Reynolds leaned closer, supporting himself by a hand propped against the stone wall. And suddenly and shockingly the sensation of solidity and stability vanished. The wall gave way beneath his propping hand, a section swung inward, precipitating him headlong through a black gaping opening. His catlike quickness could not save him. It was as if the yawning shadows reached tenuous and invisible hands to jerk him headlong into the darkness.
He did not fall far. His outflung hands struck what seemed to be steps carved in the stone, and on them he scrambled and floundered for an instant. Then he righted himself and turned back to the opening through which he had fallen. The secret door had closed and only a smooth stone wall met his groping fingers. He fought down a rising panic. How the McCrills had come to know of this secret chamber he could not say, but quite evidently they had placed Saul Fletcher’s body in it. And there, trapped like a rat, they would find John Reynolds when they returned. Then in the darkness a grim smile curled Reynolds’ thin lips. When they opened the secret door, he would be hidden in the darkness, while they would be etched against the dim light of the outer cave. Where could he find a more perfect ambush? But first he must find the body and secure the cartridges.
He turned to grope his way down the steps and his first stride brought him to a level floor. It was a sort of narrow tunnel, he decided, for though he could not touch the roof, a stride to the right or the left and his outstretched hand encountered a wall, seemingly too even and symmetrical to have been a work of nature. He went slowly, groping in the darkness, keeping in touch with the walls and momentarily expecting to stumble on Saul Fletcher’s body. And as he did not, a dim horror began to grow in his soul.
The McCrills had not been in the cavern long enough to carry the body so far back into the darkness. A feeling was rising in John Reynolds that the McCrills had not entered the tunnel at all–that they were not aware of its existence. Then where, in the name of sanity, was Saul Fletcher’s corpse?
He stopped short, jerking out his six-shooter. Something was coming up the dark tunnel–something that walked upright and lumberingly.
John Reynolds knew it was a man, wearing high-heeled riding boots; no other foot-wear makes the same stilted sound. He caught the jingle of the spurs. And a dark tide of nameless horror moved sluggishly in John Reynolds’ mind as he heard that halting tread approach, and remembered the night when he had lain at bay in the old corral, with his younger brother dying beside him, and heard a limping, dragging footstep endlessly circle his refuge, out in the night where Saul Fletcher led his wolves and sought for a way to come upon his back.
Had the man only been wounded? These steps sounded stiff and blundering, such as a wounded man might make. No–John Reynolds had seen too many men die; he knew that his bullet had gone straight through Saul Fletcher’s heart–possibly tearing the heart clear out, certainly killing him instantly. Besides, he had heard old Jonas McCrill declare the man was stone-dead. No–Saul Fletcher lay lifeless somewhere in this black cavern. It was some other lame man who was coming up that silent tunnel.
Now the tread ceased. The man was fronting him, separated only by a few feet of utter blackness. What was there in that to quicken the iron pulse of John Reynolds, who had unflinchingly faced death times without number?–what to make his flesh crawl and his tongue freeze to his palate?–to awake sleeping instincts of fear as a man senses the presence of an unseen serpent, and make him feel that somehow the other was aware of his presence with eyes that pierced the darkness?
In the silence John Reynolds heard the staccato pounding of his own heart. And with shocking suddenness the man lunged. Reynolds’ straining ears caught the first movement of that lunge and he fired point-blank. And he screamed–a terrible animal-like scream. Heavy arms locked upon him and unseen teeth worried at his flesh, but in the frothing frenzy of his fear, his own strength was superhuman. For in the flash of the shot he had seen a bearded face with slack hanging mouth and staring dead eyes. Saul Fletcher! The dead, come back from Hell.
As in a nightmare Reynolds knew that fiendish battle in the dark, where the dead sought to drag down the living. He felt himself hurled to and fro in the grip of the clammy hands. He was flung with bone-shattering force against the stone walls. Dashed to the floor, the silent horror squatted ghoul-like upon him, its horrid fingers sinking deep into his throat.
In that nightmare, John Reynolds had no time to doubt his own sanity. He knew that he was battling a dead man. The flesh of his foe was cold with a charnel-house clamminess. Under the torn shirt he had felt the round bullet-hole, caked with clotted blood. No single sound came from the loose lips.
Choking and gasping, John Reynolds tore the strangling hands aside and flung the thing off, reeling. For an instant the darkness again separated them; then the horror came hurtling toward him again. As the thing lunged Reynolds caught blindly and gained the wrestling hold he wished; and hurling all his power behind his attack, he dashed the horror headlong, falling upon it with his full weight. Saul Fletcher’s spine snapped like a rotten branch and the tearing hands went limp, the straining limbs relaxed. Something flowed from the lax body and whispered away through the darkness like a ghostly wind, and John Reynolds instinctively knew that at last Saul Fletcher was truly dead.
Panting and shaken, Reynolds rose. The tunnel remained in utter darkness. But down it, in the direction from which the walking corpse had come stalking, there whispered a faint throbbing that was hardly sound at all, yet had in its pulsing a dark weird music. Reynolds shuddered and the sweat froze on his body. The dead man lay at his feet in the thick darkness and faintly to his ears came that unbearably sweet, unbearably evil echo, like devil-drums beating faint and far in the dim caverns of Hell.
Reason urged him to turn back–to fight against that blind door until he burst its stone, if human power could burst it. But he realized that reason and sanity had been left behind him. A single step had plunged him from a normal world of material realities into a realm of nightmare and lunacy. He decided that he was mad, or else dead and in Hell. Those dim tom-toms drew him–they tugged at his heart-strings eerily.
They repelled him and filled his soul with shadowy and monstrous conjectures, yet their call was irresistible. He fought the mad impulse to shriek and fling his arms wildly aloft and run down the black tunnel as a rabbit runs down the prairie dog’s burrow into the jaws of the waiting rattler.
Fumbling in the dark, he found his revolver and still fumbling, he loaded it with cartridges from Saul Fletcher’s belt. He felt no more aversion now at touching the body than he would have felt at handling any dead flesh. Whatever unholy power had animated the corpse, it had left it when the snapping of the spine had unraveled the nerve centers and disrupted the roots of the muscular system.
Then, revolver in hand, John Reynolds went down the tunnel, drawn by a power he could not fathom, toward a doom he could not guess.
The throb of the tom-toms grew only slightly in volume as he advanced. How far below the hills he was he could not know, but the tunnel slanted downward and he had gone a long way. Often his groping hands encountered doorways–corridors leading off the main tunnel, he believed. At last he was aware that he had left the tunnel and had come out into a vast open space. He could see nothing, but he somehow felt the vastness of the place. And in the darkness a faint light began. It throbbed as the drums throbbed, waning and waxing in time to their pulsing, but it grew slowly, casting a weird glow that was more like green than any color Reynolds had ever seen, but was not really green, nor any other sane or earthly color.
Reynolds approached it. It widened. It cast a shimmering radiance over the smooth stone floor, illuminating fantastic mosaics. It cast its sheen high in the hovering shadows, but he could see no roof.
Now he stood bathed in its weird glow, so that his flesh looked like a dead man’s. Now he saw the roof, high and vaulted, brooding far above him like a dusky midnight sky, and towering walls, gleaming and dark, sweeping up to tremendous height
s, their bases fringed with squat shadows from which glittered other lights, small and scintillant.
He saw the source of the illumination–a strange carven stone altar on which burned what appeared to be a giant jewel of an unearthly hue, like the light it emitted. Greenish flame jetted from it; it burned as a bit of coal might burn, but it was not consumed. Just behind it a feathered serpent reared from its coils, a fantasy carven of some clear crystalline substance the tints of which in the weird light were never the same, but which pulsed and shimmered and changed as the drums–now on all sides of him–pulsed and throbbed.
Abruptly something alive moved beside the altar and John Reynolds, though he was expecting anything, recoiled. At first he thought it a huge reptile which slithered about the altar, then he saw that it stood upright as a man stands. As he met the menacing glitter of its eyes, he fired point-blank and the thing went down like a slaughtered ox, its skull shattered. Reynolds wheeled as a sinister rustling rose on his ears–at least these beings could be killed. Then he checked the lifted muzzle. The drums had never ceased. The fringing shadows had moved out from the darkness at the base of the walls and drawn about him in a wide ring. And though at first glance they possessed the semblance of men, he knew they were not human.
The weird light flickered and danced over them, and back in the deeper darkness the soft, evil drums whispered their accompanying undertone everlastingly. John Reynolds stood aghast at what he saw.
It was not their dwarfish figures which caused his shudder, nor even the unnaturally made hands and feet–it was their heads. He knew, now, of what race was the skull found by the prospector. Like it, these heads were peaked and malformed, curiously flattened at the sides. There was no sign of ears, as if their organs of hearing, like a serpent’s, were beneath the skin. The noses were like a python’s snout, the mouth and jaws much less human in appearance than his recollection of the skull would have led him to suppose. The eyes were small, glittering and reptilian. The squamous lips writhed back, showing pointed fangs, and John Reynolds felt that their bite would be as deadly as a rattlesnake’s. Garments they wore none, nor did they bear any weapons.
He tensed himself for the death-struggle, but no rush came. The snake-people sat about him in a great cross-legged circle, and beyond the circle he saw them massed thick. And now he felt a stirring in his consciousness, an almost tangible beating of wills upon his senses. He was distinctly aware of a concentrated invasion of his innermost mind, and realized that these fantastic beings were seeking to convey their commands or wishes to him by medium of thought. On what common plane could he meet these inhuman creatures? Yet in some dim, strange, telepathic way they made him understand some of their meaning, and he realized with a grisly shock that whatever these things were now, they had once been at least partly human, else they had never been able to so bridge the gulf between the completely human and the completely bestial.
He understood that he was the first living man to come into their innermost realm–the first to look on the shining serpent, the Terrible Nameless One who was older than the world; that before he died, he was to know all which had been denied to the sons of men concerning the mysterious valley, that he might take this knowledge into Eternity with him, and discuss these matters with those who had gone before him.
The drums rustled, the strange light leaped and shimmered, and before the altar came one who seemed in authority–an ancient monstrosity whose skin was like the whitish hide of an old serpent, and who wore on his peaked skull a golden circlet, set with weird gems. He bent and made suppliance to the feathered snake. Then with a sharp implement of some sort which left a phosphorescent mark, he drew a cryptic triangular figure on the floor before the altar, and in the figure he strewed some sort of glimmering dust.
From it reared up a thin spiral which grew to a gigantic shadowy serpent, feathered and horrific, and then changed and faded and became a cloud of greenish smoke. This smoke billowed out before John Reynolds’ eyes and hid the serpent-eyed ring, and the altar, and the cavern itself. All the universe dissolved into the green smoke, in which titanic scenes and alien landscapes rose and shifted and faded, and monstrous shapes lumbered and leered.
Abruptly the chaos crystallized. He was looking into a valley which he did not recognize. Somehow he knew it was Lost Valley, but in it towered a gigantic city of dully gleaming stone. John Reynolds was a man of the outlands and the waste places. He had never seen the great cities of the world. But he knew that nowhere in the world today such a city reared up to the sky.
Its towers and battlements were those of an alien age. Its outline baffled his gaze with its unnatural aspects; it was a city of lunacy to the normal human eye, with its hints of alien dimensions and abnormal principles of architecture. Through it moved strange figures, human, yet of a humanity definitely different from his own. They were clad in robes, their hands and feet were less abnormal, their ears and mouths more like those of normal humans, yet there was an undoubted kinship between them and the monsters of the cavern. It showed in the curious peaked skull, though this was less pronounced and bestial in the people of the city.
He saw them in the twisting streets, and in their colossal buildings, and he shuddered at the inhumanness of their lives. Much they did was beyond his ken; he could understand their actions and motives no more than a Zulu savage might understand the events of modern London. But he did understand that these people were very ancient and very evil. He saw them enact rituals that froze his blood with horror, obscenities and blasphemies beyond his understanding. He grew sick with a sensation of pollution, of contamination. Somehow he knew that this city was the remnant of an outworn age–that this people represented the survival of an epoch lost and forgotten.
Then a new people came upon the scene. Over the hills came wild men clad in hides and feathers, armed with bows and flint-tipped weapons. They were, Reynolds knew, Indians, and yet not Indians as he knew them. They were slant-eyed, and their skins were yellowish rather than copper-colored. Somehow he knew that these were the nomadic ancestors of the Toltecs, wandering and conquering on their long trek before they settled in upland valleys far to the south and evolved their own special type and civilization. These were still close to the primal Mongolian root-stock, and he gasped at the gigantic vistas of time this realization evoked.
Reynolds saw the warriors move like a giant wave on the towering walls. He saw the defenders man the towers and deal death in strange and grisly forms to the invaders. He saw them reel back again and again, then come on once more with the blind ferocity of the primitive. This strange evil city, filled with mysterious people of a different order, was in their path and they could not pass until they had stamped it out.
Reynolds marveled at the fury of the invaders who wasted their lives like water, matching the cruel and terrible science of an unknown civilization with sheer courage and the might of man-power. Their bodies littered the plateau, but not all the forces of Hell could keep them back. They rolled like a wave to the foot of the towers. They scaled the walls in the teeth of sword and arrow and death in ghastly forms.
They gained the parapets. They met their enemies hand-to-hand. Bludgeons and axes beat down the lunging spears, the thrusting swords. The tall figures of the barbarians towered over the smaller forms of the defenders.
Red hell raged in the city. The siege became a street battle, the battle a rout, the rout a slaughter. Smoke rose and hung in clouds over the doomed city.
The scene changed. Reynolds looked on charred and ruined walls from which smoke still rose. The conquerors had passed on, the survivors gathered in the red-stained temple before their curious god–a crystalline carven serpent on a fantastic stone altar. Their age had ended; their world crumbled suddenly.
They were the remnants of an otherwise extinct race. They could not rebuild their marvelous city and they feared to remain within its broken walls, a prey to every passing tribe. Reynolds saw them take up their altar and its god and follow an ancient man c
lad in a mantle of feathers and wearing on his head a gem-set circlet of gold. He led them across the valley to a hidden cave. They entered and squeezing through a narrow rift in the back wall, came into a vast network of caverns honeycombing the hills.
Reynolds saw them at work exploring these labyrinths, excavating and enlarging, hewing the walls and floors smooth, enlarging the rift that let into the outer cavern and setting therein a cunningly hung door, so that it seemed part of the solid wall.
Then an ever-shifting panorama denoted the passing of many centuries. The people lived in the caverns, and as time passed they adapted themselves more and more to their surroundings, each generation going less frequently into the outer sunlight. They learned to obtain their food in shuddersome ways from the earth. Their ears grew smaller, their bodies more dwarfish, their eyes more catlike. John Reynolds stood aghast as he watched the race changing through the ages.
Outside in the valley the deserted city crumbled and fell into ruins, becoming prey to lichen and weed and tree. Men came and briefly meditated among these ruins–tall Mongolian warriors, and dark inscrutable little people men call the Mound Builders. And as the centuries passed, the visitors conformed more and more to the type of Indian as he knew it, until at last the only men who came were painted red men with stealthy feet and feathered scalp-locks. None ever tarried long in that haunted place with its cryptic ruins.
Meanwhile, in the caverns, the Old People abode and grew strange and terrible. They fell lower and lower in the scale of humanity, forgetting first their written language, and gradually their human speech.
But in other ways they extended the boundaries of life. In their nighted kingdom they discovered other, older caverns, which led them into the very bowels of the earth. They learned lost secrets, long forgotten or never known by men, sleeping in the blackness far below the hills. Darkness is conducive to silence, so they gradually lost the power of speech, a sort of telepathy taking its place. And with each grisly gain they lost more of their human attributes. Their ears vanished; their noses grew snout-like; their eyes became unable to bear the light of the sun, and even of the stars. They had long abandoned the use of fire, and the only light they used was the weird gleams evoked from their gigantic jewel on the altar, and even this they did not need. They changed in other ways. John Reynolds, watching, felt the cold sweat bead his body. For the slow transmutation of the Old People was horrible to behold, and many and hideous were the shapes which moved among them before their ultimate mold and nature were evolved.