Catacombs

by John Farris

  Raymond finished taking Chips' pulse, and made a notation on the chart.

  "By the way, Colonel Ukumtara has requested that you take supper with us this evening, at nine o'clock."

  "Tell him how genuinely delighted I am, but I'm afraid–"

  Raymond glanced up, frowning. "Erika, it isn't a request you can reasonably refuse."

  She was about to protest again but another nurse, one of those assigned to the temporary ward in the school building, had come hurriedly upstairs.

  "Doctor, can you come? There's a woman they've brought in with a snakebite, she bleeds from the nose already."

  Raymond whirled. "Get me antivenin from the storeroom." He hesitated a few moments, looking back at Erika with an unexpected expression: exasperation, helplessness.

  "It's vital that you be there," he said, and was gone; Erika heard him running almost heedlessly down the unsafe stairway outside.

  Around eight o'clock Erika came to a curious standstill, as if her vital machinery had frozen. Her mind was a void; the simplest task required excruciating concentration. She had pains in her chest and her mouth quivered uncontrollably. Her best friend among the nurses, Alice Sinoyi, dropped by and noticed her distress. Alice led her home and drew a precious hot bath for her, laced with aloe juice and some kind of stinging botanical that made Erika's blood race. Alice spent a half hour soaping Erika, rubbing her down with a sponge, crooning the Sonjo songs of her childhood.

  The treatment worked; Erika was revived. After her bath she had an additional mild tonic for the nerves, some Scotch and Fiuggi water, and realized that she could face the coming ordeal with patience if not spirit. She felt clean, lonely, bereft, abstracted. She put on a freshly ironed bush outfit and desert boots, another surgical mask, and went along at a quarter past nine to Colonel Ukumtara's bungalow, still feeling half a step beyond reality.

  A woman who had died of fever was being removed from the school building by silent relatives. The body had been rolled in a straw mat, which was covered with black cloths and baobab leaves. A muganga, splendid in a stifling, vintage military greatcoat which he wore only on important occasions, walked alongside sprinkling herbal medicine on the cloths, an antiseptic barrier between the dead and the living. The faces of the pallbearers, all men, were smeared with clay. They staggered uncertainly with their burden, as if they had drunk a great deal of pombe, the hot thick homemade beer of the bush, to steel themselves for this task. In the distance drums and melancholy, high-pitched improvisational songs signaled another wake in progress. There was an odor of burning in the air, fires of purification everywhere. But against all opposition the fever continued to thrive.

  Colonel Ukumtara was one of a rare breed, a Masai tamed and assimilated into the contemporary East African culture. Most of the decimated tribe, who in their prime had been aristocratic nomads with cattle, fierce spearmen and hunters of lions, had failed to make even the slightest adjustments to changes in their environment. Ukumtara seemed to have prospered. He enjoyed French wines and disco music on his powerful transoceanic Grundig radio. He was tall, with a rock-like shaved head, but lighter in color than most Masai; a Hamitic, caucasoid strain was apparent in his bloodlines. His habitual expression was one of gaping good humor, but that could be deceptive.

  He wore two rows of medals on his blue uniform blouse and a pearl-handled automatic in a sweat-blackened shoulder holster. He had avoided the fever by staying indoors, burning incense, not bathing, and having a daily dose of Sloan's liniment, which he took internally with a bowl of pombe.

  The atmosphere in his closed-up bungalow, despite the cool temperatures outside, almost knocked Erika over. But the colonel scowled when he saw she was wearing a surgical mask and insisted that she remove it. No one in the house could become infected; to think so was to invite a malignant fate...

  She was late, and they had not waited supper. House-boys served Erika goat curry, eland steak, and peas cooked in groundnut oil, along with a glass of a good Bordeaux that had just arrived from Mbeya. Father Varnhalt was also on hand. He was nearly seventy and suffering from bush fever; he had been a long time at the mission. His hands trembled so badly he was forced to eat with his mouth only inches from his plate.

  At some point he had surrendered his faith to the unremitting hostility of the natural world–drought, storm, plague, the evil spirits of the forests. He depended now on ritual, the sterile intonations and responses of a dead language, to get him through the day. He reinforced a precarious hold on reality by talking matter-of-factly about the horrors that had driven fellow priests and white sisters mad in their isolated circumstances.

  "One day at Mass Father Sylvanus saw his entire congregation turn to animals before his eyes–creatures with long snouts, tufted ears, and the fiery eyes of dragons. They gnashed their teeth at him, and farted obscenely when he tried to speak. This is true. Mother Celeste was bathing in a pool when she looked up and saw the devil sitting on the limb of a fig tree playing with his penis. He ejaculated demon seed into her water; his seed turned into thousands of little biting creatures which tried to tear the chaste white flesh from her bones. Father Xavier Antonio was walking along a path in the Loita when he encountered a giant. One side was hair, the other stone. The giant, whose name was Enenauner, beat on a tree with his club until Father Xavier went deaf from the noise. I know this to be a fact."

  Colonel Ukumtara ate heavily, washing down his meal with copious wine. He had gained at least twenty pounds during his idle weeks at the mission, most of it in his belly.

  "Your religion is foolish," he said, pointing his bread knife at Father Varnhalt. "The Masai know this. The Bible is too long. There is too much to read. Why should we pray to a man? Men die, and are no longer real. We know this by looking around and seeing that they are not there. The moon and the sun endure. They are real. We see them, every day, in the sky. Evil spirits are real; with our own eyes we see the evil they do. Then pray to the evil spirits who would harm you, so you will not be harmed. Pray for the sun to come up in the morning and cast away the dark where evil hides. This is sensible; this is good. Your religion will have us all crazy like you."

  "The sun will always rise; it is God's law."

  "What if it doesn't? What if there's no light tomorrow, and tomorrow after? Don't you think the evil spirits will be all over us then? Who will you pray to when that happens?"

  Father Varnhalt tried to smile at this nonsense, but his emotional and theological resources failed him again. Some horror residing in his head caused a rearrangement of his features. He spilled wine on himself.

  Raymond Poincarré sat with his hands in his lap, eyes glazed, his own meal largely untouched. Erika put a steadying hand on Father Varnhalt's arm and glared at Ukumtara, who was too busy eating to take notice of her displeasure. She wondered what wouldhappen if the colonel could have a glimpse of what lay inside the Catacombs; a look at the cat people of Zan with their watchful, mesmerizing eyes. If he didn't faint dead away he might be transformed, temporarily, into a jackal, which was about what he deserved.

  Ukumtara suddenly pushed his plate aside, frowning, and poured more wine for himself.

  "I don't like eating with you," he said to Father Varnhalt. "You put me in a bad mood. Go along to your own house now."

  Father Varnhalt's throat tightened; his eyes swam with tears.

  "Will you go with me," he asked Erika, "and see that there's nothing under my bed?"

  Ukumtara roared, but his laughter ended in a coughing fit. He got up to change the frequency on his radio, finding Cuban salsa on a station in Maputo, Mozambique.

  As he was listening he braced himself against the top of the low bookshelf where the radio was, a look of intense concentration in his eyes. He pressed his right hand against his chest. He seemed short of breath. He strained to release a belch. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he sat down heavily in a chair. He was beaded with sweat.

  Raymond looked around at him.

  "Is something
the matter, Colonel?"

  "I'm not feeling well. Indigestion."

  "I've told you often, it's no good bolting your food the way you do."

  Ukumtara's face was contorted. "Pain . . . here," he panted, still holding his chest.

  Raymond raised his eyebrows and got up from the table.

  "What sort of pain? As if your chest is being crushed?"

  Colonel Ukumtara, now very short of breath, stared at him.

  "Yes . . . that's it."

  Raymond examined him. The colonel's skin felt clammy.

  "Does the pain seem to radiate from your chest? Is there numbness in either arm?"

  "What's happening . . . I'm sick . . . the fever . . ."

  "Erika, would you fetch my medical bag for me? It's just there, in the bedroom–now, Colonel, you must lie down. On the floor. Let me loosen the strap of this shoulder holster. Also I want these boots off." When he had Ukumtara prostrate with a small pillow under his head, Raymond took his blood pressure and listened to the chambers of his heart. He looked bleakly at Erika. The colonel was moaning with fear.

  "You mustn't excite yourself. Your blood pressure is low, your pulse rapid. No, it's not the fever. I suspect you've had a heart attack, how severe I can't say."

  "Aieeeeee!"

  Raymond held him firmly. "I'm sure we can save you. But you have to do what I tell you and keep calm. Erika, I need from the hospital storeroom sodium bicarbonate, epinephrine, dopamine, and five hundred milligrams of calcium chloride. Also an oxygen supply, enough to last until we reach Mbeya hospital. Father Varnhalt, see if you can get the Peugeot station wagon started, and send at once for Sergeant Mchanga."

  By the time Erika returned at a jog from the storeroom, there were soldiers on the veranda of the bungalow and Father Varnhalt had brought the mission's station wagon around. Three hundred thousand miles old, it stood rattling and shaking in a cloud of noxious carbonized smoke, one headlight blinking amber with every faulty stroke of the pistons. Inside, cockroaches had consumed everything edible.

  Erika knew they could never hope to cross the Mbeya Range in the pathetic rusted wagon, but the colonel was just too long to transport lying down in a Land-Rover.

  Colonel Ukumtara was semiconscious; he had vomited up much of his dinner. Raymond pumped drugs into him and clapped an oxygen mask on his face. Four soldiers carried the colonel outside to the Peugeot and placed him inside. His feet stuck out past the tailgate. Raymond motioned for Erika to get behind the wheel. He crouched in the back with his patient. There was no room for anyone else in the wagon.

  "Where are you taking him?" Sergeant Mchanga asked.

  "To the airplane."

  "But–

  "Yes, I know, there's a risk; it's also the fastest way. This man is very ill. Don't just stand there, open the gates, Sergeant. Erika, get going!"

  Sergeant Mchanga issued orders at the top of his voice; the gates were unlocked. Erika coaxed the balky wagon across the mission yard to the track outside, which in the light of the scimitar moon was a pale-red slash through sparse miombo.

  "How is he?"

  "Fair," Raymond muttered. He looked back at the lights of the mission as she negotiated the bumps and ruts down to the landing strip. The blue-and-white Beechcraft Bonanza was sitting at the near end, at a slight tilt over the port wheel. Erika pulled up a few feet from the right wingtip and lay on the Peugeot's horn, which wasn't as loud as the noise the engine was making. She couldn't see the pilot, a former Rhodesian tea planter named Weed, in the cabin, and apparently he hadn't heard them approaching.

  Erika got out, stepped up on the wing of the Bonanza, and opened the door.

  Weed, a small man, was slumped in the right-hand seat, the remains of a sandwich on the seat beside him. There was a nearly empty bottle of the '62 Bordeaux in his lap. He had drunk some of it, because he was out cold and snoring. The rest of the wine had soaked into his clothes.

  The plane settled as Raymond added his weight to the wing and looked over her shoulder.

  "Move aside," he said to Erika. He dragged the pilot from the cabin. On the ground he shook Weed vigorously, but saw only the cloudy whites of his eyes and heard a few protesting groans.

  "What'll we do?" Erika said.

  "Get in and start the engine, Erika, there's no time to lose."

  Erika threw out the garbage and settled herself in the reeking cabin while Raymond made Weed comfortable in the front seat of the Peugeot. She flipped on inside lights, consulted the manual for basic information about the plane and ran through a preflight check. It looked like a dream to fly, once she had it off the ground. The tanks were three-quarters full. She turned the engine over.

  Raymond reappeared on her right, leaning into the cabin.

  "Can you do it?" he said loudly.

  "Yes! But we'll have to pull out the seats to make room for–

  "Colonel Ukmntara isn't going. Good-bye, Erika. Good luck."

  "What?"

  "Take off. Now. Get us the help we need, Erika. I can't manage anymore, not by myself."

  "Raymond, what about the colonel? Won't he die?" She realized with a slight shock that she had never seen Raymond smile before; she had thought he couldn't.

  "There's nothing wrong with his heart. I put something in his food–a mild bush poison to produce the symptoms you observed. The rest was suggestion: simple witchcraft. Never underestimate its power. Because the colonel may have convinced himself that it's his time to die, I could have my hands full trying to pull him through."

  "You've been planning this? What about Weed?"

  "I also doctored the wine."

  "Raymond, my God, I thought–"

  "You couldn't have done it yourself; they wouldn't let you past the gates." He grasped her shoulder reassuringly. "I know you wanted to take Bobby; but there was no way to work it out without arousing suspicion. He understands. Now you're free. But hurry."

  "What will happen to you?"

  "Nothing. I responded properly to a genuine emergency. You stole the plane while my back was turned."

  He smiled again and closed the cabin door, jumped from the wing, and stood clear. For a few moments Erika was too stunned to make a move.

  Free.

  Her heart began to pound. She fastened the harness. and tried to recall what she knew about taking off in a single-engine plane with a main tire pancaked.

  Erika carefully pivoted the Bonanza, wincing at the heaviness she felt to port. She pointed the nose at the tight thicket of trees at the end of the eighteen hundred-foot salt-pan strip and turned on the lights. She needed full power before the roll. The plane began to tremble in place as the tach needle crept up the dial to 3000 rpm. Then she eased off the brakes and built up speed, gripping the yoke too hard in her anxiety; it had been almost a year since she'd logged any flying time.

  She applied hard right rudder to get the weight off the deteriorating tire, added fifteen degrees flaps for additional lift, moved the nose trim up with her left thumb, felt the handling smooth out–and then she was airborne, clearing, with not much room to spare, the trees and a small flock of roosting ivututu birds spooked from thorny heights by the noise of the plane.

  One of the ungainly birds, big as a goose, shot up against the undercarriage behind the nose gear. There was a considerable impact and the Bonanza shuddered, but then it climbed steadily higher and there seemed to be no harm done. Except to the hapless bird.

  Erika looked back through wide windows at the banked lights of Kingdom Mission, and said a prayer that those who were alive tonight would still be living when she returned. She climbed to five thousand feet, leaving the landing gear down: The reduction in air speed was at least twenty knots, but she was afraid that the shredded tire might damage the gear door, leaving her with no options when it came time to land in Nairobi. She could either balance on two wheels on a concrete runway or attempt a gear-up landing on grass; but if the Bonanza's gear became stuck halfway, then any landing would end in a potentially fa
tal crash.

  Erika came right to zero four zero. Ahead of her, beyond the rash of lights that identified Chunya town, an outpost on the road to the soda works at Lake Rukwa, was an earthly void, part of the great central plain of Tanzania: an area of torrent courses, virgin bush, and semiarid savanna the size of Belgium. Nearly all of it was infested with tsetse fly, and seldom visited by man.

  A peak was rising up out of the range of hills beneath the airplane. Erika detoured around it and got out the charts, made contact with the radio beacon in Mbeya. She plotted a heading that would take her parallel to the eastern branch of the Great Rift Valley all the way to Nairobi. At 65 percent power the flight would last a little less than four hours, leaving her with ample fuel reserves.

  Erika put the Bonanza on automatic pilot. Then she let herself drift, focusing on jet magnitude, stars in her eyes, a vision of the heavens ceaselessly busy, as colorful as bees in a hive.

  About twenty minutes later, when she made a routine instrument check, Erika saw that she was in trouble.

  Oil pressure had dropped and there was a corresponding rise in the cylinder-head temperature. She immediately lowered the speed to 150 knots.

  Erika remembered the ivututu she had collided with. Father Varnhalt had told her that the rare birds had a talismanic reputation in the Rukwa Valley: the power of life and death over human beings. Her mouth was dry from the altitude. She watched the gauges. Half her oil was gone. There was no chance that she could reach Nairobi without repairs. She had, at best, fifteen minutes to put the Bonanza down before the cylinder head cracked.

  Erika consulted the charts. She was just over the Rungwa Game Reserve and at the western edge of Ruaha National Park, a vast and virtually unpopulated tract. The nearest airport was at Iringa, a plantation town about 120 miles east of her present position. Even if she trimmed for slow flight, she had little hope that she could make it. But ahead of her lay nothing but darkness and certain disaster. Erika's teeth chattered in the thin cold air as she made the course correction.