Fatal Journeys

by Lucy Taylor

  Before her, a bright and hideous flower bloomed, its malignant petals formed of flame, the scarlet stamen made of human flesh, and in its center, the charred mask of what had once been a face, but still, improbably, alive, eyes gone but mouth thrown wide to emit the screams of hell itself. The woman’s legs were V’d, her huge belly convulsing as though the fire had slid down her throat and was burning through from the inside. It took Charlotte a moment to realize the woman was already dead; it was not her screaming, but the tar-black and bloody thing that now emerged between her legs and dangled from her corpse.

  The sight and stench felled her like a blow. She bent double and began to wretch.

  One of the men turned toward her with a reproving glare. She recognized the long-lashed eyes and rictus smile of Harry Ingube.

  The sight of him was like a vicious slap, shocking her awake. The baby and the burning woman vanished. She was on the bed in the hotel room and feet were pounding up the stairs. Someone tried the door. A key rattled in the lock.

  Milt dashed into the room, tossing his daypack on the bed, babbling like a game show contestant who just won a microwave. “My God, Charlotte, what an amazing night! I got to witness an initiation ceremony! You should have seen the masks—hundreds of them, generations old! I felt like I was—Char, are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m not okay! I’ve been worried out of my mind. Where the hell were you?”

  “A spirit house. Harry said there was one klostu, remember?”

  “He took you there?”

  “No, no, nothing of the kind. He mentioned where it was, but I was the one who got it into my head to go. Honestly, Charlotte, I wanted to take you with me, but you heard what Harry said, that women aren’t allowed.” When her expression didn’t change, he added peevishly, “I thought you’d be pleased for me.”

  “Oh, I’m tickled to death, that you got to go on your bloody adventure while I thought maybe your head was going to show up on a pike.”

  “Come on, Char, don’t carry on. Look, Harry’s downstairs. He says if we leave now, there’s a PMV can take us around Mount Michael to within a few miles of the singsing, and he knows a short cut through the forest will get us the rest of the way. Why don’t you take a shower, throw some things in your pack and meet me downstairs in half an hour?” He said this as he retreated out of the room, closing the door behind him with exaggerated care.

  “Oh screw you!” yelled Charlotte. She reached for the object that was nearest, which happened to be the pillow on Milt’s side of the bed, and flung it at the door. As she did, something fell on the floor—a delicate white blossom with a yellow stamen and waxy, pale green leaves along the stem. Insects had apparently been at it; a cluster of tiny, ragged punctures were nibbled in the centers of the leaves. Was it something Milt had brought back to identify? She started to pitch it into the waste can, then reconsidered and slipped it into the side pouch of her daypack.

  ««—»»

  They caught a rattletrap PMV south to Lufa and part way around Mount Michael, grassy valleys alternating with steep peaks that jutted above densely forested hills. When they exited the PMV, Charlotte saw no trail at all, but Harry’s eyes were falcon keen. He led them unerringly up narrow, winding trails where, under a thick canopy of vegetation, a tree-kangaroo observed their passing from on high, gravely, with black button eyes, like a small but dour judge, and birdwing butterflies the size of saucers fluttered among the trees.

  Long before they reached the singsing, they could hear the distant thunder of the Kunda drums and the unearthly ululations of the singers summoning ancestral spirits to the festival. Smoke snaked above the trees as the forest gave way to open spaces where neat clusters of low walled, round huts were built among the rolling kunai-grass covered hills. As they approached, the singing picked up in intensity, chanting interspersed with yips and trills more suited to the repertoire of jungle birds than human throats.

  Energized by the din, Harry picked up the pace and led them to a slightly raised area between two of the huts where they could view the dancing and take pictures, but Charlotte didn’t know what to focus on first. The scene before her was a kaleidoscoping whirl of riotous color and furious sound, a weird cacophony of glottal grows and a hollow, almost metallic keening made by the women dancers on the periphery of the throng.

  The drumbeat picked up speed, became a single wild, primeval heartbeat that held all other hearts in thrall. The ground shook with the stomping of feet as painted bodies slick with pig grease, bedecked with cowrie necklaces and bird of Paradise plumes, offered up their incantations to the spirit world.

  As time wore on, there was no lull, no pause in the dancing. Charlotte began to feel queasy and lightheaded. She looked for a place to sit down and was suddenly surrounded by a group of nearly naked figures caked in white mud, their heads covered in grotesque, gourd-shaped masks.

  She looked around for Milt, knowing what it would mean to him to see the famous Mudmen of Asaro. With their fearsome appearance, it was easy to understand how, generations ago, they could have terrified an enemy tribe who saw them rising from the muddy river bank and believed they were ancestral spirits returning for revenge.

  One of the Mudmen danced closer, his grey mask looming over her until it almost scraped her cheek. Hard, enamel-bright eyes gleamed through the holes in the mask. The Mudman’s gyrating body blurred and reconfigured, the arms branching into a multiplicity of grasping limbs. She tried to shove away the leering mask and felt it dent and squish between her fingers, sloughing off like lizard skin, until she looked into Harry Ingube’s rakish, grinning face. She screamed, but the sound was smothered by the rumble of the drums.

  The world blinked out for a moment and when it returned, she was peering through the viewfinder of her camera again. The Mudmen of Asaro were still caught up in their ferocious dance, their masks intact, their limbs the normal number. A hand clasped her shoulder. Harry beckoned urgently. “Hurry! He’s over here!”

  He led her to an open area behind the huts. A circle had formed around a greased and feathered harlequin with a black and yellow face who knelt on the ground, bent over a pile of rumpled clothes. Only when she realized the man was administering CPR to the unresponsive bundle on the ground did she realize it was Milt.

  “What happened?” Pushing her way through the onlookers, she grabbed Milt’s wrist and felt for a pulse, but the very inertness of him, the limp density, told her this was not a living body. The harlequin gave up his ministrations and said gravely, “He began to shake. I think that he is dancing. Then his eyes roll up, he falls down, and he dies.”

  “But he can’t be dead, it isn’t possible!” cried Charlotte. “He wasn’t even sick, he was fine”

  She looked up and saw Harry eyeing her. Then she realized all the men were watching her. In a strange, detached way, her mind pushed grief aside, to be dealt with later, and began to calculate the degree of danger she might be in. She was with Milt. Now Milt was dead. She’d talked at length and in public to Bob Okibo, and he was dead, too. Had any of the men here been among the group of rascals in Goroka the day before?

  As if reading her thoughts, Harry said, “Charlotte, we must go back to Goroka. We must go now.”

  His tone brooked no nonsense. With the help of some of the men, they wrapped Milt’s body in a heavy cloth and secured it with rope, so that his body resembled a giant silkworm cocoon. Two men then hoisted the body between them and followed Harry and Charlotte back along the trail to the dirt track where the PMV had left them hours earlier. They didn’t linger, but dumped Milt’s body like a load of trash and made haste to return to the singsing.

  When the green mini-bus finally pulled up, the driver was unwilling to take a dead body on board, and the passengers inside grumbled and shot Charlotte and Harry dark looks. Finally, after some negotiations and a hefty bribe from Charlotte, the body was secured atop the vehicle and they rumbled off.

  They were half-way to Goroka—Charlotte had seen the signs
for a coffee factory and a trout farm that were popular tourist sights—when suddenly Harry yelled “Stop!” at the PMV driver. He grabbed Charlotte’s hand and pulled her toward the exit.

  “No, we can’t get off! We can’t leave Milt!”

  “The driver will drop his body at the morgue,” said Harry, muscling her off the bus. “But now I need to show you something important—so that you will understand.”

  “Understand what? What are you talking about?”

  In the bruise-colored twilight, his incandescent smile looked wolfen, feral. “Charlotte, this is where I used to live. Don’t argue, you come with me now, please.”

  Was it her imagination or did people watch her surreptitiously as they passed, children smirking behind their hands, women muttering in Pidgin? They were on the edge of a shanty town, tiny corrugated shacks cobbled one atop the other. Women squatted over cooking fires, mottled pigs rooted in the garbage. Although Charlotte could barely see where she was going, Harry threaded his way effortlessly along the narrow, littered passageways, pulling her by the hand. Occasionally, looking back, she thought she glimpsed the shadowy images of men moving stealthily behind them, keeping pace but not trying to catch up, but she said nothing to Harry. They reached an open area where a grove of wind-whipped trees wrapped bare limbs around each other like frightened children.

  “Here,” said Harry. “This is what you must see.”

  She saw nothing: an open area, stunted trees, the bald earth littered with lager bottles, crumpled food wrappers. What she felt, though, was far more tangible and menacing—hostile gazes pricking her skin like poison darts and the tang of danger, imminent and deadly, wafting in the sultry air.

  That’s her, she imagined hidden onlookers were whispering, the one who bewitched those men! Sanguma!

  “Please, let’s go,” she said, “It isn’t safe.”

  But Harry, having brought her to this stricken, terrible place, was in his element now, focused on his own thoughts only, oblivious to danger.

  “Years back,” he said, “a pregnant woman—a sanguma—was brought here to be burned. At first the fire, it will not start, but when it finally begins to burn, she struggles so hard the baby, it pops out between her legs. The baby’s auntie grab him quick, bundle him up, and run.”

  “And the woman?”

  “She died.”

  “The baby?”

  But she knew the answer already—she’d seen it in her dream, the infant, wet and screaming, expelled between the legs of its dying mother.

  “This is what happened to the baby,” Harry said. He turned his back to her and peeled his shirt off. The seared skin covered most of the region between his shoulder blades and waist, curving pink-white deltas against a nut brown field, smooth and rubbery as a carnival doll in some places, puckered and peppered with haphazard pigmentation in others. Repulsive in its glossy slickness. Like a blind woman reading a map in Braille, she ran her palm across the pale peninsulas and continents and atolls that described his injuries.

  “I watched you on the beach in Lae,” he said. “I saw your arms and recognized you from my dreams—a burned woman who searches for her spirit-mate, but doesn’t recognize him.”

  He turned and tried to pull her to him. She shrank away, not so much appalled by what he’d said than by the fact that she was not sufficiently repulsed. Excitement, lurid and terrible, thrilled through her like a fatal poison.

  “We’re two parts of the same person, you understand me, Charlotte? Even in death … together.”

  He looked past her then and saw something that caused his smile to petrify like a mask nailed to his face, so much so that when the four men rushed at him, screaming, brandishing clubs, he never flinched or cried out. Even as they beat him to the ground, the smile, now bloody, missing teeth, remained carved upon his face.

  So intent were they on beating Harry that Charlotte went almost unobserved—until she tried to run. Then one of them, a squat, flat-eyed man, skin black as lava rock, came after her. He whipped his fist into the small of her back and sent her sprawling.

  “You want to live?” he said, mildly and conversationally as a waiter asking how she liked her tea.

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “Then you were never here. You did not see this. The sanguma who bewitched our kinsman Bob Okibo did his work alone.”

  What happened next she watched in sick disbelief and horror, crouched down behind a tarp someone was using for a wall. One of the men broke a tree branch off and lit it while the others dragged Harry to the trunk and bound him tightly. And while she hid there, seeing his flesh blister and blacken and his face dissolve, listening to the terrible howls that came from his still living form, she became aware of others with her. Some emerged from the shanties to watch what they would later, under interrogation by the police, deny ever having seen. Others came from other realms entirely, ancestors who’d suffered through their own horrific deaths and waited to welcome Harry as their own. They nudged and nuzzled against her, familiar as family, grey and evanescent as ash.

  ««—»»

  It was dawn by the time she found her way out of the shanty town and caught a PMV going to Goroka. She sat by the window, watching the light cascade across the lush hillsides, tasting tears. For the first time since she’d come to New Guinea, she saw its fierce and mysterious beauty for what it was—a doorway into things she didn’t understand.

  Back at the hotel, she ignored the desk clerk’s somber stare and started up the steps, then turned back. Digging into her pack, she pulled out the leaf she’d found underneath Milt’s pillow.

  “You will dispose of this for me?”

  He stared a moment, his nostrils flaring like a panicked mule, and made the sign of the cross across his chest while murmuring several verses from the Psalms.

  Satisfied that her suspicion was correct, she softly said, “Tell me what it is.”

  “The leaf, it is the heart,” he finally said. “The holes are punctures made by a sorcerer to bring about a death.” He crossed himself a final time and said, “Your guide, the man Ingube—”

  “—is dead,” said Charlotte, and only then the desk clerk seemed to draw a proper breath.

  She went upstairs to her room. Gooseflesh rippled her skin like rain dappling the surface of a pond. She had to hold her right hand steady with the left one so she could unlock the door. She staggered inside, shut the door and slumped against it.

  The heat of the room failed to penetrate the sudden chill on her skin, as though within her flesh a frozen skeleton had moved to life, pieces of it chunking off, tiny glacial bits of bone floating in her bloodstream.

  Something shifted and reformed in the corner where the open bathroom door blocked off the thin light seeping through the windows and cast a dense rectangle of shade. The shadows slid like panels in a Chinese puzzle box, as something that had once been Harry crabbed its blistered limbs along the wall. His voice echoed clearly in her mind, at once imperative and plaintive.

  Even in death…together.

  She did something then that, before the events of the last twenty-four hours, would have been inconceivable—she turned to the wobbling, reshaping thing massed in the corner and addressed it as though it could understand.

  “There’s nothing here for you. Leave!”

  The faceless head shook slowly, like a sea anemone responding to the motion of the tides. For some reason—there was no mouth that she could see—she had the terrible sense that the wretched thing was smiling.

  The ice in her blood probed behind her teeth and stunned the air out of her chest. Red flares hissed behind her eyes. A great weight compressed her heartbeat and pinched her lungs to the size of seeds.

  Marshaling all her waning strength, she reached for the pillow on her side of the bed and turned it over.

  Knowing even before she did, what she would find there.

  Tivar

  Graham’s whisper was harsh with fear. “Did you hear that?”

  I had a
lmost drifted off to sleep, no easy feat in early summer in the interior of Iceland. At that time of year, the sun finally goes through a facsimile of setting around one a.m., when it teases a brief dip below the horizon, but the resulting night is a pale, anemic mockery of true darkness, more a ghostly half-light that turns the world into a sepia-tinted photo and conjures shadows that tempt the eye to trickery.

  Perhaps the ear as well, I thought, as I rolled over and pushed the sleeping mask off my eyes.

  “What?” My voice was thick and gravelly, my muscles painfully sore. We’d been in the saddle almost eight hours a day for the last five days, herding the horses from Stolli’s farm in southwest Iceland into the northern Highlands.

  “Stallions,” Graham said. “I heard them screaming.”

  I reached over and patted the lump in Graham’s sleeping bag that I took to be his shoulder. “All the horses we’re herding are mares and geldings and foals. You were dreaming.”

  “I heard them, Ellen.”

  “It was probably that story Stolli was telling us.”

  Stolli Sorenson, a horse breeder and rancher whom we knew from the Landsmot Horse Festival that Graham and I attended every summer was also our guide on this adventure. I’d wanted to do a cross-country ride before Graham and I flew back to the States, and Stolli had come up with the suggestion that, following the old Icelandic custom, we’d drive his herd up into the Highlands for the summer. We’d started out from Stolli’s farm west of Gullfoss, then headed north following the Pjorsa River between the glaciers Hofsjokull and Vatnajokull into the desolate Sprengisandur. Even the name Sprengisandur is ominous, deriving from the Icelandic word for exhaustion. In earlier times, so afraid were riders of the ghosts, elves, trolls, and outlaws who supposedly populated this barren region that they’d run their horses almost to death in an attempt to make the fastest possible crossing.