Beat Not the Bones (17 page)

Washington started and looked up. Slowly he rose to his feet and they went on.

CHAPTER 16

Washington looked at his watch. The luminous dial showed the time to be twelve. He could hear no sound outside and, within the hut, only Stella's soft breathing. They had stopped for the night in the first of the river villages where the carrier from Maiola was known. The people had been friendly and had given them the use of an empty hut on the outskirts of the village.

Within the hut it was hot and airless. He had discarded his shirt and lay only in shorts. The sweat on his body pricked and crawled like the feet of insects. He lifted the mosquito net, slid out from beneath it and fixed it in place before the insects could swarm in. He stood up and looked across to the corner of the hut where Stella was sleeping. The mosquitoes descended upon his naked skin. He flicked them away from his lips and eyes and felt among his clothes for a shirt to throw over his shoulders. There was no movement from Stella. He could not see her clearly, only the faint outline of her body beneath its dim tent of netting. Outside there was no moon, but the sky was light. The doorway faced into a wide patch of cleared ground, around which the village huts were collected. He could see the tops of trees and a few pale stars.

He moved quietly to the doorway, sat down on the steps that led to the ground and put on his socks. It was unwise wandering round in these places without shoes, but he did not want to wake the boys. Lastly he put his hand in his shirt pocket and drew out a midget torch and the small carved coconut that he had taken from Anthony Nyall's desk. He waited, listening.

He was not afraid. At least, not as afraid as he had been in his own hut at Marapai. Stella gave him confidence. She slept so deeply and peacefully in the hut behind him. They had walked nearly eighteen miles that day, and she had lain down at nine o'clock and slept almost immediately, like an exhausted child. Her attitude gave him courage; she was not intimidated by the jungle, nor by the people in the village. She accepted the bizarre situation they found themselves in as ordinary. Throughout the day she had been eager, practical, interested. They had not spoken much, but every now and then, glancing back over his shoulder, he had caught her looking about alert and wide-eyed. She seemed intensely curious about everything around her, and utterly unafraid. The uneasiness of the three local carriers had failed to impress her. The irony of this – that Stella should inspire him with confidence – did not pass him by, and he smiled in the darkness. Then he stood up and, flashing the torch on the ladder, climbed carefully down to the ground.

Hitolo and the three local boys were sleeping under the hut. Ahead, the path faded into darkness. Washington threw only a brief glance in this direction. Here the jungle closed in over the sky, and he could see in the foreground only a few dim shapes of the larger trees. Behind this the darkness might have been solid. He knew that if he looked long enough he would see receding planes reaching back into the trees, darkness moving, coiling like smoke, clotting into thick shadows that blinked with the orbs of eyes. He knew all the tricks of darkness. Its slow, heaving shapes and darting tongues had displaced sleep now for many weeks, its tiny lights stabbed his eyeballs as he lay in his bed in Marapai. He knew all the dangers of staring too long at a fluttering leaf or a firefly.

But darkness was there and he could not forget it. His feet touched the spongy ground at the base of the ladder. The spot of light from his torch bobbed just ahead like a white moth. He kept his eyes fixed there, and his mind on the snakes or scorpions that might endanger unshod feet. But it seemed that this Philip Washington, this cool concentrating man following the bobbing light of his torch and treading cautiously so not to break a leaf or twig under foot, sheltered another creature, hardly a man, who crouched in a huddled animal state of apprehension, ears pricked and hair raised on its spine, its nerves like the hundred hands of a sea anemone reaching out and fingering the night ahead.

The darkness behind did not worry him. That was the way they had come, it was the path to Kairipi and to Marapai. The village was wrapped in a warm, inhabited dark, cleansed of evil by the sweat of human bodies, the breath exhaled from sleeping men and women and the trust of children. The darkness ahead was different. Anything might reside here, and they were only two days' march from Eola.

The path led around the side of the hut to where the boys had built their fire. Down the front, back and one side had been built a ragged brush fence, possibly to form some sort of enclosure for pigs. The dying fire gleamed on the outstretched legs of one of the carriers, who lay with his head under the hut, his legs and thighs stretched out into the footpath. Hitolo and the other boys were well under the hut. Washington could hear them breathing.

He paused and looked down at them. The little coconut charm was warm and damp in his hand. The village was behind him now and out of sight, hidden by the corner of the hut. He was alone with the four sleeping men and the darkness that closed around them. There was no comfort in them as there had been in Stella. They were not restless, but he knew they had not surrendered consciousness with the confidence that she had. Their sleep was as uneasy as his own, haunted by vague shapes and flickering tongues of fear. He knew so well the sleep of terror, the anguish of almost breaking surface, of lying, limbs paralysed, mind half submerged, with the anaesthetic of sleep still fuming in the brain, while the voice of the outside world whispered, ‘Danger!' There was no more terror than to hear this voice, to carry in the mind an awareness of the location and cause of dread, and yet to lie, physically still in sleep, tied and helpless, while fear plucked at the roots of the hair.

These thoughts unsteadied him, and he bent down quickly beside the fire and ran his fingers over the ground. The soil was damp and slimy, but there was no vegetation. He raised the torch and the beam of light lengthened. The pool of its termination settled a little further ahead. The long, shining trunk of a tree beamed out from the edge of the jungle. He quickly dipped the light. Something had flashed in the shadows beyond the tree.

He stepped a little further away from the fire and felt again on the ground. He only wanted grass or a few leaves. He hesitated – only a few steps were needed to carry him to the fringe of vegetation, but it needed enormous daring to make them. His gaze was fixed on the ground, but the grey form of the tree was still there, visible to those other watching eyes within that took no heed of these devices against fear but were always on the lookout, always infusing life into a shadow and movement into a log or a stone. These eyes were fixed now on the light that had shone out in the jungle ahead. It no longer flashed like a luminous insect but had settled on the ground at the foot of the trees and just behind, and beamed palely like a round, bright eye.

Would it be enough without the grass and leaves? he wondered, fingering the damp polished sides of the coconut in his hand. Would the intention be sufficiently clear? They could be regarded, Anthony Nyall had said, as fairly harmless without the appropriate trappings. There were plenty of them in the villages hanging about more or less disregarded and forgotten. So he reasoned, stroking the coconut with wet, shaking fingers. And all the time the animal within stared at the soft, bright jungle eye that beamed ahead.

The point of the torch moved on across the ground, showing only the slime of river mud. Not until that tree was reached would the ground yield vegetation. One more step forward and he could resist the drag of his lids no longer. He raised his eyes and suffered one fierce, almost annihilating instant of terror. The jungle eye glowed out from the ground at his feet. It was not gold, but a green, white light, ice-light, moonlight. It breathed. It was palpitatingly alive. It pierced the very core of his heart.

A nerve flicked in his wrist, the torch jerked up and the eyes died away in the circle of torch light. He was looking at a cluster of fungi that sprang up from the roots of the tree.

Luminous jungle fungi! He was almost sick with relief. His sweating body jerked with spasms of silent laughter. For an instant the world was safe and sweet. But the animal within was not confident of safety. Instinctively he knew that what was to be done must be done quickly. He clawed at the ground with his fingers. His hand closed over a piece of dead wood. He lowered the torch and the fungi burned out again just ahead. The next thing his fingers touched was a piece of dead pandanus leaf. He picked it and went quickly back to the hut and the sleeping men.

He squatted down by the fire, broke off the tip of the pandanus leaf and shredded it with his fingernails. His eyes did not move from the shredded leaf but a voice from the jungle ahead spoke incessantly, Look up, look up. All his will was bent on not looking up, and the shredding of the leaf was an act that he was hardly conscious of.

He tried to stuff the little sheaf of leaf fibre into the mouth of the coconut. But the opening was too small and the sheaf would not stay in position. He felt about desperately on the ground for a small piece of stick to prod the plug into place. But he knew there was nothing, and that he must return to the edge of the jungle. He squatted, quivering with rage. He knew he could not go back and that he was defeated by a coconut and a plug of leaves. He forgot that this was only a small, incidental obstacle in the journey ahead. It was the goal itself, the end of all doubt and fear.

Then he remembered the hut. He stood up and went across to the sleeping men, stepping over the legs of the boy who lay stretched out with his feet turned to the fire. He broke off a splinter of hard leaf from the side of the hut and rammed it into the mouth of the coconut. It held the plug firmly in place. Gusts of hysterical laughter broke out inside him. He need not have left the fire.

Biting back his laughter, he twisted the string that was attached to the coconut around a loose splinter jutting out from one of the beams of the hut. The little charm dangled now just over the heads of the sleeping boys. They would open their eyes to see it hanging there – the threat of a slow mysterious sickness, perhaps the visit of the vada men who cut out life from the body and left the shell to rot away, the fear of the unknown striking with weapons of magic.

The little black charm with its sprouting mouth of dead leaf and stick swayed in the faintly stirring air. The thought flashed through Washington's mind that one of the boys might die as a result of what he had done. It might need only the knowledge of guilt in one of these susceptible hearts, fear sufficiently intense, despair completely surrendered, and life might be handed over willingly to the sorcerer.

This possibility gave him little distress. He genuinely loved the Papuan people, but it did not seem to him that the death of a few of them, or even of a whole community, mattered. As he saw it, death for them was more natural, more likely, followed more closely and inevitably on the heels of life. Death for a white man was something to shudder at, to resist and fight against. To kill a white man or a white woman was the very last of all human acts to be contemplated, and then only when any other action was impossible. But a Papuan was different. He did not regard them as inferior, but as nearer to natural law, one with rock, river and tree, bird and fish, and destined for the same struggle and violent extermination. They were hunters, and like all hunters must accept the likelihood of being hunted.

He steadied the coconut charm gently over the three men's heads, and stepped back. It turned slowly on the frayed string and was at last still. The white, incised eyes stared into his own. It looked now, with the equipment of sorcery bristling from its mouth and its victims marked down, subtly animated and malevolent.

He turned away quickly, walked back to the front of the hut and flashed the torch on the steps. The doorway loomed above him; he went up the first three steps. He could not hear Stella's breathing. No light penetrated the black interior of the hut. He paused, and an unaccountable feeling of dread held him motionless, waiting. He listened for some sound, but there was silence. He was afraid to move, to look back at the deserted village, to stay where he was, to flash his torch inside the hut. The last feeble tongues of reason whispered, Do something, do something, you can't stand this. Something will crack and it will be too late. He stepped up on to the rickety verandah at the top of the steps and flashed his torch over the frame of the door. Hanging from the centre of the doorway, directly in front of his eyes, was a small, black coconut with two vivid white eyes that stared into his own and a plug of leaves bristling from its mouth.

He did not scream, he had passed beyond screaming. He stood in a sweat of terror and the magic poured out and pierced his veins. He was doomed, his blood was poisoned. He did not wonder how the coconut came to be hanging there. He believed it was his own coconut that, with gifts of thought and flight, had found its way to its true destination.

He knew that he had been discovered. The forces of evil had discovered him and would track him down till they destroyed him. With a sobbing cry, he flung out a hand and plucked at the coconut on the door. His fingers closed on emptiness. The vision faded. There was nothing there.

He clawed the wood with his nails. The palms of his hands burned with pain.

‘What's that? Who is it?' It was Stella speaking from inside the hut. ‘Is that you, Philip?'

‘Yes.'

He saw her vague white form drift near and turned towards her, clenching his teeth to strangle the sobs that bubbled in his throat. He forgot for a moment who she was. Was she his sister, Doris, who had come to help him and comfort him? He wanted to run into the hut and clutch her in his arms. But he held out his throbbing palm and said querulously, ‘My hand.'

She came nearer. ‘Your hand? What's the matter with it?' She took it in her own. ‘You're burning!' she said. ‘Is it fever? You've cut your hand. It's bleeding. Give me the torch.'

She flashed the light on his hand. It was bleeding freely from a long scratch on the palm. He stared down at it and a deep shudder that he was too weak to control passed through his body.