Стюарт Стерлинг - The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

But there wasn’t any profit in Mike Harris wandering around Father Orion’s zoo. Everything that happened was making the situation worse. And what about Trixie?

I was afraid — afraid for Trixie Meehan as I walked toward the big white shrine, the loaded club swinging in my hand and growing anger seething inside. Crackpots or no crackpots, if any harm came to Trixie I’d take the whole place apart.

The building was dark and seemed deserted. I skirted the terrace on the damp grass and made a circle of the shrine. Not a light, not a sound.

The patio entrance was open. I slipped inside and felt my way to the door through which Eddy Voss and Paige had carried the woman.

The door was unlocked. A dark hall was on the other side. Dark? It was an inky solid, with a tiled floor underfoot and rough plastered walls on either side. And the silence of a tomb.

I was wasting time. This wasn’t finding Trixie, wasn’t getting anywhere. I was sniffing unconsciously before I realized what I was doing.

The sickly pungent odor that tainted the air was familiar. Then I got it. Marijuana. So I wasn’t alone. Somebody was dragging on the weed close by. A slight draft was moving against my face and I followed it up, and almost walked into a blank wall as the passage made a sudden left-hand turn.

The marijuana fumes were stronger. A partly opened door around the passage turn let out a beam of sickly light, and a voice was mumbling in a dreamy, monotonous monotone. Hefting the club, I crept to the door and looked in.

You could have knocked me over with a marijuana weed. Father Orion was doing the mumbling. Across the room he sat cross-legged with his back to a heap of gay silk pillows. The white toga had been put aside, sandals and bullet-proof vest were gone. He wore a white loin cloth, sat cross-legged like an Oriental, holding the mouthpiece of a water pipe.

A shaded lamp on the floor showed his eyes set in a fixed dull stare. His dreamy monotone was directed into space, and the words were strange and unfamiliar.

A thousand years ago the Egyptians had smoked marijuana like this bony, rather terrible old man across the room. Only the Egyptians had called it hashish.

They too had had their fantastic dreams swirling lazily through drugged minds. And so had Father Orion. You could see it on his face. He’d been partly doped out there in the patio. Hashish gave him that piercing, dreamy stare, that remote manner.

Now he half-turned to suck at the mouthpiece. His back and chest were criss-crossed by livid weals that seemed to be scars left by whips. You could only wonder what gruesome experiences he had lived through far back in the past.

He began to mumble again as I pushed the door open.

I was inside the room before I saw the thin Oriental who had been beating the drum out in the patio. He sat back in the shadows to the right, cross-legged on the floor also, watching, listening as if in a trance.

But he wasn’t in a trance. He turned his head. For a long moment we stared at each other. His eyes were like dark bright buttons. He seemed to shrink in on himself and tense as I took a step toward him.

“What’s the idea?” I asked, jerking my head toward the old man.

The fellow was dark-skinned, wiry, middle-aged. He might have been thirty or fifty. His thin-lipped face held no expression as he stared.

Father Orion mumbled into space without noticing us.

I wanted to swear. My pulses were jumping. The white loin cloth looked brilliant against the dark, oily skin. His torso muscles had tightened, ridged, until he seemed poised with threat as he sat there cross-legged and silent to my question.

A master mind might have bluffed it out easily. But tonight I wasn’t master-minding. I was only Mike Harris, with a club in my hand and seething anger suddenly wild and reckless as I faced discovery, alarm and the blow-up of everything I was trying to do.

“Which one of you talks first?” I said.

I had started toward him when he jumped at me. One instant he was sitting cross-legged; the next he was flying through the air in an uncanny leap, white teeth gleaming and his hand flashing up from the loin cloth with a knife.

No time to talk, to dodge. I didn’t want to dodge anyway. I swung at his knife hand, hit it, smashed the hand aside. He landed like a cat, fighting and clawing. And the biggest claw was the knife which he had grabbed with the other hand.

The blade slashed my arm as I tried to parry the blow. I dropped the club and slugged him in the face with my fist. He staggered back on his heels and I jumped after him and hit him again.

He could use a knife but he didn’t savvy fists. He tried to dodge, but I’d softened him into stumbling awkwardness. His chin turned just right. I hooked one to the button — and he dropped the knife and went down, glassy-eyed and cold.

Panting, I snatched the knife and club and turned to Father Orion. And still he hadn’t noticed us, hadn’t stopped mumbling. It was enough to give you the creeps.

He started to suck on the mouthpiece of the water pipe again, and I shoved the end of the club through the middle of the beard and pushed him back against the pillows.

“Come out of it, you dope!” I panted. “Can you understand me?”

He shook his head dazedly and his eyes cleared a trifle. “Truth,” he mumbled. “Truth, Brother.”

“Truth hell!” says I. “Where did John Paige go? What did he do with that woman who shot at you?”

“Brother,” he said vaguely. “What do you desire, Brother?”

“Absolutely nuts!” I said through my teeth.

“And people who ought to be sane are looney because of you! Come out of the clouds, damn you!”

His eyes had already closed. He mumbled inaudibly as he sank back on the pillows. I knew it wasn’t any use. He was off on a nod and man nor beast couldn’t get sense out of him. I swore at him, wondering what I could do now.

Trixie Meehan’s cry of warning took care of that.

“Look out, Mike!” Trixie’s faint cry sounded somewhere outside the room.

I whirled around with the club and knife — and saw the man inside a doorway across the room. He was in the shadows. I saw the gun before I recognized the face behind it.

He thought I was coming at him. Maybe I was. Trixie’s voice had set me wild for the moment, and I’d gone too far now to back out.

The lick of fire from the gun muzzle, the roaring reverberations of the report, the numbing shock that paralyzed my left shoulder and arm and side, all seemed to come at once.

I staggered back and couldn’t help it. Father Orion’s companion was sprawled on the floor behind me. His hand clamped on my ankle and jerked me in a sprawling fall such as I had given him.

The floor didn’t seem hard. Maybe my mind was numb too. Trying to fight both men off a moment later was like a slow-motion picture. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. And I was waiting for the second shot and wishing I had Father Orion’s bullet-proof vest. Eddy Voss was behind the gun and I thought he was going to finish what he had started.

He didn’t. The gun muzzle tapped my head and made me foggier — and then they both yanked me to my feet.

“You want another?” Eddy Voss was snarling. “Keep quiet or I’ll blow your damn face off!”

So I kept quiet as they held me. Warm blood was crawling sluggishly down my left arm. I was dizzy, gasping for breath, sick and weak with the shock and the pain that was beginning to replace the numbness.

“Bring him in here!” Eddy gritted.

Beyond the door was a short, windowless corridor, dimly lit by a single bulb. The floor was carpeted, the walls seemed to be covered with leather over some kind of padding. There were five doors on each side of the corridor. I counted them. Ten doors, covered as the walls were. One stood partly open, and it was as thick and massive as an icebox door.