After a couple of miles the taxi stopped and the driver turned to the rear seats, his hand outstretched. Paul knew the intimation. The driver had gone as far as he intended. If the journey was to be completed it would be alone and on foot. It was what he had expected. Not many ventured to the house any longer. If he wanted to see Felix, he would do so without company, as he had done for all the past visits.
As the taxi drove back to the city Paul trudged on through the darkness, the persistent sounds of insects in the bush his only companion.
The reality was in stark contrast to his earliest memory of the journey. As a boy his parents had believed in developing the minds of their two sons to the fullest. Travel was encouraged when the concept was still something new and uncertain. Africa was a wild and reckless place to be, and the excitement of the unknown was as real as the heat, the dangers as diverse as the region itself. His father had heard about a ceremony that took place once a year, a kind of pagan fertility service was how he described it to their mother, though neither Paul nor his elder brother knew what any of the descriptions meant. Their guide was a man called Felix, a tall, seemingly honest man of Zulu stock, who promised them they would be able to witness what they imagined would be a tableau of dance and performance. It didn’t happen that way. In that both reality and memory concurred.
The house was even more dilapidated than he remembered. The earthen walls bowed inwards as if the night was trying to fold up the house and carry it away. The roof sagged as if out of guilt for what lay within, and for what had been allowed to happen.
Paul smelled it as soon as he put his head inside the open front door – a kind of dissolution, an odour of decay and of dank disuse. There were two men sitting in the bare room. One was stroking an unidentifiable animal on his lap while the other was staring into space and smiling. This was Felix.
‘Surely it is not that time yet?’ he said without removing his attention from the ceiling.
Paul set his bag down on the mud floor. ‘A month earlier, but it is the time.’
Felix said something in an ancient language to his companion and the animal slithered off the man’s lap and scuttled away into another room.
‘Who is this?’ Paul asked, attempting to stay calm but knowing he was failing.
‘My eyes.’
And then Paul saw that a kind of blindness had overtaken this man whom he had known for so long. There would be a tale to be heard first, about pirates pricking out his irises with needles, or of slavers applying hot irons to his pupils to guarantee his silence, but the whiteness of the eyes spoke of cataracts and nothing more. Paul felt a pleasure to think there might be some suffering because it was long overdue.
‘I still need to go there.’ He knew he sounded as if he was pleading but so near to the time he had no choice. There was too much to lose if he didn’t enter the cave.
‘Celeste will take you.’ And Felix seemed to sink into his chair, the height, and the proud heritage, melting into a pool at his feet.
In contrast Celeste stood and gestured to Paul to leave the house.
‘Wait,’ Paul began, but the hands pushed and insisted, until both men were standing outside the dying house.
Bloated shadows emerged from the trees and sank into the walls. Rustling movement slipped from the tall grass and entered the doorway. For a few moments there was frenzied activity inside the house. Skin being slapped, then torn. Hair being ripped, and bones cracked. Then there was a single scream of such depth that Paul shrank away from the sound, trying to hide within the night itself. Smoke began billowing out in formless shapes.
Paul ran to the house, brushing off the restraining hands that reached after him. The source of the smoke was what was left of Felix. The white-coated eyes were open and staring, though no longer alive. The head was hanging down on the chest, the throat and neck all but severed from the torso. Blood dribbled down the chest, mingling with the pink sacks of the lungs, which had been drawn out through the jagged and broken ribcage. Neither leg possessed a foot now, but the stumps were pushed back at an excruciating angle, forcing even wider the gaping wound at the groin. The fingers of each hand were severed at irregular points, the remains crushed and weeping.
Back in the gloom of the open night Paul picked up his bag and gestured at Celeste with open palms. So this was to be the last visit, the inevitable finale he had expected for so long.
So many years ago, when he had been a boy, the expedition, as their father labelled it, was a great hit. The chance to see at first hand the wild animals they had only read about in books, and seen once at a cramped zoo. The opportunity to show off skills learned in scout camp; how to erect a tent, tie knots, survive in the wild.
The jeep was bumpy but that was all part of the fun. Felix then had been a young man, full of enthusiasm, even if plagued by a devious nature. His fee for acting as guide was reasonable and the chance to see real African culture was invigorating. Their father was full of stories about big game hunters, and lions, elephants, all manner of exotica. If their mother was hesitant the boys would not have been aware of it.
They reached the place after two days of driving through increasingly dense bush. They were all tired, though Felix seemed infused with a new energy now they had arrived.
The ceremony took place, so it seemed, in a large cave, the entrance to which was shielded by two thorny trees. It was important he told them to be seated on a flat rock in the far corner, as that would give the best, and most private view. He would wait outside as he had seen it all before.
Paul’s parents let his elder brother take a position at the front, while he, still tired from the journey, and very young, leant against his mother. He probably slept, at first, but later, when he was the only one to emerge from the cave, he never slept peacefully again.
That would be the case now, as he sat beside Celeste in a modern version of the jeep, and started to relive the first journey, back to the cave, and his memories.
Modern vehicle or not it still took two days hard travelling to reach their destination. The first day they drove steadily, heading west, until they made camp beside a thin river where they could wash and drink. The food was already packed on the jeep and when Celeste left before dusk, with a rifle on his shoulder, Paul knew they would be eating small game for supper.
Somewhere, not so far away, he could hear the low rumble of a lion’s roar. It concerned him, but without too much fear. They were in inhospitable territory now, open acres of shrub, dotted with patches of tree cover, long grass and bare earth. The presence of wild animals was expected. There was evidence of zebra, perhaps a giraffe, and certainly the recently killed carcass of a gazelle on which the hyenas were feasting was within sight on the far bank of the river.
It was almost satisfying to be here again. The reality of the African bush matching the tributaries of his memory, allowing him, for a brief moment, to live in the present instead of in his mind.
Celeste returned with a small rodent slung over his shoulder and began to make up a small fire. There was no attempt at conversation, no stories as there had always been with Felix. Paul knew that even though this journey, and the occasion, was so familiar, this time it would be very different. Possibly because the guide was not the same, but possibly instead because Paul was at last different.
When they had found him, wandering in the shrub just outside the city limits, they had not understood the language he spoke. His English was barely formed, so young was he, and the ancient babble that had intruded into his mouth was so old that no one had ever heard it spoken before. The questions about his parents’ whereabouts were asked of him but not understood so they remained un-mourned, except in memory and nightmare. He could not make them understand about his brother, and the bond between them weakened every year, so that while once he had come back to find him, now he tried to forget.
Celeste rose early the next day, the last day, and beckoned for Paul to hurry.
‘What’s the rush?’ he asked, w
anting to add that it was his journey, his memory, and he would dictate the pace.
The scrawny little man shrugged, defiance and acceptance in equal measures. The yellowy eyes slipped away from Paul’s face, as he busied himself with packing the belongings back onto the jeep.
The terrain became increasingly familiar as they neared the cave. Sometimes memory held the upper hand, as they reached a landmark he was waiting for, and sometimes reality triumphed as an image was not the same as it should have been according to his recollection.
Too soon they stopped near two thorny trees that were bent horizontal to the ground as if being held open and away from the black entrance. There were no leaves on the trees, yet there should have been at this time of the season. With a feeling of dread Paul realised that the trees had died since last year’s visit.
Celeste waited by the jeep while Paul approached the cave. When Paul looked back at him the little man stared blankly as if neither of them was actually there at all.
Just as Paul walked into the cold embrace of the cave entrance Celeste called out, ‘Good luck.’ Spoken in perfect English, the words had as much finality as ‘goodbye.’
When they were a family they had run into the cave, excited and daring each other to be the first into the darkness. They had tried to spook one another with stories of ghosts and demons, not knowing that their reality was to be far worse.
The flat stone where it had been suggested they sit was a little damp, but they expected a cave to have moisture. That the moisture was dark was probably due to it being bat droppings or something their father had said, and they all laughed and shivered.
When the whispers started they thought it was just the beginning of the ceremony, which it was, in a way.
Memory and reality merged seamlessly for Paul now as he walked calmly into the interior. It was as dark as he remembered, and the floor was even more slippery. There was a rippling backdrop to the silence that might have been caused by bats, but he knew it wasn’t. It was like coming home in a way that was unlike any other for him.
The flat stone was still there, darker and damper now, as the years had progressed. The years he had spent returning to recapture one moment were nothing by comparison to the centuries the stone had lain in silent witness to the rituals and secrets. He sat upon it and waited.
Outside Celeste had gone. He had been replaced by his true guise. Wearing his new form he entered the cave.
Paul thought back to the family adventure all those years ago. The first indication that something was wrong was when his brother jumped off the rock and fled into the shadows. Out of polite courtesy, or simple fear, Paul never knew, but his parents remained seated and silent. After all they were on holiday, and this was a local festival of sorts. Their son would be safe, surely. Then the shouting and the movement began. It all got too hectic for the small boy that he was and Paul closed his eyes and tried to obliterate the memory before it had even formed. It was like an abortion of experience. The feelings remained through the years, the revenant of memory, the unformed reality, but never the completion of actual participation. Each year since he had made his pilgrimage to visit his parents, and to search for his brother, without actually trying to do either. He was fumbling for his memory. If he could turn it into reality he might be able to change it, to stop it.
The whispers began. Not a language he could understand or a volume that he could comfortably hear, but it was sound that now, as on all previous occasions, sent a serpentine shiver of fear along his body.
Eventually the movement started. Slowly at first, then gradually increasing in speed and tempo, strangely shaped shadows began to pulse in a rhythmic dance. An ululation crept into the cave as the sounds increased and diversified, with voices and animal noises interspersed. A crescendo of sound washed over the flat stone, draping heavy black shadow over his legs, pinning him there. He had tried to move in earlier years but had found the shadows moved with him, effectively holding him in position. Now he just accepted it and sat and waited.
Gradually the shadows that had disgorged from the blackness beyond his vision began to soak into the walls of the cave. Some hung on rough fingers of rock, twitching, as though cloaks hung for wearing later. Others partly submerged into the walls, so that half their shape was flopping out over the grey rock, softly breathing. The majority slipped directly into the stone walls, leaving dark stains as evidence of their entrance.
The emptiness in the cave was filled by a single figure. Paul sat up, finding the shadows around his legs had gone. The appearance of this figure was new.
At first it walked on two legs like a man. Then without warning it snarled like the beast it was and dropped to all fours. When it looked up at Paul he knew from the yellowed eyes that this is what had presented itself to him as Celeste. Then he saw something else behind the eyes and reality began to subjugate itself to memory as his lost brother’s face swirled around his mind as a kite in a violent storm.
The beast loped across to a mound on the cave floor. With disgusted fascination Paul saw that the mound was in fact the shape of two bodies, or what had once been the bodies, of two people. The shapes were entwined, as if with affection, but although curiously preserved, almost as if embalmed in some way, there was an incompleteness about them that was unnatural. When he saw what the beast was doing he realised why.
There was no memory intact with this image; this was a victory for the reality of the moment. The bodies had been gradually broken over the years, the fresh state somehow maintained, and they had been eaten in very small pieces, almost as though the feasting had prevented their memories from vanishing completely.
Paul watched in abject and defeated horror as the misshapen beast carved out a slice of flesh from the leg of what had once been its mother and licked it with furred tongue.
As if in celebration the shadows fell from the walls, and rose up in triumph from the floor, sloping down from the ceiling, joining the ancient ritual. At the height of the frenzy Paul saw what had been his brother look up to him and what passed between them was as enigmatic as the eternities, as elemental as agony.
Never before in all the years of his pilgrimage had Paul witnessed any of this. He knew now for sure that this would be his last time. When his parents had rushed forwards to join in the frantic dancing of what appeared to be local men and women Paul had held back, eyes tightly shut as his mothers hands trailed away from his. When he heard the shouts and the screams he glanced up only occasionally, just enough to fuel all the unending nightmares he had suffered since. When he had woken he was out of the cave, and the trees were crouching in defiance across the entrance.
This time, as he rushed outside, the trees were lying flat on the earth, ripped at the base of their trunks by a great force. The jagged teeth of the trunks were gaping white, bright and unreal in the glare of the sun.
The jeep was on fire, crackling flames lighting up the sky like the sunset remembered from his youthful painting. As he had started the painting, so casually, so he thought he would be present at its ending. The colours of the flames rested on top of each other as if deliberately trying to climb higher. The reds, ochre’s, blues from the petrol, the yellows and oranges, all ascended, layer after layer, providing a balance to the darkness he had just left in the cave.
Only the darkness was with him, despite the sunlight. All around him lithe shapes swarmed with feline grace, others with Neanderthal cunning, more with distended limbs, and mutilated bodies that came neither from reality nor memory but somewhere beyond, where the sunset has slipped away and the darkness is sovereign.
Some of the shadows roared, and the echo of their sound was like a bellow of rage.
The memory of what it had been like as a small boy in the cave the first time all those years ago crowded into his head, as a stabbing pain. He fell to his knees and wept at the wasted years of searching, the setting aside of reality for dreams. Wept for his parents and his brother, but mostly for himself.
The s
hadows had formed into a crude hunting pattern, tracking the prey, silently now, slinking closer, alert and determined. The leader broke away from the pack and moved as close to the man as it could without actually touching him. Then it slashed out and felt the gloriously soft skin as it yielded.
The sunset was a distant memory before the reality of the pain subsided.
OCTOBER CRIES
Everyone agreed this October was the fiercest they could remember. From the outset a despondent wind plucked the leaves from the trees, tossing them casually to the ground where the crisp night air turned them into something that cracked underfoot. Lurking behind the brisk wind was the occasional burst of rain that drenched the fields, the houses, and the few people who ventured out into the unforgiving cold. With the nights drawing in people shrugged and made plans for Halloween while trying to make the most of the clear but cold days when it was dry and the leaves piled high on the ground. The woods behind our cottages were bare skeletons with tendrils of rainwater dripping from them, which only added to the mess beneath them, where the leaves lay brown, curling and dying.
We pulled up in the lane, the wheels of the car crunching over the crisp layer of fresh leaves that had fallen overnight. Despite spending a splendid weekend with Carol’s parents it was a relief to be back. Although we had only been living in the cottage for a month it was now very much home. The apartment in Maine we had moved from had always been, to my mind anyway, something temporary, even though it was our first place together, the scene of many happy times, not least the birth of our son, Jack.
Falling Into Heaven Page 16