by Steve Perry
“War has been running against them,” Mac said. “Might buy a few new tanks with what the pearl would bring. And some of the high mucky-mucks in the Gestapo and SS are art collectors, too. They’ve looted scores of museums and private collections. Maybe the Japanese are taking lessons from the Krauts.”
Indy shook his head. “That’s a reach, Mac. Japanese hunters halfway around the world because maybe there’s a big black pearl out in the jungle? Not the same as looting the Nanking museum.”
Batiste looked puzzled.
“The Nazis want to show they are cultured,” Mac said. “Demonstrate that the Third Reich has taste. As a result, they have stolen a raft of Western art. And caused many of Europe’s most famous paintings and sculptures to be hidden away in barns and basements all over the Continent. The Japanese aren’t averse to swiping artwork themselves, though I’m not sure they have quite the same motives as Jerry.”
Indy wasn’t buying this line. “Still doesn’t scan. Assuming they got the same information you did, why follow us? Why not just go and collect it themselves?”
“Maybe they got to Haiti after we did? Maybe they just wanted somebody to blaze a trail for them. Or maybe they heard about the zombis. Could be they didn’t get the same information. Who knows?”
“I don’t like it,” Indy said. “Something’s not right about this. Maybe we should go and collect ourselves one of these Japanese and discuss it with him.”
Batiste said, “Perhaps not the wisest action. The jungle is full of dangers, and that includes the undead. Does it really matter why they are here?”
“It matters,” Indy said. “But maybe not so much yet. Can your man find out more about them without being spotted?”
“Oui. This is our forest, we know its ways better than anybody from outside.”
“Good idea, mate,” Mac said. “If it turns out they are Japs out to collect the pearl, we can’t allow them to do so. If we know how many of them there are and where they are, it would be to our benefit. Perhaps we might trap them somehow, or at least sneak past them.”
“Or shoot them all down like diseased pigs,” Marie said.
Indy looked at her.
“A Japanese navy submarine sank a transport carrying five hundred of my countrymen to West Africa earlier this year,” she said. “Two of them were my cousins. We have little love for the Axis here.”
Indy wanted to grin but kept it in check. Smart. Beautiful. A voodoo priestess. And potentially lethal. What was not to like about her?
Batiste spoke to Hebert, a rapid, liquid, sibilant-filled speech, and the man nodded and moved back along their trail. Indy was looking at him when he stepped into the trees and vanished.
So. Awful terrain—woods, rivers, cliffs—a local ju-ju man who controlled a couple of varieties of zombi, who were either outright dead or close to it, and now Japanese soldiers skulking around the forest after them. Yeah. That seemed about par for the course.
What next?
A couple of hours later, he found out. Hebert returned, had another quick session with Batiste, then vanished into the jungle again.
Batiste collected Indy and Mac and Marie.
“There are more men in the forest. Tracking the Asians is a similar group, Europeans. Hebert heard them speak, and this language he has heard before. They are Germans.”
Indy just shook his head. Germans. Couldn’t seem to get away from those guys.
“What do we do?” Marie asked.
“Mac said it—they must think we know where the pearl is,” Indy replied. “And they don’t—otherwise, they wouldn’t be following us. Like you said about Boukman, we’re probably okay until we collect it. As soon as we do, it would be a good idea for us to leave them wandering around in the jungle and go back to the big island.”
The rest of the day was largely a repeat of the first part—rivers, hills, ravines, nothing they hadn’t really seen before.
Another river had a rope they had to hand-overhand to cross.
More brush had to be cut, more blisters raised.
Hebert returned and reported that the Japanese were still trailing them.
“Maybe we should cut down the bridges and such,” Mac offered.
“We would just have to rebuild them,” Batiste said, “if we want to get home.”
Well, yes, there was that.
But the Japanese—if that’s who they truly were—stayed back, and through the heat of the long afternoon Indy and his party slashed and picked and climbed their way through the jungle.
As dusk approached, Batiste stopped the group. “Almost there,” he said. “Half an hour more, according to my man.”
“Thank goodness,” Mac said. “I confess I was beginning to get a bit winded.”
“I don’t believe that ‘goodness’ has much to do with it, monsieur,” Batiste said. “Not much at all.”
EIGHTEEN
BOUKMAN FLEW, high above the earth. There, a few kilometers away, a thunderstorm flashed and grumbled, the light blinking on and off in the dark clouds. Below him, half a kilometer or more, the dark carpet of the jungle lay over the island, and the breakers lapped at the shore where the land ended and the sea began.
In the Other Realm, things had forms much like those they possessed in the everyday life—only the same rules did not always apply.
Boukman reached down with his feeling, sought, and found Marie, his great-grandniece. She had raised wards to protect herself against him. He could break them easily enough, but there was no need. He knew where she was, he knew that his slaves were in the woods, watching and waiting, it was all as it needed to be.
There was still a puzzle to it, though. He felt that there was something of great importance here, most great, and yet—he had not detected the kind of energy such a thing would ordinarily emit. People, animals, objects of power, they all produced signs revealing themselves. Even a modestly strong bokor would shine like a bonfire visible day and night. Little Marie glowed less so, more like a lamp in a dim room, the tendril of her connection to Heaven a thin, glimmering white ribbon. Over many years, Boukman had seen many such lights, from the sizzling electric primary colors of loa, to the softer, purer lights of holy men and women, to the malignant purple fires of truly wicked people and wicked places. And yet, upon this corner of this small island, there was nothing to be seen. Either that meant there was nothing here, which was a possibility he had to allow, or that some power greater than his own had shielded it from view.
Now, that would be something. There had been no power here greater than his for a long time. Once, long ago, on a ship far out to sea, he had beheld a spiritual fire passing, a pillar of roiling blue and orange flame that shot up into the heavens with an intensity he had never observed, not before, nor since. He had been afraid to approach that beacon. Whoever or whatever it had been, it had frightened him. He had known, on a deep and certain level, that had he made to touch that roiling column, he would have been sucked into it and blasted into the cosmos, torn loose from himself and this world to wander for eternity.
These days, maybe he would feel strong enough to peer more closely at such a vile and wondrous thing, but even as a young man he had not been completely stupid. Knowing when to stand or when to leave was how a man survived. The jungle’s law was eat or be eaten, and he would have choked on that kind of power.
And yet, he somehow felt that whatever his niece was on to down on the island, whatever the two blan had come here to find, was as powerful as what had passed by on the sea more than a hundred years ago. Somehow, they would obtain it. And then, he would obtain them . . .
Spiritual travel had dangers; creatures that lived in the Other Realm, even a man of power had to avoid. Sometimes you had to risk these, for it was necessary. Sometimes, you should not.
There were other, safer ways to have a look at things without being there in person . . .
As he served the loa as a horse, so did his zombis serve Boukman. His âme could travel the Other Realm and
imbue one of the True Risen with his own essence.
There was little risk involved in taking such a mount—zombis were durable. But there was no joy in riding a zombi. The senses were dulled—the sight dim, the hearing lessened, the feelings coarse. Food held no pleasure—roast pork and raw feces would smell and taste the same. There was no sex, no effects from liquor or drugs, no delights in the warmth of the sun on dead skin. When Boukman rode a zombi, however, the zombi was still a part of this world, at least on a gross physical level. Sometimes, that was necessary.
So it was that Boukman found and rode a woman six weeks dead, crouching in the forest and watching as little Marie and her imen blan arrived at their intended destination: an impossible clearing in the forest, kept that way by something not the least bit natural.
Even with the greatly reduced senses available to him, Boukman could feel the thrum of hidden power from inside his zombi’s form. Like a low fog, that energy did not extend much above the ground—he would never have felt it in either realm were it not close enough to touch. This was something of a surprise, even though he had known it must be so. A bokor of power beyond any he had ever known, far past his own considerable strength, had been here. That powerful mage had hidden something, and warded it with such a spell that even the ward itself was all but invisible—even to one such as Boukman.
Amazing. He would not have believed it were he not now feeling it.
This was like a bonfire to a lamp, the sun to the moon, and that the gods and loa had allowed him to come to it was a gift beyond any he could imagine.
They had sent the imen blan and his great-grandniece to collect it for him—they must have their reasons for doing it thus, and Boukman would respect those. Once it was collected—whatever it was—then he would harvest it. And that harvest would ripen soon, he felt.
He had a small army of his potioned ones and True Risen in the woods. They would stand ready, and wait.
But not, he felt, much longer . . .
Batiste and the bearers and Marie had all crossed themselves before they first stepped into the clearing, and Indy understood why. It wasn’t lost on him that this place ought not to be here. That the jungle just stopped, as if cut off by a knife, and the ground was flat and lacking any plants, save for what looked and felt like thick gray-green moss underfoot. That seemed more than a little odd.
One more odd thing to join the party . . .
Mac said, “Could just be salted earth or somesuch. Some acid or alkaline substance in the dirt. Anybody happening upon the place might consider it a sign from the gods or the like, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly natural explanation.”
“You think?”
“Well, it would seem a reasonable thesis.”
“Reasonable. Like, say . . . dead men walking?”
Mac wouldn’t admit it, but Indy could see it felt creepy to him, too. “With any luck, we’ll be gone soon enough,” Mac said.
“I hope. I still plan to sleep with my revolver under my pillow.” Pillow. Right. Should have had Mac’s imaginary concierge fetch him one of those. A pillow. A hot bath. A nice snifter of Napoleon brandy . . .
Mac went along with the lame joke: “Careful you don’t thrash around in a nightmare and blow your head off.”
There was a certain whistling-past-the-graveyard feel to the banter, and Indy was too tired to pick it up again. He just nodded at Mac.
It was late dusk, near enough to dark so that any kind of search would be likely a waste of time, especially since there wasn’t anything to see—just the clearing, no buildings, no burial mounds, no stacked-up stones for altars. No flashing neon arrows pointing to a spot, saying Here it is! In the fast-fading daylight, the ground could have passed for a carpeted floor, flat, maybe half an acre. Nothing to see.
They were all exhausted anyhow, and fresh eyes in the morning made more sense. They lit lamps, started a fire, and broke out food. This was a big part of their goal, to arrive here, and they had managed that much. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Now all they had to do was find an artifact hidden for a century and a half, get past a bunch of Nips, Nazis, and walking dead, catch a boat to Haiti, and then a plane for home. That was all. No problem, hey . . . ?
As he had the night before, Indy set up his own sleep shelter. There were some larger tarps, to protect the supplies, but the sleeping tents were small, three-sided and floored sheets of stitched-together green canvas, barely tall enough to sit up in. There were two sets of door flaps, mesh and canvas, each of which could be zippered shut. If it was cold or raining, you could batten things down; if it was hot, you could leave the door flaps open and use the screen to keep the bugs out. The floor was a necessity, in Indy’s view. In the jungle, anything that could crawl under a gap would, and the idea of sharing your bed with a scorpion, a hand-sized spider, or—he repressed a shudder—a snake? No sir, no thank you, no way. Zipped up fully, the shelters were bug- and snake-proof.
Pup tents, they’d called them when Indy had been in the Boy Scouts, and big enough for two, if you didn’t mind lying shoulder-to-shoulder. Plenty of room for one adult.
The tents were held up with poles inside at each end, anchored with wooden pegs driven into the dirt through loops along the edges, and with a couple of guy lines attached to the support poles, front and back. Once set up properly, this kind of tent was very sturdy, and would keep the weather off and the small critters out.
If there was a chance of rain—something more common than not in the tropics during the season—then it was a good idea to trench the perimeter of one’s tent. Using a small folding shovel, Indy did this, digging a six-inch-deep ditch around the edges of the tent, as well as a short trench that led slightly downhill from this potential moat. The theory was, if it rained, the trench would keep the water from pooling under the tent’s floor and cause it to stream away. It was a lot of work but, like digging a latrine downwind, worth the effort. You didn’t want to wake up in the middle of a rainstorm bobbing in a pool of water on the inside of your tent . . .
After he had his tent pitched and trenched, and his bedroll laid out, it was fully dark, only the dim light from the fire’s coals and a small kerosene lamp illuminating the area. It had been a long day, and he was ready to sleep. He lost no time in crawling in and stretching out. He always slept head toward the door, an old habit. He pulled the steel zipper down to seal the tent against mosquitoes and drifted off . . .
He awoke suddenly, unaware of how much time had passed. He looked at his watch, the glow-in-the-dark hands dim and barely visible. One fifteen A.M. What had—?
He sensed movement to his left. He rolled slowly and carefully onto his belly, to see better, and reached out to move his revolver to his other side, near to hand.
The night lay heavy on the clearing; the partly cloudy sky admitted little moonlight or stars’ gleam. The lamps had been extinguished, and the fire’s embers burned low, so what he thought he saw was hard to identify visually. All was gray, most of that deeply so, and it was more an impression than anything he could truly see:
Somebody dancing in the dark.
Not a zombi, he didn’t think.
His eyes adjusted as much as they were going to, and the form seemed human, and small, and once, when a coal caught a moth or other insect and caused it to flare in the campfire for a second, casting a tiny bit of brighter glow, he realized that the dancer was likely a woman. He couldn’t be sure, it was just a blink of what seemed like a bare hip rolling in a quick step, and then the night covered it again.
A woman pretty much narrowed it down.
His mouth felt suddenly dry. Marie. Dancing naked in the dark?
He was dreaming, must be . . .
When he awoke, Indy’s back hurt from sleeping on his belly. Resting on the hard ground, something that hadn’t bothered him when he’d been young, was a lot less comfortable these days. Might have to start carrying a pad or something . . .
He remembered a dig, years ago, when he had b
een doing some work for the Smith. It had been in North Africa, Arabia, maybe. He recalled the archaeologist in charge, a professor from one of the Ivy League schools—Harvard? Yale? He’d been an old fossil, as Indy remembered him, but he realized that the man he’d thought ancient had probably been no older than he was now.
Normally, on an excavation that would be worked for months, the tents were high-walled, and people slept on canvas cots, which were considerably more comfortable than the ground. But because this site had been halfway up a rocky hill with almost no flat spots on it to set up camp, smaller tents had been the main shelters. Not much room for a cot, which would have had to be packed in, so Indy, like most of the students and other workers, had slept on the ground. But the professor . . . what had his name been? Dr. Lucas? Something like that. Twenty-five years, he could be forgiven for not remembering the man’s name. Anyway, he’d had the damnedest thing with him. The ground cloth normally used under a bedroll or sleeping bag had in his case been some kind of rubberized pad with what looked like fat tubes or hoses in it. There was a tire valve on one end, and the professor had one of the laborers hook up a tire pump to it. After fifteen minutes or so, there was a enough air in the thing that it looked like a small raft.
Indy and the other students had laughed at the old man for that. An . . . air mattress? Whoever heard of such a thing? How sissified was that?
Didn’t sound so bad now . . .
When he crawled out of his tent, dawn had just arrived. Others in the camp were already up, including Marie. She saw Indy and nodded at the small campfire. “Hot coffee this morning,” she said.
He nodded. He thought about saying something. Say, was that you I thought I saw dancing naked out here in the wee hours of the morning?
No, he decided.
But for the coffee, small favors were gratefully appreciated. Indy fetched a cup and poured himself some of the brew. It smelled better than it tasted, but it was hot and strong and he wasn’t complaining. It wasn’t that bad, and even bad coffee was better than no coffee . . .