Cemetery World (12 page)

“You better get out of here,” I said to Cynthia. “Try to find a place to hide.”

There was no answer from her and when I looked around to see why she had not answered, I saw that she was stooping and groping on the ground. She rose from her stoop and in each hand she clutched a club, awkward lengths of tree limbs that she had snatched off a pile of fuel that apparently had been hauled in to feed the fire. She thrust one out at me and, with a two-handed grip upon the other, ranged herself beside me.

So we stood there, the two of us, with the clubs clutched in our hands, and it might have been a brave gesture of a sort, but I knew how ineffectual it would be.

The group of men had stopped at the sight of us suddenly armed with clubs, but any time they wanted, they could close in and get us. Some few of them, perhaps, would take their lumps, but they’d overwhelm us by sheer numbers.

A big brute, who stood slightly in the front, said, “What’s the matter with you two? Why you got the clubs?”

“You jumped us,” I said.

“You sneaked up on us,” said the man.

“We smelled the smoke,” said Cynthia. “We were not sneaking up.”

Somewhere off to the left there were snorting noises and the sound of feet or hooves tramping on the ground. There were animals somewhere in the grove of trees beyond the fire.

“You were sneaking,” the man insisted. “You and that great beast of yours.”

While he talked others in the group were shifting off to either side. They were getting in position to take us from the flanks.

“Let us talk some sense,” I said. “We are travelers. We didn’t know that you were here and …”

There was a sudden rush of feet from either side of us and from somewhere in the woods rang out a ululating cry that stopped the sudden rush—a wild and savage war cry that froze the blood in one and made the hair stand up. Out of the screen of woods broke a towering metal figure, moving very fast, and at the sight of it the pack that had been about to swarm in on us were running for their lives.

“Elmer!” Cynthia shrieked, but he paid no attention to us. One of the fleeing men had stumbled when he had set out to run and Elmer snapped him up in the middle of his stride, lifted his twisting, frantic body high into the air and threw him out into the darkness. A gun exploded and there was a hollow thud as the ball hit Elmer’s metal body, but that was the only shot the fleeing men took the time to fire. They went crashing into the woods beyond the fire, with Elmer close upon their heels. They were yelling out in fright and between the yells one could hear the splashing as they fought their way across the stream that lay beyond the campsite.

Cynthia was running toward the struggling Bronco, and I ran after her. Between the two of us, we got him on his feet. “That was Elmer,” Bronco said, once we got him up.

“He will give them hell.”

The cries and whoops were receding in the distance. “There be more of them,” said Bronco, “tethered in the woods. They have no ill in them, however, for they are but simple creatures.”

“Horses,” said Cynthia. “There must be quite a lot of them. I think these people must be traders.”

“Can you tell me exactly what went on?” I asked her. “We were just entering the woods and there were some shadows. Then I came to with someone throwing water in my face.”

“They hit you,” Cynthia said, “and grabbed me and dragged us to the fire. They dragged you by the heels and you were a funny sight.”

“I imagine you died laughing.”

“No,” she said, “I wasn’t laughing, but you still were funny.”

“And Bronco?”

“I was galloping to your rescue,” Bronco said, “when I tripped and fell. And there, upon my back, I gave a good account of myself, would you not say so? As they clustered all about me, I got in some lusty licks with my trusty hooves.”

“There was no sign of them,” said Cynthia. “They lay in wait for us. They saw us coming and they laid in wait for us. We couldn’t see the fire, for it was in a fairly deep ravine …”

“They had sentries out, of course,” I said. “It was just our luck that we fell foul of them.”

We moved down to the fire and stood around it. It had fairly well died down, but we did not stir it up. Somehow we felt just a little safer if there were not too much light. Boxes and bales were piled to one side of it and on the other side a pile of wood that had been dragged in as fuel. Cooking and eating utensils, guns and blankets lay scattered all about.

Something splashed very noisily across the stream and came crashing through the brush. I made a dive to grab up a gun, but Bronco said, “It’s only Elmer coming back,” and I dropped the gun. I don’t know why I picked it up; I had not the least idea of how it might have worked.

Elmer came crunching through the brush.

“They got away,” he said. “I tried to catch one of them to hear what he might have to say, but they were too nimble for me.”

“They were scared,” said Bronco.

“Is everyone all right?” asked Elmer. “How about you, miss?”

“We’re all right,” said Cynthia. “One of them hit Fletcher with a club and knocked him out, but he seems to be all right.”

“I have a lump,” I said, “and my head, come to think of it, seems a little sore. But there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Fletch,” said Elmer, “why don’t you build up the fire and get some food to cooking. You and Miss Cynthia must feel some need of it. Some sleep, too, perhaps. I dropped the stuff I was carrying. I’ll go back and get it.”

“Hadn’t we ought to be getting out of here?” I asked.

“They won’t be coming back,” said Elmer. “Not right now. Not in broad daylight and dawn’s about to break. They’ll come back tomorrow night, but we’ll be gone by then.”

“They have some animals tied out in the woods,” said Bronco. “Pack animals, no doubt, to carry those bales and boxes. We could use some animals such as that.”

“We’ll take them along,” said Elmer. “We’ll leave our friends afoot. And another thing—I’m most anxious to look into those bales. There must be something in them they didn’t want to have anybody poking into.”

“Maybe not,” said Bronco. “Maybe they were just spoiling for a fight. Maybe they were just mean and ornery.” :

Chapter 12

But it wasn’t just meanness.

They had reason to want no one knowing what was in the bales and boxes.

The first bale, when we ripped it open, contained metal, crudely cut into plates, apparently with chisels.

Elmer picked up two of the plates and banged them together, “Steel,” he said, “plated with bronze. I wonder where they’d get stuff like this.”

But even before he got through saying it, he knew, and so did I. He looked at me and saw I knew, or guessed, and said, “It’s casket metal, Fletch.”

We stood around and looked at it, with Bronco back of us, looking over our shoulders. Elmer dropped the two pieces he’d been holding.

“I’ll go back and get the tools,” he said, “and we’ll get to work on Bronco. We have to get out of here sooner than I thought.”

We got to work, using the tools that Elmer had taken from the tool shack back at the settlement. One leg we fixed up with little effort, straightening it and hammering it out and slipping it back into place so that it worked as good as new. The second leg gave us some trouble.

“How long do you think this might have been going on?” I asked as we worked. “This robbing of the Cemetery. Certainly Cemetery must know about it.”

“Perhaps they do,” said Elmer, “but what can they do about it and why should they care? If someone wants to do some genteel grave-robbing, what difference does it make? Just so they do it where it doesn’t show too much.”

“But they would surely notice. They keep the Cemetery trimmed and …”

“Where it can be seen,” said Elmer. “I’ll lay you a bet there are places where there is no care at all—places that visitors never are allowed to see.”

“But if someone comes to visit a certain grave?”

“They’d know about it ahead of time. They’d know the names on any Pilgrim passenger list—the names and where the passengers were from. They’d have time to put on a crash program, getting any sector of the Cemetery cleaned up. Or maybe they wouldn’t even have to. Maybe they’d simply switch a few headstones or markers and who would know the difference?”

Cynthia had been cooking at the fire. Now she came over to us. “Could I use this for a minute?” she asked, picking up a pinch bar.

“Sure, we’re through with it,” said Elmer. “We’ve almost got old Bronco here as good as new. What do you want with it?”

“I thought I’d open up one of the boxes.”

“No need to,” Elmer said. “We know what they were carrying. It’ll just be more metal.”

“I don’t care,” said Cynthia. “I would like to see.”

It was growing light. The sun was brightening the eastern sky and would soon be rising. Birds, which had begun their twittering as soon as the darkness of the night had started to fade, now were flying and hopping in the trees. One bird, big and blue and with a topknot, moved nervously about, screeching at us.

“A blue jay,” Elmer said. “Noisy kind of creatures. Remember them of old. Some of the others, too, but not all their names. That one is a robin. Over there a blackbird—a redwing blackbird, I would guess. Cheeky little rascal.”

“Fletcher,” Cynthia said, not speaking very loudly, but her voice sharp and strained.

I had been squatting, watching Elmer put the last touches to straightening out and shaping one of Bronco’s hooves.

“Yes,” I said, “what is it?” not even looking around.

“Please come here,” she said.

I rose and turned around. She had managed to lift one end of a board off the top of a box and had pushed it lip and left it, canted at an angle. She wasn’t looking toward me. She was looking at what the lifting of the board had revealed inside the box, unmoving, as if she had been suddenly hypnotized, unable to take her eyes away from what she saw inside the box.

The sight of her standing in this fashion brought me suddenly alert and in three quick strides, I was beside her.

The first thing that I saw was the exquisitely decorated bottle—tiny, dainty, of what appeared to be jade, but it could not have been jade, for there was painted on it small, delicate figures in black and yellow and dark green, while the bottle itself was an apple green—and nothing in its right mind would go about painting jade. It lay against a china cup, or what appeared to be a china cup, emblazoned in red and blue, and beside the cup a grotesque piece of statuary, rudely carved out of cream-colored stone. Lying half hidden by the statuary was a weirdly decorated jar.

Elmer had come up to us and now he reached out and took the pinch bar away from Cynthia. In two quick motions, he ripped the rest of the boards away. The box was filled with a jumble of jars and bottles, bits of statuary, pieces of china, cunningly shaped bits of metalwork, begemmed belts and bracelets, necklaces of stone, brooches, symbolic pieces (they must have been symbolic pieces, for they made no other sense), boxes of both wood and metal, and many other items.

I picked up one of the symbolic pieces, a many-sided block of some sort of polished stone, with half-obscured etchings on every face of it. I turned it in my hand, looking closely at the engraved symbols presented on each face. It was heavy, as if it might be of metal rather than of stone, although it seemed to have a rocklike texture. I could almost remember, almost be sure, although absolute certainty escaped me. There had been a similar piece, a very similar piece, on the mantel in Thorney’s study, and one night while we had sat there he had taken it up and showed me how it had been used, rolled like a die to decide a course of action to be taken, a divining stone of some sort and very, very ancient and extremely valuable and significant because it was one of the few artifacts that could unmistakably be attributed to a most obscure people on a far-off, obscure planet—a people who had lived there and died or moved away or evolved into something else long before the human race had found the planet vacant and had settled down on it.

“You know what it is, Fletch?” Elmer asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Thorney had one that was almost like it. A very ancient piece. He named the planet and the people, but I can’t recall the names. He was always telling me the planet and the people.”

“The food is hot,” said Cynthia. “Why don’t we eat it now? We can talk about it while we eat.”

I realized, when she spoke of it, that I was ravenous. I had not tasted food since the noon before.

She led the way to the fire and dished up the food from the pan in which she’d heated it. It was a thick, rich soup, almost a stew, with vegetables and chunks of meat in it. In my haste, I burned my mouth with the first spoonful.

Elmer squatted down beside us. He picked up a stick and idly poked the fire.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that we have here some of those missing items that you told me Professor Thorndyke often talked about. Stuff from archaeological sites looted by treasure hunters who spirited all their findings away so they could not be studied, probably to be sold at a later time, at tremendous profit, to collectors.”

“I think you are right,” I said, “and now I think I know where at least some of them are hidden out.”

“In the Cemetery,” Cynthia said.

“Nothing would be simpler,” I said. “A casket would make an excellent hiding place. No one would think of digging it up—no one, that is, other than a gang of outland metal seekers who figured out where they could get good metal at no more than the cost of a little work.”

“It would have been the metal at first,” said Cynthia, “and then one day they found a casket that held no body, but was filled with treasure. Maybe there was a way in which the graves that held the treasure would be marked. Perhaps a simple little design you would never see unless you knew where to look on the tombstone or the marker.”

“They wouldn’t have found that mark to start with,” said Elmer. “It might have taken them quite a while to get it figured out.”

“They probably had a long time to get it figured out,” said Cynthia. “These ghouls of ours may have been at this metal business for hundreds of years.”