Run to Death

by Patrick Quentin

  I sat up. The tap came again. I pushed my way through the mosquito netting and went to open the door.

  Deborah Brand was standing there, dressed in white pyjamas. The moon-washed hair fell loose around her shoulders. She moved into the room and closed the door behind her.

  “Well, I’ve come,” she said. “Had you given me up?”

  III

  I turned on the light. She dropped down on a little sofa that faced the bed, curling her legs under her. She had put on eyeshadow and more lipstick for a femme fatale effect. It didn’t come off. She just looked pretty and young and slightly absurd.

  She said: “I don’t suppose you have a drink?”

  “No drink.”

  “Then a cigarette?”

  I found a package, passed it to her and flicked my lighter. She took my hand as she lit the cigarette and went on holding it. She looked up at me with her trick of half closing her lids. That was overdone, too.

  She said: “Girls do this with play producers to get launched on Broadway, don’t they?”

  “In the movies.”

  “Only in the movies?”

  She pulled at my hand. I let myself be drawn down. She slid her arms around my shoulders and kissed me on the mouth. Although she tried to make it rough and experienced, there was a sweet girlish flavour to her lips and a freshness to the faint perfume. It would have been rather touching if it hadn’t seemed so contrived. She was trembling, too. It was that unconvincing.

  When she was through kissing me, I said: “What’s your trouble? Want to get launched on Broadway, too?”

  “No,” she said sharply. “No, of course not.”

  “Then why—this?”

  “Why not?”

  “Among other things, I’m a happily married man.”

  Her face was still close to mine. “Is anyone happily married?”

  “I’m afraid that’s too cosmic a question for me.”

  She said: “I came because I wanted to. Because I like you.”

  “You go to the room of every man you like?”

  She flared: “Maybe I don’t like many people.”

  I got up. She lay on the couch, the silver hair gleaming, her red lips parted, her eyes watching me, half angry, half uneasy.

  I said. “Why don’t you come out from behind the Mata Hari and tell me the truth?”

  “The truth? What truth?”

  “What your game is.”

  She jumped up. “I’m not going to stay here and be insulted.”

  “Then go back to your own room.”

  “No.” The glamour pose collapsed. Her shoulders sagged. She was frankly just a young, frightened girl with too much make-up now. “No.”

  I put my hands on her arms and tried to make my voice paternal. “Listen. I’m not an ogre. If you want help, you don’t have to give your all. I’ll help you. For free.”

  She said stubbornly: “I don’t need help. Why should I?”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Why shouldn’t you believe it?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  “Don’t be silly. No one was. Only babies.”

  “In the first place, you lied to me about missing the sightseeing car.”

  She was ready for that. “I know. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I thought it had left.”

  “In the second place, you were scared of every car that followed us. The bus. And then later, when Mrs. Snood drove up, you ducked into the store to hide.”

  “No, I didn’t. I wanted a coke.”

  “You didn’t drink it.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “And you’re frightened of someone here. I’m almost sure. Who is it?”

  “I’m not frightened of anyone.”

  “Just now I thought I saw a man hanging around your window. Is that why you’re afraid?”

  She stamped her foot in a little-girl show of temper. “I’ve told you I’m not afraid of anyone or anything. Why do you have to make such a drama? Is it the play producer coming out?”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you want it that way, you’re not afraid. It’s none of my business. But I have a right to know one thing. How do I fit in the picture?”

  Her silver-grey eyes moved to my face. She blurted:

  “Please, let me spend the night here.”

  “Why?”

  “There are two beds. I won’t be a nuisance. I promise I won’t be a nuisance.”

  It was ridiculous to suspect a frame-up. This was the Mexican jungle, not Times Square.

  I stalled: “It’s not the usual procedure for a man to offer a bed to a girl when she has a perfectly good bed of her own.”

  “Do things always have to be usual?”

  “Unless there’s a good reason why they shouldn’t be.”

  She was still looking at me earnestly. Suddenly her lips started to tremble.

  “I’ll tell you the truth. I did lie. I am afraid.”

  “That’s better.”

  “There in the room alone, with the darkness and the jungle outside and the noises, it’s terrible. I don’t know why. It frightens me. It…. Oh, I didn’t want you to know. It’s so babyish. I hate people to know I’m babyish.”

  It occurred to me that a girl who had lived with an archæologist father, trailing through the hinterland of Peru, should by now have grown used to jungle nights. Certainly, making love to a strange man was an elaborate way of finding companionship. But she might just be telling the truth. People don’t make sense anyway.

  “Please,” she was saying—“please let me stay. Please don’t make me go back to that room.”

  I knew I was probably letting myself in for something I would regret, but I didn’t want to send her off alone to be afraid—even if the danger was nothing more than a lonely dark room. I liked her. That was my trouble.

  “Okay.” I gestured to the other bed. “It’s all yours.”

  She smiled a vivid smile of gratitude. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Any time, I’m sure.”

  She kicked off her mules, found the opening in the mosquito netting and climbed into the other bed. I could see her blurred silhouette through the netting, lying on her back, her hair shining against the pillow. It was like a still from an early Von Sternburg movie.

  Outside in the jungle a bird, probably one of those who were waiting for their lovers, groaned lugubriously. I turned off the light.

  There was darkness and silence. Suddenly she said: “I hate guides. Let’s get up early and see the ruins before the tour begins.”

  “I’m a dope,” I said. “I need instruction.”

  “I know all about it. I’ll be your guide.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “I’m terribly grateful.”

  “I’m glad.”

  For several minutes the silence was unbroken. I heard her sigh and turn over. Then, in a queer little voice as if she was almost asleep, she murmured: “Birds on the road. Waiting for their lovers.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She mumbled drowsily something that sounded like “Joan of Arc crowned him in 1462.”

  “Crowned who?” I asked.

  She sighed again. “My uncle.”

  “That must have been nice for him.”

  “It was. A new Joan of Arc,” she whispered. “But don’t tell anyone. Ever. It’s a secret.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “Wunnerful. Goo’night, sweet prince, and flights of angels….”

  The words turned into a grunt of satisfaction and there was no more gibberish. I was pretty sure then that she was asleep. She was young enough to be able to do that, to fall asleep without care like an animal.

  Sometime, not much later, I fell asleep myself.

  IV

  I was awakened by a hand on my shoulder. Clear sunlight splashed through the window. The m
osquito netting had been pushed back from my bed. Deborah, in her white pyjamas, was standing by my side.

  “You’re awfully hard to wake up,” she said. “It’s almost seven.”

  I looked at her, remembered her and everything about her.

  “The ruins,” she said. “You promised to get up early before the tour begins.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m going back to my room to dress. You’ll be ready, won’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  She studied me solemnly. “Are you always this bad-tempered in the morning?”

  “Whose room is it?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t have to rub it in.”

  She left, strolling casually out of the door as if she didn’t care whether she was seen or not. I got up and washed. My sunburn was better. It hardly hurt at all. I had just finished dressing when Deborah came back. She was wearing the silver-grey suit and clasped the large red pocket-book under one arm. She looked fresh as the morning.

  “Come on,” she said. “No one’s around yet.”

  We went out into the garden. I locked the door behind us. The main house, beyond the orange trees and the scarlet and magenta bougainvillea vines, gleamed in the sunlight. The terrace was deserted.

  “Let’s begin with the big pyramid,” she said. “I know this place as if I’d been here. Father’s been drumming it into me for years.”

  We walked to the inn gates and out into the little road where the cars were parked. Deborah was in exaggeratedly high spirits. I had given up trying to follow her moods.

  A few hundred feet down the road the pyramid which we had seen the night before rose massively above the jungle. The menace with which the night had invested it was gone, but the grandeur remained, grey, cold, forbidding. Soon we came to an outcrop of Mayan cottages. Here, too, there were no signs of life except for a yellow, humble-looking dog which glanced sidewise at us and then started sheepishly to follow us. We went through a gate in the wire fence across harsh, stubbly grass dotted with little yellow flowers. A turn round a clump of bushes brought us directly to the base of the pyramid. Around us, circling the great turfed arena, squatted huge, ruined palaces.

  This was not the group I had visited the night before. They had been on the other side of the inn. Deborah started to point out the individual buildings. The long, massive walls of the Sacred Ball Court, with the Temple of the Tigers humped at one end. The Temple of the Skulls. The Tomb of Chacmool, the great rain-god who had held the destiny of the Mayan race in his sacrifice-hungry hands. And, beyond, the immense Temple of the Warriors, surrounded by the remains of the thousand stone columns which had once housed the market.

  Deborah started to explain the mystic connection between the number of platforms and steps of the giant pyramid and the Mayan calendar. I only half listened, awed by the fact that so pretentious a civilization could have been swallowed so completely by the jungle. Butterflies of all shapes and colours flickered around us. A huge white heron soared through the blue sky past the Temple of the Warriors and away.

  We crossed to the ball court, the yellow dog cautiously following. We climbed the steep steps to the platform of the Temple of the Tigers and looked down on the long court itself. Its walls were carved with elaborate ritualistic panels. In the centre of each wall, high up, was a great stone ring.

  The yellow dog had timidly climbed the steps, too, and stood at a respectful distance, blinking at us and scratching.

  We passed on to the Temple of the Warriors, climbing to the top, where two huge stone serpents with their tails in the air and their snarling heads pressed against the ground stood sentinel before a stone image of Chacmool himself, who squatted on his haunches, his head turned towards the pyramid, a platter on his lap, ready to receive the sacrificial human heart.

  The sensation of evil which had overtaken me the night before began to creep through me again. The walls around us were sculpted with masks of Chacmool’s face with the conventionalized nose exaggerated into great hooked probosces which trumpeted out from the stone like an Asiatic nightmare. I was suddenly appalled by the monstrous stupidity of this dead religion, the gloomy perversity of a cult which had raised thousands of babies in cages and fattened them into suitable sacrifices for a blank-eyed god manufactured out of limestone and bad dreams.

  The yellow dog appeared around the corner, watched us with flattened ears, and then, padding past the serpents, sniffed at Chacmool’s stone buttocks and lifted his leg.

  I felt a lot better.

  Deborah, standing at my side, glanced at her watch. “Let’s go to the cenote. Father was cenote expert around here. He’d kill me if I didn’t bring back a full report.”

  We moved towards the great stone sacrificial table. The pretty little yellow flowers were growing around it. I wondered if they’d grown there when the blood dripped from the altar. Maybe they liked blood.

  “What are cenotes?” I asked.

  “The natural wells they have around here. But this one was the most important in all Yucatan. The sacrificial well. Princes came from miles around to throw in jewels and men and maidens. Particularly maidens. They were always throwing in maidens.”

  We climbed down, wound through the collapsing columns of the dead market and out into the arena.

  “It’s north of the pyramid,” said Deborah. “Off in the jungle. There. That must be the track.”

  We crossed the stretch of open country and turned into a narrow path which led into the heart of the jungle. The tangled vegetation seemed violently alive, as if it was crouching, gathering strength to rear forward and once again engulf the ruins. Butterflies—huge ones now, with sharp, orange wings—shot back and forth. An army of warrior ants was marching in precise military formation across the track. We moved deeper into the jungle, while birds with metallic bell laughs screamed around us. And then the path broadened into a clearing where a crumbling pile of stones marked a destroyed temple. We had reached the Cenote de Los Sacrificios.

  To me the sacrificial well was the most sinister of all the old horrors. Perhaps this was because Nature had made it and yet seemed to have imitated the surly brutality of the Mayan architects.

  In front of us stretched a circular crater about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter—a gaping hole as if, at that point, the surface of the world had collapsed. I moved to its brink. Its walls, white, serrated, dotted with ferns and precariously lodged bushes, plunged in a sheer drop of some eighty feet to green, sluggish water. The sunlight, striking through the overhanging trees, made weird designs of gold and shade. But the atmosphere was one of cold, stagnancy and death. I thought of terrified girls, struggling, screaming, being pitched over the precipitous side. I thought of seconds of silence and then of great splashes.

  Deborah was standing precariously close to the edge, leaning forward.

  “There are skeletons down there—hundreds of them,” she said. “Thompson, the archæologist, did some dredging. Gold, jade, amethysts, and skulls, skulls, skulls.” She paused. “You can’t get out, There’s an underground river, a current. If you fell in, if there was no one with a rope, you’d be dead.”

  “Cheerful prospect.”

  The yellow dog appeared in the clearing, studied us uneasily and then moved into a clump of shade, sitting down heavily and inspecting its paws. Deborah stepped back from the brink of the crater and opened her large red pocket-book. She looked up at me with sudden annoyance. “Damn, I promised father I’d take photographs. I felt the bag and thought I had my camera, but it’s only a book.”

  I was looking at the little mound of stones which had been a temple, wondering what witches’ sabbaths had taken place there.

  “Peter.” She took my arm. I turned to look at her, and I had the strange sensation that her face was suddenly false. “Peter, would you run back to the hotel and get it? The camera? It won’t take five minutes. I did promise Father.”

  She fumbled in the bag. “Here’s my room
key. And…” She took out a small, pocket-size mystery novel with a bright cover. “I was reading this thing in the plane. While you’re about it, take it back, too. It clutters my bag.”

  I put the book in my pocket. I took the key. I tried to analyze what it was that had given me that curious feeling of falseness behind her words. It was as if her whole behaviour since we left the inn, seen in retrospect, had been an act—something put on to lead up to this perfectly trivial request.

  But her young face with its elegant lines and its fashionable blankness told me nothing.

  “I hate to bother you,” she said. “I’ll explore the cenote. I want to, anyway. Go around. Find the best place for pictures.”

  “All right.” I started back towards the trail.

  The dog looked up at me, half rose and then, turning its pale gaze on Deborah, settled back to its paw inspection.

  “Don’t be long,” called Deborah.

  “I won’t.”

  I turned back. She was scrambling round the edge of the miasmatic Mayan crater, something bright and energetic and twentieth century with her scarlet pocket-book and her high, perilous heels.

  When I emerged from the jungle track on to the great arena of the ruins I saw that the life of the day had begun. On the unrestored side of the pyramid two white-coated Indians were hacking at tall weeds with machetes. A little wandering girl was playing round the base of the Temple of Skulls. And in the centre of the grass patch, moving towards me, was a man in a light grey suit.

  As we approached each other, I recognized the manager of the inn. We met and he greeted me cheerfully.

  “Up early, Mr. Duluth.”

  “We’ve been looking at the cenote.”

  “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Very.”

  The little girl started scrambling up to the Temple of Skulls. One of the Indians on the pyramid got bored with working and lay down flat on his back with his hat tilted over his eyes.

  “I’ve got to go back to the hotel to get a…” I began.

  The words stopped, for from behind us in the jungle came a high, woman’s scream.

  I stiffened. The manager swung round, staring at the mouth of the track to the cenote.