The Devil's Garden

by Edward Docx

  Where before we had sat, now soldiers stood and drank and shouted, gathered in a horseshoe while a woman on her knees struggled against the hand that gripped the back of her head and the penis that was being thrust into her mouth. The associate raised his rifle and cheered. And his greeting was met with answering salvos. All around, underneath the tarpaulins, human figures stirred in the darkness – eyes, teeth, silhouettes. I looked for any sign of Sole, terror in my heart. But the point of the Boy’s rifle prodded at my spine whenever I slowed. Tord choked and spat and bayed like an animal. Ants streamed the path. No god came.

  VI

  At the door to my hut, they told us to stop and began to speak among themselves. We dared not turn but listened, our heads bowed, silent, facing away.

  They had forgotten the papers.

  Lugo, in the exhilaration of his fury, had dealt out only violence and had not given any instruction. The Boy believed that they had been charged with having the statements signed. His associate did not disagree but disliked the delay. The Boy contended that it would be shrewd to have the accusations here, with them, since if we did not sign, then there was more . . . razón.

  Like some grotesque parody of inseparable childhood friends, they were obliged to go back with one another. But first the associate came in close behind and placed one hand through Kim’s ripped shirt, his fingers groping, while with the other he opened the door. He tried to turn her to face him. She swung her elbows. He shoved her inside.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he said, in a coarse whisper. ‘Then I’m yours.’

  I turned and watched as they hoisted Tord up, his body sagging, his head swinging loose, blood and spittle stringing from his mouth. They mounted the steps with him, stopped, and without saying anything simply pushed him forwards onto me where I stood.

  We rolled Tord over on the bed and took off his shirt. Already he was pale and clammy. His body bucked aggressively, the strain of his breathing showing beneath his ribs as he tried to suck in air. Our hands were sticky. There was so much blood.

  Kim stood back. She turned to my rack, took off her own ragged blouse and selected a clean shirt. Quick and tight-fingered, she buttoned it up. She threw me a second. I tore it. She took a strip and wiped her hands. I did the same. Then she stepped forward again and wound a fresh band around her wrist and wiped at Tord’s body with small hard movements of her thumbs.

  Tord began to writhe. I held him down and looked up at Kim, wild-eyed beneath her hair. The violence had stripped through the layers of her person, leaving nothing but fear and the functions of the body that time and space demanded. She had been reduced to some essence of herself, something she had always been, but that civilization had previously transfigured. And yet she had also found her cunning and her instinct.

  Tord was passing in and out of consciousness; his pale hair was congealed; his face, where we cleaned him, was alabaster white; his eyes, when they opened, glassy; his lips, when we found them, blue. Kim must have known that he would die, but she would not be deterred by this.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she looked up. ‘Talk. What do you want me to do? You’re the—’

  The door rattled. She stiffened. It seemed too soon for the Boy to have come back. They had barely been gone. They must have changed their plans and returned directly. Perhaps something had happened at the comedor. Or perhaps there was some kind of a raid.

  I started to speak, quickly, my voice low and steady. ‘When they come in, I want you to hold their attention. Don’t let them look at me and don’t look at me yourself. Do whatever you have to. Keep their eyes on you. But don’t even glance at me.’ The door rattled again. I could not understand why they were having difficulty with the lock. ‘The Boy will be the hardest to distract, but he will watch anything that is physical so you sh—’

  ‘The Virgin sent me.’ A hoarse whisper. ‘Doctor? Are you inside?’

  ‘Estrela?’

  ‘The Virgin sent me.’

  Though she addressed us through a crack, I had never heard her speak so clearly. But before we could step over to the door, she had it open and the jungle night was pouring through – a rising wave of insects and sound.

  She stood short and squat on the porch – her dark face closed in on itself, chewing at her cheek, her old black clothes stained and her grey hair wiry and unkempt. The reflected light of our lamps flickered in both of her eyes.

  ‘Soledad is with the Judge,’ she said. Then she held up her heavy key in front of her forehead and blessed us both with its crucified skeleton. ‘The Virgin sent me here.’

  ‘Estrela,’ Kim breathed.

  ‘Here.’ From somewhere in her clothes, she drew out her carcass knife and raised it up to me like a religious offering. ‘Go quickly.’

  I glanced out into the clearing then pulled her inside.

  ‘Estrela, have you got a torch? There is a way to the river past the washhouse. Lothar cut through. Could you find it?’

  She shook her head. ‘We go on the main path. There are many people. But the soldiers are busy. She must wear this.’ Estrela took off her shawl.

  ‘Kim, go with her.’

  ‘Tord?’ Kim asked.

  ‘I will do what I can. Don’t look at me like that. When you get to the river, go downstream and hide by the mud banks. Wait for me there. If I don’t come by the time it starts to get light, pay one of the Matsigenka families to ride in their boat to Laberinto. Take Estrela, if she wants to stay with you.’

  Kim’s eyes were still now but I could not read what was written there.

  ‘You are insane,’ she said. ‘I see it now.’

  ‘Go.’

  She hesitated another second, looking back at Tord, and then she was out of the hut and on the steps and hurrying with Estrela across the clearing and towards the far wall of the jungle beyond.

  I wrapped up my soap and my notebook in a shirt. I took the last bottle of water. Then I closed the door on Tord.

  VII

  I limped swiftly through the shadows behind the comedor. The noise of the music had not abated and still there were voices and cries but now several of the upstream huts were lit as well. A man was grunting; a woman urging him to finish.

  Ahead, the Judge’s lamps were lit and it was quieter as I moved further away from the comedor. I began to hear a different music – a thin-voiced aria that seemed surreal and outside of time. Close by, a tree had filled the night with the thick scent of its resin. The heat clung like a familiar.

  I passed around the back of the Judge’s hut and rose silently up onto the porch from the far side. The lights from the other huts cast stretched squares of illumination either side of the path where it ran back towards the comedor. I stood a moment listening to the music from within. Then I placed the master key in the lock, turned it quickly, stood to one side and threw open the door.

  ‘Sole?’

  My voice died in the stifling air. For there she was, just inside, startle-eyed from her sleep, sitting on the Judge’s reclining chair.

  ‘Sole,’ I said again. ‘What—’

  But already she had leapt up and embraced me.

  ‘Dr Forle, I hoped it would be you.’ The Judge’s voice rang out. I swung around. He was sat upright on the bed, fully dressed but wearing a blindfold. In his hand he had my best bottle of whiskey,which he was drinking through a straw.

  ‘I hoped it would be you because I am certain that this would have been the last hour of my restraint. Half the night I can survive – but no longer, man, no longer. What is abstinence but death’s more presentable cousin?’

  He lifted what I now saw was some kind of sleeping mask from his head and threw it down.

  ‘There’s no need to look like that. I have not touched her. You have my word on that – my word as a hypocrite.’ He sipped directly from my bottle. ‘As you can see, I have not even allowed my eyes the pleasure. It has not been easy.’ He winced against the whiskey’s burn. ‘After all, I am a man, she a woman and this a bed – and
none of us would wish to deny our own nature for too long. That would be contemptible – wouldn’t it, Doctor?’

  He laughed and took another sip.

  ‘I’ve been hiding here since the Colonel left,’ Sole said. Her eyes searched mine.

  ‘It was the only way to save her,’ the Judge rejoined. ‘She told me her news. But who would have believed her? And what difference would it have made to the animals out there?’

  ‘What news?’ I asked.

  ‘In another hour, I doubt it would have made any difference to me,’ he continued. ‘Beauty drives men mad.’

  There came the sound of voices raised and then the growl of machine-gun fire. Sole ducked down and pulled aside the edge of the shade so that she could see out.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I kept my eyes on the Judge.

  ‘There are men all around Lugo’s hut,’ Sole replied. ‘The door is open. People are going in and out.’

  Softer, the Judge said: ‘You’ll have to stay with me. We’ll be quite secure here – from the soldiers at least. There’s nobody alive dares to enter this room unbidden. Except you, it would seem, Dr Forle. Can I at least interest you in a drink? The quality is surprising.’

  ‘Don’t move. Stay on the bed.’

  ‘The more I see of you, Dr Forle, the more I like you.’ Across his eyes and around the side of his head there was a ring of paler skin where the mask must have been tightly drawn. ‘Shall I continue with the music?’

  I glanced down to where Sole was crouching. I did not know what she had told the Judge, nor his allegiances. But her kisses had been real.

  ‘We have to get to the river,’ I said. ‘We have to steal a boat.’

  She let go of the shade and looked up. ‘No – there’s a boat coming.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a boat coming!’ the Judge cut in.

  ‘How?’ I ignored him. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘When she saw the soldiers bring you back, my mother gave a boy my money to fetch a boatman – someone who knows the back channels here. We were going to wait until they went to sleep . . . But it’s just been getting worse and worse. And nobody sleeps.’

  ‘Your mother has gone with Kim,’ I said. ‘I told them to wait for us. We still have to get to the river somehow.’

  She bent back to the window. ‘There are too many soldiers. We won’t get past.’ Without looking back up, she added: ‘They forced their way into my mother’s store. They desecrated her shrine.’

  Outside, the noise rose. Somehow the Judge had started his music playing again but quietly. I stood facing him, still uncertain. He raised an open hand so that I could see it and with a passing flourish to the music reached out a cigarette from his box by the bed. ‘Shall I tell you the real problem?’

  ‘Do you have a gun?’ I asked.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In my other hand.’ He dipped his head to sip.

  ‘Use it now if you are going to use it.’

  ‘I will use it when and on whom I wish, Dr Forle. But don’t worry: I have no immediate plans to shoot you. I am not on any side.’ He smiled. ‘I am impartial. But the struggle is real and very much alive here – and, as you see, it is as tangled as the forest itself.’

  ‘Will you give me your gun?’

  ‘No.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘I am also an anthropologist, Dr Forle. Amateur, maybe. But I know what kind of man you are beneath it all. Mendax. Homo mendax. Does she know you yet?’

  I turned my back on him and bent to watch outside. But it was impossible to work out what was happening from this distance. Fire torches flickered. They must have known that we were gone. Were they looking for us? Or was this something else happening? Behind, the Judge’s voice assumed the deeper demagogic tone that I had last heard on the only day of rain.

  ‘The real problem, Dr Forle, is that a man cannot really see anything clearly until the moment of his death when it is, of course, too late. Only in death does the deception of our little self-story-making end.’ I heard the sound of whiskey being sucked through teeth. ‘And suddenly the successes we have sworn by begin to wither on the boast, the love we gave we see in truth was never really love, the qualities we claimed for ourselves we realize were but disfigurements masquerading, and everything we accrued through all those look-at-me years – instantly worthless. Yes, finally, we see them for what they are: the lies – the endless lies we have told ourselves and lived by and told one another. But explain to me this, Doctor: to whom – to what – are we lying when we lie to ourselves? What creature is it that lives inside? Of what are we so afraid?’

  The smell of his cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of camphor.

  ‘Meanwhile, the stars do not hear us. Never have. Never will. So, here we are, Doctor: you and me and this woman and the rest of our species. We dare not know that which is within us and we cannot know that which is without. We are marooned in time and space searching in the darkness for we do not know what. My advice, Dr Forle: sleep with a woman whenever the opportunity arises and learn a musical instrument.’

  There were fewer men around the huts now but the sound of automatic fire had become more frequent.

  ‘I wish you would have a drink,’ he urged. ‘You can have the bed if you like. I would be content to observe from the chair. There are a few hours of the night still to go. And tomorrow promises to be exciting. I have wine if you prefer.’

  I stood. ‘I need your gun,’ I said.

  ‘I know you do.’

  I started towards him but just then Sole gripped my arm. I turned and bent down beside her again. A lone figure was coming up the path.

  ‘It’s Felipe,’ she said.

  VIII

  He stood in the dim light thrown through the doorway, a small man, I saw now – oddly still, stiff, straight – abandoned by his smile and without spirit. Instead, he looked at me with ghosted eyes that could no longer express feeling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I came as quick as I could but—’

  ‘What, Felipe? What is—’

  ‘Dr Forle, they’re burning the lab.’

  His stillness seemed to colonize my own body. I could not properly understand the meaning in his words. I turned slowly back to face the room again. I saw the Judge wave as a king might wave and Sole’s face suddenly the face of every human feeling.

  ‘Go with Felipe, Sole. Find Kim. Wait by the river.’

  I turned to run.

  The Judge called after me: ‘What can you save, Dr Forle? Not even yourself.’

  IX

  Pain rattled and stabbed at my back, ripped at the raw flesh in my boots. There were people everywhere – as if Machaguar had come to the Station not as the carnival of lights but unmasked at last as the carnival of death. I ducked down and away, off the path, and ran the dark wall.

  On the far side of the comedor, beneath the music and the chug of the generators and the human tumult, there was a new noise: an urgent liquid crackle that seemed to feed upon itself, swelling and rising, as I loped on.

  By my hut, I bent over and held to my knees – gasping, blinking. My eyes swept the clearing but could not consent to what they saw. Everything was illuminated in the febrile light of a fire that had already grown tall in its greed. Soaring flames writhed and twined, yellow, orange and red, tulip-curled around each of the wooden sides. Above, thick smoke barely rose. The air was acrid. The blaze would surely leap the gap to the forest. Men stood watching from the path, idle, with their backs to me.

  My cheeks were wet. My lips tasted of salt.

  Sole was there beside me. She held my face, pulling me towards her even as I resisted and wheeled away. Again and again she reached for me and I saw that she was screaming above the noise. I could not hear. I thought her likewise mad and gone.

  ‘Lothar,’ she was screaming. ‘Lothar is in the lab. That’s where they were keeping him. They tied him to a chair.
Lothar is in the lab. Lothar.’

  Unheeding, through the onlookers, racing, I ducked lower and lower. But the heat sought to scorch my face whichever way I turned my head. I bent lower again, trying to advance beneath the smoke. I shut my eyes and lay on the earth and crawled forward. Embers rained down, smouldering through my shirt, searing my skin. Pressed against the soil, I squinted up and it was as if I were in a molten pit and the flames were burning towers all above me. White heat rushed up from the base of the inferno in fearsome draughts that bent the air and sucked down the sky with a terrible hiss; and from within, I could hear timber cracking, beams falling, glass shattering, a thud, a cry. I crawled forward again. My brow was singed where I held my hand against it, my lashes thick when I blinked. I pulled my shirt above my head. I ceased to believe the flame was hot, that instead I might stand up and walk the last few yards untouched, that I might reach out with bare hands and prise away the wood where it flamed and cut him from the chair with my knife and put him on my back and bear him to the river and bathe and cool him in the water. But I heard only the roar and spit of fire and death.

  X

  Inside Lugo’s hut, the lava lamp cast a purplish light. Beneath my bare feet, there was sawdust – for the blood that had been already spilt. In the corner, the puma still snarled.

  Lugo was asleep.

  The distance from the door was five short strides. At the third, he stirred. At the fourth, he spun around and raised himself up. At the fifth he found his gun. But he should have shot me without hesitation. For now I was over the desk and falling on him from on high, driving the carcass knife into the softness of the right anterior quadrant, precise and exact, just beneath the base of the sternum.

  For a moment he thrashed and beat and clawed at me. But I lay heavy upon him and hunched myself against these blows and worked only with the knife, seeking to move the blade upward to lacerate the liver and puncture the gall bladder so that his acid and his bile would mingle with the copious blood already loose and swilling inside of him. He could not know the agony of the death that was coming. The Judge was wrong. I am Homo necans. I am man the killer.