Savage Bride

Chapter Fifteen

It began that night.

It had a beginning. It was strange to think later that it did have, that on such and such a precise moment, at such and such an exact instant, it had begun, and before then it hadn’t been.

It was an hour after sundown. They’d finished their evening meal and were sitting there playing bridge. Chris was his partner, and Mallory was Mitty’s. It was just another evening on the plantation, and they’d had many like this. There was no strangeness to it.

Mitty was holding a cigarette in her hand, leisurely scanning her cards. (She was modern, she was everyday, she was common place.) “You should have come back to me in spades that time, partner,” she said.

“Told you I wasn’t very good at this,” Mallory mumbled, crestfallen.

Chris looked across the table at Jones and smiled a little. Not because of anything in particular, just for the sake of smiling at him. She smiled at him nearly every time he looked at her, he was beginning to notice. And when she didn’t she had a sort of soulful, mooning look on her face that he liked even less. He was married, and — well, she was just a kid.

Mitty paid out her card and the rubber ended. Mallory slumped back in his chair, swept his hand in front of his face, and said, “I’ll never learn.”

Jones drew the cards toward him and began to shuffle them.

Chris parted her lips slightly, sighed, and murmured, “I love to—”

“I know,” he finished for her dryly, “you love to watch me mix the cards.” She’d said it last night and the night before. The night before that, too. Mitty was beginning to snicker about it when they were alone together in their room.

He was dealing the cards, and at the fall of the third card, to Mitty’s place, it began. Then. He stopped dead in the middle of the deal, listening.

They all probably heard it with him, they were all listening. No one moved or said anything. He held the pack poised in his hand.

It was faint, far-off, but yet deep-throated. You could detect a downbeat in it each time, one to each double concussion. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

He was the first to speak. “What’s that? A storm coming up?”

It was too even for a storm, too rhythmic; he didn’t have to be told that.

Mallory said it for him a minute later. “That’s no storm. That’s too continuous.” And then he added, “This is the dry season, anyway. We don’t have them this time of year.”

They sat raptly listening for a moment more. Then Jones looked down at his hands and saw that he’d interrupted his card-dealing. He resumed a little jerkily, as if under mechanical compulsion.

No one picked up the cards or looked at them as they fell. They were waiting for it to stop as unaccountably as it had begun, and it didn’t. Their faces kept rotating before him, from left to right, as he turned his own in accompaniment to his card-dealing. Mallory’s was turned slightly sideward, as if listening down past his own shoulder; as if that were where the sound came from. Chris was looking straight over at Jones. She wasn’t smiling now. Her eyes were rounder now than they had ever been. There was a questioning sort of look in them, as if to say, “Is this bad? I’ll do whatever I see you do. If you show fright, then I’ll be frightened too. If you don’t, then I’ll know it’s all right.” Mitty was looking straight downward at the table. There was to her expression more of a thoughtful, introspective cast. It was more than just physical listening, it was a form of mulling-over as well. Her hand moved, absently, and a puff of smoke came from before her face.

It reminded him for a second of the way she had looked veiled by the smoke haze of that fire she had built within the stones, when he came upon her in the gully this morning.

He remembered that, then forgot again. There was no time for the past in the present.

Nobody made a move to play. A chair leg scraped shatteringly in the stillness, and Mallory got up and went outside. The screen door ebbed back in place behind him, and his figure stood revealed through it for a moment, orange from the lamplight behind him; then it receded into the gloom outside, darkening into invisibility rather than diminishing with distance.

The downbeat hurt a little, Jones noticed. Not the eardrums, for it was not loud, but the chest cavity, for it was deep. You felt it there each time.

Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump...

It was like an endless train going by. Each time a car passes you think it is going to be the last, but the next one comes, and the next.

Presently Jones got up and went after Mallory.

He could feel Chris’s eyes following him, but somehow he knew equally well, without looking back, that Mitty was not even aware of his going; was not aware of any of them around her; was lost on some other plane.

Mallory was standing by one of the uprights at the veranda rail in the dark. He didn’t turn to look at him, though he heard him join him.

“That’s it,” he said quietly.

“That’s what?”

“Ghost drums. What I told you about that they claim to have heard. Tambores de los muertos. I never heard it before myself.”

“Don’t say it in Spanish. It sounds even worse.” Jones heeled his hand to the veranda rail. Not once, but twice, three times, repeatedly. He saw that he was keeping time with it, and quit it abruptly.

It kept plucking at your chest, as though there were a hollow spot there, a sound box that it echoed in.

“What do you suppose it is, some echo or freak acoustic in the mountains?”

Mallory didn’t answer.

“It does sound like real drums, at that.” He tried to laugh a little, so that the other man would join him in it. “Fools you, doesn’t it?”

Mallory didn’t join him in it. “No, it doesn’t fool you.”

They stood a moment longer without saying anything more. Then Mallory glanced over his shoulder toward the lighted screen door. “Let’s go in. The kid’s getting nervous.”

They both re-entered with that pretended cheerfulness men are apt to overdo a little when they wish to keep women from becoming alarmed.

“Queer sort of sound, isn’t it?” Jones said lightly, drawing out his chair once more.

“It’ll quit before morning,” Mallory promised.

They gave one another a look.

“But there’s no one up there,” Chris protested, her voice a little high. “What can be making—”

“Who bids?” Jones said briskly.

Mitty turned over a card limply and looked at it. He could tell she didn’t know what was on it, even while she looked.

They went ahead with their game, tried to ignore it. Yet while they went through the motions of playing, each and every one of them knew that the other three were hearing it, thinking of it, just as he was.

It didn’t come any nearer, but it didn’t go any farther away. It didn’t grow any louder, but it didn’t grow any softer. Jones knew what there was about it that was getting them finally. They kept waiting for it to stop, all of them. And it didn’t, it never did. It was that principle of the second dropped shoe overhead carried out to its ultimate point of excruciation.

It was even, so it should have been more bearable than otherwise, but it was uneven within its evenness; it was that downbeat that did the damage. One thump high, the next low; one high, the next low again.

He saw that Mallory was smoking too much. Far too much. And he himself, he noticed, couldn’t seem to get his body adjusted right to the chair seat. He kept shifting every few minutes, crossing his legs and then recrossing them the other way around. Chris kept sweeping her hair back with one hand while she pored over her cards; hair that was not down over her brow at all, that was not out of place in the least. She’d look at him from time to time, and once or twice she’d smile; but it was a different sort of smile now, a fearful fleeting sort of thing that was more like a habit of the recent past lingering on than any warm greeting of the present. Her eyes remained large and bright.

And Mitty — Mitty still had that attitude of disembodied listening, of secret inner conjugation. Something about it annoyed him. She seemed to be trying to decipher it, make more out of it than — than there was to be made out of it. He tactfully turned his eyes away. He didn’t remember ever having been annoyed with her like this before, without any reason. Not even when they’d missed the ship at Puerto Santo on her account; at least not as intolerantly and as causelessly annoyed as now. He supposed that had something to do with the effect of the thing on his nerves.

“Think it would do any good to close up the windows and that main door over there?” he suggested.

Mallory said, “It would come in anyway. But try it if you want.”

Jones didn’t stir. Putting the burden of timidity on himself wasn’t what he’d intended; he’d been thinking of making the two women feel easier.

Suddenly Mallory dropped his cards and stiffened to attention so unexpectedly that it drew a half-stifled little cry of alarm from Chris before she could restrain it. The clopping sound of a horse’s hoofs had suddenly started up somewhere nearby outside, rapidly receding into the distance. A moment later another followed. Then a multiple stampede of five or six at one time, galloping off into the dark from the direction of the stables.

“They’ve heard it down at the jacales, and that’s the part I don’t like!” Mallory flung back his chair and bolted from the room. Jones got up and went after him.

An infant was wailing somewhere across the compound. Figures flitted in and out of the jacales, dimly visible by the wavering light of a number of pitch torches that hopped like crazed fireflies. Men were calling out to their women, and women were calling to whimpering children. A mass exodus was under way.

Mallory rushed into their midst, waving his arms, even striking at some of them, trying to stem the tide. Jones took a more passive part, contenting himself with trying to head them off by getting in their way. They simply darted around him, time after time, eluded him and continued their scampering desertion. It was useless to try to do anything with them. They were in the grip of a maddened, unreasoning panic. They went scuttling off into the dark, fleeing downcountry toward the sheltering jungle, safer for once than the barefaced uplands. Their shrill, frightened voices faded into the night, babbling over and over, “Que vienen los cocos! Que vienen los muertos!” The ghosts are coming! The dead are coming!

Silence descended on the empty shacks and barren compound in their wake, broken only by that pulsing that was a sound and yet not a sound, a tremor.

Mallory rejoined Jones from his useless pursuit of the hindmost ones, growling imprecations.

“They took the horses with them too,” he said. “Now we’re stuck here whether we want to be or not. You can’t do anything about it when that many people all get a single idea in their heads at one and the same time.”

“No,” Jones agreed bleakly. “I guess you can’t. You’d have to tie them all up, separately.”

“They’ll be back again in a day or two, when the cursed thing stops. I’ve seen this happen once or twice before. But they’re always a few hands short when they do come back.”

Jones pitched a thumb over his shoulder. “Is it that, each time?”

“No, I never heard that myself, until tonight. They may have, though. Usually someone claimed to have seen a line of ghostly figures outlined against the moonlit sky, up there on the heights. Something like that would start them off.”

He spat disgustedly. “Well, there’s no use just standing around out here listening to it. If it’s going to keep up, let it keep up. I’m going to bed.”

They started back toward the main house together, Mallory plowing his feet heavily over the ground in frustration.

Mitty came out of the lighted doorway just as they arrived in sight of it. To meet them, Jones thought at first; to join them and find out what had happened. But instead, as she came down off the veranda, she turned sharply up the opposite way, away from them, and glided off into the surrounding darkness like a sleepwalker. It was impossible that she hadn’t seen them coming toward her. They were near enough by then and there was enough light filtering from the door and windows of the house to have shown them to her. It was impossible, too, that she should mistake in which direction the native huts lay and in which the open uplands; the very tilt of the ground was there to tell her.

He called her name, and then called again, and when she didn’t answer, continued to recede into the gloom like a wraith, he left Mallory’s side and spurted after her.

She didn’t hurry at the sound his overtaking footsteps made behind her, but she didn’t stop either, or turn to him, even after he’d bellowed out her name a third time, in mid-pursuit. She paid no heed; it was as if her faculties were utterly unaware of him.

He only halted her finally by overtaking and pinning her against a stunted tree a considerable distance to the rear of the house. Even then, as he brought her around to him by main force, by the shoulders, her head remained stubbornly turned the other way, the way she had been going, the way in which the sound was coming from.

“What’s got into you? Have you lost your mind? Don’t go wandering off like this alone, in that direction, when all the rest of them are running the opposite way!”

He couldn’t capture her attention. She kept striving to go on past him toward that distant yet ever present reverberation.

“Mitty!” he said sharply, and shook her by the shoulders to bring her back.

Words were loosened from her, fell out at random, as if the shaking had dislodged them. “They’re calling me,” he heard her murmur, “calling me. Let me hear what they want to say.”

He swept her up in his arms forthwith and staggered back to the house with her.

Mallory was still waiting for him outside the doorway, where he’d left him. “What’s the matter, did she turn her ankle?”

“No, she’s — I don’t think she’s well. She’s talking kind of funny, as if she’s gone out of her head. What’ll I do?”

“It’s that sound doing it,” Mallory said. “It’s made her hysterical or something.” He held the door back for him.

Jones carried her inside and into their own room, past the startled eyes of the youngster, who was the only one of the four of them still remaining at the table where they’d been playing.

He closed their room door behind him with the back of his foot and set her on her feet. “What’s the matter with you?” he urged in a plaintive undertone. “What’re you acting this way for?”

He struck a match and lit the lamp.

She had sought the edge of the bed by now, and was sitting on it. She was looking at him as calmly, as matter-of-factly, as though the incident hadn’t occurred at all.

“You’d better lie down,” he suggested.

He saw her put her fingertips lightly to each side of her forehead.

“Do you want a cold cloth for your head? Does it bother you?”

“I keep trying to think,” she said vaguely. “Oh, if you’d only let me alone!”

He lit a cigarette and flung the spent match impatiently aside. “You know what you said out there, don’t you? What’d you mean by that? Did you know what you were saying? What’d you mean, they were calling you? Who was calling you?”

She pushed the back of her hand absently in his direction, as if the very sound of his voice was an interruption in itself.

Somebody knuckled the door lightly, and when he opened it narrowly, Mallory was standing outside. “Here,” he said, “try these, see if that’ll help her any.” He handed Jones two small tufts of absorbent cotton, evidently taken from a first-aid kit; they were twined into the elongated shapes of stoppers.

Jones thanked him with a nod and took them over to her. He stroked back the hair from the sides of her head. “Here, let me put these in your ears, see if they’ll shut it out a little.”

She glanced down at them curiously, but offered no resistance while he deftly inserted them.

“Can you still hear it?”

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him as though she wondered what he was doing it for.

He adjusted them a little tighter. “Now can you hear it?”

“I hear it—” She didn’t finish what she was saying, but her hands had started towards her chest.

When she tried to raise them toward her ears, he quickly held them down to keep her from removing the stoppers. He sat with her like that a while, watching her closely. In a little while she had quieted, made no further attempt to free her wrists. He got her to lie down, and when her eyes had dropped closed, in either sleep or resignation, he left her and went outside to the others.

Chris was sitting there with her hands loosely crossed and resting against the edge of the table, in an attitude of enforced calm. The tautness of the lines of her face, and its whiteness, and an occasional palsied vibration of both her hands at once, as if with the unease of their position, showed how insincere the attitude was.

Jones joined them without saying anything, and roved restlessly about the room, making a complete circuit of the table two or three times at a slow drifting gait. Each time he came around the side opposite her, her eyes would fasten on him and follow him along the short arc of his passing before her, until the curve had carried him to far offside again. They had a pleading, questioning look in them that he was powerless to answer.

It kept on and on and on. There had never been a time when it wasn’t; he couldn’t remember any. There would never be a time when it would no longer be sounding; he couldn’t visualize, couldn’t conceive of any.

The girl’s head suddenly dropped to the table. Mallory shifted closer and put his hand on her shoulder caressingly.

“Don’t cry, honey. It’s nothing, it won’t hurt you.”

He coaxed her to stand up. She held her face averted from Jones, as if ashamed now that he had witnessed her momentary capitulation. She held it pressed concealingly against her father’s encircling arm.

Jones found a curious thought assailing him. With a glance behind him at the doorway through which he had recently passed, he thought, I wish she’d cry too, like that.

“I’ll take her in,” Mallory said to him under his breath. He led Chris over to the door at the other side of the room. “I want you to get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll sit with you a while until you drop off. You’re not such a big girl yet after all. Not too big for that, anyway.”

And then, after the door had already closed behind the two of them, Jones overheard Mallory’s answer to some low-voiced plaint she must have made to him. “No, he won’t think any the less of you. Don’t you fret about that. He knows just how it is. Everybody can’t be brave all the time.”

Jones shook his head to himself, alone there in the room, in a sort of pantomimic compunction.

He was still there when Mallory came out again a good while later. Without a word, as though both were moved by the same common impulse toward uninhibited discussion and review of the matter, the two of them went outside to the veranda together and stood there by the rail.

A pall of silence hung over the finca, a silence that was only emphasized by that ceaseless throbbing. Even the stars seemed to jar in their fixed places with it.

“Sounds a little closer, doesn’t it?” Mallory suggested.

Jones timed it with his fingertips against the rail. “Either that or the beat’s quickening up. Did you get Chris to go to sleep?”

“She’ll be all right. I told her I’d be right outside.”

Jones kept on drumming in time with it; then saw that he was doing it and desisted abruptly. “Let’s try to break it down,” he said, turning toward the other man.

“How d’you mean?”

“Get at it. Do something with it. Not just stand here drinking it in. Well, either it’s something dangerous or it isn’t. Now to be something dangerous, actively dangerous, it would have to be something human, wouldn’t it? Something caused by a human agency. You’ve been living around here longer than I have. Just what human agencies are there around here that could be responsible for a far-off drumming like that?”

“There aren’t any,” Mallory answered flatly.

“I suppose that should be a consolation, but if anything it makes it worse. It’s certainly not supernatural; I can feel it right here in my chest, at every vibration.”

“There are no wild Indians, no nomad Indians, on this side of the mountains. They’re all people who’ve been domesticated for generations back, like the ones who work for me. They’re afraid of it themselves. You saw how they all ran off.”

“What about the other side of the mountains?”

“That’s an uninhabited valley.”

“Well, has it been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s uninhabited?” Jones persisted. “Has it been investigated, or has it just been written off as uninhabited?”

“It’s sort of taboo land. And after all, investigation is, or has to be, a two-way proposition. To investigate a place, you have to go there and then come back again. I’ve never known anyone to come back from there and bring a report. So you can say that if any investigation ever was made, it was involuntary, and the findings were never publicized. They died with the investigator.”

“What about the so-called government down here? It’s national territory, isn’t it?”

“Sure. But they seem content to carry it on the books as a dead loss, so to speak.”

“What about planes?”

“It’s off the beaten air-lanes. All the commercial planes go down the spine of Central America. A few have gone over it, mostly off course, but the mountains keep them at a high altitude, and they’ve reported nothing to be seen but jungle carpet. If there was anything alive, of course, it wouldn’t be visible up at that height, anyway. They’ve made out a few ruins, but ruins are cheap down here. They’re not worth their weight in building material.”

“Where does the ghost stuff come in? You said it was called—”

“Tierra de los Muertos,” Mallory supplied. “The Land of the Dead. Local superstition gave it that name, I suppose. The phantom silhouettes of warriors that they thought they saw outlined against the crest from time to time. What could they be but ghosts? Drumbeats like the ones we’re hearing now. Maybe it’s just the pounding of some subterranean waterfall, which plays up now and then through some freak of mountain acoustics. Anyway, to them it’s the Land of the Dead, and you can’t tell ’em different. You’re as good as dead if you go in there. The Spaniards made their usual passes at it, and for once drew a complete blank.”

“How do you mean?”

Mallory hitched his hip up onto the veranda rail and crossed his arms.

“There was quite a high degree of civilization in all these parts of the world before the Spaniards got here and cracked down on it. I suppose you know that. It was highly advanced, but it was dark and cruel; Prescott’ll tell you all about that.’”

Jones wasn’t sure who Prescott was; some local trader or planter whom he hadn’t met yet, he supposed. He didn’t interrupt the recital to inquire.

“Anyway, this valley is one place that held out against them. The lowlands were a pushover, but the mountains made a natural barrier. The branch of the Mayas — I guess they were Mayas — that inhabited it retired into their shell, and that was that. ‘Come and get us.’ One of the earlier viceroys, as soon as he had things in hand down on the coast, sent an expedition in to clean up on them. Just a little token expedition. You know the kind of odds they were used to, from Mexico and Peru. About five hundred to one. They were spoiled. Well, he waited, and he waited, and no word. Finally he sent a second expedition in to find out what had become of the first. And he waited, and he waited, and no word from them either.”

“Then I suppose he sent in a third.”

“That would be the perfect punch line. But no, the fact is he didn’t. They changed viceroys or something, and the new man was too lazy. Or maybe he couldn’t spare the men, or figured this one dinky little valley wasn’t worth it. Then about two years afterward, one solitary survivor of the whole two expeditions came staggering out. He was one of the friars who had gone in there with them; they always had them along. He was down to skin and bone, but he made it. His tongue had been torn out, so he couldn’t say a word. Well, they handed him a parchment and a quill, to see if he could set down what had happened. He only had strength enough to scrawl a single line. ‘Es una tierra de los muertos.’ It is a land of the dead. Before they could get anything more than that out of him, he’d died. One opinion was that what he’d meant was only that the two expeditions had died to a man, killed off by the inhabitants. The other was that there was no one alive in there at all, expedition or inhabitants. This one finally won out. The Church was a deciding factor, and the king in Madrid. Funds for a third expedition would have had to come out of his purse, and since no stories of hidden gold had been featured as a come-on, he wasn’t interested. The Church excommunicated the valley, proclaimed it accursed. And that’s the story.”

Jones screwed up his face. “Grisly, isn’t it?”

“So,” Mallory went on, “if there was anything alive in there then, and if half of what there was male and the other half female, which is the usual arrangement, then chances are there should be something alive in there today, the laws of nature being what they are. And if there was anything alive in there then, back in the fifteen hundreds, since nothing worth speaking of has gone in since, and absolutely nothing whatever has been known to come out, then whatever there is in there should be a little cell of pure undiluted sixteenth century.”

“A little too fantastic, don’t you think?” Jones said.

“What’s fantastic and what isn’t?” Mallory challenged him. “Who knows any more? What do we really know about the world today? Less than we did a hundred years ago. Then they could still be sure of their world. Today we can’t any more. The plane was fantastic in 1902. But in 1903— The atom bomb was fantastic in 1944. But in 1945— Besides, the difference between an aboriginal Indian tribe of the fifteen hundreds and an aboriginal Indian tribe of today is so small that it doesn’t really matter much in the end. It would be hardly noticeable to the naked eye. The earlier ones would kill you a little more quickly, maybe; at sight instead of waiting for provocation. Bangles instead of white cotton pants, feathers instead of straw sombreros, sun worship instead of a one-two whitewash of very diluted Catholicism. It’s only relative, after all. Don’t confuse it with the difference, for instance, between Tudor England and today’s England. That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s still too fantastic for me, thanks,” Jones said, with all the irritability of one who feels he is getting the worst of an argument. “I finished reading Henry and Rider Haggard when I was twelve.”

Mallory held up his finger to indicate the throbbing in the air. “And that is—?”

“You name it,” Jones snarled almost belligerently. “You live around here. I don’t.”

“It’s getting you, isn’t it?” Mallory suggested understandingly.

“No, I like it! It’s like dentists working on you with a drill on twenty-four-hour shifts. It’s like a subway being excavated right between your two legs. It’s like a concussion you’ve got already, being tapped with hammers.”

He bowed his head abruptly, clasped his hands, and pressed them down hard across the back of his neck, as though to relieve the strain.

“I was at Anzio,” he said, “but that wasn’t like this. Every bang had a reason behind it. And they didn’t come even, on the downbeat, each time. Oh, God, how I wish I were back in the middle of good old Anzio again! There were other fellows all around me, and I wasn’t afraid. You could see the flash that came with every crash.”

Mallory didn’t say a word, just sat there watching him closely.

Jones’s head suddenly came up again. “I’m a liar,” he blurted out unasked. “There is something to this, and I know there is. What am I bickering with you about it for? What am I denying it for? I saw a smoke sign coming up from the opposite side, the far side, only this morning when I was out riding with my wife. I shut up about it. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone else, I guess because I didn’t want to admit it to myself first of all. There’s already been too much strangeness in my life. I didn’t want any more. It keeps piling on, and piling on, until I can’t stand it any more! If it’s me, if I’m going crazy, if I’m riding for a nervous breakdown, why doesn’t it happen and get it over with? What do I have to have this long build-up for, what’re they trying to prove to me? I’ll take their word for it. Only they should hurry up and finish the job. And if it isn’t me, then it might as well be, because what’s the good of not being crazy, when your whole little private world around you suddenly is?”

“It isn’t you,” Mallory consoled him, with shrewd, sleepily lowered eyelids. “I hear it too, as I sit here, don’t forget. And if you’ve seen strange things, maybe I have too, and maybe I haven’t spoken about them either. I haven’t seen any smoke signals, maybe, but on many a ride when I was out by myself, I’ve had the feeling of eyes watching me from over a rock. But when I turned to look, there never were any there. And many a hand I’ve lost” — he swept his arm out expressively — “who didn’t go down that way.”

Yes, but you’re still better off than I am, thought Jones bitterly. With you, it’s still on the outside of you. Not in your very bed with you, like me.

They fell silent after that. Presently Jones drifted down the steps and ambled about in front of the house.

At one point he stopped, with his back toward Mallory, and a flickering orange halo outlined his head for a minute while he lit a cigarette. As it went out there was a slight spat from the ground, somewhere close to him.

He turned his head and looked intently downward.

“Did you do that? Was that you?” He thought the other man had spat over the rail, over to one side of him.

Suddenly he’d taken a quick step over, dropped down on his haunches, and stayed that way, peering close.

“Come here a minute.”

Mallory was already on his way down the steps to him before the summons was uttered. He crouched down alongside him.

They could barely see it in the dark. Jones struck another match, and it came into view. It was slender, motionless, just a long line on the ground.

Mallory said to him in a curiously hushed voice, as though there were danger of their being overheard, “You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Certainly I know what it is. What I’d like to know is—”

Mallory didn’t let him finish. “Put that damn light out.” He did it for him with a sharp jet of his own breath, without waiting. “Let’s get back under the veranda. The light was what attracted it to you, and we’re both right out in the open here.”

Jones plucked at the ground, and they both straightened up, turned, and ducked back under the veranda shed again. “Don’t touch the point,” Mallory warned. “There may be something on it.” He opened the door and motioned him in with a swift punch of his thumb. “Bring it in with you. I want to get a good look at it in the light. I can’t out here.”

He closed the door quietly after the two of them. “Keep your voice down. Don’t let them hear us.”

Jones was teetering it upright alongside of him, running his thumb and one finger up and down its surface. “Look at that. It’s nearly the height of a man’s body. Ghosts, eh?” He jutted his chin up at the other man. “That wasn’t thrown by any ghost.”

“Maybe not, but—” Mallory took it over and looked at it, lengthwise. The color in his face dropped a little. “It’s an archaic weapon.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, I’m no archaeologist, but look at it for yourself. The head’s a piece of whittled-down obsidian. That stuff hasn’t been used in hundreds of years. All weapons were fashioned of it in the days of the Aztecs and Toltecs and Mayas. I’ve seen some just like it in the museum down at Puerto; that’s how I know for sure. And hummingbird feathers dyed scarlet; that was another characteristic of—”

“It still could have been thrown by a modem.” Jones’s voice was a little unsteady.

“Yes, but there’s no reason for any modem to have thrown it — against us or anyone else. There’s no race consciousness in this country. The whites and the Indians have been living peacefully side by side since the sixteenth century, and now you can hardly tell which is which any longer.”

“In other words, we’ve had a spear thrown at us out of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and it is your idea that the hand that threw it is also out of the fifteenth or sixteenth century?”

“No,” Mallory said stolidly. “Hands that were swinging in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are dead by now. But I’m holding a weapon from those days in my hand and we’re both listening to that thing throb out there. Now let’s hear your idea on it.”

Jones swallowed a couple of times, plumbing for an answer. He couldn’t seem to get hold of one.

Mallory took the spear and stood it up in a corner of the room. Then he shifted a chair out before it so that it couldn’t be readily seen.

Jones was back at the door again. He opened it and stared sullenly out into the boiling darkness. “I’m going out there again and see if I can—”

“Watch yourself,” Mallory said tonelessly. He came over and closed the door against the other’s staying hand. “This is no time for hero stuff. There’s just the two of us here by ourselves now, with two women on our hands.”

Jones turned away reluctantly, moved back to the table, drummed on it rebelliously. “It’s the drums that get you so itchy,” he snarled. Then he suddenly clenched his fist, raised it, and pounded it like a mallet.

“Want a drink?” Mallory asked with quiet understanding.

Jones shook his head, already repentant over his own outburst. He ran his hand over his hair a couple of times in a sort of unspoken apology. “Guess I’ll turn in,” he muttered lamely. “I may as well listen to that lying down as standing up. It’ll never stop.” Then he added, “Think it would be a good idea to lock things up?”

“I don’t think it would be a bad idea.” Mallory went over to the door and drove home a crude cross latch. “The only trouble is it’s like locking up a sieve. These wooden wedges are no good. The place is nothing but doors with a roof over them.”

“How about one of us sitting up, then, and keeping watch for a while?”

“I was thinking of that,” Mallory agreed. “I’ll do it.”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“The place belongs to me, after all. You go inside and get some sleep. I’ll call you in about an hour and you can relieve me, if you want.”

He slung a chair over by the door and settled it just inside it. He opened the door leading to his own and Chris’s living quarters and stepped quietly inside for a moment. Then he came out backward, with a revolver in his hand, and closed the door again. “May as well bring this out with me,” he said. He went over to the chair and took up his position in it, the gun loosely across his knees. “Put out the light before you go in,” he said.

Jones turned the wheel of the oil lamp and killed it. Mallory disappeared in the dark, as if wiped out with an ink brush. There was nothing left but that rabid thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, sounding on a new triumphant note now that it had the night to itself.

The last thing Mallory said to him, as they separated in the blackness, was: “No need telling the girls about — that.”

Jones knew what he meant. The spear from nowhere. The spear from five hundred years ago, dropping to earth only now, like something aimed from one of the stars.