“I hope they learned good and proper,” was Charlie’s response.
Before long the Gate opened just wide enough to let the hunters through two at a time. Ishara and Charlie crouched in the undergrowth. Ishara counted silently. Ten island warriors. Twelve armed sailors. And leading them, Kublai and Magwich. As the hunting party strode past, Ishara wondered why the men all carried slings, like bags with loops. It couldn’t be for the meat. They always butchered the animals they killed and bore the meat home on spits made from saplings.
But she had little time to wonder. The hunters trotted on in a tireless, long-legged stride, not exactly a run but faster than a walk. They moved with purpose.
As she and Charlie followed, Ishara became aware that previous hunts had left blazed trails through the forest. The hunters knew where they were going and headed there with silent certainty.
The sun climbed higher, sending slanting rays of light through the forest canopy. The men startled small creatures, Ojis and agile little insect-eating saurians, no bigger than one of the European chickens. The hunters ignored these. From time to time, Ishara paused, but she could sense no large animals anywhere near. Charlie did not want to take her word for it. He had the hunted look of a man who was beginning to doubt his decision.
Before noon their path led them out of the deep forest and onto a ridge that snaked toward a distant mountain. Ishara and Charlie dropped farther behind the others, and then realization came to Ishara. With reverence in her voice, she said softly, “The Old City. That’s where they’re heading.”
“I thought the Old City was just a legend of your people.” Charlie asked her, swatting at a stinging fly on his neck. “Are you saying it’s real?”
Ishara did not answer, though she felt her brow furrow with concern. Why would Kublai take the hunters there? If they were after meat, better game could be found along the streams. What did they hope to kill there?
But the certainty of her own quest cut into her consciousness like a blade. “Come,” she said to Charlie. “We have to move quickly.”
They left the ridge and plunged back into the forest. After a few moments, Charlie whispered sharply, “Have you ever been this way before?”
“Once.”
“How do you know where we’re going? There’s no trails!”
“I know the way.”
“I hope you do.”
Ishara knew how anxious Charlie had to be. The jungle had become denser, and they crept along a winding, tortuous way, finding passage through undergrowth, among the boles of ancient trees. She found a stream and they followed its course. They skirted pools where the only danger was from crocodilians, but these were sunning themselves on the far side and paid the passing humans no attention. “Look at that one,” Charlie said. “Thirty foot if it’s an inch!”
“Only a crocodile,” Ishara said.
“Yeah, well, I never thought I’d be relieved to hear that,” Charlie grumbled as they hurried past the sunning giant.
They found a place to sleep, and they passed an uneasy night, with Charlie restless on a lower branch of a great tree and Ishara on a hunter’s platform above him. Charlie asked, “What’s that?” five or six times, but the noises he heard were always wind, water, the faraway cry of a harmless night animal.
They started again before daybreak, and at last they emerged on the very path that Ishara and Kublai had followed on their first visit. This time there were no slashers to be seen, and they had reached the path ahead of the hunters. They passed the outpost from which Ishara and Kublai had watched the death of Kong’s parents, then followed an invisible trail toward the distant green hill of the Citadel. They spent another anxious night in a tree and got another early start. Not long after sunrise, they came to a great clearing. Standing in the open, Ishara looked skyward. With a flutter that made Charlie jump, Oji circled down and landed on her shoulder, making an inquiring, purring sound in his throat. “Scared me,” Charlie said.
“Oji is guiding us,” Ishara told him. “He would warn us if danger came near. We have reached the city.”
“This is a city?” Charlie asked, staring about him. Ishara realized how alien it must look to his eyes—buildings that seemed outgrowths of soil and tree, structures that fooled the eye because they did not have the look of built things.
“It’s our Old City,” Ishara answered. Suddenly they heard the hunters approaching, and coming closer at every step. Oji leaped into the air and vanished into a dark opening. “Follow him. Come on, Charlie. In here.”
They climbed through what probably had been a window many years before. Charlie had a hard scramble of it. “If that thing’s our guide, tell it to remember that we can’t fly!”
This was a place made of living trees, their growth somehow controlled and managed so that even after hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, the structure held its shape still. Ishara found a kind of spiral ramp that led upward, and she and Charlie climbed until they emerged in a single room with many windows, high above most of the City. From one window, Ishara looked back toward the ridge. She could see the hunting party, now coming on at a trot. Charlie craned to see past her.
Something felt very wrong. Ishara sensed danger, not to herself, but to Kublai—but not danger from any animal. What was about to happen? She could not say, but the air was as tense as it was before a thunderstorm.
Suddenly Oji squirmed and scratched at a leather pouch tied around his neck. He chattered something that sounded like the island word for “fear.”
Charlie stared at the agitated creature and asked, “Can’t you make that thing be quiet? I don’t know why we followed a bird, anyway!”
Oji began to peck at the solid stone wall.
“Stop that!” Charlie hissed.
Oji stared at him and in Charlie’s own voice chided, “Can’t you make that thing be quiet?”
Charlie looked as if he were caught between anger and laughter. “I’ll be a—wait, what’s he pecking at? Look at this!” He leaned forward, his finger tracing a fissure in the wall beside the window, a crack that did not look accidental.
“I don’t know,” Ishara said impatiently, sparing it a look.
“It’s loose.” Charlie could just hook a finger inside the crevice. He pulled, and a section of the wall opened as if on hinges. “It’s another room!”
Not a large one—not even the size of a midshipman’s berth, as Charlie put it. It was a space where Ishara might have had room to crouch, but not enough to stretch out. And filling it were stoneware containers, straight-sided jars with lids. Ishara took one and found that the lid lifted off easily. Inside the first one was a dark mass of seeds, withered but sending forth a haunting scent. Another held a fine yellow powder, perhaps the spores of some fungus, and another had more seeds, broad and brown. “Oji!” When Oji fluttered to her, Ishara untied the thong that held the pouch around his neck and emptied it into her cupped hand. Her eyes widened.
“What is it?” Charlie asked, craning to see. “You got an expression like Captain Magwich opening a chest o’ gold!”
After a moment of silence, Ishara spoke in a whisper: “Not gold, but better than gold. Worth all the gold you could imagine.” The contents of Oji’s pouch were an exact match for the contents of the jars. “My ancestors used these,” Ishara said slowly. “With them Kublai and I could—”
Voices cut her thoughts short. Charlie was staring out the window. She joined him and looked down. Some distance away, the hunting party had paused before a dome-like building. Magwich was shouting orders, and the men were busy with knives, chopping into the surface of the dome.
“What are they doing?” Ishara asked.
One of the sailors struck a match, one of their precious, hoarded supply. “Get down!” Charlie said, tugging at her.
The sailor touched the match to a trail of powder, then scrambled away. Ishara opened her mouth a moment before the blast came, ripping an opening in the ancient structure. “No!” she shouted, her voice lost i
n the thunder of the explosion. “No! They can’t!” She turned and ran for the passage down, with Charlie following close behind.
She threaded her way among the ancient structures. She paused as she came in sight of the dome. A hole, still smoldering, gaped in its side, and from the hole one of the sailors climbed, holding aloft two glinting objects. “Chiefie was right!” the man yelled. “Gold statues! Dozens of ‘em!”
“Haul them out,” Magwich said.
From this distance, Ishara could see only that the little statuettes were vaguely man-shaped. No, bulkier—statues of kongs, perhaps? Or of a dinosaur?
“You’ll remember your promise,” Ishara heard Kublai say.
“Of course,” Magwich told him. “You see what that blast did to the building. Something like that could easily stop your Gaw. But powder’s not so easy to come by here on this blessed island. Such gold as you say we’ll find here should just about pay for it.”
“They must not do this,” Ishara whispered to Charlie.
Charlie put a hand on her shoulder. “Stay put. I’ve seen the captain when he’s after gold. He’ll kill anyone as gets in his way.”
“You don’t know what’s in these buildings! It’s the last chance of life for my people! We’ve got to stop them!”
Charlie patted her shoulder. “Lay low.” To her surprise, Charlie stepped around her and strode toward the hunters. Magwich saw him before Kublai did. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “You’re no sharpshooter!”
“You can’t do this,” Charlie said. “Look, this stuff don’t belong to you, Captain.”
Magwich looked stunned, but then he threw back his head and laughed, a rich, deep laugh. He held a rifle butt-down on the ground, leaning easily on it, both hands on the barrel. “It does now. Kublai here is chief of the whole island, and he says it’s ours. Don’t you, Kublai?”
“As payment for killing Gaw,” Kublai answered.
Charlie turned to Kublai as if he were going to speak, but before he could open his mouth, Magwich whirled the rifle up and clubbed him. Kublai cried out in shock. Charlie went sprawling, his limbs limp, clearly unconscious before he hit the ground. Magwich said, “Same way you tried to train Kong, Kublai. That’s how I train my men.” Ishara gasped at the change in his eyes, usually full of humor and easy-going authority. Now they glinted in the waning sunlight like polished steel.
They still hadn’t noticed Ishara. She backed away, turned, and heard some of the men coming toward her. One of the tree-like dwellings had a low, arched opening. She dropped to her hands and knees and scrambled through. Through the opening she could see legs and feet, both bare and shod. “What was that?” asked one of the sailors. “Look in there. Something went right through there.”
Ishara backed away. Then the floor ran out, and she stepped off into space. For what seemed like an age she fell, before landing hard, on her back, in the dark.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SKULL ISLAND
June ?, 1957
Jack Driscoll couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being followed. Yet nothing showed itself, and he heard nothing. He knew he was still heading toward the wall, though in the dense forest he could see nothing of it. Then the trees began to thin out, and the underbrush grew higher and denser.
Something shrieked off to his left. Driscoll stopped, backed against a tree, and stared through the green gloom. Nothing.
An answering shriek from straight ahead, then a high-pitched twittering. More sounds from the middle distance. Driscoll frowned. What was making the noise—and how many of the things were there? He could climb a tree, maybe, if he could find one with a low enough branch to give him a foothold. The one he leaned against gave no hope of that. It went straight up, branchless, until a hundred feet up it spread its canopy.
The sounds came closer, and Driscoll retreated, moving not straight back along his track but at a diagonal to the path he had followed. Why couldn’t he see the creatures making the noises? They sounded near enough.
Then other twittering voices came from behind him, and he felt surrounded. Light off to one side, an opening, a clearing in the forest. That would give him a better field of vision, anyway. Driscoll made for it, stepped into a startlingly bright pool of sunshine. Knee-high brush was at work reclaiming the open space, a spot left clear when a forest giant had toppled some years before, taking other trees with it.
A breeze made the greenery sway gently. Gripping his rifle, Driscoll squinted, sweat stinging his eyes. What in the—? Something was subtly wrong about one brushy plant, at least as tall as he was. It looked different, odd, its movements not quite what they should be. Was something lurking behind it?
Then he saw the two gleams of eyes, nearly at a level with his own. And he felt chilled.
The creature was in front of the brush, not behind it. Its thin body bore feathers, downy feathers that perfectly mimicked the leaves behind it in color and texture, and it swayed as the wind gusted, keeping almost a perfect rhythm. But not quite.
Driscoll heard the rush off to his right. He spun, saw the charging dinosaur, one just like the one standing in wait, and he fired. He missed, but the creature sheared off. Driscoll scrambled back, wondering how many there were, how—
He fell.
Desperately, Driscoll snagged a vine with his left arm. He smacked into the side of a pit, one he had not seen because of the undergrowth. A few straggly bushes grew from its sides, and he came to rest in the branches of one of these, his rifle falling from his reach.
He heard a hissing above him. One, two, three predatory heads, and they chittered to each other. They could not reach him.
Below him, Driscoll saw a scatter of bones. “They herded me,” he said. “Herded me like a goat to the slaughter!”
The far side of the drop was not as steep. Already one of the creatures had dashed around and was descending, hopping like a gigantic bird, tilting its head to keep Driscoll in focus. The other two chittered, and it answered.
Driscoll had the uneasy feeling they were talking. The one below him circled, looking up. He was in the middle, twenty feet below the ones on the rim of the drop, twenty feet above the one on the floor. He could see now that many of the bones scattered below were human.
The creatures were smart enough to hunt in packs. Smart enough to find places that served as natural man-traps. Smart enough to lure or chase their prey into the trap.
Jack Driscoll felt a chill work its way down his spine. A quarter of a century ago, his shipmates had been chased and killed by enormous monsters. These feathered predators, though, were smaller, about man-sized—and fiercely intelligent, if he was any judge.
“Can’t I get a break?” he whispered to himself, or perhaps to Fate. “I’ve paid my dues. Can’t I even have a chance to enjoy my old age?” He chuckled ruefully. “Can’t I have a chance to get to my old age?” He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what Ann was doing right now.
Self-pity rose in him, and instinctively he fought back. He opened his eyes and slowly unholstered his Colt. The two heads above him ducked back right away.
But the one below him had nowhere to hide. The automatic roared, and a bullet smashed right between the creature’s eyes, sending it spinning. It fell, tried to rise, and sprawled dead. From overhead came an angry burst of that twittering cry. Driscoll ignored his emotions, concentrating on his physical sensations. Sweat stung his eyes. His legs and back ached. The branches of the brush scratched him. “I survived once. I can survive again,” he said out loud. Then a wry smile twitched his lips. “Then again, I didn’t always talk to myself.”
There seemed to be only one path that the predators could take down. Keeping his eye on it, Driscoll climbed down himself, noticing that this depression, like the other one, looked more man-made than natural. Across from him, Driscoll could glimpse the nearly buried tops of three arched doorways leading into darkness. He grunted, wondering whether he had the nerve to trek underground again, heading perhaps to another de
ad end, with those horrors behind him.
No choice, really. Driscoll retrieved his rifle, then had to duck low to enter the first of the three tunnels. Its floor was a good five feet below that of the hollow. He lit a torch, and followed a narrow path of stairs to a high arched opening. As soon as he entered, a vast space to his left began to shimmer with light in slowly expanding waves. Before he could think, his rifle was at the ready and he had flattened his back against the side of the cave. Then he realized that the light was coming from no human source. He took a deep breath. Well, at least his reflexes weren’t bad for an old guy. He looked nervously back down the passageway. If the two creatures were following him, they were doing so silently.
As the shock wore off, he observed that the pictures were somewhat sharper than the ones he had seen earlier. He realized he had stumbled upon a scene of the Wall being constructed. Something, a kong it looked like, was hauling an enormous timber up a long slope. A barrier was being erected that cut the peninsula off from the rest of the island. And then it dawned on him: could that have been why the doors were there? Not to keep kong out, but in the distant past, to let them in? He had always assumed the doors were necessary to haul in a dead dinosaur, or trap one—a carcass like that could feed the village for months. Other panels across the way showed enormous, half-demolished ships of extraordinary size and something he could not make out: men fighting with each other, or were they man-sized dinosaurs? Something of extreme horror was taking place, but virtually all the images were obscured with unusual markings and scratches. In the hardened mud floor Driscoll saw two-toed footprints all around. In one place he found a broken claw embedded in the solid stone of the wall. Piles of what looked like petrified excrement desecrated what was obviously some sort of memorial. The hairs on the nape of Jack’s neck stood on end and chills rippled through his body. He thought of the pile of human bones he had just seen, but refused to make the obvious connection. It was too grotesque to accept and he moved quickly past it, praying the events that took place around him were old. Very, very, old.
Kong: King of Skull Island Page 13