The Lost Rainforest #2

by Eliot Schrefer

  Another pebble, and another. The capuchin is speeding up, and he can’t see her anymore. Where is the next pebble?

  He turns in a slow circle, looking for the white pebble. The bog is so dank and dark—what if it fell into the murky water? He’d never see it. “Strange capuchin, where are you?” he calls, cupping his hands around his mouth. No response.

  He summons his ring of firelight, hoping that it might help him find the next pebble. No luck. All he sees is more and more of the creepy things around him.

  As it gets stronger, his ring of light does burn off the mist, though, and as the mist burns he sees a glint of white on the ground in the distance. At first his heart seizes when he worries that Mez and Chumba’s cousin Mist has found them. But the white spot is very small, and not moving. The Dismal Bog has very many grays and greens, but white . . . That can only be . . . yes, the next pebble!

  Gogi places it back in his woven sack. It makes a satisfying clink as it joins the others. There—the capuchin flits between misty trees at the edge of Gogi’s firelight. “Hello?” Gogi calls, hands outstretched in front of him. “Where are you taking me? Could you give my pebbles back now, please? Also, have you seen my friends, Mez, Chumba, and Lima?”

  In response, the capuchin pauses and faces Gogi, with her arms out. Like she wants to hug him. Then she drops a pebble.

  “Okay,” he calls to her, making his way forward and retrieving it, while she retreats farther away. “This is a little weird. I don’t really know you, but I do know that I like hugs!”

  The mists get even thicker, so that Gogi gets no more information when his eyes are open than when they’re closed. It’s not that unfamiliar a sensation, actually—it’s like when he traveled with his nightwalker friends before he learned his firelight trick. He has more than a few scars on his shins from those nights.

  The swamp isn’t really all so adorable. It’s cold, and there’s something unnerving about this mute monkey who stole his pebbles—and the sight of Alzo so motionless and so far from home, now that Gogi thinks about it. Whatever happened to the tangy taste of the sap? There’s none left between his molars. Maybe he’ll try to leave the Dismal Bog sooner rather than later, so he can go find himself some more of it.

  Why did he come here anyway? Gogi tries to remember, but he can’t seem to get the information he needs from his own brain. “Strange capuchin, do you remember why I’m here?” But the monkey doesn’t answer. She leads him farther into the bog.

  It’s all truly bizarre.

  “Would you please . . . wait up?” Gogi puffs.

  The capuchin does! She waits by a hollowed-out tree, drops the last pebble at her feet. She’s an older female monkey, about Gogi’s size, with the same awkward sprout of hair on the back of her head. When Gogi comes near and retrieves the pebble, her eyes are trained on the hollow in the tree.

  “Who are you?” Gogi asks.

  She stares toward the hole.

  He comes up beside her and instinctively starts grooming. She’s real under his fingers, but she’s just as cold as Alzo was, like there’s no life in her. Grooming capuchin hair still feels good, even when it’s clammy.

  She doesn’t groom him back. She looks at the hole.

  Gogi edges to the tree and peers inside. It’s pitch-black in there.

  He looks closer and sees that it’s crawling with gooey black slugs. Cute slugs? No, gross slugs. He shakes his head. Slugs are gross. Every capuchin knows that. What’s wrong with him?

  The strange capuchin motions that Gogi should stick his hand in. Steeling himself, Gogi reaches into the teeming mass of slugs and feels the dark inside of the tree. It’s wet and squirmy in there, unseen creatures running over his fingers. Gogi shivers. Definitely not cute. Nothing about this bog is cute. Where’s that sap? More sap will help.

  Eventually he gets his fingers around something that doesn’t squirm. A couple of loose, knobby pieces of crumbly wood. When he pulls them out, slugs and leeches and millipedes falling away, he holds them up to his eye in the mist and sees that—hmm—they’re covered in chunks of powdery white. It smells mushroom-y.

  The strange capuchin throws her cold arms around Gogi. She pulls back and points to the sticks, excitement on her face.

  Gogi looks at them. Apparently, these sticks are important. Excellent!

  The capuchin looks at him and places her fingers around his eyes, pressing on the corners. Gogi wants to back away, but something tells him to stay still, that he can trust this capuchin. He closes his eyes and basks in the sensation.

  Then comes a soft voice, right in his ear: “I love you. I’m so proud of you. My son.”

  Gogi’s eyes snap open. But the strange capuchin is gone. He’s alone in the bog.

  “Mom? Mom!” he cries, turning around in a circle, stepping this way and that.

  She’s gone. Was she ever there? Gogi feels his pouch—the pebbles are there. He looks at his hands. These two fungus-ridden sticks are real. And his mother was the one to bring him to them.

  “Mom!” he calls again.

  There’s no answer.

  Gogi starts to head back through the swamp, in the direction from which he came. He’s stunned, can’t think about what’s real or what’s not, what has happened to him. He can just keep his mind on where each pebble was, retracing his steps through the bog.

  It’s increasingly . . . disgusting. Goopy, rotting, cold, and ugly. Gogi shivers.

  There’s Alzo again—motionless as before. “Alzo!” Gogi cries.

  No answer.

  “Why will no one answer me?” Gogi mutters as he approaches his friend.

  He fills with horror. Of course Alzo isn’t cold and sleeping—he’s dead!

  How could he have been so wrong? Gogi drops to his knees, shaking. Alzo is dead. Because . . . of him? Would he have died if Gogi hadn’t come into the Dismal Bog, hadn’t had this vision that killed him? Something doesn’t make sense, but he’s too stricken to think through it. All he can see in his mind is his mother dropping his rank pebbles, then saying she loved him, and now Alzo’s body. Alzo is no longer alive because of him. Shouldn’t a good capuchin have stayed home where he belonged? Shouldn’t he have stuck to the part of the rainforest that he’s always known?

  Shouldn’t he have waited to try the lyre sap?

  Something’s wrong with Gogi. He’s always suspected it, but now he knows it’s true. Gogi wants to sink away right there, to drop into the cold mud and never rise. He can feel his arms and legs getting heavier, and as they do the mud drags at him, asks to smother him. Opening his eyes to get one last view, he hopes he might glimpse his mother again.

  No sign of her. What he does see, though, are the pieces of wood, covered in knobby white fungus, gripped tight in his very own hand.

  His mother led him to these. They might be the answer he and his friends are looking for.

  Gogi will resist the call of the silky mud.

  Gogi lifts himself to his full height. Or he tries to, but the mud only drags him down harder. Suddenly it’s up to his chin, then it’s pressing into his mouth. He flails desperately, and it only mires him more and more until—plop!—his head is below.

  He came to his senses too late!

  As Gogi panics, his tail thrashes more and more until it contacts something—another monkey’s tail. He grips it as tightly as he can, then yanks his tail muscles. Spines aren’t made for this kind of work, and he feels a sharp, shredding pain along his backbone. But he’s out of the mud!

  His mother is there beside him. It was her tail that lifted Gogi out. She nods and says “I love you” once more.

  “I love you, too,” Gogi says.

  Then she disappears again.

  Limping, muttering to himself, Gogi shoves the rotten pieces of wood into the sack his mother wove him, beside the twelve pebbles, and begins sprinting along the sopping ground of the Dismal Bog, shivering from the cold and from the sheer disgustingness of the foul-smelling swamp. He heads in the direction
he originally came from, where he soared down on the fluffy monguba seed. Thank sweet figs his monkey sense of direction is intact.

  Finally Gogi sees the mist is dissipating somewhat. He can make out more and more barren trees between the stretches of dank puddles and decomposing grasses. Then even the smells lessen—he’d like to take it back, now that the lyre sap is wearing off: rotten eggs do not smell good, rotten eggs will never smell good—and he’s out of the Dismal Bog. He’s on fresh grass, healthy jungle trees surrounding him. He runs as far as he can into the rainforest before his lungs and legs and arms give way and he collapses into the dirt, panting.

  Now, he thinks, where are Chumba and Mez and Lima?

  Ten Nights Until the Eclipse

  GOGI SKIRTS THE edge of the Dismal Bog, peering into the misty, sulfurous terrain. He has no idea where Mez and Chumba might have landed—he was too busy eating his tangy lyre sap to notice, unfortunately—but he worries that if he hasn’t heard from them at all, it’s because they’ve run into trouble.

  How much of what happened to him is real? Was that his mother, or his dream of his mother? Is Alzo dead, or did Gogi just imagine him dead? If his mother and Alzo were in his head, was it Gogi himself who realized that the fungus growing all around him was the reason there were no ants in the bog? There’s no way to know. All he has to show for the experience are the two rotten sticks in his bag.

  The lyre sap clearly protected him from the worst of the bog’s horrors. He has no idea how much of it is still in his system, how much it might still shield him from the worst effects of the nightmares, but he’s running out of time to locate his friends and rescue them before he’s fully at the mercy of the bog.

  He has to go back in there.

  Setting his chin firmly, he wades back into the swamp. “Lima? Mez? Chumba?” Gogi calls. He’s suddenly aware of all the unknown and dark spaces around him, the lichen draping from slimy, craggy trees, the blurps of strange gases rising from iridescent mud, the pairs of red eyes peering back at him from all around. He’s so vulnerable here, a monkey without a troop, in an unfamiliar place. No right-thinking capuchin would put himself in such a situation. But he has to find his friends, so here he is.

  “Mom?” he tries. But that vision seems to be over.

  “Lima? Mez? Chumba?” he calls.

  No answer. But then . . . !

  It’s almost too high-pitched to hear, but he makes out a string of faint chirps, from somewhere within the mists of the Dismal Bog. The sound of a bat.

  Of course there would be plenty of bats in a bog. But he’s pretty sure he recognizes this one in particular. “Lima?” he calls, staggering into the muck. “Are you out there?”

  She doesn’t seem to hear him. The string of chirps continues unabated. Gogi sinks up to his hips in black mud, flails for purchase on slimy leaves and grasses until he can pull himself out. Then he’s back on his feet and racing forward. “Lima! Lima!”

  The mists whip past, and with them come Alzo’s body. It’s in a totally different part of the bog now, and Gogi’s brain tells him that Alzo couldn’t have moved, but here he is. This is just a hallucination, he tells himself as he races. But even though his mind tells him that, it’s hard to disbelieve his eyes, to stop the quickening of his heart.

  He narrows his eyes to slits, trying to keep the body of Alzo out of view even as it disappears and reappears everywhere he looks. He tries to focus only on Lima’s cries.

  Then he finds her. The little bat is flailing in the mud, eyes closed, battling something in her dream. Her bottom half is completely below the surface, and muck has reached the corners of her mouth—she’ll soon drown unless Gogi can get her out.

  The mud surrounding Lima is silty; even the youngest capuchin knows it can be deadly to walk on ground so soft. So instead, Gogi scales a rotten tree overhanging the mud. He scampers to the tip of a branch, wrapping his already aching tail around a knot in the wood before lowering himself down. The branch creaks alarmingly as he stretches, his tail muscles feeling like they’re shredding all over again . . . but there! He’s got a finger. He can’t afford to be gentle, and he yanks hard on the narrow bone that traces the top of Lima’s wing. With a suctioning sound, she comes free. Gogi holds her in his hand as he races back along the treacherous branch.

  Resting against the trunk, gasping in the soupy air, Gogi realizes that Lima is making words with her chirps. He holds her up to his ear. “Mez and Chumba—I’m so sorry,” Lima says within her nightmare. “It’s all my fault!”

  Gogi startles and nearly drops her. What happened to Mez and Chumba?

  “Where are they, Lima?” he asks urgently, giving her belly a gentle squeeze.

  The bat doesn’t open her eyes, but seems to have heard Gogi’s words within her nightmare. She thrashes, muddied wings flailing. “They died where they fell. They hit the ground too hard. My plan . . . it killed them!”

  “Lima, it’s me, Gogi,” he says. “You’re dreaming. These are the bog’s hallucinations, telling you your worst fears.”

  “No, it’s real . . . they fell at the base of the willow,” Lima says, before her voice trails off. Her body goes limp, and the fragile pulse under Gogi’s fingers slows.

  “No!” he cries. “Lima, hold on!” Even as he says it, he realizes he doesn’t know if Lima’s life is really in jeopardy, or if this is now the dream manipulating him. Regardless, he needs to get her out of there, fast—for his sake, too, if he doesn’t want the lyre sap to wear off entirely while he’s still at the mercy of the swamp.

  He scans about and sees—yes!—a willow not too far away. Gogi takes off toward it, stealing through the cold and leaching mud until he’s beside the tree. There he sees a sight even more horrifying than before: two little calico bodies curled one around the other. Panthers. Mez and Chumba.

  Their eyes are closed, and they seem motionless. But as Gogi gets close, he’s relieved to see that, yes, they are breathing shallowly. They make clicking sounds from somewhere within their throats, and their lips repeatedly pull back from their teeth. Placing Lima gently on top of Chumba’s belly, Gogi leans down so he can hear what’s coming from Chumba’s lips.

  “Yerlo—not you, too. I never thought he would . . .” The words descend into nonsense. Gogi recognizes the name. It’s one of the triplets, Mez and Chumba’s little cousins who are back in the care of Usha. “He” might refer to Mist, their missing brother. Gogi can well imagine what the panther sisters’ nightmares look like.

  He has to get them out of the bog, and fast. The edge isn’t so far away, and Lima will be easy enough to move, but he has two panthers to take care of, both of them trapped in their nightmares, and each of them heavier than he is. Gogi turns, trying to see the clearest path out of the bog, but when he pivots he comes to stare into the eyes of a monkey, a dead monkey, looking right back at him.

  Alzo.

  Gogi shuts his eyes and shakes his head, willing Alzo out of his mind, but when he tentatively opens his eyes again, Alzo’s right there. “You’re . . . not real!” he says through gritted teeth.

  But Alzo won’t go away. Gogi’s heart races, threatening to pitter-patter right out of his chest—but though he waits for Alzo’s cold fingers to grip him, his dead best friend doesn’t move.

  Shaking all over, saying “You’re not real” so many times that it becomes a chant, Gogi skirts around Alzo, then skirts around him again when he reappears directly in front of him. “Lyre sap definitely wearing off,” he tells himself as he tucks Lima into his woven sack, hoping the rotten fungus sticks won’t do something to her.

  Then he gets one each of Chumba’s and Mez’s paws under his hands, and pulls.

  They don’t move. Not one bit.

  “Come on, now,” Gogi says between gritted teeth. He pauses to take a break, hands on his hips, heaving in air.

  When he turns around, Ravanna the First is right there.

  The eyes of the big capuchin leader are lifeless and unseeing. His jaw hangs limply
open, exposing sharp yellow canines. His arms are still at first . . . but then they rise in the air, fingers reaching for Gogi.

  The immediate terror is so great that he forgets he ever had Mez and Chumba in his grip. Gogi scatters and runs. His arms drag behind him, for some reason, but he goes as fast as he can using only his legs. Mud sprays around him as he leads with his chest, woven sack bouncing against his hip. His legs are burning, his breathing is ragged, but he can’t stop, not with the sight of deathless Ravanna seared into his eyelids, those ghastly fingers reaching for his throat.

  His legs finally give out, sending him plunging through leafy greenery. He tastes mud and reeds. He heaves against the darkness for a while, then thinks to open his eyes.

  He’s out of the bog.

  He’s back in the rainforest.

  Lima is in the sack.

  Mez and Chumba are there.

  In his rush of fear, he dragged them out with him.

  Gogi gives a sigh of relief.

  He blacks out.

  RAIN. MISTY RAIN.

  Gogi can feel it beading on the fur of his eyelids, wetting his arms and legs and belly. It’s a comfortable rain, a familiar rain. A sunbeam sort of rain.

  He opens his eyes. He’s lying in a sun-filled clearing, bursts of water tumbling from a clear blue sky that’s fringed by the upper branches of trees. A sprig of lagoon berries lies on his chest. They glisten. Gogi’s stomach growls. He eats a berry. Delicious.

  He sits up on his elbows. He’s in a silvery glade, water burbling nearby. After the terrible mayhem of the Dismal Bog, it’s so peaceful. A terrible thought strikes Gogi, making him sit bolt upright.

  “Am I dead?”

  A panther chuckles. “No, Gogi. You’re not dead.”

  Gogi whirls to see Mez curled around sleeping Chumba and grinning at him. She yawns and stretches out her claws. “You’ve definitely been sleeping for a long time, though.”

  “You’re okay!” comes Lima’s chirpy voice. She flits down from a nearby branch. “How are your legs and arms feeling? You got pretty scraped up there. Took a lot of bat saliva to get you healed.”