The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (35 page)

“Oh, no,” breathed Indy. He dove back, tried to hold it open.

But it closed.

As he turned, he saw the door on the opposite side of the cave slide down: the dim light emanating from beyond it was extinguished. Indy dove toward the portal—but again, he was too late.

He sat on the floor a moment, collecting his thoughts.

“Are you mad at me?” Shorty asked in a small voice out of the darkness. He felt like one of the Little Thunders—children of My Lord the Thunder and the Mother of Lightnings, who, through well-intentioned inexperience, were always having misadventures.

“Indy, you mad at me?”

“No,” Indiana mumbled. And then, more softly: “Not exactly.” Mad at
himself was
more like it. He never should have brought the kid down here; it was too dangerous.

“Oh, you just angry?”

“Right,” said Indy, striking a match. He found a piece of oily rag on the floor and lit it. Human skeletons littered the ground. Shorty moved toward him. Indiana didn’t want the boy inadvertently stumbling into any other trigger mechanisms, though. “Stop right there,” he warned Shorty. “Look, go stand up against the wall.”

Short Round did as he was told. He flattened his back against a block protruding from the stone wall. The block slid into the wall, triggering another device.

From the ceiling, spikes began to lower.

“Oh, no,” groaned Indiana.

The burning rag illuminated the spikes as if they were the fiery teeth of hell.

Short Round shouted angrily at Indy, “You say stand against wall, I listen to what you say. Not my fault, not my fault!”

Indy wasn’t listening, though. He was shouting through the door at the top of his voice. “Willie, get down here!”

Back in her room, Willie heard Indy call. She pulled on her robe, stepped into the drafty tunnel. “Indy!” she yelled back. There was no answer. She grabbed a small oil lamp from the table, began walking down the corridor. “I bet I get all dirty again,” she muttered, rounding the first turn.

The two skeletons leapt out at her. “Indy!” she screamed. “There’s two dead people in here!”

“There’s going to be two dead people in
here
if you don’t hurry up!” he shouted back.

She ran past the disgusting, flapping skins, down the steep grade, into the deepening dark, the rising wind. The wind blew out her lamp. Then came the foul odor.

“Ooh, it stinks in here,” she moaned.

“Willie, get down here!”

“I’ve had almost enough of you two,” she barked. What did they think, she did this for a living?

“Willie!”

The ceiling spikes were coming lower, getting closer. They looked more like sword blades now, with razor cutting edges.

“I’m coming,” she hollered.

“C’mon, we’re in trouble!” he roared. Then to Short Round: “Give me your knife.” He took the dagger from Shorty, began digging frantically at the inset block of stone.

“What sort of trouble?” she called.

Spikes were rising from the floor now as well. “Deep trouble.”

“Indy?” She kept walking. The smell got worse as his voice got louder.

“This is serious,” he urged her on.

“What’s the rush?”

“It’s a long story. Hurry or you won’t get to hear it.”

“Oh, God, what is this?” She stopped at the new sensation underfoot. “There’s stuff all over the floor. It’s kind of crispy . . . and then it goes kind of creamy. Indy, what is it? I can’t see a thing.”

She struck a match.

All over: bugs.

Skittering beetles with black carapaces, long-legged arthropods, puffy translucent things that resembled scorpions, squirming wormy things, hopping locusts, segmented cave things . . .

It made her too sick to scream; all she could do was gag. “Indy, let me in. There’s bugs all over here, Indy.”

“Willie,” Indy explained to her from the other side of the stone door that separated them, “there are no bugs in here.”

“Open the door and let me in,” she begged.

“Open the door and let us out,” wailed Shorty. “Let us out, let us out!”

“Let me in, Indy, please,” she squeaked.

“Right. Workin’ on it.”

“Indy, they’re in my hair.” Making nests there, burrowing in, spinning webs, clicking their pincers.

“Willie, shut up and listen. There’s got to be a fulcrum release lever.”

“A what?”

“A handle that opens the door.”

“Oh, God, Indy. They’re in my hair.” Scratching, nibbling.

The tips of the spikes were now at head level.

“Open your eyes, Willie. Look around. There’s got to be a lever hidden somewhere. Go on, look.”

“There’s two holes,” she whimpered. “I see two square holes.”

“Right. Now go to the right hole.”

Sure. The one with all the mung and bugs oozing out of it. This was a joke, right?

Tentatively, she stretched her hand toward the left-sided hole, the relatively clean one. Not clean, exactly of course, but at least not that disgusting slime-infested . . .

A hand reached through the left hole and grabbed hers. Indy’s hand.

“No, not that hole, the other one!” he shouted. “The hole on your right!”

“It looks alive inside. I can’t do it,” she protested.

“You can do it. Feel inside,” he guided her. Come on, kiddo, I need your help.

“You
feel inside.” Big wheel, telling her what to do.

“You’ve got to do it now!” he yelled. He was scrunched way down already; the spikes were pressing his flesh.

Willie eased her hand into the mess. “Oh, God, it’s soft. It’s moving. It’s like a bowl of rotten peaches.”

“Willie, we are going to die.”

“I got it.” She found a lever and yanked. The door rolled back.

Indy sat there beside Shorty, inside the doorway, as the spikes slowly started to recede.

Willie ran in tearing the bugs from her hair, shivering at the feel of their little feet all over her skin.

Shorty ran to the opposite door, which was sliding up, and took a long slide across the threshold—just like the immortal Ty Cobb stealing second. He wanted out of there, before anything else went wrong.

Willie stomped and shook. “Get them off me. They’re all over me, get them off, I hate bugs, they’re in my hair.”

As she bent down to comb them out, she pushed in the block that was the trigger mechanism for the whole thing to start over again.

The first door commenced to roll shut.

Short Round called from the opposite door: “I didn’t do it. She did it. Come on, get out!”

He began burbling in his native language as the far door, and the spikes, began once more descending. Like a Cantonese Little League third base coach, he shouted in Chinese: “Slide, Indy, slide!”

Indy took hold of Willie; they sprinted across the room. He pushed her under the falling door, then dove under himself, just knocking his hat off on the way out.

And then, with inches to spare, he reached back in under the descending door, grabbed his hat, and pulled it out moments before the door crashed into place.

You should never go on an adventure without your hat.

They found themselves in a large, eerily lit tunnel through which blew a strange and forlorn wind, howling like a dirge from the earth’s own core.

The light came from up ahead, around a curve in the tunnel. Reddish light; brooding, spectral. Indy, Willie, and Short Round walked slowly to the mouth of the tunnel; then stared, astonished, at the sight below them.

It was a cavern, staggeringly vast, carved over every inch of its surface, as if it had been carved out of the solid mass of the rock, carved with a vaulted, cathedral-like ceiling supported by rows of stone columns, carved into a colossal, subterranean temple. A temple of death.

Stone balconies overhung the granite floor, supported by pillars and arches that led off to dark side chambers. From these grottos poured worshippers, hundreds of them, chanting as they entered the temple. They chanted in unison, in response to the bizarre, lonely winds that howled out of the tunnels that pierced the upper levels of the cavern.

This strange tunnel-music created its own harmonics, its own dynamics, rising and falling in pitch and volume, echoing off all of the resonant hollows. And as these winds galed or died, the worshippers droned in answer, loud, or discordant, or muted, or keening: “Gho-ram gho-ram gho-ram sundaram, gho-ram gho-ram gho-ram sundaram . . .”

Mammoth stone statues loomed around the swelling congregation, rock, fashioned into elephants, lions, demigods and demons; ornate monstrosities, half-human, half-animal, some surely erupted from the mind of madness.

Torches were lit over the balconies, affording a clearer view to the three onlookers who stared, transfixed, from their tiny perch high above and to the rear of the scene. Below them, the mystery cult began bowing toward an enormous altar at the far end of the temple. Separating them from this altar was a crevasse—it looked partly natural, partly carved and shaped—from which the dull red light emanated, out of which sulfurous wisps of smoke and steam rose until they were sucked away up some nether tunnel by the moaning, baying winds.

The altar itself, on the far side of the crevasse, was roiled in smoke, obscuring its precise shape. As the ceremony continued, robed priests emerged from this miasma, carrying pots of incense, clearing the air around the altar as they came forward to the far edge of the crevasse. Soon, the incense dissipated; a giant stone statue appeared on the altar, its back to the far wall, standing partly within an enormous, domed niche carved into the stuff of the rock.

It was Kali—the hideous protectress of the temple, the malevolent, bloodthirsty goddess who was the object of all this devotion.

She stood twenty feet tall. Carved snakes curled up her legs, while girdling her hips was a skirt of hanging human arms. The statue itself had six arms: one held a saber; one grasped the severed head of a giant victim by the hair; two supported her on the altar; two, outstretched, dangled a flat, iron-mesh basket on chains.

Around her shoulders were draped necklaces of human skulls.

Her face was vile, half mask, half ghoul: a loathsome miscreant. Her eyes and mouth glowed with molten lava from the pit below, scorching her stony fangs black; there was no nose, only a deformed hole; her headdress was carved with ancient markings that bespoke great evil.

The priests gazed up at the deity reverently. The worshippers chanted louder, in a growing passion of foul cravings.

Up in the wind tunnel, Willie shivered. “What’s happening?” she whispered. It made her feel cold, hollow; shaken.

“It’s a Thuggee ceremony,” said Indy. “They’re worshipping Kali.”

“Ever seen this before?”

“Nobody’s seen this for over a hundred years.” He was excited, on edge. What an incredible discovery he’d stumbled upon! An extinct religion, its rituals and totems as alive now as they’d ever been. It was as if he were viewing the reanimated bones of a lost tribe.

Suddenly they heard a wailing from behind the altar—inhuman, but all too human.

“Baachao; muze baachao. Baachao koi muze-baachao.”

“What’s that?” muttered Willie.

“Sounds like the main event,” Indy replied. “He’s calling ‘Save me, someone please save me.’ ”

Grimly they watched as the ritual continued.

A huge drum sounded three times; the chanting stopped. Only the wind sustained a relentless groan. In the chill of its echo, another figure stepped forward onto the altar. This was the High Priest, Mola Ram.

His robes were black, his eyes red and sunken. He wore a necklace of teeth. On his head sat the upper skull of a bison, its horns curling out like those of the devil incarnate.

He walked to the edge of the crevasse, facing the crowd. Just on the other side of the pit, facing the High Priest, Indy noticed a familiar figure sitting. “Look,” he said quietly to Willie. “Our host, the Maharajah.”

“Who’s the guy he’s lookin’ at?” Willie nodded.

“Looks like the High Priest.”

To Short Round, he looked like Frankenstein.

Mola Ram lifted his arms above his head. Again, a pitiful scream rose from behind the altar, as if it were coming from the statue of Kali herself. Quickly the true sound of the scream became identifiable: a struggling, ragged Indian was dragged out onto the altar by priests and tied to the rectangular iron frame basket that hung from Kali’s arms, just above the stone floor.

All watched in silence.

Mola Ram walked over to the bound victim, who was writhing helplessly, spread-eagled on his back atop the hanging frame. The man wailed. Mola Ram uttered an incantation. The man sobbed. Mola Ram extended his hand towards the bound man; his hand pierced the victim’s chest.

Pierced it, sank into the poor, squirming torso . . . and ripped out the Indian’s living heart.

Willie covered her mouth.

Short Round’s eyes opened wide. “He pulled his heart out. He’s dead.” Emperor Shou-sin used to remove the hearts of sages, Short Round had heard, to see if it was true that the heart of a sage is pierced with seven holes. This man’s heart had no holes, though, and that priest wasn’t Shou-sin. To Short Round, it looked like they’d fallen into hell.

There were ten hells, ruled by the Yama Kings. At various levels, a person might be buried in a lake of ice, bound to a red-hot pillar, drowned in a pool of fetid blood, reincarnated as a Famished Demon; many tortures were there.

This was certainly the fifth hell, in which the dead soul’s heart was repeatedly plucked out.

Short Round did not want to be here.

Indy didn’t believe in hell. But he believed in what he saw. And what he saw now was more unbelievable than any hell he’d ever imagined. He stared, rapt, at the man being sacrificed.

“He’s still alive,” murmured Indiana.

Indeed, the man still screamed, and his bloody heart maintained a steady beat in Mola Ram’s hand. Mola Ram lifted the heart above his head. Once again, the worshippers began to chant:

“Jai ma Kali, jai ma Kali, jai ma Kali . . .”

The sacrificial victim kept wailing, very much alive. There was no evidence of a gash on his chest, only a reddish mark where Mola Ram’s hand had entered.