He walked over and tucked Shorty in on the couch. Ah, to be twelve again. Along the wall there were full-scale portraits of Rajput princes on prancing horses, palace landscapes, dancing girls. Dancing girls. Dancing girls.
Willie reclined on her four-poster bed, assuming various seductive poses. Periodically, she would look up, sweetly surprised at her contrite, imaginary visitor: “Why, Dr. Jones . . .” or, “Oh, Indiana . . .”
Her bedside clock said 10:18.
Indy lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. How was he supposed to go to sleep now? Did she think he was made of steel? Could any man stand this kind of torture?
His bedside clock said 10:21.
Willie grabbed her clock, put it to her ear, shook it to see if it was working. Tick, tock, tick. She tapped her lingers irritably on the bedpost. Could her charms have failed? Was she losing her touch? How could he not be scratching at her door by now? How could he not?
Indy wanted to get up, but he refused to get up. The clock ticked beside him. He could wait her out; archaeology had trained him in the waiting game. Sooner or later she’d break down, give in, come around, hurry over. He just hoped it was sooner.
He looked toward the door. “Willie!” He smiled. The door remained closed. He tried a different voice. “Willie?” No. He tried nonchalance. “Willie. Oh, hi.”
The door remained closed. Short Round kept sleeping.
In her room, Willie was trying new poses, new greetings. “Jones. Dr. Jones. Why, Indiana, hello.”
Indiana’s clock read 10:35. He smashed it to the floor and began to pace.
Willie slid to the foot of her bed, stretched out along the satin coverlet, arms akimbo. She slid off the end of the bed to the floor.
Indy paced back and forth along his row of wall paintings of princes, prancing horses, and dancing girls.
Willie paced back and forth along her row of wall paintings, muttering. “Nocturnal activities, crap! Primitive sexual practices! ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’ ”
Indy began muttering too, in his truncated promenade. “Palace slave. I’m a conceited ape. Five minutes.”
Willie stopped pacing. She stared at herself in the mirror, dumbfounded, frustrated, bewildered. “I can’t believe it: he’s not coming.”
Indy stopped pacing, stared into space. “I can’t believe it: she’s not coming. I can’t believe it: I’m not going.”
From behind the last wall painting stepped a darkly clothed guard, who slipped a strangling cord around Indiana’s neck.
Jones managed to get a few fingers around the garrote, but even so, he could feel his larynx nearly crushed within a matter of seconds. Gasping futilely for air, he sank slowly to his knees. His eyes bulged as he stared at the tiny, smiling skulls on the ends of the death-cord clutched in the assassin’s fists. With a last, lunging effort, Indiana bent forward sharply: the guard spilled over his back onto the floor.
The guard pulled a knife, but Indiana smashed him in the head with a pot; the dagger clattered to the ground. Short Round began to stir. Indy heard something in the hall and looked up at the door. The guard jumped him again.
In the hall, Willie stood shouting at Indiana’s closed door. “This is one night you’ll never forget! It’s the night I slipped right through your fingers! Sleep tight, Dr. Jones. Pleasant dreams. I could’ve been your greatest adventure.”
Indy flipped back over the guard; the two of them tumbled across the tiles. Short Round woke up with a start. As Indy stood shakily, Shorty grabbed the whip, tossed it over. Indy caught it.
He whipped the assassin’s arm, but the man unleashed himself and ran toward the door. Indy lashed out again, this time catching the guard around the neck. The thug yanked on it; the handle flew out of Indy’s hand, up to the ceiling fan.
The whip twisted around the revolving blades like fishing line around a reel. And like a doomed flounder, the assassin was slowly dragged toward the ceiling. His toes lifted off the marble floor. He let out a short, choked scream . . . His legs twitched . . . and he was hanged.
“Shorty, turn off the fan!” Indy shouted. “I’m gonna check Willie.”
Shorty hit the wall switch; the fan stopped as Indy ran from the room.
He burst into Willie’s suite, wild-eyed.
She lay on the bed, heart a-flutter. “Oh, Indy.” He’d come after all. Sweet man. Maybe he just didn’t know how to tell time.
He dove onto the bed.
“Be gentle with me,” she whispered.
He scrambled across the bed, looked underneath it. Empty. He got up and began a furious search of the room.
“I’m here” Willie called.
Indy continued his frantic examination. Willie drew aside the bed curtains. His eyes had doubtless misted with love: he wasn’t seeing clearly.
Indy walked around the end of the bed, stood in front of the doors. “Nobody here,” he muttered.
“No, I’m here,” cooed Willie, drawing the last curtain.
Indy moved over to the mirror. Willie jumped off the bed and followed him. He felt a draft by the vase of flowers, coming from somewhere over to the left. The assassin had entered through a secret passage in his room; there had to be one in this chamber as well.
He walked over to a pillar. The draft was stronger here.
Willie still followed him. “Indy, you’re acting awfully strange.”
Indy looked at the pillar: a naked dancing-girl was carved into the stone. He began feeling around the carving’s protuberances: shoes, baubles, hips, breasts.
Willie thought this was exceedingly strange. “Hey, I’m right here.”
The lever was in the breasts. Suddenly the entire pillar disappeared into the wall with a grinding creak, forming an entranceway into a tunnel.
Indy walked in. He struck a match, read the inscription on the wall: “ ‘Follow in the footsteps of Shiva.’ ”
“What does that mean?” whispered Willie excitedly. She was right behind him now.
“ ‘Do not betray . . .’ ” He stopped, removed the small fragment of ancient cloth from his pocket, compared it with the inscription on the wall.
Shorty appeared in the doorway now, and approached the niche.
Indy read the Sanskrit on the piece of cloth. “ ‘Do not betray his truth.’ ” He turned to the boy. “Shorty, get our stuff.”
Short Round ran back to the bedroom as Indy turned into the tunnel.
SIX
The Temple of Doom
“WHAT’S DOWN THERE?” quaked Willie.
“That’s what I’m going to find out. You wait here. If we’re not back in an hour, I want you to wake Captain Blumburtt and come after us.”
She nodded. Short Round returned with Indy’s bag, whip, and hat, and the two of them started down the secret passage.
Shorty led the way around the first corner, to make sure it was safe for Indy. The shadows looked pretty ominous, though. “Dr. Jones, I don’t think we supposed to be here.”
Indy grabbed him by the collar, planted him to the rear. “Stay behind me, Short Round. Step where I step. And don’t touch anything.”
As Indy moved forward, however, Short Round noticed a door off to the side, a door Indy had missed. Short Round put his hand on the knob and pulled: the door collapsed: two skeletons fell forward on top of him.
Shorty yelled, sitting down hard. He’d seen these guys before—in The Mummy. He thought he’d made it quite clear then, to Whoever was in charge, that he never wanted to run into anyone in this condition, especially not in a dark tunnel. Someone must be trying to teach him a lesson.
Indy pulled him erect, half-carried him around the next turn. A hollow wind sprang up here, blowing flayed skins in their faces—human skins, they looked like.
Short Round drew his knife. “I step where you step. I touch nothing.”
More skins flapped in their faces. Shorty broke into a voluble string of Chinese prayers, epithets, and warnings about ghosts. More like The Invisible Man, here:
tattered coverings falling away from an empty presence. Shorty was glad he’d seen such creatures before, so he wouldn’t be undone now.
“Relax, kid.” Indy smiled grimly. “They’re just trying to scare us.”
They kept walking. The tunnel was stone—cool, moist, solid. The farther they went, the more it seemed to twist downwards into the earth, and the darker it got.
Soon it became too black to see.
“All right, it all gets dark now,” said Indy. “Stick close.”
A few more paces, and Shorty felt something crunchy underfoot. “I step on something,” he whispered.
“Yeah, there’s something on the ground.”
“Feel like I step on fortune cookies.”
“Not fortune cookies.” Indy shook his head. It was moving, whatever it was. He struck a match; they looked around. Before them was a wall with two holes in it. Out of one of the holes exuded an effluent of gooey mung, and millions of squirming, wriggling bugs. The bugs poured out onto the floor, covering it completely: a living carpet of shiny beetles, scurrying roaches, wriggling larvae.
Short Round looked down to see a few of them start to crawl up his leg. “That no cookie.” He winced.
Indy brushed the bugs off. At the same moment, the match he was holding burned down to his fingertip and went out. “Ow! Go!” he shouted, pushing his small friend ahead of him. They ran quickly, dashing directly into the next chamber.
Just past the threshold, Shorty stepped on a small button in the floor. This triggered the mechanism that started a great stone door rolling shut behind them.
“Oh, no,” breathed Indy. He dove back, tried to hold it open.
But it closed.
As he turned, he saw the door on the opposite side of the cave slide down: the dim light emanating from beyond it was extinguished. Indy dove toward the portal—but again, he was too late.
He sat on the floor a moment, collecting his thoughts.
“Are you mad at me?” Shorty asked in a small voice out of the darkness. He felt like one of the Little Thunders—children of My Lord the Thunder and the Mother of Lightnings, who, through well-intentioned inexperience, were always having misadventures.
“Indy, you mad at me?”
“No,” Indiana mumbled. And then, more softly: “Not exactly.” Mad at himself was more like it. He never should have brought the kid down here; it was too dangerous.
“Oh, you just angry?”
“Right,” said Indy, striking a match. He found a piece of oily rag on the floor and lit it. Human skeletons littered the ground. Shorty moved toward him. Indiana didn’t want the boy inadvertently stumbling into any other trigger mechanisms, though. “Stop right there,” he warned Shorty. “Look, go stand up against the wall.”
Short Round did as he was told. He flattened his back against a block protruding from the stone wall. The block slid into the wall, triggering another device.
From the ceiling, spikes began to lower.
“Oh, no,” groaned Indiana.
The burning rag illuminated the spikes as if they were the fiery teeth of hell.
Short Round shouted angrily at Indy, “You say stand against wall, I listen to what you say. Not my fault, not my fault!”
Indy wasn’t listening, though. He was shouting through the door at the top of his voice. “Willie, get down here!”
Back in her room, Willie heard Indy call. She pulled on her robe, stepped into the drafty tunnel. “Indy!” she yelled back. There was no answer. She grabbed a small oil lamp from the table, began walking down the corridor. “I bet I get all dirty again,” she muttered, rounding the first turn.
The two skeletons leapt out at her. “Indy!” she screamed. “There’s two dead people in here!”
“There’s going to be two dead people in here if you don’t hurry up!” he shouted back.
She ran past the disgusting, flapping skins, down the steep grade, into the deepening dark, the rising wind. The wind blew out her lamp. Then came the foul odor.
“Ooh, it stinks in here,” she moaned.
“Willie, get down here!”
“I’ve had almost enough of you two,” she barked. What did they think, she did this for a living?
“Willie!”
The ceiling spikes were coming lower, getting closer. They looked more like sword blades now, with razor cutting edges.
“I’m coming,” she hollered.
“C’mon, we’re in trouble!” he roared. Then to Short Round: “Give me your knife.” He took the dagger from Shorty, began digging frantically at the inset block of stone.
“What sort of trouble?” she called.
Spikes were rising from the floor now as well. “Deep trouble.”
“Indy?” She kept walking. The smell got worse as his voice got louder.
“This is serious,” he urged her on.
“What’s the rush?”
“It’s a long story. Hurry or you won’t get to hear it.”
“Oh, God, what is this?” She stopped at the new sensation underfoot. “There’s stuff all over the floor. It’s kind of crispy . . . and then it goes kind of creamy. Indy, what is it? I can’t see a thing.”
She struck a match.
All over: bugs.
Skittering beetles with black carapaces, long-legged arthropods, puffy translucent things that resembled scorpions, squirming wormy things, hopping locusts, segmented cave things . . .
It made her too sick to scream; all she could do was gag. “Indy, let me in. There’s bugs all over here, Indy.”
“Willie,” Indy explained to her from the other side of the stone door that separated them, “there are no bugs in here.”
“Open the door and let me in,” she begged.
“Open the door and let us out,” wailed Shorty. “Let us out, let us out!”
“Let me in, Indy, please,” she squeaked.
“Right. Workin’ on it.”
“Indy, they’re in my hair.” Making nests there, burrowing in, spinning webs, clicking their pincers.
“Willie, shut up and listen. There’s got to be a fulcrum release lever.”
“A what?”
“A handle that opens the door.”
“Oh, God, Indy. They’re in my hair.” Scratching, nibbling.
The tips of the spikes were now at head level.
“Open your eyes, Willie. Look around. There’s got to be a lever hidden somewhere. Go on, look.”
“There’s two holes,” she whimpered. “I see two square holes.”
“Right. Now go to the right hole.”
Sure. The one with all the mung and bugs oozing out of it. This was a joke, right?
Tentatively, she stretched her hand toward the left-sided hole, the relatively clean one. Not clean, exactly of course, but at least not that disgusting slime-infested . . .
A hand reached through the left hole and grabbed hers. Indy’s hand.
“No, not that hole, the other one!” he shouted. “The hole on your right!”
“It looks alive inside. I can’t do it,” she protested.
“You can do it. Feel inside,” he guided her. Come on, kiddo, I need your help.
“You feel inside.” Big wheel, telling her what to do.
“You’ve got to do it now!” he yelled. He was scrunched way down already; the spikes were pressing his flesh.
Willie eased her hand into the mess. “Oh, God, it’s soft. It’s moving. It’s like a bowl of rotten peaches.”
“Willie, we are going to die.”
“I got it.” She found a lever and yanked. The door rolled back.
Indy sat there beside Shorty, inside the doorway, as the spikes slowly started to recede.
Willie ran in tearing the bugs from her hair, shivering at the feel of their little feet all over her skin.
Shorty ran to the opposite door, which was sliding up, and took a long slide across the threshold—just like the immortal Ty Cobb stealing second. He wanted out of there, before anything else w
ent wrong.
Willie stomped and shook. “Get them off me. They’re all over me, get them off, I hate bugs, they’re in my hair.”
As she bent down to comb them out, she pushed in the block that was the trigger mechanism for the whole thing to start over again.
The first door commenced to roll shut.
Short Round called from the opposite door: “I didn’t do it. She did it. Come on, get out!”
He began burbling in his native language as the far door, and the spikes, began once more descending. Like a Cantonese Little League third base coach, he shouted in Chinese: “Slide, Indy, slide!”
Indy took hold of Willie; they sprinted across the room. He pushed her under the falling door, then dove under himself, just knocking his hat off on the way out.
And then, with inches to spare, he reached back in under the descending door, grabbed his hat, and pulled it out moments before the door crashed into place.
You should never go on an adventure without your hat.
They found themselves in a large, eerily lit tunnel through which blew a strange and forlorn wind, howling like a dirge from the earth’s own core.
The light came from up ahead, around a curve in the tunnel. Reddish light; brooding, spectral. Indy, Willie, and Short Round walked slowly to the mouth of the tunnel; then stared, astonished, at the sight below them.
It was a cavern, staggeringly vast, carved over every inch of its surface, as if it had been carved out of the solid mass of the rock, carved with a vaulted, cathedral-like ceiling supported by rows of stone columns, carved into a colossal, subterranean temple. A temple of death.
Stone balconies overhung the granite floor, supported by pillars and arches that led off to dark side chambers. From these grottos poured worshippers, hundreds of them, chanting as they entered the temple. They chanted in unison, in response to the bizarre, lonely winds that howled out of the tunnels that pierced the upper levels of the cavern.
This strange tunnel-music created its own harmonics, its own dynamics, rising and falling in pitch and volume, echoing off all of the resonant hollows. And as these winds galed or died, the worshippers droned in answer, loud, or discordant, or muted, or keening: “Gho-ram gho-ram gho-ram sundaram, gho-ram gho-ram gho-ram sundaram . . .”
The Adventures Of Indiana Jones Page 27
