Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (53 page)

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 fulfilment, 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 fulfilment 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’s 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.

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’s 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 mêlée 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 difficult, 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.

‘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.

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.

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.

‘We’ll have to go all the way to the end of this masonry-work at least,’ I said, ‘before we can get into the inclosure!’

Wilkes tossed away the stub of his cigarette, stood up, and stretched his arms.

‘All right,’ said he, ‘let’s do it.’

It took us a quarter of an hour of steady walking before we came to a corner. We turned this, walked past that enormous building’s end, and emerged in a kind of open space much like the quadrangle of a modern university, only many times larger in area, surround by more buildings dim in the present light, one side bounded by the edge of the great structure we had been skirting. The moonlight shone somewhat brighter on this side, against that long plain wall of masonry.

Suddenly Wilkes caught me by the arm. He uttered a typically British expletive.

‘My hat!’ said Wilkes, ‘Look, Canevin! There isn’t a window in the place!’

We stood looking up at the building.

‘Curious,’ commented Wilkes. ‘Other old Maya architecture has windows – that little anteroom effect we called in at before going into the temple has windows, both sides. Why not this?’

‘Perhaps it’s a kind of store-house,’ I suggested. ‘If so, it wouldn’t need windows.’

‘I doubt that – sort of instinct, perhaps,’ returned Wilkes. ‘All along I’ve had the idea that the – er – congregation came out of this into the temple. It’s attached – we saw that outside there, built right onto it; we had to walk around it on just that account.’

‘If you’re right,’ I said, reflecting, ‘if there are people in there – well, then they don’t need windows – light.’

‘If so, why? threw out Wilkes; and I had no answer.

We stood staring up at the blank, unornamental, solid wall.

‘Curious!’ vouchsafed Wilkes again. ‘Curious, no end!’ Then: ‘Might bear out my idea, rather – you remember, Canevin? That “immortality” idea I mean. If He has them – er – preserved, so to speak, ready to be revived, started going when He wants them, or
needs
them, what? As you remarked, they weren’t exactly “contemporaries” of ours! He’s been going at this whole affair His own way, all through; not the way we human being would go at it. If you ask me, He – er – needed them to scrag us in there, in the temple I mean. They tried, you know! Failed, rather! We’re still on deck, Canevin! And, back of that – why, for the sake of argument, did He set us down here, on earth once more, but not at the same old stand, not where we parked the old bus, in that circle of grass, under that tree? Perhaps it’s a small matter but – well, why, Canevin? Why here, I mean to say, rather than there? It’s a point to consider at any rate. Looks to me, if you ask me, as though He were trying, in His own peculiar way, to do us in, and had, so far, failed.’

I pondered over this long speech of Wilkes’s, the longest I had heard him make. He was, like many engineering fellows, inclined to be monosyllabic rather than garrulous. It was, I thought, a curious piece of reasoning. Yet, anything coming from this staunch comrade in a pinch such as he had proved himself to be, was worth consideration. It might be what he called ‘instinct’, or indeed, anything. It might be the truth.

I was very far from realizing at that moment – and so, too, I think, was Wilkes himself, despite this curiously suggestive set of ideas – that within a very short time this utterly strange adventure upon which we were embarked was to give us its final, and, thoughtfully considered, perhaps its most poignant, surprise. Even warned as I should have been by Wilkes’s strange surmise, I was quite unprepared for what we found inside.