The Graveyard Game (32 page)

Joseph and Lewis walked out again into the evening and strolled back to the Hotel Saint Catherine. It was warm, with a sky full of stars now that the last glow of sunset had faded, and from every terrace and balcony came music, and the determined laughter of mortals enjoying lost pleasures. As they passed the old Encanto, a man came reeling drunkenly out into the street toward them, the very image of a South Seas derelict in stained tropical whites and a battered hat.
They braced themselves as he accosted them; but he turned out to be merely an actor re-creating Charles Laughton’s performance in
The Beachcomber
. They tipped him, and he went away.

Back at the hotel, there was a crowd getting very rowdy on Singapore Slings that may or may not have contained authentic gin. A man at a piano was pounding out “The Sheik of Araby.” In the old-fashioned cage elevator, the elevator boy in bandbox uniform insinuated he could get Joseph and Lewis the real thing, and how, if they wanted some fun. All they had to do was ring the desk and ask for Johnny.

“Do you suppose he meant liquor or prostitutes?” wondered Lewis as they trudged down the hall to their rooms.

“Liquor, probably,” Joseph said wearily. “If you ordered up a whore here, you’d probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered a Hershey bar?” His eyes lit up for a moment. “I wonder what would happen if I ordered a whore
and
a Hershey bar?”

“You’ll never know unless you ask,” Lewis said.

“How true.” Joseph peered back down the hall toward the elevator. “Well. Nighty night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, okay, Lewis?”

“Good night,” said Lewis, and unlocked his door and stepped inside.

The hotel room was lovingly re-created to look like any one of the dozen hotel rooms he’d lived in during the twentieth century. Of course there was a modern entertainment center in the period-styled armoire, and of course the plumbing and heating were state of the art; but the narrow bed would be authentically empty when he lay him down to sleep.

He went to the window and looked out at the night. Dark branches, rustling in the night wind, and the sigh and crash of breakers on sand. Faint music, laughter, Joseph’s door opening and closing,
voices. The clink-clink of rigging and blocks on the little pleasure boats rocking at their moorings.

But not
their
voices anywhere, Mendoza’s voice shy and young as it must have sounded once, Edward’s voice strong and confident.

No, Lewis could fantasize all he liked, but the stony likelihood was that Edward was dead, long dead, and Mendoza was alone, wherever she was. There would never be the ending Lewis hoped for, with the gallant commander somehow claiming his Spanish lady.

I will not be silenced
.

Lewis turned, electrified by an idea. It was the same empty room it had been a moment before, but now the air was full of voices. The yellow pool of light around the table lamp was like an island in the night sea, welcoming, full of promise. With trembling hands he pulled his Buke out of its case and set it up in the lamplight. He turned it on and opened a new file.

It asked him for a name. After a moment’s hesitation he typed in
HAPPY ENDING
. Then he paused over the keyboard, biting his lower lip. He’d never read much science fiction; he’d never written any. True, he had seen the classic Hollywood epics . . . But the future hadn’t turned out the way they’d imaged it.

“Don’t leave me, Captain!” begged Zorn, reaching out a bloody hand.

“He’s done for, Hawke,” Moxx grunted. “And if we don’t get back to the ship soon, O’Grady will take off without us!”

Captain Marshawke Daxon paused to fire another laser blast at the pursuing Company troops before he snapped, “I don’t care! I’m not leaving anyone to be interrogated. If they find out about the contraband, we’re
all
done for!”

“I’ll put him out of his misery, then—” began Moxx, but scarcely were the words out of his mouth when he found himself staring into Captain Daxon’s icy blue eyes, lit with the glare of deadly rage usually reserved for the smuggler chief’s worst enemies. He had taken hold of the front of Moxx’s
spacesuit and hoisted him bodily into the air, and Moxx’s jackboots dangled a full twelve uncomfortable inches from the ground.

“You shoot any member of this band, and you’ll have me to reckon with, do you understand?” roared Captain Daxon.

“Aye, Captain!” gasped Moxx.

“We haven’t got time for this,” Berenice reminded them, ducking as a laser beam shattered the top of the rocky outcropping behind which they had taken cover. “They’re advancing again, Hawke!”

“Right.” Captain Daxon dropped Moxx and turned decisively. He bent swiftly to Zorn and hauled the wounded man over his shoulder. “We’ll run for it. Go! Go! I’ll keep you covered!”

The smugglers took to their heels, scrambling frantically over the rugged island slopes as laser fire shrieked out on all sides. Over the next ridge they could just glimpse the silver nose of the
Starfire
, with clouds of smoke coiling up around her: O’Grady must have already started up the star drive.

Captain Daxon brought up the rear, a towering figure in black smuggler’s leathers, turning frequently to rake the advancing Company troops with withering laser fire as his band ran for their lives. He was slowed only a little by Zorn’s considerable weight, but it proved to be, fatally, enough: for as he turned and fled again, leaping skillfully from rock to rock, a blast screamed terribly near and he felt a sudden sickening impact. Zorn stiffened and groaned once; Daxon staggered and nearly fell, then ran on, but was conscious of sticky warmth flooding down his side.

The other smugglers had already vanished over the crest of the hill, and the
Starfire
was now hidden in boiling clouds. O’Grady was going to leave without them!

Cursing under his breath, Daxon ran faster; only at the last moment did he spot the chasm opening in the rock, almost under his boots.

“Hold on for your life, Zorn!” he cried, and vaulted into space. Wide as the chasm was, he could have easily leaped it under ordinary circumstances: for Marshawke Daxon was no ordinary man. Zorn’s dead weight worked against him, however, and his fingers clawed desperately at the edge of the abyss a moment before losing their hold. Down, down he fell, as laser fire whistled through the space he’d occupied scant milliseconds before.

Daxon spotted a projecting edge of rock and grabbed for it. He caught it, and the rock held; but to his horror, he felt Zorn slipping, falling free. As he looked over his shoulder he beheld Zorn plummeting down, limp as a broken doll, staring up with wide unseeing eyes. Daxon had been carrying a dead man.

Thief though he was, Daxon felt an involuntary prayer for the man’s soul rise to his lips. He looked up at the narrow strip of sky and beheld the
Starfire
rising gracefully against the sun. Had the crew made it aboard? Even as he wondered, laser fire came from some source too near to allow him time for reflection. Using the force of will that had made him a legend in the renegade underworld, Daxon pulled himself up on the edge, groping for a better handhold.

To his astonishment, his hand seemed to disappear in midair. Understanding instinctively what he had found, he threw himself forward at what appeared to be sheer rock wall but was in fact an illusion, a trick of light to conceal the tunnel mouth that was really there. Daxon rolled and came up on his feet, staring around, all his senses sharpened by danger. Slowly, silently he drew his laser pistol. Beyond the tunnel mouth, outside, the whine of laser fire was louder; the troops had come up to the edge of the abyss and were firing down, now, at what must have been Zorn’s just barely visible corpse. Daxon held his breath and waited for them to stop and move on.

He was in a smooth-walled passage that led into the depths of the island, but not into darkness; far down its length
was an eerie blue glow. On the wall immediately opposite where he stood a steel plate was set into the wall, with the words
SITE
317 inscribed upon it.

Daxon began to edge his way along the tunnel, moving with the silence of a great cat. Something about the blue light drew him, for a reason he was never afterward to explain satisfactorily. Down he went and down, into the subterranean lair of . . . what?

After a hundred paces the tunnel opened out into a room, lit by the blue glow that had become stronger and brighter as he had descended. Daxon stepped into that room and caught his breath at what he saw there.

The blue glow was emanating from a great vault made of what appeared to be transparent glass. Floating within was a girl, naked, dreaming, and her long hair was the color of fire and moved like flame in the slow currents of the heavy fluid that imprisoned her.

Daxon walked like a man in the grip of enchantment. He knew her: surely he knew her, had always known that graceful body, that face at once childlike yet possessed of a somber dignity. He knew that her eyes, when they opened, would be black as smoldering coals in her pale face; he knew that her hair was fragrant with myrrh and attar of roses, that he’d buried his face in its burning waves. When had he done that? How did he know these things?

Impossible memories rose to assail him, of places he’d never been, in an era long past. Suddenly he remembered the sea, and the man he’d been once, a man with nobler aspirations perhaps than mere smuggling, and the girl’s name, which had been . . . Mendoza.

He could not say with any certainty just who he had been, or why he remembered these things; it was enough that he remembered the girl, and knew that she was his true love. This he knew beyond all doubt, as tears streamed down his unshaven face.

Acting on impulse, Daxon aimed his pistol at the imprisoning glass and fired. The whole side of the vat gave way and flooded its contents outward: but he was there to catch her as she was spilled free, and he held her above the glittering blue tide and splashed to a couch at one side of the room which he had not previously noticed.

There he lay her down. She was shivering, trembling with returning life, only barely conscious. He knelt beside her, unable to keep his mouth from hers any longer; and her lips were warm as he kissed her, and opened in surprise as she woke to him.

Yes, that was the mouth that had haunted him in dreams, all the years of his life. He had wanted to kiss that coral mouth, stroke that body of ivory, wind his hands in the copper hair unbound at last for him, for him, she was his now. None of the others had mattered. This was the one he’d searched for, never knowing.

“Mendoza,” he gasped. She opened her dark eyes and saw his dear familiar face: her incoherent cry of joy echoed in that cavern.

Lewis got up and stumbled into the bathroom, where he pulled a handful of tissues from the dispenser and dried his streaming tears. Blowing his nose, he sat down again and reached for the keyboard.

They melted into another kiss. Daxon knew that whatever had sundered them in the past, he would never let her slip through his fingers again; somehow he knew that at last, after centuries of heartbreak and false starts, their story was truly beginning.

And though they were going to escape from that dark prison and soar free of the Company, though they were about to go on to a life of wonderful adventures together, this perhaps would be the moment to wreathe around in flowers as their happy ending: the ending of their separation and lost years. Love had triumphed at last.

Lewis read it over, wiping away the tears that still welled in his eyes. It wasn’t good enough, it never was; he couldn’t write worth a damn.

He sagged at the table, looking out from the circle of light into the shadows of his room. It was late. Almost no sound in the grand old hotel, where the mortals on night shift leaned half asleep at their posts. A wind moving through the dark garden. The quiet surge of the sea. Less quiet surging from Joseph’s room, where a certain rhythm of sounds and voices suggested that Joseph wasn’t alone.

Lewis got up and opened the compartment in his suitcase that concealed the flask. He found a chilled bottle of mineral water in the minibar and a glass, poured himself a drink, and added gin. He went back and sat in the circle of lamplight, sipping his drink, reading over what he’d written.

The bed still waited on the other side of the room, as narrow and cold as before. He wasn’t ready to face it yet.

“You know, guy, you’re not getting enough sleep,” Joseph remarked at breakfast. “You look like hell.”

Lewis shrugged and warmed his hands on a cup of herbal tea. Bootlegged coffee was harder to come by than gin.

“Maybe we should concentrate on relaxing today. There’s a nice golf course here. You play golf?” Joseph asked.

“From time to time,” Lewis said.

“A lot of nice greens.” Joseph indicated the brochure he’d picked up at the front desk. “Oldest miniature golf course in the world. Famous pitch-and-putt course. World-Class Restored Course of the Stars. That’s in Avalon Canyon, here.” He opened out the brochure and held it up so Lewis wouldn’t miss the point he was making: Avalon Canyon pointed straight behind the town, toward the palisades.

“That looks challenging,” Lewis said. “Perhaps we can stroll up there and see.”

“We can check it out, anyway. And look, just a little way farther up the road is that memorial thing, with the library. You wanted to
see that. And it looks like there’s some hiking trails behind the library. Sounds like a great way to spend the day, getting lots of fresh air and exercise. I bet you sleep tonight.”
I’ve got it all figured out. We walk up there today, see what the best route is for getting into the interior, and then come back. Dinner, early bedtime, and as soon as it’s dark and you’re in bed with your eyes shut, you turn on a little device I’m going to slip you. It’ll zap the datalink, but if anybody’s monitoring you, they won’t be able to tell, because you’ll have gone to bed so they’ll think it’s normal to be getting a black screen. Is that subtle or what?

Bravo, Joseph
.