“Kirby had been quiet and moody during the outward trip, and he stayed that way even after freshening up and while we began to explore the ancient buildings and temples. It was while I was admiring other ruins that Kirby climbed the high, hideously adorned Temple of the Warriors, with its facade of plumed serpents, their mouths fanged and tails rampant.
“He was seen to fall—or jump—by at least two dozen people, mainly Mexicans, but later they all told the same story: how the wind had seemed almost to buoy him up; how he had seemed to fall in slow motion; how he had uttered an eerie cry before stepping into space, like a call to strange gods for assistance. And after that terrible fall, onto ancient stone flags and from such a great height?…
“It was a miracle, people said, that Kirby was unhurt.
“Well, eventually I was able to convince the authorities at the site that Kirby must have fallen, and I was able to get him away before he came out of his faint. Oh, yes, he had fainted. A fall like that, and the only result a swoon!
“But though I had explained away the incident as best I could, I don’t suppose I could ever have explained the look on Kirby’s face as I carried him away—that smile of triumph or strange satisfaction.
“Now all this happened not long after his fourteenth birthday, at a time when here in the north the five-year cycle of so-called ‘superstitious belief and mass hysteria’ was once more at its height, just as it is now. So far as I was concerned, there was an undeniable connection.
“Since then—and I blame myself that I’ve only recently discovered this—Kirby has been a secret saver, hoarding away whatever money he could lay his hands on toward some future purpose or ambition; and now of course I know that this was his journey north. All his life, you see, he had followed the trail of his destiny, and I don’t suppose that there was anything I could have done to change it.
“A short time ago something happened to clinch it, something that drew Kirby north like a magnet. Now—I don’t know what the end will be, but I must see it—I must find out, one way or the other, once and for all….”
V
By 1:30 P.M. we were once again mobile, our vehicle driving through occasional flurries of snow, fortunately with a light tail wind to boost us on our way. And it was not long before we came upon signs that warned of the presence of others there in that white waste, fresh snowshoe tracks that crossed our path at a tangent and moved in the direction of low hills. We followed these tracks—apparently belonging to a group of at least three persons—until they converged with others atop one of the low bald hills. Here I halted the snow cat and dismounted, peering out at the wilderness around and discovering that from here, between flurries of snow, I could roughly make out the site of our last camp. It dawned on me at once that this would have been a wonderful vantage point from which to keep us under observation.
Then Mrs. Bridgeman tugged at the sleeve of my parka, pointing away to the north where finally I made out a group of black dots against the pure white background straggling toward a distant pine forest.
“We must follow them,” she declared. “They will be members of His order, on their way to the ceremonies. Kirby may even be with them!” At the thought her voice took on a feverish excitement.
“Quickly—we mustn’t lose them!”
But lose them we did.
By the time we reached that stretch of open ground where first Mrs. Bridgeman had spied the unknown group, its members had already disappeared into the darkness of the trees some hundreds of yards away. At the edge of the forest I again brought our vehicle to a halt, and though we might easily have followed the tracks through the trees—which was my not-so-delicate companion’s immediate and instinctive desire—that would have meant abandoning the snow cat.
Instead, I argued that we should skirt the forest, find a vantage point on its northern fringe, and there await the emergence of whichever persons they were who chose to wander these wastes at the onset of winter. To this seemingly sound proposal Mrs. Bridgeman readily enough agreed, and within the hour we were hidden away in a cluster of pines beyond the forest proper. There we took turns to watch the fringe of the forest, and while I took first watch, Mrs. Bridgeman made a pot of coffee. We had only unpacked our stove, deeming it unwise to make ourselves too comfortable in case we should need to be on the move in a hurry.
After only twenty minutes at my post I would have been willing to swear that the sky had snowed itself out for the day. Indeed I made just such a comment to my pale companion when she brought me a cup of coffee. The leaden heavens had cleared—there was hardly a cloud in sight in the afternoon sky—and then, as if from nowhere, there came the wind!
Instantly the temperature dropped, and I felt the hairs in my nostrils stiffening and cracking with each sniff of icy air. The remaining half cup of coffee in my hand froze in a matter of seconds, and a rime of frost sprang up on my eyebrows. Heavily wrapped as I was, still I felt the cold striking through, and I drew back into the comparative shelter of the trees. In all my meteorological experience I have never known or heard of anything like it before. The storm that came with the wind and the cold, rising up in the space of the next half hour, took me totally by surprise.
Looking up, through gaps in the snow-laden branches, I could plainly see the angry boiling up of clouds into a strange mixture of cumulonimbus and nimbostratus, where only moments before there had been no clouds at all! If the sky had seemed leaden earlier in the day, now it positively glowered. The atmosphere pressed down with an almost tangible weight upon our heads.
And finally it snowed.
Mercifully, and despite the fact that all the symptoms warned of a tremendous storm to come, the wind remained only moderate, but by comparison the snow came down as if it had never snowed before. The husshh of settling snow was quite audible as the huge flakes fell in gust-driven, spiraling myriads to the ground.
Plainly my watch on the forest was no longer necessary, indeed impossible, for such was the curtain of falling snow that visibility was down to no more than a few feet. We were stuck, but surely no more so than that suspicious band of wanderers in the forest—members of “His order,” as Mrs. Bridgeman would have it. We would have to wait the weather out, and so would they.
For the next two hours, until about 5:00 P.M., I busied myself making a windbreak of fallen branches and packed snow until even the moderate wind was shut out of our hideaway. Then I built a small fire in the center of this sheltered area close to the snow cat. Whatever happened, I did not want the works of that machine put out of order by freezing temperatures.
During all this time Mrs. Bridgeman simply sat and brooded, plainly unconcerned with the cold. She was frustrated, I imagined, by our inability to get on with the search. In the same period, busy as I was with my hands, nevertheless I was able to ponder much of what had passed, drawing what half-formed conclusions I could in the circumstances.
The truth of the matter was that there did seem to be too many coincidences here for comfort, and personally I had already experienced a number of things previously unknown to me or alien to my nature. I could no longer keep from my mind memories of that strange dream of mine; similarly the odd sensations I had felt on contact with or in proximity to the yellow medallion of gold and obscure alloys.
Then there was the simple, quite definite fact—bolstered both by the Judge and the widow Bridgeman alike, and by McCauley the Mountie—that a freakish five-year cycle of strange excitement, morbid worship, and curious cult activity did actually exist in these parts. And dwelling on thoughts such as these, I found myself wondering once again just what had happened here twenty years gone, that its echoes should so involve me here and now.