Bont gave a great sigh of frustration: ‘OK, OK. I get the message. Let’s go and rescue this unknown woman.’ He looked at Ria: ‘It’s what I would want for my Sabeth,’ he admitted.
Still well lit by the big moon, the valley floor lay about five hundred paces below them. A stream wound through it and there were numerous stands of mixed trees and bushes.
It was from one of these, a copse no more than a hundred paces across, with just the faintest glow of a campfire visible near its centre, that the terrible screams were coming.
Ria decided what to do and informed the others as they scrambled with her down the valley side. There would be no out-loud speech, only thought-talk. They would surround the copse, all enter it at the same moment, and converge on that fire. If they were outnumbered they would back off without engaging the enemy and the woman would be left to her fate. But if this was a fight they could win they would attack and try to save her.
It had seemed like a good plan from outside the copse. But once inside, Ria began to have doubts. Suppose this turned out to be nothing to do with the Illimani? Or suppose it was the opposite and there were dozens of them there? Suppose there were sentries? She was aware of the minds of all her companions as she made her way forward. ‘You won’t let me down, will you?’ she pulsed to the Uglies. ‘Give them no mercy this time.’
‘We will give them death,’ came the reply.
The woman’s screams had begun again, much closer. The man, who had fallen silent, released a fresh volley of hoarse cries, and there were more guffaws of that hideous hyena laughter that Ria now recognised, with complete certainty, as the sound of the Illimani.
Her right hand went to the new deerskin pouch hanging at her side. Brindle had given it to her filled with five good throwing stones. She pulled two out. They couldn’t match the beauty of her lost hunting stones but they would do the job.
Up ahead she caught the glow of the campfire flickering through the trees, shadows moving around it. There was a sickly smell of burning flesh in the air and the sounds kept getting louder. Screams. Snuffling. Slaps. What were they doing to that poor woman? And what was the man groaning and pleading about? Ria listened intently as she crept forward. He was speaking the language of the Merell. She understood the individual words but they were garbled and incoherent and she couldn’t make sense of them.
Then the little group around the fire came into view.
With light from the bright moon and the flickering flames not much was left to the imagination.
A spit had been rigged up.
Impaled on it, roasting over the fire, was the sad, pathetic torso of a small boy.
An evil-looking Illimani was slowly rotating the spit. His narrow pinched face had been transformed to a grinning skull by warpaint. His penis was erect and his glittering eyes were eating up what was happening a few paces away where a naked young woman, her long willowy body smeared with blood, was being raped by two more Illimani braves. One of them was very tall, with huge muscular arms. He was pinning down her head and shoulders, fondling her breasts and half-stifling her screams with a hand clamped over her throat. The other man, thickset and covered in body hair, was penetrating her, forcing her legs apart as she struggled against him. He was pounding into her, uttering grunts of animal pleasure.
Ria could feel anger building in her chest like a storm, and her mind-contact with her companions told her they too were witnessing this and were ready. Wait! she pulsed.
She edged two steps closer. Could this be a trick? Could there be an ambush? Were other Illimani lurking to attack the moment they showed themselves?
But on the opposite side of the fire she saw only two more figures. One, wearing the Merell plaid, lay beaten and bloody on the ground. The second, a massively fat Illimani whose naked back and arse were covered in swirling tattoos, was shaking with laughter, leaning over the fallen man and offering him something.
Ria squinted.
The smoke from the fire was in the way. She moved a pace to the side and saw that the Illimani was holding a child’s arm – no doubt the child whose torso roasted on the spit – and encouraging the fallen man to eat it. Then Ria understood everything. The man on the ground was the child’s father, the woman being raped was his wife and the Illimani were playing a vicious game with them.
What was the deal? They’d stop raping her if he’d eat his own son?
That wouldn’t do at all.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Kill yourself. The sooner the better.
That’s what the voice had urged Leoni to do, and for a moment, in the dream, she’d accepted absolutely that she must.
Visions could be true. Leoni was past doubting it. They were a doorway into supernatural realms, where time and matter behaved differently. When she went through that door to pursue the mysteries that lay on the other side, she knew she was exposing herself to psychic attack – the way Sulpa had attacked her when she’d tried to stop him devouring the souls of the children he’d sacrificed, and the way Don Apolinar had abducted her.
Such risks came with the visionary territory. She accepted them every time she made the journey. But it was somehow much more disturbing to consider that a similar threat might just now have stalked her in a dream.
A macabre and horrible dream.
Surely it had been no more than that? Her subconscious working overtime, editing together bits and pieces from here and there? It made sense that the voice emanating from the static on the TV screen had been influenced by Don Emmanuel’s account of Jack speaking out of a mirror. And the instruction to kill herself was likely connected to her alleged ‘suicide attempt’ by OxyContin overdose.
Or so, at least, she fervently hoped.
The other really disturbing development, despite sinking Apolinar’s boat the night before, was the shocking speed with which their pursuers had caught up with them again, missing them by just two hours at Don Esteban’s village. Jack had said his ‘servants’ were on the way, but to get there so fast they must have bypassed Iquitos and begun their search from the river town of Pucallpa in the Shipibo heartland.
It was almost impressive – how they got things done.
With a great effort of will Leoni shifted her attention back to the gloomy and constricted side branch of the Ucayali they’d entered while she slept.
Perhaps it was just the aftermath of her dream, but the sinuous way the river wound through the dense rainforest, frequently doubling back on itself, was bewildering and scary. It was only about twenty feet wide here but its labyrinthine course repeatedly branched, offering multiple alternative routes and Leoni realised if it were viewed from the air it would look like a path through a gigantic maze – with walls of trees a hundred feet high. God forbid she would ever be alone here because she would never find her way out. She was impressed by the way Don Emmanuel’s nephew Esteban – a lean and wizened man of more than seventy – always knew which turn to take.
Late afternoon had become early evening. The sun was still in the sky but down here on the river, with the trees towering overhead, it was already growing dark. The night insects were out, looking for blood. As she slapped away a cloud of mosquitos, Leoni heard the distinctive call – a long falling liquid note, rising at the end to a percussive whoop – of the colourful yellow and black bird Matt had told her was called an oropendola. There was something so haunting and lonely about the sound that she found herself blinking back tears.
Matt was sitting behind her now, keeping the outboard bubbling over at low revs and the speed right down as he steered the course called out to him by Don Esteban in the bow. The river was narrowing, probably less than fifteen feet wide at this point, and there was a lot of jungle debris in the water. Soon they came to an entire tree that had fallen across both banks, like a bridge. They scraped beneath it after some industrious hacking away of branches by Don Esteban who had brought an axe and a machete for such eventualities.
A couple of miles ahead, with darkness almo
st upon them, Esteban signalled to Matt to take a left fork into an even narrower channel, not much wider than the boat itself. They followed it through a series of long serpentine loops until it spilled them into a broad lagoon dotted with huge water lilies.
The dome of the sky was a deep purple velvet, still touched in the west by the last glow of sunset, and the water was dead calm beneath them as they crossed the lagoon. Leoni loved the tremendous sense of openness and space it gave her, and gritted her teeth when they reached the other side. They forced a path through a thick tract of water lilies and entered another narrow winding channel with yet more forks and switchbacks. She looked over her shoulder at Matt. ‘Those men hunting us,’ she said, ‘I don’t see how they’re going to find us here.’ She wished she felt as confident as she was trying to sound. ‘This is totally the boondocks.’
Matt nodded his agreement: ‘It would take a lot of local knowledge, which hopefully the other side don’t have … do they, Mary?’
Mary Ruck bit her lower lip. ‘I’m not so sure of that. Even if he doesn’t know the area himself Apolinar will certainly have connections here.’ She switched into Spanish to put a question to Don Emmanuel and translated his answer: ‘The Shipibo have their brujos too – men who will help Apolinar. But the shaman whose protection we seek is more powerful than all of them.’
They came at last, in full darkness but with a good moon lighting their way, to a tiny homestead perched right at the end of a curving backwater creek. As they approached, Leoni saw only a single structure, a small simple maloca, thatched with banana leaf, perched on short stilts in a patch of earth no larger than a tennis court that had been cleared out of the dense jungle.
Halfway down the gently sloping bank leading to the creek, silhouetted by reflected moonlight, a short hunched man waited, one hand raised in salutation. Matt cut the engine, letting the boat drift the last few feet, while friendly greetings were exchanged in the Shipibo language. It was obvious Esteban was welcome here but suddenly the man on shore seemed to understand Don Emmanuel was also in the boat. He gave a great shout of greeting and ran forward into the shallows to embrace him and help him disembark.
Leoni, Matt, Bannerman and Mary were not formally introduced to Don Leoncio Amparo, whose homestead this was, until he had ushered them into the maloca, lit several paraffin lanterns, and rolled the side-screens fully open for ventilation.
He was not a prepossessing physical specimen. Barefoot, wearing mud-spattered cotton trousers and a torn work-shirt, he was balding and ugly, with squashed froglike features, his nose almost flat against his face, bulging brown eyes, short thin legs, thick muscular arms, powerful shoulders and a hunched back. It was hard to guess his age – perhaps fifty? – but so much experience, strength and warmth overwrote his ugliness that he made a strong, immediate and positive impression on Leoni.
Speaking perfect English, he commented on the similarity of their names, both meaning ‘lion’. He had a deep, rumbling, gravelly voice, with strangely formal New England undertones. When she complimented him on his mastery of the language he replied: ‘The Protestants taught me well.’
‘Protestants?’
‘Missionaries.’ A hint of anger. ‘Americans. They’ve infested the whole of the Ucayali basin as though they have a personal feud against our culture. They persuade us our spirituality is evil and convince us with money and food – and education – to accept Christ.’
‘Sounds like they didn’t convince you!’
‘No.’ A wry smile: ‘I escaped them.’ He looked to Don Emmanuel: ‘I passed through a personal crisis. This great man accepted me as his pupil and I learnt the path of the shaman from him. It turned out to be the right path for me.’
In the background Mary had been giving Don Emmanuel the gist of the conversation in Spanish. Now Don Emmanuel made a remark and Mary translated it into English: ‘The pupil long ago surpassed his master.’ It seemed that immense discipline and determination, an intense focus of the will, and long periods spent alone in the jungle seeking visions with Ayahuasca had transformed Don Leoncio into an adept of the highest order. He claimed no special credit for his skills and spent nine months of each year travelling from village to village as an itinerant healer, accepting only food, shelter and peasant wages. For the other three months he retired to this homestead in the middle of nowhere and lived the life of a hermit. Only Don Esteban and one other close friend knew where to find him.
In the next hour a simple meal of fish and plantains was prepared and eaten. Leoni found it strange, but perhaps a matter of Shipibo etiquette, that at no point in the conversation was any explanation asked, or given, for their visit. For fuck’s sake, she thought, get to the point! She was here for only one thing – to drink Ayahuasca with Don Leoncio and get back to Ria’s side.
But she stopped herself from blurting this out and finally, after dinner, Don Emmanuel drew Don Leoncio aside and they sat cross-legged near the rear of the small maloca, speaking in Shipibo. At last! Leoni thought. She couldn’t understand what they were saying but she heard her own name mentioned several times and felt the conversation grow tense and serious. Don Emmanuel must be filling Leoncio in on everything that had happened.
She felt tired, as though she’d been awake for a week, and curled up in a hammock slung between two of the maloca’s support posts.
She heard the two men’s voices droning in the background. Nearby Mary and Matt were also talking.
Leoni didn’t plan to close her eyes but sleep overwhelmed her in seconds and returned her at once to the cheap motel room of her dream, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the flickering television screen from which that horrible whispering, crackling voice still emanated. ‘Kill yourself … Do it now. You know it’s the right thing.’
Though repulsed, she was again seized by a sense of the inevitability and rightness of this command and by a powerful compulsion to obey. ‘I am ready,’ she answered.
‘Are others present? Do they observe you?’
‘Yes.’
‘The jungle is near?’
‘Yes. Very near.’
There was a pause and the voice fell to a hiss that was almost lost amidst the static: ‘When those around you are asleep you will walk into the jungle. Go quietly, be certain you are not seen and DO NOT STOP …’
A hand touched Leoni’s shoulder and she woke with a shock, baring her teeth in a silent snarl. Don Leoncio, Matt, Bannerman, Mary and Don Emmanuel were all gathered round her hammock, their faces set. Her whole body was soaked with sweat, her brow and hair slick with it. A sudden sob shook her and she sat up shaking. She knew she was breathing too fast, as though she’d been running for her life, but she couldn’t stop herself sucking in more air in great heaving gulps.
Don Leoncio asked the others to step back. He produced and lit a big mapacho and began to chant a deeply strange and otherworldly icaro while at the same time blowing clouds of fragrant smoke over Leoni. She felt a little calmer. Within half an hour she had composed herself and was ready to talk about what had happened.
It seemed that she had only slept for a very short while. However, in those few moments, said Don Leoncio, he became aware – ‘It is a sense I have cultivated’ – that some negative entity was trying to exploit her vulnerable liminal state. ‘It is intelligent, this entity, but it is not human …’
‘It’s Jack,’ groaned Leoni, scrambling out of the hammock. ‘He’s a fucking demon. He got to me in a dream. Convinced me I had to kill myself.’
Don Leoncio chuckled: ‘A fucking demon, eh? No doubt the same one Emmanuel has been speaking of? In what form did he appear to you?’
‘He has no appearance. Today he’s just a shadow – didn’t Don Emmanuel tell you? – not even a shape. He spoke to me out of the snow on a TV screen.’
‘What did he say? Try to remember exactly.’
Leoni replayed the dream in her mind: ‘He kept telling me I had to kill myself. He asked me if other people were around. He asked
if they were observing me. He even asked if the jungle was close.’
Leoncio’s face broke into a broad smile and he pounded his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘I thought so!’ he exclaimed. ‘He doesn’t know where you are.’
‘How sure are you of that?’ Leoni asked. ‘He was right there in my dream.’
‘He lost contact with you when I woke you up. If his eye were on us now I’d feel it.’ The shaman’s expression became more sombre: ‘But let’s not underestimate him. Even to track you in the dreamscape must have required enormous power …’
‘Jack is powerful,’ said Leoni. ‘I know that already.’
Leoncio hesitated: ‘So the question then becomes – I mean no offence – why is such a powerful demon interested in you at all? Doesn’t he have, how do you put it, bigger fish to fry?’
‘He’s not interested in me. Not directly. But there’s someone else, a girl, twenty-four thousand years ago, who I’m connected to … It’s her he’s really after.’
It was not clear how much Leoncio had already learned from Emmanuel but he seemed to want to hear the whole complicated story from Leoni herself. She compressed it into the shortest possible telling: what Jack had wanted from her childhood, the connection between Jack and Sulpa, her near-death experience and subsequent experiences with Ayahuasca and other substances, her encounters with the Blue Angel – Our Lady of the Forest – and her entanglement with Ria and the fate of the Neanderthals.
She was describing her last Ayahuasca journey and her desperate attempt to save Ria from Sulpa’s spy creatures when Don Leoncio leapt to his feet and made a pantomime of slapping himself on the forehead. ‘Of course,’ he exclaimed, ‘I should have guessed sooner …’
Leoni gazed at him open mouthed.
‘After such a long connection with you, the question we must ask ourselves is why Jack is suddenly going to such lengths to track you down? And why now?’
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