Eye of the Forest

by P. B. Kerr

  “Now what?” asked Groanin.

  “We have to get back aboveground and into the warmth, as quickly as possible,” said Philippa. “To avert a massacre.”

  But the horses were already moving back up the natural stairway in the cavern, blocking the way Philippa and the others had come. It was clear they would have to try to find another route out of the caverns. Philippa picked up the little flashlight.

  “Come on,” she said grimly. “There’s absolutely no time to lose.”

  Zadie snatched up the still-burning torch. She had other, selfish ideas about what to do next.

  Philippa seized Zadie’s hand and pulled her along into the first corridor that offered another way out of the cavern. Zadie hadn’t gone very far before she snatched her hand away and stood as still as a stalagmite. “I’m not coming,” she said. “You’ve no idea where you’re going. This could lead absolutely anywhere.”

  Philippa pointed the beam of the flashlight ahead. The light disturbed a couple dozen squadrons of bats that came toward them flying in close formation. Everyone dropped onto their knees. Everyone except Philippa. Beyond the rank stink of the bats’ droppings on the cave floor she realized that she could feel a cool fresh breath of air on her face.

  “I don’t think so,” said Philippa. “That breeze you can feel on your face? That has to be another way out. I’m sure of it. Trust me, Zadie.”

  “You’re so wrong about this, Philippa. Look, I’m going back up with them. With Pizarro and his men. Back the way we came. I’ll be outside in the sun and have my power back while you’re still groping around down here like a bunch of stupid moles.”

  “You can’t go with them,” said Philippa.

  “Look, I’m getting claustrophobic being down here, and that’s the plain truth. I’ll go out of my mind if I don’t see the outside again soon.”

  This was true. All djinn suffer from claustrophobia, which comes from some of them being imprisoned in old lamps and bottles for years on end. But of course there was another reason why Zadie wanted to get back to the surface with Pizarro and his Spaniards. Now that she had the map showing the way to the Eye of the Forest, she wanted to make contact with Virgil McCreeby’s expedition as quickly as possible. It was true, she didn’t have the tears of the sun with her, but she couldn’t help that. The gold disks were still in her backpack back at camp. But she supposed McCreeby would know what to do about that. He was a magus after all. And magi are nothing if not resourceful.

  “You have to stay with us. Leaving by yourself? That is not a good idea, Zadie.”

  “Watch me,” said Zadie, and stepped back into the shadows. The last word she spoke was “Sorry.”

  “Let her go,” said Groanin.

  “Zadie, come back,” begged Philippa.

  But Zadie was gone.

  Reluctantly, Philippa let herself be hurried on by Groanin who was too diplomatic to say what he really thought, which was that he was more than a little glad Zadie had left.

  Presently, they arrived in another cavern at a tiny trickle of a spring whose basin was encrusted with a scrambled egg of glittering yellow crystals — the same yellow crystals that covered the walls and the floor. The water in the crystal basin was hot. As hot as a cup of coffee. But there was not enough of it to return Philippa’s djinn power. So they merely drank some of it without any apparent ill effect and then traversed a narrow ledge that led to the only route out of the cavern, and squeezed along a murky corridor into the secret depths of the caves.

  All the time the breeze on their faces grew stronger so that now their sense that they were on the right route was ever increasing. Finally, they arrived at a gaping circular pit about fifty feet in diameter and from which a violent current of hot, sulfurous air rose from the depths of the earth and up through a high chimney to a small point of dim light high above their heads. Intuitively, Philippa guessed that this might even be the very pit from which Manco Capac and his seven djinn brothers and sisters had emerged from a djinn-made world to rule the Incas many centuries before. But there was no way across the pit. And it seemed they would have little choice but to return the way they had come.

  “There’s the source of your breeze,” said Groanin. “And there’s no going on from here.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll have to go back.” Then he smiled. “Not your fault, miss. I say, it’s not your fault. We all thought this was the way out. Didn’t we, Muddy?”

  “For sure, we did,” said Muddy.

  “Zadie was right,” said Philippa. “We’ve been descending these caves and passages for several hours.” She looked up at the point of light above their heads that was the top of the chimney. “I guess that’s ground level, up there.”

  “Reckon,” said Sicky.

  “How far up would you say that was?”

  Sicky pursed his lips and, leaning his little head back on his enormous shoulders, said, “Could be five or six hundred feet. Could be more. Long way, at any rate. Long, long way.” He looked around the walls, broke off a piece of the yellow rock in his hands. “No good to climb, either.” He threw the rock violently across the pit. The rock had not traveled more than two or three feet before the current of hot air blasting up from the pit carried it high above their heads and out of the chimney top.

  This gave Philippa an idea.

  “I saw a movie on TV once,” she said. “It was about this man who called himself a base jumper. He jumps off very tall buildings in places like New York, with a parachute. And skydives through the streets. Sometimes he dives into huge holes in the ground. So, I was thinking perhaps we could do the same. But instead of skydiving, it’d be more like sky flying. In other words, going up instead of down.”

  “You mean jump into that pit, without a parachute?” said Groanin.

  “Yes. Except that we’d hardly be jumping into the pit. It would be more a case of jumping onto the current of hot air that’s coming out of it and riding that current of air all the way up through the chimney.”

  “You’re mad,” said Groanin, and sat down on a large yellow rock.

  “I don’t think so. Heat rises. And so would we.”

  “You make it sound like we’re no heavier than a handful of leaves, miss,” said Groanin. “Myself I weigh more than two hundred pounds. I’d like to see the current of air that could blow me around like a bubble.”

  “I think you’re looking at it, Mr. Groanin,” argued Philippa. “But I bet that boulder you’re sitting on must weigh quite a bit. Why don’t we throw the boulder into the current of air and see what happens to it?”

  “Good idea,” said Muddy.

  “You’re mad,” Groanin told Muddy. “Here, Sicky, how do you feel about this idea of hers?”

  “Sick,” said Sicky. “Sick to my stomach. Still, best we chuck the rock into the air current first and then figure if there’s another way to get out of here. Experiment first, like she says. Then argue. Okay? That’s scientific.”

  “I’m not doing it,” said Groanin. All the same he stood up, and he and Sicky carried the yellow boulder along the path to the edge of the pit. “This rock is warm, you know.”

  “And plenty heavy,” said Sicky.

  “Aye, but how heavy?” Groanin grunted with the exertion of moving the boulder. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “More expensive than that, I reckon,” said Muddy. He would have helped but there was no room for three on the path. “Much more.” He chuckled. “My life is, anyway.”

  “This rock is at least a hundred pounds, maybe,” said Sicky. The guide’s head may have been unusually small but there was nothing wrong with his ability to guess the weight of something heavy.

  “At least,” said Groanin. “Right, then. Here goes.”

  Groanin and Sicky stood cradling the boulder at the edge of the pit and began to swing their arms.

  A second later, the two men tossed the yellow boulder into the pit and then watched in amazement as the hot current of air quickly carried it u
p the shaft like a pellet in the barrel of a BB gun.

  “I think that answers your doubts, Groanin,” observed Philippa.

  “I’m still not doing it,” he said. “I never liked jumping out of a plane when I was in the British Army. And that was with a flipping parachute on my back.”

  “You mean you’ve done this kind of thing before?” said Philippa.

  “This kind of thing? No, miss.” Groanin smiled thinly. “That was merely dangerous. This is foolhardy. I’m an English butler, not a flipping daredevil. Look here, suppose the air batters us against the walls of the chimney. We could be knocked senseless. And what happens to us when we shoot out of the top? How high up will we go before gravity takes over? We could land on anything. And anywhere. We could find ourselves lost in the Amazon jungle. Or senseless at the top of a very tall tree.”

  “You’re forgetting,” said Philippa. “I’m a djinn. The minute I’m in sunshine, I’ll have my power back.”

  “I’m not doubting your word, miss,” he said. “But what if it’s still raining? Underneath the tree canopy there’s not a lot of sunshine on the forest ground. It might be several hours before —”

  “I’m going to try it,” said Sicky.

  “Me, too,” said Muddy.

  Philippa shrugged as if to say, “Me, too.”

  Groanin muttered darkly. “I’m certainly not staying down here by myself.”

  “If you’ve done a parachute jump before,” said Philippa, “then perhaps you can demonstrate the best way to do this. I mean the best way to make this jump.”

  Groanin nodded. “Very well, miss. I reckon the best thing to do would be to take a running jump at it. To launch yourself into the center of the current of air so that you aren’t buffeted on the sides of the shaft as you shoot up the chimney.” He wagged a forefinger at Sicky, and then Muddy. “As soon as you hit the air current, you should throw out your arms and legs in a star, so that the air can catch as much of you as possible.”

  “Who’s going to be first?” asked Sicky.

  “It ought to be me,” Philippa said bravely, and put her glasses inside her pocket for safety. “After all, this was my idea. Plus, we might get lucky. I might shoot straight up and out of here into a beam of hot sunshine and find my power restored before I hit the ground.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” said Groanin, and then told himself that they probably hadn’t.

  Philippa walked back along the path and prepared to make her run. She’d never been much of a long jumper. Thinking was her stronger suit, which was one of the reasons why her last thought before sprinting toward the gaping pit was to wonder what the yellow crystal that encrusted the walls of the cave was made of, and to put a piece in her pocket so that later on, if she survived, she might examine it more closely.

  At the last second and just as she jumped, Philippa heard Sicky shouting and saw Groanin waving as if urging her on, and she was already airborne by the time she realized that they’d actually been shouting at her to stop. It was easy to understand why. The air current had stopped. For one sickening, heart-stopping moment Philippa hung in the air above the pit, instead of being blasted all the way up the shaft. Then she started to fall.

  CHAPTER 14

  EL TUNCHI

  For several minutes, absolutely certain that it was not he who had disappeared into thin air but Nimrod, John walked around the deserted camp, shouting for his uncle and hacking at the thick undergrowth with the machete. He wondered if Nimrod’s disappearance was self-inflicted or if there was some other force involved. Nimrod wasn’t the type of uncle who disappeared without telling anyone. Almost immediately, John heard the whistling again and this time he was careful not to answer it with some whistling of his own, quite unaware that it was already too late, and that the wrath of el Tunchi had now fallen upon his young head.

  This time it actually seemed possible to follow the source of the whistling, which grew stronger as John went deeper into the forest. He was not afraid. He was, after all, a djinn and, as he emerged into a sunlit clearing, the power felt strong in him. John was not even afraid when finally he laid eyes upon the fearsome-looking author of the melodious whistling.

  The man wore a filthy fur rug around his large waist, and his black hair was long and shaggy. The upper half of his face was painted black and the lower half white. The upper half was remarkable on account of the fact that he had only one eye. The lower half was chiefly remarkable in that the man held the head of a living lizard in his mouth, with the rest of the black-and-white reptile’s tail and body wrapped around his neck, like a necklace. It was through this lizard’s head that the man seemed to do his whistling and, as John quickly discovered, most of his talking, too. Indeed, it almost seemed as if it was the lizard that was in charge of the man. Most odd of all, perhaps, was the jaunty little tune itself — quite at odds with the man’s appearance — that continued to be whistled from the lizard’s mouth.

  “You whistle extremely well,” said John. “For a lizard.”

  The lizard stopped whistling. “I whistle splendidly well for any sort of being,” it said sibilantly.

  “And that’s a nice tune,” said John.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you,” demanded the lizard man, “never to whistle in a theater? Or on a ship? Or in a house, in case you invite the devil in? And above all, never to whistle in the rain forest?”

  “No,” said John, “she never did. But then my mother isn’t like most mothers. In fact, she’s not even particularly like my mother. At least not since she started to look like someone else.”

  “You make no sense, boy,” hissed the lizard man.

  “It’s a long story,” said John. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  “You don’t seem to be afraid of me.”

  “I’m not.” John shrugged. “What’s the big idea making my uncle Nimrod disappear like that?”

  “He didn’t disappear. You did.”

  “Well, who are you to go around making people disappear? Are you a ghost?”

  “No, not a ghost. I am el Tunchi. A shaman. The spiritual echo of a witch doctor who took his last breath in the rain forest, having been tortured to death by Spanish conquistadors about five hundred years ago. They were after gold, of course. And thinking that they were all going to be rich, they liked to whistle. They even whistled while they were torturing me. Nobody ever whistled in South America before they turned up. Nobody knew how. Ever since then, I have been here to punish all those, like them, who dare to whistle in the jungle. It is my revenge.”

  “But I’m not like them. And where I come from, people whistle when they’re happy. And I think it’s pretty sick of you to take revenge on people for doing something as ordinary as that.”

  “Who are you to tell me what I can and what I can’t do?”

  “My name is John Gaunt. And I’m on a quest to find the lost city of Paititi. And to save the world from the great destruction. The Pachacuti.”

  “I care nothing about that, John Gaunt. All I care about is my revenge.” He grinned horribly. “First I’m going to drill a hole in your head. Then I’m going to suck out your brain. And then I’m going to use your empty skull for a note on my organ.”

  “You mean like a pipe organ? In a church?”

  “Yes. Except that instead of pipes I use human skulls. My organ has sixty-one notes and five octaves. Would you like to see it?”

  John shrugged coolly. “Sure.”

  He followed el Tunchi to a little hut in the forest, where John now gazed upon the strangest musical instrument he had ever seen.

  “The five keyboards are made from locally sourced horn and bone,” el Tunchi explained proudly. “Jaguar teeth and antelope horn. The stops are made from tapir vertebrae. The pedal board is made of human shinbones. The pipe casing is made of armor taken from the bodies of many dead conquistadors. Curses be upon them all. And of course, as you can see, the pipes themselves are human skulls arranged by timbre and pitch into ranks
and mounted vertically onto a wind chest that’s really just a wooden box over an ancient hole in the ground from which hot air comes forth. There are lots of holes like that in this part of the jungle. When the wind whistles through these pipes it makes a truly infernal noise.”

  El Tunchi sat down and started to play. And soon John was obliged to cover his ears. El Tunchi had spoken the truth: It was a truly infernal noise. Like something from the deepest, darkest pit.

  “I think your playing really stinks,” said John.

  “I never learned to play,” admitted el Tunchi. “Not that it matters here in the jungle. There’s no one around to listen. Besides, I don’t play for other people. I play for myself. But if ever I wanted an audience I’d just whistle one up.”

  John thought carefully. It was beyond his power and imagination to figure a way of restoring himself to the parallel world he had occupied with Nimrod just a few minutes before. For that he knew he needed el Tunchi. But he did not think it was beyond his power to goad the shaman into some kind of contest out of which he might make some kind of advantage for himself.

  “Speaking of whistling,” he said. “You’re not much better at that, come to think of it. I bet I could beat you in a whistling contest.”

  El Tunchi grinned and the lizard head fell out of his mouth. Popping it back in again, he said, “Are you challenging me?”

  “Sure.” John grinned back at him. “But look here, if we are going to have a contest there had better be something worth competing for.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you get my skull if you win, and if you lose, you fix it for me to go back with my uncle Nimrod.”

  “All right,” said el Tunchi. “It’s a deal.”

  “Who goes first?” John asked.

  “It ought to be you,” said el Tunchi. “Since you’re the challenger.”

  John shrugged. “Fine by me,” he said, and muttering his focus word, “ABECEDARIAN!” wished that he was the best whistler the world had ever heard.

  After warming up with a few bars of “Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle,” which are commonly whistled tunes in most parts of the United States, John began in earnest with a tune called “Buffoon,” followed it up with another called “Lovely Lady” and, by the time John finished “Moonlight,” the whistling jungle shaman was looking worried.