All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (11 page)

"
What?
"

"It was Gen's first taste of Africa, Trojan Loussaint's last exploration. According to a journal kept by a sublieutenant who was deliberately spared following the massacre of Ajimba Lagoon, where a full company of Loussaint's military expeditionary force was decimated by the reptilian Ajimbas, Gen, in order to be accepted into the company of those whom she soon ruled, partook of her father's flesh. That portion of him which came from the pot clinging to a thighbone, if we are to trust the lieutenant's—"

"Oh, for the love of heaven! None of this can be real."

"I believe it is," Mary Burgess said calmly. "There are numerous accounts of that ill-met expedition in the archives of the French Colonial Service. I have copies of them all, in addition to the pertinent biographical data which I quoted. The documentation required a great deal of my free time during the last decade. Until shortly before the Occupation I visited Paris regularly, all but ruining my eyesight grubbing through forgotten papers. Accounts of Gen Loussaint's reversion to the savagery of her remotest ancestors are, I believe, irrefutable. Of the remainder of her extraordinary career, little that has come to light can be verified."

"But why have you been so obsessed with—"

"Because there is one more vital fact about Gen Loussaint. She was last seen alive in the region of the Ajimba Lagoon by Dr. Eustace Holley, in August of 1920."

"Nineteen twenty? And she was born in 1736? Preposterous."

"Medically speaking. In this modern age not even those remarkable Georgian peasants who father children at the age of ninety, and who enjoy useful years well past their first century of life, can expect to attain an age of one hundred and eighty-four years. What Eustace Holley found on the shores of the Ajimba was a tribal remnant presided over by a living corpse: blind, frail, garishly wigged, rouged and costumed in the fashions of the eighteenth century, able to communicate only in whispers. Nothing like the ravishing creature of legend. Nevertheless it
was
Gen Loussaint, begging the doctor to prolong her miserable life."

"How did this—remarkable meeting come about?"

"By 1920 the hospital at Tuleborné was famous; Negroes rowed the dangerous river for thirty-six, forty-eight hours at a stretch to deliver a diseased or dying relative into the healing hands of Eustace Holley. It would be difficult for you to imagine the impact his reputation had in a district where food has always been scarce and suffering endemic. I have no words to describe the horrors of
cancrum oris
, of children swollen by dropsy and men dying of strangulated hernias. He could cure such things, with medicine or the knife. He was very like a god to the Negroes. Though Gen Loussaint was two hundred miles away, in that place where the K'buru rises from the earth in a boil near the highlands of Cameroon, she had heard of the power of his medicine. She dispatched two dozen of her personal
garde indigène
to bring the doctor to her side."

"They kidnapped him?"

"Yes, and caused havoc after their fashion. They must have been a terrifying sight, as it was customary to go raiding dressed in the shimmering skins of poisonous reptiles, wearing huge lizard or crocodile masks. They perhaps should not have been so flamboyant, nor so murderous in carrying out their mission. The kidnapping excited the attention of the governor-general, who resolved to do away with the Ajimba forever. Throughout the nineteenth century French soldiers skirmished with the Ajimba, driving them from their haunts along the coast, but the military had never penetrated to their ultimate stronghold, the banks of that healthfully sulfurous lagoon where they lived in surprising luxury, attended by many slaves who farmed and built for their masters mud houses which were replicas of Roman villas.

"This time the governor-general placed in charge of the expeditionary force his
chef du cabinet militaire
, Colonel Charles Delafosse, who had under his command veterans of the infamous
Bataillon d' Afrique
, a battle-hardened disciplinary unit that rivaled the voluntary and better-known Foreign Legion.
Les Joyeux
, they were called, rather ironically. The soldiers were well equipped, carrying explosives and automatic weapons in shallow-draft patrol boats capable of penetrating the tall, knife-edged grasses of the lagoon. After Dr. Holley was rescued, airplanes were used to strafe and bomb the Ajimba villages. Virtually nothing remained, to the dismay of anthropologists intrigued by the unique and predatory Ajimba."

"And Gen Loussaint?"

"Possibly she was spirited away by her bodyguard and other survivors into one of the natural tunnels that extended for miles into the rocky highlands. All of the tunnel entrances that could be located were dynamited. Gen Loussaint was never seen again."

"You said Holley was rescued. What was his condition?"

"Colonel Delafosse's report stated that Dr. Holley was gaunt but otherwise in good health. Initially he seemed confused, perhaps drugged. He thought at most three weeks had passed since his abduction. In reality he was rescued on October twenty-ninth. He had spent nearly three months in captivity, ministering to the failing Gen Loussaint. He talked freely about her to the colonel; surprisingly, he was rather taken with that terrifying ghoul, whom he saw as just another sick, helpless old woman. But there's no doubt it was she, and not a descendant. Her memory was unimpaired by her great age; she talked at length to Eustace about her girlhood in France. Her mother dutifully had recorded young Gen's birthmarks and broken bones in various letters, and these descriptions match exactly statements regarding her appearance which Eustace made in 1920."

"So it was not because of the Ajimba, or Gen Loussaint, that he lost his wits. How did that come about?"

"Upon his return to Tuleborné, Eustace was urged to take a leave of absence. Except for brief visits downriver and a short holiday in Tenerife, he had not been away from his beloved hospital for more than eight years—fool-hardy, considering the hours he put in, the working conditions. His wife was unwell; weeks of not knowing if he was alive or dead had drained her strength. Instead of returning to England, Eustace immediately began rebuilding that part of the hospital which was damaged during the raid. Meanwhile he dealt with a full schedule of patients, this time without his two Negro assistants, who had returned to the bush during his absence. For a week or so everyone was deceived by his energy and devotion, but it was a false recrudescence; he was spending all the remaining years of his life in one reckless binge. Despite his insistence that he was treated well by the Ajimba, something profoundly disturbing had happened to him in that remote place. The appearance of the most common water snake caused him to tremble and scream in anguish. He refused to sleep at night, preferring to sit up guardedly by the light of an acetylene lamp, shivering despite the several blankets in which he wrapped himself. Waiting, as if for the devil to appear. He took strong doses of morphia, scopolamine, chloral hydrate, and bromide of potassium."

"For his nerves?"

"Those are drugs used in the treatment of mental illness; He knew he was in grave danger of losing touch with reality."

"And so he did."

"First reality lost touch with Tuleborné," Mary Burgess said dryly.

"Come again?"

"You must understand that living at Tuleborné was like living in a frontier prison. In 1920 there were no pontoon aeroplanes, no wireless for instant contact with the outside world. Lives depended on the twice-monthly visits of the paddle-wheel river steamer. The yellow river was their only highway, and they were seven hours upstream from the nearest station. The permanent population of Tuleborné numbered less than four hundred, including Negroes. The hillside, settlement consisted of the Catholic school and church, hospital buildings, mission bungalows, a barracks, a sawmill and a few ramshackle commercial and government buildings along the riverbank. It was only a hundred yards from the water's edge to the dense virgin forest, and continual clearing was in progress to keep the wild undergrowth from reclaiming the settlement. The trees of the encircling forest were everywhere more than a hundred feet high, and so packed together no breeze stirred in the stifling interior. A few trails used only by Negroes penetrated this wilderness. In the dry season when the river shrank below its sandbanks there was sometimes a mild breeze blowing upstream. But Eustace had returned during the wet season, when the sky looms incandescent and tons of water pour down on the red metal roofs of the station. The river smokes and swells dangerously and the teeming life of the forest is affected; from microscopic killers to the huge wallowing hippos, nature is in a frenzy.

"It is all any man can do, no matter how well fortified by experience and faith, to cope with a wet season in the forest. But at Tuleborné, as Eustace struggled with his medical duties as well as those phantasms that plagued him day and. night, it seemed as if God had inexplicably focused His wrath on their little station. The afternoon deluge was accompanied by cyclonic winds, bolts of lightning that struck with earth-shattering power. When it wasn't raining, the driver ants were out in force, and the hippos fiercely attacked almost every Negro's canoe. Even the steamer was damaged by these brutes and had to lay up at Tuleborné for repairs. Two members of the crew went raving mad that same night and killed a fellow crew member with
sjamboks
; in turn they had to be shot by local soldiers. Children at the school fell one by one into lethal comas, the cause unknown. Eustace's own daughter was affected. The steadily worsening storms uprooted trees and dashed them into mission buildings.

"A local
feticheur
appeared and spoke of a heavy judgment to be visited upon the white man. That was enough for the majority of the Negroes, who began to vanish into the forest. The hospital was emptied almost overnight. The district commissioner roused himself from his usual alcoholic daze and ordered the entire station evacuated. Eustace, for the sake of the few critical patients still in his care, refused to go, as did the Jesuit priest and the nuns of the school."

"What about the young man?" Luxton asked. "Jackson Holley. Did he remain with his father?"

"No. He desperately wanted to stay, but his sister needed constant medical attention, which he could provide, if she was to live until they, reached the military hospital in Libreville. So the steamer, packed with refugees and riding very low in the water, left Tuleborné in the rain. Hours later, as they were sounding the siren for a landing at the town of Zenkitu, the steamer was battered by giant logs that came flooding into the mainstream from a tributary of the river. It quickly capsized. Nearly twenty passengers, thrown among the grinding logs, lost their lives. Jackson, clinging to his sister with one arm, thrashed his way to a sandbar. But his mother was not seen again."

"Dreadful. One can almost believe there was a curse in control of their lives."

"For myself, I am willing to believe only in the impartial hostility of nature, a tragedy of coincidence; not in supernatural direction or villainy. However—soon after their rescue from the sandbar the little girl died in Jackson's arms, without opening her eyes. Jackson, though he'd contracted a fever from his immersion, sought to return at once upriver. He was convinced that his father would die too, unless he could persuade Eustace to leave the forest forever. Without a steamer available, it was very difficult to reach Tuleborné through the floods and unpredictable currents. Nevertheless he spent a few coins he had in his pocket to secure provisions and a Negro's canoe, and set off alone on the hundred-mile journey. The
chef du poste
at Zenkitu, a young lieutenant, promised to follow within a few hours. Fortunately for Jackson, he was true to his word."

"And Jackson made it to Tuleborné?"

"Quite a feat of navigation for one his age; also consider how weakened he must have been, how near delirium. Jackson's written account of his first hours at the ruined settlement is passional, well couched but almost certainly distorted by hallucination. He stepped ashore as the last rays of the sun flashed along the river with the velocity, the heliographic violence of day's end in the tropics; night overtook him before he proceeded a dozen steps and he was utterly alone in the shooting, shaking light of his acetylene lamp. The earth at his feet was as hot and wet as a living heart, and the air cooling like a blizzard across his skin. He called and called for his father, working himself into a convulsion of fright. He was not answered; yet Jackson was sure he was being watched. He had grown up in the forest, and its peaceful moods, the
fainéance
of the beast, were a part of his skin tone, a rhyming pulse in the innermost mind. He also knew when the forest was out of sorts, in a murk of badness, sweating evil and dangerous to be near. This night he was suspicious of its carnivore odor, unnerved by howls and whispers and a stupefying hiss of intimidation that flowed leaf to leaf and curled invisibly around him.

"Trembling with fatigue, hagridden, feeling the malevolence of the forest closing on his fragile light, nonetheless he searched the village as he had to. Prosaic horrors were everywhere. He found the priest and nuns at their prayers, but dead of bloat, in a blue shimmer of transmutation. More dead, those luckless Negroes too ill to have returned to their families, were moldering in the hospital's dormitory. And then Jackson saw his father."

Her voice, from so much talk, had become a rasp, low for his ears. Lord Luxton leaned forward on the settee, unwilling to miss a word.