The Curse of the Blue Figurine (17 page)

When the two ends were pulled apart, a hole opened in the middle, and flame shot out. Nimrod lighters used a lot of fuel, but they worked in a gale, or in the rain. Fortunately the professor still had control of his hands. He pulled the lighter out and jerked at the ends. A spear of yellow flame shot up into the night. At the same time the professor dug in his heels and struggled as best he could to stop himself.

It worked. He came to a shuddering halt. And the dark shape sprang backward, covering its face with its hands.

The professor looked madly this way and that. He wanted... Ah! Glory be to God! Over in a corner of the little lookout place, piled against a cairn of stones, was some wood. But then his heart sank. It had been raining—the wood would be soaked. Frantically, still holding the blazing lighter, he whirled around. And now, for the first time, he saw the cave, a dark hole in the beetling rocky wall. Still holding the lighter up before him, he began to back toward the cave. A few more steps... he was in it now. Again he peered around. Ah! Magnificent! Stupendous! Piled in a corner just inside the mouth of the little cave were brush and twigs and sticks. The professor had his firewood after all.

He had to work fast though. The lighter might run out of fuel any minute now, and then where would he be? The professor's mind raced. Tinder. He needed tinder. Some old leathery oak leaves still clung to the broken branches in the pile of firewood. The professor 
ripped off a handful of them and piled them on the floor of the cave. He touched the lighter to the leaves, and they blazed. Working with mad, headlong speed, the professor snapped his lighter shut and raced over into the corner of the cave. He came back with handfuls of brush and little twigs. The fire grew. The twigs crackled merrily, and now he was throwing on thicker pieces of wood. Every now and then he glanced nervously outside. His flashlight lay where it had fallen. It still cast a line of pale light out across the grass. But except for that he could see nothing.

Now the fire was burning well. The professor stuck a broken branch into it, and it blazed. Armed with the branch, he stepped out into the open. Johnny had been standing in the middle of the little grassy space. But he was not there anymore. Sick with fear, the professor rushed forward. There stood Johnny, at the very edge of the precipice. One more step and he would plunge thousands of feet to his death. With a quick dash the professor made it to where he was standing. He grabbed Johnny's arm just as he was going over the edge and hauled him back to safety.

The professor turned. One hand was clenched tight around Johnny's arm. The other hand grasped the burning branch. It was raining lightly now, and the drops hissed in the fire, but the fire did not go out. Nearby, just outside the circle of light, hovered the dark figure. Its eyes were pinpoints of red light. Johnny sagged to the ground. His body was a dead weight. Stooping, the pro
fessor grasped Johnny under the right armpit. Slowly, painfully, he dragged him back toward the cave. He still held the blazing branch up with his free hand. It seemed to take forever, but finally they made it. And just in time too, because the rain was really pelting down now, and it was putting out the fire on the branch. With a sudden thrust the professor heaved the smoldering branch at the red-eyed figure that still hovered menacingly in the darkness. "Take that, you rotten thing!" the professor growled. Immediately he was sorry he had thrown the branch. He was going to need all the wood he could find.

Inside the cave the professor squatted. A pile of sticks lay near him, and he fed them, one by one, into the crackling fire. Beyond the shimmering wall of flame lay darkness. Darkness, and something else. The professor glanced anxiously to his right. There lay Johnny, cold and still. An awful thought occurred to the professor. Was he... 
No, no, it couldn't be, he wouldn't allow it!
And suddenly a new thought came to the professor. He felt like a fool for not thinking of it before. He shuffled over toward Johnny on his knees and raised his limp left hand. Slowly he began working the ring off of the finger. It didn't want to come off, but the professor had strong hands. Bit by bit it moved, and then it was off. Johnny groaned. He opened his eyes and blinked and looked around blearily.

"Wha... where..." he muttered thickly.

The professor was overjoyed. Tears sprang to his eyes. "Thank God, thank God..." he whispered. He looked 
at the ring that lay in his hand. The stone was as dull and dark as a chip of coal. It did not even reflect the firelight. The professor had a great urge to fling the ring into the fire, but he thought better of it, so he stuffed it into his pants pocket. Someday some expert on magic might tell him what to do with the ring—if he lived to tell his experiences to anyone.

Right now there was a problem. The fire was keeping the evil creature at bay, but what would happen when the fire went out? Maybe the creature would have to vanish at dawn, but how far away was that? The professor hadn't brought his watch with him, and he hadn't noticed the time when he dashed out of the cottage. He looked at the pitifully small pile of wood, and he felt panic rising inside him.

Meanwhile Johnny was slowly returning to the world. He was bewildered and scared. Only a moment ago, or so it seemed to him, he had fallen asleep in his nice comfortable bed in the motel. Now he was in this dank, dark place where firelight leaped on the walls. And the professor was here too. What on earth had happened?

The professor would have comforted Johnny, but he had no time to be soothing and friendly. His mind was racing as he tried—tried desperately—to think his way out of the mess they were in. The professor believed in thought. He was always telling his students that you could get to the unknown by using the known. If you just put the facts that you knew together in the proper way, you might get some truly amazing results.
All right, 
he said to himself grimly as he fed another stick into the fire,
what do you know?
Well, he knew that the ghost was there, outside the cave, waiting. And the ghost had said that he was strongest in this place.
Why?
Why was he strongest here, on the side of Hellbent Mountain, Why? Why? Why?

The professor scrambled to his feet. He began to pace back and forth while Johnny watched him, bleary-eyed and astounded. The professor's thoughts had run up against a blank wall. As he well knew, there are times when logic will not do you the least little tiny bit of good. So he let his mind ramble. It began to leap from one absurd thought to the next. He found that he was humming "Angels From the Realms of Glory," an old Christmas carol. How did it go?

Angels, from the realms of glo-ry, Wing your flight o'er all the earth; Ye who sang cre-a-tion's sto-ry, Rum te-e dum and diddle durf
...

It went something like that, anyway. From there, the Professor's mind leapt to the sign he had seen on the trail:

TO THE ANGEL SCENIC VIEW

What was this angel, anyway? High above their heads was the formation known as the Hag. But hags are not angels—that was a well-known fact. So the sign probably referred to some other rock formation. Hmm. Hmmm.

Now the professor found himself thinking about the note that had been found on Father Baart's desk the day he had disappeared, the note that had been a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne's
Urne-Buriall:

The man of God lives longer without a Tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by Angels; and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human discovery.

Again the professor returned to the fire. He crouched down and fed more wood in. There were only a few twigs left, and the fire would use them up in no time. He looked out through the shimmering waves of heat and the orange flames, but he could see nothing. Nothing but darkness and falling rain.
Angels
...
 angels
... 
interred by angels...
What on God's green earth did that have to do with Father Baart? The quotation referred to Moses, whose body had been carried away by angels. That was what the Bible said, anyway. Moses had been buried in some secret place. Well, now: What about Father Baart? His body had never been found.
Interred by angels... interred by angels..
. What if...

Suddenly the professor was down on his knees, scrabbling madly at the hard dirt floor of the cave. He had no tools, only his fingers, and this made digging difficult. Johnny, watching groggily, decided that the professor must have gone completely out of his mind.

"Hey, Professor!" he called. "Whatcha doin'?"

"I'm digging!" the professor yelled over his shoulder. "And you should dig too! Dig over there? Use your hands! Use anything! But hurry! We haven't got much time!"

Johnny didn't understand why he was supposed to dig, but he did as he was told. He grabbed a broken piece of wood and began gouging at the floor of the cave. Dirt flew, and dust rose in a choking cloud. It was a strange scene, the two of them scraping away like dogs looking for bones. Gouge, gouge, scrape, scrape! Johnny wielded the stick like a trowel, and before long he had dug a pretty good-sized trough in the hard-packed dirt floor. But he had to stop because his glasses were covered with steam and powdery dirt. He laid down the stick and pulled out his handkerchief. Then he took off his glasses and wiped them and put them back on. Johnny looked down. He did a double take and looked again. At the bottom of the trough he had made, he could see stone. Rough, flat stone, part of a slab maybe. And imbedded in the stone was something that glimmered faintly in the firelight. A coin. A gold coin, it looked like.

"Hey, Professor!" Johnny yelled. "Come over here! Come over here quick!"

The professor looked up. His fingers were bleeding and sore, and his eyes were wild. "What? What? What is it?"

"I dunno, only
... only I think you better come over here quick!"

The professor stumbled to his feet. He hurried over to 
where Johnny was kneeling and dropped to his knees beside him. The professor's mouth fell open. "It's a coin," he said wonderingly. Then he looked closer. He brushed dirt away with his fingers and winced as he did this, because his fingertips were rubbed raw from the digging. Now he pulled out his Nimrod lighter again and snapped it open. He held the flame down close to the coin, and then he let out a loud, joyous whoop. The professor knew a lot about old coins, and he knew that this was an Elizabethan gold coin called an angel. On the side that was up, there was a picture of an angel. He had wings and a halo and a spear in his hand, and he was killing a dragon with the spear.

"An angel, by God!" roared the professor. He turned to Johnny and grabbed the stick from his hand. Madly he jabbed at the earth with the stick. "We've got to get this stone up!" he muttered feverishly. "We've got to, we've
got to!!"

Meanwhile behind them the fire burned low. It had collapsed into a heap of red coals. And beyond the fire, at the mouth of the cave, a fearful shape hovered. Johnny turned and looked, and he went rigid with terror. He opened and closed his mouth and tried to speak to the professor, but nothing came out. The professor went on flailing with the stick. At last he had uncovered the ragged edges of the flat stone. He forced his sore, bleeding fingers down into the dirt and pried with them. "Oh, God, oh, God!" he breathed, and he gasped and winced because of the pain in his fingers. But he got a grip on 
the stone and forced it up. Underneath was a dark hollow space. The professor plunged his hands down into the hole. He came up with a small wooden box. He handed it to Johnny, and then, suddenly, he seemed to become aware of something.

There was very little light in the cave now. The fire was down to a few smoky red embers, and there was no wood left.

"Johnny! Pick up the lighter! Quick!" The professor's voice was feverish.

Johnny set the box down on the ground. He looked around frantically. "I can't see it! Where is it?"

"There! There! God's teeth, man, can't you see it? It's right down by my knee! Hurry!
Hurry!"

Johnny scrabbled around in the dirt, and his hand closed over a small cold metal object. He had seen the professor use the lighter many times, so he knew how it worked. He tugged at the ends of the cylinder, and there was a snap and a tiny white spark, but nothing else happened. He tried again and again and again. But the lighter was out of fuel. And behind them the last red coal of the fire winked out. Now Johnny felt his flesh go goose-pimply all over. And he smelled a horrid, sickening odor, the odor of corruption. Johnny and the professor turned. At the mouth of the cave they saw a face. An ugly, cruel, grinning face. It was lit by an unearthly light, and it hovered in the thick darkness.

The professor sprang to his feet. "Go away!" he yelled. "Go away, you rotten thing, you filthy, evil—"

But the professor never finished his sentence. A shadowy hand stretched out toward him, and as Johnny watched in horror the professor
disintegrated.
His body turned to dust, and his empty clothes fell in a heap and lay there on the cavern floor.

Johnny was stunned. He was numb with horror. What had happened was so awful that he could hardly believe it. The professor was gone. There was not even a body left. Just a heap of clothes. And now the nightmarish face of Father Baart floated closer.

"It is your turn now," said the croaking voice. "You must die so that I may return to the sweet land of the living. Stand and face me!
I command you to obey!"

Johnny hesitated. He was frightened half out of his mind, but he was angry too. Ferociously angry. Tears sprang to his eyes. He wanted to throw something—a rock or a boulder— at the horrid mask that floated before his eyes. With a sudden lunge he reached out and grabbed the small wooden box. He leaped to his feet and threw 
it. The wood of the box was rotten, and it disintegrated as the box flew through the air. And suddenly the air was full of dust. The grinning mask crumpled like a paper lantern thrust into a fire. And then there was a blinding flash of red light and a deep
boom
that seemed to come from far, far down in the bowels of the mountain. The floor of the cave began to shake and tremble and jump crazily about. Clots of dirt and pebbles fell from the ceiling of the cave. Johnny looked around, panic-stricken. What could he do? Suddenly the floor of the cave heaved, and Johnny was sent sprawling. He fell across something soft, something that cried out with a loud crabby voice.