New Indiana Jones Fanfiction
Author's Note: I am posting some of my fanfiction that was first published in print 'zines back in the 1980s. Enjoy!
The Secret of Xicalpan
1: Marshall College, Connecticut September 1931
"God's in his heaven and all's well with the world," thought Indiana Jones contentedly. The old line from Robert Browning's poem suited Indy's mood admirably as he sat relaxing in his tiny office surrounded by the familiar security of his books and papers and listening to the ratcheting click of a lawnmower on the quad outside his window. This was the last time he would be hearing that particular sound that season. It was late September, and already the custodians had more leaves to rake than lawn to mow. Soon the Homecoming bonfires would be lit and after that, almost before anyone knew it, would come the first falling snowflakes of winter, bringing with them finals and the end of the term. Such was the cycle of life at Marshall as Indy had known it for the past five years.
Indy basked in the pleasant sense of anticipation that seemed to accompany each new semester, and that anticipation was made all the keener by the person whose arrival he eagerly awaited: lovely Laura Quaid, of the soft blonde curls and melting blue eyes. Although it was only the third week of classes, she had made her interest in him apparent by the subtle upward curve of her mouth whenever she caught his eye during lectures, and the discrete but unmistakable way she smoothed back her skirts to reveal two perfectly dimpled knees when she took her seat in the front of his classroom. It seemed that there was one like her every semester. Sweet young things oh so eager to please the professor. What was a mere flesh and blood man to do?
He was aware that he was beginning to get a reputation for that sort of thing, even to the point of being the butt of a few joshing comments in the Faculty Lounge, some of them good natured others not. He had, in fact, heard one just the other day - what can a boy do to get an A in your class, eh Jones? That had been
Terwillger of the Anthro department, a case of sour grapes if ever there was one, Indy thought. He had a strong suspicion that Terwilliger had a secret yen to play cat among the pigeons with his own female students but the poor man was fat, bald, and fiftyish, and no doubt even in his palmiest days of youth had been hampered by a pervasive lack of charm that even the classic hero worship that coeds seemed to have for their professors couldn't overcome.
Indy usually shrugged that kind of remark off. He always made it extremely clear at the outset that it was not his practice to exchange friendship and favors for high marks. Indeed, he was often excessively strict at grading time in an attempt at impartiality, expecting a higher standard of achievement out of his young ladies. Very few of them lost interest upon learning this fact. It was not lenience they sought from him. And if his protégé's, as he liked to think of them, did gain any academic advantages from their relationship with him, it was from their close association with a man who was an expert in his field and truly loved his work. Indiana Jones was a teacher in every sense of the word.
A soft knock at the door brought an expectant smile to his face. He carefully composed his features into the proper proportions of scholarly detachment and avuncular warmth. "Come in," he said in his most professorial tone.
The door opened and Indy's expression changed to one of surprise. The female form silhouetted in the doorway was not the one he had been expecting to see.
Esther Schulz! How long had it been? Three years? No - it must be four by now. She had been the first of his star pupils, the first of a long line and in many ways the most memorable. She had lasted longer than most of them - a whole year, from soon after he had begun teaching at Marshall until she had taken her Master's degree and left the following summer. She wasn't what his friend Marcus Brody would have called his usual type. With her hair the exact color and texture of the brown, crinkly corn silk that sticks out of the top of a ripe cob, her too long nose, her two wide mouth, and a figure that could only be charitably described as unspectacular, Esther might have been called homely - that is until you saw her smile, a smile so warm that it made a person forget about everything else. Indy had always likened that smile to the sun coming out. Four years had changed her, though, Indy thought, and for the better, subtly broadening her shoulders and hips, thinning her waist and ankles, and refining the contours of her face. She had given up the hopeless task of conforming herself to the arbitrary fashions of an age that had not been kind to her; her hairstyle and clothing seemed to be chosen for convenience now, but, oddly, they suited her - or was it just the new aura of self-assurance she had about her? Esther would still never be conventionally beautiful, but she could certainly be called handsome. Indy found himself responding to her with an interest not born entirely out of nostalgia.
"You're looking good, Esther," he said softly.
"I could say the same for you, Indiana," she said, "but you always look good - and you know it. Aren't you going to ask me in?"
She entered the office, strolling over to examine the wall of bookcases that faced his desk. "Nothing seems to have changed here," she said, running her hand across one cluttered shelf. "Same books; same little statue just here; even the same dust, I think."
Indy laughed. "What do you expect from an archaeologist? I like dust." He sat back down, leaning back in his chair and putting his feet up on the desk. "It's been a while, Esther. What are you doing with yourself these days?"
She turned to face him and leaned back against the bookcase. "At the moment, my official title is Assistant Curator of Antiquities at the Hartford Museum."
Indiana nodded, impressed, and Esther continued wryly, "It isn't exactly the Smithsonian - sometimes I'm little more than a glorified errand boy - but at least it pays the rent, and I have plenty of free time for my own projects."
Indy was about to ask what had brought her to Marshall, but at that moment they were interrupted by a knock, and a curly blonde head peered shyly around the corner of the door frame.
"Dr Jones, "the newcomer began uncertainly, spying Esther. "Have I come at a bad time?"
"Ah… Miss Quaid," said Indy, hastily scrambling out of his undignified position, "this was the time we agreed upon, but as you see, I've had an unexpected visit from a colleague. I'm sorry… Could we have our conference some other time?"
She nodded. "Of course... later perhaps?" and ducked back out of the office. Indy turned to see Esther regarding him with sardonic amusement from her vantage point across the room.
"And here's something else that doesn't change: dewey-eyed co-eds dropping in to see the professor during unscheduled office hours -when the likelihood of interruption is slight. Your latest candidate for 'advanced instruction?'"
Indy gave a deprecatory shrug, and Esther snorted. "Miss Quade? Miss Quail is more like it! Jesus, Indy, I knew you like them young, but this is ridiculous!"
"For your information, Esther dear, Miss Quaid is a student in my Archeology 101 class, and I'm sure she's well above the age of consent."
"A 101? That's even worse. At least I was a grad student." Her tone was gently mocking, and Indy was reminded of what had attracted him to her in the first place: her sharp mind, always ready with some quip or other.
"Tsk, Esther; I find your academic snobbery extremely unbecoming," he said, gently reproving, trying to disguise his eagerness to change the subject. "Surely we have more interesting things to discuss than my amours. For instance, to what do I owe the honor of your visit? Professional reasons? Or just the desire to look up an old friend?"
"Professional reasons," she answered, looking strangely gratified at the brief look of disappointment that crossed his face. She laid her briefcase on his desk and opened it, removing an object carefully swathed in layers of cotton batting, and setting it before him. What do you make of this?"
He leaned forward, all else forgotten in the excitement of a new discovery, gently stripping away the layers of protective padding. The object he uncovered was a statue about eight inches tall and carved out of some sort of gray soapstone. It depicted a being Jones was completely unable to classify; some kind of squid or octopus was the closest he could come, but there was the feel of many other wildly unrelated species about it as well. He blinked his eyes hard to clear his vision; the thing seemed to shift shape before him even as he stared at it. But by far the most unpleasant thing about it was the way the soapstone glistened wetly, giving the statue a slick slimy appearance that reminded Indy of garden slugs, the mucus membranes of oozing viscera, and the snakes he loathed. Although the surface of the statue was actually dry to the touch, he drew his hand back in instinctive revulsion, unable to forgo the irrational gesture of wiping his fingers on his pants.
"Nasty little thing, isn't it?" he said.
"You have a talent for understatement," Esther replied dryly. "Still, whoever carved it did a beautiful job."
Indy grunted. Beautiful wasn't a word he would have chosen when referring to that obscenity, yet he had to admit that the craftsmanship indicated a high degree of sophistication and skill.
"What is it?"
"That's what I was hoping you'd be able to tell me," she answered, sitting down on a corner of the desk. "It came to the museum as a part of a large bequest to us from a wealthy man who died recently in Glastonbury. He'd inherited his father's fish packing business and had so much money he didn't know what to do with it all. Seems he solved that particular problem by indulging one of his passions: traveling all over the world and buying everything in sight. He ended up with an attic full of things by the time he was through. As you can probably guess, there was a lot of junk - Buddhas with clocks in their stomachs, 'authentic' Egyptian scarabs, that sort of thing - but there were some treasures, too. I'm still trying to find out which category this fits into."
Indy shook his head. "I don't know if I can help you, Esther. I've never seen anything like it." Thank God, he added silently.
"There's an inscription on the base," she prompted.
"Well I'll be damned - You're right!" He had found the object so repellent that he'd been reluctant to take a very close look at it. He picked up a small magnifying glass from his desk and began to examine the statue with renewed interest. After a while he looked up, "It seems to be some sort of variant on Mayan glyphs."
"Well, for Pete's sake, Indy - even I can tell that! The trick is finding someone who can decipher them. So far, I've had no luck, and then I remembered that my dear old Professor, Dr. Jones, had some experience in that area, and here I am. So what about it, colleague? Think you can do it?"
"Just watch that 'old' stuff, teacher's pet." He put on his glasses and looked back down at the inscription. "I don't know. I'll give it my best shot."
He took out pen and paper and set to work, getting up several times during the course of his labors to go to the bookshelf to consult old texts and notebooks. Slowly, as Esther watched over his shoulder, the translation took shape. At last he sat back, shutting his final sourcebook with a decisive slap.
"There. I think I've got it, but it doesn't make much sense." He began to read haltingly from the paper in front of him: "Something which lies forever unchanging is not dead; for with the passage of unnaturally long time even death will be negated."
Jones sighed, his forehead creased with puzzlement, and then his expression changed. He began to smile, to chuckle, and finally broke into peals of delighted laughter. "Beautiful, beautiful," he said "You really had me taken in for a minute, Esther. I appreciate a good joke, but wasn't this a lot of trouble to go to just to see me?"
She said nothing, staring down at him as if he had taken leave of his senses.
"Or maybe you expected me to play along and suggest a little spin over to Miskatonic University," he continued flippantly, laughing even louder, "so that we could check out their copy of the Necronomicon?"
"Indy, what the hell are you talking about?" Esther demanded, somewhat peevishly.
He looked up and found only honest confusion written on her face. He pulled open a desk drawer and hauled out what appeared to be a small booklet or magazine which he tossed it in front of her. "There; that's what I'm talking about."
She picked it up and read the title: Weird Tales, August 1931. Pictured on the cover, in cheap, gaudy colored litho print, was that species of alien known to the science fiction buff as a Bug-eyed Monster, reaching out with obviously lustful intent to tear the already tattered and straining garments from the more than adequately endowed body of a screaming woman. Esther raised one eyebrow. "I can see why you keep that hidden in your drawer. A bit lurid, isn't it?"
"Well, you know me, darling; I am a man of diverse tastes."
She smiled ironically, letting the opportunity for a retort pass "Ah, very interesting, but I don't see what this has to do with my statue."
"Check out page 23," he said.
Obediently, she flipped to the indicated page. "The Whisperer in Darkness, by HP Lovecraft - whoever he is." She shrugged.
"Read the editor's introduction," he suggested.
She did so and gasped. There it was: a quotation from an earlier story by the same author, The Call of Cthulhu. While she stared, Indy spoke the phrase aloud, as if from memory: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die."
Esther closed the magazine and put it back down, regarding Indy with a questioning look.
"You honestly didn't know about any of this, did you?" he said.
She shook her head.
"That line is from a book called the Necronomicon, "he told her, "but don't go into a bookstore and ask for it or you'll make a fool of yourself - Lovecraft invented it. He's developed quite a following among the small group of people who read this sort of thing, and a number of his writer friends, like Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, and Zealia Bishop have been working in the same vein. They've given it a name: the Cthulhu Mythos. There have been quite a few stories written so far, each adding something new - an imaginary book, a place, a new god for the pantheon. There's Cthulhu, the Big Daddy of them all; Hastur; Nyarlahotep, The Crawling Chaos; Tsathogua; and, of course, Yig, my personal favorite."
He caught Esther staring at him blankly, as if trying to discern what relevance his rambling recitation might have.
"Esther, honey," he said gently, "I'm afraid somebody's been hoaxing you."
She fell thoughtfully silent for some time. "I would tend to agree with you, Indy," she began slowly, "except for one thing. When was the first of those stories published?"
"I don't know. 1921 - 1922, maybe?"
She nodded significantly. "10 years ago. The fact is that this, our rich benefactor was a strange man; his passion was only for the collecting, not for the displaying. He'd have his purchases shipped home, and there were so many that most of them ended up sitting in his attic, forgotten and collecting dust. The statue was one of those. We found it along with a hoard of other things in a crate that had been shipped from Merinque to New York by way of Havana. The original shipping receipt was still attached, and the crate hadn't been opened since it cleared customs in New York… in 1905! Indy, that statue has been in a sealed crate in someone's attic for 26 years!"
Now it was Indy's turn to stare. "Are you sure of that?"
"Of course I am. The dates on the shipping receipt and the custom stamps matched, and the crate hadn't been touched since then. I was there when we cleared out the attic. The crate was at the bottom of a huge pile, and the dust was half a foot thick. You taught me the finer points of stratigraphy Indy. If I can date the layers on a dig, I can certainly do the same in a rich man's attic. I'd stake my reputation on this!"
He believed her. Of all his students she'd been the best, the brightest. He looked back down at the statue with awe. "My God," he whispered. "What if there's something actually to it?"
"Oh, come on, Indy, you don't honestly mean to tell me that you believe all that gibberish."
"No, not all of it - of course not! But suppose that Lovecraft knows something we don't? Or that he and the others are inspired by ancestral memory or vague rumors of something so old and obscure that it hasn't reached the attention of established science yet?" He reached out and picked up the carving, in spite of the disgust it aroused in him. "Think of it, Esther! Traces of a religion that's supposedly older than all the rest. And I'm holding the first concrete proof of it in my hand."
"We're holding it in our hands," she reminded him pointedly.
He shot her an injured look. "I may be guilty of a few sins, Esther, but filching the credit for someone else's discovery isn't one of them."
She smiled evenly. "Just so that's understood from the beginning. The way I see it, we both have an equal stake in this thing, whatever or wherever it leads us. You have the greater experience… But I have the statue." She held out her hand. "Partners?"
He returned the handshake. "Partners… I like the sound of that," he said softly, keeping hold of her hand and applying a gentle pressure. "Just how far does the partnership extend?"
"That remains to be seen," she answered in a cool tone, deftly removing her hand from his grasp. She dropped her eyes and hurriedly continued as if changing the subject, her tone all scholarly seriousness. "This piece is obviously Mayan work from the glyphs, but it certainly doesn't resemble any Mayan religious carvings I've ever seen."
"Nor I," he agreed, returning his attention to the statue. But we really don't know very much about the Maya when you stop to think about it. It's hardly surprising when you consider how much knowledge was lost when Bishop de Landa burned the Codices. That could mean it came from anywhere on the whole Yucatan Peninsula." He sighed. "Damn! If we only knew where it came from, we'd have some idea of where to start looking."
Jones became aware that Esther was regarding him with a strangely smug look. "That's precisely what I do know - within about a 25 mile radius. Got a map?"
"Do I have a map? Esther… You had this up your sleeve the whole time, didn't you?" Esther smiled modestly as he rummaged eagerly through an untidy assortment of rolled up maps stuffed haphazardly into an old umbrella stand next to the bookshelf. He found the right one and pinned it up onto the wall. "How do you know?"
"I showed the piece to a mineralogist friend of mine," she answered leisurely. "It seems that it's carved out of a distinctive variety of soapstone which is only found in a number of places all over the world. But in Central America - or in the Yucatan to be precise - it's only found…" she paused for the effect before triumphantly stabbing the map with her finger. "Right here."
"Marvelous," he whispered, staring at the spot she had indicated on the map with an expression akin to lust.
"Don't start counting your chickens, Jones," she reminded him. "That's still over a thousand square miles of territory, and the map just shows empty space. No people, no ruins - nothing!"
"That's what makes it so perfect! A sparsely populated area means no one ever goes there. There could be a whole damn city lying out in the jungle that nobody's ever stumbled across."
"Fine. Now all we have to do is stumble around until we find it," she said sardonically.
"Don't worry about that," he replied confidently. "When you've been in this business as long as I have, you'll learn that there's always a little village too small to be seen on the map. Always a local tradition of a ruined temple or palace lying out somewhere in the jungle under some farmer's field. Always some local who is willing to guide you there for a few coins. And I have a nose for this sort of thing."
She grinned. His enthusiasm was infectious, and she seemed to have caught it.
"Now, the only problem is finding the time to do the preliminary legwork. Steady employment is nice, but it does kind of curtail your freedom. I hate to leave it all until next summer - if anyone guesses what we're onto here, everybody and their uncle is going to be tramping around the jungle trying to beat us to it. And lately," he added ominously, "I've been having a problem with people jumping my claims."
"Don't you think you could manage to wrangle a leave of absence out of Dean Schuyler - especially if there's a possibility of a paper in it?"
"You might be right. Schuyler loves it when one of us writes an article for the Archaeological Review. It reflects glory on the college and impresses the Alumni Association."
"Publish or perish, hm?"
"Something like that. And lately my summer activities haven't been the stuff of which papers before the AAS are made."
"I've heard that rumor," she said wryly.
Indy turned his head to give her a guarded look. He had sensed a subtle reserve in her all along, and, while he enjoyed verbal fencing as much as the next man, that last comment had been definitely waspish. He wondered what was bothering her but decided to let it pass.
"How about you and your job at the museum?" he asked.
"I should have no trouble getting away at very short notice," she said. "After all, this little jaunt will be job related - if it should lead to a major discovery, the museum will find that their little statue is worth a fortune."
"Then there's no time like the present. I'll go talk to the Dean right now. Why don't you go back to my house and wait for me there?" he said, heading for the door. "You can let yourself in - the key is still in its old place under the mat." He threw a quick smile and a wink before disappearing down the hall.
Esther watched his retreating back for a moment, a strange, troubled look on her face. Then, with a sigh, she gathered up her briefcase and locked the door behind her.
As the afternoon shadows lengthened and deepened into twilight, Esther sat alone in the front room of Indy's small house, seriously beginning to wonder if she had made a mistake in coming back here. The tiny cluttered room -and his office earlier that afternoon- both were redolent with old memories, dredging up thoughts and feelings she had thought were safely stored out of the way.
Her eyes wandered over the room, whose every detail she knew intimately, perhaps more intimately than she'd known its owner. Here were the books and art objects, souvenirs of various digs and travels, which she herself had helped Indiana unpack and arrange on their shelves. He had added several new pieces during the intervening years, she noticed, each of them as lovely as those that had been there before. The man had taste; she had to grant him that much. Here, on its shelf, was a slim, leather bound volume which belonged to Indy's mother: the George Sand novel after which he'd been named, the sight of which always made him grumble that certain literature ought to be kept out of the hands of impressionable pregnant women - even though, Esther knew, Indy was secretly rather proud of his unusual name. Here, under the large oil painting of two female nudes, was the fireplace they had often sat in front of on a cold winter evening, laughing and talking far into the night, a bottle of bootleg wine between them. She glanced upward. Yes, it was still there: the crack in the ceiling that had always looked to her dreamy eyes like the Amazon River.
Esther closed her eyes and shook her head to rid it of the unprofitable turn her thoughts seemed to be taking. It had been a matter of professional necessity she returned to Marshall, she told herself; Indiana Jones had been the logical man to consult about the statue, no matter what her personal feelings about him might be. She had just been doing her job.
"Like hell, Esther!" she thought angrily. That hadn't been the whole truth; she had a secretly looked forward to seeing him again. Indiana Jones had held an almost fatal fascination for her, ever since he had come to Marshall College five years before, his PhD fresh in his hand. He had been, Archeology Department gossip had it, under some kind of cloud. Why else, they had whispered, would a man of his talents and abilities choose to teach at a small, obscure college such as Marshall when it was common knowledge that he had been the favored candidate for an associate professorship at his own alma mater, the University of Chicago? No one seemed to know what it was. Dean Schuyler, glad to have a man of Indy's caliber at his institution, had never asked; neither had Esther, almost absurdly grateful that this handsome new professor had seen fit to notice a painfully shy, plain graduate student.
She stood up again and began to pace the length of the tiny room. In spite of her sensible resolve, the old fascination was still there, as strong as ever, and it would overcome her if she was stupid enough to let it. Instinctively, she knew she must not. In the map of her life, Indiana Jones was that uncharted area marked: Here be Dragons. And yet, the territory seemed so fair and beckoning. It would be all too easy for her to slip back into the old, hurtful relationship, especially in light of Indy's rather naïve expectation that they would be back on their old footing, as if the past four years had never happened. For an intelligent man, Indy could sometimes be surprisingly dense.
"Snap out of it," she told herself roughly, thinking of all the others who must have sat in front of Indiana Jones's fire, drunk his wine, stared up at that same damn crack in the ceiling. "You weren't the first; you certainly won't be the last."
It had grown quite dark and Esther went to switch on a lamp. As light flooded into the room, she found herself face to face with a small framed drawing that hung on the wall above, a drawing she had seen often without ever really taking much notice of it. It was executed in a crisp, pointillist style, and it depicted an arrowhead - Laurel point, Esther thought with professional detachment - and very nicely done too. It behooved every archaeologist to be able to draw, and to make a fairly accurate representation of an object at hand. Esther could draw, so could Indy, but this was not his work. Whoever had made the little drawing had a real artistic flair. Esther bent to check the signature: M. Rav -
The sound of the front door opening made her jump back, almost guilty. Indy appeared out of the hallway, looking pleased with himself and hiding something inside his coat. He reached in and produced a bottle of champagne with a triumphant flourish.
"It isn't chilled," he said, "but what the hell?"
Esther smiled in spite of herself. Who but Indiana Jones could manage to procure a bottle of champagne thirteen years into Prohibition and then apologize for its being warm?
"I take it the Dean was convinced," she said.
"I tantalized him with hints of 'something big' and left him with visions of fat alumni contributions dancing through his head," he answered, bending to retrieve two glasses from a cabinet under the bookshelves. He poured the champagne and held a glass out to her. "As of next Monday, I'm officially on sabbatical. Jensen will be taking over my classes."
She saluted him with her glass and took a sip. "Then all that remains to be done is for me to clear it with the museum and to make the travel arrangements."
"You said it, partner," he answered and raised his glass. "Here's to Fame and Fortune!"
She smiled and drank again. "To Fame and Fortune."
Indy set his glass down and came over to her with a hopeful light in his eyes. "It's getting late, Esther. Stay for dinner… We can talk about old times." His unspoken message hung heavily in the air between them, stay longer, stay the night.
Discreetly, she stepped a few inches back. "No, thank you, Indy," she said smoothly. "As you said, it's late, and I want to catch my train back to Hartford."
She put down her glass and stooped to pick up her briefcase. "I'll call you in the morning."
As the front door shut behind her, Indy felt strangely disappointed. He sighed in the darkened hallway. The house felt silent and lonely. He went back into the front room and stared sadly at the two glasses and the three quarters full bottle of champagne. No use wasting it, he told himself. He refilled his glass and raised it to the empty fireplace.
"Here's to Fame and Fortune," he said.
Fanfiction, Indiana Jones