Checking Out- The Complete Trilogy

by T W M Ashford

  Another millipede crawled out from a rock as we passed, sending shivers all down my spine. It had too many parts, all working in tandem yet waggling on their own accord.

  ‘You’re lucky I had a nap before dinner,’ I whispered to Pierre, ‘otherwise I’d really be in a foul mood.’

  ‘Lucky, am I?’ hissed Pierre, in more of a shout than a whisper. ‘Poor you, having a nap. I’d been working the front desk since seven a.m., so by now I’m probably approaching a twenty-four hour shift. As strange as it might seem, I would have much rather gone to bed than chase after a briefcase until my eyes grew dry enough to crumble out of my head. Lucky me, indeed.’

  ‘That’s hardly my fault. Your hotel should have better standards of security. Who knows what sort of vagabond might come bursting through any one of those doors? What if I’d been sleeping, or in the bath?’

  ‘Then perhaps I’d be wrapped up in my bed right this very moment, a half-empty cup of cocoa cooling on my bedside table. Quit your whining already, you’ll get your pictures back.’

  ‘Hey chaps,’ said one of the explorers behind us, his rifle shaking in his hands. He was squat like the doctor, not at all how the younger me had imagined the brave explorers of old. ‘Do you reckon you could keep it down a little? A couple of us guys are getting the willies.’

  ‘Getting the jitters, eh?’ I said, not giving into my irritability in the slightest. I’m ashamed to say I was mocking his accent a little, too. ‘Gone a bit shy-bladder, have you?’

  ‘Well, yes, actually,’ said his friend, an unnaturally tall and thin gentleman who seemed to be being consumed by his own clothing. ‘We have to be as quiet as possible otherwise we risk disturbing the wildlife, or worse… the locals. Timothy didn’t keep hush, and we all know how that turned out.’

  ‘No we don’t. What happened to Tim?’

  The two explorers looked at each other, uneasily.

  ‘He got dragged off by a herd of monkeys and had his skull caved in,’ said the short one in a whisper. ‘They ate his brain. Or at least, that’s what I’ve heard they do.’

  ‘A herd?’ said the tall one, his helmet hanging lopsided from his bullet-shaped head. ‘Monkeys don’t come in herds, you glocky mug! A troop, barrel or tribe, perhaps, even a cartload, but a herd? My God. You’re a right moose, you know that?’

  ‘I said quiet back there!’ boomed Captain Montgomery once more, not once taking his eyes off the wall of soon-to-be-dissected plant life ahead of him. ‘Do none of you clouts understand that even the slightest noise might-’

  From out of the brush came an almighty guttural roar, and then the grass to our left fanned apart as a beast all orange and black barrelled out towards us. Eleven feet long or more, it sprung through our group with its tail outstretched like a striped javelin, grabbing the shorter of our two explorer friends in its enormous maw and shaking him while the rest of us watched, stunned and inept. His words all bled into one another, running into a gargled scream that continued long after the monster had carried him back into the depths of the jungle, leaving nothing behind but a spray of claret, a lonely boot and a sea of terrified faces.

  ‘Tiger!’ screamed one of the explorers towards the back, turning tail. And then that was it; half of the expedition bolted back the way we had just trekked whilst the other rushed forwards in a stampede, crushing each other in a bid not to be left at the rear.

  ‘Jesus-freaking-Christ,’ I shouted to nobody except myself, and joined them. Pierre was already nearing the front, his flailing limbs hacking his own way through the foliage, so I followed his makeshift path. I saw somebody fall in the mud, toppled by the weight of the desperate men behind him, and I did not see him get up again.

  Captain Montgomery was waving his machete all the more erratically in his own attempt to escape the mad rush. He almost took Pierre’s ear off as he approached.

  ‘Montgomery!’ shouted Pierre, ducking under another swing. ‘What are we doing? You have guns, shoot the damn thing!’

  The captain looked as if he’d just had a brilliant idea, as if the first crack of dawn had emerged across the nighttime of his mind.

  ‘Men,’ he commanded, holding his machete out towards them. They stopped advancing. ‘Unsling your rifles and take aim at the beast. He can’t take all of us, and when he moves to strike we’ll cut him down. Understand?’

  The men whimpered a somewhat agreeable response and did as he said. However, they each continued trying to be the person furthest from the front, which meant the whole group resembled an amorphous blob trying to get to grips with the art of walking. Bit by bit they edged along a path they had yet to carve into the jungle, tripping up equally over vines, roots and their own feet.

  Neither of us having guns, Pierre and I kept close to Captain Montgomery, who refused to draw his own rifle for reasons I can only assume were related to rank, for anything else would have proven him remarkably stupid.

  There was silence. It was deafening.

  ‘Well, it seems like it’s-’

  And then it was back, tearing towards the front row of explorers without the slightest glint of fear in its yellow eyes, its lips rolled back to reveal rows of dazzling white fangs. Each step from its huge paws shook the ground with hollow thuds that echoed through the trees like a barrage of tribal drums.

  All of the explorers opened fire, with little success. Some had clearly never used a gun before - not that I was a particularly great judge of shooting ability, mind - for as soon as they’d let off their first shot they did nothing but pepper the leaves of the canopy above them, their eyes shut and mouths open. Those who managed to keep their rifles pointed in the right direction couldn’t say the same for their bullets, which flew into trees, soil, rocks and even a lizard that had the misfortune to wander across the path - everything except the tiger itself.

  Lucky for us, then, that the tiger had considerably more sense than any one of my dozen-strong entourage. It darted back amongst the trees before probability could insist it be hit. Slowly, like an old tap dripping to a stop, the rifles drew silent.

  ‘Keep your eyes to the sides, men,’ said Montgomery, and the whole group began to creep their way backwards again. With all their rifles pointed in every direction other than down, we now resembled a huge and lethargic hedgehog. But in the minutes that followed - minutes that dragged on like hours, mind - the tiger did not return, and, after a close call when somebody stepped on a twig and almost had his face rearranged in the ensuing panic, we edged ourselves into a clearing beside a river.

  The tree line stopped about ten metres short of the river. Dried-out grass and hay had been laid out across the mud, crossing over and over like a lattice. The river was long and wide, and flowed in its gentle rhythm, lapping around rocks and through the roots of mangroves. It was a natural brown, picking up clumps of dirt from the channel as it passed like a fat socialite snatching cocktail sausages from a buffet table.

  The expedition team hurried into the clearing, panting and holding on to their helmets.

  ‘Good work, lads,’ boomed Montgomery. He stared out across the vista with his hands on his hips and his legs spread apart. ‘A good deal of ground covered, and we faced down a tiger without so much as a scratch.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the chap with the bullet-shaped head, wringing his hands together, ‘half our team went running back to camp and Little Will got eaten.’

  ‘A minor bump in the road to discovery, my friend,’ said Montgomery, slapping the tall explorer on the back. ‘And one that won’t be forgotten when history tells our story. Now, Richard… Richard? Ah, there you are. Which way now?’

  ‘This is madness,’ I whispered to Pierre whilst the team tried to work out where they were. We’d both instinctively wandered down the riverside, further away from the trees. ‘I’m done with all this. Finished. You were right. Let’s just go home.’

  ‘Go home? What, do you see a door that I don’t? Like it or not, we’re stuck here until we find one, which just happens to be
where we’re going.’

  He looked over my shoulder. His eyes grew curious.

  ‘But perhaps it won’t take us all that long,’ he said.

  He walked past me, and at first I couldn’t see what he was so intrigued by. There was just a knot of roots and rotten leaves, sinking into the river. But then it came into focus; there, amongst the trees and shades of browns and greens, was a canoe. I wandered over to Pierre and helped him wipe the mess from off of it.

  ‘Our destination is downstream,’ said Pierre, picking up a dead frog by its leg and throwing it into the river. ‘We can ditch this mad bunch and head straight there.’

  ‘Nice spot,’ I said, inspecting the canoe. It had been carved from well-worn wood, but polished nicely. Plus there weren’t any holes that I could see. ‘Whose do you think it is?’

  ‘A local’s, probably.’ Pierre started to push it into the river; the mud was greedy, but slowly and surely the canoe started to float. He pointed a thumb in the direction of Captain Montgomery and his crew. ‘Do you think we should say goodbye?’

  ‘Well if they’re angry that we’ve taken it, at least they’ll be stuck here,’ I said, climbing into the rear of the canoe. ‘And why bother? Unless we found him an ancient temple, I don’t think Montgomery would remember we were here at all.’

  Pierre splashed through the water and hopped into the other end of the canoe. I fished out a pair of oars and, taking one each, we set of down the wide and twisting river.

  Chapter Twelve

  If you’ve ever been stung by a horsefly, you’ll know that it feels like having a deranged nurse give you a flu jab when you’re least expecting it. At that moment in time, drifting down what could well have been the Amazon, it felt as if every unhinged medical practitioner on the planet were trying to inoculate me from whatever infectious disease they could shake a thermometer at.

  It was beautiful though, which I noticed when I wasn’t wiping the splattered remains of airborne vermin from off of my skin and suit. The river was lined with trees that fought one another in a race to the cloudless sky; the sun skimmed through their leaves and fell in ribbons across the sea of forest and flora. It shattered like diamonds across the stillness of the water and kissed our canoe a hundred shades of gold and brown. Birds sang amongst the canopies, the river rocked against its riverbanks, and at more narrow moments vines hung like welcome banners above our heads, used as rope bridges by little white-footed mice and as jungle-gyms by the monkeys.

  Pierre and I kept a good and silent pace; I paddled to the left and he to the right, always in unison unless we needed to turn from the banks and their curious, creeping and pale mangrove roots. We’d settled into a steady drift, having both built up a heavy sweat under the direct sun.

  The further down the river we went the more clearly I could see into its depths. Fish as fat as dogs went swimming beneath us in schools of a dozen or more, some a dazzling silver, others as bleak as shadows. At one point I saw a turtle, paddling its way across the riverbed. A few minutes later I saw something just as scaled and a magnitude more deadly go gliding into the river from its resting spot upon a nearby log, and thanked my lucky stars, wherever they’d hidden themselves, that it didn’t come our way.

  ‘So why the rush to get back to your room before midnight?’ asked Pierre, resting his oar across his lap so that its end dripped above the water. ‘I can understand why you’d want your pictures back; they’re your memories, your life…’

  ‘My one hold left on a world that has otherwise slipped away,’ I added.

  ‘Exactly. But why midnight? What could possibly be so important that it couldn’t wait until the morning?’

  I don’t know whether it was the afternoon heat or if I’d reached some uncharted level of exhaustion - perhaps it was something else entirely - but I couldn’t keep up a pretence any longer. The truth was truth, and like gas it’s always better out than in. At any rate, none of it seemed to matter much, not anymore.

  ‘My family - my wife and son - died, as you know. It was a car accident, and… I don’t know if it was my fault or not. Honestly, I don’t. We were up in Scotland and we hadn’t any clue it was going to snow - when does it ever, right? But it snowed and it snowed, until I don’t think I was even driving on the road any more. I guess I should have pulled over or something, I don’t know… There wasn’t anywhere to stop. Not really. Not unless you count the petrol station, but then what use was that? We’d have been stranded, and it wasn’t far to the hotel so I thought, why not? Why not keep going? The roads were empty, and of course now I understand why, even though I was going slow. I guess you can always go slower. Sorry, I’m just rambling.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. Please go on.’

  ‘So I was driving down these roads,’ I continued, feeling a constant urge to scratch my nose, ‘and some of them are getting pretty narrow. We’re not talking the M25 here, after all; these roads aren’t built for heavy traffic. It’s night now, so all I can see is what my fog lights are picking up… most of which is just snow. Snow on the ground, snow peppering the air. Trees rising up on either side, sometimes growing right there next to the road, sometimes growing from quite a distance below us. It’s difficult to tell when all you can pick out is the road right in front of you. Anything else is just… filler, you know? Incidental background noise, irrelevant to where you’re going.

  ‘Anyway, at some point or another we spun out. I wasn’t trying to avoid hitting a deer or swerving to dodge a truck that was hogging too much road, nothing like that - I just skidded on some ice. It was that simple, that unfair. The whole world went spinning… and then it stopped. We went crashing into a tree and the car near enough wrapped itself around it. When I came around… Well, I was the only one to do so.’

  ‘I’m sorry, George. I don’t…’ Pierre visibly slumped. ‘I haven’t got any family, none that I keep in touch with at least. I can’t even imagine how horrible that must have been for you.’

  ‘No,’ I said, honestly, ‘I can’t imagine you can. So that all happened three years ago. Three years ago today… or three years to the day back in our world, at least. I was… mourning them. It needed to be that day. It needed to be.’

  Pierre’s face went from sad to thoughtful, to confused, to horrified.

  ‘Wait… you weren’t planning to kill yourself, were you?’

  I sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ I put my head in my hands and shut my eyes as if that might have stopped the answer from leaking out of me. ‘Yes. Yes, I was.’

  ‘For God’s sake, why?’ shouted Pierre. A flock of exotic birds erupted from a nearby tree. ‘I mean, I completely understand how miserable you might feel, but ending it all? Jesus, Mr. Webber. There are other options.’

  ‘Like what? Counselling? Therapy? I don’t want to come to terms with losing my family, Pierre. I don’t want to wipe the slate clean and get off with nothing but the occasional bad dream. I don’t deserve that. I was the one driving the car, I was the one who kept driving. If there was anyone who should have died three years ago, it should have been me.’

  ‘It should have been nobody, George. What happened was a tragedy, but it wasn’t your fault. And killing yourself won’t bring them back, nor will it pay off some cosmic force, or karma, or whatever bullshit debt you think you need to balance. Nobody just walks away from something like that, and talking to someone won’t magically make you happy. But there’s a whole world out there that’s still waiting for you, if only you’d-’

  ‘A whole world? Pierre, there’s nothing left. The world has lost its colour. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the sights are, how friendly or interesting its people might be - this world stopped being for me the moment I lost everything I cared about. When my world died.’

  ‘Mr. Webber…’

  ‘No, Pierre. Do you understand how awful it is, to wake up each morning and know the pillow next to yours is cold? To have to remind yourself that she’s not there anymore, that she’s not in the bathroom, or fixing h
erself a snack, but gone? To dream of playing with your kid, going to a theme park or picking them up from school, only to wake to a reality where you don’t just not have a child, but to have had a child and seen them die? You don’t just talk your way out of having that image sewn into your mind, believe me. Every goddamn day is the exact same - wear a fake smile, walk a forced routine, push the guilt down as deep as it’ll go… rinse and repeat. Nothing has flavour, nothing has life. Nothing. I’m so goddamn tired of it. I’m done.’

  Pierre didn’t reply, he just looked down towards where my shoes were.

  ‘I just wanted to say my goodbyes,’ I added.

  ‘Do you still want to?’ Pierre asked.

  I shrugged. ‘Yes… No… I don’t know. Right now I just want to get my pictures back.’

  ‘I’ll help you do that much, Mr. Webber. There’s no harm in a man having his memories, least of all if they’re your last ones left. But not if it means you’re going to end it all.’ He shook his head, slowly. ‘And certainly not in my hotel. You want to do that, you go somewhere cheap.’

  An abrupt thud came from the side of the canoe. At first I thought we’d collided with a floating branch - and then came the cold fear that said floating branch would actually be the return of the alligator I’d seen sunbathing a few minutes before - but nothing was in the water… Nothing I could see, at least. And then I noticed a protruding stick, aptly sticking out from the side of the wood. I flicked it, and it twanged.

  ‘Tell me this was there before we got in,’ I said to Pierre, trying to keep calm. The other side of the canoe had bulged inwards, splintering from what I was coming to realise had been an impact. From the end of the stick dangled a red feather, which swayed as we drifted along. ‘Please tell me this is the canoe equivalent of a spoiler.’

  Another arrow missed my knee by less than an inch, choosing to bury itself deep in the opposite side of our primitive pirogue. This too had a red and angry feather on its end.