The Face in the Abyss, novelette/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
THE EYES OF THE SNAKE MOTHER.
GRAYDON turned back. He bent over Sterrett who had drifted out of the paralysis of the blow into a drunken stupor. There were deep scratches on the giant’s cheeks—the marks of Suarra’s nails. The jaw was badly swollen where he had hit it. Graydon dragged him over to the tent, thrust a knapsack under his head and threw a blanket over him. Then he went out and built up the fire.
Hardly had be begun to prepare the supper when he heard a trampling through the underbrush. Soon Soames and Dancre came up through the trees.
“Find any signs?” he asked them.
“Signs? Hell—no!” snarled the New Englander. “Say, Graydon, did you hear something like a lot of horns? Damned queer horns, too. They seemed to be over here.”
Graydon nodded, abstractedly. Abruptly he realized that he must tell these men what had happened, must warn them and urge them to prepare for defense. But how much should he tell?
All?
Tell them of Suarra’s beauty, of her golden ornaments and her gem tipped spears of gold? Tell them what she had said of Atahualpa’s treasure and of that ancient Yu-Atlanchi where priceless gems were “thick as the sands upon the bed of a stream?”
Well he knew that if he did there would be no further reasoning with them; that they would go berserk with greed. Yet something of it he must tell them if they were to be ready for that assault which he was certain would come with the dawn.
And of Suarra they would learn soon enough from Sterrett when he awakened.
He heard an exclamation from Dancre who had passed on into the tent; heard him come out; stood up and faced the wiry little Frenchman.
“What’s the matter wit’ Sterrett, eh?” Dancre snapped. “First I thought he’s drunk. Then I see he’s scratched like wild cat and wit’ a lump on his jaw as big as one orange. What you do to Sterrett, eh?”
Graydon had made up his mind; was ready to answer.
“Dancre,” he said, “Soames—we’re in a bad box. I came in from hunting less than an hour ago and found Sterrett wrestling with a girl. That’s bad medicine down here—the worst, and you two know it. I had to knock Sterrett out before I could get the girl away from him. Her people will probably be after us in the morning. There’s no use trying to get away. They’ll soon enough find us in this wilderness of which we know nothing and they presumably know all. This place is as good as any other to meet them. And it’s a better place than any if we have to fight. We’d better spend the night getting it ready so we can put up a good one, if we have to.”
“A girl, eh?” said Dancre. “What she look like? Where she come from? How she get away?”
Graydon choose the last question to answer.
“I let her go,” he said.
“You let her go!” snarled Soames. “What the hell did you do that for, man? Why didn’t you tie her up? We could have held her as a hostage, Graydon—had some thing to do some trading with when her damned bunch of Indians came.”
“She wasn’t an Indian, Soames,” began Graydon, then hesitated.
“You mean she was white—Spanish?” broke in Dancre, incredulously.
“No, not Spanish either. She was white. Yes, white as any of us. I don’t know what she was,” answered Graydon.
The pair stared at him, then at each other.
“There’s something damned funny about this,” growled Soames, at last. “But what I want to know is why you let her go, whatever the hell she was?”
“Because I thought we’d have a better chance if I did than if I didn’t.” Graydon’s own wrath was rising. “I want to tell you two that we’re up against something mighty bad; something none of us knows anything about. And we’ve got just once chance of getting out of the mess. If I’d kept her here we wouldn’t have even that chance.”
He halted. Dancre had stooped; had picked up something from the ground, something that gleamed yellow in the fire light. And now the Frenchman nudged the lank New Englander.
“Somet’ing funny is right, Soames,” he said. “Look at this.”
He handed the gleaming object over. Graydon saw that it was a thin golden bracelet, and as Soames turned it over in his hand he caught the green glitter of emeralds. It had been torn from Suarra’s arm, he realized, in her struggle with Sterrett.
“Yes, somet’ing funny!”, repeated Dancre. He glared at Graydon venomously, through slitted lids. “What that girl give you to let her go, Graydon, eh?” he spat. “What she tell you, eh?”
Soames’s hand dropped to his automatic.
“She gave me nothing, I took nothing,” answered Graydon.
“I t’ink you damned liar!” said Dancre, viciously. “We get Sterrett awake,” he turned to Soames. “We get him awake quick. I t’ink he tell us more about this, oui. A girl who wears stuff like this—and he lets her go! Lets her go when he knows there must be more where this come from, eh, Soames. Damned funny is right, eh? Come, now, we see what Sterrett tell us.”
Graydon watched them go into the tent. Soon Soames come out, went to a spring that bubbled up from among the trees; returned, with water.
Well, let them waken Sterrett; let him tell them whatever he would. They would not kill him that night, of that he was sure. They believed that he knew too much. And in the morning—
What was hidden in the morning for them all?
That even now they were prisoners, Graydon did not doubt. Suarra’s warning not to leave the camp had been too explicit. And since that tumult of the elfin horns, her swift vanishing and the silence that had followed he had no longer doubt that they had strayed as she had said with in the grasp of some power, formidable as it was mysterious.
The silence? Suddenly it came to him that the night had become strangely still. There was no sound either of insect or bird nor any stirring of the familiar after-twilight life of the wilderness.
The camp was ringed with silence!
He strode away, through the algarroba clump. There was a scant score of the trees. They stood up like a little leafy is land peak within the brush covered savannah. They were great trees, every one of them, and set with a curious regularity as though they had not sprung up by chance; as though indeed they had been carefully planted.
Graydon reached the last of them, rested a hand against the bole that looked like myriads of tiny grubs turned to soft brown wood. He peered out. The slope that lay before him was flooded with moonlight; the yellow blooms of the chilca shrubs that pressed to the very feet of the trees shone wanly in the silver flood. The faintly aromatic fragrance of the quenuar stole around him. Movement or sign of life there was
And yet—
The spaces seemed filled with watchers; he felt their gaze upon him; knew with an absolute certainty that some hidden host girdled the camp. He scanned every bush and shadow; saw nothing. Nevertheless the certainty of a hidden, unseen multitude persisted. A wave of nervous irritation passed through him. He would force them, whatever they were, to show themselves.
He stepped boldly into the full moonlight.
On the instant the silence intensified; seemed to draw taut; to lift itself up whole octaves of stillnesses; to become alert, expectant—as though poised to spring upon him should he take one step further!
A coldness wrapped him, a shudder shook him. He drew swiftly back to the shadow of the trees; stood there, his heart beating furiously. The silence lost its poignancy, dropped back upon its haunches—but watchful and alert!
What had frightened him? What was there in that tightening of the stillness that had touched him with finger of night-
Trembling, he groped back, foot by foot, afraid to turn his back to the silence. Behind him the fire flared. And suddenly his fear dropped from him.
His reaction from the panic was a heady recklessness. He threw a log upon the fire and laughed as the sparks shot up among the leaves. Soames, coming out of the tent for more water, stopped as he heard that laughter and scowled at him malevolently.
“Laugh,” he said. “Laugh while you can—you damned traitor. You’ll laugh on the other side of your mouth when we get Sterrett up and he tells us what he knows.”
“That was a sound sleep I gave him, anyway,” jeered Graydon.
“There are sounder sleeps! Don’t for get it.” It was Dancre’s voice, cold and menacing from within the tent. He heard Sterrett groan.
Graydon turned his back to the tent and deliberately faced that silence from which he had just fled. How long he sat thus he did not know. It could not have been for long. But all at once he was aware that he was staring straight into two little points of vivid light that seemed at once far, far away and very close. They were odd, he thought. What was it so odd about them? Was it their color? They were purple, a curiously intense purple. As he stared, it seemed to him that they grew larger, but the puzzling double aspect of distance and nearness did not alter.
It was very curious, he thought. He had seen two eyes—yes, they were eyes—of that peculiar purple somewhere, not long ago. But he could not remember just where—there was a drowsiness clouding his thought. He would look at them no more. He raised his gaze, slowly and with perceptible effort, to the leafy screen above him. Unwinkingly the brilliant orbs stared back at him from it. He forced his gaze downward. There, too, they were.
And now he knew them—the eyes that had glittered from Suarra’s bracelet of the dinosaurs! The eyes of that mingled serpent and woman she had called the Snake Mother!
They were drawing him—drawing him—
He realized that his lids had closed; yet, closing, they had not shut out the globes of vivid purple. His lethargy increased, but it was of the body, not of the mind. All his consciousness had concentrated, been gathered, into the focus of the weird, invading eyes.
Abruptly they retreated. And like line streaming out of a reel the consciousness of Graydon streamed out of him and after them—out of his body, out of the camp, through the grove and out into the land beyond!
It seemed to him that he passed swiftly over the moonlit wastes. They flashed beneath him, unrolling like panorama under racing plane. Ahead of him frowned a black barrier. It shrouded him and was gone. He had a glimpse of a wide circular valley rimmed by sky-piercing peaks; towering scarps of rock. There was the silver glint of a lake, the liquid silver of a mighty torrent pouring out of the heart of a precipice. He caught wheeling sight of carved collossi, gigantic shapes that sat bathed in the milky flood of the moon guarding each the mouth of a cavern.
A city rushed up to meet him, a city ruby roofed and opal turreted and fantastic as though built by jinn out of the stuff of dreams.
And then it seemed to him that he came to rest within a vast and columned hall from whose high roof fell beams of soft and dimly azure light. High arose those columns, unfolding far above into wide wondrous petalings of opal and of emerald and turquoise flecked with gold.
Before him were the eyes that in this dream—if dream it were—had drawn him to this place. And as the consciousness which was he and yet had, he knew, neither visible shape nor shadow, beheld it recoiled, filled with terror of the unknown; struggled to make its way back to the body from which it had been lured; fluttered like a serpent trapped bird; at last, like the bird, gave itself up to the serpent fascination.
For Graydon looked upon—the Snake Mother!
She lay just beyond the lip of a wide alcove set high above the pillared floor. Be tween her and him the azure beams fell, curtaining the great niche with a misty radiance that half-shadowed, half-revealed her.
Her face was ageless, neither young nor old; it came to him that it was free from time forever, free from the etching acid of the years. She might have been born yesterday or a million years agone. Her eyes, set wide apart, were round and luminous; they were living jewels filled with purple fires. Above them rose her forehead, wide and high and sloping sharply back. The nose was long and delicate, the nostrils dilated; the chin small and pointed.
The mouth was small, too, and heart shaped and the lips a scarlet flame.
Down her narrow childlike shoulders flowed hair that gleamed like spun silver. The shining argent strands arrow-headed into a point upon her forehead; coifed, they gave to her face that same heart shape in which her lips were molded, a heart of which the chin was the tip.
She had high little breasts, uptilted. And face and neck, shoulders and breasts were the hue of pearls suffused faintly with rose; and like rosy pearls they glistened.
Below her breasts began her—coils!
Mistily Graydon saw them, half buried in a nest of silken cushions—thick coils and many, circle upon circle of them, covered with great heart shaped scales; glimmering and palely gleaming; each scale as exquisitely wrought as though by elfin jeweler; each opaline, nacreous; mother-of-pearl.
Her pointed chin was cupped in hands tiny as a baby’s; like a babe’s were her slender arms, their dimpled elbows resting on her topmost coil.
And on that face which was neither woman’s nor serpent’s but subtly both—and more, far more than either—on that ageless face sat side by side and hand in hand a spirit of wisdom that was awesome and a spirit weary beyond thought!
Graydon forgot his terror. He paid homage to her beauty; for beautiful she was though terrible—this serpent woman with' hair of spun silver, her face and breasts of rosy pearls, her jeweled and shimmering coils, her eyes of purple fire and her lips of living flame. A lesser homage he paid her wisdom. And he pitied her for her burden of weariness.
Fear of her he had none.
Instantly he knew that she had read all his thought; knew, too, that he had pleased her. The scarlet lips half parted in a smile—almost she preened herself! A slender red and pointed tongue flicked out and touched her scarlet lips. The tiny hands fell; she raised her head; up from her circled coils lifted and swayed a pearled pillar bearing that head aloft, slowly, sinuously, foot by foot until it paused twice the height of a tall man above the floor, twisting, it turned its face to the alcove.
Graydon, following the movement, saw that the alcove was tenanted. Within it was a throne—a throne that was as though carved from the heart of a colossal sapphire. It was oval, ten feet or more in height, and hollowed like a shrine. It rested upon or was set within the cupped end of a thick pillar of some substance resembling milky rock crystal. It was empty, so far as he could see, but around it clung a faint radiance. At its foot were five lesser thrones, low and with broad table-like seats. They were arranged in a semi-circle. The throne at the right end of this semi-circle was red as though carved from ruby; the throne at the left was black as though cut from jet; the three central thrones were red gold.
Black throne and ruby throne and middle throne of red gold were empty. In each of the other two a figure sat, cross-legged and squatting and swathed from feet to chin in silken robes of blue and gold. Incredibly old were the faces of the pair, the stamp of lost æons deep upon them—except their eyes.
Their eyes were young; as incredibly young as their settings were ancient. And incredibly—alive! And those vital, youthful eyes were reading him; the minds behind them were weighing him; judging him. Judging him—with what purpose?
Floated through Graydon’s mind—or Whatever it was of him that hovered there in dream or in spell or in obedience to laws unknown to the science of his world—the memory of Suarra’s vow. By the Wisdom of the Snake Mother, and by the Five Lords and by the Lord of Lords she had sworn to save him if she could.
Why—these must be they, the two Lords she had told him still lived in Yu-Atlanchi! Certainly there was the Snake Mother. And that sapphire throne of luminous mystery must be the seat of the Lord of Lords—whatever he might be.
That fantastic city that had raced upward to enfold him was—Yu-Atlanchi!
Yu-Atlanchi! Where death—where death—
The Snake Mother had turned her head; the eyes of the two Lords no longer dwelt on his. They were looking, the three of them, beyond him. The serpent woman was speaking. He heard her voice like faint, far off music. Graydon thought that he glanced behind him.
He saw—Suarra.
So close to him she stood that he could have touched her with his hand. Slender feet bare, her cloudy hair unbound, clothed only in a single scanty robe that hid no curve nor lithesome line of her, no ornament but the bracelet of the dinosaurs, she stood. If she saw him, she gave no sign.
And it came to him that she did not see him; did not know that he was there!
On her face was the light of a great gladness—as of one who has made a prayer and knows that prayer has been granted. He reached out a hand to touch her; make her aware of him. He felt nothing, nor did she move—
And suddenly he realized once more that he had no hands!
As he labored to understand this, he saw the Snake Mother’s swaying column grow rigid, her purple eyes fix themselves upon some point, it seemed, far, far beyond the walls of that mysterious temple.
Swift as a blow they returned to him. They smote him; they hurled him away. The hall disintegrated, vanished. He had vertiginous sensation of nightmare speed, as though the earth had spun from under him and let him drop through space. The flight ended; a shock ran through him.
Dazed, he raised his lids. He lay beside the crackling camp fire. And half way between him and the tent was Sterrett charging down on him like a madman and bellowing red rage and vengeance as he came.
Graydon leaped to his feet, but before he could guard himself the giant was upon him. The next moment he was down, overborne by sheer weight. The big adventurer crunched a knee into his arm and gripped his throat. Sterrett’s bloodshot eyes blazed into his, his teeth were bared as though to rend him.
“Let her go, did you!” he roared. “Knocked me out and then let her go! Well, damn you, Graydon, here’s where you go, too!”
Frantically Graydon tried to break that grip on his throat. His lungs labored; there was a deafening roaring in his ears; flecks of crimson began to dance across his vision. Sterrett was strangling him. Through fast dimming sight he saw two black shadows leap through the firelight glare and throw themselves on his strangler; clutch the slaying hands.
The fingers relaxed. Graydon, drawing in great sobbing breaths, staggered up. A dozen paces away stood Sterrett, still cursing him, vilely; quivering; straining to leap again upon him. Dancre, arms around his knees, was hanging to him like a little terrier. Beside him was Soames, the barrel of his automatic pressed against the giant’s stomach.
“Why don’t you let me kill him,” raved Sterrett. “Didn’t I tell you the wench had enough on her to set us up the rest of our lives? Didn’t I tell you she had an emerald that would have made us all rich? And there’s more where that one came from. And he let her go! Let her go, the—”
Again his curses flowed.
“Now look here, Sterrett,” Soames’s voice was deliberate, cold. “You be quiet or I’ll do for you. We ain’t goin’ to let this thing get by us, me and Dancre. We ain’t goin’ to let this double-crossing whelp do us, and we ain’t goin’ to let you spill the beans by killing him. We’ve struck something big. All right, we’re goin’ to cash in on it. We’re goin’ to sit down peaceable and Mr. Graydon is goin’ to tell us what happened after he put you out, what dicker he made with the girl and all of that. If he won’t do it peaceable, then Mr. Graydon is goin’ to have things done to him that’ll make him give up. That’s all. Danc’, let go his legs. Sterrett, if you kick up any more trouble until I give the word I’m goin’ to shoot you. From now on I boss this crowd—me and Danc’. You get me, Sterrett?”
Graydon, head once more clear, slid a cautious hand down toward his pistol holster. It was empty. Soames grinned, sardonically.
“We got it, Graydon,” he said. “Yours, too, Sterrett. Fair enough. Sit down everybody.”
He squatted by the fire, still keeping Sterrett covered. And after a moment the latter, grumbling, followed suit. Dancre dropped beside him.
“Come over here, Mr. Graydon,” snarled Soames. “Come over and cough up. What’re you holdin’ out on us? Did you make a date with her to meet you after you got rid of us? If so, where is it—because we’ll all go together.”
“Where’d you hide those gold spears?” growled Sterrett. “You never let her get away with them, that’s sure.”
“Shut up, Sterrett,” ordered Soames. “I’m holdin’ this inquest. Still—there’s something in that. Was that it, Graydon? Did she give you the spears and her jewelry to let her go?”
“I’ve told you,” answered Graydon. “I asked for nothing, but I took nothing. Sterrett’s drunken folly had put us all in jeopardy. Letting the girl go free was the first vital step toward our own safety. I thought it was the best thing to do. I still think so.”
“Yes?” sneered the lank New Englander, “is that so? Well, I’ll tell you, Graydon, if she’d been an Indian maybe I’d agree with you. But not when she was the kind of lady Sterrett says she was. No sir, it ain’t natural. You know damned well that if you’d been straight you’d have kept her here till Danc’ and I got back. Then we could all have got together and figured what was the best thing to do. Hold her until her folks came along and paid up to get her back undamaged. Or give her the third degree till she gave up where all that gold and stuff she was carrying came from. That’s what you would have done, Mr. Graydon, if you weren’t a dirty, lyin’, double-crossin’ hound.”
Graydon’s temper awakened under the insult, his anger flared up.
“All right, Soames,” he said. “I’ll tell you. What I’ve said about freeing her for our own safety is true. But outside of that I would as soon have thought of trusting a child to a bunch of hyenas as I would of trusting that girl to you three. I let her go a damned sight more for her sake than I did for our own. Does that satisfy you?”
“Aha!” jeered Dancre. “Now I see. Here is this strange lady of so much wealth and beauty. She is too pure and good for us to behold. He tell her so and bids her fly. ‘My hero,’ she say, ‘take all I have and give up this bad company.’ ‘No, no,’ he tell her, t’inking all the time if he play his cards right he get much more, and us out of the way so he need not divide, ‘no, no,’ he tell her. ‘But long as these bad men stay here you will not be safe.’ ‘My hero,’ say she, ‘I will go and bring back my family and they shall dispose of your bad company. But you they shall reward, my hero, oui!’ Aha, so that is what it was!”
Graydon flushed; the little Frenchman’s malicious travesty shot uncomfortably close. After all, Suarra’s unsought promise to save him if she could might be construed as Dancre had suggested. What if he told them that he had warned her that whatever the fate in store for them he was determined to share it and that he would stand by them to the last? They would not believe him.
Soames had been watching him closely.
“By God, Danc’, he said. “I guess you’ve hit it. He changed color. He’s sold us out!”
For a moment he raised his automatic, held it on Graydon. Sterrett touched his hand.
“Don’t shoot him, Soames,” he begged. “Give him to me. I want to break his neck.”
Soames pushed him away, lowered the gun.
“No,” he said, deliberately. “This is too big a thing to let slip by bein’ too quick on the trigger. If your dope is right, Danc’, and I guess it is, the lady was mighty grateful. All right—we ain’t got her, but he have got him. As I figure it, bein’ grateful, she won’t want him to get killed. Well, we’ll trade him for what they got that we want. Tie him up!”
He pointed the pistol at Graydon, Sterrett and Dancre went into the tent, returned with ropes from the pack saddles. Unresisting, Graydon let them bind his wrists. They pushed him over to one of the trees and sat him on the ground with his back against its bole. They passed a rope under his arms and hitched it securely around the trunk. Then they tied his feet,
“Now,” said Soames, “if her gang show up in the morning, we’ll let ’em see you and find out how much you’re worth. They won’t rush us; there’s bound to be a palaver. And if they don’t come to terms, well, Graydon, the first bullet out of this gun goes through your guts. That’ll give you time to see what goes on before you die!”
Graydon did not answer him. Nothing that he might say, he knew, would change them from their purpose. He closed his eyes, reviewing that strange dream of his—for dream he now believed it, thrust back among the realities of the camp. A dream borne of Suarra’s words and that weird bracelet of the dinosaurs from which gleamed the purple orbs of the serpent woman.
Once or twice he opened his eyes and looked at the others. They sat beside the fire, heads close together, talking in whispers, their faces tense, and eyes a-glitter with greed, feverish with the gold lust.
And after a while Graydon’s head dropped forward. He slept.