The Complete Novels

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The Complete Novels Page 93

by Don Wilcox


  “You’re wrong there, Pudding Puss,” said Maxie making a positive gesture with his short flat hands. “Danger stalks outside our window. If any man would sneeze at the wrong time, our game would be over. No danger? Hell, we’re scared silly.”

  Maxie stayed with me, and by the next afternoon, with a couple of clouds for luck, we were back at the Green Tooth Mountain.

  We ascended to the pinnacle of the tower at sunset, and there we found what I assumed Wells had missed on his survey four days before. There were three or four triangular breaks within thirty feet of the top of the spire.

  These openings were large enough to admit us. We walked in, stood upright.

  Our path led downward in what Maxie described as a cinnamon-roll tunnel. Apparently these stone formations had formed in a violent whirl of molten rock, the cooling process and the weathering of centuries had eaten out these curving passages.

  I stooped to examine what I thought was a thin sliver of metallic rock on the floor. However, it proved to be a very different sort of object. I picked it up.

  “Some clues of Wells?” Maxie asked. “We are on his trail, I hope, I hope.”

  “Could be,” I said, pocketing the object. “What’s this you were telling me about the wingmen not knowing these mountains are hollow?”

  “Hell, maybe they do know,” Maxie shrugged. “Maybe they’ve had me and the gang in cold storage.”

  I started climbing down through the passage. For a moment he hesitated.

  “Are you sure this is the trail we want? What did you pick up there?”

  “This,” I said, and showed him the small, trim orchid-colored feather.

  CHAPTER IX

  Cinnamon Roll Tunnel

  “Some on and spill the beans,” said Maxie. “You’ve been holding out on me for two days. Why did we come here?”

  “To look for Wells.”

  Maxie snorted. “You sound like a stuck record. That’s all you’ve told me the last two days. For awhile I believed you. But the farther we went the more it didn’t make sense. Why would Wells come all the way across the flat, and then suddenly turn around and go all the way back? Or did he? If he did, why didn’t we find his tracks?”

  “He flew back, Maxie,” I said.

  “Stop kidding.”

  “That’s straight goods. One of the winged folks kidnaped him and made off with him. She flew straight toward this mountain. The least we could do is come back and try a rescue.”

  “She? She? Who’s she? Don’t tell me you and Wells have been getting acquainted with the female natives!”

  I hated to go into that angle of Wells’ and my experience. “It’s this way,” I began reluctantly. There I stopped. Peering out through the mouth of the tunnel I saw, away to the south, three or four of the winged creatures floating along against the sky. Maybe they were coming our way, maybe not. Anyway I took the dodge while I collected my thoughts. “We’d better find some water, Maxie, and get ourselves hid. These sky men come fast.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  He started for the depths as if he knew this path by heart. I tried to call him back.

  “Hell, man, not so fast,” I yelled. “I can’t vouch for what we’ll find down there. We may run into a nest of them. You saw this feather. It’s dollars to doughnuts this feather came from the winged beauty that swept Wells off his feet—er—”

  That stopped him.

  But I wished I hadn’t said it that way. Maxie’s quick memory would come back to that remark. I tried to change the subject. “Speaking of doughnuts and dollars,” I said, panting as I caught up with him, “I’m still carrying a good American fin, and don’t think I wouldn’t trade it for a dozen doughnuts—”

  “Cut it!” said Maxie. “Ain’t I homesick enough already? Talkin’ about it don’t help.” He clambered on down through the rocks. The tunnel opened wider and became more comfortable, both in temperature and roominess, with every step. But it was getting real dark and we had to slacken our walk to a crawling pace.

  We lowered our voices to whispers. I had a premonition that we might burst in upon a powwow of wings and appetites at any moment. But Maxie was used to coming and going through a twisted passage of this sort, and with his confidence we wormed our way down like a pair of rattlesnakes bent on evicting a family of prairie owls.

  We heard no voices, human or halfhuman. We kept descending until we must have been lower than the level of the desert flat outside. I lost all count of the curves.

  The path became tougher against our hands and knees, presently. Through a wide, gently graded arc we moved from blackness to blackness. A subterranean river no wider than a beer barrel had wound through here at sometime in the past, and then gone dry.

  “Listen?” said Maxie. “What do I hear?”

  It was a funny little gurgling sound, and at first I suspected it was the laughter of a female. But that’s how a fellow’s disturbed imagination can play on harmless echoes.

  It turned out to be a small subterranean stream, cutting along at a swift pace. We practically crawled into it in our eagerness.

  It flowed, fresh and cold, at a level a few inches below that dry watercourse we’d just traversed, which meant that this was the same old river, keeping busy making itself newer and deeper channels.

  “Glory be,” said Maxie, splashing his cupped hands into the water. “I can drink it dry and then bathe in it till it turns to mud—”

  “After which you’ll fill your canteen, I suppose.”

  “The name of this river is Hammerstein,” said Maxie, “named after its discoverer, Mrs. Hammerstein’s little boy, Maxie.”

  “Why not call it Max?”

  “And have you spell it M-a-c-’-s? No you don’t. You go discover a river of your own.”

  “Then that dry one we just came through is mine,” I said. “I’ll name it after my prohibitionist grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather didn’t drink? Now, wait a minute. Is my memory slipping, or didn’t you tell me a story once about him winning a tavern contest?”

  “Granddaddy Patrick McCorkle swore off,” I said proudly—and I wished it hadn’t been so dark, so Maxie could have seen the light of nobility in my face. “He swore off at the age of ninety-two—wiped the slate clean and started life over as a Prohibitionist. And died ten days later.”

  “Well, well, well,” said Maxie, feeling deeply contented over our good luck. We drank, and filled our canteens, and treated ourselves to cool baths that felt darned good to sore muscles.

  “So here we sit,” said Maxie, “at the conjunction of McCorkle and Hammerstein rivers—”

  “No time for philosophy,” I said. “This is a dangerous place. Anyone who enters this cinnamon roll tunnel is going to come down to water. I happen to know that—that one of the winged creatures already knows the way to this water.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she filled our canteens.”

  “She—that same she?”

  There I was with my foot in it again. This time Maxie wouldn’t let me off. We tramped back through the darkness and he began questioning me. About halfway up the spiral we found what seemed to be a reasonably safe hiding place.

  “So she filled your canteens?” Maxie pursued. “And she swept Wells off his feet. And she carted him off—and he didn’t pull a gun and shoot her—or even clip her wings to make her an outcast. That’s our own Lieutenant Wells, the man who has many a German and a multitude of Italian prisoners to his record. Tell me, Mac McCorkle, what goes on with our lieutenant?”

  “He was sick,” I said.

  “Yes, I think so, in the head. The boys aren’t going to like to hear about this.”

  “I know it.”

  “The boys don’t like these winged beasts that feed on human flesh.”

  “I know it, damn it.”

  “They haven’t forgot Biddle and Charrington—”

  “He was sick, I tell you.”

  “So he was sick,”
said Maxie. He was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “So you think she brought him here. You figure she may have hidden him somewhere in these caves?”

  “She flew this way,” I said. “Whether she took him back to the others for a feast, or whether she dropped him in the bushes outside this mountain I wouldn’t know . . . What are you doing?”

  “Getting some matches,” said Maxie. “We’ll take a look around.”

  All around us were stalactites and stalagmites—a wonderland of fantastic shapes and colors. The chamber beyond our hiding place was about as big as one of the school rooms you remember from childhood; not as big as a church, but spacious enough to throw back weird echoes, even when you only whispered. You could see at a glance that the passages followed a definite pattern. Those to our right spiralled upward, those to the left, downward. Some of them, according to Maxie’s experience, might lead to dead ends. These occasional chambers along the way were spots where three or four of the cinnamon roll tunnels had happened to converge.

  Our hiding place didn’t look quite so good by match light, and we changed to another, an alcove shaped like the inside of a football with one end chopped off. It was a very comfortable nest, in fact. But it happened to contain a few scraps of feathers.

  Now a bed would have been most welcome, but a feather bed—no.

  We skipped back to our first lair, twelve or fifteen feet away. There wasn’t a sign of a feather in it. We held matches to all the niches to make sure.

  “All right,” I said. “Here we camp. Tomorrow morning we’ll search the outside of this peak. If we haven’t found him by tomorrow night we’ll change our strategy.”

  Maxie groaned uncomfortably, but he finally bedded down against the rock. “Mac, are you sure he wants to be found?”

  “Don’t talk that way,” I snapped. “Wells is the most honorable guy I ever rubbed elbows with. I couldn’t think any better of him if his name was O’Brien, O’Toole, or even McCorkle. He’s a prince. You know that—after all he’s done for the bunch of us—”

  “Yeah, I know all that.” Maxie was uncomfortable, I guessed, from the way he kept squirming around.

  “I’d think after all you’ve hiked you wouldn’t have any trouble getting to sleep,” I said.

  “After what you’ve told me,” he said, “how can I sleep?”

  “He’s probably got a gal back home, or a wife,” I said. “So don’t be worrying on that score. If they let him live we’ll have him back on our side in another twenty-four hours.”

  “He never had any girl friend back home,” said Maxie dolefully. “I happen to know that. I grew up in the same block. Several of the fancy babes were crazy about him, but he was always too busy to notice them. That’s sometimes the way with these handsome devils, you know. Gals falling on all sides. And he gets a notion to shun ’em and keep his mind on his business.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “Forget it and go to sleep.”

  “So here he is out on the desert away from everybody, and all at once it hits him that he’s damned lonely. Not for your company or mine, but for something pretty and soft and warm, something that can laugh in a high merry voice—”

  “My Aunt Mathilda’s parrot,” I said sarcastically, “is pretty and soft and warm, and can laugh in a high voice.”

  “Yes,” said Maxie. “Would it have any ideas about how to soothe a sick man? . . . Tell me, was this winged female good looking?”

  “Yes and no. She looked too savage and bloodthirsty for comfort, in my estimation,” I said.

  “So she was ugly.”

  “The hell she was. She had a wild beauty all her own,” I admitted. “Do you want to make anything of it?” Maxie kept on grumbling. The last thing I heard him say before I fell asleep was, “The boys aren’t gonna like it.”

  CHAPTER X

  Cavern Pow-wow

  The voices that awakened us were so much like the lively human jumble of talk you might hear in a restaurant or a waiting station that it seemed we ought to be able to understand.

  We couldn’t. It was wingmen talk—one of the languages that your expert European linguists have overlooked.

  However, Maxie listened ravenously for every word, pretending to me that he could catch an expression now and then. Owing to his few days of watching and listening through the slit in the cliff, he did seem to have a faint idea of what was going on.

  Everything was still as dark as pitch, but we knew these talkative males were only a few feet away.

  “They’re waiting for someone to be brought down for a talk,” Maxie whispered. “That vonzel is the word they used to mean us, as visitors, or prisoners, or something.”

  “It’s Wells, then,” I said. “They’ll be bringing him down for a trial, maybe.”

  A faint light came from one of the upper tunnels and grew brighter as an unseen party approached. We picked up the word for light at this moment. I was amazed, in the midst of this quiet excitement, to discover how quickly a few of their key words and expressions took root in my mind alongside certain clear-cut meanings.

  We could see, now, that only three winged men were waiting in the chamber before our hidden alcove. Those three had been doing all that chattering. How many others were coming with the light? we wondered.

  In the faintest of whispers Maxie and I laid our plans. Max had a pistol and four bullets. If this gang began any funny stuff with Wells, we’d let them have it, and take our chances hurling rocks at any that might be left standing.

  The approaching party came into view, now, and it upset our prospects completely. There were three more winged men—husky fellows in the best of fighting condition. There were two women. An older one with sagging flesh along her sides and straggling hair. And the beautiful, shapely Orchid Wings. Finally there was, in the midst of this torchlight procession, the vonzel. Not Wells, but the German professor I

  The second three men—the torch bearers—circulated around the room with eyes sharp for any signs of intruders. They marched over to the football-shaped nest and peered in.

  “Oh-oh,” I heard Maxie breathe.

  We crouched down deep in the crevices and waited. The flickering light moved closer. The shadows of little stalactites above us sharpened and their points swung inward and were swallowed up in red light. My blood froze. I could hear the wheezy breathing of one wingman not three feet away from me.

  The German professor may have cut the search short, quite innocently. He was storming around talking first in German, then in English. He wanted a favor from these people and he wanted it at once.

  So the torchmen, who were perhaps not looking specifically for us, but were simply taking their habitual precautions, returned to the center of the cavern chamber and joined the powwow. We were left in the near darkness. We didn’t dare look. We could see only the weird shadows doing startling jumps across our ceiling, to suggest the gestures that the German and his hosts were indulging in.

  The professor’s swearing was mostly in German; his questions were mostly in English—and for good reason.

  “I know dare iss vun of you dot talks English. You, or you, or you? No? . . . Maybe vun uff your brothers? Doesn’t vun uff you understand me? You, or you? Vas?

  No one answered him. The rocky walls echoed the barely audible rustle of feathers. I was afraid that silent group would hear me catch my breath. What the professor had said fairly shook me. Was it possible that one of these winged savages could understand our talk?

  If so, how? Had civilization come this way before? Had the mighty British Empire found its way into this lost land?

  Or had one of these winged, legless, half human monsters flown into some land where our language was spoken, and lingered there to listen and learn?

  “What a scoop some American reporter missed!” I said to myself. “If one of these human buzzards actually got away with a visit—”

  The German started in again. “Don’t look at me dot vay. I came here to find der vun dot talks. I vould
know him if I could see plain . . . If I could see—see—see. Don’t you understand vot I say, none uff you?”

  His voice rose to such a roar I was afraid the stalactites would shatter. He was in a very confused emotional state. He complained of having lost his spectacles, otherwise he was sure he would know the winged man who had once talked with him, if said person was among those present.

  “Vott’s der sense talking to idiots?” he growled exasperated. “But how could I be here if vun uff you didn’t happen to come to me in Berlin and answer me all my questions about der lost desert?”

  Our curiosity moved us. We crept toward the light, peeked cautiously out into the torch-lighted cavern.

  In the center of the ring of winged men and women this grizzled German stood, his frenzied red eyes turning from one to another of his hosts. His coat was missing, his linen trousers were turning to rags, his feet were bare. I knew now that he had gone through some of the same desert pleasures Wells and I had encountered. As for those dead-end tracks we had found, a wingman must have picked him up. But he may have been unconscious. As he went on with his tirade he implied that he had expected a friendly reception here—but that not one of them had returned his gestures of good will.

  I whispered to Maxie, “He’s off his base. One of those birds rescued him from the desert sun. The ungrateful cuss.”

  Maxie gave me a wavering eyebrow. “Why does he want to get mixed up with those murderous beasts?”

  The raving German broke off and his eyes lighted with a hint of terror. The eight winged creatures were moving slowly—very slowly—in a circle around him. The slight steps of their talons might have been mistaken for nothing more than restlessness at first. But when he stopped to watch, attracted by the light click-click-click of their hard yellow claws on the stone floor, he saw. They were moving in unison.

  “ ’S a feast march!” Maxie whispered. “That’s the way hundreds of them did—”

  “H-s-sh!” I crowded Maxie with my elbow to keep him back in the shadows. Then. “Look!”

  The beautiful Orchid Wings stepped out of the circle. For the moment the march stopped. She walked up to the terrified professor. With her left talon she reached under her right wing as if removing something from a hidden pocket.

 

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