But there was no time to hesitate. To stay longer in the city was certain death, for there was no question now in Markham’s mind but what the terrible quake he had inadvertently started would continue until the whole fantastic land tumbled down.
Hand in hand, they leaped into the pit and hurtled downward into the heart of the golden beam.
Rock tumbled around them and only the lifting force of the beam saved them from serious injury. Even in mid-shaft, they could feel the impact of the deadly vibrations whose quivering terror filled the universe.
“The tunnel,” Tolkilla cried at last.
They floated to a stop and plunged into the dark passage. Rocks shaken from walls and ceiling hampered their progress and menaced their lives. But miraculously, they made it at last and burst out onto the rock ledge.
Markham thought then that he had never seen a more beautiful picture in all his life than the sight of his plane, limned in the moonlight, resting on the shuddering, cracking shelf.
“Run!” he shouted to Tolkilla. “This whole shelf may break apart at any moment.”
They raced toward the plane.
They were still twenty feet from its sleek side when the propeller abruptly whirled in an arc, hesitated and then vanished into a blur of incredible speed. The shrill whine of the starter merged into the thundering drone of the engine under full throttle.
“Tutul Xac!” Tolkilla sobbed, “He knows how to operate the ships that fly.”
The plane was already beginning to move, to crawl forward across the lurching shelf. Markham caught Tolkilla’s arm, surged forward in a great leap and caught at the handle of the cabin door. Running beside the accelerating plane, he somehow got the door open, shoved Tolkilla through onto the cabin floor and hauled himself in beside her.
Tutul Xac, in the pilot’s seat, turned an insanely twisted face and shouted unintelligible hatred. The blunt muzzle of a sunlight gun peeped at them over the back of the seat. Markham read their death warrant in the flaming eyes, the twisting lips that peeled back from the priest’s glittering teeth.
“Don’t!” Markham roared. “For God’s sake, you’ll blast off the whole tail of the ship, you fool!”
He caught at the leg of one of the wicker passenger seats and jerked. The light seat tore loose from the thin bracket that held it screwed to the floor. Markham hurled it toward the front of the ship without taking time even to rise from his prone position.
Tutul Xac shrieked something and pressed the trigger of the sunlight gun. At the same instant, the flying seat smashed into his arm.
Light as the seat was, it had enough momentum to drive the priest’s weapon back and upward at the instant the beam lashed out. There was a scream from the priest, broken off in mid-note, a single incredibly-brilliant burst of golden light, and then blackness.
Until moonlight, pouring in through the gaping hole seared through the roof of the plane’s cabin, flooded down upon the headless horror that had been Tutul Xac.
The plane, unmanned and with the controls jammed by the priest’s dead body, was bounding erratically toward the rim of the ledge with increasing speed. Markham leaped forward, wrestled the gruesome thing from the seat and grabbed the wheel.
A moment later, the roaring plane dipped over the edge, plummeted downward until it picked up flying speed and then leveled off.
Behind them, thundering echoes rocked the night as the whole titanic plateau of Chichen Chikin burst asunder and roared down to earth.
A long time afterward, with Tutul Xac’s body slid out of the cabin to the wilderness below and the plane headed for Texas and home, a terrible thought struck Markham. It was a thought that had subconsciously haunted him throughout the whole mad night.
“Tolkilla,” he whispered, stiff-lipped, to the figure nestled in the curve of his arm. “Tell me, will you go on living forever, even with the vibrations destroyed?”
She smiled up at him, touching the seared heat-burn along his cheek with tender fingers.
“Of course not, my Steven. Now, I can take up my life as a human being. I was twenty-two years old when I first received the vibrations of eternity. I am twenty-two now—for the last time. We can grow old together, my Steven.” Markham hesitated, wet his lips. “You’re entirely human, now? Does that mean you can’t—can’t project your image or read thoughts.”
Tolkilla’s smile was enigmatic. “That, too, has been taken from me—lost forever when the great spires toppled.”
“Thank God!” Steve Markham breathed fervently, then. “After all, a man has to have some secrets—even from his wife.”
THE GREAT CIRCLE, by Henry S. Whitehead
Originally appeared in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, June 1932.
The transition from those hours-on-end of looking down on the dark-green jungle of virgin forest was startling in its abruptness. We had observed this one break in the monotonous terrain, of course, well before we were directly over it. Then Wilkes, the pilot, slowed and began to circle. I think he felt it, the element I have referred to as startling; for, even from the first—before we landed, I mean—there was something—an atmosphere—of strangeness about this vast circular space entirely bare of trees with the exception of the giant which crowned the very slight elevation at its exact center.
I know at any rate that I felt it; and Dr. Pelletier told me afterward that it had seemed to lay hold on him like a quite definite physical sensation. Wilkes did not circle very long. There was no need for it and I think he continued the process, as though looking for a landing place, as long as he did, on account of that eeriness rather than because of any necessity for prolonged observation.
At last, almost, I thought, as though reluctantly, he shut off his engine—“cut his gun” as airmen express it—and brought the plane down to an easy landing on the level greensward within a hundred yards of the great tree standing there in its majestic, lonely grandeur. The great circular space about it was like a billiard table, like an English deer park. The great tree looked, too, for all the world like an ash, itself an anomaly here in the unchartered wilderness of Quintana Roo.
We sat there in the plane and looked about us. On every side, for a radius of more than half a mile from the center where we were, the level grassy plain stretched away in every direction and down an almost imperceptible gradual slope to the horizon of dense forest which encircled it.
There was not a breath of air stirring. No blade of the fine short grass moved. The tree, dominating everything, its foliage equally motionless, drew our gaze. We all looked at it at the same time. It was Wilkes the pilot who spoke first, his outstretched arm indicating the tree.
“Might be a thousand years old!” said Wilkes, in a hushed voice. There was something about this place which made all of us, I think, lower our voices.
“Or even two thousand,” remarked Pelletier.
We had taken off, that morning in 192—, at ten o’clock, from Belize. It was now one o’clock in the afternoon. We had flown due north for the first eighty miles or so, first over the blue waters of landlocked Chetumal Bay, leaving Ambergris Cay on our right, and then Xkalok, the southeastern point of Quintana Roo; then over dry land, leaving the constricted northern point of the bay behind where parallel 19, north latitude, crosses the 88th meridian of longitude. Thence still due north until we had turned west at Santa Cruz de Bravo, and continued in that direction, glimpsing the hard, metallic luster of the noon sun on Lake Chinahaucanab, and then, veering southwest in the direction of Xkanba and skirting a tremendous wooden plateau on our left, we had been attracted, after cursory, down-looking views of innumerable architectural remains among the dense forestation, to our landing place by the abrupt conspicuousness of its treeless circularity.
That summarizes the geography of our flight. Our object, the general interest of the outlook rather than anything definitel
y scientific, was occasioned by Pelletier’s vacation, as per the regulations of the U.S. Navy, of whose Medical Corps he was one of the chief ornaments; from his duties as Chief of the Naval Hospital in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Pelletier wanted to get over to Central America for this vacation. He talked it over with me several times on the cool gallery of my house on Denmark Hill. Almost incidentally he asked me to accompany him. I think he knew that I would come along.
We started through San Juan, Puerto Rico, in which great port we found accommodation in the Bull Line’s Catherine with our friend Captain Rumberg, who is a Finn, as far as Santo Domingo City. From there we trekked across the lofty intervening mountains, with a guide and pack burros, into Haiti. At Port au Prince we secured accommodations as the sole passengers on a tramp going to Belize in British Honduras, which made only one stop, at Kingston, Jamaica.
It was between Kingston and Belize that the idea of this air voyage occurred to Pelletier. The idea of looking down comfortably upon the Maya remains, those cities buried in impenetrable jungles, grew upon him and he waxed eloquent out of what proved an encyclopedic fund of knowledge of Maya history. I learned more about these antiquities than I had acquired in my entire life previously! One aspect of that rather mysterious history, it seemed, had intrigued Pelletier. This was the abrupt and unaccountable disappearance of what he called the earlier of major civilization. The superior race which had built the innumerable temples, palaces and other elaborate and ornate structures now slowly decaying in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, had been, apparently, wiped out in a very brief period. They had, it seemed, merely disappeared. Science, said Pelletier, had been unable to account for this catastrophe. I had, of course, read of it before, but Pelletier’s enthusiasm made it vastly intriguing.
Our two-men-and-hired-pilot expedition into this unexplored region of vast architectural ruins and endless forestation had landed, as though by the merest chance, here in a section presenting topographical features such as no previous explorers had reported upon! We were, perhaps, two hours by air, from Belize and civilization—two months, at least, had we been traveling afoot through the thick jungles, however well equipped with food, guides, and the machetes which all previous adventurers into the Yucatan jungles report as the first essential for such travel.
Pelletier, with those small verbal creakings and gruntings which invariably punctuate the shifting of position in his case, was the first to move. He heaved his ungainly bulk laboriously out of the plane and stood on the grassy level ground looking up at Wilkes and me. The sun beat down pitilessly on the three of us. His first remark was entirely practical.
“Let’s get into the shade of that tree, and eat,” said Dr. Pelletier.
Ten minutes later we had the lunch basket unpacked, the lunch spread out, and were starting in to eat, there in the heart of Quintana Roo. And, to all appearances, we might have been sitting down picnicking in Kent, or Connecticut!
I remember, with a vivid clarity which is burned indelibly into my mind, Wilkes reaching for a tongue sandwich, when the wind came.
Abruptly, without any warning, it came, a sudden, violent gust out of nowhere, like an unexpected blow from behind, upsetting our peaceful little session there, sociably, on the grass in the quiet shade of the ancient tree which looked like an English ash. It shredded to filaments the paper napkin I was holding. It caused the squat mustard bottle to land twenty feet way. It sucked dry the brine out of the saucerful of stuffed olives. It sent Pelletier lumbering after a rapidly rolling pith sun helmet. And it carried the pilot Wilkes’ somewhat soiled and grimy Shantung silk jacket—which he had doubled up and was using to sit on, and had released by virtue of half rising to reach for that tongue sandwich—and blew it, fluttering, folding and unfolding, arms now stiffly extended, now rolled up into a close ball, up, off the ground, and then, in a curve upward and flattened out and into the tree’s lower branches, and then straight up among these, out of our sight.
Having accomplished all these things, and scattered items of lunch broadcast, the sudden wind died a natural death, and everything was precisely as it had been before, save for the disorganization of our lunch—and save, too, for us!
I will not attempt to depart from the strict truth: we were, all of us, quite definitely startled. Wilkes swore picturesquely at the disappearance of his jacket, and continued to reach, with a kind of baffled ineptitude which was quite definitely comic, after the now scattered tongue sandwiches. Pelletier, returning with the rescued sun helmet, wore a vastly puzzled expression on his heavy face, much like an injured child who does not know quite what has happened to him. As for me, I daresay I presented an equally absurd appearance. That gust had caught me as I was pouring limeade from a quart thermos into three of those half-pint paper cups which are so difficult to manage as soon as filled. I found myself now gazing ruefully at the plate of cold sliced ham, inundated with the cup’s contents.
Pelletier sat down again in the place he had vacated a moment before, turned to me, and remarked:
“Now where did that come from?”
I shook my head. I had no answer to that. I was wondering myself. It was Wilkes who answered, Wilkes goaded to a high pitch of annoyance over the jacket, Wilkes unaware of the singular appropriateness of his reply.
“Right out of the corner of hell!” said Wilkes, rather sourly, as he rose to walk over to that enormous trunk and to look up into the branches, seeking vainly for some glimpse of Shantung silk with motor grease on it.
“Hm!” remarked Pelletier, as he bit, reflectively, into one of the sandwiches. I said nothing. I was trying at the moment to divide what was left of the cold limeade evenly among three half-pint paper cups.
Chapter 2
It was nearly a full hour later, after we had eaten heartily and cleared up the remains of the lunch, and smoked, that Wilkes prepared to climb the tree. I know because I looked at my watch. It was two fourteen—another fact burned into my brain. I was estimating when, starting then, we should get back to Belize, where I had a dinner engagement at seven. I thought about five or five fifteen.
“The damned thing is up there somewhere,” said Wilkes, looking up into the branches and leaves. “It certainly hasn’t come down. I suppose I’ll have to go up after it!”
I gave him a pair of hands up, his foot on them and a quick heave, a lower limb deftly caught, an overhand pull; and then our Belize pilot was climbing like a cat up into the great tree’s heart after his elusive and badly soiled garment.
The repacked lunch basket had to be put in the plane, some hundred yards away from the tree. I attended to that while Pelletier busied himself with his notebook, sitting cross-legged in the shade.
I sauntered back after disposing of the lunch basket. I glanced over at the tree, expecting to see Wilkes descending about then with the rescued jacket. He was still up there, however. There was nothing to take note of except a slight—a very slight—movement of the leaves, which, looking up the tree and seeing, I remarked as unusual because not a single breath of air was stirring anywhere. I recall thinking, whimsically, that it was as though the great tree were laughing at us, very quietly and softly, over the trouble it was making for Wilkes.
I sat down beside Pelletier, and he began to speak, perhaps for the third or fourth time, about that strange clap of wind. That had made a very powerful impression on Pelletier, it seemed. After this comment Pelletier paused, frowned, looked at his watch and then at the tree, and remarked: “Where is that fellow? He’s been up there ten minutes!”
We walked over to the tree’s foot and looked up among the branches. The great tree stood there inscrutable, a faint movement barely perceptible among its leaves. I remembered that imagined note of derision which this delicate movement had suggested to me, and I smiled to myself.
Pelletier shouted up the tree: “Wilkes! Wilkes—can’t you find the coat?”
Then again: “Wilkes! Wilkes—we’ve got to get started back pretty soon!”
But there was no answer from Wilkes, only that almost imperceptible movement of the leaves, as though there were a little breeze up there; as though indeed the tree were quietly laughing at us. And there was something—something remotely sinister, derisive, like a sneer, in that small, dry, rustling chuckle.
Pelletier and I looked at each other, and there was no smile in the eyes of either one of us.
We sat down on the grass then as though by agreement. Again we looked at each other. I seemed to feel the tree’s derision; more openly now, less like a delicate hint, a nuance. It seemed to me quite open now, like a slap in the face! Here indeed was an unprecedented predicament. We were all ready to depart, and we had no pilot. Our pilot had merely performed a commonplace act. He had climbed a tree.
But he had not come down—that was all.
It seemed simple to state it to oneself that way, as I did, to myself. And yet, the implications of that simple statement involved—well, what did they involve? The thing, barring an accident: Wilkes having fallen into a decay-cavity or something of the sort; or a joke: Wilkes hiding from us like a child among the upper branches—barring those explanations for his continued absence up there and his refusal to answer when called to, the thing was—well, impossible.
Wilkes was a grown man. It was inconceivable that he should be hiding from us up there. If caught, somehow, and so deterred from descending, at least he could have replied to Pelletier’s hail, explained his possible predicament. He had, too, gone far up into the tree. I had seen him go up agilely after my initial helping hand. He was, indeed, well up and going higher, far above the lower trunk area of possible decay-cavities, when I had left him to put the lunch basket back in the plane. He had been up nearly twenty minutes now, and had not come down. We could not see him. A slightly cold sensation up and down my spine came like a presage, a warning. There seemed—it was borne in abruptly upon me—something sinister here, something menacing, deadly. I looked over at Pelletier to see if anything of this feeling might be reflected in his expression, and as I looked, he spoke.
The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK® Page 22
