Nightmare Country (27 page)

The morning fog was thinner here back off the beach, and wisps and strings of it floated from tree branches and palm fronds like gray Spanish moss. It dripped onto their shoes and pants legs from tall grasses and broad-leaved weeds along the trail.

“We should be looking on the streets of the village and in people's backyards or along the shore—not in here.” But Harry stayed close behind him. Small hermit crabs lugged their appropriated shell homes across dried coconut husks and flattened weed stalks in an effort to get out of their way. “You may be the best damn doggy gynecologist on all of Mayan Cay, turkey, but you are one hell of a people finder. Now, ah came to you for help …”

The trail soon ended, or rather diverged off in several tangents.

“Leave it to a goddamn Yankee. If we are not already lost, we are going to be soon. Now, will you please tell me just why we are here to begin with?”

Thad didn't know if these “trails” had been worn by foot travel or water drainage. But he chose the widest and continued on, telling Harry about his own sleepwalking experience. “And I'd been having that same dream about the tunnels, and I think I walked in here. Maybe there's something in here that attracts dreaming minds.”

“You know, I've been to Grand Cayman, Haiti, San Salvador, Roatán—all pretty exotic places—but I don't ever remember a place as weird as this one, even disregarding humongous silver things that—”

“Shhh, listen!”

The sound of a man sobbing somewhere ahead, and then a shout of outrage and pain.

“Take back everything I said. That's ol' Bodecker, all right. Biggest baby you ever saw,” Harry said disgustedly, and stepped into a puddle that gave way clear to his knee.

Thad reached a hand to help him out, and hurried in the direction of the sobbing, leaving Harry to limp, curse, and squelch along behind. Don Bodecker stood in front of the vine wall in a pair of Jockey shorts. One side of him was mud-splattered. He turned slowly, eyes wide, rubbing his hands up and down his bare arms.

“Thank God,” he mumbled when he saw Thad, and rushed to meet him, enveloping him in a suffocating bear hug. “Jesus, Doc, how'd I get here? And where's ‘here'?”

“Now I've seen everything.” Harry appeared on the trail. “Donald Bodecker, you unhand that man. Have you no shame? And you in your underpants!”

Don let go of Thad and rushed to embrace Harry.

“This boy needs help bad.” Harry patted his friend's shoulder and explained to Don that he'd been sleepwalking again. They put Thad's jacket over his arms and tied Harry's around his waist.

“I want you two to do me a favor,” Thad said. “I want you to go with me to the other side of that vine and see what's there.”

They followed him reluctantly as he looked for a passage through the vine wall. The blossoms were closed up now, and their opulent fragrance had pleasantly diminished.

“Keep your eyes open, Bodecker. Last time Doc was here, somebody hit him over the head,” Harry said, and picked up a stick.

They found an opening along the trunk of a palm where the vine had been hacked away by a machete. The raised tangle of growth on the other side looked more like a steep hill than a little building on raised steps, as Thad had thought when he'd seen the place at night and in pieces through a veil of vines and blossoms. There were even trees growing over the top of it

“If you're expectin' some kind of ancient machinery left over from thousands of years before Christ,” Harry said dryly, “this don't look like it.”

Thad moved around to the left of the hill. The fog had lifted into the sky, and now it came back down as rain. They were soaked in seconds. “I didn't know there were any hills on the island.” Thad had to shout over the clatter of rain on jungle leaves. “From the air it all looks flat.”

“Probably 'cause of the trees on top. Maybe the green flattens out everything. Come on, Doc, let's get out of here. Ol' Don's chilled.”

Don was sitting on an oblong slab of moss-coated rock. Thad ran his hands over it, and even through the rain-slippery moss and the water cascading over his fingers, he could feel the ridges of ancient writing. Every possible inch was filled with hieroglyphs. A section of one end had broken off, and one of the two pieces was missing. Thad had a hunch that the missing piece now lay up against a wall in his father's house. He guessed this to be a stela, lying on its side, and probably Mayan.

“So what?” Harry said when Thad made a point of this. “Probably not called Mayan Cay for nothing.”

The rain came down in sheets as they made a bumbling threesome trying to stay on the trail. But eventually they emerged from the jungle near the power plant. Few people were out in the weather to see Don running through the streets in his odd outfit.

It rained on into the afternoon. The surf crashed against the reef, and waves lapped up into the cemetery, leaving foam on the sarcophagi. My Lady crept into a dry spot under the overhang of the bathroom jerry-rigged onto the second story, and Thad pretended not to notice.

“Are there any ruins, Mayan ruins, on the island, Rafaela?”

“A few old broken things is all. Not important.”

Several of his father's books on Mayans implied that they were a mainland culture only, and with no more than small boats to ply trade within sight of the coast. He hunted again for that clipping his father had saved about the discovery of what was believed to have been a coral-encrusted segment of a Mayan galley in the Metnál. He went back to the chapter in his father's manuscript that discussed the Maya, but found no clue to any on the island. Edward P. merely made his usual diatribe against established scientific fact. In this case he pooh-poohed archaeological claims that the great pyramids and road systems of Chichén Itzá, Copán, Tikál, and others had been built by a race who had yet to discover the wheel or make use of draft animals.

“We are expected to believe,” wrote Edward P. Alexander III, “that blocks of stone weighing up to twenty tons were quarried, hauled, and dragged into place in ever-higher piles of pyramid by conscripted peasants using the lever, ropes, pulleys, and a succession of rolling logs à la Cecil B. De Mille. One would think that the rolling logs alone might suggest the wheel to a race already well versed in astronomy, mathematics, and using a calendar superior to our own. But no, apparently there were so many disposable peasants about, one had no need to invent.

“And why raise these monstrous monoliths anyway? The professional archaeologist will tell us, as he will anything else he can't explain otherwise, that these huge stone works most certainly had something to do with religion. Is he not merely explaining something ancient and magnificent in the light of our own primitive culture?”

Thad researched while the rain poured and surf pounded. But about midafternoon the weather departed, the sun arrived, and Mayan Cay steamed. It was like being suddenly tossed into a teakettle. He put down the papers, notes, and books and walked over to the Hotel de Sueños for a cool Belican. He told himself he was really investigating Roudan.

Rafaela had to hunt him up again for dinner, and Thad accused Stefano of hitting him over the head. Stefano Paz scooped some of his dinner onto a tortilla and looked superior. “This island, Mr. Alexander, has not been good for your head since you came. Do not blame me for what happens in the
cabeza.”

“Stefano!” Rafaela spooned more black beans and rice onto his plate, and he answered her with a torrent that held a lot of the word
“loco,”
and Thad caught many
“padres”
as well. He assumed this all meant that he was to be considered as crazy as his father.

A packet arrived finally, containing the finalized paperwork on that part of his father's estate which was in the country of Belize. Thad confirmed his airline reservation and set to packing in earnest.

He was eating a late, solitary lunch and glancing over some of the bills Edward P. had not paid before vanishing, when the screen door leading to the cemetery burst open and the woman from his dream walked into the room.

She stood with lips parted and eyes unblinking as the blood drained from her face. Shadows darkened the skin beneath those eyes. She was solid. Real. Breathing, but with difficulty. She put a hand out to the refrigerator to steady herself. Still she stared at him without speaking.

Thad, too, was shocked into silence, but so many questions ran through his mind, they would have formed an incomprehensible glut on his tongue had he tried to ask them. Instead he stood and walked over to her, a sense of unreality making his breathing shallow and too rapid. He reached out to touch her face, half-expecting her to vanish.

“Oh, God, where is she?” the dream woman whispered. She began to cry and to beat against Thad's chest with her fists.

Interim

Lost Lifetime

The engineer wanted only to be left alone with his sorrow, but the old man's curiosity could not be curbed, and angering him created only pain for them both. “Do control your anger, primitive. I'm very sensitive to strong emotion.”

“Name's Edward,” the old man snapped. “Quit calling me primitive. You have a name?”

“Herald.” Herald knew he would question too if he were this Edward. The creature's unrestrained brain waves wielded an astonishing force. He searched for the simplest manner of speaking to this curiosity, in order to gain himself some peace.

But a sense of his own lost life interfered, and despair at missing the youth of his granddaughter. Her mother and grandmother would name her at the celebration. Now he would never know that name.

“And you use these terminals and the funnel thing merely for travel?”

“And for transporting goods.” Herald recognized the decay of the flesh-eater in the man's perspiration. He'd encountered a similar odor on visits to preservations ringing the human cities of his own world, where beast-predator and victim roamed freely, killed and consumed one another at will or at need. What need had a human to consume flesh?

“Flesh is matter,” Herald attempted to explain, “and the brain is energy. When traveling at the speed of time, therefore, they must be separated and transported individually. The mind is intelligent energy that automatically stores its own code, keeps itself in a form of … altogether, let's say, while transporting.”

“You sound like a cross between a scientist and a computer programmer.”

“Matter in any form, including that of the body,” Herald continued patiently, “must be coded at the terminal of departure, and the receiving terminal then translates from the received signal to reassemble the matter.”

“How do you get the mind back into the body once you've got the person where he's going? And why doesn't the body die when separated from the mind?”

“The mind naturally reunites with its body at the end of the funnel, just as a dreaming mind returns to its body upon awakening or rising from a deep level of sleep to a lighter one.”

“Are you responsible for all the dreaming that goes on around here?” Edward drank from an oddly shaped metal flask, and Herald could smell spirits.

“All creatures dream, Edward. They always have.”

“Well, your machines sound like material for a nightmare to me. What if mind and body don't arrive at the same time?”

“Eventually the body dies. The mind continues to search for it.”

IV

Night of the Blooming Cereus

28

Russ Burnham didn't wait for his underground manager before entering the six-hundred-foot portal the morning after the cave-in. He'd had trouble sleeping the night before, and one of the things he thought about while lying awake was that if he was ever going to get to the bottom of the disturbing mysteries of Iron Mountain, he'd have to go in there alone without the influence of Jerusha Fistler's stories working on Saul Baggette.

By morning he was convinced that he would see nothing but a cave-in. Fears of the night always look silly in the morning sunshine, and after scrambling himself a couple of eggs he walked down to the mine entrance alone. Some of last night's meat still stuck in his teeth, and he worried it with a toothpick as he followed his lantern light down the tracks toward the core of Iron Mountain.

Russ could see no sign of further slippage or debris about. The soles of his work boots crunched on the grit along the tracks, sending hollow echoes off to return from all directions. If a guy didn't know better, he'd think other boots paced his along the side tunnels. Russ knew better.

The sound of water plinking into a puddle somewhere close. Nothing unusual. If strange things did happen in this world, and Lord knew they appeared to, they didn't happen to people strong and stubborn enough to ignore them. Only when the levelheaded were in a weakened state did creepy things dare to bother them. He didn't feel any power flowing like a river from this mountain, as old Jerusha claimed she did. Nor did he hear any machinery running like Saul Baggette had. Russ didn't hear anything but the echo of himself moving through an empty mine.…

And the gentle brushing sound of air. Almost a sigh. Not quite a whistle. Like a breeze moving through dried weeds. Higher-pitched than a whisper. Russ Burnham stopped, flashed the lantern around, and wished to hell he'd never seen all those scary movies when he was a kid. “Son-of-a-bucket full of high-grade monkey tits, Burnham,” he chided himself, and walked on. “Talk yourself into being scared, why don't you?”

An electric ore car sat waiting and empty at the end of the tracks. Russ continued on, deeper into the mountain. There was a light coming from somewhere ahead.

Russ stopped again. He bit down so hard the toothpick between his teeth snapped in two. He turned off his lantern to be sure. It was a dim light. But it was there. It was possible that one of the men leaving in such a hurry the day before had left a lighted lantern behind and its battery wasn't dead yet. Not likely, but possible.