TRAPPED
The thing that had happened to Johnny Thompson was absurdly simple; at
least part of it was. Unconsciously, as he moved forward in the dimly
lighted room, he had continued to fumble with the catch of his
flashlight. Suddenly, as he stood before the mysterious thing of yellow
glow and a tiny light, his torch had flashed on in all its strength.
So much was very simple. The explanation of the green glow was simple,
too, once he read the secret of it. But who had screamed, and why? That
was not so easy to answer.
The reason for the peculiar green glow was to be found in the composition
of the walls and ceiling of the room. They were of a peculiar green which
had great reflective power.
“Jade!” Johnny exclaimed after his first surprise was over. “Solid green
jade. At least the walls are set with jade.”
Who had screamed? This was the problem which concerned him most. To his
utter astonishment, as he flashed the light about he failed to at once
discover the entrance through which he had come.
“Turned around a bit,” he told himself as coolly as he could. “Take a
point and circle about until I am looking at that point again. In that
way I’ll see all the walls.”
In choosing his starting point his eye fell upon the thing of the yellow
glow. He discovered at a glance that this was not suspended in air as he
had thought, nor was there a miniature light burning in it. It was a
statue or an image of a god; a rather hideous god with a hooked nose, a
large stomach and hands on which were fingers like an eagle’s tallons. In
one of these hands rested a stone of some sort that reflected light in a
peculiarly brilliant manner.
“Gold, and perhaps a huge diamond,” Johnny speculated in spite of his
anxiety.
Then he began to make the circle of the walls with his light. First the
wall to the right of him was slowly and carefully surveyed, then the wall
which had been to his back. No opening. His breath came short and quick.
A third side was covered. In his agitation he set the light zig-zagging
up and down. Was he somehow trapped? Who had screamed?
Half the last wall was covered, two-thirds. The suspense seemed
unbearable. Then, with a sudden sigh of relief, he started forward.
Before him was an opening. It did not seem quite the same, but it must be
the one. In his eagerness and anxiety he fairly ran.
Now he was half way across the room, and now at the wall. He was about to
step forward and out to freedom and friends when, to his astonishment,
his foot splashed down into water. It was with the utmost difficulty that
he avoided plunging head foremost into a deep pool that lay just before
him.
Once he had recovered from this shock he cast his light over the pool
only to discover that the back side of the pool, which was some ten feet
across, was solidly walled in, as was the room itself.
Obeying some unknown instinct, he dropped upon his knees and directed his
powerful light straight down into the pool. For a moment he gazed
intently downward, then started back in horror.
The thing he had seen almost made him faint. At the bottom of that pool
he had caught the gleam of gold and the green light of jade ornaments,
and in the midst of these a horrible, grinning human skull.
“This,” he told himself after he had control of himself again, “is a
sacrificial pool. The gold and jade were a sacrifice. When? Who can tell?
And the owner of that head? The door is closed. I am trapped. When will
my time come?”
At that very moment there came, faint and indistinct, but unmistakable,
the notes of a call:
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
As in a dream he recalled the day they had practiced that call, he and
Jean, back there in the jungle.
Alert, straining his ears for the next note, telling himself that when it
came he would locate the singer and thus begin the task of finding a way
out, he waited.
A moment passed; another and yet another. The silence became unbearable.
He stamped his feet to break the awful spell. Then he became conscious of
another sound—a slow tap-tap-tap-tap. Always a second apart, never any
louder, never coming more softly, this mysterious tap-tap-tap in time
became more maddening than the silence. Still at strained attention he
waited for Jean’s call which did not come.
“What can have happened?” he murmured at last. “Can other ears than mine
have heard that call and silenced it, perhaps forever?”
He found himself filled with sudden anger, a raging hate of the Mayas.
“What manner of treatment is this,” he asked himself, “after I saved
their princess from a terrible death?”
This anger lasted but for a moment. He next found his mind filled with
wonderings. In the deep dust of the outer corridor there had been not a
single footprint. How could the living Mayas have set such a trap as this
without leaving traces of their coming and going?
“They couldn’t,” he reasoned. “I have been trapped by that ancient god,
or at least by those who, centuries ago, set him there.”
Again he listened, and again he caught that endless tap-tap-tap.
“Water falling,” he said. “But where?”
He began a careful search of the chambers. He examined every nook and
corner with elaborate care, but aside from the pool, found not so much as
a spot of dampness.
“And yet,” he told himself, “the sound is unmistakable. There is dripping
water somewhere. Must be within the walls.”
Once more he set himself listening for Jean’s call. A quarter of an hour,
a half hour he waited and listened, but it did not come.
“What can have happened?” he muttered at last. Then he thought of the
flashlight. The battery was good for just so long, then would come
complete darkness. When would that be? He could not tell. Shuddering, he
muttered:
“Might better be now.”
With that he threw off the catch. Sudden darkness followed, but the after
image remained. Sitting on the damp floor, staring into the dark, he
seemed still to catch the greenish glow of the walls, the yellow gleam of
the god and the white flash of jewels.
Have you never attempted to fall asleep while from some distant spot
there came with maddening regularity the drip-drip-drip of water? If you
have, then perhaps you can share in a degree at least the feeling of
Johnny Thompson as he sat there alone, a prisoner of other centuries,
listening to that baffling sound within the walls.
Yet, impossible as it may seem, he was able for whole moments to forget
the entire situation. In those moments he saw again his camp on the Rio
Hondo. He talked with Pant and laughed with him at his ridiculous donkey.
He urged his Caribs on to more splendid efforts, saw the piles of
magnificent timber, mahogany, the red lure, piling up, and counted the
days that must pass before they would send these logs plunging in the
river, fill their boom and go drifting silently away.
Yes, there were blessed moments of relief; but always the haunting
darkness, the nerve-racking drip-drip came pressing its way once more
into his consciousness.
* * * * * * * *
What was happening during all this time outside the door that had so
mysteriously closed? The scream which Johnny had heard was Jean’s.
Anxious for his safety, she had watched that hole in the wall from the
time he disappeared. The green flash of light which appeared at the
moment when his torch flashed on had alarmed her; but this was nothing to
the thing she saw a moment later. Slowly, silently, as if impelled by a
powerful invisible force, the stone, which for centuries had closed the
opening, was slowly rising. The opening was half closed before she could
recall her scattered senses. Then, without a thought for her own safety,
she sprang for the entrance. It was Roderick who, with cooler judgment,
had pulled her back. Then it was that she gave forth that piercing
scream.
After the scream, white-faced and silent, she had stood watching until
with an almost inaudible thud the massive rock dropped into place.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Roderick said reassuringly. “I’ll push it open as
Johnny did.”
Seizing the heavy walking stick, he pushed it against the door just as
Johnny had done. But, though he heaved away at it with all his might, he
did not move it so much as a fraction of an inch. Nor did the girl’s
slight, but frantic strength, added to his, avail. The door was closed,
closed and sealed for all eternity so far as they could tell.
After many futile efforts they sank weakly down upon a great flat rock,
Roderick to sulk and to remind Jean, as is a brother’s right, that this
whole affair from the time they found Johnny in the hut was a piece of
foolishness. Jean sat in sad silence. This silence did not last.
The picture of that morning in the jungle, the rocks, the wild turkey,
came back to her and she suddenly remembered the call.
“We—we agreed on a call we’d use in case we were lost from one another,”
she said to Roderick. “I—I guess that was meant for now. If he hears it
and locates us by the sound he may find a way to open the door from the
inside.”
Standing to her full height and directing her voice against the unfeeling
walls, she sang their call:
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo,
Whoo-hoo-hoo.”
The echoes of that call had died away and she was parting her lips for
another when, of a sudden, her brother seized her arm.
“Hist! Listen!” he whispered.
Faint, indistinct, but unmistakable, there came the silent pit-pat of
footsteps on the dust-padded corridor. Jean’s call had brought someone.
But who?