Savage bride

by Cornell Woolrich; Internet Archive

  They were fed liberally, if monotonously, on an unvarying diet of baked maize cakes, and water was given them to drink from a brackish-tasting pottery bowl. This was done twice a day, at about the time the slit up on the wall first started to glow greenish-blue with daylight, and again at about the time it began to darken over with night. The wooden barrier blocking the inward cell entrance, on the side opposite the vent, was slanted back at such times and the warrior who seemed to be on guard outside it at all times would come in. The actual carrying in of the food was done by a second person, the feeding of captives being perhaps beneath the dignity of one who made war. This food-bearer was a wizened old man, his head completely shaven, weaponless, and garbed in clinging linen garments, who gave them the impression of being a priest or religious attache of some sort. The warrior simply stood guard in the doorway. Then both would go out again, and the barrier would be shunted back and lashed secure on the outside.

  "I don't like the way that old one looks at us," Mallory complained one time in a low voice, immediately after the two had gone. "The fighter, he just stands back there and scowls and looks grim; that's all right. But the old one, he squats down close, right in front of us while we're eating, and keeps eying us and seems to be licking his lips the whole time."

  Jones had noticed a sort of avid, unhealthy interest too, but he tactfully refrained from saying so.

  "Did you see him reach out and grasp my biceps just now?" Mallory went on with a quaver in his voice. "They're not cannibals, are they? That's not what they're-"

  "Of cotirse not," Jones answered curtly. "Don't be a fool." Someone had to keep a stiff upper lip. He would have liked to feel as sure about that, or anything else, as he sounded.

  They kept count of the days, as all prisoners have, from time immemorial. They had nothing to make marks on the wall with, so they kept count in their heads, keeping score with one another aloud, as day followed day. "Twenty-two today," Jones would grunt. "That what you get?"

  "Yeah, that's what I get too," Mallory would answer bitterly.

  It was still easy enough to do it that way, while their captivity was young and before the passage of time had begun to fog their ability to calculate.

  On the twenty-fourth day of their imprisonment a spasm of fright coursed through both their chests simultaneously. The wall slit was glowing peacock green with advanced daylight, the barrier was freed and dragged back, the usual entry was made—but this time by double the customary number of persons. There were two warriors, and two of the shriveled-up priests. The platter of cakes and the bowl of water were conspicuously lacking. They hadn't come to feed them.

  Both of them realized at once that some sort of climax was at hand.

  Jones could hear Mallory's breathing begin to come faster, beside him. "Take it easy," he muttered, trying to steady him with a brief touch of the hand.

  The four drew up before them and stood there studying them inscrutably, die warriors in the backgroimd. One of the priests suddenly raised a bony finger and pointed to Mallory. The warriors immediately stepped forward, a knife was plied, and the thong attaching him to the wall was sliced apart. They stood him up on his almost unusable legs and led him to the center of the cell. They stripped him of the moldering rags that were all that remained by now of his former garments. Some sort of ceremonial kilt, like a sash of fine linen, was wound around him at the waist. His wrists were bound behind his back, and the heavy pressure of the warriors' hands upon his shoulders forced him down to a kneeling position. Then water and moss were brought in, and there was an ominous cleansing and symbolic purification of his left breast, about the region of the heart.

  Mallory's suppliant figure cringed; Jones could see the sodden greenish-white of his flesh, dyed by the cell light, instinctively crawling away from under their macabre ministrations. His breath came gusty and strident as sandpaper.

  "Why are they taking me and not you?"

  "Pull yourself together," Jones tried to brace him.

  They hoisted him to his feet again and turned him toward the dungeon entrance. His head remained pleadingly turned around toward Jones. "What are they going to do to me? Larry!"

  Jones hung his head mutely. There was nothing he could do, and the other man Icnew it.

  They had him halfway over to the entrance now, his legs stiffly locked against them like an automaton's. His breathing kept getting harsher and harsher, with terror and the will to resist.

  "Larry, I'm not coming back."

  Jones lied to him, trying to give him a little courage to face the next few moments, whatever they were to be. "Yes, you are. Sure you are."

  They had him at the threshold now; he was trying to dig his nude heels into the sod. They wouldn't catch. "I can tell by their faces I'm not. Larry, they're going to kill me."

  This time Jones didn't answer. He knew they were too. You could sense it. It radiated from them, in grim waves.

  "Larry, Cliris—"

  They had him outside now.

  "Take it easy, Mai," was all Jones knew how to say. The wooden barrier crashed closed, and his captivity had become a solitary one.

  He saw the thing by indirection, and that was almost worst than seeing it in full sight. Teetering on his feet, straining as far forward as the thong gripping his wrist would allow, peering upward through the vent that gave onto ground level outside, he saw it as one sees the lower part of a stage scene when the curtain has stuck on its way up, hangs there suspended, and only the lower parts of the performers' bodies are visible.

  Opposite his jail, across the open space outside, and set far enough back so that perspective brought at least the lower half of it within his sight, rose a surface of massive stone blocks. It had always been there, staring at him, in all the time he'd been in this keep, but now he understood for the first time, as he watched them, what its purpose was. It was one of those horrid elevated altars of human sacrifice that had once dotted all Middle America, to be brought into lavish use at every recurrent solar equinox. It was foursquare, but from where he looked it appeared to be two-dimensional, with only height and breadth. One edge was unerringly perpendicular, straight as a ruler; the other was indented by a channel of ascending steps cut into it. These were set at right angles to him; he saw them only from the side. Up above there must have been, though he could not see it, a flat surface, an altar platform, broad enough to hold the participants, the sacrificial block, and whatever else attended the grim ritual.

  It was nearly high noon when the death drum began to beat, somewhere close at hand, from some nearby rooftop, but not, to the best of his ability to judge, from the top of the altar structure itself. This was nearly six hours after Mallory had been taken from the cell. Where he had been kept in the meantime, Jones had no way of knowing.

  Figures gathered about the base of the truncated pyramid, standing passively waiting, but his view of the steps remained clear, for they did not quite close in around the base but left a clear space. Next a line of six priests, of the same wizened type as the one who had brought them their food, slowly began to ascend the steps single file. Their chanting made a thin high-pitched wail against the growing overhead drum, which filled the air like sultry thunder.

  The fact that no warriors followed them upward was proof enough that this was no military or war execution, but a religious infliction of death, in honor of the sun.

  The six lesser priests disappeared above. There was a brief pause, and then a solitary figure slowly ascended in their wake. The high priest, judging by his more elaborate but basically similar garb and accoutrements. He clmbed with an almost cataleptic slowness that froze Jones's blood. That fact, and what he carried with him. He held his hands stiffly and extended out before his body, palms up and rigidly side by side. Across them, glistening in the sunlight, lay a curved, razor-edged obsidian scalpel—the sacrifice knife.

  Jones remembered that ominous scouring of the region over the heart he had seen them subject Mallory to before taking him out. A s
hudder coursed through him.

  There was another wait, while the drum riunbled on. The shadows of those on the ground were circular about them now. The sun was almost directly overhead.

  An opening was made by them, and four stalwarts advanced slowly through their midst to the base of the altar steps, bearing on their shoulders a gilded litter. In it she sat. He knew her right away, in spite of the nunlike coif that half hid her face, shadowing her eyes. She was garbed in white. On her chest a flashing golden plaque was suspended, with rays standing out from it to simulate the sun, whose handmaiden she was. Golden bands were on her arms, with amethysts and emeralds blinking from them.

  They set the litter down and she stepped from it and slowly mounted the steps. A strange figure in a strange, dark pageant, which the outer world thought had been abolished centuries before.

  It was incredible that this high priestess, this sun goddess or whatever she was designated, could be a girl who had once— But it was she, come to preside over this sanctified butchery; he knew her too well, he would have known her anywhere.

  He wanted to call out to her, to scream to her, but for once he couldn't. His mouth was dry; his throat seemed to close up into a pin hole and refuse him service.

  Her head was gone now, up above into the sky, the sky where murder was to be perpetrated. Next her shoulders went, and then the slendemess of her waist. One golden sandal lifted and was gone, the other remained a moment longer, poised at the toe. Then that went too.

  Presently, in the expectant silence, a gauzy swirl of faint blue smoke descended to the ground and trailed up again, leaving in its wake a sickly-sweet odor that even penetrated to where he was. She had cast a lump of aromatic gum into some censer or tripod burning unseen up above.

  All was in readiness now, all the principals were waiting, only the victim was lacking. The drum suddenly stopped short, and high noon must have been reached at that instant. The silence was stunning.

  Then a faint whimpering sound began to percolate through it, coming nearer; audible before the cause of it was visible. That half-tone sobbing by which man and the animals alike express their fear of imminent death, when they are unfortunate enough to be made aware of it beforehand.

  Mallory's white, almost unclad body made a strange pale thing in the midst of all their darker ones. They were dragging him forward by a sort of halter arrangement around his neck, like a steer led to slaughter, and urging him on from behind with repeated bites of a leather thong into his shoulders and across his back. Every step was contested, was flinched, but he was too weak to be able to offer much resistance.

  Jones, sickened, turned his head away, and shut his eyes for a moment.

  Everyone should die bravely. It's so easy to say that, until you're the one to do it.

  When he looked again—and he had to look, though he didn't want to—they already had the victim on the altar steps. Four of the priests had come down and taken over custody of him from the warriors, who remained below. Mallory had fallen prone on the steps, and was slowly dragged up them full length by their combined if somewhat faltering strength.

  His thin legs disappeared, twitching and flexing, scissoring futilely against the slippery stairs.

  Then he was gone. Jones couldn't watch the rest of it. He could only remember that scouring of the heart region, that wickedly curved obsidian scalpel, that golden ewer he had glimpsed being carried upward by one of the priests, in which to catch—what?

  The silence seemed as though it would go on forever. Then suddenly it exploded into a piercing scream of agony that had already become death before it completed itself and winged thinly off into nothing.

  The onlookers at the base of the altar dropped to their knees. A brazen gong crashed out triumphantly, just once. Then that trailed throbbingly away too, in .the wake of the scream.

  Somthing white fell inert, with a sodden thud, to the ground at the foot of the altar, cast over the side from above. The eyes only seemed to be fluttering closed now, but that might have been an illusion. Chevrons of red streaked out from a thin-lipped, puckered incision just under the left breast.

  A deep groan of religious ecstasy sounded from those kneeling below. Scattered drops, as of thick dark rain, fell here and there upon them, as of something held aloft toward the sun, and then shaken out on those below. Another whiff of aromatic smoke came looping down and about, like a ghost snake.

  Jones slumped to the ground of his dungeon and lay there in open-eyed despair.

  To have to die is hard. To have to die as he'd just now seen this other man die was sheer horror.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The badly frightened turnkey came hurrying back along the jail corridor, bringing the prison commandant at his heels.

  'Tn here," he said fearfully, stopping short outside the last cupboard-like crevice of all.

  The commandant was still chewing the last mouthful he had brought away from the table with him in his haste. He took his time, swallowed first, then ordered, "Well, open it, fool. Have I eyes that can see through this iron slab?"

  Keys clashed and the cell was exposed to view.

  "Oh," said the commandant. "I had forgotten who was in here." He said it almost with an air of relief.

  "I don't know when it happened," the turnkey expostulated. "He was all right the last time I looked in."

  "Well, I suppose we have to make sure," the commandant said unhappily, stepping reluctantly forward to go in. "And right on top of eating, too. I didn't even have my coffee yet."

  The turnkey trailed in after him.

  "We don't want any more mistakes, like that other time," the commandant continued. "Remember what happened?'

  "The one from Eighteen. Yes." The turnkey crossed himself.

  "We had him already lying out there on the ground, when he rolled his head over and his lips started to move."

  "Well, luckily there was that shovel there handy, to quiet him with."

  "As long as we were that far, why should we have the trouble of bringing him all the way back again with us— and then maybe the next day it would happen anyway?"

  "Si, mi comandante, you're right," the turnkey agreed judiciously.

  "Bring in the lamp from the corridor," the commandant said irritably. "I can't get used to this dimness." While he was waiting, he Ht a cigarette, to temper some of the foul odor in the cell.

  The turnkey came back with an oil lamp, and rays of straw-colored Kght, spearing up the walls ahead of it, finally coalesced into a satisfactory patina of illumination.

  Cotter's body lay laterally across the cot. His leg over-spanned it on one side, his head hung partly off the other. There was not room for it to hang down entirely. His arms lay spread out sideward.

  His neck and throat and shoulders were all dark, as

  though a sudden empurpled birthmark had overspread him there. There was something the matter with his throat. It seemed to yawn open, as though his mouth were lower down than where it belonged; as though he were grinning in the wrong place.

  The commandant bent over a Kttle toward him, blowing cigarette smoke away from between himself and the corpse, so that he could see clearly. He nodded. "We don't have to have any doubts this time," he commented. "But how—?" the turnkey faltered. The commandant looked around briefly on the small area of floor space. He stooped, picked something up.

  "With this," he answered. "Here it is, right here." It was a small sliver, about an inch long, about half an inch wide.

  The turnkey goggled at it.

  "It's one of those blades the americanos make so beautifully. They're very hard to get down here. I used to have some, though. They call them—ah—you know, shave-with-safety. You cannot cut yourself with them. That is the way in which they shave up there."

  "But if you can't cut yourself with them, how could it do that to him?" the turnkey pointed out naively.

  "Ah, you're very dense," snapped the commandant. "You can't cut yourself with it while it's in the holder. You c
an when you take it apart."

  "I won't get in trouble, will I, mi comandante?" "No, you didn't know he had it," the commandant reassured him.

  "You did, mi comandante?" the turnkey gaped in astonishment.

  "Naturally. It was sent to him through me. It came from the Minister of the Interior, no less. He said he wanted the inmates to look neat, he didn't like them with stubble all over their faces when he came here on inspection visits. This particular one, in any event."

  The turnkey still didn't understand. He scratched his skull in bafflement. "But if it's supposed to be used in a holder, and if the sefior ministro wanted him to use it, then why didn't he send him the holder with it? Why did he just send him this part?"

  "Stop trying to figure out things that don't concern you," the commandant reprimanded him. "It's none of your business and it's none of mine. The senor ministro is entitled to a slight fit of absent-mindedness once in a while, a man with all the heavy responsibiUties he's got."

  He suddenly caught sight of something, leaned sharply forward again, and thrust his whole arm down between cot and wall. He brought up a small piece of rumpled paper and smoothed it out.

  "Wait a minute, here's a note he seems to have written. With a piece of soft charcoal, it looks like."

  "I gave him that a few days ago," the turnkey admitted. "It was soft, he couldn't hurt himself with it." He craned his neck across his superior's shoulder. "Does it say why he did it?"

  The commandant gave a shoulder fling of incomprehension. "No, it says the same thing over and over. It must be some kind of lesson, like they give little boys to do in school."

  The words were: