking. He quickly sent four guards to the sacred chamber.
22
Resnick knew the creature was about to expire. Not that it was hard to tell; the drip feed hadn’t revived it, it had virtually stopped moving, and its breathing was irregular. They brought in a heart monitor and EEG and attached them, shaving patches like small white moons on the temples and the hairy chest to attach the electrodes, and now one of the cameras was trained on the tiny green screen in a corner. Over and over; a white line traced the same pattern, not a large peak and then wavy subpeaks, as with humans, but a series of spikes and plateaus that reminded Resnick of the skyscraper outline of a big city. They also reduced the alarm sensitivity drastically because the unusual nature of the creature’s heartbeat continually set it off.
Now they didn’t bother anymore to close the cell door; and this made Resnick feel a lot better; as if he had been the one locked inside all this time. They had also washed the cell down so that the stench was not so bad, though it still hung in the air near the cot. Now even Resnick himself ventured right up to the creature, puffing himself up with professional pride and pretending in front of the others that he had been doing so all along, even when the creature could have flung him against the wall. He had resolved to be fatalistic about its death. It was true that they wouldn’t be able to run any more experiments and perhaps would never be able to piece together something meaningful from all the shreds and bits of observations and numbers they had accumulated. But perhaps this was for the best, maybe the creature wasn’t meant to live among humans—it was primitive, after all—and the autopsy would probably tell them much of what they wanted to know.
Grady stepped into the cell next to him, which made him feel better. The creature was completely inert and couldn’t possibly awaken, but one could never be sure about something so alien.
“Is he coming?” Resnick asked.
“He’ll be here any minute.”
It had been Resnick’s idea to send for Scanlon. He congratulated himself for it; it was a matter of sentiment more than anything else. Scanlon had made the breakthrough, Scanlon had been closer than anyone else to the creature, so Scanlon deserved to be there at its death. It was like having a priest present, or family. After all, Resnick thought, it’s just this kind of considerate gesture that makes us different from animals.
He heard a car door slam, then the front door, then the tread of footsteps above, and a moment later Scanlon appeared, looking upset.
“Don’t worry, there’s time yet,” Resnick counseled in his best medical voice.
Scanlon didn’t pay any attention to him but went directly to the creature and lifted up its hairy hand.
“Christ, will you look at that?” said Grady, motioning to the small screen. Resnick glanced over and saw that the skyscraper outline had changed. The line was moving faster and the spikes were larger. He looked back at the creature and couldn’t believe what he saw: It opened its eyes, looked directly into Scanlon’s eyes, and even seemed to raise its head an inch or so. Resnick stepped back reflexively and edged toward the open cell door. Strange, the look didn’t seem friendly. Quite the opposite.
Then the creature’s head fell back as if an invisible wire had been cut, and the monitor alarm sounded loudly. The lines along the screen went wild, flickering up and down irregularly, then slowed precipitously. Scanlon fell to the floor. Resnick thought he was making too much of his show of emotion and was going to reprimand him when he took a second look and realized that Scanlon, now thrashing about, was holding both his temples in agony.
Resnick looked over at the creature. It was dead, and the cityscape on the screen was gone.
Susan knew something was wrong, though how she knew, she could not say. Something stronger than instinct took hold, and with it came the certainty that her presence in the sacred chamber had been detected. Then the dilemma arose: Should she use the blindfold to try to fend off their telepathic power, or should she try to escape? How could she get out if she couldn’t see?
In the split second it took to form the question, she saw a blur of movement across the chamber, a glimpse of animal skin in the interstices between stalagmites. Just as panic was about to seize her, she felt a mental contact that was reassuring and told her she had nothing to fear. The figure that stepped out into the open was Leviticus. She felt like running over and hugging him, but her relief did not last long; she saw from his agitation that he, too, was aware that danger was approaching.
Leviticus led the way to a dark side passage. With one hand she felt the rock wall; her other hand was in his grasp as he moved ahead, and though his fingers were short, they were as strong as an eagle’s talons. He was moving upward along a path that followed an incline and seemed to be a little-used back passageway. From time to time he stopped briefly, and though she could not see him, she knew he was reading the route ahead, probing it with his psychic radar and trying to assess the risk.
After five minutes Susan heard sounds coming toward them. She turned to flee but Leviticus held her hand so tightly she could not extricate herself. She tried to pull her hand away but his grip was so strong that
she thought her bones would crack. She flattened herself against the wall and waited. She could hear them coming but could see nothing. She felt the bulk of Leviticus’s body ahead of her and wondered if he was planning an ambush. She closed her eyes and held her breath. Now they were only a few feet away.
“Susan, thank God!”
“Oh, Matt!”
In the darkness she felt his arms around her and smelled his familiar odor. Leviticus still held on to her hand. Hurt-Knee and Lancelot were there too.
“Why the hell did you go off like that?”
“I had to look at it one more time to see the final piece of the puzzle.”
This was no time for questions about the Enigma. “Listen,” Matt said in a tone of urgency, “something’s happened to them. They’re all in a frenzy.”
“I think I know what happened. Kee-wak sensed that I was in the chamber.”
“No, they didn’t look like that. It wasn’t as if there was an emergency. It was as if they had suddenly learned something bad—all of them at the same time. It reminded me of the way the tribe reacted when Longface died. I think that somewhere one of these creatures died—died or was killed.”
“What do we do?”
“What we came here to do,” Matt said firmly. “Stick together, and for God’s sake don’t go wandering off again.” With that, the group continued up the incline, following Hurt-Knee, who seemed to know exactly where he was going.
Even before he heard the commotion, Van knew that he was losing it. Maybe knowing that you’re losing it means you’re not really losing it, he consoled himself. He said it out loud—what difference did it make if he talked to himself out loud? They couldn’t understand him anyway, the pricks. But people who are going insane know on some level that they’re going insane. It’s not as if the knowledge means anything; it’s not like it’s protection. In a situation like this there is no protection. How could there be any when you’re helpless at the bottom of a pit, trapped like an ant?
Van thought back to his graduate-student days and the caged monkeys he experimented on. How touching it was to walk past the wire cages of those half-crazed primates. They would fall back, cringing in terror, sometimes covering their heads with their hands, sometimes rocking and sucking their thumbs. He remembered one in particular that paced around in circles, always in the same direction, always at the same speed, hunching its shoulders as it took the corners each time in exactly the same way. As he watched it Van knew that it was dealing with insanity, that the ritual motions were a way both of keeping madness at bay and giving in to it. Maniacal energy was all that was left. It was the only rational-irrational response. Now he felt like that himself.
He was afraid to sleep. Almost every time he tried, he experienced that strange Cheyne-Stokes breathing business. You begin to fall into unconsciousness and just as you lose your footing and start to sink down, your breathing cuts off and you come up to the surface gulping for air. After a while the panic sets in even before you start to fall off so that it keeps you awake, like a little bell that goes off the moment your head slumps. His head ached all the time now.
That big fellow, whatever his name is, rules over everyone like a god. When he stands below the Bear, he becomes the Bear: huge, strong, indomitable. How wrong I was to come here thinking I’d be stronger than they are. Up here on the mountain all the inconsequentials drop away and real strength shows itself. Humans are weak—nothing. Sickness is a weakness and weakness is a sickness.
A commotion began. Van knew immediately that it was connected with death. A full moon, perhaps, the time for sacrifice, and surely this time it would be his turn. When his pacing took him to the far corner of the pit, he could see the wall where his head would hang. He was thankful he had fallen from the ledge after they’d killed the Russian. Otherwise he would have witnessed the final ceremony. What was it exactly that they did?
He knew he was subject to delusions. They had begun in a minor way during the ascent up the mountain but had gathered force with everything that had happened since: the panicky flight, the cave-in, the captivity, the sacrifice. Now the delusions were full blown, strung together around the constant thread of his terror, and they were the only things that seemed real. He couldn’t tell where they began and where they ended, just as he couldn’t tell when he was awake and when he was having a nightmare. But this was different; now he was actually hearing voices. “Van!” There, he heard it again, his name urgently whispered. How could the creatures know his name? It had to be his mind turning against him, as always his own worst enemy.
“It’s no good,” Matt muttered. “He can’t hear us. Either that or he’s gone totally around the bend.”
“What now?” said Susan. She leaned around the edge of the passageway to look into the cavern and was immediately sorry that she did. The creatures were doubly frightening seen from ground level, especially now that they were racing around in such agitation. The beehive was quaking, as if someone had tossed it into the air and stabbed it with a pitchfork. But it can’t be our presence, she thought, because then they would simply zero in on us and wipe us out. The cured skins hanging on the rock walls were as thick as medieval tapestries, and she realized with a suppressed shudder what superb hunters they must be in using their telepathic communication. It would be impossible to escape their dragnet once they tuned in to her and read her perceptual field. But now hundreds of them were sharing the same room with her and Matt and in their preoccupation didn’t notice them. “Maybe we can use this confusion to our advantage,” she said.
Matt got down on all fours and peered around the rock slab. There was a small enclosure, an antechamber to the passageway that was out of view of the main cavern. He looked around for Van’s guards. One had left and the other seemed as flummoxed as the rest of the creatures, holding its club but walking distractedly close to the edge of the pit, some eight feet away.
Matt stood again. “Let’s go,” he whispered. He looked in all directions and slowly slipped out into the cavern, sticking close to the rock face. Like a shadow he glided across until he made it into the antechamber. Susan followed, then the three hominids, who simply walked across as if they had every right to be there.
The enclosure was darker than the cavern. Susan and Matt got their blindfolds ready. Now for the risky part. Matt looked out of the chamber at the back of the guard and pushed Lancelot and Leviticus in the direction of the pit. As they approached, he crouched down on one leg in his hunter’s posture. He tried to concentrate as he had done with the animals, staring at the back of the guard’s head, concentrating on images of clubs and spears and blood, trying to send the message without words: attack, attack, attack. As the two drew closer, the guard turned and there was a flicker of confusion on his features as the clubs came down neatly and quickly, one in the nook of his shoulder, the other across the top of his skull. He fell instantly and Lancelot lifted one of his legs to roll him into the pit.
Matt slunk out of hiding, ran to the pit, and ducked down behind the legs of his two cohorts. He was not totally hidden but it would have to do. As he leaned over and looked down, Van jumped back, his mouth open, a wild look in his eyes. His face was black with dirt, his clothes in tatters. Hurriedly Matt uncoiled the rope, tied it to a rock, and dropped it to him. “C’mon, Van, quick. Grab it, man, and let’s get out of here!” he said as loudly as he dared. Van stared back, uncomprehending. “The rope, the rope! Take the rope!”
Before Matt knew what was happening, Susan was at his side. Matt jumped into the pit, shook Van, brought him over to the rope, and gave him a fireman’s boost. Like a sleepwalker, he ascended the first few feet until he was within range of Susan’s outstretched arm. Matt flexed his shoulder muscles and boosted him higher. Slowly, by reflex rather than design, Van eased one knee up onto the edge while Susan hauled him upward, and then abruptly he was out and sprawling on the ground. Matt was next. “For God’s sake, hurry!” Susan whispered, glancing around fearfully.
Inside the passageway, they paused and looked back. The cavern was still in chaos. Matt saw four creatures rushing out of the sacred chamber. Hurt-Knee was already off, moving down the tunnel like a deer in flight, the others right behind him.
Their retreat should have gone quickly. They had Hurt-Knee to show them the way, the tunnels were running downhill, and they had their panic to propel them. But Van hampered them; it was not that he wasn’t terror-stricken enough to flee—terror was all he knew—but that he was in no condition to run. His legs moved but they wouldn’t support him, buckling uselessly like tires in mud; he needed a hominid on either side to hold him upright and carry him forward. Susan turned to look at his face. It had always been hard to read Van’s emotions, but now he displayed only blankness. It’s totally empty, she thought; something has happened to him—he’s burned out.
