Savage bride
Page 19
Then in a second or two, salvation peered through at them again. A lamp had been left lit, apparently by those who had just been in there before looking for them. It was a trivial, sparklike thing, lost in all that immensity of space. Yet for them it was a beacon brighter than the most flashing hghthouse. For it stood directly offside to the inner tunnel bore leading through the bowels of the mountain; it marked it, out of all the other niches, indentations, and cavities that honeycombed the walls.
A feeble stain came from it, like a smear of very dark amber honey, that scarcely tinctured the floor before it or the rock wall backing it. But it gave them their lives for minutes more—for who knew how long more? It showed them the way out of this Stygian trap. It showed them the pear-shaped gap, the deeper darkness within the dimness, that led off from the tomb itself.
"Go in! Go in!" He shoved her tlirough into the nothingness beyond, then stooped aside and snatched the thing up. It was a metal vessel of some kind, filled with fluid, but he had no wish or time to identify it. It was heavy. Not too heavy for an unspent, untired man to carry, perhaps, but its added ounces of weight now might mean the difference between life and death to him. Then too, it would have served as a beacon to their enemies, just as it had to them now, guiding them infalHbly in their wake, had he attempted to take it with him.
So he raised it with both hands high over his head, and flung it forward out of the tomb to do away with it, to hamper them as much as he and she would now be hampered.
A strange, phosphorescent apparition marked it extinction. It left a comet-like luminous trail across the vault of the dark, which was its flame expanded behind itself in flight. Then it struck the far wall someplace over the dais. There was a sudden curtan of fire as the released liquid burned now unconfined, splashing out and down. And in the middle of this, for a single moment, no more, Mitty's face stood out, illumined. The twice-gone face. which he never wanted to remember again, never would forget. The musk above the burial niche was laved for a moment by the brightly flickering fluid dripping down over it. For an instant he had the illusion it was she looking at him like that, palely illumined, through the murk of eternity. Then the features dimmed, went out forever, as the tricking drops expired with their own dowmfall.
Farewell, the farewell of two who had never been meant to meet, by immutable faws greater than either one of them. Double farewell, across forty-eighty hours, across five hundred years.
He turned and staggered into the passageway and found Chris by the sound of her hysteric breathing, lin-gering there waiting for him. He sent her on again before him, keeping his hand outthrust to her shoulder to avoid treading on her heels. She was invisible to him in all that density of darkness, close as she was before him.
They had to go circumspectly, unsure of any sudden turn the groove might make. They told off the sides of it with their hands, he on one side, she on the other, to keep from grazing them too closely. The confined air in here made breathing far more difficult; the only thing gained was that they no longer had the acute grade of the mountain slope outside to contend with. But their inability to see neutrahzed that advantage.
And already there was an echoing behind them of oncoming footfalls in the dark. Once the sound had set in, it dogged them with a maniac persistency that they couldn't shake off or leave behind, try as they might. It was as inexorable, as maddening as that nocturnal drumbeat at La Escondida had been a lifetime ago. It was the soft, slapping sound of bare soles trotting along the damp, rocky flooring, ampHfied by the nature of the place itself so that it carried forward to them only too well.
Their own harried breathing was magnified to a loud snorting, their own stumbling steps dinned in their ears, but nothing could drown out that nagging, vindictive underscoring murmuring in their wake, now close, now hanging back a little: pad, pad, pad.
They were goaded onward by it, in knee-twisting, groping flurries of haste that ebbed and flowed from them like valvular spurts, carrying them along the rock-rimmed conduit. They hurt and bruised themselves against the walls, for they couldn't run true, and when there were shifts in direction, and there were many, they could only find them out by trial and error. Not once but several times she stumbled and went down, and he was only saved from going down on top of her by the fact that they weren't going very fast any more, they couldn't. She would have lain here spent, but he drew her weakly up
again each time and supported her until her own legs could find themselves once more, and that remorseless pad, pad, pad, looming on them in these brief halts, drove her on again like a flash.
Their ears were no good to them any more. The blood was singing in them too much for them to be able to tell whether they were losing ground or maintaining the same distance they had started out with. They could only be sure they hadn't gained on their pursuers, for noming still upright on two legs could have gone much slower than the reeling amble to which they were now reduced.
They came to the place where the water was. It gave a faint tinkling warning just before they reached it, and he dreaded its arrival, parched and expiring of thirst as they both were, for he was afraid they wouldn't be able to tear themselves away from it again, wouldn't have the strength of mind.
She went down on all fours and pressed her face flat against the rock, there where the water traced its way down, and he stood over her slantwise and let it find his own agonized face higher up. He felt as though he'd gone without water all his life. He felt as though death would be a cheap exchange for standing here a stolen moment longer.
Pad, pad, pad swelled out at them, like a trip-hammering of doom, every instant nearer, surer.
He took her by the back of the neck and pried her stubborn head away. "Don't swallow any more, hold the rest of it in your mouth," he warned her.
She struggled to get back to it for a moment, then her reason reasserted itself and she turned docilely away.
They went on again, the pad, pad, pad closer and clearer. Then it desisted for a moment, in the place where the water was. But faint and far back, even when it had stopped, a ghostly repetition of it could still be heard. The pursuit was multiple, but one member of it had far outdistanced the others. And the quickness with which he reached the water, following their own departure, showed how sickeningly close he was. Almost at their very heels.
A moment only this foremost tread relented, then at struck out again. Swifter, fresher, for he had needed less restoring.
They could even hear his breathing now, hoarse and rasping, welling through the tunner after them.
Suddenly she made an abrupt turnabout, and they collided with one another, and both of them nearly fell together.
"It's stopped, it's ended," she gasped. "I can't find the way."
He struck out with his hands, all over, up and down, and felt only rock. It blocked them off, sealed them up.
And then a little paleness revealed itself at the sides. A shadow of a gleam. A thread of grayness unraveling inthe dark.
"The slab!" he choked.
He rammed his shoulder into it, and it wouldn't move. The gleam brightened a little, like a flame that is blown on, then dimmed again.
The pad, pad, pad was rising now to a crescendo of vengeful triumph.
He ran back a Uttle, and turned, and rushed at the impediment, and it wavered, the foursquare gleam around its edges brightened further, only to contract again. It wouldn't go down, it wouldn't let them out. Safety lay so near and yet so far. Life was six or eight inches away from them.
He was crazed for a minute, clawed at it futilely with his bare hands. She had collapsed into a whimpering huddle somewhere in the dark at his feet.
Then suddenly he desisted and, as if stung to a berserk fury, goaded to self-destruction, tm*ned and rushed headlong toward the oncoming pad, pad, pad.
He dropped to the ground, flattened himself crosswise on the floor of the tunnel, and lay there still.
It came on. He could feel the very rock floor under him vibrate to its appro
ach. Pad, pad, pad, pad . . . And then the last one never sounded, never fell. Instead a bare foot gouged into his side, delivering an inadvertent kick that rocked him from head to toe. A body off balance, flying through the air in an arc, came crashing down, partly over but mostly beyond him. Only its futilelv scissoring legs landed actually on top of him.
The thundering crash of the fall thudded through the vault. The savage must have been stunned by the impact; a reflex twitching was all the movement he made for a minute. And by that time Jones had reared up and was at his throat.
Then he found that he hadn't the strength of grip necessary to squeeze out life quickly. This was no time to give quarter or to fight up to a mere point of mastery, then desist. This was kill or be killed.
He shifted his grasp and caught the two coils of long, coarse Indian hair in a double-fisted grip, one at each side of the head. The heavy thud resumed again, but this time it wasn't feet running along the rock-floored passageway. He could feel the skull shatter and disintegrate somewhere in between the levers of his grasp.
He left him brained, and jumped up and ran back to her. Still others were coming, but they were still some distance off. A little time, a minute or two, had been gained.
"Push hard against it, with all your strength, as I go into it."
He made a sort of bumper of his interlocked arms, and careened into it. The light brightened almost intolerably this time, like flashlight-powder sizzling all around the rim of the slab. There was a moment while it stayed ajar against all edicts of gravity, and there was nothing but brightness and open space in front of dieir dazzling eyes.
They were back in the world again.
Pad, pad, pad was coming up behind them like a drumbeat. He pulled her through after him, scarcely able to see in the sudden new incandescence beating around them. The sun was low but it was still dayhght.
They ran through the meandering gully, flie cleft of Mitty's former longings and reveries. Its earthen ramparts were all that kept them on course for a while until their eyes became accustomed again to the light.
Then when they did, the vista of the downslope cohered before them like a slowly forming pattern on a photographic plate soaking in solution, strengthening, darkening, moment by moment. There was the little spring far below them, and standing motionless at it, two men on horses. Carbines were slung at their shoulders, the sun winking back from their barrels. Perhaps they were drawn this far up by tlieir duties of policing the outer side of the slope, or perhaps they had been detailed to search for someone who had disappeared.
He threw up his arm and swung it hysterically at them, even as he kept running, tumbling, scraping down toward them, sending jets of dust and ropes of little stones down ahead of him.
The men saw them; there was a sudden rigid locking of posture that told that unmistakably. They both became taller on their saddles. Their mounts' necks, reined up from the pool, remained suspended. They stared up at them, motionless, as if unable to make out where they'd come from.
He looked back, and one of the savages had come out into full sight past the mouth of the chasm. The sun was low in the west and it caught him squarely, in all his flaming hate and gaudy barbarism. Ruddy copper body, pulsing at the ribs with its long run; kilt about the waist; knife to hip; tuft of brilliant scarlet hummingbird feathers sprouting at his crown. A blue shadow, such as all men cast, was leaning awry behind him on the slope. His arm was back, balancing a poised javelin.
The javelin flew out, swift as a light ray, and she, not having turned as he had, would not see it in time. He caught at her, flung her aside so violently she crumpled to the steep-pitched ground. And he was left there in her place. It seemed to sunder his chest in two, and when he looked down with a sort of calm surprise, it was to find two feet of it protruding forward beyond his swaying body.
He went over and down with a sort of barrel-like roll, first upon his knees, then forehead pasted flat to ground, with a little spurt of dust flowering about his head. The shaft cracked and broke beneath his arched body. He curled over on his side, then flattened and lay still. There was pain, like current streaking through electric wiring, packed in his chest, then none, only tiredness and no regret at being prone.
His eardrums seemed to close up. As through a thick filter he could hear her screaming down to the two men on horses below them. "Shoot! Don't you see him standing there? Mdtalo!"
He lifted his head a little and watched, with a sort of detached interest, as though none of this reaUy concerned him any more.
They only needed one bullet. It was an easy shot; a dead certainty. He was in full view above them.
The rifle report, in that rock-rimmed area, had a strangely flat, crunching sound, like the collapsing of an inflated paper bag.
Stones and earth globules spilled downward, with an oddly looped, liquid eflect, like successive tiers of a falling necklace. Then his body came down, coasting on its face, almost to where they were, with that blue shadow patch still skipping after it, like the air-borne tail to a ground-dragged kite.
The little tuft of scarlet feathers seemed to sprout straight up from the soil now, like some solitary mountain flower. For sap, it oozed a sluggish little thread of blackened red, which died out amidst the rocks.
She was kneeling there beside Jones, holding the broken-off forward part of the javelin in her two hands, dazedly, as though it were some sort of linear measure that she was trying to hold up to her grief and loss to see how immeasurable it was, when the horsemen finally reached them, dismounted, and crouched down over the two of them.
He looked up at them blurredly.
"You were just a minute too late," he said, "but thanks anyway."
He closed his eyes again, but whether in weariness or because of some sort of inward pang of reaUzation, they couldn't tell. They gave the two of them water from their canteens, one from each, and he drank with his eyes closed, with his throat rippling, and a little water coming out at the edge of his mouth, tinged red.
"Help me get them up on the horses, Ramon. We've got to get them down to the lowland right away. He needs medical attention, and she needs rest and food. They've probably been wandering around lost for weeks back there in the emptiness on the other side."
'Tn the emptiness on the other side," Jones murmured wryly, without opening his eyes.
The second charro had been cautiously examining the fragment of javelin that he had taken from Chris's unresisting hands. He held it near his nose, then with slow precaution traced it across the heel of his hand, just under the thumb joint. Then he looked closely at his hand in the fading sunlight, for some gloss or telltale shiny track.
"We'll never get him all the way down," he said softly in Spanish to his companion. "It was poisoned." He flung it down curtly.
Chris picked it up again and looked at it dazedly.
"Put us both on the same horse," Jones said quietly, with his eyes still closed. "Let me hold her in my arms on the way down. We mustn't be apart any more."
Picking its way painfully, the little procession started out, the two charros on foot, one leading the carrier horse, the other supporting Jones on its saddle with his shoulder and encircUng arm.
Riding slowly down the slope, holding her cradled in his arm, he spoke to her low, his mouth close to her ear.
"Don't be frightened, Chris. You'll have to finish this ride out alone. I'm going to leave you soon."
She answered equally low, unheard by the world around them. "You aren't leaving me. We're going to be together. To the very end of the ride."
She opened her hand, disengaged the javelin tip, which she had held imbedded into her own flesh and blood, and flung it off.
Their heads close together, they went slowly down the mountain, down into the deeps, as successive tides of evening and infinity washed upward and over them in ever darkening hue; first ultramarine, then indigo, then midnight purple, then starless black.
His name was Lawrence Kingsley Tones. He was just like a
ny man, like you, like me; and yet, that is what happened to him.
THE END
of a Gold Medal Original by Cornell Woolrich
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven