Into The Out Of

by Alan Dean Foster

  "You're damn right. First they just frightened me. Now I'm mad. I think you'll find I can be pretty damn relentless when I've got my dander up, Josh."

  "If you say so. I never saw anyone with their dander up before." He leaned back as if trying to peer behind her. "Where exactly is your dander?"

  "You're trying to be funny, aren't you?"

  "Sorry," he said seriously. "Just trying to put some color back in your face. You're really going through with this, aren't you?"

  "Yes, and you're going to say that you believe me. Go on, use that bathroom. Olkeloki says the Ukunduka will screw anything that moves. Go on, tough guy."

  "The OCCUPIED light is on."

  "So what? Haven't you noticed it's been on ever since I went in there?"

  "The length of time it takes for someone to move their bowels is not an indication supernatural forces are at work. There has to be somebody in there."

  "Oh, there's somebody in there, all right. Lots of somebodies. Go check 'em out, Joshua Oak."

  "I've already told you why I'm not going to do that."

  She pounced triumphantly. "Then you do believe me."

  "All right. All right, damn it, I believe you." He eyed the door warily. "Why not, after what happened to us on the way to Dulles? From now on I take anything you say as the literal truth." He grinned at her. She grinned back. Something connected and both of them looked away nervously. Oak turned his attention back to his rapidly cooling breakfast while occasionally glancing toward the now threatening bathroom door. It stayed shut and the OCCUPIED light stayed on. Merry found a magazine and tried to lose herself in its chromatic inanities.

  Time to speak of other things, the Walrus had said. Oak wished the Walrus were in the row opposite. Maybe he'd help make some sense out of the last forty-eight hours. Soon they would be landing in a city considerably farther east than Baltimore, which was the farthest in that direction he'd ever traveled previously. Then they'd be relying for their safety and guidance on an old and maybe not too sane gentleman of uncertain intentions, who'd managed to involve himself with something dangerous and incomprehensible.

  "If they took the flight attendant," he said suddenly, "why hasn't the rest of the crew reacted?"

  "Long-flying jumbo jets like this one have a cabin staff of fifteen to twenty people, sometimes more." She smiled apologetically. "We're always finding out about stuff like that where I work. They even have their own curtained-off sleeping compartments. Probably her friends think she's napping somewhere, or maybe getting it on with one of her co-workers, or a passenger. Or they might think she's up with the pilots, or down in the lower galley. There's an elevator to a lower compartment on these planes. And I've heard that the flight attendants in coach don't mix with those in business and first class. They wouldn't miss her for a while yet."

  While he mulled over this disquieting explanation the OCCUPIED light on bathroom number one continued to glow. It was still glowing when the big jet touched down at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. The light followed him as he and Merry and Olkeloki gathered their hand luggage and disembarked. They gave the bathroom a wide berth. Merry didn't even look in its direction.

  Soon after the last passenger had departed for the terminal, the cleaning crew swarmed aboard. The heavyset woman assigned to the forward johns started in Number Four. She didn't get around to One until the first group of passengers had long since cleared customs. In that group were Oak, Sharrow, and Olkeloki, along with a couple of younger travelers, none of whom had to wait for additional baggage to be unloaded from the 747-B's cargo bay because they'd brought only hand luggage with them. They were in a shuttle bus heading for downtown by the time the cleaning woman reached first-class bathroom Number One.

  She barely glanced at the glowing OCCUPIED sign. It wouldn't be the first time one of the white man's clever pieces of electronics was out of order. Sure enough, the doorknob turned easily when she tried it. Almost too easily.

  She had five children by her first husband and two by her second and so one would not have thought the sight of blood would have shocked her. She fell back against the bulkhead opposite and stood there with the back of her right hand over her mouth, hyperventilating.

  "Now what's wrong, mama?" asked the tired crew supervisor. He'd attended college in Nairobi and he resented the fact that he had to prove himself in such a lowly position with the airline before they would let him train to be a mechanic. He glanced inside the bathroom. Instantly his stomach turned over. He barely managed to stumble the couple of feet to the open galley sink before his insides tried to spray themselves all over the interior of the aircraft.

  His violent reaction provided the catalyst the cleaning woman needed. She started screaming and didn't stop, not even when the rest of the crew had gathered around her. She had to be led off the plane. By now the cabin attendants had counted one of their members as missing, which was quite impossible. People didn't disappear from a 747 in flight.

  Someone had the presence of mind to call the police. By the time they arrived nearly every passenger had cleared customs. The more than three hundred people who'd been on the London-Nairobi flight had scattered to the four winds of East Africa. It would have been difficult to hold them in any case because there was no evidence, only the cabin attendants' insistence that one of their number was missing. The captain and co-pilot backed up the flight crew.

  But there was no body, the chief of airport security pointed out, and even if you could somehow silently murder and cut up a woman into pieces tiny enough to flush down an airplane toilet the bones would surely jam it up. And as anyone could see, he demonstrated readily, the john flushed perfectly. Perhaps the lady in question, for reasons of her own, had chosen to change from her flight uniform into civvies without notifying any of her colleagues and had slipped off the plane with the first passengers? Perhaps the remains they had found were those of some animal, ritualistically slaughtered by a wealthy passenger with ties to one of the many primitive cults that were still popular in this part of the world?

  But how had this been accomplished in total silence? And it would have had to have been a fairly large animal, for there was a great deal of blood. Blood on the floor and blood on the walls and what about those bloody very human handprints on the broken mirror? Had the chief of airport security thought to look closely he might also have seen bloody handprints not only on the toilet seat but on the bright metal of the bowl itself. They were positioned almost as if someone had been grabbing at the rim of the seat from below. His demonstration flushed them away.

  No body, no bone, just blood everywhere. It was only much later when the forensic team arrived from the city that the fragments of fingernail and strands of hair were found, along with a few threads of blue cloth. They gave the head of Nairobi's forensic medicine department nightmares for weeks because they were eventually identified as belonging to the vanished flight attendant. And yet there was no body, not anywhere on the plane or on the ground or even in pieces in the aircraft's septic system.

  The head of forensics was a modern African, well educated and dedicated to his profession, but try as he might he could not reconcile the grisly scene in the bathroom with what was never found.

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  14

  Nairobi, Kenya—22 June

  Oak didn't know what to expect in the way of prearranged accommodations, so he was only mildly surprised when Olkeloki led them through the doorway of the Nairobi Inter-Continental. The lobby might as easily have been in a fine hotel in Dallas or New York. The only immediately obvious difference was that the faces behind the desk were as black as those of the bellmen who tried to carry their backpacks. Clearly the lobby and nearby coffee shop were popular places for well-off locals to meet and socialize.

  The rooms were equally comfortable and modern, though the television was limited to one local station which was only on the air from five to ten in the evening, and that largely in black and white, plus an in-house movi
e channel. In spite of Oak's urging that they get out and see some of the city, after endless hours on two intercontinental flights all Merry wanted to do was soak in a hot tub until her skin began to wrinkle. For his part Olkeloki was busy trying to find a driver to take them to the border town of Namanga. There, he informed them, they would have to abandon their vehicle, walk across the border with their baggage, and hire a Tanzanian matatu or taxi on the other side. Kenyan vehicles were not allowed to travel in Tanzania and vice versa. Olkeloki found this rule idiotic, but then he was not a politician. He was only a simple laibon.

  Oak was damned if he was going to spend the whole day in a hotel room. He'd spent more than enough of his life in hotel rooms already. The bell captain provided him with a small map of downtown Nairobi and sent him on his way. Give Joshua Oak a map and he could find his way through Hades.

  Out the banquet entrance, down to the first cross street, then left to the broad, divided avenue known as Jomo Kenyatta Boulevard. Off on the far right was the towering international conference center of the same name, which had been designed to look like a traditional African hut. Crowds of anxious Africans, Indians, and the occasional tourist milled around him. Hordes of shoeshine boys tried to sell him a shine for his waking boots, low-investment capitalists on the move.

  The traffic jam he stepped around was international in scope, consisting of an eclectic mix of Volvos, British, Japanese, and American cars. He was a bit surprised to see the latter, which consisted largely of four-wheel drive American Motors products. Poking its flat top above the newer, shinier vehicles like a country cousin come to town was the ubiquitous Land Rover.

  The shops he passed were well stocked and only a minority of them catered to the tourist trade. Curious, he entered one electronics store and was amazed at the range of products displayed, including the latest flat-screen TVs and video-recorders. In the back of the store was a booth where locals could rent videocassettes. Half the titles were in Tamil or Hindi, a reflection of the large Indian population which Kenya had had the sense not to kick out of the country after gaining its dependence from Britain. As he watched, a tall African in a neatly pressed business suit was renting out The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

  The Soviets haven't got a chance here, he told himself as he exited the store and headed down the avenue in the general direction of the central market.

  As he entered an area of small shops, street hawkers tried to sell him crudely carved wooden giraffes or elephants, bracelets of twisted copper wire, and small, obviously fake Maasai knives. At least there were no ashtrays that said "Welcome to Kenya," no matching salt and pepper shakers similarly decorated, no rubber Mau Mau spears—though he suspected if he searched long enough he could find them too.

  He spent most of the day rummaging through the central market and the surrounding shops, particularly regretting the solid malachite box he left gleaming on its display table. Maybe when they'd finished helping Olkeloki they could come back to Nairobi and make like tourists.

  Back at the hotel, he was working his key in the room lock when the door next to his opened. Merry was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt and matching pants, having stuffed the heavier Levi's into her backpack. She all but glowed from her long stay in the tub. Oak stared for a long moment, then self-consciously looked away.

  "Olkeloki's not in his room," she told him.

  "He told me he had to arrange transportation for us to the border tomorrow, to this Nimga place."

  "Namanga," she corrected him. "So that's why he didn't answer his phone. I was beginning to worry."

  Oak couldn't keep from smiling.

  "I didn't stuff myself on the place the way you did," she said. "I could use a good breakfast, if they're still serving it downstairs."

  "And I could use lunch. Wonder if you can get an ostrich egg omelette?"

  "I understand the local coffee is wonderful. I'll settle for starting with that."

  The security guard on their floor nodded politely as they entered the elevator. Downstairs Merry was immediately drawn to one of the many hotel gift shops.

  "Let's go in, Josh."

  "We're here to save the world, remember? Not to buy trinkets."

  "I just want to look."

  Like most of the shopkeepers within the hotel complex, the owner was Indian. He didn't bow and scrape, but he smiled a lot and made an attempt to sell Merry one of everything in the store, assuming she would be the easier touch of the pair. In that he was dead wrong, just as he was unaware that he was talking to another salesperson.

  While he was unsuccessfully haranguing Merry, Oak passed over the malachite and lapis trinkets in favor of examining the less flippant items for sale. There were masks from West Africa and buffalo hide shields, intricately carved wooden animals, including a six-foot-tall reticulated giraffe, and several striking carved African heads of highly polished ebony. One head even looked familiar and it took Oak a moment to think of who it resembled.

  Then it struck him that the ebony carving was a fine rendition of a much younger Mbatian Olkeloki. In fact, all of the heads were Maasai.

  The luckless shopkeeper abandoned Merry in favor of new quarry. "All Maasai."

  "Why is that?"

  The shopkeeper shrugged and smiled. "They are the ones the woodcarvers prefer to carve." He chose a spear from a barrel in the opposite corner, showed it to Oak. The center section was fashioned of wood. From its base protruded a two-foot-long metal spire, while the blade which crowned the top was more than a meter in length and made of solid steel.

  "Separates into three pieces." The shopkeeper proceeded to demonstrate. "Traditional Maasai, very clever."

  "Old?" asked Oak casually. He was surprised by the honest reply.

  "No sir, contemporary."

  "For the tourist trade?"

  "Oh no, sir, not at all. This is a Maasai lion spear. That is why it has the long blade, so it will penetrate all the way to a lion's heart. A Maasai moran, or warrior, killed a German tourist with one of these just last year. The tourist wanted to take his picture. The moran warned him not to. Last picture he ever took. All moran still carry these."

  "For what?" He thought back to what Olkeloki had told him about the current East African government policies regarding lion-spearing. "I happen to know the Maasai no longer are allowed to kill lions just to prove their manhood."

  "That is true enough, sir, but they still carry them. It is a sign of adulthood among the warriors. It is also very functional, just in case a lion should charge from the bush. The government cannot prevent a man from defending himself." He handed it to Oak. "See the weight of it, sir? A functional device, not merely something to place on one's living room wall."

  "Josh." The voice came from the landing above. It was half whisper, half moan. Craning his neck, he saw Merry standing atop the stairs leading up to the miniature mezzanine. She was staring at something. She looked as though she'd just seen a ghost. As it developed, he was not far off the mark.

  "Merry?" The proprietor followed him up the stairs, looking concerned.

  "Is your wife all right?"

  "She's not my wife," Oak said absently. "Merry, what's the matter?"

  "Look." She pointed.

  Lining the back wall was a crowded collection of ebony and blackwood statues. Few were more than a foot tall, though one towered more than a meter above the floor. All depicted grotesque, distorted figures that were loathsome mutations of animals and people. Oak recognized the outlines immediately.

  "That one there." Merry kept pointing. "That one's just like the one that I hit on my way home from work that morning." Oak started toward it and she tried to hold him back. "Don't."

  He smiled as he pulled away from her. She didn't relax even after he picked up the carving. "See? Just wood." He examined with interest the disgusting parody of a dog-man, turning the carving over in his hands.

  "Shetani." The shopkeeper looked more confused than worried now. "Beautiful work, the best. I have locally
made cheap imitations downstairs. These are all from the south coast and the Tanzanian interior. True Makonde."

  "Makonde." Oak put the carving down. "These aren't done by the Maasai, then?"

  "No, no." The Indian appeared surprised. "The Makonde are a small tribe that lives mostly in Tanzania, though a few have migrated to Kenya. They are noted for their woodcarving and they are the only ones who can do true shetani. They do little else."

  "Does the word mean anything?"

  "In the Makonde language shetani means 'spirit' or more often, 'devil-spirit.'" He grinned. "Silly primitivism, but the art is striking, is it not?"

  "Very striking," said Oak dryly. "You okay, Merry?"

  She nodded. "I just wish you wouldn't handle it, that's all. Just looking at it makes my stomach turn over."

  Oak continued to study the carving. "How far back do these shetani stories go?"

  "There are records in which such spirits are described by a Greek traveler to this part of the world in 450 b.c. He must have been well and truly taken in by the coast Makonde because he makes reference to the shetani as real creatures. Herodotus, I believe, was his name. The Makonde say there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of distinctly different kinds of shetani. They come in all sizes and shapes. Some are benevolent, most are not." Again the half-apologetic smile. "Native superstition. Animism is still more popular than Islam or Christianity in many parts of Africa."

  "I see." Oak fingered a tall elephant carving. "So the Makonde just continue making use of these spirits to satisfy the art market?"

  "Oh no, they truly believe in them. Stories of actual sightings of shetani are handed down from father to son, generation to generation. To see who is the biggest and best faker, I imagine. People laugh at their stories, which makes them sullen. The other tribes call them the Maweea, which means The Angry Ones."

  "Do the Maasai laugh at them too?"

  "I do not know, sir. I am not Maasai. That is a strange thing to wonder. Angry or not, they are wonderful woodcarvers and their shetani work resembles nothing else anywhere in Africa. Their visualizations are closer to the later works of Picasso and the twentieth-century abstractionists than to the work of their neighbors."