Rampage! (10 page)

Dizzy with shock, he clambered out and stumbled away, swatting and scratching, still feeling as if a million tiny legs were scurrying over his skin. In fact, he was so distracted by the terrible sensation that he didn't even notice the red fire truck parked in front of Estella's apartment. Nor the clapping as the real Estella, the one who'd been trapped in the building's lift for the past three hours, stepped out of the doorway, flanked by a couple of firemen.

But he did hear a woman's eerily familiar laugh. High and chiming, it tinkled in amusement along the street behind him, echoing off the buildings as he limped away into the shadows.

XII

T
HE
L
ONE
S
TAR
L
ONE
S
TAR

T
HE
L
ONE
S
TAR
26
L
ONE
S
TAR

Well, I don’t know about you, but all those ghastly ants have made me want to throw myself into the nearest fountain too. Do you know, I’ve gone itchy all over? Prickly and tingly, the way you do when you watch one of those Sunday night documentaries about creepy-crawlies, only to find that you can’t enjoy your cup of tea any more because of the sensation of something scooching up your leg.

Ugh!

Let me think of something nicer.

I know!

A kitten!

Not a real cuddly-wuddly one that meows and flops over so you can tickle its tummy – but one made from platinum, a pendant shaped like a kitten and the one that Hazel was admiring at that very moment, dangling
in the window of the jewellery shop tucked inside Manaus’s glamorous Hotel Esplendido. Curled into a ball, its nose and collar were set with pink diamonds, and now, lifting up her sunglasses for a better look, Hazel just knew that it would go fabulously with her strawberry-coloured suede jacket. And, what a snip at $5,000! Then her eyes slid sideways to the platinum poodle displayed on the necklace beside it, with a pink-diamond bow on one ear, and frowned because that was rather gorgeous too.

Kitten?

Poodle?

She frowned, strangely unable to make up her mind this morning. Heaven only knew she deserved a treat after that terrible ordeal on the boat and expensive, glittery things usually cheered her up. But not today. Frustrated, she turned away and walked across the marble-floored foyer to sink down into a green velvet sofa. Stretching back, she felt relieved that the shop didn’t open for another twenty minutes, giving her plenty of time to think about it properly.

Above her, ceiling fans whirred and, listening to the tinkling piano being played in the lobby behind her, she glanced round at the women chatting over low tables set with silver tea pots and blue china; the old gentleman briskly turning the page of his ironed newspaper; businessmen in linen suits barking down mobile phones; and her own bodyguards, flown in last night, who stood blearily drinking coffee at the palm-fronded espresso bar.

She loved being here at the hotel. The way its floors didn’t rock beneath her feet. The way she couldn’t hear the endless slip-slap of water. The way the air smelled grubbily full of city and cars and not jungle. And most importantly, the way it wasn’t squirm-full of hulking great spiders slinking up the duvet towards you. Of this she was absolutely certain, having insisted the bellboy
27
check her suite, demanding he look underneath all five beds, seven tables, thirty-three chairs, inside ten wardrobes, beneath the pool table and under the seats of all twelve toilets (twice). Now, leaning back against the marsh-mallow-soft velvet, this was, she decided, the only way to see the Amazon, although technically, of course, she couldn’t actually see it at all from here. Only pictures of it, like the one of a golden jaguar stalking through the treetops on the wall beside her, which suited her fine.

So why then did she feel so twitchy?

She swallowed, uncomfortably thinking back to Rose’s face the day before as the helicopter Hazel had chartered from Manaus slapped down its floats on the Rio Negro. Feeling a sharp jab of guilt, she remembered the disappointment etched into Rose’s sunburned brow,
her tight mouth, the sparkle gone from her eyes and felt her own heart tighten. But, she consoled herself, that ghastly spider on the boat really had been the absolute last straw. Her second near-death experience in as many months, it had been the giddy limit, the tin lid on the cattle shed and the sugar frosting on her Dallas doughnut – and much as she wanted to help Rose, she knew she had to leave the jungle. Recalling how Eduardo had told her that it was the most venomous spider on Earth, she shuddered. A deadly critter like that, ugly as a mud fence, climbing up
her
bed? The captain had been bewildered by how the, the
thing
, had managed to crawl on to the boat in the first place and, wringing his hands, he’d explained how his staff were always so careful, shaking out the bananas and coffee sacks and boxes of supplies they brought on board. Yet nothing he or Rose could say had made the slightest difference to her decision to leave, and so, utterly unravelled, Hazel had quite literally abandoned ship.

Glancing at her watch, she felt her heart thump. Rose and Eduardo would have left the
Tucano
by now, to canoe –
canoe!
– into the jungle. She imagined them paddling up some dark stretch of water, soupy with swimming snakes and tangled with vines. Just how could Rose entrust her safety to something so flimsy, so small, so
sinkable
, over that endless murky green water?

‘You’ll miss the anaconda nests lining the river,’ Eduardo teased as he’d loaded Hazel’s cases on to the helicopter.

She rolled her eyes and quickly shook the thought from her head. Nests, where she came from, were for little biddy chicks, not enormous great snakes that flung themselves round you, squeezing you tighter and tighter until they stopped your very lungs before unhinging their jaws, and … and …

Well, that was quite enough of thinking about that.

She twisted forwards on the sofa and tried to force her mind back on to the jewellery glittering behind glass a little distance away.

Except that her heart was no longer in it.

If only she’d been able to persuade Rose to let her hire some professional to track down Professor Pottersby-Weir, some capable sort with scorpion-proof shorts and a big grin, who’d machete his way through the greenery and come back, fly-bitten but triumphant. It wouldn’t have mattered how much it cost, or what supplies or help he’d have needed. She was willing to pay for it all.

But Rose wouldn’t hear of it. She was so impatient, so determined to do it for herself.

Now, sliding lower down the sofa, Hazel pulled her phone from the pocket of her pink jeans and flicked through her photos: her and Rose trying on matching sunglasses in London; her and Rose drinking lime coolers on the plane; her and Rose trying on huge floppy hats at Barcelos Airport. Flicking to the last picture, she felt a lump rise in her throat. In it, Rose stood alone on the deck of the
Tucano
waving as the helicopter turned away towards the city. Hazel tucked the phone away and glanced
dismally at the jeweller’s window, knowing that no diamond-studded cat or dog was going to change the way that that made her feel. Whichever way she looked at it, and however good her reasons were, she’d let her friend down. Even the GPS, the emergency flares and the army phone she’d had flown out to the boat as soon as she arrived in Manaus hardly soothed her conscience. Not when she could imagine Rose simply tucking them into her rucksack with a sad little shrug, puzzling at what half of them were for, and wishing that she had her friend beside her instead.

A sudden scrape of high heels over the floor startled her and she looked up to see a tall thin woman in a grey suit clattering over to the reception desk where a hotel employee was primping pots of thunder-orchids and ferns.

‘It’s completely unacceptable!’ exclaimed the woman in grey, slamming down a crumpled poster of a Japanese lady and making the receptionist jump. ‘My husband and I flew halfway round the world to see Rosita de Bonita perform!’

‘Madam,’ soothed the hotel receptionist. She raised her palms in the air apologetically. ‘I am sorry for your dreadful disappointment. Obviously the opera house regrets —’

‘Reee-grets?’ shrilled the woman, stamping her foot on the marble floor.

Wincing, Hazel shrank down into the sofa and returned to her gloomy thoughts, consoling herself that at least Rose would be safe with Eduardo. Reliable as an old teddy bear, he knew how to survive the jungle.
Heav’n only knew he’d told them often enough about taking his granddaughters trekking through the rainforest to watch baby monkeys swing through the branches or spot owlets bustled like blobs of cotton wool in rotted tree trunks.

Meanwhile, over by the desk, the irate woman’s voice was growing more furious and, glancing over, Hazel saw the receptionist take a big step backwards, nodding madly.

‘Yes, madam. I agree,’ she spluttered. ‘It is appalling that they’ve had to cancel
Madama Butterfly
and close the opera house. But the management is offering full ticket refunds.’

‘Reee-funds?’ squealed the woman, her voice now wild as a toucan with its tail covered in termites. ‘How can anyone possibly reee-fund the experience of hearing Rosita de Bonita as Butterfly on opening night?’

The tinkling piano stopped tinkling. The chatterers stopped chatting, the newspaper readers stopped reading, the sippers stopped sipping as everyone now turned to watch the woman’s face grow as purple as the orchids topping the desk.

‘But then,’ the woman fumed, ‘how can anyone be so careless as to allow a boy and a gigantic bald ram to ruin her performance in the first place?’

Hazel snapped off her sunglasses and threw them onto the sofa.

A boy and a gigantic bald ram? Goosebumps swept over her skin as though someone had thrown a bucket of iced water over her.

Alex and Aries?

Here?

In Manaus?

Was the heat frying her brain? How could it possibly be them? And yet, even though she knew she must be going wholly la-la, she found herself sprinting across the lobby – sending the jeweller, now busily unlocking his shop, careening headfirst into a large prickly palm – to skid to a stop in front of the desk. Because if it really were them, she reasoned breathlessly, there was only one reason that would bring them back: Medea.

Shunting the furious woman out of her way, she leaned over the counter until she was nose-to-nose with the bewildered receptionist.

‘Tell me!’ she demanded, as a pot of orchids smashed on to the floor. ‘What happened to them?’

XIII

S
URPRISE
, S
URPRISE!

Miles to the west, not to mention miles hotter, grubbier and wearier too, Rose stood waist-high in ferns, blinking the sweat out of her eyes, as Eduardo chopped through yet another thicket of bamboo.

For the past two days they’d been trekking through the jungle proper, hacking their way through the rainforest understory, the tangled cage of tree trunks, ferns and palms, of prickly plants and pathless green that lay far below the canopy of leaves and criss-crossing lianas,
28
shut off from the sunshine above. Hot, thick and clammy, the air down here was murky, tinged with a mossy light, so soupy and green that it reminded Rose of the water in a forgotten fish tank. Worse, it stank of rotting leaves and fungus.

Snatching her breath in small gasps, she quickly
checked the bark of the closest tree before leaning her aching back against it, exhausted. She tilted her face up and watched two tiger-striped
Heliconia
butterflies flutter past the tip of her nose and spiral away like sparks, vanishing into the shadows between the trees. She felt swimmy-headed, dizzy from the sticky heat and the strain of hour upon hour spent picking their way over roots and toppled trees, of listening for falling fruit, of shrinking away from scorpions sunbathing on palm leaves, of splashing through small creeks and trudging through mud that sucked your feet down into it after the daily downpours. Then, wriggling her damp toes in her boots, raw and uncomfortable in their thick, bristly socks, she smiled so hard it made her cheeks hurt.

Because every aching, grubby, scary, exhilarating second of it had been worth it because they were almost there.

Tatu Village.

The thought sent a sudden swell of excitement surging through her body like an electric current jittering every exhausted cell, every nerve, every muscle back into life. Now, stretching up on to her tiptoes, she craned to see past Eduardo’s bulky frame and caught her breath, snatching a glimpse of scrubby land beyond the broken fence of bamboo.

This was it!

Finally, the moment she’d been dreaming of, the moment that made lying to her mother all right, the moment that made the heat and the grittiness and
the slamming rain and the discomfort and the fear bearable. Trembling with impatience, she felt a sudden stab of longing for Hazel because even though her head totally understood why Hazel had had to leave, her heart missed her horribly now. She bit her lip, tasting the tang of salt and wishing Hazel were beside her again – moaning, smeary-face and fizzing with bad-temper, of course – but actually
with
her now that she had finally, finally arrived at the outskirts of the village. Of course, Eduardo was kind and protective and strong and told her lots funny stories to keep her spirits up. But it just wasn’t the same as having a friend by her side.

Her head was throbbing now, thumping with the crunch and splinter of bamboos beneath Eduardo’s machete. Her heart thumped, pounding in time with the ceaseless trilling, screeching, shrieking, hoppity-clicking bang and rasp of the jungle around her. Of course, if she hadn’t been quite so elated or quite so woozy with weariness, she might have noticed that the howler monkeys had abruptly stopped adding to the din about twenty minutes ago.

And it might have worried her.

But she didn’t.

Because all she could think of was her father – only minutes away – running towards her – only minutes away – arms outstretched to scoop her up into a bear hug – only minutes away – speechless with astonishment to see his own daughter racing out of the trees to greet him.

‘Rose!’ Eduardo’s voice rang back through the trees
in triumph, sending unseen parrots squealing into the air high above the roof of leaves. Pulling off his cap, he wiped his brow and stepped through the gap in the bamboo. He turned and looked back at her. ‘Come and see!’

Euphoria exploded inside Rose like fireworks dazzling the night sky. Stumbling away from the tree, she forced her legs to run, even though they felt as though they’d turned to rubber, and stamped through the clumps of ferns to plunge through the bamboo after him, careless of the scratches on her face and arms.

In the distance, beyond the patch of cleared jungle, stood a wide circle of wooden huts. Rose swallowed hard, stifling the mad giggle that threatened to bubble up in her throat, and blinked. Thatched with palm leaves bleached by the sun, the huts stood like sentries around an enormous
molucca
,
29
the longhouse, outside which a family of armadillos were hoovering through the dirt like leathery vacuum cleaners. Suddenly, desperate to run the rest of the way, to search every centimetre of the place, she took a step forward and felt Eduardo’s hand on her arm.

‘Remember what we discussed.’

Rose nodded irritably and tried to tamp down her impatience by thinking back to the wide patches of
brown and treeless earth she’d seen from the plane window. Eduardo had explained why the villagers would be suspicious of them, of any strangers, and now, as they began walking towards the village, she reached for her locket, rubbing it nervously, hoping that an old man and a girl didn’t look like the cattle ranchers and oil prospectors he’d told her about, the sort of people who’d tear the villagers’ jungle down and turn it into a desert of dust, leaving them nowhere to live and hunt.

Closer now, Rose searched the village with her eyes, scanning every hut, every doorway, desperate for a glimpse of her father. Women dressed in red and green and gold sarongs stood peeling knobbly brown roots and throwing the creamy middles into a pot, others smashed them to a pulp with paddles. A few sat cross-legged on blankets, sifting through tubs of beads and threading them on to wires to make what looked like earrings. Around them, boys in football shirts chased one another around the huts, skittish as the dragonflies she’d seen flitting between the trees, whilst the girls helped their mothers and tufty-headed toddlers, some naked, some in red loincloths, giggled and crawled over blankets. A boy of about ten, wearing a halo of yellow parrot feathers, threw a stick for a thin, gangly dog.

By the time they reached the nearest hut in the ring, Rose could see that everyone’s faces, even the babies’, were painted with the same pattern of long red stripes, stretching from the tips of their noses and out across their cheeks, like whiskers.

Minus nought point eight three three. Minus fifty-seven point two.

Unbidden, the Scroll’s voice drifted into her mind and now, despite her dry mouth and sweat-slicked hair, she saw herself back in London, surrounded by the icy white statues of the British Museum, hearing those numbers for the first time and turning to see Alex’s and Aries’ faces, bright with understanding, knowing just how much it meant to her.

If only they could have known she’d finally made it.

If only they were here with her.

If only!

Suddenly the boy with yellow parrot feathers noticed them, threw down the dog’s stick and sprinted into the longhouse. Behind him, the women swept the toddlers into their arms and called to the other children, as five well-built men burst out of the building carrying bows and arrows. Their broad chests were hung with strings of something jagged and white that Rose thought might be jaguar teeth and now, tilting their chins up defiantly, the warriors stood absolutely still and stared at Rose and Eduardo.

For long moments it seemed like the trees were the only things moving, tipsy in the heat, and as the tribesmen continued to stare at them Rose felt another sting of impatience. She didn’t have time for all this eyeballing, like the gunslingers in the corny old Westerns that she and her dad used to watch, and she was about
to open her mouth and say something, although she wasn’t quite sure what, when another man stepped out of the longhouse. He was tall and powerfully built and wearing a crown of yellow parrot feathers in his shoulder-length hair. Rose knew he must be the chief. He grunted something to the others and began striding across the dusty middle of the village, flanked by the tribesmen. The boy in yellow feathers caught up, his curious expression and pursed mouth a perfect miniature of the chief’s face. Copying his father’s walk, he regarded Rose suspiciously, whilst behind him, some of the smaller children, having broken free of their mothers’ grasps, waddled like ducklings.

The chief stopped and stared at Rose. She held his gaze, feeling her cheeks grow hotter as he bent towards her, stretching out his hand, fascinated. Rose steeled herself as he took hold of a lock of her hair and teased a single curl between his fingers before looking back over his shoulder and barking something at the others. She glanced at Eduardo, feeling horribly confused, as the tribesmen began chattering excitedly.

‘Fire hair,’ translated Eduardo uncertainly.

Rose blinked up at him.

‘He’s saying ––’ Eduardo paused to listen to another burst of speech, ‘he’s saying that they’ve seen it before, Rose. On the pale man who sleeps beside the creek.’

A minute later, Rose sprinted away from the others in the direction the chief had pointed, diving between the huts and out towards the creek. Leaping the roots
of a kapok tree that loomed like a giant elephant’s foot blocking her way, she skidded to a stop beneath an arch of leafy ferns and gasped.

Slouched beneath a tree with a bulbous trunk was her father. She took in his hollowed face, his blistered skin, his beard, always so groomed and soft when he hugged her, now wiry and snagged with leaf litter. The sight of his knee, bony and bruised, sticking out of his ruined trousers made her heart hammer in her chest like a frantic woodpecker.

She began walking uncertainly towards him. ‘Dad?’

Startled by her voice, a few blue budgerigars flapped out of the tree above him, tweeting furiously and flying away. But he didn’t see them. Now, as an awful tightness clawed at her throat, Rose willed him to turn his head and look at her. Instead he simply continued to watch the brown water beyond, snaking away around a bend in the trees.

‘Dad?’

She hunched down beside him and laid her hand on his thin shoulder, trying hard not to notice the jab of bones beneath her fingers nor the way his body stiffened at her touch. Biting her lip, she looked into his eyes, foggy and bloodshot, searching for a spark of recognition, a glimmer, a flicker in that blank emptiness. ‘It’s me, Rose. Your daughter?’

The words felt like stones in her mouth and as her father continued to stare through her, unseeing, she felt herself starting to tremble. She waited for a few seconds
more, feeling a heaviness sucking at her bones and flooding her whole body with a dull aching coldness.

She hardly heard Eduardo’s anxious voice –
‘Aqua! Aqua!’
– as he ran, shouting, down the path towards them, but a few moments later he thrust a clay beaker into her hands. Mechanically, she brought it to her lips and then dropped it.

How could her father not know her? How could he look through her like a patch of air?

Hot tears prickled her eyes. She tried to blink them back, realising that even the terrible day when her mother had waited for her, tear-streaked behind the school fence, to tell her that the Royal Geographical Society had called off the search for him, she hadn’t felt this desolate. This lost. Then, she’d blankly refused to believe that he was gone. Her head pounded and stifling a choking sob, she covered her face with her hands, shutting out the villagers, who now chattered like mynah birds around her.

Eduardo reached out and steadied her. ‘There’s a long way to go.’

A long way to go?

She shrank back, unable to reply.

Wasn’t travelling halfway around the world a long way to go? And crying yourself to sleep for months on end? Lying to her mother? A long way to go?

Seeing the pain in her face, Eduardo took a step towards her father and laid his hands firmly on his shoulders.

‘Your daughter,
señor
!’ He spoke loud and slowly. ‘She has come all this way for you. Is Rose?
Si
?’

Her father stared back blankly at him. Frowning, Eduardo took a firmer grip and tried to pull her father away from the tree. ‘
Señor
, you should ––’

‘No!’ Her father’s yell roared in her ears.

Raw and primitive, it sounded like an animal in pain.

Scooting backwards in the dust, Rose shrieked, gaping as her father kicked out his legs out in panic, catching Eduardo’s shins to send him sprawling backwards on to the ground. She stared, unable to believe what she’d seen, feeling a curdling mixture of horror and bewilderment flood through her as she scrambled uncertainly to her feet and swayed towards the other villagers who were trying to help Eduardo.

Which was when she noticed the woman watching her.

Rose stopped and tried to take in the pale, willowy figure standing a little distance away, dressed in a T-shirt and khaki shorts. She peered at the plait of black hair over the phantom’s shoulder, the black hair streaked with violet, and growled under her breath, cursing her stupid brain. Clamping her eyes shut, she blamed the soul-splintering shock of finding her father so damaged and the throttling heat and the crushing exhaustion she felt for conjuring up such a terrible hallucination, counted to three and opened them again.