The Adventure Novella MEGAPACK®

by Wildside Press

  “Canevin, did you notice that this deforested area is circular?”

  I nodded.

  “Does that suggest anything to you?”

  I paused, took thought. It suggested several things, in the light of my recent, my current, feeling about this place centered about its great tree. It was, for one thing, apparently an unique formation in the topography of this peninsula. The circularity suggested an area set off from the rest, and by design—somebody’s design. The “ring” idea next came uppermost in my mind. The ring plays a large part in the occult, the preternatural: the elves’ ring; dancing rings (they were grassy places, too); the Norman cromlechs; Stonehenge; the Druidical rites; protective rings, beyond the perimeter of which the Powers of Evil, beleaguering, might not penetrate… I looked up from these thoughts again at Pelletier.

  “Good God, Pelletier! Yes—do you imagine…?”

  Pelletier waved one of his big, awkward-looking hands, those hands which so often skirted death, defeated death, at his operating table.

  “It’s significant,” he muttered, and nodded his head several times. Then: “That gust of wind, Canevin—remember? It was that which took Wilkes’ coat up there, made him climb after it; and now—well, where is he?”

  I shook my head slowly. There seemed no answer to Pelletier’s question. Then: “What is it, Pelletier?”

  Pelletier replied, as was usual with him, only after some additional reflection and with a certain deliberateness. He was measuring every word, it seemed.

  “Every indication, so far, points to—an air-elemental.”

  “An air-elemental?” The term, with whatever idea or spiritual entity, or vague, unusual superstition underlay its possible meaning, was familiar to me, but who—except Pelletier, whose range of knowledge I certainly had never plumbed—would think of such a thing in this connection?

  “What is an air-elemental?” I asked him, hoping for some higher information.

  Pelletier waved his hand in a gesture common to him.

  “It would be a little difficult to make it clear, right off the bat, so to speak, Canevin,” said he, a heavy frown engendered by his own inability to express what might be in that strange, full mind of his, corrugating his broad forehead. “And even if I had it at my tongue’s end,” he continued, “it would take an unconscionable time.” He paused and looked at me, smiling wryly.

  “I’ll tell you, Canevin, all about them, if we ever get the chance.” Then, as I nodded, necessarily acquiescing in this unsatisfactory explanation, he added: “That is what little, what very little, I, or, indeed, anybody, knows about them!”

  And with that I had, perforce, to be satisfied.

  It seemed to my taunted senses, attuned now to this suggested atmosphere of menace which I was beginning to sense all about us, that an intensified rustle came from the tree’s leaves. An involuntary shudder ran over my body. From that moment, quite definitely, I felt it: the certain, unmistakable knowledge that we three stood alone, encircled, hemmed in, by something; something vast, powerful beyond all comprehension, like the incalculable power of a god, or a demigod; something elemental and, I felt, old with a hoary antiquity; something established here from beyond the ken of humanity; something utterly inhuman, overwhelmingly hostile, inimical, to us. I felt that we were on Its ground, and that It had, so far, merely shown us, contemptuously, the outer edge of Its malice and of Its power. It had, quietly, unobtrusively, taken Wilkes. Now, biding Its time.

  It was watching, as though amused; certain of Its malignant, Its overwhelming, power; watching us, waiting for Its own good time to close in on us…

  I stood up, to break the strain, and walked a few steps toward the edge of the tree’s nearly circular shade. From there I looked down that gentle slope across the motionless short grass through the shimmering heat waves of that airless afternoon to the tree-horizon.

  What was that? I shaded my hands and strained my vision through those pulsating heat waves which intervened; then, astonished, incredulous, I ran over to the plane and reached in over the side and brought out the high-powered Lomb-Zeiss binoculars which Bishop Dunn at Belize had loaned me the evening before. I put them to my eyes without waiting to go back into the shade near Pelletier. I wanted to test, to verify, what I thought I had seen down there at the edge of the encircling forest; to assure myself at the same time that I was still sane.

  There at the jungle’s edge, clear and distinct now, as I focused those admirable binoculars, I saw milling about, crowding upon each other, gesticulating wildly-shouting, too, soundlessly of course, at that distance from my ears—evidencing in short the very apogee of extreme agitation; swarming in their hundreds—their thousands, indeed—a countless horde of those dull-witted brown Indians, still named Mayas, some four hundred thousand of which constitute the native population of the Peninsula of Yucatan—Yucatan province, Campeche, and Quintana Roo.

  All of them, apparently, were concentrated, pointing, gesticulating, upon the center of the great circle of grassland, upon the giant tree—upon us.

  And, as I looked, shifting my glasses along great arcs and sections of the jungle-edge circle, fascinated by this wholly bizarre configuration, abruptly, with a kind of cold chill of conviction, I suddenly perceived that, despite their manifest agitation, which was positively violent, all those excited Indians were keeping themselves rigidly within the shelter of the woods. Not one stepped so much as his foot over that line which demarcated the forested perimeter of the circle, upon that short grass.

  Chapter 3

  I lowered the glasses at last and walked back to Pelletier. He had not moved. He raised to me a very serious face as I approached.

  “What did you see down there, Canevin?” He indicated the distant rim of trees.

  He listened to my account as though preoccupied, nodding from time to time. He only became outwardly attentive when I mentioned how the Indians kept back to the line of trees. He allowed a brief, explosive “Ha!” to escape him when I got to that. When I had finished:

  “Canevin,” said he, gravely, “we are in a very tight place.” He looked up at me still gravely, as though to ascertain whether or not I realized the situation he had in mind. I nodded, glanced at my watch.

  “Yes,” said I, “I realize that, of course. It is five minutes to three. Wilkes has been gone, up there, three quarters of an hour. That’s one thing, explain it as you may. Neither of us can pilot a plane; and, even if we were able to do so, Pelletier, we couldn’t, naturally, go back to Belize without Wilkes. We couldn’t account for his disappearance: ‘Yes, Mr. Commissioner, he went up a tree and never came down!’ We should be taken for idiots, or murderers! Then there’s that—er—horde of Indians, surrounding us. We are hemmed in, Pelletier; and there are, I’d say, thousands of them. The moment they make up their minds to rush us—well, we’re finished, Pelletier,” I ended these remarks and found myself glancing apprehensively toward the rim of jungle.

  “Right enough, so far!” said Pelletier, grimly. “We’re ‘hemmed in,’ as you put it, Canevin, only perhaps a little differently from the way you mean. Those Indians”—his long arm swept our horizon—“will never attack us. Put that quite out of your mind, my dear fellow. Except for the fact there’s probably only food enough left for one scant meal, you’ve summed up the—er—material difficulties. However—”

  I interrupted. “That mob, Pelletier; I tell you, there are thousands of them. Why should they surround us if—”

  “They won’t attack us. It isn’t us they’re surrounding, even though our being here, in a way, is the occasion for their assembly down there. They aren’t in any mood to attack anybody, Canevin—they’re frightened.”

  “Frightened?” I barked out. “Frightened! About what, for God’s sake?” This idea seemed to me so utterly far-fetched, so intrinsically absurd, at first hearing—after all,
it was I who had watched them through the binoculars, not Pelletier who sat here so calmly and assured me of what seemed a basic improbability. “It doesn’t seem to make sense to me, Pelletier,” I continued. “And besides, you spoke just now of the ‘material’ difficulties. What others are there?”

  Pelletier looked at me for quite a long time before answering, a period long enough for me to recapitulate those eerier matters which I had lost sight of in what seemed the imminent danger from those massed Indians. Then:

  “Where do you imagine Wilkes is?” inquired Pelletier. “Can you, er—see him up there?” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, as artists and surgeons point.

  “Good God, Pelletier, you don’t mean…?”

  “Take a good look up into the tree,” said Pelletier, calmly. “Shout up to him; see if he answers now. You heard me do it. Wilkes isn’t deaf!”

  I stood and looked at my friend sitting there on the grass, his ungainly bulk sprawled awkwardly. I said nothing. I confess to a whole series of prickly small chills up and down my spine. At last I went over close to the enormous hole and looked up. I called: “Wilkes! Oh Wilkes!” at the top of my voice, several times. I desisted just in time, I think, to keep an hysterical note out of that stentorian shouting.

  For no human voice had answered from up there, only, as it seemed to me, a now clearly derisive rustle, a kind of thin cacophony, from those damnable fluttering leaves which moved without wind. Not a breath stirred anywhere. To that I can take oath. Yet, those leaves…

  The sweat induced by my slight exertions, even in the tree’s shade, ran cold off my forehead into my eyes; down my body inside my white drill clothes. I had seen no trace of Wilkes in the tree, and yet the tree’s foliage for all its huge bulk was not so dense as to prevent seeing up into every part of it. Wilkes had been up there now for nearly an hour. It was as though he had disappeared from off the face of Earth. I knew now, clearly, what Pelletier had had in mind when he distinguished between our “material” and other difficulties. I walked slowly back to him.

  Pelletier had a somber look on his face. “Did you see him?” he asked. “Did he answer you?” But, it seemed, these were only rhetorical questions. Pelletier did not pause for any reply from me. Instead, he proceeded to ask more questions.

  “Did you see any ants on the trunk? You were quite close to it.” Then, not pausing: “Have you been troubled by any insects since we came down here, Canevin? Notice any at lunch, or when you took the lunch basket back to the plane?” Finally, with a sweeping, upward gesture: “Do you see any birds, Canevin?”

  I shook my head in one composite reply to these questions. I had noticed no ants or any other insects. No bird was in flight. I could not recall, now that my attention had been drawn to the fact, seeing any living thing here besides ourselves. Pelletier broke in upon this momentary meditation:

  “The place is tabu, Canevin, and not only to those Indians down there in the trees—to everything living, man!—to the very birds, to the ground game, to the insects!” He lowered his voice suddenly to a deep significant resonance which was purely tragic.

  “Canevin, this is a theater of very ancient Evil,” said Dr. Pelletier, “and we have intruded upon it.”

  Chapter 4

  After that blunt statement coming as it did from a man like Dr. Pelletier, I felt, strange as it seems, better. That may appear the reverse of reason; yet, it is strictly, utterly true. For, after that, I knew where we stood. Those eerie sensations which I have mentioned, and which I had well-nigh forgotten in the face of the supposed danger from that massed horde of semi-savages in the forest, crystallized now into the certainty that we stood confronted with some malign menace, not human, not of this world, something not to be gauged or measured by everyday standards of safety. And when I, Gerald Canevin, know where I stand in anything like a pinch, when I know to what I am opposed, when all doubt, in other words, is removed, I act!

  But first I wanted to know rather more about what Pelletier had in that experienced head of his; Pelletier, who had looked all kinds of danger in the face in China, in Haiti, in this same Central American territory, in many other sections of the world.

  “Tell me what you think it is, Pelletier,” I said, quietly, and stood there waiting for him to begin. He did not keep me waiting.

  “Before Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, Canevin, and so set anatomy on the road to present modern status, the older anatomists said that the human body contained four ‘humours.’ Do you remember that? They were called the Melancholic, the Sanguine, the Phlegmatic, and the Choleric Humours—imaginary fluids! These, or the supposed combination of them, in various proportions, were supposed to determine the state and disposition of the medical patient. That was ‘science’—in, the days of Nicholas Culpepper, Canevin! Now, in the days of the Mayo Brothers, that sort of thing is merely archaic, historical, something to smile at! But, never forget, Canevin, it was modern science—once! And, notice how basically true it is! Even though there are no such definite fluids in the human body—speculative science it was, you know, not empirical, not based on observation like ours of today, not experimental—just notice how those four do actually correspond to the various human temperaments. We still say such-and-such a person is ‘sanguine’ or ‘phlegmatic’ or even ‘choleric’! We attribute a lot of temperament today to the ductless glands with their equally obscure fluids; and, Canevin, one is just about as close to the truth as the other!

  “Now, an analogy! I reminded you of that old anatomy to compare it with something else. Long before modern natural science came into its own, the old-timers, Copernicus, Duns Scotus, Bacon, the scientists of their day, even Ptolemy, had their four elements: air, earth, water and fire. Those four are still elements, Canevin. The main difference between now and then is the so-called ‘elemental’ behind each of them—a thing with intelligence, Canevin, a kind of demigod. It goes back, that idea, to the Gnostics of the second and third centuries; and the Gnostics went back for the origins of such speculations to the once modern science of Alexandria; of Sumer and Accad; to Egypt, to Phrygia, to Pontus and Commagene! That gust of wind, Canevin—do you—”

  “You think,” I interrupted, “that an air-elemental is…?”

  “What more probable, Canevin? Or, what the ancients meant by an air-elemental, a directing intelligence, let us say. You wouldn’t attribute all this, Wilkes’ disappearance, all the rest of it, so far”—Pelletier indicated in one comprehensive gesture the tree, the circle of short grass, even the insectless ground and the birdless air—“to everyday, modern, material causes; to things that Millikan and the rest could classify and measure, and compute about—would you, Canevin?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going up that tree after Wilkes,” I said, and dropped my drill coat on the grass beside Pelletier. I laid my own sun-helmet on the ground beside him. I tightened my belt a hole. Then I started for the tree. I expected some sort of protest or warning from Pelletier. He merely said:

  “Wilkes got caught, somehow, up there, because he was taken off his guard, I should surmise. You know, more or less, what to expect!”

  I did not know what to expect, but I was quite sure there would be something, up there. I was prepared. This was not the first time Gerald Canevin had been called upon to face the Powers of Darkness, the preternatural. I sent up a brief and fervent prayer to the Author of this universe, to Him Who made all things, “visible and invisible” as the Nicene Creed expresses it. He, Their Author, was more powerful than They. If He were on my side…

  I jumped for the limb up to which I had boosted Wilkes, caught it, got both hands around it, hauled myself up, and then, taking a deep breath, I started up among those still dryly rustling leaves in an atmosphere of deep and heavy shade where no breath of air moved…

  I perceive clearly enough that in case this account of wh
at happened to Wilkes and Pelletier and me ever has a reader other than myself—and, of course, Pelletier if he should care to peruse what I have set down here; Wilkes, poor fellow, crashed over the Andes, less than three months ago as I write this—I perceive that, although the foregoing portion of this narrative does not wholly transcend ordinary strangeness, yet, that the portion which is now to follow will necessarily appear implausible; will, in other words, strain severely that same hypothetical reader’s credulity to the utmost.

  For, what I found when I went up the tree after Wilkes—spiritually prepared, in a sense, but without any knowledge of what I might encounter—was—well, it is probable that some two millennia, two thousand years or thereabouts had rolled over the jungles since that background Power has been directly exercised. And yet, the memory of It had persisted without lapse among those semi-savage inhabitants such as howled and leaped in their agitation down there at the jungle’s rim at that very moment; had so persisted for perhaps sixty generations.

  I went up, I should estimate, about as far as the exact center of the great tree. Nothing whatever had happened so far. My mind, of course, was at least partly occupied by the purely physical affair of climbing. At about that point in my progress upward among the branches and leaves I paused and looked down. There stood Pelletier, looking up at me, a bulky, lonely figure. My heart went out to him. I could see him, oddly foreshortened, as I looked straight down; his contour somewhat obscured by the intervening foliage and branches. I waved, and called out to him, and Pelletier waved back to me reassuringly, saying nothing. I resumed my climb.