The Phantom

by Rob MacGregor

  In my lucid moments, I estimated that it was either midmorning or midafternoon. At some point during the night, I must have crawled between the rope holding the bale together and the wool. I couldn’t recall doing it, but it was the only reason I was still alive. But I wouldn’t last much longer. I needed water. I craned my head and saw palm trees and a beach. I was washing ashore. I was going to make it! But as I got closer to the beach, I was caught in the surf. A huge wave broke over me. The bale flipped over and over, and when it stopped tumbling, I was under it. I struggled wildly to free myself. I couldn’t drown here, not so close to shore, so close to surviving. Then the bale rolled over again, and I gasped for air. Instantly another wave lifted me and slammed me down against the sand. Over and over, the surf pounded against the bale, spinning it around and around, battering and shredding it.

  Dazed and barely able to breathe, I passed out and drifted in the backwash of my mind in a calm, pleasant place where there were no Bangallan pirates, no raging seas, a place where my father was still alive, still with me, and all was well.

  When I woke up, I found myself caked in soggy wool and sand. I could hear the surf, but I couldn’t feel it or see it. Slowly I pulled away the clumps of wool and rolled over. The surf slapped against my legs, which had grown numb with exhaustion.

  I lifted my head and looked out to sea. The sun was setting. Its fiery glow on the water reminded me of the burning ship.

  The memory of my father’s death came back to me as I clawed my way up the beach, tiny bits of sand lodging beneath my nails like slivers of glass. Why was I still alive, while the others were dead? I wished I had gone with them. I closed my eyes and a shudder ripped through my body. I was lost, cold, and thirsty. I wouldn’t last much longer.

  Something caught my attention. Everything around me was quiet, but I knew I wasn’t alone. My eyes fluttered open to moonlight and shadows moving over the sand. Several pairs of bare feet soon encircled me. I was afraid to raise my eyes, but I did. I followed those brown toes to their ankles, their calves, their thighs, all the way to the strange, hard faces of spear-bearing natives bent over me.

  One of the natives waved a stick in front of my face. Impaled on the end of it was a human skull.

  I shut my eyes, too exhausted and weak to fight or struggle. I had somehow survived the pirates and the sea only to be captured by cannibals.

  THREE

  I raised up on my hands and knees, but I was so weak I dropped back onto my belly. A muscular man grabbed me by the arm and jerked me into the air as though I weighed no more than a twig. Moments later I was being carried quickly and soundlessly through the jungle along an invisible trail.

  Shafts of moonlight created eerie, shifting shadows that quickly revealed and concealed hints of the jungle’s exotic mysteries. And these shadows were alive with animal sounds. Every time a branch scratched my back or arms, I thought a leopard was clawing me.

  Sometimes the jungle was so dense there was no light at all, and I felt strange, disconnected from my body, bumping along through all the darkness like a piece of driftwood. I wondered if this was how the Bangallas felt when they left their bodies. I lost consciousness for a while and sank deeply into some other place. When I came to, we were entering a thatched village. Yes, I was terrified. But I was also filled with incredible wonder. Ever since we’d left home, I had dreamed of getting a close look at primitive jungle dwellers like those my father had seen on his voyage with Columbus. But then again, I didn’t want to be the main course of their next meal, either.

  I was deposited on the hard-packed ground in the center of the circle of huts. One of the men left half a coconut shell filled with water by my side. I drank deeply, my eyes darting about, watching the two men who guarded me while the rest disappeared into the huts.

  Shadowy figures rippled through the moonlit night. Some stopped and stared at me; others acted as if I weren’t even there. After a time, an old man appeared and crouched down a few feet away. He stared hard at me, muttered something under his breath, then signaled for the men to carry me into a hut.

  The hut smelled as damp and as lush as the jungle. The old man gave me a cup of brown water that tasted like cold tea and a plate of stringy dried fish. After I ate, he motioned for me to lie down on a bedding of dried grasses. Even though my future was uncertain, I fell asleep with ease.

  So began the first night of my life among the natives on the island of Touganda.

  Over the following weeks, months, and years, I gradually learned the ways of the Touganda tribe. Buli, the old man who had fed me dried fish, was my teacher. He was the village spiritual leader, a powerful shaman and priest, a man of knowledge. He was a stern, demanding teacher, but he could also be kind and warmhearted.

  I was surprised to learn that the Tougandas were one of the so-called savage tribes of the Bangalla jungle. But I found that, for the most part, they lived in peace with their neighbors and shared many things in common with them. One of those things was the skill of navigating the high seas and the jungle with their minds.

  I remembered the boy from the island had said the Bangalla pirates used that skill to find ships to attack. Many of those pirates were not from any of the Bangallan tribes, Buli said, but they used Bangallans as navigators.

  When I drew the spider-web symbol in the dirt, Buli nodded and said that the ones who had killed my father and destroyed his ship were a band of pirates who had only recently invaded these waters. They were feared by the Touganda tribe, and Buli himself was afraid that someday there would be a great battle.

  I soon learned mind navigation myself. I traveled deep within the Bangalla jungle, learning its secrets, then later journeyed to other islands and other lands. Buli was an excellent teacher, but I still talked with my father’s ghost. He promised me that one day very soon my life would once again take a dramatic turn.

  Whenever I tried to use my newly acquired skills to locate my father’s killers, I failed. Buli said the pirates’ hideout was protected by powerful Bangallan sorcerers who were in league with them, men who could literally lay a blanket of invisibility over a place. But Buli promised he would use his own powers to find my father’s murderers.

  I was never quite sure how he intended to do this. Although his skills were formidable, I didn’t think he was powerful enough to go up against sorcerers and was sure his promise would go unfulfilled.

  Time passed. I never mentioned his promise and neither did he. Then one day while I was out walking, I found a body that had washed up on the beach. I recognized the clothing as my father’s, and I was certain that the man wearing the clothes was his killer.

  I grabbed the collar of the shirt my father had once worn and dragged the body away from the beach to where no one but scavengers would find it. Vultures soon arrived; in a matter of days, they picked the bones clean.

  I took the skull, held it up with both hands, and swore an oath. “I will devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, and my sons and their sons shall follow me.”

  I didn’t tell Buli about the body or what I did with the skull. But it didn’t matter. I was sure he knew exactly what I’d done. Sometimes I felt certain that he could see my most intimate thoughts, that they came to him as pictures, quick, brilliant flashes that told him everything he needed to know. Other times I was equally certain that I was a complete mystery to him, a puzzle of scattered, exotic pieces that he was constantly arranging and rearranging, trying to fit together.

  Perhaps both were true. Perhaps we taught each other, he and I: student and teacher in interchangeable roles.

  One night, he asked me to attend a ceremony. He said it would be the most important night of my life, so of course I went.

  All the tribe members were assembled around a towering tree trunk when I joined them. Images of jungle spirits were carved into the trunk, etheric shapes that seemed to swirl and dance in the firelight, almost as if the images were coming to life and seeking to leap from the trun
k and into the world.

  They frightened me, these images. I felt they represented me and my journey from the deck of the Miranda to this strange jungle tribe. I, too, had sought freedom from what I was. I, too, had sought to leap full-blown into this new world.

  Buli was wearing thick silver bands embedded with luminous pearls on his upper arms. In the firelight, the pearls shifted colors. One moment they were as pale and insubstantial as ghosts, and in the next moment, they burned like the sky at sunset.

  He stood in front of the spirit shrine, his arms raised, his eyes rolling back in his head. Then he rubbed a vivid purple paint onto his forehead, over his cheeks and jaws. He looked like a massive bruise.

  On a shelf that protruded from the shrine stood three intricately carved skulls. One skull was made of gold, another of silver, the third of jade. I knew these were the ancient, powerful Skulls of Touganda that I’d heard about but never seen. The fact that I was being allowed to see them now shocked me nearly as much as the sight of the skulls themselves.

  They were incomparably beautiful—every facet and surface so perfectly carved, it was as if they had been chiseled from celestial light. The glow of the fire washed over them with the ease of a liquid, transforming them, transforming me. But in the hollows of their eye sockets lay only darkness, a black, impenetrable sea that seemed to suck at me as if to draw me in.

  Drums thundered in my ears. Buli’s body swayed in rhythm to their beats, as though he and the drums were one and the same. When the drums reached a crescendo, he turned in my direction and thrust a ring at me. It bore the symbol of a skull.

  I raised my hand, and he slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit perfectly. As I stared at the ring, it began to glow. Rays of light shot out of it. I knew—without knowing why—that I was no longer Kit Walker, that I was now someone much different and more powerful. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw, in the shadows and tendrils of light, the new name I would take.

  From this time on, I would be known as the Phantom.

  FOUR HUNDRED

  YEARS LATER

  FOUR

  Bangalla Jungle

  After twelve years in this godforsaken jungle, Quill still hated it. He hated it more than when he had first arrived after the jailbreak in ’21. And he knew he would hate it as long as he was here.

  He had been trying to get out for years, and just when he thought he had found the ticket to a new life in the States, his ticket turned out to have the Bangalla jungle written all over it. So after a couple of months in New York, here he was again.

  But this time he knew that if he succeeded in following his new bosses’ orders, he would never set foot in this sweltering green hell again. He would be home free, and this nightmare place would be a dimming, ugly memory, nothing more. At the moment, though, the possibility seemed about as distant from him as the moon.

  He slammed on the brakes of the battered, rusted cargo truck he was driving. It squealed to a stop and the engine growled, backfired, then stalled. Ahead of him, two ruts wound through the dense foliage. Hardly a road, he thought. It wasn’t even a path.

  He flattened the crumpled map against the steering wheel and studied it. It didn’t tell him a bloody thing. How far had they come, anyway? But more importantly, how far did they still have to drive through this steaming hell?

  As far as Quill was concerned, the Bangalla jungle was about the worst place in the world. You just couldn’t venture into this jungle without something happening, and usually that something was bad, very bad. Sometimes he even thought that jail was better than life in the Bangalla jungle.

  He’d been serving a life term for a murder he hadn’t even done. Sure, he’d wasted a few guys as part of his job with the Zephro gang in New York, but he didn’t kill that cop. They’d lied and cheated to put him behind bars, but he’d shown them. He’d gotten away in a big jailbreak after just two years, and they’d never caught him.

  “I hate this worthless map.”

  “Hey, Quill. Look where you stopped. We’re sinking right into the muckety-muck.”

  Quill glanced over at Morgan, who’d been in the jungle three years but looked like he’d been in it all of his life. With Morgan around, he didn’t need a mirror. Morgan reflected Quill’s own state of disrepair. They were both unshaven and sweaty, and their khaki pants and white shirts were filthy. Quill had chewed his unlit cigar to a pulp at the end; Morgan’s Panama hat was smeared with mud and was so tattered, a high wind threatened to dissolve it to dust.

  The only thing each man kept immaculate was his pistol. Each pistol was oiled and kept so clean even a drill sergeant would fail to find fault with it.

  “So, get out and push us before we sink down to the axle,” Quill barked. “Styles and Breen, wake up!” He shook his head, muttered a curse under his breath, then shoved the native kid who was sitting between him and Morgan. “What are you looking at, you little heathen? Out! Get out! You help, too. Pushy-push. Heave-ho.”

  Two men, one tall and lanky with a goatee, the other short and stocky with a flattened nose, climbed from the back of the truck and joined Morgan and the kid in the mud. The tall one, Styles, promptly slipped and fell, cursing as Quill turned over the engine. The truck growled to life, backfired, stalled again.

  The jungle erupted in squawks and squeals. A monkey dropped onto the hood, shook his arms, bared his teeth, and screeched. Quill pulled out his pistol and took aim, but the monkey leaped into the jungle before he fired. A moment later, a huge green seed pod was lobbed from where the monkey had disappeared. It banged hard against the windshield; a weblike crack spread soundlessly across the glass.

  “Monkeys. I hate monkeys,” Quill muttered, then cranked the ignition. The engine popped and growled to life. He stepped on the gas and ground the gears. The truck rocked forward and back, then forward again. The tires spun, splattering mud over the three men and the kid. Then, slowly, the rusted hulk found a footing and lumbered ahead.

  Morgan and the kid raced after the truck, leaped onto the sideboard, and crawled back inside as Breen and Styles dove into the cargo area.

  “You drive,” Morgan said, “I’ll navigate.” Then he leaned over, reaching for the map, but Quill swatted his hand away.

  “Problem is, the map’s all wrong.”

  Morgan made a futile effort to wipe the mud from his pants and shirt. “Naw, the map is good. Remember its source. That man is never wrong. You said it yourself. He’s the best there is.”

  Maybe, maybe not. That was yet to be seen. Morgan was good at taking orders, but he didn’t think things through, and that’s what had probably gotten him in trouble in the past. He was another ex-con exile. At least half of the guys in Zavia, Bangalla’s rough and tumble port town, were wanted for something somewhere, or they were here looking for trouble. The rest of the guys were part of the Brotherhood, a ruthless bunch who’d been around here a long time.

  “Then why does it show a bridge back there?” Quill stabbed a thumb in the air over his shoulder. “We never crossed no bridge.”

  The kid pointed at the map and said something in the local lingo. Quill didn’t understand a word of it. “What’s he saying, Morgan?”

  “Didn’t quite catch it all. Whadya say, Zak? Say it again.”

  The kid turned to Morgan and repeated the same words. Morgan was married to a native woman and had picked up some of the lingo. He frowned and nodded. “Ah, let’s see. Turn around. He says we better turn around.”

  Quill waved a hand. “Not a chance! And maybe the little quitter needs a lesson in positive thinking.”

  He swung the back of his hand at the kid’s face. But the truck hit a hole, bounced hard, and Zak ducked out of the way. He covered his face with his arms to shield off any more blows and spoke rapidly in his Bangallan dialect.

  “Wait, Quill!” Morgan yelled. “Now I get it! Turn the map around! That’s what he’s saying.” He laughed, slapped his knee. “You got it upside down, you big moron!”

  Quill glared at
Morgan and Zak. This deal better work or he didn’t know what he was going to do. He couldn’t stand it any longer. If things didn’t improve soon, he was going to lose his mind.

  He rubbed the spider-web tattoo on his right forearm, as if to draw strength and patience from it. He was part of the Brotherhood, a low-level guy who’d worked his way into the outfit. Now he just wanted to use what he knew and work his way out of it.

  “If the map’s upside down, then there oughta be a bridge up ahead, and all I see is more jungle.” He leaned forward and peered through the muddied windshield. “Oh, no!”

  Quill slammed his foot down on the brake, snapping Morgan and Zak forward against the dashboard. The truck slid through the dirt and its wheels locked, brakes squealing. A huge cloud of dust billowed around the truck, engulfing it. When it finally settled, Quill saw that the truck had come to rest at the foot of a rope suspension bridge.

  The two men stepped out of the truck and moved to the edge of the precipice. Quill’s knees turned soft and mushy at the sight of the deep gorge that the bridge spanned. Everything spun. More than anything, he feared heights—the dizzying swirl when he peered downward; the horrifying sense that the earth was shifting beneath his feet.

  He wrenched himself back from the edge, sucking air quickly through his clenched teeth. His stomach churned. He took a long, deep breath for ballast to steady himself.

  “Hey, Quill!” Breen yelled, rubbing his thick neck as he and Styles climbed out the back of the truck. “What’s the deal? How about warning us when you’re going to stop like that.” Then he saw the bridge. “Oh, I see.”

  Quill took a closer look. The bridge was about thirty yards long and was constructed of thick rope and jungle vines, with a pathway made of heavy wood planks. He turned to Morgan. “Whadya think?”

  “I don’t know. Looks like it’ll hold, but then again . . .”