Run to Death Read online

  She lit a cigarette with a sharp spurt of matchlight. It made her profile gleam momentarily. She was watching me with a curious, speculative interest.

  “Want one?”

  “Thanks.”

  She leaned towards me and put the cigarette between my lips. Her finger was soft against the skin of my cheek. She slid back into her own place and lit another cigarette. Two more of the birds, waiting for their lovers, glowered red-eyed and loped away on grey wings.

  A moon, thin as a nail-paring, hung in the blue-black sky. Suddenly a huge blunt pyramid towered out of the jungle to our left, black, brooding. It brought a curious chill. The moon hung behind it like an emblem. I could make out massive, hewn steps. I thought of blood oozing down them.

  Then there was an electric light ahead. A wire fence started to our right. We were out of no man’s land into private property. Under the light was a fancily carved wooden gate with a thatched roof over it. We had arrived at the inn.

  They must have heard our car approaching, for a white-coated waiter appeared at the gate and took our bags. He told me it was all right to leave the car parked on the road. We followed him up a path through a tropical garden where the jungle had been controlled into a glossy pattern of palms, flowering vines and citrus. We reached a broad terrace. This was obviously a luxury hotel. Mrs. Snood need not have worried about getting her money’s worth.

  But I wasn’t sure I liked it. It jarred to have so much elegance and comfort and plumbing so close to that brooding basilisk of a pyramid.

  We registered at a desk where there were postcards and American magazines. Most of the accommodations seemed to be in individual cottages which had been landscaped into the gardens. They assumed we were travelling together, and gave us rooms in the same cottage. The waiter took us down another path to our cottage, which was a handsome adaptation of the basic Mayan design.

  As we parted at our separate doors, I said to Deborah: “You’ll have dinner with me, won’t you? And a drink?”

  “Thanks. I’ll change. I won’t be long.”

  My room had a high thatched roof, two beds over which hung balloons of mosquito netting, and attractive, painted furniture. I had taken off my shirt and was washing my painfully sunburned arms and chest in a tiled bathroom when there was a tap on the door. I went to open it. Deborah was standing there. She had a jar of sunburn cream in her hand.

  “Here,” she said. “I remembered.”

  She surveyed my torso from grey, equivocal eyes. She took my arms lightly and twisted me around to look at my back. She was completely unselfconscious about the semi-nakedness of a relatively strange man.

  “Quite a burn,” she said. “Better let me do it.” She shut the door. “Come over to the window.”

  We moved across the room. I heard her unscrew the cap of the sunburn cream. Then her hands began to move gently, rhythmically over my back. Her hair, soft and cool, brushed occasionally against my shoulder. It was a strange sensation, intimate, and at the same time impersonal.

  Her voice came from behind me. “Married?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Your wife not interested in ruins? Or not interested in you?”

  “She’s working. In Hollywood. An actress.”

  Her characteristic, disinterested “Oh” came.

  Her hands went on working over my back.

  “Turn round.”

  I turned. Her young face was expressionless as ever. The tip of her tongue showed between her teeth, giving her a grave air of concentration. She started to smear the cream over my chest. After that she took one arm, then the other, bringing her hands down from the shoulder towards the wrist. When she had finished, she kept both her hands on my left wrist. She looked up at me steadily, challengingly.

  To my complete surprise, she said: “Are play producers given to romantic episodes in darkest Yucatan?”

  A tingle of interest caught me unawares. I said: “Could be. With enough provocation.”

  She took my other wrist. She leaned towards me and kissed me on the mouth. It was a long kiss, posing as a passionate one, but it lacked conviction. It reminded me of the kisses movie stars give to the winners of charity raffles.

  She drew away. “Is that enough provocation?”

  “It’ll do.”

  My arm went to her waist. She twisted away, saying: “Not with the sunburn cream.”

  She crossed to the bed, screwed on the cap of the jar, and put it down on the bedside table.

  “You’ll need this again to-morrow. See you in a few minutes. On the terrace,”

  Baffled, intrigued and faintly suspicious, too, I put on a clean shirt, tied a tie, slipped into my jacket and walked back through the garden to the main building. The cream had alleviated the soreness. I was pleasantly conscious of my glowing skin and of Deborah. Except for a huddle of waiters around one end, the long terrace was deserted. I imagined it was an off season for tourists.

  I ordered a rum collins and sat drinking it, watching great moths darting around the dark garden and wondering about a girl who could be frightened one moment and unconvincingly amorous the next. I wasn’t worried about getting entangled. She was much too young.

  A clatter of footsteps behind me made me turn. Mrs. Snood, in a formal, screaming magenta evening dress, was descending upon me. Her make-up had been repaired and yet, in spite of her grandeur, the same impression of breathless untidiness remained. Her black, eager eyes were pleased to see me. She dropped into a chair at my side and said accusingly:

  “You cheated. I was going to buy that drink.” And then quickly: “How much they sticking you?”

  “They didn’t say.” I thought of Deborah hiding in the village store. If it was Mrs. Snood of whom she was afraid, I would soon know.

  The waiter came. Mrs. Snood ordered a Scotch and soda, explaining in grotesque Spanish that she was paying for my drink, too. When the waiter went off, she turned dubious eyes on me.

  “What do you think of my dress? In the States they said it would be suitable for Mexico. Bougainvillea shade, you know. Seventy-nine fifty. Think they stung me? Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

  The waiter brought her drink. She kept up a continuous stream of chatter, telling me how expensive everything had been in Guatemala, where she had just come from, and speculating upon the probable cost of a hotel room in Acapulco, which she was taking in before her return to Newark. I wondered how anyone was able to be quite so typically tourist. She hardly seemed real. She was like a superb foreign actress imitating an American from a close study of the comic strips.

  Deborah didn’t come. Beyond us from the dark road I heard the sound of a car. The waiters heard it, too. One of them hurried away to greet the new arrivals. Soon they came up the path towards us. There were three guests: an American man on his own and a couple. The man of the couple was probably American, too, a big hulk of a man in his forties, with a pink, healthy face, carrot-red hair and heavy hands, that hung clumsily as he walked. The girl with him made a startling contrast. She was obviously Latin, small and pretty and Indian-looking, with beautiful big eyes and rather thick legs.

  With them was a man whom I recognized at once as the driver of the daily sight-seeing car from the Hotel Yucatan. As the guests clustered at the desk to register, I remembered that Deborah had told me she had missed the sight-seeing car. That had been her excuse for bumming a ride.

  The realization that she had lied—a trivial fact in itself—suddenly alerted the whole atmosphere of that scene on the terrace. I experienced one of those moments when nothing seems to be what it is supposed to be. The voices of the people at the desk sounded meaningless. Mrs. Snood’s chatter could have been an animal’s chatter. Even the garden seemed like a cardboard cut-out—something artificial to hide an ominous reality.

  My mood was interrupted by an American voice saying: “Any objections if a fellow-citizen shares your table?”

  I looked up. So did Mrs. Snood in mid-song. The American who had just arrived st
ood at our side. He was sloppily dressed in a sports coat, baggy flannel pants and a yellow shirt open at the collar. His hair was either very light blond or grey. I couldn’t be sure. The whole impression he gave was equally anomalous. He might have been any age between forty-five and fifty-five. He might have belonged to any profession from engineer to publicity man. His face, with its heavy, shell rimmed glasses, had no set pattern either. He was smiling in a way that almost hid his eyes and brought out surprisingly girlish dimples on either side of a rather thin-lipped mouth.

  “Why, sure, sit down.” Mrs. Snood was watching him with her bright, universal interest. The generosity which she had such difficulty in controlling made her add: “Have a drink.”

  “Well, well, that’s an idea, too.” The stranger slumped into a chair and, half rising again, held out his hand to Mrs. Snood. “Bill Halliday’s the name; Cleveland, Ohio.”

  Mrs. Snood and I introduced ourselves. He looked around with a business-man’s eye to values.

  “Quite a lay-out they got here.”

  “A gyp joint,” put in Mrs. Snood.

  “Well.” He drew the word out the way a man does when he is going to say something either sage or waggish. “But you know how it is. They’ve got us by the short hairs. We Americans are dopes enough to come visit the ruins. This is the only place we can stay. They can charge anything they want.”

  I was mildly depressed to find I had met up with yet another individual whose prime interest lay in counting the cost. But it lifted some of the burden of Mrs. Snood off me. They took an instant shine to each other. Halliday ordered a rye and water, and they began to get chummy about a sister of Mrs. Snood’s who had once lived in Akron.

  Their conversation was banal as stage ad-libbing to cover a bungled entrance. Because I was thinking so much of Deborah, I played with the wild idea that it was for her entrance they were waiting.

  And then she appeared.

  She had changed into a long white evening dress which made her seem insubstantial as a ghost. Heaven alone knew how she had managed to keep it so exquisitely uncrumpled in her suitcase.

  She hesitated a moment on the edge of the terrace, and then came towards us. She was completely the Fifth Avenue model now, something in a full colour ad for the right cigarette, or maybe a new brand of new nail polish. Do you want to be glamorous in the evening; I wondered how she had picked up the tricks, beating around Central and South America with an archæologist father.

  I had half expected something portentous in her meeting with Mrs. Snood, but nothing happened at all. Deborah sat down in the empty chair next to me, glanced incuriously at my two companions and murmured:

  “Hello.”

  If she was afraid, there was no sign of it. Nor was there the slightest undercurrent of anything behind Mrs. Snood’s inquisitively female appraisal. Mr. Halliday accepted the introduction with a broad, dimpled smile and said:

  “Didn’t I see you at the airport this afternoon?”

  I glanced at Deborah. Here at least was some sort of tie-up. Her profile was towards me—that curiously individual profile which seemed to be trying so hard to quench its individuality. Her lashes flickered over the silver-grey eyes, but there was no other change in her expression.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “I was there.”

  The waiter hovered. Deborah ordered a Daiquiri with crushed ice—just the sort of drink a model would have ordered.

  “Flying home to the States?” inquired Halliday.

  “Yes,” Deborah shrugged. “Sort of.”

  Without being impolite, she had frozen out the chance of any other personal questions. At that moment the red-headed man with the little Latin girl reappeared, bowed us a vague greeting in passing and went farther down the terrace to another table.

  Mrs. Snood, to whom any private life seemed unendurable, called out: “Come have a drink with us.”

  The man turned back towards us. He moved with the weighty grace of an athlete just past his prime. When he reached us, he grinned. It was an extraordinarily disarming, boyish grin, which took ten years off the heavy face. His eyes were very blue and straight. “Kind of you,” he said. “But how about a rain check?” He nodded back to the girl with the beautiful eyes, who had sat down at a table. “We were married to-day. We still feel a little private.”

  Mrs. Snood said: “Honeymoon? Why, congratulations.”

  We all murmured. The man smiled again and went back to his bride.

  Mrs. Snood glanced after him. “Thank heavens he refused. I’d have had to buy champagne.”

  As she resumed her conversation with Halliday, my mood persisted. I could not escape from the idea that I was missing something, that some tiny clue might suddenly forge a connection between all these random people and words and bring a completely unexpected meaning. And, as the feeling grew, I caught, as it were by infection, the atmosphere around Deborah at my side. I began to realize that I could have been wrong. Behind the listless exterior there was a tension which might well have been fear. And, if it was, it was a specific fear of someone sitting on the terrace.

  Of whom? Of Halliday, who had seen her at the airport? Of the honeymoon couple? Of Mrs. Snood?

  Soon dinner was announced, and the group dispersed. Deborah and I ate alone in virtual silence at a corner table. With only a handful of guests, the large dining-room had a certain hushed dreariness. At one stage, the inn’s manager, a cheerfully dynamic Mexican with the acquired pep of a cruise-director, appeared to announce that there would be guides on hand to take the visitors around the ruins at eight-thirty in the morning.

  After dinner Deborah took brandy and coffee with me on the terrace. I no longer felt the tension in her, and I wondered once again if I had been wrong about her. Perhaps what I thought of as fear had only been social shyness. Perhaps I was missing the point of the stodgy silence, too. Perhaps she was so young that she intended it to be a sort of heavy-lidded glamour which would inflame me as a male.

  But before I could reach any definite conclusion she rose abruptly and said:

  “I’m awfully tired. Do you mind if I give up and go to bed?”

  The bride and groom were coming out of the dining-room. Deborah called: “Good night.” As Mrs. Snood and Halliday bore down upon me, she left the terrace. I watched her slight, gleaming figure fade down the path towards the cottage.

  I stood as much of the Halliday—Snood dialogue as I could and, pleading sleepiness, left them. I did not, in fact, feel tired. Once I was out of their sight, I turned off the path and strolled down to the inn gates and out into the dark road.

  My car was there, with the sight-seeing car from Merida parked behind it. With my back to the inn, the two automobiles were the only signs of the twentieth century. The thin moon blazed. In front of me the tops of trees, festooned with swaying tongues of vine, were black against the lighter sky. And beyond, looming in pale, eerie majesty, reared the silhouette of a great, crumbling tower.

  It had a curiously magnetic effect upon me. Now that I could see more clearly, I noticed a wire fence in front of me with a rough gate. I pushed open the gate and started down a worn path through the jungle. Crickets hummed. Moths fluttered. The night quivered with the feeling of motionless living things. Then the path curved to the right and, suddenly, there stretched before me a bald arena of grass bounded by great, shadowy temples.

  I stepped into the open moonlight. Here all sensation of life ceased. I had moved into a dead world which cast its own dead, potent spell. I could make out little detail, only the long, massive façades of the temples and the weird, lighthouse-like tower looming to the right. Fireflies, winking coldly, bobbed in front of it.

  I lit a cigarette and dropped down on the dry turf. This is what I had come for. Not for the inn and the riddle of a silver-haired girl who made spasmodic love to me and who either was or wasn’t afraid.

  Although I was ignorant of all Mayan lore, the theatre man in me reacted strongly to the spectacular quality of the ruins and peo
pled them with images dimly remembered from books read as a boy—white-robed priests, awed, silent throngs, naked sacrificial victims. For some time I sat there, letting my fancies play, watching the weary, eroded façades. And then, so gradually that I hardly realized its approach, fear began to invade me. It wasn’t something I could rationalize. It crept out from some profoundly hidden recess of my being. I felt the shadow of alien things falling across my back. The palaces, seductively white and smooth in the moonlight, seemed now to be palaces of horror from which, at any moment, might come screaming something ancient and unmentionable.

  I got up and hurried back to the road and the comfortable familiarity of the parked cars.

  The inn itself was in darkness now. Everyone must have retired early to be fresh for sight-seeing on the next day. In my abstraction I missed my way and found myself deep in the garden. I recognized my cottage off to the right and turned towards it. I was still several hundred feet away in the dark shadow of an orange-tree when I stopped.

  In the moonlight I could make out the back of the cottage. The nearest window was Deborah’s. The next window was my own. Hovering close to Deborah’s window was a human figure.

  The window was open and, it seemed, the figure was crouched beneath it as if it were preparing to climb in. I felt a chill of anxiety. Then a dog started to bark, suddenly, angrily, and the figure glided away into the shadows of the garden.

  The whole episode had taken only a few seconds. And my unnatural anxiety dissipated almost as quickly. There were quite a few waiters at the hotel. Probably the figure had been one of them on his way back to the servants’ quarters beyond the garden. Almost certainly it had been my pre-occupation with the ruins which had given a sinister cast to a moment’s loitering.

  When I reached the cottage I had already half forgotten the incident. Pleasantly tired, I stripped, put on pyjamas, and climbed through the mosquito netting into one of the beds. I had nothing to read. I lay there smoking a last cigarette, thinking of Iris.

  I had stubbed the cigarette and turned off the bedside light when a tap sounded at the door.