But now he had to fly. There was no other way to reach Chichen Chikin. Men on foot had been known to wander for months, lost in the mountain fastnesses of unexplored western Mexico.
“There she is, boss,” a grimy mechanic flipped a salute as Markham carried his first load of supplies from his car. “As good as new and ready to fly to Europe—if anybody wanted to fly to Europe in this day and age.”
Markham’s plane was a sleek, fast amphibian. It had been repaired after the crash and had remained untouched in his private hangar ever since. With an effort, he made himself climb into the cabin and stow away his armload of bundles. Conquering that first terror made his next victory easier. By the time the plane was fully loaded and ready for the takeoff, his phobia had receded to no more than a vague nausea.
Panic surged back for a moment as he slid into the pilot’s seat, but before it could gain a foothold, he whipped it by slamming the throttle full ahead and sweeping out across the field in a roaring takeoff.
Then he was in the air, flying southwest, and the nameless terror fell away for the moment. But somehow, he knew terror still lurked within him. He wondered if, after all, he really had won his first battle.
Steve Markham was refueling in San Antonio, Texas, when the droning came again. He felt it beginning as a faint, distant whine that set his teeth on edge and made his brain quiver with vague pain. The sound struck terror to his heart.
It was not seven days since the last visitation! Were weekly intervals already giving way to still shorter periods? Did it mean that danger was nearer?
The droning sound was louder, sharper than it had ever been before. It became so terrible that Markham fled into the cabin of his plane, clasped his arms around his head and crouched there in agony. An eternity of six minutes passed.
When at last Markham stepped back to the turf, white-faced and sick, the airport attendant was rubbing his head and staring around him with a queer, wondering expression.
“Did you hear that?” he demanded.
Markham’s breath caught. “Hear what?”
“Sort of a funny, faint whine that made my teeth buzz and my head ache like hell. Wonder what it was.”
“Ever hear anything like it before?”
“Not me. Never heard it or anything like it, ever. And I’ll be just as satisfied if I never hear it again.”
“You’d better make a prayer of that wish and use it hard and frequently,” Markham told him and took off in a whirlwind of leaping dust devils.
He was not even surprised when, a few hours later, he turned from a study of the mountainous barrier ahead to see the shimmering figure of Tolkilla sitting beside him.
CHAPTER III
Caught in the Trap
“I expected you,” Markham said simply, his eyes drinking in the unbelievable radiance of her unearthly beauty. “I have been thinking of you in my mind all day.”
“I know. I heard you. But I couldn’t escape before. You must not call me like that again. Others might hear you—Tutul Xac and his priests.”
“I wish you’d explain all this mystery. If you’re a prisoner, how can you meet me like this? And, for that matter, how in the devil do you meet me this way? Isn’t it about time you gave me some inkling of what this place is that I’m going to, what’s being done there and what I’m expected to do to help you? After all, I’ve got to know what I’m up against before I can figure ways to meet it.”
“Soon. Very soon, Steven Markham. When you have reached the landing place, you shall know all. But now I have too little time. I came only to guide you to your first goal.”
She bent forward, frowning prettily out at the gloomy mass of mountains ahead and below. Markham watched her breathlessly until she pointed ahead.
“See. There, in the distance, is my land.”
Markham squinted and then caught his breath. Far ahead, beyond the farthest mountains, a tremendous purple wall went up and up until it vanished in a ceiling of clouds. To the north and to the south, he could faintly see where the purple wall ended and the bluer sky beyond became visible.
“Good Lord!” he gasped. “What is it? A mountain?”
“Of a sort. It is what you call a—a plateau. It is a great high rock, flat upon the top, where Chichen Chikin sits. On the eastern side, there is a broad, flat shelf just at the edge of the cloud layer. You will be able to land there easily, for it is rock and very smooth. There you will be met and told everything concerning what is happening and concerning the Day When The Moon Is To Return. There, too, you will see me once more.”
She smiled with that enigmatic, misty smile, and her lips pursed for a moment in coquettish invitation that made the blood thunder in Markham’s veins. Involuntarily, he dropped the controls and reached hungry hands toward the vision.
“Goodbye,” she whispered, and was gone.
Steven Markham’s hands closed on empty air, closed and clenched into tight, trembling fists.
An hour later, approaching the sheer, breathless wall of the plateau, he saw the landing shelf Tolkilla had described, a mere rock ledge carved into the towering pinnacle.
Cautiously, Markham fish-tailed the plane in for a short-run landing on the smooth rock. As he cut the motor switch and sat for a moment, stung the Luger pistol into concealment under his shirt, he became aware of two things.
He noticed first that the air was warm, in vivid contrast to the high-altitude cold through which he had been flying. And the source of the pleasant warmth seemed to lie in a beam of golden light that bathed the plane, as though he had landed in the direct rays of a hot noon-day sun. Yet, no sun was visible.
The second discovery was the sound. Faint and almost unnoticeable came a soft, constant humming like the sound made by telephone wires on a windy day. It was an all-pervading drone that seemed to emanate from the towering mass of rock itself, as though the pinnacle were a vast tuning fork that had been but recently plucked.
But this humming sound was not a torture to Markham’s ears as the now-familiar periodic droning sound had been. This was soft, soothing and somehow invigorating, as though all the life-movements in the cells of his body were stirring and quickening in response to the eternal rhythm. He had a queer, abrupt feeling of coming home, as though the humming were a goal he had been seeking hungrily, but subconsciously, all his life and, having found it, never wanted to leave.
Almost dreamily, he unlatched the cabin door and stepped down into the pleasant warmth of the ledge. Presently, he turned without conscious volition and walked toward the strange group that, appearing from nowhere on the rock ledge, was advancing purposefully toward him.
There were eight persons in the approaching group and they marched in formation, three walking at each side of two central figures, like bodyguards. All were dressed in costumes unlike any Markham had ever seen.
The six guards were dressed in nothing more than wide belts from which skirt-like drapes of rich crimson dropped almost to their knees, front and back. The belt itself, ornamented in vivid colors, was made of molded metal strips linked together for flexibility. Around each guard’s bronzed neck hung a chain of the same colored metal links, terminating in an odd ornament of pure gold whose central figure was an engraving of the sun with a hawk-like human face within its disc. Each wore, in addition, a helmet of linked metal, topped by a plume of iridescent red and green feathers.
In their hands were objects of metal—richly scrolled flat cases from the ends of which protruded blunt tubes. They were silvery white, bright as chromium, with a gold lever projecting from the top.
Markham’s wondering gaze moved to the two central figures. He saw similar but much more elaborate costumes, with belts of pure gold and helmets topped by much more gorgeous feather plumes.
One of the central figures wore linked gold breast plates.
It
was Tolkilla, calm, confident, regal—and unfettered!
And, last of all, Markham saw the triumphantly-smiling face of Tutul Xac.
Like a dreamer awakening, his eyes snapped wide. The narcotic effect of the eternal humming rhythm fell from his brain. In one searing blaze of comprehension he saw—and understood.
“A trap!” he cried. “You laid a trap—and like an idiot, I blundered right into it with my eyes wide open!”
He was staring, eyes blazing with accusation, straight at Tolkilla.
Her lips curved in the enigmatic smile that had haunted Markham’s dreams from his first sight of her.
“Of course,” she agreed. “You were an enemy of my people and of their Great Attainment. Therefore, you must be destroyed, even as Tutul Xac promised.”
“You treacherous devil!”
Markham lunged forward with clenched fists upraised.
“STOP!” The voice of Tutul Xac was a thunder that awoke weird echoes against the humming rock. “You are not dealing with helpless phantoms, now, but with flesh-and-blood warriors and weapons your puny science dares not even imagine!”
“To hell with you and your weapons!” Markham raged, tugging at the hidden Luger inside his shirt. “I’ll show you a weapon that’ll match anything you Master Minds can produce.” The Luger jerked free in his hand. Tutul Xac shouted a single sharp word. The guards at the front of each column lifted the odd metal cases, turning them so the blunt tubes pointed at Steve Markham.
Blinding, unbearable light lanced out, struck Markham full in the face. There was a swift, unendurable interval of intense heat and intense cold that was vaguely reminiscent of a mild sunstroke he had once suffered.
He tried to level the Luger, tried to raise his left hand to shield his eyes from the searing, stabbing light. But he could do none of these things, and in that instant, his senses swirled away into blackness.
Markham was not even conscious of the impact when his senseless body struck the rock floor.
CHAPTER IV
The Earth-Wrecker
The first returning sensation was of a corkscrew of agony that spiraled in through Markham’s tortured eardrums and burrowed deep into the quivering recesses of his brain. It was wordless, inhuman, yet a sound. And it rose and fell, swelling to a drone of unutterable triumph, falling away to a thin whisper as of humility before some mighty force.
It was not the agonizing, earth-shaking doom drone, audible to none but Markham’s super-sensitive ears. Nor was it that softer, all-pervading life-drone, for he could still hear that in the background like a shuttle, weaving a mad pattern of sound in and out of the mightier chorus.
This was a new, wholly audible, torturous sound and Markham came up out of the depths of blackness fighting against it. His face twitched uncontrollably as the vibrations hammered against raw nerve-ends. He tried to bring up his hands to cover his ears and came completely awake at the realization that his hands were pinioned at his sides. He opened his eyes.
He was lying, flat on his back, spread-eagled and chained upon a massive altar of bright, silver-like metal. The altar stood on the flat top of a truncated pyramid and by twisting his head, Markham could see stone steps falling away and lines of feathered warriors ranged stiffly down those steps.
And he could see the great mass of people packed up against the base of the pyramid, eyes tightly shut, bronze bodies swaying in unison to the buzzing hum that issued from every throat.
They were not chanting. They were humming!
Markham shuddered instinctively as the humming swelled again and became a hellishly-inhuman copy of the dread doom drone that had drawn him here. This was madness, he knew, and there was no solid anchor for his wavering sanity in the vision of the city spread out to far horizons.
His first thought was that he was looking down upon the plaster model of Chichen Itza in the University Museum. Here were the same flat roofs, the same truncated pyramids, some surmounted by pillared walls. But here was something not a part of the plaster model. For the pyramids were bases for great golden hemispheres, concave bowls tilted against the pillared walls at angles that made them repositories for the rays of the high sun.
Memory of the last incident of consciousness swept away the hazy clouds that had fogged his senses. He swung his head the other way for the first time and his eyes snapped wide.
Before the altar, swaying to the cadence of the humming chant, stood Tutul Xac in gorgeous costume. The lean man’s right hand was upraised and in his fist was a long, keen knife of gold pointing an invisible line toward Markham’s naked chest. In the priest’s black eyes was a sardonic, mocking glow and his thin lips twisted in a leer of complete triumph.
Behind Tutul Xac, Tolkilla stood stiffly. She was like a woman drugged, or a lovely, cleverly-fashioned statue until she felt the outpouring of scorn and loathing in Markham’s gaze. Then, a dull flush tinged the velvet bronze of her cheeks.
Markham forced his gaze away, and his attention was caught by an object that completely dominated the scene. It was an obelisk of silvery metal, rising from the center of the pyramid’s top. From a base, perhaps six feet to a side, it tapered to a slender needle of silvery flame a hundred feet in the air. Markham noted curiously that the thick base of the obelisk was oddly gouged and scarred, with great slivers bitten out of the gleaming metal.
Far away, at the northern tip of the city, he could see a similar pyramid, surmounted by a similar spire of gleaming metal. Between these towering pillars, the city lay in a compact oval with the spires at its extremities. He frowned, trying to capture the vague significance of the spires and the city plan between.
“You awaken in time,” Tutul Xac interrupted his bewilderment, “to witness the great ceremonial of sacrifice. You may think it crude, perhaps, but it serves a purpose. Not only does it satisfy the rabble, but it forms a most convenient method of eliminating a dangerous enemy.”
The pitch of the human droning changed. Tutul Xac turned and spoke to Tolkilla in a strange tongue. At his words, she picked up a queer, padded hammer that lay upon a lesser altar nearby and moved woodenly toward the thick, scarred base of the spire.
Tutul Xac was bent forward, now, avidly watching the progress of a shadow upon the floor. Straining, Markham could see that it was the shadow of the great altar on which he lay, creeping across a weird and intricate pattern graven into the floor beneath. And he saw that the sharp edge of the shadow was near, terribly near, to the central figure of that pattern.
The shadow touched the figure and Tutul Xac’s arms went high. The humming broke off in mid-note.
In the profound, breathless silence that followed, Tolkilla stepped forward and struck the scarred base of the obelisk a single, light blow. From the crowds below came a gusty sigh of expelled breath. For a moment, there was nothing…
Abruptly, a choked sob of utter agony burst through Markham’s set lips.
For, sharper and more terrible than ever before, came the rising whine of the doom-drone, the sound that presaged the shaking of the earth, the sound that had torn Markham from his normal life to hurl him into this mad nightmare of fantasy.
The sound was rising, deepening, until in a moment, Markham knew, his tortured nerves would shatter and he would go screamingly mad under the unendurable agony of its vibrations.
As abruptly as it had begun, the drone began to die away. Markham had the queer feeling that the vibrations were still pulsing but that here where he lay, some force was damping their fury. He could still feel faint agony, as though his whole body were being pounded mercilessly by invisible pulsations of force, but the sharper torment of the shrill wine was muffled. By what?
Now Markham’s straining eyes saw the edges of the silvery obelisk lose their sharpness, melt away into a dull blur of unspeakably swift motion. And far away, across the city, he saw the twin spir
e losing its own sharp delineation, growing misty against the vivid blue of the sky.
Then, it all became horribly clear to him. In a single blinding light of realization, he saw the earth-shaking engine in all its terrible potentiality. Perfectly attuned, they could shatter the Earth.
Markham understood, then, the reason for the changing periodicity of the doom-drone as the destroyers quested for the exact vibration point of the earth itself. And he saw the reason for the chipped and scarred base of the spire where metal had been removed to achieve exactly the desired tonal pitch.
These things Markham saw with terrible clarity. But even clearer was the realization of his own complete helplessness.
Tutul Xac, smiling, came back to poise the knife above Markham’s bared breast. Behind the priest, Tolkilla was looking, now—staring with a fixed intensity that seemed to contain all the energy of her being. Markham forced himself to avoid her purposeful stare. How could one so utterly lovely be so treacherous?
He told himself fiercely that it no longer mattered. In a moment, the golden knife would flash down to carve the beating heart from his breast and nothing would matter.
He felt a strange calmness, born of utter helplessness, steal over him like an anesthetic. There was no escape. His golden manacles were too strong for any strength he could muster.
Down below the humming swelled to a paean of triumph. Tutul Xac’s muscles writhed as he tensed for the death-stroke.
Markham twisted his head, partly to look away from the hypnotic glitter of the thirsty blade, partly to look for the last time on a sunlit world. His eyes roved dully over the massed multitudes, moved beyond and past them and stopped at a gaping hole that yawned blackly at one side of the pyramid on which he lay. Unmistakable brown stains running down from the altar on which he lay pointed the inevitable disposition of his body, once his heart had been torn out for the sacrifice.
The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK® Page 17
