Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  They got out of the police car. “Thank you so much Mr. Cairo, Mrs. Lockhart,” Mildred said. “I don’t know how I could ever pay you back.”

  “Just take care of yourself,” Cairo said. He reached into thin air and pulled back a business card. “This is the address of our manager. Write us a letter when you’re safely back in Missouri.”

  “I will.”

  “A moment,” Mrs. Lockhart said suddenly. “Mildred, what’s that?”

  She was pointing to a ramp, paved with cobblestones, that led down into the ground. “That?” Mildred said. “Why, that’s just a walkway, for people and horses to cross the street.”

  “Are there many of them in the city?”

  “Maybe a couple of hundred.”

  “As many,” Mrs. Lockhart pressed on, “as there were little marks on the top sheet of Bruno’s map? Cairo, would you be so kind?” He nodded, reached back into the police car for the map, and unrolled it on the sidewalk.

  “You’re right,” Cairo said. “It’s a map of the pedestrian tunnels. Very astute, Mrs. Lockhart.”

  “There’s more,” Mrs. Lockhart said. “Note how these pedestrian tunnels connect with a longer tunnel that goes under the park? That park right behind us?”

  “By heaven,” Cairo said. “I think you’re on to it.” He rolled up the maps and exchanged them for the miner’s lamp. “What did Bruno say when I asked him how to find the lizard men? Could it have been that he meant us to get ‘to the tunnels’—meaning the tunnels of the lizard men—’from the tunnels’—meaning from the pedestrian tunnels?”

  “Let us find out,” Mrs. Lockhart said. “Mildred, can you make your way to your train on your own?”

  “Compared to a lot of things I done since I came out here,” Mildred said, “it’ll be a piece of cake.”

  She blew a kiss, and Cairo managed a short bow, then he and Mrs. Lockhart turned and hurried down the ramp that led to the tunnels under Los Angeles.

  The short tunnel crossed beneath Alameda and emerged again at the end of Olvera Street in the park. Cairo walked the length of it then returned, searching the walls and floor. “I don’t see any way this can join the other tunnel.”

  “That’s because,” Mrs. Lockhart said, “you’re using your eyes.”

  Cairo stopped. “You’re right, of course.” He produced a long, red handkerchief from his sleeve and tied it over his eyes. Once again he slowly walked the length of the tunnel, arms raised slightly from his sides, turning his head every few seconds to listen or to sniff the air. An elderly Mexican woman, muffled in a black dress and shawl, passed him with a frightened look, crossing herself and muttering under her breath.

  Once she had climbed the ramp to the park Cairo asked, “Are we alone?”

  “Quite,” Mrs. Lockhart replied.

  Cairo nodded, walked to the middle of the south wall of the tunnel, and ran his fingers carefully over the massive stone blocks. “Ah,” he said, and a section of the wall pivoted backward into darkness. He removed the blindfold and switched on Bruno’s mining lamp. Sniffing the air of the passage he commented, “Methane. Volatile stuff. Don’t light up one of your cigars in here, Mrs. Lockhart.”

  “Very droll, Cairo. If you don’t wish to lead, I’ll be happy to oblige.”

  Cairo handed her the lamp and followed her into the passage. The tunnel was ten feet high and nearly that wide, paved with large, uniform stones. The scars of pickaxes were visible in the rock of the ceiling. Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart had advanced no more than a few paces when the section of wall that had pivoted to admit them rumbled slowly back into place.

  Mrs. Lockhart looked at Cairo. “I trust you’ll be able to get us out again.”

  “I hope so too,” Cairo smiled. “Lead on.”

  The passage ran straight and unencumbered for several hundred yards, angling slightly downward. Suddenly Cairo halted. “Mrs. Lockhart. Shut the lamp off, if you would.”

  She did so, and for a moment they were plunged into what seemed to be absolute, stygian darkness. Then, after a few agonizing seconds, a faint, yellowish-green outline emerged from the general gloom of the floor. Cairo knelt and lifted away a stone trap-door, revealing a drop of ten feet or so, with hand-holds in the rock, and a stone staircase below it that led deep into the bowels of the earth. The green glow rose from the stairs.

  Mrs. Lockhart handed the lamp to Cairo and began to descend. “Be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit slippery.”

  Cairo passed down the lamp and joined her on the first platform. “Are you prepared to go on?” Cairo asked. “I have no idea where this may lead.”

  A narrow smile barely registered on Mrs. Lockhart’s agelessly beautiful features. “That lack has never stopped me before.”

  The stairs seemed to have been carved from living rock, untold generations before. The risers were over a foot in height and the uncomfortably narrow treads were well worn. The passage curved gently to the right as it descended. After the initial turning, Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart continued straight downward in a northwesterly direction for hundreds of feet before abruptly emerging into a chamber the size of a banquet hall with a smooth, level floor. The mysterious green glow came from a single sphere, somewhat larger than a man’s head, in the center of the ceiling. It provided enough light to easily read the carvings in the walls of the cave. Interspersed with vaguely humanoid figures were rows of hieroglyphs. Cairo took the lamp and studied them.

  “Remind you of anything?” Mrs. Lockhart asked.

  “The Temple of Ramses the Second at Abu Simbel,” Cairo returned, awe in his voice.

  Mrs. Lockhart nodded. “And...?”

  “And Chichen Itza in the Yucatan.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But if there is a single civilization that bridges those two cultures, it must mean—”

  “Correct,” Mrs. Lockhart said. “These tunnels can only have been built by the survivors of Atlantis.”

  Cairo stood for a moment, as if trying to fathom all the implications of the idea. “Are you saying that the Atlanteans were not human? That they were some sort of...lizard race?” Cairo turned slowly, taking in the carvings, the alien technology of the light sphere. “It could explain so much...”

  He froze. “Did you hear something?”

  Mrs. Lockhart shook her head once, a curt gesture that barely disturbed her jet-black hair.

  Another tunnel led from the far end of the chamber. Cairo glided silently toward the opening and looked into the darkness. “I don’t think—”

  This time the noise was clearly audible, a sort of wet thump. It was quickly followed by another. Cairo backed into the center of the room and held the lamp high. Mrs. Lockhart moved behind him, crouching slightly, her arms raised in the posture of an oriental science of self-defense.

  A panel of hieroglyphs suddenly slid open to reveal a small passageway, followed almost instantly by a second panel and then a third. A fourth opened in the opposite wall, then two more. For a moment silence fell on the underground chamber, an absence more terrifying than the sounds that had preceded it.

  And then the openings poured forth lizard men.

  There were at least a hundred of them, all about four feet in height, their skins gray-green in the eerie luminescence. Their loins were wrapped in some sort of bindings that left room for the massive tails that dragged the ground behind them. They had almost no necks, and their lipless mouths extended more than an inch beyond where their noses should have been. Their bulbous eyes stared unblinkingly as they shambled forward on massive lower legs that bent nearly double. Had they straightened those legs they would have been the height of a man.

  They formed a great circle around Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart. The odor of methane in the air was almost unbearable. Cairo shifted the lamp to his left hand and gestured with his right. “We are looking for a human woman, Veronica Fleming. We have no desire to harm you.”

  “Speak for yourself, Cairo,” Mrs. Lockhart said. “In any case, I don’t believe th
ey’re listening.”

  The lizard men had begun to move forward. “I will protect myself,” Cairo warned them, waving the lamp in an arc in front of him. “Have a care.”

  The lizard men charged.

  Cairo swung the lamp once, grazing one of them and tracing a line of dark green across its chest. He had no further opportunity. In the next moment the weight of the creatures bore him and Mrs. Lockhart to the floor of the cave and consciousness fled from them both.

  Cairo recovered to find himself leaning back against one face of a steep, ten-foot tall pyramid, his wrists and ankles secured by golden chains. He winced in pain as soon as he opened his eyes and it took him a moment to try again.

  “Are you all right, Cairo?” Mrs. Lockhart asked. She was chained to a second pyramid a few yards away.

  “Somewhat the worse for beating,” he said, “but I hope to survive.” He blinked, raised his head, and gasped in astonishment as he looked around.

  They’d been brought to a huge underground chamber, larger than any cathedral in Europe. A massive green globe seemed to hang well below the vaulted ceiling, where it blazed with a light to rival the noonday sun. Pyramids, altars, and figurines rose from the smooth stone floor at irregular intervals. Surrounding them swarmed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the lizard creatures. Many of them carried spears that appeared to be tipped with gold. And on a dais in front of Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart stood a woman in long, flowing white robes and a golden mask.

  Cairo smiled. “Veronica Fleming, I presume?”

  The woman moved to the edge of the dais. She was but a few paces away from Cairo, had he been able to move, her waist on a level with his eyes. “No,” she said, and removed the mask. “I was never Veronica Fleming.”

  Rosenberg’s daughter stood revealed before them, her haunted eyes and shining red hair appearing almost black in the mysterious light. “Veronica Fleming was a creation of my father’s, the invention of a status-seeking, fame-obsessed immigrant ashamed of his own heritage. It was Veronica Fleming who was sold into the child slavery of the studio system, Veronica Fleming who was given drugs and liquor before she even became physically a woman, Veronica Fleming who was used by producers and directors and has-been actors. Not me. Never me.”

  She spread her arms wide above her head, fingers extended. “I am Vera Rosenberg, and I have found my true destiny...as a queen.” Her subjects answered her with percussive sounds from their throats, horrid gulping barks that resounded the length and breadth of the chamber and built to a deafening crescendo.

  “What do you mean to do with us?” Cairo demanded, his voice raised to be heard above the hideous cacophony.

  “You will be sacrificed, of course,” Vera said. “In due time.”

  “Three days ago,” Mrs. Lockhart said, “you stood in the same relation to Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666, that Veronica Fleming stood to her Hollywood masters. How did your situation change so utterly in so short a time?”

  “The span of time is not three days,” Vera said, “but rather five thousand years. I am the fulfillment of ancient prophecy.” She beckoned to four of the nearest lizard creatures. “Leave them chained, but release them to walk about.”

  “So your subjects speak English?” Cairo asked, as his manacles were unfastened from the pyramid, the loose ends of the chains held by shambling lizard guards.

  “English, Latin, Hebrew—all of your warm-blood languages are descended from those of my people.”

  “Your people, then,” Mrs. Lockhart commented, “would be the cold-bloods?”

  “Your reputation has preceded you, Mrs. Lockhart,” Vera said. “You are hardly one to cast aspersions on cold-bloodedness.” She smiled without humor. “But I will give you some few answers before your deaths. The rituals are more effective if the victims have some understanding of their purpose.”

  She walked gracefully down the steps of the dais and swept her arm toward a monumental sculpture which had the same Gila-monster form as the underground complex itself on Shufelt’s map. It stretched a hundred yards in length, some thirty feet in height, and its surface was formed of beaten gold. At Vera Rosenberg’s gesture, an opening appeared in the side of the giant reptile.

  “Clearly,” Cairo murmured to Mrs. Lockhart, “she may have shed her former identity, but she hasn’t lost her flair for the dramatic.” One of the lizard men responded by jabbing him in the kidneys with the blunt end of a spear.

  “In this chamber,” Vera said, “are thirty-seven golden tablets.” She snapped her fingers and two of the lizard men scuttled into the chamber then reappeared, awkwardly carrying one of the tablets between them. The tablet had the rudimentary form of a lizard, with abbreviated head, tail, and legs breaking the otherwise oblong form. It appeared to be a slab of solid gold four feet in length, a little more than a foot wide, and perhaps half an inch thick. The upper surface was covered in hieroglyphs similar to those in the outer chamber.

  “If the information inscribed on these tablets became public knowledge,” Vera said, “it would destroy your civilization. Together they contain the entire history of the world since its creation, and believe me, its creation is nothing at all like you imagine it to be. They tell of the origin of warm-blooded life as an experiment gone awry. They even predict the coming of a warm-blooded, red-haired woman in the fifth millennium of exile to lead them back to domination of the surface world.”

  “You’ve read them all in three days?” Mrs. Lockhart remarked. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Your sarcasm is wasted,” Vera replied imperiously. “Fragments of this knowledge have escaped over the centuries. Hopi legends tell of the great lost cities of the Lizard Clan. Bruno Galt heard of the Lizard Queen from a Hopi medicine man that they’d hired to help with their research. When Bruno and I met, we were two ambitious people who quickly saw how we could benefit from one another.”

  “Bruno’s dead,” Cairo said.

  “Yes. He could never see past the gold. He didn’t realize that gold was meaningless once you had the power to rule an entire city—perhaps an entire continent. The power to repay anyone who had ever hurt you.”

  “Then you must know your father is dead as well.”

  “I ordered it.”

  “We watched both of them die,” Cairo told her, “terrifying and painful deaths. Both were incinerated before our eyes.”

  Vera nodded again. “It is our preferred means of execution: the Blood of the Green Lion.”

  Cairo’s eyes widened at the name. “The universal solvent,” he murmured, “that the alchemists have always spoken of. It dissolves the seven metals and gold. How can you transport it?”

  “Your warm-blood alchemists were wrong. Gold contains it, if the gold is pure enough. Our scientists developed it in the days when we ruled the surface world. Simply douse any object and gradually, in the space of half an hour or so, the energy within the molecules of that object releases itself as heat. We used the Blood of the Green Lion to melt these tunnels. Because gold can resist this chemical process, it became sacred to our people. As you can see, we’ve accumulated a good deal of it.”

  She seemed to drift into a kind of reverie. “The race has fallen off greatly since then. Rapid evolution is both a blessing and a curse. But in a few generations—mere decades in human terms—I know we can rise again.”

  She turned to back to Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart. Her smile at last appeared more genuine. “I realize you’ve only scratched the surface of the knowledge we have to offer you, but I fear we must break off. It’s time for you to die.”

  Lizard soldiers stretched Cairo and Mrs. Lockhart on two adjacent altars, securing their chains to the stone. On a third altar lay the heavy mining lamp. Two further lizard disciples staggered into view carrying a massive golden urn between them. They set it at the foot of the altars and stepped away.

  “That would be the Blood of the Green Lion?” Cairo asked. “You mean, then, to burn us to death?”

  “That is correct, Mr. Ca
iro. But your deaths will inspire my people to their conquest of the surface world, so you will not die completely in vain.”

  “I take it,” Mrs. Lockhart ventured, “that no one has actually used this chemical here, underground, in quite some time?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because,” Cairo explained, “these tunnels are full of methane. The ground under Los Angeles is notoriously unstable, and clearly a fissure has opened some deposit of the gas. There may be other natural gases present as well which are not so easily recognizable, and even more flammable. In any event, an open flame in this chamber will result in an explosion of epic proportions.”

  Vera’s face registered her concern. One of the lizard men tugged at her robe and she bent over to listen to his hoarse, croaking voice.

  Cairo raised his right hand as far as the chains would allow and pinned his middle finger with his thumb. “You must believe me,” he said intently. “We are all in danger. You must release us now and let us return to the surface.”

  Vera dismissed him with a shake of her magnificent red hair. “Before poor Bruno showed me my destiny, I had planned to achieve my independence by means of Brother Perdurabo’s techniques. I learned enough from him to resist such feeble parlor tricks as yours, Cairo.” She clapped her hands. “Cover them with the Blood! When you have finished, we will begin the rite of war. As they burn, they will light our charge to the surface world and the restoration of our empire!”

  Two lizard men carefully raised the urn onto a pedestal. A third held a golden bowl to a tap at the bottom of the urn and filled it with a viscous liquid. Vera mounted a second pedestal near the urn from which she could look down upon the sacrificial altars. The creature carrying the golden bowl held it high overhead and the chamber resounded again to the yelping cries of the lizard men, as bone-chilling a sound as ever heard by human ears.

  Cairo shrank from the creature as it mounted the steps of the altar, still carrying the bowl held high. Cairo’s two hands were clasped together, his knees drawn up as far as his chains would permit. From the lizard’s bulbous throat came a high-pitched warbling moan. A dozen more lizards took up the sound, then a hundred, then a thousand, until the very bedrock seemed to quiver and shake.