Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  The new arrival followed Tom. He reached him just as Tom reached the man who was tearing into little pieces the last shreds of Elsa’s dress.

  “Where’s your Mauser, you fool?”

  Dowlah! He and Tom became the center of a maelstrom of yelling monks. Dowlah shouted in Tom’s ear:

  “Japs shot the stable-men — took all the best horses — they’re on the run with all the loot they could pack!”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “Damned if I know! Some one. They’d an outpost in a cave up on the mountain. I saw the flash of his helio. Look out! Who’s that? Where’s your Mauser?”

  Chou Wang-Naosuki! Dressed in his yellow lamaistic robe. Silent in the doorway. Stoop-shouldered. Head forward. Scowling. In his right hand an automatic.

  Tom couldn’t draw the Mauser. The monks were pressing him too closely. Dowlah tried to snatch the weapon. Failing, he ducked. Chou Wang-Naosuki drew down his eyebrows, raised his right hand, took deliberate aim at Tom, fired, missed him and killed the bull-lunged fellow who had torn up Elsa’s dress.

  Panic. Imprecations — yells of terror — anger. Every one except the Böns who had their backs to the door scattered in search of cover. They struggled to hide behind one another. Naosuki calmly entered the chapel. Dowlah almost screamed at Tom:

  “Shoot him, you damned idiot!”

  “Any dog can kill,” Tom answered.

  He did draw the Mauser. He whipped it out, thrusting Dowlah aside. The shove forced Dowlah backward, off-balance. A monk tripped him. He fell. Naosuki laughed suddenly — once. It was like a big dog’s sullen bark. He tossed his weapon to the floor at Tom’s feet. Dowlah pounced on it — leaped to his feet — aimed — drew the trigger. Empty! Naosuki had used his last shell. He sneered and walked toward the door under the gallery. The Böns made way for him. One of them opened the big red door. He entered, not looking back ward.

  Tom went through the midst of the Böns with such explosive ferocity that he reached the door before the brass bar fell in place. He charged through, Dowlah behind him, into darkness.

  “Elsa!”

  No answer.

  “Elsa!”

  CHAPTER 35. “Banzai!”

  Nothing but an echo in the darkness. Silence. Then muffled thunder. That sound, and the accompanying warmth, explained itself and the steam that could be seen from far off. Masses of boiling water down below somewhere — one of earth’s cauldrons, obedient to some incalculable rhythm. Tom groped for his pocket flash-light. He and Dowlah were in a tunnel whose walls were coated with a black shiny film of glassy basalt. There were niches in the wall on both sides; there were pottery lamps on some of them, but no lamp burning. Tom shouted again:

  “Elsa!”

  Echo. Underground thunder. Silence. Then some one’s footsteps. Naosuki’s? Somewhere ahead, at an unguessable distance, there appeared a patch of dim light about the size of a man’s hand. Tom strode forward, Dowlah lagging. It turned out to be reflected light, at a turn of the tunnel — dim daylight. It increased. The tunnel made several turns, grew narrower, then wider and opened suddenly into a daylit space so full of steam that it was all whirling whiteness and noise.

  “Grand place for a miracle!” said Dowlah. “Look out for shang-shangs. Can you use a Mauser?”

  Tom answered irritably: “Shut up!”

  Dowlah shoved his elbow. “There’s Naosuki! Go on — shoot! You can’t miss!”

  “Damn you, pipe down, or I’ll kill you!”

  Dowlah giggled: “Write him a courteous letter! Why not? Your name should be Woodrow!”

  Naosuki, silhouetted against whirling white steam, stood framed in the mouth of the tunnel, staring down into the place where the steam came from. Tom hurried toward him. Naosuki glanced backward along the tunnel, turned left and vanished.

  Dowlah clutched Tom’s arm. “Look out!” he said. “I warn you! He’ll be waiting for us around the corner. Give me the pistol. You go forward, and when he jumps out at you, I’ll shoot him!”

  Tom shook him off. He hurried to the spot where Naosuki had stood. It was the lip of a crater, slippery with some kind of glassy lava. Left and right a wet path vanished into steam. The sudden, muted thunder of water boiling underground was almost deafening. There was a surge of invisible water that fell back on itself. Steam belched upward. And then silence.

  “Elsa!” Tom shouted. “Elsa!”

  No answer. He took the left-hand path and followed Naosuki, blinded by the white steam, keeping his hand on the sheer face of the encircling rock wall. The smooth, wet path sloped outward toward the crater. Dowlah slipped and grabbed him, almost dragging him over the edge, but the wall was covered with carvings of monsters; Tom’s fingers caught a devil by the open mouth and hung on. After that he made Dowlah keep five or six paces behind.

  It was all noise — muffled, deadened, ominous. There was a vague smell of sulphurous gas. Scraps of sky appeared, brilliant blue, and here and there, through gaps in the whirling steam, there were glimpses of wet cliffs hundreds of feet high.

  The path widened. It became fifty feet wide. There were stone altars, of onyx, very ancient, in a curved row near the edge of the crater. Grooves on the tops of the altars led to holes through which blood could run off.

  “Human sacrifice!” said Dowlah. “Tee-hee! Kill ’em beautifully! Chuck ’em in and boil ’em, for a meal for devils in the next world! Holy! Holy! Holy! That’s the door to the B6n-po hell, that crater! They’ve boiled your Elsa, I bet you!” He giggled, stepping backward out of range of Tom’s fist. But he needn’t have troubled. He had lost, if he ever had it, any power over Tom’s impulses.

  The carved cliff closed in again toward the crater’s edge, but it sloped backward, letting in more light than on the far side.

  “There he is!” said Dowlah. “Shoot him! Damn you, shoot him! I say, shoot him!”

  A hundred feet up, a half-arch of glistening wet rock, shaped like a pheasant’s spur, curved outward from the cliff and was almost lost to sight in steam above the crater. Hewn steps in the rock face zigzagged upward toward it. On the farthest tip, looking like a ghost in the steam, stood Naosuki, motionless. In his lama’s robe he looked like a high priest. Tom called to him:

  “Naosuki! Do you know where Elsa Burbage is? Your life for hers!”

  No answer. Naosuki took no notice whatever. Suddenly he cried aloud in Japanese and leaped, feet foremost and together, with his robe wrapped tight around him and his right hand raised. He vanished into steam. The muted thunder rose and greeted him. The invisible boiling surge up-hove and laved a smooth wall, falling back upon itself.

  “Banzai!” said Tom, and that time he pronounced it properly. He turned on Dowlah. “That’s more than you’ve the guts to do!”

  Dowlah sat down on an onyx altar, with his head between his hands.

  “All I need is a drink,” he remarked. Then, suddenly recovering his self-control, savagely: “You blockhead! Do you realize there’s nothing now between you and me and what we’re after?”

  There came a cry through the craterous thunder. It sounded far off. Tom shouted:

  “Elsa! Elsa!”

  He began running. He followed the path until it curved under the projecting half-arch. Beyond that it turned left again along a wider ledge. Around that corner there was a door, once painted red, but nearly all the paint had scaled off. It was heavily reinforced with iron. Four feet from the bottom was an iron grille, about ten inches square. It had a huge iron padlock, not very ancient, not very rusty, slick with recent greasing.

  “Elsa !” he shouted.

  “Tom? Oh, thank God!”

  “Coming!”

  He resumed his unhurried mood. He examined the lock, rubbing his thumb along the surface. It bore the legend: Honorable East India Company. 1845.

  “Tom, we’re in here with a shang-shang! Thöpe has fainted. It’s dark.”

  “Half a minute!”

  He put a shot into the padlock. Then another. He found
a rock then and hammered. The padlock broke. The door swung open and Elsa nearly fell into his arms. She was wearing Tibetan clothes, too big for her, with turquoise jewels.

  “Get Thöpe, Tom.”

  “Okay. Watch Dowlah.”

  He groped in darkness, found a leg and dragged out the Tibetan, left him lying, stepped inside again and shut the door. Then he spoke through the grille:

  “Elsa — come on — tell me.”

  She answered quietly, with her face as close as his to the grille: “Tom, please come out of there.”

  “Good girl now. Hang on to yourself. Tell me.”

  “Tom, there’s a passage for thirty feet. Beyond that there’s a cavern with a great pit at the far end. If you look for a long time by the light of the grille, you can see the shang-shang’s eyes on the rear wall.”

  “Okay. I can see them. It’s the last of the brutes. No hurry. If it comes toward me I couldn’t miss it. How did you get in here?”

  “There was a fight in the chapel. About Thöpe — and me. The Böns said, if Thöpe is genuine he can manage the shang-shang. They tore my clothes off and gave me these, and brought us here and left us.”

  “Where’s your revolver?”

  “Noropa stole it.”

  “Okay. Noropa’s dead. Dowlah’s unarmed, but watch him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Damned if I know. Stay where you are, and yell like hell if he starts anything.”

  Tom switched on his little pencil of light and went slowly forward into stenching darkness. To right and left were about a dozen cells hewn in the rock, with doors made of poles set two inches apart. Most of the doors stood ajar. Away ahead in the darkness the shang-shang’s eyes glowed pale opal, as big as soup plates, almost exactly one above the other. All the rest of the brute was invisible. The eyes didn’t move, didn’t blink. They looked unreal, almost like holes in the rock through which a wan light entered.

  At the end of thirty or forty feet the passage widened into a broad cavern and the pin-light picked up the edge of a gap in the floor at the farther end. It extended the full width of the floor and as far as the rear wall. Mutterings came out of it, but no steam. Near the edge of the gap was a naked human corpse, dried up, like a mummy.

  With the Mauser in his right hand and the light in his left, Tom leaned against the corner where the passage opened into the cavern. He tried to trace the outlines of the monster, but it was so huge that the pin-light couldn’t follow its spidery legs into the darkness. Its body was as big as a barrel, vivid green, and foul with what looked like crimson fungus. Its mandibles moved. It was beginning to blubber with foam at the snout. The light annoyed it. It moved.

  Tom fired — two shots, one at each eye. The second shot was probably a miss. The shang-shang curled up like a swatted spider and vanished, writhing, down into the chasm.

  Tom went and looked, but the pin-light couldn’t fathom the utter darkness. He could hear water, but couldn’t see it. He pushed the human corpse into the chasm and turned away, striding resolutely, not too fast, lest horror should make him lose his self-control.

  Dowlah was nowhere in sight when he opened the door. Thö-pa-ga was standing beside Elsa, looking mournful, but twice the man he was when Tom last saw him. In spite of having fainted, there were signs of iron in him, and of self-control. He had more actual control than Tom had at the moment. He was dressed in gorgeous yellow silk, with an embroidered crimson toga. He held out his hand. In his peculiar, stately English he said:

  “Mr. Grayne, I thanking you so much for all this.”

  “Thöpe has been a perfect brick,” said Elsa.

  They were all embarrassed. Tom was watching Elsa sideways. She said nothing.

  “I, who ran away from destiny, am disciplined,” said Thö-pa-ga.

  Tom didn’t know what to say.

  “Where’s Dowlah?” he demanded.

  Suddenly he turned to Elsa and took hold of her and kissed her. He kissed her a long time. She was quite still in his arms, but he could feel her heart thumping as fast as his own.

  “Tom,” she said at last, “you don’t owe me anything. It’s dear of you, and generous, but—”

  He interrupted: “I lied to you like hell. I half knew I was lying. You’re a damned good gallant little woman and I loved you from the day we first met. But neither do you owe me anything. Go and get your divorce.”

  She chuckled, with her arms on his shoulders.

  “Tom, I lied much worse than you did! I believe you meant it, or at least you believed you meant it. I didn’t! Not once, for a single minute. I’ve been all yours, any time you’d have me, from then until now! But have I played fair?”

  He almost crushed her.

  “Thöpe, old fellow—”

  Thö-pa-ga smiled wanly. “Oh,” he said, “I take the Middle Way, I think, from now on. I am no good in the world.”

  “Rot!” Tom answered. “Buck up! But for you, this place would be a shang-shang-ridden nest of lousy propaganda! Thanks to you there are no more shang-shangs. Take the credit for it! Take hold! Clean up! Run the show and root hard for the Tashi Lama. He’s a good man. Work to get him back to Tashi-lunpo. Do a man’s job. Help to keep all foreign devils out of Tibet!”

  Elsa interrupted: “Tom, is it as over as all that? Is it true about Lobsang Pun? Is he here yet?”

  “Let’s go see. Where’s Dowlah?”

  No sign of Dowlah. They returned around the crater amid steam and muted thunder and then groped their way along the tunnel to the great red door. It was locked. There was a roar of voices in the chapel, frantic gong-beats, and a new noise — the triumphant blare of conches and long radongs.

  Thö-pa-ga protested: “Wait here! That man Dowlah—”

  “Ride yourself!” Tom interrupted. “Now’s your big chance. If they opened for Dowlah, they’ll open for us. If Dowlah hasn’t found some liquor he has shot his last bolt. Stand back.”

  He fired three shots at the door and reloaded his Mauser. A monk opened the door. Thö-pa-ga stepped through, then he, then Elsa. The sunlight through the smashed windows was dazzling. The place was a wreck. Monks’ dead bodies lay in pools of blood, in a litter of fallen banners, pictures and broken lamps. No sign of Dowlah. The monks were marching around and around the chapel to a blare of trumpets and thunder of drums. They swarmed around Thö-pa-ga.

  “Your chance!” Tom shouted at him.

  The monks bore Thö-pa-ga away toward the altar. He stood there smiling. There fell a hush, breathless. No other sound than the groan of a wounded monk and the flutter of torn window paper. Then Thö-pa-ga’s voice, ringing clear:

  “Om mane padme hum! Blessed be the Word that goes forth! There are no more shang-shangs! The Thunder Dragon Gate no longer speaks for Evil. Clean up! Clean up!”

  Tom hurried Elsa out of the chapel. In the yard, between the chapel and the monastery wall, stood twenty bearded skeletons in sheepskins, beside scarecrow ponies. Dowlah’s men! On the monastery steps stood Dowlah, staring at them, and they stared at him. They didn’t see Tom and Elsa; even Dowlah didn’t. They weren’t speaking. They were simply staring at Dowlah in resentful silence, and he at them. Dowlah turned his back and walked into the monastery. Tom went up and spoke in Hindustanee to the subadar.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Sahib, that Holiness Lobsang Pun is a bahadur of the old school! Aye, a burra wallah general bahadur! There is the spirit in him. On our way we met him, near that monastery. Lo, he swept us up and rolled us westward! We have marched like men in a dream. He had a hundred monks behind him, and more than two hundred ponies and yaks. That monastery belched provisions for him — aye, and more monks. And he knew where those devils of Böns had cached their ghee and barley meal. Nay, nay, we haven’t starved, nor have our ponies. He marched us thin! He is a magic-maker! That Lobsang Pun Bahadur could conquer the world! If he sleeps, then he sleeps on horseback, and it needs relays of horses in half-hour spells to stagger at such speed benea
th His Honor’s weight!”

  “And the woman — Su-li Wing?”

  “She came, too. She has no more heart for India than we have, with our shame upon us. But we saw no shame in being led by Lobsang Pun Bahadur. Bold he is, and arrogant, and godly. He could make a dead man march to the world’s end! Lo, behold us, sahib, we are all here, not a man is missing.”

  “And now what?”

  “God knows, sahib.”

  Tom and Elsa went into the monastery. They had to step over the legs of monks who sprawled, dead weary, in the corridors. They had loads, but no weapons. More than half of them were asleep on any kind of mat or blanket they had been able to find. Some of them lay like dead men, snoring on the flagstones.

  At the end of a passage there was a crowd of monks out side an open door, through which came Lobsang Pun’s voice, reprimanding, roaring orders. Unmistakably his voice, ringing with energy. In the midst of the monks lay Dowlah, stone dead, in a pool of blood. There was a knife in his back.

  Not a monk had laid a hand on Su-li Wing. She was standing near the door, still wearing her coonskin overcoat. She seemed to have shriveled inside it. She looked uttterly worn out, and years older. But when she saw Tom and Elsa she laughed — metallic — nasal — high pitched — cruel.

  “You wouldn’t give me a break,” she said, “but there’s your Dowlah! He saw me. He knew I did it.”

  She stood aside to let Tom and Elsa enter the room. The Abbot’s dead body lay in state on a table with lighted candles, surrounded by kneeling monks. Lobsang Pun was in a great chair by a table loaded with the monastery records. Monks were on the run with more records. He had some Böns up in front of him, with their hands tied. He was pronouncing sentences, pursing his lips to taste the flavor of godliness and then opening them wide to roar: