The Curse of the Blue Figurine (18 page)

"For the love of God, would you stop kicking me? What do you think I am, anyway?"

Johnny could not believe his ears. The voice was the professor's voice! He was there, alive, lying under Johnny!

With a loud triumphant yell Johnny scrambled to his feet. He was so excited and overjoyed that he hardly knew what he was doing. "Professor? Is that really you?"

The familiar raspy voice responded. "Of course it's me! Who else would it be up here in this disgusting, dank, smelly cave? I came all the way up here to rescue you, and the least you could do is—"

The professor's speech was cut off by a sickening jolt. Once again the cave floor heaved, and more rocks and pebbles came raining down. Now the professor was on his feet.
"Outside!"
he yelled, and grabbing Johnny's 
arm, he hauled him out through the mouth of the cave. The mountain went on shaking and shivering. It was very dark outside, and it was still raining, but from somewhere far above them Johnny and the professor heard a drumming, thundering roar that grew louder and louder by the second. In terror they clutched each other and waited. It was a rockslide, another rockslide. Down the side of the mountain, boulders came crashing, thundering, and rolling. The din was terrific. Johnny and the professor put their hands over their ears and closed their eyes. Any second now they would be killed, crushed by tons of rock—or so they thought. But then the din died away. From far below they heard splashes and more rumbling. Then came silence.

Johnny opened his eyes and took his hands away from his ears. He was soaked with rain, and it was still black as pitch outside, but he knew that the avalanche had passed them by. He turned to the professor excitedly. "Hey, Professor!" he yelled. "Hey, we're safe! We're safe! The ghost is gone! Hey, you were great, you really were! I thought you were dead, but you're alive! It's wonderful! Whee! Whee!" He waved his arms and started dancing around on the grass.

The professor stood stock still. He smiled faintly. "Oh, I assure you, it was nothing!" he said with a modest wave of his hand.

And then he fainted dead away.

When the professor woke up, he found Johnny kneeling over him. He looked very anxious. It was getting light out. The sky was blue again, and the sun was rising from a reddish haze over on the other side of a wide valley. Birds were twittering in a crooked little juniper tree that grew near the mouth of the cave.

"Are you all right, Professor?" Johnny asked.

The professor sat up. He harrumphed and looked at Johnny, and then he quickly looked away. Plainly he was embarrassed. Fainting was not the sort of thing he usually did. "I'm perfectly all right," he snapped, brushing dirt off his sleeves. "And by the way, what is all that nincompoopery about me being dead? Do I look dead to you? Eh? Do I?"

Johnny explained to the professor as well as he could what he had seen—or rather, what he
thought
he had seen—inside the cave.

"Well, well, well!" said the professor. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. "It must have been an illusion. Old Shagnasty must've known that we had him in a corner. We were within an inch of victory when we found the box that had his ashes in it. He wanted you to despair and give up. I'm so glad you didn't!"

"So'm I," said Johnny. Once again there were tears in his eyes, and he shuddered as he realized how narrow their escape had been.

The professor got to his feet. Fussily he brushed off the seat of his pants and his trouser legs. He glanced this 
way and that. "By the way," he said, "what was all that godawful noise? When I woke up from... from whatever happened to me, it seemed like the whole bloody mountain was coming down around our ears."

Johnny pointed off to the right. It was not hard to see the path that the rockslide had made. A great raw gash ran down the rugged face of the mountain. The falling stones and boulders had wiped out what was left of the trail. Johnny and the professor would have to be rescued by somebody, somehow.

"Heavenly days, McGee!" exclaimed the professor in wonder. He walked to the edge of the drop-off and looked down. The path of the rockslide continued down the steep side of the mountain. Far down, near the bottom, you could see where trees had been mowed down by the rolling boulders. The professor squinted and strained to see, but his eyes were not good for distances. "Tell me, John," he said, beckoning for Johnny to come closer, "are those boulders in the lake way down there?"

Johnny walked to the edge and looked. "Yeah
... yeah, I guess so," he said uncertainly. He turned and pointed up. "They came from up there."

The professor looked where Johnny was pointing, and then, in a flash, it hit him. He knew what had happened. The Hag had come down. The jutting, shelving boulders that formed the face of the Hag had been dislodged by the earthquake, and now they were down in Hag Lake, thousands of feet below. The pro
fessor started to laugh. He couldn't help it—it all seemed terribly funny. He thought about all the things that had been named for the Hag. He thought about Hag View Cottages and Hag Kumfy Kabins and pieces of pine-scented soap shaped like the Hag and most of all of Hagtooth Harry's trained bears. It was just a stitch, it really was.

When the professor's laughing fit had died down, Johnny asked timidly, "Did... did the ghost make the earthquake happen?"

The professor was startled by this question. Now all the things that had happened last night came flooding back into his mind, and he grew serious again. "Yes," he said, nodding, "or rather, his passing caused the earth to shake. But he's gone now, gone for good. At least, I hope—" The professor paused. He had been gazing vaguely around while he talked. Now he found that he was looking at a funny-shaped outcropping of rock that rose above the entrance to the cave. The morning sun was shining on the eastern flank of the mountain, and it touched the ragged finger of rock with golden fire. The rock looked like an angel. It had wings and a head and even something that looked a bit like an outstretched hand.

"Interred by angels
..." muttered the professor, nodding. "One was up there, and the other was a coin. Clever, clev-er! But I wonder who planted him up here? Who did the burying, I mean?"

Johnny had not understood anything that the professor 
said. Not that it mattered much to him at the moment. He was just happy to be alive. He still did not understand how he managed to travel from his bed at the motel to this wild, lonely place in the mountains. But he knew it all had something to do with the ghost of Father Baart— who had turned out to be real, after all. And he also knew—or hoped—that the professor would explain everything to him in good time.

Right now, however, there were other problems. "How're we gonna get down, Professor?" Johnny asked.

The professor made a puckery face. "Oh, I suspect that we will have company shortly," he said dryly. "Earthquakes are not common up here in the White Mountains, and when the local yokels see what has happened to their chief tourist attraction, there'll be lots of people swarming all over the mountain, taking pictures and saying tsk-tsk and standing around with their mouths hanging open. So don't worry. In the meantime, however, we will have to wait. It'll be boring, I know, but it beats plunging thousands of feet to our death. Don't you agree?"

Johnny agreed. So he sat down on the dewy grass with the professor, and they talked about this and that as the sun rose higher and higher. In the middle of their conversation the professor got up and went into the cave. He came back with the slab of stone that had the gold coin embedded in it. He remarked sadly to Johnny that Elizabethan gold angels were much prized by coin collectors. Then he added that the coin had lain for years 
over the grave of a wicked sorcerer. And after that the professor took the slab to the edge of the precipice and heaved it over, coin and all. Then he went back and sat down next to Johnny on the grass and talked some more. Presently they began to hear a
whap-whap
sound in the air and the whirring of motors. They looked up and saw a helicopter. It was coming down over the top of Hellbent Mountain.

Johnny and the Professor sprang to their feet and began yelling and waving frantically. The helicopter hovered briefly near the top of the mountain, and then, slowly, it moved closer. It floated down onto the grassy patch while its whirling propeller stirred up a mighty wind. The engine sounds died, and the propeller spun to a halt. A door in the cabin of the copter opened, and a state trooper climbed out. He was a man about sixty years old, with a leathery, seamed, sunburnt face and a gray crew cut. He wore the green uniform of the New Hampshire State Police, and when he opened his mouth, he talked with a heavy New Hampshire accent.

"Hi, there!" he said, waving. "I bet you guys was wonderin' how you was gonna get down, wasn't you?" He turned and peered down over the edge of the chasm. Then he let out a long, low whistle and shook his head gravely. "Gonna be hard on the tourist business," he said mournfully. "What in heck you think people'll come up here to see now?"

The professor thought of the towering, rugged mountains, and how they looked in autumn, when their 
sides were alight with colors, yellow and orange and red. He thought of the mountain streams and steep gorges and the layers of brown needles covering the forest floor. He thought of the mountains in moonlight, and lonely night drives along the Kankamagus Highway.

"Oh, I imagine there'll be
something
to look at," he said sarcastically. "There's always Hagtooth Harry's trained bears, after all."

The policeman sighed and shook his head. "Kids'll be awful disappointed," he said. Then he added, as an afterthought, "You folks like a ride back, would you?"

The professor and Johnny climbed into the helicopter with the trooper and rode back with him to the motel. Johnny enjoyed the ride tremendously. He had only been in an airplane once before in his life, and he had never ridden in a helicopter. The professor closed his eyes and spent his time trying to remember the kings and queens of England and which one came after which. After an amazingly short ride the copter set them down on the front lawn of the Hag View Cottages. But as soon as they stepped out onto solid ground again, Johnny and the professor ran into more trouble. A State Police cruiser was pulled up in front of the cottage they were staying in. The owner, a bald, red-faced man with a big overhanging beer belly, was talking excitedly with two policemen. When he saw the two missing persons walking toward him, he nearly had a conniption fit.

"Jeezus!"
he exclaimed in a loud foghorn voice. "Where'd
you
two come from? Gawd, I thought you 
two was at the bottom o' Hag Lake or someplace! What happened to ya? Huh?"

On the spur of the moment the professor made up a cock-and-bull story: He explained to the owner that Johnny was nervous and excitable. He had been under a doctor's care recently because of the loss of his mother. Last night, for no reason at all, Johnny had plunged out into the night, and the professor had followed after, and then the two of them had got trapped by the earthquake and had to be rescued.

The owner accepted the story—at least he said that he did—but he glowered suspiciously at the professor. The professor didn't know it, but he had been under suspicion from the time he signed the register in the motel's office. He had signed it "Roderick Childermass, Ph.D.," and as far as the owner was concerned, all Ph.D.'s were kooks and Communists and God knows what else. As for the policemen, they were just glad that they could call off the search and go home.

After the policemen had gone and everyone had calmed down a bit, Johnny and the professor packed their bags and got ready to leave. The professor went to the motel office and paid the bill, and off they went. They drove straight back to Duston Heights, stopping only in the town of Rochester to grab lunch at a drive-in. When the professor's car pulled up in front of the Dixon house, Gramma and Grampa knew right away that something had happened. The travelers had come back from their trip two days early, and they had come back 
suddenly, without calling, without explanations. At first Johnny and the professor were very secretive and close-mouthed about what had happened. Finally, though, the professor admitted that something very strange and mysterious and scary had happened. And he said that he'd tell the Dixons the whole story in three days time. In the meantime he needed to make a few phone calls and confer with a friend of his. Then—after grabbing a Bible out of a bookcase and making Johnny swear to secrecy on it—the professor left.

Three days passed. During this time Johnny stayed at home. He did jigsaw puzzles and played cribbage and checkers with Grampa. Meanwhile across the street the professor was busy. First he called up Dr. Melkonian and chewed him out. Without giving the doctor a chance to get a word in edgewise, he told him that he was a pompous, posturing bearded hornswoggler, who ought to have his psychiatric license revoked. He accused him of mystagogic muckification and pointless prattle, and he said that he'd ask for his money back if he thought that there was any chance it'd be returned. He ended up by slamming the receiver down hard in the doctor's ear. This little rant did not make a whole lot of sense, but it left the professor feeling relieved and curiously satisfied. Next the professor hired a cleaning lady to whip his house into shape so he could have visitors in. Finally he made a long-distance call to an old friend of his up in Durham, New Hampshire, the town where the University of New Hampshire is.

On a Friday night at around eight o'clock Gramma, Grampa, and Johnny went across the street to the professor's house. When he met them at the door, he was wearing a red damask smoking jacket that smelled of mothballs, and he was smoking Balkan Sobranie tobacco in a pipe—he had decided that cigarettes were bad for his health. The professor ushered his guests into the living room. A bright fire burned in the fireplace, and the crystal pendants on the ormolu candlesticks on the mantel glistened and glittered. In an easy chair by the fire someone was sitting—a stranger. He was a tall, weedy man with a fluff of white hair on his head. He wore big, goggly, horn-rimmed glasses, and his long pointed nose was bent and ridged. The shoulders of his tweed jacket were covered with dandruff, and the elbows had leather patches. His pants were baggy and shapeless, and his long pointed shoes looked as if they were made out of cardboard.