Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth Page 4

  "You could be lying."

  "Could," Indy said as he drew in the bullwhip. "But there's only one way to find out. Shoot me."

  Reingold was trying hard to appear confident, but ever so slightly, his hands began to tremble. He tightened the grip on the Walther.

  "Who are you?" Indy asked as he slung the whip over his shoulder.

  "Names do not matter. What matters is that you give me the box, or I will kill you and take it."

  "You must be part of the gang that ran down Baldwin," Indy said. "The poor guy was seventy-one years old. Why murder an old man? What could this wooden box possibly contain?"

  Indy opened the satchel and reached inside. Reingold expected his hand to emerge with the box, but instead it came out holding the Webley revolver.

  "Too bad you didn't have time to look inside," Indy said.

  Reingold cursed, in German.

  "You men! Stop where you are!"

  A trio of burly track workers, led by a detective carrying an ax handle in his left hand, had passed between two of the passenger cars and were making their way toward them.

  Reingold hesitated.

  "Put those guns down," the railway detective shouted. He shook the ax handle at them. "The conductor said there was some trouble in the yard. I see that he was right."

  "Back away," Reingold said. "Or I will kill you as well."

  The detective laughed.

  "Am I supposed to be scared?" he asked, advancing, the ax handle at the ready. "You may kill one of us, but you can't get us all."

  "No?" Reingold said. "I have a full clip. I could kill all of you in short order, and have enough ammunition left over for target practice."

  The other men stopped. They had not yet reached the middle set of tracks.

  "What's wrong with you?" the detective asked. "Are you going to let a pipsqueak with a popgun get the best of you?"

  "Mac," the track foreman said, "you know I'm not scared of any man. But a bullet is different. I'm not getting paid to let folks target-practice with me."

  At the far end of the yard, a freight train began to chug toward them, amid a couple of short whistle blasts and the clanging of the brass bell atop the locomotive.

  Indy and Reingold still had their guns pointed at each other.

  "Well"—Reingold sighed—"it looks like what we have here is a Mexican standoff. Assuming, of course, that there is no snow plugging the end of my gun barrel. That was a clever bit of playacting, Dr. Jones. I congratulate you."

  "Coming from you," Indy said, "that is high praise indeed."

  "Both of you had better stop jawing and put down those guns," the detective said, "because both of you are headed to jail. I don't let anybody run around my yard trying to shoot each other." The freight had gained some speed now. As it approached, the three track workers stepped out of the way. Reingold bolted toward the moving train.

  "Stop!" Indy shouted, and pointed the Webley at the retreating figure. He cocked the weapon and drew a bead on Reingold's back, but he could not bring himself to squeeze the trigger.

  Reingold grabbed a rung of a ladder at the corner of a boxcar and swung up, the tips of his boots now free of the roadbed and scrambling against the wooden side of the car. Then he found his footing, leaned away from the ladder, and threw a salute in Indy's direction.

  Indy lowered the revolver.

  "Auf Wiedersehen, Dr. Jones!" Reingold shouted. "I knew you wouldn't shoot me in the back, at least not when the prize was no longer in danger. That's the difference, my friend, between—" The scream of the train whisde drowned out the rest of his words.

  Two days and what seemed a century later, Indy stepped from another train—this one carrying a string of Missouri, Kansas, and Texas passenger cars—onto the depot at Oswego, in southeast Kansas. Besides the railway crew, only one other person was on the platform: a well-dressed young woman whose face was all but hidden by a fur hat, a muffler, and a smoldering cigarette in an absurdly long holder.

  Indy walked over to her and put down his suitcase.

  "At least there's no snow," he said.

  "I beg your pardon?" the woman mumbled.

  "No snow on the ground. Back east is covered in a blanket of the stuff. But the sky does look like rain.... Pardon me, but I am assuming that you are Zoe Baldwin?" He extended his hand. "I'm Indiana Jones."

  "You'll forgive me if I don't," she said. "There may be no snow, but it still seems dismally cold to me, and I would rather not remove my glove. My word. What happened to your face?"

  "This?" Indy asked, rubbing the purple bruise on the right side of his chin where the left-handed detective had clobbered him after Reingold's escape. "A railway detective didn't like the way I conducted business in his yard."

  "Oh dear," she said.

  "I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances," Indy said.

  "Don't be," Zoe snapped. "We weren't that close. I'm sorry he's gone, but I hadn't seen or heard from Uncle in years. He never married, you know. By the way, what was your connection to him?"

  "Brief," Indy said. "Very brief."

  "Hmmph," Zoe shifted the cigarette holder to the other side of her mouth.

  "I take it that you are not familiar with your uncle's work?"

  "Not really," she said. "When I was in high school I tried to read that book he wrote—Under the North Star or something like that—but it bored me to tears."

  "Oh?" Indy was surprised. "I found it rather fascinating."

  "It was all such a long time ago," Zoe said, "and none of it matters now, does it? Say, I hate to be forward, but Uncle did not leave anything resembling a will, did he?"

  "A legacy, perhaps," Indy said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Could we discuss this elsewhere?" Indy asked. "It is rather colder than I expected here on the platform."

  From the plate-glass window of the Burgess Cafe—located on the ground floor of the Hotel Burgess—Indy watched as freezing rain began to pelt downtown Oswego. He savored the sensation of being inside the warm, steamy cafe while the weather did its worst outside.

  Zoe Baldwin had removed her fur hat, her muffler, and her gloves, and placed these articles carefully on top of her coat in the chair beside her. Her car, a ten-year-old roadster, was parked at the curb.

  Her dark hair was cut short in a style made popular in the Roaring Twenties. She was not an unattractive woman, Indy decided, but she seemed spoiled and her hairstyle looked somewhat dated on a woman in her mid-twenties. She looked like a flapper in search of a party that had long since ended.

  The waitress brought two steaming mugs of coffee, and after Indy had taken a sip or two of his, he asked, "What is it that you do?"

  The question seemed to take Zoe by surprise.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I'm guessing that you're not a housewife," Indy said.

  "No, Dr. Jones, I'm not a housewife." She smirked. "And I don't work, at least not in the usual sense of the word. If you ask most people in this town, I suppose they would tell you that I live off what is left of my family's money, and that's not going to last much longer. Does that answer your question?"

  "I didn't mean—"

  She held up her hand.

  "It's all right," she said. "I'm just bored, and I have been for years. It's not your fault."

  "Maybe you should get a hobby."

  "I have hobbies," she said. "Unfortunately, most of them are married."

  Indy nearly spilled his coffee.

  "You say that you hardly knew your uncle...." he began.

  "No. He was already globe-trotting by the time I was born," she said. "Oh, he used to come home once in a while, but he never stayed for long. Then the trips back got fewer and fewer, and eventually he never came back at all."

  "So he wouldn't have discussed anything with you recently."

  "Like I said, it has been years since I heard from him."

  "But you are his closest surviving relative?"

  "That
's right, for all the good it does me," she said.

  "So you never heard your uncle talk about his arctic experiences, or something called the Vril, or anything that would strike you as out of the ordinary?"

  "I never heard him talk about his explorations at all, except when he was lecturing," Zoe said. "Say, you told me that you didn't know him very well. Why are you asking so many questions?"

  "Because I'm trying to solve a puzzle that your uncle left to me," Indy said.

  After briefly recounting the last hour of Baldwin's life, and the promise he had elicited from Indy to protect the secret of the box, he removed the box from his satchel and placed it on the table'

  "So you think he may have been murdered for this?"

  "There's a strong possibility," Indy said.

  Zoe picked up the dark box.

  "What do you think is in it?" she asked.

  "I don't know. But whatever it is meant a great deal to him."

  "It's cute," she said. "It looks like a little treasure chest. What do you suppose the chances are that there's money inside?"

  "Slim," Indy said.

  "Damn." Zoe placed the box back on the table. "Actually, it's a medicine chest," Indy informed her. "Baldwin probably carried it with him on expedition."

  "Why haven't you opened it yet?"

  "Because he didn't give me clear instructions about that," Indy said. "He just told me to protect it. And I wanted to get your advice... as his next of kin."

  "Let's open it," she suggested. "Whatever's inside you can keep, unless it is something valuable."

  "Define valuable."

  "Something you can quickly turn into cash," was her immediate response.

  "But with no historic or scientific value," Indy added.

  "Agreed," she said.

  Indy untied the knot and unraveled the twine from around the box. Then he placed the chest squarely in front of him on the table, thumbed open the latch, and lifted the lid. It contained no medicines, no bandages. Instead, there was a thick ledger book whose cardboard covers were held together by a rubber band. Beside the book glittered a chunk of some smoky crystal. A leather thong hung from one end.

  "A diamond!" Zoe exclaimed.

  The rest of the cafe turned to look.

  "Sorry," Indy said, and grinned apologetically. Then, to Zoe: "It's not a gemstone, at least not a precious one." He picked up the rock and held it toward the light. "Icelandic spar, I'd guess, from the double refraction. Beautiful, but somewhat common."

  Indy handed it to her.

  "Oh..," Zoe frowned, peering through the crystal. "Why would he save something like this? And why is it on a strap? What are you supposed to do with it?"

  "I don't know," Indy said. "Maybe it had sentimental value, and he wore it around his neck."

  Indy removed the rubber band and opened the book.

  "This is Baldwin's journal for the 1902 expedition, or at least a portion of it." He began to scan the pages. Some of the entries were accompanied by sketches: sledges, dogs, the flagship America. "Page after page of daily log entries. Position, weather, supplies."

  "How dreadfully dull," Zoe commented, throwing the piece of quartz back into the chest. "The old man was obviously daft. There's nothing here that could possibly be of use to anybody. Why do you suppose he carried it around all these years?"

  "I'm sure he had a reason."

  "Stop," Zoe said. "Go back. That one drawing."

  "This?" Indy asked.

  It was a sketch of a slender finger of rock, sticking up out of the snow, covered with strange markings. It was difficult for Indy to tell because of the size of the sketch, but the markings resembled Norse runes. The caption beneath the drawing said simply, The Thule Stone.

  "Yes," Zoe said. "That's the piece of rock that Uncle had sent back here when I was just a baby."

  "Really?" Indy asked. "Where is it now?"

  "Where it always has been," Zoe said. "At the cemetery, waiting for Uncle to be planted beneath it. You'll see it tomorrow, if you're planning to stay for the funeral."

  "Actually, I wasn't," Indy said apologetically. "My train leaves rather early in the morning. I hope your uncle would understand."

  "Wait a minute," Zoe said. "Why are you so interested in that old rock? Is it worth anything?"

  Armed with a few yards of newsprint and a charcoal stick purchased at the drugstore down the street, Indy hailed a cab and set out for the cemetery, at the edge of town.

  "I'd appreciate it if you'd wait here," he told the driver. "This shouldn't take long."

  "Don't matter to me," the driver said. "It's your nickel." The grave wasn't hard to find: it was the only plot marked by a slender, three-sided stone.

  Squatting next to the stone was a disheveled, middle-aged man with wild black hair and bloodshot eyes. Despite the intermittent freezing rain, he was arranging a stack of firewood as casually as one might for a living-room fireplace. A can of gasoline was within arm's reach.

  "I'm the gravedigger," the man said. "What are you?"

  "Indiana Jones. I'm an archaeologist."

  "Ha!" the man cried triumphantly. "I plant 'em and you dig 'em up."

  The gravedigger pulled a pint bottle of whiskey from his back pocket, plucked an unlit cigar from his mouth, and took a long swig. Then he wiped the bottle with a dirty sleeve, replaced the cigar, and offered a drink to Indy.

  "None for me, thanks," Indy said.

  "Wise man," the gravedigger said. "What do you want, anyway?"

  "I want to make a rubbing of this stone, if you wouldn't mind holding off on that fire for a few minutes," Indy said. "Baldwin sent it back from the Arctic, so it does have some historical significance."

  "Suit yourself." The digger shrugged. "But your buddies have already been here to take pictures of it."

  "Buddies?"

  "Yeah, a couple of tall good-looking fellows with one of those newfangled German cameras. It was small, about the size of a pack of cigarettes."

  "Terrific," Indy said as he unrolled the paper and went to work. The stone was a reddish, fine-grained granite, about a foot around at the base and narrowing to perhaps half of that near the tip. All three sides had been smoothed, and the runes were large but cut with skill. The designs were familiar, but of a period—obviously Norse, before 900 A.D.—that Indy had difficulty reading. The stone was badly weathered and the edges of some of the characters had been worn away.

  "You know, in the old days they had to wait for a thaw to put their dead in the ground," the gravedigger announced as he sloshed gasoline over the jumble of logs, then stamped his foot on the frozen cemetery plot for emphasis.

  "The dead are in no hurry," Indy said.

  "Maybe not," the digger said. "But can you imagine waiting a week or two with gramps lying stiff as a board in the shed out back?"

  "That would be unpleasant."

  "Oh, that's not the worst of it," the digger continued as he searched his pockets for his matches. "You hear all sorts of horrible tales in this business. Why, they knocked open one old grave over in Cherokee County while they were digging next to it, and you know what? The poor devil had been buried alive. He was in his casket, like this"—he twisted his face up and turned his hands into hooks—"trying to claw his way out."

  "Maybe there was a postmortem explanation," Indy suggested. "The effects of nature can sometimes put corpses into some awfully frightening positions."

  "Nope," the gravedigger said. "Because you know what they found stuck on the inside of the coffin lid? His fingernails."

  I've seen worse, Indy thought.

  "Can you imagine what that must have felt like?"

  Indy hoped the question was rhetorical. He had finished the third and last side. He rolled up the paper and slipped a rubber band over the tube.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "Don't mention it."

  The gravedigger struck a match. He held it cupped in his hand for a moment, then tossed it onto the gasoline-soaked logs, which ignit
ed with a whoosh and a bright orange ball of flame.

  "I'll let it burn for the rest of the morning, then spread out the ashes," he said. "It will be ready for digging by this afternoon."

  "These men," Indy said. "Did they do anything besides make some photographs?"

  "No," the digger replied. "Oh, they asked me some rather strange questions. They seemed morbidly interested in Baldwin's body. Had I seen it, and so forth. Then they asked me directions to the funeral home."

  3

  Buried Alive

  Indy returned to the hotel and checked into a room on the second floor. He took the suitcase from the bellhop, pressed a dime into the boy's hand, and locked and chained the door behind him. The lock was predictably cheap and the chain equally insubstantial, so Indy took the straight-backed chair from the room's writing desk and wedged it beneath the knob. Then he went to the window and made sure it was latched.

  Outside, the late-aftemoon sun glinted from the ice-covered street. All along the street, shopkeepers were closing up. Next door to the hotel was the Nu-Day Theater, and its neon marquee—which was at about eye level to Indy's room—suddenly buzzed to life. Lionel Barrymore was starring in Stronnger's Return, followed by House on 56th Street with Kay Francis. Also, as an added bonus, Professor Rand's Vaudeville Canine Review and Dog Circus, direct from Harlem for one night only, would perform.

  Indy sat on the edge of the bed and took the piece of quartz from the box. He held it in his hands for a few seconds, testing its weight, looking around the room for a place to hide it. He didn't know the rock's intended use, but he had promised Baldwin to protect it. There didn't seem to be any good hiding places around the room, so finally he slipped the thong over his head and placed the rock beneath his shirt.

  Indy kicked off his shoes and swung his legs up on the bed. He fluffed the pillow, then tucked the Webley beneath it. He took Baldwin's arctic log from the satchel, which hung from a post at the head of the bed. The damaged strap had been repaired at a shoe shop while he waited to change trains in Chicago.

  He opened the logbook and began to skim the entries.