Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  The bush was thick with plants and tsetse flies. The lioness had climbed up into the foothills, a place I’d never been. You couldn’t see far in front of your face and the Kikuyu were jittery. I was considering ditching the horses or just turning round. The hounds were straining at the leash and I bad the handler let them go.

  There were four dogs left and game as their breed is, they dove right into the bush. Could hear them barking a ways ahead, and I expected to hear either the lioness again or nothing at all shortly. But what I heard was a woman’s scream.

  Well, I don’t know what I thought. The booze you know, and the needle I’d had for breakfast, thought maybe I was hearing things, but one look at the bearers and the askari and I knew they’d heard it too. Woman screaming like you’ve never heard a woman scream, and the dogs snarling and snapping like they were tearing into her. Never knew Lion Hounds to attack a man or woman. They’re as loyal to humanity as they come, and as I said, they’re gundogs, so they don’t really hunt by smell. No chance they’d got the scents mixed up somehow. I thought maybe this woman had been out in the bush for some reason and been attacked by the lioness, but I didn’t hear the lioness, you see. Just her and those damned dogs.”

  I rode the way the dogs had gone, crashing through with the four Maasai and the gunbearers close behind.

  The dog handler was lagging. I guess he thought whatever his dogs were doing, he was going to be blamed for it, and he was thinking of turning tail.

  The sounds got closer, and we burst through a tangle of brush and found them at the edge of a clearing in the forest.

  The woman was turtled up on her belly, knees tucked in, arms over her head, and the dogs were all over her. I saw one tear a chunk of flesh from her calf in a splatter of blood. She cried out, and the other three were trying to work their long noses into the soft space between her ears and her bare, bleeding shoulders.

  I pulled my howdah pistol out of my belt and discharged it into the air. The dogs all flinched and backed away like they were trained, looking around for their master.

  “Get up here!” I yelled to the handler. “Get up here and get ‘em, you bloody fool!”

  He came over, nodding his head and blowing the whistle around his neck, calling the dogs to him. Just as they had overcome the woman, they ran across the clearing and swarmed all over him, licking and wagging their tales as if they were to be rewarded.

  “What the hell got into ‘em?” I demanded, tucking my pistol away and going to the woman.

  She was a Negress, and naked, fine formed but for the blood and ragged bite marks in her flesh. She was high toned, not the dark sort of steam engine black you usually see in Africans. Her skin was golden, like honey, and her hair was short and I suppose dyed a light blonde color against her scalp.

  I spoke to her in Swahili, low, soothing. I didn’t want her damned village blaming us for this and getting unnecessarily ugly. I explained about the lion, and apologized for the dogs, and said we’d get her a doctor and remuneration for her ordeal. I waved the others over to bear her up.

  And that was when I saw her shoulder.

  The woman who had asked about my Swahili lit a cigarette, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of her face in the light of the match. She wore a scarf beneath her hat, and half of it was draped across her left eye. She had a young, pretty face up to the point where the scarf obscured her. The skin there was mottled and wrinkled, as if from a fire. She looked up at me, her one eye glistening, and then there was only the afterimage, and the pinpoint ember of her cigarette.

  I swallowed another glass of scotch.

  “A .404 slug would blow a girl’s joint apart, take her arm clean off. No question as to her running away either. The shock, you know, not just of the wound, but of the force of impact. They’re manufactured to take down charging elephants, and I had seen Gerry’s bullet hit that lioness as she threw off one of the hounds. A glancing shot, true, but it had taken a good portion out of her shoulder. This native girl had a wound in the very same spot.

  That was the first thing I noticed. Then, when the bearers turned her on her back, and we saw her face. That face. It was like something out of a damned nightmare.

  Her eyes were gold, the irises...narrow like a snake’s. Like a cat’s. Her mouth, her damned teeth. The canines were pointed, and her mouth was all wrong. Just...all wrong. The nose was mashed into the upper lip, which was...malformed, split like a harelip but...,” I jammed my tongue behind my upper lip and pushed out, flattening my nose to demonstrate. “Like that.

  The dog handler was the first to run. He let go of his dogs and ran amongst them, like one of them, for the back of the train. My bearer dropped my Holland & Holland and ran after him, the devil. I remember thinking if he’d damaged my gun I was going to flay its value from his black hide. The four Kikuyu that had taken hold of her fell away like somebody had lobbed a grenade in their midst. Only myself and the Maasai didn’t run.

  I can’t speak for the Maasai, but I was full of liquor and heroin.

  She flopped on her belly when they dropped her and sprung up and sort of half-ran, limping away on her bloodied leg. Then she tripped and fell to her hands and that was how she went into the bush, on all fours, or rather three, loping away like an animal on her hands.

  The four Kikuyu ran back to the train, shouting something in Swahili, and it was like a brushfire the way it caught on. Up and down the train the word traveled, echoed in every black mouth, until all our goods were being dumped and the whole party was running pell mell back down the hill. I could hear Bernice shrieking. She had these fantasies about the blacks all coming after her at once. She must have thought it was coming true.”

  “What word?” the woman asked.

  “Watusimba. Watusimba.”

  “Lion People?” Malcolm repeated, watching the bearers scurrying away like frightened children. “What the hell are they talking about?”

  “I don’t know, some local mumbo jumbo,” I said.

  “Does b’wana not know of the Lion People?” one of the Maasai, a mean young buck called Sabore asked me.

  “No we’re not acquainted,” I chuckled, taking my hip flask of bourbon out and tapping it.

  “But did b’wana not see the woman’s face?”

  “I don’t know what I saw, goddammit,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and feeling the burning swell in my belly climb up to my sweating forehead.

  I picked up my Holland & Holland and checked the action, satisfied the fool hadn’t broken it in his womanly panic.

  “What are you two babbling on about?” Bernice said.

  She was annoyed. The absinthe had run dry. “Let’s just kill this thing and be done with it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said again.

  “You don’t know you don’t know,” Malcolm taunted drunkenly from his horse. “Either it was a woman or it wasn’t.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have been.”

  “Right. And if it was, well, I want to see it.”

  “Me too! Me too!” Bernice giggled like a cow.

  “But there was a woman....”

  “Well then if she ran off into the bush bleeding, it’s our goddamned duty as English gentlemen to see she’s alright,” Malcolm said. “Ain’t it?”

  “Bleeding bush!” Bernice exclaimed, and shook so hard in the saddle she nearly fell.

  “B’wana,” said Sabore to me, low so they wouldn’t hear. “Killing watusimba will bring you great honor. But these...,” he said, gesturing with his eyes to Malcolm and Bernice. “These will get you killed.”

  “Come on, Cap,” Malcolm pushed. “Are you a man or not?”

  That boiled in my ears, this Oxford blue blood pansy saying that to me, when I’d had his silly little wife six ways from Sunday because he couldn’t do the job.

  “Alright, Malcolm. A-hunting we will go.”

  “We left the horses and went ahead on foot. Bernice complained the whole way. She complained about leaving h
er horse with one of the Maasai, she complained about having to lug her gun about herself. Mostly she complained that we had no booze. Sabore wanted to kill her and leave her, but I gave her my hip flask. That quieted her some. The Maasai still went pretty far ahead of us, and I thought they’d ditched us, but after about a half hour one jogged back and told us to be very quiet, that they’d found the...I don’t know the word they used. It was like pride, but it was like village too.”

  I reached for the bottle and poured the last of it into my glass.

  “We were crouched in the brush overlooking a cleft in the forest, into which was nestled a collection of mud and thatch huts.

  The villagers below all seemed to be gathered in the communal plaza, and we could see the girl we had pursued lying in their midst, a sort of witch doctor in a lion hide cape leaning over her. I don’t know what I had seen back when we’d gotten the dogs off of her. She looked perfectly normal now. Some trick of the rubbish in my veins or the rot in my belly.

  They were a striking bunch, all the same honey colored hue, the women all with their hair short and dyed blonde. The men however, had cultivated their hair into these bushy manes that stood a full foot out from their heads, and were almost the same color as their hides.

  “Marvelous looking bunch of buggers aren’t they?” Malcolm whispered to me.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are the lions? I don’t see any bloody lions,” Bernice hissed.

  The Maasai had been silent, but now the three of them murmured some prayer in Maa. I could only catch a word of it. It was to the Red God, their god of vengeance.

  “Oh there’s one,” said Bernice.

  I don’t know just when she’d got her rifle out. In truth I didn’t even know she had the capacity to ready and fire it, but there was all of a sudden a great boom that bounced off the walls of the little valley, and the lion caped witch doctor’s head burst into a bloom of brains, blood, and bone. A palpable shot, no less.

  Well, I wasn’t about to be showed up by that cow Bernice, and anyway once civilian blood was shed, they all had to go. No witnesses. The Colonel had taught me that as well.

  There were about thirty villagers down below, and at the first sound of gunfire they scattered to a man. Malcolm and I poured bullets down into the village and the Maasai let loose with their bows. It was quite like the old adage about shooting fish in a barrel. They had apparently planned their village trusting to its hidden location to defend them. But now surprised, there was no escape.

  Bernice was cackling as she fired again and again, and Malcolm encouraged her, as if we were shooting at a flock of pheasants.

  I don’t know how many I killed. Men, women, even the children.

  The Maasai were just as merciless. I’d never known them to exercise such unscrupulous efficiency. They exterminated the villagers, as though they hated them. Then, not satisfied with the distance, they drew their seme swords and their orinki clubs and slid down the escarpment, howling like wildcats.

  Something in their enthusiasm enflamed me, and I followed. Malcolm too, followed slowly by Bernice, who lost her pith helmet on the way down and had to go back for it.

  “Mind where you shoot now, dear,” Malcolm called in parting as he and I touched the bloody valley floor, the Maasai already ducking into the huts, weapons whistling.

  Of the original thirty, half their number looked to have died in the surprise onslaught. We stepped over half naked bleeding bodies of the young and old, loading our rifles as we went. The smell of death was thick in the air.

  “Champion fun, eh, Cap?” Malcolm remarked, tucking his rifle under his arm and reaching into the breast pocket of his shooting jacket to retrieve his cigarettes.

  Something in what we were doing penetrated my addled mind, and I slung my rifle and drew out my howdah.

  The Maasai were slipping in and out of the huts, strung with gore. I was still amazed at how quickly they were enacting this, and without question. I wondered what sort of intertribal feud had sparked such vehemence in them.

  They were even killing the children.

  “Listen Malcom. This is bloody business,” I said. “I’m up for it, but I’ve got to know that you and Bernice are too. Down the line.”

  “Sure sure, old man,” Malcom said, lighting his cigarette as Bernice came up behind him, adjusting her blouse.

  “Where’s my lion?” she asked cheerily. “It is mine, isn’t it? I shot it. Kiki can...”

  That was when there was a tremendous lion’s roar, closer than I’d ever hoped to hear one, and suddenly there was a blur of yellow. I think it came from the nearest hut. It knocked Bernice flat, and I heard Bernice scream, the sound muffled as if she were yelling into a pillow. Muffled because its jaws had covered her face.

  * * * *

  “What was it, Captain Howe?” asked the young man in the shadows.

  “It was a lion. Or rather, I thought it was. Huge beast, a male with a great wavy mane. It was strange though. Its shoulders and its forelegs, more like a man’s arms. A very strong man. Biceps, elbows, wrists, but they ended in a lion’s paws. I remember the claws in her shoulders, to the cuticle. It happened so fast there was no blood. It had a man’s legs too. The knees, you know, were up on either side of it, like a man perched on something. I saw the muscles in its jaws flex beneath the fur. It raised its head, and the whole front portion of her skull came away. Just a bloody shell left behind, with her hair all around. I could see her brains, bitten in half. Ghastly.”

  Maybe not so ghastly as what some of these others had seen, for no one excused themselves from the room.

  I saw a couple of them lean forward in their chairs. The woman with the burned face.

  “It sprang at Malcolm next. The damned fool never knew what happened. I think he mumbled something through his cigarette. He’d only just turned in time to see the thing tear his wife’s face off. I saw the cigarette drop out of his lips and then it knocked his head right of his shoulders. Just batted it off with one paw, like a man knocking another man’s hat off.”

  I reached for the glass, but the bottle was empty. I looked at it a moment, then put the glass back on the tray. It was a loud sound in the stillness. They waited for me to go on.

  * * * *

  Malcolm fell, blood spurting from his ragged stump of a neck. I thrust my howdah at the lion thing and gave it both barrels in the face. It reeled backwards, and then Sabore and one of the Maasai rushed past me and leapt full on its chest, hacking and clubbing it.

  I backed away, feeling sick. Underneath their black limbs I saw the carcass of the thing begin to shrink, the hair to fall away.

  Sabore spun and, taking his knife, hacked at the tail, which appeared to be retreating like a scared python, sliding up toward the body somehow. Severed, the tail lay, but the stump kept shrinking, bleeding only a little.

  Sabore laughed and picked up the tail. It was a traditional trophy of the Maasai, but this one was entirely bare.

  A sickly thing, like a snake, or a big brown skinned rat’s tail. But he held it up and shouted exultantly to his fellows.

  Me, I watched its previous owner. As Sabore’s companion stood, I got a better look. It was not a lion. It was one of the villagers, a man, his face mauled to blood and bone by my howdah pistol, his body perforated and broken by the two Maasai’s assault.

  I stumbled backward as the other Maasai crowded around Sabore and began to leap and call out in their victory dance.

  * * * *

  “I didn’t really understand what I’d seen, you see,” I said, folding my hands in my lap, rolling my thumbs, wanting to call for the Negro to fetch another bottle. “I didn’t know if it was the heroin or the liquor, or perhaps the cocaine I’d shared with Malcolm in camp. But there Malcolm and Bernice were, dead, and there was Sabore, hoisting up that damnable hairless tail.

  Then we heard the roaring. All around us. The Maasai’s celebration had been quite premature.”

  I smiled bitterly and closed my
eyes.

  * * * *

  The Maasai instantly ceased their jumping and formed a back to back circle, spears at the ready. Sabore issued orders. I didn’t speak much Maa, but I knew the sound of an officer yelling for his rattled subordinates to buck up.

  I stuffed my howdah into my belt and unslung my rifle.

  I was outside of their circle, and I turned warily all around, so jittery my hands shook.

  I’d never heard the sounds of so many lions together.

  One roar began before another ceased. They all blended together. It was like they were issuing their own commands and assertions, sounding their own war cry.

  Then they came out from behind the huts. I couldn’t count them. They moved too quick. Some of them ran out on two feet like men, and like the girl had done, fell to running on all fours, the wind pressing back their manes, those that had them, for some were females. I knew they were for I could see their quite human, fur covered breasts, their rounded haunches, and all of them with their terrible jaws bared and snarling, their weird, half-human, half-lion faces contorted in rage.

  The Maasai held their circle, gamely maintained their ground.

  I bolted for the nearest hut, firing my big H&H as I went. I dove into the shelter as the front line of the watusimba threw themselves on the Maasai spears with such force some of the weapons snapped in two. I landed in something like a wet bag of kindling, the corpses of a pair of small children. Too small to think about, really.

  I retreated in horror from the grisly bodies and rolled on my belly, taking aim through the open doorway with my rifle.

  The Maasai struggled to free their spears from the dying watusimba, and in the meantime those in the rear sprang over their fellows and fell full upon them, rending and tearing their black skin, freeing the pink and red and the white bone beneath. Drifting fur and blood and screams hovered over the horrible tangle of men and beastmen and beastwomen.

  There were five of the creatures left alive, but only two Maasai standing. One of them was Sabore. He flung his orinka at one of the leaping females and it broke against her forehead, then he whipped out his seme short sword and desperately began to lay about him, howling like a madman as they closed in and shredded his red garment and jewelry and slashed the skin from his shining shoulders.