Eye of the Forest

by P. B. Kerr

  “She’s dead,” he said, affecting some sadness.

  “Dead?” repeated McCreeby. “How? What on earth happened?”

  “You really don’t remember it?”

  “I think it’s not that I don’t remember,” said McCreeby. “It’s just that I’ve not been thinking straight since we were in a midget submarine. Can that be right?”

  Dybbuk nodded. “You had a blow on the head, that’s all.”

  “I’m better now. So tell me about Zadie.”

  “Well,” said Dybbuk, “do you remember when you told her to cut the bridge? With a machete? To stop anyone like Nimrod from coming after us?”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes,” lied Dybbuk, “you did.” In fact, it was Dybbuk himself who had suggested that Zadie do this. “And you remember how it was made of human hair?”

  “Yes,” said McCreeby, “I do remember that much. Who’d have thought there were so many Incas willing to have a haircut?”

  “So, when Zadie cut the bridge, some of the hair fibers, well, they sort of came alive, like a boa constrictor, and strangled her as they repaired the bridge. Before she could utter her focus word, the hair had wrapped itself around her neck. There was nothing she or I could do.”

  “Good grief,” said McCreeby. “Poor Zadie.”

  “Could have happened to any of us,” said Dybbuk, and shrugged nonchalantly.

  “To any of us who had cut the bridge with a machete, you mean,” said McCreeby.

  Dybbuk nodded gravely. “You were very brave,” he said.

  “Was I?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember? You tried to cut some of the hair that was strangling her with your own machete and narrowly escaped being strangled yourself.”

  “Good grief,” said McCreeby. “It sounds as if I had a lucky escape.”

  “You’re very lucky, yes. I’d say so.”

  “Then again. Poor Zadie. Dead, you say?”

  “Dead.”

  “That’s a pity,” said McCreeby. He made a tutting sound and then kicked a stone out of his path. “She was going to give old Virgil McCreeby three wishes. I was rather counting on those. Just to protect myself from Nimrod.”

  “I’ll give you an extra three myself,” said Dybbuk. “When my own power is restored. To make up for the three you’ve lost from her.”

  Of course, McCreeby ought to have contradicted him. Told him that a fourth wish always undid the first three. But he didn’t. And Dybbuk concluded that maybe McCreeby hadn’t yet completely recovered from the bump on his head. Either that or he was too diplomatic to contradict him. After all, without Dybbuk, Virgil McCreeby had no chance of getting even three wishes.

  They walked on, and after another hour or so they came around a corner to see where the yellow stone path led through an avenue of tall, sinuous plants. These were about the height of a man, brown, with a bright pink flower like a drainpipe, and looked vaguely fungal. At first, Dybbuk thought it was the wind. And it was only after watching them for almost a whole minute that he noticed the plants were moving very slightly, like a strange species of undersea animal. It was then he realized the plants were probably carnivorous.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked McCreeby and, pushing past Dybbuk, stepped onto the path. “Paititi is just up ahead of us.”

  Dybbuk grabbed McCreeby’s pack and hauled him back. “What is it? What’s the problem?”

  “Watch,” said Dybbuk as a small tapir came blundering onto the path.

  The pink flowers turned in the direction of the animal as if they possessed eyes. The next second, Dybbuk and McCreeby heard a series of spitting sounds, and then gasped as they saw several sharp tubular filaments fired from each flower, like a dart from a blowpipe, that hit the tapir’s leathery gray flesh. A split second later, the animal hit the ground, dead. Another few seconds passed and these tubular filaments filled with red. It was like watching a transfusion in a hospital. The plants were drinking the tapir’s blood.

  “Good grief,” said McCreeby. “Those plants are carnivorous.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” observed Dybbuk.

  “Sort of like Venus flytraps, but on a larger scale.”

  “Much larger. I’d say they could kill a man, wouldn’t you?”

  One of the plants stopped gulping for a moment and let out a noise that sounded very much like a burp.

  “Since we have to get past them without getting hit with a poison dart ourselves, I suggest we take advantage of the fact that they’re feeding and move past them as quickly as possible,” Dybbuk suggested.

  And before McCreeby could say anything, Dybbuk sprinted along the path and past the vampire plants.

  “Good idea,” said McCreeby, and ran after him. Which Dybbuk thought was unusually courageous for a man he considered a craven coward, and he concluded that McCreeby was indeed still suffering the effects of his concussion.

  But not every plant had fired a filamented dart at the tapir and, as McCreeby hurried up the path, two of the plants spat their lethal feeding apparatus at him. One missed him altogether. The other hit McCreeby’s backpack. It was lucky for him the pack was so large. The magician did not notice, however, and kept on running. At least he did until the filament reached its full length and brought him and his pack up short; such was the strength in the dart and the filament that it jerked McCreeby off his feet.

  As he hit the ground hard, his mess tin, knife, fork, and mug slipped out of the top of the poorly fastened backpack. McCreeby lay there for a moment, waving his arms and legs, trying to right himself, like a great black beetle.

  “I say, help,” yelled McCreeby. “Those horrible things have got their hooks into me.”

  Dybbuk made a noise like a bassoon and rolled his eyes up to the top of his long-haired head. Yet he had little choice but to turn back and help McCreeby. In his backpack, McCreeby was carrying Manco Capac’s golden staff and some of the other Incan artifacts needed for the kutumunkichu ritual. Without those, the journey to Paititi would have been a complete waste of time.

  Reaching McCreeby, he flipped him over onto his stomach and sliced the vampire plant’s filament off the dart with his machete. Oozing a surprising quantity of malodorous red liquid onto the yellow stone path, the filament snaked back to its owner like the tentacle of an injured octopus. But Dybbuk was even more surprised to hear the plant emit a loud hissing noise, like a threatened cockroach.

  McCreeby picked himself up and shuddered with disgust. “Ugh,” he said. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. Did you see it? That big ugly potted plant almost got me.”

  Virgil McCreeby looked at his backpack, wrinkled his nose with horror, and pulled the slimy dart out of his pack. It was about six inches long, barbed, and as sharp as the spine on a cactus. He threw it away before picking up the several objects that had bounced out of his backpack.

  “Thanks a lot, Dybbuk,” said McCreeby, forgetting just for a moment the boy djinn’s enormous sensitivity regarding his oddish name.

  “Buck,” said Dybbuk. “Just Buck, okay?”

  Not more than an hour away from the vampire plants, the lost city of Paititi lay on a ridge that rose like a tall crown in the middle of the cloud-filled valley. A more magical place could hardly have been imagined, thought Dybbuk. Even by a djinn. A narrow landing strip of rock led out on to the summit and the main buildings which, although obviously Incan in their origin, were in a much better state of repair than Machu Picchu, or for that matter, the Eye of the Forest. Although worn and smoothed by time, none of the large, ingeniously placed, perfectly fitting stones were overgrown like other Incan ruins. The squarish buildings themselves were little more than shells, however, without windows or doors and no obvious purpose except that one of them was filled with Incan weapons and armor. The main central building was different, however. This was shaped like a small dome and was chiefly remarkable for its heavy golden door.

  “A palace?” said McCreeby.

  “Could be,” said Dybbuk. />
  “Just look at this door, Buck,” said McCreeby breathlessly. “It’s even bigger than the one in the Eye. And it’s solid gold. This must be priceless.”

  Dybbuk shrugged. He wasn’t much interested in gold. There had been a time when he’d been able to make the stuff appear with just a word and he’d never really understood why mundanes were so fascinated with it. Gold was just a metal, after all. More brightly colored than iron and copper but a metal nonetheless. Power was what interested him. Djinn power. Especially now that he didn’t have any.

  More curious than the fact that the door was made of solid gold was the design engraved upon it, which appeared to be that of a large mushroom.

  “Mushroom worshippers?” said Dybbuk, and laughed.

  “Very likely,” agreed McCreeby.

  “I was joking,” said Dybbuk.

  “I’m not. Certain kinds of mushrooms were sacred to the Incas. And more especially to their holy men. They called them teonanactl, or the ‘flesh of the gods.’ The Aztecs actually considered these mushrooms divine.”

  “I hate mushrooms,” Dybbuk sneered. “I can never imagine why anyone would want to eat a fungus.”

  “When the Incan priests ate these mushrooms, they thought they saw visions. But quite what mushrooms have to do with the kutumunkichu ritual, I have no idea.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out inside,” said Dybbuk, and pushed open the heavy gold door.

  “Look how heavy the door is,” said McCreeby. “And how snugly it fits the doorway. Those Incas were amazing engineers, when you think about it.”

  Even Dybbuk had to admit that McCreeby was right. The dome itself was perfectly spherical like a bubble and about thirty or forty feet tall. Each of its giant, smooth stones had been fitted together perfectly. Inside, the atmosphere was cool, almost clinical. A series of stone steps led up to a circular white rock, in the center of which was a tall rod made of gold.

  “It’s almost as if the dome had been built to contain something,” observed McCreeby as he mounted the steps. “Hey, come and look at this.”

  Dybbuk came up the steps, and standing beside him, saw that the gold rod descended for several hundred feet below them into the darkness. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said McCreeby.

  “So what do we do now?”

  McCreeby shrugged. “According to the ancient chronicle that was dictated by the Incan priest Ti Cosi, the final part of the kutumunkichu ritual would be found in here.”

  “Could that be it?” said Dybbuk, and pointed to an inscription on the back of the door through which they had entered the dome over the rock.

  “Yes. That must be it.”

  They went to look at the inscription.

  “That’s curious,” said McCreeby.

  “What is?”

  “The words of this inscription,” said McCreeby. “They’re in Spanish.”

  “What’s curious about that?” said Dybbuk. “Everyone speaks Spanish in this country.”

  “But not back in the mid-sixteenth century,” said McCreeby. “This is an Incan temple, after all. They spoke Quechuan. What’s more, the Incas never wrote anything down. Least of all in Spanish. They hated the Spaniards. The Spaniards had stolen their gold and killed their kings.”

  “You’re forgetting Ti Cosi’s own chronicle,” said Dybbuk. “That’s in Spanish.”

  “That was dictated to a Spanish priest,” said McCreeby. “For all we know it might even have been dictated in Quechuan. And translated by the priest.”

  Dybbuk shrugged. “Then what’s the problem? You can read Spanish. So go ahead and read it.”

  “Doesn’t anything of what I’ve told you strike you as being just a little strange?”

  “Maybe if you read the inscription, I could decide for myself.” Dybbuk shot McCreeby a sarcastic sort of smile.

  “Be patient, boy,” said McCreeby. “I’ll get to it.”

  Dybbuk bit his lip. He disliked being called “boy,” as if he worked in the lobby of some expensive hotel, and he disliked being told to be patient by a mundane. Him. Dybbuk, the djinn. AKA Jonathan Tarot, the television star. The son of Iblis, the Ifrit. It was another reason for him to dislike Virgil McCreeby. Because by now, Dybbuk disliked McCreeby almost as much as he disliked the venomous pet spider the English magus kept in his shirt pocket. He disliked his fingernails, which were long and sharpened to points, like tiny swords, and he disliked the way McCreeby was forever filing them with an emery board. He disliked the way McCreeby reminded him of his son, Finlay, who Dybbuk had never really liked even when they’d been friends. He disliked McCreeby’s beard and his fat belly and tweed suits and his singsong, hoity-toity stage actor’s English accent. But he especially disliked McCreeby’s strange smell, which was referable to the ointment he rubbed on himself. McCreeby called it his flying ointment and it was made of moonlight, honey, and myrrh. It was nonsense, of course. McCreeby couldn’t fly. It was just something he said to make people think he was powerful. All part of the great magician’s pose. Back in Lima, when first they’d arrived in the country, a hotel manager speaking to Dybbuk had mistaken McCreeby for his father and Dybbuk had felt like strangling him.

  As McCreeby’s greedy eyes ran across the inscription, his lips muttered the words in Spanish. “Oh, I say, this is fascinating.” With fingers rippling excitedly, McCreeby took a notebook out of his pocket and began to write with the stub of a pencil. “It’s a set of instructions about what to do next to perform the ritual.”

  Dybbuk sighed impatiently. “Well, what do we do? Are you going to tell me, or do I have to kick it out of you?”

  McCreeby looked taken aback. “I say, there’s no need for that kind of talk,” he said. “Not after coming all this way together. I thought you and I were friends.”

  “We are,” said Dybbuk. “I’m sorry. Tired, I suppose. Maybe it’s the altitude. I’ll feel better when I get my power back.” He smiled encouragingly at the older man. “I suspect we both will.”

  McCreeby grinned back. “Quite. Well, let’s get to it. Where’s that backpack of mine?”

  “Outside,” said Dybbuk. “I’ll go and get it.”

  “Thanks. Decent of you.”

  While Dybbuk went outside again, McCreeby mounted the steps, peered down the length of the gold tube, and shook his head in wonder. He looked at it for a moment and then, taking hold of the rod, shifted the top as per the instructions on the back of the dome door. “Extraordinary,” he muttered.

  Dybbuk came back with the backpack.

  “Now then,” said McCreeby. “If you would be kind enough to pass the pieces to me as I ask for them.”

  Dybbuk opened the backpack and began to lay the pieces on the floor of the containment dome.

  “The tears of the sun,” said McCreeby.

  Dybbuk handed him two gold disks and McCreeby looked at them carefully. “As you can see, this is not a rod at all, but a tube. And, according to the instructions, we drop the first disk into the tube,” he said.

  McCreeby held the disk above the tube, lining up the edges of the matching perimeters. Then he let it go. For a moment the disk stayed where it was before settling a little and then sliding perfectly down the length of the tube with an audible and metallic sigh.

  “Look at that,” he said with admiration. “The extraordinary precision of those Incan craftsmen. Quite takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”

  Dybbuk made a noise like a bassoon and rolled his eyes up to the top of his long-haired head. “If you say so,” he said.

  “I do say so,” said McCreeby. “Now then. The second disk goes in after the first.” He took the next disk and dropped it down the tube. Once again it looked like a perfect fit. “Marvelous. It won’t be long now. Your djinn power, and me with the power of making gold.” McCreeby chuckled and rubbed his hands. “Now then. If you could hand me that rather wonderful-looking gold staff.”

  Dybbuk picked up the staff. It was heavy, about fifteen inches long and tw
o inches in diameter. At the top was a squat little Incan god wearing a semicircular sort of crown, like a risen sun. The god was quite ugly and bowlegged and, under his crown, had earlobes as big as turkey wattles, which contained studs of jade and lapis lazuli. The rod itself was perfectly cylindrical, as if milled on a machine and, as he handed it over, Dybbuk noticed that the diameter of the rod was about the same as that of the disks. Small though it was, it weighed more than five pounds.

  “We’ll just check the mechanism, shall we?”

  “Mechanism? What mechanism?”

  McCreeby took the staff and, having consulted his notebook, turned the body of the god through ninety degrees. There was an audible click and the rod fell away in his hand. “This mechanism,” said McCreeby.

  “Neat,” admitted Dybbuk. “But why does it do that?”

  “Well,” said McCreeby, “the idea is that we insert the gold rod into the gold tube. I imagine it will fit perfectly, like the two gold disks. When we decide that we’re ready, we twist the body of the god, which releases the rod, and it falls down the length of the golden tube. It’s my guess that the tube is as tall as this mountain, which means that by the time the rod reaches the bottom of the tube, and collides with those two disks, it will be traveling as fast as a bullet in a gun barrel. Well, almost.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, all we have to do now is attach the third disk to the bottom of the rod.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “Again, I’m just guessing here, but I imagine the disk is magnetic.”

  “But pure gold’s not magnetic,” said Dybbuk.

  “No, well, obviously the rod is not made of pure gold,” said McCreeby. “Gold is not a metal that’s of much use in magic. Except as an end result, of course. We like to make gold. Not use it for something else. If this were real gold, we’d hardly be dropping it down a tube into the bowels of the earth. No, I imagine the rod is made of lead. Lead is much more useful for an alchemist. There’s so much more you can do with it.”

  Dybbuk nodded. It all sounded quite convincing to him.