Full Moon (27 page)

“Why don’t blackmailed people come to the police?” Blair wondered. “What a
damned fool!”

“Was he? I don’t think he cared for the blackmail at all. He made no
bargain with Wu Tu; He knew she would not dare to accuse him, because it was
she and her agents who had looted the gold. What he decided to do was to come
back and look for the servant, even if he had to follow him into the fourth
dimension.”

“Did he think he could bring him back?”

“He didn’t know.”

“And you agreed?”

“I wasn’t asked. He went and did it. What would have been the use of my
telling you, for instance, what I thought had happened? Would you have
believed me? You believe me now. But would you have believed me then?”

“If you weren’t consulted, how do you know what he did?”

“I will show you presently. But I should have been very stupid not to
guess what, he had done. He left a note for me saying where he was going, and
reminding me that he had already conveyed his property to me by deed of
trust. He asked me to burn the note and say nothing. L did. We had often
talked over what it might mean to step off into the fourth dimension, and
perhaps meet each other there.

“Neither of us ever had the least doubt of a life after death. But we
agreed in not liking the prospect of death, it’s such a messy and sometimes
such a cruel business. I like life. I love it. But the thought of life in
love with you. and you indifferent, was such a drab, unlovely prospect that I
made up my mind to follow father if I could get into the caverns. I had been
unable to get in lately. So when Chetusingh brought me a message, that I
thought couldn’t possibly be from you, I pretended to believe, and I came
like a shot,”

“Like a shot!” said a whispering echo.

“Wu Tu wants to follow him?”

“I think she wants to look into the fourth dimension. Wu Tu craves power.
She believes she can learn black magic. She believes in it, and I believe
she’s afraid of it.”

“Yes, she does, and she is.” said Blair. “Well, she’s afraid of prison.
She’s afraid of death. She’ll learn all about both, if we ever gel out of
here alive. She’ll have to swing tor killing Zaman Ali—not. that he
didn’t deserve it. I feel sorry for her. But when a woman like Wu Tu slips
up, she has too many debtors and rivals and other sorts of deadly enemies to
have a chance to escape the gallows. I know many a worse blackguard than Wu
Tu who won’t get hanged, but who will laugh with relief when it happens to
her.”

“You’re not vindictive?”

“No. Vindictive people are all contemptible, and most of them are
self-righteous swine. Wu Tu is about the opposite of my idea of a desirable,
but if I could. I’d save her for the sake of what she has taught me, about
crooks and half a hundred other things.”.

“Look!” said Henrietta.

The rind of the moon rose golden in the gap, and the Pleiades vanished.
The entire cavern became filled with dim light: but the great cone glittered
in the midst as if cold fire burned within. The woman remained invisible, but
there were swirling shapes, like opal clouds, inside the cone. They changed
each second, with each fractional change of the moon’s height.

“Wait!” said Henrietta.

“Wait! Wait!” echoes whispered.

They stood up, hand in hand. Second by second the cone grew brighter,
until its summit glowed like molten silver—changing—
changing—the glow descending. Slowly, as the full moon stole upward
past the brim of the gap, the entire cone grew suddenly silver—and then
suddenly transparent. The silver vanished. It gleamed pure crystal. The
giantess stared forth like a splendid statue, dead and yet strangely
lifelike.

“Come,” said Henrietta.

“Come!” an echo whispered in Blair’s ear. But he stared and stood still.
It was nearly a minute before he yielded to the tug of Henrietta’s hand and
followed her. Even the echoes of their footsteps were like sounds in a
dream.

There was no longer need for the electric torch. Moonlight filled the
cavern: the cone diffused it, conquering all shadows except in the segment
behind the mound: even there it was not totally dark. Henrietta led into the
shadow until the cone stood straight between them and the moon, and they
could see the Woman, weirdly radiant. She looked alive, in motion, walking
forward; tired eyes refused to believe she was not moving. From beneath, at
that angle, she seemed to be staring upward at the ledge that surrounded the
pit.

At the rear of the mound, illuminated dimly by the all-pervading glow, a
flight of wide stone steps ascended fifty or sixty feet to a narrow
egg-shaped opening. Steps and opening were probably invisible from the ledge:
they curved on the face of the mound and were flanked by a natural balustrade
of cream-hued stalagmite, worn soap-smooth where ancient hands, ascending and
descending, had pressed on its upper surface. They were irregular steps: no
two were alike: several of them were three feet higher than the step below.
It was a stairway for a giant, worn on the surface by ages of use.

They ascended together, laboring up hand-in-hand, until they stood
exhausted before the egg-shaped opening. Its small end was downward, and
around its edge were vaguely snake-like tracings on the stone. Within was
darkness. Blair switched on the torch. They ascended a smooth-walled passage,
ten feet high, four feet wide, that spiraled gradually upward, worn along its
midst into a shallow trough by feet that must always have marched in Indian
file.

They could hardly hear themselves speak, hardly hear their own footfall;
the sounds they made seemed to travel along in front of them, so that the
sensation was of following other people into the home of all the booming
noises in the world.

It was a long climb; the passage apparently made two complete ascending
spirals within the mound. But at last there began to be light —so much
light that the torch was no longer needed. They came to another egg-shaped
opening in a weirdly carved wall. Through that the light shone from an
enormous chamber that except for two thirds of the floor contained not one
flat surface. Its curved walls seemed to be built of frozen moonlight. There
was nothing else to which to compare it.

“It is only like this in full moonlight,” Henrietta whispered. “When the
sun shines nothing can live in this place.” Even a whisper sighed like wind
until its echo flowed back past them and down the tunnel.

In the midst of the place, arranged in an elongated oval, there were
eighteen crystalline, apparently unhewn, natural columns. They supported the
roof and surrounded an oval hollow that suggested a pool, but there was no
water in it. Its floor looked like molten metal in the light that streamed
through the roof, between the columns. The mirror-like surface of the pool
caught, suffused and spread the light outward between the columns toward the
concave surface of the chamber wall, which reflected it back, confused but
soft and tolerable. The shadowy reflections of the columns seemed to swim
within the wall, in fantastic and innumerable curves that changed their shape
as the observer moved.

Sensation reeled. The slowly moving moonlight pouring through the gap on
the summit of Gaglajung touched millions of microscopic prisms in the cone
that contained the Woman. The light came through the cone into the chamber,
magnified and broken into soundless, formless, spastic symphonies of chaos.
The place swam in motion. Even the columns seemed to move, in an
incomprehensible, measureless dance, like reeds in a whirlwind. But the air
was stifling; there seemed to be no draught whatever, and that increased the
weirdness.

Up between and above the columns, seen through stone as clear as crystal,
like an undead corpse in water moved by multitudes of currents, stood the
Woman of Gaglajung: By some freak in the shape of the crystalline stone, she
appeared now to be staring downward at her own reflection. It felt like
looking up through deep, clear water at an unearthly bather—monstrous,
meditative, silent. When they stood still and made no echoes, there was such
silence that Blair’s straining ears heard his own and Henrietta’s
heartbeats.

Moment after moment the light increased. The oval hole through which they
had entered was not at the chamber’s wider end but about fifteen feet to one
side of it. At the narrower, far end of the chamber, on the floor, against
the wall, confusingly reflected amid tangled images of columns on the wall’s
curved surface, there was something not quite recognizable and yet familiar
that caught Blair’s eye. He walked toward it, treading as quietly as he could
because his footsteps filled the place with noise as weirdly broken and
confusing as the light.

Henrietta shook off her sandals and followed, but even bare feet stirred a
whispering, like wind amid reeds. They passed between the columns, skirting
the curved surface of the egg-shaped pool. It had been swept; the dust of
ages lay in a heap between two columns, except for a small oval space in the
center.

Seen close, that looked like polished, aluminum. But the part in the
center, about six or seven feet long, defied imagination. It appeared to be
neither solid nor liquid. It looked like a pool of pure moonlight. It was
very difficult to look at steadily, ‘but reflected within it, reversed,
reduced in size and gazing upward, was the Woman. There was nothing else
reflected in that central portion. Blair made a move to examine it more
closely.

“Don’t!” Henrietta exclaimed—instant—sudden— clutching
his arm. Her exclamation filled the place with rolling thunder. Blair saw the
fear in her eyes. He sensed no danger, but saw that she did, so he took her
hand and continued his way to the wall at the far end. The light, continually
more confusing, changed every second. They were close to the
wall—within six strides of it—before he saw that the curious
object was some clothing.

It was a coat, folded with military neatness, topped by a two-decker Terai
hat of thin gray felt, such as Frensham always wore,when not in uniform.
Slightly protruding from the jacket pocket was a flat metal first-aid
kit-box. Beside the hat there was an empty cigarette case of thin, polished
wood, a box of matches and a felt-covered water-bottle with a fitted metal
cup. Beside those was a bit of black candle-wick amid the shapeless residue
of a burned-out candle. Three dead matches and three closely burned cigarette
ends lay in a neat little heap together, near the wall.

“He must have sat here smoking, waiting for the moon,” Henrietta
whispered. “It was at full moon that the deaf-and-dumb man vanished.”

“Vanished—vanished!—” said the echo and went whispering down
the tunnel—“Vanished —vanished!—”

Blair searched the jacket. There was nothing in the pockets. He stared at
Henrietta—refolded the jacket:

“Why the devil did he take his clothes off?”

“The deaf-and-dumb man did,” she answered. “And he found it—the
fourth dimension. He disappeared.”

“Disappeared—disappeared—” said the echo. Blair glanced
upward, but from that end of the chamber the giantess was invisible.

Henrietta whispered again:

“Father made experiments, remember.”

She moved the coat and the other things, signed to him, and they sat where
it had been, side by side, with their backs to the wall, heads touching,
clasped in each other’s arms. A line drawn then between them would “have
passed exactly down the center of the place between the columns and across
the pool, to the middle of the broad end of the chamber. The oval opening by
which they came in was on their left-front, hidden from them by the
columns.

The light kept growing stronger every second, and yet curiously soft:
there was no perceptible strain on the eyes, although there was a feeling of
confusion. Attention wandered. It was like staring in a dream at fascinating
and convincing unreality. There appeared an exceedingly thin line, like a
plane of light seen edgewise between the pool and the roof—almost like
one filament of the Aurora Borealis. When Blair moved his head it
vanished.

When he resumed his position it reappeared. It refused to be placed. It
was there and not there, but it seemed to pass upward, through the
transparent roof toward the Woman. It shone, but it was less like a ray of
light than like one of those slanting rays that Cubists paint, to lead
imagination toward new frontiers of realism. It moved, but there was no
describing its movements: its soundlessness suggested sound turned inside
out, rather than silence.

Henrietta whispered excitedly: “Do what he did!”

Abruptly, she slipped off her clothes. Even so. Blair hesitated.
Convention dies harder in a man. But Henrietta seemed perfectly
unself-conscious. Chin on knees, she stared straight at the dreamlike line
between the columns, not turning her head when she spoke again,
low-voiced:

“I don’t know why—perhaps nobody can know why—this only
happens in full moonlight. You can’t see unless you’re naked. Why, I don’t
know. But you’ll have to resist. You must hang on.”