by Rufus King
On with the screams!
It was precisely one minute and thirty-seven seconds after three o’clock when Drusilla gave her piercing and terror-stricken scream. It rang in the ears of Ramier and Billy and Anna like a clangorous knell of death. It was followed by an utter silence through which they waited, shaken and trembling, for further sounds of her voice.
None came.
They felt certain that whatever peril she was in was due to inexplicable machinations on the part of Thyrus the Greek. It was all so especially sinister, in that he apparently wished not only to imperil her but to destroy himself as well.
Why, otherwise, should he have deliberately misled Ramier along a path that could only have terminated in explosive disaster?
What the villain seemed to have been after was nothing short of wholesale and general destruction.
Again, why?
Neither Ramier nor Billy could figure it out.
“It is so unreasonable,” insisted Ramier. “It is not only unreasonable, but it is a direct contradiction in fact of Thyrus’s own words. He has been waiting for two thousand-odd years or so for exactly this moment—for the opportunity of being restored to solidity again—and yet, when it comes, it seems to have been his intention to have destroyed that so-longed-for opportunity forever.”
“To say nothing of the rest of our—our former guests, and ourselves.”
“Of course, we may be doing him an injustice. It is quite likely that the data he advanced would have been correct for the set which he constructed in the past, and there may have been no ulterior motive behind his astounding attitude whatsoever. He may be just as upset and as shaken about it as we are.”
“Nobody with a voice like that was ever upset or shaken,” said Billy with conviction. “The man’s a villain at heart, if he’s got such a thing to be one at.”
“Heart,” muttered Ramier, while a suspicious, jealous look came into his eyes. “I wonder—”
“Drusilla?”
“Why not? Can you imagine living with her for eternity?”
“I can’t. I simply can’t imagine living with any woman for eternity, no matter how attractive she might be—or with anyone else either.”
But it was quite obvious that Ramier, in his new-found state of romantic exaltation, could. He played with the thought for a moment—with the astonishingly agreeable thought of bringing back to solidity Duveen and Wilkins and, especially, Thyrus, and of then dissolving himself into a counterpart of his Drusilla. They would have a world to themselves—their own special world—the two of them all alone in an impregnable infinity. “Why not?” he muttered. “Why not?”
“Why not what?” asked Billy, who had grown slightly callous to the extraordinariness of their situation and was beginning to get a little touchy from the effects of the abnormally torrid heat.
“It is nothing,” said Ramier. “An idea that for a minute appealed to me—an idea which would not be fair—”
“To Drusilla?” asked Billy, feeling faintly clairvoyantish as to what the idea was.
“To the world. Our world is but begun. We are on the threshold of a revolution in science. With this experiment as a starting point, who can tell what the next step may be?”
“I wish you’d leave the next step alone and complete this one first,” said Billy peevishly. “You seem to forget that the last thing we heard from Drusilla was a good healthy screech, and she isn’t the girl to screech like that unless she’s in trouble.”
Ramier was at once conscience-stricken, and a bit terror-stricken, too.
“What a fool I am,” he said bitterly. “What a selfish, selfish fool! I must go ahead at once on my own initiative, without help from them, and try to bring them back. There is only one question that torments me—has Thyrus the power to prevent Drusilla from taking her stand on the spot she must occupy in order to receive the full flux of the propagated waves—provided he wants to?”
“Well,” said Billy, “there doesn’t seem to be any special harm, does there, in trying to find out?”
Ramier settled himself at his desk and began to prepare appropriate data for the attempt. The heat of mid-afternoon was intense, more enervating than it had been at any moment since the long period of drought had set in. The murk outside had grown so thick that it was necessary to light the lamps inside the laboratory in order to see.
Anna, who had finished with faintings for the day, bore the heat best. Billy tells me that, although she bore its deadly oppressiveness without a murmur, she was, nevertheless, strangely nervous—in what he calls an “animal sort of a way,” and kept going every minute or so to the door to stare wide-eyed and uneasily up the length of the valley. He asked her, after she had repeated the movement several times, what it was she was looking for.
“Something I feel,” she answered.
“What do you mean ‘feel’?” asked Billy, rather nervous about it in view of his own recent “feels” concerning the voice of Thyrus, and having in consequence a healthy respect for the mysterious emotion.
Anna shrugged, looked at him vacantly, looked up the valley, and then said in a most disturbing sort of a voice, “I do not know. But danger is coming from—there.”
She pointed again toward the mouth of the valley.
“People?” asked Billy, while he went in for a mental parking of more cars.
“No,” said Anna. “It is not people. I wish—I wish, Mr. Billy, that it was.”
Following which, she shuddered.
Billy glanced uncomfortably along the line her finger had indicated. There was nothing strange to see. The thin, steep gash of the valley vanished hotly into haze.
Haze?
Was it haze?
The smell—faint, but drifting surely on the wind—coming toward them from a distance—but coming—coming…
He steadied himself for an instant to quiet the terror that broke loose in his heart. Then he went to Ramier, who was still seated before his desk, and was engaged in preparing the data he would employ in his attempt to bring Drusilla and the others back.“Have you almost finished, old man?” asked Billy in a strained voice.
Ramier waved him away. “You have made me lose my calculation,” he said. “Please do not interrupt.”
“I must interrupt,” said Billy. “How long before you can finish?”
“About three hours, if you will let me alone.”
“Three hours! Look here—if you hurried—if you were to work faster and harder than you have ever worked before in your life, could you get Drusilla and the others back in, say twenty minutes?”
Ramier laughed irritably. “You are crazy!” Then he added with great seriousness, “Surely you know I am hurrying all I can. With Drusilla’s cry for help ringing constantly in my ears, you don’t think I’d delay?” He turned to his papers. “You must not disturb me again.”
Billy glanced apprehensively toward the door. In his mind’s eye he already saw a vision of the danger that was creeping toward them, leaping with death-dealing lingers through its frame. He was in a torment as to what to do. If he told Ramier the truth, it might upset him so much that nothing at all could be done—or it might spur him on to make the effort that would so sorely be required. And in any case, at the end of three hours…
“Just one minute more,” he said. “Tell me—do you smell anything?”
Ramier glanced angrily over his shoulder. “Stop bothering me,” he muttered.
“You must listen to me! Do you smell anything?”
Ramier gave an impatient sniff.
“Smoke,” he said, and returned to his papers.
“Come to the door,” said Billy.
“Will you, in heaven’s name, go away?”
“Come to the door!”
Ramier, startled at Billy’s tone, complied. He glanced indifferently up the valley’s cut.
“Good God,” he whispered, “fire!”
“Now, keep your head, old m-man,” said Billy. “Go back to your desk, and when you g
et there—figure!”
“But the fire? It can’t be over three or four miles away—the wind is driving it toward the valley—it will bottle up the entrance—sweep upon us in a wall of flame—”
“Keep your head, I tell you! The fire is up to me. You get Drusilla and the others back—and get them back before the flames reach the valley’s mouth and trap us.”
“Get help,” said Ramier sharply. “Take one of the cars and round up all the help you can. If this laboratory and the instruments are burned, Drusilla and the others are doomed. Never again might I be able to construct a wireless set that would be in perfect resonance with this one which has made them invisible. I will do my best while you are gone; but I tell you frankly that, unless you check the fire there is not much hope, because I dare not work too fast!”
“I’ll take Anna with me. Her place is out of this.”
“How long before it will be upon us?”
“Don’t know. Can’t judge from here how close it is to the mouth.”
Billy gripped Anna by the hand and told her she would have to run. He led and half dragged her along the bracken-strewn path that twisted and meandered for the two-mile stretch to the valley’s entrance. The smoke swept ever more thickly down upon them.
They were shortly panting for breath, and Anna had to stop for a moment’s rest. Billy glanced pleadingly up at the sky. Its cloudless, smoke-rimmed dryness mocked him. There was no hope of rain. He would have to fight their enemy with men. The desperate need for haste made him sweep Anna to her feet and all but drag her along.
“I stay,” she kept mumbling. “I stay with my Miss Drusilla.”
“You can’t!” Billy kept answering her savagely. “You’d be killed—burned—roasted.”
He drew her demise as luridly as possible, in order to spur her on to greater speed. It had the opposite effect, as he very soon found out. She simply transposed his pictures from her own person to that of her Miss Drusilla and ended, under the stress of the vicariously felt agony of her mistress’s future sufferings, by sitting down in the path and refusing to budge.
“I am going back, Mr. Billy,” she said, while two fat tears found their way down the seams of her rugged, kindly face. “She will be lonely and afraid unless her Anna is with her.”
Billy was at a loss what to do. He was chock full of sympathy and admiration for such unhesitating loyalty, but he was also chock full of haste.
“See here,” he said, “you want to do the best thing for your Miss Drusilla, don’t you?”
Anna nodded dumbly.
“Then get up on your feet and come along with me. You know the servants at Duveen’s place and I don’t. Well, they’ll believe you if you tell them that Miss Duveen is in danger, and will come. They might refuse me. Now do you see why I need you?”
Anna saw. She got hastily to her feet and without any further words kept pace with Billy in their frantic rush for the valley’s mouth.
Gust after gust of the hot wind warned them that they must hurry; gust after gust of the choking, searing wind that already bore to them a trace of cinders.
They had covered almost the length of their journey when, without warning, the wind died down. Nothing moved or seemed to breathe. A drift of fine ash hung irresolutely in the air.
Within the next hundred yards or so they should come within sight of the entrance to the valley and the open road along which they must race on their errand of life and death.
Just a hundred-odd yards more…
Then they heard it—the thin, fierce, unmistakable hiss of crackling timber.
With a spurt, they rounded the last curve in the path. Not a hundred feet distant lay the road. For an instant they saw its narrow, whitish strip of dirt and, even as their heat-burned eyes caught sight of it, it was blotted out.
By flame.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FIRST RETURN
The valley was closed.
Stunned, maddened by the heat, Billy seized Anna and dragged her, gasping and choking, back along the path they had just covered. What there was to do, he did not know, for little short of a miracle could save them. He found a fleeting drop of comfort in four sharp reports that burst at irregular intervals. At least the problem of the parked motors was finally disposed of.
There was a faint hope—the sort of hope one feels when plunged into the lowest abyss of despair—that Ramier had somehow succeeded and that Drusilla and the others had already been restored to solidity. Even if this were so, with the pursuing wall of flame licking up all life in its path, to what a fate!
Would it not be kinder to leave them as they were?
But in contradiction to this, ringing ever in his ears was the terror in Drusilla’s screech. It made him believe that even the blotting wall of certain death would be preferable to whatever torment it was that she had been called upon to face.
How they ever reached the laboratory again still remains a mystery to Billy. The fire, because of the sudden falling off of the wind, was advancing behind them at a comparatively slow and measured pace. As Billy stumbled into the shack, the first thing he saw was Ramier still bending intently over his desk.
Hope, indeed, seemed gone.
“Time,” Ramier murmured to Billy brokenly. “I must have time!”
“We will do our best, old man. Just keep right on and leave the rest to me.”
Anna sank wearily down upon a cot. She started to pray. Billy at once saw that she could be of no help to him. He closed the windows and fastened them tight, to keep out the smoke and cinders that shortly would be drifting in. He took a pickax in his hand, and with a prayer of his own in his heart, he muttered a general and casual, “S’long, folks,” and stepping outside, closed the door.
He looked at the pickax. He looked at the heavy curl of smoke that poured up from the farther end of the valley. Then he spat upon his hands and stepped out to meet it.
If you remember my previous description of the place, the laboratory was built in a pocket that had been hollowed out by the waterfall before the course of the waterfall had been diverted. The rear and both sides of the shack were flush with the rock walls, and the roof sloped upward at a sweep pitch from the front wall and joined, above, with the rear cliff.
A calculating glimpse at the distant curtain of smoke convinced Billy that he would have about an hour’s time to work—unless the wind sprang up again.
He at once saw the futility of, single-handed, starting a backfire that would be even faintly effective; nor had he the time, to say nothing of the requisite dynamite, in which to blast a protective strip. In fact, no ordinary preventive measures for checking a forest fire were open to him.
It was more with a view toward arranging a last-minute avenue of possible escape—on the bare chance that Ramier should bring back Drusilla and the others in time—that led him to look for footholds on the cliffs that rose above the laboratory.
It is a well-known fact that difficulties which seem impossible under normal circumstances become possible in moments of dire necessity and peril. Everyone has had at least one such experience that has either happened to himself or else to some friend whose word he can, within reason, trust.
With the aid of the pickax, Billy started to scale the cliff.
It was the pickax which made the feat possible. He stuck it into crevices which were, let us say, fortuitously placed in the extreme, and so managed to haul himself up over the longer stretches of bare rock to various footholds of sorts. Any mountain climber will understand perfectly what I’m talking about.
After seven minutes of the stiffest sort of climbing, he reached the crest and hauled himself over on to the flat top. Having thus charted out his avenue of escape, he prepared to start down again in order to act as a guide for the others.
He paused an instant to take in the view, which, from the crest, afforded an excellent and terrifying panorama of the fire’s progress. The flames stretched in evil spurts across the valley and extended in fan-shape fashion
well out into the adjacent woodlands.
As Billy watched, fascinated, he doubted whether they could escape at all, even if everyone did reach the summit where he sat. Would they still have time to flee before the flames? A puff or two of wind would undo them.
He decided that, looked at from any angle, the game was up.
As they could not escape, they would have to stay. His eye glanced glumly about for the most comfortable place to be burned up in.
It was at that moment that he thought of the waterfall.
They could stand beneath it!
There surely must be an air pocket, all waterfalls had one, even Niagara, and people were charged all sorts of prices for being permitted to stand in them. And even if this particular falls should be shoddy enough not to have one, they could at least stand beneath it and hold their breaths until the flames had swept past.
His legs had swung over the cliff when a second and more brilliant inspiration gave them a sharp yank and sent them flying back on to the ledge again.
He ran to the wall that had been built by the shack’s original owner for the purpose of diverting the stream and, without further ado, began to attack it with a pickax. Fortunately enough, the wall had been built many years before, and Billy found it almost in a state of decay. It seemed to need, as he says, little more than a suggestion to knock it over.
He started to work, just the same, like one possessed.
His intention was to make a break in the wall that would be large enough to permit the stream to pour back into its original channel, whereupon the falls would return to their proper place and send a sheet of water down upon the roof of the laboratory. This would interpose a protective curtain between it and the fire—a protective curtain behind which the apparatus for restoring Drusilla and the rest of them would be safe from harm.
With every swing of the pickax Billy could almost feel the flames creeping nearer and nearer. He had already made a fair impression upon the wall, and a trickle or two of water was starting to filter through it, when a succession of warm puffs against his cheek caused him to turn around.