Catacombs

by John Farris

Erika breathed deeply and raised up, head and shoulders off the bed. Springs creaked loudly. The light swarmed; her heart began to pound frighteningly. But she took a determined look around.

  Not much to see. Her point of view was obscured by mosquito netting, the sails of her dreams of freedom. Sunlight speared down, as if from small chinks in the roof. The netting was splattered with guano. The bed itself was a monstrous curiosity, a bronze replica of a sailing ship, with tall masts fore and aft.

  Where was she, and how had she come to be here? Erika felt suddenly demented, ablaze with the unreality of her predicament. She cried out; it was the weak petulant voice of a starving bird. Her eyes filled with tears.

  When she blinked to clear her vision, turning her head again, she saw the black man beside her bed, nodding ecstatically, grinning, as if he were overjoyed to find her conscious. She was startled, but not afraid.

  He was tall and standing on one foot, the other foot braced against the inside of his locked knee, a nomad's untiring stance. Her first impression was that he had scarcely enough skin to cover his bones–they seemed about to pop out everywhere. He had a pet mongoose on one shoulder and wore a Scottish tam and a tarnished old stethoscope around his neck. His face was kind. There was a lump or wen near the center of his forehead, like a mound of intuition, or an unrealized third eye.

  He held up the stethoscope and waved it while hopping around in a stork-like circle. The mongoose went sinuously from one shoulder to the other, pausing to stare at Erika with its glittering eyes.

  Abruptly the black man ceased celebrating, put his other foot on the floor, and padded over to the bed. He spread the netting and put four fingers on her forehead lightly, as if he were testing the heat of a griddle. He grinned to find her cool. This close she noticed how scarred he was, and how dusty. There was fine dust everywhere in his hair, on his nondescript clothes. But his hands were clean.

  "No more fever," he announced. "I making you better. Me."

  "Doctor?"

  "I? No. At the Jo'burg mines, helping doctor." He showed the stethoscope again, shy and proud. "Many accidents. Good helper, I."

  "Must–get up."

  "No, no. Wait. Coming back, I." He turned and disappeared from her view.

  Erika drew a tremulous breath. From outside she heard the emphatic, derisive blare of a bull elephant.

  She closed her eyes and saw herself, in a panic, fighting to keep the single-engine airplane in the air over dark miombo woodland. Piece of cake, she heard Chips Chapman say. In her ringing ears his voice sounded so close, and comforting, that she looked up, expecting to see him in the room with her. Then despair grabbed her like a wave of the ocean and thrust her deep down into some rolling, suffocating depths. No, he wasn't here. He was there. Way back there and dying, with all of the others.

  Erika smelled something hot and savory and opened her eyes again.

  The black man had reappeared, minus his mongoose, and was busy by the side of the bed. Looking at his face, she made another, fever-distorted memory connection, seeing him hopping around like a maniac, a lighted torch in one hand, smoking up the walls and ceiling as he drove the bats away. The memory was so small and flickering it might have come from a month ago, or childhood.

  Fear licked through her like a rasping tongue. She tried to sit up and almost knocked the bowl from her benefactor's hand.

  "How–long?" she groaned, still unable to clearly speak her mind, to articulate more than a few words at a time.

  "No, no."

  "I was– Plane crashed. Did it?"

  Nodding, he held her head up with one big hand so hardened by calluses it seemed armored, and made her drink a slightly bitter but not unappetizing broth.

  "Each day I think, tonight digging hole for her. Me. But you fooling me. You want to live, so bad. Okay. Drinking more, now you be better."

  "I–"

  "Drink, mum. You no strong yet."

  "What's–"

  "Oh, digging some roots, I. Boiling them. Killing the houma, before it kill you."

  "No more."

  He put her gently down. He had brought more strips of clean cotton batting. He undid the soiled cloths between her legs, bathed her with a courteous professionalism and changed her. Erika kept her eyes closed.

  "Let me up now," she said, when he had finished.

  "Oh, no. Rest yourself. Two or three steps, that is all, then you falling down." His knees quaked realistically. "Same this house. She shake like anything." He chuckled.

  "What is–whose house–?"

  He pantomimed the aiming and shooting of a rifle. "Very old. Safaris, they coming here."

  "A hunting lodge."

  "Tomorrow, the next day, you will see. Getting up then."

  "But I–my friends need help." She tried to plead with him, and was made aware again of her tied hands, the wrists cushioned to prevent chafing with collars of sponge rubber so old it crumbled easily.

  Erika began to sob. "You don't understand. Please. Why do you have me tied like this? Untie me."

  He looked wary, as if there were a threat in this request. He came back to test the bindings.

  "No, mum. Not safe yet. You falling out of bed, hurting yourself."

  Erika didn't believe him. She wondered, fleetingly, if she was a prisoner again, if he was other than the benefactor he seemed. But she was beginning to float, warmed and lulled by the swallows of strong broth. She saw him fading away, toward a door.

  "Wait–tell me. Your name."

  "Ijumaa," he said. "Oliver. Me."

  "Oliver. And I–I'm Erika. Merci. Mon ami Oliver."

  He grinned at the unfamiliar pronunciation of his name, dancing a little in place, delighted. Erika remembered then that Ijumaa was the Swahili word for Friday. She smiled wanly at him and went to sleep.

  In her dream time she crawled through one of the Swiss-cheese walls of the Catacombs and encountered Oliver again, in a moony chamber of preserved priests. He was like a long splinter of ebony within the crystal tomb, but he looked different, forbidding, enchanted by status. She wondered again how the ancient people had achieved such a purity of preservation, without a single patchy flaw of decay–they all looked ready to breathe upon resurrection.

  The wen between his eyes had enlarged and reddened. Dream time flickered and she was back in the hunting lodge, bound in the huge floating boat-bed as he came through the doorway. His third eye was a bloodstone. It seethed brilliantly as his body froze, lifelessly, upright. Within the red diamond she saw movement, like the blur of a tornado. The bloodstone flew apart and from Oliver's forehead gushed a full-sized cheetah, leaping down to join her on the bed, the journey.

  They were on a river now, a river flowing backward, leaving the giant-sized icon of Oliver behind. She felt the terror of immobility. The cheetah sat in profile at her feet, weightlessly, and its jaws parted in a licking yawn. Then the head turned and the eyes, a riled orange, appraised her. She stared back in fascination and dread. Why was he displeased? And where was she going?

  Her vision blurred; the face of the cheetah was enshadowed, simplified to tones of light and dark. A straitened mask, then a barred gate, then the strokes of a pictograph; a language she had labored to learn.

  But now her knowledge failed her. Was it a warning, or a summons?

  Her heartbeat awakened Erika. She was aware of odors, earth sounds at night, the faint husking intonation of a big cat prowling in the near dark of her room. The spoor of the animal was unmistakable, frightening. She turned her head in time to see him, high in the haunch and with dappled nape, the glowing orb of an eye as he strode through the doorway on his way out. She opened her mouth to scream but had no voice. She lay then in the chilly night of the veld with nothing closer to listen to than her heart, wracked by tremors, wondering if, when she closed her eyes again, the cheetah would return and do something terrible while she slept.

  Chapter 8

  CHANVAI,

  Momela Lakes, Tanzania

  May 7


  In the early afternoon Jumbe, discreetly supervised by Dr. Robeson Kumenyere, devoted an hour and a half to affairs of state. He spent much of this time on the telephone cajoling or lashing nervous members of Chama Cha Mapin-duzi, Tanzania's ruling party, and his military high command, who had allowed a section of the Tazara railroad near the southern border to be slightly damaged in an air raid. He spoke soothingly to certain other heads of African states, and to the British foreign secretary, a long-time admirer. He was, repeatedly, reassuring about the state of his health.

  When the telephone link between Chanvai and the seat of parliament in Dodoma failed, almost a daily occurrence, Jumbe dictated a memo rejecting a "strongly worded protest" from Pretoria in response to an affirmation of hostility and call to arms quoted in the Tanzania Daily Mail and subsequently picked up by the world news services. The remainder of his time he allotted to a delegation of Scandinavian bankers who had waited at Chanvai for two days to see him. Jumbe had begun to tremble from exertion, but he calmly told the bankers that Tanzania would rebound from the effects of the long drought and the expensive military "police action," and would resume interest payments on existing loans within a year's time. He used this piece of projected good news to extract a pledge for additional millions to bolster the trouble plagued highway and port facility construction programs.

  "A good day's work," Kumenyere said, when the bankers had left for the airport. He gave added support to Jumbe's hand as the president held a match to his meerschaum pipe.

  "It's thievery," the old man said sadly.

  "But they're so eager to give us credit–the World Bank regularly comes begging to bury us in dollars."

  "In the end we are only robbing ourselves. We can't hope to repay the debt we have now, although I've tried to keep it within a few zeros of reality. And as long as our economy is subordinate to international capitalism, we will always be an indentured nation." Jumbe coughed raspingly. "Another failure to leave behind me."

  "I don't want to hear any more talk like that today," Kumenyere told him, a hand at Jumbe's wrist as he clocked his pulse. "Your prognosis–"

  "My prognosis, I should hope, is in the pouch that's just arrived from the airport."

  "Nothing ever escapes you," the doctor said admiringly.

  "Let's see what your colleagues in Houston had to say," Jumbe said, his smile overcast by dread.

  "I feel that I ought to have time to–"

  "We'll study the medical report together. My pulse?"

  "Altogether unsatisfactory. I've cautioned you before, anxiety can be more of a danger at this stage than the aneurysm itself. Now I'm going to give you Valium, and I want you to rest quietly for two hours. Then you may read the conclusions which the doctors Tustin and Grunewald have reached. You know that I'll keep nothing from you, Jumbe."

  The old man grasped his arm, an affirmation of friendship, of dependence.

  "Just keep me alive–until South Africans are free: Then nothing can matter."

  "I promise you."

  Jumbe took the tablet of Valium, twenty-five milligrams, with a small glass of wine.

  "And no one must find out–how ill I really am."

  "Trust me, Jumbe. You know how much I love you."

  "Remember. We need time tonight to prepare my speech. I want you to read it over several times. You'll be standing in for me before parliament, and the world."

  Kumenyere smiled diffidently. "I'm willing to die for you. But a speech–I'm no politician. I'm afraid I'll make a fool of myself."

  After leaving Jumbe's guarded bedroom he collected the sealed diplomatic pouch, courier delivered from the Houston Medical Center in Texas, and took it to his bungalow. There he mixed a drink and examined the contents of the pouch.

  The world-famous heart specialists in Houston, Tustin and Grunewald, had returned the X rays which he had personally made, in great secrecy, at the Kialama hindi Hospital in Dar. They showed a dilation the size of a peach pit on the wall of one of the great arteries feeding the heart in question; death would occur almost instantaneously following a rupture. He leafed through the long evaluation by the surgeons, who were prepared to fly to Tanzania to perform the operation that would save the patient's life. In his precarious condition, they concluded, Jumbe could not safely be brought to them.

  A knock on the door. Kumenyere left the papers and X rays on his desk and went to open it.

  Henry Landreth stood outside in the stinging heat, his face twitching unhappily beneath a wide-brimmed bush hat. He had a glass of pink gin in one hand.

  "There are problems," he said. "We must have a chat."

  "Come in," Kumenyere said impatiently, and went back to his studies.

  Henry wandered into the bungalow behind him, wincing at the drafty chill from the air conditioner. He picked up one of the X rays. In its black-and-white simplicity, it looked like a brooding thunderstorm.

  "Devastating" he said. "Even a layman like myself can tell that's no good. Can it be fixed?"

  "Bypass operation." Kumenyere gave him a look at the doctors' letterhead. "Almost routine for these chaps. But they're the best."

  "What was Jumbe's reaction?"

  "He hasn't seen the X rays yet. I've gradually prepared him for the worst."

  "What about the poor bugger who actually needs the operation?"

  "Ah, but he no longer needs it. He died ten days ago, in hospital."

  "Unattended and unmourned?"

  "I made it easy for him. After all, he did me a good turn. By presenting me with just the symptoms I needed, at the right time."

  Henry studied the doctor's smoothly handsome, pious face.

  "As long as we're talking about murder–"

  "Are we?"

  Henry shuddered. "Let's continue our conversation outdoors. The bloody cold in here will have me croaking like a frog."

  Kumenyere picked up a heavy rifle and they walked down a rough track toward Big Momela, where islands of pink flamingos shimmered in the sun. All around them, for several square miles, was the Chanvai Game Sanctuary. A warden in a Land-Rover went bumping across a stretch of short grassland still wet in low places; the meadow was populated with buffalo and kongoni, a type of antelope with a sloping back like a giraffe's, and curly horns. Directly behind the crater lake, and fifty miles away, Kilimanjaro was slightly beclouded in an otherwise perfect sky.

  Even as they walked in the humdrum noon of sun and insects, Henry slipped into a state of meditation, his mind filled with a vision of bloodstones. He had spent weeks in the Repository deep in the throat of Kilimanjaro, studying the stones for twenty hours a day. He had come to think of them as living entities, with intelligence, will, even the power of life and death over those who came into contact with them. His fellow explorers had faded to unimportant shadows in the radiance of the stones, and after a while they ceased to exist for Henry. When he decided to remove some of the stones and reveal what he had learned about FIREKILL to Kumenyere, he experienced no difficulty in murdering Jack Portline, who attempted to stop him from leaving the Repository with the diamonds.

  But now, when he was in the doldrums, a sink of anxiety, Henry was frequently concerned that he'd made a mistake in taking away even a necessary handful of the bloodstones. He was neither superstitious nor inclined to occult explanations for the mysteries and paradoxes of existence, but he felt that if the stones had not been missing, the mountain would be quiet. He had experienced the power of the long-dead cat people, the Lords of the Storm, from the unimaginable distances of their tombs. While in the Catacombs he had been susceptible to the flood of imagery and perceptions that followed unwise eye contact with the creatures. Transformation, Erika had called it. One did not actually change shape or sprout catlike whiskers; but one became, for moments or even hours at a time, more animal than human. He'd been away from the Catacombs for several weeks, but he felt the haunting pressure of their eyes in his mind, their fierce disapproval. If he could put the bloodstones back, then perhaps–
But that was idiotic. And not at all possible; things had gone too far, the stolen bloodstones were hostage to implacable ambitions: his own, and Robeson Kumenyere's.

  "The mountain's heating up," Henry said forebodingly. "And the Kibo glaciers are already melting. Seismic activity is stronger than it's been at any time since 'sixty-six."

  Kumenyere was gently incredulous. "You're worried that Kilimanjaro will erupt?"

  "It won't take a major eruption. With the ice retreating, a million tons of rock could be loosened by the continuing jolts and come tumbling down from the rim. And the entrance to the Catacombs will be buried forever."

  "I think Kilimanjaro has been in this state many times during the last ten thousand years. Yet the entrance was there to be found, by the clever Dr. Hardie."

  "It was pure luck on his part," Henry snapped. "He had very little to go on. Some rock paintings above Nyangoro that seemed to be the faces of cheetahs, but were language, a schematic drawing, symbols he had the wit or inspiration to interpret as ultrasonic frequencies. A bright child with the proper sonar equipment could then have found his way to the Catacombs."

  "He was the first. But you'll have the credit."

  "Even if the Catacombs could survive a really serious upheaval, we ought to remove the FIREKILL bloodstones from the Repository. Without delay. There's too much at stake."

  "You shouldn't be a worrier, Henry. It gives you no opportunity to enjoy life. You're going to be a very rich man, your past dishonor willingly forgiven."

  "Forgiven! I was misjudged, falsely accused, shamed, ruined! You have no conception of the work I was capable of doing, the discoveries I might have made if they'd left me alone. England has despised me for thirty years. But someday they'll appreciate how deeply I loathe them all!"

  "I'll personally supervise the erection of monuments to you all over the East African Federation; perhaps there'll even be one back home in Trafalgar Square, ha-ha. Now I have some good news. The fever at Ivututu has claimed more victims. Two are dead, two more in a condition that might be described as hopeless idiocy, their minds burned up."