He twisted on the cot, leaning his back against a wall so he could stretch out his injured leg, get his throbbing ankle on top of the folded blanket again.
“How did such a young girl become a shaman?”
“She’s thirteen,” Pilar said, settling at the foot of the cot. She set the camera between them. “Naheyo began her training when she was three. The Lalunta believe that when a shaman dies, the soul flies into the next child born in the village. The child becomes the new shaman. There’s no choice about it, but it’s a high honor, so no one complains.”
It felt good to talk, to hold a conversation in which no one angled for the advantage. Jake wanted it to go on. He wanted her to move closer. He reached for the camera, his longer arms crossing the distance so quickly it surprised him. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands.
“This work?”
She looked puzzled. “Yes.”
“The batteries haven’t died?”
“Different sort of battery than what my phone uses.” She touched his leg lightly. The heat of it seemed to radiate through his whole body.
“You’re better, but you’re not well yet,” she said. “You need rest.” She stood up. “I’ll be off.”
“What does lish gorum mean?”
Pilar crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head.
“Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right,” he said. “They’re words Naheyo used.”
She glanced toward the rough-cut window in the wall behind the cot, and then back at Jake. “You’re pronouncing the words fine. Lish gorum means ‘infected.’”
“As in having a disease?”
“As in contaminated by evil spirits. Possessed.”
He wasn’t fool enough to laugh. “Is that how your shaman sees me?”
“Evidently.” Pilar untangled her arms and rubbed her hands against the denim shorts covering her thighs.
“How big a problem is it?” he asked.
“Big,” she said. “The Lalunta take these things very seriously. Naheyo will likely feel she has to do something about it.”
Jake forced a smile onto his face. “Rain forest exorcism?”
She didn’t smile in return. “I don’t know. I’ll talk to her. I don’t have any authority here, but I’ll try to convince her to leave you alone.” She picked up the camera from the cot. “Naheyo calls me little sister, though I’m almost twenty years older. She might do it as a favor to me. Maybe I can convince her you’re harmless.”
There was something surreal about being thought possessed. And something unpleasant in the idea that a thirteen-year-old shaman girl was in charge here, that she held the power to either get him to a phone or hold him back.
His eyelids felt weighted. He sank back on the cot. “Thanks,” he muttered, his mouth so heavy that he could barely open it to get out the words. He didn’t see Pilar go—only the last flutter of the blanket door settling into place.
The early morning alarm clock of woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tatted loudly enough, Jake thought, to be heard in Manaus, hundreds of miles away. He felt head-to-toe stiff and rusty, as though his eyelids would creak when he raised them. At least his ankle no longer throbbed with a heavy pulse all its own. The sun was barely up, the light still mild and hazy through the one small window to the outside. He hauled himself to his feet, using Naheyo’s stick for support, and tested his ankle. It was still weak and sore, but pain didn’t shoot up his leg when he put weight on the foot. That was progress.
Pilar had left him a worn-down bar of soap and told him how to find a nearby stream where he could wash up. He held the soap to his nose and inhaled. It smelled of lemon, like she did.
The woodpeckers didn’t seem to have disturbed anyone else. The compound was quiet, though Pilar and the women could be up and long gone for all he knew. He hobbled down the long hallway, past doors like his—each hung with a different colored blanket—out to the grounds beyond. The stream was to the left, through the trees, less than a quarter mile away, Pilar had said. The opposite direction from the cane field. Jake moved slowly, cautious as an old man, afraid of pain, afraid of falling. It took a long time to go the distance, and he was covered in sweat when he reached the wide, gently rushing stream.
Pulling off his shirt and pants one-handed wasn’t easy, but he didn’t trust his ankle enough to give up the cane. The effort was worth it. The cool water sluiced over his skin like fingers. Red and black dragonflies flitted by. Birds called, hidden deep in the green leaves of the canopy. He scrubbed hard with the lemon soap, washing weeks of jungle grit and dirt into the accepting stream. His various welts, bites, bruises, and cuts were healing. He wished for a razor, but decided water and soap were gift enough for one day.
He’d dressed again in the muslin pants and T-shirt Pilar had given him, and was sitting on the bank dangling his feet in the stream, thinking about how to best tell Ashne Simapole at World United the truth about benesha, when she came through the trees.
“You weren’t in your room,” she said. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” Jake said. She wore the long black skirt she’d had on when he’d first seen her. He must have been more delirious than he’d thought to peg her as a nun. “Thanks for the soap.” He held out what was left of the bar.
“Keep it.” She sat down next to him, pulling her legs underneath her skirt. “I spoke to Naheyo. She says the sooner you are out of the compound, the better. She’s sending Fant over to the village today to find a paddler to take you to Catalous. It’s a day to walk over, a day to visit her family and friends, and another to walk back. Then you’ll be on your way.”
It was three days longer than he would have liked. “Thanks.”
Pilar shrugged and the conversation shrank to nothing. A troop of monkeys made its noisy way through the trees and disappeared into the forest beyond. Small fish occasionally broke the top of the stream. He wanted to reach over and touch her, take her hand. She was leaning a little toward him. He thought maybe she wouldn’t mind.
Minutes passed. He didn’t reach for her. Pilar sighed.
“I should be going,” she said, and started to get up.
He wanted to keep her with him awhile longer. “Naheyo doesn’t like me much.”
“It’s not just you she doesn’t like.” Pilar settled back again. “It’s having a man, any man, in the compound. The Lalunta consider this”—she spread her arms to encompass a vague stretch of land”—to be a power center, a place where magic concentrates. Every shaman lives at the compound once she or he takes responsibility for the tribe. A shaman’s Helpers, which is what the other Lalunta women at the compound are, are always the same sex as the shaman. They live here, away from the distractions of everyday life, so they can concentrate on spiritual as well as practical matters.”
“Celibate?”
Pilar shook her head. “Most of the women have boyfriends or husbands in one village or another, but no men are allowed here unless specifically invited. Messes up the energy flow.”
He thought that over. “I’m a kink in the works?”
“In Naheyo’s eyes.”
Pilar tossed a stone into the water. They watched the small splash the stone made, and how the ripples spread.
“I do have to go,” she said. “The women are harvesting a forest flower today that blooms only once every three years. There’s an elaborate ritual that goes with the harvesting. I need to be there to record the ceremony.”
“I’ll walk back with you.” He stood first, using the cane for leverage, and held out his hand, not sure if he should, if it was acceptable, but he’d seen men do it. It was another thing Small Jake couldn’t have managed, and he wanted to know what it felt like to be tall enough. Strong enough. To feel her hand in his, and help her up.
Pilar smiled and took his hand, though he could feel that she did most of the work of coming to her feet herself. Probably just as well, he thought, considering his ankle. But she held his hand a moment longer than she needed to before lettin
g go, and it pleased him.
He walked back with her through the forest, and didn’t mind that his ankle made their progress slow.
Eight
The silence bothered him. Not the absence of sound—the forest was filled with songs, hoots, and calls that filtered through the window into the room—but the absence of human sound. Pilar’s voice. The women coming and going, chattering among themselves. Sounds that reassured him he was no longer alone. The air in the little mud-brick room felt stifling. He got up to explore. Probably the only chance he would get.
With Naheyo’s cane to steady him, he hobbled down the corridor, an ungainly spy, pushing aside each doorway blanket to peek inside the rooms. They were all much the same. Unlike the room where he stayed, the walls were beamed in the corners. Strung between two of the posts, on iron eyehooks, a rope hammock was positioned to catch the breeze that came through the mosquito-netted window. Every room also held a dresser—each one identical to begin with, but now customized by the owner—spirals and dots on one, painted handprints on another, a painted vine climbing the drawers of yet a third. The human need to embellish, Jake thought. To surround oneself with what brings pleasure, comfort, and inspiration.
In the room he thought must be Fant’s since there were three pictures of her on the wall, a framed photo of a young boy and girl standing at awkward attention had pride of place on the dresser top. The photo looked old. Fant and a brother? Fant’s children? Maybe she would visit those people when she arrived in the village. Then she would come back. She’d bring someone with a canoe. Jake would leave. Find a phone. Warn people about benesha.
Naheyo’s room sat at the end of the corridor, nearest the door. Nearest the forest. First, or last, in line. He stood in the doorway and looked around. That it was her room was obvious. Old glass or plastic bottles and plastic buckets were filled with leaves and roots, bones, and powders. Five photographs in tarnished frames were hung on the wall. She was in every one of them, staring straight at the camera, no trace of a smile on her mouth. A cape of jaguar fur lay carefully folded on what had to be a silent butler from a high-end hotel. Mawgis had ceramic mugs and a tall silver teapot; Naheyo had a silent butler. Was there some sort of Amazonian market that dealt in used hotel supplies? The top of Naheyo’s dresser was empty except for a red cloth tied into a bag and set carefully dead center. Colored stones in three concentric circles surrounded the cloth. For magical purposes or only decoration? Either way, whatever the cloth bag held was small and round and seemed to mean something to her. He took a step in, to peek closer at the cloth and the private space of the shaman.
A soft, almost electric frizz ran through his belly. His fingers tingled and his ankle began to burn. He hobbled back out as fast as he could, then laughed at himself. Naheyo wasn’t even there and he was still afraid of her.
Pilar’s room was down the hall from Naheyo’s, next to his, and he’d saved it for last. Like the Lalunta women, she slept in a hammock. Photographs covered the walls—the Lalunta women alone and in groups, going about their daily business, or close-ups with the women’s faces plain or decorated with colored mud and plant dyes. The photos must have been taken on an earlier trip—unless she had a small printer with her. Or someone else had taken the photos, maybe given them to Pilar to help her learn the women’s names and faces before she came.
A dozen notebooks, a supply of pens and pencils, two digital cameras, a cell phone—all in plastic boxes—a pile of paperback novels, their covers curled by the humidity, and a large, rusting first aid kit with a red cross painted on the top were stacked under her hammock. A plastic chair, the mate to the faded blue one she’d brought to his room, sat up against the wall, next to the hammock. A pocket computer was on the chair, but no printer. Several bottles of hand lotion and a box of soaps marked Lemon Verbena lay on her dresser. Jake smiled. It said something that the non-work-related items she’d brought with her were books, lotions, and soaps. He liked that about her. There was a wooden hairbrush and plastic comb, but no mirror. Jake realized he hadn’t seen a mirror in any of the rooms.
On the dresser, too, in a tarnished silver frame, was a family photo—Pilar, her mother and father, a sister, and two brothers. The picture looked current, maybe taken shortly before she’d left on this trip. He wanted to pick up the photograph, study the people who meant something to her, but his ankle had begun to throb again, more painfully now. He left the photograph unexamined and limped back to his room.
Jake counted up the days again. Four since Fant had left. It was supposed to have been a day’s walk over, a day to visit, a day’s walk back. She was overdue. Five days lost to him in the forest. Six days more or less unconscious. Fifteen altogether—time that Mawgis had gained and he could never recover. By now the Brits had phoned London or maybe directly to World United headquarters in San Francisco—they knew he worked for World—and reported him missing. Worst case was that an export crew had already arrived and was shoveling up benesha and sending it to the feedlots. The best was that not a grain of the stuff would leave the Amazon before he could get to a phone.
He still slept more than seemed normal, but less than he had those first six days he’d been in the compound. He’d taken to marking his height each morning, scratching the wall next to the door with a sharp stone. His growth was erratic. An inch one day, a quarter inch the next, two inches the day that followed. “You’ll be the height you were meant to be,” Mawgis had said. At five-foot-nine or ten, he was already taller than he’d ever dreamed.
He seemed to be growing with all parts in proportion. Even without a mirror to help him see, he didn’t seem to be all arms and legs, or long body with squat limbs. He felt his face and was satisfied that it, too, had stayed the same but grown bigger. No bulging forehead or fishy eyes. No grotesque chin that he could feel. No looks of horror from Pilar or Naheyo or the Helpers. The shaman came a couple of times a day to anoint his wounds with her unguents and to bring him food. She never spoke. She hadn’t spoken to him since the day she’d brought the cane. Whenever he tried to express his thanks, she’d snort and turn away.
Where the hell was Fant?
Footsteps thudded in the hallway, fast and hard, but Jake paid them no mind. The Helpers seemed to always be moving quickly up and down the hall. He’d stopped jumping up at every sound, hoping for word that Fant had returned with a paddler to take him to Catalous. Even the soft swish of the blanket in the doorway hardly registered with him.
“Naheyo drugged you.”
Jake wheeled from where he’d been standing looking out the small window at the creeping dark of nightfall. What had she said? His thoughts were still locked on benesha.
Pilar stalked through the small room to stand beside him. Her fists were balled and she leaned slightly forward, as though still in motion. Her hair was loose and fell forward over her shoulders in angry black waves.
“She told me today,” Pilar said. “She’s been drugging your food so that you sleep two, three days and nights straight through. She said she was building your strength to fight the demon that has a hold on your soul.”
Jake shook his head and pointed to the series of scratches on the wall by the cot, his height markers, one made each morning when he awoke. “I’ve been keeping track of the days.”
“I see that,” she said, “but I know how long you’ve been here.”
“Two weeks and two days.”
“Not two weeks,” she said. “Eight. And growing taller the whole time.”
His pulse roared in his ears. Eight weeks. Time enough for tons of benesha to have been shipped to the States and India and Congo, the places planned for the first feedlots. Time enough for fast-growing benesha-fed chickens or rabbits to be ready for eating.
Time enough for people in the human trials to be already poisoned.
Pilar stood so near he could feel her heat. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “What’s happening to you, Jake?”
He looked down at her and felt again that same disorie
ntation he’d had at the edge of the cane field, the disbelief at what his eyes told him. She couldn’t be that much shorter than he was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I stopped growing when I was five. Now I’ve started again.”
Lines formed in the space between her dark eyebrows. “Does it hurt?”
“No. Not since the cramps the day I woke up here.”
He had to get in touch with the people at World United. Why hadn’t Fant returned with news of a canoe and guide?
“And emotionally?” she asked.
He swallowed hard. Emotionally? Now there was a question. But he knew the answer. “It’s . . . like being caught in a dream. I’m scared I’ll wake up and it’ll be gone.”
She rubbed her arms as if a sudden chill had hit her. “Naheyo says you’re getting taller because the demon wants you to. It suits his purposes.”
“There’s no such thing as demons,” Jake said. “I’m not possessed.”
“I know that,” she said, “though you’d have a hard time convincing Naheyo and the others. I also know that you are getting taller. Day by day. Honestly, it scares me. I can’t make sense of it.”
He looked toward the small window. From this angle, he saw only darkness. Of course it scared her. Scared Naheyo and the Helpers too, no doubt. It scared him.
“Why isn’t Fant back?” he asked.
Pilar’s jaw clenched, then she sighed. “Naheyo told her to stay in the village until she was sent for. So that you would have time to grow strong, and Naheyo would have time to drive out the demon before you went home.” Her shoulders slumped a little. “I’m sorry, Jake. Naheyo lied to me. She never had any intention of letting you leave until she’d driven out the demon.”
For a moment his brain stopped working, thought lost to action, muscles clenching, ready to move, to strike out. She’d said it as though driving out demons were a reasonable thing.
Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Page 7