by Peter Tonkin
‘. . . educate, he means . . .’ whispered Robin and Bonnie gave a complicit gurgle of laughter.
‘. . . we would like you to experience some of our tribal customs to go with this feast of local fare.’
As he sat down, the chandeliers dimmed. A vertical column of brightness struck straight down from the swimming pool on to the dance floor as though there were some kind of huge blue moon up there. It was shifting, shadowy, as much to do with liquid as light. No sooner had the assembled diners got used to it, and to the strange silence that followed the President’s ringing announcement, than the drums started. They built to a crescendo surprisingly quickly, and were accompanied suddenly by a deafening chorus of bull-roarers that sounded as though a legion of demons was being tortured to death nearby.
Abruptly, almost magically, one of those very devils seemed to appear in the heart of the strange blue light. It was the better part of seven feet tall, a thing of mask and raffia, designed to ensure that whoever wore it was completely invisible – not unlike the Chinese demon dogs that Richard had seen dance in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. But this devil was darker, more mysterious, more disturbing. Surrounded by his lesser dancing demons, he went whirling round the dance floor in a dance more complex than anything Fred Astaire ever attempted. As though possessed by something superhuman, something timeless, something out of the depths of the delta and the heart of the jungle. His mask, a carapace of ebony brutally carved and garishly daubed, seemed to glow beneath the blue luminescence. A strange sort of frisson went round the huge room. The western tourists were surprised, perhaps shocked. The local people reacted differently, it seemed to Richard. With something more like superstitious awe. With genuine fear, perhaps.
Richard leaned over to Bonnie Holliday who was sitting stone-still at his side. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘It is Ngoboi,’ she said, her voice trembling a little. ‘One of the greatest, most powerful and most dangerous spirits of Obi. Ngoboi is the dancing devil that is said to control the Poro, the secret bush societies; to demand and to take their sacrifices. Hearts. Livers. Fingers. Toes. The skin from foreheads and palms and feet. Sacrifices of people, you understand. Women. Children. Warriors, even. Human. People.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘A tourist-friendly version of Ngoboi.’ She shook herself a little, then added, ‘Pray you never meet him out in the wild jungle. In the jungle where he is real. They say it is death to look on him out there.’
‘Ngoboi,’ said Robin, intrigued. ‘Tell me about him, Bonnie. Just in case . . .’
FIVE
Ngoboi
The Army of Christ the Infant arrived at the chapel compound in a sudden howling rush, like a wave unexpectedly breaking into surf as it hits a reef. There was no warning rumble of engines for the roads on this side of the river were all currently impassable. The army’s transport section, trucks, four-by-fours and technicals, had stopped a kilometre distant, therefore, and the troops had come through the jungle on foot. Given that most of them were aged between ten and twelve years old, they had moved surprisingly quietly. Moses Nlong thought they were attacking an easy target, and that helped – he was running low on cocaine and decided against getting the kids hopped up as he would have done had he feared any kind of resistance. On the one hand, this ensured they didn’t go in screaming like ghosts and shooting. On the other hand, it meant he was going to have a problem getting them motivated when they got there. Sober soldiers were always less willing to perform the sort of acts his power relied upon. But he had a way round that particular quandary.
The first that Anastasia and Ado knew about the attack, therefore, was the sound of Evensong breaking into screaming. And then came the sound of animalistic howling and the first shots. Anastasia’s first instinct was to switch the big Maglite off. Then she put her arm round Ado’s shoulders and they crouched together for a moment at the bottom of the high mud slope, shaking with shock on the riverbank. The mental picture of the big black pearl seemed to fade slowly in Anastasia’s memory and she blinked in the velvet darkness, forcing her eyes to clear through sheer strength of will, commanding her night vision to click in. Without thinking, she shoved the whole oyster into the left-hand pocket of her jeans, looking around, her mind racing.
Further up the bank and in the mangroves, the darkness would have been all but absolute. Out here at the river’s edge there was a little leaf-shadowed starlight and the pale promise of moonrise in the east – though the black battlements of the storm front sweeping in from the west had claimed almost half of the sky above. Up at the far end of the stretch of bank, away from the mangroves and the delta downstream, their little jetty stepped hesitantly into the stream, their tiny little rowboat – hardly more than a cockleshell – tied to it, waiting for the riverboat’s next visit. Without further thought, Anastasia put the rest of the oysters into the bag that Ado had brought. There was quite a weight of them now. Irrelevantly, she wondered how much of that considerable bulk was made up of big black pearls, companions to the one she had just seen. Then Father Antoine’s distinctive voice rang out – only to be silenced by the flat, unceremonious bang of a gunshot – and the full horror of what was happening hit home.
Ado gasped in a breath but, providentially, Anastasia stopped her before she made any sound. For, just at the moment she would have screamed, a tall figure appeared from the direction of the mangroves, coalescing out of the utter darkness like one of the local forest spirits. Anastasia recognized neither him nor what he was wearing, but she knew the outline of the gun well enough. Without thinking – without even reasoning that she was probably almost invisible in her Goth-black jeans and T-shirt, she rose up in front of him, pointing the Maglite like a gun. He sensed rather than saw her movement and started to swing the Kalashnikov up. She switched on the torch and shone it full in his face. For a nanosecond she saw the features of the soldier she had blinded. Frozen, blinking, his soft brown eyes suddenly full of tears. He looked so young. Then she switched the beam off again and hit him on the left temple with the kilo and a half of black-enamelled steel that made a very effective club. He went down without a sound and she followed him on to the mud, pounding on the back of his head, to make sure.
When he was lying still as death, she set about disentangling the Kalashnikov from his lifeless arms. For a moment she cradled it to her breast, her mind racing back across five years. The rock group she had run away with were called Simian Artillery – apes with guns. It described them perfectly. They had behaved worse than apes in the end but the guns had been real. And what self-respecting extreme Russian heavy metal rock group with a name like that would not have the odd Kalashnikov lying around? Long before she snorted her first line of coke or experienced her first crack party gang-bang, she had learned how to field-strip, zero and fire an AK-47 as deftly as a Spetsnaz special forces man.
This one came apart under her fingers almost by magic. Less than five minutes after she picked it up it was back together again and she was deciding how best to use it. The magazine was a standard thirty round capacity and the weight of it felt about right for fully loaded. Short of taking the cartridges out and wiping them all off then counting them all back in, there was nothing more she could do other than to rely on the gun. But that was OK because, of course, it was just about the most reliable weapon ever manufactured. It was probably an AK that cut short the poor old priest’s last sermon. Better that than one of the local matchets – what the rest of the West called machetes.
‘Hold this,’ she breathed to Ado, passing the AK. Then she set about searching the unconscious soldier. He carried no matchet, but he did have another two curving clips. That was ninety shots in all. She could do some serious damage with ninety shots, she thought. As long as she stayed alive. But she sure as hell couldn’t outgun a whole fucking army. Mind racing now as the formless howling of the attack settled into a deeply disturbing rhythmic chanting, Anastasia took the AK back, unclipped the shoulder strap and set about tying the soldier’s
wrists and ankles together with it.
‘I’m going back,’ she breathed, stooping to scoop a handful of dark silt from the pile of flotsam on the river’s edge. She smeared it on her face, thinking inconsequentially of fish. It was the black mud that came downstream with the orchid and the oysters from the lake. ‘You stay here. If it looks hopeless then I’ll come back for you and we’ll try and go for help. If the soldier stirs or makes a sound then you hit him in the head and keep hitting him until he stops. Really. You know what they’ll do to you if they catch you.’
‘I would rather fight,’ said Ado. ‘I would rather die.’
‘Fight him,’ said Anastasia. ‘And try to stay alive. I will too.’ She clicked the safety on the AK to select single shot. And she was gone.
The brightness of the compound’s electric lighting was enough to guide her up the bank. She slid across the mud flat on her belly, trying to remember what little she had learned about this kind of thing from watching endless macho war films with Simian Artillery and going paintballing with her father in happier days. It seemed sensible to keep low, move slowly and use her eyes to the limit of their ability. At the back of her mind the fact that the soldier hadn’t been able to distinguish her black clothing from the shadows gave her a little confidence – but not as much as the AK cradled across her forearms just under her chin. Or the spare clips she had shoved down the back of her belt to lie like sabres of ice across her buttocks. Or even the Victorinox she had in her left-hand pocket. She became distracted by the wry thought that for the first time in her life she was glad that she didn’t have much of a bust – her flat chest helped her stay lower still. She didn’t even register that she also had a pocket full of oysters and at least one big black pearl.
Anastasia came up behind the chapel. Like all of the compound buildings it stood on breeze blocks that raised it about three quarters of a metre off the ground. The area might have been mercifully clear of mosquitoes but the same could not be said for ants and termites. Further, it had been erected on a slight slope – the one that ran from the compound down to the river – and the breeze blocks had been used to level it so the gap on the river side was higher than the one on the camp side. A welcoming cavern, easy to enter.
Still with the AK cradled under her chin, Anastasia wriggled under this, moving slowly on elbows and knees, keeping her butt low and her chest tight to the ground, straining to see out of the shadows into the brightness of the central compound – all too well aware that she would be lucky to see much more than footwear, calves and knees from this angle, and trying not to think about ants, snakes, spiders, centipedes and scorpions.
But it was nothing from the insect world that came closest to making Anastasia give herself away. It was Father Antoine. She had calculated that the best place for her to place herself to start with was beneath the steps that led up from the compound to the chapel. The first step was made entirely of brick, but the next two were simple planks standing on piles of bricks, maybe forty-five centimetres high and a metre and a half apart. The lower step would form a protective wall she could hide behind. The upper steps would give her good vision and, perhaps, a secure field of fire.
But Father Antoine had been standing on the bottom step shouting at the Army of Christ the Infant when he was shot. He had fallen back on to the wooden planks and the nearest child soldiers had spent some moments ensuring his demise by chopping at him with their matchets. They had rolled him over to one side of the rudimentary stairs so that they could search the chapel itself. Anastasia was therefore confronted by the vision of his staring eyes, so wide they seemed to gleam in the shadows. His forehead had been burst by the gunshot and then chopped open in four more places by matchet blows. His crisp white hair – a blackish brown now – hung forward on his forehead and the matted strands seemed to be all that was holding his brains in place. His nose was gone and his mouth gaped unnaturally wide, tongue lolling grotesquely. Beneath the shapeless russet sack of his once snowy robe, a considerable lake of blood was slowly soaking into the red mud and dusty brickwork. His hands stuck through the planks, hanging down helplessly. All his fingers were gone.
Anastasia lay there for several minutes, considering things. She had no notion of being in rapidly deepening shock. She was wondering – albeit distantly – whether to be sick. She had been too focussed on action before to feel fear but it stabbed through her now. Not fear. Sheer stark terror. She had, perhaps, wet herself. Or it might have been Father Antoine’s bodily fluids flowing downhill under her. She wondered vaguely whether there was any way she could manoeuvre the AK so that she could kill herself now and escape all this in one agonizing instant. But then she heard Celine’s clear voice, and all other thoughts flew straight out of her mind.
Anastasia discovered that if she pulled herself up as close as possible to Father Antoine’s corpse, she got quite a good view of the compound. The unfamiliar children – the Army of Christ the Infant – were distinguishable from her own young charges only in that they were armed, and were wearing an assortment of dirty, ragged clothing – shorts and T-shirts for the most part. And that they all needed a good bath by the look of things. The child soldiers were standing in a restless ring around the taller, fitter, better dressed and cleaner orphans, who were cowed and terrified by the guns and the matchets. Also by the death of Father Antoine and by the situation of the other adults in the camp. Imam Mohammed, the Muezzin Samir and Ibrahim were in the same state as Father Antoine, lying in the centre of the circle, hacked to death. Brother Jacob was kneeling beside them but he seemed to be alive. Just about. Celine was standing, tall and apparently fearless, in front of the three nuns. And, behind the nuns, the boys and girls they were trying so vainly to protect. There was silence and stasis after whatever she had said. So much silence, in fact, that Anastasia dared not risk pushing the selector down one more notch to automatic fire. Even though a fire-rate of 600 rounds a minute suddenly seemed worth having at her disposal – for the second or so that her clips would last for.
Anastasia wormed round until she could see whoever it was that Celine was speaking to. A group of older boys – young men – were standing round half a dozen adults whose uniforms were cleaner, pressed, more military-looking. The special guards all held AK-47s. In the centre of this group, the tallest man stood, apparently thinking. What looked like a Browning automatic hung from one listless arm. A blood-spattered matchet the better part of a metre long hung from the other, its lanyard looped up round his wrist above the huge gold watch he wore. It was hard to tell what he was thinking because his face was a mask of ritual scars that seemed to be set like ebony. His mouth looked like just one more scar running from side to side instead of up and down. He wore a maroon beret pulled to the line of his eyebrows. Between the beret and the scarred cheeks there was a pair of sunglasses whose silver lenses simply reflected Celine’s wide-eyed stare. Anastasia had never seen any pictures of self-styled General Moses Nlong, but she reckoned that this must be him. And whatever Celine had said must have given the general pause. And the whole of his army had paused with their leader.
Then he slapped her round the face. With the flat of the matchet. It was a casual blow, with seemingly no real force behind it, but it swatted her to the ground like a left hook from a heavyweight boxer. A gasp went up right round the compound. Silence returned. He gestured, twice. Two of the tall young men stooped and pulled the reeling Celine to her feet and held her. Four others closed on Sister Faith. They dragged the struggling woman forward. As they did so, Nlong holstered the Browning. He reached out and pulled the sister’s white headdress off. Then, with the matchet hanging from its lanyard, he ripped her robe wide, revealing her plump white shoulders. He pinched her upper arm and smiled. There was enough light to see a flash of his teeth. They had been filed to points. He nodded and Anastasia froze, suddenly realizing what was going to happen next. Celine yelled something, her voice slurred, but too late.
Sister Faith was on her knees and the matchet ro
se and fell like a guillotine. Dancing clear of the fountain of blood with practised ease, Nlong strode over to Celine, shouting wildly. But she was sagging in a dead faint between her two captors. The general took her hair and twisted her face up towards his. Then he let her drop and spat an order to the men holding her. He raised his voice and shouted to the whole of his army. Suddenly everything was in motion. The well-armed ragamuffins sprang to life. The girls and boys from the orphanage were separated. The girls were herded into one of the dormitory huts. The boys were forced back along the wall nearest to the fire and held there under guard, where they could watch. Watch and learn. While this was going on, the two men holding Celine dragged her fainting body across the compound and up the steps into the chapel. Anastasia heard the telltale thumping and scraping immediately above her which told of a body being dropped and then tied securely. By the time the two young men came out again, the rest of the army was seated at the refectory tables as Jacob the handyman, Hope and Charity served the food that would have fed their children.
Into this strange, almost domestic, scene stepped the huge, masked figure of Ngoboi, spirit of the wild jungle.
At once the atmosphere changed. Anastasia had never felt anything like it. The monstrous apparition stared around the compound, the raffia costume covering his tall frame seeming to stir as though there was a wind, the lifeless visage of his painted ebony mask catching both light and shadow. Two helpers in masks and raffia skirts over shorts and T-shirts danced forward to help him. They carried matchets that looked even longer than the one the general had used to decapitate Sister Faith.
In the sinister silence, Ngoboi started to move around the pale bulk of the nun’s corpse. Shuffling at first, then beginning to twirl and leap in a complicated ritual dance, the strange forest devil whirled around and around the fallen woman, moving to the relentless beat of a drum he could only hear in his head. His skirted helpers capered around him, also increasingly wildly, until suddenly he gestured, mid-bound. And they fell upon Sister Faith’s corpse, their matchets rising and falling in practised sequence. Every eye in the place was riveted on the horrific performance, captivated by the terrible magic. As the matchets rose and fell above the butchered nun, first the general and then his army began to pound the tables with their fists, giving voice at last to the rhythm inside Ngoboi’s ebony and raffia head.