by S. A. Sidor
I stopped them from leaving.
Evangeline gawked at my hand on her elbow. She covered it with her own and slid our entwined hands higher up her arm, and then she gave the gentlest, yet unmistakable pull toward her bosom. Her hand felt damp, heated. I almost let her guide me farther. McTroy watched us intently, silent, his mouth slightly open, transfixed.
I knew my mind was not entirely under my control at that point, and I worried about my companions. The drugged smoke lingered in the closed space, like the hazy cloud hovering above a saloon card game. But we were not playing cards.
I took my hand back.
Evangeline stuck out her lower lip, pouting, stamping her foot. She rolled her neck from side to side, as if she’d been on a long coach ride and the muscles had grown stiff. Her sleepy eyes, her swaying… that teasing, playful glare as McTroy gathered her in again. She was under some influence from the smoke.
“Best make our way to the bridge,” I said. “These fumes are sickening me. I fear they may be clouding our judgment.”
Color climbed Evangeline’s cheeks. She appeared on the verge of laughter, unable to hold it in, ready to burst. Giddy. Her right hand conducted an unseen orchestra. Music only she heard. A lock of hair fell over her eyes, and she did not brush it aside. It was beguiling to see her like this, and part of me simply wanted to watch her continue.
McTroy rubbed his face. A string of saliva ran down his chin to his vest.
“I feel it,” she said, sounding serious but also bewildered.
McTroy smacked his lips. “I could use a drink. Otherwise I’m good.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Show us the way to the bridge.”
I took Evangeline by the wrist.
“Why is there a bridge?” She pulled away from me. “Tell me, or I won’t go.”
She found her behavior quite funny and doubled over with the hilarity of it all.
“You’ll go,” McTroy said. “Follow me and Doc. Or we will carry you.”
“I think I would enjoy that very, very much.” She let her weight lean against us.
I pressed my handkerchief to my nose and mouth. “Bend low and try not to breathe the smoke.” Like three drunkards making our way home from a night’s reveries, we stumbled, arm-in-arm, up the staircase, and turned left until we reached a rope bridge over a sable black fissure cut into the earth. Like a knife slashed the hard rock, thin but not too thin, the span no more than crossing a street, but it felt farther because of what existed below: a void that contained, well, nothing – or nothing we could see. It gave off no sound, offered no scent; to reach out and touch it was to caress emptiness itself. The steep sides suggested they had been carved by waters, but the waters had receded ages ago, for no evidence of any flow was detectable. Only a current of air swirled up from the chasm and tousled our hair like a peculiar uncle at a Christmas gathering. I plucked a candle from a nearby sconce and released it over the bridge’s guide rope.
It fell and fell and fell.
I never saw it bounce. The light shrunk to a pinprick and winked out.
Evangeline sat on the bridge, swaying a bit, with her head hanging over the edge.
“Be careful,” I said. “It’s a long way down.”
She waved me off. Simultaneously she had loosened the collar of her dress and unlaced her bodice; she began scooping air to her face like it was water. For modesty and no other reason, I looked away. I found McTroy leaning his head into a wall – eyes closed, skin slack, looking altogether gray. I fanned him with my hat.
“You should feel better soon. I am clearing up now.”
My companions did not answer me. I glanced from one to the other and then across the bridge to the now shut ornate door of what I presumed to be the Temple Underneath. In our quiet respite, the chanting had begun again. Very like the chanting of ordinary, non-Satanic monks until one noticed the jarring rhythms and virtually unpronounceable tongue. They had added drumming. Hypnotic, borne on the blood.
“I am almost myself,” Evangeline said. She coughed once, but didn’t raise herself up.
“Excellent, quite excellent. How about you, Mr McTroy?”
“A slug of whisky might wash this skunk spray from my mouth.”
“In our saddlebags, I’m afraid. But keep breathing deeply.”
He spit and then asked rather gravely, “Are we poisoned, Doc?”
“I believe the chemical compounds in the censors when burned and inhaled produce a trance-like state. You are drunk on devil smoke. But it does not last.”
“Shamanistic practices often employ altered consciousness.” Evangeline pinched and slapped her cheeks as if she had been previously benumbed. “It is not that unusual.”
Ah, the lady had returned. It was good to hear her speaking normally. Though I must admit that I did not dislike her in any state of consciousness I had so far observed.
I said, “Here is the chasm. This is the bridge over it, you see. And there is the door to the Temple Underneath. We are in a good fighting position, don’t you agree, McTroy?”
McTroy nodded. He kept patting his vest, and I cannot help but think he habitually pocketed a liquor flask there. He grunted and grumbled and seemed in genuine physical pain. I saw him gaze backward to the staircase, and he took two shuffling half-steps in that direction before I read his thoughts.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Go back to the cellar for a bottle of wine,” I said.
He looked sideways, grimacing. “I’m only considering options. That’s all.”
“Considering going back for some claret?”
“No!” He stood tall and tilted his head back. “You ever been in a standoff?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Right. See, in a standoff there are considerations. And I am considering them.”
Of course, I knew this was a lie, or at least a partial untruth. He was thinking foremost about drinking. Now that I am an old debauchee myself and more than occasional imbiber of demon liquor, I know categorically what McTroy wanted. I knew it then by intuition if not experience. He wanted a drink. I had to keep him on track.
“One way in, one way out.” I pointed my stick at the door (I found I did fancy having a stick). “Take away the bridge, they can’t cross the gap. Sever these ropes and wait for them. They will have to deal with us. They have no guns. We have guns,” I said.
“I thought you disapproved of guns?”
“I disapprove of my using them. But you are a hired gunman. I hired you.”
“Miss Evangeline hired me.”
“That’s true,” she said, still sitting on the bridge, her legs dangling in nothingness.
“Nevertheless. What else is there to consider? We have them at a disadvantage.”
McTroy crouched and scooped a handful of gravel. He threw it into the ravine.
“It is, for all intents and purposes, bottomless,” I said.
“We don’t know that,” Evangeline said. “We don’t know why it’s here.”
“It’s here because thousands of years ago a river flowed through and dug it.”
She said, “We don’t know why the monks are here, then. Why did they choose this place to build their temple? Perhaps the chasm may serve a purpose other than guarding the chapel.”
“Purpose? What purpose?”
She did not scream.
There was no time for a scream. Like a whip, the tail of the giant worm snapped around her right knee and pulled her down, and in her last second, she turned and I saw her face, the fear alive in it, the sheer terror. There was nothing I could do to stop it.
Then nothing, nothing was all that was left of her. I faced the void where she had been.
The bridge swayed but not that much.
Evangeline was gone.
29
The Ka Door
For a long time afterward, I called her name in a stage whisper, my voice growing hoarse. I don’t know what I h
oped for. That she would crawl up, laughing, and say it was all a joke? That she might escape from the muscular embrace of that fleshy, prickly worm meat as it burrowed her down, down, down into the abyss? Nothing I wished for came back to me, of course, only more silence, and certainly not the woman herself. I shouted for her but once; a full-throated echo answered me, and a hand rested on my shoulder. McTroy.
“You can’t do that,” he said.
“But… but I, she… she isn’t…”
“They’ll hear you, Doc.” He pointed with his chin to the heavy door behind which the monk’s chanting never stopped. The drums were faster now, fast as my heartbeats.
“I want to climb in,” I said. I gestured to the ravine.
“Let’s look,” he said.
I think he did it just to convince me of what he already knew.
McTroy seized a candle in each fist and, hooking his ankles around the rope bridge, lowered his upper half into the crevasse. He did not penetrate far into that oceanic gloom. His outstretched arms revealed twin vertical walls, smooth as bones and webbed with cracks though none much wider than a finger. This hell vent might have led straight to the center of the earth for all we could see: El Gusano’s midnight lair.
“Useless,” I said. “There’s no way to follow.”
Nimbly McTroy contorted himself and soon joined me sitting on the bridge to brood over our next move. I was not afraid of the worm. I was not thinking about him, yet all I was thinking about was him. What would he do with her? If we were going to hunt him, then so be it. The taste of blood was in my mouth. I sought a confrontation, but it was vain of me, immature and reckless, to think we might win any impromptu battle in this alien place where the crawler was perfectly at home. Remember, I was a young man when this happened and young men never figure on their own deaths. So into their graves they go too soon, and the soil makes room for them without judgment. Without McTroy at my side, I might’ve ended up in a hundred different graveyards. He kept me above the ground, and that is but one reason I need people to know about him.
“You want to go back?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You said it before. We can cut this rope bridge. That’ll slow the monk boys down. We take some rope for ourselves and head to the well. Climb out.”
I thought about it. It would work. If our horses were alive, then we could ride home in a day or two. I doubt they would’ve pursued us. We were not that important.
I shook my head.
“I won’t go. Not without knowing where Evangeline is. We don’t even know if she’s alive or dead.”
“We may never know.” He had found the pistol he had loaned to her stuck between the knots of the bridge. Evangeline must have lost it when she was stolen away. Little good it did her in her moment of peril. He spun the chambers and holstered it.
“I want the mummy. I want Kek,” I said.
His cold eyes sparked.
“Revenge? Is that it, Doc?”
“No. I want to take him back to Montague Waterston, to Evangeline’s father. I owe the man that much. He is my sponsor. She was… is his flesh and blood. I couldn’t face Waterston empty-handed, could I? And with so many unanswered questions. No, no, no. It would be too dishonorable.”
“I’m guessing he wouldn’t be paying us either.”
“Not that he should.” I made a point I thought was obvious. McTroy frowned.
“Right, I see that.” From McTroy’s tone I was not sure he saw it very well.
“All this for nothing is a mite unsatisfying,” he said.
“One other thing.” I grabbed hold of the bridge rope strung before me and throttled it, while trying unsuccessfully not to grind my teeth. “I will not leave here without killing the worm.”
“Now you’re talking. Chasing after him isn’t the way to do it. We make a big enough ruckus, he’ll come a callin’. These are his compadres even if he ain’t all human. He must cotton to them ghoulie Mexs for one reason or other. Why hell, they been robbing trains and coaches together. That makes fast friends, doing a thing like that.”
“You were an outlaw then, once upon a time?”
“I did things I’m not proud of,” he said. “But I wouldn’t take them back.”
The first half of his answer sounded like a politician, the second half like a scoundrel about to be hanged. Putting them together somehow made them noble.
“Very well,” I said.
“First thing we do is check that door.”
“Agreed.” Where would the doorway lead? To answers? To more bloodshed? Perhaps to my own doom and destruction? I did not care. I only wanted it opened.
We crossed the hammock-like bridge.
I put my hand on the door. Vibrations, the words of the ritual taking place on the other side, carried through to my touch. I waved my candle back and forth. The door itself was quite extraordinary when viewed up close. Extraordinary… and very Egyptian.
“This cannot be,” I said.
“What?”
“This bas-relief carving, these figures are clearly Egyptian. These here are called hieroglyphs. Writing. Very old, so old I can’t read it. Perhaps, even Old Kingdom.” I could not believe what I was seeing. I knocked my knuckles against the wood.
“Maybe you shouldn’t do that, Doc.”
I knocked louder. The monks’ chanting went on, unabated.
McTroy grabbed my arm. “They’ll hear you…”
“Get off me,” I said. “They won’t hear, not where they are. It is too far.”
McTroy could not have understood what I meant, but he trusted me and let go.
I tapped the wood as loudly as I pleased and moved from the middle of the doorway to the top as high as I could reach, then on my knees to the bottom, and standing, I tapped my way back to the middle again. “Yes, it makes sense. But why here? How did they get inside? Kek’s magic must be powerful. I know what this is,” I said.
“We both know what this is. It’s a door to the chapel,” McTroy said.
I could see that he was wondering if the drugged smoke was still in my head, if I had, after losing Evangeline, lost my mind as well. Indeed, I had not.
“This is a door, yes. But it is not the door to the chapel.”
“Uh-huh.” He sounded puzzled, looked cautious, but willing to go forward.
The wood was old and dry. It had been painted once, red and black. More red than black, in fact, made to look like rock, like granite. But this object was not what it seemed to be. I found a split in the grain and pried at it with my fingers.
“Do you have a knife?” I asked.
“Any hunter worth his salt has a knife.”
“Well, for God’s sake, do you have one I can use?”
McTroy slid a hand under his poncho and when it came out again there was a knife in it. He flipped the pointy end around so the staghorn handle faced me. I took it and stuck the blade into the crack in the door. I wiggled it deep in the wood. The split I had discovered was a separation between two panels of wood, cleverly blended to look natural, real craftsmanship on display, a treasure worthy of a museum.
I worked the heavy steel blade side to side, destroying the ancient artifact.
With a wrenching pop, a corner of the panel broke free, and a puff of yellow, powdery dust sprayed into my eyes. I wiped them. They watered and stung. I squinted and wiped them again. My hair fell over my brow but I did not pause to comb it back, instead I watched the sweat dripping steadily off the end of my nose as elsewhere it poured over my skin. The knife twisted wetly in my hands. I jimmied it upward.
Still the door would not budge.
I hooked my fingers under the panel and bent the board out as far as I could. My fingertips were bleeding, the skin raw, the nails ragged. I brushed blood and splinters on the lapels of my frock coat. I put the knife in my pocket and removed my coat.
The wood was very old, very dry. I was determined to beat it.
I grabbed my stout walking stick fr
om the floor and worked the steel tip of the ferrule under the edge of the panel. I pried at it. My muscles tautened. My arms trembling as I forced the section – and finally broke it – SNAP! – from the frame.
McTroy stepped back, pistols raised.
Hammers cocked.
I took no rest.
The second, third, and fourth panels were easier to pull out. I tossed them, clattering, on the floor, not caring about all the noise I was making. No monks or mummies or giant worms were coming for us. They didn’t care what we did. The chanting on the other side had never stopped. Never once had I interrupted its steady cadence. No one came to the door to confront me. They went on with their ceremony. One of my middle fingers was bleeding heavily, the nail torn to the quick. I sucked on it and spit the metal taste out of my mouth. The hole in the door was big enough to walk through. But I did not go forward.
“This is for the Ka, for the soul,” I said.
“What the hell.”
“The Egyptians built these in their tombs. It’s a gateway, you see. Between this world and the Underworld, so gods and the dead could pass over. The door must always face the west. The Ka would go through this door.” I pounded with my fist.
“I don’t get it,” McTroy said. He pushed at the unmovable thing I had revealed.
I sympathized with him. How could he understand? You see, behind the door was nothing. A wall of bedrock. The Ka door is always a false door. It leads nowhere. Or at least, it leads nowhere if you are human and alive and thus unable to cross its threshold.
30
Labyrinth
New Year’s Day, 1920 (pre-dawn)
Manhattan, New York City
The darkness engulfs.
My noticing it comes in a rush. Like a teacup over a spider it falls on me. The reminiscences of my horrible and historic western adventures are interrupted from their natural flow. I am a New Yorker again: alert, exhausted, sophisticated if a bit scruffy; an elder scientist sitting in his workplace cubbyhole where he does less and less each year, where he is no longer essential to the progress being made by the research team whom he dearly loves – wonderful colleagues and students who cannot be blamed for not being as thrilling as past companions. I am lodged in the grisly hours before a factual but heatless sunrise, precursor to bleak, sleety skies the color of sharks, a lonely time even for those who are not alone, and near desolation for those who are.
