Murgunstrumm and Others

by Cave, Hugh

  "Who'm gonna know?"

  He lay very still, breathing deeply; and he shut his eyes and thought about having another woman in the shanty, to live with him. He told himself the other woman would be better than Cerema, and there would be no Mulvahey to interfere.

  "Bein' as I'se Gawd," he said thoughtfully, "I c'n git me de bestes' woman dey is, fob muhsel'."

  So he dozed, and presently, vaguely, he was aware that his stomach hurt him. His stomach ached. He put his hands on it and pressed, and said aloud:

  "Dat stew done dat. Cerema wa'n' no good cook nohow."

  He drew a deep breath, and his stomach hurt more instead of less. He looked down and saw that his middle had swollen a little, and the belt was too tight around it. That was what hurt him. Scowling, he took the belt buckle in his hands and pulled it to loosen it; but it was stuck and wouldn't loosen. And suddenly he let it go and cried out shrilly:

  "It moved! Lawd Gawd, it moved!"

  Fear came to him then, and he stared with bulging eyes at the belt. He sat up, squirming against the bed post. With both hands he took hold of the belt and the belt buckle and strove mightily, desperately, to drag one through the other. He struggled until his hands were drenched with sweat and his face was a bloated reddish thing and his breath came in great gulps of agony. And when he took his hands away from the belt and stared down, he saw that the leather strap had wriggled through the gleaming buckle, and one hole was showing. A dog's tail with one puncture was dangling down.

  Screaming, he twisted off the bed and stood erect, fighting at the encircling strap. He tore his fingers and wrists on the sharp edges of the buckle; he burned his hands on the leather. With huge eyes he glared at the belt, and his chest heaved up and down in mighty gasps, and mumbling sounds choked through his lips. A terrible pain was searing upward through his stomach and downward through his legs. He was on fire all over and inside, and he screeched with the agony of it.

  And when he looked again, the belt had wriggled through the buckle another notch, and two holes were showing. A dog's tail with two punctures was dangling down.

  He knew the meaning of horror then. He threw himself onto the bed, face down, and gripped the edge of the straw mattress with both hands extended, and pressed his body deep into it, striving to make himself smaller around the middle. He held his breath until his throat was full of whistling noises. He buried his eyes and nose and mouth in the unclean blankets and sucked the flannel with his lips. He clawed and scratched with his fingers. He beat the floor with his dangling feet.

  He felt, he knew, that the leather band around his stomach was tightening. Tightening slowly, viciously, relentlessly.

  Mad with the knowledge of it, he pushed himself violently off the bed and lurched into the middle of the room, where the upturned legs of the broken table stopped him. He hurled himself across the upstuck sticks of wood, sawing his body back and forth in frenzied desperation, striving to tear the leather in twain by chafing it. And all the time, as he twisted and writhed at his task, horrible sobs gurgled out of his mouth, and his eyes protruded, and his tongue grew thick and bloated in his teeth.

  And he saw, looking down in his madness, that the leather strap had wriggled another notch through the gleaming buckle, and there was now a dog's tail dangling with three punctures. A terrible agony surged up through him, eating into his hands and legs and head and feet, driving reason out of his mind.

  Screeching hideously, he staggered backward. His hands were clutching again at the belt, but they could find no hold, for the leather strap was a band of iron, cutting into the flesh of his stomach. It was wriggling into itself, closing itself tenaciously, and he could feel its movements. Momentarily he stood stock-still, glaring down at it. Then he looked about wildly for a knife, and there was no knife.

  He shrieked again and again. He fought himself. He clawed at himself, at his face and breast and legs. He stumbled about the room, knowing only that he could not stand still. He crashed headlong into the tin wall and filled the shanty with the jangling vibrations of quivering metal. His voice rose higher and higher to a knife-like screech. He fell to the floor, rolling over and over. He clawed at the linoleum. He twisted on himself, writhing with the mad convulsions of a broken snake. He sobbed . . . and sobbed . . . and sobbed.

  And suddenly he was very stiff and still, and his sobs ceased.

  He was dead, and his outflung hands were locked in the smooth floor, with their fingernails buried from sight. His eyes were out of his head and his tongue filled his gaping mouth. His body was a rigid, twisted, swollen mockery, shapeless and hideous. There was absolutely no movement about him. Even the leather belt had stopped its wriggling.

  The leather belt was a stiff band, sunk deep in the bloated flesh of his body. The buckle of it gleamed up at the ceiling, glittering and grinning. And the protruding end of the strap, like a dog's tail with four tiny incisions, hung limp and lifeless to the floor, with four empty holes gaping in it.

  Boomerang

  I don't explain this story. It goes nowhere, it offers nothing, it has no beginning except in the thickness of a drunken man's tongue, and if it has an end I was not there to see it. Yet it troubles me and it will trouble you.

  To begin with there were three of us in a place then called Kemal Sel's, which is in Sandakan on the northeast coast of Borneo, distant about seven days by steam from Singapore. The hour was near two in the afternoon and Sel's was an oven. The rain outside tumbled down from the hills, over the sandstone cliffs of Bahalla, in a deluge.

  We were Kuyper, the cutch man, Matheson, the steamboat agent, and myself, Wilkes, of the B.N.B. Company.

  "I ran into a queer one," Kuyper said.

  He was home today from two weeks inland by river, by prabu, among the Kayan's of the upriver kampongs where still, despite trade and religion, the savages are children. He was home and glad to be home, and glad it was safe to drink again. He liked his rum. His belly was a barrel.

  "I never did learn the fellow's name," he said. "We'll call him Smith. He—"

  I said, "Wait." The fellow at the corner table was getting up. Was coming over.

  He'd been there when we arrived, sitting in the gloom of his own thoughts. A white man but an odd one, bushy as a Hindu, his breed and age hidden by his beard. A derelict, perhaps, but that's a hard name. Few whites in Borneo are derelicts pure and simple. Drinking gets some; fever, homesickness, heat and rain and monotony get others.

  He came over and nodded to us and said, "I've been working up nerve enough to ask to join you. Shouldn't, of course, but company's damned scarce and I'm fed up, being alone. Mind?"

  You don't say no. Whites are whites, even with beards and sick eyes. I leaned back and pulled up a chair for him. We ordered drinks.

  "This yarn of yours, Kuyper?" Matheson prompted.

  Kuyper fished a pouch from his pocket—a new one, I noticed—and packed his pipe. "We'll call him Smith. I got the tale in a kampong deep in Kayan country. Diamonds up there, you know—small ones, not worth much, but plenty of them. Smith had his heart set on getting some."

  You either liked Kuyper or you didn't. Most didn't, but it made no difference to him; he was big, important, he liked himself enough to make up for the dislike of others. I've called him a cutch man but that's leaving a lot unsaid. He'd come to Sandakan years ago as owner-captain of a freighter. He'd holed up, sold his ship and gone to work on a spirit farm, then bullied himself into a cutch concession and was rich now. And usually drunk.

  He traveled a lot and told ugly stories. This was apt to be one of them.

  "I was up there, you know, looking over the territory with an eye for raw materials." He drained his glass and blew smoke into it, grinning. The bushy man sipped slowly and eyed him.

  "This fellow Smith wanted diamonds. He'd heard there were plenty in this particular kampong—place run by an old kapala named Makali. He was right, there was a fortune, but he was too late. Fellow named Phipps was there ahead of him. Young chap, ho
nest trader—the stupid, plodding type. Smith, of course, was a bad one. Like me."

  He laughed alone. Matheson glanced my way and raised an eyelid, which was safe enough then because Kuyper was too drunk to notice. The stranger smoked and sat and said nothing, but his eyes belonged in the yellow head of a krait.

  "This fellow Phipps had been there a week," Kuyper said, "and the Kayans liked him. It was up to Smith, of course, to pay respects. Common decency. But Smith heard about the diamonds, heard that young Phipps had bought the whole mess, and he put his brains to work. You chaps ever see a lansat pod, the poison kind?"

  "Seen the fruit," Matheson said. "Tastes like a plum."

  "Not the kind I mean," said Kuyper, his grin ugly. "Comes from a dwarf variety found in that region. It's a pod, about the size and shape of a lima bean but fragile. Powders in your hand when dry. Deadly poisonous. Worst poison I know. Well . . . Smith had some that he'd picked and dried and was intending to bring back to—that is, to take back with him. He planted them in Phipps' tent."

  It was going to be that kind of story. You could see it in Kuyper's ugly grin, in his red-flecked eyes. And not because he was drunk, either. Drunk or sober his idea of humor was always the same.

  I signaled the Hainan waiter, but the bearded man was ahead of me. He said, "Mine, this time," and pushed himself up. He was long-legged as a mantis and walked with a limp.

  He brought the drinks himself and sat down again, and there was a lull while Kuyper rolled his glass in his beefy hands to warm it. A finger tapped my shoulder and I turned to frown into the withered Javanese face of Kemal Sel.

  "Mister Wilkes," Sel said. "I like to ask you question, please. Private."

  I was an old customer. I walked with him to the far end of the room, where he held out a wrinkled hand in which something glittered.

  "That man—he don't tell me his name—he give me this to pay for drinks. He say it worth money. I take it, but I don't know. I never see him before. Maybe he cheat me."

  I looked at the stone and suppressed an urge to turn and stare at the bearded man. I thought, "It's damned queer, his coming to our table like that, not naming himself." The stone was a small, uncut diamond. You don't find them on the coast.

  When I sat down again Kuyper was saying, "Well, this chap Smith went to old Makali, the kapala, with a cock-and-bull story that was sheer genius. He told Makali that Phipps was bad medicine. Phipps was the wickedest bliam—that's a witch-doctor, you know—that ever lived. Most likely Phipps was planning to put a curse on the whole kampong and destroy it, and it might be a good idea to investigate. You can make those simple natives believe anything, you know."

  The bearded man said, "Can you?"

  "You can if you're as smart as Smith was," Kuyper retorted.

  "Well, the Kayans got Phipps out of his tent on a ruse and turned his stuff inside out. Of course they found the poison pods. That settled it."

  "They—killed him?"

  "Not in so many words, no. Wouldn't dare, with Divisional Forest Officers dropping in every so often. No . . . they just drove him out. Stripped him to his boots and trousers, hung the pouch of lansat pods around his neck and sent him packing."

  Matheson shuddered. The bearded man stared over the top of his glass and his breath made bubbles in the rum and his eyes smouldered.

  I said, "He had no chance, of course. The jungle, the flies, fever, snakes, starvation . . ." and when Kuyper laughed I added, "Smith got the diamonds?"

  "Bought them for a song. Smart man, that Smith."

  Matheson said, "A dangerous game. Perhaps he underestimated the chances of this fellow Phipps."

  "Eh?"

  "With luck, Phipps might have reached some friendly kampong."

  Kuyper drained his glass and blew a loud laugh to the ceiling. "Alone, unarmed, with nothing to eat but dried poison pods, he might have licked the jungle? Don't make me laugh!"

  "There's a thing called justice, Kuyper," I said, "that sometimes gives a man strength to carry on."

  He shook his head, scowling now. "More than likely he ate the lansat pods to cut short his misery. Sensible thing to do, at any rate. One would be enough." There was a pause.

  The bearded man said, "I think not. I think he would have saved them."

  "Eh? Why?"

  "For Smith," he said and stood up.

  He gave me the creeps, that fellow, and I was glad to see him go. I finished my drink and looked at my watch and said to Matheson, "Well?" To Kuyper I said, "Sorry to run off, but there's work to be—" and then I was silent, staring.

  Something was wrong with the man. His square face was the color of goat's milk and smeared with perspiration. He sat like wood, staring at an object the bushy fellow had left lying there on the table.

  It was a tobacco pouch, an old one. I reached for it and my glance fell on Kuyper's glass.

  Something more than rum had been in that glass. A little brown thing, only half dissolved, shaped like a lima bean, clung to the bottom of it.

  The Crawling Curse

  1.

  Vesker, the Dutchman, paced methodically down the second-floor corridor and entered the room number 213. It was the room of the man he meant to murder; and without emotion or nervousness or any feeling whatever, he hid himself there to await his victim's arrival.

  The hour was eleven o'clock at night, and Vesker's victim would return at eleven-fifteen. His name was Tenegai LaRoque, and he was a good man. He was part French and part Saputan, which made him a half-caste in the eyes of certain white men and a king invincible in the eyes of certain up-river natives. Government officials had thought enough of him to overlook the fact that he was the illegitimate son of a Saputan sorceress, and remember that he was also the son of a distinguished French officer. Consequently he held a position of high importance in Bandjermasin.

  At present he was playing bridge with his wife and his wife's friends. It was his wife's arrangement. His wife was twenty-four and unforgivably lovely, and passionately French.

  It was for her sake, as well as his own, that Vesker was hiding in Tenegai LaRoque's room. She and Vesker had planned the details together. Neither of them loved the man who was to be murdered.

  The room was shadow-ridden and murky, and a very good place for Vesker's purpose. It was one of the best rooms in Bandjermasin's best hotel, which meant that it possessed two narrow windows and smelled a little and seldom saw light enough to dispel the lurking gloom. Tonight, as Vesker stood at the east window, the gloom was thick enough to be alive, and the view outside was one of black house-tops, twisted street alleys, and occasional furtive eyes of ocher light.

  Vesker stood and listened, and heard nothing; so he paced the room twice and then leaned against the wall with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was not afraid of what he was going to do. It would be quite simple and silent, and no one would know. No one but God, Vesper thought; and God was too busy with big affairs to worry about mere details.

  There would be questions, afterward, and. perhaps an official investigation. But that meant nothing. Bandjermasin was full of officious persons who had nothing to do but investigate this and that, without learning anything.

  It was eleven-fifteen. Vesker dropped his cigarette and stepped on it, and flattened his body against the wall behind the door. From his pocket he took a short length of lead piping, which was heavy and very solid. And he waited.

  Presently he heard someone coming. The door opened, and a tall, stoop-shouldered shape stepped over the threshold. Vesker lifted the lead piping and brought it down again mightily. There was a crunch of bone, and a thin wheezing, and then the thump of a falling body.

  Vesker stood over his victim and smiled thoughtfully. He put the weapon back into his pocket. Then he moved to the door, stepped out, listened intently, and came back again. He went to his knees and adjusted the limp body over his shoulder.

  He closed the door of Tenegai LaRoque's room after him and carried Tenegai LaRoque to his own room, on the th
ird floor. There he dropped his victim on the bed, and grinned, and breathed deeply with satisfaction.

  No one would know.

  LaRoque was dead. Vesker bent over him and listened for the sound of a beating heart, and heard nothing. He fumbled with the man's wrist and felt no pulse. So he went to a cupboard and took out four empty burlap bags, and dropped them on the floor. Then, from a bureau drawer, he took a large sheet of waterproof canvas and spread that over the carpet. He put the dead man on it.

  While he was doing this, Tenegai LaRoque's wife came into the room.

  She was undoubtedly beautiful, this woman. Her hair was black and her eyes were black, and a tropical sun had darkened her skin so that it stood out in startling contrast to the off-white of her evening gown. She was slender and not too tall, and the lines of her body were daringly revealed by the fit of her dress. She came and stood beside Vesker and looked down into the dead face of her husband.

  "You are a brave man, Corlu," she smiled.

  Vesker looked at her. He wanted this woman. From the very first night of their friendship, when he had met her at an exclusive social affair, he had wanted her.

  "Any man can be brave," he said, "for sufficient reason."

  "And I am sufficient?"

  He took her in his arms and buried his lips in her black hair, and there was no need to answer.

  "I love you, Renee," he said. But he did not love her; he wanted her. And he knew the difference. He held her against him until the perspiration of his arms left wet lines in her dress. Then he released her and said quietly:

  "This will not be pretty. You had better go."

  "You will come to me later?"

  "As soon as it is finished."

  She kissed him and touched the body of her husband with her foot. Then she laughed softly, and went out, and Vesker locked the door after her.

  He knelt beside the dead man, then, and undressed him, leaving him stark naked on the canvas sheet. Looking at what he had done, he smiled and said almost inaudibly: