by Gabriel Hunt
What have you gotten yourself into? he thought.
The sun was a hazy red ball sinking toward the horizon when Noboru turned off the road onto a narrow dirt lane. Thick, leafy branches crowded the path on either side, pressing inward as if the foliage were trying to reclaim the road. Birds shrieked and cried, and unseen animals shook the branches above them. Half a mile in, the road widened and they found themselves entering a small village. Wooden houses with rusty corrugated metal roofs were arranged roughly in a circle around an open central area marked by a single, small pagoda. The villagers stopped what they were doing and stared at the jeep as it passed. A man filling a water bucket from a hand pump stiffened when he saw them, then spat and touched his forehead twice, once above each eye. It reminded Gabriel of someone protecting himself with the sign of the cross.
Noboru brought the jeep to a halt in front of a ramshackle two-story building. Most of the paint had peeled off long ago, leaving small patches of coppery red stuck to the flat concrete walls. Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat and pulled two items out of his suitcase. The first was a holster, which he strapped around his waist. The second was a Colt .45 Peacemaker, fully loaded. He slipped the revolver into the holster.
As they stepped out of the vehicle, the front door burst open and an old woman ran out shouting and waving a dirt-smeared shovel. Gabriel tensed, but Noboru stepped in front of him.
The old woman stopped running but continued gesturing with the shovel and shouting.
Gabriel had picked up many languages in his journeys around the world, but Bidayuh wasn’t one of them. It was close enough to Indonesian Bahasa that he was able to make out a word or two, but that was all. He leaned over to Noboru. “What’s she saying?”
“Her name is Merpati,” he said. “This is her guesthouse. She wants us to leave. She says your presence here as an outsider is bad luck and will bring evil spirits.”
Gabriel frowned. It didn’t make sense. If Joyce had made arrangements to stay here, if it was a guesthouse used by visitors to the island, why would this Merpati react so negatively to their arrival? This wasn’t a matter of bad luck or evil spirits, Gabriel decided—something had happened, something that had changed this old woman’s mind about letting foreigners through her door.
Gabriel held up the passport photo. “Ask her when she saw Joyce last.” Noboru spoke, and Merpati lowered the shovel, answering in a quick and anxious voice. She passed her hand over her face, from forehead to chin. Though Gabriel didn’t recognize the words, the fear in her expression was unmistakable.
Noboru nodded, then turned to Gabriel. “You’re going to love this. She says ghosts came in the night and took her.”
Upon hearing the word “ghost” in English, Merpati nodded and passed her hand over her face again.
“Ghosts without faces,” Noboru went on. “She says they took Joyce into the jungle. This was a few nights ago.”
The old woman pointed toward the far end of the village, where the houses thinned and the jungle rose in a thick green wall beyond them.
“Does she know where these…these ghosts would have taken her?” Gabriel said.
Noboru asked, and in response Merpati said something curt, biting her words off fiercely.
“She says,” Noboru translated, “the girl is dead now, trapped among the ghosts in the land of the dead. If you go after her, you will be trapped too. Become a ghost yourself.”
Gabriel put the picture of Joyce away in his jacket pocket. “I’ll take my chances. Will she at least let us see Joyce’s room?”
Noboru asked and Merpati chewed her lip. When she finally replied, Noboru said, “For fifty Ringgit she’ll let us up—that’s about ten dollars. It’s a lot here.”
“Hell,” Gabriel said, digging in his pocket, “I can do better than that.” He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, unfolded it and held it out to the old woman. She eyed him warily, then snatched it out of his hand. She stared at it briefly, crumpled it in her palm and hid it away in a pocket in her torn shift. She muttered something out of the side of her mouth.
“She says we can’t stay long. It’s a full moon tonight, and apparently that’s when the spirits are at their strongest. She doesn’t want you hanging around and bringing the ghosts back.”
“No, we definitely wouldn’t want that. Listen,” Gabriel said, “you should go. It’s getting dark, and you’ve got a long drive back. I can take it from here.”
“You kidding?” Noboru said. “I like my job. Nice hours, good benefits. How long do you think your brother would let me keep it if I left you in the middle of the jungle by yourself?”
“I’m not a Ph.D. student on her own in Borneo for the first time,” Gabriel said. “I can handle myself.”
“Against ghosts?” Noboru asked with a grin. “Two’s better than one against ghosts.”
“Against practically anything,” Gabriel acknowledged. “All right. Just stay close and don’t wander off. One missing person is enough.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. Didn’t I just tell you I’m not going anywhere?”
“You armed?”
Noboru lifted his pants leg to reveal a long knife strapped to his calf.
Gabriel nodded. “I guess that counts.”
Merpati led them to the door of the guesthouse. Gabriel noticed a short wooden post had been hammered into the ground by the door, and atop it was a goat’s skull, like the one they’d seen on the road. Merpati’s attempt to protect the house from the evil spirits that took Joyce, presumably. The old woman brought them inside, past a kitchen that smelled like spicy stew and steamed pork, and up a wooden staircase to the second floor. The warped steps creaked loudly under their weight. Barring the culprits actually having been ghosts, which Gabriel was inclined to doubt, there was no way they could have sneaked up these stairs to take Joyce without being heard. Which suggested that whoever had taken her must have found another way in.
On the second floor, a long corridor ran the length of the building, five doors lined up along one side. Each door they passed was open, each room empty but for a neatly made bed with a short dresser beside it. Nothing on any of the beds, nothing on any of the dressers.
“The other boarders must have left after Joyce was taken,” Noboru said.
“Can you blame them?” Gabriel said.
Merpati stopped in front of the last door, which was the only one that was closed. She pulled a ring of long, heavy keys out of her pocket, unlocked the door and pushed it open for them. Gabriel and Noboru walked past her into the room. The old woman hung back, reluctant to set foot inside. She shouted something at Noboru. Gabriel didn’t need him to translate that time. Merpati wanted them to finish quickly and go.
Looking at the state of Joyce’s room, Gabriel could understand Merpati’s reaction. Everything was in a shambles. The dresser’s drawers had been dumped, the bed stripped, the mattress slashed. Clothing, books and personal items were scattered everywhere—Gabriel nudged a hairbrush with his foot. On the far wall, the window was shattered, the broken glass taped over with a bedsheet. He crossed to the window, pulled the sheet aside, and stuck his head through, taking care to avoid the jagged edges. This must have been how they’d gotten in. It was probably the way they’d taken her out, too, maybe with a ladder or a rope, after tossing the room and its contents.
“What do you think they were looking for?” Noboru said.
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “But it’s clear they weren’t here just for Joyce. You don’t have to slash open the mattress if you just want her.”
Noboru squatted to sort through the books on the floor. Gabriel did the same to search the items that had been dumped from the drawers. It was mostly clothing, but under a crumpled pair of pants he found Joyce’s passport and beside it an old-style analog wristwatch, similar to the one Gabriel himself wore. Its face was cracked, the hands stopped at 3:10. “Well, now we know what time it happened,” Gabriel said, showing Noboru the broken watch. Then
he lifted the passport. “And we can rule out one possibility. If it had been bandits, they would never have left a U.S. passport behind.”
“No,” Noboru said. “You can get more on the black market for one of those than you can for most hostages.”
“So if not bandits, who?”
“You ruling out the ‘faceless ghosts’ theory?” Noboru said, then before Gabriel could answer he raised one hand. “Hang on. This looks promising.” He pulled a composition notebook out of the pile. “It’s her expedition journal.” He began flipping through the pages. “Let’s see, arrived in Borneo, met Mr. Noboru at the airport. Oh look, she says I seemed ‘interesting.’” He kept going, scanning lines of cribbed handwriting quickly. “Looks like she spent most of her time exploring the fringes of the jungle. And look at that.” He tapped the bottom of one page with his forefinger. “She writes here that she thinks she’s being followed.”
“Let me see.”
Noboru passed Gabriel the journal. The entry in question was dated one week back.
Probably imagining it, but…I think someone was following me at the Malawi River today. Not someone I’d ever seen before. But everywhere I went in the marketplace, this guy was there. Kept turning away and pretending to look at pottery or whatever when I caught him staring in my direction. Didn’t look Bornean, which made it kind of hard for him to disappear in the crowd. One of those bandits N warned about? But he didn’t look like that at all. Merpati’s opinion when I told her about it was just that “it’s dangerous for single women to wander around without a man.” Well there’s a newsflash. But I’m damned if I’m going to hide in my room.
The Malawi River? What was she doing there? What was she doing anywhere but the university archives?
Gabriel flipped ahead, scanning the pages for any more mentions of being followed, but didn’t find anything until the final entry. It was dated Wednesday, the same day Michael had gotten his last e-mail from her. Joyce’s handwriting was noticeably different, more uneven and hurried:
Another guy following me today at the marketplace in Tarakan. Definitely not the same man, though same type—white guy, maybe five-eight, five-nine, and too damn interested in everything else around him anytime I turned to look at him. This one had curly hair and a beard. White shirt, brown pants. He followed me for a good ten minutes, before I finally lost him in the crowd. Damn it. Could this have something to do with SOA?
Gabriel looked up from the page. “SOA. Any idea what that might be?”
“School of the Arts? Society of Actuaries? State of Alert?”
Gabriel walked back to where Merpati stood wringing her hands in the doorway and showed her the page in the book. He pointed to the letters “SOA.” She shook her head and started talking loudly, gesturing back toward the stairs.
“She wants us out,” Noboru said, unnecessarily.
Taking Joyce’s passport and journal, Gabriel followed Noboru out of the room. Merpati escorted them downstairs and all the way back outside, as if she didn’t trust them to leave on their own. She loudly locked the door behind them.
Night had settled over the village, barely cooling the sticky, humid air. A full moon glowed over the treetops, its round face covered briefly by a passing cloud. All around them, light seeped out of the windows of the village houses, bright and steady from those with generators, dim and flickering from the ones that used oil lamps. As Gabriel walked to the jeep, a man across the way finished hammering a post topped with a goat skull into the ground in front of his house, then spat, touched his forehead twice and went inside. The door slammed, and Gabriel heard a heavy bolt slide into place. He glanced around and noticed goat skulls had been posted in front of every house he could see. Not a great place to be a goat.
Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat, unzipped his suitcase and slid Joyce’s passport and journal inside.
“So now what?” Noboru asked, coming up behind him.
“They took Joyce into the jungle,” Gabriel replied. “So that’s where we’re going.”
“It’d be safer to wait until morning.”
Gabriel reached into the suitcase again and pulled out a flashlight. “For us. Not for Joyce.”
Noboru puffed out his cheeks and blew air. Then he nodded.
Gabriel reached into the suitcase again. “That knife of yours looks handy, but…” He pulled out a second revolver and passed it to Noboru. “Maybe you’d better carry one of these, too.”
Chapter 4
Noboru had his own flashlight in the glove compartment of the jeep, and together they entered the jungle at the edge of the village, twin beams of light bouncing in front of them. Moonlight filtered through the trees and glistened on the thick leaves all around. They moved forward, the blanket of undergrowth on the jungle floor clinging to their feet as they went. Where the foliage was too thickly knotted to pass, Noboru cut away the vines and creepers with his knife, swinging the keen blade machete-style, the revolver jammed in his belt.
The high whine of insects filled the night air, and the rustling of leaves; the beam of Gabriel’s flashlight revealed tree frogs and geckos clinging to the trunks and branches in their path. Mouse deer whose heads didn’t reach higher than the tops of Gabriel’s boots fled before them through the underbrush. Clicking beetles scurried away into tiny holes amid the twisted roots.
“Tell me if you see any tarantulas,” Noboru muttered.
“Why?” Gabriel asked.
“So I can get the hell away from them. I hate those damn things. Always have.”
Gabriel tilted his flashlight down to shine it along the ground. No tarantulas in sight. “Remind me sometime to tell you what happened to me in Chile.”
“Not if it involves a tarantula.”
“Not a tarantula,” Gabriel said. “A whole nest of them. Chilean flame tarantulas.”
Noboru shivered. “I never, ever want to hear that story.” He stopped suddenly and bent down, shining his flashlight at some thin branches poking out from a tree at knee level. “Hold on. Look at this.”
Gabriel came over, adding his light to Noboru’s. “What have you got?”
The branches were snapped, their bent tips all pointing in the same direction. Something heavy had passed—or been dragged—through them.
“It’s too big to be from squirrels, too high for mouse deer,” Noboru said.
“Monkeys?”
“Too low. This was done by people.”
Gabriel straightened and shone his flashlight in the direction the snapped branches pointed. The jungle seemed to stretch on forever, tree after tree, vine after vine, forming an impenetrable net of vegetation. After five days, the signs remaining of Joyce’s passage through the jungle would be few; that was more than enough time for rain and wildlife activity to conceal the trail. But there should still be some signs. It just meant they’d have to be that much more vigilant to spot them.
Gabriel started walking again, following the direction of the broken branches. Several yards farther on, his flashlight beam located something at the mossy base of a thick tree.
“There.” He hurried to the tree. More branches were snapped and bent like before, but this time there was also a piece of torn fabric stuck on the sharp end of a twig. Gabriel brushed aside a long-horned beetle that had made the cloth its bed and plucked it off the branch. It was filthy, covered in mud, but under the dirt he saw a tight weave and a blue and white pattern. It felt like cotton. “It’s clothing,” he said. “Piece of a shirt or a dress, maybe.”
“Well, I can tell you we’re definitely not the first people to pass through here,” Noboru said, his voice low. He pointed his flashlight at the ground ahead of them. Past the tree, the vegetation had been trampled flat.
They followed the trail deeper into the jungle. They passed whole tree trunks covered with swarms of ants and termites. Stick insects clung to nearby leaves and waited patiently for their chance to snatch up prey. Above their heads, an enormous tropical centipede with red mandibles
and spiky legs sprouting like daggers from its segmented body crawled along a thick branch. Gabriel saw Noboru look away, disgusted, as they passed beneath it. It wasn’t just tarantulas, then. Gabriel was beginning to think the jungle was no place for him.
Ahead, Gabriel could just make out a dim orange light flickering between the leaves, growing brighter as they moved along the trail. They proceeded cautiously. The path, he saw, came to an end at the edge of a wide clearing. Just shy of the edge, while they were still hidden by a screen of trees, Gabriel dropped to the jungle floor and pulled Noboru with him. They switched off their flashlights, hid behind a low barricade of fallen branches and took in the sight before them.
Six tall wooden posts jutted from the ground around the perimeter of the clearing, forming a rough hexagon. Each post was topped with a shallow stone bowl of burning oil. These were the source of the flickering orange light they’d seen through the trees.
At the far end of the clearing was a crude but fairly large hut constructed of wood and what appeared to be scavenged pieces of metal. There were no windows in the one wall of the hut they could see, only a single door, which was currently closed.
And at the center of the clearing, directly in front of the hut, were two massive, bent tree trunks bowed in a double arch over a ten-foot-wide circular stone that rested on the ground like a giant manhole cover. He’d seen a stone cover like that once before, in the rain forest of Guatemala; there it had protected the waters of a sacred well. He wondered what this one was protecting.
But that wasn’t the main question on his mind, because of what he saw hanging above the stone, suspended from the bent tree trunks by a pair of heavy metal chains: a wooden cage.