by Louis Bayard
“Well,” said Kermit once the noise had subsided. “Let’s be off, shall we?”
13
The Colonel by now had jigged himself into a new state of exhaustion, and as he reached for his rifle, his left leg crumpled and sent him toppling forward. He might have formed quite a heap in the sand if Thiago hadn’t put out a hand to arrest him. For several seconds, they hung there in a quivering suspension before the Colonel straightened himself.
“Thank you, my boy. Must have put my weight on the wrong joint. Out of joint, that’s me! Help me walk it off, if you’d be so kind.”
The boy took the Colonel’s arm, and together they marked off segments of six feet at a time, the Colonel gamely dragging his leg behind him and Thiago keeping the grave, self-possessed pace of a sanatorium nurse.
“Your father,” said Luz. “He is not well, I think. His leg.”
“Old injury,” Kermit answered. “He was struck by a trolley—um carrinho—some years ago. It threw him, oh, thirty feet—banged up his shin something fierce, it never really healed. And then just a few days ago he struck the same shin against a rock. It’s bad now, getting worse.” The heat began to rise in his voice. “If he stays here much longer…”
He’ll die. The words were more stunning for not being spoken.
“You take good care of him, Senhor Kermit.”
“Well, I—yes, I am responsible for him, naturally.” He felt a faint tinge in his cheeks. “You must feel the same about Thiago.”
“No,” she said after some thought. “You will say I am a bad mother, Senhor, but I believe Thiago is strong. He will make his own way. He must.”
Kermit watched the Colonel limp along the foreshore. “My father is strong, too,” he said. “The strongest man I know. But there are things that lie outside our control.”
“What things?”
“Well, this Beast. It’s stronger than all of us combined. We’ll need all the wits and weapons at our disposal, and even then we can’t be sure of…”
He watched her face soften into a grin.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing. I enjoy to hear you talk, that is all.”
“Perhaps you don’t appreciate the severity of our situation. There’s a very good chance we will all be dead before this day is out. I don’t think it’s too much to … to ask that…”
And even as he spoke, he was conscious of the play of light on her eyes.
Play was the wrong word. The light had to work to make it through all those layers, and it came back changed. Not like Belle’s limpid blues, he thought, transparent from top to bottom.
“Time to go,” he said abruptly.
“As you wish, Senhor.”
* * *
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the stream, the forest grew darker and danker. Dead sticks crunched beneath their feet. And rising through the gloom and ooze was a grove of trees, hung with pale globes that, in the tomblike pall, appeared to glow with their own light.
“Cacao,” said Kermit.
“This is what she came for,” Luz said. “The little one.”
“Why such a distance for a cacao pod?”
“Her mother was sick. The cacao is medicine.”
The image dug into some soft part of him. A young girl, traveling far from home, loading pods into her basket. Did she hear the thing coming for her? Did she run?
Luz had come to a stop. Directly ahead, a pair of butterflies with crimson-spotted wings rested on a pile of kindling. They stayed no longer than a breath, but they seemed to leave behind some particle of luminescence, for in the next instant Kermit saw that the kindling was an arm. And a leg. And something that might have been a head.
“Oh,” he said.
This time, Thiago declined to charge forward—declined even to take another step—and by some instinct of protection or solidarity, the Colonel remained at his side. It was left to Kermit to approach the body.
The jungle had done its work. Only the bones and the still-vibrant fall of hair could be reliably called human. Everything else was a squall of black, bubbling with flies and ants. Kermit could manage no more than a few seconds of looking at a time. But with each new glance he came away with something.
“Same pattern of attack,” he said, with affected ease. “Skin peeled away. Internal organs removed. The muscle tissue gone. Looks to be the same modus operandi, wouldn’t you—Father?”
The Colonel had turned away.
“Are you all right, Father?”
“They left her here,” he said, clipping his syllables. “Her mother, her father—they left her here to rot.”
“Luz explained it to us. They believe the body harbors bad spirits. It’s part of their lore.”
“Hang their lore. This is a child. Was a child.”
Gingerly, the old man knelt by the corpse and picked up one of her hands.
“Rigor mortis should have passed by now,” he muttered.
With great care and delicacy, he unfolded the dead girl’s fingers, one by one. The hand opened to reveal a thatch of hair, damp as oil in the sickly white expanse of skin.
The Colonel coiled the hair around his index finger and raised it toward the sky.
“By God,” he whispered. “She got a piece of it.”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as one can be. If the poor girl was clutching something at the moment of her death, doesn’t it stand to reason it belonged to her attacker? Why else would she have curled her fingers around it? Brave little thing, she went out fighting.”
“Perhaps it’s her own hair.”
“But look at the color. Can you see? Brown. Reddish brown.”
He dropped the hairs into his son’s palm. They were coarse to the touch and surprisingly cool.
Kermit lifted them toward the half-light of the canopy. Grains of yellow and gold peeped through the brown.
“No sign of blood,” he said. “They likely weren’t torn out by the roots.”
“Oh, I doubt the creature even felt it happening. He had larger matters on his mind. All the same, Kermit, this is awfully encouraging.”
“Encouraging?”
“I ask you: What is hair?” The old man clapped him on the chest. “What is hair if not corporeal? Don’t you see? We’re no longer treating with spooks or hobgoblins. Be gone with you, Curupoorah, or whatever your name is. This Beast is a thing of our world.” He seized his Springfield around the barrel. “If it’s flesh we’re vying with, then I give us a fighting chance. What about you?”
Kermit said nothing. It occurred to him, though, that things of flesh—of this world—could be quite as terrifying as the other kind. Not for the first time, he remembered Elliott waving from that bridge. Looking as corporeal as anyone.
Bon voyage.
“Shh,” hissed Luz. “Listen.”
Kermit’s senses sprang open. He heard a cry of immense outrage, swelling over a period of seconds and then strangling down into something thin and quivering, no less eloquent. It was the sound of suffering.
The sound stopped, and for a few seconds they stood in place, letting its echoes settle over them.
“How far, do you think?” the Colonel asked.
“No more than a quarter mile.”
“My sentiments exactly. From what direction?”
Here they couldn’t agree. The Colonel favored retracing the ground they had just traveled, but Kermit pointed toward a thick copse of myrtles with leathery leaves the size of elephants’ ears.
“There,” he said. “I’m sure it was there.”
“Thiago can lead you,” said Luz.
She knelt until she was level with the boy, and from her mouth came a patois unique to the two of them: a mosaic of Portuguese and Cinta Larga (or so Kermit assumed), spiced with dumb show. Thiago listened gravely but with glittering eyes.
“Siga me!” he cried.
Follow me.
“Makings of a general,” the old man murmured. “Lay on, Macduff.”
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The sound by now had fallen away. The jungle was still as death as they followed the boy through a forested tunnel so narrow that the trees jostled them as they passed. The path led down to a hollow studded with granite boulders, then climbed again. Within a few minutes, they were standing in a clearing: a tiny bay of light, in the center of which stood three or four silk-cotton trees, as bare and gray as stone walls. Around them the jungle walls pulsed and breathed. The sibilation of insects was like the sound of the sun striking the earth.
Thiago stopped, listened.
“Well?” said the Colonel.
The boy put up a finger. As if on command, a new sound welled up from the jungle interior. No, thought Kermit, not a new sound at all. He had heard it last night. That eerie lapping, quick and bright and metallic. The sound of an animal drinking its fill.
He peered through the spindles of trees. The light, as it poured from above, was peeling away the jungle’s gloom, layer by layer. The shades parted to reveal a rough outcropping, strangely tawny in the greenish-black surroundings. As Kermit watched, the outline suddenly shifted—jerked—and now that sight converged with the sound, and he understood that he was looking at something animate. Something that had just killed.
He felt a tap on his shoulder. The Colonel was backing away, beckoning him to follow. Together, they retraced their path until they were standing once more in the granite hollow. Only then did the Colonel allow himself to speak.
“Highly promising,” he said. “You didn’t happen to notice the thing’s color, did you?”
“Reddish brown.” Kermit’s fingers uncurled. The tuft of hair, so lately imprisoned in the dead girl’s hand, lay sheathed in his palm. He’d been clutching it the whole way without knowing it.
“Hard to say what species it is.” The old man blew on his spectacles, rubbed them with his sleeve. “From the color, I’d wager it’s some kind of simian.”
“Possibly.”
“Do you think it saw us?”
“As far as I can tell, it never turned its head.”
But, then, Kermit hadn’t seen a head.
“Very well,” said the Colonel. “What’s our best course of action?”
The very casualness of his tone was itself an excitement. It had been like this in Africa. Every time they came within shooting range of some prized creature, everything slowed down: movement, breath.
“Conditions are good,” Kermit said. “If he’d gone farther into the jungle, we wouldn’t have such a clear view of him. He’s—what?—twenty, thirty paces off?”
“Give or take.”
“That’s as clean a shot as we’re going to get. We have to take it.”
“But if we miss him,” said the Colonel, “or wing him—”
“Then he’ll run, sure as Sunday. Even wounded, he’ll outpace us.”
“How do we keep that from happening?”
Kermit frowned, tapped the stock of his Winchester. “We circle him. Give me a few minutes to get round to the other side. When I give the signal, you draw your bead and fire. If he turns and runs, I’ll be waiting for him.”
“So you’ll fire the next round—”
“And you the next. We’ll keep at him until he’s brought to ground.”
“Aim for the head?”
“If you can find it.”
The old man nodded. “Then let us pray we shoot true, you and I. We’ve precious few bullets to spare.”
“Senhor?”
Luz had followed them back down the path; Thiago was close behind.
“What is happening?” she asked.
“What’s happening?” echoed Kermit, unable to keep the tension from his voice. “We’re going to kill your Beast for you.”
“We will help.”
“Just stay out of sight, that’s all. We need to keep the field as clear as we can.”
A hush of incredulity crept into her voice. “You wish us to hide?”
“Stay low, that’s all.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes. A few minutes.”
“And why should we do this, Senhor?”
“Because!”
She crossed her arms against her breasts. “That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have.” But already his brain was floundering for something more persuasive. “Thiago,” he gasped. “Someone must watch over him. Make sure he’s all right.”
The argument might have been more telling if the boy weren’t presenting every bit as skeptical a front as his mother. They matched each other sneer for sneer, and all Kermit could do was turn his back on them and march up the hill, praying they wouldn’t follow.
They don’t understand. I have a plan.
But as soon as he gazed on that solitary reddish-brown shape in the jungle shadows, his plan began to sprout holes.
How could he possibly circle the thing without its knowing? How could he count on it running toward him at the first whiff of danger? For a few seconds, he hovered there at the forest’s brink, feeling the veins in his wrist and neck swell. He took a breath, pulled apart a mesh of vines, and stepped through.
In at least one respect, Fortune smiled on him. The canopy on this side of the clearing was unusually thin, and so the light, rather than vanishing, merely diffused, allowing him to keep the creature at all times in his peripheral vision. But how slowly he progressed! Terrified of alerting his prey, he had to pry apart the overgrowth inch by inch and carry himself over branches and fallen trunks with the greatest possible deliberation—as if he were crawling across an ocean floor.
By now the lapping sound had given way to something more intimate: a voracious gnawing that made Kermit’s innards writhe. Yet as he clawed his way through the foliage, pushing away sticks and pods and the desiccated remains of a wasp’s nest, this sound became an anchor—a comfort, even—reassuring him that he was here and the Beast was there.
An additional comfort: his Winchester, black and inviolate, swimming through the watery green.
Had it been five minutes since he’d left? Ten? Had he traveled twenty yards or thirty? It no longer mattered. All that mattered was keeping that sound in his left ear. Then, when the sound’s angle bent, he stopped and braced himself against the peeling bole of a laurel tree. Slowly, he turned back toward the sound.
And saw nothing.
A prickle of panic seized him. Where the hell is it?
His eyes ranged up and down the lines of trees, looking for motion, a flash of color. He scanned the canopy’s upper stories, and he was just starting to retrace his steps when something flickered into his line of vision.
It was a head—pale, still, and astonished—attached as if by whim to an empty cavity. A tapir, Kermit thought. Only the barest chassis of a tapir, stripped to its component parts. And into that devastated cavity the Beast—if Beast it was—had plunged its head with the fervor of a lover.
There was a bubble, a shudder. Then, with infinite slowness, the creature raised its head. Kermit’s stomach contracted to the size of a pebble as he stared at that tangle of hair and blood and entrail, almost indissoluble from what it devoured. It was as if the creature, not yet sated, had turned to consuming itself.
With an obscene gargle, the Beast now lifted one of its own appendages and smeared it across its head. From the morass of tissue and plasma, a pair of eyes emerged. A shock of perception—intelligence—scanning the terrain.
Kermit drew back. Breathed in a draft of air and slowly expelled it. The Colonel was on the other side, concealed in some makeshift blind, waiting for Kermit’s signal. Now was the moment.
What had the old man said? “Let us pray we shoot true.” Kermit raised his tongue to his palate, but the tongue was dry, obdurate. It wouldn’t signal. He wetted it with his lips, then tried again. Nothing. Nothing! He took another breath, then tried once more, and this time his tongue unbent itself enough to emit a series of staccato clicks, which flew one after another through the leaden air.
Father’s first volley. Not in the head, as Kermit had hoped, but the shoulder. Startled, the creature let out a shriek and spun around, frantically canvassing the vines and boles. Kermit raised his rifle, positioned the thing in his sights.
Now, he thought. Before it runs.
But its next motion was neither forward nor back but up. With a velocity so fierce it was as if the laws of gravity had been instantly and absolutely abrogated, the creature flung itself straight into the overhanging branches.
Kermit gritted his teeth, muttered an oath. Once the creature was in the canopy, there would be no tracking it down. But then he noticed that the noise above his head was expanding. Branches were shaking; leaves were raining down. The creature wasn’t retreating, it was merely seeking a faster and cleaner route to its next prey.
Kermit could just make out its outline, swinging from branch to branch with its one good arm, moving straight in the direction of the shot. Straight in the direction of the Colonel.
“Father,” he whispered.
And then he was bellowing.
“Father! It’s coming to you! It’s coming to you!”
Kermit stumbled toward the clearing, slamming into trunks, tripping on buttresses. He heard another shot ring out, but the creature, undeterred, kept thrashing its path through the leaves and vines.
“Father!”
A third shot. The canopy went still.
Kermit stopped, strained his ears. Then he heard a stifled cry. A human cry.
With the butt of his rifle, Kermit hacked and bludgeoned his way through the last three yards of undergrowth, and as he tumbled back into the clearing, the rays of sun came at him like knives. He rubbed his eyes and, through a caramel haze, saw …
Something that looked like his father, sprawled on the ground beneath a grunting bloody mass of fur and leaves.
Luz and Thiago had thrown themselves on top of the creature. They were pummeling it with their fists, pounding for all they were worth, and yet so little did they trouble the thing that it had only to shrug to fling them off—with such a sickening force that Thiago was left in a tiny ball on the ground and Luz sat half insensible against a tree.