The Cannibal Spirit (22 page)

“Not so far. One hour. Two, maybe.”

“Are you crazy? There ain't nothing to be seen. You can't know where we are going. Wait till the light is up. It don't make a difference, do it?”

“Must go. Thing happen. I know it. Must go.”

But Harry slumped down and sat, panting, near to retching, feeling the sodden earth soaking up through his trousers, too exhausted to care. “Ten minutes, then. Ten minutes.”

Charley squatted beside him, their legs touching. “Okay, ten minute,” he said.

“How in all the damned hells do you know where you're going, anyway? You told me you never been here before.”

In his mind's eye, Harry could imagine the Indian shrugging. “Hear story. Just know.”

Harry leaned his head back. He heard the burble of the stream somewhere close by. He closed his eyes against the darkness.

Hong Kong, 1885. Smallpox eats at the city as he walks the streets of Tai Ping Shan. It is night. By the wharf, the boatmen lie about on the waterside, black boils weeping on their wiry bodies. Among the overhanging buildings in that crowded quarter, prostitutes sit on the broken pavements, their cheap cheongsams or gaudy Western costumes riding up so that the seeping lesions on their thighs are visible. And Chinamen pirates, scarred savages with eyes and even limbs missing, weep with pain and hold out their blistered hands to him in supplication.

Carters, fishermen, and merchants in hats brilliantly brocaded with gold filigree fight each other amid the rotting slops in the gutters. They fight for fish heads and for shards of jade, which glimmer in the street lamps' sputtering flames. Rickshaws clatter past, piled with the dead, their faces and their bodies blackened and concave. There are food stalls, with fish balls and vats of noodles burbling, manned by stick crones with enormous cysts on their faces.

The staccato languages of the Chinese jabber agonies from windows and doorways, until he knows that he but dreams and walks some hellish enlargement of his memory.

He is immune to all sickness. His pink white man's skin shines proud and healthy. His purse is laden with the silver the Chinese so covet, and he knows himself rich. Yet also he knows where he is headed. He resists as hard as he is able, until he can feel his body move and twitch as it lies in the damp and the dark beside Charley. But his feet do not hear him and he walks the path still through Hong Kong.

He passes now into wealthier areas, with their ornately carven wooden courts, the five-storey hotels, the post offices, the city hall complexes, their windows multitudinous and brilliantly glassed—the museums and libraries bursting with the wealth of the Orient as it has been plucked by the British. On their steps, the wealthy die as well, white and yellow, collarless suits and sinuously patterned silk dresses belching black pus onto the ground.

Nausea shakes him and horror, so that he wants to find a corner somewhere and curl himself like a child into a ball to blank it all away. Yet he goes on, and now he is at the city's outskirts, staring up at the mountainsides, which rise near-vertical toward the black sky. A single lamp shines in the darkness on the hillside. He follows the path up toward it. His breath becomes short.

He is gasping when he stands at last before the door to the old wooden house, its thatch roof steep against the monsoon rains. His hand is before his eyes. He places his palm against the single Chinese sign scrawled in red upon the door. He pushes at it. The sign, as she had told him, that means Joy.

Harry came abruptly awake with Charley shaking him by his good shoulder.

“Up, Fat Harry. Move. Thing happen. Must go!” He allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. It was still pitch-black. Charley took hold of one of Harry's hands and gripped it. “Keep hold,” he said as they moved off, the swish of the machete sounding again. Harry recalled the story of Hansel and Gretel, and almost choked up, giggling. Two lost children in the woods,
except one was a deformed, leathery old savage, and the other—well, what was the other?

Spike-edged leaves raked his cheeks, his head and arms, until he winced before every step he took. But Charley's controlling grip drew him on. The fever burned in his body. Harry's mind filled again with the images of his dream. That same dream, always the same—always ending before the door. The sign that meant Joy in Chinese. He could not think on it. He would not.

Charley's grip never slackened. He wondered who this man was that could navigate in pitch black through the wild forest. This cripple buffoon who walked in darkness like he paraded along the central avenue of a city in midsummer. Nothing made sense.

At last it seemed as if there came a faint lightening of the darkness. Then, all at once as he took a step, the wall of foliage about him disappeared and he was in the open again. The shock of it made him stumble and he had to grab Charley's arm to stay on his feet. The moonlit clouds were so bright it seemed almost daylight. They rushed impossibly fast across the sky, yet down here there was no breeze at all. The stars behind were brilliant beads. A rough pasture stretched away for a hundred yards to a lake whose waters perfectly reflected the sky. Dark shadows of hills, mountains even, far off, were faintly visible beyond the lake.

But Harry still saw the streets of Hong Kong as well. It was as if two photographs were laid one upon the other. The pasture's thick grass rose up through the pavements, until the bodies of the dying lay upon carpets of benighted green, and the path to the door with the Chinese sign stretched away before him, across the lake.

He felt no confusion, though. He was calm. He observed himself, halfways to mostly dead, a man who couldn't rightly tell his past from his present, so full of fever and suppuration was he. And if now was now, or now was then, it didn't make much difference. He might have died that year in Hong Kong. The smallpox took so many. Why it had not taken him back then, rotting him into death—as his body was doing now—he could not say.

“Look,” said Charley.

Hong Kong curled from his vision like dust in an eddy from a closing door. He turned in the direction of the Indian's gaze. He saw the orange glow of a fire, halfway around the lake. Something straight and tall rose up beside it, but he could not make out what it was from this far away. His pupils adjusted to the fire's greater brightness, until it was the only thing he could see, and all that vast wilderness surrounding them dissolved away into black.

“George?” Harry said. It didn't seem possible, somehow, that they were actually to find him. That there was some end to all this movement through the world, and that it would be George they would come upon inhabiting that final space.

Charley took hold of Harry's arm and started out in the direction of the fire. Harry stumbled along beside him.

They crossed the stream that they had followed all the way from the village. Here it was twenty feet wide and knee deep, but the cold barely registered. His eyes were on the fire, which dipped in and out of sight as the trees and plants between first obscured, then cleared his line of vision.

As they came closer, they heard a voice call out.

“It's him,” Harry said and pressed forward. But now Charley had stopped. Harry turned to him. “What? Come on. It's him.”

“Think not good time go,” said Charley.

“Are you fucking mad? We found him. Let's go.” He pulled at Charley's arm, but the old man stood firm.

“Not sure good,” he said. “George … ” He waved one hand in the air in vague circles. “Think George not here.”

“Fuck.” Harry wanted to beat at Charley's head, but he stopped and thought about this a moment, trying to understand what Charley might mean in his twisted Indian way. He tried to calm his breathing, which was coming like the steam from a train engine now, so that he almost had come to gasping. “You mean he's off in a rage or the like?”

“Hamatsa go forest. Go alone.”

“But you said hurry. Something was happening.”

Charley stood for a moment staring up at the sky. Harry felt light in his head, as if he was about to pass out. He could feel his heart beating fast
now. His shoulder throbbed with each tiny movement his body made. He tried his best to slow his breathing.

Then Charley looked again toward the fire. “Go look but stay quiet now,” he said.

“All right.” Harry lurched along next to him, feeling the sweat on his forehead, under his arms, pouring down his thighs out of his crotch. Yet he was cold as well, shivering as if he had the watch in an arctic gale.

Now they were no more than fifty yards from the fire. Here and there, clumps of high rushes rose above their heads, breaking their view. But Harry could see there was a tall ancestral pole with what looked a battered, weather-beaten image of a killer whale at its top, lit from below by the fire, which gave it a baleful look. Around the pole, stretching out to either side, hints of the ruins of a now long-overgrown building could just be made out, mere straight lines in the undergrowth really, but outlined by the sharp light and shadow. Mounds rose up here and there that looked suggestive of human forms, as if they were men beginning to emerge from the very earth itself.

The fire blazed before the killer whale pole. There was a small Indian shelter of reed-woven mats beside it. Other bits and pieces of campcraft were strewn about.

George was kneeling beside the fire, wearing just a pair of trousers, hunched motionless over a smallish wooden box, the one Harry had seen him with late that night of the funeral, before he had fled. The hair on his huge torso was greyed in his age, so he looked some ancient overgrown and crooked oak. As Harry watched, at last George drew the box's lid open. He shuddered, as if dry sobs were passing through his body unnoticed. He reached the fingers of one hand inside. He cried out, arching back, his hands coming up toward the sky, then down to rest across his face, as if he sought to hide his vision from the world. Then he fell forward, shaking in that way Harry had seen before when he was sinking into rage. He lay face down, then rolled, almost in spasm, on his side. One of his arms flopped over and came to rest in the embers of the fire, but he did not react. He just lay, with his eyes closed and his mouth making shapes as if he spoke, though Harry could not hear if he made any sound.

Charley was already running toward the fire. His crippled form moved at an incredible pace. He seemed to lope, as if he was more ape than human. Harry hobbled after, his breath coming in short gasps. He could not take his eyes from George's arm as it rested on the red coals of the fire.

Charley was there before him. He took hold of George and dragged him away from the flames. Harry came up to stand panting beside the fire as Charley knelt over George and surveyed the black skin of his burnt arm. George's head twisted this way and that. He bared his teeth, then both his hands swept down to cover his stomach and his knees came up as if he had been punched in the guts.

“You watch George,” Charley said. He picked up what looked like George's shirt and jogged away toward the lake. Harry knelt beside George, who was lying on his back, eyes shut, and voicing soft words in the Indian tongue that Harry did not understand. His eyeballs behind the lids moved as if he was watching something. Harry could see that George's forearm was burned, but not too badly, the skin still intact, just blackened along part of its length. The foul stench of burning hair and skin lingered in the air.

Shortly, Charley was back with the shirt soaked in lake water. He wrapped this about George's forearm, and, as he did so, George jerked and swung onto his side and opened his eyes. He lay there for a moment, seeming not to focus on anything particular. Then he started to wiping at his face with his hands, his face horror-struck, like there was acid flowing down his cheeks. He grabbed at his stomach and lay curled in a ball like a baby. He cried out.

Charley had stepped away. Now Harry made to move in toward his father-in-law, but Charley shook a finger to stop him.

A moment later, George pushed himself up until he was sitting, face toward the fire. He stared at the wooden box, whose lid was still open. Harry noticed now that it was carved in many complex designs and looked to be of some antiquity. Without taking any notice of either Charley or Harry, George shuffled forward until he was sitting once more over the box. He reached his hand in again to touch what was inside, but, as he did so, noticed the shirt wrapped about his forearm. He lifted his arm up,
seeming surprised. He looked to left and right, then back over his shoulder, and saw them both.

George's vision seemed to pass right through Harry, but, when they came to Charley, he leapt to his feet. He seemed astonished. He stepped backward, almost into the fire.

“Lagoyewilé?” he said. Charley said something terse in Kwakwala by way of a reply. They spoke a few words more to each other, George shaking his head, muttering constantly to himself when he wasn't otherwise speaking. Then he turned away, stepped round the fire, and paced away toward the lake. He seemed unconscious to the pain there must be in his arm.

“What's going on?” Harry said.

Charley didn't answer. Harry looked over at him. The old Indian was still down on his haunches as he'd been when first he had wrapped the wet shirt around George's arm. He looked back at Harry, his face without obvious emotion, though there was, rare though it be to see it, just in his eyes a certain sympathy.

“We go back beach now,” Charley said. “George not here.”

“What?” Harry stared after George. He saw him silhouetted against the lake as he stood at its edge. “Go back … ?” He stuttered into silence. He wanted to scream at Charley, to hold him in the flames until he spoke sense again. More than with despair, the prospect of the long, almost certainly fatal, trek back through the forest to the beach filled him with something near fury.

He saw the box sitting open beside the fire. He knelt down beside it and stared inside. What he saw was George's hands wrapped about the skull of his son, that day of the funeral. He heard again the neck snapping as it broke, saw the body slump forward into the gravebox. Now, in this small box here, he saw David's putrefying face, the skin blackened in death, the eyeballs rotted away already, so that the lids were sunk into the skull, a faint movement beneath the skin as the maggots were moving.