by Jeff Long
“I don’t believe it,” she groaned. “We’re so close.”
They had a deal, though. First rain, turn home. It was all the more imperative now with the river between them and the world.
More soft pats on the roof, little metallic kisses.
“I’m sorry,” said Duncan.
A raindrop slapped the windshield. Molly leaned closer to see it. “That’s not rain.” She put her fingertip on the inside of the glass.
It was blood. Gore. With little webbed feet. Molly lifted her finger away.
“Is that a frog?” said Duncan.
He was right. It was a storm of frogs, little tree frogs. They were falling from the sky. She cranked her window shut.
You read of tadpoles being sucked into the heights and growing into young frogs among the clouds. Was this that, she wondered? Did the monsoon have that power?
Then she saw that they weren’t falling. They were leaping out from the forest’s high branches. Another struck the windshield. Another, and this one didn’t splash to bits like the others.
Dead or stunned, the frog stuck in place. Its red and black bands glistened, backlit by the white mist.
Another hit, this one alive. It took position on the glass, head high. The tiny thing looked majestic, like a creature mounting their world, claiming it. Its miniature lungs pulsed.
“What are they doing?” she said.
“They must be drawn by the headlights,” said Duncan. “Or it could be some territorial imperative.”
“They’re trying to drive us away?”
“I wouldn’t make it too personal,” Duncan said. But his voice was sober.
They began to patter, like small hail, on the hood and roof and windshield. Now that she knew what they were, Molly could see them in the lighted mist with their tiny legs and arms stretched wide.
“Or it could be the typhoon affecting them,” Duncan went on. “Animals are sensitive to change. With the low-pressure cell building, their rhythms go haywire. Lemming behavior. One dives, they all dive.”
“This is awful,” she said.
The pat of bodies became a rattling, a squall of miniature carnage.
“But at least it’s not the rain.”
“It’s unnatural.”
“It’s just a few frogs.”
“A few?”
The windshield was layered with bits of tissue. They were casting themselves down by the scores, catapulting from the trees. She saw a mother, her back swarming with tiny young. The wiper blades went to work and mangled them. The hood looked like a butcher block. Molly hated it. The death and mutilation were senseless.
Plainly, Vin had never witnessed such a thing. He gripped the wheel, and the tattoos on his skinny forearms—crude lines and circles and suns, his magic symbols—rippled. He believed in other worlds. And here was this, this curse, a hailstorm of frogs.
Vin drifted to a halt. He craned his head up to see inside the strange torrent. The banging grew louder. He was staring at her. She saw his fear. It made her more afraid.
She put her hands against the roof, as if it might collapse. The metal throbbed. “We can’t stay here.” She had to shout over the noise.
Like vomit against the windshield, the forest puked its creatures at them. It sickened her. She glanced around.
Luke’s eyes were closed. How could he sleep through this? And he was smiling.
Duncan said something in Khmer, his tone calm. He said it again. Vin nodded. They lurched into motion.
Duncan spoke into her ear. “It’s okay, we’re going inside now. They’ll stop, Molly.” His hand was on her shoulder.
She could barely see through the plastered glass. Up ahead, like the mouth of a cave, the forest parted its lips. “Faster,” she whispered.
The forest yawned open.
13.
Roots and stones rose up from underneath the fog. Vin picked up speed. The Land Cruiser hopped and bounded, tools rattling in the back.
They entered.
Instantly the darkness changed. The moonlight vanished. It was like mercy. The hailstone beating quit. The frogs stopped.
The wiper blades were squealing on dry glass.
Their battle was over, but Vin didn’t slow a bit.
Molly hunched over and peered through her side window like it was a porthole. Dark shapes reeled past, trees as thick as bridge pillars. The Land Cruiser lunged over roots like big swells, throwing her against the door.
Duncan barked something at Vin. The boy ignored him, still racing from the animal assault, driving blind. In a way, Molly was relieved by his dread. It validated her own. His fear gave her a fear to settle. She placed one hand on his arm and found he was quivering.
The wiper blades scratched at the crust of frogs. Forward vision returned in streaks. The mist flared in sudden white eruptions. Blackness and light.
Abruptly a huge face jumped up in front of them. Vin braked and swerved. Even so, they banged against it, not ruinously, but with a jolt.
“My God,” Duncan whispered.
Molly unclenched her hands from her camera.
The stone head was as large as the car.
The wipers clawed at the rusty glass. Duncan patted Vin’s shoulder. The wipers stopped. They stared at the head’s tilted eyes.
Molly lifted her camera. Fog edged through the dark trees, sliding in slow, soundless white bunches between the strings of vines brewing up around the stone head.
Time had partially melted its demonic rage. The head had rolled onto one rounded jaw, part human, part animal. Its angry, bulging eyes had eroded over the ages. All around lay more pieces of toppled giant statuary.
“What on earth?” said Molly.
“A warrior icon,” said Duncan. “A holy warrior.”
“With fangs?”
“A wrathful deity,” Duncan said. “A guardian.”
“Guarding what, though?”
“That’s the question. I don’t know. They usually don’t appear singly. There must be more like him around here, sentinels to warn the enemy away. But away from what? And look at the style, crude by Angkor standards. Primitive. Old. Molly, this goes back.” His mind was churning.
She wasted a shot through the crappy windshield.
“Something’s out there, Molly. This is big.” His voice grew larger. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he said to Luke.
But their guide was deep in REM sleep. Molly could see Luke’s eyes darting beneath the closed lids, stormed by dreams.
Duncan rolled down his window for a better look, and Molly braced for the amphibious stink. But the air carried a rich, potent scent full of flowers and fertile soil and, for all she knew, tigers and old rain.
“How can this be?” he murmured to himself. His excitement infected her.
“I need pictures,” she said suddenly, and fumbled in the camera bag between her feet, feeling for her wide-angle lens and the strobe flash.
She opened her door. The story quickened in her, morphing, branching off into a completely different narrative. They had set out to find one thing, a few bones from a war, only to discover something monumental. Punt the war, this was Indiana Jones territory.
The story would begin here, she determined, fog swirling, with the blood-encrusted Land Cruiser held at bay by this ferocious head. She backed off to shoot the vehicle, its fender bent around the head. Pieces of hundreds of frogs smeared the grille and hood and rooftop.
She angled right to get Duncan’s stunned expression as he approached the beast. Her flash made small explosions. He touched the carved face. He ran his palms over its blind eyes. He peeled off rug sheets of lime- and rose-colored moss.
Vin stayed inside his getaway car, engine idling, as spooked as a thoroughbred.
Light from the headlight beam played up the great flat nose, a ridiculous shot. They’d discovered a nose? She compensated with her own light, prowling for more shots.
“I know him,” Duncan said. “Ganas, they’re called. He’s a kind of
Buddhist/Hindi hero, like a Superman for the faithful.”
“A fetish,” she said, prompting him, capturing his moment of discovery.
“Much more than that,” he said, “a destroyer of ignorance, a protector of the Way. A guardian, not just of a people, but of a whole cosmology.”
“A hill tribe?”
“Something this large? It’s the tip of an iceberg.”
She liked that, a tropical iceberg. “A city?” she said. Molly wanted this for him, whatever it was. All his years of humble, anonymous, lonely searching were coming together here tonight.
The truck arrived, adding more light to the display.
Doors opened behind the rank of headlights. She heard a curse, Kleat tripping on a root. Samnang materialized from the rags of fog. She snapped him pressing his hands together in a sampeah to the demon head. Then he kept on walking into the darkness.
Kleat joined them, wiping the humidity from his glasses. The circles under his eyes were discolored pouches. Molly had never seen him like this, his bluff vigor drained, that muscular face betraying frailty. He fit the steel rims back onto his face.
Molly lowered her camera. Edit. Delete. Kleat wasn’t going to be part of this story.
“Were you trying to have a wreck?” he said. “You took off like a bolt. Now look. You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
“The frogs,” she said. Now that the danger was past, she tried to make light of it. “We thought it might be a spring shower.”
Kleat peered at her from beneath his thick bone of a brow, then turned to the stone head. “It would be a lot easier to go around the rocks, not through them,” he said.
“Rocks?” Duncan said. “This could go back to the Funan empire, a thousand years before the Angkor regime. The time of Christ, of Rome. It’s practically a myth, like Atlantis or Babylon. Funan wasn’t even its real name. That’s the Chinese transliteration for “phnom,” or hill. It was mentioned in early Chinese travel accounts, lost fragments referenced in later accounts. And look, here we are on a hill.”
“Save it for the lecture circuit,” said Kleat.
Molly held her hand against the bright lights. Vin’s older brothers were scolding him for damaging the bumper. Luke lay piled asleep against his door.
“We didn’t come for this,” said Kleat.
“But this is what we’ve come to,” Duncan marveled.
“Irrelevant.” Kleat snapped it like a whip. “They’re waiting for us.” His dead.
She no longer thought of them as hers. In the holes, working the screens, gathering the facts, shedding blood on the airplane metal, she had felt a contract with the bones. Not anymore. The captain had not confiscated her camera, his way of protesting what his superiors were making him do. But the exile had stolen her pride of place. The bones were meaningless to her now.
There was a movement in the darkness, and Kleat aimed his big flashlight cop-style. Samnang appeared among the trees in his neat white shirt. He blinked at the lights.
“The boulevard goes on,” he announced.
Intent on the stone head, they had failed to notice the road beneath their feet. Even with roots and rocks shrugging up through its surface, it did resemble a Paris boulevard. Paved with stones, it stretched thirty feet from side to side, and extended off into the pit of the forest.
“Where does it lead?” said Duncan.
“Who knows? It goes on,” said Samnang.
“Then let’s keep going,” Kleat said. He clapped his hands. They returned to their vehicles.
“It could be nothing,” Duncan cautioned as they drove on. Molly could hear his hope. First the channel stones lining parts of the river, now the carved head and this decaying road.
She reached back and laid a fist on his knee. “But also it could just be something,” she said.
He closed his hands around her fist. His palms were wet. He looked dazed and childlike.
Chastened by his accident, Vin took it slowly, steering around big stone tiles tipped up by time. Fog curdled in pools. Enormous trees bracketed the road. Their seeds had taken root with time, and younger trees grew in the middle of the avenue, rupturing more tiles.
“Look how big around these monsters are,” Duncan said. “Things grow fast here. But this is old growth. Very old. I can’t believe the loggers haven’t plundered it.”
No spindly, fibrous sugar palms in here. No fields of grass. No paddies. No sky. The trunks were like columns of skycrapers, red and gray and black and tan. Their massiveness had the look of a great cosmic weight being held aloft. As they crawled over and around the roots and rocks, it was like sliding over immense tendons and slippery bone. She could imagine the ribs of Jonah’s whale.
The fog puddled in recesses as dark as side canyons. It hung like linen rags among the branches.
“Look,” said Duncan, his window wide open. His wobbling light picked out another carved face watching them. There were more. Half buried among the trees, big stone ganas—some with the heads of monkeys and hook-beaked birds of prey—loomed among the branches. Gods appeared, their eyes half shut, their mouths half smiling. The statues kept pace with their advance. They seemed aware. The smiles seemed too serene.
Molly struggled to get a feel for their welcome. Even the times she’d visited Super Max in southern Colorado to shoot portraits of mass murderers, there had been a sense of control. This was different. They’d landed among giants. Giants wearing the masks of good and evil.
“The city wall,” said Duncan.
It appeared ahead of them among the complex of vegetation. The closer they drove, the more it took shape, a long, high barrier of mineral colors in the night. It seemed to be forming from their presence, taking on detail out of their expectation of its details. The stone blocks were cabled with vines. The vines had fingers. Ferns grew from the joints.
“It must be twenty feet tall.” His breathing had tripped into high gear, Molly could hear it. Then she realized it was her own breathing.
She bent to see through the windshield mottled with gruel, trying to make out the parapets or battlements, whatever you called them. Gaps plunged like missing teeth, muscled open by fat towers of trees with bark as smooth as pigskin. There was no way to tell which was winning, the forest or the dead architect.
“Here we go,” Duncan said. “The gateway.”
A broad, crumbling tower straddled the wall, a tunnel running through its base. Faces crowned the tower, each staring sightlessly in a different direction. The tunnel lay at the center of their collective chest. One entered through the heart of gods. Vin flipped his light beams from low to high to low. The eyes stared down at them and then away.
Vin inched in.
“It’s the perfect traffic control,” Duncan remarked. “You could stop any invaders with a few rocks piled inside. In fact, I wonder if this tower’s rigged to drop its guts.” He cast around with his flashlight.
Molly had never suffered from claustrophobia, but the moment they entered, the walls seemed to close in on her. A sort of nausea gripped her. She felt physically sick. It went beyond that. She felt trapped, as if she were calcifying inside her skin.
They emerged on the far side and the feeling lifted. She cranked at her window handle for fresh air.
“You’re sweating,” Duncan said.
“No, I’m cold,” she said. But her face was dripping. Duncan laid his kroma around her bare neck, and it carried his body heat.
She had expected to drive into a city in ruins, but there was more road. Elevated upon a spine of solid, squared stone, a causeway ran in a straight line, bound on either side by vast pools of water that had degraded into swamps fouled with mangrove trees. Their serpentine roots breached and looped back into the water.
“You’re looking at the wealth of kings,” said Duncan. “Barays—reservoirs—with enough water to feed a whole people. This could be the prototype for Angkor. It could be the genesis for the very idea of Cambodia.”
They came to a gauntlet of
stone cobras carved along the roadside. “Nagas,” Duncan said, identifying them. “Water snakes that figure in all kinds of Asian creation myths. From naga you get nagara, Khmer for ‘The City.’ ”
There were at least two dozen of the fantastic creatures arranged along the roadway. Some had snapped off at the neck and fallen into the pools. Most were intact, rising higher than the Land Cruiser, their hoods spread open to expose multiple heads with fangs bared.
As they motored slowly through the dangling moss, the water stirred. Molly could hear it down there. On an impulse, she held her camera to the open window and fired blindly, triggering the flash. Her light ricocheted off the black water. The sound stopped. She looked at the LCD to see what her camera had seen.
“Anything?” asked Duncan.
It showed a bulge in the surface, less than that, a shadow, not even a shape. “Not a thing,” she said. “It reminds me of the bayous along the Gulf Coast.” Just the same, she rolled her window shut.
The causeway came to an end. The broad, flat vein of solid limestone fed back into the earth. Their sculpted road top turned to dirt, and they drove on.
“There are the others,” said Molly. The truck was parked at a crooked angle in a clearing between toppled pillars and scraps of fog. The men were busy unloading the vehicles.
She was glad to see them, for a minute. Then she caught sight of their guns. One of the brothers had a rifle slung over his back. Kleat had brought a pistol of his own. He wore it boldly on one hip.
Duncan whispered, looking around. “Where do we begin?”
She made herself part of it. “We’ll take baby steps. A little bit at a time.”
They had arrived at a terminus. There were no buildings or arches, only the end of the road. From here one climbed on foot. Behind them lay the pools. Before them, rising above their lights on three sides, squared stone terraces formed an arena of sorts. The sheer mass of stone, quarried and hauled into place, promised a kingdom. A set of stairs led into the darkness above. If there was a city, it would be up there.
They parked and dismounted, and, first thing, Vin received a rifle, too.
Kleat was stacking axes and shovels against a fallen tree. Molly stood five-eleven in her bare feet, taller than Kleat, to say nothing of the Khmers. But for a moment, faced with that gun strapped to his hip and all the other firepower floating around, she felt like a child among strangers.