BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “If I weren’t so tired…” Cassie said as she ate a mango that she was holding in both hands, “perhaps I’d be scared of hearing something creeping behind my back.”

  “You, brave woman,” Iak said solemnly.

  “You can say that again!” The professor smiled tiredly.

  Cassie was not looking at them. Instead, she was looking at me as I sat in silence on the other side of the fire. I could feel her eyes staring at me as if they wanted to tell me something her lips could not.

  Finally I broke the silence. “What are you thinking?”

  She bit into the fruit before answering. “I was thinking,” she whispered, “that I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

  “Neither can I. It’s incredible to be in the jungle again, you and me, surrounded by all the—”

  “Hold it there, Ulysses,” she interrupted me with a mischievous smile. “What’s incredible is that you haven’t realized a tarantula the size of a monkey is crawling up your arm.”

  31

  In spite of the tarantula on my arm, which Iak slapped off, I slept like a log that night. Perhaps it was the accumulated exhaustion, or the soothing smell of the smoke of the termite hill we had thrown into the fire to scare away the mosquitoes.

  As soon as I opened my eyes I sat up in my hammock. The others were still asleep. I jumped down to the ground, rubbed my eyes, and looked around in search of something to eat for breakfast. As I took my hands off my face I almost had a stroke when I saw we were not alone in the camp.

  An enormous snake was coiled on top of the now extinct embers of last night’s fire, less than a yard away from my bare feet. Judging by the size and diameter of its body I thought it was an anaconda at first. But there was an uncommon yellow tinge to its skin and black triangles on its back, so I suspected it was something different.

  The reptile raised its head as it became aware of my presence, and it was then that I noticed its pupils. They were tapered like a cat’s, the unmistakable sign of a poisonous snake. Or rather, a gigantic poisonous snake.

  Just then, at the other side of the camp, Cassie too woke up and jumped down from her hammock. She stretched noisily, still squinting, but in a matter of seconds she realized something was wrong. She followed my gaze and discovered the snake partly buried in the embers with its huge triangular head pointing toward me.

  Unfortunately the snake also saw Cassie in its turn. Turning toward her it did what snakes do when they believe themselves cornered: it attacked.

  It uncoiled its ten feet or so of muscle like a spring. Then with its jaws wide open it launched itself at Cassie, who only had time to take a step back as she choked back a cry of surprise.

  Without stopping to think I did the only thing that occurred to me at that moment, which was to hurl myself on to the embers and grab the snake by its tail. A pretty foolish thing to do maybe, but it worked in this case. The snake immediately turned around, forgetting all about Cassandra to face this more immediate threat: yours truly.

  I managed to pull it back, as this seemed to me the best way to keep it under control. Unfortunately, in the process I tripped over my own bags and fell on my back, letting go of the snake, which was really pissed off by now.

  The angry snake zigzagged forward fast. I watched horrified as it came to a stop between my legs. It stretched its scaly body and raised its horrible head more than three feet, staring at me with its evil eyes.

  Then seeing I had no way of escaping, it took its time opening its jaws, so that I saw the sharp fangs oozing venom. It threw its head back to gain the momentum it needed for its attack.

  I had no way out.

  Instinctively I crossed my arms in front of me and clenched my teeth as I waited for the inevitable bite that would mean my passport to the afterlife right there and then.

  But to my surprise, instead of fangs biting into my flesh, what I felt was a dead body fall on my crotch.

  I lowered my arms and saw the body of the snake writhing and spewing forth blood from its neck where the head had been severed.

  Dazed, unable to understand what had happened, I looked to my right and there was Cassie, standing with a wild smile on her lips and the machete in her hand with its blade dripping blood.

  “I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time,” she said as she pushed the hair back from her face.

  That morning, of course, our breakfast consisted of surucucu or “fire extinguisher” snake. Iak told us it was one of the most feared and poisonous snakes in the Amazon. It was extremely aggressive and had the habit of sleeping hidden among the embers of a fire. The damn thing was so big that there was more than half of it left over. As a result, following a malicious suggestion of Cassie’s, when we started on our way again, I ended up hauling more than three feet of dead snake on my shoulders. Our supply of fresh meat looked like a massive, grotesque scarf.

  The rainforest seemed somewhat thinner than the day before so our pace was livelier. The four of us were in high spirits,, perhaps because some light was filtering through the forest roof or simply because our stomachs were full. At times the professor entertained us with dissertations on any of the many boring subjects he used to give lectures on.

  Later, Cassandra told us about the unexpected discoveries made at the archeological digs she had been carrying out off the coast of Barbate, in the Strait of Gibraltar. Finally Iak showed us some plants which were unknown to us and told us about their unbelievable medicinal effects. For example, jaracá was a must for snake bites and swamp immortal for hemorrhages. The small white flower of the parapara looked innocent enough. But when dried and ground, according to the Menkragnoti, merely touching it produced an uncomfortable tingling of the skin, followed by a temporary paralysis of the whole body.

  As for me, I tried to cheer the way by singing a song by the Uruguayan artist Jorge Drexler, but in the middle of the second verse a blast of thunder over our heads gave the others a good excuse to make me stop.

  To pass the time I looked at the compass every now and then, to check that we were following the right course toward the west. Iak tried unsuccessfully to bring down one of the monkeys, which were becoming scarcer as we advanced, as they jumped from branch to branch over our heads. His hunting method was curious: he would lie on his back and pull his bow with legs as well as arms so as to give it more power. But apparently he was not very good as a hunter. Percy Fawcett’s great-grandson shook his head and smiled uncomfortably every time he missed a shot.

  In a moment of boredom I remembered something from a couple of days before.

  “Cassie,” I said as I passed the professor and got behind her. “What were you going to say the other day?”

  “What other day? Can you be more specific?”

  “Yeah, the other day, when we were surrounded by the alligators in the river and we thought we were going to die and all that…” I smiled tentatively. “It sounded important.”

  She jutted her chin and looked up, seeming to concentrate.

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course… And you don’t remember what you were going to tell me when we almost crashed the plane, either… do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Yeah… yeah… You know what? You’re a terrible liar.”

  Instead of answering, she turned away with an enigmatic grin.

  A few steps behind me, I could hear Professor Castillo muttering. I turned to look at him and saw him scratching his back furiously, cursing the local wildlife.

  “I don’t know what’s bitten me,” he said, “but I have a lump that smarts like hell.”

  I made light of it. “Come on, Doc, it can’t be that bad. Just stop scratching. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Well, if it’s nothing why does it smart so much and why does it feel as though something is moving inside?”

  “Come on, Doc. Don’t get paranoid.”

  “Paranoid?” he said, indignan
t. “Look!”

  He turned around and lifted his shirt. There certainly was a strange lump the size of a marble below his right shoulder blade. It was red, with a bloody spot right in the middle.

  Then my stomach turned. There really was something wriggling inside.

  The professor was sitting on a stump, stripped to the waist, as I passed my diving knife through the flame of a small fire to disinfect it. Cassie and Iak were sitting on each side of him trying to cheer him up on the one hand and prepared to hold him still on the other, when the time came to make the incision.

  When I decided the blade was as free of germs as it was going to get I stood behind my old friend’s back and put my hand on his shoulder.

  He looked at me with anything but trust in his eyes.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he asked anxiously.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Damn you, Ulysses! This is one of those times when you should lie through your teeth!”

  “Don’t worry,” I said for the umpteenth time in the last ten minutes. “Everything will be okay. I know what I’m doing.”

  Cassandra looked at me in silent interrogation.

  I looked back at her doubtfully and shrugged.

  Unaware of this silent acknowledgment of my own incompetence, he bit on a stick that Iak gave him and got ready for the operation. Of course we had no anesthetic, not even the helpful bottle of whiskey to get the patient drunk that you see in films.

  “Okay, Doc,” I said, trying to sound calm and collected. “Here we go. I’ll count to three and then I’ll cut, all right?”

  Eduardo Castillo nodded reluctantly with the stick in his mouth.

  “Ready? One…” I slashed him, taking him by surprise. He spat the stick out and gave a howl you could have heard from miles away.

  If Cassie and Iak had not been holding him he would have turned to me to unleash the string of abuse he began to shout, his face contorted by fury and pain.

  “There, Doc…” I said as I cleaned the wound with water. “See? That’s better.”

  “Better, hell! You just can’t do that. Christ…”

  I took no notice of him and looked at the cut, which was not very deep and a couple of inches long. Suddenly there emerged something which I had never thought I would see outside a science fiction film.

  Something like a larva, a quarter of an inch or so wide, with a pointed mouth and tiny legs like hooks, was sticking out of the wound like a small repulsive alien, challenging me for bringing it out into the light.

  “Oh my God!” Cassandra said at my side. “What on earth is that?”

  Forgetting his pain, the professor tried to turn around and look at his back. “What? What’s up?”

  The answer came from Iak at my right.

  “A sotuto,” he said calmly. “Fly bite days ago and leave larva. Larva grow a lot!”

  “And how do we take it out?” I asked as I watched it retreat into the wound again. “We’ll have to make the cut deeper.”

  “Don’t even think about it!” the professor said, terrified at the prospect.

  “No need,” Iak said rather complacently. “Sotutos like music.”

  I thought he was joking but realized my mistake when he picked up a stick and sharpened it to a needle point with my knife. When he had done this he went to the professor, who was straining to see what was going on at his back.

  Then Percy Fawcett’s descendant did something none of us were expecting. He started to whistle.

  Cassandra and I looked at each other skeptically as we watched him whistling at the worm in the professor’s back the way a caretaker would to his goldfinch.

  We both dropped our jaws as we witnessed something amazing.

  The disgusting larva stuck first its head out of the wound, then its body, like a snake being charmed by a fakir. I could not believe what I was seeing. It was the typical traveler’s tale that no one would believe, however much I swore it was true.

  When the insect’s body was already halfway out of the wound, Iak made a swift move with his right hand and skewered the larva cleanly. He pulled it out of the professor, who howled with pain again. We breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then Iak made a plaster from the fiber of a liana he called monkey ladder and the red nectar of a tree he called dragon sap. He compressed it into a pulp, spat on it a couple of times, covered it with mud, and put it on the wound. It would calm the pain, he said, and prevent infection. After what we had just seen we had no option but to believe him.

  32

  That day we walked for hours. Sometimes our way took us through areas of vegetation as solid as brick walls, at others across barren land so empty of lianas, palms or bushes that it seemed we were walking in a well-cared for garden. Only the gigantic trees, nearly two hundred feet tall, reminded us where we really were.

  “It’s like the dome of a cathedral…” the professor said, pointing at the sky. “An infinite cathedral…” Iak had given the professor some extract of a liana to drink to ease the pain and it seemed that it had unleashed his imagination as well as his tongue.

  “Yes,” Cassandra said as she waved away a cloud of gnats from her face, “a cathedral with a serious mosquito problem.”

  “Mosquitoes are God’s creatures too,” the professor said with an idiotic smile. “This is their home too.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes and I turned toward Iak who was now walking at the tail of our small group.

  “Iak, what on earth did you give him?”

  “Only give medicine for pain, similar to ayahuasca,” he said as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  “I can’t believe it. You gave him a hallucinogenic?”

  “Only little, like for child,” he said with a shrug. “Nothing bad happen.”

  “No, nothing bad,” Cassie said as the professor raised his hands to the sky. “But apparently, it has awakened in him a religious fervor we never guessed at.”

  As if to corroborate her words, Eduardo Castillo, ex-professor of Medieval History by the A.U.B., iconoclast and practicing atheist, sunk to his knees. Holding his arms out like a cross, he began to thank the Lord for the wonders of creation. Meanwhile a cloud of mosquitoes circled around his head like a halo.

  At dusk we established our precarious camp once again. We cleared the damp ground and hung the hammocks. Iak lit the fire in his ancestral way and we roasted the remaining half of the “fire extinguisher” surucucu. As the Menkragnoti had been pointing out all along the way, game had gone from scarce to non-existent.

  As we sat around the fire, so tired that none of us felt like talking, the absence of wildlife in that part of the rainforest made itself felt. This time we barely heard the distant noise of monkeys as they jumped from branch to branch, and there was only a single pair of parrots chattering in the growing silence. The more aware of it we became the more sinister it felt.

  Iak too had been getting more nervous as we went deeper into that forest. At that time of night, in the firelight, his eyes showed something like fear.

  I did not dare to ask him fear of who or what.

  Cassie spoke in a low voice, breaking the heavy silence. “How far do you think we’ve walked so far?”

  “Something like five or six miles, I suppose,” I said, none too convincingly, without looking up from the fire.

  “Is that all?” the professor asked. He seemed to have recovered from his hallucinations by now. “I feel as if I’d run a marathon!”

  I raised my eyes and smiled wanly.

  “Shouldn’t be that surprised. You’ve had your own via dolorosa, Doc.”

  Cassie suppressed a chuckle and the professor looked at me in puzzlement.

  “Via dolorosa?” he said obviously baffled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Aw… forget about it, Doc, it’s nothing.” I turned to Cassie. “So, why were you asking about distances?”

  She looked at me in silence for a moment, as if she were not sure she sh
ould speak her mind.

  “Didn’t you calculate,” she said at last, “that we’d have to walk about five miles from the river to reach the coordinates for Z?”

  “Approximately,” I said.

  “Okay, approximately. But the thing is that so far we haven’t seen anything that suggests, even remotely, that we’re close to a lost city or anything like it. No paths, no landmark, or any other kind of sign.”

  “Wow, Cassie. You’re the archeologist and you know that we could be sitting on top of some ruins right now without realizing it. Even I know that.”

  “That’s true. But it worries me that we haven’t come across anything at all.”

  “What do you mean?” the professor asked with interest.

  Cassandra looked at both of us doubtfully.

  “What if we’re wrong?”

  “About the distance? I’ve told you that—”

  “No, Ulysses, I mean about the direction.”

  “Do you mean to say—” the professor said only to stop in mid-sentence.

  Cassie rubbed her neck uneasily.

  “All we’ve got to go by are guesses and some pretty dubious calculations. We have no guarantee that the story Mengké told us is true… or that this is the route that leads to Z. It may be that the mysterious ruins Jack Fawcett talks about in his journal are just the ramblings of an explorer from the first part of the century after he’d downed a whole bottle of whiskey. Or maybe—”

  Cassandra became quiet as she felt my hand on her knee, drawing her attention to the professor.

  His face, in spite of the mud that covered it and the poor light, had contracted visibly, so that the muscles in his jaw were strained.

  “You’re right,” he muttered, “you’re absolutely right. All this is absurd… This last-minute expedition, convincing you to come with me, risking your life, looking for a tribe in the middle of the Amazon we’re not even sure exists…” He let his head fall into his hands. “I’ve gone mad and I’ve dragged you into my madness.” He raised his head; his eyes were moist. “You must forgive me, I’m so sorry.”