The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 1: Henry S. Whitehead

by Henry S. Whitehead

  We stopped there in our tracks and the fine dust rose all about us like gray cumulus. We looked, we listened, and all about us the quickening air became alive. Then the vibrating, metallic clangor reverberated afresh and the atmosphere was electrified into pulsing animation; an unmistakable, palpable sense of fervid, hastening activity. We stood there, in that altered environment, tense, strained, every nerve and every faculty, aroused as though by an unmistakable abrupt challenge. The altar seemed to coruscate in this new atmosphere. The zodiacal figure of Aquarius gleamed afresh in the sun’s slanting rays with a poignant, unearthly beauty.

  The slow, shattering sub-bass of the gong reverberated a third time, its mighty, overtonic echoes charging the revived air with a challenging summons; and, before these had wholly died away and silence above the dust clouds established itself, out from some point beside and beyond the altar there emerged a slow-moving procession of men in long, dignified garments, in hierarchical vesture, walking gravely, two and two.

  We watched breathlessly. Here, at long last, was the fulfillment of that half-formulated wish. Human beings! Here were worshipers: tall, stalwart men; great, bearded men, warriors in seeming; bronzed, great-thewed hierophants, bearing strange instruments, the paraphernalia of some remote ritual—wands and metal cressets; chained thuribles, naviculae, long cornucopiae, like that upon the flexed knee of Aquarius; harsh-sounding systra, tinkling triangles, netted rattles strung with small, sweet-chiming bells; salsalim, castanets, clanging cymbals; great rams’ horns banded with plates of shining fresh gold; enormous, fanlike implements of a substance like elephants’ hide; a gilt canopy, swaying on ebony poles, ponderous, its fringes powdered with jewels, sheltering a votive bullock, its wide horns buried beneath looped garlands. This procession moved gravely toward the altar, an endless stream of grave, bearded men, until, as we watched, stultified, wondering, the space about it became finally filled, and the slow-moving, endless-seeming throng, women and girls among the men now, turned toward us, pouring deliberately into the forepart of the nave.

  It was after this change in the course of the procession’s objective, only a matter of seconds before we were seen. There was no possibility of retreat, nothing whatever behind which we might have concealed ourselves. We could, of course, have lain down, burrowing in the dust, and so, perhaps, have delayed the instant of discovery. But that did not occur to either of us. Such a course would, too, have been quite futile. Enormous as was this vast fane—built, it appeared, to accommodate worshipers in their thousands—there were here, thronging in endlessly, more than enough to fill it to suffocation.

  There was, once we were observed, not so much as an instant’s hesitation, a moment’s respite for us. Between the instant when the foremost of that great throng perceived us, strangers, outlanders, and the instantaneous corporate cry of rage which rose from a thousand throats, there was not time for us to clasp hands in a futile gesture of farewell. They rushed us without any other preliminary than that roar of fierce, primitive anger. The dust under that mass movement of sandaled feet rose in an opaque cloud which obscured the altar. Out of that thick, mephitic cloud they came at us, brandishing thick, metallic, macelike clubs, great bronze swords, obvious, menacing in that dust-dim air, the rapidly-failing light of the sun-deadly blades, thirsting for our blood.

  “Back to back, as soon as they surround us,” I hurled in Wilkes’ ear, but I had not completed that brief counsel of despair when Wilkes, who produced from somewhere a small, flat automatic pistol, had abruptly dropped in his tracks a huge bearded warrior, who, by reason of a greatly superior fleetness of foot, had by far outdistanced the others. This giant fell within fifteen feet of us. The nearest of the others, also bounding along well in advance of the pack, was perhaps thirty feet distant. I had time to plunge forward and seize out of a great hairy fist the enormous bronze sword of this our first casualty. With this it was my plan to rush back to where Wilkes stood, sighting calmly along his pistol barrel, as I glimpsed him, and make together some sort of stand.

  The second runner was nearly on top of me, however, before I could straighten up and try to fell him with this untried weapon. Wilkes shot him through the middle precisely as he was about to bring down his macelike weapon across my skull. I secured the mace before any of the others out of that frenzied horde was within striking distance, and leaped back through the now boiling dust clouds to Wilkes’ side. This was a trifle better, though obviously hopeless against those odds. I straightened myself, caught my balance, turned to face the rush beside Wilkes.

  “Good for five more, anyhow!” said Wilkes calmly, firing past me twice in quick succession. I was turned about and again facing the oncoming rush in time to see two more of them sinking down. I thrust choice of the two primitive weapons I had secured toward Wilkes. He snatched the mace in his left hand, fired his remaining three shots, hurled the pistol into the thick of the vanguard; and then, shifting the mace to his right hand while I made my huge sword sing through the dust, we faced the attack.

  We possessed jointly the single advantage of comparative lightness. Our massed opponents were uniformly men of literally huge stature, heroic-looking fellows, stalwart, bulky, deadly serious in this business of killing!

  Unquestionably, as I think back over that conflict, too much emphasis cannot be placed upon this single advantage of lightness, mobility, to which I have just alluded. Otherwise, had we not been able to move about very much more rapidly than our opponents, that fight would have been finished, with our offhand slaughter, in a matter of seconds! The odds were—“overwhelming” is not the word. “Ridiculous” comes nearer to it. Probably a thousand of the enormous warriors were using their utmost endeavor to close in upon and slaughter two men. But they necessarily got inextricably tangled up together for that very reason. If they had delegated two or three of their number to attend to Wilkes and me while the others merely stood by, there can be no question but what they would have accomplished their end, and in a very brief period of time.

  The bulk, and the consequent relative awkwardness of the individual warriors, too, counted powerfully in our favor. We were, thus, both jointly infinitely more mobile than the huddled phalanx which we confronted, and individually as well when compared, man for man, to even the lightest of our opponents when considered singly. They got into each others’ way through the sheer directness of their massed attack, and of this circumstance which counted so heavily in our favor we took the fullest advantage. The great warriors, too, appeared to pay no attention either to their own dead, which began to pile up after a few moments of that intensive affray, and these, as they increased, served to protect us and to cause them, intent only on reaching us, to stumble broadcast. They seemed to know nothing of defensive fighting.

  We plunged, both of us, into that fight, berserk, with no other idea but that this was the inevitable, the predestined end; no other idea than that we were going out like men—and with as much company as possible for whatever Stygian process might await us beyond the doors of that imminent death.

  It was like a preface to Valhalla, that fight! In that remote edge of my brain which people call “the back of the mind,” I remember the thought cropping up that such combat as this was an affair of utter futility! We had no shadow of misunderstanding with these towering, swarming legionaries out of some unguessed backwater of antiquity. They, certainly, apart from their primitive urges, had no reason for attacking us. Yet, I confess, I went into that shambles with a sense of relief, with a quite definite satisfaction, a gusto! These great, truculent, brown, bearded creatures were subjects of, part and parcel with, that hostile demigod, that basic anachronism, Who was persecuting us. Striking at them, His Myrmidons, meant blows at Him—shrewd blows they were...

  We struck out, Wilkes and I. I found my great awkward-looking weapon surprisingly well-balanced and keen. It was only after I had sheared through that first torso, clear through the big neck muscles and ribs of my first actual opponent, that I realized what a sword
could be! I set my teeth. Vague, hereditary instincts burgeoned in my blood-quickened mentality. I went half mad with the urge to slay. I exulted as my great sword found its mark, struck home again and yet again. Half-articulate cries burst through my compressed lips; terrible thoughts, a fearful, supporting self-confidence boiled in my mind as I fought, and thrust, and swung; vague instincts freshly quickened into seething life and power; the inheritance from countless Nordic forebears, men who were men indeed, heroes of song and saga, men of my clan who had fought their relentless way to chieftainship, men who fought with claymores.

  There came over me a terrible swift surge of security, of certainty, of appalling confidence. I was more than a man. I, too, was a god, empowered with the achievements of those old Canevins who had feared neither man nor devil in the ancient eras of the clan’s glory in the field of red battle—a sense of strange happiness, of fulfillment, of some deep destiny coming into its own like the surging up of a great tide. This, I suppose, is what people name the blood-lust. I do not know. I only know that I settled down to fighting, my brain alert, my arm wielding the sword tirelessly, my feet and legs balancing me for the great shearing strokes with which I cleared space after recurrent space about me and caused the mounded dead to make a bulwark between me and those indefatigable huge brutes who pressed on and on, filling up the ranks of their cloven, sinking colleagues.

  Heredity laid its heavy hand upon me as I slew right and left and always before me. It was like some destiny, I say, fulfilling itself. Strange cries, deep, primitive slogans burst from my lips. I pressed upon those before me—we were, of course, surrounded—and, feeling the comradeship of Wilkes at my back, as he swung and lashed out with that metal club taking his toll of brains and crackling skulls, I surged into a song, a vast war shout, rushing upon the ever-renewed front of my enemies, flailing the great sword through yielding flesh and resistant bone and sinew, forward, ever forward into a very fulfillment and epitome of slaughter. From time to time one or another would reach, and wound me, but the blood of the ancient fighting clan of Canevin heeded not.

  My bronze sword drank deep as it sheared insatiable through tissue and tendon. Before me, an oriflamme, flared a blood-red mist in that dank shambles where blood mingled with paralyzing dust clouds. It was basic; hand-to-hand; pure conflict. My soul exulted and sang as I ploughed forward into the thick of it, Wilkes’ staccato “Ha!” as his metal club went home, punctuating the rhythm of my terrible strokes against that herded phalanx. I struck and struck, and the sword drank and drank.

  I strode among heaped bodies now, seeking foot leverage, a greater purchase for my blows. Against these heart-lifting odds, heedless of death, feeling none of the gashes and bruises I received, I strove, in a still-mounting fury of utter destruction. I drove them before me in scores, in hundreds…

  Then, insistent, paralyzing, came the last stroke, the shattering reverberation of the great gong.

  Chapter 11

  With that compelling stroke, like the call of Fate, the conflict died all about me. The tense, striving fury dropped away from the distorted faces before me. Their weapons fell. I heard Wilkes’ quick “Ha!” as his last blow went home on a crumpling skull, and then my sword hung idle all at once in my scarlet hand; the pressure of the circle about us relaxed, fell away to nothing. I breathed again without those choking gasps through air fouled with the fetor of dust and blood—old dust, newly-shed blood. We stood together, still back to back, our strained hearts pumping wildly, our red vision clearing. We stood near the very rearmost wall now, such had been the pressure into the nave.

  We turned, as though by an agreement, and looked into each other’s eyes. Then, as a surge of chanted song far up by the altar inaugurated this worship which was beginning, which had taken from us the attention of that mad horde, we slipped quietly out through the anteroom, and into the garden now tremulous with the verge of dusk upon it, side by side, on the short grass, we lay down upon our faces, and relaxed our sorely taxed bodies, turned, and spoke quietly to each other, and gazed up at the friendly stars, and closed our eyes, and fell at once into the quick deep sleep of complete and utter exhaustion.

  It was Wilkes who shook me awake. It was pitch dark, or nearly so, the moon being at the moment obscured under clouds. A light, refreshing rain was falling, and my soaking wetness from head to foot evidenced a heavier shower through which both of us had slept. My wounds and bruises from that terrific melee ached and burned and throbbed. Yet I had lost little blood, it appeared, and when I stood up and had moved about somewhat, my usual agility seemed quite fully restored. The phosphorus-painted dial of my wrist-watch—which had survived that shambles intact—showed that it was half past four in the morning.

  “I’ve been scouting around,” explained Wilkes. “It isn’t so bad in this light after you’ve got used to it a bit. I’ve discovered a sapodilla tree. That’s why I awakened you, Canevin—thought you could do with a bit to eat, what?”

  He held out four of the round, dull-brown fruits which look like Irish potatoes. I took them eagerly, the first food in many hours. I do not recall a more satisfactory meal at any time in my life.

  Greatly refreshed, I washed my hands in the rain and wiped them clean on the short wet grass. Wilkes was speaking again: “Those people, Canevin! There are no such people in the world, today—except here, I believe, what do you think? That is, if you’ve had time to think after that. Good God, man, were you a gladiator in some past existence! But, to get back to those people in there. It seems to me that—well, either those are the old-time Mayas, surviving just in this spot, wherever it may be, or else—do you suppose He could—er—make them immortal, something of the sort, what? Sounds ridiculous. I grant you that, of course, but then, this whole affair is...” He paused, leaving me to fill in the adjective. I stepped on something hard. I stooped down, picked up the enormous sword which I had carried out here to the garden when we had left the temple last night. I balanced it in my hand. I looked at Wilkes in the still dim light.

  “It’s really, in a sense, the greatest puzzle of all,” I said reflectively. “You’re right, of course. No question about it, man! Those people were—well, anything but what I’d call contemporaries of ours. I’d almost be inclined to say that the immortality alternative gets my vote.”

  “Let’s go back and take a look for ourselves,” said Wilkes. “We don’t seem, somehow, to have very much choice, this trip. Now seems to be one of the slack moments. Let’s go back inside there, get up behind that altar and statue, and see what’s there, in that place they all marched out from, what? Everything seems quieted down now inside; has been for hours on end, I’d say. We weren’t molested while we slept through all that rain.”

  I nodded. A man can only die once, and the Power could, certainly, do as it wished with us. The rain ended, as tropical showers end, abruptly. The sweet odor of some flowering shrub poured itself out. The clouds passed from before the moon.

  “Right,” said I. “Let’s get going.” And, without another word, we entered the stone anteroom, walked across it to where the doorway had opened into the temple, and—stopped there. The door was shut now. It was not, in the dim moonlight which filtered through the openings, even perceptible now. There was simply nothing to be seen there, not so much as a chink in the solid masonry of the wall, to indicate that there was a door.

  “We’ll have to work around to it from the outside,” said Wilkes, after we had stood awhile in baffled silence. “There must be a way.”

  I laughed. “They say that ‘where there’s a will there’s a way,’” I quoted.

  “Well, let’s try it, outside,” answered Wilkes; and we walked out into the garden again.

  There was no particular difficulty about finding that “way.”

  We simply walked around the end of the small structure I have called the anteroom and followed along the almost endlessly high, blank stone-mason work of the temple’s outside sheathing.

  The walking was not difficul
t, the growth being chiefly low shrubs. At last we came to the end of the temple wall, and turned the sharp corner it made at the beginning of a slight slope which ran down very gradually in the same direction in which we had been walking.

  To our considerable surprise, for we had thought of nothing like this, there stretched away from us, farther than we could see in the moonlight broken by small, drifting clouds of the cirrus variety, a succession of other buildings, all of them obviously of that same early-civilization period of the first Maya empire, rounded structures for the most part, carrying the typical stone arrangement and ornamentation. Enormous as was the great temple, the area occupied by these massed and crowded buildings, close-standing, majestic in their heavy, solid grandeur, was far greater. The nearest, less than half the height of the towering temple side walls, was joined onto the temple itself, and stretched away virtually out of our sight. We stood and looked up at this.

  Not a sound, not a whisper, even from a night insect, broke the deathly stillness. I remembered the Great Circle.

  “It’s His territory, right enough,” I murmured; and Wilkes nodded.

  “Closed for the season!” he said lightly, and lit a cigarette.

  “Undoubtedly,” I agreed, standing beside him and looking up at the solid masonry, its massive lines somewhat broken, dignified and beautiful in the fickle, transient moonlight.

  I sat down beside Wilkes and looked for my cigarette case. I had left it in the pocket of my drill jacket when I took it off and laid it on the ground beside Pelletier before going up the tree. Curiously, in all this time that had elapsed I had not thought of smoking. Wilkes handed me his case, and we sat there side by side saying nothing. A glance down at the heavy sword which I had laid across my knees reminded me of our current mission.