Water splashed into Arthur’s face. He coughed. He blinked his eyes. Some of the water got into his throat and he tasted salt as he struggled for breath. There would be no escaping from this beast, he realized, and in his mind’s eye he saw its mouth opening, stretching wide, revealing long shark-like teeth. Here in this ocean far from London he would die a bloody death, and no human beings, only the ocean’s scavengers, would receive his remains.
One last time he tried to swim. He windmilled his arms and kicked his feet and turned his head for air with every other stroke. The thin white line of the beach remained a distant goal, however, no more reachable than the moon, and he felt as if he were swimming in mud. He felt knots forming in his legs, a cramp building in his side, and thought in his terror that he would drown himself before he let the horse attack him.
“Bastard horse. Goddamn monster.”
A few more meters and it would be on him with jaws made for tearing. But now, as he prepared to dive, to force himself under, he noticed that the horse had checked its advance. It seemed to be looking along the water to the shore. Arthur peered over there, too, and far down the beach by the jagged white rocks he saw the waving figure of a man. He could tell that the man was black and dressed in something blue or green and that the man had his arm upraised as if he were motioning to the horse.
Arthur spun back around. He saw the horse moving away, slicing through the water as it swam off, going parallel to the beach. It was heading to a wall of rock at the end of the cove, but just before it came to the boulders it sank below the surface entirely--gone, vanished. It did not come up. And the man on the beach had vanished also, perhaps into the bush that bordered on the sand, leaving Arthur to ponder it all. He found the water calm again, with no undercurrent, and easily swam to the safety of the shore, but once on the beach he saw no footprints. Had the man been an illusion? Something he’d imagined? Impossible, but the man could have stood in the portion of the sand overrun by the flow of the tide.
Who the hell was he? Did Cripps and June know him? Arthur walked across the sand till he reached the spot where he’d parked the jeep, and he started to drive along the path twisting through the bush and toward the house.
‘Much has become clearer to me,’ he wrote to Vaughn in his newest letter.
‘Neither Cripps nor June had told me about a fourth person being on the island. A man, someone who wields a substantial influence over the horses. But I saw him while swimming earlier today and got first hand evidence of how with a wave of his arm he can get the horses to obey him. One, in the water, was coming to attack me (these horses have aquatic skills, it seems), but he appeared on the beach and directed it elsewhere. The question is, where? Tomorrow Cripps, June, and I will try to find out and this evening, after we eat, we’re preparing for the search expedition.
‘Cripps wanted to begin that today, at once. All he had to hear about was the man and the horse, and he wanted to go. But I wouldn’t tell him which cove I saw the horse in until he or his wife told me exactly who the man is. They’d both frowned with recognition as soon as I mentioned him, so I knew I could get the answer out of them if I demanded it. And I did demand it. This man, who they called the keeper of the horses, or ‘’keeper’’ for short, is someone they used to get along with. But then Cripps had some run-ins with him and he took the horses away into hiding. The question for Cripps and June all this time has been where he could have possibly taken them. We have a lead now as to where, though none of us had any idea the horses can travel underwater, too.
‘The keeper, I’ve learned, was here when Cripps and June arrived. He was the only person living with the horses, and June was candid enough to tell me that he helped them a great deal at first, showing them around the island, acting as a sort of friendly link to the community of horses. And he suggested they relax, give in, when they began to feel urges and desires, this sexual energy. It became overpowering. They lived like happy primitives awhile, doing whatever they liked with their bodies, but then something happened between him and Cripps--I don’t know what--and the whole thing went sour.
‘That’s it for today. Time for me to eat dinner. Tomorrow we go to the cove where I saw the man and the swimming horse, and I hope I’ll have something to report then.’
That night, in bed, as he remembered the horse from the water, Arthur found himself unable to sleep. He kept thinking of the terror he’d felt when the horse had been swimming toward him, its auburn head steady in the surf, its black eyes riveted on him. He recalled his feeling of great relief when the man on the beach had saved him with a signal. Cripps and Cripps alone, from what he’d gathered, was the reason the keeper had taken the horses off to their secret area, and Arthur wondered whether it would be wise for Cripps to intrude on them there. Intuition told him that the keeper and the horses would accept a visit by him and June, but that if Cripps went also, trouble would result. Trouble might explode into violence. He and June might be able to talk to the keeper, but Cripps would go in angrily, haughtily, and make a tense situation worse.
Be ready, he thought. Be ready for anything. As Vaughn’s representative, he might have to do something forceful to keep Cripps under control.
Would he be up to it?
Chapter 8
Arthur cut the motorboat’s engine. Cripps stood up, bent forward and tossed the rope with the rusted anchor over the side. It went in with a splash--white spray--and they heard the clunk of metal hitting sand.
“Right here,” Arthur said. “This is where we should start.”
The sky promised perfect weather. Guided by Arthur, they’d reached the spot where the swimming horse had vanished underwater, and the sun playing off the wall of grey rock hurt their eyes.
“There’s got to be some sort of tunnel or passage underneath. If we can find that, we’ll find the horses.”
He had on his trunks, black and long, and felt the heat of the sun on his shoulders. June, too, was dressed for the water, and Arthur admired her swimsuit again. The suit was blue with a white trim and as snug on her body as a glove on a hand, and he had to fight from staring at her so that neither she nor Cripps would notice. Yet she, quite clearly, did notice, smiling at him from the floor of the boat and then coyly shaking her head.
Cripps was surveying the wall of rock.
“Let’s get going,” he said.
“I’m ready,” said Arthur.
“Not you. Just me and June.”
“You expect me to wait here?”
“You might be more of a hindrance than a help.”
“And why is that? You’re planning to do something you shouldn’t? Something to the horses?”
“Arthur, please,” June said, standing up and stepping between them. “This is ridiculous.”
“Tell him that,” Arthur said.
“I am,” she said. “T.J., calm down.”
“I am calm. I just don’t think he should go.”
“Of course he should. He knows everything now. What’s there to hide?”
Cripps scoffed, then sat in a huff on the boat’s rim and picked up his mask, flippers, and snorkel. None of them could scuba dive, but they hoped that basic snorkeling equipment would serve their needs on the job ahead. As for Cripps, besides this gear, he was wearing baggy white trunks and a short-sleeved shirt to protect his back from the sun, and in a belt wrapped around his waist, he had wedged his German-made pistol in case the keeper of the horses attacked him.
“I’m off,” he said. “No time to waste.”
“We’ll be right along,” June answered.
“Fine, but I’ll understand if you want to stay. I see how you eye each other.”
He slid off the boat and into the water, and they watched him snorkel toward the rocks.
“We really do have to talk,” Arthur said. “Discuss some things.”
“Let’s worry about this first.”
They hit the water together, began swimming over to the rocks. For Arthur, who had snorkeled only once, th
e breathing through the tube felt slightly constrictive, but he had learned to inhale normally. He’d blow through the top any water that collected in the tube, and he found it exciting the way his mask magnified whatever he saw--every darting silvery fish, every piece of kelp or coral. Above the surface the boulders forming the cove wall were white, below they were covered with green sea moss and the pink of wavy anemones. The water itself had a gorgeous blueness, gorgeous because despite its color it retained a pure transparency.
Arthur felt a tap on his arm. He looked at June, swimming beside him, and followed her finger as she pointed. There ahead and below them was Cripps, pliant as an eel wriggling through the water, and Arthur watched him go into a hole. Cripps had swum into a gap between two lumps of yellowish coral, and when they descended, holding their breaths, they came to the passage Arthur had predicted they’d find. An underwater channel cutting through the rock. It was dark at the entrance and for several yards ahead, but farther on the channel appeared to be open to the sky.
Returning to the surface, they caught their breaths. Arthur cleared some water from his mask. The whiteness of the sun as it shone off the boulders made him narrow his eyes, and he felt a mouth nibbling at his leg like the sucking action of an air hose.
“Fearless little bugger. It’s giving me a cleaning.”
“You must taste good,” said June.
She was treading water beside him, readjusting her own mask. Her pulled-back hair glistened black with all the shimmering water in it, and even with the business of the horses at hand, he felt an intense desire to touch her. He ached to reach out and handle her flesh. Day by day it had been growing on him, this pull, this attraction, this awareness of her as a sensual presence, and he suddenly had other thoughts in his mind than to continue with the expedition.
“We could take your husband’s suggestion--and stay behind.”
“That is tempting,” June said.
“So?”
“I don’t trust T.J. If he finds the keeper and uses his gun....”
No argument there: Cripps might do something drastic if the keeper of the horses mocked him. A refusal by the keeper to lift his curse and release the horses, to restore Cripps’ potency, and Cripps might very well use his gun. What would that elicit from the horses?
“You’re right,” Arthur said. “Let’s go.”
Down they went, their flippers kicking. June entered the channel first. Arthur stayed close behind and told himself to keep calm, to put out of mind the thought of drowning, and soon indeed they had come to safety. They surfaced in the area where the tunnel opened up to the sky. They went straight ahead toward a bend in the widening channel, and Arthur released the water from his snorkel while marveling at the oddness of the passage. The channel here cut through rock like a passage in a Gothic castle.
Because of the exposure to the sun, the water in the channel felt warmer now than it had at the tunnel’s entrance. And it kept getting warmer as he and June snorkeled along, like water mixed with leakage from a hot spring. Arthur expected to see such a spring or to smell the sulfur that would indicate one, but neither through vision nor his nose did he discover a source for the heat. When he asked June about it, she only sighed and shook her head. They could walk in the channel by this time, their flippers, masks, and snorkels in their hands, and both of them knew it was a good thing they could since the water had become too hot for them to keep their faces submerged. Up to their chests in the water, they could tolerate its heat, and Arthur even had to acknowledge that the warmth was acting on him, changing his mood.
“Do you feel it?” he said. “A heat inside?”
June stopped dead in her tracks. She revealed a crimson face to him and a look that signaled desire. Breathing hard, her eyelids fluttering, her posture straight to display her breasts, June, too, seemed under a spell arising from the heat in the water, and she pointed with certainty down the channel to the bright lagoon beyond.
They started running, lifting their knees high. Where the two walls of rock ended, the wide green lagoon began, and June and Arthur splashed over to the bank and dropped their snorkeling gear on the grass. They barely took the time to notice the V-shaped cove they’d entered, the deep cove where on the grass the island’s horses were gathered, sitting, grazing, drinking from the lagoon, and they didn’t rush over to Cripps and the keeper as they’d been intending to do. Already, on the opposite bank, those two were talking, and the lanky keeper with the nutbrown skin seemed completely unintimidated by the anger in Cripps’ voice and the revolver in his belt. Nude but for shorts, picking at his beard, the keeper had a blase expression as he listened to Cripps rant on, and when he could interject a word he would say nothing more than “So?” or “Yell all you want. It won’t help.”
A black horse taller than both stood motionless at the keeper’s side. Another one, a piebald, had its snout near Cripps’ neck and its thick teeth bared. Cripps looked frail by comparison, feeble enough to bite in two, but this didn’t stop him from shouting on as though he was the ruler of the island and could force the keeper to become his servant.
“Lift the curse.”
“Apologize first.”
“Lift the curse you put on me and send them back to the forest.”
“Only if you apologize.”
“The horses don’t belong to you.”
“They obey me and that’s enough.”
The quarrel June and Arthur had feared was on the brink of exploding. Yet they had become intent on each other and the heat they felt in their bodies. Stepping out of the channel, leaving behind the hot water, hadn’t cooled them down one bit, and Arthur knew that only one act would satisfy what they wanted. The water left on him was evaporating, turning into wisps of smoke then fading, and June was glowing with an orange light that itself carried heat. Without speaking they took off their swimsuits and they lost no time locking mouths, embracing one another, falling to the ground clasped.
Nearby a horse whinnied. Throughout the cove horses pranced. Horses of different size and color reared and neighed as if in celebration, and the keeper, turning from Cripps, broke out laughing.
“You can go,” he told Cripps. “You’re not needed.”
But Cripps had indignation in his face and no intention of obeying the man. He started to walk away from the keeper and then to run along the bank, sprinting around the lagoon’s edge so he could reach his wife and Arthur.
A horse, sorrel-colored, jumped across his path to block him.
“Leave them alone,” the keeper said, serious again, folding his arms. And all the horses in the cove went quiet so that the only sound to be heard was the panting of Arthur and June.
Cripps seized his gun, yanked it from his belt, waved it threateningly in the air. The horse didn’t move and the keeper just sneered so Cripps then fired up at the sky. The shot, he must have been thinking, would grab Arthur and June’s attention, but they kept going at each other as if insulated from the world by a bubble. Nothing could distract them from the exercise of their lust, nothing at all, and Cripps filled up with such frustration he lowered the revolver from above his head and shot the horse straight in the eye. The animal screamed--a horrible sound--and while the blood gushed down its face, it staggered into the lagoon and fell. Other horses began to shriek, running in circles, going nowhere, but the keeper maintained his staunch composure and asked Cripps to give him the gun. Cripps said no and shot him also, once in the stomach and once in the head. Then he saw he would have to flee because some horses were charging at him. Forced to back into the water, he could not retrieve his snorkeling equipment, left on the bank where he’d come ashore, and so he began running for the channel, pushing himself through the lagoon. He disappeared behind the grey rocks.
No horses followed. They all stopped at the water’s edge and started to mill around their keeper. Just then Arthur spoke – “That was extraordinary. Truly great.” – but he was referring to the sex just finished and not to what Cripps had done. He
and June were untangling themselves, spreading themselves out on the grass, and they needed time to cool down, to awaken from their shared delirium. Only after they did that would they realize what had happened and see the horse and the keeper lying dead.
Chapter 9
By pulling his body across the lagoon, into the channel, and through the underwater tunnel, June and Arthur brought the keeper’s body to the sea. As they tread water by the rocks, they watched it float in the unruffled surf, and they had to push it a couple of times before the tug of the current took it. The motorboat was gone, as they’d expected, and they discussed the possibility of returning without delay to the house, having a showdown there with Cripps. Or perhaps they could go when he’d be asleep, late tonight, and make sure they found his revolver. This above all they needed to take; they knew his capabilities now with the weapon.
They decided, in the end, to swim back to the cove, and there with the horses sitting on the grass, sitting subdued, they spent the night in each other’s arms. The death of the keeper had upset them, but in their veins they still had the afterburn of that day’s explosion of passion.
The next morning they awoke to find the cove deserted. Hoofprints on the bank along the lagoon showed them that the horses had taken to the water, probably swimming in one long file through the channel, and Arthur and June swiftly concluded that they must have left the once secret refuge to resume their wandering lives in the bush. But would these horses, with their intelligence, go to the house and attack Cripps? June and Arthur considered themselves safe, but they wanted to know what these creatures had in mind for her husband.
Jungle Horses Page 6