by Neil Gaiman
“I’ve been all over the world—a lot of places Americans can’t even go these days-and I’ve always felt that, wherever I was, God was surely watching. But once I started getting up into those hills, well….” He shook his head. “I was pretty much on my own, you see. They were going to send most of the staff out later, after I’d got set up. All I had with me was one of our groundskeepers, two bearers, and a guide who doubled as interpreter. Locals, all of them.” He frowned. “The groundskeeper, at least, was a Christian.”
“You needed an interpreter?”
The question seemed to distract him. “For the new mission, yes. My Malay stood me well enough in the lowlands, but in the interior they used dozens of local dialects. I would have been lost up there. Where I was going they spoke something which our people back in the village called agon di-gatuan—‘the Old Language.’ I never really got to understand much of it.” He stared down at his hands. “I wasn’t there long enough.”
“Trouble with the natives, I suppose.”
He didn’t answer right away. Finally he nodded. “I truly believe they must be the nastiest people who ever lived,” he said with great deliberation. “I sometimes wonder how God could have created them.” He stared out the window, at the hills of cloud below us. “They called themselves the Chauchas, near as I could make out. Some French colonial influence, maybe, but they looked Asiatic to me, with just a touch of black. Little people. Harmless looking.” He gave a small shudder. “But they were nothing like what they seemed. You couldn’t get to the bottom of them. They’d been living way up in those hills I don’t know how many centuries, and whatever it is they were doing, they weren’t going to let a stranger in on it. They called themselves Moslems, just like the lowlanders, but I’m sure there must have been a few bush-gods mixed in. I thought they were primitive, at first. I mean, some of their rituals—you wouldn’t believe it. But now I think they weren’t primitive at all. They just kept those rituals because they enjoyed them!” He tried to smile; it merely accentuated the lines in his face.
“Oh, they seemed friendly enough in the beginning,” he went on. “You could approach them, do a bit of trading, watch them breed their animals; they were good at that. You could even talk to them about salvation. And they’d just keep smiling, smiling all the time. As if they really liked you.”
I could hear the disappointment in his voice, and something else. “You know,” he confided, suddenly leaning closer, “down in the lowlands, in the pastures, there’s an animal, a kind of snail the Malays kill on sight. A little yellow thing, but it scares them silly: they believe that if it passes over the shadow of their cattle, it’ll suck out the cattle’s life-force. They used to call it a ‘Chaucha snail.’ Now I know why.”
“Why?” I asked.
He looked around the plane, and seemed to sigh. “You understand, at this stage we were still living in tents. We had yet to build anything. Well, the weather got bad, the mosquitoes got worse, and after the groundskeeper disappeared the others took off. I think the guide persuaded them to go. Of course, this left me—”
“Wait. You say the man disappeared?”
“Yes, before the first week was out. It was late afternoon. We’d been pacing out one of the fields less than a hundred yards from the tents, and I was pushing through the long grass thinking he was behind me, and I turned around and he wasn’t.”
He was speaking all in a rush now. I had visions out of 1940s movies, frightened natives sneaking off with the supplies, and I wondered how much of this was true.
“So with the others gone, too,” he said, “I had no way of communicating with the Chauchas, except through a kind of pidgin language, a mixture of Malay and their tongue. But I knew what was going on. All that week they kept laughing about something. Openly. And I got the impression that they were somehow responsible. I mean, for the man’s disappearance. You understand? He’d been the one I trusted.” His expression was pained. “A week later, when they showed him to me, he was still alive. But he couldn’t speak. I think they wanted it that way. You see, they’d—they’d grown something in him.” He shuddered.
Just at that moment, from directly behind us came an inhumanly high-pitched caterwauling that pierced the air like a siren, rising above the whine of the engines. It came with heart-stopping suddenness, and we both went rigid. I saw my companion’s mouth gape as if to echo the scream. So much for the past; we’d become two old men gone all white and clutching at themselves. It was really quite comical. A full minute must have passed before I could bring myself to turn around.
By this time the stewardess had arrived and was dabbing at the place where the man behind me, dozing, had dropped his cigarette on his lap. The surrounding passengers, whites especially, were casting angry glances at him, and I thought I smelled burnt flesh. He was at last helped to his feet by the stewardess and one of his team mates, the latter chuckling uneasily.
Minor as it was, the accident had derailed our conversation and unnerved my companion; it was as if he’d retreated into his beard. He would talk no further, except to ask me ordinary and rather trivial questions about food prices and accommodations. He said he was bound for Florida, looking forward to a summer of, as he put it, “R and R,” apparently financed by his sect. I asked him, a bit forlornly, what had happened in the end to the groundskeeper; he said that he had died. Drinks were served; the North American continent swung toward us from the south, first a finger of ice, soon a jagged line of green. I found myself giving the man my sister’s address-Indian Creek was just outside Miami, where he’d be staying-and immediately regretted doing so. What did I know of him, after all? He told me his name was Ambrose Mortimer. “It means ‘Dead Sea,’” he said. “From the Crusades.”
When I persisted in bringing up the subject of the mission, he waved me off. “I can’t call myself a missionary anymore,” he said. “Yesterday, when I left the country, I gave up that calling.” He attempted a smile. “Honest, I’m just a civilian now.”
“What makes you think they’re after you?” I asked.
The smile vanished. “I’m not so sure they are,” he said, not very convincingly. “I may just be spooking myself. But I could swear that in New Delhi, and again at Heathrow, I heard someone singing—singing a certain song. Once it was in the men’s room, on the other side of a partition; once it was behind me on line. And it was a song I recognized. It’s in the Old Language.” He shrugged. “I don’t even know what the words mean.”
“Why would anyone be singing? I mean, if they were following you?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But I think—I think it’s part of the ritual.”
“What sort of ritual?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. He looked quite pained, and I resolved to bring this inquisition to an end. The ventilators had not yet dissipated the smell of charred cloth and flesh.
“But you’d heard the song before,” I said. “You told me you recognized it.”
“Yeah.” He turned away and stared at the approaching clouds. We had already passed over Maine. Suddenly the earth seemed a very small place. “I’d heard some of the Chaucha women singing it,” he said at last. “It was a sort of farming song. It’s supposed to make things grow.”
Ahead of us loomed the saffron yellow smog that covers Manhattan like a dome. The NO SMOKING light winked silently on the console above us.
“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to change planes,” my companion said presently. “But the Miami flight doesn’t leave for an hour and a half. I guess I’ll get off and walk around a bit, stretch my legs. I wonder how long customs’ll take.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. Once more I regretted my impulsiveness in giving him Maude’s address. I was half tempted to make up some contagious disease for her, or a jealous husband. But then, quite likely he’d never call on her anyway; he hadn’t even bothered to write down the name. And if he did pay a call—well, I told myself, perhaps he’d unwind when he
realized he was safe among friends. He might even turn out to be good company; after all, he and my sister were practically the same age.
As the plane gave up the struggle and sank deeper into the warm encircling air, passengers shut books and magazines, organized their belongings, and made last hurried forays to the bathroom to pat cold water on their faces. I wiped my spectacles and smoothed back what remained of my hair. My companion was staring out the window, the green Air Malay bag in his lap, his hands folded on it as if in prayer. We were already becoming strangers.
“Please return seat backs to the upright position,” ordered a disembodied voice. Out beyond the window, past the head now turned completely away from me, the ground rose to meet us and we bumped along the pavement, jets roaring in reverse. Already stewardesses were rushing up and down the aisles pulling coats and jackets from the overhead bins; executive types, ignoring instructions, were scrambling to their feet and thrashing into raincoats. Outside I could see uniformed figures moving back and forth in what promised to be a warm grey drizzle. “Well,” I said lamely, “we made it.” I got to my feet.
He turned and flashed me a sickly grin. “Good-bye,” he said. “This really has been a pleasure.” He reached for my hand.
“And do try to relax and enjoy yourself in Miami,” I said, looking for a break in the crowd that shuffled past me down the aisle. “That’s the important thing—just to relax.”
“I know that.” He nodded gravely. “I know that. God bless you.”
I found my slot and slipped into line. From behind me he added, “And I won’t forget to look up your sister.” My heart sank, but as I moved toward the door I turned to shout a last farewell. The old lady with the eyes was two people in front of me, but she didn’t so much as smile.
One trouble with last farewells is that they occasionally prove redundant. Some forty minutes later, having passed like a morsel of food through a series of white plastic tubes, corridors, and customs lines, I found myself in one of the airport gift shops, whiling away the hour till my niece came to collect me; and there, once again, I saw the missionary.
He did not see me. He was standing before one of the racks of paperbacks—the so-called “classics” section, haunt of the public domain—and with a preoccupied air he was glancing up and down the rows, barely pausing long enough to read the titles. Like me, he was obviously just killing time.
For some reason—call it embarrassment, a certain reluctance to spoil what had been a successful good-bye—I refrained from hailing him. Instead, stepping back into the rear aisle, I took refuge behind a rack of gothics, which I pretended to study while in fact studying him.
Moments later he looked up from the books and ambled over to the bin of cellophane-wrapped records, idly pressing his beard back into place below his right sideburn. Without warning he turned and surveyed the store; I ducked my head toward the gothics and enjoyed a vision normally reserved for the multifaceted eyes of an insect: women, dozens of them, fleeing an equal number of tiny mansions.
At last, with a shrug of his huge shoulders, he began flipping through the albums in the bin, snapping each one forward in an impatient staccato. Soon, the assortment scanned, he moved to the bin on the left and started on that.
Suddenly he gave a little cry, and I saw him shrink back. He stood immobile for a moment, staring down at something in the bin; then he whirled and walked quickly from the store, pushing past a family about to enter.
“Late for his plane,” I said to the astonished salesgirl, and strolled over to the albums. One of them lay faceup in the pile—a jazz record featuring John Coltrane on saxophone. Confused, I turned to look for my erstwhile companion, but he had vanished in the crowd hurrying past the doorway.
Something about the album had apparently set him off; I studied it more carefully. Coltrane stood silhouetted against a tropical sunset, his features obscured, head tilted back, saxophone blaring silently beneath the crimson sky. The pose was dramatic but trite, and I could see in it no special significance: it looked like any other black man with a horn.
4.
New York eclipses all other cities in the spontaneous cordiality and generosity of its inhabitants—at least, such inhabitants as I have encountered.
—LOVECRAFT, 9/29/1922
How quickly you changed your mind! You arrived to find a gold Dunsanian city of arches and domes and fantastic spires… or so you told us. Yet when you fled two years later you could see only “alien hordes.”
What was it that so spoiled the dream? Was it that impossible marriage? Those foreign faces on the subway? Or was it merely the theft of your new summer suit? I believed then, Howard, and I believe it still, that the nightmare was of your own making; though you returned to New England like a man reemerging into sunlight, there was, I assure you, a very good life to be found amid the shade.
I remained—and survived.
I almost wish I were back there now, instead of in this ugly little bungalow, with its air conditioner and its rotting wicker furniture and the humid night dripping down its windows.
I almost wish I were back on the steps of the Natural History Museum where, that momentous August afternoon, I stood perspiring in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt’s horse, watching matrons stroll past Central Park with dogs or children in tow and fanning myself ineffectually with the postcard I’d just received from Maude. I was waiting for my niece to drive by and leave off her son, whom I planned to take round the museum; he’d wanted to see the life-size mockup of the blue whale and, just upstairs, the dinosaurs.
I remember that Ellen and her boy were more than twenty minutes late. I remember too, Howard, that I was thinking of you that afternoon, and with some amusement: much as you disliked New York in the twenties, you’d have reeled in horror at what it’s become today. Even from the steps of the museum I could see a curb piled high with refuse and a park whose length you might have walked without once hearing English spoken. Dark skins crowded out the white, and salsa music echoed from across the street.
I remember all these things because, as it turned out, this was a special day: the day I saw, for the second time, the black man and his baleful horn.
My niece arrived late, as usual, with the usual apologies about the crosstown traffic and, for me, the usual argument. “How can you still live over here?” she asked, depositing Terry on the sidewalk. “I mean, just look at those people.” She nodded toward a rowdy group of half-naked teenagers who were loitering by the entrance to the park.
“Brooklyn is so much better?” I countered, as tradition dictated. “Of course,” she said. “In the Heights, anyway. I don’t understand it—why this pathological hatred of moving? You might at least try the East Side. You can certainly afford it.” Terry watched us impassively, lounging against the fender of their car. I think he sided with me over his mother, but he was too wise to show it.
“Believe me, Ellen,” I said, “the West Side’s changing. It’s on the way up again.”
She made a face. “Not up where you live.”
“Sooner or later that’ll change too,” I said. “Besides, I’m just too old to start hanging around East Side singles bars. Over there they read nothing but bestsellers, and they hate anyone past sixty. I’m better off where I grew up—at least I know where the cheap restaurants are.” It was, in fact, a thorny problem: forced to choose between whites whom I despised and blacks whom I feared, I somehow preferred the fear.
To mollify Ellen I read aloud her mother’s postcard. It was the prestamped kind that bore no picture. “I’m still getting used to the cane,” Maude had written, her penmanship as flawless as when she’d won the school medallion. “Livia has gone back to Vermont for the summer, so the card games are suspended & I’m hard into Pearl Buck. Your friend Rev. Mortimer dropped by & we had a nice chat. What amusing stories! Thanks again for the subscription to the Geographic; I’ll send Ellen my old copies. Look forward to seeing you all after the hurricane season.”
Terry was eager
to confront the dinosaurs; he was, in fact, getting a little old for me to superintend, and was halfway up the steps before I’d arranged with Ellen where to meet us afterward. With school out the museum was almost as crowded as on weekends, the halls’ echo turning shouts and laughter into animal cries. We oriented ourselves on the floor plan in the main lobby—YOU ARE HERE read a large green spot, below which someone had scrawled “too bad for you”—and trooped toward the Hall of Reptiles, Terry impatiently leading the way. “I saw that in school.” He pointed toward a redwood diorama. “That too”—the Grand Canyon. He was, I believe, about to enter seventh grade, and until now had been little given to talk; he looked younger than the other children.
We passed toucans and marmosets and the new Urban Ecology wing (“concrete and cockroaches,” sneered Terry), and duly stood before the brontosaurus, something of a disappointment: “I forgot it was nothing but the skeleton,” he said. Beside us a sleepy-looking black girl with a baby in her arms and two preschoolers in tow tried ineffectually to keep one of the children from climbing on the guard rail. The baby set up an angry howl. I hurried my nephew past the assembled bones and through the most crowded doorway, dedicated, ironically, to Man in Africa. “This is the boring part,” said Terry, unmoved by masks and spears. The pace was beginning to tire me. We passed through another doorway—Man in Asia—and moved quickly past the Chinese statuary. “I saw that in school.” He nodded at a stumpy figure in a glass case, wrapped in ceremonial robes. Something about it was familiar to me, too; I paused to stare at it. The outer robe, slightly tattered, was spun of some shiny green material and displayed tall, twisted-looking trees on one side, a kind of stylized river on the other. Across the front ran five yellow-brown figures in loincloth and headdress, presumably fleeing toward the robe’s frayed edges; behind them stood a larger shape, all black. In its mouth was a pendulous horn. The image was crudely woven—little more than a stick figure, in fact—but it bore an unsettling resemblance, in both pose and proportion, to the one on the album cover.