“Somehow, some one or some thing is causing those regular vibrations for a definite purpose. And it can’t be an innocent purpose. Imagine New York City, here, rocked by a terrific, artificially induced earthquake—”
“Ten minutes!” Raymond interrupted.
He snapped his watch shut. Then he leaned forward, put sharp elbows on the desk and pressed the tips of his fingers together.
“Now, Markham, you cannot say that you have been denied a fair and impartial hearing. I have listened carefully without interrupting. Now, what I have to say to you will not require anything like ten minutes.”
Steve Markham’s breath went out in a long, gusty sigh.
“‘Your story, Markham, is interesting. I might even say exciting. Between the lurid covers of one of those hideous dime novels, it should find a ready welcome. But scientifically, it is based on nothing more stable than misconceptions and a gross disregard of the true facts.
“Certainly, it is a rare phenomenon when earthquakes occur at such regular intervals. But the region you refer to is a logical breeding place for earth tremblers and a little rational thought should show you beyond any doubt that the effect of expansion and contraction of rocks under tropical sunlight is responsible for the apparently artificial regularity of the shocks.”
“But not for the constantly shortening periods,” Markham burst out desperately. “And how can sunlight effect basic strata, far underground?”
“Professor Markham,” Raymond continued bitingly, “I believe your interest in earthquakes dates from the time your parents were unfortunately killed in a violent earthquake disaster, does it not?”
“Yes—”
“Another thing. Until a year ago, you did a great deal of flying, did you not? If I remember correctly, you were a licensed private airplane pilot and owned, or still own, a plane.” Markham’s lips drew to a tight line. His affirmation was no more than a nod as Raymond drove relentlessly on.
“A year ago, you were involved in a plane crash in which your passenger was killed. You, I believe, suffered no more than a head injury that affected your hearing for a time. Although you were absolved of all blame for the crash, you have never piloted nor ridden in a plane since that accident—”
“Damn you!” Steve Markham roared, jerking to his feet so violently that his chair crashed over backward. “I know what you’re driving at. You’re trying to prove that losing my folks in a quake affected my mind—made me a little bit cracked on the subject of earthquakes—and that the plane crash affected my hearing so that the droning I reported is nothing more than head noises of the kind that bother so many deaf persons.”
“Please. Professor, control yourself. If I were to report this unseemly conduct to the Board of Regents—”
“Report and be damned!” Markham shouted hoarsely, all caution swept away in a surge of raging anger. “You dried-up prune with a Portland cement brain. You call yourself a scientist! Why, a few years ago, you’d be throwing stones at Galileo and calling Kepler a crackpot. Report and be damned! Something threatens to blast the earth apart under your supercilious nose and you haven’t the brains to investigate—even for the personal satisfaction of proving that I am a nut!”
He snatched up his file folder and whirled away from the gasping, purple-faced savant. At the door he turned. “By Godfrey, I’ll do this job myself!” He slammed the door behind him furiously and stalked down the corridor in purposeful fury.
Still boiling, Steve Markham went back to his own quarters. Grim-jawed and sultry-eyed, he strode toward his office, blind to everything but the maelstrom of emotions in his brain. His secretary sprang up to intercept him.
“Professor, this man has been waiting to see you. His name is Smith. He wants to ask you something about earthquakes if you have a few minutes to spare.”
Markham turned impatiently with the idea of brusquely dismissing his caller. He had no stomach for visiting or for detailed discussion of abstract theories.
The man rose from the visitor’s chair, smiling diffidently. The words of dismissal died on Markham’s lips. Something like an electric shock tingled along his nerve ends at the sight of the man named Smith.
It wasn’t merely the man’s physical appearance, although that was, in itself, enough to command attention. He was well over six feet tall and incredibly lean, with a dry, inhuman leanness that made Markham think of an Egyptian mummy. His face, thin and hawk-nosed, had a foreign look, yet not one that Markham could readily couple with any known nationality.
More startling was the fleeting impression that, as Smith rose from the chair, his whole body momentarily shimmered. It was almost as though Markham were viewing him through a veil of rising heat waves.
“Professor Markham,” Smith’s voice, too, was odd in its almost metallic timbre, its queer, precise intonation, as though reciting memorized words in an unfamiliar tongue, “I will take no more than a few of your valuable minutes. But my mission is one whose vital importance I feel sure you will quickly appreciate.”
With an effort, Markham shook off a queer feeling of uneasy fear. He forced a welcoming smile and extended his hand.
“Glad to know you. If you’ll step into my office—”
Smith shrank back, an odd alarm in his piercing black eyes.
“No—no! I cannot shake hands.
My own hand—I have hurt it. So sorry—”
Markham frowned, turned to his secretary.
“Dig out all my personal papers and my files of earthquake data right away.” He saw the questioning look in her eyes. “Yep! I’m through—fired. Get that stuff together fast, will you? I’m leaving as soon as I finish with Smith.”
The lean, dark-skinned Smith let Markham open the door. Then he followed into the private office. He took the chair Markham indicated, but although it was placed at an awkward angle, he made no move to straighten it.
“Now,” Markham said, erasing his frown as he slid into his own chair. “What can I do for you? You told my secretary it was something about earthquakes, I believe.”
“Yes,” Smith bent forward, his black eyes peering eagerly. “Tell me, Mister Markham, have you kept records of recent successive earth shocks that recur with almost artificial regularity?”
Markham suppressed a start of surprise. How could this stranger know of his work?
“I have been noticing an odd coincidence,” he admitted finally, keeping his face blank.
“Ah-h-h!” A sigh of relief, a quick exhalation of the visitor’s breath. “It has been so long—so disheartening. But at last, of all the scientists I have visited, at last I find one. It is well.”
Suddenly Markham stiffened. The hair on his scalp began, unaccountably, to crawl. There it was again. Weirdly, oddly, unmistakably, the body of the stranger was shimmering, seeming enveloped in wavy unreality, as though existing in a curtain of crawling heat waves. The sensation grew, and Markham reeled dizzily.
He strove to tear his eyes away from the incredible spectacle. His fingers dug into the arms of the chair until he could hear the knuckles crack. Terror—a strange, unfamiliar terror—rushed over him like a wave.
For of his visitor, there was nothing left but two burning eyes that grew and flamed until they filled Markham’s field of vision utterly, locking him in an iron grip against which struggle was futile.
Then, he felt the most horrible, indescribably, frightening sensation of his life.
Fingers were inside his brain, tangible physical fingers that parted each wrinkle, probed each convolution to examine his every thought and memory. Vainly, he tried to drive out the prying fingers, to shut his brain, lock off his recollections.
But it was hopeless. He had a feeling that every knowledge he had ever gained, every thought he had ever harbored, was being reviewed by this horrible unknown stranger.
Suddenly deathly afraid, Markham summoned his strength and fought.
Step by bitter step, he drove the malignant prying entity out of his mind.
With a final, almost audible snap, the last tentacles lost their grip. His mind was free, clear, able to fill with the raging flame of his anger.
“Damn your black soul!” He staggered to his feet and leaped back.
There was a leer on Smith’s face that seemed to be the root of all evil.
“Who are you?” Markham cried.
“Smith is as good as any name, Professor Markham. As to my purpose, I came to find an enemy. I found him, after searching the greatest minds of science. You, sir, are the most dangerous enemy in all the world to my people and to their Great Attainment. I am glad that at last I have found you. You will be destroyed—swiftly.”
Then he was gone. Not out through the door nor through an open window, but vanishing into thin air; disappearing as utterly as though he had never been, before Markham’s staring eyes.
With a hoarse croak, Markham leaped forward, stared wildly around the suddenly-empty office. Then he tore open the outer door.
“Professor Markham—” his secretary cried in alarm, seeing his haggard face. “What is it? Are you ill?”
He glared at her.
“Smith!” he bawled. “Did you see him? Didn’t he leave through this door—just now?”
Bewildered, she shook her head.
“Why, no. He must be in your office—”
“Must be!” Markham stared at her, swallowed hard. Must be—but he isn’t! He’s vanished, like—like a ghost. Into thin air—”
“Like a ghost?” she faltered. “Professor Markham, you are sick.”
When Markham let himself into his apartment, he had tramped the streets, bare-headed and wild-eyed and blind to his surroundings, for twelve hours. He closed the door behind him and snapped on the soft indirect light.
Then he froze, every muscle in his body going rigid with surprise.
Across the room, a girl sat in his easy chair. The most beautiful girl Steve Markham’s eyes had ever beheld.
Dazedly he stared at the long flowing waves of soft hair, so black it glowed with a purple sheen; the lovely slender face and dark eyes that reminded him of the ink-pools into which ancient sorcerers gazed to conjure up their visions.
More than that, he could not quite make out with any degree of clarity, for as he stared, the girl’s slender figure seemed to waver mistily—as though viewed through a veil of rising heat waves!
CHAPTER II
To Chichen Chikin
She faced him, rising lithely from the big chair, smiling a faint enigmatic smile. Markham spoke hoarsely, the first words that came into his mind.
“Hello,” he said stupidly. “Another ghost?”
A strange, unreadable frown of annoyance whipped across her face for a moment. Then, the smile returned.
“Perhaps, Steven Markham,” she said. Her voice, queerly accenting unfamiliar syllables, was like far-off temple bells. “You might call me a ghost. But, I have no time to explain myself. I am Tolkilla, captive High Priestess of the Great Attainment of Chichen Chikin. I am here to plead for your aid.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Markham sat down bewilderedly on a nearby chair, “this is too much for me. You’re the same kind of being as Smith—you even resemble him in a beautiful way—and you came the same way he did. You talk about being a High Priestess and a prisoner and ask my help. What can I do?”
Anxiety touched her face.
“Tutul Xac, whom you call Smith, is of my land. But he is evil—horribly evil. He is the keeper of my golden prison. If you would help me to escape, I would show you how he could be overthrown and the world saved.”
Markham started. “The world saved? Is it about the earthquakes?”
“Yes,” she rushed on hurriedly. “Terrible earthquakes. But I can’t explain now. There is so little time.” For a moment, her form shimmered and almost vanished. “In a few short weeks the end will come as ordained—unless you will come to Chichen Chikin at once. Will you come?”
“But I’ve never heard of Chichen Chikin,” Markham protested. “Where is it? How can I get—”
“In the place, where was your office,” Tolkilla whispered, “there is upon your wall a map with many red dots.”
“Seismograph stations,” Markham affirmed.
“From these red dots are drawn many lines—lines that meet far down in a land you call Mexico. It is there you will find Chichen Chikin, the engine that is shattering the earth, and me. Will you come, Steven Markham? Will you come to me? Answer quickly, for I have only a few seconds left with you.”
“Yes, I’ll come,” Markham promised abruptly, impressed by the earnest pleading in her eyes. “And you?”
“I shall wait for you, meet you as I have tonight—down there in the land you call Mexico.”
Like a light beam vanishing at the click of the switch, she was gone—disappearing completely. Exactly as Smith, whom she called Tutul Xac, had gone.
For a long time Markham sat motionless, staring at the spot where the lovely apparition had vanished.
What strange beings were these two who had invaded his sanity? Were they phantasms of a disordered mind, visions painted on his brain by hypnosis, spirit beings from some world of the dead?
Or were they living persons, possessed of some strange and unfamiliar power to appear and disappear at will?
Undoubtedly, both were phantoms of some sort. He remembered the odd way in which Smith (he still called the eerie visitor by that common name in his mind) had refused to shake hands or to move the light chair on which Markham had bid him be seated.
But, real or imaginary, he had promised the lovely and mysterious Tolkilla that he would meet her down in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico, where the direction lines of all his seismograph records converged on an unexplored region.
He got out of his chair, went across to the telephone, hesitated a moment and then dialed a number. After endless measured hums of the automatic ringer, the line clicked and a sleep-drugged voice grumbled acknowledgment.
“Larson? This is Steve Markham. Your department includes a study of ancient American languages like Aztec, Toltec, Maya and the like, doesn’t it?”
“Um-m-m, yeah. Why?”
“Are you familiar with the name Chichen Chikin? Do you know what it means or what language it’s in?”
“Chichen Chikin? Let’s see. Why, that sounds like Maya, though I never heard that particular name. Chichen means, roughly, the mouth or mouths of wells. Take Chichen Itza, that famous ruin in Yucatan where we sent an expedition a couple of years ago; that means ‘Mouths of the Wells of the Itzas or Itza people.’ Chikin means west or to the west—the opposite of Likin, meaning east. I’d say your name meant something like ‘the mouth of the western well.’ Why, Steve? Have you run onto something interesting?”
“Thanks, Larson,” Markham answered. “I came across the name in a story I was reading, and I thought maybe—”
“My Gawd! Do you mean to say you dragged me out of a sound sleep just to ask me a—”
Markham hung up without apologizing, snapped off the light and went into his bedroom. Moving mechanically, like a sleep-walker, he undressed and got into bed.
The next morning, he began preparations for his fantastic journey to Chichen Chikin. It took him the better part of a day and endless fabrications to secure a permit to buy a gun. But eventually, late in the afternoon, he came into possession of a Luger automatic pistol, the most powerful he could buy.
Afterward, for no accountable reason except that some innate caution advised it, he bought a box of dynamite with caps and fuse.
These purchases he stored for the time being in his apartment. Not,
however, without some misgivings. He had too vivid a recollection of Tutul Xac’s threat to destroy him to rest completely easy at any time.
The second day, he sought out a famous eye, ear, nose and throat specialist and posed a question. Was it possible, he asked without being specific, for a person to hear or feel vibrations of common objects that would normally be unnoticed?
“Queer,” the specialist said, after an examination of Markham’s ears. “The accident you spoke of has jarred a bit of cartilage out of normal position so that it impinges on the eardrums in a manner that makes the bones of your skull a sounding box for certain vibrations. Must be damned annoying, I agree. I’d say that a very minor operation, trimming away some of the misplaced cartilage, would completely stop the effect.”
“Thanks,” Markham told him. “I’ll think it over. If I decide to have the operation, I’ll phone for an appointment.”
He went out hurriedly. It had suddenly occurred to him that, while such an operation might remove the terrible whining agony of the vibrations from the unknown earthquake-producing mechanism, it would also deprive him of his greatest advantage—the ability to sense the operation of that unknown machine Tolkilla had mentioned.
When he reached his apartment again, his arms were filled with bundles of food supplies for emergency rations. With these, his pistol, ammunition and the dynamite, he got into his car and drove to the airport to face the greatest test of all.
Even driving onto the parking apron of the airport made Markham break into cold sweat. The sound of warming motors filled him with nameless terror that left him weak and trembling.
It had been that way ever since the fatal crash of a year ago. From the day when jammed controls had carried Markham’s best friend to death, he had been afraid of a plane, not with physical terror but with some psychic horror that drained his strength when he even thought of flying.
The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK® Page 16
