The sentry stepped in, stood at attention just within the door.
"I believe you are from San Juan Obispo?"
"Yes, su."
"You know the s«i^ called Tierra de los Muertos?"
"Very well, sir. It is just on the other side of the rise from us."
"Is it inhabited? Does anyone live in it?"
"Not a soul, sir. Not a living soul."
"That will do. Back to your post." He waited until the door had closed, then he heeled his hands to the comers of his desk, about to rise and terminate the interview.
"Has he ever been in it himself, though, that man?" Fredericks asked quietly.
"Nobody has. Nobody goes there," the minister snapped, the seat of his pants remaining poised clear of his chair.
"I have," Fredericks said.
The minister's pants rejoined the chair. "What did you say?" he faltered.
Fredericks went on speaking quietly, though his hand, still on the desk, was trembling slightly, from some inner emotion.
"Tell rne, it is necessary to obtain a permit to engage in certain archaeological work, is it not? And a record is kept of the permits granted, the number of people involved, the destination, as well as the dates of departure and return."
"All that is true, but I have not got them here."
"But they are available to you, is it not so? Let me trespass on your time a moment longer. Inquire if there was not a permit granted covering a party of two, giving the names of Allan Fredericks and Hugh Cotter, in the late spring of 1946. And the date of return of the same expedition." He stopped a moment. "I urge you to do this," he added.
The minister stared at him a long moment. Then he executed another of his snap judgments. He decapitated the telephone on his desk with a slashing motion.
Cotter, who had taken no part in the interview, caught Fredericks' eye. "Look out," he cautioned under his breath.
"There isn't any other way," was the cryptic answer.
"Read it back to me," the minister was saying.
There was a wait. He picked up his cigar, then interrupted himself to set it down again, untouched. "And what record is there covering the refertm? Read that."
Suddenly he had replaced the phone as abruptly as though he had .received an electric shock from it. His swarthy face had turned a shade paler. His collar bothered him.
"They have on record the fact that such a permit, to enter this valley, was granted to two men, Fredericks and Cotter, on April twentieth, 1946. In other words, two people, both males. The record goes on to indicate that the same party of two returned from there on September fifteenth, 1947, bringing out with them various relics, including a mummy case or sarcophagus, which they had obtained from a tomb they had excavated. All objects of intrinsic value, such as ornaments of gold or silver, they were compelled to turn over to the authorities, in conformance with the national law governing this matter. However, for the mummy case, after a brief official inspection, which showed that it contained nothing but the remains of a young girl, in a remarkable lifelike state of preservation, they were granted an export license, and allowed to carry it out of the country with them aboard ship, there being no museum or other such institution in this country, to take an interest in it."
"That girl," said Fredericks quietly, "was not dead. No wonder her 'remains' appeared to be in a lifelike state of preservation. She was a victim of sleeping sickness, or at least a jungle malady very close to it in form. She was fed intravenously, not only during the whole trip down from the mountains, but also during the entire shipboard voyage to the United States. Furthermore, the 'official inspection' of the mummy case was quickened, you might say greased, by payment of five hundred American dollars to five various officials who granted the export license. The lid was just lifted, then put right back on again."
The minister poured himself a drink. It made a lump in his throat going down. His collar still bothered him. He found it warm; his forehead had a satin gloss.
"Wha-what are you saying?" he croaked. "How can you know this? Who are you?"
"Because I am the archaeologist involved, I am one of those two men who brought her out of there in that mummy case. She was not dead then, but she was at least comatose. And she is not dead today, and very far from comatose. She is as much alive as you are, sitting there, or as I am sitting here. Furthermore, I am here to report to you that she has gone back there, to where we first brought her from, and dragged with her a poor unfortunate devil who, according to the civil law of the United States, is her legally married husband!"
The minister was no longer sitting. The minister was very much on his feet, and in a state of gesticulating excitement' almost bordering on frenzy. They had to keep switching their heads this way and that to keep his face and figure in front of their eyes.
"But my official capacity is involved!" he spluttered. "This comes under the jurisdiction of my department! This must not come out! This must go no further! A five-hundred-dollar bribe! A living girl taken out of a region that I have reported over and over to my superiors is uninhabited! Are you trying to get me dismissed? Are you trying to make me a liar, a grafter?"
"She's not the only one," Fredericks said, clenching his jaw grimly. "There's a whole tribe of others in there. Small but complete. Anywhere from three hundred to five hundred souls. If you didn't know it before, I'm telling you now."
"It's not true! It's a lie!" the minister thundered, banging his desk. "My department never took five hundred dollars from anyone! Nobody living was ever brought out of there, because nobody living is in there! My department says so! I say so! I will back that up to the full extent of my authority!"
He dashed off something on a slip of paper, went to the door, handed it to the soldier standing out there, and came back again.
"Wait outside. Cotter," Fredericks said in an undertone to his companion. "I don't like the turn this is taking. I think one of us ought to safeguard his freedom of movement, to be in a position to help the other if it should become necessary."
"Who's he?" the minister demanded suspiciously, as Cotter made the move to get up and go.
"Just a traveling acquaintance," Fredericks said. "He's not involved. He doesn't know of the affair."
"He overheard this conversation, didn't he?" the minister suggested craftily.
"He doesn't understand Spanish." Fredericks signaled surreptitiously to Cotter to hasten his departure, while the chance was still available.
Cotter closed the door after him and sat down on the bench outside in the hall again.
Suddenly the soldier who had been sent with the message returned at a jog trot. Behind him, in grim intent-ness, came a number of other people, not soldiers, but wearing some less identifiable garb. Two of these were carrying a pair of poles between them, underarm, with furled canvas around them.
There was a brief, voiceless, but strenuous scuffle from the minister's office, moments after they had all gone in there. But when Cotter rose and tried to re-enter, the soldier suddenly presented his rifle, muzzle forward. "Keep out," he warned.
Suddenly the party came out again. The two poles had been expanded to the width of a stretcher, and within the canvas belly of this, strapped to the point of contortion, and even gagged, lay the helpless, heaving form of Fredericks.
Cotter tried to halt them, only to be violently shoved aside and flattened against the wall.
"What are they doing to my friend? Where are they taking him?"
"To San Lazaro," was the ominous, tight-lipped answer from the man trailing at the rear of the grim procession.
"What's San Lazaro?" Cotter caught him by the arm to make him stand a moment and answer. "The jail here?"
"Much worse. From the jail they come out again, sooner or later. From San Lazaro, never. It's the house of the one-way doors. The asylum for the hopelessly insane."
"But he's not insane!" Cotter cried out in desperation.
"He will be," the man said. "So what's the difference—now
or later?"
"And him," said the livid-faced rninister, who had been listening from the doorway, "you can take to the jail."
Two soldiers promptly pinioned Cotter by the shoulders. "For how long, sir?"
"That is difficult to say," admitted the minister. "Until he forgets the Spanish that he did not know when he was a witness to this unforgivable scene. Three years? Five? Who can tell? It takes longer to forget a language than it does to learn one."
"I'm an American citizen!" Cotter bawled in terror from the far end of the corridor.
"Just enter him under the name of some inmate who has already passed away," the minister added. "If he's not booked under an American name, who can tell whether he's an American or not? These little mistakes will happen."
Chapter Twenty
It seemed as if this journey through darkness into the center of the earth had been going on forever, and would never end. And yet it might only have been an hour or less. The trend of the tunnel was steadily downward. The angle was not too acute to maintain equilibrium, but just enough to throw the upper body slightly off balance and give the effect of hastening the footsteps involuntarily, so that they had to be checked.
It was man-made, there seemed no doubt of that. Perhaps an original fissure or fault had been made use of here and there; these had been broadened, hewn to rectangular shape, linked together to form a continuous passage.
The darkness wasn't absolute any longer. Those at the head of the procession had long ago, as soon as the aperture was closed behind them, lighted wandlike tapers, perhaps formed of some sort of slow-burning reeds or dried stalks. To Jones, from where he was, these small, separate petal-like lights blurred into one single haze of radiance, for they were borne single file and hence tended to coalesce. At least they lighted the way. Though they gave off very little smoke, still even that little was enough to alter the already stagnant air for the worse. He coughed repeatedly, but whether from the effect of these small flame tongues far to the front, or merely from the desiccated dust raised throughout this unaired passage by the trampling of the many feet before him, he could not tell.
Once there was a peculiar series of halts and starts thrown into the even progress of the party, each successive one traveling down its length, as when a string of cars is jostled about in a freight yard. He couldn't tell just what its cause was until he himself had finally reached the focal point of it.
In a groove worn down one side of the tunnel wall a thin jet of water was running steadily downward, almost like a solidified crystal rod, it was so silent and motionless. Each man in turn had stopped to scoop and drink a palmful or two at it, thus halting the entire line behind him. Jones stopped likewise when the figure before him had gone on, searching for it with his unaided mouth, for the binding of his hands denied him the use of them. He half expected to be thrust roughly ahead, but he was let be for a moment, long enough to find it, like an animal nuzzling for a drink, and to let some of the water run into his avid open mouth, and the rest of it by default run down his neck and chest. Then he was pushed on.
The first warning he had that the journey was nearing an end, or at least reaching some sort of climax, was when the cohered lights ahead began to fan out, so that they could at last be distinguished separately, as if the passage had widened down where they already were and the party's heretofore rigid single file was being broken up. Then the lights began dipping down out of sight one by one, and when they came aloft again they had been transformed into more robust full-flamed torches. Every moment the light ahead grew brighter. The confined walls of the tunnel suddenly seemed to split open as he, in liis turn, reached the latitude where this had taken place, and suddenly they were in a great stone burial chamber, hewn out of the living mountain.
It was honeycombed with niches hewn out of the rock walls, the great majority of them mortared up flush with the surface they were set into, so that they could scarcely be distinguished any longer. Others had been hacked open, a residue of telltale mortar clinging to their sides and giving them an irregular rough-edged shape, and peered empty into the torchlight, like eyeless sockets. One or two of the niches were in a midway condition; they had been broken open, or at least had had cavities made into them, without being emptied out. In these last could still be detected grisly, age-old mummified forms, with little or no relation to the human cores they contained beneath the scarified linen bandaging. About their feet, when the mortar had been rent sufficiently far down to expose the entire sarcophagus, were ranged earthen bowls and jugs that must have once held maize and fruits.
Above all of these niches, the desecrated and the undisturbed alike, were affixed masks, each one representing the individual whose final resting place was directly below it.
On one side of this crypt, stone steps rose in slow gradation to form a sort of dais against the wall. The niches, in turn, followed this up, each one that gave out upon it being a step higher than the one before. The topmost one of all was unusually elaborate, the mask over it seeming to be of beaten gold, with rays striking out from it. The lineaments were those of a rather hawklike, forbidding old man. The sepulcher itself, in this case, had been undisturbed. On the far side of this the niches slowly descended to floor level again, as did the steps of the platform. So even death in this place, it seemed, had its ranks and honors.
About the floors of this communal necropolis, lying in the comers of it, was a litter of refuse. Broken jugs and pottery, of the same sort that still remained intact in some of the sarcophagi; rubble and chunks of mortar that had been hewn out of those broken into; and even several complete skeletons, as well as numerous fragments of others. One skull, detached from its body, was propped squat upon the floor, its grinning teeth seeming to bite at the ground that supported it. A slender, gray-green amazingly long snake had died here, in one place, amidst all the litter, and lay in inert convolutions, just as it had last ceased to move. But then when his eyes had traced its intricate form along to one end, they came upon a small bulb-shaped appendage. It was not a snake, had never been. It was a section of rubber tubing, part of some sort of photographic apparatus for taking time-exposure pictures. His mind, already buffeted by too much strangeness, could give this no meaning for a moment.
Nearby was another bafling object. This was a large packing case of ordinary unpainted wooden slats. But slats of white, planed, modern wood. The sort of case in which suppHes or tools or equipment are habitually packed. The sort of case that is to be seen on any railroad siding, on any pier, all over the world.
It was no longer intact. It had been badly battered and trampled upon. But one of the splintered slats still bore upon it the initials "A. F." in stenciled Roman capitals.
His mind kept alighting on this fact like an intoxicated grasshopper. Initials in Roman capitals. In Roman capitals. Here in this place of hieroglyphs. "A. F." Allan Fredericks.
It was as though strangeness, wearied of tormenting him in its own guise of strangeness alone, were now bringing to bear the added variation of familarity-in-strange-ness.
He told himself dully: He was here before me, in this place; that man from whose house I stole her, up in the faraway States. I stole my own death from his house that night.
And she belongs here, in this place.
And now she has returned to where she belongs, to where he found her, dragging me after her, captive, to be immured or sacrificed.
He tLimed to look at her. The torches made a ring aroimd her, bathing her in quivering topaz light. She went slowly upward, step by step, while the rest remained below. None came after her; she ascended alone. The way
she moved was like a dancer. A rhythm of religious penitence. Head thrown back, arms stiffly extended rearward from her body. The grace of age-old cermony, instinctive in her blood and not learned by rote, swayed her every movement.
Then she fell upon her knees and, bending, swept her hand across the stones she knelt upon. Then raising it just over her head, she let the age-old dust it vhad
collected fall upon her glossy dark hair, in atonement. The dust of the place she belonged to, the dust of the mountain and the valley she had sprung from.
Then slowly she allowed her forehead to incline until it rested flat upon the stones, and stayed that way, arms outspread, as if to say, I am back, I have returned, to the sealed-up sepulchers of her tribal ancestors before her.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Minister of the Interior was paying a private visit of inspection to the office of the director of the insane asylum of San Lazaro. A very private visit, strictly nonofficial, you might say.
"Bring in Two-twenty," the director ordered.
The director was a spindly little individual with a massive, partly bald skull, whose rimless glasses gave him the aspect of a mousy little clerk or pedant. From his appearance, it was hard to believe he held complete autocratic power of life and death over scores of unfortunate human beings. His feet barely reached the floor from the swivel chair in which he sat, and he wa§ continually blowing his nose into a large cabbagy handkerchief, far more often than there could have been any real need for.
The office, furnished in a musty nineteenth-century style, was abnormally quiet while the two of them sat waiting. Not a sound penetrated it, either because of the distance at which it lay removed from the rest of the institution or because of the fortress-like thickness of the walls throughout the entire building, which had helped gain it its reputation of being a living tomb. And yet this very silence defeated itself, made one conscious of the presence, close at hand but unseen, of dozens upon dozens of tormented beings, crushed and mute and agonized. The place was shot through with macabre undertones. It reeked of stealthy things, kept from the light of day. Souls dying inside bodies that went on living.
The director said, between nose blows, "This man was brilliant no? An archaeologist? Too much brilliance is not good. Too much knowledge. It can soften the brains. Sometimes it may end up this way."
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