by Clive Barker
'What did they tell you?'
Through a haze of anticipation she said: 'They left a number for me to ring. So that I could be helped ...'
'But you didn't want help?'
'No,' she breathed. 'Why should I?'
She half-saw his smile, though her eyes wanted to flicker closed entirely. His appearance failed to stir any passion in her; indeed there was much about his disguise (that absurd bow-tie, for one) which she thought ridiculous. With her eyes closed, however, she could forget such petty details; she could strip the hood off and imagine him pure. When she thought of him that way her mind pirouetted.
He took his hands from her; she opened her eyes. He was fumbling with his belt. As he did so somebody shouted in the street outside. His head jerked in the direction of the window; his body tensed. She was surprised at his sudden concern.
'It's all right,' she said.
He leaned forward and put his hand to her throat.
'Be quiet,' he instructed.
She looked up into his face. He had begun to sweat. The exchanges in the street went on for a few minutes longer; it was simply two late-night gamblers parting. He realized his error now.
'I thought I heard -'
'What?'
'- I thought I heard them calling my name.'
'Who would do that?' she inquired fondly. 'Nobody knows we're here.'
He looked away from the window. All purposefulness had abruptly drained from him; after the instant of fear his features had slackened. He looked almost stupid.
They came close,' he said. 'But they never found me.'
'Close?'
'Coming to you.' He laid his head on her breasts. 'So very close,' he murmured. She could hear her pulse in her head. 'But I'm swift,' he said, 'and invisible.'
His hand strayed back down to her scar, and further.
'And always neat,' he added.
She sighed as he stroked her.
They admire me for that, I'm sure. Don't you think they must admire me? For being so neat?'
She remembered the chaos of the crypt; its indignities, its disorders.
'Not always ..." she said.
He stopped stroking her.
'Oh yes,' he said. 'Oh yes. I never spill blood. That's a rule of mine. Never spill blood.'
She smiled at his boasts. She would tell him now - though surely he already knew - about her visit to All Saints, and the handiwork of his that she'd seen there.
'Sometimes you can't help blood being spilt,' she said, 'I don't hold it against you.'
At these words, he began to tremble.
'What did they tell you about me? What lies'?'
'Nothing,' she said, mystified by his response. 'What could they know?'
'I'm a professional,' he said to her, his hand moving back up to her face. She felt intentionality in him again. A seriousness in his weight as he pressed closer upon her.
'I won't have them lie about me,' he said. 'I won't have it.'
He lifted his head from her chest and looked at her.
'All I do is stop the drummer,' he said.
The drummer?'
'I have to stop him cleanly. In his tracks.'
The wash of colours from the lights below painted his face one moment red, the next green, the next yellow; unadulterated hues, as in a child's paint-box.
'I won't have them tell lies about me,' he said again. 'To say I spill blood.'
'They told me nothing,' she assured him. He had given up his pillow entirely, and now moved to straddle her. His hands were done with tender touches.
'Shall I show you how clean I am?' he said: 'How easily I stop the drummer?'
Before she could reply, his hands closed around her neck. She had no time even to gasp, let alone shout. His thumbs were expert; they found her windpipe and pressed. She heard the drummer quicken its rhythm in her ears. 'It's quick; and clean,' he was telling her, the colours still coming in predictable sequence. Red, yellow, green; red, yellow, green.
There was an error here, she knew; a terrible misunderstanding which she couldn't quite fathom. She struggled to make some sense of it.
'I don't understand,' she tried to tell him, but her bruised larynx could produce no more than a gargling sound.
Too late for excuses,' he said, shaking his head. 'You came to me, remember? You want the drummer stopped. Why else did you come?' His grip tightened yet further. She had the sensation of her face swelling; of the blood throbbing to jump from her eyes.
'Don't you see that they came to warn you about me?' frowning as he laboured. 'They came to seduce you away from me by telling you I spilt blood.'
'No,' she squeezed the syllable out on her last breath, but he only pressed harder to cancel her denial.
The drummer was deafeningly loud now; though Kavanagh's mouth still opened and closed she could no longer hear what he was telling her. It mattered little. She realised now that he was not Death; not the clean-boned guardian she'd waited for. In her eagerness, she had given herself into the hands of a common killer, a street-corner Cain. She wanted to spit contempt at him, but her consciousness was slipping, the room, the lights, the face all throbbing to the drummer's beat. And then it all stopped.
She looked down on the bed. Her body lay sprawled across it. One desperate hand had clutched at the sheet, and clutched still, though there was no life left in it. Her tongue protruded, there was spittle on her blue lips. But (as he had promised) there was no blood.
She hovered, her presence failing even to bring a breeze to the cobwebs in this corner of the ceiling, and watched while Kavanagh observed the rituals of hi« crime. He was bending over the body, whispering in its ear as he rearranged it on the tangled sheets. Then he unbuttoned himself and unveiled that bone whose inflammation was the sincerest form of flattery. What followed was comical in its gracelessness; as her body was comical, with its scars and its places where age puckered and plucked at it. She watched his ungainly attempts at congress quite remotely. His buttocks were pale, and imprinted with the marks his underwear had left; their motion put her in mind of a mechanical toy.
He kissed her as he worked, and swallowed the pestilence with her spittle; his hands came off her body gritty with her contagious cells. He knew none of this, of course. He was perfectly innocent of what corruption he embraced, and took into himself with every uninspired thrust.
At last, he finished. There was no gasp, no cry. He simply stopped his clockwork motion and climbed off her, wiping himself with the edge of the sheet, and buttoning himself up again.
Guides were calling her. She had journeys to make, reunions to look forward to. But she did not want to go; at least not yet. She steered the vehicle of her spirit to a fresh vantage-point, where she could better see Kavanagh's face. Her sight, or whatever sense this condition granted her, saw clearly how his features were painted over a groundwork of muscle, and how, beneath that intricate scheme, the bones sheened. Ah, the bone. He was not Death of course; and yet he was. He had the face, hadn't he? And one day, given decay's blessing, he'd show it. Such a pity that a scraping of flesh came between it and the naked eye.
Come away, the voices insisted. She knew they could not be fobbed off very much longer. Indeed there were some amongst them she thought she knew. A moment, she pleaded, only a moment more.
Kavanagh had finished his business at the murder-scene. He checked his appearance in the wardrobe mirror, then went to the door. She went with him, intrigued by the utter banality of his expression. He slipped out onto the silent landing and then down the stairs, waiting for a moment when the night-porter was otherwise engaged before stepping out into the street, and liberty.
Was it dawn that washed the sky, or the illuminations? Perhaps she had watched him from the corner of the room longer than she'd thought - hours passing as moments in the state she had so recently achieved.
Only at the last was she rewarded for her vigil, as a look she recognised crossed Kavanagh's face. Hunger! The man was hungry. He would not
die of the plague, any more than she had. Its presence shone in him - gave a fresh lustre to his skin, and a new insistence to his belly.
He had come to her a minor murderer, and was going from her as Death writ large. She laughed, seeing the self-fulfilling prophecy she had unwittingly engineered. For an instant his pace slowed, as if he might have heard her. But no; it was the drummer he was listening for, beating louder than ever in his ear and demanding, as he went, a new and deadly vigour in his every step.
HOW SPOILERS BLEED
LOCKE RAISED HIS eyes to the trees. The wind was moving in them, and the commotion of their laden branches sounded like the river in full spate. One impersonation of many. When he had first come to the jungle he had been awed by the sheer multiplicity of beast and blossom, the relentless parade of life here. But he had learned better. This burgeoning diversity was a sham; the jungle pretending itself an artless garden. It was not. Where the untutored trespasser saw only a brilliant show of natural splendours, Locke now recognised a subtle conspiracy at work, in which each thing mirrored some other thing. The trees, the river; a blossom, a bird. In a moth's wing, a monkey's eye; on a lizard's back, sunlight on stones. Round and round in a dizzying circle of impersonations, a hall of mirrors which confounded the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether. See us now, he thought drunkenly as they stood around Cherrick's grave, look at how we play the game too. We're living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.
The corpse had been one scab by the time they'd hoisted it into a sack and carried it outside to this miserable plot behind Tetelman's house to bury. There were half a dozen other graves here. All Europeans, to judge by the names crudely burned into the wooden crosses; killed by snakes, or heat, or longing.
Tetelman attempted to say a brief prayer in Spanish, but the roar of the trees, and the din of birds making their way home to their roosts before night came down, all but drowned him out. He gave up eventually, and they made their way back into the cooler interior of the house, where Stumpf was sitting, drinking brandy and staring inanely at the darkening stain on the floorboards.
Outside, two of Tetelman's tamed Indians were shovelling the rank jungle earth on top of Cherrick's sack, eager to be done with the work and away before nightfall. Locke watched from the window. Tiie grave-diggers didn't talk as they laboured, but filled the shallow grave up, then flattened the earth as best they could with the leather-tough soles of their feet. As they did so the stamping of the ground took on a rhythm. It occurred to Locke that the men were probably the worse for bad whisky; he knew few Indians who didn't drink like fishes. Now, staggering a little, they began to dance on Cherrick's grave.
'Locke?'
Locke woke. In the darkness, a cigarette glowed. As the smoker drew on it, and the tip burned more intensely, Stumpf s wasted features swam up out of the night.
'Locke? Are you awake?'
'What do you want?'
'I can't sleep,' the mask replied, 'I've been thinking. The supply plane comes in from Santarem the day after tomorrow. We could be back there in a few hours. Out of all this.'
'Sure.'
'I mean permanently,' Stumpf said. 'Away.'
'Permanently?'
Stumpf lit another cigarette from the embers of his last before saying, 'I don't believe in curses. Don't think I do.'
'Who said anything about curses?'
'You saw Cherrick's body. What happened to him ...'
'There's a disease,' said Locke, 'what's it called? - when the blood doesn't set properly?'
'Haemophilia,' Stumpf replied. 'He didn't have haemophilia and we both know it. I've seen him scratched and cut dozens of times. He mended like you or I.'
Locke snatched at a mosquito that had alighted on his chest and ground it out between thumb and forefinger.
'All right. Then what killed him?'
'You saw the wounds better than I did, but it seemed to me his skin just broke open as soon as he was touched.'
Locke nodded. 'That's the way it looked.'
'Maybe it's something he caught off the Indians.'
Locke took the point.'/ didn't touch any of them,' he said.
'Neither did I. But he did, remember?'
Locke remembered; scenes like that weren't easy to forget, try as he might. 'Christ,' he said, his voice hushed. 'What a fucking situation.'
'I'm going back to Santarem. I don't want them coming looking for me.'
'They're not going to.'
'How do you know? We screwed up back there. We could have bribed them. Got them off the land some other way.'
'I doubt it. You heard what Tetelman said. Ancestral territories.'
'You can have my share of the land,' Stumpf said, 'I want no part of it.'
'You mean it then? You're getting out?'
'I feel dirty. We're spoilers, Locke.'
'It's your funeral.'
'I mean it. I'm not like you. Never really had the stomach for this kind of thing. Will you buy my third off me?'
'Depends on your price.'
'Whatever you want to give. It's yours.'
Confessional over, Stumpf returned to his bed, and lay down in the darkness to finish off his cigarette. It would soon be light. Another jungle dawn: a precious interval, all too short, before the world began to sweat. How he hated the place. At least he hadn't touched any of the Indians; hadn't even been within breathing distance of them. Whatever infection they'd passed on to Cherrick he could surely not be tainted. In less than forty-eight hours he would be away to Santarem, and then on to some city, any city, where the tribe could never follow. He'd already done his penance, hadn't he? Paid for his greed and his arrogance with the rot in his abdomen and the terrors he knew he would never quite shake off again. Let that be punishment enough, he prayed, and slipped, before the monkeys began to call up the day, into a spoiler's sleep.
A gem-backed beetle, trapped beneath Stumpfs mosquito net, hummed around in diminishing circles, looking for some way out. It could find none. Eventually, exhausted by the search, it hovered over the sleeping man, then landed on his forehead. There it wandered, drinking at the pores. Beneath its imperceptible tread, Stumpf s skin opened and broke into a trail of tiny wounds.
They had come into the Indian hamlet at noon; the sun a basilisk's eye. At first they had thought the place deserted. Locke and Cherrick had advanced into the compound, leaving the dysentery-ridden Stumpf in the jeep, out of the worst of the heat. It was Cherrick who first noticed the child. A pot-bellied boy of perhaps four or five, his face painted with thick bands of the scarlet vegetable dye urucu, had slipped out from his hiding place and come to peer at the trespassers, fearless in his curiosity. Cherrick stood still; Locke did the same. One by one, from the huts and from the shelter of the trees around the compound, the tribe appeared and stared, like the boy, at the newcomers. If there was a flicker of feeling on their broad, flat-nosed faces, Locke could not read it. These people - he thought of every Indian as part of one wretched tribe - were impossible to decipher; deceit was their only skill.
'What are you doing here?' he said. The sun was baking the back of his neck. 'This is our land.'
The boy still looked up at him. His almond eyes refused to fear.
'They don't understand you,' Cherrick said.
'Get the Kraut out here. Let him explain it to them.'
'He can't move.'
'Get him out here,' Locke said. 'I don't care if he's shat his pants.'
Cherrick backed away down the track, leaving Locke standing in the ring of huts. He looked from doorway to doorway, from tree to tree, trying to estimate the numbers. There were at most three dozen Indians, two-thirds of them women and children; descendants of the great peoples that had once roamed the Amazon Basin in their tens of thousands. Now those tribes were all but decimated. The forest in which they had prospered for generations was being levelled and burned; eight-lane highways were speeding through their hunting grounds. All they held sacred - the wildern
ess and their place in its system - was being trampled and trespassed: they were exiles in their own land. But still they declined to pay homage to their new masters, despite the rifles they brought. Only death would convince them of defeat, Locke mused.
Cherrick found Stumpf slumped in the front seat of the jeep, his pasty features more wretched than ever.
'Locke wants you,' he said, shaking the German out of his doze. 'The village is still occupied. You'll have to speak to them.'
Stumpf groaned. 'I can't move,' he said, Tm dying-'
'Locke wants you dead or alive,' Cherrick said. Their fear of Locke, which went unspoken, was perhaps one of the two things they had in common; that and greed.
'I feel awful,' Stumpf said.
'If I don't bring you, he'll only come himself,' Cherrick pointed out. This was indisputable. Stumpf threw the other man a despairing glance, then nodded his jowly head. 'All right,' he said, 'help me.'
Cherrick had no wish to lay a hand on Stumpf. The man stank of his sickness; he seemed to be oozing the contents of his gut through his pores; his skin had the lustre of rank meat. He took the outstretched hand nevertheless. Without aid, Stumpf would never make the hundred yards from jeep to compound.
Ahead, Locke was shouting.
'Get moving,' said Cherrick, hauling Stumpf down from the front seat and towards the bawling voice. 'Let's get it over and done with.'
When the two men returned into the circle of huts the scene had scarcely changed. Locke glanced around at Stumpf.
'We got trespassers,' he said.
'So I see,' Stumpf returned wearily.
'Tell them to get the fuck off our land,' Locke said. 'Tell them this is our territory: we bought it. Without sitting tenants.'
Stumpf nodded, not meeting Locke's rabid eyes. Sometimes he hated the man almost as much as he hated himself.
'Go on ...' Locke said, and gestured for Cherrick to relinquish his support of Stumpf. This he did. The German stumbled forward, head bowed. He took several seconds to work out his patter, then raised his head and spoke a few wilting words in bad Portuguese. The pronouncement was met with the same blank looks as Locke's performance. Stumpf tried again, re-arranging his inadequate vocabulary to try and awake a flicker of understanding amongst these savages.