Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales

by Garry Kilworth

Du Mirror sniggered.

  ‘She does not remember you, Wilson,’ he sneered. ‘She will never know you again. I have administered a drug: once which erodes the memory, destroys it for good...’

  I sat back in my chair with a start. Such news was of course horrifying. My own dear Lygia, my beloved wife, did not know me. This lady without whom life was an emptiness to be compared only with the void of space, had no knowledge of my existence. Indeed, she stared upon me now with the cold politeness of a stranger. That she was kind and good, generous and loving, was evident only in her unblemished complexion, her sweet demeanour, not in her eyes. There was no warmth in them for me.

  ‘You are an evil man, du Mirror,’ I said, ‘but you have calculated wrongly this time. If it takes me the rest of my life I will win again the love of my dear wife and restore myself to my rightful place in her heart.’

  Turning to the lady in question I said, ‘Madam, allow me to introduce myself...’

  I was interrupted by a startling cackle, ejaculated from the mouth of my enemy. His eyes were feverishly bright, as if he were in the last days of some consumptive disease, and his thin red lips were cruelly twisted in a gesture of mockery. The lank dark hair that fell about his brow seemed infused with every essence of nefariousness. He was iniquity itself, but he was not yet finished with his wickedness.

  ‘You poor fool, he said, ‘do you not realise the extent of my scheme? You have taken the drug, not but an hour ago at the Café M——–. The third waiter there is my man. At last, I have you, William Wilson!’

  I recoiled in horror at the words, but I too had something to impart to my enemy, which would have him reeling before my eyes. I am not a man to be treated with contempt, regarded as a mere nothing in the eyes of foreign agents, looked upon with disdain. I am a man of action: I do what others have not yet done. I spoke to him then, in the accents of the victorious.

  ‘You, Sir, are an even poorer fool. The third waiter at the Café M——– is obviously a double agent, for he is also my man, and the potion he slipped into your Turkish coffee should be taking effect within just a few moments from now.’ I stared at him grimly, then added, ‘The difference between our methods ends at last the deadlock we have found ourselves in these past thirty years. You are an elaborate showster, sir, while I am a practical artificer. I have no desire to fool around with vials of liquid that induce amnesia. The fluid that went into your coffee was plain and simple strychnine. Enough to kill a razor-wielding orangutan, let alone a worn out husk of a middle European with Gothic pretensions. You are a dead man, du Mirror!’

  There was silence between us then, for several seconds. The candle burned, the mists seeped under the ill-fitting door from the river, and the landlord coughed from his stool by the cellar door.

  It was then that Hawthorne, alias M. du Mirror, fell forward across the table, foam bubbling from his lips.

  ‘Curse you, Poe,’ he whispered with laboured breath, ‘my one solace is that you will never again recognise your own wife, the lady Lygia...’

  ‘The lady who?’ I said, pulling on my gloves, but received no reply, for he laughed an insane laugh before gargling his final breath.

  I rose from the table intending to take my leave, but not forgetting to bow briefly but politely to the dying man’s female companion, a lady of unquestionable beauty though uncertain age.

  ‘Madam,’ I said, ‘your escort appears to be intoxicated. I suggest you call for a cab and transport him to his lodgings without delay. A very good evening to you. I have been glad to make your acquaintance but I must go to...go to...’ I searched my mind but finding nothing, left the table in as little confusion as possible. Somewhat puzzled by my elusive thoughts I made my way to the street and strode out in the direction of____ Before I had gone about a quarter of a mile, I heard police whistles piercing the stillness of the night, and hurrying footsteps behind me. The woman from the inn passed me at a rapid pace, closely followed by the landlord. It seemed that some terrible deed had been perpetrated of which I had no knowledge. I returned to the inn and offered my assistance to the inspector whose task it was to solve the crime, the murder of an unknown patron of the ale house. Through weeks of diligent detective work I was able to establish that the man had been poisoned, not in the place where the body was found, but by the third waiter in a café on the other side of the city. The guilty fellow was duly tried and executed according to the law. The identity of the corpse however was never discovered and police files remain closed in that particular respect.

  All this was a long time ago. It is a peculiarity of the drug which Hawthorne administered that a reversal takes place in later years. Whereas one would normally expect to experience a decline into senile dementia, as one grows older, I in fact have noticed a sudden improvement in the machinations of my faculties. Certain areas of lost events have returned with a clarity never previously possessed. I have recently managed to communicate with my dear wife Lygia, who has also recovered much of the memory of her previous life. Hawthorne, on the other hand, has made no such happy discovery regarding the poison I had delivered to his lips. He has experienced no resurrection; has not leapt from the grave thoroughly invigorated; has not cast off his shroud and danced upon his own tomb. This indeed proves the value of the practical over the absurd. Hawthorne remains, firmly and securely, as dead as a nail.

  ORACLE BONES

  Lectures at Hong Kong’s Royal Asiatic Society sometimes sparked of ideas. ‘Oracle Bones’ was one of them, ‘China Coast Pidgin’ was another. I haven’t written that one yet and I’ve forgotten much of the pidgin I used, though one phrase will remain with me forever: ‘piano’ in CC pidgin was ‘toothy-face, bashy-in, cry.’

  When the youth reached the hill village, the elders were in the Happy Hut, locked in a debate concerning the nature of heavenly bodies and their effect on regional game. The old men were of course smoking opium in order to keep their heads clear during the argument and to increase their skill at presentation. There was nothing the tribes-people enjoyed more than a lively contest of words. It was at the height of this serious discussion that the runner arrived, bristling with urgency. He was told to wait.

  One shrivelled husk with a hollow, rattling chest stated emphatically that each time a bird was caught in a snare, or a squirrel was shot with a musket, a new star appeared in the night sky. There was an impatient murmur of agreement. This fact was not in dispute. That a tally of the hunters’ kills was maintained by the gods was a truism. In the time of the first ancestors, far back, the heavens had been black and almost empty. The point that was contested was whether each star was a permanent replacement for each separate kill, because certainly the game had decreased dramatically in number over the centuries. It was a fact that wild pigs had all but disappeared. The deer, once as numerous as the termites, were now impossible to find.

  The young messenger, who was from the same tribe but from a different village, waited outside the Happy Hut in frustrated silence for the debate to finish. Though the women had immediately taken care of his thirst, his bare feet were hot from the three-day run, and he longed to bathe in the cool stream. He sighed and scratched his insect bites, his heart full of things other than the carrying of urgent messages.

  The boy’s own people lived three valleys away in the direction of the sun and his long run was not yet over. There was the return journey to make. When he had been asked to deliver the message he had been halfway through a careful but hasty erection of his bridal hut. Sixteen years old, he had been wed just over seven days, but had yet to consummate the marriage. The living-hut which he had inherited from his father was not a fit place for the sexual act, since the spirits of his ancestors hovered around the corners and flickered on the support poles, and they would be shocked if he and his bride performed in their view. So, like all young men, he had to build a separate little bridal hut of bamboo roofed with banana leaves. This post-nuptial dwelling had to be at least a body-length from the living-hut. There, he and his new
wife could reveal themselves to each other, away from the eyes of family ghosts. He had to build carefully since it had to be strong enough to withstand youthful athletics, yet swiftly because he was eager to experiment with procreation.

  The youth looked up at the sky and sighed again. Dark clouds were buffeting each other across invisible terraces. He could make out the shapes of dogs amongst them, and wondered what that meant. A rain-wind was coming in low, through the treetops. He could see the shape of this broad wind running like a river over the foliage. Perhaps that was all it was? Rain coming?

  Amongst the creased and withered elders, who puffed on their clay pipes, creating a dense fug in the debating hut, was a man of great standing. He was the most ancient of any of the tribal dignitaries, having survived disease, accident and the rigours of opium for an unprecedented half century, though a recent respiratory problem indicated that it was doubtful he would make his fifty-first birthday. Though this particular village was one of the poorest of a poor nation, this man was their most powerful shaman. It was to him that the youth had come running.

  The village was on a tall place, the peak of long ridge, and the youth hopped from one foot to the other, staring out over the hardwood forests below thinking of the beauty of his bride. She was plump and round-faced, with large dark eyes, and when he had first taken her to the courting garden and offered to push her on the swing made of vines, she had accepted without hesitation. There had been problems with her father of course, who had not approved of the youth as a suitable husband, but the boy had obtained a magic egg and had enticed the girl into the jungle. Once they had cooked and eaten the egg together, without interruption, the father naturally had to consent to the marriage. The egg had cost the youth two piglets, but she was worth it. Her cheeks were like ripe fruits and she had strong fat thighs. The youth’s feet itched when he thought about those thighs.

  Finally, though the debate was not yet at an end, the elders left the hut to perform their individual toilets. Clearly the exercise and fresh air were not good for them, because as soon as they were on their feet and out of the smoke they began to stagger. The messenger went immediately to the shaman, who was leaning on a portal attempting to catch his breath.

  ‘Great one’, cried the boy, ‘messengers have come from the big river to warn us of a coming!’

  Red-veined eyes regarded the youth with little interest.

  ‘Coming?’ wheezed the old man. ‘Who is coming?’

  ‘Men. Men clad in clothes stained brown and green, and they have weapons, which shoot musket balls in great showers. They are as numerous as marching ants, and some of them come from the sky in whirling things, which fire thunderbolts. We are afraid they are coming to kill us all.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ whispered the shaman, coughing red flecks into the palm of his hand.

  ‘You must tell us what course of action to take. The headman of my village has sent me here to ask your advice. This is an evil which threatens our whole nation and you, as our greatest shaman, have been given the authority to consult the oracle bones.’

  A light came into the shaman’s red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘The oracle bones?’ he breathed. ‘Aaahhh!’

  The elders were recalled from their functions in the forest and told of the news. It was universally agreed that the shaman should consult the oracle bones and a woman was dispatched to fetch the last two bulls owned by the village headman. The corral where the cattle were kept was much closer than the village from which the young man had made his run, and the domestic beasts were in the hands of the shaman by nightfall. A ritual killing took place, then the flesh was stripped from the bulls and roasted over log fires. The old men put aside their pipes and feasted on the meat, which since the bulls had been slaughtered by the shaman in secret ceremony, was sacred and could therefore only pass the lips of an elder. All this was only right and proper.

  The smell of the roasted bulls drove the young man mad and he went off into the forest to sleep. There under the moon-green roof of the world, he lay and dreamed of his fourteen-year-old bride. He had seen some of the girls in this village, as he had passed the spring where they filled their gourds, and none of them were as pretty as his own puff-cheeked wife. They had giggled as he ran swiftly past them, a stranger in their midst. It was true that there were probably several in the courting gardens that evening, waiting to see if he would appear, for there is no one more likely to cause turmoil in the hearts of local maidens than a youth from foreign climes. In his own village he might cause little excitement amongst the girls he had grown up with (his beloved being the one exception), but here he was a slim young god from exotic regions. There would be much speculation amongst older married women of seventeen or more about what his loincloth shielded, and concerning the tight roundness of his buttocks. The thoughts of the maidens, less direct, would be dwelling on his sinewy arms and thighs, and on the clarity of his eyes. Altogether, there would be little of his anatomy left untouched by the minds of the female population of this high village.

  He slept fitfully, bothered less by the bark beetles and the spiders than by his own mental agitation. He went once to the spring for water, and interrupted an illicit meeting between a couple, married, but not to each other. The sounds of the elders feasting were disturbing the whole community, and there were few people in their beds. At dawn the women rose and began to pound the rice with foot-worked beam-hammers, and even the demons deep in the earth had their teeth rattled. The young man went and performed his ablutions, passing cleansed under the gate with the dogs’ skulls and wooden figures that guarded the village. Elders had told him that once he was old enough to smoke opium and be privy to the true nature of the universe, he would see those wooden figures dance on the ends of their poles. The young man was not certain he was looking forward to this privilege.

  The elders rose at noon and found their instructions for scraping clean the bulls’ sternums had been duly carried out. A charcoal oven which had been built beyond the village perimeter was consecrated, and two large bones were heated in this makeshift kiln. The young man knew that the shaman would retrieve the bones, once they had been allowed to cool, and inspect the cracks caused by the intense heat. Reading these symbols, sent by the gods through the fire into the bones, the shaman could divine the future. One sternum bone represented peace and the other war, and by this method would he know how the tribe should treat with the hordes now crossing the big river.

  The youth waited in an agony of loneliness and homesickness while this ceremony took place. He wondered what his beloved was thinking right at that moment, as she worked out in the fields under the blazing sun. Was she dreaming of him? Of course, she must be. And the hut, still only half finished! Perhaps if he made it smaller, it might be nearer completion, but then they had little enough room in which to romp as it was. Like most youths he wanted it large enough for her to be able to hold herself temporarily aloof, so that the eventual coming together would be that much sweeter. They needed to find each other in the darkness, not too soon, or the pleasure would be common and earthly. He anticipated going out on his first hunt, after their first union, and bringing home a tree squirrel or a fish for the pot. How her delighted cheeks would shine for him! He had been told by the elders that the pleasure of satisfying boy-girl desires was secondary to the wonders of the pipe, which he would be allowed to discover after his twenty-fifth birthday, but he could not believe such a tale. That was old men’s talk, for those whose loins had long since dried like seedpods under the sun. That was talk from those who could enjoy only dreams, whose passion had moved to their heads.

  The following day he was summoned to the hut of the elders and the shaman gave him double-edged news.

  The oracle bones had emerged from the charcoal without a crack on either of them. Such a thing had never happened before in the history of the tribe.

  ‘It means,’ said the shaman, ‘either the tribe has no future to record on the bones, or the invaders wi
ll pass over us without disturbing us.’

  ‘Should we risk it? Why don’t we all hide?’ said the youth. ‘Why don’t we run up into higher country still, where I have heard there are caves? We could stay there until these invaders have left our country, and then return and rebuild our villages. They would never find us up there.’

  The shaman pursed his lips.

  ‘Would you have us defy the gods?’ he said.

  ‘Is it possible,’ asked the youth, ‘that the fire was not hot enough? Or the bones too fresh? I have seen hotter fires, bones that were drier.’

  ‘Leave us,’ said the shaman. ‘Go back to your village.’

  The youth left readily enough and ran for three days, pausing only to drink from some broad-leafed plants that had formed basins for the rainwater during the last downpour. He arrived back at his home just as news reached his own elders that a village further down the valleys was already in flames. The elders took the youth’s message and fell immediately into grave debate, while the young people crowded round the youth and asked questions of one that had travelled the world outside, had journeyed to the unknown regions of another village.

  The boy ate then slept after that and awoke to the sound of rapid gunfire. He snatched his own long-barrelled musket, powder and ball, and ran outside. His young bride was running towards him, having raced from the fields. Her round face was bright with fear

  ‘The enemy are coming,’ she gasped. ‘They are shooting and burning.’

  The youth waited no longer. He grabbed her by the wrist and led her towards the first ridge. He would take her to the next village and try to persuade the elders that they should take action, prepare to resist the foe, or escape into the mountains. As he ran, pulling his frightened bride behind him, he called to his brothers, sisters and cousins to join him, but they merely stopped and stared as if he were mad, then turned their bemused eyes in the direction of the forest, from which plumes of flames emerged with crackling roars. The sound of whirling clatter came from the distant sky.