“Do you never eat meat?” I asked her.
She shook her head slowly.
“She hasn’t for a very long time,” Ambrose said. “She probably couldn’t even keep it down.”
“Is that right?” I asked Angelina. “It would make you sick?”
She shrugged and grimaced, a half-smile making her face even more enchanting.
“Here,” I said, “see if Ambrose is right.”
I sliced a corner off my steak and offered it to her on the knife’s point. It was rarer than I really enjoy. She allowed me to place it between her parted lips, and I noticed how sharp and slightly retracted her white teeth were as they closed on the meat. I felt she was being polite rather than of a mind to undergo the test, but she chewed obediently, reflectively, finishing it sooner than I expected. I cut another piece.
“More?” I said.
She took it willingly enough, then another. At the fifth piece Ambrose looked alarmed.
“Steady. That’s enough. You know it’s not good for you, Angelina.”
Her eyes turned from mine to his, her smile disappearing. She chattered at him, fast, in what I took was Hungarian, her eyes burning, her lips hardly moving.
“It’s still appallingly hot,” I said. “Why don’t you come back to my villa for coffees? It’s cooler up in Gassin. I’m due for drinks on a gin palace in the port, so I can run you back later.”
“I’d like that,” Ambrose said.
His instant acceptance surprised me. As I say, we had never been close, yet I felt he was quite glad we had met up again. Angelina seemed less keen. She stroked his arm and looked into his eyes, speaking with her own rather than in words, though from her throat came a strange pleading noise that was almost a purr. But all he said was: “Just for a little while.”
In the car he started to talk about reincarnation, asking me my views on transmigration and karma. I said I had not thought much about them, which was true. I noticed the scar on his neck reddened as he warmed to his subject.
I had taken the villa from friends who escape the mixed blessings of the Cote d’Azur from June until September. It was beautifully situated to the west of the village, with a fine view of the main range of the Massif. The terrace was a mass of oleanders and geraniums, with nothing beyond but the far hills across the falling wasteland of ilex, cork-oak, pine, and scrub. The breeze was more positive and cooler than in town, but as yet not too strong to be uncomfortable. I sat Ambrose and Angelina in the cushioned chairs and went inside to make coffee.
When I reappeared with the tray, all was clearly not well. They were quarrelling in low tones and Angelina was pulling against her leash, her eyes flashing, her extraordinary nostrils registering more than her words, which were unintelligible.
“Charles, I’m sorry, but I think we’ll have to leave,” Ambrose said. “Angelina’s rather unhappy about this wind.”
“I hoped you’d enjoy the coolness,” I said.
“That’s the problem. Below a certain temperature she’s never quite herself, and the mistral demands certain measures ... I think we really must get back. Our villa’s very warm and sheltered.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry you have this difficulty.”
“And we’re sorry about the coffees.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “Take my car. I’ve friends in Gassin who are going into Saint-Trop this afternoon, and I’ve some shopping to do before the party. They can pick me up. If you park the car in the Place des Lices, I can collect it later. I’ll show you where to leave the keys.”
Ambrose didn’t let Angelina off her leash, even in the driving seat. Because of my car’s right-hand drive, he had to switch wrists so that she could sit beside him. He made sure the passenger door was locked, then told her to get in across the driver’s seat. She was very restless, almost fearful, and made sounds from her throat that were even less like speech than those that she made before. I could see that Ambrose was tense and worried. It was quite a relief when they drove off down the winding minor road toward the N98.
Tony and Janet Turner seemed glad to give me a lift. They had their own problems, mostly of trying to keep together an unsatisfactory marriage by a frequent change of geography. They were rich enough to keep four small properties in different parts of the world, and they spent about three months in each. Others’ company broke up their bickering. As we drove toward Saint-Tropez, the car rocking in the wind that now howled between the hills, I told them something about Ambrose and Angelina.
“I think we’ve met them,” Janet said. “Yes, I’m sure we have. In Grimaud, at the Brothertons’. He’s short, very smooth.”
“Bit of a lady-killer,” Tony said. “I remember. The girl was absolutely terrific.”
Janet sniffed. She did a lot of sniffing. “That depends on your taste in such matters.”
I was sideways on and slightly to the rear of Tony’s grin.
“I think she could be quite a handful,” I said.
“Mmmmm,” Tony agreed lasciviously, gripping the steering wheel hard enough to drive the blood from his fingers.
“There’s something almost ... untamed about her,” I said.
Janet sniffed again. “Pretty near to the jungle, if you ask me.”
I leaned forward from the rear seat, peering through the windscreen.
“My God!” I said. “That’s my car.”
It had been, anyway. What I now owned looked destined for the scrap yard. It was piled up against the concrete wall of a storm pipe that ran under the road, on a nasty little bend.
Janet paled. “Maybe they’re still in it. Maybe no one’s been along.”
“Then for Christ’s sake, woman,” Tony said, “we must do something about it.”
The car was empty, the steering wheel bent, the windscreen shattered, the bonnet concertina’d. Some drops of blood on the dashboard and the driver’s seat were still tacky.
“If police or ambulance had been, they’d have left warning notices,” I said. “Or someone on guard until the recovery truck arrived.”
Janet frowned. “Then where are they?”
“God knows,” I said. “They only left forty minutes ago. Look, I’m sorry, I think you’d better go on without me. I feel I should make a search. They may have been injured and wandered off in a daze.”
“We’ll help,” Tony said. “Of course.”
“Then perhaps Janet could stay in the car in case anyone comes by,” I said.
The road was steep and the land sloped away from it, a maze of wild scrub and underbrush with occasional pines and outcrops of rock.
“It’s no spot to be lying out with injuries,” Tony said. “Least of all in this bloody wind.”
“If you’ll take the area to the south,” I said, “I’ll work north from the cars. Perhaps if we cover the ground in parallel strips ...”
After twenty minutes I found a piece of Ambrose’s shirt. A little further on I found Ambrose. I recognized him by his shoes; much the same price bracket as Angelina’s. Where his nose and eyes had been was a fly-inviting quagmire of blood and torn skin. A missing ear had left an untidy hole that oozed gently into the mica-speckled shale of the rocky hollow in which he lay. His light clothing seemed to have been torn from his body, and I saw that all the smaller (I don’t say minor) extremities were missing. As for his throat, it was simply not there; only a hideous gape of raw flesh with a protuberance of gristle I took to be his Adam’s apple. I am not a squeamish man, but the undigested remains of my Place des Lices luncheon ended up in the scrub-oak near Ambrose’s mangled left hand. Of Angelina and the leash there was nothing to be seen.
Nor was she ever found. I have often pondered on the incident, wondering what it was that Ambrose might have told me had we had longer together, recalling his untypical interest in Eastern beliefs, his apparent knowledge of the strange winds that can wreak such changes in human temperament, Angelina’s animal restlessness, those glimpses of something not susceptible to normal
explanation.
But then mine is not a psychic or complicated nature. I prefer rational explanations to overimaginative speculation. Nevertheless, when the wind gets up and I am alone—and that is most of the time now that Christine has died and I come out to Gassin more often—I go out onto the terrace and look across to the distant hills of the Maures. And something in me tells me to walk off into the scrub in search of Angelina, who I know cannot possibly still be there. And something else in me, which invariably wins, tells me to come indoors, to close the windows and the shutters, and to lose myself in books until the mistral has blown itself out.
I’ve become quite absorbed in Eastern ideas, incidentally. Reincarnation, karma, that kind of thing. From a purely intellectual standpoint, of course.
OUT OF AFRICA by David Drake
David Drake is another of that not inconsiderable group of writers who were nurtured and encouraged by the late August Derleth, author and editor/publisher of Arkham House. Born September 24, 1945 in Dubuque, Iowa, Drake discovered the works of H.P. Lovecraft as a teenager and began submitting Lovecraftian stories to Derleth, eventually making his first sale in 1967. Throughout the 1970s Drake wrote only short fiction—now far removed from Lovecraft—concentrating on horror stories and on fast-paced, blood-and-guts future war yarns, as collected in his best-known book, Hammer’s Slammers. In his fiction Drake makes good use of his background as a double history and classics major and his service in the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment in Viet Nam, which explains why his recent books range from a realistic Arthurian novel (The Dragon Lord) to a cold war spy novel with genuine science fiction elements (Skyripper) to an interplanetary mercenaries space opera (The Forlorn Hope) to a collection of his horror stories (From the Heart of Darkness). A graduate of Duke Law School, Drake served for a number of years as assistant town attorney of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Quitting law in order to have more time to write, Drake took a part-time job as a bus driver in 1980. Since 1981 he has been writing on a full-time basis from his home in Chapel Hill. “Out of Africa” is one of Drake’s early short stories, written during the early 1970s, and was appropriately first published in From the Heart of Darkness.
Forty years of African sunlight glinting along Sir John Holborn’s gun barrels had bleached his eyes so that even after long retirement from hunting they were the frosty gray of bullets cast when the lead was too hot. The chill of those eyes softened when they turned from the heavy rifle over the mantle to his young grand-nephew.
“Go ahead,” Sir John urged. “Pick it up. I wasn’t much older than you when I took my first elephant.”
Randall carefully lifted the double rifle from its pegs and hefted it. “It’s so big!” he marvelled.
Holborn chuckled and took the weapon himself. “Has to be big, lad, or the return of the rifle would break your shoulder.” While his thoughts slipped into the past, the old hunter glanced around his trophy room. From the far wall projected the massive head and forequarters of a bull elephant, mounted as if trumpeting. With a single fluid motion, Holborn spun and trained the rifle on the gape of the beast’s mouth where a shot would penetrate straight to the brain. Chuckling again, he turned back to the boy and opened the rifle’s double breech.
“See lad,” he said, “this is an eight-bore. A round lead ball to fit this barrel would weigh two ounces, and the cylindrical bullets I used were a good deal heavier. You couldn’t put such power in a smaller rifle.”
“My father shoots elephant,” Randall said doubtfully, “and his rifle isn’t that big.”
“Aye, your father says there’s been no need for old cannons like this since 1890 and nitro powder,” Holborn agreed. “Well, maybe it did go out of date fifteen years ago; but if I went to Africa again, this is the rifle I’d carry there. Your father may be right to say his .450 express rifle will kill anything on the continent—but will it stop anything, that’s what I want to know. Your Latin is fresher than mine. Do you remember a tag about Africa ...?”
“ ‘Always something new out of Africa,’ ” the boy suggested, translating Pliny’s words for the old man.
“That’s it,” Holborn agreed, “and it’s true, too. If you ever hunt Africa, don’t make the mistake of thinking you know all about her. She’ll kill you sure if you think that.”
“Why did you stop hunting, Uncle John?” Randall asked curiously, gazing in wonder at the trophies of five continents on the walls around him.
“Um,” the old hunter grunted, letting the rifle cradle naturally in the crook of his left arm. “For some hunters, there’s one chance for a real trophy. After that, it’s all the same whether you took it or missed. Gordon-Cummings had his when he bagged a rhino with five feet of horn, while Meyerling muffed an easy shot at an elephant he swore carried a quarter ton of ivory. When you’ve had that shot, the fire goes out of the sport, and it’s never the same again. And
I, I had my shot ...”
Randall could see the old man’s mind focusing on the past. “Tell me about it, Uncle John,” he pleaded.
“Perhaps I should, lad,” Holborn replied. “I shan’t be around much longer to keep the story, and perhaps some day—but no matter. My last hunt was on the Kagera River, west and north of Lake Victoria. The country was all papyrus swamp.”
“But what could you do in that?” the boy asked in puzzlement.
“Hunt hippo, lad,” Holborn replied with a laugh, “and very political hippo they were. That was in ’92, you see, and—well, it’s an old story and doesn’t matter much any more. Our relations with the Kaiser were a good deal better then, and it occurred to some gentlemen in London and Berlin that King Leopold was showing himself quite unfit to rule the Congo Basin. Perhaps Britain and Germany could do better, they thought. Well, nothing came of it, of course ... but negotiations got to the point that the Foreign Office thought they’d like to have a man on the ground. They contacted me because no eyebrows would raise at the news Sir John Holborn was back in the bush again. And so there I was, in German East Africa where it borders Uganda and the Congo.
“There were hippos in the river. Even if I hadn’t cared to try them, I had to keep up the pretence of being strictly a hunter. It was difficult, though, because none of the local boys would so much as guide me into the swamps around their village. They were afraid of the jimpegwes that lived there, they said.
“Now I hadn’t heard the word before, but it was clear enough from the natives’ description what they meant. After all, only three big animals live in the swamps: the kob and lechwe antelopes that can walk on the marshes with their broad, spreading hooves; and the hippo that browse the edges of the reed mats and keep channels open between them. When the natives said the jimpegwe was a big animal that ate reeds and had a terrible temper, they had to mean some sort of hippo.
“Some sort—that was the key. All the natives agreed the jimpegwe was bigger than imkoko, as they called the hippo. They said in fact that it killed hippos that wandered into its territory. As I heard about how big and terrible the jimpegwe was, I began to dream of surprising the world with a breed of hippo as much bigger than the known variety as the white rhino is bigger than the black. That would put it in a class with the elephant, you know. After a day of hearing those stories while I tried to hire guides and bearers, I knew I’d have to get into the swamp if it meant lugging my own kit.
“Which is very nearly what it did mean, as it turned out. The local natives accompanied me to the edge of the swamp, but nothing I could offer would bring them further. I couldn’t entirely blame them. They had no reason to trust my eight-bore, and hippos can be very dangerous indeed. I’ve seen a native bitten in half by an old bull he’d harpooned. The hippo spat out the pieces, of course, but the beast’s diet was of no concern to the poor fellow by then.
“In any case, only the three boys I’d brought from the Coast would go in with me. I needed them to clear a path.
“I travelled as lightly as I could, carrying some biscuit and a water bottle besides r
ifle, compass, and six extra shells. Even so, it took us over an hour to cut through the reeds to what seemed a likely stand beside an open channel that zig-zagged between the reed mats.
“The swamp had an eerie feel to it. The papyrus shot up straight stalks fifteen feet in the air, where they tufted into bracts like bomb-bursts. There were no taller trees in sight to give a sense of direction, since the reeds were growing on top of the water itself. They had built up thick pads of vegetation over the centuries. Beneath that, I knew, the water might be ten feet deep. The quiver of the mat reminded me of that fact every time a breeze touched the papyrus bracts. The channel itself was covered with the poisonous green of swamp cabbage, so bitter that not even the hippos will eat it. The heat and insects were as unpleasant as anywhere else in Africa, but this swamp had as well an oppressive miasma of age that went beyond all lesser annoyances. After an hour of waiting, the realization grew on me that this swamp was unchanged since Cheops built his pyramid. Even a million years before that, the same swamp had squatted here like a cancer on the heart of Africa.
“There was no disguising its evil. Even on the Nile then, the papyrus sometimes swallowed steamers and held them till the passengers had all starved ... and the Nile was like the Serpentine compared to the Kagera.
“The boys and I didn’t have the swamp to ourselves. There were hootings and splashings from the interior, no telling how far away. Still, nothing came down the channel beside us. The reeds shuddering overhead cut off vision except toward the open water. I began to feel as I had when tracking a wounded buffalo through heavy brush. By mid-afternoon, I thoroughly regretted the whole expedition. I had determined to go on with the Queen’s business the next day, leaving that damnable swamp.
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