Life Blood Part 50

Stay? Don't even think about it. I had Sarah halfway to freedom. While the Army was still getting its act together, we could lose ourselves someplace in the forest where n.o.body would find us, and when Steve got here tonight . . .

"Sar, come on, it's time." I pulled away from Marcelina and slipped my arm around her. "Nothing here is what you think it is."

"Are we leaving?" she asked, her eyes blank.

"Yes, honey, we're leaving. This very minute."

The dense forest was all about us, and I'd just carry her into it if I had to. In the coming storm, n.o.body was going to find . . .

That's when I noticed I was beginning to have gastric rumblings. d.a.m.n.

Never, ever eat "native" food, no matter what the social pressure. That d.a.m.ned "visit" . . .

When I turned to ask Marcelina if she would help me get Sarah outside, I noticed she'd been joined by the two women, both still in their white s.h.i.+fts, who'd just fed me the sickly

sweet _atole_. And more women were behind them, all staring at me, expectant, as though wondering what I would do.

Maybe it was my imagination, or the dizziness that was abruptly growing around me, but it also seemed they'd painted their faces with streaks of white, designs like the men in the square were putting on.

"She's going to be all right," Marcelina was saying. "But we have to get you back now. You'll need your strength."

I needed it then. My stomach had really begun to gyrate, and my vision had started growing colored. I noticed I was sweating, even though the day was cooling down. Actually, I felt as though I was about to pa.s.s out. What had those women fed me?

It was finally dawning on me that Marcelina's fearfulness back in the hut had nothing to do with betraying Alex G.o.ddard. It was because she knew she was betraying me.

Well, d.a.m.n her, I'm not going to let Alex G.o.ddard win, no matter what.

"Marcelina, please help me. I've got to get Sarah out of here. Now. I don't know what poison drug he's giving her, but he's driving her insane."

"We'll take care of her," she said. But I could barely make out the words. They echoed bouncing around in my head.

"I'm really getting dizzy." I glanced over again at the women standing by the door. "Please tell me what they--?"

"The elixir," she said. "For tomorrow at sunup. That's when you'll see his real power."

I'd begun experiencing white spots before my eyes--and for some reason I had a vision of the Army Jeeps parked up the hill. I didn't know how the two were connected but in my jumbled thoughts they seemed to be.

Just get Sarah and get out into the air. Walk, don't think, and you can do it. . . .

I pulled her next to me and struggled toward the door, the women studying us, unmoving.

"Morgy, I've missed you so much," Sarah was saying, slipping her arms around my neck to help herself walk. "I'm . . . I'm ready to go home."

"I've missed you too." I think my heart was bursting as I urged her on through the stone portico. At last. Had something clicked that freed her from Alex G.o.ddard? Maybe her mind was finally becoming her own.

When we got outside, the skies were growing ever more foreboding, storm clouds looming. Steve had been right about the coming rain, but now it seemed the perfect cover for us to just get out. I took a deep breath of the misty air and forced myself to start helping Sarah up the cobblestone path.

"Sar, you can walk, I know you can. Be strong. For both of us. I'm . .

I felt myself sinking slowly to the cold stones of the walkway, the hard abrasion against my knees, Sarah tumbling forward as I pulled her down on top of me, Marcelina's arms around me trying to hold me up. It was the last real sensation I would remember.

Chapter Twenty-six

Sarah was hovering around me, a sylphlike presence, as I watched myself drift up the steps of the pyramid there in the square, my senses waxing and waning like the waves on a distant ocean sh.o.r.e. There seemed to be rain, or fog, or smoke, but it had a luminous, purple cast one moment, a Day-Glo orange the next. In fact, all the colors were swirling and changing, s.h.i.+mmering from hue to hue. A pack of howler monkeys was cavorting up and down the steps on my left, like circus Harlequins in electric red-and-blue suits, doing pratfalls and huffing as they flew through the air and tumbled one over another.

Sarah was floating silently beside me, but where was Steve? Had he come? Were we escaping?

No. I sensed his face drifting across my sight like a cartoon cloud before dissolving into nothingness. He wasn't here. I was having the eeriest dream I'd ever had.

When I reached the stone-paved platform at the pinnacle, I felt Alex G.o.ddard clasp my arm and turn me around to face the plaza below.

"They are waiting," he said, pointing toward the hazy square.

I looked down, and at first I couldn't see anything except rain and smoke, but then slowly a crowd materialized. The scattering of men I'd seen earlier had become an undulating sea of upturned faces painted with stripes and swirling circles of blue and white and red, a torch-lit garden of brilliant blossoms. They all were looking up at us, at Sarah and me.

Next he held out a mirror whose reflecting surface was a polished silver metal.

"Behold yourself, Morgan. As befits a royal one, a special one, your nose has been built up with clay and pierced with l.u.s.trous blue feathers and a giant topaz. Your front teeth have been filed to a point and inlaid with jewels, your royal skull has been shaped back and flattened."

I gazed into the mirror and gasped. I was monstrous, a Halloween harpy.

Then he moved over to a waist-high censer stationed there on the edge of the platform and began adding b.a.l.l.s of sticky white _copal_ resin, together with bark and gra.s.ses, which he ignited by the quick friction of a fire stick spun by a bow.

Finally he turned to me and held out his hands. "Now we will make a miracle, the miracle of _Baalum_."

Heavy smoke from the censer was pouring out into the rainy sky as we started a stiff _pas de deux_, the strains of a clay flute drifting around us. Was it the "ceremony"? Was I dreaming it?

As the incense billowed, our Maya dreamtime dance became ever more intense, and then a faint form began to writhe up out of the haze between us, an undulating serpent the deep color of jade. As Alex G.o.ddard wrapped his arms around it, it began to form into two dark heads, then pirouette above us. Finally, as the two-headed specter opened its mouths and gazed down on the platform, Sarah stepped toward it and held out her arms.

"Sar, no!"

I screamed to her to get back, but as I did, the . . . thing reached down and swallowed her in flames. It was the Vision-Serpent come to receive her.

"Sarah . . ."

"Can you get up now?" said a voice, cutting through the haze that enveloped my consciousness. At first I thought it was more of the dream, but then someone was touching me and I opened my eyes to see Marcelina standing beside the bed I was in, dressed in white and holding a candle. For a moment I thought I was still atop the rainy pyramid but then I felt the moistness of the sheets and realized the storm Id been dreaming of was being blown in through the slats of the windows. I was s.h.i.+vering.

"Marcelina, where's Sarah?" The nightmare had seemed so real, and now I was hallucinating, having flashes of colors I didn't want to see. "I just had the most horrible dream. I was on the pyramid and there was smoke, rain and some kind of ghastly--"

"It's the elixir. From the toad. It makes you dream dreams of the Old Ones." She took my hand. "She's resting now. He gave her something to calm her."

More drugs, I thought angrily.

Then I caught the "he." Alex G.o.ddard must be back. Everything had gone wrong.