Dennis Wheatley - Unholy Crusade

His people had been most reluctant to allow him to leave them, so he had promised to return. Then, from the top of the Pyramid of the Magician, he had made his farewell speech. From that point on, his memories again became vague. He could not recall whether or not he had taken with him a crew of volunteers or had sailed alone. He was only aware that he had never reached the lands in which he had spent his youth and early manhood. The galley had gone down during a hurricane and he had drowned, presumably somewhere in the Caribbean.

During those minutes of dual consciousness Adam was aware that he was delivering the speech he had learned by heart. As he ended, there came, as from a great distance, the sound of thunderous applause. Then the shrill blowing of whistles impinged on his mind. The spotlight that blinded him was suddenly switched off. For a moment, standing there in total darkness, he had no idea where he was. A voice behind him brought him back to reality. It was that of Father Lopez, who had emerged at the corner of the temple. He was shouting:

`We are betrayed! But God will protect His own. There is still time to escape. Run, Exalted One! Run!'

Afterwards Adam realised that Lopez had meant him to turn and run towards him. But, instinctively, he jumped forward and began to descend the pyramid, taking two of the deep steps at a time. Still half blinded from the spotlight, he was only vaguely, aware of what was happening below him. There was some shouting and movement, like a troubled sea. As he ran down towards the crowd, the greater part of it seemed to disintegrate and fan out in all directions. But a small compact group formed at the base of the pyramid.

Suddenly, to his horror, he realised that the impetus with which he had launched himself forward had now become too great for him to control his speed. His feet were flying from step to step. in vain he endeavoured to check his wild career down the steep lope. He kept his balance only by a miracle. As he neared the bottom he could see the group that waited below more clearly. They were not a part of the congregation. They wore uniforms. They were police.

Utterly unable to check his flying legs, he hurtled towards them. Another moment and he was within seconds of crashing into the group. Fearing that he would bowl several of them over, the men in his immediate vicinity sprang back, leaving him a gap to pass through. Aghast, he saw that, with nothing to act as a brake, he must land with a bone breaking crash on the ground just beyond them. But two of them grabbed at his cloak as he shot past, lay back on it and brought him up with a frightful jerk. His shield, feathered head dress and staff of authority were jolted from his hands. His cloak ripped away from those who were hanging on to it and he staggered on a few paces. But the police did not mean to let him escape. One of them sprang after him and hit him on the back of the head with a truncheon. His knees buckled under him and he slumped to the ground unconscious.

When he came to, he was sitting in the back of a car; his chin on his chest, his head lolling forwards. As he opened his eyes, an excruciating pain shot through his head. Then he saw that his wrists were handcuffed.

CHAPTER 13

The Road to Prison

ADAM closed his eyes again and tried to think. Between stabs of lain the events of the past few hours came back to him: Father Lopez springing his surprise after dinner that the ceremony was to take place that night; accompanying the priest along the path through the jungle from that normal, modern world of rich, travelling Americans at the Hacienda to enter another world of unbelievable fantasy, in which he was the ruler of the Toltecs; then the sudden realisation that things had gone wrong, that Alberuque and his followers had been betrayed; his plunging at breakneck speed down the steep pyramid and the blow from a truncheon that had knocked him out.

His mind then switched to the vision he had had while automatically making his speech. He had always accepted that his incarnations as a Viking and as a Toltec Prince had been different lives; now he knew them to have been one and felt that he should have realised that before. The history of the Norsemen, in which he had steeped himself during his teens, had left him in no doubt that, as a young man, he had started to rove the seas about A.D. 950, and the date given for Quetzalcoatl's arrival in Mexico was in the 960s. Obviously he could not have lived two different lives at the same time, and the fact that the legend that Quetzalcoatl had come up from the sea in the form of a giant white man, with; golden hair and beard, fitted perfectly with his having been a Viking.

So much for the past. What of the present? Grimly he contemplated his situation. His handcuffs made it plain that the police regarded him as a criminal and would bring a charge against him. Captured as he had been, just after making his speech and rigged out in all his gorgeous plumage, it was going to be difficult to refute an accusation of subversive activities. His only hope lay in Ramon, and he cursed himself now for not having let him know, somehow or other, that he had agreed to play the role of Quetzalcoatl. He would then have been in the clear. Still, Ramon could at least vouch for it that he had reported the ceremony at San Luis Caliente, and had promised to do his best to provide the authorities with further information.

He wondered then what had happened to the others. Still half absorbed by his vision and blinded by the spotlight, he was far from clear about what had taken place. Everything had happened very quickly. Not more than a minute had elapsed between the first shrilling of whistles and Father Lopez calling to him from the side of the temple to run. Yet when he had reached the bottom of the pyramid the congregation had vanished, to be replaced by the group of police. From the one glimpse he had had of the group as he hurtled downward, he thought there could not have been more than a dozen of them and he had heard no sounds of fighting further off; so it seemed that no attempt had been made to arrest as many as possible of the fleeing crowd.

But what about the rear of the pyramid? Although it had not been surrounded, another group of police might have arrived there, or seen the glow of light coming up from the Court of the Nuns and been in time to arrest Don Alberuque and his confederates before they could get away. There was only one thing Adam could be thankful for: that Chela had remained at the hotel, so she could not be caught up in this catastrophe.

The pain in his head had eased a little and he wondered where he was being taken. Probably, he thought, to Merida, as that was the only place for many miles round large enough to have a police headquarters. He noticed then that the car was going downhill. If he was right about the direction in which it was heading, that meant that it had not yet reached the long flat, stretch through the jungle; so he could not have been unconscious for many minutes probably only long enough for them to carry him to the car.

The thought crossed his mind that, if the car pulled up, he might perhaps make his escape; but he quickly abandoned that hope. A policeman was sitting on either side of him. They would almost certainly be armed and, although they were both small men, he was handcuffed; so any attempt to overcome them must prove hopeless. Miserably, he resigned himself to spending the rest of the night in a cell, being taken ignominiously back to Mexico City, then spending several days in prison before Ramon and Chela could procure his release.

The car had just passed through a large village and was entering the flat lands when it slowed down. The driver sounded his horn urgently, ran on another fifty yards, then pulled up. Peering forward through the windscreen, by the light of the headlamps Adam saw the reason. Lying down across the road and completely blocking it was a huddle of a dozen or more Indians.